skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One wonders where we would be if Pascal or one of it's offspring like Oberon had actually caught on and challenged C. It would be nice to have a alternative system programming language. C sometimes feels like a local maximum instead of a global one.

From the PDF:

"The clean solution given in Oberon [6] is the concept of type extension, in object-oriented languages called inheritance. Now it became possible to declare a pointer as referencing a given type, and it would be able to point to any type which was an extension of the given type. This made it possible to construct inhomogeneous data structures, and to use them with the security of a reliable type checking system. An implementation must check at run-time, if and only if it is not possible to check at compile-time,.

Programs expressed in languages of the 1960s were full of loopholes. They made these programs utterly error-prone. But there was no alternative. The fact that a language like Oberon lets you program entire systems from scratch without use of loopholes (except in the storage manager and device drivers) marks the most significant progress in language design over 40 years."
2011 Toyota Sienna Minivan- A Review
2011 Toyota Sienna, a family Minivan is the masterwork of Toyota engineering and is “Top Safety Pick” award winner in 2010 by IIHS. This minivan is manufactured to give you a pleasing driving experience with your family whether you are going for long trips or for a drive in the same city.
If your original comment was downvoted (I did not vote one way or another), it was probably because it contributed little. Saying you'd "like to see" something without saying why (as in your parent comment) doesn't tend to generate discussion.
None of which ultimately matters. The United States, which for better or worse has significant influence on the world (UN included) could not even switch to the metric system on a time frame and manner of its own choosing. How well do you think we could transition from one system of time- and date-keeping to another, which is arguably more integral to people's lives than other types of measurement, especially when done by fiat through an external body?

You might be able to get Europeans to transition, you might even get the whole rest of the world to transition, but without the United States, it's not truly a universal system.
What of the magic numbers in this solution?

ThousandRange:
def child_values
@thousands * 1_000_000 + 499500
end

def child_sizes
NumberWriter.write(@thousands * 1_000).size * 1_000 + 18440
end

MillionRange:

def child_values
@millions * 1_000_000_000_000 + 499_999_500_000
end

def child_sizes
NumberWriter.write(@millions * 1_000_000).size * 1_000_000 + 44_872_000
end
You've missed the point entirely.

Ron Paul wants to make it legal for states to ban abortions, because Ron Paul generally favors state powers and is against federal powers. It has nothing to do with his personal opinion on abortion.

He's made this clear several times, but most people don't seem to understand it.
Political pandering; I would not trust this.
The surveillance state of social networking
It would make sense. Airlines had to deal with this issue years ago when frequent flyer programs were introduced.

Companies wanted to get the miles and points of their employees when they traveled for business. Airlines pushed a hard line and said that the miles and points are associated with the person who flies, not the company that pays for the ticket.
Thanks for the comment. I thought about it but wanted to keep the post short.

I agree that PaaS is a different story all together. It frees you up from doing most tasks. However a vanilla EC2 instance or dedicated are almost the same in that respect but quite different pricing and performance wise.
Accept that being a lead is going to be challenging. That whatever tasks you have taken on for yourself, you may or may not get to them when you want to. Accept that you will be the bridge between upper management and the technical folks and that you will be dealing with any number of issues.

Also, keep in mind that there are lots of resources out there about how to lead people and be a better leader. Look to the Harvard Business Review ( http://hbr.org ) for some good resources on how to be a better leader.

At the end of the day, as a lead, there is a process that you can follow to help you along. The process includes the following: 1) Meet with your team and work out what tasks are assigned, follow up with each team member and confirm that they understand the assignment by asking them to describe to you what they think they are doing, follow up with each team member on their assignment and measure their progress, and finally, check in with them to review their work and let them know when they are done or have completed their assignment - then start again. Use this process no matter how small or big the assignment is.

Some folks use an agile like approach to management of projects and one of the nice things out of this world is SCRUM and the concept of daily stand up meetings. One of the things I would recommend is to get into the rhythm of meeting with your team for about 15 minutes every day to check progress, see what they have accomplished and see what they are working on for the next day and to see if there are any things keeping them from meeting their goals. If you ever hear a complaint, that is a red flag and try to use whatever resources you have to remove those obstacles.

At the end of the day, you only have so much time and energy. Do the best you can and never loose your cool no matter what the situation is.

Best wishes and a great new year!
Foursquare and the coming end of the check-in economy
I believe Ron Pauls support comes as a backlash against politicians who have been trained to give certain responses, like for instance Sarah Palin when she was running for Vice President and had absolutely no knowledge of national politics. People don't necessarily agree with every one of Ron Pauls ideals, but at least you believe he has spent a lifetime nurturing those political ideals for himself, rather then having someone coach him.
I think his foreign policy is one of his strongest policies for which he gets a lot of support. What's funny is that Bush got elected in 2000 for having almost exactly the same foreign policy that Ron Paul has now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsvf1HU0KHM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8NhRPo0WAo
Can "The Checklist Manifesto" book be reduced to 80-100 pages?

Oh, certainly. I read that book either last year or early this year, and while it had some interesting points it felt highly padded.

It made me wonder, though, if the inclusion of a lot of touchy-feely content with emotional resonance was a technique to make things more memorable. That is, people respond to stories more so than just facts, so wrapping your bare facts in a story leads to a more lasting impression and (hopefully) action.

I still think most books could cut out a lot of their True Stories but it may not be all fluff.

My own true story: A few years ago at a local Ruby user group I was passing around some books, and one of them was about 100 pages and cost US $40. I commented on the price/page ratio, and a friend remarked that he would pay twice as much if they author could have made the book half the length.
Well, of course having the legal counselling in house makes a difference, and the US is actually a more complicated alternative the the UK for us in the EU. So in your case I'm pretty sure that your choice was the best.

For me, your last point doesn't look very worrying, because from what I read if the company operations are in Italy then you are required to pay taxes here, but according to EU law you can rightfully incorporate in any EU country; so, if I do pay the taxes in Italy, there is nothing unlawful. Moreover, in my case, the website is (and will be) in English only and my market is 99% abroad.

More worrying is having to understand HOW I should pay my company's taxes here, and how to explain to the UK that I should't pay them there too... the worst scenario I can think of would be having to pay the corporate taxes twice until everything is clear, but if that becomes a problem it means that I already got traction, and at that point I could do everything I need to fix the situation.

What I really don't want is to spend a lot of money just to validate my product!
If you can't find it anywhere for cheaper (like me) buy it from here: http://www.bookdepository.com/Mock-Mockingbird-Raymond-Smull...

They ship to a very large amount of places for free. My only complaint is that because it is shipping from another country it takes a while to get to you and you don't get any tracking codes from them.
Google Wallet stores too much unencrypted data in a rooted device--report
Thanks, J. Although neither one has email forwarding (and namecheap's email forwarding is broken) Hover does have a phone number where SMART HELPFUL PEOPLE answer. She suggested that I use Google apps for my email. (facepalm, of course!) And coupon "SOPA" gives 10% off their $10 transfer (free Whois privacy). Renewals will be $15 (still free privacy).
I just skimmed through it and there's a really controversial claim in there that the functional paradigm was a bad idea!

I also found it surprising that he disliked Dijkstra's display idea since I've used a variant of that to great effect.

Anyway, there's a lot of fun reading in there so thanks for the link! Here's a discussion on Lambda the Ultimate: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1773
It's a bummer this article starts out with a quote about Rails providing a bad OOP learning environment and then talks about the framework itself never touching on the learning of OOP again.

--

"it's lead Rails developers to build huge,
monolithic models that are hard to test,
and violate SRP."

...Sounds like you need to structure your code better.

"Have you ever seen a 200 line long
controller method? I have."

... What on earth are you talking about? This has nothing to do with rails. Structure your code better.

"The whole idea of logic in templates
leads to all kinds of problems."

...Then don't put logic in your templates. Use helpers or logic-less templates.

"MVC has served the web well...
...But I think we're reaching its
limits"

...If the type of web app you want to make isn't best constructed with an mvc framework, don't use mvc. But honestly, I can't think of anyway to more blissfully implement a RESTfull webapp than with respond_to and resourceful routes.

"This post is light on examples.
I want this to be the starting point
of a discussion"

...This exact discussion has been raging for years. Your only chance at gaining ground is through examples.

--

This brings me to: When is this post from? I feel like it's 5 years old and I've slightly been had.
Yet ironically the author of emacs virulently despises Tcl, which is founded on precisely the same concept.
> I think you might want to spend some more time looking at well-known algorithms that might make improve both efficiency and accuracy.

I went through hundeds of research papers on the topic and found nothing that could help me. Tries and BSTs are awesome for a lot of things but not what I was trying to do. If you read above, I don't search through each of the 1m words - I narrow down to the letter based on word-length and then find all possible words that match at least 66% of the letters that the user typed. This allows for typos and relaxes the filters. Going from 1m to 1000 words takes under 0.01s on iPad1 because of the bit-counting algo. The hard part is picking the best 5 out of the 1000 that match and is what takes some time. If user types 'CTA', how would pick the best match from hundreds of words like CATARACT, CITADEL, CANTINA, CRUSTACEAN etc.?

> For accuracy, consider arithmetic coding, and take a look at some of the work and writings from the Dasher project (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/). In addition to their impressive input system, they've done a ton of work on accessibility.

Dasher was one of the inspirations for KType actually. When I came across it years ago, I tried to make it work for my cousin but it requires a lot of dexterity and timing, even when configured properly. And when I looked at it last, it did not support a high-level of word-completion / finishing sentences. On KType, if the user wants to type 'GIVE ME SOME FOOD', they type 'GV', select 'GIVE' on screen, then 'ME' on screen, then type 'S' and select 'SOME' and so on.

Additionally, KType can take input from external bluetooth devices and I'm working on making it accept input from bluetooth joysticks, so they wouldn't have to touch the screen at all. I also wrote a simple algo to ignore unintentional touches a user might make if they do not have fine motor skills: http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20111105

> Also, depending on your input system, you should consider the possibility of common typos or equivalent; for instance, on a keyboard you'd consider adjacent characters as likely typos.

In addition to handling typos, I offer a special keyboard layout to minimize the amount of movement a user would have to make when typing: http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110228

Last thing I wanted to do was reinvent the wheel for no reason. The problem is that in this field, most all of the technology is proprietary and even though lot of research is done to invent systems that help others, they are purely research and rarely ship. In the long-term, KType is a system to integrate with other hardware for I/O and provide the user with a single, easy-to-use interface.
Whoa, that's really smart. Going to try that!
I only noticed because right now that's a very sensitive matter for me ;)

So, you're opening a branch here - that makes a lot of sense, as you are actually making business in Italy (but it's very sad that's necessary for those reasons). May I ask you how much does it cost? Is it as expensive as opening an independent SrL?
For Paul to claim that someone could hold a "scientific opinion as gospel" shows that he has either forgotten his scientific education that he no doubt received during his Ph.D. candidacy, or that his meaning was lost in his sweeping rhetoric. In this age of climate change, resource depletion and environmental degradation the most powerful country in the world needs a Commander-in-Chief that demonstrates the ability to understand and interpret scientific advances. Paul has not shown this ability.
Well for the hetzner server there is a 149 € activation fee with that 49 € per month so it is a bit more than the article is saying.

The only thing I've ever found close to hetzner.de in the US with good customer feedback is (though there servers aren't that close): http://joesdatacenter.com/Dedicated_Servers.html
For internet routing, theory and reality might be very distant. RED in particular has a terrible record of making things worse on live systems. But that was a few years ago and perhaps newer variants are better.

Also there's a huge problem on routing algorithms due to hundreds of patents covering very trivial uses. For example, there is an awful patent covering the very important case of not dropping tiny ACK packets. For congestion control, it's more useful to drop big TCP data packets to make the endpoints adjust. And the key networking gear players are full on supporting those crazy software patents.

So my prediction is things will stay the same and nothing meaningful will happen for 10 years until a few key patents expire. Nobody will risk exposure to a multimillion IP lawsuit. And anyway, we the users will just pay the bills either way so telcos don't care.

You can thank Big Telcos, Cisco and many others.

Of course big players with a huge patent war-chest (i.e. Google/Amazon/Microsoft) will advance their WANs.
(Full disclosure, I was an activist for Paul during 2008)

I agree that Paul seems to have too narrow of a focus in his talk - he answers healthcare or fuel price questions half the time by saying these wouldn't happen with a gold standard / Fed, etc. I don't think he's thin in his views, but that (in typical libertarian fashion) he focuses just a bit too much on pure philosophy and not on pragmatism.

I agree with the previous commenters with his sincerity and trustworthiness. I think "The Incorruptible" can honestly be applied to his name. Whenever he gave a speech he just got up there and said what was on his mind - it's not all good policy, but he's serious and consistent.

The most likely result of a Paul presidency would probably be, not his legislative force, etc., but perhaps the waking up of America to what the establishment's power (and really the presidency itself) really is - fully controlled by interest groups.

I actually think that Obama is a genuine / smart guy, but he's too afraid (seemingly) to press his views. I think Paul would be fine pressing the views, but would probably be near censured by the true political ruling class.
This is a fun puzzle. Here's my take on it. I stopped reading the article after the introduction so I could attack the problem fresh, so hopefully this isn't the same as what the author did.

The trick is working backwards. We want to quickly count the number of occurrences of each letter in the list of number words. Knowing how to do that, we just have to do a linear scan over the cumulative counts for A, B, C, ... to find the interval into which the query index fits. If it helps prime your intuition, my inspiration is counting sort with the counts evaluated partly analytically.

Number words can be divided into a fixed set of recurring components: one, two, three, four, ..., ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, ..., twenty, thirty, ..., hundred, thousand, million, billion. Build an inverse index that maps each letter to the set of all component words that contain the letter, paired with an occurrence count. For example, the inverse index would map T to {(two, 1), (three, 1), (ten, 1), (twelve, 1), (thirteen, 2), ...}.

With this in hand, the problem is reduced to counting the number of each component word in the string.

Let's consider that subproblem for the component 'nine' ('nineteen' and 'ninety' are separate components) for numbers with up to n digits. Numbers with the digit pattern xxx...xxx9 each contribute one occurrence of 'nine', and there are 10^(n-1) such numbers ('... nine'). Likewise each xxx...xxx9xx contributes an occurrence, and there are again 10^(n-1) such numbers ('... nine hundred ...'), the pattern xxx...xxx9xxx has 10^(n-1) members ('... nine thousand ...'), etc.

This same analysis applies to all ones components (one, two, three, ..., nine), and an analogous analysis applies to other components.
Hi there, thanks for the feedback. The focus of the article was most certainly more of "how to extract value in creative was other than the most obvious: straight up paying for it with cold hard cash" (less so encouraging people to race to the bottom). I suspect most early stage pre-traction / pre-funding startups fail because they can't "monetize" in some way - hence the list of ideas. Certainly if you can't monetize, racing to the bottom isn't going to help.

Differentiation of value proposition wasn't the topic of discussion either - but yes, I'm not a proponent of differentiating by price point alone.

As for the example, Match and eHarmony certainly have "real" support costs too, and I did not say that POF did not. All three have server, bandwidth, electricity cost too. I'm not sure what your point is. My point with that example was that of those 3, POF has a different way of extracting value for itself (the central topic of the blog).

I apologize if I sound defensive, I'm not. I thank you for the feedback and for challenging me to think through :)
Use #code2011 to tweet which programming languages you used this year
It's not clear to me that the $4.99 or $9.99 per month will insulate you from redesigns or other updates that the company sees fit to deliver to their customers. If you're one customer in 1M, you're sunk if you represent a minority opposed to a particular change (such as the Gmail redesign).

On the other hand, the ad-support argument makes sense - paying in cash rather than advertising attention for a service removes the tension between 'users' and 'customers' by making them the same person. Certainly a fee-for-service Facebook might optimize the site in completely different ways from the existing one - advertising impressions would not be a factor. However, as others have said, it would simply not be Facebook as we know it since it would have much, much fewer than the existing 750M users (1%? 10%?).
couldn't you just use "sort" to sort the file on disk and then offset into the file to find the answer? i would expect sort to work fine for files larger than memory (and if it doesn't i bet there is some tool that does - merge sort with tapes is not so old...)

[edit: you'd need to add, then strip, carriage returns between numbers, i guess]
it does, but you cannot predict future legislation.

In 2010, you may not yet know that the timezones will change in 2012, but you might still need to store a 2012 date in your database.

So, the best you can do, if storing in UTC, is store that 2012 date using 2010 timezone rules, as you don't yet know what the 2012 time zone rules are going to be
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I thought he was talking about moore's law.

Surely free services have always come with a catch, since the dawn of time?
Monsanto is large. They (like many other Fortune 500) can use the US Government to exert much pressure on India to pay the IP tribute for using forbidden seeds as well as accidentally cross-pollenated varieties (assuming they are viable). (why maintain a crypto-fascist empire if you're not going to use it?)

OTOH, India isn't Iraq (et al): they might respond with a big, nuclear-backed, "F* YOU!", and get away by infringing like you said.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Owing your seeds to a company is a bad thing, though.
I think you're mostly right; that's when it got really big. But it began long before...

Standard Oil, United Fruit Company, JP Morgan, DuPont, CitiBank, Associated Press, Pfizer, Macy's, and I haven't even gotten to the Civil War era yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_raider
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies#1825_to_1851
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street#Nineteenth_century
How Tetris became the world's favorite computer game
I have never seen any story like "ROBIN WAUTERS WONDERS WHY ROBIN WAUTERS ISN'T IN THE HEADLINES," like you see multiple times per week with MG...on HN. Is he the most gossipy person there, now? This is usually the kind of drama you see with Perez Hilton type personalities.
Can't find it. I can find a number of ten minute interviews with him -- this one has him discussing the Fed with an expert, and I don't think he showed well.

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=1359402302

This is 15 December 2009, and it isn't "almost half an hour", and I don't recall the details so much as my impression of the guy's thinking.

They've had a number of long interviews with him.

17 May 2010 -- http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=1496298429

27 April 2011 -- http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000018858

31 May 2011 -- http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000024836
> "why are we spending so money on NASA, when we've got problems on earth?"

> doing [...] cool stuff with the money

is that the best reason you have? i think the money would be better spent curing diseases