skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be interested to know more about the topology of the UK domestic internet, is there anywhere where one can find such information?
Is the "Lighten Up" posting becoming some sort of a meme now? This is the 3rd time it is posted in this discussion...
Yes, I did make the game, it is more of a canvas experiment than a fully polished game, that is why the color scheme maybe a bit odd. You should try to get over 20,000 points and you'll get a surprise at the end!
1. You already knew how to design. In fact you are a very talented and well known designer. If you didn't have design skills, chances are a huge huge amount lower that anything you put out will make the rounds - design is super important, and you of all people know that. And that's something you need to learn as well, so tack that on top of the time it takes to learn how to code.

We often take for granted the effort and expertise needed to do something that we can do so easily or has become second nature to us. This is sometimes why the better you are at something, the more painful it is to watch someone else do it poorly.
"They have made a lot of progress on the Sharepoint side which will keep them in the enterprise market ... it's become a completely viable alternative to Java ..."

Sharepoint appears to be little more than a recreation of the Internet "in the small". First time I saw it I had the same thought as the last time I saw it: "WTF do we need _this_ for? We already share files; we already have FTP; we already have the Internet. WTF???"

Am I wrong about Sharepoint?
Simple Ruby on Rails contact form using ActiveModel and Pony
All you have give up for this is tightly-packed arithmetic statements, like this:

5*5-3

Instead, you have to give your tokens some breathing room:

5 * 5 - 3

I don't know, that seems pretty stupid too.
PIE 1.0.0 Released – CSS3 decorations for IE
Despite the financial crisis, eCommerce is still going strong in France
Google search is overwhelmed by new "hot" topics rather than solid valuable enduring sites. It's almost as if their news crawl has invaded their web crawl. I think the rush to have "fresh" content in the first 10 links is actually making Google significantly less useful.
comments or just downvotes?
You're completely missing the point. Sexist and racist jokes shouldn't be acceptable anywhere, not in India, not in Europe, not in Sticksville, Stickscountry.

Acceptance is not the same as acceptability.
This article is actually phenomenally ignorant of what it means to run an entity such as Microsoft. Ballmer is no gem, but the author suggests he failed because he didn't re-invent an inherited, gigantic behemoth constructed in the eyes of Gates, who hung around for years in a non-official capacity. Oh, and he lost to Apple.

Could he have done better? I guess. Could he have done worse? I'm sure.
50 Tips To Make Your Small Business Look Bigger
It looks like Coursera is trying to scale rapidly. If you look at the potential course offerings, Coursera has much more. The problem is it's harder to control quality. The Machine Learning course is great, but the Computer Vision is much less engaging.

On the other hand, Udacity seems more focused on a couple of core offerings.
> The Apple dance takes a couple minutes to do

You either got lucky or did the Apple dance a lot more recently than some of us. When I did the Apple dance, I had to wait more than a month before my application to be a developer was "approved", then it took weeks to figure out how to get the certificate stuff working. Even after I got it working it was fragile - my ability to put an app on the phone was never something I could expect would just work - it would spontaneously break with a cryptic error for no apparent reason.
On a related note, I compiled and ran this sample on Playstation 3, and no memory reordering was detected. This suggests that the two hardware threads inside the PPU effectively act as a single processor, with very fine-grained hardware scheduling.

This is because all of the cores on the Cell processor are in-order (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution#In-order...). That fact is well documented: http://hpc.pnl.gov/people/fabrizio/papers/ieeemicro-cell.pdf

And for the record, the "correct" thing to do is to always use the appropriate memory and instruction fences. Reasoning about where these should go can be subtle.
Um, when I write code in Typed Racket (and I have a whole course using it), the code tends to be much more similar to ML than to conventional Lisps. When I write code in Lazy Racket, it is somewhat like a dynamically typed version of Haskell, and unsurprisingly not too similar to other Lisps. Same goes for a whole bunch of stuff. Another random example: there's a whole library of functional data structures that is based on Okasaki's book.

In fact, if you want to focus on macros as some kind of a driving force for code -- then it that exact aspect (a) macros in Racket can be very different than macros in other Lisps; (b) more than that, there are many kinds of macros in Racket that you cannot write in those Lisps. As for digging on-line for crossover code from other Lisps that finds its way into Racket: you'll obviously find a lot of Scheme code, but practically nothing from other Lisps. The bottom line is that the syntactic "lots of parens" similarity is an extremely shallow one.

Bottom line: Racket is roughly at the same level of a "functional programming language" as ML etc, certainly more than Python and Ruby where side-effects are embraced much quicker. Like you said, "even have equivalents of map..." -- whereas in Racket these kind of functional/non-destructive operations are expected. (For example, the Racket GC is tuned to perform well when allocating lots of short-term objects, something that is a direct result of FP being the most dominant style.)

And yes, I know that you're not bashing Lisp -- you're just quick to lump all Lisps on the same pile, and reach the obviously bogus conclusion that first-class syntax is the thing that drives code. (That's a point that is subjectively obvious to me, as someone who has been in this part of the PL world for more than two decades.) "LISP" is, BTW, just an outdated spelling, period. It's true that in CL circles "Lisp" is taken as implicitly meaning "Common Lisp", but in the same circles "LISP" is taken implicitly as "an outdated spelling for Lisp, therefore Common Lisp" unless you're one of the old farts whose making a reference to LISP 1.5 or something as ancient.
And there are people still using XP because they say 7 is a horrorshow. I've worked (in the last year!) with some salesmen at my company who still ask to be moved back to DOS because they can't figure out Windows.

Opinions are a funny thing: they're not always logical.
My mystery complimenters: curiouser and crsuoiesr
This is a lesson for all online videos:

> The most important button for video lectures is not ‘play’ but ‘pause.’ Students can always choose to pause at a point and, say, absorb a slide. What that means is that when you are creating an online lecture, you can build this option in and go fast. This is something that the Khan Academy have already worked out. But that Stanford course was still in the old style.
I've been a windows user for a long time. Windows evolution is too damn slow and too profit driven. Being a Microsoft customer, feels like being subjected to a painfully slow usability experiment. Now they bring forward WinRT and Metro UI but I expected that with Win7 or even earlier. Whats wrong with win7 ? Its just a (more) stable win xp with a new theme and a new price. If I had a business, I would be scared to let Microsoft control me by the b*lls.
Covering indexes is really good news!
If you are an ARM shareholder
Oh hey it's just like last time stupid money was chasing tech around and everybody suddenly wanted to be a programmer!

Once they figure out again that's it's usually tedious and unglamorous work that doesn't pay particularly well on average they'll lose interest again.
Android Users Getting Taken by Fake Marketplace Malware | Best Android Tablets
>Nothing about the experience of Windows now is any different from what it was in 2000.

Then when they change something, the world goes into a shitstorm because it's different.
Sorry, was trying to address underlying concerns rather than specific software.

you have to agree that going with a tried-and-true RDBMS that's been around for decades is a much better prospect than choosing one of the new, unproven NoSQL products.

I disagree. Like I said, CP vs AP are two very different strategies for addressing mutable shared state, and there are no AP RDMBSs that I'm aware of. If your system dynamics are fundamentally AP, no number of Oracle Exadata racks will do the job. If your dynamics are fundamentally CP, Riak, SimpleDB, and Cassandra will make your life a living hell. Few applications are all-AP or all-CP, which is why most teams I know use a mixture of databases.
Cool work! Can you comment more on the different sparse matrices you're using along the left-hand side? You said they are sparse matrices of University of Florida... are they just provided by the University or are they of some significance?

Also: I don't know if it's a bug, or what, but many of the graphs appear to have some outlying points that don't seem to be connected to anything: http://i.imgur.com/qXNjO.jpg

I'm viewing it in Windows 7 on Chrome 18.0.1025.168.
Hellloooooo, websockets. A nice reverse proxy to Node will be so welcome.
Yes: SimpleDB, HBase, Cassandra, Riak, Voldemort.
I'm curious what progress you think they made in Sharepoint?

Last I heard everyone was ditching it for Dynamics or anything-else-but-Sharepoint. I've never heard a good word said about Sharepoint. Though they seemed good at selling it. But it sounds to me that it invariably turned into a disaster.

I've always regarded Sharepoint as the new Lotus Notes, I'm happy to admit being wrong as my experience with it is a little tainted as I once worked for a company that Sharepoint was often suggested as an alternative to our product.
I'm actually not sure if Chrome's app store allows developers to monetize apps... it would seem kind of absurd if they didn't, but a cursory examination doesn't display any prices. If nothing else, web app monetization is the focus of one of Mozilla's current projects, set to launch later this year.[1]

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/apps/partners/
> What's wrong with windows as of Windows 7?

1) The start menu is just terrible, 2012 and they haven't imposed a method to avoid it being a jumbled mess. Worst part, even if i reorganize it to be more gnome 2 like, next time an app updates it fubars it again. The only thing that makes it remotely usable is the search bar.

2) Explorer's file copy capabilities are really bad, get 3-4 transfers going to your NAS, a USB key, whatever and it crawls to a halt.

3) Explorer just completely goes to hell if you lose connection to a network drive. I have my home NAS mapped as a network drive, take the laptop somewhere else, tell it to resume, "oh no i have a folder on by NAS open when it went to sleep", now I have to wait 20 minutes while it decides it can't find the network drive, nor will explorer do anything while it waits. Also the using the "file upload" window in chrome is useless when the NAS drive isn't available, it literally crashes chrome on my laptop since chrome times out waiting for windows to decide the drive is unavailable, i have to use drag+drop to attach files to gmail.

4) Mouse scroll wheel only works on the window with focus, luckily there is an addon that fixes this called WizMouse

5) No virtual desktops.

6) No native mounting of iso files, seriously I have to install some third party program that installs a fake CD-ROM drive to access the file system of an iso?

I think that covers my major gripes, my only major gripe of linux, and why I stopped using it as my primary OS, is just terrible management of multiple displays, especially in multiple orientations.
Most programs don't use anywhere near enough cpu to make parallel algorithms pay off. So you may as well keep it simple, especially if you aren't hitting the limits of your current algorithms. Simplicity means less code, which means less bugs.
But not every programmer is going to implement their own lock-free algorithms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_algorithm). Experts write such algorithms, and other programmers will build their applications on top of those libraries. And even more programmers will use abstractions that aren't even libraries, but language-level abstractions.
The best part about the general population attempting to learn to code is that there may be fewer people who think programming is magic.
I'm judging her by her writing. If I had the opportunity to meet her I may think differently. You are right, "complete lack of social skills" is probably way too extreme, but she definitely lacks some social skills if she is letting comments like she described get under her skin. People making those comments are not coming from a position of power (even if they are managers). They are the weak people in the chain and people with strong social skills deal with those people and move on. It is part of life.
Previous discussion (same company, different article)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984021
Interesting premise although I don't think this is playing out yet (my company tracks this data). That said, we do see lots of corporations entering the venture ecosystem which is probably a precursor to what Gabriel is mentioning.

That said, I do think @antrod's point that Gabriel references is somewhat flawed if I'm understanding his point correctly.

For a public company doing an acqui-hire, dilution would likely not come into play as the amount being paid is probably small (for the acquirer) and so EPS (earnings per share) dilution doesn't really become a factor. Of course, if the deal is larger, it does, but then it's probably not an acqui-hire either.

In terms of valuing on a EBITDA multiple, that may be the case for some companies, but I wouldn't underestimate the power of feeling like they (big co) might be left out from a coming boom or be disrupted as motivation to pay a price that is not strictly based on a financial ratio. I used to work in a big co in a previous life, and if they believe it's a burning platform need, financial constraints can and will be overridden.
Hands Off! Is another great tool.
So what's the surprise here? this is exactly why you use locks in the code, because you don't know what the compiler is going to do with your code, and you don't want to know all the details of that. The solution is not to know all those asm details, but to use tools like locks correctly.

edit: after writing lock-free code years ago, and having very subtle bugs like the ones described here, I don't think it is a good idea anymore, unless you are in a very specific scenario.
Close, but not quite. As I recall (some 20 years ago) it had two pages of actual APL code (not notation, real runnable code).
There's an easy fix for part of the problem: bind shift-space to underscore. Yes, you still require shift, but IMO it's the stretch not the shift that makes typing an underscore jarring.

xmodmap -e 'keycode 65 = space underscore'
Clayton Christensen: Instilling the Value of Integrity in Your Heart
For the sound of it, the job would be compiling a cross-target version of GCC/LLVM and putting QEMU, an iOS ISO and some libs in a TGZ. Could hardly be called a major feat of engineering.
A misunderstanding of the learning process
One of the most efficient everyday optimizations I've made in the past few years was to adopt the lisp-style naming convention for my local file system hierarchy. Removing all capitalization and special characters (other than the dash) makes navigating via CLI much easier. And having a predictable naming scheme means I rely on tab completion slightly less too, as I have more predictive capability regarding how I might have named things in the past. More generally, treating my home folder as, essentially, an exposed API for which I'm the primary consumer has paid dividends.
Unlike Rudiam, I thought the title was basically appropriate. Through the extensive quotes at the end of the article (clearly, the author did more interviews than he could have gotten away with), the author made it clear that these findings were the result of one scientists, and that his peers were interested, still not convinced, and awaiting more data. Pretty good for pop sci!
Thank you. These matrices cover wide spectrum of domains (such as structural engineering, computational fluid dynamics, model reduction, electromagnetics and so forth). They are available as a public data set on Amazon cloud: http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/2379?_encoding=UTF8&jiveR...

As for not connected dots - it might be a bug in my transformation code, but more likely they are just isolated components of the graph. E.g. http://www.yasiv.com/graphs#HB/bcsstm26 - big bang :)
I think that there are many assumptions being made here. The biggest of which is that everyone is even interested in writing code. I know many people whose eyes glaze over the second I mention the word code, and would consider it akin to water boarding to learn code. I don't know that everyone is even wired to write code. Its certainly a certain type of person that can abstract problems logically and create good code from these abstractions.

I personally think computer literacy/competency is much more important than the ability to code. Unfortunately we still aren't to the point where we can say that most of the population is there.
Wharton's First Innovation Tournament in the Middle East
I think they should make keyboards with the spacebar divided, and make the left half (or I guess the right if you're left-handed) into a shift key.
Generating Random Numbers, Strings, Data in Objective C with JFRandom
Exactly. If more people have an intuitive understanding of what "coding" is then that makes professional coders' lives a lot easier.
Why do mysql and PHP apologists think "people have managed to succeed despite deliberately making things more difficult for themselves" is a compelling argument? Mysql and PHP didn't make them succeed, or even help them succeed.
I had an MP3 player before the iPod as well. It was a 64MB Rio and it held ~10 songs.

The thing was iTunes wasn't designed to be a music loader, it's a music manager. This became evident when they introduced smart playlists.

A few of my friends had Nomads, they were large, heavy and the UI was archaic in comparison.
DCI and Decoupling Business Logic from Ruby on Rails Part 1
Quote:

You can see how the world is divided in two parts here:
Above average (a bad thing in this case): South America, Middle East, Africa, Asia.
Below average (a good thing in this case): Europe, North America, Oceania.

Just showing such an obvious division, without commenting on it (industrial vs. post-industrial, "developed" vs. ex-colonies, Western vs. everything-else, etc.) seems almost absurd. There's a thing to be said about the way and the ways the US and Europe control the net, it has been said elsewhere.
This looks like wheremyfriends be for github — very cool :) I did something similar [0] the other day for facebook friends, so it's cool to see this, too.

I like that you can hide the people you only know from forks.

[0] http://wwikt-peterldowns.dotcloud.com
Etags are useful for static assets as well.
> Yes: SimpleDB, HBase, Cassandra, Riak, Voldemort.

Flagged your post since you obviously didn't even bother reading 2 sentences before replying.
This misses one point when comparing Lisp to languages like Ruby. Lisp does not have infix notation. Therefore, you never have to worry that "foo-bar" (the symbol) could ever be confused with "foo - bar” the operation subtracting bar from foo. That’s because in Lisp, foo-bar is written "(- foo bar).”

Since a Lisp programmer spends all his time writing "(- foo bar),” when he sees “foo-bar,” his brain easily parses it as a symbol, and he never needs to wonder whether it should actually have been “foo - bar” with spaces to separate the infix operator from the symbols representing variables.
Well, I didn't benchmark specific parts of it, but here's a quick test (that's actually one of my favorite benchmarks now):

The program: (you can run it in the REPL; use C-S-y to paste from OS clipboard):

SS-USER> (defun sum (n)
(let rec ((n n)
(r 0))
(if (zerop n)
r
(rec (1- n) (+ r n)))))

SS-USER> (time (sum 100000))

The time spent will be displayed in the ss-output buffer.

Firefox: 6516ms
Chrome: 138ms

Parsecs away... :-(

However:

(time (without-interrupts (sum 100000)))

Firefox: 376ms
Chrome: 135ms

Still a lot worse than Chrome, but quite a big difference.

without-interrupts ensures that its body runs continuously. Normally we run 200 instructions of each thread, until we get to 50ms, then reschedule for later with setTimeout(0). So that's probably the reason why Chrome seems to do much better—maybe setTimeout is very expensive on FF.
I write code slower than my typing speed anyway. This sort of typing efficiency obsession leads people to use dvorak or crazy non-standard keyboards. No thanks, not worth caring about.
and gets even worse if you bring variables into the game.

a = 5

b = 3

everybody from nearly every programming language would expect that after

c = a-b

you will find c to be 2 not nil (or throwing an exception or whatever)
No matter how much you might try to excuse it, there is no greater user friendliness
than a device simply identifying as data storage to the OS. It's ridiculous to have
to use a separate program when you could just use your file manager.
Really? I don't find conceptual and technical difficulty of considering (co)homology theories determined by spectras/infinite loop spaces like K-theories and cobordism theories, study of stable homotopy theories, spectral sequences, triangulated categories etc. to be much smaller that the difficulty of algebraic geometry. As I said, I find them both to be really abstract and mysterious.
I was pleasantly surprised by Windows 7, and it doesn't make me physically ill to use or support like Vista did. It's like a cleaner, stable XP.

But that's the problem, really. I didn't love XP - in fact I feel like I remember the inflection point sometime after SP2 where people were starting to say, 'XP isn't that bad any more - it's gotten pretty solid and isn't too much of a pain.'

That's not really attractive.

Innovating on UI is probably what they should be doing - because all three major operating systems are powerful enough when not intentionally crippled, but Windows 8 is pretty repulsive.
Calculating the total capacity of a data network
Full Distributed Teams: are they viable?
As computers permeate more of our everyday lives it becomes necessary to understand them on some level.

I vehemently disagree on this. Apple has made a silly fortune proving the contrary.

If you need deep understanding of a device to make it useful then the designers have failed to provide you with the right abstractions.
Edsger W. Dijkstra interview (1985)
Not exactly Forbes but a "motivational speaker" and a blogger. No doubt he has the experience of running a company the size of MSFT and crippled by anti-trust settlements on both sides of the Atlantic

By the way, Microsoft is still growing all while investing in xBox, Bing and Microsoft Research (PE of around 11 and valued north of $250 Billion.) They have returned tens of billions to shareholders via dividends and still have almost $50 Billion in reserve. This blogger should send his resume and ideas to the board of top companies if he can do better as CEO.

Microsoft is about to make a cool and predictable $25 Billion in profit this year. 25,000,000,000.00 in just one year. Not sure what will happen 5-10 years from now (no one really does) but it's a great achievement for a "dead" company.
> 5) No virtual desktops.

http://www.welton.it/articles/windows_for_linux_users

There used to be one you could install, which made Windows slightly more tolerable.