skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Even in classical physics, dice may have probabilities 1/6 for each number, but once we see "6", we update the probabilities to (0,0,0,0,0,1)."

It is obvious that he himself is on crack. I couldn't read past that gibberish.
Usually I expect to see all types of excess in new dot com offices, so bravo reddit. That isn't much bigger than my apartment.
I have a client synchronization utility that uses MongoDB instead of SQLite because it's lightweight but I have all ease of use of MongoDB. Install it as a windows service with our installer and we are good to go.
And in this context, MySql would be way to heavy.

Your comment is confusing. Can you please explain:

You replaced sqlite with mongodb, as an embedded database? How can mongodb run without a server?

Are you saying mongodb is more lightweight than sqlite? If so I find this very surprising, can you elaborate?
I remember speaking to a university student at a Q&A session. Someone asked him, "what class did you take in high school that you feel helped you most here?" and he replied immediately, "AP English." He said it gave him the interpersonal and critical thinking skills that he needed to be successful as an adult.

So, yes. I guess communication is a big deal. Thank you!
I know of a company, made up of scientists from academia, that develops software by writing the code (or "codes" as they call it) in Microsoft Word documents and e-mailing them to eachother.

Some how, they are still in business.

True story.
Why Google Hangouts Are Better Than Facebook Skype
I bet Apple prefers to sell $649 phones over $229 iPods.
One thing I don't get though is that Android phones aren't very low margin. Their retail price is just as high as an iPhone (or at least close). Even feature phones aren't cheap.

So do non-iPhone phones not get subsidized at full retail pricing (or generally much more substantially than the iPhone)?
I really enjoy Toms post on Google+: https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts?tab=mX

Pretty balanced when it comes to fb vs. Google+.

Also I think he his right on this one pointing out the power of fb-groups where you basically all join the same circle ready made for you by someone else. On of the few groups I am in was created around a wedding. There is currently no way to do that with Google+ (everyone can put up new posts which can only be seen inside the group without adding/friending anyone themselves).
Look into facebook groups. A bit of a pain to setup (especially compared to circles) - but it gives you quick ways to limit the news-feed to only a subset of friends or to limit who can see you online.
Is this not simply a British English thing? I assumed it was, like "maths", since Nature is a British publication. HN users from the UK, can you confirm? gte is speaking about constructions in the article like:

"As a general rule, researchers do not test or document their programs rigorously, and they rarely release their codes, making it almost impossible to reproduce and verify published results generated by scientific software, say computer scientists."

"As recognition of these issues has grown, software experts and scientists have started exploring ways to improve the codes used in science."
What Does it Mean to be a Woman Hackerspace Member?
That falls under project lambda (and corresponding work on the collection classes), which won't appear until Java 8. I agree, it would have been better sooner.
Thanks for the link! I definitely have thought of interning, it's just that most internships are for college students only.

I'm thinking of bothering some Seattle tech companies as well to see if I can convince them to take me for a summer.
It's more like without a code review you can only commit to your personal scratch space.

A more accurate way to state "At Google, no code, for any product, for any project, gets checked in until it gets a positive review" would be that "No code goes into production without a positive code review."
Features alone do not a good product make.
There is a market, and it's called libraries. Eventually you will use a language where software carpentry and code reuse is a core feature, and tested, modular libraries for not only core algorithms, but also deployment and dev-ops stuff (like managing a compute cluster on the cloud) will have standard approaches.

This is starting to shape up on the Python side of things, but it has stagnated a little bit. People who can and do write the foundational code are oftentimes too focused on making the code work, and not at all focused on improving the quality of the ecosystem that their code is part of. Open Source is a great mechanism for many things, but polishing up the last 20% is not one of them.
Bellevue, WA

ClassifiedAds.com, Inc

http://www.classifiedads.com/

Linux/PHP Software Engineer

We're a small startup but we're one of the largest classified ads websites.

Check us out on Stack Overflow Careers:

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/12214/linux-php-softwa...
Nik - I'd love to be able to block the entire bar. That real-estate is precious. Maybe an auto-drop in when the mouse moves up there - either when on a google site, or an option when off it too -- a small mouseover box could appear.
The program is specifically designed for High School students. I would check it out, if you are interested.
Accounting for non-phone use, it's not even close, android is still behind.

That sounds reasonable, but do you have any sources?
"Some pundits are complaining that the technology is not new, but that’s besides the point. Case in point: at MySpace we launched what Zuckerberg is announcing in 2007 (try googling “myspace skype partnership”), and MySpace also had one-on-one video chat back in 2004. The point is that people weren’t really ready for it back then—now is the time, and Facebook has the user base. The large user base (750 million) paired with a simple integration of arguably the best voice/video tech (Skype) is what makes this news."

-Tom Anderson, founder of MySpace

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/06/zuckerberg-first-public-res...
To me, the biggest advantage of MongoDB is autosharding. If you read the friendfeed article, you'll see that they also have to deal with 'eventual consistency' on the indexes.
Definitely not. Queen's English here, and "Maths" is a simple concatenation of Mathematics, meaning "Codes" would make no lexical sense. Therefore, we say "Code", just like you.
They stopped allowing that now too.
I want this functionality for Firefox.
Will Kickstarter Help Josh Harris Finally Achieve His Dream of a Web TV World?
You obviously aren't aware of their plans with the new office: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bxuVyoeXcVk/ThSWd0Svi7I/AAAAAAAAAD...

I think the Paul Graham statue will tie the room together perfectly.
Greg Wilson once commented that the subversive way to get scientists to use source control was not to pitch it as a code history tool, but rather as a nifty way to sync up code between their work machines, home machines, etc. He said he had a lot more traction with that than trying to lecture them about having code history.
Exactly. I'd go further: in industry, the software is typically the end product, and the quality of the software is inherently relevant. In science, the output (the prediction of the simulation, the result of the analysis, etc.) is typically the end product, and the quality of the software is relevant only insofar as it affects the quality of the output.

In practice, of course, the quality of the software often does affect the quality of the output---but time spent on software quality creates less immediate value than it does in industry.
Which aligner(s) did you work on?

Sequence analysis companies and labs which don't value software engineering get what they pay for: serious or crippling inefficiencies and inability to do analysis on their data or maintain continuity. Unfortunately, many of them don't even realize what they need or how bad their inefficiencies are.
A few articles along those lines:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733866

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452178

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228000

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298501
[New account for anonymity]

An often neglected force in this argument is that many practitioners of "scientific coding" take rapid iteration to its illogical and deleterious conclusion.

I'm often lightly chastised for my tendencies to write maintainable, documented, reusable code. People laugh guiltily when I ask them to try checking out an svn repository, let alone cloning a git repo. It's certain that in my field (ECE and CS) some people are very adamant about clean coding conventions, and we're definitely able to make an impact bringing people to use more high level languages and better documentation practices.

But that doesn't mean an hour goes by without seeing results reverse due to a bug buried deep into 10k lines of undocumented C or Perl or MATLAB full of single letter variables and negligible modularity.
Wait, what? At every airport I've flown out of in the US (SFO, SJC, LAX, BWI, IAD, DCA, LAS, BOS, JFK, STL, AUS) just to name a few) in the past few years, the TSA has looked at both my ID and boarding pass before letting me through security screening. And I haven't had to show ID at the gate since right after 9/11.

The one time I lost my ID (LAS in 2007 or 2008), I was allowed through security, but only after extra screening.
This is just a side note, but how many non-tablet devices do you see sporting Android or BlackBerry OS?

Just saying in this case comparing only within the confines of the phone market share makes perfect sense.
Can't you just import the PST file into another mail app? And for Sharepoint there's a power toy:
http://blog.falchionconsulting.com/index.php/stsadmpowershel...
7 'Ancient' Forms of Mysticism That Are Recent Inventions
We do code reviews in person, at the reviewee's workstation. It does take time, but we've found that it leads to lots of productive discussion that might not otherwise occur, and that it helps strengthen relationships between team members.
Because most scientists write code in Fortran '77, which is interpreted, meaning that "code" == "program".
Isn't it odd how the media always compares an entire operating system platform to one phone? When iPads and iPod touches are counted, iOS far surpasses Android. It's weird for them not to count mobile operating systems as a whole and instead focus on a single type of device they run on.
Still a substantial design problem remains with Google+
It's a different feature. The skype button on myspace would bring up skype and require the other side to have a skype account.

The Facebook feature runs in the browser and guides the receiving side through the process of enabling in-browser video calls.

That said, I agree that Facebook's announcement is not that big of a deal.
The article quotes PG's Plato's Cave cave analogy about the power of Lisp. I think carsongross' "party school" is referencing Lyceum[1], the recreation/athletics school Aristotle was associated with.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyceum_(Classical)
Nobody is paid for doing research. The salary of a professor is about 1/3-1/5 of what the same person may get in industry. People who do research don't do it for the money.
It may not be intended to last, but it's still supposed to be correct. And, of course, there's probably gobs of software out there was not intended to last, yet did.
The Iron Law of Complexity
My instinctual understanding is that Skype has a distributed nature, and the hand-offs/re-syncing were primarily to blame.

I don't have any concrete basis for this conjecture.
Granted, it's a figure from Apple, but at WWDC, they touted iOS as having 44% mobile OS market compared to Android's 28%.
"Eventually you will use a language where software carpentry and code reuse is a core feature."

Well, to some extent products like MATLAB solve this problem. For better or worse, I trust Matlab's ability to generate a (pseudo) random number, parallel process my functions, invert matrices, etc., etc.

On a broader level, thanks to the specialization of academia, chances are that the code I want to write isn't duplicated by others. Even if it is, I still have to trust them to have written it well - which is the whole problem here.

I guess I don't have as much hope as you do.
Army's faulty computer system hurts operations
Yes, I hear this all the time. I know that the fancy course 6 kids here on HN would poo-poo it, but it's a very common usage in scientific computing. I can imagine the origins and can hypothesize about why it persists (the festering petri dishes of programming culture that is "grad school"), but don't have a definitive answer.

John Tukey is widely credited with coining the term "software" in print in 1958, but I'll wager that "codes" actually predates that.
Not dissing anybody. Saw the story linked to in the TechCrunch article and chuckled at it.

Just fun to remember.
In bioinformatics, Galaxy (http://galaxy.psu.edu/) is a much better alternative.
According to this article it wasn't about video but free Internet phone calls.

As Tom Anderson (founder of Myspace) stated on Google+ (https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts/g2zmxn1L...) Myspace had one-on-one video chat back in 2004 but I guess without the help of Skype and without the necessary broadband penetration it wasn't all that useful.
Not necessarily. iOS already surpasses Android in mobile OS market share, and Android isn't making any inroads into tablets and other mobile computing devices, which will probably be the bigger market than smartphones.
Actually, no. As stated in the headline, this is a report on smartphone market share.
A relevant SO question and an article for more in-depth analysis:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4308989/are-the-decimal-p...

http://ejohn.org/blog/sub-pixel-problems-in-css/
Dropbox has invalidated this pitch.
My understanding is that MSN was/is the most popular IM service most everywhere but the US (because of AIM?) and East Asia (where they have their own regionally popular services, like QQ in China).
I'm guessing Dropbox has introduced many a scientist to the wonders of code history/portability. I was pretty reluctant to move to Git when Dropbox worked fine.
Samsung lawsuit forced disclosure of iPodTouch sales http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/04/19/apples_samsung...

Even first day iPad sales blow through http://allthingsd.com/20100405/apple-300000-ipads-sold-on-fi...

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/03/02Apple-Launches-iPa...

etc.
Not to be too obvious but that would be why the article has the word SmartPhone in its title as it's discussing phone share only, not general mobile device market.
On the contrary, I think it's a big deal. Facebook has unprecedented reach.

Grandmas everywhere will now be playing bridge over video chat. :)
What remaining products does MS still compete on? Buying users, suing competitors, it's getting a bit frustrating. I wish MS would win the old fashioned way: make a great product.
According to the chart in the linked article (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sog/5909237515/), MySQL has had 73 (I assume distinct) committers in the past 12 months, but the most recent commit was over one year ago.

I'll admit that I'm not familiar with Ohloh, but I don't see how both of those statements can be true.
The only market share numbers I've seen recently that included non-phone devices were straight from Apple (so feel free to take it with a grain of salt if you'd like). They have iOS at 44%, with Android at 28%.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/06/ios-number-one-mo...
It is reasonable to question Facebook's feature choices.

A risk for both Google+ and Facebook is that because they are in a war over features; features which may threaten their own value propositions.

Facebook as made changes to adapt to Twitter and done well. But Skype integration may not turn out to be forward thinking for Facebook.

"Facebook Video Chat: Like ChatRoulette, but with real-life consequences within your relationships & social circles." -
https://twitter.com/#!/robdelaney/status/88676143158407169
From what you've said you have a good command of syntax. So the second half you are missing is general CS knowledge - how to make algorithms and data structures work for you. From there it's just a matter of finding resources to work on CS-type problems; you could work through TAOCP, Project Euler, a college CS 101's posted exercises...
There already is a magazine called Hustler, and I imagine they would press anyone out of business who used a similar sounding name.
App Engine Datastore Plus 0.5 released
ok - I will add it as an option. If anybody else has feedback let me know. Install now and I will push out an update today with new stuff
"Android Pummels Apple and Blackberry in Smartphone Supremacy Race" is a bit disingenuous when you look at periods when apple did not release a new phone (when most of their sales occur) nor compare the actual platform (iOS) which all three providers now have a tablet form of (Playbook, Honeycomb, iPad).

I find it histrionic and misleading. It's saying "Guy murdered in knife fight" to find out the one guy walked up and stabbed him during a short afternoon nap, and oh, he's not dead, just still in bed.
Still blows my mind that they had video chat that far back.
How do you develop a pricing scheme for a new product that hasn't been marketed before? At any point in time, the true value of a new product to consumers seems intangible and subjective.

It is important to consider what market you are going after when thinking about pricing. Lets think in terms of art for an example of a new or misunderstood product. If the art is priced just above the cost of materials, say, $75. What market of people would buy it? I'm sure plenty of people would see that for its price and think ooh, pretty. I can afford that. Who are those people going to show off that artwork to? Are they going to talk about it? What about the people that will look at the price and automatically assume that it is poor quality. OR, are people not defining the work's value by its price, but by the name of the artist? If the price is low, then that must mean that the artist isn't well known. Now think about if the artwork was priced at $10,000. Someone might buy it because they are a collector looking for something in particular and you were lucky enough to give them what they wanted. Or maybe they will buy it just because they can. They will pride themselves on being able to show friends and colleagues that they appreciate the finer things in life.

Elasticity in pricing is already complicated enough to understand let alone applying it to a real life situation. But when you add a subjective or new misunderstood product, pricing can play an even more prominent and critical role in how a company is perceived.

Check out this book: The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson
Tom gets it. One of the problems with experience is that you have, well umm, experience. It's the unfortunate ability to say, "We did video chat X years ago. Didn't work out, it's a bad idea."

I've seen this type of thinking first hand. You must understand why it didn't work before, and what is different now. I can see people at MS saying, "The iPad will never work. We tried tablets w/o keyboards back in 2002 and everyone wanted convertibles. It'll never work."

Little differences can be a big deal. Experience is not useful w/o the analysis to put your experience in perspective.
I don't really see the relevance of your comment, perhaps because it's mostly incoherent nonsense, but I wonder if you posted mainly to have a high-traffic inbound link to yet another one of your SEO spam blogs.

I'm not sure exactly what your business is (a one-man Demand Media?), but it's getting old fast.
FoldIt's productive for someone: http://fold.it/

Then there's the currency trade in most MMOs. That can be quite productive, from what I hear.
i'm in a similar position to you (although i started out as an academic i've worked in the software industry for ages and so end up helping my astronomer partner).

anyway, i disagree slightly with your analysis. in my experience academics know that they suck at the "engineering" part and, to make up for it, are very diligent in making sure that the results "feel right". so i don't think what you described was luck - that's how they work.

in comparison, what drives me crazy, is that if they learnt to use a few basic tools (scm, libraries, an ide, simple test framework) they could save so much time and frustration.

[related anecdote: last year i rewrote some c code written by a grad student that was taking about 24 hours to run. my python translation finished in 15 minutes and gave the same answer each time it was run (something of a novelty, apparently)].
When we put it together, if you searched for "hamburger casserole recipes" all you got were sites that tried to trick you into signing up for recurring cell phone charges or stuff like that. She thought it would be nice to make a plain site that helped folks (our idea of "plain" was not so good back then!) We figured using our target phrase as the domain name would at least tell people what we were about.

We make maybe 20 bucks a month from the site, and domain renewal is something like 140/year for all the major TLDs, so it's not a high priority right now. The only reason I shared this to try to point out how easy it is to lose traffic and not know why.

If I wanted to chase it, I'd go to SEOMoz and check out the backlinks and competition -- did anything change over the past month? Are other sites getting a bunch of links for some reason?

Thanks for the great tips! We have a Webmaster account on Google. Didn't know there were options also on Bing. Looking at Google Analytics today, we're still at 13K visitors for the previous month, which is about a 20% decline. It's all still search engine traffic, mostly from Google and mostly for "tater tot casserole" Go figure. Is tater tot casserole so popular? Why? These kinds of questions drive you crazy, because many times when you make a site for your startup or topic -- especially if it has a lot of pages, you get all this data from web analytics and it's a bitch trying to make some kind of meaning out of it.

Folks are still spending on average more than a minute on the site, which means they are taking time to read the recipes and get some value. That's all that counts for us.

BTW, if any of you startup guys want to go into recipes, good luck. She has had this site, with lots of traffic, for a couple of years now, and hell if we can figure out how to monetize it. We did books, kitchenware, magazines, AdSense -- finally writing our own ebook. Right now we're thinking about coupons or some other giveaway product, but I don't have my hopes up. Recipes, at least to me, looks like an income-free zone. One of the reasons we did the ebook was to provide a totally ad-free place to keep track of recipes. We're operating under the principle that people who are cooking hamburger casseroles probably aren't needing anything else at all, at least at the moment they're online.

Still, we did it to make something people want that can scale, so no matter how it turns out, we helped people (as evidenced by our emails and traffic stats) and we can learn something from it.
As a former student/staff I can say anything is better than Lotus Notes. But, I am surprised Microsoft is going to pay the University to use it, especially with the Jeff Raikes support/connection.
If you go to google.com and search for jquery, jquery.com takes the top stop with several sublinks and jquery.it is nowhere on the first page. It is only for the query "jquery 1.6.2" that blogs.jquery.it outranks jquery.com (because blogs.jquery.com shuts out googlebot, as mentioned elsewhere in this thred).
Just noticed the title of this post changed from what I originally entered.

I was unaware somebody was able to do this. Who has the ability?

(I don't mind, just curious.)
You could probably convert this extension to a greasemonkey script pretty easily. Might even be able to pull it off with AdBlock.