skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And releasing more often means that the changes are smaller.

Also, developers have introduced a more clever way of introducing changes to the user. Overlays with explanations of new menus etc. which I've seen first on the web (i.e. gmail) are making their way to more and more "desktop" applications.

Introducing these changes slowly over time seems to avoid the "I will never install this version" effect.
I remember when I first learned C.

I was 13 and having written assembly for years I finally got a machine that was actually equipped for running a full-blown C compiler. Compiling was slow and the produced code was slow but all I could think of was how easily I could generate [assembly] code with just a few lines of C. Loops, pointers, function calls, conditionals... just like that. Wow. So productive.

C felt like writing assembly but with much better vocabulary. C was to assembly language what English was to the caricatured "ughs" of the stone age.

I often compared the output of the compiler to what I would've written myself: the output was bloaty, the compiler was obviously not very smart, but it did do what I wanted and the computers had just got fast enough to be able to actually run useful programs written in C without slowing down the user experience. So you couldn't necessarily distinguish a program written in C from a program written in assembly, and you could "cheat" by choosing C instead. That was so exciting!

The thing is, however, that since these trivial insights of my youth it turns out that C actually never ran out of juice.

I still write C and I'm enjoying it more than ever.

In C, I've learned to raise the layers of abstraction when necessary and writing C in a good codebase is surprisingly close to writing something like Python except several dozen times faster and you can build your memory layout and little details the best suitable way you want, in various meaningful contexts.

I love doing all the muck that comes with C. String handling, memory management, figuring out the best set of functions on top of which to compose your program, doing the mundane tasks the best way in each case, and never hitting a leaky abstraction like in higher level languages.

The thing is, the time I "waste" doing all that pays me back tenfold as I tend to think about the best way to lay out my program while writing the low-level stuff. Because such effort is required there's a slight cost in writing code which makes you think what you want to write in the first place.

In Python you shove in stuff into a few lists and dicts, it just works and you will figure out later what was it that you really wanted and clean it up. But often you're wrong because it was so easy in the beginning. In C, I have to think about my data structures first because I don't want to write all that handling again for a different set of approach. And that makes all the difference in code quality.

However, I don't think you could impose a similar dynamic on a high-level language. There's something in low-level C that makes your brain tick a slightly different way and how you build your creations in C rather than in other languages reflects that. The OP said it very well: C reflects the reality of what your computer does. And I somehow love it just the way it is.

I've worked most of my career in higher level languages but I've never set C aside. It has always been there, even with Python, C++, or some other language. Now I'm writing C again on a regular basis and with my accumulated experience summed into the work it's truly rewarding.
Yes, it is = user interaction
The Older Mind May Just Be A Fuller Mind
The article only discusses the 'extremities' (C vs. Python/Java, etc...) when there is an obvious and popular 'compromise': C++, which has most of the discussed advantages of both sides. (Although it has some drawbacks; it is a bit more difficult to master than either C, Java or Python.)
Are you asking about unit tests or acceptance tests?

I suppose what I’m really asking is how you would go from not having software to having software that does those things, using TDD. I think in practice its fail-pass-refactor cycle is normally applied at the level of unit tests, but in any case, how would using TDD help to drive a good design, to ensure testability, or otherwise, in that kind of situation?

(I’m asking this rhetorically. I don’t think TDD is a very helpful process in this context. I’m just trying to demonstrate this with practical examples rather than bluntly stating it without any supporting argument.)
I remember when peeking and poking were totally normal things that people did. The world is more convenient now, I suppose.
Assuming you could do it, would it be worth it to do it?
Inside.com
I'm surprised he hasn't been recruited. Or maybe he just turns down all the headhunters...
But why ? The point of a specification is that everyone agrees on how we talk together, it's not about Being Professional and Looking Serious.
Ah, my mistake. In the number-only scenario, the value that person provides is organizational / financial. Every so often (though rarely), the expected value of a lottery ticket is greater than the cost of the ticket. Imagine a simple 50 choose 6 lottery, where a ticket costs $1, you choose six numbers between 1 and 50, and if you get all six right you win the jackpot. If, through the vagaries of chance, the jackpot reaches $30 million, you could buy one of each possible ticket (there are 15,890,700) and guarantee that you'll hit the jackpot. If, as is normal, the jackpot is shared among all winning tickets, then you have a decent chance of winning $14 million and an also-decent chance of losing $1 million or more, so it's still kind of risky in that scenario. But we can imagine the jackpot reaching, say $50 million, where even if another person gets a winning ticket you still make a hefty profit.

That's great if you have sixteen million dollars to hand, but if you don't, you could join a "lottery mining pool" ;) where you buy a certain number of tickets and the pool together covers the ticket space. In such a case, the person giving you the numbers is performing the valuable function of preventing collisions within the pool.
Amazon customer service absent? They have some of the greatest customer service I've ever seen. If I need help with my Kindle, I can click a button to get a human to call me immediately, so I don't even have to pay for an international phone call. The one time Amazon sent me an incorrect parcel, I got connected to a real human who initiated an immediate & instant refund while I was talking to them and let me keep and/or sell all the items I'd received mistakenly. For such a large company, Amazon's customer service is really good. (I agree that Google's is nowhere near as good, though.)
for the acceptance testing, how often do you run it? just curious. I found selenium to be unreliable and just stopped itself for no reason after running for a couple of hours.
> Gambling winnings are not normally taxed in the US.

Where did you hear this? They're income, and subject to the income tax.
Just as a conclusion, I would like to point those interested to the current available library implementations of the bio- related stuff (i might be missing other stuff out there):
1) BIO-seq: https://github.com/diegozea/BioSeq.jl
2) Fasta-IO: https://github.com/carlobaldassi/FastaIO.jl
3) Phylogenetics: https://github.com/Ward9250/Phylogenetics.jl
Google announces $2.7 million bounty for hacking Chrome OS
Looking through your submissions and I see three types of link:

1. Your own startup

2. A Youtube link

3. Samsung links

Your startup links need a more compelling reason to click. There's little to no info on the pages, therefore the quality content is low.

Posting youtube links is pointless. I honestly don't think I've ever seen a youtube link hit the front page.

The samsung links were your first few submissions. Your first submissions rarely do well.

HN and reddit are very different in terms of the type of content that hits the front page. Sure there are similarities to /r/programming but the type of content that works well on reddit, doesn't often apply here.
Health Biz In A Box-bestcbstore.com
Woz (yes, Jobs was an asshole, but they got to a pretty high level of success when Woz was in a key role, and probably could have gotten to the Apple II stage with Woz + anyone -- not Mac/iPhone/etc., but that's reasonable).

Diane Greene, by all accounts, is a great person. VMware is pretty successful (ok, they're dicks now under EMC to some extent, but she also left long ago)

Dr. Amar Bose (Bose audio, not Bose physics) was one of the most amazingly good people I've never encountered; Bose doesn't make the best audio equipment in the world, but it's a successful company.

Stripe is pretty successful so far; the Collison brothers are widely regarded as decent people.

YC itself has been quite successful; none of the YC partners are dicks.

There are clearly counterexamples (Zynga alone makes up for a lot...), but I think it's pretty clear being an asshole isn't necessary to be successful. It might be somewhat correlated, or not, but I think there are a lot of other traits which are far more predictive of success or failure.
All Swedish criminal records are now searchable online
To be clear: are you talking FPU instructions, or more modern SSE(N) instruction sets? Modern compilers on modern CPUs pretty aggressively vectorize my number crunching.

If it's something you're worried about, I'd suggest measuring the difference in your actual application, both in terms of performance and accuracy. If I can come up with a decent test case I can legally publish, I'll post results, but your mileage may still vary.
It seems like a perfect fit for a genetic algorithm. Even for the speed stuff.
The problem with this is that there are a select few cases where a machine can (or should) determine the expected value for a test assertion.

- My function does something complicated: chances are you will be replicating your function in your test code. Hand-code assertions.

- My function can be tested using a function that is provided by the runtime/framework: great! Remove your function and use the one in the framework/runtime instead.

- My function can be tested using a function that is provided by the runtime/framework, but is written for another platform or has some performance trick: test as described in the article.

- My function should never return NaNs or infinities: test as described in the article.

> And, you can test every float bit-pattern (all four billion!) in about ninety seconds. [...] A trillion tests can complete in a reasonable amount of time, and it should catch most problems.

Your developers will never run said tests. Unit tests are supposed to be fast. However, these exhaustive tests could be run on the CI server.
You are neglecting what singularists call 'The law of accelerating returns'(LOAR). What that means is the growth in areas like these is not linear but exponential. The more you grow, the more that growth helps in further growth. And that proceeds in a never ending fashion.
The real problem that it has solved is that criminals have no easy straightforward ways of laundering money, since all but the strictly monitored and regulated money pathways have been outlawed.

Imagine if these laws weren't there, how money laundering would go.

A criminal would make some money, and just go to his local unregulated/unmonitored cash exchange to wire the money to a swiss bank account. Since there's no monitoring or regulation, no IRS or FBI would ever know it.
What was the performance difference (in ms)?

I double-checked the article and did not see the actual performance numbers.
Tracing a cash payment is trivial: you just watch the physical address where the payment is to be mailed or dropped. So for any business in which the customer can't be trusted (eg Silk Road vendors), cash won't work.
1. This has been a thing for quite a while now, there have been numerous articles about this. This is nothing new, although it may have not rolled out to all users.

2. Facebook gives explanation of all the permissions they need, including read SMS one, here: https://www.facebook.com/help/210676372433246

3. This is more android permission issue than specifically Facebook app one. Facebook, in order to implement automatic confirmation, didn't really have a choice.

And fwiw, I use the app daily and I've had this update for at least a month and the read sms permission was never used according to various privacy tools which allow you to see, disable and view usage history of app permissions.

Until facebook starts abusing this feature/permission I don't think it's really an issue like most articles about this make it look like.
In an attempt to be pedantic for no reason you have opened yourself to criticism by other pedants ;) The words heap and stack are not even mentioned in the C standard specification. You're conflating the implementation with the language itself. The post was about the language.
It was an example of citizens working around landowner's private interest.
This is an example of something that shouldn't be patented. I had this idea about half a year ago and thought it was unique until I saw coin. Then I got excited that someone actually made it and I bought one.

If everyone's coming up with this idea now (it's the obvious solution to an obvious problem) then it isn't even evolutionary enough to deserve a patent.
That would only cost 7.5 million dollars using c3.xlarge instances! I am actually surprised that it is that close to being feasible.
Blue dance
Shame on Google for not allowing users to take better control over their apps and privacy. They almost did it in Android 4.3, and then took it back in 4.4, when they realized people might actually use it.
I just looked it up, and it's pretty much the same law all over Europe. Oddly it's much harsher in e.g. Germany (top penalty, 1 year prison) than Ukraine (15 days).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws

(Not a commentary on Ukraine; just curiosity).
You can say this, but the phenomenon is quite common. There is no shortage of people doing monumentally stupid things.
No, applies retroactively. Any NSLs we've received we've fought. And we'll continue to do so.
We were already serving over https (we've implemented HSTS some time ago).

And good observation about scrolling -- we do in fact queue, prioritize, and skip thumbnails based on scrolling.
I think you may have misinterpreted my comment (you know I don't work for Square right?).

> Hard problems should be challenges, not excuses.

Which is precisely why I mentioned in my original post that my preference (and Eventbrite's) goes towards doing the opposite and trying hard to give the user the benefit of the doubt. By doing this we expose ourselves to more risk because we want to transact with everyone -- without risking to disclose too much about our policies, you'll notice our system is very tolerant for mistakes and missing inputs, and in case something does go wrong we have a dedicated support team to deal with these issues. This makes building and training our algorithms that much more complicated if we want to keep our risk profile in check but it is a trade-off I'm happy to make, so I'd like to think I'm not guilty of what you're accusing me of.

Overall, my point was just to provide some context on where Square comes from since OP seemed confused about what they perceived as a ridiculous policy. The comparisons you picked (Comcast, Google) are a good example of why it's interesting to talk about fraud (which is a topic we rarely have in mind when building or using payment services): fraud is not a simple inconvenience for startups -- it's something that can potentially put the entire business at risk, so you have to have both the ability and the willingness to take on that risk. In the absence of controls I can think of many ways to defraud Square out of millions of dollars in the matter of hours. They're strong enough to take the hit it now, but one single such attack while they were younger could have put their success in considerable danger had they not taken some precautions.

Of course this is no excuse for not having a friendlier or more reactive support, but Square or not Square I just felt this is a topic worth bringing to the spotlight.
It is possible to do some evil hackery and change the value of integers in the small number cache.

http://hforsten.com/redefining-the-number-2-in-python.html
I am really not into fulltime job. Doing consulting suits me much more
A positioning engine to make overlays, tooltips and dropdowns faster
I am working on something similar. The project management tool is based on Bugzilla, and I have built real time chat software for Android, iOS, and Web app. I organize everything around a "project" and each group has strong focus to get the product to market. If you are looking for general socializing place, HN works well in that regard.

I am involved with a couple of active projects. They are games targeting Asia Pacific market. You can take a look, http://121.199.0.53/bz/about.cgi

It is not much a way to escape 9-5, more of a place where like-minded people get together and build something interesting. If it pays off financially, it is even better.
Not trolling, 100% serious. I don't actually want to do outsourcing, per say. My interest lies more in leveraging low market wages in India and actually setting up a foreign office with it's own management etc.

You still think India's bad for business?
Easy node.js programming
Ugh, it had to be Chris Dolan defending this family. They should've hired somebody more respectable than the guy who defended the Jahi McMath family. He is an affront to rational thinking in society.
Imagine that the President of this divided country allocated four times as much spending per capita to his political base and his son had earned hundreds of millions during his time in office.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yanukovych#Consolidation...
This posting made me look back to another posting on HN some time ago about 'Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time'.

My HN search fu is not great, it took me a while to find the posting so I post it here for the convenience of others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4128208
New Zealand political party threatens to block internet multinationals
You hit it, thanks! Not interested in outsourcing, per say. My goal would be to leverage low market wages in India by setting up a foreign office with it's own management etc.

How far above average pay do you think I would have to go?
Oh god. The future is doomed.
I haven't got round to rooting my droid yet, but my plan is to always tell facebook/twitter/google+ that my current position is directly under the moon/iss/some other satilite. Or maybe I'll trace out "Hello FB" on the Atlantic ocean.
Considering that Google's ethical statement still amounts to the "don't be evil" non-sense, yeah, I guess an ethics board is needed even today, without any actual AI implication.

We all think of incredibly futuristic sentient robots, but what we should really be worried about are the implications this acquisition will have on Google Search, a tool that is already used by millions of people. A tool that millions of people already superimpose to "the Internet" itself. A tool that already has a strong and unmitigated influence on people choices.

That may not be completely clear in the U.S. Market, but take a stroll in peripheral markets and, to quip the famous commercial, you'll see why 2014 already looks a lot like "1984".
Thanks for the tip! Isn't $1-2k per month pretty high for direct pay? My estimate for starting salaries was substantially lower.
I agree with examancer, you could put Ruby in all your article and it's not going to change anything...
Or, you know, because it was 1) a hidden debugging menu and 2) lacking functionally.
What everyone needs to do is call up Khosla Ventures and ask to borrow Vinod's "douche canoe" so they can paddle to the beach.
Did you use default postgres configuration? By default postgres uses very small amount of RAM and is forced to store hash maps on disk -> very significant slowdown.
Harvests: asynchronous programming as would be synchronous. Simpler alternative to promises and control flow libraries!
var harvest = require("harvests").create();

harvest.let('father', loadPenguin, 'MrPenguin');
harvest.let('mother', loadPenguin, 'MrsPenguin');
harvest.let('family', loadPenguinFamily, wait('father'), wait('mother'));

harvest.do(function(family){
console.log(family); //also in harvest.father, harvest.mother, harvest.family you got values
}, wait('family') );

harvest.onFail(function(error, variable, index){
console.log("Well, move those penguins to the South Pole...", error, variable, index);
});
Ha. Me too. I always felt a little intimidated by it, but I can't pass the chance to actually make my own structures.
Sounds like something you could build with Mapillary, they have an API to get the images, the web view is all HTML5, key nav would be easy. See http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/WNYdrxB1Q8tiICsCFTra0A for an example
This is the author's prejudiced opinion spun into an article. I could write the exact same thing for Ruby, Javascript, etc. PLus, if you are starting a company, the last thing that should matter is your tech stack. The first thing that should matter is your sales strategy.
Twice a day you'd need to move (and during any heavy waves); you have to stay below high-tide. Building structures in the water itself is itself a CC permit activity (as well as potentially involving the coast guard and army corps of engineers).
"so many locations seem to have... not much going on"

I think that's a problem today. We have a lot of things shouting at us. And when we are in the open we think nothing much is going on. But take a closer look ... ;)
Yahoo Is Buying Tomfoolery, An Enterprise App Studio Led By Ex-Yahoos And AOLers
This assumes the title of the "original owner" of the land was valid. Somehow I think there just may be some legitimate claims that go further back than to someone of Spanish descent in the 1830s.
Original Interview with Edward Snowden in English
Promoses and flow libraries have steep learning curve
Really, everything? Do you have any examples to share? My impression is the vast majority of their sellers are small businesses.
If my history included the Holodomor, I'd be shy of associating with Russia too.
> Except there are other safer languages to choose from, like Pascal and Basic compilers.

I'm curious, why do you say "safer"? These are languages for microcontroller programming. The things you do there are bound to be "unsafe", like peeking and poking memory for memory mapped i/o and disabling/enabling interrupts.

Unless, of course, all the possible things (i/o, timers, interrupts, etc) are wrapped in some kind of "safe" api so you essentially don't have access to low level facilities any more. The Arduino programming environment is kinda like this but you can still cause bad things to happen and if all else fails, hang the device with an infinite loop.

Is there any backing for such claims of "safety"?
Actually, it can. Killing it with -9 prevents the process from writing the buffer pool etc. to disk, so that the the server needs to recover that state from the journal/log files. No data will be lost though. So you're basically trading time at shutdown vs. time at start-up.
I've been looking for a library like this to build a guided tour in app. The demo page explains it all well.
http://github.hubspot.com/tether/docs/welcome/
See related discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7114310
Not everyone wants silent updates. I don't want Google or Microsoft replacing binaries on my PC behind my back.

When you see that Google wants to vacuum up more and more data from your PC, it makes sense that they silently update their software - in that context. Chrome continues to find different areas to mine user data e.g. turning your address bar into a keylogger, or monitoring your browsing activity even if you're not using google services via "phishing and malware protection", etc etc.