skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slightly off-topic, but in case you haven't checked out Cython (www.cython.org) before, please do! It allows you to write Python code which is _translated_ into C code that uses the CPython API. This includes classes, list comprehensions, generator expressions... practically all Python code is valid Cython code.

I'm honestly never going back to writing C again. Cython gives me all the expressiveness of Python combined with all the performance and close-to-the-metal-godlike-powers of C. I've been using it to implement high-performance graph traversal and routing algorithms and to interface with C/C++ libraries, and it's been an absolute amazing productivity boost.

However, all of this comes with one caveat: you really need to have a good knowledge of C to understand Cython and what it's doing. It merely saves you from the tedium of hand-coding against the CPython API and all of the boilerplate code that's needed to get much of anything done in C.
IE's implementation seems to be the best. Unfortunately, the post kinda comes off as being one big "our implementation is the best"
Reminds me of 3D Hidden Picture, a DSi Ware puzzle game, available in Japan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5QSclrIdlE

Supposedly this uses the DSi's camera the track the motion of the device and adjust the displayed image to give it depth.
I seem to remember there were a number of news articles reporting the $100 million figure. I'm not privy to any inside information on this so I don't really know the answer. Tech Crunch is probably the most reliable for this kind of information.

A few of the $100 million articles:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/973571/Friendster-bought-1...

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091210/friendsters-caution...

http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/4/unk...

http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200949/4892/Friends...
Not the thread that started this whole thing, but here's the NeoGAF thread about the game's development. It has far more pictures and concept art than the official website. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=381946 (Warning: typical forum immaturity... but that does seem to be the focus of this article.)
The end of publishing. Books are dead & boring.
> What people paid for was for the businesses to pay for their own costs and make enough of a profit to keep going

Huh? What are you talking about?

People don't pay for online publishing because it mostly sucks, and you can get the same quality from shitty blogs. If anything, people stopped paying only because they now feel they've got screwed multiple times over.

For instance ... I'm paying for my cable TV and for my newspaper, not to mention a national tax for public radio ... and yet commercials are being shoved down my throat constantly, not to mention the mediocre content being offered.

True journalism is dead ... mass-media intentionally focused on quick-sells like scandals, shock and awe campaigns or celebs news (like Paris Hilton's latest fart).

They've also trained their customers to look for such subjects ... because frivolous subjects are cheaper to write and easier to find.

Now who's to blame that they've got themselves into a corner because a wet-behind-the-ears teenager with a shitty blog can deliver the same poor quality?
It's also too late to change course because the average attention span of a reader has only gotten worse and now people can't stand reading thoughtful articles.

It sure sucks to be them.
One springs to mind, Adobe Lightroom (available for Mac as well :)
Title is a bit over the top and misleading. Traditional publishing is dead (or dying). Books, are decidedly not dead. They simply take different forms now.
How startups can slay giants
It makes me tingle inside every time I see a company drop support for IE6. It's the only way that we'll ever be able to put it to rest.
Federal Circuit Invalidates Harvard and MIT's Patent For NF-kB Gene Expression
I stopped $ rm -rf ./things -and instead do- $ mv ./things /tmp and just forget about it. Yeah yeah, it won't work on a server, but for a home system that reboots occasionally, it should work fine.
Anybody here read Heinlein's "Citizen of the Galaxy"? To stop think kind of a business, you make it unprofitable. The question is "how?"
They have a count-up timer of how long it's taking to be approved: http://my.opera.com/community/countup/

It's not clear what statement they're trying to make with this but it's not pretty.
That said, the day someone figures out how to generate edushi.com-style pixel art from a combination of photos and LIDAR data

Or come up with a "Pixel art" filter for Photoshop and apply it to Bing Maps bird's eye photos. Just think, you could do it today.
> but I think there's a problem with saying consequentialism has bad consequences. If it has had bad consequences, they weren't doing it right.

This is a good point, but it appears like the process of attempting to apply consequentialist thinking almost always leads to bad places. Consider, for example, Prohibition or the War on Drugs. These were both really well-intentioned in some ways - they were about having a cleaner, more sober, more healthy society, with less poverty and more prosperity, and less addiction. But the end result is creating an underground drug/alcohol trade, giving rise to organized crime and gangs, and having people now consume less safe homebrewed versions of alcohol and drugs.

I think most if not all well-intentioned consequentialist thinking goes to similar places. There were will always be seductively alluring "Works in theory/destroys the world" type things (separate but equal segregation, communism, prohibition, price controls) - and many of those are in violation of basic deontological ethics of giving people choice, letting them live their lives, and so on. I think the vast majority of drastically bad ideas can be avoided with straightforward, rule based live and let live type ethics, which is what I personally favor after searching around.

"Ends justify the means" has historically always led to bad places - and I think it always will. "Ends justify the means" works in theory, but has consistently historically failed in the real world.

Edit: Just read the Less Wrong article - quite good and I more or less agree with Eliezer there.
Well I think the issue might stem from the fact that professors in university might not be masters of the craft of coding. I am sure they lost a lot of that mastery while researching their theoretical distertations and what not.

Many who show a mastery in coding are working on the next-big-thing and not furthering their theoretical knowledge.

This is just my thoughts, however. I really have no experience in learning to code in university (2 semesters of intro ECE).
comp.lang.c hated Schildt so much they made a FAQ entry for him (though I admit I've never read one of his books).
I hope that this gets approved. I don't care much about their extra features, but on the 3G model Safari is dog slow.
Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Nodes With GlusterFS (CentOS 5.4)
Doing all the rendering on the server side is certainly an interesting approach - however, I wonder if the speed comparison will be as favourable once that server is doing the rendering for millions of users!
how well does "the general public" get the idea that colour alone is worth thinking about? won't this suffer from being perceived as an "incomplete design place"? or is the idea that there's a niche for customizing sites (like twitter) where all you can really change are (css) colours and background images?
Being old enough to remember the Alvey Programme and having worked on the EU ESPRIT programme I'm just a wee bit skeptical when I hear a politician making any announcements about funding one particular area of CS research.

The Semantic Web has always appeared to me to be good old symbolic AI with a dash of angle brackets.
Knowing where you’re going greatly increase your chances of getting there
Yes, but that's Opera's problem. I wonder though, if they fall back on using WebKit/other local HTML rendering engine if their servers go down.
going through the interview shredder

My experience was that the interviews were easy and fun once my interviewers got over the embarrassed "this is really stupid, but I'm supposed to ask you this really trivial question...".

The recruiter I dealt with, on the other hand, was collossally incompetent, and ranks among the top reasons why I declined Google's job offer.
Great essays with a great tone.
While I agree that this method might help in Algebra/intro to CS, I'm not sure it's beneficial in the long run. The net result is the following set of expectations: you teach them how to apply an algorithm, then they repeat what you told them on the test. This is nothing more than "teaching to the test".

This is, for the most part, how students are taught in high school.

The problem is the following: real life and (if you are doing your job right) more advanced classes don't fit this model. A simple linear algebra example (from my midterm two weeks ago) illustrates what happens when students are taught this way.

Problem: a 4k x 4k matrix M consists of 4x4 blocks along the diagonal, 4x4 blocks on the bottom row, and zeros elsewhere. Find an efficient algorithm for computing M v (v a vector).

[ M1 0 0 ... 0 ]
[ 0 M2 0 ... 0 ]
[ ... ]
[ B1 B2 ... Bk]

The right answer consists of multiplying only the non-zero blocks and has complexity O(k). I gave partial credit for any answer that computed M v. The most common answer I got was "compute the LU factorization." Some went so far as to explain how to use the LU factorization to solve Mx = v. Apparently, I used the word "efficient" when explaining the purpose of the LU factorization, and I used the word "efficient" in this problem.

My students were trained for 12 years to repeat the teachers password. This training failed them the moment they needed to think. It may improve performance in the short term, and it's an easy way to teach. But the long term results are extremely harmful.
Regarding the quote you referenced, that's just a fact of business. What consumers pay for is the cost and profit margins of the company in question. What they receive in exchange is content.

So you're saying that you honestly, in your heart of hearts believe that the BBC, Times Online, Telegraph, and Guardian have the same quality of journalism as a bad blog?

I find that hard to believe. I think if that's really your stance, you're more likely reciting the platitudes of the day.

Now there are publications that focus on things like that, and that should die. For instance, the Sun, Daily Mail and so on. The sooner they die off the better. But that doesn't mean that there's not still good journalism out there. It's just a smaller ratio of the total content in the public domain, as the amount of really bad stuff has swelled.

Think of the beer market if you'd like another example. There's a shitload of really crap "beer" out there. On the other hand, there's a smaller number of really good beers. However, you have to ignore the stuff that's appealing to the lowest common denominator (the Sun and Daily Mail and crappy blogs) to be able to find the real gems (the BBC etc...)
I think books will become a premium product in years to come. Lots of 'stuff' will be available digitally, but people will use books to express themselves in many ways.

Pulp fiction will go digital. There will be a market for things to leave around the house for plenty of years yet.
Interesting. If you are working with Python-only, why have you decided against Python pickling?
This topic is soooo 2003.
Heh. They might even finish sooner than 3DRealms' Forever Nukem
Isn't it interesting that while we're always debating "ad-supported" vs "paid content", magazine publishers were getting away with murder by getting both for decades???

Advertisers are paying us loads of cash! And guess what? People are paying us to see them too!
Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (1923)
No stinking loops
This really does seem to be a big problem in the Windows world. Apple has a pretty clear design aesthetic for OS X that they carry through to a lot of the applications they write as well. That's given the developer/designer community a great base to start from. A lot of the 3rd party applications are tweaks of the general aesthetic that Apple provides to start with and they end up looking great. I don't mean to imply that the people creating OS X applications aren't talented, but Apple has sure helped them by providing a solid foundation. As a developer I can go into Xcode and put together and easily put together an interface that looks both very modern and well designed (whitespace, colors, etc).

Contrast that with Windows (I do most of my coding on Windows) where the application development tools let you easily create what is pretty much a Windows 95 style application. If I want to do something more modern looking, I certainly can, but I will be on my own to basically override existing controls to come up with my own look and feel. Also, I will be creating this look and feel from scratch as Microsoft has provided no starting point.

Microsoft theoretically has provided the tools to create great looking resolution independent applications with WPF, but until they start providing some examples of what the Windows aesthetic really is through their own applications, you won't see many great looking applications on Windows.
Yes, undo rather than confirmation is not only a good idea for GUIs, but also for CLUEs [1].

[1] Command Line User Environment
add css animations, gradients, multiple backgrounds, tranforms, text shadows, box shadows

then ill be impressed about improving an edge case on a feature other people implemented 5 years ago.
> It's also too late to change course because the average attention span of a reader has only gotten worse and now people can't stand reading thoughtful articles.

I disagree on this point. The long thoughtful articles of PG and Yegge are the most successfull 'programmer's blogs.
The iPad/tablet PC market defined?
Very true. That seems to be the pattern though. The few nice looking applications for Windows are mostly cross platform and have an aesthetic that is unique to that one application. On OS X there are a lot of 3rd party applications that you can describe as feeling like a Mac application. I don't really get that same feeling about anything on Windows.
XMarks on Android
Gruber isn't non-critical of Apple's iPhone business either. He has consistently criticized them for how they're managing the AppStore, for instance.

However, because he also has deep insight into Apple's business and culture (probably better than any industry analyst), he understands the underlying reasoning and motivations, and so he doesn't just spout out ignorant rants nor pretends to know how to "easily" solve the problem, either.

Now, I might come off as a Gruber fanboy here, but just read up and you'll find that this is true. He speaks from humility and insight, and he doesn't serve up advice on how Apple should improve their business — in all respects — with a quick fix, like most other Apple critics do.
Yeah, in the comparisons they did, IE definitely came out on top. But I didn't really have a problem with the attitude of the post, "look at our shitty implementation" is not really worth writing home about.
Liza with a 'z'.
This is correct, well investigated!
Now this is something to wow about. Forget the iPad, this is real innovation.
Google used to censor Scientology and Nazi pages for U.S and German searches. Are they still doing this?
Thats actually a very good question. I can think of a few ways to make pirating unprofitable. Or dangerous. But unfortunately can't think of any non-violent way.

* Equip all the ships with armament. The pirate teams are small in size. So hopefully, the investment in arms wouldn't be a lot to fight them off.

* Turn the table. Offer an insane "Reward" to anyone who captures one of the local elders - the people who give anchoring permission.
Ubuntu One Music Store enters public beta, Canonical calls for more testers
From 2008:

Opera Mini has become the world's most popular mobile browser. Since its worldwide launch in 2006, more than 44 million people have downloaded and used Opera Mini. More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March 2008.

I think they can handle the load.
Single most important habit I've developed as a SysAdmin: measure twice, cut once.

I never just

sudo rm *

First, I do

echo sudo rm *

inspect the output, and then use CLI editing to recall the command, and delete the "echo"

I do this for damn near everything that involves a wildcard. It's a lifesaver.
Course you can!

That's pretty much what we do with new starts where I work. Give them a mentor, get them stuck in, they pick up the basics very quickly and the complex stuff during the few months after that.
Is he trying to break ground, or just share some thoughts on his first day? I don't understand why there is an expectation that this blog post would be an in-depth investigative journalism expose.
I don't agree. Often I can be found at my workstation building some contraption out of rubber bands and business cards. "What are you doing?" someone will ask. "Programming. I'll type it in later."
That sounds awesome. I wish I was on the right side of the pond.

Have you thought of putting some material online, or even taping the course? (of course, maybe you don't want to do that for the first iteration)
Google Keyword Policy May Be Restricted by EU Ruling
Pretty much for the same reasons that graffiti is illegal: Public places are often private property. Someone has to pay to sandblast or paint over those eyesores. And the broken window theory says crime increases in areas that are not well-maintained.
Having done permanent damage to my knees on numerous occasions, I can definitely relate. 3 minutes on an elliptical is about all I can stand before my knees start to buckle, though I can easily do MUCH longer than that on bikes or treadmills (as they work the knees and surrounding muscles less directly.)

If you're overweight, obviously, getting the weight off of the knees will help them tremendously too.

And yes, I don't know how I overlooked that you were already doing other exercise tasks, so my apologies for needlessly repeating what you already knew.
If Apple purposely makes it difficult for this to work with the IPhone then it's clear to me they are no different then Microsoft.
When your company has no revenue, the "obvious" answer is to sell as hard as you can until your cashflow positive. But it's not going to help unless the product actually works.

This seems to be the gist of the comments here, but I'd like to propose a third requirement: operations.

Ultimately, a business has to become self-sustaining, and that can't happen until the acts of building the product and selling the product become sufficiently well defined that they can be handed over to a professional staff. (See also: E-Myth)
There are definitely some, but a quick glance at a random X programs will convince you that Apple's products have a relative monopoly on design-centric applications. Except web apps, some of those are really impressive.

I fully expect this to gain more focus on Windows & Linux, and it has had a significant impact already. But other platforms are far more polluted by old, nasty looking software than OSX & iPhone, and Apple pretty much started the current trend towards better GUI design, despite there clearly being a desire in the market for it for a long time.

I'd have liked to see at least one from those categories, but it would be much more difficult. I have several applications on my Mac that could fit in that post, and I have never had one on Windows, despite having used literally several thousand Windows applications. Some design-centric, but none beautiful (a custom interface does not necessarily mean it's a good one). Sure, some have been shiny / beautiful in locations A, B, and C, but none all the way through to Z. There has always been several massive oversights that break with the small fluid goodness.

All of this is excluding games, of course. Games are generally well and "completely" designed on all platforms pretty equally (sans iPhone).

edit: oh, forgot to add. I'd be very interested in what other HN people can find out there on Win/Linux. I've seen very little, but I haven't looked for it very much.
Time since Opera Mini for iPhone was officially submitted to Apple
The privacy issue is probably bigger. I don't really want every page I browse to be going through their proxies.
Interesting privacy concerns as well perhaps; I can imagine a few people would prefer not to use it because of that.

My privacy has never really worried me yet but this makes me stop and think for a second (ultimately I think I'll be fine with it, but it needs considering)
Matt Mireles: How My Blog Made Me Famous Overnight & I Decided to Leave NYC
There are 24,000 studies with the search term nootropic.

To ask the question you suggested asking, which of those are well designed studies? (And to follow up with what is my concern, which of the better designed studies show an objectively measured improvement in cognitive function over a reasonably long span of observation?) Which studies, if any, make a positive case for meaningful effect with a good safety profile of nootropics in human patients?

Citations would be greatly appreciated from any reader who has citations available. I will look them up. I checked the Cochrane Reviews yesterday while this thread was first active.
He is not trying to graph the "value" of the stories.
"If the poem's score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness."
Android Apps: 7% used the free filter, vs. less than 1% for the paid filter
Just in case you aren't being facetious 3DRealms have packed it in on Duke Nukem Forever. Thats what happen when you have moving goal posts and millions of dollars to spend.
My biggest complaint about programming education and text-books is the handling of the 'object-oriented' issue. They throw it at you, at the very start, with zero context. I asked my lecturer what 'non-object-oriented' programming would be, and he couldn't give me a straight answer. A fellow student turned and said 'it's like when you don't have buttons, just prompts' (with an implied 'd'uh!'). It seemed he was confusing the OO paradigm with the 'visual' programming/design paradigm. Another problem is when they teach about encapsulation, they put far too much emphasis on defensive programming and make it sound like there's hackers out to meddle with your classes or grossly negligent colleagues who MUST NEVER see your code; whereas it seems to me the main benefit is 'information hiding' for the purpose of focusing control/interfacing into single points thereby making changes easier (eg. you could have any number of possible mechanisms behind a clock-face but the face remains always familiar to the outside world).

Of course, these are just my opinions as a relative n00b. :)
I knew that it was Budweiser even though the commercial never aired where I live. Heck, I'm not even sure you can buy Budweiser here.
Not sure either of those would work.

I don't think companies would want to spend money for weapons, nor the cost of training employees to use them, nor the liability of what happens if they are used and any ensuing results. They want the police or government to simply take care of it, and they spend no money at all. Unless that happens, it's probably less cost to simply accept piracy as a cost of busienss.

For the reward to capture or off a local elder, that just opens up a spot for another person to fill in.