skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MNesia is basically a built-in, inasmuch as I'm not sure you can find an Erlang install anywhere that doesn't have it (barring somebody going in and specifically plinking it). It ships in the open source release. (OTP application just means that it conforms to the OTP interfaces, so for instance you can "application:start(mnesia)", or depend on it in other OTP applications such as ones you've authored, etc.) Riak is legitimately a third party library, but does provide an existence proof that the specific problem chosen to highlight Erlang's weaknesses does still seem to work.

That said, the author has a point. But by privileging actors as much as it does, Erlang gets a lot of great stuff out of it that have no effective competition in other languages, OTP in particular. Haskell may offer every sensible concurrency construct under the sun, but you don't get OTP to speak of. (Some efforts are underway, but they are new and I'd be surprised if they are stable yet.) Erlang is definitely niche, but it fits that niche very well and the niche is larger than it may initially appear... but it certainly isn't the best choice for all purposes. Nothing is, and nothing can be. The argument is a bit klunky but the point is still ultimately correct.
> By the way, if you are a web developer, I strongly encourage you to use the Firefox Beta or Aurora channel:

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but if you're really expecting a lot of professional web developers to do that, I think you're crazy.

Now that both Chrome and Firefox are on silly release schedules, we waste enough time just keeping up with the breaking changes and random UI rearrangements in day-to-day work. Who has time to spend reading yet another set of release notes every few days, when there's a good chance that nothing in them will be usable in production projects for several years anyway?

If you really want to drive progress, I implore you to stop this madness, and allow a few months for the industry to consolidate so we have some sort of standards to work with. You've made your point: the W3C is a dinosaur chasing a snail riding on a tortoise and you can go faster. But until the new technologies are standard enough that we only have to develop for them once and we can rely on that development still working in a couple of years, all your hard work is being wasted because we still have to write to the lowest common denominator.

You are the new Netscape, Microsoft are the new Microsoft, and now there are several other major browsers we all have to cope with as well. Going it alone just doesn't cut it, whichever of you does it.
I thought the limit was 16 actually. Under 16 is still fine as long as you have adult supervision. (IIRC…)
That this post has so many upvotes is evidence that a lot of nonprogrammers read HN.
> And Apple just patented it so no-one else
> can implement it....

[citation needed]
Oh, I was thinking it might be the 17th Century English philosopher.
The PHP array is a wonderful data structure with an awesome set of properties. This blog post contains a lot of "problems" that are somewhat trivial and have been reasonably solved in PHP. This comment will be downvoted to oblivion without discussion.
At first, I thought that Google Chrome was preparation for Chrome OS... but now it seems like Google is building an OS right into Chrome browser.
Yes, there is. I can't trust a service that makes these kinds of mistakes.
Arguing that this cannot reasonably be done is unconvincing when well-designed languages like Lua pull it off.

The only thing about Lua's tables that consistently confuses people is the behavior of the length operator in the presence of "holes." The previous, somewhat confusing definition in Lua 5.1 (http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#2.5.5) has been replaced with:

The length of a table t is only defined if the table is a
sequence, that is, all its numeric keys comprise the set
{1..n} for some integer n. In that case, n is its length.
Note that a table like

{10, 20, nil, 40}

is not a sequence, because it has the key 4 but does
not have the key 3. (So, there is no n such that the
set {1..n} is equal to the set of numeric keys of
that table.) Note, however, that non-numeric keys do
not interfere with whether a table is a sequence.

A program can modify the behavior of the length
operator for any value but strings through the __len
metamethod.

(http://www.lua.org/work/doc/manual.html#3.4.6)
18 is for strong liquor, it is 16 for the rest (e.g. beer, wine).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age
Effective Ways To Write An Essay Introduction
An essay introduction is vital for the success of the essay. If the introduction is boring, the reader will not even attempt the complete reading of the essay. Therefore, all students should be conversant with writing an effective essay introduction.
When you say several use Linux for speed advantages, do you also include OSX?
Backbone.js, now realtime with Pusher
Some people might also be concerned that the note about sending emails wasn't added to the post until after there was mass outrage at the lack of notification. Makes it feel very inauthentic, as though they were really hoping they'd be able to sweep it under the rug.
Yes, of course. From your previous messages it was looking like you were assuming that private files were "safe", that's why I wanted to add the detail.

I agree as well on the need for an encrypted solution. I'm surprised that Dropbox hasn't been proposing this already. Well, unless they intend to have access to the contents, themselves..
IPhone 5 rumored to sport "radical new case design"
If you mute the computer before rebooting, it doesn't make any noise.
Googling "Show HN" returns HN's startups as results (not HN posts)
Infinite too
As stated above Javascript does not do this it has separate array and Object types. Javascript developers might.
While it might fail, it shows that Nokia is still able to release a phone with some kind of "wow" factor while everyone tends to describe them as "dead", "MS-owned" etc.

Let's hope that the software is as fast and as bug free as in the demo video!
I think you should have seperate models for B2B and B2C and give them each the respect they deserve. Trying to paint all by the same brush will either drive your users down (if you charge) or drive your revenue down (not charge).
Totally agree with both of you.

Tumblr is one of the simplest api's I have ever worked with, though. To decide not to use it because there isn't some one-click dashboard csv export or migration tool.. that's such a weird decision. That's like saying I don't want to use [redacted social networking site] because it doesn't feature [one-click-tool] to move to [alternative redacted social networking site]. I mean, I guess. But, if your concern is about ownership of the data and you're treating their service/app as a datasource, I'm sorry but you're going to have to get your hands a little dirty to export that data into your preferred format.
More background: In that particular case, the password of an account was obtained on the customer's computer (a keylogger or a phishing attack targeted at the customer directly), as opposed to the bank's network being attacked and the customer chosen at random. Basis of the ruling was that the bank could have prevented the attacker from withdrawing money, which could have been flagged as suspicious, but it was up to the customer to protect his account, not the bank to act as guardian to every customer.

In regards to this MtGox issue using the same argument, if it is known that an attack did happen, an that attack was directed at MtGox directly, then yes, they should roll back that trade because someone is out money/BTC due to an attack that could not have been prevented by that account holder. The only way to legitimately know who is responsible for the sell off is to be transparent, however, it seems that MtGox hasn't fully released details of the incident and we are all speculating on what exactly happened.
Three words: distributed hash table. Erlang has numerous well worn libraries and packages that provide this functionality. The fact that you are even thinking about creating a single process to handle all lookups means you don't understand message passing based concurrency yet.

This article takes a deeply interesting problem (paradigms in distributed computing) and manages to discuss nothing of substance.
The way I write software, such values of user_select_sort would never even be possible... It's much slower to compare strings than to compare numbers, and passing long descriptive values that are actually booleans or short enums is just a waste of bandwidth (assuming they are passed as GET/POST variables).

Why not just pass numbers instead?
I think it's always using D3D on Windows. Take a look with depends.exe on

depends "C:\Users\<user-name>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\14.0.797.0\libglesv2.dll"

It shows that D3D.DLL is used. There is simply no reason to complicate the life of QA and have two renderers.

Besides tracking down what works and what doesnt is very hard, and often depends on other things - drivers, settings, etc. (I have some experience with it, I work in gamedev company and we do port to PC regularly).

I myself like OpenGL much more than D3D, but my graphics peers think that D3D gives you more power to the metal. Now AngleProject is just trying not to be close to the metal, but to use what seems to work a bit more than OpenGL. (Although in honestly I haven't seen problem with desktop OpenGL on my Vista and XP machines - I have to use Maya, MotionBuilder and others and they do use OpenGL).
gah -- I wouldn't put that much faith in Alexa and ComScore data sources. Also, as if apps were any different than the web -- the web is where the data comes from!
Thoonk: Persistent/fast system for push feeds, queues, and jobs, using Redis
Tor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29

Obviously you will be intimidated by the government if you run an exit node, or perhaps any tor node at all. If you're an academic with tenure, or independently wealthy go for it.

If you need to work for a living and do not have tenure, well perhaps consider helping others run tor. Or start a non-profit with the goal to promote freedom, and raise funds, and pay to install public tor terminals anywhere that's willing to host them.
Rambler-Fund Launched for Online Start-Ups
HTC EVO - a Quick and simple review.
Watch"green lantern'online'free'megavideo
watch"green lantern'online'free'megavideo
Hal was a test rider talent and arrogant but the Green Lanterns have little respect for humans who have never used the infinite power of the ring before But Hal is clearly the missing piece of the
Quite. The whole point (haha) of an array is that you take a pointer to its first item + (the size of each item * the index number) and get a pointer to the item you want, which is bloody quick. No hashtable can compete with that - a hash is a compromise for when you can't use an int for whatever reason.
This might work temporarily, but I argue that it is still very important to protest against this type of development, because in the long run the law will win. I for one do not want to see international communication criminalized. I still remember how out of touch my country was back in the 90s before sattelite TV and the internet. Problem is that its very profitable to create submarkets, so the pressure from the industry to implement restrictions will always be on. To break the pattern, we must fight back and try to make international communication a human right.
There are two ways to make a Python program faster: make the Python program faster, or implement computationally intensive parts in another language (including using a library written in another language).

Sure but why not do both??

Take the most computationally intensive parts, use a different language and use an efficient data structure in that other language. That might seem like a lot of work but fortunately there are handy-dandy libraries easily available to let you do this with even less effort than a simple language extension; just toss your data into SQLite or Kyoto Cabinet and let them deal with it. As is standard practice in, uh, many, many applications?

Your point about speeding up the program by improving the algorithm is valid - but it's only valid when the initial algorithm is doing something more or less unique. If the program is doing which a data base does, you should use a database like SQLite or a data store like Redis, Kyoto Cabinet, etc.
Failed startup. Sales guy, learning to program, wants internship, any takers?
TL;DR: Failed startup. Business dev/sales guy learning programming, wants internship to speed learning. Have beginner level skills in RoR, HTML, CSS, JQuery. Any takers?

Long version - After three years of bootstrapping a b2b platform using contractors, I want to learn how to code.

I've completed several books and tutorials:
- Pine's Learn to Program
- Hartl's Rails Tutorial
- Lynda's Rails 3 videos
- Lynda's JQuery videos

And am working through Well-Grounded Rubyist, the RSpec book, Zed Shaw's Python the Hard Way and am also backfilling with the Pickaxe and a few older Rails books.

I've started building a few things (using github and heroku) to scratch my own itch but feel I could be learning more, better, faster while contributing if I was in with a team.

Details:
- based in Berkeley, willing to go anywhere BARTable...
- willing to work for free for 1-3 months
- very excited and willing to learn, open to junior level employment opportunities after internship.
Mortal Kombat Karnage
Thanks, never heard of it. But why would they chose something so low-level that looks like assembly (reminds of the old shaders - I guess I have to read, maybe... easier translation for CPU if there is no GPU?).
Why ship with the redundant feature? Revenue?
It's almost as if the majority of programming languaguages are "thought through". I mean, really, who designs a programming language and doesn't think it through? It's a nontrivial undertaking typically undertaken by people that are smarter than the average bear.
I emphatically disagree. As pg says all the time, don't worry about your competition. Worry about your customers and yourself. Make a product that people want. Continue making it better.

And get a server that can handle a small influx of HN traffic. Jeepers.
Privacy. I don't think revenue is a factor, since it's probably hooked up to the address bar search too.
Career advice/help required. I am worried about my career. Please help.
Hi All,

I am a huge fan of HN. I come here everyday to read something interesting. I need help. I am very much worried about my career. I don't know what to do. I am pretty confused. So I thought to take help from you guys.

I am software professional with 4 years of experience. Its only on paper experience I did not develop anything which gives me sense of pride. Before explaining my problem I would like to tell you what I want. I always wanted to create software that changes lives or people cant live without it or something incredible by seeing it I can feel proud to by seeing that I built this and this is used by millions of users. I did not care about money much all I want is work that makes me happy at the end of the day. Work, that makes me smarter everyday, work that I love.

My 1st company was telecom giant I got chance to code on few modules but that also stopped after few months. After one and half years I changed a company to get good development profile and work but I did not find work I wanted or at least challenging bug fixes. In search of good challenging work I changed three companies and like wise in my current 4th company I am trapped with previous kind of company culture where I am not getting any work or little work which wont help me to fulfill my expectations.

I am pretty much confused what to do. I understood I should go for startups to get what I want challenging work. I made a huge mistake because I was after big brands of corporate world. In doing so I marked myself as a job hopper. It was not my fault I don't like change too but just in search of challenging work I changed companies.

What should I do? Should I change company again and go for startup in order to get job satisfaction? Or just for the sake of my resume I should stay in my current company by not staying happy and wasting time? I am earning enough money, the only problem is not job satisfaction. Please help/guide.
Google Help Rap
Not the intended purpose, but the search box has been very useful to me in the past as a quick second paste-buffer, much quicker than opening a text editor or anything to place it in.
Is it just me or is Chrome getting a bit bloated? I hope it doesn't lose its lightness and speed that made it famous.
You need to stop trying to be so clever and get back to business basics. Make a product that people want. Tell them about it in clear language. Delight them when they sign up. Have a conversation with them. Make the product better.

And for goodness sake, feed the hamsters in your servers.
the search box is kept because it may be part of the deal with google i think
Forth's "CREATE ... DOES" maybe I'm amazed?
Why You Need To Fail (Sivers)
Google Displaying Ad Click Count [Image]
I think they said something like that then. But I don't think many people heard or believed them then. I'm not sure if it's any better now.

Well, they also sold some of the licensing right to Qt to another company, so at least Qt's future seems reasonably secure.
The big deal for us with this update is automatically applying slashtags to boost quality in 110 categories.

You can see the full list of categories we're doing this for in a screenshot in the Search Engine Land post: http://searchengineland.com/blekko-slashes-more-spam-with-zo...
It's non-intuitive to me because I expected it to return news.ycombinator.com pages, rather than the projects themselves. It's actually a bit of a handy shortcut.
You get map/filter/reduce via boost pretty easily, though.
They can make it a crime to access or allowing others to access censored material. Then once they have a search warrant or similar and can prove you accessed this material or helped others, you are in deep shit.

Imagine, they illegally search your friend's home, find that they accessed the material, coerce them into saying that you helped them with this and they can prosecute you. The search may not be used against your friend, but it may be used against you (IANAL). This would be very useful for suppressing opposition.
10 Over-hyped Startups That Went MIA in 2011
A/B testing the effect of social proof!
19-year-old arrested over Sony hack, London police say
This is 100% true:

I switched on our super-workstation at the office a couple of days ago for the first time in a couple of weeks. It's a bit of a hungry beast, so only usually switched on when we need the power.

It took more than two hours of me sitting at the workstation to apply all the updates. I had to manually approve more than a dozen different installations, one after another. We used multiple gigabytes of our monthly bandwidth allowance just to download the patches.

This is a recently set up machine, just a couple of months old. Only a carefully chosen set of software is installed, all of it for professional use. Commercial software is all legal. Open source stuff is all recommended versions from master sources/repositories.

I don't like the idea of auto-updates either, certainly not for things that make any sort of functional change. But I have to wonder, if this is the best the modern software world can offer to people who have real work to do, whether auto-updates for security patches and genuine bug fixes aren't worth it.

I also have to wonder whether the world is really a better place now that on-line patching is routinely available. Software companies used to have to get something into a fit state to sell before they started selling it, because patching something afterwards was prohibitively expensive and shipping a product with serious flaws would get you a bad reputation and cost a lot of money.
Ruby even makes it invisible because of destructuring assignment of block variables.

ruby-1.9.2-p180 > {1=>2}.each {|k,v| puts "#{k} #{v}"}
1 2
=> {1=>2}
ruby-1.9.2-p180 > {1=>2}.sort.each {|k,v| puts "#{k} #{v}"}
1 2
=> [[1, 2]]
Minecraft mapping: Rendering with PyOpenGL
Petsales/Tinycoupon (W09).
Cofounder was @breck, who has also launched a new startup in a later batch.
I used to be into meditation, but then decided it's also bogus voodoo stuff. However, I did enjoy reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.
It's a pretty interesting idea, I haven't seen this before.
I can't point to a "similar legacy of birth defects suffering and eviction from the land" in conjunction with any other kind of disaster, up to and including earthquakes causing millions of deaths.

The 'league' of a disaster in your head is not an important metric; the oil spill is responsible for far more environmental contamination, food supply reduction, and long term ecological damage than Chernobyl.

Coal plants kill more people every year without even being called 'disasters' - the birth defects caused by the radiation being put in the atmosphere by those plants is distributed over a far larger area, but it's way out of the 'Chernobyl league'.

You are attributing extra importance to Chernobyl because it causes an unusual type of localized damage, but it never caused that much of it.
Since we live in a democracy, there are elected representatives whose job it is to listen to voters. I think the best way to proceed is to put the cynicism aside and actually let them know how you feel about the issue. If you are really passionate about it, convince people around you to do the same. Quite easy really.
Está a procura de um hotel em São Paulo? Vá para o Estanplaza Paulista
Daniel Tammet on perception - different ways of knowing (video)
Windows 8, native apps, and HTML5: Facts and conjecture
I would like to upgrade from 3.6 on the Mac, but when I tested Firefox 5 beta, it still seemed to have the same memory leak issue Firefox 4 has, i.e. I open two tabs without any add-ons and with a half hour's time Firefox is using 250+ MB of memory.
I'm going to explain "digital fountains" a bit more because I think they are really cool. The "fountain" in "digital fountain" refers to fountain code. A fountain code can take a file and generate an infinite stream of codes. As long as the receiver obtains a portion of the codes that is just slightly larger than the file size, they can recover the original file. These codes are immensely useful for broadcast distribution. You can broadcast the morning newspaper using a fountain code and everyone's mobile device will obtain the file after downloading the paper's size + a bit more of the fountain codes. When using wireless radios, broadcast distribution is very desirable because unicast distribution (think HTTP) doesn't scale while broadcast scales perfectly.
Verizon to end unlimited data option
Fdebong: Should be in July. Just finishing touches left now. I'll see if we can get some screenshots up to tide you over :)
How does the existence of a search box affect privacy?
Well this is the _french_ government. There is .gov sites storing passwords in plain text here.