skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we have 2 posts in the hopper about it, keep an eye on the nerd blog:

http://www.propublica.org/nerds
However, if you are someone who rarely uses the same timer, you would always have to type .minutestocountdown.com after your time because the browser wouldn't know the url yet. I guess it all depends on what use people will make out of it.
I don't think you understand the proposal: JavaScript would still be the language of the web. The things you don't see would just be handled differently.

In fact, it would be easier to to "find out wtf it's doing" because something that is now ad-hoc - what to do with the JS given to a browser - would be standardized. Keep in mind that the browsers already do something to your JS, either compile it to byte-code for the browsers own VM, or compile it directly to machine code. This proposal would standardize what the intermediate representation would be.
Is anyone else utterly surprised that Steve Jobs actually calls developers and responds to emails? Is this a PR stunt, or is Steve genuinely interested in being that hands on? Or both?
Yeah, a bit shock-jockish, which is funny considering the pcmag source. I forgot they even existed. Oh, probably because they dropped in relevance like a friggin rock.
I like how the author pulls out the word "microact" as if it were the most normal thing in the world and later derides poking as created by "nerds" a few paragraphs later.
I'd suggest a lazy language as well, Haskell being the obvious choice. Having lazy infinite lists changes the way you think.

Apart from the obvious commercial benefit, if you have C++ and Python I don't really see the need for Java, but I might just be being bigoted there.

Perl could be substituted with Awk - I've had this debate and I don't feel strongly about it. Perl is more wide-spread and common, making it a better choice if you want to go hacking things that are there, but I find Awk nicer to program.

I'd also start looking for massively parallel languages of one form or another. The ability to think not just in threads or co-routines, but genuinely in async-parallel is becoming more important.

So that's my $0.02 of free advice. Probably worth what you paid for it.
Actually the article is missing a larger point. Most users probably don't want to be searching on their TV. Maybe a larger cognitive disconnect of Google's Device is that their answer to the problem isn't the right one. At some point Google really needed to try to figure out whether search was the feature that people really needed. I'd say content discovery is still a huge gaping hole as more IP Delivered video gets pushed to the main TV screen in your house. I don't think that text search is how people are going to find it. But hey when your main tool is a hammer every problem starts looking like nails right?

Apple's focus is on delivering video. period. They don't need the complexity of an GoogleTV because they're delivering the main thing that people want on their TV. They end up with a $100 box which is very usable and probably delivers the key features that people need.

BTW Vizio has a more elegant solution for a keyboard with a clamshell remote

http://gizmodo.com/5443308/every-3d-vizio-comes-with-this-cr...
It think it's more like "abandon Perl/php/javascript/whatever in favour of Python/Ruby/Lisp/whatever".

As long as there aren't more than 10 books written about the yet unborn data-cruncher saviour and as long as the brand new alternative isn't adopted in courses, I wouldn't bother -- unless you want to be the saviour's father (i.e. developer) of course.
Cisco Systems Plunges in Extended Trading
Sebastian Marshall's blog is realy great. He inspired me to start tracking my time on a daily basis, and I am certainly benefiting from it.

Here is an introduction page that he posted for newcomers: http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?page_id=288
You can see that there is many topics under "Want to get more done?"

Though I know that most books are a waste of time, these were actually filled with great information, in my opinion:

http://www.web-books.com/Classics/ON/B0/B580/TOC.html

http://amzn.to/Getting-things-done
Actually, it makes it more effective if anything. The browser displays it as a single whitespace, but the source isn't altered, (and therefore easily checkable).
Rserve is an tcp/ip interface to R so you can send R code from any other language. I have used the rserve-ruby interface to some success.
It's similar to using lists for menus. Breadcrumbs are a list -- a list of places that you have visited on the way to where you are.

If you buy that, then you can acknowledge such use is Semantically Correct. There may be alternatives that just as Correct or even moreso.

I believe the capitalization on the term Semantically Correct is a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that there is no authoritative answer to this particular question.
4 Tips on Managing An Online Community
Old men don't like it when things change, and assert their opinion as fact, trust me.
Minor refactoring note, since F# seems to bring that out in me: you could change the last bit to "List.reduce (+)". Or you could do the whole thing as "[0..10] |> List.sumBy (fun x -> x*x)"
Plans like those always bug me. You actually pay a LOT more for 201 transactions than 200.

200 = $29+$40 = $69

201 = $69+$20.10 = $89.10

Gaining 1 more customer would cost me almost $20!
What are your values as an Entrepreneur?
Proving P!=NP: "...Ryan has taken the first real baby step in decades."
The content has nothing to do with the search energy it generates, which is what makes it spam.
I'm not an apple fanboy but that's freakin cool.

At work I unfortunately work with some Oracle products. No way in hell would Ellison ever call me up ;)
The moral of the story: figure out a way to get paid for posting to Hacker News.
What about Gœdel?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/%C5%92
I developed a simple webapp that generates jogging routes that come back to their starting point.

I wanted to know what functionalities I could add to make the service more useful; since services such as Get Satisfaction start at $19 a month, I developed my own solution (a very simple one, but truly independent of the source website, so it can be deployed on other sites).

The button is named "help us help you" which I thought was cooler than "Feedback".

I'm sad to report, however, that in the week it's been up, it's never been used by anyone... Maybe I need a feedback button to gather feedback about the feedback system?!?

For those interested, the jogging service is here: http://tjp.adgent.com/
Copyright vs. 3D printing
Perhaps the camera is zoomed in somewhat, creating the illusion that it is closer to the wires than it actually is.
School Paper Format Gives you additional Chances to Get a Good Grade
There are various types of formats which students will be assigned in college. It is vital that they learn these formats well in high school. The school paper format adhered by students will make college essay writing easier, and will increase the chances of a good grade in high school.
Electric Audi A2 with 375 Miles Range on 6-Minute Charge
Boxee hits a sweet spot on the remote IMO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oPsGa0tpUc
Too Much Texting Linked to Other Behavioral Problems in Teens
Make your Mac more like an iPhone: How to reduce distractions and improve focus
Does it matter that they can re-license it? I don't think they can revoke the existing license for the existing code.
I've read that all Apple executives are supposed to be totally hands on (which is why that bloke got fired earlier in the year, despite Apple having waited a year for his non-compete to run out)
To be fair, the "about" section contains this gem: "We need adventurers like you to generate actionplatforms and microactions, and then invite people to microact."

Which explains it all.
Brilliant idea!

We covered quite a bit of ground in our couple hours and now I want to continue this project on my own. Cheers.
full article with pic: http://green.autoblog.com/2010/10/27/converted-audi-a2-claim...
Classic Programming Quotes
JD;DR. See also:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-pull-the-plug-...
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1923151,00.asp

Has Dvorak ever been right about anything? (And no, he doesn't get credit for the keyboard layout, that was a different guy.)
The Facebook Credits team has the same dream you do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/technology/23facebook.html
Firmware updates break/change public APIs too so that excuse doesn't work for me. Even more fun is when public APIs silently change so scanning the change log becomes useless.
While in the middle of closing down distracting windows and tabs in Safari. Sadly, need to keep at least one window open for Pivotal Tracker.
I second the question. If the wind is blowing at 20 mph, the rain is going hitting the person from the side. It's not enough to solve the inverted umbrella problem when the main purpose of the umbrella is to shield a person from rain.
I think I have found the solution but I'm not sure. How do I ask without giving it away on Twitter?
John Dvorak seems to have an unlimited supply of complaints, and rarely anything constructive to say.

Wikipedia suggests he's never built anything of his own. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Perhaps that's part of it?
Recent surge in insiders selling their shares
Microsoft's silverlight plugin allows for embedding python and ruby in the browser: http://www.silverlight.net/learn/dynamic-languages/
My admittedly biased view: I spent two years of my life trying to make the JVM communicate gracefully with Javascript - there were plenty of us at Netscape who thought that bytecode was a better foundation for mobile code. But Sun made it very difficult, building their complete bloated software stack from scratch. They didn't want Java to cooperate with anything else, let alone make it embeddable into another piece of software. They wrote their string handling code in an interpreted language rather than taint themselves with C! As far as I can tell, Sun viewed Netscape - Java's only significant customer at the time - as a mere vector for their Windows replacement fantasies. Anybody who actually tried to use Java would just have to suffer.

Meanwhile Brendan was doing the work of ten engineers and three customer support people, and paying attention to things that mattered to web authors, like mixing JS code into HTML, instant loading, integration with the rest of the browser, and working with other browser vendors to make JS an open standard.

So now JS is the x86 assembler of the web - not as pretty as it might be, but it gets the job done (GWT is the most hilarious case in point). It would be a classic case of worse is better except that Java only looked better from the bottom up. Meanwhile JS turned out to be pretty awesome. Good luck trying to displace it.

SWF was the other interesting bytecode contender, but I don't know much about the history there. Microsoft's x86 virtualization tech was also pretty cool but they couldn't make it stick alone.
As these types of epiphanies pop up on the web over time I wish someone would just come out and say it. Apple, as an organization, approaches problems in a way that just about every other company is too chickenshit to try. When Jobs returned and launched the Think Different campaign it wasn't for the masses, it was for Apple.

It's difficult to articulate this properly because most people don't even have a good understanding of what it means to dissent. Being rebellious isn't thinking differently, it is merely fighting the imposition of someone else's will upon your own. Thinking differently is looking at something in the most honest way you possibly can and attempting to refine your vision without allowing undue external influences to distract from the pursuit.

Rarely can you find a single person, much less an organization, that can avoid tunnel vision and approach problems without the taint of past success spoiling new opportunities. It's kind of amazing to watch.
I am really interested to know the management practices in place at Apple that enable this kind of a personal reaction to even be possible.

It simply cant be that Steve is a very conscientous person (which I'm sure he is) - but also that the infrastructure in Apple allows this.

I run a 13 people shop and I know I will get to a point where I will not be able to look at individual bugs/questions, etc. What kind of triggers, tools and techniques make it possible for an issue to be filtered up the hierarchy ?

Or is it simply because of the any-employee-can-mail-holy-Steve-but-god-help-you-if-it-was-unimportant policy?
Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.

-- Cory Doctorow http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Eastern_Standard_...

Apple takes the time to figure out how normal people do stuff.

I'm not sure what Microsoft does, but I'm picturing what some a focus group determines followed by the interpretation by committee (with the necessary compromises) followed by what some engineer implemented, all constrained by years of legacy code.

I've been using Win7 at work (I'm linux-only at home) and expected it to be a smooth experience. After all, everybody says linux isn't ready for the desktop yet. I am surprised at how often Win7 guesses my intent wrong or does stupid annoying things like jumping the list under the mouse when I click on an entry.
I can confirm that the Senz performs quite well in Chicago weather, even in the wind-tunnel areas.

The problem, though, is that fabric is removed from the front of the umbrella to create the wing shape, and the result is less coverage than an un-aerodynamic umbrella of the same handle-length. So your feet and pant-bottoms almost always get soaked in any situation where you would actually need an umbrella.
C came from Bell Labs; it's not entirely clear to me that an industry research lab counts as academia.
I use this process: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/11b.html

Works even better now that there's an iOS client: http://www.passwordtouch.com/
Xen is dead. KVM is now equally "solid", easier to use, better supported, etc.
NYT Small Biz Blog: Is Groupon Good For Small Businesses?
This is not a feminist issue. It's an issue with the reputation of massage. Addressing it through gender is not just incorrect, but divisive and counterproductive.
Rent a Coder from Pakistan
I guess I wouldn't complain about the policy to attempt to do this when initially filling seats but to have a forced policy is taking it too far. Especially when it causes cases like the man who was not allowed to sit next to his pregnant wife because of it.
It's not really that astonishing. I've been sitting in product design meetings for over a decade for applications, and anything designed through that process almost inevitably ends up looking like that Sony remote.

When you have five product managers that have a stake in something and they care more about their little product rather than the larger picture, this is what you end up with.

Apple has the singular vision of Steve Jobs/Jony Ive to drive their products. You really need a (well-qualified and competent) dictator when it comes to product design.

The better question is "what will happen to Apple after Jobs and Ive are gone?"
I think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt, for now.
What specific issues do you have with Javascript?
Designing Memorable Websites: Showcase of Creative Designs
Gold Rush: Mobile App Statistics from Appcelerator
The best remote for the TV products are touch screen phone apps with shifting UIs: a four-d pad when it needs to be, a keyboard when it needs to be. (A quick reference IMDB device when it needs to be).
Caliber Technology (http://www.taxupdate.com/overview.php) also appears to offer a similar product for Java/C# platforms.
Politically, Apache cannot use OpenJDK. Their only option is to just give up on Java.
this. the "improved" image search is terrible. very finicky and even hard to use--hardly simple.

re: ddg. regular user, but as others have pointed out already the ajax load for results is annoying (because it's slow and flashy/jerky).
the mac people seem to be saying the solution to this problem is to buy an iphone or ipad. that is a really, really lousy answer. despite the fact that to use one of those devices would be really cool, it means I have to buy a totally separate device for the device I just bought. At least the remote comes with the TV! Even if it sucks its fully functional.

How do you actually search from that remote? Can you?

That visio remote looks pretty cool as far as solving the qwerty interface obstacle.

I don't know why they don't just implement a simple Apple remote with an annoying on screen keyboard but really kickass voice recognition...
See the "How it Works" page, step 5: Craft your Rejoinder

http://thetreasureblog.com/how-it-works/
This is what I've been thinking about too. If javascript like what you wrote above were much faster than nicely structured, readable javascript, then perhaps the idea of "Javascript is the bytecode" may not be such a bad one.
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I'm just not sure that it would really provide the performance improvement we would hope for.
Prediction: Apple Computer Corp. will switch to Intel processors within the next 12 to 18 months.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,939886,00.asp

(Technically, he was short by 9 months, but Apple did the inconceivable, eventually.)
This whole copyright vs 3D printing thing is interesting, but the bigger, more important battle right now is actually patents vs. 3D printing.

The entrenched players in the industry have large patent portfolios, and this hurts the ability of projects like the RepRap to actually make improvements. We probably could have had all of these kinds of projects years ago, but the patents are only now starting to run out...
I've found the combination of google instant plus the new previews to be impressively useful when using Google professionally.

I'm working with clojure at the moment which is new to me, so I find myself doing a lot of rapid-fire Google searches to answer "is there a library for x?" or "how do I do y?" like questions.

Before instant and preview, I'd typically do a search and then open a list of the most promising answers in tab - and then possibly do the same with other variants of the search. Then I'd use keyboard shortcuts to move through the tabs and close the irrelevant ones.

Now, I've found that I can usually refine the search to a single good one using instant, by looking at the immediate feedback of the results being returned, and preview lets me quickly see which of the results are junk and which are actually salient before I even get as far as opening them in a tab.

They've made an operation that I do many times a day considerably faster and more interactive and reduced the cognitive load. This is usability where it matters - bringing information closer to my mind so I can get things done quicker.

Most impressive to me is that these improvements seem make a more significant difference for the long tail of professional work, rather than the more trivial searches for new products or celebrity gossip etc. I'm thankful to see Google choosing this as a priority.

I'm reminded of the famous Steve Jobs story about faster boot times saving lives: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

Google's saving lives too.
I had a really good conversation yesterday at the Dev Lunch in Toronto about so-called Smart TVs. Here's a quick summary:

* TVs are about media consumption, not about interaction in the PC-sense of the word.

* When one wants extra content or information regarding the media they are consuming, they tend to use a secondary device (e.g. iPad, notebook)

* Most devs in the room merely wanted a device that would allow them to better manage and consume the media they wanted

* It's not clear what sort of apps (besides the aforementioned management tool) would be beneficial to write for a Smart TV platform. This is likely a function of not groking what a future with a Smart TV might be like.

* Over and over again, it was noted that the TV is a social device. You watch it with friends, be it in a bar, or a home. It's not clear that interacting with a Smart TV could be a social activity.

I'm interested to see what happens in this sphere, but I frankly can't shake the feeling that it's a dead end. Mostly dumb boxes that enable consumption, and management of media are probably the most likely thing to succeed, a la TiVo.
Thanks for playing! Uncertainty is inherent to the puzzle, so you can never be sure that you've found the solution ;-) If your answer makes sense, however, you can be reasonably confidant that you are right.

As for not giving your answer away over twitter: the trick is that you don't tweet the answer itself, but rather a clever response to the answer. For more detailed guidelines, take a look at:

http://thetreasureblog.com/how-it-works/

Of course, I'm happy to answer more questions here, as well.
If you look at several of the games it mentions, they are not "light vs full" versions of the games. They are more like Farmville, where you can buy better stuff and/or progress faster. This is a far more lucrative model than the light/full model because it doesn't end after the first purchase.
Did you invent RSS?
I was seriously trying to forget.
Yeah, in my experience, most biostatisticians (especially those involved in public health and clinical research) are SAS folks. Some of that is inertia- a lot of these people learned SAS at the same time they were learning stats. However, I think that most of SAS's continuing prevalence is due to the fact that, for all of its (many, many, many) problems, SAS is a freakin' log chipper when it comes to statistics- it doesn't care how much data you throw at it, or what kinds of crazy and/or exotic statistics you ask it for- if you can decipher its syntax, you can get it to do it.

Even for stuff that a lot of other programs can do just fine, SAS often has an edge. For example, everybody and their brother can do a logistic regression model... but SAS can give you confidence intervals for all kinds of crazy parts of the model that SPSS won't even bother calculating and that R will only give you point estimates for.

The other great thing about SAS is that a lot of the good statistics books from the last twenty or thirty years include SAS sample code- for example, I'm currently having to do some off-the-beaten-path ANOVA stuff, and the reference I'm using (Edwards' "Analysis of Variance for the Behavioral Sciences") uses SAS as its language of choice.

That said, I personally find the SAS "language" to be alternatively bewildering and nostalgia-inducing (the "cards" command, anybody?). SAS is the only language about which I can honestly say "it makes R's syntax look clean and predictable". Also, the Windows version of SAS is an absolute abomination from a UI standpoint. And, their licensing schemes are draconian, and installing the damn thing can easily take an entire day, especially if (say, for example) the installer gets confused because you've already got a JDK installed on your computer. Not that I'm bitter, or anything...

Of course, as others have noted, in bioinformatics, R either is already the default or is almost there. I know that in my department's bioinformatics courses, they use R, Python, and Perl almost exclusively, and only break out the SAS when there's something specific they need it to do.
On some level I assume that's what she was doing, probably some level of pressure on the game show, she could be sure but some part of her probably wanted to confirm it a little more.