skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that this is a tangent - my point was that it's not a relevant tangent because (without disagreeing on any of your genetics) this woman's odds of becoming a professor after being born in a tiny soon-to-be-extinct tribe on a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal were negligible regardless of her intelligence or genes.
"F# also has a feature called ‘computation expressions,’ and we’re particularly happy with the unity we’ve achieved here. "

Computation Expressions aka Monads

"The designers of F# use term "computation expression" and "workflow" because its less obscure and daunting than the word "monad." [1]

Monads for Morts? seriously though, is anyone really daunted by Monads?

It is a great interview. Thanks for posting. F# is one thing I respect MS for. Linux/OSX really has no equivalent[2]. The ocaml implementation has a lot of catching up to do and Mono is a steaming pile of crap.

[1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/F_Sharp_Programming/Computation...

[2] Equivalent to F# . HAskell is a different (but awesome) language , thankfully available on all platforms
now that's a good idea.
Guidewire Software in San Mateo is still hiring developers (and QA and product managers), primarily on the more senior side at this point. Applications are written in a mix of Java and our C#-ish JVM language called Gosu (open sourcing later this year, we hope), the platform infrastructure is pretty much all Java, and we do a lot of testing and use a lot of agile practices to organize our releases. You can apply from the website (http://www.guidewire.com/about_guidewire/careers_listings), which will go straight to HR, or send me an e-mail (akeefer at guidewire) directly if you'd prefer and I'll answer any questions you have and/or pass along your info the appropriate parties.
no they said the opposite that they are surprisingly cpu-bound.
> Should people challenge assumptions? Sure. Are you required to challenge every assumption at every conceivable opportunity? No, that's OCD behaviour.

Sorry that I was unclear. The parent post seemed to be implying that anyone that comes up with a perpetual motion thought experiment should just have the phrase "can't exist it would violate thermodynamics" tossed at it. I'm not advocating working out every thought experiment that anyone could come up with, but to workout none of them is just putting blind faith in the law of thermodynamics. And so far as I understand it, blind-faith is not supposed to be part of the scientific process.
thinking that php is written in C why didnt they do php->c instead of php->c++?
>disconnected, community-focused

What value is there in these things? If I want to connect with somebody, I will find them were I am. A community is just a collection of random people who happen to be born within a small geographic area, a nation the same except the distances within are larger.
seriously. what a waste of time.
Web Laureate Insight, "iPad: Frowl"
By your response, I suspect that you do not think a "solution" to this problem is needed at all.

I find it refreshing that the author readily acknowledges that the people left behind are there because they are not talented enough to go anywhere else. It was very politically incorrect of him to say so.

With that as the premise, what do we do with those people left behind? Our meritocracy allows fewer and fewer people to control ever more of society's wealth and resources. What of the rest of society? Basically, we are witnessing the ghetto-fication of Middle America. Is that not a problem?
Terry's earlier article about the future of PHP (linked in the first paragraph of this one) is also very good reading:

http://phpadvent.org/2009/1500-lines-of-code-by-terry-chay
"If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result."

There are no people in the world who can do anything in the world. Even if your child had all of the intelligence, physical ability, drive, and opportunity possible, he or she would never have a choice between being a jockey and a basketball player. So, no matter how much of a meritocracy we have, you will be lying when you tell your child, "You can be whatever you want."
>A relative handful of people taking society's spoils for itself...

The economy is not a cake, if you assume it is then your deduction will be incorrect.
"The author's mistake is in thinking that you can give someone dignity by treating them as more capable than they actually are."

In some parts he argued that is what we are education system is doing now, in others he seemed to be advocating exactly that (the traditional farming community, for example).
I thought it was a little bit nifty and then signed up for it. Found a parking ticket I didn't even know I had! Awesome.
I thought Adobe couldn't improve Flash performance on OSX because Apple has no API they can use? That was the story a couple weeks ago. CoreAnimation is years old now. No one thought of this earlier in the process?
http://weitz.de/starter-pack/
Every city with wide swaths of land with restricted density has an oversupply of detached housing, which lowers prices relative to the alternatives, but increases prices across the board due to the overall reduction in available units. Reducing restrictions on density allows developers to build what they think people will buy, and people can choose the price they're willing to pay for it. If anything, the gap between condo and house prices in Vancouver is evidence that zoning in other cities is raising prices. Vancouverites clearly prefer to trade detached housing for a better location, and cities that prevent people from making that choice are doing their citizens a disservice by making any given location more expensive to live in.

If Vancouver had zoning similar to Sun Belt cities, people under 40 would buy more detached houses, but they would be in the suburbs. Housing in those suburbs would be more expensive than it would be in current suburbs if there wasn't an urban growth boundary.
Your logic's terrible.

_this community means nothing to you other than being a great place to advertise._

That conflates a community with a site, and attention-seeking with profit-seeking.

_before long the front page is nothing but posts about balls_

How long is before long? I actually think that would take a while, although I'd certainly be impressed if it happened overnight.
The ratio of existing to new homes makes sense since no one's been building the last couple of years, but that shadow inventory is definitely worrying.
It's strange.

In the beginning, they described their model creation, the procedural animation, the sheer massiveness of working with an entire universe... stuff never seen before in a game. It was huge. Everyone was excited.

In the end, the game was much too simple to be enjoyable.
Interesting. Side question - is it economically rational in San Francisco for a person to repeatedly acquire parking tickets rather than seek out parking or pay for a monthly spot somewhere?
Vancouverite here - the city has infamous height restrictions as well as maximum density bylaws in zoning. The downtown core would be an even denser maze of skyscrapers if it weren't for these laws, and IMHO they do contribute to the sky-high housing prices.

Vancouver's transit was essentially in standstill since the 80s until very recently, and "reasonably accessible to downtown" land was already all spoken for. Couple this with onerous zoning restrictions and you see why stuff got expensive real fast; the influx of rich immigrant housing speculators really didn't help either.

The city's overdue for a major reckoning of housing prices, and I for one will be happy to see it. It is ludicrous for housing to be 10x income.
Poll: How many users have been asked to submit things for social news sites?
I wanted to see how many users on HN have been asked to game HN and possibly why they have been asked? Given the recent article by ReadWriteWeb and others I was just wondering the prevalence of gaming on sites like HN and reddit?
Yes for $$$ or other goods
Yes as a favor
The point here is that if final functioned like const, you wouldn't be able to advocate 'using it everywhere' like he is.
They aren't reusing any of the Zend PHP implementation. But that's exactly what phc (http://www.phpcompiler.org) does.
This all sounds good, yet it doesn't change the fact that on my Mac, if something slows down my browser enough to be noticeable (on a Mac Pro), it's usually flash.

Hope the next version will be that big improvement that we've been waiting for, but I won't hold my breath.
Let me re-write my response: Why shouldn't they pay for getting the advertising and millions of views of being on TechCrunch? Why should this be free?

Wouldn't the ethical dilemma be the payment for good results not the payment to be included in the first place? If consumer reports was running a review of vacuums and I knew I'd probably not be included, is it unethical to pay them to be included even if they don't give me high marks?
In cases like that I usually exact the try/catch block into a separate private method which returns an int. Then the constructor can just call that method and use the return value to set foo.
It might rightly argue that. But java suffers from being too verbose and not flexible enough. Now someone proposes to add another keyword to 99% of declarations to make java act in a similar to what some other languages do by default. Maybe you should just use another language if state (i.e. the standard way of programming in java) bothers you that much?
We're hiring java devs in London, we're working on Mobile payments, SMS, MMS and VoIP

http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/softdev
Take the shadow inventory stuff with a grain of salt. Mostly speculation.

Keep in mind that Zero Hedge is a very controversial finance blog, and the writer has a dubious past.
They aren't trying to reuse the Zend C libraries. However, phc does, and it is tricky and requires sacrifices.
"If my kid grows up to be a garbageman, it will not bother me, if that's what he wants to do."

What if it means that he can't afford health insurance, save for retirement, or make a down payment on a house?
Getting the Linux Advertising Game Face On
>"Adobe's only real hope is to open-source and freely license the whole Flash stack"

This, on the week that Jonathan Schwartz officially steps down? ;)

Anyway, if HTML5 does replace Flash, what difference would open sourcing make?
Also: the photo shows boxes of Windows 95, which isn't part of the Windows NT line and thus doesn't contain the buggy code. Of course, on Windows 95 there's no such thing as privilege escalation, as all users have full access to the system anyway.
While the fact that more people want to live in Vancouver than there are houses in Vancouver contributes to the cost, the city does place a premium on views of the north short mountains and it being a livable city to the detriment of increasing supply:

http://bit.ly/cEBUTG (CBC NEWS article, "Vancouver rejects downtown high-rise proposals")

While the 10x median stats has many causes, one cannot discount the zoning element as being trivial. I imagine one can find similar practices in most major north american cities.
I make variables inside loops final. The compiler should automatically handle that and avoid unnecessary re-allocation.
> "people under 40 would buy more detached houses, but they would be in the suburbs."

The trick with Vancouver is that it's completely boxed in, and almost all land is spoken for already. Pacific ocean on the west, mountains to the north, mountains to the east, and the US border to the south. There's not a lot of land to sprawl into, especially if the province wants to retain agricultural output.

Far-away suburbs like Surrey have already seen skyrocketing housing prices, and developers are trying to convert as much farmland as possible, but the reality is that Vancouver simply doesn't have the luxury of sprawling outwards. I'm not particularly sad about this fact (I just can't get behind suburban models of cities), but it does contribute to the ridiculous housing prices.
Twitter is hiring for systems, frontend, etc. We're pretty polyglot but the majority of integration with the web app is ruby, a good deal of the backend is Scala and the rest is whatever works best.

http://twitter.com/jobs
Spoken like a man, thanks for that.
Can't beat the Weitz!
Sounds cool. When I have my greencard I'll send you my resume... ;-)
American Roamer in Memphis, TN is hiring. We are the leading provider of wireless industry data and data analysis. If you've seen a map of coverage availability, it's likely that we made it. We provide an interactive mapping tool written in Javascript with Ruby and Java backend services. I'm pretty sure local candidates are being considered first.

http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/6160
Ten Myths of Apple’s iPad: 3. It’s ad-evil
To avoid the "I'm a friend of [x] ..." email, I always say:

"Send me your resume, and I will make sure it gets to the right person."

I won't actually forward the resume on, but I usually look at the resume for curiosity - and if it's a friend I might send them a few pointers on how they could improve their resume. Pick the "Don't eat where you shit", "Don't mix business and pleasure", or whatever cliche you prefer.

Are you lying when you do this? Maybe. If they're not a good candidate, you might as well be the "right person" to discard their resume.

Alternatively, you could say something like:

"I had a bad experience recommending a friend, so I make it a personal rule that I don't do it anymore."

(I would probably make an exception for exceptional people.)
For marketing, you could possibly "disguise" flyers as parking tickets, and put them on cars parked in areas that are highly ticketed (downtown, college campus, etc). When a potential customer opens it up, it could have a link to your site and a small call to action.
Dworkin's Game Driver (open source licensed Feb 3)
That's dated December 19, so I'd imagine it's a bit out of date.
The java.util.Collections class has several methods for making collection objects immutable. I use those whenever possible. Of course that only prevents changes to the collection, it doesn't prevent changes to individual collection elements.

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Collections....
Nothing wrong with having multiple tools to accomplish the same task.

For reference, check out damn near anything computer related.
I agree, it is terrorism.

Terrorism of my senses and my brain cells. It's simply a new addictive format, like TV was when it first became mainstream. I've almost lost my wife to Facebook, and all my friends ask me for my Twitter name, even though I've told them twice that I don't have one.
Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling
Haven't really looked at it yet, but I've had the thought that if you should "not fool yourself" then probably it's a good starting point to learn how people fool other people. This looks pretty cool. Bookmarked.
Web Laureate Classic: "Alerts.com: all a grrrl needs"
There are "chording keyboards". Searching on that may turn up some items of interest. Not cheap, though, which is why I never got around to paying to try one.
I guess we can count that as a real endorsement for Apple though.
Can't seem to get the demo to work on the latest WebKit nightly build:

TypeError: Result of expression 'a.Pi' [undefined] is not a function.
We are. Ruby on Rails shop (http://turingstudio.com) - we essentially operate as an external engineering team for startups. Current projects include a well-funded, pre-launch social networking project for preteens, a web-based CRM for non-profits, lots more in the pipeline. Distributed team, smart people, desperately need more engineers. Hit us up at jobs@turingstudio.com.
Why the hate? Honest question, as I know next to nothing about Django.
"Try building a player that runs a huge range of dynamic content written on a variety of tools (some of which you don't control) by developers with massively varying skill levels. Now try making it compatible, consistent, and performant across dozens of OSes, browsers, platforms, and devices. And maintain backwards compatibility with the last 9 versions even while your target platforms change. And keep it under 5MB. And maintain it in parity with an OSS effort (Tamarin). And try to keep up with the demands of one of the most active and vocal developer communities."

Isn't this something the open source community would handle amiably? It seems like a problem that shouldn't be handled by one company. He doesn't ever address the problem that Flash is closed source and controlled by one commercial entity, but instead goes after the low hanging fruit.

He also fails to point out that the tools and technology behind HTML5 will improve dramatically as it becomes widely used.
You can't do that. It would require a language change, to make try/catch blocks expressions.
Awesome, awesome company name btw.
Odd. I have no idea why anything in this thread was vote down.
And that is exactly why this is such a bad thing, basically any company the guy ever wrote about is now 'under suspicion', which is why TC should clean up this mess completely.
The problem wasn't with performance in general, it was with hardware decoding of H.264 video. I don't believe anything has changed on that front. The core animation change is supposed to help with vector graphics rendering.
This type of service has been around in Shanghai for quite a few years. Its been very useful to me.
For me (Cambridge, MA) it was definitely cheaper to get and pay tickets than to pay for monthly parking at my two apts ago apartment building. I averaged well under $100 worth of tickets a month, against a parking garage charge of $250/mo, plus I didn't ever have to wait for my car to be brought out by the garage valets.

Back in college (again in Cambridge, MA), a resident parking violation was $10, and garage parking in Harvard Sq for the evening was $14. Guess how hard it was for the residents to use their resident parking spots... (They've since raised it signficantly.)
Performance: Using LCG to copy property values of two objects
Okay, really, I want you to apply for Systems. We're building horizontally scalable, distributed, big data systems that can take unprecedented growth. The company is only a 134 people right now, and your impact as a developer would be huge.

http://twitter.com/job.html?jvi=oAPbVfwf,Job
zero context? typically western
I acknowledge the author's arguments and recommendations.
However, I do feel I have the right to exercise my freedom of speech, even if its tongue-in-cheek. That said, my view is that Java, the language, has some deeply rooted flaws.
Lots of designers and programmers have invested a lot of time mastering Flash so it would really suck for them if it died.
Oops. There go some of the points I was trying to argue else where in this thread. Should have read to the end before replying.
I would assume through here:
http://www.bluefroggaming.com/jobs.php

But a direct way to contact him/her would be nice so that you don't have to deal with getting past the HR wall of nonsense (i.e. 30+ years of Java experience).
This is, technically, an effort by people to ensure Theora is usable in most web browsers. In other words, they're bringing a decoder to IE and any that don't support Theora ... if the user has Silverlight/Mono.

I see a win/win here, if it's opensourced!
I'm well aware of the possibility that he could be trolling, but I also don't doubt that he'd do all he could to push an article to the front page for money. Obviously I can't control his actions, but what do you suggest we do? If we all just ignore him, it might work, but it also might suggest to people on the fence about the issues that the HN community doesn't care about that kind of behavior.
http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

Stick with it...(especially in the middle and towards the end)

I'm still very much trying to digest the contents of this article rather than regurgitating the usual flippant answers.

Not everyone can get a job in at their local Google datacenter, even if they train for 2 years. (There was an amazing NPR story recently to this effect.) And while I have moved multiple times, and across two hemispheres to get to Silicon Valley (and yet still can't call myself local to anywhere) I feel some obligation to satiate something I which appears as burgeoning task vacuum in rural America.

That is, there is a tremendous amount of idle "Turking" power going to waste in the heartlands - lifetimes of mechanical acuity being thrown away on television rather than say another Wikipedia/Github for rapid-prototyped goods .
Dolby is hiring, in Santa Clara, looking for a javascript/REST/Erlang/Mongo person to hack/design/etc on a distributed validation engine. DM f00biebletch or email kevin.mcintire at dolby.com.
If the problem is moderately complex and you've thought about how to solve it, sure, why not. I could see it happening on rare occasions; at that point, its just a matter of writing the solution down properly, not solving the problem anymore.

Or maybe the 1500 lines includes tests or Allman style code and you're counting {}'s..
FourSquare Fatigue and the Evolution of Privacy
The solution is to change the system by the individual action and perspective that will diminish the entrenched badness, and to spread these philosophies among friends.

So you're suggesting to combat crime with spreading proper philosophies among friends? Good luck with that. What do you think will happen if rape or theft was legalized tomorrow?
IPad Programming Tutorial (scroll down)
I would say that it is incorrect, yes, or at least incomplete. You never see any numbers when social programs are criticized. The NY Times or The Economist would give numbers, make comparisons and give some historic context.You just don't see that in most of the Brazilian media. Social spending is always portrayed as too expensive and patronizing. Now, if a state government has to come up with a billion dollars to woo in a new enterprise, that's alright and doesn't even require a second thought.
Don't do this! I'd be seriously pissed off if I saw a 'ticket' on my windshield and then realized that it wasn't one.
The very first code snippet is NOT valid Java and yet the author claims decades of programming experience (about page).
He also seems to have very recently discovered the side-effects of imperative programming.
You are correct in that Core Animation (10.5) and Core Video (10.4 - own framework 10.5) aren't exactly new. Adobe has been shunning any native technology in OS X and preferring to do things their own way (heck - look at their UI). Maybe it finally got through to them that they need to use the local frameworks to get performance?
PhiPhone with vnc on 2/5/10 - ϕ
Are they that different?
Prosecute them for what crime?
Heh, I didn't think so. ;)
Working at Webs, for me, was a life changing experience. They took a chance on me when I was young & inexperienced and really launched my career. It's a gem in the DC/MD/VA area.

Great work environment, smart people, and an awesome place to work.
This sounds a little bit like equivocation to me.

CNN would not be closed.

We've already ran this experiment. It was called the civil war. For years before the start of conflict news agencies all over the country either called for succession, violent revolt, or the use of force to bring the South into submission.

Freedom of the press is a pretty serious thing here. Even when the press says some outrageous things. This freedom is required in order for the democracy to learn from its mistakes.

Chavez is a petty thug, using leftist principles in a thinly-veiled attempt to completely control his country. The people of Venezuela deserve better.
I'll agree that all variables should be final. However, you're applying a functional constraint (that most functional languages provide workarounds for) to an imperative language. I just don't feel it's reasonable to expect a java programmer to obey rules that languages like ocaml don't even enforce 100%.
Digg is hiring (http://about.digg.com/jobs)