skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of notes:

1.) A simple square macro will be faster than the expt function, because expt does special calculations for dealing with decimal exponents. All you really need to do is multiply it by itself. I think something like this:

(defmacro square (expression)
(let ((symb (gensym)))
`(let ((,symb ,expression))
(* ,symb ,symb))))

would work fine.

2.) you can turn degree to radian into a macro like so:

(defmacro degree-to-radian (deg)
`(the single-float (* ,deg ,(/ (coerce pi 'single-float) 180))))

And avoid a couple of function calls and some multiplication.
This way you also don't need to duplicate 'the single-float'...

On my machine, running clozure cl, this made it about 1/8th faster than the original optimized version.

3.)
I was kind of wondering, could you do this sort of computation ahead of time for varying longitudes and latitudes, then store them in a table and do a simple look up and interpolation, instead of doing a lot of trigonometry (is this technically trigonometry?) at run time?

I'm not clear on the math exactly (whether it would work in this situation), but that sort of thing is done using pre-computed tables with fairly complex polynomial equations all of the time. In the case of a web app, it might be better to do this sort of thing (ram is cheap anyway).
Users want to complete tasks. Each of these tasks should be as simple as a toaster. Push button, insert input, push button, win.

Open Mail, type letter, hit send, hear "sent mail" swoosh.

Open Safari, enter URL or search term, click Go, get webpage.

Push lever, insert bread, wait 30 seconds, eat delicious toast.

Open Word, type stuff, hit save/print/email, get happy boss.

Open Youtube, enter search/URL, push Go, Laugh.
I did a double-take looking at that syntax. I assume that fab (and all of the other bracketed expressions) return functions that chain together? Pretty ingenious. Plus you can detect the end of the chain when one of the methods is passed in "fab" again.

I think I can say that this is the best (ab)use of the syntax I've ever seen, well done. :)
I'm sorry, but I don't think 30% is an unreasonable cut.

When I sell my current indie Mac/Win software through resellers, I have to give them at least 25% to make it worth their while.
look at the bottom of http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

The Camera Connection Kit gives you two ways to import photos and videos from a digital camera. The Camera Connector lets you import your photos and videos to iPad using the camera’s USB cable. Or you can use the SD Card Reader to import photos and videos directly from the camera’s SD card.
OK, I'm a newcomer to YCombinator …. I thought it was almost exactly as tasteful as jessriedel's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1083582), with that added techie twist to make it fun for the crowd; but obviously I misjudged the proper level of discourse. I am sorry. (Were this Reddit, I would delete it, but I see that that is (probably sensibly) not an option for posts that have been voted upon.)
It might be inefficient in absolute time, but in terms of programmer effort genetic algorithms can be tremendously efficient.

I used a genetic algorithm to optimize a signal processing routine in my research (I'm a grad student in biological engineering, the project is sizing nanoparticles). It took me 3 days to write and debug a mutation algorithm, a fitness score, and a backbone that iterates breeding a new generation of code and keeping the most fit offspring. I started running the code on a Friday and by Monday morning, at around 500 generations, the fitness score had improved 60%. Colleagues of ours working on a very similar problem spent 3 months doing the same thing manually and only got to about 55% improvement.

I spent that weekend sailing and thinking, I'm glad my computer is doing my work for me right now.
Many fonts use a slash or a dot in the center of the zero in order to distinguish it clearly from capital-oh. i.e. It's clear to me they are branding this as 0MQ.
That's an understatement.
Color ePaper demo. Why the iPad won't kill e-readers.
Yeah, a (fab) function just returns itself. It's like jQuery's chaining, but using argument signatures instead of object methods to delegate work. The last (fab) is just a way to indicate the chain is over so that a listener can be returned, and has the additional benefit of making it look declarative.
Didn't this little thing get killed off during the 3G announcement? A-GPS > GPS. Same GPS chip but uses other data to quickly get a general location so you aren't waiting for satellites without any knowledge of your location.
Large low order terms, but still low order. :-)
It was my observation that this was largely true in the '90s. Has anything changed? DB2 get MVCC? SQL Server did for the 2005 version.

Are people buying Oracle RAC or IBM's equivalent offering? How much do IBM's higher end offerings require running them on their mainframes, which continue to be more and more alien to the IT workforce?

I'm not following this closely, but I don't get the impression that IBM is catching up.
Not sure what you're saying about Apple's presentation. There seems to be enough horizontal, straight-facing images on their iPad pages. http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/
Ah, was wondering why java.sun.com is unavailable. Some network issues to work out, no doubt.
The problem is that everybody likes to think their problem is as complex as a space shuttle. The reality is that in 99% of cases, it isn't. In have of those you are 100% correct - the problem isn't even a programming one.
Who said anything about whining ? It is your duty as a professional to promote what you consider the best tool for the job. A spade isn't much good if your job is to rake some leaves.

Of course your advice might be overruled for perfectly valid technical or non-technical reasons. But by keeping silent and not suggesting alternatives you are doing yourself and your employer a disservice.
This sounds suspiciously like marketing speak. I graduated in 2006, and we never even spoke of DB2 in my time at the University of Michigan.

For curiosities sake, specifically to your post:

What makes it ideal to startups (any cool examples)? What innovations exist in DB2 that are not available elsewhere?
Even though I do 90% of my dev work in *nix, I'd be very interested in the emacs version of this (if only to satiate my geek hunger).
Due Credits: Jonathan Ive
Well that's what my (doctor-made) diet involves. I didn't make the rules, believe me, I'd like to have some butter :)

I've heard good things about Atkins and such, so maybe butter isn't that bad, but I'm losing quite a lot of weight without butter, so without butter it will be.
I didn't downmod this time, but I have in the past - generally because the question shows the poster didn't even read the post he was questioning (or was really stupid), because it was clearly answered in the original post.
No, it's not obvious to me how one writes a JS application, saves it, and runs it on the iPad.
University Endowments: Worst Year Since Depression
That's what Chrome OS and Android are for; we'll get what we want in a few months or maybe even weeks.

Selling an official hacker version will only serve to confuse the other 95% of customers. (Apple's philosophy of simplicity goes beyond just their UI design.) I don't think this makes a lot of sense either when members of the 5% will eventually jailbreak it anyway.
DB2 LUW is serious and great (or it was in the mid-late '90s, and a heck of a lot less painful to set up and administer than Oracle), but isn't mainframe DB2 a different code base with a variety of differences and quirks? And how many people know how to do System Z administration or applications programming?
New Indianapolis Hackers and Founders Meetup
We've started a monthly meetup for Indianapolis Hackers and Founders. This is our 3rd meetup, but the first with the new affiliation with H&F.

The next one is Monday, February 1 at the Upper Room in Broad Ripple (upstairs at the Broad Ripple Steak House)

You can checkout our meetup site here: http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders-Indianapolis/

Don't be shy about letting us know what you'd like to see come out of this group. Right now we're keeping it casual - it's basically an excuse for startup-minded people in Indianapolis to get together and hang out.
Ajaxian: HTML5 Canvas Benchmarks
Anyone who's owned a hand-held GPS can tell you it takes a few minutes to find your initial location

Yes, this is because a current (within the last few hours) version of the almanac (current status of the GPS constellation, which satellites are active etc) and ephemeris (more-or-less where everything is expected to be) needs to be downloaded. It's slow from satellites but quick via 3G.
Scoring a year full of Apple tablet rumors - who was right and who wasn't
Why? He made his point in much less space here.
I don't know if they were being nice or not but I think they pretty much also had to make it 4:3. I have a convertible netbook (Gigabyte T1028X) and its wide screen is ugly in vertical orientation. Books look really weird formatted that way. Web pages too. The only saving grace is that I can dock an OSK at the bottom and the remaining area is more or less 4:3 and I get the keyboard there too, at the same time. That's handy at times. But still looks ugly. So seeing how beautiful is important to Apple and how they want it to be usable in any orientation, I don't think they had a choice.
1. There is no C function.

What do you call public static float distance(float latA, float lngA, float latB, float lngB) {

As I said but that's not a huge deal. Yes it's not a major slowdown, but a tight inner loop with a function call is begging for an inline.
I think that the awkwardness of using this as a camera, coupled with security policies against cameras in many companies, makes a camera a "why bother?" item. So they add support for an add-on, and especially for plugging in a SD card or camera for image management, which by contrast will be very popular.
Incorrect code is silly. It is not unlikely that the different languages are performing a different number of iterations in these tests, correcting that by being precise about the range to be iterated over is not silly. The integer indices here produce the behavior that seems to be intended by the `<=` comparison in the originals.

The speed difference is negligible since all but the inner multiplication is hoisted out, and each inner loop takes over 250 cycles.
iPad isn't a phone. iPod Touch isn't a phone. To the degree that these devices are successful, they will be replacing user-programmable devices from the bottom up.

It's all very well for you to "predict that within 2 years" everything will be fine. That's not the way it is today, and it's not the way it has been in the past. Everything I know about Apple tells me they have no love for developers whatsoever, and that their rise is one of the worst things that could happen to this industry in terms of open platforms. Apple likes their monopolies much, much more than MS does.
Yep. Apple's share in the magic devices category is more like >95%.

Funny how hard it is for geeks to let go of thinking that the worth of a product is defined by how many features it has!
What's the point of officially supporting a jailbroken product, given all the new problems it will bring? To me it's like asking Apple to support Hackintoshes.

Apple has been doing this for decades and it's nothing new. If you want freedom and flexibility, you should look elsewhere.
Similarly, while iPad lays clear Apple's ambition to pursue the e-book market aggressively (they demonstrated a nice iBooks player and added an iBook Store to complement the iTunes and App Store marketplaces), they demonstrated virtually nothing that harnesses the touch, tilt, rich media and programmatic elements that they can bring to the re-invention of print media.

I'm looking forward to downloading and running the Kindle iPhone program from the App Store.
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Faqs#Does_the...

> Does the Touch Book support multitouch?

> No. And we don't think that it's an issue. Multitouch is interesting when you want to zoom in / zoom out. At 1024×600, the Touch Book screen is big enough so that you don't need to zoom all the time as you have to do it on the iPhone.

Hmm, that seems to be missing the point a little bit... It's like saying, "Does this laptop have a trackpad?" "No. The mouse is great and all when you want to highlight text, but we find that using shift and an arrow key works just fine. And now you won't have to worry about accidentally moving the pointer like on some _other_ computers."
The syntax looks cute for one-lined request handler functions. I wonder how it stacks up for larger, multi-line functions. Heck, you're pretty close to sexps (I kid!).
When to fire your co-founders
What? Some Indie Games Made Money?
This urge of control has to do with apple philosophy; I own a macbookpro myself with a wonderful huge buttonless touchpad: if it were for OSX I would even be able to configure middle click with it (which I don't care because I run linux anyway but it says a lot about their point of view IMO).
At that point, just release an iPad app into the wild like they've done with iTunes and Safari. You'll still have iTunes and the App Store, and they'll still be able to dominate the high-end high-margin part of the market.

Actually, they'd probably wind up selling more of their kit by doing this!
I think the size puts it closer to the Sinclair ZX-80/81 family.
Rather than hoping that employees recognize patterns in customer communications, it might be better for a group of employees to review a sampling of emails and figure out some common root causes. Perhaps they already do this...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Clarke's Third Law)

In my opinion, Apple is one of few companies that works on their product design until it appears magical, and their meteoric rise is the result. The standards for "Mom" are Star-Trek-high.
It's vaguely lispy, but without all that nesting.

Multi-line functions work okay, but it's definitely cleaner to name them and put them somewhere else so that your code ends up looking like a site map:

http://gist.github.com/287475#file_hello_middleware.js
I didn't realize it was 99$ per year. That's much worse than I thought.

Apple just keeps getting eviler.
By what metric is redis faster than beanstalkd?

Does redis has any job queue facilities for making a reliable, low-latency, safe job queue?

http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/oct/04/what-matt...
IPad, the uncomputer for all of us
>>The question posed at the end is an interesting one: at the moment, the iPad appears to require a regular computer (just like an iPod touch does). Presumably a future version - or even a software update for the existing model - will get rid of this dependency.

Apple's paradigm is that the devices revolve around the main computer, and I don't see that changing. However, it could be that the "main computer" evolves into a headless thing (like the new Mac Mini Server) that auto-magically handles the Ethernet, USB devices, and mass storage for the iPad(s). Plug it into the wall, the router, and the printer, and it finds the iPad(s) via Bonjour on your wireless network. Your Mac Mini Server (MMS) downloads your upgrades for you, stores your media, and backs up your contacts and files. It works like a remote harddrive. Just drag files you don't need any more over to its home screen icon, and they're kept on the server now. It's also your hub to access your digital camera or other USB device, and shares them over 802.11n to the iPad(s).

Then, a few years later, when our Mobile Me accounts have like 5 TB limits and enough people have HD-streaming broadband, that computer can be replaced by a simple dock with an Ethernet port and USB for the printers and cameras. Apple's getting $99/year instead of $500 for the server, but still making bank. You buy stuff on iTunes and it automatically appears on your iDisk. You download it when you sync your iPad with your iDisk and put it in your iPad's library. Tired of that song? Throw it out on the iPad and download it again later.
http://ruby.alltop.com/

http://www.rubyflow.com/

http://www.rubyinside.com/

http://seriouslyruby.com/
As someone who works for a media company, the biggest problem developers run into is cultural. Media companies think they are only about media and media partnerships and not about the entire ecosystem that delivers that media. Sadly, this means the technology responsible for storing, maintaining, delivering, and reporting on the media is often under-staffed, under-funded, and under-prioritized. They can hire all the engineers they want, but unless they're willing to listen to them and consider the entire system, that's not going to make headways on their needs.
The NY Times article in question is http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html?pa... (one page).

I happen to cough know people that work with the same software suite described in the article. They encounter errors daily that are unexplainable by IT and by the company itself. Scary stuff.
Insanely great? Ars reacts to the Apple iPad
Exotic input. DataHand is back.
well, still on backorder...

http://www.datahand.com/images/DatahandTabletop.JPG
If the iPad is the "apple for mom", then what was the iMac all this time? Whatever happened to OS X and "it just works"?
> import java.util.Calendar;

might be your first clue...

> but a tight inner loop with a function call is begging for an inline.

The loop body makes several other function calls, you would be very hard pressed to measure the difference. And if it was a C function in a larger project, you probably wouldn't want to inline it because that would slow your compile times and cause you to lose modularity (i.e. you'd have to rebuild all client code rather than just update the DSO when you optimize the distance function). This function does enough work that it doesn't deserve to be inlined.
Is ChromeOS now totally doomed or what?
f you're okay with invalidating the warrantee on the slug, then I don't understand why you'd complain about the iPhone/Pad model

It's not a question of voiding the warranty; Apple is on record saying that jailbreaking is and should be a criminal act.
I'm going to guess that dinosaurs changed colors according to their environments (green in forests, brown/yellow in deserts). They evolved over millions of years, while skin/coat/scale color tends to change over the span of a couple millennia, at least in modern animals. So there were probably a variety of different colors even within species.

Still, it would be really cool to know for sure.
Why are programmers constantly trying to program themselves out of having jobs? While I am joking here, it is interesting to consider that debugging is one of the most complex aspects of programming, and if you took that away from programmers, they might spend their time actually doing something useful... like creating software.
The speed difference is hardly negligible especially when talking about benchmarks. It's actually about 15% on my OS X laptop, less but still measurable on a Linux server. Your change actually has a greater impact on execution time than off-by-ones in the iteration counts which don't really take place.
I was asked to source my statements, as I did not do so before.

The IPCC Third Report concludes that climate change might either be caused of a changing mean temperature, a changing variance, or both. What the real cause for climate change is, needs to be carefully assessed. This supports my statement that climate change is not necessarily caused by increasing mean temperatures.

http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc%5Ftar/?src=/clim...
I liked Sun's branding better.
Unlikely. Developers and designers are still necessary for Apple, and cannot be locked in easily. (neither technically nor psychologically)
Famous Personalities of the world, Gone but not Forgotten.
The quicker the feedback the better for anyone - read any fairly recent (last several decades) book on study skills and learning. It is largely the same principle as having trouble reading your own code that you wrote a few weeks ago.
I'm not finding counts of deaths, nor listings of atrocities, for these.

Argument from ignorance. They were in the same league from the point of view of their victims.

But if you believed that doing so was somehow right (again, the "greatest good" nonsense or something), then it's OK?

I never said that. From available evidence, not one of the people you mentioned did their atrocities for the ``greatest good'', and it would not matter if that was the case, because the willingness to commit atrocities is the monstrous thing.
Even if you assume a local mercator projection (centered on your business or whatever) you still need to know that the earth is spherical. Otherwise, you're likely to assume that an 0.1 degree change in latitude is the same distance as an 0.1 degree change in longitude. To correct this erroneous assumption (for small distances) divide your longitude differences by the sine of your latitude.
How to Start a Company in a Recession, part 1
>> on a 720p screen

There is no 720p video possible on that screen. It has 1024 pixels horizontal when in landscape, and it would need 1280.
They still make 'em, with digital backs. For a lot of types of photography waist-level finders (WLFs) make a lot of sense. For example, you usually want to shoot people from their eye level or slightly below, with an eye-level finder you might find yourself kneeling a lot...
This page seems to randomly show the feedback phone number:

http://www.kayak.com/feedback

Hit refresh a few times.

Perhaps they don't like the phone ringing that much after all?
It would basically not have any battery life at all. So no, you wouldn't buy it.
Unfortunate name: The Fabric Python deployment tool uses the fab binary and uses fabfiles for configuring deployments: http://docs.fabfile.org/
By tomorrow you'll switch to (decf weekend)
The chart makes Chrome look really impressive, but ~7.9fps is still not that great.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU or platform. Flash on Windows had no graphics acceleration at all until ~6 months ago.

Flash running in Virtualized Windows or Wine on top of OS X works terrifically.
In the same way the iPod range has been crushed by generic MP3 players?
I think this is exactly right. I also think there'll be some persistent indicator (I'm thinking a little icon in the bar at the top that contains the clock) for each ongoing background task. So people won't have background tasks eating up their battery/RAM without knowing they're still running.
This is a similar path to what has happened with cars. Most people used to know how to maintain their own car. Now you barely have to know how to pop the hood.
To be fair, that guy might have a huge DVD collection, so a lack of a DVD drive is a deal-breaker for him. Why does he have to like it?
In other words Microsoft has sewn up the preinstalled PC market and the government market (the two biggest markets), and have left after-market to pirates (the smallest market).

Surely your Microsoft won't see a red cent from the Chinese was more than a little exaggeration?
A horrible horrible device. Agreed. It's basically unusable.
> Apple is on record saying that jailbreaking is and should be a criminal act.

In case you haven't heard about that before:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking...

And let's make sure that it really sinks in what they are saying here:

If you buy a device you do not own it and can not do with it what pleases you.

And this from the manufacturer of a computer that was as open as it could possibly be, the Apple II.

Sometimes I find it hard to believe how far we've come and then at the same time how much we have lost.

Steve Jobs is an absolutely awesome business guy, the way he has turned Apple around will be studied for decades. At the same time I wonder if it would have been possible without all this nastiness. If not then more power to him, but I prefer to think of the other Steve when I look at Apple and what might have been.