skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have written plenty of heavily CLOS-based code that is still very fast. I doubt that Python could come close in performance.

I think it would be an interesting exercise to do some benchmarks to get some actual data behind both of our guesses.

As I am not a very experienced Python developer, would you be interested in writing some test code that is representative of typical Python code, and I'd be happy to port it over to CLOS and so that we can run some benchmarks?

I think such results would be of interest to the HN audience.
> The best they ever got from cyrotrons was a special-purpose device, not a whole computer. But they reportedly did get a gigahertz clock rate, decades before anybody else.

What did they do with it?
"GPU, a video card, is a special purpose processor that does millions of such calculations at once."

It's not exactly millions at once...
First Normal Form (1NF) in Theory and Practice
It is fairly easy to block a number now.
1. Work on something you really like.
The key point of democracy isn't voting, it's participation.

If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus - voting doesn't have to have centre stage. Voting makes sense for simple decisions, where little discussion is needed. It's a pretty poor way to foster participation (You voted, you lost, you can't complain).

That said, sometimes the sheep needs to be eaten. If that is taken literally, that a group votes to eat one of its members - the situation should be rather extreme - like people stranded without food. One might agree to draw straws. But it would be much better to avoid such situations in the first place...
I see what you're saying about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. I don't think I was specific enough. You're right in the general case and IRV doesn't solve that problem. What I mean is that 54% could prefer Nader outright. But since they also prefer Gore to Bush they have to approve of Gore or else Bush may win. This causes Gore to have the highest approval even though he wasn't the majority's most desired candidate. It wouldn't fix the bias towards those expected to win.
> Interesting development considering Nordstrom's failure with the same experiment.

Not really. I think the customer bases are different enough that it's an apples and oranges comparison. Not only do you have a different type of customer on Amazon (people shopping for groceries, or carpentry tools or even computer parts and hygiene products. While on Nordstrom, you have people shopping for not clothing, but high-end clothing.) but the scale itself is on an entirely different level. Amazon has millions of people buying stuff from them every single day. The volume of traffic and orders on Amazon is like comparing the entire economy of the United States with that of Kobe, Japan.
> having a test plan before starting development can be so very helpful, especially if development stretches over a substantial period of time and new features are added during development.

I think this could also be restated as, have your initial use case well defined. Test plans aren't as good as users and/or very targeted features. In fact, the test plan actually comes from those use cases.
I'm sorry for my lack of clarity:

An unfamiliar database paradigm. If it was some random RDBMS there wouldn't have been a huge problem there.

You ignored the constantly late transmission of requirements, and I can't believe you're saying that a fundamental re-engineering of the way the site worked 2 or less weeks before launch should be trivialized. How are you even going to test that, when you don't really have the time to implement it well?
The bottom line is: how well do these "progressive ideas" work in practice? I couldn't find much evidence online that they're more effective in general than the "traditional" approach.

I have been a college professor for 7 years, here's what I have been able to PERSONALLY observe in that time:

(1) Frequent, regular feedback (quizzes, tests, homeworks, projects) helps a lot for most students. If you just have a final at the end the majority of students will finish the course having learned a lot less.

(2) Obviously students learn more when they're personally engaged and interested in a topic rather from just doing it to get a grade. But getting them excited is not obvious and engagement varies in predictable ways based on previous background knowledge and aptitude for the subject. A lot of the extra effort a teacher does is ultimately to try to get students more excited about a subject.

(3) One on one time with a teacher students can be very helpful. It will almost certainly produce a noticeable improvement in subject understanding, particularly for those students who are motivated but struggling a little bit. Unfortunately this requires a lot of time from the professor, so it's not really practical except with small classes and a small teaching load.
You're sad that people buying games are trying to have fun?
I can take my best shot here. This is how I would see it at least:

These politicians probably know nothing about the software they are receiving. 300k for a static site? Good deal! By making the sites open source, it allows groups that wouldn't be reviewing the code / bids to do so and then validate the work.

For a US example, the TSA has that iPad application which is essentially a pRNG. Or is it? There is speculation that it might be much more than that, but no one can know without seeing the source code. If we could see the source code, we would know for sure and could verify if this project was really worth hundreds of thousands of tax-payer dollars.
Mario Kart Driver Crashes in Autopilot Accident
But can you have free markets if corporations are permitted to influence the government? It seems impossible; humans will be influenced by those with whom they have contact.

So the alternative is to prohibit corporations from lobbying government, but that would be tantamount to removing legal personality from corporations and it is questionable whether the result is a free market system. You would also need to remove the right of people to lobby on behalf of groups of other people, and it is questionable whether the resulting system is free at all, or in any ways desirable.

The system that we have approaches free market capitalism as well as a liberal system can.
If I ran servers which processed temporarily-plaintext health care information, and I couldn't snoop on it even with effort, I'd be ashamed of my poor skill at villainy. Encryption is not all-powerful.
Correlation doesn't imply that every single one who is good at music is good at math.
This article is unoriginal click-bait.

Software does have economies of scale. How much did a copy of Windows 7 or Office 2013 cost? Only about $100? That's because the more we produce/supply/consume the cheaper it gets, just like milk.

The notion that there's an optimal amount of human capital needed for a project is nothing new. We've all heard of "Too many cooks spoil the broth."
I can't imagine why you would get upset about something so abstract. Let's have a civilised discussion about if highly technical concepts can be translated into languages other than English, not make personal attacks.
I grew up in Wilmington. Didn't expect to see something on Hacker News from there. That's...cool.
May I know which operator was that? I've used Airtel and Vodafone in India, and I didn't had any "services" enabled by default.

By the way, there's a centralized DND registry in India called "Commercial Communications Customer Preference Portal"[0]. You just need to send an SMS to enable/disable unsolicited commercial calls/SMS. It has been very effective so far.

[0] http://www.nccptrai.gov.in/
I'm working on a way for people to build and deploy CRUD apps in the browser without writing any code. http://gotoluna.com

Also working on a meetup in the Seattle area for people to work on their side projects at, no "talks" and very little networking. The idea is to show up with a laptop and get stuff done, get help from peers if need be, and show off what you've accomplished in the past week. http://www.meetup.com/Side-Project-Work-Group/
There are multiple gay-only dating sites/apps that people seem to have no problem with.
Actually, I've lived in Paris for a spell, and yes: I've been to GB. I never experienced much rudeness.

> Also, welfare is below a service industry job. Some workers will (quite justifiably)
> tell their boss to stick it, because they'd rather sign on than put up with their
> bullshit.

Ah, another United States/Great Britain difference. Unemployment benefits don't work if you quit. You can't quite live on the dole here. If you went to University, there's a good chance you have many, many thousands in student loans that just don't go away. You'll need a job.

I also work a service industry job. Part of my job is to be friendly to customers. It's in my best interest, as I make just a little more than minimum wage ($1.19 more, actually), and rely on the meager tips I receive. Ah! Tipping culture! Man the US certainly is a strange place.
Live Coverage of the Juno Orbital Insertion at Jupiter
This wasn't exactly the UKIP I have been thinking about recently... and I think that's good. :)
Will add the mouse over, thanks
Yes, and another key difference between 17th and 21st century Europe is the status of women. Starting with literacy; we can record our sorrows now.

I wonder whether contemporary societies with less status for women and lower female literacy also have less formal/legal value on children. (India?)
Yeah, just 100 comics currently, will add more today.
Show HN: I created a JavaScript library to encode Martin David's theoretical language
I am implying or saying none of this. I think you need to read carefully what I have written, not what you have projected on to me.
Amazon sells Duracel and Energizer as well as super cheap shady crap from China. The same seems to be the case in every category.
Surely you must be joking. You can't play music without counting.

https://mic.com/articles/94992/the-scientific-reasons-we-sho...

"Mathematics, especially, are aided by music education because it targets a very specific set of brain activity: the development of spatial-temporal reasoning. Highly developed spatial-temporal faculties are imperative for working through solutions to the complex problems in fields such as architecture, engineering, science and, obviously, mathematics — fields that our country desperately needs more children to pursue if we're to remain competitive in a globalized economy."
You nailed the point I think is the most critical: that artificially low interest rates (along with massive government debt) have resulted in an incredible misallocation of capital. Working in Silicon Valley I see (and benefit) from this first hand. Pensions, endowments, and all the other Limited Partners need 7-8% returns. Most directly access or are one to two steps removed from the free government money. With few “reasonable” investments that can return the required numbers, they are forced to chase returns. This leads to an abundance of capital in SV, one of the few places still believed to offer these returns (this is changing as this cycle comes to an end).

Others with first access to capital are doing great in this climate too: hedge funds, investment banks, government contractors, big companies. The rich get richer while the economy stagnates for the majority. Raising rates and stoping the bailouts of failed private institutions I believe will go a long way toward fixing this growing inequality. How we get leaders who can enact these policies is another thing since conventional wisdom (and much of academia) says dropping rates grows the economy. Amazes me that the world didn’t learn from Japan’s never ending stagnation. We hit the end of a 20 year credit expansion cycle in 2000 and there still is no will to let asset prices and credit deflate, instead we got the government “put” [1], not to mention the 2008 bailouts, and continued credit expansion.

The sad part is that instead of fixing the problem, micromanaged economic policy and money creation from on high, we will get jingoistic nationalism. While I do agree that some of our “free trade” has been anything but fair, the numbers, including those in the article, seem to indicate that it has helped large numbers of people throughout the world escape from poverty. I believe free and fair trade is a boon for all. These gains, unfortunately, will likely evaporate as fed-up, disenfranchised electorates in developed countries try anything to stop their slide backwards. It’s tough to sell a “help the world” argument to people who are hurting when those on the top are doing so well.

1. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/greenspanput.asp
Yes, RC is the primary way to safely manage lifetimes of reference types in Swift. You can drop down to unsafe constructs to avoid RC overhead, and I sometimes do that in hot loops.

Using unsafe to improve performance is not unfamiliar in Rust either, though Rust gives you better tools for building safe abstractions around it.

Shared ownership is routine in UI programming - think event handlers, etc. These are the apps most commonly written in Swift. Does Rust avoid needing shared ownership for these types of apps? If so, how?
Github repo here: https://github.com/EcutDavid/xkcdReader will add more features today after work.
It is silly to equate drop flags with atomic reference counting on the heap.

It would be sillier to define automatic memory management in terms of conditional releases, (as you seem to have done) and then insist that Rust's conditional releases don't really count. Clearly, it is not really the fact that the releases are conditional that makes the difference.

What is your actual definition of automatic memory management? What, in your view, is the actual semantic difference between a language that has automatic memory management and one that does not?
> Does anyone know if the Firefox phones are still around / in use in India?

Since Mozilla stopped developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones a while back, you don't get to see those for sale on major retailers.

I still own (and use) one. Agree that it's a bit of a pain. But if you need a phone for making/receiving calls and test messages, it's reasonably good (especially for the price). Not bad if you get a phone for $30 and you're still using it for almost 2 years.
Location: Greater Philadelphia Area, PA
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: C/C++, x86 assembly, Intel VT-x virtualization, system programming, Linux
Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/almuc0f3ntjthyu/Guminski%20Stephen.doc?dl=0
Email: steve.guminski@gmail.com

I enjoy working on low level code, both kernel and drivers. I have a wide range of experience in system code, including a boot loader, memory manager, processor performance monitor, virtualization, and Linux drivers.
Yes, this is true, and surprising to me as well.

For certain products, the pricing + shipping is not at all competitive (toiletries, for example).

In many other categories, there might be a product with a nominal price of, say, $10 offered by dozens of different merchants, at more or less every combination of price + shipping from $0.50 + $9.50 up to $10 + $0 imaginable. It's a huge waste of the consumer's time, you'd think they'd be better off either providing sensible pricing for a category, or not carrying it at all. Needless to say, it's nowhere near as much a go-to provider as it was 4-5 years ago.
Unless it doubles as a tourist attraction that charges admission the economics will not work.
When I was taking linear algebra and calculus in university, I found that there was a lot of focus on deriving formulas from underlying principles, with the notion that this constituted a "fundamental" understanding of the mathematic concept. I got quite good at being able to derive formulas for anything, and did well enough to scrape by on my exams. However the concepts didn't really stick with me. Going through Khalid's site I quickly discovered I had a terrible intuitive understanding of mathematical concepts, almost embarrassingly so. Somehow, derivation from first principles doesn't quite capture intuitive insights for me, especially once I start worked at higher levels of abstraction removed from easily understood foundations (i.e. multi-dimensional vectors).

The two things that I found most helpful in relearning math is (1) building up a foundation for mathematical concepts through betterexplained's intuitive method and (2) turning it into code as soon as possible. For the latter, I have a side project that is a sort of platform to test all my various ideas, from city performance modeling, to procedural form generation, where I am constantly trying to rework or tweak with new math formulas. It's amazing how much more efficient and useful this is as a learning method.
> Cons

> 2. Contributes to a proliferation of extensions that other tools must
support. (NB: This is just a parser change so should be easy for all tools
to support.)

In Haskell are libraries isolated in the sense that 3rd-party libraries can have their own language extensions without affecting other programs that import them? Or does it get pushed up the chain to all code using it?

Or is this "con" just related to syntax when using other libraries APIs or some GHC versioning dependency risk.
"Winner takes all" is not a voting method, it just means single-winner districts. You can use an excellent winner-take-all method like Score Voting or Approval Voting.
It's really an awful process buying a lot of items nowadays. It seems like the exact same item will be sold under 30 different brands with different star levels, with many reviews full of the "free product" in for honest (usually 5 star) reviews.

I wish Jeff Bezos would try buying a travel adapter (among many other items I've tried to buy recently) and tell me that it's a customer friendly process: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel...

There are approximately 5 actually different adapters sold under maybe 50+ brands, and all the reviews are so padded with 5* free reviews, it's tough to know which ones are crap and which are good.

Reviews aren't as important for retailers like Wal-Mart that curate their products. But for a marketplace like Amazon, reviews are absolutely critical to prevent scams. I hope Amazon realizes the enormity of this issue and is working on it.

I believe Amazon should:

1. Fix the reviews. Disallow giving items for free or reduced prices in exchange for reviews. This may have worked originally for books, but any benefit received now is far out shadowed by the negatives. Alternatively, just limit it to 5 total free / reduced reviews per product to limit the negative effect. Police this policy heavily.

2. For the duplicate products (where one identical product is sold under 10 different brands, like in the travel adapter example above): Group the products together, and choose the brand like you might choose the color or size on a t-shirt. I recognize that there isn't a UPC numbering system that makes this easy - but there are probably only a few thousand items required to group together to make the buying process a lot easier for a large percentage of purchases.
The Spread of 'Billionaire's Bay,' the Glut of Expensive Homes in San Francisco
There's a difference between going outside for a walk and pacing back and forth up an open office. We have a guy that does the latter and it's definitely a huge social issue.
Bingo. I've learned more about English itself the past couple years studying Thai than I have since I was a young child; particularly how daft our orthography is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Defective...

One of the strengths of English is that it adapts by assimilation from other language; if it were the only language around it would stagnate.
That looks pretty interesting. I've done web components manually which were a little awkward but for someone using React this looks compelling. I haven't dived into it much but I'll look into it when I do. Thanks!
submarine for Battlefield
Can't second this recommendation enough. I used to take part in the whole "haha French military" nonsense... Not anymore.
>since women generally are infertile when nursing

Fertility may be reduced but they are absolutely not infertile.

Source: a friend of my wife who got pregnant while breastfeeding and various doctors and midwives who repeated "you can get pregnant while breastfeeding" like some sort of chant in the weeks following the birth of our child.
A huge problem that many smart people face (myself included) is dealing with "average" employees. The sort of person who sees software engineering as "just another job" similar to folding T-Shirts at the Gap or flipping burgers at McDonalds. Very, very few people actually care about the influence their work has on customers, investors, vendors, and other employees... so it's a struggle to mentally understand how self-absorbed wage-earners actually think. To the point of feeling like throwing temper tantrums in response to "normal" behavior.
I would wonder whats wrong with your products that they are so steeply discounted.
Actually, yes, I think a lot of people would define automatic memory management as not having to manually call free.

C does manage some memory automatically. But it leaves a lot of memory management up to the user, such that any non-trivial C program will manually manage memory. That's different from Rust, Go, Java, or D in that most programs in those languages will not need to do that.
I submitted my book http://devmarketing.xyz 237 days ago. ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538970

I just checked the stats: it's sold 2,442 copies, and earned over $60,000 in revenue.
Emotion. It's not as exciting (or profitable) to publish a paper that basically says "We tried a lot of things, but none of them worked." That makes everyone feel like they're wasting time.

Hopefully that will change soon and labs can keep their funding (from govt and corporate sources) even if they publish reams of negative results.
Otoh, staying in UKIP would not exactly let him "help steer" any ship (assuming you mean the UK).
Definitions follow usage, not vice versa. If what you are saying were true, there'd be no way for language to first develop save for some divine being handing us a book of words we didn't know and magically teaching us how to use them.
http://celtic-lyrics.com/lyrics/225.html

"For Willie McBride, it all happened again, / And again, and again, and again, and again."

And still humans choose war when we could have chosen peace, and follow war leaders when we could have impeached those leaders and thrown them in prison. Probably there is an anthropic selection effect in that this conversation only happens between descendants of killer apes, but that does not excuse us from the last stage of the Great Filter.

Will we learn in time?
Yeah, it's a great topic, funny and interesting. And it's about fire and explosions. What could be better?
This is clearly a piece targeted at a lay audience. It says basically nothing interesting about the scientific method or science, but a lot about the nature of defining words. It's basically word salad with a click-bait headline (thankfully fixed here).