skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>We are nowhere near the levels of government surveillance which are seriously dangerous

We'll have to agree to disagree. Abuses of power have happened already. It's already dangerous.

>And I prefer to be rich and work less, not to work a lot and be poor. So what?

So you posed a false dichotomy. Don't get snarky when I don't answer your unsound question the way you hoped.

>The amount of power that people grant to the government depends on the level of results people expect government to achieve.
>The more power people give to the government, the better results government can achieve.

No, the government takes the level of power that it can. The government regularly does things that the populace does not support. Don't pretend that all government powers are granted by the people. Or if you want to believe that, please explain how you would take a power away from the government.

And no, more powerful does not imply more effective. Totalitarian states are basically all-powerful (in terms of powers we've been dscussing) yet most of them have historically also been ineffective (except perhaps at retaining power).

>The reason why it's possible is that more informed government would be able to accomplish the same positive effect by arresting 1 suspect instead of arresting 10.

You're just making things up now. On what basis to you make this claim? I say that an "informed" government arrests more people, because they can find more "probable causes" to do so.

> So within that model what would be your choice? Cut surveillance and increase ability of government to interfere with our lives?

I choose less of both. I will not concede to your fantasy that the government has a fixed amount of power or that it's powers are somehow interchangeable.
Wow... this is really cool. I like how it integrates with bug trackers.
Wouldn't that be the same as just renaming the agency? It's going to be comprised of the same career people and contracting companies anyway. There needs to be hard restrictions on their powers.
:-)

I trust Moxie to be doing the right thing.
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Maybe Justice will team with TSA to strip search our laptops for illegal files before boarding an airplane.
Stevey Emacs utils
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Telescope Big Data infographic
Last time I checked, warrantless wiretaps were illegal. Yet the government has done a lot of that with no apparent reprisal.

And again, I disagree with your assessment. The government gains nothing useful by snooping on its average citizen. It average citizen is not committing crimes. The government can snoop on suspected criminals by getting a warrant. They do not need further freedom to snoop in order to do their jobs.
Excellent article.

I worked on a project that I integrated with DataSift.

Lorenzo and every one else I emailed with were very quick to respond and the product performed as expected (besides some hiccups that I can easily understand due to growing pains).

Compared to Gnip, (which we also integrated with) DataSift won hands down on both quality of product and customer relations.

However, I'm still suspect of the usefulness of Twitter analytics/ data mining.
tl;dr: You can do anything you want to do, but you can't do everything you want to do.
Windows desktop apps.
Pick up a new sport/hobby/game. Practice.
The hover nav is a usability abomination.

It's not discoverable--the only clue it's there is a tiny arrow. On the old bar it was totally obvious where the links were to jump to other properties.

It presents an inconsistent user interface. If you move the pointer in from the bottom, you're on the left nav. If you move the pointer in from the top, you're on the hover nav. It would be like getting two totally different neighborhoods depending on whether you drove in from the north or south.

It requires precise mouse choreography. It's not enough to aim for the target, you have to follow a specific path to get there (especially true with the extra fly-out submenu). If you don't, you have to go back to the beginning and start over. The old bar was a fixed set of targets--easy to hit from wherever.
Can't wait to see where this goes. The world needs a game changer in this space.
very cool, you can simplify your install instructions to

goinstall github.com/bmizerany/noeq
That's another good one. I think people tend to apply this principle to concepts from functional languages, but forget that there are many abstractions in imperative languages that simplify styles of programming in the same way.
The problem I have is that you're assuming that each of the 27 outcomes has equal probability, but the chance that we received the information in the way we did makes that a flawed assumption.

The best analogous problem is the German Tank Problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

If we have destroyed a single German tank with a serial number 100, we can at least to begin to make an estimate on the size of the German force, by basically asking the question:

"If they have 200 tanks, what was the chance one we randomly killed was this serial number? 500? 1000?"

And then combining n=100->infinity to form a probability distribution. You can then say that there is an x% chance that Germany has 500 tanks, and a y% chance that Germany has 10,000 tanks.

However - if instead, we asked 'does there exist a German tank with a serial number 100', and the answer is yes, this does NOT tell us anything past the fact that their tanks are >= 100 in number.

We have the exact same information, but how it was determined changes the outcome drastically.

Does that make sense?
How to Generate 20 Leads A Day On Facebook
Siri clones demonstrate vast technical lead Apple enjoys with iPhone 4S software
If you actually wanted this, you could just spend five dollars on a gameboy printer off ebay and make the exact same printouts.
Can Facebook Get You a Job? (Infographic)
That's interesting. Now that you mention it, I've noticed my Flask apps run a much tighter LOC count. I always assumed that was because I was achieving the same solution but in a simpler way. In any case, I migrated to Flask because I'm much happier coding in it. My admin apps are blueprint css + some really simple views that take as much effort to write as I would be spending tweaking the Admin classes in Django. Maybe it's time to have a look at Django again, now that Holovaty is making a comeback eah? hehe.
Do I Have To Move To Silicon Valley?
@codahale, was this email from you or someone else in your company?

Judging from your blog post a year ago at http://eng.yammer.com/blog/tag/scala, at one point you thought Scala was great. As someone who still thinks Scala is great, I would like to know how long it took you to change your mind and what triggered you to reach this realization. When it comes down to it, I've never developed Scala as part of a team or worked on a project more than a few thousand lines of code, so I definitely lack the experience you probably have with the language and runtime.

As to the email itself, I find the complaints about performance most uninsightful, and I say this as someone who has written CPU-intensive NLP code in Scala. Anyone who writes performant code to run on the JVM knows that the only way to get C-like performance in Java is to, it turns out, write C-like code in Java!

That means operating only on primitives and arrays of primitives when in tight loops. It means avoiding allocations as much as possible. It even means avoiding generics like the plague, including java.util.HashMap. In my NLP code, for instance, I got at least a 100x speed up by switching from HashMaps with string keys to arrays by manually interning each string into an incremented number. One library I used, called Mallet, relied on GNU trove to have hash maps without boxing of primitives, because for high performance, even java.util.HashMap is too slow!

This means that, if you want amazing performance in Scala, you have to write C-like code in Scala as well. I'd expect anyone who needs top-notch performance to know this kind of thing already. Writing performant code in any high-level language in our day and age, even C++, still requires you to understand how your abstractions are actually getting implemented underneath the hood. Scala doesn't work miracles here or everyone would probably be using it already.

Just ask the people who run JGit about performant JVM code. (http://marc.info/?l=git&m=124111702609723&w=2) They ran into a ton of cases where they couldn't write the equivalent C-code in Java and performance suffered as a consequence.

However, the points about the build toolchain, backwards binary compatibility, and to some extent, initial learning complexity are the ones that I think are most damning against Scala. I hope Typesafe has a good response to this or other companies step up to share how they worked around these deficiencies successfully. Otherwise, I feel like this could be potentially very damaging to Scala's reputation, and maybe even deservedly so.
The difference is how easy a language makes it to hang ones self, or how many ropes are lying around to do it with. I think the article touches on it aptly. It's not so much a fault of the language (one can debate the semantics of it), so much as it is an outcome of greater-than n-sized (where n is 1, 2, maybe 3) non-high-expert-Scala-users teams. The lack of an easy to grok idiomatic way of writing code is hard on a team. It bothers me when I write code and don't know the idiomatic way of doing it, and I'll often solicit feedback and rewrite it just for my own sake (really, on code that no one else will ever really see or touch).
Agreed. This isn't a tech problem, this is a social problem. There is nothing wrong with the current technology, we don't need more code to solve this.
Isn't Blackboard known for being a very litigious company? I wonder if that's come to be an issue for Coursekit yet or not.

I've talked with at least two folks that wanted to start up something in this space, but had fears about lawsuits from Blackboard.
> surely, given enough rope, a non-expert can hang himself in any language

I completely agree, and sometimes productivity absolutely demands that developers become more expressive. I've found Java overly restrictive in the past, and have spent time learning Python, Haskell and other languages (and seen decent increases in productivity when I feel less fettered by the language I'm programming in). That said, I've also come to appreciate the effect of more restrictive languages: readability and long-term maintainability. Coming back to old code can always be jarring; having to maintain decade-old Perl written in a variety of different styles was maddening.

While you can screw up in anything, it's worth appreciating that more expressive languages effectively hand you more "rope" :).
Yes, it's hard -- I'm just saying it looked like enough to matter for a server app. Maybe you could arrange to force GC in between requests somehow.

(I haven't read the OP, Google wanted me to log in for some reason.)
> Some things that should be simple and straightforward, like iterating through an array, are impossible.

Impossible?

array foreach f
array map f

Or if you miss java enough:

var i = 0
while (i < array.length) { f(array(i)) ; i += 1 }

I can't even imagine what it is you think is impossible.
The only problem is that professors don't usually pick the software they use to deliver their online course -- they can certain pick certain applications, but the professors aren't the "buyer" it's the schools and cracking that nut is very, very difficult since Blackboard has heavy investment (and contractual agreements) with so many of the pick players in higher ed. Even if a professor wanted to switch, Blackboard integration in higher ed is far deeper than a single class. Higher ed and enterprise is exceptionally difficult to disrupt when it comes to institution-level installations. There's a reason many orgs are STILL using Windows XP and IE 6. Fighting institutional inertia is massively difficult.

If coursekit wants to accomplish that goal though, they should take a facebook approach -- one school at a time. Convince some small school that isn't using Blackboard to try their software. Then expand the school targets outward to adjacent schools in the geographic region. Build up a core school-base and then go after bigger targets. It'll take more than great software. Institutional penetration is far more about sales skill than code quality (see Windows XP comment above.)
It seems to me that Microsoft is in a perfect position to promulgate such a standard - they don't care if the hardware is commoditized (in fact they would welcome it). It also appears that "will run Windows 8" should be a sufficient carrot to convince manufacturers to build to the spec.

As you say, Google is in a similar position, so perhaps a Microsoft/Google jointly supported standard makes a certain amount of sense, as odd as that sounds...
Thanks Charles. Tell Greg to use it over at Zumbox! :-)
Entire computer built into USB thumb drive
Looks like Obie hasn't gotten ----'d in a while. ba-dum-dum-clang. Thanks, I'm a Java programmer and I'll be here all week.

Seriously, Obie- you've gone on an anti-Java rant before again (and again and again). You should first explain to us why you were on the Hibernate blog. If Java sucks ass as you say, why do you even bother to watch that blog and then bother to write about something that upset you on it? I'll tell you why- because you are somehow threatened by the Java community. Well- wake up, Obie. There is JRuby. And Grails. Ruby and Rails have made an impact on Java, and Java is not out to screw Ruby. Java is the old man rambling about the good old days that is the CEO of the company. Let him do his job. One day Java will be relegated to the basement with its red stapler. There is absolutely no reason to get so upset over things. It makes you looks like a complete moron. I'm sorry that this comment is not more intellectual to be in the HN spirit, but Obie- you sicken me, and you are sad, sad little man.

All that said, that post is old as the hills and so is this response.
We had been using the wonderful mediaelementjs.js But this would have been our first choice if it had been free.

Now if we can just all agree on a single video format.
It does, but the point is that with Python there's generally one "obvious" way of accomplishing something. With Scala, I found when tackling certain problems (and my memory is fuzzy here; like I said, it's been several months :)), no particular solution stuck out as obvious. I'd consider myself fairly expert in Python now, so it may well be that what I see as obviousness may well be (reasonably) deep domain knowledge... but I didn't find the curve with Python anywhere near as steep as Scala's.
Ironic given that many indications imply that the backscatter scanners may deliver unhealthy or unsafe doses of radiation.
I was using Scala on some lone projects as prototypes, working with at most one other developer. In the end, we decided against it; there was never a chance to set down such guidelines (which I'm sure would be effective). The spectre of our Perl codebase was too much, sadly.
Oh man, HLSS was crazy back then. I can't believe you created that. I just remember every one playing Bannaphone or Jim Carrey yelling at the top of his lungs. Those were the days.
I'm not sure what you're gaining (unless you're also hiding the application's menu). A maximized application in Unity doesn't waste any more space than what you describe. The top bar is still visible, but it's merged with the menu, so there's no effective wastage.
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There's something primal about Java that invites people to write it in styles that ape other languages. In fact, whenever I write Java I find myself trying to write FORTRAN or Lisp or something else. I did a stint of work in Scala that now has me writing Scala in Java. I'm starting to feel that Java is a better Scala than Scala!

It all started when I had to write Java classes that consumed results from Scala. There are all these Scala classes like Some that, if you look at the docs, you realize you can use in Java without any trouble at all.

Many of the patterns that Scala uses can be implemented easily in Java... If there's something you like about Scala, you can usually do it in Java with a little thinking.

A good example is all of that Actor BS in Scala. You can screw around with that and come to realize that you're completely out of control, you don't know how many threads are involved and exactly how. Java's got ExecutorService, which for many of the tasks I do, can keep an 8-CPU machine busy with 100% utilization.

I remember having a discussion with a guy in Germany about his system that used Scala Actors that revealed that neither of us had any idea of what was really going on at all. Today I build pure Java systems using Java idioms that are so fast it's almost scary.
I think about this often. Usually I try to put my laptop in the trunk when I get in the car, if I anticipate having to leave my laptop in the car when I park it. However, if I have to relocate the laptop to the trunk when I park, I'll will always just put it in the trunk because the trunk in my car can be locked from the interior trunk release.
Hey, Americans. This whole mess is truly unbelievable from over the pond. Aren't there legal procedures in place to stop this unconstitutional, incredibly annoying, intrusive and expensive fearmongering campaign? Yeah, it was introduced at precisely the right moment by people in positions of trust and power, but haven't you had quite enough already? The head honcho, Pistole, is a deranged veteran of War on Terror. There isn't a yota of evidence in support of their paranoid fantasies. No one is out to get you. Just back down before you've found yourselves living in a police state without a legal recourse.

I know, this has been said time and again already, but venting your frustration on the internet is counterproductive — it assuages an urge to actually do something — and do something you should, because TSA won't dissolve by itself. But there's another side to the endless discussions on the Internet — by illuminating legal specifics of the situation you could effect a slow, incremental progress in public awareness.
The most interesting college courses are wasted on 18-year-olds
You would need to vote out the system of government that is implemented in the US. But the US political bureaucracy is itself reinforced by its deep rooted opposition to all other forms of government. Most US political leaders would rather see the US government collapse completely than fall to socialsim.
So which label do you want to attach to me?

Independent thinker.

Note that in each of your uses of the terms L & C, you had to qualify them with a specific context. In each of those contexts, there's someone else who might use the term differently but sensibly. E.g., "radical conservatism", "contemporary liberalism".

My point being that the terms L & C are not by themselves sufficient to communicate intelligently, so when you hear them used without supporting context, the speaker is often not working from a solid logical basis.
Long Term Privacy with Forward Secrecy
Because the progressives won with FDR. Both parties are socialist now. Both are in favor of expanding the reach of the state in the market. We gave away the cake long ago and argue over the crumbs.
Articles with question marks in the title are inevitably answered "no".
Pure Java implementation of LevelDB
Netflix's first OSS project on Github
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"ClickOnce" deployment, which you get for free when you're developing a windows desktop app, does the same thing as far as I can tell. And it doesn't install a service on your system; instead you can configure it to check for updates in the background when your app is running, installing them when it's launched the next time.

So... what does this offer over the stock solution?
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"Well-known" in a particular field doesn't necessarily mean "household name"... do you know who Tim Gowers is, for example?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Aaronson

A lot of people might know him from http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html, which is the article about that topic.

edit: Okay, rereading this article I recovered an insight that leads to a truer reason Aaronson's worth linking to. It is not that he's a famous professor (he is) so much that he is, in general, a great expositor. Read that big-number article and tell me he's not.
I choose less of both.

Not really.

You focus on limiting surveillance power of government (instead of limiting government ability to mess with peoples lives).

That indirectly increases amount of power government gets in messing up with people's lives.

It works like that:

1) You significantly limit what information government can get about people.

2) Clueless government agencies allow some major terrorist act (like 9/11) to happen (which could have been avoided if surveillance was more efficient).

3) Society is getting scared and gives government way more power to mess people's lives (crazy airport security, Iraq and Afghanistan mess etc.).

I understand that your intentions are noble, but the end result is pathetic.
Former Mossad chief: Israeli strike on Iran will lead to regional war
That would solve the problem of people accidentally buying fake Chanel products. Is that really what Chanel is concerned about here? When I first read this article, I assumed that Chanel was trying to cut down on the number of people who deliberately purchase fake Chanel products since they cost a fraction of the price and are not easily discernible from the real thing.
I'm getting a little excited about LevelDB

I'm an IndexedDB fanboy, and they're using LevelDB as an experimental backend to the API. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2526263

Not saying that the whitepaper is going to end up as big of a gamechanger as Big Table or Dynamo, but I think it could be pretty interesting technology idea to play in the Memcached/Redis space.
Checkout a recent build of chromium ... (especially the profile/alias switcher with "Slice", "Agent X", and "Fluffy") I'm using rev 111735.

I'm guessing anything now in the Google+ toolbar is quickly headed up a level into the "jetpack'ish" plumbing ... this latest redesign news seems like a fast-track'd gateway to that.
I think that's a good point and was also heavily commented on when Google's Unladden Swallow released its benchmark numbers (IIRC, for the django benchmark its binary size grew to 800 megs.) Probably that was even a reason they stopped working on it (there was a link somewhere, but I cannot find it right now.)

Furthermore, I think this "problem" is attributable to jit-compilation in general, since you have to store the code somewhere. The situation was/is somehow similar to the JVM's memory requirements. An interesting alternative to code generation is to optimize interpreters instead.
The Curse of Contemplation is thinking too much
"My father taught me to work hard, as his father taught him, etc"

This is a very good lesson to learn. Make sure you take it to heart.

The thing to know, is: WHO are you working hard for? If the answer isn't yourself, then you have the wrong answer. Spending your effort and time working hard for the benefit of someone else is being scammed.
Mac Launcher Alfred App Hits 1.0 Milestone
That's what makes the old-school polymaths like Goethe and Von Neumann so amazing to me - they not only did it in a single field, but many, all relatively simultaneously.
Which is actually what Python is doing, too. There is (IIRC) a mark and sweep collector that collects cycles. Another interesting technique for dealing with this problem is called "trial deletion."
FSA Seatpost
So instead of enforcing prosecution of illegal wiretaps you are suggesting to make grey-area wiretaps illegal?
And then not enforce it either, I assume?

That reminds me alcohol prohibition campaign.
Macro vs. Micro Optimisation
If you enjoyed the time, did you really waste it?