skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This power does not come without a price. Ruby is slow. Ruby is generally recognized as being twice as slow as Python, and at least an order of magnitude slower than C++ or Java.

The last two statements don't mean the first is true. Ruby's power is not the reason it's slow. Smalltalk VMs are proof by existence that the Ruby model can be fast. (See: Self, Strongtalk, Gemstone.) MagLev showed that Ruby is basically just an alternative Smalltalk syntax.

Charles Nutter, one of the creators of the JRuby VM for the Ruby language, recently posted an article about optimizations that could be made to the VM, and he improves Ruby performance by as much as twenty times by removing much of Ruby’s power and breaking compatibility.

"Remove much of Ruby's power"? Around 0.2% of Charles's speed-up came from removing the ability to override the primitive math operations. Other than that, his speedups removed none of Ruby's power.

(And nit-picking: Ruby is probably the most powerful programming language on the planet for creating DSLs, or domain specific languages. It can do this because any class or object can be extended, any method overridden, any constant undefined and redefined, and so on, and so forth.

Not true:

>> class StrangeArray < Array; def [](x); x; end; end
nil
a = StrangeArray.new(10)
=> [nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil]
>> a.map{|x| x}
=> [nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil] # wrong
>> (0..(a.size - 1)).map{|x| a[x]}
=> [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] # right

I.e., the built-in implementation of Array#map statically refers to the built-in implementation of Array#[].)

(Edited to correct example, as pointed out by hjdivad)
smalltalk is generaly slow, and it has the same calling system as ruby.

in smalltalk, methods with the same name don't exist. every method on a object has an unique selector. The selector plays exactly the same role as the signature in java there is no difference on this aspect.
Heist (Scheme in Ruby) 0.2 adds proper list support, better documentation
I don't think there's a recommended text at all. If it's like the last one they put online (minus iTunes), all the reading material will be PDFs on the course's site.

Keep an eye out here for when they start posting the PDFs and other materials: http://cs193p.stanford.edu
Black/White hole radiation from dispersive theories [hep-th/0903.2224]
MySQL and Microsoft's Entity Framework
> For example: in Java, methods with the same name but different argument types ("overloaded") are statically bound; whereas in Smalltalk, they are dynamically bound.

In Smalltalk you simply have messages. An object either responds to one or it doesn't, there's no concept of overloading. A method that looks the same, but has a different number of arguments is a different method.

For example, in Java you might have a print method which takes a string, or a method with the same name which takes a format string and a variable number of replacements:

String print(String s) { ... }
String print(String s, Object... v) { ... }

Same name, different signatures.

In Smalltalk, those methods would have different names:

print:f [...]
print:f args:v [...]

Where the names of the methods are print: and `print:args:` respectively.

Smalltalk generally closer to Python than C in terms of performance.
Cool stuff. I love using posterous, pretty much covers everything I need.

The only thing that stands out might be a slightly nicer post-editing experience online, but I only have to edit posts every once and awhile. The email optimization is beautifully executed.
Lorentz violation at high energy [astro-ph/0505267]
New design, traffic stats etc at alexa
No more gossipy than the TechCrunch article that this post addresses.
I think one thing especially for people coming to web development from other angles in programming is getting used to the fact that you have to know so many technologies / languages to get the job done.

In the early days of web apps, you could mostly get by with Perl, SQL, HTML and a little bit of Javascript for mouseovers and whatnot. Framework? CGI.pm, baby.

Now you generally need HTML, CSS, Javascript, a Javascript framework, a backend language of choice, a framework of choice in that language, a high-performance backend language of choice for the critical bits, and SQL.

I did web apps from 1997 to 2001 and then picked back up in early 2008. It was pretty dizzying at first just knowing where to start. In the systems / multimedia world where I lived in the 7 years between it was C or C++ and a framework.

So what's the connection to the story? I think it's in the web world, perhaps as a result of its relative infancy, we apparently have to get used to the fact that the right solution to a problem is often using mixed-mode programming where individual tools are selected for individual tasks -- that development abilities in the web world is as much a question of breadth as depth. We shouldn't be so disenfranchised that our tools aren't general purpose.
If the bubble is unstable then it probably just needs constant modulation, meaning the FTL ship is flown more like a helicopter than a rocket ship. That makes it more maneuverable.
Most professors/departments (at least, in my experience) are very open minded, but often unaware about these things. Just let them know (nicely).
Twitter-specific. OAuth is a great standard but doesn't really provide standardized methods of extracting user information from an OAuth connected API. With Twitter you can call verify_credentials to get all of the information, so you can actually use OAuth both as an API access mechanism as well as a user recognition mechanism. Hope that explains a little bit.
Also pretty much any lisp with some type of syntactic macro system.
That's the reason you spread it against a basket of them instead of against a single one :)
I don't see how pointing out poor english is pretentious. Especially when it's not a case of someone speaking it as their second language, but someone trying to put on airs and getting it wrong.
You'd have instability, but not necessarily consistent loss of purchasing power which is what you get with an inflationary ccy.
E Text Editor: Releasing the Source
Lesson: Charge your users enough to pay affiliates big money and you'll have an unlimited salesforce.
Yes, Ruby is OK - buuut: I would like a language that is good for everything. I don't really understand the argument that "Ruby was only replaced for stuff it wasn't appropriate for". Some languages are good for everything, so why make the effort to learn languages that can not do everything? Yes, there is the DSL stuff, but atm I am not sure if I really care so much for it.

For example, yesterday I caused an infinite loop in my Rails controller because I forgot the "@" in front of a variable that had the same name as the action - so Ruby interpreted it as a method call, not a variable reference. Being able to call methods without "()" is part of the Ruby-DSL stuff, but I wonder if typing "()" would not actually be the lesser pain in the end. I probably lose much more time to hunting such bugs than I lose time typing ().
I like what I'm seeing here.

However, am I wrong to think that this is still a terrible phishing accident waiting to happen?

I guess the worst that can happen, at this point, is that someone phishes your Twitter password. Assuming that nobody is crazy enough to use Twitterauth for logging into email or (god help us) a bank account, all one can do with someone's Twitter password is log in to Twitter and other Twitter applications.

But, wait... doesn't Tipjoy let a thief empty my bank account by Tweeting money to other people?

[Scramble to read the Tipjoy FAQ.]

Ah, the black hat can only give away the amount that is in my Tipjoy account, which has to be funded via (e.g.) Paypal. But can the thief log into Tipjoy using my Twitter credentials and then initiate a transfer to Tipjoy from Paypal or my bank, via stored credentials on Tipjoy? I have no idea.

But perhaps you're only allowed to send out a tiny amount at a time. Or there are steps to take to roll back the transactions in case of fraud (credit card chargebacks, if nothing else) -- perhaps this is a problem for my credit card company, Paypal, and/or Tipjoy, but not for me. And presumably I and/or my followers might notice fraud fairly quickly, since outgoing Tweets are much more visible than (say) outgoing email.

(Perhaps the next business opportunity is a service that monitors your Twitter feed for suspicious-looking activity that might not be your doing... ;)

Does Twitter have an appeal process for removing forged Tweets from one's account?
Based on their white paper on MTBF of hard disks, I'd guess that they avoid favoring any single vendor to lower the chance of a bad batch of drives all failing at once.
He's not great because he ignored me, he's great because he made Facebook. So even if he was a complete socialite, he'd have my respect. But I like that instance because it made me think that he wasn't primarily making Facebook for money, he was making it for his own privacy.

There are good reasons to be social to people. I'm a social person. That said, I respect immensely the people who don't feel pressured to talk to every person that writes to him.
The Crash-Test Solution: Using Physics to predict economic downturns
I'd say the main problem with Smalltalk is that it tries to pretend the OS doesn't really exist. Which is fine as long as you stay in Smalltalkland, but around the edges of the application where it has to talk to databases, the filesystem, the network, etc it gets very messy. I dare say if you could work in a 100% Smalltalk environment it would be very slick, but Smalltalk very much doesn't play nicely with others. Where as (just as an example) Python does.
Don't compare Facebook to Twitter. It's enormous in comparison. Twitter may be getting lots of press, but my friends who've tried it have nearly all abandoned their accounts.
A successful investment strategy would have been to short just about everything. The entire market is tanking. I somehow doubt if MBA's weren't running companies that things would have been any different. Should all CEO's be "hackers"?

I mean how outrageous is it that business leaders sought out graduate work in business? And Harvard, pffft. Any clown can get an MBA there, they have no standards. (Sadly, GWB might ruin my sarcasm here)

I still don't understand the ridiculous unfounded MBA hate. Did you score low on the GMAT and are trying to justify it? Did you have a negative encounter with one?
I imagine they've already had plans drawn up for multiple scenarios. How many squads would they need to dispatch to how many server rooms before things went black? And don't forget, the NSA has hardware in high places.

http://www.google.com/q=nsa+att+server+rooms
Related note: is there a "Twitter Helper" somewhere, ie a code snippet that renders a Twitter status message (with links the author ,@references and URLs)? Needing one right now.
MIT virus battery could power cars, electronic devices
President gets power to shut down the Internet?
I did one in PHP a few weeks back, which was a quick port of a Javascript version I found via Google:

function twitterize_text($raw_text) {
$output = $raw_text;

// parse urls
$pattern = '/([A-Za-z]+:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9-_]+\.[A-Za-z0-9-_:%&\?\/.=]+)/i';
$replacement = '<a href="$1">$1</a>';
$output = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $output);

// parse usernames
$pattern = '/[@]+([A-Za-z0-9-_]+)/';
$replacement = '@<a href="http://twitter.com/$1">$1</a>';
$output = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $output);

// parse hashtags
$pattern = '/[#]+([A-Za-z0-9-_]+)/';
$replacement = '#<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23$1">$1</a>';
$output = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $output);

return $output;
}
Yelp Focuses On Mobile, New And Improved iPhone App Coming Soon
This Rails template uses Twitter OAuth, meaning you don't give away your username and password for Twitter. If an application "goes rogue" and starts posting unsolicited tweets or doing other nefarious practices, you can simply revoke access to the application from your Twitter account's "Connections" tab.

Twitter has a "Delete" option for Tweets so you could just manually remove any forged tweets. Of course you should still always be careful what services you associate with your Twitter account.
Clojure does a good job of introducing new idioms specifically for Java support.

From their docs:

(doto (new java.util.HashMap) (.put "a" 1) (.put "b" 2))
(.. System (getProperties) (get "os.name"))
Tcl gave me my first taste of scripting, but even more of a revelation was that I could bury a Tcl interpreter in a C program and use Tcl to control all the C modules. It made it really easy to dynamically change the behavior of a running server. Of course security was a bit of an issue, but in 1992 the net was still relatively calm.
Video Conferencing With Microsoft Live Meeting
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That's a very curious license.

So you have all the source, but if you build something based on it, only licensed owners of E can use it?

edit: I take it back, you do not appear to get the source to ecore.lib, which appears to contain licensing code and perhaps other things.
Actual link to source: http://github.com/etexteditor/e/tree/master
Google-Twitter deal: good or bad ?
Fresh & funny iPhone apps
Wow, great! I just signed up for Posterous a couple of days ago and really enjoy using it.

I'd like to see Disqus integration, though :)
"Hackers agree the toughest nut to crack is Firefox running on Windows."

Is this generally agreed by those of you who post on Hacker News?
Azul's system is proprietary and only runs on special hardware. The openjdk that's in common use has had essentially no work done on green threads.

And from your link "we have a lite microkernel style OS; we can easily handle 100K runnable threads" it's not the VM that's handling it.
Makes sense: twitter is a great awesome search tool. For instance, I find myself searching "media temple" when my server is crawling just to see if anyone else is experiencing the same issues.
TrailBehind Beta: Please give us a test and tell us what to do
How Geico Wastes $90MM a Year on SEM
The more and more people I talk to, the more often I find myself taking a militant stance against gigantic search engine marketing (SEM) spending. My position is simple: if you create relevant, frequently generated content that’s high-quality and of a significant volume, you don’t need AdWords. That’s it.
> As food gets more expensive, people will have less children.

Food has to get really expensive before birth rates decline. Survival rates get hit first by lack of food.

> Birth rates are below replacement rates in a lot of countries that keep their population growing mostly by immigration.

The countries that have low birth rates are rich, not poor. To be crude, TV is one of the most effective better birth control devices. (The poor countries with low/shrinking population have man-made disasters.)
"Their process begins by taking the derivatives of every variable observed with respect to every other -- a mathematical way of measuring how one quantity changes as another changes."

In an ideal world, that could be done. But am I the only one who is wondering where noise comes in? All measurements are noisy, and computing derivatives from noisy data sounds sketchy.

"Then the computer creates equations at random using various constants and variables from the data. It tests these against the known derivatives, keeps the equations that come closest to predicting correctly, modifies them at random and tests again, repeating until it literally evolves a set of equations that accurately describe the behavior of the real system. Technically, the computer does not output equations, but finds "invariants" -- mathematical expressions that remain true all the time, from which human insights can derive equations."

Once again, if the data is noisy, then the program can't find true invariants. Perhaps it can "guess" them. I would like to see that source code and the data sets these guys have used.
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Yet, there's nothing in the license keeping you from downloading it, removing the license code yourself, and running it registration-free. (Your personal sense of morality may differ, I suppose.)

For curiosity's sake, what would be the legality of a patch to remove said licensing code from the code?
But aren't you also struck by his naivete? His sincere belief that all these huge entities would protect the shareholders. The people in charge with performance based compensation which at the same time has no downside from too much risk, would protect the shareholders?

How was it not obvious to him, the chairman of the federal reserve, that this is guaranteed to go exactly as it has.

He had a front row seat at the LTCM fiasco, and apparently didn't learn much from it.
Nope. Options don't become available for several weeks after an IPO. There needs to be some historical price data to feed the black-scholes formula in order to price the options.
> Snowe echoed her colleague, saying, "if we fail to take swift action, we, regrettably, risk a cyber-Katrina."

What is a cyber katrina, can you have a disaster of magnitude on the internet? I'd much rather they be worried about tangible things like bridges and roads. I really don't understand this quote at all.

And I would really like to see internet companies turn off their connections in order to aid in prevent such an emergency that would be an interesting day.
Thanks, I think I can borrow some of your RegExp's ;-)
I'd worry it might run afoul of the DMCA since it would be a tool for removing copyright protection
He doesn't mention the Erlang scheduler and processes. Shouldn't be that hard to hack into the JVM, but as I've commented elsewhere, that's only half the battle...
> And that'd spur people to get fuel efficient cars: if everyone switched from an SUV to a Prius or Fit, the amount of oil saved is several times the amount used in agriculture.

Not so fast. Building cars costs significant energy. The result can easily be more energy consumption.

Not to mention that switching doesn't necessarily work. In most cases, the only realistic alternative to "big car" is multiple vehicle even if the big vehicle's capacity goes unused most of the time. Owning two vehicles, one big for "those days" and a small one for the rest of the time is usually more expensive than owning just the big one unless the small one is very cheap.

I've posted the arithmetic. If the big car gets 15-20mpg, the small one has to cost less than $4k even if it gets 50mpg. (My arithmetic was conservative because I just looked at purchase and gas, which ignore many of the costs associated with a second car.) If the big car gets 25, it's almost impossible to save money with an additional vehicle.

And no, renting doesn't work out significantly better.
You are correct, I was pointing to cliff click's blog as he his giving back to the community.

Look at http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2007/03/a_nonblocking_h.h... : an implementation of a non blocking hashmap without lock that scales beautifully on a bunch of cores without the need of their hardware (http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-scale-lib)

As per actor on the JVM open source projects are blooming around such as http://code.google.com/p/actorom/.

Alex Miller did a nice review here of the solutions out there: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2009/jw-03-actor-co...
You’re not a social media expert
Robot achieves scientific first, discovers new knowledge w/o human input
The Beast unveiled: inside a Google server
I'm not sure, but I think your counterexample is meant to show you can't replace `Array#pop`. However, that's not what you show -- you show that irb depends on `Array#pop` for its normal usage.

Consider:

$ ruby -e "class Array; def pop; self.first; end; end; puts [1,2,3].pop"
1
Google’s Phone Apps for the Blind, and Everyone Else
It's nice, they added some new stats. I will keep using compete.com, but it's interesting to see it isn't dead.
Well Scala does that () thing too. On the other hand, an infinite loop in Scala would run much more quickly than in Ruby.
Really? Damn, I was looking forward to meeting Snake Plissken
MacHeist 3 Bundle
As a student, I disagree. The professors think this is the best way to upload documents to the web. They spend a good 5 minutes every time they try to upload a document, thinking their labor is going into providing a consistent user interface for the students, but they generally dislike it also. Of course, they aren't. It's so hard to find content in BlackBoard that it causes students anxiety. Which they take to their professors, who are themselves frustrated with BlackBoard. Those conversations never go well.

What we are finding is that a lot of medical school students are setting up their own community sites off campus in part to provide an alternate way to access the material.

In general, the professors also dislike it. They have already moved to different software for grading. They only keep BlackBoard because they think the students want it. There are an essentially infinite number of ways to get documents to students electronically.
Linux Foundation says it's time to ditch Microsoft's FAT
Ruby is generally recognized as being twice as slow as Python

Am I the only one who has never heard of this? I'd definitely be curious to see some relevant benchmarks if anyone has any.
This linked article:

http://blog.headius.com/2009/04/how-jruby-makes-ruby-fast.ht...

is really outstanding. It shows you exactly why a language like Ruby is inherently slower than a language like Java. Mainly, because Ruby does a lot more work to give you the cool, dynamic capabilities that make people like Ruby in the first place. Of course, much of the cool work on speeding up dynamic languages like Javascript and Ruby is all about analyzing code to find places where you can safely make assumptions about the code (+ is not overridden here, so I can use the built in integer addition operator, etc.).

(I probably oversimplified that, but I hope it captures the general idea.)

The "Duby" language at the end makes me think of Common Lisp and how you can optionally declare types the compiler can use to compile faster code. Would it be worthwhile to add optional typing to Ruby?
I'd take this one step further to point out that web programming is a different beast from desktop programing in that you are attempting to tie a fault-tolerant, low-bandwidth channel (the internet) to a strict, high-bandwidth channel (the CPU/RAM). Add to that impedance mismatches from latency, and I think anyone who expects to have a full stack written using only one language is kidding themselves!
Stochastic Models of User-Contributory Web Sites
Here's the explanation of why the license is the way it is, and why the code is only partially open:

http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/opencompany
Tell HN: Happy Cheese Weasel Day
The only day devoted to IT workers, cheese, and weasels (probably not in that order)

What's there not to like about it? (Especially since I camped out on the domain last night -- www.CheeseWeaselDay.org)

Now I just need to SEO and AdSense up the site.

Any ideas?
It's a hurriance in the tubes! You have to close the tube to stop the hurricane!
I am not on BB's side here, but this is a smart strategy. :)
Their "Open Company" concept is rather interesting too. Almost a sort of e-Kibbutz.
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