skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's the JVM's and CLR's characteristics to blame.

Generics in .NET are said to be reified ... meaning that when instantiating a generic type, you get that type at runtime. It also handles it smartly ... meaning that you don't get performance penalties. And for stack-allocated objects (structs in .NET or primitive types like int/double) it does code-specialization (generates a new class) which means you can avoid boxing/unboxing overhead.

This actually makes a difference, as reified generics are the only sane way to have sane parametric polymorphism in a language that does runtime single-dispatch (like C# / Java).

Reified generics are hard to implement though, especially if you want covariance/contravariance. That's why .NET only has limited support for such rules (available only on interfaces and delegates).

With type-erasure, as in Java or in Scala ... generics are only a way to avoid explicit type-casts (Java), or to enable local type-inference (Scala). And I have found no paper on implementing reified generics on top of the JVM, without modifying the JVM (a possible task, no doubt, but it's probably not worth the overhead).

Java also has another problem (which is also a problem for dynamic languages) ... no way to have custom stack-allocated objects. This is a problem since number types (int/float/double) don't map 1:1 with the types in other languages, often having different behavior / different sizes, and this is a PITA since you want to avoid the boxing/unboxing overhead.

Of course, the CLR is not without its problems ... like, if you want lazy integers (as in Haskell) ... you would need an Union of an integer + a method reference, and it should be a union to avoid the memory penalty (and you could make the distinction by holding 1 bit of that integer as the tag). On the CLR, you can't do it this way since there are no union types, and the security model doesn't allow you to store method references inside integers.

The JVM on the other hand is preferred for dynamic languages because ... it is a better target (it does runtime optimizations that the CLR doesn't) and because people wanting dynamic languages also prefer more open ecosystems.

.NET's DLR is an interesting piece of work, but you don't gain much performance by using it and to me it seems like another mouse trap (no really ... building DLR ASTs seems like a good idea, but what happens when your language is nowhere close to Ruby/Python or Javascript, which have similar base types and dispatching rules?).

It's pretty cool though that by using it you gain instant interoperability with other .NET languages. See this piece from IronJS's author: http://ugh.cc/ironjs-function-call-overhead-benchmark/
what exactly do you expect "news for hackers" to be?
Another nice example is the <intuitive> steering wheel of a car.

If you know cars, you will see: Hey. I need to turn the wheel to the left, so the front wheels of the car turn towards the left, so the entire car begins to turn to the left.

If you are a sailor, however, who only knows simple hand-steered rudders, your intuition is the opposite, because in order to steer your ship to the right, you need to turn the rudder to the left in order to get the right currents flowing.

These problems are _really_ interesting, and _really_ hard to solve. (whereas I think, the first results from the second). :)
Rackspace Cloud support is telling me the hardware we are running on checks out 100%.
Whistle for iPad is good and free. It just has a walgreens advertisement in the middle of the screen.

Acrobits Softphone is quite nice too, for $6.99 I think. It offers tons of official support for lots of SIP providers, and push notifications for incoming calls. Though I've found push to be worthless for actually receiving a call in time.

Then there's Siphon in Cydia but I haven't really used that.
Well, there WERE competing currencies in place for a time. The advent of paper currency comes from privately issued banknotes, which were legal in the UK until the Bank Charter Act of 1844.

The reason they pushed for it? Basically, private banks were printing too many banknotes and causing bouts of inflation. This was in a time when currencies were still backed by gold.

Here is the speech by Robert Peel that convinced Parliament (as well as myself) that this was a good course of action to follow: http://www.historyhome.co.uk/polspeech/bank.htm

If you made a papery currency, what is it backed by? A big pile of gold? Do you have a lot of men with guns defending that big pile of gold?

What is backing a fiat currency like the $US? Trust that the country will continue to exist? The might of the armed forces? It is a number of things, but the conditions are very difficult to reproduce without a lot of cold, hard steel moving around at high speeds through land, sea, and air.
Simplicity is like sci-fi - What we point at when we say it.
Ask HN: Who's using Clojure, and to do what?
Hello everyone,

I've seen a lot of articles on HN recently talking about Clojure. I had a quick look at a few pages (Wikipedia, etc...), and I can't help but think that it sounds like the new cool language, pretty much like Ruby in 2007.

But to get a better idea, I'd like to hear the feedback from the community: Who is using Clojure (in real-life cases), and what are you doing with it?

Bonus points if you can tell what specific features made it a better language for the task.
False. See http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/11/apple_relaxes_...
Indeed we are a trading system :o
Now that I think about it, it's always felt 100% male to me. Can any females speak up and prove me wrong?
Plus, this sounds awfully like a fake. They ought to have emergency generators.
Verily, there are many pucks.

It is pretty funny that the author includes WAP as one.
It isn't RTFM as much as do some research before choosing your data store.

The majority of his enumerated gripes aren't unexpected or hidden attributes of mongodb but fundamental considerations when deciding on a data store.
As a side note, I was really disappointed that Rockstar omitted the ambulance and firefighter missions in GTA IV. The ambulance missions were one of my favorite parts of the pre-GTA4 games -- challenging and well-rewarded.

(Edit: ...and, as the article shows, these missions are some of the only pieces of the game that could be played entirely ethically -- which may be why they were removed. I'm surprised no one's created a similar driving-and-saving-lives sandbox game outside of GTA, although the taxi minigame is similar to Crazy Taxi, which may be where GTA got the idea in the first place.)
I disagree with a lot of this. I used to hate exercise until I was taught two major misconceptions: 1) cardio helps you lose weight, and 2) high rep/low weight = muscle tone, and low weight/high rep = big muscles. These are patently false.

Cardio is NOT for losing weight. In fact in many cases it actually is very difficult to burn fat while doing lots of cardio because it trains your body to burn the fact more efficiently. This is why you'll see people spend so much time at the gym and get no results. The OP is quite correct that without a serious change in diet coupled with the cardio you will NOT lose weight. Which is exactly why you shouldn't do cardio if you want to lose weight, you may get a small drop in the beginning, but ultimately you will return to a baseline. Pushups etc. are great for warmups, but ultimately these will have very diminishing returns as well (the "100 pushup" style of training is laughable).

If you want to burn fat and lose weight you really need to lift weights, and you need to lift heavy weights. The idea that you can "tone" your muscles with small weights is just ludicrously wrong. You wont turn into a mega-hulk, trust me.

If you want to increase your stamina, your lung capacity and your heart health cardio is absolutely what you should be doing. But also understand that this comes at a cost of diminishing your muscle gains (thus slowing down how quickly you burn your fat).

TLDR: the best way to lose weight is to lift heavy weights in low reps (as heavy as forces you below 10 reps) with moderately short breaks between exercises. Cardio will be an uphill battle to lose weight.

And the best part is you actually get to eat MORE if you are seriously lifting.

Edit: if you want to disagree with me and downvote, at least post a response. I'd love to hear why you think I'm wrong.
Posterous feels a lot like my Mac did the first time I switched from Windows. It just works.
How do you know you aren't just a child with an overactive imagination who think's he's an adult? Since you say a child couldn't reliably tell the difference...

It's really dehumanizing to take a very large group of people and basically say they are incapable of decent thought like you and need to be controlled.

[edit: added the word "reliably"]
That's exactly what I'm saying but I'm getting down-voted. Not sure what is happening here.
Just curious, how do you feel Firefox is more usable than Chrome? I've felt like Chrome is much more progressive than Firefox with a cleaner and simpler interface.
Perspective on Mobile from an Open Source Advocate
It’s no secret that the mobile space is booming and that the future of computing is largely in compact devices. From mobile apps to the mobile web, developers are seeing the potential and the industry is charging ahead.
Oliver Byrne's edition of Euclid
My guess is that the answer to your rhetorical question is "science".
What the ... This is truly unbelievable. If the kid wants to drive cars, there are tons of games available (my three year old loves one such game on iPad). And you can't argue that it isn't "intrinsically bad" either, a lot of stuff that is OK for grownups (alcohol, nudity, coke) may be bad for kids and may cause permanent psychological damage. Do you want to risk it?
Cycling the same kcal/hour as walking? That's very slow cycling. A much better measure is kcal/km, as that is at least somewhat more independent of speed.

No citations on life extension.

Recommends situps, which destroy your back. Leg lifts have the potential to do the same.

Doesn't mention how many kcal/g fat is (it's 9 kcal/g), which is a useful figure if you're trying to lose weight.
the iPad sells because it's an apple product, everyone gotta have..not because it's a tablet.
If you read the article, he explicitly says exercise is best for reasons wholly apart from weight loss (like longevity and health).
Performance is indeed bad. I downloaded iBook. It takes about a minute till the first page of Winnie the Pooh is shown. Flipping through the pages is slow.
I think the very biggest companies (with hundreds/thousands of users) would require a long sales cycle, but I would start by ignoring that market since those companies aren't going to move to this new upstart until it has some history.

So the bulk of this business probably starts with individual accounts and small departments/companies (<50 users). This group is making purchase decisions much like consumers. That group can be sold on the web, and just needs bulk pricing options to feel good about their purchase decision.
check out http://crabgrass.riseup.net/ open source social networking which works.
We have used Connect Pro with more than 100 attendees.
As opposed to Sun, who really welcomed anything that would add another few megabytes to a system, thus justifying more sales of E10ks?

(Still peeved that Sun didn't open-source either NeWs or OLIT)
The deficiencies look quite obvious to me: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/android-tablet-p...

I'll put it this way: The iPad would not be a compelling device if it merely ran iPhone software at a higher resolution.

Hardware-wise, the iPad is nothing but an iPod Touch with a giant screen and a giant battery. Software-wise, it's everything but an iPod or iPhone; the use cases are very different. A touch-surface that's 5 times larger than an iPhone enables a much richer and more sophisticated UI, and this is evident in the iPad SDK, Apple's iPad software, and the successful 3rd-party iPad software.

Google needs to define their tablet HIG, they need to update their SDK to implement their HIG, they need to update their built-in apps to take advantage of the new SDK, and they need to get their 3rd party developers on board. All of this takes time, and I would not expect it to take shape before the spring or summer of 2011 (they're still "feverishly working" to get Android 2.2 out the door). Anything less will result in a product that's not as compelling as the iPad.

That said, I have no doubt that manufacturers will try to sell Android tablets before the Android OS is ready, and I have every confidence that those tablets will fail in the marketplace. But eventually there will be compelling Android tablets.
I saw you're planning on doing something with public transit. You should check out Google's Transit Program, they have public feeds of transit info (stops, routes, stop times and what not) here:
http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFe...
Same here. It actually feels a bit snappier to me in many places.
Funny how it says firefox isn't supported in some tutorials!
Data-driven property valuations
The GM seed is much better than some of the betas, but that's not saying much. Beta 3 on the 3G was especially bad.

But all in all I think the overhead of all these new features are slowly overwhelming the 3G. The only thing really worth it is mail threading.
I always thought it was kind of obvious that the rating for the games meant without adult supervision. When you sit behind your kid and take care of him and stress the difference between real life and game (and do not let him play for 20 hours straight) then almost any game would be ok.
How is this Hacker News? This belongs on Reddit.
and its a lot easier to express criminal behavior within the game without any repercussion, coupling that with a young mind that hasn't grown the mental aptitude to distinguish could lead to some ugly mishap's. We have a separate child's court for all of the above reasons.
"Maybe you've forgotten many people outside of North America and Europe own mobile phones."

I wonder how many of those folks have phones that allow them to participate meaningfully in an application marketplace.
I'm wondering then what are the benefits of Apple doing it's own silicon? Perhaps it would be the obvious and what they've actually told us... making the circuitry massively smaller so they can fit in a bigger battery. Hmmmm.
And his data loss issues seem to be related to server reboots according to one of his later comments. MongoDB's docs clearly state that the database must be shut down safely or data loss will happen. (MySQL is the same way, it gets really annoyed at hard reboots)
Sadly, while I appreciate the multi-process model of Chrome as a geek, it had almost nothing to do with why I switched: I'm a 64-bit Linux user. Firefox is, from a performance standpoint, almost unusable for me.

(On 32-bit Windows XP at work, Firefox is great, but there's value to me in a similar browsing configuration across machines.)
USB True Random Number Generator
I know - I'm really talking about the legal landscape rather than TPB. I just think the general anarchy of present-day digital distribution is the inevitable consequence of the 20th-century IP model, and a sustainable replacement has yet to establish itself. we can't rewind, so we need to Try Something Else.
exercise: read your 2nd sentence. now read again my 1st 2 sentences. compare and contrast. :)

EDIT: after this post you edited yours to add "reliably". Good, that loosens it up and you may no longer be in logical error.
For a minute there I thought someone modified WebKit so the browser widgets that are normally drawn from a toolkit (GTK, Cocoa, etc.) such as scroll bars, buttons, text boxes, etc. were actually created with CSS/HTLM/Javascript.
Sure, but he sets up a completely false dichotomy right in the beginning by comparing cardio exercises to weight loss results. He also opens the article with:

"Don't kid yourself into thinking that exercise, by itself, will make you lose weight. Consider the following activities, and the number of calories an average person burns per hour in each."

It's very targeted at people aiming to lose weight.

Weight loss is very related to overall health, and in many cases very necessary to be healthier (especially us Americans). He also is EXTREMELY focused on saving time, and then proceeds to propose the LEAST time efficient way to get in shape.

No need to be nasty, I read the article.
The interactive demo presentation is very cool. I think there may be a small error, however, as the CSS transform associated with the "3" key seems to work everywhere in the presentation, and not just on the CSS transforms slide.
The real choice isn't between stocks, cds, mutual funds, etc. It's between conventional and unconventional investing.

The conventional route is easy and standard. Emergency funds in a bank, set up a schedule to buy index funds automatically, put the rest into CDs.

The unconventional route is real estate or business. 30%, 50%, or more is possible, and even easy, once you discover the way. But you have to find the way yourself, overcoming obstacles, inertia, and common wisdom.

For example, I learned how to buy foreclosures at courthouse auctions and resell them. 30-50% in 6 months. People doing real estate transactions regularly pay out over 15% for hard money loans secured by real estate.

Hacker News is great for learning how to create a business. Go to biggerpockets.com for real estate ideas.
So when he turns 8 and starts wasting innocent bystanders for fun, do you take the game away?
"if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application"

That is hardly a blanco card for writing apps in Lua. Anyway - not my problem.
My friend and coworker 'wglb uses it, over my weak and pitious objections, to build network protocol fuzzing code here. Don't worry, we'll beat the Clojure out of him soon enough.
Exercise: explain, in English, what your point is supposed to be.
I have come to the conclusion that RSS is definitely not the optimal way to interact with HN.

If I have only a minute, I check the front page to see what the big stories are. If I have more than a minute, I check the "new page" and try to do my bit by upvoting anything interesting (maybe 3-4 stories) and answer any "Ask HNs" that are in danger of languishing. If I have even more time, I'll read the comments on the front page and, a la xkcd, make sure nobody is wrong on the internet :-)

In fact, I spend relatively little time actually reading original submissions, unless I am multitasking with something else.
Joking? I'll bite anyways...

There has been myriad research detailing the adverse effects of children (aka developing humans) viewing violence, sex, drugs, etc. I think four year-olds safely qualify as developing. If stuff like this isn't alarming enough, consider a more extreme example like the two year old in Indonesia who smokes a couple packs of cigarettes per day http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/indonesia.smokin... . You're hurting these kids' chances (of living a healthy life/of relating to their peers/of being successful/ etc)

For those hounding me for citations, here's something I quickly rustled up:

From an economist: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22743802/Learning-Violence-Young

From a social psychologist: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2038214/Video-Game-Violence

From a the Institution of Youth Development in Washington DC: http://www.scribd.com/doc/33292276/Violence
Please update us with your findings once you try it.
Which science?
I'd sure like to see some peer-reviewed scientific literature, where the peers in question aren't all members of evangelical Christian pressure groups, that documents the 'harm' done to young children by media.

If children are that easily traumatized, how can any child grow up to become a healthy adult in a real war zone?
We exist solely for the purpose of changing UK government policy to something sensible. This means inter alia that some actions now called "piracy" would become legal.
if it's on the BBC there's no way Apple put it there. There are very strict rules about that. Is the Apple logo even visible? They'll usually blank it out.
I submitted this because I've been poking around in my Dover edition of Euclid. Then, yesterday, I found this site. To me it's like what Edward Tufte would do if he published Euclid (Byrne was a 19th-century civil engineer and surveyor from Ireland).

To my delight, I noticed that Taschen has republished this wonderful edition, so I ordered it from Amazon and I'm now awaiting delivery so I can peruse it, enjoy it, and keep it for my children's future math education:

http://www.amazon.com/Six-Books-Euclid-Werner-Oechslin/dp/38...
regarding your 2nd paragraph: let's say I were to make the claim that most babies can't walk or talk well, take care of defecatory body functions well, etc. Would you think that was dehumanizing to them? Are you saying babies should not be controlled? Let babies roam wild in the streets, in the forests, on the highways? Have you ever came into contact with babies, let alone children? :)

I for one think we must control babies. The risk that they might rise up and overthrow us is just too great to ignore. :P
Make that, "just USA".
I think he should use simpler and more direct examples. I mean, Go only make the example more complicated with the intersection and stuff. It's like if I'm trying to show how filter works by using a 20 lines example of a game.. why not use a simple <p> and show what you can do with it in a simple one liner?

Ok, I know why, since it's functional stuff and more than that, COMBINATOR STUFF, it needs to be more complicated than what it should be.
I don't think it's fair to compare playing a video game in which one does bad things with actually smoking in real life.

As to the studies, I've read some such studies and deemed them invalid or unscientific. Can you cite one that you would stand behind as rigorous and accurate?

[Edit: Can you site ONE study that you will STAND BEHIND? One you've read in full. Not three studies you just googled. I can google studies too...]
How employable is a startup partner with no corporate experience
I'm a 24 year old and just graduated as an electrical engineer. I currently have an opportunity to join a startup as a partner. I believe the experience will be valuable to me but if I leave the startup in 2 years for whichever reason, would I be left poor and unemployable or just poor?

Does being a VP at 24 for a tiny company make me more desirable for a IBM/Accenture type of company? Do I get a jump start for a managerial role or do I start from the beginning like a new grad at 55k$?
Yes, this was an unusual release, and an experiment in shipping new features quicker than our major release cycle normally allows. Out-of-process-plugins was a good candidate for an interim release, because it is a stability enhancement and is transparent to the user (no UI changes).
Great image.

But I imagine what an astronaut feels when he can witness lots of energetic particles passing right through him and colliding with the upper atmosphere with enough energy to provide planet-scale fireworks...
Granted, drugs can hurt kids, but I'd be surprised to find that nudity has ever been shown to cause permanent psychological damage; otherwise we'd never have made it out of the trees. Do you have any references supporting that view?
Somebody needs to write a little app with his ladder program idea, if it hasn't been done already.
Developmental psychology.

Avoid exposing preschoolers to violent media and video games. It's correlated with increased aggression and poorer judgement. It's also --- and here I'll have a harder time citing sources --- cruel. I felt bad for the little boy when he felt bad about "running someone over". There was no reason to expose him to this kind of emotional confusion.

It is not "dehumanizing" to suggest that a 4 year old doesn't have the same cognitive function as a 14 year old.