skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I write high-performance numerical software for a living. There are a lot of baseless claims in this post. You can write high performance software in C, C++, Fortran, Assembly, or a whole host of other languages. There are syntactic reasons to prefer one or another, but you should not choose among them for performance reasons.

I choose to write in C and Assembly, for example, and much of the code I write is provably as fast as possible on the targeted architecture. It is literally impossible that it would go faster if I wrote it in Fortran instead. All of these languages are just tools, and if you know your tool, you can do great things with it. The specifics of which tool you choose are often unimportant.

There are some syntactic niceties in fortran which make it more comfortable for people who don't want to think about certain low-level details. However, you cannot write software that runs as fast as possible without considering those details, so a programmer with that goal is forced to think about them no matter what tool he or she chooses.

Fortran does have a (slightly) more relaxed numerics model than standard C, which allows a compiler to make some optimizations that a C or C++ program would need to explicitly license. However, these optimizations are disallowed in standard C and C++ because they are unsafe. The fact that Fortran enables them does not make Fortran a better language for numerical computation (from my perspective as low-level library writer, they make it worse). Performance without correctness is absolutely meaningless.

Write software in the language that is comfortable for you. Use libraries written by experts for performance critical operations. Use a profiler to identify operations that are hotspots in your code. Don't complain about your (or someone else's) tools.
Check out http://www.startuplawyer.com, there is some good info there. Also, read through Quora, as there are others who have asked the same question.

IANAL, but I'm fairly sure that a 5 year non-compete is not enforceable in most part of the United States. That seems a bit much if you ask me, so definitely reach out to a lawyer.

What part of the world are you in?
Who is large and powerful in the tech industry? Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe... they all have their own long-established lobbying efforts in place.

Unfortunately, they don't care about the internet; the net is actually disruptive of their business model, for the most part. You can look at BSA's position to see what "big money" from the tech industry really wants. For them, Google, Facebook etc, are uppity competitors, and they'd love to see them cut to size by the government.

So it's rather the internet-based industry, rather than the generic "tech world", who should improve their lobbying. FB, Google and Twitter execs should start cashing in some of those umpteen photo-ops with Obama, threatening to sponsor and enable primary challengers for everyone who will vote for bad bills. Even better, threaten to silently downrank specific politicians on their sites: "we can do censorship too, let's see how you hurt when people can't find your donation page".
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Yes. Check out the first chapter to see what it looks like: http://manning.com/marz/BD_meap_ch01.pdf
1> MS will build market share regardless, I'm currently using Android but will switch to WP7 when the Lumia 900 gets released. 1st gen Xbox was written off when it entered a market dominated by major players (Sony, Nintendo), 2nd gen Xbox is now a market leader. WP7 seems to be following the same route.

2> First time I've seen C mentioned as being "portable" for mobile devices, C# on the other hand is available on all 3 major platforms (MonoTouch for iOS, MonoDroid for Android).

3> Most devs I know w/ Macs dual-boot Windows anyway. I run OSX in a VM to develop iOS apps. It's not really that big an issue.

4> What? PhoneGap (http://phonegap.com/about/features), RhoMobile, etc, fully support WP7. Not sure where you're getting your info on this stuff but it discredits all your other points when you make incorrect statements like this.
> How does it "trick" you into installing a flash plugin? I'm pretty sure you can select not to install any proprietary software.

At install time it asked me if I wanted to include some other packages that are "restricted", such as the mp3 codecs. Using the mp3 codecs as an example tricked me into thinking they were restricted for patent issues, not because of a restrictive license.
As someone who writes a bit of documentation for dev.twitter.com, I admit that a full accounting of every field that passes through the API is certainly missing. The reasons are boring and mostly historical, related to the organic growth of the API & its documentation; for much of the existence of the API, deep pre-existing understanding of Twitter itself was assumed and required for success. That combined with the majority of developers using scripting languages with loose typing meant that devs could fill in the blanks pretty easily.

A more exhaustive index of the fields, a kind of bird watcher's guide for the fields of the Twitter API, should make an appearance in the coming weeks.
Lesson: Enjoy whatever it is you enjoy. I know people who get upset when their favorite song doesn't make some end of year "best of" list. Don't let other people decide what you should like.
They might have changed this recently. Several months ago I wanted to download a copy of a book that I had purchased in the past and discovered this policy. I was not able to download it again.
Yeah, the /fl/, /ffl/ ligatures in that font are atrocious.

Hoefler Text has much nicer ones: http://imgur.com/ofE3Z
Roman numerals were upper case, but arab numerals were introduced in latin after lower case letters had evoved.
So far only about 8% of websites are using embedded fonts but I can't wait to see that number explode -- I've been doing website design since the 90s and this revolution is way overdue!
Content aside, I dislike the giant-image-as-page-layout style. I remember seeing stuff like that in the 90s, but given the rich abilities of browsers to style content, no one should do this anymore.
Business plans.

Imagine if Ray Kroc had been able to force a rent out of everyone who wanted to copy the 'fast food business' idea he came up with.
I third Mountain View, and the computer history museum. Also, while you are there, check out Hacker Dojo. If you need a lift anywhere I live a block from the train station in MV and never mind a quick siteseeing tour.

In the city, check out Tech Shop if you have any maker inclinations.
For me, it depends on how many companies are hiring and who they are. I left my previous employer just over 2 years ago, found another that was hiring that evening. Once I realized I knew some of the people there, I didn't bother looking elsewhere since it was apparent they would give me an offer.

Previous to this, I tried to interview with at least three companies and have two offers before I decided. However, you have to tell any company that gives you an offer that you have others lined up for interviews. Try and figure out how soon they need a reply, but don't drag your feet. If you wait too long, they'll usually have someone else waiting in the wings.
I could, but even with a new name and relaunch it wouldn't fix the problem of the users being too far spread out sparsely in te US
I'm unfamiliar with the HTC/HPC space but I'd highly suggest running with just a few micro windows instances with some kinda dummy job to verify they work well enough for your purposes. For what I've tried to use them for (website + database type of demo machines) they've been just about unusable/ way too unresponsive to get much done. Linux micro are good enough for most stuff I need but not windows ones.

While not that big a charge relatively speaking -- you'll need to include EBS as well since micros only have EBS
- EBS space (10c/GB/month) -- I'd imagine 10GB minimum per machine though AWS provided instances have 30GB.
- Est: (10,000 machines * 10GB * $0.10) / 30.4 (avg days in a month) = 328.95
- EBS IO (who knows? depends on what you do) -- rate is 10c/ 1 million IO ops.
Accurate 3d printers may make guns very cheap.

EDIT: To the downvoter, you should probably take a look at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHnMj6dxj4
Speaking of Lean Startups - did you actually glean anything useful from it? Like something you could start doing tomorrow?
MacGap is a great project, thanks Alex for creating it and sharing!
Which is going to push even more people to underground.
Thank you for outlining the problem and digging up links to introductory articles. This make it much easier to wrap the head around.
Implicit conversions (and implicit parameter substitution) are just about the most important feature of the Scala language, from my perspective, and I don't think it makes any sense to hide this behind a compiler switch.

Just about every modern Scala library depends upon the "implicit typeclass pattern" - many of which require that you define your own typeclasses for your own code, or at least are able to correctly create instances of framework-provided typeclasses in the appropriate implicit scope, if for no other reason than to help out the Scala compiler when it can't correctly resolve an implicit. If you start to push implicits behind a compiler flag, this will mean that fewer people will be familiar with their subtleties, and will consequently become more utterly lost when the framework provided to them becomes insufficient to satisfy their goals.

Indeed, I'd suggest that the entire history of the advancement of the Scala library ecosystem could be described as the process of the community learning to use implicits to greater and greater effect. It makes no sense to me to hobble developers by marking a feature "off limits" by default - I know that for my own usage, Scala's benefits only really became evident once I understood implicits; before that, it was simply a slightly better Java. With implicits, it's a tool that makes Java look like COBOL.
Yeah we originally planned to allow it for all of US but because of the sparse users all spread out, we quickly focused on San Franciso bay areas first. The niche does sound Like an idea to consider though, thank you.
Mmm, that entire silo could be refurbished as a datacenter with a living quater on top to host people who need to come to the center for work. It's in a quiet area and the snow could be use for cooling in the winter. Anyone has money to invest ? ;p
Voting down this point of view is pretty sad. While the content guys have certainly behaved badly, and sure don't seem to be creative in searching for solutions, you can't deny that there is a huge problem for them if we went to the other extreme of having everything free everywhere for everyone. Huge investments in films like that would completely cease to exist. No amount of hand waving will paper over that fact, and he's just stating it, not advocating SOPA or anything like that.
Funny thing, you don't even realise what a river ya'll crying. I just don't give a job. I'm totally fine. I'm rich, doing nothing, blogging away.
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s/thrust/trust/ :)
Forget SOPA: Copyright owners must build a better BitTorrent
Why you don’t really want a WYSIWYG layout editor for Android
The longevity of the body is one thing, it is debatable whether or not it can be extended by a lot or a little (or at perhaps until the MTBF of a freak accident).

What I rarely see discussion of, however, are philosophical and psychological implications of "living indefinitely".

Even if the body is says relatively youthful, what about diseases of the mind? In other words, I am saying that in the same way that increasing life-span has uncovered a plethora of diseases that were previously unknown like cancer, is it possible that further increasing life span may uncover conditions (perhaps purely psychological) that we can't even imagine. Will people _want_ to live 100's of years?
(At least) two of the guys who have worked on Phalanger in the past are at Microsoft now. One worked on the DLR and IronRuby and is now part of the C# compiler team. I think the other is working on the CLR JIT.
Oh god. I'm going to be working with that? sobs
thanks but there are too many meetups this Thursday in the bay area, curious why don't airbnb use meetup.com?
They are, until someone makes a five parameter monster because "someday I'll want that genericity." To be honest, though, I just googled the extensions I could remember until I hit one that hinted at creating a situation where the compiler simply doesn't have enough information to compile your code.

That said, yeah, UndecidableInstances look like a much better example. Especially when googling it turns up things like this: http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/stop-using-undeci...
I prefer Reprap. Save the money and spend it developing new expansions. My original Mendel has a 210x210x136mm build area and that is pretty much stock. Nophead's Mendel90 is soon to be released and appears to be a very stable and scalable design.

Support the share alike community.
>I'm not sure why you have quite so many downvotes.

OT: how can you tell how many downvotes he has?
Imagine you're born into a tribe that has evolved to purposefully die, but you are a mutant that lives twice as long and has twice as many kids. What stops your genes from quickly spreading?

All known species die of old age. This includes species that are not social and do not share resources. Group selection can not be the mechanism at play here.
http://safaribooksonline.com/ ?
...what is to stop them from doing it now? I don't think you can fix management problems at the programming language level. Also, at least for the next five years, I doubt you'll have to worry much about those kinds of shops deciding to pick up Scala.
"triple-dub".
Someone should show Home Depot the recently destroyed violin, at PayPal's direction in lieu of return.

How do you destroy a circular saw, anyway?
Hooray for type safety?
It's worth pointing out that the FT's 84% figure is NOT correct, though that actually further reinforces the point that fund managers are fleecing their investors.

While the funds collectively realized $449bn in investment gains and paid out $379bn in fees to managers, the hedge funds earned a significant portion of these fees without making their clients a penny. Rather a fraction of the $379bn is a share of the gains fund managers made their clients, while the (likely very large) remainder of the $449 is derived from straight management fees (typically 2% of invested assets).
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The problem is very clear. Burdens or legal businesses are high. This gives illegal business (that our goverment doesn't stop, being extremely corrupt themselves) a very unfair advantage. It's like boxing with an opponent who has a gun. This is the problem.

And yes, also, that when you get sick of it all, and go the hospital that is financed with your tax money, not those, who do not pay the taxes, you are literally scared of the conditions. You are walking on tiptoes in piss.

This is basically what I can whine about when you have paid me a drink.
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This is pretty exciting for Makerbot. The Thing-O-Matic (previous model, mostly sold as a kit) was described by them as:

a hot rod style device on the cutting edge of 3D printing technology and like a hotrod, you'll have to oil it and do occasional maintenance. There is no service warranty.

... on the other hand this feels a big step closer to a consumer product - they're advertising it as ready to print out of the box, marketing it at CES.

I guess it makes sense they want to cross over from making a "niche" hobbyist-focused built-it-yourself product to the emerging broader market.
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> First of all, the things he shows aren't inherently complex: adding an additional function to the existing collections library is something that's possible in other languages in less confusing ways

> "I want to add a method to all my collections that works like the existing methods," in Scala it requires an understanding of a huge number of complicated intersecting concepts, whereas in other languages it doesn't.

Sorry, but there is a bit more to it. I will gladly accept a link to a language which does all the stuff he was trying to do, but until then I'm not convinced at all.
Authorize.net is not a merchant account or merchant account provider. It's just a gateway, the software that sits between your merchant account's processing network and your website. Authnet only supports USD and primarily US processing networks.
the MakerBot assembly instructions are horribly out of date and can be misleading. The software UI is kind of flaky. The support documentation is not very helpful and is filled with errors. I'd be very concerned about buying something preassembled by that crew.

Yikes. I'd be concerned about buying anything at all from that crew.
Apple to dictate what equipment CIOs will buy in the next 2 years
I've heard piracy costs the world economy 18 billion jobs and $200 trillion in lost revenue, so you're probably in the right ball-park.
Fantastic advice from you and Instakill, thank you. I had never even considered starting in another country besides the US. It definitely sounds like a starting place to seriously consider. I agree that the copy on the site needs to be redone- I actually had a copywriter do that, and even though it didntl completely feel right with us, we went along with it- after all, the copywriter (no names) was a highly sought after professional with a solid track record. Thank you for the kind offer to mention to your colleague, it would really be appreciated if you could do that. Even if it doesn't increase conversions, it's still worth a definite try. Please feel free to reach me by email if you need more information. Thanks
I don't know what mozilla is doing but at least IE has improved since "filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader
(src='images/image.png',sizingMethod='scale');"
On a totally off-topic note: I don't know a large number of successful individuals, but I have to say that Mr Ohanian is among the most approachable, good people I've met so far.

I wish some of the "successful" individuals I know back home would learn a lesson or two from people like him...

(brace for the downvotes)
I've always disagreed with the whole "leans forward/backward" logic. I feel that a slash is a character that you draw by moving your pen _forward_ along the page, while a backslash is drawn by moving your pen _backward_. I guess the added problem with that is that probably not all people start drawing slashes from the top.

I should add that my opinion doesn't stop me from using the correct term in conversation.
Don't get me wrong, I do love DLC that adds to the game world and extends the life of the game. I've bought DLC like this in the past, except they were called "expansion packs".

Having never played LoL I can't really say one way or another if I agree with their approach. As long as it's possible to play the game without restriction, I'm usually ok with it. What bothers me is the "You've run out of energy, pay $X to continue playing" business model.

Cosmetics, even cheats are fine by me.

It's troubling that what I find abhorrent in game design is succeeding in the marketplace. All the best to the guys doing well, I certainly don't begrudge their success [1], except that I will personally take no part in it.

[1] ok, maybe a teeny bit, but what I say isn't going to affect their bottom line
RightSignture has been for a while, and like the existing solutions it send the documents by email. What legal advantage does it have over simply and directly sending the PDF by email?

With Signsquid we decided to ditch completely the hand-written signature, in favor of a better thought process. We do not go into the contract redaction process, we leave that to the expert lawers. We use a combination of a unique link, sent by email, and a unique secret code, told by phone, for each signatory. This way, we can be sure the good person signed.

As for the design, as always it is a matter of taste :)

Give the application a try, and let us know what you think.
I'd love to port away from Titanium, any plans to support headless apps with system tray icons and menus?

(Which BTW are a PITA on Titanium)
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You pretty much point to solutions which don't solve the problem mentioned in the blog post at all and seeing how C# extension methods basically reintroduced instanceOf checks as an implementation necessity I'm pretty sure that extension methods are the wrong way to go.
When I realised I couldn't start projects I thought that also meant I couldn't back them. Thanks for clarifying.
Thank you! It really makes us feel better to know someone else is out there with a similar background.
Are you using the original links that were emailed to you? I no longer had the download message and I see no way to login on their site.
Both you and jashkenas are missing the point. The examples you are giving are also pretty easy to do in Scala.

The more complex method he is proposing (filterMap) cannot be done at all in the languages you mention, though he only uses it precisely to get the most complex kind of method that Scala collections offer. But it is also possible, and I just blogged about it here: http://dcsobral.blogspot.com/2012/01/adding-methods-to-scala....

But, no, that is not what he wants. He wants to add this method not to the collections, but to something that isn't a collection. Well, Scala can do that too -- it added all the collections methods to String and Array, didn't it?

And here comes the twist: he wants to add filterMap not by adding it directly to them, like Scala does. He wants, instead, to go _through_ that code to get at them.

With extension methods, the login would be like this:

* X adds extension methods to Y
* Z adds extension methods to X
* Therefore, Z extension methods should be available on Y

And, in fact, it is even possible to do that in Scala for many methods, but not for the particular combination he chose, and while still inferring all types.
Go East, Young Man
What I don't understand is why the UK doesn't have a government supported OS (probably best to have a linux distro I'd say) - a small fraction of the over-spend on a typical government run IT project (one of the NHS ones probably) would give you enough to buy Canonical and mould them to your will.

--

Some figures - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3734504.stm, single project overspend of £24 billion GBP (side issue: why isn't that the suppliers problem for arsing up their estimate); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_Ltd., gives Canonical revenue at around £30 million USD.

How the hell do they manage to arse things up so badly.
I read this and I think, why would I even want to write code for an API that I'd have to maintain far more actively than the rest of my project?

They've even faffed with the basic generated widgets enough for you to have to keep an eye on what works, so you can prepare to fill the same form in yet again to get the same thing working again.

Stability should be the priority if you don't want to piss third party devs off.