skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the first story that makes it very clear to me that a tablet is on its way.

Despite what Orange's PR says, it's very difficult to interpret what he says any different than "yes an Apple tablet is coming soon". (I'm French, so there's nothing lost in translation)

Another thing it confirms is the fact that cell phone carriers are involved, with 3G connectivity…

edit: French colleagues around me are not as convinced as I am apparently. In any case, I suppose we'll know more in a few weeks
Argh... was just googling to find that link when you posted it. But yeah: this is the first attempt in the modern world to sit down and come up with a real guide to high performance I/O. Most of it is still relevant, though it was written before scary parallel SMP became common (8-way is routine for a server these days).
Assuming that (1) you were born between 1950 and 1985 and (2) the danish date format is (dd-mm-yy), here are the possible DOBs:

10-01-51 30-01-51 17-03-51 14-05-51 26-05-51 27-05-51
13-06-51 16-06-51 16-07-51 18-07-51 25-07-51 25-09-51
15-10-51 21-10-51 24-10-51 21-11-51 13-12-51 17-12-51
19-12-51 28-12-51 10-01-53 17-03-53 27-05-53 16-07-53
25-07-53 21-11-53 17-12-53 24-02-57 29-06-57 25-10-57
13-02-59 24-02-59 21-03-59 29-06-59 14-07-59 17-07-59
22-08-59 15-09-59 25-10-59 26-10-59 10-11-59 24-12-59
13-02-61 10-03-61 21-03-61 31-03-61 27-04-61 23-05-61
14-07-61 17-07-61 27-07-61 22-08-61 23-08-61 26-08-61
15-09-61 12-10-61 18-10-61 21-10-61 26-10-61 10-11-61
17-11-61 24-12-61 25-12-61 10-03-63 31-03-63 27-04-63
23-05-63 27-07-63 23-08-63 26-08-63 12-10-63 18-10-63
21-10-63 17-11-63 25-12-63 13-03-67 19-03-67 11-05-67
19-06-67 15-07-67 14-08-67 20-08-67 16-09-67 25-09-67
24-10-67 17-11-67 26-11-67 29-11-67 27-02-69 13-03-69
17-03-69 19-03-69 22-04-69 11-05-69 19-06-69 29-06-69
15-07-69 28-07-69 14-08-69 20-08-69 16-09-69 25-09-69
22-10-69 24-10-69 12-11-69 15-11-69 17-11-69 26-11-69
29-11-69 11-12-69 23-12-69 27-02-71 17-03-71 22-04-71
29-04-71 29-06-71 23-07-71 28-07-71 22-10-71 12-11-71
15-11-71 22-11-71 11-12-71 23-12-71 29-04-73 23-07-73
22-11-73 15-03-77 11-04-77 19-05-77 16-08-77 22-08-77
17-10-77 25-11-77 27-12-77 18-01-79 15-03-79 11-04-79
19-05-79 11-08-79 16-08-79 22-08-79 17-10-79 14-11-79
25-11-79 10-12-79 27-12-79 18-01-81 20-03-81 16-04-81
30-05-81 14-06-81 11-08-81 15-08-81 24-08-81 14-11-81
30-11-81 10-12-81 20-03-83 16-04-83 30-05-83 14-06-83
15-08-83 24-08-83 30-11-83
In which case, your request becomes "Can we stop the language bashing, unless you really know how bad the language is?"

Which, of course, is useless. You might as well write an article asking people to stop writing uninformed articles. If someone writes, either he believes himself to be adequately informed or he doesn't care that he is uninformed, and in neither case will he be dissuaded by such advice.
We've been trying it out on a limited basis. You pick show-level targeting, set a max CPM (cost per thousand households) bid, and a max daily budget. Then, after it runs, you get reports about # of impressions, etc.

It clearly brings a lot of traffic when it runs, and those do clearly turn into some sales (self-reported in our post-checkout survey). We don't yet have enough data to know whether it pays for itself.

If you want some "orders of magnitude" numbers to play with, we're talking about a few bucks per thousand households CPM rates, with a "click through rate" (visitors per watching household) in the few-tenths-of-a-percent range (hard to track but we try). We're still trying to nail down those numbers, but it seems to be a fairly expensive way to find visitors (although within an order of magnitude of other methods, so we're hoping that with tweaking of bids/message/targeting we can make it comparable, because it scales to massive volume really well if you can afford it!).

Our current 30-second spot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTM2AVeyEMg
20 charts and graphs that explain why work sucks
With the declining popularity of Apache as the frontend server, I think PHP will have this problem in the future. Eventually everything will just be a FasgCGI handler. (PHP does FastCGI just fine, but so does Python/WSGI, Ruby/Rack, Perl/Plack, etc.)
Rails and Merb Merge: Plugin API
I do not agree, if the programmer relies on idiosyncrasies of a system then it's the programmer's fault, no matter how long these idiosyncrasies were in the system. It's the programmers job to anticipate on that. It is also a fallacy to think (especially for a programmer) that your program is done when finished, last 40 years have shown that a programmer always has to do maintenance just like buildings and bridges and other infra.

Further I agree with what Rasmus states as one of his last remarks in that bug thread: "Wow, a classic case of how not to treat unpaid volunteers who provide critical pieces of your money-making infrastructure."

In other words, go make yourself a programming language if you have a big mouth towards volunteers when you scheme of making money with their system fails you, the bloody arrogance.
This seems like a very muddled claim to me. I won't refute that there's some kernel of truth in there somewhere, but using anecdotal evidence to loosely tie one's own theory together rarely ends well, especially when one's claim would be beneficial to oneself if true.

A perhaps more plausible and/or stronger explanation for programmers' disproportional display of music talent as a group:

To gain the experience necessary to label oneself a programmer, one has likely a >lot< of time on a computer. Whether that computer exists at home or at a school/university, we can already likely assume (especially for the population of "professional" programmers, due to the lesser availability of this necessary resource in past decades and the length of time necessary to become a "professional") that the group we're talking about trends toward the higher income side of the population. That alone would make the group as a whole far more likely to have ever picked up a musical instrument in the first place, let alone to have received the countless hours of necessary instruction.

Additionally, I think we can all agree programmers are disproprotionally likely to be homebodies. If one spends a lot of time at home, one has more opportunities for practice.

Lastly, if one has the patience and determination necessary to learn enough programming to label oneself a programmer (especially a "professional"), then one is more likely than the rest of the population to have the same patience and determination necessary to learn another skill which requires countless hours of disciplined study-- like music.
Thanks! The theming aspects of compass-colors will continue to exist after 2.4 is released. I'm very pleased to see these functions merged into the sass core. They're very useful.

That said, Nathan did a ton of work to make these functions more efficient and to work correctly with alpha layers.

Edit: grammar.
WiFi for passive-aggressives
I am not a PHP troll, I just point out its technical weaknesses when people claim that it is technically superior to other solutions.
It's also a hard problem to play Diplomacy like this. (But maybe not as hard as Poker.)
Yeah. If you have any other links, please share. It wasn't too long ago when people were excited about fork-for-each-connection servers, though at least half of it was "OMG Unix system calls from Ruby" from people who probably don't know C. (That "* is Unix" meme.)

Simpler approaches are good enough sometimes, though. There are plenty of services that won't ever need to handle more than a couple simultaneous connections, and that way you don't need to bother with asynchronous IO.
Other advantages of Pingdom which aren't easy to emulate:

* Pingdom measures response time and availability from multiple points on the internet, which is very useful for working out if there are issues with your connection.

* Pingdom will alert you of downtime even in the case that there's a catastrophic failure of all your monitoring.

Both of these things are useful even if you're a big company with a lot of internal monitoring.
Venture Capitalists Eye the Doctor’s Office
No, but let's put the bar at basic familiarity and having programmed at least one non-trivial piece.

That still leaves lots of room for uninformed rants whilst cutting out the majority of the noise.
newLISP also has a bignum module (with 64-bit support):

http://www.newlisp.org/code/modules/gmp.lsp.html
The answer is hopefully never. Android is an over-hyped mobile OS in geek circles (The Google Andoid Army), but it is not well known in the market. It is almost unheard of in Europe for instance...

Personally I dislike Android from all possible points of view. Both technically (Java, HTC) and philosophically (Ad-OS, cloud).
Thanks to you and ajross, this really helps.
It depends on the range. Personally, I think the sweet spot is 80 miles of range with a 8 hour charge. Electric cars should be very cheap to operate. The volt is expected to cost $32,500 after a federal rebate, which doesn't seem excessive.
In India, a hack conversion (not approved by government) costs about $200 in parts + labor (not including the tank). And yes they use a domestic gas tank (similar to barbeque grill tank) kept in the trunk.
Actually, if you are a excellent French cook, I suspect that your brain was changed in much the same way. Fixing a computer, not so much. See my post about the "game of awareness" in music.
They can still be efficient [1]: You have to factor in the time you have to spend at the flea market.

[1] For certain values of efficient.
I think you are making my point rather better than I ever could.
>> "So, I ask again, how can an image be a number?

>> "Lacking that, I merely say that an image can be represented by a number, but this is trivial"

I think you're arguing with yourself at this point.
This is about the lowest-end desktop you can buy these days. Combined with the netbook, it's much less expensive than a 16" Macbook Pro, for example. (That's why I can't get too excited about laptops. They are underpowered, un-upgradeable, and very expensive.)
Is Microsoft leading or following with SVG?
However "The database failed." might be a good description.
Oh, sorry, you're right! Indeed I was missing the bit about having to hit the power key. In Leopard, under Energy Saver, there's a selection "Wake for Ethernet network administrator access"; will that provide what you want?

(Actually, I'm a little confused: If you're physically present to plug in the machine, what's the problem with pressing the power button? Is it just that you don't want to open it?)

By the way, according to this article (http://forums.macnn.com/69/mac-notebooks/359432/how-get-your...), which links to this Apple KB article (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3131), it is perfectly OK to run the MacBook Pro with the lid closed. Have you had trouble when you actually do so?
Depends on the culture. I guess in the US this is OK. In Germany most people opt for the equivalent of Mr Last-Name for customers.
Uhmm.. so developer productivity was measured using size/number of checkins and not based on number of bugs fixed, work items done etc.?
What do you try to hint at? Do you mean they should just go with some form of Unix, a proven way to attract hackers?

Actually http://maemo.org/ does not look too bad. (And maemo may actually be close to Linux or so. I haven't checked in depth, yet.)
Where in the DMCA does it say that

Where in the law does it say that you aren't allowed to stab someone with a screw driver? Nowhere. That doesn't mean it isn't strictly implied.

Secondly, the DMCA isn't of particular interest here: the number might as well constitute a secret pertaining to national security, distribution of which may get you the death penalty for espionage.
I guess that falls into company problems.
The rules are essentially pretend to be someone you are not and don't reveal anything undesirable about yourself (children, prone to depression) until after a man is emotionally invested (that's Rule 13). The male equivalent to "the rules" is overspending to appear richer, lying about being divorced, and don't mention your vasectomy until after the wedding.

Rule 23: Don't tell your therapist about the rules because (s)he will tell you you are being dishonest and manipulative, and then you'll die alone.

(Yes, I read "The Rules", every guy should. Once you know the rules, you can downgrade rules girls from "girlfriend material" to "short term fun".)
Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues
You have to present yourself there. Some people who go to a `normal' job fair may not be comfortable with this.
Why would natural gas make less carbon emissions?
Good point. It may not always be desireable or useful to be self-hosting.
Will single founders please stand up?
It goes deeper than amount of time spent. There are differences in the MRI scans of people who have spent time doing substantive work in music before the age of 12, and those who started much later. I've also taught music, and let me tell you, the difference is stark! It's much the same as learning a spoken language. There is a big difference between 10,000 hours spent learning spoken languages during the K-12 years, and 10,000 hours in your late 30's!

Teaching adults who had no exposure to making music as a kid is like trying to teach someone who can't see color to paint a sunset! There are some adults who can't keep rhythm with any meaningful accuracy, and can't hum a tune back at you. There is some entire facility which is missing. I've had similar experiences teaching programming.
What are you talking about? "It" is hardly guaranteed to give you a degree.

And honestly, efficiency is overrated. For one thing, it assumes that you know what to optimize for. For another, there are all sorts of fools on the Internet who seem content to scrap an "inefficient" system that does something, for nothing that does nothing.
Some more info:

Toyota, the leader in hybrid car sales, plans to have a battery-powered compact car called the FT-EV on the market by 2012 - a lightweight four-seater, modeled on its gasoline-powered iQ, that will have an all-electric range of 50 miles.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/toyota-to-build-...
See also my analysis: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/01/cnncom-jumps-shark-by-writin...
Microsoft's Plan to Save Windows Mobile
Note that nothing in this article was actually dependent upon TDD; writing unit tests after writing code, and keeping your code clean/refactored would suffice.
Grok
What's the difference to adding ++?
More irrelevant stuff. Continue if you enjoy it.

Assembly language also lacks a ton of stuff. The point is, you build it if you want it. That's what makes you a good programmer.

I haven't needed any of the items you state as shortcomings of Java, but if I did, it really wouldn't be hard to add them in a preprocessing step.

Not one of the items you state really makes Java verbose. The real reason some 'enterprisey' java is verbose is because people use endless patterns, factories everywhere, separate implementation from interfaces for the sake of it, etc.
Pretty remarkable considering any 13 year old can run a more popular forum.
The Total Growth of Open Source
So, is no one watching those xray machines, or is it perfectly ok to have toddler skeletons in your luggage?

Security theater!
Meh? Not excessive? I could buy two Honda Civics for that price, or operate one for a hundred and sixty thousand miles. Of course, maybe it is a higher quality car, but it doesn't seem to offer a serious value proposition. It's a charitable luxury, basically.
What exactly is your point? I know axod believes that the choice of programming language does not matter as much as I think it does, but what's your opinion on the discussion?
This is a great question. I've asked myself as much and I think it comes up any time someone decides to sit down and write an app.

To me, the short answer is that pople can be enticed to pay for webapps when the app delivers value and solves a problem. Open source tools all too often solve a problem, but do so in a way that fails to deliver value.

For certain customers, there's a difference between " I can do this myself " and "It's worth it for me to do this myself". Open source solutions usually fall into the first category. Paid apps allow customers to answer no to the second question.

I went into a bit more detail on my blog at http://nathanroach.posterous.com.
static const int kGoatsTeleportedColumn = (94024 * kNuthMagicNumber) & kBitMask;
case kGoatsTeleportedColumn: // Goats Teleported.
goats_teleported_ += rand();
return FormatNumber(goats_teleported_);
Actually, it turned out that the complaints coming from Linux users about Flash being used in Wufoo in the early prototype was disproportionate to the future demographics of our actual customers and so it honestly didn't make any difference in terms of our revenue today based on our current application usage. I think Linux users account for less than 2% of our user base.

In retrospect, a good number of those complaints came from Reddit users when we were just getting out the door. Our startup was only a few weeks old then and I have to say that the feedback felt overwhelming.

In the end, the decision to remove Flash in the builder was a good one because it resulted in a much simpler interface that was easier to use, but to say that it should have been obvious or that it really mattered, would be overstating it.
I'm objecting to the dumbed-down version of the many worlds interpretation as an explaination of quantum computing because it gives the impression quantum computing can do things it can't actually do, like solve NP-complete problems efficiently, which is not currently theorized, let alone proven.
Is that an appeal to authority I hear? I haven't worked on a product that has shipped in the last 12 months but I have worked with several programming languages and have read some Dijkstra and have done some literate programming, and have gone to university/college for a few years now.

My criticism was based on the stuff PB said. All of that functionality could have been done in a single version but PB didn't want to waste company resources unless he could offer up proof that they were being used wisely.

There's nothing wrong with that, but to say that it's a good development model is awful. How long did GMail stay in beta for? It never really shipped.
Why blocking websites is bad for your company
I think Bazaar would be more useful if they tightened up their docs to be more concise, while also splitting up the tutorial to have each of the pieces more closely focus on one particular way of working, for example:

* you're working on a project at work where the code is available via ssh at `some_host:/var/repos/the-project`.

* you're working on a project where the code is available via http from the author's site

* etc.

Currently, I think the impression they give is that you only use bzr if you're also using LaunchPad. That needs to change.

BTW, are there any other source code hosting sites that support bzr besides GNU Savannah and SF?
According to one specification document[1] for a baggage X-ray unit, it's about 0.1 mrem per inspection, which is less than a typical chest X-ray[2]

[1] http://www.zortek.net/SpecSheet/Dynavision100100.pdf
[2] http://www.newportbodyscan.com/radiationdosage.htm
Thing is - interfaces are getting standardized. Wireless is available everywhere. A lot of the small devices you have will soon be replacable with a mobile device:

- Door openers

- Car Keys

- Heat control

- Remote controls

- Universal lamp control

- Gas/Electricity meter
Is it possible to use these functions outside the context of SaSS in plain ol' Ruby?
A measurable difference in brain scans does not by itself amount to enough evidence to claim that programming and musical ability are intrinsically linked.

All I'm saying is two things:

a) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (note: neither a vague, nice-sounding theory that everyone would like to believe to be true nor anecdotal evidence qualify)
and
b) I feel an application of Occam's Razor is in order.
$10, or even the $40 plan, is a negligible cost to even a 1-man operation, and to a "big ticket" company, it might as well be free. So don't even take into consideration the cost. Keep in mind "open source" software isn't actually free, you have to pay an engineer to install and maintain it, learn how to configure it, fix it when it breaks, etc. Those costs are easily higher than $40/mo even if someone's only spending 15 minutes a month on it.

What Pingdom seems to be offering is a (basically free if your business isn't being funded on a credit card) service that requires very little time and know-how to maintain. Clients probably chose it because their time is more valuable than the monthly cost of the service. Contrast that to open-source, which is perfect for those who'd rather spend extra time than extra money.
The Avatar Effect
A bit disappointingly it appears that they have also lowered the bar. The concepts thought appears distinctly less advanced compared to previous years when the class was thought using Scheme.
Hiring Ren and Stimpy
> Its modest stature makes [forking] a fairly cheap operation, allowing the OS to handle scheduling and memory-protection. Try forking a JVM…

Shouldn't copy-on-write take care of that for the JVM?
The way I read the linked article, PayPal just don't list gun stores in their PayPal Shops portal.
The hardest attack to prevent against in a scheme like this is multiple players playing the game colluding.

It works as long as the number of players is limited to 2.
I probably should have posted this URL instead of the one I did: http://nms.csail.mit.edu/projects/horde/download.html
According to the newly added FAQ:

backslashes were chosen for a purely pragmatic reason; on virutally all keyboards, backslashes are very easy to type (requiring only a single keystroke). This is a handy property for backslashes to have because in ANI, you'll be typing them a lot!
Nope. But you can go read the source code: http://github.com/nex3/haml/blob/master/lib/sass/script/func...
How eHarmony Kills the Romance With A/B Testing
WSJ: A Blackberry App that Prevents Loss
Help Wanted: Twitter Seeks Staff Who Can Shake Its Monetizer
Check out this simple way to do it with what's already on your linux box from before the turn of the century. <=(spooky conan music with flashlight)

http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.loadshare.html

6 15Mbit connections from the same cable provider isn't likely to be much faster for you than 2 or 3. They'll all be on the same segment.

Also, I don't know if its improved any in 7 but up until windows XP, the packet reordering this setup will generate makes connections slower than the slowest link. Unless you've got a non-windows os, this will make it worse.
But even the friggin’ Apple keyboard (Made by Apple! Drivers and all!) didn’t work as well as a friggin’ app in this story.
And you thought this was suitable for HN why?
Couldn't agree more. I admire people who have succeeded in the goals they set themselves, but nowhere near as much as I admire people who do that and then work just as hard to help other people do the same.
I thought it was too hard to start a company with a single founder because Paul Graham said so. That guy knows everything about start ups. He is possibly the greatest entrepreneur of all time and didn't benefit from a bubble or anything. Anybody more successful than pg only got there due to luck. Everybody involved with start ups should just read everything he writes, conform to it, and help spread the word. You can't become a trailblazer until you embrace this dogma.
Thanks for the list but he said 6 digits... So the format is probably dd-mm-yy.
True, but it is a known quantity. I mean failwhale "unscheduled maintenance"
Somewhat Core Twitter API defect - 7 weeks and still going strong
Uncommon Interview: Bob Walsh, Digital Entrepreneur
How We Decide: Can neuroscience really teach us how to make better decisions?