skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Conventional wisdom says that no programming language is faster than C, and all higher level languages (such as Haskell) are doomed to be much slower because of their distance from the real machine.

No: conventional wisdom just says that no higher level programming language is consistently faster than C AND/OR better to reason about with regards to memory consumption and runtime behaviour.

(Conventional wisdom also adds fortran, forth, Ada and C++ in the same "speedy" category).

Conventional wisdom adds that micro-benchmarks of some BS outlier examples (Java where the JIT can take advantage of some known condition to do something clever, etc) do not matter in real life programs, which are far more complex.

Conventional wisdom also adds that C to be speedier it doesn't even have to be highly optimized or carefully crafted by some C programming wizard or anything. Merely avoiding gross mistakes (like using an algorithm of the wrong complexity for the job) will do.

Conventional wisdom concludes that writing in your high level language in an unconventional (non idiomatic) way to get to "as fast a C" speeds is bullshit too, because it doesn't represent idiomatic (and far more common) high level language use.
Show HN: Smart, Simple, Secure sharing on Android
The Rust compiler was also written in OCaml (until it could be self-hosted in Rust itself).
Fascinating story but how is Apple genius here? Was it Apple's all along to acquire Lala, let Lala's engineers go before they exercised their options, somehow made Color a failure, then bought the all the engineers back on the cheap? The real genius (or at least real good biz person) in this story is Bill Nguyen, Apple just did what makes sense for them, it just happens that two of their acquisitions are Bill's companies.
That was the first time I've seen it in its entirety as well. I'm glad to finally have the opportunity to do so.

It's definitely one of most moving speeches of all time, but being a pessimist, I can't help but wonder what Dr. King would have thought about equal rights for atheists, homosexuals, and women.
Umm, I own Boeing stock, I have friends who work there, I have friends who have retired from there. I have a healthy respect for them, and I have bought Ford stock on the strength of Mullally's performance at Boeing.
Since a bunch of NASA guys have gone to SpaceX and since Toyota and Daimler both work with Tesla (both are multi-billion dollar companies), I think the zip-code/ballpark analogy went too far. The company is younger and smaller, granted, but I wouldn't put it past them to put a serious dent in Boeing's businesses.

And, about the criteria being narrow: yes, of course it is.
Can non-Europeans think?
SpaceX is being funded by governments. Oh wait, no, hum, many of its customers are governments. How is that different than Boeing's space business?
Show HN: MyFollowerList. The easiest way keep in touch with your followers.
Does that mean that if a door isn't locked, it is an invitation to enter my house? Take a look at the case of Andrew Auernheimer (mentioned in the OP) who could be sentenced up to 10 years in prison for accessing data on a web server that was unsecured (http://www.technewsdaily.com/15581-hacker-found-guilty-despi...)
"This is nothing more than a publicity stunt."

Agree and also cocky hubris as well. As if to imply that Boeing doesn't have capable people coming from someone who while certainly has had his achievements doesn't have that long of a history. 787 was a huge "bet the company" type undertaking. It's a black eye but they will fix it. Nobody can accuse Boeing as a company of just being lucky either with their history.
> make a major impact on the GDP

I appreciate the sentiment, but it's worth pointing out that online retail I the US only accounts for about 5-7% of the market. The UK is doing probably the highest at around 12-15%. So it might make a blip, but don't get too carried away
So basically this is a way to change git's verbs? I haven't ever found them that obtrusive. No worse than learning some language syntax
Developer suggests turning Detroit's Belle Island into indie city-state
If people put their money in the bank or the market, then companies are spending the money instead of the consumers. The companies tend to spend the money on either capital goods, which still need to be produced just like consumer goods, or they spend the money on people who will in turn spend on consumer goods. No one is advocating hiding money under the mattress.
I feel one would benefit from learning the few simple commands of git versus this abstraction.

once this abstraction leaks (and it will), one will be forced to the git docs anyways.

my $0.02
Granted, things do go wrong, but Boeing is in a pinch. They were years behind on delivery of the 787, they now have 45 787s grounded, they can't make new deliveries to customers, and that means their supply chain is getting all jacked. I think they should look long and hard at all their options.

As far as proving me wrong, perhaps it's because I did my research on Tesla too. And in the interest of disclosure, I own Tesla stock as well as Boeing stock.
Professors are the producers and consumers of these journals. So, a group of your peers invests time reviewing your work and giving you helpful feedback, and you pay them back by reviewing other people's work.

Basically, it's a zero sum game. So if everybody paid for the reviews they did and then got paid for doing reviews, a lot of money would change hands and everybody would end up with the same amount of money they had to start with.

Of course, the companies that _publish_ the journals take a cut. But that's what it is, a cut. There are really communities of professors participating in a zero sum game.
Seconded. I'd add that languages like Python hide an enormous amount of not-close-to-the-metal-ness in every single statement, because every single statement has the implicit context "Interpreter, please interpret this string relative to your potentially complex internal state".

Haskell is only slightly less prone to this, despite being compiled, since every expression by default becomes a request to instantiate a thunk in the runtime's evaluation tree. Yes, you can contort yourself to avoid this, but at that point you are imperatively programming an expression tree evaluator. This can be fun and rewarding, but it's not that different from scripting a Python interpreter, and it's certainly much further from the metal than C.
http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/dreamliner-batteries... implies that Tesla battery packs do a better job of containing thermal runaway than many other battery pack designs; it may be that simply replacing the Dreamliner's current batteries with a design very similar to what Tesla uses in their cars would address the Dreamliner problems.

Elon has been trading jabs in the press with United Launch Alliance (Boeing + Lockheed Martin) over US military satellite launch, with Elon claiming he can provide better pricing because SpaceX has more advanced technology; perhaps there are multiple places Elon has more advanced technology than Boeing.

The other possibility is that Boeing may revert to using a non-lithium ion battery technology. I haven't found any description of how much work they'd need to do to make that happen.
I'm one of the authors. Can you send this review to me at pydanny@cartwheelweb.com?

Thanks!
FreeFalcon, a fork of the Falcon 4.0 combat flight sim, has gone open source
NAH, the warning is merely initiated by the extended attributed. The information in it comes from elsewhere (presumably the database).
Having a bite of cake is still low carb.
Thank you for making this point. As I read that claim, I simply laughed. Certainly Metro is the most recognizable name for a design motif characterized as "flat," and then as you've pointed out Google's Holo motif is a close second.

iOS is many things, but the forerunner of minimalist or flat design? Hardly.

To an extent, I agree with some replies that say, "Well, nevermind, that wasn't really central to the point being made." Yes, but it would be like me saying Java is at the forefront of first-class functions because Java 8 is doing lambdas and then going on to talk about first-class functions.
It is far easier to psychologically comply with a concrete immediate severe allergy diet than a vague "analog" weight loss diet.
History is written by the winners.

At one point, this is how the Be and Apple fans felt listening to Windows folks blather on, now the Windows and Android folks get to listen to the Apple folks blather on, and so on and so forth.

Such is the circle of tech life.
If I remember correctly, the way they track you is that they retain certain cookies that identify you even after you log off. But if you delete all the cookies you have from FB once and then delete any new cookies you get from them after each session (via incognito mode), wouldn't that fix the problem?

I suppose that they could also track you by IP address, but that would be pretty unreliable since most home users have dynamic IPs.

If you really want to avoid tracking, you can use a browser extension like NoScript (or the similar NotScripts for Chrome) to prevent the JavaScript code that puts their buttons on third-party web sites from loading.
Hands on with the Mega, the new Megaupload
The Lesson of Grace in Teaching
Facebook cuts off friend data from 'competing' startup Voxer
Well if you're right, Coulton could have his cake and eat it too. Not many Glee fans who become interested in Coulton's version will be discouraged just because of Coulton's legitimate griping.

Either way, Coulton's strategy of helping his fans handle this is a sound one.
Harvard Grad Seeks Babysitting Jobs
I like how Coulton is just sitting back and letting his fans handle this, by communicating their view to the media and giving them credit.
Thank you for your suggestion nthitz the link is working :)
1) There is the C++ language. Will you ever remember it? Stop comparing everything to C — it is an oversimplified outdated language with specific uses for low-level system programming where you don't need complex data structures or high-level application logic.

2) If you summarize all the benchmarks comparing C to other languages, it turns out that the C language is one of the slowest. Of course, that's hardly the case. It's just the dudes who did the benchmarks suck in C/C++ and suck in programming in general.

3) Haskell makes you 10 times more productive without microoptimizing? ORLY? Try doing some big enough data manipulation with C++ 11 & boost vs Haskell. In C++ you're done with the task as long as you get decent performance with the simplest naive very high-level code, whereas in Haskell you're in the beginning of your optimization journey as the simplest code is not good enough, and after optimization you end up with much more complex, cluttered and hard to understand code than in C++ and its performance is still comparable to the naive C++ version if you're lucky.
Plan Would Put a Bank in Every Browser
>What I'm trying to say is that Orkut was less passonate about it and had his creativity and motivation stifled compared to Mark. Mark obsessed over his project and had everything to gain. Orkut on the other hand - What advantage was there for him in building his project from within Google? None. And not much to gain, just a promotion.

You can be very much obsessed even in building something within Google. Obsession and passion are not measured in money.

By your logic the creators of Unix weren't obsessed with it, because "what did they have to gain (from AT&T)? Just a promotion".

I'd say being passionate in the specific thing we're discussing (Facebook vs Orkut) doesn't mean a thing. What exactly that more advanced Mark HAD to show for his passion? Yes, he has the far far better business now, but where was the passion factor at play in making a better offering THEN?

What I see is business opportunities and mistakes in Orkut vs Facebook.

Not any engineering (or other) passion that resulted in a visibly better product.
I'm not seeing where to enter the ISBN. Could you point me in the right direction please?

EDIT: I've found where you register print books, but it claims you have to pay $5 to "upgrade" to the ebook version.
Facebook is much more of a "platform" than Twitter is, however. Though, personally, I don't use FB for anything other than on-site IMs and some status updates.
The point is that making misleading comments (or outright lying) is only going to hurt your cause. People will ignore the message (no matter how right it may be) and attack your methods.
I beg to differ a little, Professors should be paid to do reviews, and not pay to have reviews done.

The companies that publish the journals don't take a cut, they take the lion's share basically, paying a professor to review would work better in having them take a share of the pie.
Some really thoughtful and enlightening words about teaching from an old math professor. Makes me realize the nuance great teachers bring to the classroom, which is something we too easily and too often overlook.
The Six Week Delay in the Swartz Investigation
So, I assume you have considered all the aspects of the problem to come to that conclusion right?

Not merely pondered upon it for 2 minutes and decided that Apple programmers were idiots for doing so, right?
They mean Bill not Tim.
Evidence based medicine is simply "medicine", no matter who performs it, whether it's a witch doctor, a MD or herbalist. There's no need for other terms.
Amongst the usual HN negativity, I'll say that this is nice. Any project aiming at lowering the bar of entry for proper DVCS is more than welcome. And all the commands make sense once you're in the "tree/branches/organism" frame of mind.
Apples and oranges yet again. The original article is about Haskell; an entirely different beast from Python. Haskell compiles down to machine code, not byte code.
ii cannot login. It shows an error page :(
(edit: removed the happy birthday analogy, it doesn't really clarify anything)

In John Coulton's case, I'm not sure what he was required to do in order to license the lyrics for his original cover; i.e. whether he paid the calculated rate or negotiated something else. But it looks like Glee owes to two parties at best (if they actually lifted his audio like Timbaland this could get ugly)
does anyone have a screenshot?
Sorry, that's not how the law is defined.

You may as well ask, if I wasn't authorized, why did the door open and let me into that stranger's house?
Using print as an example of good high resolution design is interesting, but it misses one of the main reasons we have drop shadows and fake textures in non-print design.

Drop shadows and textures provide affordances and a visual language to communicate what a user can and should interact with on screen. They provide a visual hierarchy to the user so they can easily see what is content and what is interactive, etc.

Print has no interaction, so it's a bit naive to say we're going back to print aesthetics. We need a new way forward that provides both. Web apps have been experimenting with this for a while now. Some of these ideas work, some don't, but we can't just pretend print design has all the answers.
HBase 90.4, problems with I/O we had a very heavy read load on top of a write load, write load bursting 14,000 TX per second, and an average of 8,000 per second - each record around 2k.

Because of the I/O the WAL had to be turned off, this introduced problems when Region Servers occasionally died. Implementation of large regions 10GB, and fairly large HBlocks 512MB, increasing flush sizes to reduce minor compactions. Use of MSLAB to virtually eliminate GC all together, use of large heap 12GB on RS.

Worst problems we experienced was META corruption, that really , really sucked.
There are screenshots but no source code in the repo. Are these just mockups?
Advantages and Disadvantages of Dual SIM Mobiles
It does. A lot of people have written ignorant blog posts whereby they show their first "real" Haskell program is extremely slow compared to their heavily optimized C version (with years of experience behind it).

A cursory glance at the code, however, reveals that their Haskell program is using linked lists of linked lists of boxed arbitrary precision integers while the C version uses a 2D array of ints.

Okay, perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea.
So you're saying that because analysts on wall street say they'll make 1.4b in 2013, then it's not speculation? Sure.
I think part of owning a mistake it to stop making it. Ortiz is in a rare position to do something about all of this. Own the mistake, admit to it, and do something about it. Bring Congress the real facts on the ground. Tell them why it is the way it is and produce a meaningful plan to change it. Go stand next to Larry Lessig and ask them to fix the laws. Eat as much crow as you have to in order to do the right thing, and then eat a little more.

Heck, she's a prosecutor, why doesn't she prosecute some of the jackholes who actually deserve it? Who made the system work this way? Go take on the prison industrial complex. Catch prison companies breaking election laws in order to push bills for the express purpose of increasing the prison population and put that on the front page. Work with whatever the federal equivalent of internal affairs is and investigate the propriety of her own Department of Justice being stacked with former RIAA attorneys[1] and prosecute anyone involved who she can prove committed misconduct. Wage a campaign against policy laundering as a mechanism to over-criminalize nonviolent actions and prosecute some international corporations for bribery or treason or whatever you can get to stick to them. Then even if they fired her it would be as the hero instead of the villain, and she can go to work filing civil suits of the sort that criminal justice reform advocates are always wanting to, but with a head full of insider information.

That is how you redeem yourself after you make a mistake, not by denying everything and going back to business as usual.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/obama-taps-fift/
i think largely along the same lines. Orkut done tremendous job with what he had at the time. The only (highly dubious) claim we can make why Orkut did not succeed right away its because it was treated as side-project by Google, rather then throwing 100s of people on it right away to develop it better, and to compensate for early mistakes like Brazil stealing early audience and pushing local users away from the community.

Yet thats kinda the key point of the essay: the act of knowing how big/important social networking is requires somebody first to formalize that knowledge. imho Google was very good corporate host to let Orkut experiment so much as he did. It just wasn't enough.
35 years in prison.
"Facebook later told TechCrunch that it won’t give access to data to any company that doesn’t share much back". Is that documented anywhere? I never heard about usage restrictions based on sharing. This is going to get a of lot startups worried...
S-expressions don't declare types, though. A sexp grammar for the same thing would be basically isomorphic to a fully-parenthesized C type expression.

C has some glitches: the fact that the pointer type decoration goes on the left while the array decoration goes on the right is one. The precedence rule that requires parentheses for function pointers is unfortunate. And the putting the decoration on the variable and not the type is just simply a bug IMHO.

But the complexity here is inherent. Complicated types require complicated expressions no matter what grammar you use.
Radar's aren't public. File a dup at http://openradar.appspot.com?
These are also people who don't understand you can JIT whatever language you like.

It's not common to JIT C or C++, but you could, and gain all of the profiling/whatever advantages. It's just not commonly done because the end result of a C/C++ compiler is "fast enough".
Plus, JIT's have a weird set of tradeoffs. You'd really need a hybrid model where you did expensive high level loop transformations statically, then left the IR alone and JIT'd it[1]. This whole set of ideas quickly gets into TeNDRA/ANDF territory, however.

[1] Of course, profiling at runtime through the JIT may discover some more places to loop transform.
There's an upper bound on how fast you can be travelling before being ejected from a run :)
Fun hacker t-shirts
And I think ddrt's point is that even if one does google as you're saying, they may not end up with the same information that had the person arrive at the conclusion.

In this case its valid. Yes we can google it, everyone here knows how to do that. The bigger problem is knowing from where people got their information.
You realize Boeing is part of United Launch Alliance who has taken shots at SpaceX recently, right?
In general, JavaScript wouldn't take less time to develop and especially less time to fix than a modern C++ 11 / boost code.

That's a stupid myth ("very slow C++ development times") from the guys who suck at programming.
Akka Actor And Futures
> The winningest programs are always written in highly optimised C

Actually, for example looking at the winningest programs for x64 single core (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/):

Ada: 1,
C: 5,
C++: 2,
Fortran: 1,
Haskell: 1,
Java: 2,
Javascript: 1

So plain C is only winningest in 5/12 = 38%, and C/C++ in 7/13 = 54%.
Oh fantastic!

More stupid terminology. Just what git needs.

switch, checkout, pull, push, commit, stash, branch, tag, fetch, merge, log, reflog, tree, clone, rebase, squash and cherry pick

isn't enough! let's add

publish, unpublish, harvest, sprout and graft
Brilliant. We should start a White House petition to force US Federal Prosecutor Carmen Ortiz to aggressively pursue Fox until they admit to fixing the 2000 election...
2600's hour long tribute to Aaron Swartz
Glee put the song for sale on their iTunes account. They're getting the sales, not Coulton.
No, the resource fork is dead for good reasons. (1) The resource fork is fragile and easily corrupted, like the Windows registry in the bad old days. (2) Four-character namespaces suck. (3) 24 MB limits suck. (4) Extended attributes and bundles are better in every conceivable way.

The resource fork was designed for a different world. (A) In the old days, there was a blurry line between OS and app, so there was no reason to make the resource fork "opaque". Without opacity, there is no graceful way to use it in a preemptive multitasking environment. (B) In the old days, pointers were 24 bits. The high 8 bits didn't go anywhere, so people used these high bits to store extra data. Resource forks make use of 24-bit quantities for this reason — which went out of favor when Macs with the 68020 were introduced in 1987. (C) The real feature of resource forks was to reduce the disk space usage and load times when you have lots of small pieces of data, but — data is bigger and we have better archive formats.

So yeah, extended attributes are the way to go.
I think part of owning a mistake it to stop making it.

I agree, but as you note, that takes a lot more than just admitting to it.
OK now that Chess and Jeopardy have been conquered.

I wonder if no-limit texas hold'em poker is something that massive computing power can consistently conquer as well. Imagine if you had 10,000's of instances of EC2 churning at playing one hand of poker against the world's best opponents...

Is it possible?
This is all tracked very well over at http://aaplpain.com/?page_id=8 for those interested in the options market around AAPL.
Quite. But admitting you have a problem is the first step.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this restriction discussed on HN before, especially around the time g+ was introduced. I think they ran into this well, but I'm not sure what the resolution was.