skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are severely mistaken about GC then. GC means to a large extent that programmers should know what their objects are doing. Perhaps even more so than in a non-GC'ed language.

The inherent problem with GC is when you put it into hands of people without that knowledge. Then the GC will save them and reclaim their data, whereas it would otherwise be a space leak and dead program. This means that you will have programs that work, but they will run slowly. GC-fanatics like me say that the program has bad productivity since it spends all its time in the garbage collector.

The advantage of GC though is this: If you know what you are doing, you don't need to manage memory in about 90% of your program. It is often either good enough or way faster than doing it yourself. Both in raw performance and in programmer time. A hint is that most modern parallelizing malloc routines use garbage collection internally to make them run more concurrently and faster :)

For the last 10%, the solution is the same as in any other language. You allocate large chunks of memory and then you handle that memory yourself. The advantage is that you only have to do this for a small part of your program and that means you can build software much faster.

The only place where GC is provably a bad idea is in hard real time systems.
Yes, that's how the first meetup happened, and from my perspective it was the best (I was never informed of any of the others)
Mobile devices create the opportunity for the modern workplace supervisor to leave the shackles of the desktop computer and physically return to the workplace - to perform that time-honoured role of a supervisor...to supervise!
Are you suggesting there is no upper limit amount of cash that Apple could accumulate that it wouldn't make sense to distribute some of it?

Apple has hit that limit, where it has plenty of money to do all that (safety net) and more.
Three issues with the piece.

First, its always important to talk about exactly you're measuring. I couldn't find anything in the piece to say whether the numbers being given were individual income or household income. I'm pretty sure these were household income, but then we run into the the problem that richer household tend to be larger, so the individual income disparity isn't as bad as what was in this graph.

Also, I'd tend to prefer to talk about consumption inequality instead of income inequality. The fact that the 1% nowadays pay a lot of that income out in taxes, and the elite in 1915 didn't is something we ought to care about. I think we should all be able to agree that a society with 100% income tax which redistributes all income equally would in fact be pretty equal, but that won't show up on that graph at all. For more nuance you can distinguish between total compensation, taxable compensation, normal income, consumption, and wealth.

A second point would be that they somehow don't mention the big discontinuity from when the 1986 Tax Reform Act passed. That strongly incentivised rich people to report things as income which they had previously claimed were business expenses. That does mean that the numbers after 1986 are more comparable to the numbers from before people started feeling the need to claim that things were business expenses, but it does mean that the numbers from 1988 aren't really comparable to the numbers from 1982. And its hard to compare across countries since AFAIK most of Europe is closer to the pre-1986 US system than the post-1986 US system.

And speaking of Europe, its important to remember than income inequality has been rising at more or less the same rate everywhere in the industrialized world (baring the US's 1986 jump). See pretty graphs here: http://www.scottwinship.com/1/post/2011/03/what-would-it-mea...

So the picture is pretty complex. I think we ought to tax rich people and redistribute the wealth to some extent, but if you just look at these graphs then you'll never see that working.
How To Learn WordPress In One Week (Without Spending a Cent)
I loaded the page, went to Firebug script panel, set a breakpoint on the line of javascript, hit F5, when the breakpoint got hit, I just hit escape to prevent it from running. Then, Ctrl-U as usual.

Chrome is broken on my machine (proxy issues) so I didn't test there, but I assume the same technique would work.
My bad! Yeah, women in IT who are surrounded by men all day never think about sex.
> The CEO and board have a legal responsibility to use those funds in a way that maximizes shareholder return or return it to the shareholders.

Please stop spreading this and related myths about the legal obligations of corporate officers and directors. They have a fiduciary duty, which has nothing to do with "maximizing shareholder X", or taking any other particular course of action.

These myths are simply a way to fool the masses into accepting amoral people acting in ways detrimental to society.
This is something I've been waiting for. Browsers should be agnostic to formats the OS is willing to play. If my system is happy to play H.264 then let me do it. This has always seemed to me to be the best option, allowing users to decide what they can play and allows browsers to avoid patent issues.

I hate software patents as much as the next person but put control in the hands of the user.
Encoders and decoders have to pay royalties. But MPEG-LA says they're not going to charge more (legally questionable due to exhaustion) fees beyond that.
Transhumanism is a movement interested in hacking biology to allow for life extension, intelligence improvements and so on.
Apple’s dividend and share re-purchase plan: the impact on cash growth
Nike Zoom Kobe 7 | New Arrival
The Cost and Value of SEO.
Ha, I write my Javascript like this. Makes me want to just go back to Haskell though. Does currying kill performance in Python like it does in Javascript?

To reduce clutter and unobscure the point, and support uncurried usage (like apply(f, args) however that is done in Python) , it needs more lambdas instead, of defs:

f = lambda a: lambda b: f_uncurried(a, b)
My advisors work is in this - part of it is making better use of the statistical properties of the noise in the reconstruction of the image.
The stock buyback sends exactly the same not-great message that the dividends do.
Igor's comment on Reddit referenced in the article:

[–]igor_sk 8 points 9 days ago
They're wrong, or, rather, they did not express their
thinking well. They do add "It is possible that its authors
used an in-house framework to generate intermediary C code"
[which was then compiled with MSVC], and this, I think was
exactly the case. I even found something that matches very
closely after a hint over at /r/ReverseEngineering: Simple
Object Orientation (for C).

My comment on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3682531

Just saying.. :)
This was a really great episode of 60 Minutes - also see the in-depth story on face blindness; it's an excellent demonstration of a mysterious capacity of (most) people's ability to recognize faces.

BTW - 60 Minutes should be retitled "40 Minutes" - from the time codes on my DVR I find that the Musk story was 15 minutes, and the face blindness story was 25 minutes. Is it any wonder people would rather consume video online (rather than watch 20 minutes of Cialis ads).
This article in Technology Review shows a disturbing lack of comprehension of how math works. It is not worth reading. As for the article itself[1], Wikipedia claims[2] that Fractal dimension has been studied since 1975 and Cantor's transfinite numbers[3] since the late 1800's. Perhaps someone else can find insights in this paper, but my own impression is that the authors have not advanced the field, but rather have failed to understand the basics of the field.

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.3150v1.pdf
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfinite_number
Reminds me of "we are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind...." Marcus Garvey, 1937
Yup. The tradeoff is that you lose multiple dispatch based on argument list size (overloading) (Clojure, C++, and Java takes the other side of that tradeoff. I don't know if Python has signature-overloading like that.)
I think it actually significantly matters at the extremes; having a large proportion of a country's wealth gives you significant relative power in that country's society, and so very clumpy wealth distributions produce more unstable, top-heavy societies and economies. I don't have much problem with moderate or even fairly large levels of inequality, but stuff like a small number of people controlling 20-30% of a country's resources tends to make the whole thing teeter a bit.

I disagree with your last statement, and in general think the opposite is true; extremely large concentrations of wealth, of the kind seen in aristocratic or oligarchical societies, tend to shrink the size of the pie. A main question would be where the transition point is; I think the U.S. is probably still on the reasonably-good side of the line, though less comfortably so than it was in the 1950s-80s. There's very little (no?) evidence that modest levels of wealth distribution harm economic growth, either. A Soviet command economy, yes, but a social safety net in a market economy doesn't equal communism, and there's some modest evidence that it can actually improve entrepreneurship (because people end up less scared of leaving cushy corporate jobs).
What would it look like to fall into a black hole?
If you are an experienced C/C++ hacker, this article will hurt your brain.
My country, Uruguay, implemented something like that ("Plan de emergencia"). And I don't like the results.

The problem is not that they're "doing nothing", it's that they're actively increasing their burden to the working society by having an unsustainable amount of children.

They're also REJECTING job offers (80% of those getting the emergency wage). And many of those job offers were for a good wage by local standards.

(spanish links)

http://elobservador.com.uy/noticia/214462/el-80-de-la-poblac...

http://www.mides.gub.uy/mides/text.jsp?contentid=14247&s...

It may sound fascist, but I'd like people to be able to support themselves before having children.

The idea of a citizen's wage sounds nice in theory, but implementation opens a big can of worms.
Hmm, I can't seem to find pricing at all on the main site, at least not in a way that I can make sense of. There does seem to be something linked off a blog post buried in another blog post. That bugs me.
I think it would be way cooler to have something float in international waters and use tidal/wave power to keep running. I guess that would be a lot easier to mess around with though.
Same for Korean with the ₩. And you can change the default system locale to Japanese or Korean and see it on any language version of Windows.
Practical Compressor Technology: Selection, Applications, Operation
In what it's what he describes as the Zemanta approach not "slapping together a bunch of heuristics" ?
Agenliga Sebagai Agen Bola Online Untuk Euro 2012
Ask HN: How do you find a designer?
I'm seeking a front end web designer for a bootstrapped startup. I notice a good number of the 'weekend' projects posted have great web designs, how did you find your designer or did you do the design work yourself ?

I'm a strong backend engineer, but web design, UI, CSS etc.. is just not in my bag of tricks.
The Warm Embrace of Vim
Of course, feedbacks are very welcome! :)
I'm not sure what Krugman was referring to, but I'm guessing he was making the case that because people tend to not spend money as freely in a depressed economy, that the risk of inflation or hyperinflation is mitigated to an extent. Effects of inflation become exacerbated when there is an acceleration in spending, whether it be on goods or currency or commodities, because nobody wants to hold the currency. For the past few years, this hasn't been a problem because people are scared and seeking safe havens, which is how most people view the dollar. This doesn't change the underlying fundamentals.

Here's the thing- there is a fundamental law in economics called supply and demand. Nobody, not the US, nor Japan is immune to it. If you increase the supply of something, and there is not a corresponding increase in demand, that thing becomes less valuable. In the US there has been an enormous increase in the money supply with no corresponding increase in real output. That makes the money circulating in the economy less valuable. Whether the costs of goods go up today, tomorrow, next week, or three years from now is somewhat immaterial. All of the evidence is in place that at some point the costs of goods will almost certainly go up, unless there is a shift in demand or a decrease in the money supply.

EDIT: Now we see that Apple is going to be dumping $45 billion into the economy. Not a good signal of strength for the dollar.
The Korean won symbol ₩ also occupies 0x5C. I never got totally used to seeing directory paths separated by ₩.
Let's do some basic math.

Let's say that I rent two redundant dedicated servers that :
- are each used at about 80%
- are each equivalent of about 100 cloudlets
- cost each $ 60 / month

If I want to switch to Jelastic, that's 14 x 100 x 2 x 0.8 = $ 2240 per month (gross simplification), against 2 x 80 = $ 160 per month + maintenance.

So if maintenance is < 2k€ for me, that's a no deal. In US a freelance sysadmin will cost more (?), but in my country, no. Too bad :)
... Free him, and he'll remain a slave ...

reminds me a bit about the way we're (mostly) taught life ought to go in the U.S.. go to school, work hard, get a good job (working for someone else).. get a car (now you have a car payment..now you need that job!).. start a family, get a house (now you can't even THINK about quitting that job!).. and if you come close to paying off any of your indebtedness.. BUY BIGGER!

Are we free in the U.S.? Nominally, yes. Culturally? Culturally, it seems like we're encouraged to indenture ourselves right from the get-go. The mindset is probably a lot less common on places like HN, where people are paid significantly better than median, admire the entrepreneur, and so on, but out in the rest of the world it is prevalent.
The comments has the story on that, which involved IBM.
Many sites (hi, Twitter; #! you, too!) happily break the back button. It is a standard technique to "boost" engagement and "reduce" bounce rate. Seems spiritually inline line with this view-source gimmick.
>"just a human, with many flaws. As are [snip] Sagan."

Lies. How could you? :(
Password Protect your Entire WordPress Site
Warning: Anecdote, not data, etc:
I just started playing with Draw Something last weekend, and I do have to say, it's really powerful: Getting a message a friend of you (!) has drawn something(!) and you don't know what(!) and you can score points(!) by guessing is really powerful, and wants you to open the message (and, thus, reply, as that is built in).
I also like how they combined free users and paying users, to grow the network and make revenue.
I don't know if they will exist in a year, but in a few weeks they have grown faster than Instagram in 1.5 years (and THAT was a really quick growth in itself!).
>The SSA could administer the same program for literally 1/5th what people are being charged.

Most people aren't begging the SSA to manage their money on the cheap, so there must be some kind of benefit with those more expensive options.

However, if you really think the SSA could do better with your money, I know someone who works there and could ask them where you can over send them more of your money.
Microsoft's Reddit/Twitter-esque Trend Aggregator
HTML5 is the new DHTML
The test for antitrust is competition being reduced to the point that prices can be controlled with monopoly-like behaviour, or suppliers are cut out from supplying competition.

Applying that test to all of those companies doesn't give Apple supplier control, extensive pricing control or monopoly power in any market.

for eg. even acquiring HP would be total 'PC' market share of ~25%. The only one that may be a concern is ARM, but that doesn't mean mergers are stopped, it just means that agreements are reached (for eg. as with Google and ITAR)
> like apply(f, args) however that is done in Python

Python 2 has an apply function [1], but it was deprecated for a long time and removed in 3.0 [2]. apply(f, args) is equivalent to f(*args) in Python.

[1] http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#apply

[2] http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/whatsnew/3.0.html#built...
Zurker - vShares
It's probably impossible; groups have already tried to anonymize genetic data and failed, and our ability to match genotype to phenotype is only getting better.
they would need to issue bonds valuing around $500 million

$500 _billion_
You throw dirt in the faces of those who have and continue to suffer through slavery by comparing it to minimum-wage workers. Slavery and Poverty and very distinct and one certainly more evil than the other.
Key words:

> “For a long time, we made games that did not get any traction,” said Dan Porter, the chief executive at Omgpop.
Police made 'errors' during raid on Megaupload boss
Does anyone know or have the capability to accurately estimate what the volumetric power density of these capacitors are (assuming they commercialize well)? In terms of replacing cell phone batteries or something, that's what matters, and I only see areal densities.
Spring equinox marks the official end of winter early Tuesday morning
I'm often surprised at reading about some startup that says "We don't have any managers!" And then I ask them, who buys the coffee? Pays for the servers? Who issues offer letters? etc.

And almost always there's one or two people who are doing the annoying busywork that any organization needs to do. And that's great!

But sometimes, it is distributed down to the developers themselves. And this really sucks. Developers are highly skilled, super smart, highly motivated people whose expertise is bringing their giant brains to bear on hard problems. Trolling Amazon for coffee, etc. is a waste of their time.

My style of management is very much in support of developer happiness. I'm the guy that makes sure we have the best coffee, that our internet is superfast, and if your computer breaks, I've got a replacement waiting for you.
Google bans reddit client from Play Store for "sexually explicit material"
We try to do the same thing for C++, Java, and Python, but it doesn't work as well because the process is manual.

Use http://astyle.sourceforge.net and add it to your build process and/or commit or push/pull hooks of your source control.

(I am surprised I have to give this tip to anyone on HN!)
Researchers find privacy and security holes in Android apps with ads
Better than C++ and D? You must be joking.
Servers are the new power-hogs. Go one step further: put servers on actual satellites, using solar power. Endlessly scalable, free power, at the cost of some milliseconds of lag.
I don't think you're getting his point. I can still replace GC with malloc() and we end up with the same criticisms of C that you have of Go and Java.

> I'm saying that much system level work has to optimize by not using malloc(). I've literally implemented off-heap malloc()/free() in C because malloc() is so untenable.

Anyone who has had to write fast C programs that make a lot of small objects eventually ends up here. You end up incorporating some sort of pool based allocator, which I'm sure you can come up with in Go just as you can in C (or Java, or whatever).
Ask HN: Stripe equivalent in the EU?
Hi everyone,

I'm putting the last leg on a product here, and that of course entails getting payments set up. The model is simple; monthly recurring billing via credit cards. The problem is however, that I'm in the EU (Denmark, to be exact) and while it is relatively easy to get set up with a merchant account etc., the up front costs are relatively high.

So, I was wondering if anyone know of any services equivalent of Stripe (www.stripe.com) that bypass all this bullshit and just let you get on with it? I know that PayPal to some degrees offers this, but with the recent scandals, I'd rather not risk taking this route.

Kind regards,
Nick
Windows 8 is Brilliant
In context: https://pay.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qnyy9/duqu_tro...
Because coffeescript runs in any browser and is easier to install under more platforms and security configurations than curl? The browser is the VM of the Internet. It is more standard that POSIX now, for non-system level user space functions, at least.
Qbo robot gets Xtion Pro motion sensor add-on, can't help but gloat (video)
This title is misleading, the article starts: "U.S. newspapers lost $10 in print advertising revenue last year for every $1 they gained online, a deeper loss than in 2010, as competition from Internet companies increases, a study by Pew Research Center found." Losing $10 of revenue is different then losing $10.
Mystery of Programming Language Used in Duqu Framework Solved
A new iPad... BGR reviews Apple's 3rd-gen iPad
One quick aside: all taxes redistribute wealth, and the consequences of doing so are well-known and positive. There's simply nothing wrong with the "redistribution of wealth" as you seem to suggest.

Now, onto the larger point. We care because unequal societies have a whole host of social ills: higher crime, lower social mobility, poorer health outcomes. There is, in fact, a wide and deep body of scientific literature about this. You are, of course, free to disagree with the science on income inequality, but that places the burden on you to say, "the science is wrong!", or to say, "high crime and poor health doesn't matter!"

Good luck with that.
Getting at the Heart of Security in the Cloud
so this guy claims he "discovered" Cantor's alef-null?

article is full of wrong statements beginning with the very first one.
Wikipedia has 9900kg to LEO for the Falcon 9 block 1 and 10450kg to LEO for Falcon 9 block 2 (both from Canaveral).

To GTO those numbers are 2400kg and 4680kg.

The "Launch Payload" of the Dragon spacecraft (6000kg) appears to be approximately the Mass to LEO of the block 2 (10450kg) minus the mass of an empty Dragon spacecraft (4200kg).
> However, if you really think the SSA could do better with your money, I know someone who works there and could ask them where you can over send them more of your money.

AFAIK this isn't actually possible. I looked into it at some point, and the amount you contribute is completely fixed as a percentage of your (earned) income. There are years where I didn't make a lot of income, or earned income only in non-payroll-taxed categories like grad-student fellowship, and wanted to top up my SS contribution for the year, but there's no mechanism for voluntary extra contributions.

(A few European countries do actually allow that; when I took a job in Denmark I had some options about what level of contribution per year I wanted to make into the state pension system.)
I laughed when I saw this in the press release. Anyone conservative enough not to buy a stock unless it provides a decent dividend would not buy Apple. Apple is not a value stock.
Great use of a demo - showing off what the app does.
(I get a 404 on Settings|Cancel)
Please post the URL of your site, so we can all enjoy the functionality and not see any leaked IDs. And some AWS functionality would be great, I would love to use EC2 cluster computes on the "free" teir...
I don't think python has any sort of overloading (based on signature that is). You can use def f(°args, °°kwargs) though. What you'll get is a tuple containing positional arguments and dictionary with keywords arguments. You can even specify some explicitly and then consume all others with this.

edit: ° should've been * but I couldn't escape it without using spaces.
The New iPad: A Love Story of Infinite Pixels