skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you, and some actual facts can be provided. Just look at the benchmark game between Go and C++ in quad-core x64:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

In average, C++ is three times faster than Go in all the tests. These benchmarks aren't definitive but you can assume that in general the difference in performance is much less than an order of magnitude.

Now, look at the same comparison between Go and Python3:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

Python3 is in average 20 times slower than Go. And I love Python but Go isn't that much harder to use. It's quite a nice language, actually.

So, the exodus from Python to Go is very understandable, you gain a lot of performance without sacrificing much. And I think there's room for performance improvements in Go, perhaps in a couple of years C++ developers will make the transition. But I think that the real C++ killer is Rust. Time will tell.
A couple of things:

Most things running on the desktop aren't sandboxed. Whether they should be or not is a different matter.

Hardware acceleration will by necessity be limited when one is required to sandbox, as in a web browser. It's the difference between accessing an array item by "arr[i]" and accessing an array item by "if i>arr.len || i < 0: crash, else arr[i]". Some checks can be compiled out, but some cannot. And there will always be cases where a human can identify that something cannot happen but a compiler cannot prove it. Look at the number of cases in the Linux kernel where there's assembly macros, for example.

As for the web being a "simple, open, and extensible" platform, I'd argue otherwise. Simple? Have you looked at the amount of mostly-duplicated css required to just do a simple cross-browser gradient? Open? Good luck using anything besides HTML/javascript/CSS. Even Java is blocked by default now. Extensible? Only if by extensible you mean "you can have any language you want, as long as it's javascript."

I agree that native locked-down mobile platforms are the worst of all worlds. That being said, I don't see why non-locked-down native platforms are bad.
"If your memory is between two and four times the size of yer vessel, ye be screwed hahaharrrr..."

Epic.
I am sure you guys are super smart and persuasion skills to match. The point that I am trying to make is that, maybe so are a lot from the other 99.9% of entrepreneurs who did not get funded by sequoia.

The lines of causation that we hold dear to us most of our professional lives somehow break down when we talk about startups. Maybe the simple reason that you got funded was that one of the partners thought that your market is going to be big (because of his specific personal background) and you were just another good team which just happened to focus on the exact same market - maybe also because of one of your founders background.

I understand sequoia motivation to start something like this. Even though they have a clear vested interest, I would like to believe that this was born out of an altruistic pursuit. The entrepreneurs though, are best served to take all this advise with bucketloads of salt.
No, his art is not being misunderstood in the least. That would have required an iota of effort on the part of the mindless haters.

No, they (and apparently you) think that forming harsh judgment about the person based on a few superficial details, without any regard for the attempt at art whatsoever, is somehow okay. That the person is attempting art is just being used as an excuse for indefensible behavior.
We can't stop the powerful from lying about what they're doing. We can only potentially detect the lies after the fact.

We can decide that since we can't stop the powerful from lying, we won't hand them the tools to further incentivize that lying.

It's perfectly reasonable for a polity to decide that no member should build land-mines, even if the most blame lies with the users of land-mines. This is not a public / private, left / right issue.
...is this sarcasm? Cotton gin led to the growth of slavery in the southern US. I'm not saying this is the only factor to consider relating to inventing cotton gin, but you went there... (as in, if you weren't being sarcastic, you could have chosen a less charged example)
What's better about the FreeBSD userland? Are you talking about the shell tools like coreutils/diffutils/etc., or more about daemons like DNS/mail/etc.?

I am actually thinking of doing the opposite: using GNU user land tools (coreutils etc.) with the FreeBSD kernel. I know there are some projects already in this direction -- Debian/BSD, Arch/BSD, and I think Gentoo has some relation to BSD.

Reason: I want some BSD kernel features but don't want to waste time porting shell scripts and so forth.
Besides the practical issues of using GCs, I don't get them at a conceptual level.

Keeping track of resources is a big part of any software development. You have keep track of open files, user sessions, network connections, memory mappings, all kinds of caches, many other things... and allocated memory. And for some reason this last kind of resource we don't want to keep track of "manually", instead we expect the computer to do that work for us. Why should we handle dynamically allocated memory as a special case of resource management?

Don't get me wrong, I love having my computer do my work for me. I expect my compiler to be able to inline my code for me, optimize my arithmetic, unroll my loops and do all kinds of stuff for me. Stuff it's good at, stuff it can do at least as well as I can and probably much better. Memory management is not one of those things IMO.

I feel like memory management is like pointers in C, it's a mythical dragon that scares those who have never used them beforehand. It's really not that hard or that much of an issue in the real world. If you really can't keep track of your memory allocations then the solution is not to add a GC, you have a major architectural problem.
By extension that's something that often goes for documentation comments (Javadoc, doxygen, etc.). When reading those I find it not really useful to learn that the frobFoo(Foo f) method frobs a foo and leaving the use of that method, what frobbing is and what a Foo is out of that documentation. Figuring out how to use something larger is much easier when classes come accompanied by usage samples and some notes about how they fit into the larger picture.
The $250,000 limit on medical malpractice suits in Texas is bullshit. Protecting doctors from frivolous lawsuits is fantastic in theory, but if make a grave mistake, you should be held accountable. 'License to Kill' isn't that far from the truth. It's expensive, but you can literately kill people and get away with it.

Here's my story:

We saw two doctors in Texas, both were convinced that my wife had advanced bowel cancer. The second doctor confirming the diagnosis was the Worst Day in my life.

We had no idea the doctors had colluded behind our backs, negating the exercise of getting a 'second unbiased opinion'. We had gone to a separate chain of hospitals and got the first diagnosis regurgitated to us.

She went in for a laparoscopic bowel resection surgery and woke up with:

* A nasty scar from pelvis to belly button

* Temporary ileostomy bag (her worst nightmare, requiring another surgery to remove, more nasty scarring)

* Hysterectomy (Sterilized, no kids yet)

* News that the previous diagnosis of cancer was incorrect.

* New diagnosis: Endometriosis (Can be treated without surgery in most cases)

The doctor was practically in tears when he broke the news to me.

The doctor was paid $60,000. The anesthesiologist and hospital split the rest, and our insurance paid in excess of $150,000 for the first surgery that wasn't medically necessary. The ileostomy reversal was performed in another state and cost another $40,000. Insurance is still paying for emergency room visits a few times a year.

We eventually consulted with several lawyers, and none would take the case, even the scummiest bastard I've ever met who would probably take candy from a baby if given a chance to do so. They all came to the same conclusion:

"There is no question that you have been severely and permanently wronged. Due to complications, you will need regular emergency medical attention for the rest of your life. If we took this case to court, we would win it every time. Unfortunately, it is not worth it to us due to the $250,000 limit. There is zero chance they will settle, there is no incentive for them to do so. A trial will be long, drawn out, and eventually, you could owe us more than the jury awards."

Thanks, Republicans.
It's per deployment 2000 servers with C# or 400 with C++.
And yes, it is currently used by the largest cancer center in USA (MD Anderson), DoD, VA, Kaiser etc to serve MRI, CT, XRay and similar images for diagnostics (PACS).
Nice and funny pic
This is a nice and funny animated picture that will surely make you smile!
One could argue that while you're overtly trying to screen for cultural fit, what you're actually screening for is self-monitoring, presentation skills, etc. But that's a "problem" with all interviews, structured or no, and typically those attributes are functional anyway.
Java performs well as long as you're CPU bound. But memory is becoming cheap enough to keep substantial parts of a database in memory. Avoiding all that IO translates into enormous performance gains. Unfortunately, in Java (using the Oracle VM) you can't keep a lot of data in memory without getting killed by garbage collector pauses.
I have to agree.

I code in C#. I often grouse about certain cases where we use characters instead of words - particularly in boolean logic (I find SQL code with AND and OR and NOT far more readable than C-ish characters)... and especially since the => operator is a perversion of comparison... I mean, it feels like a backwards less-than-or-equal.

But after diving headlong into C#'s various lambda and LINQ features, it's become quite natural, at least for cases where you're creating a function in-line as an argument to another call.

If I were coding more Javascript? I'd probably deprecate the function() syntax with its "this" re-binding misfeature altogether.
The biggest problem with Excel is version control, because a spreadsheet is just a file (.xls are binary, .xlsx are XML but not human-readable), and people share it as an e-mail attachment. This is what makes it a horrible, unmaintainable mess.

This is also the advantage that Google Docs Spreadsheets have over Excel. The data is cloud-hosted and automatically keeps a revision history, allowing non-technical users to collaboratively edit without having to learn about version control.

But most companies don't allow their employees to upload company data into Google Docs, and with good reason, especially in light of the NSA spying scandal.
> If you think a list of work you've done is the only thing a company should care about...

I don't think anybody reasonable is going to suggest that there's a single criteria on which a hiring decision should be made, but if you don't think that what you've accomplished should be pretty high on the list, finding candidates with an ability to create real business value is probably going to be much harder.

Who would you rather hire: a person with a track record of delivering working solutions or a person who can code on a whiteboard?
Show HN: iOS7 iPad POP3 client splitting commands unnecessarily over packets
With the iOS 7 update, the POP3 client on iPad is now splitting commands across TCP packets, using twice as many packets for POP3 sessions.

Surprisingly, it always sends just the first letter of each command and then the rest of the command:

C: U

C: SER joran@ronomon.com

S: +OK

C: P

C: ASS 123

S: +OK

C: S

C: TAT

S: +OK 2 320

...

C: R

C: ETR 1

S: +OK

...

C: D

C: ELE 1

S: +OK

C: R

C: ETR 2

...

C: Q

C: UIT

It sends the two packets 100-200ms apart, so downloading a few emails will take several seconds longer than usual.
You can also use parentheses to create a scope for the current directory and environment variables (the shell forks a subprocess to run parenthesized commands).

(cd /usr/ports/*/$PACKAGE ; sudo make install clean)

See http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu...
Crackheads trying to get their next fix just take any sort of electronics and get $10-20 for it. It doesn't generally matter what it is - they'll take it if they can get their hands on it & want to unload it ASAP. If they've been strung out & off the grid long enough, they might not know the difference between a walkman and a iPhone.

A professional thief, OTOH, probably does know what's worth taking and what's worth keeping. The problem is that, while committing a robbery, you don't exactly have the time or resources to go on eBay and price check everything you see. It's more practical to take everything that might be valuable & then figure out what's worth trying to sell after the fact.
If they patented spreadsheets today, they would immediately kill them too.
Isn't that pedantry? ;)
"Regardless of the ethics involved, try out this security penetration testing project."

...
When was the last time you met the eyes of one of these good-for-nothing, lazy, bad-smelling, disgusting … things?

That's a fairly vile perspective to project onto someone you're trying to have a productive conversation with.

Please treat folks on hn with a bit more respect.
why isn't this on the first page? 42 points in an hour? I see something with 42 points in 2 hours on the first page.
I suppose the fact that many users have shitty internet connections is a technical issue. But for users with a high bandwidth low latency connection (FiOS, LAN, dedicated fiber) there's really no technical reason it can't work quite well.

The primary reasons these services didn't take off is that many users have shitty connections and almost everyone has a fast enough computer.
Franken is one of the good guys... he's probably the strongest proponent of net neutrality in the senate.

The letter to Apple came from his role as the Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. That committee was created to advocate for consumer privacy, which is probably as important as privacy from the government. How many lives could Google ruin with all of the personal information they have on hand? How many companies have your credit card and social security number on some poorly secured server?

As for broader government abuse, Franken introduced a bill to mandate the NSA to reveal the extent of their surveillance, which is supported by just about every privacy-focused organization in the country (ACLU, EFF, HRW, etc.). While he's not as strong of a critic as Merkley or others, pushing things in the right direction is worth supporting.
Patents don't help the little guy as big company's can ignore them for years.
Some issues I see with this particular design:

1. loft access is very unsafe. Imagine being drunk (college student, no way!), sick or injured. How to get up or down those stairs safely?
2. I see no water heater or place for plumbing or electrical access.
3. I see no place for bicycle storage, etc.
4. Having a small shower would be very nice.
Mutant Football League Kickstarter
I know that's one of the features that DragonflyBSD has had for a while. I've never found much documentation surrounding the issue, but it's always been referred to as something that helps administrators set up different environments for different users. When users need to share most of an environment but with a few exceptions, you can just use a variant symlink for the differences, instead of setting up a jail and sharing everything else some other way.
On the timeline presented there is a framework called ServiceStack[0] which I successfully used to significantly simplify internal APIs, used by multiple internal systems, back in early 2011.

Recently we brought on a new developer whose first question was "Why didn't you use Microsoft's WebApi". I had to gently explain that I couldn't use something that didn't exist. So I definitely feel the author's pain.

[0] - https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki
So, while I'm far from an expert on Rust, that seems to me like they have separate heaps for separate tasks, and heap values are not shared. So, effectively, the tasks are roughly as isolated -- memorywise, at least -- as different OS level processes.

This means that you can have different tasks that have GC turned on or off at the task level, because a GC'ed object will never "leak" across a process boundary. However, if you decide you want to parse JSON with your fancy new GC-using JSON library, you either need to put that into a separate task, or you need to enable GC in the task that calls into that library.

That means that if you want GC-free code, you're going to have to be very careful about which libraries you can call into directly.
A mischievous startup with a social purpose
That's not the point. The point is that the fingerprint uniquely identifies you, and it's difficult to change.

It's like using your SIN as a secret.
Let's build, not destroy: The high barrier to entry in the tech industry
Yup. Uptight preppy hole near Chicago.
I like this, you should include Udacity for the Python section. They teach everything from Basic Python to web development to software testing and even debugging. Can't find better resource for Python than https://www.udacity.com
Tort Reform (essentially limited liability) is in direct conflict with the only corrective mechanism in the 'free market'. I've never understood why republicans support it so earnestly.
Oops I didn't read the entire article. /ignore
Why We Should Choose Science over Beliefs (Michael Shermer)
Interesting. Assuming the author is correct, do most browsers think they will be able to get away with their memory management 'hybrid' implementations in the future?
I used Apple-provided bluetooth capabilities so my experience is probably not particularly relevant to Raspberry Pi, sorry. One thing to think about is battery life, unless you only need to pair the broadcaster and the receiver once. What I mean is, if you have a listener that is constantly scanning for a signal and doing some logic depending on the signal strength, you are bound to have battery life as your biggest challenge and potentially a deal breaker to any real use.
Out of curiosity, what percentage of people on food stamps do you think are like this guy?
Seems to be missing a key section: XML as in XMLHTTP requests.

For Web Services and APIs, XML is great, and much better than SOAP or JSON.
Personally, I couldn't anymore handle the way ports asks for configuration options for every package that has configurable options. I'm spoiled by the "sane defaults" stance of better Linux distros like Arch.
"DHS lawyers claimed that international travel provides, in and of itself, sufficient Constitutional basis for detention and search of international travellers and the search, seizure and copying of the digital contents of their belongings."

Really? Fucking hell.. With every month that goes by, I am less and less inclined to travel to, or do business in, the US..

edit: I'm aware that later in the article they say the courts didn't really agree with this, but it doesn't seem to be preventing it from happening, especially when, after they got what they needed (I call bullshit on "destroy all copies"), they just back down and convince the victim to drop the case.
Yale won the NCAA hockey championship last year, Stanford has maybe the best overall athletic department in the country (including a current top-10 football program), and Duke is one of the five most successful basketball programs of all time.
They gimmickify it because they don't want to be just making commodity devices on Google's behalf. They want people to notice a difference between their handsets and others and to be deterred from switching to something that looks unfamiliar.
The marketplace rewards all sorts of things that are not related to the brilliance of the idea. Access to capital, management expertise, skill of execution, plain dumb luck, etc.

Therefore, the marketplace encourages companies to take a fast-follower approach. Let someone else spend the money to come up with the idea, and then pounce all over it.

The goal of the patent system is to encourage the idea itself, by giving a monopoly to the inventor. In this way, fast-followers have to compensate the inventor for the invention by licensing the patent.

Alternatives to patents -- prizes, research grants, compulsory licensing, etc. -- are also designed to separate the value of the idea itself from the rough-and-tumble of the marketplace.
Revenue is impossible to compute. For example, can Windows OS sales be attributed to a patent on MS Office?
My point was simply that it's a wild exaggeration to assume there are more than a handful of people in the United States who are involuntarily living on <$1/day. Whether it's "arbitrary" or not, it's not even close to reality.
“If you want to be happy for the rest of your life…try moving to Texas..” --Mike Huckabee Facebook post 9-10-2013

He didn't say the reason why is because your life would be radically shortened by a non-invasive surgery so you wouldn't have time to be sad. Maybe that was implied?
Interesting, but obviously being able to lift fingerprints remotely is worse than having to physically access the target's handled objects.
"Therefore, when the information was officially released in Washington, New York should see it 2 milliseconds later, and Chicago should see it 7 milliseconds later."

At which millisecond was the information "officially released"? Which of Bernanke's phonemes were decisive? Or do we know to the millisecond when the Fed's site was updated?

I suppose the coincidence between Chicago and New York is still a thing. Everyone receiving the leak agreed to fire at a particular time, and nobody jumped the gun?