skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to the article, Norway has a mere three thousand prisoners out of a population of four million. I really don't think America (which incarcerates people at about ten times that rate) could afford Norwegian style prisons.
(let* ((x 10)
(y x))
(+ x (incf x)))

vs

(let* ((x 10)
(y x))
(prog1
(+ x x)
(incf x)))

[INCF does it with side-effects, use 1+ or directly evaluate (+ 1 x) for the clean version]

Not everyone puts up with semantic ambiguity in operator precedence and evaluation. Some of us program in parse trees, directly :-)
What I meant was that the CLR does not support continuations of the type that makes call/cc possible, which is required to implement scheme.

It seems that IronScheme (Scheme on CLR) haven't found a solution for this issue: http://ironscheme.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId...

I may be wrong since I dont know F#, but I suspect continuations on F# is more limited than call/cc.
Nightingales if caged!
So go ahead and learn quantum mechanics.
Except this demo isn't rendered on a farm like the quake demo is, plus does caustics, global illumination and is more suitable for professional application than the quake demo is.
Reminds me of joining IBM Global Services a few years ago:

'The IPs that start with 9 are ours.'

'Sure? What's the full netblock you own?'

'9. All of it.'
Thanks, but I went to a religious High School and know everything necessary about Christian beliefs. Anyway, your ludicrous superstition does not gain credibility just because others can not be bothered to learn the exact details.

And well, yes, I suppose they do not like to be "slandered" in front of others. I don't remember suggesting they did. Their characters might not justify it, but they plainly explain it, or at least the motivation for it.
Techcrunch are they full of themselves?
They are taking a digg at Mike Arrington, this can only be bad for them!
Or find `real' humans to test. You can recruit students or so.
It should have 6 astronauts and I should be able to mouseover any of them to get a bio, current time in space and total time spent in space.

C- for effort.
OT:

Codeproject: teaching a generation of Win32 programmers the virtues of cut-and-paste "components". I have seen the same bug in two different projects, thanks to the same buggy article both original developers have read. CodeProject has a huge presence and visibility among Win32 programmers, but they have done nothing with their influence to improve the industry; the guy who runs it is happy living in his Canadian mansion and building his site on user generated content; most users there are freelancers trying to pad their resumes, and the result is a nightmare of a documentation site, marching in lockstep with MS's marketing department.

CodeProject could have easily become to the Windows world what O'Reilly is to Unix. Alas, they're Expert-Sex-Change sans the SEO; their model still follows their former competitors', ProgrammersHeaven.com, and both are due for some good SO'ing.
Oh this is very interesting. It is relevant for a P2P network architecture that I am working on. Thanks a trillion times for posting this -- I don't get enough time to keep up-to-date with what's being done in the academic world.
> but I really won't be surprised if someone will offer a multiple terabyte solid state drive within a decade.

I'll guess we will see them earlier. I already bought a 4 GB stick just a few months ago for less than ten Euro.
PF?
I'd love to know your input on this more. This whole comments thing isn't just to kill time before pg decides to pipe up.
That's an interesting viewpoint, but for a newspaper to write "Mexico legalizes drug addictions" would have been a strange, non-idiomatic, somewhat-loaded way to say things.

There's already a word appropriate for Mexico's half-step -- decriminalization -- and I'm happy to see that in the HN headline.
I predicted 21 and got 22 with gcc on mac. This is why I hack Haskell :)
My_Favourite_Compiler would compile "x + ++x" as a call to abort(3). I think "undefined behaviour" is a horrible idea.
NORML seems to only be concerned with marijuana law reform. From a marijuana standpoint, addiction is irrelevant. You can't get physically addicted to marijuana, and recreational users of cannabis are not sick; no more so than recreational non abusers of alcohol.
IBM and the New American Multinational | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com
I'm not that familiar with Kevin's and Jay's stories. Could you please enlighten me and let me know which of the two groups they belong and why? (Please feel free to email if you don't want to offend.)
My favourite compiler, would have a manual one page long. I should be able to read it and program 'hello world' in five minutes. It should come with about 40 primitives and leave the rest to me and its community!(It should also throw an error if you type y=x + ++x

:)
Still no extensions and API for notifications?

SSBs are quite cool - but only if you have something than a 'browser without the toolbars' - look at Fluid (mac) or Bubbles (windows).
A nice try, headingin the right direction but ending up in the ditch. Your analogy speaks of killing all the self-confessed communists you can find.

The attacks on Christian facebook accounts were a drop in the bucket, they were a few of the self-confessed Christians who happened to use the same name and password on Facebook that they did on a dating site, hardly all anyone could find.

The whole thing reminds me of skinhead teen-agers getting drunk and anonymously vandalizing homes with spray-paint at night. Hardly a blow to eradicate anything and much more like vandals desperately trying to dress up their lust for destruction in noble robes.
yes, "operator precedence" is of course the key
Sitting in front of a computer, they may be in the best place to get that help.
Firefox 3.5 is "location-aware"
This is perhaps a sign that "dollar earned" is a very poor metric for impact. I find it very disappointing to see presentations of Cool Project X which have as their second or third slide Monetization, when I wish things could often be justified because they make the world epsilon better.
"Acting badly towards an unpopular group is seldom frowned upon."

Your argument is disingenuous. Some groups are unpopular for good reason - because they do bad things, or make society worse for everyone else. When these groups are treated in a negative manner by society, it is proper and healthy, as it helps to discourage the groups spreading.

If you were to hear someone at a party loudly proclaiming the inherent criminal nature of blacks, would you afford him the normal respect upon encountering him later? Would you be terribly upset if you later heard that his web page had been hacked? I think not. He's not from just another group, one which happens to be randomly unpopular. He's from an inferior, dangerous, poisonous group and the more society can do to make such groups feel uncomfortable continuing in their ways, the better.

Christians, I'm afraid, are one of these groups. Even today, in 2009, they are continuing in their insane anti-science, anti-education campaign to throw the world back to the dark ages. Attempting to delegitimise evolution. Denying the fossil record and the age of the world, and by proxy all of geology, astronomy, and many other sciences. Campaigning against equal rights for gays. Opposing important medical research. Trying to weaken the boundary between (their) church and state. Encroaching on free expression. The list goes on and on.

It benefits society for damaging groups such as this to be reduced and one day eliminated. One of the tools we have to do this is that of humour/humiliation - to turn the group into a laughing stock. 4chan are simply the volunteer actors in this instance. You might not approve of their specific methods, but it's a job which needs to be done one way or the other and anything is better than nothing.

"Two millenia later, Christians are the new Christians."

Two millenia later, it's a disgrace upon humanity that there's still even such a thing as Christians. But yep - still whining.
nervous?
I'd go one step further: my favourite compiler would give a compile error on seeing that.
I don't think you can decouple the process of incarceration and the number of people incarcerated. If a functional penal system actually helps to curb society's fundamental problems rather than simply concentrating the undesirables, there's a feedback loop that affects the number of people incarcerated. In other words: fix the problem, don't just push it away.
Who Are US Policy Elites?
Interpreter, really:

>>> x = 10
>>> x + ++x
20

I suspect my other favorite compiler will say 'Type error: Could not match "Num a => a" against "Num a => [a] -> [a]"', but I don't want to wait for it to finish installing.
It is interesting I noticed that the NY Times seems to be doing some A/B testing around this. I Followed a link and was surprised to be able to read when I clicked on the second page link it told me to login. When my co worker went to this page he had to click past one of those big skip this advertisement pages but the article was all on one page and he didn't have to login.
I've met several people who told me they would like to become journalists, and they did not even have a blog. All they cared for was to appear in the respected newspapers.
That assumes OP is a hacker...that's not the vibe I get from the question.
The feature "display my position" is available in Google Maps. It is not when I use Safari 4.0.
That is the deal, in the "fairy tale" Jesus didn't go find the best guys, he just went out and found whoever was available. That your porn loving, upskirt looking, money loving, not so pretty self is destined to do more then spank the monkey, visit strip clubs, watch tv, and play video games is a suprise to most people. They don't know that they can change the world yet be broken themselves at the same time. Many people feel they must be perfect first (which is impossible) before they can go out do whatever they are drawn to (in the positive).
Make it a web app. Physical books are a thing of the past.
I kind of admire Mashable because one could argue that they have in fact done what every business hopes to do - start niche and then grow to serve a mainstream market/audience. There is however always a risk that in doing so you alienate the very audience you initially set-up to serve. But if as a business you are comfortable with that then that's ok.

I do feel however that because of its undeniable success on Twitter, Mashable tends to show a little bit of bias in favour of Twitter and sometimes against Twitter's biggest rival Facebook - just my opinion.
Think about how this is compiled. In machine language there are no nested expressions, so the compiler will have to split the expression up.

expression( ... ++x ... )

will probably be translated to

x = x+1;
expression( ... x ... )

This is the simplest way to compile ++x:

1. put x=x+1 before the expression
2. replace ++x with x

So I think most languages would get 22.

But in languages where + is a function there's a good chance you get 21.
Sneak peak on multitouch events (Firefox)
Finally someone can sit down and port OSX to web ... on the real side; What can multitouch help with in webapps? (Without conflicting with OSes and browsers behaviour for these actions).
I can picture some possibilities in gallery/image applications (triple click to tag? iphone-zoom? ...)
Why Evony server down yesterday?
Figures, you rarely find someone as bigoted as your appear to be who didn't have an ax to grind against some nuns or something or other. The truth of any idea (and the way people should be treated because of it) is not affected by others ignorance about it, but your ability to discuss it rationally is.

And well, yes, I suppose they do not like to be "slandered" in front of others. I don't remember suggesting they did

Really? your useing that tact?:

Hell, isn't being oppressed what religious people like?

Seriously, I'm done with you. :rolls eyes:
Modern Western penal systems assume that everyone can be rehabilitated. They are in the state they are now because that isn't actually true. In the old days people understood this, and that's what penal colonies were for.
yup, that's python alright. Very odd behaviour
y is 22. But my favourite imaginary compiler doesn't allow you to compile the second statement unless 1. your IQ is above a certain threshold 2. you explained in a comment - why?...
Java's result is 21

gcc says 22 and it gives you a warning, that this expression is illegal, we looked it up, because you cannot use a variable which is ++incremented more than once in the same expression.
That "comment" is called parentheses :)
You know... It's only now that it's archaic. By its time, the Apple II was cutting edge personal computing.

And I second your fear. Most programmers I meet have not but the shallowest understanding of the architectures they write for.
BrainPort allows people to "see" via their tongues
Humans can't learn quantum mechanics. Humans can, at best, get used to it.

Understanding it requires at least one brain with at least 8 dimensions and human brains have only 4. It also helps if your sensory organs are evenly spread across all 8 dimensions.
# let x = 10;;
val x : int = 10
# let y = x + ++x;;
Error: Syntax error

Hmm. Let's try that again:

# let x = ref 10;;
val x : int ref = {contents = 10}
# let y = !x + incr x;;
Error: This expression has type unit but an expression was expected of type int

So nothing, I guess!
Also presented in an article from SciAm: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=device-lets...

I wonder if eating something with a strong taste later on causes any "visual" effects.
He did say "packaged", which is rather different from "installed".
The videos are very interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCk22AaRxiE

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

Also, the discussions on /. are always... entertaining.
Sounds plausible, but I don't think it's true.

Compilers don't magically filter assignments out of expressions. The compiler already has the parse tree (+ x (1+ x)), and the arguments are pushed on the stack in reverse order because that's consistent with function calls (in c++ when you were to overload operator+ nothing would change, I suspect). So first 1+ x is evaluated and the value of x is updated, and the number 22 is returned.

Or to illustrate with a stack machine:

PUSH X
INC
STORE X
PUSH X
ADD
STORE Y

But the whole discussion is still silly, because the whole deal is undefined in any sane language (and for good reason). Unless variables become immutable you can't really prevent this kind of ambiguity from occurring, so it's no big deal.
Yup, that's the better answer- we need a flag for 'Major Update' and a flag for 'Rush Submission' in the case of an update that has to go out quickly. If we had two rush's a year (per account) and one major per six months then that would go a long, long ways to fixing the system.
Is there a way for it not to guess my position? I happen to have a desktop computer that´s very hard to move.
8 Healthy Foods You Should Eat Everyday
Java: "Regardless of their complexity, the meanings of expressions are allways well defined."

That's why you can infer that y = 21 in Java.

Would you call Java insane for that?
The second link is very interesting. What crimes against "public order" are people committing? Wikipedia suggests that prostitution, statutory rape, and DUI are all in the category. (I would guess that DUI comprises the bulk of their public order crime number then, but maybe they count that under drug crime instead?)
++x in python parses as +(+(x))
Ask HN: How to estimate (best case) early user growth?
How do you estimate/predict a new startup's growth? A lot of potential investors want to see numbers like this in a model - and establishing some 'upper bounds' on growth would be helpful for planning technology as well.

I would love to see approximate early growth numbers (first 1-2 years) for social web applications (ideally popular/successful ones, but anything would be helpful). My application is addressing a relatively new market with a large potential appeal (think Craigslist, Ebay, Google, Yelp, Youtube, etc. in their early days), but numbers in different spaces would be helpful as well.

If anyone would be willing to share some numbers for iPhone or Android Applications, I would be grateful as well.

Thanks for the help.
If the goal is to reduce gasoline consumption I'd suggest

* banning futures trading on oil world-wide.
* provide free public transportation.
What are your numbers so far?
Algorithm to predict future changes in plant populations ...
We are prelaunch, so no numbers yet. We are doing a small 'soft launch' in a few weeks (I'll mention it here when the time comes) - but the business guys could use a hand estimating 'best case' numbers (some potential partners, investors, etc. are interested).

Incidentally it would also help me figure out if my back-of-napkin load-testing numbers are in the right ballpark.

I know this is a bit premature for me, but the question piqued my curiosity and I couldn't find very much written about it (please feel free to correct me if my Google-fu is lacking).
Ultrathin LEDs Create New Classes Of Lighting
Have you launched something yet? Paid service? Free? Freemium? Without launching and looking at real, initial numbers just assume you'll be like 99% of the startups out there and get none. That's what your potential jnvestors will do until they see some real numbers.

Seriously, get something real, prove you're on to something, and THEN talk numbers with investors. You've got a bigtime uphill battle without at least one solid proof point. Get that, and then hockeystick that sucker up!
Urmia salty lake
My understanding is that the DMCA says that when a site receives a take down notice they have to take down the content immediately and notify the poster. If the poster chooses the contest the take down notice, the service can put the content back up while the supposed-copyright-holder and poster fight things out in court. In return the service isn't liable for what users post.

Thus, RateMyMD.com doesn't get to fight the copyright infringement notice - the poster does.
Vietnam Open Tourist News : Vietnam Open Tourist
x=S+e^(t*0.05)

where S = web sexiness factor

and t = time (weeks)
I have to echo this as well. Most products have a flat line, with perhaps a spike from publicity.
Ouch. SQL injections and plaintext passwords? Someone hired their nephew to do backend programming.
Unless you accidentally publish your private key online (longshot, but still).
Completely free.

I agree with you - we won't be raising money till after we launch and (hopefully) gain some traction. But one of our founders is handling the business side of things and really wants to get at least some rough numbers now.
Given his considerable business experience (and the lack of downside to letting him create his model), it sounds like a reasonable request. Rather than have him pull the numbers out of his head, I thought it would be better to do some research.

Don't worry, all our technical people (myself included) are completely focused on making the product as great as possible for launch! And, for what it's worth, we are following a very quick schedule - just two or three months of part time development before we launch and start iterating on user feedback.
I am not sure what "kicking an addiction" means but in my case I managed to reducing my there are so many files, all free, I must have them all by abandoning torrents mostly and getting a small block quota (never expiring Gigabytes). Now I think before downloading and weigh in if I really want it and if I could just multiple up the price a bit and normally buy it instead.
Necessity, cooperation and Cuba
I agree with @tom's sentiment here. Though I would like to add something, just as a note to you. If you have 'investors' that are interested in those estimates, you should probably rethink the wisdom of doing business with them.

The portion of your post that indicated that potential investors were interested in the numbers threw a red flag up for me.
The accidental entrepreneur.. how some are handling the recession
I think it's just informal interest. One of our founders has a lot of VC friends/ex-colleagues and he just wants to be ready for our launch in a few weeks. We won't be raising money that early, but it seems like he can talk to some people and get us on their radar earlier than normal (so they know us (and we know them) for when we are ready).

I'm willing to defer to the business-founder with experience on this matter.
Title is a bit misleading. This is a project hosted on google code. Also this requires flash to do the rendering.
This kid has major emotional and behavioral problems, and I don't think they're going away any time soon.

I didn't buy into the tone of the writing, which had a lot more pity and sympathy for him than I bet his victims have. And I found his self-image deeply tied to his "abilities" -- and it probably will be for life. And I also found this kid to be a cruel tyrant, ready to use whatever abilities he had to force other people to his will, laughing the entire time.

I'm not optimistic about this kid.
Wireless Electricity that can charge up devices from a metre away
Assuming he is a moderately competent journalist that has done his homework about the subject he is writing about, he's aware of this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777010
It seems a bit closer to a quarter than $100.
Right now we use cheap Asian manual labor for assembling clothing and electronics. This hand looks pretty accurate, anyone able to estimate how much current manual labor is replaceable?
Optimal Design Performance Under Stress
Re: Tipjoy's Series A. Multiple reports pegged it at $1M.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/24/tipjoy-raises-1-million...
http://www.thedeal.com/dealscape/technology/angel-investor/e...
Are you saying those reports are wrong? Or that the company didn't call down the entire round?

Re: Comments. I reached out to Ivan and Abby more than 24 hours before I published the story. I understand why they'd be reluctant to respond, and I told them that.

I appreciate the back and forth on this board -- Paul's comments have been particularly enlightening -- but I'm going to bow out now. Please contact me directly if you have specific comments or questions. Thanks. pk
I'm surprised this field hasn't moved forward as much as I thought. If memory serves me correctly, I remember being shown a cuda based real time ray tracer, with similar limitations by a masters student in early 2007. They ran into lot's of troubles because of the architecture of cuda itself (e.g. maximum occupancy was never very high on average), but could produce stunning realtime visuals at low framerate (e.g. 640x480). Not different from these guys at all. At higher resolutions it was much, much harder as the solutions didn't scale because of the limitations of cuda.

I expected to see him presenting his stuff at siggraph but never did - not sure what happened to him, and an internet search reveals nothing.
Why Steal Music When You Can Stream It?
> When these groups are treated in a negative manner by society, it is proper and healthy, as it helps to discourage the groups spreading.

Can you back that up? My impressions is that mob persecution of unpopular groups typically only makes them stronger and more comitted (as long as you don't perform outright genocide against the group, of course).

Anyway, you jump from disagreement with a viewpoint (criminal nature of blacks, creationism) to the conclusion that a group is "poisonous" and deserves any kind of random harassment and persecution from the anonymous mob. I don't know what this line of thought is called in English, but I don't think it is something nice. If I happen to disagree with your line of thought (and indeed find it dangerous to society), would that make it okay for me to throw rocks through your windows in the middle of the night?

(Just read your profile: "Part of the cancer that is killing Hacker News". I suspect I have been trolled. This is why we cant have nice things.)