skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There seemed to be some confusion during the question and answer segment regarding the relative hygiene of macros in Clojure near the end of the motivation and design talk; while it was totally off-topic for the video (and it thereby made sense to take it offline), I personally wish I had been around afterwards to ask the guy who seemed so adamant that syntax-case was fundamentally better than the Clojure solution (which he claimed didn't do it correctly) why that was the case.

I'm totally willing to believe it, but based on my understanding (which sadly is somewhat limited for Scheme, but fairly in-depth for Clojure) it isn't intuitive to me: it would seem like the way you escape hygiene in Clojure (which by default achieves correct hygiene by attaching namespaces to symbols read for macros or inside of quasi-quote) is quite similar in semantics--but simpler in practice due to being exceedingly less verbose--than using syntax->datum and datum->syntax.
One of the classics is basically the mid point between them. AKA throw one away.

Requirements desgin, DEMO, Requirements, Design, Implantation, Verification, Release, Maintenance.

The idea was to use a prototyping language for the Demo and then a production worthy language for release. The problem was a lot of Demo's ended up in production for a literally decades because people tryed to create 'over architected crap' which got scraped or takes decades to release.

Honestly, I think the real problem with most early Development strategy's is so few people have a clue how to actually design good software. Great solutions are designed to create minimal systems to solve the problem which are flexible because they are minimal and programmers can alter code, rather than people conceiving every possible change request up front.
Yes, that is strange.
The privacy and liability issues here are significant - disclosure of searches of the local OS potentially revealing the names of documents to third parties - so I think that Ubuntu/Canonical needs to take those onboard and do some re-engineering. If I was running a business, school or government department and thinking about using Ubuntu I'd be reconsidering after reading this.

We'll just have to see what turns up in 12.10, but if Canonical are insistent upon heading in this direction then sadly that's a deal-breaker for me, and I won't be able to recommend Ubuntu to others.
I have searched for a problem that they're more suited to, and I've come to the conclusion that GAs are in fact not known to work on any problem. They do "work" in the sense that sometimes they find an answer, but there are other algorithms that are much simpler and consistently outperform them (notably randomized hill climbing). Here is a paper that despite trying to prove the opposite, clearly shows that GAs are NOT a good way to solve any problem: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mm/nips93.pdf
As much as I admire and appreciate Ubuntu and all the hard work, time, and money Shuttleworth & Canonical have committed, you simply don't end a "setting the record straight on user concerns" piece with a veiled threat/warning about having everyone's root.
But if users go elsewhere because of this sort of thing, Ubuntu doesn't make money either.

To be fair, I'm sure many end users won't care. But I think they have a serious problem with advocates - people like me who would recommend Ubuntu to others. I already feel less comfortable recommending it if it's going to do things like this.
I haven't found any show-stopping or even new bugs yet with normal usage since the update came out. The new iPod app looks and feels quite nice.

Just go ahead and upgrade; you'll end up wanting some iOS6 feature / app eventually, might as well get it out of the way now.
I'm guessing the Google Maps app will be out in a month or two. Apple probably won't approve it right away, as a good quality Maps app would really make Google look like the hero, swooping in to save us from Apple's lesser service. Once the response to iOS6 has blown over it'll turn up in the App Store, lots of people will download it, and things will be more or less back to normal (apart from the bruising to Apple's reputation).
I'm sure there are still people running Windows 2000 because they are stubborn about upgrades.
But equally, I think it's unrealistic to expect growth to continue. We live in a finite world - as much as possible we should be looking for sustainable ventures.

And ideally, bringing up third-world standards of living and lowering ours (in the first world) to match. Will be a major culture shock for some people...
Oddly enough, the one thing that I really love is a much greater willingness to hop off of a weak WiFi network and onto cellular data. With iOS 5, my iPhone would stay on my home network long after I'd moved out of range, often forcing me to manually disable WiFi in order to e.g. get driving directions or listen to music in my car. With iOS 6, this problem is basically gone. It will struggle with WiFi for a few seconds, then give up and disconnect.
Ok, but where will we go from here? If there will be 100 sources of online search, will it make 100 HTTP requests on every search? Or will there be yet another (I'm sure it will be closed-source) search engine that will "aggregate" other search engines?
We also use beanstalk a ton where I work. We have put multiple billions of jobs through it over the past few years. It's rock solid and one of my favorite pieces of software.
Wow. People talk to each on the T? Never seen it.
I agree 100%.

To me, one of the downsides of many internet discussion is that it seems complicated issues get reduced to a single dimension just to get enough traction to have the conversation. And then most of the conversation is between the camps that have internalized and accepted the simplified mental model of the problem and those that haven't. Maybe that's is a good thing for the reasons you highlight.

In my opinion, it feels like we are fishing with a bigger net, but we aren't fishing any deeper now than we were 3 years ago.
Update from Amit Gupta
I'm gonna be that guy and say that you're probably looking for a Mac Book Air

But this Asus on the article certainly looks good if you put Linux in it
9 Keys to Adding Street Smarts to Your Book Smarts
>"I'm ecstatic," Blank said. "In 50 years, people are just going to go, 'That was the pinnacle of military computing. These machines are going to be as important as the first PC or the first minicomputer.'" ... Regardless of where the machine ends up, Blank said he plans to keep it in working condition. He said he was arranging with Cray and the supercomputing center to ship the machine in a climate-controlled environment.

And then...

>It sat in my barn next to the tractors and manure for five years. I had the only farm capable of nuclear weapons design.
Cray called two years ago and bought it back for parts for an unnamed customer still running one.

That's kind of sad. But he did help ensure another Cray remained in working condition, so I guess that's a positive aspect of the story!
I realise the point is to show sometimes vim is inappropriate. However, the commands given in the first one are long-winded and not equivalent, I'm not sure the readers who stand to gain from the article will notice this. As I wrote elsewhere...

Having done :v/tcp/d there's no need to match again with :g/tcp/s... since :%s... will do, besides :g//s... would have done. Also, :g/tcp/s/\S\+\s\+\(\S\+\)\s.*/\1/ mandates a whitespace after the second word so it's not equivalent to the given :%!awk '/tcp/ {print $2}'.
Metrics are a start-up’s best friend, how to take the most out of them
Apple Store-Like Design
Watch your back. I know two people who have been mugged after using a laptop on a train or subway.
Ask HN: What books for beginners in electronics and programming
This is a short, and not yet finished list of books that will be submitted for inclusion into a STEM center library at a small community college in a dirt-poor area of South Texas. The vocational degree plans are Drafting, Electronics, CS, Video Game something or other, and the academic track degree plans that will be affected are the usual, Physics, Chem, Biology, Math. I teach electronics, so I am primarily concerned with that, but, I also have to spend considerable class time teaching physics and math, so I'm interested in good books to help with that as well.

I'm thinking about some Forrest Mims type books for beginner circuit work, but I haven't opened one in years; so, if any of you know anything like it, please let me know.

Turtle Geometry,
The Art of Electronics 2nd ed,
The Art of Electronics 3rd when available,
The Engineering Handbook, Second Edition,
CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics,
Ugly's Electrical Reference,
The Pocket Reference by Thomas Glover,
The Mythical Man-Month,
K&R,
The Pragmatic Programmer

Pyzdek's guide to SPC - I'd like to find a nice short treatment of statistics and SPC, Pyzdek's is had to get hold of these days. Maybe there's a better one now.

Some PG,
Some Joel Spoolsky,
???

Anything else that might stimulate some interest in the subject matter, or otherwise help students, be it directly related or not.
I have ran Debian Testing for a couple of years now and it has broke less for me than Ubuntu used to do. I am very impressed with the stability of something called Testing.
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

A 1976 book written by Niklaus Wirth, designer of Pascal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_%2B_Data_Structures_...
How do you define "Music library"? Is it a set of all files imported to rhythmbox? But what if I use Banshee? Or, as I've been doing for the past few months, I use cvlc with files and folders typed on the commamd line? What would you consider my music library then? The whole concept of a music library seems passing strange in a world where files are everything.
I get what you're saying, but I don't see why adding an affiliate link to an honest endorsement makes it any less honest.

While I don't agree with everything Jeff has to say, I wouldn't call him a shill. His reviews have always seemed perfectly honest to me. I've even bought products he's recommended and agreed with said recommendations - not caring whether or not he made a dollar off said purchase.

Isn't that the underlying reason for affiliate links? No doubt, they've obviously been bastardized in thousands of ways, but the initial reason for them was to make linking to a product mutually beneficial.
It's Unix—use the command line too.

(Shhh, don't tell anyone else the secret)
The 1315 Project: Documenting The War On Drugs
Despite spending a lot of time both in the design Wiki and in the talk discussing the importance of being able to determine whether a / indicates a regular expression literal or a division operator entirely within the lexer (as opposed to using the parser, which is how JavaScript is generally defined), the algorithm that this developer implemented does not actually work.

First off, an example where it works:

a
/5/
7

If you run this through sjs you get:

a / 5 / 7;

This is because, in JavaScript, statements continue across line boundaries until they are either explicitly terminated by a semicolon or a syntax error, in which case the parse is retried at that point as if a semicolon had been provided. In this case, that means we have a single statement that is a division of these three expressions: a, 5, and 7.

However, let's take a more difficult case:

a = function() {}
/5/
7

This is also a single statement: you are entirely allowed to attempt to divide a function literal by a number, you will simply get the value NaN as output. If you take this file and run it through node, adding a "console.log(a)" to the end, that is in fact what you will get: NaN. However, when first run through sjs, you instead get "[Function]".

The reason is that sjs translated the code to:

a = function () {
};
/5/;
7;

This is incorrect, and demonstrates how difficult some of these underlying issues are when parsing languages that have intertwined lexer and parser state. :( Attempting some other test cases involving regular expressions (but not semicolon insertion) also failed: it seems a lot more work will need to be done on this before it will be able to process general input (and it is not 100% clear to me that the shortcut required is even possible: I haven't thought enough about it yet to say for certain, however).

(I work on the JavaScript parser for a compile-to-JS language used by people doing jailbroken-iOS development for live introspection of running processes, and thereby that was the first thing I was interested in: how well the parser worked. ;P I have intentions to add reader macros, and then replace all of the extra Objective-C syntax I added with them, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. FWIW: I actually found and fixed a bug in my parser while writing this comment. ;P)
Washington Versus America
patio11 (as usual) said it best. There is a lot more going on behind the scenes of a professional datacenter than you are aware of, and even if you were aware of it, you might not be able to replicate it.

The hardware they use is different. While you use desktop-class drives, they use enterprise class drives with faster platters, bigger buffers and better disk controllers.

While you use Marvell/Broadcom NICS which crash if you torrent too heavily, they use Intel server-class NICS which support TCP/IP processing offload. Which means they process network traffic in hardware.

While you connect everything with an 8-port NEXXT switch you got for $20, they connect everything with $20,000 Cisco / HP switches. While you have a 15 mbps asymmetric connection with dynamic IP from Comcast, they have multiple 1gbps feeds from Level3 and Global Crossing. They run BGP between themselves and their upstream providers, so their IP addresses don't change even if those providers were wiped off the map.

Most importantly?
They have huge teams of highly paid, highly qualified engineers building and monitoring these systems. Oh; and they still have outages.

Progressing is futile.

I'm a former sysadmin for a Big-4 accounting firm. Take it from a fellow Pythonista: your time is much better spent at the '>>>' prompt than at the 'root@localhost#' prompt.
> the maps thing is unfortunate, but I'm sure it will get better

Based on what? The problem in the first place is that this is an insanely hard problem that is in the centre of Google's core competencies (data gathering, search, data munching; all on a ridiculously massive scale). Apple makes hardware and an operating system and some apps for it. Where in that set of core competencies does it indicate they have what it takes to tackle this and yield the quality google has (who have poured a rather large fortune into it (they bought the satellites for google maps so they could reshoot to avoid clouds), the have paid for high tech trucks to run down every road in an increasingly large collection of cities. And then massive human QA teams)

This isn't what apple does and it was massive hubris on their part to think they could tackle this and come anywhere near the level of google maps, or their usual standard of excellence. I remain extremely dubious that there is any "quick" fix to their problem. It's not like the screwed up an algorithm and this is a bug, this is a massive problem that they've barely started to tackle.

If Apple does realize what it's going to take to compete at this and doubles down on it, it's still going to take a year or two for them to catch up. And that's an if. So Apple Maps/iOS5 combo is a write off. Probably iOS6 too. You want good mapping the next few years, stick with google. Maybe after that Apple will have something worth looking at, just as likely maybe not.
tl;dr: iOS6 makes YouTube disappear, no solution for iPad yet

I updated my 3rd gen iPad to iOS6 immediately when the update came out since I wanted to check out if the increase in JavaScript performance is noticeable (it is).

However, here's why I regret updating: I've been using the iPad as a second screen on my desk to watch YouTube. After the update, I find that the YouTube icon is missing from its usual place on the home screen. After a quick app store and Google search I find out the truth: Not only there isn't an official iPad-optimized YouTube app anymore, but also that it has the disappointing release date of "in the coming months" [1].

I know the actual reason for the missing YouTube app has something to do with the licensing deals between Google and Apple, but as a generally happy Apple customer my perception is that this "update" makes my life harder.

[1] http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/09/introducing-new-y...
Idea Generation, Potential, and Growth
Demands from first employee joining our startup
So I am one of the founders of a growing software startup and there are 3 of us in total, we have recently received some seed funding but currently none of the existing founders are taking a salary.

We need another technical guy - software engineer type - to help accelerate development of the projects we are working on, and we have found someone who seems very keen and competent.

We have proposed that this guy join us on a 6 month contract, as kind of a trial period, that would then change into a full time position if everyone is happy.

The problem is that we cannot yet afford to offer anywhere near a market rate salary and so this guy would need to take a risk (he would have to move to London from Germany) for a job at near minimum wage. But we expect that in 6 months time we will have received second round funding which would enable us to pay a decent salary.

The potential employee still seems very keen to do this although he is now wanting assurances about the future employment contract that would be entered into after the initial 6 month period.

Basically he wants to be assured that IF he is accepted into the company after 6 months to continue working, he will be given an agreed equity stake.

Love to hear some advice, should we agree to this? Is this an unreasonable request from an employee?
Personally I would have searched for hospital as soon as I saw the results. I tried it in Boston and it gave far clearer results, but still missed one.

It's so bad it's painful.

And doesn't anyone use the List feature? It's way easier than tapping pins...
Often when you get contradictory advice like that the people giving the advice do not have a clue what the real solution is.
Apple already rejected Google Maps in the past in the form of Latitude.
Show HN: Hosting my WordPress blog entirely on Amazon S3
Dear GitHub, Please Let Us Build Plugins
Please don't get bent out of shape when someone points out an error.
To me NULL means more that there is no value, not that there is a value, but I don't care what it is.
Eltanin asteroid kick started ice age?
Data Speeds: iPhone 5, 4s and Galaxy SIII
Microsoft Wins Third Patent Victory Against Motorola Over Android
Study: Boston and San Francisco residents find happiness in different ways
Apple uses this laptop to advertise Icloud on Windows
Why don't you use the web version? Works like a charm for me (better than the app ever did), no performance or stability issues, more functionality than the app had, better load times and more choice about video formats. I see no reason for an app, the web version is excellent.
i work with multiple monitors and always hated this on OSX. The Menubar is only on the main screen, no matter where program is located (there are tools to replicate it to the second monitor but still) and i hate the OSX dock. The windows taskbar with a multimonitor enhancement like UltraMon or DisplayFusion is just unbeatable when having many open windows imo, on OSX it always takes more time/clicks to find the windows i want which is annoying...
As a Developer currently working mainly with C#, no Visual Studio on OSX is a big pita since MonoDevelop is nowhere as good...
I still have a Macbook Air for toying around on the go, holding presentations etc. Its a very nice consumer device but i still prefer Windows as my main work enviroment.
Except when 1 + 1 = 10
Latitude is available for iOS, so that means we should not fear they will reject maps... Right?
Latitude is already available for iOS. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-latitude/id306586497?m...
Jasmine - A better YouTube Solution for iOS 6
What did you expect a Samsung?
I was under the impression that any app apple bundled with iOS was supposed to have monopoly and that a similar one wouldn't be approved. Has that changed?
Try Jasmine YouTube Client for iOS 6.
I'm beginning to think this is better than the previous client.

http://itunes.apple.com/in/app/id554937050?mt=8
That was a pretty big accusation to throw around, that red is just lost data. It was more likely resque or perhaps even your own fault.

As far as perf goes, redis queuing is just a linked list. It is ridiculously fast, I would really like to see numbers backing up your claims.

If you are going to make accusations like this you should at the very least understand why stuff broke.
It is possible that a better future tablet would have good enough programming tools - it will be fun to wait and see.

I got rid of all three of my desktop systems (1 Mac, 2 dual Linux/Windows boxes) a few years ago. I don't plan on buying any more Apple gear, but will use what I have until it needs to be replaced: MacBook Pro running Ubuntu, Air 13', a Toshiba laptop Linux/Windows, and a iPad 2. My wife and I live in a very small house in the mountains and not having as much computer clutter is great.

The biggest recent technological change in my work/life mix has been the purchase of a Samsung Galaxy III S super sized phone (1280x720 screen resolution). I am amazed by how much I use this device: for just about everything but coding and writing. I do most of my programming in Ruby and Clojure so I don't need much horsepower on my development systems so I can imagine a future where a more powerful phone with a docking station might cover most of my work, writing, and entertainment needs: skip the tablet!

All that said, I am likely to purchase a Surface when they are released and the early adopter bugs are ironed out. I used to have fun bashing Microsoft but there are a few things that have softened my view: Bill and Melinda Gate's good works for making the world better, the fact that the surface would fit my needs, and I still have pleasant memories of writing a Windows 1.03 app (the SAIC ANSim neural network tools that had a nice UI for managing training, etc.)
It really is. I think their pricing structure is a little off, but it's a service I gladly pay for and recommend. I met the guys at LessConf last year, and they're great people, so it's a win-win in my book.
Yeah, my 4 feels snappier, but I'm having a hard time working out if it's largely a psychological thing.
Here's a segment from a Discovery channel documentary on the Tsar Bomba[1]. It is pretty difficult to visualise the kind of impact this bomb would have if actually dropped on a city. It would obliterate London (and large parts of England), as well as Paris, Madrid, Athens, Berlin, Vienna and countless other cities around the world if dropped.

I also read somewhere (but can't find the link) that although the Soviet pilots had special shutters and goggles to keep the flash out, when the bomb exploded they claimed they could see their bones through their hands.

Of course, the damage from this bomb (in terms of fallout) was much less than that resulting from the Castle Bravo test[2].

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGk90-zvWOo

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
This is why Reply-To, Errors-To, From, MAIL-From, Sender, etc. are all separate headers.
Precisely. Throughout my experience with Ubuntu I've constantly run into half-baked ideas. It would be great if they followed though with them, but every new release focuses on a new interface or adds more "features".

I switched to Arch a long time and never looked back, but these changes only enhance the need for an easy to deploy and manage distro to take Ubuntu's place in education/business settings and for those who are new to Linux.
Maybe an ASUS Zenbook, or a Lenovo X1 Carbon or Yoga.