skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DuckDuckGo Zero-click Info API
It's bad for language purists, but it's very, very good for getting stuff done fast, easy and good-enough.

See Facebook etc.

A lot of programmers don't believe that a shoddy language (in terms of language design) can be effective, but it is.

I also happen to think that PHP scales really, really well the range that most sites need (say, from 1 to 50 servers). In that range, PHP is almost never the bottleneck.
Wikipedia provides full database dumps, if you seriously want to check as many trails as possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
The dumb part here is really that cutting these problems INCREASES the cost of government. By a lot. Taking public data offline, or making it less accessible means it gets FOIAd instead. FOIA costs the government a half billion dollars a year.
The rest of PHP is in English. A language should be consistant with itself.
Everyone is already using a filter (HN) to avoid doing some work: reading everything that is posted on the web.

For me, tldr is a favor folks more interested than me in some subject do, and I should do the same when I subject I really care turns up.

tldr is an act of love.
Here's the 3D demo in Flash:
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...
(click '3D Slopes')
Reiterating The Vision And Mentality of Microsofthttp://bit.ly/k6zBdv
Also, you shouldn't ever write a program with dependencies. :P
> But, more ominously, they can also have it changed for them by a website: "It is likely, if not inevitable, that infringement sites would use the same strategy, allowing a single site to instantly, silently, and permanently change a user's DNS path and evade DNS filtration and filtering."

That's very worrying, as presented. However, slightly later, it suggests that this either requires user interaction (still worrying) or the download of software (not worrying):

> "Those promoting pirate sites will simply create websites and postings that ask: 'Frustrated by getting filtered when you try to watch movies? Click here to fix the problem'," the article notes.

Would someone clarify whether this refers to downloading software to change DNS servers or a mechanism by which websites can actually do so? Of course, by Occam's razor, this is referring to software, since if a method for websites to change the DNS server of a visiting computer without user interaction existed then attacks of this nature would be extremely common.
8 Important Term Sheet Items to Evaluate Before Investing in a Startup
LOLCats Get Serious: Comedy Network Hires Prominent Data Scientist
If Microsoft did this with the Windows API ten years ago people would be going absolutely batshit crazy in here and the government probably would have intervened
What trolling is Facebook doing? I haven't heard of any and would be interested in seeing the kinds of suits they are filing.

(Note: I consider trolling different from a company protecting the IP used to build its business, and I think most would agree with that, even if they don't support patents [which I generally don't].)
Obscure EU cookie law leaves businesses confused
Four myths about the Lean Startup
That person was probably Sergey Aleynikov, who made $400k at Goldman Sachs then jumped ship to Teza for $1.2m - salary. He was doing high frequency trading code in C++. This is a matter of public record. Unfortunately he's now in jail having been accused of stealing said code from GS.

EDIT: I have now read to the last page of the article, and I guessed right!
Some of the Agile mafia have done very nicely out of selling Scrum Master certificates.
The thing about stuff like this is that people think that Zuckerberg is somehow unique. He is not - the only thing unique about him is how much money he has.

Most people, given the amount of seemingly limitless funds would surely be doing similar things.
Skier's amazing avalanche cliff jump becomes Internet hit
That was written before his conversion to Mac OS X.

We don't know if it still applies.
Design means more than just visual design and graphical interface. For example:

M-x <function_name>

Executes any interactive function. Any gui-based editor will ultimately be limited by the knobs and switches that can be crammed into various graphical interface elements. Emacs doesn't have that limitation. That's where the learning curve is steeper-- you have to search for function names rather than poke around menus or toolbars, but once you've learned the function name you can map it to a key, put it in your .emacs, or call it from another function.

Much like unix, this is how emacs has managed to stay relevant despite the popularity of the IDE market. It's easy to configure and extend by defining abstractions and composing functions.
Old news but good news if you hadn't already heard it. :) ACL has always had relatively open publication policies; the anthology has been online for years, and even when there was a print version of CL the articles were online too (maybe with an embargo of a month or two, but you could also go to the authors' websites and grab the PDF there).

I was in for a big shock when I realised that non-NLP papers (i.e. those published through ACM) were hard to find online and often required payment---all through grad school I just looked up everything I needed online (for free). It felt like a big step into the stone age when I had to start dealing with ACM policies.
I'm sitting about 200 yards from the 90-year-old Virginia theater in Champaign. I need to get over there more often, I guess. :)
> 93.4 % of pages in certain categories (primarily dealing w/ philosophy)

Per the article, this was from an entire database dump of wikipedia.

> Beyond that, are "sense" or "Perception" the name of a category of pages and the percentage the percentage of pages in that category that lead back to "philosophy" or are they individual pages?

> If they are individual pages, you shouldn't have a percentage, you should simply have a yes/no. If they are categories, how could the percentages possibly be the same for different categories? And how could this large number of pages all form a loop?

Those are individual pages. The percentage refers to the percentage of other wikipedia pages which eventually reach them, by following the first link in the page. The loop is formed when by following the first links in pages beginning at an article you eventually return to that article; it is, obviously, possible to enter the loop from other pages.

I encourage you to go to wikipedia and play around with following the first link in each article (not in parenthesis or italics) for a bit, as it seems like actually going through that process would alleviate your confusion and lack of understanding.
This guy is not in computer science and knows more than me about this stuff.

I quit.
This is a really great response. TechCrunch had an article a month ago with several deans responding to Thiel's thesis. I think this is a better supplement to their defense of college. and wish that TC would help link it.
That's reasonable, but I think it's sortof unclassy to ignore the fact that they "cared" (as much as a company can really care) enough to offer it in the first place, and everything else they still offer.

On the other hand I'm having mixed feelings now, trying to reconcile this with the way I feel about how Facebook's privacy policy affects users. I just don't get the impression that Google is careless the same way.
Downvoting without explanation? Fine, I love my competitors using lesser tools.
John Delaney, Founder of Intrade, Dies at 42
3.5 Minutes Of Terror: The Final Moments Of Air France Flight 44
The commentary has nothing to do with what Chomsky proposed. The author defines success as "being successful at accomplishing a task". That has nothing to do with science. Full stop.
Or even kindergarten.
Also, the days of PHP's deployment superiority are nearly over.

So I've been hearing since 2000 or so, when I chose RXML/Pike over PHP because PHP was a complete mess. PHP has gotten considerably better since then; now it's only painfully messy, rather than unusable. Sometimes it seems like every competitor has been busy building castles in the sky full of magic and wonder -- as long as you want to do exactly what the creators of your framework wanted to do, and as long as you're willing to stop by and maintain your app. PHP is more of a fire-and-forget language for apps... you can write it and then ignore the app for years without worrying about memory leaks or crashes or that it's taking up resources on your virtual server...

With mongrel2, I can restart my app instances without losing a single request!

Wow, what an achievement! This is the one thing that PHP really, seriously got right: no application server. There are applications out there that need the extra efficiency of not starting up on every request, but the vast majority of webapps do not. The additional robustness and sanity provided by not having to wonder why your app server fails after 292744 requests, or what went wrong when it just stopped responding, or whether, indeed, you might lose requests when restarting -- that helps me sleep at night. Few webapp-oriented languages have this, preferring instead to try over and over to get the application server paradigm right, this time, for sure! We just have to add a little shim here, and build another layer over these layers to interface with that one...
The problem is not that google is shutting down some of it's free APIs.

Many folks are crying out for a paid version of the Translate API for example.

I question the motive behind shuttering a useful and unparalleled API like translate without considering putting a pricetag on it.
programmers at high frequency trading firms can make well into the six figures and still spend most of the day coding.

What's the intellectual kit needed to become a programmer at a high frequency trading firm?
Well, they didn't mind lending it out, since they weren't using it anyway.
No, the argument was that you shouldn't build a for-profit business that relies entirely on a good-will free API.

Even if you have a business with all of your employees on free gmail, you hardly rely on gmail, because you can probably switch to some other email system without going out of business.

Additionally, gmail is not even really a "good-will free" API. Advertisements more than make up for the costs.
I never liked app engine. To me it seemed like you have to lock yourself into google as a vendor because your application has to be designed for app engine.
> I think Norvig acknowledges the point you are making here, namely that the statistical approach does not explain the cognitive systems behind language.

If that is the case, then the argument that Norvig is making is irrelevant to the argument Chomsky is making. Chomsky simply makes the point that statistical accounts lack explanatory adequacy. As someone who has worked closely with many of his students and who has received extensive training on his scientific program, I can say with confidence that Chomsky would have no objection whatsoever about the usefulness of statistical approaches to linguistic engineering problems. The results speak for themselves. He would go on to say, however, that how well a statistical approach solves a linguistic engineering problem is irrelevant to the question of how humans do what they do.

The answer to the question may well be statistically grounded. That is a valid hypothesis and a logical possibility which should be taken seriously. However, it is incumbent on the proponents of such an answer to provide evidence that it is what humans are doing. Here are some examples of the kinds of evidence necessary:

* evidence that humans are capable of performing the kinds of computations that the statistical approach requires,

* evidence that the statistical approach works with the relatively limited amount of data that a human receives,

* evidence that the statistical approach fails in ways that humans fail

How well a statistical approach succeeds at an engineering task is not an item on this list, simply, again, because engineering tasks are irrelevant to what humans actually do.

Let me specifically say that statistical approaches are not, from the start, ruled out as potential candidates for the algorithms underlying human language. It's just that a case has to be made for them using the right kind of evidence.

Finally, I'll reiterate what others have pointed out: from a scientific perspective, that something is hard to explain doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. And, those that have given up (as you suggest Norvig has) shouldn't fault those who haven't for calling them out on it.
I've apparently missed this in the past. Would you mind elaborating?
Can individualism cause injustice?
I think you're not understanding the problem here. Did you read the relevant XKCD? The 93.39% is of all pages. So, 93.39% of pages will eventually reach the Sense article. Of those 93.39% of pages that reach Sense, 100% of them will reach Perception, Philosophy, etc. because there is a big loop that contains those pages.
I found Google's response humorous in light of the fairly draconian (and according to my attorney unenforcable) employment agreement they ask you to sign when you go to work there. But that is all part of the 'game' here.

If you read this as Paypal negotiating to get some return out of the two years they paid their employees to negotiate a deal (which didn't close) it makes more sense. Lets say for the sake of argument that they pay them 200K/yr ($300K if you include benefits) and that they each vested 50K shares of Ebay stock, so maybe a $15/share gain on the stock over 2 years. That is $600K + $1.5M of 'cost' for the two execs ($2.1M) so settle out of court for $6M pay 2M to the lawyers and net $4M for the 'effort'.

Really sounds more like positioning to be paid off rather than a serious complaint.
all Apple/Google can do is to invalidate their patents

Not entirely true Apple is a licensor of Lodsys's patents and claims their license covers their developers.
New study ranks top 20 global mobile operator groups by revenue
I'll concede as much. I was drawn by the fact that the discussion was about design, and you two went off into style land. It'd be about the same as us starting a talk on Rock and Roll and we really just dive into guitar solos while swearing it's rock we are on about. Make sense?
So if I'm BigContractor X or Union Y, I have a few issues I really care about and have the willingness to spend money to influence legislators. Open data does not concern me.

But since the the beneficiaries of "open data" are widely dispersed, who lobbies on behalf of greater transparency? Sounds like a startup opportunity!
quantitative traders is one.
I wrote an app that puts Facebook birthdays (and events) in Google calendar a while back: http://calenderp.appspot.com

(Just re-writing it now actually, few improvements here and this time I'm doing it in Clojure.)
Firefox 6 Alpha Introduces New JavaScript Scratchpad and Privacy Tools
Scores of smoking-pill suicides overlooked
Background: I've done a touch of IDL astronomy programming with Marc Buie. I haven't touched IDL or astronomy for about a year, though I am still in contact with a couple astronomers.

In my (anecdotal) experience, it seems that a number of astronomers would actually love to move to Python but I've only seen one actually make an effort to make the move. The primary reason cited has been that some particular library modules they use haven't been ported yet. Glancing around the links from the article, it definitely seems that the porting has come a long way, but that's not the same thing as completeness.

Now, obviously the best solution would be if these astronomers each took it upon themselves to translate their own necessary tools and contribute back to the Python community, but that's pretty unrealistic, I think. I write Python for at least a good 8-10 hours/day and my IDL was clean, tight, and well-documented and I'm still terrified of the thought of translating my project.

Of course, the other question I have (and would _love_ an answer to) is how well Python holds up performance-wise to well-crafted IDL astronomy code. We were working with a data set large enough that, even on a cluster, each step of the process took between several days and a couple weeks. If Python could improve that, it would have been amazing, but if it would only hurt then Python would basically be useless for that project.
“Not everything is design, but design is about everything.”
- Michael Bierut

I think that sums us both up nicely ;)
So do applicants who don't have facebook accounts have to create one to apply? That would be a deal breaker for me. I don't have an account and don't want one.
Strictly speaking, there's no future tense in English, either; somehow, we manage to conceptualize the future despite this grammatical lacuna.

Hungarian has no word for "to have". No, really! The equivalent circumlocution for "he has X" is more or less "there is X for him".

Languages are weirder than most people give them credit for.
It's interesting that there is no mention of BFCache anywhere in this article. This is one of those fantastic features that (although unfortunately not supported in Chrome) allows for very simple infinite scroll and use of the back button.

Unfortunately this guy's script takes it a little too far for browsers that DO support bfcache and unfortunately breaks functionality a bit, or at least makes it confusing, despite it being intended functionality or not.
Bre.ad Rises in June, Adding Billboards to Social Sharing
GData: I can't take it anymore
I wonder if this will affect how people write Wikipedia articles. Will authors start trying to point to something obscure now? It would be neat if the guy went back and did this same analysis in a few months after this sunk into editors brains.
It depends on how much of your revenue is based off access to the API. Every moment without access is lost revenue; that can break a startup.

If your startup could survive if you switched off the API, then you're fine.
And I suppose you think the House Committee on Un-American Activities should have been HCUA? :P
There's also the aspect of accents. Which is less applicable in America (IMHO). More small-talk = more exact understanding of where someone is coming from (in all senses).

And that's why I prefer NYC : I prefer people to listen to what I have to say, rather than rate me based on my cultural baggage...
They did a little shy of ten years ago with VB6. People did indeed go batshit, but the government did not get involved.
Jeff Conaway Dead
Not long after the death of a fellow actor of his films, Conaway said at the news that Haim has been celebrated the same theme I would be too much use of prescription drugs, while Conaway even busy searching on google or home computer while listening to music hits after that less than 2 months Conaway died since the friend, Conaway was also found unconscious or overdose (try searching on the internet and on google or Yahoo Seacrh use your computer
If they feel as if they can only launch APIs that have indefinite lifetimes, this will seriously hamper their ability to justify building new public APIs. Deprecation is a risk taken anytime software is built on an API, for-profit or not. This is why software should be characterized as "living" and not a static entity.
Thoughts on the Facebook deploy and push process
It's worth noting that Ian Fleming named his character after an American ornithologist, intending to choose a common and drab name, not foreseeing that it would become synonymous with awesome.
None of this is really "computer science" though, right?
Ask HN: Random Traffic Spike from Bing - Any Ideas?
Earlier this week, my traffic from Bing shot up over 60x what it normally is, for one day and one day only. The spike was not limited to any particular keywords or content I'd added to the site. The traffic went all over the site, and then, the next day, was back to normal. Any ideas as to what might have happened?
umm, no one can shut down POSIX. not really a comparison.
Business Insider: Sexiest Programmers Alive
If you start getting into negative/positive connotations and meditate on them enough, you'll find that nothing at all can ever be translated between any two languages - then if you continue to meditate, you'll find that no actual communication ever takes place at all.

Speaking as a professional translator.

The actual difference between "small talk" and "gossip" is slight enough that they easily overlap depending on the situation. Certainly they show that the German language is capable of conceptualizing the various rituals that we refer to as small talk.

Just because English has no precise translation for "Gemütlichkeit" doesn't mean that English speakers never feel comfortable among a small circle of friends at a restaurant.

I'd also like to say that after many years of living in Germany, I'd say that the notion that no small talk ever takes place within the borders of the country is ridiculous. It might not be taken to the extreme art form that the Brits do it, but H. sapiens talks. Incessantly. Whether there's something to talk about or not.
Math/stats + ultra lean code + plus understanding market micostructure. From the CS side some of the more cutting edge stuff I've heard of being worked on involves hacking graphics cards to get a speed edge and building data centers in the middle of the ocean for the same reason.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/computational_finance.html

http://io9.com/5784758/the-speed-of-light-could-turn-the-mid...
With Seevl Music Discovery, the Website is the API
They have something like 37 Billion dollars in retained earning and don't pay a dividend. They didn't get that mountain of cash by losing money on things.

Assure yourself, if you are using a free google-anything, somehow or other, it adds to their income.
Why, if speech is simply a reaction to statistics we are tracking and behaviours that have been rewarded, would the first utterances have been made?

That criticism can be lobbed at all abilities that we claim came about due to evolution - which, to be clear, is all of them. The statistical model would be the mechanism, but it wouldn't be the reason why it evolved. That answer is relatively boring, and is the same one as all evolutionary processes: it appeared randomly from mutation, and it provided benefit to those that had it.
Hosting for Entrepreneurs
Excuse me? I'm assuming you read the story, and realize Facebook is the victim of patent trolling here, and has never (no, never) used its patent portfolio offensively?
http://www.google.ca/search?q=facebook+sues

Protecting the name "facebook" is not the same thing as suing every company with either "face" or "book" in the name. You don't even see Microsoft suing every company with "micro" or "soft" in their name, because that would be ridiculous.
Emacs is very usable if you can make a few reasonable assumptions about the user. Obviously it's not perfect (see the discussion of changing fonts in the originally posted blog) but making those assumptions about the user allows for a great deal of capability.
Quicksort, Parallelism, and Fork/Join in JDK7
Progressivly enhances a parallel quicksort algorithm, giving details on optimization techniques and best practices for parallel algorithms. Concludes with an example using the new Fork/Join framework in JDK7.
The paradox of "one more"
It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.
"PHP is mostly a static language; it has more in common with Java than with say Ruby."

Can you expand on that point a bit? I see PHP as far more similar to Ruby than Java when it comes to dynamic vs static.
Fourier was there first.
I'm curious as to why large content websites (gawkmedia) are moving towards hashbangs, as they completely destroy any ability to share a link to an article, which one would think is a fairly big traffic driver for these sites. Maybe gawkmedia's implementation is just broken, but it's a trend I've seen in several places now, with nothing good coming from it.
Less is More: Warm-ups Are Bad for You
I have utmore respect for that person if his name is RICK JAMES.