skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good thinking! I guess we'll have to devise some way to avoid these kinds of cycles, or limit them by setting some type of maximum number of bounces on a webhook message.
I think Alan Kay just cried a little inside.
"writing rock solid one-in-a-million-or-better tests that drive Internet Explorer"

I find this unparseable. (English is not my native language). As far as I know "one in a million" means something like "very rare". Help?
Lisp/Scheme are untyped.
Black-Scholes is an accurate model for predicting options prices,

Hi, options guy here. I don't think that model has been used for predicting in a long time. It's now used for pricing. Back in the day before computers couldn't run calculations, market makers could arb using these models, but due to the liquidity of the market it's much harder to now.

Also, BS assumes european-style options, which is not the case on nearly all options trading. I personally use bjerksund stensland as a model, but just for pricing.
Programmers are talking about ideas, while coders are talking about tools. =)
I'm personally prefer the description of mr. Booch - OOA/OOD/OOP is the way to manage the complexity of a problem.
Unfortunately the rest of his book is an advertisement of the RUP and UML - yet another tools.
OO exists on top of the imperative paradigm, never the functional one. If you disagree, please define OO.
Creating macros in MATLAB
Darn. I was hoping that the Kindle would be good for technical books. It'd be awful nice to carry around a bunch of references on one of those.
The AXD301 ATM switch, one of Ericsson's flagship products, 1.7 million of Erlang code. This is just one example of large-scale software projects written in Erlang. Your perception of it as a research language needs to be re-evaluated.
How to become an iPhone developer in eight easy steps
I am not sure why your cell phone bill has not changed much over the past few years. However, a quick Google search returned these results, and this information seems to be at least two years old:

http://in.rediff.com/money/2007/jan/10mobile.htm
http://money.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?sid=10&cid=13...

"Bharti Airtel is investing $2 billion in 2006-07 to ensure the 'death of distance', which, hopefully, will further bring down call charges by 15-20 per cent. Moreover, with sharing of infrastructure among operators and the reduced burden of revenue sharing for universal access service licence (UASL), basic and cellular mobile service providers will lower operating costs and the benefits may again be passed on to the consumer.

Bottomline: If you pay Re 1 a minute for a local call today, you may have to pay 80 paise for the same tomorrow. Talk is cheap, tech is chief."

Thats a 20% reduction in margin.
i am a native speaker and it's not entirely clear to me either but i would feel safe in venturing to guess that it's a reference to the false positive rate
He means the test is broken if it fails more than once in one million test runs.
Keeping kids online safe
Yes, but if you're subclassing them at all, then any extensions on the core data structures are very likely to get fragmented and scattered around.
There's a lot more to The White Stripes than singing in tune. :-) Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin said it pretty well on his "60 Minutes" interview. He said that enthusiasm counted for a lot, more than in his singing, which was decidedly off in the clips of him playing live that ran during the interview.

The Stripes have a whole package, from their brother/sister husband/wife pairing, to the goth vibe, to the artsy videos. Somehow they hit on something that people like, even if it's out of tune.
I wonder whether Functional Reactive Programming might work better.
What I found interesting is that it was the way the tool was used differently than the investor's intention that made it so popular.
In the article it talks about tests that fail only one in a million times (referring to the quality of the test, not the test case being exercised), I think that is what is meant.
Von Neuman architecture sucks. From our educated and elevated point of view I think we can all agree on that. At least if we transcribe to "programming in machine language sucks". Perhaps one day we may elevate to agreement on "OO architecture sucks".
OO is a successful technology measured by what has been accomplished with it. The von Neuman architecture is even more successful. The one and only architecture behind all general purpose computers. But no sane programmer would touch machine code directly.
I have always thought that OO was wrong, in some sense at least. But I have to touch it. There is no higher and better level. There are alternatives but on the same level. So they suck in their own ways.
I remember when I started forming my mental pictures of what programming in the large was all about. How to think about it. How to structure it in my mind. I read Object-Oriented Modeling and Design by Rumbaugh et.al. Even if the authors didn't succeed in explaining it fully, I got the vivid impression, that they wanted me to believe, that a computer model should be structured along three dimensions: data, functionality and events. A space with a recording axis, data, an activity axis, functions, and a time axis, events. Though a somewhat fuzzy picture, I "saw" these three dimensions as orthogonal and of equal importance in structuring and building the complex structures called programs. I find OO to intermingle the data-function-plane but leaving timing in the cold. A skewed space.
I'm looking forward to the tools and technology, that will support my clean and "right" design model in a non-skewed concrete "code" space. Well, if they ever arrive, I might then have an even better mental model and find my self stuck with the new and better but sucking tools.
Network troubleshooting: "People sometimes make mistakes"
True Enough :)

It's just that Mark Cuban seems to attribute most of his wealth to Mark Cuban and a very small %age of it to luck whereas it most likely is the other way around.
The Secret to Start-Up Success: Save Customers Money
Actaully, pg has been asked this before and his answer was 'Yes.'

So we're only doomed x 2.
Latest Mobile Phones
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The Jumbo jet celebrates its 40th birthday
Common Lisp is a multi-paradigm language, but its OO features can be used in a functional style.
Exactly right, maxwell. Charging certain customers more, just because of who they are, is not a great business strategy :)
Music culture in the sixties/seventies isn't comparable to music culture today because the general culture of these two eras isn't comparable. There's a major chicken/egg problem here: society doesn't appreciate music in the same way, there is less openness among the general population, drugs aren't nearly as accepted, not nearly the same number of people go to music festivals etc. etc. etc. It is more of a cultural shift than the decline of music as an isolated phenomenon.

If you start dragging out the "everything was better before" argument, remember that you'll get more than the music if you go back to 1970. War, the draft, unemployment, massive amounts of LSD...

I haven't seen any commenter in this thread attempt a somewhat scientific assessment of the quality of music then and now. We can probably agree that the general culture is less friendly to good music today, but if you want to go deeper than that there is really no way to reach a consensus. I'm of the belief that you can find just as novel, inspired, creative and emotional music today as 30 years ago. There might be a bit less and it will certainly be more obscure, but artists still create. As a case in point, both Marilyn Manson, Dream Theater and The Cardigans have created large amounts of novel music the last 10 years. Even though these musicians aren't among the most obscure, I still think you're doomed to fail if you search the pop charts for good art.
The maps is the matter.
When you're riding a train between Gaya and Varanasi and see you location it real-time on old Nokia phone - it is amazing.
the whole twitter phenomenon is just a circle jerk of marketers and internet "celebrities". I doubt if even 5% of their population is "real" people. And even that 5% is nothing more but fanboys who wish to be the future internet celebrities.

I don't know a single "real" person who uses it, beyond that first minute. All of them come away with "WTF is the point".

Sure twitter has marketing power, because all the bloggers have convinced themselves that this is the best thing since sliced bread. But the real world could care less.
Problems with zip files as folders.
Online Favicon Generator
> Twitter is cool because you make an account and start doing whatever you want.

Like the article on "Auto Tune" the invention is great because people started using it for something besides exactly what was intended originally.

> How do they tell the difference between individuals and "brands"?

Brands are the ones that paid. :-) They probably get more features for the fee?

But what about Guy Kawasaki, Mark Cuban, Seth Godin or Paul Graham? Are they brands? Their blogs and writings are about much more than what they had for breakfast.
Hmm, on your Google point, we know that they use partial-cluster deployments extensively, and several presentations point to sophisticated testing of these momentary guinea pig users. I wouldn't hold a one-time lack of a sanity check against their total uptime history. Tests ain't perfect.
Interesting idea but....

Looks like meeting that goal would constrain you to write code to be used by a robot and not by a human. There may be many cases where this is both doable and acceptable to the end user. So no problem with that.

I am greatly challenged to see how this could be done for a highly interactive, visually oriented, subtle pattern generating response to user input, type application. Computers are still not as bright as earth worms when it comes to generalized pattern recognition. Which means we programmers are about as bright as earth worms when it comes to writing such code.

How then could computers automatically test all the software reactions to the wonderful and totally unpredictable behavior of mere humans as they interact with your software? The test cases would expand to consume all the resources available for development. All you would get done is writing all but impossible test cases. At least you wouldn't ship bugs.

This does not consider the explosion of combination and permutations of inputs that prohibits exhaustive testing that no matter how many systems you run tests on.

It would be much easier and cheaper to go out of business. Your certainty of being free of shipped bugs would be much better than one in a million.
You mean like a blog? So should Twitter strive to just replicate WordPress or Tumblr then?
Taxing /only/ dividends is not a bad idea. It will prevent the kind of CEO salary run up we have seen in the past few decades as well.
I thought it was really even handed, and good advice. Lots of people have tried and failed: few step back, figure out why, and offer advice to everyone coming after them.
I heard a good description years ago (from juxtinteractive maybe? or maybe eric from 2advanced) on why movie websites were a really good proving ground for experimental web design - it's one of the few website projects you can land with both a decent budget and an expiration date. They're not made to last forever, so there's a freeing sense that you can try out more things and get only a few chances to bang that particular drum before the audience moves on.
From what I have read Facebook use a similar method: commit and deploy often and rollback if something messes up. We also use this method on Plurk.com and have done so for about a year. Thought, IMVU's case is pretty extreme :)

The major problem is rolling back client side changes (that are located in scripts or CSS). This is pretty costly to rollback, because of browser cache - we solve this by having real versioning of the static files so we can force a refresh of browser cache (real versioning = script_{timestamp}.js and not script.js?v={timestamp}).
Thanks. You're right - I did a couple of google searches too and they all came up with "lowered tarrifs".

I've just checked around though, and it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact on many people's bills (at least in my office). Maybe we compensate by calling more or longer.
That is not uncommon in the history of music technology.

For example, the Roland TB-303 "was originally marketed to guitarists for bass accompaniment while practicing alone" [Wikipedia]. But what we got from it — in the end — was acid house.

The vocoder was originally developed with telecommunications applications in mind, not Kraftwerk.
I do something of this sort. I have a shell alias called 'irc' that will connect to my remote server using the following local command, 'kepler' being an SSH connection alias defined in .ssh/config:

ssh -t kepler bin/irc -D 1083 -L 3128:localhost:3128

This provides me with a single three-letter command to log in to the remote machine, set up appropriate port-forwarding, and automatically run a script, which itself contains:

#!/bin/sh

if [ -f /tmp/jreese.agent.pid -a -f /tmp/jreese.agent.sock ]; then
echo "Socket and PID files found; loading..."

export SSH_AGENT_PID=`cat /tmp/jreese.agent.pid`
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=`cat /tmp/jreese.agent.sock`
else
echo "Socket and PID files not found; starting SSH agent..."

UMASK=`umask`
umask 077

eval `ssh-agent`;
ssh-add $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa

echo "Agent PID: $SSH_AGENT_PID"
echo "Agent Socket: $SSH_AUTH_SOCK"

echo $SSH_AGENT_PID > /tmp/jreese.agent.pid
echo $SSH_AUTH_SOCK > /tmp/jreese.agent.sock

umask $UMASK
fi

screen -Rd irssi -c ~/.screenrc.irssi -p 1

EDIT: do note that this script is not completely secure, because it relies on my knowledge that I am the only person with login access to my server. Otherwise, you should be adding some extra checks to the script to ensure that you are using files actually created by your own uid. I don't know the full potential of problem if someone created those files from a different UID knowing that you'd be using them. Anyways...

This script sets up a persistent, "secure" SSH key agent on the remote machine that can be reused for as many disconnects and reconnects as I feel like making until the server (if ever) needs a reboot. Then it starts or reconnects to a named screen session that I can continue using as if nothing ever happened.

Combine this method with a few different aliases as needed, and a local session key agent to only input your key's passphrase once, and then after a disconnect, press up-enter in each terminal as necessary, and boom, you're back in business.

--

On a related note, a drop of network connectivity should not be killing your SSH connection, especially for as short a time span as one second. SSH is designed to stay connected through at least 30 seconds of network loss; after the connection is regained, it should automatically reconnect to the SSH server and continue the session where it left off, even maintaining a buffer of unsent input during the connection loss.

I've personally suspended and then unsuspended my laptop within a one-or-two minute period without losing my SSH session, althought that's likely stretching things.

What's certain is that a 1-2 second lapse in your connection should most certainly not be dropping your SSH connection; you should definitely be investigating that to figure out what the problem is.
Utilities want peak power reduced because it increases their cost, not because it raises costs for their customers.
I agree 100% with this article. Keeping track of your location will be a commodity very soon.

In one or two years, there will be open standards for sending your location to the person your talking to, sending it to a contact, and broadcasting it. Handset vendors will implement those standards. If they are nice they will provide API hooks to let application act on the sending/reception of location information. The same thing will happen with status messages (Twitter and Facebook) and other activity streaming stuff.

It could happen a lot faster if carriers built these protocols on top of text messaging (probably using a special kind of service message) to drive further adoption of unlimited messaging packages.

The business model is clear. The mobile phone operators will implement it so you have an incentive to buy the next generation of phones. The carriers will implement it because adding the feature to your phone bill is basically free money for them. Users will pay for it because they are used to paying for phones and phone services, and because it is more convenient than dealing with all these social networking plays.

Independent social networks won't make any money because tiny classified ads don't work in social networking, and besides location-based advertising will be bundled into the user's mapping/searching software (Google Maps Mobile, Nokia Maps, and similar). Users won't pay directly for social networking because traditionally it has always been free.
If that's your impression of VCs, you've been dealing with some terrible ones.
> Facebook on the other hand has serious revenue potential
if it can survive the recoil from its sudden popularity,
and if it can survive the onslaught of competitors. But those are both big if's.
No Stimulus Petition Online
I don't think it's any more complex than running screen on the server, using SSH keys to allow you to connect to the server without a password, and possibly orchestrated with a small script that checks network connectivity and re-establishes your session after it's broken. Your 5 shells are running in one screen session on the server, so you don't have to restart all of them. It's just a simple "screen -D -R". If there is no existing screen session to attach to, you can have screen automatically create your sessions via the config file.

This is pretty much what I do already, except that I don't switch connections as frequently as you. But when I go to a new place, it's just connect with ssh and reattach with screen.
That's exactly what I am suggesting.

See, VCs, angels et al are investing their money or other people's money for the sole purpose of turning it into more money.

A government run investment firm can have a much broader view of success than simply 10x returns on capital investment.

Roads, bridges, and dams themselves for example are not profitable, but they enable a more productive society. The benefits of parks, museums, etc are largely unquantifiable, yet there is a perceived benefit.

A public wireless cloud infrastructure for example would enable synchronization of traffic along major corridors, reducing exhaust, fuel consumption, and time delays. It may not produce a profit, but it will improve our entire economy. We could automate 50,000 miles of rail roads, 20,000 miles of interstate. That would do a lot for our economy and our productivity.

A project like that though, is probably much bigger than any VC firm or group of angels. Also, we don't really /want/ competition to build something like that, we want collaboration. Private capital is competitive. How do we get everyone working together on benevolent projects that may not turn a big profit directly, but could enable social profit for the whole?
Scott Adams Blog: Simulation Stimulation 02/10/2009
I always thought that OO encourages not rigorous abstract thinking but fuzzy everyday thinking with arbitrary definitions.
I apologize for the editorialized title, but Valerio didn't give me much with which to work.
What do you mean by real versioning?

The major advantage to using "script.js?v={timestamp}" is that it maintains a consistent URI for the resource. Whereas with "script_{timestamp}.js", everything that points to it needs to be updated every time it changes.

You could create a symbolic link or rewrite rule that directs requests for "script.js" to the latest "script_{timestamp}.js" but it's more convenient to use a URI parameter.
I've lived in:
Victoria, BC
Winnipeg, MB
Georgetown, ON (rural portion, my neighbors were apple farmers. I raised chickens/goats, planted tomatoes, grapes, & other stuff on my family's land and picked berries for a local farm for about $3/hr - I was 10)
Norval, ON (rural as you can be, surrounded by grain farms, streams and forest)

Currently:
Brampton, ON (almost urban)

The thing about the countryside folk (remember, I was one of them) is that we didn't need new trucks or huge houses or new shiny tools. We fixed our own stuff, planted vegetable gardens, worked long, hard, fun days in the summer and read and learned in the winter.

We had gravel driveways and, some of us, blue painted houses, but we had fresh food awesome neighbors, excellent schools. I knew some farmers that had it real bad, mostly because they got injured so they couldn't work and had to mortgage out the farm for cash, but most of them loved life and their families and felt very blessed.

Things aren't what they seem from the outside. Our run down mechanic shops all had snap-on tools (for those that don't know, snap-on are very expensive unlimited warranty tools) our old broken cobble main streets had farmers markets on Saturdays, it was awesome.

Where I live now is more glitzy, but most people I talk to are lonely, or drugged up on either legal or illegal drugs. It's starting to be a real problem, and this is coming from a libertarian. Friends of mine from high school and university that used to be active with side projects/exercise now just sit and watch TV and spend all their money on getting high. It messes up their relationships too. But even those people aren't in that much debt.

One thing I will say is that the Native Canadian Peoples are in really, really bad shape. I was exposed to that in Winnipeg, and ya. It is bad. Also, Windsor, ON is horrrrrible. They are the Detroit of Canada.

I supposed, statistically speaking, it is possible that you and I fell on different sides of the bell curve to what we were exposed to, and that the truth may be somewhere in the middle, but I love it here and I'm looking forward to moving back to the sticks when I have enough money to build up some acreage.
Hulu Who?
When I say reliable, I don’t mean “they can fail once in a thousand test runs.” I mean “they must not fail more often than once in a million test runs.” We have around 15k test cases, and they’re run around 70 times a day. That’s a million test cases a day. Even with a literally one in a million chance of an intermittent failure per test case we would still expect to see an intermittent test failure every day.

He means that test failures are not acceptable in their culture, and they have a LOT of tests.
If I understand you correctly you're saying something like TweedHeads.walk(), TweedHeads.eat() and TweedHeads.rest() make it sensible to define Human as a class.

But then how would you attach makelove() or fight() or discuss() to a single Human? When do we use TweedHeads.discuss(visitor4rmindia) vs visitor4rmindia.discuss(TweedHeads)?
Isn't this the same ideal as SOA and similar? Decentralized services hanging out on the internet? Except we have gone from SOAP -> REST -> Super Simple REST as transport mechanisms.
Twitter can definitely be a waste of time. However, there's often some gems of information in the midst of it all.

My twitter strategy as of late has been to catch up on tweets while sitting on the toilet. The iPhone helps with this endeavor.

Also, search.twitter.com has become an essential source of information.
I've worked at places that have done this sort of thing too. We basically dropped css and js files in new directory with the svn rev number which made it very easy to deploy and break through the client side cache.

The urls would be something like:

/static/r12345/foo.js and /static/r12345/foo.css
commit and deploy often and rollback if something messes up

This describes pretty well what we do at Justin.TV too. These days I push new code about 5 times a day.