skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to sound dense, but shouldn't there be two checks if this is how he hopes to prove he paid? One for the StreetFax and one for The Face Book project? Or does it say something about The Face Book in the memo (cannot read)?

It could turn out that he paid $1,000 for the StreetFax project but they both abandoned the original "The Face Book."
Black Parents Give Birth To White Baby Girl Bossip.com
Is that true? Every time I see someone preaching on TV it seems to be a kindly-looking badly-dressed dude repeating some platitudes about how love is nice. The preachers who get on TV are the Oprahs of the world, the ones who are best at raising money by mumbling things that everyone agrees with, rather than ones with fringe opinions.

On the other hand, there are a whole lot of people who want to believe that all Christians are hate-hongering fundamentalists.
Threads are not that hard.

I wouldn't quite say that, but perhaps rephrase it to Multicore is not that hard. Or maybe Concurrency is not that hard. (Basically, threads are just one abstraction for multicore/concurrent programming and I think its harder than some of the alternatives - its certainly a lower-level approach than others).

In any case, it isn't that hard. The problem is we're being educated to program sequentially and very little effort (relatively speaking) is being put into educating programmers to program concurrent/parallel multicore software. You cannot simply write a sequential program and then magically make it multi threaded. Good sequential algorithms are not good multicore algorithms and vice versa.

My response to the previous time this was posted to HN (linked in my other comment) explains what I mean.
He provides links for both functions, here: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/12/10/fast-exponentiation... and here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/SimpleRNG.aspx
Ask HN: Programming books that are more like math books?
So lately I've been trying to learn to program. It's quite clear that the best way to learn will be by doing. What I find odd is the structure of programming books (or educational materials) don't support this notion. Even the most interactive resources I've found (why's Try Ruby, Eloquent Javascript, etc) follow a structure like this:

1. describe concept

2. demonstrate application (sometimes)

3. provide a related exercise (sometimes) with solution (sometimes)

A typical (basic) math book, and what I'd like to find in a programming book, goes something like this:

1. describe concept

2. demonstrate several applications

3. provide 30-50 related exercises of increasing difficulty

4. provide solutions (with explanations[1]) to most or all of the exercises

[1]Math books usually don't provide explanations, but I think they would be helpful in a programming book.

It may not be pretty, and math books often use terrible exercises (especially the "real-world" exercises), but if you sit down and work through all of them, you will learn.

Programmers often say, "Just start a project." I've found that's a good way to learn how to do a particular project, and a good way to learn how to piece together frameworks and plugins and libraries, but not necessarily a good way to learn how to program (I understand all of that is part of programming, but I think there's a self-sufficiency that I'm looking for that is separate from the piecing together of things).

At any rate, does anyone know of a resource that's closer to the math book style (preferably Ruby or JS)? Is there a reason why programming books aren't written in that format?
Keeping in mind that he can't make use of any competitors' (or even friendly open source contributors') patches because they will be licensed under the AGPLv3 and not under his copyright.

I guess they could sign the copyright over to him, but I don't see another way around that. (IANAL)
At first I thought this was more a "gigs" board, which I was happy to use but now I'm not so sure. Is it a startup co-founder matching board? If so it should be renamed as such (help wanted sounds exactly like a job board or gigs board)

So we're supposed to post something we want someone to do for free?

Since this is startup focused, and it works out, are they going to be expecting equity and/or payment? Seems odd not to get some sense of that before investing time together.
I didn't read all of the complaints... usability 'experts' and I rarely see eye to eye... That said, I really found his redesign to be far far worse. It was so bad that it was not even immediately obvious to my while skimming the page that it was a redesign. I thought he had just separated out different page elements to look at them more closely. blegh.
Gostai Urbi is going open source
Gostai, the editor of innovative software for robotics & AI, is pleased to announce that its core Urbi technology is opening its code base to the open source community.
Urbi is an advanced robotics operating system, already available for a large number of robots like Aldebaran® Nao, Segway® RMP or Lego® Mindstorm, among 15 other different robots. One of its main innovations lies in a new orchestration script language called urbiscript, which natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Next to Urbi, Gostai also offers the Gostai Studio graphical programming tools, and compatibility with various simulators, making the Urbi framework one of the most advanced and complete solution for robot and complex system programming available today.
Remarkably, Urbi is also very simple to use, even for beginners. It is perfectly suitable for advanced industrial or academics applications, as well as for the educational market.
The source code is covered by an Affero GNU GPL v3 license and is available for immediate download and use from Gostai’s website. This initiative will allow developers worldwide to participate in the growth of the industry's most innovative robotic software solution.
curious: Did you ever have to access computers using a web interface remote desktop client? Very few of them are good and does the job. Anyone who wants to do something real would no doubt install the plugin. Also in the winXP demo there was obviously a lag between the real cursor and the cursor on VM. It might not seem annoying until you need to use it for an extended period of time.

I agree that they should avoid plugins if their app works fine on html & js, however, this is unlikely with the current html and js. (Think of playing games). Maybe with the improvements in HTML5 this might be achievable, but currently it's not.
If you had a swarm of them, they would still not be viable telecom satellites.
I came here to post exactly that. He says 'well this makes me re-think self-documenting code', when in reality writing readable code would have provided all of the documentation necessary. I don't get his point.
LilyCMS open sourced - Big data content repository built on HBase+Solr
The Apollo Astronauts' Fascinating Insurance Covers
Move forward with doing the right thing for your current employer. Once the developer is in, you could continue a conversation with company X and disclose what happened and see how they react. If they are a normal company, it really won't affect it whatsoever.
Spend a week learning it and see what you think. Play with the metaprogramming, runtime code creation, and dynamic method invocation, and see if it floats your boat.

(Try this article I wrote for DevX: http://www.devx.com/RubySpecialReport/Article/34502

I tried to give an example that would show off some of the nicer things in Ruby.)

After trying the language, if you don't like it, don't use it, and stop reading Ruby articles.

BTW, anything that claims "Blub is so awesome, you should use it," but doesn't explain why, isn't worth the time of day. Ignore them.

It's unfortunate that there are some people who gush over Ruby like it was their first high school crush, but so what? Try a variety of languages, find one or two that suit you, learn them well, and go make stuff.

Code talks, bullshit walks.
This is trivially just the usual long multiplication rearranged.
Same here, half an hour later.

Your cheap server will kill your startup?
This is a great video, but be sure to check out the rest of the series with Knuth.
Oh wow. That cooking stackexchange is hideous. There is no visual connection between the topic and the design - why use blue gridlines and pencil shaded widgets for a food and cooking site? It seems more of a drafting or a tailoring site. I don't need fancy backgrounds or images, but perhaps use the site colour scheme to allude to the wonderful colours, senses, flavours, tastes, and pure enjoyment that you get from cooking and eating.

For example, chowhound uses small splashes of red to give their site some "flavour".

There is no joy in that cooking stackexchange. It is like cooking for computers.
Essential Trust Analysis
Sure I get that, but to be a "most hated company", it first must be a "well used company" which facebook is, and twitter is not.
True -- a dedicated writing interface makes much more sense for blog where you are adding new content that is similarly-formatted on a daily basis. But if you're building a marketing or informational site for a business, a traditional CMS makes a lot more sense.
I was going to agree entirely with eplanit's comment (that this post is merely a vent for the author's ego), but I literally felt a wave of relaxation when I looked at his mockup. It's probably not perfect, and it probably has some flaws compared to the use case of the current site, but man, looking at it makes me feel like I'm kicking back at the beach. What a difference.
You might be interested in trying out Nitrogen[1] first. Zotonic builds on it, but picks a lot of the tools for you, so you might be interested in the basic approach first, especially if you're learning the language.

[1]: http://nitrogenproject.com/
An authoritative source would need to cover all possible contexts (not to mention the problem of actually being right), which would make it infinite in length....
The majority sentiment in this discussion seems to be favoring Zuckerberg. I am not sure why hackers, with the usually higher integrity and honor than most, will defend this scumbag who seems to defraud not one, two, but three different parties, and laughs with his buddy on IM about his ability to steal people's information.

Is it because Zuckerberg is now rich/powerful? Are we being more lenient to those folks now? Because these are the folks, the ones without integrity but with money/power in our society, that are ruining US. These are the folks that are crashing people's 401k, devaluing the dollar, giving bailout money to their buddies, shipping jobs overseas, cheating, lying, and stealing their way to the top. These are the folks that are bankrupting our world. Pretty soon, one day you wake up, you'll have the social security/medicare benefit disappear. your house will be worthless, and so will your 401k. After you've worked hard for 30 years. Maybe then you'll hate the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.
It seems it also kills blog posts.
That Kurt Wimmer movie sucked. And Milla Jovovich looked like a skank in it. She's fallen a long way since The Fifth Element...
Oops, sorry, you're right. I would change the title, but I think the editing window has passed.
Yeah, most of us are crying ourselves to sleep every night sleeping on our giant dragon horde of money

Man, I hope you meant "dragon hoard". A dragon horde just sounds dangerous.
Biotech on a Shoestring: How Companies Are Pinching Pennies in the “New Reality”
It's beta. That's how the other beta stackexchange sites look like.
But this is the UK we are talking about and the university in question is Oxford - so the rules are somewhat different.
Thanks, you are very straight forward. I was assuming I would get a lot of people flaming this because Ruby is like "their first high school crush", but was wrong.

Do you have another link to your article? I'd like to read it, but the site wants me to register. I'm not down with that.

Thanks James
I don't normally swear in Hacker News comments, but it is such a fucking tragedy that we still have this problem, especially on StackExchange sites owned by people like Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood who should really know better.
Resumes do not stand out. Creativity Does.
May be true for some oxbridge students, but not all (and not me if I do end up doing it)
Someone should do design around the world too. In the US people still seem to love the textured background and serif fonts.

Eg http://www.remax.com/ vs http://www.remax.co.uk/

They also seem to like using posed photos of people:

http://www.verizon.com/ vs http://www.vodafone.co.uk

Anything else anyone's picked up?
Insert FP rant here
Cached version:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NHOzY_o...
StackExchange as a platform is going to face an uphill battle if they don't rethink their entire strategy.

The Area51 'vetting' process is an unnecessary barrier to creating new and interesting 'exchanges' (I guess it makes sense from a cost perspective), and they need to adjust the user experience for the non-geeky universe.
There's an Erlang Inside interview with Rusty (the author of Nitrogen) as well - http://erlanginside.com/interview-with-rusty-klophaus-on-the...
Thanks - this works for accessing lots of other data on the device, however, so it's really neat!
Well, that's pretty much the a basic OSS argument that's been around since day 1, just applied to a specific device.
Richard Branson's tips for entrepreneurial success
The Patent Troll: Making a fortune off other people's ideas
I did my undergraduate work in philosophy, and I honestly have found it really useful in CS. The ability to break down a complicated argument into small steps that are independently verifiable is very close to the ability required to break a complicated program or operation down into smaller components that are independently verifiable. In addition, philosophy improved the clarity and rigor of my thinking and writing on complicated subjects, and it made me better at presenting my arguments in an unbiased, rhetoric free way that helps get to the right answer, instead of just trying to convince people I'm right.

So while the actual content of philosophy classes is pretty much irrelevant to anything in real life, the process of philosophical thinking and writing (at least analytic philosophy) turns out to be very good training for CS and probably a fair number of other things.
Thanks to everyone. I actually didn't get in to the phone, and I'm kindof perplexed. I have returned the phone to my relatives, but it's still a mystery what is on it.
It's fine; the source code to their product is not a competitive advantage ( http://blog.asmartbear.com/unfair-advantages.html )
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I don't buy that argument. In my opinion, the more talented developers there are, the fewer bad ones will be able to remain in the industry. I don't see the market being glutted by great developers under any circumstances.

Artificial limits on the number of Professional Software Developers established by some governing body (ala dentistry or orthadontics) is a better way of keeping salaries high. Of course, I think that's a terrible idea.
Scribble: Closing the Book on Ad Hoc Documentation Tools
Business Leaders Reveal 7 Secret Ingredients to Grow Your Business
Most language books and language tutorials are NOT written for beginning programmers. They assume you get concepts like flow control (branching, looping, etc), functions, recursion, and data structures. Even if they cover (e.g) "what is branching" it is almost always from viewpoint of "here are the specifics of my language". Basically, they assume a certain level of programming knowledge.

Advice like "just do a project" is good, but again, it is geared towards people with a certain level of understanding. However, it also works for novices, albeit more painfully. A lot of what you say about 'piecing together' vs 'self sufficient programming' is a perception problem, namely the missing ingredient for you is experience. The rest is learning about algorithms, how to make them, how to understand them, etc.

One thing, here, before getting too far, is that the language doesn't matter as much as outsiders think -- sure it is important, but a good conceptual grasp is far more important, because at some point picking up languages is fairly easy. (not trivial, but..)

So all of that being said, I don't know of any programming books which follow the format you describe, but I can recommend a couple of resources that approach the concepts instead of the language. The first is a series of books called "How to think like a computer scientist"[1]. The second is the MIT scip lecture series[2]. Neither is in your preferred languages, but both are great intros.

[1] http://www.openbookproject.net/thinkcs/

[2] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...
I'm not sure that's a real excuse for a cooking site to look like that, even if it were in beta.

But I accept, perhaps the people who run the site didn't have time (or money) and just applied the default templates, and tried running it to see whether it will work.
The Pros & Cons of A/B Testing for Startups
I don't like his interpretation for several reasons:

1. When I log into stack overflow, the status bar
at the top usually contains information I want to know.

2. The use of negative space is better, but the question title and question body seem to be too separated from each other. The question body looks too much like an answer, and their isn't enough differentiation between the two. In the original design, the tabs and the line clearly separate from the answers.

3. He seems to have gotten rid of a lot of the statistical information about the page. I use this information to decide on the value, relevancy, and recency of a question. It's kind of like Github, one of the first things I do is check the network graph, and see how healthy a project is.

4. The votes are too small in his new design. This is a critical aspect of the site, and allows visitors to make snap value decisions. It should be large, it's at least as important as the entire body of the message.

In general, his design looks better and is less busy, but would kill the overall usability. Stack overflow is useful because of the information density, not in spite of it.
I apologize for my sincerity. Please downvote any of my other comments to get your vote back. :)
I second this and especially the statement

..has a large contingent of developers that they seem to prefer to not be very good at what they do..

I've seen this as an intern and it drives me mad. Whole groups of people just wanting to do the bare minimum and end up being rewarded for it. I have a hard time being around people like this.
The Web Means the End of Forgetting
It's beta. That's how the other beta stackexchange sites look like.

That's part of the problem.

If you look at the StackExchange FAQ, this is what they say about the Beta phase:

Beta. Perhaps the most important phase. This is the actual, live site set up on a "probationary" basis to see if people will use it.

If you can't customize the user experience in a manner appropriate to the subject matter, you're being set up to fail. That's why I personally have a strong dislike for the Area51 'vetting' process.
I would agree with that. If you want to learn Erlang, then I would also recommend Nitrogen first. It's at a lower level, so you would probably be exposed to more Erlang (as opposed to learning about Zotonic)

Or go even more basic...
You seem to think that teaching a class tells us something important.

Correct. In the context of a presidency, along with his words, I believe we can infer a regard for the Constitution. And Obama made essentially this point. Take a look at an excerpt from a speech by President Obama on national security:

We are building new partnerships around the world to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates. And we have renewed American diplomacy so that we once again have the strength and standing to truly lead the world. These steps are all critical to keeping America secure. But I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values. The documents that we hold in this very hall - the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights -are not simply words written into aging parchment. They are the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality and dignity in the world.

I challenge you to find any reference Bush made to any of the above documents at any time while on the subject of national security where he is clearly expressing a regard for the document(s) as a guide.
It just needs some light backgrounds to break up the content a bit. I think the original looks fine - the banner ad causes the most damage because it's in a completely different style.
+1 for using straight markup to create the "Flash" iteration.
Counterpoint: The solution is multicore. http://www.darrylgove.com/2010/06/solution-is-multicore.html "1. Many problems just need parallelising once. 2. Given a number of cores, it is almost always possible to find work to keep them busy. 3. There are very few day to day tasks that are actually limited by processor performance."
Email threads. Start an email with the subject heading of the idea. Add replies as it evolves. Use a gmail label to track them so they don't fill up your inbox
It's Oxford. Any decent business should recognise the intelligence and workload necessary to get a degree there.

edit: Of course, it's always best to do a relevant course, but it won't be the end of the world.
> Linode could offer this stack as an in browser way to access lish.

Linode already has an in-browser interface to Lish, and I don't think Lish would work over VNC anyway, since it seems to operate on a lower level.
It was already discussed in the past:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166638
+1 luigi and bigfleet. The conf being in downtown Nashville (rather than at the Opryland hotel) this year is going to provide a whole different experience. Downtown Nashville is fun, fun, fun. See you all there!
I'd assume that you would look at it a bit differently if you were in the music business though.
Universe's biggest known star discovered by British astronomers
I have a Bachelors degree in Geography. I work at a university doing systems programming for a research group in electrical systems and security. I have been published more than once. I will be doing some fun research this year about big data. The only thing my degree content has been used for so far is one time when I was talking to a GIS company about some work related displays, I spoke the language correctly.

The most important role my degree has played: I was able to get a "College degree required" job. The importance of this cannot be understated. Many places will not consider you without the piece of paper, whether it is related or not is much less important. The paper itself signifies the ability to get through 4 years of doing something.
Why is it so hard to avoid premature optimizations?
I wonder if you could encrypt the IO and CPU operations from a VM. You would burn extra cycles, but you could publicly share computer resources.
Heh... Somewhere there's a movie exec reading this article and thinking, "Hey, with this new system, we can update the ads that we force them to watch at the beginning of DVDs!"
> In the UK, being a Member of Parliament, you get around £65k.

Yes, but until recently their salaries were being supplemented by very generous expenses. They were also allowed to take on other work, subject to certain rules.

> Even the prime minister is on less pay than several civil servants which is ridiculous.

Former prime ministers can earn a fortune, however, just look at Tony Blair. Retired MPs can also cash in, to a lesser extent, on their time in office.