skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure, for my project, I'm typing in code in Visual Basic .NET. For writing code today, all things considered for my context, that is about the best option.

Maybe you should try something other than VB.NET, then. There are ways of constructing correct code, if you're patient enough, that is. If you're using the CLR, why not use F# instead of VB? That'd be a big step towards being able to prove some things about your code. Or if you really want to take out the big guns, go for Coq, Isabelle, Agda, Epigram, etc.

> Can some software go over it, report properties, do some transformations with known, useful properties?

Yes, in many cases. There's a whole lot of work in static code analysis, and refactoring tools. It's not perfect (the halting problem being non-decidable and all that) but there have been _significant_ improvements since the Algol60 days, and that's not counting functional languages and type-theoretic approaches.

> Or, return to most of the rest of engineering

That goes a bit off topic, but at the stage we are in, for most practical purposes, "software engineering" is not really engineering. Except maybe when done by NASA, but then again, that's not a practical approach either.

> Also for another of your points, I'm not talking about anything like branch prediction or deep pipelining. That's basically what to do with with the hardware to execute an existing instruction set.

Oh, but you were talking about compilers. Modern optimizing compilers have to take those things into account, among many other things.

> Clearly compiling and executing a program are necessarily mathematically something, understood or not, powerful or not. For progress, we need to understand the subject mathematically.

(from your previous post)
My point was that very significant progress has been made in many fields, even if not necessarily formalized.

> Also the point is not math or not.

Sorry, but when you state that CS should be a footnote in a math book, you are kinda making the point that everything in CS (even in those sub-domains that are eminently practical) should be math-based to do anything meaningful. This is demonstrably not true.

> The point is progress.

And I've agreed with you on this. More and better maths can help advance CS. But we knew that already.

> Your point that there's a lot of good CS to do without 'mathematizing' the field is not promising for research or significant progress.

I contend that there has been significant progress in many CS areas without 'mathematizing' them. That is a fact. I also stated, in my previous post, that I agree that maths could help improve this progress. I think my problem with your position is that you're talking in absolutes in topics where those absolutes clearly don't hold.
not to worry, we're aware of how people might try to cheat... it's not fully automated, we have our engineers judging this as well
Can Your Startup Survive Outside of Silicon Valley? Yes It Can
Google+ Games, 24 hour retrospective
But isn't he just reporting Kaspersky's finding. Unless you are saying those are PR too...
Watch"captain america'online'megavideo
watch"captain america'online'megavideo
Before Captain America The First Avenger started to defeat their enemies and the bad of the human race was a frail and sickly man who has always been rejected by the army
Sleeping during the day doesn't work for me either. What does work however is watching a show or half of a movie. Just so I don't sleep, but my brain is able to shut down and loosely concentrate on something other than work.
Mersenne Twister is hardly perfect. It's slow, causes a lot of cache misses, and IIRC the output is purely XOR of previous outputs. Do people just bring it up because they like the name?
If We’re Turning Off Social Media, I Want News Channels Shut Down, Too
You really think the hackers who spend hours of meticulous planning in preparing the hacks do it for the material prize? Insightful...
Ritalin?
People have always wanted to do certain things online: search (google et all), shopping (amazon, ebay, et all), communication (email, aol, facebook, et all) are good examples. I've never really sensed a similar demand for syncing and backing up files. The idea that a single player has a 5 billion valuation implies the industry is significantly larger than that. That's what caught me by surprise.

The numbers I threw out there were just guesses (including the 20x P/E ratio); I was trying to understand the basis of such a valuation. There are some good explanations in this mini thread, yours included, but I still struggle to imagine there will be this much money in a such a service. It seems like competition would drive the free offerings to the point where the paid usage gets pretty low.

I guess what I'm really saying is that file sync/backup as a service doesn't feel like a 10s of billions industry. I don't have much real data to back that claim though ;)
I love how Time decided to prepend the headline with "Viral."
>So, maybe in some issues of handling deadlocks, transactions, race conditions, reliability via parallelism, and more, there will be something useful in the book it would take me more than 90 seconds to reinvent!

I thought you were serious with all your writing, but after reading this bit, I can only conclude that you're either trolling, or delusional.
Oh, you are not alone :)

In fact this is a fairly typical problem of people working alone and with no external feedback. Things like killing a day to decide how to name a temporary variable is a bane of lonely programmer. Next time when you are starting on a new project, make sure you get a supporter or an adopter. The more the merrier, but one should do. This creates a feeling of being accountable to someone and it tremendously helps to make the milestones... which is another thing - having milestones that you cannot afford to miss is golden. This allows breaking out of that stupid loop of obsessing over details that do not matter (while burning out mentally) and keep a larger view of the project in mind at all times. For example, knowing that you are getting someone's blog coverage in two weeks is a sure way to not only get the beta in its best polished state (of the decade :)), but also to redo the website and what not. Productivity jumps by the orders of magnitude.

Between the techniques and what nots I find the most useful thing is writing thoughts down. Say you are working on a project, and currently dealing with a feature A of a module B of a web interface, which is in turn just a smaller part of the whole thing. And then you realize that there is that one other thing that absolutely needs to be done and not forgotten. Write it down. Getting it out of one's head and onto a paper helps freeing up idle cycles that brain would otherwise spend worrying about not forgetting this thought. There is a big, heavily commercialized theory built on top of this simple idea - GTD or Get Things Done - but that's all cruft. Just get Things for iPhone and it should be enough.

So, yeah... I hear you, and (a) it is typical (b) you need firm goals you truly commit to. That's it.

(edit) If you consider chemicals, then no, you don't want them. If you really really really desperate, try modafinil. Very sparingly, like once a month, just to jump-start the productivity and get things rolling.
by that logic touting that their biggest market is a secure OS does not help their bottomline does it?
You can't create 'idiomatic polyglots'. You just hack things together until they sorta work, for more than few languages this basically involves large strings and lots of backslashes, or base64 or something like that. (Writing a polyglot that does something more clever is obviously much better style, but it's incredibly hard.)
I kept chuckling at the 'random shot of a machine tool doing some random thing' more of an advertisement for what Cooper Union has in its shop for students to use :-).

That being said, the weight is the lose element here (and why bikes don't generally have flywheels) Also you need to be careful about braking hard and then turning :-) The depending on the energy in the wheel the gyroscopic moment on the middle of the frame which will try to twist the frame about its longitudinal axis when the wheel changes orientation in the vertical access, could be extreme.
2) "Publishing" (Blogging about this) will help. I am not too sure what you mean by "know the techniques well enough". In my case, I cracked a few books on LA/Stat and worked through them and encountered situations where I had to use those skills repeatedly as part of courses I had taken in School. Doing tiny projects where you are able to acquire mathematical intuition for certain concepts will be useful.

4) So the fact of the matter is that you should be versatile enough to absorb their tech stack as soon as possible. That is possible only if you have worked in depth in at least one tech stack. This is especially true for Map Reduce based technologies.

Its hard to be specific: All those things are doing in analytics departments. There are not many machine learning people in my place of work so I mostly find problems that require algorithmic solutions and try to see if I can solve them. Things probably are more structured in larger companies..
It is fairly common, but it was much less common.
Maybe they also want redundancy for on-site "iCloud" data centers.
Considering how i use computers, most of the time i found it far more convenient to apt-get search and 20s latter install (or the equivalent with the package manager you use) than downloading a random piece of software from a random internet site, which from this point might become a risk if it does not auto update, and if it does it's with a stupid yet-another rewritten auto update program that always uses 50 MB of RAM for just one program installed on the system, even when the program does not run.

And considering the success of "app stores" and the general dislike of the traditional windows desktop computers by the general public (except if you are fool enough to help them for free doing all the busy work maintenance tasks that can't even exist on serious systems), I guess the centralized packaging and distribution model is also pretty convenient for the general public...
It's a little annoying that the press flies off the handle about every patent Apple files. We've seen this for years - Apple files tons of patents that never make it into a shipping product. To extrapolate from "Apple patents X" into "Apple plans to ship X" is stupid.

It makes me wonder if Apple purposely patents things it doesn't plan to ship to:

- increase its patent portfolio

- to inject noise and distract from patents it does plan to ship
How Search Engines Really Work
Building with Legos
It's easier to land (and vet) a cofounder after you've done some initial work on the concept.

Particularly if you've been going out of your way to meet people who might be suitable for some time beforehand.
Visual Artists often take inspiration from nature. I've read a few articles on how someone used primes and other mathematical principles that are observable in nature and used them in programs to generate tiled images with a more natural flow to them that is more easy on the eye. Sometimes the best way to get someone to appreciate something is to frame it in the context of something they love.
Just because they have a patent doesn't mean they will manufacture a product.

Perhaps they just don't want their competitors to put it in their products, for example.
Very very cool, but too easy to accidentally bail on a game - I couldn't find a way to rejoin my game (Sorry, miked, pet, alan!)

Also, really wish this were flash instead of a Java applet.
EFF: BART Pulls a Mubarak in San Francisco
> How are you supposed to shoot backwards?

You don't - everyone sees themselves and their teammates on the left side of the screen.
Facebook too. Can't think of many recent instances where the winner of the early adopters won the space. Netflix?
A Theory of Everything (Sort of)
We are increasingly taking easy credit, routine work and government jobs and entitlements away from the middle class — at a time when it takes more skill to get and hold a decent job, at a time when citizens have more access to media to organize, protest and challenge authority and at a time when this same merger of globalization and I.T. is creating huge wages for people with global skills (or for those who learn to game the system and get access to money, monopolies or government contracts by being close to those in power) — thus widening income gaps and fueling resentments even more.
"Polyglot" in this case is referring to a person who can write in multiple languages, not a program written in multiple languages.
Different definitions. You seem to be thinking of programs that are valid in multiple languages. The page is more of a dictionary of language constructs.
Touchscreens - A Basic Explanation
Homeland Security News interviews Bruce Schneier
> do a few easily duplicated UI difference really justify billions?

A large (paying) customer base would. But, just like johnrob, I'm not sure dropbox has that many users.
Unique power footprint... hmm... like a Stargate? A Doomsday Machine?
Post office to issue Pixar stamps
Very intelligent, had all sorts of ideas, could talk about anything related to his field (networking) and would challenge you to think about things differently. Unfortunately, he could talk all around theory, but he couldn't execute. It was a strange sort of inability to choose between several equally good approaches to solving a problem. Every project he worked on got about 3/4 to completion and then fell flat into failure.

Almost textbook description of ADHD.
ref:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877100
Protecting Freedom in the Patent System
You were doing a fresh install (no SP) of a 10 year-old operating system (xp) on an infected network and you were surprised you got compromised?

Now, XP is first of all, not a great standard in security practices. But without any security updates, on a platform that hackers have had 10 years to find exploits to? If you installed that on an infected network, I'd be surprised if you didn't get compromised.
"My guess is that Jonathan made a big mistake by releasing API to keep track of cards balance."

Er... Wasn't the API part of the experiment? It wasn't really a mistake then if the experiment was undefined.
As an avid appreciator of mathematical elegance, I actually tend to agree with the author on this one. This equation arises mostly from the construction of the complex plane, and doesn't actually represent a deep relationship between our usual definition of the constants it contains.
wow, this year's gsoc? that would be excellent, i was sad when the original vimpart and then yzis both went nowhere.
Time need not end in the multiverse
The only scenario I can see that would require hitting an EBS store often enough to matter would be if you put your database on it. Obviously your OS kernel is going to be in resident memory, so your argument is somewhat of a strawman.
For me, it is 15 minutes or two hours. If I drop in the middle, I might as well be two hours. But 15 minutes can make a HUGE difference.
The New Era of Virality
To answer my own question, there was an article in Science yesterday which goes into much more detail on this project. The backing appears quite scalable if there aren't any hidden gotchas that they didn't discuss. The electronics are probably the tricky part, but they still look doable.

MC10 is doing the commercialization.

http://mc10inc.com/pages/tech_overview.php
Kindlegraph My Books
The site doesn't mention which meaning of "polyglot" the people behind it had in mind.

I assumed it was for people writing "polyglot" toy programs, because it'd be very useful resource.

I very rarely encounter uses of the term "polyglot" referring to people knowing large number of programming languages, so I didn't think of this use. Looking at it now, from this perspective, I have to say that I don't think it would be useful for these people, not enough depth.
We built http://21times.org to help the November Startup Sprint folks with info and tracking progress, and had about 1500 people signup. (This was an early proof of concept for our startup http://DailyPath.com)
I tried solving the version the problem in which the codes are not necessarily unique, the grid is 1x36, only any character that appears in the code of any item that is a special today is marked, an item "appears to be available" iff all of the characters in its code are marked, and the customer chooses from the items that appear to be available for the first question.

It seems that this is not the correct interpretation of the problem statement.
That's the trick. I find having a coffee and then closing my eyes for 15 minutes leaves me more relaxed yet full of so much more energy than before to take me through the rest of the day.
I found that comment strage. Scala is quite usable once you start actually, well, using it. If you just read through the docs it can be intimidating but if you start using it as a "better Java" and then start biting off the more sophisticated features it's not hard to get going at all. Having tried both Clojure and Scala there's no way I'd throw away the benefits of static typing in a good, modern FP.

However, my money is on neither. I'm looking forward to Kotlin from Jetbrains:
http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Welcome
> The page is more of a dictionary of language constructs.

Which would come incredibly useful if you wanted to write a polyglot program.

Why else would you use a reference like this? If you wanted to learn a language, or had to hack something in a language you don't know, you'll be better off using resources specific to given language(s).
Yesterday at CCC, a US hacker gave a talk on Bitcoin: "Financing the Revolution"
Would like to see the equivalent of Japan ... Yahoo.jp has a ridiculous market share here (especially amongst the pre-smartphone market - which is huge).

Edit: best I could find was from 2009 which puts yahoo at 51% over google at 39%[1]. However, google seems to be partnering with yahoojp to help them improve their search technology[2].

[1]http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/3/J...

[2]http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012020342.html
I'm a lot more worried about allowing arbitrary EC2 hosts to connect to my Redis port than I am about people sniffing the traffic.
I don't know. Am investigating it, though.
And when iOS 5 is released Instapaper will become completely unnecessary.
But how many are paying users?
The Queensway Syndicate: tens of billions in revenue; unknown owners.
This.

And to add, it's important to to decouple pieces of your project so that it's easy to refactor and optimize parts as you get to them.
Tech heavy site?

I'm doing 98.3% Google here. (ignoring the mysterious search engine called 'search')
传奇私服英雄合击版
My bet would be that most experienced programmers actually would prefer to compile a new NPC, and then load it in as a shared library. This arrangement stands at least some chance of working neatly with whatever debugger you are using, and should provide pretty decent iteration times.

I would certainly win this bet if it involved all the experienced programmers of my acquaintance.
Maybe you could contact them with the suggestion?

(There's at least couple more errors on the Haskell column, a typo, and a missing idiom for their 'each' example, which would be 'mapM_ print', basically).
It's also about listening. It's impossible to listen when you're talking. This can be counterintuitive as we are hard wired to not like the blank space.

Think of it in reverse... How much do we hate sales people who won't let us get a word in? How often do we really buy from them? If you have a consultant pitching you, would you rather listen to a 30 slide powerpoint presentation, or have a 2-way discussion on your issues?
me thinks you are solving the wrong problem
Prototypes for Iphone Apps
If I need to present my iphone app idea to an investor, is it best to have a prototype of the app or just a formal design on pdf/psd? or are they the same? if not, what is the diff?
> I assumed it was for people writing "polyglot" toy programs, because it'd be very useful resource.

It isn't so in this case, as the code for each language is clearly different. It's more of a 'construct translator' kind of thing.
> The laptop boots the Android emulator and runs eclipse much faster than my primary pc which is a i7 tri-channel w/24gb ram.

Which is... odd. I bought an Air in December, and stopped using it (gave it to a family member) because I couldn't stand how slow it was compared to my hand-built Windows desktop. I'm talking ~10 seconds after waking from sleep before it would even recognise that I was typing on the keyboard, and persistent beachballing whenever I had too many tabs or a VM open (again, for Visual Studio). The gestures were nice, but they're nothing my multi-button mouse didn't solve.

I'm not saying your experiences are wrong, but... it's strange to see someone make the same transition that I did, only to have the opposite result.
I'd change your analogy to make the label 'free rides', as the intent of this was to get a cheap disposable cup of coffee. And rather than selling the car the guy drains most of the gas out of the tank and takes it.

So yes, it's an experiment but the guy was violating the stated rules.
I would have liked for Go to have been included, (C style languages) not to mention Smalltalk.
What do you mean 'no'? The reasons for a bunch of ignorant kids looting doesn't have to reflect their actions. If they could realise who they're hurting they wouldn't be ignorant kids now, would they?
Relevant article: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375715,00.asp

Dvorak argues that Facebook is AOL. I disagree, and think it's inferior to AOL. Mainly because Facebook neither provides an entry into the internet (like AOL's ISP did/does) nor has a viable, general purpose email system. Facebook messaging couldn't replace something like Gmail. I think the lack of those systems make it easy to abandon the service for something else.

Having 100+ "friends" on Facebook isn't a compelling reason to stay when most people probably wouldn't notice if 90% of those individuals disappeared from one day to the next. Most of your social network online is an illusion.

I'm testing out Google+ right now, but I'm doing so under an alias. The alias is known to my friends and everything I post and share is authentic. My change in attitude comes from 4 years of having a real identity presence online; I don't really see the benefit of shedding anonymity.