skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Languages built on the JVM have to deal with boxing and unboxing. Scala still doesn't have efficient arrays of unboxed values. Progress here: http://docs.scala-lang.org/sips/pending/value-classes.html

After that proposal is implemented (perhaps in version 3 of Scala, almost ten years after its first release, though granted it wasn't their top priority) they'll still have to write at least a little bit of boilerplate for each type they want to store in unboxed arrays, and they'll be limited to types that can be stored as Java primitive types under the covers. That seems like a pretty nasty limitation for a general-purpose scientific computing language, not only because it decreases native performance but because it makes C interop much more difficult.

For a general-purpose scientific language, I think it is imperative to adopt the principle that any user-designed type should be able to achieve the same power, performance, and elegance as if it were a built-in type. To the best of my knowledge, that rules out JVM languages.

(Scala was never meant to be a "JVM language," but in terms of its strengths, its weaknesses, its user base, and its future, it is very much a JVM language, and the obstacles to implementing efficient user-defined types is one of the trade-offs they accepted when they went with the JVM.)
The IPO of the decade? My valuation of Facebook
I wonder if big, successful tech companies should be dipping into their pockets to fund internet training- not as charity, but as an investment. eBay, Facebook, Netflix and Google, for instance. Between those four, there must easily be an annual $100 in revenue from having an extra US person online.

So for them to invest $15 each in free classes for someone seems like a no-brainer. Plus it buys good PR and goodwill. Plus it's almost certainly tax deductible.
The libertarian stance is not "there should be no libraries" but more like "if there is a genuine need for libraries, and value in having them (quite plausible), then Government funding is not the best approach to creating them or running them efficiently".

Just because something is good doesn't mean the tax payers should pay for it. There are other options.

If they are a great idea, why not persuade people to voluntarily pay for them?

Or if they are providing value, why don't they make money? Perhaps they could provide some services for free and charge for others. Or profitably provide some services very cheaply.
Seems like an easy fix.
That's an interesting opinion. How do you feel about the fact that Sencha touch requires the purchase of a license for a commercial app whereas jQuery Mobile does not? IMO that makes jQuery a more attractive choice.

However, I will agree that the article was a bit jQuery heavy; several of the options presented were extensions of jQuery Mobile.
Her app is in closed beta.

Have you actually tried using her app?
As someone who has been an RC enthusiast all his life and is just now getting into multi-rotor drones--I can say that this is a step in the right direction. Currently, the only legal way to operate drones in US airspace is a recreational activity (RC airplanes/helis). As soon as you try and operate in the commercial sphere you immediately come under the FAA UASs regulations which essentially limit the flight of drones to groups with COA (Certificate of Authority) and only government and university groups are being granter these waivers.

As other have said, there are many many commercial/non-military uses for these things and we have to have someway to allow their regulated, legal use.

Also, most of these drones (at least the ones I'm building) use open source hardware and software (OpenPilot, Arducopter (DIY Drones), etc) which can be monitored by the general public. I don't think it's quite time to put on the tin-foil hats with this--the FAA is just trying to make our airways safe and make sure aircraft that are carrying humans continue to do so safely.
Note to anyone with a swimming pool: install a roof.

Giving the capability of aerial surveillance to anyone who can afford a drone would mean the end of outdoor privacy, even in your own backyard, no matter how tall your fence is. Say goodbye to the sun.
Caning and hanging in Singapore is really nothing to worry about unless you cannot live without pot or vandalising cars. Criticising the government OTOH, can get you in loads of trouble.

Google "Chia Thye Poh" to find more about one of the longest held political prisoner in the world, without trial by the way. Or "Alan Shadrake" for Singapore's treatment of foreigners who dared to criticise the government.

Singapore in general has little respect for human decency, and the population is long conditioned to keep our mouths shut and focus on chasing money. You will not find Singaporeans protesting for rights or against injustice, because we dont dare and we cannot afford to.

If this contempt for human rights bother you, Singapore can be rather uncomfortable.
You're not the only one - Maiden's Powerslave is a regular in my "coding" playlist. That album flat out rocks.
> ust because something is good doesn't mean the tax payers should pay for it. There are other options.

if you remove 'good' with 'useful', and it seems to me that this is exactly what tax payers should pay for. There are tons of useless shit tax money is used for, libraries is not one of them.
Without wanting to get into a political debate (although I'm happy to do that off-site), I see this as baseline infrastructure: part of the solid platform underlying a healthy economy. I do see it as government's job to provide that.
Her name and her investors aren't going to be why people decide they like her product (if they decide they do). They're also not going to be the reason why people didn't like yours.

You're always going to be competing with someone and unless you are Apple they're going to be bigger, better positioned, and have more money than you.
In my experience, practically anything to do with a government and technology is certain to be a terrible mess. Forms are just the tip of the iceberg; take a look at any interface created to "replace" a paper form. I haven't seen one that looked or functioned like it had been updated in a decade.
OK, perhaps I should have qualified that. It's a good 90% solution for a lot of use cases, although obviously more useful for implementing algorithms in terms of numerical building blocks, than ultra-performance-critical code where you want to write a lot of your own tight inner loops. Is that what you meant?

The parallelisation story isn't great at the moment either, although seems like it has the potential to improve. Still 'sucks' is pretty harsh. For me, looking at how far it's come since I first played with it, I'm impressed. For machine learning, the majority of the building blocks one needs are there, and you get to sit back and put them together using a nice, clean, widely-adopted general purpose programming language. And unlike MATLAB still maintain a decent amount of control over things like memory usage and which BLAS routines it's calling.

Adding bindings for new libraries is more of a pain than it should be though on the occasions where you do really need some fortran or C++ library that doesn't have bindings yet. A language which bridges the gap between high and low levels (not C++!) and has great interop would be very interesting. I guess I'm just hopeful that this kind of thing can be achieved in a general-purpose language (new or existing) which like Python is adopted across the wider software engineering community. Perhaps that's my unreasonable demand to add to their list :)
Witch is terrible unfortunate.

You can't use copy paste because it copies a raster version instead of a vector one.

This makes inkscape totally unusable. I tried to compile a native GTK version but letters and icons will appear as little boxes. It was more useful that way that the X version(at least this way you could guess what the boxes were).
Whether you agree or not, I think we are approaching a situation where our trust in fledgling start-ups, popular or not, is in decline. Just browse the names: Twitter, Path, Instagram, Google, Facebook, etc., etc. Not exactly obscure companies, many of whom are well-liked by their users.

I would be as worried as a founder as a consumer, because the joy of being an early adopter might be waning in light of this. The address book security breach has made it undesirable to just try out all apps you see and worry about security later. Before, I basically only had to worry about non-SSL and plain text passwords - something that rarely mattered.

I don't know if using "we don't send your information unencrypted and unsafely, and we certainly don't sell your private information nor nab your contact list" is going to do more good than harm to a new company. It sounds a little creepy.

Maybe we should organize a pillory service with a track record in crimes against privacy and security instead as an alternative to Crunchbase. The FTC, bless their hearts, have limited resources and don't seem to be doing to much to make Facebook do what they do, and a track record does not need to be kept up to date, as great as it would be. It doesn't need to be an exhaustive list; having the biggest companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tumblr, Microsoft, Dropbox, and Twitter would suffice in most instances, because, honestly, as much as I loathe Facebook, I have an awful memory and have to rely on my bookmarks to remember just how bad they are.

Perhaps this database can be extended to follow founders or CTOs involved directly or indirectly in these screw-ups, when they leave their company, so they don't pull the same stunt the next time.

This could be done with something as basic as a GitHub collaboration.

Who knows, maybe this can even be turned into a start-up - it seemed to work for Chris Dixon.
Here are some images of my current tricopter project: https://plus.google.com/b/112905414962865545354/112905414962...
FWIW, basic cable isn't analog (well, some channels can be delivered in analog), so your points based on that line of thinking don't follow. It's typically not switched-digital because the basic services (such as the major broadcasters) are heavily watched, so there's not much benefit to going to switched-digital.
I should mention that Jason Fried replied on Twitter: "Our office is a lot more lively these days than in those photos. Patina takes time."
https://twitter.com/#!/jasonfried/status/170928354348908544
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It's not really about read either, it's about this:

> Wait a second, if you take a look at Lisp code, it’s really all made up of lists:

Haskell has `read`, most of your data types can just derive Read and Show and they'll "magically" get a representation allowing you to `read` and `show` them.

But that only works for datatypes, you can't do that with code.

In Lisp you trivially can, because code is represented via basic datatypes (through a reader macro if needed).

It's not macros. It's not read. It's much more basic than that: it's homoiconicity. From that everything falls out, and without that you need some sort of separate, special-purpose preprocessor (whether it's a shitty textual transformer — as in C — or a more advanced and structured one — as with Camlp4 or Template Haskell — does not matter).

And I don't get why the author got the gist (and title) so wrong when he himself notes read is irrelevant and useless in and of itself:

> Think of read like JSON.parse in Javascript. Except since Javascript code isn’t the same as data, you can’t parse any code

`read` does not matter if the language isn't homoiconic, you can `read` all you want it won't give you anything.
I had to go in and delete the old version of VLC (1.12) that I had installed, and also delete the old preferences before the new version would work properly for me.

The new graphical look in OSX (perhaps other systems as well, I don't know about them) has gotten some critique, but I think it looks great.
"These gov't forms are often ripe for improvement via improved UX with step-by-step inputs, contextual help, and multi-language capabilities."

Sure, and this would undoubtedly relieve a lot of pain points. But the authors intent here goes deeper than just interface. A significant, very non-trivial portion of the population is being left behind by digitalization. These people have no recourse if certain government institutions only handle online forms. Imagine for a second that you have no web experience whatsoever, and you are greeted by the firefox startup screen.

A hard thing to do I know, but as it stands if this is your position it's hard to get out of. Where do you even start? Who can you ask for help in an increasingly competitive solipsistic environment? (Solipsistic, according to my spell check, is not a word, but it's meaning should be obvious to those familiar with solipsism.)

It's hard to imagine the peasants plight when your sitting in the Vatican.

EDIT: Going further, even the people that you wouldn't expect, generation Z, don't really understand computers either. And I'm not sure if they really want to. I mean, sure they can use facebook, but if they ever have "a cool idea" good luck to them figuring out how to express it in digital media. I wonder how many brilliant web startups, game changers, and generally disruptive ideas are trapped in the heads of people who will never get an opportunity to try them out.
"This is, in part, because outside of the ALA (which is a great organization, a great lobbying body, but perhaps not quite strong enough nor well funded enough) there is no large, overarching public library thing. There isn't a central office that can dictate policy, allocate funds, and launch a massive PR campaign. At different levels, yes, there are state and county and non-profit organizations, but the existential crises that libraries now face is massive, universal, and needs coordinated effort. "

Hmm, maybe a library czar in Washington?

Although something separate from party politics might be better...
Yes you are both..!! But your not a theoretical computer scientist..
I skimmed the article and got to the first comment complaining that Larry Ellison spends millions on the America's Cup and he doesn't give a crap ...

Basically, the problem is that for years CA, and America in general, spent money that it didn't have and now it's going to get painful.

There's no point in whining and complaining. Americans are doing it to themselves. Sit down and decide what we can afford to pay for and quit kicking the can down the road.
Both the Inception and Social Network soundtracks are excellent - check out the Batman Begins soundtrack if you get a chance - I like a lot of Hans Zimmers soundtracks and really dig that one too.
I disagree with this article's perspective, but I understand what the author intended to say and to a certain extent I like how the idea is presented.

Yes, Lisp's power comes from the embodiment of code and data together in one manner, and the ability to treat them this way when writing code is good, but `read` is a coincidence of that power, not a demonstration of how it is used. Macros are the method by which we harness the power of homoiconicity in an efficient, powerful manner.
> If they are a great idea, why not persuade people to voluntarily pay for them?

Because, in this specific case, the people who most need libraries can often barely afford to pay for food and shelter.

Libraries are such an obvious public good that I will never understand why they're not treated (both in the US and in the UK, and perhaps in other countries), as a basic and absolute necessity.

[edited to add not which I left out in my rush to get my point across]
Analysis of Google's notification bar patent, and how iOS may infringe
but I don't think any of them are nearly similar enough to humans that anyone would ever for an instant mistake them for human

Really? The article says "Run around the Citadel and you'll be damned if you find more than two or three humans out of hundreds of citizens milling about, shopkeepers hocking their wares, and government officials eyeing you suspiciously. The entire government of the galaxy, known as the Council, is run by non-humans."

That all sounds exceedingly human to me. You can't start an article with engulfs all of science fiction's greatest universes and then say that. There are some /really/ great universes out there. A government? Seriously?

A government? A mixed species government? Shopkeepers? Wares? This isn't an amazing genre beating non-human future, this is small-town-humans-in-space-in-weird-bodies. AI and FTL and life goes on? Multiple civilizations and they're all basically equal in brainpower?

Take a read of this short story http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pd... and then say this game is Taking Non-Humans Seriously as a concept.
As does anyone trained in the C tradition, but it's annoying, too, to have to translate 1-based math formulas to the C convention. Having recently used Octave for the Stanford online ML class after a couple decades of C, C++ and Java, I doubt programmers will have trouble with the mental transition.
It's not that a major CA's root couldn't be revoked, but the situation would have to be extremely dire to warrant the negative impact. Plus, there's so little visibility into what the CAs are issuing that it's really hard to justify revocation--unless it's something public and obviously dangerous like the Diginotar situation. That's what I meant by "the system is just too big to fail."

(And to be clear, this is my opinion here, not me speaking for Google or Chrome.)

Edit: I just reread my original comment and I can see the confusion. I should have made it clear that I was talking about the response to this particular situation (issuing an intermediary for DLP). Basically, the CAs have no good reason to come clean, the abuse is hard to detect, and revocation is pretty hard to justify. So, it feels to me like the threat is hollow.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem . This is what governments are for.
The Path address book issue was featured in the New York Times. So, no.
Police, Emergency and Fire departments are all "good" and "provide value" however they are not profitable. Nor do people run out to voluntarily pay for them. And there are a few cases where counties/municipalities created subscription like fees for these to the effect of somebody losing a house to a fire while the fire fighters stood to watch.

This is the core of the problem with "no taxes" - principally it's good on paper. In reality it's more complicated than that.
Actually, the libertarian stance is closer to "I have an inherent human right not to pay taxes that outweighs the public good of having things like libraries." There's some handwaving about voluntary charity, but if voluntary charity worked, no one would have invented public services to begin with, and the typical libertarian doesn't really care anyway.
You seem to have no idea what the libertarian position is. So I'll try to help:

Just because something is super good and super useful -- and uncontroversially worthwhile -- like groceries, cars, delivery of packages, the production of beds, health care, retirement savings, and so on ... absolutely does not imply that the Government should be paying for it with tax money.

Libertarians believe that Government is kind of like a really big bureaucratic company, except even less efficient and poorly managed in most respects, and instead of pitching investors (say) it sometimes just takes their money against their will. If something is important and we want it run well and efficiently, all the more reason to keep Government away from it.

The reason to involve Government in something is when Government's unique talents and position are helpful. Most good things can be provided without Government and therefore should be provided without Government.

Government has a more legitimate role to play when we need:

1) massive scale. our Government is big which is, in a few cases, an advantage

2) when we're dealing with law (courts) or force (police, military, CIA) because it's very tricky to let non-Government people do a lot in these areas
"hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV"
At the behest of mostly the music and movie industries - who are so dead set on their antiquated business model, who see the free and open internet as a big big threat on all fronts. On one side you have this so called "rampant piracy problem" (lol) but on the other side you have the internet as a medium for artist to create, distribute, advertize, and sell their work without any need for the big players in the industry. This is what scares them most.. How dare this free and open thing put a chink into our profits, and forcing us to come up with a different way of thinking about the future. But instead their plan is
to assault it, with the help of our bought lawmakers, and bring it under their control.
I agree. If all they say is "end end end" you might as well use braces. I'm depressed to hear that Matlab is an inspiration to the language design at all; the Matlab language is by far the worst aspect of Matlab, and it has nothing to recommend it. Think of the damage that Sun did to Java to make it look familiar to C programmers; no need to repeat that mistake (though if you're cynical, you might think it was the smartest thing they ever did.)

Braces would be better than ending keywords, in my opinion, but I'm disappointed not to see whitespace-defined blocks of a la Python. Perhaps that doesn't work in a statically-typed, type-inferred language, but if it does, I think it would be much better. Scientists have no problem with it (certainly less of a problem than programmers do) and Python is pretty well accepted in the scientific computing community.
Even if you won't use Perl6 (which you probably won't, in the near future), you will find the developments in notation quite stimulating. Hyper-operators and the incredibly detailed attention to array references blew my mind away. Especially see Synopsis 3.

In the long run, Perl6 could be as influential as Perl Regular Expressions have been. Definitely something to watch.
I noticed that too.

The language syntax seemed uninteresting, which is not really a bad thing but what's the case for the need for a whole 'nother language in that category?
They provide the most service to those unable to afford help. Also, they mostly provide the intangible service of raising peoples' education. That's why they don't make money. People only go to college because they think they're screwed if they don't, but almost nothing else education related has that amount of leverage in the peoples' decision-making.
You'll need useful skills to do any good in the world.

Spelling, for instance, might prove useful if you need to gain the confidence and the respect of others through written communication, in the pursuit of your larger goals.
Ask HN: Quick Survey for a StartupWeekend project - CrowdFinish
CrowdFinish is an online accountability app that lets you use your friends and family to help you finish projects and reach your goals.

We're designing and building this weekend, and we could use your help with a quick survey to help guide our product development and idea validation.

Thanks in advance for your help HN!

http://crowdfinish.wufoo.com/forms/crowdfinish-survey/