skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before spending time adding support for additional languages, I would wait for someone to demonstrate their need and willingness to pay for this feature.

I have read some interesting things about Python being used in the maths/science worlds (NumPy/SciPy being great examples), but have never heard of Ruby or JS being used in this context. So I think a lot of web devs will say "It should support Ruby/JS/whatever" - but how many of those people are actually going to pay for the site? Is there any reason to support these languages other than the cool factor?

Adding support for VBA would probably help bring a lot of corporates over to your site, although I really feel for whoever ends up coding that! :-)

This is a great site btw, lovely logo/design, and a fantastic piece of tech behind it. I could see this being bought by Google and folded in to Spreadsheets.
User Experience vs. Usability: Can They Get Along?
"Sleep is important" has been a recurring theme for the last couple of years but I am one of the few that don't buy into it at all. Maybe I fall into the 2.5% but if I sleep 8+ hours I feel overslept and groggy. I function moderately to exceptionally well on 6 hours of sleep and often times end up getting more like 3-5 hours of sleep.

I've read articles about high functioning executives that barely sleep at all and seen studies about less sleep improving lifespan along with all the standard sleep is so important articles. I think its safe to say the jury is still out on this subject and keep hoping it doesn't continue to over saturate the news/science pipeline for much longer. Until there is a definitive answer you'll continue hearing me say "sleep is overrated".
I know who you are because of StackOverflow, and I came to respect your opinion through your answers while I participated there. I have to agree with you. You asked a very tame question and got a very unexpected response, all the more strange because you've been a big contributor to the flagship.
Oh wow, that's an ace tagline! Still, it does run on web servers, would "effortless cloud supercomputing" have as good a ring, do you think?

We're definitely going to avoid trying to cater for the Mom and Pop segment -- Google docs have a perfectly decent solution for them.
Hostage oversupply forces Somali pirates to cut special return rates
A minor style point, but you can drop the parentheses here. They're only needed when you're assigning the result of the comprehension since = has a higher precedence. I go back and forth on whether it's better to remember this or to just put parens all the time.
Why Vivek Wadwha is Off Point (on Boston vs Silicon Valley)
Schools such as Caltech and MIT have rigorous curricula that proverbially requires constant study every day of the week just to stay in the middle of the pack. Naturally, most students cut back on sleep. Proponents of this approach are aware of this, even boast about it, saying that this is the best way to learn the material.

On the other hand, numerous studies -- including the link at the top of this page -- conclude that this is the worst way to get anything done.

They can't both be right.
From College Student to $100K Per Year in Profit with Domainer Andrew Allemann
If there are they shouldn't.

As mickeyben says above, choosing indexes is a compromise - you sacrifice performance in one area for performance in another. Only you can make the right decision there, because only you can begin to know how the app will be used in production.
* The algorithm that shares his namesake, an extension of the CYK algorithm (a parsing algorithm for context-free grammars), is the fastest known.[1]

[1] Leslie G. Valiant. General context-free recognition in less than cubic time. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 10:2 (1975), 308–314.
Even with a 27" monitor I choose to use second monitor, and when I am cross referencing two documents I will put one on each monitor. The 27" could easily hold both documents, but it just feels so much easier to use two screens.

It seems pretty unlikely that two screens on a tablet would be viable in terms of power and cost, but I can totally see it being a superior experience.
How Unique and Traceable are Usernames?
I think Steve's puffery is more of an explanation; it says something about why they're doing what they're doing, from their perspective.

Compare and contrast with the other kind of puffery, seen in this article. Steve's puffery can actually be valuable to interested parties, as it reveals the thought behind the actions, whereas Leo's puffery is just vacuous promises that may or may not be upheld.
Not to belittle their announcement, but what textbook says you can't filter a signal? Or is the novelty in the degree to which they had to filter the outgoing signal?
Wow, I didn't realize Angry Birds is really 99 cents. I was thinking they cost U$ 15 or something (even Plants vs Zombies, which is U$ 19 on the PC and I was considering buying, is only 3 dollars for the iPhone).

My father bought a Samsung Galaxy last week, and it's carrier subsidized so he pays 20 dollars/month for a year.

My own Nokia N86 was also carrier subsidized at U$ 30/month for a year (and that included 300 minutes' worth of calls).

Even the iPhone is carrier subsidized at about U$ 50/month for 2 years.

In those cases, paying an extra U$ 15 would make a difference, but U$ 0.99.. you're absolutely right.
Yeah, he does that on the day he is shipping the device that represents the direction in which the entire industry is heading, the device that is the harbinger of the post-what era in question.
What It's Really Like to Be a Hacker
"HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn't have. When HP makes announcements, it will be getting ready to ship." - Leo Apotheker, Jan 27 2011

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12291529
While your point is very good and valid, it was the article's goal to focus exclusively on the interface, that is why it doesn't mention the story.
Er dupe: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2304779)
Reddit - several of the subreddits are quite good. Try:

http://www.reddit.com/r/design/ - general design

http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/ - web design

Both of these pages have more specialized subreddits linked in the sidebar (e.g., http://www.reddit.com/r/designthought).
Reposted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2304858). This was first.
Lessons in Freeway Calculus
Interface Builder's .xib files are just not-diff-friendly
There not sufficient awareness from the vast majority of small businesses on the benefits they can draw from Cloud Computing, specifically cloud based applications. This article helps getting a high level view.
MIT's Media Lab's new logo has 40,000 permutations [video]
Link Prediction by De-anonymization: Winning the Kaggle Social Network Challenge
MathOverflow is a hosted instance of the SE stack, while the "Mathematics Stack Exchange" is part of the Stack Exchange network (started in their Area 51, "graduated", etc). The former is mainly for academics and professionals in the field, while the latter is more elementary and geared more towards the average user.
I'm not a lawyer. Anyway, I have yet to see a web site anywhere on the internet that asks the user for said content. So we'll just have to wait how it plays out once web sites start doing that.
My interpretation is that he is going to use your comment, like the one he linked to, as motivation to prove you wrong. Maybe your comment will be printed out and put onto the wall of the SE office.
The FC EXPERT BLOGGER fails to distinguish between the hardware and software part of the tablet and is confused by it.

Moreover, he didn't explain why he thinks copying iPad is a doomed strategy.
I hang out on the Electronics & Robotics board and even in the few months I've been there, growth is noticeable.
This is kind of cultish. Jobs being successful with a certain approach doesn't mean that it's the only possible successful approach and everyone else should copy it.

Not that you can't make an argument for his approach to disclosure, but it'd be better if not couched in hero-worship.
> HP are coupling webOS with HP PCs, instead of putting webOS on the Web

There is no reason to believe they will not also do this.

Use the service architecture to allow Enyo development to expose device specific system services (telephony, etc).

But license (open source?) Enyo for web development for pure web based apps, or even things like PhoneGap.
A Russian blogger who visited NK last year bought a copy of the NK-produced "Red Star" operating system (in reality, a flavor of Linux), but he doesn't show the hardware: http://ashen-rus.livejournal.com/4300.html
I agree for the most part. However, try going for a regular run (say 5km) once per week, same day, and track your times. Let's say you hit about 30 minutes first time, and get it down to around 20 mins over a couple of weeks. Now try greater sleep deprivation than normal one week and watch your time plummet.
looks good, I strongly support the idea of using gmail accounts to be able to post and reply, because I recently tried to sell my car on craigslist and got TIRED! of getting all the spam... I like the idea of craigslist, but the spam was the main feature(:P) that pushed me away from it.
Simple, spamfree, easy. Looks good so far. Best of luck to you, sir.
http://www.amazon.com/Most-Human-Talking-Computers-Teaches/d...

The author of this book was a guest on The Daily Show recently and mentioned that there is an award given to the human who is most convincing to the judges that he or she is a human. (I'm not sure which Turing Test event he was talking about specifically.)

I didn't know or even stop to consider this before, but it is interesting to think about what makes our written speech seem human.

This is admittedly getting off-topic.
The NASA Effect
Most of what you site is anecdotal evidence. Most likely, you and those executives fall into that 2.5% cohort.
It is the best tablet deal around. Running Honeycomb on it still lacks support for the hardware decoder, but it will come in time--older android versions support it fine.
The #map and #select approach in your example is even worse since it loads all of the associated friend and photo records into memory and tries to use Ruby for queries that should be performed by the database. If there are more than a handful of those records, that process will balloon up and could bring the server to a halt.
"sleep is important" is a lot different than "8+ hours of sleep is important." I'd agree with the former, but agree that the latter is dependent on the individual. Anecdotally, I definitely agree that oversleeping makes meore groggy.
Fair enough, however looking at the industry, the correlation between announcing products a year in advance and actually shipping them is low.

I conjecture that if we go out and measure things, we will find that the correlation between announcing products a year in advance and being successful with said products is actually negative.
The parentheses thing is the one thing that bugs me a bit about the CS syntax, but mostly when dealing with calling functions. I wouldn't mind omitting the parentheses around function arguments if I could be consistent about it. Seems like there are some cases where parentheses are necessary to make sure args go with the right function.

I'm wondering why I find this so annoying though. It's not like I complain about having to put parentheses in math to make sure stuff is evaluated with the precedence I want.
Some more information here:

http://sing.stanford.edu/fullduplex/

The problem with full duplex wireless comm. on the same frequency is that the transmitted signal is much stronger than the received signal. Therefore, echo cancelling is usually impractical.

Not sure how these guys overcame the difficulties with transmitter nonlinearities and other unknown impairments.

EDIT: they claim to do partial cancellation by placing the receiver antenna at the null of the two transmitting antennas (getting 50 dB reduction in echo power). Whether this is practical in a commercial low cost radio remains to be seen.
So You Think You Can Ops?
Must read for Ops folks looking for a job.
I'm sorry, but I've never tried to run a comic book blog. I have, however, had nginx taken to its knees with the default configuration on a system that could trivially handle the load it was receiving, requiring modifications to the exact same parameters one has to reconfigure after doing an apt-get install apache2-mpm-event to get good performance.

Frankly, it seems like your real issue here is that no one told you to apt-get install apache2-mpm-event instead of apache2, and if anyone would be to blame regarding that it would be Debian/Ubuntu (you will note I specifically stated "if I were a conservative Debian-based distribution using apt-get", not "the Apache project").

Again: this isn't a problem with the default configuration, this is you installing the wrong thing. From my perspective you may as well be complaining that you typed "apt-get install apache" and got Apache 1.3 (yes, I know this doesn't actually happen on Ubuntu: it simply doesn't work), when that "should" have given you Apache 2.x.
While I don't entirely agree with the article, I do think that the future of manufacturing is more automated, and because of that we may see refined products for specific tasks. Perhaps you could say there is a bit of 37signals mentality in having a simple, clean tool for each job rather than a multi-tasking OS. I don't see anything wrong with this, as products like the iPad would probably represent most consumers.
Samsung Tab 10.1 teaser
Get the Sheen off your screen New app blocks Charlie from your Internet
Hey! Put me in a locked room with no windows and no clocks, and I'll sleep 7 hours too - out of boredom.
In Aggregate
"So how much sleep do you need? When researchers put test subjects in environments without clocks or windows and ask them to sleep any time they feel tired, 95 percent sleep between seven and eight hours out of every 24. Another 2.5 percent sleep more than eight hours."

The broken link there is meant to point to (http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/how-sleep-works/how-m...) and I can't spot where it mentions this study.

In any case, you put me in a room with no clock or windows (and presumably no serious stimuli as it's likely to influence the results) and I can bet you I'll sleep twice as much - out of pure boredom.
I just like to say that some of HPs offerings are really well done. Just like Apple they can't make a decent computer <$500. Unlike Apple, they'll happily take your money to prove it. I've held the 13" Envy and it could give a Macbook Pro a run. Also, their dm1z laptop comes in at half the price of a Macbook Air and is quite impressive from the reviews I've seen. I was tempted to get one but they are sold out.

As a WebOS developer I think most people don't know what they are missing. It's really a beautiful OS (far better than Android, and better in some respects to iOS) I hope it continues to improve. And now that the designer behind it as at Google (Matias Duarte), Android users will be in for a great surprise.
Do you really think that Android tablet makers can continuously produce at that price point though?

Let's be honest here: as many benefits as the android -> hardware developer model has, there are some glaring weaknesses.
So it's not the year of Linux? Hopefully there will be more interest after Gnome 3 and Ubuntu 11.04 both released in April
The code in question is a benchmark of how fast two different render APIs work. The only way to do that reliably is to take the question of the timer firing rate out of the equation. I doubt you'd use setZeroTimeout in most realworld environments.
The claim that this doubles the amount of information you can send is nonsense. It simply allows you to send and receive simultaneously.
A tool I've been using for the past days: http://sleepyti.me/

I'm currently testing it. The last two days I went to bed at a time which the tool suggested; getting up wasn't much of an issue, and I felt some improvements, but it's definitely too early to say that it works for me.
It's well known that sleep is an absolute requirement for athletes. If you don't get an optimal amount, performance will suffer: http://sportsmedicine.about.com/cs/conditioning/a/aa062800a....
What would be interesting if for Barnes and Nobel to allow the continued use of the Nook for this type of stuff, and then later do a detailed report on how big an impact it had on their bottom line. The speculation (by hackers) has always been if you are selling product as a loss leader and people are hacking it, it's a better strategy than if you try to shut them out. Someone should test it!
I wish there was a way for me to sleep less than 9 hours. At least now i have a great excuse for people calling me lazy. I am special!
Considering I used to run Xcountry and have been known to go out for 8+ mile runs in the middle of the night, I'd say for the most part my sleeping habits do not impact how I feel while running. In fact, I'd actually say more exercise is more important than more sleep as I feel much better in general when I am exercising/running regularly, regardless of my sleeping habits.

I will absolutely concede that there is a threshold where sleep deprivation will negatively impact my (or anyone's) ability to perform, its just a question of what that threshold actually is.
I don't know about a file system, but I would like them all in one place in the proper context. That is why I'm building http://MindWallet.com. Here is our coverage of startup bus to see a little of how it works(although no one besides me has contributed, it is really really easy to do so. just log on, select an item, hit enter then tab and start typing):

http://www.mindwallet.com:54501/?ItemKey=787541c7-0860-41ea-...
While it's a great deal for the end user, Barnes and Noble may be selling them at a loss (or at least a very small profit) with the expectation of making up the difference with book sales. They probably don't stand to benefit from having the cheapest android tablet, with users who weren't specifically looking for an e-reader.
I hate how everyone keeps calling this "Space". It's near-space.

Space is considered to begin at 100km altitude. These balloons can go up to 45km at the very highest.
Designing with Behavioral Economics
The No-Good, Very Bad, Overwrapped Banana
I hope you're wrong too, but it's a very good point. The advantage we think we have over writing their own Python (or Hadoop, or...) on EC2 is that it's just easier to put these things together in a spreadsheet environment. But we clearly need proof points for that, and perhaps we should be focusing as much as possible on finding someone who can champion it.

One thought -- as lazylland suggested elsewhere in this thread, perhaps we should consider downplaying the spreadsheet aspect? Ultimately, what we're trying to do is provide an easy-to-use way for people to access large-scale computing resources. It just so happens that a spreadsheet-like interface turns out to be a great way of doing that, but that doesn't mean we need to bill ourselves immediately as "a spreadsheet".

(Also -- it sounds like we should be promoting the option of running the app on local server farms more heavily.)
My OpenBSD story -- solving hosting problems with open source
Three Lessons Steve Jobs Has Forgotten
The State of HTML5 Audio
In-n-Out as a burger compared to the entire burger ecosystem true enough, not very awesome. However in its own category it reins king. I feel like it dominates 2 cross sections, the first of course is fast food. Compared to almost any other quick burger joint its the best. In terms of the style (I've seen referred to as 'West Coast style' which is a thin paddy, often several of them relying on sauces and veggies for substance) it is also near the top.

There's also a lesson for HN to take away. In-n-out is a extraordinarily example of making the best product they can using the best production methods they have for their target market.
What Next-Gen Consoles?

Sony and MSFT didn't do that well on this generation.

> Collectively, that means that 2011, on the console side, is going to be relatively drab. Microsoft doesn't need a new console, Nintendo doesn't want to compete with the 3DS launch, and Sony can't afford a new console. So it seems like the only points of interest this year will be price cuts--certainly, Sony and Nintendo will have them.

http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2011/01/console-post-of-w...

There are no plans for a future generation, aside from Nintendo, which _might_ have a full HD console. (Please correct me if I'm wrong).

> The demo ran on a PC with an Intel Core i9 microprocessor with three Nvidia GeForce 580 GTX graphics cards connected through SLI technology. The demo took about three months for 12 programmers and artists to build.

It's on a huge, hot, expensive PC now, how would the big 3 recoup their investment in such a beast? Wouldn't they be better off trying to sell portable units with cheaper to produce games?
Thanks for the feedback. It's really useful:

1. Cool. We noticed yesterday that it could use an update, but we'll stick with the calm simplicity.

2. Excellent idea.

3. Interesting. We'll experiment with a less intense version to see how that looks.

4. Like ihumanable says, it's an airship where the gas envelope is a cloud. It breaks up into pixels to suggest a spreadsheet.
Not yet, but soon.
How I Used Customer Profiling to Sell Drugs
No, those schools have cultures that promote such behavior. I was a grad student and TA at Caltech and observed that the undergrads had horrible time management skills. Procrastination and heroic effort at the last minute were the norm.

(I'm not specifically picking on Caltech undergrads, BTW. I'm fairly sure this is typical at most schools.)
it'd be better if not couched in hero-worship

I admire what the man has accomplished. That doesn't make me blind to those of his policies that I dislike. For example, I do not develop for iOS at this time, despite owning a collection of said devices, and knowing lots of people who have made excellent coin developing for iOS.

Anyhow, I'd like to admire Leo as well. I have opinions. They are often based on feelings. Those feelings are often backed up by rational thought and are perfectly reasonable, but they are still feelings and opinions.

If you're looking for a dispassionate argument where everything is in the passive voice, I am not the right person for you. I take the same approach to my work. I try to make things I can admire. Or at least, I try to make things that are less then contemptible. It's the same thing.

Anyhow, I don't think that admiring what Steve has accomplished and pointing out his track record is inappropriate when criticizing Leo's choice of announcement in a personal forum like this. It's a personal opinion, which means it's personal.
I don't have a good sense of Myrvhold's overall stance or intention, but I was dismayed to find Neal Stephenson heavily involved in IV. Perhaps only to cure my cognitive dissonance, it occurred to me recently that perhaps IV is performing a grand reductio ad absurdum attack on software patents.

i.e. accumulate a patent army and then declare total economic war, forcing USPTO / FTC to intervene and prevent abuse
Nice. Just "Ubuntu", wherever you install it.
Hmm! That's funny, I thought I was "getting" monads better after reading this article (as someone who doesn't already have a firm grasp of monads, of course).

You see, I already sensed that monads:

- were a way that you could sort of simulate side effects using pure functions

- had to do with the type signatures of functions

What I gleaned from the article is that monads:

- have to do with making functions composable

- work by way of the abstractions bind and unit in order to make type signatures match

Did the article harm my (lack of) understanding of monads?