skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with C-in-Lisp, though, is modelling the low-level behavior of C using the high-level concepts of CL.

Case in point: pointer punning. Somebody takes a 'char ', writes some stuff through it, then casts it to an 'int ' and starts reading that stuff back. ZetaLisp, having been built to implement the Lisp Machine OS in, had some low-level features that made this kind of thing doable, but those features did not make it into Common Lisp (I'm thinking of displaced arrays with mixed element sizes, though as I write this it occurs to me that it might be possible to coax an open source CL implementation into dealing with this, if you can give up on the generated code being portable CL).

If you want to look at Zeta-C, the sources and some commentary can be found here: http://wiki.alu.org/Zeta-C
I'm not sure how much you're kidding, but locally perturbing the comments might help a lot. Similar to simulated annealing.
Ask HN: Any independent landing page blogs out there?
Hey guys, anybody know of any independent blogs about landing pages in general that are not a blog for an app or service like: blog.landerapp.com, instapage.com/blog, or unbounce.com/blog/. Thanks
Why can't you also keep your .vim in git too then? It seems to work well for me. see: https://github.com/kristopolous/vimbuild
Could the site just generate a really long mailto:// url?
This link is common in these emails. But as a user it's annoying as all the people I'd forward it to are in my address book.

Plus I don't trust you with these email addresses. I'll send the email on thankyouverymuch.
I experimented a bit more and found if I put it before my "syntax on" and color scheme setup lines it doesn't work, but if I put it after them the fix works. Raticide's comment clued me in.
>>Being an expert operator is job enough for anyone all by itself. Having the additional duty of being self-financier, administrative support specialist, training manager, and supply coordinator is enough to stretch most individuals beyond capability limits.

Sounds like working at a startup... except you're making decisions that take or save lives.
The author lost me when he said "I'm not a programmer."
More like the software startup toolkit. What's there is decent, but a section on manufacturing and supply chains is conspicuously missing.
I'm from Caracas, but I am in the eastern part of the country right now at a job site. Everything is calm where I am, in Caracas and Barquisimeto, where my family and wife are. Chavez simpathizers are gathering in the central squares of every town and listening to music and mourning.

There are lots of rumors of looting but I think it's mostly just rumors because there are no pics or any other kind of confirmation.

As for Amigos Invisibles, I'm not a huge fan but I like some of their music. I actually saw them live 2 days ago. Great show, I had a good time.
Right, I stand corrected, I guess I read the comment too quickly.
This headline is quite misleading. Nowhere in it does Google actually state what the article claims in any way.

If anything, what makes me happy is that Google can even disclose any of this at all. NSL's are a tool that has little oversight and a bit more awareness may help keep them from being abused.
FTA: "Well, hopefully we almost always want the asymptotically optimal algorithm to solve our problem. You might have noticed that the above code is selection sort - an algorithm with best/worse/average time complexity of O(n^2)."

"Sadly, we can't write a test or a type to satisfy our specification. We need to actually perform some (asymptotic) analysis to derive our code, instead of relying on tests!"

Algorithmic complexity is not measurable by the test code, but its also not measurable by your customers. So why measure it? Instead, write a test for something that your customers do care about: performance perhaps? Its easy to throw a huge array at it and see if its too slow.
Yeah, I remember having it on Opera Mini on my old Sony Ericsson, prior to the advent of 3G networks. It was extremely useful, actually.
Trail of tears...
Jquery.AlphaImage.js
Can we run our own proxies? That would be a good compromise - and we could tunnel SSL to our own servers safely and privately.
I will start doing TDD all the time when:

1. It is faster than developing without it.

2. It doesn't result in a ton of brittle tests that can't survive an upgrade or massive change in the API that is already enough trouble to manage on the implementation-side- even though there may be no functional changes!

Some other thoughts:

Unit tests that test trivial methods are evil because the LOC count goes up (maintenance anyone?) and the number of entry points and NPE possibilities or checks goes up (bugs anyone?) -> TDD promotes testing trivial methods -> TDD promotes evil

TDD increases the chance that more people will mock, and mocking can lead to brittle tests -> TDD increases the chance many of these brittle tests will be written -> Lots of brittle tests means that you throw them away later or rewrite the whole app (with more tests!)

TDD promotes 100% test coverage of the code you write -> Very, very few successful companies have 100% test coverage -> Code with 100% test coverage has brittle tests (period) -> TDD promotes things that are not best-of-breed practices in a quest for the false god of 100% test coverage.

I was a firm believer in what Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, et al were pushing in the early part of the last decade. But since then I think most of the rest of the world already knows that TDD practiced religiously will lead to huge amounts of code that slow... down... development... and... make... it... easier... to... buffer... estimates... because when absolutely required you can stop TDD and just hack a spike into production. And... when the application needs to be rewritten because it is too crazy complicated to change all of those tests- you just rewrite it, and we all love greenfield development!
After having to hunt in google chrome dev tools for memory leaks from a single page JavaScript app, memory dumps with a separate tool that can give you a really good insight into what hanging around would be great. I found that if you were doing snapshots of website states and the memory footprint was significant then the browser just wasnt able to handle displaying all of them at once. I know this is an issue kinda for chrome, but I figure Firefox might have a similar problem. And single page/MVC javascript apps are only going to get more demanding.
Can you imagine the abuse? You forward a cat video and they see 'Help I'm trapped in a strange city and need money!'?
It got mine relatively recently. I remember it took about 15 minutes after I reached 500. Either the system takes a little while to recognize the change, or I reached 501 in that time.

Note that you can't vote on comments over 24 hours old or replies to yourself, so don't use those to check your ability.
Researchers Create A 'Google Map' Of The Human Metabolism
I would be surprised if they were not "secretly spying".
I'm at the point where I have zero interest in learning new languages to "expand my mind" unless they have very obvious application to problems I am facing right now. For example, Matlab sucks, and scientific computing sucks in most other languages, so learning Julia is probably worth my time. What is Haskell's killer domain? Meta-programming C code seems more than a little esoteric for it to be worth the massive investment of time and opportunity cost of curling up with a Haskell book and a REPL in my free time. I spent a lot of time learning Clojure, which is an amazing language, but here I am years later and I still reach into my toolbox of imperative languages (C, Ruby, Matlab, Java) to solve any "real" problems quickly, efficiently, and in the most straightforward (and understandable by mere mortals) way.

If I want to expand my mind (towards the end of building software) I will fire up Coursera and study math or algorithms, things which are, imho, more widely applicable, timeless, and have a "bigger bang for the buck" for self-study than learning another programming language.
We enforce this in the rules on our communal listening site, http://codingsoundtrack.org -- we like to think it's something to do with that part of our brains already being dedicated to understanding computer language.
Unveil hidden Mac OS X features
Tackling Asian Privilege
When you take amphetamine every day, you incur a debt that can only be repaid by taking a break. If you don't pay back the debt, you enter the risky business of increasing your dose and dancing with the loan shark that always collects.

So I imagine most chronic amphetamine users like myself have a healthy relationship with it or we'd burn out like the girl in the article which is a rather familiar tale of classic abuse.

Amphetamine side-effects never go away. If you're tolerant of the side-effects, you're tolerant of the very effect you're taking it for. In fact, the side-effects are a good indicator of where you are in a dose. The onset of cotton mouth is what reminds you that it's working.

Even after a month or two of constant amphetamine use, withdrawal for me is at most a week of some scatterbrained lethargy (paying back that debt). The demons of amphetamine are the side-effects and psychological dependency, not the weak withdrawal. Unfortunately you're susceptible to those demons no matter how long you've been prescribed.
> This headline is quite misleading.

Indeed, the FBI doesn't have customers either.
140 Characters Just Isn't Enough
Thats the same question you can ask for Wikipedia as well!
PyPy Status Blog: Py3k close to alpha release
I'm sounding really negative, I apologize. :) I love that you've got your upgrades to 15s, that's a powerful place to be!
Also, cats usually won't go after anything that's willing to face the cat down, even smaller animals like rats. I have both cats and rats and the cats will watch the rats in fascination, and even sniff noses with the rats when I have the door to the cage open, but the rats show no fear to the cats, and will even rush the cage bars if they decide a cat is too much in "their territory" and the cats respect that. This has held true through 8 different rats so far, and like 6 or 7 different cats (mine and various roommates).

In general, to a cat, "runs away" == "prey" and "comes right up to me" == "equal and/or potential threat"
Sending something interesting is a hard problem.
> OSX uses a different normalization form from what Linux uses (I'm not even sure of what that means, but hey).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_form...

> OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default).

It depends on the file system. HFS+ uses UTF-8 NFD, as you noted.

On Linux, ext4 uses whatever encoding your tools happen to use, as long as it's an 8-bit ASCII superset capable of representing / and \0.

On the Mac, this means you can rely on a consistent file encoding, and you never wind up with weird encoding issues when using different software, sharing files between machines, or when writing code to parse file names.

On Linux, this means you're at the whim of whatever happened to write the file. There's no real way of telling -what- the file name encoding might be, and if you wind up with files with mismatched encodings, you just wind up with garbage.

I think Apple chose the right approach; it's the only way for it to be possible for things to 'just work'

> I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.

Well, technically you were doing black magic, in that:

- scp(1) is not file name encoding-aware.

- The Linux ext* file systems do not provide a guaranteed encoding

If you used a name-encoding aware tool/protocol (such as modern network file systems), and you have consistent and correct encoding on the server (there's no gaurantee with Linux), then transferring files between machines should always "just work".
I don't know about you, but the article points out those complying with NSL demands blindly even wrote NSLs for the FBI. That's pretty scary.
It's headlines like this that make me wonder if my Give-a-fuck isn't just broken.
You make some interesting points, but I feel you misunderstand the OP's remark that Personally, I think we'll come to accept the idea that, for the most part, writing is a leisure activity and not a profession. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the profitability of writing and publishing was just a temporary blip, as a result of a peculiar set of technological and economic conditions.

They said nothing about computers doing all the writing. It's about technological conditions (printing being really expensive and thus information hard to share) that lead to economic conditions (newspapers as semi-monopolies both for publishing and for advertising, limited inventory because paper isn't free). It turns out that people have always wanted to write and didn't mind not getting paid for it, but they couldn't get anything published without passing by a gatekeeper so it didn't matter.

Now that everybody can be a publisher online and supply nearly endless, it's perfectly possible that writing might primarily become a leisure activity or something experts (e.g. lawyers, academics, coders) do as part of their main job. "Leisure" in this context doesn't mean that the writing itself has no goal other than to entertain the author, it just means writing because you want to, whether you get paid or not.

The fact that most online writing isn't very good doesn't matter. As Paul Graham pointed out a couple of years back:

> Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. [0]

Toy example. If there's a demand for 10 great pieces of journalism every day, 10,000 pieces a day get published and great journalism is so hard to produce that your yield is only about 1 percent or one great piece for every 100 that are written. Well, do the math and it'll be clear that you are still overshooting demand by a factor of 10.

Even among professional media, there's a move towards seeing the journalism as a loss leader for more profitable things like events, speaking gigs, books etc.

(And you truly have to be kidding with those remarks about photography.)

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html
It seems to me that the root of the US militaey's problems is that it's a giant peacetime military. Until WWII the US military was small in peacetime so that when there was a war promotions based on real performance eventually overwhelmed the peacetime leadership. It's impractical for the US to have a tiny military, but reducing it by 2/3 should be doable if anyone has the political means.
I'm happy Google has found a way to disclose this, too.

The headline ("Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers") seems fair to me.

Google is reporting that it got more than 1 and less than 1,000 "National Security Letters", about more than 999 but less than 2,000 of Google's customers. Because the exact subjects of these letters can't be shared, the FBI's actions are being done "secretly". Because they allow the FBI to receive private information it wouldn't otherwise have without the subjects knowing, this activity fits the colloquial meaning of "spying". All the elements of the headline are supported by the reporting.
Carbon Based Lifeforms
Lessons from Geeks on a Plane, India
Often times, the goal of TDD is often confused with spec testing. I think 37signals is right when they say TDD development is like TSA's security check process...
Literally the entire purpose of currency is to facilitate trade. Having a fixed money supply penalizes and discourages trade, and encourages currency hoarding.

People on the bottom rung end up spending all of their money, and will find it even harder to ever dig their way out. The top 1%, who cannot spend money fast enough to exhaust it, will hold onto their money which will become exponentially more valuable over time.

Capital investment will plummet, because statistically, you're better off simply holding your money. It's like holding an index fund in the stock market (your money increases with value correlated to the market), except there is practically zero risk. Any investment you make by definition will perform on average no better than the economy as a whole; so why bother investing your money with risk, as opposed to holding onto your money with no risk? They both have the same expected value.
I was being serious (I know it's impossible to know in this submission's comments). I genuinely don't like the system the way it is now.

Locally perturbing and simulated annealing sound interesting. Maybe we could convince pg to reticulate the splines as well.
Why not? I'd say 30 processes is a lot better than 1 process.

1 process is better than 300 processes, and I sometimes have more than 300 tabs open. (I always have more than 100 tabs open.)

If I open two new tabs simultaneously, the whole browser can freeze for a bit.

People who prefer one process per tab tend to mention that tabs freeze up their browser, and I believe them, but this never happens to me. Maybe it's because I use NoScript and have all plugins disabled, except for Flash, which I block with Flashblock.
There are more serious problems - like Torchlight not rendering characters heads at all - and no one seems to be interested to fix the problems - this kind of bug would be patched on launch day on windows IF it would happen - because how quality control didn't notice that equiping any item to character head makes it disappear is beyond me.

http://i.imgur.com/bUQm0.jpg
This is a big part of the reason that I like BDD over unit-oriented TDD. BDD saves you time overall (once you've gotten over the initial hump), and tends to result in high-level tests that survive a major restructuring of internals. In such a system, mocks (with perhaps the exception of external resource mocks) are usually an indicator that you need to refactor something.

That said, I think that unit tests still have their place - you just have to be careful to not test implementation as much as input/output.
I've got to say that as skeptical as I was--noisy environments tend to annoy me--coffitivity is working very well for me.

Coffitivity plus Soma.FM's Groove Salad station (Soma.FM is great in general) has made me bang out more work in the last hour or so than in the several hours before it.

It could be the placebo effect, but so far, I'm loving it! Thank you!
> I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy.

Color me surprised ...
Franco, thanks from the team here at Testin for featuring us on this great list. Some great startups here I'm glad to be introduced to!
>It's seen as a bit of a social faux pas in our society though, so you might want to find a different society first if you'd like to enjoy tasty humans.

Are you honestly this much of a relativist?
Trying to get on @ShitHNSays?
The Hidden Costs of Cognitive Enhancement
Using the vim Fugitive you can quickly toggle a git blame sidebar to determine all this similar type of information.
The answer is here:

http://superuser.com/questions/558876/how-can-i-make-the-sig...
C definitely - strlen() not binary safe, you have to deal with malloc()/free()/strdup() etc. by hand instead of letting a highly optimized GC do the job...
Sometimes? Its kind of his thing.
NSL = Secret, no-judiciary, blanket access to what the FBI wants. Spying.

Google confirms at least 1000 accounts per year are accessed by the FBI via NSL.

Google confirms the FBI is spying on some of [Google's] customers.

QED
No. You you do your thing. I'll do this. I don't want to have to run another command to see what lines have changed in my file. I want small, non-intrusive icons in the gutter without doing a damned thing.
Well...

He didn't really miss that though. If the military were to ameliorate bullet points 1, 2 and 3 from his list, then your issue would be resolved as well. It's all part of the same perverse incentive generating machine that is administration in the military.

Just as a matter of full disclosure... USMC Officer, though things are probably much different now. (I went through PLC when there was still a Berlin wall.)
Assuming that Minix adopted a reasonable license and fixed outstanding issues that make Linux currently better, I'm asking you to tell me what's wrong with that. We have a de facto monoculture of Windows on the PC right now and I don't think that's better.
Show HN: Makefile for AsciiDoc + BlogPost + Wordpress
You can generally split a dozen carton and buy 6. Most supermarkets allow this. Your struggles are over.
UI/UX Designer for Formstack.com
Indianapolis, IN

We're looking to add a UI/UX Designer to our growing UX team at Formstack. Are you passionate about web apps and modern, user-centered web design? Do you enjoy working in a collaborative environment that values critical & constructive discussions about design?

Responsibilities:

* Work with the UX team to develop and iterate user interface designs for the Formstack app.
* Translate design mock-ups into clean, standards compliant HTML and CSS.
* Produce final user interface designs, adhering to the style and guidance of the UX team.
* Work collaboratively with both the UX team and Development to implement your designs in an agile workflow environment.

Required experience / skills:

* 2 - 4 years of experience.
* Experience in product development teams working on UI designs.
* Experience or a high level of interest in UX.
* Experience designing standards-based web sites that render properly in a wide array of web clients.
* Experience using modern front-end frameworks and responsive design concepts.
* Knowledge of how to best design to solve business and user problems. Ability to understand the needs of customers.
* Design fundamentals including information design, visual design, industry UI standards for desktop and web-based applications, and ease of use best practices.
* Experience with relevant design tools.
* Strong written and verbal communication skills.
* Strong understanding of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript (this is not a development role, but a strong understanding of the advantages and limitations is imperative).

Awesome (but not required)

* Experience working on a UX team.
* Experience designing for mobile apps (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.) and the mobile web.
* Experience with Lean/Agile methodologies.

Other details:

* This position is located in our corporate office in Indianapolis.
* Competitive salary & 401k.
* We provide full benefits: dental, vision and healthcare.

TO APPLY: https://www.formstack.com/forms/stack-ui_designer
I'd imagine people that mass forward an advert they receive are much more trusting.
Heroku 500 Internal Server Error on Login
I'm being completely honest when I say my first thought upon reading the name was "Adult Friend Finder".

Why did you choose a name so close to that?
this is quite interesting. please do elaborate more.
This is indeed interesting, but I'd say far beyond the needs. 10Gbps wireless transfer already exists (e.g. http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/27/ntt-docomo-confirms-succe... ), and that is beyond what flash based memory can do. In any case, it would mean transferring a BluRay in something like 30 seconds, assuming you had a faster drive.
I think it's part of the joke.
Interesting to see if this will open up the web to more linked data based trends.
Ask HN: where is the tech community in Shanghai?
Does Shanghai have any tech community for startups? Any tech meetup or co-working spaces in Shanghai?
I assume because that is what it was based off of. Click 'try' -- it opens up a 'cam' of a cat, with a fake chat.

It's specifically modeled after AFF.