skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think his point was that you don't need to learn about locks to learn about concurrency, which is a valid point. The problem with the point, at least as I see it, is that first year programming classes (at this point in time at least) do not teach languages that have concurrency models that really support it, nor do they eliminate the problem of synchronization by providing immutable data structures.

I, just this afternoon, heard Guy Blelloch give a talk about Parallel thinking today, and he seems to support the idea of teaching parallel programming throughout the curriculum almost instead of sequential programming--making sequential thinking the oddity. I think this makes sense, but it obviously has some flaws...
Read the book. It's not as straight forward as you think, and it's actually a great read. It will make you a more all rounded, confident person.

The point is not to outsell anyone, but judge how much you can make by putting in X hours and then deciding what you are happy with. IE It's better to do B2B and a 3 clients than to sell to 1000 actual customers with lots of questions etc, that takes up all your time.
Excellent time lapse video
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=lang%3A...
Thanks. I'm not going to install it today, but that's actually quite an elegant solution on Google's part. Bravo!
Sorry ars, re-reading my comment sent me for a loop as well.

All I was trying to say (poorly) was that what you expect may have no relation to how the 'real' reality works. Digitization, pixels, etc. may have no analogue in actual existence and hence we cannot infer the nature of reality from our observations in simulation.
I like how the top Google words are all generic web marketing words, with the two exceptions of "hotels" and "women."
This is slightly missing the point - if GM goes through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy they will not "stop making cars". Their stock will go to zero, they will default on most of their borrowed money, they will probably have to fire a lot of people, simplify their product line, and sell off some brands to other groups. But they will keep operating as a company.
When I realized that by the time the light leaving my monitor reached my eyes, my CPU already completed at least three more instructions, my appreciation for clock speeds hit a new high.
I think a lot of advertising is subliminal, especially branding.

Coke bombards you with ads because it wants to promote coke as part of your lifestyle. If you don't click on their ad banner right now, that's fine. You're more likely to recognize coke though at the grocery store.

The article also doesn't take into account that advertising is not static. Like a cat and mouse game, it evolves as its audience evolves.

In the future, advertising may be more "guerilla" or underground. Also, advertising has the capability to go "viral" now. In a matter of days, they can spread a meme across the internets. :-)
"But I chose this brand of coffee maker because people who had one really liked it, and the other brands, their users didn't like them so much."

Well, lots of ads say or infer that people who have X really liked it. I think marketers just hope you'll get your memory confused over whether you heard real people say they liked it or whether it was a more or less obvious ad.
i can't wait to go 4 years fast forward when fb will be irrelevant
So the expression of identity is source of all confusion in communication? I would have attributed it to sloppy thinking and and imprecise grammar but oh I guess I'm wrong.
The more niched your content, the less accurate that statement becomes.
I believe the music is from the Gattaca soundtrack.
What is the timetable you envision for your product (or something like it) to be rolled out? What are the major impediments to your progress right now?
This is great news.

I've finished reading the fist draft of the Pragmatic Programmers new book on Clojure and I can't wait until they release another draft. The first draft only contains about half the chapters.
Not sure I get the logic behind the line: With the economic slow down, countries with emerging technology sectors and talented, well educated developers will be getting a second look as a means of cutting applicationd(sic) development costs.

Surely with the economic slowdown developers in "un-emerging" economies will be more competitive?
Looks good, although I'm no investor (put a bonus in for two weeks way back: The stress wasn't worth it). Obviously, the site will only be as good as how current the news is: People need this information practically in real time. And you'll have to find those angles that people can't get by viewing the "News" tab on Google Finance.

On another note, I'd like to see a site called whomovedmysocks.com
I also wonder about that $73 figure. It must include healthcare, which means it was double counted in the OP.

My dad is a retired GM employee (33 years), and I can tell you that his base pay was about $28/hr at the end. Granted, the cost of benefits were so high that they were scared to hire too many people, so he got tons of overtime.

In fact, he averaged over 60 hours a week (and often up to 85) the last 7 years he was there (1998-2005), so his annual pay looked pretty darn good with all that time-and-a-half. He accepted a buyout to retire, even though he wasn't really ready to, and as he was leaving they already had most of the plant converted to $14/hr non-union positions.

The days of the platinum health-care for retirees are pretty much over as well. My mom just spent a week at home sick because she didn't want to spend $175 to go to the doctor. When I was growing up we could go to the doctor/hospital for free on Dad's insurance, so this was a bit of a shock to me. Sadly it seems like my $55/mo high deductible plan beats their insurance in a lot of ways.

I'm not saying all this to try and earn sympathy for my parents or blame GM. I just want to point out that it's not all roses for the 'greedy union workers and retirees' either. There has been a lot of absurd crap over the years (like the job banks that paid people to sit in a room all day), but the absurdity goes both ways. My dad has stories about them building cars that had no buyers, just to honor supplier agreements, and then storing said cars in fields until they were scrapped.
using 'is' or 'to be' causes sloppy thinking.

The main confusion here arises from using the is of identity on reality. Reality is as described by this math. That's a case of confusing a reference and the thing refered to. That's calling a hand pointing at the moon the moon. Mathematics points to the structure of reality, but mathematics is not reality. Pointing to a theory understood in terms of language about mathematics about reality, and then saying "reality is that theory" is like pointing to a hand pointing to a hand pointing at the moon and saying "that hand is the moon."

You can't really get started correctly not understanding quantum physics until you get real clear on those differences. You can't get real clear on those differences while using the is of identity.

so it's not the source of all confusion in communication (I find poor communication is the fault of the person listening to me), but it is the source of the intuitions that make quantum physics seem counterintuitive, weird and mysterious.
What company do you use for hiring virtual assistants?
This is really old...
In one of the vids I linked to, he says: "that's called naive realism, reality is how I perceive it. Philosophers have refuted naive realism every generation going back thousands of years, and still people act on the basis of naive realism."
Everspin launches a new generation of MRAM memory chips
I'm pretty sure that the singularity is not the fact that it's a point, but that the gravity is so high that it wraps in on itself. i.e. that spacetime has a hole in it.

I know Wikipedia isn't a good source for physics, but:

"While in a non-rotating black hole the singularity occurs at a single point in the model coordinates, called a "point singularity", in a rotating black hole, also known as a Kerr black hole, the singularity occurs on a ring (a circular line), defined as a "ring singularity". Such a singularity may also theoretically become a wormhole."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity

It seems a singularity is either a point or a line, but never a sphere for example.
Zynga’s Live Poker brings live social gaming to the iPhone
Also, before anyone gets too excited, Google generally doesn't go beyond Java, C++ and Python. But we do have some special purpose languages internally, as well.

Also, I don't have a PhD :-)
No doubt.. I have an account that I can't access because I don't know the password.. So.. now I'm jeremychase-2 .. sigh.
String Theory is great math but maybe you cant prove it, and maybe for any way the experiments turn out, you could provide an interpretation of string theory that supports it.

Meanwhile Chris King's Biocosmology, quantum loop gravity, orch OR, and doubly special relativity, all of which make really interesting predictions languish with not enough resources to study seriously, because string theorists dominate the academy.

We're at the same place now with our science as we were in the dark ages where scientists were called alchemists and had to sit in church and say the right outdated things in order not to be exiled or burned at the stake, basically.
I use BugMetNot but NYT is getting more vigilant about disabling those passwords.
i dont really understand the point of a blanket ban on articles from a website.

assuming the system isn't getting "played",aren't the articles that members deem interesting supposed rise to the top? So why a ban ?

(if this discussion has already been had elsewhere,please point me to it)
I didn't think you were attacking my character - I thought you were saying that my argument was so weak that it was a straw man argument, erected only be knocked down. I replied that your cynicism about my motives was misplaced. And it is.

Since you haven't made any connection between your follow-up and the issues I was raising, I'm assuming there isn't one. You were just posting.
Did anyone ask the inhabitants whether they agree to have their information stored in our computer systems under the terms of the Data Protection and Privacy laws?
How To Give A Horrendous Presentation
Tips for guaranteeing that you will never have to worry about bothersome investors, as you will never raise money if you follow the advice in this article.
You only bought it when you decided it was an acceptable price to pay for what you were getting - what claim do you have that you were treated unfairly?
I've heard of two companies that Apple is going to buy now: Yahoo and Sun. :-)
A unified approach to visual and interaction design
what was your point then, if not that programmers won't need to know concurrency because it will be in black boxes that they haven't written? (Bear with me, I'm a bit dense at the moment. I haven't had much sleep the last while)

I still think that programmers that are actually doing more than simply gluing together premade libraries will need to be familiar with concurrency, and that anyone taking a theoretical computer science degree to graduate and glue together libraries is probably overqualified.
$8,000,000 worth of RAM?

Serious hardware is perhaps an understatement.
Also, he put annoying # images after every paragraph.
agree. best article i've read in 2008, hands down. phenomenal prose, somehow he seems to write in a way that could make any subject compelling. This is what the author of Bringing down the house should aspire to be.
Check out the rest of the site. They have higher res versions plus other clips like it.
The Worst Is Ahead (Roubini)
You're misrepresenting the situation a bit. Matlab was not stupid here. The evolutionary algorithm you implemented found a way to satisfy your constraints that you didn't think of. That would have happened regardless of the language you chose.

I'm not arguing that Matlab is beautiful - it's not. I have worked in Matlab for years and years, and know most of its ugliness. But your example highlights your frustration with the task more than any particular weakness of Matlab.
The standard for low-key advertising has been set by Google, which has become the biggest media brand in the world through tiny text links.

Apparently this author has never talked to anyone under 10 or over 30. Disney is still way ahead of Google, here.
I use one through my current employer, it's provided by PayChex due to our premium account with them. I looked at Ferris' recommended YMII (Your Man In India) and I did some research to hire one but the work I have doesn't warrant paying for one yet.
"Fallen obelisks, pillars of light, the crystals are enormous..."
HN isn't like any other site out there.
A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis
I believe he has made the point before that at the ultimate extreme of targeted advertising... it's not advertising anymore, it's just providing you with a product you want. Which his example is an example of; information so targeted that it goes beyond being an "ad".
Economies of Focus: How Little Guys Compete in Big Spaces
pg and the editors hold the reins pretty tight around here. they have much more influence than the average reader. if a site tends to run nothing but articles that run counter to what's expected around here, it gets banned.

that sounds critical, but it's not. i agree completely with his decision. if this site were run as a democracy, it would eventually devolve into uselessness, as has every other site before it.
Does the classical model really work though? I certainly pay more attention to Facebook ads than I do to regular, giant flashing 'punch the monkey' ones.

Has anyone tried measuring this?
using 'is' or 'to be' causes sloppy thinking

Nonsense. Using sum when you don't mean sum is what causes problems. The ability to express such a thing isn't. Your complaint is that sum is being used express things that it doesn't properly mean, and your solution is to throw the word out altogether. Rather than taking the time to clarify what you mean, (English has perfectly good mechanisms for describing signifyers,) you blame the language and claim it needs to be changed.

What's particularly striking is the fact that you decry the dogmatism implied by sum, while at the same time being very dogmatic in doing so. In fact you used the word six times just now.
this is a popular position to take now that the big G has fallen below $300.

until you can tell me what the <viable> alternative is, ads aren't going anywhere.
I think that Google is competing with itself. After all, suppose Google succeeds in building the perfect search engine, that always finds exactly what you are looking for. In that case, it seems as if there would be no place left for advertising (certainly not what we see today, with ads looking almost like the first search result).

However, maybe there will still be advertising, we'll just call it differently.

Or it will just be the "people who liked x also liked y" thing. For example, if someone googles for a coffee maker, he gets to see ads for coffee. I am pretty sure Google already does this.
INQ1 'Facebook Phone' brings Address Book 2.0 to reality
The purpose of programming is not to maximize performance of Intel CPUs. If I want to calculate 1+1 or sqrt(2), why should I bother with parallel algorithms. Also, a lot of the time there will just be parallel threads exploiting the cores (like multiple applications running on an OS).

What would be interesting would be a kind of "complex systems" programming, stuff like cellular automata, but maybe it is impossible to make them tractable enough.

Also, aren't the most performant "parallel computations" simply specialized matrix operations. I am not sure if learning specialized and hard to understand programming languages for parallel computation are the best way forward.
Hi Martin,

One reason I said your solution might not work is because it doesn't appear to store the bids, and I need to store every bid posted, and the time it was received, and who posted it. This can be done separately of course but I wasn't thinking in those terms when I replied to your post.

The other reason I thought your approach wouldn't work is because I thought I understood it, but after reading your follow-up post and whatusername's reply it occurs to me that maybe I didn't "get it". I'll email you so we can continue this discussion privately because I'm very interested in understanding how your proposed system might work in conjunction with the business requirements. I can give you more details via email and don't worry a NDA won't be necessary.
I hate link bait articles like this. Even if the article ends up being good, the title is such a click deterrent for me.
Right now it is mostly educational. It can also save you a lot of time if you track many stocks as it will highlight only important news / events.
Agree that is the main weakness right now, do you have any hints how this can be expressed better?
Wouldn't it be interesting to have a Google Earth-like products of other planets (due to spectacular advances in imaging, of course :-) ) long before we ever have the means to travel there?
No, these are both speculation that I've heard today.
Where is the “Common Man’s” Mobile Application?
We build a small, versioned depot of ruby + rails and other gems. Running this with Apache/mod_fcgid works really well and is very stable.
This ignores the millions of single core/processor, embedded systems out there (and surely also represent a growing industry.
Ambient Recommendations, better than machine recommendations?
"Has anyone tried measuring this?"

Yes--You need to aim where the monkey is going to be, not where it is now.
Check out this Google Talk, "Why Physicists Need the Large Hadron Collider": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8xwSfuY8xA

The problem is that particle physics has a model that perfectly predicts every experiment we've done. However, it is aesthetically unappealing, and even more damning, we know it can't scale to explain everything in the universe. However, until one of our experiments actually does something unexpected, we're sort of twiddling our fingers.

In the video, the guy mentions that the worst case scenario for the LHC is to precisely confirm the standard model with no surprises. One person asks him something about what he'd do in that case (the question was muffled), and he replied that his reaction to this conundrum was to develop a sideline in quantum computing, since particle physics is really going nowhere until someone runs an experiment that contradicts the Standard Model.

In the meantime, a lot of other physicists spend their time spinning various weird, mutually-contradictory theories as a way to try to find an experiment they can run that would actually generate usable data. The continuous-vs-discrete reality question is scheduled to be investigated by a NASA satellite experiment at some point in the indefinite future, but who knows when it'll actually happen. In the meantime, we've got a lot of smart people stalled on having no (useful) data.
Maybe if there were a downward vote, people who dislike Techcrunch submissions could send them further down the page.
High quality YouTube video hack
Advertising will continue to live as long as their is imperfect information and tastes that can be branded. Hate these titles so much.
Java, Python, and C++
What kind of telescope would be necessary to actually view the details of a distant planet? Also, this seems to be the uncolored version of the pic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HR_8799_planetary_system_...
I'm hoping very hard right now that someone out there agrees with me when I say "Facebook needs to slow down and stop trying to do too much at once"
Take a look at the thread for that bug:

"Declined for Edgy by Colin Watson

Declined for Feisty by Colin Watson

Declined for Gutsy by Colin Watson

Declined for Hardy by Colin Watson

Declined for Intrepid by Michael Casadevall

Nominated for Jaunty by Jason Alan Graves "
>what was your point then, if not that programmers...

No, not "programmers", but "some programmers" or "a lot of programmers". Of course there we'll be always people that has to do the hard part of whatever, but it is a minority now and I'm afraid it will still be a minority in the future.

Don't think that everybody is as snart as you or your buddies. No sarcasm, I really believe that you get it better than my points ;-) In my experience the concurrency is written always by the same person (guess who), in the best case, that it.

That doesn't mean that I think it shouldn't be taught. Only that I'm skeptical it will solve anything.
I've only ever clicked the "classic monkey" links when I was bored or by accident. With Facebook, I've actually found things I like using the service. I'd say it works better for me than Google Ads, in many ways.

Score one for small and personalized.
It's tough that I have to give you my email address, real world address, twitter account name and twitter password (!!) before I can even see how good your service is. How about letting me type in an address and see what you would have sent me had I been signed up.
A writer with a backer / publisher, maybe. It'd be hard for an independent writer to do it for fear of crossing the lines and getting sued ;-)
Yeah. HN is the first "social news" site I've been on with a strong editorial staff and with restrictions on users below certain levels of Karma. And I'd suspect that that's one of the things that keeps it at the level it's at.

The problem with democracy is that it is incredibly open to the possibility of quality and focus loss. Hacker News fixes those problems. And I'd argue that losing TechCrunch might be a good move.
It is. You called it a paradigm shift, however, which it isn't.

I banned IE on my personal site a little while ago. It's so satisfying not having to worry about it.
Why should they? So far, Facebook's succeeding at everything it does. The new redesign was a success, the new ad platform's a success. This is a logical step for them. They already have a Phone Book online. Tying it into hardware makes sense and it's actually very useful. I just wish I could sync it with Address Book.
Diamonds produced from tequila
Same thing, and I view that as a big flaw in how a lot of companies think. Constructive criticism should be rewarded, partly because it's useful, partly because it's a lot harder to be constructive than a lot of people think.

It holds true in all fields, too. Creative writers open to criticism are always better than writers who refuse to listen to criticism. The best creative writers are the ones who take criticism, then explain why they did what they did, and possibly educate the critic as to a part of writing. I had a teacher who defended Joyce like that to me, once, and it did me worlds of good.
Wibokr.com - a new expereince on wiki and blog
A new wiki and blog - not only website, you also can download it.
Try to provide good writing experience, personalized dashboard, version control, comments, flexible access control, easy install, even support Google Gears offline!
The time continues for the item falling, but for the rest of the universe it appears to take an infinite amount of time. It means that the math works, but the actual universe would never have anything fall in a black hole since it can never actually get there.

Why is the length contraction argument invalid? Just saying it's "invalid" doesn't help me much.

"Relativity cannot calculate anything "inside" a black hole because that's the regime where that particular theory breaks down. This is a feature of physics."

I said that didn't I? That was my point - that black holes break a theory, and there are no other theories to replace it. So not having black holes in the first place would help.

When you say feature do you mean "benefit" or "fact"? Because if you mean benefit I don't see how that is.

Please don't forget my original point: that if loop quantum gravity makes black holes impossible that is a plus for that theory. I'm not arguing about whether or not black holes exist, or if their math works.