skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think your subset sum problem (the rock piles) is decent. However, for it to be useful I think you have to make it clear which class it is in (NP) and why (it is easy to check a solution and 2^n is not polynomial in n).
IKEA’s Billy Bookcase: The Real Story
I don't use Picasa or Reader so this was not an issue for me. Strange the way that each system seems to behave differently.
At least link to some digestible summary of the issue, not to some propaganda video.
Ubuntu 11.10 Beta and Unity: Mixed Verdict
Isn't it meta-ironic for a style guide to use MS Comic?
Video: the first episode of Bloomberg's "TechStars"
In Emacs:

M-x htmlfontify-buffer
or
M-x htmlize
That must be why flash, silverlight and all the other 'goodies' are still supported, just not in one particular view.
Not according to the theory, no.
Google didn't feel the need to notify affected developers. On an SEO blog [1] a Google spokesman says that developers should re-apply and wait 5-6 weeks.

[1] http://www.seroundtable.com/adwords-api-tokens-bug-14015.htm...
It's an apples to oranges comparison.

Right back at you.

On the one hand, you're saying that once MS stops actively developing a product, it's over. But on the other hand, you say that anybody can pick up any old open source software that they're interested in?

Why isn't the same logic true for the MS platform? I mean, my copy of the .Net4 installer is just fine. Even if MS decided that the .Net would no longer be developed, what's stopping me from using what's already out there?
I fully agree. A lot of people grow up in a religious bubble (I did) and sometimes it requires bold statements to jar them into doing a little introspection. Defaults are powerful and it takes something equally powerful to cause a person to abandon them. Calling them stupid may seem childish, but it forced me to think about it. After that it only took a day or two to realize how stupid I actually was.
I have the same feeling, that both worlds are appealing. Vim being "Just focus, don't go meta improving your tools your filthy procrastinator" and Emacs being an "comfortable playground". "How is that algorithm again? Let me try something in elisp on the scratch buffer."

I'm trying to use Sublime Text these days (won't ever have Slime to develop Clojure, though).
I'm being downvoted but Dawkin's fellow atheists have also criticised him on this matter:

QUOTE
"Some of Prof Dawkins’s contemporaries are not impressed. Dr Daniel Came, a philosophy lecturer and fellow atheist, from Worcester College, Oxford, wrote to him urging him to reconsider his refusal to debate the existence of God with Prof Craig.

In a letter to Prof Dawkins, Dr Came said: 'The absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part.

I notice that, by contrast, you are happy to discuss theological matters with television and radio presenters and other intellectual heavyweights like Pastor Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Keenan Roberts of the Colorado Hell House'"
/QUOTE

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8511931/Richard-Daw...
I'd be on it if they supported Google apps accounts and not just gmail.
Any suggestions for the type of reports you'd find useful ?
Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft 'to challenge Google for display ads'
Could you explain what you think puts .NET lightyears beyond the JVM? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just curious.
The first thing I did was change the font. Erk.
You can try elvis.
I havent tried it myself, but I heard it being a continuation of viper and vimpulse efforts.
I share most of Dawkin's beliefs on religion but abhor the way he chooses to communicate them.

I'm not sure if it's hit the US but in the UK we have a thing called the Alpha Course. It's a Christian run 10 week course that discussed the "meaning of life" with a slightly (but only very slightly) covert agenda of converting the attendees to Christianity.

My experience (anecdotal) of Alpha is that it does a good job of bringing lapsed Christian's back into the fold - that is people who basically accepted it but weren't practising. For anyone else - those of other faiths, atheists and so on, it doesn't seem to do much. There will be exceptions but that seems to be the general pattern.

I see Dawkins as generally the same for atheists. I doubt very much he has any sort of major influence on Christians (other than to annoy them), he just gives atheists and agnostics a cheer leader and helps them confirm what they're thinking.

Nothing wrong with that of course but he's not engaging in any way that's going to bring about the death of religion which is what he'd seem to like.
I don't see any claim that atheism has it's roots in the 9/11 attacks. The reviewer states "[The rise of the New Atheists] to fame, McGrath suggests, begins with the attacks on 9/11 where radical Muslims turned commercial airplanes into missiles and managed to kill almost 3,000 people." He is referring to the 'rise to fame' of New Atheism. New Atheism and atheism are not synonyms of one another, the former is a member of the set of the latter.

McGrath doesn't tie all atheists to Nazism (as the review might himself be implying), but deals with how the basic arguments of the form "Religion is bad, look at all these religious leaders who have killed people" doesn't work very well for quite a lot of reasons including how it could easily be turned around.

In any case - I McGrath is a well respected intellectual in the UK (Oxford, along with Cambridge is our most prestigious university), and his writing is well worth considering.
Splitting infinitives is done so frequently today that it sounds more natural. Consider:
"I was hoping to completely finish the project before the teacher called on me"
The existence of religious people who claim to be scientists does not prove that religion and science are compatible.
> I can't open a file in vim without :q and running it again with a different argument.

:e filename
That helped keep the water out
I signed up. Loved the simplicity of it all. I also love how I can just sit back and watch what comes through passively without having to go search through stuff. No idea if I'll actually take any projects, but I'm definitely a fan of the interface.
> creation of tools that are usable by the average person with minimal training

Also consider how little the tools people are using have progressed in the past twenty years too.

The fundamental issue might be that there is little incentive for the industry to invest enormous effort to enable an average person to become more productive.

Neither will lessons in a classroom likely narrow the gap to help the average consumer understand the tools.

In the middle industry can sell people software (custom or not) to temporarily solve their immediate issues.
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On Wearing a Suit
That's an interesting counterpoint to my argument that calling people stupid would cause them to stop listening and not consider what's being said. Thanks.
In my case it is more like 5x24GB RAM servers supporting 20 to 50 VMs depending on the load coupled with a very reliable managed NAS for backup. I can start/stop some instances using my provider's "cloud" if needed, but found that in practice, I always have room on my own hardware.

For the reliability, over 10 years of hosting, I cross my fingers, I have not been hit by any major incident. So, my services have something like a 99.96+% availability and up to now, no data loss or things like that.

When reading how much thinking NetFlix had to put in to adjust to the variance in the performance of the VMs/networking/etc. in the cloud (Cf. http://techblog.netflix.com/) I am happy as a very small shop to not have to think too much about this. A bit yes, but not so drastically.

This is why I tend to be happy having "a bit more control" and the current tools like Ganeti are making the management part of the VMs as simple (if not simpler) than with EC2.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the feedback, it kind of confirm that I am not totally stupid. :D
That sounds awful to me. Much better:

I was hoping to finish the project completely
before the teacher called on me.

I agree that sometimes splitting infinitives sound better, but it happens less often than most people think, and to my ear, this is certainly not one of the cases.
I only make up 30% of them
Cool I sent you an email. Cheers, Ryan
I'd argue that religious people chose to not think things through but simply rely on other authorities, and that is stupid behavior.

Also, does stupid mean "genetically hardwired to low intelligence", or can stupid people be made more intelligent somehow?
It would only be a linter if it weren't a compiler. If it compiles language X to language X, it's a compiler. Because it compiles. Rule of thumb: if it compiles, it's a compiler, not a linter. Simple. Like ducks.
I'd have gone for the Pygments lib myself, but fun hack.
I don't believe that's what he meant to imply.

Specifically though, if you decide to record Beethoven's Fifth, which I believe is in the public domain, YOU get a 50 year copyright on your performance of it. Whatever unique aspects of it you added, whatever nuance, that's yours, and belongs to you, licensable, sellable only by you, for the period of 50 years. Nobody else can duplicate your performance exactly, unless in doing so, they are also duplicating the original performance exactly.
There is a lack of rap in these suggestions, and it's a problem. My two entrepreneur-related favorites:

1. "Ima Boss"- Meek Mill Feat. Rick Ross http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4Acfqzpz4

2. "You Ain't Got Nothing On Me" - Lil Wayne ft. Juelz Santana and Fabulous http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5iJ1673r1o&feature=relat...

Anything by Rick Ross or Lil Wayne never fails to get me motivated to do some work.
List of common English usage misconceptions
Regarding 'new atheism' as a movement, this is a pretty good read:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&...

I think that reviewer used the book to push his own viewpoints at the expense of the author, and does him a dis-service.
To be fair, that is something the same as `:TOhtml` in vim. The scripts from the blogpost allow for slightly more -the HTML can be generated and written to a file without the editor actually starting. I imagine this would be useful for automation.
As dragonflee commented on the article, it reads like an ad for dice.com (whatever that is).

Guess the good news is the demand for linux people is growing (if that's true and not just some number bending to get an "article")
There's one option they didn't cover: Pay more.

If a resource your business requires (a human resource) is getting harder to get, then if you pay more, you should be able to attract more resources.
You want Joel to send someone in to give security a slap?
Evolution is guided by the environment. For example, if customers always choose the best-looking pumpkins to take home and eat, and the ugliest ones end up being used for seed, the genes of ugly pumpkins will have more successors in each generation, and pretty soon your crops will consist of ugly pumpkins only. That's the complete mechanism of evolution right there. Would you say the customers unwittingly acted as a guiding force in evolving your population of pumpkins toward ugliness?
If you had final authority over the design of a consumer electronics device, and the engineers told you "we will have to ship this with a battery and two spares, and users will have to change batteries twice daily," would you say "That's good enough for GBOG Devices; start the factories"?
24. Use appropriate font.
Shaker is not a new concept...chk out Cyworld
doubtful. a programmer could spend an entire career in industry and never run into an np complete problem he needed to solve.

i added more examples to the article, and made them as simple and practical sounding as possible, but to be honest my primary interest in the problem is mostly from a theoretical perspective. to me, the idea that P != NP implies a host of bizarre conclusions that seem incredibly unlikely to me. i am so convinced of this that i had it emblazoned my license plate:

http://www.markpneyer.com/wp/about-me/
Sep 07 Update to the SEO vs Social media experiment
> Why isn't the same logic true for the MS platform?

Because they won't publish the source code of discontinued technologies so that others can continue their development.

> my copy of the .Net4 installer is just fine. Even if MS decided that the .Net would no longer be developed, what's stopping me from using what's already out there?

I see you confuse being available (as in "I kept a copy around") with being alive and actively developed. You can't continue to evolve Windows 95 by yourself. That's not true with each and every open-source product or project out there.

BTW, try running your .NET 1.0 installer on an ARM-based Windows 8 machine and tell me if it works.
Some iconic science images, and why they're wrong
I don't know about programming games, or complex applications.

But look how many people work with Excel or similiar - all the kids in Poland learn to use spreadsheets - and this is just purely funcitonal programming language with strange ui.

If they can understand "COUNT.IF" function and referencing cells in expressions - why couldn't they learn to write simple python srcipts.

Programming is easy to learn, hard to master. Most people don't need to learn to write elegant, correctly designed programs that are easy to extend. Most people would benefit from just knowing how to glue together simple scripts to automate what they are doing.

We don't require everybody to learn to write books, but we do want everybody to learn how to write note.
You can animate SVG without JS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVG_animation

CSS3 has similarly patchy support.

I think the worst thing about SVG is the lack of resources.
Is everyone seriously missing the joke(s)?

PS This is hilarious. :)
Vim comes with a syntax highlighting engine for almost every file format anyone ever comes across. Looking at Pygments, it seems to only support programming languages and a few highly-developer-oriented config files.
Microsoft prides itself on extending backwards compatibility as far as it reasonably can. Hence the "legacy" mode that maintains the traditional Windows desktop/UI and support for browser plugins. Everything in new shiny Metro land is a clean start, so it's reasonable to say "We aren't going to support ActiveX controls in the browser anymore" there.
:ToHtml does that natively.

But I can definetly understand the authors decision to chose what he calls "the complicated solution".
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If you're a Christian (as I am), you believe you've got good news to tell others. If you're an atheist, what's good about your news, and what difference does it make to tell anyone?

The reason you think that is because you're only capable of seeing the world from your own perspective (as with anyone).

I'm not religious, and I've always found the universe a thing of great wonder. Nothing would interest me more than a better understanding of the nature of reality and conciousness. However, I find the answers given by religion unsatisfying and arbitrary - hardly good news.

Also, it's very well established that the driving force behind wonder, amazement, desire, love and pain are merely chemical reactions. It's only the subjective experience of those sensations (conciousness itself) that is not well understood.
"sparks? very low signal to noise ratio, poorly integrated."

Poorly thought out, poorly implemented too.

You go to your Stream, and you see the aggregation of all your circles' streams.

You got to Sparks, and you see ... the same six or eight advertisements for canned sparks since the day you joined. How useful is that once you've seen it for three seconds? Yet they spend engineering time and electricity keeping this non-contribution up.

Wouldn't you expect to see the aggregation of your individual sparks when you click on Sparks? Of course you would. It's the same fucking thing as your stream, it's just search instead of posts.

(Yes, I sent feedback on that.)
Unfortunately, with our new s1 core type, it's even easier to DDoS services. ;)

In all seriousness, we've given thought to this issue, and the solution we've found isn't technological. Users who want to use over a couple of hundred cores simultaneously are capped until we've approved them. It's exactly what Amazon Web Services does as well.
Want an easy way to identify people with that passion? Are you willing to pay a bit more?

Most people that start out as developers don't last - they either switch careers or go into management. So when you come across someone who's been in the workforce longer than that but is doing their daily work using a current/bleeding edge technology, you'll know you're looking at someone with the a passion for programming.

Bonus points if the candidate went into management and switched back to coding.

Note that I realize there's a hybrid ... managers that code. They may not be as dedicated to the craft as someone who's switched back to being a full-time programmer but they are fun to work for.
Flash developers usually get a fixed chunk of space to work with and any trick they can use to squeeze 'more UI' out of that same space will be used. If hovering is no longer an option you can expect the size of these blocks to increase to offset the extra real estate required to accommodate all the bits and pieces of the UI.

What is more likely is that the user agent will be detected and that if it is determined that the user has no mouse that either some fall back mode will be used or that there will be an alternative UI preserving the basics will be presented, or a UI that will use the first 'tap' on the screen as a substitute for a hover.
I'd rather that companies who were creating cutting edge technology (software or whatever), would visit schools more often in order to inspire at least one more kid in the classroom to do something creative with their skills than become another banker or lawyer.

When it comes to technical education I think most schools are dreadfully inefficient at teaching children, I haven't met any one who felt particularly inspired by their high school (or equivalent) computer studies course.
I don't see how that relates to what I posted, but to answer your question, I think all human activities do some form of harm at some time.
SMO for Coupon Code Websites – Sections that your Facebook Fan-page must have...
Happy Birthday Pirate Bay, You’ve Just Turned 8 Years Old Today
How to Install Windows 8 via USB Drive
Would his opinion have been any different if metro was the only mode available while undocked and classic PC mode was only available while docked?

Metro looks like it competes with iPad and the rest seems to be a version of Win7 under the hood. It feels to me like cmd is to windows as windows is to metro; something under the hood for power users.

I can imagine taking my computer on the bus and reading hacker news in metro and then when I get to work I plug into a dock and open visual studio. That seems to be the vision and I think I like it.

I'd have to control what was going on in the background of my computer when I was undocked, but if I'm enough of a user to set up background server like processes then I should be clever enough to understand that heavy background processing will eat my battery if I don't act responsibly when I unplug it.

The new more powerful ways to do diagnostics are exactly the type of tools I'd want to be able to control power; so it really feels like MS has a similar vision.
> Have you compared your cost with the cost of running your own cloud on top of dedicated servers from a traditional provider?

For me, using EC2 and other Amazon web services isn't just, or even mostly, about cost. It's also about ease of use, flexibility, reliability and scalability, where AWS wins hands down compared to attempting to replicate the same myself using dedicated servers.

AWS are not primarily in the business of renting servers, they're in the business of selling their operational expertise in building and managing reliable, massively scalable distributed systems, and doing that well is very, very hard.
Vendor lock-in is a bitch.
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Publish like a Pro [Nature]
You wrote that religion is merely a pretense, which I interpreted as religion being not harmful, since it never really causes anything. Dawkins presumably is convinced that religion is harmful.

Even if it is not the root cause for wars (which I can't comment on), I suspect it still enables wars, for example by paying soldiers with empty promises. Therefore I personally would have to agree with Dawkins.
Prohibiting sentence-ending prepositions? "This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put," -- Winston Churchill
Religions are complex systems that can be used for good or evil -- it's the people that choose which. You can find justification for nearly every action in the bible -- but, to do that, I think, is a gross perversion of the overall spirit of Christianity.
Android application development
The operating system is the most important platform that defines a computerized technological product. There are several kinds of operating systems available in the market from the most basic ones to the most advanced ones. The development of an operating system is not that an easy task. It requires a well refined skill set.
Awesome work Colin! I've been wanting to do something like this with analytics for a while. In terms of stuff to add, look at making the reports actionable.

Like for example on the browser report, what percent of users are coming to the site on a "mobile" device? If it's x %, then you should have a mobile optimized site.

Also, think about use cases. If I'm a blog site, I probably want to know "What are my most popular articles?". If I run a SAAS site, I probably want to see something like cohort metrics about my customers.

I wouldn't recommend letting users add their own reports for the short to medium term. I would come up with a few views of GA data that people are willing to pay for.
If you want to use CSS3 tools, even those that are widely supported across browsers, you often have to code up the same effect 3/4/5 times with slightly different syntaxes.

Or you can wait a little until the standard goes through and the syntaxes are unified.

If you want to use HTML5 elements, even just the simple semantic ones, you need to incorporate backward compatibility fixes for IE before version 9 (which is a very substantial chunk of the browsing public, since WinXP only goes up to IE8).

The target is not the browsing public -- it is your audience. For instance, a site for hackers really doesn't need to support IE<9.

I agree with the <video> problem for sure. There are philosophically and commercially opposed interests involved there.

Firefox still doesn't get basic font rendering right on a lot of platforms, and the current version can't even look up locally installed fonts properly

Could you cite or give examples of these?

Obviously things are still in flux, but we've all learned to deal with bugs in software. We know our own code isn't immune to them, so I think it's too much to expect the platform we're building on to be immune to them either. I don't think bugs reflect negatively on the web standardization process, though.