skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
one of the best sources I have found on the internet for stuff like this is mind hacks; http://mindhacksblog.wordpress.com/

They have some pretty interesting stuff over there. It's too bad that I can't afford to buy the book.
I guarantee that at some point in the future, if Blizzard doesn't get their heads out of the asses, somebody will crack some future rev of the software to allow LAN play and custom multiplayer maps and such, and that that will become the de facto version that everybody plays and shows up on Korean Starcraft channels. All this is is really a fantastically complex DRM scheme designed to keep the "we're in control" ball on Blizzard's side of the table.
Considering windows hides extensions by defaults it is going to be a pain in the ass to get a customer to rename it.
As of right now, Python, Perl, Ruby and Tcl have larger and more relevant to everyday work libraries, documentation, sample code, etc, than Haskell, Ocaml et al.

This is changing. We'll see Haskell and Ocaml in the early 2010s, where Python and Ruby where in the early 00s. Still a little off the beaten track (as per the Python Paradox) but definitely usable. And if you're deploying compiled code, you don't even need any runtime on your target...
"Nothing interesting about that scenario." OK, but let's say you're not allowed to see the contents of the envelope you picked.

In this case, the argument that by switching you get 125% on average still holds!

I'd claim that this is even more interesting and paradoxical than the scenario you're talking about, where your explanation is correct (the distribution of the bigger value is crucial for your decision, and you know nothing about it).
Modern versions of Windows include C# and VB compilers.
Marge: Homer, it's easy to criticize.

Homer: Fun, too.

Also, Fromt TFA:

NOTE: In no way should you assume that I am proposing this
is a "real world" experiment. It is exploration. Just open
musing about what could be, not a doctoral research paper
published in Nature to get my Ph.D. Not a paper to a
medical journal on a new cancer treatment. This is a blog
with me talking about stuff I'm interested in. Adjust your
expectations accordingly.
Commenter is pointing out something highly relevant about San Francisco, and more importantly the article says, "In short, New York City is more interesting and—I believe—better suited for the startup and a young guy’s lifestyle."

Young guy does not just mean heterosexual. If you're talking about best possible choices for founding a company, for gay men what he's complaining about would not be an issue.
DNSMadeEasy under major (over 50Gbps) DDoS Attack out of China
Well, the hippocampus is related to long term memory and not motor control, as I understand it. So it's doubtful.

I'm having a hard time finding studies that adequately control for fitness level though. Most tend to focus on acute exercise. They run people for a while then immediately sit them down for a cognition test.

I'm more interested in the influence of long-term fitness level. That's not as often studied.
One other thing to keep in mind in this debate is that it's expensive to defend yourself from a patent lawsuit. For example, this blog (http://rpxcorp.com/blog/?p=129), whose accuracy I have no idea of, claims that the average total cost of a patent lawsuit where the potential damages are under $25MM is $3.1MM to defend yourself, and $6.2MM if the potential damages are over that number.

So there are several parts to this equation. 1) Creating any bit of software involves thousands of "inventions," any one of which could be patentable. 2) Patents are granted for things which fail the obviousness test, where the chance of someone else independently "inventing" the same thing is essentially 100%. 3) The damages for violating even one patent tend to be astronomical and totally out of line with the contribution of that "invention" to the software in question. Out of 2 million lines of code, if one total BS patent covers 20 lines of that code, why are the damages likely to be basically equivalent to most of the revenue for that product? 4) The cost of defending against a patent lawsuit is enormous.

In other words: if you're a small software business, then there's pretty much a 100% chance someone else can sue you for patent infringement if they want to, losing the case will kill your company, and trying to defend yourself will severely drain your resources and could kill your company anyway.

There's no part of that that helps or encourages innovation.
This may be true for basic equipment like assault rifles, but I haven't seen any indication that more complex equipment like fighter aircraft are cheaper to maintain or more reliable in Soviet/Russian guise.

As a case in point, I've spoken to some people involved in a project to re-engine the South African Air Force's Mirage F1AZ fighter aircraft with the Russian Klimov RD-33 engine as used in the MiG-29. Technically, the project was a success as all the technical obstacles were overcome and aircraft's performance figures improved significantly, but the project was scuppered in the end by Klimov's apparent inability to get the engine's reliability and ease of maintenance to anywhere close to that of the aging Snecma Atar 09K50s originally fitted to the aircraft. The conclusion in the end was that if the SA Air Force wanted to go ahead with the project it would need to stockpile a large quantity of spare engines and other parts and swap them out frequently, something that introduced enough cost and difficulty to negate the performance gains that would've been achieved, so the project was shelved.

The SA Air Force has remained wary of Russian military equipment ever since. When the time came to order a new fighter it decided on the cheap to maintain JAS-39C/D Gripen from Saab in Sweden despite having received an attractive price on new MiG-29s.
This article is the intellectual equivalent of a horror movie.
I'm going to speak in generalities here... If you do a lot of work with polymorphism then dynamic languages tend to be a much better fit. With polymorphic designs, you dont care what the type of your instance is, you don't care about its entire interface, you just care, does it respond to this message ( or set of messages ).

I have used and continue to use both dynamically and statically typed languages and I find value in both. I do find little value in static type system that can't do type inference.

As to a couple of your generalities, a tour through smalltalk would do you well if you think that excellent IDE support and great refactoring are something that springs from static typing.

EDIT:

People talk a good deal about the + of compile time type checking. I have done tons of coding in statically typed languages like C, C++ and more and I think the compile has caught less than a dozen type errors for me ever and those were usually because I got lost in pointer hell. Most errors that a compiler would catch because of type has been in my experience something that there should be a unit test for and the unit test would have caught.
Here's an anecdote. I am affected by software patent. One of the well known optimization techniques in the product area that I'm working on has been patented and bought by a big corporation. The situation is kind of murky since there are similar techniques published by academics. That big corporation has sued anyway and won large settlement from other companies.

For my product, I have to forgo implementing the technique. It defines a feature not the product but it's a competitive advantage.
Ruby itself might run fine on Windows, but the fact is that the majority of Ruby developers use Mac or Linux and cares exactly _zero_ about Windows, which means that a lot of libraries etc. doesn't work on Windows. So, while possible, using Ruby on Windows is an uphill battle.
May be because big companies have the deep pocket so they are the target of patent lawsuit? For small companies, software patent has the chilling effect in prevent them in doing certain things.
What are the best RSS feeds for programmers/developers?
Massive Censorship by Conservatives at Digg Uncovered
Shame this story hasn't caught on - it's the best piece of the Google Wave kill so far. Quote:

Has Google become a bunch of technology spammers? Is their strategy to simply flood the world with as many ideas as possible in the hopes that one or two percent of them will become hits without any further work?

Ouch. But, you can see why he's asking.
So your answer to why you choose dynamic languages has nothing to do with the type system? IE, the question isn't revalent to you?

Question, what does compiled code have to do with dynamic vs static typing? You can compile dynamic code, you can interpret static code. The typing system or lack thereof, has nothing to do with compilation.
What Collapsing Empire Looks Like
This is similar to a product that my cofounder and I are developing: http://hootcourse.com/
I noticed that too. It took me a while to figure out what I was looking at.

Also you need to change the colors. It's really difficult to tell the different types of attack apart.

Nice use of the R maps package though! With a little tweaking, this should be a powerful visualization.
For what it's worth, it's happened to my company (a smaller company sued by a larger competitor), and the litigation has dragged on for almost three years now without going to trial.

I've heard of other similar incidents as well. They're far more likely if you're going into an existing market against well-funded (and shameless) incumbents than it is if you're in a nice market.

You're correct that the rational response is to not worry about it, simply because there's nothing you can do about it as a software startup. If someone wants to sue you, they will, no matter how far you go out of your way to avoid violating patents. So you just kind of hope you don't get unlucky and get sued before the company becomes big enough to file their own patents for defensive purposes.

Just because something happens infrequently doesn't mean it's not a real problem.
I read a trick that has worked for me but, it might just be placebo effect.

Can't find the word your searching for? Rapidly look with your eyes left and right a few times and it may jolt your memory.

//I promise I'm not trying to make you look silly
That's a good sign you're doing it right. When you get more out of less code after you refactor. If you're refactoring and you get more code and it all does the same thing, well not so good an idea usually.

One of my ongoing frustrations with java is that it is almost impossible to make less code. Short of a fixing a poor algorithm implementation, most any reworking in java just ends up with another heap of code.

Reminds me of this:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.ht...

Java programmers often wonder why Martin Fowler "left" Java to go to Ruby. Although I don't know Martin, I think it's safe to speculate that "something bad" happened to him while using Java. Amusingly (for everyone except perhaps Martin himself), I think that his "something bad" may well have been the act of creating the book Refactoring, which showed Java programmers how to make their closets bigger and more organized, while showing Martin that he really wanted more stuff in a nice, comfortable, closet-sized closet.
Maybe a non-broken implementation is not possible.
Except that it rarely, if ever, happens. It's a waste of money to sue companies who aren't a threat or can't pay you. Look at who gets sued: Google, Apple, HTC, Microsoft. Look at who doesn't: Y Combinator and TechStars companies.
Thanks for your reply Carlos!, I'll give it a look.
I see no reason to use a language that eliminates run-time types. Having type information available at run-time means that I can develop, debug, and analyze at a living system. The IDE and refactoring support you can gain from this is in no way inferior to what you can do with a dead, static blueprint system.

My preferred language has dynamic typing, but its common implementations also do type inference at compile time, in order to optimize generic operations, and to warn about things that cannot work. Since during development I only recompile the snippet I am working on, while the rest of the system is running on, the compiler can use all the type information available from the running system.
Scheme from Scratch to be continued
At the end of the article the OP admits: "... you will never be able to replace the social element of attending a university, arguably the most important part of it". This is so true; even in the early 70s the system was broken, and I got only so much out of the university offerings by themselves.

But I got a lot of use out of my roommates. High school had been a homogeneous environment, everyone taking the same stuff and enduring the same assignments, preparing for the same standardized tests. But at university I was suddenly thrown in with people with different specializations, different expertise, different interests. I found myself taking meals with electrical engineers, mathematicians, political science observers, religious people, educators, psychologists, physicists, chemists... and I could pick the brains of any of them. I was like a kid in a candy store.

And that's not all: I discovered the pain and pleasure of ethanol. I walked in the moonlight through a cypress forest discussing existentialism with a platonic girlfriend. I acquired some rudimentary burglary skills. I broadened my musical tastes. I learned to eat stuff that wasn't mama food. You can't do any of that these days, sitting in your parents' basement and skulking the intarweb.

The community made university worthwhile, not most of the academic stuff that was routinely delivered as part of a contrived degree requirement. Not to say that some of the classes weren't worthwhile - far from it - but I sure wish I could have selected better. I'd have rather taken more math than some of those general studies requirements.

So, thinking out loud here, is there a place for an academic hostel? A low-rent complex with dormitories and classrooms, paid lecturers but no degrees and no grades, and students stay on the basis of some kind of meritocracy? I'd go back to school, even now, if it weren't for all the BS. I just don't have time for that - and really, who does?
Let me be clear. You think Microsoft has sued more companies than smaller companies have sued Microsoft? Wow, that's some serious revisionist history. Just in the past two years MS has been sued by at least seven companies -- and I don't recall any of them being trolls.
Reflections on SICP
Four types of abstraction are the magic spells that the aspiring computer scientist needs to know, and SICP/6.001 taught them using Scheme.
I don't get why there are so many down-mods to perfectly civil comments, as evidenced by their zero-karma scores. I just upvoted all of them, for which I will no doubt be downvoted by the same worthy who down-voted the others.
I agree, but what's the chance that we'll ever get a non-broken implementation? If someone really tries to fix it, that would be great, but what are the odds it'll really be fixed instead of just being broken in different ways? From my perspective, ExpectedChanceOfBrokenness * ExpectedCostOfBrokenness > ExpectedCostOfKillingThem . . . so the probabilistically optimal course is to just kill patents for software (and business methods), even if it's not the absolutely optimal course.
Google's behavior has been pretty consistent over the years. They may not live up to "don't be evil" but they've stuck to "be less evil" pretty well. What's interesting about the Verizon story is all this reporting that they're about to take a sharp turn in an evil direction, contradicting what they've claimed to stand for for a long time. I bet this turns out not to be the case, if not because of virtue, then homeostasis.

Edit: of course that raises the question of where this wave of false stories (if that's what they are) is coming from.
The orientation is wrong because I reversed the lat/long axes (dumb). Thank you for pointing that out, it's fixed now.

Color is a more difficult issue, because so many different attacks type categories exist in the data. Welcome suggestions
The 2010 Social Networking Map
Maybe it's a coding style that suits you then. That's cool.

I just caution against putting it in such simple terms. I hate it when I read code by somebody who latched on to the latest trend and then ruthlessly bent their style to match the new way, whether it made sense or not.

As for performance, it would have to be tested. In some languages with first-class closures, a lot of code like the examples might seriously strain the garbage collector (if present). There might be a ton of young objects to clean up, all the time. That was my only thought on it.
Just wait a few years. As you say, it's a waste of money to sue someone who's not a threat. Once one of those companies becomes a threat to someone with deep pockets (and some of them will), there's a fairly high likelihood that someone will sue them.
Former CurrentTV/Obama campaign employee on "inspiring" quality UGC
> what the heck is so great about .NET for these financial people ?

A couple of points based on my experience at least:

- UI components (such as DevExpress ones) for charts and grids, with fairly good performance

- easier interop with Excel/Word (yes, this is important!)

- ability to reuse legacy C++ (I did this personally, porting and wrapping code from Solaris to C# and .Net through managed C++)

- C# itself is a good language, and it's easier to find recruits compared to say Ruby or Python (at least here in France)

Where I've worked at least, almost nobody uses "scripting languages", it's all Java or C# or C++.

I firmly believe that keeping IronRuby and IronPython alive will serve a purpose for people working in these fields!
What was your company? I'd love to know this history. I've just never seen it happen that a large company files suit against a small startup. The closest thing is something like MS vs SalesForce, but SalesForce is hardly a small company.

Again, I'm not saying it doesn't happen at all. But so do random bits flipping due to cosmic rays, but I don't think we should change how we write code due to it. Something are sufficiently rare that they're not worth spending much time on.
>You don't know how much money is in either envelope, but it needn't have been selected randomly.

This is exactly wrong, at least in the mathematical formalization of this problem that everyone is assuming. The definition of "don't know how much money" must be taken to be "has a uniform distribution".

If you want to use some reasoning that treats the amount of money as an "unknown in an equation" then you are instead giving a solution that differs for each possible value of the money and does not capture the random choices we are trying to model.

By the way, no one said that uniform distributions on infinite sets don't exist. He said "infinite series (the list of possible monies)", a slightly mis-used term that clearly excludes [0,1], your chosen example.
If the Excel team's compiler and widgets were so much better, why wasn't the rest of MS re-using theirs instead? To me, this particular example does not argue for building it yourself, it just demonstrates re-use should have gone the other direction.

I do agree with the basic premise that if an available solution does not meet expectations, the benefit of re-use does not always outweigh the inadequacies, thus supporting the business case of building it yourself.

HOWEVER...

...there are far too many organizations who think their needs are unique and different when they really aren't. I think that is a more common reason why companies re-invent the wheel and then post-factum realize their needs really weren't so special after all and could have bought off-the-shelf instead.

What cracks me up even more is, when a company realizes that an in house built system could be replaced with an off-the-shelf packet, then they have to weight their in-house maintenance costs against going out and buying an existing package. This quite frequently comes out cheaper over time, so right after they build their shiny new enterprise app, it's discontinued and replaced by a bought system.
If you rephrase the problem so that B picks after A and you ask the question "is B likely to pick a larger number than A" before B picks then the answer should be "yes".

I agree, but that wasn't what was stated. You've "moved the goal posts" so to speak. ;) The OP said both A and B had chosen a number (but only one had revealed it). That introduces TWO finite values into the experiment. The timing for when B makes the choice makes all the difference.
I've had two runins with the patent system, and both have severely weakened my trust in it.

Back in the day a student at my dorm in college decided tit would be a cool idea to make a webserver for our laundry machines so that we could tell if there was one free without going down to the basement. It attracted some interest, and was even Slashdotted a couple of times over the years. Between Slashdottings one and two a company applied for a patent on the idea of connecting laundry machines to web servers. Much later, after our dorms laundry server had been in operation for about a decade, they sent us a cease and desist letter. We informed them that they'd lose their patent if they took us to court and didn't suffer, but they are still charging people millions of dollars for the system their invalid patent gives them a monopoly on.

After I got my Master's I started work at a consultancy that did custom sensors. They had previously outsourced their engineering, but the company that had been given the engineering work had tried to patent the ideas of the consultancy out from under them. Luckily the consultancy had filed for patents first, but the company was granted one of the patents anyways.
DOD orders Wikileaks to "return all of the classified war documents"
No I love type inference.

I remember those days when Python was yet to be accepted as a mainstream language. I wanted to use it, but I was writing software for our clients, who would deploy my code on 10,000 Unix boxes. This is back when an estate like that was a huge and unwieldy thing to manage. There was simply no way that our customers were going to roll out and commit to maintaining a whole new runtime across their estate just for me (where "me" is "my project"). So our realistic choices were Perl or compiled code. Nowadays Python has become a "normal" language and no-one bats an eyelid when I list it as a prereq. Took, all told, maybe 7-8 years from when I first thought "Python can give me a serious productivity boost relative to C" to that point.

I have used Ocaml "for real" and I am still getting up to speed on Haskell (I love it!), but this time, I can skip all the struggle for acceptance. I can just ship 'em a binary. Is the type system going to give me as big a boost in real productivity (incl. debugging and support overheads) as Python did over C? Well we shall see...
Is there more? Well, yes. I did just try to summarize the book in about 20 words.

Are you about 90% of the way through? Yes. The book is written in a style to make it have the trappings of more depth than it actually has. I actually enjoy it that way and do not mean it as a criticism. (I also enjoyed the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is self-consciously written with somewhat similar motives.) Don't undersell yourself.
Yeah eye movement apparently has some benefits.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=boo...
I feel C# is one of the best languages out there second only to python. Also Python works extremely well on windows and more than 99% of the packages support windows.
dunno may be ruby programmers are apple fanboi's