skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a clearer way to put the distinction is that in Ruby, blocks serve both as lambdas AND to let you define new control structures (that are thus analogous to for loops). Combining the two lets you do things that you can't do just with lambdas, and if you want to make an argument as to why blocks are flexible that's the right argument to make. For example, to wrap file access in the appropriate open/close functionality while still letting you return early via the block.

Unfortunately, it can also result in some serious confusion on the part of a programmer that wants to think of them as lambdas. Java was originally going to do something similar and have two types of lambdas in 1.7, one using => and the other using ==> to indicate the non-local return semantics, and I think it would have confused a ton of people.

If you have a filter that takes a predicate function, for example, you might naively do (excuse my incredibly-rusty-and-thus-totally-syntatically-mangled-Ruby):

some_list.filter() |x| do
if (x.foo)
return true
else
return false
end

In this case, you'll end up returning from the outer function, NOT just returning a true/false value for filtering. To do that, you have to just do:

some_list.filter() |x| do
if (x.foo)
true
else
false
end

And rely on the way that things you might otherwise think of as statements are expression values in Ruby. But what if my predicate function is really complicated, and I want to end the block early? Um . . . too bad. Better put that in its own function and call that function from your block.

I'm sure that in practice those aren't major issues for people used to Ruby idioms and behavior, but from someone new to Ruby they can really trip you up.
they won't sell right now. just look at dodgeball.
There was a really interesting This American Life about this very subject. It does a great job of explaining some of the issues surrounding what Goldman Sachs did, though not about Goldman Sachs in particular.It does mention how Magnetar was supposably attempting to influence CDO managers into taking on riskier investment in order to get the CDO's to fail in order to cash in. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/i...
I'm sure that was only in the sense that he wanted a clean, legal separation of his Microsoft work and the work on BitC.
I didn't take Latin and I still understood it. I don't think the translation was really necessary, more a statement 'I know Latin'.
Avoid 302 redirects, they pass no PageRank.

301's do dampen PageRank as well, though the exact amount is not known. I've always put it around 10-15% (i.e., after each 301 you are left with 85% of the original value). I also suspect that its contextual - so a 301 from www.mydomain.com to mydomain.com would probably be dampened less than a 301 to a completely different domain (e.g., bit.ly).
Introductory Texts about Transhumanism
I didn't realize the "Shamatha" keyword would suffice, but it does!

The first link here has schedule for practice sessions in Seattle.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Shamatha%2C+seattle

Now, I need to find an objective way to measure before and after. Ideas?
Can someone make the title a little more grammatical? It's not really a sentence and it doesn't make sense unless you already know what it's referring to.
I particularly enjoyed this quote from Tourre (the named VP defendant), talking about how they have to move fast:

More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now…Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre]…standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!!

Fabulous Fab indeed!
Goldman did receive TARP funds, and used those funds to correct losses from maneuvers like this one. Regardless of whether or not Goldman Sachs considers that it paid back all of its TARP loans with interest, having the government prop up the company with a bottomless loan made of taxpayer money for any period of time is a public loss. It practically sponsors bad behavior on the part of Goldman and other large financial firms, because there is now a precedent for the government saving them from bearing the consequences of massively horrific choices as long as they would also cause horrific potential damage to the entire economy. The moral hazard incurred by these sort of transactions in light of the government's response is a significant and unresolved risk.
Whatever happened to FireEagle (http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/)? I haven't heard anything about them for a long time now.
Another way to save (the oh so precious) space on SSDs is to apply HFS+ compression to files.You can use ditto(1) or this GUI: http://latenitesoft.com/squeeze/

Note, however, that files are decompressed on writes, so don't try it on anything large and frequently written to.
Imho, for the same reason that schools shouldn't only teach OOP langs.

Ideas are expressed differently in different languages and there are often important nuances, where the real message is to be found, which are lost. For instance, it might have more of the intended effect to translate it as: "Who is watching the watchers?". A little paranoia here or there... today, the idea of 'guards' is pretty benign.

That Latin is a foundational language for most of the West is also an important consideration. It enables people to understand written or verbal communications which use words they haven't encountered before... Something like being able to understand a programming language you've never written in by virtue of its apparent syntax and flow control. A good illustration might be the use of "for".. you have for each, for x in y, or for(;;). Knowing the "root", "for", pretty much explains how to decode the ()'s contents in the lesser English-like C style.

Thirdly, there are many great ideas written in Latin. Those ideas have profound things to say and we risk cutting ourselves off, as a people, or maybe more importantly as individuals, from "lessons learned".
Match the Mental Model to the Conceptual Model
Take Your Network's Pulse with VoFi - Monitoring, Analysis and Troubleshooting
Is there really a serious issue in the way OS X handles SSDs?

I think I want to replace my MacBook’s hard disk with an SSD, but I’m afraid of having to spend hours rigging out the best configuration. Do you have to play with settings if you order a Mac from Apple with an SSD pre-installed?

It seems like if I want to just plug an SSD in and get on with my life, I’ll have to wait for an OS X update. Unless this is all just PC-ricer talk that’s safe to ignore…
Last I heard there was still some ongoing debate among ev biologists about whether group selection was an important effect or not; I think the general consensus tends to be that it's a pretty small effect except in certain special cases.

The existence of traits like courage is far better explained by sexual selection. Women throughout history have always strongly preferred courageous men to cowardly ones. This is only partially cancelled out by the fact that courageous men tend to die more often.

As civilization continues to advance, and fewer and fewer people die before childbearing age, I'd expect the balance between sexual selection and survival selection to tip even more strongly in favour of sexual selection, so it's quite likely that (even absent widespread genetic modification) the people of the future will indeed tend to be "sexier" than the people of the present.

(Partially cancelling this out is the idiocracy effect whereby poor dumb folks have more children; I can't estimate which is more powerful.)
"(Note that programs that run other programs need to do more than just this; they need to flush stdout and perhaps stderr before they start another program.)"

Could someone explain exactly why this is?
Richard, thank you for writing this up.

I have two questions and a minor bug report for you:

1) It seems you were tracking your Page Rank closely in this time period. Can you quantify the relationship between PR and actual rank or organic search traffic on your site? (I.e., do you know and can you share stats like "At PR N I had X organic search visitors per month"?). This will be obviously be different from site to site (as it depends on query frequency) but these would be interesting data to see.

2) I didn't take the time to watch the video, but you can briefly explain what WhySpamMe is? Is this essentially mailinator except with forwarding to your actual email address? (That's not a knock on WhySpamMe, I'm just trying to understand it. I actually think that's an interesting twist.)

3) Just FYI, I noticed that on an earlier post on your blog (http://blog.whyspam.me/index.php/2010/02/13/whyspam-me-suppo...) you misspelled "Haiti" as "Hati" a couple of times. For that matter, I think "Unicef" should be "UNICEF" (all caps), as it is an acronym. That's the way they seem to spell it officially (although their logo is all lower case, so go figure.)
There is a massive difference between expecting the seller to have your best interest at heart, and expecting that the seller will give you accurate information regarding what product they are selling you.

The first is naivete. The second is Federal securities law.
But these are not tweaks to optimize performance - they're for reducing the number of writes to the SSD somewhat. Now that I think of it, one could indeed view those writes as a performance metric (better being: less writes).
Well, putting the whole bill http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3590/text on a billboard would be rather tough, so that's the sound bite that summarizes some of the believed implications of section 3403.

This actually goes along with the back and forth between myself and RevRal. To have a technical understanding of the bill, you probably need to be a serious specialist lawyer (after waiting for the RFP and rule making). Since most people don't fit those qualification, you tend to see people explaining the implications to people. One of the implications mentioned is cutting off money to do life saving procedures based on a medical panels ruling. In a world where people use the words "prolife" and "prochoice", I don't think "GOVT DEATH PANELS" is such a stretch.

(now to really wander) As to government socialized medicine. I grew up under US gov provided health care. They very nearly killed one family member, lost critical records on another, and misdiagnosed my and my brother's backs. I don't think all of those people are "hopelessly ignorant". I would imagine quite a few have family members "served" by the VA. Go google IHS and "don't get sick in June".
What, your email isn't set to 'auto-print-then-delete-upon-open'?
As long as you leave plenty of free space, SSDs work great out of the box. Don't ever fill them (something beyond 80% capacity), or you will crush performance. The tweaks in the article are attempts to optimize for the last 2%, but in no way necessary.
Here's a link to a more recent post in other blog http://damieng.com/blog/2010/04/09/macbook-pro-upgrade-to-cr... — Author switched original 320GB MacbookPro HDD with a Crucial 256GB SSD, it provides benchmarks and compared perfomance and an interesting points:

Don’t go with Apple’s factory-options for an SSD as they use slower Samsung drives and charge a premium for it which is unacceptable especially given how easy they are to replace.

Which I hope, if true, Apple will fix by adding high-end SSD options in the near future
I've always viewed CDO's as being similar to "pointer-based" securities. GS sold the value of the pointer rather than the value of the data at the location.

Like any memory crash, when the value at the location is wiped out, any pointer to it is useless.

Shorting the value of the pointer makes sense when you know ahead of time that the value at the location will soon be clobbered.
Fake because they're probably just captured asteroids. Counts as a moon, but not quite as cool.

And yeah a trip to Mars would be way more interesting, and spectacular, but if we want to get to mars and stay on Mars, rather than what Apollo did by getting to the Moon and then saying ta-ta for 40 years, then building an incremental and sustainable interplanetary presence is far more important.

I'm not sure what the RoI on the moonshot has been factoring in all the stuff like tech industry stimulus and so on, but I imagine that the RoI on an asteroid settlement and mining plan would be way higher than RoI on a Mars-shot. Probably to the point where the asteroid program could fund the Mars-shot by itself.

I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly certain that the most expensive part of our current program is just getting shit into orbit.
Yes the minimum capital requirements for a limited company are onerous in some European countries, but at least that money is not lost. In my experience the greatest burden on startup finances are minimum social security contributions, which can be as high as 300 euros per month without earning a cent.

The UK and Ireland are without a doubt the best places to incorporate in Europe.
Being an introvert, I find that there is way too much small talk than I am interested in. I really think that most of the interviews could be trimmed down to 15-20min.

Now only if there was a highlight reel of the interview...
http://blog.kadavy-inc.com/ got on the front page of HN one time, and became PR4 almost instantly. I did link this blog to my personal site, which is a PR4 - however, that site does not link back.
Care to elaborate what exactly you dislike about it?
You can indeed get a SSD in a Mac Air as an option. Does Apple treat those different in OSX? I'm not sure.

I replaced the mechanical harddisk in my MacMini with a SSD about a year ago. It broke down last week. I don't think OSX is to blame, since I put the same model SSD in my Windows and FreeBSD machines at the same time (the FreeBSD box is always on and pretty busy), and no problems there yet. Except for the 'noatime' I didn't take any special precautions.
Because you want to make sure your output is sent before the possible output from a child program. This is the same principle as from the article.
The day my brain forgot where my back was
Google Cloud Print: coming to a wireless device near you
I've never understood why it's so important for humans to go to mars. We live on a planet where many people still endure tremendous suffering due to starvation, disease and war. In the next 50 years we will very likely have to begin large scale geo-engineering in order to mitigate climate change and ocean acidification. Prestige "science" like sending people to the moon and mars is a luxury.
Goldman is so powerful. I'm shocked the SEC is brave enough to do this.
For those who, like me, have no idea what BitC is:

http://www.bitc-lang.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitC
Because if they start another program without flushing their buffers, you'll have the output from the new program before the output from the old program, despite the fact that chronologically, the errors were generated before it started.
My friends kid can only watch the beginning. When the humans show up, he starts crying. To scary.
If you want a nonlocal return, Ruby already has a construct: throw and catch.
100M+ global monthly search volume according to google. I've owned the com, us and org variants for a little while now. I think names like this will always command a high dollar, but aggregators and traffic arbiters like google, fb, twitter, hunch, digg are only going to increase the value of solid landing pages rather than the one-word domains that "corner a market." Of course it's highly dependent on the search algorithm formula -- domainheads are always coming up with google conspiracy theories :)
Exactly, this is what the NSA wiretapping case was about. They weren't listening in on all the calls, they were gathering information on who was calling who and for how long. This is the most traditional wiretap because it requires a lot less effort and provides a lot of information.
The issue wasn't a disagreement in valuation, this is totally valid as you point out. The fraud allegation is because they were an advisor to their clients, and supposedly they misrepresented the valuation of products when then knew the value was something else.
In multitasking, more than two tasks do not compute
Also, you don't need full continuations for this, just continuations with dynamic extent. (E works this way, plus it defines 'return' as syntactic sugar for calling the enclosing method's continuation.)

Since I don't know much Ruby I'm not sure if its blocks have other advantages.
Most of the tweaks in the blog article have little to do with SSD. I seriously doubt any of the tweaks in the article will have any longer term effects on the actual usage of the SSD.
I hate you, Kevin.
One reason the furor over this died down so quickly is that different stories reported the facts differently. My friends and I all debated what had really happened. The student believed the webcam had taken pictures of him acting inappropriate without his knowledge or consent (and no parents were notified of this 'feature' of school-provided laptops).

However, it was not clear in initial reports if the student had actually done something and was spied on, or if he had taken pictures and shared them in school. Some schools have policies where students can be disciplined for violations off school grounds in instances of bullying or disseminating "ssext messages" from their peers. It was not clear, from the reporting, if this was the case.

The fact that the media is now reporting the facts, and the schools thought it was actually a good idea to spy on high school students in their own homes, shows a kind of unparalleled stupidity in both a legal standpoint and technological one.

Also, considering the statistic on how many children of the ages 14-18 "sext" one another, this software, the school's servers, the IT staff and the administrators could all be considered to be part of a child pornography network, if in fact any of those kids decided to "privately model" for another student using their laptop. Aside from the civil aspect of it, I would be contacting my state's AG to investigate whether or not any of those laws were broken.
I had a Double Down the other day. It was unspectacular; not tasty enough to be good, not disgusting enough to be an adventure.

Anyway, it only has 540 calories, which is actually pretty modest.
Here is my question about pivoting that I've never found a good answer to: What do you do with your existing customers when you decide to pivot? Wouldn't some of them be reasonably upset?
1) I'm planning another article later with some stats and some notes on usability (specifically about how adding the video you didn't watch lead to a huge increase in conversions).

2) I don't like comparing services to other services "the facebook of dog kennels!" but yes we act much like mailinator though we forward the emails to your actual email account. This is much more convenient IMHO and since the email accounts never expire you can use it for services you actually care about such as amazon.com etc.

What mailinator and the others don't do is keep track of which websites send you unsolicited spam, or sell your info. We keep track of this and publish it to http://whyspam.me/websites.

3) Thanks, there's a reason I became an engineer and not an english major ^_^ I'll fix the spelling as soon as i get a chance.
Let's not count the chickens before they hatch. The SEC is known for filing highly public cases just to get pressure off their a. This case might very well be discarded 6mo down the line and be reported in a footnote in the last page of the WSJ business section.
You could use grep() instead of filter(). Sorry for not including it in my first post... Granted, it still suffers the problem of lacking the shortcut, but programming new useful abstractions is part of our job anyway. The point is to make it readable.

I am skeptical that this example proved the thesis: "What is there you can't do with lambdas such that you need to add blocks?" unless the point was that you have the "benefit" of performing a goto/return out of a block and not out of a strictly scoped lambda. It seems like a step backward to me. For this example anyway, the better abstraction would be any() -- to treat the set of gestures as a queryable entity and to react to that query.

I haven't played with ruby in years, so forgive my syntax mistakes, but I do not think people would find

i = 0
something_or_other.each do |e|
return i if null(e)
i++
end

to be a better abstraction than

return e.length

Come to think of it, you have another return path downstream in that function anyway (not 'close').

return jQuery.any(collection, tester) ?
'close' :
'other value';

I am still open to the possible usefulness of blocks.
I definitely was considering that—at the very least as a segment of the show.
Anything less than a PR6 isn't really spectacular.
"Plenty of people knew this, but voted for Obama anyway."

In all fairness, given the range of options offered for American voters, I'd also have gone with Obama even if I didn't agree on everything.
Perfect example of the deck being stacked against the little guy
"The presence of a nude photo shouldn't matter. America has lost sight of intent as a critical component in crime."

Absolutely. The intent was to photograph kids in their own homes and without their knowledge. That is absolutely criminal. If there were no nude photos taken, it's just by chance. They should be prosecuted just as if there were.

If you put a gun to somebody's head and pull the trigger, whether the gun jams or fires shouldn't matter, legally. You acted with murderous intent.
I like it! One note: if I am not logged in, and I browse to a beer, and click the 'I drank this!' button, it just kicks me back to the root, where instead it should probably show a login/register dialog.

[edit] Sorry I missed the original point of your post and did a re-read...your site seems to be just another niche pick/rate/review which is fine, but if you want to expand it then you need to innovate. I rated a Beer and it just gave me a dumb list of other Beers with no (noticable) reason for the list. Maybe this is because you dont have enough data yet? Maybe you could capture some user-centric locale data and tie them with places to find recommended or favourite beer. Enable your ads as quickly as possible and make darn sure they are relavent, (you dont want an Anheuser-Busch ad showing up on your site), maybe evolved companies that started as craft such as Magic Hat etc. Perhaps find ways to get revenue sharing group discounts on brewery tours, coupons to microbreweries, or craft beer equipment stores. Let users submit photos of beer labels. Sorry if I am rambling.
Imitators dominate innovators in a virtual world
Yea..the unfortunate and unjust reality sets in
What do mean? Movies that have points are not to be enjoyed? A movie cannot be entertaining and insightful?
Yahoo to be honest has actually done pretty well on not running acquisitions into the ground: Delicious, Flickr, Upcoming, Inquisitor, etc.
Ok, but making it a trend wont help.
Stop people working behind desks and get them back out in the fields, then stop people taking advantage of national and global markets for food and put them back at the mercy of regional farm production, and you will see far fewer obese people.

Mind, that's ignoring the huge pretense of the linked post that the pictured level of obesity is "normal" or "unremarkable" anywhere. Obesity is a medical definition, and most people who meet it look far thinner than that.
I've worked enough in the non-profit sector, where 'accessibility' is a substitute for 'usability'. Never again.
Am I the only one which really does not see location in the sense FourSquare implements it becoming a mainstream thing in the next few years. Perhaps I'm being naive but I juts don't see it as something people want that much.

EDIT: Removed "as facebook comes", dunno what it was doing there, made no sense!
I can't tell who the idiot here is... Google or Yahoo?
Nonsense, this was just Pixar's way of helping kids learn the proper definition of irony.