skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A while back I was programming for a naive but well-written JS interpreter for set top box apps, where map was generally being avoided because of performance.

I wrote quite a fast "map" (along with the others) that looked a bit like:

exports.map = function fastMap (subject, fn, thisContext) {
var i = subject.length,
result = new Array(i);
if (thisContext) {
while (i--) {
result[i] = fn.call(thisContext, subject[i], i, subject);
}
} else {
while (i--) {
result[i] = fn(subject[i], i, subject);
}
}
return result;
};

I'm not sure if I just used "result = []", but on modern browsers I think that'd be recommended. But yeah, if you're programming for a web browser then using another impl of map is probably going to be a waste of time.
KDE's Aaron Seigo explaining why he's paying email service MyKolab.com
I agree but keep in mind that this phone was already done even before they launched WP's Lumias. So what they are doing is not killing an initiative that started at Nokia.

I don't like the idea but I can see how this is consistent with the new Microsoft view of being more open.
I attended a technology school in the Boston area with the intention of liberalizing my education once I found the time. But I never really did, save a small hobby here and there. I still have great hopes with all the new internet self-education options out there.
Google or Apple will eat Quirky for breakfast.
REST DSL for Perl
> There is no safety net.

That's a wonderfully succinct way of describing the US. It seems like in a lot of EU countries if you fail there is something to catch you (higher, longer, easier to get unemployment pay for one example), whereas there really is no lower limit on how low the US will let you fall (e.g. healthcare is a privilege not a right in the US).

They do say that the US has some of the highest anti-depressant medication usage in the whole world (or was it more than the rest of the world combined? I can never remember). That isn't a surprise when literally your health, shelter, food, etc is all riding on keeping a job.

Thank god for Obama care and the new ban on pre-existing condition limits (i.e. that you could not get insurance if you were sick before). It kept people enslaved into a single job if they ever got sick since they could never afford to lose that health insurance or they'd die.
And yet compared to those European countries, the US experiences significantly higher GDP per capita. Doing work and getting paid for it hardly seems like it's hurting the economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...

As to the studies cited in the article I would point to the OECD labor productivity statistics which, in the aggregate, seem to disagree. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL

The fact that Americans seem to only be able to find identity and meaning in their work, so much so as that it causes a psychic crisis to leave even temporarily, is the real problem, if it need be called such, rather than some imagined hurt to the economy. But that problem is so ingrained in our culture it is never going away.
Effectively this is what the Bretton Woods system was. It has the limitation that states then have to maintain a neutral balance of payments (imports+investment in = exports+investment out). This turns out to be much harder than it sounds, especially in a world of expensive post 1971 oil and even more so given post 2005 oil prices.
There's a "for profit" problem going on in the US. First of all, the Echo Boomers just went through college, and during that time period, there wasn't enough universities / colleges for everyone.

So unless you were a very top performer in your class, it was unlikely that you got into a state university. Instead, people got into for-profit universities they heard through internet ads or TV ads. (There is _always_ a spot for you in a for-profit university). For-profit universities were a bad deal, they manipulated their students and lied to them about their accreditation status. The problem didn't become known until maybe 2012 or so when the Obama Administration began to crack down on their shady practices.

The fact of the matter is, State Universities are the way to go, although they weren't an option for many people. Today, the average cost of an in-state university is $9000 / year. (This falls in line with my experience)

Even with books and stuff, that will only be ~$45k in loans for the average in-state university.

As the Echo Boomers leave college age, the college-age population is beginning to shrink again and it will be easier to get a degree now without resorting to overpriced out-of-state costs or for-profit schools.
Well, you sure can save a Word document as HTML, but it spits out some of the grossest, most xml-metadata-crammed, non-human-readable HTML and CSS you have ever seen. God help you if you actually want to use Word as a WYSIWYG HTML editor. And have fun trying to add JS to it...
All depends where you work and the culture there. Might be frowned upon in some places but where I work everyone is more than happy to see people take time off.
You programmed before? Implementations dont get simpler just because you wish them to.
>> the people always go on vacation and projects get held up, and they come back and have to get oriented with everything again. by the time they catch up they are on vacation again

It's almost as if work is something they do to support a life outside the office.

Outrageous.
It's important to debate and open old ideas, that's true. But as far as consensus and the News, false debate is extremely damaging. This is a false debate.

Let rejection of consensus exist where an idea is unexplored or where there is actually debate.
If you are in the bay area then we should go grab coffee some time. I was in your position a year ago and I'm more than happy to share my experiences and struggles.
Send me an email and we can connect.
Considering my classmates the Koch brothers have given $10Ms to various organizations with the same goal, this is small potatoes.
What this says to me as a developer in the Microsoft ecosystem (admittedly, enterprise side and not mobile):

"Four years ago we had you writing all your apps using Silverlight. Two years ago we chucked that out the window (ahahahaha) and told you to switch over to WinRT. Now we're going Android. We hope you've got the message by now. But in case you haven't, let us restate it in plain English: Dear developers, GO THE @$#!% AWAY."
Ha! There is nothing well-designed about the mutually incompatible, political hell that is OS package managers.

The best solution (as taken by npm, virtualenv and others) is to install libraries locally to the project that is building them.

That way, package management becomes the sole concern of the build system.

"Accumulation" is a good thing, it means each project has the exact version of a package that it was tested with, not some later version that a sysadmin decides it "probably should work with".
Never did I think I'd see an LIHTC discussion on HN (or anywhere technical I frequent), I've worked on and written some compliance software for them. I was surprised at the scale and implementation of them.
Even worse is the new trend in technology companies to eliminate "Set Vacation". It used to be the case that you felt "obliged" somehow to take your 10 days of vacation a year, because you saw it piling up. Even better, if you were laid off, you could get the vacation in cash, and that helped when you were cut off without a job.

But now, a lot of technology companies are saying, "No Set Vacation - you need to negotiate with your manager if you want some" - which, in my experience, has resulted in a lot of people over the last two years taking zero vacation. It's not good for them. It's not good for the company. About the only people who are happy about this are Finance who no longer have to carry that liability on their books.
That's not not how 'let' works, you can't do that with 'let'. You most definitely should blame the tools here.
Producing NoScript-friendly work is, oddly, ridiculously easy. You write your "view" code for React.JS, and render this via node.js on the server, then have the client do exactly the same. You can pick up libraries - or write your own in half an hour - which implement the glue to talk to models from both the client and the server.

You shouldn't even need to write your business logic in node.js if it doesn't fit the language well, just write an RPC server in whatever language you prefer.
>From a computer science perspective it is formally 'meaningless' because the performance improvement was made by changing the requirements, not by a novel algorithm or data structure.

I've studied computer science and I don't recall seing any such "formal" definition of meaninglessness.

Nothing in computer science tells you you have to have the exact same behavior in 2 APIs in order to measure some common subset of functionality. You can always restrict your measuremnts to that. Computer science is not that concerned with APIs anyway.

So you can use very formal computer science to compare the performance in big-O of X vs Y implementation of the common supported cases (namely, contiguous arrays).

>This is always possible, but it ignores the original constraints of the problem and hence doesn't shed any additional meaning on how to solve the original problem.

There's no "original" problem that one has to take wholesale. There are use cases, and some care about X, others about Y.

Scientific papers in CS compare implementations of things like filesystems, memory managers, garbage collectors etc ALL THE TIME, despite them not having the same API and one having some more or less features. They just measure what they want to measure (e.g performance of X characteristic) and ignore the others.
This.

It is very difficult to take time off at my job. We have one set of "PTO" days that include vacation and sick days (as an employee of 2 years I get 15 days per year). Most people do not take long blocks of time off, usually it's a day off here and there, maybe two.

We also have a no work from home policy. I am a web developer. Literally, my entire job can be done from a couch, and it is even frowned upon to stay at home to work when I'm sick. We are allowed to do so, of course, but upper management treats you like Judas for the day.
I agree that I want humans to stop fucking up the earth and I want less pollution. But those feelings do not prove climate change exists. Science doesn't work this way.
It's the reputational, "whuffie" economy, only in reverse.
I think an even better statistic would be the following (GPD per hours worked): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_... The differences are remarkable. However the comparison is not entirely fair with countries like Norway resting at the top. Norway derives a large part of its GDP from industries which are not very labor heavy but contribute heavily to GDP (Norway's economy is >50% based on petrochemicals).
16 bit: Atari ST. Yes the Amiga is better in every other way but WE HAVE MIDI SO WE WIN. *

* I have never, ever, used MIDI.
The market catches up with time, then overshoots. In both directions too. Just wait a bit.
Vacation policies are the least of it. How about the lack of a safety net? Take health care. Civilized people should agree that medical care in a rich country should be available to everyone. The thought of people dying in the streets from preventable disease and injury sounds pretty horrendous.

But for the past 20 years we've been fed the same fabricated FUD about socialized medicine that has no basis in reality. People still genuinely believe that America has the best healthcare, which is arguably true for the 1%, but not for the average person. We have major structural problems the media completely ignores.

Just one personal example, last December I needed to buy a 6-pill dose of medication while visiting family for the holidays in the US (I currently live in the UK). This cost me $600, $100 per pill. And it turns out that this medication is not as effective as the generic that would cost $2 per pill. But because there is no profitability this medication is not currently manufactured in the US. Had I been in the UK I could have walked into a pharmacy and bought this medication for £10.

Incidentally, while I was in line, the woman in front of me was purchasing a perscription of antibiotics, which cost $200, but she only had $100, so they only sold her half the dosage! I was shocked a trained pharmacist would be allowed to do this considering the perils of antibiotic resistance, but it's also pretty inhumane to withhold medication.

Frankly, the patriotic bullshit that Fox News and CNN feeds the populace about how much better we have it than Canada or the UK needs to stop. America needs to pull its head out of its ass and realize we are little better than a third-world country for anyone below median income who doesn't have a good group health insurance policy.
The Insider's Guide to Java Interviewing
Which, of course, makes it great for the private employers (the 1%), but not so great for the private employees (the 99% that was mentioned in the article)
On my machine, I get the following:

Firefox 30: 29ms

IE11: 227ms

Chrome (latest release): 127ms

Java 8 Nashorn (JJS): 512ms

Node (v0.11.13): 132ms
San Francisco Plans to Ban Certain Parking Apps
This is a fair perspective. I propose that the scientific community's collective stance is not that this is a wild deviation from typical variations, but that a significant change will result in unfavorable consequences for humanity as a species. Such change is occurring based on the data we have available to us. If we can mitigate or delay such change, we will be better off for it. This leads to emission controls, etc.

I believe the cause for concern among the proponents of awareness and regulation is that a notable change is happening, and we desperately want the status quo. Whether or not this change falls within normal variations is irrelevant to this argument.
Quick note: according to Wikipedia (citing IMF, World Bank, etc) the US is #1 in GDP at ~$16 trillion, almost double China in the number two spot. We are number 6 in PPP, but if we're talking economic output I would argue the former is more relevant.
Digging Down to the Root Cause
Can you explain what you mean by your last paragraph? The inability to find meaning and indentity in ones work causes people a psychic crisis to leave their jobs even temporarily? That problem is an imagined hurt to the economy?
Because domain names aren't public property.
Advanced search often leads to SQL injection. This is because there are some parts of SQL queries that can't be parameterized. If you allow the user to dynamically select which table to query against, or which columns to fetch, or how to sort or group the results, you need to sanitize all of these inputs by hand.

This is why saying "it's easy, just parameterize your queries" is bad advice. It's incomplete. There are still these unfortunate holes in most stacks that require you to be careful and whitelist user inputs.
>What difference does it make if the cause is entirely man made or not.

If it's not entirely man made, it would mean that efforts to curtail emissions (and consequently economic output) would be pointless and unnecessary.

>Should we let 80% of worlds population who live on the coast just deal with rising sea levels, because it natural?

It's not like the sea will simply rise several meters overnight, if it does actually rise. And again, if it's natural, then wouldn't that mean that we must, in fact, "deal with it"?

>Do you really need to know it's causing a rise in temperature to want less trucks and cars polluting the air in your city?

The air pollution you are concerned about here is sulfur, particulates, and other things unrelated to the CO2 debated over by politicians currently.

>Or does the fact that we will never have the historic data to know for sure if humans are causing global warming, make it okay to ignore the issue entirely, forever?

It certainly moves one's focus of concern to more pressing environmental and social issues.
PHP vs. .NET: Which Should You Learn?
Alfred Remote
Ninety-four percent of professional workers put in 50 or more hours, and nearly half work 65 or above.

This sounds crazy exaggerated without any citation. According to wiki, "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average non-farm private sector employee worked 34.5 hours per week as of June 2012."

EDIT: reference.. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm
Obamacare argument was inevitable, wasn't it.
Yes I know a CTO who worked in the valley (I think he reported to Vint at one point) and the UK.

He commented that the USA workers didn't produce more even though they only had 2 weeks vs the 5+ the civil service T&C derived uk workers did.

spent far more time goofing off and gossiping and taking sneaky long weekends to go skiing was his comment.
One of the things the move towards a socialized healthcare system will do for this country is focus a debate on how to increase overall well-being within the country, and how to balance that with economic output. Something I think this article misses is the effect our work habits have on our health as a country. Studies have repeatedly shown that those last several hours per week are only marginally productive, but how detrimental might they be? I would imagine the health effects (stress, blood pressure, poor eating habits, lack of exercise, etc.) become amplified in those very hours in which productivity becomes nearly worthless.

It's hard to quantify any of this, however, so it might be completely glossed over in the article on purpose. I'm sure that thinking like this will become more prevalent...
Feels more like journalists are just using any correlations to explain recession.
Functional Programming Comes to the Macintosh – Introducing Swift
regarding your edit, you're exactly right, of course a for loop will be faster. Sometimes you really do need a function call though, in which case fast forEach and map implementations become more useful.

The next step for fast.js are some sweet.js macros which will make writing for loops a bit nicer, because it's pretty painful to write this every time you want to iterate over an object:

var keys = Object.keys(obj),
length = keys.length,
key, i;
for (i = 0; i < length; i++) {
key = keys[i];
// ...
}

I'd rather write:

every key of obj {
// ...
}

and have that expanded at compile time.

Additionally there are some cases where you must use inline for loops (such as when slicing arguments objects, see https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Optimization-k...) and a function call is not possible. These can also be addressed with sweet.js macros.
Yes this is poor form. Prefixing, you don't have to deal with serious security issues, but this is just a step you really don't have to take--if this is part of your normal "bootstrap" you're likely doing it wrong.
Re: your second point, there actually does seem to be a pretty negative correlation between working hours and GDP in the OECD statistics you link. Just sort on the average-hours-worked column and look at who's at the top and bottom: with a few outliers, the rich countries are all on the low end, and the poor countries are on the high end. The shortest hours are in the Netherlands, Germany, and Norway; while the longest are in Mexico, Korea, and Greece.

This doesn't establish that longer hours lower GDP, of course. If I had to guess on a causal direction, it'd be some mixture of [more GDP] -> [shorter hours], as well as a good helping of [better-run country] -> both shorter hours and more GDP.
But how much of that GDP is going to the workers who're putting in the long hours?

Great time to be an employer in the US.
Karate kid learned from a book in the beginning.

Wax on. Wax off.

Obviously a book won't do. You need a training montage.
(EDIT: I'm not a journalist). If you have an email I would love to talk to you [EDIT:] as a fellow founder. There is a much wider ecosystem in private equity than just HN-style startup investors. The 100 VC's you'll hear about here represent a tiny sliver of a fraction of private equity. I don't know much about the whole market, but I'll tell you what I do know about it and exchange thoughts.

-

[EDIT:] I wrote this comment first, but following the journalist's response also asking for your email am adding these edits.

1. I would consider giving the journalist your email as well (or email him) as having a story written about you can't hurt -- maybe someone will read about your metrics there and want to invest. You explicitly complain about this in "Support from family and friends, investor backing, media coverage". Now, here's your chance. The journalist has a profile reading "Columnist @ Slate. Contributor @ Priceonomics. Co-host of the Stratechery Podcast (stratechery.fm) with Ben Thompson (currently on hold; please stay tuned)."

2. On the other hand you may be wanting to keep a clear separation from this online identity, which I would respect but the journalist would have to prove through showing you other stories they have written that don't divulge the source.

You can give me a pseudonymous email, it's fine.
I thought one of (not the only) the main aspects of the scientific method was that it could only be used to disprove a theory, but never to prove it 100% correct. For example, you cannot ever prove that Big Foot is a hoax, but you can disprove it by finding him. Or, the theory of gravity can never be proven, only disproven if an experiment showed it to be false. Isn't that all this scientist is asking for?
> and in effect becomes a mandatory leave

this is a good thing, as the rest of the evidence presented in the OP suggests. People should take all the leave they are entitled to.
Google domains
compete indepently using open standards

I don't think this can exist without at least some outside intervention. The monolith has lower coordination costs, potentially better usability (at least at first) and extra opportunities for profit by violating your privacy. So it's more likely to succeed in the market. And once it has dominant market power, we're back to "embrace, extend, extinguish".
> there is essentially no performance difference between native functions and their JavaScript equivalents

> native functions often have to cover complicated edge cases from the ECMAScript specification, which put them at a performance disadvantage.

Aren't these opposing statements?
Try Padrino http://padrinorb.com
if OP open sourced the code I would feel more comfortable about it. its weird that the first thought of hesitation was "that's weird they didn't do any customization to bootstrap" then this: http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fcheckr.io%2f

I dont see any backend language or framework. what does this mean?
Jumping Crocodiles in Slow Motion
Rails, for better or worse, is the flagship project of Ruby, and shapes the Ruby culture quite strongly.

I would much prefer Rails 20 than the current situation. If you want to make a major marketing level move, introduce a codename or something. Separate marketing from semantics.
To quote Bobbi Flekman, "Money talks. Bullshit walks."
i made a statement, backed it up by mentioning productivity, and then made a reference to a real world example that I have observed, unlike the article that just mostly made platitudes.

if you'd like further evidence, the EU area has an unemployment rate close to 12%. companies are not anxious to hire europeans for one reason or another.
AMA about learning to code: CAO at NYCDA
>> And it turns out that this medication is not as effective as the generic that would cost $2 per pill.

What medication was it, if you don't mind me asking? And why didn't you just ask for the generic?

Many pharmacy chains in the USA offer a large list of generics for the low costs like $10/90 day supply
How to Facebook like a Boss
Google+ The Next Big Thing: How Does Your Profile Look?
Not to mention BAC has a known baseline of 0. What is the known baseline for mean global surface temperature? Why is 1951-1980 a good choice for a base period?