skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I pointed this out in another SICP thread, but it's worth restating for anyone who might be interested in Clojure but not want to invest in Scheme for SICP: The subset of Scheme that SICP uses is so small and simple, it doesn't take much effort to use that to do the exercises in the books. Doing everything in Clojure would likely distract from the core concepts, many of which are related to Clojure's philosophies.

I would be sad if anyone waited for one of these SICP-in-Clojure projects to be finished before even starting to read SICP.
The datacenters that provide services for Windows Phone 7 and Bing certainly don't need chillers. They barely need servers.

Badoom tsss
Here's an A+ reference/tutorial for anyone looking for a "not for dummies" version of rigid body dynamics:

http://www.digitalrune.com/Portals/0/Documents/A%20Unified%2...

(Had to google for a fresh link; unfortunately this doesn't seem to be nearly as widely mirrored as I believe it deserves.)

Things I liked about it:

- The author continually explains, compares, & contrasts alternative approaches throughout.

- It builds up a full actual system, including a lot of discussion of what other references may dismiss as mere software engineering.

- The author starts with the fundamentals and goes from there, usually fairly thoroughly.
yeah founder Allan Branch also made fun of the Haitian earthquake last year...classy outfit
That was probably editorialized by TC. I work at Vitrue, and Reggie regularly corrects people around the office who refer to the company as a "startup".
Why would you want to saddle an ARM processor with all the IBM PC 5150 compatibility that lives in every "commodity" motherboard? What would be gained from obliging ARM processors to have the same external signals as x86's? How would they guess how to properly initialize the various components (something processors depend on processor-specific BIOSes and EFI to do)?
For what it's worth, I'm very glad their views are expressed. I think they're destructive and suggest a certain myopia, but I'd rather the beliefs be out there than people hide them for fear of public condemnation.
There is an important flaw with this analysis. It is using Google's worldwide platform statistics with US-only numbers. Worldwide Android use is estimated at about 50 million, giving an estimate for Xooms sold closer to 100,000.
They bought the sensor. The machine-learning approach that allows the kinect to run @ 200 fps was built @ MSR by Shotton et al.
Veracode's research was a follow up to the piece that ran in the WSJ two days ago:

Mobile-App Makers Face U.S. Privacy Investigation: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870380630457624...

In it, the journal reported:

The Journal tested 101 apps and found that [...] in Pandora's case, both the Android and iPhone versions of its app transmitted information about a user's age, gender, and location, as well as unique identifiers for the phone, to various advertising networks. Pandora gathers the age and gender information when a user registers for the service.

As far as I know, the journal stands by their story. The location pushing Tyler details was found in the bundled AdMob code, which does check for ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION and ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION. While it would seem to be relying on the bundler to request those, I wonder if there isn't something going on that allows AdMob to grab location information if another application that uses the AdMob code has requested it. Android applications can expose public or private (same signer) APIs to other applications on the same device, and send whatever data out of them they have access to.
Does anyone believe this stuff?
This is the kind of analysis you end up with when you assume an exponential change will continue essentially unbounded.
That's absolutely not true.

I had the misfortune of working with Outlook on a virus checker infected system recently. That would take minutes to open. In the same time I could open a browser, open Gmail (or indeed the outlook web interface) and send an email, easily.

Same with MS Word - misconfigured printer support on the same system would force it to time-out waiting for a printer before I could use it.

In theory, native local apps are fast. In practice, with real world computers they often suck.
We already have #1 implemented in the code, just that we haven't enabled it. We will be adding this once we have considerable number of tax agents on the system.

I was solving my own problem with running around the tax professional. Thanks for the pitch.
Here's another great game physics reference by Glenn Fiedler. It's a must-read for beginner (and not-so-beginner) game programmers and has helped me immensely.

http://www.gafferongames.com/game-physics/
And when: the 7.1 struck about 4:30am Saturday morning--the outcome would've been very different if it had also struck at ~12:50pm weekday as the 6.3 did.
From having spoken to them?
Ringing the changes uses permutations. The described method uses relatively prime numbers.

Both produce music according to a simple algorithm, but the algorithms are different.
I liked The Ruby Programming Language book because they attempted to do just that. K&R is a good model for books to follow.
I made a vote by accident, so count -1 in the Yes...
google reader. I read about 75 sites that way (including various craigslist searches to buy things)
Is this seriously a topic of conversation. Anyone that's worth going to this conference won't give a shit.
In my experience, the main reason is that you only need to design for one screen resolution on the iPhone (retina artwork doesn't really affect the screen layout). This makes it a lot easier to statically position elements and create pixel perfect effects.

On the other hand, when you're dealing with dynamic layouts, you have to jump through a lot more hoops to make sure the app still looks good as the resolution is scaled up and down (e.g. creating a stretchable images and such and so forth).

I also think that Helvetica is a much nicer looking default font.
The letters have started coming in. Good luck to everyone. :)
Safety In Your Home
Oh my god, its a hellstorm in the chats.
Unlike Mark Pesce (still surfing the 3 inch wave created by his successful creation of, ahem, VRML), I at least know that I'm a wanker.

Funny point though.
I respect speakers' rights to express whichever beliefs they hold, but I think it's also important, both for them and for attendees, to recognize the effect that it has. Their views on women (or any group), popular or otherwise, are irrelevant so long as they don't needlessly bring them up, but when they choose to do something that makes some members of the audience less comfortable and less likely to attend in the future (particularly since speakers are often perceived to represent the community), then that's a loss for the entire community, with negligible gain.

Even if those who are offended are overreacting, publicizing their views is probably the best way to be sure that both speakers and attendees can make well informed decisions about which conferences to attend.

If they want it to be a club for guys (and women who'll deal with it), that's their prerogative. If, on the other hand, they think it's more to their benefit to be inclusive, they should probably make an effort not to be needlessly offensive. To that end, it's probably best they be made aware of who they're offending.
And guess what. I had this post already prepared and I didn't have a sad version of it. It's 3AM here but we'll not be sleeping today 4 sure :)
Same reason John Carmac began focusing dev efforts on consoles - when hardware specs are consistent it's much easier to build highly optimized software / UI rather than trying to support endless configurations.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/8665/1
C# programmers are always bragging about how generics are so much better than Java's. But when I've looked at the common day usage cases they're really about the same. I know about the type erasure issue but unless you're doing some crazy reflection stuff it never comes up. I'm not trying to start a religious war here but what is it that in practice makes C# generics so much better than Java's?
But each individual in method ringing is repeating their pattern. (at least as Wikipedia explains it.)
This is a battle in which everyone wins.

However - the information released is less valuable without information on how the systems are used. For example, it would be great to get an idea of how Facebook is deploying the FusionIO cards they buy - and what the architecture is for serving up different components of its site.

There was no mention of storage - we basically saw compute nodes and the power infrastructure.

Are those nodes hosting multiple VMs? How are they connecting to storage.

Where is the Cache Layer - It looks like, via the statement they can send a reboot command via the network - that they dont care about OOB management - which really makes sense when their entire datacenter is purpose built for a single site.

So we see with both google and facebook a single application scaled to a global level.

We dont see how these architectures can be modularized to work for smaller apps or multiple separate tenants in a single colo designed around this architecture.

There is probably some good networking designs we can employ in a commercial data center to achieve compartmentalization of services -- although with the modern cloud - people area lot less sensitive to collocating their apps/data than they were just a few years ago.

One of the challenges large traffic cloud hosted services are seeing is limitations in not owning the HW architecture, such as Reddit where they dont have the advantage of designing, say, an SSD front-end cache layer.
Congratulations. Good luck on the interview :)
I'm excited to see more additional development solutions for Objective C; but why are we taking a step backward with these awful Java like GUIs that have plagued Eclipse and NetBeans?

Why in 2011, are people still building UI heavy applications with Java?
YC Founder Project (www.letsmakeastartup.com)
In one of the chat rooms about YC summer 2011 hosted here (https://convore.com/yc-s11-apps/who-else-landed-an-interview-already/). Someone posted a link on YC Founder Project which aims to take in all YC applicants (failed/succeed) to start a new project. It claims to consists of previous YC founders.
Hey, I was curious about your claims, so I ran both versions on my computer, and SBCL came out 10X faster. For one million calls (count=1000000) and n fixed to 100000, SBCL took 0.6 seconds versus 8.6 seconds.

One thing I did, though, was to call both functions directly with arguments, and not rely on read-line/readline. That might be the difference, I wouldn't be surprised if Python was optimized for text processing, and SBCL was lazier about it (Lisp programs call read et al. infrequently). Your code is decently optimized, IMO. Cheers.
I can't imagine they can compete with XCode 4 and its excellent integration with profiling tools, LLVM, etc.
"Lets just make fake stuff and let the climbers die. We'll make like $30 bucks!" How? HOW!?
Complex Systems Instability Response Agency
"Please keep this page confidential; thanks. " FAIL
It didn't occur to me the two groups were on such natural speaking terms.

So if I talk to a few Catholic priests who tell me the priesthood is about molesting underage altar boys, should I then go out and claim that is how Catholic priests see the priesthood?
I kind of suspect people fill the field in and then forget about that, though.
I'd say it's more of a refinement than something new. I haven't looked at much more than what they're saying in the video, but it boils down to:

- new featureset mobos: stripped down, no parallel ports among other things I'm sure. there looked to be some SATA/Mini-USB type sockets.
- fancy new power supplies
- the triple racks don't seem to be anything special at face value, convenient maybe, but with the power features above two of these triple racks are serviced by one battery rack. So, you'd need, oh, 400+ servers to take full advantage at this level.

NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?

- Fancy power distribution and cabling and stuff, mostly part of the racks, possibly involving wacky connectors on the compute side. For smaller operations this would be like having a 60-outlet power strip.

- 95% efficient from plug to party-time. This helps with the bills.

- Using the room/building as the cooling mechanism. While this has likely been done before in some manner (at least an intentional use of stack-effect in HVAC), that weird slot that one of the boxes gets pushed into makes me think they have some kind of sealed thingy from floor to ceiling that interfaces with the racks, basically using the building cooling to push in and suck out air forced through the racks. at a basic level it's all about CFMs, after all. This could also be done with forced current from front to back, or vice versa.

whatever is going on here, you first have to get to the "your own server room" part of business. this can be had at smaller companies, too, but for the room-cool ducting you'd need to cut into walls and stuff in the server room to pipe that stuff in. Spendy.

So, this leaves the smalltimer to save $15 on their monthly power bill by using new rack servers that don't need or have an NVidia GeForce 9000+ and 10-drive RAID. Stripped down BIOS and maybe no more IDE support, that kind of thing. Hot Rod rack servers of the skeleton/pure-compute variety, not the AlienWare one.
You mean in general or with this project? This project appears to be a Ruby DSL with aspirations to be its own language someday, but while it's a Ruby DSL it's not going to be a great language for performance exploration. Ruby is slow. Writing in a faster language(/implementation) and running it on a single computer is like running a Ruby cluster of ~30 machines, for raw performance work.

(Ruby being slow isn't a criticism. "Some of my best friends are slow languages." But it's not where I'd start any sort of clustered/cloud computing project.)
Indeed. This is how I want to see society. Sharing knowledge for the greater good. Probably the reason I'm not a fan of detriments of this such as software patents and Apple in general.
I just checked and the iOS app does indeed send an approximated zip code to Ad companies.

http://ad.doubleclick.net/pfadx/pand.iphone/prod.nowplaying;...
>If we get something with the moral foundation of wikileaks, the activitst appeal of Anonymous, the secure communication system of Tor, and the virality of Facebook?

For the record, I don't see a problem with any of those things, and I doubt I'm the only one.
Yes, you should. It's unlikely that you will be able to talk to several priests who would all say that, but if you do, by all means let the public know that this is an opinion shared by these Catholic priests.

P.S.: I think you may be forgetting that "Hackers believe in God" can mean any of "All hackers believe in God," "Hackers tend to believe in God" or "There are hackers who believe in God." From the context, it seems most likely to me that the latter is the OP's intended usage.
Interview with YC?  Crash at my house if you want
I just found out that my group will interview with YC (yay!).

If you're in the same boat but traveling in for the interview, you're welcome to crash at my house. It's in Menlo Park, next to Stanford, about 20 minutes from the YC office. I have room for 2 people. I can probably drop you off at the Caltrain station, depending on when your interview is.

Reply or email me. Contact info in my profile.
What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything...?
Doesn't

tail +n

do what your "drop" does? (Starts reading n lines from the beginning.)
Congrats! What time did you get the email?
NASA Gives Up on LISA
Avinash Kaushik's stuff is great -
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

And his books are also excellent - he's written "web analytics 2.0" and "web analytics - an hour a day"
Congrats to the greatest team ever
Is Obama's "Are You In?" app a bad marketing move?
Is this only for personal taxes, or can my very simple corporation benefit from this? Right now I have an accountant in my home state handling my corporate taxes, but he's not very internet-savvy so things like secure file transfers and even timely email replies are beyond him. I'm looking for a remote accountant for my state that can handle my very simple corporate return--but it looks like Sanetax is only for personal returns? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Just found out we've got a Y Combinator interview :)
See wealth of background material: http://boom.cs.berkeley.edu/papers.html
Thanks for checking. SPOJ uses SBCL 1.0.18 so that might be a bit of an issue, since it seems to be a couple of years old. I was thinking that the input routines might have been a bit of a problem and that CL isn't optmized as much for that type of processing. Maybe something to look into in SBCL code base for improvement.
I just submitted one.
I think I'd rather be the kind of hacker that breaks things, than the kind of hacker who gets praise from a man who employs thousands of child molesters and whose company has been responsible for more atrocities than hitler, stalin, and mao could have been capable of in their lucid wet dreams.
Web applications which rich client-side interfaces might be the reason for the change in thinking. In a web application, you anyway have JavaScript to deal with; and until a few years ago, the server-side code was written in some other language.
Had a similar idea for iPhone/iPad pixel sketching... http://souseiji.net/pixelfinger

You can share them too: http://bit.ly/bIkGnu
If we get something with the moral foundation of wikileaks, the activitst appeal of Anonymous, the secure communication system of Tor, and the virality of Facebook?

What's wrong with that? That would be terrific.
The lack of erasure means that you can use generics to do sophisticated type magic, sort of like in C++ templates - specifically using reflection. You don't usually want to do this too much, but doing it in one or two places can simplify code tremendously. This also allows you to eliminate boxing and reflection overhead in a lot of places by letting you use generics to bind to reflected types/members at runtime, which is really important if you're trying to build a performant app in C# that's got extensibility support.

For example, I use this to create strongly-typed bindings to individual fields/properties of class instances at runtime, which lets me pass around objects of types like 'BoundMember<int>', and generically store into them - essentially the same as 'ref int', except it can outlive function scope. This is really useful when doing asynchronous programming, and it lets you kill duplication when building things like configuration dialogs.
I have a feeling this guy will make it
I'll agree that helvetica looks nicer, but I don't think all the iPhone style gloss and huge spacing looks /better/. Looking at those side-by-sides and knowing that the iPhone versions came first just makes me think that the android versions could be much more information-dense and interactive than they are if they hadn't been limited by the preconceptions of what the existing iPhone version does.
From my reading of the Ars article, the only thing illegal they did is the ordering of pizzas. Even the digging through his trash is perfectly legal in most jurisdictions. Is what they're doing right? I don't know, but actions have consequences.
This is a truly amazing offering. I hope the applications in the area of biochemistry research will find creative ways to work around the two important limitations of google: its GFS filesystem and its latency.
Try this one http://bit.ly/bIkGnu enjoy!
The Veracode report at http://www.veracode.com/blog/2011/04/mobile-apps-invading-yo... has some more detailed analysis and decompiled code.
Yep, I assume the FB app home page is half height to accommodate HVGA devices.
If you make them believe anything, you can make them do anything.
This is excellent.

Also check out the speculative contacts post: http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/03/25/speculative-conta...

Even if your physics algorithms are wholly fake, you need quality contact resolution, or strange behavior will appear in collision responses, since any collision response is predicated on having correct contact information. (The consequence of bad contact quality, seen in lesser physics engines, is major errors where shapes can "squeeze through" other shapes or jitter against each other, gaining energy and eventually exploding.)
Sure. You can use Sanetax for any type of tax situation. You can request your agent to signup https://app.sanetax.com/agentsignup.

If he can use email, he should be able to use http://sanetax.com without any problems.

If you share your state, I can see if any one of our existing tax agents can help you out.
6:03 Pacific
The text on the home page is a bit difficult to read. I'd suggest a color with more contrast.

"Oh no, a Facebook app?!

* We won't spam your wall (unless you ask)
* Your profile starts out hidden"
YC S11 Rejection Letter
We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
Please don't take it personally. The applications we receive get
better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number
of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot
of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group
to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that
we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall
just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

We're trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number
of interviews means it's practically certain that groups we rejected
will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate
it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn
from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Team
Keystroke loggers now available for iOS?
Example jQuery plugin written in CoffeeScript
Meet Edward Zuckerberg, the high-tech dentist (and Mark's father)
In general. I've got zero experience doing distributed computing, hence my fanboy label. Just felt like sharing a thought. :) However, any starting points you could provide on being able to accomplish such things would be awesome. I'm especially interested in being able to use cloud services like EC2 for it.
Having "stripclub" in the title of your talk is pretty unprofessional.

Why?

Perhaps it's not your thing, but there are plenty of people, both patrons and employees, who see expressions of sexuality as normal and fun.

And if you think that having women or men dance around and disrobe encourages others to think of women or men as little more than sex objects then the problem is with those ignorant people who foolishly extrapolate from what some individuals do to entire populations.
From the apps I've worked on, iOS is a much more profitable platform and thus gets the majority of the focus and the initial app releases. Then apps get ported to Android (where they get heavily pirated and generate a fraction of the sales - regardless if time is spent making the app as good or better than its iOS counterpart.)
I'm also puzzled why they don't go all-DC. This thread doesn't appear to be getting any traction here. Is there a HN for datacenter geeks?
Well, now that's the crux of our disagreement. If I say white men are gay, I don't think anyone will argue that's a neutral statement (to which nobody will take issue) as it can be easily interpreted as meaning I only spoke to a handful of white men, and it's only them I'm speaking about.