skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. I live in one city and do most of my work in a neighboring city. They both have sales taxes, but the rates are different, and (more important for this discussion) the exceptions (which rate applies to a specific item) are subtly different. I've been here ten years and I still have to think about it -- when I care. Usually I don't bother to worry about it; it's not a significant difference on most individual purchases. A retailer wouldn't have that luxury. And how in the world is a retailer supposed to determine if I'm buying the item in City A and using it in City B, or vice-versa? That happens a lot - the shipping address I give has more to do with where I'm likely to be at delivery time than where the item will actually be used. Will City A start demanding its cut of items delivered in City B? Will I have to pay taxes to both cities? What happens if I rent a mail drop in neighboring Village C that doesn't even have a local sales tax? What happens when a state with major online retailers (say, "Washingham") starts levying a punitive counter-tax on items purchased from a state (say, "Sickinois") that's insistent on collecting mail-order sales tax? That'll do wonders for the Sickinois economy, won't it?
He was also an alcoholic, and high alcohol intake can cause depression all by itself, so there is a confounding factor there.
PR war? Check out Amazon Glassdoor reviews for engineers! This sentiment has been consistent. I am a little surprised that people were praising Amazon's culture here. This also explains I was down-voted in the past. One thing I really learnt well at Amazon was how not to treat your developers, and what mistakes you shouldn't make to build great, and long-lasting teams.
Between the speaker and the 3.5 inch screen, I believe there is some sort of logical fallacy in Dustin Curtis' reasoning: the existing design is X, then we figure out some justification for X.
You wouldn't architect that in that way in JVM. Instead, you'd use threads rather than processes, use heavier-weight but more capable tools and so on.

The JVM is not The Unix Way. You have to do things differently - and in Java-land, they do.

It's not really my thing either, but it's not as bad as you'd think if you just pretend we're mapping all our existing Unix stuff, unchanged, into Java.
i think its time we admitted that nobody wants a facebook clone. it doesn't matter how distributed it is, how open it is, how shiny it is, or anything else. nobody is going to replace facebook with a product that is essentially facebook. if google can't do it, a couple kids aren't going to do it either.

the next social networking phenomenon will be something new, not a new implementation of something old, and it's time to stop trying to re-invent old things.
Not sure if apple will go for the advertising bit, but I really really like the example you gave with your wife. That would be a life saver. I also love that sign off line - BB sucks :)
Sy Yung: From the Mound to the Microphone
I think you guys are using your imaginations a bit too much. From every Siri video I've seen, it just seems like a typical text-to-speech recognition and doesn't work nearly as good as advertised. Just look how many times it flops in this demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mNcnj2l6RE. The guy even admits that "Siri doesn't always work as expected, hence the beta tag".
Yep, that's the point. People who use gamification for things like green living and saving energy, or advertising, or redeeming rewards, etc are missing the point. There's nothing to freaking gamify. Nobody feels any sense of achievement from saving energy, or redeeming airmile rewards, or checking in to places and doing random stuff.
Do you guys remember the contraptions they stuck on the laptop's for secure logins/VPN? Made me the butt of all jokes, carrying that thing around..Sigh
RSA confirms attack was state-sponsored
Paul Graham thinks I'm dumb. I think I might put that on my resume.

Realistically, this isn't an issue of intellect. It's an issue of ethics, morality and emotion. Or then again, maybe I'm just an idiot.
I think that's what they're aiming for. Like all comparisons it will boil down to screen, keyboard, and trackpad. The Ars overview says the screen is pretty bad, so that could be a strike. The others you'll have to tell for yourself.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=mises+monsanto

I don't need a lecture on what libertarianism is.

Also, if you think Monsanto represents pure capitalism, you are not much of a libertarian.
On their site they claim 'Diaspora* is already in the top 2% of all open source projects ever.'

Kind of curious where they got these stats: All of the BSDs, the Linux kernel, all of the GNU project (gcc, GNOME, coreutils...), X11, Vim, Valgrind, LLVM, the list goes on of open source projects I think are slightly more popular.

Then again, if the number of projects is in the millions, the top 2% would place it in the top 20,000...
Kind of bound to the semantics, though.

E.g. -

memset( s, '\0', sizeof( s) );

s[ 0 ] = '\0';

You can of course create a library (e.g. https://github.com/roboprog/buzzard/blob/master/bzrt/src/bzr...) to support alternate implementations (as interpreters and VMs created in C must), but it's not really much like ANSI C anymore.
I don't do 3D work but I almost want to start because of the video on your site. Seriously, that was a great presentation of what appears to be a great product.
Microsoft Acquires Twisted Pixel
* apg http://www.adel.nursat.kz/apg/download.shtml generates per default pronounceable/memorable passwords. From the debian package description:

APG (Automated Password Generator) is the tool set for random
password generation. It generates some random words of required type
and prints them to standard output. Advantages:

* Built-in ANSI X9.17 RNG (Random Number Generator)(CAST/SHA1)
* Built-in password quality checking system (now it has support for Bloom
filter for faster access)
* Two Password Generation Algorithms:
1. Pronounceable Password Generation Algorithm (according to NIST
FIPS 181)
2. Random Character Password Generation Algorithm with 35
configurable modes of operation
* Configurable password length parameters
* Configurable amount of generated passwords
* Ability to initialize RNG with user string
* Support for /dev/random
* Ability to crypt() generated passwords and print them as additional output.
* Special parameters to use APG in script
Quits on stage, retracts. Rants about lack of SOA, retracts. Third time lucky! I do like his writing and speaking though!
This has everything I've thought to ask Siri and more... I'm very impressed. I hope Apple plans on supporting and iterating Siri rather than forgetting about it like they occasionally seem to do...
You last few statement sum up my feelings too. I am curious to see, how long they can get away with poor conditions for Devs. It still amazes me that they get away with it.
I read it as:

Coding Gamification: The Horror
Thanks matt
Looking at the screenshots I'd say Diaspora is now a Google+ clone.
They got 178k after fees/taxes. Then, they had to spend 28k on Kickstarter's "fulfillment" requirements. So they had 150 to actually work with.

They spent $114k on salaries, taxes, workers comp, etc.

8.5k on hosting and whatnot - how on earth are they using that the resources to justify that?!

8k on LUXr training. 2.5k on "Diaspora graphics/printing." Probably a waste, but you gotta spend the budget somehow, I guess.

14k on housing and travel... curious.

So the 200k turned into 114k in their pockets, 14k of hotels/flights/etc, some training and a bunch of wasted hardware.

Yeah, 29k is poverty, especially in NYC, but these are NYU students. There's plenty of financial aid to go around, but in reality, it's an overwhelmingly wealthy college. I'd be extremely surprised if their parents weren't already paying their rent/living expenses. And despite pocketing 76% of the cash, they don't have anything to show for it, and nobody's really believed they had a shot since that code release a year ago that showed they had no real technical skills to back up the project. Which probably explains the huge expenses for idle servers. I don't doubt their dedication or belief in themselves or the project, but for the love of god, stop indulging this fantasy.
Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer?
Unless Cloudant is selling vapourware, no one.
People here may be interested in this.

"Creativity in Mathematics, pt. 1 of 3, Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) and the Moore Method"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLVTV-vXJBg

I think its relevant in the current debate of the different learning styles: Physical presence lecturing, Long-distance lecturing, Class participation, Team problem solving, Individual problem solving, Individual rote learning.

If anyone has any studies comparing the end result problem solving ability of students who have gone through all the different combinations of the above learning styles, I would love to see them.
Yes, interesting how the specifically mentioned Akamai's video distribution, not the entirely of their business.
In clojure, you can solve this by using a variadic macro (instead of a function) to generate the fast, unrolled version. I think pg had a similar example in On Lisp for generating fast code to find points on a bezier curve.
Which is why Monsanto is lobbying to "ban the practice of distinguishing between milk from farms pledged not to use rBST and those that do."

Very insidious.
OWS will not solve any of those things.

I'd loosely categorize "those things" as greed. Nothing will solve greed just as nothing will solve racism. Government regulation is uniquely able to diminish the negative consequences of both greed and racism. The fact that government regulation is not able to eliminate greed and regulation is in no way a knock against government regulation. OWS is the most powerful method available to instigate government regulation.

BTW, I'm using examples of your philosophy to demonstrate the inherent limitations of it, in comparison to mass protestation. Boycotts are primarily effective on a local scale, not a national scale. If your intent is to stop a mom & pop from some ill behavior, a boycott is more effective than staging a sit-in outside their place of business. I can think of no national boycott that has instigated as much change as the civil rights protests of the 60's or the suffrage movement in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
There seems to be two similar but fundamentally different arguments here. The first is that this press release was unwise, because many people will be upset that Cloudant would do business with Monsanto. The second is that actually doing business with Monsanto is unwise/immoral/unethical.

PR is a fuzzy science at best, and I'm no expert, so I won't claim to know how wise the press release is. I'm sure that Cloudant was excited to acquire a large customer (rightfully so), and that issuing a press release can impress investors, other potential customers, and the start-up community.

It's the second argument that I vehemently disagree with. If some corporation feels that it would be unethical to do business with Monsanto, then by all means refuse to do so. But to argue for an embargo against Monsanto, and imply that any company that does business with Monsanto is in the wrong, is wildly inappropriate and unfair. No doubt countless other corporations do business with Monsanto: PC manufacturers, construction teams, office suppliers, not to mention utility companies that keep Monsanto running, shipping companies that deliver to and from Monsanto, etc. I agree with pg that to argue for an embargo against Monsanto is quite extreme, and it's unfair to hold Cloudant to such a standard.
No, it's not the same issues. I'm not a programmer, but I know that offering a well designed API to a service has nothing to do with its code being closed or not.

When I was learning to program, I was very interested in 3 Google's core products API: Search, Adsense and Adwords but got turned off because their APIs are very crippled. I understand that Google do not want to expose their core products (cash cows) to abuse, however that's exactly what Steve argued in parent's quote. If the closeness (nothing to do with code) is already in Google's mindset, how do they become a "platform oriented company"? Steve says that it will take a dramatic cultural change to catch up. Steve also chooses Amazon's example to prove: when the years of explosive growth were over, Jeff Bezos had to think of some new expansion strategies. He was betting on the cloud, whatever that means, or on being a platform, and he implemented his vision with an iron fist, because paradigm shift is hard, you have to consistently push people into doing it.
Thanks for posting, a lot of what you wrote really echoed with my own life experience. And to the OP, I will add that one makes it through those rough spots.
True, but there are two reasons for that! One is because I'm too cheap to pay the premium my web host demands for https. The other is because most of the entropy is calculated in your browser via Javascript (even borrowing a JS implementation of SHA-1). It's extremely unlikely that either I (the server), or a third party sniffing packets, could guess the passphrase you generated using passphra.se.
"Design for Hackers" now available on Amazon UK
> ... and have an increased risk for all sorts of disease. See #1. What odds do you give that GMOs do not cause an increase in disease? In light of that number being non-zero, would you like to take back this statement?

GMOs, herbicides, and pesticides have saved hundreds of millions of lives from death by famine. Current levels of food production are not possible with GMOs.

> GMO race, as the potential benefit is something like $3/meal and the potential cost includes things like cancer.

That's a lot of money. In America, where people make $7 / hour, its easy to say, we'd all be better off eating non GMOs, but in many parts of India, Africa, and China, when people make $7 / week, GMOs lower prices to sustainable levels. Note that when I say "sustainable", I mean "able to sustain currently levels of human population".
Local legend has it that the guy didn't have a backup, but senior Googler Matt Cutts wrote a custom MapReduce to process the spidering results and make him a tarball of the content GoogleBot recorded as it deleted the site.

Supposedly he sent it with a note along the lines of, "This one's on the house, but we're not doing it again."
Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Rails-AntiPatterns-Refactoring-Addison...

Easiest mistake in large rails apps is to let your controllers get too thick...
How to learn anything
How to learn anything
That was my view yesterday. Then I benchmarked some JavaScript (CoffeeScript) code, and the same algo in C code and my world changed. I know that I could have optimized my C code better (I don't think I even turned optimization on), but I could have optimized my JavaScript better too.
Not really. Diaspora already had most of its design in place, including the drag-and-drop 'Circles' feature (called Aspects in Diaspora), before Google+ was even announced.
Popular Pressure Cooker Recipes
I'm on #12 and still nothing.
Google is essentially its own CDN: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/03/18/googl...

Why would they want to make other sites on the web faster?
I don't like phone calls. SMS is tolerable.

I prefer email or IM (or a forum).

Phone is very susceptible to noise and hearing issues; it's not searchable without fancy transcription equipment, and frankly, I don't have time to think and give the answer that a quality question deserves.
Until Google Apps support is released, I find it unlikely that Steve's error here will be encountered by many other users. Most Google+ users don't have access to a separate instance of Google+ to trip them up.

I also think it is unbelievably foolish to suggest that "Google+ adoption" needs attention because of this. Why on Earth would you judge inherently aggregate metrics based on a single individual mistake?
I'm deaf. Not sure about other countries, but here in the US we have free video relay services that have a number attached to your account. Calls go to a video interpreter, who will also take messages for you.

I don't particularly like dealing with calls either, but for the times when I must, my cell number forwards to VRS. Problem solved.
I don't know the details, but whatever sequencing queries Monsanto is running against cloudant, would be nice to replicate and open source to universities and researchers.
I don't want to donate money into what's probably going to turn into a giant hole. Diaspora had its opportunity but now it's just going to fade away into obscurity I think. I'd like to be proved wrong but I'm no way near believing in it enough to give them money.

They don't tell us how much money they need either. Or what it will be spent on. The stuff about me warmly hugging them or whatever and me being awesome comes off in a sort of weird corporate faux caring sort of way.
Lua is much faster than Ruby/Python/Perl/&c. It still doesn't get close even to the higher-level compiled languages like Common Lisp and Haskell, but e.g. the programming language shootout [1] makes it pretty clear that Lua is still a league above the other dynamic languages. For just a quick result, I tried timing just the Hello World program in Python, Ruby, and Lua, and while startup time isn't going to be the bottleneck of the world of modern web development, it's still a telling result:

$ time python2.7 -c "print 'Hello, world'"

real 0m0.107s
user 0m0.080s
sys 0m0.023s
$ time ruby -e "puts 'Hello, world'"
Hello, world

real 0m0.338s
user 0m0.030s
sys	0m0.013s
$ time lua -e "print('Hello, world')"
Hello, world

real 0m0.008s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.003s

That said, I kneejerk-ly agree with you about Lua being an awkward medium for expressing programs. I personally haven't ever gotten to the status where Lua was as natural as Python, but I have also used Python a great deal more, so I don't know if my attitude is attributable to Lua's design, or Python's plenitude of libraries, or merely the experience differential between the two.

[1]: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

EDIT: Converted some tabs to spaces. (Nitpicky, I know.)
I implemented this in Picasa too! Tools->Experimental->Passport Photo.
If you didn't dress like such a slut you wouldn't have this problem.
> SSDs really are going to change the game.

I have heard this and I agree with the other posters here who are skeptical on this core point.

For read performance you cache databases in RAM.

For write performance you have writes to log structured storage system.

And either way if you care about your data, you replicate it to multiple datacenters and kill performance.
Why do you insist on creating a false dichotomy between requiring a phone number and disallowing phone contact altogether? You can support multiple methods of communication with any single one being optional. Making the phone number optional wouldn't inconvenience your other customers in the slightest.
sit, you are exactly right and they are going that route with the Opteron's. The 16-core Opterons were announced a while ago, I believe there is GPU infrastructure in the desktop chips (similar to what Intel is doing with the always-includes-a-GPU-now CPUs).

I imagine when we see the 16-core AMD's next year on 22nm, we'll have 24-core Opterons or something equivalent that is a boon to the hosting industry.

Not saying Intel won't be right there with their own solution, but going the "more cores" route should be interesting to watch and see if it pays off.
Your last point: "try and make peoples' lives suck less" ... what happens if you make one group's lives suck less while making another group worse? That's the bigger point.

As for the 99% being frustrated, that's all it's about, no? It's a bunch of people that started posting photos of themselves voicing their frustrations about not having a job, and other issues that they have.
I have the feeling that this will become a new meme and a few tumblr's will be created about it.
Regarding your second sentence, it's interesting that the exact same thing happened to reddit in 2005.

I wonder how the population sizes compare.

In their case, blind upvoting of empty politically-charged headlines turned off mainstream visitors (or just people who were looking for actual content in their political links) and attracted ever more such voters in a vicious cycle. Fortunately, the creation of /r/politics helped, but the site to this day struggles to keep /r/politics from overflowing into the rest of the site.
Unfortunately when I log on to my Diaspora I just can't help but feel it's dead. At this point if this is a viable project the community should take it and run with it, but I don't see that happening.

I appreciate their goals and hopes, but more money isn't going to make this more viable. And if it is and we just don't know, it needs to be mentioned how in the request for cash.
Honestly is sounds exactly like the strategy Sun pursued with UltraSPARC systems; however in my experience, time and time again commodity hardware with higher per-core clock speeds beat the pants off of Sun hardware except for very narrow HPC tasks (supposedly, I couldn't even get decent speeds for the distributed computing projects available on the platform).

It also seems to rely on software to be written specifically to take advantage of multiple local threads. This may or may not happen in a timely fashion for most projects (and again, chances are fewer cores with a higher clock speed will still outperform).

Time will tell though I guess!
No doubt they have some tightening to do, but they are always a generation behind Intel when it comes to fab; when they get the new architecture onto 22nm I think things should even out, but then Intel will be jumping to something much smaller at that point in a tick-tock cycle anyway.

Cat and mouse.
Sucks to be you.

p.s. You're terrible at writing. Please stop.
Phone calls from anyone are usually a pain in the ass. I have to stop what I'm doing and context-switch wasting my time. Unless your company is live dispatching transplant organs or is rescuing me from being trapped in an earthquake or if you're my wife--I NEVER want a phone call. I don't like wasting my time listening to nonsense. Amazon works just fine without calling me so I can't imagine why any other business aside from a few very narrow exceptions would ever need to call anyone. Remove validates phone number :presence => true and leave me the hell alone. Xie xie.
I hadn't really noticed these things until I used Android phones. Since switching, I've become aware of how much thoughtful design went into the boring things I used to take for granted on the iPhone.
A lot of tech reviewers seem to do that in their reviews, I've noticed. Since they like the iPhone and they are used to it, they treat it as a reference point, and then anything else that deviates from that must be the wrong way to do it.
Yes, exactly. Many Diaspora users were posting about Google+ ripping them off.
Agreed -- it really seems to be a long term bet. They see the growth of hosted apps and cloud environments and I am sure that is making up a large margin of their sales (and have been for years).

I think they are banking on dominating the multi-tenant server market with these designs and if consumer PCs follow suite with some convoluted virtualization mechanism in the years to come, that might leave them sitting pretty with a lot of disparate, fast cores ready to execute the work thrown at them.

If not, and quad-core is all we ever really utilize, then Intel is going to dominate that arena as they have for the last decade.