skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If some_function calls a bunch of random functions, it is very, very hard to tell if those calls will execute "self.worker = some_other_function" as a side effect.

I still don't see, since changing self.worker at runtime does not matter at all. Whether a call is at tail position or not can be determined only looking at the caller code. If self.worker(self) appear at the tail position, compiler can generate code sequence something like this:

discard caller's frame.
push the value of 'self' as argument.
retrieve value of 'worker' attribute.
jump to the method pointed by the value.

The value of worker attribute may be different every time this code is executed, but that's totally fine.

The only construct I can think of so far that prevents compile-time tail call elimination is first class macros, since with them the compiler cannot determine a call is tail position or not. It is the extreme end of dynamism. But even with them, you can do runtime tail call elimination. It might not be as efficient, though.

> Right, and since Python makes wide use of exceptions, true tail call elimination is often impossible.

Wait... are we talking about the same thing?

What I mean by tail call elimination is converting tail calls to jumps. It has nothing to do with non tail calls, hence wide use of try-catch block has nothing to do with "true tail call elimination".

What you can argue is something like: because try-catch block is so abundant in Python code that tail call elimination won't add much value to typical Python programs. I don't know if it's true or not, but it's plausible. (E.g. C++ has to run destructors when stack-allocated objects goes out of scope, which makes most of calls non-tail calls, hence effects of tail call elimination will be limited.)
"Don't eat pork from Mexico!!"

Sigh

Surely this sort totally false information and rumors has spread verbally before Twitter was around, now we just have a permanent record of stupid things people say.
That article could not even quote any severely misinformed tweets. Is it being misinformed to be worried a little bit? Also, the article focused on tweets of scared users, there might be zillions of tweets by users who are not scared.

I think if anything, the whole issue might make people reflect more on things they read and hear, which would be a good thing. Other than that, the same kind of articles have probably written years ago, if you replace "twitter" with "internet" or "wikipedia".

While I don't panic, I find the whole thing interesting because I have never actually witnessed a pandemic. My first epidemic I witnessed last christmass, when the whole family suddenly had a vomitting virus. That was a bit scary. A global epidemic would therefore be really scary. Since few people have experience with this, worrying seems like a sane reaction. Or would the appropriate reaction be "I am sure the government will handle it fine, and if anything serious was going on, they would surely warn me on TV"?
Twitter users are still capable of using google. So if somebody tweets about a pandemic, the next reactions of twitter users would probably be to google it. I don't think they are stupid sheep who just do whatever their twitter-friends tell them.

It is still useful information to hear that worries about a pandemic have arisen, no matter if the advice for actions is right or wrong.
Quelle Surprise! Some people associated with the American political right are crazy.

How is this intellectually interesting?
The context is different from when you're watching TV or reading cosmo. That sort of activity is done in private with friends and family you know and that you feel safe with.

That context is completely different from being in a room filled with men you don't know at a professional conference. Can you see how having the presenter show sexual images, all of women, could make women attendees uncomfortable?

My understanding is that women in technology offer suffer from degrading sexism - from being ignored/marginalized to having their butts patted (yep, still happens). It makes sense to me that women would be uncomfortable to be at a professional conference where the presentation is "priming" the attendees to see women in a sexual way.

It's not at all the same as watching tv or reading a magazine in private, and the same standards don't apply.
Latest Swine Flu Collected Info
Great addon. With a widescreen monitor there's a lot of space that could be doing something more useful.

One feature that I'd like to see, in tabs generally but it makes particular sense here, is a way of intelligently abbreviating the title text. For example on the Safari books site the titles all start with 'Safari Books Online' before getting to the part I'm interested in: the book's title. I'd like to see an addon that factored out repeated text in tab titles, or focused in on the part that's different.
Official people should show self-restraint because they are sources of authority.

The impression I got from the article is that the author thinks Twitter users are sources of authority and that therefore some means of self-restraint or censorship is required.

There's a difference between proclaiming you a source of authority (e.g. the WHO) and people labeling you a source of authority (e.g. Twitter users).
Everyone's got a bit bored of the recession. Quick, let's find a new mass panic.
This was already submitted and was flagged, why is it back again?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579230
If you want to see a language which is stylistically very similar to Python* , but has TCO, check out Lua.

In practice: you can easily add pre-tail-call tracing, you have the option of starting a debugging REPL on error, using iterators is very idiomatic, it makes implementing coroutines and fully-functional closures easier, etc.

I happen to think the most significant benefit of TCO is being able to set up "looping" tail calls between multiple functions, but that's just me.

* Somewhere between Python and Javascript, specifically.
Ask HN: What do you think of my new site?
Bred To Be A Superstar (or Not)
I was testing this last night... The twitter search was interesting because after your first query, it dynamically updates a display with how many new results would be added if you refreshed the search. The trend for swine flu kept rapidly mounting.

I could see this alarming the average person especially if Twitter was to distinguish their brand as the ubiquitous "realtime" search.
That is exactly the point of the story. Gravity works the same way everywhere in this universe (this includes non-earth locations). But instead of applying common sense, the TA made up a fact about the Moon.

Maybe there is some kind of cognitive bias in the heads of some that makes them think Earth is different from the rest of the universe because we happen to live here.
But that the TA did not apply Occams Razor to this problem seems weird; since he knew Descartes' philosophy, he should not have held this aristotelian world view.

snarkier:

Why not? Most people can probably get through life just fine telling other people nonsense about how gravity works at non-earth locations.
Simple Apache Vhost templating with Ruby
YC isn't a charity. They compete in a marketplace like any other business. Any optimization you speak of is a competitive advantage. Why would they comply with your request?

Somewhat relevant:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/adeo-ressi-fights-atroc...
What do I have to lose by asking?
Heidi Montag wedding with Spencer Pratt
Interview with Marcus Ramberg, Creator of MojoMojo (wiki on Catalyst)
Twitter, as a medium, is defined by sending short messages, with neither time for second thoughts nor space for citations. Whether it's intentional or just an emergent property of its design, it's heavily skewed towards rewarding hysterical sound bites.

(The above characteristics are shared by SMS, of course.)
Google is smart enough for this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=1%2011%2021%201211%20111221%2...
I never implied that you had anything to lose; I think it's an interesting question.

I asked, "why would they comply with your request" because I was interested if you thought it made sense for them to do so.

I suppose it comes down to whether they gain more through such a release via others contributing back and improving the process, paperwork, etc. while keeping in mind the insight and potential efficiencies provided to competitors in doing so.

Has anyone tried an open source/creative commons type licensing and repository for standard legal documents? Does such a thing exist?
Then enlighten us, please. Exactly what is "grossly misinformed".
Opera is very popular in Russia and other CIS countries.
It is inefficent for everybody to learn to about science. It is better to let them specialize in whatever they're good at. This allow advanced division of labor so that we can have a really sophisticated civilization.

It's a tradeoff.
"For the rest of the app, you are on your own."

Did it ever occur to you that some of us prefer it that way?

I really don't mind rolling my own, especially if I'm going to use it thousands of times.

What I do mind is getting "painted into a corner" because the high level tool I'm using never accounted for something I want to do.

Everything I want to do I can do with php. It's stable, popular, and everywhere. It may not be the best, but I don't care. I'd rather spend my extra mental cycles on my customer's problems, not mine.
well, as we've seen, many people were re-tweeting false advice ("don't eat pork") without bothering to check anything on google...
You are forgiven. The pessimists have had their say long enough. Mr. R is a perma-bear and his doomsday montra has gone on long enough. Spring is here. Let's not pretend, let's look at what's changed since six months ago... quite a bit. Mr R still has his head back there.

Housing prices are not still declining. Unemployment has peaked. Demand is now at capacity. Banks are in significantly better shape than six months ago. Stress tests released tomorrow will show little to no more capital required.

Read the current signs.
For terms of use:

http://en.wordpress.com/tos/

http://automattic.com/privacy/

http://ownterms.pbwiki.com/

Though US-centric of course.
Just so you all know, The Landmarkforum is based on est. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training
The people at The Landmarkforum bought the "technology" from the people who ran/own(ed?) est.
I always find these puzzles odd

Why can't this row be valid?

1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 ....

Why does it have to be 13112221? Is it just a most close answer according to average math pupil's knowledge model psychologically?
One useful resource: (Just in case, if you have not seen it before.)

http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/

Some previous related discussions here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41308

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244009
In the first CS course I took as an undergraduate, the professor spent about 5 minutes in the first lecture talking about the sizes of endowments various universities had -- I did my undergraduate degree at a fairly young institution which consequently doesn't have much money -- and asking us to remember the university when we became rich.

I don't know if I'm going to become rich, but if I do, I certainly plan on fulfilling his request.
But why Google when you can OEIS?
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/
So, in short, the "article" is claiming that lisp programmers always over-engineer everything whilst python programmers try to reuse existing language features and code to get to the solution as quickly as possible.

Yes, I'm sure that's a really unbiased, useful starting point for a discussion.

I can see why this got flagged before...
Series AA Equity Financing Documents have been open sourced by Y Combinator.

http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html
The definition of Conservative used is laughable. Religious belief has nothing to do with whether you're a conservative or not, and there's no mention of small government, lower taxes, which are what conservatism is about. The definition seems to be a caricature of America's religious right, but the sample is of foreign students in the US. In other words, the definition is based on a subset of American conservatives, which has no equivalent in many of the countries that the students will have come from.
Highly "optimized" means they can incorporate lots of companies in a short amount of time.

The value of YC lies in the advice and expertise of PG, RTM, TB, JL ... and the YC alum network; probably not in their ability to get startups incorporated 1 week faster than the competitor.

Publishing these documents would be an inconvenience, not a death blow to YC. By asking, I'm hoping this get upvoted, others also post comments requesting the same, and maybe this'll push YC over the energy barrier to organize + document the process (after they realize how many would be founders they will help).

[In my case, I have iPhone apps ready; and would like limited liability before releasing them (in this day & age, when people sue each other for the silliest reasons)]
This is going to sound strange, but I love watching how people act on incomplete information.

Some will fall back to observe-hypothesize-test. Some will ignore/dismiss all observations unless someone in authority tells them to pay attention. Some will make the most outlandish claims. Some will make false statements, like the "don't eat swine" claim, just to add momentum to the story.

Of course there's no right answer in a situation that could be fast-moving yet requires immediate decisions based on incomplete information. It's just cool to watch all the different modes of thinking critically.

I hope this story turns out to be bogus -- I have a job where I deal with hundreds or thousands of people in small meeting rooms. But I've read up many years before today, and I understand that the pandemic IS coming. It's just a matter of time.

Just not this year, I hope.
We found longhand square root instructions with worked examples in my Grandma's recipe collection. :)
It went away after 4.4 million cows were destroyed in the UK.
I disagree with both of you.

I reckon we're still in a dead cat bounce. I don't buy all the doom and gloom about how we're off to some multi-year U-shaped depression, because I think the system is more flexible than it was 80 years ago, and I think the people in charge of the knobs are also more pragmatic. So, I think there'll be recovery, relatively soon, and things will go up again from there.

That said, I don't think this current up-turn will last. There's still some rotten stuff hidden away - the banks have just claimed big profits, but that was days after an accounting rule change. I reckon they're still hiding toxic assets and there'll be another series of bank busts before we're out of this mess.

My guess, which is based on no economical knowledge whatsoever, is that we'll see a permanent rebound once the DOW hits 4,000. I think this will happen within 6-12 months from now. However, I think that once the rebound does come, things will get better quickly.
To look at this politically, the more educated an American, from high school dropout through college graduate, the more likely they are to vote Republican-- a pattern that flips dramatically at the very top. College grads are more likely to be GOP but folks with graduate degrees are fairly strongly Democratic. Even in the Democratic wave in 2008 this general pattern held true-- Obama only beat McCain by 2 points among college graduates, and it was the first time a modern Democrat candidate beat a Republican candidate among college graduates.

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national...
Yeah, the "next # in the sequence" things are in theory dubious but in practice the theoretical unsoundness doesn't really cause issues (in the sense that: the people you'd want to select for will often find the pattern you want them to find, and many of the people you want to select against won't find that pattern).

The real meaning of what they're asking for is something like:

- I assert that there's a simple-but-nontrivial "algorithm" that generates this sequence. Find that algorithm, and use it to find the "next number in the sequence".

...but then you need a definition of "trivial", which is a lot of work (and most applicants know "trivial" when they see it:

def sequence(i): return [1,11,21,1211,111221, 312211][i % 5]

...is "trivial", so why bother explaining it that way when most applicants already "know" that's the wrong answer?

Doing a more-formal definition probably gets you into issues of Komolgorov complexity, which most applicants will not know much about.
Frequently washing your hands, with soap and water, is better protection than eating and sleeping against such infections
Who cares about this article? Let's get back to hacking, and hacking-related news.
Cisco ASA WebVPN Cross Site Scripting Vulnerability
By the time one earn those "cached judgements of merit", he/she is less likely to be interesting. I turn off caching and judge for myself:-)

As for the study, I find it silly.
Nobody ever said Twitter made you smarter...
Nokia N86 Theme: Zone 60
"We had one small section of the country club building (basically a large room) and the edges of the property leading down into the river valley."

If this story is true, my guess is they were either wandering the grounds or wandered through the role-playing room into "the edges of the property"

Then they started running into people dressed as wizards and elves all telling the portal story and they were so thoroughly convinced that they figured a better chance to getting back to the wedding was to find a wizard than to try walking back to the clubhouse or the grounds closer to it.

If I were in the Olive Garden, and suddenly I noticed that all the waiters and patrons were androids, and all of them claimed I was a computer simulation of a 2009 Homo Sapien running for their entertainment, I don't think my first thought would be "If I just leave the Olive Garden, all of this will go away" To these folks, a dozen people in scale mail would probably be nearly as convincing.
I dare Mrs. Lacy, just once, to author an article in which she doesn't cite herself. That Amazon affiliate link in the opening sentence--classy. Jurinalism at its best. Oh wait, this is TechCrunch. Nevermind. Birds of a feather...
The much larger mass of upper middle-class types that cumulatively earn most of the money and run the country (the $150K households scattered all over, not just in the coastal urban centers) skew conservative. Entrepreneurs also skew conservative.

Citations, data please?
Expect bugs and funny search/result pairs to show up in blogs soon. But this is a great contribution to humanity.
Looks like a placeholder for domain. Especially the right two columns. Just an impression of ad-filled web-site.
This board was hand-picked by Steve, for what it's worth.
Unemployment has peaked? You are very alone with this prediction. Unemployment always lags behind the economy. If unemployment had peaked, we would be seeing positive GDP numbers right now. And demand being at capacity in the middle of a recession would be very astonishing indeed.
Yes one should be able to subscribe to one topic even if one didn't enter into to discussion.
I would not put it past Dennis Rodman, lol.
Ah, I didn't even notice that some people seem to think it is transmitted via eating pork. But did they get retweeted a lot?

Still not convinced that it is worse than email, for example - like those meme-viri that keep spreading via email.
My guess is that we are in a sick cat crawl. The panic is over but US (and UK) consumers will be paying down debt and spend less for a long time to come. And once the economy starts to rebound even slightly, oil will be back up very quickly slowing everything down again. That's my fear anyway.
You can see the chart for the trend here:

http://twist.flaptor.com/?gram=swine+flu&table=0
In Mexico there are 80 known deaths from about 1000 possible cases (~8%). In the US there are 0 deaths from about 10-20 possible cases. Especially given the small population size, that's not a statistically significant difference.
Yeah thanks for downvoting an actual suggestion among all the hot air.
The author claims that the Lena image is porn. Give me a break!
This is a great story. I first recall when I first knew I was being misled by a teacher. I was in 9th grade earth science, and she had shown a documentary on the early history of the universe which had made reference to string theory. String theory posits perhaps 11 dimensions in some versions from what I gather. The teacher thought this was ridiculous and said something to the class to the effect of, well I can't even imagine having a fourth dimension, can you? Student Parrots: No! Teacher: Well then, of course string theory can't be right!

Now I was 14, and it would still be a few years before I first would read 'A Brief History of Time' and so I knew nothing of string theory, but, I somehow knew, on some basic instinctual level that I was being misled in that moment, that just because the teacher could not "imagine" higher dimensions did not in and of itself mean that there could not possibly be higher dimensions in theory. Looking back, that was the start of a distrust in me with regards to the academic "establishment" which has continued in varying degrees to this very day. It is one of those epistemological moments of clarity: once one realizes it is possible to be misled by a teacher, which one naturally is conditioned to trust, then really who else could possibly mislead one? What sources can after all be trusted? Once one realizes the inherent fallibility of everyone, including one's teachers, then things just are not quite the same ever again, there is a certain loss of innocence there which can never be gotten back.
Please don't use checks to emulate options buttons behavior.
Design - I like all the blues and the layout, the yellows and the ipod seem a bit dark to me.

Functionality seems perfect to me but I would need more time with it.

As far as the concept I'm not sure - polls don't seem that exciting to me but maybe you know something I don't.
I'm all for analyzing the problem scientifically, but, really, what do you think the IPCC reports are based on?

Regarding the weather question, this is a valid concern. There's of course a difference between predicting the weather, meaning the exact temperature and precipitation on certain days, and predicting climate, meaning mean quantities over the scale of years. It's true that for a chaotic system, it's difficult to predict the exact state of the system far in advance unless you have extremely good models and information of the current state. However, predicting the mean of a distribution is usually far easier. To what extent is this a problem with current weather models? I'm not an expert enough to know, but I'd suspect it has been tested.
I dunno how it is in CA, but here you just fill out a simple form on the state website to incorporate. I don't think pg posting the YC info will help you very much, since its very basic stuff like name and address.

The administrative things, you don't really need YC specific info either, just ask one of many CA based startups on here.
It is apparently the upper part of a playboy picture, so I assume the whole image is considered to be porn.
As explained in the article it's the top half of a playboy centerfold (there's a link to the full version in there).