skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, one reason for the success of Java was the huge amount of investment Sun put into it - in both marketing and tech improvements. I read that they spent millions on that. And it did result in benefits. Across the span of some years, anecdotally, the performance of Java apps improved a hell of a lot - I remember noticing it, say maybe from 1.2 to 1.6 or so. E.g. some servlet + JSP based app running a lot faster at the end of that period than at the beginning.

A pity that they did not seem to handle the business side of things well, and went down and were bought. (I'm sure there were external factors too, don't mean to say it was partly or wholly their fault. Just don't know.) Don't know much details on exactly why that happened, though I did read about it now and then, and follow Jonathan Schwartz's (last CEO of Sun) blog for a while.
"Compiler optimization" in this thread is referring to speeding up compilation time†, not runtime of generated code. Go produces fast code, but the go compiler does not generate that code particularly quickly.

† Which can be seen as a runtime cost for interpreter+JIT languages, but that's a different issue. We're talking time-to-steady-state when the interpreter is fed a file (which is something Javascript engine devs worry about a lot), not benchmark-speed-at-steady-state.
There are no other good options.

You can complain but you will get forced out eventually for rocking the boat plus it may affect your reputation in the market place. You just need to do what everyone does. Grit your teeth, stay positive and plan your exit strategy to another company.
It's always fascinating (and disappointing) to me to read stories like this. I have had two Nest thermostats in my house for three years now, and I regularly think of them as the single best upgrade we made when we moved in. Ours work great, and provide a far better experience than the old-style programmable thermostats we had in our previous places. I don't know if we just got lucky, or what. I wish that everyone could have the same experience we have, because for us it really is a great product...
Many people – including people speaking english as second language – are unfamiliar with it.

I, for example, didn’t know w/ meant with until now.
So, I wrote the article and the thing that is the most interesting to me is that I am getting an incredible amount of positive responses to my post (outside of HN). Especially from women who feel like I expressed something that they are struggling with.

We want to be taken seriously for our companies and our minds. All we want is to walk into the room and be an entrepreneur. Not a woman, or looked at through the lens of a "wife" or "mother"

I don't know if it is the anonymity, but the discussion here seems so negative. With a lot of cheap shots at me, and hell of a lot of assumptions made. Really lacking in nuance and honestly- lacking in respect.

This was hard for me to write. It has been hard for me to deal with and I didn't take a cheap shot at the VC. I could have ruined his life/career but I just wanted to make a point, and show people what women have to deal with in an honest and frank manner.
You can use portia[1]. You can try out a hosted version at scrapinghub[2] or you can host your own. It's a web based spider creator like kimonolabs but the spiders it creates are just scrapy spiders.
If you need to do something that the UI can't handle it's not a problem, you can extend it with a little python.

[1] https://github.com/scrapinghub/portia
[2] https://scrapinghub.com
Kind of bummed on the two weeks notice, but I'm sure there's some pressure and tradeoff the team had to make, which I guess softens the blow a bit (for me at least).
Fantasy North: What explains the icy northern grip on our imagination?
Netflix Tech Blog: Distributed Time Travel for Feature Generation
C11, 6.5p7: An object shall have its stored value accessed only by an lvalue expression that has one of
the following types:

— a type compatible with the effective type of the object,
— a qualified version of a type compatible with the effective type of the object,
— a type that is the signed or unsigned type corresponding to the effective type of the object,
— a type that is the signed or unsigned type corresponding to a qualified version of the effective type of the object,
— an aggregate or union type that includes one of the aforementioned types among its members (including, recursively, a member of a subaggregate or contained union), or
— a character type
---------------------

If we interprete 6.5p6 like the submitter did then the whole p7 becomes meaningless for any mallocs. In that case everything always aliases everything ever when it's trough a malloced pointer. Which I hardly imagine is the point of the former paragraph. If so they have fundamentally changed the whole function of malloc. Which makes it odd as in C99 (The p6 wording was introduced there. It was not there in C89) they explicitly allowed unions to alias, just due to this issue. Would have been unnecessary if malloced things always alias.

The wording is not clear however. It would be nice to see the standards committee to publish a comment about this. This is also not the first thing in the spec that is unclear.
Software written by people who are working weekends / 50+hr weeks sucks. It is bad and buggy. It is really painful if it is running an appliance that has to work. The sooner managers get overworked programmers / engineers will lead to bad things which might lead to lawsuits, the better.

I am hopeful that the Nest way of doing things is not replicated in their self driving cars.
This may change with the Canadian dollar dropping down so low. A (very high by local standards) $150,000 CAD salary is only $100,000 USD. US employers would be wise to invest in Canadian offices. Especially near universities like University of Waterloo or University of Alberta that are some of the best engineering universities in North America.
I'd not heard from no permissions, but as with a website, I still prefer things with my signature correspond to things from me and are nice even if the rest is a cesspool. Given these problems, I would seriously hope that the ~8 app makers I trust feel the same way.
I must have misspoke, 'drop up', as per Win 95 onwards is anti-pattern to me, everything menu-wise that is drop-down is good, again to me, given that is the UX I learned first with WIMP GUI's.
Co-founders of conversation-commerce chatbot Kip, on future of AI assistants
Yes. Join the club.

Sincerely,
Perl Programmers :)
> 125,000$

What makes that number better than $124,000 ?
Keep in mind that Homebrew clones tap repositories when you do 'brew tap'-- this has two major implications if you're keeping your formula in your main source repository:

(1) You're pushing down bits onto users' machines that may not be necessary (like developer documentation, or development versions of your source code if you're developing on master), and

(2) 'brew update' will need to download (via 'git pull') all changes to your repository any time you update, even when the Homebrew formula doesn't change.

Keeping formulas in a separate repository allows Homebrew to work like it's supposed to (and like it does for built-in formulas): an update to your tap repository means there's updates for the formulas that it contains, and you're not downloading any source code except what's actually going to be used, at the time it's going to be used (during 'brew install').
How to Get Selenium Tests Instantly Started (Without Queuing)
Astonishing New Pattern Interrupt TechnologyBoosts Profits on ANY Website
MNIST Gaussian Classifier
What don't you like about Chocolatey?
Could it be that the people that report to a Fadell/Jobs are very talented and are able to absorb the nastiness while motivating employees below them?
Emacs doesn't really have a terminal emulator, and terminal graphics are mostly unusable in emacs. Shell and ansi-term are there for when you cannot avoid some shell-fu. I use it mostly for VCS operations that cannot be done with VC, and nowadays building Emacs 25 pretests. I use dired instead of ls, proced instead of h?top|ps, but for a sysadmin these are not viable, I understand.

I do not use magit because I do not only use git, and VC allows me to use Git, RCS and CVS easily without learning different emacs interfaces for each.
I think Theodores claims the reverse, but "drop-down" is an anti-pattern in interfaces where you use a pen or a finger because your hand will obscure the popped up menu.
assumed it was a known fact that Chinese nationals often buy their way through college

That kind of thing is very hard to acknowledge in the USA, even if true. It strikes close to past civil rights struggles.
As jaded and crass as it feels to me as I consider it in my own head, I can't help thinking that the US ought to just let people jump forward in the immigration queue based on the amount of federal taxes they have paid.

If you're paying $30000 in income tax every year, which would be lost if you had to return to your home country, there's a really good reason to just hand you a green card. $30k is a significant chunk of a useless government sinecure, after all. And if you make it based on taxes, you can be reasonably certain that it will be recurring revenue, rather than a one-time windfall. And at that income level, you're likely to be a high-expectations parent to a child who will eventually speak English and want to stay forever. So bring the spouse and kids!

As a nation, wouldn't we want to encourage as much immigration as possible from people who will be net contributors to our society? Wouldn't we want to bring their families with them, so they wouldn't be remitting their earnings back to another country? Ignoring all the irrational racism, of course. That might still be a problem.
> “Your entire profession,” he wrote back, “has preferred to bury their heads in the sand and refuse to credit my literary/creative genius and/or the outrageous pedagogical stupidity that you have all implicitly supported. And either way I just want you to know that you need to think about the price of this behavior. That one day people will know that your profession is either incredibly inept and or outrageously dishonest. And either way that likely will translate into a crisis for the humanities that you likely are not nearly prepared for. So just be warned. And understand that I will be continuing to work to bring about this very unpleasant and undesirable scenario.”

I'm basing a character on this kind of fellow! Excellent reference material.
I think this is also due to the fact that, no matter what is taught in coding schools or universities, you cannot fully understand a pattern until you've seen it working in real apps, with real use cases, and your mind grasped the whys on top of the hows.
Why can't I use Java with Polyglot?
How to get useful feedback
Ask HN: What are your favourite newer podcasts?
Getting a bit tired of the classics - Tim Ferris, This American Life, Andressen podcast. Would love to hear what informative, inspiring, or entertaining stuff you guys are listening to lately.
Scientists want to sequence the genome of all living kakapo parrots
Does it matter? Of course, otherwise this wouldn't be the contentious issue that it is. If you are the Disney programmer telling your wife and kids that you are unemployed, I assure you, it matters.

To say it doesn't matter if there are 0 H1-Bs or 250,000 H1-Bs is ...

Your "high paid H1-B worker" most likely isn't (see data contained in the referenced article). Outside of a small percentage of very rare individuals or specialists every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen, who would pay the same taxes or more, is far more likely to buy real estate than rent a nearby apartment for a couple of years, and will almost assuredly un-employ some American than hopefully employ one.
Many large companies, even those that author software, view enterprise software development as primarily an integration task, with components to be sourced. While you can see how they might arrive at this conclusion and buying a product is ostensibly easier than building a competing product, these shops never seem to factor in the cost of integration. Legacy systems, inter-departmental coordination, standardization on training... All of this is really expensive.

And its made more expensive by the having to have a very expansive security group attempting to fit external pieces into an internal puzzle.

What I think is the worst part of this is that the assumption is that software architecture and design then becomes a task that revolves around the existing and purchased tools, and very abstract pricing considerations can strongly influence these toolchains. It leads to very strange forces acting on your definition of a good technical hire. Almost none of them are beneficial for a robust and/or diverse technical organization.
To be honest I am just very lazy and would appreciate a simple GUI to make the build and project files. I guess Visual Studio has made me lazier ;)
I don't think that joining a union would be advantageous to me either. But the words "advocate for themselves as a group" don't necessarily imply unions or collective bargaining. It could mean forming political action groups. If big companies spend a lot of money on lobbyists to put their ideas in front of politicians, why shouldn't their employees do the same?
The Rule of 40% for a Healthy SaaS Company
It can be as easy as "serve result of SELECT *". We're working on it with Nodal. http://graphql.nodaljs.com/ - some pretty neat progress so far.
Have you tried adjusting it for inflation and GDP growth?

Even after that, the S&P 500 should be doing better. Why? Because the S&P500 represents the winners not the overall economy.
Nope, sorry. People do have a right to complain. Doing so may hurt their chances of actually getting such money, but they certainly have that right.
The Many Kinds of Code Reuse in Rust
Package management, to me, is mostly about the ability to have a list of sources (feeds of versioned signed package manifests); for updating to generate a merged manifest; and to install, uninstall, auto-upgrade-with-dependencies, and pin/unpin versions of the packages from that merged manifest.

OSX actually has softwareupdate(8), which does work like this—and which at least the OSX system updates (managed now through the MAS app) execute in terms of—which could theoretically be fed custom catalogs (sources) in addition to Apple's, to get most of this part of the benefit. Never heard of anyone doing that, though.
Y Combinator Launches an Experiment in Universal Basic Income
On OSX with just Photoshop CC installed, there's around 10 adobe related processes running at any given time, all the while making connections and sending data to both adobe and non-adobe (CDNs) IPs. And that's AFTER you disable all of it's settings including run at startup. There's even an adobe Node.js instance (wtf?) constantly running and using CPU.

I don't take kindly to my system being commandeered, so I cancelled my CC subscription, removed their bloated, slimy POS software and bought Affinity Photo.
Top ways to find used materials
At some level, no. But, at another level, yes: REST-ful dependencies, progress indicators, CSS transitions, history support, custom HTTP response headers for meta-actions and so on.

You can check out the docs here:

http://intercoolerjs.org/docs.html
I think you raise a very valid point.

> The unfortunate part is being a woman she has an obvious stress test point of commenting on her gender.

We all have stress points. Research has shown men react to stress by isolating themselves, while women react to stress by looking for the company and support of their female friends.

Besides the obvious publication of her point of view in search of said support, her behaviour is more consistent with belief of being entitled to the VC money than anything else.
For me it's lack of lexical scoping.
Yeah, I really don't get value of the Nest either. I'd rather just program my schedule myself and have some certainty about it, rather than let some algorithm try to guess.

The only smart thermostat feature that's at all tempting to me is the Ecobee's remote sensors (which the Nest doesn't have). I've lived in places where uneven heating is a legitimate problem.
We recently shipped a new updater that parallelizes network requests. The speedup is really appreciable; I have 27 taps and `brew update` now runs under 10 seconds.
> horrible contributor/developer experience, uncaring maintainership

I was imagining a package manager with the standard kind of "add whatever sources to your sources list you like" model, as most Linux distros have. If the MAS was rebuilt in terms of this, then presumably adding a custom package source would make custom apps (which, after all, are just packages) show up in the MAS app for selection as well, just as they'd show up in e.g. Ubuntu Software Center. Apple would only control their app/package source.

The interesting question is whether someone would be able to list an app in their third-party source as costing money—and, if so, how that would work, and where payment would go. Maybe each "source" could come with a payment processor token for the MAS client to interact with, additional APIs to let the MAS app grab payment receipts from your source server, etc. In other words, you'd be hosting less of a "package management repo" and more of a "store server with built-in package CDN"—but that's not too big of a change.

Now, I wouldn't expect Apple to actually go this far, but it'd be in line with their current philosophy on enterprise app distribution. Apple really really dislike third-party "app store" apps, third-party "updater" daemon apps, etc.; they would much rather build infrastructure to obviate your enterprise's horrible custom solution than try to have their CSRs understand and support it for you. I could see them building this thing if Microsoft, Adobe, etc. all bugged them to for long enough. And then you as an indie developer could take advantage of it by setting up a PPA-alike (and someone could create the equivalent of Launchpad to host yours and everyone else's.)
I don't care about K-12, since I am an unAmerican. But I easily believe you if you say that the subject called `mathematics' in school is horrible. (And has nothing to do with `mathematics' proper.)
Raise a bug? That sounds like a behaviour you don't want.

Edit: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=814432
> That's all fine if it actually cared to take my manual adjustments more seriously than trusting its own "intelligence," but I'm pretty sure it just thought my adjustments were irrelevant suggestions :)

And this has been my problem with all of Google's products. They can be really smart, but when I want to override something, they treat that as irrelevant.
Before it arrived, Windows users could access apps through Program Manager.
It was largely a basic list of apps, with no real organization.
While Program Manager did have smaller menus, most Windows users
simply launched apps and used it as a list.

The author doesn't address the evolving way that icons were added to the start menu. The Program Manager started with a few predefined groups: Communications, Accessories, Games, among others. Installers sometimes used one of those groups, or created it's own generically named group. This made it difficult to discover where your programs were installed. One of the purposes of the Start Menu has been to make it easier to locate newly installed programs. But even though the standard Program Manager groups were carried over to Start Menu folders (Accessories persists to this day), the most common pattern became to create folders with the name of the software vendor. Microsoft eventually made this a recommendation.

But tiles reversed this recommendation, so after installing something a user would not easily find it in the large, seemingly unorganized list of tiles. That's part of why there was a demand for the return of the Start Menu.
The H1-B issue is about pay and control. An H1-B to me is someone that is trapped because of the visa process and can't command better pay or work conditions. I'm not talking about sweatshop conditions, I'm just saying that it is harder to negotiate when you're under an H1-B visa.

I understand people are against "economic immigrants" right now, but last time I checked most of the people that passed through Ellis Island were poor and the United States managed to grow in the last 100 years.

The fantasy that the United States can just flourish with only highly educated people working in tech is not real. We also need people to cut our grass, work on our cars, and clean our hotel rooms.
> I've even written some small utilities to monitor their API

Is their API local to the unit or "in the cloud?"
She certainly didn't write that "everyone is against her." And telling what she thinks in person to the VC is not a replacement for having a discussion about the general problem in the open.
The worst part about Palantir is their ability to masquerade as this hip startup, as though working for them is as innocent as working for Imgur or Twitter or whatever. They recruit the hell out of MIT students, and it sucks seeing my friends interview for this incredibly shitty company that has openly said it won't go public since that would make running their business "very difficult" (hm, because you're doing reprehensible work perhaps?).

I wish people picked their jobs to match their ethics instead of the other way around. It makes me sad when I hear about my friends going to intern for this place.
> It would be trivial for the thermostat to figure out if your phone is connected to your home network

Which is exactly what the Honeywell Lyric thermostat does (albeit with geofencing) and it works great. My dad has a Nest, and I knew it would never work for me - my schedule is too erratic. I got the Lyric and I love it. The model of how it sets up triggers is also very simple to understand:

(some event occurs) -> (set thermostat temp)

where "some event occurs" can be a scheduled time of day, or tapping a button in the app, or the first person's phone arrives at home, or the last person's leaves, and "set thermostat temp" can be + or - some number of degrees, or set to an "away" temp.

Since I have 3 of the Lyrics, it also makes it possible to keep some areas of the house at a different temp. E.g. just tap one button and the "bedrooms" section of the house goes to a good sleep temp, while the other sections go to "away" mode. Another trigger turns everything to a good temp ~30 mins before my scheduled wake up time.
Yeah, I'm not sure how they can drop such an unqualified statement like that. Who says Palantir has the world's most important data problems?

Could someone give an example?

Why is access to these most important problems limited to Palantir, or otherwise not accessible to most people (as implied by this shutdown notice)?
Yeah, that aligns with what I've read elsewhere. Not a good look to be sure, but a long way away from physical violence.
I had a similar issue, but it's because I had setup the nest incorrectly. It asked about my equipment and about my setup, and I got it wrong. So when it would try to turn on the heat it would not turn the blower on. Once I fixed the configuration error it works instantly.
Just throwing this out there in case you happen to know....I've always wanted this ability to scrape stock discussion forums. Just one example (there are probably 3 to 10 forums I'd like to scrape eventually) is:

http://www.stockhouse.com/companies/bullboard/t.y/yellow-med...

Is this the type of task DiffBot could theoretically accomplish? (Running it through the API test drive suggests no.) Are there any other tools that might work, or is this a problem that requires hand-coding?
Surprising nobody commented on that, it is a quite interesting read, putting some perspective on the business case around Snowden.