skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmmm I was under the impression that cash was part of their operating expenses. They have retail stores, their campus, most of their employees and all their most expensive employees are all in the US too. But you're right, it's probably still enough to eat 3 months worth of royalty payments.

Also likely, this isn't going to be the only or last fuck-you Apple is going to be giving artists or content producers. The ones who agree to be screwed for the 3-month opening trial will be push-overs who can be leaned on again when the time comes.
The same code is faster (and easier) to write, correctly, in Python than in either C or C++. (this depends a little on what you're writing, but not much: C/C++ make you specify much more about your code than python does.)

The same code, however, will run faster on C/C++. This is because python is doing some of the work for you, and you did that work upfront when writing the C/C++.

If you are doing something which involves a lot of computation, which all fits in RAM (using numpy in python will make that a fairer test between the two choices), then C/C++ will be faster.

Remember that a good pattern is to write your high-level logic in Python, and write a python implementation of your app, and then profile it to work out the slow parts of the code and speed them up using Cython[1], which will allow you to convert python-like code to efficient C (you can also straight up borrow C/C++ implementations from other people, too). This pattern is designed to balance minimising both programmer-time (since you will only have to code the important bits in C) and run time (since the performance-critical bits can be optimised.)

[1] http://cython.org/

(for pedants: I am referring to the CPython implementation, which is the only one which supports C/C++ extensions.)
Yes. It's much faster. The reason C++ is fast is because you have explicit control over allocations and it compiles to native code (among other reasons). There are also a lot of subtle things that you can control in C++ that you can't in python, like memory layout. Memory layout is extremely important for CPU cache, and CPU cache is extremely important for performance. (Reading data from RAM is generally orders of a magnitude slower than reading from an L1 or L2 cache. For some reason this never gets mentioned in university CS courses, but there are a lot of data structures that are "theoretically" fast for certain things but in practice very unfriendly to hardware. For instance, linked lists. Sure insert/delete is O(1), but since linked lists are quite possibly the least cache friendly data structures in existence, you're better off with a vector/array even if you're inserting all the time. I'm not just making this up, you can read talks by people like Bjarne Stroustroup on this topic)

As to whether it matters for the algorithm, it depends on the algorithm. It's almost always going to be much faster in C, but, how fast do you really need it to be? Python is very good at saving programmer time, so if performance is not particularly important, I just wouldn't worry about it.
This is not true at all.

Many consultants may in fact be paid once. But most developers work at companies for a salary. That salary is paid for by charging for software over and over. Without being able to charge multiple times for the same piece of software, there would be no Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle, no SaaS, and no App Store, just to name a few, and none of the jobs that come along.
What is the value in a group of people debating if the decision maker stays silent?
Is everyone trying to convince the reader of their point?
What is the reader's motivation to participate in this? Having the power to decide whatever?

So your landing page made me ask alot of questions, which would probably lead to a sale if i found satisfying answers
Sorry for the typo! http://news.layervault.com
It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29
Are you disagreeing with something toyg said?
Why is everyone complaining about the deal? Did Apple force all of the artists into it or did the record companies? Either way, the problem doesn't come from the terms of the deal, it comes from why the deal was made.
Aside from the inherent foolishness of shipping water around in small containers to people with faucets, how is Coke the problem? Back when they had glass bottles, they reused them. They use recyclable packing for everything and along with the rest of the industry have relentlessly worked to make their packaging more efficient. If only everyone else did likewise.

If you don't like dealing with recycling, consider the effort to be part of the cost of the product. I am all in favor of a "disposal tax" to be levied on goods to offset the societal cost of wasteful packaging, but it would still be passed on to consumers, and soft drink companies are hardly the worst offenders.
That would be like joking in the restaurant when you tell them to get you the lobster and champagne. Why would you do that?
I've seen it happen with some startups that jobs are posted as "open" to attract applicants when they are not really hiring, or not removing those postings once filled to passively collect resumes and make it look like the startup is bigger than it is.

I really don't like this as it hurts the applicants time and distracts them from finding a place that does want to hire them now.
Sounds to me like they would rather want to use something specialized like this.

http://web.chemdoodle.com/demos/3d-editor

Please people. Don't do stuff like this in word or powerpoint.
PyPy is an amazing project, but if you're really writing performance sensitive code then relying on the heuristics of a JIT is a dangerous game. There are also a lot of things that PyPy's JIT just can't realistically optimize.
Amen. And upvoted.
The trash sorting is helpful anyway: For example, you’ll have to take out the biological waste at least daily, packaging waste can stay around for a day or two without issues, and, well, your paper bin can stay around for a week without smelling bad.
There's an argument to be made for larger companies in terms of resilience: they will usually be able to absorb more risk. Modularity of small companies is good for if they fail, but I suspect they are more likely to fail. I don't have an opinion one way or another, just musing.
I wish people would stop saying "C/C++" , these are 2 different languages.

Python* itself is written in C, not in Python. Which should give you clues to mediate and find your own answers.

*: Python, the canonical implementation.
Why in the world would you do this in PowerPoint.

Get PyMol. render it using povray.
Same in Germany. And: It works.

But if the people in the US can’t even handle a separation between one recycling bin and a waste bin, I don’t think that more separation would be doable there.
The E3 requires employer sponsorship and doesn't offer a ready path to a green card, so it isn't friendly to starting a company in the US. It is fairly easy to get because it has its own special quota just for Australians so they do not need to compete with immigrants from other countries as for an H1.
>The most basic cost you have to recoup is that of making the song (studio, musicians, production, what you charge for your voice etc). This remains real money, even if you can make a digital copy of a song for free.

Absolutely, but that is fixed cost not unit cost. Not recouping fixed costs is bad. But losing money on top of that for every unit you give away is even worse.

The distinction matters just as much as in the past because our economies have not just become more digital, they are also more service oriented than before, and services often do have unit costs. A better analogy to giving away iPhones would be to play a live gig for free.
IIRC Keevash used to teach at Caltech and was Rick Wilson's colleague.
is this tutorial applicable to WebGL? if not, do you have another tutorial recommendation?
I'm not a fan of the Times so take that into consideration, but this strikes me as an attempt to play up the cyberwar angle and whitewash the astonishing incompetence at the OPM. Namely, Ars has a source saying that sysadmin roles were outsourced (!) to at least one person in Argentina and one other person in China:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/encryption-would-not...

> A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is 'so what's new?'"

This is speculation, but I'm going to guess that the sysadmin in China either was an intelligence agent from the beginning, or was coerced into handing over root access to the Chinese military. Not very sophisticated at all, as is the case for a depressing number of high-profile hacks.
> Python itself is written in C, not in Python. Which should give you clues to mediate and find your own answers.

PyPy is written in Python and is much faster than CPython in a lot of cases, so I'm not sure the argument you're making here is valid. http://speed.pypy.org/
Spotify app itself doesn't support AirPlay/Chromecast but some 3rd party apps allow you to stream Spotify to them.

On the other hand, Spotify has its own streaming protocol which is supported by a few player/speaker brands (e.g. Gramofon).
Pretty much most job positions want a pony. It's the old "10 years experience in J2EE" thing, when a technology doesn't really take that long to learn, or a group of technologies that someone uses, that are impossibly incommon in combination.

People want developers in Foo, not Bar, when Foo and Bar are basically the same.

I prefer hiring smart people that can learn, and that are good to work with, but I do feel people don't believe that as much when there are are a lot of people on the market.

It's somewhat similar to how it's hard to get an employer to fund a conference trip, classes, books, and all of those kinds of things.

And because you can't really move and grow at work, I think that's also why people change jobs more, we're in a very creative professional that desires knowledge - and the system really wants us to hire someone who already knows X or has built X before, and crank out more of the same many times.
Really, these are the only reasons? Then it's even worse than I thought.

a) and c) are only relevant to Apple users. Spotify pretty much runs everywhere.

b) Watch for many is just a gimmick. This is really weak.
Apple disallows apps whose only purpose is one of beta, demo, trial or test. You are more than allowed to set up a trial period then charge an in-app purchase/subscription to continue using the service.
Just because something generates native code does not mean it "runs as fast as C". Semantics of a particular language can force it to do more job without any chance to optimize that away.

For example, if you modify C compiler to make integer operations clamp at min/max rather than overflowing, it will always be times slower than original at number crunching, and there would be no way to overcome that.
What a terrible waste of time
http://www.hackernewsletter.com/
Well you have to split that $10/month with all the other apps that the user accessed that month(on average). So it's quite likely that your somewhat successful app wouldn't even reach the 99 cents anymore let alone 99 cents per user.
This might be a silly question as I don't know much about compilers or interpreters, but how is that possible? Also, why hasn't the Python community tried to make PyPy the default then?
> He has said the language does matter and has talked about why Lua lends itself to good JIT performance.

I didn't say it's equally easy. The problem is essentially "find fastest set of operations that give equivalent output". That can be a very hard problem to solve.

For practical purposes, some languages make it easier, some harder.
But part of that was already done for you in iso646.h!

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/operator_alternati...
We know for a fact that its going to be less profitable for at least three months, unless they were already making zero dollars.
Watch Water Levitate, Flow Up, and Swirl the Wrong Way in the Other Hemisphere
Dead nettle herb
CPython is built more naively for lots of operations. A global lookup is a dictionary lookup. Getting a symbol out of an object is a dictionary lookup. An object creation is always an allocation; variables don't go on the stack. Everything is reference counted. The old 'range' builtin would create an actual list of that length in memory, rather than just keep track of the start and end points like a C-style for loop.

Other implementations could theoretically do better. PyPy can detect after a while that a variable can safely be declared on the stack, and so it will start to do that. If the object type is known, then a field lookup becomes just adding an offset to the pointer. It can even use different implementations for the same Python-visible classes (to store a range result in constant space, but still appear to be the full list, or use a different type of dictionary for objects and {}, or other things like that).
What a wonderful waste of time
I have opened so many fake accounts on facebook (to test things in apps) and had no problems that I can't believe they care very much about fake accounts. It seems like: its ok to have a fake account to juice traffic, but please don't be obvious about it.
I wonder if Tesla's patents helped with this. If not, I look forward to when someone takes both innovations and creates something world changing like enduring and safe batteries.
Right - and now further imagine that your app is actually making decent money before the introduction of the subscription model (like Taylor Swift does off records). How pleased with this arrangement are you going to be? I'd posit not very.
Boilerplate for turning a mobile website into an iPhone app
But if they stop working, they are not paid anymore. They are effectively compensated for the act of working, not for some ownership over the work they've done.
> so politically loaded

why do you say this?
Mike Acton gave a great presentation on this kind of optimization at CppCon2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
Various packages are incompatible with PyPy.

http://pypy.org/compat.html
I'm skeptical of the idea that drones will deliver everything. That's like saying planes will deliver everything because they're faster than ships. Yet last I checked, most goods are transported on container ships. The thing everyone talking about drones fails to take into account is cost. Drones are very flexible because of their size and the fact that they fly, but as a result they don't scale well. A UPS truck on the other hand can't drive straight line distances between destinations, but it can hold a ton of packages at once without needing to return to some sort of distribution center.
Picking good metrics that are not game-able is not easy, but as long as they are truly aligned with the company goals, it's kind of OK for people to optimize for them. You get the behavior that you measure.

From the point of view of an employee, anything is better than "your compensation depends on the subjective assessment of your manager". Talk about a system that can be gamed!
My Naive Thoughts of 2 Flaws with Loyalty Programmes Nowadays
> imagine if developers recieved payment everytime a user used and app

If software developers were compensated for their creative output the way musicians are there wouldn't be so many software developers.

I had a really innovative startup idea once where I planned to have developers work for years to create hit software products that made many people's life better and then get into a crappy van and travel the country to do 90 minute demos of their product for a few hundred dollars.

But only if they had a genuinely successful product mind you, obviously being merely competent at software development meant you didn't get paid at all, you had to actually amass significant numbers of fans of your products willing to come to these demos.

Never did figure out why I didn't get more developers interested in the platform.
PyPy is written in a subset of python called RPython. It is translated into c then executed.
1. Need to bring along the physical burdens (card or digital based loyalty).

2. Rewarding the wrong groups of people.
> Programming languages aren't slower or faster. The implementations of them are.

This is not true. Different languages provide different guarantees, which allow implementations to safely make different optimisations. For a trivial example, c99 is a faster language than c89, because the 'restrict' keyword was added.
In 215 comments no one that I could find has mentioned that, while well-intentioned, this post comes off as somewhat disingenuous because Apple does not deal directly with the artists. The entire (pretty well-written) thing doesn't mention _at all_ that the majority of musicians do not deal directly with distributors. Think about it: how are Apple/Google/Spotify/Amazon going to deal directly with 10 million individuals? The answer is that they don't.

I think anyone can agree that Apple is being shitty by not paying for something they're making money on, the people who are directly responsible for not compensating the artists are, rather conspicuously, left out of this rant.
This is actually likely to be the scenario in which the differences are most visible. If your data fits in memory then you're more likely to be compute-bound, at which point C or C++ will completely flatten Python.

If your data is too big to fit into memory, then you're likely to be I/O bound, at which point the cost of I/O operations is likely to erase performance differences between the languages.
In this case it looked like the lawyers just Google searched for IMAX. You can't threaten everyone who ever mentions your firm.
No, an alternative to the write-only regexps is nice, clean, dense but yet readable BNF or PEG syntax. And no, they're not regular expressions with a different syntax, they're much higher up in the Chomsky hierarchy.
So before they knew who he communicated with + pictures + other data, and now they know... who he communicates with. Given how easy most facebook identities are to connect to "real" identities, I don't see how them knowing the phone numbers is noticably worse.
this sucks but it's not a new technique

music clubs of 15 years ago didn't pay artists for your "12 free CDs" either
I just posted about this at the top level, but thank you for being a critical thinker: Taylor Swift _may_ deal directly with a distributer but only because she's mega-ultra-super successful. 99% of musicians use third parties to get their music to distributors. You do not do deals directly with Spotify: you sign up with ASCAP and tell them the gist of where you want your music.
Like this one: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/525650833174978560

I thought it was the most hilarious thing I'd ever seen until a co-worker on a H1-B told me what it really was.
I definitely agree with the importance of feedback. I think companies sometimes tend to be too polite. (Don't get me wrong -- you don't want rudeness, but directness is valuable). There's nothing more frustrating than spending a lot of time on a project and having no idea if you're creating value, or walking down a rabbit hole that is not useful.
If knowledge that you're changing the world is making up for inequitable financial compensation, I'd say you as a worker have screwed up.
Apple made their response to this a few days ago in this Recode article. http://recode.net/2015/06/15/heres-what-happens-to-your-10-a...

>Apple won’t pay music owners anything for the songs that are streamed during Apple Music’s three-month trial period, a bone of contention with music labels during negotiations for the new service. But Kondrk says Apple’s payouts are a few percentage points higher than the industry standard, in part to account for the lengthy trial period; most paid subscription services offer a free one-month trial.

I wonder if all of these complaints would go away if Apple said they weren't going to offer higher payouts overall but would pay during the free-trial?
That benchmark does not allow faster implementations of languages to be part of the benchmark. Like they allow only interpreted implementation of certain languages, not fast JIT version.

It's just the end results are even less meaningful this way.

All this is entirely within their rights, of course.

Someone else should create a competing programming language benchmark that includes all reasonable language implementations and all reasonable benchmark entries in those languages. Unfortunately, no one has bothered.
What is a better resource? The page itself talks about how no one should put much stock in the results, but there aren't really alternatives that give the same type of information.
I completely agree; my point was that cars are widespread despite the killings, so the potential for drones to fall on people's heads doesn't seem to be enough to prevent them from being adopted, if there's enough lobbying from the people running them.
> how is that possible

PyPy is written in a restricted subset of Python called RPython, which gets translated into C

https://rpython.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html
Ask HN: Which Works Best, Free Trial or Money-Back Guarantee?
I'm wondering if I should
1) offer a 7-day Free Trial, or
2) charge the CC upfront and give a 30-day 100% Money-back Guarantee.

There are some articles out there which say that the 7-day Free Trial works best, but I wanted to take the pulse of the actual hacker community on this subject. If the free trial approach indeed works best, what's the perfect timespan: 3 days, 7 days, or even 30 days?

If anyone has done any A/B tests on this, please let me know. Thanks!
Sadly that's still more than enough money to bully individuals :(
FU Pay Me!
An extreme example:

http://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/One-bit%20computer/One...

A bit less extreme: http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/06/adem/engin/e25/final...
Many gems are in here.

- If you can’t fire friends, don’t hire them.

- Finally, firing for bad performance is easier than having to fire good people because you’ve run out of money, so fire the bad people before you have to fire the good people too.

- The best way to avoid politics isn’t to ignore politics, but to spend your time on it.

I'm interested in the backstory of the author too.
It doesn't matter. Think about this for any other profession. This is the big business version of the craigslist ad asking a graphic designer to work for free "for the exposure".
Startups, Here Is What You Can Do That Big Daddies Can’t