skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not true at all. The casinos that cater to them make fortunes from high rollers. The average person on the Vegas strip blows something like $20 a day in gaming and has a total gaming budget of about $600 per trip. High rollers bet big enough that an unusual winning or losing streak can shift a casino's quarterly results by 5% or more.

And Amex does have a black card, it's not a rumor (though there are many untrue rumors about it). I know a holder, who not coincidentally is how I know so much about comp programs and how casinos treat high rollers.
I'm getting the impression that very few of you actually read the TechCrunch article. I stated very clearly that you only need three people (if that) to build an app like Matt. Carsonified has nine people so we used all of them to build the app. Did we need to? Of course not. We just gave a task to everyone and let them get on with it. Quite a few people on the team are not technical so they couldn't chip in with the design or dev.
Better:

"I started WindyCitizen.com to give people . . ."

"When I/we started WindyCitizen.com . . . but now . . ."
You've just exposed one of my objections against this type of limit: it's arbitrary. -5? -10? -15?... I don't like arbitrary limits if we can do without.
Until then make use of your bicycle and work more often from home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_Card
Google, You Can Eat My Cookies Anytime
Wasn't peakstream just a quick flip of the stanford brook gpu research?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060918-7763.html

The new company is entering the public eye with $17 million in funding and a leadership roster that includes former executives and tech guys from Sun, VMWare, NVIDIA, and NetApp. PeakStream's Chief Scientist is Prof. Pat Hanrahan of Stanford, who was formerly involved with Stanford's stream processing research endeavor, the Brook project. The Brook project's work on using GPUs as stream processors formed the foundation on which PeakStream has built their newly announced product.
Hey everyone! Just got back from taping. It went pretty well. I wore a blue suit (blue shirt, dark tie) and while I don't think I knocked it out of the park, I certainly did alright.

It was an 8 minute segment and I was on a panel with two guys significantly older than myself, a college prof. and a local comedian, both frequent guests on the program.

Right before we went on they told us to keep it light and fun, which we did more or less.

I got a plug from the announcer at the beginning and, I can't remember, but I think I worked in another mention later on. They said the URL would be on the screen with my name during my introduction.

My main goal was to get invited back. I see a lot of the same faces again and again....and a friend of mine is a producer there, which is how I got the call. So while I could have probably been wittier (though I think I did alright) I'm pleased with how it turned out and I made some contacts.

Now it'll be interesting to see the impact of going on the show on our site traffic, if any.
Should people in glass Facebook offices throw stones?
Pluribo auto-summarizes user reviews on the Internet
http://gravityrd.com/ - Guys from Gravity team in the Netflix prize.
One of the 280Slides guys said their IE6 # was 6% or so, as another data point.
"Sure, but their programs usually leak memory (ever use Firefox?), and their libraries handle errors by terminating the whole program (see PulseAudio; any error condition immediately calls exit(1))."

That's a poorly written program. You can just as easily System.exit(1) in Java, or to do it a more Javaesque way, throw new Error("im too lazy to do this right").
Why are you automatically assuming that the maintenance costs of a Lisp app are lower than of a Python app?

Lisp as a concept is very powerful. The current dialects, their implementations, respective libraries and package management systems on the other hand have often gotten in my way. For example take a look at http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.cclan.general/807
The article is over two years old at this point. SBCL works fine on Macs now, and OpenMCL (now called Clozure CL) supports Unicode.

(NB: I am employed by Clozure)
I'll agree that coders, writers, and artists are all in the same position: what we produce is easily copied, so relying on difficulty of copying for our revenue stream is a bad idea.

I'm not sure why you make a distinction between coders and those other groups, here.

Also, while I appreciate that this is ultimately the same issue as the death of privacy, there seem to be a lot of people who want to both strengthen privacy laws and abolish copyright. In this sense, you're less confused than that group, anyway. :)
Why is that good news? Are you still waiting for Lisp to get popular and to make all these problems go away?
Might be considered outstanding when compared to no support at all. You're right though, Unicode in Python could be much better, but on the other hand I've never had Python's Unicode support get in my way.
Mini Site Profits Exposed In This **KILLER ** FREE Video Course
Here’s my latest review for you that I promised. So let’s dive in. Most Internet marketers understand that having mini sites is the fastest and easiest way to make money online. They don’t require a lot of time, energy, or money to set up, and once you’ve got one up and running, you can sit back and just collect money from all the sales you’re making.
Google adds 'Privacy' link to front page
Serverbeach
How in the world did you stumble upon this one? I have to know the whole process.
> I don't think it's very valuable to know

I'd actually claim that C is very valuable to know, and while I'm at it, so is assembly. Pretty much all high level languages are written in C (or in a language that is itself written in C). Anyone that doesn't understand enough about how a modern CPU operates and cannot implement a compiler/interpreter for a higher level language in C should not claim to be a hacker.
Y Combinator Diaries: Installment #4
I'm sure you'll find many a great solution here but for what it's worth, I've dealt with the Strands guys and they have a terrific team. I'm sure they'll try to work out your issues with you if they see potential...
The only reason for recommending spawning processes is if you live in a non-threaded environment like Python, Ruby, Perl or Common Lisp. In a C/C++/Java world it is the normal thing to do and it generally makes communication between those threaded tasks 10x simpler.

Don't get me wrong, I love languages like Python or Ruby and I hack stuff with it daily. I would just never do high performance stuff with them.

It's my observation that the 'threads are evil' mantra only seems to be sung by people who have never really experienced working with a really thread safe environment. It's like being stuck in the early Linux/BSD days.

We live in the multi-core era. Today 8 cores are not unusual, many-more-cores are coming. I seriously think that we're going to see some fallout with regards to programming environments that can't keep up.
I think the point is that the problem isn't in the language core, but in more superficial things like libraries.
jrockway: you misunderstood my intentions. I don't code C nor Java, I was merely pointing out that it is way too early to declare C obsolete, since so much C-derived development is going on.

In case you're familiar with gcj, what's the status of that project? Their page hasn't been updating lately, is it being actively maintained? It looks like the most painless way to integrate some Java code I have with Ruby... and I don't wan to bet on a dying horse :)

And as a side note, regarding "Beating the Averages": there are many ways to beat the averages, and beating them ONLY by using a higher level language is like beating them with Aeron chairs: yes, some languages give you productivity boost over others, but I disagree with Paul on magnitude of that effect - in fact I'd say that availability of certain libraries beats any boost provided by language alone.

And, to conclude, here's a little example from real life: a group of programmers I know were working on some nifty AI stuff for automated document processing, and they were doing it in C++, which I disliked. They just discovered a totally different market in the embedded space, which allows them to grow and make money. Thanks for their language of choice (C++), they were able to beat an average Java/Python/Lisp-powered startup that doesn't have access to that segment.

Just saying... :)
More powerful language -> shorter, DRYer code -> less maintenance.

(Plus a few other reasons. See PG's essays, PG's Lisp books, and SICP if you don't know the other reasons.)

If you don't believe this, don't use Lisp. The guy writing the article does seem to believe it. He likes and respects Lisp. So he ought to analyze in the way I said.
"proclaiming the death of patterns due to closures and dynamic typing."

Can somebody explain that?
Be wary of evolutionary arguments. It is possible to rationalize any current behavior/biological trait based on a made up evolutionary theory. It is also easy to forget that the human body is a very imperfect system (and therefore should be open to hacking).

If he has data, that is another thing, but so far it seems the research really isn't good enough (on humans) to do anything more than conjecture.
"""I've been hearing how obsolete C is ever since high school"""

C will not be obsolete for a very long time. It is however completely silly to compare it with Java. Completely different and created for different purposes.
I know it's 2 years old, but it's fun to look back and see where we were, not too long ago.

His #1 need is "Outstanding Unicode support", and he's switching to Python for this. Just today there was a blog post that made the rounds, "The Truth About Unicode In Python" (http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2008/07/the-truth-about-unico...) that gripes about Unicode in Python!

One of the gripes about Python was that its internal representation is UCS-2 by default. In comparison, SBCL uses 21 bits internally, and his Python example works fine in SBCL (on the Mac, no less):

* (characterp #\MUSICAL_SYMBOL_G_CLEF)
T
* (char-name #\MUSICAL_SYMBOL_G_CLEF)
"MUSICAL_SYMBOL_G_CLEF"

I wonder if he had to make the choice again on a fresh project today which he would choose. Things change fast.
He could have just said "I only use stuff well-supported on OSX". This isn't about Lisp, really. He'll face this dilemma "X vs OSX" over and over and over again, where X can be anything, from latest vim goodies to some arbitrary libraries.

I was in the same situation and I simply ditched OSX: it just can't rival Linux as an ultimate programmers' world exploration vehicle. Ironically, it was Python and some Python libraries that drove me to Linux.

I have a Mac too, of course, as an ultimate Safari+Photoshop machine.
I dunno, I thought the thing looked pretty awesome. I'd feel like Maverick showing up to work in that!
Evolution does not create features by accident. I'm not proposing a trait. I'm proposing a lack of a trait (built-in long term life extension feature in humans), which is very different than proposing a trait, and wins by the default unless someone has an argument to the contrary.
we did the same thing earlier this year but with 11 different teams, who were challenged to make a working product in 48 hours.

great experience.

of course, we don't have a real company at the end of the event, but the goal is more about getting together, maybe find co-founders -- and well just hack things
Oh no! This post just taught me that Opera 9.5 still won't work with Google Groups... Dammit.
Summary: incompetent presenters use powerpoint badly. the incompetent event planners who hire them decided to blame powerpoint and make rules restricting its use. this is stupid and does not in fact solve the problem of having hired incompetent presenters.
That is a great clip and completely relevant. Thanks lakeeffect.
Why you only need 5 users for usability testing
....this aired in 2006....

I guess it's still an awesome Word.
What would you say changing your links from using underscores to hyphens would be? Is that gaming the system, or making a better website? I mean, from a programming perspective, it doesn't sound like it makes much difference, but from an SEO perspective, it makes a huge difference. Google recognizes words when they're hyphenated, but not necessarily when they're underscored. Your rankings will probably improve just by doing that. Its simple things like that that programmers should be aware of, and its not really gaming the system, its programming to match what Google recognizes.
In Netflix's case it's not that baseline recommendation (whether based on collaborative filtering or something else) is such a hard problem, it's that getting something statistically better than what they have is so hard. Decent recommendation based on CF was a well-understood problem over ten years ago.
It is common knowledge that IE 6 has serious bugs and problems. I'm not going to rehash them, because they were discussed in other responses to edw519's initial comment.
Ow, my eyes: Handy Randy for iPhone
Why is IT, alone out of every other business division, expected to provide common knowledge reasoning behind their decisions?
Yeah, Jax. You know, he might just be the founder of it.
This guy doesn't strike me as particularly bright. He is basically enumerating features of Google earth.
Wait, vim doesn't work on OSX?!
It's conveniently filed under finn bating:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/labels/Finn%20baiting.php

...at any rate, I just watched it again. I revisted all the old pleasures (the mostly-coordinated high-socks back-up dancing, the pyscho eyebrow work of the keyboardist at 0:06, the guitarist who seems to be reconsidering the communism of his fathers, etc) and learned some new things. For instance, I'm beginning to think the whole thing has homosexual overtones...
Picture, thousand words, etc etc..

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_gGwo1YUVIQg/RpYpNTwgJUI/AAAAAAAAApM/my...
For instance, I'm beginning to think the whole thing has homosexual overtones... You are nearer to the truth.

At any rate, ignore the downmods...that and this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFR-8NVjw-k qualify as classics.
The method is out of sync with how humans work.

Wrong.

The method works perfectly when done properly. Because it's perfectly in sync with how humans work.

So why don't most people know how? 2 possible reasons:

- All we really have to do is stay one step ahead of the users. So we don't have to be very good.

- The field is so young we still don't have adequate well-established standards and procedures. Imagine "release early and often" as the standards for law, medicine, or bridge building.

I've heard this argument too many times from people who have never done it right so they think it can't be done.
Ten XML Schemas you should know
The main problem is that most programmers never experience Unicode problems themselves. 7 bits is enough for most of us. So we only start using Unicode when the pain caused by incessant nagging exceeds the pain of implementing Unicode. So we never fix the Unicode problems out of curiosity, we fix them because people make us. No wonder we never learn.

The second problem is that we don't understand Unicode. Yes, we know that 7 bits isn't quite enough to represent all different characters, and that you have utf-8 and UTC, and so forth, but we really don't care enought to find out how it really works. We read some articles online, and we start using wchar_t / TCHAR instead of char, but that's basically it. Why bother with Unicode when you can simply write 'resume' instead of 'résumé'? Nobody cares.

That's what it boils down to:

Nobody really cares. So it doesn't get fixed.

The only mystery is why people still expect Unicode support to "just happen".
It probably depends on how "focused" your software is. If you have a very specific user in mind, you can test against as few as 3 users that fit the description, just to see if your specific user actually works the way you thought. If your software is trying to appeal to a wide range of users you might have to go up to 15 or even more.
What happens when they realize they built the wrong product or need to tweak it or pivot 180 degrees to follow a good opportunity? Helps to have programmers in house - or be a programmer.
Vim works allright, but getting the latest version with all your favorite plugins won't be as easy as "apt-get and fly". When Leopard came out I was left without gvim for some time.
First let me say I've never done usability testing.

But from what I've read, the right way to do it would be multiple distinct tests, each with a group of 3-5 users, with one group for each major user category. Lots of tests with small user groups is much better than fewer tests with more users.
HTTP Error 418: "I'm a teapot"
Wealth as an evolutionary force: rich women had 2x as many grandchildren as poor ones
It's got a cool look to it. Like a little rocket.

At only 660 pounds though sitting a 350lb American in it is going to seriously degrade that mileage figure. There is a point coming in the near future (with these ultralight cars) where being a bit on the tubby side is going to directly impact your commuting costs!
Early Stage Fundraising Advice for Tough Times
Programming is not like murdering chickens.
Coolhunting II: the n+1 dimension
Scientists find Amazonian tribe that has no words to express numbers
Google Should Deliver Its YouTube Data to Viacom in Paper Form
Mac OS X market share surges 32% in one year
Just curious as to why you put "too cold" next to Portland but not next to the places that are actually cold.

San Francisco is also too cold. I live in Mountain View which is 10-15 degrees warmer.

Just assume that any place colder than SF is too cold for my tastes. (But then again, I've been warped by living in Texas for many years before coming to the valley.)
Iraq doesn't affect anyone in the US except for the volunteer military made up of mostly people who are more than happy to be there,..

Because there's nothing quite like 2 back to back extended tours in third-world hell while they foreclose on your house back home and kick your wife and 3 year old out on the street to put a smile on your face and a song in your heart. Sheesh.
Volkswagen to Make Limited Edition of 1-Liter Car (282 MPG) in 2010
Agreed, but I wouldn't say it that way. Who knows, he might be lurking here. And I wouldn't say that in person.
Wouldn't it be cool if giant rubber snakes saved the world? See the 'Anaconda' prototype
Ruby Releases Are Scary (Or: How CI Can Save Your Ass)
Hidden Oil Subsidies: We Need to end Them
At the intersection of the site's title (camendesign), the article's subject (people who need to stop writing software) and the piss-poor scrolling behavior (you have to see it to believe it!) lies great irony.
I'm so glad they turned that from a 2 click find to a 1 click...
It really doesn't get much better than (p - 1)/t^n, where n is larger if you want age to be more of a handicap.
Oh my god the put SOAP and WSDL on top of the list!? What kind of cruel people wrote that article!?

Seriously .. if there is something you want to AVOID, it is knowing SOAP and WSDL internals. Too complex. Too bloated.
Immune to Critics, Secret-Spilling Wikileaks Plans to Save Journalism ... and the World
sorta. I mean the point of MobileMe is that you can access your email, calendar, etc... from any browser. But in this case, it means ie 7+. So it's not really meant for people who sit on their Mac at home perse.

Also, it is aimed at iPhone users, which is a fair percentage windows users.
Forget biology; introducing The Materials Genome Project
Mathematically speaking, would it make a difference to use p^2 / t instead of p / t^2?
Firefox 3 actually installs in some locked-down corporate networks. I was able to install FF3 (just not in /program files/), even though I can't install much else--including upgrading flash!

I can only assume that FF3 was cleverly designed to be installable more widely than most other programs, which refuse to install.
Free Online Games
Large online games collection, daily updated with the newest and best games.
Time for Linux?

(I still run an XP install from years ago but spend most of my time in a VMware Fedora window).
This sure is a low-quality post for someone like nickb.
On the flip side, with all PR and no product, you dont have much either. Like you said, an idea only goes so far. You have to have the actual implementation.

Just look at Qtrax. They had pretty good PR, but no product to sell. So they blew their big launch and then blew their relaunch as well later on because their product didn't perform as well as PR said it would.
Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot (vid)
I think OpenMCL works fine on the PPC architecture. Not sure about SBCL.
I don't think they'd bother trying to fake people out by releasing a different ranking algorithm than they used on the site. There wouldn't be any point anyway. Knowing how to get onto the frontpage of a venetian-blind site like Digg might be useful to spammers, but knowing the ranking algorithm of a bubble-up site like Reddit or News.YC wouldn't help them much.
Kiva robot Nutcracker video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdmtya8emMw
The iPhone is Going to Bomb
does OpenMCL run on 32bit intel chips yet?
And it's already been removed. Jokes don't last long in Wikipedia.
Twitter Revisited
I don't think 5 users is a right sample size. Lets face it..if you are a techie, chances are you'll get other techies to test your stuff. So whats going to happen when a 80 year old man logs onto your site and does something to crash it?

You know that combination of inputs that you would never suspect a sane person would ever want to do?
Collective Intelligence book has some examples - http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...

I am not sure which technology you've used to develop your site, but Project Aura being developed by Sun developers looks really promising and is open source. Here is a link to their PDF from this year's JavaOne, they are suppose to launch it within the next month. http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2008/pdf/TS...
I seriously think that we're going to see some fallout with regards to programming environments that can't keep up.

Probably not. People are creatures of habit and will continue doing whatever they were doing before. That doesn't mean we need to care though.

But anyway, threads aren't the solution. They are way too low-level and too easy to screw up. That's why I recommended STM previously.
But C doesn't have any mechanism other than exiting or returning a value that indicates "false". Both are non-optimal.

One (exit) makes the code simpler, but makes the consuming application extremely flaky; the other bloats the code with a weird API where functions modify their arguments:

errorcode_t do_some_work(int arg1, int arg2, int *result)

and forces the client code to check every single error and decide right then and there what to do.

It's possible to write code that way, but why would you want to? This is a solved problem; why keep using a square wheel when round ones are available?

(Yes, there is longjmp. Still a lot of work to use that square wheel.)

In the end, don't think I care what programming language you use. It doesn't matter. But I do think that C should be dying off now; it is much less useful than it was 30 years ago.
It's not really a joke, it's actually from an RFC. The IETF has a noble tradition of publishing amusing RFCs on April 1st. cf. IP datagrams on Avian Carriers, Electricity over IP et al.
misleading title. should be "The iPhone is Going to Bomb in Canada"
I will be sure to apply that logic to other situations ;)

"You know, I'm outstandingly attractive when you compare me to nobody at all!"