skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard to tell whether they mean that it's done explicitly or not:

"...all we need to have in Varnish is a pointer into virtual memory and a length, the kernel does the rest."

If you're manually memory mapping stuff, you'd need more than that. In any case, the first part of the article is definitely talking about swap when it comes to fighting with the kernel over whether something should be in RAM or on disk. Explicitly memory mapping a large file will work on iOS, although the lack of sparse file support on the filesystem would seem to make it painful.
I don't think native speakers is that meaningful of a metric in this case. Fluent speakers is the more interesting case and as far as I can tell, many more people are fluent in English than in Spanish. Additionally, the average income of fluent English speakers is likely higher than the average income of fluent Spanish speakers.
The comparison is against Go, not against languages with exceptions. There are other languages with the Elvis operator (.?) which can safely dereference nulls as well. Go has eschewed exceptions in favor of checked multiple returns, and I think this is more boilerplate ladden and less readable than alternatives.

Exceptions to handle null deferencing have other issues. NullPointerExceptions are not checked exceptions in most languages, and therefore, you do not see people surrounding chained method calls with potentially nullable intermediate results with try/catch blocks, it's exceedingly rare.

Some languages have nullable types which can be checked by the compiler, and indeed, even Java has adopted @Nullable/@NotNull, but the late adoption of this in Java, and non-existence of it in Javascript/Perl/etc all mean that for the most part, chained method calls, which a lot of people have adopted for fluent APIs/'DSL's tend to go unchecked, and any exceptions simply bubble to the top of the program.

In this regard, Rob Pike is right, and a null in the middle of a a().b().c() call likely represents a null that the programmer should have handled, not as an exceptional condition, but as a recoverable one (e.g. findCustomer() didn't find the customer).

In many cases, returning null I think is the wrong design anyway (I see lots of Java code where a search() returns null instead of EMPTY_LIST if it finds nothing), but null or false as a catch-all error code just seems entrenched.

That's why I like the Maybe Monad approach, because Maybe(boolean), Maybe(number), Maybe(Customer) are different types, compared to using integers and booleans as arbitrary error codes.
> with their massive distribution and infrastructures

That is a disadvantage. Along with their size that represents massive costs and massive inertia.

The actual threat from incumbents is regulation(lobbying for) and legal. Both of which they can afford due to massive size and have established the "infrastructure" for.
PhantomCSS: Automated Visual Regression Testing for CSS
Exactly. I read statements like that as either hyperbole or plain bullshit. Either way, they're not really helpful or profound.
I agree. Instead, you can say something like "We help you buy books that you really need" or "Buy textbooks that you need"
My favorite Wordpress Plugins
I disagree. The core function of government is to provide a social order. Police enforce rule of law, and legislatures write the law. Military protects our sovereignty against outsiders, and citizens pay taxes for these benefits. While military and police spending fit your description (they are not necessarily profitable but provide a social benefit), I argue that social order is the primary function of government.

In the U.S.'s case, our government happens to do much more than this, but this is not the core of why government exists.
Great idea, may I suggest that somehow, people could add links to free resources that can, in a sense, replace the book.
Urine is Valuable Can We Stop Flushing it Now?
Anyone find it as helpful as I do ?

I found that Stackoverflow hates this kinds of questions, and they mostly end up closed...

So a site just for this would be great.
Big ad network that secretly sniffed users’ online habits settles with FTC
Literally ``The Lego Book'' - http://www.amazon.ca/Lego-Book-Dorling-Kindersley/dp/0756656...
Man, what posturing we're going to see in the coming months between Twitter and Facebook.

In 12 months we'll all be back on MySpace.
Are they sharing their photos on Instagram itself, or were they just using the social network integration features? I would wager that the majority of users of Instagram don't really care about the Instagram social network, instead using the application to share photos through Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram's FAQ actually puts their social network integration as a major feature of the app, even mentioning Twitter as one of the compatible networks.
Potential startup in there based on his form to ask for feedback - i.e. people pay to get feedback early on in their startups. Someone connects businesses with feedback people.
You can innovate all you want, but if people don't want or need it they aren't going to buy it.

Moving from a farming/subsistence economy where most people had something to do with food production to survive, to our present post-farming/industrial whatever-this-age-is was a huge leap, and there was a lot of peripheral infrastructure to build up.

Now we're there, and yes there's more room for innovation, but there's no existential leap forward in front of us.

We have enough. We're not fundamentally changing the way of the world (not in developed countries). That doesn't generate a lot of peripheral work.
I am very very very pro rounded corners for clickable buttons. Rounded Corners is one of the main things that lets a user know a button is clickable. In fact roundedness was so important in UX that in the past before we had the border-radius: property in CSS we used an actual image made in photoshop as the button. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I didn't dig around much to see if it has anything in the way of content filtering, but I loaded it up at work and was greeted with a page filled with scantily-clad ladies in suggestive poses. I work information security so I spend a decent amount of time evaluating risks associated with allowing certain sites at work and visiting random websites is not frowned upon for this reason, but as soon as I see suggestive materials I'm out of there.

Hey Microsoft, how about some content filtering turned on by default to hide potentially objectionable or NSFW materials? Also while I have your attention, why roll this out without any WP8 integration?
Aren't there standards for this kind of thing? When you want a placeholder domain?

e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.example and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.invalid
The interview has begun. Are you ready? (explaining your company to the press)
What if they are wrong as in completely wrong? Then I dare say we are also in trouble. The only road not littered with trouble is if the current state and pace can be kept.
Instagram prey to man in the middle attacks
To the degree that it's systematic, I'd say it's probably a perjoration as people became uncomfortable talking about fighting in the workplace (or whatever).
The last part is a little easier if you're in a context where other people either don't speak English or are unconfident in it. Many Spanish people will be okay interacting with your broken Spanish, for example, but many (most?) Scandinavians will immediately switch to English. I've also had better luck with languages which have more speakers, since they're more used to hearing non-native accents: French or Spaniards or Italians can accept a pretty wide range of pronunciations, but mispronounced Danish ends up completely unintelligible to many people.
Ford received a loan that was an order of magnitude larger than what Tesla received. You're arguing from your biases and not from facts.
I'd love to see us getting to Europa too, there must be something alive down that salty ocean, but melting several kilometers of ice is hard even on Earth.

Enceladus seems a lot easier, just fly through the volcano plumes and/or land on one of the tiger stripes. I mean, we've got water, heat and organic compounds. What are we waiting for?
I like this as a definition of research in a corporate environment: "We investigate things that are too risky or time-consuming for our product design groups to look into, with an eye towards making our company money in the future."
Not that I'm an acolyte of Kurzweil, but he does make a pretty convincing case that humans have a tendency to locally linearize things that really aren't linear, and then extrapolate linearly out into the future. This seems as if this may be one more example of that.
TBH, Lotus Notes as of right now is probably not a fantastic solution to whatever problem you may have.

However, I think it is largely a mistake to judge software that was state of the art from 15+ years ago by today's standards.

In those days, most databases didn't really handle replication particularly well. Notes was the most fully-featured in that respect.

In addition network speeds and bandwiths were lower than they are now, so it wasn't really feasible for a global company to have everybody hit a single database instance.

Lotus Notes programming was simple, so if you could write a Lotus or Excel macro, you could create a database for your team. This made it popular for semi-technical end users.

It also pre-dates HTML, so web browsers and thin clients weren't really available.

Having said all that, I'd still take Notes over Sharepoint :-)
One of the coolest parts about this device is that it can be a USB input device (mouse & keyb at least) with the right drivers. I've thought about storing passwords on one instead of in a password manager. A couple of wires, a button, and ~30 lines of code is all that's needed.

Any word on Energia progress? It works so well with my MSP430.
It's like saying that there will be no more exciting music and it all pretty much ended with Mozart and Beethoven. And one thing that is very consistent for human kind (with few very bright exceptions, of course), is the poor ability to predict future innovations and technologies. If you look at 100 year old drawings of year 2000, you will see flying steam engines, coal powered robotic maids and biplanes used for public transportation. So.. let's just wait and see what happens. A cure for cancer may be just as exciting breakthrough as electricity was in its time, and it may as well be just around the corner :)
Work for a tax-credit seeking company?

I'm not sure of the situation in the US but in Canada we have something called: Scientific Research & Experimental Development (SRED) program, where the government will reimburse a company a percent of the money spent on R&D.
Ask HN: Why can't you ever upvote or comment on parse job postings?
S.Africa has a bill where can be jailed for 25 yrs for exposing classified info
The Live brand was retired: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live

They won't make launch anything that used to have that brand, people wouldn't use a product that was already discontinued.
so.cl is a short enough domain that some browsers might forbid it from setting cookies, since it's the same length as .co.uk (and letting sites set cookies for the whole .co.uk space would be a massive privacy violation).
Mobile Survey App for Better Client Interaction
From lunch to launch: a startup dev process tested and formalized
Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding
two ways this will play out:
1. people simply stop sexting
2. one day there will be pics of everyone online and nobody will care anymore (+ because no one will care anymore, google might eventually tweak PageRank so that if you're only searching a name (without words like 'naked') those pics dont even make it to the to top results)
Tips and Trick for Finding the Right Mentor
Comments like this annoy me. He was simply trying to mention a valid point (they really didn't do a very good job at 'forking') and he gets generalized as an Open Source zealot and hanged for his crimes.

Lay off. There was no need to bring out the extremist insults.
Auto Insurance Comparison Startup Leaky Launches Nationally, Raises $670K
They definitely need a better way to determine what content gets featured on the front page of their site.....the first image was a nsfw collection...
I don't see that Git has a "patch" command, but svn does -- is that what you meant here? Where you have "git patch", did you maybe mean:

git diff --no-prefix $OLD $NEW

...where $OLD and $NEW are the two commits you want to diff.
> Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. It should surprise no one that these have negative effects on growth.

Are you sure about this? If you're talking about manufacturing regulations, I'd be more wary about buying electronics or toys manufactured in China...

Regulations that are good for the consumer can ultimately be good for the companies that make the goods too, because they create a stable and responsible marketplace.
Potential NSFW warning: When I visited http://beta.so.cl/, I got a big eyeful of the image from the old goatse.cx

(in case anyone doesn't know what that is, here's a sfw explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx)
You can argue that the pace of innovative growth is slowing because of whatever reason, but I would like to post a few things worth thinking about, given that I was thinking about this the other day.

Firstly lets look at things such as manned flight, radio transmissions and other innovations in the late 19th century that are now critical today. These eureka moments in science and engineering were traditionally brought about by a few people and their relative complexity is low. Look at the innovations we're seeing in physics today and you're talking about teams of people across multiple generations attempting to solve problems our ancestors couldn't even imagine. Electricity producing fusion reactors like ITER (and later DEMO)? Not a chance. They were too busy trying to get manned flight to work. Breaking the speed of sound in air? No way. Putting men on the moon? Not a chance.

Here's the thing, we (as a planet) could put men on the moon. Granted we're not as ready as the USA in 1969, but given the need it could be achieved. Putting a man on mars? Well that's a lot further away much further than the moon is with a whole new raft of unsolved problems.

I can immediately think of two areas where growth is as great and immediate in the field now as it was in physics in the early 20th century - nanotechnology and biotechnology. If you look at how much of Physics we understand, and our understanding of what we can and can't manipulate versus biology you can see that there's plenty of space for innovation.

I would also make a case for disruptive versus iterative innovation. The automobile has come a long way in 100 years but is essentially the same thing, a horseless carriage that takes the driver and passengers from point A to point B. We have however had massive amounts of iterative innovation in speed, fuel management, safety and so on. The same with air travel with demands and needs changing and planes changing to accomodate. Sure, it may look like a plane but the insides of an A380 are very different to a DC-3.

If the 20th century was the century of physics, I'd say the 21st is the century of nanochemistry and biomechanics. I suspect (although have no real proof) that we don't see the changes on the same scale because our quality of life, education and so on has been brought up by such a level already that improvements have less of a social impact in the west. There's no need for a cure for smallpox anymore. Disabilities from Polio have been down in the west for decades. Diseases like SARS and H5N1 that could've wiped us out in the early 20th century like the Spanish Flu have so far been contained.
Or do basically anything at all, really.
There are many things you can do to improve the performance of your website, even to people with dial up - or worse - Mobile!

Compress data with gzip is probably the big one for modem users, but also batching scripts and CSS together, reducing image sizes, re-arranging code to reduce blocking during rendering.

These are all things under your control, and with current mobile browsers, these are things you really must care about
>Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods.

Can we keep the libertarian troll out of these comments? Do you really want to discuss taxes? Most of my wealth is taxed via capital gains. I pay maybe half the taxes my friends pay.

My dad used to run his own business in the 70s and 80s. His tax rate was unbelievable back then for his bracket.

We live in a low tax low regulation period right now. There's no denying it. Sorry Mitt lost the election, but don't fret, you'll get over it.
Can piracy be stopped without stifling a free and open web? Can information be stored digitally while maintaining the tangible qualities of property? Can a global data network be built which is immune to nonconsentual surveillance? The answers to these questions have more to do with human intent than technology.
Commercial use of GPS wasn't allowed until 1996, and there has been some refinement of use in the last decade. Without GPS, there are no turn by turn directions, and there is no GPS without the space program. There is no GPS without the government funding of military technology, and allowing commercial use.

There is no iPhone without Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley without the massive amount of defense work that was done in the area in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (See: Steve Blank's stories as but one evidence.) Much of the work on smaller electronics was originally military funded - no one else had the R&D funding to do so.

Without the government, it is likely the development of something like ARPANET would have been delayed a decade, perhaps more. I'm not saying the internet wouldn't exist, but it would have been delayed and certainly would have looked a lot more like AOL and Compuserve than the integrated system we have now.

I'd say that there is a lot of government involvement that we're talking about.
Exactly. Flat is the new thing, but people forget that depth and perspective are useful visual analogues. They help us realize what we can interact with versus what is just a flat piece of paper. YMMV.
Revenge porn exists, like aerial drones. We can't put them back in Pandora's Box. It's another weapon in our increasingly complex social struggle.
This is a research project out of MSR, not a product out of Microsoft proper. I'm still not exactly sure what it is that they're researching ("social search"? ¯\(°_o)/¯), but it does make a lot more sense as an off-the-wall experiment than a finished corporate product.

http://www.so.cl/about

> Socl is a research project from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs...
Good question, there are special arrangements for support and 24/7 on-call rotation (eg. if you have to work during the company break you get vacation days). It's also very easy to trade on-call days with colleagues, and other ad-hoc arrangements.

I'm not 100% certain this would work in a bigger company where people think of it as "just a job". But in a small team where everybody is passionate and eager to make it successful, it works great.
As a (well-paid) international tax lawyer, my anecdotal evidence is that high taxes absolutely impact business and investment decisions. I too see these quotes about tax being an irrelevant item to business decisions. I call bullshit on them, and especially Warren Buffett when he says it.

Tax is regulation. Just as you see the entrenched cab industry attempting to cudgel Uber out of the marketplace, so too do entrenched interests use tax law to their advantage or to their competitors' disadvantage.

People who say decisions are not affected by tax are saying that decisions are made on factors other than net profit after tax. They are also assuming that all investments are made within a single taxing jurisdiction, so that it is impossible to take your money from a 40% tax jurisdiction and put it to work in a 10% tax jurisdiction.

Tax is not the only factor in play for business and investment decisions. There are other factors as well. Government red tape is, in my experience, a greater deterrent to business and investment expansion than tax.

A high-tax country with a highly efficient, transparent, and predictable bureaucracy (think Western Europe, with variations of course) will be more attractive than an inefficient, dunderheaded bureaucracy-ridden country with a looser tax policy (think Southern Europe).

There are lessons for the United States in all of this. Why does money flee from some places? And how can the United States avoid creating the same factors that make capital flee?

Don't get me started on government policies that make brains flee the country. That's an order of magnitude more damaging than watching money go away.
It seems like "GMAIL"-account types have real push? Or at least I'm seemingly getting new mail much quicker than I ever used to get on IMAP?

Plus it integrates much more smoothly into the calendar app as well. Better than fiddling around with webcal links and the very well hidden multi-calendar selector at https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect )

Never had a problem with duplicate mails, in fact I'm having a problem with de-duplicated mails (When I send a mail to a mailinglist, I never receive a copy back that ensures proper list delivery, because it gets de-duplicated to the copy in Sent mail)
Grails 2.1.2 released
Yeah, that's true. The good thing is that their API has let other companies fill that void. Although with that being said, I think Instagram is changing it's focus with recent additions like the Facebook-like profile pages.
Apple trader arrested in $1 billion wire fraud
Alarmist, but I cannot object to manifestos that aim to improve the rate of innovation!

Perhaps the real problem: 1. The human mind or a team w/ communications between members can only handle so much information. 2. The toolboxes available to innovators working different stripes of the tech spectrum become riddled with complexity over time.

The solution: 1. As tools are aggregated and abstracted, this reduces information needing to be understood, allowing indies/teams to get a handle and get creative with their work. 2. As thinking/psychology approaches improve and as communication systems improve, the ability for the same people to process the relevant information also improves.

The internet has done a very good job with increasing information processing (by humans!), and other fields are being influenced by this success.
I can't agree more. As the article points out, we're seeing huge advances in plenty of scientific fields. We're talking about storing terabytes on a cube on DNA no larger than a drop of water, we're synthesizing drugs that travel to tumors, activating only on arrival, we're gearing up to put people on mars... Really? No progress? No innovation?

Why are we even listening to a chess champion espousing crap about scientific progress? And Pieter Thiel might have entrepreneurship credentials, but he's no scientist.
Prismatic is hiring. A lot.
I thought browsers used http://publicsuffix.org/ and not length of domain names to do that.
http://subdomain.localhost should solve that problem...
Ask PG: Getting started on HN?
I'm new and want to contributed but don't really understand the community dynamics and product.

I realize the basics around voting and the fact you shouldn't ask for or compel people to vote for content.

1.) Looks like all ASK posts don't have a link, is that a community agreed requirement

2.) When do people downvote?

3.) Are there moderators and who are they?

4.) Is sharing your own work viewed negatively?

5.) Linking vs re-posting text to HN. What do you prefer?

If people would share what they know, I'd be happy to summarize it and re-share.

Thanks! Sorry for being a noob =) But I've been waiting for someone else to ask these and haven't seen it.