skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well they did have a religious caste system that pervaded everything in life for hundreds if not thousands of years. Is this a surprise?
Plot your weekly cash if you quit: your savings vs. the income (or loss) you estimate you'll receive each week. Are you comfortable with that graph? Can you keep it from hitting zero with reasonable estimates in your expense and growth figures?
Since the author uses Go as a basis of comparison. I thought these benchmarks from The Computer Language
Benchmarks Game might be interesting:

Go vs. Ruby: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...

Go vs. Python: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...

Note: These results are from the 64-bit single core machine since it has already been updated to Go 1.1 beta 1. There is also a faster Go regex program (#7) that hopefully can be made to work again after 1.1 is released (in place of #1).

Although still using Go 1.0.X ,the recent TechEmpower benchmarks might be interesting if you have not seen them: http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/framework-benchma... (It looks like Go 1.1 might be 3x faster: https://gist.github.com/errnoh/5320784)

P.S. As always your own program is always the best benchmark to use, your millage may very, take your gain of salt, etc etc.
I hope to live in a future one day, where it's socially acceptable for talented scientists, artists, tinkerers, researchers, developers, people and groups of people whose work scales and benefits many thanks to technology/internet, to be completely funded via the likes of Gittip.

That way, they could fully focus 100% on their craft with the love and passion it deserves, without the drain of fixed-schedule 8 hour workdays. And they could afford to publish their work for free, fully open, without being forced to make it worse by applying DRM and selling on a per-copy basis.

I think we're slowly but surely getting there, and it makes me very happy. Cheers. :)
That's a pretty vague statement. Do you have any facts or citation to support it?
Ultimately, he's writing the story for the Seattle Times readers, not hard-core Facebook users.
"Programmers of elegant scripting languages desire similarly elegant looking code with flexible data structures even where no flexibility is in play. Some who know better will understand that technical limitations make the difference between hashes and other types of named lookups essentially nil for many popular language runtimes."

OK, if no flexibility is in play in many usages of hashmaps, should not an intelligent interpreter/compiler be able to detect this and modify the use of the hashmap accordingly? Maybe even use a different lookup system in those cases? It seems like that would be ... elegant.

The reason VMs don't need to be slow is that you don't need to treat an eval call literally, you don't always need to create a full environment to parse a twenty character string, right? But if you can get around that, should you not be able to get around hash-map's problems? Am I missing something.
Zynga makes its money off "whales" because it's a freemium model, where heavy users pay for extra functionality. Facebook has an advertising model, where they basically get paid for "unique users". So once a user views more than a few pages of ads a day, the marginal value probably starts to decline for them.
Kinda odd saying that it has an expiration date. Aren't the same systems required for the next election?
Pay them more, and help them develop into more than what they are.
We used to at least. I had classes about government every year from 7th to 12th. If we don't anymore, that is very disturbing.
The feature with scripting languages compared with system languages (C, Java, etc) is that they are fast -- not to run code, but to develop functionality.

The article argued that idiomatic Go gave at least as good runtime speedup as a normal scripting language (Perl, Ruby, etc) with the (small) time critical parts rewritten in C.

But it didn't touch the important question -- is the development time for Go faster than for scripting languages with critical sections in C?

Go looks fun, but I'd personally want information on that metric before trying it on a project. [Edit: Yeah, as the article noted, Go excels re parallelization etc. I might Go for it in those use cases.]

(What I'd really want is to find a place which use Lisp, since development speed is roughly as fast as for scripting languages and there has been good compilers for decades.)

Edit: Spelling, must start going over the room for the keyboard when using the iPad.
See previous (and humorous) discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4173101
Remember Unladen Swallow? It was open source. It had non-Google contributors. It was going to be the future of Python. Google was a heavy Python user and needed Unladen Swallow to succeed. It had a specific, ambitious goal. And then it just fizzled out because Google reassigned its people.

Will Go survive (and thrive) if Google pulled its support?
I'll give it a go. The early distribution of bitcoins seems to have been enough to motivate lots of relatively early adopters to promote it aggressively, maybe out of ideology or maybe just out of greed. Their claims, which fueled the recent speculative frenzy, have always been that Bitcoin would have a continuous, exponential growth against all other currencies. "It always goes up." "Get in before it's too late."

I can see how relatively small amounts of money could be invested into Bitcoins as speculation or just play. Several tens of millions of dollars have presumably been transferred to Bitcoin holders so far, in the aggregate. But many people are investing on claims that a single bitcoin will eventually be worth $10,000, $100,000, or $1 million. For that to happen, the world would have to transfer massive wealth to the early adopters, as this early adopter explains:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175833.msg1830933#ms...

Why would anyone do that rather than setting up an alternative? Massive delusions are possible, but it seems far more likely that the claim that a bitcoin will be worth $10,000 will start to seem ludicrous to everyone, as it obviously is.

After that, why would anyone buy a bitcoin for $100, or even $30 or $10? There's little practical use for them other than drugs or illegal gambling. And they're hardly worth speculatively buying at $100 just so that they could be sold at $120 or $150.

It's got to die eventually, unless everyone decide that they don't mind depreciating the value of everything else just so that the early adopters of this scheme can have untold wealth dumped into their laps. It's a fascinating technology, but that doesn't mean the speculative delusion will last forever.

Pyramid scheme? Just so. Of course, to some degree so is gold -- but gold has a much wider existing distribution (compared to Bitcoin), a much deeper history, and backers far more significant, both intellectually and financially, than the childish ideologues of bitcointalk.org.
Well the entire style of WordPress uses the global namespace for everything so you do have to get over that shock. But, once you do there's a kinda simplicity to the whole thing. That's my impression anyway.
Mozilla are on a roll, aren't they :)
Probably worth noting that the presentation that the author is discussing is less about 'which language is faster' and more about what sort of abstractions different types of languages encourage.

The presenter explicitly takes the position that Go and Python (actually PyPy) should be equally fast given the same sort of operations. Just that Python's idioms tend to be less efficient. He's a PyPy developer too, so I would think he would know something about what's going on under the hood. (He also talks a bit about why the VM doesn't/shouldn't try to optimize these cases automatically. Worth a look, it isn't long.)
"But he didn't touch the important question -- is the development time for Go faster than for scripting languages + C?"

That is a good question, but- Isn't that going to vary a lot by the person/team involved? Calculating "effort" is far more difficult than run-time or complexity characteristics.

Doesn't that question also assume that people writing in the scripting language can write (correct/decent/secure) C. Ironically, I have a strong feeling that many more Go developers can write C than say Ruby or PHP devs.
There was a discussion on storing passwords in source control here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178914, Although if you plan to discontinue development entirely you could just substitute keys with placeholders (YOUR_KEY_HERE) and make a note of it in your README.
Korean Words for TOPIK Beginner 13
Kind of. The reason college is usually touted as irrelevant is because while a lot of this type of thing is interesting and to some it is necessary knowledge, most people don't need to know most of the material. (Some of HN may find zero-knowledge proofs interesting, a few might even need to know it, and the vast majority doesn't really care a whole lot. If everyone here was forced to read about it, there would probably be whining and gnashing of teeth.)

The support for that position is because of what you said. Namely, if you find yourself needing it later in life you can just look it up. Because you can stitch together the curriculum when needed, doing it all up front isn't necessary. (So goes the argument; but personally I think it's somewhat short-sighted in some ways.)
There was no pre-mine. The genesis block contains a headline:

> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

He made bitcoin public exactly after this. He even announced it on a mailing list months before. Unless he had a time machine it's impossible for there to be foul play.
Design Patterns, 15 years later
Time of "Getting that shit done" and cost of long-term maintenance are two of the main reasons why people use Ruby/Python, not for the raw performance. I thought that was an old debate. And anyway, from my experience, Python has never been the cause of the slowness.. It's more about tweaking that DB query, smartly packaging the assets or using a better algorithm. (I know it's not always the case. I.e. If my program has to run in the space where bits could be randomly shifted, some additional thoughts would be needed, obviously.)
The proof is honest verifier zero knowledge. If your friend switches out one of the balls, you are hosed.
Yeah, some guy recommended I mine back in the earliest of days. "If only I knew then what I know now" ... hahah. So sick to think that my old Core 2 Duo could've made me a millionaire. I was turned off by the ugliness of the bitcointalk forum, and decided it wasn't worth the time to understand the Satoshi client.

I don't think it's right to get on the case of the earliest bunch though for not being more egalitarian. How could Satoshi have been more fair to you? After all, nearly everybody had the short-lived opportunity to mine 50 BTC blocks with ease. Clearly Satoshi believed in his concept more than most of us did, and deemed it worthy of putting in lots of effort into mining. He did his part to warn the world of his invention. Fair's fair.
Tiny Atom-powered COM aims Linux at harsh apps
Kind of wish GAE to have some sort of whitepaper, reference architecture, best practices/patterns as well.

Oh well, I guess GAE is for toy project ahem.
If there is one thing I love about vim, sublime, light table, etc.. is it gives emacs fans new things to implement in elisp!

But seriously, I love the work that has been going into all these different text editors. It seems to be net benefit for everyone. Multiple cursors are like a visual kbd-macro-edit..

Obligatory emacs equivalent source:

- https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el
- http://emacsrocks.com/e13.html

By the ever awesome Magnar Sveen
>>Calculating "effort" is far more difficult than run-time or complexity characteristics.

If it really was impossible to measure development/support speed, then we'd still use hex code with switches on a console. :-)

And yeah, kids today often don't learn C at school, it is a pity.
True, the author doesn't really address "effort to get shit done", but Others have commented on this and there seems to be consensus around "Go is a very human readable/writable language".

Anyone know of a human read/write-ability comparison of programming languages?
Why is this article here on HN?

It takes a single incident and extrapolates from their to the authors biases.

How is this at all worthy of discussion for intellectually curious people?
How to Add PDF Text on Mac OS X?
Weird, looks like just a clone of the original Android Developer Challenge winner Locale, or the newer Tasker.
With 3 and a bit years of downtime to sort out the crud and weirdness between uses.
Your callousness and (what seems to be a) lack of empathy to those less fortunate is quite confronting to read.
The only part our tax dollars paid for was the DARPA research that made all that technology possible. The rest was financed by campaign contributions. The Obama campaign refused public funding.
> I was recently asked to build something that requires either a crawler or access to a search engine API

By the way, is it possible to get deep query results from Google or another search engine? Say I need to see top 1000 results for 100K keywords and use that as a seed for my own crawler. Is anyone offering that?
This is a good line of inquiry and one that should be put to the article itself.

The article takes one event, and then reapplies it liberally to a popular narrative.

I could never have imagined that this was HN material.
Try Fluid. It's essentially a webkit-app-creator for OS X, and it can sandbox cookies and the session. It also allows facebook to be fired up from spotlight.
This article was posted just a couple of weeks ago.

Link to previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5415691
I love how this shallow and superficial article has been on the front page all day. I struck a chord and obviously people saw something in it. Leave it at that and stop being so negative.
I think what you're describing is more a culture problem than an issue with the design of the FMS or pilots receiving incorrect information from instruments.

Any pilot will tell you the very last thing you want is to be at war with your own aircraft (or its instruments), but incorrect readings should not solely cause an incident. This is also the case with AF447. I'm more likely after reading the CVR to put the incident down to poor communication between the crew (in the industry known as CRM or Crew / Cockpit Resource Management) [1].

The crew failed to effectively communicate what each other were doing, to the extent where they were inputting opposite commands to the flight controls and had a misunderstanding of what conditions triggered certain flight control modes [2] of the Airbus' autopilot.

Coming back to the original point around culture and training, it was evident that the more junior pilots were relying on certain "protections" the autopilot has against conditions like a stall. It's this reliance upon a computer (commanding a full nose-up during a stall) and lack of understanding of how the aircraft's flight computer acts under certain conditions that ultimately ended 228 people's lives. The French investigation concluded that the inconsistency of speed measurements was only one of seven factors that caused the accident.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Resource_Management
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes_%28electro...

EDIT: Having said that, I would not want to be the pilot flying an aircraft where I can't trust my own instruments, however there are numerous cases (QF72 [3] comes to mind) where pilots have had to disregard most if not all digital instrument readings and stick to the bare minimum to safely land.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
QuickBooks ;-)
If you want to buy direct display advertising, buyads.com is the way to go (full disclosure- I work there).
Slightly related: If you are using ST2 I recommend the "Clipboard Manager" plugin to have multiple clipboards, it gets anything that is copied inside ST2 or any other software, it works with multiple cursors which is really handy.
The all human approach:

I think human powered search could be achieved by Google. All they need to do is track our clicks on the serps and interpret which sites are good. Rotate all sorts of sites in the serps and gradually build a database. The whole thing would be like a wiki, with everyone contributing a little, and benefitting from the whole. The only way to accurately beat spam and low quality is to use human feedback. They probably do use human feedback already, just in a different way.

I'm wondering if reddit and Facebook could use this approach to build search engines. They do have large databases of human preferences.

The machine learning (AI) approach:

Another idea would be to distill information from the web Watson-style and try to answer many questions directly instead of redirecting to external pages. So far Siri, Watson, Wolfram Alpha are ahead in this field.
Perhaps its the other way round - as in the Indian scale goes from uber rich - upper class - middle class - lower class - impoverished - below poverty line - subsistence.
I'm sorry, but your comment seems blinded a bit by ... I'm not sure what the right word is? angst, self-hatred, jealousy? There's a lot of negativity in general coming from the HN crowd towards BTC, I'm guessing because everyone here was more than capable of installing the original Satoshi client and mining early on, but chose not to or didn't hear about it. With BTC now on the rise, of course it all seems so obvious, and oh so unfair.

Everyone had the chance to mine in the earliest of days, that's certainly true for me and I sometimes kick myself about it. Hindsight is 20/20.
Question 1: If drunk boys have sex with drunk girl, is it rape? Who raped who? Some news sites claim that the boys say that the girl _wanted_ to have sex.

Question 2: how can minors get access to liquor?
I see this as a devtime-runtime tradeoff, If you follow the link to the mentioned article [1] there is some discussion about how to improve on this tradeoff.

FWIW: I use C for many of my personal projects as I often enjoy solving problems at that level, however at my job I am 90% Perl with the other 10% being various web things (css, js, html, etc.).

I too would be very interested in articles looking at performance of some of the older dynamic languages.

[1] https://speakerdeck.com/alex/why-python-ruby-and-javascript-...
Winnipeg, Canada. Clear skies, but the aurora wasn't very bright. Just barely made it out.
As long as you've documented or used the invention in public prior to the filing, I believe yes. IANAL, though.

If you're trying to keep it as a trade secret you might have trouble then.
I'm guessing you're paying for the reliability and range. Does the price include sensor suites? Those are usually big ticket items.

Also, since these are autonomous, a crew is not necessary. You also save $ on fuel. I imagine the boat's cost savings pay for itself.
that's some powerful delusion.
I don't think there's anything wrong with posting multiple versions of a video, but if you don't feel comfortable doing that, my email is in my profile and I'd be glad to give you my thoughts.

Good luck - shooting demos is quite an art!!
Everything you've described can be applied toward any type of asset.

1. Early adopter wants more buyers in their market to drive up share price? Check.

2. Price bubbles up and crashes due to high expectations? See number 1? Check.

Unlike any asset I'm aware of, this one is open-source and completely transparent.

> There's little practical use for them other than drugs or illegal gambling.

I think these types of statements will be looked back at contemptuously years from now, even if bitcoin fails and is replaced by something else. This is a completely new field. How can you imagine bootstrapping a currency like this? It can't start with nobody receiving any coins, or it couldn't be used. You could give all the coins to a single entity and have that entity distribute (like Ripple is doing) but this is even less fair than Bitcoin, especially since OpenCoin is keeping half of the coins they're minting.

Practically speaking, there is plenty of use for Bitcoins. I don't have to give anybody my personal information to transfer value, which is impossible to fathom in any other existing commodity. There's even more use for them as it grows and concepts which have not been fully implemented (smart property and the like) are developed into/around the protocol. Every month a great new idea pops up, like fidelity bonded ledgers or some zero-knowledge proof system which makes bitcoins pop into and out of existence without a linear path -- all without a central entity and only some crazy tricky math and sometimes game theory.

Gold itself has had a nasty history too. Remember, it was bootstrapped (relatively speaking) off a market of financing war and has been periodically seized by governments for that end. I personally think gold is much more secure of an asset now, as we have to trust that nobody will seize a majority of the hashing power in the bitcoin network for our coins to be valuable, whereas with gold we only have to trust that they are scarce. It's something like NSA vs. Science, really.

Every bubble could be its last bubble and just like the early adopters who were smart enough to cash out in 2011 when they saw the opportunity, there are some who were smart enough to cash out during this last bubble. This is why it is absolutely pointless to call it a ponzi scheme. The economic base does not depend on new users financing it. Massive bubbles do, which is why they should be ignored/hedged against.
Well, rather than armchair psychology, you could consider the points I made themselves. Do you think there is a good reason for the world to transfer massive wealth to those who currently own bitcoins, rather than setting up an alternative (assuming that the fascinating technology of Bitcoin solves a problem that anyone except ideologues have in the first place)?
Tilting at windmills.

More accurately, asking the most ardent followers of bitcoin to help launch an investigation into their prime diety.

This discussion and variations of it has been going on for years now. Each new attempt has/will be dismissed by the faithful with some combination of the following:

A) You're wrong.

B) He deserves it.

C) That's just like everything else.

D) You're just envious.
Depends who his lawyer was and how many people he and his lawyer know in the local criminal justice system. Connections are just as important as wealth - sometimes moreso. See George Zimmerman (father is a judge) who would have walked were it not for the Worldwide media shining a spotlight on the case.
This question is partially address in the articles linked to at the start [1]

I linked to the slide that begins to mention it, rather short though.

The answer is that we can add heuristics, but that we should also be able to solve this somewhat on a language/library level rather than only at a vm level.

[1] https://speakerdeck.com/alex/why-python-ruby-and-javascript-...