skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Awesome man, nice work!
Also, compiling to Lua is not a bad option. Its syntax (http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8) is quite straightforward, and it's designed to compile rapidly (due to using table as a JSON-like serialization format).

While writing out a (kinda silly) benchmark a while ago, it struck me that, while Python's compiler is rather slow, Lua's has very little impact on the overall runtime. Between that and the lack of weird corner cases in the grammar, I'm reasonably comfortable doing string-eval metaprogramming in Lua, something I would never do in Python.

Benchmark (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800396) and commentary (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804166).
Intelligent people better at cooperation
great stuff, thanks.
Despite being cursed with an endless string of horrible (for me - I'm sure some students did well) math classes from high school through college, the one thing I came away from with them was an appreciation of how much more intuitively you can learn mathematics if you don't use a calculator.

The problem with using slide rules as a replacement is that students would complain too much about learning something they won't ever use to ever get the deeper understanding that Cook talks about. Most young people who don't want a career in math, science, engineering, etc do not want a deep understanding of the principles - they want an A on the test. Unless you can use one of the external tools as a shortcut they won't be willing to put the effort into learning from it rather than using it.

Ban calculators, ban slide rules, ban everything except pencil and paper and hope that people gain some smidgen of understanding through sheer force of not having any other option.
Forgot about the dictionary, I use it all the time in spotlight
I remember them being in Sim City 2000. ;-)
So, it's been a while.

I am actually disappointed in the video. There were no 3d models, and the project talked very little about the engineering effort. Instead we are given very stoic music and a bunch of PR.
So, where do you get the impression that the author wants to be taken seriously by people who are easily offended?

This looks to me like a typical personal blog where a non-native speaker jotted down his notes about a certain topic. The text is perfectly understandable and the grammar mistakes are harmless. Take it or leave it.
How to keep your sanity during startup launches:

1) Set sane timelines
2) Don't work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
3) Realize the world will not end if you miss an arbitrary deadline.

As an end user, If you miss your go-live date by a couple days to iron out some kinks I'm not going to head to my blog to tell the world how terrible you are. Get it right and I'll still be there with my cash in hand ready to give you a fair shake.
Workshop Addition
Specifically, the luajit implementation is known for being ridiculously fast.

http://luajit.org/performance.html

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-06/msg00071.html
Also compare it to the existing 10-20MW "solar tower"-type plants. It is a serious step forward!
It's not just syntax, but some semantics too.

Last expression in a function is returned. This includes assignment statements which are in fact expressions.

foo = () ->
a = bar()
z = () ->
if a
b = fu()
else
b = kar()

Here, foo returns the function z, and z returns either fu() or kar() while assigning the value to b

One could argue this is just syntax but I think this way beyond the kind of thing that comes to mind when somebody thinks of "syntactic sugar".
Yeah, so... bugs in the spec? Bugs resulting from i/o, unexpected input, wackiness of underlying system calls, things like that?

I guess I have a broader definition of bug than the author.
What you can learn from YouTube vs. Spotify
I actually noticed only two grammar errors while reading the article, even though I read the article after reading your comment. Now when I go back and look at the article again I see more errors, but since I (a native English speaker) didn't notice them when I read the article for real, they weren't a problem in this case. I've read articles that I started hating because of all the English errors, but this article doesn't even come close to that level for me. I don't think this article deserves such a long rebuke for bad grammar when I had so few problems reading it.
Beyond Facebook: Private market regulation is in need of rationality
Unless the post has been edited since, I don't see anywhere in the post where says the word lie.

As to your second point, it depends on how the number is being presented. If it's being shown as the number of recommendations, then including the number of comments is clearly inaccurate. A comment disagreeing with an article does say something as a useful metric, but it certainly isn't a recommendation.

Not a particularly big deal in the long run, but I still think the article has a point.
Python's twisted library supports both styles:

d = long_io_operation()
d.addCallback(callback)
d.addErrback(errback)

With defer.inlineCallbacks:

try:
result = yield long_io_operation()
callback(result)
except Exception, e:
errback(e)

It is not necessary to use functions in the second case.
I wouldn't call a situation where said developer discovering one small piece of information changes from him being a happy, productive member into a disgruntled employee a "win win". It could easily lead to a situation where much more value is lost than was ever created from this arbitrage situation (through morale-based negligence, not actual malice).
As fascinating as it is, people from Business Week and Reuters commenting that they 'look real' seems silly. Pure speculation, unless those guys and linguists who have studied Zuckerberg's writing and style and compared it to the email, their opinion means exactly nothing. I thought that really detracted from the whole thing.
Books on Education
Google Goes Gaming With Search Puzzles
The Little Schemer book is also a deceptively deep introduction that is a good preparation for On Lisp. If you work your way through it, you'll really understand functions that make functions, which is a good foundation before diving into On Lisp (and, of course, as a bonus, you'll have written an implementation of the famous Y combinator:)).
Uof Calgary forms committee to determine rules for electronics in class
Pilot here(private pilot, anyway), and yes: we use the E6B a lot when we're up there. It's nice that avionics can give us things like true airspeed and fuel burn rate instantaneously, but that's only as good as your power source is when it's working correctly. An E6B will never suffer from electrical failure.
There is some reasoning behind version numbers. Check out http://semver.org/ for more information (although I don't know if nginx actually subscribes to the semver spec)

Under this scheme, version numbers and the way they change convey meaning about the underlying code and what has been modified from one version to the next.

It's mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but it's not something I knew about beforehand so figured you may also find it helpful.
You can catch up on it here:

http://www.aolnews.com/2010/02/05/tech-site-apologizes-for-c...
Is it an execution problem, or just a different set of goals?

It looks to me like the Android ads are focused on their target market (male, 18-35) rather than the product. And I would have little trouble believing that market responds better to an emotional hook (dystopian sci-fi? cool!) than a 30 second product demo.

IME, that market approaches the 30 second product demo with the capability-checklist attitude: "Browser? every tablet has a browser. Pandora? Every tablet has Pandora. Games? Every tablet has games".

Given that, it seems perfectly valid --if that's your target market-- to simply aim for a 'cool' commercial that gets your product into their field-of-view before the inevitable internet research.
Due to the way the legal system in the US works, there is a lot of posturing. Plenty of the forms you sign are not enforceable at all and only there to make people ignorant of the relevant laws afraid to exercise rights they actually have.
30 years old and financially doomed
Some things to consider when deciding whether to be a tech entrepreneur
Salary negotiation for engineers
Paul Stamatiou recently wrote a really good "intro to design for developers" here: http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-web-design-ux-crash-course
> Learning Lisp requires real, significant use of the language. Eventually you begin to think in the language and that's when profiency begins.

This applies to any programming language. It's just more pronounced when switching paradigms. When I was learning python I would write python like it was C. The programs work, but it's not a very good way to write python. Even now when I write something quick in any language it ends up being very C-like since that's the language I use the most.
That wikipedia article seems to be citing somewhat conflicting references. Further down it says "The capacity factor for power towers was estimated to be 72.9%" [35] (http://www.nrel.gov/solar/parabolic_trough.html).

A heliostat based design is going to significantly raise the amount of usable insolation. And the mojave desert is probably close to an ideal location for such a plant.
Even if they are real can someone really claim 50% ownership after this period of time? Surely the ownership would have to be backdated to around his last involvement with the company, which would be miniscule compared with Facebook's valuation today.
Don't know if it's true or not, but if it is, Paul Ceglia could be the greatest early investor of all time, at least in terms of returns.
There are a lot of powerful people that probably do not want the control of facebook to be questionable.
Vinton G. Cerf: How to Fire Up U.S. Innovation
Quoting your [1] (end of power tower desing paragraph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Power_towe... ):

>The capacity factor for power towers was estimated to be 72.9% and 56.2% for parabolic troughs.

so the 20% figure is simply incorrect, and is probably the one applying to rooftop solar heaters, which are a totally different type of design.
I remember seeing these emails when this story broke. IAAL, and it looked to me like this is a colorable claim (without predicting its eventual outcome). It was weird to me that journalists and tech commentators dismissed it so readily at that time.
There's something about a lawsuit "building buzz" that disturbs me.
"...to which most self-respecting recruiters will say..."

That is to say, a tiny minority of recruiters.
Anyone can contract for anything, unless it's against public policy in the form of a law.
That isn't lack of lexical scope. It's that the for() syntax isn't purely functional in how it binds variables. One could define an equivalent syntax in Scheme and see the same result.

EDIT: http://pastebin.com/7BUXKVXT

Paste it into Racket and choose language R5RS.

(define-syntax for
(syntax-rules ()
((for ((var init) condition step) expr ...)
(let ((var init))
(let loop ()
(if condition
(begin
(begin expr ...)
step
(loop))))))))

(define (test-for)
(let ((v (make-vector 10)))
(for ((i 0) (< i 10) (set! i (+ 1 i)))
(vector-set! v i (lambda () i)))
(for ((i 0) (< i 10) (set! i (+ 1 i)))
(display ((vector-ref v i)))
(newline))))
Ridiculous. Did this guy ever show up in a cap table anywhere? He would be diluted into obscurity by now.
Why is there a presumption of truth in regards to emails like this, especially when coming from someone previously convicted of fraud?
The acquisition made sense if they wanted to diversify into the consumer space. What did NOT make sense was the astronomical pricetag of $590 million. How many flips + services would need to be sold to generate $590 mil in revenue?
Meet the guy who offered to pay Zaarly for a two-month contract and was hired
I would!

But I would also be interested in any book that gives new insights, expertise or broaden horizon in a compelling and fascinating way.

Book will be rather judged by how good it is, than what's about.
Only $25 cheaper than a regular kindle? Doesn't seem like much of a discount.

Ad supported usually equals free these days.
The five tweets:

1) Salary negotiation for engineers in 5 tweets: Never, ever reveal past salary information or your salary floor. #salarynegotiation

2) Every number in your contract is subject to negotiation. Hear otherwise? They're lying for advantage. #salarynegotiation

3) We are all businessmen here. Insecurity will not be rewarded with karma. Competency will not be viewed as greed. #salarynegotiation

4) Always have a counteroffer. Always have an option to walk away from the negotiation. #salarynegotiation

5) It is a seller's market now for talent. If they don't budge, firm handshake and wish them well in their search. #salarynegotiation
Groklaw is dead. Long live Groklaw!
I agree with not getting caught in a lie. Personally I don't like the lie approach, even if I can't be caught because it forces me to remember two sides: the truth and what I've told people.

I think the take away here is that you shouldn't be discussing previous salary in any case. If I'm asked I always say "I'm not at liberty to discuss contract conditions at my previous employer" or something to that effect. As I mentioned: as a free market entity, I should be getting what I'm worth now, not some variation of what I was worth 2 years ago when I last tested the market.
Its really easy to fake some emails, and it seems wierd to wait seven years to come forward with the claim. In addition the person isn't exactly the most trustworthy.
I still don't see why people would pay money for this virtual thing. It doesn't have any real value yet, everything is promised to come. It looks like some kind of scheme that promises future value in exchange for your cash today. Isn't this called a Ponzi scheme? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

If, on the other hand, governments backed this currency by guaranteeing some kind of flat conversion rate, I would be all for this system. As it is, I'm staying out.
I'm glad you liked it. Would you like a blog post on this general topic?
First, Ceglia (who was previously convicted of fraud) waits 7 years to file this lawsuit. Now he releases a new batch of e-mails that bolster his story, which were conveniently omitted from his first round of accusations?

This is enormously suspicious across the board. It should be ignored as an annoyance and nothing else until a court finds otherwise.
From the article: People now reading the emails are beginning to take them very seriously. "The emails don't read 'fake,' writes Henry Blodget at Business Insider. Felix Salmon at Reuters agrees. "The emails Facebook says are fake don't seem that way to me." In any event, everyone agrees that, if the emails are fake, it should be easy for Facebook to demonstrate that. "Facebook almost certainly has a forensic analysis of Mark Zuckerberg's hard drives and email boxes from this period, because these drives would have been the same ones analyzed in the Winklevoss lawsuit," writes Blodget. "Perhaps the drives show different versions of the emails in question--or no emails at all."
Seems pretty dismiss-able to me...

1) The guy said it took so long for him to come forward because he "forgot" about the contract/emails.

2) Selling 50% of the company for $2k seems like an odd move... I don't know my facebook history perfectly, but didn't Zuck have a business partner with a lot of money already?

3) The guy has a history of fraud convictions.
If I press "submit" without typing anything, I get a big fat nice 404. Might want to change that, maybe have it automatically search for iTunes, as is described in the example?
Don't expect overnight success.
Occam's razor time: Ceglia was according to that email full of ideas for Facebook until it started getting publicity, at which point he promptly forgot about it for several years...

If you're not looking for an interesting story angle, the posted examples look less plausible than the original contract.
Depends what they did in their job, and depends what they did on the side.
Woooooooops! Will fix that.
This is precisely what I am referring to:

The emails don't read 'fake,' writes Henry Blodget

Felix Salmon at Reuters agrees. "The emails Facebook says are fake don't seem that way to me."

Why does this matter? How it "seems" or "reads" to online commentators is irrelevant. What are these opinions based on - gut feelings?
Facebook-Baidu deal brings FB back to China.
I really don't think anyone just from reading the article(s) about the situation has enough information to know for sure.
Careful--this is the same logic behind the demands for Obama's birth certificate. People and entities should in general not be obligated to defend every ridiculous claim that comes their way.
One thing I noticed immediately is the duplication of cards. I wanted to sort by the biggest percent discount and basically the whole first page is the same 1-800-flowers.com cards.

The execution is very tight from what time I spent with it.
Yup. I'm reading this. Let's talk privately about how we could set it up. http://mixergy.com/contact
I typed in amazon and pressed submit and got a 404.I think I pressed 'submit' before the ajax could return a reply (I'm on a slow cellular connection). I clicked the 'buy' button on the homepage and it couldn't find the host for "http://www.anrdoezrs.net, which I guess is a referral program?

Cool idea though. Work out some of these kinks and add vendors!
About time :)
Some Startup Opportunities Are Losers Today
Camera phones probably made it inevitable. But Cisco certainly accelerated matters.

I got a Flip camera phone 3 or 4 years back for Christmas. Great impulse buy. I think there was only 1 model. Less than $100. Didn't use it that much but still loved it. Girlfriend, too. Great for trips.

Loved it so much that when it crapped out, we decided to get a new one this year, even though we both have good smartphones. Now there were 2 or 3 models of Flip. None less than $150. I just wanted what I had before. Simple, cheap, works.

I think I got a discounted one on Amazon for a little under $150. Get it in the mail. Doesn't work out of the box. Neither Linux nor Windows computer recognizes it. Won't charge. After an hour on the phone with a woman in the Philippines, we finally got it charging. First time we try to use it, it just shuts down. It was on the next flight back to Amazon.

There was still a market for the old Flip: me. Cisco screwed the pooch on this.
Agreed. A launch or redesign might get you a bit of buzz, but it fades away and then you have to work your butt off to sustain the traffic and attention.
Stratified B-trees and versioning dictionaries - future FSs will kick ass
Would be nice if project authors or someone from HN summarized how it is better/worse/different than say Raphaeljs or Processing.js
I've always wanted to take a negotiation class. I feel like I would learn a lot more being able to actually practice in person.
Thanks -- someone else noted this. we'll fix it asap.
Seriously, CoffeeScript is amazing. I've been working on a large client-side project in CoffeeScript for the past few weeks and every time I look at the resulting JS output I can't imagine having written it by hand; it's been a massive boon to my productivity. I wrote JavaScript for years before this and hated it at times, and now I can't ever imagine going back if given the choice.
The Education Complexity Shift
> By new insurance products you probably meant something like CDS? Or credit rating agencies using those improvements in risk analysis to rate those CDO's as AAA+++ would buy again?

I made a list of a dozen or so recent, top-level financial innovations (each of which has created many billions of dollars of value), and instead of recognizing that they had massive impact, you ignore all but one of them, redefine the remaining one from 'insurance product' to a credit derivative, and then attack it because of recent, well-known issues with mispriced credit and failures to account for counterparty risk when dealing with mortgage-backed products.

That's beyond disingenuous.

Have a nice day.
And since each has its merits, you decided to choose based on compensation

I can think of a handful of companies off the top of my head that would immediately rescind the offer if you made this proclamation. I'd be careful about doing so.
>"Surely the ownership would have to be backdated to around his last involvement with the company, which would be miniscule compared with Facebook's valuation today."

That would be a HUGE amount of money. Even if the subsequent investments are still legit (despite not having the involvement of the main investor), Zuckerberg owns like 30% of Facebook, so if you assume the primary investor wouldn't have gotten diluted worse than Zuckerberg, you're looking at tens of billions. Even if he gets diluted as bad as Saverin did (down to 1/7th), that's still like $5 billion or so, right? That's shit-tons of money.
Well the part about X is getting more than me is important from a value estimation point of view. He thought he was getting close to market rate until he saw what other people were making. The proper response would have been to start looking around and find out if he actually is being underpaid.
Building Epic Win with Backbone.js
Now I'll be really impressed if he manages to get the Kindle version into the top 50.
Well done Lachy! Good start, and a great MVP. Looking forward to watching it develop..
There is already a great html5 canvas library: http://easeljs.com/

Great for treating images and other objects on the screen as objects. With proper attributes likes position, alpha, rotation and so on. Been using it (along with Coffeescript, which it goes along very well) for 4 months so far, and it is really nice.

Don't forget to checkout the demos:

http://easeljs.com/examples/barGraph.html

http://easeljs.com/examples/sparkles.html

http://easeljs.com/examples/game/game.html

http://easeljs.com/examples/bitmapSequences.html

http://easeljs.com/examples/globalToLocal1.html

http://easeljs.com/examples/dragAndDrop.html
Using domain fluxing to spot a botnet computer
Elefant (Efficient Learning, Large-scale Inference, and Optimisation Toolkit)
This is great! I for one have always been writing scripts as a hobby. Film-making business has always been a closed circle, even in foreign and indie markets. An additional channel into the circle for people outside of Hollywood couldn't hurt.
I don't suppose there's a chance of seeing the O'Caml implementation released as well, is there? It's neat to see it being used for what (IMO) is a really underutilized sweet spot for the language.

(That & the fact that a code release is an invaluable road map for anyone looking to follow in your footsteps.)
My mail feels private, Facebook doesn't. A lot of people complained loudly when Google started scanning the text of emails to display "relevant" ads. My guess is, there will not be very many people complaining about this.
I think the fundamental objection fogus has is that the language does not support the programming model. For example, I can program object-orientedly in C, but that language does not help me do it. I have to do much of the work myself. So you can program in JavaScript in an event-based way using Node.js, but JavaScript itself does not help you much in doing so. It requires that you do most of the work yourself - work that is mechanical, and basically requires that you be a human compiler.

Disclaimer: I don't program in JavaScript or Node.js. So I'm talking from conceptual understanding, not experience.