skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh-my-zsh with git and git flow plugins work well so far. https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
I hope no one uses jonesforth [or FORTH] for real development. It's a beautiful thing to learn and I encourage everyone to learn how to write a FORTH, but it's an anti-pattern for real world programming. (Edit: this is not a contradiction)
I believe that everybody will have a least one "cloud storage" account. Actually probably multiple "cloud storage" accounts since cloud storage providers will try to specialize and differentiate (i.e., you will have Google Docs account, Dropbox account, iCloud account, etc.).
So 21M is a conservative number.

And don't forget companies of all sizes are going into cloud: so replace 21 million users with 21 millin users via their employeer. (Ever tried sharing documents using MS SharePoint?)
To everyone who's saying his university entry at sixteen is implausible: actually, it's fairly common. I started uni at sixteen (B of Technology, RMIT). So did my best friend (BCS, UTS). My partner started at fourteen (BCS, U of Canterbury). Anecdotal yes, but it's not exactly unheard of.
Interesting stuff. Keeping the OS so up to date has got to help both users and developers. As a nitpick, the "OS/CPU is at least this" plots are screaming for a CDF graph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_functio...
I completely agree. Using 4.x today allows to write code in a much cleaner and efficient way; a few examples: gestures (for iPhone), blocks, GCD. Besides multitasking and background processing allows features that were impossible to get or required complicated hacks. And now that we must provide iOS4 and iOS5 mixed compatibility, we cannot absolutely maintain any compatibility with iOS3.
Affordable Michigan Individual Health Insurance
So, where are the parking lots? I see a building and a bunch of trees. Underground, maybe?
Just ate a sandwich while watching this. It was stimulating.

If you ever have some time to kill when you can't use your hands, this is a cool thing to watch.
Here's the same article, formatted for print (I find these easier on the eyes): http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2009/03/-quot-wh...
Early Interview with Mark Zuckerberg (2005)
That these languages are so similar a table like this is possible leads one to think those programmers who consider themselves "polyglot" by programming in a subset of these aren't really "polyglot" at all.
Patently Insane, Part 1
Patently Insane, Part 2: Fowl Play And How Writing And Coding Are Similar
OSM is the data. It is not the example map rendering on openstreetmap.org. Sad but true. I wish there was no map at all but instead a selection of nice looking and more useful maps listed.

For routing give these a try:

http://map.project-osrm.org/

http://open.mapquest.com/

http://maps.cloudmade.com/

http://openrouteservice.org/

Compared to proper editors the Google map maker thing is horrifying. I tried to use it once and gave up because it just did not do what I was trying to do (adding 3 simply streets).
Dropbox already has 25 million[1] users.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/17/dropbox-hits-25-millions-us...
Nice! I was going to suggest adding Lua and Tcl but they're available on the Embedded page. The link in the title goes to the Scripting page.
I thought it was going to be about people who can't neatly conclude their sentences and so end up with something like "blah blah blah, so..." or "so, yeah...". That's annoying, especially when I do it myself.
Watch OpenStreetMap Edits Live: http://datenkueche.com/osmlive/
Seeing violence should indeed make you less violent unless you're a psychopath or trained to commit violence like modern soldiers are.

This is a fun doco about most WW1-WW2 soldiers being unable to kill in combat, only 2% shot to kill, being psychopaths, and 10-20% shot in the direction of the enemy.

http://youtu.be/2vlGR7S2wcI

Modern training makes 95% of soldiers killers. The training consists of simulating combat as realistically as possible and turning it into a routine. Amount matters there. Can realistic videogames give people some level of calm in a combat situation, which would allow them to kill better? Perhaps the military has some studies.

Is it related to being the aggressor in shooting rampages and gang violence? Perhaps weakly.
Engadget did a test of headphones (earbud) and it seemed to indicate for those, more expensive (at least for those they tested) did better:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/09/big-box-earbuds-put-to-a-...
Security isn't just about lack of buffer overflows. It's in the way users interact with the system, and the way they're encouraged to interact.

In most Linux distributions, the user is encouraged (by the design of the system) to, in almost all cases, either install cryptographically-signed software packages vetted and maintained by the vendor; or download a source package and compile it themselves. In Windows, the user is encouraged (by the design of the system) to download unsigned binaries from all over the Web and run them.

That's why I'll never consider Windows to be comparably secure to modern Linux distributions. Sure, you can keep a Windows system airtight, but the way the system is designed makes it require effort, so users, in general, don't.
dtach is very tempting. Is there a nice way to keep all the scrollback history?
1. Why is a 20x P/E ratio appropriate for a high-growth tech startup?

2. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/04/18/reviewing-dropboxs-vi...

3. File sharing is, like, what the Internet was originally invented for. Quite a few people use the Internet (>1billion), and it's still hard to share a photo album with your family.
Neat, ridiculously comprehensive table. A few "warnings" I found in the first 10%:

> Python: Statement separator: ; or sometimes newline

More like newline or sometimes ;. When was the last time you saw a Python script with a semicolon?

> Python: Multiline comment: '''comment line\nanother line'''

That's a multiline string.
interesting! thanks for posting that.

I still think it's bad design b/c it fails to train the average user to avoid false privilege escalation dialog boxes.
the first question seems a tad ambiguous to me. Is a contiguous rectangular block a rectangle s.t. all restaurants == P, or is it rectangle in which every P has at least one immediate neighbor == P?
How would you run your database off a file storage service?
meta: I already miss the days that we were grilling AirBnB or even the bitcoin days.
x.succ is not the Ruby equivalent of ++$x in PHP (or Perl). x.succ returns x + 1 (by default, on integers) but does not increment x as ++$x does (since numbers are immutable and that's what "x" is giving us in Ruby). The closest match would be x += 1 (shorthand for x = x + 1). I don't see x = x.succ in common usage but that would work too.
"-So, where are you taking Facebook at this point? Are you going to expand to those other schools that you're not at? And then, what?"

"-I mean, there doesn't necessarily have to be more. Like, a lot of people are focused on taking over the world ... part of making a difference and making something cool is focusing intensely."

Whoa. Sean Parker really changed him. Joking aside, I wonder at what point MZ started to considering taking over the world for real.
Even worse : it just says that flash is more insecure than windows. Nothing more.
I'm mostly standing on the side walk here, a new resident and not a citizen. But yeah, these topics basically dominate all smalltalk recently.

Co-workers tell me what they pay for kinder garden and it's unbelievable. I can judge the general prices for housing and basic needs myself and again it's weird. I moved here from one of the most expensive cities in Germany (I think it ranked on place 2-3, depending on the report), this is 1.5 times more expensive in general, ignoring obviously crappy (from my point of view) fees for kinder garden, university etc..
NULL is actually #defined to 0 in C++ as void* is not implicitly convertible to any pointer type as it is in C. So unlike in C there has been no safety in using NULL. Until now.
As they say there is more than one way to mouth a cliche.
Same story.

A few years back I had moved the majority of my sites onto Amazon's web services, using more and more of them as they were released. W3Counter.com was, just a year ago, using multiple EC2 instances of various sizes, Elastic Load Balancers, Amazon RDS instances with Multi-AZ failover, RAID arrays of EBS disks... and during those years, its reliability and performance degraded significantly compared to when it was run on physical servers. I was hit by the big Virginia outage as well.

Two months ago, I took the time to rearchitect everything and move every site back to various dedicated servers at SoftLayer. I feel like I'm in control again... no more worrying about things like the network latency of my hard disks. Despite prepaying significantly for reserved instances on both EC2 and RDS, the costs of dedicated hardware are still significantly less, too.

It was painful to waste thousands of dollars in reserved resources I'll now never use, but you know what they say about sunk costs.
Any idea how they're changing the number? Sounds like it'd have to be a manual process rather than something they could automate.
On hacking while stoned: http://hack.org/mc/texts/inspiration.txt

Also, I'm not going to name names, but I know several non-famous (but very accomplished) hackers who swear by it.
You can see it on the indie level editor: http://www.badboll.nu/acme/able/

Also on the dissassembled apk (it is compiled lua by the way, so you might need this[1] to see it more clearly).

[1] http://chunkspy.luaforge.net/
Got myself a caramel macchiato. Works and I'll definitely donate later.

Hopefully this lasts and doesn't get abused.
I don't believe most retailers will redeem cards for cash (if they can avoid it) but gift cards are use widely as a money laundering and value-exchange system amongst criminals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored-value_card#Money_launder...
What sort of hardware are you running? Windows 7 runs on netbooks!
I think this shows that much of the time, the choice of open source scripting language isn't going to make or break a project. Ditto for well-maintained web frameworks.

http://www.slideshare.net/joestump/starting-your-startup/65
Honeybees and Investors
Even when arbitrary code is being executed, if the user has limited permissions kernel-level, a program can't screw up the whole system.

The Android NDK is reliant on this - any application in Android can perform your arbitrary code execution, and it seems to be working out alright.
I'd still recommend spending a few weekends banging out a minimally-functional prototype in Rails. It's more engaging and it forces you to think through the concept in more detail. It's also good coding practice.
Anonymous to the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART)
I don't disagree with what you're saying, but it does mention in the comment that x is not mutated.
Don't confuse Safari, the browser, with OS X the operating system.
Will you be posting the answers after this concludes? I solved #1 but am afraid I won't get #2.
Ten ways to improve your technical blog writing
Let me put something else up. I'm smirking while I post this and have no bad intentions. I think it's ~somewhat~ on topic here:

During the World Championship in Germany (football/soccer. Pick your favorite) there was an article circulating in German newspapers about leaflets handed out to visitors from the US, supposedly from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The extracts and quotes said about media (among other things) that US citizen visiting DE should be prepared to understand that

- Nudity is far less a problem here. You might see nipples! And - even during daytime (serious stuff is limited to broadcasts after 22:00).

- Violence and gore are less common and sometimes inappropriate (again, there's more freedom after 22:00, but still).

So - there was a nice discussion about this trade between sex and violence. What's worse? :)
In addition to being able to control the fuel source, the main inefficiency in a power plant is wasted heat. If you've got the ability to use the waste heat from a power plant, say to heat water, then you can increase the overall efficiency significantly. "Combined heat and power" or "cogen" installations are not uncommon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
I totally didn't notice that note but the page doesn't seem to have been updated since then :-)

I still don't see why it doesn't just use the common syntax though that does the same thing. It's intriguing that the Python one has no example for that row. Perhaps they are specifically looking for idiomatic techniques, even if they're not commonly used.

I note that the page is on a wiki so I could fix it, but given it's been there for years, I suspect there's a good reason no-one has already made the change.
Someone should create a jonathan's card aggregator of all sites attempting to do this. Yeahyuh.
Funny thing, I registered saasaas.com for this exact same idea (though I had other projects since and did not go further).
Those children that are allowed to play video games or watch t.v. on end in my opinion are those that are most likely to end up in a poorer situation because there is little parenting done.
These tables are comprehensive, but the authors don't seem to actually understand the languages' idioms.

Over on the ISWIM-family page the Haskell "command line args" program is ten lines long, when it could be:

import System
main = getArgs >>= mapM_ putStrLn

I wish these were written by people who knew the languages.
Jonathan 1.0 automated it, why couldn't they? To curb abuse they are probably just not polling/updating as often. Who knows.
To be precise, OSM is not public domain data. It is under CC-BY-SA and migrating to ODbL. (The migration will probably be painful.)
Go to http://hyperpolyglot.org/ directly.

Included there:

Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby
Embeddable Languages: Tcl, Lua, JavaScript, Io
Shell Languages: Bash, Zsh, AppleScript, PowerShell
C Style Languages: C, C++, Objective C, Java, C#
Pascal Style Languages: Pascal, Ada, PL/SQL, SQL/PSM
Lisp Dialects: Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Emacs Lisp
Type Inference Languages: Standard ML, OCaml, Scala, Haskell
Declarative Languages: Prolog, Erlang, Oz
Concatenative Languages: Forth, PostScript, Factor
Computer Algebra Software: Mathematica, Sage, Maxima
Numerical Analysis Software: MATLAB, R
Apparently you haven't seen the latest trends in the ruby development world. Here's two examples I've seen lately. The first is for OSX only but the second is for *nix.

curl get.pow.cx | sh
bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)
I'm a Linux user and I do agree, but I do have to tell you - the lack of universal binaries that you can just download and install on a Linux workstation is one of the reasons Linux will never be as popular as Windows or even OS X.

People want convenience over anything else. A computer has to be secure in spite of people downloading software from all over the web.
Squirrel - Timesheet Manager now available as freeware
The Python bits do not seem to be written by a Python programmer, at least things like the above and this "package management" entry make little sense:

$ python
>>> help('modules')
download pkg with matching python version
$ tar xf libxml2-python-2.6.0.tar.gz
$ cd libxml2-python-2.6.0
$ sudo python setup.py install

That's just bizarre.
Rezurrection Map Pack Announced for Black Ops
I remember something about underground parking from Steve Job's presentation to the council.
A lot of other companies' games integrate scripting engines to ease level/mod design, because they don't want to ship a compiler toolchain along with the game. Carmack's games, on the other hand, are just eventually open-sourced, and modded "natively."
Relevance to HN? I get that much of the time Hacker News involves global politics, intrigue, and events... but since when is local news, specific to a very small corner of the world relevant to HN's membership?
Why the downvotes, please? Doesn't the very fact that the BBC's main coverage was using hours-old video despite having reporters and camera crews at the scene through the night rather negate any argument they might make that they need to use anyone's material before they have time to get permission because of some sort of urgency/public interest argument?
Neat table, one thing about PHP's member variables compared to Python/Ruby seems inaccurate though. In the example "define class", the member variable $value is declared private and then accessed through a getter and a setter, while the corresponding Python and Ruby examples use a public variable and hence look cleaner. The equivalent PHP version should be more along the lines of:

class Int {
function __construct($int = 0) {
$this->value = $int;
}
}

instead of the ridiculously verbose thing they posted there.
Let me tell you about one project I have been working on. It was a large embedded device, with lots of highly optimized code in C and ASM on Sharks and Blackfins. The problem was, every time you changed the code, you also had to push it on the device via FTP, then power down the device to reset it's memory, then reboot it with the new binary and reconnect your FTP and debugging host. Some of that could be automated, some not.

However, we also had a scripting interface. Update a script, tell the software to restart, done. Easy.
True, but "can't instantaneously spin up a new instance" just means that for a few hours the US-East EC2 region was providing the same amount of flexibility as dedicated servers.
I thought the Mac was exploited first because a Mac is more valuable than most Wintel machines, thus a better material prize.
This is the best list of submissions I've seen:

http://si14.livejournal.com/8266.html (mine is the "mortimer" one)

That said, spawnfest has said they'll be open sourcing all submissions on github by default unless the contestants request otherwise by Aug 27th.

My submission's code is online at https://github.com/choptastic/LobsterDraw
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code may be more comprehensive although not as immediately accessible
I've had the pleasure to work with him as well - I'd definitely second all of those points!
Where it really does work is in explicitly actor-modeled games, like MMOs with thousands of NPCs. You don't want to have to compile a new shopkeeper and dlopen() him on the client; you just want to stream his source and eval() it, then toss it away.
I once installed Windows XP on a machine that got compromised in the first 20 minutes just because I forgot to unplug the network cable while installing it -- although I wasn't prepared for offline updating anyway.

When a machine gets compromised by just being connected to a network, that's pretty bad and I sure hope Windows 7 is a lot better.
Now that's a great idea. Have a card that is limited in certain ways: max purchase of, say, $5 (I don't know if $5 will buy anything in $tarbuck$, since I haven't been there in many years). Limit purchases to coffee (or tea) only. No transfer allowed from one GC to another. No more than, say, 30 uses per location.

It would be an interesting series of social experiments to limit the card in these various ways, and see which limitation helps the uptake, and which hurts it. Fascinating!
>If you threaten the life of a police officer, expect to be shot. That's all there is to it.

If that's what actually happened, sure, but it's interesting that they refuse to release video of the event.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-07-05/bay-area/29737621_1_ba...
You're right that if you can create a nice, modular API and have it be slow-as-heck if it's model doesn't correspond to the underlying hardware or processes.

But I would claim you are still in better shape than if you'd done spaghetti code.

Caching of a multitude of type can solve many problems of classes that treat resources as more available than they really are. You, yourself give the solution for your string example - in the yourself, if the actually needs random access in any performance-driven fashion, you'll need the extra-array so there's no problem. Double buffering and similar stuff have put to rest the problem of repainting pieces of windows in ordinary GUI programming. I'd imagine something similar could solve whatever the problem is you're talking about with OpenGL.

And given that you admit optimizations tend to be fragile constructs, it seems your argument strengths the argument, my argument, they should generally be done last.
A lot of effort to prove that e^(*pi) + 1 = 0 is ugly
I believe that cloud storage accounts will find widespread usage, I just don't think it is a $5 billion industry. I think it is more something that will exist as a free bonus within some other business model (eg. buy one Amazon album, get many gigs for free, or use Google Docs storage so google can have even more info on you for ad targeting).

In short, I think Dropbox got on to something big early on, but they will eventually be like the early Netscape of this area.... Other competitors are pretty much guaranteed to come in and erode their value with "free" (enough) alternatives that exist to prop up other business models.
Their methodology doesn't seem very rigorous. It's impossible to do a true double-blind test of earbud sound in isolation because they feel different in the ear and that's likely to affect sound perception.
I appreciate your concern. However, in fact, I have NEVER worked for Developer and Platform Evangelism or anywhere near that division in any capacity. I worked for the Developer Division under ScottGu when I first arrived, then moved to MSDN (the online documentation team) in Server and Tools and have recently moved into the Web Platform team as an architect. I've never been in marketing or sales. My blog is my own and my voice is my own.
For #2, are the codes unique? Do customers select dishes uniformly at random, without regard to whether they appear to be available? How could an item possibly appear to be unavailable when in fact it is available?

The problem statement makes it seem that the grid presented to the customer is an array of 36 squares, where every square that corresponds to a letter or number that occurs in any index of any possible special (whether it is the special today or not) has been crossed out. How is the customer to deduce anything from this that he or she could not already deduce from the published list of possible specials?
500 customers and a 4% conversion rate - so does that mean 20 paying customers total?
> You should be able to significantly improve performance with a few changes .. in code written [well?] enough.

Unfortunately, I don't think that is usually what happens. In an established code base that is reasonably well designed and well written, the performance is rarely dominated by a small number of very expensive bottlenecks that are ripe for local optimisation. Such things have usually been worked out a long time ago and there is no low hanging fruit left to pick.

At that point, if you've got five layers of architecture and each is only running at 75% efficiency because of all the little details, that might take your overall performance down to perhaps 25% of what it could be. If your software is I/O bound anyway or runs in half a second, you might not care. If that is the difference between taking a week to complete your research calculations and taking a month, or it represents a 5x increase in your hardware budget, then you probably care very much.
"He exposed the vulnerability."

What 'vulnerability' did he expose, that wasn't already STARING everyone in the face? The card was no more 'vulnerable' than an unattended tip jar or an unattended farmstand. This was like taking money from a 1-year old.

Ooooh! Look at the big boy Sam! He's so smart, he showed how you can rip a child off!

To me, Mr. Odio seems like an attention whore who got jealous that Stark's experiment was creating a buzz.

I'm sorry if this sounds like an adhominem rant, but I'm sick of people who will piss in the punch just to make a point that there's someone thirsty in Africa.