skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One could argue in every case other than perhaps Bellard that while maybe some programmers are 10x more productive in spurts than other programmers, they average out to a similar productivity in the end anyway. Sure, Eich created JavaScript in 10 days or whatever the story is, but as far as I can see (and I mean no disrespect to Eich here), those 10 days were an anomaly in terms of his usual output.

I can only really speak for my own experience where I do often have bursts of creative output that are extremely productive which are then often followed by days or even weeks of relatively slowish slogging maintenance work.

Am I capable of "10x" work? Yes. Can I maintain that "10x" 100% of the time. No, certainly not.

I think Joel's Salieri/Mozart point is the far greater one than whether anyone is "10x" productive -- some developers are simply capped at a certain level beyond which they lack some combination of the basic creativity and/or fundamental software engineering knowledge that would allow them to perform some task outside of their routine. If all of your developers are of that type, you're pretty fucked unless you're just producing run of the mill CRUD apps all of the time.
Based on the tone of Louis CK in his description, I would try sending some feedback on the problem... he appears receptive. It's only been available for one day so far, so I imagine he would appreciate a chance to improve the system.
Gnuplotting - Create scientific plots using Gnuplot
I guess SmartOS reserves /usr for the Solaris base install and puts additions in /opt/local. If you look at http://wiki.joyent.com/display/jpc2/SmartOS+Smartmachine+Dat... and click "to see list of installed software", it includes grep 2.5.3.
To whoever downvoted, I'd like to read a polite explanation why.
Exactly. There are lots of jobs for which a degree or certification is absolutely required.
This is especially seen in the alert you get after clicking the 'What is this?' button.

"It's nothing, I just wanted to say hi! Hope everything is going well for you!"
The 3rd type of acquisition (Business) is a lil generic and should be broken down into a few more parts.

IMHO, in the tech industry, I observed many times that if a company acquires another purely from a business perspective, it is either:

(a) Customer/Market - The acquired company has a huge and highly desirable market share,demographics,etc that the bigger company would like to "acquire". Also sometimes, it is simply to get the "pageviews". I.e. Google acquiring Blogger/Blogspot (community) or the myriad of blogging companies that AOL has acquired (market share).

(b) Expanding - The acquirer would like to expand from their core business and the best way to do this to acquire a company that is the best in the field. I.e. Apple acquires Quattro (advertising), Google acquires Android (mobile).
RE with backreferences is strictly more powerful then RE without them. Implying that PCRE is somehow inferior due to backreferences support is quite fuddy.
All patents must die. After some time. Creators and investors are entitled to their money, their inventions must be protected somehow. That's all right. But not forever for god's sakes. Let's make it 5-15 years depending on the industry or something else. So much it's enough time to make fortune. But not so much that you can troll with that patent after half of the century. Even though the investors are paid and inventor is dead.
The Marc Maron 2-part interview with Louis is one of the best podcasts ever made. Louis goes into his production process, how he creates 2 hours of new material every year, and why he brought in Jean Luc Godard's DP to film Pootie Tang. Will definitely make you want to put up a measly 5 bucks for just about anything Louis does.

http://wtfpod.libsyn.com/episode-111-louis-ck-part-1
Spam. Verbatim copy of http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020341330457708... which it also links to as "read more". That URL hides the rest of the content behind a pay wall (or something like that, I saw the login form and closed the tab).
I hardly see how that's the case? $90/small vm, $10/gb db, $7/50gb storage, $3/20gb bw. $109.99/month. ???
Ugh. This data is somewhat obnoxiously wrong.

- The federal gov't employs ~2.8 million people, not 29 million [1].

- State and local gov'ts employ ~17 million, half of which are education (a little ~6 million are elementary and secondary) [2].

- Let me also note that the topline figure is about ~150 million jobs [1]. I have no idea where he cuts out the retired and young from.

Very quippy; very tantalizing to ideologues; very empirically inaccurate.

Ugh.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
[2] http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/10stlus.txt
Facebook placed their last message to me about changes to their own privacy policy into this folder!
The problem is you are stuck wading through the spam, since FB's notion of spam (not from friends) is not the average person's notion. It is worse than no spam filtering.
You think your corporate IT department sucks? You haven't seen anything till you examined the technology architecture of a hospital. Many are still running copies of unpatched Windows XP with no virus scanner in sight.

Sure your doctor may be running around with an iPad doing medical diagnosis but the vast majority are running on antiquated systems interfacing with unmaintainable hodgepodge data stores.

Might I add the hospitals probably paid millions of dollars for these systems.
Hey, it's a solid idea to be built upon. I like what I take the point of this post to be, which is just go ahead and release what you have instead of waiting forever. It's actually a very 37-signals/paul grahamy sort of message.

I do think you should keep working on it, and add what it takes to make a useful little tool. Some people here have decent suggestions.
SpaceX mission to space station set for February
It seems somebody hacked my website.
I logged in tonight to find my wp-content folder empty.
Don't know why somebody would do something like that to my little website.
Great.
From Twitter:

I'm going to be doing an IAMA on Reddit, Monday around 1230pmEST I don't know what IAMA or Reddit are, but I'll be doing that.

awesome bunch of geeky-openness from ck.
Good WIP software, but not quite ready for prime time. Used it to mine a large archive of PDF's and found that it works for about 30%. The rest crash.
"Of course, for this to work, there has to be a lot, possibly the majority, of super-payers who pay more into the health care system via their taxes than they receive back."

Yes... but, this is also true for for-profit non-socialized health care insurance.
Seriously, why are restaurant websites so terrible?
For a good time click on "Menu" as well... the one menu item kind of runs away from your mouse.

http://shigezo-pdx.com/index.php?option=com_oziogallery2&...
Water-powered jet pack lets you swim like a dolphin
I hadn't actually heard of that. Very cool concept though. Our software is generic enough that something like this could easily spring up. As in, we don't limit our event to food only, we're interested to see how our users bend the site to their own will. Thanks for the good wishes and such an interesting comment.
HTML5 Inline Form Validation : ht5ifv
Fair enough, but the value of a fancy meal is quickly lost. Comparatively, the value of a college education lasts forever.
> Emscripten is not a viable alternative. The Javascript it generates is too slow for performance intensive things

Is 3-4X slower than native code "too slow"? Those are the results right now. And it will be much faster as JS engines continue to improve.
its very weak when you consider that GE is in fact a 10x company
This can only be fixed with a crypto hash function, that IMHO would be a premature optimization here. Users having this potential problem (key names are result of external user inputs) can simply prefix the key with HMAC(key,secret) truncated to a few bytes.
The truth about Android & iOS UI performance
At ~$100,000 USD this will simply not replace dirt cheap labor in developing countries for decades to come.
I like the brochure thing. I think it takes into account the human nature of the users and their feelings. It's design that lets us feel connection with the program.

I much rather prefer comfortable textured armchairs than soulless straight chairs of Bauhaus' spirit. I think what Metro and other "minimalists" forget to remember is that computer screen is a canvas, a medium. You shouldn't force user to think like a machine, but rather force the machine to think like a human.
> The lack of seriousness on the site greatly compromises the value of the data.

I think that's the point. They want to make a point about privacy, but they don't want anyone to take the specific data seriously.
Three organizations that use the web to kick cancer&#8217;s ass
Your comment is spot on.

For those who don't get the reference to Salieri and Mozart, I can recommend this highly entertaining film:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_(film)
Most REST APIs are simple, returning flattish records, shallowly nested, with a maximum depth of one list, and some choices within. Simple is attractive, but this leads to the REST problem of "chatty" APIs, going back-and-forth to the server for each lookup/join, to locate the resource.

As soon as you start "denormalizing", it makes sense to consider RDB/SQL solutions: there, you avoid joins/lookups between "normalized" flat records by having the data already pre-assembled in the form needed by frequent requests. Here, the problem isn't performance of database joins, but the latency of the whole network stack. Still, the same solution works.

My playful RESTful proposal to achieve this is to consider an SQL query ("SELECT... WHERE..." etc) as the name of the resource returned.
Through caching these names for these resources, it is scalable in the REST way.

This is odd, because the SQL grammar allows all sorts of "names" to identify a "resource", so they don't look like names. But if different queries return the same table - these are just different names for the same resource, which REST permits. (It's more scalable to use the same name for the same resource, but that tends to happen anyway through convention.)

SELECT/*/WHERE/a/AND/b # is the same as:
SELECT/*/WHERE/b/AND/a

---

Is this a real problem that businesses need to solve (will pay to fix), beyond annoying developers? Many website have become slow, as they go back-and-forth aggregating content. Bandwidth is fine; latency is the problem. It's one motivation for Amazon's Silk browser, which assembles content in the cloud, which is local to the services hosted there.

EDIT "naming resources" is a database; a hierarchical database, the sort that relational databases (largely) replaced. It's not surprising that relational algebra is applicable to REST problems.
Heartland robotics, rodney brooks' startup funded by jeff bezos working on a 5000 dollar robot arm. That will really kickstart the revolution.
So, memorization will change brain structure. Interesting.

I'd also bet that people who for various reasons had to memorize a lot (for example, if you weren't ever taught to read either now or years ago when it wasn't a common skill) also have different brain structure.
This doesn't excite me, it scares me. A rapid transition to robotic manufacturing could mean a very rough time for an entire generation of human workers.
Just FYI, it's been moved to the Web Events working group:

http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webevents/raw-file/default/gamepad.htm...

there's an open mailing list if anyone wants to participate.
Since I'm not willing to pay for an app just to listen to one podcast, the "2 hours of new material every year" bit (I'm assuming) is also explained in Louis CK's speech about the late George Carlin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zkizucPU
Louis CK is an interesting example of an artist who has grown. His stuff from 20 years ago (that I've seen, at least) was really bad; it was timid and boxed in by convention, which is death to comedy. Somewhere along the way he obviously said fuck it and started telling the truth more directly and provocatively. And that is how lead is transmuted into gold. Funniness is almost a side effect.

Now he seems closer than anyone working in this area to Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks territory (if anybody's closer, I'd love to hear about them) with at least a shot at equalling them, which would be amazing.
I'm happy to have found a very sweet message from an old friend! How rude it would have been to (seemingly) ignore it.

While Facebook might be right in general to hide messages from non-friends, they should certainly have moved that message to my inbox once we became friends (which apparently happened only the day after she sent the message).
Olark, among others. I'm surprised no one has mentioned them.
This would also hamper the original purpose of patents - to protect small time inventors from large companies duplicating their inventions. Sure, maybe Apple could afford greatly increased patent fees, but if you raised them enough to pay for six-figure salaries of patent examiners, it would be prohibitively expensive for ordinary people to use the system.
In the world of programming/development, at age 27 I feel old, but this article is inspiration that it's never too late to learn programming, and continue to learn.
I've worked extensively with Alchemy and Haxe (which can use Alchemy op-codes for near-direct memory access).

And, recently, started with NACL.

Games are extremely performance-intensive. Its simply crazy to pick a platform that is any factor slower when you have a faster alternative to hand.

NACL is a whole new level of possible. I think its going to succeed technically where Flash and plugins failed.
I'm reminded of this story of the folks who worked on LEO hunting down a similarly difficult-to-find bug that was eventually found to be caused by an unrelated external machine: the manager's elevator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrn24SdW64I&t=2m50s
> For a hobby developer or small business where time is precious, using built-in HTTP libraries is far easier and faster ... Sorry, but you're not going to convince me that rolling your own implementation of Apple's APNS is better than an HTTP-based APNS would have been.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark; if this can be done in 20 lines of Python (see comment above), then why do so many ostensibly capable engineers find it so difficult?
I have static IP and it knew exactly what i have downloaded; i guess it is using some of the most popular trackers from 'the pirate bay'.
Blackberry, Your Time has Come.
I think the issue is initially when things were being invented there was a general lack of understanding of things. When car manufacturers first discovered how to bind metal to rubber (think tires), they didn't even patent it. There wasn't enough knowledge or skilled people to do the experimentation needed. They didn't want to patent it at that point they would just be teaching competition how to do it and within X number of years lose their advantage, and a minor variation in the process could allow them to compete anyway.

And what is the difference between discovery and invention? Anything science related is discovery.

Worse, money only goes into research that has a high level of profit potential, meaning that only if it can be patented. This structure is very detrimental to all societies.

Who knows how many times things that could be very beneficial to society never see the light of day. And if there is something so beneficial to society that is discovered then the cost skyrockets giving companies huge profits. Even worse, what if something is found to totally eliminate a disease but isn't patentable? The company surely isn't going to release that information if it's in an area they're trying to generate profits. On top of that the low-profit-margin solution will have to fight the big-profit companies marketing campaigns directly or indirectly against them. That is totally the opposite behaviour behind the point of innovation and capitalism.

The purpose of capitalism is to drive innovation, and the point of innovation is to reduce costs to zero, so then those savings can be past onto increasing innovation in other needed areas; Currently those profits are used to further research of other profit-potential patentable drugs. Thankfully we have universities but even those people resources and their efforts are driven much of the time by big companies looking for profitable options.

Discovery and innovation should be rewarded by society, however preventing others from easily furthering an innovation or using it in further inventions causes a huge delay (and potentially even permanently) to

People fear monger and say innovation won't happen if you can't have patents, which I don't believe to be true. One of the main keys is you need education systems in place, and we have those.
So far, Mozilla has explicitly stated that they won't adopt it, citing philosophical differences.
I had a Facebook recruiter send me a message on Facebook about the possibility of work for them, and it went to my Other folder. I didn't see the message for months.
Yep, that's the problem with long expiration dates -- the client may never check again (that's what we wanted, right?). The workaround is to request a new url which restarts the process.

Separately, the easiest way to get started with all these optimizations is to run the page speed check online:

https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

and follow the recommendations, most important to least.
<meta name="author" content="versionindustries.com" />

I would love to know more about how this was produced. Like what level of decision Louis himself was involved in.

The writing is great and the design is clean. I want to believe he micromanaged everything. Or even that he made this site himself and that this line was a paste-o that he forgot to remove.

Edit: Nuts: "their company (that built the site) is called Version Industries". gotta tweet that shit."
It's the stress!
Lindsay lohan playboy photos bunny
lindsay lohan playboy photos bunny
Playboy publication is to launch its January February concern beginning after unclothed images of stressed celebrity She Lohan published online.
Azure SDK for node.js
Azure just got a nice facelift.
Very cheap robotics will decimate China's low skilled labor force.
The Serious Business of Fun
I find the entire article quite poorly thought out and I disagree with it more or less entirely.

One part in particular stood out as being perhaps the most offensive to reason:

"Professional talent does vary, but there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, much less on a meaningful timescale such as that of a product release cycle."

I really don't understand how anybody with experience in our industry could say such a thing.

I would have thought it was fairly routine for "professional developers" (by which I assume he means those devs who work in companies) to meet large numbers of people who are completely incompetent.

So in my view there must be a huge amount of first-hand evidence to support the statement that some people are 10x better than others (or even the more stringent requirement that they're 10x better than the median).
I've experimented and managed to shave 2 seconds off a client's website upon reloads - that's significant! Still playing with it, but I've already learned a lot.
My guess: severe burns, pulmonary edema and cardiovascular collapse. I'm basing this on the temperatures of lava vs. what would be expected inside of a fully involved house fire (I used to be a volunteer fire fighter).
Article Marketing Strategy Secrets
> An important component in this calculation
> is not just the actual cost to build the
> technology but the opportunity cost of the
> time it would take them to do so.

I don't think that's what opportunity cost means.

Of course the time to build the technology is part of the actual cost.

The opportunity cost might be the value derived from developing it in-house or acquiring a competitor.
I enjoyed Curb - I made it through one and a half seasons - but I couldn't continue watching it. I may just have a low threshold for enduring discomfort, but Curb just keeps pushing and pushing the cringe meter. For Louis CK, it's about what happens WITH the discomfort. Curb, to me, is a DISPLAY of discomfort that is funny to a point, but then just has very little redeeming value beyond that.

Another example of the same dilemma would be Ricky Gervais - I really enjoy his comedy specials and stand-up work, but I couldn't watch the original Office or something like Extras. It's funny alright, but if I have to pause it for the cringe to go away every other minute, it just looses focus to me. Cringe->Funny is a proven vehicle these days, bit it's to a point where I find it a little too simple, really.

Anyhow - Louis CK (and, to a point, Gervais in his stand-up) glances at the cringe and then opens up a world of insight around it that is way funnier than just having the cringe meter top off every thirty seconds.
Minor correction: the "bug" in grep was fixed in GNU grep 2.7, not 2.6. I recall that because I wrote an article about it on my blog. See the release notes for GNU grep 2.7 here: http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=6521
Letting the FDA fund clinical trials could create conflicts of interest. I think it would be more beneficial if the FDA started conducting long term efficacy studies to determine if newer treatments outperform older, lower cost options.
"No Messages"

Oh. :(
> A few more iterations will surely make the human counterparts obsolete

Say this to any AI researcher who has done work in the past 5 decades. See what happens.
>I'd like more information on the CPUs and CPU/GPU bus of this FASTRA II.

"the graphics cards, which are connected to the motherboard by flexible riser cables." - so this sounds like typical PCIe based design. Usually the bundle of GPU cards on PCIe backplane is placed into separate case which connected back to the CPU host, and in this case they engineered it into one big case thus each card getting it's own x16/x8 pipe.

In general such "supercomputer" is cheaper, hardware-wise, than equivalent CPU-based, yet it is still more expensive human labor (ie. programming) -wise.
"The Knowledge" is not purely about memorization, there is also route planning to consider. Potential cabbies are not merely asked to quote street names and tell you where they are, they are also required to plan routes from point to point given various limitations such as road closures, etc.

It's not clear that the memorization alone would cause such changes in the brain's structure.
All we've seen from foxconn is a lot of huge promises.They amounts they mention were equal to doubling the robotics market in a very short time.

On the other hand , threatening to replace workers with robots in mass , seem like a powerful negotiation tactic.

I'll believe it when i see it.
All of his copy is awesome:

Hi

Thanks for subscribing to the Louis C.K. email list. I swear to Christ* I will not bother you now that I have your email.

To complete your subscription, you need to confirm you got this email. To do so, please click the link below:
...

*(of course I mean Bill Christ, who owns a Fiat dealership in Ronkonkoma, NY and has diabetes)

Which makes me think - why does anyone write boring standard auto emails? But I guess no one is as funny as him and we don't need more Groupon copy in the world.

Can't say enough about this guy.
This country is so corrupt
First thought when I read the title, was "enlarge as in make smarter, or enlarge as in adema and increased intracranial pressure?"
The end of social
I guess they aren't using GPS. If they did, I wonder I studying other brain increasing activities would give the cabbies even smarter brains.
A Lemma on Factoring
Another great reason to operate your own mail server.
Would learning a second language over a 4 year period with a 25,000 vocabulary have the same effect?