skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bet we wouldn't have started thinking about it in the 9th century...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbas_Ibn_Firnas
Awesome, I work here in SD during the week and have just recently gotten into Python/Django for a side project. Looking forward to this!
I was thinking the same until I got to the end of the post:

>Don’t worry about building the next Google or making lots of money, because you’ll probably fail. But the lessons you learn and the connections you make will be worth it.

The general spirit of the piece is good.
You're not counting the cost of deallocation.
Logo and Brand Identity Group on FriendFeed
Wanna get these 2 to disagree? Put them on the same bridge team and have one of them open 2 no trump with 8 points.
You saw that if you watched the actual episode, where that fact was another punch line.
For the given example code the answer is to use the underlying SIMD types and intrinsic instructions. If you're on Intel or PowerPC then the SSE or Altivec registers and instructions are available. Use them and you'll beat any compiler optimization every time. And, most importantly, the chances that up-to-date SIMD types and intrinsics will be available in any language but C/C++ is vanishingly small. Java, Ocaml, Haskell... you name it, you can't properly use SIMD (AFAIK... please let me know if there are exceptions).

And if you're application doesn't fit the native SIMD properly, there's no chance the compiler can really do anything meaningful with it anyway.
I think a large part of the "C is Efficient" fallacy/truth is that C is more predictable with its assembly output than HLLs. Since ultimately all programs are converted to machine instructions at some point, you will always be able to write machine instructions that are at least as efficient.

The test lies in the ability of the programmer to do so.
That brings up another question.... since newmogul.com and AHN seem to use the same script, is it open source somewhere?
How to Land a Six-Figure Software Developer Job
Fractions of time would probably be full of fail, since it uses a different scale since it's time.

Try to think of an example using video games, maybe some RPGs use three decimal places somewhere for stats.

Somehow as a civilization we must have decided somewhere that 2 fixed floating point places was plenty for 99% of things, because you usually never see any more than that unless you get into science.

Another possible way would be to show percentages, but that might also complicate things if they don't know about them yet.
This is what people mean when they say pointers may be able to look like arrays, but arrays are not necessarily pointers.

Consider, "float a[X][Y][Z]" and "a[i][j][k]".
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591897
As Consumers' Demands Change, Designers Are All in the Behavior Business
Would many people buy an iphone app from an individual developer?
Assuming apps of similar quality, do companies typically get a significant sales boost over individual developers just because they are companies?
What an utterly useless article. All the author offers by way of commentary is: "The guy is a serious nutcase."

Does this really advance the discussion in any way?
http://arclanguage.org/

A bit more than a script.
Call me superstitious, but I believe that teleporting machines are just copying machines. The you a t the destination is just a copy. The you at the departure is just thrown into the supply hopper to build the next arrival.
Superstring theory is a failure. The moment that you resort to the 'anthropic principle' to select one from out of more than 10^500 metastable vacua, you've given up falsifiability and thus any claim that what you're doing is science. It is interesting to note that superstring theory has not only failed abjectly in every way, but has nonetheless established such a death-grip over the apparatus of scientific funding and publication that no competing theory is given any practical chance of success.

It seems that many if not most superstring advocates would rather give up on the very definition of science than admit they have completely wasted their careers, down a Calabi-Yau shaped rabbit hole with no bottom and NO BLOODY PREDICTIONS.

That's right folks, superstring theory doesn't predict anything. It can't be falsified, because even if the superpartners don't show up at the LHC (they won't), they'll just tweak the parameters and move the energy scale around and away from the LHC's capabilities.

This is a crime.
AGW is a myth.

http://www.climateaudit.org/
OK, it's great to be able to crack the crackers...

The Ars summary of the report seems strange (I've not read the whole pdf) in a couple ways:

They talk about percentages of private behavior getting scooped, but not about percentages or numbers of credit card or bank account users/passwords (which they indicate were the primary targets of the botnets).

And weirdly, Ars says, "Torpig controllers may have exploited these credentials for between $83,000 and $8.3 million during that time period..." Funny numbers. ?it just happens that the range is 8.3 x 104 to 8.3 x 106 ? Makes me wonder about overall accuracy of post/report.
slashdot.org -- nerd news

dzone.com -- programming
It might be that they found something like 8.3e(5+-1), and Ars is reporting the bounds rather than the find.
I read the original article (the one by Orson Scott Card) when he originally wrote it and prior to reading it I had heard that he was a religious nut.

It's really unfortunate as I truly loved the Ender's Game series. It's not just that he's hate filled, it's that his article is full of logical fallacies.

For example, he's written about how gays already have a right to get married: gay men can marry women and gay women can marry men. Somehow he considers gay marriage to be a destroyer of the "sanctity" of marriage, but considers a loveless, lie of a marriage to be perfectly acceptable?
Amazon to Launch Kindle for Textbooks
Really? In the course of about a month and a half Facebook has caught up on nearly every single feature that makes Twitter distinct and interesting. I haven't seen a compelling reason to think that they won't be able to finish the job and go even further than what Twitter is capable of in the future.
Seven questions for Nate Silver
I wish I had a better comment then that, but that's all I can come up with too
Well, Torpig obtained credentials for 8310 accounts, so I'm guessing that's just a $10-1000 estimate of the loss per account. But from my experience, $1000 per compromised account seems quite a bit on the high side for credit card accounts (I have no idea about average loss for stolen brokerage accounts).

Edit: From the pdf

"A report by Symantec [37] indicated (loose) ranges of prices for common goods and, in particular, priced credit cards between $0.10-$25 and bank accounts from $10-$1,000. If these ﬁgures are accurate, in ten days of activity, the Torpig controllers may have proﬁted anywhere between $83k and $8.3M."

As an aside, these amounts are a good reason you should you your credit card instead of your debit card.
SimRank:  Two objects are similar if they are related to similar objects.
This matches with my experiences with ICC doing kernel development. It would vectorize loops and break out the SIMD instructions where gcc would not.

It was quite strange the first time looking through the objdump seeing things like punpwlkd and xmm.

And then discovering what -fast would do to things (it makes icc look at your whole program to optimize, so it does things like ignore CDECL and uses whatever registers it can.
Anyone know of any similar Python/Django meetups in Orange County? Meetup.com has not been very helpful here. Any Orange County hackers have anything going on or want to start something? I can't be the only one here.

How about collaborative workspaces?
Suggestion: being able to select more than one rating. A link may have gore and nudity, it would be helpful if you can easily specify both.
I have a better idea (from a usability standpoint): Remove the "I'm at work" button entirely. It serves no purpose (other than being cute the first time it's clicked) so it will never be used. If I'm at work, I'll just close the page or go back.
And just like PageRank, SimRank also has a random surfer model, which is described in Section 5.
Survey Says: PR People Love Our No-Embargo Policy
This looks like a lot of calcs for the inner loop but is quite easily optimized. The compiler knows that (j * ni + i) is constant in the k loop and that ni * nj is constant. Check the assembly output. But it is probably better to reorder the loops and traverse linearly through memory so that each cache line brought down is fully consumed in order.
> C programmers have more freedom to arrange data in memory to exploit locality

I think just about everyone here is underestimating the impact of this one "feature". Most optimization approaches are grounded in 1970s computer hardware, where CPU speed and memory speed were two aspects of the approach. That's not the case anymore... memory access times absolutely dominate on modern hardware. Just lookup the number of instruction cycles a cache miss takes for your favorite system. Its appalling.

C and C++ have been able to stay ahead of the curve because they allow strict control over memory layout. Ocaml is often brought up as a competitor, but storing a floating point value in ocaml requires a boxed pointer! Nevermind trying to make an aggregate structure that includes floats and other types bundled together... everything will get boxed and the cache never stands a chance.

C and C++ are the only fully current languages that let you bundle your data exactly as you need it in as small space and in appropriately sized chunks such that memory access doesn't grind your program down. Of course you can fail to take advantage of this ability and write slow code in C or C++; in which case you'll match the benchmarks for your other favorite languages and maybe make a blog post about it. That'd be missing the point though...
The stack is an implementation detail
Making It
There is some brilliance going on here:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/cue/bc...

research.microsoft.com/otherplaces as well. Corporate-backed R&D, plain and simple. The only unfortunate thing is they are mostly hidden from the public eye, and the consumer market.
This is why I love HN: even if something has a boring (or linkbait) title, if it has 100 votes, chances are it's worth reading.

#3 alone is worth the read, I've never quite thought of relationships that way.
I'm totally with you on the "ideas as answers", but I feel the article is bashing exactly these kinds of ideas - the ones that "geeks" tend to have.

There seems to be a number of people here that often say things like "execution" or "knowing what customers want" are what matters, as if those weren't composed of many good ideas, too.
A Micropreneur’s Perspective: Selling Physical Products vs. Digital Products
Fred Wilson covers off the agregators he uses in the comments here, which might provide some inspiration: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/celebrating-aggregation.html

While slightly different, the reddit code is here, and publicly available: http://code.reddit.com/

lastly, if you're looking for environmental news topics, I've slapped together: http://www.environmentalbubble.com/
Lightbox Gone Really Wild
He's not a web designer, at all. He does things like "I <3 NY" and Time magazine covers. His work is way older than the web... so I can't blame him.
One need look no further than recent history to find evidence of this better than anyone can hypothesize about: VHS vs. Betamax. Tesla vs. Edison.

Vision is important. A good example of someone who deftly handles both tech and business is like Wolfram, but he's out of our league; most of us, anyway.

Fascinating read about Wolfram's embarkation into business:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/interviews/88-fortune/
Buffett’s love of Google, quoting him: “Their moat of competitiveness is so wide..."

She was referring to a conversation with Buffett and Charlie - anyone got more info on that? I don't think Google has a wide moat. I must be wrong. I want to know why.
Very cool - reminds me of a City Generator include for POV-Ray I used back in the day: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/citygen.ht...
Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath
Please email sf-house (at) googlegroups dot com if interested. It's home to divvyshot, close to the YC community and would highly prefer a hacker/ news.YCer to join.

Thanks!
Read the comments: turns out the author was ignorant of C++ templates (including Blitz++ scientific computing library) and he was lumping C and C++ together in his "benchmarks".

It always annoys me when clueless people judge a language they don't even understand.

Repeat after me: there is no such thing as C/C++.
I don't know if that would really help. The problem with numbers above "million" is that people tend to think that a billion is a few million. Changing to a notation where the exponents are just numbers won't help. They know what 12 and 6 are, so E12 is like, twice as big as E6.

I think the solution is to go Carl Sagan: start saying "million million" instead of trillion.
Some good microsoft stuff:

1. C# -- Despite all its faults, it's a hell of a lot better than java and they've done some really interesting things with the CLR and type systems...

2. Photosynth & Seadragon are pretty cool.

3. XMLHTTP Request (what powers all this ajax stuff, that's microsoft)

4. Microsoft's birds eye view in their map applications.

5. A lot of the features that got dropped from VISTA were cool (new command line and the new file system)

6. The Microsoft intellimouse (best mouse ever made)

That's just a few off the top of my head... sure office & windows don't innovate too much; but microsoft access is a pretty important product because it solves a real business need (never really used it, but know tons of companies rely on it).
> just bumping a pointer

If only. You have to check for out-of-memory, and throw an exception if so. (This check can sometimes be optimized away, though). You also have to mark the size of the allocated block, so the garbage collector knows how many bytes to copy during the sweep phase.

Also, garbage collectors usually allocate from a shared memory pool, so every allocation also involves some mutex operations.

Allocation is bumping a pointer in theory only.
Oberon, a delightfully insane system
Maybe they mean "execution" as opposed to "ideas as questions"? Or maybe not: I guess it's true that even with PageRank designed and implemented, it's a hell of a long way from a business, with many opportunities to mis-execute. To go from the idea of pagerank, to a working pagerank is also a lot of work. Edison's comment about 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration applies both to inventing and commercializing.

For myself, the inspiration of a product was instantaneous; the first working version took two hours; but it took a year of further iteration before my first sale. I think that's much more than 99% perspiration (though there were lots of little ideas along the way, and one brilliant suggestion of what to look at - from someone else - that changed everything).

I think pinning people down on what they mean by "idea" might clarify things.
Most Influential Tech Blogs
Maybe I'm crazy but the artice, which was obviously meant to rebut the criticism of PSD, really ended up confirming every piece of criticism.

The only real counterpoint was backwards compatibility and to be honest I don't think that's really valid. With a computer savvy group like Photoshop users I suspect you could introduce a format that addresses all the criticism with minimal disruption.
I agree.

People don't realize what a power tool C/C++ is because they haven't had it out for a spin at that level. If you've done serious API work, and wondered why you're busy byte-packing, it's because there's some highly optimized code somewhere you're feeding. You can allocate a big honking chunk of memory and create your own world in there. Boxing, for all its goodness, is a performance killer.
No. Don't use a big word that you don't understand when a simple one will do.
Tokyo Tyrant can be used to build a distributed KV store with Tokyo Cabinet.

http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/tyrantdoc/
While I'm not necessarily ready to write off string theory, it is rather disturbing to see putative scientists declaring that since this as-yet unproven theory (and I do mean rather thoroughly unproven) declares that there may be a multiverse, well, then, there must be.

Brian Greene has always spoken rather more confidently than his evidence really permitted (even as I enjoyed his book), but this is taking it to the next level. String theory remains a conjecture, and this is nothing more than conjecture built on conjecture. Passing it off as truth is quite unscientific. (But... very New Scientific. I've lost almost all respect for the publication. The quoted do deserve at least a bit of consideration for the possibility that the New Science article is distorting their quotes for sensationalism or due to lack of understanding by the author.)
Live Imogen Heap Performance Shows Power of Realtime Sampling
Time-space trade-off. Meaning Java uses a lot of memory for almost anything. Speed isn't everything.
Become a "fan" of a Facebook page = "follow"
Is that meaningfully different from what happens to you now, instant-to-instant? How many of your atoms need to be swapped out for the copy to stop being "you"?
It's be simpler, and more humane, just to not let them breed and vote.
C programs manage memory manually, and so lack GC overhead

At this point, GC is often faster than manual allocation. (Due to being able to allocate or deallocate a bunch of things at once, rather than having to allocate/free memory whenever the programmer says to.)
Not an easy thing to count globally. Your GC cost (at least in mark-sweep) is dependent on the number of objects you're not deallocating. The rest are implicitly destroyed.
Some quick googling suggests you are wrong:

http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~kahl/Publications/TR/Anand-Kahl-...

http://wwwlasmea.univ-bpclermont.fr/Personnel/Jocelyn.Serot/...

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Nov-03.html

etc.
The biggest cults in tech
That's so close to my house on Haight & Webster. Are you guys going to be having meetups there?
Ways to be a better programmer in 6 minutes
It sounds startlingly similar to what has happened in the humanities with postmodernism and deconstruction. Once a field abandons the reality principle it crosses over into a completely self-referential regime that is impervious to criticism and impossible to correct.

In some very essential ways it seems as though the forms remain, but the substance has largely been lost.

I wish I knew what I could do about it.
>Maybe I'm crazy...

You are not crazy. I drew the same conclusion you did. There was no discernible refutation.
Google Chrome on the Mac: what's the holdup?
I just reskimmed the article's comments on ideas, and I think you're overlooking his nuanced point of view on "brilliant ideas". For "business" (that's the scope of his comments) the key is being useful to a customer. He's exaggerating his position to counter the geek tendency to ignore this aspect.

2. for every Google there are ten examples of companies that had killer products that didn't sell - and for 1/10 the idea alone is enough. Nuance.

3. Even on the off chance that you do manage to stumble across someone who is as excited about your idea as you are - most people don't appreciate your idea (I can't even explain my current idea to myself half the time, as I'm lost in the gritty detail - that's why some kind marketing is needed). [BTW: I think that once your idea is successful, patent protection can be useful, esp to have something to sell to acquirers.]

4. What matters is what your customers think. - it's true that to sell something to someone, they have to think it's worth buying. If you think it's a brilliant idea, that's only helpful if it somehow translates (in some way) to something that customers want. Maybe you can communicate your conviction that it's great (like Jobs?), or (more likely) you use the idea to provide them with something that they already value. For the latter, the brilliance of the idea is utterly irrelevant to them; they don't even need to know it exists.

9. The idea is very nearly irrelevant. - he's not saying the idea is irrelevant, but almost irrelevant. Another nuance. He's saying it is relevant - just much less than he, or the hypothetical audience he writes for, would tend to weigh it.
Amazon and New York Times to Introduce Device for Newspapers, Magazines
Delivering Bad News
David Heinemeier Handsome
Most influencial doesn't mean the best. From these I'll say that only Engadget, GigaOm and ArsTechnica are worth reading. Well, maybe VentureBeat too...
3D Coverflow for iPhone Using CSS-VFX
This is a nice little app called Zflow that uses Javascript and CSS transforms & animations to emulate the Apple's native coverflow on the iPhone/iTouch.
>Um, like, holy fuck.

No doubt. Exponential trends like these are all over the place (life expectancy, CPU performance, etc...)

One of my favorites is life expectancy [1]:
1850: 38
1900: 48
1950: 66
2000: 74
2004: ~76

This kind of trending is one of the foundational aspects of Ray Kurzweil and Co's singularity forecasts.

[1] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html
Just think about it; it’s likely that a lot of the information was already structured and comes from vetted sources. Of course they don’t inspect every single bit of data! Instead they’re likely to do doing some checks, editorialisation and general shepherding to make sure that the data is accurate.
Does The FTC Really Think Apple And Google Are Too Buddy Buddy?
So? What does "just a copy" mean? If it's an exact copy, how do you tell the difference? Why can't there be two you?
Always remember that the total time between you having a problem, and you achieving results, includes the coding (and recoding) time, and the run time. There's a tendency for people to ignore "slow" languages because they focus only on the runtime.

I am well aware that there are good reasons to optimize things in languages like C (and I use them), but consider...

If I take several extra weeks to code, debug and test a C solution, and I could have had a script done much sooner, then my results were not faster overall. Why? Well, the script could be slow as dirt, but if it has a few extra weeks to churn through data and produce results, it may be done before the C program is even ready.

It's also important to remember that not all bugs are in software. Suppose I was looking at an entire problem in the wrong way, and this wasn't apparent until I started seeing results? In that case, my earlier start with a "slow" program meant that this mistake was found much sooner, so the script can be thrown out and redone, producing correct results with not much of a time penalty.
5 Ways Traditional Media is Going Social
Tokyo Tyrant is a network wrapper around Tokyo Cabinet, meaning it translates commands coming from the network to local db calls. In itself Tokyo Tyrant is not a a distributed KV store. Sure, it can be used to build one, but so can BDB, Mysql, or just about any other piece of software which takes data from the network and stores it on disk.

The part that actually coordinates all the different network wrappers to work in unison is what makes a software "distributed".
Treaps:  Using randomness to balance binary search trees.
Of Course There's Going To Be A Newspaper Bailout
The face of the first European
C works in CUDA and OpenCL - which for scientific programming is the fastest thing there is.

The GPU is used with C.

C isn't faster than hand coded assembler on cpus... but is pretty damn quick.

There are specialist compilers for C, like vector C etc.

anyway... whatever. back to typing text into a file now.
A Battle to Preserve Wardenclyffe, Tesla’s Bold Failure