skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
and 17% stay at their job due to generous recognition.
Twisted (a python asynchronous network programming framework) does something similar, but inverted. Twisted functions return a Deferred object without blocking. A Deferred is a promise of a value, so rather than passing the callback into the function, you register a callback with the deferred, and the function promises to call it later.

This type of thing has a few nice properties -- you can easily register more than one callback, as well as using them as a pipeline (kind-of like monads in haskell), which are awkward to implement with callbacks.

As an aside, in python you can trick generators into turning synchronous-looking code into asynchronous, which can actually make things look a lot neater if done properly -- i'll provide code if anyone's interested.
This is going to sound fanboyish, which I hate, but there's a valid point in here:

At least as far as major new product categories go, Apple doesn't ship a Minimum Viable Product. They ship a Minimum Earthshaking Product. Anything that's strictly necessary for their new product to be earthshaking (multitouch, the little touches on the iPhone UI like the rubber band inertial scrolling) they will spend years to perfect; anything that's a niggling little feature (copy and paste) they'll leave for the next version.
That's pretty cool! One of my friends suggested to use dictionaries and bloom filters but I've wanted to build probabilistic language models.

Do you have any accuracy stats? I'm guessing my approach might work better in some cases because the models include frequency information too. Did you experience significant accuracy loss when adding new languages? Anyway, I'll run it over my test data and compare.
Why don't Americans want broadband?
I hate the future.
Indeed. That was the first thing I though: Macross!

It did not end very well. The movie/series explored a dark side of this tech.
The fact that the US military response was 'nope, wasn't us' instead of 'oh my fucking god can you believe somebody just fired a missile off the coast of LA!' pretty much tells me it was them.
I have to admit, I'm getting a little uncanny-valley vibe from that. The movement is too crisp (they've got to be digitizing the movement of a human dancer?) in combination with the cartoony appearance.
All very good points. And I agree there seem to be a lot of misunderstandings even now.

How about, though:

2) Agile does have a good process for estimation. Estimating by relative size removes all those "unknowns". This does allow for a velocity that doesn't vary between iterations. I have three teams that have a velocity that on varies 10% between iterations. There is more to Agile than just Estimation. There is the commitment that a team makes to deliver. So, even if their estimates are off, the team is more likely willing to put in the extra time to meet the commitment. Remember, in Agile you commit to product, not points.

With regards to accurate: it isn't supposed to be accurate. It is supposed to be reliable.

4. With regards to documentation, no light design, etc. This stuff always seems so mis-understood. Agile says you do enough documentation/design to make it to the next game. But yes, not a silver bullet.

5. Agile requires any issues brought up by a retrospective to be placed in front of the backlog. I guess if management isn't willing to allow that, then they aren't following Agile. In the end, it is really all about execution which has nothing to do with Agile itself. Agile just affirms that you need to continually reflect and improve on the process itself. It doesn't explain how to manage that.

6. It is true this would be silly to say. And there is Behavior Driven Development (BDD) which requires you to test your system from end to end. There is also continual integration (CI) which allows "heavy tests" to be run periodically as opposed to continually during development.

Please note, I didn't make these "rules". I just follow them and it has worked really well for me.
In SunDog, you'd start out without much cash, but you also started with a spaceship. Now, in order to keep the spaceship you had to fulfill a contract. To fulfill that contract, you had to make money to keep the ship going, and you had to explore a bunch of planets. The spaceship was reasonably roomy, could land on planets, and had a large all-terrain vehicle for exploring the surface and bringing back cargo.

I could see not needing an apartment, if I had an FTL spaceship like that.
It's worse than that. Imagine if you robbed several thousand people's houses and stole their mp3 players. Then you started throwing the mp3 players at someone's storefront, breaking glass, breaking dishes, causing a mess, preventing patrons from entering, etc. In what crazy world would you not be harshly punished for such multiple crimes?

The reality is even worse than this, as the attacker in question also stole personal financial information (CC#s, SSNs, etc.) from his botnet victims.
Amazon patents bad gift defense system: "gift conversions"
Living in Canada is not living abroad... unless you're Michael Arrington (judging from last nights post even if it was tongue in cheek).

Scratch that... maybe living in Quebec City could qualify. Ha!
My point is that data portability should be transitive. If by manually entering a friend's email address I 'own' that data, and it is thus valid for me to export, any service that imports that data should also allow exporting it. Otherwise it's lossy if I want to move on to another service.

In the FB case it's perfectly reasonable to prevent me from exporting data that I didn't provide, especially if another user provided it and has set privacy controls around it.
That article sums it up nicely. If you have employ a flexible design from the start, it is really simple to use media queries to automatically adapt your site to the user's browser.

I usually develop for three main sizes. The standard 960, the iPad, and smart phones. And typically only have to tweak specific elements.
Back when I was an IT consultant, I used to visit two clients a day and then have to tally the hours and enter into our billing software later each evening. I could not do this every evening so sometimes I would have to guess the hours spent several days later. It was a real pain. Something like this, targeted to IT consultants or IT consulting firms as an automatic billing tool would be very useful.
Ask HN: moving to Thailand for 2-6 months, any advices? Anyone join me?
So I decided I should do this some time, just to change the scenes and boost productivity, so this December I'm probably moving to Thailand for 2-6 months where I'm going to code the hell out of my current projects. However I'm not really sure where do I ask a couple of things I'm concerned about. I was hoping some HN people lived/are living there and could give me a valuable advice.

I'm mostly concerned about renting an apartment:
1. Is it a good idea to look up an apartment on the internet (if so, what's the best website?)
2. What are the usual agencies fees and other conditions there? How much do you actually pay if you get an apartment for $x? Is it $2x? $3x?
3. What can go wrong in the process of renting an apartment?
4. I heard that most apartments are rented for 6 months or more. Does that mean I lose some money if I move out earlier?

Also, if anyone was thinking about doing the same, you are welcome to join me. Not suggesting living together, but meeting up and making friends could be exciting. And I would also be glad to meet people who already live there.

Thanks, HN.
I agree that Flash is awful. But there are two different arguments here:

1) Flash is awful

2) Flash is the _only_ contributor to power drain so lets vilify it, and let's ignore HTML5 ads for now. (this was DaringFireball's implication)

The article does a wonderful job of demonstrating a very near future where John Gruber's Macbook will have 2 hours of battery life thanks to spinning gerbil HTML5 ads.

Again, I'm all for disabling Flash, but DF's constant championing of HTML5 as a panacea for all of Flash's forthcomings needs to be stopped (it's becoming a religion).

If anything, this article encourages a more constructive discussion than the trolling DF does.
I tried applying to them a while back with no dice. They seem like a really cool company to work for and I really like their product. It's disheartening to see their ads for engineers everywhere I go, but maybe I dont qualify as top-notch at this point.
Blocking Stress Hormone Improves Memory In Old Mice
With something like 1 trillion dollars in credit card debt in the U.S. I'm think it's safe to say many aren't "living in the future" at all.
Maybe the idea is that we're not just proving that we're capable of launching missiles that way, but that we have enough of them to waste some on pointless launches. If we only had one to protect our whole west coast, we wouldn't launch it without good reason.
Absolutely. Just because Oracle owns the test suite that "certifies" Java does not mean it won't go on. There are a lot of heavy hitters that are stakeholders, and they are very incentivized to protect the stack.

> versions from some combination of IBM, Apache, RedHat, Eclipse, etc.

To expand: don't forget about VMware (SpringSource), JBoss, Azul Systems, Qualcomm, Siemens, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and, of course, Google (Android).

Oracle will hear from them, as it has seats on most of the major orgs, including OSGi, where most of the Telecom players live.
Please do so sooner than later as something like the limit of simultaneous chatters in Campfire has been an issue for us in the past. I've got our HR guy looking into upgrading but we've got little in terms of comparisons to go on.
Ask HN: Review my Plugin - Landing Pages for WordPress
Max Foundry just launched our first product - a plugin for WordPress to make creating Landing Pages extremely simple and easy. This is our MVP that we have been working on for a couple months and are looking for as much feedback as we can get.

http://maxfoundry.com/plugins/landing-page

This has been a unique (and great) experience for me because unlike Adzerk and TekPub I am a minority stake founder in this company. I have been able to help come up with the idea, provide feedback on development, and help with marketing/advertising without it detracting too much from my other ventures.
http://maxfoundry.com/plugins/landing-page - clickable
I often wonder if the mild alcoholism of my youth (drinking to blackout roughly once every month, starting at age 16) has given me any lasting impairment. Certainly, I have no terrible damage since I am highly functional at an intellectually demanding job. But I've always wondered if I took an edge off my memory. My "prospective memory" (remembering to complete tasks without reminder) seems to be much worse than average, but it's hard to tell if this is within natural variation and, even if so, if my alcohol use affected it.

I've read in a few places that alcoholism in children and teens leads to demonstrated long-term memory effects, especially for prospective memory. Does anyone know the level of alcohol consumption at which this effect becomes measurable? Is this damage permanent? (My google-fu seems inadequate.)

I suspect that researchers simply don't have the data to make precise confident statements about damage that is marginal (and, hence, is hard to measure).
Why not move to Java EE 6 platform?
I dislike promoting my most valuable work, because the most valuable work I do isn't glamorous - it's more often dirty and tedious (where there's muck, there's brass... but who wants to talk about muck?).
+1 on the Keepass/Dropbox combo. You can also get an iphone app that syncs up with your dropbox keepass database called iKeepass.
Even Python is more pleasant to debug in.
Thank you for the help offer. I am considering China is one of the destinations, though I was concerned about where to live and work. I'll take a look at Kunming.
You guys should def take a look at the recently added Build Script..

it's Ant-based and does all the common tasks you're supposed to be doing: concat&minify css&js, optimizes jpgs & pngs, basic to agressive html minification, filename revving (to pair with heavy expires caching), and removal of development only code (console.log, profiling, test suite).

https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/wiki/Build-sc...

It's still a work in progress but combine this with the provided apache/nginx/lighttpd config and you'll be hitting 95 point marks in YSlow. Should save a lot of time with these common tasks/best practices.
I'm not saying the HTML boilerplate is useless. I'm saying that something less bare-bones is useful.

Something less bare-bones can also be used as a base for anything. Deleting unused elements is easy.

The aside was intended to hold a variety of content. You're right that the sample content is navigation. I will look at making it a nav within the aside.
Pure self-promotion is a naive strategy. Effective promotion of one's own work comes as an expected side effect of other more desirable activities. Sort of like getting good SEO by posting useful content on your company blog.

Rather than focusing on making yourself known, focus on identifying people who need problems solved. Meet with them directly, make sure they know you want to help, make sure they are comfortable with your solutions.

You should also make a point to identify and promote the successes of people you work with. In doing so you'll improve the team culture around you. Some those people will remember you kindly and promote your own stuff for you when appropriate.

Spend a lot of energy on problem solving and professional networking and you'll get there.
> ECMA doesn't require efficient tail recursion. Caveat programmer.

You can always use setTimeout to call your tail, which has the neat effect that your CPS "threads" become cooperatively multitasked and can progress alongside each other. Just replace "foo()" tail calls with "setTimeout(foo, 0)".

And the downside that you're nuking your stack every time, making debugging quite a bit harder.
This is such a predictable reaction to the threat.

9/11 - ban all sharp edges, nailcutters and knitting needles included.

Richard Reid - make everyone take off their shoes.

The bipartite liquid bomb plot - strict controls on amount of liquid, except for contact lens solution (!?!)

The Underwear Bomber (a.k.a. Mr Fizzypants) - intrusive pat down searches ("encounter resistance") or nudie X-rays.

Yemeni printer cartidge shipping plot - ban printer ink and toner.

Geez, you'd think that the TSA would learn since they've been burned 5 times, or that whatever terror organizations exist would start doing stuff just to see how far they could push the TSA.

Or maybe that the rest of us would learn that the TSA is making it up as they go along and not actually preventing anything, just inconveniencing everyone with nonsensical civil liberties violations.
I think the reason I was 'surprised' is that I expected the 'good for sudden bursts of CPU' to be what it was good for, rather than an actual hard limitation on how it works. Perhaps this is because I'm not terribly familiar with how EC2 is managed behind the scenes, being a new convert from Rackspace.

My post was mostly meant to illustrate that Amazon puts hard limits on how your VM operates (which makes it inconsistent over time under load), vs. Rackspace, which gives you a constant amount of CPU capacity all the time.
Great point! I am not looking to avoid fellow countrymen, rather to immerse myself in a completely different environment. I can see how having expats to talk to would be of a great benefit.
I sat over the shoulder of a co-worker who tried it out when they ran their $100 deal a while back. From what I saw, which was probably close to 9 months ago, it's a pretty impressive tool. Lists off drug reactions, probable diseases, where you father's family was from etc, and provides references to studies that support those characteristics.
I disagree with the include files section.

As long as each file has a proper include guard, it won't matter how many times you've included a file. I'd much rather have the preprocessor figure out when and where to include a file than do it myself. Maybe this was a significant performance issue in 1989, but it shouldn't be anymore.

That said, you should only include files that are direct dependencies. There's no need to include stdio.h in every other file.
OpenBSD gets much improved VMWare support
Oh, cool! Big misconception on my part, thanks for clearing it up :)
1. No, get it when you're there. Reserve the first two weeks to get settled and organized.
We're going to get 3D ads. This is not a maybe; the ability is there, so it will happen. Anything else is wishful thinking.

And they won't be rotating cube demos - no, the designers will instance an entire 3D engine, and they'll start dumping in expensive shaders and high-poly models that "work for them" on a high-end desktop. And then web sites load three or four of these ads. No optimization or acceleration is going to tame such monstrosities. Your netbook might hang just trying to load the page, forcing you to use an ad blocker whether or not you want one.

The long-term solution is for ad networks to minimize client-side tricks and stick to safer performance envelopes(images or video).
Blackhat 2010 video on remote timing attacks
I've considered studying abroad, though I'm not sure how competitive the universities are. Good point though, I'll investigate this further. Do you know if after graduating you get a temporary work visa like in US?
You want a reference to a study about mice who fly planes? Seriously?
I'll definitely try and drop by for the next meetup ..
Clearly it's a weather balloon...
I haven't lived in thailand, but lived in China for a year, and I find that anything found on the internet that is in english has the rents raised substantially.

You may want to start by staying at a hostel and becoming friendly with the hostel staff. They usually have friends who know friends who will be able to help you out for sure.

You may also want to bring a bit of money to hire someone from the country (in china you can pay around $500-$600/month for a full time university graduate who majored english) to be your personal assistant while getting things set up for you. In fact I would highly recommend this.

In China, we had to sign a year lease, but actually got out of it early and it wasn't a hassle at all but that may just be that our landlords were great.

Another idea you may want to try is to use something like couchsurfing.com just to meet local expats there. When I lived in the Caribbean I used to let people couch surf and would introduce them to the locals that would show them what they wanted to see/do. You don't even need to stay at their house, you can just ask them questions through the website.

Good luck on your adventure, I haven't gotten to Thailand yet, but as soon as I can make it out there, I will. Iceland is next on my list.
I think rudimentary is a good descriptor in this instance.

It can mean "being in the earliest stages of development" or "basic; minimal"
Yeah, thanks. I was thinking exactly that. Any tips on the agencies to go to then?
Wider is better...until problems begin. Apple.com's chosen 984px width is a good choice, for a variety of reasons: http://j.mp/HowWide
Privacy and the User Experience
That sounds like a great time. I wouldn't mind living in the country side for some time, I'm sure there pluses and minuses to living in a city like Kyoto or living in the country side.
Offer HN: Berkeley hackers in next week's YC interviews
I'll be at Philz Coffee from 1pm - 3pm on Shattuck ave. If you guys are in the interview round next week, and want to chat, let me know. I know I had a million questions before the two YC interviews I did, the latter being successful.

Mention / DM me on twitter: http://twitter.com/kineticac
Accelerating Future » Darpa Aims to Create Intelligence
heroku has a free plan, so there's no reason not jump head first into a Ruby app.
This is how flash player now works, with the latest release it drops the frame rate of the flash movie to something like 2-3 frames per second if the movie is not visible in the browser.

Flash player is also single threaded so executes code on a single cpu core, but it does rendering using multiple cores. If you are seeing a single core spike to 100% usage then it is a sign of badly coded actionscript (onFrameEnter event handlers are very popular with designers who cut and paste as2 code), if you are seeing multiple cores at around 100% then it is a rendering issue, i.e. trying to redraw the entire stage every frame and/or a very high frame rate (> 30 fps).

I'm not sure if code attached to the frame in the Flash IDE would also cause multiple cores to spike, or if this also executes in the single threaded cycle. But again, having actionscript inside the .fla instead of separate .as files is a sign of a poorly designed/developed flash application.
Has SVGWeb really brought SVG to IE?
For many years, anyone who used SVG scoffed at IE's lack of support. Last year, Google announced a project to bring SVG to IE6,7,8 and many looked forward to the promises. But a year later, svg still lacks basic support for internal and external CSS. Nonfunctional within iframes. Still riddled with enigmatic hacks which only fail in certain contexts.<p>If you have had any measure of success with svgweb please post. Frustrations also welcome.
I may be biased because D has been my favorite language for more than five years now, but, well, it's good enough to have been my favorite language for more than five years now.
Thanks for this valuable input. I will probably use some of the advices. And couchesurfing.com is exactly what I've been looking for.
I haven't visit Vancouver, but I've been to Quebec City and Montreal. I imagine Vancouver to be very different from Quebec, just like LA is different from Boston or New York (some would argue including the language), however, in US we're Americans and thus certain cultural aspects hold true. Living in Canada would be different from living in US, maybe not from the language perspective, but definitely from a cultural perspective.

I am basing this on my own assumptions, which could be quite wrong, please correct me if I'm making the wrong assumptions.
> When you get to the airport and there is a 3-hour backlog for patdowns but no line for the ionizing radiation backscatter, are you going to miss your flight?

You should be at the airport a couple hours earlier...
Crowdsourcing Surveillance