skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a rule, pointer-based data structures tend to be slower than array-based data structures (though, as with any general rule, there are exceptions). This is a simple consequence of how caching and prefetching works in modern CPUs. And this performance difference can easily amount to several (!) orders of magnitude.

However, there are a few caveats:

1. A garbage collector with a bump allocator can reduce these overheads significantly. So can a custom implementation (e.g. emulating pointers as offsets within an array).

2. The overhead often does not matter for performance due to the 90/10 law or because the application is not performance-critical to begin with.

3. Pointer-based data structures may support a richer set of operations than array-based data structures (or have significantly more efficient implementations for some operations).

4. Pointer-based data structures can have better worst-case or per-operation costs where array-based data structures rely on amortized or average performance to pull ahead. This can matter in soft real-time situations or when dealing with user-supplied data.

5. Certain types of data structures do not have good array-based implementations to begin with and some algorithms demand pointer-based implementations. (Think of spatial queries, for example.)

6. Performance cost is not always dominated by operations on the container, but can also be dominated by cost of operations on the items within the container. For example, there are algorithms where the most expensive operation (by far) is comparison between elements (e.g. for a priority queue implementing an expensive heuristic); in this case, you want to minimize the number of comparisons more than the cache behavior of the data structure itself (note that this may still result in you picking the array-based implementation).

7. Pointer-based data structures allow for the sharing of substructures, potentially reducing the memory footprint of an application. Binary decision diagrams are a popular example.

8. Some array-based data structures require a much larger working set than their corresponding pointer-based implementations and take a performance nosedive when the size of the working set exceeds the size of the cache. Especially when you have several such data structures in use at once. (This is where relying on microbenchmarks for performance comparison can be dangerous.)
> If you mean you want it to be automated

ACL2 is an alternative that strives to strike a balance between interaction and automation.

- It is more automated than any of the interactive theorem provers including Isabelle/HOL, Coq, etc.

- Its authors received the ACM software system award in 2005.

-It is used in commercial products since several years in companies including AMD, Centaur , Rockwell Collins, etc. There is a not-so comprehensive but yet impressive list of applications here:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/publications/acl2-paper...

- Also, since the language is a subset of Common-lisp, any one who knows a bit of programming can very quickly start using ACL2. One does not need to learn type theory/logical formalism to start using it. It has an eclipse plugin that is used by first and second year undergraduate students (http://acl2s.ccs.neu.edu/acl2s/doc/).
Problem is that they have sent me a message and I replied that this is about number of employees, not number of programmers, etc.

And they are keep asking for INDIE. Sigh.
Bohnanza is fun, and doesn't get much attention.

Ticket to Ride is great fun too.

Button Men is fun, and possibly free if you print it, but requires some dice.
What's the relevance of the ratio between engineers and sales people?

Seems the point you're making is that it takes 57,000+ people to make google run. You'd think they'd want to automate those sales reps, except that's human work and they can't. Which is the point the previous poster was trying to make.
Operators – codingeek
See also: XML
It takes a lot to die from hunger when you have food in the fridge. That is if you use an app that tells you not to eat but your body is telling you you are going to collapse, you won't even have to think, you will magically find yourself in front of the fridge in no time.
One of the most common mistakes is delimiter in a field. E.g. comma as thousand separator...
Full anonimity: is Spectrocoin better than Zcash, Dash and Monero?
I've worked at Los Alamos for 6 years and I didn't know this existed. Pretty cool.
What aspect of the sales rep job is unable to be automated in the next couple of decades?
You're assuming no countering disincentive that would offset those savings. How much will the operators pay for software liability license, so if their truck does crash, someone gets paid out? How much will the annual software updates cost?

These sorts of things get waved off with tech enthusiasm as things that will just somehow get figured out; this leads to a straw man where the real costs of human drivers today are compared against the hypothetical, unknown, but believed to be effectively zero costs of the glittering future.

Not a very fair comparison I'd say, comparing fantasy to reality. We'll see how it shakes out in the years to come.
It doesn't so much as it says here are some things that people have done.

> While there are various specifications and implementations for the
CSV format (for ex. [4], [5], [6] and [7]), there is no formal
specification in existence, which allows for a wide variety of
interpretations of CSV files. This section documents the format that
seems to be followed by most implementations:
That's a long way of saying that Microsoft spent many years promoting a overcomplicated bad ideas over simple correct ideas.
You're absolutely right! I'm generalizing about large populations here. I'm doing this because the subject is public policy. Discussing millions of people individually is utterly intractable in such a scenario (EDIT: or any scenario, really).

I do not in any way, shape, or form believe that "work" is the only path to fulfillment for humanity. I do think that in much of the rust belt, a majority of the population has incorporated the dignity of work into their identities.

You are absolutely correct that a great many people love to do other things and find fulfillment in them. I simply do not believe that this number is large enough to significantly alter the analysis I have offered.
They're hosting a proxy on appspot.
> Excel is a good tool for working with CSVs
> Excel is an OK tool for working with CSVs
> Excel can losslessly save CSVs it opens

Seriously. It's amazing how fast excel can corrupt a simple csv file.
kids. easy to see what 'should have been done' from a nice safe distance.
My grandmother died of early Alzheimer's and I really don't know whether to get tested or not. It's more than likely genetic but how do you live knowing if it turns out I have the gene.
Not at all true. There are LOTS of jobs in the service economy in most any region. Robots won't be building or maintaining the physical plant any time soon. We need carpenters, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, gardeners - the list goes on. The market will do it's thing to match this supply and demand. The successful retraining programs that I've witnessed just use small carrots and sticks to facilitate this transition.
In China, when [say] 100 people are about to get fired government will negotiate a deal. That might be to have them hire 300 more for at least 2 years, get 25% of the salary in advance and have them provide training for 200.

I don't remember the exact numbers but it was some kind of custom combination like that designed specifically for the type of business.
How Vera Rubin changed science
I'm glad this is the only comment on this article, the TSA is an inane joke. It's easy enough to slip weapons etc. through airport security. (I've brought a pack of blades for my safety razor on almost every flight I've taken since around 2010, and never been questioned about it.) Even if security were actually tight, the fact that pilots are armed and behind blast doors during flight means it would be pointless anyway.
...because in a macro sense what used to be spent on book
binding is being spent on something else. Maybe it created
a thousand jobs at print shops (for example).

This assumes that there will always be a "something else". Something else for people to work at, something else for banks to invest in. My question is, what guarantees the appearance of this "something else"?

Looking at past examples, these new jobs seem to come from advancements in technology that both improved human lives (and thus were in high demand) and also required human labor to operate (and thus provided jobs). For example, we no longer need nearly as many farmers, but these people have all been freed up to pilot commercial airplanes, program computers, repair cars, operate print shops, etc.

But what if these trends don't hold up? What if the value-producing technological advancements of the future continue to eliminate jobs, but require radically less human labor to operate?

My best guess is that people will be pushed into less technology-driven and more service-driven pursuits. Instead of print technologies eliminating book binders but providing print shop jobs, we will be eliminating print shop jobs and getting — I don't know — more masseuses, therapists, cleaners, gardeners, personal chefs, etc? Basically the service economy we see emerging now — people performing what were previously considered "luxury tasks" for other people.

I suppose I've talked myself out of some of my former skepticism. We don't need new jobs, because we have plenty of "old" ways to provide value that become more broadly affordable as workers are freed up to do them. However, if this leads to a society in which the masses perform menial tasks for the rich who fill a limited number of high leverage technological positions, that could cause tremendous cultural problems.
Cut down on employment taxes

I haven't been able to figure out why employment taxes are paid by the employer and not shown to the employee as yet another deduction on their paycheque. Is it because most employment taxes are collected by local governments who don't have power to impose "income taxes"? Is it because it's politically easier to hide the tax from employees so that they don't realize they are paying it?
It's a matter of degree. The OP has flamebait aspects, but it also has substantive, on-topic material. Obviously we're not going to treat all such stories as off-topic just because some people make flamewars out of them. If we did that, people could kill any story just by flaming enough.

"Blah blah blah what about nurses fuck you", on the other hand (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873), has no merit as a subtopic at all—not after the number of times we've all endured it. I trust that most HN readers understand that when we make a call like this, it isn't about ideology, but about not subjecting the community to tedium.

> your side of the ideological narrative

We hear this often enough from a minority of readers who feel strongly about ideology. However, it varies (quite reliably in fact) with the ideology of the beholder. To me that seems like evidence of cognitive bias at work, since it's same body of moderation decisions being interpreted in conflicting ways.
The USA is definitely slower than everywhere that's been using the system for more than a decade now. No idea why though as some of the slowest connections I've experienced have been in LA.

In the UK transactions typically take less than 5 seconds with more than 10 seconds usually prompting a response from the owner that it's "playing up today". In New Zealand it's quicker still, and contactless payments seem to get processed slightly quicker as well, although that could just be psychological because it removes the whole insert-wait-enter pin part.
I haven't been clear, and for that I apologize.

We're discussing people who are inevitably going to view a basic income as charity. You can tell them it's their human right. You can tell them it's what society owes everyone. You can tell them they deserve it for existing.

I honestly believe that how you frame it isn't going to matter. Not with the populations and identities we have today. They're going to see those Other People over there paying them to shut up, sit down, and be useless.

If you want to discuss how people who identify differently would react differently, that's cool and fun. I don't believe we're in a scenario where that's a relevant discussion, though.
> In fact, I would be in favor of law enforcement having the ability to "tap" these network-attached microphone appliances with a warrant. Then, perhaps, people will begin to understand what they've really bought.

All your arguments apply equally to any smart phone. It's another network attached microphone. Are you in favor of it there too?
It would be nice if we could remove the "@KevinRose" bit from this title. Allowing that kind of callout further promotes the growing concern (reality?) that the people behind a startup matters more than what problem the startup is actually trying to solve.

If someone is really wondering what Kevin Rose is up to they can do a simple search and find out.
True, although conventional metrics like Sharpe ratio or ROI are not very meaningful for HFT models, because they can't scale with any additional capital (you can safely assume they are scaled to the max). Their returns are extremely consistent, but also ultimately limited in magnitude. Rather than magical money-making machines who have cracked the "secret code" of financial markets, HFTs are essentially a fixed-cost utility service for reducing market inefficiency through improved price discovery.
Wait, are we talking about board games, or JavaScript frameworks?

:P
It's supposed to be. But due to demographic shifts and dishonest officials the program now requires ample supply of young workers in order to be able to pay out the benefits to older workers. Inevitably, benefits get cut.

If trends continue, the program will eventually turn into pure welfare.
that is your job. do it.
Flask.
Mainly because I do a lot of different things with web frameworks. Sometimes I'm serving a straightforward web page, sometimes I'm querying a database and rendering a template, other times I'm wiring up a json API, and other times I might be doing some weird data analysis before sending results to a dashboard template. Some of my URLs require three lines of code, some require three hundred.

In Flask, an endpoint is just a Python function, and most importantly, the URL endpoint is right next to the function declaration, so you don't have to keep track of two or three things in two or three different files. (Though the template is a separate file, of course.) To do something new just add an endpoint and a function; and most IDEs let you collapse/hide the function's code when you don't want to look at it, so it's as "clean" as it is flexible, if not elegant.
ThreatExchange
If you're thinking of the bug that exposed private IP addresses to the browser, it was fixed years ago.
What does it mean to say that an argument's meaning could be unamibigious regardless of the program it is passed into ? that's a logical impossibility

Still, it would be right and proper if Unix programs a little type-safety in their arguments, for example by requiring that ALL arguments be flags, as in this hypothetical smart_rm: "/bin/smart_rm -rf --pattern foo/bar"
I don't know. You'll have to ask them. There are values at play beyond bank account balances, though.
> I quickly dropped Rust upon realizing that the core of the language addresses problems I don't have.

There are plenty of other expressiveness advantages to Rust, over and above the safety advantages you apparently wouldn't benefit from.
Stochastic Terrorism: Part 1, triggering the shooters
33C3 – How Do I Crack Satellite and Cable Pay TV?
2 and 3 for sure. Anything that makes it so small businesses can more easily and cheaply hire people will have a big impact. Employment taxes, workers comp, etc may seem like they are helpful, but because they raise the cost of hiring employees, they discourage businesses of a certain size from hiring
Kotlin 1.0.6 is here
Your characterization of climate science is incorrect. If you read the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they understand that there are trade offs to carbon controls. These controls are expensive and those costs harm humanity.

Drilling for oil and gas greatly increased human well-being by improving transportation options. You can argue about carbon restrictions and where to draw the line, but saying that drilling is objectively evil is not a statement based on science.

For example, some scientists argue some moderate warming is net beneficial. http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/the-economic-imp...
It does not matter if they are in CA

"An operator of a commercial Web site or online service that collects personally identifiable information through the Internet about individual consumers residing in California who use or visit its commercial Web site or online service shall conspicuously post its privacy policy on its Web site, or in the case of an operator of an online service, make that policy available... An operator shall be in violation of this subdivision only if the operator fails to post its policy within 30 days after being notified of noncompliance."

but sort of moot, because I don't think there is anyway to enforce it.
When I worked at the Cornell Theory Center in the late 90s, I didn't know about the arXiv, but I sure as hell knew about screen readers. One of the best FORTRAN programmers (numerical analysis/applied math research faculty I think) was blind as a bat.

I learned a lot about not underestimating people there.

It's a strange university but it always makes me happy to think that it (specifically Ginsparg, and to some degree strogatz and the law scholars) pushed forward what the Web was supposed to be.

Not a place to buy stuff, but a place to learn stuff, without waiting for it to make its way through a hyper politicized review process so that it could be printed in a 17th century fashion and mailed to some corners of the world, eventually perhaps reaching a fraction of the people who could use it. Rather, everyone everywhere with a connection.

Anyone who doesn't deposit preprints (arXiv, biorxiv, or wherever) or who doesn't agitate for their coauthors to do so is not really in it for the science. It's fine to be competitive -- deposit yours first. Make the fucking discovery instead of parasitically piggybacking on those who do the work.

But that last part, that's hard. Very hard. As long as there is enough money left in academia to encourage lazy shits, those of us who care about scholarship will have to push, hard, to remove the last refuge of these scoundrels.

You're either on the side of justice -- open data, open formats, open scholarship -- or you are tacitly endorsing Elsevier & Springer, who haven't the slightest problem using crap like incremental JavaScript & mangled PDFs to deny access to scholarship even to those who have paid.

David (blocking on his last name) at CTC made that choice for me. He set an example that forced me to admit what was right. I hope others will do the same. It's the right thing to do.
> the biggest impracticality is that ISPs are monopolistic

I reckon the biggest problem would be that you could DoS an entire ISP simply by doing a SYN flood attack from inside it.
U.S. Marines Changed World War II in This Complex Strategy Game
I think that's "ark ive" where this is "ar chive". I'm gonna call it ar chive dot org now and get more stupid looks, aren't I? :/
I love the fact that if I want to work with CSV from C# I need to use a VisualBasic namespace:

Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.TextFieldParser

see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3507498/reading-csv-files...
I don't see how the chip's 'sinkhole' enabled bugs like heartbleed, which was industry-scale, which absolutely could've been prevented by having a really nice floor.
I mean, its a bit apples or oranges.. XML's well-formed rules are, in my experience, fairly universal, hence parsing isn't as much an issue as is poorly constructed XML schemas (and schma-less xml documents as well) I know there are edge cases, but overall XML doesn't have many of the problems specified.
Thanks for responding. I'll submit a bug if I can, now that I know the cause the problem. But I need to know where best to submit it.

It's a design and documentation bug, that needs to be addressed at a higher level by re-evaluating the decisions and justifications behind all the keyboard accelerators, removing the ones that nobody actually uses and that cause more problems than they solve (like making closed captioned text transparent and changing its colors), implementing full and immediate "?" keyboard help, and writing some online documentation.

So should I simply click "send feedback" on any random youtube video and write up my suggestions, as this page tells me to? [1] I've done that now, so let's see what happens.

Do you really sincerely think my suggestion will actually make it back to the designers through that channel and that changes will happen as a result? Is there a way for me to track it?

Or is there a better accountable bug tracking system that I can actually submit a real trackable bug into and watch the progress and see if it gets marked "will not fix", like https://bugs.chromium.org but for youtube? Do you have access to a better bug tracking system for youtube that's not public?

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/4347644?hl=en
Research and development of artificial intelligence in China [pdf]
find --name *.txt --exec mv {} {}.bak\;

That's imperfect because find doesn't provide a nice way to do the pattern-replacement but it's a pretty simple pattern.

If this use case were important, it's simple enough to write a purpose-built program that generated command-line argument pairs according to a spec.
Having developed on a system that had to import and collate insurance claims data from multiple providers, I've come to dread CSVs for all of these reasons.
It's a joke... you said that you always get a canned response, didn't you? That's the canned response I always get from them. Doesn't matter what the issue is, raising bids is always the solution.
Without truck drivers, farmers, or laborers, the world would have a big problem
Pretty much every political or economic theory or ideology is a caricature in its pure form. Libertarianism is not special in that respect.
Alexa, how do you hide a dead body?