skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
O(n) and O(2n) are equivalent. So run speed is not good argument. IMHO
It was a course on data structures, not on the C++ standard library. Referencing counting would have been the wrong thing for the lesson on doubly linked lists -- which was basically the first lesson of the course. "Modern" C++ would not have helped at all for the student who had a function with a missing return statement and a confusing error log.

Frankly, almost none of the C++11 features are actually useful for teaching data structures, and those that are relevant would only confuse students. Basically, only auto and the three kinds of smart pointers are relevant to an introductory data structures course. At the end of the day those would only create as many problems as they solve. For example, unique_ptr means that there is only one "owner," right? Wrong, get() returns a raw pointer to the object, and you can make a new unique_ptr from that. Sure it is easy to avoid -- if you are an expert with lots of C++ experience, who follows coding guidelines and all that. The data structures students had little to no C++ experience and would almost certainly have done what I just described -- and that is just one of many ways they can and will screw up C++11 features.

At the end of the day, C++ is too complicated, too poorly defined, and has all the wrong abstractions for basic CS courses.
The NSA's been around since 1952, but what the 2001 Patriot Act did was to amend the 1978 FISA law to setup secret courts to issue secret warrants to conduct secret searches, and the NSA only had to report the number of such warrants obtained per year to Congress, meaning there was no real accountability. The US Constitution allows for spying on US citizens, but there was supposed to be accountability to the Courts and Congress. Now the checks and balances are gone.
What the Heck is Happening to Windows?
Scientifically sure, practically though, it matters when working on large data sets and you're already exhausting the snappiness that you would have liked.
You're not giving the JIT a chance to warm up at all. Also, you're degrading into 'slow mode' because your array has different types. Basically, it looks like you're doing a lot of bad things to the JIT on purpose :P

Both the different types and the delete (array with holes) are _very_ harmful for performance in v8.
Well, maybe I am an outlier, but I didn't start programming until I was 20, and didn't seriously get into it until I was 24 (i.e. actually shipping something).

And I sure as hell don't think Zuck is "better" at tech or being a hacker than I am. Luckier, perhaps, but not better. I guess we'll see.

Also, I was married at 19, and a year later was a father. By 24, I had two children with a third shortly thereafter. So I definitely had the whole "lots of responsibility" thing dynamic, and while I do agree it slowed me down relative to what I could have done if I was single, it wasn't fatal and didn't stop me from learning, or becoming good at what I'm doing.

But again, I'm probably an outlier.
Java certainly moves very slowly. I recall reading debates on how to support Lambda long before Java 7.

The reasons, IMO, are twofolds:
1) The huge install base in enterprise: changing language feature is a big deal, and like it or not, enterprises are conservative in this aspect. One only needs to look at all the garbages included with Windows in the name of backward compatibility.
2) Design by committee: Many vendors have stake in Java eco systems, all with their own agendas. To get them to agree on something take time.

In some ways, Java is victim of its own success. On the other hand, JVM is a very solid platform. Those impatient can go with Scala or Clojure. I could be snarky like you were and said Scala was light year ahead of C# in terms of feature evolving, but of course I know C# is a fantastic language which serves its users very well.
From personal experience, I learned theory and structure first. It took a long time to "get" variables as locations in memory, and I had to relearn it many times.

Harvard (who sends a lot of people on to PhDs) forces everyone to learn C in introductory cs50. I like how they do it. If you don't get "the machine" early it is hard to get it later.
You're kind of cheating because you're using slice which will create a copy of the Array, and that's not cheap if the array is large.
I think the genesis of the obsession you describe is that having significantly not enough in your bank account causes severe problems.
So, facebook's IPv7 is 2a03:2880:2110:df07:face:b00c:0:1
The defacto standard workflow in CS academia is still to produce a dvi file from latex sources and then generate postscript from it. I think you will remember that unlike postscript, pdf became open only in 2008. You can of course generate pdf directly using pdflatex, unfortunately it doesnt work with another defacto standard for vector graphics "eps".

What I find unusual is that acrobat-reader and some other pdf viewers do not attempt to display postscript. A big part of pdf is really postscript underneath, a pdf viewer already knows how to display a large subset of postscript.
Ya, but the pew pew video wasn't posted until well after the game hit number 1.
Action Centre: the Windows 8.1 Notification Centre
For my son, it was "Johnny Test" and "Phineas and Ferb", the latter being one of the most well-done bits of hacker/maker propaganda I've ever come across. Amusingly, all the scientists/engineers in Johnny Test that aren't creepy villains are girls (Johnny's twin sisters and occasionally friends). My son had no problem looking up to them anyway.

I got a certain amount of crap from others for "letting" him be so into a girl thing, and I remember getting crap as a kid because most of the figures I looked up to are men. Is it hypocritical of me to be both frustrated by the lack of stuff about girl techies and irritated that our society pushes kids to pick such things only from same-gendered examples?
My point is that "O(2n)" is an extremely specific and misleading way to characterize 'extra conditional per iteration'. It doesn't matter what the actual percentage difference is.
>> ... the resulting clipped waveform carries a lot more energy than an unclipped one.

> Is this claim actually true?

Yes, it is -- but it depends on how we define "clipped".

> My understanding is that if you take a waveform and clip it, the resulting waveform actually carries less energy (think of the corresponding integral)

Only if the clipping reduces the peak value. If you compare a sinewave with a peak value of 1, and a square wave with a peak value of 1, the square wave has a substantially higher average level (with a ratio of pi / 2).

> It's this – the unexpectedly large amount of high-frequency energy – that kills speakers because their crossover networks push it into the tiny, tiny tweeters, and they are utterly unprepared for it.

Yes -- the rate at which the speaker cones are required to move is an additional factor. But for a "clipping" definition that clips by means of trying to exceed the available voltage, these two effects add.

http://i.imgur.com/oE5NFZ9.png

In the above linked image, the red trace is sin(x), the integral for the interval 0 < x < pi is 2. The green trace produces an integral of pi. The ratio of the two is pi/2, and the speaker power difference is (pi/2)^2 = 2.46 (because the speaker's power is the square of the applied voltage).

The green trace is what you would get if you simply turned up the volume beyond any reasonable setting -- the amplifier produces a clipped version of the sine wave and the peak value is equal to the supply voltage.
Could you perhaps identify a single important task that we'd want to do in space that can't effectively be done by machines?
Zach Will's GitHub "contributions" chart looks like the 1UP Mushroom
> Bluetouff ended up admitting in testimony that when he found the documents, he had traveled back to the homepage that they stemmed from, where he found an authentication page, which indicated that the documents were likely supposed to be protected. That admission played a part in his later conviction in the appeals court.

Of course the fine seems absurd to me personally, but this excerpt hints at a couple things one should definitely not do.
It seems to me that there is concerted effort to discredit alternative init implementations.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daemontools&actio...

I can't imagine what agency with a history of undermining technical standards could possibly be involved.
Just for perspective, here is the same graph adding Python and Java: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#cat=0-5-31&q=julia%2C%2...

At the level of 'google trends' (or really, any language ball-parking) we should be talking about orders of magnitude instead of small differences.
"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." - Knuth

Micro benchmarks are not how we optimize - we profile.
Thank you for saying this.

On the other side there are also people like %#&$* Scoble that say this is just a marketing play. The lack of empathy and awareness that not everyone in the world is as greedy and selfish as you really upsets me. But you said it better anyway.
I use Amazing Weather hd as my lock screen, which takes care of the weather issue for me. But as far as other live tiles, you can turn any of them off if you want. I mean, you COULD just make a start screen that looked like android/ios with a ton of icons if you really wanted to.

I don't use Facebook so I can't comment on that, but most apps I've used (twitter, linkedin, hacker news, readit) have settings for syncing. I only let readit sync in the background personally.

The notifications bar itself is only there for a few seconds, so I'm not sure what issue you could possibly have with it. Notifications appear on the app tiles themselves, which I prefer (especially for when I add a person to my start screen and they call/text/email me). It doesn't function the same way as android/ios, but I prefer it.

Every App Store is full of garbage, there's no denying it. I've found the windows App Store much easier to wade through, though. It's still far below the amount of apps in the android/ios stores, and the few top rated apps are almost always the official (or best) apps. I haven't found an issue with apps, but it am not a huge app guy. I mostly use twitter and readit (for reddit, obviously).

I haven't faced any issues like your last one either, so I can't really comment. I have verizon and they have next to no support for windows phone, so I could see it happening.
I wouldn't say so. The US waved nuclear threats around about of sorts of things in 1950. Nobody does that now. Iran is a totally different situation. They are a developing regional power.

The tone of our own propaganda always makes the pecking order pretty clear. North Korea is always dehumanized, and gets obliterated, if only because nuclear attack is the only way to prevent a complete massacre is Seoul via artillery/etc.

Iran is a totally different situation. They are a developing regional power. We never say things we can't take back about Iran, and fight with Russia out of habit. China isn't a threat -- nobody can afford to lose the trading relationship the China has with the world, including China.
That's my guess. For all, for the sake of argument, let's say this developer did hire somebody to pump up his numbers. They could even be extorting him to pay them more in exchange for their silence. It reminds me of the movie 'Office Space' ... where they rig their software to shave fractional-pennies off of each transaction for an eventual payday, only to have their plan work too well too quickly.
> Of course not. My editor, like any proper editor, automatically inserts spaces when I hit tab.

Which translates to "yes".
For anyone watching this thread, here's what I know about Qualcomm's offerings (through our embedded program partners) -
1. http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/qualcomm/dragonboard-devel...
Intrinsyc is one of the partners who offers "Dragonboards" with the latest (so far, that will change soon) SoCs (APQ8064 and contemporaries). AFAIK, these boards can be ordered in any quantity from 1 to 100s, so they should be a good start for a development kit. Intrinsyc offers a Linux distribution for the 8074 SoM. Not too sure about the maturity of Linux support, but I am expecting updates in the near future, and will post them here.
For those who need to eventually build their own boards using Qualcomm SoCs, Intrinsyc's FAQ here should be useful: http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/qualcomm/dragonboard-faq.a...
2. Inforce computing also offers a cute board with the APQ8064. http://www.inforcecomputing.com/product/qualcomm.html

Hope this helps!
Long commutes are enabled by cars, but I don't think they're the direct cause - sprawl was a thing before cars as we know them came about. It's a natural phenomenon to move away from the civic center, we are just able to move father away because of cars. Before that, it was horses and carriages. Cars let us move further our, sure.

Specifically in my case, the company I work for is located in my city (despite recent sale to an SF-based one). They chose a prestigious address over being near where the already sparse urban living was, and even that is geared at singles and young couples. I couldn't live near work if I wanted to.

Personally I don't think cars are a bad thing and I don't want to trade mine for a bike or the bus. I like the freedom a car gives me. I don't have to plan my route to work on anything or anyone. I can leave when I want. I can go to lunch farther away from my office. Yes, it's contributing to climate change, and we need to solve that problem, but I don't think the solution is removing dependance on cars.
Yes, and so could you if you weren't more interested in arguing.
I was being kind of tongue in cheek. But you're right, most mastering engineers are competent enough to avoid clipping everything. Although you'd be surprised at the amount of music that has clipping at a few points here and there if you start listening for it (unfortunately audacity doesn't help much here since it will lie about clipping if it's exactly at the max).
I suppose they could, but every good launcher I had on android wanted donations or an up-front + theme fee. The best android devices are really expensive, whereas you can get a brand new windows phone for wicked cheap (mine was $50 when I got it, my wife's was free).
People use arrays for things like queues and stacks all the time in JavaScript - they're _much_ slower than hand rolled collection (eg. http://jsperf.com/deque-vs-array-2 ) - why not micro optimize that as well?

If you have a very large array of course optimization can/should be considered but that's simply not the average case.
This illustrates an important point:

Information costs nothing to replicate, but it's attention that is the great scarce commodity of the information age. I expect to see extreme escalation in the sophistication of methods for getting peoples' attention in the coming years.
I come from an EE background, so I learned C and studied various aspects of computer hardware and computer architecture to some relative level of detail before doing any sort of algorithms or software design. Sometimes I wonder what sort of software engineer I'd be if I had gone the other way - studied CS to start off and then descended down the stack later on. Would I be better? Worse? How would I think about problems, and what mental models would I go for first?
Citizen Cloud: a personal data backup solution from the NSA
It is not that simple. The speaker is a dynamic system whose response to signals is not memoryless. A speaker that can easily handle a pure 4kHz tone at the maximum amplitude cannot necessarily also handle a 4kHz square wave at the maximum amplitude (a square wave distributes much of its power into harmonics). It is well known that you can destroy speakers just as easily by overdriving the output stage of the power amplifier (which leads to clipping) than by overdriving the speakers themselves.

Of course, Dell could include analogue filtering circuitry to filter out the excess power in inaudible frequencies if they wanted to.
The Goggle trends, they do nothing!
I've lived in Honolulu for a couple years, and IMO its a shining example of bad infrastructure. The public transport is quite a bad actually and efforts to build a rail system have been constantly delayed by corruption, NIMBYs, and bureaucracy. People rent cars so they can access the rest of the island because otherwise its impossible. Its not just American tourists either, a huge portion of the tourist population is Japanese or Canadian.

But at the same time the locals seem to really love driving. Every household has at least one car and traffic is often rated as bad or worse than LA. For a place that you would think would be ecologically responsible (and a great test bed for transportation technology, as its such a well-isolated location), the car culture hear is so ingrained that I think it would take some major deterrents to get people to stop driving.
Tizen is in a very precarious position at Samsung. If Samsung saw the slightest advantage (or, conversely, threat) to the billions of dollars they make with Android, Tizen would be gone. There is no handset business at Samsung without Android. Samsung lacks an ecosystem like Amazon has so forking is not practical.

Intel, you say? Tell me how many handsets has Intel.

Jolla and Firefox OS are better bets.
I'm responding to your claim that Arrows theorem debunks attempts to paint some voting systems as objectively more democratic or better than other voting systems.

If you think that Arrows theorem really does this, then you should stand by that assertion and defend all voting systems that Arrows theorem applies to as not objectively better than any other voting system that Arrows theorem applies to.

And yes, Arrows theorem applies to Dictatorship/Random Ballot/Plurality/Condorcet-loser methods which are the ones I used in my example.
Blimey this piece is spot on. It manages to basically sum up many of the wordless, un-expressed proto-opinions I have on on the matter into one incredibly coherent package. Lucid, rational and heart felt - great discourse.
How does ISS control its orientation relative to the earth?
That Thin Layer Between Technology and Entrepreneurship
I spent years as a foreign language teacher, curriculum designer and eventually language school owner. That experience has largely made me numb to these sorts of products and claims.

Learning words isn't the same thing as learning a language. Spaced repetition is exciting to people when they first learn about it, and it's great for memorizing certain types of discrete information (e.g. the capital cities of each country, the periodic table of elements, etc...) Memorizing a dictionary doesn't lead to language skill, though. At best it's a useful stockpile that will speed up your later learning efforts, but at the cost of thousands of wasted hours.

If you're determined to learn a foreign language from a heavily memorization based method, at least use an audio-lingual system that will give you decent pronunciation! The Pimsleur Approach will do that. It will beat not only words, but pronunciation and grammar into your head. It's mind-numbingly boring especially after the first one or two languages, but less so than a vocabulary memorization app.
Command line website design
This is awesome! Kudos for the team/devel.
The "implementation" of an interface is the code that actually does stuff when that interface is called.

In this case, the implementation of the DRM hooks are those proprietary DRM modules.

This "standard" shuts everyone except the select few in the dark. Without have the appropriate plug-in, you cannot access the content.
Huh? EDIT: Ah I guess you are saying two places of work, one for each adult in a household? Well have you heard of these things called buses and trains? They're awesome. You don't need everything to be in walking distance, as long as both ends are walking distance from transport.

Also the nice thing about not being a superstitious throwback is I don't have to find any place to worship, walking distance or otherwise.
I'm sure he was inundated with people wanting to buy it, license it, claim the made it, asking for tips, etc. I'd imagine this kind of thing basically ruins your email address.

Then when he said he didn't like the attention, more hate came. Then when he said he was pulling it, death threats came.

Reminds me of people who win the lottery. All their friends just want something, charities start bugging them, they can't be left alone.

I feel sorry for him.
Actually, I made it a point to explain that it doesn't have to be computers...

"Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm clocks, repairing pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios. Some of them built pumpkin launchers or LEGO trains."

There are many early maker/hacker experiences that don't require access to or interest in computers. The point was that, at some point early on, every hacker (maybe there's an outlier or three, but I'd be shocked if there were twenty) had some experience digging in and building or fixing or changing something.

For me, it started a long time before my exposure to computers. I grew up in a rural area. As early as toddlerhood, I was learning to cook, sew, make candles, weave on a loom, etc. I was making as early as I could hold things and be relied on to keep them out of my mouth. It never occurred to me to throw something away without trying to fix it first, because if something broke, my parents would fix it, and I'd watch or help.

It's not about computers and youth, it's about making/fixing/tinkering and youth.
ART is in AOSP. Had Google intended to create a two-speed Android, that would have been the place to turn AOSP into a second class citizen.

Kindle Fire will run on ART. Heck of a technology to give to an ecosystem competitor.
Or maybe he was just naive and didn't expect that outcome.
Which doesn't change the fact that a human overseeing an experiment can do a better job than a machine, and could cause the experiment to not be lost in the first place.

Due to the versatility and adaptability of humans.
Flipping a jump statement is a criminal offense in many countries now.
Men apparently are rapists, Women are victims (Please share on Facebook)
The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird
The linked article talks about the enormous upswings at the end of January, and pewdiepie was likely the funnel that caused that.

However YouTubers had picked up Flappy Bird much earlier, again for the "so impossible" angle (in the same way that there were tonnes of reaction videos to the game Amnesia, though it was far less accessible so had a lower ceiling). For instance-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMQSLT7e9Q8

The linked article assumes bots during this period, but more likely it was simply that it started making the organic transit through the YouTubers.
I'm really curious, why do you think it would be different for a daughter?
I'll not comment as to the vocabulary/language thing, but the interface and UX of this is really, really excellent. It feels fun to use and has a strong and pleasant visual identity. Great work.
No, but it does change the fact that humans are likely to lose their lives in the pursuit of the experiment. Losing a machine is merely an inconvenience.