skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While true that some languages (and supporting open source modules) are better at certain tasks than other,
I believe the real reason people want "one language to rule them all" is reduce the loss in productivity due to context switching between languages.

Try going back and forth between langauges when you have an app in Java/Obj-C, high performance native code in C++, a backend server written in python/php and an admin dashboard written in Javascript.
Pimp my fridge
I'd love to be able to comment on the wifi spot. Also, some indicators as to how old the information is.
LuaJIT1 compiler was also pretty basic in the way it worked - it did not do any major speculative optimizations afaik, so comparing LJ2 interpreter against it is not of much interest.

Now check out performance graphs of LuaJIT2 compiler+interpreter vs interpreter modes[1].

Anything remotely computationally expensive is 2x faster with compiler and you can go up to 28x for integer number crunching.

I do believe that original point "a good interpreter can get a large portion of the gains you'd get from a compiler" can't be correct simply because it is too broad and ill-defined. What are the gains you expect from the compiler? How can "large portion" be defined? All of these really depend on many things: from the language itself to concrete design decisions in compiler/interpreter.

[1] http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html
For anyone "hearing" about 18F for the first time in this thread, they are pretty legit. It's not just another typical gov agency with a little lean startup lingo and a cute site. That was my first guess when I first read about them, but I was wrong. A quick cruise through their github shows that. However, like someone mentioned, they will need more good luck than a leprechaun with a rabbit foot keychain if they are going to bring true innovation to the federal government. There are so many points of failure within the process of working with other agencies. I'm hoping for the best!
I'm really curious about the results. This is the first time something like this has happened, but with the results, actually knowing a lot of variables, not even from the lander itself other missions will have something to base their work upon.

The first programming languages (static, duck typed, ...), database systems, web frameworks, anonymization frameworks, ... all had a lot of things that were either far from perfect or are now considered stupidity. But when nobody did what you did, when you are a pioneer everyone following would be a fool not to look at your work.

Also a nice example: Operating Systems. In the early days they were considered a waste of energy, time, resources. Why would you want to emulate computers on other computers (no, not visualization, but running multiple programs) or why would you use that valuable memory/storage space to have multiple programs on a machine at once? Those used to be actual questions. But that's a bit far fetched.

The project was/is a real pioneering project and I have lots of respect for people investing all their lives (more than two decades in this case!) so passionately into landing on a comet. Not too long ago that was science fiction.

The first message on the internet (arpanet) was meant to be "login", but it crashed after the o. I think those people got further, even though without doubt it didn't run as hoped for.
This is a (near) duplicate of a comment you made 302 days ago! - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069311
Saving lifes with Ambulance Drones
Facebook Launches Iowa Data Center with Entirely New Network Architecture
Their mistake was to state a _minimum_ target mission like that in the first place, when you know that this is an incredibly complicated mission.
Also, take a look at the US Digital Services Playbook. Pretty impressive, right. The US Govt is stepping it's game up! I wish the administration would do a better job of touting these big steps on the right direction. Can't have it all I guess.

http://playbook.cio.gov/
Yes, it would have been much much better for us Europeans to use that money to subsidize our agriculture a bit more... /s
Hah, an old friend. A company I worked with had a Novix in 1986/1987 for prototyping purposes (early days number plate recognition system). Before we got it we had to sign an unreasonable amount of paper. Rumor had it this is the chip powering the Tomahawk cruisemissile.
To give some more information about the French perspective here:

- No source is given for the claim that "The French government has declared books an 'essential good.'", I have been unable to find any French source about this, and I am entirely unaware of such a declaration. I would be interested if anyone could point me to more information about this.

- There is a fixed price law on books, which to my knowledge has nothing to do with them being considered "essential". The way it works is that the book publisher sets the final sale price of the book that will have to be applied everywhere (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_relative_au_prix_du_livre)... a maximal rebate of 5% is permitted, which in practice is applied everywhere (except for online sales, see below). This is not unique to France and exists in several countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price_agreement#Sco...). My understanding of the point of this measure is that it reduces competition between booksellers, allowing smaller booksellers to survive, and allowing them to offer rarer books than just blockbusters.

- There is a cultural attachment to smaller bookshops, and a dislike of large foreign players (Amazon) even compared to large French players (Fnac, Gibert-Joseph, etc.). The smaller bookshops claim that Amazon's free shipping poses a great threat to their existence. Free shipping was challenged by the French Booksellers Association, ultimately unsuccessfully (http://www.maitre-eolas.fr/post/2008/05/15/954-le-prix-du-li...). Recently, however, a law was passed to achieve the same results, with online booksellers being forbidden to offer free shipping (hence Amazon.fr charges 0.01 EUR shipping for books) and being forbidden to offer the 5% discount. (http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTE... article 1). Of course, one could also argue that online bookselling makes books more easily available to the end consumer (and faster, say, than asking a library to order your books for you); but the problem is that the role of booksellers, to select interesting books and guide you in your choice, is lost.
> I'm just raising the kind of precise, detail-oriented questions that typically emanate from this community.

This better get included in the next "fake HN frontpage" that gets posted :)
The collapse of Ukraine’s economy
You're asking for a persistent first class function; write it like one.
Even that isn't the mistake at all. It's a good strategy to prepare to do a lot, then when some things go wrong, at least some of all things we're prepared for work. If you set the goals too low, you'll do much less. Therefore, the basic plan was to do the most of the work during a short time period. But they prepared to be able to do something interesting for much longer, if everything goes as perfect as it ideally could.

The mistake would be allowing others to feed on smaller-effect non working stuff instead of the things that amazingly worked.
Friday nights and weekends, although I haven't played it in years, basically since I switched to Linux.
Or we can use alternative semiconductors that are more radiation-resistant. One of many reasons why materials discovery is still very important even if initial chips will never match the performance of silicon.
Anyone who intentionally throws away errors because they "got tired" of checking errors, isn't someone I'd want on my team, and their code is not something I'd want to depend on, regardless of the language. Hopefully it would get caught in code review. But yes, it would be nice if go vet or go lint caught this syuff. Luckily, someone else wrote errcheck, and that's good enough.
Chemistry of Cast Iron Seasoning (2010)
I have no idea. Probably an interesting project for the author, or maybe they are trying to fix some backwards-compatibility debt from the aforementioned languages. Either way, it would be good to see this mentioned as the first point on the page because it will be the first thing everyone will be thinking.
I just realised that this project has been released under the mozilla github account — this (might) mean that it'll be actively maintained, and perhaps better documented than other libraries around.

:thumbsup: Looks really great
> It seems a case of intense bureaucratic / political pressure to change targets after they aren't met, and the fact scientists are participating in this is pretty disappointing.

This is a big leap to make from the available evidence. Mission targets change all the time. It's a very fluid situation with many unknowns, so I don't find it at all surprising. I think calling foul play is premature to say the least.
Yes, one of the premises is it flips bits, a phenomena called Single Event Upset(SEU) - e.g. the open source LEON FT (http://www.gaisler.com/index.php/products/processors/leon3ft) processor, is designed to be able to correct and detect such errors - in addition to being manufactured with materials that block radiation. In spacecrafts such radiation hardened processors are often used in addition to having redundancy.

One issue with only using redundancy to overcome errors from radiation is you'll have a hard time determining which processor has an error - especially when several processors are affected at the same time.
If one of them fails, the rover could use the other as a backup

Any idea how that works practically? I mean, there are two boards and one set of peripherals. Is there like an external controller which constantly checks if board A is doing fine, and if not, somehow reroutes all peripheral communication to board B?
Apertium and Wikimedia: A collaboration that powers the Content Translation tool
Hansure Soft Launches, Aims to Help Doctors Keep Their Hands Clean All the Time
Wall-E is absolutely amazing in that way. My little ones have a total crush on him and I must have seen the movie about 400 times or so. I think I know the dialogue by heart and I still like to look at it every now and then to appreciate the skill of the animators.
Interesting. That is probably the reason why ex-councel houses are rented out for so much money after they are bought from the council. They are often in very desirable areas.

I wonder what the measurable/measured effects of this deliberate integrated housing system have been. I.e. there most have been some objects, and I wonder if they were met.
This is a really great project! I think caring about people in prisons is one of the best ways to show the strength of a society.

I know, the US/Californian prison system has many things to criticize and rant about (and people should!), but here is a great project to face some of those problems. It's really great, but I hope people keep pushing such projects. Prisons will probably never be empty, but setting that goal is always better than surrendering, cause huge costs, both financial and social ones.

I hope such projects set an example for other states and countries.
Yeah I was looking for unit test macros and found your project. I added your project as a reference in the README for clarification of the origin.
Thanks exch and pjmlp, I will check out Go before C#
“Social innovation in healthcare is rising”
While it would have been convenient to have a RTG onboard, it would have made the lander too heavy (with the current RTG technology. Smaller nuclear generators are possible in theory but none have been built yet.)
Calendar printing
Added your project as a reference. Sorry for the missing reference I originally never planned to make the project known publicly and therefore never added the references.
It's also much the same content as:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn802602.aspx
Yes, the lander was around 100 kg, whereas RTG would weight around 40 kg alone. And it would anyway be needed only in this case of unfortunate landing in the shadow.

Once we talk about details it's clear how a lot of the complaints are based purely on a huge ignorance. It's good to ask to learn. But when somebody starts from the position that people who managed 25-year mission missed something to him "simple and obvious"...
Another gfx-rs contributor here. It still has a long way to go, but we've made some solid progress, but some in-progress language changes will enable to next iteration of our API, with a lot of simplification to our public interface. It's still a WIP!
Show HN: Freeciv-web HTML5 strategy game updated today
A while back, I had the chance to work on a research project that used a prototype HUD much like Google Glass. The cost? $5000.

This is not mature, commoditized, mass-produced tech. If Google chooses to start mass producing these some day, that cost will come crashing down, but at the moment, I'd be a bit surprised if $1500 even covers their costs.
Absolutely nothing in either the article you linked or the actual published paper the article links to [0] indicates that the experts think this points the way to FTL signalling of any type.

The article might have glossed over that, but the researchers wouldn't have. Anyone who thought they had a way to send information FTL would be heralding it from the rooftops, because that, and not quantum teleportation or quantum solid-state whatever, would be the main story.

Why? Because FTL signalling inherently means causality is broken. Effects can precede causes. You can send information back in time. This is inherent in the geometry of the Universe, as predicted by Special Relativity, one of the best-tested and most-validated theories we have to date. Special Relativity is validated every time anyone uses GPS, for example, and the prediction that FTL implies travel back in time is inherent to what Special Relativity is.

So I'm not going to take you at your word. The supposed FTL neutrinos which turned out to be some loose cables show what happens when the scientific world even thinks that Special Relativity might need to be modified.

[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.6958
And also that (I'm happy to say, an intentional joke) comment that I can't find now (please post the link here if you know it!) that explains that the communication of the lander and Rosetta is done with web technologies (web servers, htmls and stuff) and suggests that they aren't modern enough.

(In reality, as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8611274

"Philae is controlled by 2 RTX2010 CPUs (hot red), further 8 control the Experiments. 13 CPUs (10* RTX2010, 1* ADSP-21020, 2* 80C3x) in total. © https://twitter.com/philae2014/status/427842417920712704 ")
Released a new version today. Please post your feedback here on HN. Looking forward to again get some useful discussions with the HN community here.
The sky is the limit Pure CSS animation
Burning through metal requires the laser to stay focused on the target for a few seconds. That's not going to happen by accident with an airliner moving at hundreds of meters per second and a different velocity than the intended target.
Pioneering Philae completes main mission before hibernation
This seems to be more a lesson in the difficulty of bottling a solution that works in one country and reusing it elsewhere.

Because in France and Germany, the exact opposite happens: the profits of bestsellers are being used to cross-subsidize new books and new authors. This is in fact one of the rationales behind both countries having price-fixing laws: namely, to preserve the profit margin for bestsellers to make such cross-subsidies possible.

You can argue whether that is fair (I know there are plenty of French and German readers who'd rather have cheaper bestsellers instead of books by new authors that they may never read), but both countries have a healthy book publishing industry.

So, while this may not have worked in Israel, in France and Germany plenty of books are being published, bought, and read. In fact, Germany publishes more books per capita and year than the US, even though German publishers can't easily sell to the much bigger international English language market.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per...
Xamarin.
It is a good solution in order to make a small applications (let's say a showcase/order app for a small restaurant) on iOS and Android at the same time.

For more ambitious apps, IMO the overhead will never be worth it.
Another microprocessor able to execute Forth natively is the b16, from one of the original authors of Gforth.

http://bernd-paysan.de/b16.html
Marc Andreessen: The ‘90s Had It Right (Full Video)
The time variance is not very interesting to me at all, but the question of how or if they were able to get at least a week's worth of science done in 2.5 days, is very interesting to me. Was all the science completed, or just a fraction of it? Did they originally plan for only doing a day or two of science (with anything else being a plus), so the short mission life wasn't a problem?
Thanks, surely will try :-)
How Obama’s net neutrality comments undid weeks of FCC work
Would you install and run random applications that you have no idea what they are doing from random sites? No? Interesting.

If in 2014 you need to run code in my PC to display some fucking text or to let me scroll, then we're pretty much doomed.
To be fair, Moore originally wanted the language to be called "Fourth":

> The file holding the interpreter was labeled FORTH, for 4th (next) generation software - but the operating system restricted file names to 5 characters.

http://www.colorforth.com/HOPL.html

It was the OS for the IBM 1130: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130

Because it was the cheapest computer IBM had at the time, it got used by a lot of young pioneers in their salad days.
The actual watt-hours generated will depend on a bunch of factors that determine the brightness and duration of the sunlight the panel is receiving. So to keep things standard, the solar panel manufacturers quote the maximum watts the panel can produce, and derive the price per watt from that.
Well, it was the original name Forth was going to have. Just that the OS it was built on allowed only five character file names...
I have spent a large portion of my career teaching new developers. I think C# is a pretty terrible first language already. The sugar here and there is nothing compared to the massive mental burden of OO, inheritance, compilation, DLLs, Visual Studio, etc etc etc.

Scheme, via SICP, is much easier to get started with, and one can learn the basics with that quickly (including getting much more comfortable with the sequence abstractions -called LINQ in .NET- than even the average .NET developer).

All these reasons are also why I greatly prefer F#. If you stay away from much of the OO system, F# is much simpler to teach in my experience. At my company right now another team is putting together an F# training program intended to teach our QA automation.
Thank you, that helps a lot
I was being sarcastic, because you will be disappointed if you learn C# first.
Tor developers tried to smear me after I reported their US Government ties
An excellent piece, and very thorough. Stories like weev really demonstrate just how far people go to justify horrific ugliness to avoid abandoning the dream.
Jonie Wylie: Peer-to-Peer Rent the Runway
Something must be wrong, I get the Ubuntu default apache page.
I had this book at University. It made a good companion text to our main textbook, the dragon book. The dragon book covers a lot of ground, and is very interesting, but Holub's book is much more practical, with everything illustrated with real code examples (if my memory is correct). This was a big help when learning and made compilers a lot more fun. It's well worth reading.

It's interesting that most of the content is still just as relevant today. Coding styles change over time, and definitely the popularity of languages has changed, but the theory is still just as useful.

Off topic, but we had the 'International' edition of this book. Many publishers at the time did this, I'm not sure why. The explanation was that it was to make it more affordable for us, although the prices were still high. They were soft cover editions with plain covers (this book had a red cover with only the title and author, in white). The linked page is the first time I've seen the real cover. This is probably an early example of regional pricing, much like DVD region codes. They could charge more in USA and less in other territories I guess.
Here's a word diff between the two FAQ versions you posted: https://gist.github.com/avar/29d060e178e8fac4e2a3#file-faq-w...

Just search for "[-" to find deleted entries and "{+" to find added entries.
Can someone point to resources comparing stack machines and register based machines? The RTX2010 technical documentation talks about all the advantages of a stack machine but doesn't say anything about its shortcomings.
That Mermin PDF is pretty interesting thanks!
Start contributing from Apache projects
https://projects.apache.org/indexes/alpha.html
Try to develop plugin, component for some open source project.
Optimal register allocation is an NP-complete problem. By doing away with it, you don't need to allocate registers.

How that compares on a practical level, I have no idea. But it's one of the reasons the JVM has a stack-based model and no registers: it makes writing compilers for JVM byte code a lot easier.
> No source is given for the claim that "The French government has declared books an 'essential good.'"

It was part of the rationale behind the introduction of the Loi Lang (the "loi relative au prix du livre" you refer to above) in 1981. More importantly, this was how the French government managed to defend the law before the ECJ.

See: http://www.librairiesatlantiques.com/index.php/les-grands-do...
I would say Consideration. I am a designer, and I work with lots of designers. Design is harder than it looks and even brilliant designers don't get it right 100% of the time, but I can see a clear difference between the types of designers whose work "looks right" and designers who have approached a brief with the aim of figuring out what "works right".

It's easier to be the former than the latter both in terms of skill and the politics of the client relationship, and that's why there are so many "designers" and so few designers.
Thanks for the references! Do you happen to know when the first results (verified interpretations of the data) are usually published after such experiments?
Bulldog Doing Crazy Skateboard Tricks in Berlin
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Unikernels: Who, What, Where, When, Why [video]