skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case you missed it, this article is part of the 'Poul-Hennings random outbursts' section which is a nice collection of thoughts from a very talented programmer. I have always enjoyed reading these:

https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/index.html
A big sincere thank you to the author for giving concrete examples of why this is bad, instead of general fearmongering and ranting.
Bitcoin: We ain't got no government loans
Fun, but it likes to crash when loading levels. For a while it crashed when trying to go to the second level, which I fixed by force-restarting the app, and just now when reloading level 2 after a failed attempt. iPad 1, iOS 5.1.
Sharing Scheduler App Buffer Raises $400,000, Gets Kicked Out Of US
Heh, timing is everything I guess.

So one 'take' on the cloud meme is public utility compute. I have never been a big fan, but have found the success of EC2 and its equivalents to be reason to doubt my doubt :-)

Back in the way back times the high school I went to shared a mainframe (a Univac) with all the other schools. They used it teach programming and to run various bits of accounting and grading and such. That installation could be an EC2 cluster now. (it isn't but the same reasoning for a shared mainframe would apply to sharing the districts computing tasks into a web2 style cluster.) Every time all the machines get stolen out of a school I think "Gee if they were just terminals and useless without the cluster, they would not be as tasty a target."

Still, not a fan, but like I said the ability to drop in a data center near the center of things in an friendly way, seems like a Useful Thing.
> I'm going to tend to believe PHK if he thinks explicit structure packing is a win, noting at the same time how unlikely it is that any implementation of it is going to be a performance bottleneck compared with I/O.

I've spent a lot of my life writing parsers for various network formats, and one thing that I can say with authority is that at both my current company (Google) and at my previous company (Amazon) the CPU cost of parsing bytes off the network was noticeable enough to spend significant resources optimizing.

I haven't done benchmarks myself about eg. bitvectors, but I'm pretty sure I've heard that the performance of packed bitvectors is noticeably slower than non-packed. I also think the cost would be comparable to 64-bit math on 32-bit processors (ie. an overhead of 3-5 instructions per operation), which is a non-trivial cost.
Understanding higher-order code (Haskell)
> Simple expressions like x.y++ could end up being much more expensive than expected.

He's talking about pulling protocol packets off the wire - who increments values in a packet like that? Typically all you ever do is pull the relevant fields out into your own structure or pass them off as arguments to a function call. Which will always involve unaligned reads from buffer somewhere.

The only real way I can see it being misused in a way that results in poor performance is if you read data into an explicitly-packed struct and then pass a reference to it around everywhere, reading from it willy-nilly instead of extracting the values once.
I've looked at all of the examples in the src/generators, and the amplitude processor and I don't see the buffer-based generate() -- maybe I am just missing something?
"On my machine, testing the prime number 27,644,437 took about 1.2 milliseconds with a k value of 50 (far higher than you’ll probably need for your applications.)"

I'm sorry, but WHAT?

Writing the dumbest implementation of trial-division that I could, in C++ on my laptop, in Debug mode, took 0.0247046 ms to determine definitively if 27,644,437 is prime.

My dumbest-possible implementation, in Debug mode, is 48.5 times faster, and doesn't get confused by Carmichael numbers.

Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

"The trial-division method... gets slow quickly."

That may be true, but using the number 27,644,437 as a benchmark will not get you anywhere near that "slow" point.
Combine with sendwrite.com like functionality for effortless letter sending?
Since when windows and eclipse aren't cool?
After the Acquisition: Xmarks One Year Later
I find this article troubling for two reasons: it fails to back up with evidence some of its boldest claims, and it suffers from the same problems presented by it's own argument.

Claims like this one:

> "First, all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain of facts for the tiniest of associations."

May be true, but the author presents no evidence to support them, with relevant studies, articles, etc..

The second, much more troubling problem however, is that the argument suffers fromt the very problem it presents! The author's conclusion that the returns on scientific research are diminishing due to an inherent flaw in conclusions being drawn from correlations-- is itself a correlation. He's correlating the increasing cost of research to the increasing difficulty of finding new correlations in the data.

There are other, simpler, less circular and philosophical explanations for why the returns on pharmaceutical research have decreased, such as increasingly strict regulations and fear of risk on the part of regulatory organizations. See this TED talk, where Juan Enriquez talks about these issues: http://www.tedmed.com/videos-info?name=Juan_Enriquez_at_TEDM...
I released an Open source project (http://www.samuellevy.com/mico) which has had a few hundred installations; travelled through Europe; quit a job; got a job; became self-employed; started several projects (but got bored with/dropped most of them); explored some concepts that interest me through the medium of JavaScript and Conway's Game Of Life (http://gameoflife.samuellevy.com/ and http://gameoflife.samuellevy.com/shared/); and most recently have started work on a new charity-based system/startup.

I've had a pretty eventful year, I think.
A slight amendment to your statements: in some fields of research, we've exhausted the low-hanging fruit, and "low-hanging" is defined differently for every field. In mathematics, for example, we ran out of obvious things in the 1700s, but there are still "low-hanging fruit" because the cost of investment is so low. My field, robotics, is currently new enough that we're still finding things that are obvious in hindsight. In pharmaceuticals, things are pretty easy to come up with, but really ridiculously expensive to test and verify the safety of. Making sweeping statements about "low-hanging fruit" doesn't work.
FCC official: Internet freedom threatened by upcoming "International treaty"
$5 isn't much if you are able to demonstrate more value - example: personal safety - what are the areas to avoid? where can you find free water fountains? where are the best spots for a cheap meal along the route? You might be able to raise your revenue mix if you had sponsored content.
I think people love "the idea" of your idea. People love to imagine they're off on a vacation to Paris, and they'll have so much to think of, they'll probably want a locally-authored tour guide. So they're excited about traveling, going to Paris and finding lots of cool things to do there. But not necessarily from your guide books. When the time comes to actually go to Paris, the problem for you guys is that there's a TON of free information. You're competing with the simplest of all Google searches: "What should I do in Paris?", not to mention dozens of in-flight magazines, tourist info packets, maps, concierges, coupon books etc etc. When you're competing with so much free information, a $4.99 price point is too high, imho.
I'm probably going to buy a MBA soon after working with Debian & Openbox on a dated netbook for too long.

I spend most of my time in side-by-side Vim/shell/ssh sessions inside tmux within the Guake terminal.

If MacVim is a standalone app, why do people use it? Isn't one of the nicest things about Vim that it lives in the terminal and can be launched from any root in the terminal?
What would be their barrier to entry story under this? Why would they need to raise so much capital? How would they scam together an IPO without those two justifications?
Because treatment is not science. Its goal is not to understand more about your body but to cure you and/or relieve you of your symptoms. So yes, doctors try to cure with what they know is the best option and they try again if it fails.
"Lifestyle" CEO bootstraps business to 30 MM unique visitors: The wikiHow story
White House Gets #40dollars to Trend on Twitter
Definitely outsource this. I wrote this post comparing prices for some service providers: http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/40month-to-send-my-... . The cheapest (FastMail.FM) is orders of magnitude cheaper. They've been in business since 1999.

(Disclaimer: I founded FastMail.FM, although I sold it a few years ago and no longer have any financial or operational relationship.)
Parse is looking for a Developer Content Producer
Parse provides cloud services for mobile developers. We write backend code so that mobile developers don’t have to. As the first Developer Content Producer at Parse, you’ll be responsible for building quality content that teaches developers about the Parse platform and best practices in mobile development.

At some companies, content and documentation is an afterthought. At Parse, we believe that content is core to our product.

About Parse:

- We move fast. We launched our private beta a little over two months after starting the company. Since then we've signed up over 5,500 developers.

- We build products for other developers. You'll be your own customer.

- We are passionate about making mobile software development easier.

- All of the founders are very technical engineers who have been early employees or founders at successful startups.

About you:

- You’ll be responsible for creating an ecosystem of content that teaches developers about Parse and mobile development.

- You should have a background in software development and be knowledgeable about APIs. You have built applications in iOS and Android, and are able to communicate technical ideas to developers from all walks of life.

- You are passionate about communicating complex ideas through quality content like blog posts, tutorials, documentation, screencasts, and videos. You have a track record of making great content that people love to share.

- You should be a self-starter that constantly thinks about new ideas for marketing products through content. You should understand how to promote and curate content via social media like Twitter and blogs.

- You should have excellent writing, editing, and communication skills.

We offer significant equity, market salary, health insurance, and your choice of equipment. We're based in San Francisco (right at the Embarcadero BART station) and at the moment we'd like people who can work in the office with us.

Please get in touch - email james@parse.com telling us about why you think you’re the best fit for this role. Also include a few links to content you have written and/or apps you have created. Bonus points if you write a short tutorial teaching us something about Parse’s API.
You don't need a OS patch.

I run dnsmasq on my machines, for example, and its primary purpose is to alter DNS resolution - my nameserver is set to localhost, and my dnsmasq configuration sets which DNS servers to use for what top level domains etc., and routes *.local to a flat file on my home server, for example.

Dnsmasq itself isn't suited to avoid SOPA, but it's a good proof of concept for a small dns server that mediates the lookups based on rules, but defer to "regular DNS" for everything else. There are tons of simple DNS servers out there that can easily be modified to do detect likely SOPA blocked domains and use whatever mechanisms to resolve it through non-US servers (even if your upstream ISP gets forced to filter DNS).

Worst case? Distribute zone files of blocked domains as torrents automatically, or hide lookups in otherwise innocuous looking traffic.

If they IP block the sites, the same mechanism can be used to serve up lists of addresses of proxies instead of the real sites.

The system just needs to be faster than the SOPA proponents manage to send their extortion letters to ISPs.

The beauty is that if/when mechanisms like this start becoming commonplace, the cat is out of the bag - they'll never regain control.
This video made me curious about what a magnet factory would look like and I found a really great video that goes step by step through the process at a neodymium magnet manufacturer in Shanghai:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHuWloNGo6c

I was sort of hoping that the factory would look like that plexiglass prison in the X-Men movie that was designed to prevent Magneto from using his powers.

Alas, it's nothing like that, but it's an interesting video nonetheless.
This article made me think of the cool startup https://www.popvox.com/ They are working to provide a two way bridge between Congress and Constituents. They won the Social Media Tech award in the SXSW Accelerator this year and Tim O'Reilly is a founding advisor. I think they're the kind of company that would love help from open sourcing l33t haxxors such as yourselves.
From what I saw this is because a good portion of the Mozilla staff is away for the holiday so they're actually doing the official release in the first week or so of January once they're up to staff. They don't want to do any kind of major release and run into issues when they're down in numbers.
Great to hear someone else using Fireworks. I feel like it gets ignored by Adobe in favour of Illustrator, but it's really a fantastic tool.
Sometimes I wonder if C++ deserves more credit for /saving/ C, by absorbing all the crap that might otherwise have been added. :)
You want my street address and my Facebook profile?

No thanks.
Yes, it costs money. I've used the Mac version for several years now, and the windows version for maybe 10 years before that. I think I've had my money's worth. Given that it works for me better than anything else, the cost is nothing. I don't mind paying for software that makes my life better.

It has a free 30 day trial, so give it a try and see if it is worth the money.
Buy Beats by dre Solo White From Monster for Sale
See also: The gallery of flying objects sent in by people who work with MRI machines:

http://www.simplyphysics.com/flying_objects.html

I worked with an NMR machine in college and would always have to empty my pockets before entering the room. I'm not sure I really understood the danger. I heard stories about people having piercings ripped out though.
I wouldn't take it that seriously, because to be completely honest, the article sounds to me like a troll post. The title and the content seems to be chosen for the biggest impact and there doesn't seem to be much more to it. The fact is that this questions have been asked and tried to answer many times by scientists, philosophers and epistemologists.

For instance, the author chose to talk about Hume but chose not to mention Popper. Falsifiability is the key word here. Science doesn't advance by gathering knowledge about how the world works directly, but by accumulating false results.

And besides, the fact that there will always be mysteries is what makes science fun in the first place.
Congrats guys! Sorry to see you go :(
It's a thorny legal issue, all right.
I'll need to refer to the case of Finders v. Keepers.
Why startups should never be your target market
"I also don't think it's always the case disproving something is a step backwards, that still enhances our understanding of the topic."

In theory, yes, in practice, no. The human body is wildly complicated with an absolutely enormous state space, surrounded by an incomprehensibly larger possible state space that expresses our ignorance about what the body might be actually doing. Throwing a dart at random and eliminating some particular claim about the nature of that state space may impart vanishingly small fractions of a bit of information, roundable to zero with insignificant loss. Not entirely without value? Sure! Worth it? Well, losing the bet and coming up effectively empty in information a certain amount of the time is inevitable, but when you pretty much do nothing but lose, it's time to change your strategy.
It might be really easy to learn. But after having programmed Ruby for any significant time Java is very unpleasant to program ;)

Also just learning basics to do simple customizations is not enough. If something breaks you will not have a slightest idea how to debug and fix. With a Ruby CI server I can just stick a debugger and walk through the code.
If you're just going to extract the values once, why not just write the code to actually do that instead of trying to play tricks with memcpy()? Those tricks won't even work in many cases where certain fields indicate the length of certain other fields (which is quite common).

When I first started programming in C I also had this fantasy that I could parse network formats with memcpy(). Since then I've become convinced that writing the actual parsing code is for the best.
I don't remember anymore - running 11.0a now. I'm using nightly builds since ~2009 and haven't experienced any issues so far (really - not even a random crash). The difference is so huge in overall performance, I don't want to go to the "stable" release anymore.

The only problem are some less common plugins, but adblock and firebug get updated within days... and I just switch to the latest official release for quake live.
Thanks for sharing the stats, always love seeing real world examples. Couple of questions -
1)Where you taking people directly to the app store page or a landing page?
2)Did you see any significant differences between the sites in terms of conversions/downloads? Between the sites your performance campaigns?
I made the same commitment at the same time (though I've probably paid to see Sony movies, alas), but I was still looking enviously at their laptops last time I was buying one.

Still, it gives me a fair amount of satisfaction to choose something else over Sony when the products are next to each other on a shelf.
SWTOR Math « Coding In My Sleep
I was an early contributor to Cocos2d, Riq was always looking for a good level editor and produced his own eventually (http://www.sapusmedia.com/levelsvg/) but it was a bit limited. I'm sure he'd be interested in your work, have you reached out to him?

Knowing nothing about Fireworks, in what language did write the plugin?
Response from my Senator regarding SOPA
Yesterday on a whim, I randomly decided to write a letter to my Senator encouraging him to be against SOPA. Here's the response I got. I'm sure it's a cookie-cutter response, but I'm considering possibly responding to it anyway to see if an actual conversation might be started. What do you all think? Think there's any chance whatsoever that a real conversation could be started? Worth doing anything else? If so, how would you respond?

Without further ado, the email:
Dear Joshua,

Thank you for contacting me regarding S. 968, the Protect IP Act.

Intellectual property industries employ more than 19 million people, making it an integral part of our economy. Rogue websites dedicated to the sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and pirated content are a direct threat to these jobs and to entrepreneurs growing and building legitimate businesses online.

Businesses have lost $135 billion in revenue annually as a result of these rogue sites. Customers have also been harmed by these sites; for example, online pharmacies that don't adhere to U.S. regulations have been reported to cause a rapid increase in prescription drug abuse.

I am a cosponsor of the Protect IP Act which would cut off foreign websites dedicated to counterfeiting and piracy that steal American jobs, hurt the economy, and harm customers. It would allow the Justice Department to file a civil action against those who have registered or own a domain name linked to an infringing website. The bill does not allow the Justice Department to target domain names registered by a U.S. entity.

Innovation is a cornerstone of our nation's economic growth. Proper intellectual property protections and incentives ensure that inventors develop products that benefit consumers. Without such incentives for innovators, we risk falling behind places like China and India.

Again, thank you for contacting me. I look forward to continuing our conversation on Facebook (www.facebook.com/SenatorBlunt) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/RoyBlunt) about the important issues facing Missouri and the country. I also encourage you to visit my website (blunt.senate.gov) to learn more about where I stand on the issues and sign-up for my e-newsletter.

Sincere regards,

Roy Blunt
United States Senator
if my program compiled and my unit tests demonstrated correctness, that was enough.

...

Your professors taught you unit testing? In terms of learning the "practical" side of programming, I think that right there gives you a leg up on most CS students.
The only good reason to use MacVim is support for millions of colors so color schemes look nicer. It also supports full screen mode (now in Lion Terminal does too, but before this used to be a missing feature), also it's easier to launch MacVim as external editing tool for other apps like Firefox with Pentadactyl extension (this allows you to edit any text box/area with vim). Other than that, you really don't need MacVim, unless you are very anal about colors :D.
i'll have to agree with SHOwnsYou.

My first impression is not "Wow!". Your website design doesn't have that wow factor with it's design. i would highly recommend either getting a design to do some work for you or download a nice design from themeforest.

also there is no way i would pay any money to find an "itenary" because as mentioned below i can just go on google and search for "what to do in xyz?" and pick and choose the ones i like. so personally i would make it free, redo the design and try and make money from the advertisement. maybe down the road you can make deals with certain locations to add them in your itenary for a fee? sell tickets on your site for those locations and keep a commission? either way, charging for an itenary when anyone can just do a google search for it doesn't make sense to me.
Last Minute Gift Guide For The ‘Design Snobs’ In Your Life
I can't stop laughing at the name of the app. It's fantastic!
It really depends on proficiency doesn't it?
most likely an intern there answering all his emails!
I'm confused as to why this is hard. I code primarily in java with JSF for views and this is possibly the simplest thing to do in any of my projects. Using something like primefaces I generally never even need to write a line of javascript unless i need to customize some action and I can use theme roller / stock css for appearance.

Example: http://www.primefaces.org/showcase-labs/ui/datatableComplex....

This is working client side, if i want to do server side its as simple as implementing a single class that pushes the sorting/filtering/paging off the to the database:

Example: http://www.primefaces.org/showcase-labs/ui/datatableLazy.jsf

It can't really be much harder to do this on other stacks can it?