skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No.

CUDA yes. Cg yes. HLSL yes. Verilog yes. VHDL yes. C++ or Java with MapReduce yes. PHP and MySQL with memcached yes. Erlang yes — and it really is functional, inside each process, anyway — that is, the level where you aren't getting any parallelism. Octave or R, potentially, but not today, as far as I know. Mathematica yes, and it, too, is mostly functional.

In theory, side effects are what make parallelism hard, and so languages whose semantics are side-effect-free (unlike F# or Mathematica or Erlang) should make it easy. So we all thought in 1980. Since then we spent 20 years or so trying to make that happen, and it basically didn't work.

There are basically four kinds of parallelism within easy reach today. There's SIMD, like MMX, SSE, 3DNow, AltiVec, and the like; you'd think that data-parallel languages and libraries like Numpy and Octave would be all over this, but except for Mathematica, that doesn't seem to be happening. There's running imperative code on a bunch of tiny independent processors that share no data; AFAIK that's what the shader languages are doing. There's instruction-level parallelism on a superscalar processor, which largely benefits from things like contiguous arrays in memory, or maybe what Sun is doing with Niagara, where the processor pretends to be a bunch of tiny independent slow processors. And then there's splitting up your data across a shared-nothing cluster, which is how every high-traffic web site works, and that's what MapReduce makes simpler.

Uh, and then there's designing your own hardware or programming FPGAs, which is what Verilog and VHDL are for.

Languages like OCaml (I don't know anything about F# except that it's like OCaml, but for the CLR) have no special advantage for any of these scenarios. They don't even have the theoretical advantage that they have no side effects and therefore you can speculatively multithread them without breaking the language semantics. They do have the massive practical disadvantage, in most of the scenarios I described, of needing unpredictable amounts of memory, having massive libraries, and using pointers all over the place. Using pointers all over the place kills your locality of reference and your ILP. Having massive libraries and using unpredictable amounts of memory makes it impossible to run them inside your GPU and means they can't run on an FPGA (except by using external memory, like the awesome Reduceron). And nothing about the language semantics helps with SIMD either.

So, sheesh, go read Alan Bawden's dissertation or whatever, but don't go around claiming that ML (or even Haskell) is going to magically make your algorithms parallel. We tried that. It didn't work. We're trying something else now.
We'll be adding ways of getting more than 3 soon, and we'll also roll out an automated way of merging.

We could have waited, but this release was so huge and really one shipped feature is worth two in the Git repo. =)

EDIT: Here's the workaround for now. Just add your other email addresses as contributors. You'll be able to post using both accounts.
Of course, Huck and Tom are the ultimate in mischief and going against establishment, so it's ironic that it has become the study material of forced assignments.
"One shipped feature is worth two in the Git repo"

Damn straight, couldn't agree more. Thanks for the dynamism :-)
Oops, I forgot to put the link to the Christmas Special. Here it is (all 2 hours of it):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=323909610753051544
It's not inherently less enriching, just a different skill. Learning Perl can allow him to understand code and algorithms at a deeper level.

Putting extra effort into high school English can be totally worth it, but it is a personal preference that shouldn't be pushed on the unwilling.
How to Recover Your XP Password | TechJaws
Here's something just out--I doubt it would interest the community at large, but I thought you might enjoy it.

http://www.quickanded.com/2008/12/gladwell-kane-theory-of-te...
I don't have time to check it out now, so I'll gloss over it tomorrow... but I think I might just have to kiss you (run away now). This seems to be exactly what I'm looking for!

I'll drop another line and some feedback after trying it in the morning!
Does Gödel Matter?
That'll put Munroe in his place.
"Twitter of Korea" Acquired by "Google of Korea"
Wow, that explains how I can code all the time but just tread water except for a few weeks a year.
Tatas to raise Rs.15,000 cr to fund projects
Oh, I saw the link and didn't read your username clearly. I have the TextMate bundle here...I suppose some interested person will have to get to writing a few io.vims :^)
The site looks kind of spammy, and the formatting is pretty nasty, but actually these are mostly excellent pieces of advice.
Ha. My mom told me to do exactly this, but I wasn't ready to abandon my friends and safe, familiar school.

It seemed daunting faced with yet another 4 years of school, college, and I had fantasies about dropping out in the middle when a business starts to take off. But the first 1/12 went by in the blink of an eye, so this is looking actually doable. Plus, many at this age would much rather be in college than working a boring job, so it would be short-sighted to run away from such an appealing community.
So is this vociferous, down to earth rant an in your face way of saying "that 37signals methodology of work now, make money later ostensibly DOES NOT WORK"?
Investing In Thick and Thin
Microsoft has put a lot of effort into student recruitment this year. It will be interesting to see whether it continues this drive into the new year.
I'm so glad the article didn't end up taking a 'social enterprise' angle. Silver was doing his stuff a long time before the concept was given a title, and hence got diluted with PR nonsense and consultancy management speak.
This then, if true is the nth transformation of Reddit in under a year. It went from serious news and discussion, to a few fluff stories, to the rather tremendously epic and pronounced title wars in which there was constant bitching and moaning about 4chan/lolcats flooding the front page and the tenacity for persons to exaggerate stories in order to get more up votes, and now it's a dating site?

Reddit is truly the shining beacon of internet evolution. Or maybe it's just a bunch of people who don't know what the fuck they want out of one website.

Good observation mate.
Homework is at the discretion of the teacher, and is also highly correlated to subject. For example, math might be every day, history once a week or so, and a couple gym class health assignments the whole year. But it seems to have nothing to do with what grade you're in. I thought that writing assignments would gradually get longer, but my final essay senior year was half the length of my 7th grade science report on the human body, so I was clearly mistaken.

I always thought the whole sleeping at school thing was pretty lame. I can't say I haven't nodded off a few times, but it seems disrespectful to your teacher and peers. Although, it is a pretty funny break from material when the teacher creatively awakens or badgers the offender. (Or, best of all, let's them sleep through to the next period and awake to utter confusion.)
Top 10 Hollywood movies on hacking
The movie listed below doesn’t teach you how to hack, but these movies are good enough to inspire/motivate you for hacking.

These are the top Hollywood movies on hacking which is worth adding to your movie collection.
Reddit brims with eager singles ready to hook up

What makes you think those singles, much like here, aren't predominantly male?

I disagree with the idea of adapting the reddit system to fit that particular use. Seems like an obvious case of over-optimisation if they did do that.

Simple systems (like reddit) encourage complex behaviour (like what you've observed). Complex systems encourage simple behaviour. Don't make the system more complex than it needs to be.
I agree. I use the scroll button to open links in new tabs, but sometimes I really want to open a page in the same tab.

This is only seconded by links that are something like:
<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="someStuff();">

I sure do love opening a tab for javascript:void(0).
While I'm not a Vim user (or even an emacs user) that sounds useful without the knowledge of Vim keyboard shortcuts.
Joy, as well. (http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy.html)

Putting words in a list is also a way to do quoting, so you get the lispy code-is-data property without necessarily needing Forth-style immediate words.
"I fail to understand how tables are more "semantic" than nested divs. Tables only have semantics within the context of some formalism that defines their semantic meaning."

Tables are not more semantic than nested divs. But nested divs aren't very semantic, either. Tables are used for tabular data. Divs are used for dividing content.

"I don't see how swaths of divs, some of them used for semantics (according to some metadata standard), some of them used for purely presentational purposes, improve anything."

No one is proposing that you make every element a div. In the web standards community, we call this "divitis" and while better than table-based layouts, it still isn't semantic.

"CSS people are completely anal about not using tables for layout whilst at the same time the whole notion of document structure is so utterly destroyed in any JavaScript heavy app."

Don't lump these developers (who's code doesn't gracefully degrade for non-JavaScript users0 together with the rest of us.

"These priorities make no sense to me. Laying out web pages with divs and CSS is a black art. It's fragile. It breaks in all kinds of nasty ways."

Just because you don't understand how to make something work doesn't mean it's a "black art". Plenty of web developers are able to create semantically-meaningful documents styled (cross-browser) with CSS. CSS offers advantages, but you seem to only see (imaginary) disadvantages.

"It reduces the productivity of UI development to pre 90s levels and leads ot entire pages done in Flash."

I'm not even sure how to respond to this. It's ridiculous.
Because then they would all have the same syntax.
I've used them. The reliability is terrible; at one point the entire system went down for several days. I've also had numerous other problems affecting my account there. The support staff are really nice, and pretty responsive, but that doesn't make up for their systems being broken.

For my needs (occasional access to a windows machine, cheaply) all this wasn't a big problem. Maybe if what you need is just a uk-based account for occasional testing, it'll be OK for you as well. But I wouldn't use them anywhere I needed even a little reliability.
2008 end-of-year tech stock tips
Perl 5 now uses Git for version control
Ask HN: Opening a company
So I've got a ridiculously simple idea which I think is pretty good. That is, it is something I'd pay to use and people I've asked would pay to use too. It's a subscription-based service where I will be able to charge $10 to $25 monthly per user.

I have taken the time to write the code for it and it seems to work very nicely. I could only work on it on weekends since I have a day job which I like very much. But quite surprisingly, despite having worked on it for only 10 hours so far, I think it's already good enough to try it with a group of friends.

Also, despite having what I think is a strong business model, I'm not willing to take any investment money whatsover, so if I do manage to launch it, I'll pay for hosting and everything myself. Now the question: I'm a Brazilian citizen living in Brazil, and one of the things I think I'll need is to actually be able to found a company in the US or UK, so I can have a business bank account there, so I can have the website take international credit cards via Authorize.net or something.

Does anyone have experience with that? Requirements? Fees? How hard could that be? My guess is that I'll need to hire some professional assistance, I just have no idea where to look.
Well, it wouldn't be much of a braid with just Escher and Bach, now would it?
Good point. I'd like to add though that while there are merits to launching early and often, you only get one shot at delivering the right first impression. This is especially true if you've lined up the "press" to talk about your app, only for it to receive "bad press" because it's not ready or crash under the heavy load.

I think it was Paul Buchheit who said "launch your product if it's better than anything else out there". To me, it means launch when it's ready but not before.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

Nonfiction:

Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager (1993)

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (history)
I disagree that it's a personal preference. Just as some tastes need to be acquired, so does much of understanding (as with art). The first 10 times I heard Bob Marley (& Tom Waits, Arcade Fire,...) I didn't get it. Then, suddenly, I understood and now I love it. The first time I saw Van Gogh sunflowers on the wall of a friend's house I was 16 and I said, WTF? It's not a "personal preference" and I don't believe it's something you let kids decide on their own. (Picasso is crap? Ok, Billy, if you say so!) Instead, you push them a bit to essentially "listen to Bob Marley ten times". If they don't get it after that, too bad, but at least they had a chance.

Learning Perl isn't value-less, but it doesn't compare on any scale to trying "to acquire the understanding" of Huck Finn.
It's not that it magically makes thing parallel. It's that it puts the tools to do it in the hands of Joe Developer who has hankered to do functional programming in the "real world" and now can say to his manager, look, it's part of Visual Studio now, it's official, there's no reason I shouldn't do this. I am confused as to why you say OCaml/F# don't even have theoretical applications here - it it because the .NET libraries aren't side-effect free? It's about practicality, not about technology. The former is what was missing, the latter's been around for 20 years or more.

And please, PHP and MySQL? For computation? Are you serious?
Didn't he put forward two theorems? One about the undecidable statements as described in the article, but the other was much "worse": the consistency of mathematics can not be proven. That is for any axiom system with a certain minimal strength (like strong enough to derive natural numbers) it can not be proven that the axioms don't contradict each other.

Hopefully I am citing it right, as I am too lazy to look it up. But I think that is more of a ticking bomb sitting in the guts of mathematics. It could happen that one of these days the whole building of mathematics collapses because a contradiction in the axioms emerges. Apparently the common way to deal with it is to just deem it very unlikely since things went fine for centuries, and there is not much that can be done about it anyway.

Must finally read Gödel's proofs again, have been meaning to do so for ages :-/
Every linux box in existence supports PS, very well. So does every PDF reader. That covers over 80% of all computers. Extending this support could be done through a plugin. Compare this to the fact that IE does not support SVG and PS is a far better standard to work with in terms of vector drawing.

As to the turing completeness of SVG, how efficiently can JS transform vectors in comparison to PS. Not very fast.

Also, nobody wants to draw just paths.
In Boston, I've seen a few women wearing reddit t-shirts. I have yet to see the same of Boston men.

Are two lines in a profile (male/female and single?) really "over-optimization"? It seems like a really good way to get to know someone - by reading their submissions and comments.
For a second there I thought Alec Baldwin wrote a dissertation having something to do with concurrency...
It's one of my favorite languages, and is rapidly crowding out Python. It's a tremendously clean and powerful language. Since Lua was designed for embedding, its design favored adding a few meta-features that could be used to build task-appropriate features into the language, rather than adding to the language core. It's also a relatively quick language to learn, and is extraordinarily portable - the whole language is written in pure ANSI C.

It also has tail-call optimization, closures, coroutines, and other aspects that are interesting from a pure CS standpoint, such as the way the table datatype is implemented and its register-based VM.

For a good taste of Lua, skim
"The Implementation of Lua 5.0" (http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/jucs05.pdf), the quick intro to Lua in the LPEG paper (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html , around page 6 of the PDF), or _Programming in Lua_ (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/). The first edition of the latter is online, though the second edition has a bunch of added material, and IMHO is well-worth buying if you get into Lua. Also, check out LuaJIT (http://luajit.org/), if you're using i386 hardware -- it's a FAST JIT.
Surely you can take international credit cards with a Brazilian merchant account? If authorize.net don't allow that, there are many other similar providers which can help.

Setting up a merchant account is a major pain in the ass (and slow) even if you are based in the UK... I imagine it'd be even harder if you're not, and really, it's not worth the hassle unless there's really no other way to take CC payments.
http://www.bytemark.co.uk/ Sterling's cheap at the moment! "Darling, why don't we sell up in the UK, move to France, and buy a croissant."

They've been doing virtual machines for years using User Mode Linux.
Wasn't Erlang originally implemented in Prolog?
I'm getting very sick of Ted Dziuba.
You mean:
$Current_Year+1 is the Year of the Linux Desktop..
You know - I've never actually seen it.

Is it worth 2 hours?
"So does every PDF reader."

I don't think every PDF reader supports PostScript very well. Is that what you meant to say?
The main thing Joe Developer lacks to do parallel programming is massively parallel hardware, and if he's happy with just getting a 100× speedup with GPGPU hacking, maybe he doesn't even lack that. High-performance parallel programming has very little to do with functional programming languages, today and in the foreseeable future.

And please, PHP and MySQL? For computation? Are you serious?

What do you think people use PHP and MySQL for, fertilizing flowerpots? Computation is all they do! Obviously the PHP5 interpreter isn't the most computationally efficient medium in the world, but it's where it's at when it comes to horizontal web site scaling, i.e. parallelism.
indeed! how does he get out of bed in the morning, dragging that big load of negativity around.
You've got a keen insight, whoever you work with is going to be lucky.

I'm not a regular reddit user, but you actually proposed interesting thoughts for dating websites....
Only if you're a glutton for punishment. It's really awful.
How big of a deal is to raise money from a few angel investors vs. a single VC? If you get one angel investor, do they pull in a few of their friends that usually invest with them?
My thoughts exactly, I was also involved in Flash experiments from the days of Flash 4 even, when it was horrendous to "code" in.

I can't help but find it slightly irritating when people remake these in Javascript these days to have praise heaped upon them for interesting new experiments. ;)
More so you should get more then one angel investor interested and talking to you ...from there others will follow. Same with VCs .. there not interested until you have a few of their friends or other firms interested in your start-up.
Looks like good times gone till 2010
Little-guy data centers prospering in a tough economy
Even though they're not axiomatizable, natural numbers rest on reality - a contradiction would let us make two apples from one.
Washington Is Killing Silicon Valley
Advice for troubled times: Build war chest
I keep saying this, there is more to computing than websites. I completely concede your point that F#/OCaml/FP in general has little to offer when it comes to serving up web pages more quicky. Formatting records from a database for display on a client device isn't all that different since the 80s anyway. Fortunately, I don't care about doing that. I care about, for example, people not trying to do Monte Carlo work in Java because that's the organization's "standard" language. A language like F# that it is acceptable to use in a large organization with arbitrary standards made by non-technical people is a huge deal.
Escher and Bach, a semi-permanent silver braid.
I've read the book the article ostensibly reviews, and to be honest it's not much cop. It's full of, frankly, a load of rubbish about post-modern thought and the extent to which Gödel's work might vindicate it. There are certainly interesting aspects to it, but it's neither a good biography nor a particularly good introduction to incompleteness, and is liable to merely frustrate anyone possessed of a passing acquaintance with either subject.
A view which Gödel, an ardent Platonist, would have no doubt agreed with.
Yes, that's true. Did you know SVG 1.2 has sockets? http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20041027/api.html#socket
Ask YC: Running SaaS applications
Is there any special techniques on running SaSS apps? I know some people use EC2 and then charge on top of that. What are the problems or techniques when doing this?
Check out Aaron Hillegass's "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". Not directly iPhone related, but a good start on XCode / Cocoa / obj-C.
Trump sues small californian town for $100m
1000 Proverbs In English
1000, english, free proverbs, in, proverbs, proverbs in english, sayings
YC startups in general are more well suited for angel rounds than Series A. Angel rounds usually mean less dilution and a ton more flexibility. For us, we're getting a lot more valuable advice, connections and help from real engineers/entrepreneurs/founders who have built lasting companies before.

You talk to as many investors as you can, get a lead angel investor to negotiate terms, then build the round out with other angels who want to invest. Your lead angel(s) will help you find more people as well.
Suits Up, Geeks Down: The Latest Tech Hiring Numbers
What does this have to do with natural language processing?
The consumer web has been "built".

--Charles H. Duell
another version of the funny game to throw bush by a shoe in http://www.farewellshoe.com
I still don't think we have grasped the importance of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. For example, indirectly it means that we can't ever solve the halting problem. Personally, I also think it applies to physics, especially the idea to find a theory of everything. I think theory of everything won't be possible simply because the incompleteness theorem states that "given any system of axioms that produces no paradoxes, there exist statements about X which are true, but which cannot be proved using the given axioms." (where X can be numbers, computer programs or ...)
Reddit is indeed a strange beast.

I was surprised when I recently found out it is not anymore one big community but instead it got fragmented into many smaller ones.

People from one subreddit can be completely oblivious about what's going on in other ones. For the same URL you can have multiple discussions going on in parallel, one group not aware of the existence of others.
Just for my own edification, since you seem quite familiar with the subject: Is Obsidian* a big fat waste of time that'll never be as good as just compiling Haskell for a CPU like a normal person? 'cause I was considering investing some time in learning it, when I wouldn't have the free brain cycles for CUDA.

* http://www.google.com/search?q=obsidian+haskell
I heard the W3C isn't going to have a spec for Web 3.0 til 2011.

I figure that puts adoption by Microsoft around 2015.
My instincts agree with you, but the rational part of my mind can't distinguish statements that are affected by Gödel's theorem from those that are not.