skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Writing quicksort non-functionally doesn't HAVE to be unreadable. Not that I disagree with Haskell being great and all, I just think it's important to realize that imperative != ugly code.

public class QS {
public List<T> Quicksort<T>(List<T> l, Comparator<T> comp) {
if (l.size() <= 1) {
return l;
}

List<T> lesser = new ArrayList<T>();
List<T> greater = new ArrayList<T>();

T pivot = l.get(0);

for (T t: l) {
if (comp.compare(pivot, t) <= 0) {
lesser.add(t);
} else {
greater.add(t);
}
}

List<T> out = new ArrayList<T>();
out.addAll(Quicksort(lesser));
out.addAll(Quicksort(greater));

return out;
}
}
When I click on any of the product pages they are all 404's. Is this a dummy site?
The Java example builds up a straw man. Never underestimate your readers!
> I'm not a compiler theory expert but my hunch is that ExpiredLink's premise is wrong. I'm guessing that any non-trivial program requires a priori knowledge from the programmer's mind to properly inform the compiler which variables do what and when.

I also think the thesis is wrong, but i'd put it differently. I suspect that in many cases, a sufficiently smart compiler could analyse a program and assign plausible classifications to every variable. However, i suspect that there will be some cases which are not - there is no set of classifications which can be assigned which will conform to the rules. Inevitably, these would be exactly the cases you actually hit when writing real programs. In other words, i think this ends up looking a bit like the halting problem.

As a thought experiment, imagine Rust, but without any of the memory management classifications on variables: no tildes, ampersands, or single quotes. You could compile and execute this with fairly conventional garbage-collected memory management semantics. But you could also try to assign memory management classifications to every variable, and the compile it as Rust. The number of possible assignments over the whole program is clearly finite - there are a finite number of variables, a finite number of pointer types, a finite number of lifetimes, and so a finite number of arrangements of all those. Large, but finite. So you could, in principle, enumerate them by brute force.

If you took an existing, correct, Rust program, erased all the classifications, and fed it into this brute force re-classifying compiler, it would eventually find a legal classification, and compile it. It might be the original classification, or it might not. This means that there isn't a requirement for "a priori knowledge from the programmer's mind". Any program which could be given a plausible classification can be given one automatically.

However, i think there is no such certainty that it would find a legal classification for a arbitrary program. Indeed, i suspect it wouldn't be too hard to find a counterexample: you just need a Rust program which doesn't compile, and can't be fixed purely by changing memory management classifications. Anyone want to give that a go?
We built on Polymer, so that imposes quite strict browser requirements. See http://flowhub.io/documentation/flowhub-faq/#browser-require...

However, if you're having one of the supported browsers and still have problems, we'd love a ticket at https://github.com/noflo/noflo-ui/issues
>> But the increasing divide in between the rich and the poor and the nouveau riche will only hurt in long term. History has taught us that. I hope my American friends will learn this for the larger good.

Every time I hear this, I wonder if people just don't know that we lift more people out of poverty every year, or its just such a common misconception that is now engrained in our culture.

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/10/land-of-opportunity-almost-...

"Land of opportunity: Of the 1.8M net increase in global millionaires last year, more than 9 out of 10 were Americans"

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/17/2633881/poverty-...

"The official poverty rate was essentially unchanged at 15.1 percent in 2012, and alternative measures show that safety net programs like food stamps, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and tax credits for the working poor keep tens of millions of Americans out of poverty each year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday."

Maybe we have different ideas of what poor is?

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-pov...

"“The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.”[3] In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.[4] In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker."
I don't program in Dart, but it sounds interesting!
> Can anyone think of any advantages to a non-neutral internet?

It would give ISPs an incentive to spend the large sums of money required to upgrade their networks/infrastructure to offer significantly faster Internet speeds. I very much doubt that any amount of legislation/regulation is going to force ISPs into it otherwise.
When my mom passed, I felt like I was supposed to feel a certain way - overwhelming grief.

I felt that, plus a bunch of other things. Even some "selfish" things like feeling glad the ordeal was over. I felt bad about feeling things like that and had a lot of "internal arguments" about that.

A breakthrough came when I gave myself permission to feel whatever I wanted to feel, even if it was "stupid" or "selfish" according to arbitrary moral standards. And that those things didn't mean that I loved or missed her any less. Less judging, more feeling.

Everybody's story is different. That was just part of my story in case it's helpful to somebody else. Maybe you can work a little bit of it into yours, or not.

I hope your story gets better - I think it will.
Everything Wrong With The Room:

Paradoxically, this video manages to be more irritating than the terrible film it talks about. It's particularly ironic that the reviewer complains about Tommy wiseau saying 'hi' too often, and then peppers the video with metallic pings every few seconds while making nonsensical unfunny asides to viewers.
When the fuck did bad sci-fi books become people's technology roadmaps?
Ultimately, it was 2048 that downvoted you.
I Still Don't Know What I Want to Be When I Grow Up
There are still plenty of variable costs that would make those 4 extra more expensive, the only thing being saved is transaction costs between two companies. The raw materials, either there's some surplus or you're going to have to buy more at higher prices, you're going to have to set up various things, or recheck their alignment, refresh your memory and if you fail at any of those throw one away, etc. etc.
> "This future is “only” mobile. I thought it is mobile."

I wouldn't mind seeing more expansion on that thought. Maybe it's because I spend so much time on the computer for work, but I still think there is a LONG ways to go before you can have the same experience with applications or sites on your mobile device that your desktop gives you. I will never want to be locked down to such a small screen for everything. And things like touch screens (at any size) are far from perfect verse the precision you can get with a mouse.

Yes, I think the future is mobile, for certain categories of business. I just think we are still very far from saying that statement applies to everything in the tech industry, or any industry for that matter. I think a better statement is the future is "mobile enabled" meaning you have to have a way to use the site or app on the go (mobile), but that doesn't mean it's the ideal way to interact with the product 100% of the time.
Honestly, their criticism sounds like the kind of thing any jealous nay sayer would say. They're trying to make it sound like an honest warning, but in reality, they're just afraid of having their crown stolen. They're basically telling SpaceX that their new approach has unforeseen risks. It's never been done before, hence it's risky, and it could well fail, it shouldn't even be tried.

They're saying the NASA people had a working model for decades, and hence people should trust NASA's expertise more, not the new guy taking big risks trying new things. In reality, they can see that SpaceX knows what they're doing, and NASA has been falling behind for a long time, but that's really hard for NASA to accept. Still makes me sad to see this kind of attitude. Risk taking is necessary for innovation, and calculated risks often pay out big time, but the establishment is still always too afraid to take the said risks... And then when somebody else is there to take those risks, they try to discourage them.
But that isn't a consequence of the GPL, is it? That's a consequence of you being the copyright holder.

The misconception that the poster above was correcting was the claim that the GPL requires you to contribute back either code or money: it does not (unless you distribute changes to the code, etc, etc, in which case it's about making your changes available under the GPL, and not at all about giving money to anyone).
> The Space Shuttle was a political football whose design was dictated by the whims of Congress and the meddling of the military first, and by engineering second.

Partly true, but keep in mind that was a problem NASA brought on themselves. They chose an overly ambitious design which congress, rightfully in my opinion, balked at. They tried to skip technological generations, which is a nono in R&D and always a very expensive and risky prospect. Instead of coming up with a new idea they doubled down on their fantasy, turning the Shuttle idea into a political juggernaut. And they got their way, they got massive buy in into the Shuttle, by selling it to everyone as the be-all-end-all of everyone's space dreams. It would be all things to all customers: NASA manned spaceflight, NASA space science, commercial satellite companies, even the military. But part of the cost of that political juggernaut was imposition of additional design elements, which brought more compromises. But on the other hand with so many people on board the program had political inevitability and was almost impossible to shut down. The Shuttle would already have been a bit of a turkey relative to its promises but those additional compromises made it one of the most expensive and troublesome launchers in history. But those compromises came about because of the unwillingness of the Shuttle's original backers to consider other options, they made those deals and those compromises and they were forced to live with the consequences.
Three Months In: reflecting on 3 months as a freelancer
There was an open source 2D avatar chat system called OpenVerse, IIRC (Metaverse was trademarked) that behaved this way; each room was a different server.
That seems to be largest complaint I hear from tourists. SF takes care of their homeless. Matter of fact, SF programs are so good we have a problem with other states sending their homeless specifically to SF[1]. I'm from Chicago where the homeless don't have nearly the same advantages as they do here in SF(particularly the weather).

There were encampments in Grant Park in Chicago and they were forcibly removed by the police both in '68 and just a few years ago[2]. Which, again, is in stark contrast to something like Golden Gate Park here in SF where there has been a large homeless encampment for at least as long as I have lived here and probably longer[3]. That shit would just not fly in Chicago but I do like that SF actually takes care of everyone and not just the people that know the right people.

[1]http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/11/2602391/san-franc...

[2]http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-10-16/news/chi-occup...

[3]http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/despite-improvement-5...
They solve different problems. Ctags and cscope index a corpus of source code, usually tied into another tool, like Ctrl-] in vim. ack searches the files every time.
Edit2: Problem is with duplicate/wrong lat-long data attributes. Same issue with Heerlen/Haarlem and Boston (Stoughton)/Southampton.

Edit3: London (Wembley), Hamburg (Schnelsen), Milan (Carugate), Beijing (Chao Yang), St. Peterburg (Parnas), Ulm, and Samara aren't working at all as well.
"Their rocket engines are high performance"

No all contemporary Russian engines have a much higher Isp. Usually because they use high chamber pressures in the 3000+ psi range. The merlin series runs a mere 1000 psi.

It does win one performance metric of thrust to weight. Little surprise because they might give up 10% of thrust (err, whatever) by running at a lower pressure but obviously running a third of the chamber pressure the engine walls are going to be about a third the thickness and a third the mass, so its a huge win for thrust to weight, knock down the nominator by 10% and the denominator by a factor of 3 and you win. So they do hold a record in this category.

Also lower pressures imply lower temps imply lower thermal load, lower heat shock, lower thermal distortion and thermal related stress on startup/shutdown. It inherently should always outperform a Russian engine WRT restart / reusability unless something has gone very wrong.

Two things make engines un-reusable. One is simple runtime. It seems intuitively obvious that a 1000 psi turbopump is cheaper and more reliable than a 3000 psi turbopump, all things being equal. The other thing that kills reusability is thermal shock effects where need something to be "X" thick to handle the forces and pressures, but the exterior or one side heats up much faster than the inside creating enormous stresses. So low pressure means low temps
> how can Cashman argue...

He can argue it because he has a lot of money (indirectly) invested in the outcome going his way. There will be winners and losers if net neutrality is abandoned and it looks like Cashman would be a winner. Most of the rest of us would be losers.

I hate when reporters find the most biased people in the debate and quote them as if they were an objective opinion. This reporter, to his credit, immediately follows the Cashman quote by saying "Some less financially invested observers have little sympathy for this argument" and then quotes Rob Faris, who may have strong opinions but at least isn't talking his book.
This is a really great and simple visualization, I definitely enjoyed seeing all the little dots go kerplunk :-)

One minor issue is that I think your Boston (Stoughton) store GPS coords might be wrong. Scrolling through I noticed the point was dropped in the UK somewhere, might be a confusion with Stoughton, Leicestershire.
They probably do a better job of it than you do, so let them handle it.
I would be, even more so if there was an active forum/irc channel.

In fact I just finished a C Programming course at a state university. After talking with the professor I decided to continue on myself with a C++ book (to be determined), and a Linux Kernel book, [Understanding the Linux Kernel](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000028.do).

Finding a group of people of a similar skill level willing to do this type of learning would be fantastic.
You are, but the guys coding the software you use are not.

So unless you make the effort to contribute back, they will have some issues to pay the rent.
The privacy concern is a very real one. Also, see: http://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/84829703425/r...
Thanks, I actually meant how useful this book will be for professional programmers who want to understand financial math?
(btw, I actually bought your book already :) )
It did Pastel, which is related to Pascal but isn't actually Pascal.

I picked it as an example of a compiler where others could distribute the source. Since you want to narrow it to C compilers, I'll instead point to the proprietary Aztec C compiler. It didn't come "locked behind hundreds of pages of licensing requirements and legal bullshit".

In fact, as far as I can tell, it had no licensing requirements outside of it being covered by copyright. Certainly there are fewer requirements than the GPL.

Here's a list of C compilers for micros of the 1980s. http://www.z80.eu/c-compiler.html . In a spot check, I can't find any which have hundreds (or even tens) of of pages licensing requirements.

Do you have any evidence to support your earlier statement? I've noticed that people sometimes emphasize Stallman's impact, but do so more out of ignorance of the other threads of history. How do I know that you aren't similarly inclined, given that it seems to be different than the written accounts from that time?
Show HN: Android/iOS Motion Library – detect a backtap, knock or wave
Not using placeholders should be an automatic fail of any code review. Period.

Without placeholders the risk is way, way too high. A single mistake can be the end of your entire application if not career.

Don't think "Oh, this is just test code, I'll fix it later" and leave a vulnerability in your application. Always write using placeholders. No exceptions.
its a fallacious argument to say that women should be respected in the context of modern software because 2 women contributed to something that is nothing like programming today
Bitcoin Startup Vaurum Gets $4M
Cool for learning Git. However, not that great for the first time somebody uses a version control system.

Does anybody have a good tutorial for "Code Version Control for Dummies (while using Git)"?
The iframes idea is a really good one because it wouldn't require changes to the web server configuration. The throttle could simply be simulated with delayed loading using JavaScript.
"Wow. i's and j's all the way, what is this? Why is it so long compared to the Haskell example? This looks like comparing C and assembly 30 years ago! And in some respects, it is the same leap."

I don't think this is a fair comment considering the in-place Haskell implementation isn't incredibly readable either.
(Since HN isn't letting me post a reply under chippy1337's comment, I'll post it here.)

I found chippy's comment interesting and helpful and don't know why it was downvoted to hell while other "+1"-style comments (that didn't add any value) are left as-is: https://twitter.com/taoeffect/status/464090445677481985
Here's a source for you:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch5.htm

Quote: "However, it meant that if a shuttle was to execute a one-orbit mission from Vandenberg, it would return to the latitude of that base after 90 minutes in space only to find that, due to the earth's rotation, this base had moved to the east by 1100 nautical miles. Air Force officials indeed expected to launch the Shuttle from Vandenberg, and they insisted that the Shuttle had to have enough crossrange to cover that distance and return successfully."

It goes into quite a bit of detail on the Air Force's involvement and reasoning.

I'd be interested to see them if you had sources that say otherwise.
>>> But we already have such a slow lane. And it already made the internet less free and less useful.

I'm pretty sure you can still get ISDN lines from your local telecom provider. I know a long time ago there was talk of binding ISDN lines to together to increase upload and download speeds. This was right around the time DSL was blowing up so I'm sure it got lost in the wave of DSL hype.

Of course compared to DSL. GigaFiber, or any of the current technologies, it's downright pathetic.
After rewriting Collections.sort() just for the fun of it, the claim that "an hour of a developer's time is a lot more expensive than an hour of a high-performance AWS super-duper-cluster instance" isn't all that convincing. If you're going to rewrite sort at all, you should take time to do it right, and the Stream-based version isn't it.
I have a CS degree and I'm interested anyway! I think it's a good way to learn about threads, memory management, concurrency mechanisms, etc.. Also can contribute if needed.
Update: Emile got back to me and we're working it out. I haven't received anything definite yet, but he's at least trying to make it right.
I have two conflicting moods here.

First, companies using OpenSSL for free were completely living up to their end of the bargain, which was "you can use this for free."

Second, there was absolutely nothing stopping a few banks and/or giant web companies from getting together to raise a million dollars to have this code professionally audited. Banks do spend lots of resources auditing the code they write themselves, so how come nothing was spent here?

(Related to second point: There was also absolutely nothing was stopping people from doing what the OpenBSD team is doing now and deciding to tear it apart to clean it up. There was also absolutely nothing forcing people to use OpenSSL. )
Probably a good strategy, selling services using OpenStack and supporting hybrid public/private cloud services.

For smaller companies I think a sweet spot will be running OpenStack themselves on their own or rented servers (way cheaper than even VPSs) combined with some capacity in commercial OpenStack offerings (geographically close by for low latency) for redundancy and occasional scaling.
JavaScript style: Programs should be stored in and delivered as .js files
Alleluia.

Ok, I want to use and modify assignments.
I am not a multi-billion company. If I had free time and such resources, I would love doing something like that.
Genetically Modified Babies Are Already A Reality
It's way easier to build a reliable DNS cluster than it is to build a reliable UNIX box.

Anycast works way better for UDP/dns than it does for TCP/http.

The idea behind Anycast is that you announce the address block your DNS cluster is on out many different locations around the world. At each location you have (usually a redundant cluster of) dns servers.

The router ahead of the IP of the person looking up an address on your nameserver will check it's bgp table, and then choose whichever location of yours is the fewest hops away. From that router's point of view, this is no different from you having one location with many different service providers.

If one of your locations goes away, it stops announcing the block, and all clients that would have gone to it instead use the next closest (hop-wise) location.

(this is actually one of the hard parts; if you have a setup where the dns server stops responding correctly but it's still announcing via bgp, you are broken.)

You generally don't use this for HTTP and other connection-based stuff, because a route flap is going to move your connection endpoint to an entirely new server. This causes a bunch of problems with your connection oriented stuff. (yes, you can sync connection state across servers... but the latency in that is going to kill you.)
My top EQ traits:

Control the emotions of others Some people are too lazy to bother controlling their own emotions, so you have to be able to execute control for them.

Be able to critically analyse the perspective of others Don't assume that others have the ability to understand their own perspective.

Be realistic That is self explanatory.

Share ... Division of labour.
>Companies like Comcast have no interest in slowing down web site traffic

Yeah? How about money?

As a comms engineer, I too think about the technical implications of this.

But you have to remember that the people who push for the abolition of net neutrality are mainly the finances guys, i.e the ones responsible for bringing as much money as possible to the company. And when you put yourself in their shoes, all of a sudden you get dreams of Comcast turning the Internet into the same kind of market it has in cable television. And you very quickly forget about QoS, bandwidth, latency and the job of "delivering the bits" and just think in terms of profits. You wouldn't know what most of those terms mean anyway...
Thanks for the great tutorial! It definitely helped my understanding when I went through it.