skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like C/C++ are the wrong languages to implement this type of automatic parallelism. It seem like these features would make so common uses for C/C++ problematic (embedded & games).

// maybe Occam can make a comeback
It would be interesting to know if it's because he brought these issues to the attention of the developers.
Most likely NYT updated it. Easy mistake for someone not familiar with this topic to make.
Yes, C's memory model is fraught with concurrency race conditions, but it's fast, direct, and dangerous and that's part of it's appeal. It'd be a shame to see C be tamed and muddled to look more like its caged derivatives.
I spent a lot of time bolting strange things onto Common Lisp systems in the early '90s through a foreign function interface and I thought it was pretty straightforward.

[Note: Strange things being C++ simulations generated by Lisp code directly from systems of nth order ODEs. Other non-Lisp types also wanted to use the simulations, which is why they were in C++].
It's easy to see where both sides originally began from:
As a web hosting provider owner myself, I can see where the default assumption that paypal disputes automatically equal fraud originates. Sadly though it's not the correct stance to really take -- and one has to distance themselves emotionally from every situation (particularly as 'Director', in this case, like Jules) otherwise it'll turn into a shitstorm just about 100% of the time.

Allowing it to descend to the point where backups were deleted is just an absolutely appalling situation though. I've given clients the boot before, but descending to the point where removal of their backups occurs after suspending them is just wrong.

As a provider you're the technical link between someone and their content, and your goal is to protect that content with everything you've got: Destroying it yourself is simply disheartening.

It's sad to see that thiswebhost* has arrived at this point, but the good news is all it will take is some effort & 'emotional distancing' to really improve. I know not many years ago I was in the same position as a fledgling company owner where it's very easy to take things to heart.

Hopefully thiswebhost* can dig through some backups (assuming they still have some) and provide the users with their content.
How about "great lecturer or speaker" over "great teacher"? Because a 300:1 lecture by an ok lecturer is much less useful (bordering on worthless) than a recorded one by a great lecturer. And that mediocre lecture is what you will get in most schools for intro classes.
(the reddit thread mostly re:arc)

http://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/jfscn/survey_of_synt...
The panel cannot take part in the bid itself, just scrutinize the bids they come and question their budgets. The bidders do not know who the panel is so they can't influence it. The panel doesn't have to know who the bidder is as well. They just get a spec and a budget attached. All I'm after is not seeing so many multi-million-billion failures when I know the initial budget was way overkill.
(If 'multi' was 1,5 or 10 million I would have understood. But 100, 600, 20,000 million is a bit much).
That's my question too.

ROC's TransientStore thing might be a win for testing.
Another bookmarking app
The sentiment of this petition that government IT projects are ludicrously expensive and often fail due to a lack of internal technical knowledge I fully agree with.

However the world of the 'internet startup' and large scale software development are somewhat far apart. And you have learn to walk before you can run. Perhaps the government should start by making more use of IT / software sector experts, and encouraging career development and training for in house staff to help retain the young budding quality developers rather than have them disappear into the private sector. I'd happily work for something more constructive for less money if I knew I would be allowed to make full use of my skills and help the public sector to be more innovative with technology.
s/ CLOS and MOP seem like they are welded on to an otherwise good language, whereas loop is beautiful in all its loop DSL glory. /s

(In truth, I find that both have their uses).

Basically, different people disagree about which part of Common Lisp it is that they dislike. Unfortunately, this leads many people to believe that Common Lisp is not a very good language for programming in. To the contrary, people simply end up with very strong opinions about the different parts of Common Lisp that they _do not yet_ understand.

This is largely because it is trivial to implement your own object system or loop construct, so people think about the language in a completely different way. There is a mentality of 'Hey, I could do this better than what the standard does.'

You think about the way languages work differently.

My evidence for this is that I have never seen a C++ programmer complain about the for loop and describe a better for loop, you rarely see java programmers talking about how much better a different object system would be.
Redislite (a serverless redis-compatible database engine) online demo
That's the homework for their machine learning class (ml-class.org). ;-)
calling the author a troll without addressing his arguments is either plain abuse or ad hominem abuse. Take your pick, either way it isn't contributing to the discussion, is it?
That sounds like the makings of a good essay :)
Someone else recommend the Khan Academy lectures [1], and I was thinking about using those.

[1] http://www.khanacademy.org/#linear-algebra
needs numpy filled out (for MATLAB/R) but otherwise really cool!
Ubuntu One Music App Comes to iPhone
I never got into the whole having a fake name or nickname on the internet thing, so I use my real name everywhere. There are a few places I only use my first name, but I'm not known as turbogeek42 or anything like that.

I've never cared much about the cons of using my name. What I say and what I do is what I say and do. I'm not really worried about it.
I think Little Snitch has that feature, but it might go against RS’s design: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886679
Think of it as an explicit request for parallelism. So I may say something like:

parallel_sum(array);

And it would do a data-parallel summation of my array. In fact, OpenMP (http://openmp.org/wp/) is a great example of what you're asking about.

#pragma omp for
for (int i = 0; i < N; ++i) {
dest[i] = a[i] + b[i] * c[i];
}

That is explicitly requested parallelism with serial semantics. The serial semantics are what you would expect without the omp pragma. But at runtime, it will execute in parallel. The compiler ensures that I did not do anything which will violate serial semantics, and the runtime system does the work of farming the work off to threads, and then synchronizing them.
I'm using linode and I've had problems with payment once. They contacted me and we solved it within day or two. I don't know details of this story, but suspending account immediately seems like overreacting.
More ideas than time: Logarithmic calendar view
What's that even doing here?
Nokia tried that with "the best open source community money can buy" and failed in the end, what makes you think HP will succeed? You cannot increase market share with hardware that only "community" and geeks buy...
There are implementations which implement the standard, slight variations of it (lower case identifiers, ...) or large extended versions of it (+ MOP + CLOS everywhere + ...).

There are also derived languages like Stella, L, SubL and others which implement some kind of subset.

Then there is ISLisp, which is very similar, but slightly simplified.
Wich has zero to do with whether this post of his is insightful, correct, or worth reading. That's the trouble with ad hominems, they aren't adding value. What I as a fellow reader want to know is whether this postnis wrth reading, and if so, what to watch out for good or bad.

I don't care if the previous 99 post by the same author are lumps of coal, I want to know whether this one is a diamond.
C does not have a memory model. Its "memory model" is whatever is provided by the underlying hardware.
In California and Illinois it may not necessarily be true due to laws those states have passed, but in most other states, it generally is. I live in New York state.

My contract states: "I will promptly notify <employer> of all inventions, discoveries, computer programs and systems, works of authorship, improvements, and developments, which I may produce during my employment with <employer>, and I assign my right, title, and interest to <employer> in such inventions, discoveries, computer programs and systems, works of authorship, improvements and developments."

There's other paragraphs roughly stating that if I notify upper management of my work done outside of business the company engages in or plans to engage in, upper management may provide me a written exemption for those specific works. But they do _NOT_ have to provide this to me, even if I ask nicely. I personally do not know anyone at my company who has ever gotten an exemption.
There are two problems with your example. First is that Common Lisp is a lisp-2 so the '*' function won't actually be rebound at all.

Secondarily, and more importantly, every unhygienic lisp I've used has had a broader namespacing system which takes care of this. The compiler warns you whenever you are about to rebind something within the same namespace.
Do you mind to explain a little bit more on why you are addicted to JBoss Netty?

I don't mean to hi-jack Node thread but I'm curious since I use Java day-to-day and would love to hear more about non-web-app framework type of activities in Java.
iTunes U was a big step in the proliferation...

A big step backwards, from what I can tell.

Sharing video recordings of class lectures on the Web is easy: record video, upload to Web. Why is there a need to do it through iTunes? AFAIK, iTunesU is just a way for Apple to try to get campus lock-in. I know this sounds kind of rant-ish, but I'm being 100% serious and honest.

My school started using iTunesU, which didn't seem to have any advantages over just putting video online, except that I couldn't use it, since I can't run iTunes on my computer (Linux).

I'd honestly like to know what benefits iTunesU has for anyone besides Apple and Microsoft, in the sense that if it became truly widespread, it would prevent any widespread movement to adopt Linux on campus.
Thanks for this. Do you know why the courses aren't all hosted on Standford.edu, though?
It's important to look at the "In programming languages" section - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud#In_programming_... - because there, 'big ball of mud' means something else that one would think at a first glance, and the quoted statement does not use 'big ball of mud' as a negative description; it refers to its malleability.
Draw to canvas real time with Node.JS, Web Sockets and Socket.io
I would have classified big internet projects done by startups as 'large scale software development'.
Maybe my use of 'start up' is not really accurate when you look at it from within the industry but I was trying to make it easy to digest to people outside who will think 'early google, early facebook' and apply the scale of these now to the moniker 'startup'.
I'm not talking about small web apps with 1000 users. I am actually thinking 'google like' and 'facebook like' in terms of volume of interaction. Those dwarf any scale of government initiated project, and in contrast they actually work.
What was much more fun was the fact that we also had NeWS based user interfaces connected to our Lisp applications by some glue C/RPC code.

Developing in Lisp, C and PostScript on the same codebase was a lot of fun (PostScript being surprisingly Lispish - which I would never have suspected had I not been developing in both at the same time for a couple of years.)

I therefore got quite excited (in an RPN kind of way) by the reference to Forth in the "Let Over Lambda" book featuring on HN today! :-)
Apple manipulated picture of Samsung Galaxy Tab in filing?
Why is Everyone Still Ignoring Ron Paul?
I'd argue that compared to OpenMP and CUDA, Cilk has very little traction. My frame of reference is the current set of HPC platforms, though. We had one customer who wanted to build Cilk, and it was really just for R&D, not production.
I worked on a similar project while an undergrad at KU. (http://www.oread.ku.edu/2008/october/20/fraank.shtml)

I like the idea, a lot. This seems to be well executed, but I wonder how much of a future this thing has with XBRL becoming a requirement. In 5 to 7 years there will be enough historical data tagged in XBRL for any analyst to perform as financial analysis.

Also, on the website I can search 400,000+ companies, but there only seems to be ~4900 filings on the dashboard. Doesn't add up to me.
Note: This was a company director, not CS employee.
The only thing that reduces corruption is choice. Being able to choose whether you are going to participate in a scheme gives you the ability to walk away from situations where you are being taken advantage of.

And that is not what government gives you. Its what government takes away.

It doesn't have to be that way, of course. We could be governing our affairs through voluntary cooperation not coercion. But that would mean a distinct lack of jobs for those unable to produce anything of value.
Thanks. I changed the wording to reflect this. Is it better now?
I don't think he talks about Lisp. He seems to talk about another scripting language like Ruby or Python on the JVM or a compiled static language like Go or something else. Maybe.
"Eventually, all URLs will be wrapped regardless of length; we'll let you know more details on those dates well in advance."
Odd, from what I've read all the accounts were paid up to date -- but paypal had taken a particular payment back for some new service (a domain name or something to that effect).

#6a) Hosting provider deletes the backups as well.
Being overly defensive about your favorite programming language is also not productive. This just one guy's opinion not some "community".

No programming language is beyond criticism (Clojure has plenty of warts), and certainly the mainstream ones are positively filled with teeth-grinding flaws - otherwise you wouldn't see such active work and interest around new programming languages.
The Most Overlooked Lean Startup Principle (and a cute kitten)
Sorry, this is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

We've already seen how having a integrated hw + sw solution combined with execution has lead to success for Apple.

Palm has the sw + hw piece (for the most part), they just really need to execute well which they have not done to date.

Licensing the OS is just going to add fragmentation as well as delay the release process as now they would have to synchronize with carriers as well as phone manufacturers.
Maybe to emphasize that you are not getting credit?
Just like I always knew which company had written the proposal from the technologies and choices made, I would also know if I were on a panel all of the possible bidding companies and the solutions.

The panel would have to be vetted and trusted, right? In which case there would be record of who was vetted and trusted and you would know who to suck up to and bribe in other ways.

And the panel would definitely spot the SharePoint vs Clarity choice and know who was the bidding consortium or vendor.

I applaud your intent, but think it fails to address the problems with IT acquisition and could actually make it worse. If I can see how to abuse the process, you can be certain that a vendor will take advantage of it even for a contract worth a couple of million.
That was my first thought, but it looks like this company has a trend of poor customer service: http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_f...
For the AI class, they had tweeted that they were looking into the possibility of letting people audit the class.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/aiclass/status/97508929893965825
Uh, in "AI", the "I" is mostly just a hope or goal and not yet an accomplishment!

We have AI as a field mostly just because of long, aggressive funding by DARPA, early on especially of the MIT AI Lab. Since then DARPA has funded the prize where computer controlled cars chase across a desert. It appears that some people at DARPA are hoping that something good happens from their funding. Tough to say something good will never happen! If something okay leaks out of the research, then some lives of some US soldiers might be saved and, by now, may have already. In that case, good. DARPA is likely some of the very best money spent, even if for some years the work looks weak. At least with the money so far, a lot of quite bright people have TRIED to make progress in AI.

Some years ago, I was one of three researchers in an AI group that did some of the world's best AI work. I had two conclusions: (1) For the practical progress desired now, just use 'traditional' approaches of (A) see problem, (B) analyze problem, (C) find assumptions can make about the problem, (D) do some math starting with the assumptions, (E) take the conclusions of the math as progress on a solution, (F) use the best of what have to wrap up the best solution can see. (2) For the AI part, so far "We dance 'round in a ring and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows.".
Patents are not measured by quantity, but by their quality. A ton of patents doesn't mean anything if you can't use them in court to hold AppleSoft back.

I don't have the faintest idea whether these patents are of good quality or not, I just wanted to point it out. It's beyond me why so many bright people here on HN think these 25,000 patents might worth the same as (or three times more of) Nortel's patents. They 'might', but we don't know that as a fact. I'd always heard Nortel was strong on patents, but prior to this day I didn't know that Motorola had any patents at all.
When purephase said "they can't fail", (s)he was not saying that it is impossible for the process to produce an outcome that an outsider would consider failure. It is impossible for the process to produce a result that an insider would consider failure, and all necessary damage to the budget, original spec document, and yea verily the very laws of time and space itself will be done to make sure this result occurs. Plain reality will be denied, if necessary, such as confident declarations that yes, it's OK if entering someone's name, birthdate, and address takes 40 keystrokes and half an hour, yup, successful outcome!

BTW, this does precisely bupkis to solve the problem. Having competent people around makes it harder to pretend that everything went great and the job is done, so the competent people would simple be ejected at the earliest available opportunity and everybody would know it. If you really want to fix this problem you have to go a lot deeper at striking at the incentives. Lack of competence is a second-order effect of much, much deeper pathologies.

(Actually I'm honestly uncertain of a way to structure incentives in such a way that this outcome won't occur in a government project. And I mean, actually won't occur, not a handwaving fairyland theory about how it might not occur, but an actual process that will produce real engineering results in the real world. The incentive mismatch in government goes all the way to the top. This is a non-trivial part of the reason behind my libertarianism.)
None of this really seems to clear up my confusion.

I guess my question is closer to, how is webOS hard to duplicate? How is it special?

As someone who's never actually had a webOS device, I've been given little reason to think about them, so I might just be missing how polished it is or something. This still points to a major marketing problem, though. HP hasn't told the world why it should care about webOS.
Let's put it this way, ChromeOS is a lot like webOS except in a much larger form factor.
I have never seen a C++ programmer complain about the for loop and describe a better for loop, you rarely see java programmers talking about how much better a different object system would be.

Amen to that! Except...

I'm a C & C++ developer who sometimes complains about for-loops, and often pines for dynamic dispatch. And any C developer who has written or used a FOR_* macro has complained about for-loops, whether she knows it or not.

In CL, I prefer iterate.
I don't consider CUDA in the mix because it's designed specifically for GPUs. But, yes, OpenMP has much more traction in the HPC community, because it was designed by and for them. Its task parallelism, though, is rather ugly. I don't know what Cilk's data parallel abstractions look like, but I suspect they're better than OpenMP's task parallel abstractions. (Just because, well, I think OpenMP's are that bad.)

But, fundamentally, OpenMP is not integrated into the language. It's tacked onto the language through pragmas. I think that was a hack, not a long-term solution. And I say this as someone who did the exact same hack: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/papers/scott_dissertation....
Can you explain a little bit more regarding node ability to interface with services?

Let's say I have a few services, Service A that does Invoicing, Service B that does Payments, and the system has to communicate with 2-3 web-services as well. Let's say there is a need to create some sort of "portal"-ish solution (mobile or not). In this situation, what would be the advantage using Node?

Would you mind to share when Node is not the right choice as well?

I'm interested to know more about Node :)

UPDATE: Thank you for the replies.

FYI, I do understand the concept of node.js in terms of the async callback and the argument of client-side and server-side use the same code.

I'm not a heavy Rails user (more of a Java/Python guy) but when it comes to creating a typical CRUD web-app, Rails would be more productive?
For example a for loop is typical serial semantics:

for (i=0;i<10;i++) {
a[i] = i*10;
}

... but it's obvious that this loop can execute all passes in parallel so we want to pass a concurrency suggestion to the compiler without losing the readability of the code, so perhaps something like this block syntax:

parallel {
for (i=0;i<10;i++) {
a[i] = i*10;
}
}
webOS does not have the Java/Dalvik baggage.
I actually find Lisp to be head and shoulders above Perl/Python/Ruby at interfacing with C.
> It's so fun and easy to develop in Node, that it sometimes feels like a toy.

and using CoffeeScript makes it even easier!
Why writers sometimes work for free and designers don’t
Gorilla vs. Shark = Python v. Perl
I am most excited about the machine learning course, since I could use the structure to go through Andrew Ng's lectures; also the ones from 2008 are already out of date.

As for the AI course, I'm skeptical, frankly. Sign-up right now has meant putting your name and email address. There is a big difference between spending 2 second to fill that in, and spending the amount of time necessary to finish the course. You come to a website that sounds like making robots and turns out the class is about developing pruning heuristics for search trees, do you stick with it? Maybe...but I'm going to save my awe for how many people complete.

I praise Stanford (CS) for thinking up this idea. Like Khan, they are going to reach a lot of people, and I think its particularly useful for motivated learners who, for whatever reason, are stuck in a place that you can't take a good AI course or can't afford one. Ultimately, though, the course is going to require drive that a lot fewer than 65,000 have.
That is amazing. Based on their twitter stream you know they are bad news. They would be better off if they spent less time "defending" themselves, and more time making their customers happy enough so they don't want to make "incorrect public statements."

https://twitter.com/#!/thiswebhost/status/102089336509562881