2009-05-08 front | Hacker News

Stories from May 8, 2009

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		Other
		108 points \| parent
		iPhone
		98 points \| parent
3.		How to implement 'realistic' swordfighting in video games. (shamusyoung.com)
		81 points by jamongkad on May 8, 2009 \| 35 comments
4.		Being too successful is one of life's biggest risks (2004) (groups.google.com)
		69 points by zachbeane on May 8, 2009 \| 19 comments
5.		Search Goes Real-Time With Scoopler (YC S08) (techcrunch.com)
		67 points by rokhayakebe on May 8, 2009 \| 35 comments
6.		What database would you use to store (min) 10 billion objects?
		63 points by imajes on May 8, 2009 \| 46 comments
7.		Speeding up a Rails request by 150ms by changing 1 line (scaldeferri.com)
		60 points by amanfredi on May 8, 2009 \| 34 comments
8.		Being able to build something cool is not good enough. Neither is fast performance. (groups.google.com)
		56 points by zachbeane on May 8, 2009 \| 17 comments
9.		KIVA Robots Continue to Conquer Warehouses (singularityhub.com)
		55 points by kkleiner on May 8, 2009 \| 31 comments
		tumult on May 8, 2009 \| parent \| context \| on: A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of pr... Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them. Alright, this was surprisingly amusing. Thanks.
11.		The Harlem Miracle (nytimes.com)
		52 points by robg on May 8, 2009 \| 33 comments
12.		Backup your Database in Git (viget.com)
		50 points by tortilla on May 8, 2009 \| 18 comments
13.		Help wanted: Seasoned wikipedia editors to write a proper article about Fravia (wikipedia.org)
		43 points by pygy on May 8, 2009 \| 15 comments
14.		A 'nerd' shoots for the stars, and NASA comes knocking (theglobeandmail.com)
		43 points by awk on May 8, 2009 \| 17 comments
		Chocobean on May 8, 2009 \| parent \| context \| on: A 'nerd' shoots for the stars, and NASA comes knoc... How patronizing: "He goes to school dances (but not clubs) and has never had a girlfriend. Asked if his new science stardom might help land one, he replies: I haven't thought about that." When will society ask the new starlets and Oscar winners how often they help out in the community or go to the library/museum/gallery when there isn't a gala on, or if they have ever written an academic paper which contributes anything to society?
16.		Econometrics In R (r-project.org)
		39 points by Anon84 on May 8, 2009 \| 8 comments
17.		Calendar as Filter (dilbert.com)
		38 points by mad44 on May 8, 2009 \| 8 comments
18.		Debian moving away from SHA-1 (debian-administration.org)
		38 points by r11t on May 8, 2009 \| 5 comments
19.		Hooray: The Second Derivative of the Unemployment Rate Improved (fivethirtyeight.com)
		38 points by soundsop on May 8, 2009 \| 16 comments
20.		Ask HN: Merchant account and payment gateway for subscription-based web apps?
		37 points by _pius on May 8, 2009 \| 19 comments
21.		My mom is a programmer, raging against the machine (boingboing.net)
		35 points by kqr2 on May 8, 2009 \| 16 comments
		jfarmer on May 8, 2009 \| parent \| context \| on: A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of pr... My favorite: 1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.
23.		Hackers wanted: Scholarships available to coders to save journalism and democracy (oreilly.com)
		34 points by peter123 on May 8, 2009 \| 10 comments
24.		Tell HN: Wolfram Alpha preview goes live
		34 points by anigbrowl on May 8, 2009 \| 49 comments
25.		Urwid - Console User Interface Library for Python (excess.org)
		33 points by samueladam on May 8, 2009 \| 6 comments
26.		Smeed's law (wikipedia.org)
		33 points by nice1 on May 8, 2009 \| 5 comments
		patio11 on May 8, 2009 \| parent \| context \| on: What does a programmer have to barter with? Just about everyone in the world puts up with boring, repetitive #$()# which they hate with a burning passion but can't do anything about because they don't know how to make a computer do it for them. You don't have that problem.
28.		Flickr: PHP4 vs PHP5 drop in CPU comparison (flickr.com)
		34 points by vaksel on May 8, 2009 \| 19 comments
		pg on May 8, 2009 \| parent \| context \| on: Being too successful is one of life's biggest risk... Lisp Machines weren't that successful. I was their target user, and I ditched Symbolics to use Lucid on Suns at the first opportunity. The Lisp Machine software was appallingly baroque. Everything had every possible feature. There was no design, just implementation, and lots of it. The manuals took up a whole shelf, and it was generally faster to write something yourself than to find the predefined function that did it. A lot of (arguably most of) the badness of Common Lisp is Lisp Machine culture showing through.
30.		BBC Vs National Geographic - a subtle comparison (naturenet.net)
		33 points by justlearning on May 8, 2009 \| 10 comments
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