skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When a company playing catchup says "comparable", they generally mean "not quite as good as".

So it still seems an odd mix of messages to me.
http://iphonedevcentral.org/home.php

http://www.iphonesdkarticles.com/
Should team up with http://en.literateprograms.org/
Advertising agencies warn of tough year ahead
I run the theory of computing blog aggregator (http://feedworld.net/toc/). P =? NP "solutions" show up on there every couple of weeks. The community basically just ignores them because of the virtual certainty that it is flawed. Here is a meta-page discussing the attempts: http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm
Commodore Basic as a Scripting Language for Unix and Windows
> it's just my yearning for those days of daring frugality, when a byte was worth fighting for.

Which I certainly share :-) I borrowed a ZX-80&ZX-81 and then got my own Spectrum...

Perhaps buy yourself an NSLU-2 http://www.nslu2-linux.org/, they're pretty cheap, low power devices with 1 ethernet and 2 usb ports. There's good support for plugging lots of things into the usb ports (you can stick a usb hard drive or flash stick in for storage, usb sound card for media player, printer server, etc). Just don't expect them to do too much (the CPU isn't powerful).

I use one as a low-power 'always on' file/ssh/git server.

And you can then once more have fun writing software which will run well in a restricted memory environment :-)
I know it's not completely what you asked, but I'm with the OP - the one thing I missed the most in my one year in Windows-land last year, was the command-line shell. Everything you can do on a Linux machine, you can do in the shell

Two days ago I was handed a CD with some fonts on it, and needed to get an overview of them - two lines of commands, right in the shell, took me maybe 20 minutes, to generate a HTML page with a PNG sample of each font.
I've had to do that with regard to weight training before, I didn't think it was something that could be generally applied though!

Thanks for the tips, kaens. I will certainly keep them in mind in the future.
Though after reading the paper it seems like gibberish.

Weird prank though since it seems fairly elaborate.
Leibniz ∫ums It All Up
Tapping the Vortex for Green Energy
All things don't have to be practical. There's a lot of insight in knowing the theory, because it's the theory that everything is built upon. Knowing something about complexity theory gives one insight into how problems relate to each other and how complex they are - vital if you are solving problems.

And even if you don't use the theory, it still gives a better understanding fundament. For example, if you understand computability theory, you'll understand why your Java compiler can never determine if your program can halt or not (or any other interesting property of the program), and why you have to use static analysis to give an approximative answer.

And "theory" can be used in practice, an example is Google page rank algorithm which would have been hard to brute force without a good understanding of linear algebra.
This kind of environment is tailor-made for making absolute fortunes...
Amazing piece. It makes me feel sorry for all those fish out there, stuck in tanks... and all the people in similar positions as well. I've spent my entire life trying to avoid prisons, whether it's a job I can't get out of or a really long-term commitment (military service not withstanding... although after nearly 6 years I'm really starting to feel that one)

While I can't speak for all programmers, I must admit that I have a very high demand for adventure -- or at least routinely changing circumstances. I don't like to be "safe" or "secure" and I don't like starting adventures that I know will end. Perhaps that's why programming appeals to me so much; no matter how much I learn or try there will always be more. There's no way for a person to "master programming" in general because there are just way too many adventures out there to ever finish them all.

Of course, the ultimate adventure that will end is life itself. Then again, I guess that one is supposed to end. Otherwise we'd never have a reason to start truly living in the first place.
I clicked it, and then I wanted to know how my clicking compared to other people. Unfortunately, there are no stats.
you seem to think all these companies will welcome Yahoo with welcome arms. You're dreaming.
Former AOL Exec Raises Funding For Sports Blogs Network
Project Playlist May Boast A New CEO, An Ex-Facebooker
As a big flickr fan, I'd hate to see it "monetized." At least, not beyond raising the price of a Pro membership. I'd have no problem paying something in the range of $40-80 (though I think the lower part of that range would probably make more sense in terms of the market).
The voting of HN users will never be relevant to my opinions.

I have needed to use the concepts in my job, and I'm pointing out that these are really not what computer science is about. Anybody who focuses on algorithmic efficiency based off speed is looking at the bark of a tree and failing to recongize that the forest is being cut down.

Our problems with CS have become wider and bigger and different. We are having to deal with abstractions of very complex behaviour, and N vs NP, even though it should be understood, is not something that needs to be focused on in-depth in most programming activities today.

NP problems are not 'incredibly common' in most programming activities. They are common in most programming fields, just as molecules are common in most human beings, but it does not mean that all human beings have to bio scientists.

The reason I am arguing against this N-NP name dropping is that I believe that to properly evolve in computer science, we need to abstract away the details and focus on the bigger picture. For that to happen, we WILL need a generation of programmers that should not need to know this stuff. Just like many new programmers do not know assembler.

You're obviously preaching to the choir here, so lots of people will agree with you. But I am convinced that the only path forward we have is by wrapping complexity in aggregates, so that programmers can create even more complex machines. We need to get rid of the details for a certain class of high level programmers, otherwise we will not be able to break out of the existing models we have.
Let's say you wanted to write a CD burner program using the lowest level APIs provided by your OS. Which CS theories would you say would be applicable to such a task?
Sending the coordinates is the standard http behavior in the case of image submit buttons.
I think we turned what was an innocent and perhaps true remark to a certain degree(people like to namedrop it) into a quarrel here.

I'm not saying that computer science is all day P vs NP philosophy. I'm just saying that you have to know complexity and algorithm theory to work in the field just as you have to understand the hardware, you might get by most of the time without it but when you don't, if you don't even know where to start, you'll have a mountain to climb rather than a little tree.

* However your remark about how this should be abstracted away and people shouldn't have to know it in the same way people don't have to know assembler now, that's not the same thing at all.
Word Cheat, a simple Ruby anagram engine
Guide for Online Businesses Who Want to Accept Credit Cards (and not get ripped off)
The Worlds No 1 VoIP Service Provider - Mobile VoIP, PC to Phone, VoIP Phone, FreeTxT
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It's still early days, but myself and Dan Grigsby launched http://www.mobileorchard.com/ a couple of weeks ago.

We already have an iPhone developers' podcast (first episode is an interview with Hampton Catlin, who's selling 1000 copies of his app each day) and are trying to link to interesting iPhone developer related stuff over time. It's getting better each week :) You can also follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MobileOrchard

As an example of what we have, try: http://www.mobileorchard.com/9-places-to-publicize-your-ipho... - 9 places to publicize your iPhone app :)
This is at the same level of madness as "I am rich" iPhone application except that application had a cost model to it unlike this one...
What is up with the giant, irrelevant photos in between each item? Is this a new blogging fad?
Annals of Sociology: Red sex, Blue sex
>I suspect Christmas sales will be very disappointing for Sony.

Man, the way things look right now, I suspect Christmas/Holiday sales will be bloody horrible for pretty much anybody. Tough to have consumer frenzy when everybody's wallowing in red ink. Somebody better come up with an amazing must-have thing, or the media better change their strategy of scaring people to sell news.
I find complexity theory to be extremely important to CS students. In fact, complexity theory is exactly what differentiates the good programmers from the bad programmers. Not that they use an asymptote in their day-job, but because they have an inherent knowledge of the cost of an algorithm. Now of course, in practice it might be the "bad" algorithm that wins because N is small enough. It often is.

But the masters inherently know when they need to switch to a more complex algorithm with a better bound. You can't get that without understanding of complexity theory.

There are several really interesting problems that people might want an algorithm for which lies in the NP space. Granted, most ${STANDARD} programming is not about the solution to such problems. But then again, it was not the intention that people skilled in theoretical CS should use their time on such problems. In this sense, the theoretical people tend to be far far ahead the "real world".
swombat, hapless,

you both hit the nail :o).
Our management disappears and/or does not care about software. We got a young guy with little experience, who has to run the software configuration control business and he gets rather frustrated.

So we developer are somehow self-organizing. This is a problem in some cases, but it is also terrific in others.

That is the reason why I asked. How do you do it? Your managers don't shut the door and do it for you. They need developers expertise, right?

Oh, yes. You may wonder how this can survive? We develop for a scientific project. So our managers are scientists (like the developers). Although we have some very smart developers in the project, management is not among the talents of most scientists.
NASA's Phoenix Mission Faces Survival Challenges
Math graduate who knows some complexity theory here. I don't understand the paper and can't even say it's legit. Explanations, anyone?
That statement doesn't even make any sense. Linux is a kernel. .NET programs are run in userspace. The two cannot, as far as I can tell, be even tangentially related, unless you're trying to call .NET some sort of kernel API?

Or is this that definition of "Linux" that people love these days, which is "whatever free software operating system distribution I happen to be most annoyed with this week"?
The low level API calls that you make, make use of the OS scheduling. But you may claim that you can be agnostic to this fact. On the other hand optimizing your code to run efficiently can be done either using your gut feeling, or by understanding the complexity of your code, to make it run faster, with fewer calls, and optimal buffer usage. Would that suffice as an answer to your question?
You know what would be a better experience for my mother?

If she turned on her PC, and a browser appeared, instantly, and there were no other applications, OS updates, viruses, or anything like that to worry about. Just a browser, from which she can search, read, edit, print, and then turn off again.
Punched cards: One of the biggest breakthroughs in programming history
What if you add the constraint that the user has a library of a N songs and you wanted to fill the CD completely for a road trip?

An approximate solution would work for the above but you can see how easily it pops up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem

Complexity theory is the coolest thing I've learned. I think thats why people study it - they don't particularly care about the practicality of their work. Which is ok. Breakthroughs and connections are often unexpected (It's hard to discuss cryptography without understanding it), so you might as well let the smart people do whatever they feel like in academia than declare x,y,z to be the 'real' issues people are facing that should be solved - we have the market/industry for that.

Incidentally, I wasted a lot of time thinking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_problem in high school - I was trying to figure out how to make the A-side and B-side of a mix tape of equal length.
Digital Equipment answers a user's complaint that the year 2000 should not be a leap year.
What does it mean for something to be true and provable in a simply consistent extension B" of B ?
PowerShell is ok, but not so hot.
Infrastructure 2.0: The Feedback Loop Must Include Applications
Wow. What a flame war going on over here!

Care to explain that some? I've only poked around a little with PowerShell, but it freaking looks like it could do anything. It's modular, extensible, threaded, and has this huge library base.

I'm not defending -- I don't know that much about it except my initial impressions. Just curious as to why you would say that.
Why does Google have FF, just because Google search is the default on the search box? I always change mine to Yahoo.
hell yeah!!! go cocotron!
sproutcore, cappuccino, and now cocatron!! I might one day soon be able to address the majority and not have to leave my Mac ;)
Commodore BASIC actually was my first experience with a scripting language (and my first experience doing any programming at all a few years before).

When I was about 12, or thereabouts, I operated a BBS that ran the Color 64 BBS software, which was an assembly core with BASIC scripting. The assembly core made it just fast enough to serve out to a 2400 baud modem, and the BASIC scriptability made it really easy to add new games and features, and without having to restart the whole system (BASIC with line numbers allows overwriting of lines by using the same number...so, it's like a LISP machine...if you squint really hard, and hit yourself in the head a few times). The fact that a program could be both BASIC and assembly was something altogether novel to me. Of course, now I know that UNIX guys had been doing it for years, but at the time I'd only ever seen programs written entirely in assembly or entirely in BASIC. Never one that was a seamless combination of the two.

I still have the Color 64 manual and floppy disk. It was hand-bound and printed on a dot matrix printer. I could never bring myself to get rid of it, in the numerous cleanings over the past 20 years. And I think the reason is that it taught me something that has stuck with me all these years (that one should use the right tool for the job--not necessarily the one that is "fastest" or most popular or the same as everything else in the toolchain).

Now that I think of it, I'm wondering if it actually extended the BASIC syntax (making BASIC a DSL for BBS software, of sorts), or if it just did the networking in assembly and rerouted standard IO from BASIC to the modem. If the former, I think I owe some more props to the author of Color 64 (above and beyond the $50 I paid for the software 20 years ago...though that was when $50 meant something...it'd be like six grand in today's dollars).
Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7
Malicious Spam On The Rise
Yahoo begs world+dog for free engineering
So Zed Shaw is dramatically less of an asshole than I'd always assumed based on his vitriolic writings. He's gone to far greater lengths to help this guy than most folks would in such a situation.

I'll point out that this sounds very much like Matt suffers from schizophrenia. I know this illness well as someone very close to me suffers from it, and when unmedicated behaves pretty much exactly like that. That's not to say the situation is any less dangerous, but probably not because someone is going to kill Matt--more likely because he'll get himself into dangerous situations because of his dramatic misinterpretation of events. Schizophrenics without friends and family to help keep them out of trouble, and medicated as necessary, often wind up in prison.

If my from afar diagnosis has any basis in reality (which it very well may not--I'm not a psychiatrist, and I only know what the website told me), the fact that Zed posted all of this information will very likely be taken as a sign that Zed, formerly a "friend" worthy of trust in a dangerous situation, is now Matt's enemy. Family and lifelong friends are not immune to this effect, so I'm certain a random stranger who wrote some nifty software won't be. Anything said or done that doesn't match precisely the worldview of a schizophrenic is viewed with suspicion, and very often the worldview changes from minute to minute as the mind flits from one misinterpretation to the next. This may explain why Zed can't get in touch with him: Zed is obviously part of the conspiracy, and his trying to call him frequently merely confirms it (there is no "right" action here; Zed certainly hasn't done anything wrong, it's just the way things go in the mind of a schizophrenic).
The license for OS X Server lets you run it virtualized. I don't remember if they have actually released the products yet, and I'm too lazy to look, but both Parallels and Vmware have been working on it.
It shouldn't take more than a few seconds to determine most non-urgent calls aren't urgent and transfer them somewhere else.
When I was a child (8-10 y) I used to collect them, my parents worked in a computer facility with lots of room-sized computers. Ah, good times... :)
Cairo Activists Use Facebook to Rattle Regime
How about a flat panel tv showing first person perspective footage of walking around beautiful green places? Central park comes to mind...

Any recommended dvds?
Building an installer isn't so difficult anymore. NSIS and similar installer builders are really easy to learn and very stable. Windows has many flaws, but the whole install/uninstall system works remarkably well in practice.

It's far more difficult to create RedHat RPM packages and Debian packages and so forth.

But 20% of all manpower? That seems a bit much.
Yahoo Opens YOS to Developers
Hulu's Formula for Success - TV Content With Fewer Ads (and user say)
That's not real CS.

Ahem, you mean it's not real software engineering. SE != CS.
Calories Do Count
Best Yegge essay in quite a while; illuminating and to the point.
Knock Knock Who is it? Microsoft Windows 7.
You sound so confident of that. Try to find who my parents are. I've been on the Internet since 1994. I have a trail 14 years long. I'll give you some keywords for the past ten or so: squid, webmin, texas, joe cooper (and the obvious "swelljoe").

Good luck. (And, if you do happen to figure out where my parents are or their names, no need to post that data. I'll trust that your google fu is above and beyond the merely mortal. I will also be deeply impressed, because I couldn't find the barest of clues in the couple of minutes I searched...I really wondered, "Is it that easy to track down someones family?")

Edit: So some folks have decided to take me up on the challenge, which is fine with me. But I will make a humble request that you not actually call or email any of my friends, family, or acquaintances. If you think you've got a lead, just let me know via email and I'll tell you if it would result in an answer or another solid lead. (So far, no one actually has figured out any friends or acquaintances to call, and no one has gone beyond a virtual search, as far as I know. I'm just thinking proactively. The Internet does strange things sometimes.)
Review my startup - Plura Processing: Web Traffic = Grid Computer
"Linux" is used here as "a linux distro" (which was pretty clear). Is there a runtime for a linux distro that is better than .NET?
Hey guys, we just launched our private beta for Plura.

I submitted our game page as the HN link, but www.pluraprocessing.com has more general information.

Take a look and tell me what you think. We've been paying our alpha affiliates for months now and are ready to take on a much larger pool of affiliates in our beta. "Affiliates" are the people that put Plura on their site, browser game, or other content (even download apps) and get paid for their user time.
A better option, which seems to be what Yahoo is already doing with their open apis and such, would be to aim to become a de-facto platform for people to build new start-ups - to expand the market of "creating an online business" and be right in the middle of that market.
I respectfully disagree. For what it's worth:

The entire yahoo should focus on building a better advertising system than google. I believe they have the tools to do it. Google pushes ads to you by crawling your site and determining what ads should be displayed. What I want, and I believe others would too, is a method of pulling ads to your site completely programmatically. To do this, we would need to be able to classify links, and this is where the power of tagging comes in. My four steps:

1. Programmatic "pull" advertising retrieval with complete control.
2. Dynamic ads for single-page applications.
3. Integrate delicious into yahoo itself (e.g. have "tag this" buttons for each search result, and show tag clouds/related tags in search). Make these tags easily obtainable in real time for any website that wants it, which would be required for the "pull" model to work.
4. Integrate flickr into yahoo for the same reasons.

Advertisers will switch, because even as lower rates are on yahoo currently, you will have greater contextual ads and greater results with site visitors. You know your site better than google!

Advertisers want to be working on a mixed model. Google provides a push advertising model. Yahoo could provide a mixed model, providing push + pull at the sites discretion. I believe if they do this they could take back the lead. And, they have a unique advantage at the moment: delicious and flickr.
Good example. I don't dispute the fact that the command line makes it easier to do some tasks. I've had cygwin installed for a while now and I use the command line a lot but its power on native linux may be much more.

As you said though, it doesn't really answer my question. I'd genuinely like to know what is poor at API level.

For example, I could easily write a small utility that would display all the fonts on the CD. It would take an hour or so but the API's should let me do that (disclaimer: haven't tried it).
FTA: "Although one can never be sure of what will
happen at some future time, there is strong historical precedent for presuming that the present Gregorian calendar will still be in effect by the year 2000. Since we also hope that VMS will still be around by then, we have chosen to adhere to these precedents."

The writer proved remarkably prescient but,alas, Digital Equipment Corporation was not there to greet the new millennium.
according to readwriteweb it will include js,html, and silverlight, as one would expect.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_office_comes_...
Whenever I want to see if a prospective employer is a complete hack I drop some of those letters and see if they think their irrelevant.
Creativity?
http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enNZ291...
google: ajax counter.