skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Warning! Highly unscientific, non realistic test ahead!
Running on a baremetal, idle server..

python -m timeit -r 10 -n 100000 -s 'import json' 'j="""[{"t":"Hello"}]"""; json.loads(j)[0]["t"]'
100000 loops, best of 10: 9.07 usec per loop

python -m timeit -r 10 -n 100000 -s 'from xml.dom import minidom' 'xml = "<t>Hello</t>"; minidom.parseString(xml).getElementsByTagName("t")'
100000 loops, best of 10: 74.9 usec per loop

python -m timeit -r 10 -n 100000 -s 'from xml.dom import minidom' 'xml = "<t>Hello</t>"; minidom.parseString(xml).firstChild.firstChild.wholeText'
100000 loops, best of 10: 76.6 usec per loop

Given that the "study" comes from a "markup conference" that has XML all over its website and given the fact that XML documents (uncompressed, in memory) are much larger and that XML is a much much more complex standard, i seriously doubt the conclusion that XML and JSON are "almost the same" in terms of speed and memory usage.

Or simply put: How is it technically even feasible that an XML document that, by its nature, is much more complex (and thus i imagine a XML parser to be much more complex) can be parsed as fast as JSON with more or less the same memory footprint?

Wouldn't that only suggest that the JSON parser that is tested is just not as optimized as the XML parser?

I can imagine that a webbrowsers XML parser is much more optimized and mature then its JSON parser, given that it's a browser that mainly needs to parse HTML/XML?

Does it mean i should switch to using XML instead of JSON in commandline tools?

Or to put it another way:
The headline "XML Can Give the Same Performance as JSON" is probably true for browsers which have had years in improving the XML parser. But i don't think this can be a general conclusion.
The Great Pointer Syntax Debate
I have no doubt China will become an economic superpower. They are investing heavily in the African continent and central and South America. Those are long term, strategic investments.
Mostly because there's a bunch of subtlety around bank transfers and identity verification. The EU simplifies a lot of the regulatory framework but the actual operations still entail a decent amount of heterogeneity from country-to-country.
My 5 cents: today I've submitted this [0] post, its title was "Valve is planning to use Blender as a game modding tool in Steam". Then it was renamed by somebody to "Steam-powered Blender" which resulted a bunch of title related comments like:

> You know, with a link title like that, I was really hoping to see a food processor powered by a steam engine.

>> That's HN for you. You're never quite sure whether it's programming related or not.

>> Same. I was expecting something along the lines of the pulse jet powered tea kettle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fDM9Eb16Do

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6215219
> As opposed to studying for five years in a college, learning Java and programming in Java exclusively, never learning anything outside the Java and never perfecting?

Uau!? Do such universities exist?
1?

I just logged into an (old) account[0] with no comments or submissions. It has 1 karma and as far as I could tell it was able to upvote no problem.

[0]826 days old. Can't for the life of me remember why I created it, or what (if anything) I did with it but the karma count was at 1 and there were no listed comments or submissions.
عاجل
I stand corrected. Thanks. Edited my original post. But the point remains unchanged. He was not an isolated kook with no money or connections, and his supporters and his financiers definitely were not.

To illustrate my point, here's a solid gold Mercedes: http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/03/white-gold-mercedes/

Kooks in caves with no connections. Yeah.
Network Performance Monitoring Survey
Google is preparing for screenless computers
For me neither, i thought i am just too stupid to see it ;)
Or he could easily have stolen the book recommendations from absolutely anywhere on the damn planet. Also who cares if he posted on bitcointalk, also do you honestly believe he has a facebook or if he does do you honestly believe there is any overlap between the 2 personas? If so, your recent silk road purchase must have been a humdinger.
Some sites are auto-banned. I wouldn't be surprised techeye.net is among them, based on a quick look at the home page. While this has the occasional false positive, there are reasons for most of them.
thechangelog #100: Go programming with Rob Pike and Andrew Gerrand
In other words, you have no idea why the pain comes and goes, or why allergies come and go.

Which is fine.

I'm just trying to say that whenever we don't know, we have a tendency to reject and ridicule any new hypothesis, especially if it's in the field where we also have no idea on how to measure things. So, while agreeing that a scientific approach (measure, quantify, prove, etc) is better, I would not reject nor ridicule hypotheses that we can neither prove nor disprove. Personally, I find them interesting, as they lie on the boundary of what we know and might offer promising research in the future.

[I don't want to pick up on your simplification wrt pain, so I'll just note it's huge. Psychosomatic pain is not about "perception" at all, it's real, and the symptoms are real.]
I'd argue the opposite, simply because XML has many well defined schema formats and XPath. If you end up having versions of data formats, or are dealing with data from an unknown source, XML is far superior, and allows for easier interchange of data.

The correct way to load an XML document is as follows, IMO:

* Open it
* Run it through the schema to validate it's
structure
* Manipulate/access it via XPath, with the ability to
assume correct structure as defined by the schema.

Compare to JSON, where the process is

* Open it
* Attempt to access it, even though it's structure
may deviate from the expected
* Die or try to rollback work when an assumption about
the data structure isn't met.

Thus, most JSON code either trusts the input data implicitly, or is a mess of "is this where it should be?"/independently re-developed schema equivalent every time. I am aware of attempts to create JSON schema languages - unfortunately these are neither in common use, nor well defined enough to be standards, and they're more verbose and less expressive than XML's RelaxNG compact syntax.

JSON is fundamentally a dump of a data structure, not a document format. It isn't designed for long term data storage, or for inter-compatibility, despite being used those ways. Thus, it's great if you control both ends and your data structures don't change, as is the case with most web programming. It frequently falls down outside that realm.

Now, the above ignores runtime performance concerns. I'd argue (again) that outside of web apps, the load/store into a data structure is done rarely, or can be done in the background or in parallel if there's a lot of data concerned. Also, we're probably talking about less than an order of magnitude in the vast majority of cases.
My original title was "Valve is planning to use Blender as a game modding tool in Steam", it was changed by a mod/admin.
hellbanning is worse because the person doesn't know they are banned and almost no one sees their content. it would be much nicer to the person being banned to simply tell them they are banned and not to waste effort any more. the only reason hellbanning exists is to trick the banned person into not making a new account with a different ip. for spammers and people making personal attacks, fine. but a lot of people hellbanned are simply voicing unpopular opinions. there were several europeans in a thread recently about how europe has different rules about PC who were dead, for example, which was pretty funny but also sad
It's designed for extensible document markup

This is, and always has been, an absolutely terrible way of writing off XML. Do we judge every technology today based upon their purported original purpose? "The computer was designed to solve linear equations, therefore it is ill suited for any other purpose". Noisy nonsense.

JSON only maps to the information model of JavaScript, and has no closer ties to any other language than XML does.
I was thinking to migrate my email to Rackspace but now I am looking to another provider with similar quality outside US.
HN has a moderation policy that is heavy-handed, overbearing, inconsistent, and pathetically ineffective at preventing the lowbrow discourse that such a policy is theoretically designed to eliminate.

This is consistent with the site's elitist tendencies.
Reactive Programming, CSS Spacing, & Image Loading – Treehouse Show
Your comment, standing alone, sounds like a really interesting idea.
Think of it as a successor to the $5 wrench attack.
ah, the feeling of living in a false democracy...
Looks like you're reasoning at level four:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_m...
Given that the "study" comes from a "markup conference" that has XML all over its website

So? The overwhelming majority of JSON advocacy comes from developers who happen to know JavaScript, and thus JSON appeals to them. Virtually everyone speaks from the position of self-interest.
IBM and Universities Team Up to Close a 'Big Data' Skills Gap
The study is entirely based on first principles simulations. So even though these may be the most accurate calculations we can possibly carry out... they still may not be experimentally validated (for any number of reasons). In this case they cannot state anything as 100% truth as it has not (necessarily) been tested through experiment. "should" is appropriate.
Honestly curious: why do some commentators seem to hold The Atlantic in disdain?
>> In any sizable JavaScript code base, especially if third-party libraries are used, these incompatibilities can become a very real issue, very quickly.

Whether you use constructor functions, object literals, or the module pattern to structure your code in an OO-like manner, they all result in 'functions hung off objects' which can be called in the same way: object.foo(), I don't see the very real compatibility issue you're talking about.

>> It's very good to see more and more people openly admitting that JavaScript's prototype-based OO approach just isn't practical.

It's plenty practical, I will welcome ES6's class keyword for the clearer semantics, but this is simply vague FUD.
I've been using the UK beta for a few months.

Honestly, the API docs and Gem are so good you don't need a book.

From sitting down can looking over the docs to charging my debit card for a monthly subscription took about an hour (and I'm not even that good with ruby, if you're a pro you could do it in half an hour I reckon).
In the case of one of our infamous hellbanned posters (hint: the guy with the random text generator, attributed to "God"), I'm fairly sure that he knows he's hellbanned.
Probably the next freedom revolutionary will be an user in HN?
"It's time we called the government's actions what they really are: commandeering. Commandeering is a practice we're used to in wartime, where commercial ships are taken for military use, or production lines are converted to military production. But now it's happening in peacetime. Vast swaths of the Internet are being commandeered to support this surveillance state."

This is an exceedingly well-framed point. Just because it's information and not "stuff" doesn't make it not commandeering. If you're a communications company, reputational damage and other indirect costs have real value, i.e. indirectly intercheangable with money, beyond just the costs of directly complying. It's commandeering.
There are plenty of meal replacement products that can be used as a sole source of nutrition.

The manufacturers don't heavily promote that aspect because they are cautious and careful.
You are waaaay overthinking it.

Probably was just flagged to death because people are getting overloaded with NSA stories, especially when there is no new additions. I would probably have flagged it if I saw it, doesn't really advance the discussion and frankly, I don't come to HN for politics.
6 realtime analytics dashboards
If I recall, the same is true of Gorilla Glass.
Indeed. The irony is that anyone following that (good) advice were affected by this.
In the interest of experimentation with censorship, I'm going to state the following:

pg is an asshat.
Never mind PayPal, they're more expensive than the commodity players in the UK, like SagePay.

Stripe's strategy is all about developer-led adoption, and their approach to their tech belies this. Unfortunately, in reality, developers have as much say as to which PSP their client uses as the cabin boy does what course the captain should sail.

I run an eCommerce firm - we've mooted stripe to all of our customers, as we like the look of their approach - but none will adopt, purely on the basis of cost.
Great comment. I had to laugh at this:

"extra cost is probably offset by the amount spent on
heart medication"

One of my top comments [1] on SO says much the same:

"Enjoy PayPal's sandbox test environment! It's about
as fun as extracting one's teeth with a pair of pliers."

It looks like Stripe could really start to push back on PayPal in the UK as well. About time if you ask me.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/67394/which-should-i-impl...
>you can set variables in your parent threads before the child threads execute, but unless you're doing it in a locking way (eg. with a shared semaphore) there's no guarantee that the parent thread actually executes before the child thread

There are definitely some surprising outcomes from the JMM, but I'm pretty sure this isn't one of them. If I recall correctly, starting a thread automatically synchronizes the current thread with the first thing the child thread does, without any explicit synchronization. So anything done prior to that point in the parent thread will be visible in the child.
What are you going to do once you get that cheap sheet of graphene?
And that my friend is why Anarchy or Libertarian Socialism is the only choice for proper governance.
I'll get to it right after I start my own OS because Microsoft's too evil and my own superpower country because the military-industrial complex is too evil.
Chase.com is down
Cooking is a stressor for many people. Sorry, can't go to the movies tonight, have to make lunch for tomorrow. No time to read books, have to shop, prep, cook and clean every evening after work. Food enthusiasts love it and are good at it and paint this idyllic picture of it all that's not really in sync with the daily reality for many people who work full time jobs and aren't particularly interested in cooking. Me, I do like to cook, but it takes a LOT of time, and I would love to have more time for other stuff without paying a fortune to eat out.
> Jamming doesn't need to always block the source transmitter, you can also block the receivers on the drones by flooding the frequencies, or spoofing GPS, etc etc.

AFAIK it works by lowering the signal/noise ratio to the point the channel is useless for it's intended purpose.

Something with extremely tight focus via aimable directional antenna or phased array, along with spread spectrum hopping would be extremely hard to jam, because you need to get enough energy into the channel to mess with it.

GPS jamming can be countered by a better inertial nav system, and even the tightbeam comms themselves can be used to locate approx positions with enough links.

Regarding combat capabilities, is there any fundamental reason for their relative lack of performance beyond it being unnecessary/risky with high-latency comms? From a quick scan of current costs, you could get >10 Avenger/Predator C drones (~15M ea) for a single F-35 (~200M) or F-22 (~150M).

I suspect (but am utterly unqualified to say) that such an encounter would go badly for the (human) fighter, especially if everyone has modern AMRAAM or similar BVR weapons ("... we only need to be lucky once").
For me, it's not that The Atlantic is held in disdain but that Schneier is held in high esteem.
Ashton Kutcher reveals real name, tells how he became a success
Excited about etcd
Part of it is that as the total value of the company rises as the company matures and it removes various sources of risk. The dollar value of 1% of the company could easily rise from $1 (idea on a napkin) to $2000 (early prototype in seed stage) to $250,000 (business model proven and many customers secured). As that happens, a smaller and smaller percentage of the company is required to make up a given disparity in cash compensation.
Why the F%#& should we care about Yahoo's new logo?
It's be cool to build an actual steam-powered blender, but the article title is misleading (in a funny way)
Ted Nelson "The future is ______" EXPO 1 (2013)
Phantom types are used frequently in Haskell to really great effect. Perhaps the most well-known example is the ST monad which allows you to do mutable, destructive updates in a "pure" fashion by containing them all within a narrow region. From outside of that region, the effects are invisible and referentially transparent. This is great for embedding your favorite iterative/mutable algorithm in a pure program.

Phantom types along with quantified type erasure allow the compiler to force these impure regions to be contained. They disallow sharing of variables or results between ST monad invocations statically.

To do so, most operations are polymorphic in the phantom variable. So something like `get (put x box)` is of type `ST s Int` for an `x :: Int`. The `s` corresponds to whichever ST region this action gets run within.

Running ST looks like `runST :: (forall s. ST s a) -> a` which means that the ST action you give to ST must be completely naive in its choice of region. Another way of thinking about it is that the `s` parameter is chosen adversarially by the compiler so that only ST actions which are able to be run in any region are allowed to be run at all.
Mexican hot sauces contain unsafe levels of lead
Job Titles in the Web Industry
Awesome, congrats guys. We have been using the BETA since the start and its been very good.

If anyone from Stripe is reading, in your announcement you say:

"In addition to keeping the best parts, we've also built multi-currency support: the ability for UK businesses to charge customers around the world in US dollars, British pounds, and Euro. We'll automatically handle all the conversions for you and deposit daily into your bank account."

My understanding was that we would need a USD account in the UK in order to charge customers in USD. Have you now fixed that? I can't find anything in the docs? Or are you saying that we can just charge people GBP no matter where in the world they are?
As a fellow left-libertarian, thanks for mentioning libertarian socialism.

My thought for a long time has been that the most practical (as in achievable today in the real world) and best government for actual human beings who want to be free would be a very minimal non-invasive and efficient government with a negative income tax and possibly some kind of non-profit health cost sharing system. Other than the rest of the standard stuff, it would be minimal and stay out of things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
Similarly: my favorite one is that you're an order of magnitude more likely to get struck and killed by lightning than win the lottery.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I think the policy should be to use whatever the title of the original article is, by default in the link to the content. Allow the text field or another field for the submitter to describe (briefly) the content as it's relevant to HN users.

Or at the very least add an 'updated' or asterisk or something next to the title when it gets changed.
YC Alum James Beshara Interview & Details on Savage Deal Terms
For me, the easiest way to visualise that you have equal probability between the two sets of numbers is to simply visualise the balls, but without the numbers. Now, what are the odds of drawing blank set of balls A. Then, what are the odds of drawing blank set of balls B.
Be careful when flagging articles you are tired of seeing, apparently if your tastes are different to that of the watchmen the ability to flag gets removed from you.
C++ String to Int
Bugfreak a free opensource bug tracker for .net and android
While we where working on our latest startup (omnipasteapp.com) we needed a way to get reports on application crushes from our early adopter. Existing solutions where either to expensive for a startup or did not had support for all the platforms we needed.

So we created bugfreak used a couple of weeks and then opensourced it:

https://github.com/agilefreaks/apibugfreak - the api and web app, same app as www.bugfreak.co so you can fork it and deploy it on your own server

https://github.com/Agilefreaks/winbugfreak - the .net clients (wpf, silverlight, aps mvc)

https://github.com/Agilefreaks/droidbugfreak - the android client

All packages are available in nuget and maven

As always PR are more than welcomed. Let us know what platform you want to have support for next (rails is already on the roadmap)
For what it's worth, a lot of our bigger users (from MoMA to Walmart) ended up using Stripe because their developers successfully pushed it internally.

Could you drop me a line? patrick@stripe.com. I have an idea I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on.
No, it was not disdain. I like The Atlantic (indeed a little bit less after reading they manipulated Reddit)

But I read a zillion of posts daily and thought that the author was another opinionated journalist. If I had been more interested I would have clicked in the submission and read it after recognizing the Schneier signature.
Wow I wasn't aware that EEGs are this cheap. Does anyone know how well these 200-300$ thingies play with Linux and how easy it is to hack around with them generally?

I'd love to log my brain activities while learning, reading or playing poker :D

Edit:
Seems like the Emotive EPOC has an SDK that supports Linux and also an open source library called Emokit that was build from reverse engineering the device's communication :D
Customize Your Web
> Have you now fixed that?

We've fixed it :-)
I totally agree that Stripe is easy to get started with and I believe their documentation is the best in the industry. But, as someone who processes payments in the six figures annually with Stripe, I feel there is definitely still room for a book like Pete's, in the same way that there was a place for a book about design patterns even among talented and experienced developers. His book builds on the platform, rather than replacing the documentation.

I manage a drop-in Rails engine for adding Stripe subscriptions to an app (http://github.com/andrewculver/koudoku) and the number one piece of feedback I get is that people wish they had heard of it before they integrated Stripe subscriptions in their app. This tells me that there is room for gems like mine and books like Pete's in the little ecosystem Stripe has created.
It's a good question. For me, right now, the thing holding me back is the risk. With a wife, a mortgage, and a baby on the way, leaving a well-paying "safe" job is a somewhat scary prospect. It wouldn't be impossible, but I haven't gathered the courage to make that jump yet.

I continue to work on side-projects, hoping to build enough momentum to reduce the risk to the point where making the jump seems reasonable.
>The stat that did it for me was when I heard that I'm far more likely to be murdered than win the lottery

I personally like "You're more likely to die redeeming the prize than you are to win the lottery itself."
My point was that even with node's mind boggling growth it still hasn't really overtaken rails when it comes to developer productivity.
Could you provide a screenshot? I don't have Chrome on my work computer, but I'm interested in seeing how it looks.