skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've started using "why the internet sucks" as an indicator that the person writing may be more in love with a good rant than anything else.

I don't think you can weigh the number of bytes you receive that are the message against the total weight of the page. Doesn't work like that. Facebook gives me a stream of people I know saying useless things. I consume maybe 4-5K of plaintext on it every day. Have any idea how much crap it pushes down the pipe? How much real-estate all the things I don't care about consume? A lot. Hell, the information isn't even that valuable. But still I consume it.

It's way more complicated than the author makes out. If I wanted to know Abraham Lincoln's birthday and you put it in bold 48-point text in the center of the page, I'm spending 3 seconds reading it and I'm gone. The rest of the experience is just a waste of time and bytes on the part of the supplier. Who cares?

ADD: It's not the crappy ads and social stuff that's the problem. It's sites using more and more techniques to subtly make you stick around. The subtle distractions, like a FB list of which friends also liked reading the particular article, or offering badges for participation, or tracking you across sites, that cause the most long-term trouble for folks. The big, glaring stuff is easy. People are used to that crap by now.
I would so firstly to engage in discussion in this community. I take more time and expend effort when I see someone has at least some karma through adding value to this community as a signal of quality. Im sure I miss some good stuff but it filters a lot of crapola out.
I can't speak to Python, but Java was for a short but incredibly relevant time, the cross-platform scripting language of web servers.

Java was the scripting language of WebSphere and Tomcat and a few others. During the first dotcom boom, it was the lowest-risk platform choice.
Keep in mind that if you're not an experienced C/C++ coder, you're going to be (largely) benchmarking your relative ability in either language rather than the intrinsic speed of each language.
I've been coding with SBCL and Common Lisp for years, and the general optimization strategy is great. With compiler hints (standard in Common Lisp), you can really help the optimizer, and locally vary the speed/safety trade-offs (eg. bound checking).

I don't think I would ever write something like the code linked above. Half of it is not standard Common Lisp, and not even part of SBCL's official extensions. At that level, you could write custom assembly, which kinda defeats the point of having a language shout-out IMO.
Show HN: We manage your code duplication. We want your bugs to stay fixed
Not really, it's just C2 being C2. You can often see a lot of conflicting opinions on those pages, but the arguments tend to be solid. Try reading these two:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWeLoveLisp
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWeHateLisp
I never really understood why Virus scanners are so keen on scanning archives. Most stuff that I have archived I never touch and if I touch the contents, the Virus scanner will warn me anyway.

In fact the archive search is the single reason why I never do full disk scans voluntarily. They take ages and need tons of resources... Most of the times such a full disk scan is stuff on decompressing some archive.
You could render off-screen in a fragment or couldn't you just make an element using the view's "make" convenience function, append all objects to that, and then append that to the view? Does this require the same reflows?
Did you look at Julia[0]?

It is a Lisp, semantically, with a MATLAB-like syntax (including all the linear algebra sugar), and a LLVM back end.

The stated goal of the language is to give to scienctific programmers the convenience of high level languages for prototyping, yet the speed of low level ones. It has multiple dispatch, based on a powerful type system, homoiconicity and macros (optionally hygienic).

The package collection is growing steadily [1]. There's also a mailing list dedicated to doing statistics with Julia[2].

I looks like a good fit for your project.

[0] http://julialang.org

[1] http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.1/packages/packagelis...

[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/julia-st...
Founders, Equip Your Champions
Win a paid internship at the home of LCD #GetItDownOnPaper
Tucked away on the outskirts of Oxford is Sharp Laboratories of Europe. It’s the European Research and Development arm for Sharp, responsible for cutting edge innovations like mobile LCD technology, smart cards, DualView, the ‘lab in the palm of your hand’ and many more that have helped solve a genuine human need.
Every day, scientists in the labs work to come up with new ideas and technologies that can benefit society. Now, for the first time in the company’s history, students across Europe will have the opportunity to win a paid summer internship lasting two months, where they will be given a once in a lifetime chance to work on a new project that could go on to become a central part of our everyday lives.
Depends on the crowd. I wrote a blog post called Hackers and Engineers (the target audience is obviously the same people who read Hackers and Painters) [0]. From what I can see, lots of entries, lots of clicks on the links of the blog post, none on the share/tweet/facebook/g+ buttons.

By contrast, I see people clicking on the tweet/share/facebook button for the blog entry where I compared memes to speaking in metaphor ala Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra [1]. They don't click on the links (except to the book Wisdom Sits in Places)

Different crowds of people react differently to those share buttons, I guess. The HN crowd doesn't really click that much.

[0]http://blog.chewxy.com/2013/04/11/hackers-and-engineers/

[1]http://blog.chewxy.com/2013/02/22/darmok-and-jalad-at-tanagr...
"Novel" or "difficult to implement" doesn't actually mean better or years ahead. Researchers tweak things to be novel when standard tools will work just for the purposes of experimenting sometimes. I've been arguing that 1981-tech is superior to Bitcoin, even though Bitcoin is novel.
I can totally attest to this, but for me the story played out a bit differently. My v1 designs for the company I'm working on now look like trash, but at the time, I tried to convince myself that I liked them a lot. Deep down, I know they weren't fantastic, and people told me this, but I equated the quality of the work with the number of hours I'd spent.

Turns out, a lot of what I spent time on was learning specific UX techniques from different places that looked pretty ugly when they were all smashed together. I think it's analogous to programming (when you learn a concept, you kind of want to force it into the project you're working on, even if there is little to no relevance).

All in all, I agree with the message. Becoming a great designer takes a lot of patience, hard work, and iteration. You have to be okay with throwing entire pieces away in pursuit of something better.
"Specifically, glass is placed in a 400°C molten potassium salt bath, which forces potassium ions to replace the sodium ions originally in the glass. The larger potassium ions take up more space between the other atoms in the glass. As the glass cools, the crunched-together atoms produce a high level of compressive stress in the glass that helps protect the surface from mechanical damage."
I'm not sure that HN is a place for launching a site. It is, however, a great place to ask for feedback regarding most new software applications. I've been given great feedback on a couple of different websites I have done.
Cute. Nice fake list. Nice writing. The "true" list at the end, like a Hollywood ending, was probably not necessary.

Now my list:

1. You don't "work with" software engineers. We don't even "work with" each other. If you don't learn anything else from this, get this: we work alone. Always. Even when we think we don't. Sure, we occasionally get together to plan, analyze, discuss, white board, even "pair program" whatever that means, but sooner or later, we all sit down alone and do what we do. With that in mind...

2. Leave us the fuck alone! If you see a software engineer looking at a screen and typing, that means we're BUSY. Do not interrupt. Do not call. Do not text. Do not IM. Do ask if we're busy (WE are!). Do not tap us on our shoulder. And whatever you do, don't just stand there waiting for us to stop typing (We won't; that's a test of wills you will lose). Just send an email. That's it. When we break, we'll check email and reply. If you don't write well enough to communicate with us, then learn how to.

(If my language seems a little strong, it's because I feel so strongly about this. Nothing is more frustrating to us than having work to do and being kept from doing it when we want to. We often need large blocks of time and room to focus deeply.)

3. Don't try to understand how we work, what makes us tick, what turns us on, or the "secret" to making us more productive. a. All those things are different for every one of us. b. We don't even know what they are ourselves.

4. Don't patronize us. Sure, we all appreciate beer, donuts, chocolate, and foosball, just like everybody else, but don't bother trying to get something from us with a gimmick. It may work once or twice, but then never again. That shit doesn't even work on your dog. Why do you think it would work with us?

5. Provide us with the resources we need. This is pretty binary. Do this and get results. Don't do this and don't get results. For the most part, we're fairly easy. A comfortable chair. A decent machine. Good lighting. Fresh air or HVAC. Peace and quiet. Decent facilities. Specs or requirements > 50% accurate. (Forget about 100% accurate; none of us has ever seen that; we'll live with 50-80%.).

6. When we tell you we need something, believe us!.If we need clarification on something, get it. If we need more time, give it to us. If we need access to someone/something, make it happen.

7. Never lie to us. We are used to our machines always telling the truth. We insist on no less from other humans.

8. Contrary to common belief, we do not hate the following classes of things, we just hate idiotic instances of them: meetings, status reports, timesheets, processes, procedures, policies, mission statements, motivational posters, HR, reviews, interviews, reports, specs, and team-building exercises.

9. The best thing you could possibly do for us: everything you must and not one thing more.

10. Top ten lists suck (except this one).
It wasn't until I read the hn comments here that I noticed the "No, don't do any of these things" part of the post.

I think he should make the bold NO in the slideshow much more noticeable in the blogpost.

The sad part is that most PMs I know skim too and will have all the wrong takeaways from this post.
> Recall that the White Pages contained names and addresses in a (largely) neutral format, and that both individuals and businesses were included.

And still, the Yellow Pages were successful because they were helpful. People liked using them, so businesses were happy to pay for better exposure.

> The service you used was monetized. It just didn't charge you a fee. Instead, it will seek to charge someone else a fee later for data about you. You didn't use a charity.

It's not clear why I should care? They provided me with a valuable service (or they might have been, I was just testing it out), if they can get paid for that, good for them. They didn't ask for any information from me, contact or otherwise, so I doubt the value for resale is very high.
It is absolutely not a racial/ethnic thing. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamdi_v._Rumsfeld.

They found a Saudi who was a U.S. Citizen (born in Louisiana), fighting in Afghanistan, and took him to Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ordered him released, and the government complied.
The core of the argument has nothing to do with popularity. You're right about everything you say (if only you glossed over notable exceptions like Java or C++), but we're discussing "power", not popularity.

Unfortunately, power has a very positive connotation. As a programmer, wouldn't you want to use a more "powerful" tool? However it's different when it comes to programming languages. Too much power can hurt you. Realising that there can be such a thing as "too much power" is new to me or at the very least, it's counter-intuitif enough to deserve being debated. That's the point of, or at least that what I take away from, this page.

Arguably, the success of Java comes from its complete lack of Lisp-y power. Python may be "powerful", it makes a big deal to enforce the "one way to do it" culture and has always had a love/hate relationship with functional features for this exact reason. Speaking from experience, I find it easier to read and understand Java or Python than I do Lisp or Lua (another "powerful" language where every project will inevitably implement its own object model, basically rebuilding Python or Ruby).

So yes, I believe that there's a spectrum of "power" between programming languages, and more "power" isn't necessarily better. It's a characteristic, nothing more.

But more importantly, I wish we could start discussing and comparing programming languages without talking about something as meaningless and volatile as popularity. I don't care if my favorite language becomes the most popular. I don't want to unify all programming languages into one. I am happy when different languages solve the same problems differently, more or less elegantly, and I have so much fun learning all these approaches. I don't care what "succeeded" and what "worked".

I sincerely mean no offense, but I'm tired of having people cut the debate short by turning any meaningful comparison into a popularity contest.
I was a teenage programmer before teenage programmers were cool
It's a long standing rhetorical device known as "humor."
Understanding Groupthink
Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks [2005 documentary]
It's more complicated than that. Languages don't become a hit in a night. It's because the authors carefully chose the features in a way that makes the language pleasant to use or that it's particularly adapted to solve a set of problems. It's a complex ecosystem that also includes package managers, editor support, ...

When you read ruby you won't have 10 different implementations of conditionals. They're implemented with keywords and the language doesn't have macros so unless you want to add more indirections you have to take Matz's decision. There is also a common understanding of what is idiomatic ruby and not.

I'm not sure it's the same with Lisp. It seems way to easy to come up with your own smart constructs. It seems to me that this flexibility is what makes lisp hard to settle as a language. Everyone gets their own say on small details that prevent the bigger things to emerge.
Yeah, Go is a great language. However, I am trying to develop some low level queues that should be faster, and less generic, than the ones that Go provides. But I am having some difficulty putting memory fences into my code.

But if I can get a reasonable level of performance out of the standard Go queues then I will just use those in the meantime.
Tiles Harvest Marathon Runners' Energy
HTML5 is hardly better than Flash here.

Do most screen readers support Flash?
> The Constitution was never contemplated to give rights to foreigners not on U.S. soil.

Or to anyone. The Constitution is supposed to limit what the federal government can do, not grant any rights at all. When it was written, the assumption was that those rights were already held.
In a way journalists writing this type of article over and over puts a little fear in my heart. I don't ever intend or want to pass up my PC or laptop in favor of a phone or tablet interface; as a content developer its just not something I could ever see myself wanting to change. Sure, I own a smartphone and tablet but they're recreational at best and often used only for efficiency in my life, never a replacement for my PC where work gets done.

But what I mean when I say I'm afraid is that people listen to these articles. They believe what is said and trumpet it across the skies for everyone to hear. I'd gamble more than 90% of the consumer market are content consumers exclusively; they don't see the need or benefits to having a powerful machine that lives upon your desk. Its not mobile, its not sleek. What happens next? Manufacturers follow that market and begin to neglect the ways of old.

I never would believe the PC ever disappears but what I can see happening is it becoming a more niche market. Prices will go up and selection will go down as a result. It wont be soon but it will eventually happen. Perhaps I'm just afraid of change like my father before me. Perhaps I'm a bit too stubborn for my own good but whatever the reason I fear the day when finding a PC and OS modern enough to fit my needs isn't as easy as it is now. Until then I'm just going to keep on hoping the strong PC gaming market keeps the platform afloat.
There are a lot of snobs in the Lisp community. They can't stand the thought of Lisp going mainstream, because their language is too beautiful and perfect. Every language has them, but Lisp seems to have the highest ratio of snob/regular person. I love the language, but the community is not as good as others.

edit:

I'm getting downvoted by the snobs themselves. Hilarious.
rule of law, right to fair trial, upholding dignity of human kind and the farce of democracy. Feed the rabble with trivia they need to know and all is well.
It's what I'm focusing on as I study organizational decline. It turns out that the metaphor (reproduction of processes, skill sets, and values) applies to corporate life. The reason most jobs suck balls is that most companies are r-strategists.

The r-selective alpha male was the harem owner who treated his "wives" like chattel and invested nothing in his (hundreds of) children, most of whom would fail. It was "spray and pray". The K-strategist was the monogamist who treated his one wife well (often, as an equal) and invested heavily in the health of mother and children.

The r-strategist boss doesn't mentor employees, creates a sink-or-swim environment, and over-hires, generating internal competition, which is always toxic. The K-strategist hires more slowly but invests trust and interest in the people brought in. Of course, r-strategist companies grow a lot faster and, in many spaces, are much more "fit", but I believe that's going to change amid the convexity of post-technological work.
JavaScript's success is particularly freak-ish. In the early days of research into prototype-based languages, I don't think anyone imagined that a language with a model so obscure and research-y would become the ubiquitous programming language in the world.

I like how you put that. Explodingly popular languages owe their success to tandem platforms. It makes much more sense than other explanations.
When you stop thinking for yourself, you drift with the devil
I think he hits on what's really the issue, but then gets distracted. The college wanted a PR publication, not a truly independent newspaper.

Given that they paid the printing costs (I'm not sure if this was always the case, but it was at the start of the venture), I guess it's up to them if they want to control it like that.

What doesn't seem right is them telling him that his later independant paper can't 'compete' with their PR mag. So long as they're not funding it, it's not their concern.
The big question is - what else do we want a desktop to do that they can't already do?

I struggle to think of anything that Windows could add to its functionality that would make me want a new version.
How to Sell Your Roadmap Without Selling Your Soul
An iOS 6 UIKit template for Sketch.app
More than once I saw them being used in video productions, with a steadicam guy riding one.
STL implementation from Bloomberg
He has slides. Did he do a talk? Was there a video?

because that would be a great video.
"Done" in the sense mainframes are done.
>>No, not really. Considering when something bad happens anywhere in the world, nobody calls Canada, nobody calls Turkey, nobody calls Sweden. They call us to fix it. They call us to send billions in aid. They call us to take care of their crazy saber rattling neighbors. You think we deserve the disdain, but can you imagine the world without the billions in aid, without all the military aid we give other countries?

Citation needed, please. There's a lot of countries and a lot of people outside the US, and the idea that they are all calling on the US to solve their political and international relations problems sounds a bit silly to me. Did you know France has had military operations Mali since 2012 without the advice, consent, or involvement of the US, for instance? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Mali_conflict_%282012%...)
I've just moved and while my ISP is still setting up my internet, I'm using my phone's 3G for internet.

Having a quota on the internet bandwidth, I created a minimal browsing profile: no images, no javascript, no flash. You'd be surprised how many websites are broken.

Facebook, twitter, mashable, theverge all consistently consistently consumed hundreds of megabytes per page. When I used my minimal browsing profile, those sites were so much faster.

Browsing reddit without being logged in shows how much junk is in reddit (no point clicking on links that go to imgur afterall). I suddenly found myself to be far more productive.

In fact I think when I get my ADSL up again, I'm going to keep using the minimal profile
There's a whole host of reasons, here's a handful:

- Some sites will attempt to use the first part of your email address as your username.

- Foreign domains are difficult to explain to people who don't understand.

- People expect you to say a your username at a domain they have heard of.

- Anything other than .com is confusing.

eg: johnasmith@gmail.com is easier for humans to digest and computers to parse than john@johnsmith.net or john@smith.be or john@smith.me.uk
This is something I see on The Guardian and it infuriates me no end. I end up randomly clicking on articles, even adverts (deliberate maybe?) accidentally as they load and shove what I wanted to click down the page...
Great ideas! Of course, system can't be secure when you have physical access to the hardware.

What I shared is is not an attacking method, but just a recovery method, which was helpful for me recently, so I hoped that it can be helpful to someone else as well.
The Big Hack Results: Berkeley vs. Stanford
SDN Market Opportunities
Our CEO Robert Jenkins to speak at ONS on SDN Market Opportunities!
1. I would "return to the battlefield" too after being treated like they are, even if i had done nothing before. What makes you think Gitmo is not the cause?

2. If the convention is outdated, update it. It's not like the US is pushing the Hague and others to convene treaty proceedings to get this done.
Until the US actually takes any steps to try to fix this "problem", i take it as just a BS excuse.

3. You have a very strange view of what happens, one I can only imagine is contributed to mainly by local media. They do in fact, call Canada, Turkey, Sweden, and others. These are rarely, if ever, unilateral actions. Due to some folks i'm friends with, i've actually occasionally traveled with some of these kinds of delegations, and I assure you, none of this is "better call big brother US to beat these guys up".

4. They would never declassify a document that shows them having been wrong until at least 20-25 years after the fact.
Essence of Coffeescript: An Interactive Tutorial Series
Ask HN: How do you manage your logs?
On a typical Linux system, there's a ton of logging going on. How do you stay on top of it, on your desktop and on servers?

Do you use anomaly detection systems to email you when something unusual happens? Do you keep windows open showing the tails of lots of different logs? Something else?

Did you learn any hard lessons about logging that you want to share?