skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I understand these experiments pretty well, having executed experiments of their kind myself. The mathematics tells us the particles are indistinguishable. The physics tells us that the mathematics describes the observations pretty accurately. But they remain observations with an experimental error and they leave room for the especially interesting options of

1) small deviations that are amplified when you increase the scale of the problem and

2) small deviations that simply occur only 1 in a billion times, for whatever reason (the assumptions of homogeneity, isotropy, time-invariance, and so forth are dangerous assumptions).

No observation allows you to conclude anything about what gives rise to those observations. You certainly cannot conclude it obeys the same mathematical relations used to predict the observations.

We can't solve a trivial 3-body problem and the deviations in numerical approximations are problematic for some purposes. As we get more ambitious, those deviations will become smaller, but may remain too large for the goal. We don't know whether the law of gravity contains an exact exponent of 2. The Voyager spacecraft seem to suggest there may be more involved and nobody has offered a decent suggestion in the past decades. We can't predict the flow of sand rolling of a dune and we may never be able to do that, because the complexity of the problem may turn out to exceed the theoretically possible computational power of the universe.

As for the second sentence: it's not observed reality that lies: it is our overinterpretation of the observations that are lies. We extrapolate beyond what is reasonable. There are too many trivial puzzles unsolved or even proven unsolvable. How can you possibly trust or accept a description with those defects to be the say-all, end-all description of our universe? I have every reason to believe that my universe defies complete description, modelling, simulation. How about yours?
Inside IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Database economics in cloud and virtualization
Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it.

That's the honest truth. When Nokia opened the Symbian code three years ago, it offered a peek into their software development process... And it wasn't a pretty sight.

I used to spend a fair bit of idle time browsing through the Symbian Foundation wikis and forums (all now offline). It seemed that there were basically two kinds of people working on the operating system. The guys in England, who used to work for Symbian Ltd, were pretty smart but arrogant; in old-school programmer style, they were only concerned with managing some extremely narrow domain and couldn't take any criticism.

Then there were the Finns at Nokia, who were either completely uninterested and oblivious to the world around them, or just obviously incompetent at the job they'd been given. An example of the latter was the "Direct UI" proposal in 2009. It was supposed to outline a completely new touch UI paradigm to ship in Symbian^4. All there was was a few pages in broken English that essentially said "it should be like iPhone because touching stuff is cool".

Unsurprisingly, Symbian^4 was canned last October after years of development. I'd like to know who had made the decision to put the same people who had mismanaged the previous S60 user interface in charge of creating the replacement... But that's how it went at Nokia. No one ever lost their job for screwing up the software -- until now.
A Sr VP of a well-known sports equipment brand told me he was planning to create a new product for the sole purpose of selling it on Groupon - in order to maximize his profit margin. The product will be virtually identical to a competing product in his line.
For all we know what the TC commenter experienced could be one sleazy Groupon salesperson all on their own, trying to meet some sort of sales quota.
I wonder if it was a formula in an Excel spreadsheet.
Another plug: Oregon programmers. We have strong open source tech culture and programming talents are everywhere, comparable to SF area. But our living expenses are drastically cheaper.
> Unless you have a ten-line† program or one hell of a suite of unit tests documenting every single interaction with the world your system ever performs‡, you can never be sure that a first-day employee 'fixing' a bug hasn't introduced a new obscure one somewhere.

New employee creates test to cover bug.
Fixes bug.
Runs test suite. Test suite passes.
Commits code.
All under the watchful eye of another developer.

You keep pushing specific work environments into different situations. Not all tests work for all cases. Stop assuming this. Your entire argument against this strategy is that X doesn't work in Y. You ignore that X works with X.

> Do you deny that this test is trivial to game for those who want to game it?

Yes, if you want to work for a company that does something you don't like, it's easy to game.

> Or do you claim that just passing this test, at whatever motivation, is a useful signal?

If you choose to do the task rather than just game it, it helps in several specific ways. Taking the code committing part, it ensures you have everything set up correct, from development environment, testing suite, VM, connections to dev, intergrated, staging and live, etc. You have your editor setup, connections to source control, understand the ticketing system.

Their is a lot of value knowing that everything is setup. There is also a lot of value with the person knowing they just deployed code.

> other than not being philosophically opposed to meaningless tests?

Just because you assume something is meaningless doesn't mean it is.

> About which part?

About the strategy being useful or not. You think the strategy is useless. I believe it's not, and has proven it's value.

That being said, the only thing you've done is construct hypothetical worst case scenarios and question how it's good, which is next to worthless.

If you have honest questions about the strategy, go ahead and ask. If you just want to play more games with hypothetical situations, let's just end the discussion here.
Hold on, you mean there's a markup on those discounts?
I often look back to a few years ago and assume that if I was approached with the same idea now there is no way I'd tackle it. I'm not near 50 but even having 5 years of experience in a difficult technical field has made me jaded with wanting to take on more challenges that I don't see a genuine value for. I'm hoping to take a couple of years off soon and get back to that naive self and start something new in a different field.
Collaboration.

It's really that simple. We live in cities and work in groups and/or at companies because the benefits of collaboration and casual exchanges of ideas outweigh the detractions.
I figured it was Twilio, well done!
> They will then file a number of lawsuits in a shotgun fashion, perhaps a few hundred, half of which will be against Google, and the other half against various companies using WebM

And then we'll finally get to see what Google has up their sleeve, because they're not dumb and surely saw this coming.

Maybe there will be a counter-suit, because h.264 violates some of Google's patents.
To develop WinMo 7? Very unlikely.
Nokia's CEO shouldn't be focused on tech. He should be focused on significant internal cultural factors he was clueless about. He should also try to figure out how he and his advisers could've got it so severely wrong. After that, he has about 3 more Whys to go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
I'll be sure to lead the charge. ;)

Haha, just kidding (Sort of), best of luck in the program!
The console world now has dedicated servers
> You know this is pseudo-science garbage, right?

You're not making any sense.

> There is no reason to believe that Arabs have a particular "sense of unity and brotherhood".

There's plenty, actually. Just walk around any street in any major Arab city/capital and ask the people:

* Do you view Egyptians as your brothers

* Do you view Palestinian as your brothers

* Do you support the Palestinian cause

* Do you support the Egyptian revolution

> I know that people like to make up stories about how awesome their national/religious/ethnic group is, but at HN I'd hope we could dispense with that BS.

I didn't make any such claim.

EDIT:

Right this second, Al-Jazeera (Arabic) is reporting celebrations throughout the Arab world.
Free London School of Business and Finance MBA lectures
The ESR post has no basis in reality. The announcement will "split nokia in half"? How does he think it's structured right now? Nokia is split sixteen different ways inside already, it's a total mess of competing agendas and technologies.
Full disclosure: I'm a django developer and have never written an app in rails.

People like to say that python+django is equivalent to ruby+rails. I largely agree, but that's only a first order approximation.

The rails community is larger than the django community. This means that whatever you are trying to do, you are more likely to find someone who has done it before in the rails community (along with the discussion, tools). This also means that the power tools for web-apps will be very good and plentiful. Due to that, rails > django. (Heroku is an example of this -- there is no equivalent for django that is so well established as being awesome). However...

The python community is larger and more diverse than the ruby community. This means that if you deviate from the usual track, there will still be a community to support you.

Python is popularly used in a variety of fields with very different needs. This leads to a very diverse ecosystem in python, both in terms of areas of specialization for developers and tools available. python > ruby. This makes me prefer python+django.
Facebook Valued at $60b, May Let Employees Sell $1b Shares
Mind, I don't think future historians will weep too much about losing some promotional websites for such actual content.
Ask HN: Do you know Photoshop?
I am a photoshop master
I know it well, but am still learning
I know the basics but want to learn more
I don't know how to use it, but want to learn
Don't know, don't care
I use a different application for mockups
That's just for editing photos, right?
You should've seen Ryan Paul's twitter feed today. It was brutal watching his love for Meego break down into cynical snark for Nokia.
This has nothing to do with the CEO, it's responding to everyone talking about how long it's going to take to "port" WP7.
Works fine with android or WebOs too. What's the point?
One might also say there was far less information available at their fingertips to help them learn, even if they wanted to. They may have been relegated to one or two books, which likely were outdated or wrong.
Isn't the first query generating a cartesian product ?

select e., u., l.*
from entry e, user u, location l
where e.location in (select l2.from location l2 where (l2.lat between x1 and x2) and (l2.lng between y1 and y2)) and e.user = u.id
order by e.id desc
limit 0,10

Where's the join condition for the Location table in the outer query ? Furthermore, what the heck does this mean:

select l2.from location

It looks like it's missing a column name, or a * wildcard.

I was pretty surprised by the results, though. Even our lowly product ElevateDB can handle optimizing correlated sub-queries like this pretty easily, and effectively treating them just like an inner join. I suspect that the query was specified incorrectly, although I guess it's certainly possible that MySQL is very bad at optimizing correlated sub-queries.
Not really. It's a trivial amount, and it would seem rude to refuse.
>>The OP is Al Jazeera. That means it's not on American TV, at least.

Really? Because it's on Al Jazeera it means it's not on top of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News right now? A prime example of how logic flies out (even in the smallest details) when discussing politics.
It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead".

Reasonably successful? I dare you to name one single Nokia-phone made the last half decade which you would consider relevant.

The truth is that platform-wise and software-wise, the bits you interact with, they've been stagnant since around 2000 and no amount of megapixels or Carl Zeiss optics will be able to compensate for that. They seriously need to throw their old stuff away and start going on something new. Like Microsoft did with Windows Mobile prior to Windows Phone 7.

I'm honestly surprised they didn't do it years ago. Now they've finally gotten a CEO which actually understands this and is willing to act on it. About time! While Microsoft is a risky bet, this move may actually save Nokia from complete annihilation and is certainly better than doing nothing at all.

And so far, Windows Phone 7 looks pretty good. Care to elaborate on how it is a failed platform already? Not disputing it if you have numbers, just that so far I've actually seen more enthusiasm for it than I expected to see.
How Not to Get Cut Out When You Are the Middleman
Did any of you actually see the content?

I downloaded one of the sites in the torrent titled Zombies. It's about a British girl who organizes a community effort to make a Zombie Movie. Sure the site was ripped but not the video content. Nothing on the page is worth seeing other than the video. Once the BBC turns off access to that stream the archive is virtually useless. I'm going to checkout more ripped sites; my gut says they're probably video heavy too.
> The host guy back in the studio pointed out the journalist on the phone had been impartial up until now, and basically apologised for her expressing her opinion.

Really? I haven't been following the English Aljazeera, but the Arabic Al-Jazeera was not impartial at all throughout the revolution (which I don't mind).
"Well, first off, it's supposed to be fun. If you don't see the joy in either of these puzzles, please don't apply."

Sorry, but there are plenty of 'fun' things and problems I can work on without essentially doing spec work for someone who will then feel perfectly free to ignore it. That is to say, problems where I can be sure I'll see a reward for my work that is meaningful to me, instead of potentially wasting my time.

Also, "rockstar?" Really, reddit? Seriously?
There's certainly some Microsoft anti-love going on here, but it's also not exactly unfounded or irrelevant. After all, they were supposedly competitors in the cell phone OS market before this move and now it appears that Nokia has psychologically completely caved to Microsoft.

This is not going to go over well in Finland's politics is what I was saying. If this move costs thousands of white-collar jobs, this guy may end up being as popular in Finland as Julian Assange is in Washington DC.
Is Dropbox overspending on employee perks? I highly doubt it.

Does that make every expense that can be rationalized in comparison to headcount, revenue, or (worst of all) potential pull-through revenue valid? No! Some are valid, some aren't.

All I am saying is, this notion of "we need the very best talent, and we need to make it is as happy as can be" is a platitude that was used by execs to justify a lot of excess.
Not to mention that I come here specifically to hear HN's views on the situation.
Portugal had a revolution in 1974 that ended an dictatorship of more than 40 years. The Army was fed up with the colonial wars and persuaded by the left-wing illegal parties, took control of the country. Democracy exists in Portugal, but corruption and widespread cleptocracy by a small number of elite families still rule. I hope Egypt avoids that.
Does this remind anyone else of SGI?

- Total domination of their own field

- Resting on laurels while others snatch the market from under them

- Panic

- Get a CEO from Microsoft

- CEO quickly decides that the O/S developed in house is not worth maintaining. And that the right O/S is no other than Microsoft's offering

- Company continues dive to irrelevance, albeit at a much faster rate than before

Well, the last one hasn't happened to Nokia. yet.

Goodbye old Nokia. You will be missed.
I don't think that's completely true. The youth idolise Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sagan etc. You just need to match their energy level and enthusiasm. I'd think it's irrelevant what age you are if your eyes sparkle with the mention of a relevant technology.
They know exactly what they are doing. They are "knifing the baby". Some employees will suffer, but it is for the greater good. If the company fails (look at Nortel), then everyone suffers.
I guess we won't be seeing a RIM, Microsoft merger any time soon then.
It's a weird synthesis, but I wouldn't frame it as hostile. A functional programming style has always been at odds in the Python world. OTOH, you have functools and itertools, et al. On the other, classes and a preference for explicit loops.

Yet even in Python3 where reduce has been moved around, there's still the spirit of functional programming present. The map, filter, reduce functions all return generators. This is a pretty good improvement as you can now use them on (theoretically) infinite sequences.

Yes, lambda is the lame, dead horse. It's just a syntactic issue. I'm sure most people in the Python world would be happy to receive a multi-line lambda that can return more than just an expression. It's just that no one has been happy with any of the syntax proposals to make it happen.

However, there are other things about lambda in Python that make it difficult to implement as well. But I think baby steps are important.

Is a fork necessary? Well... it would be nice to see some people experimenting with getting lambda to work. However I don't think a fork of the interpreter is necessary just to support a style of programming. Indeed Python prefers one way to do things, but functional programming has proven practical enough I think to be an exception to the rule and so it lives on. Sort of. :)
Cyber Solutions: The Company That’s Spamming All Your Favorite Blogs
This is not a Java port of it, but rather it runs using the Native SDK.
I would point out technology and the Internet played an important if not vital role in the events of Egypt and Tunisia.
This is a very good point. 'Thinking more slowly' isn't a problem in any other field.

I think that in software development, a lot of the time, 'thinking more slowly' with age is actually thinking more carefully. You have more experience, therefore you have a larger knowledge base; so of course it takes longer to query. It also means that you get better answers, rather than the first answer that pops into your head. At 26, for me to get the same type of results, I imagine that I might have to do some research.

Do you have any examples of what you do to stay mentally active? It also seems important to keep physically active (from my experience with older guys, the ones who are thinking best are typically in the best physical condition).
I would love to hear something about:

- how much you can make working for a think tank

- what kind of skills you need, specifically. for example, if you're doing research, i suppose PhD credential would be necessary

- what made you decide to leave the industry
Perhaps a post-HM government can do something about it - now that there will be one.
MySQL supports spatial indexes exactly for circumstances like this:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/spatial-extensions.ht...
Tools to Stay Informed and Invisible on the Internet
This is a side question and I'd like to get any/all opinions since I have yet to find a suitable answer to this.

How do I, as an American citizen, minimize cognitive dissonance when the following disparate events occur?

America's stance: democracy and 'freedom' are fundamental rights of all people.

-and-

America's actions: refusing to recognize a democratically elected body because the resulting will of the people is openly hostile towards America and Israel (Hamas winning seats in Palestinian elections).
"We'll see what happens."

The discussions I've seen about Egypt seem to assume that it can be governed like the countries we're familiar with. Most of the things that seem evil are in fact cock-ups or unfortunate necessities. We learned about this after ousting Saddam Hussein, and were forced into all sorts of brutalities that indeed would not work well in the US or Britain.
Those articles point more towards Nokia's support. I am more curious if there is something wrong with the actual OS.
The article talks about two types of programmers. The passionate type and the type that programs because it's a way to make money to fund life outside of work. Then it points out that many of the latter type write poor code.

I've found that if you engage your non-passionate co-workers and try to educate and inspire, you can really help them improve their skills. Nobody wants to be bad at what they do. A guiding hand can do wonders.

It makes their life better and it makes your life better.
(IncPy author here ...)

yup agreed, but the programmer needs to figure out:

1.) when it's safe to memoize

2.) when it's worthwhile to memoize

also, your memoization decorator doesn't save data to disk. if you wrote a persistent memoizer, then you would need to also track all dependencies for the data you memoized, so that you can know when it's safe to invalidate on-disk cache entries.

IncPy takes care of all of this automatically ;)
DON'T: Choose a partner that has a spouse/significant other who won't be supporting the business through the inevitable down times that come with launching a business.
It's another way of running rich functionality in a browser. It might be advantageous in some situations to solve uncommon difficulties with distributing UIs. It won't necessarily be a tool for the common case.
It takes some impressive cognitive dissonance to say this...

So, should Nokia have gone Android? No way. That takes them through a real commoditization (IE, non differentiated) minefield. One that Nokia execs aren’t smart enough to get through.

and this...

Nothing matters in this world more than apps. Write that on your forehead. Write that on the mirror on your bathroom wall. Write that on your car windshield. Whatever it will take so you remember it.

in the same post (a post praising Nokia for picking the platform with virtually no apps).

The rest of his points would be decent if Microsoft were in any way committing to Nokia. But they're not so all those platform advantages are spread across other hardware competitors.

Yes it will be 8 hardware competitors instead of the 40 they'd have to fight on Android. But Android would at least give them the apps and if Nokia really does have top notch hardware people they could find a way to perform in the Android market.
I don't follow the exact numbers, but my impression was that there were a hell of a lot of Nokia phones running Nokia OSes sold in world.

Do you have a source handy? It would be interesting to see how Nokia's market penetration (however declining it may be) compared to Microsoft's.
You're not making any sense.

Let me break it down for you: you made a claim about the sub-conscience of a group of hundreds of millions of people. You've supplied zero evidence. You've cited no scientific studies, nothing.

There's plenty, actually. Just walk around any street in any major Arab city/capital and ask the people

Let's assume everyone says yes...so what? What does that tell us about a sub-conscious sense of unity and brotherhood? If you went to many European countries, there'd be huge public support for the Egyptian revolution or the Palestinian cause, but surely that wouldn't be due to a sub-conscious sense of unity and brotherhood, right?
Nokia's current situation has everything to do with the C-level team.
Yeah I was reminded of OpenGL.

Haha, at least Nokia isn't claiming that they and Microsoft are going to develop technology "jointly".