skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the advent of Homebrew, why would manually compile from source for your local dev environment?
Shell proofreading and writing tools
The idea that gold has no real value is bizarre.
Apple to Launch iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud Next Monday at WWDC 2011
This view is compatible with solipsism.

Assuming solipsism (however absurd it may be), both me and the universe do exist.
If you couldn't upload your own music files, and thus only play tracks you've purchased, then this isn't much of a cloud "music locker" at all. It's essentially just letting you play/stream the music you own from multiple devices (where currently you can only download the music file once). Of course, that's not to say this isn't what iCloud will be, but I'd be a little disappointed if it were the case.

I'd make great use of it if I could upload my own files, and probably not otherwise.

Also I'd just like to toss in it wouldn't shock me if this were "US Only" at least initially.
I just imagined that the bitcoin world post-mining (after or near the 21M BTC is reached) would just consist of the transactional interfaces and not need the specialized GPU miners.
I think the biggest issue for adoption is overlooked -- advertisers and monetization. Flash has been around for so long that the infrastructure has been built around it, and it's quite stable. As more companies learn how to harness HTML 5 for advertising purposes (with metrics, etc), we'll see more and more of it.
I think we're essentially in agreement; you've just defined "know how to use a calculator" a little more specifically than I did.

In my mind, if you don't know the concepts behind what you are doing, you don't know what you are doing. It's like copy and pasting code from the interwebs and then saying you are a python programmer.

But it isn't about balance, it's about using a tool to extend your abilities, not to replace them. If you are doing 36+19 on a calculator, I would posit that you simply aren't every good at math.
By satisfaction I meant, were they satisfied with the decision to relocate back. One of the factors would be the opportunity cost; the money they would have made staying back vs actual money they have made.
They pointed out on the Planet Money podcast that gold may be in a 4,000 year-old bubble.
http://www.bitc-lang.org/ Not there yet, but I'd say there's hope.
Facebook clickjacked by World's funniest condom commercial
I agree. The article is actually pretty good and provides useful tips. Even as a programmer I've many times been annoyed by these kinds of UI laziness, usually in "enterprise software".

It's not only programmers that make these kinds of mistakes, though. Also designers that come from a "forms on paper" background, or simply don't know enough of HTML/JS to make friendlier forms. So they simply make an unending list of text fields...

My most common annoyance with forms on the web is asking things that you A) don't need to know or B) already know.
Thanks jaxn, will do!
> Netflix is the one exception because it's too big to ignore.

That, and they've probably struck a lucrative deal.
calculators have been generally available for a long time, well over 30 years

Thirty years before 2011 is 1981. That's not true of graphing calculators generally being in the hands of high school students. By that year, many engineering students at university had calculators that could do calculus (usually with a "solve" algorithm) but the graphics plotting was just beginning for hand-held devices for university students. I was alive and studying math in the relevant years. Four-function or "scientific" calculators in K-12 schooling were just coming in during the 1970s.

After edit: while I disagree that calculators have been pervasive and encouraged in either elementary education or higher education for much longer than thirty years, I agree with the (grandparent?) comment that the curriculum in K-12 mathematics in the United States is lousy, and has been lousy through at least three different eras of curriculum fads, calculators or no calculators. The curriculum is indeed the key issue. Calculators are a useful tool, and today they belong in K-12 and in higher education. For a classic comment on how much calculator technology has progressed in the last fifteen years, see

http://xkcd.com/768/
I do think its admirable to push your boundaries. The article and some comments here recognize that greater interest is more valuable to employers than specific experience, less of a China thing, more that you've done it. But, if you're interested in China:

I've lived and worked in China for 5 years and wanted to make a few more points:

* It is hard to get in touch with the key company person for intern opportunities;

* Even if you do, it might be the first such approach they've ever had;

* Outside the largest companies with formal intern programs there may be intern programs (and may not), but in partnership with local schools or other feeder companies;

* Global companies tend to have global intern programs with limited local admission.

That is by no means not a reason not to have a go applying. If anything, if you can break through those barriers you're already a long way there.

Bear in mind the following:

* Companies are going to ask themselves "What's in it for me?"

* They might panic about visas, especially the headache of applying for a short term working visa;

* They'll need some very strong persuasion you're committed, will avoid significant culture shock, will not simply run away, and as sponsor of your visa will not damage their reputation;

* Cowboy language schools mascaraed as intern opportunities, beware.

An additional: The article doesn't state explicitly, but the consultant company, CRCC Asia, mentioned as internship intermediator, organizes internships for a fee. That does mitigate much of the above - both effort and reward in my view. Link to their fee page: http://www.crccasia.com/internships/prices-dates

Edit: Lines initially did not break
>Is it necessary to be unkind, even slightly?

No, sure, it isn't. However, one can write a useful reply in terms of content without being aware one is being unkind.

In such cases it will feel something like 'wow, I'm so clever today' or 'he deserves a good solid fisking'.

The trolls are useful in that they bring this problem into awareness. Kindness/decency is a requirement for continued discussion, which is at least as important as discussion itself.
10 Most Fun and Inspiring YouTube Channels
Creative people around the world are now sharing their art and ideas with videos on the Internet via YouTube. The next time you need some inspiration, or just a pick-me-up, check out these YouTube channels. Some of them may even make you laugh, which is a good thing.
I was worried about this so I worked out the math. It wasn't as bad as I expected.

Let's say it's 20 years from now, the total size of the bitcoin economy is $1 trillion, and there are 10 million bitcoins in existence. (We could find the number of bitcoins exactly, but 10 million makes the math easy and it's within a factor of 2 of the ultimate limit. There are about 6 million coins right now.)

$1 trillion / 10 million coins = $100K per coin, so we can expect people to spend almost that much money to generate a coin.

The rate of coin production is currently 50 per 10 minutes, dropping in half every four years, giving us 9 coins per hour in 2031.

That's 78K coins per year, at $100K per coin, or $7.8 billion in computer time and energy spent per year.

Let's say half of that is energy, call it $4 billion, including the energy to make the dedicated mining computers. At ten cents per kilowatt-hour, we're talking 40 billion kilowatt-hours per year. Divide by the number of hours in the year and we get 4.5 gigawatts.

In other words, a $1 trillion bitcoin economy can be run on the output of roughly five typical nuclear power plants (assuming it's 20 years from now).

If we get to $1 trillion in only 12 years, energy usage will be four times higher, since coins will be worth about the same but four times as many will be generated per hour.

If people use custom ASICs to generate coins, they'll be costly but more energy-efficient, weighting expenditures more heavily on hardware than energy.

People can grant transaction fees to miners to make their transaction go through faster. If transaction fees become prevalent, resource usage will be higher, since there will be additional reward for completing blocks. But $7.8 billion is already almost one percent of the bitcoin economy. If the average bitcoin changes hands once per year with a one percent fee, or ten times per year with a 0.1 percent fee, we add $10 billion to mining rewards and approximately double our resource usage.

Edit: $1 trillion is about equal to the amount of U.S. currency in circulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
I just put the screws back into the screw holes that they came out of, after removing the component that it was holding in place. And take lots of pictures along the way.
Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qmKT38N...
There's been a quiet battle going on for 10+ years to work out who will own your living room entertainment experience.

One of the theories about why MS dumped so much money in to the XBox over the years was that it was really a trojan horse that was trying to be the hub of your media centre. The problem with the XBox is that it stays switched off when you're watching broadcast TV, which is still what most people do in their living rooms.

Whoever can get in between you and "broadcast" (or VOD) TV content and control that experience has just taken control of a multi billion dollar market.

Soon enough when you switch on your TV you'll be presented with a customised line up of viewing across different channels/sources, lists of what your friends and favorite celebs(/brands/whatever) are watching, suggestions of new shows you might like, enhanced experiences around live content (polls on news topics on CNN, click to buy the track that's playing on Glee, etc), and, most importantly, targeted commercials.

I'm utterly convinced it's inevitable.
I didn't notice until after I commented on the site that the post is from 2009.

His call to sort reads like this:

alist.sort(mysort)

The ordering function doesn't sort, it orders. I would have called the ordering function myorder, so the call would read:

alist.sort(myorder)

More specifically, his ordering function orders by length, so even better would be:

alist.sort(orderByLength)
It's not the cost of the paper. Some costs originate from delays, caused by the fact that paper travels slow. If the stakeholders can digitally sign documents on their laptop or mobile phone, processes can go much faster.
Haha, 10/10 for that.
Freeze unused, running applications, to free CPU resources and screen space
imagine all that computing power being used to boinc projects. World problems would be solved
My article suggests and assumes you are using Homebrew.
Instead of telling me it exists, please show me a visually appealing 'find in project' plugin/package. Which got this whole discussion started in the first place...
Looks like wifi calling is coming:

http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/articles/t-mobile-android-wifi-...
The average hour-long program is 40-45 minutes once all the commercials are removed. Think about that, up to 1/3 of scheduled show is dedicated to advertising. I'm sure if you go back 10-15 years it was 1/4 and before that it was 1/5. This doesn't even count the inshow advertising that goes on.

It seems to be a sensible idea, I agree. But like government projects, sensible ideas tend to metastasize.
>>So you cannot have proper functional language with OO.

>Yes you can. Check out my language Babel-17

I failed to see how purely functional structured programming address the need of identity for objects.

Could you elaborate a little more?
Thanks for the comment, that's great to hear!
How is Java, as opposed to its occasionally questionably-designed API, "imperative OO" in ways that Scala is not?
Hmm... I guess I'll be the one who posts the Fauxgeek's Lament on this thread.

Reading stuff like this always makes me feel like a second-rate geek! I've had my fair share of soldering iron burns (for my senior project in college, I cracked open an RC car's remote and connected it to a BASIC stamp, which I controlled via RS-232 and a network socket), but the parts of this article which the author considers "easy" stuff are still a mystery to me. For example, "According to the application note I could use a simple signal diode, so I just pulled a 1N4148 diode out of my component drawer." A simple what diode? A 1N4-what diode? My component drawer? I don't even have a... help! S.O.S.! Man overboard!

I'm sure that I could come to feel more comfortable with stuff like this if I went out of my way to learn more about it, but the applicable extent of my electronics hacking day-to-day has been unplugging the rumble packs from my Xbox360 controller. Most of the things I use on a day-to-day basis are not devices that I feel comfortable screwing around with!
The problem of connecting with friends online
Nice approach. Remind me of the OfficePod [1] discussed at HN [2] about one year ago. The used trailer is much more affordable (less than $1000?) than the OfficePod, which costs a whopping 25K.

[1] http://www.officepod.co.uk

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069526
Using the myGengo Translation API with Python
If you're getting charged for the time paper's in transit through the postal system, you need a different law firm.
The contrast to imperative programming is not FP, but rather declarative programming. The idea of referential transparency comes from DP, not FP.

Example: Prolog, a declarative language with many of the qualities of FP, yet not FP.
great article, well put gil.
One thing I'd like to see is an example set of wire-frame's/specifications etc. so I know how much detail I need to give you?

This is pretty appealing to me for two reasons:

1. Everyone I have spoken to (albeit 'professional' firms) have gone for the big dollar, final product. As meetings with these kinds of places have progressed, I realise I probably won't get what I am looking for the first time, hence a prototype appeals to me.

2. Every now and then I have gotten a little caught up in what it should be built in but as time has gone on, i've realised that as a business-side guy, it's really not my call. If you (as a technical-side person) want to use X AND are genuinely interested in working on this concept, then we're good to go. That is what my concern is now- finding someone who will commit for a decent period of time to the concept we're trying to create.

Maybe in time you'd be able to post some more info on what it is you need to get going. I am sure you can give guidance etc. via email however it might save you some time.
So you're saying its like the housing market?
I think we should aim for "quantitative intuition" by teaching how to do rough calculations instead of spending time teaching precise calculations.

There is a lot of "cheats" possible when calculating approximations that makes it much easier to learn/perform.

In real life there is often so many uncertainties in the source numbers that a 'precise' answer is not meaningful anyway. Many people think that all the digits displayed in the calculator are significant/meaningful.

If you are a painter that estimates an offer price to the customer, you don't need to be able to work out in your head that 10.5 * 21.5 is 225.75, the estimate 'approx 215-230' is almost always good enough.
Every Entrepreneur Needs to Outwit the Devil
http://www.lo0.ro/2011/cookiejacking-stealing-cookies-with-i...
But anyone who is sure it will happen is a cynic ;)
Data-Binding - Overcoming Data-Centric RIA Challenges
What you're proposing is a cartel of users who agree to only use 1% of their computing power. The Prisoner's Dilemma still applies and thus the incentive to cheat still remains because using more than 1% can give you a competitive advantage. By assuming every one will compete as much as they can the prisoner's dilemma disappears because there is a limit of how many resources a user can expand. The main issue is whether bit coin is a valid expenditure of those resources
The Linux Week In Review May 31
The top story for most of the day yesterday was about Bitcoin, actually.

And I'm not crying "dupe"-- it's not that people are re-posting an old article with evergreen content.

Instead, people are having the same conversation over and over again, making the same points, repeatedly. I don't think that's a good thing.
There is one more thing... the iPhone 5 :)
No more local backups? That seems like the next big step.
Here's a good piece by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson on Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice, he's the guy who's pretty much behind all this research on deliberate practice and the making of outliers - http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...
Isn't D exactly what you're looking for here? That is, roughly equivalent to C++ but with a coherent design?

I head Go also lets you manage memory manually if you want to.
If someone started mining bitcoin when it first started, they have a significant stash created by now

Some of the early adoptors of BitCoins have 1% of all the current BitCoins each.
Looks like a Markov chain text generator.
ISTR news of a large datacenter being built by Apple near Asheville, NC; I assume this is part of that push.
No, it makes perfect sense, within context...

VB6 is not an object oriented language, but needs to play with Microsoft's COM. So they added limited object support which enables subtypes through contract declaration and fulfillment (aka. interfaces), but not inheritance.

The way I read this, it means that Jabaco would extend Visual Basic syntax to support Java-style inheritance (single class, multiple interfaces).
JQuery Air CodeSchool.com Course Released
It's no where near as pronounced with fiat currencies as it is with bitcoin. Only a few currencies have experienced this level of hyperinflation that bitcoin has (e.g. weimar republic, zimbabwe), and those currencies have failed.
For your next meeting
I have a Nexus S, and I agree with the author.

It seems that it is the only phone (along with the Nexus One) that you actually own.
Unlocking the boot loader is explicitly allowed, which allows for arbitrary customizations.

Now, I don't need HD video recording, an SD slot, or 4G.
Cconsidering a computer programming degree, how do I find out if I like to code?
I am 26, I have a degree in business economics (worth little in the job world) but have always tried to run my life "independently.". I have raised money to buy rental properties, managed a few retail stores, and have make some good money with Internet marketing.
I am considering returning to school in order to find a "thing" I can be good at that is also high-tech. I like using my creativity as much as possible, I just dont find myself very skillful at anything. :/ I have been thinking of going to school to study comp sci, and maybe tack on physics if I can handle the pressure. I imagine that the variety of things that I learn in comp sci can help me in my career regardless of whether I code full time or not.

But I don't know if I will like programming. I have seen HTML and CSS but always leaned towards using frontpage, wordpress, or whatever thing possible without ever writing code.

How do I find out if I like to code?

-lost in my career
> A large part of human endeavor is not about increasing value in the world, but rather increasing value for oneself, possibly with the side-effect of decreasing value for others. It's just the way we are.

It's not just the way we are, it's the way we are under capitalism.

But I agree that the wastefulness of Bitcoin is nothing compared to the waste caused by capitalism as a whole.
New Google Wallet Will Face Stiff Competition
Traffic Squeezer - 5.01.5 and Aquarium - 0.08.5 Released
This article is laughably light on specifics and big on meaningless sentences like 'HTML5 is an effective solution to the challenges of delivering content to smartphones in a consistent and efficient manner.'

Don't waste your clicks.
Back in the 90s there was an episode of the Outer Limits that touched on this subject. Effectively there was a nexus of information that everyone connected to through their minds. Anytime they wanted to know something, they just looked it up by thought and presto, instant expert. One guy couldn't connect, so he had to learn things the old fashioned way by research and practice. Naturally, the nexus goes down and people can barely function. He goes from being the village idiot to the village savior.
Really? It seems like the computational power thrown at this is way less than the latest console game.
Android is a much more integrated and native citizen of the web. Apple is playing catchup here and I have my doubts that they'll make it work this time after several lackluster previous attempts. It just doesn't seem to be in Apple's blood, just as social isn't in Google's.
Since iTunes allows you to use music you got from any location, it would make most sense to go with option two. This would be consistent with the manner in which Apple allows customers to use iTunes currently. If they choose option 3, their servers would probably be overloaded immediately, an embarrassment which hampered the launch of MobileMe[1]. Apple won't want to risk this.

I doubt if there would be much uptake of the service if it were iTunes-purchased music only. Piracy aside, what about music that you bought legally from legit sources?

[1] http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/09/inside-apple/

EDIT: there would probably be some limit that you could use for free (e.g. 10GB), but beyond this there would be a monthly fee, à la Dropbox.
Except that FP basically dominates class based OO[1]. If FP were the norm, nobody would study class based OO. Remaining alternatives could be prototype based OO, bare-bone programming (assembly, C, LLVM), stack languages, and domain specific languages.

[1]: http://www.loup-vaillant.fr/articles/classes-suck
Display advertising on the web has surely been around for longer than Flash?

Perhaps the style and metrics used in mobile ads needs some work, but I don't think HTML5 changes anything in any meaningful way.
Can we agree that any given reactor will likely have no core containment either, after a passenger jet crashed into it?

No. A broken core containment still provides some protection.

I take my optimism from the fact that I'm not too impressed by things that have little chance from happening, which prevents me from being scared of meteor rains, terrorist attacks, or whatever disaster you can think of.

To put things in perspective, again :

There are much less nuclear power plants than there are dangerous pesticide or fertiliser factories. It is also more likely that a pesticide or fertiliser factory will be poorly maintained.

And yet, people who want to shut down nuclear plants are much more numerous and listened to than people who want to shut down chemical plants.

The only reason people are afraid of nuclear power is that it is associated with those bombs so powerful nobody ever dared to use them in a war since 1945.

There is no rational reason to shut down nuclear plants, and get rid of an energy source that's more efficient and cleaner than any other we know of.
Launching Radish, a new monitoring and analysis service for Redis
Heroku Announces New Version: “Celadon Cedar”
Raspberry Pi: Tiny Computer That Runs Linux
I can just imagine, if Apple's cash pile keeps growing, Steve Jobs buying Microsoft and doing nothing with it other than changing the name of Windows to iWin
If you are interested in the "deepend" then you could always have a look at lambda calculus and combinators:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic

Then you get to see where the term Y Combinator came from :-)
Gold's market value is far above what it would be if it wasn't used as a value store.