skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are other options in the systems field like "virtual time" and "time warps", or "space-time memory", or a plethora of optimistic concurrency schemes where you optimistically try to do something, discover there is an inconsistency, rollback your effects, and do it again (like STM, but with real "do it again").

Our raw parallel concurrency tools, especially pthreads and..gack..locks, are horribly error prone and not even very scalable in terms of human effort and resource utilization. That is why we've expended so much effort designing models that try and avoid them.
AFAICT, everyone that isn't complaining about Android fragmentation has never actually worked on a project that involved supporting 90%+ of users.

There are some horrific devices available today that are Android in name but definitely not in spirit. They are so underpowered that they are more akin to feature phones.
Don't get me wrong, I am agreeing with you that, "Google is trying to differentiate between consuming a service and providing a service." Where we disagree is that having that differentiation is compatible with the term 'net neutrality' :-) If you are familiar with the original debate, Verizon and friends defined net neutrality as "Anything we approve of you doing on our network." Many people, and I count myself among them, did not accept that as a valid definition.

That Google would model itself in the same vein as the ISPs when it became an ISP is not particularly surprising. it is merely disappointing. From the Veridian Dynamics commercial on Lying.

"Lying. It's always wrong. But sometimes companies have to say things that aren't 100% true. Is that wrong? No. When companies aren't truthful, it's not because we're bad. It's because we understand things that you don't. Veridian Dynamics. People lie. Companies protect their interests. It's different."
I'd still be irked that some "customer-centered" jackass thinks so little of my time that he'd call me in an attempt to play a game of 20 questions about what questions I might have.

Look, if I want to know about your product, I'll let you know. Read the last four words of the previous sentence again: I will let you know.
We're getting a little off topic here but...

When it's in your home, they can get a warrant to break in and bug it without ever notifying any third party.

When your data is in a data center the government can get it without even a warrant and the provider will be gagged so it won't matter that they know about it.
A monthly retainer, though try not to sell it based on the amount of time they reserve of yours each month.
> I've never heard anybody suggest that the VERY common clause that prohibits servers is in some way related to net neutrality.

Clearly, you have (well, unless you are using "heard" very literally, in which case perhaps you haven't, but who cares then?), if you've read the article or the comment you are responding to. And I'm sure you've heard it more than that, too.

You've just chosen to disregard those arguments.

> Sure, be upset that Google won't let you run your company web server on a personal Google fiber account. Fine, complain about ToS... but don't pretend that this is about Net Neutrality or Google Flip-Flopping.

Its about Google prohibiting users from running a particular class of lawful applications / services on the fixed broadband service offered by Google, for which Google has offered no network management rationale (they have asserted that it falls within "reasonable network management", but provided no justification for that except "everyone else does it").

The Open Internet report and order (for which Google lobbied) provides: "A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband Internet access service, insofar as
such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management."

This is absolutely about Net Neutrality and Google flip-flopping.
Credit card transactions can be reversed weeks/months after they are made. This is necessary to combat fraud, and is part of the reason why fees around 2% exist. In contrast, bitcoin transactions are infeasible to reverse after a few hours.

That said, anything on the order of minutes is obviously too long to wait for certain types of transactions. Litecoin, with a target of 2.5 minutes between confirmations, does nothing to solve this. Bitcoin/P2P cryptocurrencies will need a solution for this problem if they are to be used for in person sales at retailers.
Fbcf
Fundamental rights is a legally defined term, you should look it up sometime.

(Also the federalist papers pre-date and argued against the Bill of Rights. Which means they're a strange authority to reference in this context.)
> Rust introduces some interesting pointer semantics, but it doesn't look like the project will last very long.

Why not?
"sophisticated games" pretty specifically implies contemporary 3d gaming, which is not a useful criteria for exploring a fundamental paradigm shift in programming.
Bon Jovi Rocks Google Glass at Concert
I really don't think Google is out to get torrent users. What I think is happening here, is a legal battle.

"Server" is a very broad term, heck every device is technically a server. What I believe Google is pushing for, is the ability to include this language in their ToS, then to discriminate on a case by case basis.
I just opened a tab and searched for some iPhone app screenshots in Google Images and dragged it back into Breezi, all without touching my filesystem[1].

[1] I should say _technically_ it did touch my filesystem as that image was probably yanked from a local cache of some sort, but to the user this feels intuitive and not invasive.
Maybe 30 stock images for free, gain access to larger library for flat fee.
Shopping carts are relatively expensive. Metal ones (cheap steel covered in chrome) are $1000-2000 each. Plastic ones are probably about 10%-20% cheaper.
> And again, it is within the scope of agreed contract

The controversy is not over whether it is within the scope of the Terms of Service. It is whether the Terms of Service are consistent with the FCC's Open Internet Report and Order.
Retainer:)

I contract out to a few hedge funds for writing trading systems. I have my main product and roll updates out every few months.

if a fund wants a couple of hours a month they pay a flat fee per month to me. If the time needed is less than 5 hours then no problem. If its more then I bill on a daily basis.

Rate depends on who gets final ownership of the code, ie can I resell it to another fund or is it theirs.
Well in the end it doesn't matter if your language is looking for popularity or not. What matters is what you can do with it. You think a language with weird symbols all around can't win? Just look at Pearl.

On a related note, if one plans to sell the Language of The Future Of Programming, I swear this thing will know the same fate as Planner, NLS, Sketchpad, Prolog, Smalltalk and whatnot if it cannot help me with the problems I have to solve just tomorrow.
All very good questions. I was wasn't thinking about it as the blame game though, but I do see how it could quickly become that.

I was thinking, firstly, along the lines of having some ammo to make fun of people with (insult based humor is the basis for most of my relationships with people). Also, on a more practical note, as a developer myself I would like to know when my code breaks and why.
Actually, in the US through a quirk of US law a server in your residence has stronger protections with respect to seizure by law enforcement than one in a data center.
If you want to be taken seriously you might want to change "I ordered 2 leaps through kick starter".

Kickstarter is not an order platform. It's a donation platform.
Nothing personal/technological; the reviews of it have been very positive.

It's the $300 MSRP is a just a little ridiculous. (Though I know it takes a lot of R&D.. etc..., but this is just how Firewire devices were: full of promise, but are few and far between plus priced too high)
"Don't be that guy who has SQL injection issues" is rookie advice but mistaken ideas about what SQL injections can do are widespread (probably #2 common security misconception after "hash your passwords").

The blind timing-based information leak is pretty clever and makes a nice counterexample to a lot of wrong common-knowledge.
Phenotropics, actually.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/jaron2019s-world

I dug around for a bit when I came across the idea but never could figure out where the reification of the idea went.

I'll eyeball RNA, but at first glance it doesn't appear quite the same idea.
He's saying professional as in 'all i do is make music'. There are plenty of local bands where the band members have 2nd jobs.
Don't talk rubbish. Nobody enjoys spending 10 hours to accomplish something that can be accomplished in an hour. Ofcourse we're trying to build compilers for nicer languages. Programming isn't going to become any less complex or unintuitive by sitting around wishing for better solutions: it's going to happen by studying existing technology, and using it to build better solutions.

What has "prevented" us from getting there sooner is purely our incompetence. It's becoming painfully clear to me that people have absolutely no idea about how a compiler works.
In addition to being hard to sell, this also multiplies the risk involved, which I imagine most drug runners would prefer to minimize.
Actually, they can add long as they have access to the lock itself. Take a blank key, insert and turn; find the dent made by the closest pin and for that place one level down. Repeat until you have a key that works. This is regarding the physical keys for the trunk.
Since you seem to have all the solutions to JStor's woes, maybe you should apply for a spot on the board of directors. I'm sure they've never even thought of using volunteers, or accepting donations. With you on board, they'd never have to charge another cent!

Sorry, but you're being completely unrealistic. Do you honestly think JStor would be able to rake in nearly as many donations as Wikipedia does with a userbase that is no where near as big as them? The people behind JStor aren't some cabal that just loves charging people a ton of money for access to journal articles (key word being access). If it were feasible to use donations and volunteers alone to provide their service to the general public for free, they would've done that.

> No it doesn't. All you need to do is free the publicly funded data.

I'm getting tired of this pointless philosophical debate. Hosting the articles is a small portion of what JStor actually does. When this Public.Resource.Org group goes to the library and digitizes all these journals, including tagging and sorting them, let me know if they'll still be able to provide them for free. Hint: they won't. Unless they keep getting people to unlawfully access them from an organization that does, that is.

If JStor were some big corporation that was raking in millions of dollars each year, then you'd have a point, but they're not. They are a non-profit that is doing excellent work.
Show HN: House on Fire, Who Would You Save?
Hi HackerNews,

I got fairly bored last week and decided to use my spare time to create a social experiment where theoretically there's a house on fire and you have to save one of your friends.

I created it pretty quickly so the code may be a bit heavy but it works pretty well (I'm sure one of you will be able to break it though!).

Hopefully the homepage is self explanatory...

If you login via FB (I'm adding Twitter shortly) you will be able to play the House on Fire game--it basically loads two of your Facebook friends and you have to choose who you would save.

It's pretty fun and I hope a few people enjoy it (if any). Feedback is welcomed too. Thanks!
This iPhone app identifies any object for blind people [video]
A year without food (2012)
I think much of the motivation for developing new paradigms stems from growing frustration with tool-induced blindness, for lack of a better term. We spend much of our time chasing that seg-fault error instead of engineering the solution to the problem we're trying to solve.

A new programming paradigm allows us to reframe a problem in a different space, much like how changing a matrix's basis changes its apparent complexity, so to speak.

The ultimate goal, I think, is to come up with a paradigm that would map computational problems, without loss of generality, to what our primate brains would find intuitive. This lowers our cognitive burden when attempting to describe a solution, and also to allow us to see clearer what the cause of a problem may be. For example, if you're a game developer, and you find some rendering problems due to some objects intersecting each other, but you're not sure where it happens, Instead of poring over text dump of numerical vector coordinates, it'd be better to visualize them. The abnormality would present themselves clearly, even to a layman's eyes. I suspect this is what Victor is trying to get at. Imagine, if you will, that you have a graphical representation of your code, and a piece of code that could potentially segfault shows up as an irregularity of some form (different textures, different color, different shape, etc), so you can spot them and fix them right away. The irregularity is not a result of some static error analysis, but is instead the result of some emergent property resulting from graphical presentation rules (mapping from problem space to graphic space). We're good at spatial visualization, so I wonder if it's valid to come up with a programming language that would leverage more of our built-in capability in that area. This may seem like wishful thinking or even intractable (perhaps due to a certain perception limitation...which we have to overcome using more cognitive resources), but I certainly hope we'll get there in our life time.
I agree it can definitely turn counter-productive quickly. On the other hand, if not a wall of shame, I would like to know what happened if it was my code.
Three reasons.

One, practical: I'm European, and found that my options for living in other countries were narrowed by not having a degree. I would probably have moved to Japan for several years if I had had one, since it's a prerequisite for getting a work visa in that country and (obviously) being a westerner in that country causes you to stick out like a sore thumb and they're super-bureaucratic about this. I'm just personally interested in Japan and Japanese culture, so I regret foreclosing that option for myself.

Two, socioeconomic: although a bit of an introvert, I think there's enormous value to the personal networks you can build up in college, in terms of meeting potential mentors, colleagues and so forth. Now, I think there's (pan-)social downsides to that system, and somewhat disapprove of the whole 'Greek system.' But overall I think college provides access to considerable social capital, whose utility may not be apparent in the short term but which makes a huge difference for most people over the longer term. Most of us are not Bill Gates, and the fact is that Gates inherited a lot of social capital from his parents.

Three, intellectual: Although I enjoy being a self-directed learner and feel pretty confident about my smarts, I do go through deep and horrible abysses of self-doubt, and often feel ashamed of not having fulfilled my intellectual potential by completing and exploiting a degree. I'm just shy of 43 now; whereas in my 20s I felt very proud of my ability to learn, navigate life, and make a living sans degree (and still do in many respects; I've built an impressive resume as a high-level film technician over the last decade despite never having taken a film class), these days I hate admitting that I don't have a degree and feel that my career overall has stalled for lack of direction and focus. True, people often tout their degree as a substitute for actual skill and experience, and an excess focus on credentialism is a negative aspect of our society and economy. But at the same time, I am sick to the back teeth of explaining why I don't have a degree, having to sell myself from scratch every time instead of simply saying 'oh yes, I have a BS in Economics from Berkeley' or whatever. Also, I struggle with a nagging feeling of being a dilettante and lacking a solci intellectual focus, so when I'm down in the dumps I don't feel like a smart guy who has a decent life in defiance of the odds, but a bullshit artist whose run of relative good luck could end at any time. Having to regularly re-sell yourself to yourself on your own merits is just as tiresome as having to sell yourself to others. It's a large and omnipresent confidence drain.
Congrats to the SeatGreek team! I have used the web and iPhone apps a bunch of times and have had great experiences with them.

I particularly like SeatGeek because they are providing a service that is:

* valuable(in terms of $) by making it easy to find the best seats at the best price and presenting an OTD price

* visually interesting with an intuitive and robust UI

Many startups do one of these points well, few do both very well.
An interactive force graph written with d3
> When I hear people talk about net neutrality, I think of ISPs inspecting and/or rate-limiting (or blocking) certain types of packets.

That's one way of violating net neutrality, but that's not the boundary of net neutrality.

> I don't think that a simple declaration of rules (ie no servers) is as serious of a problem as silently blocking/throttling certain types of traffic.

Well, no, silently blocking is both a neutrality problem and a transparency problem, the latter of which compounds the former by obscuring the nature and scope of it from the customer.

Of course, Google's policy (which states a blanket "no servers" but is, per the statements of Google employees that some servers are okay, doesn't really mean that) also seems to have transparency problems on top of its neutrality problems.
Brilliant analysis! Navel gazing indeed. Typical NCA (Non-Coding Architect) stuff.

This reminds me of the UML and the Model-Driven Architecture movement of the days before, where architect astronauts imagined a happy little world where you could just get away from that dirty coding, join some boxes with lines in all sorts of charts and then have that generate your code. And it will produce code you actually want to ship and that does what you want to do.

This disdain for writing code is not new. This classic essay about "code as design" from 1992 (!) is still relevant today:

http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_original...
I wonder if emailing them and asking for e.g. a 25k reward before disclosure exposes one to criminal liability or not.

I mean, is there a law making it illegal to sell exploits to the black market? These bug bounty programs must know they compete with a large market for these sorts of things.
Hi HackerNews,

I got fairly bored last week and decided to use my spare time to create a social experiment where theoretically there's a house on fire and you have to save one of your friends.

I created it pretty quickly so the code may be a bit heavy but it works pretty well (I'm sure one of you will be able to break it though!).

Hopefully the homepage is self explanatory...

If you login via FB (I'm adding Twitter shortly) you will be able to play the House on Fire game--it basically loads two of your Facebook friends and you have to choose who you would save.

It's pretty fun and I hope a few people enjoy it (if any). Feedback is welcomed too. Thanks!
The current Mac Pro is only 1 year old (although that was just a minor CPU bump). Similarly, graphics cards you can get for the Mac Pro are typically a year or so old. You can buy GTX 680s from NVidia or Radeon HD 7950s from ATI.

The newest cards need to be flashed to Mac firmware. For example, you can buy pre-flashed GTX 770s like this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nvidia-GTX-770-2-GB-for-Apple-Mac-Pr...
Prepared statements don't handle all cases, e.g. "ORDER BY :?" doesn't work.
I think it's really nice! Usually these flow-chart languages have difficult UI, but this one is pretty easy to mess around in.

It would be good if, while clicking and dragging a new connection line that will replace an old one, the latter's line is dimmed to indicate that it will disappear. Also, those blue nodes need a distinguishing selection color.

It sounds like you're aiming more toward a fun tablet-usable interface, but:

Have you thought about what it would take to write large programs in such an editor? For small fun programs a graph visualization is cool, but larger programs will tend toward a nested indented structure (like existing text) for the sake of visual bandwidth, readability of mathematical expressions, control flow, etc.
Thank you SO much for that breakdown, as all of your advice and suggestions are greatly appreciated. I couldn't agree more that we need to narrow our focus and hire developers based on specific tasks they excel in, rather than finding someone who can accomplish everything. I will definitely look into Phonegap Build. Any chance you would be willing to have a deeper conversation with me so I can pick your brain a little more. My email is pkratsios@golfmatchapp.com- I would love to bounce some ideas off of you.
This is what retroactive restrictions based on "generally accepted understanding of what things means" feels like:

Its "Unlimited Internet!", oh wait, if you are in the top 1% of bandwidth users we reserve the right to throttle you. Oh wait, we really don't want you to use more than 5GB a month. Ok fine, if you use more than 2GB we'll start throttling you and at 5GB your network connection will become unusable.
The same with GNU Parallel, only it picks the right number of cores automatically and removes .psd from the file name:

find . -iname "*.psd" -print0 | parallel -0 convert '{}' '{.}.png'
"4G" doesn't actually mean anything. "20 Mbps" means something specific. If you advertise "20 Mbps" then you should be providing twenty megabits per second. If you don't actually want to provide that then you can call it 20 Mbps burst or what have you, but one way or another you need to be providing what you're selling.

The real problem is the lack of accountability. If the first company to advertise 20 Mbps without actually providing 20 Mbps was held accountable to the offer then everything would be fine: The users who want to use 20Mbps sustained 24/7 for the whole month would be attracted to that service, the provider would have to set the price at a sustainable level or go out of business, the market works. It's the fact that we allow them to get away with offering something they aren't actually selling that creates the problem to begin with.