skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"C++ programming pioneer"? I'd never heard of him before. From the headline I thought they were talking about Bjarne or somebody like that.

And 10,000 lines is not a lot. What's so special about this guy's C++ code?

Sorry to be negative, but the article sounds full of hype.
The one that I like that nobody else seems to is the PHP documentation at php.net, especially the documentation circa PHP3. I like it because, despite the language inconsistencies at the time, they allowed curated comments on the language docs so that exceptions were generally spelled out in the language.

They also had usage examples so that it was easy to remember "Was it find(needle, haystack) or find(haystack, needle)?".

jQuery is the same way, though their comments seem less curated, and often have red herrings attached to the documentation that should be removed, but aren't.

Really good documentation exists for Django and Python, but in my opinion, more 'how-to' examples would be great for people just starting out.

That said, since you asked what the best is, for me, the answer is quite easily the documentation for Stripe[1]. In addition to being exemplary in every other way, they also do real-time substitutions for variables.

An example that would look like "get("<YOUR API KEY">") in every other document you've ever seen would actually contain YOUR API key in the Stripe.com docs. Simply brilliant.

Leftronic[2] does the same thing as well, which I thought was a good lesson learned, but overall, their docs aren't quite as brilliant as Stripe's.

[1] - http://stripe.com/docs

[2] - http://leftronic.com/
The "text" part is important and has been under attack by all proprietary formats for a long time, but right now it is the "file"part that is under attack, by the cloudy services we are using more and more. I think it may be an even greater threat under individuals' control over their own properties.
"Third, I think Amazon's rationale in not innovating the hardware that much is that it's not really worth it to move too fast."

I think Amazon's approach is interesting if you consider that they appear to be trying to commoditize the Kindle as fast as the technology allows. It's not just simple market competition, they seem to lead in price and tablets are just a different kind of beast. I think it's the realization that book purchases are far more lucrative.

Besides you can make a nice device and get $20 in profit on it and fewer customers buying e-books with it, or you can make a cheap device and get $15 in profit on it but three times the number of customers buying it.

The rumor of the Kindle eventually becoming a free item makes all kinds of sense to me. Imagine a promo, "Buy 5 books get a free Kindle". I'd have Kindles lying all over my house.
I agree with his heading the future looks pretty dire for the low skilled, but he then descends into hyperbole. As hessenwolf says, there are plenty of non-technical skills that are very much in demand.

Those without such skills have always been at the bottom of the pile, but he's right in that things are going to get very much worse for them. If all you have to offer the world is your manual labour, you are not going to have a fun time of the next few decades.

However, his hope that the tide of human suffering rises high enough for the murmurs of discontent from the slave castes turn to cries of revolution is mistaken. Every revolution in history has been made by the educated - sometimes in the name of the proletariat, but never actually by them.

The uneducated just get Bread and Circuses, and if the modern world knows how to make anything, it's Bread and Circuses.
Things we did to make our blog engine super fast
Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
Every time I see that page, I see the equation, I read statistical terms and I get overwhelmed. I use PHP so I have no pnormaldist. Would love to use it for some random page I run.
i found an article that might be relevant

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
I liked the hint he dropped here:

"But today something went seriously wrong. I have been interviewing senior hires for the crucial tech lead position on the Fizz Buzz team, and while several walked out in a huff when I asked them to let me look at their Facebook, one young lady smiled and said I could help myself."
Would you stop visiting Google if it had a homepage full of news?

Having a sparse homepage is not the reason why Google is winning today, or why Yahoo lost.
Here's my attempt:

- "Programming in the large" - programming produced by lots of people and/or meant to last a long time.

- "creating and maintaining boundaries" - when you have a lot of people working on code, it's very useful to be able to isolate code and define the boundaries between code explicitly. Things like interfaces and type safety tend to help do this (the "abstract" in "abstract and operational"). On the "operational" side, having modules that produce dynamic libraries with good versioning semantics helps.

- "that preserve large-system integrity, availability" - again, type safety, in-built null pointer protection and garbage collection all help make sure that code doesn't fall over as much as it could without those (there are some philosophical arguments in here that I'm not exploring).

- "concurrency" - Consensus appears to be forming around the idea that a good way to manage concurrency is with lightweight processes and message passing rather than threads and shared state. Rust does the former. Rust also encourages the use of immutable state which also helps avoid concurrency issues.
Actual source is http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/mpaa-megaupload-kim...

Torrentfreak added nothing of interest.

Please submit the actual source next time.
That'snot accurate, there was plenty of coverage since the game's inception that complained about its violent content.
You're exactly right. I should restate I mean '1.0 final' so we can say we are out of beta and anyone that buys it can know they're now getting something that has no problems with it.
Forgot the exact quote, but it stated that "in the future, everyone will need to understand statistics".
i like this one http://www.mindomo.com/404
Pretty cool but it seems kind of clunky by Google standards.
Ted Smith: 'Think different', Apple
This is a rather simplistic account. Newton and Leibniz neither started nor finished the development of calculus, they just happened to make the connection between differentiation and integration which opened up the way for the spectacular development of the subject in later years and Leibniz invented some of the notation we still use, but there was lots of progress before and lots of progress since then, especially regarding logical foundations of the subject and a big part of it is now incorporated in the undergraduate curriculum. Linear-algebra based multi-variate calculus is pretty common in universities now too and it wasn't well developed before the 20th century.
Thanks for the link, I upvoted you.

I'm a C++ systems programmer, so I'm trying to understand some of the issues here. I'm not familiar with either language, please forgive the ignorant questions.

Null: Why is null evil? Doesn't Go use it in the Java sense of releasing a reference to the object?

Global GC: Seems more like a runtime implementation choice?

Shared mutable state: Doesn't seem so bad for someone approaching a systems programming language. I don't always want to make copies and send it over as a message to the other threads?

My higher-level point is that, perhaps these languages could do a better job of selling, differentiating, explaining themselves. I know it's hard, that's why I'm trying to help by posing my stupid questions. Btw. if they're planning to write Firefox in this, maybe the author should maintain a minimal browser written in Rust to show how the language fits its original design goals.
I have a great big hammer in the *nix text tools, and I try very hard to buy nothing but text nails.
Yeah yeah, right right
In 100 years from now, when you are talking to someone, what would make you say they are human rather than robot?
The iPhone and Consumer Guilt
Traditionally Apache projects have been seen by the bigger companies like IBM, HP as common ground and (with exceptions) well managed. It will be interesting to see if some of those companies building solutions on top of OpenStack shift their interest/resources to CloudStack. It is certainly more production-ready than the alternatives.
> JSON is a bit less-wrong than XML here, because you know what's a number, what's a string, what's a list

http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#typesystem
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See this example: http://www.derivante.com/2009/09/01/php-content-rating-confi...

However, if you install the stats package for PHP you can use stats_cdf_normal() as well.
A lot of this article seems to apply to INTJ personality types, I wonder what the overlap is?
It could do well on either or both platforms. Most of the gamers who remember playing the originals back in the day are likely to own a PC or Mac now.

If I were in charge of developing this I would be using a cross platform setup from the start, Unity etc.
I'm not making a trivial point though. I believe the tools, techniques and expertise this guy professes in image analysis are modern day snake oil. I just think that he has deluded himself instead of being deliberately dishonest.
Installing another browser (or even an OS, in the case of IE10) should not be a requisite for accessing a web site. The irony is that this site was built by a company whose browser was part inspired by that very nature of IE6.
I wrote a game called Fly! on an Altair 8800 with 128b of RAM (yes, BYTES!). Toggled it in using the front panel switches. It made a little animated X-X fly around the text screen and bounce off the sides.
We really need this in the API. We do our own version of this that is hacky and error prone but it's all we have right now. I was a bit amazed initially that this didn't already exist.
Single page version: http://www.stephenfry.com/2012/04/03/four-and-half-years-on/...

Has it really been such a short time? It feels more like a decade.
i had never before read about the unicode flags, and the rather (politically and technically) brilliant end run around the problem. fascinating.
Even if Megaupload doesn't relaunch the MPAA wouldn't want people to get their data back. Right now they have this huge intimidation factor where they can shut down a web site and make people's data disappear forever. Without that threat, enforcement actions don't really have consequences to consumers beyond the annoyance of finding a new site.
So, according to you Web pages should have been some binary blobs instead of the beautiful soup we all love to hate? Then we would not have seen this eruption of amateur pages with animated gifs? And all the Web would be clean and straight as early Frontpage HTML? Can't agree less.
True. But since it's optional, what is the number of people who actually use it, or parsers that care? It's a bit like with xml namespaces.
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Well I've been on a govt contract to build a little intranet website (and do some other work) for nearly five years now and we're just getting to the point where the software might be possibly getting close to maybe tentatively getting approved (barring yet another rotation in management, shift in priorities, change of scope etc.) So yeah, half a million for a government site is cheap. Dirt cheap.
One ofmthe original ideas of oop was that it would be possible to encapsulate how part of anrogram worked from the person who used it. You shouldn't have to care about the inner workings of the storage layer, say, or the gui toolkit.

Unfortunately in reality things are usually not that well encapsulated. Things like threads, integration withe the system, etc often interfere as does things like the desire to test a particular piece of software.

Basically think of it as enabling the same benefits you get from having a general count function over having specific functions for arrays, directories, lists, etc but to an enti system.
I don't know if this will apply to you, but it's also possible to "see" the blocks just by indentation.

If you assume that this is possible, and your eyes can get used to read code just by its blocking, then brackets are unnecessary, even superfluous.
Actually, in my experience, it's quite difficult to get Unix-style development tools running on OS X. There's a whole basis of Unix software and development headers you have to install first, whereas Linux has a package manager for that.
Horizontal scrolling... why?! I realize it works with a mouse wheel, but why do it?

Awesome concept though. Probably would have been nice to have when I took art history in college.
Is this new, or has it been around for a while? Usability-wise, it's great.
I was overwhelmed too (here's simple wrong solution #1, here's simple wrong solution #2, here's incredibly complicated but more correct statistical solution #3 that you may not understand) but since this is relevant to my day job and we use PHP, I did find this:

http://www.derivante.com/2009/09/01/php-content-rating-confi...

I'm not a statistician so I can't speak to the correctness of this implementation.
What is Gitblit?
One annoyance with JSON as a config-file format is that you apparently can't put comments in it. At least not out-of-band comments:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/244777/can-i-comment-a-js...

You can put in in-band comments, by defining a JSON format that has a bunch of '_comment' keys sprinkled through it, but that's annoying because you've got to design that in, and decide which elements deserve comments and which don't, and that's just a big hairy yak which sits there daring you to shave it, practically begging you to do a bunch of YAGNI up-front design of the comment protocol, and then even when you're done you still have to fret about how those keys might get misinterpreted by clients from now until the end of time. Even human readers will have to intuit the the semantics of your '_comment' key ("oh, the computer never reads this, this is just for me!"), whereas humans generally recognize the significance of real, standard comment syntaxes like # or ;; or // or what have you.

Or you could use a JSON preprocessor that strips the comments, but that's a little trap that you build for yourself, because now your JSON is no longer universally-parseable by any language's JSON library. You could strip the comments at build time, but now your production JSON files on the server don't have the comments, and this is likely to be just where you need them - you put them there for the troubleshooter, who will find them at 3am when the server just crashed.

But I've sometimes used JSON for these things anyway. Life is too short for perfectionism, and it is a nice clean format. Almost too clean.
I likely would stop visiting Google as frequently as I do.

The sparse homepage is one of the main reasons I switched to
Google way back in the day.
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It's a case of changing paradigms.

At the time of Yahoo's rise, the way users typically searched the internet (not the web) was gopher. And Yahoo's early approach (categories) was somewhat similar to that of gopher.

The term "internet search" meant something different in the 1990's than it does today.
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For one the console market blew up, no longer did you need to drop wads of cash for a computer to run the latest games. Broadband reached critical mass so networking the consoles got better and with it came a number of players you could never justify at an arcade (can you imagine a 16 player shooter as an arcade game?)

The arcades fought back with unique control schemes, gimmicks, and experiences that weren't easy to replicate at home, (for example Dance Dance Revolution at first). But even those experiences became replicated at home, cheaper HDTV's and Surround Sound.

Pinball, in part because its charm is in actual physical interaction, was never translated as well as the other games (but the fall of pinball is an entirely different post)
>Are you suggesting VCs just toss money away on projects they don't expect to have any return?

Yes. Their entire business model is built around start-ups having a 90% failure rate, with the remaining 10% being such massive successes that they make up for everything.

I mean, look at the facts. VCs invested in Groupon, Yahoo, and Pets.com. They are expecting that some start-ups in which they invest will not ever make a profit and will go under.
Of course it's the MPAA's job to tell tales of the unspeakable damage that will occur if Megaupload springs back to life.

You then get in to an interesting argument over whether the content that Megaupload has that the MPAA represents is worth more than non-MPAA content on Megaupload's servers. Should efforts be made protect that data, or is the collateral damage to other people's data an acceptable loss?

If the MPAA forces all of Megaupload's data to be destroyed, can a case be made against the MPAA for destroying the valuable data of others? If a single copy of an MPAA film is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, how much value is lost by destroying the hypothetical sole copy of someone's video of their trip to Hawaii?
On The Management Team
I'm going to to off on a limb here and say that MU would not dare relaunch until after Kimble is released. If he is convicted I have a hard time believing they would/could relaunch even if they had the data.

So what the MPAA is basically arguing is that MU should not get their data back because in the event that they are unable to secure a conviction, they still want him punished.

Despicable, as usual. Also curious, that they think this might happen.
Yeah, it's an interesting format I've recently started experimenting with for some of my own talks (though only preliminarily). It seems sort of halfway between the "throw up slides" non-solution, and the traditional academic solution, which is to accompany a talk with a written paper. Then the paper would serve as the "durable" version of the talk suitable for archiving, laying out the same material but in a way more suited to text, and usually a bit more formally, with more details (e.g. to enable someone to actually reproduce the work).

The slide interspersed with text format could be seen as a more heavily illustrated, easy-reading sort of paper. More similar to the talk than a traditional accompanying paper would be, but not just the slides. But I think it's still non-trivial work to make a good version, which is why people often just throw up the slides, because that's almost literally no additional work.

You basically have to take the same source material and think how you would write it up into a blog post, which is not 100% the same as thinking of how to give it as a talk. Though I guess a first-cut solution could be to just record the talk and type up a transcript in between the slides.
Case in point http://coffeescript.org/
I guess if Google is using something browser specific it's one thing. However, if they are simply using open standards and Microsoft is slow to implement them, that's a different story.

Seriously, developers should be more aggressive about not supporting "legacy" browsers. Many people, and organizations, won't upgrade until they have to. IE6 and IE7 should be dumped now and IE8 should be dumped in a couple of years. There are other options.
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I know this apology has only ended up being as thorough and all encompassing as it has because of the other recent PR screw-ups from YC/tech related startups (wont name them here), but I'm not sure I care!

This should go down in the annuls of history as the defacto "OH SHIT! Sorry guys, our bad, srsly, really sorry! It wont happen again for these reasons.... oh and as a gesture of our sorrow, here's some free stuff!" style apology!

I don't currently use balsamiq, but after seeing this apology and reading their attitude to customer service, I will definitely be finding out more about them!
lets figure out specifically which lawyer is responsible for this and ruin their career

make there incompetence the first google hit for their name
Excellent all the way around: taking responsibility, explaining what happened without making excuses, describing what they're doing to keep it from happening again, making up for it with 3 months credit. The photos are a great touch too. Balsamiq and Peldi continue to be a great example for all of us to emulate.
If they focused first on #2 - finding the right people for the job - where "right" meant the proper skill set for the job, that would go a long way to solving #1 - following the law on hiring practices. For if they are truly hiring on skill alone then they have already passed the biggest hurdle HR has in #1 - discriminatory hiring practices - because skill set does not look at sex or gender or race or age or any of that.
No, maybe I should've been more specific - I mean only the formats which are well-defined and which have their own structure. Especially things like image file formats, communication protocols, etc.

For example, I wouldn't mind it if HTTP was a binary format. I don't think HTML has to be... it's a markup language not a strict protocol. It was a bit arbitrary by design. Same thing with markdown. They were supposed to work with existing text as much as possible. HTTP doesn't need that - noone's writing HTTP by hand and even if they kind-of do that, they use things like Curl which provide an abstraction anyway.
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the tech-blogs' perception of google is so far off reality. google isn't loosing. google just entered a new market (social) which has a huge barrier of entry, thus they're fighting to get a foot in this door. within their traditional domain (search/advertising) they're unrivaled.
all the "google is doomed" talk is based on the potential entry of facebook into the search market. however, this hasn't happened yet and if or whenever it should we'll see how that goes. until then, i'd like to not read the same shit over and over every day on hackernews.
The point is not that coding is easy. After all, reading and writing are difficult for the illiterate. I think what he's trying to get across is that technical skills are going to be necessary, not optional, if you wish to be employed in the future.
The Balsamiq team is incredible. We use it for our specification process and they have never let us down.

The one thing I truly love about working with them is their transparency. If we ask about a feature they don't have available, they offer a workaround and offer to put it on a future dev list. It doesn't end there. They let us know the likelihood of the feature being added.

I cannot tell you how important that is. We can then make a decision on how to proceed knowing that feature X is way down the road if ever.
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