skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's worth noting that the numbers for MySQL are slightly artificial. In the real world, you would use a relational database and ask it difficult questions that take a lot longer to answer than just getting key/value pairs.

If you just look at the numbers on that page, you would think that Memcached is only 10 times faster than MySQL, but in reality, the speed increase is closer to 100 times or more, because MySQL grows slower the more difficult questions you ask, and the more data you've stored in it. Memcached performance is (almost) independent of the size of the data, and it can only really do one thing, but it does it well.

Then again, if all you're looking to do is to store key/value-pairs, this benchmark is useful.
Sparklines in OpenOffice.org Calc
Closure. "I had the only farm capable of nuclear weapons design."
Hacking Minds: Leverage Your Habitual Nature
Coding Horror: Buy Bad Code Offsets Today
I would Invest all of it in an Alternative Fuel research.
Well, he is fucking right. The fucking point being that the fucks in the Perl 5 camp need to get the fuck off their high horse and move on with the fucking business of Perl without being defensive will end up benefiting both these fucking camps in the end. And who the fuck knows, maybe if we get more familiar with both fucking languages we can fucking communicate and improve both fucking codebases?

.........

Fuck.
I'd be uncomfortable with 100 million I did not earn. I'd like to think I would say, no thanks. Instead, I would probably come up with some justification for why I am suitable to control this very large investment.

(You could argue that, given luck, a lot of people receive $100 million without really "earning" it. That may be the case, but that would probably make me uncomfortable also. However, as in the previous case, I'd still delude myself into thinking I earned it by foresight, brilliant investment, or mettle.)
I'm not aware of Jobs ever being a programmer, what are you talking about?
maybe the act of doing boring work teaches a useful life skill

Yes - it teaches passive compliance. But this life skill is more useful to those assigning the drudgery than to those doing it.
Private Company Valuations: Blekko, Inc.
The Free Information Society - Media in eBooks/Other
Personal crash safety suit for motorcyclists/extreme sports which could absolutely protect against all damage. I have ideas, which could be applied to other applications, anyone have the $100,000,000?
I think the main title is the issue. If someone calls for someone else to solve their issues, there is a problem. If the idea was lucrative and someone had a method of implementation, laziness or inability are the only reasons I can fathom not to proceed.

"Hey, guys, I have this great idea..." I hear this so much, but when I pick apart the ideas of others, they are normally not fully developed, they have no profitability, and they want to take credit for someone else doing all of the work. I think the title is the major issue with the article.
Why from scratch? If you remove that seemingly pointless requirement then there's quite a few examples, starting with the Litl OS which is based on Ubuntu

Heck, there's plenty of good solid starting points. What about BSD? Linux? Android?
Fred Wilson: Anatomy Of A Big Day On AVC. 2172 vists from HN.
Thanks, but we weren't tracking cents. Nor using Java.
The Singularity Is Coming—Now What?
Cool. I've always wanted a programming mentor. I work in a really small software company in which I find a lack of standardized software practices. Not that it is bad, but I would love to discover the other side of the spectrum through a mentor.
I grew up owning a Vic 20 (which I still have, by the way), and my friends all had different types of computers; Tandy, Amstrad, Sinclair, BBC, C64, Atari etc. Can't even remember them all now, and they were all different but it was great. Learned to programme just about all of them and had a ball.

Many many happy memories of those times

[Edit: thinking about it now, the one thing that was missing was one-upmanship. I don't remember any comparison between machines for the purposes of deciding which was 'better'. We were just happy to have something; didn't matter what brand it was]
I'm not a parent so I can't say this from personal experience, but if you come home from work, do you want to still have a night full of more work, and better yet, do you want to deal with/feel the pain of your child having to? That's what college is for, not fucking elementary school. There is a limit to what's effective.

Also, studying all the time as a kid (or having a night full of homework every night) leaves you with less time to develop socially and hang out with friends. I don't want my kids to just hole themselves in their room all night doing homework.
It may be quite off topic and all, but i have a question for you daeken : How is it to code such a project in boo, considering an OS project is at the same time quite large , and quite low level in nature ?

I will look at the codebase someday, i'm very intrigued
Sure, if they log into the site to read it. Most people got tired of bothering long ago, however.
Also irritating is that the onus is on the parents to ensure that things get done, I'd rather that my child is taught responsibility than taught dependence...

Err, isn't it the parents' responsibility to build responsibility in their children rather than the schools'?
I'd build a college, maybe only inviting 500 students at a time or something and hire the best professors paying the highest salaries and see what happens.

Of course the college would be super selective, but it would be a breeding ground for awesomeness.
I am going to cash in on this fad by selling "Bad Blog Offsets" and "Bad Idea Offsets". I will make a fortune from just one person...
For those of you attending one of the iPhone Tech Tour stops (if it hasn't already occurred): get the UDIDs of Apple folks' phones while you're there. I know I'll be doing that (or dying trying) in Toronto on the 3rd.
The death of the blog post (and rise of the blogazine)
New release of Knoppix now available - Linux Critic
It's fantastic. Downright fantastic. Even in portions that deal heavily with memory directly (e.g. our AMD PCnet driver), we get the ease of use that Boo and .NET give us. After working on this iteration of Renraku, I don't see myself ever using a non-managed language for OS work again.
I'd build a biotech-biogerontology institute for the SENS Foundation and Aubrey de Grey.
did anyone already do performance tests? I'm especially interested in memory and cpu usage. Any limitations?
Oh well, the Excel team itself credits Tufte with the invention :

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/07/17/sparklines-in...

What's more it's by the Patent applicant himself - Sam Radakovitz! Something is missing here.
yep it's work to note that at the contrary most Redis higher-level operations like PUSH / POP or even getting a few sorted elements from a ZSet are as fast as GET / SET.
To be fair, they're not claiming sparklines itself, rather the integration of sparklines into a spreadsheet. That still doesn't seem useful and nonobvious to me, and on top of that there seems to be prior art, but don't mischaracterize what they've patented.

The patent itself: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0282325.html

[Update] Having read the claims more closely, it seems the patent might be misnamed. Claims 1-12 and 14-15 make no mention of a spreadsheet at all, only the embedding of sparklines in an electronic document and autogenerating them based on data in the document. Claims 13 and 16-20 are the only ones that cite a spreadsheet.
I'm not sure that the poster's point. When I was in grade school, the only thing my parents had to sign was my report card each quarter. It was my responsibility to do my homework, and my responsibility to shoulder the consequences if I didn't.
Thanks !

Do you use Boo's macro facilities ? I also saw that Boo has got pointer manipulation facilities. Do you have to use that in the low level (-> drivers) parts of your code ?

EDIT : I'm following your project since the beginning. Many kudos on your work :)
I was thinking about this the other day. There's a lot of opportunity in terms of other Operating Systems/Interfaces. Computers used to JUST be these beige boxes that sat under our desks. Actually at one point, it used to be huge mainframes. Now, computers are everywhere, and by computers I mean full fledged system specific GUIs tied to some piece of hardware. They're in our pocket, in our cars, on our desks, in our laps, on our tvs, in the cloud as servers, and probably other places I'm not naming. This is where I see other Operating Systems taking away Microsoft's dinner. Microsoft got us to the first billion, but I'm pretty sure someone else will get us to the first trillion. Now, that's pretty exciting.

As far as the desktop goes? Apple will have its market share, which is the high end computing market (they have ~90% of it that 10%) and windows will have the other 90%. You can make Ubuntu function/look exactly like windows/mac. The problem comes down to the OEMs. Will they support it? Will they make the strong push in marketing to get people to try it out? Your grandmother is not going to do sudo and apt-get commands. If an OEM made beautiful machines, that ran tight software/hardware integration running a customized version of Ubuntu, marketed the hell out of it, and offered the right amount of training like Apple does, it could possibly get off the ground. Even then, linux is a scary place for the average person and the apps just aren't there.

Honestly, I'm more bullish on other Operating Systems taking us from billions to trillions on devices that aren't beige boxes that sit under our desk.
Java: What does its future hold?
Do you have source control set up? Because you will break the code and be unable to fix it and that might cost you 4 months itself. Source control is your #1 priority.
Fedora, Still Pushing The Envelope
I found some context for this after searching around a bit.

A potential new Perl programmer goes to #perl and is told that Perl 6 isn't Perl then goes to #perl6 and is told Perl 6 is the new Perl but if they want to Get Things Done they should use old Perl.

http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/39861

The F--- Perl 6 post is more directed at a Perl 5 audience. This companion blog post for the Perl 6 audience. These are both bridge building attempts.

http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/39912
Local is the new global for the social web
I write my bad code in Perl, so people won't be able to tell whether it's bad or not. (Just kidding, I love Perl).
UK plan to create Pirate Finder General: power to appoint militias, create laws
Syncing: The Most Important Feature of a Multi-Device Web
They might start buying the things they produce themselves or invest in their own country. As much as the US government tries to punish savers with low interest rates it seems as though the people with savings end up with all the options.
Yes, what are the peasants going to do as they see the gap widen with the middle class? Is the time right for a peasant revolt that returns China to hard line communism?

Not sure but this also reminds me of the early 90's when the Japanese were "buying the world." Japan's problems pale in comparison to China's.
We use Boo's macros now and we'll be using them even more soon. We don't use Boo's pointers, however. They didn't exist when Renraku began, and our pointer intrinsics are considerably more powerful. We use direct memory access in a few drivers and system initialization, but that's about it.
I was planning to use them in a web app. I wonder where that leaves ... everybody?

Will Tufte have to license his own invention for a future book or app? It would be odd, considering that Microsoft names Tufte as the inventor on the posted page.

"For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence. "
I just read his book. Interesting in a Popular Science magazine type way. I mostly enjoyed the fact that de Grey -- a guy who champions vastly extended lifespans -- dresses like a freaking wizard. The photo on the back cover has him sporting a long wizard-like beard with a very colorful, starfish print shirt. I'd almost donate to him just for that.
New Microsoft products released at the Professional Developers Conference 2009
Microsoft announced the availability of the Windows Azure Platform at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, thus making Windows Azure and SQL Azure as core elements of the company’s cloud services strategy.
First of all, I would have expected better from Microsoft given all of the goodwill they've built up (with me at least). I actually use some of their better products (Xbox360 for example) and I really like them.

Secondly, sparklines are content that would fit into a cell - nothing unique here. So why go patent it other than to be predatory?
According to the comments after the article this story is both inaccurate and 15 years old.
ShopSavvy Comes To The Iphone - Turn your Iphone into a Barcode Reader
I would expect that the serious number of "fucks" just go to indicate how pissed off the poster is about the issue. Overuse communicates utter frustration. You'd need to see how the post usually talks to know for sure though.
Short version: American journalist discovers the rest of the world isn't like home.

Disappointed to see this getting a lot of upvotes. It's hardly a new issue for entrepreneurs or governments. Traffic control on the roads, in the skies, and on the rails is a known problem that transportation engineers have been working on for decades. Sarah Lacy is talking about it like she just discovered the problem.
It would be nice if the languages in the sidebar on the left were in some non-abitrary order, preferably alphabetical :)

apart from that, a definite improvement on the languages http://codepad.org/ supports

Chromium and Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu just sit there "Loading...waiting for compilation"
I'd try and find a mothballed oil platform, buy it for cheap and renovate it into a luxury hotel with luxury apartments and market it to celebrities as a way to completely avoid the paparazzi and to a wealthy client list. Bars, nightclubs, restaurants and casino's would be there from the start to help clear out people's pockets. It would be self-sustaining with gardens and hydroponics, wind power and eventually wave power, both of which could be sold back to shore to decrease maintenance costs.

If it failed, so what, it would advance the idea of seasteading. If it succeeded I'd attempt to expand the platform, or build another platform within about 3km, so that the platforms could be connected with existing gondela technology.

The idea of seasteading has always fascinated me, but to make it carbon-neutral or even better carbon-negative (encouraging coral growth around the bases, out putting power to onshore communities, etc.) would send an environmental message that the people who care about the environment aren't just a bunch of witless nags at greenpeace but are people who actually want to change the whole world into something better. This environmental message could be capitalized on during expansion phases and used to attract businesses.

In theory you would become a monopolic supplier of all goods. Food, power, housing, transport, would all be owned by your company meaning you can attain income from all aspects of the business and keep it profitable. By keeping the market open, it makes you look friendly and open (consider you own the transportation, so anyone competing with you and winning is still paying you money).

In 40 years time I would be a James Bond-esque supervillain and precisely where I want to be before retirement.
That's not so far off from how Olin College was created, except with 5x as much money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Eng...
http://www.motoair.com/
Another reason I like it so much is that purely functional software tends to be more reliable. Joe Armstrong of Erlang fame makes that point in an excellent talk much better than I could ever hope to.

Erlang is not purely functional. Not even remotely.
Still doesn't matter. Unless you create an ecosystem around your software, I think it still isn't relevant in the larger scheme of things. For eg., can Maemo, Android, WebOS etc all share applications, APIs, drivers, and other infrastructure seamlessly?

The point is you need to end up creating an ecosystem around your offering, which is non-trivial. Even if you do, you may still end up as a niche player. Litl is nice; but how well do you think they'll do against traditional netbooks?
Terracotta Acquires Quartz
Computer Glitch Grounds Air Traffic
Louis C.K. has ideas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95fNgx8aCS8
(I have submitted this to Tufte's site, but it is awaiting moderation. I figured I would post here as well)

Under 35 U.S.C. 301, you may submit proof of prior art to the patent office for any patent. To quote:

"Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent. If the person explains in writing the pertinency and manner of applying such prior art to at least one claim of the patent, the citation of such prior art and the explanation thereof will become a part of the official file of the patent. At the written request of the person citing the prior art, his or her identity will be excluded from the patent file and kept confidential."

In short, call the patent office, and tell them that you wish to submit prior art under 35 U.S.C. 301. Given that you have a published book with a clear description of the subject matter, it is a very strong case.

Alternatively, you could ignore it. It may not issue, and even if it does, it may not be defensible.
"MOTOAIR, motorcycle airbag jacket is the necessary equipments of riders, the AIRBAG SYSTEM is designed to proof shocks ordinary, can protect the human body easily to be injured the fatal spot"

Their site copy reads like a bad video game port script.
The X-Men Guide To Unlocking Your Financial Mutant Powers
I don't want to test on somebody's server and cause them to have a bad day, but does this thing have proper stack overflow/memory protection?

#include <stdio.h>
int evil(int y)
{
char *x = (char *) malloc(y);
return(evil(y+1)-evil(y+2));
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int a = evil(1);
return 0;
}
Translation into SmashingMagazine title: Top 3 Blogazines You Should Be Checking Out!

In seriousness though, those people they mentioned don't just have interesting designs with each article--they also have interesting content. Dressing up a "Top 10 WordPress Plugin" post in a special skin isn't going to make it any less shallow. However, maybe designing a skin for an article forces people to think more about what they are writing. After all, it'd be a waste not to put effort into the content if so much effort is being put into the design. I really just want more interesting content.
Peter Thiel (Paypal cofounder) has a net worth of 1.3 billion, which is a hell of a lot more than 100 million.

He has already said he believes in the concept and donated money to the 'seasteading institute'.

Obviously either it isn't worth that much to him, or 1.3 billion isn't enough for it to be reliably done.
Robots, lots of big robots :) So what I do now but more so...
Great survey.

Their question as to whether blogging is "too easy" really resonates with me: I began prototyping a CMS a while back on the premise that Blogging Should Be Harder (a reaction of sorts, I guess, to services like Posterous and Tumblr [full disclosure: I am a very happy user of the latter]). And what I found is that if it's hard to design a "blogazine"--manually setting type and choosing colors for each individual post--it's just as challenging to build an "anything goes" CMS.

I still think it's a great idea. There might only be a handful of people out there who would use it, but those that did would likely be producing really top-notch content.
What an over-the-hill supercomputer looked like in 2000:

'16 vector processors, each capable of 1 GFLOPS performance, main memory amounting to 512 MegaWords (4GB), and a 512MW (4GB) Solid-state Storage Device (SSD) serving as an extension to memory. He comes with raid controllers and disks providing over 130GB of high-speed disk storage.'

I am again reminded that our industry is insane. That machine is not even a top-line laptop anymore.
Great, now all we need is an online IDE that supports editing SVN and GIT directly.
It's still just an application, so there's a chance that it will be rejected or limited in scope before it's approved. You may also be able to design around their specific claims.
IBM's Cat-Brain Breakthrough
Cray Receives Contract to Upgrade
Mathematical disasters
"Given that you have a published book with a clear description of the subject matter, it is a very strong case."

Does he actually have a description of the subject matter? I haven't read Beautiful Evidence, but Tufte's descriptions of sparklines that I've read don't say anything about auto-generating sparklines in electronic documents based on data in the document, which is what is claimed in the patent. And claims 16-20 specifically cite embedding in a spreadsheet.

[Update] It seems he does, in fact. Tufte himself wrote a comment called "ET brief history of sparklines" on March 21, 2006 on this page: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

"My first sparkline sketches were made some 15 years ago when I reviewed an HP medical interface for monitoring hospital patients (which involved, I recall, a Unix box for every ICU patient, or maybe a Unix box on a cart wheeled around the hospital). The idea was to put sparklines on the margin of a big spreadsheet recording all patient data (event by time), thereby summarizing the time-series history of each event category. My conclusion was that the medical staff would rarely look at the original spreadsheet and would instead just look down the column of sparklines showing the events time-series. And then the original medical event spreadsheet could then be down-screen if a user wanted details."
IANAL, but this seems ludicrous on its face. The patent app was filed in 2008, and Bissantz has prior art back to at least 2006 (see, e.g., http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/sparklines-in-excel-si...).

However, my half-assed OpenOffice version (http://joeganley.com/2008/10/sparklines-in-openoffice-calc.h...) postdates the patent app. It would amuse me if I were in violation of a Microsoft patent.
okcupid also has a higher than usual amount of people who are in open relationships or polyamorous, so there might be more better looking dudes than you'd expect.
Site isn't working for me, but the github url is http://github.com/slact/nginx_http_push_module
Jolicloud Steps Up Its Game As Pre-Launch Excitement For Chrome OS Builds
Many artists have a requriement for what their art should do. For instance, a film composer has to create a soundtrack that enhances the emotional content of a film. They may have broad discretion, but ultimately their goals are largely defined by the existing narrative and pacing of the movie.
And I think this is why hardware vendors could come out with their own spin on an operating system.

We didn't use to have a standard for sharing information. If you wanted to share a file, you had to have the exact same hardware and software. That is what led us to the local minima that is PCs running DOS/Windows.

Now, however, we have a well accepted standard. If you can have a good TCP/IP stack and run a browser, you're golden. With just these two things you can be productive on any operating system.

So now, the fact that the OS is the last thing that you consider, might just free manufacturers to come up with their own designs.

That does however leave one crucial thing out, which might just kill Gruber's argument: games.