skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
dns is the cause of many seemingly unrelated problems. some services (like sshd) do reverse dns lookups on connecting ips. a misconfigured dns server somewhere (or improper delegation) along the path can make this initial connection take up to 30 seconds while waiting for dns timeouts. it may look like an extremely slow/busy server, but in reality it's just sitting there doing nothing waiting for a dns reply.

tools like dnstracer (http://www.mavetju.org/unix/dnstracer.php) and dig are very useful for diagnosing these issues, but you really need to understand the fundamentals of how dns and delegation work.
If I recall the story of the "Hot or Not" founders, they suddenly found themselves with an experiment that went out of control. They had no immediate means to profit from it and more traffic than they could handle. Rather than just pull the plug on the site, they found ways to get servers and bridge the gap until they had money coming in.

I couldn't help but think I'd have given up on the site early on if no money was flowing. I wouldn't have seen the point in keeping it going with no immediate cash flow.
you are missing the fact that the last "(3 times revenue today)" factor which you just dropped means you are expecting the company to triple its revenues next year, which means the normal rules won't apply (to that extent) so you can charge a premium today for potentially growing more than 100% YoY. On re-reading I guess you've managed to confuse me as well and my brain is about to explode from cognitive dissonance its experiencing right now.
Looks like they took the overview page down... you can still
see features here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/techspecs/
The presently available materials on Red Ryder are unclear, but Toady definitely survives solely on donations [http://www.kwanzoo.com/social-trivia/tarn-adams-interview-pa...]

Randy Mulholland of the webcomic Something Positive quit his job when he received in a month donations that exceeded his yearly salary.

Most webcomics that are 'full time jobs' for the artist also sell t-shirts, taking them a slight step outside of 'pure' donationware, but including these artists, the numbers of successful donationware vendors go up.
It's totally gay!
For that form factor, it's quite good. Compare to the Dell Studio Hybrid.
It doesn't even support the reverse-reach-around-click. Very sad.
Do you know how to fix almost every one of these cases for good? Just don't allow implicit copying of your classes. Problem solved. If someone tries to write that horrible code, they can't.

This is more a question of knowing what you are doing and less of C++ sucking. C doesn't solve this - you still have to know what you are doing there or you end up shooting yourself in the foot. I much prefer having an interface with virtual methods to a struct with function pointers.
Wrong: C++ promotes library features before language features. Language features are carefully considered before they are included or dropped.

In fact the entire language is designed with care, which should be obvious to anyone who has read The design & evolution of C++ or has followed C++'s evolution.
None of what you've said is in any way specific to C++

APIs can easily lose performance when refactored for correctness or code clarity. Large projects have large project issues!
Since there's no one green energy source that will cover our entire energy need, a mix is required.

Putting up a solar panel just because it looks good is contra-productive, however, as it makes the entire green energy movement look less than serious.

[edit: rephrased a tiny bit]
False. Lies.
You can download Mosaic at my site for only $40! What a steal!_!
I'd never heard that advice before - sounds like a great idea.
You learned you are a tard! I knew that!
I read all the statistics when I was applying to university a few years back, it was my high-school careers councillor who actually pointed it out to me. All the open-statistics give the percentages for university drop out rates (they all seem similar throughout the UK, Canada and Australia and many parts of Europe where I've read the statistics). The incomes I've actually only seen for the US, Canada and the UK, which all seem to correlate reasonably well, however nothing offers a reason for the unemployment of university drop outs.

In this context I believe the distinction is between a technical college (1-3 year programs for certifications and diplomas) and a degree-orientated/undergraduate university, where the courses typically grant a bachelors degree instead of certification or a diploma.

I have to note the UK's statistics on this front are very confusing, as there is no physical distinction between a technical college and a university as there is in North America and is based off of course-outcome aims rather than actual institutions attended.

Canada's statistics are rather interesting on university drop outs, in that the Atlantic Provinces have phenomenally low first-year drop out rates (I believe P.E.I. is ~16% versus ~36% in Ontario, note that these don't include first-year failure percentages). So it truly isn't the institution itself that causes the failure, but an artefact of the process present in most schools.
And I discovered the ring around your mom's anus.
What about missing butt dances?
Users = Money. It might not be enough money to justify the costs, but there's almost always a way to make it work.
This whole situation is funny to me. We get so angry at large financial institutions, insurance companies, and other businesses that have all this money yet raise costs, premiums, and tack on fees. Yet we just sit by and allow these institutions of higher learning to gauge our pocketbooks whenever it suits them. I know things are slow now and its affecting everyone. I admit I don't know the circumstances surrounding public schools, but these private institutions should be ashamed. Schools like Harvard, Yale, Boston College have money in the coffers. Check out the dowries of these schools. I mean billions. And alumni keep adding to it every year. These schools, if they really cared about the financial issues of their graduating, classes would dip into these funds to assist in keeping costs low. This is not the case because these schools are just like the insurance companies and financial institutions..they want to make money. Presidents of educational institutions have the same goals as their counterparts running the financial institutions.
Unless you can hide the full screen book cover display at the bottom I think that'll be very distracting.
Pixpls of wife.

kthxbye.
I like nookie.
the ultimate Evil test: will google bend over to the telco overlords?
My reply was not targeted at you and I don't do game programming.

Anyway:

* smart pointers don't need an OS.

* for me, C++ is at the exactly right abstraction level to allow me to use only C++ instead of "C++ + other language" or "other language and C for speed". Most C + HLL proponents underestimate the logistics overhead of using multiple programming languages.
I've thought this for a while. Ideally, you want to have drives of different ages, so they're at different pts of the 'bathtub curve'.

If you're mirroring, you should only ever mirror a "fresh, unproven" disk with an "old stalwart" disk. Doing that also means that when your "old stalwart" becomes senile, it's paired with a younger disk.

But doing that does mean rotating mirror sets when you buy a new tranch of disks. Which does put load on, which can trigger failure.

Anyone have a good plan for doing this?
Would it make sense to use drives from more than one company as they would very different failure characteristics?

This is probably difficult to take advantage of unless you setup your RAID layout very carefully.
Ask YC: Hackers and Founders Post Startup School Meetup in Mountain View?
I set up my Hackers and Founders meetup for Sunday afternoon from 1-5pm at the California Billiards. We have room reserved for about 50 people.

All the information is here: http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/calendar/11565689/

And, it's linked from the Startup School Wiki here: http://wiki.startupschool.org/doku.php?id=meeting_up_2009
I don't think this rumor is true.

The US market is not well suited to selling phones retail. I don't see how Google can sell a smartphone that is considered "cheap" without being able to recoup anything in carrier subsidies. HTC smartphones retail for $400 and up without a subsidy. (For example, Google charges $400 for the developer version of the G1, but T-Mobile can sell it for $50 with a new contract)

Secondly, how is one phone going to work on Verizon and AT&T? Even if Google limits itself to GSM networks, AT&T and T-Mobile use different frequencies for 3G. Will they make an edition for each carrier?

I think Google is just creating one or more netbooks or "mobile internet devices" and this analyst (the only source in the story) got confused and thought it was a phone.
This is the one. Ever since I got my MacBook, I have been hesitant to use any other kind of computer - even a desktop iMac - solely because of the lack of multi-touch support. I always wondered why Apple never came out with a separate touchpad, now I know why.

I'm going to test it out at the store tonight.
Agreed, this is an aspect that would have always prevented me from ever paying for an ebook. As an avid reader I frequently give books to someone else to read, and handing over a $100+ eBook reader is an absurd prospect for loaning a book to someone.
I like it but I would much rather have a wireless keyboard with multitouch surfaces on each key so you can use the keyboard as a trackpad.
Because the other companies already dismissed them?
Its only available as an upgrade for their top of the line imac.
Use http://github.com/documentcloud/cloud-crowd
Yes, I should have been emphatic that part of the problem with not understanding DNS is that if you don't understand it, you might not even realize that your problem is DNS-related.

Whenever I hear, "X is slow!", my first response tends to be, "Are you sure it's not DNS instead of X?" About 50% of the time, DNS misconfiguration is at least a component of the problem if not the entirety of it.

DNS touches every service on the Internet. If you get it wrong, you break every service, sometimes in subtle ways.
Eh, I meant exactly what I said. An opinion from a person is an opinion from a person. There are ways to become an expert in something. I'd be stupid not to listen to at least some of the things he might say about browser design.

This isn't about empty credentials but about track record. Dude has demonstrated to do X,Y, Z well. I will value his opinion on such matters highly. But just because of XYZ, valuing his opinion on Q doesn't make sense to me. Because most people don't have XYZ, perhaps I'll weight his opinion on Q a tad higher than the average, but not much more than that.

Does this not make sense?

Edit: I should add that any and all complaints of his are valid. Some of them are objectively accurate (loading the calendar app is slow) some of them are subjective. The issue is that both kinds seem to be weighted by people to be highly representative.
The browser can be scripted to mimic human behavior -- clicks, keyboard entry, mouse movements, etc. How do you determine that a human is behind the browser?
Worrying about not knowing how functions are called on your first iteration is such a moot point. Simple programming conventions (e.g. no multiple inheritance) can eliminate this problem. Even if each function call does take 10x longer, I would argue that in 99% of the cases you wouldn't even notice the difference, practically speaking.

Shipping high quality games, developed as fast as possible.

If this is what you care about, then you should care about optimizing AFTER you write the initial version and identify hot spots.

You don't write sloppy code and argue that you can find bugs in the debugger, either, do you?

Sloppy code vs. "slow" code are vastly different. I would much much rather have slow code, since 99% of the time it isn't even noticed by the user. Hence, it was worth not thinking about how to improve it.

most high-performance items are not on the GPU.

I agree that you want to take load off the GPU. However, CPU speed has not been the limiting factor in games for a LONG time. In fact, in conferences such as the GDC it is rarely discussed any longer, only in the context of using more CPU if available for non-engine tasks such as AI.

And no, the 95%/5% rule does not hold true in game development.

There is a big difference between what is essentially a graphics engine (you reference the Unreal engine) and a video game. If you look at modern games, do you think it is a waste that they are based on interpreted scripting languages? They can do this because as I said above, CPU isn't as limiting a factor as before.
It's a terrible idea to mix and match drive models, because they'll have drastically different performance characteristics, and if you're lucky you'll only get a little worse than the lowest common denominator on all axes.

What quality OEMs do is make sure they never ship you drives from the same manufacturing batch in one enclosure.
Lua makes accessing REST APIs from the iPhone dead simple
And how long until the B&N bookstore will be able to match the number of ebooks offered at Amazon? Until then B&N will lose customers to the company with an already established library.
hmm, I have a hard time understanding why anyone would try to use sqlite in production unless they explicitly wanted to?
This is setting off alarms in my head. He's talking about path MTU discovery, but for some reason he doesn't actually use that term. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_MTU_discovery

Also, I've never heard of a system that sometimes uses PMTUD and sometimes doesn't. I can imagine that those SSL offload boxes may be doing weird stuff; maybe that's where the author saw this problem.
I think this could be very detrimental for Android's future. My biggest concerns:

1) Google's implementation is going to instantly become the reference platform for Android. Third party handsets will probably have to conform closely to its screen size, processing power, and input methods to play nicely with third party apps. This is ultimately a good thing for end user experience but will negatively impact the variety of different Android handsets on the market.

2) It's confusing. Android has its own proper name but most people know it's a Google powered/developed project. Is the average consumer going to understand there is a "Google Phone" but also Google phones? Even if Google has no anti-competitive intentions here they are going to cast a shadow on their competitors on their brand strength alone.

3) Google is going to have a huge competitive advantage. They can time the release of their hardware to match up with major Android releases. They will have a clearer understanding of where Android is heading and what types of hardware features will be supported in the long-term. Google's wealth and influence guarantee they will always have first mover advantage. Let's say company X comes out with an amazing new SoC. Google is quick to port Android over and quick to get a handset to market. Competitors get the trickle down support but won't have a product out the door until long after Google.

4) What is Google's motivation? The latest batch of Android phones look fantastic. There is no need for a Google first party device as a supplement to the other handsets on the market. This leads me to believe Google is getting into this space to win. I don't know how they can possibly juggle their multiple roles here. It's a no-win situation. Even if they play this straight the appearance of dishonesty and anti-competitive tactics is going to be a huge problem.

This is an amazing turn of events. A week ago I would have said Android had an inevitable path to Windows-izing mobiles. After this news I feel like these handset makers would be crazy to look at Android as a long term solution. If Google is getting into this market they're doing it to win. They apparently don't want to Windows-ize mobiles, they want to Apple-tize it for themselves. What a crazy turn of events.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=890129
The reason that the average is so young is that younger people tend to be more able to take the risks of starting up. I wouldn't get caught up in age mathematics. Either you've got it in you or you don't.
It didn't quite work out that way when IBM release the IBM PC
Skeptics point out that Google might have a hard time getting the phone out in time for the holidays, since it typically takes a year or more to bring a phone from design to production.

The article's author appears to be totally oblivious to the fact that Google has been selling unlocked phones (rebranded developer G1s) for almost a year now: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/12/google-introduces...
Now if I can only get those users. :-)
This reminds me a lot of the video game console market, where newcomers compete with: the existing consoles with the established customer base, library of games and even second or third generation consoles that have the initial quirks ruled out.

B&N will have to compete with the Kindle and even Sony's readers to an extent. The biggest question is always what will B&N bring to the table that is different enough or better than its competitors to woo customers over? It seems a lot like just another iPod and iTunes clone.
As a bit of background on Danese:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danese_Cooper

She's also a member of the Apache Software Foundation.
Its pathetic ..
Do we have any system in place to know how credible is any VC/angel/Conferences
Thanks for the hints. Another hint for 4a: thinking in terms of the binary/bit representation helped me a lot as well.
Entirely inapproproate for Hacker News but strangely fitting given the nature of the original article. How this fellow can expect any measure of sympathy for having a website eaten by spammers after failing to do secure the site properly escapes me. It's not like a simple solution isn't available: http://mollum.com
who cares, the economics will self-correct it
When I code in a team, we don't just write one big mass of C++ and hope that all the interactions work out okay!

Instead, we follow modular programming practices. If some interactions are too slow, we know who didn't optimize his section and we kick the problem back to him.
Disciplinary Bubbles
Yes, and it costs $400. Or you can get the same hardware for $50 with a new contract from T-Mobile.

I'm pretty confident this rumor is false. There's no way Google can make a "cheap" smartphone without a kickback from the carrier.
Thanks wmf I should have included the reference and have added it. There's a lot more that I don't cover e.g. PMTUD black hole routers, etc. But the article is targeted at an intermediate level audience, so leaving those out for now.
Apple beats Microsoft to market, again, this time with a mouse
I really can't wait to see what the new generation of large-screen eInk readers will look like. I bought the Kindle DX specifically to be able to read PDFs, books, and papers I already had. The smaller format readers (nook, kindle 2, etc) are fine for reading fiction and non-formatted documents, but a lot less useful to me personally.

I am fully convinced that eInk is a viable surface to read on and I can't wait to see what the displays will look like when they mature.
Wax looks really interesting (since I don't really have an urge to go back to non-dynamic language development), but I don't immediately see how this gets around the "no interpreters" rule for getting into the app store. It looks like one app using Wax, by the creator of the project, has done so, but I'm not sure how.
You still think that people know what HMAC is. Most people think HMAC means "hash a key in with the message".
Like many of SQLite's other quirks, this is because SQLite is designed to accommodate embedded usage.
New electric car will do 250 miles on a single charge
Wondering why it doesn't have 3/4 finger gestures, like the trackpad does
i can't believe this isn't more popular. this blew my mind, i was hoping someone smarter than me could explain the hack.
_Sloppy code vs. "slow" code are vastly different._

Not really. Some amount of up-front investment can avoid a lot of pain at the end. Do I obsess about every single call? No, of course not - but I try to avoid obvious performance issues.

While you can optimize them after the fact, it's more time you're spending.

_CPU speed has not been the limiting factor in games for a LONG time_

Yes, actually, it is. It might not be raw speed - we're talking cache misses instead - but you still have to be careful with your resource usage.

_There is a big difference between what is essentially a graphics engine (you reference the Unreal engine) and a video game_

Yes, and no. Unreal is more than a "graphics" engine - it's an entire game engine. (There's way more than graphics there.) And CPU performance still is discussed at GDC. See here, for example: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15118967/Hitting-60Hz-in-Unreal-En...

And the games built on top of it use some scripting. And often dive into C++ and even the engine itself to make the game actually perform well.

But that's exactly the model I'm advocating. Write the kernel in a low-level language (preferrably not C++, for many reasons, some of them mentioned in my post), and do the game logic in a scripting layer on top.

The faster you can get the kernel, the more resources you can devote to a language that makes life much easier for the rest of the world.

So yes, I wasn't exact. When saying "game development", I was referring to "engine development". The point still stands - I think C++ is inappropriate for low-level tasks (too much "magic") as well as high-level tasks. (Incredibly convoluted language. No, I'm not saying Stroustrup is a bad designer. I'm saying the constraints he imposed on himself forced C++ to head that direction. And design by committee helped.)

If you look at modern games,

I do. Every day. Intimately. I work on them. That's why this topic matters to me. It'd be kind of stupid to complain about C++ usage in game development without knowing about it ;)
This is nice. I wonder if it'll be available outside the US. It would be cool to have even without the 3G.
I'm going to assume (yeah I known) you meant the testing part. The problem is that PC input/output is pretty standard (display, keyboard, mouse) with the added advantage of once the screen size gets past a certain point and you have a windows OS, testing on multiple screen sizes is not a real need.

You really need to test on small screen size(s) and check that your program will work on the available input options (keyboard, touch). If a vendor goes outside the box too much then that product becomes a new test case.
Sony Ericsson s700i Unlocked
Sony Ericsson s700i is restructured handset of Sony Ericsson with most up-to-date features and the phone has come out with startling look. If you are going to change your phone then this is the best one. s700i is a Walkman phone.
The link points to a web page that displays only that particular message. The web address for that unique message is virtually impossible to guess.

However, if a user copied that unique URL from their email notification, and published it on a public website, then typical search engines, including Google, could have indexed it.

aka "Security through obscurity fails again"
This is not a question of "code monkeys". It's simply a question of having some programmers that are less experienced than others. And that's kind of unavoidable if you ever want to hire new people...
Manage your tasks with Google
I just tried tcpdump of http vs https, and both had the flag unset :/ (As I'd expect)

Would have been nice if the OP had included some example logs showing the issue.