skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't forget that Apple is reaping 30% fees on all software sold on its platforms. It's not just a little bit of money btw, the fees taken off the app store are very nearly 100% profit and are currently running somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year range. Let the app store grow for a few more years and app store fees could easily account for 10% or more of Apple's profits.

And isn't the review process totally and completely necessary because it justifies this fee structure?

Tradeoff or not, capturing those rents is a major concern for Apple. It's not ending any time soon, and it's not a mistake on their part.
Linear Algebra by Axler

Matrix Computations by Golub

Collaborative filtering papers by Koren: http://research.yahoo.com/Yehuda_Koren

Stanford paper which is the source of Mahout project: http://www.cs.stanford.edu/people/ang//papers/nips06-mapredu...

Map Reduce algos book by Jimmy Lin:
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/book.html

Pattern Recognition by Bishop (or Theodoridis)

Linear algebra by G.Strang

Graph Theory by Gross

Hadoop the definitive guide by Tom White

Natural Language Processing by Manning

Information Retrieval by Manning

for additional references here is a great compilation: http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/3/12/learning-about-m...
One important thing to point out: functional programming and object-oriented programming aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Scala, OCaml, and a lot of Lisps have proven that. Whether it's a good idea is another question entirely, but the point is that it can be done.
You can search and open different things with spotlight.
Ask HN: How did you learn about stock market/trading investing ?
Any good videos/books ?
Just checked out clementine as well. It's missing my killer feature still. Music queuing. The Queue this song group of features really fit the way I prefer to listen to my music. It's getting there though. I've been dissapointed with Amarok2 it felt like a step down from amarok 1.4. That might be just because it was heavily rewritten for kde4 more so than intentioned though.
Mortgage brokers didn't lend money to anyone. Banks did.
The WRT54G was hackable long before they realized there was a market and put out the L. The stock WRT54G, L or not, was quite flexible. The L just had more memory and more flash, so you could do crazy things like running spamassassin on your router :)
Full Tilt Color Coding In Twenty Minutes or Less
Steve Jobs Makes Easter Eve Appearance
Point 1: It's perfectly possible for the average woman to do better than the average male on the verbal portion of the SAT and for the average male to do better on his verbal portion of the SAT than on his math score. Not that that's true.

Point 2: When will you guys stop clinging to anecdotal evidence? Just because most computer scientists are male doesn't mean that there are no female computer scientists, which is a claim analogous to the one you made.
His tweet seemed to indicate that this is a bad idea:

http://twitter.com/rlove/statuses/11609100128
Just wanted to say thanks to Sean and Kev for doing this -- had a lot of fun with it and can't wait to watch the next one :)
Scrabble for the iPad: the best $1,000 you ever spent on a board game
Missed this - but Daeken is a smart cookie, so I'd appreciate a link to a video if it's available?
The probable answer is obvious if you think about it for a moment.
I suspect recruiters are comforting when companies don't know enough about the technology to judge qualification. Of course, rarely do recruiters know much more.

Does anyone know if there are services for performing due diligence on candidates? I know at a CTO level they exist, but what about hiring that one guy who knows iPhone development when the rest of your shop is Java?
Outflopped.com, a Stack Overflow clone for Poker
Fascinating side note: Submitting an article to HN with "Poker" in the title gets it auto-killed immediately.
There is a nice "oneliner" in Ruby for that, created by Piers Cawley: http://j.mp/anfTlJ

And for python there is a nice Article on CodingHorror: http://j.mp/aCxlI3
Hope it's useful :)
No, we really appreciate you being part of our experimental "let's see how the hell to do this" phase :)

UPMC sounds like an amazing challenge with a ton of opportunity, but only because you guys have come so far already. Congrats on getting your first beta customers, and keep us up to date on the launch in June!

Also, for the future, I would be curious to hear about how you found your business advisors, since I can imagine that's the difficult point for people starting out.
How  To Improve Your Adsense Earnings
What TSA is doing (and its approach to screening data)
Directed Graph of Which Human Language Is Incomprehensible to Most People
I can't think of a single article I've read with an anti-orm stance that has addressed what my issues are, and are successfully solved with an ORM.

For most ORM advocates, it is not a "fear" of SQL, it is a productivity issue. A good ORM gives you an entity model with inter-object relations, a powerful query language, in-memory object cacheing, and all sorts of other useful things, for free. They can be a huge productivity boost. And for those "what about this" scenarios that are always raised, a good ORM will allow you to easily drop down into calling native storedprocs when that makes sense. (This also applies to the supposed performance issue with ORM's)

I've read most of the anti-orm articles out there and I always get a disingenuous feeling from the author, like they are knowingly not being entirely honest.

A few other issues I've found with SQL:
- business rules or perhaps more appropriately, behaviours, when implemented down at the stored procedure level (which in a non-orm environment is exactly the proper thing to do) are largely hidden from the calling source code. So when reading the code, much of what is happening is not obvious unless one examines each SP. When using an ORM, this logic can be brought up into a higher level of your application making it much more visible and accessible.

- in large projects, every time you need a certain subset of data (filtered), or a different set of fields in the resultset, you end up writing yet another stored procedure, likely just for that task. Often, a stored procedure may already exist that would server your needs, but in a large project with multiple developers, how does one know of its existence, and even then, find it? I've found almost without exception that large projects start to degrade into a quite disorganized mess that is very hard to understand for a new maintenance developer. Of course, many of these problems can be avoided with proper organization and discipline, but the fact is in many places, they aren't. I find a good ORM largely prevents the problem in the first place.
Had swaying lights and shaking desks + monitors in Scottsdale.

Rather unexpected.
We're still trying to duct tape available tools together to do a panel-style interview. Tinychat seemed like the best bet so far, but there's a bit of lag (maybe inevitable), and there doesn't seem to be anyway of recording the video once it's been broadcast.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a group-video-chat that's easy to use and can save the video for posterity?
Programmers can reason about runtime cost without seeing the assembly. Why is SQL any different?
Everything seems easy until you get down into the specific implementation details.
April 5th is tomorrow, get ready for some predator drone on civilian action at the national press club. http://twitter.com/wikileaks
Developers Are in a Scramble to Strike iPad Gold
Is it a sarcasm?

It seems that Microsoft's StrCmpLogicalW() has exactly desired behavior. Besides it is trivial to implement:

def natural_key(key):
"""See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001018.html

>>> L = 'a01 a9 b1 b10 b9'.split()
>>> L.sort(key=natural_key)
>>> ' '.join(L)
'a01 a9 b1 b9 b10'
"""
return [int(chunk) if chunk.isdigit() else chunk
for chunk in re.split(r'(\d+)', key)]
What I'd like to know is why this is a bad idea...
Ya, out of the money puts was the route I took as well. However, when the company you buy puts in suddenly takes on a couple hundred million of new debt in order to do a share buy back so the CEO can cash his shares out, puts don't perform too well.

Nor do they do so well when the SEC decides to suddenly ban short selling on a certain subset of stocks.
Weekend project: compute a 68 gigapixels fractal image
The Age of People Using Social Media
Tell HN: There really is a tech boom in NYC
I spent the beginning of last week in NYC meeting with lots of startups and geeks. There was a real buzz to the place and I appreciated how smart, thoughtful, hospitable and open everyone was.

I'm moving to Manhattan/Brooklyn this summer and look forward to meeting more of you.

For anyone interested, here's the heatmap from my checkins for Mon-Wed: http://bit.ly/cEvVGU
I took a moment to break down all the individual criticisms of the iPad in the article:

1. The OS's interface is "linear".

2. There's no multitasking

3. There's no accessible filesystem.

4. There's no camera.

5. The screen gets smudgey.

6. It doesn't come with a screen cleaner.

7. The speakers aren't loud enough.

8. It's "not portable".

9. It's hard to read in direct sunlight.

10. You can't get it wet.

11. It has too many book suppliers and no unified book reading interface.

12. It costs $30 to turn it into a picture frame.

13. It has no USB port.

14. You can't replace the battery.

15. There's "no ability to create content".

16. It costs $100 too much.

I found this to be a distinctively superficial and unhelpful review, but it was at least mercifully free of moral judgements.

Since (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (10), (12), (13), (14), and (16) were clearly evident before he bought the device, and (8) and (15) are... dubious... at best, I find it especially amusing that he opted to pay for it.
Since he's talking about the app browser interface exclusively, and not accounting for the degrees of freedom in the applications themselves, it's hard to take the critique too seriously.
"It's weird to see someone you think of as writing in a genre that kind of combines Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Nabokov with an almost fanatic pleading for empathy and communion -- described as someone who writes puzzles and brain teasers!"

I didn't mean to characterize all of DFW as obtuse metafiction. But there's stuff in, for example, the Oblivion story collection, that is just, um, quirky, stories that focus on playing with ideas of character and narrative.
A sufficiently large convenient aggregation of otherwise not-easily-obtainable public data becomes a privacy hazard. (I choose the word "hazard" with care.) Knowing that theoretically one could go find all fans of $PERSON_OF_INTEREST with enough work is one thing, being able to type one query into your data set and get the answer back in two seconds is another.
Older Palm Treos (up to Treo 600 if I'm not mistaken) had everything in RAM and I remember upgrading to a newer, supposedly better Treo - and everything but the lag was...
Make breakfast a daily habit
Is it GS fault that AIG was doing securities that it couldn't collateralize? No.. why does GS care.

Yes the government could have forced them to eat their losses, but the point of the bailout was to stabilize the market. The government didn't want anyone (not just GS) to lose money, as that would have caused a cascade effect. (In their mind)

I think your suggesting (as far as I can tell) is that GS forced the government to give out money (through their political connections).

I really don't think that's true. I think the government was super concerned (and super scared) that the flow of money would stop and the whole US economy would fall. Not just investment banks but everything.
What are the military benefits of bring something back from orbit? I can't think of any.
>There isn't even a helpful warning like "are you sure you want to end this game you just invested an hour of your life into without even saving or something?"

Well, yeah. That's not possible. When you hit the menu button, the app gets killed. (I think it gets some sub-1-second time to try to wrap up loose ends, but still.)

Now, it should save your state as you go, but that behavior isn't possible with the iPad SDK, and engadget should know that.
@arpitnext disagree with you, and 100% agree with @sachinag. This could have been handled better by Michael.
Ditto in the Philippines. The non-power users I know all have jailbroken iPhones.
Well, shit. I guess thanks to the iPad we aren't deprived of literally 100s and 100s of online scrabble games.

http://www.google.com/search?q=online+scrabble
not so! i have my own game that also runs across two or more iphones and/or ipads via wifi, and it saves its state just fine, and allows you to pick up where you left off.

true, you don't have a whole lot of time to save state, but you don't need much. in my case, everything i need to know about the game is saved in a roughly 4k blob, which is saved to prefs almost instantly.
Wikipedia is a relatively reliable source for information on controversial political topics. Simply stated, Wikipedia editors tend to be a lot more anal about facts and details than policy makers and journalists. It's also an excellent source for information about marginal ideas.

Either Lanier doesn't have much of a case or MacManus does a poor job of summarizing the book.
But what's the life expectancy of smartphones and the likes? I wonder if flash storage in them could die so quickly - even before such a device itself would become obsolete.

If it's correct that at least Palm's webOS and Maemo dare to swap on flash storages, we shall see soon...
WebTables
What I meant is that the message asking if you're sure you want to quit isn't possible. But yes, it definitely should save state automatically.
Or, per the recent Mythbusters (another Discovery production), you can cover every square inch of your torso in three phone books.

This may be less practical, but some evidence suggests it could work.
NASA was definitely rigorous, maybe even overly so, and that is why they became such a money pit.

On the other hand NASA does so many damn things around the world that space flight can hardly be called it's specialty.
It's the only reason I've ever been interested in Apple's mobile devices. I joined the iPhone Dev Team right after the iPhone came out and worked on it through the initial unlock. Once the challenge was gone, I moved on to greener pastures. It wasn't to get some specific goal (I never really installed any apps on my phone), but just to do it and have some fun. Everyone should reverse-engineer something like that at some point -- the feeling can't be beat.
Better to use 'rate' or 'irate'.
SQL is based on relational algebra, but does not strictly follow it. For instance, each tuple in a relation is unique; but an SQL table can have identical rows. So firstly, SQL isn't a language that is "100% dictated by relational algebra".

But even if it were, the syntax is still poorly thought out. There's no consistency in SQL; each command has its own grammar. You "SELECT ... FROM" and then "INSERT INTO ...". Command syntax is effectively arranged at random.

Worse, there's no extensibility. Most programming languages, when faced with the problem of manipulating data, make use of functions. Instead of having specific syntax for selecting columns or filtering by a condition, a more sensible approach would be to make them functions that lazily transform tables. Then the user could define their own operations, and we'd no longer need to generate a page of SQL each time we wanted to do something complex.

Next problem; integration with calling languages. SQL is not designed to integrate well with ORMs or other client libraries. We either want a language that's basically little more than a serialized AST, or take an approach similar to CouchDB, and farm out specific calculations to some server or library running our programming language of choice.

Finally; optimization opaqueness. It can often be difficult to predict how the database server will optimize a particular piece of SQL. It might be useful if we could drop down to more primitive, but more predictable, operations when necessary.

In short, I think that if a relational database system were to be designed from scratch by experienced programmers, it would look very different to the SQL databases that are around today.
Switching call stacks on different platforms
"Quite a disappointment, especially because I liked the idea."

The idea of building a music player on the Mozilla platform? That's what killed it, because it's actually a terrible idea.

Mozilla is responsible for screwing over a lot of developers by making glorious promises about the Mozilla "platform", but in fact to the best of my knowledge nobody has made it into anything "significant" that wasn't already in Netscape 4. And those who did went to great effort to do so (nvu in particular) and it is not at all clear they actually came out ahead vs. the other choices they had. (I know there's a handful of other dinky apps, but I'm not talking about whether someone bodged together a small local app in native XUL. The lofty rhetoric says that not only should Songbird be working better under Mozilla than it would in other places, it should be joined by the same kind of numerous "significant" apps that exist under QT or GTK.)

Historically, for the last six or seven years, trying to turn Mozilla into anything other than a browser has had exactly this result; bloated, buggy programs that barely work with a strong tailwind. And I'll tell you why: It's the platform. Mozilla is a browser. They made a lot of terrible platform choices that they managed to power through because it was a platform with basically one app (and Thunderbird off to the side), but it has not been able to get past that.

(RDF stores, where the fact that the RDF store is in RDF brings complexity, but no value for the complexity beyond other storage technologies. XPCOM, an abstraction layer with the same problem, nowhere near enough value brought for the complexity. XUL/XBL sort of eventually redeemed itself, but long after it should and I bet if you tried direct development in it for a "real app" it would still break your heart. And it still arguably fails the "not enough value for the complexity" test; lots of other things do what XBL does, much more simply and reliably. Note I know some of these have been supplanted; this is not a catalog of problems of today, but major errors the platform has made over time. And building something like a music app which is fundamentally multithreaded in Mozilla...? And the Mozilla of several years ago no less.)

Fortunately, it mostly doesn't matter, because it has done a pretty good job at being that one app. The only cost is all the developer hours sunk into developing on a "platform" where the only thing going for it is the grandiosity of the promises.

I say this partially because I was bitten, but not as bad as the Songbird developers.
Cara Mencari Serial Number dan Crack Di Internet
Sejarah Facebook
Soraia Chaves GQ Portugal April 2010
Portuguese actress and model Soraia Chaves covers the coverpage of GQ Magazine Portugal issues for the month edition of April 2010.
Depends on who originally built it and who brings it back. I'm sure some countries wouldn't mind getting their hands on US satellite technology (and vice versa)
Audit the Congress: the AIG bailout was about $180 billion of which about half has already been paid back by the company selling off pieces of itself and the rest might be paid back within 5 years. AIG is cleaning itself up, all of the investment banks have repaid their bailout money, and so have most of the large banks. The estimated cost of the Fannie/Freddie "conservatorship" is $291 billion as of late 2009 and another $389 billion over the next 10 years, almost as much as the war in Iraq up to this point. Guess what, these "companies" are not being unwound, but are actually increasing the size of their mortgage books because cheap housing is still a policy goal.
What would memory management have to do with it? That seems orthogonal to his point.
this immediately made me think of 99designs.com

...but of course it applies everywhere
The iPad could learn from Droid
Customers do react to "Oooh shiny!" -- it's a permanent part of our psychology.

Ask your average consumer what was new in Vista? Aero. What's Aero? Neat visual effects. What was new in Office 2007? Ribbon. What's Ribbon? It's that new bar at the top of the screen. Consumers remember the visual changes in these products best.

Like it or not, those superfluous window animations in Mac OS were exactly what screamed "creative" and "cool" to a lot of customers, over the then "business-like" Windows XP. Video games invest in graphics so they can have impressive screenshots. Office suites tweak their UI so that they can communicate "new and improved" visually.

Of course there are other benefits than looks. But the looks, the screenshots are your product's first impression -- if it looks the same as the last version, people just might not buy.
Are they mutually exclusive? It is perfectly possible that Goldman colluded with Bush and Pelosi (no Obama?) to get money into AIG that they knew would then flow into their pockets.
I love how he is just casually strolling outside. If you didn't know who he was you'd suspect nothing.
WikiLeaks and the Future of Journalism: Transparency, Connectivity and Anonymity
System Hacking - خدمات العرب
For those you who are nerdy enough like myself: if you stick around for the better part of the end, there a funny moment in which a buzzer goes off, and Brian shake like a female dog. I love the man, but that was unexpectedly hilarious. Hahaha
Excellent post. It's focused, unbiased, simple, covers a useful problem and includes source.
The first photo is exceptionally creepy,
Calvinism is back
No no no -- he said that 3 year-olds have the computing needs of an iPad. It's an important distinction.
This is great, happy to see some valid competition in this space. I'll be giving it a try off and on. So far in my initial tests it's been pretty good.
Here's my gardening advice:

Get 2 of each starter plant you want, get used to the idea of death. I see many first time gardeners get overly emotional about a couple small plants, this amplifies the stress of failure too much.

Start with herbs. Things like oregano and basil give a huge flavor/effort payoff compared to fussy plants like tomatoes. They are very hearty and a little goes a long way.

After you get fresh herbs on hand for your kitchen, you won't ever want to go back.
The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

I think aggregated behavior is interesting. While it may be true that Wikipedia and Facebook (and perhaps even more pertinently, 4chan) are networks of individuals chopped into a "mush", each of these resulting mushes has its own unique character and identity. A mega-individual, if you will. I can't see how he could consider that meaningless.
If you want a better guarantee of having 3 pairs, go with 7 developers. Then you're covered when one is sick/on vacation/on jury duty/off getting married/stuck at the DMV, etc., and you've built in some insurance in the event that one of your coders gets run over by a bus.
isc.ro by far the best
Nothing's worse than getting to an interview and finding out that you know COBOL from the hiring manager reading it off your resume.

The rest of the tips seem to be really sleazy, but are pretty surreptitious. However, wouldn't this be extremely obvious to both parties and be so blatantly unethical to end the recruiter's career?