skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A GC still has those same delays when freeing a large object graph (assuming that large object graph is in the tenured generation). They're just sometimes incrementalized or done in a background thread. Your malloc implementation could do that too.

Of course, I was just making an argument against 'immediately deallocating is always the best strategy'. It's clear that malloc()/free() could implement the same behaviour.

free is usually implemented with a free list.

Sorry, I was a bit vague: I was referring to moving garbage collectors, where one of the motivations was to be more performant with a lot of short-lived objects.
An article around the time of sentencing (mid-2013) said he'd be out in about a year,

> Kip and Nicole Macy agreed to a plea deal of "four years, four months" in state prison. If a judge approves it next month, they could be out in a year, with time served.
FWIW, the RAM trend is related to power, heat, and the increased speed of disk. SSD performance offsets some of the reduction in RAM, at a much better heat/power cost. Swap is much more viable on SSD than spinning disks, making huge RAM sizes less important for most user tasks.
It's just bizarre that the rule doesn't apply to packetslave. Snide personal remarks based on truth are okay? Scare quotes around the word "confirm"?
>I wonder why one hasn't popped up yet

Because all the sites need html/js nonsense ?
What current computers don't do is remind ex Amiga users of what it was like when they were in their teens and/or twenties.

Difficult problem to solve...
Your definition is completely worthless, then. Someone writing Java EE apps is then a "low-level programmer", which is totally wrong.

In fact, ATMs these days more often than not have full operating systems like Windows CE with the software being a Java app that communicates over some standardized XML-based middleware to access ATM system and transaction mechanisms.
It's a case where the existing solutions aren't perfect but are plenty good enough, and building a high quality product requires an immense amount of effort and long-term support.
How can a website / service be operated in 2015 without any contact or legal information? How am I supposed to use this for my personal information without being able to read the privacy statements or knowing who's operating the service to what purpose?

Edit: To make the reason for my comment clear, there was no link in the footer like there is now at the time I wrote it.
Forward error correction can add significant overhead. From the specification of the RF subsystem posted earlier (http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~tcase/NH%20RF%20Telecom%20Sys%2...), 5/6 of the data returned is redundant.
There is nothing secret about it.
Thanks for the comment. You are right. I did not think of all the space exploration equipment that is up there. But maybe there are doing upgrades as well? I don't know.

Also I like what you said about timeframe. Why software doesn't have a warranty period after which the software is absolute?
> Does a comment on this article truly need to be substantive?

Yes. Just because an article is lame doesn't mean the thread should be.

(By the way, please don't go on about downvoting in HN comments—that's so invariably lame that it has not one but two guidelines against it. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Appropriately enough, they're at the bottom.)
It is an interesting question, but it would help to be a bit more crisp. You need to define 'maintenance'. Allow me to explain.

A sun-dial, requires little maintenance after it has been set up. Cleaning off the bird feces and the leaves is all. It is not "zero" maintenance though. A trail duck is just a pile of rocks, and in the absence of getting knocked over requires no maintenance, but may require repair from time to time. A spacecraft on a mission to Pluto might require a software change or a course correction, but its hardware is not changed once it launches. A humming bird feeder sits on my porch and provides sugar water to birds in the neighborhood, when it runs out I pour in more.

So there are three things people often lump under the general heading of maintenance:

Repair - making something work after breaking.

Resupply - replacing consumable supplies, cleaning, and adjusting

Renew - giving something new capabilities or changing its operation by replacing parts or software

If you're being pedantic about the term, there is no such thing as 'zero maintenance' if you want a system to remain stable. Entropy is a thing.

So perhaps the more crisp question is, are people working on systems with really low maintenance requirements? Where "low" can be defined as hours of maintenance vs hours of operation or skill level of maintainers vs skill level of the builders, etc. Sure there are some really famous ones like the clock of the Long Now. Every museum in the world with interactive exhibits tries to design systems that will run with very little maintenance for a long time. Pretty much every operations lead spends time working on ways to keep large numbers of computer systems running with little human intervention.
Go uses golang for almost anything search-related on the internet.
The comments here seem to be very focused on the "secret" alloy. What I took away was the success of keeping Zildjian a profitable family business is mostly due to smart processes in how to involve new members of the family. IE, no reporting to another family member, must work outside the company first to gain another perspective to bring back to the company, no hiring spouses. I'm not an expert on the matter but I'd imagine that nepotism and having limited outside insight are big problems for most multi-generational family businesses.
Take this posters advice and do _exactly_ the opposite. Don't start with with relying on clicky drag things. Take the time to become comfortable with command line. Learn real database concepts. I recommend looking at some books and playing around with Sqlite and staying far far far away from MS Access unless you want to work in corporate accounting or something.
Holy shit! Can you give us some more background? Was the account inactive? Free or paid? Did you try contacting anyone else at github?
a) Use ninite.com
b) Don't install stupid shit, and pay attention when it all of a sudden says "I need more permissions"
c) If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
It's not "Customer Service" it's "User Experience".

We are not Instagrams customers. We are the product that Instagram and Facebook sell to their actual customers, the advertisers.
> There is no guarantee that the content of a particular URL will remain the same over time

I don't need or want a guarantee. I expect content to change over time. That's fine.

What I also expect is that the content provider understands the value of preserving previous versions and makes those available. Wikipedia does this well. The entire software suite is designed around this principle.

It is also trivial to implement.

Which leads to the conclusion that those who don't do it are doing so consciously and should be criticized for doing so.
As long as it can get feedback ("a little to the left") somehow, it seems doable to this software expert.
All companies have a termination clause to protect themselves.
Greece, Europe, and the United States
>> It seemed deeply unlikely at one stage to imagine Google would flush Code down the toilet

> If you know Google you know this isn't the case. Google are ruthless with cutting ideas and products - just look at Reader.

Well, yes, it's obvious in hindsight... but Google started Code in 2005 and project hosting in 2006, while Reader was shut down in 2013.

Github wasn't even launched until 2008.
Writing Code Poetry – Readability
>all computation software still not java, mission control and other realtime stuff definitely not java.

You should have a look at JSR-000302 Safety Critical Java Technology. No GC, realtime, direct hardware access and certified for DO-178B, Level A.

>The speciﬁcation is targeted to a wide variety of very demanding certiﬁcation paradigms such as the safety-critical
requirements of DO-178B, Level A. This speciﬁcation presents a set of Java classes providing for safety-critical application startup, concurrency, scheduling, synchronization, input/output, memory management, timer management, interrupt processing, native interfaces, and exceptions.To enhance the certiﬁability of applications constructed to conform to this speciﬁcation, this speciﬁcation also presents a set of annotations that can be used to permit static checking for applications to guarantee that the application exhibits certain safety properties.
Sure. But this guy wants to learn coding and do startups. Not make spreadsheets for the company.
>World's population grow fast and practically no new first or last names have been introduced in the last years, therefore the chances of having another person with your exact same first and last names and more exposure than you is growing exponentially.

I plan to give my child a new last name for this reason so he/she could have unique google hit. But I am not sure what the legal implications of this are.
What's galling about the notice that it's "cumbersome" to leave a note about changes is how widespread the practice is at other publications. I used to write for Wired and if there was a minor change, say mispelling someone's name in the story, we'd add a note to the footer highlighting the change. Same with Slate, a well respected news outlet that will add a footer for minor changes. When rewriting the story wholesale it doesn't seem a stretch to leave a footer, or at least a timestamp that highlights when a story is "complete."
Mohamed - I would recommend learning about basic software engineering practices but NOT building your own app. It takes years to become good enough to do that successfully. Instead, learn how to hire and manage developers, especially overseas developers on upwork.com (formerly odesk), how to share equity (read Slicing Pie book) and most of all how to design the user experience, and market yourself to investors (create an online portal for investors that works on mobile and desktop browsers.) Use invisionapp or something similar to show your app to others, and iterate THAT. Your first customers are actually investors and developers!
Not to discredit this product, but I'm having a harder and harder time trusting products that feature high security. They seem like trojan horses. I think I'm probably just being paranoid - is there a trustworthy independent third-party of some sort that verifies just how private these types of products are?

Edit: to be clear this is most likely an awesome product put out by people who care about security and privacy. I'm not trying to call this product out specifically. Privacy / security are really bold claims and without any specific regulations in the area that I'm aware of I feel extra cautious around anything claiming to provide those things. Like I said, I'm probably just being paranoid, but I like to think strategically, and if i were to be a spy agency of any sort and thought I could get away with it, selling a not-so-private privacy product would definitely be a move of mine.
But what if anything you program is written exactly like that. The internet is still based around 20-30 years old protocols and there are software systems out there that still work. So what is the secret sauce of building a software system that will survive without any maintenance for the next 20 years?
Nothing on that page mentions a hash. There is absolutely nothing misleading in the page you linked.
See also this previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870347
"More important, it taught me that the most critical step isn’t to “make a difference,” but to understand." I think the writer is encouraging listening and being aware (in his case - professionally through market research/data analysis) as told through the first hand experience.
certainly they are doing upgrades and maintenance. They have probably set time frame requirements for these too, for instance, "device must be able to function with current sw for N hours/days/months while out of radio contact"

Your question was a great one though -- and worthy of pursuit as a sw engineering goal in general!
Not sure why you're so quick to jump to the conclusion that there's a conspiracy, but comments appear when people write them. And I'm looking at a whopping score of 3 on my end. Such coordination! Many conspiracy!
> I decided to log in to my old account which I hadn't accessed in a few years.

If you hadn't logged in for a few years why would you expect it to still be open? It's a perfectly reasonable policy to recapture unused accounts.
I would imagine that the policy was put in place to eliminate trademark name squatting, and has probably been abused by someone internally at the company for whatever reason.
That's unlikely to be correct. Whatever your measurement, the average could easily be skewed towards one part of the population. E.g. including or excluding Bill Gates and other billionaires will change the average wealth.
Fair point, I bring Bootstrap up as an example of how frequently the actual frameworks relied on to build things on the web change. A better example of is the endless paradigms popping up to handle highly interactive javascript.

RE: NoSQL and SQL, I agree and I understand the nuance (my go-to database is PostgreSQL), I'm just pointing it out as "another thing" web developers need to understand.

And that's the point I was trying to make. When it comes to how many "other things" web developers must constantly be learning, I actually think developers in iOS or at the lower-level sometimes have things easier despite the stereotypes about web development being easy.

RE: Slack - Slack is interesting because it combines many elements of traditional web app design, and succeeds simply by executing on those elements extremely well. I believe web developers (particularly front-end ones) could learn a lot by studying how polished Slack's design and interactivity is.
HN users aren't allowed to make baseless accusations of abuse against other commenters. If you have a suspicion of abuse, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.

I'm going to detach this subthread and mark it off-topic.
Ask HN: Things to Do in Amsterdam?
Hello HN.

I'm going to Amsterdam next week and wondering where should I go, what things to do, that to see?

Any recommendations?
Predicting Crime Using Twitter and Kernel Density Estimation [pdf]
Same thing happened to me. The trend of larger online services having non-existent customer support worries me.
Power consumption is a valid reason, however most T- or W- laptops from Lenovo aren't aimed at the mobile user - they're aimed at the power user. I know I'd gladly trade an hour of battery life or an extra 500 grams of battery for another 16 gigs of ram.

At least screen resolution and panel quality is being taken much more seriously these days.. It was a nightmare for nearly 10 years there.
The reason why I call RGB "wrong" is because the L and M cones both have peak sensitivities to greenish light. So the three cones would be something like "yellowish green" (564-580 nm), "bluish green" (534-545 nm), and "violet" (420-440 nm). It is a common misconception that long cones are mostly sensitive to red. People often say that, but it would be more accurate to say that long and medium cones are both mostly sensitive to green light.

At least two cones are usually stimulated, and often all three, even by monochromatic light. Color is perceived by the differences in stimulation between cone types.

RGB is a model which allows us to reproduce color, and it is useful because it can be mapped to LMS using a linear transformation. However, RGB is not how we perceive light.
It's a good article and I'm sure if it works for all those major brands it's worth trying. However, it doesn't work for me. I prefer to know more about what a company is, or does, before I sign up. I'll Google them and often not come back. I have way too many emails coming already without more from a site I have to sign up to just to check them out.
My fridge is 30 years old and unless you count periodic cleaning and defrosting as maintenance it has had no maintenance at all in that period. One of my two freezers is 25 years old, ditto. Microwave oven is over twenty as well, but as the internal light has failed I suppose it doesn't quite count. My wife's hair dryer wasn't new when we met and that was forty years ago, still going strong.

I very much doubt that anything I buy from now on will last so well, mostly because of quite unnecessary use of electronic control systems that add unnecessary features and extra failure modes. Of course my new fridge uses only half as much power as the old one which means that the new one saves me about 125kWhr per year, which in turn means that it will take about twenty years to pay off the investment, good job that wasn't the reason I bought it.

As someone already pointed out you have to specify the expected life time to be able to evaluate 'zero-maintenance-ness' of a system.
Yeah... the Google search engine is not written in Go. There's a big difference between folks who really, deeply care about sub-ms level latencies ( like this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9twUcX1Zp0 ) are not the same folks pushing Go.
Of course it's possible, but I don't know where you're trying to go with this.

Set a lifespan the product should be able to operate without maintenance, based on your goals and engineering constraints. Design with the lifespan in mind, perform lifecycle testing. Then release your product, stop working on it and don't offer support.

The feasibility of such depends on what you're trying to build. Customers have different expectations of lifespan, maintenance needs, and manufacture support depending on the product. A garden hoe is not an alarm clock radio, which is not a car, which is not a general purpose operating system.

The status quo of maintenance for any product domain is an inherent limitation to putting out something better. You can't just jump ahead of the competition because you will it so. You need some combination of: building with higher quality components, insight into the problem domain that none of the current commercial solutions have, or simply more productive (ie. more expensive) R&D.

If you're just looking at products that currently require maintenance and are licking your lips at the idea of selling a turn-key solution, join the party. Otherwise roll up your sleeves and make low maintenance a key design goal of your product.
There's systems that require zero-maintenance from the creator after they've taken off, like Bitcoin.

The programmer's dream is to setup a website and watch the checks roll in... but if you have a way to make money programmatically, then someone else will out-compete you if you do not continuously improve your product.

Maybe a roomba. Its a system that continuously cleans your kitchen floor as long as you pay the electric bill.
For the service to be valuable, users are led to believe that when they create a username and a password for themselves, their username will not simply disappear and access revoked at any point in time. That would be quite a useless service wouldn't it?
The first? How about LibreBoot [0]?

[0] https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/gluglug
It's tried and true, and worked for both Reddit and the New York Times.
They do offer an alternative. You can pay to watch each show. You're just choosing to ignore it or think it's too expensive to justify stealing it.
> This place is overwhelmingly full of smart people, and I sometimes feel out of place!

Rule 1: Don't confuse intelligence with experience.

Technological and critical thinking skills can be learned by everyone given enough time and effort. A lot of people dismiss any possibility of becoming technically minded by saying "only smart people can do that", even though they have the potential to gain the same skills.
That's one of the things that struck me. Of the headlines that came up for me for March 2010, there were only a couple that would seem out of place today. (One related to Flash on an iPhone and one to the network at PyCon 2010.)
I'll just say this definitely doesn't agree with my experience, though it's certainly the kind of thing that might differ from person to person, brain to brain.

Here's one thought experiment: imagine variables get longer and longer and longer. Clearly, at some point, they become so long that they're much more unwieldy to work with. Now it's just a question of, as they get shorter, when do the gains start to become insignificant?

(Re QWERTY: Ease of input is certainly a consideration, but hardly an insurmountable problem. We should not forever restrict ourselves to basic latin because that's what happens to be printed on many physical keyboards at this moment.)
Exactly. It is not abuse to honestly review a patch or an idea, and block its progress pointing out serious deficiencies. This is just a way to assert quality, and apparently it is a very effective way - we do trust Linux.

You are not the code you write. Accept the critical comments and improve.
Those are surface flaws, designed to give the appearance of wrongdoing. Despite how heavily Batman's internal struggle is emphasized, he never does anything less than noble. Contrast that to Achilles' treatment of Hector, which even in the context of ancient Greece is presented as being beyond the pale.
The frontpage design is nice, I can see the value - currently I'd use workflowy for small pieces of information like this.

I think you're missing a trick by not having any of your example's linked to an actual FAQT - those 8 boxes should link to shared examples, even the link in the share field at the bottom 404's :(
> A GC with compactation gives you bump pointer allocation though. No need to traverse free lists. With malloc you potentially have short-lived and long-lived interspersed with each other, creating lots of holes/fragmentation.

You only get bump pointer allocation in the nursery, not in the tenured generation (unless you want an inefficient tenured generation). In a manually-managed system, short-lived objects usually aren't going to be allocated on the heap at all—they're on the stack. Even for the few that are allocated on the heap, the way free lists work does a great job of keeping them in cache.

Fragmentation really isn't much of a problem anymore with modern mallocs like jemalloc and tcmalloc.

> While you can just null a reference with a single, unfenced write to something that's probably in your L1 cache already. Plus thread-local lists to avoid contention.

I have a hard time believing that the cost of a TLS lookup and a couple of writes per freed object is more expensive than a Cheney scan for objects in the nursery.
By "precomputing object lifetimes" I just mean that the object lifetimes are determined at compile time, without runtime scans. Human assistance is still required, of course.
Many GC'd languages also have stack allocation (see dynamic-extent in Common Lisp, for example); when talking about GC vs malloc (already an over-simplified dichotomy), we should be talking about heap allocations of indefinite extent.
OP: thanks for submitting this on my behalf! If anyone can think of anything that needs to be expanded upon, let me know!
Do you like tasty beers? http://www.brouwerijhetij.nl

It is a wonderful little brewery with a great view:

http://mikestravelguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Ij-Br...
It only approximates the date you first joined. It uses https://archive.org/ (the Internet Archive) to load the archived page nearest to (or nearest before?) the date you joined. Since the Internet Archive does not mirror HN every day, the page it will show you may differ by a few days from your exact signup date. It so happens that I joined on March 11, 2009 but I was shown the page for March 10, 2009 instead. You can use http://www.waybackhn.com/ to get a list of the top stories on the exact date you joined HN.
Seems nice but something is weird with the layout of the article: http://i.imgur.com/qKi4JNR.png