skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't necessarily agree with you, but I at least understand your point. Are coders who comment rarer than coders who don't? Probably so. Are coders who don't comment out of ideology more common than people who do comment out of ideology? I don't think so.

More often than not, if someone is under-commenting, it's probably just out of laziness. However, if someone is over-commenting (which is possible in my opinion), chances are that it's because they believe that what they are doing is correct. Personally, I think posts such as this would be better to programmers in the latter category. A similar post aimed at the lazy under commenter probably would have no effect simply because such a person has been told they need to comment more throughout their programming careers.

That said, it really wasn't my intent to tell people they shouldn't comment. Rather, I'm merely trying to get people to think more about the comments they make. And that's not a bad thing all things considered.
That's just your own negative connotation. The man is using short, concise and clear terms to describe a trend and it's anecdotal evidence.

Coroners shouldn't stop calling a stiff "a body" just because it sounds mortifying to you. It's what it is.
As you said, some debuggers are better than others. However, you may be surprised by how much better some debuggers are than others. If you have any interest in debuggers, and how awesome they can be, it is worth giving VisualWorks a try.
I just finished a ton of great books, some that immediately come to mind:

The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris - Really made me think about life and the work I do

Tribes by Seth Godin - Love this book.

The Dip by Seth Godin - read it before, reread it again this year

Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina - really had to struggle to get past the beginning, was fantastic once I did

Find Your Great Work by Michael Bungary Stanier - I liked this one a lot, motivational

The Power of Less by Leo Babauta - no surprises here, I enjoyed the book, it reads like you would expect it to. Some new insights that aren't on the blog

Superfreakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Dubner

Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (I liked The Tipping Point the best out of those 3)

Free by...Chris Anderson (?) I forget. Very interesting.

Team Up by Pete Mockaitis - Great read about accountability groups, subset of a mastermind group IMO.

Collapse by Jared Diamond - Very interesting looks at patterns in civilizations. Some people I spoke to get bored after a few examples, it is a little repetitive but I enjoy the parallels

My old faves are of course Gettings Things Done, 7 Habits, Greatest Salesman in The World, and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

More details here:
http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/best-personal-deve...

I regularly (and will be posting a bunch in the next couple weeks) post reviews of books I read here:
http://sidsavara.com/product-reviews
I agree, I would buy this game in a second for Android.

I also agree that the web design was a little off-putting at first and could benefit from a designer. Now that I've been playing the game though, the bad web design gives me kind of an insider feel, making me feel a little more connected to the game... you know, like how proud you feel recommending that little hole in the wall diner with the great Hippy Hash breakfast, compared to recommending the Denny's down the road, even if their breakfast is as good.
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Watch the Sugar Bowl 2010 Live Stream online for free! This is it! Florida Gators vs Cincinnati Bearcats!
You need it to take advantage of 4GB+ of memory really - so that's most systems you see in shops already. 64bit took off in Enterprise systems (IBM/Sun/SGI etc.) where it was common to have 4GB+ of memory years ago. The Desktop is next. 64bit will come to mobile/embedded when they have 4GB+ of memory.

The Windows and Mac OS ecosystems (particularly drivers) need to catch up with 64bit support, currently this is still spotty which is inhibiting adoption. Linux support driver support for 64bit is excellent due to most drivers being open source - but most people are not using Linux.
Because we can't run DNS queries inside Google App Engine. Instead, I query the DNS results from my home computer and feed them into the datastore using remote_api.
Note: old link (Zed needs to date stuff :))

This was the result (some useful conclusions in there eventually)

http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-03-16.html
> Code must always be "self documenting"

This is in practice very hard to achieve. One reason is that a fully self-documenting name of a functiom might be rather verbose. I'll give an example based on code I'm currently working on. It contained this method definition (in Python):

def varGloLv(self, varp):

Clearly no-one looking at that on its own could tell what it does. What it in fact does is look up a variable, specifically a global one ("Glo") withch is an lvalue ("Lv"). And the parasmeter is the variable name as a Python string. A more self documenting name might be:

def variableLookupGlobalLvalue(self, variableName):

But if I gave all my methods and variables such long names, the code would look terribly verbose and be hard to follow. So instead I use a comment that says what the method does, and specifies the type of its parameters and return value:

def varGloLv(self, varp):
""" lookup a variable, that's global and an lvalue
@param varp [string] the variable name
@return [UBasicType] the value of the variable
"""
Next on my reading list I would like to read some Vladimir Nabokov since I've never read any of his work. Has anyone else here read any of his books?

I read a lot of Nabokov beginning in high school and continuing into my university studies (when I was initially a Russian language major). Nabokov is very interesting to read. I like Speak, Memory

http://www.amazon.com/Speak-Memory-Everymans-Library-Cloth/d...

and his essays on literary criticism (which I'm not turning up just now as I do an Amazon search, but which you should be able to find in a library). I'm not such a big fan of his most famous novel, Lolita. I read it once and have never reread it.
Aspiring web developer ends up homeless in San Francisco
“Modern browsers” nearly doubled in 2009; IE6 lost 38% of its user base
This is fascinating. But. How do you prevent a bad actor asset provider from creating money out of thin air?

If you can't solve that problem, your economy is going to have more liquidity than real assets. It's a hard problem.

Much respect for Pelle. But this won't fly until that problem is solved.
Anathem started slow but ended up being one of his better efforts, I think. Like classic Stephenson, it's short on plot but long on details and interesting dialog between characters.
Most definitely.

http://community.electricsheep.org/
you're obviously also fairly unaware of the history of your own country - both when it comes to politics and economics. May the new year be an opportunity for you to man up.
My submission methodology: saw Ed's prediction comment, went to your site, read the last article, liked it, read the second most recent article and decided the classical music one would do better here.
ah, ok (thanks). did you see the recent post here about someone exposing dns over http? although i have no idea if you could call that either...
I wish I could take the guy who came up with the headline to task! We've had a headline homicide...

1) "it is pancakes" isn't a sentence (ambiguous in the extreme).

2) The words "[it is] pancakes" are incompatible because "are" is the plural equivalent of "is".

3) "in a can" is not a sentence (lack of a subject & verb).

4) "it's made" is "it is made" not the "it has made" it should be. (It's as "it has" is not an official contraction due to its obvious ambiguity.)

The unmurdered headline would be,−

It's pancakes in a can, and it has made $15 million.

</grammar-nazi>

To CNN: Remember, it's my language you're abusing. Maybe you should care too? As a "big news agency" you should at least care enough to force your writers to learn basic English grammar!
Judea Pearl's Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference. I'm not finished with it yet, though. (It might be superceded by his Causality which I'd also like to read.) It's provided some "aha", scales falling from eyes moments. I'd guess it's the most important book - for me - I've read in years, perhaps ever. Highly recommended (with the caveat about his other book perhaps being better).
Lolita is great. If you like puzzles, you might also consider Pale Fire, which is bizarre, but quite rewarding if you get into it.
> If current methods were working, neither bomber would've been able to bring fire onto the plane.

What you just said was that in order to meet your standard of working, a security system must produce no false negatives at all. I'm sure you didn't mean that because it's a totally ridiculous position to hold, but I just wanted to point it out in case anyone else took you at your words.

> I'd say a 450% increase in wait times is significant.

Indeed. When I read the grandparent I was unsure whether he was being sarcastic when talking about the jump in wait time. I just flew home from Hong Kong today and the additional screening process probably took an hour or so of full-time effort from ten or fifteen security people. It's hard for me to believe that this system can remain in place permanently.
is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_sort#Merge_sorting_tape_d... what you were remembering? that's what immediately sprung to my mind on reading the article, but i don't know if you're expecting something more specific.
However, if someone is over-commenting (which is possible in my opinion), chances are that it's because they believe that what they are doing is correct.

I've yet to work with anyone outside of an undergraduate class that over-commented their code.

It takes effort to over-comment code, and those that do are invariably writing both poor code and poor comments.

A much more prevalent malaise is that of developers with an unduly high opinion of their code's readability grossly under-commenting their code. This increases the long-term maintenance overhead and sometimes leads to forced rewrites by follow-up maintainers (which may be the author himself).
> Bottom line is that we can not afford larger holes in the confidence the flying public has in air travel.

Why can't we? We survived it before. And I have some bad news for you: it's almost certain we'll have to survive it again some time in the next fifteen to twenty years, if not sooner. Our luck with the missed bombs will not hold out forever. It will be a tragedy. Life will continue (except for those people for whom it does not).
This is the same point I am making. If they are still manually curating each song at 30 mins each, they could just stop, use the labels they already have, and infer the rest through semi-supervised learning, or learning the target labels based on the destructured tracks.
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Feels hopelessly naive. Conflates transactions and securities, for example.
> But according to my risk assessment, airline terrorism is such a low-order threat that it's just not worth getting exercised about.

Let me introduce you to a pair of concepts I like to call "symbolism" and "morale." Americans like to feel safe, and up until about 2001 they felt pretty safe flying in a plane. Then in a vast, symbolic gesture, terrorists flew the planes into buildings. The American people's morale was so damaged by this gesture that we subsequently allowed our government to drag us into two wars that will do us no good and only harm in the long run. It will be exciting to find out what we allow or even demand it to do next time.

So yes, it is a much bigger threat than you're apparently aware. Or are you asking if the percentage chances of you being harmed are high? Probably not. In fact, even if there were no security you'd probably still be safer than you are driving along America's roads. But that's not all you have to worry about.
That's a reductio ad absurdum, since (begging your pardon) your revised headline sounds bad and lacks punch. Meanwhile the original headline qua headline seems fine. Headlines are their own specialized context with their own rules, somewhat different from the main rules. You might even say they have a domain-specific grammar.

I'm upvoting your comment anyway because the concept of a subgrammar never occurred to me before and it's kind of neat. I'd be surprised if it weren't a well-known phenomenon among linguists though.
A new OS for the desktop is introduced and gains a significant following. And I am not talking about the next Microsoft/OS X/KDE incremental release. Probably based on a Linux kernel it would have a different security system, different application deployment and upgrade system. Pretty much taking all we have learned with desktops the past fifteen years and applying them without having to live with the existing legacy applications.
Good suggestions for writing:

1. Creative success is taking what's available and rising above.
2. Get started.
3. Avoid or minimize interruptions.
4. Prepare to accept the consequences of failure and finish.
5. Finish by taking definite and public steps
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Probably a lot of the effectiveness comes from getting user spam classification feedback. The same letter is generally mass-mailed, so the chance someone got and flagged the spam you got, before you check your mail, is pretty high.
"Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy
"War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy
"What to Listen For in Music" by Aaron Copland
What sales numbers or statistics would have helped you predict what the iPhone would be like before you knew anything about it other than "Apple is working on some kind of a phone"? All we know today is that Apple is working on some kind of a tablet. There are no relevant facts or sales numbers that would have improved the article. Whatever market Apple creates or redefines with the new device will look completely different afterwards.
If the author doesn't want me to use it, why does he have 50 links to it in the text of his article?
My bad. Might be the only time my Snopes radar was off -- struck me as similar to some of those "faux old" articles.

Anyway, I'd delete my original comment, but evidently too much time has elapsed.

Serves me right for writing "Clearly" :)...Hopefully at least the life expectancy link in it was informative.
Not exactly in the spirit of your prediction, but such a planet was found in 2007: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso0722/

It has not been confirmed to have water, but the temperature is right for it and it's otherwise in the "habitable zone." I'd go along with your prediction but amend it to mean habitable by humans - that would be incredible news!
I'm sorry to disagree with you but some people would rather invest their time to learn how to use Maven more effectively than to learn another programming language _and_ a new build system altogether.

Breadth vs Depth I suppose.
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Hmm, that's an interesting and good point. I think it's still a bit more messy for Iran, though. Their religious doctrine is much less tolerant of liberalism. That means citizens will have to choose between being pro govt. or pro "evil" liberalism. That's why it's hard for me to see change. Btw, I wonder how Britain handles issues of religious freedom if there is no official separation of church and state.
While you might feel the need to post such things, I would request you do that on some other form. It's effectively the same thing as trolling.
"I want to switch gears slightly and talk about other ways we use humans in modern research."

I thought the first argument, regarding the use of humans to conserve resources associated with time, data and domain expertise, was right on and very articulate.

I expected this argument to be extended in the '40 years' section of the article. After all, isn't the shift to computer-driven learning simply a threshold between te utility / cost of supervised/semi-supervised learning vs unsupervised learning? In other words, couldn't you say that at some point the 'ways we use humans' becomes too expensive vs non-human methods? When this threshold is crossed is when 'non-biological entities have more reasoning and processing power than biological entities' Maybe just another way of saying the same thing.

In any case, a great post. Worth reading closely in my opinion.
It sounds like the author has had quite a bit of experience with Maven and most likely has RTFM.
This is basically a map reduce. You should look at hadoop as you start doing more complicated stuff.
This patch is now available via sa-update. Check what you have with this command (assuming your path is similar):

grep FH_DATE_PAST_20XX /var/lib/spamassassin/3.*/updates_spamassassin_org/72_active.cf

If needed, update with this command:

sa-update

Then check again to confirm.

If you don't already, consider running sa-update daily in a cron job to mitigate the damage from bugs like these and to benefit from other changes.
Anonymous hate speech is tedious. It's not even any good, he just reads like a Slashdotter with nerd rage.

Edit: it's also already a failed site. Its name pretends to a comprehensiveness that is belied by the meager three dates on which he's posted, the latest of which is in September, 2009. Gruber posts something almost daily-surely he's been wrong about something since September?
To show that he is familiar with it and isn't just shooting from the hip.
Rant or not you hit the jackpot.

Most Maven users are "forced" to use it when they join a company or a project; they did not pick up Maven and learn it on their own time.
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Causation and Hill’s Criteria
A bunch of books by Kahlil Gibran. Read The Prophet twice.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Problem Of Pain by C S Lewis

Disgrace by J M Coetzee

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

On Writing by Stephen King

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Dictionary Of The Khazars by Milorad Pavic

Candide by Voltaire

The Labyrinth Of Solitude | Life And Thought In Mexico by Ocavio Paz

I finished that last one today. Read this:

All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature -- if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" himself by saying "No" to nature -- consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

I recommend this old book.
We have to agree to disagree. Peace.
- Spherical displays ("you inside")

- Multi-core, with identical cores, is abandoned in favour of highly
specialized cores (like organs in the body, or firms in the economy,
due to the same pressures: "transaction costs" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_...)

- The first real AI is created, but isn't taken seriously until it
comes up with a revolutionary way of promoting soap powder,
which advertising executives describe as "blindingly obvious" in
hindsight. However, its success is tragically short-lived, as advertising
is mmediately redefined as not requiring genuine intelligence.
The search for real AI continues....

- a formal theory of the "good life", that maximizes human
happiness - joy, contentment and satisfaction - is proposed.
To almost universal chagrin, it is experimentally tested...
and verified. A virtual reality game is created, based on the
theory. Massive hoards of users are anticipated, but no one plays
it. A competitor then creates a version with the suffering and
pain removed. It's a runaway hit.
I don't think anybody wants spray cheese...
Seconded hard.

If you have to read only one of these, read Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems.
Ain't that the truth!
Check out this page: http://buildr.apache.org/quick_start.html. I will paste the most relevant text below.

"No knowledge of Ruby is assumed. Buildr is designed to be a very intuitive, very easy-to-use tool. You can create buildfiles which describe incredibly intricate projects, write custom tasks which do things far beyond Ant, and still never need to pick up more than a smattering of Ruby syntax."

Also, learning a new programming language isn't exactly a waste of time. When I learned Ruby it made me a far better Java programmer, for instance.
One note of interest about pg's source code is that the dot functions (and., pair., etc...) are based in the host Lisp and not `eval.`. The implications are that pg's functions can take advantage of lexical scope, whereas McCarthy's original Lisp was dynamically scoped. This will make a huge difference if you are so inclined to use pg's code to do some hardcore Lisp anthropology. I did so a few years back using pg's code and it was a blast. I then wrote a small Lisp runtime with dynamic scope (http://github.com/fogus/lithp) to do the same exercise and it turned out to be a very different experience. It's worth trying it out to gain a full appreciation for the tools the Lisp pioneer's had to work with.

Thanks for linking this article -- it's one of my favorites.
How to win friends and influence people.
Recommendations:

- Collapse by Jared Diamond, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_%28book%29 about how we over-exploit our planet.

- The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom, psychological and cultural explanations of how humans react to "memes" amongst other gems of knowledge.

- The Eschaton series by Charles Stross (sci-fi).
but for hadoop, you need several boxes and the admin overhead of setting it up and administrating it. if you have a large iron box, this approach works well as I have done this style many times.
you have to install a .exe player to view the transcripts.
awesome! just bought beltoo.com from it. thanks :)
The guy has agreed to it when he signed up for the service. It's in the terms and conditions of World of Warcraft:

Blizzard may, with or without notice to you, disclose your Internet Protocol (IP) address(es), personal information, Chat logs, and other information about you and your activities: (a) in response to a request by law enforcement, a court order or other legal process; or (b) if Blizzard believes that doing so may protect your safety or the safety of others.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with that. It's not the job of Blizzard to provide help for criminal suspects on the run.
I second that - 2/3 through and have a hard time putting it down. It's written in a way that outsiders can understand the hour-by-hour details of the crisis. While some of his opinions are clear, it seems mostly objective.
I really don't see the connection. Are Howard country sherifs involved in international airline security somehow?
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That's being spoon-fed? This would be useful when I'm out for dinner with my gaggle of Math, Physics and Engineering PhDs. Splitting the tab is rarely the most interesting conversation to be had...
That looks like it. Do you know if the Chinese Government has a stake in it? I tried doing research on the investors, but it's hard to know if the various arms of the CCP are actually limited partners in the VC firms with just a quick google.
Like Bejeweled?

The Blitz version is good - one minute is enough to be addictive but leaves one unsatisfied. They've enhanced a few times to getting the complete Skinner Box effect going (I'm totally addicted to it anyway).

They also have the prize and collaboration elements encouraging ongoing participation and word-of-mouth advertising - if one plays every month a prize might be won; the more friends playing the better the prize.