skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favorite answer:

"My Sunday school teacher, when I was a Mormon teen, once memorably advised us that "There's nothing more overrated than sex, and nothing more underrated than a good bowel movement." It totally worked...I don't remember a single other sermon from when I was a kid, but I think about this guy exactly once a day, and then again once a week."
Considering the fact that they recently settled on charging users for listening to their stations on the iPhone, and that Apple added the 30% subscription demand shortly after that, I'd say, well, prediction is bullshit.
The blog poster is actually only asking for help getting his students faster. He's not looking to pontificate.

But, I will. Since it's the Internet and all...

One of the things I find intensely irritating is the presumption that classroom effects significantly correlate with industry effects.

Many/most students are still learning. It takes years to really start getting on top of your game. Further, even if the students are highly competent, e.g., a typical "young hacker", the activities are very small and limited.

So studies and anecdotes (plural of anecdote is not data) regarding student or professional performance in a classroom environment just isn't realistic.
I totally agree with this. A lot of people don't realize how much they are helped by their society because they've never seen how bad it can truly be. Here's an example of I mean (and a worthwhile read to boot): http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50799

You aren't going to be able to develop your skills if there is no society or infrastructure to support that development, if transit is difficult and dangerous, if all money and energy is being siphoned to a few corrupt people at the top. Of course charity isn't the only solution to breaking this cycle, but it certainly helps more than a $1500 laptop.
I just think Google has a much higher than 70% share. Here are the latest #s: http://searchengineland.com/research-bing-powered-engines-gr...

Yes, Bing, Blekko, Yandex, Searchme/Wikia (before they sadly went away), and I know of others not yet released.
Yeah... such curiosity clicking costs advertisers. Conversions on the fb platform are abysmal.
5 reasons why the iPad will fail...
http://webtrends.about.com/b/2010/01/26/5-reasons-why-apples...

Sorry, I've read these articles too often to even bother clicking through to the rant.

The Mac App Store will do fine. In fact it will be an amazing, resounding, blindingly successful success. You don't have to like it. There are in fact a lot of things I don't like about it ... but that doesn't change the fact that Apple customers will LOVE it.

If you don't love it, it wasn't meant for you... stop being such a hipster.

... how's that for a rant? ;)
A reformulation of the question as "What contributed to improving your programming speed?" would be nice. Concentrating on why or how the professor is faster is only indirectly useful, coming up against tips that helped people improve in real world scenarios is much more useful - at least to me.
One of the things that's really impressed me about 10gen is how much effort they've put in to running and promoting MongoDB events. We've been collecting them on Lanyrd and they've been involved with 17 in the past 12 months, and have another 8 coming up:

http://lanyrd.com/topics/mongodb/

They wouldn't be spending all that time and money on events if they didn't work, so I'm beginning to think this is a major factor in the huge amount of buzz surrounding MongoDB compared to other NoSQL alternatives.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein
Good job sir! Wonder if he does tuition? :)
We did some market research using Facebook ads and we were super satisfied. In this particular case, we were interested in a specific customer segment (what they like, location, status, etc.) and Facebook ads did a great job. Google ads and other services were useless.

If other words, it is mistake to equate Google AdWords with Facebook Ads platform. They should be used differently.
Their channel? Definitely. Their hardware? Only if it's sitting on a shelf.
You need to consider the goal of the Constitution: to prevent tyranny. Everything in the Bill of Rights was put there to thwart a known tactic of tyrants. Today there are new tools that give the tyrants new tactics, and we need to make sure our Constitutional protections keep pace. It may be that the courts will decline to extend our existing protections, since they don't literally apply; but it's a good first step.
That's a poor analogy - in rabbits versus foxes, I would place my bet on the rabbits. Historically rabbits have been real pests for places where uncontrolled growth occurred, as foxes don't hunt rabbits when having lower hanging fruits in the area :-)
Whats the point of paying for MPEG-LA's license for AVC if doing so doesn't actually make the format legal to use?

Both sides are saying (if not expressly then implied) that their licensing technique is believed to be enough, but they can't promise absolute protection.
WAIT, this captcha seems like its inverse, easier for computer than human to answer.
I could see some sort of "disambiguation" feature like on wikipedia. So when I click on your link above, it could give me links to Felt (rock), Felt (rap), and Felt (classic).

I made up the genres, but the point remains. Then clicking on Felt (rock) takes me to last.fm/music/Felt(rock).
I've been exceptionally pleased with Facebook advertising -- I find it has had far higher conversions than Google advertising has.

So as with most things, your blanket statement doesn't ring true to others; and ymmv.
For those that don't know, this is the model by which electronic discovery is generally conducted today: http://edrm.net/

It's over a billion dollar market and there are plenty of enterprisey vendors that have positioned themselves into every box on that EDRM chart. Lawfirms and corporate counsel will happily pay for this stuff because the amounts at stake in litigation are so huge.
I think that's just an argument about semantics. You say "fastest". If you ignore that and just do it the dumb way, then you're deleting data by overwriting it. Making it "fastest" is the optimisation.

In any case, I still think your point is valid despite disagreeing with you, and I think it's disappointing that you just received a downmod. I've just upvoted you back to 1.
unions are well known for scaring compilers away from many types of optimizations when encountered. For example, if you're writing a SIMD vector class then pretty much the worst thing you can do is put the SIMD data type in a union with a float array.
I agree with that, but I also don't really see the current incarnation of Greplin as a threat to any open vs. closed battle the big players want to fight.
Help us to Build - Code in Cloud - Next Generation Cloud Platform
Consider the firm or lawyer being compensated on a contingency fee basis -- they must cover all the expenses and overhead related to prosecuting the case, including the salaries for attorneys and paralegals working the case -- and if they lose they get nothing. Since their reward for winning the case is fixed, at usually 1/3, reducing the time and cost they expend on a case, particularly during e-discovery (which can consume quite a bit of time and manpower), is both valuable and in their best interests.
Network camers - show world
I'm not sure I'd using the FUD-inducing "destroy evidence" to describe what's happening.
I used to speak that fast, and I still do when I forget to speak slow.
The problem is that most humans can hardly follow the speaker and think about it at the same time. I was actually forced to learn to speak slow in high school by my language teacher. My presentations in front of a class were too fast even for the teacher.
Speaking fast has its advantages, but it should only be used for simple presentations like this one. It certainly doesn't work for very scientific topics.
Fair enough. Maybe Henry Petroski instilled a little too much engineering pride in me: http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/engineering-is...

Sorry if I was being a pedantic jerk.

BTW, I have these two images hanging in my office. Both are scientists discussing science. Love them.

http://ysfine.com/maga/feydirac.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Niels_Boh...
That's not surprising. What is surprising is the general hostility that Facebook has for its developers. It's like they don't want people making Facebook apps. (Perhaps they don't).
I think there's a bigger problem here - this isn't just normal bathub-curve component failure. What seems to be happening is that the firmware panics due to an assertion being hit, and what could be a hiccup that requires a reboot becomes a total data loss event.

"gamble" suggested above that this is related to power-saving modes. That fits with our different experiences (laptop vs server). Think about how you would feel if you rebooted your server, it went through a different power mode as part of shutdown, and when it came back all eight of your presumably nicely RAIDed drives were dead. Of course a lightning strike could do the same thing, but you have a surge protector that guards against that. How are you protecting against your SSD's firmware? That's my real concern.

As to whether it's SandForce or OCZ, I'm just going to go Intel next time. You're free to go with OCZ or a non-battery-backed ramdisk - it's all the same to me :-)
Obviously, smoking causes death!

/troll
Code in Cloud is a cloud platform targeting novice developers to build their applications rapidly with fun. We are at very early stage and we need to initial feedback to get started. So help us to help you.

thanks
The project looks dormant right now. There have been no changes in months; no release in over a year.

direct link: http://retrospectiva.org/overview
Get Cheap Soma
Sure it does, in the sense that there are fewer selective pressures on us, and those pressures are weaker. Our intelligence is able to overcome many of the pressures our environment exerts on us.
Personally I don't. I started off with data flow diagrams and similar top down design methodologies which I'd been formally taught, but it's very difficult to keep your software and your diagrams in line and over time the diagrams become more and more spaghetti-like, to the point where they're no longer useful.

The best methodology seems to be the unix-like approach of dividing the problem into small self-contained programs for dedicated tasks which are then strung together as needed. This allows development to proceed in a flexible way, without having to waste a lot of time re-drawing impossibly complicated diagrams. Instead of a hierarchy of programs you can think of this as being an ecosystem of programs.
Check out Facebook's FlashCache: they use SSDs as a cache on to traditional HDDs. You can have a read-cache to keep 'hot' data fast, and (if you want to) you can have a write cache that will buffer writes on SSD before flushing to HDD.

I don't know whether it's ready for general (non-Facebook) use yet, but it is definitely one to watch.
Show HN: Tinfoil Security -- Security For Startups. Launching soon
8-1-1 against Veteran. Now what?
I prefer to use UML as an output language, never input. It's good to come to foreign codebase and generate visual presentations of its hierarchy and flow graphs.

As an input language, created by hand? No, not really. It's mostly something for java/.net architecture astronauts: often used only once, to generate the cruft that will be the project directory hierarchy, but it's brittle and grows quickly out of touch with code & documentation.
Removing Facebook from searches for Facebook or people's names wouldn't just invite investigation, it would damage Google's credibility as a search engine. Penalising the Facebook content farm consisting of Wikipedia articles plus lists of fans would probably be a net positive though.
You're right, he did. We let him present again at your batch's dday. We do that occasionally with startups that have special circumstances.
Sure, but reading code is quite different from writing code. Not necessarily easier, but different enough that I think it invalidates the comparison.
Speed can be taught (ask any pro athlete).

Speed is worth teaching (ask any manager).

Being able to solve small problems fast makes one capable of solving complex problems (divide and conquer).
I think this line of thinking greatly underestimates the value of UI and the integration of APIs. Take Yahoo. They're moving to Bing for deep results but concentrating on UI and weaving in other structured content for a lot of the head searches. That approach may well be good enough to start gaining share again over the medium term.
Information gleaned from the world can be evidence and deleted data at the same time; so what are you really saying?
Heck, I've never heard of them, let alone used them.
>..."the changing landscape of ever more tightly controlled "platforms". It used to be that the way software interacted with a platform was via APIs; now it's increasingly alignment with the platform owner's business goals..."

What I love and find scary about this whole thing is that i feel like I am watching Neuromancer come to life - the online landscape of the internet - which used to seem like a massive coop of all these companies for the greater good of information freedom is now replaced by massive walled gardens, protected not so much by lethal ICE apps, but by corporate dogma, policy and ruthless greed.

Sure, its not quite a dangerous network in which your wetwire cant be used to kill you -- but we aren't yet in 2020.

I am in wonder and shock that the Cyberpunk fantasies of my childhood are the reality of my adulthood. My children will be the characters I used to role play when I was slightly older than they are now.
http://www.secondmarket.com
Jon Stewart - Teachers vs. Bankers
Difference between C++'s STL and "Standard Library"
This isn't the case. See the HP and MPEG-LA testimony before the FTC.

The pool agreement isn't exclusive. The members are free to license their patents through other venues, including cross licensing.

In fact, one of the points MPEG-LA made in their initial review letter with the DOJ is that he pool would not be used to force anyone to pay for a license to a patent which they were already licensed for some other means.

So a pool member only has to pay royalties iff they've been unable to achieve complete cross-licensing with the other pool members.
I don't mention biotech for a vey important reason: that good , common sense techniques can prolong life as easily if not better. Biotech is there for the tails. I believe the article clearly states that and cites all of the relevant statistics
Beating cheating
Hi! I'm borski. I'm working on Tinfoil with sbisker and ainsleyb. I've been doing security for a few years.

One thing I've noticed is that, all too often, smart people build websites that have major security vulnerabilities; usually, these are easy to fix, but they'd rather spend their time focusing on building out their product than worrying about security. As well they should.

Tinfoil allows you to worry about your product, not your security. We provide automated scans of network and web vulnerabilities with our custom-built crawler and fuzzer, displaying the results to you in a manner you can understand. You shouldn't have to be a security expert to understand how to fix common vulnerabilities and why fixing them is important.

Let us know what you think!
I've been using last.fm for just over 7 years (and I was one of the last of my friends to join). I love it. Why? Because unlike other "social networks", last.fm is actually useful. For me, its is about data, both aggregating my listening data (across several devices including desktop laptop and squeeezebox) and using it to recommend new bands to me as well as local concerts to go to.

This article is laughably bad. It's creating a problem where there isn't one. Last.fm is not on the decline. It is not any less exciting than it was 5 years ago. In fact, the service only gets more interesting the longer you use it. IMO the premise for the article is false. Moreover, the recommendations for improving Last.fm are weak and for the most part frivolous.
They have a track record of showing images and video with their reporting and imply the images are related to the news being discussed when they are often not.
Based on your comment, you might like this article:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/why-twitter-is-massively-un...

There - Don't say I've never curated content for you :)
Techdom's Talent Poaching Epidemic
Lion wasn't the first, and Unity will beat Lion to market, so that's something.
Python now uses Mercurial
I think that's covered by point #1.
I know that idea, does it now go by the name The Humane Interface (THE)? I haven't played with it in practice, but the way OS X does spaces+expose is similar.
This is a funny topic. The best developers generally solve a problem by using high level abstractions. They would usually (in my humble experience) make some drawings on a piece of paper or a white board, before writing any code. UML&Co tried to teach average developers this method, but lost focus, bloated and are hated by real developers nowadays.

BTW this is the best book on UML and software design I've read: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/020169946X?ie=UTF8&tag=...
See http://libre.fm/
Right, but then it becomes an apt analogy again :).
PHP Dependency Injection
A number of cool IDE's for Processing.js exist:

- http://sketch.processing.org

- http://sketchpad.cc

- http://jsfiddle.net ( Processing specific example: http://jsfiddle.net/zalun/FZqZN/ )
More Than Good Enough
Ask HN: 40 iPhone app promo codes for candid feedback
I'm relatively new to iPhone app development and am having trouble with one of my apps. The app is called PowerPlay+ and is a power hour playlist generator for the iPhone. I realize the idea isn't that original, but I think my execution is better than similar apps. The problem is, I'm not getting feedback from users (<1k downloaded between free and paid versions)--which isn't too surprising given the nature of the app store.

Could anyone provide some feedback on the app? I spent a good amount of time designing the app to be 'attractive' and easy to use.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/powerplay-plus/id413083997?mt=8

Thank you!

Codes

99RN6EXHYY3P
JKHJA4JW6TJL
R73MAT3JY9EX
WTK4NMA9M7T7
XLX4A9E79HLH
ARH3LTT7K949
4NJ7ETY9KJX9
TWMR9LE766Y3
MYJTA67E73WY
RMEWEPM3Y6LF
JALAFMHPR639
A79K7XJMFYPW
HMXEPRYHPPEK
PELN7HPAYW3W
P6MENXJMKM9F
J3TAFNPXW49W
9KPPRKRPRPXA
6LMRLERALPPF
W73J4KFL6HWX
NJNNPYMMPHMA
MN74NLJN797E
433KE6P7JPPY
TWXWMMLEM6LK
7W4HJ9HL7KLF
PF67KEELT77K
PYFL7MYXA7XL
966XWKT4A397
AY6X6X7WK4E3
A3MMLNT6XXPM
9HRNTTAFPL9Y
EN73WXKLL6XH
379KWK3KHE9E
AWMR4NJPJELM
YK6L7XMNAJT6
JH6PJXYH79P7
WTAHK6K4LP4J
TR79PM4KH9RJ
XP3MKHRYT7JM
43JRYJWL7PXE
YF9R9TWLJ9TW
> He has never taken a non-academic job in his life;

That's not quite right. He did at least consulting work outside of academia. As I quote him in Coders at Work: "For example, some of the best work I did for Burroughs Corporation was to debug their hardware designs. Their engineers would show me the specs for their computer and I would look at it and I would try to construct examples where they would be off by 1 or something. I got more than 200 bugs out of their B-5000–series machines before they went into production, although it had passed the simulators."
Jonathan Ive Facts
Webkit is open source. It's a big difference. I agree I'd like to see Opera gain more market share as well.
It's not ideal, but artist-disambiguation is also a non-trivial problem to solve. The effort of which needs to be balanced against a) how many people it affects and b) what else needs doing.
Here in the US I use last.fm fairly regularly via firefox toolbar add-on fire.fm. With it I just hit play, pause, fwd and stop to listen to my last.fm station; it's controls sit at bottom right of my browser.

On my iPHone though I use Pandora more then Last.fm. Pandora for non indie/vanguard music plays better recommendation then last.fm does.
They actually took the image from the paper, but they used the comparison image instead of the actual one.
This is incorrect. It's not possible to implicitly use an incompatible ABI for prototyped and vararg functions, since a foo f(bar, bas) function needs to be callable via an unprototyped foo (* )() pointer. Thus, even prototyped C functions need to use a caller-cleanup convention. To use the callee-cleanup convention, the entire Win16 and Win32 apis are annotated with explicit __stdcall attributes and are addressed by distinctly-typed (__stdcall * ) function pointers, of which no vararg variation is allowed.
"Multinational corporations and governments may seem fair game, but what about private citizens?"

The irony here is that the "private citizen" in question ran a company which specialized in facilitating illegal collusion between multinational corporations and governments to attack - yes - private citizens.

And unlike Arron "sweaty ballsack of caterpillars" Barr, the people his firm set out to smear (e.g. Glen Greenwald) were targeted for having made effective use of Constitutionally protected liberty. Barr, on the other hand, was singularly focused on undermining that liberty for commercial gain.

So yes, fair game in spades. Assuming, of course, that you think this is just a game. Happily, the Atlantic concludes that - so far - their effect has been "nothing more than regulatory."

Yay for sanity.
Apple makes/made softwares/oses to run exclusively on Apple Hardware only.
Monk Mind: How to Increase Your Focus
I place my bet on Google as well.

One a sidenote, I think it's ludicrous to even suggest Facebook is a Google killer. It's a social network. That's all it is. Unless you have people that you interact with on it, it's pretty useless. My 2 cents.
Typical startup fallacy. Just because they aren't overhauling their site every few months doesn't mean they are stagnating.

There is a difference between being stagnant and being stable.

The new content and change come from the data users scrobble and from the new music musicians make. The site is a platform for that, and IMHO it does its job perfectly. Not only that, but it makes a lot of money doing it.
WordPress post to your blog using email
Decent article, common sense for the most part. What does it have to do with living forever though? With a reasonable amount of effort you can avoid a few things that shorten your life span. The problem is that the long tail is huge, and it WILL kill you.

By following your advice you add maybe 10 years to your life expectancy. Not bad, but "forever" is a long time.
Well the odds are somewhat high that if one has a patent on something in h.264, they would have joined the consortium and gotten royalties for it already. Plus there are a lot of patents that already exist in the patent pool that MPEG-LA has, which is indirectly what the MPEG-LA guy is saying, that one of them probably infringes.

My head hurt after going through one software patent trying to figure out what it actually meant. I can't imagine cross referencing every single patent against everything that WebM does.
Can you explain how would be a "power hour playlist generator for the iPhone" useful to me (or entertain me)?
The truth is the same in both cases: sometimes "deleted" data is actually deleted, and sometimes it isn't. The difference is perspective: the user wants "deleted" data to be deleted and forensics people want it to be preserved.
Oh good--- I still have a change purse!
Is Fabric basically capistrano implemented in python?