skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The original expectation was that OLPC would be selling 5 million laptops to national governments in its first year and hundreds of millions by now. Instead, it has sold hundreds of thousands of laptops. A 1000-fold difference in scale makes a large difference in price.
The best thing about OO in app development is that it lets you abstract the main routines of your program into what is effectively business logic. For example,"
$customer = new cp_customer();
$customer->add($customer_form_data);
/* Customer_Info => Customer_Storefront*/
$customer->link_to_storefront($SID);"

Earlier this was a garbled mess, full of functions like
custID = addCustomer(form_info)
updateAddress(custID, "Billing", some_args) and so on ...

On the flip side, OOP is trickier (b/c of encapsulation) to debug esp when object model gets complicated. In terms of programming the only way to do it better (and this is frankly v debatable, esp when you consider management of DB connections and API administration etc) is "LISP style", where you effectively concoct a DSL for your specific app.
It's funny you should mention it...but Iran is one of the few countries in the world right now that seems to have a clear picture of exactly how international politics works.
Iran recognizes that what we call sovereignty in this day and age is a joke. True sovereignty (the ability to actually govern your own affairs) is conferred by nuclear power.
I'm sure you don't think Russia is a good example of how a country should be run either, but no one is talking about invading Russia...
Pakistan is an interesting case. It looks as though the U.S. saw the political upheaval there as an opportunity to take away their sovereignty by going in and taking their nukes. Never really saw a follow up story on that.
I doubt 50%+ will apply any time soon. I know I won't. It seems like they should be offering something much better for much more money. At $375 it's too much for the casual developer and peanuts for any company serious about their FB app.
They haven't been around very long, I wouldn't be surprised if they figure out a slick way to address those problems in the future. I'll be interested to see how they approach it if they do.
class Animal
def initialize(options = {})
@type = options[:type]
@name = options[:name]
@legs = options[:legs]
@noise = options[:noise]
end

def type?
return @type
end

def name?
return @name
end

def noise?
return @noise
end

def legs?
return @legs
end
end

dog = Animal.new(:type => "Dog", :name => "Pipin", :legs => 4, :noise => "Woof")
puts "#{dog.name?} the #{dog.type?} has #{dog.legs?} legs and goes \"#{dog.noise?}!\"\n"

cow = Animal.new(:type => "Cow", :name => "Kevin", :legs => 4, :noise => "Moo")
puts "#{cow.name?} the #{cow.type?} has #{cow.legs?} legs and goes \"#{cow.noise?}!\"\n"

Output:

Pipin the Dog has 4 legs and goes "Woof!"
Kevin the Cow has 4 legs and goes "Moo!"

…a simple class which turns the dog and cow variables into objects, like small boxes with information referring to that animal. By the way — I hope code isn't classed as words, else I've failed to describe it in under 64! :P
One day we suddenly had a Slinkset site that was fully decked out in the TicketStumbler layout. They have magical gnomes working there, or something. And it's currently one of our top 3 traffic drivers!

<3 Brett & John and fully recommend Slinkset. If Dan successfully set it up, anybody can ;)
That brings up another important question. How do you find the ideal person to take a leadership role for development? That is where the credit should go, but it's a tough spot to fill.
Steve Jobs On Being Laid Off
I think the root problem is how we define "fraud". What is fraud in this context? If you borrow from 1 person/entity using some asset and then borrow from another reusing the same already leveraged asset and are not extremely clear that the asset is already fully committed to the first debt, then it is fraud? I think so.

We seem to be dancing around to issues: first is fraud and second is usury. Usury works both ways. If you gain 50% in less than a year from some investment, then someone is paying 50%. (for simplicity lets ignore the win-win of an expending system, even factoring this, you end up with rates over 10%). Until the last few decades, usury above 10 or 15 percent was illegal in most U.S. states. So if a bank is booking earnings on home mortgages of 50% (due to people flipping property in 5 years), then is this usury? Is it healthy? Is there any model where these levels of usury are sustainable or healthy for a society as a whole?
10 Mistakes That Could Be Killing Your Blog
I'm very happy about the fact that this is inevitable. The first nation to build it will have an order of magnitude if not more of an advantage when it comes to space travel costs.

Not being stuck at the bottom of a deep well is going to be a game changer.
I want to see what posts I upvoted.
Another idea I have been thinking about is the necessity of having plans in place, from the beginning, for if, and when, the project begins to have commercial merit. If everyone knows that 90% of any ensuing corporation will go to the top 6 developers on the project, they are much more likely to commit valuable resources.
Besides slinkset, if you have the time and need the control, why not hack at HN [1] or reddit [2]?

Honestly, the best discussions online are still on mailing lists. I need more time to think about why that is, and how we can designed that into the newer stuff. But I can't get into that now.

[1] http://arclanguage.org/install (Hacker News engine included)

[2] http://code.reddit.com/
@patio11: Actually, you can save bandwidth at the sub-packet level. Ethernet is a common link layer protocol that we can examine: It has a variable length frame, and because it uses time-delimited bit-level framing, the smaller your ethernet frame the quicker it can be sent. The only real caveat to axod's article is that you often can't save on performance of intermediary systems (routers) because they tend to pre-allocate blocks of memory for packets, so no memory is saved when some packets are smaller. But your ISP doesn't meter you at the link layer anyway (or often even the IP level), so the savings as reported by the article are absolutely real in terms of bandwidth costs. (as in money)
Perhaps the studios could fight back by selling BD-9 movies themselves.
BTW, I think they've dipped under $10
Worry About Integration, Not Installation
Fighting spam just got a little easier
Lexical scope + hash table + closures
space elevators are at least 50 years away...

we haven't even been back to the moon yet. let's be realistic
You do object oriented analysis of your problem domain. This results in a set of objects. Then you design a class hierarchy for your objects (base, child etc). Trick is to realize objects themselves do not accomplish project purpose, they just have behaviors. How you play these behaviors decides what the application finally does.

I am surprised to see no one has mentioned the analysis part. To identify and abstract (like pulling oil well from well) "classes" of objects in your problem domain is the core proponent of OO programming. This is the basis for all data hiding and reuse.

The OO design principles (not design patterns) tell you how to go about your class design.Check this link: http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/publishedArticles.html

Once you have completed all your classes, you will realize how easy (and natural) it is to script the actual business logic of your application - more or less like a movie: while all the actors have their identities, the "script" tells how they interact and decides the movie experience.
How to Cite Electronic Sources
it doesn't matter now, its too late. google has taken so much share from yahoo in search, advertising, and soon banner ads, that there isn't an option for "turning around" yahoo. that was 2006.

the next ceo really only has one job - fire half the workforce and try to bring ballmer back to the table.
the web is drowning in development tools from appjet to google app engine. web developer tools aren't making anyone money, so its not clear how they would aid yahoo. what yahoo needs is a time machine to go back to the day before adsense and adwords were launched.
you nailed it. goog destroyed yahoo in the ad market a while back. there is nothing that can reverse that now. indeed, goog continues to take percentages from them even today
and how many of those were due to circumstance beyond the engineers control?
I wonder why Perth? 2000 miles south of Hawaii makes sense since it's near the equator to maximize centrifugal force and tangential velocity during launch, but why Perth?
Hopefully nowhere near any kind of shortlist for any position that would drive tech in this country.
wonder what kind of person they'll go with for the new CEO

someone who has no issues with cleaning house. frankly they should have gone with an axeman after semel in order to clean up the company.

you bring in the axeman, let him cut for a year until the forest is clear of deadwood and the remaining trees are in nice neat rows, you give him a $10 million golden parachute, send him on his way, and start trying to build something out of the good material left. if they had done this after semel, yahoo might be in a better place today.

i wonder if filo and ash patel will leave also...frankly it might do good to completely clean house of all the old guard and start with a fresh team with no alliances or turf issues.

you can be sure that selling to microsoft will be put back on the table for the next ceo.
Yo're right I did hit far off the point I was making which is: Hard libertarians read this story as market signals were distorted by government. We might as well be burning silos of wheat.

Social Democrats are predictably reading this as an example that markets do not protect themselves against unacceptable results.

But it seems that anyone without an ideological attachment is siding with the latter. Of course this is dangerous as it probably means a wholesale swing towards that side which comes with a whole lot of completely unrelated stuff.
my thoughts exactly.

i'm looking through... boat collision, boat collision, construction failure, no inspection, fire, bombs, etc. etc.

i see tacoma narrows in 1940: "Since that time all new bridges have been modeled in wind tunnels."

edit: here, have some engineering:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_bridge
Any next CEO is still a crap shoot that could drive the final nail into Yahoo. All these *ssholes are ready to kick a man when he's down, but I have yet to read ANY good suggestion for turning around Yahoo. Yang just got caught in the perfect storm. How many of you geniuses sold you 401k before the crisis. I've seen stocks drop 80% and bounce back completely before, I didn't remember people lynching the CEO like this.
Wow, very cool. Just wish I could save my loop or adjust BPM.
Actually, links work now for some reason. I personally really like this format because it lets me see comments right via RSS. The only problem is that Yahoo then tends to cache them, and so if I want to see the _latest_ comments, I must visit the actual article permalink.
I remember my first class. It was a Stopwatch. It had start, stop, reset, and read methods. It maintained an internal counter by calling time(2) or something like that.

A lot of objects have no real-world equivalent (they are not "objective", I kill myself), but that doesn't make them useless.

Objects are an odd mash of concepts: inheritance, interfaces, global data with limited access, encapsulation, memory management. The object model will differ from language to language, and your objects will look different depending on what features you use.

You can program in a pretty object-oriented way in straight C. Some languages bend more easily to these ideas than others.

http://www.planetpdf.com/codecuts/pdfs/ooc.pdf [pdf]
I have one word. Why?
You may be looking for Drupal. The core is extremely light and you could easily configure it to do just that. Drupal's done a great job of only adding the most necessary features. I'd like to see them pull Book + Forum and add CCK + Views to core, but I think that they still need to keep some obvious out-of-the-box functionality for new users.
I was sorely tempted to follow the same path. But then I had an insight: github may be a terrible blog platform, but it is _good enough_ by itself.

So far, it sucks not having full text RSS feeds and having to manually tag posts in delicious. It's slow and some readers seem to miss the comments. But a Tom says, you get to write in textile or markdown. And as for not having CSS, I have convinced mself it's a benefit; I am not spending any time tweaking page layout.

http://tinyurl.com/homoiconic
but I have yet to read ANY good suggestion for turning around Yahoo

there isn't one. google's momentum in taking marketshare hasn't diminished one bit. yahoo has less share in ad dollars then they did two years ago. there really isn't much a new ceo can do to reverse that.

from a shareholder perspective, the msft deal was a no-brainer. especially at today's trading range. yhoo isn't going back to the 34 msft offered them anytime in the next five years. the next ceo will do their best to get something going again
Jekyll is a re-implementation of existing projects except they don't have version control. I use rassmalog, which is small and easy to hack on, and supports plugins. There is also rog, and hobbix, both of which I looked at using but have not blogged with.
they need to take info and turn it into $$$$
It was a lawyer-vetted statement in response to media stories about him. Mark had to post something on his blog so he did not look like he was avoiding the issue, nor give the false impression that an elaborate explanation was coming.

There was a recent article that said the best way to stop a rumor was to directly address the allegations, regardless of how trivial a rumor was. If that is true, Cuban would have been more effectice if he simply stated that the prosecution would have to prove in court that he did anything wrong, and that he is glad to finally get the chance to settle the matter. Instead, he attacked the prosecutor's motives several times, and denied it only as a last remark. Therefore, it is not surprising that he is getting all this attention.
the reason Macs are so expensive is that they don't (generally) skimp on parts

are you kidding? they sell inferior hardware for more cost. it is trivial to locate a vendor selling better performing hardware for less cost
They aren't considered evil for providing everything they think you want, they are considered evil for [formally] exploiting a monopoly.
It is obvious in retrospect never at the time. Like shorting financial stocks three months ago (or yahoo) for that matter. If they knew, they would have acted differently.
Space elevators are just one way of avoiding the near exponential nastiness of the rocket equation. We currently have the ability to construct compressive towers that extend beyond the atmosphere. Build several of these, and park an electromagnetic accelerator on top, and you have something that gives you the same economics as the space elevator for a comparable price. The big problem with this scheme: building it would be politically impossible.
International space station gets a makeover
It should have permalinks.
More-detailed explanation of Mark Cuban's civil suit
Incidentally, there's another huge vote for Markdown from this corner---for me it kind of takes posterous from the toy column to the essential column. Which is not meant as a slight to posterous; I think it's the most elegant blogging system out there, bar none. But a lack of some kind of structured text means that I'd be having to hand-code html in a mail window. And I promised myself I'm never going back there... NEVER.
Ron Pollack is very Knowledgeable with Finances
An informative site about Ron Pollack's participation with Stocks and hedge Funds.
Object oriented programming is definitely the way to go. OOP came about as a series of incremental improvements made to procedural programming.

First came the idea of segmenting functionality into more manageable 'building blocks' called modules that worked together to provide the functionality of the entire system.

Next came abstract data types which incorporated the idea of treating a set of data and the logical operations on that data as a single unit. Different ADTs were naturally stored in separate program modules.

Next came the idea of information hiding, or separating out a module's interface from its internal structure. Information hiding serves two major purposes: a) allowing a module implementer greater freedom in changing how a module works without distrubing clients of the module and b) making it so a user does not have to understand everything about a module in order to use any part of the module.

Having figured out modularity, abstract data types, and information hiding, programmers then turned to the task of how to better reuse code. Structured programming reduced the amount of duplicate code in a system, but still had quite a bit of code with only slight differences. Inheritance was developed as a mechanism to deal with this problem. Basically ADTs, now called classes, were arranged in a tree structure with the most general classes at the top and the most specific classes at the bottom. Several additional mechanisms were added to the system that allow child classes to have access to their parent class definitions and for runtime polymorphism.

More than 64 words, I know. However, because seeing how OOP evolved out of the solutions to procedural programming problems helped me to understand it and see its value, it seemed like it may help you as well.
Well there's only one reason for a male to risk death, radiation damage, bone loss, etc & it's not the rocks.
are you talking about this?
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0701/0701093.pdf
Does not functional programming allow you to do just that?
One word can also answer that - ego.
Proof of concept at VC pitch meeting: Willy Wonka movie.
It seemed reasonably clear at the time to quite a few shareholders.

Anyway, I don't think it's a matter of catching up to Google in search. It's a matter of finding a business model that makes them money. For Yahoo still to be looking for one is kinda like a 53 year old hanging out in a Uni bar all day & getting excited about Oweek.
Sigur Ros I'm not such a fan of. I love Dead Can Dance, though.
Thanks for the book link!
Yeah agreed.

That could make it into quite an interesting (well, novel) social device/experiment.
It can be done on a small scale, and is all the time.

The first step is likely to assemble a few yourself, or even manufacture a short run yourself. If you don't have the necessary knowledge, advertise among your friends or here and find someone to help you. You can hire someone to design and make a single example of the product, and then take that to manufacturers.

Electronics has had a revolution similar to Open Source in software, but more gradual and less hyped, and it is much less expensive to make short runs of things now.

When you are ready to make a couple hundred or thousand items, look on mfgquote.com and outsource it the same way you would outsource grundgy coding work on rent-a-coder.com.

If you post more details of the device here, you will get more explicit help, maybe even a partner . . . just a suggestion.
Consider this: Yahoo is #1 in the WORLD based on traffic (Alexa.com). But nobody will touch their stock? The writing is on the wall. Like I said, there is a downward trajectory there. Good companies find a way to leverage a #1 ranking into dollars and dominance.

to be fair, they have in a sense.

the company is profitable. they have cash in the bank. but the writing is on the wall, google has become completely dominant in ads. yahoo has tried to reverse this but google has just taken more share. web ads are a winner-take-all economy...it doesn't look good for anyone going head-to-head with google

yahoo won't go under, but its days as an independent company are likely numbered
Ad-supported companies exist in a two-sided market.

Users give you attention in exchange for a media product. You resell that attention to advertises for a profit.

Most technically minded folk, for whatever reason, only focus on the first half of the equation, which mostly boils down to product decisions, and when they focus on the second they come up with stuff like micro-targeting or Facebook Beacon.

Hulu isn't making more money than YouTube because the product is less risky, although that is true. They're also most making more money because they have a more lucrative audience, which is also true.

They're making more money because they have experience as a media company and know how to field a killer ad sales team. Don't under estimate soft power. :)
It is obvious in retrospect never at the time

i strongly disagree. indeed the only party that didn't see the msft deal as a no-brainer were in management and the board.
Ah cool - thanks.

Must admit - seeing this was a bit retro moment for me. I might even fire up the A1000 :-)
Euler Problem #18 and #67 using functional Scala
With Jerry Yang Gone, What Yahoo Should Do Next
It's a meaningless argument in that the two sides won't agree. But I think it's useful in that some people are interested in the opinions from both sides. And I don't like people calling Apple "evil." It's immature.

Translation: I like it when I am mistreated by Apple because I can believe it is part of some greater purpose.

So, was my argument entirely invalid? Because I thought I did an okay job of explaining why being "evil" wasn't actually evil.

In my opinion, Dell and Microsoft mistreat their customers, because they sacrifice quality for customization. I understand their viewpoint but they turn out the inferior product. If Apple's "mistreatment" means excellent screens, keyboards, designs, specs, and software, then by all means let them go ahead.
UCSB Social Computing Group's innovation competition for students anywhere
Actually - has a lot of potential now that I think about it :)

As a social device, I wonder if the limited instrument set is an advantage/disadvantage.

On the one hand, having a limited set of instruments (and beats/bars) funnels the creativity into the composition alone.

On the other having custom instruments adds a new dimension to the sharing. You could even overlay different instruments over the same composition.

... I'm probably just overthinking this :)
In 64 words or less:

Start reading this and keep going until the end. In two hours or less, you will understand object-oriented programming. This is very well written and explains many differences between functional languages and object oriented languages.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/OO...
Doesn't work on Ubuntu sigh.
The Java on OSX situation is pretty deplorable, I agree. But that is not equivalent to "treating their third-party developers like crap." Java is an underprivileged minority on the OSX desktop, for better or worse.
Housing rentals Rss Feeds
we've just now started created nanotechnological materials. it will be a significant amount of time before we can actually engineer with structures this size. also keep in mind a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, that means this nanotube "ribbon" has to be pristine and perfect throughout its entire length.

understand that the tether is only part of the equation, you need to construct the huge ass counterweight in space as well, and that doesn't get up there by itself, and we don't have an elevator to GET it there until we make the first one.

that's a thousand small details that have yet to be even addressed let alone discussed as to their feasibility.

just don't get your hopes up about seeing this in the near-term...
Personally, I need frequent changes of scenery to help me focus. Since I'm usually tied to a desk, changing music frequently helps. If I'm actually tuned into the problem that I'm working on, whatever I'm listening to just fades in the background anyway.