skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Undefined behavior means anything is allowed.

If you have a buffer overflow which overwrites your x86 instructions to completely change the behavior of the program, that's "OK" because buffer overflows are "undefined behavior". Simple cause and effect.

The authors of compiler optimizers noted this basically gave them free reign to optimize based on the assumption that undefined behavior does not happen, because if it DID happen, whatever the program ends up doing in that case of not a concern, as whatever it is, it's "OK".

An example of this: If I dereference a null pointer and try and assign it to three, and then after that dereference check if the pointer is null, I can optimize away that check.

On a typical x86 system, this sounds reasonable: "It'll crash anyways, right?" ...however, the optimizer is allowed to do this even if there's no guarantee there will be an access violation because I'm using an unprotected memory model, or the member is a sufficient way into the containing struct to be in a seperate mapped page, etc.

Taken to a further extreme, this applies to signed integer overflow as well. "You're not allowed to do it within a well defined program, ergo, we assume you don't do it and optimize away based on that assumption."
Google's continued abuse of the FRAND process has done nothing to hurt their image in the eyes of most. And likewise this suit won't affect Apple or Microsoft's reputation one iota.
When it comes to optimising a Javascript app that involves inserting hundreds and potentially thousands of elements into a page, save yourself headaches and use documentFragment to prevent reflow and at the same time, insert a lot of elements into your page/app very quickly. I recently build an app that has reached almost 54,000 mouse click records. Each time you click, it saves that value in a database: http://coolcoolcoolcoolcool.com/

Inspecting the page will yield a click map where I am displaying all 53,000 mouse clicks inside of a map. As you can see I am using canvas now, but before that I was inserting them into the page and believe it or not, using documentFragment it was amazingly fast.

The reason I switched to canvas because performance on mobile was poor. 53,000+ elements rendered by Javascript on desktop didn't cause any fuss though, using documentFragment makes all the difference. Keep in mind, documentFragment really only shines when you are inserting 1000 plus elements into the page at once. One reflow against many reflows is going to cause you a lot of headaches.
Those are all basic optimizations that most make as their apps grow, I doubt there is a single framework in that benchmark that couldn't handle all of them easily.
Are technology companies eventually going to become like cell phone companies (or oil companies) where everyone sort of agrees that they all suck, but "oh well, what are you going to do", or will some company become the de-facto "conscientious choice"?

I feel like there's at least a bunch of "companies" on the software side of the equation who I don't feel shitty about supporting, but I think the problem will be with hardware.
Cogent article explaining bitcoin in layman's terms, in a balanced fashion.
I love it! It's a perfect example of what makes Stripe a great company. This feature is in no way necessary, it's just icing on the cake. I wish more companies would address API usability issue like Stripe does.
It's not just software patents, it's all patents. The current 3D printing technologies making a big splash right now were all invented in the 80's. The patent minefield just beginning to expire is what's causing the 3D printing boom.
Yes, but!

At 103ns per iteration, you can do 9.7 million iterations per second. At 298ns per iteration, you can do 3.4 million iterations per second.

Let's look at the wsgi numbers for json serialization:

wsgi-nginx-uWSGI: 109,882 rps
bottle-nginx-uWSGI: 65,793 rps
wsgi: 65,755
..

Now, let's look at the best case comparison: 109,882 rps vs 3.4 million iterations per second. Is cutting iteration time down to 1/3 significant (298ns vs 103ns)? Yes. Is it significant in the overall context? No.

With a 31x difference between 109,882 and 3.4 million* (and, since this is comparing to an i7, that 31x is probably closer to the ballpark of 100x), this simply isn't likely to be the place where optimization will help much. Put simply, the {"message": "Hello, world"} vs dict(message="Hello, world") cost difference is likely insignificant when compared to the cost of the rest of the request.

With that said, this sounds like a change that should be committed as part of a pull request! Why? A couple of reasons:

- It may still help the performance in a minor way (at the very least, it shouldn't hurt it)

- We prefer idiomatic code and, assuming the literal {} notation - vs dict() - is idiomatic for such a case, this would be a good change.

Your point about this is also interesting:

What you have is the slower way to contruct a dictionary
and then passing to the Python native JSON vs. a C
optimized JSON for output.

Please do consider a pull request for both. We love community contributions.

* Yes, I know these aren't directly comparable numbers, but they compare well enough in this case.

Edit: Fixed the literal {} vs dict() mixup that e12e pointed out in my comment.
Need to be able to generate some randomness into the tweets, they get flagged for being the same tweet over and over.

Also has to send some non-@replies, so it'd work better as a dual-purpose bot that does some other work too, I guess.
Why is it that an off-topic (and untechnical) thread always seems to go to the top of HN discussions? So irritating.
That's an awesome observation. Maybe that's why he went back on his word of only being a one term senator, so he'd increase the window of opportunity for getting something right.
Yes, because there's two of them.
Linux is an ideal development platform. Mac is an ideal procrastination platform ;)
It's called strategy, and from Google's standpoint, it's a brilliant one. Seems to be working very well for them, while keeping competitors at bay.

With regards to Schmidt on Apple's board, you're not the first to mention it here, as I responded to another comment, Apple was really dumb in this instance. Google bought Android in 2005, Apple brought Eric Schmidt onto it's board in 2006. So, either Apple was hoping to get some insight into what Google was doing with Android and hoping Schmidt might slip up, or they just shouldn't have brought an advisor on who was the CEO of a potentially major competitor. I was always amazed that that happened.
Google Buys Android - 2005 http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-08-16/google-buys-a....
Schmidt Joins Board - 2006 http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/08/29Google-CEO-Dr-Eric....
#IgnoreLaughFightWin, we are now at the fight stage for Android and you know what comes next
"Hey, uh, Google... We are sorry we secretly stole information from your personal networks and spied on you and your users activities. Can you be good pals and help us get our site working?" — what a joke. If only Obama dedicated as many resources as he does to his spying programs, then the site might have made its deadline flawlessly.
Engineers trade in failure modes. That's 99% of engineering; so to tell a site full of engineers that they shouldn't look at how an idea could fail ( especially catastrophic failure modes that could cost people's lives ) is going to get you mocked mercilessly and rightly so.

And notably; Dropbox has had some serious security issues; and it should not ( even today ) be used to handle information that is sensitive, confidential, safety-critical; or part of operating a nuclear facility. And that is true, despite the fact that it's tremendously useful and popular.
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure what you mean about Google's abuse of FRAND.
Please. Stop acting like Google is some innocent child. It's pathetic.

Google has been using SEPs as weapons and undermining standards and the huge benefits they bring to humanity.
Yahoo internals were even discussing ideas of creating their own fork of Android, way back in 2010. Nothing happened.
> Motorola Mobility sued apple in 2010.

As far as I know Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2011. So they had nothing to do with the original suit. As for last month's one, I don't know about the details.

> I disagree, microsoft tried to destroy linux

Where did I say Microsoft was clean ?
LOL fair enough, fair enough
Why can't we do both? Let the companies know we don't accept their behaviour, and try to change the patent system. The patent system won't change overnight, but the companies can drop the suit in an instance.
Just saw Matthius give a talk at Scala.io in Paris on his meisterwerk, Spray.

Surprised it came in so high (6), no wonder Spray was acquired by Typesafe...and why Spray will take place of Netty in Play stack.
Small companies that have done something new aren't buried six feet under a lawsuit, they are bought out and become Google YouTube, or Google Maps, or Google Blogger.

Yes they may be forced to sell or sell for less to avoid patent lawsuits against them, but they sell for more than if they didn't have any patents themselves.

It isn't an idea situation, but patents still generate a ton of income for small inventors.
Good point, I totally forgot about hardware decoders.
This inspired me to create a 'buycott' that people can join to show their dissatisfaction with these patent trolling tactics:

http://buycott.com/campaign/699/boycott-rockstar-s-weaponiza...
As am I. I really hope they don't phase them out. The current 16x10 24" ultrasharp (U2412M) is a great monitor at less than $300.
Needs more maps and greps. :)

Seriously though, I use maps and greps a lot now, often chained to transform a data structure from one type to another. I'm annoyed when I have to drop to a for(each) loop.
Apple made significant API changes as well.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/releasenotes/General...
> While I definitely agree that the software around synthetic biology is weak, I think this is not actually the problem bottlenecking the field. Ultimately, most efforts in synthetic biology are gated foremost by a lack of underlying biological knowledge.

This is spot-on correct. In the lab I worked in, we are working on a gene cluster of 11 genes, that result in the assembly of an enzyme that creates hydrogen. The PI's project was to play around with "promoters" that tell the bacterium to produce the genes. Think of this as 'script kiddie' work. I came in and immediately told him that this was the wrong approach; we had to alter the structure and chemistry of the enzymes themselves (think of this as 'assembler-level hacking'). Thankfully he was sympathetic to my argument and let me play around; I achieved a 3x improvement in enzyme activity. This summer,we tested the original idea, and all of the variants we tested were worse than what we started out.

Also, and this is my highly opinionated position informed by my experience as the sole chemist in a synthetic biology lab, but part of the problem is that a lot of biologists tracked themselves into biology because they didn't do so hot at chemistry. Many synthetic biology problems are chemistry problems, and even problems that are not on first blush like those that Drew Endy are trying to solve really become easy to grok if you're used to thinking qualitatively in terms of statistical thermodynamics and can mentally estimate collisions per nanosecond, from concentrations and kinetic parameters. These are quintessentially chemistry skills.

reference:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23819621
Google didn't bid on these patents because they were infringing - they bid on the patents so they wouldn't get patent trolled.
reads half line description which outlines not a single important feature of the patent Yep, obviously these are shippy patents, I better not read them!

What a joke, this is why I always get angry when reading anything about patents on HN, everyone is so uneducated and seemingly proud of it.
I'm now ashamed I ever worked at Microsoft and I'm assuming a lot of devs there will feel the same way :(
Good to know, I'm not alone with that experience then. All of my clients already have XMPP, but there is no good CrossPlatform Client, that JustWorks™. Which is sad. But maybe something new will replace this, for example WebRTC is on the way.
Apple threw down the gauntlet when they made it clear that their devices would be a walled garden where they would have absolute control over what apps you can run.

Prior to Android, your choice was between your carrier overlords and the Apple overlord. Not only was that limiting for users, it was a vulnerability for Google business-wise to have their direct competitors as gatekeepers between their services and their users.
...it's particularly misleading because you could be sentenced for 124 years for a several dozen different offenses but serve your time concurrently.
You can take months to create puzzles, there's no pressure here.
I just don't know anyone who would actually speak that way, nor have I ever seen writing deliberately like that save possibly as a stylistic thing. Omitting the cream from ice cream is completely strange. Ice is more of a modifying element there - it's iced coffee, you'd just say coffee, not 'iced' by itself. I often see 'icecream' as a single word, in fact.

I didn't mean to get into a long aside though, I just wanted to help someone out. I should have known that here I would get overanalysis instead of people just ignoring it if they didn't appreciate it.
This article is very emotionally loaded. Containing a lot of phrases designed to evoke an emotional response: 'Nuclear', 'DEFCON 1', 'Attack', 'Shocking'.

It actually doesn't mention what Rockstar is suing Google for (i.e., whether it's monetary compensation, banning the sale of products, etc.) The article seems designed to get fans of these companies to react.

I think this will play out as a much more boring, lengthy, and anti-climactic fashion than this article implies.
How dare they! And how dare Linus Torvalds "dump" Linux on the industry, or Mozilla "dump" Firefox. They should be required by law to charge high fees!
... if they're not infringing, then they have nothing to worry about. Are you kidding me?
Wouldn't referencing a website regarding fallacies in this manner be, in itself, an appeal-to-authority fallacy? :)
Calm down. Google didn't break "the law". Intellectual property is covered by civil law. One party has to prove that a contract was broken, a patent misused or other IP misused. They also have to prove their damages. They do this in court and if they make their case then the other company has to pay for those damages. It is not a crime. It is not breaking a law. This is not a semantic issue either. It is a civil matter.
That's because most hackers perceive Google's FRAND suits as a justified defensive counter-attack brought on by Microsoft and Apple's patent abuse, so they are given slack.
You don't understand how patents work. Patents allow you to prevent someone else from selling a product that is covered by your patent. But to do so; you have to get a court order and show that the product in question is covered by the patent in question. It's not a question of whether the defendant is doing something illegal; it's a question of whether the rights the plaintiff asserts are valid.
Of course, once the plaintiff has won an order; defying it is ... ill-considered.
This feeds into one of my pet questions : will Moore's Law really die?

Doubling transistor density on silicon will end about 2020/22, when 7 or 5nm etching occurs - beyond that and chip designers are past the wavelength of red (?) light and into quantum tunnelling effects

But ...

maybe the amount of CPU cycles available to use for a given bi-annual price will keep doubling. More efficient systems on a chip, cooling in huge data centers means Siri can keep doubling its ability to run voice analysis on my behalf?

is that true?

3. is there genuinely any chance things like bio-computing?
What about Pakistan :)
They are really evil people. Probably as evil as those who created OSes, languages, browsers, protocols, libraries, compilers, IDEs - and gave them away for free. If not for the "rest of the software industry", everything would be in ruins now due to evil commies that dare to give away software.
seems like you got your future head of marketing over here!
Exactly which part of investing billions of dollars acquiring and developing a technology and giving it away for free, lowering the price of consumer devices, needs to be prevented?

If they've discovered a business model that enables them to invest, develop and freely distribute their own tech to end-users benefits, they should encouraged, not a victim of established cartels using their cash war-chest to buy B.S. patents that they can use as anti-competitive weapons to legally attack their competitors instead of competing against them technically in the market-place.
Significant consumer-facing iOS 7 Changes:

UI
Inter-app audio
Background fetch
P2P (arguably, this isn't a new feature, it's essentially a wrapper to dns_sd)
Airdrop

Significant KitKat changes:

*Actual* SMS/MMS API
Storage access framework
Printing framework

Plus, Inter-app audio and Airdrop are essentially wrappers to P2P (which is also a wrapper to dns_sd), so the only real added feature was background fetch.

You could say the same about KitKat (except for SMS), so really it boils down to this:

iOS 7:

UI
Background fetch

KitKat:

SMS/MSS API

Which Android still wins, IMO.

Plus, Android already has way more features than iOS already, not to mention the ability to install unsigned software, NFC, custom lockscreens/launchers and who knows what else.
A good example of the creative flexibility that GL allows: http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light
Says the guy living in a $2k a month studio in San Francisco whilst working from his $3k MacBook Pro at Starbucks?

So your answer to everyone living in fear, in let's say Juarez, Mexico is that they need to be out in the streets protesting against the psychotic drug cartels, because that's how they "ought to" live, since you know third world country and all?
Genome compiler is not a good example. The fundamental premise is incorrect. Biology should not be done as a drag-and-drop exercise... Saving a few minutes of your time is not worth having blinders that increase the likelihood of huge errors in your design. Having an intimate and comprehensive knowledge of your sequence is critical, and having a casual knowledge can lead to disaster. This is not for just anyone, either, you also have to have instant, library recall of as much as possible.

To give an example, I once witnessed an algorithmic redesign effort completely miss two extragenic components in an essential gene that would likely not have been missed by an attentive human (or better yet two or three attentive humans). Luckily, the cells evolved their way around it, the researchers tracked down the problem and how the bugs solved it and the situation is interesting enough to possibly result in a publication.
Locking people into their mobile ecosystem is probably worth way more then that in the long term. That's what these companies are all about, after all.
But OH MY GOD it's APPLE and MICROSOFT, didn't you see that? It's literally the devil incorporate trying to DESTROY GOOGLE who have NEVER done anything wrong ever!!! How dare they use the law to their own advantage! and besides, APPLE have never invented anything at all and stole it all from Google even before Google released it!
I believe they were still seeking regulatory approval of the acquisition when the lawsuit was filed. Either way, Apple sued Motorola first in 2011.
I went skimmed through the whole history of the user (dozens of comments, but the account is just a day old right now). It's obvious looking at the number of points each comment got that it depended on there being a large audience in the reddit thread stoked_for_you was commenting on. 1000+ points on very popular threads, 1 point on unpopular ones.

I do want to say that it's one of the best reddit user comment histories I've ever gone through.
Their market share is already going away progressively. There's way more Android devices being sold than Apple ones nowadays. They still have a clear edge on tablets, but for how long ? I can't see how Apple's growth can be sustainable unless they come on new segments (just like they did with the iPhone and the iPad in the first place). Fighting to the death on existing segments is not going to cut it in the long term.
3. My opinion is no.
Why We Can Give the Deaf Sound, but Not Music
Have you seen the screen on the Chromebook Pixel?
In a script: sudo chmod -R apache:apache . /

Note that space? I didn't.
Has facebook sign up and own local brew sign up but no Google sign up, somewhat missing the iGoogle target audience.
You got to be kidding me -_-.
By dragging out negotiations for years and then trying to use the courts to establish a ceiling (but not a floor) on FRAND licensing costs, I think Apple has done more to undermine FRAND. They've developed a "heads I win, tails you lose" playbook.

Remember, Motorola has been talking to Apple about licensing their FRAND patents since 2007. Over six years later, what do they have to show for it? I bet plenty of companies will start thinking that FRAND and royalty-free aren't all that different.
> Google threw the gauntlet when it took a billion dollar investment into a mobile OS and gave it away for free.

Seeing as how MS sold Xbox consoles at a loss so they could sell expensive games, I doubt MS has much of a leg to stand on with this claim. Apparently, the Xbox One is the first Xbox to be sold at a profit or break-even from day one; this was such a bold move that Forbes devoted a whole column to it: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/06/microsoft...

(Other articles indicate that most consoles are sold at a loss. I'm picking on MS because it was mentioned in the article as a party to this suit.)
Straight up bribery comes with scandals and criminal convictions when detected, which is a plus. Because then you can start to weed this behavior out.
they will have to have their own, popular, mixing service to pull this off
comparing Linux to Android is ridiculous. Linus released and built it from genuine, ulterior motives. google wanted a platform to display ads.
> Are we down to allowing only individual citizen donations to political parties?

I'd be a lot happier if no one could donate at all. But I also think price signaling is bullshit, so probably better not to listen to me.
Have you read the patent?
Fully open source the pricing tables, and we can do the rest in a matter of days.

Nothing the 'data hub' is doing is actually necessary to "help" the American people price out an insurance policy, and decide if they want to buy it or pay the "fee" instead. I think the allure of feasting on all that Big Data and tying all their systems together for more efficient error correction, de-duping, and mining for "other purposes" was too much to resist.

thetylerhayes mentioned http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/insurance_plans?zip_code=3670... which is a good example of what's easily possible. It's not much more work to ask for household income, birthdates, and tobacco use, and calculate the exact cost.

It's trivial to take a given household income and show the resulting subsidy. Personally I think checking for Medicaid eligibility is out of scope, but it's not black magic either, just the questions you would have to ask would vary per state.

If they would open source the APIs and schemas for submitting completed applications to the insurance companies, then starting from scratch a team of 5 could have the whole system online before Thanksgiving.