skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
as shown in the link, this work allows idiomatic Haskell to outperform idiomatic C

Interesting that you mention this. I know when I am writing C, I usually "malloc" dynamic data structures, whereas in Haskell, I usually "alloca" dynamic data structures (when talking to C libraries, obviously). Same end result, but alloca is actually faster, which makes allocation-heavy libraries faster when used from Haskell. (I guess I should use alloca in C, too. But I've never seen this anywhere.)

I noticed that this was especially helpful in a library I recently used that never allocated any of its own memory; it was always the responsibility of the caller. Haskell idioms worked much better than C idioms here.

I'm a bit confused about why you think operating within a monad causes problems for proving correctness; to my knowledge, verifying code which uses monads is no more difficult than code using any other data types.

Wait, are you saying that calling a function called "(>>=)" is no different than calling any other function? Shocking. :)
A list of Multivariate testing software available
As I’ve mentioned many times before there is no innovation without diversity.

I would love to see that supported. These things are parroted around a lot, always in relation to race. Is it true? Should VC's only fund companies with multi-cultural founders?

I'm pretty sure that it's most definitely not.
We had a similar problem with the magnet schools out east that were ladders for immigrants. It feels like the media pundits would rather attack an apolitical meritocratic institution or corpus for failing to take part in society's broken promises, instead of drawing attention to the real (and boring) cause of the problem.

What's more is that it's damaging in how it proffers the idea up that Si Valley is now some system, some status quo, that people should be obligated to aspire to (or at least is some measure of "success" in the traditional sense).

Whereas getting a good education is something that everyone should aspire to, getting a job in tech?.. That's a personal decision that should come from the heart. Who the heck knows where the tech industry will be in 20 years anyway?

I think the graveness of this difference will become more apparent when you think of possible solutions. One that I offered was that there should be more magnet schools that cater to minorities, that would seem more accessible to them, because honestly, most of these schools are self-fulfilling prophecies anyway.

But what would you do for tech? Set up companies for minorities to go into? Seed funds? What would they invest in? See, I don't think there's really anyone who actually knows where the tech sector is going, so this is going to be difficult to implement.
I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing, specifically how insane it is that people so widely believe that humans are some sort of apex of evolution and even don't recognize that we are just animals with tons of limitations and animal traits.

It's entirely and easily conceivable that there could be another species that looks at us and wonders whether we are intelligent or persons according to their standards of intelligence and personhood. After all, manipulating our environment might not be proof enough; it could be argued that we still do it as an automatic response, simply working together as a species to propagate the species and still ultimately motivated in all our actions by innate, animalistic desires. It can easily be argued that the only fundamental difference between humans and other animals is simply the complexity of our interactions with our environment. Even the things we hold up as proof of transcendence from the animal world are likely just adaptations, eg, what we consider an impulse to develop ethical systems is just an adaptation of the brain to keep individuals working in the interest of the species.

Furthermore, imagine these hypothetical creatures had a better understanding of what we consider "souls," death and even pain. They could theoretically see no ethical issue with causing humans pain, suffering and death since, from their perspective, we don't really understand what's happening and our reactions are just automatic self-preservation.
This covers fan pages - anybody know how to do the same for personal pages, in case you feel like snooping on people who are looking you up?

But then I see this:

http://grownupgeek.com/facebook-forums-whos-been-looking-at-...

Apparently it's against the TOS.
According to every dictionary I can find[1], radii is at least as accepted as radiuses. As for Prius, since it is a made up word the plural is essentially whatever the accepted English usage turns out to be. According to Toyota[2] anything customers want to use is fine, however online the general consensus seems to be that Prius is the plural form as well.

I am so tired of comments where people assert their particular view as true without doing any research, especially when trying to correct someone else.

[1] See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Radius, for examples.

[2] From http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_... , an interview with a manager at Toyota.
Approach potential buyer for something else like partnership or strategic investments, etc
Indeed, mastery of technology is the last thing that most blacks and Hispanics want to achieve in life.

Mastery of technology is the last thing that most people want to achieve in life, race irrelevant. What's your point exactly? Come out and say what you want to say.
The reason blacks and hispanics are not employed in silicon valley is that there are not as many skilled in IT blacks and hispanics as there are from other races in the United States.

It's a reason, sure.

If it were the reason, the percentage of black and Hispanic employees would be commensurate with the percentage of the "skilled IT" workforce made up by blacks and Hispanics. In addition, the stated decline of employed blacks and Hispanics would indicate a commensurate decline in availability of that skill set amongst blacks and Hispanics.

Vast oversimplification probably isn't useful in this case. It's quite likely that there are confounding factors besides the reason you named.
I think the article is a bit disingenuous. It's actually finding the carbon footprint of animated banner ads (since the only Flash content on the page right now seems to be a lone video player that does not autoplay). A more interesting test would be a comparison between these Flash ads and their equivalent HTML5/Canvas ads.
Nice looking site, though I'm not sure I completely understand how it works.
Your video demo is more of a 'how it works' than a 'why would I use it' type of thing.
As a developer, I'm stuck wondering how do I get picked to complete the task? or is it more like CrowdSpring where the buyer picks a winner in the end?

Also, the shadow behind your navigation items is pretty horrible. otherwise, a simple and good looking site.
Spam vs Mahalo: Matt Cutts Explains the Difference
Chinese Hacker Behind Google Attack Found
As a counter-example. Out of the 5 people that I tried to hire last year, 2 of them were black.

There are very good black programmers out there but I don't think any startup in their right mind will trade skill for diversity. It's strictly business, not personal.
I agree with it having nothing to do with free speech. However, your analogy seems off. I can buy any other brand bottle of alcohol and drink it at home and behave how I want to. Apple expects a strict code of conduct out of me even at home. And in this case they seem to be changing the conduct they allow.

It's definitely within their right, but surely we can complain about it.
Virtusphere - Full Body Immersion Virtual Reality
definitely better than having to relearn java or C++ every time they ask me to take one of these tests... which tests for your knowledge of a particular language rather than programming concepts in general. Way cool test.
Justdial.com spamming mail mocking Google (obviously illegal)
I guess this also means the more mentally handicapped a human is, the more acceptable it is to harm them.
The difference is that Cringely wasn't promoting his own products.
I don't mean to be naive, but aren't Eastern-Europeans white? This is more about visual minorities than foreigners.
Matt Cutts surely can't ignore this debate for much longer. The least he could do is chime in with Google's official perspective on the situation whether it's for or against the Mahalo approach.
Where's the data coming from? This is interesting as a sort of bookstore web-storefront, but the numbers look funny to me. Catcher in the Rye readers are 75% male? Poor Little Bitch Girl (by Jackie Collins) readers are 100% male?
I'm not sure i agree with graham on this one. Certainly it's useful and necessary to keep some brevity, however his jab at design patterns is a schoolbook false opposite (if you don't like extreme brevity you must be an enterprise java programmer, seems to be his subtext). That, and some lengh/repetition is useful to the brain's pattern recognition, allowing simpler understanding of code. There is of course also a point where too much repetition leads to a "can't see the code for all the statements" situation.
Where exactly this point is is probably highly personal.
Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural
forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary
includes an entry which implies that the plural of `mouse' is meeces,
and notes that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese'. This
latter has apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke)
among railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years

On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x' may
form plurals in `-xen' (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even
words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way;
e.g., `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are the
Hebrew-style `frobbotzim' for the plural of `frobbozz' (see frobnitz)
and `Unices' and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see
Unix, TWENEX in main text). But note that `Twenexen' was never used,
and `Unixen' was not sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty
years after it might logically have come into use; it has been
suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular
endings that attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is
reported that `comma' and `semicolon' pluralize as `commata' and
`semicola' respectively. Finally, it has been suggested to general
approval that the plural of `mongoose' ought to be `polygoose'.

The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is
generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an
import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending `-im', or the
Anglo-Saxon plural suffix `-en') to cases where it isn't normally
considered to apply.

This is not `poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware
of what they are doing when they distort the language. It is
grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done not to
impress but to amuse, and never at the expense of clarity.

- Jargon File
I've known a few people who don't get the "conversation is ending" inflection and can't/don't express it. It leads to some awkward pauses on the phone and me having to ask continuously if there is anything else. May be the other person doesn't want to hang up first, but I have no trouble hanging up first if there's an indication that the conversation is over and the other person isn't just stalling because they have more to say.
In short: becoming world-class is getting to the top N percent and depends on the number of people willing to practice for being world-class.

It seems that currently we've settled to 10 000 hours because 10 000 hours seems to reduce the number of candidates enough to make each "survivor" a real expert.

If suddenly more people started to practice 10 000 hours, you would possibly need 15 000 hours to distinguish yourself back to the top N percent among the horde of damn good (by our current standards) piano players, programmers, or whatever.

Being world-class also depends on the subject: the world can take only so many world-class piano players because the audience is somewhat limited, but it can absorb many more programmers because there are roughly infinite number of interesting and useful project to be done.
Feeling pretty insulted by that comment, what life achievement would you recommend us then?
I'm amazed this is not on the front page (as of this comment, anyway). I haven't had time to fully process the announcement, but anything Google does in the advertising space is going to have a fairly big impact.
Which is a gross oversimplification since we know that biomass production is often anything but carbon neutral. Were petrochemical fetilizers involved? Did they clear land to produce it? How much oil was used to transport it? If it came from a landfill, was anything done to hasten decomposition, if so, it may be releasing CO2 that would otherwise have been locked up for much longer.

I appreciate the idea of getting maximum use from things that have already been produced, but I'm pretty down on scaling biofuels up. I think there are better uses of land and freshwater. In practice, photosynthesis just isn't that efficient, and then the plant takes a big cut for its own growth and maintainence. Finally, there generally multiple inneficient steps for transformation into useful work. It is dismal compared to solar + battery + electric motor.
Leaving the iPhone
Why is Affirmative Action okay in every other industry and region but somehow when we take into account Silicon Valley it should be ignored. Bogus. As I’ve mentioned many times before there is no innovation without diversity.

Agreed. How 'bout it. And while we're at it let me say that I'm appalled by the over-representation of black sprinters in track and field too. How can it be that they are so consistently and completely the best? There's obviously something amiss. The total number of gold medals and world records they own is astonishing and a perfect example of why more diversity is needed. How can there be any innovation in the sport without slow white guys like me adding my perspective 80 meters behind in a 100 meter race ?

Pure human athletics and complex digital systems are very unforgiving in many of the same regards.
As a race, yes, but many tend to be immigrants that came to the US after the breakup of the USSR and come from different backgrounds than American-born whites, with mainly western-European backgrounds. They constitute a sizable bloc of their own that would be interesting to see the data from.
It's a nit, but please! Put dates after re-runs and old essays. Save the rest of us some lost seconds clicking to stuff we've already read.
From a couple of searches.

"The radius of a circle is the distance from the centre of the circle to its edge. The radius of a regular polygon is the distance from the centre of the polygon to any one of its vertices.
The plural of radius is radii."

From maths.org, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY.

http://thesaurus.maths.org/mmkb/entry.html?action=entryByCon...

From the BBC,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/tutors/lessonplans/spelling/...

From the Oxford dictionary,

http://www.askoxford.com:80/concise_oed/radii?view=uk

From the Chambers dictionary,

http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chre...

I'm sure both are generally accepted. Geniuses, Genii, Radiuses, Radii.

Bear in mind I'm talking about English, not American-English which may be different. I'm certainly not just making this stuff up though ;)
I graduated from high school in 1998. My grandfather, wanting me to learn something about business, gave me $500 to invest in the stock market. Java programming was hip at the time, and I decided to put the money into Sun Microsystems, resulting in ten shares.

A few months later, my grandfather passed away, so suddenly the stock wasn't just stock, but was also his final gift to me. I watched the stock double in value, go through several stock splits, and eventually my $500 investment was worth around $6000. But, due to emotional attachment, I didn't want to sell.

The dotCom boom turned into the dotCom bust, and my Sun stock gradually sank back down. At their request, in 2008 I mailed back my stock certificates as part of their "reverse stock split", and in 2010 (just a couple of weeks ago) I received in the mail a check for $190 from Oracle Corporation, as Sun is now no more.

Had my grandfather been here, he surely would have advised me to sell the stock when it was valued in the thousands of dollars, and had I known that in the end the stock would be reduced to a check for $190 from a different company, I reckon I would have decided to sell it myself.

So what did I learn? Don't get emotionally attached to a stock, or to a company, or to anything of that nature. Companies come and go. If you can make the world (or even your little piece of it) better by selling a stock, then consider selling it. The memories I have of my grandfather are far more precious to me than the stock, or the $190, or the potential for $6000, but I let emotions (and maybe a bit of stubbornness) persuade me otherwise for a decade.

Deal with facts. Find out what the company is doing and planning to do. Find out how well the company is managed, and if you do buy stock, keep up on how well the company is managed. If it looks like some new CEO is going to drive the company into the ground, that might be a good time to get out, even if the company is still making some cool product that you like.

For me, I tend to shy away from buying individual stocks now. There is great potential for great success, but there is also great potential for great failure. I like to think I have better odds at becoming wealthy by creatively working hard rather than by picking stocks, so most of my stock investments are spread across a variety of funds. Even those can turn sour quick, but in most cases, not as sour as quickly as an individual stock can.
By the time the employee comes to work for the company, the company has already committed quite a bit of resources into the employee. It doesn't seem all that unfair that the employee now has a somewhat greater obligation to the company, particularly since the employee chose this route.

Similarly, my sister's employer invested several grand in training her in Crossfit. She is now obligated to teach Crossfit for a year at a fixed wage, or else repay (12 - # of months worked)/12 x 100% of her training costs. Is that also "bonded labor"?
Or at least shut down their website - and, obviously, their even more wasteful print edition.
Freakonomics: Shaming Your Way to Weight Loss
Oh sure. A good analogy for me would be swimming up stream. Even if the outbound tide of Peak Oil is draining our wealth, technological advances can stem that tide.
It's a 15 year payback for ebay. The units were 50% off after subsidies.
not sure if i am saying the obvious here, but the reason that brevity is important is because it shows that you have the right abstractions. short code is a good indication that it's done right - you've found the best way to express the problem and so don't need to say so much handling the parts that you have not captured well.

if some languages are more verbose than others, then this can be for two reasons:

first, they may just need more typing to say the same thing. this is not, in my opinion, a problem.

second, they may lack ways of making abstractions that stop you from producing a good solution. that, in turn, leads to longer code (see above). this is a problem.

so "verbose languages" are not in themselves bad. the problem is languages that don't support easy / sufficient abstraction. and brevity is a quick n easy way of measuring this.

taking that further, and ignoring the practical issues, a strongly typed lisp might be more verbose if it required type annotations in some places. that wouldn't make it necessarily worse. in comparison, lisp without macros loses expressive power (in some vague sense) and so is worse (and gives longer code).
It's Joel Spolsky. See here:

http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html

and

http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.ht...
Canadian Citations - Breaking News on 411.ca
Well, that was my article. I did link to it on this one. This is a follow up.
"As an aside, organizations like TiE are absolutely absurd. You're trying to fight a "boys club" by forming your own boys club."

Amen. I am Indian but I think TIE perpetuates a racist/ethnic mentality and I would never take a cent (or rupee :-P) from them. Indians can be very racist/exclusionary

I don't want to be judged on my skin color dammit, just judge me on how well (or not) I code (or do product design or marketing or whatever).

In one company I worked at (ThoughtWorks) the owner was a kind of weird socialist (he was a nice guy just had these weird political beliefs - he thought the USA had too many conservatives but China had a very nice political system and that Reagan was a tyrant but Chavez was cool and so on) who believed in "Affirmative Action" and many dumb folks (carefully not specifying ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion etc here, to avoid a conflagaration) were promoted based not so much on any skills or successes but because they fit into a predetermined "diversity" slot.

Soured me on the whole concept (No, I didn't want a promotion to management. I was (and am) happy being a dev).

Thankfully , to date, programming remains a field where affirmative action and other half baked political fantasies don't apply.
Javascript: The Scope Pitfall
Are more or fewer syllables needed in various languages? Does it matter whether they are tonal languages?
I posted this about 2 hours ago but it seemingly fell through: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142971
How can there be any innovation in the sport without slow white guys like me adding my perspective 80 meters behind in a 100 meter race ?

Right, because having a diverse team means hiring incompetent people.

Trust me, the fact that you happen to be a slow white guy doesn't mean that I'm an intellectually slow black one. There are fast white people and smart black/Hispanic people: the fact that you aren't personally one of them, while sad, is certainly not an effective argument against a team or company recruiting from either group, respectively.

Your metaphor is a canard, plain and simple.
Very interesting. I think phone skills are something a lot of people overlook.

I don't have the resources to do a study on this, but another tip is to smile when you talk on the phone. It might just be because my voice is deeper (making something like a smiling face lets you hit higher notes when singing too), but it seems like people understand me faster on the phone when I do this.
Chimps Teach the Origins of Language
It was a pen name, and as Wikipedia mentions, was used by several different writers. It was made clear in his (their?) columns, at least in the early days, that the name was fictitious.

What happened here is a little different. Someone was claiming to be two different real people. In at least one case he even interviewed himself.
What I mean is that most flash games require mouseover and mousemove events to be used — or else they're completely void of interactivity — no more useful than a static image.

Most web apps, on the other hand, are fully useable without the user ever seeing any tooltip. That's what I mean by crucial. To be honest, I thought it was pretty clear already.