skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally liked this review, but I really had a hard time choking down the sections on Concurrency (which was—charitably—poorly written and confusing) and OO (which classically mis-defines OO).

It makes me wonder, why is concurrency really that much of a black art in 2011? I still see people confuse parallelism and concurrency and just the other day an article got upvoted here describing why JavaScript programmers don't need to learn about concurrency; as if the continuation-passing callback style of JavaScript isn't a concurrency technique.
Awesome approach. Whenever I start out a project, I always reset, then normalize it back up to a common standard, then apply the additional style. It's good to accelerate the first two steps with this.
Read the comments on Youtube and tell me the Internet is "The Creator".

Right now the Internet is at the primordial ooze stage of evolution.
"few things about history and don't get the exact dates or details right."

This is exactly what a person needs to get right - the Chronology. Otherwise things do not make any sense.

For instance these facts:

Fact: The U.S. dropped two Nuclear bombs on Japan.
Fact: Japan became the largest debt holder for the U.S.

..can be misconstrued to say something that did not occur, such as, "The U.S. dropped bombs on japan so they did not have to pay back their debt to them."

Now I know this is an extreme example, but the reasoning is the same. History is a study of facts that occurred; who, what, where - chronology provide the "why".
Code sharing really only becomes a compelling argument if you're building browser games or something similarly interactive (i.e., really bloody interactive). In this case, you need to run the same logic on the client (to reduce latency) and on the server (to validate and actually update game state).

Otherwise, you really have no excuse for putting logic on the client. Even with something like validation, I think its much more sensible to have your renderers pump out generic validation event handlers than to reconstruct the whole model class on the client.
Sharing the utility libraries are a huge win though and should not be underestimated. For example on one project alone:

- Input Validation

- Asynchronous loop patterns

- Promise pattern implementations

- markup logic & output

- A* pathfinding

More and more use cases will pop up over time, and it's really unique to the node.js environment. This alone would not make me pick node.js over another solution but I feel it is still an advantage.

I spend about 50% of my dev time on writing / working with utility libraries as writing these libraries takes far more effort than writing handlers, models, etc.
just wanted to say thank you for all your hard work Sal
I went there expecting teachers whining about a new teaching model, but seeing what the videos really are like, and the things said, I fully agree with the article. I think having a full video based classroom for everyone would be good, but Mr Khan seems to be doing a rather sloppy job filling every topic in the world by himself.
Parent is wisdom disguised as snark. The reason given for outlawing bitcoin: drugs. I think the real reason is taxes.
I think it's more complex than that; in his point of view, History of WWII shouldn't be taught this way, in large (huge?) brush strokes. He argues (IMO successfully) that you must go deeper in details to get at least a basic grasp of these important events, and give them some meaning.
Said differently, a simple list of loosely related facts simply doesn't constitute history; and to make the narrative compelling, understandable and memorable, you have to give at least one (and preferably several) explanation for the facts, else it's only kindergarten stories, not college-level material.
Now I didn't see this particular video; maybe it's just a quick overview of what's to come in a long list of upcoming courses.
Any plans for a Firefox extension yet? I'm pretty stuck in my ways, but this would make my HN&Reddit experience a lot more productive. Although I spend so much time on here already...
What's a virtual company? If it's just a company you can run from wherever, I've been running my own, UK-based company (Stochastic Technologies) for a year now, with great success. I don't even need to be in the UK ever, my accountant does all the filing and most other things can be done online...
>sometimes projects do start with very simple UI and focus on application functionality, so it could be hugely helpful to consider the context of UX.

I've found this is one of the more powerful and easy ways to prevent feature creep, at least for the smaller/shorter projects I have worked on. When I start with a UI, I find it's easier to ask what the bare minimum of a) inputs and b) feedback/guidance for the user that needs to exist. In the projects where I've started with a backend first, I often end up having to create more noise on the UI side to complete it.

I think this just goes back to your first point, how developers are more effective when we're involved in creating the requirements. Practicing good design is going to be more effective when you choose to focus on it up front, instead of relegating it to something to check off a list when the application has been developed.
It seems to be pretty nitpicking. He says things that plenty of educators would likely say in describing events such as, "as you'd imagine".

His point about FDR's viewpoint of Hitler's invasion of Poland is really weak and I just don't get it. Everything actually is relative. The Germans probably thought it was just as fine (if not moreso) to invade Poland as in the US Bush thought it was ok to invade Iraq. Of course history is written by the victors. Had Germany won, it would have been written as a good action from their perspective.

So in 15 minutes he doesn't dig into terribly much detail. Let's face it, even after a teacher spends an entire semester going over this with 8th graders, in 10 years time do they remember all the details? Details are something that can come after interest is solidified. Pushing details on 8th graders misses the larger point often as it is buried in dates, maps, names and such. If you get them hooked on the main point, they will find the details.
IMHO, the merit of sharing code really shines with templates. You can have full-featured Haml-js templates that are rendered on the server and the client. This means your client can make RESTful calls to your JSON api and has full rendering capability in the client.
It really is like watching a very fast-paced sport match, except without all the constant in-your-face product branding. Like I remember college basketball used to be, except more cerebral.

I'd not played SC or SC2 much but I bought a (replacement - long story) copy last night.
NookTouch Rooting
It's an interesting use of the Smart Cover, but can it be a serious competitor to other flash card replacement apps since there's no easy way to report success or failure by lifting/replacing the cover?
Is this slow server BS the same reason it can take 48 hours for Google DNS changes to propogate? Have they been selling us crap on that for years?
Wellll.... Meyer says right there "In other words, this is a starting point, not a self-contained black box of no-touchiness.".

I understand a lot of people treat it like that, though. I modify the reset to set defaults for each layout myself.
If they skip over something like Jim Crowe laws and someone notices, then that someone can mention it to Sal, explain why (s)he thinks it's important, and then Sal (or another instructor in the future) can make a video, and it can easily be incorporated into the curriculum. This process is much easier than it would be to incorporate it into a textbook, curriculum, etc.
Hey, if anyone does that, do a post (put link below, and I will post and link to it) or post a YouTube video (I will post and embed)! Everyone is very curious about what it can do. And if you can, try running the Kindle for Android program too. Thanks!
Curious, how do the capture the event of the cover lifting?
>I have built web apps out of shell scripts that perform hundreds of forks and open dozens of files per request, and still easily managed <200ms response times while running on a crappy xen server.

With how much concurrency?
It does sound a bit "pitchy" though, especially if the comparison isn't direct. If you're telling Coke about what you did for Pepsi that's one thing. If you're telling Unilever about your work for Proctor and Gamble that's another.

Also, most people with financial experience will realize that a bottom line (net income) is an easily manipulated number. I don't think your generalization is appropriate.
Git Tutorials for Beginners
The figure has varied fairly wildly over the last decade, so I think it would be hard to pin down an accurate number. The average seems to be about $100-200/month. I don't think that makes his actions any less humble though.

You should take note though that the focus here is on factory workers, whereas the average Chinese wage for all Chinese workers would be lower.
You're the one who sounds greedy, expecting him to give his money to his employees for no particular reason.
What held them back? Probably two things:

1. They only had the Mac platform (and non-connected iPods). Can you change the world with a 5% market share?

2. They wanted to charge for it.

Now, they could have done this a couple of years ago after they conquered #1, but they were still hung up on point #2, and just tried to make a better pay service.
> human-readable text has proper names capitalized

Apple products excluded, presumably...
I don't think the students who miss out of high school history are the ones watching this video.
Uh. Would citing sources of information with pop-ups in the videos help? Perhaps links to online books or wikipedia articles (which I realize potentially creates a loop of false references, but whatever)
The FDIC only protects your bank account up to a certain limit.
A bank is in a better position to protect electronic access to the account than the consumer is. This bank provides simple username/password authentication to an Internet service that allows transfers of hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time to entities that a business has never worked with in the past. Offering that service with that level of protection without assuming any liability for the result is borderline negligent.
I don't think they NEED to have an understanding but I think it makes a major difference. The best designers I've worked with have an understanding of style and aesthetics beyond their craft, extending to art, fashion, cars, cinema, etc.
Damn, they looked good, but I guess it was all marketing.
This headline seems a bit hyperbolic; the article does not actually substantiate the part about Schumer going after Bitcoin. It does reiterate the news about Schumer wanting Silk Road shut down; that was reported yesterday on HN. But there's nothing new here that says that Senators are going after Bitcoin, specifically, except for the headline.
This is what normal people do. The real question is why certain wealthy people think they need to throw away the money that they extract from consumers and employees on things like cocaine, vacation houses and prostitutes.
There's always been an untraceable currency sold and traded globally. Gold. You can't trace it back to the origin, as long as it's been melted down.

The only thing is, you can't easily transport it. And lets be honest, how many people are willing to accept gold?

This is scary stuff for governments all over the world, not because you can buy drugs or use the currency for illicit reasons, it's because -- taxes and bypassing traditional financial institutions. (Just think paypal)

If you can move money around the world securely and anonymously, you can hide your money from the tax man. At least in theory...
Show HN: Hacker Notes chrome extension 
https://github.com/butu5/hackernotes

This is a simple chrome extension.

While reading any article, I prefer to select few lines of text and want to add some of my comments. So that I can access it later.

It does this much only. It is in pre-alpha stage :)

Find the notes in
http://codesnipr.com/notes
Great example of why client side software is more exacting (and frightening) than building for the web. I wish I had more of these tales as ammo for future "native vs mobile web" debates.
What would be admired? Buying a 100 foot yacht, 2 private jets, 3 vacation homes and a private brothel like many executives in the west? He can't take the money to the grave, so he should spend it all... on himself, frivolously?

Probably he is looking out for his family, or will donate a lot of money to charity.
Well, I suppose I go by the following guide:

* stdlib is library code, not core VM code. It shouldn't be counted.
* Percentage of functionality of Rubinius's core implemented in Ruby is definitely higher than percentage of functionality implemented in C++, at least for the core Ruby classes. Hard to quantify that though.
* Rubinius's VM is basically all C++. I will concede that.
I agree with him. As kylematthews points out, it's not about the substance of the thing--capturing an audience, I/O calls, or anything like that. It's about communication.

Communication is about translating something conceptual inside your own head to become understandable by something (usually a person) outside of it. The way we do this is by language. A programming language is merely the way we communicate with a computer. To do it right, you need to understand the parts of the computer that you want to change.

It's not a mistake that we used to call impressive coding "wizardry" or "deep magic". It was about casting spells... except that if you actually step to the side and look at what "spell" means, it's simply a story.

A good program tells a good story. You might not appreciate the characters or the plot, but the computer sure does.
No, traditional code reviewing is just spot checking. That is analogous to having an editor only look at a few passages of a novel. An editor needs to work with the whole text. This is the trouble with formal code reviews. Pair programming attempts to solve this by making all code get reviewed as it gets written. Like it or hate it, that at least tries to solve the core problem.
>which I'm not sure you fully understand.

Ah, condescension, now that is a perfect example of a typical HN comment.
If I shot you, would it be your fault because you weren't wearing a bullet-proof vest?
I agree. If you're an executive, you get pitched every day with stuff that will "improve your bottom line by 20%". Most of those numbers are smoke and mirrors. It's hard to decipher fiction from reality, which requires often a detailed understanding of how the number was calculated, what other effects may have been present, whether there was an impact with other customers as well (to prevent cherrypicking randomly favorable results), etc.

Execs are busy and it's a lot of work to understand whether that number is legit or not. In response, they will be jaded to your claims of bottom line improvement.
Perhaps I shouldn't have omitted the sarcasm tag?
Since Chrome auto-updates all its users every 6 weeks, specifying the version number isn't necessary most of the time.
It was to give back to the community.
Regretting Move, Bank May Return to Manhattan
That's great to hear! Given that FFI is intended to work across all Ruby impls, I wish there were more attention paid to using FFI instead of C extensions. I will admit there are some usability problems, especially around cross-platform struct mapping, but the resulting libraries are vastly easier to deal with than a bunch of grotty Ruby C API code.
I agree completely. At the least they could have included a link to the source.
We have had other JRuby users state that most 64 bit stuff just works with JRuby and not so much with MRI. Thanks for sharing another example.
They don't. They capture the active/inactive event.

Try tap the home button and re-open the app.
The Ruby world is nuts
We decided to upload when only when we had logs right when the user backgrounded the app. This way we don't fire a new connection just for logs.
"... although Goldman Sachs equity traders revolted in 2002 when the investment bank tried to relocate them to an expensive new tower in Jersey City, a mere mile from its Lower Manhattan headquarters."

Location still matters.
Samsung is preparing to bid for Nokia
Maker Faire 2011– Bay Area Recap
In this case, it doesn't matter that Khan is displacing worse things. These videos are still a disservice to their viewers.

Better for people to know that they don't understand history, then to wrongly think they do know it. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Actually a lot of the process size in JRuby is the fact that we need to set JVM's max size high for rare cases, but then the JVM happily grows to fill much of that size. If you choke it down to a smaller size, we're competitive with at least generational-GC impls like Rubinius (but still much larger than conservative-GC impls like MRI).
Facebook Hires A Pixar Animator
Still doesn't stop people from writing MAC instead of Mac; its an abbreviation, not an acronym!
User-to-user relationships aren't that great with incomplete data of the tweets, but also of the social graph. Pulling a large social graph from Twitter is nearly impossible and getting deltas on anything more than a few hundred people is equally impossible.

Propagation of retweets really needs a near complete dataset of those tweets/retweets. A steaming sample of the dataset really isn't great for this.

Sentiment analysis can be done to determine the overall feeling on a topic, but I'd feel really incomplete doing it on this dataset. Again, pulling the stream for the term or keyboard you're looking to sample is much better. Most sentiment analysis on Twitter is pretty flawed anyway.

Trend analysis works on this dataset ok, but measuring the true magnitude of an event would be hard (like Osama being killed) since you don't know what portion of the tweets you've actually got.

I worked with Sethish on the Web Ecology Project. I wouldn't call your dataset useless, but it really would be more useful generally to have a question, then pull the best possible data that will help you answer that question. Otherwise there's going to be a lot more unknowns that make it a weaker piece of research.
I'm not sure why that is relevant here. We're not voting on anything, just discussing it.

Besides, you could always send a message to the author and ask if you're interested.
Is he wrong? How is he wrong?
Is Groupon's business model sustainable?
The only way I see of "evolving a response to it" is selecting for baby-crazed women who are basically addicted to the hormonal changes of childbirth and rearing. Men would already be happy to impregnate women as much as possible, if they didn't have to stick around or pay child support.

It's hard not to think of Idiocracy.
As I've learned when such promising technology is announced, I'll wait for system integration prototypes to roll out.
Note to self: Stop posting on websites drunk
Would you friend a virtual friend optimised to your interests?
مسلسل ايزل الحلقة 25
Affordability isn't really the reason, though.

Take the class of devs who, in their spare time, want to learn mobile programming. If they don't have a Mac, their choices tonight after work are to 1) sit down on their own familiar computer right now and start Android dev, or 2) go buy a Mac and a dev account and get familiar with that and start iOS dev. Paying $800+ for option 2 doesn't exactly sweeten the deal.

A modest app in the store will pay back the costs of the hardware, even though it probably won't pay for your time. Doing iOS work for hire will pay for your time, however.

So people should do what they want, but it's easy to see why Android would be the favorite of new casual mobile devs, many (or most?) of whom don't have Macs.
I thought it was a cute bit of desperation. "Let's rewind reality back a couple decades, and then assume Go came out at that point. Yay!"
>They never actually came out and said it in the article, but it sounds like the thing that shut down was just squeaking by and distracting their core, profitable, business.

I sure hope that is the case. The only other take-away I saw in that article was that they're so incompetent at management that they couldn't even clean up the organization of a profitable entity. That the management was just so bad its a better decision to kill the product than let it bumble around until it was no longer profitable.
This is what happens when you pivot into irrelevance.
The problem wasn't really lack of testing, unless you expect these devs to test their app on every extant Android device and all future devices as well. The problem is that they assumed they could rely on the behavior of the Android system on one device to apply to another, and that turned out not to be the case.

Even worse, the device in question ("Fascinate") was apparently just a Verizon-branded version of the Galaxy S, which probably gave them a false sense of security if they tested their app on the Galaxy S.

But, as you touch on, there do seem to be some things they could have done differently here. Checking the last time the logs were sent, not connecting unless there is data to send, etc.
Samsung Preparing a Bid for Nokia?
I thought that was going to be the point, too, but I read it and I couldn't find anywhere that he stated anything like that.

And I agree with that. The best way to get better at something is to do it. Other things can help you along and accelerate your improvement, but they don't work on their own. You have to do it.
Interesting; can you elaborate? Surely it would be folly, say, to teach some children _wrong_ things simply for diversity. I doubt this is what you advocate, no?
It's kind of crazy. I know that my battle.net account is more secure than a lot of people's online banking credentials: not only do I need a user name and password to access my bnet account, but my account is linked with a mobile app that gives me time-sensitive one-time-use 8-10 security code.

Recently I had to wipe my phone without being able to get the serial number information from the bnet app. It was kind of a pain, but I had to actually scan and send in an image of my drivers license for them to release the old authenticator from my account so I could attach a new one.

Think about that. An online gaming company is more secure about account authorization than a lot of banks are.
Why not choose as many perspectives as you possibly can? If human history (in the small-h sense, not the kind being argued about in TFA) is any kind of reliable guide, the truth will probably be somewhere betwixt all of them.
Ah, the snide counter to condescension, &etc.
Original article: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/flow-batteries-0606.html
Non-physicist here. If the modulation is annual, does that imply that the Dark Matter they're detecting is stationary, relative to the Sun (meaning it orbits the Milky Way on the same path as our Sun)?
Station X is hiring a Scientific Data Visualization Engineer in the Bay Area
A few great resources are missing from that big list at the bottom:

Git internals PDF (Scott Chacon) http://peepcode.com/products/git-internals-pdf

"Getting Git" screencast (Scott Chacon) http://blip.tv/scott-chacon/git-talk-4113729

Interactive Git cheatsheet (Andrew Peterson, NDP Software) http://www.ndpsoftware.com/git-cheatsheet.html
Hey GOF, It's not a good metaphor unless you can drop it on your foot