skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife and my son has one, and I have the same AT&T service on a Razr. I get far better reception. Their calls drop ALOT--way more than I could tolerate. The other features work pretty well, but it seems the iphone is good at everything except being a phone.
So confused! Okay, so Suits suck, tech jobs suck, society sucks... none of these things can stop you from hacking. It's not like your boss comes in and steals your computer / paint set / circuit board while you're asleep. I guess I'm missing the value-add here, especially since there are "tryouts."
Thanks!

Yes, the 2d/3d isosurface incremental exploration machinery was all written (exceedingly tight C++) by my whiz-kid development partner.

The challenge is to take an arbitrary equation in a given viewport (2d or 3d cube), find all the satisfying points, and build a displayable mesh (output as OpenGL triangles).

Then, as the user zooms in and out, pans around, etc., the challenge is to rebuild the new mesh intelligently, re-using what you computed so far, including garbage-collecting all the old mesh values, all the while increasing or reducing the mesh density for the given zoom level.

It's a really hard problem he solved extremely well.
Then Scheme is like Go. Interesting like Common Lisp, but more beautiful.
I’m a PC, and I Write Blog Entries
Maybe they could run a VMware appliance with Mac OS X Server (which is legal now)? ;-)
To be honest I wasn't thinking of Haskell when I mentioned "other languages". Haskell has less need for macros for the reasons you mentioned. Lazy evaluation also makes macros unnecessary for creating your own conditionals. For eager-evaluation languages, or languages without such concise syntax for functional composition, macros fill a real need.
So Android phones are going to outsell iPhones?
Well, it's a hard question, because they won't easily come to mind - by definition. If you were 100 years old, this question might be easier.

- IBM had a monopoly on electronic computers (mainframes) for a long time. And, hey, it also had one on "IBM" PCs for a while there...

- Cray supercomputers - there's an excellent example

- The original Apple II computer was a monopoly for a while.

- DEC minicomputers

- SUN microsystem workstations

- Silicon Graphics workstations

- that guy who patented the "car", and everyone licensed it from him (and who Ford challenged and defeated). Although this was a government created monopoly (a patent), it wasn't lost through government intervention. Or is that just semantics.

- Ford mass-produced cars

- General Electric (do they even sell light bulbs anymore?)

Another difficulty with the question is how you define monopoly: "well if you lost it, it wasn't really a monopoly, was it?"
First Visual Image Of A Planet Beyond The Solar System
This looks like it will be an interesting series. The grammar's not great, but hey, my Italian's much worse.

I'm not sure Ikarus is the best choice for diving in, though. PLT's DrScheme is probably the nicest micro-IDE I've used, better than IDLE or any other Python equivalent, and the accompanying textbook makes it easy to get started.

I've been checking Launchpad occasionally to see when Aziz will release Ikarus 0.4 and close the remaining 6% gap between Ikarus and R6RS -- the first 3 releases were quick and well-organized, but since the beginning of this year there's been no hint of what's coming next. The frequent check-ins on his dev branch indicate he's deep in the mines of 64-bit compatibility, but still... I'd be hesitant to use a semi-stealthy project as my reference for learning R6RS.
How do I open a TCP port on a Ubuntu physical machine (host) for a Win virtual machine (guest)?
It might be like facebook apps at the begginning, they were new and cool so alot of people browsed the app directory and since there were few apps, new apps could be noticed and grew

As the app store grows, it might be much harder if your app is buried in the app store somewhere to draw these kinds of sales.

But maybe the app store will accomodate this somehow.
> C# is used by people that develop only on their 9-5, Mon-Fri job.

Heh, my case exactly. ;-)
Why does the person need a job?
Macros haven't flown into mainstream languages, but they've been smuggled in through the back door. C++ templates were not intended to be as useful as they are, but now many of the most powerful C++ libraries use templates as a compile-time metalanguage. Java library developers have also discovered the advantages of the transformation of data into runtime code - except they use XML as the data medium instead of s-expressions, and they use Java reflection to translate the XML instead of using "read" to get a Lisp object.

Ruby and Javascript library authors use the metaprogramming capabilities of their respective languages in combination with XML or JSON or YAML data. Look at ruby on rails, or at jquery.
I have to say, I'm an iPhone user living in Houston, Texas, and AT&T was just a little worse than my former carrier during normal times, but now that we're on a disaster recovery footing, their service stinks! Even two days before the storm, EGDE was unavailable for me to get traffic info like I always get before my return commute. There were also lots of dropped calls, calls whose service degraded until I couldn't understand what the other party was saying, and missed calls that never rang even though I had my phone. The only thing that kept reasonable service consistently throughout was SMS text. I guess that's to be expected during times like this.
Obviously the C# guys are on their yachts or flying their planes at the weekend. The Ruby people would have web access from their security guard jobs.
If everyone adopts Android, then sure!
So... "Apple: Einstein and Gandhi would have loved us" doesn't count?
How can a non-scientist better understand science? Do you know of any good books?
I bet you said that when Microsoft came along and took on IBM.
It's also supposed to rain a lot like Portland, but that hasn't started yet ...

Don't worry, it will. ;)
Unfortunately, there is no analogue to 3 right turns making a left.
Reuters and Hubdub partner for prediction market
The problem with the "Extreme" moniker is specifically: What do you call the next "version"? Squirrelfish Turbo? Super Squirrelfish Extreme? Squirrelfish this?

I think this is why they invented version numbers, but of course, those get annoying after a while too. Isn't that why microsoft went to dates with office?

Squirrelfish 2009
(which of course is released in the summer of 2008)

Its pretty kickass though. I've been reading some of the literature on interpreter design lately because of all this javascript hype. Its really great stuff, and the basics are surprisingly simple to understand. I really love that they post their references along with the posts so we, the adoring public, can do some further reading on how they did what they did.
Hands on: ExitReality, another useless 3D Internet tool
Rephrasing the question then: is SuperPoke worth 5 seasons of 24? Which would you rather collect profits from?
Because there is no funding on the beginning. I’m working on the startup every night after my job for 2-3 hours and on weekends I invest about 8-12 hours. I think it’s better to have an income while you building every thing up, once the company makes money then you can quit your job and do it fulltime.
Yeah, I'm sure CP+B is real upset with their 300MM account.
More psychobabble and pseudo-intellectualism. [Sushi-eating Republican here ...]
When was the last time you first heard of a startup through a paid-for ad? (And then spent money on the service, or clicked on an ad shown by that startup and bought something there?)
The future of gamming is online, and Google knows it!
I say PROBABLY!
I guess it deserved a longer comment, but when you add it all up, the man hours come out much less than you think.
We have a bunch of social features on the web site that need to have very tight integration into the chat server. I just don't see us getting the degree of control we currently have, with an off-the-shelf chat solution.
You can't funnel creativity. For every satellite we send to Mars, there will be 20,000 things like SuperPoke and iBeer, and that's not a problem.
Bit of a non-story, no? The NYT try hard to find something in this, but come up with nothing.
ESPN Programmer Challenge: Football Algorithm = $50,000
Definitely. I sat in on a Flash user group meeting last Wednesday (shouts to any FlashcodersNY folks), where Alan Shaw gave a fascinating presentation on prototype-based inheritance in AS3. One of the tricks he showed off involved having one class add methods to the prototypes of other classes at compile time -- to get the same effect with the Java-like static-typed OO that AS3 <i>appears</i> to encourage, you'd need a veritable bouquet of Command and Factory structures. Instead, sprinkling a little prototype stuff in among the traditional OO allowed this particular trick to rest all in one class.

The same thing applies in a lot of areas of AS3 -- you can write a GoF-y 2001-Java-looking app with self-documenting code and doc comments and blah blah blah, and then if it's convenient, you can ALSO use first-class functions with currying and all that geek stuff for statements like (just an abstract example):

newArray = oldArray.map(convertFrom(value)).map(applyTransform(transformParams)).reverse().filter(namesFromLanguage(Language.GERMAN));
Interview: Reginald Braithwaite (aka raganwald) on Rewrite
Download Star Trek Episodes
It is an incredible money saver if you ask me the only problem is to find a reliable and legitimate TV download service in order to download quality Star Trek episodes. It can be quite difficult and time consuming but the good news is that Ive done the home work for you,
I once scribbled down some Scheme on a napkin during a conversion with my sister, a non-programmer. (God knows how it came up, but anyway, it did.) She looked at it, and said two things:

1. So many parentheses!

2. You made a mistake right here.
Traders and bankers knew, philosophically, that the risk in these products was much higher than the models would admit. "25 sigma", to use Goldman's excuse, means nothing when the distribution is not normal. For a 20-year-old to die (death being a 0/1 event) within a year is "30 sigma", and yet it is not uncommon for a college student to die.

My lay explanation of the risk-management failure is as follows. Let's say that you're of average means, with a net worth of $25,500. You've decided that "fuck you" money is $10 million, and you want to get there by (wait for it) betting on coin flips, pursuing the Martingale betting strategy. You'll stop flipping when either (1) you lose everything, or (2) you get to the fuck-you mark of $10m.

Martingale works as follows: start with a small bet (say, $100). If you win, bet again at the small size. If you lose, bet again, doubling your size. You'll win almost all of the time, losing only on an improbable string of losses. When you win, you'll be up exactly $100.

Obviously, this is an extremely stupid strategy. On the first go, you lose everything on a string of 8 failures (1/256). You win $100, 255/256 of the time. Expectancy is still zero, and although a blow-out loss is unlikely on a single round, you're going to progress to $10m so slowly that you'll almost certainly fail out beforehand. You have, roughly, a 0.255% chance of getting the "win" outcome of $10m. This doesn't improve if you change the size of the bet.

If you're able to borrow $1 billion, in addition to your meager $25.5k, this strategy makes perfect sense. Let's assume that the coin-flips are instantaneous, and interest is agreed-upon to be a flat 1%/$10m, meaning that you need to win $20 million to have your "fuck you" money. Now your blow-out probability is extremely low. The probability of getting to +20m before -1000m is about 98%. So, you have a very high chance of reaching your goal, and a low chance of losing your few-months'-salary bankroll (plus a lot of someone else's money). Of course, the billionaire is getting screwed.

This is a toy example, but it's not far off from what actually happens. Much of the money made in finance has been obtained by borrowing others' money to bet against "black swan" events, so infrequent that no one can accurately model their likelihood and impact. This is what "rock star traders" try to do their banks, and what banks try to do to their customers, and we've now seen the resulting clusterfuck.
To figure out what's going on, you can check the iptables for any firewalling with the command iptables -L -v

And ports that are listening for incoming connections with netstat -ltp

For example, it might be that you're listening for connections on a different interface (ip address) than the virtualised machine is connecting to.
Abiquo: OSS platform for building & managing distributed applications released
It's about shutting up the short sellers, not short selling in and of itself. People with big short stakes have been the ones going through the books and screaming on conference calls and to the media that various companies are toxic. Smart people have made billions in recent months. The government wants to shut them up so it has more time to triage.
Nice puzzles, but their dreamhost server is way overloaded at the moment :-(
15 Books To Make You a Better Software Engineer (Not Web-Developer) at engfer(s)
Can we standardize version control?
On Talent
Because even if you know (in general) what is going to happen, it is quite hard to time it. Plus I think you need balls of steel in certain situations (everyone telling you are wrong).
Why Should You Use Plain Language?
Thanks for the Advice on Josh
> They plan the ads, shoot them, and buy the slots months in advance. They're not pulling them like recalled toys from Wal-Mart shelves. If they had wanted more of them, they would have filmed them and purchased the ad slots months ago, and we'd be watching them next week no matter what the critical reaction to the first two.

In my previous life as a marketing manager I have seen ad campaigns get pulled. They could have shot different ads as a plan B. The ads we are seeing now might have been intended to follow a longer series of Seinfeld ads but got moved up. Or they might have been intended for smaller markets and were promoted.

It may be the case that Microsoft planned doing just two ads with Jerry all along, but I wouldn't say that not running a third Seinfeld ad is proof of this.
British Computer Society does BarCamp
Why Do We Believe Impossible Things?
Well done, Raganwald
Oh that is fascinating. I just recently installed Haxe on my Ubuntu a few hours ago. Hacked a swf after reading the documentation. (Which I believe is lacking.) Do you know of any good Haxe tutorials for a newb in ActionScript land?
Amen.

For all the buzz about "Facebook apps", has anyone looked at most of these things? Bug-ridden, ugly, utter shit. Facebook is slouching toward the Gomorrah of clutter. I hope something better comes along. I never liked Facebook (originally Thefacebook, lulz-on-a-vomit-pie) or that Zuckerberg clown, and I only use it because my friends do.

Sheep-throwing is a case of the exception attempting to drive the rule. SuperPoke is a mediocre idea that has achieved some measure of viral success. It makes "success" (high user count) look easy, and that's a catchy idea to many people. Does the "Million Dollar Homepage" really scale? Of course not, but it's an attractive idea that some kid out there can make $1m from a mediocre, one-flash concept.

With the right infrastructure and some luck, mediocre ideas can lead to smashing success, even reliably. Take the board game Monopoly. The design of the game is quite primitive; not nearly on the level of Settlers of Catan, much less Tigris and Euphrates or Puerto Rico. But mass-producing and marketing a board game during the Great Depression was not easy, and there was a high barrier to entry, so the designer who was able to surmount this barrier was able to collect. Now that the barrier to entry for most ideas is low, the mediocre ideas that achieve lasting success are going to be very rare.

In terms of the money and talent being wasted on mediocre ideas, one source of this problem is inherent to the VC culture. MBAs, by definition, are risk-averse people. It's an incredibly risk-averse move to trade two years and $100,000 (if you have, or can borrow, the money) for an assurance of elevated career status. Elite MBA programs are, compared to similar law, medical, or PhD programs, extremely unselective, and getting an MBA is a way to reach the executive level by (wait for it) schmoozing and taking classes-- in other words, without accomplishing or risking anything. To the extent that most VCs are elite MBAs, of course they're going to be throwing their money after me-too social networking sites, which can be compared to other such sites on paper-- rather than original ideas that only the marketplace can evaluate. Investing money in social networking and "Web 2.0" is like buying the proverbial IBM, for which nobody was ever fired.
Badminton Tips For Beginners
There are certain basic tips that you can follow to improve your game. Badminton requires lot of stamina and aggressiveness and when you have a match ahead you must be prepared both mentally and physically. To prepare yourself physically you need to warm-up. During warm-up try to work up your pulse by jogging and skipping but at the same time do not tire yourself before the match; the warm-up session is only to prepare you for the match. The warm-up session should also help you to stretch the major muscles in the legs, shoulders and your back.
It's a tough call, but note that the iPhone is not the smartphone market leader -- Blackberry is. Android could outsell iPhones solely by cannibalizing Blackberry sales, although it obviously has other opportunities: Windows mobile users, Palm users, people who want something like the iPhone but don't want to switch to AT&T, etc.
Now where can I get some datasets that don't require me to work for a massive educational or corporate institution?
Does that indicate that a bulk of the C++ work in Seattle is related to Microsoft? Sweet Zombie Jesus, I like C++, but my hatred for COM burns brightly.
This isn't exactly 'The problem' but it certainly is 'A major problem'. I was expecting 'The problem' to be password resets being sent to email accounts.

We're always going to have to compromise between security and convenience. Someone in the public eye should probably have been well over towards security already. It will be interesting over the next few years to see how big an effect this has on the average member of the public.
This has always been pretty evident to me ever since I opened a Hotmail account 10 years ago. I always pick either questions only I really know the answer to or choose answers that are slightly misleading.

The only downfall is that sometimes I forget the answers, but I eventually get them right. :)
The same trend seems to hold for other "corporate" languages, such as PHP, .Net, and C++:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=.net%2C+php%2C+python%2C+c%2B...
Newest Microsoft Ads Released
Personally I love Jerry Seinfeld, but I think these ads are going to go over much better for the folks over at Microsoft. I'm use a Mac, but I really did enjoy this, to be perfectly honest.
No, but they can stop you from talking about hacking with other hackers, if everyone around you is a suit. The FU is meant to gather hackers, and only them, together to talk about it. The tryouts serve to keep everyone else out.
Time Warner drops 'AOL' from name, five years later
The 3 Critical Characteristics of the Creative Entrepreneur
Whilst we're on the topic, here is a quote from Yes Minister (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_minister):

"The identity of the official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent discussion is not shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, but, not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun."
You're welcome! It was educational for me too, I had never tested render latency in isolation.
cbetz, I think I can help you there.
Email me
known you too, I actaully have experience using quantlib, use different tools now.
or im me at bkrmrk314
Mother's Maiden Name
Here's a nice picture on how effective banning short selling is in curbing the market slide, courtesy of our friends from Pakistan.

http://i33.tinypic.com/xlzfjo.jpg
But if what those big mouths like Einhorn/Eckman say is true (which it is), wouldn' that be to the benefit of the shareholders? These big mouths have alerted the shareholders of the innate problems in MBI and Lehman months before they capitulate.

Those crashes you've seen lately, I would argue, are the works of an efficient market. Isn't it prescient that the market drove down the price of AIG to near the fair value after the bailout ($2-5), well before it was actually bailed out?
It's all those Texas mountains blocking the signal.

What I really want is the ipod touch with GPS and force feedback for the keyboard. That's the killer device I'm waiting for Apple to bring to market. I don't want to pay "upkeep" for a portable usually-connected-online device.
MacRabbit HTML Editor: Espresso (Beta Testers Needed)
Are these tools also open? If so, can you share the information?
I don't foresee this replacing TextMate for view coding, but I use their companion software CSSEdit all the time, and it is a stellar program. So perhaps Espresso is worth a test drive.
If your competitor bashes you in their ads and they have a valid point, there is nothing you can really do to fight back. But, if your competitor's ads are based on unfounded or misleading claims, you can get big points if you respond in a clever manner. That is exactly what is going on here. Apple's underlying message is that cool people use macs and boring people use PCs. Well, it isn't hard to find a bunch of cool people that use PCs to refute that claim. The hard part is packaging them up, and I think Microsoft did a good job with that here.

The other thing is that Microsoft can kill the PC vs. Mac commercials simply by drowning them out. The Bill+Jerry ads were a few minutes after the PC vs. Mac ads during the same show on ABC (or NBC, I forget). If they do the same thing, where stations run 1 PC vs. Mac commercial followed by two "I'm a PC" commercials, they will deflate the PC vs. Mac message, and actually kind of turn it around to Microsoft's favor.

Plus, as people get tired of "I'm a PC" they will get tired of PC vs. Mac too because there is such an obvious association there. Even if people have the "I'm a PC" ads, they still serve a valuable purpose.

As for the specific claims that the PC vs. Mac commercials make, I'm not sure it makes sense for Microsoft to counter all of them. But, some of them definitely could be countered. For example, the "it just works" ad is easy to counter. Just fine some hardware that has drivers for Windows and doesn't have drivers for a Mac. Then, have a commercial where you have 10 people with 10 different brands of computers. Have the first 9 plug the device into PCs and say "It works!" Then, have the 10th plug the device into a mac and (insert clever imagery here). This is not hard to do, because in reality more stuff "just works" with PCs than it does with Macs.