skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
re: searching for punctuation sequence, lots of times you have to do Control-F on the API ref:

http://faustus.webatu.com/clj-quick-ref.html

http://richhickey.github.com/clojure/clojure.core-api.html

or maybe the Apress book has these indexed, I can't remember

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Clojure-ebook/dp/B003VM7G3S/

[[EDIT]] nevermind

http://books.google.com/books?id=4QacPa1vwMUC&printsec=f...

------------------------

also called "threading" macro's

(also read about "comp")
http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/393...

http://blog.fogus.me/2009/09/04/understanding-the-clojure-ma...

http://formpluslogic.blogspot.com/2009/07/using-clojure-macr...

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/2c46d9cacca13b0b

http://kotka.de/blog/2010/04/Did_you_know_II.html
Want to bounce around an idea? Need a proxy desk neighbour? Call 714.881.1119
My name is Kent.

I am a Rails programmer and work from home. I will be online on Skype from 11:00AM EST time until around 3:00PM EST.

If you have a Ruby, Rails problem, question or just want to bounce an idea around give me a call.

I know a lot about web design, web applications, HCI, startups, Ruby, Rails, jQuery, SEO, HTML, CSS and am a good sounding board for ideas in general.

Often times I need someone to talk to when I need to bounce an idea around and I don't have another programmer / techie in my area. I also don't work in an office and find IRC a little cold. So, let's go remote, I will be your proxy desk neighbour.

Skype (kent.fenwick) or call (714) 881-1119

Thanks,
Kent
This is such a good idea that it must have no chance of ever becoming reality.
On ROWNUM and Limiting Results
I'm not saying that you can't build large complex applications in Ruby. You can. You could also write them in Brainfuck. Having static typing helps tremendously when you have a team of 50 developers and 15 BAs. There are so many moving parts and edge cases that having an IDE and autocompletion is a must have. A team of 50 ruby devs are going to have a heck of a time keeping track of all of that business functionality without an IDE.
Cheat your way to a liveable codebase
Interesting theory but the comments below the article indicate that the theory is all pseudoscience crack pottery.

Any good reason why or why not I should take their theory seriously?
I feel like I'm being forced to get a fake FB account (or a bunch of them) just for purposes to bypassing "Facebook tax" on the Internet.
To be honest I can see absolutely no reason why you can't use floats as you describe and < , >. Depending on what you are doing it may be a little tricky due to lat/longs being angular values, but over small distances I think this can be largely ignored. (In geosay we have some front end code that sorts out the niceties of the angular stuff)
Seems like they have invented their own signaling standard. They claim to move uncompressed HD video, audio, 100 watts of power, 100mbs of ethernet, and "control signals" over the cable.

I initially assumed they were just using a protocol over ethernet, but it looks like they have something better worked out.

They don't get into details, but it looks like 10-20Gbps for the video data. The 100 watts of power is twice what can be achieved with Power-over-ethernet.

The visible fly in the ointment is looming confusion over internet ports and AV ports since they use the same connector.[1]

[1] And a thousand curses on the toad at IBM that used identical connectors for keyboards and mice but incompatible protocols. That was probably a 1 million man hour mistake.
I never sign up to these types of websites because I don't want to use a social login. I'm sure I'm not the target audience though!
ARM Holdings: The most disruptive tech company no one understands
The worst case scenario is the blink is able to do enough damage such as shutting off the computer and a hard drive being destroyed in the process, or even a power surge and the server being destroyed. (Though power surge equipment may be able to take care of the latter, a UPS would be helpful with the former).
I can't help thinking this might be vulnerable to the very real age differences. Women enter and exit the dating scene at an earlier age than men, and consequently might not see the theory or the purportedly undesirable elements before they are practised on.

Or maybe it is or will be a common topic of discussion among débutantes, moreso than among men. I have no idea.
I'm largely ignorant of commercial RDBMS's, having worked almost entirely with open source ones. So I had assumed that LIMIT was part of some SQL standard. Looking into it further, I realize that I've been wrong about that for a long time.

http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/#select-limit-offset
This is false. You can't make money by being consistently wrong about the "true" value of an asset. Then, the only way you can stay in business is to sell the asset when it's too high, and buy it when it's too low. Notice how doing this actually decreases the amplitude of the oscillations. If you're selling at a high point, you're pushing the price back down. Likewise, if you're buying at a low point, you're pushing the price back up (both times, towards its "true" value).

The reason I use "true" in quotes is because no one really knows the value of an asset. The only real estimate we have is the market estimate. Let me put it another way: if you don't believe markets efficiently allocate capital, then how would you propose we do it? By fiat?

Once again, I want to emphasize that you cannot be wrong about the value of an asset and consistently make money. If these AI algorithms are consistently making money, then they are, more often than not, accurately predicting the value of that asset (where value is defined as the future market price). Of course, my argument hinges on the market price being "right", but like I said, markets are the best way we know how to value things.
The Men Who Stare At Screens (why going to the gym might not be good enough)
Also known as 'The DDR Engine'
The real advantage of PHP is deploy-ability.

If you choose mod_perl, mod_python, JSP, or most of the classic environments you need a sysadmin to take care of the web server... It's going to crash from time to time, run out of memory, and otherwise make trouble for you.

PHP's mode of integration with the prefork Apache web server is almost trouble-free... It's such a big difference that there could be a "blub" factor here... People who program in other environments often have a really hard time believing that a large fraction of the sysadmin activities that they are doing just don't need to be done if you're running PHP. (You can go five years and never "kick Tomcat", something that some shops have to do every 5 hours).

That said, scaling comes to play here. For a small company or for a company that's doing a number of small projects, the cost of system administration that comes with other programming environment matters a lot more than it does for a big company. It's not such a big factor for a company like Facebook.

On the other hand, PHP forces people into a "shared nothing" model that scales well and ~eliminates~ a wide range of concurrency-related problems that are endemic to thread-based backend apps. For instance, quite often I've seen a race condition in an ASP.NET app and had everybody on the team swear up and down that there's no shared state, then I spend a few hours looking at the app and there's a static variable that nobody knew was there.

Another strength of PHP is that it has a very complete library that's largely correct. The PHP team is much more honest about what works and what doesn't work than a lot of others (PHP and Python have the same problem with threads, for the same reason -- PHP says "don't use them", Python says "jump in the water is fine".) If you program in some weird-o language like Haskell you'll probably have to write your own urldecode function and you'll probably be so busy thinking about higher-order functions you won't pay attention to details... Like making it work right. (Perl has a broken urldecode function in CPAN FOREVER)

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty to hate about PHP; but try to get some real work done in environment X and you'll find plenty to hate too.
python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:2525

Runs a local SMTP server on port 2525. Very useful for debugging.
Or maybe you're just an outlier who (a) understands how Facebook Connect works (b) actually cares. Does anyone have hard numbers on Social (FB/Twitter/...) signup vs. old-fashioned signup. In other words: as a site owner, why should I go through the trouble of setting up my own user management when I can get that for free by integrating FB Connect?
You can have power conditioning without a UPS per se.

Most businesses, and I'm saying this as a former consultant, greatly overestimate what systems are truly critical. Each group within a large company wants to claim their systems are the most critical to the business, but in reality, very few systems need to be up 24x7.
Hypothetical: What if an AI driven investment fund significantly out performed other funds?

The focus on number crunching seems contrary to advice given by Warren Buffet and other successful investors about investing in what you know.

i.e. "I think the market is under-estimating the impact of Product X, I'll invest in that company" versus "Analyze market cap, yearly revenue...."
What do you mean?? Do you have any idea of just how many programmer hours have been wasted by the absence of features, just how insecure so many web apps are due to the weird casting system and lack of safety-oriented features.

My impression is that people who claim PHP has not cost them development time have simply never looked at alternatives that solve many of the problems.
I know a lot of startups that do Scrum. It's helpful getting everybody on the same page and getting motivated.

Why do you get shivers? What's so bad about it?

Scrums and startups do mix.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/jjj?query=scrum+startup&#...
My company does outsourcing, mostly with startups. We use scrum (the management framework) and lots of extreme programming (technical practices), all of which fall under the broader "agile" (abstract concepts). We do these on every one of our projects...from 2 person iPhone apps to year long, multi-team projects.

For any group of people that's going to work together and produce, the ideas in scrum and agile are super important. Apply them how you like, using whatever names you like, but understand them and be aware of which ones you're doing

To me, scrum is barely a process, and it won't solve any of a group's problems...but if it's applied at all it will make those problems really obvious, at which point it's up to people to fix them.
So far the research has shown that it does save more lives than it would hurt.
"
Suddenly, a patient goes critical on her shift and she has seconds to insert a life-saving IV for fluids and medication. Can she operate efficiently without a checklist? I suspect the answer to that question is a resounding "no" and that her patient's life suffers as a result."

The point of the checklist is not to replace knowledge it's to prevent stupid mistakes. The nurse should know how to do these things without the checklist. The only reason it's there is to prevent laziness and forgetfulness. It's easy to forget one step out of x when you do it all day. I'd even say the checklist would make him/her better in an emergency because they are conditioned to do the same thing over and over. Like a ninja master!
Very interesting. How come that view is hidden? How does it work?
Lovely. First "reinvent" 3D, used by nVidia and other for years. Then "reinvent" basic ethernet. Just lovely.
I guess they are learning the game from Apple. After all, they managed to "reinvent" 8-bit gaming.
When Microsoft reinvents Windows 3.1, you'll see how this game is played! :D
Ahh. Here: http://xkcd.com/732
My own personal summary:

- it's ok if you're suffering everyday with over-engineered codebases

- we provide a tool to ease the pain - go buy it!
what great hackers have in common according to pg: http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
If the system writes state at regular intervals, the scientists would only "lose" the computing time since the last state write.
Yeah, that's one of the things I miss when I have to work with Oracle. Oracle's method of limit result set sizes feels like such a hack and leaks implementation information needlessly. It's not like Oracle couldn't implement something like LIMIT, they just choose not to.
Curt Monash: How I’m planning to package user services
The Uncanny valley
That is true. There's a lack of stickiness to the original poster's app as it is. It might be interesting to see how other people's writing was rated.

The newsletter addition was a good idea. I have a feeling many "writers" would be upset to learn they wrote like Dan Brown, no matter how many novels he's sold. Possibly a "From Brown to Updike: How to Improve Your Writing" course.

The OP's idea is darn viral, however. I love the success he's had.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

Those few seconds add up.
I don't think .NET has to support different "types" of applications. I think just about anything you can build in .NET you could do in Ruby. Ruby has a bit of a reputation for being on the slow side, and sometimes that can be an issue, but other than that, it's a general purpose language with a vibrant community, so in the end rather capable.

I think the difference lies more in the cultures. .NET was born out of the largest software company in the world with billions at stake. That alone ensures it will be on the conservative side. Whereas Ruby was born more in the open source and start up community, it has more freedom to just go for it. Look at Rails 3, massive changes and a general attitude of "this new way of doing it is better, so buck up." Which is fine, perfectly fine, for Ruby. Microsoft would never get away with that (take ASP.NET 4 for example, they went to exhaustive lengths to make sure it can be ran in "legacy" mode). The jump from .NET 1.1 to 2.0 was a painful one, and so was 3.5 to 4, and Microsoft knows that. Yet they still maintain admirable backwards compatibility despite all of that. They took serious effort to make sure from 4 on, .NET releases can live side by side. I don't think your average Ruby framework/library/whatever would care so much.
Grammatically, "disproportionately" would have been a better choice for your utterly ridiculous statement.
Ask HN: Does anybody have any success with NLP sentiment classification?
If yes, can you point me to some resources? I know it's a hard problem and one that hasn't been solved yet, but my domain is very limited.

I just need to classify text as positive or negative. Of course this can't be done with full accuracy.

What approaches have you used? What libraries?
Yes, but does it really matter if stocks are priced marginally more accurately? How does that significantly increase the productive output of the economy?
What gets me about the keyboard/mouse ports is that it took over ten years for them to get a colour coding standard! The green/purple spec came out in 99, by which time USB was already starting to take off.
They've landed "lazy frame construction" which improves rendering performance by an order of magnitude in some cases: http://tinikkel.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/lazy-frame-construc...
Who's interested in startups in the humanities?
This is a brief tutorial on Arc
Without going off on a limb, I'm guessing you're a not too experienced developer. You comment as if instead going for Perl, Ruby or ASP inherently makes an application safe, saves buttloads of manhours etc. And you're wrong. Gravely wrong.

Excluding the obvious issues caused by bugs that are a natural part of any programming language's development, security problems are not caused by the language chosen, but by the developers themselves.
Is it falsifiable?
I use fixed sprint lengths (3w) with fixed team members, and a backlog of time estimated items that the product owner prioritizes.

I would not go back to not doing this, as it allows focus (sales people fight to get things into the backlog and next sprint, rather than grabbing a developer directly). It discards out of the blue time estimates ("oh, maybe 3 months?"), by rejecting everything longer than the sprint. It also foster better developer-tester communication inside the team, already during development, which kills bugs earlier.

We're currently 3 teams with 5-6 developers and 1-2 testers each, soon to split into 4 teams and 2w sprints. So yeah, bigger company,

Agile killed a previous waterfall model with 2 month spec creation/review, 2-3 month development phase with developers being added and taken away during the time, and 1-2 months of testing, followed by bug fixing by developers that were taken out from other projects started by then.
ah good to know thanks
I think it ranks, or at least it did when the feature was added, items only by people who have had accounts for at least a year. (I may be wrong or it may have been longer than a year)
As a site owner you should probably have both. FB connect isn't "free": implementing integration probably takes more time than installing authentication plugin for Rails (and doesn't Django have built-in user management?)

But I think you should have Facebookless login if you care about early adopters: too many of them are indeed "outliers" you've identified above. I also think you should have facebookless option simply because it's good for the Internet: I wouldn't want to see so much of it being controlled by a handful of large corps.
What kind of process would you prefer to have in your company?
Yeah, but if we continue that logic and fill up that "etc etc" it would seem that the other languages have their own bad features and PHP combines them all.
First, congratulations.

I think your first goal now should be encouraging users to return later.

I would definitely promise right on the results page that more writers would be added regularly and algorithms would be improved so that people had reasons to bookmark you or to subscribe to your twitter/facebook waiting for their favourite authors.

I would also make local pages for all writers you have. Link to Amazon in that place is unexpected.

You could also encourage showing off by enhancing badges. That could be percentages (e.g. I write like 7% of users) or cool portraits or even something like "I write like Stephen King - I could have written The Stand".
Interesting to note that half of the comments isn't about the service but about Facebook connect...
Being 1.0 feels so ... reliable.
This is what I'm referring to. An IDE should make what I already know easier to get from brain to fingers to keyboard to screen.

Intellesense does this by letting me type a couple chars of a known method, then pressing tab.

It should also make what I kinda know easier to find.

A good IDE does this by letting me find a method in intellesense and showing me the method description.
Faking a recall is a bad idea. Consider the possibility that Toyota drivers were primed by the media hype to believe that the acceleration problems were real and out of their control. Thus, when they found themselves mistakenly pressing on the accelerator, they were less likely to reevaluate the situation. If they had, they would have realized what was happening and pressed the brakes. The accidents, regardless of cause, were real and dangerous. Inducing more accidents to prove a point is bad policy.
Perhaps, but most of those funding decisions were not made in the public markets. Those capital allocations were made by angels, VCs, and the people who committed to investing in the IPO of the company. The only thing that the overall stock market directly controls for capital allocation is secondary offerings, which are a very small part of the allocation of productive capital. The stock market just serves to trade pieces of capital that already exist. Having the stock market be a bit more accurate, particularly on short timescales, doesn't really affect capital allocation.
TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance
And another good read on make: http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf
Market prediction is one of the hardest areas for machine learning/statistics/AI to prove their value. What the system can do is monitor more inputs than a single trader, so the screening process can be scaled up--provided you have relevant inputs. With more signals becoming available electronically it is possible to automatically incorporate non-market prices into trading decisions. All this will require lots of non-ML engineering to supply the data (just like Google search). When monthly-issued government economic statistic stop moving the market you'll know we are there.
Three surprises with bc
In this particular case, the comments calling the article crackpot are far more crackpot than the actual article. Extracts from the comment:

The very idea of a black hole is based on the concept of continuity, an idea that is not only illogical (it leads to an infinite regress), but is not even scientific in the Popperian sense of falsification. Even Einstein, Mr. Continuity himself, had doubts about continuity.

Worst of all is the idea that somehow time has a direction of flow, i.e., an arrow. The idea that we are moving in time in one direction or another is a conceptual disaster. Why? Because time cannot change by definition...

The problem with the physics community is that theirs is an incestuous science that has been spawning hideous monstrosities for some time now. Their bunker mentality (the public is stupid and is the enemy) prevents them from considering other points of view, especially views that contradict their worldview.

And so forth. This sets off most of the alarms on the crackpot detection test (references to Einstein, assertions that all physicists are stupid, nonsensical use of terminology et cetera). But it does it in such a way that I think I see a self-aware troll at work, rather than a garden-variety crackpot.

As for the paper, I'll give it a "meh" for now. It doesn't seem to be crackpot, but it's not necessarily true either; it's just speculative, and doesn't seem to make any testable predictions.
You're probably getting downvoted because of the age of your account. (Not that I think you're wrong)
glad to hear it!

btw: keep the paragraph - pimp your stuff by all means - and (eg) a simple bar <hr> would separate it; that's how 37signals and Joel do it (of course, maybe it's just me who was distracted by it). While it is very effective advertising to integrate it into the story (a kind of product placement), it's harder to do both well than focus 100% on the content.
I'll add a contrarian view about Agile in big companies--I consulted for a major media company in NYC that used Rally and "did Agile" but it was mostly lip service and the daily scrum meetings were more like status reports. It was their sheer size and the inability of their project managers to adapt to a non-status-report mode of thinking that made the Agile methodology weak and unsuccessful.

I'd say Agile is much more easily adopted in a startup where no prior culture exists to inhibit it. Major companies with older systems in place don't change overnight.
this is pretty cool news, though I'm a might concerned about how the links to the couchone hosting seem to be broken :p
if MySpace is the digital ghetto, then twitter is the graffiti covered walls of the ghetto.
It'll be really interesting to see what Apple does for map data. MapQuest and Bing just announced that they'll be using OpenStreetMap.

If Apple goes that route it'll be Google Maps with its walled garden model v.s. the rest supporting an open source project.
How a friend outsourced his apartment hunt (and saved 30 hours)