skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Call Perl from Python

This is an oldie but a goodie, but a lot of bad programmers don't realize they can make their Python code even worse, if they embed a bunch of untested, legacy, Perl code in it. There is a Perl/Python module that makes this a snap.

Yes, throw in a Perl slight for good measure. A surer way of endearing yourself to your fellow Pythonistas, I know of not. This is not unlike what happens on reddit.com/r/programming, where an opportunity to sneer at Java is never missed, and every kind soul you encounter will gladly regale you with tales of the imaginary programs they claim to have written in Haskell or Lisp.

Perl, that miserable little unwanted orphan of a language, has real anonymous, first-class functions complete with closures. Python, sadly, does not, and that is an undeniable, glaring defect in the language. And for what reason? Because its Benevolent Dictator for Life decreed that functional programming--even in the greatly-diluted form in which one finds it in mainstream languages--is bad and "unpythonic"--heretical, essentially. He recently lashed out against tail call optimization, and before that attempted to exile some Lisp constructs that had been resident in the language for many years, but back-peddled as soon as his subjects threatened to revolt.

When Python catches up to Perl, Ruby, Javascript and every other decent dynamic language in this department, then you can condemn Perl as much as you like. Until that time, hold your tongue.
That depends if you're asking a garden-variety follower of the cyclic faith (no), or a radical cyclist (yes).
I'm pretty sure the battery->electric motor conversion is a more efficient use of energy than the food->muscle->pedal conversion, so no, it's not lame.
All the existing data says it is largely inherited
One point is graphing did not begin and end with Tufte.
> The concept of "free memory" on a modern system also makes no sense. RAM that is not used is wasted.

The problem is that the iPhone OS tends to have issues with releasing memory especially in high-pressure situations e.g. games. It's quite frequent that out of the ~60MB non-OS RAM of a 3G a game only gets to use 10~20MB, and lags (or even crashes for the most intense ones) because of that. The initial "solution" was to reboot the damn phone in order to kill the MobileMail and MobileSafari background processes.

"Free memory" functions give users the ability to kill those without having to restart the phone, which far shorten the time it takes to "reclaim" all your ram and be in an ideal position to launch a demanding game.

And apple's ripping on WiMo's task manager comes to bite the users's asses.
> In the mean time all background apps are zapped which includes Mail, iPod, ...

Yeah but if Mail (and Safari, of all apps) didn't stay running in the background the low mem issue wouldn't happen in the first place…
PayPal also grew this way, with collateral damage - until they were slapped with several class action lawsuits, which went through, and (I believe?) they ended up being at least partially classified as a bank. Or threatened with being classified as a bank. Something to that order.

In any event, they really had to clean up their act.

That's going to happen with Google, too, I would expect, and there's no way they are going to be surprised.

If you ask me, it's no different than a chemical manufacturing company deciding that it is more cost-effective to pay the EPA fines than to clean up their act. It's about pure numbers.

That is a point of view I will never condone.
I love, love that they decided to analyze the human in terms of being a really inefficient battery. Hopefully when the machines build the Matrix they will consult this as a reference.
> They removed ALL of them not just this one.

They missed a bunch of them then. Memory Status is still up for instance.
Common Lisp is already quite fast and dynamic. And for the same number of hacker-hours spend in optimizing, you probably get a larger speedup. Also Python+C can be quite a fast combo. Fast to develop and fast to execute. Forth is also quite fast and dynamic, if you grok it.

A lot of functional programming languages have also become quite fast in the last decade. While there are in a sense more fluid than C++, they are normally considered static (and not dynamic) languages.

If you want to compare asymptotic speeds where programmer-hours invested goes to infinity, the lower level languages will probably always win. Like assembler, C or C++.

For benchmarks see: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
How real is the threat of autonomous technology?
Most of the web designs look great! How did everyone manage to put together such sharp looking sites?

I'll just tell myself they had designers so I don't feel to badly about my design skills (i'm a programmer) :)
You can find out more in Warren Buffett's bio:

http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/snowball/

Warren is also a good friend/father figure of Bill Gates. Gates was a major influence on Buffet in the philanthropy area and hence the reason Buffett is donated all his money to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

They have some interesting views on society. Warren's Ovarian Lottery idea is interesting. If he were born in Bangladesh could he still be the world's richest man? Probably not, so those that make it in America owe something to America for the framework that allowed them to be wealthy. This is the first time "giving back" actually made sense to me.
I sympathize with the author's dislike for C++ and while you can't argue that dynamic languages "could" at some point in the future be faster than C++, it's very unlikely to happen since one of the requirements for this kind of speed is for a language to be statically typed. Without type information, the compiler is left with very few options to optimize the generated code.
The correlation between parental income and IQ also holds for adopted kids, which makes it hard to blame genetics:
http://bit.ly/2RzLIp
The amount of time they spent saying "read teh GPLs" they could have easily spent saying: You EULA is wrong, you need x, y, z. They've done the work to find out he's violating but unlike their source they're not sharing why he's violating.

I think it is a bit unfair to expect everyone to know the score all the time. A lot of us humans are pretty rubbish. To be honest I think there is a certain amount of vitriol in their writing that makes me think they are enjoying the feeling of superiority and making the guy squirm. Sure they have the moral high ground but they drag themselves down towards his level with their attitude.
Boy is that false. http://bit.ly/2RzLIp

Edit: full URL is http://books.google.com/books?id=YdnK_PLtDVQC&pg=PA33...
Buy somebody lunch
Er, prions, viruses, bacteria, runaway breakout of monoculture -- these things use up resources, and have the potential to cause great harm. It's just that few of them are likely to rise to the level of existential threat, while in the field of recursively self-improving AI, the likelihood is strongly the other way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/killervirus.html
What surprises me most about these graphs is how relatively flat they are!

Let's pretend for a moment that the distribution of SAT scores across income strata would be identical if all kids were forced to take the test. Given that a much greater percentage of wealthy kids take the SAT and the probability one takes it likely increases along with his expected score, you would think the correlation would be the inverse of the NYT graph. If a wealthy child is an idiot, his parents will encourage him to take the test in hope that some college somewhere will accept him. But, a dumb poor kid probably dropped out of school before he had a chance to even take the SAT. So, the positive correlation in the NYT article suggests a much greater disparity of test taking ability (and all that it might imply) than just the slope of the graph naively implies.
My introduction to Kurzweil was this lecture he gave at MIT in 2005:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/327/

I then read The Singularity is Near.

I tend to agree more with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Michael Anissimov than Kurzweil about this stuff, but the video above is still worth watching (much much better than his TED video, which was too short to allow him to make his main points).
Wow, Rubinius that's certainly a blast from the past. Its great that the project is still ongoing.

I especially like the link at the bottom of the post to the Rubinius book tour http://bit.ly/1wVU4 aka what you can read to fully understand or design a Rubinius.

Faster speed is always good. However, my interest in Rubinius is more of a learning thing. Its really cool to be able to check the implementation of class 'Class' http://bit.ly/fCyIw when you need to or fully understand how some underlying algorithms implemented in the language are put together in just plain old Ruby code (not C).
Having a big hill as part of a commute and bad knees is a perfectly reasonable use case.
There is huge difference between saying

1. Smart parents -> Give their kids more exposure -> More Exposure and guidance make the kids smart

2. Smart parents -> kids inherit their smartness.

Greg was talking about genes , or case 2, and not case 1. which is what I think is unsubstantiated.
There's one thing about it that surprises me a little: the comparatively big jump moving between the $180k-$200k and the $200k+ categories. Sure, that last category includes the veryveryvery rich as well as the merely quite rich, but I'd have expected -- wrongly, perhaps -- that both the link between (parents') intelligence and wealth, and the ability of wealth to purchase better education (in a broad sense). would be showing diminishing returns by that point.

Perhaps it's just a statistical artefact: the last category is relatively small. On the other hand, the absolute numbers are pretty big.
Key passage from the article:

"Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)"

"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."
First, please don't use shortened URLs.

Second, here's a few counterpoints:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090317142841.ht...

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/12/us/study-raises-the-estima...
Thanks for the pointer

--Steve
Wow, talk about overreacting. The guy didn't say anything about money; it sounds like he's just trying to figure out how to find developers.
Great looking site, and a neat app.

From the title I expected that the service would push the video to YouTube, Myspace, Vimeo, etc. (i.e. superdistribution), which would be more useful to me. Are there a lot of content producers who don't want their videos to spread?

Congrats on finishing a cool app in 2 days, and best of luck in the competition!
The problem is that the support channel is a black hole. There's no way of knowing where your request is in the queue. Has it been reviewed? dismissed? do you need to be more patient? should you submit it again?

What about starting with giving out the average response time and queue length when submitting a request? That'd be a good first step...
Why call Perl from Python?

Why not just do everything in Perl?

This is an awful lot of invective from one paragraph that, personally, implies an itinerant bad programmer migrating from 'cool language' to 'new cool language' and carting along everything he'd written before.

On another note, everyone seems to love anonymous, first-class functions with closures, and yet they never give nontrivial examples - what am I missing out on?
(For that matter, I still haven't seen what TCO offers that is new, but that was April's issue.)

[edit: http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependabil... indicates that it doesn't bring anything- any counter offers?]
How to run a Linux based home web server
The Kindle's biggest problem is its "Hotel California"-content model: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

I'm a new Kindle ower, and I love the device. I think Amazon is going to dominate the market for the next few years.

Having said that, the DRM and walled garden they've created sucks big time. I'm ready to move to a better touchscreen device the instant one comes out that doesn't have all the DRM but has the same or better specs.
But this is built on top of your zencoder product? So this really wasn't done in 48 hours?
this is only tangentially related to the article and i don't even know if this is possible:

i'd love to see an attachment of some sort that you can install onto a bike and can produce an output able to recharge laptops and cell phones. i couldn't find anything with this capability based on a quick search.
Most people use progressive HTTP. And a lot of CDN's support that now (bitgravity, panther/CDNetworks).
The iPhone will start selling in China, with China Unicom as Carrier, Q4 2009
Assuming parents adopt at random...?
Your text on the main page needs help. You said it right above but on your site you have "Do you tweet? Sure you are." which makes no sense.

The site overall doesn't look very professional (which will make people not trust you).

I can see the use but then I already use cotweet which has this baked right in.
Or maybe poor people value something other than intelligence. This argument works for both heritable and learned attributes.
All the existing data says it is largely inherited

The existing data say "partly" rather than "largely." There is still a substantial influence of environmental factors found in any study of "broad heritability" (which is a characteristic of groups, not of individuals) of IQ. And at the individual level, there is a very large malleability of IQ through the best known interventions. Important data showing the powerful effect of environmental influences on IQ include the trends in raw scores on IQ tests over time in most countries of the world, resulting in the need to renorm IQ tests every half generation or so.

All these data and more can be found cited to primary sources in Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count by Richard E. Nisbett,

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-How-Get-Schools-Cultures/...

a recently published book that is well worth a read.
Did you mean photons?
the Plastic Logic device is apparently going to be what Android is to the iPhone [where iPhone == Kindle]
An answer to the second would be a system pointing out people's replies to themselves.
I guess he's not a systems programmer. What language did Slava Pestov turn to when he recently re-wrote Factor's VM?

C++ programmers: we do the dirty work so you don't have to.
The graph shows the central tendency of scores (the median score) for each self-reported income range. As I posted in my first reply here, it is regrettable that College Board doesn't simply report a scatter plot of all score levels found in all self-reported income ranges.
That's not a problem with left-wing ideology. It's a problem with ideology.
That's too bad you had a bad experience there. I've always found the Valencia Cyclery people to be very helpful and friendly. I, too, was clueless in the beginning, and they helped me get up to speed by letting me ride basically every bike in their store.
Food is solar power except for transportation, so that isn't the appropriate comparison.
It's actually built on FlixCloud, which is built on Zencoder. http://www.flixcloud.com/

In the Rails Rumble you can build your app using any external services available to everyone. Half the apps were built on the Twitter API.
Try to take a corner on that particular bike and you will get a short and unpleasant lesson in angular momentum and the gyroscope effect...
More RAM always makes me happy.
I've been biking everywhere for a couple of years on $250-$500 bikes, so I disagree with your coworker, especially for an occasional use bike.
So...

1. You shouldn't leave it up to some third party to keep your information up to date across multiple websites. Therefore;

2. You should delegate your ISP (a third party) to keep your information up to date across multiple websites.

:/
Fully agree about perverse incentives in search result / ranking, but do not think it applies in nearly the same way when there's a business relationship, such as adwords etc.
I love how the only actual example they give is one in which the problem was effectively created by humans interfering. :/
You really don't know how food is produced, do you? Try reading up a bit on the subject to see just how much energy is required to get a calorie of food energy to your mouth (quick hint: the most commonly used forms of plant-ready nitrogen fertilizer are almost completely derived from oil.)
Indeed. So many of these articles can be boiled down to:

"As long as we limit the comparison to things (our language) does well, and exclude things C/C++ do that (our language) can't do at all, (our language) totally 0wnz C/C++".
This has already been covered: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788409
Am I the only one who thinks Mountain Dew is nasty? But then again, I rarely drink soda. Real, brewed, root beer, OTOH... mmm.

As for PopTarts? Well, I probably bought my last dentist a nice boat. Not going there again!

Not to sound elitist or anything, but the last time my palette was this simplistic, I was about 12 or so.

And what's wrong with beer at work? A nice cold Vanilla Porter would make most meetings a lot more fun!
Indeed, these statistical surveys are telling you less than you already know.

They might have heuristic value, though: you might not previously have looked through your own experience to see if durable goods or experiences brought you more pleasure.
Not if you keep it level enough, which should be feasible on a four-wheeler. I mean, the gyrobus shows that it's not a infeasible concept - they still let people ride it sometimes here in Antwerp, as a curiosity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus
The canonical anti-C++ link for me has to be http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ - pretty thorough and reasonably well argued.
one of the requirements for this kind of speed is for a language to be statically typed

No, one of the requirements for static optimization is that a language be statically typed. It does not follow that there are no ways to make dynamic languages fast, just that they mostly have to use different techniques.
Swear the pain away: study finds swearing alleviates pain
I cut off the age vs income plot at 100k because otherwise it would severely compress the points where it would be really hard to discern anything from it. There are people who reported over 100K.
Ousterhout of Tcl fame has a very nice (and surprisingly old) paper about this. http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html
Or gold which is even heavier.
It is a bit odd about content and blogosphere engagement.

That being said, I think that having great (or at least good) content is a part of what leads to increased engagement with the blogosphere. I don't think it's necessarily easy to separate the two cleanly. Not that there aren't other aspects to blogosphere interaction as well, of course.
I didn't even notice, I guess it is some sort of bug (or "feature") with excel, because the data driving that chart is correct. The numbers are in the correct order (increasing in 5K increments), but the second half has a zero clipped for some reason.
it turns something that people shouldn't have to do (contact Google for support) into a source of revenue

That's why the model stipulates that [the money] is refundable in the case where there's a genuine grievance
Thanks! (I'm one of the programmers)

Yeah, that kind of stuff definitely is in the pipeline, as is just adding lots more data. We felt from the beginning that is was the linking between the datasets that was most interesting. Unfortunately, we found this much more challenging once we started trying to do it since there is surprisingly little standardization in how different agencies report things.

Longer-term we're hoping to try to crowd source this kind of thing. So say you found the material safety data for toluene, you could link that up.

Anyway, thanks for checking it out!
Yeah, the judges were mostly nice and gentle, and they had to back up their votes with comments. The public voting round isn't going to grant any leniency, since if someone doesn't like something, they'll just 1111 it.
What's dangerous is that people are letting the military, politicians and the cybersecurity industry raise the hype and fear about the online world. That will only feed their budgets and militarize the internet. Remember the hype around Conficker and "cyberwar" in Estonia. Neither, in hindsight, meant anything. Good network security practices for the government? Sure! A secretive government internet security program run by the NSA and DHS and a Pentagon botnet? No, no, no.
Hm. I generally get away with spending about 30 GBP on second-hand bikes, or 90GBP on a new bike (some assembly required) to great effect.

I can't see the appeal of riding around in lycra and helmet, fantasizing about being a racer though. Bike is just an alternative form of getting from A to B, pleasant in mild weather, on relatively flat roads and over not to long distances.
Ask HN: What strategy would you take to build a search engine today?
If you were to begin working on a search startup from scratch today, what strategy would you take? I'm thinking the best route would be to focus on a specific niche and tailor the search features around that topic since you wouldn't be able to compete on breadth.

What would you do?
More than 10 years ago Jeffrey Mark Siskind posted micro benchmark [1] of his aggressively optimizing Stalin Scheme compiler versus then-current GCC. Stalin produced code 21 time faster than GCC.

I do not know why this fact remains so little-known.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9801ba2edd...
I went from a 1340 to a 1520 after a Kaplan course when I was in high school. On the average, massive score improvements are rare, but there are definitely some test prep teachers who can consistently get better score improvements from students. The secret is tailoring your approach to different students' needs. I always looked at the types of questions my students got wrong to identify patterns. If you can fix a bad habit you can get bigger score gains with less effort. My best success story was a student who went from a 980 to a 1420 (out of 1600). That's about 50th percentile to 95th percentile. Another student went from hoping to meet the NCAA minimum for a baseball scholarship to getting an academic full ride. The last student I taught almost beat my score...I took the new SAT in 2005 along with him and he got a 2180 out of 2400 (I got a 2280...99th percentile).