skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> GCC's experience of moving toward a hand-written C++ parser was very positive.

Fom what I see here, the measured improvement was 1.5% -- http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/New_C_Parser

> I don't believe hand-written parsers have an inherent speed advantage, but it does seems that it'd always be easier for a hand-written parser to produce more informative error messages

From what I can see, this is the major shortcoming of parser tools at the moment. I haven't looked into this problem too deeply yet, but at the moment I suspect that it isn't possible to get good enough error messages automatically.

But to me this doesn't mean "parsing tools will never have good error messages", it means "parsing tools need to evolve to give users the right hooks to produce good error messages themselves."

This would let the algorithms do the part that they do well (analyzing the grammar and creating state machines) while letting the human do the part that can't be done automatically (creating good error messages).
This is pretty cool but will definitely rely on heavy adaptation. One thing I found annoying is having to remember the exact spot to tap.
Hate to nitpick, but it's sheer scale

Shear is a verb (or noun); I shear the sheep

Sheer is an adjective; I was awestruck by the sheer cliffs
Not directly (Sun open sourced v28, but encryption shows up in v30), but there are other solutions to that problem. e.g. FreeBSD has geom_eli which can happily underly ZFS or any other filesystem (http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/disks-encrypting.htm...)
Not if you want it to be “SMS based”, by which I mean: use phone numbers as identifiers. A server can’t easily prove to another that it serves the user with a specific phone number. There’s no cryptographic proof possible, there’s no hostname part like in email. You can verify by sending a text message, but that gets expensive if you need to do it often.

This is trying to combine 3 points on Zooko's Triangle [1]: You want human-meaningful names (which phone numbers are, because they map to existing things), so you have to make a trade-off between decentralization and security. WhisperSystems opted for security for some reduced decentralization. For something that’s aiming to replace text messaging, I can’t really blame them for that choice.

[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle
It would be nice to see where he is with this now - that was 2010 and it appears nothing has been written since about it.
Will the iOS version require a jailbreak? Not sure how it can seamlessly handle plain SMS/MMS otherwise.
The valuation is so unknown that the project has its own currency: the ITER unit of account. True, that was done because 3 dozen countries with their own (mostly) separate currencies are collaborating on the same project, but it makes for a nice excuse. :)
Thats the case for python. Ruby actually shows that designing a language that runs both on and off the JVM is indeed possible.
Ask HN: How to detect montage tape(Turkish prime minister)?
There is a tape belongs to Turkey PM. i wonder that if there is simple program to check it if it is montage or not

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvf4aeRLu0E&feature=youtu.be According to tape, Recep Tayyip Erdogan telling his son to hide money, it is about 3 billions dolar.
Ubuntu + Mapbox
I would think the ideal moon base would have multiple layers, the innermost an oxygen volume and the outermost a thick absorbing defensive layer against space debris, enemy/terrorist attacks. Dome structure perhaps.

Alternatively - mobile moon bases, and be super ready to spot space debris.
Make it movable, and a alarm system?

And by movable, not in "left-right" but "up-down". I think is easier to deflect a blast if the base move up, instead of try to run...
Behavior Driven Development and User Experience
So you have found some esoteric issues that are likely encountered by less than .01% of developers and this is somehow 12 years of crap from Microsoft?

I find it funny (not really) that somehow this floats up as the top comment when most developers have no clue what he is talking about but since this is HN and someone is saying how bad Microsoft is then lets upvote. Microsoft killed my pappy and all (ht to shanselman) so I must do everything I can to make sure no one else dares like them.
Why Your Writing Sounds Lame When You Read It Out Loud
Hunter vs. farmer hypothesis
Yes, unfortunately I had to choose between the two. I like CloudFlare a lot but without that I was unable to stay.
I'm saying you've got to have pretty strong arguments to make a project dependent on a third party tool, if you expect to distribute it, expect it to be long lived, and expect to port it to many platforms.
This guy went on to found a company as I recall, which I think was then acquired. Its a pretty clever way to make fast floating point.
First, as random internet commentator guy, I want to thank Stephen for his contribution here. This and NKS are incredible.

Second, I keep seeing videos and articles about Wolfram Alpha and am always left scratching my head kinda going "WTF?"

So it's a knowledge-based purely symbolic programming language? Can it play Flappy Bird? Power the next cool startup? Give me an answer to a question I might have today? I've been to alpha a couple of times. Never seemed to be able to get the questions right to get the answers I wanted.

I don't mean that to be negative. My point is that any audience is going to have a thousand different needs and viewpoints, most of which will probably seem trivial to Stephen Wolfram. Most new technologies get past this hurdle by open-sourcing. That way there's a thousand experiments, and over time a few of them are bound to give all of us little nerds a gleam in our eye one way or the other.

The other way of doing this, where you have a single point of creation describing to the world how cool it is? It is limited to things that have a single terrific property that everybody can agree on.

I'm not sure that is the case here. Still -- awesome stuff. Can't wait to watch this evolve.
I'm surprised that so many of the comments in this thread are about dns hosting services and not dns server software support for these so-called "alias records".

I was making a list of "why on Earth doesn't this simple software exist?" items the other day and "simple server-side CNAME support" was on the list. Does any common DNS server package provide this support easily out of the box? It seems like one of the most common uses cases possible.
This is actually great news. It has been impossible to find out whether you are on the US watch list. Now you have to do is get an Australian with your name to order something from Element 14 and now you know.
Sure, things might change. I'd be happy with better error messages from automatically-built parsers. There's a lot of potential, I think, in methods that take advantage of having a formal description of the language grammar --- you could, for example, automatically generate a sentence that "fits in" at the point at which an error occurs. There's still a lot of progress to be made in the area, though, and for now, hand-generated error messages do seem to be more useful to people.
I believe so, and it's a small price to pay to eliminate the homeless problem. I imagine the prices will only come down once we can "3D print" those homes.
Picbookjs – simple library to display photos from a Facebook Page
Silent Circle's Privacy/Security Focused Smartphone for $629
An update from 2013 apparently : http://www.bdti.com/InsideDSP/2013/10/23/SingularComputing
Bitcoin’s Apocalyptic Moment: Mt. Gox may have lost 750,000 bitcoins
This guy is totally stupid. I just read 4th slide.

1% error - what that means? Error in mantissa? Shorter mantissa? Simplified IEEE?

He writes O(5K) and presumes it to be "better" than 500K ... wtf? Does he know what O() means?

So, he basically "rounds" the values in images, mentions some recent technologies and says "if we had better engineers, we would have flying cars blah blah blah ...".
Mt. Gox may have lost 750,000 bitcoins
I had a colleague in a past job that went from aeronautical engineering to a hedge fund. His career trajectory was MIT masters in aeronautical engineering -> ~5 years in aerospace -> 2 years at a financial software startup (where I worked) that was somewhat desperate for people -> hedge fund. Basically he could demonstrate a solid grasp of math from his past career, managed to find an entry-level position at a financial software startup (taking a pay cut), parlayed that into some knowledge of finance and industry contacts, and then jumped ship once the opportunity arose.
The interesting thing about McMaster's design is that they haven't changed much in the past decade that I've been buying from them. It's always looked like that!
I read this article, and I couldn't help thinking — Couldn't they spend these billions on something like deep geothermal energy and get a much better (and more likely) return?
Are or were? Were, there's plenty. Are -- well we're talking about a covert agency, no?
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive
I have a simple rails app now I want to add realtime to it, it seems I have those options:

a. rails + node.js + reddis

b. 'rewrite' the rails app in meteor.js

c. rails + firebase

Any suggestions? Anyone uses meteor.js from a rails background?
I did this, and it was a lot of fun. Recommended!
Probably not: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/01/26/why-n...

EDIT: On second thought, Mads said primary contructors are being considered, and I think that would make implicitly-typed fields possible.
and people with cameras, and everybody protesting.. the status quo dont want people protesting.. or fighting for their rights... the midia show only "black blocks", wich is always a minority, to criminalize the movement, and make people hate protests.. mostly of course.. brainwashed people manipulated by the corporate media...

Your comment are really uninformed, or probably very bad informed.. i think you dont have a clue of whats really going on behind the curtains of power..
I guess you mean to print the key components as bricks I think are easier handwritten.
I feel the same about Google Voice at the moment. It's killer feature for me right now is the ability to text and call people from my Google Voice account from OS X. I use GrowlVoice[1] extensively. It's easily one of my favourite menubar applications.

If TextSecure could replace this functionality it'd cause me to seriously reconsider GV

[1] - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/growlvoice-google-voice-clie...
you still have to set it up on CM but the text secure app has some nice added features
Argentina begins charging for com.ar domains
Yeah, all 3! I loved those games
Theres some irony in your mentioning having to reenter passphrases and your username being "forgottenpass" :)
Writing parsers is fun, and having done it several times, I know roughly how long it will take. Using a highly specialized tool has risks of its own: that I'll sink a lot of time into learning it, only to discover it isn't a good fit for what I want to do, and that I'll have to go through the whole learning curve again a few years from now because I don't write parsers very often and will have forgotten how the tool worked by then. Then there's the fun of debugging Other People's Code.

Not to mention the way that open-source tools tend to drag in a godawful mess of dependencies, most of which they don't really even need. In my experience, I can write a basic recursive-descent parser from scratch in C++ before I can get a warning-free compile out of many open-source packages.

So yes, there are reasons to roll your own parser. They may not be good reasons in your view, but don't shoot the messenger.

(All of this being said, there's no way I'd try to bake a fully-compliant C++ language parser from scratch.)
> seven acres of land donated by Carmen Guidi

Yeah, good luck with that in major cities.

What if we took all the tiny houses and put them all in a shared building, with shared infrastructure and a tinier combined footprint?

We could call it... an apartment building.
Upvoted and I hope it gets read but I don't think any one thing is THE solution to homelessness.

In previous life, I wanted to be an urban planner. As part of that, I took a class on Homelessness and Public Policy at SFSU. I am currently homeless and have been for over two years.

So, some thoughts in brief:

Current housing stock, financing, and policies in the U.S. is very skewed towards housing for "the nuclear family" and is rooted in things that happened when our soldiers came home from WWII. In the decades since, our demographic has diversified thus this type of housing stock, financing infrastructure and policies no longer fit our needs. Ironically, the result is we no longer have a lot of the options that were once fairly common here, like SRO's and boarding houses, which were better suited to single people with limited incomes. You increasingly see things like 3 (or more) roommates sharing a three bedroom apartment designed with the nuclear family in mind.

Yes, smaller houses would be nice. Post WWII, the average new home was around 1200sf. In 2000, the average new home was over 2000sf and housed fewer people and had more amenities. This is driven in part by tax policies that encourage those who can afford a house at all to buy the largest house they can afford. Meanwhile, homelessness is on the rise because it is increasingly hard to afford housing at all.

I have commented on this in various places over the years. I could probably write a good blog post on it. But most people seem to think this entrenched history is irrelevant. So I see little reason at this time to put much effort into laying it all out.
I understand the speed and energy efficiency of the proposed design can only be reached with specially designed hardware, but couldn't some of the expected effects be achieved on existing cpu-core-hardware designs by using the lower precision requirements?

Also this could be nice code golf idea: solve algorithm xyz only with a strictly limited cpu instruction set, which could be chosen to be those operations which are very quick resp. very energy efficient on a target platform...
Thanks. I knew of Mori, but hadn't looked at it yet. Now that I've glanced, you could definitely implement something like _tree with Mori, but it'd be missing a few key things.

What jumps out most is that I'd really miss batch mode, which lets you escape from immutability and get a big performance boost for complex atomic operations. I think Mori must use something like this internally, but the docs don't indicate it being exposed.

It may be subtle, but I also really prefer _tree's syntax, where objects are fitted with their own methods (Mori does something like `mori.get(m0, 'foo')` instead of the more succinct `m0.get('foo')`). This is also the backbone of _tree's data modeling layer, which lets you work in terms of your domain, rather than a tree.

Performance comparisons are on my list of things to do.
As this is a tutorial, the snippet will likely be copy-pasted into production code running on God knows what OS by someone who can't imagine why there could be a problem with seeding from the system clock. Using a fresh instance allows the code to be portable, noob-friendly, and concise, which are important traits for its context.
This article doesn't seem to tackle the very question it posed- is inexpensive housing actually the fix to the problem? From what I recall of past discussions, past experiments have suggested affordable housing is simply not the problem for many of the chronically homeless, and it is not clear that providing inexpensive (or even free) housing will be successful.
What, in particular, is problematic about them? Do you mean their particular implementation, the fact that they aren't also encrypted, or the general "password equivalent in a cookie" concept overall?
This perhaps 0.01% of the problems I've encountered for reference.

I work in other ecosystems as well and there's just not as much crap to deal with by several orders of magnitude.
I can't really tell whether you're being sincere, but you are still way out of line. You've been using emotionally charged language from the start, perhaps you should consider your motivations for engaging in this thread.
Yes I agree with the point that the portability of your dependencies limits your own portability.

This is definitely something that is dependent on the tool or library though. For example, if you decided to use Lua as a tool, it is extremely unlikely that the portability of Lua will be a limiting factor. It is very likely to be more portable than your code (given that it compiles unmodified on Turbo C 1.0 from 1990: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jvLY5pUwic)

So I definitely agree with "choose your dependencies wisely."
The use of pronounceable acronyms is European post-war tradition so that people speaking the multiple languages can use common words. CERN is another example.
I have wondered if you could build a building with plugable apartment modules that could be moved to other building when you wanted to move. Shipping crate apartments with standard utility hookups.
My only takeaway from the thread was that you approached the process of patch review begrudgingly, and seemed to assume that everyone should understand/appreciate your node-derived vocabulary and design.

Each iteration of the patch was provided with a whine about whether it was ready for inclusion yet ... when the reality is, that as the patch author, it's your job to make sure there aren't more bugs and the patch is ready for inclusion.

Every time someone found another issue was a red flag to any sane maintainer that your patch wasn't ready for inclusion. Every time you whined about having to iterate, you made it clear that you couldn't be trusted to have written something stable and maintainable.

If you can't deal with working on mature software, stick to startup code.
Oh, that's fine and understandable. You should just give people a little warning as I didn't even know what I was clicking on when viewed the site and it popped up immediately asking for my details is all.
I think human brains are probably wired for speed over accuracy too. This might have a lot of potential in machine learning and eventually AI, where information processing speed is often more important than accuracy.
NSA is, but Snowden is not (or, at least, wasn't noted as being in the writeup).

See here: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
Hindsight and all. I think the promises of fusion energy turned out to be overhyped during the latter 20th century.
The analogy with a river doesn't work at all. Rivers don't act or engage in exchange. I see what you are saying on the most optimal path for water to flow, but that is then equivocating on "monopoly".
The problem is that the definition of "important" is highly dependent on context. Github messages are not "important" in my general mail (I have, on occasion, contributed to some open source repos, that doesn't mean I want to receive an e-mail every time a contributor makes a commit), but they are rather important in my work e-mail. I guess Gmail, optimizing for the most common case, broke all the others. That is acceptable for a freebie (my personal Gmail), but not for a corporate tool you pay for (my company's Gmail).
Doesn't it seem wasteful to have four walls a few feet away from another four walls?

I'm open to the idea that it's more dignified to live in a unique, isolated dwelling, but it seems terribly inefficient to have 10 tiny houses versus a single-building condo with 10 dwellings of identical square footage.
You can flag posts, just click on the link that says "link".
cool tech but i have to remember where i made my buttons? what if there's music playing in the background?
Why Microsoft should welcome Nokia's new Android phones
Python Concurrency: An Intro to Threads
The problem is "a lot of people have them" is a very small amount compared to the number of 8-bit computers that sold. I am still at a loss how we lost a whole price range of computers. I wish for a modern day Sinclair to rescue us.
specifically it would be interesting to compare GPU (instead of classic CPU) vs. proposed imprecise approach
There is probably an efficiency reason the human brain has 85 000 000 000(85 billion) neurons that operate with lossy compression operate in parallel drawing less than 20W of power.
Pre-orders kick off for security-focused Blackphone
A lot of DNS providers provide "ANAME" records. Which are essentially services which do the lookup and update A records in a cron.
Radix sort is one of those tricks that doesn't help often, but every once in a while can produce spectacular results. Here it is showing a 4x speedup on a particular operation in git:

https://github.com/git/git/commit/8b8dfd5132ce91f632b5303c39...
This design is utter computational tripe that completely ignores Amdahl's Law or any notion of data-parallelism.

His 1% error comes from relying on 7-bit logarithmic floating point used in a task-parallel manner. This is a non-starter for HPC. While most theoretical models certainly have 1% or greater underlying errors in accuracy, a 1% or worse error in precision is going to doom these algorithms to numerical instability without Herculean additional effort that would obliterate the computational advantage here.

Neural networks? See The Vanishing Gradient Problem.

Molecular dynamics? It's numerically unstable without 48-bit or better force accumulation as proven by D.E. Shaw.

NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel have invested a huge sum in manycore processors that are already too hard to program for most engineers. These processors are a cakewalk in comparison to what's proposed here.

Finally, even if you did find a task amenable to this architecture (and I'd admit there may be some computer vision tasks that might work here), where's the data bus that could keep it fed? We're already communication-limited with GPUs for a lot of tasks. Why do we even need such a wacky architecture?
Somewhat tautologically, yes. Building and giving away homes is a solution to "involuntary lack of a home".

Of course the effective reality is not so simple. Done naively you are going to end up with little more than a tent city with a greater sense of permanence. Tent cities "solve 'homelessness'" in the strictest sense, but of course a satisfactory solution is more than that. They need to be accompanied by social programs designed to help people with a wide variety of problems (mostly having to do with joblessness and health (mental or otherwise)).
Read up on Security Theater to find answer to question.
GE To Spend Another $10 Billion On Clean Energy Research By 2020
The derelict mansions on London's 'Billionaires' Row'
I think the title used on the site is purposefully misleading/attention grabbing: "Runs out of parts" would be more accurate and fits the language used on the site.
I thought that was sort of his point, that you can't? I didn't read it as a DTrace vs. Systemtap discussion, but as an observability-on-SmartOS versus observability-on-Ubuntu discussion. If Ubuntu shipped with DTrace (or it could be easily installed), there'd be no real observability difference.

It's a good point that this is a SmartOS vs. Ubuntu rather than SmartOS vs. all-Linuxes comparison, though.
Each neuron in the human brain has ~10^4 connections to nearby neurons. This makes it an insanely data-parallel computer. This PoS is a task parallel nightmare.
I get the impression that there is another benefit here. Each tenant has their own space to be responsible for. It's small enough to manage but maybe brings a sense of ownership that would be lacking in a regular municipal type shelter or shared apartment block.
Sorry I missed this due to unplugging for some snowboarding in Crested Butte. No, I didn't make Threes, but my friends and I have recently begun playing it.
I'm not familiar with the floorplan but it might be necessary to have an extra window or two to let more light in. At least one of the designs in the article power was limited to 80W of solar panels. Can't afford to waste anything on artificial light with those constraints.