skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This looks pretty well-answered already, but I'll throw in my $0.02.

The stack and heap are the two main regions of memory where data can live in a program. They are (somewhat unhelpfully) named after the data structures originally used to represent them. Pretty much all modern languages have a concept of a stack and a heap, although there are differences both in how explicit they are, and in implementation details.

The stack is the function call stack, used to store data local to a function call. It behaves like a traditional stack, with push and pop operations. When you call a function, a new stack frame is pushed onto the stack, which contains all of the local variables that are only accessible inside that function call. When that function returns, it pops its stack frame (and sends its return value, somehow). The language scoping rules determine how one function may access the contents of an earlier stack frame that called it, but stack frames are basically deleted and inaccessible after they are popped (a source of errors in C).

The heap is the region of memory where you put data that lives longer than the function that created it. Heap behavior is far less specified, and more variable, between languages than stack behavior is (and involves the OS more), but if you're passing around pointers or references to an object you're probably using the heap. In languages that have them, the malloc and new operators usually mean "put this on the heap." In languages with a notion of reference types and value types, reference types are usually heap-allocated by default.

The distinction between the two types of storage is more important in some languages that others. It's really important in C, where you have to manually manage all your memory, but some of the more dynamic languages (especially everything-is-an-object ones) use the heap for all user data, and the call stack only for implementation details.

Languages also vary greatly in how much control you have over where things get put. On one extreme, C lets you put any type in any location, with malloc, while on the other I am not aware of any way in JavaScript to control object lifetime. Java and C# both distinguish between value-types (stack-allocated by default) and reference-types (heap-allocated by default), but C# allows user-defined value-types while Java does not. Common Lisp has a standardized way to tell the compiler that it is safe to stack-allocate a value (of any type). And so on.
No, if anything, this day and age of just in time, scaling up production is harder if you suddenly cannot use your suppliers. Manufacturing, especially on such a large scale is heavily reliant on gained experience and what basically accounts to institutional knowledge/memory. The reason why some of the remaining American manufacturing remains profitable is because their combination of automation, and institutional knowledge. One is easy to replicate/replace, the other is much harder.
I don't think the distinctions you are making between market segments really match the way "the market" actually approaches these purchases. The market for "MP3" players is dwarfed by the market for iPods, and recently, something like 50% of iPod sales are for the iTouch, which, in theory and practice is more than a music player. Up until this point the market for "tablets" has been dwarfed by the market for iPads.

It is undoubtable that there is a market for an iPad-like device that is cheaper than the iPad. As you note, such a thing isn't possible, which brings us to the Kindle fire. It is much cheaper, but it is cheaper in part because it is less "powerful," in part because the hardware is less "refined," but most of the reason it is cheaper comes down to the fact that it is smaller and sold for a loss. That it is smaller makes it, on the one hand, more portable, but on the other hand, less good for many types of reading and interaction.

How will people feel about those tradeoffs. You seem to think that a lot of people will find them compelling because, well, why? Because of price? Price is clearly not the only consideration for people, as the iPod's success demonstrates. Portability? The iPod Touch isn't just a music player, and at least part of the market understands that already, as Apple will likely sell ~7M this quarter. It is more portable than the Kindle fire, and used for many of the same tasks. Taking both price and portability into account leads one to look at another alternative: the smartphone the consumer either already has, or is likely to acquire in the next six months.

People were faced with a similar choice a few years ago. Should they buy a netbook, or a "real" laptop. Netbooks sold well, for a little while. Some people loved them, others wanted to love them, but found their compromises too limiting. I borrowed from work, but it ended up just being a curiosity, and when I got an iPad, I realized it was better for both reading, because I could rotate the screen, and writing, because the on-screen keyboard could compensate for errors introduced by its small size in a way the netbook's keyboard could not. The netbook market is now in decline, while the market for the iPad seems to exceed Apple's ability to supply them.

I don't pretend to know how this will turn out, other than to guess that Apple will continue to sell a lot of iPad's at a healthy profit. I also expect that Amazon will sell a healthy number of Kindle Fires, and its successors. Further, I expect that the gap between the capabilities of the Kindle Fire and the iPad will grow for the foreseeable future, as Amazon "spends" most advances in technology to lower costs, and selling prices, while Apple uses most to drive upgrades and maintain margins.
Over the past 7 years using the different sites I've turned down 20 projects that I've been asked to bid on, and have only taken one when I was really in dire straits. You could probably make more on odesk than at mcdonalds, but you'll make 5-8x as much by building up a network on linkedin, and by posting your resume to craigslist once per week. I set my contracting rate on a sliding scale from $250/hour down to $125/hour based on commitment, project, and how much I like the guy I'm talking with. I manage to bill out 750-1250 hours per year depending on how much I care to work versus how much I desire to travel. I couldn't fathom managing to bill out at more than $35/hour on oDesk, and even then I would be considered expensive.

oDesk/elance/etc is where cheapskates who don't know what they want or how to ask for it go to get what they pay for from guys in India and Romania who don't know how to accomplish the work they're being paid to do.
Stuck in snowdrift... what would you have done?
Ask HN: What are your favorite tech based YouTube channels?
What tech based YouTube channels do you think other HN users would enjoy?
If I could create wormholes at will, I wouldn't traverse the wormhole with the whole ship - just the bombs would suffice.
Gambling from a mobile device will be huge. Not only will the gambling market see an explosion, but there will be spinoffs, such a security and cheat detection companies.

Also, a market that is growing fast that you may not be aware of is daily fantasy sports. Fantasy Football is considered a "game of skill". So, companies are popping up that allow users to build "fantasy teams" that only play for one week. Basically, you are using your skill to pick the best players for the week.

IMO, the companies that are doing well in this market have poor marketing and a 1990's aura about them. Someone could just in right now, buy a subscription to a stats provider, make a slick mobile app, and take the whole market.
Um, that's a) not a response to the article I provided, b) focuses on a single inconclusive paper while completely ignoring the other 42 papers cited by Guyanet.

I agree that by itself, the one paper Taubes focuses on does not prove all that much. So what?

Taubes is using rhetorical tricks - in this case, throwing words at the reader, confusing the issue, and declaring victory, in an effort to prevent fanboys from catching onto him. It'll probably work, he'll probably make millions more selling books. Doesn't make him any less the charlatan.
Dabbled in Lua, not had chance to play with many languages this year but managed to get my head around lot of new mobile frameworks and tooling
What do you actually do, for $250 an hour?
I work at Facebook.

My short response is that the repository is public once again, with a notice that it is deprecated. I personally apology for the churn.

My long response is that we haven't supported this SDK for some time and with our recent move to OAuth 2.0 across the board, the SDK does not support the latest cookie format. The reason we made the repository private was to avoid confusing developers with a public SDK that just didn't work and that we already said we didn't support.

You may be wondering why we don't support this SDK. The answer is very simple, resources. What we have been doing all year is reduce the surface area of our platform to a place that we can actual provide good support. This is the reason that we are removing FBML (https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/568/), deprecating the REST API (https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/616/), moving to support OAuth 2.0/HTTPs (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/oauth2-https-migration/) across the board and deciding what SDKs we are really going to support.

Based on this, we are going to do two things. First, we have made the repository public again, with messages that it is now deprecated. Feel free to clone and mod to taste/work. We really want to support a Python SDK, but we need to get all our resources focused on the SDKs we can actually support well. I have no doubt that the developer community can and will provide an SDK to fill this need in the interim. Second, we are going to post something on our developer blog to make sure everyone is clear about what SDKs we support (at this time we are only supporting the PHP SDK, the Javascript SDK, the iOS SDK and the Android SDK).
The people who have executive power in the leadership structure of companies control what companies do.

The leadership structure is determined by the Chief Executive, who is appointed by the Board of Directors, who are elected by the shareholders, i.e., the owners. Q.E.D.
(Lest you accuse me again of naïveté, I'm aware that there remains a principal-agent problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem); when an angel becomes available to serve as CEO, I suggest doing your level best to get him the job.)

By your formulation, there is no way to argue that company A is violating ethical norms.

The whole point of my formulation is that it is silent on ethical questions. If you find it unethical that Company A uses child labor, you can buy from their competitors, or organize a boycott, or lobby to make their practice illegal—and I might well join you. Supposing that Company A is a standard joint-stock company, your actions would serve to align their interests (maximize value) with yours (be ethical according to your criteria). There is no conflict between your actions of protest and the statement "The company owners determine its actions"; as categories, is and ought are orthogonal.

should be held ethically responsible

Note the passive voice in this statement: "be held responsible". By whom? When people say that corporations should "be held responsible", what they means is, "We want to hold corporations responsible [is] according to our system of ethics [ought]." In other words, stripped of all camouflage, it is a naked grab for power. It's a generally well-intentioned power grab, of course, and depending on your system of ethics you might consider their achieving power to be a good thing. But Robespierre had good intentions, too, and the road to hell, etc.
I respectfully disagree with your opinion that her efforts will have no positive impact. What you may be trying to say is that her actions alone will not change the law, and that is true. It may also be true that she is a lunatic, but that does not change her status as a citizen and is, therefore, irrelevant. Since civil disobedience may involve breaking the law in order to demonstrate injustice, whether she broke the law or not is also irrelevant.

Rosa Parks has been mentioned before. Her civil disobedience was not the first of its kind in the fight for civil rights. It was not even the first of its kind involving the bus laws. She is famous for having been the last such incident before the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

I believe this woman's actions in demonstration against the TSA will be one of many that plant a seed. I also mention her because part of her story sounds eerily familiar.

"Two policemen came on the bus and one asked me if the driver had told me to stand and I said, 'Yes.' And he wanted to know why I didn't stand, and I told him I didn't think I should have to stand up. And then I asked him, why did they push us around? And he said, and I quote him, 'I don't know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.'" - http://achievement.org/autodoc/page/par0int-1
Choosing what to examine in the course of due diligence is often a function of experience. Should someone be lambasted for making a mistake their first time?
I would love to see more companies on the list getting targeted. The reverse-robo call idea is a nice one, but with good organizing a lot more could get achieved.

Does anyone know if it would be illegal to target employees individually instead of "the corporation"? For example scrape the web for email address and phone numbers for these people employed at the SOPA support companies and inform them about the fatal policies their organization is supporting. The issue is still to web-centric and needs to reach beyond that level. Most mainstream news platforms, e.g. drudge, huffpo have still very little issue related news.
Investing in myself: Realizing my value as a programmer
Slight aside: What's the best way to market apps? Do you have a workflow setup?
Don't get it if you have a newish MacbookPro. Battery life for many folk went from ~6hours to ~2hours:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235
Set a timer so I would go out every hour to try to get the snow off at least part of the car so it didn't get totally entombed like that.
> "The drug stats are not down. It's created more addicts."

This isn't really correct, certainly not the way you've stated it. The data you're probably thinking of point to a slight rise in "lifetime use". Almost all of that is cannabis use. The only significant effect shown by the data is that there has been a ~5% rise in the number of people who regularly use cannabis, and are expected to continue in the future.

Twisting this into "created more addicts" is a bit tabloid, don't you think?
He addresses that in the next paragraph:

If that’s not bad enough, one could envision flinging appropriate small moons or large asteroids from other solar systems. Why not? Boosting a large body to fractional c velocities and aiming it at a far away planet isn’t inherently any more absurd than building a ship and boosting it to fractional c. The motion of stellar bodies is famously predictable out for many centuries. The body could guide itself: add some small motors, and it could even correct for small errors in prediction. It would be the ultimate fire-and-forget weapon of mass destruction.

So you don't have to sneak up at all. You just need to have a solar system with a Kuiper Belt, and you've got all the arsenal you need. In fact, launch attacks from remote solar systems is preferable, since it gives your bullets more time accelerate before becoming visible to the enemy. They may have enough enough energy to stop an asteroid traveling at .5c. Do they have enough energy to stop one traveling at .9c?
Yes, we (RedLaser) just launched a WP7 app last week.
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/apps/8fbeb777-a17c-4afd-b8...
To borrow a phrase, "When the Congress does it, that means that it is not illegal."

Nixon/David Frost interview, 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvyDn1TPr8
...but whatever you do, don't talk about "crushing" your competition, especially in public. This is a terrible idea from a legal perspective.
Ask HN: How do you mentally manage all the Ruby on Rails code?
I'm just starting to learn rails, and it seems that the mental load that comes from frequent context switch among files is enormous. Sometimes I forget what I was doing while I'm switching from one file to another. I know there are a lot of rails programmers on Hacker news, so wanted to ask:

Do you all have this problem? Or is this something that only newbies suffer from? Is there an effective design pattern that helps you code without confusion?
I'm curious as to how this positioning will play out. On the one hand, its a better Kindle because it can play movies, etc, but its also the most expensive, heaviest Kindle with the shortest battery life and a worse screen for reading.
Two of the lunchtime sessions at WWDC really inspired me as did much of the entire conference.

Morten Lunds talk at the Power of 1 conference in Battersea powerstation
In all fairness, this press release should be read in context with this other one:

http://www.godaddy.com/newscenter/release-view.aspx?news_ite...

I'm not defending go daddy (my comment elsewhere in this thread still stands), but this release on its own only shows a small part of their current stance.
Ported my top selling iPhone and android app to wp7 pretty recently. Can't say sales are stellar but I think you can never count Microsoft out. The new Nokia phones look very good.
Hah - that'd be a good story.

"I'll be a complete internet jerkwad, and get you in front of thousands of people. Disassociate yourself from me when the shit hits the fan."

As long as you're careful about not letting the internet detectives dig too deeply, you could probably re-invent yourself and do this repeatedly.

However, I'm a little unsure how many people would be willing to work with you on this. Great tin-foil hat material though.
> I fully expect to see a response project of ACTUAL TCP/IP implementations via lego trains.

Here's hoping that they also work their way up the OSI stack. I'm looking forward to seeing what "418 I'm a teapot" looks like from the LEGO http server.
Theo Schlossnagle's "Career Development" (Velocity 2011 Keynote):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0mHo7SMCQk
Wifi hotspot is a native feature in recent Android versions, which has been disabled by some carriers, but is present in the Google-branded stock Android phones. It works great.

So saying it's not really supposed to be doing this is not really accurate. Your phone IS supposed to be doing that. Only your wireless carrier thinks otherwise.
I think that has already come to an end, at least for simple residential mortgages. When I refinanced my home mortgage a few months ago I just filled out a short form on Zillow.com and it gave me instant price quotes. Then I picked the cheapest one, filled out a longer form, and closed a few weeks later with total fees of about ~$600.

With the tools and information available now only a fool would get stuck with $6000 on fees (unless they're intentionally paying points to knock down the interest rate).
Visual Studio Express is a free version Microsoft makes available so it isn't like you have to buy Visual Studio. Here's a good tutorial on writing a quick Windows Phone 7 app using VS Express: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/03/18/building-a...
It was a great concept 5-10 years ago when ads made a decent amount of money and people didn't spend 80% of their time on Facebook/Google/whatever.

In the present day, we have large dominant sites, so you need a better way to make money than "I'll get the eyeballs and point them to ads eventually". The eyeballs aren't coming in sufficient quantity to make ads profitable anymore.

Either sell them something, affiliate or go mobile.
I am doing my research. I am not that familiar with oDesk, and presently looking into switching to freelance development. A question I posted on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394265) lead to this, very informative, discussion
"It's all about having enough power."

That really does sound like the name of a Culture GSV.

[Correction - No Culture ship would be quite so lacking in gravitas, so I suspect a more likely name would be "Fiddling around with calculations about DeltaV"].
Well, good luck to them on surviving in their current state on hosting margins and "email to fax."
"To "disrupt" the gambling industry is to inevitably profit off of addicts."

The same can be said about MMORPGS. I knew many people from highschool that never graduated because of this addiction.

More people need to take personal responsibility for their decisions. Many people gamble and are not addicted.
I'm a big fan of their free e-mail forwarding and customer support (they got a domain back for me that I had let expire out of its grace period).

But, I'm surprised so many people tolerated godaddy for this long just because of their control panel. Every time I have to go in there and help a client/friend, I begin to feel like an idiot almost immediately. It's impossible to find anything intuitively and I feel like their design changes every few months.

Namecheaps panel isn't pretty by a long shot, but it's so clutter free I just don't care.
Thanks, good points
Sam crushed it. It felt like a TED talk. Hickey and Sussman at STLoop were both awesome, but Sam takes the cake. I hope the video goes up soon.
The advice you got there was reasonable: use oDesk once or twice to see if you like doing transactional development work (ie, series of unrelated projects under tight time pressure) but treat oDesk as an apprenticeship, and as soon as you feel like you're going to stick with consultative development, get the f!%k off oDesk.
I don't see why this is the end of the world really. Sounds like it was just a basic depreciation, but frankly I don't see why anyone would expect it remain online forever.
And why do you think they would be remote controlled?

If you put a smart enough brain inside it, you could just upload a copy of the crew (assuming you can digitize and run human minds, of course, something that seems easier than interstellar travel). This way, the ship would not be limited by its crew. The crews responses would also only be limited by available processing speed. And, instead of lifeboats, you could transmit the crew states. In fact, you could do that regularly across the fleet for synchronization and backup purposes.

And, from the inside, it could look exactly like a Constitution class federation starship. People younger than me would prefer a Galaxy class. I, myself, am in doubt between the Constitution and the Heart of Gold. Or a big bridge like the original Battlestar Galactica. The computer could easily generate a lot of red-shirts for added drama during battles.
Terribly junk code.
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” -- Fyodor Dostoyevski
Having something more like CPAN would be preferable because its mirrored on over 400 sites across the world (http://mirrors.cpan.org/) and should any CPAN author decide to delete any of their modules/distros then it is still accessible via BackPAN (http://backpan.perl.org/).

I suppose this is one of the great advantages of CPAN being developed in the era of modem based internet :)
Many of the most addictive drugs are legal. Good luck avoiding the narcotics if you ever need back surgery.

You assert that marijuana "kills brain cells". I would LOVE to know where you got that from. Keep in mind that the bar is pretty high here. Brain cells are slaughtered in mass by drugs which are now perfectly legal -- one in particular, I'll let you guess which one.

Your last sentence is telling I think. Why would you assume that arguments against you are coming from "the left"?
Free Indie Games not on TIGS or Indiegames: The Night Before Christmas [Sokurah]
There are plenty of legitimate uses for it where you just want to get a point across.