skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I downloaded it last week (strangely enough, I got there by browsing the Stripe website despite being subscribed to the PHD RSS).

For an indie movie, it's really not bad. Yes, it has some terrible, terrible scenes that just don't work - but the majority is actually pretty watchable. There are some good jokes in there, even though I often felt they could have been portrayed better. The character I love most is the professor - he looks and acts exactly as expected from reading the comics :-)

Overall I think most of the script and some of the actors could really shine in a Hollywood do-over of the same movie.
I like your support because you gave me some very clear goals to work with. I will consider doing all of them.

What I'm struggling with now, since I'm still an lower-division undergrad trying to make my way into a BS program, is do I continue on and persue this - perhaps getting a meaningless part time job in the meantime to supplement my income? Or, do I just go full speed ahead and try and apply for some very entry level IT work. I have no idea what I'm doing in the civilian sector despite my getting out 2 years go - I've only been a full time college student since. Perhaps I'm just rambling because I need answers to these questions, but you seem salty, and wise. Thanks for your help.
Personally, I don't think Instagram "created" $1billion worth of value. $1 billion was just the price FB had to pay to stop them raining on the parade of their own (gigantically inflated) valuation.
The thing is, Lion runs like crap without an SSD or insane amounts of RAM for many people. It doesn't help if it works for some, or even the majority. If anything, we need more people digging in OS X internals. I am sorry to use a tired analogy here, but Vista did work great for many too.

I have two Macs, one brand new, one migrated from SL, and 10.7 Safari was almost unusable on both until I installed SSDs. If that isn't a negative effect in every possible use case, then I don't know one. I actually guessed it was just that Lion inofficially dropped support for HDDs (by removing all caches or so).
True. I guess we are trying to find something "less wrong".

Our objective is to i) validate our concept by receiving input from potential customers and ii) with input build an "okay" prototype to take forward.

We want to do the first bit with limited development costs.
I dont think "re-colouring" or "moving things around to be pretty." really applies to this series. The redesigns seem really effective and are based on a specific criticism of the site (“doesn’t make you feel confident in their claims of what their app does.”).
Intel's Ivy Bridge reviewed
> but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with college degrees matches the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees?

I think the imbalance is actually in the other direction, if you ask it that way: the fraction of the population with college degrees is considerably lower than the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees. Unemployment among people who don't have college degrees is very high, suggesting that there aren't enough no-degree-required jobs. And when no-degree-required jobs do come on the market, they get massively over-applied for, like when McDonald's announced 50,000 job openings and received a million applicants.

Now whether those jobs should require college degrees is another story. For better or worse, employers demand degrees for a wide range of jobs, and you often won't even get past an automated HR screen if you don't have one. Until employers start offering more jobs to people without degrees, people will continue to feel that they need one, so they can qualify for those openings.
First and foremost, I named my price on this contract, which will be 27 hours per week average for the first 3 months, then option to renew for another 3 months. By your metric I should have asked almost 3x as much. But I'm not charging for a principal .NET guy, I'm charging for a jr. Rails dev. Put it another way, I'm probably at 1/3 the speed of a sr. Rails dev. There will be a day... so in a way, perhaps by this scale I took a huge pay cut against the risk. More than the $$, I get tremendous amount of value from this experience. It's my first paid 1099 (well not quite, but in this space it is). I get to work with a top-notch client and design firm, and I have a very sr. guy on retainer the client pays for for my use to help out on areas I get stuck and review all my code (FWIW, he is actually the one who introduced me to this client, we worked together on the prior project as well).

I also have another client who wants me to bid shorter term work (they did offer at a rate that's 40% higher) but I told them to hold off for now because I want to get used to the new contract first and make sure I'm comfortable with the cadence.

Key point - I will consistently be raising my rate, but for now I'm making almost as much as my day job and working much less hours, and I need to get out there network, get good, etc... and the rest will come. I'm approaching this in a way that aligns with my own principles. I'm not trying to be a bottom feeder in this market. I just am getting my feet wet with a minimal portfolio and simply happy to be in a position that I can make the transition into something I'd much rather be doing.
It's hard to tell for sure, but it seems like this problem may only be present if you're running certain kinds of applications. For example - if it's related to garbage collection, anything that uses ARC instead of GC isn't going to be affected.

I thought it was pretty clear that this isn't a "fix", but there's definitely something wrong here.
Microsoft, Facebook Announce Patent Agreement
Objectively that may well be true, however if you hire someone more experienced than you then perhaps they should be supervising you and not the other way around.

Also I think most geeks like to think of themselves as Jedi Masters. There is also the fear of someone tearing you a new one for the quality of your codebase.
Max out the 401k and IRAs every year. Save more on top of that. Hope we don't get hyperinflation to wipe out all those savings. If necessary, keep working (maybe part-time, maybe telecommuting, whatever) into old age.
I'm not sure about the current version of Oracle, but the one I used did not support nested WITH clauses. Pain in the lower part of the back if you want to compose and optimize queries. PostgreSQL has no such silly trouble.
The cynic wonders if this is the office workers geting more ordianry viruses and blaming the great satan to save face - migt be a bit hard explaining to the vice police how you got a virus from browsing porn sites.

"But Hounoured Mulla - I have no idea how those decadent pictures of those shameless hussys Palin and Widecombe appeared on my PC"
I upgraded to an SSD while on Leopard, and was amazed at the speed. Snow Leopard continued to impress. Lion slowed things down terribly (even with the SSD!), but I have good news: ever since Mountain Lion DP2, it's been fast again.
Cmd line syntax, for the lazy, please?
This is obviously anecdotal evidence, but I've met a bunch of older programmers who were very good. And this is across several specializations--all the way from developing drivers to virtualization software to enterprise Java development to compilers. I suspect that, right now, by pure competence the best programmers I've met have actually been older. (And this is ignoring my professors who tend to be exceptional as well as older.)

So really, do not worry about becoming a worse programmer. Worry perhaps that younger people will be subconsciously biased against you, sure, but this is just a bias not based on reality. That said, nobody mandates startups to be started by younger people. My dad recently worked for a startup doing some very interesting low-level work (they concentrated on using SSDs to speed up servers) that got acquired by SanDisk recently. And he doesn't have a CS degree either--he got the equivalent of a Masters in Physics in Leningrad where they didn't even have CS in his time. (I gather they barely had computers at all.) And, most importantly, I've noticed that he has become much happier after working at the startup than he was while working at a bigger company (VMWare) before.

So, ultimately, all that matters is that you are a good programmer--and I imagine you are. Perhaps it will take a bit more work for you to find a job at a startup, perhaps you will sometimes encounter bias against your age, but ultimately you should be able to do whatever you like.
IOS Mirroring and Programmatic Airplay Selection
PayPal is pretty similar but PayPal's checkout flow is still horrifying.
I hit a collision when I moved from one browser to another on my iPad. I'm guessing the number of permutations on mobile devices is quite small.
Highexpeditions.com
Thank you for your input. I'm not sure how to get into the Operation side of things, I might have to inquire with a career counselor about that path, if it's an avenue that I can take.

I'm aware that my time in is worth something, as I did obtain rank that probably looks decent, but I'm slightly edgy as to how it will be received. (I was an infantry Sgt.) Some have some derogatory views of how we are and I'm reticent to mention too much. (Everyone thinks you have PTSD despite studies)
Yes, I am a fan of ML so far too.

Given that Apple has fixed none of my reported bugs in 10.7, but I can't reproduce many of them in 10.8, I wonder if it even makes sense to analyze 10.7 anymore - seems it's a done deal for Apple.
Incredible motion timelapse, shot by single person
Can you explain a bit more how this works?

The `purge` command has a pretty short man page:

> purge -- force disk cache to be purged (flushed and emptied)

> Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis. It does not affect anonymous memory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc.

[This seems to talk about it more: http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/19036310553/two-things-that...

On my 10.5 laptop it didn't seem to dramatically decrease the memory marked "inactive".]
Title is wrong. It's Facebook paying Microsoft $550 million for about 650 patents (former AOL patents).
Enabling click-to-play in Chrome (and not one of those extensions that hide or remove from the DOM the element once it's loaded) just makes the fingerprint to have less bits, since it can't get the list of the installed fonts on your computer.
Yes, but I'm using weaker hardware (2009 Mini w/ 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo) on two Samsung panels @ 2048x1152 each. It's improved and doesn't completely hang since I bumped it to 8Gigs of RAM, but there is still a noticeable amount of lag at times. Goes away completely on one panel. Not sure which chunk of the hardware or OS I'd blame first, as I'm hitting the limits of most everything. Little box wasn't bought (or intended) for what I'm using it for.
Links to sourcecode here: http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Main_Page

OMeta is the configurable syntax project, and there's a lot of other stuff.
Meet Google's secret weapon for fighting Apple and Microsoft
Unless someone substituted the javascript served by the page over unprotected HTTP (while it was sent to you). Firesheep already showed that making similar process user-friendly isn't that hard.
By saving wisely and living well below my material means. I don't plan to retire lavishly after selling a hot start up for hundreds of millions of dollars. Sure, that might happen but I am planning on retiring from a average paying job after working for many years while saving and going without luxury items like fancy cars, giant TVs, having kids and real estate I can't afford.
Works very well here: Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit, FF Aurora 13.0a2 (2012-04-23), nVidia 295.20, 4GB RAM, Core2Duo E6600
NFC Contactless credit card information can be read in plain text
Sounds like a shot across YouSendIt's bow.
Digital Modernism Done Right
I'm running that exact config and it worked for me.
"Because these people are paid poorly, they have a sense of living on a precipice and will do anything to avoid falling off."

This is actually a positive externality (well, depending on how you look at it) of providing some sort of social security net. You get to live in a society where people are less incentivized to stab each other in the back. Of course, they are also less incentivized to work themselves out of being-close-to-the-cliff.

On the other hand, in societies where, if you don't have any money, you are starving on the street as well as ostracized, you can hardly ever trust anyone not to carve you up if there is anything to be gained by it.

I once heard of a doctor working for an NGO in a major Indian city (I think it was Calcutta), who talked about how it was virtually impossible for a white person to make a friend there, because everyone he met was just trying to use him to gain status/money in some fashion.
100 lines:

"Ometa can be made in itself and optimized in about 100 lines of code" -- http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010004_steps10.pdf

And then about 100-200 lines to compile the intermediate language to machine code according to this paper: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010003_PEG.pdf
the OS X kernel is open source. so why aren't people reading it to figure out where this bug is?
Thank you. Those are great points.

Is it weird that I love doing this stuff so much, that the simple idea that I can go work anywhere means I can go on a 2 week road trip and work while doing that is vacation enough? Granted, me from 2 years from now might have a different take. But the fact that 'work' means going into a coffee shop, staying at home with my dogs on the couch, or going into a cool co-working space and collaborate with like-minded people... it's like my whole life will become this big vacation. Because I really love writing software, it's just exhilarating. 'Work' to me is having to slave through rush-hour, deal with water cooler talk, walk into a sea of cubes in a faceless corporation, spend hours upon hours in meetings that accomplish little, then put on my headphones and pretend I'm somewhere else. The work itself is what actually takes me away from that reality.
Age-related observations tend to be 1% fact, 99% confirmation bias. It is also a short circuit to actual debate by invalidating opposing viewpoints.

"John refuses to switch the project to MongoDB. They're too old and complacent."
You could accomplish the same thing using local storage in an iframe with postmessage and it'd be a lot more robust with fairly significant browser support. (IE8+)

I built a demo a year ago that let you store personal data and exposed a postmessage API for storing and sharing permissions and personal data with sites as kind of the beginnings of a poor man's client-side only Oauth.
I've been a Mac user since the beginning, and by far my biggest frustration is the perpetual running-out-of-RAM, even when I close basically everything. I have 4GB of RAM, and frequently catch kernel_task using at least half of it.
Skype for Windows Phone is basically useless
> If the same team of developers could rewrite the system from scratch using what they learned from the original system?

We're doing this right now at work - completely rewriting one of our apps from the ground up. It's been an awesome experience to look at what we did wrong in the old code base and discuss how to fix that with the new one.

I definitely don't advocate doing this on every project, but unless there's been due diligence (in refactoring, consolidating duplicated code, etc) I think oftentimes we reach a point where this becomes somewhat inevitable for progress to be made.

A forest fire now and again is a good thing to clear underbrush and replenish nutrients and whatnot.
Sure, computers were around back then. But I don't think there was much of an industry around them outside of academia. There are quantum computers now, but not many "quantum programmers" :P. (It's not a perfect parallel; I'm just being a little glib.)

Edit: My point was that there won't be very many programmers with 40 years' experience. Turns out the OP meant 40 year old programmers, which is a different story.
The post is (too) light on information, but I don't dismiss it immediately. Perry Metzger was very much involved with NetBSD (maybe he still is) as a developer. He might know a thing or two about memory management ;).
They tend to use layers of DSLs (sometimes four or five deep), but even when you add up the code for all the layers it's smaller than C.
No difference, except they didn't just warn of a possible attack, they implemented it.
Should we ban all analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics)?

Or should we regulate how analytics software handles data instead?
Cool. BTW, is there a reason for naming the file "isullshit_spiders.py" and not as "isbullshit_spiders.py"? :)
You started out with the hardest programming language in common use. Bad idea. Start with Python and grow from there.
...sudo purge? ;)

> purge
// wait ~10 seconds
Done.
Probably a lot of people hitting the up arrow to save the link to try out this evening. I plead guilty to doing that. I wish I'd read the comments first.
What I don't understand is that Ruby already has the purported benefits that node.js provides.

If you're doing networking stuff, we've got EventMachine for doing event-driven architecture, and that's a heavily proven library in production.

Sinatra pioneered the microframework niche, and most microframeworks in other languages like node.js are almost a carbon copy.

And, of course, we have the highly mature full-blown frameworks like Rails, which is becoming more modular by the day. It's dead simple to pull out the default "cruft" that Rails comes with to make it easier for beginners and custom build your models, routing, controllers, templates, assets, etc.

I just don't see the appeal in switching to a less mature platform that doesn't have any benefits that I'm aware of.
App zaps junk mail
The compilers, down to machine code, are included in the 20K budget. The special language -> intermediate form tool is only a few hundred lines. There are a couple of intermediate -> machine code tools, also a few hundred lines. And of course, together they are self-hosting.

Check out the top paper in that list http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf The pdf was produced in their publishing software, running on their OS, compiled with their compilers. And, they are still under budget.
When look at similar lists of errors, wonders how the C++ program can work
FCC responds quickly to CREW request for Murdoch docs
I have the same experience: my MBP with 8GB RAM and SSD is pretty fast running Lion. But my two-year old Mac Mini at work with 4GB and platter disk runs terribly slow ever since I did a clean Lion install.
>I don't recognize any of his symptoms anyway, and my OS X computers get pretty RAM-heavy use, with almost always a linux VM open, XCode, Safari with ~10 tabs, iTunes with a few thousand songs, etc.

Oh boy I wish I could say the same. Admittedly I don't shut down on a daily basis but this didn't used to be a problem in SL. FWIW I've an old tank of a tower that has a video card on its last leg.. shutting down invariably leads to ~30 minutes of downtime while the card heats up and reconnects whatever needs reconnecting for both monitors to work.

Since Lion, I've noticed frequent hangs and beach-balls when doing even menial tasks. Transmit, terminal, texmate, a few tabs in chrome. If time machine starts backing up I can forget about a smooth Preview open or switching to a largish open textmate file without beach-ball'ing. If I want to use a Win7 Parallels VM--I can't do anything else. Even now as I type this I have a ubuntu vm running at the login screent and it causes the machine to shake off the cobwebs between almost everything.

It's certainly not a bad machine--there's 8gb ram, and tons of diskspace--good processor. In fact, I would go multiple months without a reboot and heavy use when on SL without hardly any problems at all.

Then there is the new i5 MBPro. Cool trick you can do: hook up an external monitor via thunderbolt and watch as the [left side] dock becomes a mangled mess with icons miss-positioned and wrongly triggering apps--it's like playing a game of whack-a-mole trying to open terminal to kill -KILL dock :)

The i5 has also been less than stellar compared to the older MBPro I sold to buy it in terms of performance.
Kay's assertion seems incredible -- he really has to prove it.

It does not square with at least some research and what Brooks most perspicaciously noted in 'No Silver Bullet' -- that there is essential complexity in software, and it is the dominant factor. That really seems very opposed to anything anywhere near 100-fold general improvements.

Looking at the VPRI Steps report of 2011-04, prima facie, overall, they seem to be producing a 'second-draft' of current practice, not a revolutionary general technique.

People regularly say they translated their system from language A to language B and got 10-100 times code-size reductions. This seems essentially what STEPS is doing: when you look at something again, you can see how to improve it and do a much better job. But the improvement comes not from the general aspect -- the language B -- but from understanding better the particular project because you already had a first-draft.

This can still be valuable work though, since it is about general things we all use. Second-drafts are valuable, and ones of important things even more so.

But we should probably not infer that they are coming up with a revolutionary general way to write new software.

Substantially because large scale software cannot be designed: it must be evolved. We only know what to focus a second-draft around because we muddled together the first draft and it evolved and survived. You cannot write a second-draft first.

Having said that, if they find particular new abstractions, they could be very valuable. If, for example, VPRI came up with a neat way to express implicit concurrency, maybe, that might possibly be comparable to inventing/developing gargage-collection in common programming languages -- certainly useful and valuable.
Iran cuts off Internet access to oil refineries following malware attack
I thought the presentation metaphorically enforced the message they were trying to deliver. To me, that's actually useful and not "over-styled" or "all-nonsense" - it's a valid technique to communicate with more than just words and to encourage a viewer (well, a viewer that doesn't distrust animation and/or "styling") to watch the entire presentation.
The Coursekit identity was great. It was done by Ed Nacional – http://ednacional.com
Has anyone used Manpacks? I'd never heard of it until now, but I'm considering signing up.
Computer Science changes very little in 4-6 years. Computer programming might change - but if that was true then nobody would still be programming 3years after graduating because everything would have changed.

The reason for schools dropping CS is market forces. In the late 90s everyone wanted to do CS because that's where the jobs where, the market crashed and nobody wanted to do CS, then the market picked up and there were no CS grads, so wages went up, so people enrolled, then the market dipped .... Unfortunately there is a 3-4 lag in the system.

Of course if the schools taught CS rather than programming this wouldn't matter as much.

If you really want to get worried, check out how many schools still teach chemistry. Google/Facebook/etc can get by with self-taught programmers. The rest of industry can't get by with self-taught chemists.
Looking at his personal website it seems like he might have other motivations http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/matloff.html