skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading about great performance of newer ARM-based offerings I was surprised when I compared real-world performance at the same clock speed recently: ARM doesn't even come close to any recent-generation x86. This is certainly one very important measure of architecture.

A quick sunspider test with a US Samsung Galaxy S3 1.5GHZ snapdragon on Jelly Bean's likely highly-optimized browser shows performance very comparable to a first generation intel 1.66GHZ Atom 230 single core on the latest Firefox. Granted it's a mostly single-threaded test anyway but the ARM has both cores available and the test is pretty cpu-bound after it starts.

I'd estimate the latest i7 is at least 3x faster per-GHZ on this lightweight but fairly general (cpu-wise) test.

For heavy lifting, a recent i7 with it's cache size, memory bandwidth and accompanying i/o would probably compare to an ARM that is running at about 5x the clock speed.

I don't think that ARM can be suddenly declared the best at anything other than maybe performance-per-TDP.

Performance-per-cycle is the more difficult problem to solve... ask AMD how hard that's been since the original Intel core series appeared on the scene in 2006. Prior to this and after it wasn't just a chip clone maker, AMD dominated this metric.
I don't have time now, and I'm unlikely to have time in the next six months, but it looks awfully like he's setting up a standard LP problem, but I don't see how he's extracting integer solutions from it.

I expect there to be errors, and I expect them to be subtle, and I expect that if they're pointed out he'll push them around to some other place where they're hard to find. Having said that, I haven't read it thoroughly (and won't have the time to) and I'm disinclined to. Not that that's any great loss - I'm not an expert.
Honestly, I'd pay just to have his posts nice and curated into a single book. My company bought his drip campaign classes and they were really great as well, so I'm looking forward to this.
TOP 5 Ultrabooks As Christmas Gifts
I'd say, Ruby: Smalltalk is scary and Perl is a kludge
I think it's still a dumb idea for an app.
I like 'em thick 'n curvy.
AFAIK they block installation from the Play store.
Not sure when this came out, because none of these essays are dated - this one is near the bottom of the list. But I like it!
Are the two columns supposed to look similar? Because on Safari in OS X, the right one is very bold, and the left one is often way too spindly, especially on the last font. I wouldn't reliably call one column or the other better, but they are definitely very different.
I thought the same. I've been mostly using Linux for the past month and now that I switched back to Windows (trying out windows 8) this is something that is really bugging me.

And it's not just the font aliasing. Some UTF-8 characters are not even rendered (only squares appear). There was one article I saw here (I think it was about lambda calculus) that I had to read on IE.

Maybe its time to go back to firefox on windows.
Could you back up your statement with some examples? I have friends with the SII and they are very happy with it.
LOL. OK, simple question: Do your parents know what Quora is? Do they know what Wikipedia is? Quora is unknown outside of the valley. Is there some switch they're going to hit to open the flood gates into this site, and suddenly overnight the entire country know what it is? Honestly, I don't know anyone outside of the valley who's even heard of Quora.
So I feel sort of morally obligated to comment here and yet don't want to sell my book, so instead, can I sell Hyperink? They were fantastic to work with, and successfully convinced me on why I should try publishing through them rather than trying to e.g. go through a traditional publisher or even one of the smarter tech-specific presses.

I've been asked to write a book for a few years by potential readers, and a few times by potential publishers, but I was very disinterested in doing so. For most people capable of writing tech books, writing books is a very poor use of time under any economic calculus. The typical model is that you and the publisher agree to do the book, then you're paid an advance (sometimes in installments contingent on milestones). You earn a royalty on each sale of the book, with the royalties first going to pay back ("earn out") the advance, and then being paid to you quarterly.

This sounds reasonable, until you hear the numbers (typical advance for a tech book from a first time author: $5k, typical royalty percentage: 8% on a physical copy, 15% on an ebook). They're not universally that bad -- an author or two from Apress and Pragmatic Programmer wrote me to say they were genuinely happy with their experiences -- but that's sort of the general flavor of things.

If you do the math, it is highly unlikely your book will recoup the advance, and that is indeed what happens to most tech books. So you've traded months of full-time labor writing and rewriting, plus additional months of part-time work hawking the book to anyone who will listen, in return for $5k. That is not a rational use of time for anybody who can e.g. do contract programming, which (one would assume) virtually all tech book writers could do.

When I said as much to publishers who asked me to write things, they said "Ahh, but the book will allow you to establish your bona fides", and I do not believe that making stupid decisions for my business successfully demonstrates to clients that I will make smart decisions for theirs. To my view of things, I'd rather have lots of folks be able to read my writing than have it blessed by a gatekeeper but widely unavailable.

But blog posts do leave a lot to be desired for teaching people. For one, my blog is very disorganized, since I have six years of back-issues which appear in order of "what I was working on that week", and they're of varying quality and relevance, particularly early in my career. Something with a bit of structure and curation seemed like it would add value. Plus, I am spelling- and design-challenged, so having an editor and someone with a sense of style would be a plus.

That's basically what Hyperink pitched: curating the best of the blog into a book, complete with editing and design help, with some extra essays added. It's far less work than scratch-writing a book, the terms are more equitable (no advance, equitable royalty split), and it provides incremental value to readers over the blog.

I don't expect to make a huge amount of money on it, relative to the business in general, but the idea sounded attractive enough to try it as an experiment.
Giotto, a functional style Python web framework
Assembly: binary is too low-level.
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> People couldn't lift the weight without consuming energy from food. Doesn't mean that it's powered by food.

Actually, it does, and that's the perfect way to analyze this. Food is good for keeping humans alive, but it's a pretty foolish fuel to burn in a human engine to accomplish things. It's perishable, it's eaten by rodents, it's hard to transport, and more. I chuckle darkly when someone tells me that something is "green" because it's human powered. Growing food isn't free - it uses conventional energy sources to harvest, transport, etc., and it's a ton less efficient than just burning that fuel directly.
That seems extremely unlikely in the short term given the revenue Samsung is bringing in from their Android sales.
As far as I know they Google is using it's own network for Google Fiber.
[Disclaimer: I've written only a tiny amount of Rust code, and no real Go code. I work for Mozilla but not on the Rust team.]

From what I've seen Go is designed with emphasis on ease of programming, performance, and concurrency; Rust is designed with emphasis on safety, performance, and concurrency. (Of course these are broad generalizations, and neither language is limited to only these concerns.)

Go is a simpler language in various ways. Rust provides more control over things like memory management but at the cost of some added complexity (e.g. multiple pointer types). Rust provides some abstraction/expressivity features that Go lacks (like parametric/generic types, macros, and algebraic datatypes), again at the cost of some added complexity. Rust makes more static safety guarantees (for example, no null or "nil" pointers). While the compiler provides many of these guarantees without creating extra work for the programmer, sometimes you do have to structure or annotate your code in a particular way so the compiler can prove its safety.

Of course the two languages are also similar in many ways. For example their syntaxes are in the C family; they compile to native code; they provide CSP-style concurrency; they have some amount of local type inference; and they do not use inheritance as the main style of composition.

Rust's safety features should make it ideal for writing security- or stability-critical code. Go's simplicity probably makes it faster to learn and better for rapid development, especially for programmers used to dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript. Rust's expressive power might provide more options for abstracting common patterns out of large codebases, or to provide libraries that extend the language in different ways (e.g. using macros). Go is more mature than Rust at the moment and has more libraries and a larger community. Rust has first-class support for code that does not use garbage collection, which can make it more suitable for certain types of systems programming.
Honest price, not $100 and bundled with some garbage videos I don't even want, like I've seen around here.

Thanks Patrick, for not pricing it to squeeze every single penny you can from me. It's an easy sale.
This article strikes me as the next coming of "you didn't build that". The right place is always here. The right time is always now. The skill that separates the successful entrepreneur from the rest is identifying what they're right FOR.

That's what Jobs did better than anyone else. It was a learned skill: certainly the Steve Jobs who founded Apple and NeXT could not have done what the Steve Jobs who led Apple to greatness did. And frankly, he was not terribly consistent when it came to using his skill for good and not evil. But it was his skill, and it was what made the difference.

It can be learned. That's the big lesson to take away from his life: he had to learn to do what he did, but he proved to be able learn to do what he did.
Anyone who thinks Smalltalk is scary has never used it, and I doubt that is what Matz thought of it.
The real issue for intel is 7W is not worth 100$ to most consumers. OEM's have been selling good plenty of 400$ laptops for a while and tablet manufactures can always down-clock a laptop CPU from AMD.

However, this is the reason Microsoft is trying to stick to the 800$ price point for as long as it can. Cheaper options are more popular and they don't want most people to hear how 'crap' Windows 8 tablets are based on hardware anytime soon.
Oooh, thanks for the explanation. I figured it had something to do with touches dropping off (the other posts mentioned it, and it's kind of obvious since they ask you to long press to view). But I thought the touchesCancelled would be too unreliable, with push messages, system notifications, incoming calls, or just dragging the finger out of the screen.

How would you detect the lack of WillEnterBackground/DidResignActive to avoid false positives? Just set a timeout and send a "screenshot!" notification if the timeout expires without going to background?
> i get particularly excited by projects that could provide grid-free lighting and clean water to rural areas.

The best way to provide lighting and clean water is via the grid: power lines and water pipes.
Interesting to note that all the snowboarders refused to join the crowd and opted to go their own way. Erin the liftie, who actually took off skiers right on her own; tall Tim, who took off alone hard left; and pankey and Carlson who followed tall Tim and ultimately discovered the bodies. Snowboarders are stereotypically not crowd followers, and that characteristic might have saved them here.
You really think that the OEM-installed apps on a Windows machine make it terrible, and the OS contributes nothing?

I have a friend that really loves Sony laptop hardware. Every time he buys one, though, he has to spend a day cleaning off the bloatware. It literally goes from a sluggish Windows filled with crap to reasonable OS.

As for the "controlling the hardware" comment, I completely agree. How many Windows laptops have I had that had terrible close-the-lid-and-sleep behavior? Every single one of them. A colleague had a laptop overheat and almost catch fire because he closed the lid, and after assuming it slept, putting it in his laptop bag. A couple of hours later he removed it only to find the thing was too hot to touch. This kind of thing is much rarer on Macs because Apple owns the whole stack and can make sure everything plays well together.
Well, I don't think that's what anyone has ever said about any of these languages. :D

I was just trying to stick with the form of the essay.
True. But I am certainly technical enough to do it, while I have no chance of breaking a coded decryption routine.
Good thing you have all those specifics in there. Or any. Or even a hint at what is such a "train wreck". My litmus test is when my got-super-rich-off-Apple-stock friend is saying that he's trying out 4.2 and is envious of it. And that's just from casual exposure to someone who has owned every iOS device made.
As always, the devil is in the details here. Does this lamp produce enough light for a family to be motivated to actually lift it every N minutes (e.g. does it produce enough light to read comfortably, or to cook a meal)? Is it durable enough to survive in essentially outdoors conditions in terms of heat and humidity? If the answers to these questions are positive, it's certainly a great invention. If not, back to the drawing board.
Look at the Londrina. The right one is a little bit bolder.

Even so, I don't think I would ever notice something like that if it wasn't for the side-by-side comparison.
Dropbox Poaches Top Sales Execs From Salesforce, Apple and Google
Does screenshot not work during those times? I'm confused how this would give the sender any comfort at all...
Chrome 25 to disable silent extension installation actively and retroactively
I know, but that was back in Andy Grove's time. I don't think Paul Otellini ever understood the innovator's dilemma that well. In a sense, it does seem like they get it now and try to compete with ARM, but I'm not so sure this came from within the company. I think they were pressured into it by stakeholders and the media a few years ago.

But again, even if they succeeded making competitive chips against ARM, that doesn't equal market success in the mobile market, and it doesn't equal that they will survive unless they take serious steps to survive in a world where they are just one of several companies making chips for devices, and where they might not even have a big market share of that, and where they make low-margin chips. Bottomline is they need to start firing people soon, restructure salaries, and so on. I think this is why Paul Otellini left. He didn't want to be the one to do that, and be blamed for that.
Why not? They can already send photos to all their friends, because Facebook already knows their friends. To me, it seems like it would be a hit.
Sure you didn't download the 64-bit binaries? The 32-bit ones look fine to me.

If you see that on 32-bit ones, file a bug.
D3 is so good, the work of mbostock is quite brilliant, I am just starting out with d3 but I hope to really do some good stuff with it over the coming year and beyond!
I'm about 80% finished writing the ebook I emailed you about a few months ago and was planning to launch it with in the next few weeks from my own site as a PDF, but your praise of Hyperink intrigues me. Especially the help on the design and editing side would be a huge asset.

After going to their site and clicking on the link for bloggers, it presented me with a form asking my email and URL and then said they'd follow up when they were ready. Any ballpark idea how that process works?

Also, were the new blog posts your idea? I've actually written in quite a bit more depth for the book than I did on the blog. I definitely do want to earn money out of it, but as long as I'm doing it, it's worth doing it properly.
Apple lifts block on combo 30-pin+Lightning charging accessories
web.archive.org has its first snapshot of it from Feb 2002, so it's at least 10 years old.

http://web.archive.org/web/20020210063149/http://paulgraham....
VB: Programmers are too expensive. Business Process people are more necessary.

MUMPS: All other languages weren't written for/by medical doctors/professionals.

Lua: Python and Ruby are each too big to embed.
When I opened this page, I was going to be the third comment, then I got caught up trying to explain why their linked paper [1] (proving P=NP) is non-sense. Unfourtuantly, my habit of assuming that my not understanding something just means that I need to re-read it or play with that segment of the proof myself costed me more time than I thought (even after I wrote in my partially completed reply that the introduction alone was sufficient to dismiss the paper as nonsense). Anyway, here is my overkill analysis:

I would be highly skeptical of their claim. First of all, if they did prove P=NP (and long enough ago to write another paper), then I cannot imagine why this is the first I am hearing about it, as solving this problem would likely get a prominent spot in mainstream news, and definitively its own article on HN.

Beyond that, the paper proving P=NP, even to my amateur eye, looks like garbage.
From the P=NP paper:
"What is the powerful ingredient which allows a dramatic speed-up of quantum computation over classical computation ? We propose that this ingredient is an implicit use of the Bayesian probability theory. Furthermore, we argue that both classical and quantum computation are special cases of probability reasoning. On these grounds, introducing Bayesian probability theory in classical computation as well, we reduce a typical NP problem, namely 3-SAT, to a linear programming problem. According to algorithmic complexity theory, this proves that P=NP."

"Any logical algorithm can be formulated as a linear programming problem. Specially, a basic question of logical satisﬁability with n variables, namely 3-SAT, is equivalent to a linear programming problem with O(n^3) unknowns and even in general with O(n) unknowns. According to algorithmic complexity theory, this proves that P=NP."

"Again, the main reasons of the supposedly quantum eﬃciency are basically unknown,
but the common wisdom is that entanglement should be the key ingredient. Indeed, in the
quantum community, it is ‘widely believed that classical systems cannot simulate highly
entangled quantum systems’ [13]. By contrast, we have nevertheless argued [14] that
the concept of entanglement is actually a quite classical attribute of contextual systems.
Furthermore, any classical computer can be regarded as a highly entangled system as far
as the entanglement is measured between the binary digits of the processed data during
the computation. In addition, we shall argue that the crucial ingredient is not in the least
a Hilbert space with its full quantum machinery but only a ﬂexible randomization, or to
be exact, the implicit use of Bayes probabilities. This is like a grin without a cat in Alice
and Bob adventures in Quantum Land."

They devote two pages to history and what should be common knowledge to anyone interested in this paper.

The actual proof is mathametical gibberish, however there are surprisingly large contiguous sections of the proof that, by themselves, work.

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.6658v2.pdf
Hey Eric, I'm the author of the linked post. I actually do mention that light fonts on dark backgrounds look terrible on OS X and suggest using the antialiasing mode as a fix. Dark text on a light background is another story however.
Love this idea. I need it so bad.
On the spelling front: "... never-before-seen tails of abysmal failure". Is that the long tail of abysmal failure? Or should it be tale? :)
He charges $X0,000 per week for his consulting services and has had more than modest success in doing outreach/education/marketing through his blog and participation here and on the SEOmoz and Business of Software boards. He's past the point where writing a book is the most remunerative use of his time.
Not giving Pando the click, I'm guessing they don't touch on how big of an asshole he was.
Yeah, probably. Anything that gets in front of the app should call one of those two, and do so pretty immediately. A timer for a second or so later should be pretty safe.
Nah, I just opened it in Gimp, moved the right one on top of the left and toggled it visible/invisible. It's identical (at least from the screenshot posted by the GP.
> don't pretend there are no valid arguments for having that legal job.

Is anybody? A valid argument for having a job does not place an individual above criticism.
Ruby: Perl has crap OO, and Lisp syntax is scary.

Perl did a lot of things right, e.g. regex literals, wide range of terseness possible (one-liners vs. large modular programs), CPAN, but I could never get over its ugly, hacked-in implementation of objects that kinda-sorta behaved like hashes and didn't do information hiding well.
I was very pleased to see the first couple of comments on this agreeing completely. I often get the vibe the HN community doesn't understand this risk of the GTD philosophy, but apparently I was happily mistaken.
I think Facebook is on the right path with this as a potential money making idea.

However, they need some modifications if they don't want to piss off their users in implementing it.

Here's my suggestion(s):

Let users specify how much it should cost to contact them, and let them keep a percentage of every dollar over $1. Then let marketing messengers set a 'maximum cost' amount - if it's too costly, they won't send.

Don't want to be messaged? Set your price insanely high.

Don't mind being messaged as long as you get something out of it? Set it to $2-$5.

Win for everyone.
JavaScript: UI code should be asynchronous and throw as few errors as possible.
Please setup 2-factor authentication on your Facebook account
Ranting without substance.... arrg
YouTube Android API Lets Developers Natively Embed Videos. Captions, Ads…
i'm seeing a lot of the good old "ie toolbar" behaviour lately: chrome extensions (typically developed by big portals) get installed with third-party applications without user consent.

this looks like a proper (if a bit delayed) measure to me.
This idea just hit me, and it's so powerful I'm still reeling. What if someone built a battery-powered weight lifter that would go off every 1/2 hour? You wouldn't have to keep getting up to do it yourself!

Not sure if I should patent this, or just donate it to the greater good of mankind.
Haskell: programming is math but other languages make that unnecessarily hard to see
That's not a network effect. A network effect is a growth pattern related to having other users on the network adding value to you. In this case, it wouldn't matter if I was the only AT&T customer, they'd be more valuable simply because of coverage area.
The point of the article is that intel has been disrupted by ARM. You can disagree with this or not, but all these points are kind of irrelevant. People making mobile devices care about power efficiency, and Intel is behind for another year or two. Worse, even if it catches up it needs to compete with ARM's business model which cannot support Intel's revenue model. The point is that ARM allows — as you say — anyone make their own SoC and drain the profits from Intel's pool — they're not going to give that up unless Intel offers some incredibly compelling advantage, and it's not clear what that might be.