skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"which probably does make it a bit slower"

(citation needed)

Dalvik seems to work just fine. It also helps that Android doesn't use libc but their own custom-written version (bionic) that has a lot of the standard stuff (strcmp, memcpy) hand-written in ARM assembly. What does the JVM do?

I wouldn't call it
He's practically the poster boy for Sufficiently Smart Compiler cheerleading, but he despises the most useful real-world example? And he's in the middle of a blog series about how awesome auto-parallelization will be? How is observable nondeterminism not a much bigger lie than TCO?

If you like Clojure's recur but find its syntacticalness distasteful, and clueful compilers abhorrent, the Y Combinator is exactly what you want.
"A glass of wine a day is generally healthy. But what if you pour that daily glass into the sauce of a 5000 calorie dinner?!"

Then I realized your point -- in the US, lots of people think of 800 calorie drinks containing coffee as "drinking coffee"?

Well... there are certainly even weirder advertisement effects on my home culture. :-(
Except it's still distressingly common for braindead email address validation scripts to not accept the plus character.

So, I'll use the plus to sign up for something that may produce junk (to differentiate it), and then attempt to unsubscribe--producing an error as the web form email validation to unsubscribe doesn't accept the plus. Doh!
Out of curiosity, how long after you guys started it did you start seeing a lot of people other than you post links?

I run a similar website and it has just been my friends and I posting for about a year now (which is fine with us)...interestingly (and one of the coolest feelings I've ever gotten, I'm sure you can totally relate) somebody that I had never even heard of posted my website to yours last night and told people to check it out...Since then we've gotten about 200 signups (and 3-4 people that have been hanging out on there all day today).

Was it pretty quick after you launched reddit that you started seeing a ton of people using it? I had quite a while ago accepted that it would likely just be my friends and I posting on mine...
The funny thing about this is that Facebook leads to the exact opposite of peace among groups of people. There's massive amounts of social anxiety associated with your virtual prominence amongst your friends, even if you see them in-person on a regular basis.

Since I've quit using Facebook, etc I have noticed a massive improvement in the quality of my interactions with friends. They actually bother asking how I'm doing / what I'm up to, and I'm genuinely curious about their recent experiences.

I'm actually convinced that this global obsession with social networks could lead to more wars than peace -- the current generation of Internet trolls seem like a mere precursor of what's to come. People really take this virtual shit seriously -- doesn't that seem just the slightest bit scary, when coupled with natural youthful aggression?
Surprised at the downvotes. Clearly you people have never had to deal with trying to get anything done with Apple or any other similar massive inattentive bureaucracy (like, say, immigration services?).

It's one thing to, in good faith, work through an outstanding issue with someone over the course of months, another to simply ignore any/all requests until they go through extraordinary measures to capture your attention.
Writing your own handhacked regexp for Apache logs in 2009? :( I respectfully suggest that you use wtop / logrep or one of the many (configurable!) libraries available instead.

http://code.google.com/p/wtop
According to http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10959, the minimum requirements are either an ATI Radeon 2600 or an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M.
I wouldn't say that using Python for scripting is even a de facto standard in that sense. Don't make the mistake of assuming your experiences are normative.
This all feels really familiar. The PC application market used to have the same "get rich quick" carnival vibe, as did dot-coms.

Eventually the craziness will die down, and only the more serious developers will stick around. There's bound to be some big consolidation. It's inevitable as the market matures, and we've seen this pattern over and over and over and over.

The real question though, is whether the pricing model and consumer expectations have been so degraded that the situation is unredeemable. At 70 cents per sale, the revenue isn't enough to support many players.

At current prices, the TAM of iPhone apps looks like around a billion dollars, with Apple skimming around 300 million right off the top. So, that leaves us with around $700 million in revenue per year.

That's enough to support a handful of small-to-midsize development shops, with nobody capturing more than a few million a year. However, the money certainly isn't enough to support multiple large software businesses. Adobe alone did $700 million in sales last quarter.

I don't think that this is a healthy state of affairs. Hopefully, things will improve after the shakeout.
After seeing MZ at startup school, it was apparent that he is a big thinker. I didn't think this big though. Brilliant!
I'm struck by his mention of a middle ground, the idea of relative calm in a small town. This is a lot of what I'm trying to say with http://richmondhackers.drupalcafe.com (cf. my HNN post a week or two ago).
Google could solve the spam problem in groups, they've solved it in gmail.

That they havent, is most likely a symptom of their size and having so many balls in the air.
Isn't it also possible that facebook could be used for the promotion of hate? An obvious and outstanding recent example was the recent quiz about whether the U.S. president should be killed. If you read about the balkans, (and more recently iraq) what is shocking is how quickly cultures with cross-ethnic/religous connections - even those as strong as intermarriage can quickly become polarized into bitter enemies. Which makes me wonder what these graphs of israel/palestine friendships will look like when tensions again escalate between these two groups. What did the india/pakistan graph look like after the Mumbai bombings?
Nobody is asking for "quickly". It's way too late for "quickly". How about making a proper good-faith effort to reach an amicable resolution in a remotely timely fashion, instead of general stonewalling?
I like Joy's recursion primitives for much the same reason, and particularly since they make various patterns (ie binary recursion) explicit.
It's an optimization. Most optimizations don't require that the programmer annotate "I want this optimization" around the code that can be optimized. Obviously, he always wants the optimization. Tail call removal does this; it's a case that is easy for the compiler to identify and optimize. Requiring an explicit "hey, optimize this!" instruction is just confusing...
I disagree. Seeing people use something that you use but who live in a completely different place and have very different lives is a really enlightening thing.
He probably didn't. He probably meant @ymail, or firstlast3@gmail or some other permutation.

At least, that's been the case for most of the misdirected email I've received.
You're changing the topic of conversation from 'recur' to 'tail-call elimination', but I'll bite.

I don't understand your argument. How is the decision to take advantage of tail-call elimination any less a part of an algorithm's implementation than the decision to, say, use a lazy iterator rather than read into an intermediate array? If it's not the best tool for what you're trying to do, certainly, don't use it, but there are plenty of legitimate places where it is needed, so why argue against it?
Very interesting point, never saw it that way.

And yes, my previous problem was trying to chew something too big. I broke down the problem, now realizing it's enough for three separate projects.
That would be a harder claim to make if you had quoted the whole of ajju's sentence. I think what's interesting here is not that they have a blog, but how the blog is run. They respond to a webcomic, they enable comments, they respond to comments, they write in a human tone, etc.

Sure, most organizations have blogs, but for most they are a write-only place to put press releases.
Maybe they were doing puzzles in the newspaper instead and it was harder to notice. Computers are just a more visible mode of distraction.
Stack Exchange is designed for one type of interaction: answering focused questions.

It's not appropriate for just putting an idea out there and discussing it, or for that matter even having a discussion about answers to an individual question.
The more and more I learn about Kanban and Kaizen, the more right on it feels.
I wasn't being flip. His head is full of mush and delusions. He is unsatisfied with his academic success, girls, and hobbies because they do not cast him as some kind of mythic hero. He needs to get rid of that illusion. Throwing himself into the army or a startup company would just be feeding it. Once he stops doing things only to aggrandize his self-concept, he might find something he actually finds interesting or beautiful and from that will spring endless energy.
I get the opposite reaction. I talk to people I'd never talk to otherwise. It doesn't hurt that I unfriend people I don't like talking to that much.

The problem is that Facebook is a constant communication. When you interact with people after talking to them on Facebook, there's less to talk about, because it's already been said. If you consider Facebook to be a part of interaction, as I do, the net conversation swells; if not, it shrinks.

> I'm actually convinced that this global obsession with social networks could lead to more wars than peace -- the current generation of Internet trolls seem like a mere precursor of what's to come. People really take this virtual shit seriously -- doesn't that seem just the slightest bit scary, when coupled with natural youthful aggression?

Yes and no. The good thing about the Internet is that to take it seriously, you have to make the choice yourself. It's not like a war, in which nationalism can sweep a lot of good people into doing bad things. Rather, it's a bunch of smaller, decentralized, isolated incidents, and I like that. The more isolationist (not isolated) the world is, the healthier it is. If a thousand nutjobs kill a thousand people over Internet bullshit, that's a lot healthier than that thousand nutjobs congregating over political/religious/economic bullshit and attempting to kill a lot more. There'll be more incidents, in other words, but each one will be vastly less harmful.
[if you think you're brilliant, you're probably not. The most brilliant people I know tend not to think of themselves in terms of brilliance.]
The response is more than a little weak. Confiscating people's shampoo and water does nothing to improve the safety of air travel. That's the point Randall Munroe is making and it's still quite valid.

It's trivially easy to smuggle enough liquids on board an airplane to bypass the TSA's "security" measures. Simply claim it is saline solution or use something like a "beer belly".

Similarly, the TSA's ban of knives on planes is equally toothless. Many fliers (myself included) can attest to having accidentally brought pocket knives on planes without security screening having noticed them. And even a moderately dedicated attacker would find it easy to acquire a ceramic knife capable of passing through a metal detector.

It's a kabuki dance, it's security theater, it increases security not one bit, but makes it more difficult to fly.
How is 'structure your code to make tail calls' any different from 'annotate "I want this optimization"'?
I just left this comment on the TSA blog: "To translate:

"Our policy is irrational, but we're sticking to it anyway in the interests of security theater." "
Looking at it from a broader perspective, Facebook is the promotion of communication manifest. It strives very hard, in fact, to be a neutral medium, in which no one type of conversation is favored over another, so conversation ranges from flirting to intense debate.

The question is, does prolonged communication lead to more peace or more hate? My bet: In the short term, more hate, because there'll be a lot of people getting in fights over issues they didn't know existed. (I lost a lot of Palin-supporting friends last year.) In the long run, however, more open communication leads to us understanding each other better, and only good can come of that.
Ideas for Justin.tv RFS from JTV
Fake business name is just another word for business name, also called doing business as, and fictitious name.

It just means it's a name you are using, but it's not your name.

All non-corporation company names are legally fake names.
No affilaition, but I just came across this app-store web gateway and thought I'd pass it along:

http://app-store.appspot.com/?url=viewSoftware%3Fid%3D333273...
What advantages do you think software offers in this respect that books don't? All I can think of are:
a) Logging successes/failures
b) Suggesting questions

Both of these are partially replicated in books by
a) Having a list of answers at the end of the book the student can check their answers against and so mark their own work.
b) Students can look at the entire list of exercises and choose whichever they think appropriate - the very height of a "personalized learning experience"

Think about the reason we still have human teachers even though books have been available for hundreds of years and you'll probably answer your own question.
Honestly, I feel like recursion is the natural way to express transformations on any nexted data structure (like a list, tree, or graph). I think the major reason that many people don't see these data structures often is because some languages make recursion harder than iteration, so they stick with iteration across arrays and `for` loops.

Recursion is really a natural way to express almost any repeated operation on a computer.
Okay sure a few people did crosswords but I'm talking like 50 percent of the students having their computers out on facebook and playing dumb facebook games. It is distracting to me who ends up sitting in the middle of the class cause my other class is across campus and ends late and having a bunch of flashing computers in front of me.

Makes me glad I'm in engineering where people need to focus, it doesn't help that this freshman level class enforces attendance either cause these people probably wouldn't even be showing up.
Enable Networking In Xen Guests On Hetzner's New EQ Servers (Debian Lenny)
Here's the initial note from the forum. I copied it before and can't reload, so I don't know the user that posted it.

"During a shared library update distributed to our hosts, a number of the hosts incorrectly have marked Linodes as being shut down. To recover from this we may be issuing host reboots to upgrade their software to our latest stack, and then bringing the Linodes to their last state. We're working on this now and expect to have additional updates shortly. We'll also be notifying those affected via our support ticket system. Please stand by."
FWIW: If you are saying people aren't responding as you had hoped to things you are posting, you are the best person to do something about that.

I really suck at starting threads. For the most part, I try to avoid starting too many threads because it usually goes pretty badly. At one time, I made it a specific goal to figure out how to get better at that in one forum I participated in regularly at the time. I did get better at it. One thing I did: I observed what other people did who had a track record of successfully starting conversations. I couldn't do exactly what they did but I did have a style all my own that worked reasonably well for me in that forum, at least for a time.

Often, it's not simply the topic that is the problem but what the way it is framed.

And if that's not what this question is about: Nevermind.
Yeah, you're probably right. This is my 'limited life experience' showing...
High Performance Computing at Amazon: A Cost Study
Ruby, PHP, Python, Java, ELisp, and C Fractal Benchmark
Modest agreement here.

I am a big fan of being able to get stack backtraces when I have a problem to debug. But tail call recursion silently throws away stack frames. You get great performance benefits from doing so, but I'd like an option when debugging to get at the information that has been thrown away.

During debugging I'd prefer to change recur into a function call than make an edit that kills the optimization for less obvious reasons. So far so good.

But recur is less flexible than tail call optimization. Consider for the moment a problem that you have modeled with finite state machines. Each state is a function, and a state transition is signaled by calling the next function. With tail call optimization this won't grow your stack. With recur you have no choice because you can't jump to another function.
Software can adapt to student ability and evaluate student progress. The software is like one long exam and the resulting grades should matter.

Moreover, the data obtained from this software can be used to improve it (e.g., by making it better adapt to ability).
Some people get a tattoo to remember a trying time in their life, others...
I did a little research and discovered that there actually has been a successful terrorist attack on a plane using mostly liquid explosives, Korean Air Flight 858:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858

Two explosives were used: C4 and about twice as much PLX (a binary liquid explosive) as C4, totaling about 1kg of explosives. The bomb was powerful enough to take down the plane and cause the deaths of all 115 passengers. I suspect C4 was used as a component in order to ensure that the PLX was detonated, because it appears to be a tricky explosive to set off with just a blasting cap.

Regardless, the critique that is being leveled against the TSA is not that such an attack could be successful, but rather that the methods being used to thwart such an attack are wholly ineffectual, with the side effect of causing a great deal of inconvenience, wasting a massive amount of effort, and providing a distraction from more robust methods of solving the security problem.
Some people just like to feel helpful/needed and like to spend their time working on stuff they believe in. If no money is exchanging hands, your best currency is to make them feel respected and appreciated. But, as others have suggested, don't give access to something that might lead to regrets. And start small and let the role grow. It's much better to do that than to give too much to the person, have a bad experience on both ends, and try to curb it back.
Small business credit cards flourish as loans disappear
The article is well thought out and presents a good viewpoint. I think it's one-sided and, um, short-sighted.

I see the RFP process from the viewpoint of a buyer and a provider. From the buyer's standpoint, when we start a project we simply don't know what firms are capable of doing what we want done. The RFP gives us a level playing field to compare costs, capabilities, and experience.

Without an RFP, particularly for complex projects, you can spend months scoping out capbilities, refining your needs (both of which you should be doing AFTER you form a relationship.)

Which takes longer for a firm? Researching an RFP and presenting a document for a potential client's review or spending eight months going back and forth trying to figure out what to build. Of course, the latter. The difference is that providers get paid for those eight months (a plus for them) while buyers get nowhere.
Could someone please provide a link as to how Facebook and/or Yahoo use PHP with "templates"?

I want to create "yet another" social networking site for a niche market, and am trying to figure out what technology would work best for this space.

I've been using asp.net for the last several years, and used to code in mod_perl, java, etc. But, I don't have any experience with the newer open source languages. I want to pick what's a good fit (even if I have to learn a new language). I know these are just basic details, but would greatly appreciate any feedback.

Thanks! (long-time lurker, first-timer poster)
I don't think Clojure's "recur" or Scheme's tail-call elimination should really be called optimizations.

The point of optimizations, AIUI, is that the code will still run with the optimizations off--it will just run more slowly, but might be useful in other ways (easier debugging, faster compilation, a chance to confirm that there are no bugs in the compiler/interpreter itself, whatever).

But if I'm using "recur" or tail-call elimination to write loops in a recursive form, and I know that my code has to still work even if those features are turned off, then all of a sudden I have to worry about things like "how many times can I recurse in this function without exhausting the stack?"
Do they actually have a "theory of peace" that they are using to design the site, or are they just posting statistics?

edit: Here's my take. "War is a failure of the imagination." Once you understand that quote, you've just 'gotten' about half of history.
This is a clever example of one of the millions of things you could use wave for... And they didn't even get very far into the good part - Ideally, Wave D&D would have a robot extension which the DM could use to roll the die, calculate scores, etc.

I could see wave spawning a whole genre of multiplayer, wave-moderated games which take advantage of the ability to move seamlessly between synchronous and asynchronous player communication.

Another example where this could be applied: live fantasy football drafts.
He's just running the numbers. In a best case scenario, he can pay rent and food with cashflow, but there's no money left over to pay for extra development cost. Art assets, music, and such cost money.

Two updates a month is probably full-time work, so there isn't any time left over to build new apps, and no surplus capital either. Plus, that's assuming that each and every update spikes sales like the launch did.

According to the OP, daily sales are currently holding steady at around 11 sales a day. That's a little bit over $200 a month in persistent revenue. At that rate, it would take almost a decade for the game to break even, given a cost of $20,000 to develop.

Special note: This is for a game that cost only $20,000 to make. Building a solid AAA title can cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars.
After reading your library, I have something to say to YC, but no way I'm stupid enuf to post it on the Internet!

P.S. I'll give you a hint: the demographics celebrated in your start-up post vs. me. 49 yr old female: 2 level 80's in WoW + many other lower lvls, living with engineers at my house to get this great idea off the ground and get our application submitted (since Friday), .... YC can read the rest about me in my application, don't think that anyone else can :-(......
And I'll write a post about how my shitty 3rd world university didn't prepare me for working on startups (or anywhere else in the formal economy for that matter).
Looks like that hasn't been active for a long time:
http://twitter.com/haystackmusic
Net Neutrality Explained Again Differently
$241 per account, that's some expensive email.