skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Hopefully with people from the dynamic languages camp trying the language they'll clean up the syntax.

Considering the year elapsed, that's about as likely as them killing the project and admitting that Go is a turd which only gets airwave because it's a project by two extremely famous googlers. The syntax is crap, the type system is garbage, they spend their time reinventing utterly terrible wheels and they've thrown out basically all ideas of safety they could get on fire.
I don't know about the other guy. I can't imagine it would have been hard for him to work.

I was moving between projects in the same company for technical reasons; my salary and position didn't change. The flippant raise offer was from the program I was leaving; it wasn't serious and it wasn't possible. Everyone knew that.

In spite of the bitter tone of my post, I've enjoyed working where I do and do my best to make transitions smooth. I, the program I was leaving, and the program I was going to got together and figured out what seemed best for everyone. We agreed to 4 months of support. What actually happened is that a couple months after I left, they called in a panic. . . and I ended up supporting them on Fridays for about 18 months thereafter, before finally weaning them.
His entire point is that you wouldn't be surprised if this happened, which is exactly what you're saying. The point he's making is about how fast the world is changing along with our perceptions of what's normal and what's impossible.
Hahaha. I'm an academic but I still laugh because we are so horribly arrogant and yet quite oblivious. We always introduce our papers and grants with "this is a very important problem with applications in blah blah blah" but we honestly have no idea what that really means or if it actually is the big problem for engineers (as opposed to an annoyance) and go on to do present our work developed in a bubble and tested on whatever we have access to in our labs. Consider erlang, such a language would never come out of academia. It's far too focused on reliability and maintenance. Those two problems are never on our radar in any real way.
> On the other hand, the academic community seems to have a fairly narrow outlook on programming language design.

That's a joke right?
And maybe expand it beyond just courses. Every school seems to have a site thats layed out differently. Making it difficulty to find information. So maybe you can also have other school related pages such as departments.
I think you specifically don't want to play games or surf the internet. I work in a big building, so about once an hour I get up and go for a 5 minute stroll and come back to my desk. Though I do a lot of work with other people in the building so I guess people just think I'm going to talk to someone I'm working with.
In all, 53 people died during the riots and thousands more were injured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots

(Just a history lesson. I agree with you that it's a huge stretch)
Milky Way bubbles could signal massive black hole eruption
Personally, I've been occasionally watching the efforts to put Android on the HTC HD2 (WinMo 6.5, left behind for 7). Seems to be going well, with reasonable battery life, etc. although not "over the air" install. Look up the XDA developers forums.
Well, although that's one step better than blogs that completely lack a link back to the product, I don't find backlinking the actual blog logo to be all that intuitive. Often times I see blog logos that are variants of the actual product logo indicating you're looking at the blog, and so it doesn't make much sense to hide the link there. Just make an explicit link to the product in the sidebar or something. I can't tell you how many times I've closed a product blog page after growing frustrated with not being able to spot a link to the product quickly.
Hey hey, don't leave out Bottle[1], its inspiration.

[1]http://bottle.paws.de/
That is because the 30/30 ratio it terrible. I do 50/5 or even 58/2 and it is enough. You need to get up about once an hour and just step away from the computer. It helps a lot to go outside but that can be difficult, so I usually settle for a quick walk around the floor of my building which takes around 2 minutes. Nobody minds.
Man, I hate hearing about someone so gifted throwing their life away. Can you imagine if he had gotten interested in stopping the spam epidemic? That would have been awesome.
If it doesn't scale(for some definition of scaling - features, server load, etc.) and you have to rewrite it, it's still essentially hard to follow, because you will have to reconcept the entire system, and presumably stay data-compatible.

Zed simply advocates that you ignore toy systems if they don't give you an in towards writing a real app later.
But we won't be very surprised.

I've seen it in Mexico. For example, last week one medium-sized Drug Boss was cornered by the mexican army in Matamoros and he ordered a city-wide operation of road-blocking and setting-cars-on-fire in order to escape, aided by a personal army of highly armed mercs.

10 years ago, this event would have been very surprising and scary and unlikely. Now that our world is upside down and we are upside down too, it barely raised some eyebrows.
Doesn't work, because the original claim wasn't that they could record every aspect, but that they in fact would record every aspect of their lives. Which seems absurd to me, and that's what I was trying to point out.
Here's another link that explains it pretty well without using any fancy math:

http://www.mast.queensu.ca/~peter/inprocess/prisoners.pdf

edit: I agree that this does involve some math, but I like that it all can be derived from basic principles of probability.
Anyone curious about how I know there is less blue in the photo should open the photograph in an image editor and inspect the histogram for each channel. If you don't understand color histograms, read my dandy article on the topic:

http://upload.bradlanders.com/mycanikon/essays/histograms/ht...

The article focuses on average luminance, but histograms are interpreted the same for all color channels when looked at individually.
Typography specifically - sorry Apple guys, but my standard-issue corporate desk monkey box does not have Helvetica and Arial is not a great way to "pop". I would highly recommend either the $25/year for Typekit or hitting up the Google font api.
So the issue is regression. I can believe that, but the original story didn't get that across clearly. Though I imagine the concept was familiar to the players, so it was probably clear at the time.
OK, I gave up and looked at the answer. Pretty amazing. Just out of curiosity, why isn't the probability of my solution equal to 1/2^50?

edit: I think I found the answer: it should be equal to (50!)^2/100!, right? Now, how to decide if that's smaller or larger than 1/2^50?

edit: Awesome! thanks for the answer.
that price is for the min number of cards, per card price would look different
The language of the future is Lisp. always has been, always will be. (which is a shame, because APL and its children J and K would be a better foundation).
I would have thought there was some onboard CPU on the kinect, based on the power requirements (it can't be powered by a USB port alone.) If so, I suspect that any heavy lifting the unit does is probably by software that uploaded to the camera via USB at startup.

Anyone have further details?
No, between you and your opponent, practices are not actually zero-sum.
Original source: http://www.tomscott.com/mob/. From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source". That's not quite the same as embedding something in your own blog and then submitting your own blog.
I disagree. Something can be easy to understand even if it doesn't scale well. Bubblesort is easy to understand, even though it doesn't scale well. If Zed's claim was that it doesn't scale he should (and would) have written that, instead of writing that it's hard to read.
How to Make a Webcam Intruder Alarm with Mathematica
small thing. You might be missing a favicon.
you get a cookie :)
I like the idea. I written something an donating to open source projects myself: http://rockiger.com/en/blog/view/linux-users-are-software-pi...

Imo contributing isn't enough. First class software is (often) in need of fulltime first class developers.
That explanation is not consistent with the claim

You don't need math skills to solve this, only problem solving skills.

I'm just saying, it'd be nice if there is a warning when something that looks like a standard lateral thinking brain teaser is actually the topic of a paper submitted by a pair of professors of mathematics to the 2003 Conference on "Compexity".
Flowdock: Evernote for IM conversations
I worked with a guy who was over 65 and still working at a tech startup, and he was the best guy we had. Unfortunately passed away about a year ago but they do exist, there are just a lot fewer of them.
Indians invented the positional numbering system.
Arabs only introduced it to your part of the world.
There is an onboard CPU on the kinect, but it doesn't do all the work. It still needs the 360s CPU to finish the processing and such. As a result, Kinect games will suffer a bit visually compared to normal 360 games. It's outlined in the ars technica review (and I'm sure in other places)

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2010/11/buy-a-house-cl...
Yes, there's at least one CPU. It looks like the Kinect performs depth extraction on-board and the 360 performs gesture recognition.

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/406...
Jesus, 4 weeks? That's awesome. I've been learning on and off for a few years now, and have recently buckled down to finally get something done. What are some lessons you learned for building your next project? Also, it seems like you've got a good eye for design. With a bit more practice and experience, you could likely make some great looking sites. It certainly looks a lot better than sites I've seen made by more seasoned coders.
Thanks!

That video preview on site is prerecorded but whole conference will be live. You will be able to ask questions, chat with other viewers and more...
The Always Challenging Founder Equity Issues
Certainly there's some post-processing going on on the Kinect; whether it's via CPU, ASIC, DSP, or FPGA I have no idea. I'd imagine there's some signed code image that is factory-installed to some Flash or EEPROM on the Kinect; it's probably upgradeable via USB, but I don't think it can rely on the code being transferred over every time, since the posted driver gets depth images off the Kinect without doing so.

EDIT: The link posted by another commenter http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/406... (Step 11) shows that the Prime Sense reference platform has Flash storage, almost certainly for code and calibration data.
Indeed. The author of this article is pretty badly misinformed.
Produce Creative Suite for Linux
Thanks! I do think functionality that answers those kinds of queries would be engaging and fun to use. I structured my database with support for concepts like weeks of the football season, conferences, divisions, franchises, etc. with the idea that people easily make queries for things like Kansas City's home win/loss/tie record in December, or a QB's playoff performances as a starter.

Will take a bit of backend and frontend implementation to add some of those concepts to the live site.
Aesthetics for starters. CoffeeScript http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ is what modern syntax should look like. White space instead of the bracket mess.

Go's public/private difference is capitalization of method names. That's hard to scan. Then you get chains that look.Like().A().Mess().

What the Go team seemed to do was take syntax from other languages they were familiar with, ugly syntax non-dynamic languages. They didn't focus on it, Pike said it wasn't important, semantics are important. So when you don't design syntax first, you get a syntax that's on the opposite end from Ruby.

Arguments func([] byte T* blah), who knows what goes where. That needs work.

The c-> and <-c is unintuitive, the syntax is so itsy bitsy it's easy to miss the difference. They should have keywords for that.

And in general the syntax is itsy bitsy, they feel that shorter words means quicker to read, but it's an overreaction to never ending lines commonly found in Java and C++.
No, because once something is bsd or apache licensed you could repackage it as a commercial vm.
MythTV 0.24 released
1. being haughty would be something like "unafraid to complain and taking a superior air when doing so". The sort that would say "My bags, boy" to a bellhop. A pretty traditional attitude for a Baroness to take on.

2. Mirror is a tabloid, generally considered somewhere between less reliable and a "tissue". Certainly prone to revel in the slip-ups of snobby government officials.
Ask HN: Java in 5 Years?
There's been a lot going on with Java in the past 2 months. Oracle sues Google. Oracle and IBM dump Apache.

Even commenters on HN are all over the map. Java will be fine. Java is the next Cobol. (Keep in mind that Cobol programmers make a TON now). Java should be splintered. IBM and Oracle are doing a good thing.

My question: where does HN really see Java in 5 years?
The don't get stuck in the past bit is a fine line you have to walk.

Its dumb to spend your whole creative life simply reproducing ideas that seemed obvious decades ago. You can get a lot better if you know what other people did, and then consciously build on it.
Agreed, I would be interested in his device if I didn't already have a media server with mplayer and youtube-viewer installed. I even have a nice apartment complex that unknowingly multicasts all available cable channels to me for free!

It was a great article though, even if it was a sales pitch.
Ask HN: Is Go a program language I should learn
I've been interested in Google's Go programming language for quite a while, but have been too busy to actually learn it. Has it matured enough to be readily useful if I spent the time learning it? Or if not readily useful, then at least a valuable use of my time to learn it?
>I'm not getting the point here - we all get pissed when they launch into a lecture about how important security is

I think their point is that she is the figurehead of the group setting the minor rules that govern the security protocols that she is complaining about. I think it's irony, but it seems irony is like Lupus ...
The lack of MSFT traction with startups has more to do with cost than cool. (Biz Spark is temporary - they get you in the end).

At my last startup job we used the microsoft stack very effectively - the cofounder was a microsoft guy, so that's what we used. Not a big deal.
Honestly the hardware is more interesting than the software. Yeah, skeleton tracking is cool, but the hardware is capable of so much more. 3D scanning, mapping, and localization for robots come to mind. With the microphone array built in, Kinect is basically begging to be the eyes and ears of a robot.
Interesting quote. But since Go is meant to be a "systems language", and the (only?) others are C and C++, which first appeared in 1972 and 1983 respectively, I can confidently assert that "modern language design techniques" are not all they're cracked up to be.

Moreover, I care not one whit that Google looks "really bad and unattractive to programming language researchers"; because I'm not one.
It's pretty awesome. I have it set up to lock my computer without any way (besides going to the tty screens) to unlock it... Any other way and I end up postponing the breaks and not taking them.
I think its fine, it made me picture dropping it in my pages.

But maybe it doesn't work from the PHB point of view.
I find it interesting that most of the guesses to this puzzle here are perfectly valid solutions; they do fit the pattern, but they just aren't he solution that you have in mind. And there's no reliable way to take the puzzle as given and arrive at your solution; it would have to be a matter of guessing the one of the multiple possible solutions that happens to be correct.
http://jclg.fr/projects/textcaptchahack/

Just tell me if you need the source code ;P
Lots of text there, and you certainly sound confident, but I tried an experiment, and it confirmed the claims of the article.
I used Paint.NET, loaded in an image, copied it to three layers. Adusted each layer to be a single colour channel, then changed each of the layers to 'Additive' mode.

Pixellating the blue layer - I could perceive at most some 'colour blotching', but no real loss of 'sharpness'

Pixellating the green layer - pixellation was easily visible.

Pixellating the red layer - the effect was somewhere in between.

You should give it a try. Here's my test Paint.NET image file with the layers all set up for you:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/714931/bluejay.pdn
Announcing Google Refine 2.0, a power tool for data wranglers
It's either a telephone's ring

Or Microsoft's bing

or a fisherman's nets

or the president's pets

or a ballerina's toes

or (something that grows

when dishonesty flows)

Pinocchio's nose?
Great article and insights. I just happened to listen today to Techzing's episode 56 which has as a guest the author of this same article.
Java is too entrenched as a language to seriously languish in 5 years. Its popularity for new projects might be significantly reduced, but there'll still be a ton of work available due to the built-up glut of projects and developers (even more so than COBOL ever experienced).

Java as an ecosystem and including the VM? We might see it splinter a little but the VM is even more entrenched than the language. There are too many other languages and ecosystems sitting on top of the JVM and its compatible libraries that I doubt any damage will be negligible in 5 years even if Oracle really screws things up from here.
The hopelessness and confusion that comes at the frontier of science is precisely why I stopped studying biochemistry for my bachelors degree. By the first 300 level course, people begin to start asking relatively simple questions that are not yet known to mankind. It freaked me out. I couldn't imagine ever discovering new knowledge and subsequently dropped out and into computer science...
Ask HN: Learning Heroku
I'm beginning to learn Heroku for a side-project. What are the best resources out there? Are there any books you'd recommend? Any good blog posts, documentation etc.? Please share them all!
The problem is, it turns out computer programs feel exactly the same way.
especially because VCs invest other people's money.
this is my old hero
I think we're arguing from different premises. I think that once you know the algorithm, getting an answer of "around 30% to 35%" is both easily within the grasp of a reasonably educated person, and within the spirit of the statement.

The problem is getting the algorithm at all. The idea of chasing cycles is pretty common to mathematicians, and should be well-known to computer scientists, but is not well-known otherwise. To that extent, finding the algorithm will come more naturally to people who are familiar with discreet math.

If you want an answer that's exactly right in the limit then you certainly need more math, and quite a lot of it, but simple counting arguments get you between 20% and 40%. A little more care gets you "around 30%."

Perhaps you think that's "advanced math." I don't, and have done it in math enrichment classes for 14 year-olds. It's not in their curriculum, but the curriculum is so impoverished that's no surprise to anyone.

<shrug> Not much point in debating it further.
Wordpress Display post thumbnails in RSS
It would be interesting to see if there are any cases where hackers bribe a software company's employee to disclose information on vulnerabilities.
Niklaus Wirth would disagree.

(I know, he would probably disagree with Pike, Thompson et al., too, but on different principles.)
> Pinocchio's nose

Bing
He is right you need to shed a whole lot more than you might be motivated for.

But also, success in the field of music requires a level of social assertiveness and competence that is way beyond what it is in technology. Nobody cares about your cool grooves or whatever, you have to fight to stay on board. But oh you can build my ecommerce site for me ?

I got out of Berklee in '92 and basically dicked around trying to get non-shitty gigs for a few years, not going to enough jams and auditions, until an ocean of interest and money came at me to do anything related to computers, after I had sworn them off to be a musician. I was interested in eating and not living in a box. The market decided for me on that one - scratch and claw your way to get some real music gigs, or step into this plush world of "wow you can program ?". Wish I could play again.
Brain gym helps elderly drivers avoid crashes
This is a big one - can't stress it enough. Expect a takedown notice from the NFL any time now - and their ground is pretty solid. I'd come up with a strategy to deal with that before you're up against a legal wall.
It came as a surprise because up to that point, someone had the answer. Even if you had great teachers and even if you're a problem solver...at the end of the day, someone had done what you were doing.

I think that's why most people I know that are on "the cutting edge" are very humble: either they got "it" right and know 40 people just as smart that went in one of 40 equally promising directions and got it wrong. Or they're one of the 41 people still trying to figure out just where the heck they can go from this apparent dead-end.

Then along comes 42...
Yeah. I thought it was some exec shooting his mouth off the first time. There didn't seem to be much a of a traditional DRM reason to lock the Kinect down. So the most obvious answer is it wasn't.
Sounds fishy to me
to go from not knowing how to make a <form> to doing all of this in 4 weeks is majorly impressive. and the site has a really nice, unique look and feel. good work!
Is it based on Scratch? http://scratch.mit.edu/

Just looks very similar in the layout of the program parts.
IMO:

I love capitalised public method names. It means I can immediately tell whether a method is public or private, in any context, e.g. on code pasted on HN.

look.Like().A().Mess() looks awful. Don't do it. Or do, it's up to you/ your company's style guide. You could easily avoid chained methods entirely.

Go is at the opposite end from Ruby. It's a systems language... The fact that they look different is no surprise.

func([] byte T* blah) - that's not Go.

send and receive are perfectly intuitive to me. Watch! You put it in the channel<-. You get it out of the <-channel. There is no "->".

"in general the syntax is itsy bitsy" - I can only suggest you try it for a bit longer until you get used to it.
Thanks for the user-defined groups idea. I probably won't get to it for a while (in favor of adding simpler functionality), but it could be really useful for frequent users or in conjunction with user-generated Protovis charts.

I probably need to rework the fumbles page, both because the page is presently showing incomplete data and because the presentation could be more intuitive.

I thought it was easiest to have all of that data on one page rather than to have separate pages for fumbles and fumble recoveries. Fumbles fall under a weird special teams / misc category of stats; offensive players often recover, plus there are weird cases where defenders recover the ball and then fumble themselves.

The postseason data is in the todo list. I just need to add the relevant control to the search filter form.
I spent ages looking at various timer software and finally found this one - been using it for years:
http://acapsoft.com/det.php?prog=Egg
The best thing is how few clicks it takes to start/reset a timer.
Tetris could prevent post-traumatic stress disorder flashbacks
Worth noting that Overnight Prints very frequently has coupons for significant savings: http://www.retailmenot.com/view/overnightprints.com

Currently it's 50% off premium biz cards. I think they're very hard to beat at that price.
Construction Begins on America's First Commercial Spaceship Factory