skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their sound is a little too good for an iPhone speaker. Sounds like they are using an amp.
We really should teach people about the Streisand effect in school.
I was talking about WebObjects.
Hatsune Miku, Vocaloid: world's first virtual diva [video] (English captions)
Tucked away in the offer terms is:

You will become ineligible for the Offer if, during any 3 month period, you do not [..] (b) incur fees for use of the service that exceeds the free usage amount provided under the Offer

So it is free as long as you exceed the free quotas. Hmm.

[ http://aws.amazon.com/free/terms/ ]
I'm not coming up with this less pejorative usage all on my own - clearly the original article meant this usage as well. The pejorative "nerd" is really kind of fading out lately, I think.
OK - I hereby declare a bias. I'm a PhD in mathematics, and I program soft-real-time semi-safety-critical systems.

Most people don't know what a proof in advance math is like. They seem to think it's all miniscule steps, starting from blindingly obvious miniscule statements, and build as a tedious, laborious, verging on infinitely long sequence of quantum-sized deductions.

It's not.

It's a way of imparting an understand of "what's really going on" and communicating that effectively.

Here's the proof that sqrt(2) is irrational as most people have seen it:

suppose sqrt(2) = a/b
then 2 = a^2/b^2
hence 2 b^2 = a^2
that means a^2 is even
from that we know that a is even.

we need to show that.
suppose a is odd
then a = 2k+1
hence a^2 = (2k+1)^2
= 4k^2 + 4k + 1
so if a is odd, a^2 is odd
but a^2 is even
hence a cannot be odd
so a is even
(end proof of mini-lemma)

therefore we can write a=2k
so 2 b^2 = (2k)^2
so b^2 = 2k^2
That means b^2 is even
Using our mini-lemma, b is even
so b = 2n
Thus sqrt(2) = a/b = (2k)/(2n) = k/n
But k and n are smaller than a and b.
Repeating the above process gives an
infinte descending sequence of
positive whole numbers
That's a contradiction.
Therefore sqrt(2) cannot be a/b

But the choice of a and b was arbitrary,
hence sqrt(2) is never a/b for any a or b

Hence sqrt(2) is irrational.

That's what computer proofs of correctness are like.

Here's what a modern mathematician does:

suppose sqrt(2) = a/b
then 2 b^2 = a^2
but the LHS has an odd number of factors of 2,
and the RHS has an even number of factors of 2.
That can't work, so sqrt(2) is irrational.

Reasoning clearly, carefully and completely about code need not be the infinite suop of minutia people think it is, especially if you write the proof with the code. It's also important to write your code so that only small sections need truly detailed proofs. Error-robust code is a real winner.

The purpose of the code, the comments and the proof is to impart understanding to the reader. Yes, people will make mistakes in writing the proof, just as they make mistakes in writing the code, but having them both makes mistakes much less likely. Explaining both code and proof to colleagues reduces further the chances of error. Running tests to support the understanding does even more.

It will never be perfect, because the specification may have bugs, the compiler, the hardware, there may be cosmic rays that cause bit-flips. But having proofs, proper, human-style proofs, makes it much easier to have confidence.

In our experience it makes the code-production cycle faster and more predictable too, not to mention reducing the unpredictable bug-finding process.

Semi-formal proofs are a win all round, but in our experience most programmers can't do them. That's the problem we face.
A worthwhile bit of anecdotal evidence. However, grad students and postdocs are hardly representative of college students as a whole.
He completely misses that graduate programs are known for their specialization.

"
3.Grad school is more important. Particularly, whether you're moving up or down: consider (a) undergrad at Penn State, grad at Harvard, vs. (b) undergrad at Harvard, grad at Penn State. Option (a) is universally considered better, and costs much less."

Not exactly. Harvard is nowhere near the top of the mechanical engineering graduate program list. I'd be better off at the University of Illinois than Harvard if that is what I am doing. More importantly, what the hell do you want to do in your major? Some schools are great at fuel cells but not robotics. Some schools are great at AI and computer vision but not other CS disciplines. That is what you need to know.
Constructors are easy to write in GO:

Maybe I didn't clarify it enough, but I tried to explain my problem with initialization functions in the "Future-proofing" section: "If you later need more complex initialization, you’ll have to replace every new(Foo) call with NewFoo()."

An exception-like mechanism has been proposed:

Yes, and implemented and put in the language and referenced in the post. I'm not crazy about panic and defer for reasons spelled out a bit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/du9zu/the_langu...
The thing I liked about Opera was the lack of plugins.

No waiting for 10 add0-ins you've never heard of to update themsleves and ask you to restart your computer.

No having to search the net for add-ins to do things like toggle image loading or prevent popups.
Depends on lot on which community you're looking at. Being primarily in the IRC/slashdot/web dev/scripting language/sysadmin areas (as well as a student of a rather Linux-centric university), I was amazed at all of the Windows-centric stuff when I found StackOverflow. I honestly didn't realize that there were good programmers who preferred to work on the Microsoft stack.

Now, of course, I realize there are, but I'm still a bit confused when I talk to one... our worlds are just so different.
So.. gaming the system equates to studying well and working hard? That's.. not what's usually meant by "gaming"..
How to Raise Funds Through Angel Investors: Finding an Angel Investor-
How to create advertising that sells
Most technical terms are English regardless of the language. When I was an undergrad we had a bunch of Greeks on my course, and when talking amongst themselves it sounded like malaga malaga second differential malaga malaga surface area... You could understand them perfectly.

(malaga IIRC translates as "loser", the Greeks insult each other a lot).
Do explain how you've figured out creating one ad with elements of all 5 advertisers.
Circular data structures where you need to simultaneously initialize two values to each other are the common case where this is problematic. To me, that's a fairly rare edge case and you can easily handle it using mutable variables and option or maybe types.
Companies are about money. Countries are about people. Taxes build services that are used by people. "Web Services" doesn't count too much as a service. I would live without google search no matter what people say. But what about hospital, street, public transportation, cheap houses for poor people, and on and on and on...our society is based on taxes. The reason why people have to pay taxes is to build a better society. Look at what is happening in Britain with Cameron: no money to fix the deficit. Poor people take it all over their a@@#@.

And, to put that simple, we are not talking about a couple of thousands dollar a software engineer is not paying: we are talking about millions (billions?). Greed is bad, is fucking bad. And all this talking about disruptive innovation is usually a bunch of stupid Internet Services to play with. I think the hacking community is overestimating its value.

No cancer cure. No cheap energy. No cleaner air. Just some web app, iPhone app, something app.

Google taxes would fix a lot of problems, just letting millionaires a bit more poor. I can live with that, why you can't?
Hot iPad lawsuit turns Apple's ads into ammo - Computerworld
How Starting a Company Is Like Coaching College Football
A comparison of running a startup to coaching a college football team.
Time to replace your alarm clock and weatherman
MorningReport is a wonderful way to wake up with the morning, and it gives you all the information you need to start the day for only $0.99. Not only is it great for the mornings, but it can also provide you with updates throughout the day regarding the current conditions.
At least with the people I work with, the term "flash" is used to refer to the Adobe product. When we're talking about flash memory we use a variety of other terms, but not simply "flash."
PostgreSQL vs. MySQL: How to Select the Right Open-Source Database
Seems like building a solar shield to reduce incoming light would be the simplest approach.
I wonder if they will ever make their Mac version more native (e.g. standard OSX shortcuts would work in text fields). It's really strange that having a lot of stuff well polished, and releasing a lot of new features, simple things like that are forgotten about. Kind of like OSX not letting you select an arbitrary solid color as your background (that may be intentional though).
Seems down here too. Not affecting me though since I'm a Google Apps user.

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en
The better approach is to figure out where the risk in pushing updates is coming from and develop tools to mitigate that. More testing, pseudo-production deployment infrastructure, better change management, more frequent deployments, better understanding of the changes going out with big deployments, etc.

The biggest companies in the world (amazon, google, etc.) who have literally millions of dollars an hour/minute/second at risk if they screw up deployments put in place all of these tools so they can push out deployments at peak times and be confident that they aren't going to destroy their business on accident.
This seems to be a point that you are alluding to: In some ways, the UI for an API is actually its documentation.
Maybe some of the ecological aspects, but changing the atmosphere and climate sounds like a risky affair. I'm pretty sure if we were able to do some heavy handed climate modification, we would want to do it somewhere else, not in a fragile environment like Earth where extinction or at least long-term catastrophe of many ecosystems is on the table.
funny, I seem to be downvoted by the minister's men.
I figured that the example given was a generic case, for people living in PA.
Vocaloids have been around for quite some time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid

I find the Hatsune Miku phenomenon somewhat amusing at the moment, given the trend of overt Autotuning in pop music - while virtual singers' voices are getting more realistic, real singers' voices are being manipulated to sound impossibly accurate and digital.

It's also an interesting study in image and marketing: Crypton really pushed the concept of associating a character with the voice, as if Vocaloids were virtual pop stars whose services you could buy, rather than just another virtual instrument.
This is a novel idea. Storing contact details for concurrent people and presenting them to each other in a randomised way. I've not seen this anywhere using telephone numbers, skype, email addresses - it's novel. Chatroulette connects people directly through its own servers, Facetime is one-to-one video chat. This is something that bridges those two in a simple way.
The most important part of this article is:

> The government has made halting steps to change the rules that let multinationals shift income overseas. In 2009 the Treasury Dept. proposed levying taxes on certain payments between U.S. companies' foreign subsidiaries, potentially including Google's transfers from Ireland to Bermuda. The idea was dropped after Congress and Treasury officials were lobbied by companies including General Electric (GE), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Starbucks (SBUX), according to federal disclosures compiled by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.

The issue is that the US (like many countries) has the best tax code money can buy. The US has the additional problem of dual sovereignty such that the states are competing with themselves to offer tax breaks to lure in companies and thus jobs.

Companies are like water: they seek the lowest level. They're not immoral, they're amoral.

A hideously complicated tax code is going to have holes in it so simplify, simplify, simplify.
I think people are focusing too much on examples he gives, assuming he's recommending those specific schools to everyone, no matter what their actual interest is.
For roads it's almost impossible to avoid impacting use during maintenance, the same isn't, or shouldn't, be true with software.
Winamp Music Player Comes To Android
There are some companies doing this for general prescriptions. Vitality - http://www.vitality.net/ - has a wireless cap that helps track adherence.

But asthma is pretty unique since the inhalers are used in "rescue" situations and there are strong geographic correlations that arise from environmental issues.
FWIW, many 10k+ user organizations are "around the world" as well.

Web apps for server cluster admins have customer bases evenly distributed across every time zone on the planet? Really?

There may not be a perfect time, but there are almost certainly better and worse times.
Banks are not government provided. They are private. And all the time saying that is Government fault when the market turn to shit, it means that it is not science just something you want to be true, no matter what.

If something can't be proved false, you know...
Google Apps status says its fine, but I get a 502 on both gmail and hosted...
Sorry, but if anyone expects me to pay for the right to develop on my own machine, they can buzz off. I'll just go back to GNU/Linux. I hope that others will do the same and we see a brain drain of developers.
You can say the same of any programming language. Why should I try to use features I don't really need to use? To put things in perspective, it's equally easy to make a convoluted API that sucks in PHP than in any language or framework. PHP is not exempt of following decent UI/IX guidelines, regardless of how fast you can get up to speed with it (which in my experience I still find it slower than Django or Rails).
Nice eBook on Concurrent and Parallel programming in C#
These aren't Firefox add-ins. These are small pieces of JavaScript and HTML/CSS. Probably won't bog down your browser any more than UserJS scripts.
Alpha feels quite stable. Stumbleupon-Addon works great.

Whished the would made the addon-system compatible to Chrome's
I guess I don't get it. The Mac App store is... wait for it... a store. Just like the physical brick and mortar Apple Store, it carries not the universe of software available for the Mac, but a screened subset of that software that Apple thinks best showcases the capabilities of their product line.

Complaining that the App Store will not carry all available MacOS Apps is almost as silly as complaining that the Apple Store at your local mall does not carry all available MacOS Apps. (`almost' because the shelf space of an online store is, presumably, less limited.)

Now, if there were a move to make the App Store the only way to get (or even the only way to buy) apps for the Mac, that would be different. But as far as I can tell, there isn't.
Why not ship an A4 process along with intel chips? It only costs $10.75 for the A4 v.s. over $100 for the intel chip.
This should be helpful even if you don't know (or care about) C#.
Startup book for micro-entrepreneurs
This is really good stuff. I'm reading the sample chapter now and it's just hitting point after point for me.
My car comes with a complete technical manual online (http://www.hmaservice.com/) that I can access freely, so that if you want to remove the four bolts that hold that plastic cover on, you can.

It sounds like you chose to stop learning about cars after manufacturers stopped using carburetors.

The point still stands though - some people like to hear that the computer they're buying "just works," and other people like to know a little more about what goes on under the hood, so that they have a better idea of whether or not they're getting shafted by their, uh, mechanic.
The title of this article is highly misleading. Does the author really think she accomplished something significant by gaining admission to the General Education program of an Ivy League university by knowing someone? The truth of the matter is that those programs are just not at the same level as the normal programs, and that you don't get an equivalent degree.
This junk should stay on Reddit.
Another site with inadequate security. Learn from the past.
First time poster here, cause it's the first time I had something important to say.

I was using a site for a project. I noticed the url structure seemed too simple. So I changed a single variable (the id variable of course) and voila! I get another person's project.

This is not some random site, this is a funded startup back by a well-known VC.

Reminder to developers and investors - think about security, especially those with sensitive information.
Why haven't we learned from past mistakes? If they had read/followed HN, they would have seen this about Quiptxt http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226313

I have notified the company of their security flaw. Now lets see how they respond.
It could be a difficult task for them as I suspect they have a lot of new customers using their service.

* update - I spoke to customer service and they graciously acknowledged the issue.
> So, while I don’t like Apple’s general direction, I do think that an iOS-like OS is great for consumer computers. I’m just not sure it’s great for the rest of us and everyone’s wallets when Apple is in control.

Let's get down to brass tacks. Nobody says you have to buy an Apple computer (and the author of this post points out that he doesn't have one). We're done here, right? Not quite.

Picking through the ranting what I think I see is someone who's upset about Apple's success and what they're doing with their market inertia. It was pretty much a given that if the App Store for iOS took off there would be an App Store for OS X. If we were in a pirate movie right now we'd call that a "parlay." Apple has done a lot of things right if your metric is strictly financial success. Where people seem to be incredulous is that (although highly subjective) Apple has also done a lot of things right when it comes to user/consumer experience. Nerds are not the primary audience for Apple's products. My parents, grandparents, and people who are more interested all things non-technical are. An App Store on OS X (and the existing one of iOS) is good for the two parties most important to Apple, normal users and Apple.

If you feel strongly about how this has shaken out then I challenge you to ask yourself, "why?". There are tons of ready-made excuses along the lines of "openness", "freedom", and "I don't like guys in turtle necks." None of them really matter. The problem of how non-technical people find and install computer software is decades old. As designers and developers we've largely left that problem to platform developers, sales, and marketing people. Now someone has come along and placed a viable solution into the mass market all while creating the potential to make a tidy profit. We call this capitalism.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 90
I guess the problem is that there are a lot of things many of us really like about OSX. I like it for a lot reasons, and while I'm sure I could learn to like things about Linux or Windows, I'm also pretty sure I've got the right OS for me right now. But I still need to be able to get under the hood, or it's just not going to do everything I want.

So if (hypothetical, not real world) Apple were tomorrow to remotely turn OSX into an iOS like system where everything is centralized and the internals are locked away, I'd be really disappointed. Because I'd ultimately have to choose to use a "super-user" system, but that means switching to some other one that I don't care for as much.

The message of this post and others seems to be "We like that you're making everything simpler, but please don't take the power away from those of us who need it. We don't want to switch, so for everyone's sake, please don't make us".
1. solve the accreditation problem (either by alternative means of accreditation that would be accepted by employers , or by changing college accreditation rules).

2. improving the social element in online learning, to make it comparable or better than social element in offline learning.

3. today , knowledge is much more externalized. computer libraries and tools , outsourcing/crowd-sourcing , search engines and online communities enable this. it will probably become more externalized. does this require a different learning process ?

4. self learning is important. how do you teach people the skills to effectively self-learn ?

5. in many tasks today, the barriers to performance are not knowledge but psychological(things like motivation , concentration , attention to details , etc). is it the place of higher education to teach those ?
Another way to sneak into the Ivy League: apply about 35 years ago, like I did, from an out-of-the-way place (San Diego), and you're in. They liked geographic diversity, and there wasn't much competition. ;-)

Oh, I guess Trip Hawkins (of EA founding fame) was from San Diego, too, at the same time, but, still...
A physician on the admissions board for a top 40 medical school told me the secret to their process. They separate each applicant into their respective ethnic background, take the top 5% of each pile, and then take a closer look at the individual applications. His words, verbatim, were "So if you're a black guy with a 3.2 gpa, you're good. But an Asian dude with a 3.9? You see that all the time; so good luck." The arbitrary nature of the admissions process of schools in America is pretty ridiculous. I like the way the UK does it -- fairly structured, and your candidacy is more typically rooted in your actual achievements and performance. That and they limit you to the number of schools you apply to, so you don't get kids firing their flak cannons by applying to every school in the nation, taking up spots in 'back up' schools that could be better taken by those who actually want to go there. I could go on and on.
Based on the tone of your commentary, I'm not convinced you believe the second part to #2.
This shows that not only are ideas cheap, implementation is now cheap too. Just monetization left...