skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly, there are a lot of bits and pieces duplicating things that google did in the late 90s but there's nobody out there who's doing all those things at once. Which is surprising because there are huge business advantages to doing so. But it requires a level of execution that only google has been able to pull off so far.

Edit: on the one hand it's an impressive achievement on google's part and a testament to their exceptional competence. On the other hand it's a bit disappointing because it means that google is that much harder to compete with and diversity in the marketplace is always a good thing (no matter how benevolent the rule of the monopolist of the moment might be).
Surprised that nobody has mentioned yet: this code is stateful for no reason. There is no need for instance variables, a constructor, an object, or a class at all. It's just a function. Put it in a mixin, as a module function, in a helper, as a class method; there are lots of ways to do this that don't involve extra code, nounifying verbs, and state.
The effect you are seeing there is because the as it says in the documentation: "The iteration values are assigned to the respective iteration variables as in an assignment statement." So item is being assigned and because it's an obj and not a *obj you are getting a copy.

Whereas slice_of_obj[i] is accessing the element within the slice without a copy. One solution to this problem would be to store pointers in your slice instead of objects.
This looks to me as a cautionary tale that warns against using haskell in a company.
I'm a 35 year old software developer attending community college right now. I've been programming for a long time but still think there's a lot that a university education can offer me.

In a few months I will apply to University of Illinois for Computer Engineering. I'd really like to focus on computer hardware and low level software, while still learning more fundamental computer science. Computer Engineering strikes a great balance.

Since I started taking classes last year I have discovered a new love for math, thanks to the great professors at my local college. I'm thinking about finishing up my undergraduate education with a dual degree in Mathematics and Computer Engineering.

The long term plan is to become a researcher, in academia or a corporate research lab, so I'll be going on to graduate school. Academia is not for everyone, but I'm prepared to burn through all of my savings to fulfill this dream.
True. Only latency can reduce a single round trip time but reducing the number of serial requests also helps. In addition to SPDY, concatenating or inlining scripts / image sprites and upping the number of parallel connections helps.
None of companies you mentioned have cornered any market.

Dropbox may be popular but it's still not mainstream.

Heroku's market is still very young.

AWS is probably used by just half of the startups I know. But Linode & Rackspace are pretty big too.
The full example app from the tutorial is linked from the blog article, but it was too much code to show inline. Also, the hamburg.io app gives a pretty good overview of what Happy can do. It's also linked from the blog post, or directly: https://github.com/hmans/hamburg-io
If at some point Ford decided it was in their interest to restrict sales of used Fords then yes they could.
Although it's likely that high end makers would do so first - a supercar maker might be more interested in protecting it's brand image by keeping broken down versions of it's car off the street.

Ford is more likely to suffer from the anger of departing new buyers than gain from there not being 40year old Ford pickups rusting in fields.

Microsoft has already won a number of cases stopping companies selling unused software licenses. This is actually a big deal if you are a company - if you have $$$$ in MSFT licenses that you have been treating as assets and the court rules that they can't be sold and so have zero value - you might have a lot of auditors and shareholders you have lied to.
It is worth noticing that Dennett, while not taking Penrose out of context per se, is using him to illustrate a much narrower point than you're making -- and your quote of him therefore does take Penrose out of context. He continues that quote by saying, "It may well be that such appearances are quite deceptive. There seems to be something about the way that the laws of physics work, which allows natural selection to be a much more effective process than it would be with just arbitrary laws."

Penrose's point is that natural selection seems to have capitalized on a specific physical feature which can do something better than any computer can -- this he finds quite remarkable, and he is expressing skepticism that, if you just leave a genetic algorithm for a while with an arbitrary weighting function, that it will develop structures which start to reach towards such logic puzzles with curiosity and form proofs of them.

That we have done this is not testament to the anthropic principle nearly as much as it is testament to the fact that, among all the animals, we seem to have most cleanly decoupled our logical intuitions and applied them to our problems.
Hmm no one committed suicide in 1900, how wonderful times must've been.
Pragmatics generally is a fascinating topic.
The never-ending class action scam continues. Lawyers find a reason to shake down a company, the company pays them off, the defendants get nothing of value as damages.

How about making lawyers get paid based only on cash paid to defendents?

scam over.

easily addressed ripoffs like this go on for years, as the people we elect continue to ignore our interests.
Bye Bye Craigslist
Thanks for making the distinction, but the word "fallacy" can also be used more loosely than the way you define it. Googling "fallacy definition" gives me:

1. A mistaken belief, esp. one based on unsound argument.
2. A failure in reasoning that renders an argument invalid.

We were using it in the first sense.
Resolution independence?
With round-robin DNS you have that now. It is fairly easy to setup. The data may be a bit more challenging, but certainly not impossible.
Why do you feel it's superior? It feels distinctly clunkier to me. I'm not opposed to new things, but powerful DSLs are one of Ruby's best perks.
Yes, that works nicely, thanks. But sometimes (rarely) you do want a contiguous bunch of objects, rather than have the indirection.

I think ideally, it would work (as an alias) but if not, I think it should error. Or maybe this is a FAQ, with a good rationale, which I just haven't got to yet.
I totally get what you're saying, and of course companies do things for PR, but typically events like these are not only about the competition, but also about raising awareness, showing women in male dominated areas "hey look, women do this too. It's perfectly acceptable to be interested in it!"

Now, if that's the message that's taken from this? That's open to discussion. And a discussion I'm not much of a part of, being a guy.
Nice. FWIW: it's flawless under Chrome for Android on my GNex too.
Thank you!! Serious time saver when you cut the ding-dong-ping-pong Reddit karma whoring replies. Just enjoyed this AMA with a former Rosetta Stone employee:

http://www.topiama.com/r/21/iama-former-rosetta-stone-employ...
I'm about 5-6 years into my Ruby programming career (and 5-6 years into my OO programming career) and this is something that I've been wondering about lately. When I read Design Patterns for Ruby Russ Olsen seemed to generally write classes that require instantiation, but when I look at the work of other Rubyists that I admire they're often writing classes that are nothing but class methods.

I'm starting to get a pretty good feel for it, but what are the criteria that you use to determine if a class should be stateless or not?
Very very awesome! I love IAmA's, but the signal to noise ratio is relatively low, so that I can only bear it for about 1 page. This does a fantastic job in separating out the great questions and answers!
Am I the only one who read this headline thinking Google is going to launch a cloud rival to Microsoft called Amazon?
> No one should ever be happy about working for free

Why does "crunching" have to mean working for free? I didn't see anything about that in the article.
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00 A4 04 0C 07 A0 00 00 00 XX XX XX

03 10 10 Visa

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An interesting side note from one of the stories: "some universities with multiple colleges house [English and computer science] in different schools, making double majoring... impossible."

These universities demonstrate remarkable short-sightedness. Studying different subjects, particularly at the undergraduate level, makes people intellectually well-rounded and far more interesting. Imagine telling Leonardo that he cannot study painting and engineering at the same time.
I just made this with SVG:
http://ex1.lynndylanhurley.com/timeline

It runs really great in Chrome + Safari, but Firefox performance is awful.

*edit: grammar
Good luck, I think it's a sign of your success that this has happened. Providing more value with their data than they do is a threat to their business.
looks about right for NYC (I'm only posting this so people can know they can reliably use it)
The Devil is in the Details: A Closer Look at Four Manhattan Neighborhoods
Ubuntu is pretty good about keeping it's packages up to date and specifically Numpy and Scipy.
Why doesn't the Python world just copy CPAN and update it for Python? You can e.g. literally find stuff in CPAN with hundreds of dependencies -- which is a pain, but even that works.

At least CPAN testers? Please...

If Python people insist that there is only one way to do it -- and the answer is Python, then rewrite CPAN in Python. Copy stuff that works...
Even as a functional programmer, I'd be OK with separating out comment functionality into a separate file, class or not. This code seems fine to me.
"This approach should be reversed if you're shipping a library for use by third parties"

I'm coming to believe more and more strongly that there should be a difference in the way writing library code, and writing code that uses libraries, is approached. (This applies to the use of design patterns, abstractions, and various other "best practices.")

In many cases, there's a big difference in both programmer quality and the amount of time spent on each line of code between library code and application code. And worse, most of the time, when programmers come across good code, it's library code, not application code. This leads programmers to think that library code--with its multiple abstractions and design pattern complexity--is the right way to do things, and so then then apply this approach, quite inappropriately, to their application code.
correct, and LinkedIn needs tons of positive PR now like never before!!
Awesome reply! We're actually considering building a small product that can fit into the typical kitchen (2+' x 1+'), where you can grow all your fresh herbs: the Living Spice Rack, code name AutoNanoFarm. That can be retailed for $250-500, I believe.

I like the exotic angle. One suggestion from an aquaponics guy that I came across (the AutoMicroFarm products would be aquaponics systems) is to grow some kind of an exotic fish that can be sold to asian communities for thousands of dollars. As far as plants, perhaps something lesser-known tropical that would do well in a controlled environment?
ICANN's appointment of Kurt Pritz actually bodes well for the future of the [seems to be a doomed endeavor] gTLD process, given his no-nonsense approach in the previous train wreck that was the .jobs TLD (http://news.dot-nxt.com/2012/01/11/dot-jobs-could-kill-icann)
Apple's iPad vs Microsoft's Surface announcement mashup
I used PadMapper with great success numerous times, I hope it can survive this.
I don't see that AWS has really "cornered" the market. They're leading because they're better, which is a different thing entirely.

Cloud services like EC2/EBS and (to a lesser extent) S3 are really fungible. It's comparatively easy to move between providers, or even to your own hardware if you want. If someone were to come along and offer a comparably performant and reliable service to AWS at half the price, Amazon's customers would flee like rats. Obviously the devil is in the details, but it seems to me like Google is better positioned to offer that kind of value proposition (c.f. Google Drive, whose retail price is already cheaper than S3) than Microsoft or Rackspace.

Basically: linux boxes are a commodity. You can't compete in this market on features. That makes Amazon's (admittedly) dominant position more precarious than it looks.
Indeed, that was my guess. I'm confident anarchism is not a good solution to any problem, but I fear you may yet get your wish. I doubt you'll like the result. (I'm sure I won't.)
Very cool. Reading the Nate Phelps AMA:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/v99eg/iaman_exmember_o...

Right now the top-rated comment by Nate Phelps is not in direct response to a particular question.

This top-rated comment is not on topiama.com:

http://www.topiama.com/r/4/iaman-exmember-of-the-westboro-ba...

I don't know if this is a feature or a bug or if hasn't been crawled recently.

It would be great to see these top-level comments!

------------

Linking to an answer's context would be super-useful as well. A great deal of the fun and value reddit supplies is the community commentary and responses to an AMA's answers. This can range from the funny to the insightful to the scary - something topiama.com doesn't capture. Which is great - sometimes you don't want the peanut gallery.
"Postman" ... One of the trending Android apps on Google Play
Quite a misleading title..I think many clicked thinking to read about an unexpected shutdown of Craigslist actually
Amusing. Your description fits very well for Google, Microsoft and Apple, if we leave server hardware aside, because I don't know exactly what hardware does Microsoft (or Apple) use in their own Datacenters. Does anybody know this?
No way. They redirect all non-existing domains to their advertisement pages, thus screwing DNS queries that should return NXDOMAIN responses.
Wish I could access the full list, but I think that's convincing enough. Thanks for the link.
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iOS 6 was really the first major revision that didn't change anything fundamental that will force another edition of the book. So, everything in the book not only works with iOS 6, it is still the recommended approach/foundation.
jQuery never really "supported" quirks mode, the unit tests were not ever run in quirks for example. A few of the offset and dimensional tests tried to account for quirks, but we gave up on that totally in 1.8 in favor of fully supporting the CSS box-model property.

Many Quirks pages could still use jQuery 1.8 successfully if they avoid asking for dimensional measurements, but I'm not sure why developers would still use quirks since it throws IE into prehistoric mode and has serious performance impacts.
I understand. I guess I don't do even FP to find that to be terribly important to me. To me, and I understand it's not, the pattern matching against None looks to me like a nil check in Go. Also, with your example, the compiler could definitely check, for thread-bound variables, that that code is "incorrect".
Patent to Foil Behavioral Trackers
Your Mind on Magic
How is this possible? From my reading of the article, the suspension of first-sale only applies to goods manufactured abroad. Wouldn't MS software be manufactured in Washington state?
Probably. Because men make up the majority of the software industry, it would be a little pointless to have a Men's hackerday, and so would be seen as excluding women for the sake of excluding women. This hacker day on the other hand targets women, who are a minority, and thus has a purpose for excluding men other than misandry.
Check out langalot.com. Python (for example) is a nice language but I doubt it could be used to create as brisk a similar site.
How do you use Twitter?
The rule of thumb I use in most cases: Can it be written statelessly without contortions or large inefficiencies? If so, then I make it stateless. Depending what is idiomatic in the language and project, I will usually put it into a function instead of a class.

I find stateless code easier to reason about.
In the general case, the compiler can't check to see that that code is incorrect. Consider the case in which the boolean result "x == nil" is threaded around from function to function, aliased (you handed out a pointer to it), etc... Also consider the case in which "x" is aliased (you handed out a pointer to it) and it gets mutated to nil in the middle of the branch by calling some function.

If you go down this road, you end up making the compiler perform a very difficult (probably undecidable) proof. There has been lots of research on this and it's not easy...
Curious if Live Lovely (http://livelovely.com/) will get a similar cease and desist. They do essentially the exact same thing, but with a nicer design.
"Only one way to do it" is a point of language design, not an assertion that Python is the one true way.

Python does have PyPI. Works fine. Use pip to install and uninstall packages. Use virtualenv to isolate dependencies/PYTHONPATH, as needed.

Can you be specific about what aspect of CPAN you think should be ported?
Sorry, I didn't mean it that way - if you know what PadMapper is and see the URL, I think it makes sense.
I'm pretty sure you'll be fine. Erik's a Pretty Cool Guy(TM); I can't see him trying to take down a site whose express purpose is to make the content on reddit more accessible.
It's probably unenforceable for individuals but, what about the guy who starts a business buying broken iPods, fixing them, and reselling them? He would definitely be a target.
A printer jam in 2012 doesn't mean quite the same thing as a printer jam in 1912 either.
Right, just a trivial matter of engineering right? ;)

Amazon has a unique advantage here because the systems and technologies needed to run the retail website are very much identical to what's needed to serve up a commercially viable PaaS offering to the public. So much so that amazon is moving rapidly toward self-hosting the web store on aws (a lot of it is already on aws today).

In contrast the way google runs their own services is very different (though in some ways more advanced) and not generally suitable to morphing into commercial cloud services, so they don't have that self-hosting advantage. They certainly have the know how to put out a decent offering though, especially now that the market has spoken so clearly on exactly what it wants.
I don't think that's the right analysis. Amazon and Google both offered cloud products at about the same time. Amazon had based their business on building out and provisioning tons of "plain vanilla" linux boxes, and then layered a virtualization interface on top. So that's what they offered.

Google had build a highly customized, scaling environment based on their own software layer instead of mere "linux boxes". And clearly it worked great for them. So that's basically what they offered with GAE.

But the problem in the market was that GAE was this weird custom thing, while Amazon was selling a "cloudy" version of the same environment all the developers were already using. So Amazon won -- the market wants linux boxes, even if they aren't as scalable or efficient uses of hardware as Google's stuff.

The point is: Amazon won by circumstance. They happened to have an internal product already that they could sell, and they did. Google had an internal product too, but for reasons beyond the control of its designers, it wasn't a good fit for the market. I don't think either of these has anything to do with being "great at doing business".
I hope this doesn't get down-voted for the confusing title (I know it's the title of the Blog post itself; but out of context it's a bit misleading).

When I moved from Atlanta to Boston, PadMapper was invaluable in finding a place to live. Given that 1) we didn't know the area, and 2) most rentals in Boston and Cambridge are rented by individuals rather than part of larger complexes, it was great to be able to have the listings from Craigslist on a map.

Ditto when I moved from Boston to San Jose. My wife and I were only interested in a house for rent and the vast majority of those could be found on Craigslist. Again, we didn't know the area so having a map was beyond valuable.

I sincerely hope Craigslist does a 180 on this one; PadMapper is a great tool that deserves access to that data.
True, but also a technology Google did not invent in-house but bought. Although i don't know how much of the original software developed at Android Inc. got into the first devices. That'd be interesting to know :)
I _think_ the complaint is the following:

if x == nil {
x.doSomethingCrazy(); // Runtime error?
} else {
...
}

"Boolean blindness" (bah) is that either the type system should catch this at compile time (because we know x is nil), or the language should make it impossible to phrase (pattern matching to pull the information out, such as with the Maybe type).

Go has many type system oddities (reflection instead of generics, for instance), but the things they _have_ done (auto-implementation of interfaces, for example) are pretty cool.
That looks really slick. Nice job.
Imagine telling the engineers that they might have to mingle with the mendicants! As an anecdote, at U of Michigan the arts college is called LS&A (Literature, Science and the Arts), but the Engineering school students referred to it as LS&Play (at least circa 2000).
I can't see Craigslist ever stepping up their game and providing meaningful visualization. I can't really see why CL cares about where people are reading the listings - their business model is based on selling the listings, not monetizing the viewing of them. I suspect it's out-of-control lawyers at work.
What does "iterates" mean in context?
"Pealk has been in contact with lawyers in the event that LinkedIn iterates its own version of the app"

I can't tell if it's misused or I'm missing something.
Classes exist to bundle state; if there's no need for state, there often shouldn't be a class in the first place. I tend to use module_fun for that, or just:

module Foo
def self.some_stateless_method
...
end
end

Foo.some_stateless_method

class MyController
include Foo

def index
some_stateless_method
end
end

and so forth.

People think of modules as being mixins, but they're actually just function namespaces--which you can happen to bind into class contexts via include/extend.

I tend to use class methods where:

a.) The class exists, because you want state, and

b.) The function operates principally on, or is only useful in, the context of that class, but

c.) The function isn't bound to the object's state.

That last requirement is fuzzy, since the call semantics are different: self.class.foo is awkward, so I'll often write instance methods which don't actually depend on the state, just taking advantage of the local namespace.
Wouldn't this potentially muddy up his tests though? Now he's creating a lot of mocks for a simple create action. Not only that, but should the create action not be called "create_and_maybe_send_to_social_networks"?
With the OP here, I saw the thread title and silently went "thank god" to myself immediately knowing what this meant, having used PadMapper very extensively in the last year after moving to Austin. I knew it meant a good portion of ads being gone, but I was going to get much more qualitative results in finding a condo.

I really hope PadMapper can make up the volume but continue to have good results for people searching. It's a wonderful resource.
No serious developer would lose months of work to this, that claim is completely ludicrous.