skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how much that actually accounts for C's generally good performance in these kinds of ad-hoc benchmarks. There's really two "low-level" things about C: 1) it's low-level in the actual language sense of being reasonably close to the metal; and 2) it has a pretty bare-bones standard library, requiring most algorithms to be hand-coded, if you don't link in a 3rd-party library. Mostly people focus on #1, but as you point out, #2 might actually be a big part of it.

I don't actually mean this as a slight against C, fwiw. In some ways, coding in C feels liberating, because I'm culturally allowed to do the nasty special-case hack, instead of doing it The Right Way with the library function that checks all the edge cases and error conditions and whatever.
HP Labs announces Environment-Friendly Data Center
I would guess there's a jQuery plugin or three (or a plugin from another framework) that would do this.

I see two major issues why you wouldn't want to do it though. One, you're already in an app with a context menu, ie the browser. How do you deal with overriding its context menu while staying out of the way? Two, touch devices can't emulate a right click (like they can't emulate hover). Major bummer for accessibility, especially if your app is designed to leverage context menus heavily.

You might consider something along the lines of a context menu button, which you could put next to actionable items and would take a direct click to pop open a menu. Of course, that's just a menu bar stuck somewhere in the page. Whether or not it would be worth the trouble I guess is application specific.
Eee. I think your idea of degrading isn't actually degrading! Respectfully, I believe you are misunderstanding the meaning of his words and possibly the idea of "degrading to woman."

When you reversed the story (I'm completely ignoring the wife's second comment), you used a nickname "husby," which is clearly meant to be derogatory because you used it in a context akin to talking to a young child. Husbands shouldn't be treated like young children on leashes, so it is negative. The actual husband's article, however, meant to convey a sense of glee and admiration which is innocent and childlike in form. A positive emotion rather than a negative one. You may say because it is such an unadulterated emotion (and she starts "Tap. Tap. Tap" -ing away), that it is animalistic, but still not degrading to woman.

I believe you are seeing what you want to see- rather than what is actually there. His wife didn't just discover the internet, she discovered a new method of browsing it which is enchanting. Honestly, if you switched the husband and wife aspect of the article (not your recreation), it wouldn't seem degrading to men.

Respectfully,
dbz
> Well, if that is your method then why not just shoulder-surf?

Recording the session is useful for further analysis, and sharing with other team members.

> isn't it about the bare minimum for a meaningful usability test to ensure the tester doesn't get interrupted?

It's useful to test software in the environment it will be used, where a user may well be distracted or have other things to do. Does the interface cope with distractions? Is it easy for someone to resume where they left off?
Leaving IonLab: Stop reading. Start doing
Why did it not bring joy to your family? Because you have to listen to silly childrens jokes too much?
If you're a striptease club owner, you pretty much have to hire pretty young women, competent or otherwise.
It's not in her interest in any shape or form to care about the next minority. It's perfectly rational for her to maximize her own profit.
If anyone is working on this, I would be thrilled to hear more.
Doesn't it have something to do with international licensing issues? Which seems odd to say as it's not been released worldwide yet.
I'd argue that using FB is pointless, not quiting it. Not using it is the default state of things, so the burden of proof should be on the other side. It's a bit like with smoking.
I don't think an "obligation" or obeying the law is necessary a good qualifier.

Let look at this way. Each law we made will have potential side-effects, which is most likely to be negative. Thus, the law of unintended consequence.

For example, a business deciding who to hire might decide on only the merit/performances of employees. However, this end up with lot of white people, because white people are disproportional represented in the tech industry. Any minority in the tech industry have to swim against lot of talented white people. So what we end up with is a firm with mostly white people.

However, discrimination against race is prohibited in our law and it looks like the firm is engaged in favoring white people over other type of colors. So people either sue the firm for racial discrimination, or the firm decided a quota of people from each race to hire.

Thus, we end up with the strange situation of a color-blind company being sued for discrimination that it never engaged in, or forced to take a racist route to avoid lawsuits.

So we better be careful of how we make our laws. A law with good intentions and made with great moral conviction may end up doing the opposite.

"It is a saying among Divines, that Hell is full of good Intentions, and Meanings." -- 1654 R. Whitlock Observations on Manners of English 203
Though sometimes it is nice to separate things out. Back in the java jdbc days, I'd always have to look up the exact url format for database connections because oracle's url connection string would be completely different from mysql, and still different from postgres.
did the post criticize fb? if not, giving them this "exclusive" could also be a middle finger wagging at the nyt, wsj, and others who attacked them.
How Google Maps splits the world in 2^20 256x256 tiles (2006)
My issue with "man cave" is that it's derogatory. A man has a personal hobby he enjoys, which she doesn't understand, so it's addressed with terminology like, "man cave." Really, do you want you wife referring to you as a neanderthal?

As for trekking in Nepal, it struck me as a tremendously abbreviated comment. Could, "trekking in Nepal," possibly describe the sort of action a man so distraught wants to take?

This is akin to my wife being upset at my emotional distance and refusal to address her needs and, when called on it, I simply say that it's fine if she buys some new shoes.

I'm not a fan of sexism, in either direction.
Best Industries for Starting a Business In 2010
> Mixing data and code in the memory of a running program is what has lead us to every exploit involving a buffer overflow or a stack smash.

Not exactly. The totally unsafe programming model of C is what has caused this. Once you have untyped pointers that need not point to objects owned by your program, it is very easy to fuck something up.

> Lisp is not the only language that can build a string and throw it at an eval function.

Well, evaluating a string in (Common) Lisp just returns the string. Evaluating a symbol or list will actually do something interesting.
I didn't even know that such a thing existed until today, here is the other thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373046
I fully agree; the point is that, in quite a few cases, these people weren't (obviously) misusing tools. Look at the Perl code - it's readable, uses a well-tested library, and is ridiculously slow.
Secarik Kenangan Bersama Anas Urbaningrum « Dwiki Setiyawan's Blog
Another fun graphical way to see the effectiveness of a hash function is to:

1) Run a known dictionary against the hash function with a specified number of buckets.

2) Calculate how much of an error there was versus the theoretical optimum (even distribution of the inputs across all buckets).

3) Graph that (each bucket becomes a pixel in a rectangle) and use color to convey the relative magnitude of the error.

If you do this, you get to use some very powerful software backing your eyes as anomaly detectors. Low intensity noise is a good result. Anything which your brain can sort out is a bad result.

They're perfectly good enough to identify most bad hash functions. (Try this with an English dictionary and Java string hashing. You will, ahem, not have difficulty finding the problem.)

[Edit to add: I might just be getting old, but I'm positive a professor and I broke the Java hash function wide open in college using this method, yet my 15 minute attempt to replicate this result gives me an image which looks like a good hash function would result in: white noise.]
As with all programming methodologies; OOP is a useful tool for situations where it works.

Outside of that other things become useful... this is how the world has always worked :)
You can't discriminate on gender either, yet someone advertising for a prostitute (in itself legal in my country) can specifically request women and prevail in court, whereas someone advertising for an accountant will not. There needs to be an objectively justifiable reason, the modalities of which have been (to an extend) worked out in hundreds of courts cases over the years. In the firefighters case, I guess that by now most fire brigades have set limits and reached agreements with union and the legislation to sort these things out, as have other fields.
I was never arguing in favour of reuse; I was arguing in favour of the C approach (keep everything in local variables and build a state machine.)

And yes, concurrent zeroing is nice. I don't dispute that: I just wanted to point out that the speedup you demonstrate above (partially) comes from using additional resources (CPU time on another processor), not from using existing resources more efficiently.
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Kung Fu Kitties are everywhere! You may even know one! What's a Kung Fu Kitty you ask? Well, it's any cat who is out for fun and doing it while on their hind legs, front legs, flying through the air, leaping cross-legged, doing back-flips, and well, you get the picture.
According to a biologist friend, the biggest challenge in working with genetically modified organisms is keeping them alive. Even in a sterile lab they generally end up getting exterminated by native organisms.
> Actually, no. They're a way of unambiguously representing said AST.

I'm not sure how that's a contradiction. "unambiguously representing" is still representing.

> Why do I say that? Because very few people know the full precedence of expressions. So, they break expressions in unnecessary places and/or add redundant parentheses.

Interesting, but not really relevant. They prefer the syntax, knowing that there are things they don't know about it.

> And then there's the problem of manipulating said AST. To do so for a traditional language requires a parser and a bunch of datastructures, which every project reimplements. Everything that you need for lisp is built-in.

Er, I don't understand how you can make that claim. A parser is necessarily built in to any interpreter/compiler for language with syntax, whether that language be a lisp or an assembly language or Java. Some of them don't have the parsers available at all (e.g. C), but some do (e.g. Python), and for some the parser is irrelevant (Lisps, machine code) because the AST (or "AST" perhaps, in the case of machine code) is always directly available regardless of explicitly calling out to the parser. In any case, your claim does not hold for "traditional languages" in any generality, there is too much variety.
Exactly. If you are content to do the same thing over and over again, you won't improve no matter how many years of experience are on your resume. On the flip side there are some aspects of the profession that you just aren't going to learn without putting in serious time.

People who do the first thing can be OK if you only need easy stuff done in a routine way, and have someone to give them direction. People who do the latter are invaluable resources.
8 High Tech Pet Gadgets You Might Have Missed
The United States of America alone spends almost $50 billion a year on pets and pet products and there are no signs of slowing. And where there is demand, someone better supply. Fortunately, there are many companies and people that are happy to supply us with high end pet accessories and high tech devices.
I dont have time to watch an hour long video. Can someone summarize? How do you address content without location? Is this the idea of p2p replicated content so that the network knows where all the copies of the content are? What happens if all the copies of the content are deleted from the network?
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Tomorrow, will you know where your towel is?
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TechCrunch Disrupt Conference Livestream
The video doesn't start - I know it could be a line problem, but it should me blazingly fast everywhere, since that's what you're using to sell your product. And once started, it's tiny!

Also, excluding the video there aren't any screenshot around, and the "Tour" is just a list with tiny thumbnails.

Excluding those things, however, I think that everything else is well done: it clearly states the price (maybe, add a high-level offer with an high price tag) and explains pretty well some advantages. Also, the try button is everywhere so it's ok. :)

Why don't you offer a basic free-forever account with like: 1 user, 1 project, 1 invoice/month, etc. Something like this. I think it would be perceived really better than a 30-days test (that will still exists!).
The most powerful thing you can do regarding any service or product is to vote with your wallet ... or in the case of Facebook, with your subscription.

When Facebook loses one user, the quality of their network drops ... insignificantly from a single user, but when speaking about multiple users quiting, then you've got a network effect.

So ironically (thinking about TFA) if you care about the quality of their service the most effective thing you can do is to just quit using it. That will send a message more powerful than bitching and moaning about it in blog posts.
Actually, they are known for making it pretty hard on advertisers. They're rules for what ads are acceptable are pretty strict, to the point where showing almost anything other than just a plain description of your product/service can be interpreted to break the rules.

Most ads that you submit get rejected on sight, but if you post the same exacting thing at another type of day it gets through.

Mainly their ad platform is surviving because the sheer volume of impressions they can serve is hard to ignore. Other than that, they damn sure aren't making it easy for advertisers to give them money.
IANAL, I don't think it's true that just anyone can sue for wrongful termination.

In the US, the general rule is at-will employment, which means they can fire you whenever they want for whatever reason. There are some exception - discrimination, the family medical leave act for new parents, retaliation against whistleblowers, and employees who refused to break the law. That's about it. Sure, an employee COULD file a lawsuit alleging that the employer broke one of those rules, but, if it's made up, they're all easily disproved except discrimination - which means nobody would bother with it, unless they had a grudge and money to burn, because there would be no payoff.
Also sounds a little like O-Meta (at least from what I understand of it...) - which is something Alan Kay and others have been working on for a fair while now. And this seems a little more alive and modern than prolog.

This seems to take a similar approach, by simplifying (once you understand it) the programming method, and by doing so, drastically reducing the LOC needed for a functional system.
I'd like to pick up on that "detachment from users" concept. In my (limited) experience, it seems that the more interesting the technology is you're working on, the further you're typically removed from the users.

For instance, in a typical java consulting job, you're face to face with users all the time - but you're building a boring webapp. On the other extreme you could be building awesome technical tools but your real users are several time-to-market phases away.
"it absolutely beats the snot out of Kindle for the iPhone/iPad in pretty much every way (except book prices, which are much higher than Amazon's)"

So I take you can't just transfer books between the two? Sorry, Apple and Amazon, but unless I can't own the books I buy from you, I won't become a customer.

"page numbers. Compare them in Kindle vs. iBooks. Someone at Amazon needs to be shot."

He wants to shoot people for messing up page numbers? Creepy.
I don't think panoramio includes photos of people taking pictures of one another.
hey good feedback thanks.

- I'll look in to the speed issue.
- the screenshots, i'll maybe make those lightboxes
- I'm not sure what you mean by high-level offer?
- the free forever is basically freemium and i'm trying to get away from that, but i'll consider it. I wondered about making a 7 day trial but like you say making the 'after 7 days you get put on your free account', or something like that.
You're right. XML is about 25% of the code (~3M of ~12M lines, ignoring blank lines). And overall, some 20% of the project is comments (~3M comments of ~15M lines code + comment, again ignoring blank lines). And in spite of that, they appear to have several small things with no comments whatsoever. Most of the other stuff is about what you'd expect, though: the header files and assembly have the most comments, while the one-off programs have very few.

Still, I wonder what they used Lisp for? Or why they used so many different tools? I mean, Perl was all but made to replace awk & sed. Did they have several people who did little one-off tasks in their favorite language when they were pressed for time?

Must be nice to get the tools you want, though, instead of being subject to absurd decisions by superiors (think "Daily WTF material").
I think it was about 60Mb of source, around 1000 packages and stand-alone procs.

Basically the perl pulled a list of scoped function names from the DDL, did a text index on the executable code, and searched the index for references to those functions, creating a list of [from.function, to.function] pairs that I fed into prolog.
Am i the only one that found the Paris analogy and surprises more interesting? :P

" What surprised me about Paris was that, at their fruit stands, every fruit is arranged with absolute care and precision. Compare to a typical grocery store in Canada, where fruit is typically dumped into a bin so you can sort through it yourself. When I think about how much more time it must take to do it the hard way, yes, it surprises me. How can they afford to do that? It's magic. (I also had other related observations at the time.)"

Magic? It's the same in germany and i guess many other european countries too.. Never occured to me to throw all the fruits into one basket randomly.. :D

Those little differences around the world can be so interesting.
Personally I love Facebook as a developer ... because Facebook continually fucks their users, I can take advantage of their profiles without feeling guilty about it :-)

Zuckerberg does have a point ... most users just authorize whatever app wants permissions to their data with whatever permissions are asked for. This I know from experiencing the integration of my app with Facebook.
Probably the most disturbing thing about the article is the original title: "Programming like it's 1995". I'd feel better if he had said "OOP is like so 1980's".
Would you apply that some logic with regard to race?
+1 -- a crappy product that is nothing but a thin veneer over an enormous database of private information that they are selling for profit.
Well, you know what I mean re: the last bit, it's not just Lisp that can modify code at runtime.

As for C, it's not just the fault of pointers. You just can't shellcode something that doesn't execute data.

Like I say, we'd just have a different class of problems, so it's not a panacea.
The demo is great in that you are dropped into it quickly and given a pointer on how to start (add a project). It would be cool to see this expanded - so that after a demo project is created it steps you through some other aspects of the system (adding tasks etc.) and shows off the features.
Despite Good Intentions PaaS Interop Still Only Skin Deep
OpenStreetMap, an open source compeditor to Google Maps does a similar 'split the word into tiles'. This is how they do it:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map_tilenames
The 'cleaner' copy of the same article: http://beta.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article435036.ece
i think it should be a phpinfo()
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
Ask HN: How do you determine market potential?
Howdy HN,

I have an idea for a web application that seems suited to a subscription based revenue model. There are already a small handful of similar products but they all look really pathetic with the exception of maybe two which fall squarely into the marginal category.

I believe I can implement my idea well enough that it puts the other services to shame but I worry that the lack and shoddy look of the existing services might indicate a near non-existent market potential. Or, maybe a market that's just very difficult to get any traction in.

How can I test the market? Are there ways to get an idea of how much traffic or how many customers these other service might have (there's nothing listed on the sites)? I've heard people talk about using Google AdWords to test for market interest but I've also heard that there's a learning curve to figuring out how to effectively use AdWords. Any ideas?

Regards

--update--
For anyone interested, I did find this:

Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online service, step-by-step

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/using-adwords-to-assess-demand-for-your.html
The linked article gives no actual support for its claim that the Buddha's was "the quintessential rational mind". It cites a few of his opinions and draws tenuous connections with the findings of modern neuroscience.

It's pretty clear that the Buddha was a clever and insightful chap. It wouldn't surprise me to find that some of the things he said about minds and bodies and persons fit well with contemporary science. It would be interesting to read something about this written by someone with no axe to grind. The hyperbole of the linked article, though? A waste of space.
The author may be a top-notch neuro-scientist (for all I know), but he's not much of a Buddhist scholar. He's quoting texts that were written approximately 1000 years apart, and attributing them to the same author.

There's a lot of fascinating work being done in Buddhist Psychology; in fact, I'm in the middle of a course on precisely that subject as part of an M.A. in Buddhist Studies. Unfortunately, this article only hints at the subject.
The Century of Self is Adam's best work.

Next to it I loved The Trap and Pandora's Box a lot.

Pandora's Box:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639026381197734332#

The Trap starts here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085#