skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been playing w/ Rust this past week, and I've had something of an enlightening experience related to the pointer semantics you describe.

Rust's memory management works similarly to what you describe in C++[0], but things like unique_ptr, et al. are baked into the syntax and compiler. -- It's basically syntactic sugar for memory semantics.

Coming from a background of GC'd languages (Java, Go, and Ruby) these different allocation semantics were Very Hard(TM) for me to understand at first.
I kept battling w/ the type checker, throwing different pointer types at it until the example compiled. (Rust's compiler is _very_ intelligent, w/o using "unsafe" code, you basically cannot have a "use after free" condition in Rust. -- It will not compile.)

As the parent points out: I've never really spent any length of time _understanding_ the allocations I'm asking a computer to make. I just generate things, they become garbage, and the runtime cleans it up eventually.

Once Rust "clicked" for me, I realized something: I know the lifetime of _every single variable_ in this piece of code.

I know when it's allocated, where it's allocated, and when it gets freed.

The reason it was so hard for me to initially grok Rust was because I'm _not used to reasoning_ about memory allocation.

Once I understood the semantics though, it was as though I had an _entirely new_ level of abstraction at my fingertips.

These semantics are definitely some powerful stuff, and I'm very glad I'm taking the time to try and understand them.

[0]: http://pcwalton.github.com/blog/2013/03/18/an-overview-of-me...
A denial about a completely new product is something I'd think Dalrymple could easily get wrong. Unless he's actually talking to Tim Cook, he can't possibly be aware of everything Apple is doing.
> I'd humbly suggest that you enumerate the "common errors" in the presentation.

That money exists to serve as an improved barter good, rather than barter being a degenerate form of trade that exists mostly in the rare cases when credit is impractical.

That quantity fixation or durability are particularly important properties of money.

That gold is particularly important, versus anything else that is pretty and value-dense.

That the only forms of money are commodity-backed and pure fiat.

That the USD switched from the first camp to the other in 1971.

Describing the USD without reference to the Federal Reserve at all.

The assumption that the debasement of coins over a 300 year period had any harmful effects other than making the coins less pretty 1700 years later.

That +200% wage and price inflation over 130 years is any kind of serious problem.

That hyperinflation and regular inflation are the same thing except in degree.

That Bitcoin limiting supply controls inflation.

That the problems with deflation are somehow non-obvious or not happening observably in Bitcoin right now.

That flat-rate Demurrage fixes Bitcoin inflation.
In my opinion, early on in your career the important thing isn't so much what language you are developing in, but who you are developing with. If you aren't in an environment where there are more experienced developers that you can learn from, find a different job. Over time you will probably move through several languages, but the core principles of programming apply to all of them, and learning how to think through problems from a developer's perspective is fundamentally important.

Another bit of advice would be to work in a position where you have your hand in all aspects of a project. That will help you decide if you want to focus on a particular subset of application development (i.e. back-end, front-end, UX), or if you want to move forward as more of a generalist. This decision will impact your future type of employment. Concentrating on one particular aspect of development will lead you towards larger companies and/or larger development teams. Being a generalist will lead you towards smaller companies or start-ups with smaller or no teams at all, as well as possibilities outside of normal technology companies (i.e. I am interviewing with a law-firm next week that needs a senior developer to create internal tools). I'm of course speaking only from my experience and making generalizations on that basis alone.
It's not always space. Just the idea of owning vs. renting.

For example, in Toronto the real estate prices are sky high in the city (e.g. I've heard of just a single floor of some of those large houses in The Annex going for upwards of $800k). There are a lot of condos being built (and already built), but they are all aimed at single people or childless couples, not necessarily at families. Two or three bedroom condos are few and far between, meaning that they aren't exactly cheap.
Yes, agreed. Well stated.
Bitcoin seems to be in another bubble, so I'm going to wade back into this insane discussion.

I agree that we're in a potential bubble, but bitcoin was never ever a pyramid scheme. Bitcoin is a fully transparent cryptocurrency system and investors were never promised anything.
Actually, anyone can buy Treasuries direct from the auction at no fee. (The government even has a website for it.) Furthermore, the Treasury market is extraordinary tight, so it barely matters who has access to the Fed. Finally, the recent effect of the Fed announcing expansionary programs has been to lower Treasuries values through implied inflation. (Check the charts if you don't believe me.) So I'm not sure how you can be correct to any significant degree.
Flat 3D Mockup Kit
Help me pick a blog
So I have two different blog engines and I am wondering which one you think is better overall?
http://gregimba.github.com/ or http://www.gregimba.com/

Thanks in Advance
Don't forget Marital Status + Gender. Big indicator, statistically.
Hey Bryan, I loved your Fork Yeah! talk at USENIX. Everyone who's interested in the history and future of Solaris and ZFS should watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

I know it's a bit off topic but could you elaborate on the issues you see with BTRFS?
The problem shifted from "solution is hard to find" to "solutions are abound, but its hard to find the best". Github has lots of code, and its really difficult to tell what are the best solutions (and of course, there's the whole issue of marketing, where some stuff that show up highly on google or github searches aren't the best but rather the most highly marketed)
First Human-Neanderthal Hybrid Found
Will Your Gravestone Be QR Coded?
I did not propose demurrage as a solution, I was trying to describe the concept for people that were interested in alternatives to printing-based inflation.

I did not dismiss deflation as an economic risk, it certainly could be. But I'm saying that deflation is toxic to our current economic structure, simply because we are inflation biased, and so everything is designed with that in mind. Switching from an inflationary economy to a deflationary one would certainly be devastating.. but in the long run, once the correction had happened, what would it be like? That's a question we actually don't have a lot of evidence on.

My thoughts on this came right out of this book: http://www.amazon.com/Deflation-Current-Historical-Perspecti...
WillowTree Apps
colony collapse may be more complicated than a single factor

If that's the concern, then changing a single factor would be a good idea. We could ban neonicotinoid pesticides and measure the results.
Find anybody who has used Windows on a regular basis and you'll find they do the same thing. I expect to have to reformat Windows multiple times a year. I've carried this mentality everywhere. I've used Arch Linux and configured every little bit of my OS and found that having a portable config and being used to system defaults is much more valuable than finding an obscure way to make yourself more productive. I can basically pick up any unix-like OS, clone my dotfiles, and I'm good to go.
> with his maths, statistics, patterns, trends, he increased his odds to 30-70%, I have seen him when he is 100% sure, he would be travelling 100 miles to different places just to buy all the lotteries

Those payouts must've been pretty decent to justify so much time and effort. (Or perhaps he was, unfortunately, not also into economics.)
How a Doctor Discovered U.S. Walls Were Poisonous
Distillation (Followup on KDE's git hosting troubles)
neat. this was the one feature i missed from xmonad!
Very excited to get mine. It is funny though as I look at OUYA, Steambox, even GameCube of old and other console cubes appear and can't help that Jobs almost called it too early with the Mac Cube a bit before it's time and not targeting the right area of the house yet while GameCube did around the same time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube - probably based on NeXTCube).

Hopefully the game controller for Apple TV isn't really an April Fool's Joke as AppleTV is close to being the next big console possibly.
It's more disheartening that this is what the police are spending their time doing. There seriously isn't anything more important they could be working on?
I was initially thinking the Ouya would be cool. But then I actually thought about the console space and realized that what was true of my younger years is no longer the case. In particular, a NES was significantly different than a Windows or Unix workstation. The console was an entirely different platform/ecosystem, and in a time where they were reasonably complex by comparison other computing operating systems.

These days, we're literally running the same software we run on everything else, but in a little box that has an audio/video output and a port for a controller. And then when I realized that, I immediately realized that the console is mostly dead. The only case where this isn't true is where performance metrics are consistent. This is why development on platforms like a PS3 or 360 result in shorter dev cycles and higher quality results: the hardware is all the same. But that matters when you're writing software that isn't shielded from the system, so with Java, that's a non factor, making Ouya nothing special.

I believe the next Playstation, Xbox, and Nintendo will all have their merits -- high-end hardware that is consistent for years, which will allow developers to rapidly build games without having to concern themselves with the lowest common denominator (it's ridiculous to see software designed to run on a 512MB 1 core machine performing horribly on a 24GB machine with 6 cores, 2 GPUs, and 3GB of GPU memory because it was decided by someone that progressive enhancement of features would be too expensive a development cost, or for those high-end features to be completely non-optimized).

For me, I am summarily unimpressed and not excited. For me, this is packaging Java in yet-another-box that I have to buy. Why can't I just download an app and play Ouya games on my PC? That's a -1 for Ouya and a +1 for what Valve is doing with Steam.
Oh, wow. Mr. Bojangles was my very first exposure to programming computer graphics and animation.
> But as a broader point, how much information should you be giving your clients about technical decisions?

I explicitly list the technologies I use for a project. Let's say a webapp: Django (Python 2.7), HTML5, CSS3 (SaSS), JavaScript (jQuery) together with two short sentences explaining that the (to the time of development) current versions of the libraries will be used.

From this point there are two possibilities: The client has objections or doesn't care. If there are objections it is likely from someone who will maintain the code. If he doesn't care I wasted 4 lines.

I once had a client which was convinced by his nephew (he recently started studying CS, so he obviously knew what he was talking about) that I did everything wrong using Django, I should have used Node.js. Even a discussion if I would have to rewrite everything in node emerged.

I prefer to explain to my client what I will use and put it in the contract. Those 4 lines saved me a lot of trouble.
Scala Web Frameworks Benchmark
I don't know, COD , Skyrim, Halo etc still seem to be having healthy sales.

I don't see any reason that you couldn't have these titles on an Apple Console though. But it would probably depend on Apple making deals with the developers. I can see EA wanting their AAA titles to be listed on a special shelf away from all of the dross.
Quite. It reminds me of my old boss: tidy desk, tidy mind.

Uh huh. More like tidy desk, nothing better to do. And BTW have you seen Einsteins desk?

http://kottke.org/10/04/einsteins-desk
You can bypass writing the archive to disk, as well:

pushd /tmp && \
curl 'http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/tmux/tmux/tmux-1.8/tmux-1.8.tar.gz?r=http%3A%2F%2Ftmux.sourceforge.net%2F&ts=1364579710&use_mirror=garr'| tar xvf && \
cd tmux-1.8 && \
./configure --prefix=~/installs/tmux-1.8 && \
mkdir ~/installs && \
make && \
make install && \
popd
> how do we differentiate apart from popularity of the network?

Currencies are all differentiated based on their ability to be spent. Qualities of the "issuing authority" is one measure of that, when there is such an authority. But even for dollars there are other properties: difficulty of counterfit, number of merchants who accept the currency, etc. Merchants in Argentina don't accept dollars because they can pay their taxes in dollars, or because the U.S. government is insuring their accounts. They accept dollars because they can be readily, stably traded for value in their country.

Cryptocurrencies can be spent in places where no other currency can (international transactions, politically sensitive transactions, etc). Transactions can never be reversed. You can store them in your brain. You can keep your bitcoins in your brain while you are imprisoned in Iran, and spend them whenever you are released. These are all aspects of a currency's spending power.

You may think that government deposit insurance, or promise to accept tax payments in a currency, or promises to stabilize prices by issuing debt are the Be All End All of spendability measures, but that's you. There are lots of other concerns people other have.
With Pitchbox[1] we've seen full-stack engineers typically have the potential to earn the same in Ruby, .NET, or any language for that matter...compensation variation usually comes down to who they work for and the company's compensation ceiling more so then the language.

More narrowly focused skill-sets on the other hand will have variation...for example, developers that solely want to work on the front-end (e.g. backbone) are going to make 20K-40K+ less then their full-stack counterparts.

[1] https://trypitchbox.com/
Something I learned from the game industry is that sucky code can be the best code. Coming from the university and a company that treasured beautiful code, it was hard to get used to.

I find that it's pretty similar to premature optimization. First you make it work. Then you ship it. If you constantly keep coming back to that code and find it difficult to work with, then you make it beautiful and modular.

Some caveats:

* You need a small team and a small code base, so at least one person near you knows how it's working.

* Projects need to be time-limited. Ugly code will be much harder to read when you forgot how it worked. If the project is done and over with within a year, then it's fine.

* Everyone on the team needs to agree that it's possible to work this way. Some people just freak out when code isn't beautiful. I got over it, but I'm not sure everyone can or want to.

* One of the reasons we write beautiful code is that it's just simpler to write. It's a way to structure thoughts. In those cases, you should of course do that. It takes a while recognizing when to write ugly code.
What actually is programming?
Can you explain why you feel that way? ZFS has intelligently managed RAID that keeps the performance penalty minimal. I'd rather have multiple-redundancy parity than 2x mirroring, and it takes less space.
How do you introduce democracy into a highly divided country like Myanmar?
fyi, Actual price is $150M - see submitted HN story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5462281
The article mentions that for optimizing out of bounds checks it uses constant lists or fixed length lists. Could it also optimize the check in a loop if it knows the loop ends at the end of the list? For example, in the article it mentions:

for (int i = 0; i < v.constraints.length; i++) {
...
c = t1[i];
...
}

Does it do that optimization because it knows v.constraints is fixed length or because it knows that i can never be bigger than v.constraints.length?
Makes sense. All the tweets were by hand. I tried to tweet every weekday but missed some, then eventually gave up.

I just didn't know what to do upon getting no feedback from you guys after posting to the Google Webmaster forums, filing reconsideration requests, contacting friends at Google, posting to and commenting on Reddit about it, commenting on HN about it, posting to Facebook, blogging, and tweeting about it, and putting a yellow box at the top of all pages on the site mentioning the penalty and linking to a page with the details.

Thanks again for talking with me about this. (I'd still like to hear about Web Build Pages / Jim Boykin and the rest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5444996 ...)
Thanks cmbaus, I'll have to your steps out. Appreciate you taking the time to put this together.
Apple's Data Services Are Showing Strain
Spam? Not Spam? Tracking a hijacked Spamhaus IP
This seems like a sensible approach, I will be more thorough in future. I assume you also inform the client if you change your mind about a minor library?
Out of interest, what are you working on?

And what did you do to win that competition?
I might have been using an old version of Django, or I did it wrong, but hidden fields seemed to be a major pain with Django forms. Just because a field isn't marked a editable, doesn't mean that it should be included in the form data. It would be nice is editable=False, meant that "You can't edit this field and hidden=True meant: You will not see this field, editable=False would be assumes in this case.

We tried to do a few forms with Django forms, only to find that the designer wanted something that made it easy to just skip the Django forms all together and just do them form by hand.
A HP Proliant Microserver. Has room for four disks, but I've only got two in there atm. It runs Debian with Samba for network file access. I intend to configure up NFS but haven't got around to it yet.
>He explained that statistics are created for groups, not for individuals. As an individual, it's not relevant to you. He went on to pass the course on a broken ankle. That makes me think about some startup founders. Their companies should have died, since most die. They should have given up, since most give up. But, somehow they willed their company to exist. Startup failure is a group statistic, it doesn't apply to you.

Yes. Also known as "survivorship bias".

Fact is, the brothers of all the other people who attended that course could have (and might had) said the exact same things to their brother. And most of them would be proven wrong.

Group statistics are indeed about groups. It's our way to predict what the most likely outcome is for individual members of a group taken at random (or all other things being equal).
Yeah, the AAA franchises are doing great, but they're still part of a stagnant market that's selling into a market that doesn't see the value in what they consume.

Apple would need to spend a fortune in hardware costs just to enable the current expectations of AAA titles, and even then they wouldn't be bringing anything to the table that Sony and MS aren't already.
It totally stands within reason that until it has wide spread adoption and regular people stop caring about what the exact exchange rate is that we will see large runs like that. As I stated, we have several people (myself included) invested to make money and take care of an investment, not to use a daily currency.
On the contrary I feel great pity for people who grow up only knowing an entirely searchable world. There was so much magic and excitement when things were unknown, secret, mysterious.

Specifically trying to solve the kind of problem discussed by the OP, yes it was frustrating as hell but it taught tenacity, resourcefulness, and was ultimately SO satisfying when you figured it out.

Now you just google and get pissed if the first result doesn't have a copy/paste answer to your problem.
I read "safe" differently than you did; now I'm on the same page. With or without a GC, if you want to guarantee safety in that sense no matter what, you're right - you just can't allocate memory. So in the worst case running in a managed environment doesn't buy you much, but often the guarantees you need are a bit looser than that, and in that case managed memory can be really beneficial.
Of course. I'm just not sure about whether domestic bank accounts are reported.
But... why? First of all if it bothers the neighbours why can't they just arrive on the spot and bust the thing?

Also, all this planning ahead and resources, why instead don't they just create one or two halls per area that are soundproof etc and let people rock out?

Is the state really that stupid?
Good questions! Security is a top priority for us, and we can handle all of the use cases you mention.

One thing to note is that you don't put your auth credentials into the HTML (this would be very insecure!) -- you rely instead on a trusted service to do the auth and generate tokens for you. We provide a means of doing this called Firebase Simple Login, but you can do this yourself if you want as well. We then use these credentials in addition to a security rules language to define the operations a user is allowed to perform to the database. The security rules are very flexible. We have a video here that explains this:
https://www.firebase.com/docs/security-quickstart.html

If you want a full example of security rules in action, check out our Twitter clone Firefeed:
http://firefeed.io
Well there are several ways to go with this beyond just why you said yes. What if you are consistently offered less? At some point it may not become a choice.
What is a Hacker House?
Essential .NET Developer Workstation - 2013 Edition
Ask HN: Place to get code checked and get advice on it?
hey,
recently I've had to start picking up PHP for university.
As we do IT-security as a different subject I coded the first assignment for that class in PHP, to get to know PHP better and to try to fix the problem before I implement it in C++.

Now, I am not sure if this code and algorithm are as good as it could be (I am actually pretty sure it isn't) and I want to improve and learn. Hence I was wondering if there is a good place where people give advice on such.

Searching google I didn't seem to find anything matching with the terms I searched for and the forums I found usually had small snippets that were designed for other people to use.

Thanks in advance.
Marissa Mayer - Lean In
Samsung: our Game Controller is long in the works.
Some news outlet: Google is rumored to be working hard on Android Game Controller, will be called Nexus G.