skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Psychology is prone to having fad diagnoses that lots of people could fit into. For a while everyone is astonished that so many people could be X. And then the popularity of the diagnosis fades, and eventually a lot of the X's turned out to be something else. In extreme cases the X can even cause or turn out to be the result of bad therapy. (For 3 nasty examples read the history of frontal lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and false memory syndrome.)

When the dust settles I am firmly convinced that Aspberger's Syndrome is going to turn out to be one of those fads. Yes, it is a real disorder on the autistic spectrum. Yes, a lot of healthy people are somewhere on this spectrum and feel that the diagnosis fits. Yes, a high proportion of those people are geeks. But there are a lot of people walking around today diagnosed by themselves or others as having Aspberger's who wouldn't have been so diagnosed 20 years ago, and who 20 years from now won't be considered to have a significant handicap that is worth worrying about.
I didn't figure this all out until we got our own chickens.

I even threw out an egg because it had been sitting outside for over a day. I didn't know at the time that a farmer has 30 days to sell his eggs. That the grocery store has another 30 days to sell the egg. And on top of that, you still have another 3 months before the egg actually goes bad.

Incredible! Even more incredible -- and this only applies to farm fresh eggs -- there is an anti-bacterial layer around the egg.

I am pretty impressed with eggs.
duh...

Q:What border : 1px solid silver; does on an image?

A:It adds a silver border to the image

Q: But doesn't Photoshop do this too? I don't want my browser to have this...

I hope you got it now
That is crazy. Believable, but crazy nonetheless
New Schemes for Powering Processors (on-die power supply)
Given the fact that we were eyeball-to-eyeball with some serious deflationary pressure I think that this is probably a much better alternative :) The fact that the CPI did not go up and we are actually thinking of sending "sorry there was no inflation this year to bump your COLA" checks to millions of people puts some of this into a slightly different perspective.
Angel investor groups: To charge or not to charge?
The first link mentioned in the article was a very interesting read.

http://timetobleed.com/defeating-the-matasano-c-challenge-wi...

It's a fairly clear explanation. Before the language warriors come out in force, I'll mention that it appears that all of the problems turn out to be issues with 1) calling new and 2) C-style casts.

Exploiting the issue requires someone with a detailed knowledge of C++ inner workings. It would have taken me a long time to figure it all out.

Avoiding the issue? Well, most modern C++ doesn't look very much like the problem code for very good reasons.
This just creepy. We had a session at the Real-time web summit yesterday where we described needing something like this.

One of the guys from Google named it the "Comet Tornado Reverse HTTP Proxy" because we were talking about adapting Tornado, this look like exactly that.
> Btw, I think that some people want to use difficult languages at work to make their job more challenging.

Like Java or C++? I'd rather stick with the easy stuff like Haskell, the problems at hand are challenging enough.
What I'd like to know is which is cheaper...
A similar topic was posted to HN here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=863435

In that thread my comments match fairly closely with this author's predictions starting near the bottom of the article section "Are the Dollar’s Days as Reserve Currency Over?" including my comments [..maintaining reliance on oil means gas prices comfortably around $10 (or more) along with the corresponding inflation and further vanishment of any middle class. An unemployment rate of 10% would begin to look normal...The trade-off is less spending power, which means our economy must shift away from being spending based. People will kick and scream when that realization hits but America simply won't continue to dominate the world economy.]
I wish they'd release more information on what they're doing to improve battery life. That and speed are the most important things to me as a daily user of Android.
Three Tips on Choosing the Right Technical Book
If an ISP hosts content, would analysts also say that they "have no bandwidth bill"?

This article states that "[Google] has purchased unused fiber optic cable known as 'dark fiber'. ... Its costs for bandwidth are then amortized across the life of its fiber and routers." Sounds logical to me -- it doesn't seem like Google is "getting away" with anything here.
The Science of Making Perfect Boiled Eggs:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/10/the-food-lab-science-of-h...
The article glosses over the fact that maintaining that infrastructure costs money as well.

> Its costs for bandwidth are then amortized across the life of its fiber and routers.

It's basically the difference between 'renting' and 'buying', the costs can be (and probably are) significant though.

If you rent some resource you'll be paying bit-by-bit (pun intended), if you own it outright you pay it all in one big 'bite' .

So, their bandwidth bill is far from 0, it's just under a different heading on the balance sheet.
In this case it seems the mis-attribution was unintentional.
That's also an example in favor of why syntax highlighting is a good thing.
I have to say it looks really really good. It's tuned specifically for desktop needs.

What are the chances of this getting into mainline? Yes, I read about his history. Maybe it will go in anyway. (But it really needs a new name - any suggestions for a better back-ronym?)

One thing I did not see that it has, is hyperthreading support, i.e. detecting that two cores are really the same, and not scheduling two tasks on the same core, while other are available. And also, not scheduling idle priority tasks on a core used by other tasks.

I emailed him to ask.
The only way tech founders can appreciate the biz guy is by personally engaging in biz development

Going by trends & data I would say every startup founder / founding team must have basic business & sales acumen to succeed. Even if u have a great business guy , he / she would need a team to compliment the efforts and that would be the founders in the initial days. Lets take the most obvious examples to back up this theory
Bill Gates – a technology god but also a very shrewd business guy , he actually bought the OS
Larry Page & Sergey Brin – beating Yahoo out of AOL by diverting a Spain bound flight and meeting with AOL’s Rowley in London eventually clinching the deal – this was impossible if not for the biz acumen of Page & Brin
Google & Microsoft clearly indicate founders need to be well rounded in Business & technology both
Its disastrous for a startup founder to say hey I am the tech guy , for success u gotta be good at Biz Development. The good news is it’s a skill that can be acquired by meeting prospects
Ok, we are getting nowhere with your "not as simple & multifaceted" counter arguments. In an argument, don't patronize your opponent, just focus on defending and making your points.

Obviously things are not as simple as they look, otherwise, we would not be talking about it.

Now that this is out of the way. I think that quality is a pretext. Apple could have let developers distribute their application by other mean, and keep the same AppStore quality. The fact that AppStore is the only way to distribute an iPhone app does not make it higher quality. I would actually argue the opposite. If developers had other means to distribute their mobile application, Apple could fairly refuse the "iFart" type of applications and accept only applications that have real entertainment or productivity value.

Also, I know people developing iPhone apps, and while they welcome the additional income, it is not that easy to make a living out of it. Some might, but I do not think it is as big as people think it is.
New Israeli battery based provides 1000s of hours of power
I deleted my post, it wasn't banned by the mods. I did this because it got vote weighted heavily, it may have been an automatic thing based on submitting something that had already been submitted.

And I don't think it was the mods that dead'd the first one, it was flagged by the users.
I wonder if they'll offer a "left handed" option as well. The layout on the car app is clearly designed for the thumb of the right hand.
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
Joe Damato's post on this was really excellent, and I highly recommend people read it first.
For Virtual Racers, a League of Their Own
Golden Image or Foil Ball? (VM maintenance issues)
Creating a Blocks-Based Object System
I can't wait to get my hands on Motorola's "Sholes" - http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/30/motorola-sholes-android-p...
I suspect the problem Google has with a lot of things is scale. To take this for example it might not seem like a big deal to pre-cache images but when you look at the millions of people who probably use Google maps and assume that a lot of that cache will be wasted (people closing the site, people only going 1 of possible 3 ways at an intersection, etc...)

So even though each individual is only caching a few wasted images per visit the end result is probably terrabytes of wasted bandwidth for something that's a fairly minor feature (I agree it would be nice but it's not a "must have")
I guess it pays off to hire geniuses eh?
RMagick doesn't work with GraphicsMagick, which kills it for me. Almost everything we do with ImageMagick we effectively do offline (with Compass CSS hooks).
JobConcierge
Thats like asking, "Can there be enough people doing things with a population of 6 billion?"

Jobs aren't a finite resource, they just consist of people doing enough things to convince people to let them get to enough of the food and shelter.

The threshold most people place on the difference between having a job and not is usually around "I have enough to eat, and a place to sleep".

Or was your question, will there be enough food that's possible to grow on earth to feed everyone? Some ted talks I've listened to say no.
title feels a little misleading.

the best way to not have your cost scale is probably to do what spotify is doing - make every user into a peer in a bit-torrent network and have them share the vast majority of the bandwidth consumption

A Glance at Spotify's Peer-to-peer Streaming:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...
Do desktop workloads benefit from hyperthreading? If not, there is no need to clutter this code with support for it.
At the end of the day, someone stole his stuff, so he got pissed. He over-generalized and argued the wrong point, and hindsight kind of made it so he made an ass of himself.

That said, there really are very few people alive who haven't gotten mad and made an ass of themselves at some point, so we should probably forgive this "Open Letter to Hobbyists".

(I saw Gates talk when we opened a new building on Campus and someone asked him about the huge piracy rates in China so he brought up this letter in particular and said he's since learned to not get bent out of shape about it)
Suggest adding ', silicon' in the title between 'battery' and 'provides'.

Nice find, it's a pity they're not rechargeable, but with such longevity (if that really proves to be true) that's less of a problem.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872813
I'm liking these Seibel digest posts more than I'm liking the actual book, which, even in the Norvig chapter, drags a bit.

I think the book might have worked better if it was organized topically, instead of by person.
New Intel desktop/laptop systems have hyperthreading on by default, so the real question is whether desktop workloads are hurt by HT. In that case BFS could improve performance by avoiding co-scheduling (which it currently doesn't appear to do).
Ask pg:  avg = karma per submission or karma per comment?
Just wondering.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885303
This would be more accurately stated as "YouTube's marginal bandwidth cost may be close to 0". They're peering with enough providers that they don't pay for bandwidth like, say, Wired does. While Wired pays for the amount of data they send out (or expect to send out), Google mostly pays for the infrastructure, not the data.

Peering like this isn't all that new. Roughly 80% of our transit goes directly to our host's peers, which means they're probably not paying anything for that traffic (though they're charging us for it). We're happy with this because if it's going through a peer, it's much snappier for those particular users.
I don't believe anything they say so... how much was really stolen?
If an ISP hosts content, would analysts also say that they "have no bandwidth bill"?

Yes, they very well might. The ISPs costs are largely fixed, it doesn't really cost them much to stream you a movie or whatever.
That "Eggstractor" website is straight out of 1997.
I was at a McDonald's a while ago and they had a job ad that said something like 20% of the entire US workforce had been employed at McDonald's at one time. I found the number very hard to believe, but interesting if true.
This thing needs a better name. I can see the technology benefit, but commercially it needs a more technologically correct (P.C.) name.

If this is sold, the publicity people will have heart attacks and the legal documents will come up on porn searches. Not the best business strategy to peruse if the developers want to maximize the value of this asset.
The whole point of the article is that they're not really paying for bandwidth like you would if you were buying from Akamai. When you peer with someone, you rarely pay by the mb. It's more like a direct crossover connection from your router to theirs in some peering facility.
Sending confidential documents to Omni, and the gibberish-izer
And now you can download the lastest version of basic directly from Microsoft completely legal. Oh well.
The reason bandwidth costs money is not because ISPs and Akamai and other CDNs are greedy, it's because the infrastructure behind it costs money.

Building your own inftrastructure doesn't make bandwidth free, it just eliminates the cut that the provider normally takes.

Also, Akamai doesn't charge by the megabyte either, they charge by the megabit per second, as does most anyone once you start dealing with Facebook or Youtube-size loads.
Comparison of Con Kolivas's previous BFS scheduler to mainline CFS scheduler
As noted in the comments this compares the prototype implementation prior to today's "stable" BFS release. Should give some context to the claimed improvements. Will be interesting to see if Ingo re-runs this comparison and publishes the new results.
Simply wow. Is there any follow up to this research ?
If the scheduler's purpose is "to make typical desktop loads feel better", how do you benchmark that? There is certainly room for improvement in making the Linux desktop feel good, but I don't know how one would get to a number. Perhaps you'd have to resort to double blind comparison tests.

(FWIW, my 1.2GHz PPC running Debian performs unacceptably as a desktop machine. There are sometimes >1000ms lags between a keypress and it being reflected on the X11 display with no background load. But I can't say this is because of the scheduler.)
They're quite valuable images. I'm going to steal them for my myspace page.
You are very lucky.

Overestimating (and therefore overselling) technology is extremely common. It really takes experience being burnt a couple of times to realize there are no silver bullets - only trade offs. Engineers tend to perpetuate myths that you could stumble on great technology, develop a product based on it, and blow everyone else out of the water. Without experience you couldn't have known things don't happen that way. When beautiful, elegant ideas interact with the realities of delivering a product, things get messy and complicated. Every successful high tech product I'm aware of started this way. You now have the skills and the experience to recognize it.

I think your experience is perfectly natural. Thank heavens for the education you've received, but do not get discouraged - that's how technology products always start. You have to find your first adopter - some high tech people who wouldn't mind parting with some money in exchange for broken technology, so that you could keep polishing it until it's usable for many people.

I highly recommend you to read Crossing The Chasm. The book demystifies this process and explains how you can intricately balance the company to get past it.
My parents have had eggs for decades and we always threw then away at the end of 3 weeks after they had been collected.
Objective C is cleaner and much more fun to write in, but it's less accommodating than C++:

* You have to actually run the dynamic runtime, which even OS X's XNU doesn't do.

* The dynamic runtime also obscures what's going on with the hardware, which can be a problem in embedded environments.

I like Objective C but it's always felt like voodoo to me. I'm always more comfortable in Ruby+C than I am in ObjC.
AutoCAD is not written in Lisp. It has been written in several languages, including C.

AutoLisp is just a thin scripting layer.

See <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html>the autodesk file</a>.
I know you're asking for free ... but look into istockphotop's audio collection if you're willing to spend a little money. It's a very affordable option with a huge range of loopable tracks, and artists that are responsive to specialized requests. Just make sure the licensing options meet your needs for distribution.

http://www.istockphoto.com/audio.php
Note that this comparison is completely obsolete.
What kind of product do you envision that would be named after, or whose marketing material would even mention by name, a process scheduler?
It's interesting that this also seems to have factored into Richard Stallman's philosophy. Since he considered working on closed software unethical, and noted that he could always survive as a waiter, he felt he couldn't justify working on closed software based on the excuse that it was necessary for financial reasons.
I usually just keep my data on a USB key and then buy a brand new laptop from a random store every time I want to access it.
Pretty damn sure they're combined, despite being representative of entirely different values.

You can get more considered stats using http://searchyc.com
I don't think Attwood really meant that Ted Nelson had autism he was just trying to describe him in a way that people who don't know him might be able to understand what he is like.

Maybe I don't get what the author is trying to say. I know there a lot of people talking about how Asperger's could explain geekish behavior but I think it's a very small minority of geeks so it doesn't make sense. But saying someone displays autistic behavior doesn't say he's autistic.
Two-Year Study of Global Internet Traffic
> But I can't say this is because of the scheduler.

Yes you can.

And you answered your own question: latency is exactly how you benchmark this (with a measure of total throughput added in to make sure it's not low).
Actually a bit of market research for a book. Trying to decide between two cover blurbs: "A programming background in Java or C++ is recommended." or "A background in object-oriented languages is recommended."

The book uses some Java and C++ comparisons when introducing new concepts.

Edit: Also, awesome site. Thanks for the link!
The topcoder headline reminds me of Mythical Man-Month.
"What could you accomplish with a team of 222,375?"
Nothing?
Yes, that's what I meant when I said "mb", perhaps 95th percentile billing would have been more explicit. And when you start dealing with Facebook or Youtube sized loads, you generally start peering rather than just buying transit from various providers.

When you peer, you no longer pay a 95th. You work out a peering deal with some provider you send a lot of traffic to and effectively connect directly to them in some shared facility. Some providers will charge you a 95th rate when you peer, but even then it's vastly cheaper than what you'd be paying for normal transit.
In general, hardware optimized for high-level languages have been a failure, usually the extra baggage for handling things as machine-level interpreter slow things down nearly as much as a software interpreter. Nothing has been a real commercial success and it isnt for want of trying. Off the top of my head I can think of the Burroughs B5500 which had hardware support for typed data, the Lisp Machine, and the Intel 432. Sun had a Java machine specification, but I dont think anyone ever bit.
For Windows users, Bitsum's Process Lasso does an admirable job of maintaining desktop responsiveness.

http://www.bitsum.com/prolasso.php
I dunno if that's the best way. If you're large enough to make your own infrastructure worthwhile, I suspect that's way more robust than a relatively complex end user p2p setup.
perhaps you are right (although I don't quite understand what "publicity people" will have to do with a kernel scheduler), but the Unix world seems to have done not too badly with non-PC expressions such as "killing" or "starving" a process.

The kill system call even made it into "serious" standard documents:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/kil...
The author kinda makes a point. I think the unaddressed age-old elephant in the room is the question "how do we get more women interested in science and technology without castrating the things that get men interested in science and technology?"
Business Purchase Order for RedHat licenses with BFS scheduler for the developers.

Just don't say what BFS stands for.

OK, it's a bit of a stretch that they'll say what the scheduler is on the PO, but it could happen.

It needs a backronym.

Bloody Fine Scheduler?

Bazinga Fast Scheduler?

BigBang Feory Scheduler? :)
That sounds like a classical example of starvation.
For any product there will always be someone who feels its not fit for their purpose. Its not your problem or the author's problem, its inevitable.
He replied:

> Does BFS support hyperthreading?

> Meaning, detecting that two cores are really the same, and not scheduling two tasks on the same core, while others are available.

The answer to that is "somewhat". It depends on the topology and workload, but it does not do anything like the complex balancing the mainline scheduler does to achieve this. I don't have enough hardware to see how it works in the real world on different topology and what workloads and how that compares to mainline.

> And also, not scheduling idle priority tasks on a core used by other tasks.

It does nothing smart to separate idle priority tasks from normal ones on SMT siblings vs cores.

And to answer the obvious question that follows these, I don't anticipate I'll be adding any more complex HT management than is already there as that will sway from the philosophy of BFS.

Regards,
Con
Yes, but you still need to enter the PIN.
Mostly a case scenario when development is completely outsourced , its suggested that the tech vendor drafts a technology plan inclusive of Design & Architecture . Get the technology plan vetted by experts , plenty of tech guys would be willing to help for free. A clever way to go about it is , post a specific tech challenge / query on LinkedIn , of those answering and willing to help request if they would vet ur technology plan & get this done by 3-4 good tech Samaritans
Don’t go overboard – prepare for success not for failure , spending too much time on analyzing tech plans is preparing for failure. Focus on building the Biz & success. Once u have costumer traction all tech challenges can be solved . Heard of Twitter in the early days ?
You can say it might be the scheduler, but it doesn't have to be. It could easily be something wrong with a device driver.
National Mortgage Delinquency Rates
Great piece of hacking. Can't wait to see what kinds of amazing things develop from such a simple addition to C.