skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect it might be fruitful to do static analysis for constraints, with type identity as just one attribute. While inferring that X is an int is useful, inferring that it's an int which is always positive and less than 256 would allow a lot of other optimizations. Even if an inference engine can't completely prove something is always a (string * int list) pair, it would still be useful to know that it's (string * (either int or double) list), and the list cannot be empty. Etc. Type declarations or inference are a bit all-or-nothing, and I think being able to read through the properties that the compiler could infer (or at least confirm) would help find bugs, suggest optimizations, etc.

If I ever get past the first dozen projects on my list, I'd like to write a compiler for a dialect of Prolog designed with constraint analysis in mind. (I also need to read more about what's already been tried, first - this is just me being curious about how far constraint analysis could go and wondering out loud.) It would be tricky, but more feasible with Prolog-like semantics than in, say, C.
I can just sign in with my library card and read the journals on the library's web site, actually.
I hate when pages say my email is invalid because it has a plus sign in it.
The Nokia E72's Arabic Keyboard Is Horrendous
Keeping your phone clean
Chunkhost:  free half-gig VPS
Last I heard, they were waiting for extension support in mainstream Mac Chrome betas: http://www.switchersblog.com/2009/12/chrome-support-is-comin...

EDIT: They also have a workaround using a bookmarklet you can use right now: http://www.switchersblog.com/2009/12/tip-one-way-to-get-1pas...
It depends on timing, too - there have been several times where an interesting and fairly substantial link was posted, and discussion seemed to hold off for half and hour or so because people were actually reading it.
Well, one of the issues is magnitude: do we get, naturally or unnaturally, temperatures back to the level of the Medieval Warm Period or do we get a "cataclysm" (or do we get the next Ice Age, we are overdue one, and the same general group of people and some of the same people were warning of that before the '80s).

"Worth doing something" is nice and fine, but that "something" really needs to be connected to the probability of the risk. The extreme warmists want us to essentially spend all the world's disposable wealth on something that has at best a very shaky scientific foundation (cataclysm). It would be a real pity if we did that and it turned out we were entering the next Ice Age instead, or needed the money for some other greater threat instead (e.g. one of the ones mentioned in this discussion, like a megacaldera cutting lose). A maxim of warfare is that the side that tends to win in a battle is the one that is the last to commit its reserves. We really need to keep some reserves.

In the HN discussion in which you posted a pointer to this discussion I referred to Bjørn Lomborg, "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Back before the release of the CRUtape Letters he believed moderate AGW was happening, but he advocates moderate local expenditures to deal with that (moderate at least when compared to the "take over the world's economy" proposals of the extreme warmists), and that we spend some serious money on targeted interventions that will clearly help a lot of people (e.g. as I vaguely recall one involves addressing a common vitamin deficiency).

Unless a threat is truly cataclysmic it's a mistake to focus on it to the exclusion of all else, and the extreme warmists are just one example of an advocacy group that thinks they've found the one problem we're facing.
If you really are just copy/pasting into it then it won't make such an interesting replay because most edit information is obviously lost...
Was anyone else reminded of the Better Off Ted episode where they install motion detectors that can't detect black people?
Along with that, I'd probably have to add XCode. Extremely well-designed IDE and makes writing Cocoa a breeze.
Offtopic:

Everytime I see XMPP in print, it makes me think of that media player I use to use in fvwm way back when.
You want every feature of Wordpress, but you don't want Wordpress. Not once in the last 3 years have I had a plugin that didn't work with a newer version. I haven't had to "reinstall" it even once either. Maybe you just need to choose your plugins more wisely, or if you really care about the quality and security of your blog; write your own plugin.

You're not adverse to switching platform entirely and if the comments here are to be followed, you don't mind rolling your own platform. But you can't write your own theme that's compatible with future versions?

I'd say if you pay attention to the capabilities of Wordpress and actually use it as you're supposed to (I've not seen one major security vulnerability that affected the current version, someone can correct me if I'm wrong) you won't find a better fit for your requirements.
Absolutely! Great company. Though the KIS is a bit clunky.
That's largely because the weapons industry has been corrupted by government funding, though. I find it hard to believe that the research, development and manufacturing of the F-22 Raptor would really need US $65B, and $125M per plane, for instance.
The video author's bio: "A Mac consultant ranting and raving about technology. And life, too."

Likely staged. If this guy was actually high up enough in a company of 93,000 employees to be sitting in meetings with the CEO, then he's not the kind of guy you fire during a meeting for not "Bing"ing loudly. Nor would he be making so little that being fired mid-December means he can't afford Christmas presents for his family.
Please notice the 'update' sections, where Compojures Sessions Middleware has been implemented.
I'm glad that I don't (directly) any more, either. :)
Canonical announces commercial services for its version control system, Bazaar
Those particular questions are now toast, but the essay was always about the five subjects he asks about.
Revamped Routes in Rails 3
Beware humans bearing gifts.
Oscar best picture changed from single vote to full preferential ranking
Tooth-mounted hearing aid.
A day in the Internet
Blast, as if that bit wasn't confusing enough. Thanks for the tip, fixed.
The Physics of Energy Devices (F09 Compton Lecture)
I use a plugin called no-script in firefox - is there any news on when it will be available for Chrome? I will hang on to firefox until I can decide what js to burn my cpu cycles on, thank you.
Are you talking about the new system or the old one? The new one is http://mps-expenses2.guardian.co.uk/ - it doesn't seem to fit Ajax quite as well (we should definitely have used Ajax for the first one).

The scans were sized to fit the design - with hindsight, having a "zoom" option would have made sense for some pages. They were large enough for the documents we had in advance, but you can never be entirely sure what the actual released documents will look like.
At one level, do we care if it's true? (At another, it really does matter if Ballmer is a chair throwing maniac who'd do this sort of thing.)

E.g. how many people will find this believable and/or believe it? I could counter your points by asking "What if Ballmer was managing by walking around and dropped in on this group of programmers?" or "This guy is still in shock/is otherwise set up to survive but serious Christmas presents are right out?"

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" ... and in this sort of thing we'll likely never get the latter. But we do know terminations like this happen in the industry, there are more than a few insane managers out there. Maybe Ballmer is not this insane, but I'm not impressed by his tenure at the top of Microsoft.
redis - insanely fast - I've been using for some stuff at Cork'd
mongo - very excited by this one, too. not having to write ALTER TABLE statements is pretty great.
Probably part of the reason your community ended up the way it did is because it is a very common paradigm that there are a few people who are deemed "experts" and the rest are deemed "beggars". I've belonged to a number of lists where a few people were treated like they had all the answers and everyone else acted like they had nothing to contribute and were only there to get support, not give it. (This is similar to the school paradigm where the teacher and one or two bright kids are viewed as the only folks having answers. So most people readily adopt such a social assumption.)

I have managed on some lists to reduce that tendency. One issue is that giving advice is "status-y" and often the people giving most of the advice try to hog status. One way they try to protect their turf is by vehemently arguing with anyone who puts forth a different point of view. This kills conversation and makes most people scared to speak up, especially if the owner/moderator is someone who happens to be doing this. One thing that helps reduce this tendency is a requirement to 1) cite your sources or 2) speak from first-hand experience. The second criteria means that saying "I think" and "I feel" and "In my experience/view" works better than saying "You should" or similar. This is hard when the express purpose of a forum is to give such feedback but keeping it from coming across as personal criticism makes a big difference.

Another thing that helps is "greeting people at the door". Encourage new people to post an intro. Make sure you personally welcome them warmly no matter how boring, bland, and uninteresting their intro is. Set the example for others to follow in that regard.

On one list I belonged to, introductions got replied to only if someone said something interesting and engaging enough to inspire commentary and discussion. I noticed that folks whose intro inspired conversation jumped right into discussion with both feet. People who got utterly ignored seemed to never post again. When I became moderator, I had two personal rules: 1) Greet everyone at the door and 2) Don't tolerate 'orphan' threads -- if no one said anything in reply to a thread, I would go back after a few days and reply even if I had no answers. Sometimes this did help get other replies. If it didn't, the person at least did not feel shunned. Within a week, the list went from cold and low traffic, to warm, lively and high traffic.

Good luck with this.
Control Diabetes For a Healthier Life
I looked at your couchdb client. Why are you claiming Go can not make "generic" http requests?

There is already http.Get and http.Post. So why are you exposing http.send (which obviously is intended to be package private)?
Interesting...except, if you are going to do most of the talking how are you really going to find out more about the candidate? I think the problem isn't that you let the candidate do most of the talking. It is that you got lazy (as you admit) and didn't listen intently enough and ask probing questions. I think it is more useful to really probe and find out if someone understands something in sufficient depth and demonstrates a mastery of programming/software engineering principles than to answer high level questions in broad areas. The latter is much easier to do!
Looks like they're using instant runoff voting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff_voting
Here we were, seeing headlines about some MPs who claimed a gas bill twice, or a second home when they didn't really need a second home. It's peanuts. It's irrelevant. It's small fry. Obviously if you make rules fuzzy and allow for second homes, people will push those rules up to the limit. Just like anyone else would.

Whilst at the same time, bailing out banks for BILLIONS.

I guess it's easier to sell papers with a headline about an MPs husband claiming expenses for a £10 adult movie, than it is to investigate a multi billion bank giveaway.

If the crowd-sourcing finds a receipt for gimp outfit you can be 100% sure that'll be front page news. But why should anyone care? Is there a risk that MPs may be spending too much on gimp outfits? could thy all start claiming gimp outfits and we'd have no money to pay the NHS bills? No. Exactly.
MOST FAMOUS FAILED PREDICTIONS OF ALL TIME.
Nothing against jackfoxy, but from what I saw of his comment, to somehow pass this off as art criticism is a tribute to trollery.
Yes, that's how I understand the challenge. And I agree, it is subjective[1].

I think that the most positive way of looking at it is to declare that session storage in a web app and parsing csv files are understood problems which we don't want to get bogged down solving again. Last week I was writing a small web app to browse a 2GB or so data set, which was provided to me variously in xml and csv data files in a zip file.

If I could have called:

import data_20091201.zip

and gotten something useful, I would be all the happier.

I can now make that call, but in terms of getting stuff done, I'm judging my programming environment on the availability unzip utilities, xml and csv parsing libraries and database tools. As far as the language itself is concerned, I want to be able to structure my code neatly without worrying about forgotten temp files if the import fails.

I see the arc challenge as a proxy for making this sort of judgment, but it does come down to: "Do the people who maintain the language and contribute to its libraries worry about solving the sorts of problems that I would like to solve? And are they successful in making my life easier?"

[1] Subjective in the sense that the problem to solve is one that you may or may not care about solving, or may prefer to solve in a way that happens to use more code to make different aspects more explicit.
There's definitely something wrong with this link.
Grand Central Dispatch and C blocks.
The original linked to from this item:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005926

Personally, I really can't care.
CouchDB was probably the most interesting since it had iterative map reduce, but I ended up abandoning it for MongoDB because it was much faster.

The second best is Mako. A month or two ago I switched from using Django for templating to Mako. Depending on the composition of the pages there was a 2-6x speed improvement, the code got significantly cleaner since special tags/filters weren't needed for basic opertions like less-than or modulo. Also, the ease of creating custom tags in Mako made me more willing to create them and drastically reduced code complexity.

The best technology I first used this year was jQuery. As someone who knew ECMAScript extremely well and JavaScript a bit it made me an order of magnitude more productive and made things possible that I would have been too frustrated to complete otherwise. It immediately seemed natural to work with the DOM using set operations. And it has tons of plugins which are just as easy to use. This is one of the best designed libraries I've ever used. I hope using it will act as an introduction to functional programming to people who might have otherwise been scared of it.
I don't see how these two things are even slightly related. Other than the Lloyds business, what was not above board about the bank bailout? What laws were broken? How were any of the people at the Bank of England who recommended and actually implemented the bailout personally enriched?

Note that according to the latest Budget, the actual cost of the bank bailout when the dust settles is expected to be 10Bn (5% of the welfare budget) and if Alastair Darling can be convinced not to wreck RBS, we (the taxpayer) might even make a profit on it. We own 84% of RBS, that's where the money went, into acquiring stuff, not into a black hole. Not that we'll see any of it mind, but that too is beside the point.

If you want to conflate anything, MPs expenses + "dodgy dossier" is the way to go.
I got redirected to a site that "scanned" my C drive, found 431 viruses and trojans including some MS Word vulnerabilities and offered (once every 5 seconds or so) to download a .exe file that would supposedly fix everything. I was running Linux.

Beware humans bearing gifts indeed.
Try Ruby is down :-(
By default, open the link in a new tab/window, a la Google Reader. And I agree, some kind of standard syndication is key: Atom, RSS, etc.

That said, it's got a decent hit rate of showing me links I'm interested in so far.
For my personal projects my main consideration was price, I found fsckvps.com. For $12.95 a month I get 512MB memory, 30GB disk and 400GB transfers a month.
We're owned by the Scott Trust which keeps us free from undue influence by shareholders and actively encourages long-term thinking about the future of journalism.

In the interest of full disclosure, you should also point out that the Graun has a near monopoly on public sector job ads, so is effectively State-subsidized.

(Back in the late 90s I worked on your old StoryServer implementation... What a bunch of arse that was).
update: google group created: http://groups.google.com/group/writing-feedback
The link must have been fixed in the meantime - I didn't have any trouble.
yep - tried to trick me into installing 'anti-malware'. Please remove the link!
The point is, the Bank bailout was spending taxpayers money without our consent.

Claiming a few blue movies on the tax payer is the same, but hardly in the same league in terms of amount of money spent.

I'd just rather read about real news - that matters. Not a few grand some MPs have claimed on expenses that they maybe shouldn't have but it's a grey area.

What is the total money claimed by all MPs, that shouldn't have been claimed by MPs? 6 figures maybe early 7 figures? Oh well that'll keep the NHS running for another few hours - the scale of this just seems miniscule.

It's like finding out someone in the ships bar has stolen £10 from petty cash while the titanic sinks.

</rant>
"Vision lets you take in mega-bytes of information in seconds. Speech processing involves far less because language processing is such a hard problem for the brain."

I've read that people with extraordinary memory or mental arithmetic ability often visualize shapes and perform operations on them to get at the answer. And I guess "normal" people use "subvocalization" instead. In light of your comment, that makes sense.
I found this interesting because it isn't just a Challenge entry, it's the introduction of a new Go framework: web.go.

http://github.com/hoisie/web.go
I got to the proper New Scientist article. Maybe it was just an exploitive ad that they've gotten rid of now.
Free Yahoo Developer Accelerators from Joyent, they apply same terms and conditions and AUP to free developer accounts as well as their customers - http://is.gd/5uR3I

PCSmart Hosting is cheap at 4.95 pounds / month - http://is.gd/5uR4E unmanaged linux vps, pure bliss for the low price.
9090X HD Ultima والسوفت وير الخاص به
The second time I went in I got to the New Scientist article as well. It's probably fixed now.
Perhaps a DNS attack? Try 194.203.155.123/article/mg20427391.400-beware-humans-bearing-gifts.html
Most of the founders of successful Bay Area startups are not "locals", but first generation "immigrants" from other parts of the US/world.

Very true. When I started representing startups in the Valley in the mid-80's, the overwhelming majority of the founders were "locals." Since 2000 at least, this pattern has decidedly shifted, at least for the companies I represent (with a clear majority now being either immigrants or from first-generation immigrant families, many from India).

There is also a decided international emphasis today in terms of Valley companies using resources (people, investment sources, etc.) not at all centered in the Valley as they used to be.

The Valley connection does remain important in many key ways, however, as noted in the post - in my judgment, it is still by far the best place to be for a significant number of startups.

A good, balanced post on this issue.
Thats the funniest thing I have read in a long time. :)

I have been living in NY for about 10 years now and I can tell you that I never had problem. But more often than not people don't make eye contact here in NY they stare at you.

Of course, this all depends on where in NY you are. In NY, there are micro-communities within communities and they have their own rules. Some may consider making eye-contact offensive, other may not.
Am I the only one who thinks that his "Example 2: Write function to compute Nth fibonacci number" is a terrible resource hog?

IMHO an iterative approach would be the way to go.
The Bank of England has always been the "lender of last resort". That's integral to fractional reserve banking. That ship has sailed my friend :-)

Now personally, I would have no problem with a few banks failing. There are 700-odd in the City, what's one or two? Wiping out existing shareholders was the right way to do it tho'.
in-house column oriented database,
source code generator for diameter protocol application..
et. al.
If you believe the Clinton impeachment was about perjury in a court of law by the highest law enforcement officer in the nation, it was arguably worse than all of the above.

But based on what I read of the first batch of (leaked) expense disclosures, they paint a pattern nearly as bad as Clinton's, much worse than "claiming a few blue movies*, one of an irredeemably corrupt ruling class.

Granted, this is corruption at a "retail" personal level, but it's hard to imagine these same people aren't as corrupt when they're acting in their capacity as MPs and ... how do you say it? ... members of the government/ministers/front benchers/whatever.
The thing about NYC is that there are just so many people you can find someone to fit any stereotype so it is easy to reinforce preconceived notions. If you get on the subway with the attitude that there are a lot of people ready to fight if you look at them the wrong way you will be able to find one.
I use WebbyNode as my main VPS provider, but over the years I've made enough friends on the Net as to be able to get shell accounts on several servers, as well. Add to that a machine at home which is used for less important stuff.
I don't think there is and I don't think there will be. There are limitations with what you can do with Chrome extension, which is why in its current form, extensions like noScript and ABplus (the one that works) and Firebug (not firebuglite) is not possible in chrome. They intentionally did that so that extensions don't hamper browser performance. Unlike Firefox, your chrome browser doesn't get slower with more extensions. Their performance is actually the same.

Another thing to think about, is that one of the biggest selling point with Chrome is it's ability of render scripts faster. If you are going to use an extension like noscript, whats the point of using Chrome? Might as well stick with Firefox.
I have done some JRuby + Sinatra coding for AppEngine in the last 6 months, but I keep running into problems that I simply don't have when I use Java. I worked through the linked article several days ago and hit errors (at least on my dev system) near the end. I started converting an app to JRuby + Sinatra several months ago, and things were mostly working, but I ran into enough problems to postpone the project. I can be patient.

That said, I expect the JRuby support to keep getting better, and I hope that soon I can mostly switch to JRuby.
I have a server at fdcservers and one at theplanet - both "unmetered" 100Mbps, no problems so far (I'm with theplanet for more than 5 years, since ev1)
I know this sounds small and I'm likely nitpicking, but the one thing that bothers me a bit in chromium is that the entire page "flashes" white for a second while it is loading a page. It seems that when you click on a link it "blanks" the page real quick, then loads. There's no doubt it is fast - but this "flash" on every click is annoying. Am I the only one that sees this? I don't see this in Safari, and I thought they were both based on the same rendering engine.
What is Forcing?