skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't that the whole point of social media? Be authentic and don't sound like a PR?

I, for one, give them a hell of a lot of credit for pushing back at Jason in this way. He's the one who brought up the subject, and it's fun to see people stand up for themselves. It's part of why Jason is such an entertaining writer himself. He's a big boy; he can take it.
Interview with most astute leader of 20th century
Is there difficulty implementing constant-time algorithms for async processors? For example, it is very desirable that every crypto operation takes exactly the same amount of time, to avoid timing attacks.
I'm hoping for PS2 backwards-compatibility
Which Chrome version is that? v3.0.195.38 runs it without a glitch here. I did a screencapture, but Jing can't quite keep up with the framerate of the animation, so that looks jumpy (http://screencast.com/t/ODQxMTdmMzg).
I can understand that certain companies use social media to be more authentic and to not sound like a PR. But comScore targets enterprise clients. They should play the enterprise game, not the social media game (although the two aren't mutually exclusive, I expect them to sound professional at all times).
I agree. It's similar with Monads, Arrows, Functors. They have been around far ages in category theory, but only recently have some of us begun to structure our programs around them.
Understandable. I like Lisp [1], but I am also quite content with the way Haskell looks like. And Haskell has a lot of syntactic sugar. Lisp just enables you to grow your own sugar beets.

[1] Actually I like Scheme. Common Lisp is ugly.
I don't sugar my tea, either.

In a sense Lisp is the ultimate in syntactic sugar. I'd like to use Scheme more, but I am currently in love with Haskell too much and use Ocaml at work. Matthias Felleisen does very interesting work with Scheme.
v4.0.249.49 for the Mac.

This isn't the only site that Chrome is slower on. There was a link on Reddit or HN a while ago about an image blurrer that was entirely written in JavaScript. FF 3.5 managed to be 2-3 times faster than Chrome for that particular page.

Chrome is faster than FF 3.6 on some sites, like Mockingbird, but it does not always outperform FF.
Argument doesn't make sense. Author asserts that goal is "autonomy", "competence", "relatedness," as opposed to "passion" or "personality." You don't have to "care" about your work as long as you self-manage and are good at it.

However, then the author defines:

"Autonomy" as "you endorse [your] actions at the highest level of reflection." This implies work that satisfies your own human values, which seems like part of "passion" or "personality," more than simply freedom of choice.

(Also, what's the point of making your own choices if it's not for pursuing of goals you either care about or enjoy, which again seems like "passion" or "personality.")

"Competence" as "mastering unambiguously useful things." I don't know about you but I have never been able to master anything that I did not in some way have some "passion" or "personality" for.

There is the Carol Dweck argument that if you decide you can learn anything, and put in enough hours of deliberating practice, then you can be good at anything. Given that the amount of deliberate practice people are citing is 10,000 hours required or approximately 10 years, then doing this without passion seems like a hideously painful waste of your life.

"Relatedness" as "to love and care [about people], and to be loved and cared for." Again I don't see how this is independent of passion or personality. Passion is loving and caring about something, e.g. people. Personality I think has some definite non-zero correlation with whom you love, care for, enjoy spending time around.

Autonomy, competence and relatedness seem like fine things to seek in your work, but I'm not convinced of the author's argument that these things are independent of passion or personality.

(Also it's worth pointing out that the author does not provide a "have an awesome experience of work" example so much as he provides a Tim Ferris-style 4 Hour Work Week example of "make a bunch of money quickly and then go spend your free time." The example person in the post, despite having "mastered" database optimization, doesn't actually care to go optimize a database more than once every few _months_.)
I like macros, too. In a similar vein: Since I got accustomed to folds, arrows and monads I also see them in a lot of places.
Strategic SEO for Startups
IMHO, OpenPGP did it right. And there is an effort to use OpenPGP to authenticate hosts and users on the web. It already works for SSH: http://web.monkeysphere.info
Yes, it's hard to fathom.

Don't tell anybody, I've heard there are also still using cheques in the US.
We also seem to have trouble acknowledging there's a toolbox full of tools, and determining when its worth acquiring a new tool vs using an existing one.

(aka, there are scenarios where the dumbest language might in fact just be the smartest choice.)

From an engineering judgement, seems he got precisely the result he wanted; which was to get from A to B in the shortest possible time, with gains beyond that (maintainability etc) very much a secondary concern. To me that seems to preclude acquiring a new language.
Linux is such a waste ;-)

See http://www.losethos.com
While those are a basic requirement for sure, in my opinion it's much more important to be able to recognize the links between the many different interfaces any sufficiently complicated device (here: PS3 or iPhone) has (both in software and hardware).

If you have a look at geohots's blog, he talks about crude hardware glitching, buffer overflows or programming internal PPC registers via the SPI interface this CPU apparently has. We might now speculate that he used some or all those things to affect operation of the running hypervisor. Being able to grasp how these things interact is much more important than being a good C-coder.

If you look around blogs or watch videos from conferences, you can find many people that are fluent in specific areas of a particular technology, but I think there are much fewer that can jump between a diverse set of abstractions or interfaces.

Being able to do this is something I'd really love to be.
I've yet to try the v4 beta. Seems unlike that they've taken such a huge leap back from v3, though. I'm more inclined to say that Google's implementation on MacOS is inferior to Mozilla's.

Did you ever measure the difference with the Windows versions of the browsers, on said web sites?
> I aced the programming classes

All grad schools care about is how well you did in that particular subject (or maybe a related subject, like math). You could easily ace your programming and math classes, bomb everything else, end up with a 2.0, and get into grad school. This isn't particularly surprising.
Juvenile? That's a real problem people face every day because some designer/programmer failed to foresee it. This automation tool is a way to deal with the problem the way that user can understand. Sure ifconfig is superior way to do it bu it's beyond reach of most users. This kind of gui automation tool is something that empowers normal people to get around their problems.
This was inspired by (among other things) a thread earlier today about how to launch a beta (where Vaksel said, and I agree, get something out there and start SEOing -- this advice provides a bit of the "how").

I've also chitchatted with a few people here who asked me about this topic. Feel free to chime in if you want me to share what I told you with the group -- I default to Facebook 2004 privacy settings regarding specific advice. ;)
I agree, it's important to master something useful.

But the hidden lesson in this blog post is to always apply that mastery to problem environments. The bigger the problem, the better.

When things are going along smoothly nobody cares what you've mastered.

In other words, if you want autonomy, relate to someone who genuinely needs help with the things you've mastered.
I always try ls even when I'm on the real windows terminal, and I suffer each time it happens. Fortunately it's a rare event.
Whenever there are lot of money, there tends to be a lot of developers competing for the cash.

The only question is how do you become a positive statistical outliers in a crowded market?
Mike McDerment of Freshbooks at LessConf 2009[video]
Yeah, but you can't remove all the CA certs from your users' browsers, which is the issue. www.bank-of-america.ru will not display anything out of the ordinary to real users.
Yes, it's pretty close. However where SSH warns you whenever you encounter a new server, the SSL in your browser only warns you when you encounter a new CA (Certificate Authority).

For the browser to behave more like SSH, it would have to maintain a list of individual sites which you have accepted as genuine. Then if you get a phishing email asking you to click a fake link such as https://lo0m.cc, you will get a warning even if the lo0m.cc site has a certificate "verified by Equifax" or whomever. This is a good example of where the current SSL protocol utterly fails.

When you visit the real loom.cc site which you originally trusted, you should see a happy warm reassurance in the browser bar, maybe including a pet name or avatar. But when you visit lo0m.cc, you should see the entire browser framed in red with a warning that this is the first time you have ever visited this site and you could be the victim of a phishing expedition. Something like that. I'm hand-waving a bit now. And it may get annoying for people at first, as they establish trust in their first 20 banking, gaming, or social networking sites. Kind of like installing a new CA root 20 times right? You don't want it to be too easy or people might just "click through" unconsciously. But personally I don't find this to be a great difficulty with SSH.

Indeed the building blocks are all there in SSL, namely (1) the verification of digital signatures, and (2) the negotiation of a symmetric encryption key. Some may carp about the protocol or the code being a mess, but as a black box it works just fine.

I think browser writers could phight phishing more effectively by thinking outside the box of implicit trust in central authority.
Hello current fellow countryman

The reason you need to give your tax card (skattekort) to your employers is because there may be more than one of them. In the event you hold two jobs, neither of your employers knows what the other is paying you, so they don't know your total income (and therefore don't know how much tax to pull.)
The OP source is one of the organs of record for a specific political set and this is probably the outlines of the (official) emerging sacrificial goat theory for the collapse. The "anti-intellectual" aspect is likely incidental beyond its nice fit with a strategy designed to deflect the certain anger and energy of the ripped off population.
New ZAIN and MTN FBT for opera mini
There's a fellow in Iowa using an Arduino as part of a GPS guidance system he developed for his tractor.

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1254445743

Last I checked, he had his variance from ideal track down to 1.5 inches. Interesting read.
Thanks for introducing me to the Burrows-Wheeler transform, used by Bowtie. That's way cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transfo...
I'm amused that the submitted article, which spells "boost" in the expected way in the article text, has a headline with the word "boot." That word is subject to both a favorable and an unfavorable interpretation. I guess spelling skills may not be boosted by all computer games.

P.S. Obligatory disclaimer--my oldest son likes to program roguelike and other computer games, and almost any computer science class he has taken has included assignments to program what are in essence games. I think game programming is great--but I don't think it is sufficient to constitute a complete education.
Q: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over?”

A: Instead of taxing productivity, why not tax consumption instead? http://www.fairtax.org/
NameCheap + the current month's coupon (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=namecheap+coupon) is usually hard to beat price-wise for new domain registrations
I have moderately complex tax affairs here in the UK. Each year it takes about an hour.

I log on to the Revenue and Customs website, it asks me some basic questions about what I'd like to declare and then optimises the sections of the 'form' I need to fill in. So for example I don't need to declare any offshore assets so I never see that section of the form.

At the end it presents me with the entire form which I can download as a PDF for personal filing. I declare it to be true by clicking a check box and I send a cheque to the government (or in a bad year they send me a cheque).

It's all SO easy. They have a great phone line with people who answer questions honestly.

The only caveat being that you should do it well before the January deadline for personal tax as the website gets a bit slow in January.
No, it's been ages since I've used Windows.

In any case, FF 3.6 definitely doesn't feel slow on that site. Everything is pretty smooth except for scrolling which is a little jerky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ2PDbffKuQ

All in all FF 3.6 is a very nice update. It's noticeably faster than 3.5 on many websites. I used to use Firefox for general browsing and keep Chrome around for a few select websites that Firefox was slow at, but with this update FF is sufficiently fast so I don't need Chrome anymore.
Pardon my ignorance (hope I'm not kicked out of HN), but how does this work? Is there a server? Is it pure Javascript? Clueless...
I've got a pretty weak single core laptop and I have to say those benchmark tests are by far much much much faster in ff3.6, these are my results:

Garbage collection:

19	-	14

651	-	83

dom manipulations:

213	-	136

269	-	34

string:

400	100

120	122

410	16

230	66

Ok, the tests they provide are used to test those things that are supposed to get faster, so it's reasonable to believe it will, but the results are pretty good none the less.

(I ran the tests multiple times in both browsers to get the average)
I groaned when I read the Guardian's pretentious introduction too, but since I'm a massive Eno fan I read on. He's actually very down to earth, confessing his love for Abba, and coming up with a great metaphor for the music industry:

"The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it"

If you're interested in his music, here's a good taster:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOgQyIMX_XU
Forth isn't compiled most of the time. So go and write yourself a Forth interpreter in C or Assembler for your iPhone. It's (relatively) easy.
Well someone doesn't get it. In the 80s it was Apple running exactly the same play as they are trying now. Turns out the power of variety and multiple manufacturers prevailed over 'Your new model for this year will be'. Wonder what makes you think it will be so different this time.
I agree that amplify seems to offer more abstraction. But the Brace homepage says its more than just using significant whitespace:

"Brace has coroutines, hygenic macros, header generation, #! scripting and cached executables, libraries with graphics and sound, and many animated demos." (http://sam.nipl.net/brace/)
I'm curious.... Do you typically converse in Hebrew at these meetups?
Yes, though C-- might be a good target for his amplify system, still.

D also looks interesting --- as a much saner C++.
Pricing. The Macintosh was too expensive, the iPhone is dirt cheap at $100 subsidized.
He used familiar tools to quickly create a working prototype. He made progress with his thought experiment. Don't hate!
The Kindle is no better. Flash, flash, flash, flash, ok we've finally loaded your next page. I would have hoped that an electronic book reader could turn pages faster than I can by hand.
OKCupid Continues To Open The Kimono
Good health

Something engaging to do

An environment that aids rather than fights what you are doing

Honest company

Time alone

A steady dose of nature
The guy couldn't use it commercially for many many years. That was one of the better outcomes.
The idea that you could somehow "round up" the country's leading innovators in order to ask them questions, is itself the problem.

Innovators seem to appear out of nowhere; by the time they are well-known enough to find them, they have already done the bulk of their innovating.
This is the first one, we'll probably find out on the fly.
I think a lot of the guys here probably got interested in computer science because of games.

I started by making websites using a textarea on tripod and writing HTML for a Worms website. C++ and DirectX were just another 4 years away (I was 11).

I did 4 years of game programming in high school before going to college where I finally sat down next to others that wanted to learn. Some of them had never programmed before. But things that making computer games taught me intuitively instead of in a text book (and therefore understanding it deeper because I made the mistakes that called for these concepts):

- Polymorphism / Interfaces

- Large Project management and organization (main.cpp:10045 anyone?)

- Problem decomposition / abstraction

- "Full stack" multi-tool pipelining (photoshop->custom sprite sheet editor->low level image loading->memory management framework->abstraction layer->game logic)
- The interaction of a full system.

These things gave me an edge in school, and I'm not (just) beating my chest when I saw I wasn't really challenged until the second semester of my sophomore year. This is more likely because I had 200,000 lines under my belt by the time I got to school but its games that got me there.

I strongly encourage game programming as a way to start because the first time you get a picture moving on a screen you're going to want to do more, and it'll bring you back every time.
It's mostly Javascript and good ol' html/css. You can browse the source of the site with your web browser and check out all the JS goodness. There has to be a server to host the site, but I don't think it plays any other major role.
I'm curious why someone would enroll in a college and yet not go to class. Sure, for frat boys who are going for "communications & alcoholism degrees" that makes sense, but for someone sincerely interested in learning it's very puzzling.
UK seals documents about suicide of weapons inspector David Kelly for 70 years
That's a great concept which I need to try. The challenge will be extending it to SSL and making it friendly to Grandma.

That said, when Grandma first signed up at building-and-loan.com, she probably went to the correct site. Now that she has trusted that site, she won't be fooled by phishing sites asking her to enter her building-and-loan.com password. Her browser will play a message from Wilford Brimley warning her about the new site.

Of course when she first went to the building-and-loan.com site, she also got the warning from Wilford Brimley, which might have alarmed her. I suppose the warning would have to say "If you are signing up at this site for the first time, just make sure you came here by clicking a link that you trust." Grandma then thinks "well gee, I just clicked here from the Association for Golden Girls web site, so I should be fine."
At the place where I work it's become clear that we need something like cassandra or redis. The lack of robustness in the php redis client is a cause for concern for me (as compared to libmemcached), and I don't know much about cassandra, but our CTO opposes it because he thinks the documentation is spotty and not enough big projects are using it.

Thoughts?
I am in the last of my high school and I am still writing
games. I only have somewhere around 70K loc under my belt though.

The peers that I have in AP Computer Science seem to be also inexperienced as well.

Being able to start programming earlier than most of your peers definitely give you lot of edges. This is more so when you already have lot of projects(not necessary all successful) under your belt.
O'Reilly's original post does not say anything about DRM.
Tuned and asynchronous stencil kernels for CPU/GPU systems
For me, safari feels faster than chrome on the mac. I haven't done any tests so i don't have anything to back it up with..

On Windows/Linux though, chrome is the fastest you can get.
I make a practice of executing such a search before I submit a link. Of course, for me it's a VERY occasional practice. ;-)

Separately, would it be useful if HN had a sort presentation that listed posts/threads recently commented upon -- perhaps further weighted by post score -- as opposed to just recent comments (where the quantity combined with flatness of presentation quickly overwhelms me)? Of course, one would have trouble finding the new comment within the old thread -- particularly active ones -- unless there was further utility added to locate it within the thread of conversation of such a post. (If it was in response to a parent comment, it would not sort to the top.)

At which point, the current presentation paradigm for the site is starting to change significantly. Representing both a lot of work for PG, and an open-ended question as to the effects upon the community dynamics.

So... perhaps we are better off with what we have. If a page/topic is brought up again after after a significant period of time (more than a few days), it is handled as a new discussion. With thoughtful people like Rider... perhaps citing older posts/threads for further reference.
The two short lectures we have, are going to be in Hebrew.

But during the StartupWeekend event a few weeks ago, most of the pitches and demos were done in English.
Getting Up To Speed With Rails 3
I'm not going to argue with you about my choice of tool, enough bits have been spent arguing the pros and cons of various languages without getting anywhere.

But here's a challenge for you:

I've spent, start to finish less than 10 hour to code that, having the idea (life cells that track time independently by counting generations) was 5 minutes, building it including breaks for dinner and a movie and a nightly session to work out the kinks was 10 hours.

Clone it, in any other language that you care about, as long as the following conditions are still met:

- no fixed size world

- uses the same principles

- produces correct output (easy enough to verify, the
'end' stable state of the f-pentomino minus the ejected
gliders is easily checked)

You have this code for a reference, so you really only have to make a port, or you can decide not to look at it and build it from scratch.

Report back how long it took and show the source. That way we can all learn something because I'm really curious to see other implementations in other languages.

edit: to make this clear, my 'hangup' had to do with the bit that creates new cells on the fly, I was making them one generation older than the current one, that was a tricky mistake, it seemed like the right thing to do, after all then they could 'catch up' with the current crop and things would continue.

The reason that strategy backfires is that you potentially create a cell that is older than the 2 generation 'window' that you can accommodate in this scheme (because you only hold the state for the current and previous generations in a cell).

It took me a long time to figure that out because I was very much convinced the problem was elsewhere.

If I had chosen to use a statically allocated array of cells (more in line with a hardware simulation) that would have never happened, so as always, premature optimization is the root of all evil.