skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In all fairness to Microsoft, the last IE9 beta was released on 2010-09-15:

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/downloads/Default.htm...

I wonder if he has the same issues with the latest platform preview (which came out nearly two months ago).

Now, all this fairness aside, I'm extremely curious why MS isn't adopting the rapid release cycles that the Chrome team have used. As a (potential) consumer of the Internet Explorer line of products, I feel like I'm left out in the cold when I see that the last release was sometime last September. In the meantime, Chrome has added a major enhancement to their JavaScript engine, WebGL support, and more. More importantly, they've added this stuff incrementally so I, the (current) user of Chrome don't have to wait for months for the next major release.

Or perhaps more to the point, I'm curious why the IE9 marketing team don't see the promotional advantages of rapid releases as compared to the old major release model. As the Chrome team have said...market features, not releases.
Mark Rosewater, the lead developer of the card game Magic:The Gathering constantly talks about how restriction breeds creativity.

"The explanation he gives is simple: when someone is building a house, the more tools they have, the better off they are. But when someone is looking for something, the more space they have to explore, the worse off they are"

from:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ir/narrow_your_answer_space/

and the original article (on Magic:The Gathering design, but with useful information - scroll down to the "Design Tool #1: Restrictions" header where he discusses this point):

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/dai...
Google ads - never. They are invariably 'spam' keyword regexes & when they aren't, I usually see the same site in natural results below. Out of politeness Ill click that and not cost them anything.

Other ads, banners & whatnot I tend to not really notice any more. Except groupon ads which tend to always have a photo of some delicious cake. Their actual daily offers are always spa treatments though :(
Helium balloons still have positive weight. They just have more buyoancy than weight.

Weight is measured in Newton, it's the force that keeps you one earth. Mass is measured in kg.
The test doesn't measure swimming, but rather how long before they give up.

So you could make a rigged test. For example:

Tell people you will pay them $200 if they can find the exit of a maze (either real or on the computer). But the maze is rigged, and has no exit. Then time how long it takes before they give up.
Before you replace a slave with a machine there are other steps. Indentured servants, share croppers, migrant labor. There is a whole ladder of human exploitation. Ultimately, slavery is a less efficient substitute for free skilled labor.

Having a slave is more than just feeding them scraps. You have to be able to contain a slave population and keep them from murdering you. There are real costs to this. At a certain point the costs are outweighed by the benefit of freeing people and letting them create surpluses.

Communist Russia and North Korea were slave societies. They couldn't compete with the free west. When China enable certain economic freedoms and gave up (some, not all) of their slave-state tendencies they experienced the greatest economic boon in history.
This is my favorite part:

Comment 17 by alexfpayne, Apr 21, 2009
Marking "Invalid" so these issues don't clutter the
main view of issues.
All are tracked on http://apiwiki.twitter.com/V2-Roadmap
Status: Invalid

<sarcasm>Yes, Twitter, the best way to stop production issues from cluttering up the issue queue is just to mark them as invalid.</sarcasm>
It was a 'bug fix' that caused a major regression. What would you have them do?
Character & Fitness Fail for Law Graduate With ‘No Plan’ To Pay Off His Debts
It's possible that there's a lot of organisational momentum behind it - MS have been doing slow releases of major versions for the last few decades and that mindset could be quite entrenched by now. It might be that they haven't seriously considered doing rapid incremental releases.
I just did a search for an error message in a piece of software. The one result from Google was my own pastebinned traceback from five hours earlier.

Google indexes random pastebins faster than I can forget I posted them.

This still cracks me up, but now I laugh nervously: http://www.ftrain.com/robot_exclusion_protocol.html
When the world gets into H.264 there's no way back but waiting for 20 years for patents to expire.

This was the last chance to at least try to keep the web video both open and free. It's a far shot, but it's at least a try. Before this move, the game seemed beyond lost, now it is only probably lost.

Flash will support WebM too, Skype is using it, so there are some chances. It's a very long way off, but now WebM has a fighting chance.
I'm not sure that's such an absurd question, depending on the CEO and the intern.

I can right away think of one intern I've worked with that I would really like to work with later on, and I've worked with one CEO that I would never want to work with again... (only one intern and one CEO because I haven't worked with that many of either in fact)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_aluminium

"To create transparent aluminium, more power than is used by an entire city had to be focused into a dot with a diameter of less than one-twentieth the thickness of a human hair, and then could only maintain the transparent state for 40 femtoseconds."

And its only transparent to the X-rays that are needed to knock out the electron in the L-shell.
Sex, Drugs and Chocolate at CES 2011
Check out a really cool service that offers this service and much more: http://earthclassmail.com/How-Mail-Management-Works

They scan the outside of every piece of mail that comes in, and you can view it online and choose to have it opened and the contents scanned for you to view online, have the piece of mail recylcled or shredded, or have it forwarded to you onopened.
It would be nice if people stop saying 'async' when they mean 'callbacks'. Twisted's inlineCallbacks, Corotwine, Gevent... are all plenty async, and there's not an explicit callback in sight. (I suppose you could argue that the yield in inlineCallbacks and Monocle delimits a callback. You wouldn't be wrong.)
Great work Tony! This is highly addictive and made me informed on what some of my past colleagues are up to. Apparently an old classmate decided to ditch programming and become a police officer. O_o

Love the use of css3 transform
Lorem Ipsum is Evil
They won't be coming in node.js: http://twitter.com/#!/ryah/status/25685501193232384
Interesting.

Myself, I find that I click essentially two kinds of ads:

1) Sponsored search results that are exactly what I was looking for anyway, and

2) Ads relevant to my interests, typically delivered through the Fusion Ads network.
Ask HN: What does your Lisp workflow look like?
[I'm not sure what the etiquette is re. cross-posting; I've also asked this question at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/36535/what-does-your-lisp-workflow-look-like/ in the hopes of getting a broad range of answers.]

I'm learning Lisp at the moment, coming from a language progression that is Locomotive BASIC -> Z80 Assembler -> Pascal -> C -> Perl -> C# -> Ruby. My approach is to simultaneously:

* write a simple web-scraper using SBCL, QuickLisp, closure-html, and drakma

* watch the SICP lectures

I think this is working well; I'm developing good 'Lisp goggles', in that I can now read Lisp reasonably easily. I'm also getting a feel for how the Lisp ecosystem works, e.g. Quicklisp for dependencies.

What I'm really missing, though, is a sense of how a seasoned Lisper actually works.

When I'm coding for .NET, I have Visual Studio set up with ReSharper and VisualSVN. I write tests, I implement, I refactor, I commit. Then when I'm done enough of that to complete a story, I write some AUATs. Then I kick off a Release build on TeamCity to push the new functionality out to the customer for testing & hopefully approval. If it's an app that needs an installer, I use either WiX or InnoSetup, obviously building the installer through the CI system.

So, my question is: as an experienced Lisper, what does your workflow look like? Do you work mostly in the REPL, or in the editor? How do you do unit tests? Continuous integration? Packaging & deployment? When you sit down at your desk, steaming mug of coffee to one side and a framed photo of John McCarthy to the other, what is it that you do?

Currently, I feel like I am getting to grips with Lisp coding, but not Lisp development ...
If I happen to see an ad for something that I like, I will go so far as to do a separate Google search for it, and click on the search result, to avoid clicking on the ad.

This has the added benefit of not ending up on a specifically crafted landing page, plus making visible other research options, opinions, etc.
Absolutely? It's like being surprised that your bank knows your account balance.
Would you recommend Marlboro or Camels? :)
"what you are suggesting would make the license unfree"

Yes.

If you want to make different demands of users of your software than those of the GPL, BSD license, etc., you should not use one of those licenses.

If you want to use a free license, accept users' freedoms and don't be petulant that some people will choose differently from you.
Big enterprise customers don't like change, and rapid release would frustrate their IT guys to no end. That's why we still have IE6 in lots of big companies, why I still see IE7 in my visitor stats even though IE8 has been out for years, and why all of these versions will be sticking around probably long after IE9 is dead.
Just to be clear, this isn't about the guy who offered to leave law school in his 5th semester in exchange for all his tuition back. This is an entirely different situation with an entirely different flavor of fail.
Prion disease can spread through air
I can see that to a degree, though I think some video games (especially indie ones) could be inspiring as well. But I appreciate that we all have our chosen muses.
Practical Applied Mathematics ( multiplication is treated as repeated addition)
I think this is a great step forward (though does anyone remember mozilla's online IDE efforts - bespin?). Has a more special place in my heart since Ive been "thinking" about doing something similar for years.

Plus I think this (and/or bespin) would make it a lot easier to combine RFS5 (Development on hand helds) and RFS6 (iPad applications)!!! Cant wait.. My hour long train rides to the city would be a lot more productive without having to carry a laptop!
FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD. Now it's FUD that you may subscribe to, but it's FUD nevertheless.

I love this line, "where the uncertainty is based on traps that are known to exist"

Have you never bought a DVD player in fear of MPEG-LA might do? Do you own no computers with no licensed technology? I shiver in my boots every morning for fear over this.

Gimme a break. I love how the Google/Mozilla tribe have become the world's best FUD slingers. Everything now is about this horrible tragedy that can happen at any moment.

If that's your choice fine. Stick with Chrome and stay away from H264 streams. Like I said to RBanffy, a fragmented web won't keep me up at night either.
Yes, I certainly am aware of the technological solutions to this problem. Nevertheless, I am still baffled by the apparent stigma towards linking to your site in the URL field, which seems like the natural, obvious, and right thing to do.

I would welcome an explanation!
I find that Borders employees are generally not that helpful. True story: I bought the "Inception" soundtrack on CD from Borders, and the bookseller checking me out saw it and said, "Wow, I didn't know we had this movie!"

Barnes & Noble employees are a little better on average, in my experience. I've actually gotten some good recommendations there.
Looks like you guys have pivoted quite a bit since when I blogged about E in June 2008:

http://paulstamatiou.com/thoughts-on-physical-social-network...

Grats on the new angle!
Unfortunately the comment "Running a real estate website? OK... you’re not allowed to show the asking price or address of any home. Go." describes some of the most annoying real estate websites I've come across.

While restrictions can encourage innovation, sometimes they really do just get in the way.
On Samurai swords, computer chips, and maya
>> I've just seen that the splitting the marketing budget between channels can get political.

One of my favorite stories involved a very successful online marketing campaign for Oldsmobile. When they launched the Alero, there was amazing testing of TV vs. Print vs. Outdoor vs. Direct Mail vs. Online. They tested for scale - how many sales were produced - and cost per channel. The results were that Online came in #2, with print a distant third. Before the test, print had a $5mm spend and online was just shy of $1mm. After the test, Olds tried to move their entire print budget into online. The agency team at Leo Burnett (LB owned StarCom at the time) that was responsible for print hit the roof and waged a successful campaign to have much of their budget restored. They didn't want to lose their jobs, I guess.
I don't shy away from buying DVD players. The companies that make them are the ones on the hook there. But I certainly wouldn't want to build one.

Again: We have no guarantees from the MPEG-LA that they won't turn around tomorrow and demand outrageous royalties from anyone using H.264 videos. We also know that they are able to do so. The only reason it isn't so today is by their good grace. That is real uncertainty, and it seems like a valid cause for worry (Google would have been better off if they'd treated Java so cautiously). Am I mistaken somewhere, and this situation is actually not plausible? I'm not personally involved with either camp — they just seem to have the facts on their side, while all any pro-H.264 folk ever respond with is ad hominem and dismissals.
"hack them straight out"

Any design would be totally just in my head. I'd only sketch something on paper if it's a GUI.

The design that's in my head is basically a short list of what it should do and what it should not do.
Ex-Microsoft here. It's been a while since I worked there, but my recollection is the same: blind, automated testing stripped of UI elements showed that Microsoft's search results were at parity to Google's in terms of relevance.

People sometimes forget that all of these large companies have teams of very smart engineers and researchers. Google may be a talent sink, but they're not a talent monopoly.
So let me get this straight.

Apple supporting only h.264 and deliberately not supporting flash in order to force uptake is a good thing.

Google supporting only WebM and deliberately not supporting h.264 in order to force uptake is a bad thing.

This doesn't seem to be particularly logically compatible to me. Gruber seems to imply the first was ok because Apple got their first and it's already happened, but I'm sure that a lot of people with flash video delivery systems did not particularly enjoy converting to h.264, but they did it.

Considering Chrome's growing market share, plus Firefox and Opera, content providers /will/ be forced to offer a compatible video delivery system. If that has to be flash, so be it.
Sure I recognize that, and I see it as a highly valid point. But if it is in Microsoft's interests to maintain enterprise users, I don't quite see why it must be done at the expense of the non-enterprise users.

Please call me out if my naïveté is showing, but couldn't MS fragment IE into consumer and enterprise versions? Surely something must be done to appeal to non-enterprise users to halt the increasingly rapid deterioration of IE market share.

To expound on this idea a bit...imagine IE adopts the multiple channel approach like Chrome has. They could have the four typical channels (canary, dev, beta, stable) and add another one called "enterprise" or something like that. The first four would receive silent automatic updates while the "enterprise" channel would only be updated when the administrative user requests to do so. Furthermore, they could perhaps choose exactly which release they want. So theoretically, they could upgrade or downgrade the browser without being subjected to automatic updates.

Just an idea, I know. It's probably much harder to implement in reality, but something must be done, and this sort of setup would probably be a one-up on Chrome (something I think they desperately need at the moment).
Sometimes, trolling gets taken seriously.
That post was right after we graduated with the concept, great to see it linked back. We learned quite a lot since then.
Some of his advertisers (and I have heard this in other podcasts, too) seem to be handing out discount codes (usually the name of the podcast or something like that) which would allow them to track their success fairly well.
Use F# instead

let async_copy (in:Stream) (out:Stream) = asnyc {
let buf = Array.create 8192
let rec copy = async {
return! match in.ReadAsync(0,buf.Length,buf) with
| 0 -> ()
| x -> do! out.WriteAsnyc(0,x,buf);
return! copy; }
return! copy; }

There's an async copy routine, not much more overhead than a sync copy.

let sync_copy (in:Stream) (out:Stream) =
let buf = Array.create 8192
let rec copy =
match in.Read(0,buf.Length,buf) with
| 0 -> ()
| x -> out.Write(0,x,buf);
copy
copy
There are soo many interesting ways to solve this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2101724
International Comparisions Of Mobility
Chinese Driver Sentenced to Life in Prison for Evading Tolls
You point out a real problem with the article. The given rationale for (.)^2 vs. |.| is just wacko ("there is obviously more variation in the second data set than the first").

The reason it's mistaken is, there are other examples, typically with just one or a handful of outliers, in which the SD is "obviously" too high compared to mean absolute deviation.

Futhermore, these type of examples are common in practice, so the SD is problematic to use if you have outliers.

Often, in robust statistics, the Median Absolute Deviation (which is conventionally labeled MAD, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_absolute_deviation) is used. As an estimate of scale, it's much more robust to outliers. But of course, you can't differentiate it!
I agree. Gruber says:

"Supporting WebM and H.264 is better than supporting only one or the other, in my book. But if you’re only going to support one, I say support the one that is in wide use, with extensive wide-ranging support from camera makers, mobile playback devices, and online video services."

But I seem to remember that he wasn't that keen on Apple supporting Flash, even though it was in wide use by mobile playback devices, and online video services.
> Second, a copyrighted work does not enter the public domain by being published in a court filing or record

Court records in the US that are not sealed are presumptively open to public access and copying. While this may be technically different from a work being "in the public domain", in practice, especially if the goal is secrecy, it doesn't make much difference.

My favorite example of a copyrighted work in a public court record comes from Campbell v. Acuff Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994). The Supreme Court decision includes the full lyrics of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman". http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-1292.ZO.html

I guarantee that Cornell didn't bother to ask Roy Orbison's heirs/assigns for permission to include the Pretty Woman lyrics on that site...

kb
Camels, obviously! More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!
Odd, I thought TV and radio were supposed to have killed off rhetoric long before I was born.
I've heard Microsoft's freely published TrueSkill algorithm is good. There are some libraries to calculate it out there already.
Interviews like this make me feel pretty crappy. I've been a successful software engineer for 10 years, and I'm in a senior role at the company I currently work in, but these are not the kinds of problems that I find myself solving on a daily basis. I don't have a CS degree -- I'm mostly self-taught, which means that if I'm presented with a problem I do the research to figure out how to solve it and seek feedback from the smart people I work with to make sure that the solution I come up with is the best one possible.

If you're applying for a job at a puzzle-solving factory, fine. But if you want people who really know how to solve problems, this kind of question usually doesn't get you those kinds of people.
Whenever I do that (rarely) I surf around the linked site a little bit. Will Google cancel accounts because the advertisers have low conversion rates? I could see them canceling accounts when a lot of visitors clicked the ad and stayed on the linked page for only a few seconds but I’m honestly wondering whether they will also cancel if a lot of people merely buy nothing.
One of the issues here is that paper cards aren't just a well-entrenched and pleasing communication tool, but they're also a status tool. American Psycho is the model here—If I give you my business card and you see that it is letterpress-printed and impeccably typeset, you know that I have excellent design sense—but also that I have more money than you. Really good business cards are expensive. Whereas even if you create an e-business card that allows for complete typographical customization, there's no implicit class message because the only difference between a simple, banal card and a beautiful one will be taste (thus I don't think it would be a space worth expanding to; when there's no status message encoded in a design issue like that, the most simple and uniform formatting tends to be privileged. Hence the low-class associations with people who send emails encoded with extravagant fonts and colors). And of course nobody would participate in a system where you had to pay more for an e-business card that was more nicely formatted.

The fact is that the purely utilitarian aspect of business cards is a very minor element of their continued use. As a way of giving somebody your phone number, they're absurdly overevolved and ripe for supercession. But as a medium of social display, it'll be a lot harder to shake loose of them.
Agreed. Skimmed the first page, not really sure what's going on with this thing. I'm not digging because I'm trying to retain the "first impression" mindset. From experience, I'm assuming it's one step too complicated and/or yet another data mining system masquerading as a useful service (who is really the customer here? Me or someone buying truckloads of contact info?)

I'll for now fall back on old cards. They require no fiddling, no dictation, no operating gadgets...just "here's my card" and "hey, that's a neat card".
To play the devil's advocate, a secret cabal wouldn't be running every little detail. It would decide things like "bring a black man to presidency", "next year we're invading country X".

Not that I think such a cabal exists per se, but certain powerful groups can make such decisions, and these groups do exist.
>Yup, it's probably no more dangerous than printer toner or asbestos or coal dust...

I assume this was a tongue in cheek remark. The problem is that we contain these things whilst the article is anticipating covering virtually all contact surfaces with this spray. Which will probably be fine for 20 years or so and then we'll run out of serviceable lungs.
Hold on a second. You're suggesting slavery is in the same category as indentured servants, share croppers, and migrant labor for human exploitation? The difference is night and day! If I have to spell it out, in one case you work of your own free will, and in the other you don't and are abused and beaten.

I do agree that in the macro sense it's better economically to free people and educate them, but that is NOT the logical path slave owners in the U.S. were on. And once, after war, slaves did become free they were not made to be educated as whites.