skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm always surprised at reactions from modern readers who seem to think that these sorts of observations are new. It's a particular type of blindness to history. People aren't more intelligent now than three thousand years ago.

Note that we have sources that commented on duplicates by around the 8th century, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soferim_(Talmud)
see the summary comment about Chap viii.

The Talmud describes all kinds of things that you might think are "modern" - ironing clothes (albeit by a different method), rain gutters, complicated financial arrangements (e.g. a contract with a managing partner and a silent partner, the silent partner putting up all the money, but half as a loan to the other partner and half as an investment), fertilizer, complicated property rights (e.g. when have I established a right to prevent someone from blocking my light or building a structure that lets them overlook my private property), methods of fraud detection in written contracts, and so on.

People knew about these duplicates since ancient times and weren't troubled by them. They have had explanations that aren't particularly far-fetched, e.g. that Ps. xviii. and II Sam. xxii are duplicates because one's a historical record of what King David said, and the other is the version he later edited for Psalms. Perhaps modern readers have different explanations, but the mere modernity doesn't automatically make them any better.
Root cause of problems in Africa: land and productivity
It also merits noting that hyperlinks did not exist at the time. Repetition and duplication accomplished this function instead.
I like it! What increment did you use?
Yes, but e.g. data tunneled over DNS is pretty hard to detect. I'm sure the Chinese government could spare some (a lot of) domain names.

Also note that a network card with DMA access has pretty much free reign of the computer.

However, all this is a lot more complicated than just hacking the latest Windows hole; I doubt it would be cost-effective.
Perhaps, but consider:

* Agile practice indicates that experience with users is the best way to keep project on a useful path. Research groups necessarily act without such input, which leaves them prone to going off into the weeds, including producing interesting technologies without a total appreciation for the practicalities, or a clear path to delivering it to users.

* One of Jobs' first acts on returning to Apple was to disband the research group (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203996.html). Why? I would guess because he wanted research to happen in the course of and for the purpose of innovative product development. There you can get the benefit of a user-focused development process, with a defined end result.

* As with any institution (e.g. NASA http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092972), without accountability from strong leadership or users they're prone to unproductive efforts. After all, how do you judge the quality of their efforts? How can you motivate them to strive - day to day at all levels - to make an impact, when they have these cushy unaccountable ivory tower positions?

Or, more practically, what has MSR produced that's active in changing the world, compared to a handful of startups acquired by Apple?
‘Don’t Be Evil,’ Meet ‘Spy on Everyone’: How the NSA Deal Could Kill Google
> Lambdas are for "one-liners", functions are for more-liners.

The problem, though, is that this is entirely a Python conceit. It is in no way, shape, or form any kind of programming truism. In fact, taking a more principles-oriented approach, a named function is really just a special case of a lambda. I think this may be one of those things that using a LISP (such as Scheme or Common Lisp) helps people realize.

This:

(define (foo n)
( . . . ))

. . . is just syntax sugar for this:

(define foo
(lambda (n)
( . . . )))

The fact that the syntax sugar is all many languages expose to the programmer doesn't change that fact, and the one-line restriction on "lambdas" in Python seems quite arbitrary.
Just now another link was posted that is much more valuable, while basically saying the same thing:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101201

In that video, he clearly expresses the same main idea, directly and without the fluff.
yawn .. This is really one of the first things you'll learn in any sales training class that you take. Never respond with a price the first time you're asked, but instead explain your value proposition.
I just read the article and loved it.

I'm a developer - I've been working on a startup for two years now and have some momentum. But it's hard work and great things don't happen overnight.

"Overnight success ... takes years" is a great reminder, and the idea of my software as a little box with a magical engine in outer space is delightful :-)
Sounds exactly like me. When I was 10 I dismantled my ZX81 to 'see how it worked' and broke it of course. I then got a ZX Spectrum to keep me from crying about it which I also ended up taking apart, but managed not to break.

I think I conditioned everyone in my family to be more afraid of letting me near electronic equipment with a screwdriver than the equipment itself.
People aren't more intelligent now than three thousand years ago.

While I agree that there's a lot to be learned from our ancestors, there's some question about how the average intelligence may have changed over historical times. The Flynn effect suggests that rather large changes can take place across entire populations.
An additional explanation (by Rashi) is that the first one is about the destruction of the first temple, and the second one about the second temple.

I don't know why it was left out of the translation, but 53 starts: For the conductor, on the machalath [a kind of music instrument].

And 14 starts with just: For the conductor.
My iPhone to-do app phones home with usage stats. After I sold 5000 copies I had a user inquiring about the suspicious network traffic. There is practically zero chance that something like this goes undetected - you just can't hide this stuff.
What happened to the library situation in Common Lisp? Your comment looks like it improved since the last time I checked. That would be nice. (Though I fear Common Lisp is still too ugly for me to enjoy it. Perhaps some reader macro magic could rectify the situation. ;o)
Is China throttling Google.com?
I do live in Shenzhen, and i noticed that in the past 2 days Google.com is getting seriously slow and unusable. Since it works quite perfectly with my VPN located in USA, i am becoming quite concerned. Moreover Google.com.cn does work perfectly, and all the other foreign sites are at the average usual speed. My main concern is that for all of us, foreigners in China, Google is absolutely a must have, for me is even more, a survival tool. Can somebody in China confirm that this is actually happening ?
Evidence please?
Having a clear business model, a simple-as-possible route to that business, a good demonstration, and a high level of personal investment is how you nail a pitch.

Or I guess you could focus on your elevator description of your business and wearing high heels.
While certainly they won't be interested in your grocery list, theatrics are part of the presentation, and do make a difference. Would you react the same if a bum came in, pulled that list out of his pocket, and uncrumpled it as he handed it over to you?
Awesome work Angel, fantastic presentation and some insightful points. I'm glad you finally told your story because you should. Now to get this on WomanzWorld.com like I've been wanting to more months!
Social Search has Potential
Why spider webs glisten with dew
Isn't this pretty much NLP?
Big Blue Builds a Big Green Flagship for its Cloud
HipHop PHP - Nifty Trick?
Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of Systems Hungarian.

After thinking about it more, I think I've decided over the years that problems like variable type should be handled in the architecture, not the variable names. If encoding your variable types in your variable names is doing you any good, then either your functions are getting a lot longer than they really ought to be, or you've got more globals than you should, or you aren't correctly handling objects.

I think this is true even for Apps Hungarian. It looks like Joel's article [1] is one of the most-cited resources on Apps Hungarian, and the specific example he uses is for signaling safe versus unsafe strings in a web application. He comes up with a somewhat convoluted example of why you might want to keep an "unsafe" string around, but I don't buy it. Every single input in a web application (for one example) should be vetted before any processing on the input takes place. You might not want to HTML-encode a string going to your credit card interface, but you certainly do want to validate it.

This is actually even more the case in things like traditional C/C++ applications, because the code bases get so much larger than the average web application. By the time you get to inner functions, they shouldn't need to care whether the input is correct or not; it should have already been handled elsewhere.

The one exception to this -- in my case anyway -- is in resolving variable scope. If I'm starting to use too many globals, it's hard to ignore lots of "gSomething" all over the place. That's a signal to me that it's time to re-think what I'm doing. Likewise with the loop counters. Prepending "x" to local variables just reduces name collisions with other functions and objects and whatnot.

[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html
Having a clear business model, a simple-as-possible route to that business, a good demonstration, and a high level of personal investment is how you nail a pitch.

No, that's now you nail your business. Nailing a pitch may require those things as well (though apparently not always), but investors are sales prospects and need to be marketed to and sold, just like anyone else.
GCstar 1.5.0 su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
This looks very cool. I wish I could get my hands on one.
Rasmus writes:

> The "nifty trick" part of that seems to have become the story, and them injecting a "just" in front it of it makes it sound more derogatory. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of nifty tricks that solve the problem. When I first heard about the Facebook effort I was assuming they were writing a JIT based on LLVM V8 or something along those lines. Writing a good JIT is hard. Doing static code analysis and generating compilable C++ from it is indeed a nifty trick. It's not "just" a nifty trick, it is a cool trick that takes advantage of a number of characteristics of PHP. The main one being that you can't overload PHP functions. strlen() is always strlen, for example. In Python, this would be harder because you can overload everything.

> I also noted that most sites on the Web have a lot of lower hanging fruit that would provide a much bigger performance improvement, if fixed, than doubling the speed of the PHP execution phase. The ReadWriteWeb site, for example, needs 160 separate HTTP requests and 41 distinct DNS lookups to load the front page. And once you get beyond the frontend inefficiencies you usually find Database issues, inefficient system call issues and general architecture problems that again aren't solved by speeding up PHP execution.
While our situation is quite good (and in absolute term probably the best ever), I doubt that we (=US 2010?) have "insane mobility" --- measured in actual turnover between quantiles of wealth from one generation to the next.

Does anybody have some sources? (I'd guess it would be interesting to look at societies in great turmoil (e.g. England after 1066, French Revolution, Communist revolution in China) or societies with more equality of wealth than the US (e.g. Scandinavian countries). They may well have more mobility (at least in a purely technical sense).)
Well AAPL and MSFT are two different ball games. AAPL hit the jackpot with iPhone, post iPhone Apple has been a second coming of Apple, its no longer the same company for investors.
For investors, due to consistent profitability and revenues, MSFT is a safer bet than Apple which reflects in the returns.
I'll be sure to try this technique... tomorrow. ;)
"gVariable" was common back in things like "Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus" and the like, years ago. I think it's an old Pascal convention, but I'm probably wrong.

When working on others' code, I do adopt their style, including their braces and so forth.

But for my own stuff, my style is more comfortable, and I think that when other people see it, it's pretty clear what's going on.
Wikileaks Raises Enough to Keep the Lights On
The fine people at DARPA are working on this problem: http://www.darpa.mil/MTO/Programs/trust/index.html
All New Facebook User Interface for Windows and Mac
Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software
My opinion is that Steve Jobs won't survive in MS due to their culture. Their take on innovation is to be a late market joiner.

They win because they do things better with their resources.

MS has an innovation model. It's just that it is a very non-innovative innovation model.
Flash 10 versus JS/HTML5: The Tour Guide
mass = tasks, the ones that need repeating (or you'll stop (making money)) and the ones that have yet to be done (or you'll stop (making money)).
Google Streetview in Stores
One problem that I don't think the iPad's defenders are acknowledging is Joel Splosky's "Law of Leaky Abstractions" -- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm... .

Of course, the ideal is to leak minimally; Apple has always been good at that, but very bad at allowing anyone past the abstraction in the event that it breaks down. I believe the analogy is "sports cars with their hoods welded shut."
My point is that there are many small problems which we solve as engineers every day that are too trivial to publish in a paper.

It is all well and good until some moron (genius?) comes along and patents these simple ideas.
Vision India 2020 Is Ready For You
Readers, you know that I have been working on Vision India 2020 for almost two years. The book is a collection of my 45 business ideas leveraging India’s strategic advantages, spanning a diverse set of sectors ranging from technology to education, healthcare to infrastructure, film to rural development.<p>These are big ideas, each with the potential of becoming billion-dollar businesses while addressing specific market opportunities in unique ways. I have, in effect, given you access to my notebook, so that some of you can take these ideas forward.
Polyamory gets a bad rep due to the highly sensational abuses reported the last few decades. Most recently, in Utah and Paris(?).
The article we're all commenting on talks about Microsoft's ill-fated Tablet computer, which premiered almost a decade before the iPad. Microsoft does many things which could be considered 'innovative,' except that they never achieve widespread market acceptance.

Also, when was the last time Microsoft won with the "non-innovative innovation model" you refer to? Sharepoint? SQL Server? I can't think of any instance where this has worked in years.
Might've been fun, but probably wouldn't've done any good. Based on my experience -- numerous judges spread out across a handful of counties in California -- the judge is short on time, shorter on patience, and will decide your case based solely on whether or not you were going faster than the posted speed limit.

(Yes, I like to drive fast. No, not because I'm in a hurry or expect to get anywhere faster -- it's just how I drive. It's not something I'm either proud or ashamed of.)
I wonder which would actually faster - binary search on the standard ordered alphabet or going linearly in order of letter frequency.

Even better - some hybrid algorithm that goes through the most common letters then goes into binary search for the remaining letters (many of which appear at approximately equal frequency)
The Flynn effect is too short a timescale. Maybe it was just recent malnutrition from industrialization.

Aside from the fact that cranial capacity has been pretty stable, it's just impossible to believe that intelligence is substantially different if you spend time studying the Talmud, or for that matter Greek philosophers. The Greek philosophers throw people off, because everyone remembers all the science they got wrong.

For instance, in the Talmud, in that kind of transaction I mentioned - the half-loan half-investment deal, where one guy puts up the money and one guy puts up the work, the Talmud notes that the guy doing the work a) received a loan, and b) is working to manage the other guy's investment. Putting two and two together, he's working for the other guy for free, just because he got a loan. I.e., he's paying interest, and therefore this is forbidden under the prohibition against usury unless the investor pays the worker for his time. You can't begin to wrap your head around that kind of stuff unless you have more or less modern intelligence.
That's when you wish them luck in their endeavor, and break off the conversation.
I wish i had this advice when I was first pitching
Here's a comprehensive list. I'd encourage everyone to get involved with their nearest hackerspace!
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces
Something of a broader response from Reason.com - "Stop the Car, Larry. I Want to Get Out", excerpt: "While the folks at Cato would respond to special-interest lobbying by reducing the size and scope of government so less of life is politicized and there is less to lobby about, Lessig would respond by amending the Constitution to restrict freedom of speech."

http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/28/stop-the-car-larry-i-want-...
This is sort of off the topic, but only a little bit: I would consume a lot more content from InfoQ if it wasn't in video form. I rarely have time to sit and watch a video, but I can throw a written interview into Instapaper and read it wherever. Yes, they provide transcripts for everything, but they're so poorly formatted as to be mostly useless. And no offense to the interviewees, but I can probably read faster than you talk.

Am I alone?
Mail.app and the iPhone natively support Exchange if you're into that.

iPhone support is great in my experience.

I love Outlook 2010, which I'm beta testing. Mail.app was just too buggy for me and I like being able to have a shortcut key to file email and the rule support is just so much better in Outlook.

I also prefer OWA to gmail, but don't use either.
I think there would be a healthy demand for that service
Don't everybody gonna get hung up on the $250,000 demogrant. Bowles is a super interesting thinker (same for his frequent co-author, Herb Gintis). Bowles (and Gintis) are trying to synthesize agent-based modeling, evolutionary game theory, behavioral economics, mainstream economics together with the other social sciences. It's an ambitious project and absolutely necessary.

Come to think of it, ff there's one economist who would appeal to functional programming eccentrics and polymaths it'd be Bowles. His papers are pretty readable for non-economists so if you're curious check out his homepage.
Uh, I meant; Nokia currently develops Qt; Qt as it currently stands is developed by Nokia. Qt was developed by developed by Trolltech. Nokia didn't originally develop Qt. I didn't say "was developed by"... Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo ... English ... has a lot tense strangeness...
It's a great book, and of all the game theory books I've seen it's the easiest and most enjoyable to read (not that it's easy).
No, just don't trust those who have proven themselves untrustworthy.
No you're not. That's why every time I see one of their interviews, I grab the transcript and dump it to google docs for everyone to use.
An in-residence collective sounds like a great idea! Again in LA, I know of one great example for artists: the Brewery Arts Complex: http://www.thebreweryartistlofts.com/brewery_website_002.htm
A demogrant and a NIT are different ideas.
"AAPL hit the jackpot with iPhone, post iPhone Apple has been a second coming of Apple"

And before the iPhone, AAPL hit the jackpot with the iPod, post iPod Apple has been a second coming of Apple. And before the iPod, AAPL hit the jackpot with the iMac, post iMac Apple has been a second coming of Apple.
Looking for developer? Visit my portfolio @ tjoozey.com
You are right, mobility in the US is not what conservatives think it is.

Sources:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
"By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

From The Economist, http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/01/the_economist_o.ht...
"would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap."
Adobe Defends Flash, Calls Apple Uncooperative
That's pretty cool. There are some good ideas that can be implemented for the iPad, and if several iPhone devs could get together and apply together, I think this would be quite an opportunity.
Big companies are horrible at innovation.
Simon Peyton Jones
I like the direction that UI design has been headed at 37Signals. They've gone from extremely minimal to clean and simple. I seem to recall that they've hired some graphics people in the last year, which is a skill I don't think they had that much of in the past.

That aside, kudos on this - most forums are painful to look at and use.
How Many Passes? - How the C# compiler works
Not so much anymore. Google Apps and/or Open Office are more than sufficient for most small businesses. 10 years ago Windows and Office didn't have any viable competition. Times have changed.
Isn't that number kinda shady given the MacBU is under Entertainment and Devices?
How much you get paid is a function of your perceived value and your employers budget. Age can affect the former, but only if you let it.
I don't think many people who have grown up using computers struggle with basic file system concepts, installing programs or using office applications. Maybe we have reached the stage where a basic understanding of computing, along with basic numeracy and literacy, is necessary to function in modern society?
We have Postini already, so we decided to relay through them. Also, I noticed that my emails were blocked before I had an elastic IP, but after I got an elastic IP address they weren't. YMMV.
I dunno.

I once met some SunSpot developers at a conference (perhaps it was a Maker Faire?) and I asked when the Spots would be for sale. One of the developers explained that they had a warehousefull, but had a lot of problems getting organizational agreement on how to sell the units (they aren't servers, etc.) They eventually found they could sell them the way the company sold t-shirts. $500 t-shirts, anyway.

tl;dr: company can't sell things even when they want to.
You can write apps in other languages and embed the associated interpreter (e.g. Ruby, Lua, Python). You are not allowed to download and interpret code that has not been signed and reviewed.
Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness
Agreed. My Mom wants an iPad, too.
The apple price would factor in the constant innovation they bring, if this were to stop then I'd imagine they would lose a lot of value.
By the way, this article first appeared in a recent Something Awful thread. It is very long but has heaps of information for anyone interested in highway design.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=317...
Frequency order is analogous to Huffman coding while still being easy enough for a human to use, so it's probably better than binary search.