skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, the demonstration of divide-and-conquer strategy is the merge sort.

So is Quicksort. There needn't be just one algorithm that demonstrates divide and conquer.

The whole point of quicksort is that it is in place, which makes it fast in spite of the pessimistic quadratic time

That's not the whole point of quicksort. It is done in-place, but that's just a great side effect of the algorithm. But assuming a cacheless memory model (for example the RAM model) the complexity of the out-of-place version is unchanged. The great thing about QS, IMO, is that it's easy to implement and typically O(n log n). When it is quadratic it is slow -- being in-place only barely makes the quadratic version more tolerable.

With that said, I know what you're saying :-)

If you read "Purely Functional Data Structures" there are a lot of tree/graph manipulations that are cake to do in C, but are a bear in ML/Haskell. A great programmer has all tools at her disposal, not just one (even if it is finely tuned).
I have a small amount of experience with this kind of stuff (gov't assualts on Internet activists through property seizure, collusion with the private sector, etc) from reading Glenn Greenwald and some others and here's my take: the gov't has been cracking down on people suspected of DDoSing the credit card companies a few months back in the name of anonymous and wikileaks; I read a thread somewhere about the FBI raiding a house with guns drawn to go after the OP's 13 year-old son, who the mother said was absolutely innocent of using LOIC to do this at all.

I think you, and possibly your neighbor, might have become victims of this kind of shoddy, falsified intelligence work. Back when the "war on terror" was really hotted up after 9/11, there were tons of stories of Muslims being erroneously charged with terrorism, like the time with the "Detroit Sleeper Cell" that turned out to be just some impoverished Detroit Muslims; the FBI took wild liberties interpreting a disturbed man's doodles to be some sort of terrorist plot. Well, now the intel agencies are a little more restricted in their ability to harass and intimidate innocent Muslims (well, as long as they're within our borders). But as we've seen with the story about the 13 year-old, these agencies are still quite willing to harass and intimidate online activists, accusing them of being "hacktivists" and seizing their property. And we've also seen that companies such as google are quite "in bed" with the gov't whenever they ask them for the data in the name of "the war on terror."

TL;DR I suspect that google disabled your account at the behest of the gov't who are in turn serving credit card companies mad about being DDoSed by Anon who was mad at them for stealing money from wikileaks, who the credit card companies say violated THEIR terms of service.

The question remains, despite the link to Betsy Perry's G+ post which has been repeatedly posted in this thread in order to discredit you, is which term of service you violated in the use of your gmail account? Google refuses to answer this, which is what makes me most confident that some homeland security BS is involved here.
If captcha system isn't reliable, a new system of deterring spam registration is in order.. maybe the system uses images to direct the user to move the mouse in a certain pattern and then use mouse gesture detection to ascertain if its human..
Given that the difference between our calculations is a result of the margin of error in determining the Earth's ocean's volume, I wonder what the margin of error is for NASA's measurement.
Hardcore procrastinator here.

Reading good articles like that won't change anything. That's the bitter truth. At least this is the case for me, and probably some other people on the internet.

I'm nowhere near to have myself in full control again but I'm sick of wasting my days and feeling bad over this.

Willpower for me only works when I'm concentrated.

So there is a concentration problem. Being able to concentrate is also a muscle. I'm having a habit of actively avoiding exercising concentration.

Related to programming it's difficult for me:

A problem in my Code appears? I'm starting to Google solutions instead of trying to get a complete understanding of the problem. I'd fool myself into saying: I would look into this but I don't have the time and nobody will pay me for that. Googling and somehow trying to apply the results often works but it gives you an feeling of being unable to create something on it's own.

Then there is this thought: I would like to do something but there are too much people out there that could it better, so why bother trying?

And Instead of spending the days and nights learning and working on something I'm jumping around switching between problems I never fully understood nor am I able to afford the time to understand them...

So it comes down from willpower to concentration and at the moment I'm believing the cause for a lack of these skills is a lack of structure.

Structure for me is planning, planning in advance. Revisiting your plans and having clear ideas about yourself and the surrounding world. So creating structure requires concentration...

It works like a Circulus vitiosus in both ways. If you are structured for a longer time you're concentration and willpower will go up. If you lack concentration your structure get's weaker and concentration will fall, procrastination will rise.

How to solve this problem? Honest question.

(Sorry for hijacking this thread, but I think it is somewhat relevant to productivity and flow to sort these things out)
Come on, dude, just be real. Your "question" was so loaded a team of pack mules couldn't shift it:

"Isn't the whole purpose of joining Twitter is to get your ego stroked?"

And it got, appropriately, down voted into the earth's core. You showed up, you were a little flip, it turned out you're not seeing the whole picture. Just own it and we'll all have a good time learning things.
You've got a new Gremlin fan. Playing with it right now.
Oh joy! A $10 cable with a $50 apple tax!
my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years

Dude, you're just getting warmed up to pitching if you've only been rejected by 60 VC firms.

Google got rejected by 55. Pandora by close to 300. Adam Rifkin's first startup was doing AJAX in 2000, and he got rejected by 176 before raising $8M from Kleiner Perkins.

HR's job is to screen through job applicants and throw away resumes so they only show a precious few to hiring managers. A VC's job is to say "no" and to come forward with 2 or 3 proposals to their partners. Only rarely do they say, "Yes".

But, remember there's roughly 400 VC firms in Silicon Valley. There's still a ton more for you to pitch. You're just getting started.

Raising money is the process of pitching your idea to 150 investors, maybe 10 of them will say, "yes".

And, I agree you are doing serious work with FaceCash. I'm a fan. I like the product, and I think it has legs. Selling VC's on the idea is going to be the first of many hard sells that you're going to have going forward. Hang in there, Dude. You'll make it.
The most important thing about local tweets is that you can refine search results to your country/area. I just tried, on the website and on the iphone app, I couldn't.
I kept the default scrolling direction to see how long it would take to get used to the reversed motions. After 2-3 days you switch over without much of a problem. I did have trouble using the scrollwheel on the mouse of a Windows machine recently, though.
The more interesting hidden nugget in this post was the analogy to Krispy Kreme. Krispy Kreme primes their line up with free donuts and a visual display of how they make the donuts.

The lesson for startups is that put a teaser on the sign-up form so people know what they are getting excited about.
This is a near-complete rewrite of all of the exercises live on the site currently. The scratchpad text tool has been removed because it doesn't provide much that isn't easily available via other means.

You can see the beta of the new site at:

http://khan-masterslave.appspot.com/

(Please report issues on GitHub if you find any.)
12 billion light years away huh? hmmm
Let us know how it goes. BTW, it's been 45 minutes -- have you proposed yet?
In vim, with scrollbind:

nmap <silent> <Leader>ef	:vsplit<bar>wincmd l<bar>exe "norm! Ljz<c-v><cr>"<cr>:set scb<cr>:wincmd h<cr>:set scb<cr>

Source: http://markmail.org/message/kbnyhxffy6zs7pic
I found that I liked things that I didn't think I would:

- I like the new scroll bars, though I had to immediately reverse the setting because I couldn't get used to their behavior (probably right for a track pad, but wrong for a mouse scroll wheel). It is even shocking how useful they can be, e.g. in column views such as file save dialogs I don't think I realized before how much space was wasted by scroll bars.

- I also don't mind Launch Pad, although Launch Pad still seems like it tries too hard to shoehorn in an exact implementation from iOS. A big screen with a mouse should yield more flexibility; it would be especially nice to be able to leave spaces between icons and to group them while still showing all icons instead of putting them in a folder like iOS does.

- Other random changes to the UI are generally pretty good. Though I think sliders suck (they look too dim and unclickable now), and the decision to make tab segments metallic seems out of place with the Aqua look that remains everywhere else. Similarly, darkening the blue shade of menu selections seems mismatched compared to everything else.

Many features are maddeningly useless on dual-display machines. Full Screen inexplicably blanks out an entire display with no apparent way to make use of the other one; it even moves windows that started on the 2nd display over to the first before entering Full Screen mode! Mission Control is obviously aware of multiple screens, but the way they did it still seems kludgey to me. It is frankly as if Apple didn't even bother to try supporting multiple displays well, even though they're perfectly happy to sell you systems that encourage this (expensive) hardware arrangement. Like Xcode, Instruments, iTunes and other new one-window apps, this trend is extremely irritating because it's as if the entire potential of my display is being actively shunned by the software side.

Animations are about half-and-half; some are quite nice (like for alert boxes), but most are simply too slow and weren't user-tested properly. Full Screen for instance takes a ridiculously long time, as does switching Spaces, and these delays are unacceptable.

There is a general sluggishness to the new OS in areas besides animation. Sometimes applications seem to take longer to open, and windows take longer to open. It is not clear why.

I prefer to minimize windows into the application icon, and this is kind of a step backwards on Lion: Apple no longer shows these in Exposé (Mission Control). The only apparent way to get them back is via a new dock menu item "Show All Windows". In other words, that preference is no longer useful.

I think the new Mail is brilliantly designed.

The inclusion of FaceTime is nice I guess, but I know absolutely no one who uses it (the other instant messengers like Skype are king now, I'm sorry to say).

In general, a pretty good upgrade, and absolutely worth thirty bucks.
> You're kind of arguing from ignorance. And I can't, for the life of me, see why. It's okay to not know about some things. And it's okay to not have your curiosity draw you to certain things.

Please, ignorance has nothing to do with it, the author has kind of hit the nail on the head. First of all, he's correct insofar as nobody really wants to follow uninteresting or anonymous people. And the hard truth is that the majority of us are not interesting nor famous (me included, I've only got 2-3 followers, even though I follow around 30 people).
The link is to the PDF version already. It will take you to Scribd only if you click the [scribd] part.
In particular, this means that 12 billion years ago, there WAS a reservoir of water of such and such size.... :-)
Dot product.

Here's a random list of thoughts, speaking as a graphics and game programmer:

First, you hardly ever have to even think about "perspective transformation". Put it out of your mind until you're ready to attempt acquiring advanced knowledge, because it will just confuse and therefore hinder you.

Second, a transformation is typically a 4x4 matrix. It looks like this:

Xx Yx Zx Px
Xy Yy Zy Py
Xz Yz Zz Pz
0 0 0 1

In this case, "P" is the translation ("how much the matrix will move the input").

X, Y, and Z are "right", "up", and "forward" directions, respectively.

That is, imagine yourself sitting in your chair. Your comupter table defines absolute right (1,0,0) up (0,1,0) and forward (0,0,1).

Now imagine a blue arrow coming out of your chest towards your monitor. That's your Z axis. Imagine a green arrow coming out of your head, pointed at the ceiling. That's your Y axis. And now stick your right arm straight out and color it red. That's your X axis.

Now rotate to the left 45 degrees. Then scoot two meters backwards ("backwards" as in "opposite the direction you're currently facing", NOT "away from your computer desk"). Imagine the arrows rotating as you do this. Now figure out the exact numbers for those arrows (vectors). Plug those into X, Y, and Z columns of the matrix. Plug (0,0,-2) into the P column of the matrix. Congrats, you've built a transform that "rotates an object to the left 45 degrees, then scoots it back two meters".

Note that the above assumes a left handed coordinate system, with Y axis being 'up'. Which is the most natural IMO.

Lastly, dot product is the most important tool you could possibly want to understand. It's so versatile. You want to figure out the closest point on a line to point P?

dot( (P - line.start), normalize(line.end - line.start) )

... is the distance along the line of the closest point to P.

It's a projection. It "projects" a point onto a basis. (I know a lot of mathematicians are probably screaming at their monitors at me right now, but foo on that. This is one of the most useful ways to think about dot products with respect to game/graphics programming, which is what we're talking about.)

Also, if you want to impress any interviewer who asks you about dot product, remember this phrase: "The dot product of two normalized vectors is the cosine of the angle between them." ... But you should really also understand that phrase. =)
I don't understand why everyone is giving Google a pass by saying they are in beta.

A link didn't get broken, a photo didn't fail to load...instead an account was suspended intentionally. That has nothing to do with being a beta, and has everything to do with Google being a company that spits on its users.

A company that actually cared about their users would just fix the error and edit the name or simply send a warning...instead Google goes for the kill shot each and every time.

Crap like this is exactly why people should be wary of putting in the effort to switch over to Google plus...for all you know you might end up losing everything a few months later
Well you are making the assumption I am referring to a romantic relationship.

The article presents (and this may be the reporters bias) the picture of someone with minimal social contact. Whilst I accept different people have a different level of need for social contact, this certainly feels more than a little unbalanced.

I realise whilst writing this reply that "sad" can be construed by some people in a derogatory sense. I didn't mean it in that way. I genuinely feel upset that, for whatever reasons, the lead developer feels that almost anything would be a distraction from his life's work, especially a partner and children. Intimate human relations - romantic or not - offer things no personal achievement can.
Which also means that what we see now is the light that finally reached us and that "image" is old by a billion years.
Yeah it kind of is. Google has a lot of resources. I still don't know if their strategy of long running public betas is marketing or a true inability to start with something much better then a beta version.

If it's marketing this, quotes in your name stuff, is not funny.

If it's a true inability to iterate and scale without a public beta, well they are not a start-up, it is kind of absurd.
By your own admission, after three years your code still was pretty bad. That is the reason I said what I said, not because it can't be done--the results are entirely too often marginal. C++ is not pedagogically sound, and building something somebody actually wants to use with it is a nontrivial task.

I find it a little self-defeating to try to tackle two of the more complex tasks in software development at once. Learn to program (obligatory Learn Python The Hard Way reference), learn to write games, learn C++. Or learn to program, learn C++, learn to write games. It separates the hard bits in such a way that you can approach them, understand them, master them, and then move on.
Cool! :) Here's an 8 min screencast tutorial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wpTtEBK4-E) by Marko, the creator of Gremlin.

You can ask questions in the Gremlin Users group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gremlin-users

And if you're a Python developer, check out Bulbflow, a new persistence framework for graph databases that uses Gremlin as its query language (http://bulbflow.com/).
You can do that in Sublime Text as well: File -> Clone File

http://www.sublimetext.com/
The 'path' seems to be of a solid programmer/consultant. If you are going to work in a team then I would add 'improving teamwork skills'. This mainly involves respecting others in the team and focusing on team's success. These things go a long way and you will get a chance to work with developers in different areas of the company and contribute towards interesting projects.
This didn't deserve to be downvoted. The first sentence (while perhaps obvious) is both true and relevant.
I'm not talking patent theory 101; I'm talking about the business of what amounts to the securitization of patents for the purpose of extorting money (either from businesses who pay IV as an insurance policy so they won't get sued or from businesses who have to pay settlements for violating a patent).
my sex needs come before my art

That's a good way to put it, that's how I feel as well ;) The monk analogy is really good; I'm guessing that monks were attracted to their lifestyle for the same reason the most introverted nerds are attracted to computers today.
I just saw this and passed it on to the right folks in Google+.

Added: Looks like it's back now. The field test is definitely helpful for finding corner cases that we can improve before rolling out more broadly.

One small thing: If you do the query [site:plus.google.com ladyada] on Bing, it looks like Bing has an older version of the profile. The title for that search result is "Adafruit Industries - Google+" So my quick guess is that the name of "Adafruit Industries" might have been the issue. Either way, I'm glad that it's solved now.
Disclaimer: was running GM for a few weeks.

Love:

* Never been a Spaces user, neither do I use Exposé but I found myself using Mission Control more and more. It feels very natural to my workflow possibly because I hate having an empty spaces around and partly due to gestures.

* Full screen apps is awesome, especially if you use web apps. Currently I created a new Safari window in fullscreen running IRCCloud, I could "peek" that window simply by three-fingers swiping to the right to see if there's any activities in channel I'm on (but not switch to it). I think more (desktop) apps should utilize this. Put some activities on left and right side of the window to allow peeking without leaving the current desktop.

* I thought scrolling was stupid at first, but with Trackpad and a mindset of "control the content, not widget", it kind of make sense.

* Mail.app is a bless for non-Gmail IMAP user like me. It has almost everything I want from a Mail client. My only complaint is that it lacks proper email address aliasing support.

* FileVault 2 no longer randomly eats up my data and transparent to all applications due to the fact it's now disk-level encryption rather than an encrypted disk image. Never did a benchmark, but the performance impact doesn't seems noticeable.

* 256 COLORS SUPPORT IN TERMINAL.

Dislike:

* "New window" effect, it adds a lot of delay and adds nothing in terms of usability.

Unsure:

* I want to like Versions, but couldn't get myself to like it. There's this one time when I open an existing file, accidentally delete half of it, close the window to try to restore its previous state but TextEdit simply overwrite the file on exit.
Embossed wristband
I've only been using emacs for 18 years and I use 19pt Menlo!
How the media turned an attack in Norway into an Islamist terror plot
"No reason to add extra complexity just to dodge having a single global variable"

Yes, yes there is. It's called "reducing side effects".
Completely agree.

(It's important for your comment to be worded like that, and not just "you shouldn't learn C++ and game programming at the same time". Otherwise a lot of the context is lost.)

That said, if I had to do it over, I wouldn't change a thing. I know myself, and therefore I know I'd be too timid to try to ever do more than move Python code into C via writing my own extensions. That would have significantly crippled my career, and denied me the opportunity to work on game engines written entirely in C++ (which almost all triple-A game engines are, for better or for worse).

That's a personal failing, I admit. I'm just spewing thoughts that were important relative to my career, because it's the only actual example I know enough to talk about.
Vinyl projected to grow more than 25% in 2011
... and now it's back.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/108772200278976934119/about