skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does this book cover?

From FAQ
....

While there is some amount of overlap in results presented in other books (reflecting consensus in what the field views as the important results and techniques), because of our interests in the field there is more coverage of scheduling problems (especially single machine scheduling) and semidefinite programming.

Simply because the book is more recent, it has some coverage of the unique games problem and the unique games conjecture. The book also covers recent results on uniform sparsest cut (the Arora-Rao-Vazirani result), minimum bisection (due to Racke), and some of the recent work on the minimum Steiner tree problem. The book covers the probabilistic embedding of metrics into tree metrics result of Fakcharoenphol-Rao-Talwar that is now a standard technique in the field. It also covers recent work on minimum-cost bounded-degree spanning trees, and the local search algorithms for facility location and k-median problems.

Also because the book is more recent, it can give simplified proofs that didn't appear in the original papers. For instance, the proof for the survivable network design algorithm of Jain has a simplified proof that was devised just a few years ago.

A final difference is that the book's organization shows how different techniques can lead to improved results. The book returns several times to the facility location problem, prize-collecting Steiner tree problem, bin-packing problem, among others, showing how a new technique gives an improvement over previous results.
I don't know about phone apps, but in online games, some of the really big winners that you don't hear too much about are the games that are "free" but then make money off of micro-transactions. Once you get a huge install base, there are all kinds of ways to make money. Perhaps it's a valid analogy.
This is the same argument people have been making about the desktop Apple products for years, and they were wrong then too. Apple is aiming at the luxury market and seems content to ignore the rest of the market. What Apple should worry about is that "good enough" is getting very, very close to Apple's "premium".
"That Symbolics would have not gone out of business if Genera would have been free software and portable is speculation."

Two different things. I was claiming that Genera would still be around if it was Free Software - this is by virtue of definition. Symbolics being in and out of business has nothing to do with it.

A totally different thing is that I think Symbolics stood a very good chance of surviving if it had made its software more portable. It's a good thing you mention Franz, because they're almost as old as Symbolics, and still around, largely due to the fact that their system is easily portable. They don't waste immense amounts of engineering resources on supporting platforms, but dedicate it to improving features and performance and more importantly responding to customer needs.

"1) repeating the design of the past (with the same problems and maybe slight improved. There has been lots of talk and little action. It's difficult because we don't have the hackers with knowledge and time for that."

It's difficult to do because when you get down to it, Zetalisp sucked for systems programming. Portable Standard Lisp, Interlisp, CMUCL/Allegro/Clozure (anything with LAP and VOPs) provide a much better model for how to build a Lisp runtime.

It's also difficult to do because people like to waste their time imagining how awesome hardware type-checking on FPGAs would be and how the new Lisp OS will have super-duper database-backed storage and network transparency and etc. etc.

"2) doing a new design which gets rid of the limitations of past designs (single user, single image, no security, ...). That's even more difficult."

The key is the namespace. Symbol identity needs to be preserved across users/processes, symbol values don't. This is actually a much simpler problem than you assume.
Deep review on the HTC Desire HD
No, because these machines have different I/O & graphics hardware and no common operating system or BIOS layer to abstract them.
Totally agreed!
I explained how the culture will change. It will change because academics will use failure to release source code to throw doubt on the results of their rivals, and people (especially those who aren't already established in their fields) will answer that criticism by releasing code, which will raise the standards for everybody else. There's disincentive to be first, because everybody will pretend to be shocked at the buggy, undocumented code, but not everyone writes bad code and not everyone will feel able to refuse.

You want me to actually change the culture right now in a comment thread on Hacker News? I think predicting how it will happen is the best I can do, sorry.
Im not sure how superficial those things are. How you host, deploy, test, (data?) are important and usually rise on the merits of the technology. The larger community provides support, advice and evangelism and fuels the popularity of the technology.

As a counter to my own argument...
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/ewww-you-use-php/
How to Get a Fair Result From a Biased Coin
NY Blogger Criticized For Posting Photos of Teen Vandals
There is no substitute for being face to face with family and friends.

For co-workers, not so much. Of course you lose something, but it's not as important a loss as not seeing family face to face.

I think the solution, for some, is to live close to the people who are important to you. Commute and telecommute to your job, not your family.
Yeah, it's still bad for you - but see how good it can look
Excellent. Do that.

Now, to go invest in gold/oil, because the price of those will rise significantly in response to our hyperinflation.
Here's some info on how it was built: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/sep/27/drupal-interface... along with a Drupal module from the folks that developed it, for accessing and building sites/applications around the data: http://drupal.org/project/wbapi.
Exactly. In my experience, if someone wants to look at your code, they will e-mail you and ask for it. Then you e-mail it to them.

Sharing on something like sourceforge just simple isn't done. It's not because scientists are "cheating," it's because it's not part of the culture.
From what I understand, iPhones aren't really bought to be used as everyday phones and an iPhone owner will probably have a second, Japanese phone as well. If someone has one it's because it is a cool, western thing to have (basically just a gadget) plus they can be used on trips to the US and elsewhere.
I tried to do something like this with IEEE student branch of my college (in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar or Mehesana, Gujarat, India). I could have got student from all over the state with all the 13 SB in the section. But the problem is, there is simply no speaker. Back in 2005, Indias first Drupal Bootcamp was organized by our college, but after that no such event has taken place.
If you want to play with something similar, there's the Ben Nanonote : http://sharism.cc/

More powerful, but really cheap and fun. And so small.
Gravee - Registration FB
You explained the manner in which it would change, not why it would change. That's the hard problem.

If that's not clear, you did not explain why academics would "use failure to release source code to throw doubt on the results of their rivals" when they do not do that now. I don't disagree with you that this would be preferable to the status-quo, nor am I disagreeing that it would be sustainable once the change occurred. I just don't see any reason why the change will occur in the first place.
He needs to find out for himself that he's not missing anything...btw he IS missing a LOT.
Being Single and being in a relationship affect your lifestyle in different ways, and everyone should take time to enjoy both.
Take a wild guess at where he's going from there

... into bullshit territory. I had to endure a pre-OS X desktop at my first job ('96?) and it was absolutely terrible. When it wasn't crashing hard (requiring a complete reboot) it was barely usable. That was compared to Linux of the same era which was rock solid and lightweight. If pre-OS X was 5% of the PC market, that was 5% too much.

Best thing Jobs did was to throw that entire codebase away.
It's often misattributed to Borges. It was written (in prose) by columnist Don Herold in 1953 for the _Reader's Digest_. Since then it underwent several changes, has been attributed to several authors, was broken into a verse form, was translated to Spanish, acquired a Spanish title, "Instantes", was then re-translated back into English often retaining the Spanish title...

It's lived a long and colorful life. But Borges didn't write it.

There's a detailed study of this poem's history at http://www.borges.pitt.edu/bsol/iainst.php. It's in Spanish, but Google Translate can give you the gist of it in English.
I tend to bill on a daily basis. I will present my clients with my hourly rate and then explain to them that I bill per day instead. My daily rate is slightly slower than 8 times my hourly rate. The reason I do this is to prevent nitpicking on time sheets etc and to be accountable for every single hour of the day. The last thing I want to do is have a clock sitting next to me measuring my every single move. Some days I do some overtime (1 maybe to 2 hours max) and other days I find myself working slightly less. In the end it all works out fine. The estimates that I give my clients are based on days, not hours. If they want me to do a 4 hour job, cool, I still charge them for the entire day. Most clients are cool with that. Since most projects I do tend to have time-frames that go into weeks it's much easier that way for everyone involved.
Boo! title change. My submission referred to "hardened criminals"
So, if I understand you correctly, you'd like a 9-to-5 job where you won't be forced into management and be able to keep your valuable skills to yourself while you work on more interesting things after hours?

I think I am currently in that situation. It's not all it's cracked up to be. First off, your time on nights and weekends is not as long or of the same quality as 9 to 5. You don't have the same energy level or focus.

As for the job, no job is immune to change. If you have skills that are valuable to your employer, you'll find that either your employer will overwhelm you with work and/or they'll seek to have your co-workers gain those skills to distribute the workload. This kind of stuff will make you more and more unhappy with your job and this will surprisingly make it harder to work on your side projects outside of work. If you put all your eggs in one basket by anchoring yourself to the Oracle stack, when you go to look for another job (because you're tired of your current job), prospective employers (and especially recruiters) will see mostly Oracle stuff and you'll be pigeonholed into jobs that are similar to your current job.

Don't make perceived stability the central focus of your job search (unless you have others that depend on you financially). Choose jobs that will serve you better with respect to your career goals. That may mean changing jobs more often than you'd like (but not necessarily so), but you'll get to where you want to be sooner.
People play games and have egos; but I think the overly-stylised prose of this post, goes a long way towards glorifying what it's potentially trying to criticise.

It's a bit over the top for my taste .. reads a bit like a teaser for a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
I reget not checking my email in July 2009.

Yesterday, I decided that 61 unread messages was too much, so I went through them.

In July 2009, Facebook emailed me suggesting I give them a quick call to discuss my "career goals/ambitions and opportunities at facebook". For real.

I was right in the middle of my degree, super busy with my final project, and... somehow it must have just slipped past me.

Although, as one of my friends commented:

Look at it this way: It's not like you're a worse developer since then.
Flask looks delicious.

On the other hand, for this specific app -- bottle, itty and juno all look very similar to the app made with flask. For whatever reason I find this very Pythonic.
again, its tough to explain. but, i mean, i don't know much about your situation. it may well be an upgrade. i dunno.

if you're fine with sitting down and grinding things out, not really solving problems, do what you're told, etc, then, its not bad.
"E.g. Allegro Common Lisp has traditionally been about as unfree as possible (e.g. $$$ required to distribute solutions to your customers (for the Lisp runtime)) and it's still around."

Franz started only a few years after Symbolics. I believe one of the key reasons they're still around is because their Lisp system is easily portable.

"Also, would the MIT Lisp Machine system or Genera have gotten as good as they did as fast as they did without outside funding (government and VC respectively)?"

Stallman was totally right about Symbolics though - they took all of their Lisp work and most of the Lisp community to their grave. There wasn't a lot preventing them from making their software more portable or open, but they made a business decision not to do that, which proved to be disastrous in the long term.

"Or look at the failure of GNU to produce a kernel."

That's because there's already other, better Free Software alternatives out there. Why work on HURD when you can work on Linux or one of the BSDs? And it's important to note that it's a continuing failure - because the project is Free Software, people can continue to work on it if they want.
No, I'm not implying that at all. I don't doubt they are good products.
I regret not implementing my ideas into real projects, fearing the fear, predicting the worse, not making a decision on what to focus on among 5 things, writing about all this here rather than learning something.
Not quite. Islamic extremists don't care one bit about the erosion of American civil liberties; they simply want foreign powers _out_ of lands they view as sacred. Capitulation in the face of terror is one method of achieving this end, the other is a ruinous, lasting and unwinnable war designed to sap the power of the invader. What we do to ourselves that does not achieve their ambition is irrelevant.

Terrorists haven't won: the sacred lands they prize so highly are still "occupied". Rather, we've simply been dullards content to walk around in our socks, whistling 'God Bless America' to pass the time.
The most I saw in Heathrow was that they made me take off my shoes, and they wouldn't really make a fuss about it if you didn't do it. The only time they made me take my shoes off was when they found a swiss army knife in my hand luggage (I absent-mindedly took it, along with 15 kg of stuff, from my checked luggage because they were too heavy).

Even with a pretty large knife in my luggage, what happened was that I had to go through the metal detector with shoes off, and then I had to wait for the police for 20 minutes. They were very polite and told me that there would be no problem if the knife wasn't a "locking" knife (no idea why that's a problem), but they just kept it and let me go.

However, I imagine I didn't look like the typical terrorist, with four bags bursting with clothes as hand luggage.
Apple (OS X) can't beat Windows (Microsoft) but it's not because Apple is not/was not trying.

Apple does compete with Microsoft and would love to be the dominant OS. If they were, their profits and market share would be stratospheric. They're doing extremely well selling just 5% of PCs but can you imagine how well they would be doing if they were selling 95% of them?

The same applies to phones. You're right that they would do well selling just 10% of phones but the goal of every company is to get 100% marketshare.

Clearly, that's not going to happen but let's not fool ourselves: Apple and Google are in a cut-throat race to be the dominant phone OS (in marketshare terms) because the number one is more handsomely rewarded than number 2, in any market, and both companies desperately want to be number one.
It's weird that that article is only a couple of weeks old, because I think he's putting way too fine a point on PHP backlash. Who are they interviewing and getting such pushback on PHP, people who already don't like PHP?

Sure, there are language nerds and IRC-fueled rivalries, but when interviewing prospective employees it would seem they're choosing from the most myopic. If they are entry-level FOOC one-lang kids, it seems additionally strange that their attitudes would form the basis for a blog post with such sweeping characterizations.

It just seems like he's either putting way to much stock into the thoughts of unseasoned professionals, or for some reason they're interviewing lots of non-PHP people for PHP positions. I don't know, his argument and reception of language backlash in this context just seems a bit dated and I'm left wondering if it's just a matter of their posting poorly-written job ads.
Robert Duffner Interviews Chris Kemp, NASA, and Kevin Jackson, NJVC, on GovCloud
Recently, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Mr. Robert Duffner, director of Product Management for Windows Azure, as part of his "Thought Leaders in the Cloud" series. In this interview, we discussed...
By not winning.
The pat-down gloves are sometimes sent through a residue scanner. However, assuming you place the foreign object into the cavity using a surgery setup any residue that _would_ trip the detector is likely to be left on the long discarded prep-clothes.
But you pay for the plan the same regardless of the phone you use so it's not a basis for choosing a phone.

The price of the phone, on the other hand, is a factor in choosing a phone.
You have no way of verifying they've completely removed your data from their servers. All you can tell is they no longer let anybody see it through the website. They've publicly stated your data may be retained in "backups" indefinitely.
Yeah, the issue got closed. Github should really fix that.
The more bizarre and nonsensical the "security" restrictions, the larger the shitstorm officials will be in when the inevitable attacks finally occur and people realise the TSA groped their toddlers for nothing.
Nights I stayed in during school so I could "do work" when my friends wanted me to go out.

Basically any time I let paranoid thoughts of "I have to do work" prevent me from growing my relationships with others.
Euler's identity, explained
What about the root document?
Shoe bomb, underwear bomb, water bottle bomb, cargo bomb, these were all (thwarted) attempts to destroy a plane in transit over metropolitan areas. When is the last time someone hijacked a plane and demanded a ransom for the passengers outside of a movie? What do you exactly think happens to a plane when it explodes over a populated area?
This is a good idea, but I think to be effective would require more organization; everyone here deciding to do this the next time they fly to their random destination wouldn't likely delay any flights.

If you could organize enough people to constitute 25-50% of a flight's passenger capacity, you could plan in advance to all fly to the cheapest/closest destination (so everyone is on the same flight, and no one has to spend too much). Maybe some publicity would result.
The best CAPTCHA ever
Airlines are corporations with billions of dollars. Corporations with billions of dollars can effectively lobby the US government.
Did you friend any of your IRL friends? Because if you did, that would probably be enough for them to cross-reference enough data to figure out who you are. It occurred to me that even when people tag pictures with unlinked text (as they sometimes do to be funny or if the content is sensitive), Facebook could probably use some fuzzy matching and heuristics to map those faces to real identities elsewhere in their database.

...if you think about it, that's probably an easy way to get a lot of photos of people that they don't want to be seen.
What is the point of making toy apps? Make a complex app that evolves over a period of 2 or so years, and then tell me how it went. Much of the time the framework where it is easiest to make a toy app is the one that has lots of hidden, implicit assumptions that come back to fuck you when you need the flexibility to do something that violates those assumptions.

Having dealt with python frameworks for several years and developed several complex apps, I'm not willing to use anything other than werkzeug. It's lightyears ahead of than else out there (flask is werkzeug wrapped in shit you don't need with the intention of making it more popular). Pylons is also very nice, although it tries to do too much for you, and has too much magic for my taste. The context-local request and response objects in pylons are a double edged sword that I find cuts the wrong way too often.
I think his disdain for "B-level and C-level people" is arrogant. I see this sentiment a lot amongst startups and coders, the idea that some people are good and the rest are complete garbage. There is no objective measurement for this. I've seen people described as top-level that I thought were awful, and even though I think highly of myself I'm sure not everyone does. Some people use validation by the scene as measurement of a person's worth; I'd like to know what the author thinks makes an A-level person. Presumably, being popular in the scene disqualifies them. Nevermind the hip startups with good connections that get sold for many millions of dollars.
The Soul of Open Source: ApacheCon
Gigastraps Starts Up
The Marginal Productivity of Debt
Enabling Offline "Facebook Likes" Via QR Codes For Your Brand
Haven't we had enough of these articles already? They're not about startups or technology, really, and I think we've all formed our opinions at this point. Posting them here won't change a thing, in any case.
I think the fundamental problem of Symbolics was their strategy as a systems company. They were a half-assed hardware company that could not keep up in price or performance and didn't even bother to let others develop system software for it, and they were a half-assed software company that didn't bother to port their software to other computers (a $10,000 plug-in board for a Macintosh does not count as a port).

They were also a pretty good computer graphics and computer algebra software company, and both those divisions got sold off and continued their work for a number of years after Symbolics itself went out of business.

It's interesting to note that by the time of Symbolics' demise (I'm placing it at 1993ish, although that's probably not accurate), even IBM realized that developing systems as integrated software/hardware architectures was not feasible.