skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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.

If he had meant only that and meant nothing more, he wouldn't have singled out Perl, or he would have done so in a more tactful manner. And ask yourself, is this really a big problem? How often have you actually seen someone embed Perl (or any other language) in Python? Why is that admonition sandwiched between remarks on unit testing and maintaining control flow?

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?

Spend some time with a language that not only supports them but actually encourages their use, and you will see for yourself. For example, both Smalltalk and Ruby make heavy use of blocks, and because of that classes can be written to allow users to greatly customize their behavior without the need of subclassing.

(For that matter, I still haven't seen what TCO offers that is new, but that was April's issue.)

TCO allows programs to, in certain circumstances, reuse existing stack frames for possibly many function invocations. For example, if a function is written to be tail recursive, a VM with TCO could reuse the same stack frame for each recursive function invocation until the terminating condition is reached, at which point the last return value is caught and the frame is popped off the stack. (TCO isn't strictly limited to making tail recursion more efficient, but that is its most often cited benefit.)

The main reason Guido and his Pythonistas have no use for TCO is that they also have no use for recursion. If Python supported TCO, more recursive Python code would probably be written--and that would be very unpythonic.
The Biochemistry of Searching the Internet
Last year it was estimated they had revenue at 350 and expenses at 500.
This is the game developer's issue -- on the iPhone, you must avoid extreme memory pressure and ramp up your usage gradually enough to allow the OS to exit background applications.

I wouldn't be surprised if "Free Memory" functionality was a placebo in the vast number of cases: the number jumps from 4 megabytes to 20 megabytes, isn't that an improvement? Never you mind all those cached pages the OS just dropped.

In the cases where it's not a placebo, it's a bug in the original application. If "free memory" functionality allows you to work around that bug, I can see how you would be frustrated with its removal from App Store applications.

Of course, as stupid as I think it is to charge money for a malloc()+bzero() in a loop, I still don't think Apple should be censoring applications.
Per the email sent back to m

"
The ad posted on craigslist regarding this rental to which you havereplied was not posted by a property owner, landlord, property manager, or real estate leasing agent. It was posted by an affiliate who is making commissions by referring applicants to etenant-apps.com. "

This came from:
yvonegrbrubakery@gmail.com
jeffreyjensen83@gmail.com
raymundohiggins5@gmail.com
Hehehe, one thing is having my own server (which I have, CUPS, LAMP, Samba) and another thing is using it outside my private home network.

Although I have LAMP and make my things locally I prefer to "outsource" my hosting to someone else.
related note: http://code.google.com/p/mail-trends/ provides great insights into our own and the recipients' mailing trends
Don't you mean statically bound? I think quite a few C++ programmers get into the mindset that once the program has compiled that's the end of the optimisation. It depends on the system that is being run, but if the system has a long runtime: ongoing optimisation may bring about better performance over time. This is particularly true given how many bad C++ programmers there are (which is partly down to the language learning curve).

Strict typing was mostly about trapping programming errors at compilation rather than runtime. Perhaps something despite all the effort C++ has struggled to improve defect count through typing (C++ systems often fail for far more obscure reasons, and the strict typing can cause hideous compile-time errors).
My brother is a real cycling enthusiast - so I've traveled with him a bit and met the cycling community all over. Your experience seems very typically west-coast-big-city.

Just be aware that this isn't the same everywhere. That being said, California seems to have a hipster culture that not even NYC can rival - and hipsters in general are not the most inclusive bunch.
Yes -- the API (host_statistics() on Darwin) is in the public headers and is not private.

Of course, it wasn't the ability to show free memory that they removed, rather, the ability to trigger OS low memory handling by allocating (nearly) all available free memory.
You need to make languages fast on both dimensions, static and dynamic. A dynamically typed language can only be optimized in one dimension, which is why they usually trail behind statically typed languages in performances (since those are optimized along both axes).
This is always the danger when you give humans autonomy.
Yes, that's what I meant. Quicktime streaming, too. Basically providing a way to jump around in a video, even if the video hasn't been been buffered to the point you want to play.

Again, nice looking site and service!
I hear good stories about D from colleagues:

http://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/overview.html
That's cheating :)
It's nice to have a dev server at home though.

I recently put together a new machine - an MSI Wind (the cheap one, $160) + 2gb ram ($20) + a OCZ Vertex 32gb SSD ($100). It's quite nice, fast, silent, and consumes 25 watts at idle.
Extremely harsh laws branding and shaming sex offenders for life seem very easy for politicans to pass, and wildly popular. Once they're passed, as the article noted, it's hard to imagine anyone mustering the political willpower to strike them down.

From the perspective of someone pretty young - why are these laws being instituted now, instead of, say, a hundred years ago? What's changed? Is it simply a matter of finally having enough central organization to actually effectively track and monitor them?
Well, a lot of cyclists say it's good for the environment (therefore more bikes = better). Others say it's healthy (and therefore everybody should do it).

Of course, they could just be dicks and say they don't care if other people start cycling. In which case, they don't get to wear helmet stickers touting their "zero emissions vehicle" or complain about SUV drivers.

Either they need to be more friendly about getting more people on bikes or stop sneering at people who don't have them. They can't have it both ways.
yeah it's lame. The human body is infinitely more efficient than battery technology we have.

You are basically a supercomputer, if you're lucky you get atleast 30,000 charge cycles over your lifetime, and the waste you generate is biodegradable.
I agree. If all the guy brought the table was a couple bucks for food, I wouldn't want to take lunch with him. The guy can't be an empty suit. Good stories and laughs are always welcome at my table.
C++ hits a certain sweet spot. In some cases - whether you like it or not - it's just the right tool for the job. Two examples I can think of are:

* VM implementations (I mentioned Factor, but also HotSpot, Microsoft's CLR, SquirrelFish, TraceMonkey, V8 and Opera's Carakan are all high-performance VMs written in C++ (x). Note also that all major layout engines are written in C++. Complex but fast and highly-tuned beasts)

* Production rendering. PRMan, MentalRay and pretty much every other renderer in day-to-day use on film and video post-production are written in C++.

People who write these systems care deeply about performance. They'll dip into assembly when they have to. While fast, C won't cut it because in these cases, it doesn't give you enough abstraction to avoid making your code a mess (strong typing, operator overloading and templates in particular, but also virtual method dispatch)*. I'm sure if you ask them, they'd tell you that they'd love to use something nicer and more modern. But it doesn't yet exist.

This is not to say that C++ is the right tool for writing web applications, or even the average desktop application, or even - increasingly these days - games. But somebody needs to write the stack underneath, and that stack needs to be fast.

(x) note Mono as an example of a VM that sticks with C. But it contains a lot of object-oriented shennanigans that probably could be better expressed in C++, and the core developers came from a strong C culture.
Yep. We had an awesome designer working with our team. He mocked all the pages up after discussing our ideas, then cut then up perfectly for html/css (button sprites, background images, etc).

Wouldn't have been nearly as good without him.
I don't think #1 is as cut-and-dry as you're making it out to be. It depends on how you squint - you could just as easily say that you're selling it to the companies who are paying for the ads, and that both parties are hiring Google to mediate that relationship.
Is it possible that one thing that has changed is the media/entertainment world?

Most of what people know about people who commit sex crimes comes from movies and the evening news, and is not representative of the vast majority (90%+ ?) of people who end up on these lists.

Same with people in prison. People imagine that it's a bunch of murderers and career criminals, while it's mostly pot smokers and non-violent offenders.
Fake Web sites offer free versions of Snow Leopard
Alright. Who's the 26yr. old with 900k income?
Because a hundred years ago 40 year old men married 12 year old girls.
They don't seem to work very well:

>>> def foo():
... blah = 42
... def wibble():
... print "blah is " + blah
... wibble()
...
>>> foo()
blah is 42

Great! Looks like we have real closures!

>>> def foo():
... blah = 42
... def wibble():
... blah += 1
... wibble()
... print "blah is " + blah
...
>>> foo()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 5, in foo
File "<stdin>", line 4, in wibble
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'blah' referenced before assignment

Oh. Maybe not.
Why Excel beats iCal for to-dos on the Mac
So, you don't use a C++ compiler for your C code?

The old C infrastructure is really outdated already -- you can use C and a very limited subset of C++ (without OO), and be perfectly happy.
It would only be useful to me if it removed duplicates. Otherwise, what's the point? It's just seeing the same thing twice.
I can't help feeling that Common Lisp should be doing better, considering that it's a language where you can effectively tell the compiler "It's OK to store this variable in a register". It's currently doing about the same as Mono, which IIRC doesn't JIT, and worse than Java.

The king of dynamic language performance right now is LuaJIT, which crushes Perl, Python, and Ruby and performs admirably relative to Smalltalk and Scheme.
Misuse: the shutdown switch or codes aren't properly secured and Foreign Enemy X shuts down your country's internet throwing it into chaos.

Introducing systemic weakness isn't the answer when you're trying to strengthen your network, strengthening your network is the answer.
To clarify: Valencia Cyclery is where I had the least problems. It was all the other stores that sneered at me (especially Pedal Revolution, who looked at me like I was a space alien when I asked for bikes under $500).

I find even at VC it varies from employee to employee; some are super-friendly and helpful while others are a little stand-offish.
Motorola SLVR L7 Black Deluxe 
Featuring Motorola SLVR L7 Black Deluxe Pack Reconditioned, including lots of outflank features. You can access high speed internet via WAP 2.0/xHTML with GPRS connectivity. It has also enabled Bluetooth and USB connectivity for data transfer. Email, Instant Messaging, EMS are some new messaging features. Take picture and capture video with VGA camera alongwith 640×480 pixels resolution. It has also 11MB internal memory while you can also expand memory further with microSD
This should be part of a required reading regimen for anyone about to post yet another 'Bullshit Study Reveals Whimsical Quirk' article.
Weird question, but how did he go about offering to buy?

Offering to buy someone lunch can be a little awkward, especially in situations where it isn't usually done. My hypothesis is that they way someone pulls this off is the differentiator between whether it seems authentic or phony.
Mostly pot smokers and non-violent offenders.

Citation needed. My father works in a medium-security prison, and it is exactly as "people imagine".
I am still somewhat new to the sport, but I consider myself a serious cyclist. The kind of people who wear spandex versus the kind of people who just want to commute are very different people, even if they're riding similar machines. I do look down on people who ride electric bikes a little bit, because personally, I feel like the extra exertion you're making on an acoustic bike is part of what makes riding a bike so enjoyable in the first place. I like riding because I know it's purely me that's making the bike go 20 mph, and I actually enjoy going up hills and feeling exhausted at the top.

It's like the difference between getting a netbook just to check your email and write documents, and building your own PC and installing Linux on it just because you can and it's fun. A lot of the latter look down on the former, and it's because the former have no idea what they're missing out on. It's not very nice, but it's understandable.
Two things:

- Of course there are lots of good things written in C++, there are also lots of dreadful things. This is not a reflection on the language so much but the talent of the developers involved. If nothing good had been written in the language in the last 30 years then it would be a real disaster.

- C continues to be used for very large projects, you only have to look at linux. One of the problems with C++ is the amount of bad programming there is. Perhaps this is because such poor examples are given by the in the Standard C++ Programming book.

There is of course objective-C, I wonder whether the first version of Doom was objective-C: there is a high possibility given it's NextStep lineage.

I'm not sure if I'd go this far but have your read: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...
Study: GPS systems with real-time traffic can save drivers four days per year
Only since Python 3000, with the addition of the "nonlocal" declaration, can python claim to have closures. And yes, Python does also have "first-class functions"--in the same way that C has first-class functions. It's the "anonymous" part that it has difficulty with.
In this case, how do you know the act isn't phony? If you know that person is sometimes phony, you'll be left wondering whether anything they do for you is insincere, including buying lunch. I couldn't accept it if I smell something off about their intentions.
Not in America, they didn't. 200 years there were some youthful betrothals happening, but marriage has kind of always been reserved for those that could make legally binding decisions.
Anyone want to buy me lunch?
Does anyone who are pro's in music production/audio engineering wana help a wannabe out?

I'm curious as for a noobie, into computer music what kind of software/languages/theory I should get into. Do these live coding people use plugins for Ableton Live or do they write their own libraries from scratch? As for electronic music theory and improvisation, what books do you guys recommend. Do I really need to understand the theory/language well such as DSP, Max/MSP really well or could I just dive in and improvise? Thanks in advance for all the help.
There shouldn't be much to administer once you're done setting everything up. Worst case scenario (which was my case), you spend a day fiddling with the damn thing.

Then you stick it under your desk, and it purrs along forever.
Big Morning in Social Media
Why would anyone use them instead of Posterous? Posterous is dead simple, allows me to share all media, and autoposts way more places. It's basically a direct subset of Posterous's features.
Yup, they're common, and I agree with cturner - they're a very good thing. Comments that point out bad sections of code that need rewriting are invaluable.
Second place in the App Store brings in $6,300 a day
Stallman still won't use it .. bloody propriety icons they've used without releasing their photoshop source code which has stopped all innovation in the market!
The thing that concerns me more is the surface area into my home network.
I also live is SF. If you want a cheap bike, you must buy second-hand. My wife bought mine off a friend for $200 (discounted because of the friendship, but still: it happened.) A coworker of mine scored a bike for $40 after a conversation with someone that was riding a bike they didn't like. It's possible to find cheap bikes, you just have to be willing to buy something that may need some work.

The attitude of many cyclists in this city needs improvement, but there are lots of organizations in the city that do their best to help out new cyclists, like the Bicycle Coalition and the Bike Kitchen, and on Bike to Work Day you can find a lot of really helpful people.
First legal issues, then dollars…

If you are in the US at least, your contract you entered into with your ISP probably forbids you from running a home server.

Now dollars. Figure out how many watts your server uses. This is not the wattage of the power supply or the amperage on the power connector times 110. I measure mine with a Kill-a-watt. For a desktop PC of unassuming power it is probably something like 90 to 150 watts. As a quick rule of thumb, you are paying $1/year for each of those watts.

You would have to have a 60 watt PC to compete with Hostgator on dollars. The only PC I have ever had that falls under that is an Atom based machine.
So glad Neuroworld exists, we really don't have enough outlets for reblogs of shallow summaries of stupid studies.
The new logo reminds me of something. Vidly for Vendetta?
Use us. http://www.80legs.com.

:)
There's also the effect that when you do a favor for someone, you feel better about them.

If you want to make a friend, let someone do you a favor.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Man, do I feel lucky when reading this article and your comments...

Hippies riding bikes? If you look carefully you might spot a few but since over 60% of people here in the netherland use their bike at least three times a week chances are you'll see almost every type of person riding a bike :)

Which reminds me of:
http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/
A lot less lame than a segway.
He never ever offered to buy. Just whenever the check came, he completely insisted on paying the whole thing. He wouldn't have it any other way.

So it's not like he was going around asking to buy people lunch. We just had lunch and did stuff like anybody would.

You know, this is going to make me sound awful, but at the time I kind of thought of it as flaw -- it was even a bit insulting at times. He just wouldn't let me pay for anything. But he was that way with everybody.

It didn't stand out so much that I noticed it right away -- hell, it took me four years to figure it out. Just looking back, I don't think I ever paid for anything when we went out. And he did that to everybody. Four of us would go out for lunch, and there he was, insisting on picking up the check. At the time it was almost stressful, because I knew when the check come we would always argue over paying it. But it looks like long-term, he had a much more successful happiness strategy than my counting pennies!
Much more (and less). They will pay for each client that accesses an Exchange server you run at rackspace. You could upgrade a dozen desktops on their nickel.

But it is limited to the first 1,000 people. So think of it as a $30k ad buy where they cut out the middle man and paid some of the end eyeballs instead.
How did you end up educating yourself? Are there any specific websites you went to for useful information?
Look for booming business in offshore hosting facilities.
Media is not the key. In fact, we can't change the media/entertainment world, but change perception of things in our society.

For example, a guy which has once visited a prostitute in his life is not a sexual offender. At least for me.

That said, it's a priority to set levels of "punishment" (like appearing on a public list that after becomes an iPhone app, and after all your neighbors know that you appear in a sexual offender list, when it's just some stupidity you did some day).

On another side, I find that the consensual sex ages may be a bit high. For example, 'we' (DISCLAIMER: I'm a 15y guy) do it around 14-16, not 16-18. And, why consider that like a crime, or something bad? (hey, we do have fun in secure ways, just avoid any unneeded intervention in it)
Government Jobs in India
If I were competing with vid.ly, bit.ly, or any of the other ly's... I would quit, and try something with a business model next time.
Nowt wrong with skimming a surface, sometimes you can get more impact with a one-page summary than a long essay :-)
Wow, it was quite nice to wake up to this. Thank you all. And thanks, kirubakaran :)
I still like the idea of using p2p computing to get the computing power (Searchi at home?), though I am not sure how viable it is.

Another thing I would be interested in experimenting with is browsing search results. Maybe a flat list of results is not the end of the story? For example maybe it could be interesting to be able to click results and say "more like this, or more like that" (maybe Google does it already with voting on results - did they continue that eperiment?).

I am not sure if Google's Algorithm is even that good (the SEOs still succeed, after all). Computing power might not be an edge forever, either. Where they have a big lead might be the number of data sources they have. Not only crawling the web, but people using Google Groups, Google Maps, the book scanning thing, and so on...
This guy gave an excellent interview on Software Engineering radio a few weeks ago. http://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2009-07/episode-140-newspeak...
That is a major factor; our communications technology does not immunize us from moral panics - if anything it can amplify them.

I wouldn't say 'most' prisoners are pot smokers or non-violent, although I think too many of the former are in prison. In California I think the rate of imprisonment for drug violations is about 20% - don't have time to looking up the stats now. That's not as high as people imagine, and of course many of those people are gangbangers or suchlike rather than hippies who were smoking peacefully on a mountaintop and suddenly got arrested.

But you have to factor in 3 strikes and so on as well. Unfortunately more people will vote for 'throw away the key!' than 'study and rehabilitiate!', and California has a very powerful prison officer's union which always heavily supports law-and-order legislation and ballot initiatives.

Although I too found this article very interesting, I do have to question if it really passes the HN smell test...the kind of policy questions under discussion here are not really amenable to technical solutions. No flag, but I urge you to be a bit more selective.
Edited post-acquisition. I thought it was a good idea to edit the page quickly after it happened. However, Christian wanted me to keep my position and run Atomplan (under Branchr), so I did.
I used to do this when I lived at home, with AT&T DSL. I ran a site for my friends for three or four years. I used http://freedns.afraid.org/ for dns hosting, and just had a cron script update my ip every 15 minutes. It worked great.

The only issue is upload speed, so any large files take forever to transfer and kill your internet speed for your family. I did fix this a bit by using the traffic shaping support you can compile into the Linux kernel.

EDIT: it should be noted that this is against the TOS for AT&T.