skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there is a tension between the user's desire for simplicity and the underlying complexity of the data involved.

So the user thinks: "I want to know how to fix X". But it's never really what they want to know. It's always something different.

This is the same problem software development teams face when asked to fix something. Simply because you can state it in a sentence does not mean you are communicating to me all I need to know to help you.
To me, this falls into the (rather large) class of libraries that, while a viable library in most languages, are almost too obvious to be worth talking about in a more expressive language such as Clojure.

In fact, to write a "map/reduce framework" for a lisp is to come full circle. Google's map-reduce algorithm was an extension of the well-known map and reduce functions from functional programming to massively distributed computing. To me, it's not particularly interesting to take the map/reduce engine and shrink it back down to its single-machine, functional roots, because that's already been done - it's what inspired map/reduce in the first place. It's called two functions: map and reduce.

That said, the posted code is good for pedagogical purposes, for people who want to understand how map/reduce works. But I'd argue that Clojure really doesn't need a "map/reduce framework." As a functional language, it is a map reduce framework. Almost every Clojure program will probably end up using the map/reduce pattern at some point, almost by default.
I think it has support for some of those. Here's an article on multitouch support in Windows 7: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/archive/b/windowsvista/ar... I haven't used it (or even read the article) so I have no idea if it's any good. App discovery is the same as it is on a regular Windows desktop, presumably - that is, less hand holding but more freedom. I'm sure the tablet manufacturers will include drivers for whichever sensors they embed in their tablets. Perhaps there will be some standardization so that apps can rely on them, I don't know, that sounds like it would be in everyone's interest. I don't really understand why you're asking these questions, honestly...it's like you've forgotten how a full OS works.

I guess it's a question of whether you want a big smartphone or a tablet-shaped computer. I lean towards the latter, and I don't dispute that in general a Windows 7 tablet is going after a different market than the iPad.
whoa! $1000 for a 2 page mockup?
I'm happy to keep duplicate questions in the system, even if it means I repeat myself when I answer them.

But question askers need to show that they've done a little research first: if I can type a few words from the OP's question into Google and get a reasonable response, then the question's a candidate for closing.

(One phenomenon I've seen is "I don't believe it unless I see it on Stack Overflow". Somehow a Stack Overflow answer is better than the same information posted elsewhere...)
Also, iPad applications seem to be up to twice as expensive as iPhone applications -- even if they're essentially the same app. I expect the same mystical price expansion will happen for Mac apps.
Are they really? I still have to unplug one of my monitors during Ubuntu install because otherwise it just doesn't work. I also still have issues with setting up dual boot with Windows as the installer can't setup partitions properly (in some cases at least).
Bingo. This was definitely the case for a recent local freelancing/consulting job post; an associate took up the position and tipped me off to the Java/JavaScript mixup (though I don't think the post asked for X years experience).

Something to consider though... if they can't even accurately name the language, can they really judge the experience required in said language?
But doesn't that make it a compiler bug? If the root cause is that the compiler truncates data it shouldn't, does that mean the fundamental issue is a compiler bug?
> hsl color spectrum covers colors that RGB can't represent

This is simply false. HSL is a simple deformation of the RGB cube into a cylinder, as you can see in this nice diagram I drew up about a year ago: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Hsl...

> conversion algorithm will throw you back something with a few digits off

These are rounding errors, and shouldn’t be especially noticeable. So what?
Yep, I've seen this. I almost upvote correct answer (orphaned or not) even when I land at SO via google. I'm not an active participant.
It's not even as "simple" as changing Windows to work well on a tablet. Look at what it took to make the iPad a success:

1) Release a really slick smartphone that is a huge hit

2) Release arguably the most seamless and well integrated app marketplace in history

3) Get boatloads of developers to develop for the new platform

4) Release the iPad to a willing, educated audience, with a huge catalog of existing apps

That's a lot of moves to be behind. Changing the OS is a start, but far from sufficient.
The Secret History of Venture Hacks
Disclaimer: I'm no expert on PL research, and haven't read any of the texts you mentioned (bought myself Purely Functional Data Structures for Christmas, but it's sitting behind several other books on my to-read list). That said, the titles you mentioned reminded me of Steve Yegge's list of advanced reading for programmers:

http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ten-challenges

TaPL and PFDS are both on the list. Given what you wrote, I thought perhaps you'd be interested in some of the other entries, such as "Programming Language Pragmatics" or "The Essentials of Programming Languages".
Thanks! You were right, I'm less salary sensitive right now so I guess I need to start researching how equity packages work.

Appreciate your help!
Two interesting tidbits in 3 pages on topic of the logo:

"the company felt it no longer needed to reinforce its name at every turn"

and

"The new wordless logo also is better suited to the company's expansion beyond coffee into a wider array of business lines and into more international markets."

The second point makes good sense to me, the first not as much.

As in removing "Coffee" from the logo is a good idea.

But eliminating "Starbucks" entirely going to cost them brand association, hands down, unecessarily.
Click and it'll stay.
Extracting the Main Content from a Webpage (PHP)
Google Has Given Up On Social
Yes, that's it. I'm on my mobile right now (sorry) so I can't exactly check my code but as far as I can tell this was exactly the line. Sorry for not being more helpful but I didn't want to post some untested code that I just typed on a crappy touch screen...
A Computer Geek Fights Back – Shaking off Mr. Sloth
The website's colors hurt my eyes, the uneven height of strifes are also fairly annoying. However, the idea sounds interesting, and since it's on github, and I don't have to visit the website ever again, I'll give it a try!

If it does work as I expect it to work, this'll be a very nice addition to my collection of favourite tools.
In fact fundamental analysis is predicated on the very idea that company value is independent from stock market valuation.

How else can Warren Buffett make so much money investing in undervalued companies if their value is identical to valuation?
SLIME is cool, but the underlying communications protocol (SWANK) is not only network transparent, but also editor-agnostic. Besides Emacs, it's also used by MCLIDE and the Cusp plugin for Eclipse.
"Facebook is Google five years ago, and Google is Microsoft."

Ouch.
Best way to build a fast, scalable instant messaging bot?
Twitter is tricky. I very rarely if ever tweet about technical topics for a couple reasons:

1. I don't think anything technically interesting can be accurately explained in the 140 characters provided by Twitter.

2. Simply announcing what I'm working on is self-congratulatory back-patting. No one cares what I'm working on that hour.

3. I have many non-technical friends (e.g., no one else in my frat is CS). I would not alienate them from a conversation by only talking about tech all the time.
I killed my account a long time ago and haven't missed it.
My personal opinion is that the big gains in programming productivity in large projects have have to do with how code is organized and structured. The right abstractions are also key to keep the inherent complexity under control. It is not about implementing x feature in t time. It is more about implementing the feature in a coherent way, and the gain is long term. To measure and compare that, you would need to track 2 projects implementing the same features over a period of time. That experiment is hard to do.
I visited Quora a while back. It had a login page, nothing that really described what it was, no examples. I figured it was a walled garden that invited participants. From the front page, you still can't tell what it is or why it is worth taking the time to sign up. Maybe it is a decent service, but, they lost me on the landing page.

Path.com, maybe I'm stupid, is it a dating site?

Instagram was interesting and I was able to figure out what that site was almost immediately. Since I was around when the SX-70 Land came out, their design and presentation actually was interesting. Too bad I use Android.

A landing page should tell me precisely what you offer, in quick and simple terms so that I can see how that site is going to benefit me. I'm not going to sign up - no matter how easy it is - to investigate whether this site has anything of interest.

I'm still unsure what path.com is other than a hyper-local facebook newsstream.

Maybe Quora and Path are still in stealth mode and doing the google invitation rollout, but, Instagram does look interesting.
Google has most likely given up on replicating the social graph, since Facebook dominates. No doubt.

But what about social search?

I'm positive that Google has something up their sleeve.
Respectfully, I'm pretty sure you need to read up on SOX before you talk so stridently about it. SOX most definitely does increase the costs of going public to a point where it changes the types of companies that do go public. In the '90s, companies went public with little or no revenue. In the 2000s, you can't get anyone to underwrite you until you pass a fairly high 8-figures revenue threshold.
There will still be piracy. If anything, more, as those currently benefiting from obscurity of their chosen DRM and software will be lumped in with the high profile releases with unified DRM. So once the hard work is done, it'll be trivial to automatically crack and cross-post anything new that is posted to the store.

The benefits are all about discovery, performant hosting, confidence, and lower friction of purchase/installation/uninstallation.
EnergySavvy.com is looking for front and back end developers. EnergySavvy's goal is to make home energy efficiency easier for homeowners, so if you're interested in cleantech, this might be a good fit. Check out http://www.energysavvy.com/jobs/
In simple terms, this isn't really a 1000 core processor in the traditional sense, this is a reprogrammable GPU (which is close enough that the title makes sense). That's not necessarily either better or worse, but the title is a little sensational.

The really interesting part is at the end of the article when they quote the researchers saying "This is very early proof-of-concept work where we’re trying to demonstrate a convenient way to program FPGAs so that their potential to provide very fast processing power could be used much more widely in future computing and electronics." A more convenient way to program FPGAs goes along with things like CUDA/OpenCL to make massive data parallelism more accessible.
Put another way - in the last Ten years as an owner of:

o PowerBook - 2000
o PowerBook - 2003
o MBPro - 2007
o MBAir - 2010

I have purchased the following Applications:

o VMware Fusion+Upgrade
o Windows XP
o Microsoft Office (Twice - 2011 rocks my world)

Yet - I have 40 or 50 apps on my laptop (VLC, Colloquy, Acorn, ChickenofVNC, etc, etc..)

Looking at my iPad + IPhone, I see that I have approximately 200 applications, purchased, on average, for about $3 each + a few premium apps (Omnigrafflle, OmniFocus - $50/each) Subscriptions to the Economist, Zinio, PressReader, WSJ, and copies of Time, Wired, The New Yorker, PosSCi.

Reviewing my itunes Bills - I see I have spent approximately $40/month on applications - or about $1500 in the last three years, not even including content - which adds another $2k I don't even _think_ about purchasing $1.00 Apps, I just do it. I'm also comfortable buying, with a bit of research, the nicer $5- $10 Apps.

None of which seemed to have hurt the price points of Applications like Omnifocus/Omnigraffle that much.

I expect that my behavior on the iPhone/iPad will carry over to the Macintosh, once a nicely curated store is available for me.

I _love_ rewarding developers - I just need the channel that I feel comfortable in doing so. The Apple Store is that channel for me.
Can someone recommend a Lisp that will behave properly as a scripting language? By that I mean run quietly without a REPL, and honor this convention:

#!/usr/bin/lisp
anybody in or near tampa?
This article is ridiculous because the author does not address the fact that volume will increase dramatically: a $3 app on the Mac app store will undoubtedly sell many times, perhaps 10+ x, more than the app distributed on a CD/DVD via Amazon for $30.
Personally I like the LD of old games b/c somehow it left more to the imagination.
Google's library for dealing with URLs (C++)
Lower population density actually helps wireless internet

Not quite true. Wireless internet is most cost effective when population density is at an extreme on the scale. If the density is low then you can use fewer towers that have larger cells and if the density is high then you need more capital for the higher-capacity infrastructure, but your backhauls are shorter and you have a larger userbase to recoup the investment. I would bet that for wireless operators in Finland the Helsinki area, Turku, and low-population areas make money while Kuopio is probably a break-even region at best...
When did "powerful" start to correspond with "the sheer quantity of things that can be done at a minimum poor level of quality"?
A. If a "unit of wealth" is just a number, why can't I give ten identical copies of this number to ten people? The way encrypted exchange has been envisioned and really how it has to work is that the values are kept on smartcards and smartcard's possessors don't know all the information on the card and can't change that information at will. But a smartcard system is clearly far from the "utopia" you envision.

B. Assuming the impossibility that an encypted number would be enough, What "algorithm" could prove you've the destroyed the private key anyway?

C. Why couldn't someone else do the same thing and so why should we work with Bob's system when Mary's seems just as appealing? If Bob is German and Mary is French, it's logical to expect the German's to go with Bob's system and the French to go with Mary's. If human beings suddenly became massively more cooperative than they are today, a system of this sort might conceivably be organized - but in that case why bother since any money inherently adverserial. If everyone in the world is cooperating, they can just organize society in that fashion. If not, we'll muddle along with our current currency system as we muddle along with everything else.

D. An economy with only a fixed amount of value units actually doesn't work that well. Think about it. There is more and more valuable stuff produced each day for a larger and larger population. So with a fixed amount of value units, those units become more valuable each day. That is call "deflation". It creates a disincentive to buy stuff since your money will buy more tomorrow. That tends to cripple economic activity in the infamous "deflationary spiral". And, yes, the Gold standard did have this problem. The economy was not well served in the days when people actually carried gold (bank deposits representing are something different).

-- So yes indeed, seven ways from Sunday it can't be done and probably shouldn't be done. What could be done is returning to the gold standard but that still shouldn't be done (and certainly won't be done since it would require the acquiescence of the world's governments who stand to lose by it, not that many people would win from it).
Thank you. Definitely encouraging words and I am now going to jump in the deep end (Canonball!).
There's also some Python bindings for it: http://code.google.com/p/python-google-url/
It's important to note that (as far as I can tell) the author doesn't actually debunk the claim that good programmers are 10x more productive, only the claim that studies show that programmers are 10x as productive.

Personally, I think the author is unintentionally also pointing out the problem of relying on studies of programmer productivity: it's next to impossible to measure. I seriously doubt that there is no valid research on this because no one has gotten around to it. Too many peoples' businesses rely on understanding programmer productivity inside and out for that to be the case.

Personally, I agree with whoever it was that argued that we need to view this as a soft science like psychology or sociology. We need to focus on working in spite of our imperfect means of measuring productivity rather than dismissing all of our research based on it. Such is the nature of studying the human mind.
Ask HN: Anything getting you excited at CES 2011?
The massive amounts of mobile announcements are exciting to me. Also, seeing more and more TVs with app capability gets me excited for app developers.

CES, if nothing else gets my brain grinding through ideas.
'Virus' in Military Computers Disrupts Systems Nationwide (1988)
The (released) videos are new. The discussion about the hack itself was on HN previously at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049026.
Performance-tuning .NET apps with Event Tracing for Windows
"bitch" -- no never. I only express my disagreement.

Nobody posted "stolen" iPhone story here 6 months after the fact. The Dubai news story has been covered on TV and is very old. More cherry picked quote from the guidelines -- "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports ...."

You are right , hacking is not just about node.js. Personally speaking, I love articles from Academia , and maths , even when they are not related to programming languages.

This article is a stale crime/politics/current affairs type of story that does not belong here.
By "NoSQL" I'm referring distributed key/value stores. I know that's not quite right, there are other kinds.

Also, I'm not saying that NoSQL doesn't have any purpose. It definitely does, and long before NoSQL was hot, there were standalone b-trees like BerkeleyDB, Faircom and many others. It may have been unfair for me to drag NoSQL into this, but the question sure sounded like it was suggesting that the sun was setting on SQL due to something, and NoSQL was a reasonable guess for what that something was.
Does anyone else find the Lanyrd UI sloppy?

* Eigerdals Bold font: "i" character is messed up (it's way too tall)

* "Sign in with twitter" overlaps the text below it

* The other "Sign in with twitter" button is cut off

* Conferences today section is just poorly designed

* Trending topics: what does "trending" mean? Is this twitter?

* Topics page: tags that wrap onto 2 lines aren't vertically spaced

* Profile page: columns are too narrow + text too big for list of conferences

In general I think the site lacks some polish and focus. The coverage and books sections just seem tacked on without much thought.

I really like the idea I just think the site needs a good UX overhaul.
Neat indeed. Great, slick design, and clearly useful. I'm about to write the same functionality into my swombat.com codebase, so I can really see the use for it. Tweeted about it: http://twitter.com/swombat/status/22747385750888449
So now going to school and getting good grades isn't good enough? You have to also learn how to develop software at a level where you can contribute to OSS projects and blog/tweet about it? Glad I graduated a few years ago, I would never have gotten an internship or a job.
Salman Taseer Murdered: Salman Taseer laid to rest
Software development internships can pay very well. You can check glassdoor.com and see that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, et. al pay at least $5k/month.
I would suggest having folks enter their city, geocoding it, and then saving that lat/long into the database so it can be visualized as a map later.

Here's some HTML/JS code for a form + map:
http://pastebin.com/57nw4awx

And then you can follow this tutorial to create the map showing all the submissions:
http://www.hackerlunch.com/
I think the confusion was that others assumed you meant an unpaid internship. I'm not sure why. In our field, I assume an internship is paid unless explicitly told otherwise.
Though on the other hand, how else do you learn?
I was a big fan of 3D Dot Game Heroes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTP0hVlYRts
As the article points out (and I have before), even if it wasn't a myth, there's no interviewing technique to determine who is at what level.

Also, it should be kept in mind that there is a chance that the original study was contaminated by bad programmers. The truly bad - those who don't really know how to write code at all - are going to vastly underperform those of average competence.

If you had a test that screens out basic competency (an ability to handle CS 101 tasks like assignment, for instance) - how wide would the range be?

Certainly based on 1 study from the 60's... we can't make a good judgment. It's not even a coding study! Even if it was a coding study, it doesn't measure how well they work in teams, or how well they adapt to new languages, or the myriad other things that matter in a programmer's career.
.
Here's a question that deserves study - what interview techniques can make productive teams? What productivity difference is there between those good at brain teasers (programming ones or otherwise), and those that are bad at them? What about those given syntax questions? Those who feel like a good cultural fit? General IQ?
thanks this is very useful
One of the things that goes unmentioned and I think that this is an important thing, even for facebooks valuation that we have all been talking about:

With the right feedback loops companies can ramp up quickly like never before is true. But those same loops are in place for the site to down down very quickly too.

In the valuation for such companies analysts often use a multiple times revenue (or users etc). This multiple is based on the old school model that it took time for companies to die, for competitors to emerge etc. Doubt that is true anymore. One bad move that pisses off the community and people will leave in droves too. Digg anyone?
Wal-mart is a bad example to use here. They actually tell companies what they are willing to pay; and everyone falls in line. Thats why some products you buy at WalMart aren't as good a quality as they are at other places. Companies make cheaper products to meet the demands of walmart.
Apple's vertical integration advantage further reinforced.

Forbes called in in 2008:

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/04/24/mitra-apple-pase...

John Gruber summed it up a few weeks back:

"Today’s Apple has turned the pricing story on its head. Used to be thfe knock against Apple was their kit was overpriced. Now, even putting quality aside, competitors can’t match Apple’s prices."

Tablet marketplace shows most clear cut difference.
Isn't the point that Apple would never be dumb enough to sell a Macbook without the keyboard?
Finally a tablet that runs Outlook!