skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well it's a complicated system. Whilst individual traders might benefit from faster trading if you consider the health of the system as a whole, which favours steady predictable controlled growth, faster trading may introduce instabilities which result in reduced profitability.
The Tax Haven That's Saving Google Billions
Good point.

Although this doesn't solve the issue you raised, one change I would like to see made on the browser side is sandboxed tabs. As far as I know only Chrome is sandboxing tabs at the moment. I'd like to see Firefox and Safari do the same so one bad javascript doesn't kill the browser entirely.

One way those issues could be addressed is by Google page ranking. If certain abusive practices were highlighted as universally obnoxious, I'm sure Google could create filters to reduce the search ranking of those pages using obnoxious HTML5 and JS. My reasoning here is that the same executives and elements of corporate culture responsible for obnoxious uses of Flash and other technologies today are the same ones that push the hardest for SEO. At least at the HTML5 and JS level, Google could parse for obnoxious code, which AFAIK is something they can't do today with Flash. It's a bit of a stretch but certainly a possible solution.
Sorry to nitpick, but one should say

"The language I wish Go were"
It's not a case of them needing to not care about it, just that if they understood how the balance of ups and downs would end up over life, they would be more able to get through those years.
So many I wouldn't know where to start. Databases have had not-null constraints for years, but an accurate model often means having null values.

A better improvement would be to handle null references better - Rails' whiny_nil support is great for example.
Isn't the optimistic guess at Drake 2 or something (correct me if I'm wrong)? That's not /very/ far from zero, and if you consider that it's the number in the Milky Way I'd say that's pretty very much close to zero.
Network troubleshooting: Checking Your arp Entries
Brian Chesky, of AirBnB, gave a talk at startup school that touched on this topic: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

His advice was that "you always focus on supply first... then you shift to demand." Here that would mean to try to grab producers before promoters.

The idea is that producers are more willing to list their movies on your site, no harm done, but promoters won't be interested unless you have some movies for them to choose from.
It's not just you! http://www.patrick-wied.at looks down from here.
If you are really interested in this, read "Rare Earth", http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/d..., it goes through an incredible mass of astronomical, geological, and biological information. It concludes that, because so many things had to go just right, and so many others were completely random, primitive life (bacterial-level) is likely to be more common than previously thought, while advanced life (multicellular) is likely to be much less common. Because of the sheer size of the galaxy, it is probable that other intelligences evolved elsewhere, but they are probably going to be too far away for any sort of contact, even receipt of potentially meaningful radio. It is a well-written book, despite the amount of information it is very readable.
Innovative Campstove Generates Electricity
Ouch. In retrospect, "Falling Sky Entertainment" was a good name choice for the production company.
"Perhaps it stems from Apple's claim that Flash is bad for battery life"

Supporting multiple similar runtimes (HTML+JavaScript vs Flash vs Java vs SilverLight vs somebody else's kitchen sink) may make sense, but eats disk space, and, once people start using them, RAM and CPU bandwidth (due to less sharing of code between programs).

Including Flash and Java made sense a couple of years ago on the Mac, but when designing the iPhone, Apple, as they always do, revisited earlier decisions, and decided they should go. Given RAM constraints, I can see why.

On these new MacBooks, I guess Flash was dropped not because of RAM constraints, but because the disk is relatively small. It is but a tiny part of that 64 GB, but they probably must make many small cuts to give the user as much space as possible for his own stuff.
The only case is when you want to express data is missing (not that a variable is unitialized, but that there's nothing there, think ternary boolean) and that is very neatly taken care of by option types (ML's `option`, Haskell's `Maybe`) which you can easily replicate via union types (create a type Nothing with a single value `nothing` and replace what was formerly a nullable type `T` by the union type `Nothing | T`; depending on whether you want these to be easy to use or not, you may or may not want to add the ability to lift computations into the option type)
I upvote based on content not title. Perhaps a mod can change it to "New theory suggests Mitochondria precede complexity in early life" I definitely would classify engulfing mitochondria as not just another mutation, it's an entirely different thing.
If it's online I'll check Merriam-Webster. If I notice I keep mis-spelling a word, I'll dedicate my mistake to memory.
Ask HN: How to learn Javascript and HTML for devs coming from C++/Java/Python?
I am a programmer who has good knowledge of C++, Java, Python and even some Common Lisp and looking to learning a bit of HTML, CSS and Javascript. What resources will you recommend for learning these to a developer who is experienced in other languages?
tl, dr; This post ended up way longer than I expected. Super science summary: I wish Go had tuples, unions, constructors, no Nil, exceptions, generics, some syntax sugar, and ponies that shoot Cheez Whiz out of their noses.

There's always D, if you want more whiz bangs. It's been oft quoted, that good library design involves leaving someone wanting more. I think one form of good language design involves this too. Go is supposed to be minimalist. I think it's a good sign if people keep wishing it were just a little less minimalist.
For the sIFR thing don't blame the website designers, blame the browsers and HTML group.

And as for 'more appropriate standards-based techniques', the phrase gives me the creeps.

We're living in an age of a range of wonderful languages, fantastic form markup languages, superb IDEs.

Apart from in web applications.

Languages? Javascript. One choice. And a very odd one at that. Markup? HTML. Yuck, no extensibility, barely updated for 10 years, way, way, way behind flash or xaml, it hasn't even got close to what's available to us on desktops yet. Javascript IDEs? None of any note that I've come across.

Wouldn't it be great if Chrome, Safari or Firefox added in python or ruby client-side support. Or all of them, really kill off IE...

It's a dire state of affairs, Microsoft are to blame, but I wouldn't celebrate 'standards-based' techniques. They're frustratingly constricting and old fashioned.
I'd suggest getting in early with apps called Aardvark if they're really only giving people an alphabetical list of apps to scroll through rather than any way to spatially group them.

Works out well for AT&T though:

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/3982/HTCSurround-9483_575px...
I'm only 4 hours into knockout.js but this seems to be the key benefit.

I've been massacring functions that manipulate multiple elements and instead am directly tying the behaviors to the underlying data. My future self is very pleased with me.
Great. This gives you syntax-highlightning when viewing a plaintext source files using chrom{e,ium}.
Masan, South Korea: The Place With the Fastest Internet
> So many I wouldn't know where to start. Databases have had not-null constraints for years, but an accurate model often means having null values.

These nulls are a different issue than the initialization-originated nulls (that is in fact an other issue with null: they can mean both "I have nothing to put there" and "I forgot to put something there").

> A better improvement would be to handle null references better

No.

> Rails' whiny_nil support is great for example.

whiny_nil exists because you can't do much more in a dynamically typed language, apart from making nil a message sink. Go is not a dynamically typed language, and statically typed language communities have found much better ways to handle most cases where you would use null references decades ago.
Monkey Peeler - Patent
> so doesn't depend on a VM

But "dependence" on VM is nothing tragic if the GC is not in the game. If you'd imagine a VM without GC then what remains is just the potential for run-time JIT and optimization which can actually be a good thing! There's a long history of p-code interpreters which provided the more compact code, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_P-Code At that time tracing and JIT would have been too heavy thing to do but today it could maybe be interesting to have something like that.

And as far as I know, Go doesn't "depend" on VM but does on GC, but D also generates the native code but doesn't have to use GC and I think that is an important advantage for such a kind of the language.
How to measure page load time with google analytics
Isn't this one of those cases when the credits of a movie mention "Alan Smithee"?
Nice observation brudgers. My work at Apple is developing internal tools using scripting languages. As a CS student, I feel that it is not challenging for my programming skills but is a good environment to learn latest mobile communication (2G, 3G and more).

Without brand value taken into consideration, I feel inclined towards Amazon. Can someone please suggest which team in Amazon would be the best to work with?
Touch screens on a laptop or computer are a stupid idea and Steve explained why right in the speech.

They don't need a touch screen they already have a fantastic horizontal touch space on the device: the trackpad. Personally I would look to see trackpads getting more and more functionality.
If you read the post instead of just the funny tldr, you realize that many of the demands would make Go simpler and/or more orthogonal and/or smaller.
It may have changed, but to register your copyright, you send (I think two) copies to the LoC with the registration. The issue isn't whether LoC gets a copy, the issue is their ability to backup or transfer the information in the event the media deteriorates or for other risks.
I think it's worth pointing out that underneath, most of the libraries those dynamic languages are using are written in C or even assembly in some cases.

I'm not saying that those benchmarks don't have value, but saying that Go's barely faster than the best dynamic languages doesn't ring true to me.
Website Security | Tricks Window
Japanese diva plays massive stadium concerts. Also, she’s completely fictional.
"Down the road there will definitely be a need for data marketplaces, common platforms where producers and consumers of large information sets can connect, just as there are for other commodities." MS is entering this area with project "Dallas" on their Azure platform: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/dallas/default.aspx
The original article [1] is titled "The energetics of genome complexity", which is much more reasonable. It argues that the energy processing of mitochondria was necessary in order for eukaryotes to expand in complexity.

The article is behind a paywall, so I can't read the details.

Anecdotically, there exist anaerobic eukariot cells that live on hydrogenosomes [2]. I don't know if they were originally aerobic and lost their mitochondria, or if they evolved in parallel.

There also exist sea slugs that live in symbiosis with the chloroplasts of the algae they eat [3], so this kind of symbiosis has happened more than once.

1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7318/full/nature0...

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogenosome

3. http://www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/content/full/123/1/29
From talking with someone at Google Zurich who is involved in page-rank computations, those jobs run on ~10k to 20k cores. Of course Google has many more distributed around the world, but unless something has changed in the last few months, they are not running single jobs on more than about 20k cores.
You are absolutely right. i) Pay - Both Apple and Amazon pay 90k, with Amazon pipping with 25k more as sign on bonus. ii) I feel that my work at Amazon would be better, even though I am yet to make my team selection iii) Both seem to have same culture.. which is slog for at least 10 hrs a day. :(
Google must name YouTube cyber bullies
I mostly program in Clojure now and I have only used Go a little bit. However, I really like Go.

I have a lot of respect for the people who developed Go. I'm sure in their many years of designing operating systems and languages that the features described in these obvious criticisms were considered. That is not to say the language shouldn't be criticised but, in this case, a little research would have made the article a more interesting read.

To take two examples. Constructors are easy to write in GO:

http://sites.google.com/site/gopatterns/object-oriented/cons...

An exception-like mechanism has been proposed:

http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thr...
I believe that the current WebObjects license (while no longer having a licensing fee) stipulates that it should be run on Apple hardware. Some wags have speculated that it would be OK to run it on an Mac Pro even with Windows 7.

I don't believe this is an immediate issue, but one that people doing long term planning should consider. If you want to write/run Java code, have at it. If you want to write something that will be widely distributed, you may want to think carefully.
Another way of saying this is "MacBook Air ships without common cause of poor browser performance and crashes."
I think Eclipse is in a better position to handle this because it uses SWT instead of Swing. SWT is not produced by Apple, and uses native widgets (for OS X, there is both a Cocoa and Carbon version). So in theory, Eclipse could run on something like Soylatte without having to use X11.

It's the Swing apps (such as Netbeans, etc) that are potentially in trouble. Apple has been maintaining their own code for Swing. If they are going to stop maintaining this, I hope they contribute their changes back to OpenJDK so that someone attempting to maintain a Mac version does not have to reimplement this.

I wonder if Apple is really going to stop maintaining their port of Java, or if this move is to be able to say "you can't use Java for App Store for Mac apps because we could possibly stop including it." Or maybe they are planning to hand over development to Oracle.
I feel that my working hours per week is going to be the same at both places. I do not know about being on-call for support in Amazon.
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Ask HN: Need your feedback on application functionality/usability & UI
We are in the process of launching a cloud based solution that will help small businesses, departments/groups and freelancers to manage their customers, employees and projects.

I need help from the community to give feedback on application functionality/usability and user interface. Any form of guidance and suggestion (as well as criticism) will be greatly appreciated.

What problem are we trying to solve?
Having worked with several small and medium sized business, we’ve seen that they do not have IT/technical resources (and budget, of course) to deploy tools and solutions that automates data management of customers, employees and related interactions. We are trying to solve this problem by providing cloud application that will give necessary functionality to businesses, all integrated with each other and will not require any IT/technical resources to maintain it.

Currently, the functionality includes customer management, customer support/portal, project management, employee management and business collaboration using twitter/yammer style messaging as well as document sharing.

We’ve setup a demo account that can be used for login to the application (or you could create your own beta account at http://www.appsoncloud.com).

Demo application URL: http://bit.ly/doMilQ

You can use any user name/password combination from below list:

1. demo/demo - Employee login

2. demo1/demo1 - Employee login

3. demo2/demo2 - Employee login

4. demo@client.com/demo - Customer login (to access support portal)
It's also down from here: http://www.websitecheck.org/www.patrick-wied.at
You have to remember, different people think in different ways. I'm a search focused user, and use Spotlight extensively, however my wife much prefers to navigate around the operating system in a more visual manner.
I was under the impression that iTunes (the backend server) was all written in Java using Apple's own WebObjects framework that they ported from Obj-C.

Have they ported it back, or are they planning to ship OpenJDK for server purposes?
> I'm more worried about development of server stuff becoming more painful, particularly as Clojure, my favourite language, is (currently) JVM-based

That is what the clojure guys get for investing in a dead platform. Java as a language was dying. The sun-oracle deal means that the Java platform is also dead for open source.
<fx: sighs and starts rant and posibly excessive claims unsupported by objective evidence>

It's not the math, it's not the advanced concepts. It's the ability to think in abstract terms, about abstract objects, rigorously sometimes, intuitively sometimes.

It's not the direct benefits. Knowing topology or analysis is unlikely ever to help you. Being able to do topology and analysis probably will, in subtle, unexpected and most often unnoticed ways.

Every single advanced athelete does progressive weight training. Why? Certainly not because they want to be able to lift weights. No, it's because of the side-effects. Similarly doing advanced math trains your mind in ways that are relevant to programming, and unobtainable elsewhere.

I won't convince people who are already convinced that math is useless, and most people who haven't done any advanced math will see that they don't appear to use it, and thereby believe that it's useless.

It's all blub. Obviously.
I do not have any personal location preferences. Bay area is cool but Seattle is cooler (thanks to the 9-month per year rain) :)
Yes it is. Check Alexa or Compete, Justin.tv is ahead by a significant margin.
I am building one now, and they do allow you to create a native installer for all three platforms. The only thing that sucks is that you have to build the installer on said platform. Not that big a deal with vmware, but still kind of annoying.
It also means that Apple has to apply fewer engineering resources to supporting Java.

OS X and iOS, full steam ahead !
That is very bad news for those of us who use Java on Mac OS X. And I don't mean UI programming, but developing server Java (or any JVM-hosted language, such as Clojure) applications.
Like the result from the article. Showing the page load time vs percent of users is a very useful way to analyze site performance:how many percentage of site users are experiencing slow performance?

Further, combing this with web timing API would be even more interesting.
64-bit types and arithmetic on 32-bit CPUs
A few links that might be useful:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799565

http://hbr.org/2006/10/strategies-for-two-sided-markets/ar/1

http://blog.asmartbear.com/marketplace-business-model.html
I just spent a couple weeks comparing Jira, Bugzilla, Fogbugz, and Redmine. I'm at multi-faceted design group doing firmware, desktop software, and silicon design(multiple codebases / documentation), and I wanted a system that will work for everyone, and let me move issues across projects to their root cause. I also wanted it to have email-in support to make sure employees have no excuse to not file an issue.

Fogbugz: likely my favorite from a user-interface standpoint. But I needed project categories, something you can now write a plugin for, but didn't have time to deal with. Their Kiln product looks great, but you may need to check if it's svn/git compatible -- I think it's primarily mercurial.

Redmine: I would've chose this if it was a small group. It's free, open source, lets you create compartmentalize into subprojects probably more than you should. But I had fears of ruby scaling out to a bunch of people. There were also some UI quirks that bugged me (e.g. global search should always be enabled, even in a project), although there's some gorgeous themes coming out for redmine soon.

JIRA: What I ultimately chose. It's definately a "wine of fear", that is an enterprise product with many features thrown in not to offend or lose business. Because of this, you get a fairly boring UI, and can feel bizarrely complex to configure. That said, it works.
This is more analogous to multi-tasking. First they poo pooed it, then they came out with a variation that wasn't what people asked for (but was plenty) and then explained why they wont do exactly what people asked for.

They can't do a satisfying touch-screen on computers because it can't be done. There are certain tasks that are fundamentally "mousy" today. Can you imagine doing those tasks with your hands stretched out in front of you? Imagine a designer working in photoshop all day having to hold his arms out in front of him for 8+ hours a day.

And there's no reason to. We're already long used to the indirection of a mouse. The trackpad suitably acts like a touch screen that just isn't the actual screen.
Right. The language makes you check for nulls at the few places where the result can go null, and all other tedious null-checking goes away forever.

All the advanced type system jiggery-pokery aside -- that's probably the best "normal programmer" example of why ML & Haskell do static typing better. The ALGOL family of languages should have done that years (decades!) ago.
Yes. It depends on the case, but sed, awk and grep are also useful.
> Whereas I can understand the motivation for it missing from iDevices, this makes far less sense.

How about support costs. If Apple doesn't supply it, and you install it, then have problems, who ya gonna call ?

I'd say, call Adobe. Let their support call numbers spike off the chart.
Why is this at the top of HN?
...
And while everything you say may be true, I still don't think most people care. In fact, I'm fairly certain most people don't care. Ask your average developer, much less consumer, the difference between Chrome and Android with respect to openess and you'll probably get blank stares.
...

and what subset care about:

the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"

?
I had wanted to create something similar at one point but thought there was too much activity in this space. I now see that there was definitely room for improvement. I like what you've done so far. The hardest part will, of course, prevent gaming of the system once it gets popular. But assuming you have a good strategy for that it looks like you have a winner on your hands.
Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself
"Chance of life forming from non life * age of the universe * number of stars * the chance a star has an earth like planet, is far from zero"

You have no proof for this, and things can well be the other way round. Let

n = age of the universe * number of stars * the chance a star has an Earth like planet

n is a number that we currently have a pretty good guess at. Let p = chance of life forming from non life on Earth-like planet within a given year. We are basically clueless as to the value of p. p may well be much less than 1/n, which would make our biosphere very special indeed.