skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the advice guys. I'm aware of the idea of sunk costs but it sure is hard to use that idea in practice haha.
You are also right in that I am confusing the role of a masters education and "practical programming".
I guess my real frustration is that I'm getting very impatient, every time I read about some guy who hacked together some brilliant thing I want to be able to do the same, but I haven't done anything like that. And then I start to think that what I'm learning now isn't helpful enough, etc.
You're right, I need to be less short sighted and focus on the long term. In the end I can always take my time out after I graduate to wrap my head around the "practical programming", and do small things each week to improve those skills.

Thanks for all the insight!
I've never restarted my Linode ;-)
I think this is a really clever and unexpected take on weather prediction. A real case of Think differently, an innovation through lateral thinking.

Got a spare fiver? Let them know you agree :)
Web development is like a fashion industry. Just because it is popular it doesn't mean it has the functionalities.
"Most importantly, graduates in the arts, psychology and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth. Economic growth is not a magic totem to which all else must bow, but it is one of the main reasons we subsidize higher education."

I think this is a completely misguided assumption. Maybe this is true these days. But it wasn't always true, and it shouldn't be true. Higher education, especially in the liberal arts, is for training students to become good community members, citizens and leaders. It's about giving them the cognitive, rhetorical, and even emotional skills required to solve the hard problems that we face as a society. And there is a lot more to solving those problems than promoting "innovation" or "economic growth". We subsidize higher education because producing citizens with those skills is valuable to our society.

Are liberal arts programs perfect? No. Do they cost too much? Maybe. Would it be good for society to have more people going into STEM fields? Probably. Does all this mean that liberal arts education is "oversold"? Certainly not. Indeed, it is rare to see people express just how valuable the liberal arts are, and why.
Backbone.js On Rails Screencast
Why do you hate using mercurial? You like to type things like this:

git fetch <project-to-union-merge>
GIT_INDEX_FILE=.git/tmp-index git-read-tree FETCH_HEAD
GIT_INDEX_FILE=.git/tmp-index git-checkout-cache -a -u
git-update-cache --add -- (GIT_INDEX_FILE=.git/tmp-index git-ls-files)
cp .git/FETCH_HEAD .git/MERGE_HEAD
git commit

instead of this:

hg pull --force <project-to-union-merge>
hg merge
hg commit

Mercurial "just works", and its commands are less arcane.

To be fair, git is now much easier to use. But also to be fair, mercurial has become much more powerful. In mercurial, doing straightforward things is simple, and doing complicated things is more complex, which is the way it should be IMHO

It even has rebase, although one might argue that is not a great differentiating feature for a REPOSITORY
I wonder how much of the anecdata being relayed here is a result of selective perception? We don't really remember the cases where a freeloading customer went away at the first "no", or where a well-paying customer received the red carpet service treatment. The high-maintenance cheapskates stick out in mind because they're the exceptions, but perhaps they're not quite so common as they might seem.
> Half a mil so that when you apply for a job at $MEGA-CORP or in government the hirer says "Oh you went to %SCHOOL%, same as me" welcome to our management fast-track program, followed by promotion and VP-dom.

Do companies really work that way? I think trying to max-out your competitiveness and money-making skills by hiring the right guys would make more sense than hiring via secluded grapevine.
Results of my iOS App experiments Month 1 (and a half)
They probably used the CPU -- I remember reading somewhere that Carmack also wanted to implement a beam-tree (3D BSP) for faster culling of shadow surfaces, but I am not sure. I did some experiments with Shadows myself 10 years ago, on that era of CPUs and GPUs and the bottleneck for me was drawing the volumes in the stencil buffer.
The beauty is on the inside. Although the wood case is handsome, I think this would be very nice in a case that allows a view of that amazing looking circuit board.
Seriously? Cloud operators are so desperate to attract customers they are playing the "green" card? Clouds are data centers. They heavily virtualize but no one else can? Show me you can secure my data, restore it quickly for me, migrate it to another operator quickly, track where my data are at rest and stop telling me nonsense.
High-Tech Cordon Photo Radar Trap Could Catch EVERYONE...
I tried Textmate. But I was also using a web browser, an email client, a terminal, a VM running Linux with gnome-terminal and a few other linux-only utilities, including our product.

I don't recall exactly what was inconsistent with what, but the overall effect was to make me unhappy.
Wednesday Transcription Tip- Be Learning Always
Elitism only works while it has some kind of advantage.

If going to an elite college gives you a better chance of reaching the top, then hirers will come from elite colleges.

If getting a CS degree gives you a better chance of reaching the top, then hirers will have CS degess.
not to ruin the spirit of this post/project, but if you're looking into a low power, inexpensive home server why not consider an old laptop with a few USB drives?

With an old laptop you get battery backup (UPS) for free. Bonus points if you find a super cheap one with a broken display.

Disclaimer: I've been doing this for years and it rocks.
Yeah, he sounds like Max Headroom.
Mac lost my data

Many day of work gone

Learn to commit more
> The 'first' claim here is moving in 3D space. Controlling pixels on a screen has been done before -- and in many ways, this development is basically the same thing. The researchers make it sound like 'continuous and real-time' are also significant developments, along with the 3D thing. <

Mrsebastian, in case you didn't know: you appear to be hellbanned so I can't reply to you directly.

You are correct, the newness claim is centered around the 3D thing, but I'm very skeptical of that claim as well. Using cortical electrodes to control things is so old a method you can't really slap a marketing label on it ("look, this time we control XYZ! it's NEW!1!") and call it new. In any case, it's grossly misleading to hype this as groundbreaking research.
Great site, interesting idea, but doesn't sync very well with Google Reader, so kind of a burn-the-boats jump.
This is true, but:

11:12:52 up 44 days, 54 min, 63 users

The machines I connect to are restarted rarely. I expect this particular machine to be up until Christmass time, at which point there will probably be some scheduled maintenance.
What's the point of these kind of announcement when there is no data to back it up? They could have just as well made this up and there's no third party measurement that can validate their numbers.

Rovio is just milking this cow to the max and until they announced or released another hit game, it's all a show.
transactional DDL for granted? Not at all! Oracle doesn't support that AFAIK. May be you were thinking about transactional DML?
Exactly. A subtle change to our workflows where we force ourselves to think about the problem for a minimum of ten minutes prior to coding will provide more benefit than any piece of equipment ever could.

Not as sexy as a new cinema display though.
آژانس هواپیمایی
This is a travel agency site with very good and attractive offer and will recommend this company with the greatest pleasure.
If by critic, you mean from the greek "kritikós" and not some creation of cable news or au courant op-ed pages.
I hope your boss said "no."
> 2. The instance will lock you out (no web interface, cannot push to repos) but you own all your data so you will never lose your content

Does that mean one can still clone repos?
I got used to it, especially with a little help in .inputrc: https://github.com/pavellishin/dotfiles/blob/master/.inputrc

But moot point, now :)
Samsung released Galaxy Note in India……
This is a very very clever idea, and very useful too.

Why do they need so much money? for servers?
The functional programming is a side effect of the desire to teach computer science in a low-friction way. It's nice to not have to also teach Java along with your CS concepts.

I know that when I teach myself anything it's best to focus on one new concept at a time. Scheme's light weight allows all but the CS concepts to fall away from the new coder's consideration.
Google phased out support for IE7 across their Apps platform in August. It shouldn't be surprising that other new versions of their products only support the newest and second newest versions of a browser.
Successful go to elite college, successful only hire from elite college, therefore to be successful you go to elite college.

Of course this system eventually breaksdown. But for Eton school it's worked since 1440, for Oxford since 1096, Cambridge since 1284 - but eventually it will break down.
I don't know - I find that smaller screens tends to mean more context switching. I often need to move back and forth between more terminal windows / virtual desktop / screen sessions where I'd just split my emacs session horizontally and/or vertically when I'm on a larger screen. The latter makes direct comparisons, cut and paste and working on things that cross files easier (e.g. writing a test and filling in code that correspond to them side by side)

I'm not sure how much a small screen would or wouldn't actually slow me down, but it feels more tiresome to work on a smaller screen.
Emscripten... oh wow if emscripten could handle this that could be an amazing tech demo for browsers.
Ways to Decrease Your Chance of Bootstrapping a Successful Company
The article does not mention whether the bugs have been reported and rectified in subsequent releases, either.

Since at least some of the bugs found are segfault/data-corruption/wrong-query-results level ones[†], one would assume they'd get found out quite soon.

For me, when picking software for a new project, an important metric is how fast bugs get fixed upstream.

--

[†] I just love how `ones' is a perfectly reasonable expression in english. `Would that it were so in our programming languages', with apologies to Alan Perlis ;-)
I don't see the difference compared to owning a MacBook Air. Is it that the screen and keyboard are separated?
Not true at all. Data can be pulled from multiple database sources, each with their own projection info., so if there are datum shifting issues, you can have some pieces not aligning to basemap while others do.
10,000 Raspberry Pi $25 PCs available to programmers in December
I have no specific knowledge of the Swedish justice system.

But any system can be swayed, and from 3000 miles away, the Swedish system doesn't look really resilient: e.g. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9622/swedish_prosecutor_wont_in... , and both the Pirate Bay trial and the Assange case look like a charade.

If you believe that there's such a thing as an independent, only-cares-about-the-law-and-not-about-any-ties-and-pressure justice system out there, there's a bridge near my house that I can offer to sell you.

Things aren't (much) different now than they have always been - there's law for the common people; there's law for the influential people; and when you upset the _really_ influential people, the law will be rewritten against you, retroactively.
Why Talks Make Luck
Manchester United vs Otelul Galati Live
Manchester United vs Otelul Galati Live
Manchester United vs Otelul Galati Live
Manchester United vs Otelul Galati Live
Manchester United vs Otelul Galati Live
Compromised WordPress Sites Redirecting to Black Hole Exploit Kit Servers
I'd also doubt this is the "first brain-computer interface that allows the human user to navigate a 3D space". Note: "real BCI" does not need to be bidirectional and may be accomplished via read-only EEG (as ones eyes and ears will be receiving information from the machine).

One problem with neurofeedback has been that the visualizations have been done using proprietary software toolkits which inhibits the ability of designers in working with neurofeedback specialists to create more engaging and intuitive imagery for the brain. I've been working on a small toolkit that will allow you to control events in a browser using canvas and websockets: http://vimeo.com/mindhead.

Would love feedback and/or development help!
This is really true, although depending entirely on a low-price, commercial app makes me uneasy.

I'd be happier if I knew iSSH made enough to support a small company.

I'd be happiest with an open source version I could contribute to.
competitiveness only matters when you have competitors.

So if you are an engineering company and you work like this you will be destroyed by countries with more meritocratic hiring systems.

If you don't have any competitors because you work for government or in a sector like banking where you are protected from foreign competition and all you competitors hire on the same system - then you will do fine (for now).

Can we spot any English speaking countries which might be an example of this?
The Bug Hunt: Facebook, others turn to researchers for help finding flaws
Mark Jason Dominus on the importance of giving fish
Great! Thanks for your data :D I'm glad you enjoyed it. You wouldn't imagine how many complaints we got from fellow students.
No, it's Google and their monopoly of your privacy.
That's awfully rude. Which part was unintelligent and why?
Which part was poorly argued and why?
How much activity on the Internet is consensual?
I think this is also the first C++ version of their engine, isn't it? And by that the first C++ code released by Id.

I wonder how much C++ there is involved in the code.
Awesome! I'd always wanted to do something like that with a site of mine, http://meteo-veneto.net/ but simply don't have the skills to do the prediction part of it very well.
I tried out an iPad app called Koder, it was nice but still lacked some things.

Your post has got me wondering about Vim again.. :) Making the switch to Sublime Text has got me appreciating a more shell-like interface for some things.

Have you ever found yourself wanting to code and not have an internet connection? I think that's a pretty rare scenario, I'm rarely offline.
What hosting company would you recommend then?
Children and Apps: Educational Tool or a Shiny New Distraction?
Yandex Relevance Prediction Challenge
We are pleased to announce the launch of the Relevance Prediction Challenge, which is a part of the WSDM 2012 Web Search Click Data (WSCD) workshop. This challenge provides a unique opportunity to consolidate and scrutinize the work from industrial labs on predicting the relevance of URLs using user search behavior. It provides a fully anonymized dataset shared by Yandex, which has user queries, clicks on URLs and their relevance labels.

Important Dates:
Oct 15, 2011 - Challenge opens
Dec 15, 2011 - End of challenge
Dec 25, 2011 - Winners candidacy notification
Jan 20, 2012 - Reports deadline
Feb 12, 2012 - WSCD workshop at WSDM 2012 (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nickcr/wscd2012/) and Winners announcement

The top three competitors will receive the following cash prizes:

1st place: $5,000
2nd place: $3,000
3rd place: $1,000

Contestants can participate as individuals, or as teams. You will find a detailed description of the task, data sets and result evaluation methodology at:
http://imat-relpred.yandex.ru/en
1) Ah ok, didn't see that.

Do you PEAR-install PEAR packages? It's important for when there are executables. We wrote another project called comice to make it easy to create PEAR sandboxes and work with them: https://github.com/ardell/comice

2) We will move to 5.3 ourselves soon, I am just telling you the reality. PHP 5.3 broke some BC stuff, making it risky to migrate. I think that's slowed adoption a lot.

3) Not a huge problem that it doesn't install executables, so long as you support legacy PEAR installs with executables (see #1).

4) Cool, I will have to look into that.
Can I get this on a t-shirt?
Yes, I only make them do the first ten assignments in Notepad and a command-line compiler. Then we switch to JCreator, which is a pretty unremarkable IDE, but it does have syntax highlighting and a few other niceties that make it a much more efficient code editor.
Core HTML5 Canvas: Mind-blowing Apps in Your Browser
And check out the story under their first update: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jackadam/dark-sky-hyperl...
Looked at it; didn't see any compelling reasons to switch; went back to screen.

Screen is for the most part "good enough" that any replacement that aims to supplant it completely needs to either be vastly and obviously superior or enough of a drop in replacement that it doesn't require any effort to switch (I'm most definitively not investing time updating config files or changing key presses unless the improvements are dramatic).

As far as I can see, while tmux might be "better" in some nebulous way, the value proposition is way to weak to invest time in switching for me.
Playinator Week 1 Example Usage
Gmail has a compact format if you go to setting which tightens things up nicely. I couldn't find one in reader unfortunately.
One of the Dark Sky guys here...

So yeah, we need money for servers, and to pay for rent / food / etc for the several months it'll take us to make this thing.

When you start doing the math, a lot of the money we're asking for disappears. 10% of what we raise goes to Kickstarter and Amazon (for payment processing). Another 30% - $35% goes to paying for the Kickstarter rewards, and then the government takes it's cut. What's left is a minority of the money.
i'm in NL
please, see my address in the profile for more
PEARFarm, pearhub, and phark all made it easy to create packages, so I don't think this is going to be the silver bullet to broad adoption.
I found the easiest way to do this test was to first find something the uniquely determined the the the position and rotation of the cube. Then I would see which edges were adjacent by folding in my head. I would use this to gradually construct a
010
111
010
010
canonical 2d picture of one picture. I would then compare the others to this one.

I couldn't hold a 3d picture in memory. 2d and graphs on the other hand..

8/9 points
There is only one time that my batteries die on the wireless: When I don't have fresh ones nearby. Also, some server firedrill also increases the probability exponentially.

I'm sure it's a consequence of thermodynamics, but I can't explain it.
With SVN, probably, but the branching just feels heavyweight so sometimes it's hard to motivate. Git with the "git flow" addon seems like it'd be a better fit for you. Being able to checkin in "to your feature", as opposed to waiting till it's done and ready, feels great.

It's also not just about avoiding data loss. If your feature starts going off-course or has a bug, you can look at previous revisions to get fixed up.
Was my second sentence really that incomprehensible?
Banks drop the $5 fee after online backlash
Yep - you know it's the "end of days" when you look back on Microsoft as the hey-day of freedom in computers!

See the shiny aluminium laptop - don't worry about not being allowed to own the stuff on it - look shiny.

We have a funny logo some days - just enter your kid's details here for marketing purposes - look funny logo.
The one thing I miss after switching to PostgreSQL from MySQL is Sequel Pro. pgAdmin 3, sorry to say, sucks, and I grow tired of rails dbconsole - but that's my only option, really.

Please, someone, make a good osx pg client. Just copy Sequel Pro if you don't know what I mean by that. I would pay a lot of money for a good osx client, I am not kidding, I have to deal with this every day. I cannot be the only one..
I am surprised this got only 6 upvotes.
/me wonders when Mercurial will ever do anything other than copy BitKeeper.
We've been doing this for years, my photos are in a ~100GB BK/BAM repo.

Release notes for BitKeeper version 4.1 (released 12-Oct-2007)

Major features

BAM support. BAM stands for "Binary Asset Management" and it adds
support to BK for versioning large binaries. It solves two problems:
a) one or more binary files that are frequently changed.
b) collections of many large binaries where you only need a subset.
The way it solves this is to introduce the concept of BAM server[s].
A BAM server manages a collection of binaries for one or more BAM
clients. BAM clients may have no data present; when it is needed
the data is fetched from the BAM server.

In the first case above, only the tip will be fetched. Imagine that
you have 100 deltas, each 10MB in size. The history is 1GB but you
only need 10MB in your clone.

In the second case, imagine that you have thousands of game assets
distributed across multiple directories. You typically work only
in one directory at a time. You will only need to fetch the subset
of files that you need, the rest of the repository will have the
history of what changed but no data (so bk log will work but
bk cat will have to go fetch the data).
Buying Silver, Gold Or Phosphates: A Lesson On Planning And Hedging
It matters because if you're still on a 5.2 platform you cannot run composer without having php 5.2 and 5.3 installed side-by-side, which is a pain.
That's why some distros roll packages with bugfix patches applied even before upstream maintainers include those in official releases.

Even better, if a particular bug is a show-stopper at your organization, you can build fixed package and deploy it to your local package repository on a short notice; machines can then obtain the update automagically.
Maybe you should make an app that your potential clients can use, to determine if they need an iPhone app :)
I wish we could start teaching real programming in middle school at least. I think just variables, if statements and some sort of looping construct ought to be mandatory in education.
> Maybe it works better on an Android - no, wait, that’d be anti-competitive behavior and Google would never do something evil, right?

I don't see how releasing a full Android version would be anti-competitive in any meaningful sense.

Especially since the Android app and webapp support for Google Docs is unbelievably horrible. It amazes me that something as simple as editing a document (or simple spreadsheet) is almost completely impractical on Android tablets.
Inside iOS 5 - Three New Features That Will Help You Build Better Apps
Nokia Phone Spy Software
> every source release produces a new wave of discoveries/press about crazy things id did in the guts of one of their engines

wow, that sounds interesting! any links?
Took my time (around 10 mins) and got 8/9
Decided to make a new try selecting randomly (around 10 seconds) and got 4/9.
Old lesson from engineering school reminded: usually the most accurate is not the most cost effective solution.
Kudos to Pete, Ian, Michelle and the rest of the team. It is incredible to see how much change has happened in the last four years in London and impressive to see how deep YC is into it.

I wondered round and saw James from WebMynd, Hiroki from GroupPay, Devin onto his new company Lyst and other YC's as part of the attendees.

I can't emphasise enough what a different place London it is now to where it was four years ago and while part of that is the passage of time, a chunk of it is definitely the efforts of the SK team. Well done guys.