skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with "age" is really a problem of attitude. We'll be crippling ourselves if we go by this proxy variable of age instead of looking at the real problem, because there are plenty of people under 30 who are a lot more cynical about new tech (e.g. JSON, NoSQL, advanced/mature FPs) than people a decade older than them.

Will there be some BS in the new tech? Sure, but that's because it's new. Too often, some wise-ass with a pretty degree or a major accomplishment at an early age thinks that they'd already seen everything under the sun.
A strong stack doesn't mean quality. Django for example lacks on quality and maturity. There are great tools like cucumber, rspec and rails who delivery a dynamic and productive environment, they are ages ahead python based solutions.
Thanks, I've used that before but I meant with cookies, etc.
Ruby has a wealth of frameworks, due to Rack. They all have interesting bits... maybe Rails gets a lot of press, but Sinatra, camping, ramaize, padrino, and others would probably like to have a word with you.
wow, and there's a group making swastikas in the corner. classy.
I know in games like Starcraft players are obsessed with their Actions Per Minute (APM); the more you click the higher your APM and the better you do in the game.

Yes, you can see a whole host of problems with this logic.

None the less, my impression is that it looks like this game hooks into that sentiment and tests your ability to react quickly.
Agreed. I'm not sure why these days, a writer can't find themeselves an editor. I was publishing a website and it wasn't so hard for me to find a friend that I paid for three progressive sessions of editing.
Surprisingly watching more TV and playing more MMORPG's didn't make the list...hmm
Anecdotally, I saw a neat open-source cryptocurrency system that come from Japan. From hearsay, I heard he is a cryptography researcher since he published a nice professional looking technical paper on his system. Other than that, nobody knows who he really is.

Other than that, I used the Ruby programming language. There's not much else that I knew come from Japan in software. If they did come out though, they are pretty awesome.
check out http://saucelabs.com/! Write your scripts with Selenium RC, run them against any browser, and get screenshots of every important steup.
Well, as your friendly neighborhood real estate agent: What do you feel is so "evil" about the NYC real estate market, aside from using it as a provoking headline?

Apartment prices depend on the move-in date - an apartment may be rented at significantly less than its current market value if the tenant has been there for 10 years, while someone who just moved in to the identical floorplan will be paying quite a bit more. Comparing this smattering of prices is unhelpful, and is exactly why rental reports like the one linked above are based on average and median prices for apartments currently on the market or recently rented.
Doctors - Insurance Companies - Patients : Writers - Publishers - Readers

Didn't realize that was the analogy. Glad those authors cleared that up for us.
I loath TV ads as well. I've had cable for the last few years with a DVR. For the longest time, fast forwarding through ads was really nice. Then, a few months ago, I picked up a Bluray player with Netflix streaming built-in. Netflix streaming is just awesome. No ads to worry about, no fast forwarding, I just watch my tv episode and I'm done.

Eventually, I started to get pissed off at the mere thought of fast forwarding through commercials on the DVR. I just cancelled my cable last week because I hadn't actually turned in on in over a month.
Its definitely true that imagination is important for all the innovations that have fueled the progress of mankind.

But, is it even possible to convert imagination into reality without knowledge?
I think the biggest issue facing Python as a web development tool is deployment. Among the people I've spoken with, they like Python and the frameworks but often fall back to PHP because the deployment is so simple (possibly to a fault). Doesn't stop me from using it, but i would gather it's a significant factor for a lot of newcomers.
completely disagree. I spent six years in the field of science. For many years, the most glittery, eye-catching, out-of-this-world hypotheses were the ones that got funding. I saw so many of my colleagues come out of undergraduate education and spend four or five years in the wilderness chasing after projects that went nowhere and in hindsight were horrible, though imaginative ideas. Execution is tough, because it's beholden to standards, and thus far more valuable than imagination. Ultimately you cannot properly edit out bad ideas without experiential knowledge. The catch is, go too far, and your knowledge creates prejudices that cloud your vision and block the genius ideas.

Imagination is important. But most of us are born with the inherent capacity to dream; a dreamer is a dime a dozen. Execution matters more. That's hard to find.
I generally friend only people I'm, you know, friends with -- or at the very least met enough times to recognize. At some level of friends (300+?) I don't think the site is useful for actual personal communication -- which is more or less the only thing I find Facebook to be useful for.

I find those friend recommendations to be just that: recommendations. I likely know them through someone or they're in my local network: have I met them? Do I want to be friends with them? Or am I just shamelessly network-marketing myself here?

I'd love to see this on every login, even just for a day. The fallout would be hilarious.
I strongly disagree with what he's saying, but I don't think that's a fair way of characterizing Calcanis. To me, it seems as though he trusts his gut instinct. Nothing wrong with that until you trust gut instinct at the expense of sound logic.
You have to keep in mind that unspecified elements of SQL are not guaranteed to be random. There is no situation in which the two queries you supplied, executed sequentially as you "expect", would be guaranteed to produce different results. For any possible set X of 20-or-fewer Davids who are 29 or older, there exists a set of Y of 20 or fewer Davids of unspecified age such that X is the subset of Y obtained by filtering out the Davids in Y who are younger than 29. If your query allows this result, the DBMS is permitted to return it if it deems it more efficient.

You cannot assume anything about your result sets. It's best to just pretend every database functions something like the Monkey's Paw: it will grant your wish to the letter, but always in the most horrifying manner that your wish permits.
Have you tried looking or searching on www.StackOverflow.com ? There's a ton of information, often very specific to the types of technology you could be using.
I'll try to answer the general question.

It's kind of a quantum physics problem, at least with respect to testing in general. Code that is completely untested hides all errors, and code never put through its paces won't show a performance problem. As it gets closer and closer to the "real world" (compiling, initial tests, beta, 1.0, 2.0, etc.) bugs and scaling issues will show up(often somewhat "magically"). The best you can do to counter this is simply to make the most efficient use of your time given the quantity/complexity of features, schedule, and available manpower - so that the remaining time can go towards a thorough test cycle.

Code built within restricted computational models(stronger type systems, garbage collected memory, functional-style code, relational logic...) can eliminate entire classes of errors. This doesn't eliminate the benefits of tests, but it makes it possible to focus your tests on a smaller subset of all errors.

Code with extensive ongoing review processes(e.g. space shuttle code, or perhaps the Linux kernel) can eliminate a different class of errors from regular tests or restricted models, because it uses the power of human minds to reason through the concepts repeatedly; a mistake made by one programmer is not likely to be repeated in exactly the same way by ten or twenty of them.

Also worth consideration is test scaffolding and debugging tools. In a large codebase, errors can appear farther and farther from their origin. This leads to a "test suite" (unit tests, functional tests, example datasets) run more-or-less independently of the application. For some kinds of applications, relatively elaborate debugging features may be necessary to display and step through core data structures while the app runs. Debugging-related features are easy to overlook, but are often well worth the time spent, and I have taken towards adding them whenever I encounter a class of bugs that they would help address, rather than to just muddle through the first instance and say "hope THAT doesn't happen again!"

Also, to a large extent, language and environment dictates debugging methods - C code benefits from a machine-level debugging system like gdb, but in languages with runtime reflectivity like Python or Ruby, you rarely need more than a print statement to uncover a problem. If you are working with an embedded device instead of a desktop OS you may have a remote monitor system or an emulator. If you're working on a webapp, you have server logs and browser-level tools. Et cetera.
The only reason I even cared about it was because you stated it. It made me think this information SHOULD be kept private and think twice before letting it information out.

Does that message even need to be there? Is anyone concerned with it? Might be be better to put the message at the bottom instead. Those who care will look for a statement like that and others won't be distracted.
I agree with you that this is possible. Then again, because it's trivial to prove (at least to yourself) that altering brain chemistry can change both color perception and color preference, I think that my hypothesis is the most likely explanation. Especially since the fact that gender differences in sensory preferences are detectable at 3-4 months of age shows that they are likely biological and not cultural.
The Most Important Business Lessons I’ve Learned
Ask HN: How can I learn how to formally verify Haskell programs?
To give some context into my current state of knowledge, I'm currently enrolled in a calculus course. My experience with formal logic is somewhat limited, but I have played around with both propositional and predicate calculus.

As of late, I've been extremely obsessed with the idea of formal correctness. Even though it's fairly unlikely that I'll be more employable with the skill, I'm still curious on how to learn formal verification, if only for the fact that it'll help me reason with existing programs better and the confidence of having a 100% correct algorithm is pretty cool :)

Unfortunately, searches on the Haskell wiki and on Google give me links to research papers that I unfortunately don't have the prerequisites to understand. A Wikipedia search explains that through the Curry-Howard Isomorphism allows for programs to be translated into combinatory logic and then be reasoned with, but I'm not sure whether simple combinatory logic is enough to handle a language like Haskell.

So, if I'm going to approach the beast, what would be the best way to do so? What kind of knowledge should I know about logic and Haskell, and what kind of books or articles would best explain the required concepts?
Try Chrome. Firefox 4 doesn't work for me.
in google
> At some point, you could perhaps mash up data you get about buildings with a lot of the data NYC has opened up about the city as part of its gov2.0 efforts. This way, you can provide a sense for the "value" of an apartment alongside stats like average income of neighborhood, crime rates, etc.

Already got some heavy competition in that area:
http://nyc.everyblock.com/
http://streeteasy.com/nyc
http://www.trulia.com/
Since you mentioned data structures... The nice thing about most data structures is that they are deterministic, and therefore there is (usually) a clear definition of "correct". Write your unit tests, make sure they work, and then make sure they work after all future changes.

For each function, you should have a handful of unit tests. Test the normal/expected values. Test edge cases (zero, infinity, negative infinity). Test possible error cases (null values, uninitialized data, etc). Basically, you want to test all the possible "buckets" of possible inputs.

"Correctness" is typically assumed. If your code isn't correct, then fix it.

"Robust" is the ideal. Most seasoned devs will have their toolbox of classes, snippets, and nuggets that they have incrementally tweaked and improved. Over time, they become ridiculously stable, full of years of bug fixes and all sorts of edge cases. They'll then use those snippets in project after project.

Testing becomes a lot more challenging when the function is less deterministic. If it's a heuristic based function, you will constantly be balancing the tradeoffs of accuracy vs. performance. For example, I used to work on a driving directions algorithm. Our team had a library of ~30k routes. After every code change, we would compare "accuracy" (average driving time) vs. "performance" (routes calculated per minute).

Testing becomes even more challenging when you're playing at the system level. Then you have load testing, stress testing, endurance testing, etc. That's when you need full time testers.
I'm curious why you think Django lacks quality and maturity. Your specific examples seem to be about testing, but Django emphasizes unit tests quite a bit. If you're looking for BDD specifically, there is lettuce (http://lettuce.it), freshen (http://github.com/rlisagor/freshen), and pyccuracy (http://wiki.github.com/heynemann/pyccuracy/).
It was actually my experience learning various FP languages that inspired this idea in the first place.
I started a wikibook on this stuff a few years back. Includes material on inline perl, gnuplot and has lots of examples. Check out: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ad_Hoc_Data_Analysis_From_The_U...
May I recommend the Fagles Iliad and the Fitzgerald Odyssey?
that's a really cool application!
I've too have been working on a multiplayer application, hope to release soon.
we plan to after node.js ko is over
Warren Buffett’s New 80th Birthday Vow: Work Past 100
4 to 10 years to completely recover? yikes
ya, this is one of the top bugs we want to fix. thanks
http://me-and-my-sherpa-from-mit.no.de/ also uses socket.io
i consider myself a nerd as well if that helps :-)
> The prices on craiglist are borderline fraudulent

The most attractively priced apartments advertised on CL are on there because they are great deals. There are thousands of people looking for the cheapest apartments, and when someone rents it, that means 999 other people get to hear "I'm sorry, that apartment is gone." Obviously I understand the frustration, since I've been on both sides of those conversations, and there are some brokerages that put out shady ads, but nearly all rentals are on the market less than a week, and smart landlords price their apartments so well they are rented within a day - just because apartments get rented is not evidence of a mass conspiracy.
That's a bunch of some really good advice with loads of common sense.

Thanks for posting it.
Going about it all the wrong way. You need fundamentals, not technologies.

Get yourself a list of buzzwords; read each one out and ponder for a minute how it might be written, how it might work given the limitations of the platform(s) it runs on (you know your Posix/java/win32, etc internals, right?) If you can't mentally visualize how that thing works internally, or how it might be implemented, do some research until you have a firm understanding of how it functions internally. If you don't still get it, research the underlying techniques.

As a programmer you're not required to implement every tool you might use, but you sure as hell need to grok its form and function at the lowest level.

This frothy trend-hopping is just pure wankery. Don't be one of those suckers. Learn the primitives of everything.

You also need that tireless spark, the desire to figure things out and learn their innards; so you don't have to poll others for what you should hack on.

(btw, am I the only one who finds the question irksome in a very personal carpet-bagging way?)
It also depends on how a business uses the access to instant personalization. I would use it as a way to generate fast growth but also focus on segregating this growth from facebook reliance, as Zynga has done to an extent.

This way if the relationship remains good you can continue to reap the benefits, if it goes sour you have your own userbase with some separation from facebook.

It depends though, plenty of developers are happy to put all their eggs in the Apple app store basket because the benefit now outweighs to potential downside later. This would be the same here.
ummm..... thanks? :-p
I'm so sad to hear of his passing. All of his films, and his TV series, were stunningly animated (and paired with equally wonderful music). I was and still am greatly anticipating his final film.
http://chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ The detail article with architecture & photos from the building process.
I disagree that Django is lacking in quality, and I maintain that Python itself is one of the best things about Django.

I have experience with both Rails and Django. After careful deliberation, we chose to use Django over Rails in part because of Python and its extremely diverse community. Ruby on Rails is a cutting-edge framework, but the Python community was what really convinced us to use Django.
it might even be nice if the teams were forced to cooperate sometimes. if each team was a different color we could have color coded formations.

any more ideas?
die, J2EE, DIE! ^_^
Nice article. The argument over basic arithmetic at the top of the comments is entertaining, too. :)
have you managed to complete the lobster formation yet? i'm starting to think it might be impossible
did someone tried to learn math ( linear algebra ) from the net ?
The only real answer is "it depends" for the correct way to do testing. You're never going to get out of thinking it through, there's no substitute for human judgement. If you care a lot about the memory profile of your data structure, you need to test that really carefully. But you might not care very much about that, in which case it would be a waste of time.

However, I think I can lay your fears to rest about "running a bunch of functions" - in the end all testing frameworks come down to running a bunch of functions. All that you get out of a framework is a (sometimes) shorter way to write those functions in a domain specific way. In the case of a data structure, a test framework doesn't buy you very much because the domain of the problem is basically "a computer program", which computer programming languages are pretty good at making statements about already.

So in short, it sounds like you're already doing the right thing.
On Cubicles and Public Libraries
I think you're right- I'm in the first group you mentioned.

I think to myself that I'm willing to do anything to get ahead...but when it comes time to act, I can't bring myself to screw others over.

As I've learned, the best way to succeed is actually to enable other to reach their goals- who will in turn help you reach yours.
is this a good thing? we were considering adding the ability to chat as a special power, but i kind of like the simplicity/anonymity of the current setup
Cisco owns Jabber, inc. Maybe they'll turn Skype into an xmpp-based service, allow federation with other service providers, and lose the proprietary protocols.

or maybe not.
Yeah found myself in the same situation. Or sometimes I was part of the pattern that matched, and I didn't win. I think this is just a bug and they'll probably fix it soon.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/27/2995751.htm

This guy says "not so fast". I didn't think they could predict these things two years out.
The article should mention Webex, instead of leaving that for the fluff in the bottom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebEx

CISCO might want Skype just for the brand and userbase, since it already has a VOIP platform, far richer than Skype's (except maybe for the P2P stuff)
AMD to Retire the ATI Brand Later this Year
I'm not quite sure where you are going with this but your argument started out seriously flawed. Successful implementation is not at all on the shoulders of contract developers. As a contract developer, you are not the key to making the application successful. Good implementation is much more than an idea and a developer to build out that idea.
This couldn't be more true. If you haven't already, you should check out Ian Bicking's Silver Lining. Its not an immediate solution, but its certainly an exciting development in this space for Python.

http://cloudsilverlining.org/
I've actually had "ok" experiences finding apartments on Craigslist. However, here are practices that bug me:

- brokers and rental companies ALWAYS post in the "by owner" section. I've had agents from Citiapartments actually pretend to be the "owner!"

- brokers post in the "no fee" section but there are always fees.

- no photos... because everything that's a decent deal is also a dump.

- "Net Effective" rent prices in the listing. It's listed at $1700 but that's the "Net Effective" rent not taking into account your 2 months free after 14 months and waiving the fee we didn't tell you about which means that you're really sending us a check for $2150 every month but really, trust us, it's only $1700.
I went to a talk given by one of the most senior guys at Microsoft Research, and it seems that they work on interesting problems there. One of the few gems in the dark Microsoft mine, I suppose.
Wow, Gabriel Weinberg came across really brilliant in that interview. Had never seen him speak, but I like how measured and thoughtful he is with his responses. Free of hyperbole, and solid ideas.
Ten Fallacies About Web Privacy
i think firefox 4.0 will have support for websockets but until then we have to rely on fall-backs provided by the socket.io library.

although i successfully tested this game in firefox 3.6, i suggest you try chrome or safari for a better experience.
Yes, I had the same problem. I thought maybe the '+' button would take me back to my last tile played but.. it didn't so now I can't find it again :(
So you did! I stumbled across her work at Maker Faire (too stunned to fanboy, thankfully) and I keep thinking it's a shame she isn't better known.
'Disingenuous' isn't quite the word I would use. I'm sure the author really does think he's contributing to The Crusade, which is precisely the problem. He can't just dissect the errors in Arrington's logic. No, that's not good enough.

He needs to put on a Crusader uniform and act like he thinks those people are supposed to act: offended. He can't just BE offended, he must explicitly tell you he's offended, and start swinging his sword around so you know what a noble Crusader he is.

If he were responding to a blog post offensive to men, would he have used that language? No, because being offended for yourself isn't noble, it's being offended for others. And telling everyone about it as much as you can. How else will people know what an altruist you are?