skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If only it was that easy: change programming languages, change programming models, and poof! Magical parallelism.

But parallelism is harder than that. It's an algorithm problem, a design problem, not a language or code problem. While OpenCL might be harder to write than plain C, for anything except the most embarrassingly parallel problems, that difficulty pales in comparison to making the solution parallel to begin with.

For every problem where you can simply split into masses of shared-nothing tasks, there's a dozen others where you can't. Rate-constrained video compression. Minimax AI search. Emulation. All of these can be parallelized, but it requires parallelizing the algorithm and making sacrifices that are light-years beyond what a dumb compiler that isn't even allowed to change program output (let alone rewrite half the program) could do.

Modifying an algorithm -- possibly even changing its structure entirely, changing its output, or even accepting nondeterminism -- is inherent complexity, to use the terminology of Mythical Man Month. No programming language or tool can eliminate this complexity. Good tools can make it easier to implement an algorithm efficiently, but they really can't take a complicated application and figure out how to change its design, structure, and behavior. Until we have AI-complete compilers that take program specs as "code" to be compiled, that's a human job.
Design is something almost everyone feels qualified to criticize, so a post like this lends itself to all kinds of bikeshedding.

Fortunately, we live in the age of A/B testing. Rather than listening to any of the speculation in this thread, the thoughtful businessperson can actually quantify just how good or bad a design is at achieving its goal.
Mutable state won't eat your children if you know how to handle it in a disciplined manner. Pure functions and immutable datatypes are definitely preferable in a variety of cases. However, just because you discover one day that there are better tools for driving screws than a hammer doesn't mean you have to start banging your nails in with a screwdriver and wearing a saffron robe and preaching to your friends that you have achieved liberation and that they won't be free until they also throw away their hammers.

The softwareverse (and he universe, for that matter) is still full of patterns and constructs that are inherently stateful, and need to be constructed such that they behave as if they were stateful. Heck, some constructs simply can't be made to work efficiently in a purely functional manner. Hash tables come to mind. Fortunately we already have a tool that's proven to be excellent for efficiently and effectively modeling state. No, it's not monads. It's state. And it does the job so well that even Haskell was forced to resort to it for its hash table implementation.

(Though admittedly not until after much sound and fury to the effect of, "Nobody needs hash tables; trees are Pure and just as good!" I'll say this for silver bullets - people sure can cling to them.)
No information just a sign up page and the same thing with launchrock.com. Not very helpful. anyone have any other info on this?
YouTube has a business model now, but is it a profitable business unit? (I'm not trolling; this is a serious question about business models.)
When in doubt, C Corporation.

Every bit of advice I got about corporate structure was mealy-mouthed, noncommittal, and almost completely useless. Unless you have a very strong set of attorneys and can afford to pay them to get you out of messes, you want a C Corp (or, if you do have them, you probably still want a C Corp).

What they never tell you about an LLC is that:

a) LLC operating agreements are roll-your-own documents without widely established boilerplate examples. Imagine trying to write a somewhat complicated word processing program that needs to allow for numerous bells and whistles (multiple typefaces and fonts, footnotes, and multiple paper sizes), but not being able to compile it or test it (or modify it) until after somebody buys it. It isn’t enough that a few years later when someone does compile it and run it (with a newer version of the compiler), that it works flawlessly, but that it has to have every feature they want! Oh, it doesn’t? See you in court. You can afford your own personal legal counsel, right?
b) Many investors won’t touch companies with LLC structures (probably because of reason a). Most investors (if the round is big enough) will toss them aside for a C Corp formation (also because of reason a).
c) Your state (even if it isn’t Delaware) has default rules for things in a C corp that you would forget to include in an LLC operating agreement.
d) MicroSoft L.L.C., Google LLC, Facebook Ltd.? No? They all started as C Corps. Bonus points for naming a company you do want to emulate that started as an LLC.

The only real pro to having an LLC as a startup is the lack of requirement for documenting regular meetings, which is a pain and easy to overlook (but a major screw-up when you do overlook it) in a C corp. Your CFO should know how to do this properly and take care of it promptly or you need a different CFO.
I believe within 20 years, we will have unlimited energy from the sun, and this will not be an issue. I don't know whether an interpreted languages is that much easier, but I do believe that any language that gets people writing code and solving interesting problems quickly can't be too bad a choice.
Anti-gun laws don't stop killings, they just give gangs and the police a monopoly on the most violent type of crime.

And that's a bad thing? I suspect the number of casulties from six-year-olds shooting their classmates and teenage rampages would drop significantly if it weren't so easy to get at daddy's gun...

Gun laws are one of those things where intelligent, well meaning people replace reality with their model of reality

In contrast to all these omniscient people who don't argue from their mental model of reality?

and end up with a backwards system which does nothing to address the root causes.

Only because it doesn't address the root cause does not mean you should stop treating symptoms.
That Instagram would turn out like FriendFeed would be my major fear. I mean, who uses it any more?
How many people work at instagram?
It's trivial to write monstrously inefficient C/C++ - arguably it's even easier than writing slow Python code, because high level concepts like events and callbacks are harder to express programatically and code that should be event-driven becomes:

while (1)
{
// check for input
}

And no offense to the TFA, but all the academic code I've seen is buggy, slow, and inefficient - hardly using "every ounce of efficiency". For example, the most popular data processing tools I've seen in engineering are matlab and excel (!). Not exactly coding to bare metal.
I hate environmentalists. Don't get me wrong, I love the environment, I even call myself a geolibertarian at Mises conferences, but the problem I have with environmentalists is that they think "the world doesn't boil down to dollars and cents" (This was actually said to me).

Let's be very, very generous here and assume that it would take twice as long to code something in C that it would in Python. Let's assume that the code isn't a static library, but something like a web app or equivalent. Doubling the number of developers to get the 10x speed up / 90% reduction in server use is not worth it from an environmental perspective. Those developers use resources to live. They burn fuel to heat their dinner. They drive their car to work.

These types of arguments are trying to make an emotional plea to a perceived market failure. The solution is to fix the market, not waste time implementing stuff in C. Tax pollution at the rate at which it would take to clean it up and the market will automatically allocate resources efficiently.
"$400 Million", FTFY.
If code runs faster then the user time is wasted less as well. That seems in alignment with the ideas behind the video.
Apple was cool, but Commodore was affordable. Thanks, Jack, for that $199 C=64. Rest in peace.
According to their press release, Instagram will continue to work independently and use alternative networks. Until they prove otherwise with their actions, all anyone can do is speculate.
If properly encrypted with an authenticated encryption mechanism then the server can be sure that the data has not been modified and has not been read. This would allow private data to be stored. As long as the server is the only one that knows the key, then only the server can read it. An evesdropper can still use the cookies for replay attacks, but at that point they're on the connection already.

It's useful for things like storing the current user session. You wouldn't want someone to be able to log in and then change their account to someone else's by modifying the user id in their cookie. Thus this information is often stored in a server-side session. With an encrypted cookie you can push this data to the client, which makes the server stateless with respect to client sessions.
>I need to delete my account //

Surely it's already too late. They bought your data.

Why do we allow companies to sell personal data on as part of the company? Should this be legislated against?
I am a big believer in FP (reasoning about functional code is much sounder even in the sequential case) but not in parallel programming. Most algorithms just do not parallelize that well, regardless of the programming paradigm used.

Quote Donald Knuth:
'[...] So why should I be so happy about the future that hardware vendors promise? They think a magic bullet will come along to make multicores speed up my kind of work; I think it’s a pipe dream. (No—that’s the wrong metaphor! "Pipelines" actually work for me, but threads don’t. Maybe the word I want is "bubble.")'

'I won’t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.'
Most of the big things we cured where diseases that no-longer seem to be a big deal because they where cured. Food born illness, measles, and smallpox are all things that have killed more people than AIDS and are no longer a problem in the western world.

Measles what's that? If vaccinations were stopped, each year about 2.7 million measles deaths worldwide could be expected. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htm

And "Smallpox is believed to have emerged in human populations about 10,000 BC... Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox We are talking about something that killed around A BILLION PEOPLE and now it's 'gone'.

At it's current rate AIDS might catch up to Smallpox 200-600 years from now. But, that's just deaths the side effects where far more common. She might not be dead but I don't like seeing this picture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Child_with_Smallpox_Bangla...

PS: You say there is no cure for blindness, but smallpox was responsible for 1/3 of all blindness cases which just don't happen any more.
Netflix creates super-PAC
We actually don't know that the world is stateful. Quantum physics would tend to suggest that the world is a waveform function that collapses on a discrete value when evaluated. If you think about it the current 'state' of the world should entirely depend on how the previous functions collapsed to produce the current 'state'.

Perhaps like in physics there is a sort of Church-Turing duality to it all that is hard to tease apart.
>- Sequencing Cancers and attempting to find a match to suggest a treatment will not work, each cancer is unique and itself made up of a diverse population

It seems to me that sequencing is a must, rather than a "not work," as without that type of intelligence one can't even know what you're up against. You just need to take into account the diversity of mutations, and not assume that you've seen everything that's currently in the population.
HTML5 Features Can Drive Up Mobile Websites’ Usage By Up To 28%
I learned BASIC on a Commodore PET. Thanks, Mr. Tramiel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET
Ask HN: Fair Use of Trademarks?
Are there any IP attorneys reading HN?

For a while I've had an idea to build a site where users can up/down vote consumer brands. In simplest terms, think of it as "Hot-or-Not" for Brands. However, it's been suggested that, while this might be fun and interesting, and it might be appropriately categorized as "fair use" of trademarks, that I'd most likely be inudated with cease and dessist request and lawsuits.

Can anyone shed any light ... would such use of trademarks belonging to others be fair use? On what basis then, are market research firms able to survey consumers on the brands they prefer? Do they get the permission of brands prior to their surveys? Is "Fair Use" real?
I learned BASIC in the early 80's on a VIC 20. Luckily we had the tape drive so I could save my 'work'. We also had the extra RAM cartridge that was needed for some of the larger games.

I really wanted an Apple II though. That's what the rich kids had.
An Airbnb for Dogs Gets $3.4 Million in Funding
Are you sure that it wouldn't have taken you 3 days to check that?
Which came about also after Jay Miner took the Amiga away. I believe Tramiel acquired Atari hoping to get the Amiga chipset, which Miner then took to Commodore.
Hey Pair, Go Ahead and Centralize My Entire Relationship
>Very few processes want to be parallel.

Maybe, but IMO it's often that the abstractions used to build software suck at it. Consider for example UI programming, the UI thread and event loop are hacks done because of lack of tools, performance with the current ones, and legacy environment/design. There is no reason why every event cannot be executed parallel, manipulated as push collections and have event handlers that perform application state transitions as transactions.

>and being able to reason about necessary state is how you do anything useful

I agree, and two parts need to be stressed in this, being able to reason and necessary state. Immutability/values make reasoning part transparent and necessary state is isolated in separate abstractions that again simplify reasoning about them.

I don't know how this applies to Haskell, but from playing with Clojure I can definitely see the advantages of working with values, even with single threaded programming reasoning is much simpler, and state is isolated in to Var/Ref/Atom/Agent primitives that have clear usage patterns and clean semantics (no gotchas with compiler reordering some instruction for lockless programming, no worry about lock acquisition order, etc.)
The game is scored in profit.

I'm all for capitalism, but that statement strikes me as particularly narrow-sighted -- with due respect for tptacek (since I always find your comments insightful). Plenty of people and corporations are not purely motivated by profits. For example, kudos to GOOG for making a cheap smartphone OS available to the 3rd world.
Ok, in that case I'll settle for some stale bread and a bowl of thin gruel.

Don't worry about the world peace thing either, I'll just take more afternoon naps instead.
This has to be mostly stock...how much cash does FB even have? Enough to casually hand out hundreds of millions?
You know what I'm afraid of? Facebook doing to Instagram what they did to Beluga.
At work, we used Beluga to communicate about work related stuff. Facebook bought it, shut it down and turned it into Facebook Messenger. Goes without saying but we didn't move our conversations/groups over to Facebook Messenger.
I really hope Instagram doesn't get treated the same way. That's all.
Current design: "we built this in 10 minutes with twitter bootstrap to test our MVP".

Redesign: "this is a product, and a brand".

Also, very smart idea to do facelifts to YC companies. Many coming out of this batch have really weak design chops (the screen sharing site looked like an SEO landing page) and by focusing on YC companies, he increases his chances of being noticed.
\
See also: "Facebook acquires Instagram [for $1B]"
This is your second post, and you've already become one of my favorites. Have a nlp question for you. I noticed you're doing: {"Prismatic" {"runs" 1},"runs" {"on" 1},
"on" {"coffee" 1}}
Why do you care to have a count of each word that follows and not assume its always one. Why not just analyze a simple bi-gram as key and an int to keep the count as value?
What you say is true (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law), but it's not really the point. Most programming is not that hard, it's just moving data from one place to another, operating on that data, and then moving it somewhere else. Using functional languages trivially allows you parallelize these types of operations, and forces you to think about problems in a way that will allow you to parallelize other things more easily.

So you're right, good design is a human's job, but when you're just doing things the grunt work that most of software development is, having tools that enforce The Right Thing is very helpful.
Some people just fit the dictionary definition of "unmitigated gall"...
Except that in the 1800's you couldn't build another B&O in six months with a couple of nerds with Macs.
I might be wrong here but I think it prevents against a user tampering their own cookie. Say I store User_Id:5 in a cookie and pass it over an ssl connection. The user can still change from User_Id:5 to User_Id:6 and get user 6's account info. Typically you would have to store a non guessable token instead to avoid this. I think by encrypting the cookie you provide the non-guessable part of the equation without having to think about it. This isn't really a benefit from a security standpoint (as in it doesn't provide more security), but it is convenient.

Could be wrong here, I'm not very familiar with Yesod.
You shoot down our own argument. The video suggest C# and Java as alternatives to interpreted languages. By picking C you are deliberately trying to make your argument sound stronger than it is. The video also mentions the economic cost.

From an economics point of view you are just wrong. Because of the vast numbers of computers used in 'scale out' architectures the impact of code efficiency is enormously bigger than the cost of developers. If a developer's code runs on 10 or 100 machines then you are correct. But modern software runs on hundreds or even hundreds of thousand machines.
Great job keep up the good work. Im pretty impressed that this will be open source. Never seen such a beautiful looking open source project :)
LuaCocoa does both sides of the bridge. You might try that.
Deals fall apart. Running both deals in parallel is a smart way to hedge risk. Also, it is in fact possible to put together a deal very fast. We sold FriendFeed on a weekend.
Personal experience essay
The practiced writers structure personal experience essay in-depth, which totally is imbued with valuable characteristics and original quotes scrupulously.
How Nicholas Wade's grandfather survived the Titanic
You have not been looking at scientific computing. Matlab is more something people used for comp-sci of math. If it was not FORTRAN then it was not scientific computing.
No more Linux 2.4 releases
this one's easy - depending on your budget (I'm assuming you have almost none but one never knows): Advertise in travel magazines, hit up some of the travel agencies that cater to your demographic, call some of the travel apps and website services to partner, hit up all the blogs in your space, combine that with a press release targeting the industry publications and reviewers ( it's actually pretty cheap to do - check out Marketwire or others like it). I'd probably also give some of the dating websites a shot - you might get some traction from sites that cater to singles and travel that way. Try the vacation clubs too - many of these cater to singles also - could offer them co-branding opportunities.

Given your demographic I'd also post in University/ College sites. When it comes to hostels/ bed and breakfasts, you can probably contact some of the industry organizations to get lists and partnership or advertising opportunities - and of course call up hostels in some of the bigger cities to have them put up a notice for you. Get a list of journalists that write for travel sites and magazines and send them an intro email - maybe you'll get lucky and be picked up by one or two, offer an exclusive interview if they pick it up ( and stick with your promise).

All of this is legwork, but (except for the advertising) it's pretty cheap to do - just a lot of salesmanship - which is laborious but I figure you have more enthusiasm than money.

Hope that helps - good luck!
Evolution does occur in cancer cells in the sense of increased genetic variability which may lead to more aggressive/resistant cancer in a patient. However we won't see things like drug resistant staph infection because the genetics of the tumor don't spread beyond the individual.

I also agree that our understanding of degenerative diseases is poor but I think that modern technology and methods will change this. Hopefully to the point were we can prompt the body to move the body from a diseased to a healthy state but that may be a ways out.

However the genetic diversity in cancerous cells is not present in functioning human beings. Based on the analysis of genetic sequence data from tumor and blood samples from the same individuals it is clear that a large amount of mutation and structural variation occurs in cancer cells.
Welcome to Wall Street: The Instagram Buy Is All About Facebook's Investors
That would not be obvious to me. I often have to process quite large and messy XML files and a functional approach works well. I'm not even sure how inserting print statements would be helpful.
Unfortunately - right now - we do not have unlimited energy. If we did - then the argument simply shifts to the limited mineral resources we have to make the computers...
LuaJIT requires mprotect which was disabled in version of iOS pre 5.0. It has been secretly activated in 5.0+, but it's unclear if apple will allow anyone to use it. Feel free to try and let us know the results.
A Faster Emulator with Better Hardware Support
Can you tell more about your mother's situation? Is there wifi where she lives?
Here's the more information. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713941
It's already illegal in the UK to enter and/or use a computer system without permission, you don't even have to crack it. Presumably this is true in most of the EU too.

So, the only reason I can see that anyone would want this law is so you can prosecute without having to show someone committed a real crime. Kinda like having a law saying you could prosecute people for hit-and-run if they own a car.

If the "hacking tools" are capable of causing near instantaneous death then I think there's an argument for it. Otherwise this seems to be over-stretching the law to infringe on hackers liberties.
3 Great Ads I Wish I Had Come Up With
Facebook bought Instagram: how Twitter messed up (Google too)
Mario Goes Berserk
Best quiet period PR stunt ever.
Seems like pulling out an oil-drenched card would let oil into the PCI slot, which would then cause issues when a new card is inserted. Do you have experience with that?