skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
harryh's point, and the point of this legal decision, is that the text of the law is not really relevant. Anything that appears to any halfway reasonable person to abide by the text of the law, but which upsets powerful groups, will be prohibited, because the goal of our IP legal system is to protect those groups.

Personally, I still think that is dumb and bad.
What potential negative effects would that be?
> Programming languages are a network effect problem first and foremost.

If only reality wasn't like this. Yes, network effects are ridiculously important. And so is status-quo bias in general. I know C++ wouldn't be nearly as popular if it adopted a different syntax. I know that the ability to compile most existing C code out of the box was a big help in the adoption of the language, even though it technically doesn't matter. This is why I said erlier¹ that C++ is one of the greatest shame of our community. Stroustrup was well aware of our insanities, and he exploited them on purpose, supposedly for our own good. We as a community were simply incapable of accepting anything better. It would have been too different.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938469

> But isn't that because C++ itself evolved from C?

It didn't. C++ did not evolve from C, it was implemented on top of C. Stroustrup didn't started by modifying the front-end of GCC, he started by writing CFront. From there, it would have been real easy to fix some of the most glaring flaws of C: switches that fall through, overly general (and verbose) for loops, the insane syntax of type declarations (ML existed at the time, and could have been an inspiration), the priority of the operators (15 levels are too much, some priorities are backwards), and maybe some operators themselves (the star for instance serves two unrelated purposes, which may be confusing). While we're at it, Stroustrup could have thrown the headers away, replacing them with a proper module system. Nothing fancy, just a nice way to package compilation units.

That was the "fixing C" part. These flaws were known at the time, it would have been easy to fix them. (Except maybe the module system. You still want an easy way to talk to existing C code.)

Then we can move on to building C++: a language with a stellar C FFI, semantics that are identical to C (except for advanced syntax sugar such as classes), but with a much cleaner, easier, and more flexible syntax. This language would have been much better than the current C++ on every possible measure, except one.

Adoption.

It seems we just can't change our syntax. No, scrap that, we just can't change, period. People love "change", but they hate change. There are few circumstances where people are willing to accept change (like this anecdote about introducing OpenOffice as "the new version of Word"). One of C++'s greatest strength (and our community's greatest weakness), was it's apparent similarity with C. It's the same, except with more features! A better syntax for C however, while more useful than a mere C-with-classes², would never have caught on.

[2]: Templates are C++'s killer feature, not classes. (OO as done with C++ and Java classes is mostly a mistake³. But that's another debate.)

[3]: http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/classes-suck

(I'm not kidding about C's syntax being terrible. Experiments have shown that beginners fare no better with C than they do with a randomly generated syntax. It is that bad.)
Exactly. They have a limited supply of tools in their arsenal. And short of negative rates they can't drop the rate any lower. The economy is complex. Entities can influence it, but not even the Fed controls everything.

However, they were instrumental in the last economic crisis by fueling the housing bubble. It seems fueling bubble after bubble is something they do well. Maybe they have to to prevent the music from stopping. Or... who knows....

Count me among those who is inherently suspicious of bankers. But that could be as much bias and ignorance as anything else and I am well aware of it.
Handy! However, this seems to do fuzzy searches by default, and I don't see an obvious way to disable that.

I tried searching for "xcb_connect", and got a pile of results for "xcb_connection_t". However, unlike with other search engines, I can't quote the term to force an exact match, because it'll search for the quotes literally (which I'd otherwise appreciate when trying to find a string).
I suppose the comment before yours is sarcastic, but yeah you are talking about the real issue here.
The Fed is a tool for managing inflation and monetary supply and it does its best with that tool to sustain job creation and the economy in general.

The real problem is the US's structural problems have become a systemic cancer that is choking off growth:

1) We have a tax code that incentives capital when capital isn't an economic constraint. We are demand constrained as far as I can tell, which means more people need to have an income to spend it.

2) We have a fundamentally broken political system that incentives things like invading other countries, the war on drugs, and a bunch of destructive spending over constructive spending on things like infrastructure that would act as an economic multiplier.

The net result is we basically need to equalize taxes on Labor v. Capital and shift the income into reducing taxes on the poorest people in the country who also pay taxes + infrastructure spending. It really is the only solution I can see that is truly going to fix anything.

Tbh, I'd settle for the taxation equalization with all of the gain on the Capital side going to the poorest income earners. That might be politically viable without the Republicans fighting it [after all, they are reducing taxes for everyone and only raising them on capital]. [e.g. Raise capital gains, raise the standard deduction for everyone]

I don't really see this happening while the US still frequently has good years. It is going to happen when we get hit with another great recession or other calamity.
Cool Google phone wall
Show HN: Am I late to the game? Just launched my C++ app for Windows
Heh thanks, it was more along the lines of: well i've never tried to get set/longjmp to work with threads, how hard can it be?

Short answer, harder than you'd initially think. So many edge cases, the horror.
Beautifully designed e-commerce app for sale
For corporate restructuring reasons my startup has to spin off a hack-a-thon project.

It's a beautifully designed e-commerce checkout app that has about 200 customers (maybe 20 of them active). The typical feedback from customers is: "We love this app, but it's buggy."

It needs:
- a lot of technical attention
- some marketing work

Unfortunately I can't name the app but here are some high-level stats:

- ~4,000 transactions (many of them test transactions)
- 215 merchants have processed at least one transaction
- Approx 2-10 transactions a day
- ~$400k in processed revenue

If anyone is interested in the app please contact me (email address in my profile) and I can provide more details.

Thanks.
I have labels for organization but once something is marked as read or out of my priority inbox (where starred emails go) is has an extremely low priority and might as well not exist. If it's in my inbox and unread it gives me anxiety not to action it. A Snooze feature is a perfect middle ground.
And can be bypassed in most standalone clients
Generally. Technically, it's a "breaking change".

As you can imagine, this didn't actually affect anyone.
The Federal Reserve has, according to them, three objectives for monetary policy: "maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates". [1] So actively promoting job growth is indeed part of their remit.

[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12848.htm
Food? Gas?

I don't have hard numbers, but it sure feels like they're twice as expensive.
Gmail don't implement IMAP properly anyway - the IDLE command in Gmail doesn't provide notification of changes in the number of unread messages, just the existence of new ones.

It was quite a shock to find when I stopped hosting my email via GetMail/Dovecot that my read messages wouldn't automatically propagate across my devices until I did a manual poll. Gmail seems to use some HTTP API for this rather then following the standard.
No different than looking at your phone.
When the intent of the law is to take something that's legal to do personally, and make it illegal to outsource, I'm not bothered by going against it by removing juuuust enough outsourcing.
We would clearly need to do a deep dive but since Orly was designed with modules in mind it should be feasible to use the storage engine underneath Cayley.
> Stack Overflow questions,

true but not by a long shot :

ts : 2,441

dart: 3,465

now compared to all js questions both are insignificant anyway ( 641,566 )

> neither Typescript nor Dart can make that claim

as devs move to ES6 using TS will make more sense ,that's Microsoft bet.
Apropos of nothing, and since you mentioned it, a surprising number of things are at least twice as expensive now as they were in 2004.

Nearly all produce products, gas, houses, rents, cars,
and clothes. Beer, wine, and soda seem a bit less impacted.

If you want you can play this game yourself by looking at archived newspapers in Google's newspaper archive (http://news.google.com/newspapers) from 2004 and them comparing them to present day newspapers.
This feels like unusual timing. I am presently reading 'A Suitable Boy' by Vikram Seth. One of the main characters is sent into virtual exile where he learns how to read and write Urdu. Until now I don't think I'd heard of it.

My own opinion is that we should preserve history, remember it, but not morn it. We are programmers! How many writing styles and languages have we seen die to make way for something better (or worse?). This is a natural survival of the fittest cycle that effects writing styles, languages, civilisations and everything else. I have Japanese friends who read even less Kanji than I do. I see that writing style dying out over the next 50 years also.
I've paid something like 10 euros to travel the ~250km from Dusseldorf to Frankfurt in a high-speed ICE bullet train. There is no way in hell they could operate that service if everybody was paying that price.
If it's a bad law then get the law changed. Unless you can make an argument to convince the supreme court why that law is unconstitutional, the supreme court doesn't decide which laws are good or bad -- they only rule against how (and why) the laws are written. Changing the laws is Congress's job.
I use only object databases. No relational. BTree response times for the indexed objects so life is good.

Some projects I use NoSQL, mongo.

I do use Redis for reactivity and caching (but redis isn´t a database so)

Congratulations for the progress, thanks for sharing your work. I do want to see more great odbs with friendly APIs
No because it is a horrible idea for a nation in debt to go further in debt to lock up a citizen that is in debt. That would be the exact opposite direction to go to get debt paid.
At the same time Motorola Mobility was sold, Google announced the Android Silver program which seemed to confirm rumors that Nexus devices were being sunsetted.

I really hope its not true. I love my Nexus devices.
When the fed buys securities, the securities go on their balance sheet. Now... granted some of the securities may be junk, but there is an entry on the balance sheet. What would go on their balance sheet if they gave away money? The fed is a bank. Not a government. It's (arguably) the governments job to redistribute income. Not the job of a private institution.
Part of the reason for the purchase of securities was to lower the interest rate on longer term securities like the 10 year treasury note. This lowered the rate a lot of consumer loans like mortgages, car loans, etc. with the hope of stimulating the economy. Usually the Federal Reserve just changes the discount rate (overnight rate to banks) to try and stimulate the economy but lowering the discount rate through 2007 and 2008 wasn't lowering the longer term interest rates and thus consumer borrowing rates. Thus Bernanke took the unprecedented step of buying the securities to drive down the longer term interest rates as well.

In effect they printed money to do this but inflation remained quite low by standard measures. Bernanke requested Congress to help stimulate the economy in the near term, but politically it was impossible for Congress to achieve even a short term second stimulus package. History will be the final judge of the extraordinary actions taken by the Federal Reserve but to me it seemed like the best of a lot of bad options. Even as I'm glad that some agency was trying to stimulate the economy I'm concerned about the historical precedent that a small unelected group can decide to take on so much debt with no public comment.
Interviewing at a Startup Taken Down
Thanks! Was curious if Project Wonderful worked, given how remarkably cheap it is. Targeting specific comics works best, got it.
Experimenting with new products requires businesses to shift how they operate
Seems to have been removed after the this scathing article from a few days ago:

http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html
Nominal dollar values is but one way to measure consumption.

The original comment I was elaborating on was talking about other factors that can impact PSR without a change in consumption patterns as measured by what goods and services are received not the nominal value spent on them. One important and very real factor is that nominal income growth for most workers has not grown as fast as inflation. On a macro level you're right, but at the individual level it's that mismatch that matters.

I wasn't talking about measuring consumption in dollars but in value received. If I buy a can of peas this year for $1 and a can of peas next year for $1.10 (assuming no factors specific to the peas or can market), then I have consumed the same amount in terms of the benefit I get. You're also right that I've consumed more in terms of nominal dollar values, but nominal dollar values wasn't the measurement stick I was using when I said they consume the same amount.
Android TV and Playstation
If you look farther down the page, you'll notice hashcash launched their proof-of-work captcha replacement thing today. I'm not saying it's related, but both of these are on the front page together.
Gmail also offers a nifty "Starred First" view which keeps the last 10 or so starred emails at the top

http://i.imgur.com/0Vokq4C.png
We only run the community edition (everywhere). We could legally use the enterprise edition in QA, but it wouldn't make sense since production must be community.
Cultural Bubbles in the Era of Globalization
This is a very clean approach preventing people from reinventing the wheel. I just found this, although not recently updated, which is tuned ported to Ubuntu: https://github.com/edwardbadboy/tuned-ubuntu
People already do this with phones, I don't see how watches are any different/worse.
Some day I'm hoping Google will deal with the 960px gap, but judging by YouTube and gmail not any time soon.

1920x1080 is a common form factor, yet for some reason they are allergic to the idea (as are a lot of other people) that their web-apps should not break when split to half the screen size.
Redistributing some wealth would be a positive for the economy at this point and time.

It's like playing monopoly and someone wins all the money. The game is over at that point. Now sure... some people try to keep it going by lending money. But when the winner gets all that as well and the other party eventually has mortgaged and sold everything there is no more money for the winner to get.

Getting money out of the hands of accumulators and hoarders (oh, I mean, "investors") and back into the hands of consumers would be the best thing that could happen to everyone at this point in time. It would re-energize the system. But... give that the hoarders have much more political clout this is difficult to do. Even if it is ultimately in their best interest.
Android Wear available now
It's not that the text is irrelevant. It's that there is also the "spirit of the law" that goes along with that text. When you have to go around the text of the law by jumping through convoluted hoops (which Aereo has definitely done), it's likely you're violating the spirit of the law.

While Aereo's setup is undoubtedly clever, I am glad our legal system doesn't treat the raw text of laws as gospel. Laws are created for a purpose, and it would be impossible to foresee every possibility to get around the intent of a law when you are drafting it.
Automatic Sperm Extractor in Chinese Hospitals
Ty so much, I've be waiting for something like this since when they ruined koders.com!
I've never seen this site - the URL may need to be changed because it geolocated me when it first loaded. Shows how abysmal Australian broadband speeds are, though.

This seems to use speedtest.net data. I haven't found any concrete evidence, but you can bet that ISPs are prioritizing the traffic - either directly via QoS or via hosting their own speedtest.net server.

In Australia only a few metro areas are shown. You might see a variance of 10x (slower) in rural areas.
So protest that person instead of the entire company.
I like that they open sourced the code, although I think the license is a little restrictive.

I try to run all my companies as FOSS companies, as I believe that it's practically impossible to create a competitor just by forking the code. Much of the work in any code base comes not from the programmer, but from the community that interacts with the system as a whole. Even if a part of the community forks there will be different needs and requirements in the different communities which will mean they diverge as they address different niches.
Sure there is if those debt levels devalue the thing that you use to trade for the goods and resources your country depends on.
Open XML SDK goes open source
And breaking down a cable company in the same way works consistently too. Antennas are legal, long cables are legal, paying your neighbor to set things up is legal, sharing an antenna with your neighbor is not legal.
Both are driven largely by Supply & Demand rather than inflationary pressures -- hence why economists rely on Core CPI to make decisions -- but there is good data for both;

Gas is ~90% more expensive (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=E...).

Food is ~30% more expensive (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=E...).

Think about the rest of your life though, especially if you're outside the SFBay area. Are rents twice as expensive? Did an equivalent Camry cost $11k in 2004 vs. the $22k it costs today?
That list won't ever be accurate. The only way to know is to re-run your performance tests every time Google and Mozilla ship new releases.

SpiderMonkey now optimizes a bunch of difficult cases it never optimized before; some of them seemed like they would never get optimized, but now they're fine. V8 does some nice optimizations now that weren't possible before, similarly.
_Deficit_ levels can reduce the exchange rate; but that's not something the U.S. is having problems with at the moment.
Good compilers optimize a switch into a jump table, which is much, much faster than a hashtable.

Using a hashtable for instruction dispatch in an emulator would be utterly insane. You'd use an array (but the compiler can do a better job by generating raw asm for a jump table.)
"The idea of taxing the socially beneficial act of working and hiring workers is pretty repugnant anyway."

HEAR! HEAR!

Payroll taxes are essentially a form of slavery. Every week you work X number of hours for the government. Almost like you were hauling pyramind blocks under a whip.

And, on this point, conservatives (who are often wrong) are exactly right. Taxing innovation and labor are hardly incentives to provide more of it. Tax something else. Tax emissions. Tax fuel. Tax aluminum. Tax land. This would encourage efficiency and conservation anyway. Encourage innovation and productivity. Discourage waste and trashing of common resources. It's more fair and would lead to much better outcomes.
Since when has Google made hardware(actual mainstream hardware not things like nexus or glass)?
Parents have different points of view on vaccines too, and I don't see people defending anti-vaccination rhetoric as "different points of view".
The first one.

Probably the mankind will hate me, but I'm the kind of person who answers correctly the control word, and writes an incorrect, but similar word for the unknown one.

This is my way to protest against recaptcha.
Hurr Hurr, two years right guys?

Honeycomb was introduced in 2011. That's three years.

And besides, Android is on design iteration #3, Apple is on #2, and I think most would agree iOS was aged pretty badly by the time it got #2.

Personally, I find Android's 2.x design about as much as a design as a factory floor's sounds 'music'.
I'm sorry, but that is bullshit. Plain and simple.
Houses / rents are twice as expensive from 2009? Maybe in the Bay Area, but the rest of the country strongly disagrees;

The 20-City Case Shiller is up 4.5% total since June 2004 (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=E...).

Clothing is up 5% total since June 2004 (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=E...).

We don't need Google's newspapers since this stuff is meticulously tracked and organized by the BEA and BLS.
Google Play Services 5.0 has a new Networking API
I meant before the law was passed, when they didn't pay those fees. I cannot figure out how payment is undermined on a free broadcast. Can you explain how to me?
I was curious too, so here's a jsPerf:

http://jsperf.com/check-for-undefined-argument

On Chrome 35, looks like comparing to void 0 is a bit faster.
Would love some more samples though.
Yes. At present if you want a jsperf test to be remotely accurate:

1) It shouldn't exercise the GC. GC pressure totally skews jsperf results in a way it can't compensate for.

2) It should compute a result on every iteration that is checked at the end to make sure it is accurate. (This ensures that the compiler can't optimize out unused results from your benchmark loop)

3) The check should have actual control flow so it can't be ignored.

It's also worthwhile to warm all your test cases once in the setup portion of the page before the loop runs. Some performance issues only appear once you've passed multiple argument types into a function, so if you run a test case that passes in ints, and then run a test case that passes in floats, the second test case will be slower for no obvious reason. You can swap the test cases around and the second run will still be slower.

(There are actually a huge list of problems with javascript microbenchmarks, and jsperf only adds to them by being low quality software. Please use it sparingly.)
Show HN: Write web servers in Swift
On the other hand, Calibre is FLOSS and doesn't contact any servers, so there's not much they can do to enforce it.