skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, they'll survive. Will they have to adapt? Of course they will, but no one is better positioned in the education system than the...education system. Our colleges won't look the same in 10 years, but I guarantee the names will be familiar.

"Peter Thiel believes smart people don’t need college, and he’s right"

I don't really understand this argument. Need? You go to college to learn things. Smart people don't need to learn things, nor do dumb people. The system needs work, the price may be out of whack, but nobody can deny that college (and the education system in general) is generally efficient at the diffusion of knowledge.

Disclaimer: I love school. If I could spend the rest of my days as a full time student, I would.
give the man a chance to make a difference in the space

What space, asking for an introduction? There is no product on that page besides this.
The "Javascript is a shitty language" argument is getting old. I feel like you're only admitting that you're too lazy to learn how to program with a prototype-based language. You even suggest Coffeescript which is big on making Javascript like an OOP language when it's really not.

As far as a reason why you might "hobble" yourself is because Javascript is great at asynchronous design. You should try checking it out for real instead of jumping on the opinion bandwagon.
Nope, it was the Flash runtime. That, and the fate of being a plugin that provides functionality that the browsers would eventually make part of the core rendering engines.
Here's an article describing what it takes to reach those speeds:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/5-ghz-project,731.html

The article is a few years old, and the clock limits have changed, but the principles of reaching them are the same.

As for replicating it at large in the public market, I don't anticipate that liquid nitrogen feeds will be ubiquitous anytime soon :)
Pynomo - constructing nomographs with Python.
“I want to optimize my JS application on V8” checklist
Farewell to a pen-friend (Tim Gowers on Gilbert Adair)
Strawman. A congressperson ought to either be an expert in those things, or listen to those that are.
I'm not taking it personally. (And I said that.) I'm just curious what the thought process was for the person who did the actual downvoting (not that I think it's likely they will reply, but I also believe in "don't say no for them").

Thanks for replying.
I'm also in the interested-onlooker camp, but I think this is an example of a variable denoting a computation rather than a value. It's a Haskell version of an exercise in SICP:

> p = p

> if True then "I'm the value of this expression" else p

I would love it if someone would help me phrase this more precisely: the variable p doesn't really have a value, in the sense that evaluating it fully will never finish; it's bottom, the non-terminating computation.
New Relic Up-Ends Tradition
I think it's curious that at the top of the page it says "requires iOS 5" and at the bottom it says "iOS 5 ready."

It's a beautiful landing page, but I'm not quite sure I understand the problem.. Is this to split tabs? Or to show the bartender, "Hey, I only ordered these drinks, don't charge me for more!" The latter doesn't sound like it'd go over well. Confused.
The PDFs on this page: http://www.fontshop.com/education/ will get you started ...

Most of them are pretty good. "Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips" are some rules that you can apply to what you're doing almost immediately and see improvements, but really -- read them all.
Creation of anything can be artistic. It can also be mundane.
Google hasn't made 'random' pricing changes. Sure, they didn't do the best job of handling the switch from beta to a real live service, but they did listen to the community and they learned a lot of lessons. I really don't think they will make the same mistakes twice. Maybe you missed the meetup at Thirsty Bear in SF where they bought us all drinks and apologized? Even Guido was there.

I think you are wrong about the costs of EC2. First off, you have to run your own servers on EC2. When one of those servers goes down in the middle of the night for some random unexplained reason, who are you going to call? Yourself? If you don't think EC2 servers go down, you are kidding yourself.

With GAE, I'll never have to hire IT staff to manage servers or networks.

The high replication datastore on GAE is amazing. I'll never have to worry about running out of capacity, backups, or downtime for that matter. I've been told that entire datacenters have gone offline and nobody even noticed. Now, that is reliability.

It sounds like a lot of your issues surrounded using XMPP on GAE. I think that is a perfectly valid thing to complain about. That said, just cause XMPP is expensive doesn't mean that all of GAE is expensive (or problematic). As you found out by writing your own C++ servers and what not, XMPP is a difficult service to provide reliably. Maybe that is worth that cost?

Note: I'm building my sporting event ticketing website entirely on GAE. People will be able to register for marathons, bike races, etc. It may cost a bit more for their service, but given that I won't have to hire any staff to manage servers or worry about adding capacity when thousands of people all want register for an event at the same time, I think that is worth it.

Note2: I'm a user of PartyChatApp. Thanks for providing it.
It's cool, but the REPL could let you do multiline stuff by detecting whether you've closed all the parentheses and quotes yet.
The top IBM POWER7 CPU is clocked at 5ghz and isn't cooled with liquid nitrogen.
> Peter Thiel believes smart people don’t need college, and he’s right

To be honest, most of the classes I've taken in my life (not just in college but in grade school as well) taught me very little that I couldn't learn by myself from a textbook. And in many cases, I did indeed end up teaching myself the material from the book (usually beforehand). This means that class time would essentially be a review session, or a time to highlight the topics that the professor wanted to focus on (useful for the exams). So the classes were definitely beneficial, but arguably unnecessary. This is partly a function of my own study habits and workflow, but I imagine that many other motivated students are in this category. And in the age of the Internet, the ability to teach yourself will become even more valuable.

That said, I wouldn't say my time in school was wasted, even if I could teach myself most (though not quite all!) of the things I learned in my classes. At least in college, my favorite classes were the ones which challenged my previous beliefs or forced me to consider things in another light (yes, this can happen in CS, too!). When you're learning things on your own, following your own interests, there's a natural tendency to avoid this kind of dissonance, which provides a sort of selection bias in what you end up learning.

Furthermore, college is a great time to meet other people and engage with them on an academic level. This can be your professors, who are oftentimes domain experts, or other students who share your interests. (Or even other students who don't). Yes, you meet smart people in the workforce and other aspects of life too, but it's rare to engage with them on the same type of academic level as you do when you're in an academic setting. (And even if you could simulate this through online classes... call me old-fashioned, but I still put a premium on in-person, face-to-face interaction).

My formal education has been incredibly valuable - just not for the reasons one typically considers a formal education to be valuable. If that's all you're considering, then yes, online classes can simulate most of that. But for me, they would have missed the most rewarding parts of my academic experience.
Oh, it is a complete failure. I've switched to Git entirely as a result of it and will never use Subversion again if I can help it.

I wrote a long'ish blog post detailing why it is a failure:

http://lookfirst.com/2011/04/subversion-mistake.html
Frank Herbert was born in 1920. It took him five years to research and write his second published novel; it was first published as a serial in 1963.

That book was called "Dune".

You do the math.

----

When I was 25 I moved out to California to attend animation school. When I was 30 I'd been a part of the first wave of dotcom boom funded Internet cartoons, watched some of my colleagues go in to TV work, and burnt out. When I was 36 I drew a Tarot deck[1]. The year I hit 40, it got published internationally. I think it's adequate. Some people react to it a lot more strongly than that.

Success at 25 is the exception, not the rule. Very few people are that driven. Many more labor under others for a time, slowly honing their craft until they make something amazing. Learning to identify the ideas worth focusing on for a whole year is an important, subtle skill.

[1] http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/
If I read the system requirements correctly, JavaFX requires Windows.
Some things need to get done no matter what.
PHP is indeed a "templating system turned on its head" (according to second-hand reports from a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP was originally designed as a bare-bones templating system for C programmers, but then more and more stuff migrated into the templating system...). And it is, indeed (or was, anyway) tied strongly to a single domain, and a limited set of architectural patterns.

But every design choice cuts both ways. These features are not merely drawbacks. These are PHP's strengths, the things that make it so delicious for "HTML authors who need to cross over into programming".

You can learn PHP with Google. My understanding is that most people do. [1] Just Google all your problems and up will pop some code that you can mimic. This works because, to first order, all PHP code is solving the same problem in the same way. You will probably not accidentally Google up some PHP-based physics simulation. You will probably not Google up some PHP code used by sysadmins to parse the output of pipes on the command line. You will certainly not Google up any PHP-based graphics algorithms or device drivers or client-side DOM manipulations or Android system functions. No, when you Google "how to do X in PHP" you'll get some code that you can paste into a template with a .php extension and then execute on your cheap shared host. Until fairly recently there wasn't even any danger of encountering object-oriented PHP.

You can argue that programmers trained in this way are useless for anything but cobbling together Web pages, and you're right, but 90% of them don't care. Web pages are a killer app. People build whole businesses out of cheesy web pages.

My suspicion is that many PHP tinkerers don't want more "architectural flexibility"; that translates into "decisions that we have to make but don't know how to make", "knobs that we have to set carefully but which we don't even know how to turn", and "oodles of online documentation for use cases that we don't have, which chaffs up the search results for the use cases that we do have."

The irony, of course, is that PHP's maintainers have been hard at work bolting features from other languages onto PHP, which as a side effect threatens to destroy the narrow domain-specificity that was its most unique feature. [2] Objects, namespaces, closures have all been welded onto the superstructure. One wonders what happens next. Maybe the folks who embrace all these things will drag the entire PHP community closer to Java, Python, Ruby, or some oddball superposition of these things. But I think it more likely that the community will continue to balkanize, with the bulk of users rejecting all these transplants but certain segments embracing one or another of them.

---

[1] I learned PHP via reading and hacking on Drupal modules, which is a much better plan, but also definitely not the beginner-friendly choice. Drupal has a steep learning curve.

[2] Though don't blame the maintainers too much: These features are in fact in demand, from the people who took up PHP without realizing that it was a narrow domain-specific language and pushed it right up to the limits of the available hacks.
TEDx talk: Thomas Pogge, Medicine for the 99 percent
Limited Choices for Yahoo, Each One With Its Own Risks
This is an old recording.

It's my favorite of the many recordings of Rich giving presentations on Clojure in the early days.

It's where he presented his famous ants program that runs on ~64 native threads.
Another example: if presented with a podcast with transcript, I'll almost always read the transcript than listen. Unless the speaker is someone I'm really engaged to hear specifically I prefer to skim in order to rapidly gather the information (see NPRs audio/transcript style for example, I love that they do this).

And who would listen to a 'radio' station made of music generated by an iPad app? You can give someone the most advanced creation tools in the world and if they are not inherently a musician it's going to be a series of notes, not 'music'.

I agree with you that his argument is not convincing, though there is certainly a huge space for innovation yet to come with audio creators and connecting them with listeners. Soundcloud is doing pretty well on this front so far.
Congratulations on missing the point.
Yes, but due to how the structure was (poorly? likely…) constructed, the movement caused by someone walking down the hall was much larger than me typing.
so you invented a shopping cart. Why the fuck are you not funded!
Also, I read that today is Kazakhstan's 20th anniversary.
The tldr here is that iterating through large arrays simultaneously with identical alignment can be slower than non-simultaneous access because of cache associativity. It's basically hash collisions in the cache due to alignment.

I've actually run into this in the "real world" in image processing applications. Given a "magical" width to an image, a pixel directly above (or below) another pixel can have the same alignment with respect to cpu cache. This can mean that things like (large) 2d convolutions are slower on images of very particular sizes.
I find this thread fascinating. In over 20 years in the formal IT sector I've had one idea, and have stuck with that single idea for seven years.

It started with frustration at a piece of software I was using on my phone at the time (a Nokia 9210 Communicator), and has since been influenced by books I've read and other apps I've used. I quit my job at Microsoft in September last year to work on it full time.

Granted, over the years I've had a few more ideas - most of them spin-offs of the framework I created, but all have been put on hold until I can ship v.1 of the current idea.

I guess it's just another example my tendency to assume that eveyone else thinks like I do.
World Largest Capacity Sporting Facility Indianapolis Motor Speedway
Stack adeptness = time + number of solved edge cases on said stack. Difficulty with a stack has an inverse relationship to adeptness.
Ask HN: Roommates, apartments, etc [San Francisco]
Hi HN,

I'm going to be in San Francisco for at least 3 months, hopefully longer, yet as someone who's never been there, I've got no idea about accommodation.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on finding a place, finding roommates, hacker houses, etc. Basically I've got no idea about the best locations, the options, etc, all I know is that I want a place close to 923 Market St!

Thanks in advance.
This was especially the case on the old Pentium 4's. What we used to do was over-allocate the amount of memory needed, then offset the pointer into the allocated memory to avoid cache collisions.
Mute the audio. Watch the video. What value do you gain?
Now, turn the audio on, and don't watch the video. What value do you gain there?

It's an interesting way to look at things..
SO, a congressman has to be an expert on:

Thats kind of exaggerating the parent post's position, the congresspeople were flat out admitting they have no knowledge on the subject. He didn't say they had to be domain experts.

They _should_ have good domain knowledge on everything relevant to the proposed legislation. Its their full time job to legislate. We pay them so they can have time to focus on understanding the issues instead of treating it as secondary to their real job.
Marketing is to programming as plasmodia are to mosquitoes.
Drug dealers are nice people
"JavaFX 2.0 is currently available on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

A developer preview of JavaFX 2.0 for Mac OS X is available for download on the Oracle Technology Network. It is expected to reach General Availability in the first half of 2012.

The Linux version of JavaFX 2.0 will follow, with a General Availability expected in the second half of 2012.

JavaFX supports both Java SE 6 and Java SE 7 on Windows, and are expected to support these versions of Java SE on Mac OS X and Linux. For a detailed list of system requirements, see the JavaFX 2.0 Supported System Configurations."

http://javafx.com/faq/#3
Clean Code seems quite a bit more relevant and in-depth than this.

http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsman...
My Favorite Strange Number: Ω
You should take a look at cilk. They compile two versions of your code: one sequential, one parallel. The runtime switches between them dynamically. This avoids paying a lot of overhead managing parallelism for small subroutines, but still presents the programmer with a unified view of very fine grained concurrency.
How to Disagree: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Yes, except it's not really a CS (or any other) degree at all. The video is about using the MIT video lectures to learn the equivalent of 4 years of CS education - without any earning any degree.
Maybe I'm bad at communicating. I totally agree with your first paragraph. What I really meant by not ready is basically what you said in that very last sentence.

This site basically says "new programming... Coming soon". Well that's not much to go on. There's so little information that there really isn't much to discuss. Dart is a work in progress but I think it's a great thing to submit here because it gives us all the information we'd need about a programming language. This is just a coming soon page for yet another language and all I can gather is that it's like acoffeeScript but for PHP?
I usually like new programming languages, but from just the key features that they list on the front page, I thought "wtf, this is like java/c++ that compiles to PHP just to make it slower". The only advantage I can see is that it lets you write in a more java-like language and then run it on a free php-only server.
If you want to use a reactor pattern and you don’t want to use JavaScript, you can use EventMachine on Ruby. Twisted is the same thing for Python. I’m sorry to hear you were having problems with Twisted, but EventMachine is absolutely rock solid. I have gotten a lot of work done with it.

Now, let’s say you don’t want to do callbacks, but still take advantage of the Reactor pattern in EM. I wrote a patch for Sinatra that uses Fibers to wrap callbacks, hence allowing you to continue to program synchronously as you used to, and it’s called Sinatra Synchrony (http://kyledrake.net/sinatra-synchrony).

But in order to do non-blocking IO, you don’t need to use a Reactor pattern, because Ruby internally does not block on IO (the GIL does not affect this). And of course you get solutions like JRuby (built on the JVM), which provide for threads (and Rubinius 2 coming soon).

My APIs written with any and all of these concurrency options can get thousands of hits per second. It’s quite scalable, but still provides all the rich libraries, reusable code, and testing support that makes my APIs high quality, which to me (and my users) is more important than making them fast. With this approach, my APIs are both high quality and fast. And I have never experienced a single crash of any worker processes in production. I would know, because my process monitor is smart enough to observe the workers in my deploy code and informs me, while adding another worker to replace the fallen one. Did I mention I can do zero-downtime hot deploys? Again, all implemented in Ruby.

I’m not trying to brag here, but there’s this weird current of arguments that these existing solutions don’t scale. It’s a myth, I don’t know where it comes from, and I’m worried that if I don’t speak out against these arguments, I’m going to wake up in a giant pile of half-baked Javascript spaghetti written by people that didn’t even understand the real problem in the first place (blocking IO people, research it!).
How are drunk people gonna use it?
Can you elaborate on x86_64 code generation? (are you referring specifically to the vector instructions?)

What do you think are the most promising directions to improve in this area?
Um. Why doesn't it?

Because when you think about it, that's a surprising thing about humans in general. Why do people who do not believe in immortality (as an ideal, I'm saying) still go in for cancer treatment?
Thank you very much, this helped a lot. I'm at least glad that it sounds "normal" enough, and I do believe that what I've presented is compelling to Minecraft players.
I may have (intentionally) missed the "I has a product" point, but I believe the point of the post is public exposure, and critiques are a part of that.

I have to say, getting money from Angel (and others) and still having to do this for an introduction might be a story in itself about the relative utility of incubators & VCs beyond cash.
Honestly, next we'll be accusing them of double-standards!
Who or What Downed the RQ-170?
Here was my idea: upload a bunch of music from Universal artists, then tag them all as "auto-takedown". Breaking the YouTube detection system will be the only way to get rid of it.
The use case is more for splitting tabs between large groups of people.

Also cross reference what the establishment is charging you vs what you actually had, you'd be surprised how many bars and places are willing to overcharge you once you've had a bit too many.
Right. To me, and again I'm not an expert on semantics, but to me, bottom isn't a value in the value domain of the language; it's a meta-value, if you will, a value in the semantics but not in the language. And what it represents is precisely the absence of any value in the value domain of the language.

After all, you can't in the language compare two "bottom values" to see if they're equal; there's not even a notion of equality.

So the way I would want to put it is that bottom is a notion that we use in modelling the semantics of languages (and I've used it in modelling strict languages too; the value returned by a function when it throws an exception is modelled as bottom), but it's not a value in the language. This contradicts the author's entire argument that the Haskell type system doesn't permit the definition of recursive types.

I'd have to learn a lot more to be able to make this argument with any authority. But that's my intuition.
Most directly: == defines equivalence classes within particular types (polymorphic over types fulfilling Eq). This means by definition it's domain is limited to processes which result in a Eq-able type at which point it defines equality as equality of that final type.

Your example only seems strange when you assume semantics of equality that are more dramatic than actually used.
We made a fair bit of "on-site user testing", it works :)
Static Keyword in Java with Examples