skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I have a polymorphic type that should be copyable. Because of the limitations of C++ copy constructors and operators, my only option is to expose a virtual method (call it "copy"). The non-smelly semantics we want are such that if you call "copy" on an object, you get an identical copy of the same type."

Well, yeah...because those semantics are just as smelly as the one you described before. What you describe isn't a copy constructor at all, and trying to make a copy constructor do what you want is a dangerous thing. A "constructor" that takes any subclass of class A and returns an instance of that subclass is inherently brittle: add a new subclass of A, and you've got to update the "constructor" to know about the new type. On top of that, your "constructor" has to introspect into the type to determine what to initialize when, and that's slow.

There are easy ways to get the behavior your want (e.g. make a template function that calls the appropriate class' copy constructor, or -- closest to what you want -- make a template copy constructor function on the class itself), but complaining that you can't make a bog-standard copy constructor do polymorphic construction kind of misses the point.

Here's a better discussion of the problem than I have the space to go into here:

http://www.jaggersoft.com/pubs/oload24.html
It'll be nice to see a nice html5 guide that is current.
He goes to prison?

But seriously, I wouldn't even look for holes in any payment system without prior indemnification.
Nowadays I think most cities they have spaces that can be rented on an hourly basis that are suited for this purpose (beyond hotel rooms)
I guess some other team will eventually spin off an alternative server engine, still keeping the API compatibility, but improving or re-designing the poor parts. Let's wait another year or two.
Pity is that as an application developer, I cannot rely on Mongo as a long-term backend solution.
Be yourself. You will grow as a leader over time regardless of your personality. Your success will, ultimately, be in your abilities to hire great people.

Groups of people make amazing things, not individuals.
I listen to the radio for music when I'm driving (no particular reason other than I'm lazy) and I can not remember any time I heard something introduced that was new to me.

My greatest period of musical growth was college. This was years ago (Win XP was just released) when Napster was still around (briefly) and we had a campus-wide filesharing system[1] (also briefly).

1: http://ostatic.com/buzzsearch
Err, perhaps I'm missing something, but what does this comment mean? Anything?

You're new to Hacker News, so I'm not going to downvote this, but a piece of advice: this sort of vague, useless-without-context comment adds nothing to the dialogue and will be driven down before you can blink.
If there were an argument to attack, I'd gladly attack it. You didn't offer one, just snide remarks and an appeal to authority. Kindly refrain from content-free posts.
OK, so I don't have much problem domain knowledge here, but couldn't you optimize the cluster size based on algorithmic bounds on variation within the cluster?
> queued up on disk IO

And there's where your legacy understanding fails. You're really not supposed to be doing a lot of disk IO in modern datastores in the first place. Your working set should be in RAM.

> beat benchmarks

If my vendor is investing time in beating benchmarks instead of solving real problems, I'm finding a new vendor.
Happy New Year from Portugal.
Best Papers in Computer Science up to 2011
I don't have enough karma to give you, sir / madam.
Remote is fine right, if that's your choice in business. Surely though, the joy is in building something with others - products, services, cultures etc regardless of success or failure.

If your business is your life's work, I can't see any greater pleasure than sharing it with others.
It was a grid of cells. Each cell could contain a constant or a formula, strings or numbers. You selected the cell to change with a mouse, and it recomputed once per click on a button. In essence it was fully functional, just lacking file load and save.

It didn't have charts or graphics, but the cell functionality was pretty complete. Using "EVAL" meant you had access to any function in the underlying language.

I'll see if I can dig it out.
Happy New Year from Omaha and Boulder!
Hi folks, I'm a co-founder and the CTO of Airbnb.

The author did not book the property through Airbnb. Had he done so, he would have learned what we do in these rare situations. His article missed a couple key points:

1) If a host cancels a reservation on a guest, a default review is generated stating that the host canceled X days before arrival. The guest can modify this auto-generated review if he wants to add color to it.

2) The host is penalized monetarily if he cancels on guests more than once per 90 days. The penalty is $100 if the cancellation is within one week of arrival, otherwise $50. Hosts that repeatedly cancel on guests may be removed from the site.

As a result of these policies, host cancellations are rare. Most occurrences are honest mistakes and not from repeat offenders.
... many [Perl 6] useful and usable compilers exist and implement several portions of the specification.

My company was working on a product based on Perl 6 two years ago. We planned to release it to paying customers at the time of the Rakudo Star release. We officially scuttled it several weeks ago when it became obvious that Rakudo's development process would continue to be incompatible with shipping a working product for as far as we could predict (and two of us have commit access to most or all of the Rakudo stack, so it's not like we're disconnected from the development of Perl 6).

The words "useful" and "usable" do not reflect the reality of the situation.
I'm unsure how to take your phrasing "never realized that women in tech had to deal with all these issues on a daily basis."

On any other board I would assume that phrase to be argumentative and patronizing, but HN people always seem to be earnest and helpful, so I will take it on face value.

Many people have that kind of issue. Most of them are women. Women exist in tech. :) It's just more frustrating and sort of ironic when you're the one working on the products.

Not sure there's anything I can add that danah boyd hasn't covered on her many privacy presentations or that wasn't already "done to death" during the past "women in tech" arguments on Techcrunch, HN, etc. If there's something new or revealing that I can think of I'll share it, though!

ETA: Also, I didn't bring it up during the g+ name controversy on HN because I honestly couldn't add anything new. The pros and cons of the policy are out there for everyone to read. I watched it go on and decided what was right for me, which is to not engage in that medium due to the way it works and the intentions (that is, that g+ is an "identity service").
Depends on who's asking. Most HN'ers would call me old.
If the "measurably" bit refers to how the runtimes benchmark...

That and language stability, ecosystem, internal coherence, library availability, release process, compatibility, deployment concerns, tooling....
This doesn't even show the $2.4T Treasury/Fed spent on bailouts or $5T-$15T of "nationalized" Fannie/Freddie/AIG liabilities.
I hope! Sadly there's no way to know for sure since I don't require verification :(
Steve Job's cognitive dissonance
Sticks suck even more in stop and go traffic on hills, i.e. San Francisco, especially blind hills and parking garage ramps.

Dual-clutch automatic for me.
why would I want to be on site most of the time if it is not necessary? So I can be more involved in company politics ? If I deliver all you wanted what is a problem where I was when things were done ?

Your last sentence actually might indicate that your team is maybe not so high quality like you think ? High quality developers are sufficiently self motivated that they don't really need to be forced to produce results.
There are complaints out there about accepted VRBO reviews going away later. Yelp has even been accused of proactively offering this as an incentive to spend (perilously close to a protection racket). And of course there's nothing AirBnB wouldn't stoop to with Blecharczyk involved.

It seems to me we have a need for a fully independent system of reviews with some kind of social trust metric (maybe degrees of separation) and technical measures to prevent them from being silently unpublished by anyone (maybe signed authentic distributed copies).
Cycles, memory, fuel and parking
Just because pypy is faster than cpython on a handful of test cases doesn't make it worthy of corporate sponsorship. I would sponsor development if it made a noticeable improvement.

Not to belittle the project, but I tried a vanilla order entry implementation on my test box in nasdaq. Essentially it runs an epoll loop using a C extension to take advantage of the myricom DBL calls. RT latency was roughly 5 usec faster using cpython. As for other parts of the system (eg feed handler), the performances were comparable.

For other applications (eg compliance reporting) pypy is 2x cpython speed, but I could care less about that timing (even if it ran 1000x slower than cpython, it wouldn't matter)

TL;DR: it needs to be useful. And I just don't see the usefulness for my Python applications.
I agree, it is quite bizarre. PyPy is among the most remarkable and successful projects of its kind. That it isn't funded in some way is very surprising.

Perhaps there is a business opportunity here? Python as a service, sort of like how Python runs on Google App Engine, but using PyPy. PyPy's sandboxing makes this easier actually, and the main advantage of course would be performance.
Infinitely more expensive.
On most platforms, mlock(2) and mlockall "lock" data in memory, theoretically preventing it from being paged to disk.

OpenSSL provides hooks for adding a custom allocator which uses mlock, and some of its interfaces allow for the app to allocate its own key space and pass pointers (hence theoretically allowing the app itself to use mlock or whatever platform-specific method of allocating "safe" memory is desired).

However, this attack vector is often overlooked and is very commonly exploitable - FileVault and the Login Window on OSX were vulnerable to this brand of attack last I checked. The easiest workaround is to use encrypted swap (and the linked project would be a perfect way to encrypt swap in a way that's not vulnerable to a cold boot attack).
You can write a scraper to pull realtime quotes from finance.yahoo.com not too difficult to do either I wrote one awhile back
a thoughtful software designer would build an endian-neutral and memory-aligned architecture in the first place. In case of Mongo, the designers don't seem to really understand how the computer hardware operates on the low level.

for the rest of your points, neither you nor me can tell what would be the most selling server architecture in 3 years. Do you intend to design software with unpredictable lifespan? I don't.
VRBO sucks as a rental seeking user.

Two years ago I tried to organize a ski trip for my then employer (Scribd). VRBO stats: I contacted ~30 places. Only thirteen called back, not even 50%. Of the 13 that responded (over a period of 9 days), many of them had sold the cabin for my desired time but couldn't be arsed to update the availability calendar. I managed to make it happen, but in the future, I can't recommend vrbo; it was an enormous waste of time. For Tahoe, you'd be far better off googling then calling the rental management agencies up there directly, because they at least have their shit together and can give you accurate availability.

Also, VRBO doesn't seem to take any responsibility for accuracy of the advertisements. The sleeps number, a key criterion for group vacations, is almost useless and not consistent across homes: some houses seem to think you'll stack sleeping bags like a jig saw puzzle in the living room.
It is, but keep in mind that on general-purpose computers running AES, if you can extract secrets from virtual memory, you are already in a position to wiretap the AES process directly.
I would argue Linux ended up with decent concurrency because both Sun and IBM poured huge heaps of dollars into making it so with their contributions, plus huge efforts from other contributors. If someone pours same amount of effort into MongoDB they might succeed with a retrofit/rewrite as well. It's relatively rare though.
In other words it will be surpassed by another system, aiming to solve the same set of problems, but designed with concurrency in mind from the start. MongoDB developers will end up spending all their efforts to retrofit concurrency, and the community of users will simply move on.

Fine, I'll bite.

Your assertion that MongoDB was not designed "with concurrency in mind" is simply wrong. They have in fact put a lot of thought into it, they simply made decisions that you either do not understand, or happen to disagree with.

Nobody at 10gen is arguing that a global write lock is the best idea in the world. They are acutely aware of the drawbacks. They initially implemented it that way because it significantly reduces the complexity of offering concurrency in the first place. There's a reason that a NoSQL solution with more granular locking doesn't exist yet. It's much more difficult to construct. There is an ongoing, documented, transparent effort to migrate toward more granular locking, but that is hard and takes time. In the meantime, they have been working on mitigating the drawbacks of their decision by aggressively yielding whenever possible during long running operations.

Did you even read the article? Did you look at the benchmarks? The entire point of it was it's not as bad as you would think, and it's getting better.
Then he is probably of the second type. His analysis reeks of bias and has glaring problems.
GPG uses mlock() to prevent swapping, and warns if it cannot do this: http://www.gnupg.org/faq/GnuPG-FAQ.html#why-do-i-get-gpg_war...
Not sure if you will see this but have you read any of Clavell's followups to Shogun yet? I recently read Shogun as well and really loved it, but haven't had the courage to tackle the other books in the series - as they sound so different (and take place hundreds of years later).
Free Indie Games not featured on TIGS or Indiegames: Keylugger [Leon Arnott]
A Year Without Fear - Scott Adams
It seems to me as though the community would be better served by submitting each of these posts to HN separately. I found some of the mentioned posts to be very interesting, but the blog didn't talk much about the posts beyond giving a link. If HNers want to have a conversation about any given post, it could easily get lost among people talking about all the other posts.
Ambitious unlimited music startup Beyond Oblivion closes down before launch
Note that the "beep" terminator is antiquated; xterm relies on a universal string terminator of an escaped backslash, i.e. "\033\\" in this syntax instead of "\007". (Also nicer since it won't beep in terminals that don't support it.)

The "0;" means "set both icon and window title"; you can also make this "1;" to set the icon title only (i.e. when minimized) and "2;" to set the window title only (i.e. when not minimized). For example:

printf "\033]1;icon title\033\\"
printf "\033]2;window title\033\\"

If your terminal supports this, you'll see "icon title" when the window is minimized (e.g. in the Dock on Mac OS X) and "window title" otherwise.

If you want to do this in any Bourne-compatible shell and not just "bash", try omitting the "function" word. And if your system does not have an "echo" that supports these options, see if the "printf" command is available and use that instead. For example:

settitle() {
printf "\033]0;$1\033\\"
}

There are other tricks, e.g. I use "zsh" and in my ".zshrc" this causes the window title to show the hostname and current directory path any time "cd" is used:

chpwd () {
printf "\033]0;[${HOST}] ${PWD}\033\\"
}
Interestingly, using a WPA or WEP key of all zeroes breaks lots of cracking algorithms and thus is arguably more secure :)
ErgoEmacs is really helpful to me, the only problem is that most modes shipped with Emacs (like org-mode) are still using the old c-x c-something c-blah blah keybinding, that sometimes annoys me after I have adapted ErgoEmacs keybindings. It seems no good solutions for this issue available yet.
Sad news. My neighbor was one of their developers. I couldn't believe it when he told me he was looking for a new job. Sounded like it came as a big surprise.

On the same note, I know a guy looking for a new gig. Anyone hiring? :)
AndesBeat first month metrics & best news of Latinamerica startups 2011
I've met an equal number of non-engineers who feel they should work remotely. I watch as my wife works remotely. She gets at least 10 times more done for her employer when she works remotely. 1 reason being is that her work is so much more efficient. No one jumps in her cubicle to bug her about whatever. And there are plenty more. Another thing that happens is that she tends to spend the time she would have spent commuting (at least 2 hours each day) working. And she's not alone. I've seen all her colleagues and bosses do the same thing. What sucks though is she works in a culture that isn't anywhere ready to let go of the control. They are too scared.
How can a President sign a bill that is clearly anti-Constitutional (in this case, the Fifth Amendment) into law? Don't they even bother reading what they're signing anymore?

Maybe the HN community should just start campaigning for Ron Paul. Who knows whats next, have a startup, get foreign investor, go to jail forever?
"The president, for example, said that he would never authorize the indefinite military detention of American citizens, because “doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation.”"

While I support Obama, it doesn't feel correct to sign a bill and to fix it later(maybe). Especially since that bill can be used for such awful things, like the ones cited above...

Also, it's kinda ridiculous, after saying a few months back, that he wouldn't sign it.
In those cases i have the Team come to my House or the Condo's Amenities Floor, lot's of quite room and wifi.

But yes, this arrangement is not for everyone.
you may put this line in your .emacs or .emacs.d/init.el:

(setenv "ERGOEMACS_KEYBOARD_LAYOUT" "dv")
This post from DHH misses one bit. This hiring remote workers works for them, (as it's worked for me/us at Inkling and Cityposh) because we also have another tenant to our hiring practices. We hire people who can manage themselves. 37signals calls this "managers of one" http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1430-hire-managers-of-one.

I like to think of it as hiring employees to boss me around http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2009/10/hire-employees-to-bos...

The companies complaining about remote workers not working for them is also because they are surrounded with people that can't do their work unless they have constant group think meetings so no one can possibly be blamed for the work/decisions being made.
I apologize if my reply sounded patronizing, I'm notorious for getting the wrong tone across the Internet.

What I had found interesting about your post was the level of detail of what you described. This clearly shows my ignorance of the subject. I was aware of the G+ pseudonym issue, but I imagined that the harassment was limited to your personal information being looked up on the Internet and certain people sending creepy / unwarranted messages to you online.

Again, I must have been very naive about this, but I didn't realize that women in tech with any level of Internet exposure had to continuously deal with stalkers in real life, following you home, to meetups, to your workplace and so on.. It's quite awful, borderline terrifying. I thought the harassment was mostly verbal and impersonal, still unacceptable obviously, but at least not nearly as dangerous as what you described.
New Synthetic Molecules Treat Autoimmune Disease in Mice
WebSockets: A Glimpse of the Future
Might be related to a custom icon applied to the document, or something like that.
A cold-boot attack as detailed in [0] makes it vastly easier to extract secrets from physical memory than to wiretap the AES process, especially if you're not in possession of a privileged user account or a route into kernel space.

[0]: http://citpsite.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/oldsite-h...
since you refuse to actually learn about what's going on before arguing about it, i'll just leave this here, lifted directly from 10gen's official page on concurrency[1] (nevermind the fact that this is directly addressed in TFA)

mongod threads yield their lock (read or write) in two classes of situations:

* yield-on-page-fault – v2.0 implements a yield-on-page-fault feature which results in much more concurrency than one would achieve with a pure reader/writer lock. For common operational cases, file system page faults are detected in advanced and handled outside of any lock, then the lock is resumed. Not all fault situations yield, but many do. This results in v2.0 having much better concurrency in practice than v1.8.

* yield-on-long-operation – mongod also yields periodically on common operations that are extremely long running. The goal here is to allow interleaving so that other operations which are quick-running can execute soon.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/How+does+concurrency+wor...
> "What attracted me, then, to APL was a feeling that perhaps through APL one might begin to acquire some of the dimensions in programming that we revere in natural language — some of the pleasures of composition; of saying things elegantly; of being brief, poetic, artistic, that makes our natural languages so precious to us. That aspect of programming was one that I’ve long been interested in but have never found any lever for coming close to in my experience with languages of the FORTRAN, ALGOL, PL/I school. It was clear in those languages that programming was really an exercise in plumbing."

This quote by Perlis from the article sounds eerily similar to some of the stuff written about Lisp over the last decade. Perhaps there's something to be gained by combining the concepts of Lisp/Scheme/Clojure and APL/K/J together. Of course there's the problem of entering all those APL symbols, but surely that's solvable.
Superfluid Helium (2 minute video)
Happy new orbital period from Greece
There's a lot of hysteria on the net over this bill. A pretty good and reasonable examination of it was published at Lawfare:

The NDAA: The Good, the Bad, and the Laws of War–Part I: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/the-ndaa-the-good-the-bad...

The NDAA: The Good, the Bad, and the Laws of War–Part II: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/the-ndaa-the-good-the-bad...

They also published an earlier look at it:

NDAA FAQ: A Guide for the Perplexed: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/ndaa-faq-a-guide-for-the-...
Future of Screen Technology - YouTube
Issues with hypersonic flight - London to Sydney in 4 hours
I see. Thanks for the explanation!
Keyword is "teams". Not "workers" (individuals).

Remote team is a group of people who work together in a branch somewhere. That's a big difference.
This is why we can't have nice things. Really. I'm a security researcher and previously had no real interest in Facebook's bug bounty program, but once I saw this I decided to start poking at it just to get one. The card is a cool way of getting people into the program and rewarding them beyond just the money. Please, please don't make things like this harder on companies; if someone does something cool, take it for what it is.
How Guile (and Scheme) Could Really Win the Language Selection War
I'm sure if you're finding bugs and you ask nicely, Facebook will forgo the publicity stunt for you and just cut you a check.
Ron Paul voted for the AUMF bill, which was the bill that actually gave the President that powers that NDAA is just reaffirming.
It's a lot more clever than the silly challenge tokens other companies give out.