skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Credible empirical investigations of programming language efficiency are too hard to carry out (though they could be done in principle).
However, what we can do instead is look the evolution of programming languages: what features do the latest creations have, what features are older languages retro-fitted with? What ideas have seen little uptake?

(i) Higher-order functions: Yes, slam-dunk win. Essentially all new languages have them, Java and C++ retrofit them.

(ii) Lazy evaluation order by default: mostly dead. All new language use eager evaluation, even SPJ is sceptical that lazy evaluation should be the default. Scala has an interesting approach: eager by default, but you can switch to CBN (although not full laziness) if required. This hybrid form enables you to define control-operators easily, while keeping the simplicity and efficiency of eager evaluation. Exceptions are
languages with dependent types that are really theorem provers (e.g. Agda).

(iii) Purity: dead. All new languages have side-effects. The widely used FP languages like Haskell, Ocaml and F# have side-effects. Exceptions are
languages with dependent types for Curry-Howard-based theorem provers (e.g. Agda), because there is no convincing Curry-Howard correspondence using state.

(iv) Everything is function application: open. This may work reasonably well in purely sequential languages, but there are theoretical reasons to believe that message passing is not function application (while function application is a special case of message passing).

(v) Types. The answer on this one depends on whether one is a proponent of statically typed languages or not, clearly an unresolved question. For dynamically typed languages, the question is moot, so the rest of the discussion is irrelevant to those who think that static typing is a bad idea.

(vi) Types (1), type inference: Slam dunk winner. All new languages have inference or wish they could have it but don't know how to do it (Scala). There are probably some hard trade-offs between expressivity of types and efficient decidability of type inference (B Pierce termed Hindley-Milner a "sweet spot"), so we might have to tolerate some type annotation being required, e.g. in local or bidirectional inference.

(vii) Types (2), algebraic data types, pattern matching: winner. Most new languages have them in some form.

(viii) Types (3), monadic encapsulation of effects: open. Most new languages have not yet embraced this. Some conceptual problems not yet solved, e.g. destructors for state monads. There are also expressivity problems, e.g. not all effects can easily be expressed as monads, and composition of monads doesn't always work as desired. Moreover there are pragmatic questions about whether monadic encapsulation should be required or optional.

(ix) Types (4), higher-kinded types: open. Not all new languages have them, but HKTs are generally considered useful, but not super important, cf Rust's evolution. If monadic encapsulation of effects is used, then HKTs become highly desirable, cf the recent Scala fork.

--------------------

Any other suggestions?
This is subscriber only.
1903 Wright Engine
One where he starts as an actual spider and gets bitten by a radioactive man, just to give us something different forth time around.
You're right, the article claims OP had 1099 earnings of $9.34/hour assuming expenses of $0.51 per paid mile. But then also goes on to note that other driver's expenses were more like $0.70 per paid mile.

I wonder if she amortized that $100 of tire damage in that $0.51 / mile! Also, what about the unpaid miles getting to a fare in the first place, or getting back home after a fare takes you off the beaten path? I think it's extremely difficult to fully account for all time and expenses in that line of work. Finally, subtract another 7.6% off the top for 1099 vs W2.
Edit — Yes, I made a slight mistake in the URL.

Here you go — http://teespring.com/programming-is-what-i-do
I don't know about Canada, but in the USA precedent is only applicable if it's brought up and the judge decides its relevant.

In non-contested situations (eg: only the government is before the court, there is no opposition attorney) there would be no reason to bring up precedents that don't support the governments position.

This is part of the reason secret courts are so fundamentally wrong.
Why 2014 was the best year yet for LA startups and VCs
How exactly is a memristor not a state device?

And about journalistic coverage... you seem to be knowledgeable about these programs, so there's an opportunity for you :)
Regarding one system under test, is there a java library (with maven preferably) that would check that unit test is performing tests on single class and all the rests are mocked (e.g. with mockito, or with custom anonymous classes)?
I would imagine that anyone who just happens to have some nitric acid (or any strong acid of appreciable quantity and concentration) lying around would have the sense to at least Google the products of the reaction, if they didn't know offhand. Other than that, gold doesn't react with terribly much anyway, does it?
I've been depressed recently -- maybe not suicidally depressed, but depressed enough to think about it a lot* -- and for me it's absolutely a balance of fears. The weights of past regrets and past failures, the fear of facing them, the fear of future failure (I'm co-founding a slowly failing startup now), the fear of disappointing or alienating loved ones -- they all gang up and become completely overwhelming. The passage above captures it pretty well, though I haven't ever gotten to the extreme it's describing.

Exercise and sleep help.

*I have enough people who love me and depend on me that I know I'll never act on it, but it has become something I fantasize about probably a couple times a day, and many times more on bad days.
Eight isn’t enough: MediaTek plans 10-core mobile SoC
Ask HN: What do you love about programming? What is your favorite field?
I have been reading a lot of comments here about how happy people are to be a programmer and how much they enjoy doing what they do.

So I want to ask - what do you love about programming? What field are you working in, and what do you like about it?

What makes you excited, what do you enjoy doing?
Google's plans for a massive, futuristic new headquarters derailed by LinkedIn
Plan: Organize your life
Nolan Bushnell on augmented reality and how self-driving cars kill the Teamsters
Hi Travis,

Jakub again here. This is great; thanks for your comments. We try to have a very pragmatic approach and believe that room beaconifying procedure should be extremely simple, so mobile developers can concentrate on domain specific challenges regarding their use-cases.

Thus, ref (a) it is as simple deploying few beacons in the room (see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtBERi7Lf3c)
The floor plan and location of beacons is calculated automatically and once you save the room in the cloud you or other people can access calibration and build location-aware apps. There is also no specific training requirement.

The advantage of using BLE beacons over WiFi or ZigBee is the fact they are natively integrated with mobile operating system s (e.g. via iBeacon protocol for Apple), so a smartphone can perform calculations in the background without any user intervention - frictionless applications are possible.
> If the minimum wage weren't so damn high ...

It's about where it was 50 years ago, measured in real dollars:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/04/5-facts-abou...

By other measurements, it's relatively low:
http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/the-minimum-wage-is...
Regarding purity and encapsulation of effects - I would say instead say that it's just not decided if monads are the best mechanism for controlling effects, but there is still a lot of interest in some mechanism for control and reasoning about them.
New augmented reality horror game is terrifying because it maps your house
This intensity-based approach is probably suitable for deciding what ad to display as someone moves around a store. It's not going to make VR headsets work indoors.

At 1M, this would become much more useful. Then they could tell which aisle of a store you're in, and approximately what shelf section. At 4M, it's more like knowing what department in a department store. At 1M, for a museum system, they could tell what object you're looking at and give you the audio for it.
3 Super Easy Hacks (plus Infographic) to Make Your Pinterest Images Stand Out
She also pointed out that her take-home was lower than that of the other drivers she checked against because she did not take full advantage of surge pricing and other "tricks" of experienced drivers. And she pointed out that some drivers' expenses were less than her $0.51.

I suspect $10/hr is a fairly reasonable average. The discussion is interesting enough even without needing to exaggerate that number.
Show HN: CSS Filter Effects
How about reading what I wrote before you reply?

>What about programming in the large?

less code -> less code at large -> win

>What about efficiency of naive implementations?

like a stack overflow version of it the starters always come up with in Java? what exactly are you talking about?

>What about maintainability?

What does FP or any of this thread for that matter do with maintainability? You can write unmaintainable code in any language.

These are a very limited subset of what really matters in software engineering. (I would also remove the naive implementation part.)
Becoming a Big Data CEO: leadership from data to big data
Thanks! Glad you experimented with beacons and Hue. There is already several apps that combine beacons with Hue: https://vimeo.com/91335074

When it comes to Android we have just released an update to our main Android SDK and app (you can read more here:
http://blog.estimote.com/post/118119809840/announcing-an-upd...)

We plan to catch up with other SDKs for Android as well.
> So why can't, just like with strong crypto, Mr. Wilson place his drawings behind a web form where you certify that you are within the United States and will not export the drawings?

He's been disadvantaged by being held in legal limbo for two years.
Show HN: MyStartupLand-Anonymous Reviews on Accelerators, Events and Competitions
What if Vine meets Craigslist?
First off, I agree. It was rude and when I wrote it I was in a bad mood in general. I think the ensuing discussion is definitely worth my karma hit; I'm a little bit sorry that you had to receive that aggressiveness, but reading your response I have hope it's ok.

What I felt when I read your post, and wrote my response, was not so much about you as about an attitude that I'm fed up with, which is basically "I can see how this system isn't working out, but I'm participating anyway because it treats me pretty good". And as you say, and others in this thread, there is something - an ideology, a rationalization or a truth - which excuses if not condones this.

I don't buy that coffee, I brew my own, and always buy eco and fairtrade. I know and agree that this isn't really working out either, but it's a start, and a "market signal" or whatever. Thing is, I've been to those coffee and cocoa plantations and guess what - things aren't working out for the people working there, either.

When it comes to the electronics, I'm painfully aware of the fact that the rare minerals are often mined by actual slaves, under gunpoint. What is probably the worst war since WWII is basically about minerals for smartphones, it's in The Congo[1] and has claimed millions of lives. All the while some of the world's wealthiest people are laughing and smiling about their billion dollar profits. So I don't get a new phone all the time. I have a Geeksphone Peak, for the record. Still, it needs cobalt and coltan and tin which might well have been mined by children, literally with their hands.

What javert says about choosing to work there just isn't that simple. What branchless says further down the thread is; it's about access to land. And those people working factories in China were removed from their land in agricultural reforms. It's a political thing and it has happened all over the world; see e.g. The Enclosure[2] in Britain.

This isn't simple at all, but since it's a market economy where all decisions are ultimately made by the "consumer", which is us in the context of this discussion, we have to make the right choices. And if we have the information, we can't just disregard that with "hey, at least it's a job". That's what bothers me the most about this; a lot of people just don't have the information to make the right choices. If the people who have the information, and the wealth, to make better choices don't, then we're doomed.

I realize how this will come through all high and mighty, but I think it's worth it to get a clear message across. The idea behind the market economy is that we organize ourselves according to every individual decision. In that case, it's up to everyone to make the best choice, using all available information. You can't have the cake and eat it.

If you don't agree with how Uber operates as a company, don't do business with them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congolese_Civil_War

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

Edit: Spelling.
Gas prices come to mind.
Purity is not dead. Haskell 'has' side effects but they are explicitly managed. Managing side effects and relegating them to well defined areas lives on in newer languages.
Isn't gold supposed to be soft? Can't you pound it with a hammer? Maybe it wasn't pure gold.

In the Italian Job, the thief of thieves fenced the gold bars, but was discovered because of the image of the lady printed on each one. Bet that'd be easy to pound out.
Uber can only make money if most their drivers do not respect the law is an assumption. Keep in mind that Uber evades the cost of a medallion, which the article says runs $420-460 per week in Philly. That eliminates $1700+ per month of cost that effectively goes to the banks that fund loans on these assets. I don't see much social good in that.

Uber may additionally benefit from regulatory arbitrage, but it is not obvious that their business requires it.
This benchmark is a fairly bad reference.

It measures memory usage from the lz4 command line utility, without mentioning it. This is completely different from lz4 algorithm.

Effectively, it measures input / output buffers, which are external to lz4. Plus it uses highest settings for such buffers, also without mentioning it. Using -B4 setting, for example, would reduce I/O buffer memory by a 50X factor.

lz4 itself uses only 16KB for compression.
I don't know if GRE is inadequate: if I knew that, I wouldn't need to ask these questions. The author doesn't disapprove of VXlan, so there must be something insufficient in GRE.

Look, I'm just trying to understand the playing field here, for when the moment comes that I need that knowledge. I don't currently have a need for funky networking between Docker containers, but I do have Docker containers and can imagine a future need for funky networking. The article slams new technologies, but doesn't clearly explain the alternatives, which is what I'm interested in, so I'm asking follow-up questions. There is nothing rhetorical here.
Mathcard.us
I understand all that. But typically you must exercise incentive stock options within three months of leaving a job, or lose them.

If the OP can exercise his options right now for an amount of money he considers not terribly significant, then he could quit his job now, and if the old company monetized in the next couple of years (which he stipulates is reasonably likely), then he can still get the payout for it.

If on the other hand his options are not vested, or he can't afford to exercise them speculatively, then if he changes jobs now, he throws away significant equity that he thinks has a good chance of monetizing.
C++ dumping ten pages of unreadable error messages on you because you forgot a semicolon or misspelled an import? If that is C++14, I'd hate to see 1983's version.
This is a great How to be Evil manual.

"If you decide to downsize your product, you should reduce the size of all three dimensions — height, width, and length — by an equal amount. Consumers are less likely to notice a change in all three dimensions."

"People will perceive your price to be smaller if you display that price in a smaller font."

"People will perceive your price to be lower if it contains fewer syllables."
Indeed, yes, it's astonishing. 5cm, for an object 20'000 km above ground.

http://ccar.colorado.edu/asen5050/projects/projects_2008/xia...

The satellite position and clock correction are similar in scale as shown in figure 1 and 3. However, as described in previous sections, the accuracy of the satellite position calculated from broadcast ephemeris is about 160 cm and 5cm for the precise ephemeris.
That's what I chose to project into his response. Both interpretations are plausible which itself was sort of the point of my response.
Must be to boost their ad impressions. Really scummy, and kept interrupting the embedded Uber training video.
Your experience (and others like it) is the reason Airbnb decided to redo recruiting from the ground up. Almost the entire recruiting team has been hired in the last 2.5 years. Clearly it needed to happen.
This alone tells me that they don't know what they are doing.

I interviewed for a job using Hacker Rank about 6 months ago. They insisted that I complete their problems. The problems were trivially easy (that's ok, there was a time limit so you don't want to make things too confusing or difficult) but I struggled and barely got it in on time due to how terrible the HackerRank system worked. I ran into innumerable bugs, from not compiling the code correctly (poor install of the language) to front and bugs that would cause edits to be lost -- I eventually started coding in a text editor and copy and pasting the results in to submit-- but that didn't work very well either, possible because they have an anti-cheat system or something.

I literally spent 5 minutes writing a solution to one of the answers, 1 minute running it locally (worked the first time) and then 20 minutes trying to get Hacker Rank to accept it. Some of them it never accepted-- the code would be there but I couldn't get the hacker rank system to run it to check its output.

Of course, the "scoring" on hacker rank is how fast you are and whether you get the correct output-- and this company explicitly stated that they rank people by score. This was the only "technical" part of the interview process.

Of course I told them about the issues I ran into but at some point that's going to sound like complaining, right?

So, now, I take outsourcing technical interviews to hacker rank as a sign of incompetence.

IF the hiring manager isn't technical enough to conduct a technical interview, then your company is not competently managed. PERIOD.

And hacker rank was such a joke that it shows they didn't even try it themselves.
Heads-up: Using the default Iceweasel (Debian's Firefox) User-Agent, the content of the article doesn't show up. If I switch to a Firefox User-Agent, it does.
This seems like an odd choice to me.

I think OS X has been the best all-round Desktop OS for many years now, but what does it give you as a server that a linux-based system can't, and that's worth the trouble of custom racks, vendor lock-in and high costs?

In fact, if you're working with OpenGL, OS X can be frustrating since it only ever supports an OpenGL version a few years behind the latest release - IMO one of the platform's biggest drawbacks.

Then again, I've seen some pretty strange errors on server machines doing GPU-heavy work on linux machines with Nvidia cards, and it's probably easier to get support on a standardised SW/HW system such as the Mac Pro...
Technically there is no limitation in the size of the space; it can be an airport or shopping mall - you just need to use more beacons if you want better results in a huge space.

See this GIF: http://i58.tinypic.com/33nyrgo.gif It's a 30m x 15m space (half of your space) and we used 12 beacons. You can use less if you want "corner / room" level accuracy.

Because beacons broadcast signals all around any number of devices can access their signals and there is no limit in number of people with mobile app that uses our SDK. If you put beacons high enough the signal absorption should be minimal, but we haven't tested with high density crowd yet.
Google's data templating language
I'm kind of curious - is this new to the US market ? There was Paypal BillMeLater, etc. In India - we have something called EMI (Equated Monthly Installments) which a lot of credit card companies do for certain online purchases (like mobile phones, etc.)

what exactly is new here ?
Oh, right. I didn't consider that:

Welcome to PyPy.js!
>>> import js
>>> "console" in js.globals
True
>>> "console" in dir(js.globals)
False
I agree. It is getting out of hand.

I try to be more pragmatic in my interview process. I don't expect candidates to be passionate because the company isn't their dream. I expect the owner to be passionate, but the rest of us are just here to pay the bills. Therefore, I don't bother looking for passion. What I do want is somebody who has coding experience and someone I'd enjoy working with. I focus all my questions around those two goals, with a greater emphasis on the second.
It's like self-sustaining structures in Conway's game of life.
How is that worse than javascript loading javascript via AJAX?
None. Both the oxidation and reduction are quantitative.
Man, why are all the silicon people so fixated on spiking nets? Maybe in 20 years once we figure out how the brain works they'll be great but if you built a convnet chip instead then it could be smashing records in real problems like speech recognition, translation, image identification, etc, today. Where are the convnet chip startups?
It might not be your primary concern but I found Ghost's performance to be much better than Wordpress': http://www.anmolsarma.in/lazy-performance-comparison-of-word...
There is no need to put "has" in scare quotes. Haskell does have side effects like C, Java and Python (although maybe not quite as conveniently). If you want to look at side-effect free languages, consider Miranda, Coq, Agda.

What Haskell contributes (in a concrete implementation, the ideas go back to Moggi's theory) is the monadic encapsulation of effects, which I treat as a separate point under (viii). Monadic encapsulation of effects is not absence of effects. It's a reflection of effects at the type level.
What's wrong with `looking for easy employment`? I mean, we know tech interviews suck. So if there any other way to workaround this thing and show to the prospective employers what you can do (assuming that you're willing to sacrifice your time), why not? Especially, given that `github is your CV` meme, which is fading nowadays.
Use no-script (FF) or script-safe (chrome). It never reloaded on me.
How the UK election could affect the war on drugs
I fully agree with that, that's why my point (viii)
was: "monadic encapsulation of effects: open". But it's important to realise that (a) the existence of effects and (b) their control at the level of types are two differnt things.
It's deep in the comments and I really like the sentence:

x0054: "You are fitting triangular shaped computers, wrapped into round cases, into square shaped boxes."

And place them horizontally. And without additional fans!

And surprisingly, if you read skuhn's answers here, for them it all still has sense, financially.

And also surprisingly, Apple says it's OK to use the Mac Pros horizontally:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201379

Fascinating.
>denying credit on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, marital status

Are any of these independent factors for greater (or lower) risk once other factors like income, education and conscientiousness are considered? If they aren't why do any lenders care and if they are then any lender is just going to use cruder proxies for these factors disadvantaging more people.