skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing I found most interesting was "supervisory mode execution protection (SMEP)", AKA rings, available in 64 bit as well as 32 bit modes. This is something that AMD punted in their 64 bit macroarchitecture (which Intel was then forced to copy) and is sorely missed for various low level stuff. Unfortunately the long 64 bits interregnum without rings means it will be a long time before you can depend on others being able to run software depending on it.
Medicare Supplement Plan F for Texas
Of those, about 50% can do FizzBuzz style questions. On paper, all of these ~10 people would be qualified to do the work

If it's for a programming position, the "paper" is lying in this case. If someone is claiming to have experience or qualification in certain areas that they can't even perform basic operations in, they're fraudsters.

It'd like trying to hire a surgeon and have someone turn up who doesn't even know what lymph nodes are. Dangerous and unhireable, but sadly a lot of employers put up with this sort of nonsense.
Report on http://askascientist.org
Alan Kay talks about field effects but maybe what he really means is that "everything is an object" is a mistake. Not everything is an object in real life. For example, a sound wave is not an object but objects can react to it (or it can manipulate them, whichever you prefer). Maybe emphasizing this in a programming language can be done as simply as you have described it is done in go. ( I have always found objects expressive and useful but when overused they feel like a straitjacket)
Everybody, including corporations, institutions, and even just people, care about their name and its associations.
Doesn't work on a Chromebook, where everything is always fullscreen.
This is my side-project, as I said in the previous thread discussing it questions/feedback/comments are welcome.
There is no legally mandated minimum wage in Sweden (often to the surprise of my fellow countrymen), there is however typically collective agreements negotiated by the unions that about 80% of working Swedes belong too.
Firefox Now Scores 100% on Acid3 Test
I am reminded of the weird financial metric that Groupon invented...
I meant 'slow' as in 'slow to trickle in', not as in 'performant'. Concretely: I love the idea, would gladly have our startup sign the pledge, but I'm not enthused about giving a third party that level of access to the company's Twitter account.

I imagine many others will feel the same way, and more so the larger the company, which could be counterproductive. Perhaps you might consider accepting pledges with alternate means as well; the existing signees presumably didn't use the Twitter app for it.
A [Haskell] play in one act
we were passing a FEDEX dropbox at the time and I said, hey, wait a minute... flipped the lid and found the FEDEX secure lock and.... managed to open it almost instantly.

You made me want to read the guide just to get free newspapers.
Such a nice read, thanks for sharing
Yes, quad-core Sandy Bridge is incredible, even on the low-end of the scale with the i52400.

It seems like the power-savings in Ivy Bridge will allow a further transition of this tech down to smaller form-factors.

I wonder if the non-premium laptop space will still remain stuck where it is now though? I'm not sure, 5 years on from 2006, what percentage of consumer laptops are significantly faster in use than my MacBook Core Duo.
Any discussion about indexing needs a link to
http://use-the-index-luke.com/

It's the best resource that I've seen with respect to databases and indexing.
Terrible tragedy.

http://www.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Avis=J7&Dato=20...

Photo 7 is very peculiar. The pilot is not visible. I am familiar with this cockpit, and there is no where to go backwards, so he must be all the way forwards out of view.

In photo 38, you can see how visible he is when taxiing out.

Just absolutely terrible. My thoughts are with all involved.
This is really cool, I'd love to see more default charts added to the DB. Would love to see daypart mashed up against ecomm data.
The problem is that revolutions tend to be more harmful than their predecessors: see China in the 60s, for example.
Anyone can learn how to pikc locks.

There's an error in the second sentence of Chapter 1. Not promising.
How to get him back
If the only question running through your head right now is how to get my man back then you must be willing to change your approach immediately. The number one reason people fail to get their man back is they allow their emotions to dictate their actions leading to erratic behavior.
Perhaps in theory. In practice, some companies manage to do less badly than others.

It's not necessarily even a contradiction, if your primary business is selling to consumers it's entirely reasonable that a company would want to keep a positive image going.

For a company that makes earth-moving equipment primarily purchased by strip mining operations, no one would question the business sense of them not donating a percentage of their profits to environmental protest organizations.

For a company that sells to some gamer demographic, perhaps it would be the better part of wisdom to, say, decline to antagonize the likes of Geohot and the noncommercial hackers, modders, and Linux users of their platform. (Never mind the legally questionable tactic of retroactively disabling previously advertised and purchased functionality).
People always put Sculley down but the era that he was at Apple really opened doors for me in so many ways about twenty years ago. Hypercard showed me that you didn't have to be a programmer to make interactive media. CD-ROMs and QuickTime showed me that computers could be an entertainment medium. It was also during his run that color Macs came out and the crazy idea of built in sound cards came of age. And yes all of you can make fun of me loving my Newton -- but it was the first bold baby step in a market that didn't exist.
What is a moral solution, can you give a historical example?
Check this one out http://elweb.co/programacion/how-to-host-django-apps-on-hero...
I didn't focus on that but anecdotally I find that consistently oversleeping (over 9 hours) would leave me groggy and generally reduced performance (at least temporarily in the morning) but not as bad as sleep deprivation. Whereas getting one or two nights of mild oversleeping after being sleep deprived for several days does seem to speed up the recovery time.

Of course there were many other variables like exercise, diet, health, and mood, where each seems to have some minor effect on my sleep requirements one way or the other. The Sudoku benchmarking was performed on more or less "idling" lifestyle (no unusual healthy or unhealthy activities, and I wasn't consuming alcohol/caffeine or smoking).
email address was pretty funny
"Yahoo has no vision. It has no purpose. It's dispensable."

Facebook may have no vision. (I actually think they do. Even if it's not very clear or savory.) But facebook certainly isn't dispensable. The analogy would be much more complete if you imagined that Yahoo was the only main email provider, emails didn't get exchanged between servers and in order to get an email to yahoo mail users you had to go to Yahoo to mail them. That's about how dispensable Facebook is to a lot of people's private lives.
Objective-C JSON Mapping
A framework for mapping from json data to native model objects and back to json. Rudimentary support for CoreData NSManagedObjects.
"Another turning point in the last 10 years is that basically any PC made since 2000 will probably be sufficient for what most normal users want. We get increasingly powerful CPUs that most people just don't need."

That's being quite generous to the Pentium 4. Really the last 4-5 years is when acceptably good CPU power in any circumstance for normal users became the norm. The Core series of processors is what first gave us the sort of power that we've come to expect and Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge and now Ivy Bridge are all just improvements on that.

Also, according to cpu world, the original 80386 was done on on 1.5µm lithography.
Best Cardio Workouts You May Be Missing
"There are ... groups that take an "ends justifies the means" approach to achieving their goals--goals which often involve killing others."

Groups such as the United States of America?
What's an example of something that depends on this?
Ehh. You really think Windows XP is a "business-facing" OS? It accounted for the overwhelming majority of all home computer installs during the time it was sold. The internals of the OS aren't what makes it "business-" or "consumer-" facing. iOS's internals are more sophisticated than Win2k's were.
Facebook smart lists are not a copy of circles. Circles were an improvement on Facebook's lists, that they've had for years. Smart lists are an improvement on lists.

Facebook's messaging has effectively killed AIM at least for me and everyone I know. Huge failure...
It should have been "ZZüy – A Lesson In Language Choice". If he had stuck with BASIC, he would not have had to endure the tortured route to success that was necessary with C.
To be honest I didn't even think many people would use it, I only put the site live on wednesday evening and posted a link on my personal twitter on thursday. I certainly didn't expect it to get the traffic and word-of-mouth popularity that it did.
It's definitely just ActiveRecord and not ORM that cause the problem in my opinion.I've started work on an alternative which focuses on automating just the most tedious parts of writing sql then getting out of the way (and requires no boilerplate classes - it intuits the relationships from the key names). Oh and it's fast as hell and uses very little memory.

I call it PluSQL: the ORM for SQL lovers:

http://github.com/iaindooley/PluSQL/
I used ORMs for a long time and I have written my own many years ago, so I understand them well and I have learned to dislike them for most tasks. But I should have been more specific in what I mean by set oriented.

The point of working with sets of tuples is that you can apply any set operation to a set of tuples and what you get is a set of tuples. You can use selection, projection or union and you still get a set of tuples. The recursive nature of this principle makes it so powerful and simple. Kind of like Lisp.

ORMs introduce a conceptual barrier between objects defined by domain classes created at design time and generic containers used to hold the result of projections and aggregate functions. If you join over two classes and project over some of their attributes you lose all the properties of the original classes, including any attribute accessor methods. Same thing with aggregate functions and grouping.

Even if the result of a query involving projections or aggregate functions happens to have the exact same attributes as another existing class, you don't get objects of that class and hence none of its methods. The tuples don't compare equal to objects of that class either because they don't share their type.

Different ORMs have various features to partially paper over these issues. I don't want to get caught up in a debate about what ORMs can or cannot do because powerful ORMs like hibernate can do almost anything and everything is optional.

The point is that they discourage me from working in a set oriented fashion because they make it hugely more complex than it needs to be. They create a conceptual mess and then they want me to learn a lot of tuning techniques to fix what is broken as a result of that mess. It makes no sense to me.
I've been reading Design for Hackers today, so doesn't look like that. Though sometimes Amazon (or publishers) seem to delay kindle book availability in some regions. Really annoying when Amazon first recommends a book to you, and then tells you that it isn't available when you try to buy.
Depends on your software stack, too: the Athlon system I bought in 2000 had no trouble running a web browser with multiple windows while simultaneously compiling, transcoding DV, having email & IM open, etc. on BeOS.

We've gained in many areas but I think it took the hail-mary SSD migration to dodge the usability hit from poor I/O scheduling on Windows, OS X, Linux, etc. This is far from saying BeOS was perfect (e.g. networking was wretched, there was no pervasive color management or visual quality from the switch to GPU compositing) but rather that some of our memories are colored more by the software than underlying hardware.
Yeah I think Facebook has a vision which is plain to see if you look for it, they are working very hard on unified messaging/communication system. Which in its current state isn't interesting, and if successful probably won't be interesting, instead it will be subtle and invasive into my daily routine.

I for one haven't noticed a change at all on my Facebook... I think the "boring" aspect maybe a tech related issue where people expect to see something crazing happening every week. I know I often open up Hacker news and go "ooohhhh nothing to see here today", which is more a sign of my indulgence in news as opposed to article nothing happening out there.
Definitely: for at least half a decade most of the HPC people I've worked with or for had power and cooling as the primary constraint, not space or budget. Things like switching to centralized DC (vs. in-server power supplies), getting disks out of cluster nodes, etc. but there was an obvious problem when a rack of servers was roughly comparable BTU-wise to a large gas grill running at maximum.
Using vi keybindings in dvorak is an exercise in pain anyways...
I remember that some things depended upon it before AMD came out with their 64 bit architecture, but not what they are.

One thing I do know it's useful for is allowing your GC to run in an intermediate level of privilege between user and supervisor code. Also, if you do it right (i.e. Multics) a system call can be much cheaper because the supervisor isn't running in its own address space etc. Instead, your user level code calls a carefully vetted bit of system gateway code that has a foot in both rings.
teh guide has lots of typos.
The article claims that Facebook's messaging features are a failure. I disagree; they have massive potential.

Facebook chat is the primary real time chat system that I use these days and has replaced MSN for me and my friends. I recently installed the Messenger app on my iPhone and it certainly has the potential to kill off whatsapp and similar apps due two reasons: all my contacts are already available, and that I can use either my laptop or phone, depending on whichever is available to me when I need to communicate.

Unfortunately I doubt that this potential will be realised. Why? Because I haven't seen Facebook advertise the app AT ALL. (I heard about the app through HN.) None of my friends are aware the app exists and it's such a shame. It wouldn't be hard for Facebook to push their chat service as an alternative to txt/bbm/whatsapp, they already have an ad network in place that they can use for free.

I really hope to see Facebook push their messaging service as a way to communicate not just when you are browsing facebook.com but instead as an alternative to text-based communication methods on phones.
If he had stuck with BASIC, he might not have had the protocols he needed to write what he wanted.
JVM execution (a Java applet I assume) now requires a confirmation, at least in Chrome.
Software Piracy (1985, Computer Chronicles)
> While the speed of light limits latency in wide area networks, electrons can traverse 100m of copper cables and back in about 1µs

You can reduce latency by making the cable runs straight, vs. winding around underneath streets. That actually accounts for a significant amount of time, and might be an interesting problem to research.
You probably thought that because it's uncommon in good writing and you're taught not to do it. It's probably against style guidelines for major newspapers, for example, and it sounds elegant to educated native writers.
If you're going to store in a relational database anyway, why have the expense of having to develop and support both? It'd make more sense to try to either denormalize - with some support framework - or just use the SQL database from the beginning, the deciding factor being how important aggregate operations are to your app and simple questions like how much your NoSQL database costs to operate vs. your SQL database.

tl;dr: "Know your data access patterns and pick a good fit with your resources"
There's more to database programming than just concocting queries. Once you've built a query you want, you have to run it and handle the results somehow. Most object-oriented programs are going to use an object for this. So it makes sense to just write your whole program in terms of set operations on top of predefined objects which map pretty nicely to the database's idea of objects.
I don't buy it. Before anything else, Yahoo was a combination search engine and indexer. Google trounced them. There was just no way they could continue to compete. So then they branched out into becoming a "media company," and lost all direction. There is nothing they excel at.

Until someone is a better social networking site than Facebook, they are in no danger of "becoming Yahoo." And I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon - and maybe not ever. Facebook may become "boring," but only in the sense that all of your utilities are boring. You rely on them, but they cease to be exciting, and instead just become part of the background of things that you take for granted. This is very different from Yahoo, which is boring because it's irrelevant.
If looks like there was something very bright there, probably a sun reflection, and older digital sensors have a problem with that, it's called "blooming" and "streaking". Basically the charge in one "pixel" is so high, it leaks to the neighboring pixels.

Example:

http://www.aerith.net/misao/pixy/tutorial/blooming.html
Are people excited by search?
Yeah, buying your hardware is largely a one time capital cost, but power for it and for your cooling is a constant operating cost. Haven't I read somewhere that power is now the largest expense in the lifetime of a "supercomputer"?
Enigma machine coming up for auction
The problem with something like non-premium laptops is that cost tends to be the biggest constraint, so they're not going to give you more than the market demands unless that's "free".

But who knows? You can't buy a Sandy Bridge Xeon chip that's less than 3 GHz.... (Although I forget the clock rate of the very low power OEM only part.)
Hi there.

I'm the author of that vi.

What are "text objects"?

PS: "caw" and "ci" aren't in vi.
Certainly, although you have to differentiate between confusion, which can be beneficial as you say, and being completely lost, which hampers learning.

The subject matter being obvious and well understood can look a lot like the subject matter having no meaning at all because the learners are completely lost.

Particularly, asking 'any questions?' and then moving on (often rapidly) when no questions are forthcoming is another sign. It's hard to tell if it is because there is full understanding or almost no understanding. Instead, try giving more time for people to think of questions, and ask 'what questions do you have?'.

I've not had a chance to try, but in a similar vein, having an IRC chat running along side a lecture could provide similar useful feedback, and an avenue for questions without making learners feel stupid.

I like the direction they are taking with this tool. Good, honest, and especially timely feedback is one of the difficult challenges of education. Without it you are flying blind.
No link in the article so here is the report cited:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2011....
IE9 on Windows 7 and IE9 on Windows Phone Mango (7712) also score 100% now.
Verizon initiates 'network optimization' to throttle bandwidth of heavy users
So, theoretically, wireless should have lower latency, on this factor. Line of sight.
I kept reading this and wondering why there was going to be so little improvement when dropping down to 22nm. Turns out they are mostly just bumping the GPU which is useless to anyone with a discrete graphics card.

"Intel isn't disclosing the die split but there are more execution units this round (16 up from 12 in SNB) so it would appear as if the GPU occupies a greater percentage of the die than it did last generation. It's not near a 50/50 split yet, but it's continued indication that Intel is taking GPU performance seriously."
Are the Male Extra Reviews for Real? | T Jewels
contentEditable isn't very cross-platform, comes with its own set of keybindings, and it's difficult to decorate the text you're working on as you type without glitching things.

I'm also skeptical about canvas, so when I implemented my own jsvi years ago (at http://src.internetconnection.net/vi and now at http://geocar.sdf1.org/vi ) I didn't use canvas. It works everywhere but chrome (which won't let me capture escape), and it produces the same results all the way back to MSIE6.

In retrospect, I would've had an easier time overriding keystrokes on a textarea.
Yeah I think its doomed, too. I mean just look at it. Everybody and their dog is on Facebook, with status updates and comments quickly approaching the niveau of Youtube comments. Meanwhile marketing firms are vigorously trying to get as much attention as possible in more or less shady ways, which is getting increasingly annoying. A large portion of the userbase is so annoyed, bored or has serious privacy concerns, that they stopped submitting altogether already.
The main reason a lot of people are much more happier with Google+ and Twitter nowadays is not because some features are marginally better - it's because the atmosphere is so much nicer there.
Sure, but if you ignore the trickle of new coins you have to get those 100 from someone else, and that requires burning significant amounts of bitcoin days.
The problem with unplugging the ORM or inter operating is that the 2 biggest ORM frameworks are implemented such that they don't support composite primary keys and have stupid requirements like having an auto increment column called "id" on every table (including tables used as part of a many to many relationship!!).

As far as I know Doctrine 2.0 absolves a lot of these problems but I've not used it yet.
Facebook jumped the shark when all those horrible, ugly apps started polluting the thing with idiocy. The editorial incompetence and general awfulness of the ecosystem was astonishing. Farmville was the end of the beginning of the end.

In 2004, Facebook wasn't garbage. It was simple, it served a purpose very well. It changed the social experience of being in college, a sharp contrast against "social" today which is largely irrelevant to having real social experiences. Facebook is what it is today because of the momentum it established while a social networking site for colleges, in a time when it actually served its purpose very well.

At any rate, I agree that "social" is a very boring space right now. I find most of it anti-social. It's an excuse for not being social: if you put everyone you meet in your Facebook "friends" list, you have an excuse for not keeping in touch with people.
Cocoapods: An Objective-C library package manager
Thanks for the reminder. I was beginning to lose interest because of the (inappropriate/disinteresting) content and often times the negativity. Keep up the good work HN.
Safari on my iPad got 100/100, but there was a small glitched box (bottom right) not on the reference page so it's obviously not a perfect test.
Basketball Jordan Shoes
Last one in the bunch, even later than IE9, but something good nevertheless. Funny point in the article: FF passes the test not because of changes to FF, but because of changes to the Acid test :)
hey im not gonna sell bs. im poor like all people here. itd be cool if you choose me. im a novice rail developer. xelnyq[at]gmaildotcom
My dream house
Apparently, what's good enough for American education is good enough for grading web browsers: if your pupils aren't learning, give them easier tests.

It's still a misleading headline, though.