skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way I think about it is this: comprehensibility is a feature. You have to weigh it against accuracy, effectiveness, etc., but it should be taken into account.
Everything old is new again in this industry. Your "1970's technology" might as well be "2020's technology" for all we know. The only thing constant in this world seems to be how cyclical it is.
United States Patent Application: HAPTIC COMMUNICATION
XML has XPath.
JSON and YAML do not have xpath.
They have those lame language-specific constructs that aren't recursive, aren't traversable and throw null pointer errors when they can't match.

You can format XML with xmllint and query it with xmlstarlet. You can't do that for json - good luck if you've got unformatted json.

Tooling is everything.
I recently decided to start learning maths again. I stopped it after my penultimate year of secondary school because I found it such a joyless subject. I remember friends from the 'advanced maths' class lording it over me saying they were doing 'matrices' (no idea what they were) and 'second order differentiation' (differentiation was hard enough, so that must be way too tough, right?).

I figure i've really only missed out on a couple years of math education compared to the people I know who I consider 'good' at maths. And to my advantage I did do some statistics at university. With all the improved learning materials available to me, plus an alliance with programming, and my improved bullshit-detector for bad teaching and studying practices, it should be a breeze to catch up.

One problem I still have though is that maths just gets so incredibly boring... at least classes do. I used iTunes U and Khan Academy to study calculus and linear algebra. I had to start skipping past some of the really mechanical parts, because as the article said, as a programmer you just think 'put that in a function and never worry about it again.'

Breadth not depth is definitely what I'm after, although I do worry that it's the equivalent of being a musician who knows lots of diverse harmonic theories but still hasn't mastered some scales that would let him/her jam with other musicians.
Yeah, I've had some app that did it.
State Of The Linux Kernel 2011
This is an older post describing the subproblem of ontology/vocabularies:

http://lingpipe-blog.com/2008/11/17/accident-involving-space...
Gesundheit.

Here's a nice list of common phases that can be eschewed without worry: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/__oMEOi1B6Rc/TDxuvGxYfeI/AAAAAAAAAA...
Hi Joe,

In general, there's a certain amount of tedium in any endeavor. During my PhD, I did some work on synthesis--it was fun to try to figure out how to realize some properties in a new material--to try to figure out synthesis challenges--the actual sitting down and grinding with a mortar and pestle was meditative, but tedious. The same thing happens with coding--there are parts that are exciting, but there's (at least to me) a certain tedium that comes with testing, engineering, etc (if I want to write code that other people use, instead of one-off pieces for my own use). Even on the analysis side, there are exciting bits where I try to see if I understand why a material has a given set of properties, but there's a certain tedium in writing portions of the analysis code--the question is whether or not the exciting bits outweigh the tedious ones...One of my students (undergrad) was a double major between physics and computer engineering and has decided that he wants to go on to do robotics in grad. school--physics wasn't fun for him--another one went on to grad. school in physics--you just have to see what you have fun with--not just with classes, but in the actual doing. If you decide to stick it out and pass prelims/first year courses and get your masters and are still not happy, then definitely get out--opportunity costs will outweigh your sunk costs ;> At your university, do the theorists give trial projects? In terms of just variety and fun, have you looked at any of Nigel Goldenfeld's work?
http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/

If you do decide to leave (and it seems like that's the direction you're going), then I suggest that you get an offer somewhere, spend some time working on your own project, or taking some CS courses before leaving...

Good luck!
Here's a superior Bayesian solution: http://masanjin.net/blog/how-to-rank-products-based-on-user-...
I think the modern financial system is pretty efficient at using that cash while it's "sitting around", if it's in the bank it's being lent out to somebody, if it's in bonds it's financing either government or corporate activity and if it's in stocks then it's in a partial ownership of a company that helps capitalise that company. Just because that money is concentrated in a particular place doesn't mean it's not doing society some good.

I don't think people get rich or stay rich without putting in an incredible amount of work and I truly don't understand why you would penalise people for being successful.
Even some of the bourgeois can see inequality and act upon it. Slaves typically don't free themselves.
That's not quite what I'm saying, I don't think his tests are scientific not that they show absolutely nothing (although probably fairly close to nothing with ELA). I also haven't doubted his ability to detect fakes but I do doubt the particular efficacy and explanation of his techniques. There is no doubt using PCA can highlight unusual changes in an image - but there are also other explanations. His famous suggestion that terrorist videos had books inserted into them could simply have been a slightly different coloured spot light.
Calvin Klein Bootcut Corduroy Jeans Espresso Womens
How is the work/life balance at puppet labs?
I hope you have an option to buy copies for friends(who get it in their email).
I love the idea but how exactly is this an enhancement? The curated packages included don't make it unique, exactly.
It is human readable if you use firebug or vim.
And that's what you use.
I agree with the thought. While I really like SQLite as a piece of software I see little reason to use it over PostgreSQL unless I need an embedded database.

And even if you have no plan of becoming big (e.g if you are in business to business) I see little reason to pick SQLite since PostgreSQL can do everything SQLite can and much more so you never need to worry about outgrowing it.
Do you think there is anything "cloud specific"[1] about the web app vulns in the control plane? Or is this just the bread and butter targeting of command and control?

Cloud computing certainly opens up a plethora of side channel attacks that probably would not have been possible before.

[1] Its unfortunate that this is such a loosely defined term. I am not trying to be fussy and overly pedantic.
Sweet! See you there!
I need to be more tolerant towards people who think I don't deserve legal equality because of who I'm sexually and romantically attracted to? Sorry, that's a hard sell.
Google is planning to open Hangouts On Air for everyone
Agreed. I guess I'm just trying to weigh the "worth" of the degree (not just money) against the "cost" of it (not just money). Lots of intangibles in the equation.

It sounds like the consensus is not "Absolutely do X, or you'll regret it later," but "(Either one will be fine;) do what you love." So it's comforting that I probably can't screw this up too badly with either choice, but I'm going to have to do some introspection.
The only thing I have to firmly disagree with here is putting your name in the From: header. If the company name does not appear, either instead of your name or in front of it, I will probably throw your message in the trash without ever figuring out what it is. (If the _very first thing_ in the Subject: header is your company name, you may be able to get away with this.)
This will probably get downvoted into oblivion (fair enough since it's a thoroughly unconstructive comment) but I'm really developing a pet peeve against comments that basically consist just of the word "This." or start with "This." and follow it with some tame form of agreement.

I find it about 2.44 times as annoying as someone commenting "upvoted". I now reflexively downvote any comment starting with "This.". I know I have no power to alter such a strong internet meme, but I thought I'd mention it to get it off my chest. Sorry for wasting your time with this post.
First weeks with Papermill
Pretty great. I've been through two major release crunches, and while I won't say that a few folks haven't pulled the occasional all-nighter, there isn't anything like the pressure I've seen at other software houses.

In PS it's a bit different, because you're on the road/at engagements often. But they do their best to schedule you so that you're home on the weekends, and you can schedule "no-travel" weeks. In general they've never been anything but accommodating and respectful.

The company is also very spouse/significant-other friendly...I've often seen spouses around the office at the end of the day, during stand-ups at the end of the week, etc.
Do wildcard records work?
You're really misrepresenting that thread. Here[1] Linus says C is pretty readable in patch format, because it doesn't do overloading (unlike C++, which was the thread's conversation topic) and thus doesn't much depend on some outside context. Also, C gives the required level of control for kernel programming, in terms of memory model and concurrency (and those conditions implicitly exclude Go), but higher-level languages have something to offer for other problem domains; and in that context GC or concurrency primitives become interesting again.

In answer to that last paragraph, someone asked about Go, which is where you got Linus's overall noncommittal answer.

[1] http://www.realworldtech.com/beta/forums/index.cfm?action=de...
Sure, it's an imperfect comparison, but it's the closest we're ever going to get through coincidence. Same launch day, same format, similar topic. The length is different and the authors have different-sized audiences, but we should be able to learn something from this, rather than write it off as "apples and oranges."
Why the Juju Charm Store Will Change the Way You Use Ubuntu Server
I got pretty far along with Rails Tutorial, and came to love Ruby after just a short time. Its so nice and such a refreshing change from PHP.

BUT! What I hadn't anticipated was really not knowing anything about how to make a web app. I knew nothing about REST, nothing about get/put, nothing about forms, etc.

I thought Ruby and Rails were the answer to the problem I'd been having for years. I thought that I was just in need of the right programming language to help take my skills to the next level. I realize now however, after some cool Ruby bits and some Rails basics, that you're only going to get the best results out of language and framework when you know the basics.

And there's a lot of basics: rest, basic http methods, forms, sql, routes, etc etc etc.
I read this twice and I can't figure out how this is relevant to the article, please explain?
Rather than reflexively attacking your viewpoint, I'm instead curious to see if I can understand it.

I'm most curious about what you mean when you say "real algorithm". Can you offer an example?
Just a friendly warning: The overall tone of your comments seems to be rather negative and kinda hostile, especially to people who make money from teaching, and as a result your karma is currently negative. If you keep on this way, the system is going to hellban you. I'd recommend sticking to productive rather than destructive comments, at least until you get a good feel for the community's standards.
The Minerva Project raises largest-ever seed funding for elite university
Sure, you can do lots of things in the signal handler, if you are careful, but that is the point, it is more likely you will make a mistake than not. It is very simple to think, let me add this to the signal handler it will make my life easier and cause all kinds of weird issues that happen randomly like a heisenbug...
Crossfilter - Fast Multidimensional Filtering for Coordinated Views
I think there is a key distinction here between messages we pass between applications and data we store on disk. These problems have different tradeoffs, and a conflict probably occurs when the same bits are used for both purposes.

I think the fundamental difference is that messages seem to have these sorts of properties:

- temporary and transient; exist primarily to move information from one program to another

- may be merely copies/representations/serializations of information that already exists in a running program

- may specify implementation ("the following is a hashmap of strings to strings consisting of k1,v1;k2,v2;,...")

- may use a common format/language (e.g. XML) to encode arbitrary data structures

- therefore, can use commonly available parsers

- not usually read/edited by humans

It seems like binary data is very often a good choice here, especially since performance seems to matter.

But I think the author's use case is very different. S/he's dealing with code. (Data, code, tomato, tomato.) It has different properties:

- permanent: stored to disk, possibly copied to other disks, but not "created and destroyed"

- is the real true representation of the actual object in question; as the object is changed, the data is edited/overwritten on disk

- usually descriptive of problem rather than giving implementation details ("line (7,2) -> (8,4)" rather than "<class>[line] <member>[start] <value>[<pair>[7,2]],...")

- is usually domain-specific rather than an arbitrary common language like XML

- thus, tends to require a custom parser to read

- primitive values transparently map to changes in the object

In this latter case (think HTML, LaTeX, and all programming language files), we get tons of good benefits from plain text. It can be read in any editor, it's universally and trivially portable, it can be manipulated with tools like grep and find/replace, it can be generated or altered with simple scripts and programs, etc. And finally, it's primary purpose is to be compiled into a representation which is presented to the user (such as a webpage or pdf document or so on).

Those are the two extremes, I think. Data vs messages. So we can argue about which option is better for cases that seem somewhere in between, but this is the landscape as I understand it.
I would say when SQLite added the WAL mode they greatly improved the concurrency. In WAL mode SQLite has better concurrency characteristics than MyISAM which not too long ago was commonly used.
depending on your chosen minecraft server, his first game was an MMO too!
EVE Online meets Minecraft.
Technology of note: "The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish.
[...]
The cost of the game is still undecided, but it's likely there will be a monthly fee for joining the Multiverse as we are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren't logged in."
Itsy-Forth: a 1K tiny compiler - part 2: the dictionary and inner interpreter
Between this and http://www.ftlgame.com/ , it's nice to think that the scifi games I used to be only able to dream about are slowly becoming real.
Interesting point.
We do that in a few places, e.g. if a customer starts a conversation and a user replies. Small change though (says the guy who doesn't have to make it :-) )

We'll take a look.
Advertisers Given Guidelines for Magazine Issues on Tablets
Many people do still want to run FreeBSD, and it may not be you the original developer that has to port it, but the ports maintainer that puts it in the FreeBSD ports tree, or a company that already has everything running on top of FreeBSD (think Yahoo) wants to use the software, now they have to take the time to port your Linux only code, when using standard POSIX compliant code would have made it much simpler, possibly as simple as a ./configure && make rather than introducing extra work.

Why limit your audience to one single operating system?
Thanks des.

We are relying heavily on caching, and I noticed that you require the users email and created at to be available in the page with each snippet? Could you explain this a little more?

Is this just for the initial signup for the user, or is this for every request that the user makes. I mainly ask because it would seem odd to pass the "created_at: 1234567890" in every request.
As a fan of old space travel role playing games like "Traveller", I'm looking forward to this.

If it combines the "build-it-yourself" bits of Minecraft (build your ship, build your computer, build your programs) with MMO trading, and guild-building of EVE Online, and let players build the universe, then it might be a real winner.

I'll sign-up regardless.
I think I'm going to lose a lot of time to this game...
Or, as a a "spinning" script might reword it:

> Implements and setups that take a corpus of tuber text and create meaty number of changes of that tranquil, to avoid duplicate content sanctions when trying to stuff localities to catch Google's contemplation.
Nokia guide to saving a Lumia Windows Phone from drowning
Backstory is cool too and coincidentally appropriate for parent's username: "released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years."
I thought Scrolls was his next game?
Digital native conference funded by EU and organised by social network analysis
I put 'compiler' in quotes because I was thinking of a research project a few years back which converted the Python byte code (parsed by CPython itself) into C code, along with a small bit of peephole optimization. I don't think it's worthy enough to be called a transpiler.

The generated C code is still a stack machine. You could replace that with C code, but if you wanted to program to a stack machine then you likely wouldn't have been coding in Python in the first place.

Part of the nuisance in replacing that C code would be wading through all of the extra code Python generates, just to add two numbers.
Nope you're correct.

You can filter your userbase any way you want. You can use our tagging feature to create segments (e.g. You can define VIP as plan = "premium" and LTV > 2000 ) and then you can create auto-messages which target segments of users, as you wish, to say whatever you way.

Users can reply, and we keep track of that too. We use this data to establish a relationship score (i.e. which users you've talked to). Relationship score is great for finding users who nobody has talked to (score = 0) and there is usually good return in talking to these guys.

We really believe in this product, and if you don't want our word, try here: https://twitter.com/#!/intercom/favorites
Unfiltered - a toolkit for servicing HTTP requests in Scala
Hitchcock's Rear Window recreated as huge panoramic timelapse
This essentially embraces "macroing" as part of the game. Something every MMO out there has tried to fight and usually ends up losing. Makes me wonder if he will provide a way for players to sell the programs they make for in-game resources.

This aspect alone is enough to excite me, can't way to play it!
and ..
"Full specifications of the CPU will be released shortly, so the more programatically advanced of you can get a head start."
After reading the title I was a little surprised when I skimmed the documentation. It seems like a better title would be:

"Luadns, managed DNS with Git and Lua scriptable front-end"

It seems like tinydns is your back-end. Which in my opinion is nothing to be ashamed of. When I thought the service was a new dns server written in Lua I was less intrigued. There are a ton of pitfalls when writing your own dns daemon, tinydns is a good choice.

What are you going to do when dnssec becomes a requirement?
Someone should write a browser extension or Greasemonkey script to automatically quote your Google search terms.
Programmable 16-bit CPUs? Sounds like work disguised as gaming!
And the highest employee-rated tech CEO is...
This is why my question is addressed to the Hacker News community. How do hackers see ITIL? What about startups? What about small companies? Hackers aren't usually associated with IT services bureaucracies for sclerotic multi-billion dollar corporations. Do any of them get excited by "service as a service" or even, "'service as a service' as a service"?
Improve rendering of normal resolution image on the new Ipad 3
> 5 star rating systems are obnoxious. From a mathematical perspective, if you treat them in an ordinal fashion they are poorly behaved, and if you treat them categorically, you lose the relationship between stars.

Helping out a friend with a statistics test, I recently read up about the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test[1]. Now this one is intended to get a p-value for experiments with "before" and "after" measurements, but what I got the idea it's trying to do, is to use the ranks of a not-very-normal behaving random variable, turn that into a summation of lots of things, so due to the central limit theorem you can treat it as a normal distribution again.

Though thinking about it, in this case it's the rank we're after, so maybe it's not useful at all. But it gives an interesting idea about the tricks you can pull if your input data isn't quite the sort of type that you can analyse very well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilcoxon_signed-rank_test
OP here. For some reason nobody gets the point that it was a joke. While you could argue about the merits of the statement, the blog post on whole is just for entertainment.
I've followed his comments on Twitter. Apparently he considered doing a clone of a real CPU (6502), but it was too complicated to emulate efficiently. According to notch, the custom architecture he's inventing can run 2,000 DCPU's at 100kHz each and only use 50% of the time on a real CPU. Here's the first public spec from a few days ago, I think it's changed a bit since then http://notch.tumblr.com/post/20056289891/start-classified-tr...
Aren't all MMOs like that?
Good News, We're Profitable
New Jenkins UI Improvements, by Nicolas DeLoof, CloudBees
The Jenkins Continuous Integration community has just implemented some useful and time-saving UI improvements. One of the project’s major contributors outlines the major improvements.
CSS Painter (my side project) open-sourced (MIT licence)
I will not have time and resources to develop and market this as a product, so I decided to give it to the community. Hopefully something can emerge out of it, that can break Adobe's hegemony in the field of visual creating tools. The code is on github: https://github.com/karolk/csspainter
Sounds like a Core War MMO. :)
I'm sure a lot of people here have read Atul Gawande (of the New Yorker) article about The Checklist, in which a simple list of steps before surgery, such as "wash your hands", vastly reduced infections at hospitals. Yet the checklist faced resistance, including from doctors who thought that having such an obvious list was beneath them...even though even the smartest doctors mess these steps up in the rush of an operation.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...

This is the mindset that any disruptive enterprise must face. It's not like in the coding community, where spending a substantial amount of time writing seemingly trivial and boring tests -- i.e. an automated checklist -- is considered to be a necessary step in writing software.