skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, but if you ever get a group of these people together in a room, these are people you want to hang out with.
The trouble with this approach is that the Javascript prototype-based object model is somewhat incompatibile with precompiled-library loading. Loading Javascript (Even in bytecode form) requires running the code. Modern desktop/server software leverages tons of code via shared-libraries with fast startup times, but Javascript webpages have horrible startup times with only tiny amounts of library code. This problem is important to fix or the javascript ecosystem will be prevented from effectively building higher and higher leverage software layers.

In addition, Javascript's abstractions are based on relatively slow mechanisms such as dynamic-hashes. This make it difficult if not impossible to get C/Java/C# like performance out of it even with a JIT. You can build fast dynamic hashes out of structs, but you can't really build fast structs out of dynamic hashes.
You see, this is often the true reason that someone is "skeptical." It's not a problem with the science itself, but potential implications if one were to accept the science.

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not saying that this is hugh3's reason, I don't know what that is. I just know that his stated reason is pretty plainly false by the usual standards of engineers and scientists, it's a common enough reason, and when I discuss this with engineers the true underlying reason for skepticism are precisely the sentiments that anamax presented.
That's a fairly good site, actually.

However, when the position taken up by one side is "There is no room for skepticism about what my model predicts will happen in the future!" and the position taken up by the other side is "There is some room for skepticism about what that model says will happen in the future" then the no-skepticism side has already lost.

If only these folks would phrase it as a balance-of-probabilities issue rather than an absolute-certainty issue then they'd have me on their side. But as it is, I'm forced to side with the skeptical side.

Nothing could be worse for science than to try to make "skepticism" a dirty word.
You are sharply underestimating per-deal sizes for enterprise sales. $200 a class isn't so much to actually make $200 a class. $200 just establishes an anchor such that the school district demands a discount and you say "Alright, with 500 teachers teaching 4 classes each, we can let you have this for only $350,000 a year. That's a huge discount off our list price."

Welcome solidly to Enterprise Sales if you adopt this path, which has it's own set of challenges vs. e.g. selling to teachers directly. There are quite a few enterprise software companies which make good money. Some of them even produce good software, too.
Obviously, you haven't played with anything that uses autotools, have you? :)

> it's partially a case of "Why should I bother, I can't see the source."

I used to think this too.

Then I noticed that my Ubuntu 10.04 machine exhibits hard-lock like symptoms anytime I make -j. I know approximately what the problem is: the kernel scheduler isn't giving enough time to the UI while it does this, but, even with source, it isn't something I can fix trivially. Just reading the source and seeing where it happens doesn't do anything to make me feel better. It shouldn't ever happen. Period.
Elaborating: some things that are simple in a fixed layout can become very difficult in fluid ones.

Two brief examples:
1. Try embedding a YouTube video into a fluid layout. You'll need a JavaScript solution to remove the ugly black bands that will appear above and below your video.
2. IE 6-8 do not support media queries, which form the basis for fluid layouts. When we relaunched MogoTix in March 2011, I had to include a jQuery script to get IE to understand media queries (that script is now included by default in the 1140px grid at cssgrid.net).

If anyone has questions about implementing a fluid layout, feel free to ask.
Scala Powers AMD Embedded Mdina Media Players
The easy solution is to segment easily deduplicated data from 'private' data. Perhaps sufficiently deduplicated data doesn't count against your quota. (as amazon does with music)
> (in addition to being downvoted for the TRUTH),

How do you know why he's being downvoted? I'd guess that he's being downvoted for his ignorant bigotry towards "hillbillies".

> He's outraged at the situation ..., so I think it's understandable.

Sorry, but outrage, legit or not, is not an acceptable excuse for slaming people who have nothing to do with whatever it is you're outraged about.
Is PG wearing two collared shirts at the same time?

/offtopic
Ask HN: Have "tech" job perks spread to other sectors in the Valley?
I don't live near SV, but I always read about the philosophy of giving employees freedom and small perks (good food, nice break rooms, pets at work etc.) that make people want to be at work. It always seems that it is tech companies embracing this.

I'm curious whether other companies in SV/Bay Area that aren't in tech are creating a more flexible and comfortable work environment to compete for the same pool of workers.

My hypothesis is that workplace perks at, say a parts manufacturer that employs many electrical engineers, should be much better in SV than other areas of the country due to competing for the same workers with companies that go above and beyond the standard water cooler and donuts.

People in the know, tell me where I'm wrong or right.
At which point you've already wasted $10,000 of someone else's money.

There's also the good ol' sunk cost fallacy. The longer you've spent working on your dumb business plan, the less likely you are to change it to a smart business plan.
[Note: I run Debian on my laptop and servers. And I use Gnome 3! <ducks>]

>Well from an outsider look I'd say the problem is the
>majority of businesses are running Windows and have reasons
>not to move off Windows.

[I understand that you soften this later, but...]

This is not a Bad Thing. I certainly would say that MS has used some nasty tactics to gain dominance, but more power to them if they provide value to customers.

Personally, I don't see the value in the ROS project. MS provides a product that people use on servers and that's fine. The ROS team's calories would be much better expended helping Linux improve.

> its also completely true that Linux and Unix is completely rubbish
> at certain things Windows excels at.

I'd love an example here. AFAIK, ROS is basically a server OS and I'm not aware of any places that Windows demolishes Linux/Unix in the server arena (except in the I've-got-an-army-of-Windows-IT-folks department).
IOS After Android (what's been copied by Apple from Android)
:) No, because it's followed by 'var serverRoot = "http://disrupt.flickmunk.com;.

It's nothing personal though because it's giving me a blank screen as well. For some reasons the movie list returns empty. Anyway, it wasn't meant for public use at this point…
How bugs per line of code is similar to traffic deaths per car
Yeah, it's almost like there are truths that aren't empirically verifiable!

Oops, I forgot: reductionism is the modern dogma. Carry on.
>"There is no room for skepticism about what my model predicts will happen in the future!"

Can you show me an instance of someone espousing this position?
There is a great big giant humongous gap between something that sounds good in an editorial and something that actually does something useful

I am reminded of "politician's logic" from Yes Minister.

1. Something must be done.

2. This is something.

3. Therefore, we must do this.
The real success here - if it is successful - will be convincing readers that have previously had free (for registered users) access to Boston Globe content at Boston.com to pay $208/yr simply for the new interface. It will be the same content, with a few exceptions, simply rehosted at a new site with a new URL.

If they're able to convert even a subset of their current audience over, journalists everywhere will rejoice.
Objective-C, C#, D language: Winners in programming popularity
Tips for Improving Web Content Usability
I often wonder why there is so little interest in a high level language that would compile to pure C++, with a syntax that makes code more succinct and friendlier, just like CoffeeScript compiles to JavaScript. We have a clear problem: higher level languages make programmers more productive, but they have performance issues. Because of those, developers that need performance fall back to C++ (look at videogame development, C++ is there to stay).

So why not make a language that is high level, but compiles to pure, cross platform, C++? Think of the productivity win: a higher level language that rarely needs optimizations. Obviously it would have to come with some lower level semantics, like memory management (although it could maybe be solved somehow like Apple did with Automatic Reference Counting, which is basically a preprocessor) or static typing (although the compiler can sometimes be instructed to guess the type, see the := operator in ooc [1]), but even if some lower level semantics are unavoidable, it still seems like a huge win. Yet every time I saw the idea mentioned online it's been either mostly ignored or treated as stupid idea, and the very few projects that attempted to go in that direction never took off. Maybe I'm missing something? If so I'd love to know what it is.

No matter how fancy and awesome higher level languages are, we keep going back to C++ for performance, and that's probably never going to change (at least until processors are stupidly fast). So why not make it easier? The CoffeeScript approach has largely been proven to work.

[1] http://docs.ooc-lang.org/language/syntax.html#declarations (note that ooc is a good step in this direction, it compiles to C99, but then takes step back: it depends on a garbage collector)
He likes to do that a lot, see http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/25/absolute-must-watch-office-...
Would you like it in those exact words, or would you settle for something functionally equivalent?

If you want those exact words then it'll probably take me a while to dig up. If you want something functionally equivalent go watch Al Gore's movie.
Missing many frameworks (JSONKit, for example), and no ability to add them to the database! Also lacking license.
I do hope that whoever knows him personally points out just how unprofessional those emails were.
7 major food items that India imports
The rising middle income groups of consumers in India and their spending patterns on consumption related items have resulted a faster rising imports demands of the country.
OK, so look ten years ahead into the future. Let's say you're a middle-class American right now. How are you going to double your energy consumption?

Is your home going to take twice as much energy to heat? No. If anything, it'll take less as increasing energy prices make insulation pay off even sooner.

Is your gadget collection going to take twice as much energy? Probably not. TVs are getting more efficient as a side effect of other issues. As your computers go portable they have to consume less energy unless batteries get better in a way they aren't likely to in 10 years. What will a 2021 home computing device do with 200 watts? (Other than "explode".)

Are you going to passively consume energy by, say, buying a new car? For all we bitch about quality, a lot of the big ticket items are lasting longer than ever before. A 100,000 mile car used to be a cantankerous beast, and a sort of badge of honor for the skillful owner who kept it running. Now it might not need replacing for a long time after that if you just feed it oil on the recommended schedule. And in general the acquisition of "stuff" seems to be slowing down and will continue to slow down; media collections that were once walls of books and plastic VCR tapes are now downloads and some bits on a disk.

What would you do with twice the energy budget, if you're already a middle-class American?

It is true that economic activity has been correlated to energy output, and it's a bit soon to start shutting down the oil companies. But there's an ever-increasing amount of economic output being done in the form of knowledge (of how to build better cars, etc), and in just-plain-bits, and we can have a looooot of such output for not very many terawatts. I expect that we are probably going to see the peak mass-energy-resource-environment-consumption per person in the US peak in the next 10 years, then start inexorably trending downwards for a very long time after that. (As others observe, this is not an announcement of that peak, but I think we're going there.)

Incidentally, that's one of the interesting questions to ask of anyone who ever mentions the Kardashev scale... what exactly is the civilization doing with the entire output of the Galaxy, assuming it also basically has perfectly efficient manufacturing and computing processes? It's a mindblowing question. But in the meantime we mere humans don't appear to me to have infinitely unbounded energy desires.
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I can't remember the last time I had to install a driver using anything other than apt-get or yum on my Linux desktop or laptop -- although I do have a hand configured xorg.conf that I've been using for years. The majority of drivers are available with the kernel, and those that are not and are popular are packaged up by the distribution maintainers.
No better way to understand database transactions in Java
Android.SkotGat — Android news, app reviews, roundups and how-tos
Same, had no problem until I read the edit. I'm not an evangelical and certainly have my qualms with them, but I have some serious issues with bugsy's characterization. Living in the (mainland) US, you are exposed to many Christians of many denominations, and I don't know of a significant group yet that can be characterized as entitled, lazy, mad, etc. That may be an appropriate characterization for some of their oppressive false priests, but it definitely doesn't apply to the generality of congregants of any major religious group in the US of which I am aware.
For one thing, the article is not suggesting that the climate change hypothesis is based on some random simulations that someone came up with (it's based on an incredibly rich amount of observational data, see final point below). He's talking about a hypothetical discovery, and he uses very careful words to describe it:

"Let’s say we studied computer models of the influence of excessive greenhouse gases, verified them through observations, then had them peer-reviewed and published in Science." (my emphasis)

Secondly, I don't find your counter-argument to climate change very convincing:

- There is overwhelming evidence that the world is heating up dramatically and at an accelerating pace, whether or not you agree that the cause is man-made (cf. Gruber, http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/09/07/krugman-shape-of...). If it's due to some other cause, what is said cause? Why has no one suggested any credible alternative?

- If you are of the "it's not us, it's something else" camp, this website does a great job laying out the reasons why so many scientists (~95%) believe that climate change is human-caused: http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-basic.htm (already linked somewhere in this thread).
Leather Lace Up Boots
Skepticism is good, and there are no absolute-certainties, but here I think skepticism is the wrong word.

It is remarkably similar to the evolution "debate". The theory of evolution fits all the evidence seen and makes predictions that can be tested successfully.

I accept the theory of evolution and I'm not sceptical about it. However, if a new theory came along that explained things even better I'd be happy to accept that change. The fact I'm prepared to change doesn't make me sceptical.

It's the same with climate change. If a new theory came along that explained the climate behaviour better than what we have now then I'll accept that.

There is a point where balance-of-probabilities becomes so strongly weighed one way that you end up in a discussion more about the nature of "a fact".

Realistically your scepticism is probably better reserved for things like predictions of the details of what climate change will mean. There isn't consensus about that yet (beyond "not good"), and the range of predictions is quite striking.
I'm really curious why you're not using LAPACK or ScaLAPACK for this. They were created specifically so that you would get the best possible performance regardless of which language you're using or which architecture you're running on.
I was definitely looking for a Google Maps-like experience. In addition to what you said, I'd like to the place description to not cover the destination, so that I can keep track of where it is on the map.

Also, clicking the search box doesn't clear the existing text. I ended up clicking multiple times before realizing that the window wasn't frozen.
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The problem with this is that the data which you want to de-dupe are the big files that everyone has a copy of; files like mp3s, videos, etc. Unfortunately these are the same files that users are most likely to not want the RIAA/MPAA to know about and keep private.

The short version of all of this is that Bitcasa can't actually pull off what they are claiming and still maintain any user security/privacy.
A mini review of some Android dev tools: ACRA, BugSense, Scoreloop, OpenFeint
I was a little disappointed in the point where he said he rewrote it in 15 hours, and was 75% lighter code... and didn't explain why.

Makes me think is think a few things...

- the original code was bloated and needed a rewrite anyway, and hence was performing badly. Most importantly having written lots of code that has evolved myself over the years... I have taken my own code (written in the same language) and cleaned them unto be half the size of they where before hand.

- The closure rewrite was incomplete as compared to the scala version and totally invalidates his comparison

- would the out of memory issue and performance difference be solved by not using actors with known memory leaks and swapping to akka.

Would love a follow up on this as I'm slowly learning scala as a hobby ATM
Yup, the cookie isn't limited to your path. What's even worse, when logged in you can edit any page:

http://deadsimple.me/foobar/?edit
i would not use it in future projects, myself, because my company is currently using it in several products in several different ways, and it has been nothing but headaches, problems, etc..

the theory behind the thing is great. in reality, its buggy and not fun to work with.
Hi, I'm working on both of them! If you find anything else, feel free to use Github issues
If they want some "People on the fringe of science" to be quoted as "opponents of their work", they should try saying that the existence of a diamond planet 4000 light years away from the earth is a proof that God did not create the universe or some such.

But to me, it does not seem a well-thought blog. Who says a "scientific-method" that works for identifying the structure of a planet 4K light years away would also work for climate on earth?
HTML5 Adoption Might Hurt Apple's Profit, Research Finds CIO.com
Funny. It was so patently obvious that PG was holding back on a couple of the startups today. One was positioning itself as "Google Maps but better." PG recommended the company focus on something Google wasn't doing well, so that "...at least then [they'd] be hanging on the cliff by a finger, rather than in free fall."
Your Idea, Done By Another
The original Scala code was written back in November 2009. Akka wasn't really the "accepted production solution" back then. There's no question that it is _today_.

We used actors to create a pool of workers in order to run some slow processes in parallel. The simplest equivalent in Clojure was to run the processes via pmap. Cheap, quick and very effective. We didn't have as much control over the parallelism but it didn't really matter for our use case.

We had about 1,000 lines of Scala that we'd developed as we learned Scala. Today we have more experience in Clojure than we did in Scala back then. Writing 260 lines of Clojure with the Scala code as a guide took a couple of days, including writing a new set of unit tests.

Learning enough about Akka to migrate to it would have taken us some time - and would still have left us with three languages in the mix. By replacing this Scala code with Clojure, we only had two languages in the mix, which was also a win.
The Colocation Hosting Solution
Cloud computing, web hosting, and even reseller web hosting all have to rely on the power of a single server. A company can ship a their server to a data centre located in a different place
"whoever knows him personally" = "their boss"

"points out just how unprofessional those emails were" = "fires them"

?
are global average temperatures increasing on a decade-to-decade timescale?" and "is climate change at least partly due to human activity?

Yes. See page 3 of http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2009/bams-s...

"is climate change at least partly due to human activity?"
"is the observed change in climate due primarily to anthropogenic factors?"

These might be different questions but the answer is the same. Yes. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-advanced.htm, in particular these quotes:

The late-twentieth-century warming can only be reproduced in the model with anthropogenic forcing (mainly GHGs), while the early twentieth-century warming is mainly caused by natural forcing in the model (mainly solar).

Our results show significant anthropogenic warming trends in all the continental regions analyzed.

I don't believe that there is consensus around how bad a problem this will be in the future (beyond "bad").
LogicTask goes into Alpha
Thanks, I hired a designer for that
Clearly you have not been paying attention.
Disenthrall
Your Invention Assignment Clause Is Killing Your Company
Fatherhood depletes testosterone, study finds
How does that Gandhi quote go? :P
Well. This seems kind of self-obvious to me. But I don't live in a programmer-heavy culture.

Statistically speaking, most people are not programmers. So to have a broader influence and communication ability beyond our particular subculture of geeks and techies, we have to be able to ably communicate our ideas and concepts in ways that relate to them and make sense to them. The engineering world is full of brilliant people who do not have the people skills to communicate ideas (aka influence) to others.

People like purchasers, salespeople, teachers of your children (if you have any), your family, your managers and executives, the plumber who fixes your toilet, your stockbroker: the list runs on and on. People who really matter to your existence, but don't live in the same technical space you do.

I consider it a grave strategical error in one's career to shut out non-programmers.

But, I am (relatively) young. Time will tell if I am incorrect or not.
No, your choice to participate in society by earning or spending money does however constitute consent to be taxed.

If you do not want to be taxed, don't participate in society.
This is cool. I will have to try it.