skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surely if it were that, then fingers should wrinkle faster?

If I stick my hand in water then it gets wet immediately, but doesn't wrinkle for... what, fifteen minutes? And that's warm water -- cold water (like practically all the naturally-occurring water in the world) takes a lot longer.

And then, I can dry my fingers much faster than I can un-wrinkle 'em. Surely the circumstances in which an ancestral human would:

a) Spend fifteen or twenty minutes in the water, then

b) Need to pick up something vitally life-preserving within the next few seconds

would be sufficiently rare that it probably wouldn't have been a major selection pressure?
Are distinct open and close delimiters syntactically necessary?
So the real question is: What did Chrome do differently than Firefox to gain market share that fast?
Did you even read the Post that we are commenting on? There is a whole section that starts with " There are pieces of Google+ that are mighty geeky....".

It is ok to be passionate but as a minimum courtesy - please read before commenting
+1 googolplex. I hate Publisher with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns.
Apple, Microsoft Win Nortel Patents, Google Out
I'm well aware of letscrate however it's not as customizable as what I did where you can name your own drops. Plus once I get drag-n-drop in place it will be a lot more obvious/easier to use.

The reason I did not put DnD in yet is because I wanted to get something out the door without always adding new features or thinking up new features.

But I appreciate your input :)

And yes it's Flash (for now)
As a longtime vim user I'm interested in knowing if there's anyone that's switched to Sublime Text (or TextMate, or any other similar contemporary editor) and if so, how has it gone? There seem to be a lot of cool features here but do they outweigh the benefit of knowing that they key bindings you've learned will continue to serve you for decades?

Please, this is not flamebait. I'm interested if anyone's made a switch from an old standby like vim/emacs to a new editor and how they've fared. Maybe it's time for me to start looking at all the new editors out there.
Exactly - Nortel had a big portfolio of phone switches (the DMS-10 and DMS-100 are the two that leap to mind) and I would assume a rich collection of switch patents as well.

Too bad they blew up - can anyone recommend a good write-up about their implosion? I interned there and had a job offer that was rescinded around the time the dot com bust occurred. My recollection is that they heavily leveraged themselves to make a run at beating Cisco in the IP switch market. When everything melted down, they had nowhere to run.
Nice Idea: "Oh I feel sad... let's burn some money!"
Agreed, but just because they dominated a competitive field with features doesn't mean that strategy will work now, where there's a near-monopoly.
Not sure about the logic:
1. All banks are defined
2. Me: You cannot claim banks are the same everywhere
3. "Pretty much every country" == not everywhere

So you agree, or you disagree? Sorry to stick with Aristotelian logic.
> philosophize their way to vapidity and numbness

I've often felt that the Buddhist "no desires" and "no mind" concepts are akin to the trivial solution in polynomials or vector math: set everything to 0!

That it's one solution does not mean there are not other, non-zero solutions.
Salesforce places bets on HTML5
German police vulture scheme fails to take off
This isn't an exception, this type of horrendous behaviour is the norm. For an industry who's product is software, they're the worst at doing it in a sustainable and repeatedly successful way.

It isn't just the games industry. Pretty much all of entertainment is like that. It is like that (and always will be, IMHO) because of the endless supply of labor. Lots of programmers want to work in the games industry, just like lots of actors want to be in the movie industry. This allows the bosses in those industries to treat their workers as disposable commodities.
well for one: advertising on the google home page.
OK, I'll discuss what's different and leave "better" out of it.

1. In Fexl, there is no distinction between data and function. All data structures such as lists, pairs, etc. are represented as functions.

2. Fexl has a small grammar, about as small as I think is feasible for expressing arbitrary functions. You could actually omit these rules:

exp => \ sym = term exp
exp => \ sym == term exp
exp => ; exp

But the resulting forms would be far more difficult to write and understand.

3. Fexl has a very simple compilation and evaluation strategy, reducing everything to combinatorial forms. There are no "environments" or "closures" or "contexts" being whipped around at run-time. The resulting Fexl executable program is about 35K in size.

4. Unlike other functional programming languages, Fexl does not rely on "pattern matching" for branching on the different possible forms of a piece of data. Instead, it simply calls that piece of data as a function, passing in the appropriate handlers for the various cases. For example, using excessively verbose function names here:

list
handle_empty_list
\head\tail handle_first_item head; handle_remainder tail

5. Fexl doesn't really have a distinct concept for defining a name -- that's all handled normally by lambda calculus. However it does provide the syntactic shorthand "=". For example this function:

\square = (\x mul x x)
print (square 4)

Is equivalent to this function, which does not use the "=":

(\square print (square 4)) (\x mul x x)

I'm not exactly sure if that's oh-so-different from other programming languages, but I'll venture a guess that many of those other languages use a symbol table to store function definitions at run-time, while Fexl does not.

6. Fexl never creates circular data structures in memory. Now because of lazy evaluation, you can create logically circular or infinite structures in Fexl, but these are always closed forms and never involve literal circularity in memory. Consequently it is possible to manage memory using reference counting -- and Fexl does that. Some may not like that, but it's simple and it gets the job done. The code even has a built-in assertion to ensure that all memory was properly reclaimed at the end of a run.

(I'm not certain that other languages create circular structures in memory, but I am certain that Fexl does not so I thought it worth mentioning.)
Except it's a bizarre law because those US companies are not necessarily in the EU themselves. It'd be like California demanding a business in Poland should charge local California sales taxes for any exports to that state.
Brilliant piece. Thanks for sharing.
Not everyone is gripped by the new theory. "This hypothesis is unjustified", says Xi Chen, a biomechanical engineer at Columbia University in New York. Chen thinks that the wrinkles have a simpler cause: when fingers are immersed in hot water, the blood vessels tighten and the tissue shrinks relative to the overlying skin. This contraction causes the skin to buckle. "It's a classic mechanics problem," he says.

Ugh. Explaining the mechanism behind a behavior is not an argument against its purpose!

Scientist A: I think polar bears evolved white fur so they'd be camouflaged in the snow.

Scientist Crazy Pants: No silly, polar bears have white fur because their hair follicles contain keratin and are hollow.

Scientist A: I'm going to kill you.
What sites aren't available on Google Chrome?
Puzzle for Facebook
Did what Firefox did to IE? They treated Firefox as a slow, bloated, antiquated browser; a browser too in your face with too many security holes.

In other words they built a better browser, and had the powerhouse that is Google behind it for marketing.
It's nix plus a bit more. I'm not aware of anything the GUI does in Linux that it doesn't do in Mac. Some workflows will be different, such as xcodebuild, but everything else like svn, git, cp, mv, make, sudo, nano etc is the same. You can do without Xcode, cdto and a Cocoa-only text editor, but don't put yourself through it.
That's slightly sloppy phrasing. It captures it, but it does not duplicate it, so it's lifetime is tied to the stack frame of the function you declared it in.

In short, you can only do downwards funargs.
Massive advertising campaigns online and offline.
It's fast.

It's fast.

It's fast.

Oh, and it pop-up blocks, adblocks, and flashblocks.
I bet there are a lot of people out there that see parallels between RIM and the companies they work for. Sadly, I don't think RIM is in any way unique and is more the norm than the exception.
Who's to say? It's by definition - the "Big Bang" was the moment when the universe,time and space, came into existence. Neither existed before that. To talk about "before" the Big Bang isn't even correct - there is no "Before".
Blocks, http://clang.llvm.org/docs/BlockLanguageSpec.txt

Much better solution to the problem, hopefully coming to standard GCC soon(tm).
That was the dealbreaker for me with vim too. Otherwise a very nice editor, but none of the many other text-entry devices I have deal with are modal and I'm not interested in trying to shoehorn a plugin into everything.
London Plumber | Plumbing service | Plumbing in London
This is why Google+ will surely get a huge audience.
Selling Scala to the PHB is an exercise in futility. What Scala needs is more success stories like the Twitter backend.
That is the most succinct and accurate insight I have heard to date.
This article is awfully thin. It doesn't give any argument whatsoever for why software patents are not a good thing. Here's a summary:

1. Google, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and Sony are willing to pay a lot of money for a bundle of patents, including both software and hardware.

2. Therefore, software patents are evil and a tax on innovation, rabble rabble rabble.

It's not much of a syllogism.
Sadly, I don't think there's any way to make the public really care about this. For one thing, it's a sufficiently rare pain in the ass that virtually no one worries about what the latest nonsense from the TSA is on a day to day basis.

I also suspect many people actually do believe it makes us safer. Many others probably don't care one way or another, but if a politician were to seriously attempt to end the TSA, they would be branded as soft on terror so fast their head would spin.
Why didn't Google gather around all the Android manufacturers from the beginning and make a pool with them? Why did they risk losing the patents by going at it alone?

It only took Apple to try to bid for them, and they could've beaten Google if they really wanted, simply because they can afford to lose more cash than Google. Google should've considered this from the beginning. And in reality it was even worse, it more allied against them to get the patents, so Apple didn't even have to bother too much for them.

I think it was a newbie mistake to not get all Android manufacturers or the whole OHA to pay for them.
One thing that struck me as interesting is in the second letter, section 6:

There is so much secrecy in the company, no one knows anything about new things until we see it on the news. That means we’re not able to tell our friends and family anything about new things, and that reflects badly on RIM.

Is the reason it works for Apple so well and not for RIM because people anticipate Apple products more (i.e. the products are better), or because Apple are better at showbusiness, or both of the above, or something else?

I for one, despite being a huge Blackberry fan, never even realised there was any secrecy ahead of launches, I've never anticipated new product announcements or put much thought into what they would be.
Genius: Shortmail restricts emails to 500 characters, no attachments
Just the ones that you rarely have to deal with, but you do have to deal with. Like your insurer's site, your bank's, if you're in college and you have to take tests online, that too.

Bank sites are just terrible in general. Why is my least secure password always on a bank site? Shouldn't they have the highest requirements as far as security goes?
Cool Geek Jobs
Well, one example might be if you were implementing your crypto in a language that doesn't have bcrypt bindings.

So you would either have to port bcrypt or use existing crypto code to approximate bcrypt-level security.
Own a shape
It's not that inefficient if you consider you can boil the water for drinking or making food and it charges your phone as a "side effect".

The pan also looks a lot sturdier and more robust than a solar cell
That's how I've been getting Groovy in the door
I don't understand Google's game here. I thought Mozilla was being showered with cash from Google? If Google is now betting on Chrome, are they going to continue supporting Mozilla? Mozilla is a pretty small-budgeted non-profit and I think they rely heavily on Google's support.
Why should I use Sublime Text and not emacs? (note that I'm not experienced with emacs)
This Is The New Way To Invite Your Friends To Google+
In theory an unrestricted free market is nice, in reality unworkable. The role of the State is provide ground rules and regulation of the market.

A prudent State recognizes such a thing works best with a light hand, of course.

Customers need not be un-informed on safety issues. There are many, many organizations that provide such information to consumers - think Consumer Reports, Ralph Nader and so on.
75% of the poor do have a car (25% have two or more), 66% have 2 rooms per person, and just over half have AC.

Firstly AHS has a disclaimer that it overestimates poverty levels. This can inflate who falls into the "below poverty levels". Also the AHS is counting totals, yes someone may have A/C but that doesn't mean they have a car or 2 rooms per person. Someone could have two rooms & a car that breaks down often, but no A/C. Someone could have all 3 and someone else could have 0. Also the AHS mentions that 11% of those below poverty don't have safe drinking water & 20% live in a neighborhood with serious crime.

Also rooms per person & A/C & a car may not illustrate quality of life. You could look at Brazil having a rooms per person ratio which is much better than India, but your life would still suck if you lived in the slums.

Let's just say that being poor in the US poor isn't a picnic. But I don't think that India is a picnic either. The poor in each country faces a different set of problems. Just because the US poor have more money than the poor in India doesn't mean they don't still face serious problems. Like the saying goes "More money, more problems".

No, it's due to wealth, plain and simple.

Is the US just magically wealthy? Where is wealth derived from? How does a country like India become wealthy?

Take away government assistance and virtually all Americans still have more than $1200/year to live on.

...and cost of living in the USA is exactly the same as in India?
You said it yourself. The Django ORM is designed for relational databases. Django-nonrel seems to work, but it's a second-class citizen in the Django world. Much of the appeal of Django resides in the ecosystem of pluggable apps, and most of them won't work or will fail subtly when running on GAE.
When I was on Windows I used Copy2Contact (nee Anagram)[1], and loved it. It looks like they now have an iPhone version and a Google Apps version on the way.

[1] http://www.copy2contact.com/
Yeah, occasionally educational software (like taking a test online or something) will render incorrectly in Chrome. I don't know why this is, but some old web apps use hacks that are not standards compliant.
How Japan's data centers survived the earthquake
The problem with looking outside the US, in East and South Asia particularly, is numbers. Yes, there are many more talented developers over there. However, there are even more untalented developers. You'll have to put a lot more work into filtering and developing an absolutely solid recruiting process.

Then, there's the fact that cultural and language barriers still exist, despite American English being the lingua franca of the web. Even something like timezones can be a hardship when the person you're working with is offset by eleven or twelve hours.

That's not to say that outsourcing is a bad solution. It's just not the low-cost, high-skill panacea like everyone makes it out to be. Like any other form of recruiting, you have to really work at it if you're going to be successful.
Animal Cruelty Free Makeup - Australia
In other words - he discovered gcc's ({ }) construct and decided to write a macros named lambda around it.

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-2.95.3/gcc_4.html#SEC62
brian.j.conway

Thanks.
"Scala would have a positive impact on recruiting"

I'll bet this is a big Yes for Scala, Groovy or Clojure compared to Java.
Ten Ways to Prepare Now for a Startup or Any Job
Hey guys,
If you're interested in the background of the product, read about here: http://contrast.ie/blog/product-launch-intercom/

We'd be interested to hear any thoughts.
Genius: Body restricts reach to arm length...
How tragically ironic that this presentation doesn't even work on my BigCorp laptop restricted to IE8.
This is exactly what I thought.

side note: Why would anyone downvote this? What is a downvote? Does it mean it's not true? Should we downvote everything we don't agree with? Is this some kind of competition?
If you want the unix experience, stay in the shell. Use vim or emacs and become a passionate follower of either of those religions (but not both; nobody likes a cleverdick).

Actually, it's hard to do powerful things in OSX without using shell commands, just like it's hard to do in any graphical environment. But once you drop to shell, it's all unix.

That being said, use the right tool for the job. If you're writing mac or iOS software, use Xcode.
I think this method of thinking does have that pitfall, but it does have a tweak that I find useful.

You can throw away expectations about how things are, without stopping work on making things better. Anger is not useful without action.
My understanding is that the money that Google forks over to Mozilla is simply to keep Google as the browser's default search engine, not to sustain Firefox as a competing browser. If Google ceased that "funding", I'm sure some other search engine would step up to the plate.

(Note: I've got no sources for this; just a cursory understanding.)
> In my experience bad management succeeds despite itself, usually because of the workers who put up with it and push to succeed for their own reasons

I sincerely wish, more managers would understand this instead of knocking each other on the shoulder.

Just because you manage to get something out of the door after all does not mean you are a good manager and it does NOT mean you are _NOT_ a bad manager.
It doesn't really seem like a dig at the MtG subculture, IMO. It's just natural that a trading card site probably would focus less on security than a financial institution. This has nothing to do with the people or the hobby involved, and more to do with the fact that pretty much nothing needs as much attention to safety as a bank/currency storage.
The show must go on
scala, clojure, JRuby and groovy each has a lot to recommend it, groovy has the performance/benchmark skeleton in the closet (not meaning you'll hit a wall, but meaning you'll have to convince your VP Eng or client or whatever that you won't hit a wall)

(and why is it not in Alioth language shootout? ATS is brilliant, but how many devs could tell you anything about it?)

http://groovy.dzone.com/articles/groovy-action-how-make-5000
Hopefully will when the plugin is baked into an update.
Google+ may have geeky aspects to it, but Scoble saying it doesn't make it so.

It does seem like Google+ could use a little bit of polish, but Scoble's examples are pretty poor. Non-geeks don't want to organize their friends into groups? I'd guess some will want to, and some won't. But it doesn't seem like enough of a barrier to keep people from joining if everyone else is.
eccentric.one
Another commercial with Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber will get them around 10M users, that's for sure ;)

I haven't personally tried out Google+ (I wish i could), but if Google holds it back long enough to create enough buzz about it and people already invited keep saying that it is awesome, i believe they will have enough adopters to grow strong.
That's interesting, but excluding the "reducing to combinatorial forms" thing, which only seems to be an implementation detail, can't this all be done in Scheme or another Lisp dialect? "no distinction between data and function" goes hand in hand with https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Homoiconicity
Where are good places to look for people who want to work in Scala? My startup is currently all Ruby, but we're thinking Scala is a good candidate for some performance-critical pieces.
Salts are suppose to be considered public. For the most part, they are defenses against rainbow tables and to make an attacker have crack each password individually.
For reasons that escape me, web2py doesn't seem to get much love, but deploying a web2py app to GAE takes all of 5 minutes. Web2py uses a DAL instead of an ORM, which means it's much easier to use the same data model on the non-relational datastore.

(The inevitable restrictions imposed by BigTable still apply, see http://www.web2py.com/AlterEgo/default/show/138).
How do you bold and italicize on Facebook? I'm not aware of the ability.

Personally I think having a Word interface for a textarea is pretty darn geeky. Using Markdown or some other markup language is better solution since those who don't know just won't use it.
Yeah I've got Vimium, so that is pretty nice, but I still get confused a little bit when it doesn't work as I expect. Vim has ruined my mind.
Isn't the bigger news here that IE has dropped below 50% market share (dramatically) for the first time in over a decade?
It's dominance is kind of over.
Lollapalooza Asks Developers To Create the Ultimate Festival App [VIDEOS]
Israel has one major international airport, Ben Gurion. It serves ~12 million passengers a year.

That's two months of traffic for Hartsfield-Jackson.

The Israeli security model will not scale.
Content that you post to Google+ seems to be more private by default. I have to choose who I want to see it. It takes a lot of effort figure out privacy settings on Facebook. Plus, it feels like Facebook is trying to game you into sharing more personal information than you really want.

Sharing with family would be easier with Google+ than without it, not necessaryily easier than Facebook.
Yes, i wish it was Google who bought Skype.
They could just integrate the service with Skype, and get every user on Skype automatically to Google+.

Immediately, they will have more than 500M+ users from Skype only, not to mention Gmail.
Note that the Plan 9 team at the time were already working on Alef ( http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ ) and would later develop Limbo ( http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/limbo_language/ ) as the language for the Inferno distributed system ( http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/ )
No one is confused. SHA-512 is designed to be very, very fast. I just ran a very rudimentary test comparing SHA-512 and BCrypt with these results.

BCrypt 1000 iteration test script: https://gist.github.com/1058610

# => That took 76.370953 seconds

BCrypt 1 iteration test script:
(same as above but with `1.times do`)

# => That took 0.074209 seconds

SHA512 1000 iteration test script:

# => That took 0.004092 seconds

SHA512 at 1000 iterations is over 18,000 times faster than BCrypt at similar iterations; which, by the way, makes no sense to do.

BCrypt has a "cost" factor, which is used to adjust the computational complexity to your use case. This is why BCrypt makes so much more sense for password encryption than something like SHA512. Running SHA512 n times is just a cheap, ineffective imitation of BCrypt.