skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A clojure program written in "canonical" style will usually be slower than the equivalent "canonical" java program (as long as canonical != enterprisey canonical), if only because canonical Clojure uses immutable datastructures and therefore spends quite a bit of time churning memory but Clojure lets you type-hint programs (to generate more type-tight bytecode, closer to what statically typed Java would provide), use Java mutable types and alongside compile-time metaprogramming that can be used to generate code which will likely be as efficient as tight Java code: http://www.learningclojure.com/2010/09/clojure-faster-than-m...

A bigger drawback to Clojure, in my experience, is that error messages are complete shit (most errors will yield stack traces to compiled bytecode, so you get java traces with a layer of obfuscation in that they're tracing the bytecode generated by clojure). The same issue exists when trying to improve performances, you get performance counters for java bytecode and have to match them to clojure code "by hand".
Google Nexus 7 Tablet Features And Price
Many of these presentations come across as proselytizing. It's an immediate turn-off to some developers and most all managers. The proselytizer claims to know or be able to understand things that others on the team cannot. It's condescending. You wouldn't say to a co-worker... "I understand why we should use X, you do not, so I'm going to enlighten you and explain this to you in a way that you can understand and see the benefits of."

The best way to gain traction and to get others to use your favorite tools is to write code and implement projects on time and under budget that are reliable and easy to maintain. If you do that, then the tools that you use will be in demand. Others will want to use them and they will speak for themselves.
For now.

Surely some of the gangs would love to get their hands on them. It would be very, very difficult prove who committed the murder and it would be all but impossible to prevent.
I am unsatisfied and would like to make a change.

I work in an odd environment. It is an academic/research institution, but my role is a standard IT position. I am primarily expected to do system administration tasks and small data management assignments. In general, development is frowned upon. There seems to be a ceiling in opportunity here due to both my "lower" credential (MS rather than PhD) and perception of what my role is by outsiders.

From a more general perspective, I made a critical error when entering the job market at the end of the first Internet boom (early 2000s). I did not take a development job, but rather a test role at a large IT company. It took me several years at that big IT company to realize that this colored perception of my skills and limited internal opportunities despite a MS in CS and significant programming work on the side.

I left for another company where my job role was related to db skills I had picked up but was a greenfield project. That was enjoyable and a learning experience, but the project was cancelled and the entire team laid off in the early days of the financial crisis.

I landed on my feet in my current role. The role has turned out to be quite different that originally pitched to me, but I have a senior title and pay level. The job just doesn't provide much in the way of personal growth.

For family and lifestyle reasons, I will not leave for at least a year. I have been developing some interest in statistics, modeling, and machine learning. While I would prefer not to simply seek another credential, my employer would probably allow me to obtain a MS in statistics at their expense. Perhaps this would lead to more interesting and challenging work, but to be completely honest with myself, my current role is where many people with that background windup anyway.

To somewhat worsen matters, I am often much more attracted to niche technologies (APL,KDB+,J,Common Lisp, Clojure, Ruby) than the market in my area seems to offer employment opportunties for. I probably need to consider re-entering the Java enterprise programming world and not be a prima-donna about programming language.
Serif vs. Sans-Serif Fonts for HD Screens
> Because I'd rather believe that than believe that people this dense actually exist.

Oh, just ask any hardcore religious right-winger why they think women should have no birth control or why gays shouldn't marry. The world is filled with these brain dead crazies who can't put 1 + 1 together if their life depend on it. We just don't see them too much during our day-to-day, if we're too busy inside our work routine on our little tech bubble. That we tend to forget about them. But they're all over the place.
Are we one step closer to the mozilla seabird?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG3tLxEQEdg&feature=youtu...

I wish, but realistically that phone would probably cost $6k today.
Wait, users can install new keys on their machines? What's the issue then?
I'm a B2G developer and while it's definitely getting close to being usable on a daily basis, there are gaps. Due to the fast pace of development, it's not uncommon that things like the camera or telephony stack will break in an update; we're constantly putting in new optimizations and features, and breaking stuff is okay for us in the short term. Overall, it's pretty damn solid, but expect breakage frequently while things are moving this quick.
Facebook and your email
Properly serviced, not faulty, and operated by qualified personnel with health physics training.

(What? You mean that TSA goons get to shoot X-rays at people without having to take the same courses as doctors, dentists, and medical techs, including state certification and continuing-ed requirements?! Sign me up!)
From the transcript:
Lou: We basically had a group of cheapskates that were buying tires from a bike shop in the U.K. And then one day we got a box of tires that were the wrong color and when I went to the post office to send them back to England the guy wanted $50 to ship the box. I said to myself, “There’s got to be a better way.” So I handed the box of tires to my 12 year old son and I said, “Nate, sell these on eBay and I have $300 tied up in the box. You can keep anything you make above that.” And that was almost ten years ago. He sold the box of ten, eventually, for $350, made $50, he was 12 years old at the time, and said, “Dad, next time you’re ordering tires, order me ten more too.” And said, “All right.’

So then 20 tires became 50, became 100, became 500, and eventually we had 18 wheelers pulling up into our driveway dropping off pallets of bicycle tires. And my two kids at the time by then were 13 and 11, they shipped 10,000 orders from the parking space in my garage, a million dollars worth of product in the first year.

Andrew: So, this sounds like such a beautiful story, I’m wondering if, well, was it just that simple or was there maybe an intention to sell this . . . well, you tell me. I see that smiling, there’s some recognition in what I’m saying.

Lou: I think there was a point at which my wife and I had a conversation about my use of child labor in doing order fulfillment and she felt like maybe we should scale the growth back a bit, it was getting a bit out of control. And as an entrepreneur that was just not something I could relate to. It’s like, “Hey, if people want to buy the product and we can buy it and we can sell it at a profit, we have to do more.’

So we eventually got to the point where my wife walked into the garage one morning at about 7:00 a.m. and my 11 year old was in tears. And when she asked him what was the problem he, in tears, said, “We’re not going to be able to ship all the orders before we have to leave for school.” And she walked into the house and said, “This has got to get out of the garage.” And so we eventually moved the inventory up to Portland, Oregon. We were in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, at the time and we moved the business up to Portland, Oregon. There was no sales tax in Oregon. We reincorporated and started doing business out of Portland.
Right, I know about that, but I still would have expected them to put out their own manuals for their CPUs which implemented that architecture.
Not necessarily. After some layoffs at Atari, there was a guy who daily got past the receptionist with an old badge (not electronic) and hung out in our building's machine room. He was logged onto a Vax as some innocuous account. There was a lot of turmoil, so he got away with it for a while.

When we discovered him (I was flushing old accounts, and found this guy in our Vax room who shouldn't have been there) we ejected him, and he had the chutzpah to ask for a tape of his directories.
> I'm not sure if focusing on syntax and succinctness is such a great approach though.

Depends on the audience I'd guess, considering bug-proneness is an almost direct function of LOC (at equivalent skill levels) it can be a pretty interesting note.

Though I'd agree that concurrency prowess should be higher on the list, especially in SOA companies.
Seems like the Ars headline is inaccurate. Inman posts in his blog that the money is still with IndieGoGo pending a restraining order to have it transferred.

"Once the money is moved, I still plan on withdrawing $211k in cash and taking a photo to send to Charles Carreon and FunnyJunk, along with the drawing of Funnyjunk's mother."

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/fundraiser_update
Not only that, but Firefox is a de-facto standard. The HTML extensions adopted by the Firefox Mobile OS team will be not just open, but also widely used from day one -- they will be present in all desktop, tablet, and mobile editions of Firefox across all hardware and OS platforms in which the browser is available.
afaict the "popularity" of most of those languages is being grossly distorted when you convert the "# of Tags" and "# of Projects" data to rankings.

(You haven't provided raw data, so I'll take an example from the raw data Drew Conway posted.)

The range in rank value for the stackoverflow tags is from 1 to 56, but the range in "# of Tags" that rank is based upon is from 0 to 82,923 and the data is so skewed that only 11 of 56 languages have above average "# of Tags".

Most spreadsheets will provide easy to use functions to calculate the mean, standard deviation, and normalized scores (STANDARDIZE in LibreOffice).

Please plot normalized data not rankings.

---

Similarly, the range in rank value for the github "# of Projects" is from 1 to 56, but the range in "# of Projects" is more like 0 to 104,239!

http://www.r-chart.com/2010/08/github-stats-on-programming-l...
Why Your Complaint About Twitter Is Wrong
sorry guys. horrible host... all my fault.. moving it to another server later tonight.
Everything about this seems stupid. In the video bazzargh posted these guys come off as absolute pricks, oozing with smugness and condescension and completely devoid of empathy. They use (steal) someone's identity (name + pic), the person asks them nicely to stop and they insult and ridicule him: "You'd like to kill these algorithms; you feel threatened in some way." These guys have such a laughably asinine narrative, I can't believe they deliver it with an (almost) straight face. Why didn't the creators use their own identities? Why didn't they stop using Ronson's when it became clear it was irritating him?

To the software output: Maybe I'll eat my words but it seems to be complete garbage. Basically boilerplate, randomly generated spam. I typed "wine" into the "find weavers" box and picked the top result: a weaver/spambot called "In Vino Veritas" (in wine, truth) with a wine glass as an avatar. This should be a good match for wine, I figured! I was asked if I'd like to "chat" with the bot and did so, I pitched it a softball: "What is your favorite wine?" It came back with "I don't know much about wines but I prefer those from California." "In Vino Veritas" doesn't know much about wine? Not exactly crushing the Turing test here...
http://screencast.com/t/fKGzERNr

I looked at the bot's profile page and it had a post "I'm dreaming something about #proof and #evidence." In the interview, Ronson says that the bot posted 'Dreaming about #time and #cock,' almost the exact same string with the hashtags substituted.

printf("Dreaming of %s and %s", x, y);

And we're supposed to regard this as what, cutting edge AI? Winebot that can't say anything about wine, bots feeding random values into preformed strings and tweeting them, taking a word from some interaction (e.g. "wine"), pulling a pic from google and posting to tumblr... nothing here is remotely interesting or new. If the creators weren't such class-a assholes I'd be more polite in my assessment, but as they can't be bothered to care about how their actions affect others, I don't feel the need to. They've done their controversy-color-by-numbers thing and got their publicity, the product (?) is worthless, the sooner their 15 minutes passes the better.
Longevity is a mechanical problem, rather than a chemical problem (as it is in batteries). A-priori, this is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage - it is just different. But it is likely that these could live longer and be perfectly recyclable (and with no toxic materials at all).

Modern batteries are a marvel of chemistry, but they have made little progress in density in the last decades (and a lot of that progress relies on rare earth materials). There are many competitors for energy storage now, among them water fuel cells, aluminum and ultra capacitors. If these guys succeed, pressurized air will join this list as well.
Women Explain Why Google+ Is All Dudes
It's their foot in the iPad-style tablet scene. They desperately want to compete with Apple but also are uncomfortable competing with their Windows brand strength.

Thus WindowsRT - they should have just called it MetroOS, but hell, maybe their maintenance contracts with huge companies forbid them from doing so.
From the article...

The company’s vice president of marketing Joe Reiss told me in an interview that any dosage received by a human from these backscatter vans would be "exceedingly small," far smaller than a medical x-ray. He says that the vans’ dosage falls well within the health standards set by American National Standards Institute, and AS&E’s marketing materials say that the scan’s x-ray levels are equivalent to the dosage received in fifteen minutes inside a typical airplane.
I realize that this is purely anecdotal, but may answer your question.

My father got me playing around with programming when I was very young -- I think six or eight years old. Some of my first memories involve our VIC-20 computer.

While a lot of what I did was just typing in simple programs from a book, I did some experimentation on my own, and it became pretty obvious how variables, loops, and the rest worked.

When I hit school I was mathematically so far ahead of everybody else, not because I'm some kind of genius, but because I had already spent a lot of time unknowingly learning algebra.

This was a disadvantage, because the school system wasn't built to cope with a kid that understood algebra before he had memorized the multiplication table.

As an adult, however, I've enjoyed a pretty serious advantage when it comes to understanding abstract concepts, especially anything involving symbolic manipulation, and I think I can thank that VIC-20 BASIC manual from many years ago for it.

I wouldn't be too worried about starting a kid out 'too soon', provided that other areas of the child's mental development aren't neglected in favor of developing mathematical skills.
Make was made for *nix, it's not exactly surprising that it doesn't conform with Windows's preferences :-) I certainly wouldn't call that show-stopping.

Oh and there are some file systems that don't allow spaces by the way, though admittedly not in common usage.
Perhaps. But shouldn't getting a helping setting up a new source of _demand_ for your product, grain, in the form of grain alcohol producers help prop up the prices for your supply?
This reminds me of the book called "The Tao of Programming", from 1987. If you like these you might consider checking the book out as well.
This finally actually won me over. Starting the clojure book - let's make this happen.
I'm actually wondering what the legal ramifications of this type of behavior is. The Oatmeal can clearly be described as parody/satire. It never once purports to be serious.

However, this woman is dead serious, and is making quite defamatory remarks about Inman. She's directly and unashamedly calling him a murderer, a Nazi, the man who shot Giffords et al, and a criminal. I would love to see a defamation of character lawsuit from Inman against Tara. She's given no hint that she is playing satire or making a joke (no matter how distasteful). Even going so far to make veiled threats against his life!
When clicking on a file to preview it, you should append the name of the file to the bread crumbs, to show that you can go back to the listing by clicking back on the repo name. It took me a while to figure that out.
It's true, but they above anyone else were in the greatest position to do it.

http://nerdbusiness.com/blog/mozilla-launch-open-source-sear...

Either way, the ship is sailed - DuckDuckGo is now leading the way in this department.
Haha, you raise a valid point. And as an lgbt female, I can't say that I ever forget about them. And yes, its that same exact feeling of complete disbelief when someone that closed-minded speaks to me. However, its a bit more difficult to write it off as an elaborate hoax.
Which column are you looking at - so.rank or so.tagcount? ;-)
So, one thing that myself and others on the team have been working on is moving things out of the main thread/process. There's a big push by the whole team to get everything working cross-process, so that we can start separate processes for each application; that should let us mitigate the problem of GC pauses and the like. One other big push is making everything off-main-thread composited. That lets the graphics work happen more or less independent of the main thread, and frees it up to do standard processing, in addition to letting animations and the like run async (much smoother).

There's a lot of work still to be done, but those pauses should go away over time.
I wouldn't fight for any other, with the possible exception of Germany, Spain or Austria.

France is too egocentrical, Britain (as much as I love the country) has a government hell-bent on recreating 1984, the Scandinavian countries are dying a slow death of too many paper-pushers and most of Eastern-Europe cannot rightly be called developed.

But none of that matters as realistically the US is the only country powerful enough to cause sufficient damaged to be worth worring about.

I should note that I am not American and so this is not a matter of nationalism.
Breaking Down the Walls of the Siloed Application
Giving money to the needy has different effects than that.

For one thing, if you finance the handouts with taxes rather than printing money, they will have no effect on inflation.
Google and Samsung to Work Together to Put a Stop to Apple’s Tirade
To the OP: If you have to take a cheap shot at Perl in order to demonstrate the benefits of Clojure, then you have failed.

For the record, I am not implying that Perl is above criticism. But, showing a single arbitrary perl code segment, and touting that Clojure doesn't look like it is not fair comparison.
It shows the lack of appetite from consumers for social networking companies. Sure, the investors for Facebook got rich, but will then next ones? The post IPO stock price would suggest that the next party won't be as big.
I was reading through your blog, assuming this was some faux-naivety mixed with socially uplifting product placement (look! hip young designer of the future actually LEARNS from has-been discard of the old materialism! wow!) and then you went and ruined it.

Are you seriously proclaiming to the world in general that you've absolutely no idea about the socio-economic impacts that a cashless society will have, and their potential for exclusion as well as inclusion within a social sphere?

Are you seriously so naive in reality that you cannot picture some very important men (you know, the kind who invite the Zuckerberg's of this world to behind-the-doors meetings, politely suggest some features that should be included, and then ensure that the resultant IPO is very much in his favour, markets be damned) looking at Square, and its ilk, and imagining a world where our "homeless hero" cannot be a part of society?

This is not to mention that "the homeless", are by their very definition, already excluded from a large part of society, and that the American model has seen a dramatic increase in social exclusion in the last thirty years, which trend-wise, seems to lead to the logical assumption that it will probably increase in the short term. (How short-term might depend on several issues, however that's a different thread)

Oh, to be young and such a waif! The blind optimism of a useful idiot!

“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”
Funny, that the video in this article has already been pulled.

I'm guessing it won't be long until law enforcement agencies start using these when they have "probable cause".
How Fractal Tree Indexes Work
Good you're not a manager then.

When I switched from C to Java, I experienced a considerable bump in development speed. Just the collections framework was a godsend, not to mention things like GC etc.

Quite literally I would write things in days instead of weeks. Same thing goes for Java -> Clojure. And just to be clear, it is not my favorite language.
Corona beer share sold for $20.1 billion
-slightly off topic-

I really like some of these languages. Clojure is something I've worked with but haven't built a complete product from, but I'd like to make something standalone.

I just wish there was a single website devoted to re-creating the terribly boring "Employee Directory Website" app in each language of choice.

It would be even better if the creators of said language would go through the time to make the example site so I could see how they imagine a CRUD layer working, or sessions, or REST/XML data, or the sql connection.

For every "new" language it seems I can find a hundred examples of fibonacci sequencing (or more recently everyone seems to enjoy creating 'twitter in 5 lines of code!') but almost no real "boring web stack" examples.
Shooting off your mouth about an ongoing case is just asking for trouble. All of this could be brought into the courtroom, with Tara being an associate of Charles. It wouldn't be the first time a judge has ruled on a case partially due to professional behavior outside the courtroom.
Windows 8 is also a HTML/JS based platform. It's not "the Web" either.
I would not be hirable there. I have had the misfortune of only working at jobs where there has been (1) a lot to do, (2) much of it very interesting, and (3) the quicker it gets done the better. Trying to throw in any significant open source work on top of this would push me past the burnout point.

When I get off work, I sit down on the couch, put on something relaxing on the TV (Science channel, Discovery, History, Nat Geo, etc. or a sitcom or Futurama, Simpsons, or South Park), and then pull out a math textbook or a theoretical CS book or an interesting research paper, and work on expanding my theoretical knowledge. I've also added a lot of Udacity and Coursera to the mix.

(I assume it goes without saying that I also waste a vast amount of time on Reddit and HN...)
Wow, I just read up on the LoseThos thing and it's heartbreaking.

Call me a bleeding heart killjoy if you must, but I've recently come to the conclusion that just like prison rape and developmental disabilities, mental illness just isn't something you can make tasteful jokes about.
Have you taken an electron microscope to trace each line for every CPU you use in production to know how it actually works?

No? Well perhaps, not needing to dig into how things work is a useful feature of a well designed system.