skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure how you can talk about concurrency without talking about locks and other such topics, which I think is very ambitious for new programmers.

However, if universities start teaching programming with pure functional languages (which is highly unlikely), concurrency becomes a much easier topic for discussion.

Perhaps this is the sort of thinking that will lead to more universities adopting something like PLT Scheme, which in recent versions, has moved the notion of mutable pairs into a library. Doing this might bring functional languages out of academia and more into the mainstream, which would be fantastic.

I remember fellow students having trouble grasping pointers, even after a 2nd year architecture course, which I thought was completely absurd since they were writing assembly code without tremendous strain.
I agree with most folks that it does really solve a problem, but in an effort to try and be constructive, one potential problem are forms on mobile devices. It is very difficult to port web applications or forms to mobile platforms because the display area is so small. Creating a conversational interface via chat might be a good angle to creating usable, yet complex, forms on mobile devices.

One good example might be ordering a pizza at a party. It is loud and you don't know the address. You can start texting a pizza place your order and let some other aspect of the application handle the GPS position.

Anyway, it looks like you guys have been doing a good job so if this idea makes you millions or something feel free to send an email or something ;)

http://ionrock.org
Parallelism still costs overhead. Concurrency is not free so you have to weigh the cost/benefit before deciding to use sequential or parallel for the task at hand.
Embedded Development: ARM and Embedded Processor
I heard once one guy telling one of his friends : "I'd give my right arm to know what's inside this portable device." He didn't know he was already holding an Arm in his hands.... since ARM designs the technology that lies at the heart of advanced digital products, from wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security and storage devices. Learn more about this embedded processor.
It makes sense that low-information terms would have a lower preference when searching without any context. If your index models the context around terms, you can get better results from a low-information search.

I think...I'm kind of shooting from the hip here relating it to context modeling in lossless compression schemes like CABAC and PPM.

Could you overcome stop words with some sort of Bayesian phrase matching over some learned hidden states?
In my opinion,"Python+Scipy+Matplotlib" can replace the "equal" libs in MATLAB. I had the same problem with python when I decided to develop a face detection software by useing Neural Networks ! In that period of time, there were no complete N.N. lib for python. I don't think that there is any comprehensive one too.
long story short, if you want to stick to some small libs, that mixture is OK. But if you want to develop your field (like blending NN and DIP) you will fall in trouble ....
As a solution, you can mix python and libs like OpenCV for computer vision and image processing . Check pyOpencv too :)
Storm ahead: Verizon sets date and price for touch-screen BlackBerry
That first link was really informative. Thanks.
i don't think the tourists have gone home: i think they ran out of money.

you say tomato, i say potato.

did i say the community was not useful or that it didn't want serious conversation?
Often when competent programmers are having trouble grasping pointers, they are actually doing fine with thinking about pointers in abstract, but having trouble with the notation describing a particular instance of them. (Especially with C programs.)

One of the things that doing good OO and following the Law of Demeter does for you is to reduce the levels of indirection you have to deal with to one or two.
I think 50/50 is the worst structure.

Someone must have the last word, and that's actually less stressful.
How can you teach concurrent programming without teaching sequental programming first?
Wow. A blog posting an image of a Twitter post. That's like uberspam.

I think that companies ought to hire just the Ruthlessly Honest Dick, and let its product users become evangelists. If you're good enough, shouldn't that just happen?
Let's also not forget that Paul, as an employee of Intel has interest in boosting his company's strategic direction (many-core). I think this may explain the ostensibly inflammatory headline.

Nevertheless, you can still see what Paul is trying to get at: CS curriculums are woefully under-preparing their students for a parallel world.
As long as lobbyists exist, this won't happen.
Yep! No question mark there.

I'm still surprised HN hasn't banned TechCrunch stories. When they do have a good story, usually somebody else has the story as well. And TechCrunch attracts a lot of spam.
Feds: Please Open Foreign Bank Accounts To Play Online Poker
I'm not sure how you can talk about concurrency without talking about locks

that is because you have slept through the entire revolution of share-nothing concurrency
I think they made my all-time favorite online search engine. Try the one on their site. It indexes all their pages, including support pages, and runs basically like Spotlight does. Extended search includes iTunes music results and a bunch of other cool things.

If they could expand that unto the entire Internet, it would be glorious. But they can't, and they won't, and they don't stand to profit. So... oh well.
That's ridiculous. Programming is not all about multi-core performance.

it will be. you're getting beaten over the head by chip designers telling you that your future cpu is going to consist of a (possibly large) array of processing cores with a high-capacity bus connecting them. they are telling you this is the only way they can give you higher performance. you had better start believing them because these systems are starting to get delivered now.

A great example of that is Rails, when set up with mongrel processes, each of which can run on its own core if necessary

?????? so mongrel comes with its own OS kernel that has better support for multicore than linux and freebsd? wow!! coolzzz!
I avoid TechCrunch as much as possible, but my impression is that most of the crap is coming from Arrington.

That TC story about Loopt that had "Told you" in the headline? Yeah.
Well, that's if you want to record the whole state for simulation by a classical computer. It you just want to have the state, it seems like it should be measured in qubits.
no, java programmers pick up haskell is more likely.
Ask YC: Anyone used Hubspot?
My web-based startup wants to work on its SEO and inbound marketing. In other words, pulling in visitors, and driving visitors to subscribe.

Hubspot seeks to help websites with these sorts of things through SEO tools, lead tracking, and analytics. It isn't cheap, but if it really works, then the price is worthwhile.

Has anyone here used Hubspot? What sort of experience have you had with it?
it can't be a blank check, if they are going to bail them out that better come with a huge list of demands...forget golden parachutes, demand complete reorganization, huge cuts, new focus. i.e. I'd sell/cut Buick, Hummer, Saab and then go through the brands cutting models. GM makes 89 vehicles and many of them are pretty much copies of each other and compete with each other. Notice how honda only has 10 models, 1 for each class. This lets them make 1 good car for each space, instead of 4 half-assed ones.

Startup idea wouldn't really work, it costs way too much money to bring a car to market, and there aren't that many startups in the automotive space, Tesla is pretty much it.

Personally I'd want GM/Chrysler and Ford to go into a joint venture for a new brand to sell a full line of electric/hybrid vehicles. The space is too costly of an investment to take on by one company. This way they can spread the risk and work together on the same technology. And people looking for electric vehicles wouldn't be locked down into funky looking hatchbacks as their only choices.
quite seriously, customers.
I can relate to the perfectionism syndrome. But the release early, release often theme seems not a good counter while going at paying users. Sometimes that early release simply isn't worth paying for yet, it may take several iterations to get to something that is worth a package fee. I agree all products are incomplete both in testing and in functionality and that should be used to temper perfectionism.

Though there seems to me a difference between releasing early to get people to use it, and releasing to get people to pay for it. The release early and often theme I tend to think should not be broadly applied to both.

Perfectionism aside...thanks for answering my questions.
Chicks love rubies, but don't like snakes that much. :D

Seriously, you should probably learn both.
How To Catch A Hacker: Offer Him A Job
Where financial organisations were concerned, letting them go bust was not an option because of the impact on the rest of the world... The Lehman bankruptcy fucked everyone up big time, and should have been avoided.

However, when it comes to "normal" companies like GM, I say let'em go bust.

Obama sees them as a key part of gearing up the US to becoming a leader in green cars, but tbh, I think the $50bn would be better spent buying Toyota or something...
Shifting Careers - Need to Take a Breather? Have a Game Plan
Traffic sharkfins aren't something to be proud of, really.
Problem is, if we do bail GM out we most likely would not attach any strings. So I think bailing out would have to be a no for now.
This isn't really true; you can't just start spinning up multiple mongrels with no consequence to your application. If this were true, there would be no need for locking the database in your application code for a transaction. Plus you can only spin up so many mongrels before your database performance starts to suffer.
No more a proof that we live in a matrix than the music in my Super Mario paper
game is to Luigi that in our world if you go into another room the music changes.

In the "real" world the rules of information theory may or may not apply just as
the rules of physics in a game may or may not apply in reality. So we cannot discern
the probability of a simulated universe from whatever results may come from loop quantum
gravity.
Buying franchise
MatchPoint Franchise Consulting Network™ was founded with a mission of matching individual Franchise buyers with the Franchise opportunity that is best suited for them.
Fred Wilson: A Slightly Different Perspective
My argument also wasn't intended as a strawman, so I don't really understand how your initial reply relates to my comment. Though I think we're probably just talking at cross-purposes, as I'm discussing "being good" while you're talking freemium.

BTW: TV/radio is ad-supported. PayTV has apparently not worked out as a good business.

Interesting your point about the cinema concession stand - though there's also student discount tickets; and "gold-class" premium seating (here in Australia, anyway).
I don't write OS kernels, I write rails application. I don't give a rat's ass about the OS kernel. I don't even give a rat's ass about how Mongrel is programmed. The Rails applications themselves don't need to be altered to run in a multi-core environment. Mongrel naturally scales to as many servers or CPUs as you want to run it on, since there is no interaction between different mongrel instances, all that happens at the database.

Let me make that point even clearer: I don't give a shit how the database has been programmed. Someone there has obviously had to think about parallelism, but I don't need to, because I'm not writing a fricken database.

Got it?
if you believe it's going to be a parallel world in the future. I think that's still up for much debate.
Wrath of the Lich King has iPhone-style launch; thousands queue in line
That's irrelevant to the discussion at hand - if anything, it goes to show that parallelism is already integrated into the rails architecture via transactions.
"you're getting beaten over the head by chip designers telling you that your future cpu is going to consist of a (possibly large) array of processing cores with a high-capacity bus connecting them."

Sorry, but I don't buy that. We're also moving to a thin client world where we don't actually need that much power on our thin clients.

Of course the chip makers are saying that - they want to sell more chips. They have to come up with some other number they can increase.
Ask HN: Mailing Newsletters
I need to send out e-mail newsletters every week to my website users. I am looking for cheap email marketing/newsletter manager solutions. Any recommendations ?

Do you recommend downloading open-source newsletter manager like PHPList and installing it on the server ? Or would you recommend using a hosted newsletter manager like campaignmonitor.com, icontact.com etc.
Sorry, but I don't buy that

then you clearly aren't buying new high-end servers for data crunching either, because these are already multicore
Thank you! Installed it and it's great.
Since clock speeds have pretty much hit a barrier - the only way to go faster will apparently be to leverage parallelism.

It's worth pointing out that the "speed-of-light collides with 20+GHz serial processor"
See http://www.hppc-workshop.org/HPPC07/Vishkin_HPPC07.pdf
3 Flat-Screen Makers Plead Guilty to Trying to Keep Prices High
Some (self described) smart people believe that "it'll all just work" if we put the just-right smart person in charge of such a bailout to decide what the just-right thing to do is. We instead need to put 200 million smart people in charge of deciding what to do - and they can each decide with their own hard-earned money. Give your money to government - or just the same, give government the power to take your money - and all you get is a handful of not-really-that-smart people deciding what is best for you.
According to this:

http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/582

one of your main issues has been addressed. As for the other, it's true that the OCLC shouldn't view itself as a for-profit entity that needs lock-in to survive when all of its member organizations are non-profits for good reason.

That all being said, I think WorldCat is a great product, and when you consider that most libraries use SirsiDynix or some other horrible on-line catalog, it's not too surprising that the people at OCLC don't trust libraries to make good IT decisions for themselves.

As far as your own product (Open Library) goes, I think it looks nice, but I guess I don't understand the benefits very well.
"video removed by user"
Donna Shalala. Yes. But even if I agree that that's a perfectly reasonable thing to discuss in the public record, I can still concede that the administration shouldn't waste time picking fights with the ~15MM people (and their ~100 elected representatives) that have a huge problem with that.

And it's all relative. If Warren Buffet wrote an article about teaching masturbation in a sex ed curricula, they'd still put him up for Sec T. If you're someone with no name recognition going up for a post that's not a top priority and there are 20 other reasonable candidates for the spot, your outre positions are going to be more of an issue.

This all seems reasonable to me. I don't expect Obama to suspend thermodynamics; nothing's going to be 100% efficient, and I want health care fixed more than I want to watch epic media debates.
"?????? so mongrel comes with its own OS kernel that has better support for multicore than linux and freebsd? wow!! coolzzz!"

In fact, quite the opposite. Handling concurrency by having multiple share-nothing processes relies on the OS to handle the scheduling and core assignment.

edit: "real" (system) processes.
I don't write OS kernels, I write rails application. I don't give a rat's ass about the OS kernel

then stop spouting off uninformed comments about how processes are scheduled

The Rails applications themselves don't need to be altered to run in a multi-core environment.

nor do any other program compiled for that architecture. its the OS that schedules processes, not your userland program. the point is, some programs can be written in a way that makes it easier for the OS to exploit multicore. since ruby is not a functional language, my guess is that it would tend to not help the kernel exploit these resources. but obviously in the worst case, a process can run inside one core and never get the advantages of the rest of the chip architecture. this is about exploiting multicore

Got it?

yes, i get that you know very little about how computers function
As surprising as that may sound, 99% of developers out there are not buying new high-end servers for data crunching, no.
uh, yeah, i know that. i thought the "coolzzz" would relate my sarcasm
Sometimes that early release simply isn't worth paying for yet

If so, no one buys it - no problem :-) (assuming they can evaluate it first, e.g. free trial).

Though there seems to me a difference between releasing early to get people to use it, and releasing to get people to pay for it.

I don't know. You could be right. But both require a benefit to the user; and both exact a cost from the user - of learning; time and effort of changing behaviour to integrate it into their life and apply to their problem; constraining other choices/products to integrate with the product (depending on what kind of product you have). It's natural to think price is the cost of something - but it's simply not. (It's true though, that customers also think of it that way).

hehe I'm getting a bit of the answering-the-comment-while-being-edited syndrome :-) It's a bit disconcerting seeing from the other side.
Digitalsmiths Lands Another $12 Million For Video Fingerprinting And Search
Google Site Search gets more demanding
nor do any other program compiled for that architecture

Then none of the people writing those programs need to know or care about parallelism.

Therefore, the core message of the article is brain-dead.
you should stop posting until you take classes in operating systems and compilers. really
.NET Framework rootkits - backdoors inside your framework
Blackberry Storm coming 11/21
Concurrency is a Myth in Ruby (and Python)
I think in one of Steve Yegge's epic narratives of life at Google, he said that only the "Big 4" languages can be deployed on Google's servers.

Does this mean, if you ever wanted your research to go "live" in a Google product, you would first have to rewrite in C++, Java, Python, or Javascript?
Speed up your Hard Drive with Smart Defrag | TechJaws
Teach them concurrently?
explain. It's better than a sharp stick in the eye, right?
The Toggle that Wouldn't
If only there were 200 million smart people in the US! By definition, 50% are below average.
It's still not easy, you mean, when you try to override the default package manager.
And as more things are run on servers, and less on clients, do we need to go faster on the client?
It seems to me that the company most well-positioned to create a successor to the iPod (other than Apple), is Amazon. A mini-Kindle with audio and video - and downloads everywhere 3G reaches could be a smash hit.
Not to mention a blog, and formerly a tumblelog as well. The guy's connected.
Hacker News take off? God, I hope it doesn't. I like this community as it is: small, informed, grammatically capable, and rather elitist.
Keeping It All in the Google Family
If GM goes bankrupt, there will be massive unemployment and closed factories. This sucks. On the other hand, this is a good environment in which to be a manufacturing company with cash on hand. If GM can't turn a profit, they need to make room for someone who can.
>However, we wouldn't have health insurance, and that is crucial (pre-existing conditions and baby).

If you have health insurance through your employer, then you can continue it for 18 months after terminating employment through COBRA, IIRC.

If you can't afford to continue health insurance coverage through COBRA, how does living in Phoenix change that versus living in Mountain View or Cambridge?
Escape Your Email At Last (Really) With AwayFind
Wow, very cool. I just tried it on a product on our website (We are a Canadian retailer) and it worked!

I'm curious how are you crawling the web? As a small business, it doesn't find us unless I actually enter our url (even though we have decent rankings in Google for many of our products)

This would be neat to make as an API so retailers like myself could plug it into our stores websites.
There is a new Y-Combinator style accelerator forming in Arizona called Tekcelerate (www.tekcelerate.com).
It's not necessarily all about speed (or what theorists would refer to as single-task completion). It's also about increasing throughput.

Google adds a pinch of concurrency to its web browser (each tab running in another thread) and it improves the client side experience.
search "shared nothing concurrency"...read sutter's "the end of the free lunch"...
Numpy/Scipy syntax is very close to matlab, but python is a lot more powerful. I port matlab code over to python pretty frequently.

A toy example is here along links to other comparisons:
http://www.datawrangling.com/python-montage-code-for-display...
What makes this article special? It's basically just a prop piece for FriendFeed. A lot of these points are kind of airy, too.

As you’ll find with most great social networking sites, it’s the community that makes the place. You won’t find A-Listers throwing their weight around or Z-Listers ignored, as long as you contribute and have something interesting to share - you’ll be paid attention to.

In other words, just like Twitter or Tumblr or any opt-in network.

Everyone has their own Friendfeed, no ones Friendfeed is the same.

This is just silly. And again: it's saying nothing that isn't already on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook.

For every post, photo, video, message, song even product shared on Friendfeed there’s a possibility of great discussion stemming from it.

...Which, again, is something that Tumblr and Facebook already offer. I'm only naming the sites I'm really familiar with, but this is nothing unique.

And so on. I mean, I'm biased: I have a open and active dislike of FriendFeed; I wrote an article advising people not to use it. But what does this really offer that we haven't seen about FriendFeed before? It's a waste-of-space article.

Blogs like this are the worst they get. Overtly glitzy, overtly cluttered, posts that have no relevance whatsoever.
what is in the cpus of those machines will be in the cpus of all machines. jesus, how much more legit can you get than intel telling you this is coming?
I think this is the conversational fragment you're referring to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257260
Many-core overshoots needed performance for most uses. Hence the rise in sub-notebooks, iPhones, best-selling games console being by far the least powerful console (wii).

+

Concurrency is a unsolved problem. There are locks etc; there's smalltalk/Erlang pure-message passing and Web Services/SOA (it's concurrency). Concurrency is of academic interest, and niche apps (game engines; simulations; etc.

=

unsolved problem that is not needed... so far, anyway
There is a middle ground between bailout and a liquidation - a bankruptcy reorganization. It would probably wipe out the shareholders and the debt holders, and some jobs and factories, but a lot of GM and its brands and factories would live on.
Consider the fbFund.

I'm happy to chat about it. I've written a little about it too: http://blog.luckycal.com/?p=11