skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"That F# can outperform C on numeric code"

Do you have a citation for this? I love F# and I've written some fairly pointer-intensive code with it, but the CLR's code-gen is pretty bloody abysmal[1]. F# does more optimizations than C#, but most of the heavy lifting is left up to the CLR/JIT (obviously).

In fact, I find I have to experiment with F#'s inline feature for high-perf code, because the CLR optimizer works far better on big functions than inlining/optimizing calls to smaller ones. Even simple stuff like removing a tuple allocation is not done. Even basic things like eliminating the allocation of a tuple when it's obvious you're immediately deconstructing it is not done. F# doesn't even lift lambdas, as of 2.0.

F# doesn't even do fusion like Haskell, so for high-perf code, you're often giving up nice functional code and resorting to loops and mutability. Just check the F# stdlib implementation.

So while I really do love F# and enjoy writing in it, "faster than C" is not really applicable. A: You'll be writing C-in-F# (which is fine, if most of your app isn't that way), B: the codegen isn't remotely competitive with a modern C compiler.

[1] Edit: OK, that's an exaggeration, but I mean in comparison to what you'll get out of a C compiler for equivalent, low-level code.
Yep - But look to the Volstead_Act[1].

Its not whether or not it is illegal, its whether or not they want to / have the power to enforce it.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volstead_Act#Enforcement_and_im...
The not-always-pure FP that sometimes uses state is what real-world functional programmers actually use. We manage state. It's neither possible nor desirable to eliminate it outright.

It wasn't until recently (a couple weeks ago, when giving a presentation on FP) that I realized why stateful programming lends itself so easily to evil. If a program is a serial collection of possibly unrelated stateful actions, everyone can add new intermediate behaviors to a function to satisfy some dipshit requirement, and the API doesn't change. Writ large, this allows silent complexity creep.

I think a major reason why FP is better is that changing a purely referentially transparent function requires an API change: more parameters or a different return type. If nothing else, this tends to break tests. It's hard to change functions that already exist, and it should be hard. You should be writing new ones instead. Also, if there's only one way to combine programs (function composition) it's easier to break them up. So you don't get the 500-line monsters that plague enterprise codebases.

That said, the worst thing about OOP isn't state. It's inheritance, which is the 21st-century goto.
Facebook just realized it made a horrible mistake
I quit Twitter for a month and it changed my thinking about mostly everything.
Americans tend to be ignorant about Canadian or otherwise foreign universities (I am an American who went to college in Canada).
So far Startup Revolution is crap. I was neither able to edit my submission there (title,description) after posting, nor was I able to delete my own submission. And when posting the same link again, it wasn't detected as a duplicate and organized in such a way.
[student from current batch here]

While I can't speak for the facilitators, I can tell you that the range of knowledge is varied; from people who dabble a few languages, to those who have mastered several, to those who are just starting to dip their toes. If you're genuinely interested in programming, go ahead and apply. I can say I'm certainly glad I did!
Show HN: Freaking cool JS game where you code your own bots and battle
I'm the stupid one :(
Well, depends on what we want to measure with synthetic benchmarks but general terms like "processing power" are fair to be interpreted as general and common PC tasks that these benchmarks address.

But yeah if your load is specific like floating point calc or mp4 encoding, then it will vary, but its a good shorthard to have these types of conversations, especially when people go half-cocked about how CPU progress has stalled which it clearly has not.
Why I tried to buy The Daily
While you're changing the battery, check the expiration date on the smoke detector itself. They have a limited service life due to radioactive decay.

As a side note, preferred practice - and the current NEC [NFPA 70] requirement - is to hardwire smoke detectors to the electrical service with the battery serving only as backup. This significantly extends the time between battery replacements.
This ties into #1 and important to also mention:

Undergraduate students also own all of their own IP. If you want to commercialize something you've worked on in school, you don't even need to deal with a tech transfer office: you just do it.
Well, sort of, but then the moment you run into hazards [1], bad branch predictions [2] or any other problems, the CPU will either stall the pipeline a few cycles or just flush the whole thing, so it's not like it's a magic solution just waiting to be adapted.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_hazard
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor
Ask HN: How do I get my hands on MLS (real estate listings) data?
I'm interested in trying my hand in this space, and my research indicates that getting real MLS data is not exactly trivial. Hoping that someone is willing to give me a hint.

Thanks.
Did somebody say hobo hotspot?
Around 23:30 you can see that they added a wooden safety structure, which did not (normally) hold any weight. It was just there in case the Lego failed. The Lego alone actually held itself, and the occupants, just fine. The first test is at 40:30.
Win an iPad Mini 16gb
This won't apply to most people, but if your talk involves any math at all, use LaTeX + Beamer (www.math.binghamton.edu/erik/beameruserguide.pdf) to prepare pdfs of your slides. They will look much better. The beamer user-guide also has a chapter on presentation preparation. You can export outlines from Emacs org-mode as pdf slides via beamer, which can be (depending on the version, etc) a little fiddly but is much easier than typing the slides up directly in LaTeX.

FWIW, I started feeling much better about presentations once I convinced myself to view the audience as friends who are trying to help me understand the material I'm presenting, rather than a group that I needed to try to impress.
Yes but according to the article, he wanted his normal salary and the equity. So the only part of your comment that applies is leaving a stable job for an unstable one.

This is a risk but not a big risk at all if the engineer was "one of the best engineers in his area" because he would be able to find another job easily.
What do you mean ? I seemed like web login to me. I got asked for my username and password then my token.
Yeah, that'll win over those iPad users! :)
Waterloo is correspondingly one of the only universities with a whole faculty devoted to math. It's one of the reasons I chose to study at Waterloo: I get a lot more math in computer science than I would elsewhere.
This makes me want to create an network of access point named "x Karma" that installs viruses and malware. "Viral marketing," I'll call it.
Transforming a desert into a life flourishing environment will also potentially affect rainfall patterns and climate in general all over the globe. Can't find the source right now, but fine dust from one particular desert provides large portion of condensation kernels in the world.
Brad Feld is one of the founders of TechStars, which is a network of incubators much like YCombinator.
His reach is right up there with Fred Wilson IMO. He's a well respected guy in the entrepreneur/investment community. He also always answers his wife's phone calls, even in the middle of talks.
Why are there "rewards" and why can't I register?
If you are interested in browsing the source for our hack it is on GitHub: https://github.com/sgreenlay/PYLONS.
And the rewards are not even for this website, they are managed by "BigDoor" - a gamification startup Brad Feld has invested in: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/06/fun-and-games-with-b...
Great points. I recommend actually reading the paper behind the blog post (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/170528/msr-tr-2012-79.pdf). I guarantee it'll blow your mind how well the system works. It's much more compete than you imagined.
I'm not sure that "the universe as Turing machine" is anything more than a theory. The universe can contain Turing machines -- we're both using one right now -- but I don't think we can say for certain that the universe is one.

Also, not everything is computable. Alan Turing proved this in his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem." The Halting Problem is a related example of the limits of computation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
Interesting that they seem to be de-emphasizing their own options (Heroku provided Memcached, etc.) in favor of partners.
Share a Fix - Help others save time, money and frustration
You can probably partner up with a local realtor or agency.
or the future of the remaining 99%...
How many sellers would use a multitude of accounts to get around this restriction?
Extracting pages from a PDF document with JavaScript and Adobe Acrobat
I was able to sign-up via Twitter without that or any problem.
MoonRocks - Lua Module Hosting
I am very happy with fastmail. I host my personal email there, and over the last three years, have had significantly fewer connectivity problems than with Google Apps hosted work email. Which is not to say that GApps is unreliable (it clearly isn't) -- just that fastmail works fine.
There seem to be two Lego-related articles on the front page right now. One a piece nominally for "geeks", demonstrating how adults can continue to do novel and interesting creative things with Lego bricks; the other an emotionally-resonant piece (probably aimed at parents) showing that Lego-the-company/brand "cares about kids."

Both of these showing up just at the inflection point of the Christmas shopping season.

Good game, Lego.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection

http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/
Well yeah, I'm not quite convinced that it's a winning strategy (or even what Google are doing). But personally, I can never go back to iOS from Android because of the integration with Google products- Gmail, Maps, etc.
This would be pretty neat, but file it under "things that will never happen on iOS in a million billion years."
It's posted under the section "Contributor Content" which is a fancy way of saying "PAID ADVERTISING".
Actually, Mixcloud's UX is even better on the audio playing thing.
They just change their favicon so it displays the play button instead of the regular cloud icon. It even has the progress bar! http://i.imgur.com/VyGVX.png
This is an awesome improvement to the Makefile for bootstrap. The OP clearly sees the strengths of make and hopefully upstream will incorporate these changes.
High reliability and continuous standby are primary considerations. The more components one adds to the system the harder these are to achieve. Best practice is to use the battery only for backup and grid power for the primary source. It would be hard to achieve similar life safety protection in the scheme you propose (i.e. it would not meet current US building and fire codes for new construction in most jurisdictions and would not meet similar requirements for existing in many places).
This is not quite right.

Gmail isn't great on any Android device. If you have only used Android, it might seem great. But after you try the built-in iOS client, your standards will raise a bit (not intending to offend!).

In my experience, nothing that Google has produced for the mobile platform(s) is great.
OMMAGEO - Video Sharing using Google Earth UI
The link is to a walk through demo for OMMAGEO: http://solitaireinfosys.com/demo/will_brown/

I hope to gain:

1. Understanding of potential interest from HN and YC members;
2. Feedback on the design, UI/UX, and suggested modifications; and
3. A little attention to in turn gain attention for my (late) YC application.

Thanks,

Will
So what's the story of the school and the name? I have a few friends who love the idea. Seems like the right idea at the right time for people who are interested in jumpstarting a coding career.
Why background Emacs? That's what make-mode is for!
Can't stand that pink for very long :(
HipsterStruct - new way for creating objects in Rails
For examples of what this guy is talking about, see http://www.yankodesign.com/

Every week someone invents a new hubless bike, electronics that can bend 180 degrees in any direction or folding power plugs and switches that ignore the physical fact that behind the wall there is not and endless amount of space
I doubt Brad spent much time on this. If you notice, it's powered by "SocialEngine", which got its seed funding from TechStars where Brad is a mentor.
One of those few situations where color-blindness pays off, I guess.

Thanks, Mom!
I've only skimmed through the first bit, but this probably answers the question. http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~astrobio/docs/Seiferlin_et_al_2...
Tell HN: Open-Invite Thanksgiving in SF was a Success
10 days ago (or so), I made an open invite to anyone alone in San Francisco on Thanksgiving to come to our house for dinner.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819792

The event was a smashing success! About 15 people from the HN community showed up. We ate, we drank (some more than others), we talked and we told stories. It was the best Thanksgiving I had in years.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidelramos/8210866302/in/set-72157632076081113
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidelramos/8209779319/in/set-72157632076081113
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidelramos/8210868806/in/set-72157632076081113
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidelramos/8209783247/in/set-72157632076081113
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidelramos/8209783641/in/set-72157632076081113
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidelramos/8210871646/in/set-72157632076081113
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidelramos/8209781867/in/set-72157632076081113

Album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidelramos/sets/72157632076081113/with/8210866302/

HN'ers even took turns entertaining Luca, our uber-smiley 8 month old son. Some guests were clearly more comfortable around babies than others. ;)

While it was a little stressful in the beginning, everyone was so grateful: "Dude, this is so much better than sitting at home alone reading Hacker News." I heard that sentiment expressed over and over again.

Turkey was eaten. Connections were forged. Friends were made.

Honestly, the whole thing was a magical experience. I think I might even turn it into a Thanksgiving tradition.

-Matt Mireles
Founder, Swig! (SwigMe.com): The liquor store in your pocket.
I've found that the weakest part of many presentations is in the transition from one point or idea to the next.

Shaky transitions are a prime cause of audience disinterest, and poor flow can quickly remove the auditor from the energy and flow the speaker has established, which makes such a time perfect for checking twitter and FB and otherwise disengaging.

The boundaries between ideas should feel natural and smooth, and I think for many it's difficult to arrive at a natural transition without getting very intentional about it, i.e. writing it out.

So I say write it down, edit, speak chunks out loud, and edit more.

In this way, the presenter can craft the most important sections with style while becoming familiar enough with the material that the delivery feels quite natural.
Twitter Users Vulnerable To SMS Spoofing Attack
I love the shark. It's the best single purpose 2 pieces ever.
we can call them "applets"!
The original article is about replacing GMail with a more privacy conscious service. Lavabit was mentioned because they use encryption to protect email from premium accounts.

Doing some cursory research, I was unable to find information about how Gandi secures your email messages. Their terms and conditions - http://en.gandi.net/static/contracts/en/gandimail/pdf/specia... - do not make it much clearer, and contain some weird language:

By accepting Our Contracts and using Our services, You agree to
abide to Our code of ethics which consists, in particular, of
protecting and respecting minors, human dignity, public order and
good moral standards, not infringing on the rights of third parties
(private life, image, honor and reputation, trademarks, designs
and models, copyrights, etc.) or the security of persons, property,
the government, or the good working order of public institutions,
and to help in the fight against abusive and/or deviant uses of the
Internet (spamming, phishing, hacking, cracking, or attempts at
hacking or cracking), or any other infraction as cited in the Penal
Code.
What does it mean by a "good paper" (in CS) ?

- published at a high impact journal/conference ?

: There are gazzillions of paper out there in many good journals/conference proceedings but no one really cares about.

- total number of citations ?

: This may be a factor. But I have seen many survey papers (most of them are boring and mostly involve physical work) get a load of citations, but do not always add anything new.

- On the other hand, I have seen a number of good PhD thesis (especially in CS theory/math) that did not produce any "publication", per se. But they are highly cited and pretty much popular. Even many of them are written in Russian/German.

The impact of a "research work" is not always possible to be measured by some numbers. Getting the attention of the community is a totally different aspect -- and that's what makes a research work valuable.
Way better than the first version. Still missing things Sparrow is good at:
1. Send & Archive button/setting
2. Option for 'Delete' and 'Archive' on swiping an email in the inbox.
3. Hold to mark as read/unread for an email.
Yes, but being inside the CPU means that it can be much finer grained which makes the problem much easier.
The idea that you can find a privacy-protecting social service as a substitute for Facebook is just absurd. FB very well, at some point or already, may maliciously intrude on you. But the vast majority of horror stories arise from the kind of behavior of users and their friends that cannot be prevented by any (non draconian) social platform.

In other words, the privacy problems arise from people being social...if you want maximal privacy, then the only solution is minimal sociability. This is the case with online networks as it is at e water cooler. So finding a privacy-protecting platform -- that is, the kind of privacy that most people want -- is like finding a way of gossiping that prevents words from being repeated and secret pacts in breakable.

* an example comes to mind: recently on another FB thread, someone said how FB nearly destroyed his marriage because his fiancé had, as her profile pic, a photo of both of them before the relationship was known to the family. fB is obviously wrong to revert privacy settings, but thhe relationship should never have been broadcasted in any pictorial form, because any "friend" could CC or refer to the photo regardless of FB privacy settings
Because it's so hard to make a fake Facebook account. If someone actually wants to cause trouble, requiring Facebook won't do anything except slow them down for about 20 seconds. I see this "reason" everywhere, but it's total garbage.
Ban These Buzzwords From Your Resume
I have been working on this for two years. It is very difficult but the key is getting access to sellers before they talk to a realtor. That is how I did it. If you get the information before a realtor does you can avoid issues of conflicting interest, data rights etc. The MLS data is covered by license agreements as you would expect so you need to get to sellers before realtors do. That is my experience at least. Getting to sellers first is not that hard if you have a good mailing list that buyers and investors are interested in. Building a good mailing list is damn hard though.

Where are you located? I am looking for help on the programming side (I am a programmer as well). I would love to crush MLS and make it irrelevant. I hate it and everything it is.

Also, MLS data has yearly costs. I did not want to pay so I get access to the sellers first. Get them to sign some contracts saying I have exclusive rights to the data forever but I do not bar them from going to a realtor in the contract.
bwaahhh??? a cursory google search wasn't very enlightening... teach me your ways, wise one!

Edit: oh, I see... compilation mode. I've now set C-c c and C-c r to 'compile and 'recompile respectively. thanks!
That seems like it might be driven more by a lack of supply than a lack of demand. Why not have Spotify on all the time?
I agree with other HN'ers that LifeHacker has lost a lot of it's appeal - they post waaay too much. I have found myself doing two things

1. Only go to lifehacker once every few days and quickly browse to see if anything catches my eye.

2. Rather than going to lifehacker.com (the new design is absolutely atrocious) I go to blog.lifehacker.com which presents the stories in a chronological order, which makes more sense to me.

With that said, this is (IMO) a completely useless collection of how-to guides.

Edit: Formatting
In what cases is unified inbox relevant ? I don't like to mix my personal emails with my work emails. Did sparrow make a clear distinction between which accounts the email was from ?
You had me until you knocked goto.
Automatically downloading and executing binary code from the web. What could possibly go wrong?

Isn't NaCL supposed to in part solve this?
" This could theoretically fit 1/6 more people into the same amount of "square land" without any drawbacks other than cosmetics."

In the US, the primary constraints on density tend to derive from land development regulations - particularly those relating to parking (non-surface parking is expensive), direct limitations on density (dwelling units per acre) and limitations on overall floor plate area (floor area ratio).

Overall building height is somewhat uncommon as a constraint on density and tends to play less of a role than floor-area-ration in determining how much space can be built.
At what point do people start believing that Google has a strong interest in carving out its own proprietary ecosystem, all their openness "plays" always lead to the same thing: some rhetorical platform used only to advance their private agenda. Chrome and Android will soon be Internet Explorer and Windows of the 21st century.
Interview with SmartThings: How a Faulty Pipe Unlocked The Internet of Things
Don't confuse "mutlithreading" with "parallelism." Multithreaded code is a particular kind of parallelism, but not the only kind.
Pushing the play button to make it go, perhaps? As in, using the apps is so easy you just "press Play"?
Wow, bold words, not even Maps?
"I am not a lawyer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL

(Unless you were being facetious, in which case, carry on.)
I am sure having just changed the name from "Android Market" to "Google Play", and "Google Docs" into "Google Drive," they wanted to avoid confusing the hell out of people by rebranding one more time for no reason.
Why should there be a catch if you're paying $14/GB? Not exactly a bargain. There are very similar offerings like the one from Virgin mobile at a similar price point.
indeed, also the experience of collaborative development is hard to get over. So hard to shake that my entire focus has now shifted to creating a collaborative development environment which facilitates a similar experience for creating software.
This guy started by running a popular site. He went from thousands of visitors on his site to $60k+ in a year, a non-trivial achievement, but he did not start from nothing. I wish him continued successes!
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