skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I am surprised to see that so many programmers still like to reason and guess what the performance of their program is instead of profiling it...

Yeah, us old fuddy-duddies. We also like to reason about the correctness of our code while we're constructing it, instead of writing all of it and testing it. Crazy, huh? Like deep correctness, a performant system does not come from sprinkling some tools over at the end; it's an emergent property of attention to detail at every step.

The performance problems a profiler can show you are the easy ones. Hard performance problems come from users, where you can't touch, feel, and measure the code's dynamic behavior. Somewhere out there, in some customers' hands, software you barely remember writing three years ago is crawling along, and the customer is too livid to clearly express what she's doing to make it slow.

Just like debugging a tough correctness bug from the field, you are stuck alternating between deduction and induction. You try to piece together what the user did, and with luck you can reconstruct the bug! Yay, profile it, deduction worked! But I was almost never this lucky. I was left stuck using my bottom-up understanding of what the source code does and how it could have interacted with the user's setup. Identify a possible critical path for this workload, and stare at that motha with a critical eye: "I think you're slow sometimes. But obviously not always. Why? What could make you slow?"

C++ makes this part much, much harder, because even having narrowed it down to a candidate critical path, you can't look at the source code to know (as reliably and quickly as with C) what the hardware is going to do. Notice the qualifiers there (as reliably, as quickly). I'm sure a C++ expert like yourself could rattle off the whole flying circus of default constructors, copy constructors, operator overloads, and destructors that the compiler spits out, but to do so you will need non-local information in a way that you do not for C.

If these problems don't arise in your practice, awesome, good for you. Your marginal user doesn't consider performance problems bugs. That's a great situation to be in, because it lets you focus on features. But it does lead to question of why you are using C++.

> I don't want to match malloc/free calls, strcat strings together or realloc pointers.

If you don't occasionally really need realloc, that's cool, nothing wrong with that, but what kind of resource-intensive software are we talking about, then? It's an important tool in the toolbox when trying to implement data structures that occupy significant fractions of your address space.
i worked at landmark digital up until about a year ago, so i can say with some confidence that you've got it backwards.

the music recognition algorithm was developed by mr wang, specifically for shazam, to do just what it has been doing all along.

the reason landmark got into the picture is because they are a subsidiary of bmi, the music rights organization. they monitor radio stations. since the dawn of time, they have been paying actual human beings to record logs of every song played on most of the big radio stations in the united states, 24/7. they use that information to ensure that the song's rightsholders get paid for the plays. obviously this is a situation ripe for automation. they hired a guy to do a multi-year search for the best technology for the job, and settled on shazam's algorithm.

i am not privy to the details, but i believe shazam sold the code to landmark because they were strapped for cash. there are complicated legal agreements in place of course, so that shazam can still use the code for cellphone music recognition.
You mention RDF / SparQL ... any interesting progress on Graph Query languages?

Im suspicious of RDF, it comes across as marketing.
Hi bemmu, thanks for the feedback. I've actually changed the title a couple of days or maybe hours!? ago, to display something different, they're not that much peoples searching for "buzz" in google, so I will change that in my meta Tags to latest buss, great. Well, for the "no comments" I can't really help myself here than keeping it, or changing it to something like "more" as there're more than comments behind that option (subscribe, tweet, view other peoples comments and more). Sop the average User won't figure it with the mouse-over, and an Icon will just be too much additional connections and load for the site and the user experience. Maybe I should remove the "no" there? not sure as it's there to interact with the user, somehow inviting the user to comment...could you figure out what the site is about? and what about the usability/your user experience there? were most of the options self-explaining?

Thanks
I'm kind of shocked that you are using SQLite to power this site. I suppose it'd be easy to move to something better, but still...
He seems to have been quite receptive to M with more than a little E thrown in, to the extent that receiving M from a (probably non-Mossad but there is no proving that) Israeli source convinced his E that he was really a Highly Sought After Secret Agent.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/20/nasa_security/

Mr. International Espionage was apparently a really cheap date: $9,000 for "... information classified as both top secret and secret, on U.S. satellites, early warning systems, means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack, communications intelligence information, and major elements of defense strategy".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/19/stewart-nozette-pic...
I'm on the border between libertarian and liberal
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To me this whole Nook thing feels like a "shock and awe" campaign from B&N to take steam away from the Kindle and to their credit it seems to be working.

Personally, I'm skeptical they will be able to pull it off. They have a feature list a mile long (touch screen, eink display, wireless, wifi, etc) and I'd be shocked if things worked even 1/3 as well as they are advertising in their press releases, but I will reserve judgment for when it is finally released in November.
Good point. I think you nailed my problem, that I am not an every-day user of OS X :) but I expect there to be affordances for "advanced" features. This is really no different from their current trackpad offerings -- when I use a friend's MacBook, I'm usually befuddled enough by the trackpad that I stick to basic point+click+keyboard.
As somebody who's given you a hard time up thread, and who has advocated the C + HLL approach, let me say: you're right, I now think that approach is naive. It's really difficult to share data across the C/HLL boundary, and in normal applications the data representation is the most likely place to need performance tweaking, and thus you often want to represent it in "LLL" data structures.

The mappings of C/C++'s type system into an HLL is almost intractable. What if there's a union somewhere? You could have distinct HLL and LLL representations, sync'ed either lazily or eagerly, but that's really, really complicated.

Unfortunately, you can only apply "C* + HLL" when there's a nice, clear, never-shifting boundary between the HLL and LLL parts. So, language selection is not a false dichotomy; you really do have to choose "mostly one."

(edit: typo, non-sense sentence. Sorry folks, running a fever.)
One can hope whatever he's doing in gradschool is more valuable than this blog... :-P
I was at Truman for undergrad and WUSTL for MS.

I think Truman's undergrad curriculum is fine and the profs care about teaching more than anything else. I'm glad I took courses in philosophy, art history, literature, anthropology and so on; Truman is probably a better place to do that compared to MS&T.

But, if you wind up wanting to be a CS researcher (PhD), then it would be good to get involved with prestigious research as an undergrad. Also, undergraduate students at WUSTL can enroll in graduate courses to increase the breadth and depth of their CS education.

I wish I'd discovered before midway through junior year that I'd like to be a CS researcher. Also, I believe most jobs for which a CS degree is nominally required have very little to do with CS, and I wish I'd known earlier that the differences among programming jobs were not superficial.

Program goodness is not an objective, scalar quantity.

The smallest part of the value I think is in the curriculum. Truman's was much the same as WUSTL's and from what I've seen in the course catalogs they both seem similar to CMU's and Stanford's. I will admit that the Webster University curriculum seems rather different.

Another component of value is teaching skill. I have no idea how you'd assess that ahead of time, unfortunately. Famous profs are not always skillful teachers. I've had really excellent profs at both Truman and WUSTL. More at WUSTL than at Truman, but then WUSTL's a bigger department. I've had terrible profs at both Truman and WUSTL.

Your fellow students can make a big difference. Not only is it much easier to be hired by someone you know, but while you're in school together you can inspire each other to work on great projects. I think that doing the overnight visit circuit coordinated by each admissions office was helpful for sampling each school's culture.

I didn't know it until after I'd been at university for a few semesters, but the best indicators of my love of CS were: (1) I enjoyed the number theory topics in my 6th grade math class (2) proofs in geometry were fun (3) proofs in calculus class reawakened my dormant interest in math classes and (4) I had an addiction to programming that endured from grade school through high school and to today.

Look up the degree requirements at a couple of schools, Google for the course web sites, and browse the lecture notes and homeworks to map out the foundations of CS. Take a look at Communications of the ACM and IEEE Computer to find out if the frontier of the CS field interests you. Do the overnight visits and hang out with some current students; talk to them about what they like about CS and see if you feel the same way.

Good luck.
Loopt acquires GraffitiGeo
Wrong Jason... Calacanis is Mahalo & others... 37signals is Jason Fried. (Minor, of course, though I suppose not to the Jasons!)
The technology is there. If you live in the US then most substations have metering, various indications (transformer monitoring, breaker positions, etc.), and breaker/circuit switcher/motor operated device controls. If there is a fault on your feeder then the utility should know immediately. Chances are if you are served by a larger utility then you will also get an automated time of day meter in the next couple of years. Is the adoption of technology slow compared other industries? Sure, safety and reliability rule.
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no, that's μTP. UDP is a 30-year-old protocol: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc768

it's substantially faster than TCP because it doesn't provide any guarantees (e.g. error checking); consequently it's more difficult to work with. this protocol builds on top of UDP to provide all of the nice guarantees that TCP does.
I think this is a feature (or bug) of capitalism. Capitalism (or socialism for that matter) is a hard to use term. No one agrees on its real meaning. Free is definitely a premise. Honest, I'm not sure. I think many free marketers argue that honesty is one of the emergent qualities of markets.

There is a capitalist core though. I think that core says that the non-market system (governments, societies, etc.) need to make sure that things are free. Emergent order will take care of the rest. Incentives & feedbacks will make sure (via the mechanism described above) that transactions are profitable for all parties, that they are safe & that they are otherwise ethical. Honesty is usually included in this.

Again, when I say 'usually included,' it's hard to nail down what I mean. Most people have obviously never considered this particular aspect. They use think in more general terms. But the Capitalism-as-philosophy guys (Libertarians in the US, Austrian-schoolers or Liberals some other places), would consider honesty as something that emerges, part of capitalism.
Will have to do it tomorrow, had to stay late at work.
Obviously I don't know the details of the sting operation, but shouldn't it be the default to assume someone approaching you about selling classified information is an FBI agent, unless very convincingly demonstrated otherwise?
I envision a cellphone that can be docked inside some kind of a netbook shell. The phone holds all the essential hardware, but the netbook shell provides a bigger battery, a keyboard and a larger screen. Take both or only the phone with you, depending on your needs that day. And you'd never need to sync files and contacts between your phone and netbook, because they'd be the same device.

Something like this can't bee too far off.
Oh but that is just wrong. See for yourself... http://qntm.org/?board
Congrats to the GraffitiGeo team!

This would seem like a talent acquisition, unless GraffitiGeo had a large amount of active users.
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IIRC 'play/pause' doubles as 'select' in the menus and 'menu' doubles as 'back'.

Putting them next to each other would seem to make it easier for people to note and remember the relationship when navigating menus.
Congratulations to Loopt as well!
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I'm sure he's talking about the design and aesthetic, not the actual display quality.
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To me that random access is the killer feature itself. What other benefit would I have from using an ebook reader if not to carry around my whole library instead of just the book I am currently mainly reading.
Are you shocked that it works or shocked that I would be so stupid as to use SQLite? I expect extremely low load and that I'll have plenty of time to move to memcached and no database...

EDIT: it's on memcached now.
Certainly not, as the major LCD manufacturers have stopped producing 8-bit panels in portable sizes.
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That's a horrible idea, and it sounds a lot more like training than education. 90% of Math, Chemistry and Physics are calculations? You're doing it wrong anyway.

The material content of the calculus class is nigh useless, the goal is to get to get people to be able to think and solve problems.
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Similar small scale problems of mine were easy to solve with Python Queue's. Maybe I am lucky those problems weren't at a scale azim and gthank explained though. oh the goose-bump :)
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How many operational failures were there, exactly? I think it was at least 2 or 3 fairly large setbacks, right? I guess the problem here is just how damn long the system takes to cycle up and down. I imagine if the LHC could turn on and off within a few hours we would have seen the entire facility blow up if the theory were true.
Reminds me the "Automatic CS paper generator"

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
This is true in general, though for the newer MacBooks they're just getting up to a good approximation of sRGB.
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I propose an alternate theory in which the LHC does destroy the world thereby never allowing time travel to be developed.
Well, go ahead and make your specific, reasoned, and well-evidenced accusations. That's still a discussion about the data.

Or did you just want to throw up FUDdy innuendo?
Classic Google tactic of buying early stage companies with great technology and brains.

Is this the first time a YC company has acquired another?
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Real estate is one that really chaps my ass.

I don't know what it's like in other countries, but in Canada there's this bizarre mafia of middlemen that take ~6-10% of the value of house when you sell. They self-promote and self-reinforce to maintain an information advantage, but they don't seem to offer a service beyond a list of houses with pictures, and hand-holding.
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The purported "loan to a friend" feature of the Nook does sound a bit Zune-like. It's unlikely that there will be a DRM free approach, but I've seen notably less hacking on the Amazon format than on AAC. Perhaps since the decryption doesn't happen on a general purpose computer, it's harder to crack. Or maybe crackers don't read books?
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Do you mean having the nearby pages in your current book show at the bottom of the screen? That would be nice, since e-ink is a bit slow to refresh. I don't see much in point in the way it's pictured on the site though and in the video, shopping for books by flipping through book covers is highly inefficient! Overall, I lament the lack of a keyboard. Searching for books using the Kindle is probably better.
Shazam works much better than Midomi in my incredibly informal, anecdotal experiences... never got any of the extra midomi features to work when I could use them, either.
I was on the line between libertarian and centrists, although the text said I was a Centrists. Interesting questions.
I would also like a pony.
Scaling relational databases to the point of 10s of millions of requests is extremely non-trivial.

Simply not true. That level of database activity is bread-and-butter for many people these days. Hundreds of millions, non-trivial in the sense that it will cost you a pile of money, but these days, basically straightforward, especially if you've done it before. Thousands of millions, now that's where things get interesting.

Oh, and he's talking about requests. The trading systems I've worked on can and do handle hundreds of millions of commits per day.
Neither of those factors play a role: there are plenty of 27" televisions, and it's not the resolution that matters, it's cutting the glass. The official Lenovo blog talks more about this: http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=220

Apols for the depth thing, don't know where that came from. Possibly reading about bit-depth, another traditional area of Apple cost-cutting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite...

Interesting articles. I don't know if they apply or not. :)

Edit: ah, you're probably right, there hasn't been an execution for a non-homicide since 1964.
No, I think he's referring to digital whiteboards that capture what is written on them.

They've been around for a while (I remember seeing them at Tech/Edu conferences in the web 1.0 days).
There's one I can think of off the top of my head: Posterous acquired Slinkset. There are probably others.
Is this a example of a knowledge level of modern sysadmin? If so, we're in trouble. =)

Sysadmin should be able to think in terms of data flows, which means memory management, data partitioning, and network stack usage, able to put different types of data into different kinds of storage, and understand the role of cache and how data should be access.

Packages are just a tools.
Doesn't this make anyone else wonder about the accuracy of statements physisicts make about other galaxies? I mean, it seems to me like if we're still disocvering things like this about our solar system (relatively nearby) then how in the world can anyone be confident about statements made about other galaxies (compratively further off)?

To some degree, I'm sure its just the fact that articles written for non-scientests tend to make them sound more sure than they are, but it still seems strange to me...
Firefox uses native dialogs on the platforms it runs on

All three of them -- Win32, Carbon, and GTK+

What's preventing them from switching to a WebKit-based browser when it's ready for production?

Inertia is a bitch
Reddit merged with infogami back in the day.

http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html
I go to Missouri S&T, in my last year as a CS student.

Our CS program is primarily focused on getting a software engineering job. Our primary language is C++ (though with a few exceptions, professors don't make use of most of it's features). There are Java courses, but I don't think they start until the 300 level.

Our primary forms of research are either military-funded ventures (one that comes to mind is disposable ad-hoc networking sensors) or machine learning (with a heavy focus in evolutionary algorithms).

Our local ACM chapter does some interesting stuff, mostly projects. Two recent ones that come to mind were the building of an arcade cabinet, and the building of a soda machine, with a corresponding API.

Most design teams on campus are looking for a good CS to write some code. This could be image processing software for the robotics team, or porting Fortran code to C++. There's also a team that hosts a programming competition every semester. I think it's pretty awesome, but as it's leader, I may be a bit biased. Here's a link: http://megaminerai.com/

I haven't seen much in the entrepreneurial side of things here. We have some sort of organization for it, but I don't think it has much membership. There are a few individuals interested in such things, but you have to look around for them.
Alt+Middle-click allows one to resize a window in most X11 window managers without moving the cursor to a window border.

Middle-click also pastes the clipboard in most X11 apps.

Finally, I used to bind middle-click to next weapon in Quake 3 (since I bound the mouse wheel directions to the rocket launcher and rail gun), and zoom in other games.
Ditto. I just wish the hard drive were user replaceable: from what I can gather, the HD is the big bottleneck on most of my day-to-day activities and would very much benefit from an SSD.
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The Home.

It should be "standard" to have a single web interface for control over everything in my house.

1) Real-Time monitoring of water, electric and gas consumption.

2) Entertainment. I should be able to login to a website and click "TV's". Then I can see if they are on, what channel is being watched, what is scheduled to be recorded.

3) Security. Doors and Windows. Automation of opening, closing and locking. Plus video surveillance.

4) Upkeep. Sprinkler control. Heat control and lights. Start the dishwasher, start the coffee pot.

Sure, this can all be done with an excessive amount of work, lots of high tech and expensive gadgetry, and custom software setups, but that doesn't mean it HAS to be that way. I think the Home needs an overhaul.
I think that's an interesting idea. I know that quarterly filings are an SEC requirement, but it's at least in part to help shareholders keep abreast of the goings on of the company in which they are part owners. It seems like completely realtime would overwhelm casual investors, but could provide for much more accurate trade decisions than those made on speculation and the current system of quarterly conference calls.
I used to hear a lot more about "smart" appliances than I do now. I know there have been some companies that have worked on developing outlet adapters that allow you to control some basic functionality over a network, but the smart appliance craze seems to have died down as of late.