skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are people working on reversible computing hardware for that very reason. You still have to consume energy to output information, but that's relatively insignificant.

Kurzweil talks about it in The Singularity Is Near, when he examines just how far Moore's Law can go. If we can figure out reversible computing, the upper bound is quite a bit further out, since heat dissipation issues go away. Ask a reversible computer a yes-no question that takes enormous computation, and it will consume no more energy than a rock, until at last you have to pay for your one bit of output.
That would be nearly useless in my opinion.

If you have a table with four rows in it, would you like the database to give you errors when you do a full scan on it?

What you want is an option to throw errors when a query takes too long to execute and most products already have this in the form of a statement timeout parameter.

On a separate note, the balance between "late" optimization and "premature" optimization is thin indeed... These test systems need to run with the same data and on the same hardware as your main database to give meaningful results, so it's generally unavoidable to do some kind of performance tweaking on the already deployed code. And of course as the data distribution and its amount changes, you need to keep on optimizing...
Turns out the most spectacular part of it was how dedicated he was to it, with apparently hundreds of flash drives full of emails.

Even that isn't so spectacular though, considering this is someone dedicated enough to his cause to successfully plan and execute terrorist acts as a career.
Enchanted Objects: The next wave of the web
Linux World Map
IANAT (I am not a teacher):
Hmm.. I certainly don't think classroom style would lead to people not engaging in face-to-face conversations - I think many/most people seek that out by themselves socially (and entertainment technology like say WoW has much more impact on that).
I think it's a really odd context - volunteering in class to answer (normally fairly closed) questions; it's not a presentation, it's not a conversation of peers. I think the main thing you can learn from that is to get over risking being embarassed by asking stupid questions. But I think in terms of social/communication skills, group projects / debates are much more valuable.

I think the main reason people don't speak up is social - it's not seen as a cool or valuable thing to do by peers (and I've seen that even at university level in a self-selected group interested people, for anything beyond small groups, except with exceptional lecturers).

Chatroom style interactions seems to somehow change the dynamic somehow. One of the better set of lectures I had used an everybody-vote-on-answers-to-problems format, and because you're not singled out, there was much more engagement. It also gives the lecturer/teacher more input (whereas volunteers I think are often on extremes of ability curve).
Happiness and Risk
To add to pragmatic's point, they are hiring huge numbers of people to the point the oil companies are buying out hotels.
Indian Entrepreneur claims NY is better. New Yorkers are moving to the Valley cause things are better. Signs of an entrepreneur who cant spot an opportunity around and execute.

Zoho sits out of a city in India named Chennai (Not bangalore) and takes on Google. They make it happen as well. Some folks will always crib, even if life was handed to them on a platter.
That is very much false. I just installed a new motherboard, and I simply needed to re-activate.
My guess is that it's this company called Lodsys LLC. Yesterday someone posted in the TouchArcade developer forum that they received patent claims from them for similar functionality.
Fun fact: Mike Rowe wasn't rich growing up, but because of the way the freeway next to his house cut off access to a large area of land, he had free roam.

His family kept a horse, which he used to ride to school on.
That's a good point, but I'm not sure to what extent it's true; Where did Mike Rowe's grandfather learn to be a jack-of-all-trades? Most likely from his father or grandfather. If parents today choose to be "less interested in how things got made, and more interested in how things got bought" then chances are so will their kin.
While many of those jobs cannot be outsourced in the sense that you cannot send them overseas, they can be outsourced in the sense that you can ship in cheap labour from abroad, have them do a job for a fraction of what you'd have to pay a local, and then ship them back.
Yes, important point - skills are learned and you need to practice them.

I somewhat look forward to fixing stuff. I just fixed our furnace. Even if I need to buy a specialty tool, I'm usually better of getting the tool and learning how to do something myself.

I have a joke I like to tell: The first guy from the [HVAC|Electrician|Plumber] just comes out to get the check. Then next 1 or 2 might actually fix it.

Because I've had so many right out of votec kids come out, don't know what they're doing and don't fix the problem. I'm relieved when I answer the door and an older guy is there.

They really need to apprentice the young guys with older guys more than they do.

(I have some experience here, my brother is a master electrician in 2 states).
I'm British, and it's only in the last few years that I've heard of the American compulsion to modify quotes by adding punctuation.

I'm glad it seems to be vanishing.
+1 for James Altucher's blog, no one writes about business war stories like he does. He lays it out straight for you.
Not as pointless as most people intuitively think. What if the chat server you're using is compromised by a hacker trying to make a name for themselves and they publish all of the chat logs on bittorrent?

Some examples of comments in a private chat that might at first appear like they don't need encrypting, but might come back and bite you in the arse if they ever get published:

"God work is boring today. Need to update my CV/Resume"

"Bob was a bit of an idiot last night wasn't he"

"Thinking of skiving off work tomorrow."

"The wife has been nagging at me all afternoon. Fancy a pint later?"
Mike Rowe is also an Eagle Scout if that matters anymore to you.
The higher you climb, the less hands-on research (including everything from planning to write-up to manual procedures) you do -- absolutely. It's staggering how much money is wasted in the process due to lack of management skills.

One solution would indeed be adding managerial skills to the PhD curriculum. However, most PhD will never reach such a "position of power." Hence, the more efficient way around this issue appears to be hiring of full-time lab managers.

The whole science-pyramid requires restructuring.
> @jsprinkles, it might be worth considering that your tone mars an otherwise worthwhile post.
I've been saying for a long time that we need to adopt use of technology in the classroom more often. Kids are accustomed to interactive media and yet we teach them with books and lectures only. I think this is an interesting idea because some of these children will grow up and be using social media at their jobs one day. That's not to say that it should replace a class discussion, but it's a cool way to let kids express their thoughts without interrupting the lesson. Many seminars encourage the audience to tweet their questions so they can remember them... how many times as a kid did you have your hand up for so long that you forgot what you were going to say? Tweeting your question while it's fresh in your mind would eliminate that problem.
Actually, the App Store in Europe is provided by iTunes S.à r.l, a Luxembourg (EU) company, not Apple Inc., so a US court can't really force anything to be pulled from the App Store in Europe.
You hit on part the problem. People see "vocational" and think "factory". Factory jobs can be outsourced, but you cannot outsource construction work. We need more skilled labor not factory workers.
Mozilla employee on WebGL & Security
> Where did Mike Rowe's grandfather learn to be a jack-of-all-trades?

Some place I did. I picked it up. I kept trying. I read books, I did it. I was also raised on a farm and took wood shop and engine shop, drafting and auto-cad (and physics, chemistry, etc).

Maybe some people just have a knack for this stuff?

(Can't reply directly to this comment)
I liked the article. It was a simplified explanation, which is a good thing in its own right: not everyone reading it cares about the gory details. I'll provide some such details for the curious, though.

Technically, malloc() is not a system call; it is a library function that calls either brk()/sbrk() or mmap() (or just uses memory it already "has"). The choice depends on the situation and just what it's doing.

mmap() engages the VM subsystem, backing a chunk of RAM with part of a given file on disk (in this case with a special flag to not actually do that, but just give the RAM). Of course this will never require actual RAM until you go to use it: that's the whole point of the call. Normally mmap() will not cause OOM issues, because it creates exactly as much virtual memory out of thin air as it requests physical memory. That's not true in this usage, though. I suppose in this usage, it could block off a chunk of virtual memory.

brk() and sbrk() are the more "normal" ways to get extra memory, by expanding the heap. The new memory must be initialized manually (or not, as the runtime prefers). The main reason to not do this all the time is that the heap itself must be contiguous. Using mmap() lets malloc() return pages to the system under more varied conditions and work around parts of the address space that contain other things[1].

Calls to mmap()/brk()/sbrk() are rather expensive compared to malloc() calls. They are system calls, after all. That's why programs will normally ask for more memory than they actually need at the moment: it reduces the amortized runtime cost of malloc(). Linux tries to take advantage of this.

So, the strange Linux behavior is that if a process calls mmap()/brk()/sbrk() (and doesn't hit the addressable limit) Linux will simply record that the process has requested mapping of a particular region of memory. Then, later, the VM subsystem hands out the memory when the process tries to do something to it. The question is, what to do if there isn't any memory to hand out?

There's no way to cause an arbitrary memory access to fail with ENOMEM, so Linux has this hacky workaround where it semi-arbitrarily selects and kills something.

The historical way to avoid this was to have a huge amount of virtual memory, hence the suggestions like "twice the amount of RAM in the system". The system would become unusably slow before the OOM killer would engage, and the user would manually kill some relatively unimportant processes.

[1]- In older versions of the Linux kernel, the program code would be stored in memory about 1G away from the heap. So, as soon as you used about 1G, you'd run into your code and malloc() would no longer be able to brk() for more memory.
Trick is, I don't think Microsoft bought Skype for the consumer service. I think it's solely to make Exchange/Lync a better enterprise offering.

MS has apparently realized that there's still a huge opportunity following the analog PBX shakeout of the last decade. They've been pushing Lync pretty heavily lately and I think the Skype purchase was made so they can directly address the things people ask for when they're evaluating Lync.
Cannot be outsourced... yet. Do you really think it will be very long before small welding robots scale and weld steel on new high-rise construction? A robot that can scale an I-beam doesn't seem too farfetched... and no worker's comp, no danger of people falling off the building, no overtime wages...

Same with plumbing and wiring. I would bet that within a few decades we will see massive use of robots in construction.

Now, for ad-hoc repairs you may still need a skilled human being, but for new assemblies I think the robots are going to take over there sooner or later as well.
Yup, a friend of mine works for a company that develops software used by farmers (among other things). He says that all the farmers he meets are surprisingly tech savvy and always on top of the latest computer and tech trends.
Interesting. I am using Chrome with --ignore-gpu-blacklist flag, and can run webgl apps on browser quite well (one such as Doobs' minecraft demo[1]). Yet, the site won't let me run it on Chrome.

[1] http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_geometry_mi...
It's a pretty ignorant criticism to complain that Apple doesn't do enough B2B, that's like complaining General Electric doesn't do enough pharmaceuticals--it's not even in Apple's business scope to worry about B2B, they make consumer and prosumer products. I treat idiots with the respect they deserve.
You can disable overcommit globally (/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory).

At the application level, you can allocate as much memory as you want and then write to it all. You are not guaranteed not to die of OOM while doing this, but at least you will know right away that you will have enough memory in the long run.

The point of overcomitting is that it reduces the possibility of OOM errors. I think people are just offended that the kernel is killing their process. With overcommits turned off, the OOM would have happened sooner, and I doubt most applications would have handled it any better than the kernel did. If you think the kernel is wrong, or if you don't like this behavior, you can both customize the OOM killer and turn off overcommitting.

Also, overcommits are by no means specific to Linux. FreeBSD, OS X, HP/UX and so on all have it. I _think_ Solaris is the exception here. But if you want the Solaris behavior, you can have it under Linux too.
tech news: http://sayem.me

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

http://finance.yahoo.com/

Twitter, Reddit, StackOverflow, High Scalability
There's nothing wrong with "An historic event".

I'm from London.

(However, it does irritate me no end to hear RP speakers say "An historic", pronouncing the "h")
It's interesting that our solution to "nobody wants to do physical labor" is to outsource it to other countries and our solution to "nobody wants to do professional knowledge work . . . for cheap" is to outsource it to other countries and supplement with H1Bs as much as possible. What I find odd is the difference in response to each.

If you're a professional that works with knowledge, you're told "hey, that's the world market, baby -- if you can't compete on a fifth of your salary, then to hell with you".

If you're a professional that works in labor/manual work, we involve unions and national programs to re-invigorate interest in the field of welding or laying pipes or wiring homes and treat it like news that the national flag has just been replaced.

I find both a concern, yet am bothered by the seeming double-standard.

As a personal anecdote: My grandfather was a pacifist who none-the-less served his country when called during WWII. He was an engineer who was responsible for a lot of stuff in Anchorage during the time. (He had an amazing panoramic photo set he took of Valdeze back when it was whole). He was a pianist. He was a chemist. He touch mathematics in college. He threw discus in college track and field. His home was filled with books on chemistry, math, history, physics, geography. I grew up surrounded by stacks of OMNI, National Geographic, Discovery, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and plenty of other great reads. And for a living, he chose to build houses. He became a general contractor who didn't really contract out that much work. He did almost everything himself, except pour foundations and wire the homes. He built beautiful homes that often took two to four years and cost a few million dollars (and some people hired him more than once to build their homes over the decades as their tastes evolved). He just loved building stuff and working outside and he did it his entire life. I was also fortunate to spend many years of my childhood going onto his job-site with him day after day and goofing around, helping, watching. There's a lot to be said for loving your job and doing it excellently.
LimeWire Pays RIAA $105 Million, Artists Get Nothing
Actually == true and == false will still work, === true and === false will fail (as the return value is now "disabled" or undefined).
Believe it or not, in addition to the other tidbits people have posted here, Mike was also a professional opera singer in a former life! He's one of the most interesting and real guys on TV, IMO.
If you can afford to rent a decent place you can afford a small house. Just need to get the down payment, which is a matter of discipline to save it up.
As a student, this also comes from the department. It is apparently urgent and important that there is a talk in three weeks time which is optional!
Yes, I've been in that situation and it really sucks.

You can't modify your living environment. You can't just string cat6 and wire up your place.

I think this speaks somewhat to the principles of Christopher Alexander http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander

Paraphrase: Humans should be able to modify their living/working space.

There is nothing quite like building something real. Programming is cool and I love it, but building something real (and that other people can use), modifying your environment and customizing your space is just so damn satisfying.
JQuery 1.6 and .attr()
How can you explain cancer clusters?
I do have to choose among rules. The choices that I make are also a signal. I am an American, and I work in a profession where writing is important. I try to make style and grammar choices that match those of well-thought-of American writers in my profession. I do try to avoid choices that might make some people think I don't know the "correct" definitions of words (nauseous vs. nauseated, for example). I don't care as much about "will" and "shall," because American writers I respect mostly use "will," unless they are writing statutes or contracts. Also, I try never to correct other people; I am not much of a prescriptivist.
Why Hourly Billing is Inherently Flawed
How about evented frameworks like Tornado (python) or Goliath (ruby)?
> AOL killed CompuServe. The Internet killed AOL.

I remember quite distinctly that AOL connected me to the Internet. I may be misunderstanding the article though.
Don't post reports from centre right think tanks if you want to be balanced. You could find an opposing report from a think tank on the other side of the spectrum.
Ah yes, I forgot all about that. Guess it's not a prediction if it's already come true. Anyway, more focus will be put on such things, as we're about as far along as we can get with the initial fast compilation.
We use a Perl Bot for this. It will uses POE-Components to connect to the IRC and to the XMPP and then dispatches the messages to one from the other.

If you are interested, just join us on IRC and we talk about it :)
I think the canonical response to this comes from Harry Frankfurt:

"""
Both lies and bullshit can either be true or false but bullshitters aim primarily to impress and persuade their audiences, and in general are unconcerned with the truth or falsehood of their statements (it is because of this that Frankfurt concedes that "the bullshitter is faking things", but that "this does not necessarily mean he gets them wrong"). While liars need to know the truth to better conceal it, bullshitters, interested solely in advancing their own agendas, have no use for the truth. Thus, Frankfurt claims, "...bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are" (Frankfurt 61).
"""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
The tube (which i use about once a year) is considerably better at this (different, tighter consortiums). There are a bunch of good apps like Tube Boards and Tube Status (if I used it more I'd pay for some). Even just that, the current 30mins of the timetable, and any delays as a whole, would be a big improvement on what there is now - announcements on the platform.
Buying back shares doesn't raise the stock price because it doesn't change the underlying fundamentals. If the stock goes up after a buyback, it only stays up if there was a reason other than a share buyback.
I don't think the people in skilled trades really want congress to fix the skill gap problem. Just about every state sets incredibly high bars to be licensed. To be a licensed plumber in Massachusetts you have to pass a test (with only 70% correct!) and then work for 4 years before you can apply for a license. Plumbers around Boston get $100/hr and are hard to find. If Congress wants to allow more people to do skilled work they could mandate lower requirements. Kansas and Pennsylvania, for example, do not require plumbing licenses and I can personally vouch that toilets in those states do in fact work.
I would guess 24in60.com - people occasionally respond not to the comment they mean to but that comment's parent, and the only other discussion on keane's comment is about 24in60.com. That's just an educated guess, though, as there's no way to know unless kebaman clarifies his comment (either through responding or editing it).
> People who want chat logs can simply generate them on the client side.

That wouldn't fulfil 90% of the purpose of keeping logs, for me at least. Not everyone has the same requirements as you - I for one very rarely bother with OTR, but I have to search my chat logs for something on an almost daily basis. I use XMPP on my work PC, on my laptop and desktop at home, and on my phone. Splitting the logs across all those devices would make them literally useless.
I always suggest prosody :-) And we use this as our XMPP server cause its the modern way to use XMPP :)
I started to write a reply to some of the comments here but ended up turning it into a blog post:
http://ejohn.org/blog/jquery-16-and-attr/

Looks like someone has submitted it to HN as well:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2544698
But there will be a human somwhere in the chain. Just as IT made business more efficient AND more expensive at the same time. There will be someone that has to maintain the robots, someone who can program the robot to do what it needs to do, etc.

Unless of course you think these robots will have AI. In that case, why would they build buildings for us, vs ruling over us?

I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
Windows 7 is a decade behind OS X.

Why does Apple need to worry about B2B? They sell consumer products--iPads, iPhones, iPods, Macbooks--that's where they make the bulk of their revenue/profits.

The idea that it's valid to criticize Apple for not having enough B2B is like complaining that Fender doesn't make flutes. It just isn't their business.
Don't people commit crime in North Korea? Or is it just a nation of activists and saints?
How about this. I visited China last year, and saw/heard about the following.

Say you want to build a new building. The workers are brought to the construction site, and they live on the site 24/7, taking shifts to sleep in a small cot. When they are not sleeping they are working (7 days a week). They do not see their families for months during the job. They work on site for several months, and will only receive pay after the building is done. If you have to leave the site for some reason (say a sick or dying relative, or you get sick yourself) before the building is done, you forfeit all your pay. You could have worked 6 months on a job, and if you hurt yourself, you go home without even $1.

It's a deplorable condition being forced to live where you work. It's a prison, even if voluntary.
probably 24in60.com