skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Love him or hate him, I think it's great when someone makes a mistake, owns up to it publicly. Even allow others to contact them directly and list all levels of accountability even to the top.

I have heard of Scoble but never follow him.I have made the same mistake he has made, where a friend I highly trust, who I think is rarely wrong forwards me info which I use for an argument and it turns out to be completely false. Yes it was laziness, no doubt about it and I learn that the hard way, and so has Scoble.
Canadians over at RedFlagDeals.ca have been in touch with HP customer service and been assured that although the price on hp.ca isn't adjusted yet, refunds will be given for the difference in price sometime over the next couple of days. If this does not happen automatically, you can supposedly call on Monday and they will do it manually.

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/merged-hp-touchpad-16gb-99-99...
> Our citizens don't want to work in manufacturing

Not true among those to whom college is not attractive. There is a group of Americans that would like a semi-skilled labor job that affords them a middle class lifestyle.

I grew up in an area primarily populated with people like that, and while all of my friends are now of the BS/MS/PhD crowd, there is a huge set of people who now go on to college not because they want to but because they don't know what else they can do. Unless they are lucky enough to know somebody who can get them in as an apprentice at a union.
Web Developer for Swedish start-up
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Journalists aren't all Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, most of them aren't. They are, in the main, reporters. They report what they've been told, pausing only to package it up and make it more digestible to the reader. To hold the media in general to some higher 'you must be a domain expert to write about this subject' standard is to have a starry-eyed view of the world.

<bracing myself for the downvotes>
An open operating system without any sort of central authority is pointless. That's a 100% guaranteed way to kill the platform.

They should skunkworks it. Instead of punting, they should round up the HP employees who built it, form a LLC, retain an ownership stake, but give the group full autonomy to continue on in whatever fashion they think they can survive with.
The History Of One Tough Motherfucker by Charles Bukowski
Bought a 32GB one at Sam's Club this morning. I watched the last one any Walmart had in town sell right in front of me. Went on a wind goose chase but got one. Its an awesome device. Been rock solid, feels great. My only gripe is lack of apps. There is one vnc app out there but has bad reviews from touchpad owners.
This paper is one part of the long-running threads vs. events debate, and it probably isn't that helpful to read it in isolation. Erlang, JRockit, and Go implemented the kind of scalable green threads proposed in this paper, although I don't think they were inspired by it. Most programmers who care about high concurrency (other than Erlangers) decided to just bite the bullet and accept the difficulty of writing event-driven code rather than try to make threads scale. The fact that people prefer to struggle along with events doesn't negate their difficulty, though.
This kind of thing is in production.

There are systems using light-weight threads to write very high concurrency servers. That's what the Erlang VM does, for example. The GHC Haskell runtime now does this as well. They both use epoll/kqueue/etc. in their I/O systems, but the code itself is threaded in user-space, and these lightweight threads can be mapped onto a pool of OS-level threads so the programs can run on multiple cores.

Even without fancy compiler and runtime support, you can do this. In Python, you can use eventlet or gevent to write very concurrent servers with what looks like threaded code, thanks to coroutines in the interpreter. It's very pleasant.
My favorite reason is "Apple could provide the missing revenue that Twitter needs." Synergy!
Like it has been stated on other comments here, this is a old paper. Technology (both hardware and software) has changed.
These arguments boil down to fun reasons Apple should spend money to lose money, possibly long into the future, with no business upside. Dodgeball, MySpace and Orkut are all great warnings about companies that don't already "get" social from buying their way in.
Two thoughts on this post/submission. The first is that it's really pretty shoddy, I mean why did it need to be filmed, why not a written (or even to camera) piece that just explains the logic. Anyone who doesn't believe it after having it explained isn't going to believe it after a video of an experiment that could so easily be edited to show 1000 heads out of 1000 flips.

The second is, even if it was presented better, is this suitable for HN? Sure, the topic of probability is suitable, but this is on such a basic level that surely most, if not all, HN readers already comprehended it.

That said, here's hoping that, if people are going to insist on upvoting it, it can at least spur some interesting discussion. With that aim, here's a tangeant:

It's always interesting in gambling how, no matter how mathematically smart someone is, it's incredibly easy to let your heart make decisions for you when money is on the line. Whether it's betting red on roulette because it landed black 6 times in a row, or betting big on a blackjack hand because you've lost your last few in a row and surely it can't keep going.

Even though, as you place the bet, you're thinking "I know the last X spins don't actually have any impact...", you can't help but feel the urge.
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> "He's not a scientist"

Ironically, the OP didn't say anything nearly so insulting.
I think you're going through a lot of trouble to formalize an argument I'm not even contesting. I'm talking about the minimal value of a degree as a credential outside the Professions; you're arguing with a fictitious third party who says they have zero importance anywhere.
> I have yet to see an online lab course. Equipment is expensive, and proper training is important...

The students can rent the equipment and acquire training online.
In this case, as someone who actually has built one of these efficient threading models (and studied, while in academia, these results), I believe it is only because the larger engineering community has incorrectly associated "threads" with "slow", and refuses to even though them anymore, especially if it involves modifying the compiler to make the stack ripping efficient (I did not modify the compiler, and instead required the developer to occasionally manually rip the stack). The result "events == threads" is introductory CS material at this point, and was largely established in 1978: this paper only claims to "refine" that result.

Frankly, the event/thread duality result is actually pretty trivial to grok if you bother to look at it. Hell: with only minimal overhead (due to having started with events and having to adapt up), you can use a continuation passing transform on JavaScript and have a threaded node.js (and some people even do this): you'll have roughly the same concurrency and roughly the same memory usage (and the "roughly", again, only comes from the fact that we are building the threads on top of events with an adapter that will be forced to slightly inefficiently store and access its state).
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As the movie begins a young boy Cimmerian Conan is trained to Corin importance of the father of steel to his people Shortly afterwards a number of warriors led by warlord Conan systematically destroying the village to take possession of Corin mask.
Do you know where this is documented? (I just skimmed the bash docs and couldnt find it) thx.
"I'd say it's because if you're finding functional programming incredibly difficult, you maybe shouldn't be lecturing on what it is."

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I really do appreciate it.

It isn't the programming that is the hard thing. Writing some code to do something meaningful is not what is giving me a problem. Actually, it is trying to develop a deep understanding of functional programming that I am finding difficult. Maybe the problem is that I am confusing functional programming with purely functional programming?

My apologies to tumult if it came off that I was lecturing in my original post. I find it challenging to get tone perfectly right on the Internet. Face to face conversation or conversation over a phone is far better.

I think maybe this entire thread comes down to a question of semantics. When I program in non-functional languages I tend to lean towards using map/reduce type constructs a lot, but I never really thought of that as "functional programming". I guess I always thought that in order to really do functional programming, you really needed to have some kind of deep understanding of it.

Maybe if I had a formal computer science background, my perspective would be a little bit different because I would have more easily seen the point that you are making. As it stands, my background is in the social sciences and my knowledge of the science part of computer science is sometimes lacking.

Perhaps you are right, I should have been better informed before attempting to inform others. But if I had not typed my original post, then I would have never received your helpful reply and I would still be in the dark!
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Does not seems like a good fit for me. Apple is probably rethink its social networking strategy after Ping fails. Twitter API from within iOS is just more like a testbed. It has some form of messaging in FaceTime and the upcoming iMessage. It has a successful GameCentre social networking platform. We probably will see some social networking feature in iCloud v2 but I'm guessing it will serve a purpose such as for iTunes (Ping) or for games (GameCentre). Maybe for mobile payment purpose? Apple has the foundation for a commercial social networking platform as there is a large percentage of Apple ID that is tied to credit cards. We probably will see some hints of what to come at WWDC 2012.

Commercialisation is one reason why Google+ wants you to use real name. And I believe whatever Apple build, it will not be just Facebook like but rather have hints of social networking here and there.
BBC’s The Code: Math And Tablet Success
BestBuy is no longer selling them and if you click on a link for HP Touchpad from the back to school page it shows an error message.
Developers, EMPOWER Yourselves
It’s with pride if I answer questions about what I do. I’m a developer running a web startup. There are 2 things in the previous sentence that makes me smile every time I think about it. Let’s dive in.
[30 mins video]Why Europe is a good place for startups
"I'd be happy to sit down with anyone from the company and any investor too to give their side of the story." and then he refers to himself as a "journalist".

He's nothing but a shit stirrer, why do people still pay attention to him? He just creates needless drama with everything that he does...
There's a con based on this: send half your marks a prediction that the stock market will go up next week, and half a prediction it will go down. Repeat next week, restricting to whichever set received the correct prediction. After five weeks, you'll have a group of people who think you've accurately predicted stock market movements for five weeks in a row, and some of them will be prepared to pay for your next prediction.
We all know what we see on T.V. and from places like CNN suck, but that doesn't mean it's journalism.

Journalism is talking to as many people as you can about a story, then putting it together in a really straightforward, no bullshit report.

It's just sad that popular news organizations are calling themselves journalists when in reality they are just advertising for someones beliefs.
It is option-4. But I almost went and bought a new keyboard before I discovered that.
That's what they did, but with PuTTY. Open PuTTY, type in the remotehost, click the tunneling option, hit D, type port 8080. (then be prompted for username/password).

The rest of the article is explaining why it works, and setting up SSHD on the remote host, (or, acquiring a remote host) which you assume has already been done.
I think you miss difference between OO and FP.

It is paradoxical. Fifteen years ago, OO was this giant, over-sold piece of junk that was going to magically make random code piece. But, but it does/did have merits for ginormous software operations employing many, many mediocre programmers. It contains a simple metaphor and simple device for turning totally bad code into slightly less bad code, for allowing completely unrelated stuff to relate together in a half-assed way. OO isn't about giving programmers more power but allowing the power one programmer to interface with that of another (even perhaps another inferior programmer).

FP is about power. You could anhilate whole galaxies with the power of a third order functional if your mind was strong enough to wrap itself around such a thing - from another link currently up: "Lisp's purpose in the programming language galaxy is to assist our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts, remember?" Essentially, neither Lisp nor FP nor Logic Programming exist to collect the multitude of junk that enterprises have and make it more sensible.

==> I am speaking "jocularly" here. I actually think collecting the junk of enterprises is a worthy activity. Large scale programming in a typical enterprise (not Google) requires you to make allowances for a multitude of human foibles and this can expand you as a human being and not just a genius.

Just consider, there are geniuses who just produce "amazing stuff" for others to run after trying to understand, there are geniuses who explain to other geniuses and there are geniuses who explain to normal people. All have their place.
>I'm talking about the minimal value of a degree as a credential outside the Professions; you're arguing with a fictitious third party who says they have zero importance anywhere.

Umm, wrong. I am arguing with the "minimal value of a degree as a credential outside the Professions". I have made that clear, by statements to the effect of "granting the professions are a different case."

I am saying -- I have limited evidence for causality in the effect of a degree (outside the professions), and you have no evidence for the absence of causality .

It's all good though...
Can't find the original article he wrote that stirred up all this commotion...
I never had much of a problem with 'color', but grey/gray got me every single time. Always went with the British spelling.

However, at this point, I actually can't remember which spelling is which. I have to look it up. 'a' is the American one, right? (gosh, I hope I'm right)
I'm not sure I do wish it. I don't use Twitter and am no fan of it. I do hold shares in Apple but I suspect a Twitter acquisition would reduce their value if anything (at least in the short term).
It's called Ion Saliu's paradox or The Fundamental Theory of Gambling.
If you have an event with probability 1/n and repeat it n times, the probability of realizing the event at least once is is about 1-1/e = 0.63
(for high enough values of n).

His calculations were correct, showing that chance of failure was 37% and success 63%.
Found out about this a little late and it's sold out EVERYWHERE. Would have loved a tablet for $99!
This has been posted to HN a bunch of times over the years:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Eve...

What I said about it last time:

The problem with the article is that it's superficial. At its core, it's premised on the idea that threads are inherently easier than events, because they produce straight-line code and automatically handle tracking the state needed across a transaction. If that's true, then the article says threads are just as good as events once we solve all the problems that make threads dangerous or slow.

But it's not a given that threads are easy. In particular, as anyone who has spent time doing high-performance threaded code will tell you, there's the effort you have to put in to make sure your threaded code is correct, and then the 2x more time you have to put in to make sure that it's efficient; in particular, you have to do synchronization without effectively serializing all your threads. Which is a huge pain.

I think this is gradually becoming a moot point, as modern languages --- all of which have some kind of anonymous function and some approximation of closures --- allow us to write evented code that looks and feels like straight-line code. jQ callbacks in Javascript are the most vivid illustration of this idea (I suppose the node.js people are carrying that even further; I haven't played with it).
When the blogger used the phrase "Fibonacci mysticism" it becomes clear he has far too much bias to pay attention to what the kid was actually doing.

He points out that voltage in solar cells is essentially boolean. Ok. That means that the kid has shown a way to orient the cells so they get sunlight for a longer period of time. If evolution is anything to go by, his approach likely reveals a local minima for maximizing the time that sunlight is collected.

Is that worthless? No, it is not. It may well explain why trees orient their leaves the way they do, and there could well be practical applications. If your solar array produces more than the peak power you need but the cost and energy loss of storing the power are significant, you may well want to use a pattern like this that mimics what trees do.

What impresses me is that the kid noticed something in nature he hadn't noticed before, read up on it to see what was known about this pattern, and then went out and measured to see whether what he had read was accurate. Once he had verified what he read, he then figured out how that knowledge might be applied. In doing so, he discovered something that, while obvious in hindsight, is not something that would necessarily have occurred to someone trying to figure out how to maximize the time for solar panels to deliver energy. I think the kudos are appropriate, even if the stories are misleading.

An important point here is that in any news story about something that you know a lot about, there are always errors. Always. We should all keep that in mind when we read or watch or listen to the news.
Wait, like what?
Because that wouldn't replicate a world in which either one existed as the sole Google+...like, at all.
"Doublethink" is a bit harsh. It's probably diplomacy on the part of the author, rather than active self-deception.
My "through the DB" solution is not as good as a heap or stack would be, but it's not as bad as it might sound, because the DB lives in memory. If, in a given phase, you have some data, you add it to the context, it will be there in the next phase.

It would be easy to have an API that is along the lines of "in the next phase, call this function, pass it this data". I could make an API that does that, or you could put the data under a key in the context, and then call that function at the beginning of the next phase. IF the set of functions you'd like to have called that way varies from request to request, they could be stuffed in a list under a key, and you just process each of the functions in that list.

I think it will be quite possible to provide something equivalent to closures, via an API, though I can't yet say how syntactically convenient they will be, but really not too bad, I don't think.

On further thought, I think it would be quite possible to do actor style message passing... I'm focusing a bit much on the mechanics of implementation right now, and not making this transparent, but the context could easily be used to manage a set of mailboxes and "processes", where, in each phase, or even between phases, whenever a message is available in a mailbox, the function that it was sent to gets woken up and executed. In fact, not function, but process.

So, I can add an API that provides an actor model interface. The actors can be identified by a process ID, they can send messages to each other (addressed by PID) and include arbitrary data, and this can happen in concurrently in coffeescript.
Silicon Valley Booms but Worries About a New Bust
Forgive me, but that seems vague. The ending of chess is easily decidable, but how do you quantify 'disruption'?
This is interesting psychology. Eventually 10 in a row has to happen. But would you bet 50 cents to win 51? At what point is it Bayesian statistics that tells you not to make the bet? (That somehow the coin is loaded)
Yeah, but your assumption is that HP, the company that has made thousands of products since 1939 doesn't know how to price things. Or that they know and chose to price the Touchpad for a extremely high profit margin. We know how much the parts cost[1], and that's but 1 small part of the overall cost to produce the tablet. Chances are that the Touchpad was priced correctly, and that anything they could have cut and remain profitable wouldn't have been enough to make a difference at retail.

[1]http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/07/hp-touchpad-parts-analyze...
Let's hope this behaviour is self-limiting.
Also good readings: type in google search:

threads +posix +signals

threads +stack +usage

thread +safe +function
You only have to be trained to learn the execution. Anyone sitting in a car and watching someone drive can figure out what the controls do, it's just that driving a car requires timing.

...of course, perhaps the problem with the above is the assumption that they've had a chance to watch someone drive!
I agree, but at the same time I think if anyone could buy Twitter and keep the key people around and happy, it's got to be Apple. I'm not entirely convinced of my own argument, but my intuition says that Twitter needs some sort of plan, and Apple need some social elements. They've tried doing it themselves and failed.

Twitter is lossmaking because all it's selling is adverts that don't really work. Apple are selling products and if Twitter helps them to sell more products or lock customers in, then it may cease to be lossmaking.
Of course just about every language has a freely available library for working with JSON, and that is one of the main reasons to use JSON in the first place. However, the rendering or parsing in a dynamic language like JavaScript or Python typically takes one line of code. The equivalent in something like Java can be horrible.

Even if you have a library that can parse JSON according to some known format and give you back a nice object of some known type in your static type system, you still have the problems of how to describe that format and how to handle errors where the incoming JSON doesn't match your expected format in some way. I suppose you could simplify common cases by determining the expected format using reflection if your language supports it, but that's not going to be powerful enough to cope with the general case without providing some sort of metadata as well.

In short, I'm still waiting to find a library that can parse arbitrary incoming JSON within a statically typed language without at best requiring the programmer to repeat structural information that is already implicit in the code that uses the resulting object. It's just that architectural issue I mentioned before, where converting from a freeform format to a known object type in a static language essentially requires you to do all the parsing and error recovery up-front whether you want to or not. Perhaps someone has come up with a clever approach I haven't yet encountered, but I don't see any sign of it in the documentation I looked up quickly for the libraries you mentioned; they look downright painful to use compared to dynamic languages from the code snippets I saw!