skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But you do know the reason why this situation is highlighted in because Microsoft touted this as an example of the success of the .NET platform? That's what we call a pretty hard fail.
If you could answer one question, what would it be?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_time_Java
Why? Are you afraid of automatic memory management? There are incremental real-time garbace collectors available. And that should be preferable to space leaks and seg-faults.

Or is there any other reason you advice against using a `managed language'?
A closed system cannot be modified at the whim of the organization that uses it if it is closed. It implies vendor dependence. With FOSS you have vendor independence and greater competition, plus promoting the local industry by not having to depend on the IBMs and Microsofts of the world for your software support.
It would be a lot smarter to unbundle it from the unlimited wireless connectivity forever plan. The device would be cheaper and users could decide how much (or how little) they want to spend on connectivity. I also bet slashing the cost of the perpetual wireless could allow Amazon to include wifi, making moot my whole point here.
> Self-tail calls (where a function calls itself in tail position) can be compiled as a goto

Right, that's the example that I had in mind.

I can see that for more complicated situations something more would be required, but I always figured that if the JVM is turing complete that it should be possible to 'target' any language to it without having to invent special bytecodes. Probably this is a direct consequence of the JVM and java being developed in tandem, it is not as general as I thought it was.

Thanks!
The low-contrast faint text on tan makes it annoying to read. Would be nice to see higher contrast, and perhaps narrower column, for long posts like this.
This would just be a massive cost for zero benefit. Silly idea - and a silly article.

Switching from one side of the road to another when visiting continental countries is a trivial problem easily encapsulated by the process of crossing the channel. I regularly move between the UK and France and happily drive cars on either side of the road and with the steering wheel on either the left or right depending upon which car I am driving.
OK, you run it twice and the results differ. You go back and look at what the starting state should be and the starting states differ. Where do you get the definitely correct data from for the third run?
> which is just unfounded bashing.

i'm always surprised to hear things like this. it's certainly not unfounded - it's just so obvious and universally accepted that it doesn't require explanation - one would think.
> First of all, if a JVM were to attempt this optimization for tail calls using the ordinary method call bytecodes, it would break existing programs that are written to rely on stack frame inspection.

That is not a bug, that's a feature. Too bad the feature request for hanging people who write programs that rely on stack frame inspection didn't go trough.
"many books are not available in Europe (...) even Dan Brown's latest."

I call this a feature
In a project here at work we are storing IP Addresses in both string format and in integer format (primarily, so we can sort the addresses intelligently). By sorting on the integer column, yet displaying the string column, you get the result set in the order that makes the most sense.
did anyone ever find out if he was actually ok (out of interest - I cant see in that thread)?
It seems they'd be a prime acquisition target from major airlines. An investment could keep them afloat until that is realized.
Google testing a service called Cloudboard
The Hotel at the End of the World
In the hotel at the end of the world it's business as usual, as Pema dishes up rice and pork curry to travellers who stop by for a drink and refuge from the rains. Everyone there has a story to tell, and at times they end up revealing more than they want to.
Dumping .NET for Java seems like dumping a Buick to buy a Chevrolet.

They share a common set of flaws - both apparently tend to produce overcomplicated designs and generally "enterprisey" solutions.

It would be much more interesting news if they went with Erlang, Scala, Clojure on top of Hadoop or something like it ;-) but I bet no "enterprise consultant" over there wants to bet the career on that.

Shame. I would give it a shot. Considering the productivity gap between a Java (and C#) developer and one on any modern dynamic language, they could afford to try 5 different approaches on 5 different technologies within the same budget and have time to spare to benchmark each one to select the best solution.
Has anyone else spotted this contradiction?

Assertion:

This strategy for survival, known as autophagy ("eating oneself"),
evolved in our ancestors over two billion years ago.
Today, all animals rely on it to endure famines, as
do plants, fungi and single-cell protozoa.

Proof? (2 paragraphs down, after the more technical explanation of the need for autophagy.)

When the scientists engineered mice so they could not use
their lysosomes at birth, the newborn mice almost immediately
died of starvation.

If this evolved 2bn years ago, then how did our ancestors survive until it evolved? By this point, the mice have already lost many individual cells; the survival of smaller species/organisms would be infinitesimal once food ran out, or even in the time spent between meals.
It's been said that IQ tests measure IQ, where IQ is defined as "that quantity which is measured by IQ tests".

The interesting part is that, even defined in that rather circular manner, IQ can be consistently measured and compared between individuals and has strong, reliable correlations with performance on other tasks commonly seen as intelligence-based, as well as correlating with both academic and professional success. Yes, these are correlations, not guarantees, but don't underestimate the value of that, and it's not actually clear that there's any better way.

The unknown quantity that such tests are trying to measure is usually referred to as g, or the general intelligence factor. Look up the term "g-loaded" for more information.
Nvidia working on CUDA-based anti-virus
I'm still amazed by what the FlightCaster team has built in such a short amount of time.
Remember how in Babylon5 they would turn in yesterday's printed newspaper to get today's news printed on the recycled pages? I think we are headed that way. Because reading on paper just has a certain handiness to it no matter how sophisticated our portable devices are.
Steaks Virginia Beach
Find a handful of restaurants in the entire country that can offer you a fantastic dining experience. We have been offering our guests fantastic seafood, steaks, live music, nightlife, private party, group events, Wine, casual & Spirits since 1992 in Virginia Beach.
Embrace your startup failure – the faster you fail, the better
How to use Crontab in ubuntu Linux
I have the DX and have been very happy with it, so far.

Amazon has no control over content you add on to it yourself; they never know about your own PDFs. This is the major reason why I bought the device and what I mostly use it for. I seldom buy Kindle books, and I get those on the Kindle that I just want to read and don't particularly care what happens in the long run.

On the remote erasing feature, I really, sincerely doubt they would ever try that shit again. The amount of bad publicity this earned them, it'd be ridiculous for them to even imply doing it. Bezos personally apologized for it and if they do it again, it would cost him his credibility.
This is why clojure has a special form for tail call where you can "recur" a loop by re-binding the variables. When proper tail call comes to JVM, it'll be possible to do write the loop as a function call instead of hiding it inside a function.

(def factorial
(fn [n]
(loop [cnt n acc 1]
(if (zero? cnt)
acc
(recur (dec cnt) (* acc cnt))))))
What an awkward thing to off-load to the GPU. Isn't virus scanning bound by I/O, and trailing far behind by substring matching?
Autoseller Network
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As a young guy who tries to learn everything he can on the business of VCs and that whole world this post was awesome!

-know the terminology. If you don't know an NDA from a MOU then you will have to spend some time on that.

Does anyone have any tips on where I can spend some time studying up on that? NDA is pretty much the only term I know.
Not that I'm aware of. I did go so far as to check the whois for a phone number but I have no personal knowledge of nickb so I figured it would be pretty intrusive of me to call.

Prakash or miles would be better suited for that I think.
I see. Sorry I misunderstood your intentions, then.

There are basically two contexts the word "right" is used: an moral and a legal context.

If the right you're talking about is an moral one, you surely can trade it. This happens all the time since people differ in moral judgements. For example, some may say you have a right to health. Assuming the premise is true, you can still "trade" it for the (subjective) benefit of smoking.

If the right you are talking about is a legal one, it depends on the law. I don't think, for example, that you could sell your right to vote. However, there are other rights you can sell. For example, copyright gives you certain rights that you may sell or trade.
Nickb commented on an NM piece a few weeks ago. Everyone told him how happy they were, and he didn't respond to that.

So I assume he's fine, just busy.
OK I only skimmed it but it looks like woolly thinking and poor reasoning. Interaction is not continuous during any process and hardly brings any new computational function to even a "Turing Machine".
There is a book "Graph Theory" by Reinhard Diestel. There used to be an online version as a pdf, but it seems to be gone now. The Archive has it:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/...
(the pdf is almost 3 Mb).
Um, no. Your advice is completely backwards.

Perl does NOT have a lightweight threading model. Period. Literally every time you spawn a thread, Perl copies all of its data structures to avoid sharing stuff that is not threadsafe. If your Perl developers try to tell you otherwise, they are incompetent. The standard way to build a high performance website in Perl is to use prefork and then put a reverse proxy in front of them in httpd accelerator mode. See http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/strategy.html for an old, but still accurate, description of httpd accelerator mode if you don't know what it is.

Please note that Windows does not have good support for forking. Therefore I have never heard of a competent team of Perl developers choosing to try to deploy a high volume website on Windows.

To the best of my knowledge both Ruby and Python do support lightweight threading, unlike Perl, but both have a global interpreter lock that synchronizes very frequently, and severely limits scalability. I don't know what strategies are common in those languages, but personally I suspect that the right strategy on Unix with those languages is, like Perl, to use pre-fork with a reverse proxy in httpd accelerator mode.

However both Python and Ruby have implementations on other platforms, such as the JVM. I believe (verify this before relying on it) that those implementations support lightweight threads without the drawbacks of the C implementation. Therefore if you want to use lightweight threading with that class of scripting language, use one of those implementations.
DX isn't great for reading code. There is significant lag when trying to go through multiple pages in quick succession. It is however, great for normal reading as after you view a page for some time, it loads the next page relatively quick.
A good way is to read the articles on upcoming m&a deals, once you fully grok those there isn't much that will surprise you in a basic deal. Especially the financial side of things has a whole bunch of acronyms that can be hard to remember if you don't use them daily.
Well to complete the anecdote, her tire go caught crossing some railroad tracks (she was an experienced cyclist), she fell and hit her head on one of them. Her doctors praised her wearing a helmet, so I'm apt to take their advice over yours.
This seems like a spin. They seem to be outsourcing this to Sri Lanka by buying MillenniumIT, which is a Sri Lanka developer ("Compared to the bill of $65 million for TradElect, MillenniumIT, a Sri Lankan developer, is a bargain at $30 million." 1))

Is this Windows or .Net's fault? I really doubt it. .Net is a great platform and offers performance similar to Java/C/C++. Will it help to switch the platform to Java? Probably not, unless MillenniumIT are much better programmers than developers from Accenture. Open-source does not prevent you from making fatal mistakes or do bad code.

1) http://www.ibspublishing.com/index.cfm?section=news&acti...
How not to do regexps
there used to be another one, nonhackernews.com, run by mattmaroon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315692

that one is so far gone that the domain has expired.

so much for the splinter groups!
I remember hearing about this, and was hoping for the price to be about half what it is. This is a great opportunity for physical books, but it won't be all that feasible until the cost for the on-demand books are significantly cheaper.
Wonder what happens if (when?) the FTC disclosure requirements collide with non-disclosure agreements? NDAs can certainly steer public discussions and opinions, though in a more subtle fashion than "blogola."
Announcing GWT 2.0 Milestone 1
Very true. Verizon could be all talk at this point.

But it's interesting to see the walls starting to come down, slowly as they are.
While you've made a lot of good points, the time overhead is insignificant. By default modern versions of Linux use a O(log(N)) scheduler, so going from a few thousand to a few million threads of execution only doubles the scheduling time. Furthermore if you go to an older kernel you can get the O(1) scheduler, meaning that scheduling is constant time no matter how many threads you have. (But the scheduling had worse characteristics, which is why you're probably better off with the less scalable scheduler.)
"If you're a blogger and you're really upset about this, you're telling me that you're now pissed that you have to now disclose all of your back-room dealings, and that doesn't instill much confidence in your reporting."

Sure, it may require that bloggers report gifts and incentives. But the law is basically unenforceable. There are millions of blogs in existence and the FTC cannot police them all. While I'm sure that the FTC is only intending to go after the extremely successful blogs, it would be preferable to see some kinds of limits built into the guidelines so we actually know where the FTC is intending to enforce these guidelines.

Second of all, this is the internet. So if someone seriously wanted to get around this, they would just have to host their blog someplace where the FTC doesn't have authority.

Edit: changed FCC to FTC
It takes a lot of effort to admit an idea you get really charged up about doesn't have any viability in the marketplace. Interesting article; failing is a good thing most of the time.
I'm mostly arguing against patenting trivial increments over non-trivial ideas.

It has been long known that MC can be applied to computing any integral over any domain, so computing the integral of color over a pixel is simply a specialization of a general technique, and should not be patented.

Similarly, in akeefer's post above, storing insurance claims in a relational database is a specialization of the well known process of storing anything in a database, so should not be patented.
It's like any business. Sure, you can lie to make a sale, but don't expect many repeat customers.

And most advertisers (and all ad agency clients) also do their own tracking on click-throughs. Many also track image loads.

(Open rate is the other big metric. If you're doing a branding campaign, you want to know how many people saw your ad, not necessarily how many clicked on it.)
Critical reasoning is not failure.
How to keep fraudsters out of your e-commerce operation
Getting 80% less compilation errors
Classic review of "The Story of Ping"
There have been some attempts at setting up an auditing system (as there is for newspapers), but they never took off, and I don't think that's really the issue.

Ultimately, advertisers can tell if there ads are working because they get more hits, more leads, and more sales. For most clients, if ads are generating sales, it doesn't really matter what the CTR is.
It's one of those cases where the future total cost is infinite and the current cost to switch is finite. And yet, you know that in the long run there will never be a moment when the perception of those two will make it urgent enough to get everybody on the same page to make that switch.

I've driven in England, it takes me about 20 minutes to really get 'in' to it, after that it is ok. The danger points occur when you enter traffic from a very small road onto a larger one and there is no other traffic. Years of conditioning are hard to overcome when there are no other references.

And when crossing the street, I invariably look the wrong way. Nearly got flattened by a bus outside a London convention center a while ago. Good brakes on those buses!
From http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2... :

"Kindle (U.S. Wireless) user: We'll send personal documents to your Kindle via Whispernet while inside the U.S. wireless coverage area for a fee of $.15 per megabyte.

Kindle (U.S. & International Wireless) user living in the United States: If you transfer personal documents to your Kindle via Whispernet while inside the United States, the fee is $ .15 per megabyte. When travelling outside the United States, a fee of $.99 per megabyte will apply.

Kindle (U.S. & International Wireless) user living outside the United States: We'll send personal files to your Kindle via Whispernet for a fee of $ .99 (USD) per megabyte anywhere in the world you access Whispernet service."
Soft errors are temporary (e.g. a bit flip caused by cosmic rays) so rebooting will eliminate them.

Hard errors are permanent (e.g. a bit is always bad) and that's when you throw the DIMM away.
how much of AMZN does Bezos actually own though?
If you have a sip account you can use fring to make voip calls.
And what if they did go on, changing their product and target audience while developing ?

Like many others, who started with an exciting idea but ended up with (a completely different yet) exciting product.
Disclaimer -- IANAL, so maybe we can all get some elaboration from an attorney and learn something?

Let's make a distinction between intent and awareness of the law. For example's sake, let's say you've been trading stock off a tip a company insider gave you, which is illegal. At the same time, you don't know it's illegal, but you are consciously trading the stock.

Intent -- You have the intent to trade the stock because you are doing it during the day, awake and fully aware of your actions. You would not have intent if you traded the stock while sleepwalking.

Awareness of the law -- You are not aware that your actions are a crime, despite having an intent to perform those actions. This makes no difference -- you are held accountable for your actions whether you knew they were illegal or not, as long as you were cognizant while you were taking those actions.

IANAL, so again, the language is probably all flubbed. But it's my understanding that intent matters, not awareness of the law. Can anyone correct me if I'm mistaken?
Ask HN: Comet in Python--suggestions?
Hi all,

This weekend I'm planning to play with some Comet stuff using Python (that I can run on MS-Windows). Couple of days back someone posted a Comet Python framework (not Tornedo) whose name I cannot recall? Can you please give some good suggestions?

Also, I don't have any experience with Python web-frameworks so a question (probably a stupid one)

1- If I use Django will I still have to use a a Comet-based server? How does a comet server fit into the picture if I'm planning to use Django? Does anyone has any experience/thoughts on this.

Any help is appreciated.
The code for my lock would not be found this way. Choosing the correct 3rd number (which obviously I know) my whole code does not appear in the suggestions to try.
In java, you could use the "while" keyword for that.

Anyway, tail-calls aren't necessarily loops. If I'm not mistaken, tail-call optimisation for looping constructs only (which the poster a few levels above probably had in mind) wouldn't require a special byte code.
I see no contradiction. It says strategy for survival, not necessity.

Neither does it say that there are no contemporary organisms without these autophagous mechanisms.
I think the benefits are low but greater than zero. For example, us Brits would be able to buy left-hand drive cars instead of paying more for right-hand drive cars as we do today.
The thing is that these guys are already part of a company with a different product and revenue stream. This was kind of a 'what happens if we change our product and audience' exercise, and fortunately, instead of spending months wasting money to find out it wouldn't fly, they spent a few days. I guess if they weren't already doing other stuff, soldiering on and seeing what happened would be an option - provided you have some way of paying your rent while doing so.
> You can't measure a person's intelligence using a test.

Do you actually believe this dogma?

This Usenet post should be read by all "IQ deniers":
http://tiny.cc/F7gxA

"according to IQ doubters, knowing how smart I am should
tell you nothing about my IQ. It is as likely to be 50 as 150."

The same poster once proposed a beautiful test of the depth of an IQ denier's beliefs:

You are to be operated on, and have been given a choice between two surgeons. You know nothing about them, save for the IQ of each. Will you choose the surgeon with the lower IQ? What if the difference between them is an entire standard deviation? Two standard deviations? If you truly believe that IQ tests measure nothing - that the result of any such test is essentially a random number - you should happily choose the surgeon with the lower score. If you do not believe it, we are merely quibbling over the accuracy of existing tests.

Moreover, the only way to seriously dismiss the existing IQ tests as hopelessly inaccurate is to borrow tricks from the Creationists' playbook wholesale (as Steven Jay Gould, the patron saint of IQ denial, often did) and close your eyes (and more importantly, those of your audience) to reams of high-quality data.

More references, for those actually interested:
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intellig...

And if you want to know the core driving force behind the IQ denialists:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconven...

"Watson was thinking like a scientist. Which is exactly why he was punished. The moral laws of our society dictate that we are not allowed to think scientifically about some issues. Especially not in public."
Is it possible that Sam Collins failed at failure?
What if he and his team could have re-purposed their modular utilities/design for HTML5 support? There's still a great need for very high level utilities to aid domain experts in building specialized web services.
Ohhh, that sheds more light on the quick nix. Thanks jlees.