skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well said.

Back in the day, I actually used both the NeXTcube and a BeBox (although neither as a primary environment)

The NeXT environment enamored everybody who was introduced to it... for a day or two. Them almost everybody moved away from it because it was so... damn.. slow. The base cube only had 8MB of RAM (a decent amount in those days!) which wasn't nearly enough for the big heavy frameworks it used. NeXT had to retrofit all of the cubes with 40MB SCSI drives just for swap. The display postscript system was elegant (it provided a common display engine for both the screen and the NeXT-brand laser printer, for instance) but ate up precious cycles of the 68030. The magnetic-optical drive that supposedly was the future of personal storage had horrible performance (although the drives mercifully gave out after a few years anyway)

In short, the NeXTcube's we had were the machines everybody loved but few wanted to actually use.

The BeBox by contrast was nothing if not zippy! There were too many missing bits for it to really be my main environment, but you really felt that you were using the future of operating systems. After years of using UIs that always had at least some lag the BeBox's instantaneous response was almost a shocking experience.

When Apple was quite publicly looking for an OS to buy I was certainly rooting for Be. It seemed to fit their needs perfectly: it already ran on PowerPC and its responsiveness would have been great for the multimedia creators that were Apple's bread-and-butter. When they went with NeXT instead I thought it was just another of Apple's classic missteps. I couldn't see why they were hitching their wagon to an OS that was last decade's news.

Clearly I was wrong, even if you ignore the Steve Jobs factor. The hardware advances underway quickly made the amazing responsiveness of BeOS moot; now every OS feels like the snappy BeBox did in 1995. As memory sizes grew the NeXTstep frameworks came into their own (probably if the NeXTcube could have had 1GB of RAM it would have been fine!)

To put it simply, Be built an OS in 1996 that was perfect for 1996. NeXT build an OS in 1989 that was suited for the 2000s.

I don't mean that last bit as a pure complement, by the way. The "too far ahead of its time" is a cliche about failed tech products. Building something that only works with hardware 10+ years in the future is hardly a recipe for success. It's only through the accidents of history that NeXTstep got its chance to shine years after its original failure. 99% of products in that position only get to be footnotes.
Rants about OS X, but only bitches about the email client like a clueless 90's Windows-user. Is there any reason to take this seriously?
Except WebObjects was used for the Apple Store, and later the iTunes Store.
> That way people will have completely portable code.

Makes sense about portability, but what is your security model? Are you using static analysis, sandboxing like NaCl, or something else?
We've actually reached out to one or two poli sci professors, but if she does research and suffers from a lack of funding then I will find her. She'll be hearing from me one way or another!
They work in every Cocoa text field. Ctrl-[abefnp] ... not sure if I missed any. Those are the ones I use daily.
Weather APIs know the indoor temperature?
I 100% agree. We read about so many Crowd-Sourced-Cloud-Based Social Location-aware ridiculous web apps that spring up every day that allow you to "throw a sheep" at your friends that it's getting a little ridiculous. That's why people keep shouting "bubble!!!" -- because we aren't really solving any true problems.

If these droids were upgraded to water, move, feed, and monitor plant health, it would be a huge revolution to the industry and actually _increase the efficiency_ of a necessary industry.

It makes me a little sick to see Color getting 41 million, Shaker getting 15 million, and this great startup gets 5. Priorities people...
Crowdfunding bill would expose investors to swindles
For Xbox players this would be akin to being logged into a live-account whilst playing a single player game. I regularly see what my friends are playing when I check who's online.
Closures break the high-performance part of things. If we could have just used JavaScript, we would have done so - KL is as close to JavaScript as we can get, and still offer native, multi-threaded performance. If we introduce inferred types, then the only difference will be 'no closures'.
If they succeed, it will mean the financial transaction space is truly becoming efficient. At $.25/transaction and an average transaction size of $500, that means a charge of %0.05 or 5bps. Compare that to most credit card companies that charge 2% plus a fixed transaction fee.

That also means their current run rate is $175,000/year which is not a huge business.
From the article: "The average transaction volume for Dwolla is right around $500 dollars. We move between $30 and $50 million per month."

So that's 60k to 100k transactions for $15k to $25k per month in fees.
> This looks like 'snake oil'. What exactly is the purpose of using the brainfuck code instead of the message itself?

Hackery, pretty much.

> if the message was discovered, then brainfuck does not represent much of an obstacle to reading it.

The point of stego is that the message is not suspected. Usually this is done via statistical analysis(1). However, this just tells the adversary that "a message could be there". Given that information, they still need to find out which bytes are information-carrying, and that those bytes encode to a BF program. Stego is all about the extra hurdles, it is literal security-through-obscurity. But once they got that, yeah, the message will be exposed.

(1) Which is why encrypting the message before stego is not a straightforward good idea, as encrypted data looks like white noise, and contrary to popular belief, the lowest bits in most photos are not distributed like white noise (as a naive stego algorithm would just hide an encrypted message in the image's least significant bits).
What kind of a genius does it take to realize that you can't represent two bits by one bit?
Very cool, question: How do you know what's the official image of the page? I fetched google.com and it seems to "extract" the right image. However I don't see anything special in the <img> for google.com.
Separate volume bars for speakers/headphones are already maintained, no?
They way I learned it is, I pushed it to see what happened. Voila, it means end of line.
The canonical shortcuts are Cmd-left/right/up/down, which move the cursor to the absolute left, right, top, and bottom of the document, respectively. This makes perfect sense.

Home and End behave differently, they move the viewport to the beginning or end of the document but do not move the cursor. They are like scrolling in that you don't lose your position. I'm not sure, but I think that page up and down (Fn-up and Fn-down) behave similarly. I never use these though.
If the average transaction is $500 and they move $350MM a year, that's only $175,000 in revenue. I know they are still a young startup but that's certainly a less sexy number than the headline tries to imply.

Am I missing something?
This last paragraph was very interesting:

>>As a counter-example, drug use in Mexico is relatively low, approximately 2 percent, whereas in America it hovers around 8 percent. Yet, violence there is at an all-time high. The market and the crime surrounding the trade might have crashed in the U.S., but the death toll has only increased South of the border ever since that region inherited the title of lead cocaine importer. Currently valued at over $3 billion annually, the Mexican cocaine market shows no signs of subsiding, and as long as such a high-valued market exists, violence will most likely follow.
<<
Didn't realize that "alt" here meant the "esc" key.
Very clever. Here's a link to the page: http://www.hermancain.com/404
A few different ways, it will favour the open graph image or meta 'image_src" tags if there are any. If not, it will take all the image tags on the page and then decide what's relevant based on the correct size and position on the page which is usually fairly accurate.
Porting the C++ code directly to Java:

macpro:ValueAtRisk sam$ time java -cp . VarMT

VaR = -43.7173372179254300

real	0m36.863s
user	4m48.944s
sys	0m0.978s

macpro:ValueAtRisk sam$ time ./var-mt

VaR = -43.7173372179254329

real	0m27.048s
user	3m33.971s
sys	0m0.145s

Pretty good showing for such a low level benchmark.

https://github.com/spullara/Benchmarks/blob/master/Server/Va...

It would be moderately interesting to see how well this benchmark would do in OpenCL or the like.

(Benchmarks ran on a 3.33 GHz, 6-core MacPro, JDK 7 Developer Preview)
> Homebrew is awesome but it should be way easier to compile from source without installing Xcode.

If it was a real issue someone would have packaged up GCC or LLVM. There is absolutely nothing that prevents anyone from doing this. The truth is that nobody actually minds installing Xcode to get a compiler. Or at least the few who do don't actually care enough to do something about it.
Terminal.app barely changed between 10.6 and 10.7. I have the same settings I've had since 10.5, actually.
Because it doesn't matter what is it based on. Important is _where_ it is. I mean, yes, instead of "in the cloud" you could say "out there", but that's more confusing, because can mean too much things. Cloud is a nice word that does it's job well.
Haha, that's clever! It works, too.
Windows 7 actually supports explicit vertical maximization; dragging the top of a window to the top of the screen will maximize the app vertically but leave its width unchanged.
To me this just sounds like "somebody else should make me my shiny toys so I can be an 'artist'".

Take some responsibility. If you "artists" hadn't all ran after the shiny toys Adobe offered but taken those "pedantic" standards people seriously, you wouldn't be in this position.

The success and dominance of Flash held open standards back for over a decade. An you were not an innocent bystander in that.
My personal sympathies lie with ending the WoD and lowering the incarceration rate. However, I think a nearly fivefold increase in the rate of incarceration probably has something to do with declining crime as well.

Does anyone have any solid evidence that the jump in incarceration was not the driver of the decline in crime?

Maybe the Levitt paper addresses this. I'll check it out.
A lot of programs have some kind of auto-save, here is how it works in Microsoft Word. While editing your document, it is auto-saved, but as a new, hidden file. When you manually Save, this new file overwrites the old, and a Save As does the same, but with the new name, not wiping the old document. You can argue that this is messy, and only a hack to get around the paradigm. It all depends on how people want to work, giving the program the responsibility to handle it.
The technology has existed for decades to install applications without having to make potentially dangerous alterations to systemwide shared state. There's only so much you can blame on app developers. In the year 2011, shipping an OS that allows an application to corrupt the registry is just as stupid, if not stupider, than shipping an OS that allows the application to grab or generate arbitrary pointers into memory allocated to other processes.

No one should have to know what "reregister the library" even means.
>> Who are those people? Politicians? (serious question)

Prisons and drug producers/dealers use lobbies and politicians to keep drugs illegal.

The fact that they're illegal is the biggest factor effecting their high price.
Another idea is to substitute the eight BF instructions to different bytes. Right now the byte-values for most instructions are within 1 or 2 values from eachother.

You'd need a modified interpreter, though, but by picking different values for the BF instructions, spaced further apart in the 0-255 range, you'd get less collisions (incorrect BF tokens appearing at the wrong spot in your stream).

Another possibility would be to pick different code points for each image/message encoded. Though you'd need another channel to specify which 8 bytes encode for which BF tokens. You could even not specify it, but limit the choices for the 8 byte values and try all combinations, then see which ones decode to a string that comes closest to character distribution in English language (this is the same method used by online translators to determine source language, character distribution is highly distinctive).
It's actually a reason why we went down the 'create your own language for operators' path - we originally wrote our operators in C++, but when we shifted to the browser it was clear that wasn't going to go well :) We looked at sand-boxing, but given how long the NaCl guys took to get it working, we really didn't want to take that on as a start-up. We also wanted something that a web developer would be comfortable working with - so we looked at JS and decided we could create a variant for performance.

We don't give pointers, and we do things client-side like guarded arrays (not necessary on the server). Memory management is handled by the core. I will get our guys to put a post up that covers KL in more detail - security was a major consideration for us.
Prison contractors. It's a huge industry.
We started with  100 games, and now we have only 6
You know you're done if you understand what this image means (and how it was made): http://i.imgur.com/Kn7Za.png
The Fortress: Inferno IPA Version 1.0.0
I found most of associations so talent-less that it's even funny.
Very nice ;D
I'm not sure how comparable it is to your program since I cannot run it in batch mode (memory leaking...), but I'm able to process the first 340k rows of that file in under 7 seconds with cache limited to 15 characters. That makes 20 microseconds per row (with checking the result).

Or another way - 7 microseconds per reduction step on average.

Without cache, it takes minutes, so I didn't want to wait for the actual time. See http://imgur.com/FL2Eg for seconds per row -vs- cache limit. Ah... written in python without using the bit-packing tricks. I guess the 100+ times speedup is enough anyways... https://bitbucket.org/viraptor/ski/src
Why high code coverage is not enough
Cmd: this is an important command we expect you to use a lot.

Shift-cmd: wow this program has a lot of commands that people want shortcuts for.

Shift-ctrl/alt: holy shit this program has a lot of commands.

Shift-ctrl-alt: this program is probably old enough to vote, and has a huge ton of commands

Alt: rarely used alone outside of terminal

Ctrl: see alt

Fn: NOT ON ALL KEYBOARDS. Used to force f-keys to output f-key codes instead of doing media control stuff, or to change cursors into page-up/dn/start/end.
cool :) Thanks for doing that - we can merge in at later date and include Java results.

We expose OpenCL in Fabric as an extension, as we wanted to be able to target heterogeneous hardware architectures. We didn't use this for benchmarking as we wanted to show CPU performance first. For clarity - KL does not compile down to OpenCL, you have to write for the GPU explicitly.
Sock puppets are not welcome on Hacker News. Please don't do this.
You're not the only one - this idea has been done before, google "The Third Voice" for the details.

it was apretty big deal back in 1999 - http://blog.collins.net.pr/2011/11/httphypothesis.html
Chances are you downloaded a 64-bit Linux binary. That happened to me, too.
I don't believe the conventional wisdom that the stockholder only cares about short term gains. I see, over and over, share prices punished because the stockholders do not see the company doing well long term, and vice versa.
Two programs that make my life on OSX way better:

Zooom/2, which lets me move and resize windows with my positioned anywhere on the window, activated with customizable key combinations. http://coderage-software.com/zooom/index_green/index.html

SizeUp, which lets me position and resize the activate window with customizable keyboard shortcuts. One common use case is to make one window take up the left half of the screen, and another the right half, if I'm working on something that needs information from both. http://irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
how does this compare to embed.ly?
The article Levitt's article. I want to note that in that paper Levitt found that the increase in the incarceration rate was a the biggest driver of the decline in crime:

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUndersta...

See Tables 5 and 6 on pages 184-185.
Homebrew tries to use the default libs and utilities that come with OS X / Xcode.

MacPorts and Fink try to create their own little microcosm of a Linux system complete with all libraries and utilities. They generally seem to fail at this because major packages are broken all the time and conflict in a million little ways with the system ones.
And what's wrong with that? "On topic" is anything that interests the group.
Dwolla lost a lot of Bitcoin business when they started doing chargebacks (the only reason Bitcoiners were using Dwolla to begin with was the claimed lack of chargebacks).
Pretty much everything I've read about Lion (and, ok, Windows 8) suggests theuy is taking a hard right towards non-techies.

Meh. Give me Linux. In a few years, I'll be 100% Linux I figure.
I find this title frustratingly ironic since Microsoft won't support C.
Future Investment Bankers vs Builders
Ask HN: Validating your idea
Just curios at the ways by which people looking to do a startup validate their initial ideas. "talking to friends", "google ads"?...
What Separates Me From You
What Separates Me From You
A Day To Remember continues to mix this kind that appears relatively unmixable on his fourth album which separates me from you Pop Punk is gay happy go lucky themes seem to run into a metallic core aggressive moments
I can make a fairly accurate guess of what type of scan an MRI scanner is running by the noise it makes. T2, PDFS, T1, types of gradient echoes etc.
I'm not alone in this and know a fair few people who can. I have managed to tell when a scan is badly set up with this technique too, really surprises people!
Is it really called the maximise button? I was expecting the same as Windows the first week, but I learnt it wasn't (meant to be) called maximise, I stopped using it. A fill-screen button would be nice, but you just do it once manually and it remembers.

Tim says the Library folder is hidden (power users would quickly change this, and several other things), and that the trashing system (or any copying/moving) is not as good as Windows. I do like W7's copy dialog, but it's very wordy, nothing in OSX would be that wordy.
For the same reason most (if not all) real estate agents are worthless. There's no barrier to entry and there's the allure of easy money. Until the profits collapse the market will be inundated with wannabes.
Which spelling error are you referring to?
BountyIt: Win cash Bounties for your feedback, ideas, and skills.
Can't wait to use this. I got a $165 parking ticket last week.
Have you read this article?
http://startupbound.com/how-i-quickly-test-and-validate-star...
That's awesome! Thanks a lot.
That's incorrect. Objects aren't objects, in imperative languages their largely syntactic sugar for passing struct as a this pointer, and providing a vtable. They don't actually implement many of the ideas from OO theory such as sending messages to objects.

Look at a language OCaml which can consistently beat C or C++ which also frequently beats C.

Most of the reason why C is fast is because it mirrors the hardware so closely allowing people to write reasonably optimized portable assembler, C falls down on macro optimizations such as inlining function pointers that are available to higher level languages such as OCaml. Sometimes the marco and runtime optimizations are far more important than the micro optimizations.

You don't need static typing or lack of object support to write fast code. OCaml beats C providing both inferred typing and object support.
Money isn't everything, I think he's more interested in changing the world: those 2% banks take for every transaction is a relic from the past that still exist because of a lack of competition, and the greed of those who dared to compete.
I am really impressed by this guy.
Yah - even if they get to 3.5bn it's a tiny business for taking so much risk. They need to re-think their (pricing) model.
I disagree, because taking up the whole screen is what many people expect said button to do.
I think the more impressive stat is the growth in volume. Explosive it is.
It's similar, but I would like to think it's slightly faster due to it's simplicity. Also, as far as I can tell, embedly is not so good at finding relevant information from sites with no proper image and description metadata. It's really just a small project that I wanted for myself and thought others might find useful as well.
I think I'm going to go back to Snow Leopard tomorrow. I've been running Lion for many months now, and I still can't stand it. The only reason I'm sticking with OS X (rather than using Linux exclusively) is that I've purchased tons of pricey software over the years (e.g. Logic Studio and Adobe CS4). I hope 10.8 ditches most of the retarded "features" Lion introduced, and reverts back to the wicked HCI that Snow Leopard has.
no i havent, i'll check it out! Thanks
The problem here is that you think 'corrupted registry keys' means that the computer is unusable. A corrupted registry key just means that a setting hasn't been saved right - it could be as trivial as whether an app starts fullscreen or windowed.

The GP's statement did not say that the system was faulty, just that he was experiencing errors and he reinstalled. On enquiry, they weren't system errors, but errors around the installation of a program, for which he sledgehammered the result. You don't need the "Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable" to run Windows, or a great many things on windows. It wasn't the operating system blue-screening.

No one should have to know what "reregister the library" even means.

We're in 2011, no-one should have to know what 'engine oil change' means either, but someone still has to know how to do it.
No problem, do let me know if you decide to use it at all, I would be interested to see. I'm no javascript expert so my jquery examples with tooltips etc are pretty basic, I'm sure it could be used for more interesting things.
Is there a paid plan? I'd love to use something like this, but before I build on it, I'd like some assurance it will stay around for awhile.
This solves a problem of exuberant costs for large payments, but my main problem is the reverse: small payments, transactions of a few dollars each. $0.25 cents for a transfer of just a few dollars is way too high.
I have absolutely no idea how this sort of opinion piece is supposed to be of value to another person on this planet.

Sure - everybody has to learn their own lessons and sometimes it can be helpful to read about another persons journey. In this case, however, the author is still too much in the middle of it and would do good giving it some more time, then digest it, then look back and reflect and maybe THEN write about it. Reports from halfway through an experiment do make for good blog fodder (and a post about going BACK to Coldfusion sure gets attention), but most of them, as this one, leave me very unsatisfied.

So sure - go write stuff like that into your blog, but I think only the blog post at the end of the series is what should be submitted here.
Great idea!

I see:

Could not generate a preview, please check the URL is valid and does not redirect then try again.

It seems like the service is down, so the error message is probably incorrect. That being said, you should follow redirects, this is a no-brainer. You can make HEAD requests to save bandwidth. Also, this one is minor, the enter key should submit the form.
I bet building robots that appreciate and buy those plants will be the market of the future.