skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that a so-called dynamic language like Python is at something of a disadvantage because it must make atomicity guarantees that lower-level languages like C need not.

I still don't think it's reasonable to conclude that typical programmers are fine with their threads not really running in parallel, or that the GIL isn't worth bothering to fix, even though fixing it would be hard. In my original post yesterday, I pointed out that as the language footprint has grown, Python's disadvantage in this respect has increased: it is much harder to remove the GIL now than it was in, say, the 1.5 era when there actually was a (problematic) GIL removal patch.

We've gotten way off track, but the original point I was trying to make was that 1) the GIL really is a problem for not-purely-theoretical programs written by competent developers, and 2) that the 2->3 transition, by complicating the language and increasing the workload for the alternative implementations, has made it less likely than ever that the GIL problem would be resolved.

And, indeed, Nick explicitly confirmed this by saying the GIL is basically a dead issue for the CPython devs. His post made many good points about the merits of the 2->3 transition, and in particular pointed out some ways that 3 has reduced work for the alternative implementations, but I remain unconvinced overall. And not out of ignorance or incompetence, as he implied.
Hopefully it's just you. Some of us have been waiting for this for more than 20 years. :)
He was in the 3rd grade in 1955.
He wrote his first computer program sometime after 1970, on a 360.
Therefore he did not write his first computer program in 3rd grade.
You don't need to use Gavin's client.
Notifications are the New Spam
Transcribe Videos And Make Them Searchable With Koemei
Dissecting the GZIP protocol
As one of the lead developers for the platform, I'll be around to answer questions. We're really proud of what we've accomplished in the last two years.

For those that like X is like Y but for Z, I would liken us to a Heroku for telephony applications.

You can use our high level REST APIs to build high level things like a PBX (configure a device, provision it, configure a callflow, voicemail box, etc); our low-level AMQP APIs which provide lower level telephony actions (answer the call, play this file, etc); and coming soon are more real-time interactions to make it easier for third parties to integrate telephony into their existing work.

And for startups just getting going, we're offering the first five seats free (plus a phone number)! Sign up at kazoo.io and message me to get bumped up in the invite list.
It doesn't -- at all -- the obvious workaround is to extend the middleman game a little longer and pass the user's answer to the site.
Show HN: Bugsnag - Exception tracking app with open source plugins
What's with the 'PHP sucks' fixation? Enough already. It doesn't help educate others, it makes you look like a know-it-all.
I love this post.

There is no doubt in my mind that the file system (as we know it) is dead. Daily workflows are becoming more and more integrated with the social graph. Its one thing to manage your own file set, but try keeping track of everyone's files... or even your own across multiple different purpose devices for that matter.

If I save files using one filtering scheme and someone else saves to the same shared drive using another scheme... both of our files eventually become lost in a mess.

Like others have posted, I believe the solution is search. Maybe not textbox search like Google, but certainly different ways to view lists of files. Can you imagine viewing the most recent files edited by a certain coworker, or the most recent files edited within range of a certain GPS location. I don't have an exact answer how to sort the data, but in my mind... there is a lot of additional data that can be used to help filter file presentations beyond the just the file index and file attributes used today.

I'm in the bay area, working on a startup to address this shift. Message me if interested... I'm always looking for people to talk about it with.
Senator Kerry: Self-regulation alone won’t protect online privacy
Former Wall Street Trader Swallowed A Deadly Pill In Court Before Dying
Its just a different kind of addressing. The way different things are integrated is an independent concept.

Perhaps you could expose URLs in a unix file model style and pretend that they are files. Or build http into the kernel and give every file and executable on the system a URI. Or even map 64 bit processor address space to IPv6 addresses. Based on a 4k block size you could address every hard drive in the world in a 64 bit single subnet.

My point is that files are just one type of abstraction. URLs are just better.
You mean Symantec's VIP app.

Personally, I have no idea why they didn't just use Google Authenticator and implemented OATH/TOTP on their own servers.
Relying on a third-party for authentication seems a very bad idea, specially when there's an open algorithm that is essentially just feeding a secret and the current unix time to an HMAC-SHA1.
icebraining: decentralization and optional anonymity are key selling points of Bitcoin; without these two features, it looks a lot like existing payment systems.
I've got these and really getting a lot of good info. In fact, taking them to the beach next week for my "summer reading".
Wow, that was our "bible" years ago in art school! Must revisit it.
We stored lots more than just "notecard entries" in the Newton object store. We had application packages (with demand paging of compressed code). We had "large binary" support, similarly demand-paged. And all of this stuff was hooked up to the garbage collector.

I don't know how well it would scale to a non-hand-held device, but it worked really well on the Newton.

Files are useful, but they are not necessary. We are used to them, but there can be better ways to do things.
It doesn't. The entire idea is seemingly cheap and ridiculous. Digital security is going to change dramatically in the near future.
Serve static websites from Google cloud storage
I can imagine people wearing headsets like that all the time would cause innumerable problems.

They'll be like bluetooth headsets. Reserved for a very specific subset of the population.
LoveBucks a new way to monetize content debuts on SF Gate, SitePoint, GROU.PS
Wrong! Nope!

PHP OO is screwed up and hacked together. Look at crappy support for late static binding, being unable to bind $this in closures, and all of the hack-glue that is get_class(), get_class($this), get_called_class(), self:: vs static::, the list goes on.

The thing is that, with PHP, the "new, modern" features are only surface deep... once you do anything slightly advanced, you can always tell that they were hacked on to a language that was never meant for anything more than 'include counter.php', and maybe that's okay, but stop saying it's a real programming language because it's NOT.
Except I did. I read every word.
Horacio (exec director) today announced the changes that I'd hinted at yesterday (I didn't know this was happening when I posted yesterday).

Changes being rolled in:
* Mentorship - try to provide mentors for all
* Traction Groups - get companies to start and join private self-mentorship groups (based around the prototype I organised in this round: http://ianozsvald.com/2012/05/16/mentorship-groups-in-startu... )
* Roadshow in Silicon Valley - after Demo Days take companies up to the Bay Area and run an investment/demo road show
* Academy - online & face to face courses for StartupChile members to learn about business basics (e.g. lean processes, pitching, sales etc)
* Top 20 Accelerator - cherry pick a top set of companies and super-accelerate them (private mentorship, focus on growth etc)

I don't know the details of the above changes, the ideas will evolve and a lot of questions are raised. What interests me is how a lot of the current programme criticisms (e.g. lack of mentorship, DemoDay not being too cool, lack of peer mentorship) should be addressed (and then some).

As stated yesterday I'm not employed by StartupChile, I'm nearly finished with Round 2. As much as I've criticised the programme in the past I continue to be impressed at how quickly they're iterating and improving.
Issue #3298392 for EC2 this month. This is ridiculous, so many websites rely on EC2 and it's proving to be extremely unreliable. Cloud computing is definitely not the answer to everything it would seem.
A suggestion to browser vendors: add a key combo that will turn all of the screen real estate managed by your browser into yellow diagonal stripes.

Then we just have to educate users to press this panic button whenever something that looks like a popup is on screen. If it's a real popup, it'll do the modal flash thing; otherwise the browser -- and everything in it -- turns yellow.
Here is an recent and excellent article on the sordid story of Palm and WebOS:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insid...
Do we have too many editors? Seems like good people just keep writing more and more of them.

Do we have too many programming languages? Ditto, after all.

Do we have too many books? Too many songs? Too many paintings? Clothing designs?

Yes, it's fun, educational, a personal achievement, relieves a creative urge, and even, sometimes, profitable.
I really don't like the software as a service business model since it under-values the coding part of things. I wish more people would experiment with partially commercialize open source projects like this.
That's what Bitcoin does. The protocol can't know if funds are destroyed... because they cant be. They are actually just sitting in unreachable wallets.
Why I Didn't Buy from Fab
The fact that people have to constantly defend PHP says something in itself.
"So we decided that having the technology out of the way is much, much more compelling than immersive AR, at least at this time."

I'm not really convinced by this. "Out of the way" means you have to switch focus every time you want to see your information, and then switch back afterwards. To me, this seems even more distracting, albeit less prone to clutter.
There are auto-taggers. For example, I use Picard for music files.
Why do there have to be two copies of the file? Could there not be only one copy of the file, with two "begin pointers" that are dated? When a user decides that they no longer need an older version, the older section can be purged. Obviously, this could result in quite large files, and we start wanting to do smarter edits to the contents, but I'm not sure having two distinct copies of the data serve the average user any better than one with two internal copies of the data? Obviously, there are technical challenges, but let's just assume for a minute that years of database and similar use case-driven development have solved many of the basic issues already.
I'll tell you my experience with iOS. I bought an iPod Touch, and there was no way to put music on it. Because I run GNU/Linux the only way I could do that was with a Windows virtual machine.

I click on a link on an e-mail an it opens Safari, when I want to use Opera. I have to kill all the applications living on the down thingy (multi-tasking), although I do know that they may not be using any memory, but they do feel like slowing things down. And of course, I almost lost all my apps, had problems with my iTunes and lot's of other issues when I moved country.

That's not exactly 'just works'.

Of course, YMMV. And that's why we don't use personal examples to say that something is better than the other.

EDIT: OK, not exactly better, but to say something 'just works' or is 'airtight' and things like that. Android works pretty well too.
Predictions for Crowdfunding
Do you mean something like this?

function s($string) {
return new String($string);
}

class String
{
public $string;

public function __construct($string) {
$this->string = $string;
}

public function __toString() {
return $this->string;
}

// several helper methods like the following:

public function toLower() {
$this->string = strtolower($this->string);
return $this;
}

// this would create lots of extra objects,
// but leave the original unchanged
public function alternateToLower() {
return new String(strtolower($this->string));
}
}

$username = s('ExampleUser');
echo $username->toLower();

My concern would be the memory used to create several dozen extra objects. If this is indeed what you're talking about, is there any strong benefit besides convenience?
If you suck at interviews, you'll suck even worse when you're desperate and in a hurry.

Also, interviewing is a skill that gets better with practice.
New Facebook Study Reveals Motivation Behind Facebook Visits
Two other articles linked in the OP about Nvidia and linux:

Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever, http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyM...

and, NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words, http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyM...

Both are well worth reading.
It's a catch-22. While many people would agree that strict deflation is probably a bad idea, the very fact that this policy proves changeable by a popularity vote would set such an immensely worrisome precedent. It would mean that the inflation policy is in practice discretional.
asp rulez
Except for the apparent reason of fooling a user to confirm something he/she is not aware of?

Anyway, asking security questions from the end user is always a bad choice. There is an excellent paper about it by Ka-Ping Yee:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.9.4...

But then of course, to relieve users from the burden of making security decisions one needs the whole chain of authentication of executables, access control and a trust system to dispense privileges.

EDIT: a better link to Yee's paper
Still solving problems...
> The fact that the tests would be easy to fix makes it worse, no better.

Somebody has to fix them; these things don't happen instantly.

Given the fact that they had hundreds of failed test cases and now they only a few is a significant improvement -- and this is while development has continued. They realized the problem just as you describe; there isn't much more to say about it except they're working to fix it.
You're assuming that simple CRUD apps will still be interesting in the future. It's possible that future apps will be CPU-bound.

It would be nice to have a language that lets you prototype quickly but also build the real deal efficiently. Actually, not having such a language should be embarrassing for the software industry.

Maybe Clojure fits the bill, difficult to say.
I can see a match-making service for finding people to give mock interviews being really useful for folks like [redacted] -- People who may be good coders, but their confidence is crappy.
I'm seriously thinking about getting rid of everything I have just to try and start a business. Might as well do it while I'm young (28).

For me, its not really the money (although, I do like money). My approach to programming isn't to just solve problems and earn a paycheck. I want to make something cool. Something that affects the world in a positive way. An awesome product. We are essentially inventors of our world. To me it doesn't make sense to waste that mindset.

Money is a powerful factor in this decision, however. You do not want to leave a well paying job just to go out there and fail miserably, or not even get the chance to get your idea off the ground.

For me, while I'm still getting paid at my job, I think the smart thing is to get the basic idea up and running before I go out to Silicon Valley and see what I'm made of. The web is good about letting folks test the waters first before diving in. So, I will continue to punch away at this idea.

Its so scary to think about doing this. Perhaps, being scared is a good thing...
I think the "here today, gone tomorrow" nature of app stores is impairing file interoperability. There's just little incentive to allow your productivity or creative app to play with others (unless that's the whole point of your app, like PlainText). I've given up on fancy note-taking apps, knowing there will always be a better one that's not compatible with my old data.

In another decade we'll have a whole lot of unreadable proprietary app data, inaccessible because the original app doesn't work on new hardware. Extracting it will be a tedious process of either reverse engineering or emulating the old hardware/software combination.

Not that we haven't been down this road before, but it just seems like it's worse this time. Even the word "file format" seems archaic, and not many (other than pirates) seem interested in reverse engineering and/or documenting them.
Just cause I can solve problems in BASH doesn't meant that it's a real, modern language.

http://bashlib.sourceforge.net/
FYI: You can get a virtual visa card sent to your email for bitcoins :::: http://www.btcinstant.com allows you order anywhere with bitcoins.
Oh you also get a nice dose of tongue-lashing from the team if you write a time bomb into our unit test suite.

Could I have named it something more politically correct so feeling doesn't get hurt? Sure. But what's the fun in that? ... so why not throw in a small dose of public shaming for good measure?

Those statements are huge red flags to me.

As the boss, it's easy to forget that you're the boss. The people who work for you will perceive and experience your actions very differently than you. Something is "fun" to you may be hell for them because they don't have power. Your goal is a good one, but I get the impression that you don't have an intuition for power asymmetries.
Interesting model. Is the binary free to distribute?

Even if it's not, someone will just make something like lunduke-free.com and put up compiled binaries.
The mistake in this (and in similar articles) is conflating activity and purpose. Programming is an activity, not an end in itself. To love programming is to love solving challenging problems with a computer, not the act of typing code for 9 hours a day.

That is why articles like these just end up being psychological mirrors - those who aren't being fulfilled in a programming job will always perk up at the idea of "bluer skies". Job unhappiness almost always has a root cause that has little to do with the activity of the job itself, and more with the job situation.
Court rules in Apple's favor, Galaxy Nexus sales banned in US
Meet PsDefaults: Better Presets for Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop has been on the leading edge of digital image editing since, well, the beginning of digital images. They’ve been the foremost application for digital images on the internet, in print and in practically any visual media you can think of. Literally millions of graphic artists, photographers, designers and people who communicate visually have used the program, and also millions of people who just love to do cool stuff with their digital pictures.
git-annex is a similar system. Files are tracked and can be on many storage devices (local, removable and even "cloud") simultaneously, and you can always know where they are from any machine.
No one is disputing that you can hammer a nail with a brick. Most of the criticisms around PHP revolve around the idea that it's better idea to use a hammer (with one claw side, and one hammer side)

Likewise, when you have a real problem that isn't needs to run on a $5 shared host, or written for $4/hour in China PHP is rarely a good choice unless you happen to already know it.

If I needed to solve either of the above two problems I'd choose PHP. I write a lot of PHP (mainly wordpress sites) and it's certainly workable, it's just annoying once you've used languages like C#, Ruby, F#, Scala, Clojure, or Python.

None of the problems with PHP are unmanageable it's like driving an old diesel car, you just remember to plug it in the night before if it's going to be less than 40 degrees.
Don’t Be Afraid of Imperfection
This is what MySQL implemented long time ago. They stopped providing windows binaries download but provided the full source code access
You're all about transparency and openness and accountability and public shaming, but you don't have the courage to post under your real name. Nice.
Well, it doesn't make them more stable, but it makes them more resilient to criminal theft.

Bitcoin "depositories" open up a pretty big can of worms if they convert their assets. Part of the point of using bitcoin is not to have to use other assets.

They could start lending bitcoins, but that's going to invite a lot of scrutiny, particularly from the regulators.
I wanted to make an example of a poor place. I know it was not potically correct, and a generalization.
Or, how dare they only allow specific actions to their own apps that the deny to third party developers...
Use Strava, Get Sued?
Instead of trying to create a fake image, why not print screen the real thing?
Yahoo's general counsel quits
It wasn't quite my first program, but during one of my introductory high school programming courses I independently derived binary search (though of course I didn't realize it at the time). Additionally, this was well before I discovered what recursion was (I wonder if anyone else vividly remembers having their mind blown the first time they were introduced to recursion).

The funny part is that I abandoned the binary search strategy nearly immediately after conceiving it. Why? Because I realized that the array needed to be sorted in order for the search to work... and, at the time, the only sorting routine that I knew of was bubble sort. :)
From the linked post: You’ll note that all of this software is GPL’d. Which means any Tom, Dick or Harry (or any other awesome name) can build their own binaries and distribute it on their website or repository. And I have absolutely no problem with that.
My college professors did a pretty good job of giving some historical context to new ideas when they are presented, but I really wish there was a review class that gave historical context to all of the ideas from arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry.
My biggest fear has always been customer service. How does one launch a startup and still provide ample customer service without the humans there to serve? Having lots of docs isn't enough for some people, especially in a B2B setting. Do you have to build a customer base slowly because of this?
Would you care to explain why you threw that out there?

I dont like cheese on my hamburgers and when someone asks me why I usually tell them that I dont like the consistency and the toppings slide all over :-)
I hate hate hate hate this model, because it just splits off people who could be using, advocating for, and contributing to your product (by documentation, by bug reports, by leaving positive reviews, ...) into two groups of people: those who are willing to pay for the program before they get to run it, and those who will just google "program name +free" and click on the first link.

It also eliminates significant amounts of feedback that would be sent to you as the developer and instead splits your mindshare among you and whoever compiled your program and has the best SEO. In the worst case scenario, somebody compiles your program with a suboptimal set of optimization flags, or with a bad library, or any number of things, and it makes your program look terrible. People start posting that "Foosoft makes terrible software" because they downloaded a version that is terrible, and you get all the blame for that - do you think they'll even remember that they downloaded their binary from free-foosoft-binaries.com.net.mx.biz.cc?

I also take umbrage to calling this a 'donation'. If you get something in exchange for it that people who don't donate can't get, it isn't a 'donation', it is a purchase. Call it a purchase. Say you're buying the binaries. It isn't a "contribution", a "donation", or "feel good warm fuzzies", it is a cold hard transaction of cash for something of value.
Thanks, my post didn't link. Thought it auto-linked...