skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After being a full time-500+friend user of Facebook since the days when you required your university account to sign up, I finally got around to deleting my account on Facebook. Moved my close family, including my five year old niece, and my six "actual" friends over to Path (well, five of six. #6 doesn't have a smart phone, ironic that my five year old niece does (her father's old 3GS))

I realized one of the nice things about Path is - not sticky at all. No extended timelines, or history that you typically see. 99% of the time you are interested in the last five or six updates only. What this means, is that moving off of Path will be trivial once the eventual commercialization pollutes what is currently a great user experience. (No Ads, No Distractions)

Great for us, not so great for Path, I guess.

Oh, and the fact that I spend a grand total of 5 minutes a day on Path (Less time than I've spent writing this post) - is also appreciated.
I'm running programs of similar functionality but coming in at 1.95GB.

Chrome (only 8 tabs right now), Rdio, Sparrow, Coda, Terminal, Notational Velocity.
By most accounts Sheryl Sandberg is handling most of the traditional CEO duties. Zuck has the benefit of being a founder CEO, with an experienced exec in Sandberg to help. Any issues Facebook faces, won't be because Zuck is in over his head.

The problem that Zuck (and Facebook at large) face is that there's a rift between expectations (100 Billion+ valuation) vs reality (it's a profitable, but much smaller business). Facebook needs to either change their belief (or expectations) or reality (somehow morph into a 100 Billion+ company). Neither is easy to do, but now that Facebook is a public company, they've at least got a chance. Market forces can help guide them to a realistic valuation, and given enough time as a profitable but lower valued company, it's possible they'll reset their expectations to something more realistic. Or they could finally pull the rabbit out of the hat and become a 100+ billion dollar company.
Odd. I had this problem in 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and it went away when I upgraded to 10.7 (Lion). The most obvious symptom is the machine does not seem to be able to make use of the inactive memory (the blue slice of the pie in Activity Monitor). I did not notice the problem at all when I first started using 10.6. When I hunted around on the help forums a few months ago I found lots of users with the symptoms, but nobody acknowledging the "validity" of the problem. In fact a lot of deniers out there. I wonder if it was quietly fixed or will recur after the system gets used for a while.
Sounds like a good long bet (http://longbets.org/). I'd be willing to bet that "Worldwide, the 2020s will be less violent than any preceding decade in the 20th or 21st century".
We're developing this with Magnus Manske, one of the original developers of Wikimedia (Jimmy Wales even declared January 25th as Magnus Manske Day - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Magnus_Manske_Day), and Mozilla WebFWD (https://webfwd.org).

This big idea is that in about 2 years there will be a massive paradigm-shift from traditional wet-lab work (beakers, people in white coats) to DNA Synthesis, which is basically a laser printer for DNA.

DNA is the code of life and we think there will be an explosion in the number of biological projects and biological hackers in the near future. We're creating GENtle (open source) and Synbiota to be an entirely web-based crowd-innovation platform for Biotech.

I love discussing the future of Biotech - hopefully there will be some good questions in this thread!

Regards,

Connor Dickie
Co-Founder Synbiota & Mozilla Fellow
I've met a lot of graphics programmers, that are simply in love with D3D, and despise OpenGL (my own experience, I work in a video game studio doing console and PC games)
Don’t skip meals to save time. 5 good hours are better than 10 bad ones.

Can we apply this to sleeping too?
What's the problem with the OS and apps using as much available memory as possible?
This site is responsible for more lulz than any in recent memory. Very addictive late-night.
What about Code School (http://www.codeschool.com)? I'm pretty sure that it's a well known place to learn programming, etc.
nathanb: Yes, that would be ideal. The way I think about it is this: even though this effort falls far short of the ideal with NVIDIA and AMD, it's still a huge win for the platform.
I once (many years ago when I was still learning HTML), coded a website locally and it had a few links to http://localhost/. My apache was set to auto run at system boot and hence the local site was always available to me. I hosted it to internet but for many weeks didn't realize the broken links. It was all good and fast for me. Guess I was not alone
Tom DeMarco, of Peopleware fame, wrote a book called "Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation". He has, in some ways, rejected his ideas in that book.

In this article, "Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?" http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep... he states:

"My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation (Prentice Hall/Yourdon Press, 1982), played a role in the way many budding software engineers quantified work and planned their projects. In my reflective mood, I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no."

The tl;dr of his article is that the software projects that require tight cost control are the ones delivering little or no marginal value. That is,

"To understand control’s real role, you need to distinguish between two drastically different kinds of projects:

■ Project A will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million.

■ Project B will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of more than $50 million.

What’s immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A but almost not at all
important for Project B. This leads us to the odd
conclusion that strict control is something that
matters a lot on relatively useless projects and
much less on useful projects. It suggests that the
more you focus on control, the more likely you’re
working on a project that’s striving to deliver
something of relatively minor value.

To my mind, the question that’s much more important than how to control a software project is, why on earth are we doing so many projects that deliver such marginal value?"

I believe this as well. If the value of software we're writing is so low, it's probably not worth being written. The high value stuff isn't worth more than a cursory (e.g. Agile "Points") estimation.

The other thing, which he doesn't touch on the article, is that in order to shrink the "cone of uncertainty" (http://construx.com/File.ashx?cid=1649) you must put more and more effort into actually "solving" the problem. Rarely do estimates consider the time it takes to estimate (requirements docs, interviews, etc.). Ultimately, if you follow the line of reasoning all the way out, perfect estimation requires you to solve the problem and all you then estimate is precisely the amount of time it will take to type the code you've specced out.

Of course, what you don't have an estimate for is all the time it took to arrive at your estimate. And thus, the folly of software estimation is revealed.

(edit: Lack of blockquote is quite annoying, apologies for the messed up styling)
A lot of that memory is shared memory.
How social media has devalued journalism
Fasting appears in many of the world's religions. I'm curious about the roots of fasting that have been codified into religious practice. Did the ancients discover that fasting was good for you?
Exactly!

It has nothing to do with the programmer. It has everything to do with what projects really are today.

1. Undefined in scope even when defined
2. Problems to be solved (innovation) not solutions to be produced (production)
3. Filled with hidden complexities of potential infinite character.

Copied from another post of mine:

Time estimations is an industrial way of thinking applied to a post-industrial (and post-capitalist) world.

In the post industrial world time isn't the problem but rather project definition and scoping.
In the industrial world the problem was already solved (machine was built, market often established and output depended on a few factors that could be adjusted. Need more output add more of X)

In the post industrial world every project is about problem solving and scoping.
To put it into comparison.

If we apply post-industrial reality to an industrial world.

It means that each time a product needed to be done if not the factory, then the machines would have to be developed.

It will take many many years before time estimation will die, but it will happen.
I once had a conversation with a Frenchman (in France) about how he had berated some poor American girl (also in France) for not knowing that Zurich was in Switzerland. I promptly quizzed him on which states 5 American cities were in, all larger than Zurich. He failed miserably.

The United States is geographically almost as large as the whole of Europe. The closest foreign border to me is Niagara Falls just over 400mi away, and even if I go there, they still speak my native tongue with pretty much the same accent. I don't think there exists any point in Germany that far from another country.
> You could potential improve the engine in some way and use up that headroom

That is a headroom of a factor of 5.25. If you use that headroom to implement better graphics, your performance characteristics will likely change completely.

That's the point. A thousand vs. a million FPS when you draw a single unshaded triangle doesn't necessarily interpolate to predict the performance in a real scenario.
It probably _was_ noticed, but once it started you can't just pull all of the plugs since that you make you lose even more...
Senate kills Cybersecurity Act of 2012
Hey, thanks for the link. I've looked pretty hard for sites that teach cooking and they're pretty hard to come by! The cooking for engineers has been the best one that I've seen. Its surprising that there's not better resources. I didn't want to have to start linking to youtube channels...
I'm not sure, if it was a technical failure, but here is a great talk from Def Con 19 about security and high trading systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncpm6vRi9F4
because they don't account for the 8 hours a day they spend on HN
I've tried this before, and I didn't find that I got any better. I had an excel spreadsheet tracking each task, my time estimate, and the actual time spent doing it. And I found that while for half to most tasks, I was fairly accurate, every couple of tasks, I'd have a task that was wildly off. Thus, my variability was huge for task estimation.
If you're just starting out with cooking as I was a few years ago, http://startcooking.com/ is a great site. Very basic information but explained concisely.
Yes, it's hard to estimate time for problem solving. But the author has a very good point that you shouldn't neglect an hour for basic testing of a fix after solving it. And that you should take a moment to consider what classes depend on the code to both hinder changes and make you spend more time thinking about side effects.
While the author of the linked article expiates the hit coding performance can take when fasting I have personally observed an interesting phenomena during my observation of Ramadan. Namely, I can experience moments of acute lucidity and penetrating insight into a problem at hand.

Usually this occurs when I am in the midst of something that requires a good bit of effort such as tackling a thorny algorithmic conundrum or analyzing a particularly complex call stack. If I attune my mind to repress the pangs of bodily need I occasionally feel as if the external world melts away and I slip into an almost mystical state of oneness with the task at hand. Needless to say, I have been surprised immensely by this development.

One theory I have is that the blood flow that would normally be assigned by my body to the act of digestion is now free'd up to be reallocated to the ole cranium. Plausible? Unsure, but am certainly enjoying these life experiments!

Side note: for those observing the fast I have also noticed that my immune system is closely linked with the gut and my self-imposed starvations can lead to immune system compromise. Make sure you supplement your Iftar goodies with some replenishing nutrients such as pro-biotic yogurt smoothies rich in vitamin C and home-cooked chicken consomme.
I think it depends on your end goal regarding space travel.

If your end goal is to mine resources in space, then yes, using humans seems like a waste of time and money.

However, if your goals are more along the lines of colonizing other planets, or setting up research stations on other planets, than dealing with issues around transporting humans through space is more important.
OneSec - A revolution in self-expression
Is there anything good written about failsafe programming? I try to code defensively so terrible bugs like this can't snowball. A heuristic like "only make 1000 trades a minute" could have saved Knight $400 million!

I try to build global failsafes into my code, particularly network code. For instance, a recent Twitter project I wrote has various loops calling their API. That code has a global counter that says "this program can only ever make 25 calls" that's enforced in the bottom level HTTP calling function. If the rest of my code is correct I'll never trip that limit, I have application-specific logic that means I should only ever need to make 10 calls. But I appreciate having the failsafe in case that more complex logic fails.
Recent article: Has Kinect failed gamers?

http://360.mmgn.com/Articles/has-kinect-failed-gamers
Never Ask Strangers About DEFCON
Strangely, I usually put on more weight during Ramandan. I think it's a combination of work/food/sleep-pattern.
Re: Matching IP address - given the prevalence of NAT, in which several thousand users will be associated with a single IP address - you can't rely on that.

Cookies, on the other hand, or, browser-fingerprint-matching, probably can be used to identify these shill accounts. I wonder if Facebook knows how many of it's accounts are fake, or if they actively avoid looking into that information.
my manager is worse, and he doesn't even program!
Wait, where's the payoff? They haven't taken off because, for the vast majority of websites, it's not there.

If I mark up the address on my contact page... who cares? I've already got a map next to it anyways, and the business can already be found on Google Maps. And it's not like it's going to improve my PageRank or inbound links or anything. I see zero evidence that a marked-up address will bump me up five spots in Google for keyword searches.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but any mobile browser that will let you click on marked-up phone numbers to call them... will auto-detect phone numbers as well, no? Figuring out what's a phone number is not a hard problem, and false positives aren't really a big deal.

I'm not saying microformats are a bad idea in theory. It's just that they haven't taken off because there is no clear payoff for most people, neither programmer nor consumer. This article certainly hasn't convinced me of any. Maybe someone here can explain if there's anything I'm missing?
I think there's a great potential in merging biological with a traditional digital/electronic interface when it comes to genome sequencing. Our white blood cells already does a good job of recognizing cells, as do viruses etc -- I'm confident we'll see virus/RNA/DNA-derived sequencing before too long.

If nothing else, by looking at nature, we can see some practical examples of how far it should be possible to take this technology.
Are you aware of history at all? Police in Western world have much less power than they used to have. One example was the Riot Act in UK ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Act ) which gave local authorities the power to declare 12 or more people a riot, and if they didn't leave within 1 hour, they could be legally killed.

Protesters have had much harder times than "sonic cannons". Try soldiers shooting into a crowd (e.g. Bloody Sunday in 1972, Northern Ireland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972) )
Indeed. The death of the immediate draw APIs is something that only driver writers and serious optimization wonks think is a good idea. For everyone else, it simply makes ES2 an API that is basically impossible to learn. Without exception, everyone I know who does any 3D work at all learned first on 1.1 doing flat shaded fixed function stuff.

And all those APIs are gone. The amount of code required in ES2 to put anything on the screen at all is staggering.

But that said: the per-vertex APIs really are broken from an optimization sense, and serious apps absolutely must do their work on buffer objects. (Display lists have historically been a way to cheat this, at the expense of huge complexity in the driver. This is one of the bad APIs exDM69 is talking about, I suspect.)
Reminds me of the plot of Heinlein's The Man Who Sold The Moon, in which space-loving entrepreneur Delos D. Harriman builds a company big and capable enough to send a manned rocket to the moon, only to find out that his board of directors won't let him go.
Freedom Sleeve: Turn your iPod into an iPhone
If writing software is more akin to writing essays than building bridges, and thus hard/near impossible to do accurate estimations--

Why do we need time estimates at all? Why does a company manager need time estimates? Is it mostly budget concerns?

How would a company operate if there were no time estimates?
Is that Virtual Memory? Or Private / Reserved / Shared?
I don't believe in this at all.

I think it is probable that China start to colonize Mars before US has the ability to. Next, they start to claim area after area, while also dominating the earth economy. It will not stabilize the geo-political landscape - it will complicate it.
I tried that experiment, and the first couple of years it was about 50/50, but most recently almost everyone who posted did so on the FB birthday date. I think theyv'e come to rely on the Facebook reminders.

It was also interesting to see the cognitive dissonance from some posts: "I'm pretty sure it was your birthday next week, but Facebook says its this week, so Happy Birthday".
The THOR database: a military record of every US bomb deployed since WWI
They are out of cash apparently. Likely to be sold or file for bankruptcy shortly it seems.
sssssh You'll ruin the illusion that (Societal Breakdown|End of Moores law|Space Travel|Strong AI|etc.) is only ~10 years away!
For those who are familiar with tptacek from HN but don't know why he's so respected in the infosec space: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/06/how-to-break-into-securit..., http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/06/how-companies-can-beef-up...
In the fiction aisle.
Lack of Rain a Leading Cause of Indian Grid Collapse
It depends on how good your eyes are. Mine are bad enough that I expect to have trouble seeing it. Most people's glasses aren't nearly as strong as mine.
Are women with high testosterone allowed to compete in men's events? If so, I wonder how this will interact with ski jumping, where women reliably out-perform men. If not, the Olympics are excluding a lot of people just because they can't define "woman" or "man" in any sort of intellectually-consistent fashion.
I've got a bit of a mirror image of that: I use these "AI-heritage" finite-domain solvers like SAT, ASP, clp(fd), but have been wondering lately if tools from other communities, such as integer programming, could be more useful to me for some applications. :)

My impression is that there's a little bit of tool-choice segregation by community, with OR people, AI people, software-verification people, and PLs people each having their own favorite tools, and not as much overlap as there could be.
These sorts of problems will occur in any distributed system which runs at a high rate without humans in the loop. There is no chaos monkey for the stock market, and transaction rollback is available only in the most extreme circumstances.

I have yet to see a convincing rationale for how high frequency trading adds value to the system - it certainly doesn't seem to add pricing stability. Because this is hacker news, I suspect a few people reading this either work in the industry and/or have strong opinions about it, and I would love to hear why I am wrong. Because I do like it when clever computer scientists make money, and that seems to be pretty much the only social benefit of HFT, at the cost of flash crashes and things like the example above.
I grew up in a rural area AR-15s are very popular for varmint hunting. Predators like coyotes are a real problem for farmers. Some states go as far as to offer bounties for the purpose of population control.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varmint_hunting

To your original question, do you "need" a semi-automatic rifle for varmint hunting? No, but they are very well suited for that purpose.
'Turf Geography Club': if Wes Anderson made a mobile game
The long lasting existence of humanity requires a team effort. It is laughable to believe that an individual can do it.
That's child's play. Open Dashboard and watch the horror.
Profile on Eugene Kaspersky
Tell that to the student protesters at Kent State in 1970. 4 killed, 9 wounded (one of whom was permanently paralyzed), in a peaceful protest. It was a time when the national guard was regularly called in to break up peaceful protests.

There isn't an increase in violence, there's an increase in information now. There weren't cellphone videos of police violence on youtube in the 1970s (neither existed). There weren't 24 hour news stations who needed any content they could get (violence sells). We're over-saturated with ways to see current violence, and it can make it seem like it's happening more now (there's more reports of it, so it seems like it must be happening more). That's not at all the case.
Anyone did the upgrade from SL? Is a clean install always recommended?
I fast regularly and if you already on a low carb diet, then the transition is much easier on your body. I don't notice a a diminishing of mental capacity, but I do notice that I need more sleep.

There are a lot of things you can do to prepare for a fast. For example, cut back on caffeine, sugar and even salt in the days or weeks ahead of your fast. Also, gorging on food the morning of a fast is not really healthy and is a sure recipe for "Ramadan code."

There was a fantastic article on fasting in Harper's Magazine this past March that covers the history of fasting, "Starving your way to vigor: The benefits of an empty stomach." Sadly, you have to be a subscriber to read it online:

http://harpers.org/archive/2012/03/0083829

Fasting doesn't have to devastate your mental faculties. I actually find that it helps me focus, and I have started doing it a few times a year.
Sadly some of the cooking for engineers advice is just bad. I just perused it briefly. For instance it says to make sure to buy a cutting board that fits in your sink, then recommends wooden cutting boards. You don't soak wooden tools so why would you need it to fit in your sink? I love my butcher block and it's much larger than my sink.

If you want to really jump into it, grab Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller and just start cooking your way through it. Keller has an engineer's mindset and level of precision, and explains things assuming you're not stupid but don't know much about cooking.
> I won't say that they are doing a bad job

I do. I watch American shows and films exclusively in their original version because of the really bad job they do with the translation. From time to time I catch the dubbed version by accident. Mostly I just cringe and make it go away.