skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Anyway, I can't see how this would be more useful than a classic optimizing compiler, except for languages like javascript, which is interpreted by third party clients.

Pretty much every language can benefit from optimizations like constant folding and inlining (even C, yes); those techniques are subsets of partial evaluation, and partial evaluation is, apparently, a subset of supercompilation.

And we should expect these general classes of optimization techniques to offer speedups.

We know that classic optimizing compilers (GCC?) miss a lot of opportunities; this is especially obvious when you compare C and FORTRAN numeric performance - presumably all the FORTRAN optimizations could also be done in C by a sufficiently smart compiler (they're both Turing-complete languages, after all), but the C compilers can't reliably figure out when to do them.

Even a language like Haskell which practically goes out of its way to let the compiler optimize however it wants can benefit: http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2007/12/supercompilation-fo... (Although I've read the paper and was confused; it looked more like partial evaluation to me - inlining and rewriting at compile-time until a fixed-point is reached - than this runtime supercompilation stuff.)
I believe they were referring to the paper discussed here:

http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/17/climategatekeeping-2/#mor...

It seems to have been included with a dismissive editorial comment ("Michaels says X, but he's wrong"), which was not supported by any literature, and which the authors were not given the chance to respond to before publication. Just mentioning that "it was included" is a bit misleading.
Well, that actually seems more reasonable than the ACM situation. I expect Lieberman, as an individual, to have interests that are not the same as his constituents'. (He may be derelict in his duty as a Senator if he puts his own interests above those of his constituents, but that's a discussion for another day.) But there's no reasonable expectation, in my mind, that Lieberman's interests as an individual and my interests as a voter are going to be the same.

Likewise, I wouldn't expect the interests of one of the ACM's directors -- as individuals -- to be the same as the ACM's membership. (I'd want them to set aside their personal interests while acting in their official capacity within the organization, but that's different from saying that their personal interests don't exist.) But I would expect the ACM as an organization to reflect the interests of the membership.

When an organization that supposedly exists for the benefit of its membership starts doing things that are almost certainly out of line with the best interests of the membership, it's a good sign that the organization has been subverted and is being used for some other purpose (e.g. simple self-perpetuation).
It certainly helps to learn to be deliberate with language. Particularly in formal writing, and to a large extent in creative writing. This, I think, is the central problem in English instruction today. We try to teach arbitrary rules when what we need to teach is deliberateness.

Learning other languages certainly helps the user understand their own language more (nouns, subjects, objects, adverbs, etc.) in a nuts and bolts kind of way, but it doesn't really help with writing (well) or comprehending the more advanced forms of the language. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, the writers of the King James Bible, Jefferson and Joyce are all vastly different from each other in their use of the language -- yet we hold all of them up as defining the flavor and character of the language in ways that are highly contrary to the thinking that produced S&W's Book and Lowth's Book.

Most of English grammar instruction, and particularly guidebooks like S&W and Lowth seek to define and tackle imaginary English language edge cases that simply don't exist in other languages. "Don't split and infinitive" is not an edge case useful for consideration in Latin-rooted languages because you simply can't. It's also not an edge case in German because infinitives are always split (like in English).

Other cases, like proscriptions to use "whom", fall flat because they are simply archaic or invented as a kind of shibboleth to demark persons with education from persons without. In modern usage, a person who uses "whom" is ultimately marking themselves as ignorant of the modern tongue.

Learning a bit of Latin is hugely useful for understanding individual English words with Latin roots, and for fudging your way around Romance speaking Europe (it's astounding how much French an well educated monolingual English speaker can translate). But so is learning a bit of Greek useful in a similar way, and again German in other similar ways.

Ultimately, the best way to learn about language is to study linguistics, not just another language. The very first thing you learn in linguistics is that there is none of this "correct" proscriptivist nonsense in a serious study of languages - at least not in the sense of the ignorant grade-school grammar guides we all grow up with.

The most salient point to all of this is that the authors of those guides could not even keep in agreement with their own rules within the same guide!
Isn't it possible that the Cato Insitute's beliefs preempted the money and not the other way around?

I donate money to the NRA because they support gun rights. The NRA doesn't support gun rights because I personally give them money.
Actually, the C standard guarantees that char is equal to one byte.
More reasonably: if you were typesetting something carefully, you’d stack the ” close to directly above the . and you’d use a separate typeface or color to set a precise computer string such as `.txt`. In plain text communications, I tend to avoid situations where a string like « ".txt". » might come up, because it’s confusing no matter which side of the quotation marks the period ends up on, and instead use some punctuation like «.txt» or `.txt` to make clear that this is a technical word whose precise character arrangement matters, especially since the " character is itself often meaningful in such strings.
It's more general English Language writing ability. This tends to be correlated with spelling and grammar.
Louis CK's quote pertinent to this is "Will you give it a minute? IT'S GOING TO SPACE!" I take that to heart when I get frustrated by tech in general.
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Ah, if there's voice communication, then yes. Voice comm is important.
I just took a quick look around, but is all of the server-side code down in JS as well?
And you can get wonderfully creative with something like

"The group changed its mind"

and

"The group changed their minds"

depending on the meaning you want the statement to have. Are you emphasizing the concept of "group-think" or the independent conclusions of the individuals?

It's more poetic than

"The members of the group changed their minds".

or

"Each group member changed his or her mind".

But at least you get a ridiculous bag of options for a single sentence.
So design errors and language feature misuse are less likely in procedural languages like C? Come on, that's ridiculous. You can't judge a language by the people who misuse it, otherwise nobody would be using JavaScript and HTML these days.

Sometimes complexity is intractable. There are no silver bullets.
Twitter Hack: Part Of Broader Iranian Strategy
Question: Just how small a slice of data per month are you going to accept as a valid definition of "unlimited"?

Just asking.
FWIW, it's often possible to find the full-text articles on CiteSeer (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/) or the original author's home or faculty pages via Google Scholar.

Also, while I graduated several years ago, I still have access to surprisingly many research journals via my alumni library card. If you are or have been a student, that's worth looking into.
AT&T's network problems go well beyond speed - dropped calls, disconnections, and just plain it-don't-work. Not to mention a great many countries (including Canada, a much more sparsely populated country than the USA) have zero problems running a stable, speedy network with the iPhone. And no, it doesn't cost $10K/mo either.
404'ed - hmmmmm
Their busy message with - consider suicide at a later moment - is quite hilarious

"It seems like that all of our machines are currently busy!

Please consider suicide at a later moment and accept our apologies!"
FTA: "Often the story of what happened in between films is grander, and far stranger, than what eventually got made."

Okay... is that really the end of the article? I'm disappointed with how flippant this sounds, but: I think this article is the joke, and that Wired article is the punchline.

(Note: I know there's a 'video slideshow' at the end, but I don't think it mentions Cameron...)
The problems of C are not a universally recognized truth. There are plenty of C programmers who believe that C is perfectly fine. Maybe the issue with C is just people misusing the language. /snark

Whether a truth is universally recognized has no bearing on whether it is true, quite irrespective of what OO advocates believe or who/what they choose to blame. The big issue with C? It's tough to use correctly. The criticism that is being made against OO? It's tough to use correctly. Why does OO[1] just get to opt-out of the criticism by blaming the user, but C can't?

[1] Not even OO, but inheritance in particular.
no I mean that there is a lot of unethical things for most companies, early in their history.

Whether it's using scrapers to steal content and spam competitor's users, or using high monetizing scammy offers to cash in.

Early on, when starting out, a lot of the companies we admire today, have resorted to doing anything in order to survive.
Books.

Edit: I am not trying to be snide, but you don’t actually have to talk to people to get an understanding of their viewpoint. Try reading some books from the far left and far right in the US and you will start to see how the other side thinks. Heck even tuning into Fox News, NPR, and the BBC in the same news cycle is useful.
I stopped reading when the spectre of pedophilia was brought up. I expect more from oreilly.com. [i work at facebook, but these opinions are mine]
Being sparsely populated makes it much easier to run a stable network, so that's not a very good comparison. It's not that AT&T's network is bad everywhere, but places with lots of people in a small area cause problems. Where I am the service is excellent. I've never had a dropped call here and the data speed is always high.
Is the snow at the top of the page supposed to fall? By dynamic is it an animated gif, or just dynamic on reload? I kept waiting for the snow to fall.
Some cosmetics: Possibly move the "Get your friends at tweakio" only shows up correctly without being clipped in a exact resolution, a better option would be to move it to the left side. Another is on the home page, the background doesn't repeat so looks off on screens wider than 1600px.
There is a very clear link between GDP per capita and life expectancy, literacy, health, and a host of other social benefits. Holding back the industrialization of the world for potential far-off benefits has very real human costs now, in the present. If we wait 5 years to sign a Global Warming treaty, nobody will die. If we take trillions from the global economy to mitigate gas emissions that turn out to be harmless, many will.

The conservative thing to do is to gather data before making trillion-dollar changes to the global economy, while spending money on moderate cost green energy research (but not billion-dollar ethanol mandates).
Focus on collaborative editing for things like school reports, round robin novels, etc. Support TeX eventually, images sooner. Then hook it up to print on demand and allow people to sell beautifully bound copies of their stories/theses/whatever right from the site.
More to the point, it defines a byte in terms of a char. sizeof(char) will always be 1, but UCHAR_MAX need not be 255.
"kids to Facebook, blithely assuming that they are free from the roaming eyes of some sexual predator."

Here's where I stopped caring about what he had to say. It's the first point he jumps to: "Think of the kids". And then he goes on to equate a site changing its privacy settings to Perrier giving people cancer and Tylenol killing people.

Hello sensationalism.
I took a quick look too and it looks like its javascript calling over to Java using Liveconnect (http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/scriptjava.html). The infrastructure folder contains support for Rhino.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll play with better positioning for that. I know it looks weird if you have a giant screen. I'll see how big I can make the image w/out bloating the file size too much.
Unfortunately, it seems even more prevalent in the real world...
I completely forgot about the possibility of animated gifs. I'll look into this. If I do it, I should probably make it optional - some people might hate me for it. :-)
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Ask HN: Examples of great web app/SaaS designs
I figure a lot of us could benefit from this, but lets start naming web apps that illustrate good web design. I'll start off to name a few...

1) basecamphq.com - considering all SaaS's derive from here
2) onehub.com
3) lighthouseapp.com
I would hazard the suggestion that the library performs metaprogramming, and what it affords is a mental model for associating classes of entities with behaviour that is different from Ruby's out-of-the-box Smalltalk-like OO semantics.
Climate change has already killed people. Suggesting that waiting five years will kill nobody is begging the question. Now has it killed significantly more people than it has saved, and will waiting 5 years make a significant long term difference is debatable, but you can't just assume your answer and move on.

Also, a 20-40% reduction in greenhouse gasses would (if done efficiently) cost less than 1 trillion over the next 20. years. (Multiply the cost Delta between electricity produced with coal to that produced non C02 producing options over their lifetime.)

PS: I often see people use the term "begging the question incorrectly" so I felt the need to point it out.

Edit: Wow, lots of hate. Do the math 1,000,000 * 1 million $ is a LOT of money, and coal plants have a finite lifetime.
And links back to the topic of this thread:

"Most of my wishes for C have been granted."
Ah, but hammers actually work pretty well on screws. It all depends on the depth of the thread.
GS had already arranged to be "bailed out" by Warren Buffett. They took the TARP money because the government made it mandatory to do so (so banks that needed it wouldn't be seen as weak in the marketplace). They simply sat on it, then repaid it with interest

Warren Buffet only invested $5 billion into GS. Look at their cash flow here: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:GS&fstype=ii

$5 billion is peanuts compared to the amount of money being lost during that period, but of course it is impossible for outsiders to tell for sure if GS needed the TARP money, there were strong signs that say yes.
Well, the problem is that densely populated countries and cities like most of western Europe also don't seem to have any issues running a stable, fast network.

So... density really isn't much of a variable here.

Oh, also, I have it on reliable information that iPhone network stability and speed in Toronto, Canada is very, very good. This is a city that's denser than most major American cities, especially notable cities where network stability sucks.
I don't disagree at all, and if doing more of the above is a change you would like to see in the world then it's laudable that you're doing it (if you're doing it.) The phrase that moved me to post was "the world just won't stay saved". Of course the world won't stay saved, because we're all subject to entropy and, with apologies to Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart.

The world is a garden and it requires constant maintenance.

Sisyphus, from greek mythology, is a metaphor for this inescapable curse. Modern man would probably decide that it's much better for the rock to be at the bottom of the hill, as it were, but that strikes me as choosing to be a part of the problem.
Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of 'Friendster' Civilization
Some of the gatekeepers of the peer review systems have had a long and celebrated history here, and sometimes to the detriment of the purpose of the review process.

The experiences of John Harrison and the Board of Longitude and the Royal Society, or the initial reception of the work of Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren around H. Pylori, both come to mind.

Most any large shift can involve overcoming very strongly-held beliefs; of sticking your neck out.
This makes no sense - you're scaling your network based on existing data usage patterns, which only does one thing: keep existing data usage patterns constant due to constraints on the system.

It's like sticking up a big "speed limit: 20mph" sign on a road, and then claiming that your observations indicate drivers don't WANT to drive above 20mph.

The fact that the majority of your users are dealing with your system is not in and of itself evidence that the system is good, or even well liked.
Since it seems we could have had viable colonies outside the atmosphere by now, this should have implications for Fermi's Paradox.

If Fermi's Paradox comes from a limiting factor "removing" civilizations (a physics experiment, etc), it should need to destroy a whole solar system and not only a planet. Otherwise it would only remove the fraction of civilizations that didn't develop an Orion before that experiment.

IIRC, NASA killed Orion politically? They might have exterminated humanity -- for job security...
In the center. Outside? Not so much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panelák :-)
This is apparently such an important point, yet there isn't much talk about how to go about this. I was at Odeo when we pivoted to Twitter, and I can tell you it's not as simple as just launching a new product. You've made promises to investors, customers, and employees about delivering one type of thing and you have to go back on your word. Some of those people were hired for the first idea and are going to need to be let go. You're not really sure about the new product so you're hesitant to let go of the first product. Even if you are sure that you're changing direction you still may want to find a home for the first product so you don't want to completely trash it. You may have cash/runway limitations. Etc.
Joseph Smarr joins Google
(Small) image of the display in both modes, in this other Engadget story.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/07/pixel-qi-displays-hit-pro...
This isn't a particularly powerful or insightful article. The entire subject is blown out of proportion and distorted until hardly any of the actual facts remain.

1. Scientists ruin their careers by repeatedly attempting to discredit theories they cannot find the evidence to discredit (or proving claims they cannot find proof to claim). If a truly compelling set of studies discrediting global warming trends came out, you can be sure that many publications would be eager to publish it. This is how science works, and how it has worked historically. It's a surprisingly stable environment of meritocracy. Politics intrude, as in any human endeavor, but we'll get to that in:

2. Differences in opinion in the peer review process are as old as science. That is why there are multiple publications and multiple standards for entering into those publications. The whole notion of "scientific consensus" is built around assumptions like schisms such as this. If everyone agreed about the exact criterion for publication we'd only have a few (perhaps regional) scientific publications (and then we'd truly be in trouble).

3. Science is about consensus, but that implicitly accepts dissent. People argue for awhile, a consensus is formed, and then things blow over. Seldom are careers ruined. For an example, see Einstein's extremely controversial claims that eventually became the next major stepping stone for physics. People violently opposed his propositions at first, and now we look at him is one of the greatest minds in human history.

The difference here is that there are active sources of misinformation trying, for whatever non-scientific reasons, to drum up controversy around the global warming issue of anthropogenicity. This issue is still under active debate and research, but unlike many other subjects in a similar status (e.g., quantum physics) there are "deniers" who will not accept any positive evidence against their claim and will resort to any means, social or otherwise, to make their point of view supreme.

Some might argue this is warranted because climate science is making predictions that require us to radically restructure our industry and energy infrastructures to the tune of massive sums of money. To be honest, I think this complaint is shortsighted. Scientific predictions, even those in the limbo state between "well-accepted" and "just a theory" that we are calling "consensus", have always dictated the allocation of resources. Consider the exorbitant cost of the LHC, which is one of the single greatest achievements of human engineering and physics.
Skype/Kazaa Founders Launch Rdio Streaming App (Beta)
I don't get how an iPhone can be considered solely a rich person's toy. I'm not claiming to be hard up, but I live a pretty frugal lifestyle, and I consider it a completely reasonable expense. It's my phone, it's my map, it's my address book, it's my calendar, it's my handheld gaming device, it's my alarm clock, it's my reading device, etc. ad nauseam. It, my laptop, my apartment, my utility bills, clothes, and food are basically my only expenses. From that list, clothes are the only thing I'll spend less money on, and nothing will spend more time within arms reach.

When I bitch about AT&T's service, it's because they told me they would give me something for my money, and they aren't following through. How that gets conflated as privileged rich white-person whining is beyond me.
> Office 2010 preview was out which has threaded discussions he raves about in gmail.

Serious question: When was that available? Gmail had it at least since 2004 (I know since that's when I got my account).

And I was reading threaded emails in emacs in the early 90's, and I bet I was late to that party then.
SoundHound -  A Music App That Could Change Mobile Search
ActionScript 2 Open Source free compiler written in OCaml
Reddit vs Digg War (2/3)
Sometimes complexity is intractable, sure, but I'd argue that on the balance, inheritance makes it worse. Programming to object interfaces (whether or not they're known at compile time) brings most of the same benefits without having to pigeonhole everything into trees and potentially rewrite tons of code when the design changes.