skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to read mimimsft all the time, not because of the blogger (who is a little repetitive in his calls for layoffs) but the comment section, which is consistently entertaining.

And, of course, MSFT doesn't need all its employees. Really, Windows and Office should go into permanent maintence mode, just have security updates, and knock off 5000 people. MSFT should focus on new markets, developing xbox, and transition to business services like IBM.
I strongly recommend against RimuHosting for reasons that should be released in a few weeks.
To fill in some of the details: the so-called 'Second Incompleteness Theorem' states that recursively inumerable systems containing arithmetic are insufficient for proving their own consistency. It is possible to prove the consistency of arithmetic, but to do so you must use an even more complex system of axioms whose consistency can itself only be proved with an even more complex system, and so on.

So strictly speaking, the theorem doesn't rule out consistency proofs, but it does rule out proving the consistency of complex systems by simpler systems, meaning that the consistency of the consistency proofs can't be trusted any more than the consistency of the original system!
Neuro Linguistic Programming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
I agree with you on the merits; and the connections & advice from many people who have been there, done that -- trumps the other options.

Can you expand a bit more on the flexibility part either here or offline? Did you also consider VC's such as Founders Fund, First Round Capital, Maples, Union Square, etc?

Thanks, and good luck!
Tom is the anti-establishment, mischievous one -- he's set up with a family, so he has the room for mischief. Huck has no family, no one other than a drunk bum dad. He's interested in Tom's mischief, and that's his strongest connection to childhood, but mostly he's grown up beyond his years because he needs to take care of himself all the time.
The answer is probably yes, and you give no clues as to what you're doing (understandably) but do you need CCs?
Might it not be possible just to use PayPal? Since you hold the service, if someone doesn't pay you can email a reminder, give them 2 weeks' grace, then simply pull their plug.

Credit card payments can be a complete pain. In the UK it's very common to set up Direct Debits, which have all sorts of guarantees to make them attractive.
Famous Sed One-Liners Explained, Part 2 of 3
IFrauds: a photo essay on the fakest iPods ever
The Old New Thing : Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize
"I was surprised when I recently found out it is not anymore one big community but instead it got fragmented into many smaller ones."

That happened to Usenet over the years, so I am less surprised by that. I think it happens to any online forum with sufficient volume of posts that no one reader can read all of them.
I worked for a company like that. They had a whole department dedicated to analyzing customer (or rather, prospective customers) data and feeding it into a system to generate metrics of how much the company's product could save for the prospective customer.

Only trouble was, they did not charge for this, and often times failed to close the deal, and the entire operation just became a drag on profitability.

Were I the CEO of this company, I'd fire whoever came up with this scheme. If the company were based in, say, some heathen place in sub-Saharan Africa, I'd hire a tribe of native barbarians to stone his children for good measure.

(Yeah, I feel strongly about this one!)
I keep saying this, there is more to computing than websites.

I'm aware of that; I wasn't suggesting that people should be programming their websites in Verilog, after all. But running websites is part of computing.

I completely concede your point that F#/OCaml/FP in general has little to offer when it comes to serving up web pages more quickly.

That wasn't my point; I think functional programming might have a lot to offer when it comes to serving up web pages more quickly, and especially programming web-server software more easily. My point was that functional programming doesn't have a lot to offer when it comes to making your code more parallel.

Formatting records from a database for display on a client device isn't all that different since the 80s anyway.

I cannot imagine in what sense this sentence could be true. The database architectures, the languages used, the required level of efficiency, the CPU architectures, the scale of operations, the kinds of failure we expect from components, the structure of the machines (then SMP mainframes, now shared-nothing clusters of thousands of computers), the type of people doing it, the client devices, the networks, the formatting, and the nature of the data have all changed dramatically since the 80s.

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.

Do you think doing Monte Carlo work in Java is bad? Because of performance? Last I heard, the optimizations in the CLR's JIT were pretty minimal, while the Java JITs had pretty much reached parity with GCC and were breathing down icc's neck. (What Fortran compilers do people use these days?) Maybe you should get excited about people doing Monte Carlo work in Scala instead?

Anyway, whether a language is pleasant to program in or has a good compiler has very little to do with whether it helps you take advantage of available hardware parallelism — unless the way in which the compiler is good is that it auto-vectorizes your loops or supports HPF directives or something. As far as I know, F# and Java are equally abysmal at that.
> I'd guess it was a term invented to sell books/consulting services

Like UML then
Good idea. Thanks for checking it out.

David
Voted up because the premise of the article is interesting. But I disagree with the statement that Sarbanes-Oxley is killing entrepreneurship, so I'd like to hear comments about that from the entrepreneurs here. I'm also not sure that it is a sign of failure that many start-ups sell themselves to an existing big company rather than doing an IPO. It seems to me (again I would like to hear from the entrepreneurs here about this) that the whole point of starting a start-up is to have FLEXIBILITY to decide later how to cash out the business. Some like to sell to one company, some like to sell shares to the public at large, and some stay closely held for a long time. To each their own, methinks.
I tried it on Chrome running in Virtualbox seamless on a year-old box, and it was pretty zippy.
there's no reason to change the way the app works just because an anomalous thing is happening. i'd only consider it if it were to continue to consistently happen over a long period.
No, I think that'd just be a twisted pair! :0
The second theorem says that the consistency of a system cannot be proved within that system (sufficiently strong, etc).

If a contradiction is discovered in set theory, either it will be fixed by a change to the axioms, or another set of foundational axioms altogether will become the standard foundation of mathematics. Perhaps the canonical example of this is naive set theory itself - paradoxes were discovered, but set theory was interesting enough that mathematicians looked for alternate definitions that did not contain the paradoxes, and they succeeded.

There are two things to note here. First, axiomatization was a useful tool in distinguishing various types of set theory and defining the ones that did not contain the (known) paradoxes. Second, the full formal treatment of these set theories came relatively late to mathematics, as did widespread use of formal, axiomatic methods in general. Rigorous axiomatic formalisms are very useful mathematical tools, but mathematics got along without them for a long time (not even Euclid counts, by modern standards) and can do so again if necessary. It is unlikely that this will happen, not because axiomatics can be proved to always work or because mathematics cannot get along without it, but because it is too useful a tool to abandon easily.

This was really Godel's point: mathematics is not identical with formalism. They stand and fall separately. This is not to say that mathematics could never collapse for any reason, only that it would take a lot more than finding a paradox at the center of ZFC to make it happen.
Coding Horror - Gifts for Geeks: 2008 Edition, Sort of
The need for iPhone app folders and search is quickly approaching
JIT compiled languages are slow to load, because they have to compile each bit of code the first time they run it. That is why Java is known as a slow language, even though it does fine in benchmarks: because loading is the one operation that's slow enough for the user to notice.
You have a point with over-optimization.

But there are plenty of people at least claiming to be women on there. Probably still well under 50%, but not a complete sausage fest.
Toyota Expects Its First Loss in 70 Years
What's Inside Darpa's $21 Million 'Liquid' Laser?
PHP Sessions on localhost
Extending the standard model to include gravity, and thereby creating a "TOE" (Theory of Everything), is not I think going to be hurt by Godel. Because for TOE to work, all it need do is make predictions over and above the standard model, which can be verified by experiment, but also be consistent with all predictions of the standard model. If it can do this, it will stand as a TOE, at least until it disagrees with prediction, if and when that would happen. In other words, a TOE need not be "provable to be consistent in all it axioms". All it needs to do is include the Standard Model's predictions, then, make a few new ones to include gravity. Like one nice prediction would be to have the value of 10^-120 plank units for the energy density of "dark energy" arising naturally and nicely from someplace. That would be a good prediction, just as an example. If a TOE (inclusive of the standard model, plus a description of gravitons which delt with infinities), could regurgitate all standard model predictions, plus just make one prediction more (like setting the energy density of dark energy without having to appeal to the anthropic principle, mind you), then we got a good TOE. "Provable?" No. But it lives to fight another day, which is the best we can ask of a theory anyway.
The best one I've heard is displaying ratios and frequencies of interaction. Maybe "Sandy has been contacted by 7 in the last month and has responded 29% of the time." If someone has a low response rate, then fewer will waste their time.
Yes, I should probably set up an account and subscribe to everything if I want to get a better sense of things.
Banned in Cupertino
My point is that it's a cry for help, analogous to prison inmates talking to visitors through a pane of glass. A few changes in the app would be akin to adding conjugal visits.
Pure subterfuge. A thinly veiled attempt to justify tax cuts and deregulation. AIG was killed by accounting? Try again. SOX hasn't killed the IPO, it's just made the hurdle higher and that's ok. IPOs are about consistent revenue generation - most of the firms of Web 1.0 didn't have it and didn't deserve to IPO. The WSJ has truly been compromised by Murdoch. NYTimes editorial on the death of the WSJ: http://tinyurl.com/6f879h
That's why I added the bounty system.

You'd probably end up with layers of insurance. So one company might give IBM's financial statements a Seal of Approval, stating that any investor can pay the company, say, $1,000 a quarter to insure up to $1 million in restatement-related losses. Then, they double-reinsure this (every $1 million they lose gets them $2 million from a reinsurer) and offer a bounty for anyone who catches fraud.

Or you could just expect people who suspect fraud to short the relevant stock, announce their findings, and make money if they're judged correct.

You're right that it's hard, by the way. I just think it would be easier if we were able to have multiple voluntary levels of insurance against fraud, instead of a single insurer -- especially because, in many cases, the SEC fines a company when management lies to shareholders. So if XYZ Co. overstates earnings by $100 million, investors are poorer -- and then the SEC makes the company give up another $20 million in restitution.
The very slim possibility of interference is one of the main reasons they disallow them during take off and landing, since that is the most critical part of the flight, the other reason is passenger distraction, they want people paying attention.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/02/41273

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_on_aircraft#Elect...

The reason it is unlikely is because the systems are shielded but you could for see a situation where shoddy maintenance leads to the degradation or removal of what ever is shielding the instrument.
The Vista follies: Windows' tortured 2008
> The site looks kind of spammy

Like most stuff on NLP, then.
Yeah. Four and a half more minutes and that guy's ready for Open Mic Night. He'll kill with that opener.
Do they, though? Is there infinity in reality?
BBC: Top Gear Tesla didn't run out of juice
It depends. Did you applaud at the end of Manos: The Hands of Fate?

(I did see the original Holiday Special, but I was extremely young and barely remember it, thank god. I avoid links to the Holiday Special like the plague. Indeed, given the choice, I might prefer to try the plague!

I would, however, pay good money to hear members of the Special cast describe the experience in their own words. Train wrecks are fascinating, provided you don't have to see or experience them in person. Especially if the folks involved in the train wreck are highly experienced comedians and writers -- they are the masters of the painful anecdote. Which reminds me that it's time for my monthly plug of The Box: An Oral History of Television.)
Hm, I thought set theory already contains arithmetic, so wouldn't Goedel's proof show that such axioms without paradoxes can't be found? I thought that is why he is so famout - for years it had been the goal of mathematics to find the ultimate axioms, and then Goedel showed that it can't be done, ever.
Recently, I saw a presentation by an voting machine auditor.

Not only were they easily hackable but they found porn on them.
Article Summary:

"Blab blab blah...big surprise, somewhere in your business plan you have to MAKE MONEY...blah blah blah web 3.0 buzzword huzzah...blah blah...How is god's name is facebook not profitable.....blah blah....why in god's name would you have funded Twitter -- they have no business plan...blah blah...a lot of start ups without a product or a business plan (just traffic) will die soon....within a year...blah."

In other words, this is basically a ZDnet column from sometime in 2007. When it was still obvious that you needed to build something people would PAY FOR in order to survive.
Both preachers of the silver bullet to self-control.
I didn't know about it! From a cursory look (all I can find is presentation slides?), it doesn't sound like you'll be able to take any off-the-shelf Haskell subroutines and run them in parallel on the GPU; rather, it's an embedded DSL for constructing shader programs. So I imagine you'd have to learn both CUDA and Obsidian to use it.

But it would be awesome if someone came along and proved me wrong.
I really don't see any way to prove that one topic is more valuable than another.

I agree about acquired tastes; I've had a few myself. But people run away when something's pushed on them too harshly. Sometimes the cool assignments are the ones with a list of options (say, choose two from this list). It's an independent choice but still related to the material.
Thanks. I am a bit hazy from not reading too thoroughly and mostly picking it up from spoofs.
One analyst put it best: "Who the hell thought it was a good idea to try to monetize the space where someone publicly breaks up with their fiance?"
I know a CEO of an Internet company that planned on doing an IPO in 2008. Of course the economy tanked so it's not happening.

He told me that SOX required the company to have auditing/traceability and controls for everything. This meant they quit using any software as a service applications, they shut down IM, they have to keep track of everything on every machine, banned a whole list of applications that would interfere with SOX (iTunes, file sharing, and music app), etc.

They had to hire lawyers, more accountants, consulting firms. He told me they were looking at > 10m to comply. And that doesn't count lost productivity of having to act like a draconian big ass company where they had to have design docs for everything they do, detailed project plans, get rid of the tools they use (as listed above), etc.

In other words to go IPO now you give up agility, spend more money, and become less productive.
Care to elaborate on that now? The only reason I can think of that you wouldn't is if there was an unpatched flaw in their security
I don't know what she's saying, but I want some
"The Thirteenth Floor" should be on this list. Came out around the same time as "The Matrix" and got sort of overshadowed by it, but was better for my money. Gretchen Mol is the daughter of a murdered computer programmer of a virtual reality world, and has to "go into" the virtual reality world to find a clue as to the killer. Also stars Vincent D'Onofrio as a character in the virtual reality world, which is based on 1930's LA (the "real" sequence of events is in present day LA).

Not as much "action" as the Matrix, but it does not spoon feed the viewer. Actually forces the viewer to think. Maybe not a good idea for box office receipts after all.
But clearly something has changed. FTA:

"According to the National Venture Capital Association, in all of 2008 there have been just six companies that have gone public. Compare that with 269 IPOs in 1999, 272 in 1996, and 365 in 1986."

It's probably more complex than that, or he'd have hammered the point a lot more. I'd love to see a graph, for instance.
From PayPal to Mars
This relates to software development, how?
How fat went global
No, this is advice for preparing for troubled times.
Hooray! Now I can be more vocal about new features :) .... twitter integration?
My point exactly - sorry to sound so callous.
I use myself dedibox.fr (France). I certainly recommend it.
I read the book, and it was sometimes boring, still there's a lot of positive things makes you continue with the book. I got to learn about the works of Godel, Escher and Bach. And then about the patterns which exist in nature, or any work, where we never thought it could be a pattern.
Anyways, I'm not a mathematician or a physicist to comment on Godel's work. I think the book is worth reading, whether it contributed to computer science or not, i do not know.
"IMO busywork is why few high school valedictorians do anything interesting or meaningful with their lives."

Citation needed.

Is it really true that valedictorians perform worse than students with lower class rank, by any objective metric?
Infinity is not a number.
#1 Stock tip: start tweeting and go on http://stocktwits.com

Some of the best guys out there are open and real time. It's pretty awesome.
Yeah! That's my evergreen state. Watch out, Houston; you're next.
One context in which I've tested SVG is together with XUL, running on Firefox. The combination is brilliant for complex UI and makes you wish it was more widely supported.
Understanding Ruby Blocks, Procs and Lambdas
Learn the subtle differences between Blocks, Procs and Lambdas with Ruby and how to use each effectively in your methods.
So the solution to selling confusing software is a sales call. That's a novel idea worth exploring.
The second theorem tells us that we can't prove the consistency of set theory without using an even more powerful system. This doesn't mean that set theory is inconsistent, it just means that we can't prove its consistency in any meaningful way. So yes, Gödel indeed shows that there are no 'ultimate axioms' that contain everything of interest in mathematics.
Banach-Tarski paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox.
Very negative, but he does bring up one good question: what the heck does Twine do??
I believe the argument is that claiming that a weekend hacking Perl is of greater value than an entire year's worth of academic school work undervalues skills like reading and writing, history, even math and the sciences. Maybe if you are arguing that you knew the entire curriculum from front to back before entering the 11th grade then one weekend of Perl might be of greater value. But if there are even a few things in each subject you didn't know before hand then claiming that a weekend of Perl is more valuable is just hyperbole.
I'm not moving from Textmate to Emacs or Vim
If it hadn't been for that weekend I spent messing with perl in 11th grade, I wouldn't have gotten into ycombinator
Steve Wozniak gets a new job at Axiotron, makers of the Modbook Mac Tablet
New version of IE for mobile phones based on IE6
Big Updates for Android
Collapsed version of this slideshow:

http://jottit.com/m7y9g/
'I winced my way through such winning courses as "Home Economics" and "Typing"'

Others have already addressed Typing, including the Mighty Steve Yegge, so I won't dwell on that.

Home Economics just requires the right attitude. Like me and my friends would move everything from one drawer to another when the teacher wasn't looking, just to mess with her head. We would experiment and sneak ingredients into dishes that the recipe did not call for. We would beg for the right to make the Kool Aid (insert Steve Jobs joke here). The teacher was mostly a good sport, maybe because we were a bunch of guys being good sports about taking in a Home Ec class and having fun with it (in our admittedly immature way) instead of whining and complaining about it.
This is argues the federal government, not Washington State, is killing Silicon Valley and all tech centers like it.
Is locally-sourced food worth it? Three geeks try to survive a week on local food only.
This article is heavily biased, makes ridiculously exaggerated claims, and bends statistics to its will.

The computer boom came about because of capital gains tax cuts, huh? What a joke.
Really great product - well done guys!
One good reason might be that a dating site has very obvious and proven monetization opportunities.
"And what makes you think the people designing your high school curriculum knew any better or that teaching you important things was even their goal?"

The insinuation here borders on slander.

How much time did you spend asking your instructors for more interesting work to do? Did you ask them about why they chose the curriculum they did? Whether there were better choices? For advice on guiding your personal learning process?

If so, you might have a case to make here (but only for your specific teachers, not the entire profession). If not, you malign your teachers without enough evidence to back your accusations.

I remember two teachers specifically, who were ecstatic to have a student who actually gave a damn about learning. One affectionately (and jokingly) called me his "disciple." They went out of their way to find experiments for me to do in the course of applying for my state's summer science school. They found ways to help me learn more about computers and programming.

If you just blew your teachers off and did not even engage them about how they could help you learn, the blame falls more on you than them.
20 Predictions for Digital Media in 2009
I'm sure it went something like this:
1)Give the number from this economically disastrous year,
2)find the other years with the highest number of IPO's and list them.
3)Use this ridiculously skewed comparison to prove your point
I got to learn about the works of Godel, Escher and Bach...

You're thinking of the wrong book...