skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't encounter programming by luck. I was mesmerized by the first computer I saw, and soon sought out programming through library books and hobbyist magazines. At that time, home computers were rare and expensive, so I was lucky that my parents' indulgence made my obsession possible, but now? They're so common that it's very likely John's family had a desktop on which he could simply type "I want to program computers" and it would tell him how. I have trouble believing strong aptitude could go completely unexpressed until college.
Your code looks bad to me. Either x isn't used at all later, or you set x then for some reason set it again which is bad.
Tracking excessive garbage collection in Hotspot JVM
It's hard to tell from the screenshots if you track weight or not, but if you do I highly recommend doing a similar weighted-average system as Libra[1]. Not a lot of apps do this and it's pretty critical to tracking actual weight loss over time. It's based on the thoughts in [2].

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.cachapa.li...

[2] http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html
like_using_method_names_like_this is more readable. White space has been in use to separate words since the time of Alciun, and that's the closest way to do it. Call me conservative but I prefer to stick to the insights of the last 1400 years rather than mangle them horribly ;-)

Oh, and I am not a Ruby developer ;-)
Well, they have in my lifetime... but at bordering 42 I'm higher than the average here. Still, I was too young to remember it which is about the same.
I wonder how a simple pre-processing operation would affect the accuracies? In my experience, standardization (z-scoring) can really improve SVM accuracy.
Every idiot already copied Dustins conclusion and ignored his research. This article deserves an award for the most intelligent thoughtful accurate article that broke the web because its readers are idiots.
Few points:

1. I don't believe it's an accurate statement to say Nokia is dead (if even as a stand-alone company). They have several great things going for them today, it's just hard to see if you're not looking beyond the current quarter or two (which I've found is a common symptom of blindness).

2. I don't believe it's an accurate statement to say they flushed every piece of software they have ever built down the toilet. Firstly, they're still releasing non-WP phones. Secondly, a lot of their skills are in innovating within hardware, which they're very much still doing great stuff with.

3. The takeaway from the article is that if you are a tech company, you shouldn't become a media company (or get into media). Firstly, wouldn't Apple, Google, and Microsoft have never entered the media industry if they would've followed this? Secondly, this takeaway is a great example of the innovators dilemma [1]. The two opposing strategies could just as well lead to failure -- a. Following this "takeaway" advice and being too afraid to join new "value markets" (e.g. innovating within media), and so you just keep on running with what works [3a]; and b. Not following this takeaway advice because you realize you can't stay on top forever with your current strategy, and so you make an attempt to enter new disruptive markets even if it means cannibalizing yourself [3b].

[3a] I think this blanket advice has problems -- media may have been a good thing to get into because the media integration could have caused (or did?) a major disruption in the existing market (I believe this was Nokia's belief and a cause for why they did what they did). Thus not trying new things like this could cause failure as well, as new players enter the market and take their marketshare (e.g. Apple with music and media at its core).

[3b] Though Nokia failed at it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...
It's inspiring that a company has the courage to let a franchise rest when it has artistically run its course (you need only to look to Hollywood for infinite counter-examples to this -- see http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2009/10/-worst-sequ... ). The fact that Valve can still be successful, even without pressuring their employees to develop more "sure thing" games (read: sequels) is pretty awesome if you ask me (I say this as a long-time HL fan).
That's very bad advice that misunderstand the distinction between objects and actions and is completely uninformed by psychologically or marketing insights. It's fine for a semantic Web for robot archivists, but poor for human users.
I've been using v1.0 for 3 weeks now. Very clean, have been able to drag myself for short walks at lunch.. :)
Ryan Patterson, an engineer at Facebook, "built Find Friends Nearby with another engineer for a hackathon project." See his comment on the Techcrunch article on it:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/24/friendshake-facebooks-new-m...
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Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't nokia still the biggest seller of mobile phones worldwide, by number of units shipped? not smartphones sure, but just general mobile phones.
Classic. It is strange how us geeks travel down these paths, making us who we are...
I have yet to have my big ah-ha moment for how to do what I do (scientific computing) in Haskell.

I recently found myself needing a proof-of-concept implementation for solving a bunch of big tridiagonal matrices in parallel using MPI. I thought to myself "here's an opportunity to use Haskell!", but I must confess I'm rather stumped for how one goes about allocating some memory, banging on it, communicating a subset of it to another processor(s), reading a buffer from the other processor, and then banging on the memory I allocated before some more based on what I got back from the other processors(s).

Does one actually attempt to control the machine with this level of granularity with Haskell? Can one actually get any mileage out of the type system doing this sort of thing? Or am I just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole?
Google downplays link text after the "miserable failure" incident, and only that Wikipedia page has the search keyword on the content page itself.
I agree that method_names_like_this is more readable, even (or, especially) after many years of .NET programming. I used the_style_like_this back in C++ days and, honestly, miss it. Perhaps, the renaissance of C++ in the form of C++11 will bring it back :)
Does the video only showcase features that are new to 1.1? Presumably most people going to your website already do not have the app, right?

Also, I'd love to see something a little more visual (I skipped the video because I was listening to music) like static screenshots, icons for the features, and a larger call to action at the bottom (at first glance I couldn't find where you actually talked about how to get the app).
Uh-oh, lookout, it's a Highlight killer! Just like how facebook killed foursquare (fb check-ins), quora (fb questions), Craigslist (fb marketplace), and whatever it is they were trying to kill with fb credits, now they're coming for Highlight.

Might as well give up now, Highlight. You're doomed.
Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% is 100% creepy
> F# : I run Linux... next!

I feel your pain. The other thing that bothers me is that Mono developer(s?) have been extremely bone headed about tail recursion. Hey guys if you are reading this, sorry about the tone, but that needed saying. John Harrop can be quite a troll but he is right in calling Mono out on this. Their incorporations of futures and promises is indeed an attraction though. But then we only have a non-binding promise from Microsoft that they wont go after other implementations. Thats not a threat I would like to be under.

I really would love a multicore enable runtime for OCaML. I dont even ask for threads, just the ability to run some of the concurrency exposed by the functional semantics be (optionally) run in parallel without forking processes.

Yeti...I dont know, unless JVM includes proper tail calls I will always have this nagging sensation in my brain.

Felix, BTW is far from dead, in fact it is quite the opposite, its too intensively developed. The wiki is very new, so there would be some breakage there. The original website is stable. Oh it uses Hindley-Milner type inferencing.

From your comment it seems you would like the white space thing http://people.csail.mit.edu/mikelin/ocaml+twt/ I have never used it though.

Wonder if there is anything akin to P4Caml for SML to give you significant white space. But I think you will get over the syntax :) I have to work with arrays a lot, there SML is a bit more verbose.
Personally, my aptitude was unexpressed until college. It was first-year computer programming (standard in Canadian engineering schools) that opened my eyes. Prior to this, I never really had the desire to program anything because no one had told me how fun it was. It was not encouraged by my parents (who didn't even own a computer for the longest time) or my teachers both of which did not know the first about programming or why you would ever want to do it.

I certainly think that the "talent shortage" could be reduced by making computer science mandatory in high school, or at least on equal footing with other sciences such as biology or physics.
Link with details?
Its pretty awesome that a product manager wrote code and made shit happen.
I don't think you understand either ML or Lisp. SML would never make whitespace significant because: 1) that's a brain-dead choice, and 2) ML, much like Lisp, is used as a language, as a notation, and as a "kernel" language.

Clojure without dynamic-typing is bath-water without baby. What is the point of interactivity, homoiconicity and macros if the language is statically typed?
> Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web is that the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running. Then why are there so many dangling links in the world? Part of it is just lack of forethought.

Nope, it's the lack of a crystal ball. The technology world moves fast. And breaks things, as Zuck says. I have no idea how a site of mine might be structured even a year from now, and if the currently URL scheme will conflict directly with its needs or not, or if an old-to-new translation will be trivial or overly resource-intensive. By now, the world has mostly realized that over-planning is bad, and agile is important.

So who cares if a 5-year-old URL to a page virtually nobody ever visits anymore doesn't work. It's easy to Google the keywords in the link, and you'll probably be able to find the content if it's still around.

(Obviously big sites have an incentive to keep their links working, but they don't need an article from the W3C to tell them that.)
technel, good point. You could mute the youtube video, but I get your point. Will add screenshots and a CTA at the top right away..
Perhaps this will encourage more unique branding instead of generic terms. It sucks for some decent apps in the short term, but hopefully it will reduce search term squatting in the long term. I doubt this change will be a problem for well-branded apps like Evernote and Dropbox.
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Not anymore. Samsung claims that position now.
http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-knocks-nokia-from-global-ph...
A very interesting discussion, I think, even if its promoting some strange ideas. But I don't think enough was done to explain the success of English as the dominant scientific language, as a basis for comparison. The subtext is that it is due to various geopolitical factors, which is likely not far from the truth. But I think one important feature of scientific English (I am a scientist, and so often write in this dialect) is the lexicon. I think the upper bounds on the number of words are around a million and a significant fraction (5 percent?) is used in science writing. Having this large pool of words, mostly co-opted from other languages, allows one to make precise technical statements in a simple way. This is not an elegant grammatical solution, as the author discusses in his analysis of Sanskrit. It is a practical solution. It is scalable inasmuch as scientific communication is specialized, so that I don't have to be familiar with the technical subset of the scientific lexicon outside my field. I feel as if the argument I am making here is not original, but I don't think I know the references. Any suggestions?
xxcode, thanks; that's the best complement I could get. Coding for your own project is amazing fun :)
Winamp: it really whips the llama's ass!
Organizations with large websites use content management systems. Vendors of content management systems come and go as technology changes. Usually, changing the CMS a website uses necessitates URI structure changes depending on the conventions of the system.

Maintaining in perpetuity a complete set of redirects (or stack of rewrite rules) for every page for a website consisting of millions of pages for decades is not feasible in most cases. Things change, departments are created or disbanded or renamed. Management decides certain things should not be accessible to the public or stored in a particular location.

It's incredibly unrealistic to expect every URI to be permanent.
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Personally I'd rather take heart looking at the private-industry space vehicles getting off the ground - if humans do avoid blowing ourselves up and make it to the stars, the ability to do it profitably and sustainably will be much more significant than hooning around in a government-run rover again.

"righteous rage" is a little much.
Not to feed the conspiracy nuts...but why are the shadows on the left and right of the shot being cast in different directions?
wickedchicken, that's very interesting. We intend to have weight tracking in v1.2 and will take the weighted-average system into account.
Some developers already know how to clean toilets. :)
I'm so sorry. The music prevented me from getting far enough in the video to understand what this was.
This has nothing to do with Chomp.
Did you down-vote my comment because you don't agree with me?
That indeed is amazing. In a typical app development project vision, product and engineering is owned by different people. Sometimes, vision and product is done by a single person. Rarely, I have came across projects, where a visionary, thinker and creator is a same person. Outcome of such a project must be absolutely fantastic.
amccloud, not sure what you mean.
Oh, so you are the guy who has been causing all those 404s that I bump into.

And nice strawman, by the way. I have had some EXTREMELY popular blog posts that I bookmarked (remember NVIE’s post on git branching?) 404 just because the site changed architecture. (Now hosted on GitHub.) It’s all laziness and lack of forethought and planning. What is agile about one of the most popular blog posts in the development world 404ing?

That said, yes, it can be a bit time-consuming to map old URLs to new. I once started a project that would help considerably with this, but my employer at the time decided it wasn’t worth it (hey, would they see any more gold coins if they helped clients’ visitors’ bookmarks and search results work?). But a manual connection isn’t impossible. In some cases, it’s easy. When I moved off Drupal (damn it to hell), I redirected all those old /node/<id> URLs to their new ones. Because, damn it, I wasn’t going to add any 404s to the Internet if I could. I didn’t blog to make money. I blogged to help people. And maintaining URLs helps people.
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Because its a panorama taken of multiple shots that span a very wide area of whole scene, almost making the resulting shot a 360° view.
"This sharp panorama is digitally stitched together from pictures taken by Cernan as he and Schmitt roamed the valley floor."
The IP was the software I had created (web app + marketing websites), and bundled in with that was the customer list. Basically any intangibles.

In Canada it was done through a Section 85 election and there was some corresponding paperwork (T2057 + T2 tax return) But I needed to involve an accountant and a tax lawyer to make sure that the new company was structured properly to take advantage of the lifetime capital gains exemption, plus the lawyer's time to help me get specific wording in the sale contract to make sure I qualified for the exemption.

Cost wise it was probably an extra 15-20 hours of professional time.

Feel free to contact me directly (email in profile) if you want more details.
no. there is absolutely a talent shortage.

as proven by 1) the fact that the percentage of of the general population who have an aptitude for "brainy things" in general is pretty much the exact same as it was 20 years ago and 2) the percentage of companies with a need for said people is growing exponentially as software eats the world.

basically, all of the new-need companies from point 2 are bottom-feeding all of the people from point 1 which applies upward pressure on the talent pool.

because a talented accountant-turned-programmer still leaves a hole that needs to be filled.

feelin' me?

m3mnoch.
I still haven't found a solution better than winamp with advanced crossfading output (which was last updated in 2002) to DJ a party... I usually bust out my 5-year old PC because nothing beats the crossfader of winamp (coupled with the awesome keyboard shortcuts - the ability to search for anything in the ID3 tags and enqueue the song via keyboard is so useful for a DJ)

Anyone have a better solution?

Amazing reading here how many people still use the old versions of winamp... It's pretty much the only thing I use my PC's for.
All I can say is winamp is open on my computer playing my music as I write this. Are there really other players out there that do a better job? Seems like a lot of people use iTunes but I've always found it to be a very slow media player. But maybe things have changed I need to reevaluate the current offerings?
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The good versions of Winamp were essentially a giant list of searchable songs with a lightweight skin. It was fast and lightweight and was able to handle thousands and thousands of songs in a single playlist. 10 years later and both iTunes and Clementine will choke if I add 5k songs to a playlist, yet Winamp 2 handled it without a problem.

The skinning feature was overrated, and I never understood why there were so many skins. In the years I hung on to Winamp 2, I may have changed the skin one time. Most people picked one and forgot about it.

I think I heard somewhere that Foobar2000 only exists because Winamp 3 messed everything up so badly. I don't know if that's true, but Wikipedia says Winamp3 was release in August 2002, and the first release of Foobar2000 was December 2002, so the dates would be correct.
I think he meant music in video is too distracting for him.
Change the music, it is for preppy teenage girls that bring back terrible memories for nerds.
I look on this as another example of the miraculous leap the moon program was. Being so far before it's time, it was miraculous but doomed nonetheless.

You can't commercialise something that was only affordable because two countries were trying to out-cold-war each other.

Now, I hope and believe, we can.
Reminds me of this graphic: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/303619_...

Ugh...
I suggest remapping your (utterly pointless) CAPS LOCK key to CONTROL.

You said you were on a mac so:

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys
I was converting a somewhat complex Haskell example into Ruby for a presentation and kept running into neat concise Haskell expressions that I could not easily express in Ruby.

It got me thinking that Haskell might be a better Ruby.
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>When I first discovered reflection, I was using it for everything.

Well there's your problem. You have to use the right tool for the job. Reflection shouldn't be used for everything, and I wasn't suggesting that was the case. My point was that it shouldn't be avoided. It's damn helpful in a lot of different places, and to say outright that you're just not going to use it would be depriving yourself of a powerful toolset.
I wish they also keep track of other diseases, maybe they can use the voice to detect more than Parkinson's
This is a good point. Probably long term this is a good change. The thing I was frustrated with is just the lack of a heads up from Apple. Losing > 30% of your sales because all of your search phrases depend on title + keywords sucks. Especially considering they are apps that didn't use the keyword stuffing.
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Winamp 3, as an application, got it all right. Software developers even today struggle to get applications to be so usable.

Dead simple interface
Super fast start up
Super fast search
Easy playlist creation and management
Simple keyboard shortcuts
Simple configuration
Huge library of plugins
Zero distractions
Stable

I still miss winamp. To this day there hasn't been another media player that just got completely out of my way and let me listen to music.
It often surprises me that in discussions of Indian History (including that article by Mihir Bose that you site), one of the best historians of ancient India is conveniently forgotten. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romila_Thapar
Well, it's a panorama. If the light source (sun) is located in the 'missing' portion of the panorama, then you would expect the different shadows on either side of the missing bit. This is consistent with the apparent shadow under the buggy.

Here's a terrestrial example of the madness that happens to shadows (and geometry in general)with panoramas. It's partly less obvious on the moon since it lacks familiar references.

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundeena-pier-360-pan...]
My programming experience was unexpressed before college as I was mostly interested in basic sciences - mainly physics. It was only after high school did I seriously get into CS type of stuff as I started developing an intesrest in AI/algorithms. So for me, it is not hard to believe that there could be a lot of people with a hidden aptitude for programming. After all, programming is a means to an end. After high school, understanding the brain and developing AI was my "end", which obviously requires strong programming skills and thus subsequently triggered a stronger interest for programming.