skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You mean they aren't already?
I think dot notation was a mistake -- it creates ambiguity between what is an object and what is a struct. There's no way to know without the aid of the documentation or the compiler.

Reference counting isn't that hard, but garbage collection is superior. I used to fall into the same camp as you, but prolonged experience to Objective-J and then going back to Objective-C, I realized that even though I knew how to solve the problems, they weren't worth wasting cycles in my thought processes. All that to say, reference counting works really well, but there's no good argument not to just use garbage collection (at least 99% of the time).
I've been using obj-c for around a year now, and it's growin' on me :)

I didn't like it too much at first (funky syntax, different naming conventions, generally crappy string manipulation), but once I started using it, especially in conjunction with cocoa and ib, I really started liking it.

It has some cool perks, like using '+' (I forget the technical term) to add functionality to an existing class (i.e. adding a method to the NSString class by creating an NSString+Additions.m file, and all classes in your project can call that method on any NSString object). Much easier than having to create an NSString subclass just to add one method, and then having to remember to name all your NSString's something like MyString* str;

I also like that I can just throw a chunk of c or c++ code in there, and call it as a method. Kinda like having native JNI (department of redundancy department). Alright that was a really bad analogy...

Xcode is a decent SDK as well.
The despicable whitewashing of the BHO campaign goes on. Maybe when the newspapers are threatened with looming bankruptcy will they treat that corrupt Chicago gangster with equity (for the sake of sales). Until then, we're stuck with hagiography and cocksuckism writ on a grand strategic scale. The neocons are in firm, firm control. Expect hard-rightism in foreign policy, hard-lefism in domestic policy. Same as Bush. Nothing more disgusting than a sucker repeatedly warned.

http://timepassonline.blogspot.com/2008/12/jon-favreau-hilla...

Yes, the drunk 19-year-olds define public thought. You voted for it, bitches.
You can't really call it a step backwards, since it's been around for 20 years, long before many other dynamic languages like Ruby and Python. But irrespective of time, there are a few annoyances compared to at least Ruby (I wouldn't say it's worse than Java though).

The pointers aren't such a big deal, as long as you don't try to use the math operators on them. You just have to remember the "*" in declarations. Remember, objects in most dynamic languages are "pointers", you just don't have access to the raw bits.

BTW, Objective-J solves the problems you mentioned (no raw pointer access, no header files or needing to declare things multiple times, the "+" operator does string concatenation and regexes are built in). Of course it's mostly for client side web apps, rather than native apps (though Cappuccino works in Adobe AIR...)
Didn't he also write Swingers? Barack is so money, and he doesn't even know it.
Perhaps you mistook this site for Reddit?
Really? Do you have a source for those statements from Google engineers?
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It's been done (but for SETI, not password cracking):

http://ajaxian.com/archives/massively-parallel-crowd-sourced...

However, this requires the client have Gears installed, which is basically no one. There's no reason you couldn't do it in the main thread, as long as the task were easily split up into multiple chunks and you were careful not to use too much CPU time.

The hard part is getting it widely distributed. The big traffic sites like YouTube would never do something like this. If you're unscrupulous you could inject the JavaScript in any site you can hack (WordPress blogs, etc...)

A MapReduce type implementation would be very very cool. Make it generic, such that you could submit bits of JavaScript code and the URLs of the data to operate on, and the location to post the results too.

It would surprise me if botnet owners hadn't already done something like this. Of course they can run whatever native code they want.
I've started http://siliconverge.com for semiconductor and hardware folks. it has small community though. I'm trying to spread the word.

Wanna help me and join the forces in spreading the word to more people and have a nice focused site for hardware folks?

Email me: aditya AT siliconverge.com if you are interested.
I like the notion of 'reputons' but might I suggest a different word, 'reps', or perhaps 'props'?
Hah, blast. Just when you think you have an interesting new idea... Certainly not using google gears would be a good idea, though.
That does look interesting. Will let my friends know too :)
Berkeley UI Web Patterns Project
Endowments have charters which limit the amount of their capital that can go to high risk investments - in other words venture fund and private equity firms. This means that they need to "rebalance" their portfolios and shift money that would normally have gone into venture funds back into public markets.

Am I understanding this correctly. They have a charter that determines the balance. This means that is a certain mandated class losses value, they have to top it up with funds from the other classes?
I saw that quote somewhere, I think marissa said it in one of her talks
For D&D people often create their own stories, and they display their imagination in acting it out (even with pre-fabricated stories, the options for actions are infinite). WoW only allows you to follow actions that have been written into the game by Blizzard. I think it is very different.

However, you are right, employers might not know the difference.
Not only is it bad practice, but as the article points out, there is a performance hit.

The reason is because @ makes the PHP engine switch between rendering modes. Basically it's as if you have an extra <?php ?> in there.

Do that a lot and it adds up. So it's bad on every level.
I have summarized my (negative) thoughts here: http://blog.blinker.net/2008/11/11/impressions-from-the-ipho...

I haven't really used it, though, it is just the impression I took away from glancing at the tutorials and listening to the beginnings of the iPhone tech talk.
I rather like it. The problem is this: make a language that is a strict extension of C and has Smalltalk-style OO.

It's not a bad problem to solve and Objective-C does a nice job. The syntax is odd, but it's to clearly separate the Objective-C parts from the C parts.

C++ on the other hand mushes the syntax together. It might look more C-esque, but it's less dynamic and more difficult to maintain as your project grows, IMO.

Plus XCode is awesome.
Design, branding & visual communication? Identity 2.0
The Dutch design firm Total Identity published a book about the philosophy behind their work. A look into Hollands leading design firms.
Yeah. One of the advantages of Objective-C over C++, IMO, is that it's clear which syntax is foreign to C and which is the extension. For example, Object-C strings are prefixed with @, so you see stuff like Log(@"Some message").

It looks weird to a C programmer, but it reduces ambiguity once you move up the learning curve.
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I consider it a step backwars because Apple is forcing us to use it (again). Why not let a 20 year old language that hasn't aged well rest in peace?
pretty much a spin on "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

I don't believe it for a second. There will always be room for some kids in a garage to make a game-changing company.
-3 points by mattmaroon 35 minutes ago | link
Didn't he also write Swingers? Barack is so money, and he doesn't even know it.
reply

Looks like you both did tonight :-)
http://linuxdevices.com
"Obama edits and rewrites portions himself -- he is the better writer, Favreau insists -- and they usually work through final revisions together."

I wonder if the same can be said of other presidents. Some of the classical speeches from the early 20th century are really incredible. I wonder who really wrote them.

Obama's acceptance speech was very powerful, too. One of the most powerful speeches I have seen in a while. Comparatively, McCain's speeches seemed to lack a varying style. They felt stale, and even his concession speech was kind of boring.

If anything, this article really solidifies my feeling that Obama is a smart guy.
Looking forward to it. As I said, next one is on me.
In my world, you are wrong. When I was young, I knew with absolute certainty that I was right. Things were black and white. I thought I knew everything.

As I grew older, I realised that there are no absolutes. Things are hardly ever true, there is no perfect way to do things. Everything is just a truth by tendency of mass, and that is fundamentally fluid.

I think that's the most important thing I've learned in my life. That whenever I think I know something, all I know is either how to do something, or what I think about something. Which is different from actually knowing the thing.
Different Jon Favreau
I hate to relate it to startups, really, but I couldn't help but think it sounds so much like a startup that just got acquired. I hope the Whitehouse doesn't do what big companies do to little startups so often. Hopefully the fact that they're not being taken in so much as taking over means it won't be so demotivating. Obama can sign an executive order allowing jeans in the Oval Office, right?
It was a joke about the guy's name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Favreau

Not a ranting, nonsensical political diatribe. I can't help it if people here aren't film buffs I guess.
Glad someone at least caught the reference. Why am I not surprised it was you?

How long do you wait to call your babies?

must... resist... urge... to... quote...
Come on, this is funny.
I just wanted to remark that I am thrilled to have a writer in the White House, and someone who thinks of himself as a writer, as a craftsman, as someone who creates things for other people.
Neat stuff! One thing you might want to look into (if you haven't already) is Probabilistic Incremental Program Evolution (PIPE) by Schmidhuber.
No Presidents in recent memory at least. From what I gather, the last one that was noted as such was Grant. Let's hope for the sake of our nation that Obama's similarities to him end with the pen.
From what I get out of the blurb on the linked page, reddit's only asking a given person to donate the kind of work that he does professionally. Which would actually make this a rare instance of volunteer work where your point doesn't apply in any case.

Even if they're also asking for hobbyists, your point still might not apply, because people take pleasure in their hobbies -- and it's possible that value(output of x hours of hobby work + pleasure gained from x hours of engaging in hobby) > value(output of x hours of maximally efficient work).
That explains a lot. They really do pump out one solid gold hit after another, and even to drastically different audiences. From Wii Play to Twilight Princess.

I wouldn't count our Asian friends out.
I've never played, but my perception (from what I've heard) is that in D&D one person does the creating and the rest just sort of play. Is that inaccurate?

I really just meant it as an example of a hobby people obsess about though. I don't doubt it's a little more food for the brain than WoW, which I rank possibly below reality television.
Well, it's not true. One group (bands, record labels, distributors, companies that press the cd, etc.) is getting hurt when you pirate a CD you otherwise would have paid for. However another group, often including the band you pirated, makes money when you pirate a CD you wouldn't have paid for, like it, and then go see a concert you otherwise might not.

In the end, the net effect is certainly bad for a lot of people, but possibly good for some.

Either way, it is unpreventable and isn't going away, so the question any more isn't so much "who is this hurting and how much?" as "what do we do given the new realities of the industry?" But just because the focus has changed doesn't mean that piracy isn't hurting people. It clearly is. Not as much as they'd like to claim (record industry lawsuits always assume every pirated CD would have been purchased, which is clearly far from true) but still, people are getting hurt.
(Top Gear) tested [the Tesla Roadster] last week. ... The thing ran out of juice after 60 miles of track time.

55 miles.
http://www.google.com/search?q=top+gear+tesla+roadster+55

The Roadster has also been informally tested by a Hacker News reader:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318154

it will be the laughing stock of any track day.

First off, as Wil pointed out, it doesn't like staying at 100mph+ for very long. That naturally makes it not a track friendly car. It will get passed up easily on the straightaways at some tracks (ex you can hit 140+ on the back straight at Road Atlanta). And the brakes will get roasted and it will run out of battery after just a few sessions.
...
In summary the Tesla is not a car guy's car, it's a SV show-off car.
i believe flickr's api uses the same method of creating signatures.
This is interesting: I submitted this article both here and to programming.reddit.com; but at the same time as becoming the top story on news.yc, it got voted down on reddit (well, 1 up vote, 2 down votes).

I wonder if this is just the random luck of who happened to see the post on reddit first, or if news.ycers are innately more interested in security-related stories than programming.redditers.
1) Preventing a deflationary spiral is not that difficult. Declare a tax holiday, and print money to fund government operations. Keep printing until the price of land/gold/oil stabilize and start to rise again. At that point, ease off and return to a stable money supply.

2) Money supply deflation usually only lasts a couple years, four years at most. When the banks stop failing, the money supply stabilizes. Bernanke is hard wired to err on the side of inflation, rather than deflation. so I would not expect a deflation lasting more than a year or two.

3) Price deflation can last for decades, but that's a sign of a stable money supply and a rising productivity ( for instance from 1980 to 2000 in the computer industry). From 1870 to 1910 was a period of general deflation, but it was perhaps the best time for startups in the history of the world.

4) The New Deal had a devastating effect on small businesses. The NRA, AAA, OPA, and other alphabet agencies were insane. Here is a small taste: "The NRA was discovering it could not enforce its rules. Black markets grew up. Only the most violent police methods could procure enforcement. In Sidney's Hillman's garment industry the code authority employed enforcement police. They could enter a man's factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject to minute interrogation, take over his books on the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coat-and-suit police went through district at night looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night. But without those harsh methods many code authorities said there could be no compliance because the public was not back of it." source: http://mises.org/books/rooseveltmyth.pdf (p 45)

Want to try a startup with the code authorities breaking down your door to stop you from coding at night? And then there were was the crush of paper work, price regulations, etc: "A Michigan grocer who had run a successful business for 40 years testified that 'For the last six months I have been behind the counter ten hours a day, then up half the night filling out government forms. Sunday is needed for inventory reports, ration accounts or applications for coffee, sugar and canned goods. I couldn't keep up with it, so I closed my doors.' Small food distributors were going out of business by the tens of thousands a month." (p. 316)
I just looked at the flickr API documentation, and it looks like you're right -- maybe that's where Amazon got the idea from. I'm not sure if it's a problem in flickr's case, but I'll send them an email pointing out the possible problem.
Take advantage of the object oriented features (classes, inheritence, etc) Write unit tests early and often. Re-read the docs; some of the PHP functions are inconsistently parameterized -- meaning one function expects params in one order and a simliar function expects the params in the opposite order! (Can't think of those functions off the top of my head but there I swear...) Just be careful. PHP is forgiving (almost?) to a fault
Related only to this comment... I happen to be an Economics major as well. I'm graduating soon and am getting nervous about having to search for jobs/internships in this field because it seems most employers are looking for CS degrees. I have taken courses on Java and web programming in the CS department as electives, but most of what I know I've learned on my own. I don't really know much about theory.

Should I just be working on building my portfolio? I feel like the more I concentrate on my projects, the more my GPA suffers. I'm caught in a dilemma where I'm split between school and career aspirations, and that doesn't seem normal to me... or is it?

If I could do college over again, I would major in CS, but it's too late to change my major now. I had a horrible CS teacher in high school that initially scared me away from the subject.
Well, there's one other striking similarity: they were/are both under 50 upon inauguration. Obama is 47; Grant was 42.
Thanks for your kind words. Yes, any kind of help will be appreciated. And if you have suggestions/feedback, then don't hesitate to shoot me an email.

Thanks again.
does anyone here know how to unit test or design a unit test to the gui interact and multi-thread program? the javascript unit test tool seems only provide methods to fire up event.
http://isbarackobamamuslim.com was not for marketing purposes and didn't really go "viral" (http://s3.amazonaws.com/altano/droplet/isbarackobamamuslim.p...).
Google Code Blog: Google Maps API Tutorial
Nevermind, you cited it in your paper... :P
You know, I always wondered why they don't have, as contrasted with the "For Dummies" series, "Yet Another Language: Foo" books: books that assume you already know every language but this one, are already down on all the theory behind the language, and just want to know the syntactic, library-usage, and perhaps semantic (for example, macros in Lisp) transforms to take the code you already know how to write and retool it.

The flagship books of the series would be for Java and PHP, marketed to people that otherwise abhor those languages, but have to whip them out for the requirements of a specific project.
One person creates the story, but playing is really roleplaying. The players can conceive the wildest actions, and the master has to come up with a reasonable continuation of the story, often improvising on the fly. I think it is not uncommon that things go entirely different than originally planned.

Sometimes one might even play a completely improvised story, it all depends on the group.
there's no guarantee that infusions of currency will reach the people that will actually spend them

Why not just print money and mail it to every American? If they don't spend it, keep printing. When the spending returns, then you can ease off.
Many web apps are SLOW.
Does it worry anyone else that there seems to be no protection provided against replaying any particular authenticated request? If I were using this service, I'd heavily recommend restricting non-https requests to read-only operations. Any updates or deletes should be done using a security protocol proofed against replay attacks, like HTTPS.
That definitely sounds more creative then, and actually maybe not a bad thing to look for in employees for certain jobs.
This is a lovely reminder that designing cryptographic protocols is hard. Even something as simple as signing a bit of data can have nasty pitfalls.
Historically however, it seems that hyperinflation has been the more prevalent cause of economic woes, e.g. currency collapse, loss of people's life savings, etc. than hyperdeflation.

There doesn't appear to be an upper limit to hyperinflation (e.g. trillions of Zimbabwe dollars for a loaf of bread) whereas oil even in a deflationary environment shouldn't go below 0.

Personally, I am worried about the hyperinflation scenario and hope the government doesn't cause an overcorrection by its recent measures.
Well, for that matter so did kalvin and the 10 people who voted for this article about politics.
At least in the case of SimpleDB, replaying requests is usually not a problem -- if you Put or Delete an attribute which has already been Put or Deleted, it has no effect.
Well I don't know about that. There have been a few times that I wrote code as cleverly as possible because I couldn't find a simpler way. And then when I found defects later I was able to debug it, although that took a while.
I would have said the exact contrary oppinion... C++ is a horrid and butcherous hack that should have died and let objective C take over the world...
Of course I'm exagerating a bit... but objective c feels a lot cleaner to me than C++
I'm thrilled to know that Obama can place so much trust and responsibility in young people's hands. Glad to see a president that can recognize true talent regardless of age.
I think there are some website guides out there (Google for 'em) that do a good job of introducing Obj-C to C++ coders.
Coding for the Hell of it
Ask HN: Working Tactics?
What are the various tactics and strategies you use to get yourself working and get things done?

My favorite is 'time boxing', from Steve Pavlina, where one commits a certain amount of time, usually an hour and a half for me, to focusing 100% on some task.

Also, any links or book recommendations on this topic is greatly appreciated.
Its interface is definitely cumbersome by Java standards - but through it you gain a lot of control over performance. String ops are painful because you are cloning your memory over and over, and if you used NSMutableString instead, you'd get a much nicer interface as a result.

If ever in Cocoa you think to yourself "man, this API is really awkward", Google it, you might find that you're not using it right. It certainly worked for me.
I wouldn't say that this shows that designing cryptographic protocols is hard. "Use hashing and signature methods which don't have collisions" is a simple rule, both to remember and to apply -- no harder than "drive on the right side of the road" (or "drive on the left side of the road", depending on your country).

Would you say that driving is hard because people have to remember which side of the road to drive on?
Sorry, but you aren't thinking like a security professional here. Consider the case, e.g., where you create a domain, delete it and recreate it. An attacker monitoring the deletion can with impunity wipe out your data at a later date.
I do, I've been doing Mac dev for a while though, so it's just us Mac people...
I did say "usually". :-)

An attacker monitoring the deletion can with impunity wipe out your data at a later date.

Only within the next 15 minutes. Beyond that point, AWS will reject the request for having excess clock skew.
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