skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About point 2: the author is probably ignorant of ast module (http://docs.python.org/library/ast.html), which allows the programmer to take any ast and recompile it to anything he/she wants (in runtime, unlike Lisp macros, but alike parse tree and ruby2ruby in ruby).

This feature allows you to transform things like "1, minute" into "Minute(1)", enabling dsls, and "wrecking havoc" all over. In ruby, you don't have to do this, as there are simpler and less powerful metaprogramming tools.

So yeah. Just because you have a shotgun, it doesn't mean you can't use it to kill a fly. Of course, the really important question is not if you can, but if you should. And it is always better that this decision is left for the users of the language than to its creators.
The positive v. negative rights distinction to me is that it involves trying to control how people behave in their own homes, versus how people interact with you. Theft fundamentally is bad because it is an unwanted intrusion: you're on that person's land, or in their house, or rummaging around their shed. But I can copy something without ever intruding anywhere.

If I buy a Honda, and then carefully build a replica in my shed, with my own tools and materials, this isn't a violation of Honda's property in the same way that breaking into their factory and taking one of their cars would be. It isn't even a violation in the same way that breaking into their factory at night and building my own car using their assembly line would be--- I'm building it 100% with my own materials, on my own assembly line. It is still a violation of their design copyright, but that seems much different to me.
A lot of the best inventions seem obvious after the first person comes up with them. Especially when it comes to code.
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The Last Exorcism is an upcoming horror movie directed by Daniel Stamm and written by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland.
The article confuses "degree" with "education".
and so much harder for me to maintain someone else's scala code. It feels like statically typed perl, but that's just mho.
Path Snags Digg’s Matt Van Horn As VP Of Biz Dev, Approaches Launch
Mozilla could just use the host platform's codecs like Safari (Quicktime) and IE (DirectShow), or use a cross-platform abstraction like Opera (GStreamer), or ship an easily-replaced dynamic library like Chrome (libavcodec), but of course they probably won't.

They'll stick with their jackass NIH attitude and continue to link directly with liboggplay and libwebm.
I've never bought the idea that the opposite is a better trade off because it comes with costs too. Have you ever worked with a bunch of mediocre java programers? Heaven forbid they make an interface that isn't well thought out and needs to be changed later!
'seizure' is not the issue. 'search' is the issue.
A better Google PageRank checker
you should tell that to the android team at google.
You certainly could solve that with a symbol, I suppose, but that's a bit like doing a word-for-word translation of 'it's raining cats and dogs' into a foreign language. Better to translate to the local idiom than to try to blindly write Fortran in any language, as the saying goes.

So, for instance, you might solve it with:

result = case
when baz>10 then foo
else bar
end

This is synthetic, of course. If the goal is to pass around methods, there are lambdas and codeblocks that can be passed around and may fit the problem more naturally than sending yourself a symbol as a message.
That may accomplish the same thing, but the direct translation would be:

if baz > 10
func = method(:foo)
else
func = method(:bar)
end

result = func.call

Here, we actually deal with the Method objects, rather than just sending a dynamic message. Although the send() approach would be closer to idiomatic Ruby, I wanted to emphasize that dealing with methods as first class objects in Ruby is indeed possible.
good to know. thanks!
> " Yeah, it's slower, but do you really notice the difference between 2ms and 1ms when your web page loads? Didn't think so."

But that's not what happens in real life. A 2x performance difference means 1000ms instead of 500ms to load a page - and that is noticeable. It's also the difference between 30 fps in a game vs. 15 fps - that is really noticeable.

The list goes on. A 2x performance penalty is huge. For desktop applications, our hardware is so ludicrously overpowered for what we do with it that this penalty large doesn't matter (as you said, 1ms vs. 2ms), but in mobile land, where hardware constraints are still very, very real, this is absolutely a critical issue still.

Apple's platform is by far the most responsive out of all of the current smartphones, and I think it'd be foolish to discount native code as one of the primary factors in this. The responsiveness is also part of what attracts users - people want their machines to work on human time, not slower-than-human time.
I'll resist the urge to describe pinboard.in the same way.

We're always delighted to receive feedback!
I've used some of these that suck a little and some that suck a lot, but I couldn't find one that I liked. So I built my own. Includes a bookmarklet for on-the-go checking ;)
Unless we believe that the universe is actually made of math, then Maxwell's Equations are also just a model.
Ok, I agree. Thanks!
On a phone that has limited storage space?

And there's another thing ... with Android I'm not sure if it will run correctly on a "Samsung Galaxy S" if I've only tested my app with the Nexus One, but at least I know it will execute.

If you're reuploading an update for Samsung, it will surely not be one about binary-compatibility.
A quick glance at Appleseed's SVN repo and I see the code base is PHP, like GNU social. It's maybe not a terrible decision, but it deters me (as a developer who sometimes deals with PHP at my day job) from any interest in looking any closer or wanting to risk installing it on my server.
I-would-rather-be-tweeting-from-somewhere-else Twitter Client
"View anything public as Marketing"

It also means that anything in public sends a signal. You're not always actively selling but you're communicating in ever so subtle ways about yourself and your business.
I think it's more of a when than a how question. As long as an asteroid doesn't come and wipe us all out before we master planetary space travel, I think it's pretty safe to say at some point we will encounter alien life. With all the planets that exist...too much potential for their not to be.
I think you lost the typical user at "whoever wants to download the source". Facebook users don't want to do that. They also don't understand "download" or "source" in many cases. They can click the blue icon in the "internet window".

(yeah - I know that's not as true nowadays as it was at the beginning of y2k, but I'm trying to make a point here...)
Fight When it's Time to Fight. Be Gracious When It's Time to Give In.
The only way I know of to get Mac rendering is to use Safari for Windows. It's got an option to use Mac-style rendering or Windows' Cleartype.
Scala is for VB programmers
Sounds like an Illuminati of the 21st century.
but in mobile land, where hardware constraints are still very, very real, this is absolutely a critical issue still

A machine with a 1Ghz processor, a half a gig of RAM, dedicated video processing hardware, dedicated audio compression hardware (the GSM modem, etc.), and so on is "constrainted".

The premise of the article is that's impossible to achieve reasonable performance on a mobile device while using a virtual machine. This is obviously false, as Android performs wonderfully on my phone. A call comes in, the "slide to accept" action works smoothly. I visit a web page, it loads as fast as the network can give it to me.

Apple's OS may be more responsive, but I'm not really sure about that. The browser feels the same. Maps feels the same. Receiving a call feels the same.

We've passed the point where every bit of performance matters. Now, it's about features -- let me know when I can use irc over ssh on the iPhone or use Google Voice to make calls from the native Dialer application. "Slow" VM or not, my Android phone can do that stuff, but the iPhone can't.
I'm pretty sure there's a Vonnegut or Hunter S. Thompson quote where they say something like...everyone lies during working hours or no one tells the truth once they leave their house for work. But yeah, it can often seem like you live life on a stage and every action you take has to be made in consideration of your audience.
A system that's actually running is more useful than one just planned. Really though, current paper records are "document oriented databases", where each record is self-describing (at the cost of redundancy) and access latency is the biggest issue. Upgrading to electronic document oriented databases would actually be a very natural fit, whilst still leaving open the possibility of further relational optimization in the future.
That extreme is also terrible. Python is somewhere in between.
i tried it and got:

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Notice

Message: Undefined index: recent

Filename: controllers/pagerank.php

Line Number: 44
A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: array_merge(): Argument #1 is not an array

Filename: controllers/pagerank.php

Line Number: 44
The author is clearly correct and yet he is wrong because he asked the wrong question.

How fast it runs is not as important as "is it fast enough for the customer" and "will I be able to produce this at a reasonable price?"

Everything in engineering is a trade-off.

A VM in a puny chip is the price one pays for a developer audience, to build a thriving ecosystem of apps so that consumers will want to buy the device.
Careful youngin, don't equate conformity with professionalism. The text is quite legible and the serif font makes a nice counterpoint to the rest of the page.
Remembering the Importance of Humility (According To Clayton Christensen)
1120 Subscribers in 2 Days: My Foray into E-mail Newsletters
If it's true that computation is just an extension of two "traditional" legs of science, then it follows that the steps taken in computation as part of scientific research ought to be as public as the steps taken in theory and traditional experimentation. That is, opening up the source code and data to peer review and scrutiny becomes just as important as describing methods in a non-computational study.

In other words, computational transparency is important if computation is just an extension of the traditional scientific method.
I am often frustrated by this as well, but I'm not sure it's specific to Python or Ruby. Why is it Math.log(1) rather than 1.log()? And given whatever reason it's Math.log, why is it a.inverse() when a is a Matrix not MatrixMath.inverse(a)?

Is there a good guideline for static method vs. instance method distinction?
Yeah, but I tried opening Eclipse and it took a while for my 3400 RPM disk to read it into memory. Since Eclipse is written in Java, Java is slow!

Incidentally, Visual Studio and KDevelop are native code, and they take a while to load too. Could it be that big bloated apps are big and bloated, VM or not?
Well they'd had a moratorium on collecting fees for it.

All the other links in the chain (encoders, decoders etc) are licencing it, and when a company does give their pound of flesh then they have jump on them over licencing terms (eg, the Nero free trial case: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372536)
It's just not consistent since other parts of the page are in sans serif. I just prefer sans serif, I guess. Serif fonts remind me of cursive. Sans serif fonts seem more objective. For example, when you write "dog" you don't necessarily want the word to look like a dog.
Ask HN: what is the point in Billing Address any more?
more or less universally when ordering online I get asked for my billing address.

nine times out of ten when I'm ordering something online I get it delivered to my billing address. however on the rare occasion I get something ordered to work, I get that the billing address adds extra security... however surely the most retarded fraudster if dedicated enough to find out my card number and security code could find out my address and security password.

so my question comes down to this... other than stopping the most mentally defunked fraudsters is the extra time entering additional information about your self online really required or useful?
Check-ins at Y Combinator Demo Day: totally even on Facebook Places & Foursquare
A relevant bit of information missing from your summary:

We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.

I don't know if everyone knew that already, but it was news to me.
I was mainly referring to the fact of us bumping into them.
This is semantics.

Finding non-intelligent alien life would raise our current estimate for the likelihood that intelligent non-human life exists.

Is that better? :P
"Every public place is a market"
> So maybe Android should have used Java, but compiled it direct to ARM rather than burning users' cycles on an interpreter.

It doesn't have to be an interpreter, the processor itself can be optimized for Java (or whatever bytecode you'd like), a point the article also missed.

This has been going on since 1996 ... http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/announce/1996/java-procs.h... (and the concept itself was first tried with the Lisp machines I think).

The difference between high-end phone makers, like Apple, and the low-end phone makers ... low-end phone makers cared and still care only about price, not about how snappy those Java apps run.

Again ... the article sets up a straw man.

Desktop Java applications are slow and ugly, but show me an open-source IDE that can compete with the breath and depth of Eclipse / IntelliJ IDEA and their plugin ecosystem.

There's some merit to Java in that ... open-source developers would rather spend their time working on the features they want, rather than hunting down memory-leaks or deal with all the shit that cross-platform development brings.
Somewhat ironically, the object with sharp edges that annoys me most is my 2G iPod Nano, which, similar to the 4G iPod Nano, has a sharp rim all around both ends. The 2G is basically an extruded rounded rectangle and the 4G is like an extruded oval, in the same way a cylinder is an extruded circle.

I bought the 3G nano, but very seldom use it because the scroll wheel is too small. I didn't buy the 4G precisely because it had the same sharp edge problem as the 2G.
PageRank, named after Larry Page

I always assumed it referred to web page!
Anyone like Design Patterns GoF?
Both of your examples have no network effects, which is why it's very easy for people to switch. Try switching to a different IM, for example.

You won't switch if you don't have anyone to talk to on it, and you won't have anyone to talk to on it if you don't switch.

Google Talk and its Gmail integration did wonders for Jabber, thankfully.
I am having a hard time seeing the different.

A thought experiment can tell you that if A then B. A model is a means of producing a prediction B from A by means of long, complicated calculations instead of simple logical inferences. In both cases the conclusions should be evaluated before accepted as physical truth.
I think they'll find us first though. Isn't that what Stephen Hawking has said also?
Sounds like the perfect opportunity to provide a hosted service.

I've always thought the distributed social site concept had room for both those people who want to run things themselves and for service providers. Kind of like wordpress.
I'm not allowed to talk about the details actually. But it's consumer focused, using GWT.
Yep, you can do just that. Browsers that support rgba for text color make it quite easy and in older browsers you can do onselect tricks and the like to make it work.
Adding the billing address in is completely optional; it's at the website's discretion. When you go to a store (in RL), they don't make you enter in a billing address to buy your groceries, do they? No - they have the physical card and expect the person accepting the card to ask for your ID (which they don't). However on the web this is a "Card Not Present" transaction and the website owner has the choice as to how "deep" they want to match. I force all purchases to match card, secret number, name, and address down to zip code. Many times people on the web have just the card number, sometimes just the card number and name.

No, the "most retarded fraudster" does not always have the billing address.
Thanks for your comment. I am really sorry for making this much typo and grammatical error. I will try my best to be more careful best of my ability to rectify the same. As english is not my first language so must of basic grammatical error I am not able to spot if by myself. But it should not be excused, I will try my best to improve. Thanks again for your reply.
"A system that's actually running is more useful than one just planned"

Absolutely. To go back to the original point, I don't think it's document-centric or not that causes the massive cost overruns. Instead it's that big consulting companies know that they can absolutely ROB the government blind and get away with it. Here in Canada we've seen the same farce with the long gun registry, with the health records here in Ontario....just about any government-related project is a boondoggle.
They'll stick with their NIH attitude and continue to link directly with liboggplay and libwebm. Jackasses.

You're the jackass for not implementing this. Open Source is not a bureaucracy where you do whatever your boss tells you to do. You do stuff because you want to. The current set of Firefox developers doesn't want to support H.264. You do. You both have the same source code and the same number of hours in a day. So add it yourself.

If people want to, they will use your version instead of Firefox. Remember Netscape? Neither do I...
Microsoft to pay more than half a billion to jump-start WP7
Congrats for scratching your own itch and releasing something useful for the rest of us! It worked for me, and I agree that it sucks less than every other PR checker I had previously tried.
So "the author" is Alex Martelli, a long-time Python user, contributor, and winner of the 2006 Frank Willison award which is given each year for outstanding contribution to the Python community.

I highly doubt he's "ignorant" of anything when it comes to Python...

A better theory is this article is from 2003, but the ast module was added in Python 2.6, which was released in 2008.

(I agree with everything you've said in the second and third paragraphs, but, man, try to give people a little credit before you assume they're ignorant, 'k?)
Nicely put. I often consider this problem when I think counterfactually: "What would have happened if I missed the train? Where would I be right now if I hadn't lost my pencil two days ago?"

I have an instinct to just dismiss this kind of musing, because I think to myself that even the smallest changes propagate in wildly unpredictable ways, with potentially vast consequences -- think "the butterfly effect"-- and so it's pointless to even try to reason counterfactually.

But of course it's not pointless, and our minds do this naturally all the time: holding everything else equal, we're constantly twisting this knob and that one, imagining all kinds of possible worlds, exploring the space of what could have been.
Did you perhaps have cookies turned off? Do you mind trying again now?

It stores previous results in your session which is tracked by cookies, but I just added an explicit test to ensure that the array exists before adding the most recent result to it.
I really hope their API will come soon; I think the best chance they have of user adoption will be based on the creativity of API developers bridging the gaps between Diaspora and other services. If users can communicate between Diaspora nodes and other social networks, at least on a basic level, they could see enough migration to make their efforts worthwhile.
At the last D8 conference, Steve Jobs said that he likes the consumer market because "everyone votes for themselves", as compared to the enterprise market where the users may not be the ones in control of the purchase decision.
IMO the only 'aliens' we'll ever meet will be humans who had left Earth for distant planets sometime in the future and whom Earth inhabitants have forgotten or fail to recognize for some reason(environmental adaptation causing inhuman features). A chance encounter in space will then be the 'meeting with the aliens' that many fantasize about.

As far as meeting intelligent species completely alien to our planet and our ecosystem, like the ones shown in Hollywood movies, I don't believe that's gonna to happen. Not now. Not ever.

The logic usually is that since space is vast, there's gotta be a planet somewhere that has similar environment like Earth and thus similar life forms inhabiting it. That's sound logic. My problem with that logic is... out of the 100 million+ species of life that are estimated to exist today and the countless ones that used to thrive over the last 4.5 billion years since the birth of our planet, only one... just one out of all those billions of species that existed over billions of years has developed far enough to type these words.

That's why when people say 'hey there are billions of galaxies out there, so we can't be the only ones' I ask them then that by the same logic, out of the billions of species that have existed on this planet there's gotta be more species like us doing the same things that we do? But there isn't. We are the only ones capable of doing things we keep hoping the aliens would do.

That's why I believe we are the only ones, on our planet as well as outside of it.
(To be clear, I'm not using AppEngine for enterprise software. But I've done lots of enterprise software in the past, and I'm doing AppEngine now)

The main problems are as follows:
1) Data privacy. Usually this is just people worrying unnecessarily, but sometimes there are legal requirements about where customer data is stored. These may be jurisdictional or geographic requirements.

2) Integration issues. Enterprise software is all about integration. The AppEngine integration story is getting better, but you'll need to understand the SAML based single-sign-on support that is built into Google Accounts and/or implement it yourself, and you'll need to become familiar with Secure Data Connector (http://code.google.com/securedataconnector/) to integrate with private data sources.
This doesn't affect your point at all, but just so you know, Firefox 4 doesn't use liboggplay nor anything called libwebm.
The new US online form authorizes you before you go - can't see how that is different from a visa.
Qualcomm job listing for iPhone dev guru sets Internet absolutely aflutter
I don't understand the resistance against scala. It's not academic and it is certainly not a black box. I have been reading the book written by Martin Odersky et al. and they explain everything you need to know to be productive in the language. There is no academic jargon or any unnecessary high level abstractions that get in the way of writing actual code that does useful things. If these arguments were being thrown against haskell I would be a bit more sympathetic but scala is as practical as it gets. The type system doesn't get in the way and it's got all the goodies modern programmers have come to expect from high level languages like first class functions, closures, and objects.
Interesting. The main difference is server-side rendering of content, on-device caching so not network connection required, and that one account services many devices. I think I'll start low and raise the price as I get more customers.
It always struck me as obvious; with a square of n*n, just add n + n (for the two sides) + 1 (for the corner) and you get the next square. 2n+1 progresses 1, 3, 5 etc., plain as day.

What got me thinking about it (at perhaps 11 or 13 or so) was trying to turn it into a way of calculating the square root.