skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We only use this method for new and junior developers, for maybe 2-3 months depending on how quick they are to get up to speed and we trust that every day is spent on something constructive.
Cloned at birth: the story of Ridiculous Fishing
JRuby question -- Why is it that much slower? I'd have thought that part of the point was to take advantage of the JVM's built in optimization.
Bashing Perl5
How much water is used during the growing/production of a tomato?

I've wondered about the use of hermetically sealed greenhouses where over 95% of the water is recovered with dehumidifiers. The power needed by such dehumidifiers would track solar flux rather closely. Would increases in water costs make such setups economical?
It's not some deep mystery. They just need to stop doing the things listed in the Google webmaster guidelines https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356
I didn't - so I wouldn't be surprised by a 20-30% difference. This is double that.
There is an effort to port ejecta to android, which a company I used to work for is now maintaining. That means accelerated canvas for the big two.
I think how easy your app is to clone depends more on your feature set and business model, than any choice in language. It's actually an advantage to use languages that make it easy to write your applications, since really, speed-to-market is the most important factor in selling software.
Really helpful comment, thanks. I probably overestimated the importance of a "framework" in the java world, where everything is standardized, and every standard is implemented through standalone libraries (which is probably another reason spring became so famous when i come to think of it, with its original glue-like approach).

I'll start with "raw" java next time i'll want to try playing with rest services.
Not just prettier, but it is more correct to shadow if your intent is to make the original x unavailable.

It would be cleaner/safer if the language had a keyword like 'shadowlet'.
Synth Secrets, Part 1: What's In A Sound?
For me, it's incredibly interesting because I did not find anything wrong with the tactic they used: in fact, it is far, far better than actual SPAM techniques they could have used instead. Or the bullshit tweaks to content that other sites use to improve SEO score, when those tweaks do not benefit the consumer in any way.

Think about the fact that there's a human in the loop, and that it's a plug or tit-for-tat. The ways that companies actually do SEO 'within the rules' is way, way worse than that.

Also as a consumer I have only been on their site < 10 times but I loved it each time. It is an actual benefit for them to gain ranking. They have a real service, and a good one.

It also seems quite genuine, from the tone of the email. Totally normal.

You might think I have some association with rapgenius, but I don't: my only association is that the handful of times I got to their site, I was absolutely thankful and totally surprised at the quality of the result.

By contrast, there is a good chance there are textual quotations I've searched for where I missed good commentary there that I would have appreciatied.

All of these aspects, especially above-all the fact that consumers are happy when they do get to the rapgenius site, that combine to make this story very interesting to me.

I see rapgenius as the good guys, and very honest, in their attempt to gain additional exposure on real content.
Sure, in 2 years. That's still a pretty long time.

It's constantly been improving for like 5-6 years, and it's still not there yet.
NWA said it best: "Fuck the police."

But look at the date... End-of-the-month quota-filling dragnet likely.
Actually, when I type in "fuck" I also get the suggestions "dick" and "fucking".
Maybe you should RTFM more? And I actually don't recall consciously adding them to the dictionary.. / Android 2.3
Interesting thing to note: the severity of penalty may be hurting Google too. It was already mentioned that Rap Genius lyrics can't be found even when the words "Rap Genius" are included in the query. So when a user wants to find a Rap Genius lyrics page via Google (as is the custom for most of them), Google fails to provide them with a relevant result.
"to target" and "first" (:

Well, it's a hack - for pretty much one day, mostly for our family friends. If something doesn't work, really, I would have no problem saying "Oh, sorry, just use Chrome on desktop. Merry Christmas!"

Really, tablets don't matter much here (:
I'd replace the word monopoly with popular.
Oh boy, another language war.

Snooze.
It's open source! Use, remix, study and criticise!

https://bitbucket.org/lekevicius/christmas-2013/
beautiful work! would love a breakdown on how you built this (I made a postcard app a few years back picsicle.com)
I was also struck by that image, but the rest of the article is very good too.
I'm not familiar with the exact numbers, but I would be extremely surprised if a solar panel or wind turbine took that much fresh water to manufacture and install. I suspect that the argument you're referencing is more likely geared toward fossil fuels.
But it's a summary of more than just the 1st answer :) so it's worth it.

Though they could have edited it a bit better, or tried to reach the people involved, rather than just repackage the thread in one big article.
Android NDK is primarily about native code, not language (except, possibly, for somehow language-related ABI like "C" calling convention or x86).

As for languages - it's whatever you can compile.
What are the 'real numbers', really?
There's nothing magical about a Linux server. If you're arguing an LTS edition will run on newer hardware, well sure but the benchmarks will be just as incomparable.
You use it for all your messaging and image sharing, over SMS, SnapChat, or other apps?

Having a Facebook account and posting status updates while chatting on SMS or SnapChat is the point of the article, and the point of FB is dying posts.

No one things that everyone won't have a FB account. But if FB isn't your one source of social media interactivity, it's losing mindshare.
I thought that discrete logarithms were related to factoring, such that an advance in one problem presaged an advance in the other.
A social site.. if I ever get a chance. Really busy with family, friends, good food and good drink!
So I sold my first business and here’s what I learned
Amazon says their "m1.small" instance has 1.7 GiB of memory. That's a lot less than most current laptops.

Maybe JRuby uses more memory in total, but can handle more concurrent requests per MB of memory used? That could explain the discrepancy if it's true, though it's just speculation on my part.

Another theory is that the benchmarks are too application-specific. Rails is a complex framework with which you can build many different kinds of applications, each with its own performance characteristics. Conceivably, application A could perform better on JRuby, while application B could perform better on MRI. Depending on which application you use for your benchmark, either interpreter could appear faster.

This calls into question the utility of benchmarking an entire framework. It might be better to do micro-benchmarks, with each one testing a specific scenario. Scenarios could include, for example: A request that loads 1,000 database records into memory; a request for a static image; a request that queries a many-to-many relationship; a request that saves an uploaded file to disk.
Somewhat off-topic, this is really a misuse of the term "lingua franca". If anything, the lingua franca of development is currently JSON/XML.
Open access 2013: A year of gaining momentum
I'm not aware of any best practices, but I'll speculate.

>Naively, PINs are 4[1-9] numbers, which makes any type of rainbow table approach based-on a simple hash, much smaller than 8-16[52+] given caps sensitivity and special chars.

Yea, you're talking about 10k combinations. That's nothing at all. I don't think rainbow tables are even applicable. Even if they were salted, you'd be able to crack a hash in a split second. The only thing I could see mitigating this is if the crypt function was so ungodly slow that that doing a single hash took 10 seconds (that's a 10s checkout). But still you could crack one in half a day... enough time to do damage control if the data is stolen I suppose.

Probably the most important thing is a "lock out" mechanism in store. After a small number of incorrect tries, your credit card company locks your card and calls you to see what's up. I assume they already do this.
>Can you explain why you care if other people discuss a topic you don't think is "worthy" of discussion?

I thought there might be a piece to this story that I was missing. I gained a lot of value from the replies to my question (esp. the conversation spawned from @snowwrestler's comment.)

>You know you can ignore the story and look at the entire rest of the front page, right?

You didn't really need this in your comment. It was a bit of snark that devalued your otherwise justified response.
you are not using that word correctly. If Google was the only company doing search and prevented others from entering the market you would be correct. Being the best through a superior product and innovating is not a monopoly.
The approach they're taking is likely the correct approach for the "future" - we should be designing languages and approaches to coincide with the ability to tool them.

Unfortunately, we still have many in the PL community that don't think that way.
The Android NDK is usually used for applications that don't use the Android API's (which are all Java). Most applications on Android is written in a JVM-based language. The sort of applications that would typically use the NDK are games, emulators, VMs (like Xamarin.Android) and the like.

ObjC is also slow. Anytime you write something performance sensitive in ObjC, you usually drop down to pure C or pure C++. Luckily, since valid C is valid ObjC, this is rather easy.

Javascript and HTML is actually a great fit for mobile, but there are two complications. 1) You will have to mimick the UI of the native platform. 2) Mobile platforms have sub-par JS engines. iOS don't allow JITs outside Safari (even when you use a webview in your ObjC app) which in turn makes JS-based apps in iOS slow. Android has in general had a pretty sucky webview, but that is getting fixed in 4.4 with chromium being the default engine.

JS is getting better everyday on the mobile though, I would be surprised if not alot of people were using JS for apps in the coming years.
Beware trying to assess "what HN thinks" about a topic from informal, personal scans of items. Neither the top stories, nor the longest/loudest threads, are necessarily representative of 'most readers' or even 'most commenters' – just those that show up at those times/places.

Where the especially peeved choose to spend their attention (and comments and upvotes) can make lots of people or companies seem like community bete noires – even if most of the HN audience thinks the targets are fine or even admirable, but just has less energy for anti-carping.
You can check the source: https://bitbucket.org/lekevicius/christmas-2013

Basically, it's just a Rails app. No front-end framework, just jQuery. Canvas is converted to base64, sent to server, server uploads to S3, user gets URL. Very simply, one day hack.
If you don't mind me asking, how much can you survive off for 3 years in NYC?
I often go to http://www.emacswiki.org/.
To be clear (for readers, I know parent knows this), the return values of the effects are discarded. (The first sentence maybe should say "discard its results", not "discard it's effects").

The point is to make the (side-)effects happen (since non-strictness means the effects have to be forced, by calling `(>>=)` or similar) but not use the return value (which is how computations are usually forced in Haskell)

And also, the effects happen in the order determined by the function forM_ or whoever, instead of in a hard-to-impossible-to-predict order of the pure non-monadic/non-effect computations defined by equations of function applications.

(The M in fooM is for Monad, indicating that bind (f <<= x) is used instead of simple function application (f x) that is used in the "cousin" function foo. But that is just naming convention.)
Too many here have a Snowden fixation and it's weird/unhealthy. The issue none of you cares to address as you ply your trade is the moral component of 'just doing your job'. Coding up the violation of other human beings.
That's what this article's about and that's why this post has very few comments. But hey, after a genocide, they don't go after the engineers who designed the guns, do they? Plausible self denial/cognitive dissonance - a coders goto.
How to Unit Test Private Functions in The Revealing Module Pattern
The funny thing about this whole controversy is that they're getting more organic links to rapgenius.

When the penalty is taken care of - they may be sitting in a better position than they were previously.
Are you sure? See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6965178

Although I am not seeing any change.
I pretty much agree - as long as this is healthy untrust. Why redo something running for little benefit? But I know many people who dismissed smart phones at the beginning, or other pretty big things like AJAX. Their decision wasn't much based on a sound analysis. Also often they failed to identify the new realm. Rather when someone say "with that technology you can do that and that which is new, and in the future you may be able to do this, but it is limiting on that and this aspect", I take the person much more seriously for their analysis. The tried and tested may be what you know to use, but something better might come along as well, or establish a different new playground which you cannot imagine of as possible in your current framework of thoughts.
() is not null, it's the type that has only one value (think of it like Bool that's always True). Null (or C-void, which it is also often compared to) on the other hand stands for a lack of information and is more of a makeshift placeholder.
Psychopath Night test and game- Channel 4
As opposed to your painstakingly thought out and intellectually engaging rebuttal?
Wait until you hear how many kids get killed every year by handguns. Those put little magnets to shame in terms of killing power.
yeah i was wondering about that too. is it just because the lib is left in even if it's not being used you think? i haven't heard of anyone using H2 for production, if they are i'd like to know more about how/why
Not sure if this really paints the most accurate picture. For one, LA has plenty of unmarked crosswalks that are completely legal to cross. When I worked in Downtown LA I never had a problem with this.

Secondly the LAPD regularly does the reverse of this crackdown and has plain cloths officers cross said crosswalks in order to catch motorists who aren't paying attention/don't care.

I live in Hollywood and every few months I see a jay walking/unmarked crosswalk related accident. When you have distracted motorists in a busy area it's going to happen. When it gets really busy the LAPD cracks down on both sides and erects barriers to keep people on the sidewalk. Seems to work well here but probably is too manpower intensive for downtown.
Essential skills for the 21st century
From engineering POV JavaScript is more effective, for example w/ cross platform PhoneGap.

Say you have a $2M eng budget for start up round A for 2 years, so $1M per year. 1/2 goes to services/back end dev and ops. So $500K for front end. 3 platfroms, Web/mobile web, Android, IOS, so 3 developers ~ 150k.
I recommend you get 3 HTML/js devs.

If you get 1 per platform: vacation/sick time, turn over, management difficulty, lack of oversight, pain.
Just let the compilers do the work.
as a 外人 item #4 works to my advantage ?
I'm surprised at how negative the comments are here. Graphing how different Ruby versions/implementations perform running Rails is very helpful! Glad to see that MRI continues to get faster with every version. Merry Christmas!
Would love to see the NYPD do this. People make absolutely bone-headed decisions as to when and where to cross the street and get killed every year.

My favorite is when people block traffic to cross one way, then the light changes, and they do the same thing to cross the other way. If they had just crossed the two streets in the opposite order, they would have done both crossings with the right of way. Stupid, stupid idiots.

I also enjoy it when people jump out from between parked cars right into the bike lane. It must be nice to have a destination that would be out of the way if you went to the fucking corner to cross the street.
This is good advice, from a straight shooter who has upper management written all over him.
I live in Atlanta and people jay walk, aggressivily every day. I have never seen either anyone get arrested or an accident result from jay walking.

I hope the LAPD move onto something more reasonable.
Mastercoin is a Decentralized App for Building Decentralized Apps
Wow, I really wanted something like this. Thanks. Gave it a try, looks like it crashes whenever I try to upload a file.
I find it pretty interesting that email isn't even an option in that list.
Indeed. If you are interested in prior discussion on using the Seiki television as a computer monitor, see the following thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6835521
List of mirror sites (which are usually faster to download from): http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mi...
Some of the details are a bit sketchy, buy $197 for jaywalking really caught my eye. Got a parking ticket a couple if months back... $128. Seems like these more than doubled in last few years. Inflation anyone?
As someone that doesn't have a Quora account, it's nice to have the content without a Facebook/Google login wall.
You're getting downvoted for the first line, but the second line is the most insightful comment so far.
Doesn't matter how you achieve a monopoly: it's defined by dominance, not bad-behavior. And once you have monopoly power, things that used to be legal for you to do – for example certain pricing or bundling strategies – can become illegal.
That backport works on MRI 2.0.

I've completed a pure-ruby polyfill that should work on 1.9 as well as 2.0, any ruby interpreter including jruby. (It does have some issues mentioned in the readme).

https://github.com/jrochkind/scrub_rb
And Quora doesn't disable pinchzoom like Slate does
Google even penalized its own product http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag...
Why? Because the sheer magnitude is crazy. Rap Genius's traffic fell by nearly two thirds! This is a very prominent, YC-affiliated startup that is being nuked by Google. It should come as no surprise that the news is seen as significant by the HN crowd.

Moreover, I think many people are upset with the scope of Google's punishment. De-weighting RG is one thing, nuking it into the ground is entirely different, and is in my opinion unwarranted. Even searching directly for the name of the site does not yield any Rap Genius results.

If I type "Rap Genius" into Google, I am justified in expecting Rap Genius to be the first result. Period. When Google goes out of its way to effectively expunge a site from existence (to the extent that Google can expunge a site), they are doing a massive disservice to their users and are degrading the quality of their search results.

There is no reason that a response of this magnitude by Google is justified, and by issuing such a draconian response, Google has lessened the usability of their product and done a disservice to their users.
It's incredibly racist and classist for these privileged plutocrats to mimic the dialects of the underprivileged. The ironic and overplayed way in which they take on the pose also makes it clear that they intend it as a publicity stunt--not as genuine respect for the culture or because they fit into the culture or want to fit in. They just want money and they think this is a money making stunt.

It's one of the clearest examples of cultural appropriation and exploitation by a corporation. Really fucking disgusting.

Imagine if an American corporation wants to sell vacations to Mexico, and as a publicity stunt the CEO dresses up like a latino stereotype and adopts a Spanish accent.

This is how the Rap Genius douchebags-in-chief come off. Racist fuckheads.
Couldn't resist
http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/44344545.jpg
No, it's worse than that, far worse. In hard times a city with a failing budget does many things to generate revenue. One of the easiest sources of revenue for a city is a series of laws that imply fines on people for actions that at the time is considered normal behavior. Often the reason given is for "public safety" or for "public goodwill" or other similar notions.

New taxes is popular too, but if you live in a city that has legal issues with creating new taxes they suddenly institute new "fees".

As more cities drown in their budgets you can expect more of this behavior from some cities. Not all of them will go down this road, but many will.

You can expect, and we've already seen much of this, new ideas of generating revenue such as fines, fees, and/or taxes. All at the expense of the people that these revenues are supposed to somehow help.
It's remarkable how different cities have such radically different approaches and attitudes toward pedestrians. More so how drivers - on the whole - have this almost ESP-like ability to share a common like or dislike.

One of the most (pleasantly) jarring things I noticed about my move from NYC to SF is how totally dominant pedestrians are in SF, how totally deferential drivers are to pedestrians, and frankly how polite drivers are to each other. SF is filled with 4-way stop signs, and there's a very efficient (unspoken) system of coordinating who goes when (based on arrival time at the stop sign). If you dare break the system, you get yelled (honked) at mercilessly.

As a pedestrian in SF, I sometimes have to insist that cars go ahead (I'm rarely in a rush when I'm walking, and I know how frustrating it can be as a driver to wait for a slow person to meander across the street). You need to do nothing more than approach a crosswalk and every car in every direction will stop and wait for you to cross -- people even insist that you cross and will stop their cars while in mid-turn. I find that sometimes ill have to actually walk away from the curb if I'm waiting for someone or not actually crossing yet, otherwise I impede traffic. It's pretty cool.

I spent a weekend in New Orleans recently, and one of the first things I noticed was the complete lack of that pedestrian deference. Step in the street at a crosswalk and cars will rush to get through before you start crossing.

I guess that's what they mean when they say "Live in Northern California, but leave before you get soft" ;)
Indeed.

However, many "prosumer" monitors have supported greater than 24-bit color for a while now. Still, my nVidia drivers still don't allow me to select anything higher than 24-bit.
Agreed. This is much more of a test of the rails framework then ruby