skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah I always hear people saying how Python is slow.

But in 10 years of Python programming, I see 2 repeated performance anti-patterns:

1) Writing quadratic loops and not realizing it, then it blows up on a biggish data set. This is quite easy to do in Python because people don't realize that "in" on a list and .remove() and so forth do a linear search.

2) Writing Python like Java, where you have tons of indirection, which is slow. People somehow feel naked when they only have to type 10 characters rather than banging out a bunch of boilerplate for a mundane task.

When you're just using basic data structures in an idiomatic way, Python is fast. I think there were some dictionary-heavy benchmarks I saw awhile ago where Python is faster than Go, because its dictionaries are so highly tuned.
Its time for the government to seize last mile infrastructure in the US and convert it to a municipal style utility.

The existing broadband monopolies have no incentive to evolve their value propositions, quality of service, or adopt favorable consumer practices; plainly evident with anti-consumer moves such as six strikes policies, arbitrary bandwidth caps, and breaking net neutrality.

With last mile infrastructure secured, the government would wholesale the infrastructure to anyone who wants to be an ISP. Competition could finally exist and new business models could be brought to market.

Furthermore, the federal government could fund programs for a substantial last mile upgrade program very similar to the Eisenhower highway system. 1gig connections to all Americans in populated areas could reasonably be achieved in 10 years. Just as improved roads and physical connectivity multiplied economic growth with auto manufacturing, transportation, oil and fuel -- improved, open broadband will serve as a platform for decades of future economic growth.
You got marhallp-trolled. Check the post history.
EWG's Guide to a Healthy Thanksgiving
I don't think the analogy works, because you're already an AT&T customer. AT&T building out capacity, doesn't necessarily lead to more sales; the price/GB drops, they don't necessarily make more money, whereas building more printing plants does lead to more sales. Unless of coarse their offering gets better than Verizon's, and people start switching.
How to Become A Better Designer (Web, Mobile and Desktop Applications)
> However, not using strictly defined self-contained data types for a large project is also recipe for confusion and pain.

Not using well defined data types for in a widely exposed interface in a large project is suboptimal.

Overly formalizing data types for entities of limited scope is suboptimal on small and large projects.

We need to be careful about adding unnecessary weight to large projects, because it costs more there.

> in many languages arrays are objects, dictionaries are objects, and tuples are objects

I am not aware of a canonical definition of object. One thing that is commonly included is the idea that objects have identity. So "two" arrays with the same values are distinguished in the object world. This is not what people mean if they create an RGB from an array (or dictionary).
You can learn something from anyone, even someone you disagree with.
It literally broke my mind about when I realized that I didn't need to ask for permission from anyone to start a business. That very well might have been the first consequential decision I ever made in my life where that was the case.

I think that is related to one of the fundamental mindset shifts you have to go through, and it is a bit of a wrenching one: success is now successfully identifying and exploiting features of reality, such as project feasibility and customer demand, rather than adapting oneself to match the exact published criteria of the decisionmaker who can grant success. (pg has a much better phrase for this in the wealth essay: "wealth does not come from Daddy.")
That's a big infographic for having so little actual information. Even as a CS major, I have a few gripes with the way digital education is going:

1. Digital textbooks suck. The traditional book publishers want to make lots of money. They make even more money here renting these horrific pieces of crap they call e-books, which greatly exaggerate the benefit they truly provide to the student. Publishers would do a whole lot better if they adapted the Udacity model of short focused video segments.

2. Online lectures are not as effective as in-person. In online courses, deep learning doesn't happen. Online classes are setup so you can pop in once a week, answer a few questions by skimming the textbook rather than hearing a liver lecturer speak, and move on with life. Thus avoiding deep synthesis of topics. The social and personal interactions which are lost are significant as well. It's a flexible model plagued with tragedy.
Anyone else find Curiosity intriguing not for the game (which is arguably about vanity), but for the technical brain-trust that operating such a service creates? Here's hoping they all write books...
That does help! What would you suggest that we start the initial prices at?
What this writer doesn't understand:

--not every single human has a 10" iPad, already.
-- the iPad mini is a response to a different segment of the market that Apple was missing out on.
-- the iPad mini is Apple's new iPod.

Just because this isn't made for tech writers doesn't mean that it won't add to Apple's revenues and it especially doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have anything else in the pipeline for brand new segments.

Has everyone forgotten about Apple TV already? Just last spring all of the major news outlets were reporting on it...
A simple idea — look how Apple now only releases OS updates via download. With speeds like this (~GB) we may be able to forgo updates altogether. Boot the entire OS from the cloud/remote server.

Perhaps then software will become versionless, and we just run the latest and greatest that has been pushed to the public.

I have 50Mb/s over 10Mb/s which I pay handsomely to Comcast for. No cap is nice. No packet inspection is nice. No QOS on ports is nice. I've had it a year. We very easily do 500-1000GB a month, and are just pulling down SD video at about 300-500MB per file.

I have backups with Arq once an hour to S3 that take longer than I want. I keep a full time VPN on the media server that downloads torrents, there's a few phones, tablets, etc. it's pretty easy to saturate the upstream. And I would live to lite up the VPN network wide.

Funny that the VPN service is unlimited and faster than my connection and I only pay $29.00 a month plus get much more than just VPN. It could be lower if I just wanted VPN.

The VPN provider can afford it, are making a profitable business out of it, and push it to 100% of their users. Yet Comcast and AT&T would like us to believe 1-5% of their users could even make an impact on their network if they tried?! If they can, that's sad that a small business can better manage their infrastructure than an actual upstream wholesale provider and/or cable supplier. Comcast shuffles uncompressed HD from their feeds at 6.6Gb/s [1] all day long. NetFlix drops the data at their front door so it's free. They have plenty of overhead for us Internet users.

http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/How-much-bandwidth-does-Br...

Just for fun I throttled my laptop down to 2Mb/s synchronous, remembering back to the day when I paid $600.00 a month for a T1 at 1.54 Mb/s and people were amazed. I felt at the throttled 2Mb/s the connection was non useable.

We are falling behind. The only way this is going to get fixed is if Americans start to see that we are sitting at ~13th place in some "contest", and that China, Iran, Africa, Bulgaria, and third world countries we have a general sentiment of dislike for — are winning the "contest".

At that point Americans will care. How dare the Russians beat us into space. How dare the Koreans can build a better Internet than us!
still, a lot of consumers haven't even seen the iPad 3/4's retina display. i think it's a bigger deal for tech writers than it is for the majority of humans who will actually buy a tablet over the next year.
>There are 8600 likes on google+ .. translate to 860,000 purchases.

If this wasn't HN I'd just post "LOL."

But, seriously? There might be just a little bias between heavy users of Google+ and people who would "like" the Nexus 4.

I'd say it's more likely that would translate to <8600 purchases, than 860k.
are you on teksavvy cable or dsl? they setup cost is so high around $180, that i dont want to take cable which is at higher speed in my area 28mbs, while dsl is 15mbs, and realize there is too much congestion in the shared hub, $180 down the drain
FYI - it looks like some of your wufoo scripts on the Enterprise signup page are loading insecurely. Wufoo has https endpoints as well, so it should be a quick fix.
1) Why not make a datadump so people wouldn't need to scrape ~80024 json files individually?*

Publicly available JSON files was just a side effect of the implementation. But it's easily to tar and gzip it up, so there's now such a file at http://secretshenanigans.s3.amazonaws.com/hnfrontpages.tar.g... (32MB).
You would be a fool to think that "What Linus gets to the front-page of HN for" is a representative sample of what he does.
Coffee.io; A Real Time Collaboration Tool For Developers
I can only dream of the MMORPGS possible with this, hopefully these speeds hit critical mass in NA within a decade
"He's a harsh and selfish person"

Harsh, perhaps (a function of his brutal honesty). But, I don't think you would find more than 1 out of 10 people who would agree with you that he's selfish. He did license the linux kernel via the GPL, and, he's dedicated pretty much his entire software to writing software that you can freely copy, modify, and distribute.
If this was offered by bell or rogers you'd get 1Gbs transfer, with 100gb of bandwidth
Show HN : Entofly - Tv show subscription and download.
What was your motivation?
This!

I cant agree with this more, unless you approach me with an experiment that would put most science to shame I do not value your use of Jmeter/Tsung/Siege/Rando-Python-Script. If you test plan does not have pauses in it, and you are not engineering a nuclear reactor I probably wont even start the conversation.

....
At $DAYJOB, when we were putting together a new search engine we spent some time upfront putting in a lot of tooling to worry about and test performance every step of the way. Some of this tooling was built around jmeter and focused on generating realistic test plans (which we could derive from the already operational existing search engine). It was a neat infrastructure it tracked everything by commit, captured all manner of metrics and used huge datasets, mined from the logs, built out with markov models. Everything we reported into an install of the software that runs http://speed.pypy.org, we thought we had it conquered.

Yet it was so flawed! Data would get stale, models would break, caches invalidated datasets and much much more.

It was funny at the same time I wrote a tool that we now know as darklaunch, this tool is stupid simple, it captures incoming traffic to the production system with pcap, and then (after a little mussing with it) sends it through to a always on test cluster. Yet its this tool that produces all the load, has all the weird user behavior, never gets out of sync and can run load, soak, endurance and impact tests.

Guess which one we use to test out new software, or new features, or to tune a garbage collector in as close to production as possible ?

I have not started Jmeter now in over a year, its been no great loss; sure we have microbenchmarks where they matter but for everything else you often hear the words "darklaunch it"

Now for sure we have the luxury of having real traffic to use and abuse, but if you don't have real traffic then realise you are using a scrying device anyhow and I will bet you good money your assumptions are wrong.
OOP gives you tools. Having spent the last 15 years using them, I'm not convinced they are nice.
The only exempt jobs are in management, and in very well-paid programming jobs. I don't know the amount, but I imagine it's six figures or nearly that. Sysadmins and programmers who don't get overtime are having their wages stolen, basically. Unfortunately, the amount of ignorance (or denial) about this is widespread, so many people have accepted that they will work past 40 hours and not get paid for it.
Well I like it. Simple,Easy to pick up and integrate. Looking forward to use and contribute.
Yeah, can't remember but I might have browsed from one of your comments earlier. (lost in a sea of open browser tabs now) :)

Useful info (assuming one's utility function relates to acquiring more accurate beliefs), I had hoped other hackers might enjoy. Pity, as it seems to have missed the main page.

Many of us have probably made one or two similar arguments against "new paper proves xyz" overstated claims. But a large collection of these red flags, with historical examples to boot, in one document, is simply fantastic.

Thanks for sharing
In this case, Word8 applies nicely, but I'd like to point out that the argument doesn't fly either when something isn't nicely mapped to a type. E.g. (not checked):

module Temperature (
TempCelsius
tempCelsius
) where

newtype TempCelsius = TempCelsius Double

absoluteMinimum :: Double
absoluteMinimum = -273.15

tempCelsius :: Double -> Maybe TempCelsius
tempCelsius t
| t < absoluteMinimum = Nothing
| otherwise = Just $ TempCelsius t

In other words, by hiding the constructor, you can control all access to a datatype. You could do the same with opaque pointers in C, etc.
It reminds me of one time when one local phone company decided to subscribe everyone to a new automatic answer service and everyone received a letter that if they don't wanted this new (paid) service they had to call the phone company. They lost the lawsuits.
Yes, all of those make a difference. Sometimes a big one.

But in general, it is best to just try to be reasonably sane and not worry about it until you have a proven problem. A surprising fraction of the time, a "reasonably sane" approach is not that far off from optimal. And setting the bar there helps development speed.

Which, of course, is what you care about when you choose to use a scripting language. If you care more about computer time than developer time, then using a more efficient language makes sense.
Airbnb Neighborhoods Brings Travel Guides To Hyper-Local Level
Think about what a Chromebook would be capable of with always-on 700Mbps.

They could sell that thing with practically nothing inside -- no hard drive, barely any RAM, no processor to speak of, just a screen and a keyboard -- and it could outperform the best desktops that money can buy, just by offloading computation to Google's massive data centers in real time.

Of course, in the short term latency will still be an issue. So more realistic would be to just get rid of the hard drive (why bother? It's practically the same delay to access the nearest data center's SSD as your own), but keep the RAM and GPU, and enough of the CPU to keep things running smoothly. But I definitely expect to see computation offloaded to the cloud as Internet speeds ramp up. It would be super cool to be writing a python script to test something out and just type in a call MapReduce or whatever on gigs of data, and have it Just Work in the cloud in real time.
There's an exception to the 40 hour week called comp time. You get paid for excess hours by being given paid time off.

The 40 hour week is already legislated. If you work over 40 you are supposed to get overtime. Overtime needs to be requested, though - that's an important point. If you're going over 40 you're supposed to tell your boss to get permission, and the boss is supposed to say, "nah, go home."

I know it doesn't work that way.
Can someone explain how this is potentially dangerous?

if (!cachedReturnValues[key]) {
cachedReturnValues[key] = value;
}
Original IBM PC (Intel 8088) in Javascript with Visicalc
One particular action won't demand that kind of speed, that's sure. However, think of scenarios, where there's multiple users down- and uploading stuff. For example, you and your family are watching tv via iptv provider (multiple tv sets in the house, each streaming HD video), at the same time you might have bittorrent server somewhere in the basement and numerous mobile devices (tablets, phones). The demand can break 50Mbps for one technically advanced family.

Now, if you think of businesses, then the demand for data throughput might be 10x greater or more. Depends on the type of the business and number of users (users also being servers).
> people will use less of it than they would otherwise

The trouble is that the economy is directly tied to energy usage. Force lower energy usage, and the economy suffers.

The cost of virtually everything is directly tied to the cost of energy. What costs money in lettuce? Mainly the trucks used to plant, harvest, and ship it.

What's your cost with trucks? Energy. What costs money there? The metal, and the assembly. The metal is free - it's in the ground. What costs money is the energy used to get it out of the ground and refine it.

Assembly? That's more machines, trace it back and it boils down to the cost of energy.

Salary? Also energy, since people need money to buy stuff.

What costs money in making alternative energy? Energy again. So raise the cost of conventional fuel, and alternative also costs more. It's impossible to win!

Use the carbon dioxide tax to fund alternative energy and people will fake it, like in Germany. They outsource the carbon dioxide costs to China, then ship that energy to the country in the form of solar panels. Those solar panels will not pay back their energy costs for decades. (Although if they do last that long it will be a win. But in the medium term it's a loss.)

You just can't force this stuff. You have to let the energy sources develop naturally, and let people use them due to price, not because you force them.
You spent a lot of time and effort into this company that you don't even work for. It's sad to see that job searching has come to this: doing the work for free to prove you can do the work.

Have you done this for other companies as well? How have they responded?
I'm anxiously waiting - but programming nonetheless :) Any other teams/solo developers in Houston?
My question then is: where is the sweet spot? What's the right amount of OOP before it becomes overkill? Is it perhaps a matter of domain, and therefore some domains will benefit much less of OOP?
So, you spent 9 months on changing a name (which IMHO is just as peculiar as matygo, as the comments in this thread have shown), rather than working on your product itself?

Nice blog mate, but seriously think you're losing track of time here. Facebook (thefacebook), Twitter (twttr), Google (a typo of Googol) are all products that didn't take naming too seriously when they started. Don't you think spending 9 months on a rebranding campaign for a startup that was set up just 3 years ago is a little rash?

Personally, loved the earlier Matygo logo.... the 2 word bubbles intersecting told me everything I needed to know about the company. And the business card was sharp too.

Hope this all works out for you guys! :)
> You say that like its a bad thing. If humans like to categorize, why shouldn't our programming languages be designed around this tendency?

I've always had the impression that we (at least as programmers) are incredibly bad at categorizing things into hierarchies.

I think class hierarchies (and module hierarchies for that matter) suffer from a similar problem to that of hierarchical file systems, there is often more than one way of organizing the items and it's unclear which way is right. I'd like to see if one could use a tagging mechanism instead; I guess interfaces/mixins/traits could be thought of as tags for classes though.
Agreed!

And interestingly coal plants are already being shuttered due to the low price of natural gas. All that without any taxes - just new technology.
> Why can't it just once be "Yep, you nailed it."

Insubstantial praise isn't really worthwhile unless invited. If it's invited, it'll be through comments on the article itself, not on an aggregator like HN.

I don't disagree with your overall point: the nitpicking is nearly as worthless: but if you don't have anything substantial to say, it isn't worth saying anything. Just upvote and move on.
Think of Glacier as another storage class for S3 when used in this way. We have regular, reduced redundancy, and now Glacier.
And yes, your prefix can be a pseudo-folder.
Literally broke your mind?
I like to think how this could change how ideas are spread and organizing. I imagine something like google hangout but with 100 like minded people all present at the same time discussing a common interest, with something like a real time voting mechanism in place so that those with (presumably) better ideas are more likely to be heard.

In one example I'm imagining a city council meeting, where anyone who just has the time to log in can take part. And then I realize that maybe this would lead to horrible popular ideas being more easily spread.
3rd paragraph, 2nd sentence: "This is supposed to be a fairly clean HP laptop ... "

There's no such thing as a clean HP laptop ... or desktop ...
Indeed, I read that book last year and it felt really relevant, Vonnegut sort of nailed it with the second/third industrial revolution and the kind of social problems it would cause.
Continuing on the game theme, I recall that Rage originally had hundreds of gigabytes of textures, and they pared it down to the point that it would fit on a BluRay. That would not be necessary with such a fat pipe. How many design decisions have been based on the space limitations of BluRays, or, worse yet, DVDs?

And 1080p is nothing. It's already outmatched by the retina display on a Macbook Pro. Right now the utility of higher resolution displays is limited by the lack of availability of media, since net connections are too slow and BluRay is the best you can do with optical media, but that bottleneck would go away with higher speeds.
Notice though, how you define "progress" as "more stuff".

I'm not that convinced that even life expectancy raises are to be automatically qualified as progress.

Is life and civilization merely a quantitative issue?

Should the life in today's L.A., for example, be qualified as progress over the conditions of, say, early 20th century Vienna?
I think that it's a question of how difficult it is to hold the entire idea in your head. The utility of OOP is in breaking down a difficult idea into manageable parts; if you can commandingly capture the entire thing in a thought, OOP is overkill. Write your program and be done with it; tweak when needed. If you find yourself backtracking and needing to map things out on paper, though, OOP is probably a much better fit.

So my answer is basically, "Can you explain it in the elevator?"
The world according to Twitter as seen through a high-performance computer
Yes, I wonder what Google's plans wrt to Canada are (if any). It's hard to believe that the Canadian big telcos will let it happen, though.
Which is interesting considering how often "write a DSL for every problem" is used as a selling point for lisps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

A fair number of libertarians actually believe in this (modulo implementation issues, regulatory capture, corrupt politicians, etc.)
It seems like a lot of risk to base your business on the proposition that Google probably won't enforce their TOS.