skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Launching the interpreter takes 10 seconds

With SBT you're only going to do that once per work session. Plus the startup time isn't as bad as you make it sound. I've had a much more painful experience with Ruby (Rails).

> Compiling a small module takes 15 seconds

That hasn't been my experience. I just did a test for a project of mine and it took 5 seconds. Without line-counts such metrics are useless (how small is that module anyway?). Also many Scala projects are composed of multiple subprojects that are efficiently managed by SBT, so a root compile triggers compilation for all these sub-modules, but context-switching between them is what increases compilation cost.

> Running 100 command-line unit tests on a small compiled module

When in the world are you ever going to do that? Like seriously?

> Scala fails to infer the type of `optBar`

In practice it's good to annotate the signature of public functions. Haskell developers do that too, because really, when a developer looks at the definition of "optBar" are you seriously going to suggest that they should be looking at other parts of the code to infer what it returns?

IMHO, this is a feature, as what you want is even worse than what you get with a dynamic language, but YMMV.

> Scala's implicits can pose a significant barrier to understanding other people's code

I haven't met a single library or project of significant size that isn't making use of implicits in one form or another. Whether they are called global state, singletons or parameters injected through DI, we are really talking about implicit parameters.

The difference is that Scala gives you the means to document these implicits in the signature (referential transparency FTW). They are also statically type-safe, can be overridden and have the extra benefit that they make possible some powerful techniques, like type-classes, something that Ocaml isn't capable of.
Did you ever change the theme from the default for the widget? The default is exceptionally bad and mimics the one from HTC Sense (also extremely ugly).

Example of it not looking so ugly: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24904191/Screenshot_2012-03-04-21-5...
My long term interest is in Android, but I switched to an iPhone a year ago to follow that ecosystem, too. The first thing I did was buy three call blocking apps from the App Store, none of which worked at all. After reading all the horror stories about the vaunted App Store approval process to protect innocent iPhone users from bad apps, I realized it was all marketing FUD. When an app has 99% bad reviews, all saying "doesn't work" and it stays in the app store, that is Apple fraud.
> DMA is disabled when a machine is locked

For Firewire. What about for Thunderbolt?
Libraries and legacy code are an issue, but if the Julia ( http://julialang.org/ ) folks manage to deliver most of their promises, Julia might cover a lot of the data processing needs (and is faster than Python), for which people use Python + NumPy at the moment.

And the main reason some scientist migrated to Python is probably that Matlab is non-free, and the language of Matlab sucks. Julia might attract both Python users and future Matlab refugees.
> I'd love to hear it.

And sadly you are dealing with a Libertarian and you will.
Why should Quixby be allowed to scalp the content for FREE?
This is the only way I was able to quit smoking. At its height it was about a pack a day (18-20). Every few days I'd reduce that daily number by one. Eventually it got to the point where a pack would last long enough that the last few cigarettes were stale and I'd have to throw the pack out. It doesn't take too long at that pace to just quit altogether.
It's friction in the development process.

Incremental compilation suffers from the fragile base class problem. In a well structured app with proper encapsulation and rigid (and type annotated) interfaces, it helps a lot.
Five Years Of A Brutal Job Market, In Two Graphs
Ah, but let's look at what we mean by "best".

Certainly, we can fall foul of a greedy solution by picking two excellent speakers who are known to violently disagree. Instead, we need to optimise the panel/conference globally.

If a tech panel inspired a woman into pursuing a career in tech, that she had previously felt was "too male-dominated", would that be counted towards being a "good" panel?

Even weaker than that, if a panel went some way to dispell rumours that the tech-world was sexist, wouldn't that be "good" too?

You or I may never notice the impact that these choices have, but some people may, and it may have a profound effect on them.
It isn't techcrunch, but nor does it try to be. I present to you, cloudegory.com
IPod Touch dropped from 100,000 feet [video]
I had precisely the same experience.
While this is true, owning and testing all the android devices is a lot harder than having a system with many web browsers on it.

Also asking customers to upgrade is usually downloading new software for websites, but is buying new hardware for many android users (as there is no released update nor will there ever be for their devices)
I'm a little confused. This community (myself included) often complains about how we wish Hollywood would release their movies as DRM-free files. But then some of us say that the "purchase" price is too high and we want a "rental" option.

How exactly would this work? Would the movie studios ask you nicely to remove the file from your computer after three days? I'd love to hear a technical answer that contradicts this, but don't see how a DRM-free rental could ever be possible.
NSA's secret 'Perfect Citizen' cybersecurity program detailed
Not sure what this is since it's down (500 error), but based off the name it sounds a lot like http://gist.io/ (which I really like).
That's because you never hear about what's going on outside of the research centers- they're all under NDA.
I have the same issues with voice direction. It repeats the same instructions way to frequently, often without even a pause in between. For example, earlier today:

"Take exit for XXX. In 500 ft. stay to the right at XXX south. Stay to the right at XXX south".
The correct way to implement it would be to prevent the initiation of DMA operations when the device is locked, but to let current ones continue. I have no idea if that's what happened, though.
There seems to be two distinct types of attack for that attack vector:
(1) bypassing OS logon screen by patching in-memory code
(2) stealing password or encryption key for already-mounted encrypted volume

But bypassing or stealing password or key for cold, non-mounted volume is impossible: for example, TrueCrypt volume is mathematically indistinguishable from /dev/urandom output until exact password is provided.
As well as spices that vary with season, cocaine, etc [0] ...

I'm curious as to how these tests are done. I'm guessing samples are drawn and then run through a IR-spectrography machine. I wonder at what depth, how close to sewage runoff, etc.

[0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drink...
Amazon Launches Tablet Support And Android App For Its Web Service Console
I'm interested in a reply to iskander's question as well as some concrete examples of new "computer algorithms... frequently requiring years and millions of dollars".
You'd be surprised. It's not just the James Bond types that are being attacked by foreign intelligence anymore. By some estimates industrial espionage against technology companies by China is second only to domestic security in terms of funding and manpower.

Companies are issuing disposable laptops, iPads, and cell phones to employees traveling to Asia. Consider why that might be.
I just looked up IO MMUs, which can provide protection for this. Sadly, on Wikipedia, it looks like the hardware support for them is blotchy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOMMU_hardware_list

Hopefully that'll get better.
If you need secure IRC, use SILC.
Soon: Super intelligent sharks
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149261/
Isn't that a more noble subset of being rich?

I completely understand, mind you.
Generally speaking you don't need to own and test all devices, the emulator does just fine. There are a few quirks here and there but as cryptoz alludes to I've never had more headaches than trying to support all the versions of IE and modern browsers.
Very much so...

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HzwUy6B...
Correct, the tiles were from Google and Google got first cut of the route information. But Apple was the one collecting vectors, and there's no reason to think they were ever signing those over to Google.
No, write half of one.
Yes. They have different life experiences, different use cases, even different cosmetic issues (for some women/most men). Technology is about helping us to live. I also think racial and national origin diversity is useful for the same reasons
Yes, they are obligated. Everyone is. Because it’s an untenable situation.

If you refuse to go the extra mile, expect to be called out as reinforcing sexism.
GitHub repository is here: https://github.com/khebbie/GistBlog
"Intel's fab advantage and CPU design expertise, plus their willingness to make custom parts for Apple (see small outline C2D for original Macbook Air), would make up for what design control Apple loses by not designing in house."

As I understand it the small outline C2D was simply a packaging option rather than a silicon change. And then Intel turned around and has been trying to get all of the 'other' manufacturers to make MBA clones aka Ultrabooks.

If Apple says, "Make us a Haswell chip where there is an extra GPU core, but don't let anyone but us use that core." That is a hard place to be for Intel. Now they invest time and energy in a silicon change, and an all mask change at that (not just a metal layer change) with the proviso that only Apple can use those extra transistors. The only way to amortize that cost is on Apple sales, and if Apple says "Gee, that hasn't been as successful as we'd like, never mind." Intel takes a hit.

When I was at Sun, Sun decided to start making its own CPUs (the SPARC architecture). Seeing how they could tune their code and their process to the CPU gave them similar advantages that DEC, HP, and IBM had who all had an in house CPU capability. Previously Motorola was the chip maker but Motorola wouldn't agree to 'Sun specific' changes, especially if it forces Motorola to support a specialized part just for Sun. Early on Apple tried a different approach which was a consortium which had a CPU architecture (PowerPC) that could make chips just for it. That must have shown them the advantages of that approach but dissuaded them from wanting to convince 'somebody else' when they wanted something done their way.

FWIW, I also think the fact that Samsung had that capability (making their own ARM chips) and they were executing faster than Apple was really pushed Apple into the space it is today.

What that adds up to is Intel being frozen out of the market. Can't compete on price, can't compete on features, and can't compete on software base (any more). Bad news all around. Will be interesting to see if Intel decides they are going to start making smartphones/tablets themselves.
I was going to guess kidney stones from all of the sodium in the soda.
I greatly appreciate that an app which messes up with chromes ability to generate secure SSL keys requires root to run.
Ah, this is interesting, since he's probably one of the few people outside of Google with the credentials to actually comment on something like this. It still seems hard to quantify "UI jank" but I'm glad he's looking into it. I had dismissed it as placebo yesterday but if he thinks it's worth looking into then maybe it is.
Email Encoder to Help Prevent Spam
Apple Must Think Differently to Slow the Android Invasion
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I wasn't suggesting that the "Is a solution reproducible via logical steps?" rule to be a validating rule... It only invalidates patentability if found to be true. Otherwise, nothing.
I'm really looking forward to using 2.10 now that it's (finally!) final. Over the last year it's been really interesting to see Scala popping up all over the place. One of the interesting data points is that downloads of the Scala plugin for IntelliJ have crossed the 350,000 mark. I have yet to encounter anyone who wants to go back to Java after having used Scala for a project. For many of us it's the first language that's a viable successor to Java.
I actually agree with you, and the scenario you described is interesting and makes for a good example.

Of course, that is different than what the linked article is demanding, which is having more women on panels just because, as if it is an intrinsic good, and without considering whether and how much it would affect the quality of the conference.
Asking for DRM-free movies only makes sense in the context of purchasing.

Rental is the oldest form of DRM. That's basically how it works.
King County is very large and a lot of it is rural or forest service land. I know Seattle owns a lot of land in the Cedar river watershed since that is the city's water supply. I'd guess somewhere out there is the farthest spot.
Those numbers must include the Meep! devices kids got for Christmas (Android 4.0). I don't know how many units they sold but I suspect just about all of those have been or will be returned [1]. Just about the only thing I could do on it was connect to Google Play.

[1] Here's their 'Hot News' page full of apologies http://www.meeptablet.com/us/hotnews.asp
Have you been to a doctor and checked to see if you have ADD? I have ADD and I used to use caffeine and it had the same sort of effects as the aderall that I got prescribed. I stopped taking caffeine because of all the side effects I noticed.
Yep, examples would be interesting. There are counter examples - like the open Opus audio codec, which was developed by collaboration of various engineers and which is state of art precisely because they weren't burdened by stupid patenting issues, and could instead concentrate on creating a beautiful technology.
While I enjoy reading about new and interesting languages (note: Felix has been around for over ten years), I really wish that language designers would put example code for something like FizzBuzz right on the front page to give people a flavor of the syntax.

I can't remember how many times in my life I've done a link expedition through a website or docs just to see a simple programming example.
I see you're attempting to disregard my results by making assumptions about my workflow. I'm not going to respond to these comments.

> I just did a test for a project of mine and it took 5 seconds. Without line-counts such metrics are useless (how small is that module anyway?).

Obviously, comparing absolute times between two unknown systems isn't going to make sense. I was comparing how long it takes to accomplish the same thing on my machine in Haskell and Scala.

> In practice it's good to annotate the signature of public functions. Haskell developers do that too, because really, when a developer looks at the definition of "optBar" are you seriously going to suggest that they should be looking at other parts of the code to infer what it returns?

I agree, annotating type signatures of top-level functions is a good practice. However, in the above example `optBar` is an internal variable in class `Foo`. The point here is I found Scala's type inference to be incapable of dealing even with trivial code.

> The difference is that Scala gives you the means to document these implicits in the signature (referential transparency FTW). They are also statically type-safe, can be overridden and have the extra benefit that they make possible some powerful techniques, like type-classes, something that Ocaml isn't capable of.

Haskell does type classes without the need for implicits. Also, true referential transparency requires control over side effects, which is something neither OCaml or Scala are capable of, but Haskell is.
Average programmer definitely could. Average applicant, maybe not.
Yes, if you have 100 developers then by all means create native versions for every device, but as a single developer there is no other way for me to provide my app on PCs, phones and tablets other than HTML5. If you're making a one-off game it might not matter for the user that they can't play it on their other devices, but when you provide a service that needs to be available on the go and accessible anywhere, you really don't want to alienate your customers with "only available on iPhone".
I use Mike Bostock's awesome bl.ocks.org service that's very similar.

It's great for gists with html/js that you want people to preview, as in: http://bl.ocks.org/4331769
While not germane to the conversation, it's worth pointing out that this is a wonderful movie with an exceptionally smart and computer-literate script that celebrates electronic culture instead of deriding it.
> There's no good reason why this vulnerability still exists after 10 years except a failed design

I'll give you that, but there are too many kinds of physical access attacks to even consider aiming at solving the entire class of attacks.

> Physical access should not equal compromise.

And I want a million dollars. Guess which one's more likely.
A large problem with software patents is that feature definition and implementation have been rolled into one. Patents were designed to protect implementation - that is, you can't patent having an engine in the car, but you can patent a specific design (implementation) of an engine. In the software world I feel like that distinction has been blurred.

Even if we assume that software is patentable, the bounce back effect should not be patentable. The reason is that all the novelty is in coming up with the feature itself. I don't know whether I could come up with the bounce back effect by myself. I know for a fact that I could implement it, and so could any sufficiently strong software engineer. There is no novelty in the implementation that is worthy of patent protection.

This is trade dress all over again hiding under a different name. It should be given a different status (just like business patents), and different time frames of protection. This way we still protect truly novel research in algorithms (pagerank for example), while eliminating 95% of the patents we as software engineers find so objectionable.
Please direct me to these efficient lawyers. I think everyone in the world would like to become their customer.

It's pretty clear to me that you have never been involved with "private litigation".
24/7 support of complex infrastructure? That's always going to be expensive :)
I would suggest a combination of SSH config, ZNC and Textual.
Other 'fun' fact: the guy who discovered that lead prevents 'knocking' in engines also discovered the usefulness of freon as a refrigerant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.)

His works probably did more environmental damage than those of anybody else in history.
As a note, it's really sad to see these kinds of articles. I do perhaps 90% of my home programming in Common Lisp, a language which is around 30 years old, but still has an active development community. Without modifications, I can run code from 30 years ago on a modern computer and have it return correctly. I have no particular belief that this will be true for Python, Ruby, Perl 5, Perl 6, C++, and a variety of other popular languages developed after Common Lisp was popularized and standardized. So much effort wasted upgrading your language instead of solving your problems[1].

It's something to think about with your software choice: every line is a legacy line for someone else to understand and compile/interpret/run. Can they do it in the future? Do you care? If so, think hard and- I recommend- choose a language which has a formal standard with multiple implementations.

[1] Obviously innovation is useful. But reinventing wheels into the same design isn't. Obviously Haskell and other research-y languages will change. I'm talking about production languages for production environments or for other things persisting over the 5-20+ year spans such as science.
Very few investors are going to turn down a $500M exit, even if it is only at a 2X multiple.

Giving your investors the ability to torpedo a deal of that magnitude seems to be a failure in its own right. So if you do get funding make sure you're not handing over control over future exits.

What's good enough for the founders should be good enough for the investors.

A good set of 'drag along/tag along' clauses will take nicely care of that possible scenario.
Does thunderbolt always use DMA? Perhaps if it's just being used as a screen output then it can turn DMA off but still work.
CODEMKRS Super Challenge - SuperBowl Hackathon
Why is C++ relatively “harder” to use/bad choice for a beginner?
This is why real reference checks rarely rely on the references you provide.
Do companies want to profit from this computer science research being done under a NDA? Don't they have to release these advances in the form of a product to earn a profit?

Then show me some products which demonstrate this "cutting-edge" computer science research.
I hope folks don't mind this rather off-topic question here. Is there a JavaScript-based equivalent to Django or Rails? My (limited) understanding is that node.js, Meteor et al are rather different beasts.
I have the same question as @hnwh: I'm using Knockout and really, really like it (more suited to my way of working than say Backbone), but considered that Angular could be a more advanced/featureful Knockout.

Can you elaborate a bit? Thanks!
The reason for why it hasn't been a problem for us is because we've been making heavy usage of SBT's support for sub-projects. Scala makes it easier than other languages to decouple components, so after a while you begin to spot possible sub-projects all over the place.

The project I'm working on right now is about 15kloc, but it's split in 3 sub-projects. Coupled with incremental (and continuous) compilation, this compilation speed issue hasn't been a problem for me.

Also, if you look around, many open-source projects built with Scala follow the same technique. It's quite sane too.
> Physical access should not equal compromise.

Physical access == compromise even for devices that are as simple as a hollow metal box.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe

Security ratings for those devices are measured in time. Basically, if you lose possession, it's just a matter of time. Digital security is both easier and harder, because all you're protecting there is information. If you wish for the information to be destroyed on tampering, then your job may be easier.

The only way for there to be hardening when physical access is lost is to have some form of layered defense in depth, the aim being giving the user enough time to send a command to wipe the device.
This doesn't strike me as falling to the category of "simplest of tasks."
I think the owner of this post was given money with Google to make it this post, he is praising Google+ and debunking facebook, everything he posted does not make sense to me
Well, we'll never know now, will we? :)
But I know that he knows that I know
This was asked on Reddit, and the answer was yes ...

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/15ydem/inception_is_...
In my opinion, Fortran is pretty good in the metrics of (1) easy, (2) safe, and (3) faster or as fast as C. Pretty much the perfect tool for those (poorly) self-taught coders to be productive and produce performant numerical code, without spending much time on learning the language.
Yep, physical access in general means game over. If its unlocked they can just clock you over the head and take the laptop and copy things. No need for fancy devices.