skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's less of a "build a replacement for twitter" kind of thing and more along the lines of "build another twitter, but better." So it's a difference of degree, not kind.

This sucks. A distributed social network would be incredibly cool. On the other hand we've known we've needed one for a long time but nobody can seem to build on that catches on. Maybe there's a reason for that.

Here's a question for the app.net leadership. If app.net ever became successful, and someone came along with a real distributed social network and tried to Padlister your Craigslist, what would you do? Does your commitment to open APIs extend that far?

This post sounds more negative than I intended. Marginal improvement is still improvement! I'm actually starting to get kind of excited to see what happens.
London 2012 rhythmic gymnastics
Today (August 10, 2012, Friday) Google is featuring “Rhythmic Gymnastics” by showing the Doodle “London 2012 rhythmic gymnastics“. This event is taking place from Thursday 9 – Sunday 12 August.
xlloop works for a bunch of languages, python, ruby, etc... But as far as i remember, xlloop is more of an RPC facility.
The big companies all charge crazy expensive transaction fees: Emdeon, ENS (now Ingenix), ACS (now Xerox), Ability, Relay Health (formally HTP), and Meddata/Transunion. They all charge upwards for 25-35 cents per eligibility transaction.

The software company I work for sells a healthcare product which includes automatic real-time eligibility verification. We don't charge per transaction. We can afford to do for two reasons 1) we put a lot of effort into finding cheap/free/redundant real-time connections to payers and 2) we can simply eat the cost as part of the margin for our product. Our philosophy is that you should check eligibility often and always, at every point of the patient's encounter from scheduling to check-in. Per transaction costs scare away customers which is part of why we don't charge per transaction.
seems algebraic to me
The Twitter Underground Economy: A Blooming Business
I'm sorry, but whats the point of DDOSing this release? Aren't there just a million ways to push something out? How is this effective at all?
They're in it for the fame, not the delivery. They could put it on public torrent networks if they really wanted it out there. (They've done the "this torrent is everything we have, encrypted, if something happens to Assange we'll release the decryption key" before though.) Thanks to the Streisand Effect the DDoS guarantees this will receive lots of attention.
Completely agree. One of the quickest ways to burn bridges and ensure you are perceived as caring more about your own ego and "needs" than anything else, is to re-implement something without talking to anyone about it, be they the authors, stakeholders or 3rd-party dependents. This kind of "look at me, manager! look what I did!" behavior is the cancerous seed of a team ruled by self-seeking and ego.

If your needs would benefit the whole and are not a mere excuse for egoism, but are not aligned with the company/team, get another job.

In the end, the author learned a lesson, but the wrong one. It's not that you should listen when voices of dissent shout in your ear, but that you should simply foster a general environment of open communication, and discourage action-without-coordination.
Darn, I was about to ask how good this would be for obfuscation, but you beat it already.
A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
Point set topology?
FTA: "I'm not buying any proprietary or traditionally copyrighted products unless all other options are exhausted."

I'm pretty baffled by his mention of copyright here. The linux kernel is 'open source' by most people's standards yet the copyrights are held by thousands of people. Living a modern life with only open source products is very doable, living with only products which have no copyright would be almost impossible
I don't agree with that. IMO removing the zlib, hex, and base64 encodings was a good thing.

While an argument can be made that they're technically "encoding", they're really outside the scope of the problem the encode and decode methods were meant to solve.
In case ammmir decides takes you up on your offer, I'd advise him to ensure that a contract is in place before committing to do any work.
What formatting example should replace “his suicide note” in the Markdown help?
"Take a label that is offensive, associate it with something you don't like, paint people who like what you don't like with a label that they don't like."

You forgot "Then sit back and watch the fun as otherwise intelligent people buy into your frame and scramble to defend their favorite languages on HN, Twitter, blogs etc".

I am in awe of Steve Yegge's ability to conjure up an internet storm at will. Everybody gets what he is upto, but feel compelled to respond anyway.
You'd be amazed what you can do just with a watt of radio power.

If a transmitter and a receiver is in space, what's the furthest distance the receiver can go away from and have a 1 watt signal still above the noise floor? Assume the transmitter is a perfect omnidirectional.

About 9200 miles.
I eat corn on pizza. I'm a manager
Yegge's entire essay seems like an application of JWZ's regex admonition. "I know, I'll present my hypothesis using political terminology!" Now you have two problems.

Political terminology in the United States is MASSIVELY warped by entities who spend literally millions of dollars in an effort to connotatively redefine words. When you (re)define words like "conservative" or "liberal" you risk alienating people who have been conditioned to have an emotional response to either definition. If you define a term in a way that seems pejorative to your reader, the reader will weight every subsequent statement against the rigor they think you brought (or did not bring) to those definitions. Your essay will entirely fail to persuade if it rests on (perceived) faulty definitions.

When writing to a largely US audience, no attempt at honest communication will be aided by the application of political labels.

Here's a test: can the essay be rewritten without that political terminology? Reader "nirvana" used the terms "cowboy" and "architect" to describe his two axes. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367328 ) I very much prefer those terms. Yes, they're also connotative and subjective, but as analogies they map much better onto the subject being discussed.
Voyager 2 was at the edge of the solar system when JPL diagnosed and corrected a single bit error that caused it to return garbage data.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-151
Electrimod: stackable electronic platform w/ open source hardware and library
This is science-fiction coming alive, TrapWire seems to be a little like 'Minority Report' and 'Person of Interest'.
I think a good way to classify the two is :"one group feels that others cannot do what I do" and the other group feels "what I can do anyone can do - right away or with learning/time".. and I think this shows up
irrational ideas are the work of the Devil !
A Closer Look at Apple's iPhone 5 'Unibody'
Thank you for the link to the older Yegge article. I REALLY needed that to remind me I'm stupid again.
If email subject has "spam" as a sub-string, gmail doesn't consider it spam?
I have recently realized as a consequence of an email in my gmail account, that if you use spam in the email subject, gmail doesn't consider it a spam, when it actually is a spam and many other such emails from the same source have landed in the spam folder. Is that a flaw in the algorithm?
FullScreenWrapper2 - A GUI Framework for developing full screen apps in SL4A
Waiting for that bad boy. In case anyone is curious of what gman is referring to you can read my response here katgleason.tumblr.com
Facebook gains as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings buys $1M in stock
I wonder if the US Government, presumably behind most of the DDoS attacks against them, are aware of this - that attacking them now, only puts tWikileaks back into the public's attention.
This http://mapsaurus.com/static/javascript-warning.png is amazing. Best "please turn on JS" ever. Dinosaurs have a tendency to do that.
I eat my corn in spiral and I love analysis part of maths. I am doing my masters in data mining. I guess, it adds another data point to your findings.
"our tools don't matter. All code turns into shit " - most hilarious phrasing. I've recently adapted this philosophy and this helps me ship !!
ps : any chance of getting to see your blog archives ?
pps : this whole response thread has turned very religious !!!
I hate to be the bearer of good news, but launch costs these days is more like $4k/lb.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=301
I don't really understand what it means for physical items like shoes to be open source in the sense that some software is.

Users are already free to modify their shoes. And even if you had a video showing how the shoes were made, that isn't enough to replicate the shoes unless you have the machinery and dexterity to make shoes.

He also claims he wants to be open source in "how I get around." What would it mean for walking to be open source or closed source? Is it "open source" to ride a bus?
I was interested to learn that most of the software was done by the end of 2008.
This is one of the best pieces of advice in the thread and should be much higher. Make the fix but never check in the code, and just run it like that on your own machine. Assuming it is a visibly big enough change someone is going to eventually notice.

An extra bonus potential is, who sees the change running first....if it is engineering personnel from the "wrong" camp, one could derive some delicious pleasure watching them squirm once they've seen what you've done and the implications dawn upon them, I can just imagine seeing the gears turning in their head, trying to figure out how to get themselves out of the predicament!
As an algebraist who would be classified under "spirals" here I just think the corn looks more interesting if I leave bands of kernels in the first pass and then pick them up in the second. Definitely sounds like a more algebraist-focused reason for it, too :)
Hi! I'm another member of the Mapsaurus team. Alice (http://mapsaurus.com/about.html) drew that up in the middle of a late night coding session. We think Rex is pretty awesome too.
Public schools are not that poorly funded. Here's an example, Detroit, not the richest place, right?

Average spending per pupil: almost $16K per pupil
http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/10/city-leaders-think-tankers...

Average spending per pupil in private schools: $10,045
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_063.asp
Average spending in public schools: $10,259

I wouldn't call schools that spend 1.5 times national average per pupil "underfunded", unless there are some data that all schools are terribly underfunded and funding them more would change something. And public schools routinely spend more than private schools too: http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/they-spend-...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04...

So I do not think financing is the main problem. You can always find ways to spend more money, but first it needs to be shown that the money is the problem, and it is far from obvious, as the data does not show that lavish spending leads to improvement in results.
I've been playing around with a similar idea - using plain JSON as the message format, you can make a set of pipeable command line utilities for manipulating data from many web APIs.
Wouldn't it be something as simple as a continuous recording, uploaded to NSA/gov servers where they would then run basic facial recognition, tag each face, index them and compare them for matches in the database. Then you could track where an individual has been over time.

The product may be publicly available, but the difference here is that the government is secretly installing cameras in every major public location, and building a growing database of every individual's face and movements. No individual company could do that. The government can.
I live in the US. I find it moderately disgusting. However, sneezing is acceptable when done down and away from the table.
The algebraist/analyst corn cob distinction seems much more valid & meaningful than Yegge's split.
Scary! What if they brick it?
Consider that shoe piracy is actually pretty prevalent. You are free to make and modify shoes, but you are not free to sell copies (knockoffs, as they are commonly known) of existing closed source shoes.
I as a user would like to tell you my insurance info and tell you what procedure I want and you tell me the best/cheapest location to get that done.

This is offered by Castlight Health (www.castlighthealth.com), where I used to work. Though it is currently only sold to employers & offered free to their employees.

Re the groupon model: I think you'd need to adjust the model a lot to sell services which are frequently covered by insurance. Teeth whitening generally isn't insured, which is why it is in fact a very frequent groupon offer.
Are you referring to something more like DabbleDB rather than MongoHQ?
I find myself more and more hoping app.net DOESN'T get funded. I want the messaging-platform successor to twitter to be an open, distributed platform, not a single-provider closed platform.

I like what they're planning to build, I just want that to be a layer built on the open internet...
"Hey, This college sounds familiar."

Dr. Lewis' book is listed on Amazon as having a publication date of October 30, 2012.

[edit: The author himself will tell you; If you're already familiar with programming basics, and just want to learn Scala, you'll be better of with Odersky's text.]
I don't like corn, but I checked with my parents and they both followed this rule.
Already Yegge has fouled the technical discourse. Sad.
There is plenty of redundancy to deal with this sort of thing and they've done lots of on the fly updating of various robot probes including on 40y/o Voyager 2 which had a flipped bit in its memory.
If someone's doing an unusual thing, why does it matter that somone else has done it before?
A much better split than Yegge's.
Similar idea: http://code.google.com/p/recordstream/
That is beyond amazing.
Nimble's 'Scale to Fit' Storage Architecture Can Scale Up or Scale Out
PSB registration does not take two minutes, literally or figuratively. I was at the 出入境 for about an hour two weeks ago. This one visit was one of many visits. Yesterday, I went to register at the local 派出所. I was the only person there. They processed all my documents (three passports) in one hour.

I should amend my statement above: PSB registration does not take two minutes for me. You are fortunate that it only takes two minutes for you (I am assuming you mean figuratively, though if you are being literal I am even more envious).

China is a big country. There are places in China where the administration is very efficient and effective. Most places are not. I say this from personal experience and from the experience of others who don't live in large, developed cities. Some generalizations are accurate, but like any generalization, the veracity may vary from your own local experience.
I eat my corn in rings, fix a z and then scrape through theta before choosing the next z. It's efficient and it sort-of follows the cornkernel grid.

I'm also more of a statistician who edits in vi and emacs every day and I'm challenging myself with some category theory and abstract algebra because I find it intoxicating.

So, I don't have a clue how to fit into this divide.
Yeah, RT alone is not a reputable source. They thrive on unfounded conspiracy theories and often times report outright falsehoods. During the Libyan revolution, they would claim whole cities were under Gaddafi control when they was clear video and multiple members of international media proving otherwise.
None of that has any meaning to me. "Leaves no room for rational discourse". How? What does that even mean? How is he blocking anyone? It's his opinion, he's not stopping anyone from making a counterpoint. "Cost/Benefit analysis". Have you done one? What would it even mean in this context? Would such an exercise even be meaningful? (Not snark, honest question)

You obviously disagree with his viewpoint/conclusion. Cool. So do I, somewhat, for very different reasons. Calling it "dangerous" just adds a lot of hyperbole that doesn't need to be there.
Would you be happier if he'd used different words? If, instead of talking about "politics" between "liberals" and "conservatives", he had made the same post about "differences in taste" between "caution-focused" and "momentum-focused" programmers? Because, you know, he could have said it that way, and it would have made as much sense, while probably being a hell of a lot less controversial -- but it would be the same blog post!

(Personally, I think I would have been happier if he'd used different words to say the same thing.)
Solution looking for a problem. Not a particularly good one at that.
>>The author is clearly stuck in a massive cultural conflict in his brain. He wants China to remain where it was, a mediocre country compared to his original homeland. He doesn't understand the cultural pressures of families in developing nations. He doesn't understand those countries are trying to go to where, his homeland is now. He clearly belongs to his native culture, where bulk of the growth work is already done, and people are just building on top of it. Where you can get to enjoy foreign vacations, passion based work environments, freedom to not worry about basic stuff like food, clothing and shelter.

What quote do you base this off of? This is your conjecture based upon a mostly negative article about China. I live in China so I can concur with most of the author's experiences if not his opinions. What I got from the author's article was this:

I loved living in China. There is an inequity in China regarding money and power. I wish the Chinese people something better.

Is it a cultural conflict to want justice and then to be frustrated when the legal system swings the other way without explanation? Your conclusion that the author wants China to remain where it is show a lack of comprehension for both the content of the article as well as the pathos meant to be evoked.

Here is what he wrote in his conclusion:

>>There are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of mainland Chinese who “follow” such people too, and there must be countless more like them in person, trying in their small way to make China a better place. One day they will prevail. That’ll be a good time to become Chinese. It might even be possible.

These aren't the words of a man, though embittered, that wants to see China remain where it was. These aren't the musings of one that hasn't spent time in the culture and has no understanding of it (though his understanding, as is yours is colored by your own personal background). These are hopes of a man that wants to see China move forward.
Interesting tidbit there about Mitt Romney's account. Nice investigative journalism.
I wasn't talking about getting the hukou, I was talking about becoming Beijinger
Wow. It's so weird seeing Meddata mentioned and described as one of the "big companies."

I was Meddata's second programmer, and built their eligibility system. I wrote their edi parser in five pages of C# code. Two of us built an entire eligibility and referral system, and took the company from nothing to profitability in five years. Then I moved on.

I still visit them from time to time, and although Transunion owns them now, the Meddata team is still pretty small.
It doesn't look like it's very hard to detect these fake users. Is Twitter actively cracking down on these or do they not care much?
The analysis in the first link you posted has flaws as well. The author does not deny that when you break down the US scores by ethnicity, Asian-Americans do as well as other Asians, European-Americans as other Europeans, etc. He bases a large part of his argument on the contention that the US should actually be doing better than it is right now - that "we can do more" - simply because we have a higher GDP per capita.

One example he cites is that the mean PISA score for Asian-Americans is 534, while the mean PISA score for Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong is 533. The author argues that since our GPP per capita is much higher than Japan / South Korea (and especially the Asian-American GDP per capita, which is probably slightly higher than the overall US number, given that Asian-American median income is about $1-2k higher than White median income), we should be doing better than we are now. This ignores, of course, that even this alleged observable underperformance must then be shared by Singapore and Hong Kong as well, which have higher GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) than even the US (Singpore has $10k higher GDP per capita, in fact), but do only equally as well as US Asian-Americans / Japan / South Korea.

The author also argues that it the explosive growth of private tuition services are propping up US test scores, completely oblivious to the fact that the pervasiveness and ubiquity of private tuition services in many Asian countries (especially South Korea) make US private tuition services look like day care centers.

Finally, link-dumping 3 articles and a book that we'd have to purchase on Amazon really does not add much.
Is this mouseover effect too much? I like how porn sites animate onMouseOver
No, but I do fold the code to allow for tail recursion. It makes deployment less resource intensive. This often prevents overflows.
Chrome is doing something funky with the nav bar text when you do the mouseovers.

Works perfect in Firefox.
If I do a survey of 10 engineers who use Linux, and OS X every day - I'm willing to wager that 9/10 of them wouldn't be able to explain what should be in .bash_profile, .profile, and .bashrc. And I can almost guarantee you they couldn't explain the difference between OS X and Linux.
I know I couldn't. I like the solution, actually:

- .bashrc_all - always gets executed
- .bashrc_scripts - non-interactive bash execution
- .bashrc_interactive - duh.
- .bashrc_login - motd and friends (when you "login")

I'd have no problem remembering that. Why don't you think there is a problem, and, why do you believe this is a poor solution to that (nonexistent) problem?
Thank you very much for the post. I have written a distributed crawler at my startup Semantics3* - we track the price and metadata fields from all the major ecommerce sites.

Our crawler is written in perl. It uses an evented architecture (written using the AnyEvent library). We use Redis to store state (which urls have been crawled - using the hash- and determine which urls to crawl next - using sorted sets)

Instead of using a bloom filter we used sorted sets to dedupe urls and pick the highest priority urls to crawl next (some sort of priority queue).

For the actual distribution of crawling (the 'map reduce' part) we use the excellent Gearman work distribution server.

One major optimization i can suggest is caching the dns (and also do it asynchronously). You can save a lot of time and resources, especially at that scale, by simply caching dns requests. Another optimization would be to keep the socket connection open and do the download of all the pages from the same domain asynchronously.

*Shameless plug: We just launched our private beta. Please sign up and use our API using this link:

https://www.semantics3.com/signup?code=ramanujan
> Both Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft have been sent software updates, without fault. MSL was designed from the get-go to have software updates mid-mission.

OK, but the Viking 1 lander on Mars was lost due to human error during a software update.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program#Mission_end

That's not to say software updates don't make sense, but you can't just justify them with "MSL was designed to do it and it's been done successfully before." Rather, you have to weigh the benefits and risk as usual. Luckily, I have confidence this was carefully though about and that the right decision has been made.