skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very cool. I wrote an Ethernet driver for an OS I did for my master's thesis, but there's a lot more complexity here I didn't have. (For one thing, my OS didn't do SMP, and I was using old cheap network cards, so I didn't have multiple queues. That's a nice advance.)
Perhaps you're right about people doing "actual" complicated maths simply not caring about a multiplicative constant. However, a lot of people do most or all of the complicated maths they're ever going to do in their lives when they're in university. During this period, the correct symbol makes every formula and equation simpler and easier to learn. Crucially, it's also during this period that people's understanding of complicated maths is most important, as they are judged by letter grades upon which many of life's opportunities depend.
From the headline, I thought this was some sort of government initiative.
...and the login music...
Good luck to those who hope and dream to attend MIT, for today is admissions decision day! 3/14 9:26pm (not 1:59pm this year because of Class of '15)
I guess none of you have seen The Recruit.... :(
Unless find has been changed since the last time I tangled with it; you need to explicitly put the search path in first (which yours doesn't do), which since that is opposite the utilities I used more often, I kept forgetting to. Second, find seems to react weirdly to wildcards in search terms, I sometimes ended up rerunning it with slightly different search terms to be find the file I wanted.

Maybe I just wasn't using find right, but several introductory linux books have also claimed it is hard to use. Before I found the du -a | grep idea, I was using one I read somewhere else of grepping a directory listing (made by ls -lR ~/ > dir) rather than use find.
The problem he had other than the reporting may have already been ridiculously parallelizable.

If he wrote stable code and sharded user accounts or something, it might have worked with no real difficulties.
haskell is terrible when you want to make big changes---it's often quicker to just rewrite completely from scratch. fixing all the little inconsistencies is a real pain.

But without a type system that finds inconsistencies for you, all you can do is hope that a) you didn't miss any or b) they come up at runtime when you exercise the code with tests. Refactoring is hard, but Haskell ensures that partially-refactored code doesn't even compile. That's a good thing, because code that is broken shouldn't be running. With Python, all you can do is cross your fingers.

I've had good success with the "make one huge change and chase the compiler errors" strategy when making major data structure changes like String -> ByteString or [] -> Vector. It's tedious, but that's what would happen in any language when you switch from the native list type to a C array.
You can create a file with your git commit id in your deployment script and have it run on your source control box.
Here it is: http://www.sti-k12.com/publicsis1.asp

Interestingly, I've had a family friend starting out as a teacher say that she can't find a good, intuitive gradebook. Maybe there's a market for that as well. I think it's fair to guess that this kind of software is made for buyers, not teachers, and may not address their needs very well. I could be totally wrong.
You should read this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They probably dont care if they are torrented or not, they likely care if they are made public.
I find that Haskell shines at a specific kind of hard problem, namely those involving significant math. It's particularly good for problems involving abstract algebra. Why?

1) The Haskell community tends to rely heavily on math—it's part of the culture. Part of this comes from Haskell's functional nature, which favors mathematical approaches, and part of it comes from a community tradition of using more math to work around the limits of functional programming.

2) A typical Haskell library is usually an algebra defined over an abstract data type. Haskell has excellent abstract data types, and good pattern matching, which makes this a natural way to work.

3) The QuickCheck library generates random input data for functional programs, and makes sure that certain invariants always hold. For example, you can use QuickCheck to verify that (reverse (reverse xs)) is equal to xs.

4) If your problem domain has a certain mathematical structure (specifically, a topos or a closed Cartesian category), then there are some really slick ways to map it onto a Haskell DSL. See my notes at http://www.randomhacks.net/darcs/probability-monads/probabil... (PDF) for an example involving Bayesian filtering and particle systems.

5) Haskell's strong type system make it feasible to work at very high levels of abstraction without going completely insane. For ordinary CRUD apps, I actually prefer dynamically-typed languages, but when it comes to scary math, a good type system makes life a lot easier.

6) Because Haskell is so steeped in math, it tends to force my brain into "math mode" well before I reach the mathematical heart of a problem.

So I'm not convinced that Haskell is the ideal language for small DSLs. (Ruby shines, here, for almost exactly opposite reasons.) But when there's enough math involved, Haskell is absolutely a wonderful language.
It's a noun I've used to attach the adjective sanctimonious to which adds more emphasis than the word "person" would have, and also confirms to the reader that I disapprove of a holier than thou attitude.
Is 22π equal to 2 times 2π or is it equal to 11 times 2π? That is, is 22π equal to 2(2π) or (22)π? If 2π is a single symbol, then 22π would be equal to 2(2π), which would be really confusing.
I'm sure they must have received DCMA notices for infringing files people host in their publicly shared folders.
It's all electro magnetic. It's an issue of energy. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation
M&A Issues: Timing
sidenote- Blogsmith, the AOL blog editor, does the tag optimization for spacing / hyphens automatically.
Haskell's type system only guarantees things that the type system guarantees. One thing which it does not guarantee is "does my program do what it's supposed to do". That, you need unit tests and a good design in order to feel confident about.
I would direct anyone who thinks geeks are harsh now to read chapter 10 of "Dealers of Lightning," about the early days of Xerox PARC.

They had a weekly meeting called DEALER, where the boffins would present their ideas to the group at large.

A quote:

"But the argument had best be carefully thought out. Anyone trying to slip an unsound concept past this group was sure to be stopped short by an explosive "Bullshit!" from Thacker or "Nonsense!" from the beetle-browed ARPANET veteran Severo Ornstein. Then would follow a cascade of angry denunciations: "You don't know what you're talking about!" "That'll never work!" "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard!" Lampson might add a warp-speed chapter-and-verse deconstruction of the speaker's sorry reasoning.
If the chastened dealer was lucky (and still standing), the discussion might finally turn to how he might improve on his poor first effort."
I wonder if it would help to think about what job the user wants done (instead of how good the app is).

Christensen suggests the user is hiring your app, as an employee, to get something done for them (it might be a work task, or it might be fun, to pass time, start conversation, break ice etc). So: what's the minimum the app has to do, to achieve that, for some user?
Stack Overflow: Printing 1 to 1000 in C
Twitter and Me
Andrew (from Meetup) here. While the main web app is written in plain ole Java, the API is almost all Jython (the streaming stuff is Scala). The API team was 1 person until last December, and Jython was a big reason for this. The ability to glue all of the core logic and custom ORM into web.py on top of the modjy Servlet container is really powerful.

And, I concur entirely with what ibejoeb says.
I actually agree. If you want for instance some weird scoping rule like

; example taken from PG's On Lisp
; "it" refers to the big-long-expression
; "aif" stands for "anamorphic if"
(aif big-long-expression
(foo it)
(bar it))

then combinator libraries won't cut it. Template Haskell might, however (but its' not standard, and besides our point).

Now my point is that the subset we speak of is easier to achieve through functions with lazy evaluation. Macros are more capable, but harder to deal with. This is magnified by Haskell's paranoid type system: functions are checked in ways macros aren't.

So my guess is that neither system dominates the other.
I think he may have been so whimsical that he popped out the other side of reality into the pragmatic.
" ... he has done no experiments to verify any of his hypotheses."

Personal experience or experimentation are not the only means of acquiring knowledge. In fact, most of our knowledge is gained by other methods (e.g. trusted sources).
You have a point about the story dredging in the OP. Here's a more carefully sourced story that has more context:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14seismic.html?...

I think the overall displacement (around 13 feet as quoted in the article above) is of interest to both specialists and to the lay public. Just as an indicator of size.

The main thing that's of interest to earthquake people is not so much the peak displacement, as the underlying stress/strain field (i.e., the forces and displacements as a function of space). There will most certainly be a slew of journal publications, as well as press releases, once the displacement data are analyzed.

Here's an example of the latter, for the Landers earthquake, which was a M7.2 in 1992 in the desert east of LA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giJaGdfavfs&feature=chann...

The closing frames show how the strain probably accumulated in the centuries prior to the earthquake.

*

It may be helpful to say: what they're driving at with all this hyper-precise GPS and displacement modeling is a forecast capability for earthquakes, same as is done for weather. In both cases you have sparse measurements of fields that are assimilated into a forward model.
> The type system gets in your way

I think that anyone saying this suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of how to use a type system like Haskell's. I encounter it often with people coming from C/Python who start writing typeclasses, data types etc. and only afterwards start adding functions and then struggle trying to get the right types for their functions.

Fundamentally, programming is a search problem. We are searching for a sufficiently good solution (program) in the space of all possible solutions (all possible compiler inputs). I am of the opinion that the type system can significantly help in searching for such a "good solution". In the words of Conor McBride: "Sometimes it's easier to search for good programs in the space of well typed programs, rather than in the space of ascii turds."

Personally, I start by writing down type names (just names, no implementation or anything) and function names of what I want to do with said types and most importantly what the type of said functions should be (inventing new type names and functions as I discover I need them).

Say, for example, a game would start with GameWorld type and an update function of type "GameWorld -> some events -> GameWorld".

This way I start fleshing out the skeleton of WHAT I want to do, without any regards yet as to HOW I plan on accomplishing it. Once I think my skeleton is somewhat complete I define all my functions to be "undefined" (actually, I do this as I write them down, of course). undefined has all possible types in Haskell, so it always typechecks, but throws an exception when evaluated.

Then I start replacing the undefined's with actual code that matches the signature and start implementing typeclasses/datatypes as required while writing the functions. I will occasionally compile the code to see if everything so far actually type checks.
> My reason is that I have difficulty calling someone a "fantastic developer" if they don't have a basic understanding of algorithms, data structures and systems

A lot of development is plumbing.
Out of curiosity, why did you go with them three times? There must have been some benefits; how did you make out all told?

EDIT: Would you go with them again?
Not at all. Check the links. Flattr are directly contributing money to Sea Shepard. This is not about who they collect donations for, it is about who they themselves contribute to.
It's true. I don't know how many times I've watched eager hackers get lambasted for "reinventing the wheel," or "don't bother doing it yourself, you'll just screw it up -- someone has probably done it already and did it better than you could." This happens most often at the intersection of technology and entrepreneurship.

The business advice is that it's cheaper to buy it than build it.

The engineer's perspective is that a square peg isn't going to fit in every hole.

"Geeks," are harsh. I mean that in the very broad, general, and discriminatory sense. We have to work with bad code all day written by bad programmers. Some of us make a career out of saving businesses from bad technology decisions and poorly written programs (it is NOT good work, btw. Just pays well). So when yet another new-comer comes on board with bright, eager enthusiasm to revolutionize the Internet (yet again) we do tend to be rather cynical.

I agree w/ the poster that the cynicism is a bad thing. We could be more constructive. Don't stop them from writing their own web server... show them where to look up the RFCs, reference implementations, etc. Encourage them to learn. We could all benefit from having more knowledgeable people around.
Please forgive me, but I feel the need to say:
"this is a shop i can tell from the pixels"
As of last week, Jython 2.5.2 was released, which is with some benchmarks is a 20% performance boost. I'm told that as of Pycon this past weekend, Jython 2.6 has been officially started, which will bring Jython closer to what you currently get with CPython 2.6 (library wise, etc). I can't speak for the project, but my guess is that it'll be sometime next year before that gets to an alpha state.
It's a little more advantageous to firmly establish your current language/style/concept as the standard than it is in skateboarding. The job market is all about hype. If RoR is the latest trend, a RoR programmer is better off. Same with Node.js. Same with HTML5 over flash.

While I doubt people actually think "I'm going to tell you that your choice of language sucks because I want more work" I also doubt bullies on the playground think "I don't have a lot of self esteem, so I'm going to pick on kids smaller than me to make myself feel better".

Some communities are more harsh than others. Ask a stupid question in #perl and compare the response with #python. The perl community is well established and isn't trying to evangelize. Python is (or was) less commonly used. They don't want to scare away new users because more python programmers means more support for the language.

It's not an excuse, but it is a possible explanation.
Valve's Erik Wolpaw Talks Portal 2's Difficulty
It's funny when the dup makes the front page and the original doesn't. Guess it's all a matter of timing.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322355
I'm not so sure it is a joke. The author clearly states it's more for neophytes. And the convention can be explained of using 2π after showing what it all means by explaining Tau

If nothing else, we should at least get a non-separated printing character that looks like 2π connected up, similar to latin dipthongs.
The man page says that if path is omitted in

find [path...] [expression]

the current directory is used. I don't know if it's just that way for GNU find, or if it's standard Posix find behaviour.

Regarding the wildcards in search statements, I usually just need to match a case-sensitive substring, so I use something like:

find -name '*sub*'

I don't know of any weird wildcard reactions, but that may be because I don't usually use complex searches or matches.

One last thing, if you don't mind all the "./" prefixes, "find ." (or just "find") is just like "du -a" without the block counts.
Even worse than that is the anti-(anti-(patterns zealot)).
No problem. Further to my comments about the design, I read in another story linked to on HN that generation III reactors now use convection based cooling. I gather this means the water is taken elsewhere as steam to cool then returns via gravity to the core. Therefore you wouldn't have this same kind of issue with a modern reactor.
While I agree with this to some extent, I'd just like to comment on the the skateboarding analogy; You were probably taking it one step at a time, learning to stand on the board, increase your speed, make turns. Once you got all that done, you might move on to try some tricks, perhaps trying to learn the rock to fakie trick. What you _didn't_ do was, on your 2nd day, to scream out "why am I not sticking my 720 kickflip?!?!".

The latter is fairly common in the world of programming, in my experience.

(There's obviously also a big difference between being physically together with the people in a skatepark and sitting on the other end of an IRC session.)
In lisp, this sort of thing could be handled by a macro.

So why not apples-to-apples and use Template Haskell to do it?
TurningArt Draws $750k in New Funding
Process PDF File in Memory with File Stream & Memory Stream Support
New version of Aspose.Pdf.Kit for NET (5.4.0) has been released. It includes improved PDF to image conversion, PDF file concatenation, bookmark editing, and JavaScript stripping features. This release also include an overloaded Strip method to support streams as well — FileStream or MemoryStream etc. This new overloaded method will help you process the PDF file in memory, without saving it to the disk and thus increases the performance of your application.
great video montage guys
I think that's taking things a bit far.

The compiler will make sure you are returning an Int, but it has no ability to make sure it is the right Int.

Or, in more practical terms, the type system has the ability to make sure I'm returning a Reader MyConfig Int. This guarantees that a) all configuration parameters come from a single known location, b) no side effects and c) the output is an Int. But I still need unit tests to make sure the result is correct.
If you notice closely, you'll see almost the exact same video being repeated in all the screens- no matter how big/far they are. The size of the receiver/transmitter certainly isn't really big enough.
If it was real, it would be grainier too. Good effort on the video though.
Is he getting published in the Wall St Journal?

Look, I agree with the general viewpoint that we should build more nuclear power. But his points about the article are valid, and I don't see why he should be held to a higher standard than the PR flack getting free op-ed space.
My impression from the article was not that Poole thinks Facebook is evil, or that anonymity is always better than a clear identity. His point was simply that it would be a mistake to eliminate anonymity from the internet entirely. Both systems have valuable benefits. From that standpoint, I don't see any contradiction in the choice for his new project.
What I was trying to say is that there is no need to introduce another symbol τ as we can simply refer to "the circle constant" as 2π. I am not suggesting to treat 2π as a single symbol in formulas.
Absolutely no major book, be it pop or a college text touches on the role of power in the relationship.

I recommend reading up on game theory, which might as well be understood as the study of the role of power in relationships.

Interestingly enough, your portrait of banks abusing customers is a lot like my view of how I abuse my bank. They give me risk-free credit, help me manage my money, and make basically zero revenue from me. All I really have to do is read the fine print and avoid going into debt, which isn't especially hard.

Milken is an interesting guy to mention, actually. He started out as a great example of powerlessness--a low level employee who happened to be one of the few Jewish guys at a sleepy, Waspy firm, where he was stuck analyzing the stuff nobody else cared about. I guess he had some secret reserve of power that helped him fake his way into basically running the company and making a killing before getting shut down by some overzealous regulators. Milken doesn't contradict your theory, but he does fill in the missing variable--power is something people accumulate, and very often they accumulate it within their lifetimes.
Tileboard is great. Not the highest-quality whiteboard material you'll ever use, but definitely the most cost-efficient and easiest to obtain.
> My understanding is that those clauses (or similar ones) are standard. We have one on our house.

Really? Where and what originating financial institution?

I read my notes and I don't remember anything like that. (I found a lot of other things that I wasn't happy about.)
Big applause for my cofounder Chad launching his blog. I knew he was up to something.. he was asking me Jekyll questions in Campfire this weekend. Then I woke up at 7 this morning and he was still in Campfire saying he wrote a big post.

His blog is actually hosted by S3 but I'm sure he'll write a post on Jekyll stuff later.
As a user I shy away because of the option magnitude, too much. As a designer I shy away because no app can beat Photoshop, sadly.
Selling excess capacity is not the problem Groupon is intended to solve. Groupon is a promotional tool, not an inventory management system.
OpenBSD base now free of C++
What's the reason for starting a new project when you could build on existing ones like Ekiga instead?
I don't think that's a very strong counterargument.

Most people probably aren't really watching these things. They either process it with their peripheral vision or glance at it for a while when they're really bored and there's nothing else to see.

Now, the image is rather ordinary and stays there only for a few seconds.

This isn't flying saucer or a plane crashing into a building. It's just a dude on a TV that displays ads.

How different is it, really, from the famous Blade Runner ad?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ17UsZ0DEQ

Also, the camera almost never films people who actually see the screens. So even if there was someone pointing finger at it, we wouldn't see it in the video.
I wouldn't call it propaganda if your merely trying to get people to put facts of an entire tragedy into the proper context. Yesterday morning I turned on the ABC and saw this: http://yfrog.com/h7r6rmcj CNN has been treating the nuclear accidents with equal importance, just because they know it freaks people out, publishing numerous errors on their website, according to one MIT scientist (Dr Josef Oehmen): https://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-w...

Don't get me wrong, there is definitely propaganda on both sides, but the anti-nuclear crowd pouncing on this before we have all the facts, and while there's a race against the clock to find survivors and prevent more loss of life, is counter-productive.
I think it's relevant to point out that this is not a news article written by a reporter; it is an opinion piece written by someone who has a very specific viewpoint.

This is not ad hominem, I am not claiming anything about the correctness of his claims. However, I think it is important to distinguish this from the other numerous WSJ pieces on the situation of nuclear plants in Japan right now.
Thank you. I don't think this will do any good, but I'm still glad somebody is saying it loudly.
I don't know why you'd want to discuss this issue at all when you know that the people who disagree with you happen to do so out of base motives.

Incidentally, "every single one... save for one guy," might not be the best way to phrase it.