skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mathematics isn't necessarily solely about what professional mathematicians do in the contemporary world. Saying that 'calculations' and 'geometry' aren't 'mathematics' is like saying that atoms aren't chemistry.... ridiculous.
Startupturkey
Unfortunately integration with other processes does not always lead to the expected results and many tools have been reimplemented in Emacs Lisp to integrate better with the rest of the Emacs platform. Suddenly, not having multi-threading becomes a real issue (Why the heck is Gnus taking so long and why can't I edit in the meanwhile?).

Some might say that it is insane to use Emacs for every conceivable task, but it offers me exactly the degree of integration I'm after, a uniform UI and a disruption free environment for most of my computing needs.
"worthless applications" like a news site or blog? Yeah, those seem to be pretty unpopular eyeroll
I think that the "overpaid CEO effect" talked about by Terviö via Cowen is similar to and related to the "lemon effect", but I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say that it is the lemon effect. If I were to oversummarize the two effects, I'd summarize the lemon effect as "an abundance of lemons depressing prices" and the overpaid CEO effect as "an abundance of lemons raising prices".
Imagine if your phone or iPad took as long to boot as a Windows laptop. Would you use it? Would it be usable?

My android phone (Nexus S) takes longer than my 6 year old Windows laptop do (sure, it's updated with an SSD but even without it would be a close call), my mothers tablet isn't faster either. Solution? I never turn either off. Problem solved.

Hibernate for longer sessions, sleep if battery isn't important and I know I will use it for the next few days.

On my workstation I never turn off heavy applications anyway. On my laptop I'm limited by my 32 bit Win7 OS so that's a burden, but I can work with it. The 8 GB I have in my workstation isn't ideal either, tempted to get a 24 or 32 GB machine but probably can't justify replacing the current machine just yet. I see no reason to get less RAM on a new setup though.

Also I really appreciate having the whole application ready. Having parts of it lazy-load can be way more agonizing than a slow boot. And with an SSD you don't have to wait long anyway, I always tend to fiddle with other windows during the boot so I'm not that annoyed. The splash screen itself can be annoying if it claims window focus or is just in the way but they exist for a reason. There should something telling me that the application is booting (firing up a task manager doesn't count), I agree that there are less obtrusive ways for this than a splash screen though and for that OS developers should be blamed for not realizing this.
I know Cuil is the poster-boy of how to suck at launch but it really is a pity they didn't succeed. With Bing powering Yahoo there are really only 4 players in the English language index space, Google, Bing, Gigablast and Blekko. Add in the non English ones Yandex and Baidu and there really is a lack of companies to compete with.

Its because of this I want DuckDuckGo or another company to eventually do its own deep indexing to avoid the very singular view of the web we are presented with.
> Dismissing out of hand as "ludicrous" that user research on small groups can and very often does produce useful results is enough to discredit the rest of this guy's rant.

In other news, dismissing an entire article based on what is only a minor detail in the overall argument is enough to discredit the rest of your rant, right?

On some websites, people think they look smart if they point out a single flaw in a long article and pronounce that they "stopped reading right there". Happens all the time in Reddit. But I'd expect better from a top comment in an HN thread. Yes, the article has flaws. Lots of flaws, actually. But discredit the whole thing because of one point that isn't even the main point?
Episode 32432432 in the pissing match between MS and anybody who dares make a dollar in the computing industry. Yawn
Shady warez sites? Huh?

P3P as a solution to protecting privacy on the Internet is an utter failure. The whole approach is bogus. I realize this is a judgement call, but I don't view sending bogus P3P headers as bogus. You want your site to work the same in a default Firefox install as in a default IE install and the only way to do that in this case is sending the bogus header.
Learn from Haskell - Functional, Reusable JavaScript
Imagine you have User has_many Comments. When someone's username is updated, you might need to update all the user's cached html comment fragments to include the new username.

However, ActiveRecord doesn't support touch on has_many relations. (It probably shouldn't, as updating the username would mean updating/touching thousands (or more) comment rows).

Also, if you have to update the database outside of ActiveRecord for any reason, you could be screwed - the cache would become out of sync with the database.
The point of the article is that Apple's profits (and, indirectly, market cap) could be even higher (at least in the short term) if they decided to focus only on this instead of great products. (That would be the wrong thing to do, of course, since a more innovative company would disrupt Apple.)

Apple's strategy, the strategy to solve the Innovator's Dilemma, shows that creating disruptive products leads to profits that are large enough to be considered a successful company, even if profits are not your primary goal.
I, can see that. People, always say, that they can determine my writing style, without, much problem.
Yes, but there's a critical difference. New cars are the most expensive (ignoring restorations) with the most well-understood value, then they depreciate over time. With tech workers the opposite is true.
Many of these can be shoehorned in: Mac, -, -, cpp, gcc, -, -, ghc, ogle, -, -, -, Lisp.

(I know that Scheme is not the same as Lisp, and that a language is not the same as its compiler; but would you have "Just another .* hacker"? :-) )

(Also, I can't remember if 'ogle' is actually a tool in the Go language toolkit, although I seem to remember someone saying that it should be. Googling 'go ogle' doesn't have much luck, since Google thinks it knows what I really meant.)
There aren't very many almost identical, but there are a lot of communities that have significant overlap.

- Superuser
- Serverfault
- Database Administrators - 8.9 questions/day
- IT Security - 6.9 questions/day
- Healthcare IT - 1.1 questions/day

The stackexchange community is all about forking. Clearly Healthcare IT, IT Security, and Database Administrators could all be tagged questions in serverfault. But apparently serverfault.com/questions/tagged/heathcare didn't sit well with the 298 people who committed to the beta. Separating power-users from IT professionals (superuser vs serverfault)is certainly reasonable even though there is a large overlap of knowledge there.

Of course, without the forks, as an IT person there might be a question if your cryptography related question should go in cryptography.SE or serverfault. With a dedicated site the "correct" location for those questions is easier to determine.

But if we're going to talk about overlapping stackexchanges we have to look at those populated predominantly by programmers, because... well, they are the master forkers.

- stackoverflow
- Programmers
- Code review
- Theoretical Computer Science
- Code Golf
- Signal Processing
- Computational Science

I left out the language specific ones like Mathematica and TeX. I also omitted Software QA and Cryptography.

Apparently theoretical physicists and applied? physicists are unable to co-exist on one stackexchange.

Anyway, clearly the stackexchange community thinks that forking is the answer. I think tagging is superior and I think fragmenting the community gets fewer able eyes focused on questions. Forking doesn't really hurt google users trying to find answers to questions that have already been answered.

Even while not being a professional developer I would stick Code golf, code review, and Programmers into one stack exchange. I'd also put Signal Processing, Mathematica, Tex, and Compuational Science back in Stack Overflow and let the theoretical CS folks stay separate.
Raspberry Pi Video: upcoming Fedora Remix
With Adium I've been pretty happy since I discovered the ability to turn off show/join messages on the history menu.

The other thing was the Renkoo message style (from preferences, messages) was much better than what I had before. Date and name to the sides, content in the middle.

I have a Mac mini logged in permanently so I can review logs and there I took the advice which was to right click and block chanserv and nickserv. Not quite brave enough to do that on my laptop.
I wouldn't mock it, actually, but others ("fanboys") do.

I got that, sorry if my reply wasn't clear. When I said "not sure why you would mock it", what I actually meant was "why one would mock it".

Anyway, as I've argued before [1] the whole Vim-vs-Emacs (and Emacs-vs-Vim) fanboyism is sad and a waste of many talented people's time. Can't we just get along and instead focus our efforts on converting the legions of people who understand neither Vim or Emacs and embark on writing the n-thousandth Notepad clone? :-)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037133
Using MongoDB with ASP.NET Web API
That is actually the one reason I like carrying a pager. I still dislike it for enough other reasons that I would give it up in a second.

But, when I'm on call, I know that if anything is important enough that I have to respond to it RIGHT NOW, I'll get paged. And that lets me completely forget about checking any other form of electronic communication until I feel like it -- which, on the weekend, can be a day or more.
My coworker from Chattanooga assures me that nobody would want to live in those neighborhoods, and that he is sending the list to friends and family to laugh about.
Samsung Apps
I love this because if it's true it means that as a proven employee I will be overpaid, and that as a hiring manager I will have less competition for young talent (can't say I really feel that holds up, but there may be some SV bias in my hiring experience).
Oh I get it. People were ditching code academy because instead of learning to code, they could just use ScrollKit instead. I thought people were actually saying "ScrollKit is better at teaching me to code than Code Academy is."
I'd imagine that with most paid accounts the private repos are also the largest. I know my stats would we be completely different if it included those.
100% agree. Have been wondering this for a while.

One way to do it would be to include an extra attribute on the script tag with a SHA1 hash of the library. For example:

<script type="text/javascript" signature="24bdd1c96c20c3943054c146340243ccf88eef9e" src="http://myserver.com/js/jquery-1.7.js" ></script>

Old browsers would ignore the extra 'signature' attribute, while new browsers could check for that library in their included, pre-optimized list and skip the download if its found.

Seems like it would solve a lot of problems at once without affecting backwards compatibility.
This cannot be emphasized enough. High-performance algorithms are constrained by memory latency/bandwidth and the CPU caches. Java, with its large per-object space overhead is not well suited for this. You need special case libraries to get the same performance, and in many cases you can just as well use modern C++.
Leveraging Social Networks in Mobile Commerce
Fab Buys Casacanda For $11M To Fight The Samwers In Europe
Leah Culver can't do startups right. First Pownce, now Convore. What's next? Grove? Let's wait and see.
Actually, there's an awesome IRC client for OS X called Textual:

http://www.codeux.com/textual/

You can customize its UI using css. I love it.
I think the latter summary should read: "if determining the 'lemon-ness' of a product has a high cost, it lowers the drive for finding more non-lemons and increases both the price and tenure of the existing ones"

(Not sure if that makes sense in _your_ example, but thats how I read the paper)
I cannot imagine a viable business that would blink at $10 per month for a productive tool that people use.
It does if you value other aspects of it: Debian package management, Ubuntu PPA's, Wayland (when that arrives), popular apps like Spotify target Ubuntu and Fedora and don't 'just work' on other distro's, etc.

Default interface is just one aspect of the decision, and some of the others may outweigh it even for those who hate the interface direction.
He wrote a rant on his blog, he didn't kill anyone. What exactly would be "proportional"? Never speaking a word when something annoys you?
Splitfix allows you to share a netflix account with a random stranger
Comparing a web "sync" to an integrated solution like Dropbox? Tell me another one.
Hmmm, well as an iPad user, I'm pretty sick of every Web site trying to channel me into downloading an app, I tend to just you the Web site. The only site I can think that I use via an app is IMDB.
At least as best as I can gather from the TPL docs, they block "all third party content", which includes iframes (the mechanism used for ads).

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Browser/TrackingProtection...
iOS development is the wild wild west
Making an iOS tableview scroll well is not easy. UITableViewCell is a subclass UIView. If you create a complex tableview with UIKit, however, by adding subview hierarchies to tableview cells, scrolling grinds to a halt. To make a tableview scroll well, you have to do all the drawing in the top-level cell's drawRect method.

iOS development is less mature than web development. There is not yet a body of best practices. Fundamental improvements like drawing tableview cells in drawRect lurk behind every corner. At Socialcam, we work continually to find better ways to build our app. We’re now hiring our first engineer to work on iOS. Interested? Send us an email: founders@socialcam.com.

-Ammon, Guillaume, Michael
Pakistan's answer to the iPad is the PACPAD
This was awesome. Thanks for posting this. My eyes are still recuperating from the site.

I loved the Ling's response in the the comments section:
"Yes, many people will take one look, or make one visit and leave, never to come back. Many people complain about retina burn etc. But, so what? I HAVE to polarise visitors, and get them to choose to stay or go. It's no good being average, no one would commit to £12k of payments over 3 years if I was average. So the argument that I get drop-off is very valid."

She is literally implementing Seth Godin's "Purple Cow" and what is weird is that she actually "builds trust" with it. The site is definitely memorable and fun.

Thanks again for sharing. I have read so much about design and done a lot of design along coding - this is the real deal.
title should read 'Programming Perl (NOT Pearls)'
I got fooled for a sec.
Can someone who has seen these comment on which they thought were most interesting/beneficial?
I had a freshly cloned WinXP instance running in Hyper-V when I was called by one of these scammers. I went through the same thing out of interest's sake. I thought they might clue in when Oracle 10g was the only thing in the Start Menu. They didn't.

The interesting bit is that I called LogMeIn with my other phone, excused myself for a moment "to answer the door", explained the situation, gave the session ID (whatever it's called) and they got to listen in on a good portion of the whole thing.

After I called them on what they were doing, LogMeIn told me there was nothing they can do about it. I suppose if the scammers are LogMeIn customers, LogMeIn is perfectly willing to facilitate this sort of behaviour.

That put the nail in the coffin for my ever using LogMeIn.
Here's the patent: http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/docservicepdf_pct/id0...
Why we shut down Newsberry Part 2: Why we didn’t sell
Would the functionality be possible if browsers wanted to make the functionality possible? I feel like this would be a big deal when it comes to the IP concerns of frontend code.
Reddit has something similar with these:

http://reddit.com/r/netsec

(Check related subreddits)
5 Tips for Programmers Who Want to Design Good Websites
I wrote this article. What do u think about it.
A quad core i7 has 1.16 billion transistors, for reference. The question posed was whether each instruction might touch 10 million, or .86%, of these.
I find the cachet that C++ has when you interview for jobs at financial corporations to be equally depressing and hilarious.

When you go in to interview for a C++ position, the guy starts off by looking at you like you're some kind of brain damaged impostor who eats babies when nobody's watching and starts asking about how sizeof works on pointers to member functions or when "inline virtual" does and does not inline something. Essentially, incredibly dick-waving arcane compiler-specific stuff that no one should ever have to know because it makes for really horrible C++ code.

And vice versa when you interview for a Java/C#/Python/whatever position and some of the interviewers drop how they gave up on all that and then look on in admiration when a conversation about actor model drifts into using atomic pointer swapping to build worker queues.

None of it matters, the C++ masochist questions are more an indication of the kind of people you'll be coding with more than anything while the Java/C#/Python/whatever guys are still working on difficult algorithms.

Moral of the story: Since the hardest part of working in C++ is passing the ridiculous interview questions, might as well stick with it to still appear like a wizard. It's all just programming.
Thanks for the heads up. It was meant to redirect over to the .com. Fixing...
How about rethinking investment entirely. Why not just fund projects as open source that will be released to the world. This includes physical objects, designs, and software.

If you were creating a startup, and it would have cost you 1 million dollars of software development cost, 1 million dollars of hosting costs for 10 years, and you expected to earn 1 million dollars profit over 10 years, why not do this instead - ask for 1.5 million dollars on kickstarter - 1 million cost and 500,000 dollar profit. Say that you will be releasing as open source - this is the value you provide to funders. Then sysadmins come in and compete on hosting the software and divide up the other 500,000 dollar profit among themselves. You can move on to other software development projects instead of supporting your startup for 10 years.
There's a team at UC-Berkeley which is working on compiling C++ to a combination of CPU/GPU/FPGA code right now, which might change things. I think you need a special architecture to take full advantage of it though.
This is designed to be very compatible with BDB: http://fallabs.com/tokyocabinet/ and is open source.

This builds on the ideas from BDB and Tokyo Cabinent with a newer codebase: http://fallabs.com/kyotocabinet/

Both have network server implementations available (see links from their pages).
Typically someone wanting anonymity needs to defend against future attacks on their published works, not just current ones.
how does this compare to https://github.com/bestiejs/benchmark.js?

[thanks!]
I'm very familiar with the "you have a virus" pop-ups that trick helpless users into downloading bogus software, but I've never heard of a cold call version of that scam.

Am I misunderstanding something, or do these scammers literally call people's phones and tell them out of the blue that their computer is infected? What if they say "I don't have a computer"? What if they say "I have three computers, which one?" Seems like that would raise more flags more quickly than a pop-up showing on your actual computer, and manual phone calls can't scale like pop-ups... how is that still profitable or what am I missing?

Edit: OK, number of computers is easy. Still surprised that it is profitable given (what I suspect as) the inability to scale. I guess the conversion rate just isn't that bad.
Honest question: why would I use Grove over HipChat?
This is fantastic news.

From the recent tweets by https://twitter.com/danwrong it looks like Twitter are moving entirely to HTML5 pushState, and leaving IE users with full page refreshes rather than continuing to serve them #! - Dan says "I'm not sure why everyone is so adverse to page refreshes these days. You can make them fast too."

Of course, Twitter are going to have to include a piece of JavaScript on the http://twitter.com/ homepage which checks for a #! and redirects the user to the corresponding page - and they'll have to keep that JavaScript there forever, since they have nearly two years worth of links that they need to avoid breaking. One of the many reasons #! is such a nasty hack.

In terms of performance, this is going to make Twitter a lot /faster/ for me - I often open Twitter profile pages in new windows (due to working on Lanyrd) and each new window has to pull in and execute a HUGE chunk of JavaScript before it will display the page. Being able to just load a regular HTML page will be much faster for me.
> The spashscreen does 1 thing, it tells the user that the app is loading and you don't need to click the exe/icon again.

This is the wrong way to notify. Let its dock icon bounce on (or similar), instead of obscuring the center of the working area on the computer.
Ironically the experience of pirating an adobe product seems much simpler than the anti-piracy measures you've described.
Gosh, I always use the Terminal-based Emacs because it's the same whether I'm on my machine or on a remote machine. (Including being OS-agnostic, so it's the same whether under Lion or on a remote Linux server.)
> I can have the funds wired to you next day or PayPal'd to you

NO. DON'T DO THIS.

Always use an escrow service. I didn't and I got scammed by no one else but a fellow startup founder. The amount wasn't great, $400, but that left an awful aftertaste that is hard to describe.
"... There was nothing wrong with their offering ..."

except it didn't work ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2710119638/ a quick search for common words I knew of revealed little ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/cuil/ and the HN verdict at the time ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258737
The idea that people should be more specific when talking about one of the most well-known (and used) programming languages on a site called Hacker News is simply odd to me.
I think that's what most hackathons actually are. :-)
Card services are the calls I've been getting lately, although I haven't bothered to engage them.

Last year I got tons of auto warranty calls. The FCC eventually managed to shut them down, but not before they annoyed me quite a bit.

I got so tired of it I started playing with them. As soon as they were trapped, they'd hang up. When I pointed out I didn't own a car (as it's not in my name), they hung up. When I pointed out my car was out of warranty, they hung up.

When I thanked them for calling and was happy to renew my warranty, they were thrilled. I asked which of my two cars was out of warranty, they hung up.

I'm glad the new anti-robocalling rule just went got passed, but since 99% of the calls are either illegal already or by politicians/political groups, I doubt the law will make any difference.
Those problems do come up, yes, but they are never serious nor annoying enough to leave me searching for a better solution.
Could you point me to any references about pointer comparisons in Java? How is it different than

Object a = new Object();
Object b = new Object();
boolean bool = a == b;
This is worse than the Austin group that thought they could hire SF devs with taco parties.