skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I remember correctly, a big advantage of particle filters over Kalman filters is that the particle filters can model complex, multi-modal distributions, whereas the Kalman filter just updates the mean and covariance of a single high-dimensional Gaussian (albeit optimally). This is nice for localization problems because it allows you to keep track of multiple competing hypotheses about your current location.
This actually reminds me of the Plato/Artistotele difference. Plato held that there was an ideal, perfect version of everything in a sort of Idea Heaven, and the goal of the philosopher was to get ever closer to understanding that ideal.

Aristotele, on the other hand, thought that Heaven was too remote, and held that we could learn more by measuring what we see in this world. As opposed to the presumably ideal, but unaccessible, concepts in Heaven.

The medieval church loved Plato, the scientific revolution loved Aristotele.

My point is that the difference between these two frameworks for interpreting the world seems to be fundamental. Fundamental in the sense that the distinction has been with us for at least a couple of milennia, and we are apparently not likely to agree on a single answer anytime soon.
What do they mean "claim" twitter name? do they mean claim your app.net name?
Obligatory link to "Probabilistic Robotics" -- generally considered the #1 reference on the subject, written by top roboticists (Thrun, Burgard, and Fox): http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Robotics-Intelligent-Aut...
Nice thesis.

He's wrong.

The super-programmer that I'll hold up is Jeff Dean (see http://research.google.com/people/jeff/ for some of what he has done) and the task that I'll hold up is coming up with new standards and abstractions for creating scaleable software.

Sure, it is possible to break any one of the things he has done down into simple components. As a random example look at any of the many blog posts that discuss how MapReduce works and how to implement it yourself. (Heck, he had to do so when he turned his ideas into running software.) But could you have come up with those ways to think about problems? I am sure that I could not.
It was called Wirehog and was a seperate website which was linked to Facebook users accounts. Sean Parker encouraged Mark to shut it down (although Mark seemed interested in the idea at the time) because he saw another Napster situation coming and knew Facebook could be big without the hassle.
I was at a meetup where the Foursquare data science team spoke about this problem. If I recall correctly, their solution was to have jobs that would take the data from Mongo and store it in flat files that would then be used by the Hadoop jobs. They found that the performance gained was worth the additional storage costs. They have a pretty well defined Hadoop process though so were able to optimize for it. If you plan on having a variety of Hadoop jobs it may not make as much sense.

Note that this information may be outdated so just treat it as a data point. I'm sure others will have better ideas.
Emscripten in no way emulates LLVM (as far as I know it's the only C-to-JS compiler that uses LLVM, and hence must be what you're referring to!) — it compiles LLVM to JS, with no emulation, and there's currently work going on to re-implement it as a LLVM backend (it currently is an entirely separate codebase that takes LLVM bitcode in and spits JS out).
I too changed the default Windows background. However it was just the default image with an almost transparent eye in the corner. It lasted a few weeks before it was reverted one day.
I quoted selectively because the author gave no source for "their interest in implementing PHP".

None. No links. No names. No quotes. No press releases. No blogs. No email archive. Nothing. Not a skerrick. Not a sausage. Not a sniff.
I've been struggling to find presentations of parsers and parsing that really peels back the magic and shows how everything works, without just punting and letting Lex and Yacc do the dirty work (btw if you know of a compiler text that doesn't do this, let me know!)

Here you go: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~scott/pragmatics/

(Expect to spend several months reading it.)
It's good to know there are still realistic perspectives in academia. To be fair, the "anti-industry" attitude is probably adviser rather than department dependent, as I have heard a few first-hand data points regarding advisers that align much more with your experience than mine.

Given the 1/10 statistic, sooner or later professors will have to satisfy themselves with student's "real-world" contributions, whether they like it or not. I'm just worried how often I see real skill sets (e.g. proper software engineering) being devalued among graduate students because it's not directly relevant to a hypothetical future job as a professor. I feel lucky that I've been able to make extra time to write "real" code from my dissertation work, but it's rather unfortunate that this isn't always the norm.
Road Bike Wheels
haha was totally tounge in cheek, but seriously i wonder what the verb will be? if it does well there will have to be one eventually...
"And FPS works well on neither (go go mouse + keyboard)."

Crazy sales and millions of console FPS players would disagree. I think playing an FPS on a controller is "normal" and just fine as of the current generation of consoles. Of course there will be edge cases, too (quake 3, CS, etc.).
I don't think we can leave it to the Toronto Star to think of this idea. Good point.
Your poor video card... :-(
Funny I used the same image for embedding a watermark some 8 years ago for a university assignment. Had no idea about its origins.
This is a good point. Actually, "simple" requires understanding and insight that is not "easy" at all. Sometimes you have to go with a complex solution simply because you do not understand the problem well enough, but the understanding you get doing the hard thing can lead to enlightenment that leads to beneficial decomposition and simplicity.

All solutions to the hard math problems only look easy in hindsight, it probably took frustrating long while for the super programmers to get there. This is why Google hires a bunch of PhDs to dev, they are just conditioned on slogging through those problems given their research training; they are not necessarily better than the non-PhD programmers, they just often spend their time differently. Great at math, then you can focus on math problems. Not great at math, you are probably great at something else that needs to be done. Diversity is good.

As an aside, real compiler writers :) write their own lexers and parsers. Once you've written a lot of these, you get more efficient at writing more, but its a 10,000 hour thing.
Some quick Google Books searches indicates that Sister Mary Jucunda might have been a nun for maybe as much as 20-30 years by then (someone by her name shows up in various documents from the Catholic church dating back quite far). While I have no idea how much of her life she spent in Zambia, it is quite possible that she received her "standard education" in the 30's or 40's.

It would seem quite reasonable for a nun who received her regular education that early to possibly have grown up going to a religious school somewhere where the idea of teaching topics such as economics to a woman would not have been particularly favoured, and/or where the use of a "standard library" to read texts outside of the curriculum would have been discouraged.

In other words, depending on the wording of the original letter, it might very well have been entirely reasonable to assume that she would not have had any knowledge of economics (for that matter, you could assume a fairly substantial percentage of adults today would benefit from the explanation he gave).
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It's like math. You don't believe the difference between the best and the rest until you meet the best. It is apropos that someone linked to a Terry Tao math post in this discussion, because right now, in math, Terry Tao is definitely in the "best" category. Unless we have chased the people like him away from programming, they must certainly exist in our field as well. However, our works are largely anonymous, which means that it is much harder to tell who is the best.

But Rob Pike probably is up there.
The ideas in this article are weakly argued and poorly researched. The theory of disruptive innovations in The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen provides a much better explanation of why successful companies fail. We see this happen more rapidly in the tech industry than others, but it happens everywhere-just at different speeds.

Looking at the graphs at the top-Hewlett Packard, Nokia, and RIM all took heavy hits from not recognizing disruptive innovations until it was too late, and lost a huge chunk of their marketshare as a result.
Here's a little script that does something similar with some features that make it more useful (for hackers at any rate):

https://github.com/jtmaher/Passwords
The big "what stopping this from being mainstream" part of this is the need for a prior map. It's absolutely analogous to Google's autonomous vehicles needing to be manually driven through the area in which they're planning to later operate autonomously.

This is great work, but it's not onboard SLAM, only onboard localisation. All up, it's great to see more of the autonomous ground vehicle work becoming small and lightweight enough to go on aerial vehicles. Traditionally the low payload capacity has been a showstopper for UAVs, and laser range finders are often heavy, hence why so many UAVs have used vision-only localisation techniques.
Previous discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326647
What's cool here other than the fact that it seems to react really quickly is that it has no universal conception of location, like GPS.

Nit-picky robotics engineer chiming in: it's not reactive. The planning is done ahead of time, and they expect there to be no dynamic obstacles in the environment.
MapReduce is a simple realization that what we were doing in functional programming 20+ years before was useful in systems programming. Actually, "simple" isn't "easy" here, and MapReduce great realization so they deserve all the praise they get. But there was a lot of groundwork in place already.
Beautiful ending:
“Growth for its own sake is the logic of the cancer cell.”
Author here. I've updated my post to include some words on the current Android games market and how none of it maps to the Ouya. Simply, a game written for a 4.5" diagonal phone screen will not scale down to the 2-3" diagonal touchpad on the controller and then back up to the 52" diagonal of a TV. You have lost too much fidelity in the process; the game will feel wrong if it even works at all.

As for Android being the future of gaming - I don't believe it. Why might a motley collection of devices with disparate specs upend a highly focused and adaptable juggernaut, besides it making a great story? This won't kill the current gaming juggernauts anymore than streaming content killed television ones.
Learning OOP with Smalltalk can actually hurt your career.

I learned OOP with Smalltalk/V, wrote some apps with Actor on Windows and, when first confronted with C++ I closed the book in horror and only came back 8 years later.
5 Things a start-up founder should think about 30 days from launch
Is it generally accepted that "only HTML/CSS" really means "HTML/CSS/JS"?

To me the title is inaccurate but no one else seems to have mentioned it so...
The LLVM infrastructure gets more amazing every day; Emscripten and Cling are very exciting projects. C++ gets a lot of flak but it's still got a huge amount of life in it.
Thank you. I will keep it in mind. :)
Thank you Yossi for writing this piece. It's about time that Worse is Better argument was debunked. Worse isn't better, portable, free (libre, gratis, or at least really cheap) is better.

What many people forget is that during the time frame Worse is Better talks about, Lisp machines cost as much as two or more houses. You couldn't get a decent Lisp system on affordable hardware until MCL, and then you still needed a fairly high-end Mac to run it on.

OTOH, Unix and C-based software ran on a bunch of different machines, which you either already had or could acquire inexpensively. The software was easy to get and inexpensive as well. Then 4.3BSD and Linux came along, and you couldn't beat that on price.
I hear that many small companies cannot afford to use recruiting services because of their prohibitive costs. What about that case?
i was looking at this presentation, but cant really make sense of the two slides on "BSON Data ..."

http://engineering.foursquare.com/2012/06/22/our-hadoop-stac...
This approach is cryptographically WEAKER than a password manager!

Because password[0], password[1], ... password[n] are all related through common salt and master password string (and known domain name). Where as passwords stored in a password managers are independent.

Therefore, in theory, if I know a few of your passwords (lets say I own 10 top domains and you've got accounts with me), I can crack your salt and password file, or at least, I can generate probable passwords for other domains.
The timing doesn't match--this might have been the answer ten years or so earlier--the intercontinental ballistic missiles had long existed in 1970. But, preventing another world war from happening, which is what nuclear rockets did, probably saved many more lives than any humanitarian help could have.
Do you even know what a REPL is?

It's just a way to run code interactively. "A whole REPL" is something that usually fits in 10 lines of code. With comments.
>Their ability to program? Or their ability to practice interview tricks?

Often, neither. It can be the ability to think clearly and communicate that thinking. I personally avoid whiteboard coding questions when I interview people, but the good ones I've been given involve a good back-and-forth, basically working on the problem together.

I usually ask more open-ended questions, like "how would you go about solving this large, potentially ambiguous problem". Both types of questions give the interviewer the ability to gauge personal skills and mental clarity. Whiteboard questions provide some ability to test technical ability in exchange for some ability to test higher-level knowledge. They both work in the same kind of way, though.
A professor from a local university was giving a computer science related talk; he was quite proud of how many of his PhD students (graduated and ungraduated) had been recruited by Google.
Great article! Really hits home for me because I spent a year working in the children's room of a local library. I was that guy who helped people find books, stacked books on shelves, and checked people out.

The worst of the three jobs was definitely stacking books back on shelves. I'd start with a cart filled with books. OP has it totally right — they are grouped (sometimes, but not always!) by general type — but within those type they're usually randomly arranged.

At this point in time I'd been programming for around a year and a half and was just starting to try to learn about different search algorithms. If only I'd realized that I was sorting every day! Looking back, I found the fastest method (for me) to be quicksort. Go figure!
One thing I notice here is that the author does not mention if she spoke to the staff at the conference at all. If the staff is not made aware of such behavior, there is little they can do about it. I realize that this can be uncomfortable, but, the staff is there to help, and want to prevent such behavior as much, if not even more, than the victim of such behavior.
I've upgraded my account and am going to take a spin at a html5 app. It's an interesting group of people and even if it does not get massive scale it's fun.

Also keep in mind that I don't think app.net wants to be Twitter, it wants to be the back end public messaging system for any and all kinds of apps that have a need for a messaging or notification network.
RPG's sequels to the original text are worth reading: http://dreamsongs.org/WorseIsBetter.html
In my experience, the degree has not been a factor at all when it comes to value in industry. I have seen people that didn't have a degree produce more maintainable code in a more productive manner. I also have seen coworkers with bachelors outshine others with masters. I have climbed the corporate ladder at my company and now with my power to influence hires, I rarely take the level of degree in consideration.

Strangely, I have seen the attitude problem with new grads that possess a masters or doctorate. I even had one tell my manager that he had a masters and that meant he shouldn't ever have to do support work, and that he was smarter than my manager. He was a fresh 23 year old grad and eventually left for a larger company because he believed they would appreciate his masters. To add salt to the wound, we found that almost every bit of his code either broke our current projects or just flat out wasn't done correctly because he knew better than everybody so there was no reason for him to ask a senior dev or even a BA any questions about what he was doing.

All that to say, no matter the shop, no matter the degree, business is about money, and we, as coders, produce value which is why our salaries are high. A coder that is seen as valuable will always do better in there career and most of the time his coworkers will see his value and respect him for that.
> 1. Platform. Its not about 1 canonical interface or usage. Its real time social information network plumbing. Build your own idea on top of it. In the beginning it will be twitter clones, eventually it will be hooked into all sorts of information generators and consumers in different contexts.

This is what got me to back it (at the developer level). I'm just extremely curious and interested in seeing what I can do with the platform. It may start out as a Twitter clone, but I think there's a lot of potential there for the platform to evolve and grow into something more and I'm looking forward to see what I can do with it.
The Building Blocks of a Successful API
I apologize, I should have clarified. An MBA is a postgraduate degree and covers an umbrella of undergraduate degrees and walks of life. I don't see the comparability of the qualification with an undergrad degree in CS as the article suggests. I don't think it's as black and white as that and is disingenuous to say that an MBA presents a single type of CEO to compare to a CS engineer.
Twitter Bootstrap is pretty much everyone's de facto CSS framework these days.

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
> However, precise information on exactly what occurred and on what is still ongoing is yet to be established

This is why, if you are trying to publish in another language, you need not only a translator, but a technical proofreader who knows what you're talking about. I do this for a Japanese company (ThinkSCIENCE), and I feel fairly certain they didn't have a proof reader with expertise. I'm starting up a pathology research collaboration in San Diego, and when I proof pathology papers, I still feel like there are things I need to look up or try a couple of different ways before I'm sure I understand. But this is basic grammar!
Sure you might be able to understand something given enough time and guidance. But to me a super programmer is someone who is able to make that leap and create something novel, useful, and valuable. For example, John Carmack, who many would describe as a super programmer, showed the rest of the game industry what could be done with 2.5D in Doom, and later commodity 3D hardware with Quake. You can certainly review his code since it's open source and understand it, but how many people could have independently done what he did when he did it? Not many I would wager.
It's funny you bring this up, because Platonic idealism has been thoroughly debunked in the past century. Some of the latest thinking on the subject is known as "new materialism," and its core tenet is exactly the "technical evolution" that Yossi talks about in the article. I recommend Manuel de Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines for an introduction (it's as near to a hacker's philosophy book as I've seen).
Yeah, I considered leaving that example out ;-)

So FPS games have changed dramatically to work on consoles. They are often third person, and it gives you a better sense of space on a display so far away. They have become 'slower' and the fighting has become mostly horizontal and far less vertical, because controllers just aren't as good as a mouse in terms of aiming. The games tend to have lots of 'shooting' gallery style situations since it's harder to both move and shoot. The whole chest-high wall thing is another by-product, as is auto-aim.

I'm not saying you can't play FPS: you definitely can, but a mouse fits better. I find console FPS / TPS games are easier on PC because the mouse aiming is just so much easier.

I can't think of a way of phrasing this in a way that doesn't sound like "my dad could beat up your dad", so I'll simply say it and hope for the best: I'd wager than an average FPS player on a mouse + keyboard would be 'better' than a good FPS player using a controller, due simply to mouse superiority.

(I haven't played a console FPS in a couple of years though, perhaps things have changed)
I think the fact that someone was an actual Nazi is enough to raise doubt about any moral arguments he makes.
My reasoning is that it wouldn't be an exception based on past projects they approved. I think it would have been approved if it had been submitted, very likely through the normal approval process.
NOT TRUE.

If you read the methodology listed in their FAQ, they state in bold - "Time measurements include program startup time".

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#time

If you read the section "What about Java?" they mention ADDITIONAL measurements, which are only shown on the Help page, and indicate how little difference JVM startup time makes once these programs have run for 5 seconds and 20 seconds.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#java
also the bit about publications - "it only matters if there are very few or none". Considering the author is a PhD himself, it is some what self-deprecating. And he works at google interviewing PhDs. sigh

I believe that quality of publications matters a lot. I've seen many passionate hackers move into industry after Phd and some of them have authored seminal papers. I am positive that most industry positions recognize these contributions.

I'm mostly convinced that current form of interviewing process of asking trick programming questions is little random. And this post has many red flags to confirm this. All the best google!
Microsoft's Build 2012 developer conference sells out in an hour
There is this:
http://api.mongodb.org/hadoop/MongoDB%2BHadoop+Connector.htm...

And a generic connector as well:
http://blog.mongodb.org/post/29127828146/introducing-mongo-c...
A great number of advances in math and computer science can be recognized as someone taking techniques developed in one area and recognizing how they can apply to different area of programming. MapReduce is clearly one of these, and they were quite clear where they pulled inspiration from.

However Jeff Dean was the source of a number of insights which were utterly essential to Google's managing to scale. Only some of these have been widely disseminated outside of Google.

Once lightning has struck enough times in one place, you can rule out coincidence. It is clear that intellectual lightning keeps striking at a place named Jeff Dean. And the fact that it does is part of what makes him such a great programmer.
A Week on A Jailbroken iPhone