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Hello moe,

actually a lot of people overestimate the amount of their data. Btw there are a few solutions:

* given that RAM is cheap, use a Linux box with 32 or 64 GB of RAM. After all with the performances of Redis you need a single box when with other solutions more than one server is needed. It's hard to saturate 150,000 write or read per second even with a lot of users.

* to split data across different servers (using application-level partitioning or consistent hashing).

* to wait for Redis VM implementation (virtual memory).

Basically there is the plan to implement something like Operating Systems already do with memory pages. More information (and why we can't just let the OS do the work for us) in the Redis FAQ at http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/FAQ

Search for "Do you plan to implement Virtual Memory in Redis? Why don't just let the Operating System handle it for you?".
On the other hand, you don't want a review board to say: "That looks like it could be useful, so we are going to withdraw your funding."

Something could be branded, "has no commercial applications," simply by lack of imagination. We want to keep imagination alive in blue sky research :-)
ars, you make a good point but pollution is a very big hole in your metric. If you can't account for it, then your rule of thumb is misleading.
Though strangely, the "winners" in these things are usually accents that would generally be considered low-class in a similar manner to AAVE e.g. Scots and Geordie accents.
I am extremely excited about Redis, however its data size limit as the amount of available RAM is a big showstopper for me. Even when the available RAM in entry level servers is getting larger and larger (however in most cases it is <512 mb for entry level VPSes) and 64 G servers are easily available, the thought that it holds all data in RAM is not very comforting. Why keep all the data (even the pieces which are seldom used) in RAM? Couldn't there be a functionality (like TC) which flushes all old data to disk from RAM and makes room in RAM for new data?
Hi Antirez,

>to wait for Redis VM implementation (virtual memory)

When can we expect this?
Some of it is useful, some of it is useless nonsense, perpetuating other myths.

If you want to learn how negligible the effect of turning off your lightbulbs or converting to a gas heated kettle is, read "without the Hot Air" by David McKay: http://www.withouthotair.com/ It's transport and domestic heating that are the major energy consumers in the west. It's barely worth focusing on anything else.

"wood is a green fuel because the CO2 released when it gets burned will be sucked from the air by the trees planted to replace the felled ones"

What? No. Wood is a green fuel because all the CO2 released when burned was previously captured by the plant itself! What you replace it with is irrelevant.

The "Buy local" section is very good though. Local purchases will in general be a lot more wasteful than purchase of mass produced food which takes advantage of economies of scale.
Their "languages closely related" is way off. They should have just labeled it "easy languages", since that's apparently what they mean. Icelandic, in the third category, is uncontroversially more related to English than most of the (predominantly romance) languages in the first category, as English and Icelandic are both Germanic languages.
To a company that still had $4 billion in cash reserves it's the equivalent of one wallstreet banker asking another for hotdog money
Of course, something may have been cheap because it was produced in a place with lax environmental regulations (so lower compliance costs) and shipped via bulk freight options which dump a lot of nastiness into the atmosphere...
It's something like two release away. The next release will implement the Hash type, needed for virtual memory so that applications can be designed to put data that is accessed with similar patterns in the same hash.

The release after this VM will be implemented.

It's something like <= 6 months.
I suspect the average SF fiction reader will be more tech savvy than the average ancient history reader

Again, why? The topic doesn't determine the tech-savvyness of its readers, at least not in the way you suggest. Particularly, ancient history is an academic subject, and it will likely follow the general pattern in academia, with younger people being more acquainted with technology (with minority exceptions in both directions).

Consider dinosaurs: I don't think there is a less tech-heavy topic (unless the poor dinos used computers, dunno), but I'm pretty sure that a vast majority of people interested in them have been familiar with computers at least since college age.
It wouldn't be hard to extend HTML in order to support HTTP-auth (digest auth) via normal forms. The logout-button feature would be a natural addition as well. Think along the lines of a javascript call or a magic form-target.

This is just one of the many failures of the W3C.

Authentication is at the core of every webapp, browsers already support a strong mechanism - but with interface issues so severe that everybody prefers to invent their own.

The fix outlined above could be specified in a week and implemented in another. In W3C terms that translates to: 1-2 decades.
Anyone here uses Windows by any chance ? :)

Any recommendations ?
yep this is exactly the plan :) But actually it will be a good idea to use such a feature only if data access is not evenly distributed across the dataset, otherwise it's simply better to buy more RAM or more servers IMHO.
If it's less than a year old why even bother doing all that work? The disk is bad. The wipe only masks the inevitable. Formatting maps out bad sectors, but these tend to grow as time goes by.
The planet doesn't care. It has already seen pretty much every climate imaginable this distance from the sun.

The real question is, whether it's good for us.
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Fatcow review by fatcowreview.org. There is a limit in sending emails, the fatcow mail limit is set to 200 email sending per hour, or 2000 email per day. Thats the maximum that you can send. This is to prevent email spamming activity or misuse of mail server resources.
mod_perl2 is really difficult to beat if you need to dig into the guts of Apache. DBIx::Class is a huge win if you need/want an ORM but you've been given a really weird pre-existing DB schema. POE has been around forever, and makes really stable long running daemons that don't have to be babied. CPAN has stupid amount of tools for automating sysadmin tasks, all of which you'll probably end up using once, putting in a cronjob somewhere and forgetting about because it will just work. Any time you need to deal with something old, or weird, or both there's probably a CPAN module for that, you can find it via search, and it probably has tests and docs. Template Toolkit for creating uglyass text is both nice to use and full featured (if you don't want to go down the XSLT hole). I've also found that Perl handles I18N, unicode and uglier things (like shift-jis) fairly well. Almost every payment processor has a module, and they all have a standard(ish) API, so they're mostly interchangeable. Likewise crypto stuff is fairly standardized and pretty complete. In general, if you have to tie something to something else that's weird, Perl is a good bet (because someone has probably done it, put it on CPAN, and documented it).

That's a few of the problems I think it stands out as a great tool for.
What? No. Wood is a green fuel because all the CO2 released when burned was previously captured by the plant itself! What you replace it with is irrelevant.

So burning oil into the atmosphere is green because the CO2 and other dangerous substances were previously captured by the oil itself? (though it takes a bit more for an oil deposit to form than for a tree to grow)
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I think I have too much to say about this for a HN comment, but I will try to condense.

Perl is okay for parsers; but I think other languages have better parsing libraries and other languages run faster. I tend to prefer Haskell these days. It runs quickly, it has good libraries, and it's easy to get it right. (Most of the stuff I have been paid to write is Perl, though. It does get the job done, and it's certainly easier to get right than C or C++.)

Where I think Perl is really really great, though, is for building large applications. Applications are often a lot of pieces that need to be glued together, and this is were being a "glue language" really shines. The "language", of course, is CPAN. There is a library that gives you a good abstraction over almost any task you would ever need to perform.

If you are writing a large application, you don't want to have to implement boring things like HTTP header parsers or HTML templating engines. You want to write your application. Perl lets you do this to whatever extent you like; you can have libraries that make all the choices for you, or you can write everything yourself. (Most people choose some combination of this.) The language itself is fine for this, and the libraries support it. (One time, I wrote a web application without a web framework -- but I used many parts of other web frameworks from the CPAN. So even though I was writing something fairly obvious from scratch; I could still use libraries for the parts I didn't really care about doing My Way.)

I know people are going to say, "well, my language has a library for xxx", but they are kind of missing the point. CPAN has really good libraries for popular tasks, and At Least Has Something for relatively unpopular tasks. But it also has libraries for things other than "tasks"; you can change Perl itself with libraries, and there are libraries for very small programming problems. (Things that you probably wouldn't think you need a library for, like finding the largest element of a list.)

It is just hard to explain this to people that haven't used Perl. They think the only library they will ever need is Ruby on Rails, but there is so much more to library use than huge frameworks.

Anyway...

Perl also makes metaprogramming very easy. This means I can quickly implement some abstraction that's higher-level than "raw Perl", and then implement my application in terms of that abstraction. This makes the application code easier to read and understand, and it makes the application easier to write. As I hinted at above, there are a lot of libraries for this; so metaprogramming isn't some magical thing that only wizards can do -- it's something accessible to every user of the language that can imagine an abstraction.

My blog is currently dead (due to my general disinterest in system administration)... but I wrote a long article a few weeks ago about the sorts of abstractions that the Moose object system lets you build. If you care to read it, I think it's still on the planet.perl.org main page. Search for my name :)
You're right: the duration over which the CO2 was captured is important. The argument doesn't apply to burning the whole of the amazon at once! But burning growth which has happened since we started caring about CO2 has no net effect.
Yes, I think we had this discussion before but I'll repeat my concerns:

given that RAM is cheap, use a Linux box with 32 or 64 GB of RAM. After all with the performances of Redis you need a single box when with other solutions more than one server is needed. It's hard to saturate 150,000 write or read per second even with a lot of users.

For many apps even 64G is small. The problem is less about the height of the ceiling but about the fact that a ceiling exists - and that redis effectively stops working when it's reached. I agree that there are applications where redis is a perfect fit, but for many others this limit is a serious problem. Also note that many projects, especially those just starting out, simply can't afford to start with 64G servers. 4-8G is a more realistic scale to assume and that will fill up faster than anyone likes.

FWIW, the EC2 high-memory instance (64G) you cite in your FAQ goes for a swift $1728 USD/month. Translated to english that means: reddit is pretty much out of the question for cloud-based apps because RAM is expensive in the cloud and the normal instance types (<$300 USD/month) top out at 4G.

to split data across different servers (using application-level partitioning or consistent hashing).

Sharding is always worthwhile for scaling but it's a fairly delicate subject (esp. the rebalancing after add/remove of a shard and queries spanning multiple shards) and I haven't seen a shrinkwrapped solution for redis, yet.

So, while an option, most people will probably rather use a competing product (e.g. MongoDB) before opening that can of worms.

to wait for Redis VM implementation (virtual memory).

Yup, that would be me. Once the RAM-limitation is gone redis will suddenly become very interesting to me.
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It doesn't even make any sense to a mathematician. This is an example of trying to write technically for a general reader, and failing on both counts.
> $ someCommandChain | perl -pe 's/because sed regex sucks/'
>
> Maybe I could spend some time learning a new regex dialect

Maybe you should first learn the Perl regex dialect (the above regex doesn't parse in Perl).
Maybe there are people who found the article interesting and worth sharing but did not have anything original to add to the discussion. That doesn't seem too far fetched to me....
Programmers produce code, not languages.

I think Python makes it hard to write readable code, because it forces unnatural constraints around your programming. If you want a two-line anonymous function; too bad -- you have to give it a name. If you think a closure would make more sense than a named class with named fields; too bad -- that's not supported.

With Python, you get a lot of code that looks the same. And that's good when the code that looks the same does the same thing. But if it's doing something different, you might miss the difference if all the code looks the same.

(The argument against TMTOWTDI is that similar things will look different, and that's bad. But the problem is that different things will look similar too, and that's also bad. It's simply a Property Of The Universe that There Is More Than One Way To Do It, and pretending that there's not is a fool's errand.)
To quote from the article:

In particular hard cheese, which takes a lot of milk to produce, can have a bigger footprint per kilo than chicken.

This is super stupid. Hard cheese contains more than double the calories of chicken. And nobody in their right minds will consume hard cheese as the main food item.
It is written in JS and it looks like that JS can be edited in the editor and reloaded on the fly. That's the core of Emacs I think, being able to recode the editor on the fly.

I haven't actually tried that with YMacs so I don't know how well it would work. But I could see something like this forming the basis of an actual serious editor. The one thing I feel is missing from Emacs is a decent display engine. Of course that's not a new idea.

EDIT: I just fact checked my comment and it turns out that you can't just reload code into a running YMacs. If that were supported then I think it would be fair to call it an "Emacs like editor" or even just an "Emacs".
And several faster but less-complete implementations; PyPy, Unladen Swallow, Psyco, etc.

Wow, just like Perl 6.
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I am a mathematician :-)
However, we see that a lot of great researchers are being motivated to leave research because the financial markets and large corporations can offer salaries 3-4x those available to people in universities, while working fewer hours. By allowing people to exploit some of their work for commercial gain, you offer an amount of freedom and potential economic gain that corporations cannot. And often, the university gets some of the money from the company that gets ploughed back into research. So the university gets some money, the researchers get some extra benefit from staying in the university system and are usually motivated by the university to share the results of their work in some sense - not the commercial secrets, perhaps, but the pure science behind what has been done. They then continue to produce results that can be shared with the public.

Everyone wins - the university gets more money, the researchers stay in science and produce more results and the public gets the benefit of having the most driven, creative people staying inside the university system producing public gain rather than private gain.

The citation/impact scoring system offers no motivation to do 'great' research, in my experience. Rather, it offers a lot of motivation to do the administrative work that gets your name on papers with little to no risk, rewarding networking skills and knowledge of the system over any great creative insight. In fact, I would say that this requirement to have citations and impact statements actively drives away the people who are most likely to do the research.

I don't think that universities should focus on commercial exploitation, that's for sure. It's not fair to private companies, it's not fair to students and it's not fair to taxpayers who fund the university system. But stereotyping anyone who is good at research as a selfless, socks-and-sandals proto-hippy shows a certain lack of familiarity with a large cross-section of researchers. And to say that the culture of research that we have right now is just fine? Wow. The way I see research right now, the science 'managers' get rewarded and long term research is put at risk by political meddling at the highest levels. Of course, we may come from completely different cultures.
This is very depressing, but probably rational.

But is it rational in the longer term? I suppose this depends on your opinion of our politicians and the businessmen who buy them.
Not if you are buying SSD disks. SSD disks offer very good random read performance, so it does make sense to use them for non often accessed items.
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Boy am I glad we found non-anglo foreigners to make enemies of.

I'm not sure what that comment was supposed to mean or what feelings it reflects so while it's clear that it was said in a joking manner it's in pretty bad taste.
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Unfortunately in a lot of cases, someone else cannot do the job. And certainly not for the money that is offered by most universities. Go ahead and find me someone who can write C and C++ and Python and Java well, do complicated mathematics, understand quantum field theory/genetics/taxonomy/quantum optics/nuclear engineering/etc., manage large research projects, teach classes of 50-100 students a few times a week (having prepared all the material!) and is willing to do all this 60-70 hours a week every year of their career for $80k-$100k/year, after investing 10+ years of the adulthood in an expensive education. Plus, until you ahve tenure, you can never be certain of a job for more than a year or two, and will need to travel regularly both in the job, and just to find work.

Financial firms and large corps. are sucking good researchers out of the university system. For those that are motivated by the material gain available in those organisations, allowing them to exploit a tiny fraction of their work keeps them producing the rest of their work for everyone else. There was a great quote on here a few weeks agoa long the lines of 'There are plenty of scientists, the government just isn't willing to pay market rate.' Allowing spin-off companies and the exploitation of some research is one way that the universities can keep those scientists within the system.
Indeed. It is amazing how much heat-per-watt of electricity you can get from a heat pump. Much better to use your electricity to power that than it is to use a bunch of old servers as your primary heat source. (Yes, I know someone who did this...)
POSIX message queues. SysV message queues. POSIX realtime signals. POSIX monotonic timers like clock_gettime(). POSIX semaphores living on shared memory for inter-process synchronization. Pthread spin locks.

Linux has them, OS X does not. These are just a few things that I encountered while developing on OS X. Where did you get the idea that OS X implements more POSIX than Linux?
Extract of the discussion for one of the (legitimate) articles that got deleted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Newbie_treatment_at_C...

I created an article with three links to coverage by reliable sources, two of which were significant. The article clearly identified the subject, and was tagged and deleted as patent nonsense, without any communication whatsoever with the creating account. Skomorokh, barbarian 02:19, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

The reason I deleted the article was that the wikilinks did not have the proper markup. In addition, "See also" should be used instead of "See articles" and "External links" should be substituted for "Sites". Willking1979 (talk) 02:43, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure any of those reasons are relevant to CSD, and sadly I note that User talk:...and the circus leaves town is still a redlink. ϢereSpielChequers 09:16, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Wow. I had to read Williking's comment a few times to make sure it wasn't a subtle parody. (Just to check: he did genuinely mean that comment, right?)

I think we can end this experiment now; it's an obvious success. --Gwern (contribs) 22:37 8 October 2009 (GMT)
Ask HN: Is it worth to study languages on the JVM without knowing Java?
I've recently began looking at languages built on the JVM like Clojure and Scala.

I come from a Ruby background mostly, but I deeply appreciate languages like scheme, and even Erlang.

The thing is that both Clojure and Scala assumes that you know Java to get the most out of it. For example in the Scala book from the pragprog, the author says that if you are not experienced with Java, you should complement your study with several Java books.

The fact is that I don't think it's worth for me to learn Java, so I wonder if learning any of these JVM languages is worth it.
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I've actually never used the Compose feature in Linux.

I prefer dead keys for accents for ease of typing (though it does tend to get hard to remember where you put dead_ogonek when you're not using it on a daily basis) so I naturally just set up my own xkb map. This ceases to be helpful when you're not only adding punctuation or alternate scripts but special symbols or letterforms as well (okay, so the Russian "i" could be on the "I" key for phonetic typing or on the "N" key for what it looks like, but where would you put "left arrow" or "double dagger" or even "logical not"?).

I think the same holds true for the compose key, tho: it's easy to remember "o + / = ø" (or was it "o + -" or even "o + |"? With the kind of redundancy in the compose table, all three probably work), but how do you deal with conceptually similar glyphs like "a with dot below" and "a with dot above"? What about glyphs that looks similar? Once you have to enter a glyph that's rarely used, you'll have to look it up -- and then it'd probably be easier to use a char map unless you're going to use it a lot.
If you're doing Python, do consider Google App Engine. If you're doing Ruby, Heroku is a great option. Otherwise, I'd probably recommend using Slicehost. They have a great "articles" area on their site that has lots of information about setting up your own server. Plus, you can add backups for $5 a month, which is a good safety net in case something goes wrong.