skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see lots of languages targeting the LLVM (for example Ruby's MacRuby implementation, Python's Unladen Swallow, and recently a thesis about using it for Haskell through the GHC).

What does this mean for the average programmer? I'm assuming that the more popular it gets, the more likely it is to be further optimized? Is there any effect on cross-platform portability of code?
The source for this story puts IE6 at 10-12% in North America and Europe and 20-35% in South America, Africa, and Asia.

Whether or not IE6 support is still necessary depends on who your target audience is. Are you targeting a young and tech-savvy crowd? Then drop it. But if you're working on a project intended to be used by non-profits and government agencies (as I am right now) then it's unfortunately still necessary.
I've seen this happen once, and I can almost understand why it did. In this case there was a rather severe production problem that had potential long term revenue effects for the company.

In the course of the after-action report some screen dumps were shown to the executives in which the "whimsical" server names appeared.They were (understandably) in a rather agitated and non-whimsical mood, and incorrectly (in my opinion) correlated the seriousness of the problem which the perceived lack of seriousness of the naming scheme.

They could not see that the naming scheme was not whimsical - it was in fact quite methodical and conveyed more meaning to the engineers who lived with the machines everyday than the strict, sanitized names we eventually ended up with.
A little bit of all those things -- it worked just fine, on the device, for 2 years, including the occasional eastern hemisphere TFR. It only happened with a TFR that was close to the international date line which made the ascii -> float conversion run off the end of the string. I admit I didn't test that eventuality -- but I was using a C library function that's been in constant use for over 30 years.

There's no real weather data standard, XM Weather is a collection of formats (nexrad radar comes over as a bitmap, weather reports are METAR encoded).

The Temporary Flight Restrictions are in XML, well, not really XML, it's a really nasty format designed by Jeppesen were you basically have to write your own XML parser because they made it impossible to parse with a standard XML parser.

It just goes to show that even when you test the hell out of something, you can still get blind sided by something you never thought of, but once it happens, it seems really obvious.

Remember the problem the F-22 had going across the international date line -- that code was a lot less tested than mine in that regard -- but they just didn't think about it.

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-b...
@garnet7, there are no gnomes in LoTR. ;)

Or, actually, there are, but they are actually Elves...
At Least Someone Is Putting Their Job On The Line
Derogatory terms give people a way to send a high-cost signal that they're part of a certain group. It's one thing to call yourself homosexual; it's another to identify as "Queer."
I wonder how long / how hard it'd take to implement a shadow exchange to test new algos and systems... Like, perhaps new code needs to be certified in a full test environment before being deployed to the live market?

Seems like something along those lines would adequately deal with the uncertainty risk here.
From idea to Mashable.com in 24h [video] #agile #reverseprogramming
Maybe. I know when we migrated Chesspark from native machines to EC2, the postgresql database performance was at least an order of magnitude worse, and we spent two weeks doing caching and index hunting that we never had to worry about before.
Building a culture of failure and why that's a good thing
Does it finally not crash on Windows yet? Because I'd love to mess around with it, but it's hard to make a game when it occasionally crashes deep within SBCL's internals.
JavaScript charting tools: an overview
I was assuming he was using the hex digest of the hash. You have to use some kind of ascii armoring, and base64 seemed like one that'd be reasonably safe.
We don't go that far, but we did choose the data center that had the faster machines. It had upgraded hardware that the others didn't. It won't be the fastest forever, but you can certainly shop around internally to find faster machines.
Happy Holidays from Google
Knowing where the One is.

Easy for 2 3 and 4 beats. In most styles of music, more than that is treated as a compound of 2 and 3 beats. So 5 is 1-2-1-2-3 1-2-1-2-3 or 1-2-3-1-2 1-2-3-1-2. There is one Middle Eastern 9/8 rhythm which is 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-3. There is the obvious and symmetric 9/8 that Irish trad enthusiasts are familiar with: 1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3.

By treating things as compound rhythms, you never have to remember where the one is. One is one. You just have to remember how many beats there are this time around.

I think this comes from the way humans walk. Since we are bipedal, we naturally fall into gaits with 2 or 3 beats. (Skipping is based on 3. Waltz step is another one based on 3. Since we have two legs, we have to repeat on one foot to get 3. 4 is really just a smoothed over 1-2-1-2.)
Agreed. It is my understanding that the best companies are led by their original founders (cf. Apple, Google, Oracle) or by people nurtured for years to become their leaders (Microsoft, IBM).
Related:

http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2008/12/teach-everyo...
New York Startup Movement
Grigory Perelman and the Poincaré Conjecture
Google Go: Good For What?
We all like free stuff, but there is no demonstration that the company was actually harmed by saving the money on free drinks. Did having the early engineers move on have a significant negative impact? Apparently not, or it would have been mentioned in the article. . .

After all, you could hire them back if you offered them enough, and you'd do that if they were essential.

Maybe it was in fact better to replace them with people happier working in a medium sized company.
What I actually heard: TechCrunch Erlang TechCrunch Erlang Erlang Erlang Erlang, TechCrunch Erlang Erlang Erlang Erlang Erlang Erlang
Nobody is working on SBCL on Windows.
Another good example: academia. As of a few weeks ago, the janitor only comes once a month, and we have to take out our own trash.
The issue, then, becomes training. As you say we're used to ignoring entire classes of alert so having a documented process for how to handle specific alert conditions and training with that process isn't comomon. Like any other skill, use it or lose it: train with arbitrary automation failures so the skill of triage is exercised and make sure there is up-to-date documentation that's easily referenced.

It's not quite avionics-level but at my work SOP is that every automated process be documented as human-readable text which is easily visible if the automated process encounters an error condition.
research.microsoft.com has been unreachable from Budapest for months.
> humans are irrational

It's not irrational to recognize that the kind of thinking that would eliminate free soda on the basis of narrow cost-benefit analysis is also the kind of thinking that would transform their beloved startup into a stultifying corporate bureaucracy.
That's why the professor called his book 'Nerds', then. Because it's so derogatory it should be banned.
What straw-man organization is unable to send up unmanned prototypes? Oh, yeah. Must be NASA.

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/history/mercury/mercury-unmanned...
How to run Google's Chrome OS as a Virtual Machine on VMWare server
Wrong smell!

Depending upon where on earth you live, I think it's possible that you haven't smelled this smell. I now live in the Pacific Northwest. I rarely smell it here, and I miss smelling it. It has to be a hot summer rainstorm, not a winter drizzle.

The smell you're describing, I think, is just "wet earth smell", which isn't nearly as pleasant.
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can someone give the comparison between erlang and haskell?
The Worst Ideas of the Decade - Sarbanes-Oxley
Thanks for your interest. I hope that you take the online survey too http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/S8BR3NX because it will provide the feedback we need.
A former boss of mine once said that he wasn't buying us a coffee machine so that we'd have an excuse to get out of the building and go for a walk. So much good high-quality thinking is done when you're walking instead of sitting in front of a computer.

(It helped that there were three truly excellent cafes and a bunch of so-so ones within walking distance; this wouldn't work in, say, Silicon Valley.)
Well looking at the industry exposure that haskell has got one may presume that functional programming may be making there way into the world of commercial software.
You'll get no argument from me that a good investment is money well spent, whether it's free soda or a company fleet of Lamborghinis.

But what problem is the CFO in the article trying to solve? The author claims the startup is "fairly successful" but it's already a few years old, just breaking even, and still heavily dependent on financing. His true measure of success seems to hinge on the fact that the company continues to exist in a bad economy. Meanwhile, the CFO needs to address "Sarbanes Oxley compliance, a new accounting system, beef up IT and security, Section 409A (valuation) compliance, etc." This sounds like an important phase in the company's growth, and she's trying to find ways to pay for it. In the context of the article, this isn't an arbitrary decision that disregards morale, productivity or even QA. It's a growing pain essential to establishing the company's success. IOW, they do have much bigger problems.

There's no question that preventing disgruntlement during these stages is an HR challenge that needs to be handled delicately. But I think the need can be communicated effectively without losing valuable employees. The fact that it wasn't is the real failure in the article.
Million Dollar Math Problem
They also have a record of ignoring warnings of problems by engineers, and in the parts that launch the shuttle, ineffective motivation to achieve economies of scale.

As in a lot of government projects, there's an incentive to bill expensively for things regarded as esoteric, hence a desire to keep things esoteric.

My friend also told me about one control, which was something like a 10-key keypad, a commit button, and a nixie readout. It dated from Apollo. You'd send commands by dialing in alphanumeric codes. What was it like when they "updated" it to run on workstations? It was a 10-key keypad with a few other buttons, with an alphanumeric entry field.

I don't necessarily want VCs running NASA. But it's for sure that there's some ossification in that government organization. Maybe it's time for private enterprise to step in?
Google would be glad to oblige to a fellow scientist!
Interviewing Tips: How to Ask for the Job
The whole video is about how fructose is toxic. Many, many plants are rich in fructose. It's not as simple as "eat plants." A modern variety apple or orange is a blast of fructose.

It's also perfectly healthy to eat predominantly meat, organs, and dairy if the animals are properly pastured. So the "mostly plants" claim makes little sense without a lot of qualification.
Why not take it to the next level and do a whole campaign like that ? Even ... a whole company ? Called [name to be found by market study], doing [TBF by customer survey] using [TBF by best practices review]. Or by an evolutionary algo :)
Google vs Apple will prove to be a great battle - great for consumers, that is.
RSS readers are sort of like the big brick circa-1991 mobile phones from Big Lebowski or Wall Street. They are better than the alternatives in a couple of dimensions, but they are not a long term equilibrium.
Headline-article disconnect. He actually says they should be "banished to the literary dustbin", not "banned".
Web 2.0 startups. Choice of server-side technology.
How long until Google becomes an authority and just starts handing out SSL certificates for free?

Doesn't this sound like something they would already be doing?
You could fix the deanonymization problem this way: when you pick a trusted user, you can see not only his votes, but all his trusted users' votes, too. Maybe weigh the votes differently depending on how "distant" they are from you.
While no one quit due to any one of those changes...about three months later a large number of the architecture group and other key people quit within a 1-2 week span

Sounds to me like they put out resumes shortly after the cost-cutting, it just took a few months to get a better job.
Why Hollywood security is better than Pentagon's
Uget 1.5.0.1 su Ubuntu
Jesus Christ you are so right and it is scary.
The physical principle is basic inertia. You need to accelerate a container large enough to hold a human being plus the systems needed to keep that person alive to 17,000 mph, and then decelerate them again without cooking them alive or smushing them into a paste against the inside of the vessel.

Your 747 argument is specious. The energy in a stick of firewood is comparable to that in an equivalent mass of dynamite. I invite you to set both on fire and report back on the difference.
Our target audience is primarily NGOs and organisations working with poverty in developing countries. IE 6 last month was 17%. IE(5/6/7/8) was 40% and Firefox/Netscape total was 34%.
David Carr: Reasons to Be Cheerful in Media
What's the point in raising $155mm if you aren't going to spend it on growing like crazy? Otherwise it'll just sit in the bank lowering the average return.

(Free soda comes under 'development expenses' in my view.)
Computer Science is in Middle School, you just need to know where to look
I think these terms have pretty much been embraced by the people they are most often applied to. I, personally, refer to the room myself and my colleagues work in as "The Nerd Cave". I frequently refer to myself as a geek in social settings. I see absolutely nothing derogatory about aligning myself with other smart, thoughtful, and creative people.
IMO, Nerd is a derogatory, meaning someone who is socially inept and not much fun to be around.

But a geek is just someone who has unusually strong interests in a subject, activity or occupation. COmputers, cars, film, fashion, politics, math, celebrities, etc. You can geek out on anything. Doesn't make you a bad person, or a social pariah. You can be a very social, likable person, and be a complete obsessive geek. You just have to know when to shut up about it.
Its fascinating how decisions taken by companies can have such a long term effect. MS decided to give away IE for free before Mozzila and even now some how IE6 has a major market share even though Mozzila has a much better product
If you look at the energy costs of a vending machine it's actually cheaper in some cases to have an efficient fridge with soda for free. (at least back in the day) The vending machine company often doesn't pay for power, so they have no incentive to cool the soda efficiently.

A nice 'interim' way of making a change would be to have a $.25 'donation' for each soda which eventually goes to some animal shelter, which would then be a tax writeoff.

CFO's will suck the lifeblook out of a company if nobody stops them. That is their job. Shame on the others for letting the CFO mess with their culture.
A very interesting incident

In October 1997 Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found the giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached that read "From the IE team ... We Love You". The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dinosaur mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" representing the market distribution.
From what I remember of middle school, they DID teach us a little comp sci. They taught LOGO for about a week. Seemed pretty fun. It was at least mostly competent from what I can remember.
If you're sending up unmanned prototypes, why go on to man the missions at all? Save yourself the cost of all that life support plumbing and call it a brilliant hack.
Have things gotten so bad, that simply reading about other opinions (on the "denier" blog), gets you branded as a heretic?
Would Microsoft accept a Google-signed certificate? Would Microsoft pre-install such certificates by default?
Professor should be banned says Nerd and Geek.
"I’m not releasing JSC compiler today because I’m not satisfied with the code in the current version."

No one is ever satisfied with the code in the current version. If it works, open it up with suitable disclaimers. That'll put pressure on you to fix the bits you really don't like and also open the possibility that someone else might point you at the bits that need work first.
I think one of the problems comes from the fact that big players affect the game. So if say, Citi launches a new algorithm that does some new crazy thing, which turns out to trigger random issues or unexpected responses in other algorithms -- such a thing could make lots of people other than citi a pile of money. Are those people really going to want Citi to test it too well?

Another, real concern with such a shadow market, where say everyone is running their algorithms (to prevent the above scenario), is that i could test "a buggy version" and find holes and odd behaviors of my competetors for free, since it is all play money.
Introducing FunctionalNHibernate (NHibernate with F#)
Sounds way too meta to me. You have to review the reviews to actually find a useful review? If the site is being abused and the reviews need to be filtered than it's effective usefulness goes way down.
Beijing graduates crammed into slums like "ants"
IPhone worm code suggests mobile botnets may be future risk
PHP in the cloud
Are PHP developers going to the cloud?
> I wonder if this implies something about gullibility.

I wonder if this implies that skeptics/deniers are more productive (and have more money to spend.)

I wonder if this implies that skeptics/deniers are more curious (and will follow a link to learn more.)

I wonder if this implies that skeptics/deniers are less anti-business (and don't ignore advertisements.)

Maybe not but I don't particularly think that clicking a blog ad is a clear implication of "gullibility" either.
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Well, I was a geek way before it was cool, and continue to be long after it is cool, and my zipcode of origin, I am sure, is nowhere on the professor's list--I would be surprised if he ever heard of it.

I wonder how much credibility we should give to a Psychologist who suggests banishing a language term for a field he is not part of?
"maybe you shouldn't fund your site with it"

Maybe you should read the part that says $0.50 is a typical month. What exactly can one "fund" with 50 cents?
So if I get this right, Google and Microsoft decided that they cannot datamine (strip-mine ?) Twitter by themselves, and that they need Twitter's collaboration. I guess Twitter would refuse firehose access to someone surreptitiously applying for access from "Google Inc.", but also that Twitter cannot be spidered like any other website, with its huge, unseen until recently, rate of updates.

Maybe Google could have spidered all the data they needed after all, but decided to play nice to build trust and to build the "ecosystem".
Should we make them "the g-word" and "the other n-word"?
The way I read the article was that we would cut NASA up into a number of rapidly iterating teams, each analogous to a small company. If you take this model and comparison to heart, and realize that there are actually /two/ levels of 'looping' that make silicon valley effective.

One is competitive attrition, the other is rapid iteration. The attrition factor should be obvious, you have a large number of companies vying for success, and only the top few are even moderately successful.

There would have to be a large enough margin that it doesn't cost NASA much to fail horribly on quite a few of its projects.

Iteration is good because if you iterate rapidly enough, you are allowed a larger margin of error, because any errors in your previous version will be fixed relatively quickly in the next version.

But here's the unfortunately reality: Sending anything into space is horrendously expensive. It is not like programming where releasing and distributing a patch is a tiny part of the overall cost of the program.

When you screw up with a space ship, bad things happen (shit falls out of the sky, there is pollution to clean up), it costs money into the millions, and you have to fill out a TON of paperwork.

Its not like a major error in a rocket you are launching can just be 'pulled from the website' after the rocket has exploded.

Even if you /do/ go with cheap unmanned probes, you still have the massive pr disincentive of potentially failing every day for a month, and losing tons of money.

NASA would become a joke.
When I attended middle school there was a mandatory programming class. We all got to program in BASIC on some Apple computers. That had a pretty lasting influence on me, and may very well be responsible for my career path.

I also just recently finished teaching an after school program on using Scheme to program a (simple) computer game at a middle school. While it was only a 10 week program that met once a week, I think we had a fair degree of success.
The thing is, nobody has compared the moon and North America.

Instead.. the moon is analogous to the inhabitable rocky island just off the coast, just past the horizon.

Getting there was relatively easy. Vikings did it. It took a decade.

No, going several orders of magnitude further, several centuries later, that's the New World.

But nobody would've ever gotten there if they first hadn't made it to the inhabitable rock 20 miles off the coast.
in other words, woz is a hedonist and doesn't have any clue about business.
No, but I was assuming that the vast number of people who do read those blogs agree with their contents (because of homophily) and that only rarely are people reading things concerning opposing ideas.
Google Taps StackOverflow as Official Android Dev Support