skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quantum computer firm D-Wave claims massive performance boost
I simply have to mention this great little story:

http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-test/
There's a good thread on Hackpad's waaaay premature announcement that they were open sourcing their code on the original hackpad/hackpad repo: https://github.com/hackpad/hackpad/issues/1. Wonder what the story is and why the actual release was so delayed.

EDIT: Spelling and grammar
yeah, this seems like some YC would be well positioned to either provide as reference, or give a pointer to an appropriate reference
I wonder if Smalltalk doesn't have much larger community now, than it did in the 80s. Sure, other languages are bigger still -- but if we have, say a thousand times as many Smalltalk programmers today, as in 1980 -- then hopefully the language will keep getting better. Especially since there are now a few Free/open source implementations, tutorial/books and frameworks.
> Async doesn't do anything fundamentally new.

This is correct, but not in the way you're describing. The API calls that it ultimately makes have been in place before C# 5. C# 5 just made writing that kind of code significantly simpler than it was before.

> If you already implemented multithreading in your application that you're happy with, there's no compelling reason to switch to doing it the async way.

This isn't necessarily true.

From the perspective of a client application, it's less resource-intensive to use async code than to spin up another thread. On mobile devices that's less battery life used, which is always a good thing.

From the perspective of a server, multithreading only gets you so far, plus they can eat up tons of memory in the process. Async code does not spin up new threads and allows for spikes in traffic to be handled gracefully rather than (a) using tons of threads, or (b) being unable to handle the load at all.
AFAIK, yes, that is the plan.

However, "without lockdown" is going to be an "unbranded browser."

So likely you will see two folders, something like this:

/browser/release/

1) Browser with DRM (no lockdown)

2) Browser without DRM (no lockdown)

/firefox/release/

1) Firefox without DRM

2) Firefox with DRM
>Ruby, at least, performs quite well.

Are you talking absolute performance (as in machines are faster now, so speed has become less important) or relative performance (compared to performing the same task with a different interpreter/complier)?

https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?t...
You're right about the dates, but when I had a more convoluted set of figures for 2014 (which required doing quite a bit of arithmetic to get the raw inputs, and would have required linking several pages and so forth) the results were pretty much the same.

The fact is the Australian government spends in the ballpark of $2 for ever $1 of benefit handed out; whether it's $1.80 or $2.20 doesn't really matter -- it puts some actual figures behind the concept of simply giving out a basic income (versus trying to figure out who gets the benefit, means testing it, and so forth).

Australia's unemployment rate hasn't changed much over the period 2009-2014 (it was shielded from the great recession by commodity prices).
The correction is finally here.

Good that this bubble finally burst and the Wall Street Wolves will be suffering for some time =)
Scheme is actually used quite a few places, just not as much as a general purpose implementation language.

I would say that smalltalk is way more "dead" in the sense that news doesn't make waves the same way scheme news does.
This is anecdotal, but staying in Airbnbs made my cross country drive from Richmond, VA to Seattle much better than if I had stayed in hotels.

1) The prices were significantly cheaper. I stayed in a room in a beautiful home in Spokane for $35 a night. Sure, you can find rundown 2 star "hotels" for $50 - $60 a night, but trying to find something of comparable quality in a hotel would increase that substantially. Where Airbnb was great was in little towns and areas in the midwest. I stayed in the entire top floor of the most amazing, one hundred year old creamery turned bar turned home in Fertile, IA for $65. Hotels in any nearby city / town were much more and couldn't come close to matching the value.

2) Being able to stay in interesting places really is a benefit. I stayed with an amateur chef in Cincinnati who cooked a fantastic breakfast that otherwise would have cost me $15 at a hotel. I stayed with Yellowstone guides in Belgrade, MT that told me exactly where I need to go the park next time I visit. When I was tired some days and wanted the hotel experience, hosts were more than happy to let me have that.

3) If you want to be really sure you're staying somewhere great, look for superhosts. I never had an experience that didn't match up with the reviews that a host received. Reviews on airbnb actually make hosts and guests accountable for the quality of the stay.

4) The local experience is what you make of it. Hosts typically will let you control the amount of interaction you want to have. It's impossible for them to predict what everybody wants, so you have to communicate.

All of your points don't match up at all with what my experience has been. I love the experience and quality Airbnb helps provide and hotels are always my second choice now.
Is it though?

I still see them on the tail in terms of performance:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?...

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?...

Here comparing with Racket ( not even Java, C#, C++ or C)

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang...
Mostly nonsense article with no answers.

Get rid of carpool lanes and add some dang lanes in the meantime.
> .. stop developing Titan ..

From your [1] we find the follow-up [1a] which clearly says work will not stop.

[1a]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/aureliusgraphs/WTNYY...
> Languages invented by enthusiastic geeks can succeed, but they don't take over the world.

Ruby, Python, and Lua are all obvious counter-examples to the idea that enthusiastic geeks cannot create languages that are many orders of magnitude more successful than SmalllTalk and Scheme. Even CoffeeScript, if you can call it a complete language, is in the realm of that success.

The only language that has come out recently that is successful purely because of the backing of a large company is Swift.
I placed the same order at Amazon, Jet and Wal-Mart. Here’s how they did
> Obviously, you can’t remove the newspaper article, even if it is heavily editorialized.

Wouldn't it be easier to have a law requiring that if the newspaper article is online, then they MUST have some sort of Editor's Note or retraction in bold before the actual article.
I'm like the biggest Ruby fan out there, but c'mon – that's just not true!

Ruby is great at many things, and it has adequate performance for many situations -'Fast Enough', as DHH said. And with liberal use of C extensions, I've used it in some high-performance scenarios where the expressiveness was more beneficial than the complexity of using extensions.

But it's really not fast – up to 100x slower than Java (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang...) or 30x slower than Javascript on V8 (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang...). I know these are micro benchmarks, but they're useful for comparison.

Some of this is down to the nature of the Ruby interpreter and will improve with time (and with implementations like JRuby). Some of it is down to the highly dynamic nature of the language. The point remains though – if you need high performance for a particular task, Ruby may not be the best option.
How Nvidia  Is Unlocking the Potential of GPU-Powered Deep Learning
I used the word "predecessor" with a more of an ironic connotation. The awkward midpoint is spot on.

Like it or not, but all of the hospitality exchange networks seem to have failed so far (provided that a success implies creating value, with an indicator being profit and/or number of members). Even Couchsurfing, the most "successful" one of those was originally started as a service to find a free place to stay. It just happened that a great community formed around it. If we leave the community out, Airbnb in its essence is a "paid" hospitality exchange network.

In a way Airbnb derives from the ideals of sharing economy, being a more of a peer-to-peer marketplace which promotes itself as a hospitality exchange service.
Those in power who want to change the historical record already have the power to do so. They do not need this legislation to do what they want.

You do not have that power and this does not give you the power to change the historical record. It allows you to influence the bias in which Google, a biased search engine, displays information that should be relevant to your identity.
Feature parity is a meaningless term. Extensions currently have access to the entirety of Firefox internals. That huge internal surface couldn't be stabilised without stopping development entirely.
True... it does include R5RS though, and I think it does include lot of libraries for that too.
SmallTalk was taught as a course when I was at University in the 90s. I doubt that's the case now even though conceptually it's a good language in a CS education. We also had courses with functional languages (at that time ML) and Lisp was taught with AI.
Thanks for implying I'm in it for the money without even knowing me. Nice ad hominem you got there.

Let's just say that the donations do not nearly cover the time I spend developing add-ons, helping other add-on developers out with their questions, volunteering on AMO, writing patches for core Firefox and so on.
I think it's unlikely they would fork from the upstream FreeBSD kernel that much without contributing ASLR back. They would end up having to repeat it all again for Playstation 5.

Stranger things have happened, though.
Primarily due to the requirement that post titles be identical to article titles. If a post is intended for a small audience who are already aware of what is going on, then little additional context would be needed.

If Hacker News allowed modifying titles, a reasonable one would be "Over 50,000 Old Technology Manuals Rescued".
Control over memory layout and timing. [1]

[1] https://cryptocoding.net/index.php/Coding_rules
There's a paper I can't find at the moment that looks at almost 4000 non-related people, give them an IQ test each + scan their DNA for typical SNPs with a DNA chip. That gives us almost 8,000,000 pairs where we know how similar their IQ score and DNA was. That gives us almost 8,000,000 points we can plot into a 2D coordinate system (and we can of course also throw statistics at them). It turns out that there is a clear correlation between measured IQ and measured SNPs (i.e., the point cloud is denser along a line). In other words, there is a statistical relation between DNA and IQ.

As always, correlation does not imply causation. Since clearly nurture has a very strong effect on IQ, unless you control for the background of these subjects, I don't think it means anything. It's clear that for a random sample of people in the world today, there will be a clear correlation between race and background.
We do, but (a) international media does not have to adhere to that law (for example, a newspaper in Switzerland could still contain such an article), and (b) tabloids like BILD ignore that regulation anyway and even end up showing themselves as the only newspaper that fights against the evil censorship.
Tell it to NoScript.
I think what it's trying to tell you is that you haven't selected any text inside the edit window. (I agree it's a terrible error message.)
> I can imagine that having to learn how to study (and developing the character to actually do it) is something that takes time and commitment, but if everything else is so easy for you, surely it can't be impossible?

Studying is more of a practice/habit, than an area of knowledge; someone that has avoided needing it because they pick up knowledge well without it and hasn't had their ability to pick up knowledge challenged isn't necessarily going to pick it up easily, especially, if they have many years of strongly ingrained contrary habits when, suddenly, for the first time their ability to gain knowledge is stressed and they need studying to keep up.

Sure, its not an impossible skill to develop. OTOH, when you've missed out on many years of before-college skill development in it and try to catch that all up in time to make a difference once you get to college, its not all that likely to succeed as well as you'd like.
Well, fixing security bugs obviously is necessary. But that doesn't mean that features should be thrown out of the window in the name of security.

And I was mostly referring to mozilla's tendency to nanny its users.

For example the argument for extension signing is that users can't decide for themselves what to install. And that even side-loading from the operating system would be too dangerous because some users could get tricked (in my book that's a people problem, not a software problem).

And again, the argument for whitelisted, locked-down APIs for extensions is security, that giving extensions the same powers as native applications (which don't have to be signed) is unacceptable. Again, reducing features in the name of security.

Fixing privilege escalation attacks and nannying users so they don't apply foot-guns are two quite separate approaches to security in my opinion. Especially since the latter is onerous on powerusers while the former is not.

The restrictions weren't necessary in the past, the situation was clearly good enough for millions to start using browsers. Why is it necessary now?
It's kind of a false debate. There were a number of empirical studies in the 90's that compared many 3GL languages, esp to Ada as it was being assessed. The results were that C programmers produced the highest number of defects (esp severe ones), C++ improved on that, and Ada's safety features cut that way down except one time. Outlier might have meant anything. However, almost everything ever published showed C/C++ were less productive, harder to maintain, harder to integrate, and had more bugs/vulnerabilities. So, burden of proof is actually on other side to justify C particularly as a wise choice in building robust software.

The AdaCore book below illustrates nicely the different areas where defects are common and how they systematically eliminate them. The Wirth languages similarly added all kinds of protections in automatically while letting you disable safety where performance or low-level requirements demanded it. Still did interface protections for calls to that code. I think updating something like that with extra protections Ada community, etc have figured out would give lots of safety, performance, & without Ada's steep learning curve. What you think?

http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secur...
Excellent response, captured my thoughts exactly.
Show HN: Jam on is a music app that doesn't suck
I'm terrified that my lack of social skills is limiting my personal and professional lives. I haven't had close friends in 13 years. My coworkers are middle aged, suburban folks, while mostly nice it gets tiresome explaining what a selfie is or how Twitter works (or having them explain football to me), and our workplace (mechanical engineering) is unusually antisocial. The vast, vast majority of the time we only talk about work because we're in a constant mild crunch. The people I've met via Meetup.com have seemed kind of narrow and were mostly older (i.e. a hiking meetup of 20 people where all they talk about is running/hiking). I despise so many aspects of the tech/startup world that I gave up hanging out at coworking spaces years ago. I've met some good individual out on hikes alone, but I can't hold a conversation or keep in touch to save my life. Is there any experience that I could get into serving as a crash course in social skills? It can be expensive like long-term travel, except I've done enough recreational travel to know that I'm just as nervous in a campsite in Europe as I am in an office in the US. I just want to develop these skills before my social ineptitude becomes permanently ingrained.
The Spruce Goose
QuerySelectorAll from an element probably doesn't do what you think it does
Well, to be fair they did add cards and some new grid stuff for mobile.
On that tangent: is there such a thing as a "dexterity-and-reflex-enhancing drug"? I don't think amphetamines do that, nor any nootropic I'm even vaguely aware of. "Focus" or "alertness" is one thing, but actually suddenly being better at competitive twitch games is quite another. Maybe an anxiolytic, actually—theanine?—if you wanted to prevent "yips." But otherwise...
Why Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
Don't (US) Americans often think of Mexico as part of "South America"?

North or Central America would be more correct geographically but the major divider in practice is the US/Mexican border, isn't it?

We (in Western Europe) also called some of the Central European states "Eastern Europe" for a long time because the Iron Curtain was the thing that mattered, not the actual East/West position.
Light Sport Aircraft and experimental/kit airplanes, sure (although "startup" is probably the wrong word for it).
Uber is only losing money right now because it's in a land-grab situation [1]. Barring some cataclysm, someday Uber will be insanely profitable. Their investors understand this, and their valuation reflects it.

[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/14.html
Hmm, I wonder if Pharo/Squeak publish their download numbers? Is the recent uptick in smalltalk articles on HN an indicator in increasing interest in the language (even though they've been mostly harsh).
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
Many streets in LA are wider than even the widest highways in certain countries (UK comes to mind). You can't broaden the 405 much more, nor would such a scheme work for the 10.

The obvious answer is more mass transit and please, pretty please, protected bike lanes on major throughways.

If Amsterdam can squeeze a dedicated bike lane, cars and trams on roads that haven't changed in hundreds of years, surely LA can figure it out.
Was there ever any explanation for the delay?
And just imagine if they rewrote Rust in Rust! :P
Each of those threads has a stack allocated to it - and from what I understand, the CLR will actually commit a megabyte of RAM for every thread. You really don't want to have all of the threads permitted in the threadpool up and running at once if you can avoid it. Async allows you to handle 32000 simultaneous requests without having to have 32000 threads and 32000 stacks active at once.
Props to Tarsnap team for doing stuff like this. They set quite a good example for others in design, implementation, and combating exploits. Always liked their work. Especially the hilarious and overly-generous pricing scheme. Truly original. ;)
I completely agree. Perhaps it's my "more data is good data" approach, but the more we save of our history (no matter how seemingly inconsequential), the better.
Excellent way to put this in perspective.
>We have decided on an approximate timeline for the deprecation of XPCOM

Thank god, this undocumented crap is a nightmare to use
OK interesting, so this capability is on by default then? I didn't change the default inode size, but it looks like I could SAVE space by increasing it (from 256 or something). Since I have 1.91M files less than 2048 bytes, I guess I could increase it enough to store most/many of those.

And I guess it halves the IOPS for serving those files, since with a cold cache you need to read block holding the inode and block holding the data.
Thanks, didn't see that one. That said, it seems work has slowed down to a trickle, and I'm not seeing much activity on the Apache end.
Nope, all blocks, unless wikipedia is wrong or I am completely misunderstanding the following:

"When a block is accessed, regardless of whether it is data or meta-data, its checksum is calculated and compared with the stored checksum value of what it "should" be. If the checksums match, the data are passed up the programming stack to the process that asked for it; if the values do not match, then ZFS can heal the data if the storage pool provides data redundancy (such as with internal mirroring), assuming that the copy of data is undamaged and with matching checksums."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
Smalltalk was designed for experts. It wasn't intended to be designed for experts though.

That's why we study the reasons why it failed so that we don't make the same mistakes again.
Blogging in general, or submitting to HN?

I mean targeting HN with an ongoing effort to reach the front page again and again, doubling down on relatively easy traffic with a few customers vs the much harder challenge of finding a good customer acquisition channel.
I remember ten years ago when worrying about Peak Oil was all the rage. You don't hear too much about that nowadays…
This is a great comment, and it actually highlights some additional problems with it all.

Let's say your name was "Mike Smith." Pretty common name, right? Even if HR took your Hiring Scenario 1, it will be most likely it will take until the offer-pending-official-background-check is made. Why? Because "Mike Smith" brings up hundreds and thousands of results even with a geolocated search. Living in a city of several million is a boon to reformed misdemeanor teen Mike Smith. That's not even considering the legitimate criminal Mike Smith's that need to be ignored for our innocent Mike Smith's sake.

Now, if your name was "Quincy Brouwer" (Dutch Surname), its easier for this arrest to pop up.

The reality of the situation, at least from what I've seen, is that there is a hybrid of Scenarios 1 & 2 that actually go on. they will do some rudimental Googling on your name, but it won't be until the offer is about to be made that they'll do the formal, paid, background check and look into your credit history and other things.

Unfortunately on the other side of the coin, for developers in particular, many will go through several rounds of sometimes grueling technical interviews only to find out a silly mistake they made as a youth disbars them from the job.
I asked my teenaged nephew the other day, while he was playing a car racing game, what he thinks would be a reasonable good first car for him. He is two, maybe three years from driving age. He grew up in the suburbs and both his parents have cars. Dad has a classic car for weekend pleasure driving. You get the picture. My nephew hadn't really considered getting a car. I can see the first car thing being a whole lot less of a thing for his generation than it was for his parents'. He would rather spend time tinkering on his computer than under the hood or behind the wheel like his father did.
I think there is an in-between ground not covered by your comment. Good languages tickle (some class "foo" of) programmers in ways that tend to expand their repertoire. Many of those expansions enable better approaches to system design.

It may be true that "experts" could do it even in Java, but many "foo-level" programmers would just do it the Java-way in Java, but can appreciate the better features of a better language in context.

It's also probably true that many programmers will struggle with foo-level features. That harkens back to Vanier's LFM and LFSP essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html. Having seen LFM approaches to systems over the years, I'm skeptical that it is the right approach for anything with much complexity. YMMV.
They fired the guy who made them open source and held the release until their Notes product was ready.
"Better" can mean a lot of things including "cheaper", "easier to use", "better marketed", etc. Explains why sometimes "worse is better", I think :)