skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought most of us agreed by now that ref-counting is slower than GC? http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html cites a paper empirically showing just that. I quote:

" In a well known paper [2] several widely used programs (including perl and ghostscript) were adapted to use several different allocators including a garbage collector masquerading as malloc (with a dummy free()). The garbage collector was as fast as a typical malloc/free; perl was one of several programs that ran faster when converted to use a garbage collector."

And this is just with single-threaded performance! I really hope both unladen swallow and macruby succeed in their goals of removing the GIL from their respective scripting languages, and I suspect that the numbers will prove that python gets better performance with a GC as opposed to reference counting.
The article also contains a link to a detailed discussion of PALs - "Permissive Action Links" - that control arming and detonation, and guard against tampering. See: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html
RHickey asks for Clojure funding
Apple working on 3D displays
I've been using PayPal for 10 years without a single problem and I process many payments every week (varies week to week).

The problem is that MOST people have success stories, but it doesn't make for a very good blog post does it? One sentence nobody wants to read.
Closest thing I can find to a cite is [1] which indicates they have similar sized returns, about the size of a hummingbird (!).

[1] http://www.answers.com/topic/stealth-technology
Bacteria Turn Microgears in Suspended Solution by Swimming
Google * 4
..and some folks already reacted: http://clojure.org/funders
This is one thing I've been thinking about since Google released Chrome Frame. Microsoft should release a service pack that attaches a standard compliant rendering engine to IE (basically a Microsoft blessed Chrome Frame). Then legacy applications would continue to work and the rest of the world could toss a meta engine="nosuck" that IE would respond to by rendering with the good engine.
Uhh, every piece of code in Python "invokes the GIL". That's the point, it's a single global lock on the interpreter.
I'm over 30 and I have never owned a checkbook. Checks are backwards, insecure and prone to abuse with no real guarantee for whoever gets one that he will actually get money, which makes them even more worthless.

If I were a bank I would do everything in my power to get rid of checks pronto.
Is that the son of the machine learning expert Robert Tibshirani? All signs point to 'yes'.
With all eyes on you, the right move would have been to accept Microsoft's apology, and thank them for seeing how great Plurk is - after all, imitation is the best form of flattery. Then it would have been a good chance to mention how to sign up for Plurk.

What a wasted marketing opportunity.
Absolutely. I'm gung ho for IE catching up, but they don't bother to push their IE 6 and 7 users to upgrade in the same way safari, firefox and all other browsers use.
Mainly, it's just creating yet-another-browser-to-test.

(edit: forgot to hit reply and made a new message. doh.)
Perhaps some would find this more interesting:

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/linda-tischler/design-times/...
(Mark Anderson's 10 Predictions For 2009)
Actually, I'd argue that Microsoft's assessment of Acid3 is reasonably fair.

Acid 3 isn't like Acid 1 (sane CSS box model) or Acid 2 (good resiliant consistent CSS2 support) - rather, it tests a whole bunch of random features and JavaScript edge cases. I can perfectly understand why Microsoft would prioritise implementing certain up-and-coming features or improving their rendering speed and stability over implementing parts of Acid3.
Friendly: NoSQL With MySQL in Ruby
Early Adopters: How To Get The First Users To Your New Site
It's a critical Windows update, meaning that for most people IE will update automatically with Windows.
Local Advertising Startup Yodle Sues Former Employees Over Alleged Data Theft
I agree that a manager's role is to cause work to be done. I think the point of the article, though, is that there are different ways of accomplishing this. You can cause work to be done by inspiring your workers, giving them a comfortable, fun place to work where they feel free to experiment and do good work. You can also cause work to be done by telling people what to do, making it clear what the consequences are for not completing work, and restraining people. In the last year, I've basically worked under both types of managers, and I can say that, generally speaking, my productivity is much higher, and therefore more work gets done, when I feel engaged and that my thoughts and ideas are valued and that I'm helping drive the success of the company, vs. being told what to do and feeling like my opinions and ideas aren't very valuable.

I think what's difficult is that this stuff isn't very cut-and-dry; there are times, as a manager, when it might be easy to give your workers a ton of freedom and to really trust them with responsibility. There are other times when it may not be a good idea. As a manager, you can't always be "inspiring"; sometimes you just need to get stuff done.

Personally, I believe that if I'm involved and responsible for big decisions, I'm inherently more engaged because I'm directly involved with the success/failure of the decision.
As someone who recently started taking fish oil (prescribed my my doctor) due to low HDL levels, I find this highly frustrating. And it's not like I could just eat fish; it seems most of our fish sources are contaminated. The more I learn about nutrition, the more uncertain I become about what to eat, and the angrier I become towards our entire agricultural industry.
Brand Commandments
I've dealt with this before, and it's absolutely ridiculous. Paypal should not be in business or allowed to operate. They go around acting as if they are "bank like", but in actual reality they do not have to adhere to bank standards. This means they can do things like this. I understand there are a lot of scammers and fraudsters out there. If they need to do something like this, they cannot make it a multiweek process that will most likely end up in you waiting 180 days for your money. They also need better communication with those that have had their accounts frozen. Using their system is utterly ridiculous and not being able to talk to the actual person making a decision is even worse. We're talking rightfully earned money that people rely upon to make a living, you can't screw around with a person's living like this. I see all these Paypal developer conferences and "developers love paypal" promotion going on, and I call complete fucking horseshit on it. There's no way a single dev or software company should go near your service with service+rules like this in place.
This would be neat for a fun side-project, but I'm 99% sure there's no business model here.

But feel free to post evidence to the contrary, I'd be glad to read it.

(EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm talking about any potential "startup" or entrepreneurial angle here. If you want to teach yourself game programming, this is probably a great cheap way to do it.)
I think you've hit the nail on the head - and that's exactly why Plurk is going about it the way they have: They're not expecting a proper legal repercussion to take place - they want publicity for themselves, and bad press for MS. In his previous blog post he begged for this to become viral.
I'm not a legal expert, but like others, I don't think they have much of a legal argument. But isn't "your business should be based on making innovative products" exactly what Plurk is complaining about?

Although Microsoft was caught lifting code, what if they didn't copy so exactly? Their intention was clearly reimplementing Plurk for China, probably without all the Taiwan users that would make it a sure thing that Plurk is banned. How is that really any better from an ethos perspective?

Plurk is very clearly satisfying some kind of niche in parts of the world that Twitter does not (maybe its the emoticons or easy way for viewing replies in the web interface? or the idea of karma?).

I suppose not innovating is one way of running a business, but it's one I say "boo" to.
I used to train hard for the topcoder competition. It's a nice community; and those tutorials are very useful.

The ones that I found more interesting were the ones on line sweep and geometric algorithms.

On Fenwick's Trees; this tutorial http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=tutorials... is really good. Although, the original paper is well-explained: (link to the author's website) http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~peter-f/ ("A new data structure for cumulative frequency tables")

And on bit manipulation; I highly recommend you read this... you'll be thinking in zeroes and ones for a while...
http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=tutorials...
DVD Backup for Mac - How to backup Protected DVD on Mac OS with DVD Backup Mac?
Suggest HN: Algorithm to guess population size from poll results
(Reposting because of server downtime.)

Hey,

I'd like to share a little project idea I thought of a few months ago. I immediately liked it and felt like working on it, but I didn't have time. So I suggested it to a few of my friends, but they eventually didn't work on it either. So finally I'm posting it here, maybe someone here will do it, and if so I'd love to see the process and the result.

It's like this:

Make an algorithm that, given results of a poll, guesses the number of people in the population.

For example: "According to the poll, 18.75% of people prefer jazz music, 43.75% of people prefer rock, and 37.5% don't care."

The algorithm will probably guess that only 16 people were asked in the poll.

Now I know, it's gonna get complicated, with probability distributions, rounding errors, heuristics, and whatnot. But I think it will be very interesting, and possibly there will scientific uses for this algorithm as well. Maybe this is a good subject for a paper.

The first step would probably be to phrase and solve this problem mathematically. This will require good knowledge of probability. Then, developing an algorithm.
"The military [is] trying to solve the problems by better encrypting the drones' feeds."

Where by "better encrypting" they mean "using any encryption at all"
A Day in The Life of NYTimes.com
The M16 would've been fine, if the brass hadn't skimped on the propellant.
This could be an awesome combination with Node.js.
So first we had a bunch of pundits "discovering" that the peer review process is flawed. Then, next step, we have a bunch of scientifically-untrained pundits and non-specialists jumping into the debate and giving loud opinions without understanding all the research already done.

This is debate is just becoming more ideological and less scientific.

P.S.: No, I don't know who this Randi is. But I am sure he's not a climatologist.
The F designation was used to get more highly qualified pilots. (Lots of pilots would rather fly an "F" than an "A")
This is an inaccurate statement of the law. Chapter 17 of the United States Code goes into voluminous detail of that actual law. Actual damages includes costs saved by the infringer. Courts can also impose punitive damages, which is not necessarily a multiplier, as well as costs and attorney's fees.

All of this assumes that US jurisdiction applies.
I am perplexed why this kind of information is not classified.
I rather think it was the classic pointy-haired boss mistake. "I can't understand this video feed stuff, so those towel-heads shouldn't be able to either!"
This article is not a clear cut case for a founder's visa as the business model isn't at all clear it should be operated from the U.S. Quality control from Shanghai is a critical element of this business. Boston does not provide enough of an edge to addressing their global market than many other cities. Shanghai would do well for a headquarters for all aspects of the business, possibly better than Boston. The only thing I get from this article is the founder likes the vibe in Boston and wants to stay.
I agree, the climate can potentially change fast (it could potentially change very slowly, we're guessing at a process we haven't been around for before) which is why the burden will be on governments to monitor changes in arable land and provide incentives for farmers to grow crops in the areas opening up rather than waiting for our existing farmland to become useless.

With proper care and planning we should be able to ride out even the fastest change of climate that nature can throw at us, however I started this sentence 'with proper care' which is certainly not a synonym for the government handling of industry.
Greybeard Stories: The Jamming Gyro
Google says ad blockers will save online ads
You're clearly not from North America then. :(

Not that I disagree with ditching them, of course.
good suggestions. rank for long/medium tail keywords is incredibly important. it just takes time and concerted effort to do the work to promote your site and most people, particularly developers/hackers don't want to spend time on 'chores' like that.
Guerrilla, BTW.

The thing is, these drones' primary use is against insurgents, AFAIK.
Wall computing "fundamentally changing the way we collaborate at work"?

The technology is certainly available (if Microsoft Surface and some of the high-end videoconferencing systems from Cisco and Tandberg count) but it's not widely used ... yet.
The fundamental change will occur when prices come down, and/or killer apps are available, IMHO.
Designer/Programmer Harmony: Not Just a Myth
That's not so impressive, right?
Sounds like normal practice to me. It should be possible to reinstall Windows and then get the warranty. But how should they be able to support the Linux machine, if they are not trained for it?
James Randi is a professional skeptic: he's the one behind the million dollar prize for anyone that can demonstrate the paranormal under reasonable conditions.
Posts like that are generally useless to me. "Are you creating value? A guide." Don't I know if I'm creating value by the response/success of my company? By how inspired I am in what I am building?

I could see the "A guide" part as being useful though in providing a guide to generating high-value ideas and products. That would be useful.

Ultimately, that post doesn't really have any value!
Going To War With Static Electricity
An explosive charge would probably be easier to engineer and more effective, in that case.

If you could program an Arduino drone to track a laser of a certain frequency, then you could make your own laser-guided missile.
Even if NoSQL solutions are new, there are no data durability concerns in my opinion.

I can talk for Redis but my guess is that's the same for the other datastores. In Redis to have full durability enable append-only-file: it's a text-only file, you can check by hand what's written inside your database.

In addition even while running in append only file mode, you can still ask Redis to "BGSAVE" (crete a copy of the dataset into an .rdb file in background). It's a single file and you can save it everywhere.

With the append only file, it's trivial to write a script to export ALL YOUR DATA into MySQL every 24 hours for instance. So you have your data in:

a) compact .rdb file you can backup easily.
b) the append only file
c) MySQL, where you can perform query to check if the data is sane.

In addition in the next months Redis will get a JSON export feature built-in, so you can also d) save data into a JSON file.

This new products are still younger than MySQL, and there are more bugs probably, but it's just a matter of being a bit more careful to use this DBs in production without concerns, experiencing a huge performance gain.

p.s. since the release of Redis 1.0 no critical bugs were found.
You are absolutely right about that.

I think the homeless and gay populations reveal that SF has an above average amount of tolerance for differences (in general, but with heated disapproval by vocal minorities) but that certainly doesn't mean that if you choose a SF resident out of a hat and show him a GWB t-shirt, that he won't reveal himself to have utterly un-nuanced (even boneheaded) views on topics such as the differences between the parties, relevant details of the Bush administration's policies, even things that he ostensibly supports like gay rights, clean environment, and nationalized healthcare.

I think the bottom line is that there are some very dumb people who thoughtlessly parrot what they perceive as "enlightened" views, who couldn't explain why if asked... essentially "dittoheads" of the left.

Note: I'm a libertarian (small L) so I find fault with a lot of ways that people reason (or more often bleat) about political issues.
Which country are you referring to? In France this is not the case. If there is a disagreement and nothing is written down you're screwed.

edit: I've checked up a bit. There is such a thing as "oral contract" in French law but it's very strict and limited to certain transactions.

The legal definition of contract doesn't say if it must be written or not (http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte=...).

It's extremely rare (read: never) to start a work without a signed fax or letter which basically says "ok, go ahead for that price".

That goes from a plumber who's going to fix your sink to me paying a designer to work on a web site. I guess in some cases an e-mail has got a valid proof, but it depends on the price of the transaction. You can confirm a 1,000 € job by e-mail, but I guess a 100,000 € transaction needs more.

What you need is a proof that the agreement occurred between the two entities.

When giving someone the right to sell your product, I'm quite certain than an oral agreement or even an e-mail is insufficient.

A printed e-mail sent by fax, let's just not talk about it. ;)
This is not actually a list of specific angel investors to avoid; that would have been a lot more useful.

The real problem is that most of the traits listed in this article are really hard to discover without having worked with the investor. At that point, you're past the whole "avoidance" part of the process, and well into the "you're in trouble" phase.
This will be the last of these stories for a while. The previous two stories pretty much sank without trace, so I thought I'd finish and submit this one, then stop writing them up and re-think the effort.

In case you're interested:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=996250

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994358
Agreed...as a hacker I definitely avoided marketing for a while and felt it was "beneath me" or something. I think you still have to be careful, most of the stuff in the "internet marketing" community for example is ridiculous and scammy. But you definitely can't ignore marketing as an entrepreneur.
IOI participant? Hello and welcome to HN!
Which programming languages suck the most
The logic behind this might mean that Plurk is aiming to force Microsoft into some form of settlement by which MS stipulates to certain restrictions on its future activities as a condition to obtaining a release, the spirit of which would be along the following lines: "you, as a willful infringer caught red-handed already, agree that, in the event you should ever again use any code or interface remotely resembling ours, we can apply to a court for immediate injunctive relief."

Obviously, I am speculating but the last paragraph of the press release tends in my view to support this theme, implying that these founders have a perception this was not at all innocent on Microsoft's part but instead something quite calculated.

This also may constitute gamesmanship by which Plurk is trying to create enough of a nuisance to force Microsoft to consider acquiring it as a way of clearing the way for it to enter this market in the future.

This may indeed be nothing more than bad judgment by these founders, as the comments here suggest, but it must have some logic behind it (wise or not) and that logic may well run along the above lines.
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There are damages - Plurk has a right to any money derived from copying their code, including any payments made to the evil outsourcing company and any advertising revenue (gross) that the site brought in during its short life.

That being said, suing MS can only lead to ruin. If they could keep a BS case like SCO on life support for so long, they can certainly keep this running long enough to bankrupt Plurk. I don't know about the legal system in Taiwan though - maybe they could get a judgment against Microsoft before the universe cools.
If the search engines could do an image search based on camera serial number then you could locate some stolen cameras that way. Just search for any images uploaded from that camera since it was stolen, and then you could have some evidence to use in tracking it down. EXIF data can include serial number but apparently it's not very standardized right now.
Those are my personal views and aren't related to nor generalized from the article.
African genetics 'critical'
I wonder if (when pricing is reasonable) we will see surface used in conference tables, etc. Something clicked when I saw a demo of people exchanging things across a table by pushing documents around on the surface of the table. It's hard to tell if it's one of those technologies that looks great but even when it is ubiquitous turns out to be underused.
Better SEO was one of their stated aims.
I was a one-time subscriber of Men's Health and let me tell you something: everything, absolutely everything is potentially bad for you.

In one issue they could say that drinking a beer a day in moderation can prevent certain cancers and taking too much health supplements can cause irreversible, long-term damage to your liver. Then six issues later they could say to get the dream abs you've always wanted, you must take these same health supplements every day and cut out all beer.

They can provide facts and statistics to sell you any nutritional scare story, and the whole game is this: they want you to think that you NEED them, so that you will continue to buy their magazine. Most people take one story or more from this type of scare tactic and run with it. Every diet has its secret. Every nutritionist has his angle to keep you living for longer or to get results in the gym faster. No wants makes money on the obvious: eat equally from every food group and without bias, exercise regularly (cardiovascular and weight training) and most importantly - have a bit of luck on the way - and you'll be fine.
If you ever want me to not read or understand something make a poster like this.
You could run some A/B testing with two different designs and show them the results.
Marx was himself an intellectual: an economic philosopher whose work has informed western society. Blaming Marx for the anti-intellectualism of the Khmer Rouge is about as sensible as blaming Adam Smith for the atrocities of capitalist countries.

If you're not heavily mentally invested in an ideological tribe and look objectively at history you'll find that lots of "-isms" have been used to sell people on collaborating in atrocities.