skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's true, but Pike didn't explain it that way. He wasn't talking about compatibility, but readability. That part of the article was explaining that longer and more complicated is not necessarily better in terms of readability, and there is a sweet spot where something is concise but not overabbreviated. That's all obviously true. Then he suggested that "maxphysaddr" is in this sweet spot for the idea of the highest point in physical memory that can be addressed, which I think is wrong.
At Legal Fringe, Empty Houses Go to the Needy
No problem. That nextweb article is misleading.
A theory: Archos has obviously created prototypes to send to the press, but it doesn't look like they're pulling off mass manufacturing at the advertise prices just yet (except the Archos 5, which has a resistive screen). Could it be that the prices quoted are simply an over-ambitious projection?
Usability tool prototype build with nodejs. What do you think? [Screencast]
If there were no causation then you'd expect to see the same J-curve for all causes of mortality, but that's not what you see. For example the more you drink the lower your risk of heart attack, regardless of how much you drink. There's actually very clear causation for certain causes of mortality and morbidity, it's just that the picture is a little bit murky when looking at total mortality and morbidity.
LA "Mystery Missle" - Just a Jet?
A lot of my earlier work was in formal specification of JVM thread behaviour, so I was very interested in what the standard said and required. I agree that in practice, it probably will map to threads, which is unfortunate. The experiments were mostly to satisfy my curiosity on how stuff behaved in the real world.
It's interesting how noone wants to actually respond to the arguments that Mike Vernal is making, instead resorting to the equivalent of "Facebook is evil, how dare they say they aren't!".
Now, even putting quality aside, competitors can’t match Apple’s prices.

The only Archos device that is shipping and comparable to an Apple product (the iPad) is this: http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/02/archos-70-internet-tablet...

This is not something that can be easily compared to the iPad. Yes it is cheaper, but the two devices aren't the same. The three biggest (and easily measured) differences are the screen size, screen resolution, and storage. I can't find a price for the Achos 10.1, but please feel free to link it if you have it.

no one else can afford to match the iPad’s price with a comparably sized touchscreen display

See above and below.

iPods, iPhones, iPads. Across all of them, Apple’s prices are either comparable, or lower, than their competition.

The other Archos devices available for sale are indeed cheaper, but also fail to have comparable specs to the Apple devices.
Proof-of-work systems are really neat, but that's cheating: if you make it optional, it doesn't work at all, and if you make it mandatory, you're arguably not speaking SSH anymore.

Besides, I, too, do not recall any actually working implementations.
When you practice tasks, you get better at them, when in the same (or relatively same) situation as the practice. For example, if you get really good at playing chess wearing a tshirt and shorts in the snow, then you'll probably not be as good at chess in 40 degree heat.

Same deal with performing under influences of drugs. Up to a degree, if you do something more while drunk then sober, and get quite good at doing it while drunk, then you it won't necessarily translate over completely to when sober. Of course, if you're totally wasted, then it's all bullshit.
You're accusing Gruber of ignoring certain competitive products which, by your own admission, aren't competitive products. The Nook is also in the "same basic hardware class for less money."
What Not to Do When Designing Your App
A jet seems like a much more likely explanation than a missile that NORAD didn't know about. Plus, he has mathematical equations, who can argue with that ;)
IAC still distributes the Ask.com toolbar which is installed on close to 100 million computers.

"The search business grew 20 percent, goosed primarily by a 55 percent increase in active toolbars to 97 million. IAC’s toolbar business is its secret distribution weapon"

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/27/iac-third-quarter-25-percen...

They get a ton of distribution from software installers that ask if you want to install other stuff during the installation process.
What would you say the essential difference is betwee pre-empted coroutines with a scheduler and threads?

The only thing I could think of is that with coroutines one can explicitly pass control over to another coroutine, but that is something that Erlang does not provide, so I don't really understand what you mean.
Evolution of Microsoft's logo
The (admittedly more expensive) 3G ipad has both a cellular and a GPS chip. $629/$729 for 16/32 gigs.
You can use the sliding values on the calculator. Were you not able to do so?
Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is:

"Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

Facebook Platform and the Graph API enable everyone to bring their own information to millions of sites and applications, including even Google’s YouTube."
Cool, I hadn't seen this before. I will definetly check it out. Thanks for the pointer.
This sounds like a really interesting story. Thanks for the tip.
I found this link before posting the question but I still can't imagine how to use javascript call/cc implementation from your article (on the other hand I think I know how to use call/cc in scheme). Maybe I am too tired today.

If you posted a simple example of JavaScript written in continuation-passing style and using this call/cc implementation probably everything would be clear.
Alcohol is really getting a beating these days. Just like anything, in moderation it actually is ok, and has some benefits. Studies on pubmed show light to moderate alcohol consumption helps with:

Longevity [1]

and guards against:

Alzheimer's disease [2]

Metabolic Syndrome [3]

Rheumatoid Arthritis [4]

Cold [5]

Types of Cancers [6]

etc.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10636266

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15455646

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15562213

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16872514

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8363004

[6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15957170

edit: formatting.
Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 6
Why You Should Start a Company in... Omaha
Evidence for this can be seen in their volume pricing discounts:

http://www.twilio.com/pricing-signup/volume-pricing

I doubt many single customers will require multiple thousands of phone numbers or be using more than 15 million minutes a month (that's 1,500 people on the phone for 8 hours every week day of the month).

OpenVBX is somewhat a direct-to-business play, but they stayed out of the pool by open sourcing it and then by hinting that others are allowed to re-sell it (more minutes for them!). It's really slick though:

http://www.twilio.com/openvbx

I could see a Big Telco scoop them up for tons of money in the near future. All those cushy business lines are going away at a rapid pace, they need to get in on the next big thing. The players are huge, a $100 million buyout would barely even make the company newsletter (case in point, AT&T banked $12.5B last year).
No, but it was arguably price-performance leader, which the Mac, in raw terms, decidedly was not. I guess the other piece at the beginning was the IBM brand, but that wasn't enough to make it take off like a rocket.
Divine Invasion, VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (perhaps not in that order).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS_trilogy
I'm using the latest 10.2 beta release. It's actually a marginal improvement over the official 10.1 package in the Ubuntu repositories. I'm using a Lenovo X201 with a common Intel graphics chip (I think it's referred to as "Intel HD Graphics"). The chip isn't the speediest out there (games are out of the question), but it's more than fast enough for HD video.

I don't need any unsupported closed-source drivers, and my system is basically all Intel hardware, which as far as I'm aware are the most Linux-friendly components out there. I'm using a more-or-less stock Ubuntu install. One thing worth pointing out is that performance seems to be worse in 10.10 compared to 10.04, but I'm hesitant to blame Canonical, as Flash seems to be basically the only thing suffering.

The thing is, I'm probably in the top 1% of computer users in terms of competence. If I can't figure out how to make Flash work on my laptop, how the hell is my Mom going to? If it won't just work on one of the most ideal Linux environments, something is fundamentally wrong.
If you included Canadian stores (NCIX.ca, Amazon.ca, etc), this would be immensely helpful. Also, including Opterons and Xeons (and their motherboards) would be nice.

This app is incredible. I wished for something like this years ago while building PC's off pricewatch. thanks for making it happen.
3 simple steps to better Android app ratings and comments
That’s interesting but is it also a good reason to use “USA” and “the world” interchangeably?

Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Finland, Ireland and Romania combined – all EU member nations – are about equal to the US. They have a larger combined population (about 460 million v. about 310 million) but the USA certainly don’t beat them by a factor of 5 even taking population into account, more like a factor of 1.5.

Oh, and 10 divided by 2.8 is 3.6, not 5.
I've never contributed to open source before - this might be just enough of a 'its easy just do it - like this' type tutorial to get me started.
I prefer god_is_nowhere. The easiest thing to read is what you are used to. To fairly compare godisnowhere, GodIsNowhere, and god_is_nowhere, you need to stick with each for several days. I bet you'll discover, as I have, that god_is_nowhere is the easiest to read.
You can download a compiled version :-)

Seriously, do you have to compile the whole program for every code change? I suspect that is not necessary?
Thanks for the feedback. We definitely want to keep innovating and we're working hard to improve as much as we can!
203 people tell What I wish I knew when I started Drupal
This puts a hole in the "Apple is more expensive" claim (which I've believed to be false for years)
I started to develop a little skepticism when I came across this quote:

"In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008."

Isn't that exactly how many you would expect based on the demographics of the US?
It sounds more like a customised TV-channel than an advanced search feature.
Erlang processes are managed by its scheduler, while threads are managed by the OS. Erlang has more info about appropriate stack sizes, garbage collection is done per-process* , it only pre-empts processes that are currently working or recently got a new message, and probably a half dozen other optimizations I'm not aware of. Let me know if you have more questions, I really like Erlang and I've wanted an excuse to research this. :)

* And often doesn't need to be done at all, because the process terminates first.
Funny that an article inventorying the effects of alcohol fails to discuss how it addicts some people.

[edit: I meant failure to discuss mechanisms of addiction to alcohol, which are at least as interesting the biochemical pathways by which alcohol is metabolized, if not as well understood.]
I think the body is actually a pretty big deal. Who else is making unibodies like that?
> Only Endless.com, a shoes-and-handbags site launched in-house, and Small Parts are “powered by Amazon.com,” a status which means Amazon.com customers can use their accounts on those sites.

I know at least Audible also has this functionality, so it's pretty safe to assume this isn't a comprehensive list or portrayal of Amazon's second party brands and sites.
A solid hypothesis from a redditor: http://bit.ly/aNr7sm
The memory model is nicely specified, given that the program is race-free. If it isn't, then all bets are off. There are a lot of programs that are not race-free (although he races in themselves might be benign), and as such have a very weak memory model.

The concurrency model does have a very weak specification. It essentially says that a) threads exist, and b) threads with the highest priority will run at some point in time. This specification was left purposefully vague, AFAIK, so that a JVM implementation can rely on OS threads. Unfortunately, it also means that the programmer has to be aware of the specifics of all relevant JVM+OS combinations where a particular program is run. This is what I meant with underspecified, although I understand the reason for it.
Possible Major Flaw in Facebook API Detected
Twilio Labs has some really neat stuff: phone calls and SMS from the command line. You can give it an mp3 file and it will play it for a list of recipients.

http://labs.twilio.com/bash/index

http://labs.twilio.com/bash/sms
Well, I had the archos 10" tablet in mind when I made that post.

Archos clearly intends the 4.3" device to compete in the ipod touch space. The fact that it lacks a capacitive screen means it really doesn't, and seems like a mistake. But given Archos' price points ($200 4.3" resistive and $275 7" capacitive) it's hard to believe that component and manufacturing prices would prevent them from shipping a closer mimic.
The Pixelmator team seem to have good stamina for releasing worthwhile free updates at a steady pace. Glad to see they're making money.

TBH, OS X should have an image edior included, and this should be the prime candidate. MSPaint on Windows gets laughed at, but at least it's there (limited as it is, I like it).
YouTube Comment Search
He is talking out of both sides of his mouth though.

If Facebook exports a list of friends, what do you get? A list of names with no links? That isn't really useful. You either need email addresses or Facebook profile URLs to actually make a graph. What if your list is Billy Bob, Joe Smith, John Doe, and Mike Collins. How many of those are there are facebook? Dozens? Hundreds? It is meaningless.

If Facebook exports a list of all of the friends' Facebook profile URLs, that is a step in the right direction.
It is a great design except when you try and enter your credit card late at night and have to think about your expiration date because it's on your card as 03/13 and they make you translate it to March 2013 instead of just putting the numbers in front of the month drop down.

Then you have to make sure the CC number is entered with or without the dashes - I don't remember which. Then after you mess up the CC format they reset the expiration date back to the defaults and you don't notice and then have to start all over again for a third time. Great design - except for the part where you try and pay them.

I emailed them about it but I guess they have better things to do or don't want to offend their designers sensibility.
I'd argue that if the competitors didn't have Android, the tablets would just run on x86 processors. And run either windows or linux. I believe that the presence of ARM early in this market is actually good on the OS side, because it doesn't lead to shoehorning windows onto a tablet. x86 tablets aren't going to succeed both because of the pressure to run desktop OSes, but also because x86 processor companies only seem to be able to produce and market market clock speed and not what really matters in this case (low power consumption and heat output).
they still are able to do complex SQL when needed
Chumps vs. Checks: Handling The Venture Capitalist Cold Call
Ask HN: Want to optimize reading of Twitter - need your help!
Hi all,

A quick intro: with time I grew quite frustrated with how inefficient reading of twitter was. I tried finding an on-line solution to the problem, initially the one which would simply take all the new items and convert them to RSS.

I couldn't find one, so I built one myself, using some simple node.js scripts and adding the feed into Google Reader.

Having RSS feed in compact view helped a lot, nearly cut the reading time in half.

The next stage I see is grouping the messages into categories, and presenting the categories in the order of importance. Say, all the news first, then RTs, then social stuff like 4sq/twitpic/yfrog etc.

I think that the service should allow viewing tweets in real-time (using twitter's SiteStreams API) as well as having an ability to expose the categories as RSS feeds.

However I am as blind and subjective as anyone else is, so that's why I am asking you to point out some obvious deficiencies of the idea.

Also I'd like to get your help in identifying the important categories of messages and ranking them in this short survey

http://is.gd/gSCvo

Thanks a lot!
Art
In theory, I agree with you.

In practice, I have spent an entire week during a universitary course with various problems from such problem site and eventually learned that the problem descriptios were different in a subtle way or certain edge cases were not considered or the test suites were flat out wrong. (This was particularly amusing, because they had added wrong test cases after certain solutions were accepted beforehand. Thus, It was clearly visible that the problem was solveable, because there were programs accepted).

Also I don't entirely agree with the argument that my program has to work in an unknown environment with unknown controls. In such a situation, I would at least get a logfile to see what was going wrong. Without that, debugging anything non-trivial is just not worth it without getting paid for it.
Very true. In my experience, many ruby and rails developers aren't familiar with these tools and these intro tools are the groundwork for using some of the more ruby specific ones.
NASA's Fermi telescope finds giant structure in our galaxy
> 'Be Passionate' is great advice.

I've never understood that. It seams to me that you either feel passion or you don't. If you are already passionate you don't need the advice, but if you don't, what are you supposed to do? say "OK, I'll be passionate from now on"?

Same with "be confident".
Why most press releases suck and are a waste of time
Except for two, actually: there aren't any linked lists in Python, either.

Why? Because there's only one thing that a linked list is better at than a growable array: O(1) splice. Everything else is better with a growable array.
Today I heard of http://phpfog.com/ which might be good for Facebook apps too.

I think the headline is a bit linkbaitish, especially because the bundle is so specific. It's not just Heroku+Facebook. If you take away RPM and use something else, the bundle is no longer cheaper. So it's for people who want Heroku+Facebook+RPM.
Being an engineer, constantly learning is a given. Technologies change everyday. That happens from hardware all the way to the top. Don't bet on just one technology and think your career will end with it. Java, Python, Ruby, and many others are things people talk about, but I guarantee you, there will be more new languages, new technologies and new platforms pop up every now and then.
" as he points out in comparing it to the price of the iPod touch, which is $300 for a comprable model."

But the iPod touch has some corners cut. No anti-oil coating on the screen, for one. It also retains the former body shape, not the flat-glass-on-both-sides iPhone 4 style.
> The majority of people/groups I see selling Drupal stuff sell themes which I see as legitimate... It takes a lot of work to make a well-written theme

It takes an equal amount of time and effort, and in many cases significantly more, to make a module. As a developer it's hard to argue that the time spent isn't worth something. If that project is the only project worked on by a developer continued work and development may not even be possible without charging for the software. Certainly their work can then be redistributed for free, but that's a risk the developer can choose to take and offset with value added services such as official support for the module. When the module doesn't work for someone that got it for free they then also have the option of turning away support requests from that person or trying to sell them support. I don't see how this is any less legitimate than making themes.

> Isn't the point of using software like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, et al to be a part of a larger Open Source community?

I've been involved with a bunch of open source projects and the majority of the users don't really seem to know or care where the software came from. They care that it works the way they want. The fact that it's "free' is a bonus typically but many would willingly pay for it. That's part of the reason Red Hat makes money and other companies supporting open source make a lot of money.

> I know I would never sell a module or theme rather than release it to the community, because that's what's been done by my predecessors in the community.

That's great, and that's a choice that works for you. It likely doesn't work for everyone. One of the nice things about the GPL is that it allows each end user of the software to use it as they see fit so long as the same rights are extended to the next person it is shared with.

> There's a good thread here http://drupal.org/node/237682 discussing just this and the general consensus seems to be that it's possible but generally harmful to the community. I think this applies not only to Drupal but to every Open Source project in general.

Unfortunately that thread, like so many others, is filled with a lot of incorrect information about the GPL and it's very hard to find the valid information within all the noise. Selling open source software has worked extremely well for a large number of companies. There are and have been numerous companies that have helped grow open source communities and projects through their charging for open source software or addon services. Red Hat, Cygnus, VA (Research/Linux/Software/Whatever they are this week), etc.

I would recommend reading the gnu.org page on the philosophy of selling open source software. One of the key lines is:
> Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Well by the time you get to the NYT article you're on the third layer of overlapping propaganda, after NAEP and the CGCS. But since most HN readers aren't interested in reading through the hundreds of pages of methodology for the NAEP, you just have to take pretty much the whole thing with a grain of salt.
Does that not assume that somebody else is switching with you. What if you got a sucky group and nobody wants to switch ?
Why Is Quora Mass Creating Twitter Accounts On Mechanical Turk?
Google at UCLA on Web Search