skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never thought that way, interesting.Thanks
Oh, wow. I was just gonna run out and get some more KelcoGel Gellan Gum this morning. Thanks for the recipe.

Actually, molecular gastronomy is pretty amazing stuff. Where can an ordinary person buy this stuff in public? A restaurant supply store?
Very good stuff, but note that it's from 2001.

(Kent Pitman was involved in the ANSI CL standardization process, was the lead author for the standard itself, and created the HyperSpec -- http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index... -- which is possibly the best programming language standard document ever.)
So does the pre-order process help Apple? They now have advance information on the demand for the product 1-2 weeks in advance of the launch.
I may be wrong, but this seems like just a rage dump.

I don't work for a large corporation so I can't say how they treat this stuff, but the way we're approaching this is "starting conversations."

In addition, if you don't have any presense, how will you be found? If we stop posting blogs, making websites, using twitter and all the other tools we have to get our message out (and linked to) how would the author want us to be found? We could go back to the old days of directly calling prospects who weren't even looking for us. I just love getting unexpected phone calls from salesmen myself.
I realized the headline "question" is just rhetorical and fashioned to be link-bait, but can't resist offering an answer of: "Nothing."

...because this is not the long-dreamed-about NCAA national football title.

It's not about titles. Or even dollar totals. Whether Apple as a country can continue to offer great value to its shareholders (wish I were one) depends on its long-term business model (and ability to judge consumer tastes/desires). And they certainly could potentially make some strategic missteps like any huge corporation (can you say, 'Toyota'?).

More interesting than Apple teaming up with MSFT at this point would be Apple moving into Google's turf: search.

What if Apple bought up DuckDuckGo and invested as much innovative energy there as it has in hard/software? It's sounding likely that they'll soon be launching iAd to compete with other online ad processes. They're already getting practice at building huge server farms (Maiden, NC).

I wouldn't rule out Ads/Search from Apple: it would just require getting ratcheted higher up on Steve's priorities.
It made sense to me (although correct me if im wrong because i dont know anything about real math or e8): the room is a collection of furniture, the e8 is a collection of theories. if you rearrange all the furniture, it's still a room full of furniture, but now all the smaller pieces' intended purpose (sitting on them, putting books in them etc) no longer work. he still keeps e8 intact holistically, but he manages to do so only by invalidating the sub theories which make up the e8.

close?
From http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/garbage_col... I gather that the GC isn't compacting, but I'm not at home in GC terminology, so perhaps it is, but they use another term for it.
KMP's answers to the Slashdot questions were very long, so they split them into two parts. There doesn't appear to be a link from the first part (which is the thing linked here) to the second part, so here is one: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/13/04202...
Cisco held the title of "world's most valuable company" at one point during the bubble (see http://news.cnet.com/2100-1033-238483.html - March 27, 2000).

That proved pretty meaningless then, as it would for Apple now.

Market cap is not a good basis upon which a company should frame its strategic planning and for the article to suggest that Microsoft may do this vis-a-vis Apple and Google renders its analysis pretty superficial.
This has tones of Zuckerberg's "privacy is passe" and Schmidt's "if you don't want anyone to know about something, don't do it". I pretty much despise this view.

I also think it is somewhat naive about how this is going to play out. People are not going to accept with good humour that their reputation is being trashed on line. And they are also not going to magically ignore other's indescretions. We're pretty much biologically incapable of that - when we see someone portrayed in a highly compromising light it makes psychological impressions that we can't just dismiss. The reason this hasn't really been a problem yet is just that it's still so new.

What is going to happen as time goes on is that the lawyers are going to start getting involved. People are going to start suing left right and center. It's already happening - there was a case just today where a school is suing a parent for making disparaging comments on a web site:

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-bit...

Things are going to deteriorate into a very messy and ugly fight until we sort out new norms and social conventions on line, and possibly, if things get bad enough, new regulation by the government (which I really hope we avoid, but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope).
If the only way to protect yourself from negative information is to make the information absolutely untrustworthy, everyone will quickly be accused of everything.

This new startup's only real use will be as a honeypot for 4chan trolls.
basic...
now with microsoft's new one who could go wrong?

i learned AWK... but then QBasic is what made me a programmer.
Edit dissertation – Learn the rules first
When you embark on writing a dissertation, you think the job is over once you have put all your thoughts down. You don’t realise that this is far from true. Proof reading and editing dissertation could literally send you up the tree because you need to spend double the time that you have already put in, writing the whole thing.
> When you trust the abstraction

I agree. I would also say that in cases where the abstraction doesn't make sense you have to know what's going on inside the box in order to trust it.

In your example, the file system as an abstraction makes sense because once you understand that it's a tree, you are pretty much good to go.

I remember working on some projects early in my career with a very senior developer who had a habit of making the strangest abstractions possible on a problem. For example, need to use a class to define a triangle? His constructor might take 7 arguments! The center of the triangle on the screen, and the distance from the center as well as the degrees of rotation from the center (with the bottom of the screen being 0 degrees). Oh, and actually, it didn't take 7 arguments, it took 4, but three were some special object type containing a tuple of radians plus a mishmash of other parameters and a coordinate on screen. Because he wanted to, you know, reuse that code again. So in order to build a triangle, I had to define a center point on screen (with 0,0 in the middle of course because that's how his code worked) and then calculate the coordinates of the three triangle points from the distance I wanted, then convert degrees into radians or some such....bah! I don't remember all of the details, this was a long time ago, but it was horribly obfuscated and made no intuitive sense. He explained that it was all to avoid some singular edge case that he had encountered once, and he thought it was a good trade-off because all of the new edge-cases it introduced were manageable.

When I received this code (without documentation or useful comments), he was on vacation for two weeks.

Naively, I assumed it was an easily understandable abstraction in that I could simply supply 3 coordinates in some order to the library and get a triangle. I spent a couple days trying to figure out the order I was supposed to issue the coordinates to get it to draw before giving up and just reading the code to figure it out. Worse yet, the internals were abstracted all to hell in a similar obfuscated fashion and I literally got nowhere in trying to figure it out.

I actually just waited for him to get back to walk me through the code, peppering him with question like "do we really need to define the z coordinate as 0 all the time since the display is always 2d?" before proceeding on that work. Once I understood it, I just wrote some wrapper code to translate three normal 2d coordinates into his craziness to simplify my life.

I ran into this kind of thing with his abstractions all the time. From the most insane string class you have ever seen to a home rolled virtual memory library that pickled objects onto disk, but all of your objects had to be built around a base class that was full of useless virtual functions that you had to implement.
You experience is correct. Microsoft tools and platforms are, generally speaking, good.

Some things, like making the entire .NET source available for debugging, even cuts into the open source's advantage of deep debugging.

The key problems for me are: cost, lock-in and to some extent, slower pace of evolution.
That's the point that seems to be most missed here.

It makes total sense to split things into 7 different classes when you actually need different implementations of all those parts so that the abstractions you've made are useful.

The problem with demonstrating these things in books (or in general) is that your examples have to be simple to be comprehensible. But the presumption is that the techniques are being applied into reality to a much more complex system. I'm sure if the book had injected 20,000 lines of code into the example he would have written a blog post about how the book should have used a simpler example to demonstrate the point while having no complaint about the fact that it used 7 classes to do it.

I think because of this tendency in books and courses to demonstrate complex OO techniques with simple examples many people come away with the attitude that you should do all this stuff pre-emptively rather than "on demand". I'm not sure that was ever really the intention, but it has resulted in a lot more overly abstracted code being produced in the world than necessary.
"Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says “Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce.”"

It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society.
http://inventwithpython.com/

I have two girls (10,7) and they both enjoy this one. Easy to follow.
Agreed. With the old-fashioned rumor, there's always the chance that it will be traced back to you, providing a real disincentive to gossip. With fully anonymous rumor spreading, just go to town and make up all the shit you want.
Hold 'home' on android to 'alt-tab' between running apps.
World hottest news: US man 'tried to revive dead opossum' in Pennsylvania
I can only think that the GC has a bug. From [1], the GC is incremental, but I suspect it's not guaranteed to make forward progress, because it's not collecting large orphaned object graphs.

Object pooling may or may not make sense depending on whether the GC is generational or not, and how large the graph of live objects normally is. In a non-generational GC, the whole object graph will need to be traced to free any garbage at all, which means that if your live set of objects is large - and hence expensive to trace - you'll want to minimize the number of allocations, and pool almost as much as possible, especially if the GC is non-incremental and users can perceive freezes during a GC.

In a generational GC, cheap objects should not be pooled, but it may make sense to pool objects that are expensive to allocate or collect. For example, in .NET large objects like long arrays (over 40K bytes IIRC) are allocated in a special heap that's only collected with a full GC. Pooling those guys makes a lot of sense, because dropping them as garbage will force full GCs too often.

I would expect most modern GCs to be compacting (and generational), to avoid fragmentation, the cost of keeping track of a free list and improve locality, but if there's a lot of interop between the GC managed memory and native code, then updating references may be problematic.

[1] http://192.150.8.60/devnet/flashplayer/articles/garbage_coll...
Divide and conquer approaches show that complexity is a matter of perspective. From the right point of view, many problems become trivial, or at least tractable.

The standard example is quicksort. Sorting requires N^2 relations to be enforced, but quicksort does it with N * log N operations (on average).

Matrix exponentiation is another simple example. Take M^N, where M is a square matrix and N is an integer. Directly calculating that takes a lot of arithmetic. So instead you calculate M^2, M^4 = (M^2)^2, M^8 = (M^4)^2, and so forth. Then M^N is simply the product of at most log(N) those binary powers. (Since iterated linear systems can be written as matrix math, this lets you easily calculate their Nth iteration. Want the trillionth Fibonacci number? No problem.)

The fast Fourier transform (FFT) is a much less obvious example. It computes an N-element frequency spectrum of N data samples in O(N * log N) time. This is impressive because every input contributes to every output, so the naive algorithm takes O(N^2), which is intractable for real-time signal processing.

Even less obvious are the various algorithms based on the FFT. For example, the primary school method for multiplying two N-digit integers requires N^2 operations, which is intractable for large values. However multiplication is equivalent to the digit-wise convolution of the integers followed by carrying the digit overflows, and there is an FFT theorem for convolving in O(N * log N) time. So you can multiply in O(N * log N) time! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6nhage%E2%80%93Strassen...
What a silly thesis. I always find theories based on deep assumptions about extraterrestrial psychology bunk.

The beginnings of social rather than biological evolution on earth are fantastically recent on a geological scale. 10,000 years, give or take. And it's only been in the last 100 that anything that we've had anything that would be detectable from space.

On the sorts of timescale that the universe functions on, we simply have a tiny, tiny sample of what a technological society looks like in the one instance that we are aware of. It's such a recent thing that we can scarcely predict what it will look like in 1000 years, much less 100,000 or 1,000,000 and even 100,000 years would be a small sample to start generalizing upon.

In other words, we have no idea what we're looking for when we're looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. The odds of finding another society that is exactly in this first 100 year sliver we're at are vanishingly small.
There's not actually any content in this article. It's just ranting. Flagged.
But if a child is never exposed to work (that is, focusing on things that don't necessarily interest them rather than simply floating between things they find fun), he may not be equipped to make the proper decisions later in life.

Don't misinterpret what I'm saying--I'm not suggesting that children are simply forced to learn things, especially without any sort of context. I am suggesting that sometimes children needed to be nudged to get over the "I don't want to think hard about this" hump. We've seen this in our own kids. Our older son didn't particular like to put forth the effort to read himself, but we asked him to do it just a bit each day, and quickly he realized this opened up a whole world of stuff that he could do on his own.
He came up with a TAM of 1500, not a sales projection of 1500. Normal products capture small fractions of their total addressible market.
This goes against all my experience. Certainly, practise is needed to become a master at something. But innate ability combined with motivation and practice will yield a result that motivation and practice could never yield on its own.

"The fact is that no one is born with innate talent. Everyone is born with a potential for musical pitch."

Seriously? I've heard so many tone-deaf kids play an instrument they've practised a lot, only to start out on the wrong note, and continuing all the way through the song without even notcing. The statement is outrageous to anyone remotely musical. Some people are born tone-deaf, technique can make up for that for some beginners, but it will become instantly noticeable for people who want to master music.

"Every time we learn about which things are teachable, we can improve the way we educate people and make changes on a policy level."

Now it gets scary, because this is what we do in Sweden. We spend a lot of resources on stupid people, and we are just fooling ourselves. The stupid people continue to be stupid, they are unable to learn the concepts behind math or any other subject they fail to learn, and they continue to fail.

As a smart person, this is downright scary. I have innate ability, spend resources on me, and I will become a god. This is not true for stupid people.
Tab completion is very painful on some of the Unix systems that I have access to. NFS can randomly hang making tab completion very unresponsive. I would have thought that, these days, this shouldn't happen. But I've experienced crapness over NFS at more than one place where I have no control over the network. As I result, I have had to resort to using fancy tools like the one posted.
Transfers a hot commodity for colleges
Would be great to be able to make the drawing area full screen and/or resize it.

Great app. Fast, simple, effective.
The rant really only applies to big corps.

If you're a small company (like a 2 or 3 person startup, ie. the HN crowd), then you are the face of the company doing the tweeting/blogging/whatever. Sure, don't fool yourself that your couple hundred followers really care all that much, but it's cheap and easy marketing, and sometimes you get a bite.
We're looking for ways to make this more fun and addictive... any ideas?
When i filter this through my michael arrington lens, i find this article hilarious. It almost seems like he's priming his audience for some big letdown a couple months out, rather than hypothesizing about the future.

"the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor."

umm... right.
One thing that never gets mentioned but that seems important to me is the time factor of scaling. Say your web 2.0 disruptive foo.com starts out with whatever tech stack you'd like. The RDBMS upgrade path is several discrete and large increments from MySQL on a VPS through beefier hardware, read slaves, Oracle, shared storage, faster SAN, etc. Each one of these steps adds moving parts and substantial engineering time to get to the next plateau. If you're scaling predictably that's fine but for a lot of startups the possibility of having large unpredictable traffic spikes and not a lot of cash in the bank isn't exactly ridiculous.

Being able to have an ops staff that knows one tech stack (say Cassandra) means you can upgrade incrementally by adding small amounts of capacity in-place vs forklift upgrades. If you get featured in $media_outlet you buy more servers which add to your capacity instead of replacing it.
The pictures are great.
Scheduling Technology At Its Best
I have innate ability, spend resources on me, and I will become a god.

A wee overstatement, perhaps.

Certainly, the distribution of educational resources could be better optimized, but that won't happen in places where experimentation on educational styles is impossible.
I prefer cdargs http://www.skamphausen.de/cgi-bin/ska/CDargs

it doesn't learn, but rather you create bookmarks with simple aliases. The nicest part is that it's set up so you can tab-complete bookmarks and subsequent subdirs.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! You deserve to have your liver stabbed out with a tennis ball. A blunt tennis ball.
Python comes with a turtle module, which means you can do all the neat drawing stuff you could do in Logo back in the days.

Also Python's interactive console provides two helpful functions: help and dir, which let you stay in the console even when you have to look up documentation, check properties of an object or find what else is contained in an imported module. There are other shells for Python that provide other functionality like saving your session's input in a file so you can actually write entire programs in Python for later use.

Also there's http://www.inventwithpython.com/, which is aimed at children and lets them create simple games to see results early on.

My first programming language was PHP at age 15, so I never had to make the jump from BASIC, but I've seen people stick with BASIC way past its expiry date just because they were used to it, becoming increasingly frustrated with its limitations. I think Python has the advantage that you don't easily hit a wall like that because you are writing in a "real" programming language from the get-go.
Maybe they have secret graphical find and replace tools ;).
The real reason, as others have noted-- advance societies discover nuclear fission and supercollider technology and destroy themselves.
Ibuffer-git: See your files' git status in Ibuffer
There was an HN article a few days ago complaining about this not existing. Now it exists.
Smallbasic from Microsoft is very kid-friendly.
Creating Term Paper Cover Page
Any term paper cover page should give sufficient indication to readers about the valid points that concern the main research paper. Moreover, it is essential that students provide brief information about the research topic
Just out of curiosity, have you used both? For how long?
George Bush Blooper - Jokeroo
You want experimentation on educational styles? Try the market, because you won't get it with government schooling.
The market is a discovery process, and today we got to see a spreadsheet on YC startups, some failed miserably, but many startups (e.g. reddit, dropbox, textpayme) were smash hits.

If the market for education was open to this discovery process, there would be a lot more gods walking around. As for stupid people, there would be no incentive to spend more resources on them than necessary for what they'll end up doing. Sure, parents are free to spend a fortune on their stupid kids, but it won't do anyone any good, and it's their choice to make.

An article by Lew Rockwell on the subject:
http://mises.org/daily/2937

Also: When I say "god", I really mean a smart person that is able to reach his full potential.
But that cuts both ways, because anonymous internet rumors are worthless. At least with old-fashioned rumor, you were listening to somebody that you could make some judgement on trustworthiness (positive or negative).

If anything reputation would be more important, somebody has to put their reputation on the line to criticize someone else.
That's incredibly misleading and a fantastically blunt example of correlation not implying causation.

Do you really think Indian Independence was the only factor over a 60 year period responsible for that 33 year life expectancy increase? It's what you comment appears to say.

I'd still believe your (implied) argument considering that it was likely that after Indian Independence the people were more able to get access to modern medicine and distribute it effectively, but without including some comparative estimate those data points are particularly biased and misleading.
i agree with this but don't just 'prescribe' the right language - give her a few to try and see what she gravitates toward. you'd be surprised what kids can learn.

my 8 year old went from tryruby.org to hacketyhack. i have also taught him some basic erlang list concepts - lists:reverse, lists:seq, and functions. he got it right away and found it fascinating. ruby is easier for him because of syntax but he 'got it'.