skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author mentions how he thinks representing all strings as linked lists is the 'right thing to do', and later complains about the language's runtime performance. These two things should immediately seem connected to anyone who has ever heard the term 'L1 Cache', and it makes me wonder if the author has heard of it. There are in fact many runtime environments with support for representing strings as linked lists (I believe V8 and SpiderMonkey both do this) but it is never a universally correct choice. If you compose a long string out of a linked list of single character strings your performance will be miserable.

Then again, when I reached the part where he says "I actually like the fact that there are not many Erlang libraries available" I started wondering whether this entire article is a giant troll...
Is this an instance of Think Different?
Some websites affected by catastrophe: OccupyWallSt.org, Alternet.org
Lifehacker/Gizmodo and its affiliate sites are down too
Climate Science and ‘Reverse Tribalism’
I've always assumed it's more about the backbones of the Internet. If anywhere in the world, being close to the Capitol of the largest economy on earth is likely to be the best place to put your datacenters.

You know except for hurricanes and terrorism but whatever it's got a fat pipe.
When did ROTMG move to Erlang? I spoke personally with one of the game's original developers at GDC before the title launched and he said the game servers were written in C++.
Cool CSS accordion
Over the years I have certainly seen what I think are cases of hindsight or survivorship bias where people think "if I want to be Steve Jobs I have to be a jerk!" People can work this in a PR push like Forstall may have done in the BW profile.
Great! Then do it. Tell me the correct metric for measuring software developers. We'll use it to hire and fire them, to decide their pay, to compare divisions of a company, and so on.

Do that successfully, and I'll happily give you a good metric for teachers.
I believe some do keep strategic reserves, they just want to "reserve" their usage for situations where they don't have other options.
It's hard to say what happened since we haven't heard Forstall's side of the story but maybe then Cook or the board saw the tension between Ive and Forstall camps, and recognized that losing Ive to another company would be devastating. So they set Forstall up to fail by setting him up to get Maps done in two years (or however long they were planning)

Regardless, even if Maps is totally Forstall's fault, they still threw him under the bus with this story.
Man, are you serious when you said that "The result is that concatenating two strings takes O(1) time in Erlang, compared O(N) time in other languages"? Yes, you are right that Erlang represents strings with lists, and that's the VERY reason that Erlang must take O(N) time to concatenate two strings (N is the length of the first string).

Just check your /usr/lib/erlang/lib/stdlib-xxx/src/string.erl, and you'll find this:

concat(S1, S2) -> S1 ++ S2.

and "++" is obviously a O(N) operator.

But yes, string concatenation is somewhat faster than other languages that represent strings with arrays of characters. Because in Erlang, it's O(N), while in others it's O(N+M), where N is the length of the first string and M is the length of the second.
[Tangent about math articles on Wikipedia]

I'd like to respectfully disagree. 'Nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field' is a phrase that can be understood after freshman level multivariable calculus.

More generally, Wikipedia articles on math do tend to rely on the accepted terminology of the field for the opening sentence. It's generally better, however, to skim that bit, pick out the words you know to make sure you're in generally the right place, and then skip around until you find something you can latch onto. If you're really lost, you might need to click around a bit.

It's actually pretty amazing what you can pick up just from looking at the pictures and trying to get the general gist of what's going on rather than getting caught up in the details. But the details have to be there -- without the precision and proper terminology, these articles would not only be wrong; they would also be useless to anyone trying to actually apply them.
Look at the IPs voting yes and if they aren't on the east coast, discount the votes.

If they are on the east coast, discount the votes. They should be completing their application, not voting.

:)
Mountain Lion’s New File System
That's not really how that phrase is used. Deus ex machina != act of god.
Cool in itself, wasn't aware, but dependent on a thirdy party service and indexing/searching seems to happen online?

A browser builtin local solution could be best
I don't know Scott at all, I don't think I've even casually met him. My advice here is to not stress over the "why" of his departure, unless he tells you honestly why he left, or Tim tells you, everything else is just speculation.
Good thing I didn't pay much attention in high school English class.
The most interesting and important topic which is near and dear to me and I find it totally unbelievable that nowhere in your article/study above, you make a single mention of the browser History and how it correlates with the user's need and habit of saving-of-bookmarks. Browser history (in theory) is basically your bookmarks which you never saved manually but they are there in your browser available for you at the command. Now, how Mozilla is going to upgrade its long-overdue Bookmarks Manager without paying any attention to the History feature, is beyond me.

In any case, I welcome this blog post. It's been a long time. One thing I really hope Mozilla does is that they get rid of their tags, or at least they come to some sort of standards with other browsers. Nobody else is supporting the tags as Firefox and that in itself is a limitation because you are holding up the user base with your tags. And what are the odds that your article also does not discuss tags (am I missing something big here??).
It must not have been Realm of the Mad God, whoops! I'll edit the above.
I think that's unfair: The "everything is simplistic, monochrome gray" half of Apple's recent design may be more tasteful in many people's view, but it isn't any more usable.

I had many situations in which the auto-hidden scrollbars made it impossible to tell that there was more to discover in a scroll view. The CAPS SIDEBAR HEADERS have no triangle indicator anymore, it is impossible to tell without hovering if a section is closed or open & empty. The monochrome sidebars made Finder and iTunes noticeably less efficient in my usage. Many new-style toolbars like Xcode's are not customizable anymore. etc...

And all these things are in line with Apple's hardware design (where I enjoy the simplicity a lot more).
The new podcast app makes certain workflows impossible--like downloading a single podcast before taking a walk. Now it just says "preparing to download" indefinitely. By the time it shows up on my device, that window of free time to listen to a podcast is gone. Complete and utter crap.
Arguing against standardized testing is arguing against A/B testing.

If you can't measure it there is no way to tell whether it's getting better.
Your Employee Is an Online Celebrity. Now What Do You Do?
Didn't know you meant visual(design and interaction). Still though, it's a little frustrating to say they've stagnated. Apple is very, very long-term focused.
Ask HN: What will it take for phones to be able to mesh during emergencies?
Is it yet possible to do mesh networking with modern smartphones? If not, is there a point at which the phones will be likely to be able to create robust mesh networks during an emergency outage and if so what will it take?
You might want to put some limit on what other people can upload... especially for a demo. I mean, it's been a while since I've seen the Goatse.cx guy...

Edit: offending content has been removed (Sorry that you'd had to deal with all of that).
Not to make light of the situation at hand, but that would be a pretty epic story; I'd definitely read the post on "How I hacked my way into YC by stealing a jetski to get away from the floods, then hitchhiked across the US to hand delivery my application to PG's door within 15 minutes of the deadline"
I know lots of YCers who worked on their applications until the last minute, myself included.
...likewise
I'm not suggesting the person that overruled you is free from blame. I absolutely am suggesting that if you are in that situation you have to take your lumps and accept it, not deflect ("it's not my fault because Tom told me we had to use xyz"). The other person who is at fault should also be accepting blame, but it's not your job to render the blame. In fact, you're never at all the arbiter of blame with anyone lateral, above you, or (usually) anyone in another department; it's always your fault.

Your boss told you to use xyz technology? You (and others, if necessary) should have convinced him otherwise. If you can't and his decision is a bad one, you have to be the one that says no. That's right -- it's your job on the line, not his. If you signed up to be vp of IOS software, you're in the wrong if something is broken in IOS software. That's why you need to learn to say "no", not only to clients, but to coworkers as well. If that's absolutely not possible, it's time to put on your big boy/girl pants and take the blame because you couldn't fix a problem that you knew existed.

If you're in a situation where different people are telling you different things, then it sounds like you get to decide the specific implementation. It's even probable that those different people telling you different things are really giving you their unsolicited opinion, rather than micromanaging your career.

I think it's cowardly to avoid responsibility for what you sign your name to.
I've recently noticed the same problem in my writing: I spend too many words saying too little. I also repeat myself. Repeatedly. I'm hoping that being aware of this, coupled with some practice, will help me improve.

Coincidentally, one of the people whose writing I've grown to respect the most is Stallman. Whether or not I agree with some particular essay, his points are always really clear and accessible.

In early high school, I would have dismissed his writing--it doesn't feel sophisticated or fancy. Now I realize that clear and concise writing is both harder to come by and more effective than it seems. It's certainly more impressive--in a subtle sort of way--than most essays with complicated sentences and large words.

Even if you disagree with his core tenets, his essays are worth reading simply because they are so readable. It should also give you a better idea of his core philosophies: in my experience, many people have rather inaccurate views of what free software is actually about and why it matters.
Exactly. Thanks! Had no idea that feature existed, going to try it out. Always have Opera i stalled and the UI is cool but frequent crashes (on OSX) and, i admit, mainstreams, make ne not using it much although i do cross html browser tests there
I highly recommend you check out Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/).
We also now have Relex (https://github.com/yrashk/relex) which makes making releases a breeze.
8 crappy things i did during siwes
I like to colors and the layout. It's simple to navigate and all the data is very clear and easy to read.

A few minor things...There's no way to edit an action. You'd have to delete and re-add if you made a typo or forgot the date. To be consistent, you might want to add a button to the "Delete Spec" link; all the other actions look like they are buttons.

I was also slightly confused with the ad links, but now that I refresh the page, it looks like you took them off already.
I'll also recommend you check out Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/).

We have mix (http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/mix.html) that is very much inspired by leiningen.

If you like records, we have dynamic records with pattern matching and now exrecord (https://github.com/yrashk/exrecord) for record upgrades.
Just haven't had the time to build it yet. Part of why a 3rd party solution is preferred. But custom needs call for custom solutions.
Nice reference, I did not know it.
"The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution 'fail' while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to 'succeed' if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

I like the reference to Milton as well : "It is better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven."
How it actually happened doesn't matter.

If you've accepted the role of svp of IOS software, you're at fault if there is horribly broken IOS software.
Best exercise in AP English: respond to a reading for class. Turn that in, randomly pass them around, and have students respond to the responses SOLELY in the context of the responses themselves. And they had to be as long if not longer than the initial response.

It wasn't enough to bullshit. It could only take you so far. You only did well if you could surgically read into what was written and explore it prosaically and pragmatically.
Clouds are bad for cloud computing.
https://www.google.com/search?q=matte+black&hl=en&sa...
Nexus 4, Nexus 10, Android 4.2: from inside Google HQ
The Lost Art of Empathy
> The author mentions how he thinks representing all strings as linked lists is the 'right thing to do

I think the author just likes that the runtime for string concatenation is fast; not sure why he ignores the fact that you'd need to chase pointers for every other string op.

He then goes on to talk about openCL and how he can use his erlang code to use the benefits of the openCL compiler, but of the 25 years of using this language, he's only had this benefit for a couple of years.

Sounds wacky to me.
I've never understood the people that put adverts on projects like this. Adverts work at scale. If you have 100,000 people viewing your website every day people are willing to pay good money for access to that audience, if that audience is 100 people the cost of advertising to them is pennies.

If someone puts 100 hours into building something like this it's clear they intend on it becoming a legitimate business, this means every single person that visits at initial release is someone that could be a customer or could help the site reach the goals set out by the creator. Anything that can potentially jeopardise this (poor functionality, making it look amateur -- adverts) is pointless. Trading potential success for the advert revenue adsense will bring from a HN post (most posts about the HN traffic bump talk about ~10k page views, so let's say that generates $10 in revenue with a small advert bar) is nonsensical. It'd be better to go and pick pennies up from the street!

There was a person that posted their Youtube channel on reddit a few days ago and they wanted people to review it and give them pointers. I decided to check it out, so I clicked to their channel and was made to watch a 30 second pre-roll advert, I decided that 30 seconds wasn't worth it and closed it. The channel could have been amazing; I could have been the person that watched their video and shared it with my network and that could have triggered great things, but because of very silly short term thinking they lost that.
If you're interested in getting all the benefits of the Erlang VM and OTP, but very little of the bad, please check out Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/).

It's staggering how fun and easy it is to code in Elixir while leveraging the Erlang platform.
Valve's thinking about Linux: It has everything to do with Apple and Microsoft
Not so slippery. "Tape reels" won't make sense to someone who has never seen a reel to reel. A knobby thing that protrudes, as if you could feel it if you ran your hand over the surface, transcends culture and applies to any normally functioning human being.

The difference between skeumorphism and visual affordance is the difference between "intuitive" and intuitive. One makes a reference to past experience, and is built on natural affordances. The other is not.

That said, I think what you're getting at is it might be impossible to completely eliminate skeumorphism. I agree with that. There's going to be at least a sliver left in almost any interface. That's just one of the byproducts of our having a culture.
"The building itself is being evacuated and no remote hands support will be available to assist in any equipment shutdown. Life safety is our number one priority and we are making plans to completely exit the facility."

Uptime that requires people to risk their lives isn't worth asking for.
Codero.com Is Down
Great summary, thanks.

Important to mention (you did already, but just to emphasize) that Scott Forstall will be "advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim". Interim meaning more specifically 6 months, till April 2013.

This should allow him to cash in some thousands of stock options, which will serve as a natural non-competitive package. Which would be very fair, given his role in re-shaping Apple over all these years.
On Writing Well, by William Zinsser is a classic that you may find useful.

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-30th-Anniversary-Edition/...
A few of my domains on dedicated IP addresses are down as well, but my server and all of the websites using default IPs are up and running.
Checking it out right now. Thanks Mike!
How impervious are they to flooding?
Phones are more personal compared with tablets.

How many people actually share their phones with someone else on a regular basis? I share my iPad with my family but we each have a phone.

Thus it makes more sense to have multiple user accounts on tablets (which is shared more often) than phones
Ask HN: Modern Uses for Prolog?
I like Prolog, but I don't know of any modern applications for it. I've heard rumors of a Common Lisp Prolog implementation. It seems like it might be useful in relation to graph databases (Titan, neo4j).

I'm coming from a position of enjoying languages like Haskell, Clojure and JavaScript so weird syntax, etc, aren't really concerns of mine.

Has anyone used Prolog in the last year to build something that couldn't easily be done in other languages? Or maybe there is a fairly new language that supersedes Prolog?
There is one massive thing that I picked up from using Erlang that you failed to mention and I think should be pointed out. I have applied it in various ways outside of Erlang with a large amount of success (and the habit has caused no end to frustrations when dealing with external libraries, particularly on the JVM). If there is an error of some sort, but it can be recovered from, is a potentially anticipated scenario, etc. and can be handled at the point of occurrence, handle it. If it can't be handled, return a response indicating an error. If it is an exceptional condition, blow up and let the next level higher deal with it if it can, and so on. You can enumerate any number of ways that something can fail, but you will never catch all of them. However, exceptions are not an error communication device, they represent a condition that cannot be handled where they occurred.

It didn't really sink in fully for me until I had to write my first full non-trivial Erlang application from start to finish. However, once it clicked, every piece of code I wrote was significantly more predictable, easy to reason about and had significantly less bugs.
Why is it suddenly my job to make up tests? If you'd like some, give it a go.

My point is that NCLB is scientific in the same way Taylorism was: it's a cargo cult activity that takes on the trappings of science and looks for something easy to measure. And then uses those measures in ways that aren't scientifically validated at all.
I don't know if that's what happened here or not

There's a lot we don't know. Was the court case the result of political squabbling, or maybe there were disagreements as to its validity? There's a long line of decisions and personalities in play on the Apple side, and while I think in context we can riff on Maps being the straw that broke the camel's back (the firing was sooner after the apology than the apology was from the court order), we don't have the slightest inkling what the camel looks like, or even whether it's actually a camel.

He's a very smart guy, he simply may not have made it all the way into the consumer side. A Linux distribution should try to get a pro bono out of him while he has extra time.
More Butterfly Labs Jalapeno Pics
For those who don't know, Evan Miller is the author of Chicago Boss, a Rails-like web framework for Erlang:

http://www.chicagoboss.org/
I think part of the reason that a lot of student evaluation is now in the form of tests (multiple choice I assume) is because they are relatively easy and quick to mark. Evaluating a piece of design or art work, or asking to write creative prose, or showing all the working out for a lengthy mathematical problem requires significantly more time and energy than feeding a test through a computer.
You can be an executive and still be in a situation where a higher ranking executive can override you even when you are the domain expert and they aren't.

Then you quit.
OT, but if someone publishes though you, and you provide art and music, who owns what? What happens if they want to go cross-platform? Do you sign over the rights (if any) to the art to them? Or will you take royalties off the game if ported to, say, Android? Or will it not be permitted at all?
Too often, the bigger the idea lust, the bigger the insecurity.

You will find many more successful businesses that started small with the idea that really resonated with customers.
Add a team location flag - those east of point X will be given extra consideration time.
I agree. Autonomous cars can and will have a profound impact on society, in combination with cheap personal powered transportation like electric skateboards and bikes. The less time we spend commuting, the more time we have to care for each other, innovate, and stay healthy. When we waste less land on parking lots, and turn off lights when they're not being used, we will benefit. When goods and people are shipped autonomously in the night, we will save ourselves much stress and inefficiency. When the world is 3D mapped and sensed in realtime, we can spend less time worrying about the unknown and spend more time doing useful productive things.
I would think it's that SMS and telephone features don't map well to multiple users. Would you share them across accounts or block them for all but one user? It's just weird.
I'm a bit confused. Is this a seller's screen or a buyers screen or is it the same for both?
Is the "My Deck" basically my inventory? And if I add it in there is there marketplace sort of screen where I as a buyer (Not that I'm buying a million dollar jet tomorrow - maybe next week) would go and find what's available?
Rule one. If its important enough to register a .com, its important enough to trademark.

I lost one I cared a lot about, not to squatters, or "enemies" but to guys I knew, respected and did business with because I got the .com and they got the trademark, both of us assuming that later on, we'd get the respective missing piece. Fortunately, neither of us was spoiling for a fight with the other so it was resolved amicably.

Trademarks trump ICANN registrations (to the point that ICANN will take your .com and give it to the trademark holder).

About the only thing having registered the .com before someone else trademarks it will get you is the ability to charge more to the trade-marker to sell him the .com.
I think it's mostly a signal to the market that they've heard the ridicule.
I guess what he was meaning is that in Erlang in most cases you can work with strings as iolists.

Maybe here you can find a bit better explanation:
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2012-May/066590...