skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Contrast this with a language like C, in which string operations are (unless the programmer writes or uses a library) far more explicit

String operations are more explicit. Mostly.

But some things (like sharing between threads, type conversion, and memory ownership) are very implicit and unsafe. Some of the implicitness to C programmers is so familiar that they don't notice it:

/* 1. This function returns an error code
* and not a size
* 2. zero is success, nonzero is an error */
int
/* 3. this method belongs in mylib
* 4. this function supports ASCII???
* 5. this function allows memory to overlap? */
mylib_copy_first_n(
/* 6. *out_s is allocated
* 7. *out_s is greater than n bytes in size
* 8. out_s will hold a null terminated string */
char const * out_s,
/* 9. in_s is allocated
* 10. *in_s holds at least n characters
* 11. it's not a big deal if in_s has null characters */
char const * in_s,
/* 10. n is not negative
* 11. if n is zero, something sane will happen */
int n);

I wouldn't hold up C as an example of explicitness. Now, this isn't a great example of C code, but even in the best examples of C code, there is a lot of correctness by convention and documentation.

To be fair, I'm not aware of any languages and libraries that are fully explicit in type, behavior, and memory usage. Maybe Ada or one of the functional languages get it right. But there are a set of C++ tools that can make this sort of thing fast and correct. That's why it's disappointing that std::string isn't fast and is only mostly correct.
"Who decided that a centralized entity could be the authority for these things, anyway, instead of a Web of Trust?"

Usability.

Try explaining to a non-technical person how to bootstrap their trust system.

Things either "just work" or they are broken, at least for 99% of users. I'd even count myself as part of that group. I'm a highly technical user, but I'm usually too busy to futz around with stuff. I get something akin to road rage when stuff doesn't work and get out of the way. I played a lot with stuff when I was younger but I don't have time for that crap anymore.
From about me:
"I’m a doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition at Purdue University. Rhetoric and composition is a subfield within English, dedicated to the study of writing and argument. Rhetoric concerns the study of argument, persuasion, and discourse."

Not sure if he was trying to be funny or he really thinks his response should be taken seriously.

That being said the idiots at TNR who backed the Iraq war deserved to be fired, though not sure who remains from back then.
>I'm glad a US company can do in 2014, what a cash strapped USSR couldn't in 1970/1980.

actually it is cash rich Russia which is trying to do it today with much less success than SpaceX.

>So you confirm my argument.

my point here is that while the both functions have the same value, the SpaceX's has much higher first derivative at present and that, for all practical purposes, guarantees that it will be well ahead tomorrow
WebKit in Firefox?
> And no, the jobs you are thinking of are certainly not just as unavailable.

It really depends on what you can see yourself doing. My closest compsci friends are all employed by either big companies working on their backend or by "young hip" companies doing web solutions for the local tobacco companies and the like.

Anything that I would like to do would have to (subjectively) help humanity as much as research/teaching; and getting jobs like these either requires a whole lot of dedication (leaving your family behind, moving to Asia/Africa) or a lot of connections (governmental public good jobs are rare for compsci people).
Very out of topic but, is lena.jpg still acceptable? I mean, tech industry is getting better at inclusion but come on, are we still using that crop from Playboy?
“If someone drained my cell phone, they would find a picture of my cat, some phone numbers, some email addresses, some email text,” he said. “What’s the big deal?”

Wow.
My comment is not a response to the article, but is a response to loudmax.
The Doom That Came to Puppet
Show HN: How to get to the front page of Designer News
Build an alarm that goes off when your website is down
That's really interesting. Not being connected to grid power means that your house gets condemned.

A part of me wants to believe that there's a justification for most if not all of the laws on the books. I wonder what the justification for condemning an off-grid house is. There are places where it's sufficiently expensive to bring grid power in that people will have solar, wind and generators and that's cheaper at least for any given decade. Should those houses get condemned too?

Or are you talking about in big cities where the house is already hooked up to the grid? Have you got any links? I'd be interested to read about it.
I thought the descriptions of Facebook guy and Yahoo guy trying to do something grown-up were as cringeworthy as they possibly could be but kept going back to the thought "well, at least Leon Wieseltier got fired." He's that repugnant.
We did move in with my parents for a year after I quit grad school, which lowered our cost of living significantly. But we no longer rely on family now.

I'll share numbers too: My revenue this year is around 50000€. (mostly sofware sales + some consulting) My take-home salary (after expenses, social security, taxes) will probably be around 30000€, which is significantly above the median income in Austria. It's also more than what I'd make as a junior software developer.
I must admit, when I read the title, the first thing I thought of was Doctor Who having two hearts.
Perhaps you know: on Linux, how do mmap() and brk() differ as far as page initialization? Does brk() conceptually include the effects of MAP_POPULATE? Do both of them cause virtual to physical memory mapping at the time of the call?
> I have seen many PhD students, including myself, arrive with half-baked ideas that go nowhere.

Another way to look at it is that failure is a part of learning, and chasing those half-baked ideas can build experience (by finding out what doesn't work).
I lived in that neighborhood where he sold them (sadly he passed away a few years ago). Union Square in New York. I had no idea he was so successful. Thanks for digging this up! (2008)
Hmm, very interesting, thanks for the link!

I guess I meant for my point to be somewhat larger, "using public data for good instead of controversy" - or something like that.

It's been awhile since I've been to NYC, does bus fare run the same as train fare? Would that throw this off at all?
It hardly seems like introducing yet another type can solve this problem which is caused by temporary conversion back and forth between string and char*.
Developing Native-Activity (Android) Applications in Visual Studio
I understand.

Much of that is effectively exercising control over the market venue though. The studio gets to specify which facilities do or don't meet the standards required to show their content. To that extent, the technical restrictions are less about keeping the content from being pirated (there are plenty of other leak channels, typically pre-release review copies, which have their own copy controls, yes), and far more about keeping cinemas beholden to the studio vassal lords.
No more blue gradient?
Nintendo decided to make a shift in their target market, for better or for worse, when they came out with the Wii. They wanted to go after so called "casual" gamers. The Wii was a great success, however the Wii was more of novelty than a gaming console. For most of the "casual" gamers that novelty has worn off, or they are satisfied with the Wii and have no desire to move on to a "next gen" system. Also, it is very difficult to keep coming out with "casual" games, how many tennis, bowling, baseball games can you make? Once you start going into RPG games, first person shooters, etc. you just broke away from the "casual" player. Gamers grew up and matured, Nintendo however did not, Nintendo has always been marketed as "kid/family friendly".
Uber GPS is fucking terrible. It always suggests alleys in downtown DC.
Show HN: Feedient – All of your social life in one place
What I like about them the most of the separation. You're actually manipulating the data (XML) and displaying it to end user in HTML without going through the formalities of coding.

Being using them since 1999 too. Still use them today although more work is being done with JSON/JS.
Put another way: iOS' app sandbox is so poorly made it can't handle any app that includes a scripting engine. (I'm kidding, of course)

Realistically, Apple is about as anti-competitive as they come behavior-wise. And the 'engineering for security' bit has more to do with their marketing than their actual technology.
Using NASA Imagery and Linking to NASA Web Sites
5 guidelines on scaling systems
Then maybe considering making a similar law for the jurisdiction you are concerned with -- in California (both statewide and at the local level), laws can be enacted by citizen initiative without any involvement by legislators.
A much more substantive article:

http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/11/05/engineers-recommend-cha...

The Orion heat shield’s titanium skeleton and carbon fiber skin was fabricated by Lockheed Martin — the craft’s prime contractor — in Colorado. The skeleton was shipped to Textron Defense Systems in Massachusetts for installation of a fiberglass-phenolic honeycomb structure.

More than 330,000 individual cells make up the honeycomb, and Textron technicians — using a special dispensing gun — filled the cells by hand with a material called Avcoat.

The Avcoat insulation is supposed to ablate away during the Orion spacecraft’s re-entry, protecting the underlying structure from searing temperatures. The Apollo moon capsule used the same type of manually-applied material for its heat shield, and it worked so well Lockheed Martin and NASA decided to dust off the design.

But a review of the heat shield on the Orion spacecraft set for launch Dec. 4 revealed the Avcoat was slightly more uneven than expected, according to Jim Bray, crew module director at Lockheed Martin, Orion’s prime contractor.
I'm not sure as to the specifics, because brk is a strict subset of mmap; however, I would be surprised if it doesn't use the full VM substructure to allocate the mapping immediately.

I would amend my statement before to say that, if you're looking into memory allocation, conceptually, mmap is where everything happens these days. brk is kept for backwards compatibility.
Nice site. One advice is to remove the lego keyword from your domain ASAP. It's a trademark and they really enforce in a bad way. Change it to "bricks" as almost everybody know bricks refers to lego.
Reverb.com in Chicago, Ruby, ElasticSearch, iOS, in-house tech recruiter, and more!

We are hiring for all the things. If you're a musician this is the job you've dreamed of but never thought existed. Well, it does. Come work with an incredible bunch of people who value solid code just as much as they do the craft of making music. We're two years old and growing like wildfire. This is still a chance to get an early position at the Etsy of the musical instrument world.

This is not a venture backed shoot for the moon or fail hard startup. We're making real money and helping people build real music businesses online. Local preferred but we're considering remote in the coming months.

Check our product team here http://product.reverb.com/work-at-reverb and our marketplace at http://reverb.com
Ahh yes... mobile first... because Mobile Is The Future(tm) this week. Last week Cloud Was The Future(tm). Tomorrow it'll be Internet of Things and mobile will be old and busted and nobody will ever pitch a mobile startup again.
Street Fighter V leaked as PS4, PC exclusive
Keep It Modular – Talko Web Libraries That Enable Our Modular Design
I didn't stay in formal education beyond high school so I can't really comment, but from that article:

"Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large research grants. So he was to be fired."

However, Imperial College' statement on his passing claims otherwise:

"Contrary to claims appearing on the internet, Professor Grimm’s work was not under formal review nor had he been given any notice of dismissal."

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcolleg...
It's actually a very good point when you take into consideration the origin of the image. From [1]: “Lena Söderberg […] appeared as a Playmate in the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine” and it is referring to this particular photo. Article in cyrilic (Russian?) [2] shows what the uncropped version look like. Putting things in context is important.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_S%C3%B6derberg

[2] http://dimka-jd.livejournal.com/3673381.html (NSFW)
"Varnish allocate[s] some virtual memory, it tells the operating system to back this memory with space from a disk file. When it needs to send the object to a client, it simply refers to that piece of virtual memory and leaves the rest to the kernel.

If/when the kernel decides it needs to use RAM for something else, the page will get written to the backing file and the RAM page reused elsewhere.

When Varnish next time refers to the virtual memory, the operating system will find a RAM page, possibly freeing one, and read the contents in from the backing file.

And that's it. "

https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes

I'll try and hold back the snark but I find it interesting that after attacking '1975 programming' and Squid's deficiencies, here we are 8 years later and maybe the kernel doesn't know best.
I wish I hadn't, this season is bad.
If you use LinkedIn, BEWARE Huge flaw found
"Assumption 1. Using write() instead of implicitly writing to a memory map would lead to better performance."

I've seen this mentioned in the context of RocksDB; but contradicted by e.g. SQLite. The case for mmap has always been that one avoids the overhead of a system call & some double-copying, and in either case it just dirties the page cache and is only "really" written in periodic flushes (assuming it's not writing via direct IO). Can someone explain what the bottleneck is on the mmap side and why write() might be faster?
I think it's nice to have separate formats for lossy and lossless compression. Makes it easy for users to tell what's going on.
>Judicial review seems to have become an all too regular occurrence used by people who don't like what a particular government is doing.

Could it be because what the particular government is doing is ethically wrong. It's easy to look at the past and say 'why didn't people change these things, it's obvious they were wrong.', but then we look at judicial review and say, 'well, they are just giving the government trouble'. Don't you think that's exactly what the people that defended slavery would have said? Or the people that didn't want women to have voting rights? Or any number of anything we take as rights under the law?
How does it compare to WebP? Also, how you measures lossy image quality? What are the metrics? I hope it's not just by looking at result and judging.
This is because they use an SSL cert that is signed using a cert not included with browsers (or at least not included with Chrome).
Considering that Lenna herself is fine with it, I'd say so. (Unless you want to deny a woman the right to permit the use of her own body for aesthetic, erotic, or academic purposes, which is the logical if ironic outcome of some schools of feminism.)

The problem with the Lenna imagery isn't political correctness, it's the fact that it's a crappy scan from a magazine that always had crappy photography to begin with.
No - it's classical, but it was, until now, considered resistant to quantum algorithms (as in a QC would not yield a significant improvement over a classical computer).
Neither of you are really answering the question. You still haven't proposed a language is better.

When the half dozen browsers that represent about 99.9% of the browswer market all use C++, perhaps the explanation is not "They're all wrong."
MongoDB 2.8 features tout document-level locking
> I also doubt they will just let anyone use their superchargers because they are currently paying the power bill

Yup, Tesla would love for other companies to use and pay for their superchargers.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184141-tesla-reveals-plan...
"I'm planning on taking a vacation from DD/MM to DD'/MM'. Are there any conflicts in the lab for that time period?". If the answer is no, she can put it on the shared calendar and have her mind at peace. If he says yes, then you can move the vacation to before/after the conflicts. (If the PI is formally opposed to any vacation, then it's a larger problem)

I used to be a PhD student (although I dropped out), so I know the ironies of academia too well. But for situations like this, clear communication in advance solves 99% of problems (and this is not specific to academia).
Takes about 20 seconds for a 1280x893 bitmap. But the decoded image always looks blurry no matter what settings I use. The original bitmap is 3,349 kB and the IFS file ranged from 17 kB (looking awful and blocky) to 569 kB (looking about half the resolution of the original but not too bad).
I just stopped reading after I got to that image. Why, with all the photos you could possibly choose, use a sexually suggestive one? And one whose context is the kind of boys-club software engineering we should be doing everything to get away from. Sigh.

Also, looking at the other comments, the fact that you happen to be fine with that image is neither here nor there. It certainly doesn't cancel out the fact that I'm not.
The upside of noise–rounding, quantization and dither
Instead of Julia Studio, I would recommend Juno[0], the IDE based off of LightTable. While it still has some rough edges, it works very well.

[0]: http://junolab.org
I still don't get why HN is against adding features like this or open links in new windows/tab AS AN OPTION.

I get that some people don't want anything to change on HN - no problem - but what is the harm in adding features that we individually can turn on that would not effect anyone else? Aka, add the features but have them off by default.
The Android and iOS devices running malware are nearly all doing so due to the built-in security measures being disabled by the end user to enable the addition of apps not from their respective app stores. Specifically, Android devices with side-loading enabled or iOS devices that are jailbroken. Pirated versions of paid apps and games will often contain malware. There are numerous examples for both platforms. As to the numbers, there are a lot more Android phones where the user has enabled side-loading or rooted than there are iOS devices that are jailbroken.

Anecdotally, I don't know a single person in real life on either iOS or on Android that's gotten malware.

Anti-competitive behavior to keep apps that compete for Apple's customer data and money off of iOS provides a clear and undeniable benefit for Apple. It's not like this is unusual or new behavior for them: http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/apple-deleted-non-itunes-...
The "fine" thing would be to let Lena use photographs of herself in her own work.

The problem is that women in science cannot read a paper on image processing without being reminded that it's a boy's club.
webkit in firefox?
For use in iOS, I imagine.
"There is no trace of evidence that you can get the best out of people at high-level tasks through pressure and competition. The opposite is true. Worried people get dumber. They may be faster at carrying rocks… but they do not get smarter."

That last sentence is a great turn of phrase.
> Except many judicial reviews aren't about the legality of the decision, merely the way the decision has been made

But isn't that an essential feature of the constitutional structure of the UK: given that the UK doesn't have a separation of powers system in which various entities within government have limited powers, any decision by government that is within the sovereign power of the government is substantively legally, the only question of its legality is whether or not it is a valid decision of the government, made by the means legally prescribed by the government for the kind of decision it is -- but this can look at like review of the legality of the substance of the decision, because the legally prescribed mechanism for a decision may vary based on the substance of the decision.

(In a sense, this is true of any sovereign government, even, e.g., the US separation of powers system, wherein the "way the decision has been made", in order to be legal, for certain decisions involves a Constitutional Amendment.)
Seems like people have already snagged every 5-letter .ninja domain.
Their desired audience is hackers.

Pure speculation, but maybe they know the best hackers will find solutions around all this (e.g. all the extensions linked to in this thread).
Especially if you're shipping the decoder in JS alongside the encoded file.
I briefly wondered the same thing.
Tradition would probably be a poor argument for continuing to use it.
But being able to directly compare the results with the lena.jpg results throughout its history might be valuable?
It does not "beg" any questions. It is still a question of context. Sexualizing women has nothing to do with image processing research.
In the following film, you can watch them make and test the Apollo ablative heat shields and capsule blankets.

Apollo Spacecraft Status Report #2 - 1966 NASA Educational Documentary - WDTVLIVE42
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk5QI0-k6nc

> I really hate modern journalism.
In my opinion, the journalism of the 60's wasn't any better. Technical matters have always been simplified to a degree that scientifically educated people find distressing. At least today, the internet gives the interested person access to source documents nearly as easily as depicted in "Star Trek".
People aren't forgetting. It's a disgusting "in" joke. The entire point of including it is because it's pornographic.

Disappointing, but unsurprising, to see HN defending the use of literal pornography in a professional setting. I thought we moved past the Ruby on Rails jerks defending porn in a professional setting as harmless fun.
I remember dreaming up this idea years ago (but significantly after 1992), probably around 2000 sometime. We never tried to implement it, but we tossed around the idea of encoding images as chunks of fractal portions. There were some pretty serious deficiencies in our idea which these authors must have addressed. Neat to see that it can actually work.
I dunno, it's kinda hard to tell with this one:

http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/kodim04.html

The fact that you call the uncropped image "pornographic" (which, yes, it technically is) when Playboy centerfolds are rather tame by modern standards kinda hints at the real problem here: the boring old American prudishness that has been masquerading as feminism as of late. I sincerely could not care less if Bellard had used Billy Herrington's toned ass as a test subject. The sooner that our society can get past this ridiculous fear of sexuality and the human body, the better.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Bellard is from France, a culture much more accepting of nudity and sexuality than ours. I would not be surprised if he had simply not considered the possibility of prudes across the pond getting outraged over such an innocuous thing.