skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Strange that you find the state of Danish apartments to be sur-par. My experience has been the opposite. I am interested to hear what your criteria are.

Fire regulations, plumbing regulations and so on are very strict, so internally you shouldn't really find any qualitative difference between Scandinavia and "other first-world countries".

In Scandinavia we have a strong affection for historic buildings, an affection that extends to interiors. We like fireplaces, creaky hardwood floors, crown mouldings, exposed brick walls, that sort of thing.

So buildings might feel distinctly unmodern, even though they aren't really. Some facilities may be lacking. Elevators are only common in somewhat newer (post-1980) buildings, for example. Common laundry rooms are usually pretty awful. And I have never come across a Scandinavian apartment building that has a porter.

But these are not important things. So again, based on what criteria are you judging Copenhagen?
It can be objectively measured. Tubes tend to produce even harmonics, which are pleasing to the human ear. The even harmonics sound like octaves of the original pitch, creating a rich sound. Solid state tends towards a mix of even and odd harmonics. The odd harmonics are not pleasing to the human ear because they produce pitches not easily resolved to the intended pitch.

Ironically, solid state amps can have a lower total harmonic distortion than tubes but produce a sound less desirable to humans (in general).
Empirical Software Engineering
A free service from Google? Is the source code available or are institutions going to be screwed if/when it gets canned?

For those who have forgotten: Code Search, Google Video, Wave, Buzz, Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads, Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff, Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke! Pets), Google Pack, Image Labeller and Google Dictionary. I'm sure I have missed a few things, but you get the idea.
I use Blackboard everyday. Blackboard is a scam.

It has an interface from 2002. To many users this might not be a problem. To the hundreds of students I work with, this is.

It is counter intuitive to use, has poorly designed features and has terrible email, calendar and document integration with any other client. Professor complain, students complain and universities shell out millions.

With the advent of Google/Pearson - This could solve alot of these problems and reduce barriers to adoption. However it will not be revolutionary in terms of enabling education. Such software has been around for a while and better execution will not enable better education.

However if google can integrate the following two factors, we have an education game changer, not just a free substitute

- Live work collaboration with Teachers/Teaching Assistants/Students on google docs.

This will allow students to work on documents and have teachers etc check-in and help them out.

- Google Hangout : A feature that is often left out of Google apps suite. But the potential to video conference with students across the city country and the world is a real game changer (As YCombinator knows)
How did you get an internship at that age? Was it fresh off a grad program or through networking? Which languages do you use?
From Blackboard's patent pledge:

"Blackboard hereby commits not to assert any of the U.S. patents listed below, as well as all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries, against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software or Home-Grown Systems to the extent that such Open Source Software and Home-Grown Systems are not Bundled with proprietary software.

<snip>

"The commitment not to assert any of these named U.S. patents and all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries is irrevocable except that Blackboard reserves the right to terminate this patent pledge and commitment only with regard to any party who files a lawsuit asserting patents or other intellectual property rights against Blackboard or its parent or subsidiaries. This pledge is binding on Blackboard’s successors and assigns."

I really wonder if Blackboard will try anything shady a la its dance with Desire2Learn a few years ago. Limiting this commitment to open source/home grown systems not bundled with propriety software provides Blackboard an opportunity to launch an infringement action against Google, which in a certain light would be hilarious to watch.

[1] http://www.blackboard.com/about-bb/patents/patent-pledge.asp...
Check this out:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Genetic_progr...
http://martinfowler.com/tags/
I agree. The iPad version is flawless and I don't like the glossy borders on the iPhone. I can't believe I'm saying this but I would rather have the stitched leather look that Apple has been using on their apps recently.
Sure, but the $900 dollars would otherwise have gone to buy a car from someone else who fixed up a car or made cars.

I can see how reducing the cost of items or services can make more people "wealthy" - such as being able to buy a second car. But reducing costs normally means reducing wages meaning the owners get richer, and the manual jobs disappear.
Not necessarily. Especially not if you can program the cache (no idea if that is possible on an ARM processor).

The thing is that Malloc isn't particularly smart about how memory is allocated so you can end up with various tangles, etc.

On the other hand if you have enough memory you can do a hole world copy which, among other things, means that allocating memory is O(1). This is better than malloc if you have short lived and small objects.
And, apparently, videography.
Facebook's Wall of Shame: Facebook Fails Follies and FUUU [Infographic]
You need to stop posting about this on the internet and get some competent advice.

If you actually have $12.8M + potential damages at stake, saying "I cannot afford a lawyer" is ridiculous.
A Picturesque Venus Transit
"San Fran" is what people who aren't from San Francisco call San Francisco.
The Iconfactory is credited in the (new?) "About" screen.
This is exactly why these words should be banned. What you fail to realize is that "good" or "bad", when applied to all these things, depends a lot on the context.

You don't expect the same level of quality from a one-page script that will be used once, than from a crucial part of a large-scale program involving thousands of people.

Spending two days making the script robust, modular, flexible and unit-tested is just as bad as pasting an undocumented hack in the large program.

We need to try to be rational and stop mixing morals and code.
The article discusses deploying to a percentage of your user base at a time. I have an idea on how to do this, but it is probably the wrong way.

Anybody know of any articles explaining this process for a rails app?
Billion Tonne Comet May Have Missed Earth By A Few Hundred Kilometres in 1883
Sonar 2.11 released
The latest version of open source Sonar – platform to manage quality – now detects code duplications accross projects

Sonar – developped and promoted by SonarSource – has become a must-have in Software Factories of any mature development projects. Massively adopted by IT organizations, the Sonar platform provides Continuous Inspection capability on application portfolio to track quality defects and report them into customizable dashboards (test coverage, duplications, architecture integrity, rule compliance, complexity, etc.). Used by many large corporations, Sonar performs analysis on billions lines of code... daily.

What's hot in this release?

- Cross-Project Detection of Code Duplication: so far the detection of copy paste code was only done inside a project. Thanks to GSoC, Sonar has now got its own Copy-Paste Detection that is very scalable and can detect cross-projects duplications.

- TimeMachine 2.0, the ability to replay the past has been greatly improved and is now fully part of dashboards as it is widget based. This means that the evolution of any metric can be tracked along with the dashboard. And in order to not display irelevant analysis, it is now possible to removed them.

Read the release note : http://www.sonarsource.org/downloads/#2.11
Sonar in action: http://nemo.sonarsource.org
Download: http://sonarsource.org/downloads

About SonarSource
SonarSource is the Swiss IT company that provides solutions for Software Quality Continuous Inspection. With more than 150 customers worldwide, SonarSource is strongly committed to make quality tooling available to the many and to improve governance on development projects.

More about SonarSource : http://sonarsource.com
Follow us : @SonarSource
This is a great example of using humans for what humans are good at (interpreting photographs) and computers for what computers are good at (lots of light modelling).
Doesn't the fact that my POV is apparently outnumbered 7:1 undermine the idea that everyone is a bear? =)

Instead of subjective measures like what everyone feels, I prefer to focus on things like P/E and Case-Schiller ratios. Though they obviously have their limitations, they tend to suggest that the market is still overvalued relative historical norms. And I see no reason for our economy to prosper in the near- and medium-term.
Agreed. For all the hype, pre-IPO valuation and talent draining, Facebook has done surprisingly little worthy of attention for several years now.
Buy the unlocked 4S a few weeks from now in November. (Yes, Apple will be selling it officially!)

Use either the AT&T or T-Mobile prepaid plans. (You are pretty much guaranteed to save money over the cost of a two-year contract.)

Sell your 4S on Ebay after a year, and buy your new phone.

Voila. First-world problem solved. (This is what I'll be doing, anyways.)

Bonus: if AT&T or T-Mobile turn out to have bad reception in your apartment, you can effortlessly switch to the other carrier.
I like Shopify, but they are going to be feeling a lot of competitive pressure from Magento Go SaaS offering, which is still in its infancy but has the full weight of eBay behind it and provides a migration to "regular" Magento if the store requires a lot of customization. The 15MM funding should also help with acquisitions of smaller companies to fill gaps in their offering (in addition to the Shopify fund of course)
as you have seen in the article, bundler needs dependencies of all versions as it might have to deal with older releases. Building the whole dependency graph for all versions of a gem with many dependencies in itself will a) take a very long time and b) probably be huge - likely much bigger than the whole gem index that was downloaded up until 1.1. The time required for parsing those MB after MB of data of which most will be thrown away will quickly get significant.

Another option would be to query for all dependencies of a specific version of a gem. That would reduce the amount of data, but it would still mean more work for the server and it would produce a lot more data to cache (much of which would never be queried more than once)

With the currently applied method, only the data that's really required must be queried and it can easily be cached on the server side too.
This is a brilliant example showing what great visual design and typography can do for an app. I never liked using Instapaper because I thought it looked so ugly. Now it's on par with the likes of Reeder and Twitter and I'm much more likely to use it.

I'm not sure how many people think like me but I just can't stand using software I think is ugly. It's no fun for me.

(That said, I think the actual user experience has also improved – which is equally as important.)
Android is forthcoming - the decal is just a placeholder for now while we finish it off.
Marco comes across as a real ass on his podcast. Which has made me not listen to Build & Analyze, or use his app. Hell, "Build & Analyze" isn't so much about "Building & Analyzing" as it is him bitching about stuff. I'm not even talking about the coffee discussions, I can get through that stuff, the bullshit attitude I can't get through though.

He used to be pretty humble in the first dozen episodes, but he's slowly gotten a big head and turned into a dick. At least from my perspective.

I don't recommend his app any longer, instead, I suggest people use one of it's competitors, Read It Later.

Again, the podcast isn't so much about building apps as it is a soapbox for him to complain about other applications and other developers. While he does discuss some of the aspects of Instapaper, he may as well have called the podcast something else. If you're expecting developer oriented discussion there are better podcasts to listen to.

If you're going to spend time listening to a 5by5 podcast, I suggest two that are much better. Hypercritical with John Siracusa. John at least knows how to complain while being constructive, unlike Marco. The second would be The Incomparable, on a totally different topic but very worthwhile.

As as example of marco being an ass. Just listen to any of the podcasts from 10-onward. Also, listen especially to the programming episodes where he tries to argue against Siracusa but instead sounds like a whiny brat.

edit: Keep on down voting people. Seriously. It's called an opinion. If you don't like it, too bad. But it helps people make a valid attempt at determining whether they want to listen to something, or read something, otherwise spending their time with something. Make your own opinion of the podcast and Marco. But down voting simply because my opinion is different than yours is just stupid.
Analyzing Gender Differences in Real Estate Sales Performance
Yes you can, I used to have (G)ubuntu, KDE and XFCE installed simultaneously and switch between them. The problem I saw was that the menus got really crowded.

Once you settle on one, you maybe want to start over with a backup and a fresh install.
SF and the valley (or san jose as well) are often used interchangeably, yet:
1. They're in different counties (heck..the valley is even spread over multiple counties).
2. San Jose to SF is often over an hour (with traffic)
3. SF, Valley, San jose have very different vibes
4. Is Palo Alto (for example) a suburb of Fan Francisco or of San Jose?

What I'm trying to show is that it's typically called the "detroit area" for simplicity's sake. Just like "the valley" or "sf area" is often used to encompass SF to San Jose (and the east bay as well). It's more of a moniker for the region.
The Joel on Software article that he refers to is probably "Making Wrong Code Look Wrong":

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html
Marco talked about Android support on his 5by5 podcast "Build and Analyze" sometime over the summer I think. I don't recall if it was the focus of the episode or just a side-topic. I believe at that time he had concluded that it wasn't worth the amount of work required to support two platforms.

Perhaps it was ep 38 [1]...?

[1]: http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze/38-decaf-compatibility-stick
Here are the ones in my reader, admittedly I haven't visited often enough over the past couple of months:

http://www.igvita.com/

http://ejohn.org/

http://codingrelic.geekhold.com/ (Denny covers assembly and networking issues often in great detail)

http://buhrmi.tumblr.com/

http://elegantcode.com/

http://72lions.com/

http://kellabyte.com/ (mobile-ish dev)

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

http://ihumanable.com/blog

http://4loc.wordpress.com/

http://www.maxogden.com/

http://till.klampaeckel.de/blog/

http://www.quirkey.com/blog

http://www.mikealrogers.com/

http://cocoawithlove.com/
From August 4, 2011. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850271
Agreed, why not leave the original notation but show the footnote in the popover as show?
While I agree that those terms are unclear and might mean different things to different people, I think "banning" them is solving a non-problem. I don't know anyone who would ask a developer to "rewrite the code to not be ugly" (without providing specifics). I think it's a useful informal term for when specifics aren't needed: "making this change will require us to touch the X module, which is really ugly, so factor that into your time estimate" (if both developers know the X module, this needs no further explanation). In other words, I've not encountered any discussions where "ugly"'s ambiguity has caused problems.

Sometimes "ugly" really seems to hit the nail on the head, like when code fails to communicate what it does or why it works (e.g., due to an implementation that looks like it resulted from brownian-motion trial and error).
Why wouldn't that be OK? I like when they take a product of theirs that is already very good and refine it in a bunch of small ways. All those little refinements add up. This phone really is a beautiful piece of technology.
Goldman Sachs is expected to report a loss at the next results, seems like ruling the world doesn't guarantee profits ;-)

It's true that day traders don't care if the market is going up or down, just like many specialists focusing on their domain doesn't care that much about the industry that employs them. Some people make money on volatility (day traders), but a lot of others make their money on trading on certainty (pension funds). Some people have a vested interest in seeing certain markets crash, e.g. if your industry struggles because of materials are getting expensive because of high demand from the building industry.
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/ -- Updates infrequently. Very good programming articles.

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/ -- Updates infrequently. Good articles on Linux and Programming. Start here: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/best-of

http://catonmat.net -- He doesn't update much anymore since he's working on his startup but the archives are still good. Mostly unix tools and CompSci stuff IIRC.

http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/ -- Curates unix and plan9 articles and some lower level/systems programming stuff with a few other peculiarities sprinkled in.

http://www.foldl.org/ -- Curated programming/compsci stuff from certain subreddits. Didn't last long, archives still have some gems.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ -- I actually don't read the articles that often anymore but I scan the titles as if it were a ticker of what's going on in the programming world.

If someone could point me to more curated sources like foldl, I'd appreciate it.

Non-programming:

http://ryanholiday.net -- http://www.ryanholiday.net/an-introduction-to-me/

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ -- I skip the pharma articles that are way over my head. Cultural deconstructionism.
That's pretty amazing that you get to work with someone like Will Wright at such an early point in the creative process! Has it given you ideas for your own games?

You hint at one of the other issues that arises. So much of what a piece of software becomes (game or otherwise) is formed as it's being written. Something sounds great, you implement it, it doesn't look so good but leads you to something else, etc. In the end the game might end up being 50% of the original and 50% from prototyping.

One of the things that gets me is the person who says "Implement my idea. I don't have any money to pay you but you can have a percentage of the profits". Is there a single word that means naivete + ignorance + hubris? This is especially true for those who say they have a great idea for a game, but don't want to tell you because they don't want you stealing it.
You think the rest of the world should call your city, "the city"?? I love the Bay Area, but that's just short-sighted and arrogant.
With Siri, Apple Could Eventually Build A Real AI
I read this like ten times and while I agree that messing with input events is ~hard~ I still don't get your explanation.

Out of curiosity, can you explain that problem again? Entering quotes works fine in US layout (yeah, you said that), DE layout (Shift + 2) and HE layout (well - like the US here, no surprise). I lack experience with any other keyboard layout and couldn't follow your explanation, so - what's going wrong?
Can we please not use OTT descriptions like "Mind-Blowing". It sounds a bit... tabloid-y
> What would you say if this person's technology contribution was fundamental to the success of the company...?

Looking back, I wrote some code in 2004 and again in 2005. Assuming that said code was left intact(1), at no point in my existence would I pretend that a company was able to launch, become a going concern and grow to the point of multi-million dollar sale based on some code I wrote six or seven years ago.

(1 a completely insane assumption, imo)
While there is some truth in there, I feel like some of the advice is pretty reckless:

"Problem 1: You presume there will be problems that impact availability. You have no confidence in your code quality; or (or maybe, and), you have no confidence in your infrastructure and deployment process."

Or you're playing it safe. You absolutely cannot guarantee that every update you are deploying will have zero problems. If your business absolutely relies on users making payments online or anything of that ilk, you could lose a lot of money.

"Imagine, for a moment, that your team is rolling out an update to a service that monitors life-support systems in hospitals."

What? Why? Throwing out hypothetical "what if" scenarios that would affect 0.1% of your readership isn't a very useful thing to do.
> And GC is always less efficient than no GC, even with more memory.

No, it's not. GC allows for more efficiency in many scenarios. Imagine creating and destroying many small objects. With traditional memory management, every malloc incurs a cost to allocate a chunk of memory from the free store. This will involve some work to break the correct-sized piece of memory off some larger block, and some bookkeeping for later restoring that memory to the block and possibly enlarging the block, merging with others, etc.

On the other hand, in a modern generational GC, a malloc typically consists of adjusting a single pointer to the nursery pool by the size requested.

Depending on the scenario, GC can be just as fast, or even faster. In other scenarios, manual memory management may be faster.
wouldnt it make sense to include the costs for the physical workspace into the employee costs as a employee not only needs a salary and benefits but also a place to sit, a computer to work on and maybe some coffe to drink?
They took a still image and added moving objects to it, but I don't know if they can apply the technique to videos yet (although I'm sure that's coming).
I really think the success of 4S is due to 2 things:

1. Many iPhone 3G/3GS users never upgraded to 4. This is their chance.

2. iOS5 has many compelling features. Us techies forget that the average joe doesn't really understand upgrades, versioning, etc. Phones are sold as both a hardware and software solution and so many of the iOS5 features are inherently see as being a feature of 4S and not just a feature of any iOS device.

Many of the tech blogs are looking at a technology aspect (RAM oh my!) and not towards how the common man thinks and acts.
4QFY10 they sold: 14,100,000 unit's which is a little over 4million a month. If apple sells over 2million a month for the next 50 days they will break 8 million in the first 60 days or am I missing something?
Why I am no longer a skeptic
For the schools I work with (secondary education), this is a bonus. Faculty has been trying to get students to use their Google Apps email and converse using the school's own tools rather than Facebook. Any tool that gets the kids to login to Google Apps to use the website is a bonus.

I'm curious to see how this LMS works out and am recommending teachers check it out immediately.
As far as I know, the 4S still doesn't support T-Mobile freqs for > 2G..