skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Macros should be written so as to depend as little as possible on the execution environment to produce a correct expansion. To ensure consistent behavior, it is best to ensure that all macro definitions are available, whether to the interpreter or compiler, before any code containing calls to those macros is introduced.

- Common Lisp the Language, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/html/c...
You just have to tilt your head a bit and realize that you do need more than one server. For example - I don't know about you but I don't want to take down the site to deploy everytime I have to update some code (esp in the early days, this happens practically once a day).

With MongoDB you simply add a cheap second box and use it as at least a replica of your database. When you get tired of "we're updating the site with shiny new code" interrupting your users, you simply make it into a web-node as well.
Intermediate work is used as a way to get students to perform work as the semester progresses, rather than trying to do it all at the end.

There's lots of reasons why. For example:

* Memory formation works best with spaced repetition.

* Students will just cram for an exam if you let them, which won't form long term recall.

* Spreads the assessment workload over the semester.

Actually, spaced repetition with game mechanics might work best. I was looking at a spaced repetition idea for a thesis ... a badges/levelling up thing might make it easier to pitch to students.
Now if only they would start using this. Google Maps' permalinks are absolutely terrible for example...
We also had Carl Sagan once come by our dorm (Page) for dinner and conversation. I only realized years later what a treat that was.
For minorities, new 'digital divide' seen
"A weird-ass cross section of human" is a great description of Carnegie Mellon.

Also, for all of the article's bashing of "dumb jocks" athletes at Carnegie Mellon slightly outperform non-athletes in GPA (something like 3.23 to 3.16 while I was there.) I ran cross-country and track there with people who were studying Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Architecture, Physics, Biomedical Engineering, etc. -- the one who was studying Biomedical Engineering ended up with a 3.97 as well as being one of the best distance runners in school history (3:51 1500m, 14:40 5000m, runner-up at the DIII national track and field championship for 5000m.) The team has consistently gone to the DIII national cross-country championship in recent years as well. I was never good enough to go with them, but some of my best memories are with that team. That's an important part of college too.

Caltech can have their famous losing streaks.
In North America it probably doesn't mean what you think:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humid_subtropical_climate
> In games like WoW, you can win through sheer playtime and repetition. In real life, such as school, you must apply intelligence.

Effortless recall is one of the foundations for reasoning fluently about concepts. And one of the most efficient ways to build that recall is repetition.
Can somebody tell me who the target market for Square is:
- For brick and mortar stores, obviously this is not the answer.
- For payment to friends online transfer is far easier than carrying hardware in my pocket.
- For online stores obviously there are many choices and many of them better.
Is there some other advantage to Square that I dont understand?
Yup. It's a special case of Bayesian estimation that is derived when all the conditional distributions are Gaussian.
Why only SF? How about London? I'd sign up.

Also, why only 2 people? You could have lunch networking with 4 or even 6 or 8 people... Try it and see how it goes. Small businesses have done networking lunches/breakfasts for a long time, and often there are about 20 people around the table.
I've built *Nix testing frameworks using Expect. Would one use Expect/Fabric/etc. to manage deployments and development environments?

Having the ability to immediately stage an environment to reproduce an error without configuration issues would really take a lot of treachery out of trying to evolve larger systems.
Great glad to have you on. Once there is some interesting or meaningful data I'll be sure to make a blog post. Thanks
Being lean is about getting maximum leverage, not keeping costs as low as possible. This kind of hire is a great example.
Since you gave credit to even your operating system, the fact that that you leave out any canvas/webgl libraries probably means you didn't use any -- I'm superly impressed! Was thinking you may be using three.js or pre3d to get it working on both canvas & webgl.

@everyone: Try it in webgl like in Chrome Canary or FF4, huge difference in performance and panning angle allowed.
1. Web Apps can store data locally in a way you control, the data stored within the twitter app is as closed as it ever was.

2. There are plenty of tools to let you use web apps as standalone apps / without the traditional browser chrome, fluid / prism / save as application in chrome, these are being introduced into browsers natively.

the web is not dying, that s a fairly ridiculous statement, and the linked article was widely discredited
Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head.

You really have to do "defensive patenting" when you are this large or you might face problems when another person patents a key technology your business relies on.

I don't think google would ever pursue this patent against another company, because it is doubtful it will stand up in court. As such it probably would win a court trial if another company patented the tech, but it is much cheaper to just patent it yourself, stick the patent in a drawer, and continue taking over the world.
Gender is the correct word, actually. It refers both to sex and to sexual identity. Why would they take offence?
You can write off odnoklassniki at this point: they are plagued by account theft, and are milking users for money in heavy-handed manner. The only people left there are the long tail middle-aged folk.

I expect Facebook to eat VK within a couple of years.
>it sounds like most of the Cal Tech freshmen have already wasted a few years getting ready for the SATs, making straight A grades, and taking AP courses. Sorry, guys, but that's a LOT of work,

No, it isn't a lot of work. I never studied before going to Caltech. I never studied for the SAT. This was typical for incoming freshmen. The ones who had to study hard for SATs, etc., could not make it at Caltech, and frankly the admissions committee tried to not admit them.
Honest question: Why does it matter if your comments are deleted? If you no longer want to participate in the community, then you can simply not return. If you want to stop yourself from logging in, then change the password to something incomprehensible and log out, effectively locking the account.

However, it feels like you are angry and you also want to withdraw the content you've submitted as well. Why does that matter? To be honest, your comments are going to fade into history even if they continue to exist. Deleting them aren't going to change anything. Same thing with your account — even open, with no new comments (if you stop using it), it'll fade into essential non-existence as well.
I'll be sure to keep my links to myself next time. You can do your own work collating, filtering, and selecting links to fit your question.

Message received 100% clear.
You are right, reading joel's piece afterwards is super easy. It probably helps I have been doing a lot of node.js programming recently and so the functional stuff is kinda mundane now.
I'm glad I'm not alone in being frustrated by blu-ray. This post could have easily been about my own experiences. I wonder if the phrase "bag of hurt" was hinting at inherent problems in the spec that give rise to bad user experiences.
I've built a lot of stuff on RDBMSen, and often, those 'nice features' are actually what I call 'a giant pain in the ass.'

Sometimes, data doesn't fit a relational model well. In those cases, something like Mongo is a godsend. And yeah, you could de-normalize your data and get halfway to Mongo, but I'd rather use each tool for what it's good at.
American sues Sabre in battle over flight listings - Boston.com
Not at all; I want to be able to print stuff like this in the generated documentation:

----------------------------------------------

3.2 HTTPS driver

The HTTPS driver is currently implemented using either GNU TLS or OpenSSL:

== driver includes

#include <gnutls.h>
#include <openssl.h>

== driver list

, {"HTTPS (GNU TLS)", driver_https_gnutls}
, {"HTTPS (Open SSL)", driver_https_openssl}

== drivers.c

static void
driver_https_gnutls(DriverState *s) {
||common driver local storage||
gnutls_init();
gnutls_ctx_init(&ctx);
check_extra_algos = "FOO:BAR";
some_feature_flag = 1;
// etc
}

static void
driver_https_openssl(DriverState *s) {
||common driver local storage||
openssl_init();
check_extra_algos = "BAZ";
some_feature_flag = 0;
// etc
}

----------------------------------------------
That was also the most relevant snippet I found while searching. :) Unfortunately, I couldn't quite figure out if it was a confirmation of my claim or a rebuttal. Would you mind clarifying?
Don't bother polluting this thread with facts. HN is clearly dominated by Keynesians. Your dissent will not be tolerated.

I believe the standard response writ large upon Bernanke's beard would be something like "But but but the 2011 model has a navigation system and is expected to last an extra 5000 miles, so hedonics alone imputes an extra $30k in value above the 1980 model. No inflation! Run along."
Ever feel like we're floating in a bubble?
The Year of Practical Thinking
Congratulations. I've been looking at moving to Austin, recently. I'm from Dallas, so I'm familiar with the area and it's a great one.
Well, you could look at their own use-cases document: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Use+Cases

Personally, Mongo maps so nicely to Ruby that sometimes, I just use the regular driver rather than an ORM. A database that naturally understands hashes and arrays is lots of fun.

Also, it seems like with Mongo, I can often design most of my pages to need just one query, and therefore they're crazy fast. This might be possible with other NoSQL stores too, and I'm trying to get more experience with more of them.
ESP Report Sets Off Debate on Data Analysis
(It's Caltech, btw, not Cal Tech.) Of course academics are not the only thing. Caltech looked hard for people that were smart, motivated, and passionate about their interests. You wouldn't get admitted without all three.

Keep in mind that Caltech is a very small school, smaller than a lot of high schools. They chose to focus on doing one thing very well, and they succeeded at it. For some types of people, very much including myself, it was a perfect fit for my personality and what I wanted to get out of college. If you're not one of those people, there are plenty of other excellent choices.
No one ever claims it's impossible to be successful outside of The Valley. All anyone ever says, at most, is that all things considered it's an advantage.

It's a completely false controversy, and always has been.
The reason that its bay area only is that I want to make sure things are working smoothly before I expand. I really want to avoid a situation where people are signing up and then not getting matched for lunch or having a bad experience. A secondary point is that I need a good source of free restaurant data. A lot of the APIs out there are pretty restrictive and I'm not sure of the best solution yet.

I definitely like the idea of lunch with 3 or 4 people. I'm not sure about 6 or 8 but open to the possibility. 2 is just for simplicities sake - as this gets started.
Penny wise, Pound foolish: What happens when you try to write down every dollar
"Sometimes, data doesn't fit a relational model well."

I keep hearing this but I've yet to see any good examples.
Taxonomy of the haterboy
Poll: How often do you visit HN?
I just wanted to see how addicted we really are to Hacker News.
10+ times a day
5-10 times a day
1-5 times a day
Once in a while
It's the best picture and with Netflix it's also really cheap. I'd only have to watch 2 movies a month on Apple or Amazon to hit my Netflix subscription price, and I'd be watching overly compressed 720p instead of 40Mbps 1080p.

Plus, I've yet to have a single issue with using my PS3 as a Blu-Ray player. Maybe the rest suck, but for me, it's just like watching a DVD.
Here's what I posed last time someone asked me this, I got no answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637903
There's a difference between being defensive about where you are not located, and actively promoting your favored location. I was born, raised and still live in the Silicon Valley, but even a remote simpleton like me knows how cool tech can be in Austin TX...

http://geekaustin.org/

http://sdf.lonestar.org/

As for startup stuff going on in Austin, from JUST today's reading I noticed the following being in Austin:

http://blog.asmartbear.com

http://wpengine.com/

http://www.capitalthought.com/

I'll still prefer my home over yours, but your home is also pretty sweet (and worth bragging about).
I don't have any experience with MongoDB, but I am building an application right now using CouchDB and I've found it to be pretty easy to use -- definitely easier to prototype with vs a relational database + ORM framework.

CouchDB supports ad-hoc queries in the form of 'temporary views'. The downside (and I think a difference compared with MongoDB) is that temporary views can't be used in production since they are not indexed and thus are much slower than permanent views.

I'm developing my application in Python, which has great support for CouchDB in the form of CouchDB-Python (http://packages.python.org/CouchDB/) and CouchDBKit (http://couchdbkit.org/). Using CouchDBKit, it was pretty easy to set up CouchDB artifacts (map functions, reduce functions, design documents) into a nice file/folder hierarchy and write the simple Python glue code to deploy updates to CouchDB via a single shell command.
I read once that every developer ought to use 'kill -9' as their method of stopping services they are writing, then ensure that doing so never causes a problem. Even if you can keep people from executing 'kill -9' (hint: you can't), there are always cases that you can't control that can stop a box in its tracks. By developing explicitly for this, you save you and your customer a lot of pain.

Honestly, I would never use a database that doesn't make safeguarding my data as its number one priority. Even if I'm just dumping logs in it, the time I really need to know what's going on is likely the time those safeguards are put to the test.
I know about as much as you do. I did some googling, and maybe it's because I'm sitting at pitt.edu, but cmu.edu seems authoritative. ;)

To me, this paragraph says "using a macro before it's defined is undefined behavior," and seems to back up your assertion.
No, it means exactly what you think. Summer in Texas is miserable.

Highs exceed 90 °F (32.2 °C) on 109 days per year, and 100 °F (37.8 °C) on 12.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin,_Texas
I'm not dissing repetition as a method to facilitate memory.

In WoW, people repeat the same boss over and over without learning anything or changing the approach until through luck they win. This is not possible with a school exam because you only get one chance, and even in the event that you can repeat it, the exam will be changed.

Not so in videogames.
And by doing that you will have perverted the meaning of the book.

It is a great book but the main lesson there is to observe, learn and act. In that order. Not to follow a prescribed formula.
This is a cool idea. This is a very common feature in security camera DVRs and people love the idea once they understand it. Good job.
R interface to Google Chart Tools
Are you thinking of Fail-fast software? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-fast
Hah! At the moment I read "at that very moment", I got a popup from Chrome's PDF reader in the background tab I loaded the article in:

"Some slides have failed to load and may appear blank. Click OK to try reloading the presentation, or cancel to continue viewing."

So Chrome hasn't completely ridded itself of modal popups just yet, though it's happens infrequently enough that I was pretty surprised.
An admissions officer at Caltech once told me they did look at applicants with poor grades and would overlook them if there was a good reason why the grades were poor and there was very strong evidence that the applicant was impressive anyway.
>The author uses SAT scores because they are the best objective measure we have of academic quality.

I wouldn't agree with this point. Though this claim has traditionally been accepted by academia but plenty of literature exists to make a claim otherwise too. I never took the SATs but did take the GREs and my anecdotal experience would say that standardized test are only a good measure of test-taking abilities.

>This isn't the main thesis of the article; the author is just giving you his perspective on where the situation originated.

The author tries to paint an idyllic picture of Universities of the 40s and 50s. He builds upon this premise and makes a claim that the quality of the Universities has gone down and ties it to the introduction to the Affirmative Action and rise of sports. I am attacking this very premise in my comment.

>No one is suggesting that athlete's be penalized. The author is arguing that they shouldn't receive the (massive) boost in admissions.

An obsession of being very good at something (be it sports or academics) brings with itself an inherent penalty of not being very good at other things. Though I am not saying that its impossible to excel at both sports and academics but to treat sporting excellence as a skill not as valuable as being good at academics is something I take exception at. In addition, considering that good sporting skills is how many racially and economically disadvantaged students make it to college is also not lost in the author's arguments.

>That data says nothing about the how lower admission standards for minorities impact the schools academics.

I haven't read the study, only Malcolm Gladwell's book on which I've based my argument. The books talks about the study done on Michigan alumni. I don't know if we are talking about the same study. Would like to read about both (or the singular) studies before making any further comment.
The graph seems wrong. For example opennet (where they got their data), says there is no censorship in Nigeria, but they mark Nigeria as being censored.
I’m not really surprised that genetics influence intelligence. I always thought that to be a pretty standard view and the 50 percent figure you are citing doesn’t exactly startle me.

I’m not so sure how important those 50 percent are in this context, though. One question that I think is not answered by twin studies is how ‘hereditary’ intelligence is. (I’m certain that there exists a wealth of literature about just that topic, I’m too lazy to look for it right now.) Do two parents of average intelligence only have children with similarly average intelligence or is the range of intelligence of their children much wider? Then there is obviously the question how well wealth corresponds to intelligence in the first place.
It depends on what you like. I spent my entire life until I was 27 in the frigidity of Northern Minnesota. After that, I rather enjoy the fact that nearly every day in Austin is a t-shirt day.
Plumbers, electricians, photographers. Anyone who needs to physically meet their customers outside of a traditional shop/office.
I know! All these huge valuations for companies that are posting revenues of hundreds of millions and growing like crazy! Wait...
1. Hire someone to come in every week or two to help do cleaning.

2. Figure out approximately what bills come to every month, and get everyone to pay that much along with rent. And then don't sweat it.
PHP Fog Raises $1.8 Million To Be The Heroku Of PHP
The replay button reminds me of the Achron game (an up-coming Meta-Time RTS). Basically, you can start drawing, then press Replay and draw some more on the replay, and then press Replay again... looks amazing :D. Nice work :).
Who Came Out On Top At CES?
Pro tip: In Terminal.app you need the checkbox "Display ANSI colors" checked.
True, but I suspect the average person wouldn't describe a humid day at 95 °F as "awesome weather".
For my own experience, I loved being around people smarter than me. I don't recall ever being bored at Caltech.
There is more information in two links from the main page of the site:

* with explanations: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/icespikes/ic...

* with more links: http://www.fredandsarah.plus.com/ice/index.html
7 courses? Wow! That's a lot of cooking. Guess someone domain squatted 3-6courses.com. So, if I want to rip off this idea do I have to be 8courses.com? Or could I beat you to the punch with 6courses.com?

Sorry, didn't get past the first page with a forced google/FB login. Change that and I'll try it out.
I think you're definitely over-thinking this.

The average user doesn't record all the time so they would be missing all kinds of great video opportunities.

With your software, they're still not recording all the time but now they don't miss any great video opportunities.

Great page by the way. To the point and great design.
$(function() {
if ($.browser.msie) // Sorry, I tried. && $.browser.version < 9)
$('body').addClass('ie')
})

What was the deal breaker in IE9, out of curiosity?
The QR code generator's always been available from the Chart API[1]

[1] http://code.google.com/apis/chart/docs/gallery/qr_codes.html
Thanks for sharing, very informative.
>What's the definition of "female equivalent"?

Author's words not mine. I should have put quotes around "female equivalent". I believe that female sports should be given as much attention as male sports.

>Are you suggesting that all current programs to achieve social equality are worthwhile, that none of them are bad? Or is it just that any criticism is necessary wrong?

No. Some of them might have failed spectacularly and deserve criticism. But to criticize the social equality programs in colleges because they get students with lower SAT scores into colleges is a very imprecise argument to make.
Mirrors my experiences with conventional DVDs. I have vowed I will never buy a Blu-Ray DVD or player because of that. I have constant problems with DVDs, they seem to require clean-room storage and handling to avoid skips and freezes, and forget about letting your kids try to use them. I might as well set $20 bills on fire and save myself the time, than to hand my kid a DVD to play.

I have not bought a DVD in several years. I sometimes rent them from RedBox but have moved almost completely to NetFlix.

As far as physical media, video cassette was the best medium for the consumer, picture quality aside (and for most purposes, the picture quality was good enough). I never had one problem with a VHS tape. I could fast-forward over the ads and trailers easily. If I couldn't finish a movie in one sitting, I could pop the tape out and resume it a day, or a week later exactly where I left off.
http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/candea...
The FCC Continues Trend Of Aligning With Google’s Ideas
I haven't read such a book. If someone writes it, I will read it. Meanwhile, this is the best source of practical info I've seen - http://mixergy.com/
I like the simplicity of this, this would be really fun as a Quartz Composer patch.
Thanks for the effort :) should be a fun event! Hope you'll be there.
Reminds me of OkCupid's blind date: http://www.crazyblinddate.com/, they're redoing it but the concept was very similar, but for dates.