skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, the education / intelligence level on OKC is MUCH higher than PoF. Much more overlap with HN crowd than PoF.
That sounds like a pretty interesting research I'd like to read more about - can you please provide some citations/ links.
To paraphrase the Beastie Boys [1], "You gotta fight / for your right / to barter!"

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBShN8qT4lk
How do you define terrible? Test scores? Parental opinion? Student vote? Passing grades? Ability to babysit kids?
SearchYC is back up
This is how all officially licensed Tetris games are required to generate blocks.

http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator
It has very current results too, as I just verified by test. P.S. I'm curious why the parent post, which just opened this thread, is now dead.
Four Steps from Perdition
> The purpose of design patterns is to give a name to something you already do, not to find new things that do that aren't needed (cough Spring Framework, J2EE) ...
> Now, I'll often make sure to use standard design patterns for my APIs when possible (e.g., Iterator interface, rather than accepting an anonymous classes/function objects if all I want to do let them lazily stream data one at a time).

You're absolutely right. Thanks for catching that!
Totally agree. The appstore is going to mirror the web. I'm wagering that Apple will increasingly have to focus on search/sort/filter tools rather than the winner-take-all browse approach they are using.
It's STL-implementation specific. look in your c++ kit.

in mine (osx 10.6.7, g++ 4.2.1), it's in

/usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/stl_algo.h

and it uses an algorithm very similar to the original article
As much as I love Ender's Game I've turned my head away at it since I found out that Orson Scott Card was an extreme right-wing mormon. While I don't like to attribute a book's content to it's author I feel like this sort of ruins a bit of the book's magic.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution was an excellent read and then of course you can't go wrong with Douglas Adams. Excellent stuff.
I found a book at my local library that I really loved. "The Faith of a Scientist" by Henry Eyring [1], a brilliant chemist and devout Mormon who has a beautiful, refreshingly rational take on religion. The chapters are succinct and cover specific scientific principles that often receive a lot of undeserved friction from religious people - the age of the earth, evolution, etc. There doesn't have to be a discrepancy between intellectual curiosity and religion. I recommend it to all of my friends who are religious but find the general attitude of those within their faith intellectually unsatisfying.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Eyring
Agreed with GED.
In about 48 hours, Silk Road will get used to justify the PROTECT-IP act that Sen Wyden of Oregon just put a hold on.

"Intellectual Property" is not yet one of the Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse, but Drugs still is.
I used to play Zwok a lot. Are you saying the opponents are bots, always? If so, some of them are really good (and some, horrible).
Why Startups Should Raise Money at the Top End of Normal
Okay, this is sad. Not that Sony got hacked again, but that I'm putting Sony getting hacked and Yet-Another-Groupon-Article into the same basket: do we really need to post this. I mean, at this point, I'll assume Sony is constantly being backed. Come back in 100 days and post a 100-days since Sony was hacked. That would probably be more informative. As for Groupon: everyone has a weasel-filled opinion.

And I thought /. was plagued by duping stories.
Or if it's even possible. Doesn't the iPad 2 have 512mb of RAM? You'd have to do some serious black magic to run a heavy weight IDE, compiler/linker and underlying OS in that footprint.

I guess there's always virtual memory...
A year old? Try 3 months old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence#Contradicting...

And in the vein of hardwired preferences, notice the mention in the later section of that article of 7 minute old babies preferring faces - unless you want to suggest that unbiased algorithms would learn the importance of faces in that little time?
I want to be this guy when I grow up.
Why don't you join http://www.weekendhacker.net There might be some projects you would like to join.
Neat idea. Just posted my project (BugCam). Let's see how it goes. Note that I am already using LaunchRock (see getbugcam.com) - if you service works than you might want to integrate LaunchRock-style referral tools.
(: the syntax for comments makes me smile for each and every of them :)
Ocaml has its own performance gotchas (especially on 32 bit machines) although they are much easier to work around once you know them. For example, if you allocate a string larger than 16MB on a 32 bit machine ocaml will segfault. If you don't know this little fact that can be a really hard bug to track down.

I also had issues with the garbage collector traversing arrays of native types which is a complete waste of time, especially when said array is 7GB and immutable.

I don't want to give the wrong impression - ocaml is a fantastic language. It just has some poorly documented rough corners which can bite beginners.
I found its messing with history incredibly annoying. Here's why...

Every single letter typed creates a new history item. It got to the point where so many history items were added that HN was pushed out of my history: I couldn't use "back" to get back to HN. I had to type in the URL to get to HN, then I had to find the comments page to get back here again to see the discussion.

I continued on looking at other HN stories. Once, I went back too far and landed on the HNI page again. I typed "L" as one does in Vimperator and Pentadactyl to go forward and get back to HN. The only problem was the text box stole my input, this resulted in a new query and a new history item, erasing, once again, HN's history item. I had to (again) type the URL to get here!
First post here - long time lurker.
I was transferred to Singapore for work from Tokyo. Here are my impressions.
-housing is extremely expensive, food is generally cheap, air quality is nice

-streets are not as clean as expected, especially compared to Tokyo, which is a much larger city. I lived in Chinatown in the People's Park Complex with 6 mainland Chinese (I'm American), which was an interesting experience.

-the expat community is dominated by the finance community, which can tend to limit the crowds you will run with if you're not in with the locals. I tried to befriend the locals, with limited success.

-it doesn't feel like the police state it's made out to be, don't worry about being arrested for chewing gum (I saw some T-shirts with a "Legalize It" theme referring to gum).

Overall, Singapore seemed sterile to me. That was part my reason for quitting my job and moving back to Tokyo in April. I like Singapore, but not my cup of tea. Maybe that's just because I'm a huge fan of Japan.
I totally agree. I think most of my "working smarter" came as a direct result of "working harder." And especially, in making mistakes.

I don't remember the exact wording of the adage right now, but it generally rings true for me: "You remember a third of what you hear, half of what you read, and all of what you do." So if I hadn't put in all of that sweat equity & hard work (and mistakes!) in the first place, I wouldn't have gotten to this point today.

(And I hope I'm not giving the impression that I think I've got it all figured out - I don't. Relative to where my mind was a decade ago though, I think I'm in a better place.)
The problem here is that managers think that writing good software is like baking a cake, if you have the right ingredients, the right process, the right environment and the right people, then you are 99% likely to end up with a satisfactory cake. This is absolutely not the case with building software.

It could very well be the red tape in the office, the politics, maneuvering, posturing, noisy programmer area, the tools programmers were given, time-wasting meetings, and thousands of other reasons.

My feeling is the blame falls on the guy claiming the problem space consists of "the programmer" or "the methodology". The manager figure delivering the bad news to the programmer is a kung fu master of politics and the art of war, he's trying to get blame placed on anywhere but himself.
Dopamine

(Seriously -- looking it up, together with seeking/discovery behavior.)
Does anyone understand the Yuri Mcluring reference?
Made me think of this: http://qntm.org/difference
1. It's pretty much isomorphic, yes

2. The title gestures to that (notice that programmer and prisoner both have 3 syllables, even)

3. The article links straight to the SEP article on the prisoner's dilemma
The Arsenic Paper is out, along with eight critiques
A little, except in the prisoner's dilemma, if they both agree and don't blame each other, you get the best outcome. That isn't really the case here. And if they both betray each other, they are both screwed.
I live near Zurich but don't perceive the rules to be anywhere near as strict as you described, and would certainly not talk about "being told what to do" by the state. In Singapur, there are lots of laws unimaginable in Switzerland (for example, it's forbidden to smoke in public, you go to jail for speeding/driving while drunk, spitting or chewing gum, you'll t get killed for possessing drugs...). In Switzerland, what I believe causes the low criminality rate is the even lower poverty rate because of the strong social system. What would be called socialist in the States is completely normal here in Europe, and often results in a much better quality of life for everyone living here.
There is easily as much crap in the AppStore as there is in the Android Market, trust me, I like to dig deep for games and I've downloaded (and purchased) some awful stuff.

However the App Store has enough polished apps that work on all their devices that they can easily bury crap apps so they can only be found in narrow searches.

Android has a really hard time doing this because the best games don't work, or barely work, on older devices, or they are messed up on large screens, or they crash on some phone models, etc, etc.

So, on Android, the simple, addictive Indy games live at the top because the big games are sometimes providing a frustrating, rather than fun, gaming experience.
One nuance of the story that I think is the most interesting is that the problem wasn't discovered until LeMessurier decided to look back on his completed design and re-review some parts of it out of intellectual curiosity.

Sometimes when I'm nostalgic, vain, or super-bored I'll go back and read code that I've written. Sometimes I find something that I've forgotten and once in a while I'll find bugs. Having that curiosity (or is it just excessive pride?) is a good thing in my opinion.
Of course it's publicity, but some of the "big names" they got to write promotional blurbs (what do they call those quotes that appear on the cover or inside the cover?) about the text -- and the degree of praise they contained -- were surprising, when I saw the book.
"It’s extremely unusual for a paper to be delayed this long, and then to appear simultaneously with its critiques. Usually the paper is published and then the critiques (with a response by the authors of the original paper) appear in the journal a few months later."

Indeed. The paper claiming to find a life form on earth with arsenic incorporated in its DNA molecules made an extraordinary claim, and received extraordinary treatment from the press. But it hasn't been backed up by the extraordinary evidence necessary for believing an extraordinary claim.
Also, two other very critical steps:

Sony sought the right (and won it) to subpoena the IPs of everyone that had done something as viewed GeoHot's blog, watched YouTube, Twitter, donated via Paypal, etc [1].

Sony sought the right (and won) to search all of his computer equipment [2].

These are severely heavy-handed tactics. They wanted to embarrass and persecute him. They took this thing personal first.

1: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/geohot-site-unmaski...

2: http://www.destructoid.com/ps3-hacker-geohot-must-surrender-...
A free world-class education for anyone anywhere
Now you need to write the followup, which shows how agile and Scrum are so often used to shift power from the business people to the developers without actually solving the underlying problems. (You'll have to edit parts of this piece where you imply otherwise.)

Unless, of course, agile is that magic bullet Fred Brooks stopped looking for 25 years ago.
I know! Right now I am storing cursor coordinates as one moves and displaying it via red squares.
My initial thought was to timestamp each point and then every few seconds make an ajax request to server with just the updated data. And once I have lets say 2000-3000 points, run some sort of algorithm to weed out arbit points and have only most visited coordinates displayed as most popular regions. Easy peasy right?
But now as I am thinking more about it, I think the data I will have might not be able to accomplish the task. My first question to myself is, a point on my screen will have different coordinates than yours, for example lets say the top left corner of button that shows map is 300,400 on my screen. But since my screen resolution might be different than yours, it might become 200,300 on your screen. Therefore data point loses its relevance.
One approach that I can think of to solve this issue. Get screen resolution of each user along with the data points, which can be used to normalize the data back on server.
Any thoughts, suggestions?
I thought this was going to be about using IRC to control bot networks or programs in general.
I think this started 2005 with the Sony Rootkit. [1]

At that time it was pretty clear that they didn't care much about their customers' security. However, it was not (yet) clear that they didn't care much about their servers' security, either.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...
Obscure hack that was hard to defend against (DNS or OS vuln) I'd feel sad about.

Not encrypting customer data and transport, plain text passwords, etc.. doesn't make me feel sad, at all.
Three Haskell web frameworks: an overview
So security is relative compared to a threat. That's a assumption that any thoughtful person can make. Yes, the resources available to you will greatly affect your ability to achieve a particular level of security. Just because you connect your server to a network does not mean that the security of your server disappears. Whatever level of security you've managed to achieve is still there. It just may be that the attackers you face are able to overcome your security measures.

If by security one means absolute security against all threats present and future, then yes security is not only illusory but also meaningless.
Just because they seize their domain, doesn't mean those guys will stop selling drugs, or that their "business" will be affected for too long by a domain seizure. Obviously they need to catch them and arrest them.

Seizing the domain doesn't help at all, and the fact that they are using bitcoin is pretty irrelevant.
Thanks for the link! It also made me think of that but I couldn't find it back.
Far easier to do stuff like 'assert(postcondition)'
It's not a website, it's a Tor Hidden Service.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tor_%28anonym...
There's a lot of research on infants these days. There's a great deal of discussion on what infants do and don't know in _The Philosophical Baby_ (because the issue has obvious philosophical relevance to Kant's categories and Locke's tabula rasa).

Just yesterday I read of new research covering probability: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110526141357.ht...
Well, yes, the new entry title wouldn't mislead me.

Unfortunately, being a student doesn't allow me to know enough folks in a domain other than 'software'.
Max, thank you for the additions. I didn't actually know there had been a bit of back-and-forth before the big OtherOS-kill-off.
I don't know why we are so sympathetic towards them - either they are just bad at security or understaffed and thus just can't maintain everything. Both options are about as probable.
Singapore reminds me of Apple.

A very focus country on being the most successful country in SEA and it's built on the vision of one man, LKY. However I do fear the day LKY pass and the government is lost.
I imagine that "no studying" should really be read as "no loitering." Or perhaps "this is not the place to come and read all day, please, there are other people who need to use this space." It was probably a problem.

I've seen such signs at cheap chain restaurants in Japan. (I'm not attempting to generalize here, just relating an experience) The clear message was that high schoolers would come and buy the $3 all-you-can-drink soda package and sit and study and chat all day. Hence, no studying. Seems reasonable enough. Many places don't have that rule though, and there you can see many people studying all day.
OKCupid is already going downhill post acquisition. Friends that are on OKCupid (exes) who were ~70% match earlier, are now ~90% match. It's a shame that OKC tweaked their algorithm just to make a few bucks. Based on their general demeanor, I had assumed they would be above such shenanigans; but it turns out to have been a flawed assumption.
Interview: Is climate change caused by solar inertial motion?
Interview with Nefario, founder of Bitcoin Global (Bitcoin Startup)
These are interesting observations. I'd love to hear more about them.

Ocaml's problem, from what I've seen, is that INRIA wants to run a tight ship regarding the design of the language. This makes sense, but it also means a lot of real-world use cases get ignored. For example, my understanding is that priming Ocaml for multicore use would require substantial rewrites that aren't a high priority, given INRIA's desire to maintain it as a "research language".

The 2^22 - 3 array limit (and the corresponding 2^24 - 12 string limit) on a 32-bit machine (it's 2^54 - 3 on a 64-bit system) are examples of this: the language designers simply didn't anticipate that people would be using the language for purposes that require such enormous arrays or strings. These use cases are tremendously important for real-world production use but not terribly interesting from a research perspective.
Caching! Check out Varnish, and memcached for various caching schemes.
"if this is just unique to Sony"..."Sony is incompetent"

More likely, Sony simply outsorces their web properties to some outside teams, which do not have proper expertise in building secure websites. This theory is especially make sense if you look at what properties were hacked - they're mostly local-market websites. So, I'd say, the only one hacked property Sony must really be embarrased for is PSN, hands down.
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Oh, you'd be surprised. For example: what do your parents do for a living? Did you ever have a summer job, or an after-school job? Do you have any (slightly older) friends who have already graduated and taken jobs? Siblings? Aunts or Uncles? Friendly neighbors?

I'm guessing that you know lots of people-- the trick is to a) talk to them about what they do for a living, and b) listen. (That last step is critical.)
Even if it is a "thing", a great community (technical, public, etc.) has grown up around it.
Singapore actually has one of the freest economies in the world, with an extremely friendly business environment that is free of trade barriers and free of strict regulations. Yup, it's ranked #1 on the Ease of Doing Business Index: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_Doing_Business_Index
I was pleasantly surprised to see PcWorld not treat Linux like dirt. The Pcworld I know (may not be connected) is a UK crappy computer shop, now merged with Currys. At one point I said I had a Mac, they told me how to get the mac address of a Windows computer (in a way a non-technical person wouldn't be able to do).
A non-sequitur. I assumed this was another "Joel on Software" blogpost, because of the name... I read the article, all seemed inline with something Joel would write, then got the end and though "Goddamn... the last 2 weeks at the gym have been kind to Joel."

Then I realized it was two separate Joel's.

As for the article, any commitments on the diet front? Do you find if you commit to too many new routines (gym, eating, sleeping, working, being productive) you run out of will-power-gas before the day is out, making it harder to pickup the commitments the following day?

This relates to the "How to get important things done" article from a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2582913

and the ensuing willpower discussion I think. Would like to hear your thoughts on that.
Interesting idea. I agree with the other comments that some UI love would be nice.

At first glance, this reminded me of early adopter feedback sites like AlphaList.co, BetaCandy.com & LeanThingy.com, though they are geared more for feedback and you are more for actual users.

The name threw me off a bit. I like it, but I'm guessing it's not meant to be literal, yea? As in, all of the services listed have 0 customers and after I sign up and become one, they will not be listed anymore. In that line of thought, is there any criteria to how & when a company will be removed from the list?

In the "I'll take it" dialogue box, the Offer could perhaps be better off as plain text instead of as a disabled field. I thought I could click on that and edit the offer when I first saw it.

Very neat idea. I signed up for BugCam, so it's already working! :)
A colleague of mine - his wife was a 3rd grade teacher.

One day, he mentioned to her the process that we were doing.

And she laughed. She showed him the daily progress report. "What I did today? What I want to do tomorrow?" That her 3rd graders had to fill out everyday.

Are programmers adults that need to be self-managed + micro-managed like 3rd graders?
Nothing in the way of a methodology stops underlying problems of a culture that thinks careers are a zero-sum game and that actually delivering the software is secondary to advancement.

But FWIW, all I claim is that Agile does a poorer job of blaming people. The other stuff you're talking about is your point of view, which suggests to me that you are the right person to write the blog post.
It is common for students who go to Changi Airport studying and gathering. It became problem for the business owners because they are holding on to seats for long hours. The sign you see are put up by the business owners. Similarly you can see such sign at downtown at Starbucks for example. As for the Swenson, the queue is there not because Singaporean are crazy about Swenson. It is just that it is the cheapest western food restaurant the young can afford in Orchard Rd. That was few years back and I think the place is no more btw.

Did you live in Singapore or just stopover?