skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Have we heard a lot of stories about deployed Golang apps having problems because of garbage collection? It's true that this is a significant designed-in advantage for Erlang, which can run it's collector on a process-by-process basis.

In general most Go apps that have been deployed are Web apps and server infrastructure, where concurrent garbage collection is not too much of a problem in practice. So Go's choice makes sense in Go's context. It does limit parallel scalability in some contexts—which of course are not the contexts that most people have been using Go for at this point.

> What's also true and potentially compensatory is the C-like degree of control Golang gives you over how you allocate memory and lay it out.

Go doesn't give you C-like control over allocation of memory. Language constructs will allocate memory in ways that are not immediately obvious, to quote Ian Lance Taylor [1]. It does give you control over layout of memory.

> I'm not sure the unbounded channel thing is a real advantage for Erlang. I'm happy to be convinced I'm wrong. What's a real, correct design which would be hard to realize in Golang (without unbounded channels) that relies on unbounded channels?

Suppose you're pulling down images from the network and printing out a sorted list of URLs of all the images you find. You might structure it as two goroutines A and B. Make two channels, "urls" and "done". Goroutine A is the network goroutine and simply crawls looking for images to stream to B over the channel "urls". When it's done it sends "true" on "done". Goroutine B is the sorting goroutine and first blocks on the channel "done" before it proceeds, after which it drains the "urls" channel and sorts the results.

This program contains a deadlock due to synchronous message sends. If there are more URLs to be downloaded than the buffer size of "urls", then the program will deadlock. If "urls" were an asynchronous channel, however, this would be fine.

Of course this can be structured to fix it, by doing the send in another goroutine for example (although that costs performance). But hopefully that's a good illustration of the subtleties of synchronous message sending.

[1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/LoJJ1bICdu...
Then you are bad at programming. 1/10th? Code or it didn't happen.
It's just that they have access to an operation which classically doesn't exist, because their probabilities are complex numbers rather than real numbers. (Just as importantly, there are known limits to how great their correlation can be; the nice thing about Betrayal is that you can quickly prove that six classical random variables don't work no matter how they're jointly distributed.)

So what is this strange operation? There exist two nice "superposition over all states" quantum states for the three bits held by the three players:

+++ = 000 + 001 + 010 + 011 + ... + 111
−−− = 000 − 001 − 010 + 011 + ... − 111

Separately those states are not entangled: that is, +++ is made from the separable (0 + 1)(0 + 1)(0 + 1) while −−− is made from the separable (0 − 1)(0 − 1)(0 − 1). In both "pure" states any bit pattern from 000 to 111 has equal probability. Quantum mechanics now lets these observers have the superposition state:

(+++) + (−−−) = 000 + 011 + 101 + 110

This is an entangled state. In this state you cannot be sure which of these four will occur, but they will each occur with even probability and the sum will be even. So that's the "control" experiment covered. But we could solve the "control" experiment with the 000 state too. What about the "traitor" experiment?

Here's where you need the complex numbers. Each of the "make the sum odd" people maps (+),(−) → (+),i(−). This is called a phase rotation, and you might know i² = -1 in the complex plane. These separate acts shift the global state to:

(+++) + (−−−) → (+++) + i²(−−−) = (+++) − (−−−)

If you work it out you will find:

(+++) − (−−−) = 001 + 010 + 100 + 111

So even though locally nobody can tell what's happened (every single person still has a 50/50 chance of seeing 0 or 1 by themselves), the global sum changes due to this phase rotation. That is what entanglement can get you, large-scale correlations.

As for proving that classical probabilities cannot do this, take six random variables no matter their joint distribution, call them Ao, Ae, Bo, Be, and Co, Ce -- what Alice, Bob, and Carol do when they're told to make the sum odd or even, respectively. The problem asks to make Ao + Bo + Ce ≡ Ao + Be + Co ≡ Ae + Bo + Co ≡ 1 (mod 2) while Ae + Be + Ce ≡ 0 (mod 2). Adding those four equations together gives 2 * (Ao + Bo + Co + Ae + Be + Ce) ≡ 3 (mod 2), but 3 isn't even. So it's not possible to satisfy all four equations all of the time with classical probabilities.
I don't think that doesn't make any "economic logic", for lack of being able to remember the correct term.

If that were true - if the price was based on the cost - you would have small towns & rural areas where it would be so expensive, no one could use them, and cities where even though there were more ambulances, EMTs, etc, the cost would be spread so thin as to be barely noticeable

I don't believe the price is tied so directly to cost of service
> It's such a surreal concept to me that having to be picked up by emergency services will cost you money. I feel so incredibly lucky to live in a country where healthcare is free.

We have a (very good) public healthcare system here in Australia; but an ambulance will still cost you.
Ah, I see, makes sense. Those were the days when Microsoft hadn't learned how to make a secure browser, after all.
> They keep seeing very popular apps and messaging products that are completely proprietary and locked in, and that are able to move and innovate fast because they either don't have to conform to an existing standard, or worry about publishing and support whatever internal protocol they do use.

But the only feature that matters in a messaging app is knowing the person you want to contact also uses the app. In this case by choosing to "innovate fast" they are guaranteeing failure.
It's funny, I actually met a guy once who worked on Alaskan fishing boats and decided to move into programming. I don't think he regretted the move.
Almost as much as color.com?
Unfortunately, simply reaching the ground may not be sufficient. The ground is not necessarily a good enough conductor to dissipate the full charge quickly. The rest of the charge flows near the ground looking for more ground.

Most lightning strike survivors are probably surviving "near misses", albeit sometimes ones where substantial electricity flowed through their body. A direct hit is probably going to be lethal nearly 100% of time -- there is a lot of energy in a lightning strike.
Why can't normal pythons sum do that?
There is a fundamental problem in everything that you say.

The VCs may be private equity guys, but they have learned to pay attention to what is said by angels and early seed investors. Who in turn frequently got that way by being in successful startups. Which really did compete on merit. And those people know plenty about programming.

As a case in point look no farther than ycombinator itself. I first heard of Paul Graham because he was a well-known Lisp hacker, and when I was starting in programming I was told to read a book of his to open my eyes to how much I did not understand. (I did read On Lisp and highly recommend it.) I first heard of Robert Morris because he famously accidentally took down the internet. They got the money with which they started ycombinator by running their own startup. And every year they identify dozens of unconnected but talented people as people who deserve a chance, and suddenly some kid whose main qualification is that they could impress some talented hackers is in one of the most prestigious inner circles in the Valley.

And yes, part of what they look for is the "social polish" that you deride. Because they've learned that you need some of that to make your business succeed. And yes, they will help you learn how to spin yourself successfully. Because that also helps in the real world.

But in the end they give a first step up to a lot of people who then go on to build everything from better online analytics to motorcycles that won't fall over.
Or of those looking for a cheap, reliable car :)
> Also, why would it be better to pay 80% of your labor directly to a king who would let you starve after a bad harvest or two than it would be to deal with some douchey suits?

Most of the time its literally the same thing: pay 80% of the value of your labor to someone who doesn't care if you starve in a drought.
Or they could just have a lot of sinners... ;-)
Ask HN: Tips for coding with one hand?
After breaking my right (dominant) arm on my bike yesterday, I had to get a cast that restricts the use of my arm to the point where I can only use my left arm with my computer. Seeing that I'll have to wear this cast for at least four weeks, do any of you with experience with this have any suggestions? Typing with just my left hand is very slow and frustrating. Thanks.
When you consider all the costs involved, it's not so unreasonable. You've got the cost of the ambulance station, ambulance itself, equipment, maintenance, fuel, medical consumables, paramedics, technicians, etc.

You're not only paying for the time you spend in the ambulance, but for the paramedics to be on standby, and for technicians to clean and prepare the ambulance for its next trip afterwards.
On a parallel note, I remember several years ago seeing Microsoft spruiking its 'Windows 2008 Server Headless'. Running a windows server without the gui was mentioned right there in the MS-generated marketing material as reducing the attack surface, as 70% of all discovered Windows exploits couldn't be done without the GUI components.
Beneficios de tener un mueble hecho de pino
Los muebles de pino no solo son conocido por lo económicos que son si no también por su resistencia a la humedad y lo elegante que son ..
Sure. http://research.swtch.com/gorace

In general I consider segfaults exploitable, because of heap spray and virtual method calls. Even if not "exploitable", I consider it "very very scary".
There's http://www.explainxkcd.com/, and some of the comics have a <div id="transcript">transcript here</div>.
I'm an American software dev, living in Dunedin (South Island) - happy to chat.
I used to assume it was about cutting costs, but I'm not so sure anymore. Samsung apparently has a 3200x1800 (16:9) at 13.3" laptop coming out. That beats the chromebook pixel by a decent amount and certainly cannot be cheap... I think they must have some market research that suggests people actually do want 16:9 for whatever reason.
I think you're right, but I think they should still be called out for it.
box.net is now HIPAA compliant. (And S3 can be to, if you're careful and want to build something.)
Update:
Got funded in 22 hours !!
Better string handling.

Static typing with a very convenient expression in the language.

A concurrency model that is easier to adopt if your frame of reference is concurrent C++.

A simpler, friendlier syntax, which is probably not a win if you're a veteran Erlang programmer.

Probably better tooling: native binaries, a lightning fast compiler with great error messages and testing facilities, &c.

Perhaps a more modern standard library, which is made somewhat simpler and more concise by the pragmatic adoption of a very little bit of conventional OO, without going whole hog the way Java does.

There are certainly advantages to Erlang, too!
Does any company do that? I can't think of any that do that for e.g. Terms of Service violations (as opposed to just going over a quota or something), even accounting for false positives.

It sounds like you really just need to diversify the providers of the services you use.
Digg’s Google Reader alternative will be called Digg Reader
Practicality? The US civilian sector alone manufactures 11-12 billion (sic) per year (and we get tasty leftovers from manufacturing for the military on their equipment at Lake City, plus there's imports), and that number will be going up somewhat as e.g. Remington expands their Arkansas plant. Then there's the problem that ammo, if stored in minimally good conditions (cool and dry, of course), lasts a very long time. A lot of WWII era ammo is still fine and functional, although disfavored because most of it uses corrosive primers.

This is recognized in the near total deregulation in the US of ammo after it leaves the manufacturer, you don't need any special license to sell it, although shipping of course requires proper labeling (an ORD-M sticker) and must be by ground.

Oh, yeah, the leftover brass of centerfire guns and brass and plastic hulls of shotgun ammo can generally be reloaded a number of times, that's completely unregulated beyond again the usual safety stuff, primers and smokeless powder are somewhat more dangerous when packaged in bulk vs. as part of finished rounds. And more on longevity: my father is still reloading shotgun shells using powder from Hercules (now Alliant) casks bought plus or minus WWII (!)....
>A large part of it is that big companies have given up on trying to innovate (they just buy innovations, at a panic price) and the people from whom innovation typically came are now a pariah caste of almost-unemployable miserable geniuses.

Why innovate when the miserable genius idea generates a 10% cap rate and you can borrow from your wall street pals for 3% and run the company like crap so it only generates a 5% cap and it still makes money?

The miserable genius eco-system has very expensive money. Meanwhile, up in the wall street/VC jet stream, money is easy to come by.
In this case, Low skill is adjective on knowledge worker not a category unto itself.
Yes. You can always build the right thing in a system with synchronous channels—there are many ways to build asynchronous channels out of synchronous channels, after all, even if they aren't built into the language. My point is that asynchronous channels make it easier to avoid accidentally shooting yourself in the foot, that's all.

For what it's worth, I don't think that Go made a bad decision here (although I personally wouldn't have made the same decision, because of examples like those I gave in my other reply downthread). Certainly synchronous channels are faster. There are always tradeoffs.
All good questions, but I think the idea of open source or open spec is not an "either your 100% or your not". For me, it's more about attitude and orientation, not achieving perfection. Even companies which are primarily open source non-profits keep secrets.

I look at Search and Ads and Datacenter secrecy being closed as necessary evils to fund everything else, you've got to have a rich uncle who will let you work in his basement if you want to work on open software. Search in particular, represents a challenge, since even if Google were to just ship the source to it's search engine, it would likely devalue the search engine by showing blackhat SEOs exactly how to spam.

Like I said, the natural proclivity of many Googlers is to lobby for open specs and source, to bitch and moan about it internally. Sometimes they win, sometimes they don't. Many googlers don't like secrecy. Google will still have a competitive advantage over most other companies because of the datacenters, so the source availability is often not a threat IMHO. I could give you the source to Gmail, chances are, you won't be able to run it competitively without investing a billion dollars in infrastructure.

That said, Google has published papers on it's crown jewels, like Spanner, Borg, GFS, Map/Reduce/ et al, stuff which makes its services scale very well.
Is this exclusive to College students or are High School students eligible too?
One idea:
- A major drawback to using generated javascript is that line numbers in error messages don't relate to your original source files. Perhaps a debug option to add line number comments in the generated code?
That's jetpack level energy density!
If she was making Drano bombs, she should have been punished.

With a few days' detention, tops.
Where is this contract available online?
And then there's the 99% between those two extremes, who have ambitious long-term goals but feel the best way to reach them is through patient perseverance, as opposed to getting frustrated right away and quitting in disgust at the first sign of a setback.

> Why does the second group of people put up with not being in the prestigious X teams?

In my case, it's because there are plenty of impactful, prestigious, and fulfilling positions elsewhere in the company, and many of them are a better match for my skill set.

BTW, I decided to pick someone at random who had helped millions of people, and see what their career was like. The first name to come to mind was Jonas Salk. Here's an excerpt from his Wikipedia page:

By 1947, Salk decided to find an institution where he could direct his own laboratory. After three institutions turned him down, he received from William McEllroy, the dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, an offer which included a promise that he would run his own lab. He accepted, and in the fall of that year, left Michigan and relocated to Pennsylvania. But the promise was not quite what he expected. After Salk arrived at Pittsburgh, "he discovered that he had been relegated to cramped, unequipped quarters in the basement of the old Municipal Hospital," writes Bookchin. As time went on, however, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory, where he continued his research on flu vaccines.

And it was a result of that long period of hard work that he got the invitation to work on a polio vaccine. It's a good thing he didn't quit in a huff when the going got tough.
High school students are eligible as well.

Since most high schools don't issue email addresses, the turnaround for approval can be longer.
Excellent points.

Elizabeth Gilbert gave a great talk at TED on these topics:
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html (warning: auto-play video)

Don't be put off that she's the "Eat Pray Love" author if that's not your style (it's definitely not mine). She speaks very well to the creation process - and even touches on topics like depression and suicide among creators. It's well worth the watch.

Another great talk (that isn't quite as directly relevant) is JK Rowling's Harvard Commencement speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHGqp8lz36c (also auto-play)

My favorite part of that one is her speaking against not creating and thereby failing by default.
This is a great point. I was wondering what about the new Star Trek movie made me unhappy, beyond the Michael Bay-esque explosions and off-topic banter between characters, the annoying contemporary compulsion to be "dark" and the fact that the plot was drawn out in crayons. This is it!

The original Star Trek blew my mind -- warp speed, teleportation, colored people on the bridge! Even TNG had the replicators and the AI computer and Data. What do we get now? Tired, topical tropes of terrorists and characters recycled from the Wrath of Khan. For a recycled franchise, there isn't anything mind-blowingly new.
Go doesn't give you C-like control over allocation of memory. Language constructs will allocate memory in ways that are not immediately obvious, to quote Ian Lance Taylor [1]. It does give you control over layout of memory.

These are two sides of the same coin. Having control over memory layout allows you to implement what are in effect allocators.
Hehe, I think he wants the traffic load problems more than he wants Go.
If you open the Illustrator document, there's an illustration in the bottom right corner that says "not for commercial use".
Atari hasn't been Atari for a long-ass time now. Most recently it was a French EA-style conglomerate called Infogrames that changed its name to Atari after acquiring the brand for better PR.

The Atari name and assets will end up with some other high roller who'll run it into the ground then sell it, not knowing what to do with it.

Nothing more to see.
Once you are going down the road of actually writing code you may as well just take the plunge and use a nicer language than VBA.

VBA isn't really going to be any easier unless you already have visual basic experience in some capacity.

If you use a "proper" database you're also going to get advantages in robustness and ability to easily deploy over a network. My last memories of using access for anything (admittedly about 10 years ago) was that it was prone to performance issues and data loss.
I'd rather see the direct or marginal costs of the ambulance or paramedics billed to the user (so, if they expend saline, or bandages, or whatever, you pay for it), and the hourly wage and vehicle costs for the trip itself. That would price a routine EMT-B ambulance trip around $100 -- still enough that people who didn't need it would take a taxi or drive themselves to a doctor for a non-incapacitating problem, but cheap enough that it could be paid out of pocket.

The costs of keeping ambulances ready, training, etc. could be socialized somehow. I benefit by having 5-10 minute EMS response times even if I never use it for 70 years, so paying for that out of taxes or some other universal subscription fee to users makes sense, rather than putting all the costs on those unlucky enough to need it.
Excel can easily export CSV files, which are easy to parse. However, standard Linux tools aren't great for working with CSVs, especially ones with multi-line content (eg exports from a CMS).

As an experiment, I wrote a quick ruby script called csv2sqlite which parses one more CSV files (and their headers), and automatically populates an SQLite database based on the CSV.

If you have a CSV and want to easily know how many records it has, or to filter or join these records, it can be just a matter of running something like following:

ruby ~/csv2sqlite/csv2sqlite.rb baby-names-10.csv --output babynames.db

sqlite3 babynames.db "SELECT * FROM baby_names_10 WHERE percent > .05;"

Hope it helps you!
Except this is just generic Google comment #4 and has nothing to do with the current situation. AFAIK Google Talk is nowhere near the most popular chat service, there are a ton of competitors, and the problem here is the exact opposite of letting it rot: it's changing the communication format so completely that it's breaking the former adherence to XMPP.

Google Apps doesn't seem especially relevant, but it also has lots of competitors (including, just like chat, very active open source projects), hasn't been left to rot, and they've actually moved to only charging for it, instead of having an ad-supported version.

...so, are you really just talking about Reader?
I'm trying to find this fee on my bill. My AT&T bill labels every charge with a number. On your bill, is the new charge labeled or numbered?

Edit: I found the notice of the charge. It's on left-middle side of page 2 of my April 2013 bill and is called a Mobility Administrative Fee.

Edit 2: On my May 2013 bill, the charge is labeled #8.
It might be, you could ask. People are also generally quite willing to talk about their jobs, what they do all day, the annoying parts of said jobs. Or you could get a job for a week or a month in a place like that. Actually doing it beats seeing it done for insight.
Ahh, OK. Grabbed it to hand off to the designers just in case, but I have nothing to open AI files with. Thanks!
I've just made a new version for google hangouts.
hangoutAES.user.js : https://github.com/nicolas-t/gAES
Yes, we're aware of Apple's restrictions and they make things difficult for developers. However we have found and applied some tweaks to make the experience of getting your photos and videos into the cloud easy, transparent and 'unconscious'. We're also building Loom to be better at browsing, managing and sending photos than Apple's Photos app -
once you use Loom as your primary photo library, things fall into place.
But it doesn't give you control over when you allocate.

(Also, if you implement memory pools, the GC still has to trace the pointers within at mark time.)