skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want to look at a real-world compiler, check out the Go suite of "gc" compilers, which are mostly written by Ken Thompson. The source for the Go ARM compiler is at http://golang.org/src/cmd/5g/, or you you can browse the entire Go source tree at http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse.

The Go compilers are very fast. For most of the code I've developed (several hundred lines per package) I rarely have to wait more than 0.1 seconds to compile and link on my 2.4GHz i5.
I gave you a point, but I don't have a problem with being nasty to insects.
Right, because geeks should be fighting other geeks, for some mystery reason, rather than going somewhere where there is grown-up supervision, safety precautions and people who Know What They Are Doing.

Lousy technique - check. Out of shape guys - check. Amazing size mismatches - check. Hard floor so that the first time someone manages a decent throw or slam, someone can break something - check.

All of these 'Fight Clubs' I've ever seen usually revolve around a couple larger guys using this whole thing as a venue for somewhat sexually charged sadomasochism with their smaller buddies. There's a reason that they're not walking in the door of their local boxing/Muay Thai/MMA/BJJ club instead...
SRC Comparisons
I don't understand why the computer vision community is so locked in to matlab. Sure it's a great tool, but it's only marginally better than what the python community has to offer (that margin being the network effect I'm about to rage against) and it's damn expensive. You'd think the high cost and vendor lock-in would be off-putting to academics (the discounts are such a transparent ploy.) I mean, what good is it releasing some code under the GPL when you need a $2000 system (plus a handful of toolboxes at $1000 a pop, plus maintenance fees) to run it.

What's particularly galling (to a matlab hater like me, anyway) is how some of the most highly-cited and useful work that's made available by researchers is done so only through matlab. The de facto standard benchmark for keypoints (http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/affine/) is a matlab function, but it's not like that code uses matlab in any interesting way, it just reads text files. And even though it's not computationally intesive (the benchmark is only on small set of images) there is a mex function involved to do the actual computation, which makes it a pain in the ass to use with octave. Basically they're using matlab as a $2000 bash shell. Same situation for the standard segmentation benchmark (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/bsd...) And then there's LabelMe (http://labelme.csail.mit.edu/) the "open" annotation tool. They've got a really slick javascript UI for crowdsourcing ground truth collection for image segmentation / object classification tasks. They make the data freely available (which is awesome) but to access it you have to go through a matlab toolbox...? WTF?! I mean really, you've obviously got someone on your team who knows a thing or two about the web: take a page out of Flickr's playbook (after all they've done for the CV community) and make your data available via open standards. There's not even a goddamned download link on the page. It's like they're on the Mathworks payroll.

Grrr...
10k @ 40 hrs per week is $62.50 an hour - if this is a short term contract it's not that good. Even as a longer term contract it isn't that great. If it's W9 it's even worse. If it's 1099 it's a little better, but still not going to get you top talent. My pulse on the current market for rails developer's isn't that current, but I'm guessing you'll need to get closer to $100 to $120 per hour to find talent at the higher end of the spectrum.
No dude- you were right and he was wrong.
Ask HN: Anyone swapped to a MacBook Air as a primary development machine?
I'm considering swapping from my recent gen MacBook Pro and virtual machine development environment to a MacBook Air and a server in a cloud somewhere. Does anyone have any experience on this? Is the latency frustrating?

I'm a LAMP/Ruby developer and I typically work with databases around the 5-10GB mark, so quite light.
All I wonder is, what happens if you delete a portion of the wallets in existence. Given that the supply of bitcoins is limited, does that mean you've essentially permanently destroyed part of the bitcoin economy?
It's called the Subjective Theory of Value. That's what determines every market price. Learn it.
You haven't destroyed part of the economy. You've just made everyone else's bitcoins worth a little bit more.
Plus it's a $65 ebook, I know it's quiet specialized but that's going to turn away anyone who has a passing interest in compilers pretty quickly.
That makes sense. I'm watching the iPhone app market, and just wondering how developers are determining their pricing strategies.
Cholesterol in eggs are lower than assumed
Most of the comments here are "why bitcoin?" I'll ask again, but in a form that I hope is slightly more detailed:

Gold was valuable before it started being used as money. It started being used as money because it has several valuable properties: it's rare, it's portable, it's fungible.

Why would someone start using bitcoin? Who will accept a bitcoin in trade, and why is that bitcoin more valuable to them than $1?
I don't want to be a dick, but you do have some amount of control over the probability of you winning the lottery. If you don't play, it becomes significantly more difficult to win.
Awesome. Quick turnaround. Looks good now.
Nokia S60?

Blackberry for mobile texting?

We're past them now but we still see lots of bad UIs that could learn with their success. I'm thinking about the heterogeneous button layouts on Android and previous generation Windows Mobile devices.
These days there are 'pooled' mining systems in which you can receive payment for working on fractions of a block.
How to pick up Donald Knuth is something computer scientists rarely talk about.
After taking a look at them, the only thing I could find that set them apart was cost... They're _much_ more expensive...
But that doesn't change the fact that, since I was able to get $12.50 every 250 days and now I can get $50 every 1250 days, I'm getting less money per day than before.
Can you give more detail on this? I'm curious if they're really that bad or if this is just a common thing to say because it's cool to hate anything built in PHP. I made a basic template for WP and I thought the little parts of the API that I used were fine. I've never done anything serious with WP but I do run a WP install.
Based on my own minimal experience, the majority of these IRC channels are just a small group of "Anonymous" doing whatever they want, different channels will get publicised at different times through different means, "Anonymous" doesn't exist in any way beyond being a label people use, I guess it could be compared to "emo" or "jock" in high school; they have no "leadership" but people join these groups and label themselves as such.

> The show was run by a couple of admins he identified as "Q," "Owen," and "CommanderX"—and Barr had used social media data and subterfuge to map those names to three real people, two in California and one in New York.

isn't Q the bot that runs on quakenet as a proxy admin?
Bitcoins are a creation by some who don't understand what a currency is. Bitcoins back to nothing and are only useful to the extent that you can fool another ideologue into taking them; for as long as they've been around, it is far, far easier to obtain goods or services with Warcraft gold or Microsoft Points, which aren't even trying to be universal currencies. (Just yesterday I was on a blog that cataloged the reasons Microsoft gave for various bannings, and selling services for Microsoft Points was a very common one. It's so easy Microsoft considers it a pestilence.)

Last time this came up on HN BitCoin's FAQ had a question directly asking what useful thing it backs to. I say "asking" because the answer was basically no answer at all. I see it is no longer there. This is because if they can't answer it, it is better for them not to bring the question up at all, so I guess it's a good move for them.

Currencies have to back to something. Dollars back to being able to pay the various governments of the US not to throw you in jail for breaking various laws (tax, fines, etc); a dollar is useful even in Africa to someone not subject to those laws, because you can trade it to somebody else who has that use. The way an economy works allows the value of a dollar to appear to become severed from its backing and just float in space, propped up only by mutual consensus, but this is an illusion. When the backing goes, so does the currency. History's full of examples, just look up "hyperinflation".

(Also note the difference between backing and rarity. Anybody can make something rare, backing means it's actually worth something even on its own.)

Bitcoins provide an interesting technology platform around which to build a currency, but trying to use them directly as currency is only slightly different than using Monopoly money, and the differences aren't relevant.
'cos "it's rare, it's portable, it's fungible."
Hilarious. :) Some of the other answers are worth reading, too. Specifically, there is a really good one a little lower that is worth reading:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2407540/what-are-the-down...

> The same basic problem you often get with object oriented programming, style rules and just about everything else. It's possible - very common, in fact - to do too much abstraction, and to add too much indirection, and to generally apply good techniques excessively and in the wrong places...[answer continues]
You should ask the FSF (the foundation around the GPL) for the finer details of their preferred interpretation.

By my reading, essentially, anyone who gets a copy of the modified work must also be given the right to give it to others, and to get the source code.

I suppose your competitor could try to conspire with some small, cohesive group of customers to hide from you any evidence/copies of their derivative product. But, the competitor can't make this secrecy a license condition of using what they built from your code, without also violating the GPL's terms. So you could then go after them for violating your copyright, if you know they've added license terms.

(If they have violated your copyright/license, the remedy isn't automatically that you or anyone else gets their source code under the GPL; it could be some other correction/settlement/damages.)
very nice. kept me playing for 20 mins and I will be back.
Wow, I just learned about bitcoins and I have to say they are very clever. Their brilliance is in that they play to the urge to collect in humans.

You run the software and makes bitcoins for you. Almost like earning money in your sleep. And of course once you have "earned" these bitcoins by installing the software you have a psychological inclination to assign actual value to them.

Of course like most things academic it falls flat on its face on execution. My software did not work. I had to spend half an hour diving through forums and wikis to find some obscure command line argument that may make it work, although I am still not sure it is working properly. Of course 99% of ordinary people would have just given up.

So the folks at bitcoin have ensured that only persistent nerds like me use their service.
JUnits a feature all programmers should know about
Agreed. I'm a hockey player too. But hockey requires lots of years of practice and skill to get fun/good at. It's easier to just wack someone with a chair.
Twitter Finds Itself Between A Facebook And A Google
plus - there is slight chance someone will generate same private/public key combo and suddenly "find" "lost" coins =)
A lot of it is institutional buy-in.

Your group might be buying single licenses or something, but pretty much all reasonably big research universities in the US have either a site license or a college/school-level license -- like maybe the whole College of Engineering or whatever.

A lot of engineers (non-CS guys) REALLY like Matlab because it's extremely easy to use with good visualizations and with all the toolboxes and stuff, you can do whatever you want. So you get a lot of ME, EE, CE, other guys saying "we want Matlab" and all of a sudden you have a good reason to get a site license.

Add to that that many computer vision researchers are really EE or applied math guys who aren't going to use some other language/tool and it boils down to free Matlab (because you have the site license) or free Octave (because it's free) and they take Matlab because it's more full-featured. Particularly, until the last few years, the plotting/visualization stuff under Octave was some mix of incomplete and very hacky. The situation has certainly become better, lately, though.

Also, as of say...2006? Matlab was considerably faster.

Also, at conferences, etc, it's easy to find books about Matlab and a salesman with a little booth who's happy to talk to you and they also advertise elsewhere a good bit.

I don't think anybody's preaching Octave, actively, except for the choir.

Edit/addendum: I think Octave is great. Just explaining why I think people choose Matlab.
so, you're saying if paypal/mastercard/visa charged no money for transfer, you would continue using them?

that example isn't reason enough for me to use bitcoin.
Why does the number of bitcoins in circulation converge to an asymptote?
I immediately thought the same thing. This is far, far too similar to TidyPub, though they do both look great... so I guess I can't complain?

Nice work, regardless.
I don't find Convore interesting. Give me IRC over this garbage any day of the week.

Flowdock, Convore, Chatterous, and on, and on. The same idea as IRC but less accessible.

I hate to be so glib but, if you can't script it, who cares?
Yes, but market forces did not solve that problem.

Should we not worry about Facebook because government will solve it?
until you destroy 99% of all the wallets and then you can't exchange them for anything useful.

I'll wait for bitcoin 2.0 :)
Revactor - Actors in Ruby
Those are prices that people are buying and selling bitcoins at. Many thousands are traded every day on mtgox.com alone.
"No central authority" ? Well, I think the guys who decide there will only be 21 million bitcoins can be considered a central authority.
Currency, in any form, is deemed to have a central authority -- national currencies, for example, have real-life value because states limit the available quantity. In this case, the Bitcoins people are acting as the central bank. Especially when I see that the total produced bitcoins will be halved each year by decision.
My prediction:

* Apple will keep April as the refresh month for iPad. Putting iPad in the same iPod event will steal thunder and is no good. And component supplies is tighter for iPad thus it takes few months to meet the demand and September is too tight to the holidays season. When iPad 2 is launched in April, the rest of the world will get it by Jun-Aug which ensure Apple can manufacture enough to meet year end holiday demand.

* There will be no iOS 5 this year. At June WWDC, Lion will be the focus and Apple will give sneak peak of iOS 5 at the event, with beta available in early 2012, ship in June 2012. Aple needs to get its developers ready and it takes time. iOS 5 will share the code base of Lion and will ship after Lion. iOS 5 will include user interface elements changes. I think Apple is keeping two years release cycle for major OS release.

* There will be iOS 4.4/4.5 this year for: iPhone 5, NFC capability, AppleTV 3, App Store for AppleTV and App/Games on AppleTV.
Because every few years (4, I think), the number of bitcoins in each "block" (what you generate) is halved. So right now you get 50 BTC when you generate a block. In a few years it'll be 25. Then 12.5. Etc. In a very long time, they'll round from 10^-8 down to 0, but generating a block will still get you transaction fees from the transactions that occurred since the last block generated.
This site needs a lot of help - and the subdomain redirects (e.g. music.bluerize....) may not be best suited for refinery - but I'll let the core team member of that answer.

What I see from your site is certainly within the capabilities of wordpress. It's just hard for me to justify leaving such a capable system because of a theme issue when you have so much more functionality that is proven.

Just my opinion. FYI - I chose Refinery for the simplicity of a simple site that I needed. I think it's great - but not a match to WP, nor do I think it was meant for that.
Oh, no, I'm a PHP developer myself, and I think that PHP code can be well structured, but Wordpress is generally a mess. It isn't MVC, a lot of it isn't object oriented, and it generally lacks a logical sense of things.

It has gotten better over the years, though, I will grant it that.
"IBM was a systems company, not a hardware company. The difference is that a hardware company doesn't, by and large, develop their own software."

You can't have it both ways. Nokia makes the vast majority of their own software and has for years. They have a huge software development staff, and have acquired a number of major software shops to augment it.

And, while we're on the subject, in the PC market, IBM did not, by and large, develop their own software. They contracted out to Microsoft to make the OS in the beginning, and then teamed up with them to make OS/2. So, technically, I guess you can't compare the two because Nokia makes a lot more of the software on its devices than IBM made on its early PCs. But, that's the opposite of the argument you've made above.

I don't think it really matters, though. I think this is a mistake for Nokia, and I think time will bear that assertion out.

And, of course, if you don't like the IBM and OS/2 comparison, how about SGI and Windows NT? That was a unique relationship between a hardware (and software) company and Microsoft that had disastrous consequences for SGI.
All I did was download the client and run it. It "just worked" for me without doing any special on either Linux or Windows (XP). This was with the current version 0.3.19.
Movie quotes have replaced puns as the lowest form of wit. Yes, we get it. You're quoting a movie. Congratulations.
This article is misinformative. It attemps to talk about the xUnit family of unit testing frameworks, not a feature, and not firstly implemented in Java. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUnit
How Do You Design For Creativity?
Except bitcoin has no way of marking a coin as "lost" so if you did generate that combo, everyone would be in agreement that it already belongs to a lost wallet.
The same with any other product, the internals would only matter to the technical people.
Google-chartwrapper - Python Wrapper for Google Charts
neat idea, long way away.
just a quick question here: why using your standard editor and saving stuff onto the 'Dropbox' folder on the local-machine is not sufficient ?
Bitcoins provide an interesting technology platform around which to build a currency, but trying to use them directly as currency is only slightly different than using Monopoly money, and the differences aren't relevant.

The differences are relevant. Monopoly money makes a perfectly acceptable currency for the game of monopoly. It would make for a currency between neighboring households as well except for the fact that it is easy to copy and therefore impossible to trust.

In this way you can say bitcoin is backed by the mathematical certainty that hashing functions are hard to reverse.
Visualization: A Revision Control System Piano
I really like the idea, but I have a question about how transaction growth can be sustained once all 21MM bitcoins have been generated. In order to support borrowing/lending IMO you need an increasing supply of currency. Otherwise where will the interest on debt come from?

The only other type of non-inflating "currency system" I can think of is the market for collectibles (baseball cards, limited edition artwork, etc.). But collectibles have intrinsic value while bitcoins only have value inasmuch as they are useful for transactions.

So, TLDR I am concerned about the long-term viability of bitcoins
Generally a "because it's cool to hate anything built in PHP" thing.

If you take a look at wordpress's internals especially nowadays they aren't that bad

If anything I would say the codebase is not bad and the user interface is amazing. I love it because I know that even the least tech savvy of my clients can figure out its backend user interface so they can make content changes themselves.

Another great thing is especially at this point in its maturity you wouldn't need to alter the wordpress codebase itself at all to get most of the value out of it.

Plugins,whether found or written by you, can take care of whatever you need.
Poll: How many accounts have you made on HN over the years?
A lot of people make throwaway accounts here and there, so including those, estimate how many accounts you've had since you joined HN.
Only 1
20+
exactly, that is how reddit does it... I wonder if YC has heard of them ;P
It’s Official: Voice is Worthless
I don't understand the revulsion against banking.

I do understand resentment towards some of the financial engineering that occurred in the past fifteen years, especially in areas of exotic securitization in which systemic risks were made opaque.

But that has very little to do with classical banking. To say they have little intrinsic worth is essentially to claim that the industry that governs the allocation of credit in our economy -- that is, the credit line that finances my business's inventory and receivables, the loan that finances my new production equipment, the reasonable mortgage extended so a homeowner can buy a house, along with a substantial downpayment -- is of little use. That's an absurd position, and I don't know how one can reasonably claim that such an important function in our economy is not a respectable profession. My own company, which employs over 100 people, would immediately shut down without bank financing.

Are you confusing the practices of exotic finance, which arguably have a lesser or questionable value to society, with traditional banking?
I don't mine bitcoin. I just earn them as a freelancer.
The same argument could be made about the iMac. It's possible that Apple would say roughly the same thing they would about the iMac: That their goal is to create one device that does everything, without having discrete components that people have to manage, or cables that they have to deal with. It's Apple's style.
It has almost all of the same characteristics of gold, though in some ways more convenient. Bitcoins are rare, portable, fungible, divisible, durable, etc. The system is fairly anonymous, completely decentralized, completely free market. And for many, it's more accessible than gold/silver. Bitcoins have increased in value and are expected to continue increasing in value for some time, unlike government fiat currencies.

If you look at some of the charts from the trading websites, you can see they weren't all that valuable right away. But as more people learned of bitcoin and the way the system is designed with it's anonymity and security, as well as it's hard money qualities, it started to catch on.

A single U.S. penny used to be able to buy lots of bitcoins. At this moment, not even $1 USD can buy a whole bitcoin. It's generally expected that it will take many USDs to buy a single bitcoin before too long.
A few that I swear by:

github http://github.com for source control and wikis

sendgrid http://sendgrid.com or Amazon SES for email

mogotest http://mogotest.com for browser testing

recurly http://recurly.com for managing recurring payments

tender http://tenderapp.com for support / help desk

linode http://linode.com for hosting or Amazon EC2

mocksup http://mocksup.com for quick and easy mockups

clicky http://getclicky.com for analytics

zerigo http://www.zerigo.com for dns and monitoring

AWS http://aws.amazon.com S3, EC2, and everything else :)
And, they've released about 5 updates with new features for that 99 cents.