skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Private helper methods indicate classes are doing too many things.

Absolutely wrong. Sometimes you do want to hide details. I can imagine many domains where you'd need a priority heap, and where the rest of the object model would care not one bit what goes on inside such a beast. Exposing such details is not useful. Paying for the instantiation of another cluster of little objects to do so wouldn't be helping matters one bit.
I see the increased wake you're talking about, but that looks like it's at the very last few seconds and the captain of the Ady Gil is trying to turn about. The second video, the other vessel makes a radical change in direction.
Bullish on the U.S.
Not such bad advice here, especially consider that it is coming from a service provider (i.e., corporate attorney). My own opinion is that realistically, the only startups that could close an investment deal in 2010 are mature companies that have demonstrated a robust revenue model and are in need of money (and only money) for expansion. My advice to them is the same as what I received in 1999 after I secured my first term-sheet. After almost three years of hard work I finally had something to show to my attorney friend and I asked him what to do next. He said, “now go out and get another one just like it.” In other words, getting a term-sheet is only the first measurable step and to close any deal, you must have competitions. But all entrepreneurs should remember that “Every problem in a startup (including funding) can be solved with the timely arrival of a PO.” So even if you can't close any investment deal in 2010, as long as you have sustainable revenues, all other problem can be solved. In other words, focus on "value creation" and the "valu-ation" will follow.
Facebook, Google Employees Agree To Merger
Earlier he was using Kawa Scheme on Android at Google Research. I wonder if the educational program will use it.
In fact, if your submission helps prevent murders, you would tend to lose the contest.
I'm fairly sympathetic to the issue but I've flagged it anyway since I can't seem to find any relation to either hacking or startups.
This article treats the Apple Tablet as obvious fact. Has this actually been established? I know the rumors have hit a fever pitch, but has there been anything 100% credible yet?
"Moving these methods to collaborators and making them public creates opportunities for future reuse without reducing the clarity of the original code."

That's not even always true. Sometimes, the best way to express an algorithm may be with a recursive function. Making those separate objects might even slightly reduce the code's clarity. The code smell here should not be the private methods. It should be such private methods with similar functions repeated in several objects. Let "a need for reuse" become self evident, then refactor for reuse. Otherwise, you are just pre-optimizing. YAGNI!
The reason TV produce smooth motion is not because of the blurring effect but because they really work at 60 frames per seconds (NTSC) or 50 fps (PAL).
But the effect is achieved only with interlaced TV (CRT).

The motion on films is not smooth at all, shaky at best. That’s why cameramen make sure not to move their camera too much and use a lot of tricks to avoid "motion sickness". In one hand they do use full frames (aka progressive frames) but only at 24 fps.

That’s not exactly what you call "Motion blur" to be "the biggest reason TV and film get away with smaller framerates".

However, yes, to have a good motion you need to have a good framerate.

You can read a very good interview of James Cameron about it:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=...

It basically says: Perceived resolution = pixels x replacement rate.
and the magic number is known: it’s 48 fps.

The main problem is not only having the game/software logic to send the frames to the display fast enough but also having the display being able to display them!

CRT were able to do it through interlaced frames, but mainstream flat panel technologies (plasma/LCD) basically can't. OLED should do better on the near future.

That said when there is no motion, 1 fps is just fine :-)
Use with caution. Much of the content (everything beyond the headlines) is inaccessible unless the user trusts js, and it's not obvious that there's more to see.
Encapsulation can an excellent step in making a problem go away.

First a mistake is made all over your code. Then it's made only in the private method. Then it can be changed easily -- and reverted easily if the change doesn't work.

Of course, this isn't always a good idea. But there are many times that it can be a good idea.
I do the same thing, which is why I have my doubts: I'll do a search and ctrl-click (or equivalent to open in a new tab) the top 4-5 that look promising. Last clicked in no way means it is the best result, especially considering that the last one I clicked will be further down in the search results and (theoretically) be the least applicable.
Research in Motion announces mobile Blackberry Presenter
The financial incentives for downloading Joel Fuhrman's book from btjunkie are great!
A very similar thing happens to me when I'm doing visual design.

I can work on something for hours and hours and love it. And then I come back an hour later and finally see all of the problems.
No, use a thermostat. It is much simpler, less prone to errors, you only need one per light housing, and the energy cost required to keep the shrouds above 34 degrees is quite insignificant.
I really like that he termed a website an "operating system." It's funny to see what kind of weird stuff comes out of the mind of rock stars only surrounded with yes men.
Brilliant observation.

The only difference is that music needs to always stand on its own, so in that case he is always making a mistake. In code, sometimes you are overcooking, but often times you are just reflecting a growing understanding of the big picture. In this case the code may end up quite smelly for very good reason, only to be discovered when the next developer comes along to refactor and only realizes the ingenuity of the original code hours later.
Smoothness of UI is as much about software as it's about hardware. My Macbook Pro is a super-powered work horse compared to iPhone, but still many applications and web pages do not give a great smooth, experience.

Reason? Because asynchronous, multithreaded programming, which is required for smoothness, ain't trivial with abstractions that current programming languages and platform libraries provide.
I saw the news and the videos and is just got my mind going, so I posted it here. The whaling ship is kind of "hacking" the law by hunting whales unter the pretense that it is for scientific research (anything else is outlawed by int'l law I believe). The eco ship is also "hacking" in the sense that it is doing anything it can to stop the other vessel from doing its job without breaking int'l laws (?).
WORST WEBSITE IN THE UNIVERSE
> However, in tech circles and beyond, Apple's Tablet is the only game in town.

That's a circle of hell I missed when reading Dante.
At a conference, Norvig once mentioned that you not clicking on the number 1 link says a lot more than you clicking on the number 4 link. Just saying.
This is the network he was plugging:
http://modlife.com/

There are a lot of other sites in this space and I can't say this one stands out as being particularly impressive.
Even better than Push Notifications is the ability to downwardly sync your Facebook Friends with your Address Book, including Profile Photos. If you have it set up, that then syncs to Google too!
This is essentially the approach taken by functional languages (they also include ways to collect functions into logical units). Object-oriented programming is all about mutating the state of an object with private methods, though, so I think the author is trying to make his OO programming style look / feel more functional.

If you're still convinced that OO and mutable state are a good idea, read this essay by the author of Clojure, it might change your mind: http://clojure.org/state
The way I see it, this is just an entrepreneur being very passionate about his product, and some too-cool-for-school kids make jokes about it.

I submitted the (full) source article to HN a couple of hours ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1034444
That's got to be the furthest stretch of the word hacking since I saw Michael Jackson be called a hacker here.

The reason why I'm sympathetic to this is because I remember this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pereira

Even if I don't always agree with Greenpeace as an organization their struggle to literally save the wales is a noble cause. The rest of it I'm not so sure about, they are much more of a political and marketing organization now.
On State and Identity
Seriously $100 to do statistical work? The site looks very nicely laid out, but I have to wonder what the purpose of this competition is.

My first inclination with such a low prize amount is to be a little suspicious of the motives behind this effort. For instance, is some local political figure wanting to do something that might be viewed as controversial and this site is a CYA move before taking that action?

What I mean is will this site be used by some politician to set himself up to make the statement in public "We tried to get X done with this website campaign, paid millions of the taxpayers money for web development, even offered a cash prize (without saying how much the prize was) but the results were trivial so now we have no other option than to do Y (whatever controversial thing the politician’s contributors wanted done in the first place).".

To the OP: if this is your site and you are seriously looking to promote it and attract contestants you might want to think about bumping the $100 grand prize up to at least $1,000. It seems to me the $100 will not be enough (after taxes) for people to take the effort to get involved. Maybe seek monetary sponsorship from the city for the prize amount.
Exercise Slows Telomere Decay (ie Aging)?
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I've switched from Defender to Security Essentials and I'll check out Avira.

I run a few sites that depend on ads so I've been reluctant to use an ad-blocker, but it might make sense to look into it.

Thanks again.
Good idea, but I would put the wires in the (colored) glass, not in the LED bulb.
What have you used Bloom filters for?

The "secure" instant email addresses on http://mailop.com are implemented with bloom filters, I may write about it sometime.
New Year, New Startup, New York?
To precisely state what others have implied - the prize was deliberately set low so that there would be no incentive to murder someone in order to win the prize. The prize is "symbolic" rather than "incentive."

If the prize was $1mm, then someone out there might have been inspired to murder people in particular areas after predicting they would be killed in that area.
Is it really that significant? Designs haven't been released for the tablet yet but it sounds more like a mobile device than a "desktop" style device.

Most similar devices use ARM chips right?

"As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than a billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processor.[3] As of 2009, ARM processors account for approximately 90% of all embedded 32-bit RISC processors. ARM processors are used extensively in consumer electronics, including PDAs, mobile phones, digital media and music players, hand-held game consoles, calculators and computer peripherals such as hard drives and routers."
I think this is why I lost 5 pounds during my two week vacation in France.
People refer to Facebook as an "operating system":

http://www.redherring.com/Home/23046

or

http://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+operating+system
Why Startup? (Part 1)
Why Startup (Part 2)
Neither of these are the source article, which isn't online. Your nymag link does appear to predate this one, but they're independent of one another: the New Yorker is not short on print subscribers.
Article Has No News Inside
Tip #1 is so great, I wonder why I didn't think of it before. Launching an influential blog, all you need is wordpess and thousands of visitors... so easy...
Monitors have a much higher resolution these days. When a few years back, 1024x768 on 17″ (75dpi) was the norm, nowadays 1680x1050 on 22″ (90dpi) or 1920x1200 on 24″ (~94dpi) are mainstream. (I'm even at 125dpi with 1280x800 on 12.1″)

No wonder a larger font size is needed to get the same experience as a few years ago. I find myself scaling the font when reading longer texts, because too many fonts are just too small.
I was having problems with the newegg data stream. Updates are disabled until YQL unblocks me in 1 day.
Nitpick: "dyanmic programming" does not meant what you think it means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming
JunOS (Juniper) Flaw Exposes Core Routers to Kernal Crash
Is this really augmented reality?
SearchYC's Ask HN page is pretty cool:

http://ask.searchyc.com/
You're right, my apologies. The names must have gotten me confused.
Ask HN: What would YOU do with a massive amount of computing power?
Let's say you're given a million dollars worth of cloud computing services, or perhaps you've gained control of a large botnet (e.g. Conficker, which I read has between 9 and 15 million nodes). What would YOU actually do with it?

I have some ideas, but I'm curious to see what yours are.

Here are some things that that I do not find interesting, though: spam (evil), next Mersenne prime number (boring), SETI (stupid).
I fled k5 into the arms of reddit, but K5 had been dead for a long time prior to that.

It was funny reading the article, since I recognized a few names and immediately thought, "Holy Shit, that guy's still there?"

Then I saw the date.
Yeah, the poorly labeled CPUs don't search well on newegg. Please let me know if you find any others. I've hand checked the ones I cared about and they seemed good.
Yes, in so far as major, main-stream news organizations (NYTimes, Wall St. Journal, etc.) have treated it as fact for months now. Additionally, if Apple were not about to announce a tablet they would have squashed this ages ago, as they have squashed previous out-of-control rumors that had no basis, like rumors about the imminent release of an ebook reader or netbook. Apple knows it can't allow this level of hype to build up if nothing is to come from it, and it knows that if February comes without a tablet announcement its stock with take a huge hit. Therefore, their silence is as good a confirmation as needed that the tablet does indeed exist and will indeed be announced soon.
Community First: How Wufoo Created a Captive Audience
If you find me a site that has the power consumption data I'll happily add it.
I saw this in Iowa about 20 years ago. The cloud appeared to be rolling along in an otherwise empty sky. When it passed overhead, there was a gust of wind - about 15mph. No apparent change in temperature - it was a warm day.
Half an hour later another roll cloud followed. Then after another half hour, a third!
The clouds extended from horizon to horizon, as in the article.
All cores (says the passmark guys)
Got an interesting reply and links from guest TechCrunch writer connected with UC-Berkeley, Harvard, and Duke: http://www.siliconbeat.com/2010/01/05/the-innovation-age-bia.... Bottom line was: "You have explained why."
In reply to the [dead] sibling comment by aw3c2: you were hell-banned for some (probably capricious) reason two weeks ago, make a new account if you want to contribute.
So what you are saying is that I could post a blog saying anything I want and get a lot of traffic, apple wont complain, and places like HN will post it?
WTF is this drivel doing here ?
- "Intel 'had'[citation needed] a lock on the netbook market"

- The Apple tablet isn't released yet.

- Is the (as yet unreleased) Apple tablet(?) going to be a netbook by any stretch of the word ?

- The "Windows that runs Office" (XP, Vista, 7) doesn't run on ARM.

- ARM wasn't (isn't) as powerful as Atom. Neither is stuff from VIA or AMD in the price/power range.

- Apple did buy PA Semi for some reason.

- PA Semi has experience in power efficient Power architecture. (http://web.archive.org/web/20070927205658/http://www.pasemi....)

Something is wrong with the tenses of this 'article'.

"and it was widely assumed that the chip giant would win the Tablet contract at all costs. " :: would try to win at all cost. would need to win at all cost . was/is willing to win at all cost. ????

"Intel can't be happy sitting on the sidelines as Apple's new product catches on with consumers. "

Shouldn't present be replaced by speculative futur ?
Oh interesting! I'll look at it tonight. Thanks.
Randall Munroe visits MIT
I'm pretty unconvinced that it's a worthwhile product. I don't see a worthwhile gap in the market in between smartphones and laptops.

Smartphones are great because they fit in your pocket, but annoying because they lack some of the features of laptops. Laptops are great because they have full keyboards, optical drives etc but are annoying because they won't fit in your pocket. I don't really have any desire, though, for a device which has no keyboard and still won't fit in my pocket.
The wierd thing about Acorn Risc Machines is that IBM invented the RISC architecture, and some Brits made it a product (200MHZ StrongARM). So the PowerPC is competing with the ARM, when the ARM came later! Pretty amazing story behind that chip.
Tyler Durden's Guide to Personal Finance
Google launch Nexus One Handset
Personal Phone Numbers For Business, Yeah That Was A Mistake...
Call of Duty's campaign's are extremely short. They don't do much repetition.

For me personally Call of Duty is one of the few games I actually went through the campaign. It felt satisfying.

But like I said, if there must be a challenge, it should be against other players, and Call of Duty got that right too.
I think the deciding factor is this: are your friends voting you up because your post was good or because they're your friends? I think there's only a problem if it's the latter.
Independently of line height, it still looks much better indented.
You're at least 10 years late to the party of making an Apple rumors site, but yes that's definitely something you could do.
I hope I can say this...but the answer is yes! internally at least.
No, because one blog post from (sorry to say) an un-credible source is not comparable to the current noise around the Apple tablet. Again, major newspapers have reported on the tablet as fact. Major sources in the apple-news world (DaringFireball, AppleInsider, MacRumors, etc.) have done the same. Since this is widely being treated as fact, if it were not true Apple would be forced to do something about it, especially as they will be having a special media event in January after which their stock will fall precipitously if they do not announce a tablet.
So that Westerns can project their stereotypes about engineers upon religious fanatics from another culture and feel they have a deeper understanding of the situation.
1 fps, 1 dpi. This is too low even for a game like "Simon."

As a musician, I consider 1/100 of a second just a bit beyond human perception. 1/48th of a second is something like "magician sleight of hand time" to me.
This is very true but fortunately for us, programming is a little more scientific and objective than making music. When I find myself unsure which route to take I try to fall back on principles such as DRY and coding at the right level of abstraction. At least with programming, you can go back and say "this is a load of rubbish because of X", or "this is and awesome design because of Y".

In fact this is what I try to encourage in my fellow team mates. You shouldn't choose a particular design without knowing exactly why it is the better choice over any other.
Navteq Touts 3d Laser Mapping Technology
Here is a good explanation of Persistence of vision which relates to how the Human Eye actually sees motion. In reality, your eye does not work in frames.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision

And here is a breakdown of Motion Perception:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_perception
It seems strange that all the "solutions"---heating coils, diodes, whatever---seem to presume that the basic form factor of the light system would remain unchanged. But wouldn't it be easier to solve if you just rethought the shape of things? Instead of a three-light assembly with hoods over each light (where snow can build up on top of the hood for the next lower light), just reshape the traffic signal as a box with the lights on the back, the four sides opaque (to block glare and peripheral view), and the front side transparent plastic of some variety? There are surely engineering issues there too (like preventing glare off the clear plastic), but it seems like a more stable system, no worries about snow accumulation, and it's probably cheaper to manufacture too.
This is exactly why my[1] app (which will be going into beta Any Day Now) uses clear, legible, 12pt text, and it supports zooming up to a shockingly large font size without breaking the layout.

Doing this has had an additional benefit: We can't just cram everything on to the screen, and instead need to think more about whether or not we're showing information that is truly important.

[1] Okay, my-plus-cofounder. :)
That affiliate link just kinda kills it for me.

And no, you often do not get what you pay for. A lot of ebook peddlers will take your money and give you some really crappy stuff. I've never bought them, but I've taken them off bittorrent and been glad I didn't buy them.

He's making money off the guys system - he has no incentive to tell us the negative stuff. The positie stuff may be true, but what has he not said because he knows it will lose him money?
Work on finding algorithms for the longest path (aka critical path) in cyclic directed graphs. The general case is NP, but what algorithms can you come up with for specific graphs? How much could you brute force with a massive computing power?

Edit: been working on this on and off for the past few years. A very fun problem.

Also recommendation algorithms are another fun problem that you want to toss hardware at.
> So the PowerPC is competing with the ARM, when the ARM came later!

How is that amazing? Unless they were created at the exact same time, one had to come after the other, and so long as they target the same niche they will compete.
sunk costs. infrastructure changes would cost an order of magnitude more than a tweak.
Did you read his post, "Blogs Are Godless Communist Bullshit"?

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/12/blogs-are-godless-c...

He's not concerned with credibility. He's mocking the system, mocking its methods, but using them to build his own traffic and generate money via affiliate marketing.

It's a parody. I'd say the original post and all the followups he's doing along the same lines are incredibly effective at demonstrating his point.
but in one language?

The main difference between Lisp and most other languages out there is that Lisp has been designed for computing with symbolic data.

(+ a b) is a Lisp expression

'(+ a b) is Lisp data

This enables the easy manipulation and computation with symbolic expressions that stand for Lisp programs, algebra terms, theorems, logic expressions, rules, frames, music compositions, ... and many more.

Some languages have similar capabilities that can be used easily (Prolog, Mathematica, ...). Some have it in difficult variants, where one has to deal with complex representations. Others simply represent programs as strings and not more.
This is trite and over-used as a "perk" to attract people to working at start-ups.

The problem with this approach is that you can't have this type of policy without an underlying culture that supports it.

This is straight out of the Netflix playbook: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664?src=embed
It will certainly fill the gap on my dining-room table that used to be filled with piles of newspapers and magazines.