skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, Paul Graham's explicit statement re: success is that you should sell out before you are operating at large scale (else you might start growing pointy hair).

As it turns out I'm poking about Wharton these days myself and, although already a semi-successful tech entrepreneur, I am fascinated by the lack of concern for scaling that seems to permeate the startup world (inclusive of HN). An addendum is that probably most people who read this will instantly think of purely technological scaling (servers, etc.) while within an HR context there are large number of other issues that you will not be particularly well placed to address merely by being tech saavy. Apropos to this I thought was Andy Grove's recent article in Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-amer...), which is likely to go unheeded.
Introducing the world's first Temporal Analytics Engine
Okay, then let me tell you what I /can't/ do without. To name a few:

hot-swappable classes
design by contract
re-ified generics
closures

These are all things that have been on developer wishlists for years. Design by contract is the #1 upvoted RFE in SUN's issue tracker, the others are all in the top 20.

But what happens? The guys that can make a difference come together and wank about performance hacks for dynamic languages. The 2% of the user base that actually uses Scala and Clojure will thank you for it, but the other 98% is left out in the cold.
Hey Steve, what's Job Two?
I would submit to you that the installed base of iTunes is a lot higher than XBox. I believe the days of thinking of Apple as the little guy are just about over.
Krugman's take on high frequency trading
First off, I didn't insult you by name right? Which means I didn't insult _you_ I insulted your ideologies. To me there are no kings or heroes to worship. If you get offended because I disagree with you then you're not intellectually honest and most likely would get offended no matter what I say.

Second, it depends on the audience, but I plan on purpose to alienate 1/3 of my audience when I write technical documents like this. I focus on alienating the 1/3 of the audience who are arrogant, obnoxious, and too blind to see that their beliefs and values are killing the industry.

I just don't want to work with them, especially if they can't take a joke. Surprisingly, this turns out to be a very small number of people in practice, and they're usually just pseudo-intellectual blowhards.

If you go through all my insults, they're aimed at the people who are screwing things up for the regular Joes trying to get things done. And _that_ is the entire purpose of the Mongrel2 project too.
When was the last time something described as a "X killer" actually killed, or took significant market share away from, X?
About once a month I find myself wishing there was a downvote button on articles. This is the perfect example.

It's a link to a page that contains nothing but a title. No, I'm not going to give you my email address in the hope that you tell me what you are. I'm leaving and making a mental note never to come back.
I second what mcgraw says.

I would also add:

If you have a topic that you love talking about, then go ahead with the blog. You will need to have a regular posting schedule.

Try getting a few posts in draft mode (ready to be published). This way you will have something to post even if you do not have the time to post at that interval (weekly, biweekly etc.)

Letting your readers get used to a regular posting schedule will help a lot.

Twitter/Facebook are good tools you can use to make people aware of your blog.

If you have something interesting to say, people will follow you :)

Good luck!
US Government sues Oracle for fraud
I am relieved to read that so few of you are annoyed by other people. The same question on reddit would be a bitch fest about fat people, stupid people, religious people, slow drivers, etc, at the intersection of tribalism, ego and impatience.
I thought this snippet was particularly interesting. Do any of the HFT guys here want to debunk this, or at least give the other side of the story?

But speculation based on information not available to the public at large is a very different matter. As the U.C.L.A. economist Jack Hirshleifer showed back in 1971, such speculation often combines “private profitability” with “social uselessness.”

It’s hard to imagine a better illustration than high-frequency trading. The stock market is supposed to allocate capital to its most productive uses, for example by helping companies with good ideas raise money. But it’s hard to see how traders who place their orders one-thirtieth of a second faster than anyone else do anything to improve that social function.
If you're looking for a good tech community / channel to hang out in, I can recommend two. These channels are best suited for programmer / coder types who enjoy hanging out and chatting about tech stuff.

irc.darkscience.org/#darkscience
irc.oftc.net/#neverfear

And their respective websites:

http://darkscience.org/
http://neverfear.org/
Ask HN: HTML5 storage frameworks? SQL, MongoDB? In browser?
I am working on a browser plugin in Chrome ( and may port it to FF later ), and I will need to store the result of a few thousand web requests over time. ( they are translations of words and phrases from one language to another, so utf8 field values are important )

Are any of you aware of a few HTML5 storage frameworks ( before i build one ). It seems that local storage is a key value store, which for small stuff is great, but if i want to store a few thousand objects in local storage, it will clutter my keyspace. Option 2, involves storing a key, as a map to an array. localStorage.key = []; or localStorage.key = {childKey1:value,childKey2:value2}; again this is problematic because both the array and the object need to be stringified before they can be placed in localStorage, which is not an optimal data model to load a large object, change a slice of it, and then save it back in one large chunk.

So, why not just use Web SQL Database storage? http://html5demos.com/

Well, Web SQL Database storage only works on Webkit ( Chrome/ Safari) and Opera, so it would make it hard to port. ;-(

Additionally I don't like the idea of a javascript storage model using SQLite, when we could work off of the vast array of JS inspired object stores springing up, like MongoDB, etc....

A friend at mozilla tells me, this is coming down the pipe, but it looks like chrome is holding on a release till the spec settles.
http://www.w3.org/TR/IndexedDB/

UPDATE: this will be in FF4 and may have been ported back to FF3.6

ideas, comments?
Thanks. I was not aware of this, not having used any tokens, yet. Disappointing.
A good writer entertains readers and makes them think while getting his point across. Boring writers try to not offend anyone.
You no longer need an association with the military to sign up for USAA's checking/savings accounts. They're just really quiet about it. I made the switch to them a couple months ago. Signed up online and had an account minutes later.
Back then, MBAs were much cheaper. I think mine cost < $10K. One of the benefits of living in Canada, although prices have gone up since.
Righty-o. Didn't mean to sound annoyed, but there has been a bit more Craigslist-y trolling-for-programmers-for-hire than usual lately it seems, and that kinda stuff needs some trouncing IMHO. :)

Also, you are going to be limited to the tools for processing images that are out there for the most part, which sadly means ImageMagick and/or GD. But not SO sadly, as both of those (while annoying to deploy, granted...) have decent bindings to everything, support a pretty good selection of images types, and have params for controlling the aspects you mentioned (except maybe smart cropping).

Everything else is arithmetic and designing a clean, RESTful URL scheme for invoking it. I guess I meant trivial in the sense that all these things are solved problems or only require a bit of time/cleverness.

I built one of these a few years ago using PHP/GD, and it performed admirably (and did everything except smart cropping in your aforementioned list...)

So, feel free to hit me up if you get stuck on any specifics. Been there done that, and can commisserate if nothing else. ;)
Hey! This is awesome. Can you do me a favor and take notes on lessons that they screw up, then submit bug reports? I put it out there and then I know people are using it but I don't get any feedback. Short of running my own intro class I can't find any other way to get information on whether it's working.

Either it's working so damn well nobody needs to tell me because they end up writing their next million dollar idea a week later, or it's really not working and people are just not bothering to tell me.

Thanks.
Gary Kildall refused to develop anything like a word processor application for CP/M because, basically, that way leads to evil and corruption. MS, of course, beat him out in the IBM deal and dominated with exactly that recipe.

Everything old is new again.
Thanks for that, but Im looking for a "pay as you go" service.
to be fair, Canonical is contributing a lot of the right things making opensource code usable by the masses.

there is always the quote about an engineer removing 2000 lines of code. it's not about code contribution or dollars its about the right changes, and Canonical is clearly doing a great job with ubuntu.

hence the reason that cloud computing is moving in that direction with eucalyptus, and appscale.

Keep up the good work.
That's my feeling exactly. Too often the manuals and documentation people read are a chore to get through because they're so boring. They're also passive aggressive because they're obviously saying their technology is better in some way, but they're trying to be nice. You read through and there's little lame attempts at being the next Oscar Wilde when really it'd be much better if they just came out and started a fight.

When I write my docs I want it to teach people how to use it, and not put them to sleep at the same time.
I sure hope they waterproof it. Sorry Steve.

I'm laughing my ass off at his answers though.

"I relish the competition. I relish holding up those couple of machines today that I wanted to hand you. It's not today. I'll relish doing it tomorrow. Bring on ‑‑ particularly if with the application base, with the tools that we have, with the user understanding and momentum and everything going on, we can't compete with ‑‑ particularly whatever the weird collection of Android machines is going to look like, shame on us."

I hate to even hint at politics here, but does he not sound like Sarah Palin in that response. Unfocused and just blabbering on for the sake of it.

Microsoft's real problem is that they just have too much management, and they deeply miss the commercial and technical instinct of Bill Gates. As a result, they just can't iterate quickly on any meaningful scale.

Microsoft's best hope for a decent tablet is to bang hard on the Windows Phone 7 stuff, but they are way behind, and may end up being 'niched', though unlike Palm with WebOS, they have the deep pockets to pour money into Win Phone 7 forever.

Just one screenshot of a Norton, Symantec or Macaffee dialog demanding an anti-virus subscription, and the Windows 7 tablet is toast.
Excellent tip! I can recommend to apply this technique to lecture notes, too; it'll work wonders during the preparations for exams.

Although in a slightly different context, take notes as a way to get better advice; see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635064 and http://lifehacker.com/5270397/get-better-advice-by-taking-no...
Parent's ideas are much more applicable to the general public, which is who needs this training the most.
But the beauty is that because it's a Lisp, it's all implemented in terms of macros - Clojure's complete set of concurrency tools could be written as a library.

The only exception is the deref reader macro "@", since Clojure doesn't allow user-defined reader macros by default.
Sure, I agree, I didn't say it was a good way to present things, just that it might have something to do with how programmers think.
Ehem, wrote the manual and the features the manual describes (with some help). People always forget the code.
I guess I don't actually find the 300-lurkers-who-never-talk channels much of a feature. Much prefer the ones with 15-30 or so semi-active users. There can still be large periods of not chatting, but you know who's there, and there's a decent chance that when someone does say something, it's relevant to you. There's a difference between sitting in a room of programmers quietly, and sitting in an auditorium of programmers!
If you have to use a stylus with it to click on UI elements that were designed to be targeted with a mouse, they have failed.

I see UI elements in this screen shot (specifically the tray icons on the taskbar) that are too small to be tapped on with a finger:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/202234/microsoft_vows_tablet_...

The only way I can see Microsoft making a Windows tablet that doesn't fail is with a brand new Explorer.exe built for fingers and multitouch rather than mouse/stylus. Of course they'd need to do the same thing with Office as well.

Apple took a much better approach by designing a new OS - it forces devs to not use small UI elements that are too small to be pressed with a finger.
Utterly and completely wrong.

The exchanges are not allowed to fill a sell order at $9.99 with a buy at $9.99 if there is a public buy order for $10.00 on another network - that would violate RegNMS. This is called "crossed markets" and no trades can occur in this situation.
Wow I agree with you 100%. I hate job interviews like that! I've always wondered if interviews for other professions like accountants or dentists are this harsh.
Thats so true. When I wrote my book, most of my battles with O'Reilly was over 'toning down' of my content.

O'Reilly was great to work with but they were a bit worried about offending people. When the book released, it worked out great - people loved it.
Feminist fascism doesn't have to imply everything about fascism. Its a compound phrase. Just as 'fly fishing' has little to do with the wright brothers. He's more talking about militant feminism (again, which has little to do with the military). Militant Feminism seems is where women try to find every reason in the book that white, middle class, men are the root of all evil. It may or may not be a real thing, but that's what people are thinking of when they say this.
I think that was his point. iPhone is where the money is (for the top X developers).
Yeah, and Haskell programmers love having it pointed out that their language makes them stupid by not allowing them to do this ;)

Oh wait. Nobody says that about Haskell programmers? They only say it about Python? Huh. When they both have this same shortcoming with their so-called "closures"? Wonder why that is?
A command line java refactoring tool? That would be cool. Is it possible to extend it to other languages? Do you have a link - even if its to a "coming soon" page?

Let me reduce "good ide" to IntelliJ or Eclipse if that helps.

By "formal grammar" I mean that both Eclipse and IntelliJ have full Java parsers. So they can successfully rename a method on an interface, all its implementations and all its uses. This can be done if and only if the tool can correctly identify which text symbols represent a class, interface, variable declaration and method invocation, and further it can infer the type the variable in a method invocation using information from that variables declaration, even though it may be in another file.

That needs a parser. So you are correct in that you don't have to write a formal grammar to do it. You can hand role your parser. I used "formal grammar" to imply a level of complexity. Does vim have a tool of such complexity?
Another option: cook for two days and put half of it in your fridge or freezer.
Start your own group. Email me when you have questions.
I believe it is a rare example of a symmetrical Blub paradox. We know objects are a poor mans closures, just as closures are poor mans objects.
They had that (multiple times). Their obsession with putting "Windows" everywhere is killing good things. I (not a Microsoft fan) thought the Courier would have been a great product in the $300 - $500 price range. I could easily see people buying it and ditching their daytimes.
I agree. You do not have to be a member of the U.S. Military to open an account (or more) with USAA. It took me roughly 15 minutes to open accounts for myself and my family through their website.

What you cannot do (if you are not/were a member of the military) is use their direct deposit feature i.e. scan checks and upload them to their website. You are not also eligible to get insurance from them.

Other than that I agree that they have a fantastic website and awesome customer service. Because they do not have ATMs when you withdraw money from another bank's ATM, they refund up to $1.50 for the ATM fees up to 10 times a month.
Australia begs residents to accept free fiber connection
The U.S. Company That Knows More About China Than China Does
So are you lining up to buy a new Volt?

It think it's great GM is doing it, taking some risks, approaching it from a slightly different angle than the other companies are. That's all good stuff. As someone who has bought and been burned by GM products in the past I can boil it down to 2 things:

1) Would you pay more for a Volt than a Prius? Just on quality experience, I'd pay a premium to go Toyota, personally. It's anecdotal but a GM is going to have to be incredibly compelling for me to go back.

2) Would you pay $40k for anything from GM that's not a corvette, Cadillac or like an industrial truck?

What's the overall goal of the Volt? Are they looking to have 5million of them on the road and it'll be the next Taurus or Accord or something? Is it supposed to be a platform for future development? Is it a one off? Is it hitting that mark? What's so compelling for it to cost more than a prius?
When Adobe InDesign was released (1999), it was soon called the Quark XPress killer.
http://www.macworld.com/article/21336/2001/02/indesign.html

A couple of years later, most print shops had switched to InDesign.

(EDIT: The print shops I was working with had all switched to InDesign by 2002. I'm sure that it took longer in other parts of the country. Be that as it may, it has definitely become the layout package of choice.)
I'm going to submit my old CS .cfg files alongside a Clojure project from github.
World Population to Top 7 billion in 2011
U.S. Copyright Group ‘Steal’ Competitor’s Website
A complication with patent trolls is that they're immune to defensive patents: they don't practice, so they can't be countersued or bargained with. I think you probably mean "other companies that develop mobile apps." In this case, especially in the context of the direct copy of the TapTapTap app as shown above, it looks like this means "our own developers."
You guys seem to think death isn't inevitable? Huh?
This is about the 5th time this has been posted, and it probably won't get traction this time either. The suit is not about technology but about pricing, so it might as well be be about filing cabinets or fuel tanks for all the hacking significance.

I'll bet you, however, that with congressional and California gubernatorial elections on the way Larry Ellison will temporarily become the poster boy for capitalism's sins - this lawsuit, his recent identification as perhaps the best-paid CEO, and his accountant's highly original explanation for cutting 70% off his property tax back in 2008: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/26/...
Submit a ticket and we'll help you out.
Of course it is not perfect, but it is one of the best ways to get a quick idea of the speed of a language. For example if we do it in OCaml we get native machine integers and cheap function calls. If we do it in Ruby we get expensive integers and heavy weight procedure calls.

> I can easily imagine optimizing performance for an unrealistic micro-benchmark that would actually hurt overall recursion performance.

I can't. Can you explain this and give an example?
Current price $100. Firm puts in order to buy at any price up to $110. The HFC algorithm puts small volume sells to work out that they are doing that, then sell to them at $109.99. They then turn around and fill their position at any lower prices. If the HFC was not there the limit order would be filled more slowly at lower prices.
It's worth noting we (the team that's building Skynet) didn't set out to build a parallel language, we set out to build a distributed one. It turns out that a lot of the things that make Spin a good distributed language also make it a good parallel one.
Around the time I was finishing up mine (1994), the prices skyrocketed. I think my fees were just over $2K CDN/semester x 4 semesters (back when the US dollar was super strong), and then universities started introducing accelerated "executive MBAs" that cost well over $20K for 6 months.

I got my ROI a long time ago, but if I had to do it again today, I wouldn't bother. You have access to so much information these days (BBS's were how you communicated back then, not the www, and the idea of youtube was just c-r-a-z-y) that it's hard to justify the high costs of tuition.
Don't suppose you have a link to a decent tutorial on these features for, say, java?
Not to be overly critical, but the phrases to use start out at #7, as if they are a continuation of phrases to avoid. When really they are a separate idea. As a designer, make sure you address details like that, as critical clients will see them and judge accordingly.
Intel's 50Gbps Silicon Photonics Link
* Having applied for three internships at major research labs, which obviously lack the courtesy of letting you know that they are not interested. (This pisses me of so much that I hardly find time to do productive work anymore.)

* Living in a comparatively rich country that is so full of asshole civil cervants playing shenanigans that it makes you wonder why the hell you should continue providing for these jerks. I for one cannot believe the insane amount of taxes I have payed in my country just to get lied, cheated and straightout harrassed by people who should actually sit down and listen before telling you off.

* No funding for PhD research and travel expenses for attending conferences. Even though there is a shitload of money set aside exclusively for women in CS, I cannot get this kind of funding because of my gender. My research group is underfinanced and a recent grant proposal has been denied because of minor improvement suggestions. Of course I can re-submit, but I figure that I will be finished before any decision can be made. Man, I've had it with my country, I cannot wait to turn my back and go somewhere else...
True, the nice things about libraries is that they can compete and make your ecosystem stronger. But the nice thing about building it into the language is that it becomes a common layer of compatibility.

We've gotten comfortable enough with our concurrency model, that we felt it deserved to be in the language.

As an aside, some features that benefit parallelism can be tricky to add retroactively, although possible (like an N:M threading model).
It took a hell of a lot more than a couple of years.
We use google docs spreadsheets. Depending on the number of transactions you need to track, this might be good enough, web based and free.
He probably meant "distributed". Erlang has a better "distributed" story than Clojure.
Would you really be kickstarted by a meetup if you don't have the gumption to do anything about it now?
That's me :(
Dunno. It wouldn't violate the store TOS...
tophercyll, can you give an invite to skynet?
Nice blog post, but you need to give references/links for Spin and Skynet. Otherwise it's just an ad trick...