skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interested in collaboration? I'm definitely passionate about open-source translation tools and community building, and there's a dearth of good technology in the translation industry, it's always seemed to me. My email is in my profile if you're interested.
Fighting Like Insurgents: When The Bad Guys Win
Did you read the article? The very first sentence is

"Obviously this is an utterly preposterous statement: it’s hard to think of a more ridiculous and esoteric coding requirement."

Or how about this:

"Don’t worry! I don’t think you should refactor all your code to be sure you have strings of length 23 or less. That would obviously be ridiculous. The speed increase sounds impressive, but actually the time differences I measured were insignificant until I allocated 100,000s or millions of strings – how many Ruby applications will need to create this many string values? And even if you do need to create many string objects, the pain and confusion caused by using only short strings would overwhelm any performance benefit you might get.

For me I really think understanding something about how the Ruby interpreter works is just fun! I enjoyed taking a look through a microscope at these sorts of tiny details. I do also suspect having some understanding of how Matz and his colleagues actually implemented the language will eventually help me to use Ruby in a wiser and more knowledgeable way. We’ll have to see… stay tuned for some more posts about Ruby internals!"

I truly do not understand the emotional reaction you were having when you wrote this comment. It sounds like you've had some issues in the past with your time being wasted debating pointless optimizations, and that's what you were reacting to.

The article is not advocating pointless optimizations. The article is simply exploring a cool little piece of MRI.

It sounds like you have a lot of experience with dealing with optimization, though. It'd be cool if you wrote something educational about optimization.
Show HN: Time series visualization service (many weekends project)
Ah yes, the old Reflections on Trusting Trust. http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html Fortunately that wasn't nodata's question. Recompiling the kernel from known source should ensure that it hasn't been modified to misread xattrs.
Too bad System X was a publicity stunt that was never used for science AFAIK.
I think the excuse of Premature Optimization is used a lot in a context where it doesn't mean what it supposed to mean.

Which may be why I didn't use the phrase.

In all seriousness, though, I can sit down and come up with dozens -- heck, hundreds -- of "well, what if" cases. And you know what? I don't care about 'em.

I went through the phase of abstractly decoupling everything to the Nth degree because of "what if" cases. And I paid for it; I was overlooking simple and often more elegant solutions to actual problems in favor of complex solutions to hypothetical problems.

Does using a real database instead of decoupled MockableWriteableDataStorageInterface mean my tests take a few extra seconds to run? Yup.

Does the time I'd save running tests by writing and passing in a MockableWriteableDataStorageInterfaceImplementation outweigh the increased complexity and thus mental load of the codebase? Unlikely.

And, importantly: does testing with something that isn't a real database potentially cover up bugs that only happen when I use a real database? Yup, and that happens often enough that the whole mockable thing just goes out the window right there.

Anyway. I think most developers go through this phase, too, and I think it's similar to the way people spend disproportionate amounts of time worrying about dramatic but unlikely things (shark attacks, terrorists, etc.) rather than dealing with the mundane but extremely likely things right in front of them.
Dare you to try view this site on an iPhone, it's unusable. The scrolling jumps around all over the place instead of smoothly scrolling. I've seen this mobile theme on a few sites, can't figure out how any one could possibly think it's a good idea.
Surely in this scenario, Google is actively hurt?

You argue that, in the short term at least, these individual companies that are part of the Android Ecosystem can avoid costs but surely the ecosystem as a whole would produce more, better and cheaper phones if they could be forced to take the long term view.

I'm also not sure how many of the various reasons given are plausible given that HTC can and do release the source, but simply delay it for whatever reason.

Is compliance really not the norm amongst businesses that sign up with Google to ship the market etc.?
Cricket
Cricket was founded by England and it became more and more popular with the passage of time. Most of us love playing it and this has become the most enjoyable game nowadays. This is all because of its fame and repute that it has gained in past few years. People of ages love playing it and they enjoy it for sure. Cricket World cup takes place after every 4 years and on this site, you would find latest information about matches and statistics. In world cup 2011, India won by beating Australia after an exciting match. To talk more, we have provided you with some cricket videos of past matches. These videos have some competitive recorded matches to entertain users. Do try to have a look on these cricket videos.
a minimum viable product, keyword being viable

Absolutely, but I'll add this posit: What "viable" means is heavily context driven. If the goal is to learn about whether or not your specific take on things is valid, then what your MVP will need to look like will depend on the kind of market your pursuing, whether or not their are already existing players in your space, how radically different your approach is, etc.

IOW... if you wanted to launch an MVP of a "Facebook Killer" and the "secret sauce" was something, like, oh... some gamification thing... badges or accomplishments related to making new friends, let's say. That's enough like Facebook (or g+, etc.) that the expectation for a potential user would be based around Facebook... your "secret sauce" is only an incremental improvement, so you'd almost have to roll out something as feature rich and visually polished as Facebook, in order to find out if you can compete. That sucks, but one that's why there are both pluses and minuses to entering an established market with an incremental improvement. :-)

Now if your "secret sauce" is something world-changing and totally new, like say, "automatic Frombleglizzits when you Gwizztickum" (whatever that is), then you may ONLY need to build enough to make people understand what "automatic Frombleglizzits when you Gwizztickum" is, and then you can find out if that's compelling to them or not, in isolation. If it turns out it isn't, you would have wasted a tremendous amount of time building a complete Facebook clone just to find that out. You have more uncertainty in this case, but this is exactly where the Lean Startup approach helps... eliminating waste in the face of extreme uncertainty.

good news: no one knows who you are when you launch, so you have nothing to lose.

Exactly.

Unfortunately I think what we're seeing is the lean startup backlash where people use the terms but don't really take the time to understand what they mean.

Absolutely.
I, for one, would love to see a day (1) without Google. Almost like a moment of silence to realize how far the internet has come since '96. Would bing suddenly gain mass users? Would we rediscover dogpile?
Exactly. There's a difference between "putting off indexes" and "waiting until it takes hours to add them." The problem is likely evident well before that point.
An important distinction, at least in my definition of MVP, is that you're flexing on scope, not quality. If you release crap, you can't accurately assess the viability of your idea. If you release a quality product that does one or two things really well then you can measure product market fit and start iterating on new functionality. By restricting scope, you give yourself a better chance of getting to that point.

As @alexmturnbull suggests, the equation is a little different when your scope is large just to be a contender in a space.
I think it's a combination of top notch care and an engaged mind. Even the medical establishment is acknowledging the connection between state of the mind and health (placebo effect research).

On a lighter note, here is something the great physicist cannot fathom:
http://news.yahoo.com/women-mystery-british-physicist-hawkin...
THANK YOU! I feel the same way. Why is it that people who supposedly love programming are somehow expected to no longer want to be programmers at some point in their career? Being a great manager / team leader takes a whole different skill set than being a great coder.
Lets-See-What-Australia-Gets-In-2012
No Doubt, 2011 proved to be a year of swinging balls for Australia and unlimited roundabouts crossed their ways. 2012 is going to be the note of recently uncommon stability for Australians for sure. The team who swept India at Melbourne have been askesd to repeat the same thrill in Sydney and even the centuries of Tendulkar and Laxman have not have not proved well enough to deliver a victory.
I know why manhole covers are round and if that's the reason I got the job I don't know if I'd be happy with that.

After all this FizzBuzzing I guess I should start writing one up just so I can say I've done it.
I've heard this summarized as "Hollywood v. Silicon Valley" which seems pretty accurate. That makes this an intra-party fight among the Democrats, leaving Republicans free to jump in opportunistically on either side.
I live in a house with two adults (42,31) and five kids (20,17,16,6,4). I think we cover several different demographics but are pretty typical otherwise.

Everyone in the house streams their media (Netflix, iTunes, downloaded TV series). I also pay for a VPN account that gives me unrestricted access to US and UK media not otherwise available in Canada.

We do still pay for cable but, honestly, it is only used three or four hours a month for when we're looking for something to act as background noise (and, even then, we're just as likely to put on Pandora or Spotify).

The one reason that I've been hesitant to cancel cable is because I DO download TV. It assuages my guilt, somewhat, at what is effectively piracy because I _could_ get the downloaded content through my cable subscription.
I think you are missing the point that this is simply intended to provide insight into what is going on inside the head of the person who is doing the hiring. They might be excruciatingly polite in what they say to you directly and personally, but in their mind they are thinking "Why is this fool wasting my time with this stupidly long resume." He's telling the world in blunt terms the reality of what it takes to get hired and how people are going to see you. He's not composing a personal letter to you.
Do you have plans to include screenshots of the graph output?
Can anyone find a source for the unemployment rate of high school graduates? 22.9% is astoundingly high, if true.

I couldn't find a source (beyond tons of articles echoing the study), and found several contrarian sources, including http://www.wiredacademic.com/2012/01/unemployment-data-most-...
Nice. Congrats on getting your live app in the store. It is a great way to get hobby projects out in the open. Plus I get nice sense of completion when the app goes live.

Sometime soon I'll post a sales breakdown for my latest app. For me getting reviews written on sites like MacLife and AppAdvice made all the difference for sales.
ESA members and SOPA: Where they stand
If you need a compiler and a debugger to implement Pascal's triangle, you're simply not a good programmer. Good programmers write code. They don't just mash keys and wait for a compiler to tell them what to fix.

Any programmer I want to work with will be able to walk up to a whiteboard and write a program to print a row of Pascal's triangle or a function that determines whether one string contains another. Simple programming problems like this are the tiny problems we solve on a daily basis; if you can't implement such trivial functions without bugs, how can you expect to design or implement multi-kloc systems without bugs?
There's nothing wrong with a simple, clean PDF. A book is great because of the words, not any fancy formatting. These are books, not magazines. If your book is worth reading, it's worth reading with any decent layout.

Of course, there are exceptions to this. For example, books for very young children are very much about layout, art, etc. Also, books that are really multimedia projects, with heavy images, embedded video, etc are exceptions.

However, these exceptions are the minority. The vast majority of books are just words and figures. An author can create this themselves, writing in Markdown and creating their own figures. Will it be as polished as what a publisher would produce? No, of course not! Will it be all the reader really needs and wants? Definitely!

This is 90% of the value, and it's something that the author needs to produce. This is true even when working with a traditional publisher.

For technical books, business books (like startup books) and fiction books, all a reader really wants is the words and (if applicable) figures. In bookstores, things like nice glossy covers, layout, etc are important because people flip through books and make purchasing decisions. For example, this is why technical books have large indexes: people look at the index when making purchasing decisions.

On the internet, people make purchasing decisions based on Twitter, reviews, the book landing page, sample book content, price, etc. So that's what we focus on at Leanpub.
Awesome, thanks for the details. You mentioned only dabbling previously, any tips on learning iphone app programming quickly? What tools/things did you use to learn? Any recommendations? Did you use any books/guides?

Finally, did you use a mac pro or imac? and if it's relevant, does the glossy screen cause eye strain when programming for extended periods?
Congrats on releasing.

Question: When you submit an app for approval, can you tell them the exact date you want the app to be officially released in the App Store?
What switz said.

It's useful as a very early screening because it eliminates a lot of people who are wasting your time and is so simple as to have almost to false negatives. It has no complexity, no algorithm or concepts you might be unfamiliar with- just the for loop, the conditional, and the modulo operator. No one who claims to be a professional developer should fail it.

For reference: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
"If you can code, then you can only code. Forever."

There are sets of programmers complaining about being forced into management if they want to progress any further with their career, so that is not necessarily true.

I'd do a gap-year style explore the world if you've never done one. Go to all of the major continents and regions, and don't stick only to the developed countries. It will broaden your perspective.
Regardless of whether this reviewer is real, the laughs were worth it.
The sea level rise is one of those things I find is over blown by advocates of the anthropogenic hypothesis and under rated by advocates of either the natural variation hypothesis or the non-variance hypothesis.

Given that 75% (to a first approximation) of the surface of the planet is ocean, and that ice that is currently in the ocean is already displacing its mass (so not contributory to sea level rise when it melts), lets do a little math.

Using a nominal radius of 4,000 miles for the planet (yes its an ellipsoid I know), and only 75% of the surface area is water, we can compute the surface area of the ocean (approximately) as

(4/3*pi*4000^3) * .75 = 201,056,640,000 sq miles.

Call is 200 billion square miles. And we can convert 200' of sea level rise into miles by using 200 ft / 5280 ft/mi to get .0378 miles. So the volume of water that would have to flow into the ocean is then:

201,056,640,000 * .0378 = 7,599,940,992 miles^3 of water

We know ice is 92% the density of water, so its going to take up 8.7% more volume so 7.6x10^9 miles^3 * 1.0869 is a bit more than 8.25 billion cubic miles of ice.

Now Wolfram Alpha [2] puts the area of the North American Continent at 9.461 million mi^2, so this ice we're melting, if it were on the north American continent, would cover it to a depth of 8.25 billion / 9.461 million, yes 873 miles. Way out into orbit. I've looked around on Google Earth and can find no ice structures which poke out of the atmosphere :-).

But there is an even simpler way to 'check the facts' here. For every foot of sea level rise, we need to melt 1.0869' * (.75/.25) = 3.4' of ice over all of the land in the world. That doesn't sound too bad until you try to figure out how much of the existing land today supports 100% ice holding (which is to say, water which is, but for temperature, permanently locked into ice so glaciers and the poles and the peaks over 12,000') That number is closer to 1% of the total land mass, and that is only .25% of the earths surface area, yes 300' thick ice in those areas for each foot of sea level rise.

Bottom line, given what we know of the ice on our planet, if we melt all of it, we'll be lucky to get 20' of sea rise. 200' is completely out of the question unless a comet hits us that is 100 miles in diameter, at which point all bets are off.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area+of+USA

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area+of+north+america
What do you think of Facebook's Timeline?
At first I avoided it with the mentality of Fb and their evil plans to get all your info, but after giving it a shot, I think they've done a great job with Timeline. It provides a valid value proposition (a nice UI/UX format of your fb history) and makes a lot of people (including myself) compelled to upload more pictures and document them accurately.
The OP doesn't include the implementation of "createLogMessage" because he is suggesting that this method would be part of a framework, and by using it you can focus your mind on your application code, rather than boring details like checking for file locks on a log file.

I do think that choosing where to abstract and where to split functionality is the "art" of the code and we obsess about as we master the craft. So I can appreciate your code example!

I personally like to have a dedicated log function. That way you can refactor from using a file to perhaps a database table or any other method of logging. I personally expose our error logs as RSS and subscribe to the feed - I find it a really easy way to monitor because I'm too lazy to go looking at error log files every day!
R4 ds card
R4 DS card is widely used in the Nintendo gaming console for store and load games which is very helpful for user to play all the homebrew games and also getting fun with the multimedia files.
From November, so when it says "early next year" (w.r.t. Firefox implementing SPDY) it means "early this year".
If that's all that your code does, then that's fine to use #1. But in a larger class, it's needlessly cluttering the class with operations below its abstraction level. Why should a logger care about file locks and the such? Why should you care about file locks when editing the logger? Hint: You shouldn't normally.

As far as "the complexity is hidden", you're absolutely right. I want that complexity hidden. By hiding the complexity in this way, I can reduce duplication and at the same time make the code far easier to read. Sure, you do need to dig through more levels of abstraction if you need to debug something. But abstracting in this way enables bugs to be fixed far easier, since the methods are really small and simple, the "ripple" effect is far easier to understand and contain.

Think about how long it took you to understand what log() did. With the first one, you needed to parse a whole lot of detail (including the flag passed to fopen, the two exception checks, the arguments passed to flock, the fprintf declaration and the flock call arguments). With the second, all you needed to do is read the two steps: 1. createLogMessage() and 2. file->append($message). At a glance you know what the method is supposed to be doing.

Why is there such a hang up that people want to know what code is doing at all levels? If you name your APIs well, you should be able to look at the method's name (and perhaps its arguments in some cases) and know without a doubt what it's doing (at least to the abstraction level the API is designed for). If you really need to know details, you can go deeper, but I know when I read $file->append($message) that I'm appending a message to a file. I don't need to worry about anything else 99.9% of the time. So I'd rather get the clean win with well named APIs, than spend my time sifting through methods like the first one...
Fastest Company to reach 1 million users
This is a great comment, OP should take this one to heart.
Here's the APIs for the older version: http://api.maps.nokia.com/. Hopefully they'll be doing some documentation on using the new WebGL based API!
Scaling is Hard
Encapsulate Web Traffic Through Veepal’s SEO Services
The debate about intelligence being a trait of nature vs. nurture is an academic debate, and not the takeaway here.

What I took away from OP's story is that his friend "R" was a more useful source of lasting wisdom than his MIT instructors. Why? Because "R" had cultivated an air of confidence, charisma, and credibility. How "R" achieved this wisdom himself is a red herring.

P.S. This also isn't about my gripes with academia. I have no problem with people squandering their time and money and lives on any variety of "rat race", including the various diversions that people consider to be an education. As I said, you have to "taste" for yourself to truly understand. I have no agenda to change anyone's mind with words. I was just sharing my own revelation about the OP's message.

Allow me to further muddy the waters with another Nasrudin parable:

An opinionated and small-minded cleric was lecturing the people in the teahouse where Nasrudin spent so much of his time.

As the hours went by, Nasrudin realized how this man’s thoughts were running in patterns, how he was a victim of vanity and pride, how minor points of unrealistic intellectualism for its own sake were magnified by him and applied to every situation.

Subject after subject was discussed, and every time the intellectual cited books and precedents, false analogies and extraordinary presumptions without intuitive reality.

At length he produced a book which he had written, and Nasrudin stretched his hand forth to see it, because he was the only literate man present.

Holding it in front of his eyes, Nasrudin turned page after page, while the assembly looked on. After several minutes the itinerant cleric began to fidget. Then he could not contain himself any longer. ‘You are holding my book upside down!’ he screamed.

‘I know,’ said Nasrudin, ‘Since it is one of the archetypes which seems to have produced you, it seems to be the only sensible thing to do, if one is to learn from it.’

(With credit to Idries Shah, Octagon Press)
Algorithms are one thing, but I don't know of a single business that is dependent on Pascal's Triangle. That is, is it realistic to use PT?
HBO Ditches Netflix, Positioning its own non-Cable Distribution Services
I'd be happy if they just had a Tumblr-like widget to call your representative at the top of the page.
The graph output is a work in progress, I will update it in a couple of days with a screenshot.
I'm curious why my comment has been voted down. Was "suitably embarrassed" an offensive way to phrase it, or do people disagree with the distinction I made in the last sentence? I think it's pretty valuable to have a sense, even if you can't solve something, of whether the solution is likely to be simple or not.
Take a look at http://cryopid.berlios.de/

I've never used it before, but it seems to do what you want.

Edit: You might also want to take a look at http://checkpointing.org/ as well.