skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And at the rates given in the article, you could theoretically stay airborne for over 8 hours. Keep in mind that most pilots would like to keep about an extra hour's worth of fuel in reserves should your intended destination be unavailable. Still, figure a 'road' trip of about 6 hours in your seat, with no bathroom breaks, and no rest stops.
I think my next step is actually to do something similar but then with memcache as the backing store instead of a local map.
It was my understanding that dark grey was actually better than black for readability? Granted, much darker than Duck Duck Go is currently using.

Also on readability: I find the search result synopsis far too wide for easy reading.
What’s Your Own Personal Coding Horror?
I like the SoftReference idea btw!
Depends who I want to recommend it to. Different networks reach different audiences.

But for most tech stuff: Twitter.
There's no need to create a player; as far as the creator goes, Adobe's already released the free mxlmlc so you could simply generate ActionScript and let them compile it.
Well, we need to make sure they're prepared for the standardized tests they'll get in first grade. If we can start them on reading early then we can score higher for our district and get some more money for our schools. If we let them spend their time finger-painting then we might get tagged as a deficient district!
FWIW the author of DJ posted in more detail on this subject in this Google Group:

http://groups.google.com/group/delayed_job/msg/9e2987caa177b...
I call bullshit.

Some of the most intensive games out there are using about 100% of the iPhones power and still get several hours of battery life. Even if the app used some pathological combination of CPU/GPU/Disk/Network resources you wouldn't get it down to 30 minutes,
It's interesting that this piece comes right after The Ph.D. Problem which was posted yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916850).

In that piece, the author points out how graduate studies have gotten longer and we are producing more graduates, but there are fewer positions and they are getting less non-academic experience. Essentially, more Ph.D.s is a problem in itself.

I'm not sure how that might translate to 4-year degrees though.
My macbook goes absolutely nuts when I watch even a 2 minute flash video -- CPU usage spikes to close to 100% as the fans try to compensate by ramping up to a speed that makes watching the presentation without headphones unbearable. Adobe definitely has a lot of work to do on Flash on OSX :(
this is really cool. Anyone wanna port it to matplotlib in python, or should i?
The Boom of Social Networking Sites [Infographic]
Just tried out the screen from git as somebody pointed out above. Works as advertised. Pretty cool!
FWIW, xal (who you replied to) == the author of DJ.

http://github.com/tobi/delayed_job
Where are you getting the idea that someone who spends n hours a week on their business should be completely ignorant of things that affect the business the other 168-n? Furthermore, how is that idea actually relevant to this submission aside from being an attack on the author?

From your link: Markus Frind works one hour a day. Not week, day. You didn't even get the figure you were criticizimg accurate, in spite of taking the time to find a link to it. Is your point to inform, educate, enlighten, discuss, or just to revile someone for being successful?

It's a snide and pointless criticism and it's embarassing that this kind of thing gets upvoted so often here.
I'll admit that I only have a passing familiarity with consultancies and other companies in India, but I don't think I'm defining innovation too narrowly.

A striking example is the IITs. These universities are lauded as some of the best in the world, but where is the ground-breaking research? Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I haven't seen anything amazing come out of these schools.
Totally true. Two totally separate points I meant. He doesn't work in PHP and (unlike the site that this was originally posted on) he makes stable/scalable sites :)

No doubt, PHP is faster than Ruby in many instances.
What I would really like to see is an intro to Clojure that assumes the user doesn't have a background in Java at all. That's been by far the toughest part of using Clojure for me - dealing with things like managing CLASSPATHs and the like.
No-one ignores the macro :) It's just that he loves to repeat he is not the macro guy.
I never said whether it was moral or not, which it definitely isn't...I was just referring to the students response to the task at hand, which I still believe for what they were assigned was a job well done.
Yes. I was just doing my college applications and thinking this exact thing. The Common Application would look like a piddly idea if the college application process just had an API.
Agreed! I don't think world domination can or should be the goal of every company. There's something quite respectable about doing great work for a devoted group of customers / users.
And yet they make millions every quarter.

I'm no fan of rediff yet somehow I end up visiting it often.
Maybe this is why Twitter works. You only see those you follow in your stream. You can't opt to see everything someone else is seeing, mostly because their platform can't really handle that sort of fan-out yet. But the basic idea of whitelisting is the same.

That's why Twitter's still fun for me regardless of how many social media consultants are around. I just don't follow them.
Seems nice, but I need a "did you mean" spell check. I simply can't spell well enough, and have been trained by google not to care. When I misspell something on duckduckgo it doesn't even warn me, it just gives me low quality pages created by people who also can't spell.
How do you know it uses 100%? If it has smooth animation, it most probably doesn't. It's easy to check if you're really interested - just run a typical busy loop in your app and measure the time until it the battery runs out.
Not anymore. Most from this group have moved to craft beers.

raises hand

Life is too short to drink shitty beer.
The Nemesis hypothesis
Seconding the wish for smaller presentation -- think you're a bit below the sweet spot on the info-per-square-inch curve. I feel pretty hampered.
I don't know much about IITs beyond the standard. But is research their strength? I'm not sure. On the other hand, I did find this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_Institutes_of_Te...
I think you mean:

http://www.droiddoesnot.com
Twitter, if it's of a broad interest, or aim, if it's of a specific interest to 1-2 friends.
I'm not sure I agree with programmers working long hours making good business sense. Maybe if developers could work long hours without making stupid mistakes that would be true. But software developers are human and need to limit themselves. It is possible to do negative work (ie screw stuff up that has to be fixed later) after all.
That is incredible. Coming at this as a computer engineer, I'm astounded by the theoretically capabilities of this chip and the opportunities it opens.

With any true massively multi-core solution (greater than, shall we say, 16 cores), it's no longer efficient to get more "bang for the buck" by simply threading or running multiple processes.

Tilera is forcing the developer to truly begin architecturing the software stack at the hardware level. You have a complex "hive" of processing units specifically designed to carry out particular highly-complex tasks in addition to a huge array of "general purpose" (and I use that term lightly) cores that can be configured to do pretty much whatever you need them to.

What's brilliant here is the on-core "packages" and what they do. This Tilera really is amazing in that everything is there, and it doesn't look like they're compromising on performance in order to get the kitchen sink in there too.

With the Gx, you can basically string together the available specific-purpose processing units with blocks of the general-purpose processing units - each block configured to run a particular task - and sort of chain the commands through. Of course it does require writing special software, but developing for such hardware seems to be quite enjoyable! All it would require to become downright mainstream would be for Tilera to ship with a decent compiler/API that lets developers easily choose what the general-purpose processing units will be doing and string together the blocks in an easy and logical way, and I think they may have a real winner on their hands.

One sentence summary: imagine the Tilera Gx as a hardware implementation of just about any software solution of your choice. An on-die webserver. A single-chip RDBMS. Whatever your wildest dreams desire...
If you do, please post the link.
Yeah, that was weird.

But, I do think if you're "buying into it" by creating a unique voice & finding low-cost ways to get your message out to the public -- & not by just trying to be another 37s -- that's a positive thing.
I don't think that's an example of passive voice.
Newsweek also recently devoted its cover to shortening 4 year college programs to 3 years (http://www.newsweek.com/id/218183) and also asked a team of "experts" to discuss the idea (http://www.newsweek.com/id/218234).

Much like the blog post here, there was no discussion of the quality of education. No statistics about the quality, effectiveness, or usefulness were presented. The primary focus was cost and arguments about "development."

Unfortunately, discussions without supporting data seem to be the norm on this topic.
The kind of work Ars Digita were doing wasn't algorithmically complex tho' - one template-driven corporate website is much like another. They certainly weren't debugging race conditions or anything mentally exhausting like that. You can just grind this stuff out 12 hours a day if you have to/are being paid enough.
patio11 - The reason a lot of people start with AdWords is exactly because the learning curve is low and there are some reports of success using it. However, as people have learned to work AdWords, I'm afraid such reports are getting far and between, and you can very quickly loose yourself in it.

Our goal was not to work AdWords to pull bunnies out of it, but rather to drive a little targeted traffic so we could test. We got much more utility out of usability testing and talking to real customers. I also think there is a lot more low lying fruit to be picked before resorting to working AdWords.
Gmail - Ambusar singh Profile
Exactly. Top hedge fund managers regularly make over a billion every year. Even last year, with the stock market meltdown, the 25 top earners made more than $11 billion.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/25/markets/hedge_alpha/index.ht...
I saw sometime ago a video that a guy opened up a flash video on the os x and then the same on a virtual machine, running windows, on top of os x. The cpu use on the latter was negligible.
How schools stifle creativity
About building the API first:

So many web apps are already built on top of an API or framework provided by a RAD tool. So if you build another API atop that then you'd lose the ability to enjoy the benefits of the RAD tool for the actual application--since it's now two levels away from it.
For those of you who have seen the TED talk before, today's submitted link is a follow-up by the speaker on the worldwide impact of his talk.
Sure, why would they ever want extra hits from search engines (not just google remember, no other search engine can see this properly either). Why would they want extra traffic, surely they want to keep this a big a secret as possible??

The fact is that the people who did this have no idea, sure they can create fancy flash, but they are ignorant of almost everything else about the web.
Ask HN: How do you do real time document tracking?
I was considering diff Document Tracking options and came across DocTracking.com. DocTracking.com allows you to upload documents (PDF Word etc) and adds some kind of invisible tracking to it and returns the document to you which can then be used just like you would use the document otherwise. This tracking tells you when your documents were opened, who opened them (IP), geo-location of opening if they are re-opened or forwarded, what pages were read and how long it was read for, what was printed. Any leads on how this could be done would be appreciated.
>Swiping back and forth through your browser history beats clicking or keyboarding

Opera gestures beat that, and I still have middle click.
I don't write TripAdvisor or Amazon reviews, but they can inform my choices (both +ve & -ve) if I'm considering a purchase.
From dhh in the podcast: "The 37signals' job board made 1.5 million in the past 18 months for 1 and a 1/2 days of work." Not too shabby. But you gotta remember that that was 5 years of community building that made that revenue possible.
> now that I think about it, to win first prize, you don't even need to code anything

True, but you also need to be the first to figure out the combination of pre-existing WASTEpoints. A 'funny' progression:

1. Contestant #1 figures out how to do the computation using 9 existing WASTEpoints and one personally created one.

2. Contestant #1 registers said WASTEpoint to use it to submit their program listing.

3. Contestant #2 figures out how to use Contestant #1's WASTEpoint + the 9 others, and submits the winning program listing before Contestant #1 does. Thereby winning the contest on the back of someone else that had already figured out how to win the contest.
I agree with 95% of what he says, but I'd make one change to the Unix philosophy: text files aren't the best primitive.

Text files have a super low-level API (stat, seek, read). I think the system he describes would be much more usable if he picked slightly higher-level data abstractions. I would recommend Python's built-in types: list, tuple, dict, set. Most data can be easily represented by these types and they provide a higher level API than streams (files), which means the barriers to using them are much lower.
Could you explain why this is relevant, rather than just linking to it?
It's a way to cover their asses. "We put it in the Terms & Conditions! It was just that stupid judge that wouldn't let us exercise them!"
Hacking C++ From C
This is interesting, but the last sentence implies there's a part 2. No link.

http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/nemch2.htm is a 404.

Ah: http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/Nemesis%20Chapters/

A brief reminder: write for the web.
"which tags implicitly close others" - stuff like this makes me cry. What is the benefit of a format that allows such complicated rules for parsing the document? Flexibility like this on the input is just increasing complexity of the rendering engines and ambiguity of the resulting output.
Also, an engine in a car cannot run all the time at the same load, because there are hills, crossroads, faster and slower roads, etc., while a plane operates in much more constant conditions, so the engine can work at roughly the same load most of the time. Combustion engines doesn't scale, so the engine cannot have the same efficiency for every possible load. (And it's not practical to put an electric generator and engines, which are much, much better, in a plane or car.)
My office has a gorgeous view of the city (and I'm a hobbyist photographer) - but I've yet to come in on a weekend with my camera to take any pictures.

Most people desire a separation between work and play, and I think one ought to respect that. It's unreasonable to expect your employees to embody their job at all hours of the day - including weekends! At some point they will leave the office, and chasing them and trying to reel them back in with perks or goodies is just going to generate antagonism. You expect happy engineers yet you clearly have no respect for their personal time, how does that work out?
In reality, I believe that Frind probably works at least as much as any of us, otherwise I doubt his startup would be successful at all. However, at some point he realized that he could garner a lot of free press by pretending to be lazy.

My point was to revile someone who consciously puts out the image that running a startup involves just being lazy and cashing checks. I think it continues to perpetuate a very false but popular view of what startup life is like. People here at HN upvote this because they know that running a startup involves hard work and meager rewards.
I would argue that most tier 1 universities in the world should have a strong research focus.

Posting a list of accomplished alums is nothing special, right? I mean, any good university is going to have that.
Support for "the welfare state" in the abstract is irrelevant. The relevant question is "would person X purchase retail goods or health care if given the choice?"

People might support the welfare state for various other reasons, including signaling [1], compromise and ignorance [2]. Regarding more efficient public health care (assuming it to be true for the moment, I've seen no compelling evidence for this), all this does is reduces the deadweight loss by lowering the price of the unwanted goods.

[1] I voted for X because I'm {religious/moral/not racist/hard working/$OTHER_TRIBAL_IDENTITY}.

[2] This is due both to politicians lying ("I won't force people to buy health insurance they can't afford") as well as to people not having a clue ("death panels").
In the United States, where this railroad operates, there isn't electrified freight rail. Whether railroads in other countries are electric is irrelevant to this acquisition of a US railroad.
I'm imagining Outer Circle being implemented as a peer to peer application. In my example Albert->Carol->David. That is Albert is reading David's posts because Albert has white listed Carol (at level one) and Carol has white listed David.

How does the text of David's post get from David's machine to Albert's machine? We already have routing built into the semantics of the white listing hierarch. Since Carol is reading David's posts, Albert can get them from Carol.

I've read that one of the issues with amateur web comics is that good ones become popular and the artist suddenly finds himself with bandwith bills to pay. A peer to peer implementation of Outer Circle could cause this problem if an author becomes popular by millions of fans putting him on their direct lists, but I think that the common case is that a popular author reaches a large audience because he has been picked up by a hundred influention Circlers who are read at two removes by the Outer Circle. So the tree structure will usually give the system good fan out just because few users will wish to manage a direct list of more than 50 or 100 and will therefore access the system through several layers of hierarchy.
I've done the grind work - used to work in an auto parts plant actually. 12 hour days are exhausting, and your output decreases dramatically after you go past the 8 hour mark. Repeatedly doing this over multiple days results in dramatically reduced productivity.

Read up on the studies yourself - the 40 hour work week was established based on output studies of factory workers - people who, like you say, aren't doing anything complex. They still suffer from performance penalties just like everyone else, and they also eventually go into negative output mode, just like programmers.

Having done the grind work while strapped for cash, I can tell you that the allure of money and the desperation of making rent will only make you productive for so long. Everyone has different limits, but at the end of the day someone who is overworked will likely give up large sums of money just to work less.

As an employer, why can't you give your guys normal 8 hour days? It's more economical for everyone - you are getting sustainable, high output, as opposed to the illusion of working hard, while getting very little out of your employees in reality.
I was able to reproduce with Chrome 3.0.195.27 on Windows; it's happening because Clicky Web Analytics has an image inside of a <p>, and you've styled p in footer to have a background image. I was able to get it to go away by removing the style, or by removing the p around the image in the footer.
I've had more traumatic code errors due to times than I care to admit.

The bottom line: Learn from Unix. Store everything in epoch time (even if you're in Windows.) Do all your math in that. Showing local time is for display _only_. You won't ever regret it. (Well, hardly ever.)
Open source email clients that make Outlook look outdated
Not sure how diesel trains are "worse". When you have a 1000-mile line through the middle of nowhere, it's probably better to bring the power-plant with the train, instead of having 1000 miles of wire and electrical substations sitting idle most of the time. (Overhead wires also interfere with tall railcars, like double-stack container trains.)

For commuter trains, though, I am not sure why we use diesel. Lower upfront cost is my guess, which is kind of a shame. (The US has big problems with buying proper infrastructure. Much better to spend $100 million over 10 years and provide mediocre service than to spend $50 million in one year and provide excellent service for 10 years. Funding anything other than roads is politically unpopular; trains are "noisy" and we don't want more of them. Yeah... some day I will move to Europe or Japan...)
Long Tail Criticism Might Affect e-Business Strategies
Wikipedia's shorter, less narrative text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_%28star%29
I agree, it frustrates me too that the W3C has moved away from XML for the HTML specification. I feel like HTML5 takes 1 step forward but 2 steps back. There are some great semantic tags and I love the multimedia support, but the move away from XML just seems like we are going the wrong direction.

I don't think that the requirements of being a valid XML document are all that onerous for HTML.
I don't know if I'm just lazy, but there is no way I would use something like this.
The camera is a poor analogy because it invites you to explore many different places. A better analogy might be a theater room with cushy chairs, big screen, and great sound. That would make you want to go to the office to use it. Your camera does the opposite.
"I like cash," Mr. Buffett said.
terminal tabs are still useful when you want to have multiple screen sessions on multiple physical machines. I run a screen session on my server with Irssi and admin stuff in one terminal tab, and another terminal session for my local machine. But honestly, Terminator [1] beats out tabs with it's useful split terminal layout. I can on-the-fly arbitrarily split, hide, maximize, or group panes, and then I can have multiple tabs worth of split terminals. It's quite fun. :)

[1] http://www.tenshu.net/terminator/
Loopt Shifts Its Strategy To Tap The Pulse Of Location
Wow, I'm being downvoted into oblivion for observing that other mobile devices can run flash apps and pointing out that Apple keeps tight control over their platform. Neither of these are particularly controversial, as I see it.

I realize that Flash is annoying, and of course I'd expect to be able to turn it off on any reasonable platform---most of the time, I really don't want it. But when I do, let me make a big-boy decision about battery life versus usefulness all by myself.

Are you really under the impression that Apple is in a better position to decide whether the tradeoffs are worthwhile than I am? On my phone?
But a movie is significantly less content than a novel. If you read manga instead, the time invested would be about the same.

(And of course, neither are as intellectually stimulating as a well-written novel. Which is the point of reading them, for me anyway.)
Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone...

Do you believe that this opinion both motivates and justifies Apple's refusal to allow Flash on the iPhone?
That's probably fair. I honestly don't think we're at the point where we can abandon text files altogether, but you're right -- a lot of data could definitely be stored in slightly higher-level data structures.

I still really like text files though :)