skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was some analysis posted when the article originally appeared on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1227936

As I understand it, the trig calls are just to establish the camera position and direction. The rest of the calculation (the two inner loops) is marching along a ray to find a depth value.
Good comment. I just did a quick google for the government employee premium - I was thinking specifically about California since that's the state economy I know most about. Their spending on salaries, benefits, and pensions was crazy. Lots of good analysis about California's problems - Heritage wasn't actually the link I was looking for, I saw a different specific analysis but that one came up in Google first and was close enough to give a general idea.

Edit: Also, the article mixes federal and state spending. Their examples of high spending they think are wasteful are all federal - bank bailouts, assuming private debt like General Motors, and wars are all federal spending.
Wow, all those glyphs and still no padlock or play/pause/fast-forward symbols! *

That’s a very cool one, dmd. Would be even better if (like ZoomWorld), sections were labeled in huge text, and more information were available next to each symbol.

* Edit: There is a glyph that could stand in if you use your imagination. ꉩ "YI SYLLABLE NGO" http://alanhogan.com/images/Coincidental_pictograms-20100806... (though it doesn’t always look like that. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/A269/index.htm)
Good job; it looks amazing... That one's my favorite (although the tunnel is also nice).
I'm not disputing the facts and don't really have the time to look it up right now, but the Heritage Foundation isn't really nonpartisan.

Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institution—a think tank—whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.
How does that make everything they did while in existence irrelevant?
Sidney Reilly
You did not read carefully enough.

If N is the difference between the values in the two envelopes, then the chance that you will guess a value in this range depends on the actual values. If you average over all possible intervals it averages out to 0, but for every single interval the odds are greater than zero.

The non-intuitive (yet mathematically straightforward) fact that you can average an infinite set of positive numbers and get 0 is part of why our intuition is so badly mislead in this case.
Actually, in just about anything non-JITted (without faking it by hinting the compiler), I see no reason why (basic) locality optimizations would change with different architectures. A sufficiently smart branch predictor deciding what to load into caches could take care of such a thing, but that can't really be relied on (too hard to predict), and it would likely benefit from such hints as well.

This is all taking into account that there is indeed too much of a "good" thing. More extreme methods of optimization can definitely shoot you in the foot, and not just while you're writing them.
I honestly don't get it. State governments are floundering trying to cover their expenses. It seems like people need to make a choice: do we want these public services or not? If so: RAISE TAXES. God forbid we actually pay for the services we want.
Buffett, Gates to urge rich Indians to donate wealth
Ouch. This was painful to read. Map is not a visitor. (setcdr foo foo) is not the same as the 10,000 line graph library.

This is truly the lisp attitude that is preventing it from becoming a success, "some other language does that, therefore we don't really need that".

Wrong. You do need that. And, you can learn from the other language's implementation and get it right.
Freud explains why there aren't more women entrepreneurs
Fred Wilson wrote a blog a few weeks ago called "XX Combinator," commenting on Teresa's earlier blog which proposes the founding of "XX Combinator" to support women entrepreneurs. The answer is very obvious. Freud is right, sex is the ultimate driver to explain most human behaviors.
And yet, that explanation isn't correct.
Are short-circuiting boolean operators as conditional-plus-result-rolled-together really a functional technique? Certainly in strongly typed functional languages like Haskell they're impossible, because his example isn't even well-typed:

evt && (evt.target || evt.srcElement)

You can't apply a boolean operator to an event! And even if you could, the result would always be a boolean. I associate this most commonly with languages I wouldn't really call functional, like Perl and Ruby (I believe Perl popularized the technique).

Even in Lisp, where you can write like that, it's much more idiomatic to use the if or cond forms, which is more morally equivalent to C's ternary conditional than to short-circuiting booleans.
What school did you go to?

We did piles on networking, dcom, everything in the OSI stack actually. (I went to a canadian university, UNB).

While I agree undergrad uni isn't going to be on the cutting edge, I think that learning the basics, and the ideas behind why decisions are/were made is extremely valuable.

In short, you can't move forward without learning where you've been.
AT&T Says Loss Of iPhone Exclusivity Will Not Materially Impact Earnings
Well, of course you're right, as is yanowitz. But there is something unsatisfying about this explanation. Intuitively it is obvious, but why is the relative reasoning incorrect?

There is no formal distinction between absolute and relative quantities, and no theorem that says that expected values can only be taken from absolute quantities. There are just random variables, and these have some distributions, and they can be independent or not. Nothing prevents you from taking an expectation of a random variable that is a ratio of two other random variables.

Another angle - I could say that our definition of expected value, based on weighted arithmetic average, is completely arbitrary, and instead define my own expected value G[X], based on the geometric average. Suddenly, the relative approach becomes correct: sqrt(2 * 0.5) = 1, so the expected relative improvement from switching is 1. What the hell is going on?
Showcase of html5 apps
Hi, I am an ex HP and surely can confirm HP has lost its battle in winning the hearts and minds of its employees. 2008 recession, Mark Hurd took $52 million and later after 2 months declared 25% loss and eventually leading to firing spree, which in US also lead to one HP employee commiting suicide.. I bet this is not what Bill and Dave envisioned for HP. Employees hates the phony speech he gives to build up employee morale but reality is everyone hates him.
No one knows why Mark is fired. Bad business deals or sexual harrassmenT. And given the mammoth size of HP, no one will know.
Brand HP is somewhat a mirage, suferficial and very calous from inside.
It's 21'st centuary, its all about packaging, no one cares whats inside anymore..
Every employee is saying one thing right now 'I dont care if Mark stays or goes'...
Isn't the expected value of both envelopes, prior to picking either, 0.5 X, where X is the sum of the envelopes' value?*

Only if the value of X is determinate. As matters stand for the person picking, it is not. It is simply undefined.

The solution to the "paradox" is simply that expected value doesn't always mean what we'd like it to mean.
yeah it's important to note that we're talking about sun tzu's rules for soldiers, not himself. You better believe he had a way out of every room he walked into.
I think the key difference is that the iPhone uses inertia only for deceleration. Acceleration should always feel snappy and instantaneous; the relationship between the mouse pointer and the image should be nailed until the user lets go of the button.
From the title, I was expecting something interesting like "SubText", or at least some kind of talk about dispatch :) Using &&, || etc gets you terse code, but the branching that you mentally work out is exactly the same.

.. unless you use the && and || so much that you end up chunking out specific patterns of usage without having to explicitly think about the branching.

.. which you can do with if as well.
Senate Approves NASA Bill, Extra Space Shuttle Flight
Eh, Google embraces OSS when it doesn't affect their bottom line.

Which is not to say that Microsoft embraces it. Even internally their policies are almost downright hostile.
Simply, no. I prefer to think in boolean expressions rather than sequences of statements. Personally, I'd further reduce it to (assuming there's no JavaScript subtleties I'm missing here; in C/C++ this would have the same semantics):

function getEventTarget(evt) {
return (evt || window.event) && (evt.target || evt.srcElement);
}

A boolean expression is straight-up math, and I've been trained to reason about that. With a sequence of statements, I have to first figure out what you're doing, then extrapolate the implications. The implications stare me in the face when I look at a boolean expression.
I don't think guys do startups to get girls. There are much easier paths to get there. :)
Agreed. One of the best aspects of sites like HN and Progit are that over the years I've been able to figure out which CS/Software Engineering books are the really good ones. From SICP to Date's database books, if you take the time to do that you can give yourself a foundation of knowledge as good or better than probably 90% of the schools out there.
We sometimes use if-else statements to write out some straight-up logic because we don't understand it at first. So we build it from the ground up. If, after writing it all out with primitives, we realize "Oh, it's just this anded with this and ored with that" then we actually understand the problem.

Put another way: if you write a boolean expression as a sequence of statements, my assumption is you don't really understand what you're doing.
He's moving to Portland [1]; VMWare does not have any offices in the state of Oregon, so that does not seem likely.

[1]: http://twitter.com/ezmobius/status/20515487977
Sorry, but your post is complete nonsense.

In my experience, all medium and large organizations in this industry have a very unique culture that affects everything they do. For better or worse, there's nothing like working at Microsoft. Personally, having the valuable opportunity to see it up close, I would never work there and I'm not surprised to read the accounts of those who have worked there.
Ask HN: How to become a Biz Dev Superstar?
What are the most valuable experiences/concepts/books/skills to prepare oneself to succeed in a biz dev role?

Answers from some current biz dev professionals at rapidly growing startups would be awesome.
Only if it's sustainable. Corruption on the scale here is a known destabilizer of empires.
Good article... short, informative, and fills you in on a whole history in the space of a few paragraphs.
I discovered, much to my surprise, that Andy Beaulieu (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/789) insists (without any justification that I can see) that it is neither: http://books.google.com/books?id=1PgCCVryjOQC&lpg=PP1....
I've always thought computer science could be taught in the opposite order. Instead of starting with "Pascal/Java 101" and finishing with CPU design / architecture, what if you started at the hardware and worked up to high level languages? That's actually more of the course I followed, but only by chance.
I'm also interested in the answer to this question; as far as I can tell, without being shady about ignoring people's AUPs, there isn't anyone who beats s3. If this is the case, I'm considering entering that market at the $0.05/gigabyte price point (both for storage and transfer)

rsync.net; it's cheaper than s3 if you transfer up and down a lot, otherwise, more expensive. I think it's around a dollar a gigabyte month if you buy a whole lot, but transfer is free.

dreamhost and other shared hosting providers often give you 500GiB/month for like 10 bucks... but if you read their AUP, I think using it for backups is prohibited. still, it's probably worth trying if you are on a tight budget.

I don't know of anything that beats a supermicro with 16 or 24 2TiB disks in a co-lo, though.
A lot of that floundering is all about their big losses...Wall St, over-resourcing for the housing bubble, budgeting based on bubble math, widespread corruption and backroom dealing, oh, and there's that huge army fighting a couple big wars with a budget larger than the military of rest of the world combined.
These points have merit, yet I know of at least one pioneering effort that was successful: The "Higher Cracking University" or +HCU for short. It ceased functioning a long while back, but at that time it didn't just meet, but far surpassed the expectations of online learning described in these comments.

The link speaks louder than my words:
http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/student.htm

Here you had a community that
- spent years simply learning
- shared their knowledge (for free!) in essays, email, and forum discussions
- maintained a level of intelligence in incoming classes by use of strainers (reversing assignments such as http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/strain99.htm)
- never needed to meet in person to contribute these great works

It can be done, but perhaps the question is, "why haven't we seen more of these in the wild?"
In the OP's example, evt will retain it's value if passed in as "truthy" or take on the value of window.event otherwise. The return then returns evt and evt.target or evt.srcElement which may from the original passed in evt or really from window.event, which was assigned to evt in the first line.

With your example, evt.target and evt.srcElement are only coming from the passed in evt which may have been passed in as "falsey" and would not take on the target or srcElement of window.event as intended.

I could be mistaken, it's late and I'm rusty. Anyone is free to correct me.
Write readable code for your source files and then compile with Google's closure compiler.
I have to say I'm very surprised at how few people here seem to have liked the book. Going by my experience, I would have expected that HN readers would have thoroughly enjoyed it.

I first read it about 25 years ago, and while I didn't understand much of its philosophical arguments, I remember the experience as a sheer delight. Since then, i've read it at least twice more, and enjoyed it every time ( and understood it better):

- It's the best explanation by far (for a non-mathematical reader) of Godel's theorem and its philosophical implications.

- It's a theory about what is consciousness and how it arises, but unlike most such discussions, genuinely interesting and even playful.

- It's an argument for what is called 'strong AI'. Given the author's view of consciousness, he makes a strong argument for why he believes conscious computer programs are possible.

- It's a great introduction (again for the math-challenged) to formal systems, mathematical proofs, and what was called the Entschiedungsproblem (who can resist finding out what a word like that means?) :-)

- It's tantalizing glimpses of the world of western classical music and painting and some interesting parallels he draws between them and his theory of consciousness.

- It's a set of delightful dialogs (in the style of Lewis Carroll) about all the above.

For me, it was one of my formative experiences, and the one thing I got from it at the time was that there was more to computers than writing Pascal programs. It helped that I came to this book as the proverbial tabula rasa, knowing nothing about classical music, painting, formal systems or philosophy for that matter, but I really think most people here, even those who know a lot about these things, will enjoy and learn from it.
There's a big opportunity for the taking here for the right person with both .Net and Ruby experience and enough time on their hands. IronRuby might be a minor Ruby implementation but I suspect if it stays alive it could be a bigger deal in the .Net world and there could be a great consultancy business off the back of it, especially in skunkworks-type situations.
C++ and C# are big deals in the financial industry, but remember that programmer time is a lot more expensive than hardware time, and there could be wins to be had in extremely rapid development.
After reading lots of useful nginx/ruby/rails stuff for years on Ezra's blog, I met him at merb camp a few years ago - a cool and interesting guy -- I wish him well!
Apple uses ASP.net and breaks it.
It is from the neutral Heritage Foundation (yeah, the one Rush Limbaugh gives donation information for nearly daily); their methodology in determining what public/private sector jobs were directly comparable was no doubt squeaky clean.

Limbaugh has a piece praising the report, behind his paywall:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Inflated+Federal+Pa...
When I made my comment, I believe it said "please offer the app on Steam", or something similar.
I'm curious as to how Gates compares America to Asia and says that Asia is currently beating the West (example he gives is that Asia has smaller, shorter textbooks and yet scores higher on global acadeimic tests).

Whereas in Asia people are scrambling to emulate the Western education system. They see the American education system as better at fostering originality and creativity. And there's a bias towards rote in Eastern education systems (at the moment).

Could it be that this is a grass-is-greener on the other side phenomenon?
Bill Gates went to a private high school with tuition 2.5 times more than Harvard at the time, and computing facilities comparable to Stanford or MIT.
"use of an impossible probability distribution" - this sounds interesting. Which exact distribution do you mean? To me it seems (though I might be wrong) that the distributions are perfectly valid.

You have a pair of random variables (X, Y) that take values (100, 200) or (200, 100) with equal probability. Then E[X] = E[Y] = 150, there is no question about that. Also, E[X/Y] = 1.25, there is also no question. The only question is why E[X] is useful and E[X/Y] is not useful for our decision making - and I honestly don't know why.
It would not be for cleverness, much less for optimization (is it even faster?)

For some reason every time I see a condition I cringe mentally. There's something in a "for" loop that makes me uncomfortable and god, using "map", "filter" and micro branching would help a lot.

I'm just thinking of what I would like to see and checking it against the opinion of others.
I don't think so, but of course this differs between demographics. In my experience it has become completely natural to "add someone on Facebook" instead of asking their telephone number. Also all the local competition here (Sweden) has been marginalized.
Cool. So might the new neurons be more for motor control than say, mathematics?
Good story. Surprised you got to ride home with the evidence.
تحميل الشيكروباص | جميع حلقان برنامج الشكروباص | برنامج الشيكروباص كامل
Yep http://zoom.it/1Sma#full
A colleague was telling me yesterday that the official Apache Tomcat packages for CentOS/RHEL keep all their runtime temporary files in /usr/share/tomcat; that's the sort of thing that would never be allowed in a Debian package (runtime state belongs in /var).

Another example: The Debian packaging guidelines demand that every executable have a man page available, even if the upstream project doesn't supply one. They're not always as complete and comprehensive as one might hope, but they're often enough to give you the general gist of what a command is supposed to do, and how to use it.

Yet another example: Debian has an 'alternatives' system, by which you can configure the system and tell it that your preferred terminal emulator is 'xterm', your preferred text-editor is pico, etc. (this extends to man pages too - if you make "x-terminal-emulator" point at xterm, then "man x-terminal-emulator" will give you the xterm man page). Every package that Debian ships that is able to spawn a terminal emulator in some way is required to launch x-terminal-emulator rather than hard-coding xterm or rxvt or whatever.

The downside to all this is that if you know how to configure/administer package X on RedHat or FreeBSD, you might get lost trying to find where the package keeps its stuff in Debian. The upside is that if you know how to configure/administer package X on Debian, you should find it pretty easy to configure/administer packages Y and Z as well.

One more example: The last time I installed fetchmail on RedHat, I wound up having to create /root/.fetchmailrc and write my own cronjob to run it. The last time I installed fetchmail on Debian, it already came with an /etc/init.d script that would do all the periodic checking for me, all I had to do was create an "/etc/fetchmailrc" file (like any other system service) and start it up (like any other system service). Debian's integration goes far, far beyond any other distro I've seen.
I can't remember this specific discussion, but you're absolutely right in all particulars. Egads. Now I'm even more scared of the borg.
Your system has a user named `hacks'? ;)
You're combining two worlds and then adding up probabilities. But there's no world where all three possible values are in play at the same time. There's only two, and you either picked high or low. It's a 50/50 shot.
That's just decorative plumage. They are demonstrating their superiority over other similar companies.
This isn't a functional technique! Functional languages remove assignments and mutable variables. Not branches.
Seems like a lot of hackers moving to Portland lately!
I've been hacking around on the side in functional languages for over ten years now and I don't ever remember seeing close to this much mainstream interest in functional languages. The web opened the door for anything that can talk HTTP and Python and Ruby made FP seem a lot less exotic.
The Fall of Steve Jobs: Then 1985- Now 2010
AT&T will be affected.

Beyond AT&T, ending the exclusive arrangement will also hurt Android marketshare (and that of the future Windows Phone 7)
Wikipedia Lamest Edit Wars (Infographic)
Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence
On the other hand, I just finished taking a couple of courses online and I have to say that I really missed the hands-on and interpersonal (study groups, discussions, etc.) aspects of a real classroom environment.
Branches too. The only conditionals I've seen in functional programming are equivalent to the ternary operator.

Unless I'm absurdly wrong, which can happen.
> We did actually look at doing this for spouses -- not to detect cheating (a cheating spouse will be even more motivated to subvert the system than a child), but to help out with stuff like "are you near the supermarket? Can you pick up some milk?", but fundamentally people don't seem all that interested in it.

They just call each other in this situation which means there's no need for some additional program on a special phone that they may not even own.
It's a great city, and very affordable.
Manage your flirting account at ClickandFlirt
Here comes Skynet
That's a false choice. We can get the same level of public service for less by cutting public sector compensation.
Salaries and benefits — for identical jobs — are up to 5-10 times higher than the developing world... even adjusting for purchasing power parity and the cost of living.. this is too large a difference... and is becoming increasingly unsustainable.. leading to all kinds of job losses. maybe just a little bit of lifestyle downgrade in the developed world is the need of the hour
A comment here, which is unfortunately dead, says this:

Make sure you don't neglect its contrary twin: Emperor's New Mind. (The entire dialectic between these two books is something straight out of G.E.B.)

I haven't read GEB, but I loved reading the Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. It's a little all over the place, going from non-periodic tiling patterns to quantum mechanics and relativity, all to argue against the case for strong AI.