skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting but I can not find any correlation at all. So I'd guess the conclusion is that olympic medals have nothing to do with population size or money.

Instead it has everything to do with if the country cares or not. India clearly doesn't.
Ruby and Python are definitely different languages. May want to check with the creators on this one.
The use of a religious text is regrettable, it's a bad first impression to make on their hypothetical future civilization discovering one.

Otherwise, damn cool. I wish they weren't charging $25,000 for them.
New members with no prior references may find it hard to get a couchsurfing host immediately, especially on short notice.

Simply becoming a member of the site doesn't guarantee a place to stay...so here are some helpful guides to get started in the CS community and culture.

http://www.couchsurfing.com/mission.html

http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Searching_and_requesting_a_c...

http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/How_to_write_a_CouchRequest

http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Cheat_Sheet

(I'm heavily involved on CS)
As with any piece, your style should reflect its purpose and the intended audience.

In the "real world" I quickly discovered that eloquence and "getting the message across" are inversely proportional.
What's the false-positive rate?
I wonder if there's are some correlations to be found that might not jump out from these numbers, like medals won vs.

# distance from home country to hosting country

# similarity of hosting country's culture to home country

I'd also like to know how many medals were won by NCAA or American professional league athletes representing other countries (Usain Bolt, for example).
Not sure if that's the case or not, but while he complains about SQL Server's default locking strategies, it doesn't seem like he has tried running his queries using any non-default ones.

In the end he goes with read comitted snapshot isolation level which I agree sounds like overkill and an unnecessary load on tempdb, but from reading his post, it seems he has honestly never heard of the SQL Server way of doing things trough setting and using regular transaction isolation levels, as opposed to the no lock hint he for MySQL and Oracle.

I might be wrong, but to me this honestly seems like a case of not knowing your tool and how to use it properly.
I'd say yes, because Scheme is a Lisp and I don't know any specific language that's called just Lisp except perhaps the original one by McCarthy. As far as I know Common Lisp and Scheme are the two Lisp languages in usage today.
"proprietary crap"

Look again. Everything we use from Adobe is open-sourced.

EX: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home
Yeah, still down for me with proxy errors.
I tend to agree, although I didn't want to jump to too many conclusions just based on chapter titles. A chapter with Silverlight in the title is a dead giveaway, though ;-)

Is anyone writing a book just on Mnesia/DB integration?
Robert Virding's Lisp Flavored Erlang, which, among other things, does away with records, neatens up the syntax, and enabled Lisp style macros, but is still built on Erlang, and still contains it's high quality pattern matching.

Virding is one of the original contributors of Erlang.

http://groups.google.com/group/erlang-questions/browse_threa...

Copied here:

I have finally released LFE, Lisp Flavoured Erlang, which is a lisp syntax front-end to the Erlang compiler. Code produced with it is compatible with "normal" Erlang code. The is an LFE-mode for Emacs and the lfe-mode.el file is include in the distribution. Most things seem to work but some things have not been done yet:

- The interpreter does handle recursive letrecs, binaries, receive or try.
- There is no lisp shell.
- Documentation!

Yet. The system will be updated as new features are added. This is the 1st release so there is much left to do.

I have include the existing documentation lfe_guide.txt in this mail. There are a number of LFE test files and a version of the LFE interpreter written in LFE as examples of code. There are also a number of issues which need to be decided for the next version and I have included a file lfe_issues.txt which describe them in this mail. Both files are in the distribution.

Note that while this this lisp has been inspired by Scheme (one of the issues) it is a NOT Scheme, it is Erlang with a lisp syntax and many nice lisp features. Not for that matter is it Common Lisp. In fact features of the Erlang engine mean that it is actually impossible to implement full Scheme of CL. No, they shouldn't be changed or added.

It was quite writing Erlang code in lisp and I could easily consider using a lisp syntax for Erlang. I suppose it depends where your preferences lye. It was also easy to get into the traditional lisp habit of using long names for everything which I personally think is not a Good Thing. Perhaps we should do AFE, Arc Flavoured Erlang, instead? Although I think they have gone too far and missed what makes programs easy to read.

Macros are very nice, and it is easy to generate LFE code, which is one of the benefits of lisp syntax.

LFE also shows that it would probably be possible to write other front-ends inspired by other languages, though why anyone should want to I don't know. Perhaps back to a real Prolog syntax again.
My honest opinion, and this is about the idea, not the implementation.

If you need the relationship advice from the internet, the god damn internet damnit, it's long past time to finish it off.
Building Safe, Secure, Stable Garden Gates - Associated Content
Awesome!

And now I finally understand why my browser freezes for many many minutes sometimes. I thought it had something to do with firebug, but I never realized how bad.
Best Western Hotels security failure: 8 million customers' data stolen
From the page: "an international criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-heists ever by stealing the identities of an estimated 8 million people - who have all been guests in at least one of the 1300 existing Best Western Hotels in the past 12 months - in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than 3.5 billion euro in illegal funds."
Tweetrush Shows Twitter Usage Far Below What We Expected
"Dear Adobe..."
Bram Cohen explains the Fast Extension proposal for BitTorrent
>This is absurd that your professor isn't staying up to date. Especially considering he's teaching a PL class

The afformentioned professor Abelson is one of the authors of the Wizard Book. A look at the above citation reveals that he made the statement in 2003, while the paper your reference was published in 2005.
Join us at Hacker News Coffee, San Francisco, Tuesday at 9:15am
Located at Muddy Waters Cafe: 521 Valencia St. and 1 min walk from the 16th St. BART stop.
That seems counter-intuitive. The collectors and museums will still buy it even if it were massed produced and everyone in the world had one in their pocket. It's just that cool (as far as museums are concerned).

If your goal is to have something that could be found after some catastrophe (or by future archaeologists), then obviously more are better. But I guess (as you point out) if your goal is to have something that will spend 500 years in the Smithsonian on display, rarity is a good thing.

Either way, I imagine the high price has more to do with the cost of making them than marketing. ;)
This sounds great and I've got a ride etc etc but DAMN that's early. Think I'm not going just because it's insanely early. Seriously guys, wtf.
Do you know any programmers who exhibit these personality traits?
C and x86 assembly.

I've been floating in high-level land for too long, feel like I need to get close(r) to the metal.
I don't think that's really the problem here. My favorite tetris clone (quinn) was pulled for a while because the developer ran into legal issues with the Tetris Company.

So if Tris wasn't distributed through the app store, this likely would have happened anyway, just mainly involving the developer and the Tetris Company, not those two and Apple included.
Reminds me of a story:

There was once a monk who would carry a mirror where ever he went. A priest noticed this one day and thought to himself “This monk must be so preoccupied with the way he looks that he has to carry that mirror all the time. He should not worry about the way he looks on the outside, it’s what’s inside that counts.” So the priest went up to the monk and asked “Why do you always carry that mirror?” thinking for sure this would prove his guilt.

The monk pulled the mirror from his bag and pointed it at the priest. Then he said “I use it in times of trouble. I look into it and it shows me the source of my problems as well as the solution to my problems.”

Where was I again? Oh yes, I do know someone just like the OP describes. I see his face whenever I look at this shiny piece of glass I carry.
Picwing (YC Summer 08) on Engadget
I think continuation-based web frameworks are a bad use case. It's a leaky abstraction in the same way as wiewstate in ASP.NET: It tricks you into believing that you can write a web app like a traditional stateful application. But all kinds of subtle problems with caching, bookmarks, the back button, search engines and so on crops up.

But continuations are really cool for implementing language features like backtracking.
Designing a better ballot
<unrelated thought>

I think the real reason why Apple has kept such tight control over the App Store has nothing to do with the applications or quality, at all. It has to do with iTunes and music locking. If you opened up the device, it's only time before a variety of media players and mp3 syncing mechanisms will appear -- all without DRM, of course and without the restrictions (only sync with one device, etc. etc.) And that is what Apple can't afford to do. It could potentially cannibalize the entire iTunes business unit.

</unrelated thought>
I'm also going for Objective C. The rest are a bit too not useful.
Not debating that, but without the AppStore-only solution people still enjoying the game would be able to distribute it to friends and what not without having to deal with the Tetris company.

When the AppStore is the only way to get applications for a non-jailbroken iPhone, you lose that option and having something pulled from the AppStore means it's gone for everyone.
More on learning from mistakes
I think we killed it :)

PS. Great service. Definitely has value.
Survey: Women Leaders Smarter, More Honest
Do you know any data sources for these things? I'm doubtful of the mineral content claim unless the fraction you mention is something like 9/10. Housing stock that is on average lasting for much less time is also suspicious to me. The biggest reconciliation issue is that we're much much wealthier and healthier than we were decades ago so I'm not sure there are broad meaningful declines in the quality of most things.
Coq, a proof assistant (http://coq.inria.fr/); lectures: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis500/cis500-f07/schedule.html
There's a slight anti-correlation with population size. Large nations with conventionally "successful" olympic programs (USA, China, Russia) are well below median in medals per capita.

My guess is that this is because there's an upper limit on entrants. The USA and China might be much more likely to get medals, but they're still limited to three per event at maximum. There might be events where a big nation (China and diving comes to mind) might be able to get even more medals, but can't because they only have so many slots.
At the last conference I attended, I didn't receive confirmation that I would be attending until one month beforehand (also, the delay was not something that was my fault, it was Apple for being unusually late and taking a while). I spent the next week trying to look for a short stay apartment or a hotel room that wasn't $500/night that was also in a neighborhood where I (as a woman going alone) would feel okay about being alone and would not have to commute upwards of an hour to attend said conference. Having a sold out conference (if you haven't guessed already, it was WWDC) on top of multiple other busy conferences in the same area at the same time meant that there was a huge shortage of available hotel rooms.

Then a friend (that at that point lived across the world from me and that I only knew from IRC) found out about the situation and offered to let me stay at his and his friend's hotel room since it had two beds and a sofabed and they were also attending WWDC. If he didn't offer to do that, I would have been stuck with a HUGE hotel bill or the possibility of not being able to attend the conference because I didn't want to be stuck with a huge hotel bill (think literally $500/night times 6-7 days). Instead my trip was fun, I felt safer being with guys I knew over being alone, and my trip was affordable because of their generosity in sharing.

Sometimes things happen and it's not easy to find a place to stay. Other people in this community may be willing to let this guy crash on their sofa for a night in exchange for something. Calling him a leech is unjustified if you don't know why he's asking for a favor like this.
While a lot of athletes from around the world attend college / compete in the US, Usain Bolt isn't a good example.

I seem to remember one of the commentators saying that a lot of the sprinters from Jamaica (and the Caribbean in general) are somewhat unique for having not come to the US.

Usain Bolt's wikipedia page doesn't have him spending any time in the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usain_Bolt
This came as quite a surprise to us, but hey we're glad it happened!
Is the App Store Review System Defective by Design?
I can't believe the Tetris company actually cares that people clone Tetris. It's the cloned game, there must be 10000 different clones out for every platform in existence
CIA Textbook on Psychological Operations In Guerrilla Warfare
I'm not sure I agree with the analysis and reasoning, but I definitely think we're due for a decade or so more of mediocre equity performance, in addition to the lackluster decade we've had.

The bull market of the 1980s and '90s came from the entrance of middle-class Americans into the stock market. Before 1980, equities were considered risky (and were so, compared to bonds and annuities) and were seen as a "rich person's game", but this changed once people became educated about the "equity premium", which may no longer exist, and diversification. The influx of new investors allowed the markets to rally, rejuvenating Wall Street, an industry that had been fading up to that point.

Given the economic problems the U.S. currently faces, I think we're looking at a decade or more of mediocre equity performance. S&P/dollar isn't terrible, but S&P/euro is pathetic. The erosion of the U.S. middle class is a troubling sign, and I don't think we'll see the next bull market until this trend is reversed so decisively that a new middle class is being created. That point seems to be rather far off, in my estimation.
I love the App Store, but folks who "review" stuff that haven't bought it ("wow, the price is too high, so I'm going to give it 1 star!" or "this app should be free") drives me absolutely insane. In a straight-jacket, on the 13th floor of the nut house, in a padded-room, insane.
I'm a category theory novice, but isn't their arrow definition a category that looks suspiciously like a monoid? And isn't an actual arrow a morphism, which is this case would just be a function?
What does it say that people like Atwood, who presumably would have no difficulty writing threadsafe synchronization code in a typical application, are stumped when trying to do the same thing in a database? Database server synchronization primitives are just awful, sorry. They're completely opaque, highly implementation-dependent, and the only way to see the innards and optimize what's really happening is to become an expert at the database implementation level.
Venture Fund Economics: Allocating Follow-On Capital
I didn't really see anything of value in this dataset. What I found more interesting is that someone took the time to put it all together in the first place.

At the risk of sounding overly negative, I don't really get what the hype about the Olympics, or professional sports is all about. People seem to put a lot of time/effort into watching, tracking, following various sports, but I don't see what the benefit is to being a rabid spectator. It's not like more gold medals == some improvement to society or economy. Same thing when one random sports team bests another in some championship or tournament, no measurable increase (save for the increased revenue to sports paraphernalia dealers).
My "to-learn" list has three items on it, and I'm torn about which to pursue first...

* Lisp (Interesting, recently bought pg's ACL)
* C (Would be useful at work, recently bought K&R)
* Obj-C (Have both an iPhone and a MBPro that would be neat to develop for)

I'm leaning towards C.

[edit: list formatting]
1) Working Effectively in Bash Emacs Editing Mode

Whoah. I've been using bash for ages and I didn't even know half of these. Finally a useful "Linux tutorial" :)

Also: I all of a sudden feel like a noob.
Aww, common guys! Change the casing! You'll have the best of everything, but that casing will kill you. Your outside has to be the very best part of your frame, because it's decorative. Right now it's too big, the screen is depressed. People have to pick up the case and love the device. Right now it looks a bit...ugly.

I'm not an industrial designer, so I can't say how you can make it better. But I can say that the picture does not really appeal to me. It's not sexy just looking at it. That's what you need to change, because if you are offering a premium product, first make sure it LOOKS premium!
Technically, the developer can distribute it to friends. He's in the iPhone developer program, he can use the ad-hoc distribution method to send it to friends. I suspect if he "released" the source, any person in the program could do the same.

But yes, I understand your point. The app store model has some benefits and some downsides. The simplest thing to do is to just not buy an iPhone or develop for one if you dislike the model. I know that I don't like some aspects of it from both a user and developer perspective, but I like it more than what I had to deal with when I had other smartphones/PDAs.
Can't you say the same thing for most arts and entertainments? Not much "practical" benefit to be had, but that's kind of the point of a diversion.
a high priority is to add About and Tutorial buttons this week. thanks guys.
Developer Compensation: The New Reality?
I am currently reading 'The Black Swan' and he does a good job of explaining how some fields lend themselves to extremes and others don't and that it is hard for our minds to wrap themselves around this. He explains that if you take the shortest person ever and the tallest person ever - the differences would be a lot but not orders of magnitude greater. Yet, if we were to take this year's best selling book, it would be so many orders of magnitude more than the least selling book. Our minds have a hard time dealing with comparisons that don't have real world equivalents.

What this does is create an opportunity for some industries to have 'winner takes almost all' scenarios. Book publishing and POP music are two examples where the very top people take almost all the rewards. Brain surgeon is not one of these industries - being the very best brain surgeon would still require a (in comparison) a lot more time than the author of the Harry Potter books takes to sell another book.

Most wealth is created by massively scalable business models such as licensing, show biz and mass media. And interestingly not that many fortunes come from Wall Street.
You can, and at the risk of sounding even more negative, I don't follow "celebrity stats" much either.

However, I don't see people walking around with hats and jerseys with their favorite actors name on it the way you do for sports.

I do enjoy many mainstream forms of entertainment (TV, music, movies, etc) I just don't obsess over the smallest details of the entertainers, awards they have won, etc.

From my perspective, I would rather take credit for something I have personally done (alone or as part of a team).
Given the significant changes made in the fast extension, maybe it should have a cooler name like "BitTorrent 3000".
That and the inanity of those "I didn't download it, but will review it anyway" reviews is approaching that of YouTube comments
Should be fixed soon. There is a change I'm supposed to make soon to make the rule database shared amongst sessions. Right now its loaded for everyone and well that makes memory go bye bye real quick.
[research paper] Where does Entrepreneurship pay? (Serguey Braguinsky)
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1022421

An interesting paper from Serguey Braguinsky, a visiting professor at CMU.

Research studies show that entrepreneurs earn 35% less on average than if they went to a paid job, but this study includes all self-employed occupations (like barbershops, mom-and-pop stores, etc). This paper says that in higher education industries, entrepreneurs earn more on average than wage earners.

Here's a quote from the paper:

"For example, the expected initial earnings of an entrepreneur in an education-intensive occupation who starts an independent business after just 3 years of labor market experience are more than 30 percent higher than the expected paid wage of a worker with the same observable characteristics, and this earnings differential is still positive after 20 years. In contrast, for a similar entrepreneur who starts the business after 15 years of labor market experience, the initial premium is only 2.8 percent, and it turns negative after just 4 years. These findings are very robust as they survive various refinements and changes to our definition of education-intensity of a job."

Just thought it was ycnews worthy.
How do you teach leadership in high school?
That's the noise you'd expect from a random process. Any country with an Olympic program has some chance of earning a medal. Thus, given a sufficiently large number of small countries, you'd expect that a random subset of those nations would earn a higher number of medals per capita than the big players. That Jamaica is at the top of the list is a decent example -- without the unexpected, astronomical weirdness of Usain Bolt, they'd have half as many golds.

The larger programs have a greater number of chances to win, but normalizing by GDP or national population doesn't tell you anything about the overall probability of an athlete from country X winning a medal (which is arguably what you want to know). To get that information, you'd have to normalize by something else -- like size of team, or program expenditure, or some factor that's more directly related to athletics than GDP or population.