skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This particular bit of information is worse than useless for the vast majority of developers. For the parts-per-million development efforts where this sort of optimization is necessary (a tiny subset even of kernel developers) there will be many orders of magnitude more developers for whom this information is actively harmful. Devs will spend their time trying to second guess the compiler's optimizations of their if statements in order to eek out micro-seconds of performance improvement. Meanwhile, by focusing their efforts on the wrong thing they will take attention away from quality of design and execution as well as macro-optimizations. Their code will be lower quality and, ironically, slower.

Micro-optimization is a silly diversion the vast majority of the time. Wait to optimize at that level until you have the tooling and the measurements that indicate you truly need it (more often than not you won't).
While I would choose Python (or Ruby) over Perl 5, I think Perl 6 has a lot to offer a programmer. I am just waiting for a stable release. Even if Perl 5 may have declined (can't say for sure), I think Perl 6 may change that.
My Development Environment (using VMs for development)
Is force.com the new Smalltalk?
The same argument exists for just about every fiscal requirement the government imposes on us, that doesn't mean it's not necessary.

People on HN are not normals. If the USA was filled with nothing but hackers, we probably would do just fine with a more libertarian set of policies. Unfortunately, we're the fringe, and we have to pay for the masses' mistakes.

Many normals would gamble away their wealth. Without social security, many people would be ruined and too old to sustain themselves.
I've watched most Pixar movies between 3 and 300 times (I have two small children) and I'm still catching bits and pieces of hidden detail that I missed on previous viewings.

One of the things that I love about their process is the way they essentially make the movie multiple times, script, storyboard, animated storyboard with stand-in voice talent, and so on, and how at each step of the way they aren't afraid to make changes to make the thing better.

If you haven't seen it lately, take another look at Toy Story 2. The characters feel real, every scene transition is perfect, and only one or two lines in the whole movie fall flat.
I bought EditPlus (www.editplus.com) way back when I was in high school (NT4 days), and the license is still good for newer versions. I've lost the license twice, don't have the CC or email address it was registered to, and Sangil has been very responsive about getting me my license info even without that stuff.

Since I bought it, they've added code folding, which is really nice. It's really just a plain jane text editor with pluggable syntax highlighting. The ability to save to a remote server is really nice, too, especially if you're doing remote dev work. I just wish it had SFTP support instead of just FTP. Or SCP. Whatever. Something more secure.

It's incredibly fast and lightweight, and I've never felt a need to use anything else.

I've also been known to use jEdit, nedit, and vim, depending on what type of environment I'm working in/through.
But you don't have to buy the printer and the ridiculously priced ink. Most of the time you can just do it in the store too, no delivery.
The first major purchase I made on eBay was a HP LaserJet 5P purchased in 2000 for $200. I still use that printer today, I think I've replaced the toner cartridge 3 times in the last 10 years. At $75/cartridge, it's been a bargain. On top of that, I purchased memory upgrades, the postscript SIM, and a used JetDirect external box for around $50. Now I have a network printer that doesn't even need drivers to work. On top of that, it's built like a tank. I'll be surprised if it breaks down in the next 10 years, given my relatively low usage.

Despite all the personal experience I have indicating a quality laser printer is a better long term deal, I still have yet to convince anyone else they should use this solution. Most folks believe color is too important. Even with the advent of cheap color lasers, most people aren't willing to make the upfront investment. Then they complain when their ink costs nearly $100 to replace.

If anything, one of the largest problems I've seen in modern society in the inability to think in the long term, and by extension make short term sacrifices for long term gain.
Then why didn't you drop the tests if you think there was no benefit?
Sale off and make money online
In a hundred years, will any of the stuff in Arc matter? What exactly? The innovation in Arc is minimal, Clojure does much more in new and better ways.
"Multi-core is here to stay", says Rich Hickey
> No, but it guarantees that, at least in theory, such a parser could be made available.

By that standard, all languages are equivalent. That's true in a rather meaningless sense (Turing equivalence), but very few people think that Haskell is the same as C.

> it is merely laziness, minimalism, or coincidence that causes many to not.

The reason doesn't matter. If you don't have reasonable "out of the box" support for manipulating ASTs, it isn't part of the language.

This cuts both ways - few lisp implementations have reasonable libraries.

> It's just not true that Lisp is the only game in town for AST support

Feel free to show how ordinary {pick your language} programmers could implement and use something like the LOOP macro. Compare with how easily that can be done in lisp.

Ease (like speed) matters.
The interference being run has to do with (1) merit pay being a quite deliberate attempt to break current bargaining methods so that overall teacher pay can be reduced afterwards, and (2) the metrics for “merit” being extremely difficult to do in any reasonable way, since every student is different and (for instance) standardized test scores are a pretty terrible proxy for learning.
New "Drastically Simplified" Facebook Privacy Controls Coming Tomorrow
Bach, Allard leaving Microsoft
>EDIT: Also, the importance of asking stupid questions.

The company I work for really, really loves acronyms; and different departments often have different names for the same thing. An important early lesson I learned from a manager was to stop during meetings and ask what an acronym means.

One of my biggest surprises was discovering that different people had different ideas about what the acronym stood for, and many people - including the people using them - simply had no idea at all.
This is one of those areas, like the OS kernel or browsers, where the losers need to gang up on the current winners by collaborating on an open platform, like Linux, Webkit, or in the case of maps, OpenStreetMap.

Mapping the world, like building an OS or web renderers is just too much for each company to do themselves and the value deliverd is multiplied by wide uptake. They need to figure out a way to add value on top of that open platform, and a way for 3rd parties to add value to that open platform too.

Building your own silo just slows you down. Is Apple really getting the benefit of building on OS X rather than Linux? I've heard it said before, but not recently, so the benefits seem minimal when upstarts like Palm are turning up with exciting looking phone and tablet OSes seemingly out of nowhere.

Will Apple spearhead this open map thing in the same way they kicked off Webkit and led with HTML5? I doubt it somehow, doesn't seem to be in their DNA despite most of the interesting stuff they do having this characteristic recently.
Another "Lost" Phone: Motorola Droid Shadow Found In Gym
Read 'The Dip' by Seth Godin. Describes it exactly.
Top Five Diets That Work | Hi Health and Fitness
"Congress has little time left on this session’s calendar. And it took more than five years to produce the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which itself was the first major overhaul of telecommunications law since the Communications Act of 1934."

I don't understand why it has taken so long for something that has changed so drastically and is vital to our economy to addressed. Hopefully they have some idea of where they are going with this...

I'll also be interested to see if this impacts mobile internet.
He should mass produce these. I'd buy a stack for myself and I bet a lot of other people would too.
Crazy violent explosion shoots out two cosmic bullets
> Zuckerberg turned down a $2BN offer from Yahoo, so clearly he believed he could make the company worth more than that.

I thought that Yahoo offered $1B and Microsoft (later) offered several (15?) billion.

Note that Zuckerberg may have interests other than money. For example, he may be happier running a company worth $3B than having $5B.
Yes! The functional aspects of lisp have always made it feel more parallelizable, but outside of particular lisp dialects (*Lisp), effective parallelization has been difficult. Pervasive immutable data structures and front page concurrency mechanisms make clojure decidedly parallel.

(I hope that parallel being the only way to gain additional performance should be obvious by now.)
127.659 MPH that's terrifying. Talk about a steam punk.

I like Ford's plastic car... sounds like the soviet niva (sp?) made of plywood. Easy to ridicule, but cheap, economical, though not that safe. Unfortunately, once cars went mainstream, cool became the key attribute.

It's nice to observe that even the most famous inventors had many failures; you only need one success (probably, s/even/especially/, because more attempts --> more successes).
As of this moment, if I google "integrate "open graph" in-house analytics", it links directly to your post. How very recursive.
Button Color Test: Red beats Green
Well, that link (http://code.google.com/closure/) invites one to "Try the Closure Compiler", leading here: http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home

So I pasted in the source (http://macek.github.com/google_pacman/src/js/pacman10-hp.3.j...), and tried a couple of the optimization levels. The first squeezes whitespace, the third mangles everything ("Saved 41.37% off the original size (17.94% off the gzipped size)").

But the original is pretty clean, readable source code. It even uses spaces for indentation. Clearly not the output of an optimizer. Code lines such as "g.currentDotEatingSpeed = g.levels.dotEatingFrightSpeed * 0.8;" are better than possibly-out-of-sync comments.
Just glanced through the book and was pleasantly surprised to see that the code is lisp. Adding this to my reading list.
Careful with the zipimport approach to running Django: you may see very high response times for "cold" requests to App Engine. If you can wait, it is likely that GOOG will eventually support Django 1.2 via the use_library() call, which seems to give far better performance.
Also, http://yehudakatz.com/2010/05/17/encodings-unabridged/

My post is mostly about the ramifications of Ruby 1.9's encoding support on Rails (a similar topic), but I go into some detail about the problems of Japanese encodings on the web.
Not really. The arguments still hold.
How slow are functional implementations of quicksort?
Is there a PDF (just got a Kindle DX...)?

I'm not criticising, because you might want a print version and a HTML version, and I can always convert the HTML pages to a PDF.

Other than that, I'll read the 1st chapter on this laptop and see what's in there.
Well... Scheme, actually. The author is one of the PLT Scheme developers. The PLT DrScheme environment has features built in expressly for running the code in this book.
Welcome to Indiagames Games on Demand (BETA) – Powered by Indiagames.com
Perl is a great tool, in the tradition of the Unix command line.

Indeed. Most of my day job programming is in C#, and I don't suspect that my employer would ever want a major product release written in Perl, but we have plenty of internal tools that are written in Perl, and new ones are always being created.
Any videos of the Gnome Shell? Their vimeo link had 0 videos uploaded.
You are absolutely right, thank you for the advice. I am going to update the article as soon as django 1.2 is supported via use_library() to reflect this. Cold startup time really is a bummer for low traffic apps.
I am always on the lookout for interesting stories about people using functional programming on the job. Are you currently using Arc to this end?
People keep mentioning alternatives to FB but I feel pretty locked-in. I would be interested in joining a site that was a superset of Facebook... that is, a site where I could control and access my Facebook data but also interact beyond Facebook.
For me, it's Linux support, ease of use, features, and economy.

When my little Samsung laser printer finally died, I bought an HP inkjet (OfficeJet Pro 8000 Wireless) for a bit over $100. I got home and took off all the tape, stuck in the large individual-color, separate-from-print-head ink tanks, plugged it in to power and my network, and printed the network settings page (which I turned out not to need). Then click-click-click on my Ubuntu system, and I was printing. Download driver click-click-click on my wife's macbook, and she was printing. One of the easiest setups I've ever done for network printing, and even easier on Linux than on Mac.

And it duplexes automatically.

My 6 year old is thrilled to be able to print in color, and I'm happy not smelling ozone.

So I'm happy with razors and razorblades inkjet, albeit with HP's most economical cartridges. (And there's a little part of me that is bothered by the lack of perfectly-sharp text printing that I've always missed when not using a laser.)
Payday Loans No Fax: fax is Outmoded
North Korea severs all ties with Seoul
Fair enough, I believe it was only a rumored $2BN offer from Yahoo.
Ning is the model Facebook should follow.. Seriously?

They have screwed their network creators over time and time again.
It's neat, but I'm kinda leery about plugging random USB devices in. Lots of room to compromise security there.
tip: when making a screencast make sure your email notification is turned off so that your viewers don't keep going off to check their mail ;)

Very professional screencast, it looked great. I think there is often still some value in the less-scripted approach, (along with mistakes), I think it can sometimes make it feel less like you are not being sold to, and show some personality – of course depends on the audience.
I also have SICP on my reading list so I just thought this would make a great follow up to that text since by then I would have a good grasp of scheme and functional programming.
My first thought was, "Oh neat... oh wait.. Autorun... people won't like that"...

I really love the idea and would love to own some of them myself but I suspect most employers would say, "Oh it's clever... can you email us a CV also" and never plug in the card.
Funny you should say that, after the reocities project I was approached by a number of parties that were 'locked' in to ning without an export facility if I could please get their data out of the walled garden for them in a way that they could import it elsewhere.
Did your friend quit to do something else? [He sounds like a good Reddit IamA candidate.]
Phenomenal! I would suggest adding mac support :)
You Suck at Design (Here’s Why)
aha, got it. thanks
Did MPEG LA kill media support in Java
The same things is happening with Twitter. It was just a cool little thing to do at the beginning, then they had issues scaling, now they're just co-opting whatever worked well in the ecosystem. It's the same bait-and-switch, just with developers around the API as the losers.
There probably is a big turmoil inside Microsoft. Maybe this shake-up is needed, especially in the entertainment division.

On one hand, expect to hear many people outside Microsoft to boo this move since J. Allard seemed to be one of those "young executives who Got It". On the other hand, Steve Ballmer is left with less choices seeing those red numbers in Excel Spreadsheet almost overflowing whatever the data type in cell G-14, H-15 and K-25.

I'll give Microsoft two thumbs up for its effort trying to stay relevant (cause y'know... it's hard). But it's the price they have to pay when they decided to relax when they managed to monopoly the consumer market back in 95-2002 time period and to pursue/grow their business offerings.

It's tough to be both Apple and IBM at the same time.
I just added a link back to this discussion.
You might have better luck reading it before (or in tandem with) SICP, actually.

PLAI is intended as an alternative to EoPL, which is also quite worthwhile.

FAQ, w/ some other notes about prerequisites - http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/200...
Adobe's PDF Reader app comes to Android phones
The People Who Support Linux. Driving 4K Miles to LinuxCon
A few people have tried before, but it's not panned out as far as I know. I'm interested.
Google Chrome for Linux goes stable
Works for me in Firefox 3.59 on OpenSuse 11.2. OpenSuse for some reason also seems to have more compatibility with my workplace's web-based internal tools than other coworkers running Ubuntu or Fedora.
They are in 'stealth mode.' I'll ask them what I can talk about.
Those aren't good sources of examples. They're good sources of explanations with examples.

When I'm evaluating a language, my first priority is seeing whether it's even worth spending the time to read the explanations. First and foremost, I just want to get a feeling for what the language actually looks like. If I like what I see, then I'll be willing to go more in depth. I'm much more likely to look elsewhere if I have to wade through the manual or complex explanations to get an idea of what a language looks like. It's not that I can't handle the complex explanations. It's just that I can't handle every language's complex explanations. :-)
Anyone in Dallas interested in a HN group?
Well maybe Ning's execution of the model leaves much to be desired but what I wanted to express was the idea that a social network where the owner of the network paid for it is a good system because the provider of the service has to cater for the needs of the customer. And if the customer is a user and not an advertiser then I think the user should get better service.
If I'm remembering correctly, the Microsoft "offer" was an investment that valued the company at $15B, not a complete offer.
You're right, I think I did pay $120 for it, not $99. Maybe I unconsciously factored out the shipping, even though shipping was free.
Dynamic brand identities vs static identities and logos
from comments: " I see too many students come through here who don't actually know what they want out of life or what to do with it (~30-40% of my students) and they go through the motions without having a clue as to why."

What a waste of resources, if true.
Microsoft didn't offer 15bn... they invested a couple hundred million (~250mm, if I recall) to buy a certain percent of the company. That led to a 15bn valuation.
But Facebook is really only 6 years old right? That's not really enough time for a generation to grow. I think what we're seeing is that Facebook's user-growth is being driven by older and older people.
On current releases of PLT Scheme, you can use:

#lang plai

to write the programs in the book, instead of using PLaneT.
"Even Bernie Madoff is a direct result of the Fed killing yield causing investors to seek returns wherever they could find them."

You make the right point about the fundamentals not being there for the housing bust. However it is hard for me to take you seriously when you say things like the above. Investors are always seeking heavy returns -- and Madoff didn't start a Ponzi scheme because of the Fed he did it because he is greedy.
I don't understand what he's asking here. JavaFX apparently supported using local H.264 codecs on certain operating systems. Is that what got removed? Or is it the VP6 support that got removed?

On a related topic Oracle is listed as a WebM supporter on the website, which I assumed was related to JavaFX since I knew it used On2 VP6 for cross platform video, but I haven't seen any announcement about what they're actually planning.
I wouldn't be so confident.

What's the logical extension to Google TV?

Yes, Google Games Console.
A New Type of Phishing Attack - "TabNabbing" - Phishing via unfocussed tabs
Unfortunately I've found that the passwordanywhere stuff doesn't work on Chrome on Linux anyway. Probably wishful thinking :)
I can quote you 'monsters inc.' line by line, it is my sons favorite movie...
I have a friend who's working on something like that. He's not saying much publicly yet but I'll post it once he's ready to share.
I wonder if Facebook would have done better if they had started charging power users. If users were the customers Facebook would have avoided this whole mess. Assuming a reasonable $10/month per power user, a conversion rate of 2-3%, at 500 million users they'd be generating $1.2-$1.8 billion in high-margin revenue. Instead, users are the product. Advertisers are the customers. And Facebook is generating maybe $1B in lower-margin revs. Admittedly the growth prospects of being the big display advertising/lead gen platform are better than being the leading social network.

On the other hand, isn't this great for HN users? Facebook is screwing up in some core areas. Up and at'em, I say!
Linked in the thread: http://www.engadget.com/2005/08/02/elevator-hacking/

I have got to try this.
We care, it's not open source, so it shouldn't be treated as such.
Journalists won't report news unless it can drive page views
Any piece of information can be abused.

The article simply explains what branch prediction is and why CPUs implement it. No part of the article advocates that you attempt to optimize your code to exploit branch prediction. In fact, the conclusion of the article is that in the majority of real-world cases, the branch predictor will automatically do the right thing.
There are two halves to price: supply and demand. The investment is a sunk cost. Competition in an efficient market should reduce the price to the marginal cost of production. And if the marginal cost of production was genuinely so high, why would printer manufacturers be putting in all kinds of validation electronics? Why not leave it at caveat emptor?
True. The Chrome team accepts feature requests though. It couldn't hurt to ask.
There's Cobb County Transit, too. I was in Atlanta last weekend, staying near the Cumberland Mall while going to a conference in Midtown, and didn't know about Cobb County Transit until I saw a bus. It wasn't on GMaps, while MARTA was. Now I know that when I visit a city I haven't been to, I ought to check more than just GMaps.

Of course, that wasn't the only mistake I made while planning. If I'd booked my hotel sooner, I could have got a nice place, within walking distance to the conference, at a reasonable price.

I like this article because it reminds me that planning can be fun, isn't really that hard, and can help a great deal. It sounds like Stammy got a much nicer place than he would have if he didn't reply to new listings. It was also smart to get in-building laundry. My current place in Boulder has me going to the laundromat, and it's much more of a distraction than I thought it would be, even if I pay them to do my laundry. It makes me take my car on days when I'd much rather be on foot or on a bike.

...and I concur about grocery stores being important. Boulder has three stores I like to frequent really close to each other: Whole Foods, Vitamin Cottage, and Sunflower Market. Each has their strong points. Whole Foods has everything and a great salad bar and deli; Vitamin Cottage has only organic produce, with better prices than Whole Foods, and Sunflower often has the best prices town on both organic and non-organic produce.
If you have a driving partner, I would recommend a cross-country driving trip to everyone. A few months ago I moved from Charlottesville, VA out to the Bay Area. I stopped in Memphis, Amarillo, Phoenix, LA and drove up highway 101 from there. It's a weird feeling to describe, but driving across the entire country almost gives you a renewed sense of patriotism.

Oh yeah almost forgot... drive the speed limit in Texas.