skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that choosing a computing device is a First World Problem. But that's not on point. GP was saying it's a luxury in the sense that it's completely redundant for most of us who already have a laptop, phone, and workstation. In that sense you're paying $500 and up for the privilege of something that's slightly more convenient to hand than a laptop, and slightly more convenient to eye than a phone.

Yes, in fact my cell and my computer did displace the earlier technology completely.

This "big touchable surface" may be powerful enough eventually to be a new way of looking at the world. I think it needs better feedback first.
WikiLeaks’ Assange faces Arrest
> I think jwz's point is that he prefers having his old code run very slow through a compatibility layer rather than having to port the same not-so-important old code over the new APIs.

If that's what you want, just write it yourself once (which he did) or use one of the many (subsets of) fixed-function pipelines running on OpenGL ES that others have made. The official 'Programming OpenGL ES 2.0' book even shows you how to do most of it, with example code included.

What jwz fails to recognize is that OpenGL ES does not only have to run on iPads, iPhones or other relatively high-powered mobile devices, but also on extremely low-powered devices with really small memory sizes (RAM and ROM) where every byte (code or data) counts. Compared to mobile devices at the time the first OpenGL ES API's were designed, an iPad could almost be considered a supercomputer. For OpenGL ES, small API size was one of the design constraints, simple as that.

Last but not least, OpenGL ES was supposed to become the industry standard for mobile 3D graphics, which means it needed strong industry support. Stuffing the API with loads of crap that almost nobody would use would drive up implementation costs for no good reason. Programmable shaders are called 'programmable' for a reason, if you want to do very specific stuff with them (such as emulating the fixed-function OpenGL pipeline), there is nothing preventing you to do so.

The single point I can kind of agree with is that maybe they should not have used 'OpenGL' in the name of the API, because it suggest at least some form of compatibility with previous OpenGL versions. Confusing indeed, but not really worth the kind of rant in this article.
I'd like to personally see bigger, more realistic implementations of projects with frameworks. It gets old seeing simple "todo" list apps. I've personally pursued GitHub for large Django projects and haven't had much luck. It's nice to see what a "bigger than demo" project looks like, so then you can "smell" the framework better. This isn't just a Django thing, btw, I find it especially true for all these new MVC-ish JavaScript frameworks.
I'm not sure that you can call pre-kernel malware a "serious problem" yet. It exists, but is rare. Stuxnet and Flame seem to have the current crowns for "best malware" and did their deeds without it, after all.

It's also important to point out that the secure code chain is also held up (albeit often incorrectly) as an important criteria for a working DRM implementation. The content providers like that story, and like to hear about efforts to prevent rogue code from running. Certainly this has a lot to do with the Intel/Microsoft rush to secure boot.
> The walk back and forth across the Mississippi River on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus was always pleasant to me. I liked seeing the university rowing team practicing in the river and the signs of the changes of seasons as I looked upstream and downstream along the riverbanks.

You mean in the Fall and the Spring, right? ;)
Using the Spring Converter API with VoltDB Data Objects
I thought this was going to be the Bing napkin sketch style for directions:

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/06/bing_destination_ma...

Love the end result of the bezier curves shown on the map of the Caribbean, but really thought the napkin sketch feature was fantastic for directions.
I agree, but coming to the conclusion that you don't have all the answers shouldn't mean inaction. Inhumane treatment of animals, brutal working conditions, and environmental damage are moral problems we should be addressing as a species.
Project Management Breakfast Briefing
Perhaps if they added integrated batteries that only initiated a power draw to charge when they reached a specific level they wouldn't need to draw power from the grid constantly. Expensive way to solve the problem though, perhaps.
I don't know how you could contrive what I said to be cognitive dissonance.

If you have a team of N good programmers, you can probably write without static typing. If you have a team of N-1 good programmers and 1 bad programmer, you should really use a language static typing.
Choosing Vinyl vs. Fiber Cement Siding | All Roofing Solutions, DE/PA Roofer
Most of the triggers on IFTTT require polling to receive updates. We poll the sources roughly every 15 minutes.

Quick triggers, on the other hand, are event-driven.

So, for instance, if you had a task that was "IF I send IFTTT a Google Chat THEN post to Twitter" we'll now post your tweet within a couple of seconds (vs. before it would have been within 15 minutes)
Very reminiscent of the work Stamen is doing; I'm a big fan of both.

Here's Stamen's watercolor map: http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor/#12/37.7706/-122.3782
Nomiku Sous Vide cooker on kickstarter
Hell yeah for marketing this is cool:

IF retweeted

Then Turn Strobe Light On

Then Wait 5 seconds

Then Turn Strobe Light Off
I disagree. I prefer a development environment that settles on a coding style, even if I don't like it, rather than chaos. I find reading code using multiple coding style painful.

It also ends the bikeshedding, "that's how we do it there, deal with it".
I can fully guarantee this is going the Jack Thompson route, and he'll continue to waste court time, money and patience up until a judge finally goes "License to law, revoked" and kicks him out. He's got himself stuck in an infinite loop where each time something happens he feels more and more obliged to beef up the threat.
> That assumption isn't hidden, it is made up. By you.

Not at all. The assumption is clearly implied by the conclusion of the study, which makes an unwarranted equivalence of all languages that have 'static type checking':

"The translation of these four software projects from Python to Haskell proved to be an effective way of measuring the effects of applying static type checking to unit tested software."

> Just because java has a crappy type system, doesn't mean we should be content with that.

I don't know what this means. If the study was meant to comprehend such a broad category as 'static type systems,' and from the explicit language of the study, it clearly was, then absolutely Java must necessarily be included. Otherwise, the study, as I noted, should have restricted its conclusions to a scope of Haskell vs. Python, with at most modest and well-qualified statements regarding the broader implications of static vs. dynamic in general.
Typogenerator in Javascript
The RIM blackout that occurred in October sent waves through my industry (finance) in which nearly every employee is glued to a Blackberry in and out of the office. After the blackout, I noticed a lot of long-time (10+ years) Crackberry addicts switching over to iPhones or Androids.
Honestly, I havent' gotten one in a while. I do recall some that seemed very legit (no implication that victim would be in on fraud). It was inheritance, and there were banking regulations that to be worked around, etc. Adding a taste of fraud seems like smart choice for the attacker.
Home | Commercial Printers - Heat Set Web Printing - Mailing Services
McCormick Armstrong Provides High-Quality Commercial Offset Printing, Heatset Web Printing & Mailing Services in Tulsa, Texas, Dallas TX & Kansas City.
Someone parrots an unsourced tinfoil-esque screed, and backs it up with a citation that doesn't prove anything, and I'm the one getting downvoted. WTF, guys?
Jonas Salk polio obituary
carreon v. the internet. mr carreon is clearly intent on leaving his mark on the history of internet.

a skid mark, perhaps, but mark no less.
Do you think could be useful a restful API for Mathematical Optimization?
People who know seem excited about this, so I spent two minutes following links. I still have no idea what ifttt is.

This would help:

- Change the tagline from "Put the Internet to work for you" to something more descriptive.

- Have a prominent "About" link on the blog. Write an About page, or better put some content on your home page.
ILuv’s MacBook Sleeve Case: Peanuts but no Pumpkins
Wahed Sefr
Normally I'd disregard this post as the frivolities of a slow Wednesday news cycle, but this caught my eye:

"It would probably shatter into a bunch of pieces, but hey, if it’s an alien race, who knows what they’re skulls are made of? They’re skulls could be made of Kryptonite."

Forbes needs to seriously upgrade their copyediting.
Top 3 Best Linux Jobs
Obviously, that people care more about iPads as they are willing to pay a premium for them.
like the pebble yea?
Very nice design, I like particularly self-changing background.
Maybe the search bar could be refined a little bit more
Yes, I'm full aware of that. I'm not claiming that it tells us the complete and final truth, just that it is an interesting data point.

In my experience a lot of those "I programmed 15 years in Java, get off my lawn" senior developers get angry about Scala. This is interesting, because it isn't that way for other languages running on the JVM like Clojure, JRuby or Groovy.

It is only a speculation why it is like that, but in my opinion it is because alternatives like Groovy, JRuby, Clojure are considered to be some sort of "supplemental" or "add-on" languages by those people, while Scala is seen as full-scale alternative to Java (not in the sense that it will replace Java, but in the sense of "I can write 100% of my application in this language without dropping down to Java for the performance critical parts").

I think it is interesting how different the reaction is compared to C# <> F#, for instance. Is it because Java and C# developers come from different backgrounds? Because F# is "made by Microsoft", while Scala is not "made by Oracle"? Is it because Java developers were happy with Sun telling them that they wouldn't need all those "fancy" features of the .NET languages? I think this would be interesting to discuss further, although I think it is hard to come up with valid data points.

From my experience, most of the claims about "complexity" and "too hard for beginners" come not from people learning the language, but from people with > 5 years of Java experience _not_ wanting to learn another language.

I'm quite ambivalent about the syntactic flexibility. On the one hand, they cut it down for 2.10, but on the other I think it is a superficial measurement. There are a lot of languages with more flexibility and a lot of languages with less, both seem to be alive and well. (Just want to make it clear that I think your stance is totally valid, even if I disagree slightly. Different people have different tastes, and this is a good thing!)
Beautiful Paper Birds by Diana Beltran Herrera
maybe having the learn more content just be below the tagline instead of having to click a link. friction.
The Humans With Super Human Vision
This is pure awesomeness. I've rejected people for all of those reasons but haven't ever put them together so succinctly.

The one that can really swing my vote one way or another is the lack of passion. To be clear you are probably passionate about something, and I don't mean "getting paid to work here." For example when I was with Google (and even earlier at Sun) I interviewed candidates who were passionate about wanting to work at the company but were not passionate about any thing in particular the company was doing. Their passion was 'to be employed by <company X>' and I would ask them "Ok, so lets say we hire you and you've achieved your goal, now what are you hoping to achieve?" only to get crickets. That is always hard to get past.
Well, we know about Jane Harman, and we know about J. Edgar Hoover's files on just about all USA Congress members. I believe your "danger" is an actual problem. That sort of thing really undermines representative government.
I'll work on getting better info on the blog. In the mean time, here's our about page http://ifttt.com/wtf
Stanford's free iOSd courses return with p2p help, a first for iTunes U
You could try this: https://github.com/divio/django-cms/
The problem is Variable Data, not Big Data. The answer is in late-night TV ads
Apparently, people do not like walking around all day round with all those best of breed devices (a eBook reader, a full-size cinema, and a desktop PC with three 30" monitors) and/or cannot afford to.

I think smartphones are in the same situation: those sub-optimal tablets beat them for reading eBooks, watching movies, web browsing. One could even argue smartphones aren't even best of class for making phone calls. Yet, almost everybody owns one.

From tablet sales, it looks like people want to sacrifice some portability to get a 'big screen smartphone' in exchange for that bigger screen.
Seems to me that that's what static typing proponents have been saying for years (if not decades), and it still isn't true.

That said, I'm currently hacking on a compiler to see if I can come up with a design for a static language that's almost as pleasant to use as a dynamic one, so I'm not completely hopeless. But it certainly seems like the data point that until now no such superior type system (strict but flexible) has become widely popular should not be underestimated.
People weren't really looking for a better phone at the time, though. Everyone knew you had to go to AT&T to get an iPhone, and if they didn't want to change carriers or shell out $$ for the iPhone, they were fine with the cheap feature phone. Cue the Droid advertising campaign, which let people know there was a smartphone on Verizon that did pretty much everything the iPhone did for a bit cheaper. That's pretty much how I saw it go down, but maybe I missed something and it was your average Verizon store rep that upsold it enough to make android a contender.
RailsWizard - Simple Rails Templates
So when the Query is sent to the database MySQL actually receives a Query object and then parses that Query object?

...oh wait, right before it is sent to mysql it is turned back into a string again.

My point is that static typing doesn't help you do anything other than verify that the objects being passed are of a particular type. I'm not saying static typing is bad or good I'm just saying that type checking itself is NEARLY USELESS unless you include some sort of validation.

Query q = new Query("select * from users where id = (id)");
QueryParam qp = new QueryParam("(id)",25);
q.addParam(qp);
ResultSet rs = q.execute();
public class Query {
public ResultSet execute() {
for(QueryParam qp : this.getQueryParams()) {
this.getSql().replace(qp.getId(),qp.getValue());
}
super.execute(sql);
}
}

That's all type safe. So it should be good right?
No, I am saying your strawman is a strawman. You were claiming static typing doesn't help since a string can contain a bad query. Now you are suggesting that you wouldn't write such code in a dynamically typed language anyways? Then why did you offer it as an example of how static typing doesn't help.

Of course you can make sure you never actually run the bad query with dynamic typing. I assumed it was obvious when talking about static typing that the difference would be compile time vs run time. With a statically typed language, when you make the error, you get told about it by the compiler. With a dynamically typed language, you find out about the error later, when that code actually runs.
I wonder why there are so few fusions, think about PayPal. Was there another big one after that?
J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List 2012
This seems like the job for an independent non-profit organization. We need a trusted third party to rubber-stamp software signing until particular packages are flagged for malicious or incompetent behavior. It shouldn't be Microsoft or Canonical.
> "frequently cited claim by proponents of dynamically typed programming languages that static typing was not needed for detecting bugs in programs"

Who says that? There's trade offs, multitudes, in choosing paradigm / language. It's never so black and white (except for academics, and twits who like to argue more than code)

I did not read paper, don't have time for 60 pages of pointlessness.
Looks like marshray was right, actually. http://techtodayshow.com/wikileaks-assange-faces-arrest/
Your point about businesses changing reminds me of the arguments I've read in the past that there's too much full time employment and not enough freelancing. The idea is to get the best person for the task then move on instead of constantly trying to adapt everyone to the latest departmental needs.
There's something very pleasing about dedicating so much technical attention to something that is so artful. I love seeing map styles like this- not sure where I'd use one myself, but I sure want to...
No, it's not content-free, at least when put back into context.

It's like coffee. If your coffee is shitty (complect), then no amount of sugar (unit tests) or cream (type checking) will make it any better.
Sans the creativity.
My Startup Isn't Profitable and I'm Not Upset
What happened to my EnchantedForest/Tower/5436!?

I remember that first i-frame site I built when I was 10...
What the heck is going on in that top image?
Windows Phone Summit - Live
What happens when you ask the tiananmen square questions outside china?
>which makes an unwarranted equivalence of all languages that have 'static type checking':

No it doesn't. Read what you quoted, it says nothing even remotely resembling "this benefit applies to all languages with static typing". It is testing static typing, not a specific language. It uses the best static typing system to do so. You are entirely inventing the notion that this must then apply to java.

> If the study was meant to comprehend such a broad category as 'static type systems,' and from the explicit language of the study, it clearly was, then absolutely Java must necessarily be included

No it mustn't. Comparing the best of dynamic vs the best of static is a useful test. Just as nobody is complaining they didn't use a worse language than python, it makes no sense to complain they didn't use a worse language than haskell. You don't draw conclusions about the potential of X by examining the worst example of X possible.
How to Code Four iOS 6 Features into Your App Today
How to be a confident speaker
The Oatmeal: Charles Carreon officially suing me and and the charities
The cleverness attribution error
No, he has a different view of what on topic means than the people who currently hold the power.
Not sure where this one fits in (passion? commitment?) but having a candidate mention that they "don't do overtime... ever" half-way through an interview when nothing has been mentioned about over-time is a serious turn-off.

Sure - people have families and not everyone is geared up for 18-hour work days - but sometimes the sky is falling and companies need an employee that isn't going to disappear out the door at 5:01 PM when the place is burning with a "well that's me for today! good luck guys!"
Auto Transport Hesperia, California - Shipanycar
" the suicide rates at those factories are actually lower than the nationwide suicide rate in China"

China is a large and complex country. Forty-nine percent of the population is rural [1] and are not going to be working in the factories that make our toys. So I'm not sure what its possible to conclude from a nationwide average suicide rate in such a population.

It might make more sense to compare the suicide rate with that for all industrial workers in China, but I can't find such statistics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_Peoples_Rep...
Glad you noticed the changing bg! I have a few changes "in the works" which directly affect the search bar area ;)
>> CIA gets lots of their foundings from drug trafficking

Citation?
Dynamicity or dynamicness.
Why buy another appliance when a microwave does the job perfectly?
As usual Tristan makes me think... about refactoring Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, making it more UX Grokkable.
Interestingly Wikipaedia lists SQL injection as being mitigated by strong typing (no I did not just edit it!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection
PPC Account Assignments As A Narrative
I don't what google you use :) and venture-labs doesn't offer such focused material. the idea is you want something that will cut the learning-curve, not make it bigger. So you pay startup plays to cut the learning curve. Seems awesome to me, especially after you've spent 2 years on building your startup, you don't want to spend 2 more years just to get to know some things.
I was thinking about this. It appears that software development is headed to become a regulated profession but the regulators will be the hardware manufacturers and platform providers.

There might be value in having a recognized "professional body" where membership can be revoked but having a rubber stamp issued by such an org allows the developers code to bypass a lot of the BS.

So "thou shalt not write malware" as opposed to "thou shalt not harm the interests of the platform vendor".
Perhaps online colleges could replace impersonal experiences at large institutions while freeing up more opportunities for those who really would benefit from smaller classes. Alternately, the education bubble might just continue to swell. Then, those who can't afford the increasingly exclusive, expensive and, therefore, grade-inflated campus experience might be told there is no real problem since they can just 'learn online for free.'

Further, the fact that you managed to learn without small classrooms, contact with professors and a formative campus experience doesn't mean that you wouldn't have benefited from those things. For example, I don't think it's meaningless hand waving to talk about being able to go to Alfred Aho's office hours and ask him pretty much anything you want and get an impromptu interactive lecture. The people who seek out office hours of this sort are often those who are voracious learners who do learn on their own and want to keep learning more.

As for having to rush back and forth or not being in the comfort of your own home, I'd say that comfort is not necessarily synonymous with personal benefit.
> we've had runtime errors in Python code, due to [...]
> type error, something a compiler would have caught

Are wrongly spelled variable names and type errors the only runtime errors that you get? If not what percentage are they?

Personally, I think that people tend to obsess about the specific type of errors because the 'solution' (static-typing) is something that already exists, whereas there is not easy solution to other types of flaws.
Zeno stirred a little...
Plus it makes no sense. If they really hated it that much, they could simply quit (the Chineese government may be commies but they do not like slavery), so why commit suicide?
Things that make software user-friendly
Thanks for reading. I've received many of these responses lately on some job candidates and thought there was some value in compiling them for engineers that may be interviewing. I could certainly see where candidates might get hung up on working for a particular employer without necessarily being as passionate for their role there. I don't see that too often as I tend to recruit for smaller software firms, but I'm not at all surprised that you would see that at Google, Sun, Apple, etc.