skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the great problems that plagues MRI is the lack of real concurrency with its global interpreter lock and the single-threaded, single-generation, stop-the-world garbage collector. That is many years behind the state-of-the-art as far as runtimes go.

Dynamic webpages consisting of several widgets are quite amenable to parallelization by rendering subviews separately and just assembling them in the layout in a final step. With parallelism slow single-threaded performance can still yield reasonable response-times if you can throw multiple cores at the problem.

But even if you have parallelism, a slow single-threaded GC would halt all of those threads, again affecting your response times.

I don't know about V8, but mozilla's JS is suffering from similar issues. They're currently working on generational GC and it's promising to provide quite some speed-up. But the javascript runtime, just like ruby, was not designed with parallelism in mind, that's why we're seeing those webworkers which essentially spawn an isolated javascript environment. Simply because it's hard to tack on parallelism as an afterthought.

Similarly one of Ruby 2.1's major performance boosts stems from the generational GC.
I agree that understanding of pointer is essential to use C++, but the problem is many learning materials force learners to believe the have to use pointer everywhere - which is opposite in reality…

So there should be a good guidance of avoiding pointers as much as possible when learner is stepping to C++ from C.
Sorry about that. If you're looking for a laugh, I actually do have a few developer/QA comics that I published to the same blog a while ago:

http://blog.smartbear.com/cartoons/so-i-heard-you-guys-like-...

http://blog.smartbear.com/mobile/5-software-cartoons-to-get-...
See, that's why I love HN. There's a huge wealth of information available to help people with an idea and a prototype have a shot at getting to market. Thanks for all the replies, everyone!
I think one of the complications is we have become used to historically unusual levels of security. Far fewer babies die in childbirth these days. Cars have airbags. Medical care is fast and reliable.

Not unreasonably, people expect their governments to provide the same level of predictability. And, not unreasonably, the majority of those politicians who want to preserve their jobs go along with it.

So what can be done about it? If this was a flawless AI keeping us all safe like in Iain Bank's culture universe, I think we'd be all happy. The problem comes when it's not clear if those charged with curating this information have other agendas.

I think this is a historically unique time, when we have the chance to put in safeguards and oversight while we can still see the cameras and the window of debate is still available.

But in order to do that, I think the debate has to be reframed not as security vs liberty but as structured oversight vs tyranny.
Not always the best technology is the one which success. If that better bitcoin is invented too late, bitcoin can have a large infrastructure and accepted by a large proportion of merchant to be switched. Just think about VHS and Beta or OS/2
Thanks for the bug report, its fixed (not sure, when the file transfered half).

Your critical comments are really appreciated. If you look at a popular script under same niche on same marketplace, you will see no description, yet they are making 35 sales per week http://bit.ly/195MxJ3.

Different versions for CMS could be created and definitely have a worth, but again, the popular scripts are selling quite good.
I would assume that discouraging people from speaking their minds the way they feel like to is more harmful to a community than having to tolerate the occasional cuss word.

I know this is just a plea of yours, not an order, but it still comes across as patronizing to me. If you hate going all happy family on someone, don't do it. It will achieve nothing but aggravate them.
Your'e one of HN. so fight hard and good luck right back at you.
they'd be able to handle webscale if they redesigned their platform using node.js
IE11 is a very promising alpha release of the next "good" IE.
He has captured a demographic that is nearly impossible to grab the attention of. That is worth big time money to record labels.
You cannot do random access at all in Unicode, not even UTF-32 (and absolutely not UTF-16), due to combining characters.
OLSR Protocol in ns2
Honestly, I was really looking forward to that program. I started the process, but was deterred by:
1) The need for official Transcripts (I attended 3 undergrad schools - 2 of which require in person forms/snail mail and a 2-4 week waiting period) I have unsealed formal transcripts I can send in - I don't understand why those arn't enough for a conditional acceptance.(based on verification)

2) The need for letters of recommendation (As I mentioned in the post - I've recently asked my employer/co-workers for letters twice, I hate to impose that again)

It might be worth revisiting GT's program.
X10 programming language
I managed about half of his final puzzle, from November 16th. Even solved the "nil by mouth" one without making the connection. Now I am sad.
Python 3 gets so much of this right. It's one of the things I really loved about python 3 as it allows for correct string handling in most cases (see below).

Note that this is only really true with Python 3.3 and later as in earlier versions stuff would start breaking for characters outside of the BMP (which is where JS is still stuck at, btw) unless you had a wide build which was using a lot of memory for strings (4 bytes per character)

In general, internally using unicode and converting to and from bytes when doing i/o is the right way to go.

But: Due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification being locked into Unicode with a language might not be feasible for everybody - especially in Asian regions, Unicode isn't yet as widely spread and you still need to deal with regional encodings, mainly because even with the huge character set of Unicode, we still can't reliably write in every language.

Ruby 1.9 and later helps here by having many, many string types (as many as it knows encodings), which can't be assigned to each other without conversion.

This allows you to still have an internal character set for your application and doing encoding/decoding at i/o time, but you're not stuck with unicode if that's not feasible for your use-case.

People hate this though because it seems to interfere with their otherwise perfectly fine workflow ("why can't I assign this "string" I got from a user to this string variable here??"), but it's actually preventing data corruption (once strings of multiple encodings are mixed up, it's often impossible to un-mix them, if they have the same characer width).

I don't know how good the library support for the various Unicode encodings is in Ruby though. According to the article, there still is trouble with correctly doing case transformations and reversing them.

Which brings me to another point: Some of the stuff you do with strings isn't just dependent on string encoding, but also locale.

Uppercasing rules for example depend on locale, so you need to keep that into account too. And, of course, deal with cases when you don't know the locale the string was in (encoding is hard enough and most of the cases undetectable - but locales - next to impossible).

I laugh at people who constantly tell me that this isn't hard and that "it's just strings".
Again somewhat less features offered to similar product under same marketplace is making good sales. Your critical analysis though is really appreciated.
Well, Ubuntu can do that without Docker; just with LXC. Docker uses LXC and does other things with it, but if all you want to do is run multiple lightweight Ubuntu VMs, then just use LXC.
So Asm.js is a strict subset of Javascript, and the author is saying that Asm.js is only useful when you want to compile a C/C++/Whatever library into Javascript, and that it's not interesting for Javascript developers themselves. Then I wonder: why? Can't you write Asm.js code directly (instead of compiling to it)?
Objective-C handles the "baﬄe" case just fine.
This is why the U.S. dominates the software world. Back when everyone was figuring out how to express their languages, we had the option to punt on complexity and just use ASCII.
Can I run CLR/JVM/Mono in asm.js today? Are there any clear plans for it? Will performance of this scenario equal to that of NaCl? I have my hopes about asm.js but it's good to see that there is an alternative that is evolving in parallel.
This is about as clear a sign that Time magazine has become irrelevant as you could ever wish for.
"Or you don't really care about the people you are meeting."

I've been to very few of these events and at one I approached one of the people who gave a short talk earlier in the evening to merely ask him more about his business. Towards the end of my first spoken sentence to the guy, he turned to his female cohort and blurted, "wow, did you hear that, Kristy?" (as she sticks her hand in front of me, while he walks away). It all happened in the span of 5 seconds and I couldn't decide if it was just really smooth on his part (being a seasoned networker) or really douchey. I decided it was both.

'Kristy' was also pouring some drinks for some other people at the moment and thus couldn't talk after the initial handshake.
One more thing to add. A similar script on same marketplace is selling quite good with almost similar features. So personally I think, thats not the real issue behind low sales, still community comments are really appreciated. Kindly keep them coming.
A nitpick from the article

>This spells trouble for languages using UTF-16 encodings (Java, C#, JavaScript).

if they were using UTF-16, this wouldn't be a problem as UTF-16 can be used to perfectly well encode code points outside of the BMP (at the cost of losing ability for O(1) access to specific code points of course. If you need to know what the n-th code point is, you have to scan the string until the n-th position).

They are, however, using UCS-2 which can't. If you use a library that knows about UCS-2 to work on strings encoded in UTF-16, then you will get broken characters, your counts will be off and case transformations might fail.

Most languages that claim Unicode support still only have UCS-2 libraries (Python 3 is a notable exception)
For cases where the most basic simplifications are enough (0*x=0 etc.) there is this one: http://glat.info/flatorize/
This is a very interesting comment indeed.
I am far too poorly informed to be able to tell if anything you say here is reasonable, but I must admit that your comments all sound very reasonable.
But lets please get instead to the substance of the article that you are commenting upon: tell us more about what do you think regarding the implications of the central claims of the article itself?
I've been waiting for someone to ask me to reverse a string in an interview, so I can tell them why the code I just wrote for them (using the XOR trick, which is what they're usually expecting), is wrong.
Ellipsisising text when it does not fit into a label, for example. And if you just remove code points from the end (instead of graphemes) until the string (including ellipsis) fits then you might just drop a diacritic.
Neither of those assertions are true.

Only if there is a yes vote returned in the referendum will it be possible to say that "Scotland is seeking independence" - at the moment the most that can be said is some Scots are seeking independence.

Secondly, the white paper released yesterday does not suggest that England (by which you rather arrogantly mean the rest of the UK presumably) be liable to pay any Scottish debts incurred after independence.

So get that chip off your shoulder.
While that's a problem with Unicode, it's a really big problem with Unicode. As the name alludes to, Unicode preserved as much as possible of existing regional encodings, which is why (among other reasons) there's a pre-composed version of basically every accented Latin letter.
For those that don't know what hbags is referring to:

https://github.com/moron5/dongml

Apparently the twitter account referenced on moron5.com is still active and is passively still trying to be a dick

https://twitter.com/elotente
This is misleading, $10 is just for the duration of the test. Roughly $58k/mo if $1.33/min.
Rebasing Merge Commits in Git
I echo your list of books. I would add Accelerated C++, at least when they get round to making a C++11/14 version.
He's not really trying to piss off corporations - sounds like he's just trying to hustle.
I think the issue is that 23andme has no rigorous data on what the false positive and negative rates are. Unless they can supply that it's snake oil. And I say that as a 23andme customer.
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>Smalltalk: You consider Smalltalk fast? Lol.

Well, any Smalltalk JIT beat the standard Ruby implementation hands down, what can I say?!
Ask HN: Is there any AI+Robotics Start-ups in Bay Area?
eBay's completed listings is definitely one of the best applications of obtaining sales data on the Internet that I'm aware of. Besides that, in some cases there are ways to imperfectly estimate quantities when best seller rankings are available (e.g. at Amazon) -- Chevalier and Goolsbee where the first to suggest this approach back in 2003.[1]

As you mentioned, monitoring half-life is another imperfect approach, but it is of course plagued by false positives (a listing goes away but no sale was made). There was a Google Tech Talk many years ago where some economists took this approach[2], except they were looking at pricing power instead of measuring quantity sold.

[1] http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~mshum/ec106/chevaliergoolsbee.pd...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfjAezl3-cU#t=27m20s
please accept this small piece of karma as a token of appreciation for helping this person.
we need more people like you in this world.
Verdana doesn't seem to properly support U+0308, apparently. It's wrong (with that font) in Chrome, IE 10, Firefox and Word 2010. Other operating systems might substitute a different font that works better, perhaps.
I think this might just confuse new programmers and the filename thing is especially dangerous since at some point you might want to support i18n there. I think it would be better to have two types of string: 1) unicode strings and 2) arrays of 8 byte data with some string like functions (essentially C strings). The second case is essentially binary data strings.
Truncating with ellipsis in the GUI in a desktop app. I can measure rendered length on a desktop, so I can truncate down to the desired number of pixels, round down to the nearest char, and then tack on "...". I would hate to see a semantically-important accent mark lost this way.
Sure, I updated the spreadsheet with links to the code for each benchmark. BSD license. Please keep in mind these were quick and dirty. If you run any of them, please reply with your findings.
You have a search query and you want to remove stopwords and normalize the query.
I would have gone with the C++11/14 syntax right away. C++03 is here to die out, and if you start with C++ there's no reason to learn the old syntax.

e.g. auto keyword, {} initializers, foreach(), lambdas, etc.
I have a database field limited to 100 "characters" [1]. The user sent me a form submission with 150. I need to do something to resolve that. This is incredibly common. Truncation to a defined size is routine.

[1]: I'm leaving "characters" undefined here, because no matter what Unicode-aware definition you apply here, you've got trouble.
> Compiled other languages to ActionScript?

For the interest of historical accuracy, I must point out that Adobe Alchemy predates Emscripten by years.
Thanks. I watched my partners struggle with wives and kids. Me, I only had a wife and cats... which made it easier in some ways, and harder in others....
See this one from Mozilla:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Ajax
Maybe they cleaned up a bunch of 'spam' votes?
UTF-16 is just as bad as UTF-8 regarding variable-width code points. The only thing you always have (unless using compression schemes like SCSU) is random access to code units. Only UTF-32 also allows random access to code points. However, that's still of questionable value because when dealing with text you often want to handle graphemes, not code points, code units or bytes.
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When he says "unsuspecting advertisers", I don't think he means it in the sense of "unaware", as this problem has been broadly covered in the trade press over the past year. It's more that they have trouble doing anything about it.

The problem is that cleansing the display ad supply chain is complex, and some suppliers (notably "supply side platforms", or SSPs) are complicit in the fraud, knowingly signing up and profiting from publishers who pay for this fraudulent traffic. The article cited as footnote #1 gives some detail there.

Buyers have limited options to combat the problem. Spider.io does absolutely oustanding work, but they're a small company and can't deliver at scale. Larger, more widely adopted suppliers have solutions that (arguably) aren't work paying for.

Because display is a tonnage game and ad rates are so cheap (well under $1/thousand impressions wholesale), you can just bake the cost of fraud (and viewability, and other issues) into the cost of your buying. Assuming you can reliably measure your ad ROI, which only a fraction of advertisers can do.
You can but it's a bit like writing inline assembly code. The code doesn't look very nice and you lose LLVM's optimizer passes which kick in before the JS code generation.
Definitely hustling. I don't think he set out to piss off record labels, instead he avoided them, which pisses them off. Kickstarter is making this more and more common by empowering individuals
Read XMLHttpRequest specification, www.w3.org
Thanks, very nice. How do you get story point scores from the RSS feed? The last time I looked at it, it was missing that crucial bit of information, and I don't see it now either. Or are you using parsing or another data source to get at them?
There is no overthinking. If something is not naturally to you, you would have to learn it at first, too. Only then you can feel comfortable.

As an example, I recommend a visit in another country. Socializing is vastly different in another culture. But, even if it is not natural for you at first, take your time, and see that the new culture is learnable!

To do this, I really recommend a reflected, thoughtful approach.
pwang, there are some people who actually enjoy coding in JS, believe me I am one of them.

One cool thing about JS is that you have runtimes for it in computers, tablets, phones, TVs and most current videogames so you can experiment and build stuff for a variety of hardware that no other language can reach as easily (of course you can reach anything with C but it is not easier).

Remember all that could be done in JS two years ago and all we could do now. Imagine by the end of the next year what we'll be able to.

I don't care if people are using LLVM to cross-compile other languages to the JS runtime, this kind of approach and research makes better runtimes and both camps benefit, the people who hate JS can use their fav language and those that enjoy JS end up with a better runtime.
What scared H. P. Lovecraft?
In my experience, the world is full of software which "work fine for the majority of use cases" until the point where you take the wrong code path and things go south.
I'm in favor of playing to one's strengths. You're not really keen on networking and it doesn't really suite you? Fine, don't network. You're much better market fit for being better at what you already do well, than being average at what you do bad.
LuaJIT shows dynamically typed languages can be fast. And even plain Lua is enormously faster than Ruby. Complexity costs, not necessarily being dynamic.
UTF16 is variable length just like UTF8 is (so don't assume 2 bytes == 1 character).
If you hadn't heard, the new release of docker no longer uses "color_animal" but "mood_inventor"... "the most important new feature of docker 0.7"

https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/pull/2837

tl;dr They are going to pick a new pair of things for every major release of Docker. This is meant to let you keep track of more containers over a long time. Apparently you are in fact meant to keep them around if they're still in working order, and remember them "by ID" or by name.
Congratulations! I'm curious to know - is that script now working on the 20BTC's challenge?
It's not so black an white: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6794122
Umberto Eco: Exploring Imaginary Lands With One of Italy’s Masters of Fiction
I think the idea of having the users compare/contrast two sketches is useful. As you said, they have trouble telling you what they want, but have no problem telling you what they don't want. Especially if they're visual thinkers.

ob.: A Developer and a User walk into a Bar. User says "Why aren't you done yet? Those screens look fine to me." The Developer replies "Fuck you, I'm fully vested."
I don't understand what makes this story markedly different than the story of any other self published act in music/art/entertainment.

Also, this tends to work a lot better for artists with mass appeal than for those whose work is a bit less approachable and thus profits from proper curation by well respected people/companies.
Support waning for RC4 after NewEgg Patent Troll Victory?
If I understand this correctly, the pushed information by the master isn't stored on the server (hosting the application) and then retrieved by the slave device?

But can the pushed information be intercepted by the server?

Does anyone know if there are more applications/experiments like this? I really like this idea (if I've understood the concept correctly).
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Have you checked how your database counts? Does it count code points or does it try to count graphemes? I assume the former, but I guess you would still have to cut the input at a grapheme border when truncating the input.
Zed has to do Zed, just like Patrick does Patrick.
Last time I looked into it jruby itself was faster than MRI, especially if you take multithreading into account. But rails-on-jruby was a different story because some metaprogramming things that rails does are terrible for the JIT compilers.

Charles ominously called "dark matter" inside rails.
.tiredofyourworthlesstldshit is missing
You could try compiling Mono/Java to asm.js and see for yourself. Of course performance will not be equal to that of NaCl, but portability will.

I don't see NaCl as a viable alternative, I see it as an attempt of locking down the user to a specific browser, and also as a potential security worry.
Well, these things exist not raspberry pies. ARM architectures are a pain. Like x86 ones were in the old days (i386, i486). MIPS is even worse.
Does this officially open the possibility of running Mozilla Firefox on a Chromebook (ChromeOS)?
One problem is that you can't do runtime code generation with Emscripten. V8 has no interpreter, so you would need a different JavaScript engine.

JavaScript engines can be run using asm.js. https://github.com/jterrace/js.js is a SpiderMonkey port to Emscripten (with JIT disabled).
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Exactly - I fail to understand how, if the person is already at a higher risk for breast cancer, how an earlier screening could increase costs.

Isn't a mastectomy for a 35-year-old cheaper than paying for years of chemotherapy for a fragile 80-year-old person whose cancer has already spread too far for surgery and needs to be hospitalized for months on end?
Yes, I am running Debian without having installed the Microsoft core fonts so Verdana is substituted for DejaVu Sans.
Swear in a private Xbox One Skype call, get banned from Xbox Live