skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft's bundling of IE meant it wasn't a free market. It's the same as how here, in ontario, my house comes hooked up to the local wing of the government hydro company who control my electricity, natural gas and water supply.

Unless I'm already looking elsewhere, I don't know I have another option. I technically have a free market because I can hook my house up with solar, wind or even tap a river, I can drill a well, or I can hook my house up to an external propane tank . . . however, how is that really a free market?

Similarly when I buy a PC and I'm handed it with IE, unless I'm already looking elsewhere, I don't know I have another option. I believe this is why the paid referral campaign worked so well for Firefox, because it was like an independent power company hanging signs around your town, suddenly you're told you have an option.
ParEdit (paredit.el) is a minor mode for performing structured editing of S-expression data.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit
The biggest problem in San Francisco is not the city government nor the government workers but its the voters.

SF is a city of really well meaning people who will sign any petition when they leave Safeways and vote yes to every single idiotic ballot issue.

What this means is that every single interest group gets people to vote them funding.

Of course the people voted in are all of the same political flavor so rather than having devils advocates amongst the commissioners you get each of them pushing for spending on their particular special interest groups.

Unless the voters start voting no to these idiots and ballot measures I don't see anything changing in SF in the foreseeable future.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Don't the in-memory databases generally run in another process (memcached) anyway?

(Not that your general point is wrong)
Announcing Amazon CloudFront Streaming
SVT creates web site to get their iPhone app approved
There are quite a few projects going on in Scotland which are attempting to restore species that were extirpated over the past few centuries. Beavers are being re-introduced and the waters are tested every few years to see if it is politically acceptable to try and re-introduce wolves - the red deer currently have no natural predators (apart from humans and possibly a few eagles that take fawns). Sitka deer messing up the gene pool of red deer may cast some doubt on the overall goal of this effort and it will certainly add to the cost if Red Deer are to be kept "pure".

The population of Red Deer is currently unsustainable - they are fed during the winter by the large estates to maximise their numbers for shooting. Hybrids might do some damage to this aspect of the economy by dimishing the trophy value to the estates. However there might some good from this if there are culls in the areas where hybrids are occurring. It would certainly improve the areas where the original pine forest is starting to recover by reducing the grazing pressure from deer.
Given that S3 must be used as the origin, I suspect live streaming is not possible at this time (S3 does not support streaming upload).
Qt Graphics and Performance - An Overview
Lua, too, though there are a couple extensions to add threads.
The objective here is to destroy the Earth, as specified in the article. Sure, there are lots of ways to kill everything on the planet, but it'll still be there when you're done.
You are forgetting what people had to cope with before. The new security popups are nothing compared to the abuse shareware has heaped on users.

If the security warnings are discouraging people from installing new software, they would equally discourage Chrome and Safari installation. So this is not an issue.

When it comes to web users, I lean towards them being "naive". You are free to hold a positive impression of the world as benchmarking enthusiasts :-)
Fascinating article. Perhaps it's a lesson in what happens when you lack political balance? It's been fashionable in the last few years to talk about cooperation between the major parties, but to me, it's the scuffle between Right and Left that produces a government that isn't too crazy in either direction.

If a sizable number of Libertarian Nutjobs were there to fight with the Socialist Nutjobs, they'd probably be better off.
Isn't the game you're at already in 3D?
Agents launch the update function in a separate thread, which seems a bit much for incrementing a counter.
> Windows 3 and MacOS classic apps used to get wedged every so often because cooperative multitasking is so easy to get slightly wrong

This is a different issue: multitasking of processes in the same CPU. This is an area that needs to be done by the OS, because you can't guarantee that other processes will be cooperative.

Inside your own process, however, you can do whatever you want by diving tasks in small chunks, without the need for threads.

The only place where I think we need threads is when dealing with libraries that we can't control. For example, UI libraries, networking libraries, math libraries, etc.
How high do I need?
> (I am not an EE, but I have built a lot of headphone amps. The sad part is how people with $1000 amplifiers often have worse components than an amp built from $30 worth of parts. Ah, the free market...)

Don't forget your monster cables. (Or what where they called?)
This is a great way to describe "The Clojure Way". I think I'm going to co-opt this explanation for future use (I hope you don't mind).
Never.

I used to quickly look through my spam folder in GMail and then flush it whenever it went above a certain amount of messages. Now I don't have that compulsion anymore, since there is an option to not display the unread count.

I just let the spam folder alone. If there is any false positive, and if it is important enough, the sender will most likely send another message and the probability of multiple false positives is lower.
Great way to promote themselves. My first thought was "I gotta have that app" (had I been an iphone user).
The execution is good as well.
I think the worry is the hybrid species might out compete the native red deer, or that fewer "pure" deer of either species will be left if hybridisation continues, as the hybrid offspring will be less picky about sticking to their own kind.
Houston "proper" is a fraction of the City of Houston. (I assume you mean inside the loop.)
Microsoft apology for code theft may not do, Plurk says
I've heard that argument since we started having dual CPUs 5-10 years ago. I don't buy it really. Netbooks are so popular mainly because we don't need so much cpu power on our local thin clients to the web.
RedLaser iPhone App reaches 750K downloads, $1M in revenue
I played around with Jekyll a bit and while it's cool, there were a few things I didn't like, such as the fact that you're limited to one "posts" feed, rather than being able to easily publish arbitrary content and have multiple feeds. I also wanted to be able to use Haml instead of Liquid, and dump the configuration into my primary layout rather than in a separate file.

So I grabbed my yak-shaving kit, and rolled my own library in Lua. It's not entirely done, but I'm using it and it may be interesting to you if you like to work with Lua.

http://github.com/norman/grackle
Hmm, the link suddenly started sending me to Facebook. Anyone else?

Didn't happen when I went directly to http://dearstevejobs.com
China bans individuals from registering domain names
I think the idea that every piece of software will run in parallel in the future is nonsense. Hardware vendors are just trying to create a need where there is none.

Clearly, someone will find applications where this power is needed (graphics, simulation, robotics), but there is no way that MS Word will run in parallel in more than a few processors. The biggest change in multicore is in enabling new applications, not in changing the way current applications are developed.
There is probably more traction from what you are saying that some of the commenters suggest. For compute bound tasks, it is often productive to split computations into long-running processes.

There are two reasons that the discussion goes beyond what you suggest, I think. One is detailed in http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/27/Concur-dot... where the wide finder project is a way to explore relatively easy ways to split a log-searching task into effective threads on a multi-core machine.

This is really a hard problem, as evidenced by Tim's long series of articles detailing various forays into clojure and other languages.

Your comment "Hardware should handle multiple cores" reflects the opposite of what I think chip manufacturers are thinking. They run into the performance barrier, so they build a chip with more CPUs on it and hand the problem off to the compiler team and the rest of the software world.

I would take it another step further in challenging hardware manufacturers to look at the broader problem. There was an article recently that noticed that for Lisp, the effective performance gain over a decade or two went up by 50 where for C-family programs it went up by several orders of magnitude. To me this implies that hardware isn't going in the direction that supports higher-level computing.

Remember when the 360 instruction set came out? The 7094 people looked at it with some sense of dissapointment. And where are the nice instruction sets as evidenced by the PDP-10 and family?

Perhaps this implies smarter cores so that we don't have to do so many of them.

But in today's world, it seems that the languages that work well with multiple threads have a language construct that is required to make it work--libraries don't do the trick. The clean channels of GO and the constructs in Clojure point the way. Maybe the GIL-fix approach is truly doomed.

So I agree with your closing sentiment.
Its not only not constructive to the discussion, even in practice its not constructive. This group of people (or this particular man) has dedicated his life to enriching himself by exploiting the system. Yes the man is broken, but the system moreso. Simply removing him through violence or otherwise will not fix the problem. There will be a long line waiting to take his place. We've let the system get way out of hand. So far so that the normal methods for fixing such things seem to no longer be available to us. We could have filled the cavity in 1980. Now we need a root canal. Some are going so far as to say we need to pull the whole tooth.
For some possible solutions to Fermi's paradox, this can easily be solved. We just build e.g. radar stations which output lots of MWs and get someone's attention... :-)
There are plenty of poorly run and corrupt city govs. A few I've had close exposure to: Atlanta, D.C., Miami (most of south FL), Jacksonville FL (they've had a highway construction project running for over 20 years!!), Savannah GA. SF can simply get in line for the crown.
It is fundamentally wrong to support one kind of infringement while condemning another.

I would disagree, actually. By way of comparison, most countries have multiple distinct crimes or not-crimes that "killing someone" can fall into: killing an enemy soldier in wartime is generally okayed, offing a fetus is okayed in many countries, killing someone by accident is (broadly speaking) manslaughter, and doing it intentionally (if it doesn't fall into one of the above categories) is murder.

I don't see any terribly compelling reason why similar divisions couldn't be worked out for the copyright issue.
The mark and sweep collector is a little more complicated than that. It doesn't use a single "seen" bit the way a normal GC header would, instead it uses the refcount itself in very, very clever ways
Well iTunes especially has been a resource hog on Windows in my experience. Between the ipodservicehelper.exe and the itunes.exe itself taking a lot of memory I think there is room for improvement there.
> Firefox is single threaded

Incorrect. See http://mxr.mozilla.org/firefox/search?string=thread
Used to be 200, but might have gotten upped.
sadly, this system is incompatible with 'noprocrastinate' :)
I doubt it would work, Chrome's adoption has been phenomenal for its first year and due solely to the techies who adopted it with open arms because they all knew why it was good.

Every techie on the planet is going to see through a Firefox or IE shell/clone. It won't get the market share and loyalist fans that Firefox and Chrome gained, so it certainly won't be hitting the top spot like Chrome did within a year of release.
On plaforms without fork it uses threads (e.g. windows). Why do you care if it is using fork() anyhow?
In the long run, it seems like approaches like ConCRT and User Mode Scheduling (Windows only, sadly) could address this. The OS can provide support for detecting any blocking operations (even page faults, for example) and doing task-level switching for you.
Uh, can't they also link those accounts by noticing that they are the exact same picture? I mean, I thought that was partially the point.
Interfacing with a broken bad interface is never fun. But perhaps fix the problem instead of working around it and letting it spread...
Smalltalk is stable and growing
How does a real GC work? I can't picture how you can do GC without ref counts.

(sorry if that's a dumb question)
It seems a culture has developed where "good" intentions justify anything. There is also a complete causal disconnect between those intentions and the results, and this appears to be happening world-wide. If you say the right words, you can sell any program, regardless of what those same words may have led to in the past in terms of other failed programs. History is evaded and forgotten, it's only intentions that count, not results. sigh.
> Native threads do this timeslicing for you; that is why they were invented

But they don't solve the fundamental problem of how to organize your code to take advantage of this. It is really easy to create a threaded application that has lower performance than a single threaded application that divides work by chunks. And, after all research in this area, there is no clear way to use threads without spending a lot of time to make sure that they work.
If you know what version of a library you want to build against and you know the path to it you can link against it. The compilation and linking is no longer automatic because you have to specify your dependent library specifically, but you can put it anywhere you want and it won't conflict with a different version of the same name.

One way to simplify this is to customize your library builds and associate a unique pkgconfig .pc file with them. When you build your application, reference the .pc file for the library version you want. If the application does not support pkgconfig you could write a wrapper that parses it and provides the build/link options you desire. If you're building packages you're doing enough work by hand that this should not be unnecessarily complex.
Under terms of the European settlement, Microsoft will...send ballot screens ...to 100 million users of Windows XP, Vista and 7 operating systems in Europe who have set Internet Explorer as their main browser.

Why only to those who have IE as their default? If they really want to be fair, they should let everybody get a fresh choice about which browser to use.

I mean, if it makes sense to let current IE users choose to go to Firefox or Chrome, why doesn't it also make sense to let Firefox users choose to go elsewhere (even to IE!)?
There was no response - from a while back.
I would assume he meant the legal boundaries of the City of Houston, which is what the term "proper" usually means in that case.
I'm interested in both!

An intro to SuperCollider would be nice too =)
Maybe if the apple employee doesn't want to get caught he shouldn't use his apple.com email address that has his real photo as his gravatar.

"Who leaked this info?" "I don't know but it's someone who looks just like Bill! They even use the same gravatar image he uses everywhere else! Devious bastards! Let's see if we can reverse engineer this email hash to find out who this rogue might be!"
The problem with the GIL is nearly the opposite. The lock is dropped for system calls but kept when Python code is running. That's not a problem for IO bound workloads but does not scale well over multiple CPUs for CPU bound tasks that do most of the work in Python-land.

I not sure dropping the GIL is the best solution. Something like Erlang message passing sounds like a better model. I'm not sure if that's a good fit either though since it works best with functional style programming.
What panman said in spades. The person-hours you spend on the internet can have an influence but it's a much smaller factor on ad click rates then other demographics like age, gender, educational level, etc. No disrespect to people who sew, but you compare ad click rates on a sewing blog vs a javascript blog with the same traffic and I'd wager the sewing blog has a much higher click rate.

And as such, I'd highly doubt, at least until Chrome actively courts hardware manufacturers, that Chrome Ad click rates compare to IE. IE is the default web browser for many computers and ad clickers are more likely just to use the default web browser that comes installed on their system (the whole addon toolbar business is based on the fact that users won't (or don't know how to) switch their default search engine back once it's installed).
By that reasoning alone though IE users would be more valuable to Google than Chrome users. I think ultimately it boils down to controlling the user's means of access, probably with more long-term aims in mind, in which case it could be argued that it is raw market share that matters after all.
I guess it depends on who you're talking to. I still keep hearing 'movies used to be better'.

And I never argued that quality was constant. I believe it's essentially random. So the existence of an aberrant concentration of quality isn't surprising to me. I'm sure you could find clusters of a few years where nothing of note came out as well.
This only works if the UI library has good performance. During years this was a big issue in Java, and why it really needed multi-threading.
FTC sues Intel for 'anticompetitive tactics'
How ironic is that? A country that was supposed to have been founded on (Mao's interpretation of) Marxist principles, giving power to the people over the capitalist extremes, will now refuse Internet domain to those people; only businesses, those tools of capitalism, get this privilege.
Thought experiments:

1) What would have happened if IE had to be bought, or at least downloaded and installed?

2) What if Microsoft had formed a new company to develop and distribute their browser, and this company was expected to make a profit?

3) What would have happened if Netscape wasn't forced to make their browser free because Microsoft subsidised the development of IE using profits from unrelated software?

I suppose the underlying question is whether bundling the browser with a monopoly OS allows a free market in browsers, and if it didn't allow a free market, what should the remedy be?
I'm willing to help out organizing. I live in utrecht. Have contacts with seats2meet and can also offer a free space. Contact me through my profile.
It wouldn't totally astonish me if MS eventually settled, perhaps sooner rather than later. The fact that they gave a flat out blunt apology (as opposed to a non-apology apology: "we are sorry you feel that way") shows that they understand the seriousness of the error, and own up to it, even though the contractor did the deed.
These lists are useless. There is no metric on how they pick these companies, plus I think that most of us working in worst companies than those listed on Lowest-Rated tech companies.
I tried Webby before and liked it. I'm now using Nanoc3[1], which has tagging and a lot of other nice features, especially for blogs, right out of the box.

[1] http://nanoc.stoneship.org/
I did not say every piece of software will run in parallel, or that it should. The subject is the runtime environment of a programming language. If Python is going to be used in these new applications you brought up, it would help if they were able to remove the GIL.
The aim is to remedy Microsoft's abuse of their Windows monopoly position, which resulted in a large number of IE users. Therefore, offering only to IE users is fair as well as practical.
Chrome users are on the internet for hours every day. It's part of their job. IE users are on the computer maybe once a day at the end of the day to check their Hotmail accounts.

Is there any factual basis for this type of claim?

I would imagine there are a large segment of IE users who are also on the internet for hours every day and are locked into using IE by their corporate IT departmnet.
Plurk's gonna burn a lot of sympathy if they do, and it may not even be a tactically sound decision.

The situation was handled swiftly and correctly by Microsoft. It got Plurk some free press. It wasn't even caused by Microsoft directly, but by a contractor they had hired. And, best of all, although ordinarily you might be able to allege that it cost you sales ... this all happened in a market in which Plurk has been denied access anyway.

This isn't David and Goliath anymore. Plurk was fortunate to get a swift response from Microsoft in their favor; if their next move is to start a fight with Microsoft, I fully expect that Microsoft's expert, well-paid legal team will chew them up and spit them out.

I'd much rather see Plurk issue a press release stating simply the matter has been resolved and they appreciate Microsoft's swift action.
Expanding your service to multiple verticals
It's quit exiting because

1. Works under Windows now

2. Runs on the same interop-able platform as Processing.
I guess I still don't really understand what the concern is. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that the article didn't really make it clear why this is a problem, other than the mongrels will take over. Is it a big problem if the "pure" varieties dissappear?
I think it's clear that no Communist nation has ever succeeded in being the bastion of democratic, personal freedom that it was ever intended to be.

I actually sort of feel bad for Karl Marx. I mean, dude just wanted people to live happier lives and not worry about owning stuff so much. Now he's forever tied to some of the most oppressive regimes in modern history.

Idealism fail.
Oh man, thats funny. I know very little about SF, other than it has lots of "causers". Seems to me they keep voting for this terrible managment, so there are plenty of causes to rally for/against. Seriously half of those examples solve one problem (sending the causers home with a "we fought the good fight" feeling) only to create 2 more cause-able problems (e.g. the old-folks-home/mental hostpital overflow -- cause A: save the old people from criminals, cause B: mentally ill are people too, they need homes).
It would be wonderful if the first line were true.
"It is well known that correlation does not prove causation."

Causality itself is hypothetical, an artifact of perception.
Microsoft was caught red-handed stealing and blames a contractor. A company is responsible for its contractors and bears legal liability in most jurisdictions for their actions. While it was good of them to apologize and pull it down immediately, Plurk is right to pursue Microsoft further if they so choose.

If, say, your kid gets caught stealing a car and say "oops, sorry" then walks away, that doesn't make everything ok.
Amazon's core competency? Pricing.
A GC looks at the content of memory and checks if each piece of memory is accessible (there are sophisticated algorithms to do this) - no need for a ref count is necessary with GC.
Rage against the Machine against X-Factor