skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds like the Sufficiently Smart Compiler line of reasoning that was supposed to make Itanium the architecture of the future and has been forecast to make high-level languages faster than C any day now. In practice, the extra costs imposed by high-level languages (and in particular, the loss of memory management control) have outweighed the benefit of extra high-level information consistently for decades. And I see no reason why this will change.

In particular, the the optimizing VMs you are describing still have to be written in something. The proof is in the pudding: no serious language runtime is written in anything other than C or C++. The argument that C is being displaced will be an empty one until you start to see language runtimes being written in something else.

(Just to clarify, since another commenter missed this distinction earlier: I'm talking specifically about VMs/runtimes, not ahead-of-time compilers. Compilers are frequently written in non-C languages because an ahead-of-time transformation doesn't have the same stringent efficiency and resource usage requirements that language runtimes do).
It did better than I expected.
What is the most elegant line of code you've seen?
Time is even more complicated than that because of vagueness, either intentional or unintentional.

Humans represent time vaguely rather than precisely. Computers tend not to.

A while back, the British Library catalogue was put online as linked data. The library cataloguers had added details of author birth and death years but not always birth dates. But the data model normalised "1941" to "1941-01-01". (They fixed it after I moaned on Twitter.)

You should be able to represent in your data model, date-time library etc. vague dates and relative dates. When I say someone was born in 1941, I don't mean they are born at 1941-01-01T00:00:00Z. When I say that something happened on Thursday, I don't mean it happened at 2013-01-17T17:04:00Z. It may have happened at any time on Thursday.

If you store everything as Unix epoch seconds, good luck representing vagueness.

ISO 8601 gets around the problem rather neatly by being big-endian and allowing omission at any point. Wanna say 1941? "1941". Want to say January 1941? "1941-01". Want to say January 14, 1941? "1941-01-14". Want to get very detailed? You can add points of a second: "1941-01-14T12:14:03.0482Z". You can do timezones.

Eventually, we'll have an even better way of representing date-times that are more like bitmasks. We can then represent in a sane way the concept of opening hours. If you say the shop is open from 9am to 4:30pm Monday to Saturday, how do you do that?

If I am digitising an old text of unknown origin, and on a page it says "January 12", and on the page after that it says "January 15", can I represent those with a reference to an implicit but unknown year? I don't know the year, but I do know that the January 12 instance comes before the January 15 instance on the next page. And at some future point, we might deduce from circumstantial evidence what year it was and the sequential ordering will still make sense. Relative dates would be useful here.

ISO 8601 allows you to represent ordinal dates (the number of days since the beginning of the calendar year).

Can your date-time representation deal with moveable feasts like Easter?

Have a look at the WHAT WG Wiki page on Time to see more obscure use cases: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Time

Your date-time representation, storage format and calculation libraries are probably inadequate.
There aren't a bunch. Sugarsync and Dropbox only offer encrypted transport of your files. To actually encrypt the files/folders themselves requires a 3rd party piece.

Mega offers everything wrapped in encryption, so presumably, his company will have plausible deniability (zero knowledge) of the files/folders that his service is being used for.

From a technical standpoint, I also believe it makes de-duplication impossible but someone with more knowledge on that subject can comment on it.
Do advertisers get information on the specific users who click on their ads? Can you reverse-map an ad click into a Facebook profile?
YC doesn't control Dropbox. Whatever trust you have in a minor shareholder, it shouldn't translate to trust for the company.

There are other reasons as well: potential vulnerabilities in their software, malicious/crazy/corrupted employees, etc. Healthy need-to-know rule is enough to decide that if there's no reason your cloud provider should have access to your data, he shouldn't have it.
You can use an umbrella company to do all your accounting. Ten minutes at the end of each week doing time sheets, 30 minutes each month submitted receipts for write offs. Equipment costs can be deducted from taxes so they can end up being extremely cheap or free.

IR35 is a good point. If you have multiple contracts and don't work in any one place for more than two years you should avoid any questions around if it's really a contract or not. Most employed coders I know hardly stick around in a place for more than two years here in London.
The Value Of A Google Books PDF
I have little experience with the aviation industry besides once having been a student pilot, but I have a fair amount of experience in the medical device industry. If this were a medical device, there would not be a regulatory process specifically for changing batteries, but there would a process for changing anything about the design of the product.

Briefly, that means that a Risk Assessment of the proposed design change must be made, the design change will be controlled (i.e., Requirements, Design, Testing and Reviews of all phases will be performed and properly documented), then the Design Output must be reviewed for correctness and the results may be used to update the initial Risk Assessment if needed.

Similar processes will apply to an airliner, the question is will they be more or less rigorous.

So yeah, changing a critical component is a time consuming and expensive process.
"People approaching developers often dramatically underestimate the amount of development work, or the complexity of it."

I'd add underestimate the cost of a decent final product to that too.
Getting a TAI timestamp is impossible because the BIPM (the authority that defines TAI) does not want TAI used for such purposes. Without approval from the authority nobody will undertake to construct the technology to provide TAI to an operational system. Without a source for TAI, any system which claims to be using TAI is making the same mistake that POSIX made with UTC. To wit: Creating a new thing which has the name of an existing thing but does not have the properties of the existing thing. This is a recipe for confusion.
On the advertising side, I don't think it matters what the sharing settings are. We have been targeting on very specific parameters with quite a large reach for a while now.
It's still optimal because your preflop play with KK is going to be exactly the same as with AA. Similarly, you are going to play 9s8c exactly the same as 9h8d.
No, this isn't possible.
Forget the special characters and get more entropy from the sheer length of the password. Now if they restrict that, you have a problem.

(Also use a decent password manager that can remember randomly-generated 30-40 character strings for you.)
Im sorry, but the best computer programs available will beat the best chess player in the world 90% of the time[1].

Also, while I dont doubt your friend is good at poker, that does not mean he has an understanding of the algorithmic advances in game theory as they apply to stochastic games. Further, simply knowing him does not make you an expert, even if you had a background in poker botting. How do we know that a game needs to be perfectly solved in order for it to beat the best players? Would the best nlhe hu player in the world beat the best bot at 100bb stacks? Yes. Will this be the case for the foreseeable future? Probably not. My point is that you cannot speak conclusively about a field like this with so little knowledge of what is going on academically to advance it.

1: http://blog.chess.com/Clavius/most-impressive-computer-game-...
.. because you are feeding it into an evaluation engine. Thats why. If you wanted the expression to be evaluated into a string , then you would use JSP standard way of doing it which is <%=whatever>.
I'm sure Boeing does, but the FAA has doubts about those. They need more input. I'm sure Tesla has more batteries in the field for longer periods and probably harsher vibration environments. This is engineering and safety, not finance. Dollars and the length of your list are not helpful metrics.
this is not true. suit simplifications can be made without any loss to the value of the solution, but saying AA=KK is not a lossless simplification
Running LaTeX on Chrome OS? Frankly, I'm not sure.
What was the prosecutor's last offer two days before he died?
I don't know if I would say impossible to succeed. But by demanding full price for the OS, even on low end phones, it meant that Nokia rolled out far fewer windows phones. I think that was bad for Microsoft and Nokia, and indicative of old school desktop thinking on Microsoft's part.
Has Microsoft ever produced a good version 1? Maybe XBox? I don't know much about games. But for the most part I think what MS is good at is slowly improving a turd until it's really quite nice. DOS, Windows, IE, Office, and Visual Studio were all much worse than their competition initially, but successful by their fourth versions or so.

But I don't know if MS has the heart anymore to go through a few rounds of failure to reach success.
That seems excessively cynical to give someone who is sharing something they're obviously quite proud of.
Text stream manipulation command in pure python
It is * technically* possible. Not sure if FB allows the advertisers to do that or not, but internally they would almost certainly be using this information for targeted ad placements.
Nice analogy. I'm hoping to find a girl that doesn't yet realize she's pretty enough to be a model, and hasn't yet developed that diva attitude ;)
Underdressed at CES 2013
Successful test of laser link to the moon.
As long as a limit of 2GB is okay for you, you can have both the privacy and the "trustability": https://spideroak.com/faq/category/privacy__passwords/
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#Non-synchronous_Netwo...

The Unix timestamp 915148800 (from the table) represents two times (separated by one second from each other).
Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz’s Experiment with Images
Having done this type of consulting myself, I could never work around the maintenance issue.

You likely setup the entire system so if something goes wrong, whether its you're fault or not, you're on the line. It's all about reputation. And if you tarnish that by leaving a paid client behind when their server catches on fire, it will be remembered negatively.

It's hard to do this type of contract work continuously. You build up a portfolio of apps that you have to maintain. Most of the time you're clients are out of cash.

Equity is great but it doesn't put food on the table today. On the other hand it puts you in contact with some really great ideas and you get to play startup founder several times and you gain enormous perspective on what works and what doesn't.
"30 Minutes until #Mega. Lets make it 5% of the Internet this time ;-)"

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292682270324703235
Iranians thinks the CIA killed Aaron Swartz
I hate that Mixpanel and Google Analytics APIs return data in timezones, and the former doesn't tell you what the timezone is while the latter in v2 of their API can give you the wrong timezone.
"30 Minutes until #Mega. Lets make it 5% of the Internet this time ;-)"
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292682270324703235
Marketers have certainly been able to do "people who added our app who are x and like x" queries for a while.

The only difference is that ordinary people can do it with their friends and no obscure query syntax.
That's how Facebook Ads worked/works.
> Also, does the problem that the leap second solves actually warrant all of the problems that it causes?

Definitely not. The only benefit of leap seconds is keeping UTC in sync with solar time: the sun is highest in the sky at 12:00 noon at Greenwich.

But in the modern world, synchronizing solar time and clocks to <1 minute is of no value to anyone but nostalgic astronomers.
Your API should return Unix time. The end.
I updated my win 8 release preview with the $40 price. And i have read online that pirated versions can also be upgraded. Maybe this is a mistake Microsoft means to make. People who pirate mostly aren't going to pay anyways, this way they at least get some money and get to convert non genuine users to genuine ones. A win-win for everyone.
To clarify, I'm not saying $500 for just the car, but $500 for the car payment, gas, insurance and savings for future maintenance.

I think $500, when you factor in all of that, is a fairly modest car.

My wife and I have a Honda Fit that is paid off (I would call this a pretty modest car), and when a car reaches a certain point in its life, you may'll have more maintenance to pay for.
Use SpiderOak[0] then. They assure strong zero-knowledge privacy and, while the client isn't technically open source, much of it is completely unobfuscated python. I definitely trust SpiderOak with my data. It also has more features than Dropbox or Drive... You can set syncs as between a subset of all devices, create an arbitrary number of syncs, and create some backups which aren't syncs too. It's quite nice.

Another service which is open source is Tarsnap[1]. It doesn't do syncing or have a free tier, but it's definitely trustable online storage.

In both of these cases the encryption keys are not on the servers.

An additional provider which claims to offer cloud storage/backup with zero-knowledge is Crashplan[3]. I wouldn't trust them as much as either of the previous options, but I still think they're telling the truth. I note it partly because I really like their approach. You can a) let them keep the key and thus you can still reset your password etc, b) let them keep the key so you don't have to transfer it manually to all crashplan-using computers, but have it encrypted on their end with a password only you know (can't be reset), or c) provide your own key which they claim they'll never know. These three tiers make sense and at each one you sacrifice some usability (such as the web-interface being unusable at (c) I think) in exchange for security.

So yeah, dropbox and google drive are both obviously able to look at your data, but that doesn't preclude using other cloud storage providers. There's many that are trustworthy and have the code to prove it. In the case of Mega, I'd trust them less than the typical one. They're big enough that the government will notice them... they'll need to make it usable (allow password resets etc), it looks like you upload unencrypted data and then they encrypt it server-side (edit: turns out it's client side javascript encryption. Downside there is it'll probably be a bit slow)... All of these are problems. If it's not sent already encrypted with a key they've never touched then the government could court-order them to alter the software to store unencrypted copies or to keep encryption keys. Since they're the one giving you the key they obviously know it at some point, however briefly, and they are thus vulnerable. Forcing users to generate and supply keys just isn't user-friendly on a web-only application. The only way you can make that work, as SpiderOak did, is have the user download an application which seamlessly does all the crypto work.

[0]: https://spideroak.com/
[1]: https://www.tarsnap.com/
[2]: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/articles/encryption_ke...
I don't mean to offend, but I still fail to understand the excitement around this.
Why the dismissive comment? And how do you justify the blanket statement that cases are useless, given how many are sold all the time?

Your comment tells me you're the type of guy who, if given the chance to print an actual phone, might just comment "Its not like you are printing an iphone/samsung - just a useless nokia". Some people can never be satisfied, I guess.
Keep in mind most acquisitions for product integration kinda fail, well at least most of the acquisitions I hear off. The company I work for is small printing co, they made a small acquisition (sub $2M or $3M)a few years back, I doubt they got more than $500k in revenue from it.
Host your own hackathons and make them open to students. This way not only do you build a camaraderie with the student body, but you now also have a talent pool to draw from if you say, want to do a large project or found a startup.
Yes, and there are deductions for charity and this and that. And some of these deductions start to phase out with the more money you make.

The point is that you can't take two people's incomes and assume you know what their tax bills will be.
Kerr's writeup also relies on "pre-crime", heaping punishment on Aaron for something he might do (release the documents publicly), but, crucially, never did.

I do think it's a strong possibility that Aaron intended to do so, but I also have my doubts. There was another instance where Aaron obtained documents en masse but did not "liberate" them: from Westlaw; he contributed to a statistical study on them. The results were published in the Stanford Law Review.

I cringe at the thought of Aaron's life being ruined over guesses about his future behavior.
Doesn't EC2 come with Windows instances? You could try that.
I think Hushmail made the same claims, until compelled by law enforcement to send altered client software to the machines of suspects.

Not sure how these other companies operate, but unless the user hand-encrypts files with openssl, gpg, pgp, etc., then the trusted client software has the potential to be a vector for compromise.
Most big tech products are like that. The first Android and iOS devices were pretty crap (but showed promise).
Introducing Yeoman: Express Stack
you forgot Wuala, which has a client for every OS (Java).

http://www.wuala.com/en/learn/technology
the benchmark said the Pi can handle 500 requests/sec, which shows that benchmarks and real world are very different
I get the "technically possible" argument above, but this is what I'm driving at - targeted advertising is one-way (you can target people, but don't know who they are), while Graph Search is two way (you can target people, and find out who they are), which is why I don't think the comparison between the two is all that apt.
But I think it's the serif fonts that are ugly you insensitive clod!
Those tools present their own problems but they aren't bots. Bots are making decisions and acting on them, not simply providing additional information for players to incorporate into their decisions.
I imagine, since you say you love C# are you a .Net programmer? Others have pointed out that .Net programmers are Microsoft's biggest cheerleaders these days and have a conflict of interest in speaking about Microsoft's future since maybe they have staked their career on .NET.
True. But also at the end of 2013 even more employees will be bringing their own devices - phones and tablets to work so they don't have the enterprise lap top. These devices will run Android and iOS in a roughly 50/50 share of OS distribution.

The enterprise supports the work their employees need to do by giving them the traditional desktop tools - this is Microsofts market and always has been. But more and more those tools are overkill for the job the employee needs to accomplish so they are turning to the tools that work for them in their personal lives.
I've seen emscripten-generated JS crash Safari before. It's not a performance issue; jsc is plenty fast and beats SpiderMonkey in most benchmarks. However, emscripten seems to exercise certain corners of JS that pose stability problems for jsc.
To bad that libertarianism is not held in high regard here any more.
I am happy to live in Vienna as it is a great city, but governmental overreach was recently demonstrated by a trial against some animal rights activist based on trumped up "terrorism" charges.
And while they were acquitted with the judge stating her disgust with the police and prosecution their livelihoods were mostly ruined.
I do not agree with their opinions, but they should be able to express them. (Apparently the police investigation was done after the owner of a clothing chain got annoyed by the incessant protests in front of his stores for selling fur products)
Pyreshark - A Wireshark plugin for writing dissectors in Python
Compounding Aaron's tragic death with another tragedy (video at marker 32:05)
I swear, if I read the word fondleslab one more time...
Upgrade business isn't really a big source of funds compared with pre-installs. This time Microsoft offered a cut-rate deal that it said (last October) would last until January 31.

I suspect that PC makers like Microsoft having a high retail price for Windows. It makes cheap laptops look better value.
What problem does Windows RT solve? Aside from niche use cases for IT types, nothing I can see. Potential customers seem to agree -- they're not buying it.
The Nike+ Accelerator will host 10 companies for a 3 month startup accelerator.
Anyone want to test a webkit nightly? I don't have a desktop machine handy tight now to test on :(

Or even just a bug report at bugs.webkit.org

Thanks :)
The dominant operation is recalling how to copy something and actually going through the steps to copy it, not anything related to disk IO. At least, as people experience it it is.
The obvious solution would be to get rid of leap seconds entirely, and let UTC and solar time (when sun is highest at Greenwich) drift apart.

Sun rising 30 seconds later every century is not really a problem in my opinion.
As if Lessig's feeling of extreme loss isn't already justified and understandable given their years-long friendship, Lessig's comments punctuate the grief harder than I thought was possible. Lawrence, it's not your fault!
Well yes and no. My idea is a little different, but I'd need the SM crowd to be able to have enough revenue to build it, so my worry would be that I wouldn't be able to get enough people to allow me to work more on developing the part that I'm sure there's a market for.
I am nearing the end of a "crash course" code lesson and have no intention of creating a company on this knowledge anytime in the near future.

However... I would like to start building out some of those "annoying itch" ideas I have been sitting on and feel this enables me not only to prototype those out, but also allows me to have a half-intelligent conversation about my idea with someone who is a far better dev than me.
I thought they lost that domain and the forbes author was just made a mistake. All of the recent links have pointed to kim.com or kim.com/mega
No search? Browsing through page upon page is going to get tired soon.
> And all it takes to store a time like that is a 64-bit integer and it is very convenient. And a lot of software do precisely that. Most timestamps are just that: they don't care about "real world" details like leap-seconds, {23,24,25}hours per day, etc.

Your claim that using Unix Time saves you from worrying about leap seconds is incorrect. Unix Time goes backwards when a leap second occurs, which can screw up a lot of software. Check out Google's solution to the problem, which is to "smear" the leap second over a period of time before it actually occurs: http://googleblog.blogspot.in/2011/09/time-technology-and-le...

Practically no software uses true seconds since the epoch; if it did then simple operations like turning an epoch time into a calendar date would require consulting a table of leap seconds, and would give up the invariant that every day is exactly 86,400 seconds. Whether this was the right decision or not is debatable, but it is a mistake to think that using Unix Time saves you from all weirdness surrounding civil time.
64-bit Ubuntu -- 0.7s

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes...