skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is this[1]: strings are compound objects, which use 2 memory allocations. One for the object representation, the other for the memory holding the character array. The problem arises when you access the character array but technically no longer need the string object itself anymore. The C compiler notices that you don't use the pointer to the string object anymore, so it doesn't bother storing that on the stack. It is allowed to do this. The GC's mark phase now runs; it inspects all the stack frames and the global roots. It detects that no references to the string object exist and decides to collect it. There happens to be a destructor function associated with that memory object, which frees the character array, as the character array is manually memory managed. It blows up when you then try to access that character array directly.[2]

The correct way to handle this is to add the object reference to the GC's "root" set while you're using its guts, and removing it again when you're done.

Another possible solution is to allocate the string object and its character representation in one chunk of memory. This only works for immutable strings which never share substructure, though. The reason this works is that most conservative GCs will consider objects live as long as there is a pointer pointing to somewhere within a chunk of memory, not necessarily at the beginning.

[1] note: I'm not a Ruby coder but I fixed a very similar problem in a Lua implementation about 4 years ago. That one wasn't even conservative GC. EDIT: I told the story of that bug on HN 3 years (!) ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217189

[2] worse, it probably doesn't blow up immediately and instead causes memory corruption.
Maybe you have don this for brevity, but git branch does not create a new commit.

"The command’s second form creates a new branch head named <branchname> which points to the current HEAD, or <start-point> if given."

So after a git branch command, the test branch still points to the same commit as HEAD.

You have to make an additional commit for them to diverge.
It didn't actually say that. Where does it say streaming sites?

Do you go for the seeders or do you go after the torrent search engines? One is whack a mole, one is destroy the C&C.

I know which one I'd choose.

It's more analogous to ignoring the street level criminals and going after the Don, who never get his hands dirty any more but is directing all those that do.

Edit: I'm not arguing for or against, just want to point out that there's no point going after the individual seeders.
Also known as morally questionable & gaming the market.
the practice of reducing ideas to specifications is the process we undertake as engineers, so it certainly can be done without any special skills

I simply don't understand how you can reach this conclusion. I can say that "the practice of reducing specifications to code is what we undertake as engineers, so it can certainly be done without any special skills" and I'd be hopelessly, completely wrong!

I think your idea has merit, but I can only see it working with sophisticated clients who understand exactly what they're getting. The vast majority of the others will expect a huge body of work for that $1000 because they have no idea what the difference is between a "prototype" and a finished product and simply explaining it to them will be useless -- they have to have experienced it to realy understand it.

If you aim this product/service at busy IT departments or startups who need to offload a little work, then I'd say you're onto something. If you are targeting the average small business owner, you'll lose your shirt.
This is huge news for Moller and ilk. I know Moller's been working on the 'flying car' idea for what seems like forever now (having built working prototypes in the 60s or 70s), and from what I've seen, the Moller Skycar at least SEEMS to be the closest thing I've seen to a feasible product.
Android Background Threads: AsyncTask versus ServiceIntent
NASA's Final Shuttle: The End of an Error?
No, because YouTube is a brand name that competes successfully on its own. There's nothing they could name it that would have better name recognition than YouTube already does.
Kaggle contest aims to boost Wikipedia editors
I have blogger configured to use my domain (blog.markwatson.com) and I certainly hope that Google does not take away this flexibility.
Thanks, everyone!
We'll be sure to let the HN community know when our mind-mapping tool is ready for some more serious publicity... e.g. when it's ready.
>And it was chosen hastily.

It was chosen here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0506415

Elegance is found in arguments and proofs, not in results, and so any attempt to look at equations is really missing the point. If you believe Euler's methods might be simplified by using 2pi instead of pi, first consider a look at the methods themselves.
"I have years of history in albums, photos, videos, tags and notes..."

This is primarily why I don't use facebook today. It's not easy to get that stuff out. I don't have API access to G+ yet, but my hope is that I can move data in and out pretty freely. That will make me quite comfortable to use the service.
That's why I want to see alternative DNS services (TLD) take off...
Exactly, because lobbying to allow a merger that would reduce competition & lobbying to block things like net neutrality are really essential to providing quality service. Maybe we should just give AT&T their monopoly back.
If they want to help build one here in the U.S., it may help for the sake of rhetoric to make a scapegoat out of the one they have over there. It's just a PR sleight-of-hand.

The title is white-lie misleading. Cisco has been doing this sort of thing for China for as long as I can remember.
The original quora post was at: http://www.quora.com/What-would-make-sense-for-Apple-to-use-...

The business insider article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2727494

Really sad that the news outlets aren't really adding any insight to the conversation
Yeah, on the latter point, I agree that the odds are stacked against any claim. But they'd be stacked against a claim by a U.S. citizen, too; apart from the added expense of litigation, I don't think a foreign company would be at an extra disadvantage in trying to get their domain name back, just the "normal" disadvantage that comes with trying to fight administrative property seizures.
I pretty much agree. I'm not blind to the fear that some women have in situations like this, and I don't doubt that the guy's behavior came off as creepy. And I think Richard Dawkins came off like a jerk and needs to soften his position slightly even if he is trying to make a point.

On the other hand, I think that there's been an overreaction here. Plait says:

"Oh my. I have tried and tried to see some other way to interpret this, but it looks to me that he really is comparing a potential sexual assault to someone chewing gum."

Here he makes a similar leap to the one he perceives Dawkins making, IMO. Comparing what seems to amount to just a creepy but harmless come-on to a "potential sexual assault" is a bit much. There was no sexual assault. I understand it was a scary situation for her, but is it valid to simply imagine a scary scenario, stick the word "potential" in front of it, and demonize the man for it while we lash out at anyone questioning the claim?
2 new iPhones to be released in September
This wasn't UI as much as it was data model.

Also, the guy they had doing the official i18n libraries had a default position of We Only Do The Right Thing. Admirable, but not fun to work with. So even if I proved to him that our downstream vendors, and indeed almost all French companies, handled these special French zip codes with a simple hack... that wasn't good enough for him.
It's important to note though, that Microsoft only accomplished that by bundling it with their OS (which they'd gotten to near monopoly status through a long series of dirty tricks). Then they tightly integrated its code to prevent removal. They attacked alternative projects at every level from PR/FUD to lawsuits. They used things like Active-X to create technology traps which they wantonly inflicted on naive customer, totally against the customer's interests. They increased lock-in at every step, making it easy to use other program's settings but hard to migrate away. Just as we hear Facebook is doing, blocking tools for reading your own data.

Google on the other hand, is offering services without any lock-in or bundling. You can export your setting easily.

They're doing something much harder, and that we rarely see. They're competing on value. If they want users to stick around they'll have to treat them as the customers.

It could, eventually, usher in a new age in software - one where you didn't just tolerate failure because it came bundled with your hardware.
Am I the only one who doesnt see the direct connection between rebranding Blogger & Picasa & G+ push? I think its more of a good timing for it because everybody focuses towards G+ now. If the growth of the two services were satisfying there wouldnt be need to change anything.
KISSmetrics Now Analyze Your Users’ Browsing Habits — Before They Even Sign Up
Also known as the nature of capitalism.
Macbook Air. Really hoping the rumors of core i7 versions come true in the next couple weeks, and hopefully with more ram. That would make it a really killer machine, especially if something like that new Vaio's power dock came out to bolster it.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/sonys-new-vaio-z-ultrapor...
From http://www.gplusinfo.com/google-will-retire-blogger-and-pica...

"Google has said that YouTube will remain as is."
Yea, what is now MS-DOS and associated with IBM PC and compatibles was actually originally developed before the IBM PC even existed!
It still costs them CPU/IO time and thus represents a possible DoS vector.
If it understands PDF bookmarks, I'd default to Firefox for PDFs
I'm excited for auto-save and versions in Mac OS X Lion for this very reason:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/auto-save.html
Did you actually read the WSJ article, or just the rebuttal to it?

The actual article mentions almost everything he does, then focuses on wage increases as worsening the effect. This blogger decides to focus on 55+ employment, which he already wrote about. How is one pre-conceived narrative and the other not?
I'd, personally, prefer to see a new camel. There have been like three llamas since the last new camel. But, I guess Larry's been sort of busy lately.
I'd love to see the entire course in the format of that first lecture linked above, i.e you start with a naive implementation and gradually improve it both algorithmically and with language-specific hacks until you get orders of magnitude faster version working on your machine, not on paper.

Make every homework a contest on the fastest implementation,e.g. see Tim Bray's Wide Finder benchmark: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/10/30/WF-Results

Python is great for teaching, but I'd let them do the optimizations in any language.

Use problems from your current research as examples/assignments, rather than boring textbook problems.

Let them work with real data: http://www.quora.com/Programming-Challenges-1/What-are-some-... , http://www.quora.com/Data/Where-can-I-get-large-datasets-ope...

Add parallel algorithms to the mix. Ask to parallelize serial algorithms that you explain in the lecture. They should at least start thinking about programming for multicore and clusters, they will thank you for that later.
Referenced from the article, I found this (http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...):

> We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.

I couldn't find any such info (forcing user profiles to be made public) about Google+, but anyway I find it a little bit strange coming from Google, or any other company for that matter.

For crying out loud, at least FB gave me the option of my name not showing up in any of their searches. That's why when I google my FB profile name it's nowhere to be found in the first 10 pages, because I don't want the whole world to know what friends do I have or which photo did I choose to represent me. It's like giving the option of everyone who has access to the Internet of entering my living room while I'm having a beer with my friends, at least this is how I perceive it.

Or maybe Google+ just wants to be more like Twitter and less like FB, I cannot really tell, either way, I won't ever use it because of this.
Twitter Acquires Data Startup BackType
Is it wrong to read a journal paper and keep giggling at "posterior simulations"?
As seen elsewhere in the comments, Crockford's is very good:

http://javascript.crockford.com/code.html
Groupon would never get a $6bn offer today, and to pretend like that is what I was proposing is absurd. Their market position and future prospects has significantly slipped from what it was. We can only speculate if that would have occurred had Google acquired them or if they would have managed it better.

The exact same line of thinking that you are using would allow you to say "Here's a source that puts Myspace above Facebook (Alexa rankings from 2008), and most likely had higher ad revenue at that time. MySpace just sold for $35m so how can you say Facebook is worth even $100m?"

Valuations of tech companies is largely based on future projections and the future projections of Groupon has shifted in the past 6 months just as significantly as MySpace did in the last 3 years.
I think a very good way of doing this is putting a question on quora and picking out the most upvoted answers.
A controls engineer I know designs systems using ladder logic diagrams, which represent the control logic graphically, largely by drawing the relays and other devices that an earlier generation of engineers would have wired up physically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic

In the systems dynamics world, programs like Simulink, ModelicaML, and Stella allow users to graphically assemble the systems they want to simulate, by linking icons (e.g., "accumulators" and "flows").
http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/
http://www.iseesystems.com/softwares/Education/StellaSoftwar...
http://www.openmodelica.org/index.php/developer/tools/134

None of these cases really meets your criteria that the source code cannot be expressed as text. Rather, they all use graphics to enable non-traditional programmers (e.g., controls engineers with legacy skills) to interact with a modular programming system.
Twitter Testing Facebook-Like Message Wall [PIC]
Your reasoning is circular (get it!). If the circle constant were τ, Euler would have found zeta(2)=τ^2/24 instead. The proof is the same.

The definition of the circle constant comes first.
Oscar Award Wallpapers, Oscar Trophy images, Pic & Photos Collection
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Interview with Debian Founder Ian Murdock
Let's put it this way: If you can actually come up with a system that will force people who don't really know what they want to produce a working spec whose implementation they will later accept and pay for, opening a consulting business is the very last thing you should do. Sell this magical system to the consultants of the world and you will be a millionaire within a year. Because this would create billions in revenue, and nobody else has yet managed what you propose.

Right now the best we have is, "Get a lot of experience in dealing with clients and learn how to recognize and reject the bad ones." Your system would not only obviate years of experience, but it would also increase the client pool by turning horrible clients into great ones.
>They're both eminently simple concepts, but they remain obscured by π.

They are equally obscured by tau, or whatever other arc-length you might choose! The meaning does not depend on the definition of a circle but on the properties of the exponential function:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_formula#Proofs

As for sin(x), it is a function based on circles and arc lengths, but specific values of arc length do not enter the definition.
> Google on the other hand, is offering services without any lock-in or bundling.

There isn't lock-in, but they do seem to be trying for the bundling, where they're jump-starting a new product (that people may or may not want) by trying to tie it to existing popular products, not entirely in an opt-in manner. It'll be interesting to see how exactly the process plays out; they do appear to be aware of the potential for backlash if they're too strong-armed about forcing Blogger and Picasa users into Google+, but they also seem pretty interested in strongly nudging them towards it.

Looming further on the horizon, it'll be interesting to see whether they try to integrate Google+ and the similarly-named "Google +1" more closely, as a way of getting Google+ into search (their big dominant-market-share product that's an obvious candidate for bundling, at least if antitrust regulators don't get upset). The +1 product much more overtly tries to leverage search; e.g. it's on search results by default now, and information about how it affects search results is on the Webmaster Tools console.
Google+/Profiles also has an option to not be indexed by search engines and I believe the only info required for a Google Profile is name, gender, and maybe age.
>Your reasoning is circular (get it!). If the circle constant were τ, Euler would have found zeta(2)=τ^2/24 instead. The proof is the same.

>The definition of the circle constant comes first.

You didn't read the paper, did you? The "circle constant" wasn't even defined when it was written. He picked it out of thin air in that very paper in order to make his arguments more clear.
Fuck everything about this attitude. I don't know where it started, but this sort of uber-Rand-ism is just flat out wrong. It is this same sort of short-sightedness with regards to morals vs profits that caused Alan Greenspan to famously state: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief."

Disbelief my ass! "Fiduciary duty" is not an excuse for corporate raping and pillaging of a society (which, in effect, is what this is). Any student of economics who understands the concept of Pareto efficiency should understand that any action which causes an overall detriment to the economy or the society at large cannot lead to sustainable profits for the company involved. Sure, you can make a lot of short-term gains walking down the street and robbing everyone you see, but it's not a sound formula for long-term profits.

Fiduciary duty is no excuse here. What these companies have done is reprehensible on its face and it is a shame that it is not outright illegal! (Consequently, before anyone cries "First Amendment!", I would add that this type of situation is also a good reason why corporations should not enjoy the same status as individuals under the law.)
Release of TasOS 11.06 (Jaguar)
TasOS is basically build off ubuntu linux operating system.customize to provide a stable gnome environment with integrated applications.project goal is to promote opensource softwares and provide with alternative to commercial operating system.
> I guess that v8 is leading a revamp in the languages.

1. v8 is an implementation, not a language, so it hardly makes sense to say v8 is leading a revamp in the languages.

2. most of v8's behaviors were pioneered by Self and put to task in JVMs (HotSpot and — even earlier — Jikes RVM) and Strongtalk (v8's assembler comes in significant parts from strongtalk, I believe), so it hardly makes sense to say that v8 is leading unless you restrict this to the pretty small world of javascript in-browser runtimes.

3. finally, other browsers were already walking down the route of JITs when Chrome arrived (Tracemonkey landed in Firefox trunk in October 2008)

V8 is definitely a strong work of software engineering put to good use, but the amount of inane praises are grating: it's not magic and it's mostly the application of preexisting practical research and development (meaning stuff which was already used, not just research papers).
I agree with you completely on the simplicity and readability ideas. I think perhaps our difference is on where the unwarranted verbosity comes from.

I'm not advocating a very terse programming style, as tyically seen in Perl or C code.

However, Java doesn't let you compose basic data processing easily. If you have a list of Xs and you want to find those fitting a certain criterion, just compare the effort you have to go to in Haskell:

results = filter (<10) xs

and in C#:

var results = from x in xs where x < 10 select x

and in Python:

results = [x for x in xs if x < 10]

and in Java with someone's collections library on top:

results = CollectionLib.filter(xs, new CollectionLib.BooleanTest<X>()
{
public boolean test(X x)
{
return x < 10;
}
} );

That's pretty typical of the problems with pure computations, in my experience.

When you start talking about I/O and other programming with a time dimension, you find similarly clunky handling of everyday things like events/publish-subscribe/observer/whatever you want to call it, not least because everything has to be in an explicit interface before you even start. Meanwhile, other languages these days are offering tools like message passing and actor models, which both scale up with system size without compromising the basic architecture and support concurrency with relative readability and safety.

Please notice that none of this has anything to do with terseness as such. It's about whether the language provides simple, readable tools to implement widely applicable programming techniques.
Perhaps I've grown cynical, but I second the suggestion to shut your trap.

First of all nobody loves Cassandra, especially because it shows them they were wrong.
Moreover, the moment something will happen you might be caught inbetween the shitstorm exactly because you mentioned the possibility and hence becoming suspicious yourself.
I'm not entirely sure that IE only became successful because it was bundled with the OS. In many ways, it really was the better browser. It rendered faster than Netscape, its UI was for the most part cleaner, it introduced innovations like the XHR, and it was even more standards-compliant. (Shocker I know, but does anyone remember trying to do DHTML with Layers in Netscape 4?) The reason I switched from Netscape 4 to IE5 wasn't that IE5 came with my computer (the first thing I did with a new computer was to download Netscape anyway), it was that Netscape 4 flat out hung when I tried to visit many websites.

Microsoft also did all this shady stuff with bundling it into the OS because that's apparently how they operate, but I'm not actually sure this made all that much difference in winning. It certainly wasn't what won me over.
Why your fingers and toes wrinkle when wet
I most certainly did read the OP submission. Perhaps you meant to address the parent?
Craigslist Founder Launches a New Site to Connect Nonprofits
The example in this document of using the delete operator on a function is wrong.

http://perfectionkills.com/understanding-delete/
I think that's true for each of the products, and even the set of products taken as a whole, but perhaps not from the perspective of trying to use them as a captive audience to jump-start Google+. My read (perhaps wrong) is that Google thinks getting into the social-network game is important enough that they're willing to make moves that from other products' perspectives are negative, in order to achieve it.