skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I understand it correctly, the Rust issue is that tail calls are expensive in the context of LLVM and the calling convention that they are using. MLton (like Manticore, which I work on) uses a different code generation backend and calling convention entirely. And neither of us worry about "destructors" or, in general, things that happen at every return point.

Though, interestingly, in the context of a CPS-converted program, destructors would just be the next continuation called on the way to calling the procedure previously "returned to." Under our (Manticore) calling convention, we would just jump to each of those continuations and wouldn't have to grow stack (though in our case, it's keeping around heap frames, as we're not stack-based), and would have the same next allocation and instruction-level behavior as a tail call.

That said, if you think tail calls are hard to debug, CPS-converted programs would destroy most people's will to live. No stack backtraces, except in debug modes, with 5-10x performance penalties.
more like 0.2% of its actual COST. His point is that he thinks cost and value are out of sync.
Sounds mostly like a pile of empty words to me. Usable and pragmatic are purely contextual. Is rust faster than Haskell?
Why do people go with ADP or Ceridian?

And secondarily, perhaps relatedly, but what kinds of organizations are not a good fit with ZenPayroll?

Meaning, how niche is ZenPayroll—really targeting companies of, say, less than 20 employees, or is it actually a good fit for everybody and ADP et al are just winning with brand awareness currently?
"The Perch" Roulette Simulator
Right. In Clojure you'd use an explicit trampoline for stack-free mutual recursion.
I would never have thought about that. That just this is sufficient to push the ship forward is amazing.
I can't answer fully for Clojure's reasons for not supporting TCO, but it will at least be fundamentally rooted in the fact that the JVM, as a platform, does NOT support TCO.

Scala is usually the language brought up as a counter argument here, but Scala has the same limitations as Clojure - the JVM can't do the TCO. Scala's compiler tries, with certain types of tail calls, to optimize via (I believe) a trampoline – it reduces those calls into a loop, so they are no longer a function call.

But, only certain types of calls (specifically, the last line of code in a recursive function must be a call to the hosting function) can be TCO in Scala. There is an annotation, scala.annotation.tailrec, which can be placed above a method you want to tail recurse.

@tailrec does not, however, "force" the compiler to do TCO – it simply forces compilation to fail if the method in question cannot be Tail Call Optimized. It's a developer hook for saying "I realize the compiler tries to do TCO where possible, but I require this method to be trampolined". If it can't be, you'll get a compilation error with details on why the TCO failed.
You are defending a position he did not take. When did he say to pander to waitstaff? All he said is don't be rude and demanding. There are ways to address deficiencies without being rude or demanding.

> You say it's bad to treat people "below you" badly, but I think it's even worse to believe anyone's below you

That's why he put it in quotes. hackinthebochs never said he thinks they are below him, just that many people do, and treat them badly. You cannot deny that there are people who think this way or that there are not some standards that society in general uses to compare people.
Thanks to all who replied! Great advice that will definitely be taken into consideration.
Who says they are both cool? HN isn't a single person. It is quite possible that group A thinks rust and clojure are "cool", and group B thinks that languages without TCO (including python, clojure and rust) are bad.
I don't consider a post that only points to the current value to be a discussion of technical aspects.
First release of 64-bit PCLinuxOS KDE Desktop
http://markdownrules.com
I think this is easier said than done. What I believe you're proposing is difficult to enforce. Can you give some examples -- sounds like you're mapping this to the manufacturing domain.
Slick! Makes me feel a bit better then.
Image cropping for your web app in 20 minutes
FYI: What Would It Feel Like To Travel At Warp Speed?
> As for breakeven conditions they merely state that the power that the fusion generates must be at least equal to power used to start/sustain it.

Yes, but (apart from stars and weapons) this has never been achieved anywhere, ever. This is a big issue, bigger than most people realize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power

Quote: "As of July 2010, the largest experiment by means of magnetic confinement has been the Joint European Torus (JET). In 1997, JET produced a peak of 16.1 megawatts (21,600 hp) of fusion power (65% of input power) ... Fusion powered electricity generation was initially believed to be readily achievable, as fission power had been. However, the extreme requirements for continuous reactions and plasma containment led to projections being extended by several decades. In 2010, more than 60 years after the first attempts, commercial power production was still believed to be unlikely before 2050."

My point is if this project creates a net gain > 1, it will address a lot more than the problem of getting to Mars.
From what I understand, it is useful for storing compressed data and querying it without decompression.

Range queries allow for full-text search, for example.
Firefox Nightly: network monitor added to dev tools
Screen: http://cl.ly/image/2q2s450r2B43
3.82 / 8 years
"Google, Twitter, and Facebook are three of the biggest companies on the web and they house a massive amount of information on their users. It's important that users constantly remind them how much we care about our privacy."

Seriously? While I'm sure there are still some romantics out there who believe this stuff, if you actually look at what a company does as opposed to what it says in press releases, it couldn't be further from the above statement.

I'm more worried about the Google and Facebook then I am about the government at this point.
Seconding the desire to integrate with Quickbooks. Glad to hear it's in the works.

Our small business has been with ZenPayroll since the beginning of the year and we love it. Very easy to use, and we're hoping to add more employees in the near future.

You guys have solved a major pain point for small businesses. Keep it up!
Exactly! This would be news if they predicted the future without data from the past.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/9XWKo4p.png
A ship (or fleet of ships) on a voyage of discovery goes thousands of miles away from any court or police presence or indeed from any prospective allies or enemies who even speak the same language as the people on the ship.

That single strategic factor makes stories of mutinies dramatically interesting, but it also leaves me puzzled (even after reading the article at hbr.org) as to why the author of the article at hbr.org expects his book or his article to shed much light on situations in which all parties have recourse at any time to a judical system with a strong centuries-old commitment to the preservation of the rights of property and its duly appointed "agents" (i.e., the managers of the corporation).

ADDED. Well, yeah, for a group of employees with a bad boss to go over the boss's head to try to get the boss removed has some resemblance to a mutiny on a ship, but why rely on this rather tenuous connection between mutinies on wooden ships and "modern employee mutinies"? Why not directly study cases when in this day and age employees tried to get their boss removed? Because reading about mutinies on wooden ships is more fun? Because it makes for drama that can be converted into page views?

ADDED. Another huge difference is that for an employee to leave the ship during the voyage means being stranded 1000s of miles from civilization, which is a much bigger deal than walking away from unvested options or the chance of a pension.
Ask HN: CharityCoin - Complementary currency for NGOs
Imagine a world with a currency that:
* can be generated by your favorite NGO in exchange for dollars or euro (one to one)
* can be used with many merchants (those wiling to display social responsibility or for other reasons)
* allow micro-payments
* exchange fees will be used for supporting NGOs's causes

I can imagine a SaaS startup providing this service for NGOs. Has anybody tried this before?

I would love to have some passionate, native English speakers, serious PR skills and relevant expertise as co-founders (hustlers) on such startup.

Thank you!
What exactly causes reasonable doubt here ?

If 80% of bitcoin sites unrelated to each other are down at once, there's obviously some sort of attack going on. Several unrelated sites (but sharing a common theme) don't normally go down ... unless there's an Amazon outage :P (which there wasn't..).

The question was, whether the DDOS was caused by a large volume of trades. The answer is, no, because there wasn't a larger than normal volume of trades occurring, it wasn't possible due to the lag on the exchanges.

I don't know why all those bitcoin sites were down, but the fact is that the largest bitcoin sites were all down for at least a few minutes each.

The intention though was probably to trigger a market reaction to buy in at lower prices. It appears to have worked temporarily.
It may be that paid support would be profitable, but still google shouldn't do it. They've openly expressed that their strategy will be only on businesses/products with large ($1B+?) potential, to ensure focus; and killed a number of semi-popular, profitable but "too small" products.

Would paid support for the free stuff even be a rounding error's (on google scale) worth of revenue, much less profit?
Tech partner for a music ed app
Hey guys,

I am a director and owner of a music school in Manhattan. We work extensively with very little children, and over the last 10 years I developed my own method that works great for the 3-7yo age group. It is based on fun and game-like competitive activities. All of my teachers are using this method now, and it's a great success.

Over the last two years I've been working on transferring these activities into a format of a mobile or tablet app. I currently have the entire structure and the content for this potential app: eight 'games getting progressively harder through several levels.

Many of our students' parents were asking me for a recommendation for a good music theory app, and so I've been frequently checking what is out there on the marked. So far it seems to me that my idea has a very good chance to stand out. Everything else is very simplistic and repetitive.

I am posting here hoping to find a person interested in becoming a technical partner for this project and who would work for equity rather than cash upfront. I would be happy to provide you with more info and answer any of your questions.

If interested, please write to dmitry@riversidepiano.com, and please include some info about yourself.

Cheers,

Dr. Dmitry Alexeev
Social Engineering Skype Support team to hack any account instantly
This is interesting. But I think it's only test to see how they can actually crash it to zero later on.

And if we're voting here in Comments too, yes, let's have the Bitcoin submissions. Hacking a currency is interesting.
Would it be possible to add some minimal protection to the video stream by at least requiring https and a password to be entered?
I had the exact same experience. I emailed to return the nexus, did not get a response. I called them and they said they would set up a return, then I didn't hear anything. I called them again and they told me I past the deadline to return the tablet so they couldn't accept it. I then spent an hour arguing with them that I had started the return process before the deadline and that it was their lousy support that put us past the deadline.

Finally I just had to be obstinate and say "I want to speak to your manager." over and over and over again until I got to someone who knew how to look up my support ticket and see that I had started the return process before the deadline. Eventually they sent me the info I needed to return the device, but by that time I was so scared I would send it to them and then not get a refund that I chose to sell it instead.
Looks like it's taking lines from other songs that match a certain algorithm. There is already 2 other songs with the line "This is no trial, this a closed case" on rapgenious.com plus actual production songs on lyric databases with the same line.
Someone supposedly sold $10+ million worth of bitcoins.

http://blockchain.info/address/1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG...
Keep in mind you're playing 'musical chairs' here. If you do this with money you need and the music stops you might possibly be in deep trouble. Only do this with money that you don't actually need, and only do it if you understand all the risks that come with playing arbitrage over exchanges with flaky connectivity. If your initial trade goes through but your offload does not you have a problem.
Arbitrage here implies the ability to move money in or out of the country using ways other than bitcoin.
Wow! I really didn't expect this much attention and feedback! First, I want to say thanks for all the comments!

I designed this last, late California night. So the design isn't finished; this is a first draft.

Obviously the posts themselves are an issue. I didn't put much attention to the posts. I'll do that. Some of the feedback I got on it were: 1. Larger vote buttons. 2. Less contrast (too hard on the eyes). 3. Too much white space, a little too small of text. 4. Focus on title, not author.

Some other feedback I got was on the orange color. I pulled this straight from HN's header bar. I guess because the bar is taller that the color is brighter. I need to think about if it's the color or the surrounding elements that make it feel this way.

Keep up the commenting and feedback. I'm not finished here yet. I really liked the HackerWeb design, but it's too narrow; it feels like a mobile app. I'll pull some inspiration from there, but I really want to bring the design back to a "hacker" feel. So stay tooned!
How would that work? How/why would you extend credit/financing to people with bad credit. BillMeLater is subject to credit approval.

This could be disastrous and a recipe for bankruptcy if not managed properly. My biggest concern with this software is what type of person is likely to finance a $100 purchase from NewEgg, certainly not someone with good credit I would hope. I only use BillMeLater because it's interest free so, however minimal, I get 6 months of interest I wouldn't have normally gotten if I had paid immediately. This doesn't sound like what the OP wants to do.

That said, I'd never NOT purchase because of a lack of BillMeLater or similar services so it's not like adding this feature would give you access to new customers.

What the OP proposes is basically a credit card company, it's not really disruptive. Neither was BillMeLater.
Again, McConnell isn't disagreeing with Bossavit's claims about the Curtis 1986 citation. He concurs! "I never stated that Curtis 1986 was an 'empirical study.' Curtis 1986 is a broad paper that touches on, among other things, differences in programmer productivity. "

The difference is that McConnell thinks that summarizing four studies "offers support for the 10x claim" and Bossavit does not. That's a matter of analysis & evidentiary standards.
You mean my chemistry website that you helped in?!?!
Wait, you're saying rocks on an empty boat, but why not just have an empty boat? Wouldn't a totally empty boat travel faster than boat+rocks?
Something like that + data compression. If you have some data type mapped to a sequence of symbols, WT can speed up search in it. Please also note it is not a complete full text search index (like ones used in genome sequencing). It is a rank/select dictionary.
If you wouldn't wish monetary loss on people investo-speculating near-randomly in a very small market for an emerging decentralized cryptocommodity, who WOULD you wish it on?

What is this, "too small to fail"?!
The problem with email privacy: it's trivial to copy/forward email, but hard to ensure every endpoint is secure. Even if you are running your own MX in your basement, all of your email recipients use Gmail.
http://TLDRstuff.com comes back with:

Why Marissa Mayer Bought A $30M Startup - Business Insider:
The deal got a lot of attention because Summly's CEO is 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio. Acquiring Summly seems to have been an almost incidental side effect of a deal Yahoo made with SRI for a piece of "summarization technology." Until Yahoo bought it, SRI International held equity in Summly. The job of implementing this technology at Yahoo will not be given to anyone from Summly, including its young CEO.

Notice that the version from TLDR Stuff actually has the Answer in it. "Incidental side effect of a deal Yahoo make with SRI"

It also tells you that they aren't interested in the young CEO.

This is possible because it is not a keyword density Algo, the core technology called Liquid Helium is a Language Heuristics Engine and it can put weight on which sentences are Causality, and which are Subject matter. This creates a version of the text that tells you Who What Why and if there is still space, How. You can't do that with just a KeyWord density or where in the article is this system.

Summly claimed to have that tech, SRI has some of it, but what they really have is a nice Concept Tree, and sentence parser.

A far cry from a system that knows which points are important, not just which points are most talked about, because as you see in this Business insider article the important part isn't "what is summly" or "who is nick" or "Who is mayer" it is "Why did Yahoo do this" and that is captured in the TLDRSTuff/Stremor version, and not in TLDRizer.
Not sure if that'd apply here - the Sea of Galilee is awfully tiny for the kind of merchant shipping you're talking about, just 33 miles in circumference, max depth of 141 feet, etc.
In other news:

Man Crosses Atlantic by Expending Energy

Scientists Find that Virtually All Earth's Water is Wet
Yeah the biggest I've seen so far was $94,000.00 It doesn't specify whether that was a sell or a buy though. Either way someone made or lost a lot of money.
> Rust is supposed to be as fast as C/C++ and TCO will slow it down.

TCO doesn't slow programs down. If anything, it might even make them a tiny bit faster. But speed isn't the reason you'd want TCO: you want it as a stack optimization so that tail-recursive functions use constant stack space. Furthermore, although the C specification places no TCO requirement on implementors, it's actually a very reasonable optimization even in C. GCC actually does do TCO in some cases (I'm using 4.5.3, and tail-call elimination occurs with -O2 and higher).

> Clojure can't have TCO because the Java Virtual Machine doesn't support it. So they have a workaround (trampolines).

This is true. There was a time when TCO support was slated for Java 7. That time has come and gone; unofficially, it looks like it may make an appearance in Java 9 at the earliest.

> Python doesn't support TCO because... it screws up stack traces?

That's the cited reason, but it's horseshit. As others have pointed out on this thread, it's feasible to simply disable TCO when doing debugging if you need a stack trace. Even fancier, there are algorithms to recover the stack even after the calls have been eliminated (see Lua for example).
Not that I'd wish monetary loss on anyone, but if the first Bitcoin crash is any indication, these things tend to have a positive side-benefit of driving out most of the speculators flooding in after all the news reports that fuel these cycles, and the people actually interested in the currency itself stay behind, with an influx of new folk.

After all the noise dies down, new businesses and services get built backed by the wider audience, and the ecosystem develops further.

It's not yet clear if this is a crash similar to the previous one, but if it comes, I don't think much will change in terms of Bitcoin's future for the next few years.

(Posted this in the other thread just before it got ethered)
Startup Recruiting Action Items
Yes, surely the fishermen who were sailing it would be ignorant of shallow rocks right next to the boat. It's not like they would have to avoid hitting them.
In some ways the price is tied to the cost of electricity needed to mine a coin. Granted, the mining "price" is usually about two weeks behind the actual price, and the electricity required is variable based on the current sum of computational power being used by all the miners, so there's certainly some disconnect.
For many products and services the support would be far more expensive than providing the "main" service.

There is a LOT of well deserved space for stuff provided "as-is", with an explicit refusal to do any support at all, but still very useful for the 'customer'. For example, large part of free software.
This is a community with a variety of interests and needs that shares articles that may or may not line up with your interests and needs 100% of the time. That's the price of going to a collectively aggregated news and discussion site, you have to see stories that may not be specifically relevant to you.
So according to wikipedia, the Sea of Galilee is 13mi by 8mi. It's a lake. A big, but not very big one. Generally you wouldn't get ships on a lake that size, large boats sure, but not ships. Those boats generally don't need a lot of ballast, particularly because you are't going to get really large waves on a body of water that small. Even if you did, does it even make sense to move ballast stones down to the shore, then put them on a boat across this small of a distance, just to dump them, when in the same amount of time you could probably just load up a mule/horse/camel train and walk around the lake, and for better profit than pulling down the stones. (Note there is lots of historical evidence for trade by boat on the sea, I'm just not convinced of the need for ballast stones, and there is nothing on one side of the lake or the other that suggests an empty return voyage even makes sense).

Some other problems with this theory:

1) Ballast piles from wrecks are much much smaller than 50 meters by 50 meters, and not 5m high.

2) dumping ballast stones wouldn't occur in such a well confined way resembling a pile - there would be more outlying boulders, potentially increasing in density towards a central spot (the designated dump spot) rather than a pile with edges like this.

3) 4000 years ago, it is not clear to me that there were ships with the right properties to need balast stones anywhere. I'll be glad to be shown wrong, it's interesting. Similarly, trading in ancient times like this was usually far more circuit based than "there and back", so you get and drop items every stop.
Or an Actuary
okay, added a fix to try and extract article text from non-feed urls. try http://tldrzr.herokuapp.com/tldr/?feed_url=http://matt-welsh... :)
There is something you are not getting. Assuming a set of solar panels like those on the ISS, able to deliver 200KW near Earth and 100KW near Mars, one must still convert that power to useful thrust. That means achieving fusion break-even, a requirement that the NASA documents explain.

Obviously ion thrusters aren't practical for this kind of heavy lifting and short mission time, but that doesn't usher in fusion power as an obvious substitute -- unless the project creates a useful reaction, meaning a gain > 1.
There's actually a huge volume of trades during the dips, at least according to bitcoinity.

I still don't understand why they would bother spreading their attack volume across multiple sites. Hitting Mt.Gox with everything they've got offers two potential strategies:

- trigger a crash, buy low, stop the attack and watch it go back up

- trigger a price drop and profit massively from arbitrage with other exchanges still trading higher(BTC China for example)