skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Currently this is generally true, though not always. The compiler only has so much information available when it's compiling, the run-time potentially has more information. The most aggressive optimizations of compiled code rely on profiling data gathered from actually running the code. You generate representative usage scenarios, run your program using those usage scenarios (usually automated), gather data about how frequently different code blocks are hit through the use of instrumented binaries, then use that data to produce a highly efficient optimized compiler output.

However, not all software engineering groups have the capabilities to produce such highly optimized binaries, and there is always the risk that a user's particular usage patterns will differ enough from the expected patterns that they will lose the benefit of this extensive optimization. However, in an interpreted or byte-code language a lot of the same information needed for optimization is available to the run-time. A run-time designed for optimization may be able to take advantage of that, creating super efficient code paths based on actual usage. This model is more difficult to implement but potentially more robust than statically optimized compilation (and also has the potential to take greater advantage of differences in hardware, a statically compiled native binary doesn't have the ability to morph its optimization based on whether its running on a single core Atom or a 6-way Core i7 cpu, or some 100-core monster of the future, but a run-time potentially can).

In the average case most of this is just theory, but the potential is very real.

Some worthwhile background reading:

Trace Trees: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/ICS-TR-06-16.pdf

A blog post / talk from Steve Yegge on dynamic language performance and other topics:
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st...
So in this article he states:

Traditional chain: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer

Then he says that Amazon is acting as wholesaler to the publishers and bookstore to consumers. That would give us this:

Amazon's chain: author -> publisher -> Amazon -> consumer

What I don't really get is what's so different between that and what apple is proposing:

Apple's proposal: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader

The only difference I see is that apple hasn't started going after the publisher's profits (yet).

What am I missing here?
Is it really the "vast majority" that walks around with Bluetooth headsets stuck in their ear?
I've seen it help for unranked applications.

If you're currently a decently-ranked paid application, don't forget that in the transition back from free -> paid you will be unranked until you have sufficient paid purchases over time to rank again. You could end up throwing away whatever momentum you have :-)
Out of curiosity have you developed your own time-series database to do the analysis ? - your api looks much nicer than other time-series databases like KX which I've used.
I'm experienced with a variety of technologies, although I'm currently most competent with python. I have a lot of experience doing web development and web-scraping/spidering in python.

I have the understanding of (X)HTML, CSS, javascript, and HTTP that comes with making web-apps in languages that aren't necessarily just beefed-up templating languages.

I also have working knowledge of C, and can read a smattering of other languages.

Extensive experience administering linux servers, minor (but growing) experience with BSD. Can work with windows.

I'm in NE Ohio. I'm open to remote work, or relocating, but am currently suffering from a bad case of brokeitis, so I would either need to be offered a relocation package, or work remotely for a month or two to acquire the necessary funds. Unless you're in NE Ohio, that is.

If you have any questions, would like to see an example of work I've done, or would like to contact me for any other reason, shoot me an email at jeremiah.dodds@gmail.com
Actually, according to their Open Letter, Macmillan wants to sell you a book on Day 1 at $12-$15.
Never said that.

The ease and user experience of Cocoa Touch and Android make J2ME apps look so slow and ugly that I don't honestly believe any consumer will put up with those kind of devices for much longer.

About a year ago I sat in a meeting with a carrier that proclaimed "We're not worried about iPhone" but in the same breath asked "so, how can we get an App Store running for our handsets?"
Hmmm:

Anecdotal evidence from non-peer reviewed popular news media, student dissertations and environmental advocacy organization reports and web site articles that supports our thesis, good.

Serious research that's kept out of blessed peer-reviewed journals by our conspiracy that doesn't support our thesis, bad.
Track.com is looking for a summer intern or two with a CS background and some web development experience. Django experience is a plus. Based in Manhattan. Contact rich@ if interested.
The two words that make me close a site instantly: "Skip Intro".
Indeed, the pleading tone at the end of the statement suggests it worked too!
Cashing them is not an option anymore, as he only gives out fake checks now.
I don't know about that--I'm an Extrovert, and I like having private space.
Points also to the issue that thinking about security from a perimeter point of view (everything outside firewall is bad, everything inside is good) is outdated. There is no inside vs outside anymore.
Come'on. Why would you submit a news story from March 2009?

Do you think it somehow didn't get the attention it deserved back then? (it did)

If there was something new to the question about Yelp's ethics, you wanted to alert people about you should've linked to THAT story, rather than a story from 12 months ago.
If Amazon is writing the book, fine. But if Amazon is saying that somehow magically they will sell you a book for $10 when MacMillan needs $12-$15 to make money, then MacMillan or the author are going to starve while Amazon makes all the money.

That is not a win for anyone except Amazon.
Anyone got a link to the leaked MI5 document itself? I don't really trust this article to present its claims faithfully.
Frescobaldi 1.0.1 su Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic
Okay, you've in-cent-ivized me. The way I see it, when you have a secret security solution, you tend to convince yourself that "it's okay, noone will ever figure it out" and thus settle for something less secure than you'd have to otherwise. A lot of security solutions thought of by very experienced and smart people have been broken. Assuming yours would be better is quite a statement. If you can back it up, awesome, then all the more reason to publish it and collect fame.
In most browsers you wouldn't know if it was Flash that crashed or the browser itself. In Chrome it is more explicit.

I've never had my browser crash on me either. Firefox-user on Windows here. To me Chrome seems to "fix" a problem I've never, ever had.
Contest: Win 10 Licenses of BitDefender Internet Security 2010 | beingPC
Measuring brain activity in experienced meditators
"better" is relative. Sure the winters would be nice for living outdoors, but the summers would likely kill you.
The writer states:
book publishing is notoriously, uniquely unprofitable, within the media world

Is he kidding? Macmillan occupies the famous Flatiron Building on Fifth Ave. in Manhattan. (It's the narrow triangular building shown in a lot of movies and TV shows.) If they can run their operations out prime real estate like that, then they are either profitable or mismanaged.
I think part of the problem is that nobody knows quite what a tablet is supposed to do. Is it just for web browsing (CrunchPad)? Is it for basic web, email and office (iPad)? Is it for everything that a laptop does (Windows tablets)? Once you have a scope/audience, then you can design a suitable UI.

Apple is attempting to take the lead here, defining what a tablet should and should not do. If it works out, then I suspect other tablet manufacturers will follow suit and create devices with similar scope to the iPad. If it doesn't then it's back to the drawing board.
I do a fair amount of Rails, so I'm really curious here. How could it be that they've so heavily patched 2.0 that they can't move on? Anyone from Twitter care to comment?

I've worked on many Rails apps, and have upgraded the apps from version to version. It's a pain when key elements of the API shift, but it's not that bad...even when the project has monkey-patched Rails a lot. And twitter certainly has the resources to afford to dedicate a few programmers to this task, so I'm just not sure I buy it.
To be perfectly honest if the all the people caught in Chinese honey traps just went to their wives and the press saying "I committed adultery because the Chinese attempted to get leverage over me, it was irresistible"

I think they'd get awarded the Victoria cross for bravery or something. Ig noble prize for politics please?

CHINA! Feel free to send honey traps this way. I'm in local government. Fantastic. They've obviously not looked at the divorce statistics lately.
Do they still get their trillion dollars?
Are you arguing that Apple has a monopoly on phones? Even narrowing the category to smart phones doesn't really make enough of a difference for your point to be valid. Sure, there are plenty of people out there that have iPhones, but there's also people out there with phones running Android and PalmOS. There's people with Blackberry's and WinMos. If you don't like Apple's walled garden, you can easily get a decent experience buying another phone. You want rich media on the web? Well, good luck getting away with that without using Flash.

I'm not arguing for or against the AppStore. I get why Apple is doing it, and I get why people don't like it, but comparing Apple to Adobe in this way is fruitless (no pun intended).

Also, Apple has reversed rejections when the blogosphere cried foul.
Amazon is just following the model set by Apple. Apple pays whatever they want to recording companies, and we are OK with it. Amazon and Apple are now doing the same to book publishers, and I don't see how they will be able to fight back.

It turns out that the digital future will look even more centralized than the previous world. And one day people may even start missing the old world of big record labels and book publishers.
Here is a more flexible functional representation of numerals, courtesy Steensgaard-Madsen [1989], but written in Fexl:

\zero = (\zero\succ zero)
\succ = (\n \zero\succ succ n)

This delays the binding of the handler functions (zero and succ) until each step instead of deciding once way up at the top.

Addition is easy:

\add = (\x\y x y \p succ (add p y))

As is multiplication:

\mul = (\x\y x 0 \p add y (mul p y))

Now unary notation is fine for some things, but when I'm using arbitrarily large numbers in Fexl I use a binary notation (lists of bits), with representations as follows:

[] = 0
[F|N] = 2*N (where N != 0)
[T|N] = 2*N+1

In that notation addition is a little harder but not too bad:

\add = (\x\y x y \xb\xn y x \yb\yn
\z=(add xn yn)
xb
(yb [F,T|z] [T|z])
(yb [T|z] [F|z]))

Multiplication is:

\twice = (\x x [] \_\_ [F|x])

\mul = (\x\y x y \xb\xn y x \yb\yn
\z=(twice; mul xn yn)
xb
(yb [T|add xn; add yn z] [F|add yn z])
(yb [F|add xn z] [F|z]))

[The ';' you see there is the Fexl "right-pivot" operator, a syntactic device for avoiding right-nesting. For example, (add 1; add 2; add 3; 0) is a shorthand for (add 1 (add 2 (add 3 0))). Also the notation [x|y] is a shorthand for (cons x y), where cons = (\head\tail \null\cons cons head tail).]

You can also harness the full power of the computable numbers, which is how you do the so-called "real" numbers on a physical computing device. A computable number is a pair of lists of bits (T or F). One list is the integer part and the other is the fractional part. The fractional part can be infinite, allowing exact representation of numbers like pi and e. (Come to think of it you could have an infinite integer part as well, which might actually be useful somehow.)

If you're careful to avoid non-termination you can do useful work with lazily evaluated computable numbers. Something like (add pi e) will work just fine and give you an exact result to any number of places you desire. On the other hand (equal pi pi) will loop forever, searching futilely for two bits which disagree. But when you're looking for "close enough" you can just apply (clip 20) to the numbers and then compare them.
Your comment implies that the IPCC panel started with an idea of what conclusion they wanted to make. What is your evidence that's the case.

It's entirely invalid to say that because they came to a certain conclusion and the majority of the cited studies support that conclusion, they picked the citations to support it. That claim can be applied to any valid scientific review. It uses some sort of Catch-22 argument that because the evidence support the conclusion, the evidence must have been cherry-picked. With that view, no science would be valid.

Besides, your comment doesn't make sense. What about all the anecdotal evidence from non-scientific sources that do support their thesis but was excluded from the report?

Without assessing the rates of the complementary claims, your statement just looks like good, old-fashioned selection bias.
I agree. I think Django's model system is a good example of when metaclasses can help a lot. It's essentially a domain-specific language that overcomes some of Python's limitations, such as remembering the order in which class attributes were defined.

I have noticed that the same sometimes applies to __getattr__ and similar Python features. You easily shoot yourself in the foot unless you are very careful. So all that stuff is best left to carefully debugged and maintained libraries, and out of everyday quickly-written application code.
In my option, in e-book business, a company like Macmillan is unneeded middle-man. "unneeded" is probably too big word, I don't know publishing industry. But their added value to an e-book is much less than in case of printed books distributed via traditional sales channels.

In long term, economics is on Amazon side. Macmillan is loosing power so they play hardball to survive.

By analogy, think about Apple app store and developers. Developers do not need middle-man companies like Macmillan.
Taipan. Yes, that was the game that started me on Apple ][. I started programming after discovering Beagle Bros. Oh the pokes and the peeks.
I watched this and was very disappointed. Not recommended - go build something instead.
Is that your site or was it just something you remembered? If it is your site, I have to tell you the logo/icon is stellar.
Even the wikipedia entry for Knuth checks has an image of such a check with the full ABA and account number on the check, with only the most inconsequential data (to a forger) blurred out. It's sad that he had to make the change, but if I was doing something that resulted in the full data for my bank account being available on wikipedia and google image search (let alone thousands of CS cork-boards across the nation), I'd probably put a stop to it too.
This whole thing is fishy.

Here's an article from 3 years ago, with a very similar "document": http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,314718,00.html
Adobe have had years and years to produce a well performing Flash for Mac OS X. They have done absolutely nothing besides pulling a straw mans argument about lack of hardware support.

With this history in mind, why do people think that Apple would trust Adobe all of a sudden would produce a well performing implementation for the iPad/iPhone?
Of course, you could also randomly generate a time, then sleep for that long. This gives you significantly more control (you can easily specify "wait at least an hour" or "wait at most 48 hours") and is less resource-intensive. (Of course, "wait at least an hour" is not a good idea if your program crashes all the time.)

Still, nice.
``P.S. Somebody stole my nick, where can I cry about it?''

Please learn to read. He is complaining about a policy he wasn't warned about, a policy that _doesn't_ involve warning the user of upcoming expiry, and finally, that doesn't in any way seem to take into account channel ownership.

It's a bad protocol. That's all.
I can actually see a 5th grade teacher nixing this one because it seems to encourage drawing conclusions from research rather than a hands-on experiment.
My most successful middle school science fair had me experimenting with different liquids to see which would exhibit the most capillary action. I made it a little more scientific by using different concentrations of sugar water, but he could also use juice or soda or things like that.

Seriously, though, the kid should be expected to come up with ideas on his own. Go through his science book with him and see what he's learned about that's most interesting to him.
How The iPad Could Change The Face of The Web
That may be the iPad you wanted but to me it just looks like a Tablet PC running OSX.
I would point out that, if I owned a Kindle, and yesterday I could buy a given book, but today I log in and find that said book isn't available anymore because the vendor of my Kindle is flexing their monopoly power, I'm not sure how happy I would be.

Now, let's try a metaphor. It will be a little clunky, since the situation isn't the same. But go with it for a second.

I see that Bingo Card Creator sells for $29.95. That seems awfully high. [1]

But suppose I've got my hands on the channel through which 50% of Bingo Card Creator's sales are flowing. (Perhaps I'm Google, and I both (a) run AdSense and (b) own a lot of the pipes down which your content flows.) And I'm starting up an app store. My deal for you is: You will license Bingo Card Creator to me for republishing at my app store, where all apps cost $19.95 flat rate. If you refuse, I'll cut off all the ads and distribution that connect you to over half of your customer base, and we'll see how long you can afford to defy me while your cash flow has been cut in half.

Of course, if you say yes to $19.95, your customers will be very happy. They will flock to my app store where the prices are lowest. Soon 75% of your customers will arrive through my channel. At which point I might decide to lower the price on your app to $9.95, flat rate.

I'm assuming that there is a price point below which you will go out of business, and below which your replacements will go out of business (even if I hire the cheapest labor I can find, and cut QA to the bone). You may prefer not to explore exactly where that point is, if only because you like producing quality products, and because it's nice to not be one temporary sales slump away from bankruptcy. But, thanks to my grip on your distribution channel, we will now perform that experiment, on my schedule and my terms.

Why hasn't this happened more often in web software? Perhaps because no monopoly controls a sufficient portion of the network. Perhaps because those with the power are scared of anti-monopolist legislation (which, in this context, we tend to call "net neutrality laws") and don't want to provoke anyone. Perhaps because software-industry mavens are very well practiced at picking up their operations and moving to a different channel literally overnight. Perhaps because software has a huge profit margin compared to print books, which provides healthy margin for emergencies. Perhaps because we've been lucky so far. And perhaps because, if and when Google does destroy entire industries by tweaking a bit in AdSense, they tend to be industries we don't like very much, and/or it tends to stay under the radar. [2]

My sense is that this moment isn't so much about publishers and authors trying to stave off the arrival of the internet. It's about an attempt to stave off a monopolist's control of their pricing and distribution.

---

[1] To a cheapskate. Cheapskates think all prices are high. People complain about high prices on the iPhone App Store, for god's sake.

[2] Note: I haven't seen any credible evidence that this actually happens, although people do complain about it now and then.
Free Downloads Rapidshare Software
I'm not saying anything about why they engaged in this observed behavior other than "good" and "bad", the meat of the point is that they have vastly different standards for what they consider to be evidence worth citing in their reports.

The real key is how they treat unfavorable serious research, not what they pick and chose from un-peer reviewed anecdotal sources. And how they're willing to use the latter, but made a big deal about how the research of their critics wasn't peer reviewed or in a blessed journal ... when they were conspiring to arrange just that outcome.

I think it's clear where the real selection bias is.

Look, the essence of science (that doesn't first start with experimental data) is that you put forward a theory, marshal evidence in its favor and answer all the criticism and evidence not in its favor. If you hide, obfuscate or destroy your evidence and refuse to answer your critics you aren't doing science.
Excuse me.

Even though Darth Siddy may own the times, journalistic integrity is a point of pride in Britain. Not everywhere but in the Times, BBC, Guardian etc it certainly is.

He also owns Sky and that's our version of faux news. Sky is rubbish and complains the BBC is 'too big' and a 'monopoly'.

Why? Because the BBC is made of uhm. 'Win'. No adverts and an insane amount of programming for less than a couple of months of Sky (For Sky think Cable). Fantastic.
Amazon has a right to buy books for the price they can negotiate and sell them for whatever price they want. MacMillan is trying to force them to sell ebooks at the same price as every other ebook retailer. Let's see, what would we call that... How about price fixing? --Something generally considered bad for the consumer.

Amazon is doing exactly what any other business with bargaining power would do. And really, Amazon is doing what customers want - they're trying to keep prices down. So really, who should consumers be mad at - Amazon for working to keep prices lower, or MacMillan for trying to prevent competition in the market and make sure their books are being sold for the highest price possible?
Video explanation of Roger Federer's incredible footwork
If you're interested in more Church, here's the blog post I wrote for my compilers students (with code) on Church encodings:

http://matt.might.net/articles/church-encodings-demo-in-sche...

When building a compiler, I have my students use Church encodings to eliminate many constructs at first. As we learn how to handle each construct, we steadily drop the Church encodings and performance improves.
I'm not sure I understand your point, however the link I posted was Fox News syndicating the Times which as you say, does have journalistic integrity...

I'm sure this document is real, I'm just saying that the fact that the chinese government has been spying on large multi-national corporations across the world is not "news" or even "hacker news".
Also, how does he guarantee his function to be called at least once a day? Perhaps he needs a quantum machine to run his code or he should use a "predictable-random-generator" (http://goo.gl/jsYC) which "would violate his 'stateless' requirement".
Thanks! Yes, we rolled our own - on top of Tokyo Tyrant (http://blog.timetric.com/2009/05/upgrading-the-timetric-back...).
Fair enough, then we should compare the iPad to the Lenovo without the extra computer. My impression is that Lenovo knows this tablet is rubbish, so won't sell you it by itself. Ergo, iPad wins by virtue of being on the market.
British journalism is fairly independent compared to the US, that said I do notice a lots of 'tamtam' around China in the last couple of weeks.

First the Google announcement (from which rumour has it they've quietly backtracked), then the US arms sale to Taiwan, now this.