skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WILL GROWING GOVERNMENT DEBT FORCE A DEFAULT IN JAPAN?

Unlikely. That's mainly because Japan has almost no foreign
currency-denominated debt obligations and more than 90 percent of Japanese government bonds are held by domestic investors, who are typically risk averse.

It is also the world's largest creditor nation, with net
external assets of 225.5 trillion yen, and it still enjoys a
current account surplus.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTOE60P0BH20100127

For safe investments jewelry and Art do well in turbulent times:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=tuxGXgJ_HEwC&pg=PA222...
The question is though, is getting featured in such a list a good thing. Does it lead to good things?

Perhaps I'm just a bitter "old" person (over 30), but I'm not convinced it matters that much.

IMHO The Visual Website Optimizer guy should concentrate on providing value and cool stuff for customers rather than pandering to journalists fashion tastes. If he's providing real value, it's fairly simple to start paying for advertising and driving new customers to sign up etc.
I have/had anxiety disorder, so I used to take a klonopin every morning when I woke up which causes me to be drowsy all day long. I rarely take klonopin these days though, and haven't had a major panic attack in several years.

I also went through some intense burn out when I was at a former job (17 hour days, 7 days a week), so I had a hard time concentrating at my new job.

There is also a family history of narcolepsy. My dad was famous for falling asleep while chewing food.
Sometimes it's trivial, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's not even possible (e.g. the naive Fibionacci algorithm). Sometimes all you need to do is to add an accumulator argument to the recursive function. Still, it's not something that can be easily automated and I'm yet to see a compiler that does it automatically.

In computer science (and generally, in mathematics), every word of the dictionary definition matter.
The introduction of these electronic systems helped to establish a course which society is now destined to continue along. A gradual step-change is more socially palatable.

Maybe the only limit to the possible dangers is human imagination?
flickr. that's about it.
It is a good way to start. It is a bad way to end up. Dynamic languages can get away with not using IoC containers for large projects: http://onestepback.org/articles/depinj/index.html

On static languages, using a dynamic language DSL to configure the container will usually do wonders, while losing refactoring support (for instance, Spring plugin for Eclipse will be aware of all rename methods and rename classes, as long as you use the xml for configuration).
Wait, did you also factor in everything I said after "smarts"? And did you interpret prediction variables as crystal balls with 100% accuracy?

All I'm saying is that, based on historical accounts, initial ideas/pitches do not seem to be good predictors of success.

The only patterns I have noticed have to do with the founders (not just smarts!).

But maybe you have noticed something else? Or perhaps no pattern at all??
Ask HN: When did you get good at computer science?
I am currently an undergraduate senior majoring in computer science. My last few years, I have been learning computer science through a very breadth first approach, always working on different types of projects or reading about something different every couple of days. Although I have learned a lot, I feel like I am not amazing at any one area of computer science.

I thought by this time in my life I would have fallen so dearly in love with some topic that picking a specialization would have come naturally . However, I am interested in so many things right now, it is hard to limit myself. If I don't though, I am afraid I will be at the same place I am right now in ten years.

When did you decide that you wanted to specialize in some area, and what was the path like to the day when you woke up and realized "I am really good at X." ?
How to find start-up ideas
It probably takes longer when there are more digits.
In the future we don't need to go anywhere, because we have replicators.
You're absolutely right. Such lists mean nothing to your core business, and the effect is minor in the long run. Imagine you want to create a great airline. What do newspaper articles have to do with that? If your airline is great, people will hear about you. That's how it should be.

My original point was just about why it seems that it's always the same people being featured. It's because those people just have more human interest in their concepts than other people, and the fundamentals of their businesses have little to do with their being featured.
That is one way to look at it.

Another way would be to create a portfolio. Spend $25/mo or whatever on a web server, build some web apps and put them online for people to see.

Don't work for free.

How do you feel about working on open source projects for free?
Ok, that's not at all what I mean by being designed for an expert user, though. The example I gave shows windows phone 7 taking the speed side of the speed vs obviousness tradeoff. Are there other examples if it doing that?
School Attendance (9th grade) Predicts Graduation
Today it's netflix. Tomorrow they will throw off the yolk of British imperialism and embrace the inalienable rights to freedom that we've longed to share with them.
Julian Assange Ted Talk: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
There's no such thing as "free" - you mean healthcare paid for by their taxpayers. Who might not be keen on non-contributors showing up and using it...
Cheap Chinese Android Tablets: Do Not Buy
I stopped reading this once I saw the huge flow chart. Not only does this over-complicate things, but it is the completely wrong way to allocate equity among founders.

I'm a strong believer in founders splitting equity evenly. If you want this technical person to act like a founder, he should get an equal share. If you want an early employee, treat him as an early employee, but don't expect him to work like a founder.
It's right there in the first paragraph of the article: http://programmingzen.com/2010/05/16/benchmarking-macruby-0-...
"Apple refuses to replace dropped iPad with voided warranty."

Apple fans: you know that user experience you value so dearly? The slick interfaces and integration between applications and devices? The way you can take an Apple product out of the box and have it "just work?" The ability of Apple to bend over backwards to make you happy by doing things like immediately replacing devices that malfunction?

Those things are all possible because of Apple's walled garden. If you take your Apple device that's only intended to run an Apple operating system that was specifically designed for it and make modifications, Apple will no longer support it. You don't get to have it both ways.
Incidentally, the iPad has no fan (though I still agree with your general point).
Sounds like something fishy for sure.

Send me an email, my day job is with a very advanced security camera, I might have something interesting for you.
Is getting featured on such a list a bad thing?

Why do you think these people had to pander to journalists to make this list? They were just doing their own thing.

There's so much thinly-veiled jealously in this thread, which, sadly, is exactly what I expected.
Electing PG would be cool beyond words but I say "God, no!"

If he goes over there he will most likely be incapacitated by politics and most of his time will be taken by useless committee meetings, etc. I think he is doing much more good as in his position right now. It wouldn't be too much to say, I think, that he (with his excellent colleagues, of course) singlehandedly changed how people thought about early stage tech funding and incubators.
IronRuby was tested on Windows a few weeks ago: http://programmingzen.com/2010/06/28/the-great-ruby-shootout...
Idea degeneration: when to confiscate the coloured pens
At the assembly/bytecode level, you still have to save the return value of the recursive call and then do something to it, whereas a tail call wouldn't need to save any intermediate value because it would immediately return it as soon as it got it.

I guess Java's infix notation kind of obscures this. This is one of the reasons why functional programmers prefer to consider everything a function. It's also why some languages (like Clojure) have special syntax for tail calls, with special error messages if you goof up the semantics.
Multi-core HTTP Server with Node.js
Ask HN: (CL related) Are iterators actually a bad pattern after all?
Some time ago MJD had a blog spat with Ralph Johnson about the nature of patterns [1]. In his example he claimed that the iterator pattern was a sign of a weakness that some languages didn't have. Then he went on to show an example of languages that actually did have this problem [2].

Now it is true that implementing a traversal method on the collection class itself is more powerful in most situations (e.g. Smalltalk: #do) but where I see a problem is e.g. Common Lisp's "mapcar" function. It can map over an arbitrary number of collections.

So my question is; is the iterator pattern bad for implementing this scenario? I looked at the SBCL source code and they seem to be doing exactly this (granted they use closures for iterating, but it doesn't look like the generator strategy to me). I see in [3] they make the case for using generators instead of the iterator pattern but this doesn't look very easy to use on an arbitrary number of collections (in fact I'd like to see an implementation of it, as it's not immediately clear to me how it would be done). Further, I don't see what is being bought here. The function passed to map isn't protected from the collection being mutated by another thread anymore than an iterator would be.

I would certainly agree that Iterator is an inferior approach in most scenarios but for mapcar-like scenarios? What do you think?

[1] http://blog.plover.com/prog/design-patterns.html

[2] He mentioned Perl as not needing this pattern and showed a foreach example. But the fact of the matter is that foreach in Perl can only iterate the built in list type. It wouldn't work on custom made collections.

[3] http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/Iterator.html
If almost any of quicken's competitors had gotten their software into stores, the world would be much better for small businesses who would have had a decent option to buy.

You seem to have forgotten Microsoft Money which has been available since Windows 3.0.
Apple replaced my jailbroken original iPhone when the battery died as a result of using a very very shady car charger from some Chinese company.
Uggg, horrible font for a blog or any type of extended reading. However, interesting moral decision we all face at various points in time.

It's discussed like an economics decision, but I see it more as a gambler's decision. To me it's about the bankroll and the ability to sustain several losses in a row while waiting for the odds to even out.
Java != JVM
Nexus One Will No Longer be Available Online From Google
Which is why I said "Turing-complete".

Python and Ruby communities are radically different. Ruby people tend to be in their 20s and primarily employed to do Ruby, mainly for websites. Python people tend to be older and write Python as a part of their main job, they are not employed as programmers (and as such language choice is not mandated).
Basecamp, Dropbox, Highrise, Campaign Monitor, Xero, probably a few more.

(That's my company, not me personally, personally I don't have any paid apps. I've no problem with doing so, just never needed any)
I am on the stand-up desk program and really like it. Though it isn't excercise from a cardio perspective, it can improve your posture (though like anything, you can still slouch at a stand-up desk).

I also sometimes stand on a balance board to make things a bit more interesting and engage core muscles while at my desk - though the second you touch your keyboard or mouse, you'd be amazed how much less you use your core for balance.
Why are we speculating about Michael Phelps’s ability to swim through crude oil? It’s utterly irrelevant to understanding how much oil 190 million gallons is, and including the comment in the CNBC "slideshow" was a confusing distraction.
I love Windows 7 window snapping. Bettertouchtool emulates this on the mac: http://blog.boastr.net/
Hence the "loosley described" qualification
Don't you mean avatars?
Maaaan, that's a lot of spammy advertising links at the start of the page. They all go to what looks like a site that doesn't know it's hosting spammy nonsense, and has presumably been hacked. So is AEOWPTD.com in on the hackery, or has it been hacked too? I don't see any other obvious sign of hackedness on the AEOWPTD page.
This story was absolutely planted in the NYT by the Honest Tea people terrified that Coke would make this change - among others - when they complete the acquisition next year when Coke can do anything it wants with the company.
It wouldn't, because you would still have to do something else after the recursive call to your function. That would prevent you from applying tail-call optimization, which is the point behind making your function tail-recursive in the first place.

For those who aren't familiar with tail-call optimization, here's a very simplified explanation: if the very last thing you do in a function is call it recursively, then instead of allocating the space for its local variables (and any other local state it might have) for another call, you can simply set the arguments to their new values, reset the local state and do an equivalent of "goto" to the beginning of the function.
No tool will do it!!!!! No for a bit of less sensationalism, you need a good process, if you have that you can do it on paper tools just help you streamline your process. When creating a process the #1 rule is don't add steps to a workers routine for example forcing a developer to branch and merge their changes just to get their 1 line of code into the system.

Here is what we did, we looked at ever-ones job and tried to figure out a way that we could not add steps to their job, that broke their work-flow. We then identified tasks that while technical really only needed someone to administer the process.

A good example of this is taking everyone's defect tickets and merging them into a version branch. While branching and merging is a technical process the person that is most knowledgeable about what needs to go in and what needs to be deferred to the next release is the release manager. Good ones generally have better process administration background than technical chops.

So given that they are the best person to oversee this process we wrote scripts and built a simple UI that allowed them to do trivial merges. If there was a conflict the system created a conflict branch and then generated a ticket in the tickets system and assigned it to a developer.

All of this worked in the work-flow that the developers are used to in their day to day tasks. If you got a merge resolution ticket. That was your task, it was not a by-product of trying to get your change in, so the developer saw it as their objective to resolve the ticket not just something to try to plow through to get you change in.

As well, when a developer checked in a change it would go into a continuous integration build once deployed onto a server the system would generate assign tickets to QA testers automatically when approved it would auto merge into the release branch, generate tickets if there where any non-trivial merges and then generate a manifest for the release manager.

The point is, streamline your process, identify areas that you can automate to not create new disjointed work-flows for your workers and get a manager to mange the process. Then and only then can you truly identify tools that can be plugged in to help streamline that process.

And remember above all else, creating task that are not intuitive to the work flow of a worker will create and environment where people put in the least amount of effort to get it through the hoops to get back to doing what they do best. It also means training every new recruit on a disjointed work-flow that does not come naturally and enduring the associated errors that accompany it.

EDIT: Forgot to mention once you have a process defined the metrics for reporting become self generating from that process. For example our release manifest is consumed by our PM tools to update velocity, effort towards goal, milestones and general project tracking.

How we start a project is that we define requirements in a system. Those requirements get broken down into work tickets and they they get assigned to developers or administrators. As the tickets get worked they feed back into the project management system to update the overall progress.
Note that the power supply's rating is not indicative of the machine's usual consumption. When all else fails, you really should hook these things up to something like a Kill-A-Watt to measure it.
It sounds like he is not looking to dive right into another job (he was going to write a book next). Maybe if he asks for that reference 6 months from now?
So you are assuming that they are not going to do something like that to Quickbooks? They are not going to drastically increase the price, and then hold you ransom for all your financial history, knowing that you have to upgrade to be able to work with your accountant but he can't read your old files?

Just saying - desktop software isn't any safer unless you have an open migration path available.
Brashness and entitlement are essential to leadership
In my tests, it's still worse than MRI. Memory-wise, the best between 1.8.7, 1.9.1, and JRuby 1.5 was still 1.8.7. Of course, if this is the difference between storing stuff in memory and loading from disk, 1.8.7 would be faster by orders of magnitude. The ability to use stable, high-performance JVM libraries trumps this concern in many cases though.
I think there's too much focus on initial advantages. There are a lot of people that make a lot of money by starting restaurants, dry cleaners, book stores, and other run-of-the-mill, every-day things in common and saturated markets. The idea that you have to have something earth-shaking to be a successful entrepreneur is far too pervasive, imo. The real thing is that you start, persist, and have some semblance of the skills that you need and a lot of dedication and perseverance.
What to look for in online backups
But invokedynamic is part of Java 7.

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/DynTypeLang/
From my point of view

- You don't have solid evidence to back the claim that your neighbour is a drug dealer.

- If he is indeed a drug dealer, he probably wants not to attract attention and not to get in trouble, specially with people of where he lives.

I think, as long as he doesn't trouble you or your family, that you should live your life and let others live theirs.

Of course, if he ever menaces you or your family you should defend your family fiercely, but in the meantime if you care your own business he'll care his.
Interestingly, our first implementation of Cloud Files was based on MogileFS. It's a decent design, but it doesn't scale to the levels we need. The central DB that stores the metadata was the bottleneck.
It's not jealousy, I think it's great the companies were featured. It's always cool to get your photo/product mentioned somewhere :) Interesting to note that 1/3rd of the people featured were Women. Higher than I'd imagined.

I think it could be a bad thing if you make decisions in order to get on such a list, if you're spending time trying to get on such lists rather than doing what you think is best for the business. Getting featured on Techcrunch/Inc/etc won't make or break your business.

My comment about pandering to journalists was a more general point. As was stated by TechCrunch, they ignored "Visual Website Optimizer" basically because they thought the name was unfashionable. I'd be very doubtful that any customers or potential customers would care.

Journalists write about what people want to read about - extremes/freaks/car crashes/drama/soHotRightNow/epicFails etc. Which may well not be your business or your product. But that doesn't mean you have a bad business/product...
Here's an article by the writer you should read:

"Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway"

http://blog.asmartbear.com/your-idea-sucks-now-go-do-it-anyw...
Virtuon Launches Virtual Desktop in the Cloud
Un cadou de ziua mea … de la mine :)
Un cadou de neuitat :)
It's doing it on the square brackets too. =) It's not a huge deal; as another person replied to me, bitly seems to ignore them and get you where you're going.
This story usually involves puppies.
Unstoppable Inside Sales Specialist
I don't vote because I think the way the system is set up with the Democrat and Republican parties being the only legitimate candidates is corrupt, the federal government greatly exceeds its legal and moral authority, and I don't want to appear to grant any legitimacy or my blessing to this farce of a process. I don't feel beholden to it, nor do I wish to control it. My personal feelings are that I'll support the few legitimate, non-bureaucratic, non-corrupt aspects of the system while the rest of the system can get tossed.

But I might rethink that if Paul Graham somehow got on a ticket. America needs engineers and honest businesspeople running the show instead of lawyers and activists.
So if I install a screwed up program on my windows machine, MS may claim the warrenty was voided?

No? Then Apple doesn't have the right to.
Single Founder Startup: Using advisors as your co-founders
The founders he admires (Gates&Allen, Jobs&Wozniak, Page&Brin) probably wouldn't be able to articulate competitive advantages that this guy considers "real". They didn't have insider info or authority. They were passionate about what they are doing, but who knows if they were more passionate than their competitors (also applying this point to Apple for design and Google for search is not correct; Apple sacrifices very little to make their products look beautiful (and this is a narrow understanding of design), Google founders cared more about collaborative filtering at first).
Visual Migraine , Visual migraines symptoms
What somebody really needs to do is to take the fight to the US Government, to eradicate the sugar tariff system which keeps the US stuck eating liquefied corn (bleech) while the rest of the world munches down on delicious sugar from real sugar cane.

Alternatively, wait for global warming to convert Texas into a prime sugarcane-growing region.
You'll notice that that bit of the document is dynamically inserted, by a bit of javascript that it looks to me like being called by a flash slideshow controller. Maybe they want to discriminate against people who don't watch ads? Wouldn't be the first media company to do so.

I also noticed that the page contains all slides, as well as some logic to change them dynamically, yet fails to do so.
I think working on open source projects for free is different. There usually isn't really a client.. for a lot of people who work on open source projects, the client is themselves.. so in a sense, they're not working for free.. they're putting in effort, and getting a return. That said, some of the "Don't work for free" challenges still hold.. like motivation. For many people, it helps to have money on the table, and a timeline committed to. Loads of open source projects fall down because interest and motivation wax and wane. It's helpful to have an outside force keep you moving forward, and someone else's money is a big outside force.
Yes, the ability for the user to set the repository status to "abandoned" would be great.

I don't like the other idea about automatically setting the repository status to abandoned if it hasn't been updated for a while, because it's not necessary that project has been abandoned, because there were no code / repository updates recently.
That problem will not go away, instead you'll have a new one: "Okay, is this abandoned and did the owner forget to mark it as such?"