skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That may be the case in some places, but certainly not everywhere. One of the public companies I've worked with uses Oracle to the tune of several million per year in licensing fees. The CEO is responsible for maximizing shareholder value and he's not stupid - he approves the checks to vendors and knows very well that a single company accounts for an overwhelming percentage of their annual software costs. Therefore they are actively looking for alternatives where the cost-benefit ratio of switching is favorable.

Heck, they would be negligent not to investigate ways to reduce their costs on behalf of the shareholders.
Actually, we were running Cassandra 0.6.1. I'm a bit sorry that we didn't try to upgrade to 0.6.3, because it could have fixed some of the problems.
Fish feed is harder to produce than cow feed, but it is not an insurmountable obstacle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_farming#Intensive_aquacult...
That is a ton of code if the goal is writing a web page that does addition. Maybe that wasn't the goal.
He probably has a point about preserving your knowledge but I find his fascination with this 'Fortune 100 lawyer' a little odd. Those are the guys that battle out stuff like Microsoft/SCO vs. IBM or the hypothetical "MPEG-LA patent trolls Google for WebM", right?
I fully agree with this one. By simply switching my blackberry to not buzz me when emails came in felt like a vacation. I realized at that point that I was close to burn-out.
What does it say about Google Adwords when the top 15 networks that my campaign is running in are link farms.
I agree. They showed a bit of discretion and also managed to provide a resource to established media outlets.

With this sort of collaboration, vetting, etc, I really think it's hard to make the case that Wikileaks is a bad thing. In this case it empowered/emboldened the NY Times to write a series of stories that never would have been written.
How Groupon Bought The Domain Groupon.com
That's a great, simple test.
Did working manual labor help you figure things out? I am seriously considering working a job such as the one you described part time to pay the bills after school while I try to build a freelancing business.
Note: I have not seen Inception, and I plan to see it, so I am not reading your reply too closely. Nolan, on the basis of past work, is an excellent filmmaker, so I'm sure he isn't guilty of the things I talked about, certainly not blatantly. And I agree that you can't apply criticisms without properly understanding the concepts behind them, and the reason they work the way they do. I grew up in an artistic family. My mother was a theatre actress and director, and my father a songwriter and playwright, so I've been steeped in these mechanics in the practical sense, not just the academic, for a long time.

On the point about flashbacks, probably my favourite film, Once Upon A Time In America, is arguably formed out of flashbacks, or possibly even "flashforwards". The effect, especially after multiple viewings, is something like In Search Of Lost Time in they way it creates a sense of nostalgia, in its case for poorly made life choices, unrequited love, and more. So I certainly wouldn't make the accusation that flashbacks are in principle bad, or necessarily cheap, just often so, in average movies.
Hi. Pointers to type T have the type Pointer[T]. '&' operator is for getting the address of a lvalue, and the '^' operator is for dereferencing. '^' is a better choice than C's '*' for dereferencing because, I can conveniently use the same operator for dereferenced field-access too, whereas C had to invent another operator "->" for that.

record Point[T] {
x : T;
y : T;
}

updateViaPointer(ptr) {
ptr^.x += 1;
ptr^.y += 2;
}

test() {
var p = Point(10, 20); // type will be inferred as Point[Int]
updateViaPointer(&p);
}
Online Banking Fraud Found Rampant and Unreported
Efene 0.8 - meta programming, parametrized modules, -spec, -type and more
MSSQL supports it because it was inherited from Sybase. SQLite also supports it as well. You're right that it's a feature, but frankly I can't live without it -- there's no way to write safe schema migrations!
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You can read an English translation of this article through G-Translation at:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&tl...
I don't think it's contradictory to both support Wikileaks in principle and also condone stiff penalties for leakers in principle: Such penalties are legitimate insofar as the state is legitimate, and even most libertarians grant it some legitimacy.

Surely if a leak is worth leaking then it's worth suffering the penalty for leaking it if caught. Thousands of people are dying in Afghanistan and so the people who risked their careers, lives, etc. to get this information out are heroes.

The value of Wikileaks comes from the sensitivity of the information... If there were no penalty for disclosing it, then it wouldn't really be secret. The existence of Wikileaks diminishes the ability of any organization to conduct secret operations, and so we can expect secrecy to be used less often and more judiciously by everyone.
It looks pretty nice. I'm curious about how the code generation works and whether Clay has the potential to produce the kind of code bloat you sometimes see with C++ templates. Say I have a function

min(a, b) {
if(a < b)
return a;
return b;
}

From what I understand, this function can accept two Int32s, or a Uint8 and a Float32, or basically any other combination of numeric types. Is a new function for each type combination generated? I don't think there's any way around this to some degree, but I'm curious if you've been able to do anything to ease the pain.
He is not fascinated with the lawyer but with his proficiency in his field, the field is irrelevant.
I don't quite know where to begin, so I'll have to default to a point-by-point approach I'm afraid, sorry about that.

- How can banking 'soon come at a premium'? Like I said, the only appealing quality of Swiss banking is its secrecy, and that is going away fast. How are Swiss banks going to be of any use to anyone that is not Swiss without their bank secret? It's a closed country, hard to reach, with no natural or other resources.

- Yes it's stable, but how is it any more stable than any other Western country? Besides like I already said it's very closed (the stability and closedness are intertwined, of course) - its internal stability has little value to anyone but the Swiss themselves.

- No the US doesn't have enough oil for its own use - my point is that at least it has some. I was contrasting it with Switzerland which has nothing (no offense to Swiss readers, I love hiking in your mountains so thanks for that ;) )

- You coastline argument is a red herring. A country that is basically a bunch of islands with irregular coastlines will of course have more coasts (but Greece has only a bit more than the US). Amount of kilometers of coastline is just a proxy for how much exploitable sea area that represents, and how much access it provides to the rest of the world for trade purposes, and the US crushes Greece on both accounts.

- Advanced technology: to paraphrase Charles Babbage (badly), "I'm unable to comprehend the level of confusion that could lead to such statements". Despite the sensationalist reporting and the high growth rates of China (and the rest of Asia) over the last 2 decades, China is still effectively a third world country. Its R&D capacity is below Western level and production capacity is highly concentrated in low-tech mass manufacturing like steel, clothing and electronics assembly. If you are serious in claiming that the Chinese have overtaken the West in technological development you'll have to come with proof of such claims, considering that all measures that would reasonably be used for such statements (GDP, R&D budgets, production in high-tech sectors, origin and ownership of leaders in the field, ...) solidly point to the US as world leader (with the EU as a second).

- I'm not sure what you're comparing by. GDP and consumption power are lower in Sweden, unemployment roughly equal, debt (as a ratio to GDP) is only a little bit below the US, and to get out of the near-bankruptcy state that Sweden was in in the early 2000's they had to significantly raise taxes yet cut in benefits. Not sure where you're going with this but Scandinavia being so much better is not a closed case as you try to make it seem.
Feel free to do so!

For me writing about burning out is like writing about a disease that I may or may not have suffered from, as I wrote here - and elsewhere - I spent three full years 'off' because the sight of a keyboard disgusted me, I couldn't see the point in shifting bits on hard drives around any longer. Doing physical stuff was a welcome change from all this virtual work and I still do a lot of that on the side now to keep a balance in my life.

The wikipedia article is very dry, as a rule I list the sources of the stuff that I write and I took the list and expanded on it to put this in to context so that it becomes easier to see if you are at risk or not.

Writing about my personal experience is a different kettle of fish altogether, I'm not even sure if I am quite ready to document that phase of my life, it was not the most happy occasion. What prompted this was the ease with which people throw the term 'burn-out' around, as if it is somehow a fashionable thing to be suffering from, instead of a serious and potentially debilitating (and in some very unfortunate cases life threatening) condition.

I'll think about putting together a piece on what exactly was my road to total misery and how I recovered from it (and to some extent am still recovering) but I still shy away from listing myself as having burnt-out, simply because during the whole thing I never felt bad about myself per-se, just about the work.
It reminded me an old presentation - "Why Threads Are A Bad Idea
(for most purposes)", a little bit old, but still contains a lot of truth.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~norm/508/2009W1/ouster95threadsbad.pdf [slide5]

What's Wrong With Threads?
- Too hard for most programmers to use.
- Even for experts, development is painful.
I agree. I think there is a difference between passionate advocate of a cause that requires some public leaks -- and being able to accept the consequences, and being an armchair, couch-potato anarchist.

Last night my youngest son and I watched "Tora Tora Tora!", the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Back then, the United States had cracked the Japanese embassy codes. We were literally reading all their messages before they were.

This information -- that we had cracked the codes and what the traffic contained -- was limited to only 12 people in the entire government. After the president left one of the reports in a waste-basket, he was taken off the list.

Revealing even one of these messages would have been cause for long-term imprisonment. For a member of the military, sworn to protect the constitution, to release hundreds of thousands? I can't imagine any worse intelligence catastrophe. And that includes losing the A-bomb secrets.

The activist (or foreign intelligence service) has a cause and is will to suffer the consequences for using the information. The anarchist has only chaos as a cause. The activist selects what to leak, selects how to leak it, and sometimes dies for the revelation -- a fair penalty since leaking information can easily cause the deaths of others. The anarchist simply wants openness and lack of secrecy -- their enemy is reality itself, the fact that secrecy is necessary in some cases. A much more dangerous situation.
---spoiler-----
I think you're partly correct. His wife was not a real character but a projection of his subconscious, hence the impression that one of the main characters was 'underdeveloped' - she was supposed to be. I don't think the other characters were underdeveloped, they were just minor characters anyway. If his wife was a normal character, then it would seem like a normal film in terms of character development.

How do I know this? Well, what was the climax of the whole drama? When he confronts his wife's projection in the skyscraper near the end. That's when the most important/meaningful lines of the film are delivered, which are to the effect that dreamed characters/projections can never compare to the real thing, even in a very powerful imagination. That's why the film ends with him back with his kids and why we know he's not dreaming. He no longer wants his wife because she's a projection, but he wants his kids because they're real. He knows the difference.

Nolan cuts just after the top wobbles because he wants us to search for real meaning in the film, rather than have things settled by the director's arbitrary power.
Scientists informally intervene in cases of sloppy research
Why I’m giving up on Europe and moving my startup to China
gedit is pretty complex.

libgtksourceview-2.0.so.0
libgconf-2.so.4
liblaunchpad-integration.so.1
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
libatk-1.0.so.0
libgio-2.0.so.0
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0
libcairo.so.2
libpango-1.0.so.0
libgobject-2.0.so.0
libgmodule-2.0.so.0
libgthread-2.0.so.0
libglib-2.0.so.0
libX11.so.6
libSM.so.6
libm.so.6
libpthread.so.0
libc.so.6
libICE.so.6
libpangocairo-1.0.so.0
libxml2.so.2
libORBit-2.so.0
libdbus-glib-1.so.2
libdbus-1.so.3
librt.so.1
libXcomposite.so.1
libXdamage.so.1
libXfixes.so.3
libpangoft2-1.0.so.0
libfreetype.so.6
libfontconfig.so.1
libXext.so.6
libXrender.so.1
libXinerama.so.1
libXi.so.6
libXrandr.so.2
libXcursor.so.1
libdl.so.2
libpcre.so.3
libresolv.so.2
libz.so.1
libselinux.so.1
libpixman-1.so.0
libdirectfb-1.2.so.0
libfusion-1.2.so.0
libdirect-1.2.so.0
libpng12.so.0
libxcb-render-util.so.0
libxcb-render.so.0
libxcb.so.1
libuuid.so.1
libexpat.so.1
libXau.so.6
libXdmcp.so.6

How would you improve?

Outside the duplication of XCB and the libX11 based libraries, it's hard for me to see much that isn't at least justifiable.

I understand why the X extension libraries are all broken up. But, in the modern world, it seems likely the same set get loaded time and time again. It would be "simpler" if they were all in one library.

gobject/glib/gmodule and friends could get sewn up. Same as gdk/gtk/atk.

(Though, why the hell is directfb in there?)
Ask HN: Programmers vs. Developers vs. Engineers
I've done some basic Google searches on the subject, but I'm curious for the HN take on the situation.

What are the main differences between programmers, developers vs. engineers in the industry? Is there that big of a difference between the three? Based on what I've read there does not appear to be any consistency to which title applies to which type of job. It seems to be preference.

Thoughts?
What would you advise your 22yr old college-grad child to do with his/her life?
Absolutely, I think it kept - and keeps - me sane. Physical stuff is great in that it keeps your body in shape and at the end of a day you can literally touch the result, you can see it, it is solid. Virtual work is much less satisfying in that sense, you could be programming the stars from heaven but if it is business logic internal to some application you'll be happy if some maintenance programmer sees it 10 years down the line.

I think that's a big part of what drives the open source movement, programmers getting appreciation from other programmers about their work in a way that 'closed source' will never give and money can't provide.

The last couple of weeks I spent on two tracks, the one is building a small RV (just drove it to the other side of Europe, so I guess that worked out well :)), and a web project that I hope to launch sometime later this year.

When I'm tired of the one kind of work, I switch to the other, it seems to work better that way.
Gah. I had no idea. Sorry about my snarky comment then. I didn't realize you were already fielding that kind of drama.

This is really stupid though... hey world, guess what, software development is a field dominated by men, get over it!

I'm not a fan of forcing diversity for diversity's sake. If you give a spot to a somewhat qualified person, forsaking a more qualified person, that is wrong. If there are minorities that are talented enough to rise to the top, they will. Agree?
Apple To Begin Accepting Orders For iPad Engraving Later This Year
We’re hearing from one of our sources (who legitimately holds a position at the company and has asked to remain anonymous) that Apple is planning to offer consumers the option to personalize their iPads with engravings later this year, in the midst of the holiday season, much like the company has offered consumers who have purchased iPods...[continued]
I guess it's a value judgment and a function of one's command of the language to decide when something is 'complex' and 'obfuscatory'. I'm not even a native English speaker and I had no problem at all understanding what's being said. It's just the language that is used in a certain environment, I don't see any sign of deliberately trying to obfuscate the issue.

If a doctor tells me tomorrow that I have a "malignant neoplasm on the trachea', is he an evil man that tries to hide the truth from me? No it's just what the terms he's used to using when he talks about throat cancer. (disclaimer: I don't know anything about cancer and I just wikipedia'd this example)
Ask HN: Rate this start-up: XIPWIRE (xipwire.com)
XIPWIRE (pronounced Zip Wire) is a mobile payment service that enables people to securely send and receive money using a simple text message.

A person "xips" money by sending a text message to XIPWIRE's mobile number (known as a "short code"), 56624. There are no extra charges to send or receive messages to/from this number. The money sent is drawn from a bank account or a credit/debit card that's linked to the XIPWIRE account.

Signing up starts by the user texting "go" to 56624. XIPWIRE will reply back with a temporary username (your mobile number) and 4-digit password. Use those credentials to login to http://xipwire.com to complete the simple registration process.

Once signed up, you "xip" money by sending a text message to 56624 with a simple command in the body of the text: "xip <username or mobile number> <amount>". For example if Violet wants to xip Dash $20, she would text "xip dash 20".

To request money from another user, use the "ping" command. For example, "ping dash 20" would send a text message to Dash requesting $20 to be transferred from his XIPWIRE account to yours.

XIPWIRE requires the user to text back a 4-digit PIN to authenticate every payment transaction. Other commands that can be texted to 56624 include: bal, hist, id

Interested in any feedback regarding XIPWIRE's linked account model, security concerns, usability, etc.

Thanks!
Profits are high during a recession, nice work companies!

Too bad the article doesn't congratulate them for doing so well during the downturn. Someone remind the nytimes that businesses exist to make a profit, not to hire people.
I like the multiple dispatch feature (http://bitbucket.org/kssreeram/clay/src/b1df8340f2b4/test/va...).

It reminds me of clojure multimethods (http://clojure.org/multimethods). Can dispatch conditions in Clay be "arbitrary"? (in the example it is on the value of 'x', but can it be as complex as in Clojure multimethods?
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> It's like saying, "This software is Mac compatible!... inside a VMware instance running windows XP"

Hey, that sounds like FlashDevelop, which actually claims to be "Mac OSX/Linux compatible using virtualization software (VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallels)"
> If anything I think the right analogy with Inception is the second Matrix movie.

I too prefer to think Inception as a spiritual successor to Matrix. It explores the idea of layers of constructed reality in a recursive fashion that I hoped Matrix sequels would reveal.

Also, I suspect Matrix world would seem less weird to computer geeks than the world of Inception. The opposite is also true. Inception appeals even to a non sci-fi buff. That is a remarkable achievement for such a complex movie.

There are a lot of questions towards the end, but they make you think much beyond the canvas of the movie. That is truly a rewarding experience.
I think this criticism is right on, but he's got his conclusion backwards -- Inception is so awesome because it's exactly like the first few levels of a video game. Yes, tutorials in video games are boring, but the most interesting part of a video game to me is the "figuring it out" part. So I skip the tutorial and figure it out by failing miserably on the first "easy" level. Once I've done a few levels in the game, there's more "game" and less "new", so I move on to the next shiny new toy.
Google primarily write code in C++ and Java (with Python)
It might not even be that Oracle isn't interested in that culture so much as Oracle simply isn't Sun and that was Sun's culture. Sun believed Sun was the best and everything else wasn't. Sun believed in Sun, quite a bit, enough so that Sun wouldn't wake up and smell the coffee when the CEO was blogging about a filesystem in the 21st century.. (You know, I couldn't tell you what filesystem gmail is on or amazon uses or salesforce.com uses, since we dumped FAT nearly 20 years ago, I haven't really had much reason to care other than because I'm geek. It's not impacted performance in anyway that would hurt business, just as one example.)

If there was some sort of news from Oracle, how they weren't interested in a class of products or they weren't interested in technology or anything like that, or maybe all all the senior sun guys were being demoted a notch or seomthing then folks would be screaming bloody murder and we'd all know about it. Oracle wants to continue to make money and Sun was more interested in making their team think they were the best, regardless of what the market showed. That's the difference.

Some of these guys simply might be better off elsewhere, their time might be past, but if they really want to show their greatness then they have an opportunity to do so now with real marketing might. I went through this with a company a few years back, we boot strapped it, got it going, came up with some good ideas and some products but didn't have the money to make them robust and didn't know how to sell; we got bought and maybe a quarter of the team saw that as the ending (nobody made any money at that point) and they put that kind of effort in, the others saw it as time to get real and do the hard work, take things to the next level.. It's just a natural sort of thing when companies get bought.

On the up side, I give the guys that are leaving some credit. They could just hang out and be dead weight, draw probably giant pay checks and not do a whole lot.
Never make the browser guess.
I had a conversation with a well-known entrepreneur in my city. He has created a chain of cafés (completely different from my field) but we talked a lot (in fact, he talked, I questioned and listened) and I learned a great deal.

At the end of the conversation, he said "it has been a long time since I talked that much". WHAT? It meant that I was probably one of the few lucky who had learned from his experience. I always thought that entrepreneur were sharing their knowledge to everyone once they were big enough.

I hope that he will write about this someday but for the moment, I'll just write it myself in a document and try to find a way to share it.
You define reality by some set of unprovable axioms. That is your belief system.