skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marijuana and Divergent Thinking
Ways Android beats the iPhone - CNET Reviews
Came across this today: http://www.terrafugia.com
Why Smule won't be developing mobile apps for Android
they really are the same thing semantically, a thunk is a just closure that will be evaluated once (being applied to a unit/trivial value), and then GHC will have its runtime mark a bit that indicated that its been evaluated and redirect the thunk pointer to a value. This is simply a difference of efficiency between normal order evaluation vs lazy evaluation, with a special sort of common subexpression elimination built into the language
Why are they using a 2-stroke ICE instead of a small turbine I wonder? The pack looked quite cool from the front but when the pilot spun around it looked like he had a VW beetle strapped to his back...
Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
Good point. What if a "job hopper" is someone who is looking for a good fit and won't settle for less? I don't see that as a negative.
"Reversing a linked list is not an Alan-Turing-level problem."

I'm not suggesting that it is. The problem is, people are asking much harder questions -- questions that require "aha" brilliance -- and using it as a proxy for intelligence. That's stupid.

Hell...it's not even a deal-breaker if someone has to struggle a little to work out the algorithm for reversing a list, so long as they get it right. The problem is that if you spend more than 5 minutes (or whatever) doing it, 99% of nerds are going to flip the idiot bit on you, and it's time for "Do You Have Any Questions For Me?"

Once you've set up the game such that a candidate has to memorize the answer to "easy" questions to perform, there's no end to the regurgitation that could be required. Before long, people are committing obscure algorithms to memory, because "someone might ask", and they don't want to appear to be stupid. It's a waste of time and energy for everyone involved.
Obviously a very content free article. As a proud punk, i call it bullshit. Although hacker culture is a lot like punk culture. But thats true of almost any creative subculture filled with misfits with attitude problems.
one odd thing reading through was the comment that A benefit of lazy evaluation is that you can write code like an Icon or Python generator that spins forever, returning a value on each cycle, and it will only be called for the exact number of returns that the enclosing program actually needs even if the caller is itself a generator.

that sounds to me like it's making a contrast with icon and python generators. but, as far as i understand things, that's just the same as icon + python. also, "even if..." was emphasised, and i don't understand why.

i suspect i've misread it or am missing something. would someone be kind enough to set me straight? thanks...
Are you sure that experience can be extrapolated to the labor market as a whole? I get the feeling that the difference in capabilities from one individual to another is much more pronounced in software development relative to many other fields. It's a testament to how hard software development is. While this idea might not work for something like software startups (or anything that requires extremely skilled labor, like medicine), I don't see why those criticisms would apply to fields that don't take a decade to perfect.

Also, I think it would be difficult to confidently infer that the unemployed tend to be the lowest quality workers. That might be true outside of recessions, but during a time of 10% unemployment, (and much higher if you look beyond the bullshit U-3 indicator) a lot of those people were just at the wrong place at the wrong time, or had jobs in shrinking industries.
How the iPad redefines multi-user
One of the most interesting things about the iPad is how it allows multiple touches to be registered at the same. This makes multi-hand but also multi-user scenarios possible.

How are you using these rich multi-touch events in your iPad projects?
Either way, it is damn ugly.
Especially relevant, as I'll be moving to Kansas City in July and have yet to start the process. Now that I'm only 4 months away, I'll probably tell my employer (a medium sized startup of 25ish employees) and get to applying!
By extension, could we say that people have a right to equal, quality health care, but shouldn't expect taxpayers to foot the bill?
The Ancient Greek Passion Story- Isis and Osiris
Love in the ancient Egypt. Passion that remained a mystery for a long time and is about to unleash...
Here's why:

1) they don't have the money to develop for both the iPhone and Android.

2) announcing they won't develop for Android will bring them some needed publicity as it did for that gaming company who did last time.

3) if they don't have the funds to develop for android and make money out of it, they may as well try to cash on the fact that they won't be developing for Android.

All and all, pretty pathetic PR.
I think Eric Sink describes some strategies for setting up a booth for trade shows in the Business of Software. So it must have worked for him, but I think that was after he had a profitable business. I'm not sure how important that would be for a new startup. You've gotta get the word out somehow though.
I think parallelscalator has a nice ring to it.
10 Maven Myths Debunked
I don't think that is really important. I'm sure you can learn a lot by reading comments and always trying to analyze it, might it be a famous or not author.
What's a forward slash? I know only of slashes and backslashes...
Aren't these questions mostly a way to trim the prospect pool to a size that you can do "real" interviews with? ("Real interviews" are the interviews after the ones in which you get asked these kinds of questions).
I read the article, saw no conclusion that was novel or applicable, saw the 18 upvotes...
Don't you mean preaching?
"Let us see the whole ACTA text or else... We will be very, very angry with you... And we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are..."
Amazon One-Click Patent Slides Through Reexamination
Over 4 million apps at around $2-$3 a pop? I'd say they have more than enough money. They also raised $8 million in December http://moconews.net/article/419-smule-adds-8-million-second-...
I think in SF they need a special "fixie - non bike messenger" option that keeps you on the flats between point a and b.
If you became the last person on Earth, what would you do? Realistically.
Video embedding finalé: OK Go leaves EMI
Drownproofing: A New Curriculum for a New Economy (Entrepreneurship @ GaTech)
> {} == parentesi graffe (claws)

I initially read that as "parentesi giraffe" which could have been plausible...

,-{ __ }-,

in French, they are (plural form):

( parenthèses )
[ crochets ] => "hooks"
{ accolades } => "hugs"

Some computer scientists split the word in two to distinguish the opening one from the closing one (like Physicist do with the bra-ket notation).

( a b c ) is then pronounced "Paren, a, b, c, thèse".
opstache

clostache

Shorter this way.
Seth Klarman: 20 Investment Lessons of 2008 (and 10 false ones)
Panel Releases Proposal to Set U.S. Standards for Education
One of the things that I've always liked about Weebly is that I could recommend it to friends and family and know that they would practically have to end up with a nice looking site. All of the provided themes were well done in my opinion. Adding user developed themes will certainly result in some brilliant offerings, but it will also result in a lot of crap.
I wonder how much altitude you could expect to lose from the moment the engine quits until the moment the parachute is fully deployed and slowing your descent? Surely it would be over a hundred feet - which means that any engine failure in that altitude range would result in a painful splat on the pavement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height-velocity_diagram
Loved it when I tried it this morning, but the [apparent] overload of the servers led to my team dismissing it without a second thought.
From the article:

UPDATE (March 10, 12:45am PST): With thanks to Prof. Jon Butterworth, member of the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC, I've been informed that the plan to shut down the LHC for an extended period of time was actually announced in early February by Dr. Steve Myers after the LHC Performance Workshop, in Chamonix, France. So rather than this being a sudden development, it is part of a planned shutdown.
If anyone wants to know more about how the Penguin logo was designed, Alex (the designer) has a great blog post here:

http://blog.iso50.com/2010/03/10/plancast-penguin-developmen...
Wow... that's one very neat little machine.

$194,000 is a bit steep though!
Makes better since given the context of the article, for them to not refuse the agreement and talk about it, as the agreement prohibits anyone from talking about the agreement
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Why You Should Pay For The Freemium Software You Use
Brizzly Acquires Birdfeed, WikiRank, Adds iPhone App
I can only guess fuel-consumption-to-thrust efficiencies (longer flight times) or pure cost since a pure gas turbine will always beat out a mechanically linked fan-stroke in specific power (i.e. kW/kg), but will almost always be more costly due to the extremely high manufacturing tolerances required for turbines.
ostache, clostache sounds funnier
The etymology [1] does not suggest a joke origination.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#Etymology
Tried to signup .. Got 500 Internal Server Error. :(
I agree 100%. Whatever the reason, once you make that declaration, you've made it clear that something else in your life is more important than "the company" Most employers don't take that well, and startup founders even less.

Having watched fellow startup employees be let go and told to clear out by the end of the day, I don't believe they (or you, or I) have any duty to give more than the culturally accepted 2-weeks notice.
Having been through this I can give a little insight. All the questions are from the interviewer. There is no MS book of interview questions. Each person asks whatever they feel like at the time.

While they seem like pointless questions for some jobs, this list is a conglomeration of questions for the three types of positions (Dev, Test and PM).

The questions are made to be very difficult because the interviewee is supposed to struggle and have to verbalize what he/she is thinking. If the questions are less strange there is the chance that a candidate will have seen them before and know how to solve them off the top of their head. That's only useful for weeding out people who can't program at all. The verbal communication is just as important as actually solving the problem correctly. Microsoft has a pretty high confidence in it's mentoring system, it believes that teaching the actual code is much easier than teaching how to think systematically.

I was given questions that took me > 6 hours to fully complete when I went home and did them. There is no way the interviewers actually wanted all the code, just a discussion.

Some of the "Gotcha" questions are from earlier in Microsoft's hiring practices, so take these lists with a grain of salt. Though they are wicked fun to try to solve them all.

HR at MS is very good at their job. They keep track of everything about who talked to whom.
In the case of the jetpack the parachute is launched upward with rockets. This takes extra time: the time it would take for the operator or system to detect engine-out and initiate parachute launch, then the time it would take for a rocket(s) to launch the parachute up to where it could be, then the time for the uprush of air to catch the canopy.

Here's a link to an article about the ballistic parachute fitted to Cirrus SR20/22 aircraft. http://www.cirruspilots.org/content/CAPSHistory.aspx There's one mention of a low-altitude parachute deployment: "one activation occurred at too low an altitude to fully inflate the canopy (witnesses report 200 feet above ground), and another activation where the rocket took an unusual trajectory resulting in a failure to open the canopy."
I'm not going to comment on patents here, but you're absolutely wrong in assuming that implementing an optimized algorithm is trivial, especially in real-time graphics.

Sure, coding up B-trees from a textbook description is easy. But in a video game, 10fps and 30fps is the difference between unplayable and perfect, which means that your "by the book" implementation likely won't cut it. Video game developers spend months squeezing the last 1.1x improvements out of their inner loops, using clever bit coding techniques, cache alignment, often even hand-optimized assembler.
Ask HN: How to sell an App Store company with 15m installs?
(I'm a long time user of HN, just posting under a new account for this)

I've been developing on the App Store for about 9 months and have built a set of apps that collectively have over 15m installs. Among these have been several top 100 apps.

I'm considering selling them all, and I'm wondering how to go about it. Obviously if a buyer knows you want to be bought, it instantly lowers the price.

I'd really appreciate any thoughts/suggestions anyone has?
I'm not in any way saying that it rules out JIT compilation* , just that it's a a constraint that may not have occurred to people, and one that gives it a different (often complementary) focus than static analysis.

* I'm delighted that the LuaJIT port to amd64 is almost done, BTW. I've submitted two threads about it that haven't made it to the front page.
Any meetups planned for MIX10 in Vegas the same week?
Well isn't the extra weight pretty significant in this case? The jetpack obviously can't be jettisoned.
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Afraid not, the schedule is quite packed right now with interviews and demo day right around the corner. We will be doing more meetups over the coming months though.
Don't forget about pointed functors in between, i.e. return.
That seems to be the typical experience of most contractors.
My advisor (Dr. Thad Starner) is a full time wearable user. His computer is basically his extended memory and his students have learned not to have discussions with him unless the wearable is on, the heads-up display is working and he has his Twiddler in hand ready to type in new info or look up past info.

EDIT: Useful links

Thad's website: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Thad.Starner/

Paper on how he uses his wearable: http://berkeley.intel-research.net/~klyons/pubs/everyday_cas...
Sure, the general principle has been known for a long time. This research adds some empirical analysis.
Having been there and done that, I totally disagree with the original poster. Once there's money on the table, bad behavior follows soon after.
It's interesting how truth can be revealed through empirical research and also art.

As someone who started out as purely a math, physics, hyper-rationalist type of person, I used to think truth could only be found in empirical studies like this one.

However, the results of this study became apparent to me several years ago, largely due to watching the film Princess Mononoke. Since then, I've lived a happier more fulfilling life.

@nazgulnarsil: I think both (the study and the film) have extremely applicable conclusions that make them worthwhile to pay attention to: Since there is a multiplier effect on all of your actions, don't do bad things and do do good things. Or more simply, Karma exists. Just because the conclusion is simple, doesn't mean it can't have powerful effects.
10 ways Microsoft is juicing Bing's search traffic
What? No! What?

I've worked in startups my entire adult life and, please take my word for this, there is nothing magical about startup bosses that change the dynamic between employer and employee, and there are no special obligations startup employees shoulder.

If you give 12 months notice, you should prepare to be marginalized in your last year at the company. If you give 2 weeks notice, you should not expect to be blackballed in the industry. If someone gives you a bad reference for giving "only" 2 weeks notice, you should urge your friends never to work for that person again; if a prospective employer makes a stink about that kind of reference, you should avoid working for that employer.

Tech startup employers are fond of a "third-prize-is-you're-fired", "reward for just OK is a severance package" mentality. They don't feel like they owe you a year's advance notice about their plans. Stay professional, but don't bend over backwards for an employer unless you have a specific, personal reason for doing so. "That's how it works in startups" is not a valid reason.

And please, please remember: it is a seller's market for talent.
Haskell pushes [static typing] to some sort of logical limit.

I think that distinction should go to Qi. Derived from Common Lisp, but with a type system that's Turing-complete.

http://www.lambdassociates.org/doc.htm
Err... "realistically" ?! Fly to a new planet and become a superhero there.
I made a field guide to brackets a while back:

http://carlos.bueno.org/brackets-of-the-world.pdf
This seems to be one rule where the employee is more protected in the US than the EU. Unpaid internships are common here. Common to the extent that some graduates end up working for free for years before finally being promoted to a paid position. It's so prolific that the current generation of 20-somethings is frequently called "Generation Praktikum" (the internship generation) in Austria & Germany.
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I'd take down the ads. Not much point without the traffic.
I grew up in India and am familiar with this, used to always wonder if I was wrong and why i often get confused when people say parentheses instead of brackets.(I have been in the US since the last 10 years)
These all methods assume:

1. Lack of BIOS protection.

2. Lack of HD encryption.

You cannot carry out any of those if you set the on-boot password and don't keep your harddrive in plain. TPM adds some additional protection for bootloader itself. Even if they mention it at the end of the article - the title is really misleading. It's not "any system".
I'm not sure what I said that you are disagreeing with, but it's not clear to me that "monad" is strictly an adjective like "red".

My understanding is that a monad is a data type paired with a properly implemented bind and return (proper in the sense of obeying the monadic laws)... much like a monoid is a tuple with a binary operation and an identity element, a monad is a triple of bind, return, and the data structure.

In a practical sense, I find myself saying "this behaves like a monad" rather than "this is a monad" or "this is monadic" (although that last one is an adjective like you say). Once you recognize the that something behaves monadically, you are free to write the plumbing (bind and return) and use the abstraction if you wish.

Then again, I'm not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination, and it's entirely possible I just completely missed the point you were trying to make. Just throwing out my thoughts.
Ask HN: Rate my site - delishbits.com
That's a bad, literal translation of how it's called in Portuguese. "Keys" can be translated to "chaves" or "teclas".

Anyway, I don't get this, just as a joke. "Parenthesis", "Brackets" and "Braces" do just fine, thank you very much.

() Parenthesis => Parêntesis
[] Brackets => Colchetes
{} Braces => Chaves
We have this too in Switzerland. If a separation period is not mentioned in the contract it's automatically 2 months (or 3 I don't remember).

If you get fired, the company has to tell you the same number of months in advance.
A closure is a function + environment, i.e., the values of its free variables at the time of creation.

A thunk is a suspended computation together with an environment. That is, a thunk is a special type of closure, where the function takes no arguments. Additionally, a thunk is updated with its result.

In GHC's execution model, the Spineless Tagless G-machine (STG), every heap object is actually a closure. That is, every heap object has a code pointer that can be called to return the object's value. For evaluated objects (including functions) that is essentially the identity function, for thunks this will evaluate as much as necessary, return, and possibly update it's heap object with its new value. Of course, there are several optimisations going on, but that's the basic idea.

So, I'd say a thunk is a special kind of closure.
I think it's really sad to change jobs without a period of a few months doing nothing in between.
Heroku never goes down, and it eliminates the need to pay a sysadmin (or the time value of sysadminning yourself).

Those are two bold, scary statements.
But he does draw direct equivalence:

"Local color so you can sound like you know what you’re talking about: in Haskell-land, a closure is called a “thunk”."

Which just isn't true. A closure is called a closure and a thunk is called a thunk (as it is in Scheme and any number of other languages; there is nothing special about Haskell). For most of that article he should just replace the word 'closure' with 'thunk' and the issue would disappear.
Planned features for Emacs 24
Wireless Carriers in the 4g Race
I'll bet you have NoScript switched on?
Christian Renaud talks about the needs of a startup community
The photo showing everyone at work looks like it would difficult to concentrate and rife with distraction. Why do companies feel the need to treat their developers like this? I understand that they wanted to get their projects done quickly, but it seems like that would be a tough place to work.

Hopefully the interns were paid well (this is relative) and learned a lot.

-JP
I'm not sure I understand your question.

A skydiver is transitioning (abruptly) from unpowered free-fall into unpowered, albeit greatly slowed, descent. The jetpack user is transitioning from powered, controlled horizontal flight (with its characteristic 6 degrees of freedom) into unpowered descent.

A back-up chute for the skydiver has essentially, but not quite, the same flight characteristics and initial deployment conditions as a main.

Parachutes in a stable flight configuration are incredibly safe and reliable, but it's GETTING that 6-axis dynamic flight-body INTO that stable flight configuration that's the real challenge.

It's relatively easy to design a system for even extremely large, static, dead-weights (such as cargo or even battle tanks) to be safely launched, arrested, and landed via parachute.

It's an entirely different problem when your safe chute deployment must take into account the wide variance in airspeed, pitch, yaw, altitude, and environmental influences which powered free flight allows. Imagine a worse-case scenario where all power was lost just after a major inadvertent yaw maneuver (it appears to be designed to minimize yawing). That's a sticky-wicket to solve repeatedly and reliably.
To quote the Jargon File's entry on ASCII character names <http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/a/ASCII.html>:

"INTERCAL called this `ampersand'; what could be sillier?"
Running? How do we know he's not skating or dancing?
You're definitely correct about the first statement. It should be revised to "Heroku has a strong history of very little downtime."

Regarding the second though, I truly believe that the cost + time savings are tremendous from using their platform vs administering your own early on in a startup product lifecycle.