skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just got "an embedded software primer" by david e. Simon and absolutely love it so far.

Depending on how much your course is oriented to electronics vs. the programming side of things, it may not be appropriate, but the first few chapters are about hardware and signals. If the class is built around playing with arduino,say, I think it would be great.
I think you missed my point. I wasn't arguing against bad use of data structures; just for a formalized, checked description of the data structures used in the program.

I have in the past written preprocessors for this purpose. A simple language just to describe the types used in the program, with the output being the implementation language's definition of the type, as necessary. I've even done it in Javascript, in a very roundabout way - was JScript.net, producing XML, which was consumed at runtime to create classes dynamically, which in turn were used by a dynamic programming language.

I'll go a long way to get a simple up-front map of the program's data in a checked format.
Big data rewrites the CMO’s role
Hey RobAley, thanks a lot for the tool recommendations... also big thanks for the person who suggested SONAR+PHP, will definitely look at that too.

I was planning on using phpdoc and xdebug, but haven't ever looked at XHGUI. Is it significantly different from xdebug? At first glance there seems to be a fair bit of overlap in terms of functionality.
This is Normalization rearing its head. A properly normalized database can be extended without needing refactoring and does not have modification anomalies. There is a formal process to normalization. There is no such equivalent in code, but a poorly normalized data model virtually guarantees that any code wrapped around it will be messy. Conversely, mediocre code wrapped around a clean data model (less common in the wild) is much more amenable to incremental improvement.
Your Git repo doesn't inspire confidence for usage by the public at large. If you want to continue using it, I would recommend that you change it over to friends-and-family access while you improve it.

A few things that don't impress me right off the bat:

* text file for queue of users to create
* not accepting passwords with non-alphanumeric characters
(and also not having the knowledge to recognize a use case
for a regular expression)
* using a static salt

To be honest, I just stopped looking at this point. That's all without actually looking at the front-end of it (which has several typos, by the way -- when you're selling yourself to a very large audience, every detail counts).
You've already mentioned the Mims notebooks, which I think are at the top of my list. But I also think the Evil Genius guides are pretty fun and enlightening. For programming, I like Mastering Algorithms with C, Mastering Algorithms with Perl, Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang, and Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python.

Mind me asking where in South Texas? Austin here. I have quite a few technical books lying around and plenty of colleagues who likely do as well.
There's a Microsoft store three storefronts down from an Apple store in our local mall (Bellevue Square, near Seattle).

I looked at the Asus UX31, wrote down its specs and went to the the Apple store. Nearly exactly the same specs for an Air, but the UX31 was about $400 cheaper.

(The UX31 didn't come with any crapware, either).

I'm somewhat disappointed with the keyboard, but other than that it's a great little machine.
The coffeescript rocks/sucks crowd does not belong here. This person wrote a blog post explaining something using a language he is familiar with.

If articles are boiled down to a shouting match because the java-haters or the coffeescript-haters or the ruby-haters found the article first we all may as well go back to /.
That's not quite my understanding of the paper's results: "As can be seen, the time to reach level one is comparable for the two algorithms, but the GA is much faster at reaching levels 2 and 3. Further, the GA discovers level 3 approximately twice as often as RMHC [randomized hill climbing]"

I don't dispute that there are generally better optimization algorithms than GAs, but this paper does present an artificial case in a GA outperforms hill climbing.
I see more and more galaxy notes here in China, even in the hands of tiny girls. They hold it under the armpit, like a bag. Own one myself and rarely power on my pc when back home.
If you can't see see the qualitative difference between algebraic data types and Javascript classes, there's no point discussing things.
Why not just give him equity with vesting and a 6-month (or 12-month) cliff?
I've always, only half-snarkily, said that if you have never had to maintain/modify someone else's code then you probably write code like an asshole. Writing code that is both easy to understand and maintain and correct can be difficult, lots of people just go for the latter.

Unfortunately as you pointed out, especially in large companies, people can get promoted before the deficiencies of their previous work become clear. This leads to people never learning because the feedback loop is too long, or worse, they never deal with their past code so are oblivious to all its shortcomings and just think they are awesome. Also management tends to reward based on accomplishments today without an eye for costs to be born down the road, which gives perverse incentives to "get it done" programmers who leave mountains of technical debt in their wake for others to deal with.
Indeed. Even if the police over-reacted, which could mean anything from merely showing up to throwing tear gas, anyone in a mob is free to walk away. There is no obligation to throw bicycles at the police.
I think you overestimate how close the average smartphone user pays attention. The phone pops up and says there's a new version of the OS available for free, maybe along with something about all these new features. Most people don't read tech news and Apple doesn't normally remove features that tens of millions of people rely on every day.
I think this can be distilled down to: "bad programmers worry about how, good programmers worry about why"
Here is my bag of tricks that I apply to OSX/Finder to make it a more usable UI (and by usable, I mean more like ion/ratpoison/etc.)

http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/making-the-mac-...

... although who knows how well any of this works on Lion, etc. - I am a "once snow leopard is EOL, I leave OSX" kind of user...
It has similar Allow/Deny UX as Facebook and opens you up to major email providers like Google and Yahoo as well as the plethora of other providers and ones such StackExchange if you're creating a technical site/app. Having only Facebook as an auth alienates 1/3rd of the US population.
Even if you are eschewing OSX (as I will when I upgrade my current MBA) you should probably get a MBA.
See, I, the exact opposite when it comes to Alt+Tab. At work I have to use Windows and I hate the fact that if I have multiple Windows of one program open I may have to Alt-Tab several times just to get to the window I want. I prefer how it is on the Mac where if I switch between to programs, both of which have multiple windows open, it'll just show me all the windows stacked on one another in the order they were used. To me, doing this then clicking into the stack to get the window I want is much faster than trying to see which window looks closest to the one I want using the Alt Tab icons in Windows. They're just too small for me and often multiple windows of the same program look exactly alike at the size Windows shows the previews. Same with the task bar on Windows. I hate clicking program icon and instead of just showing me the windows I have to once more hunt for what looks like the one I want before it brings it to the fore.

I've never used OS X With multiple monitors but I do use dual monitors at work and I can bet it definitely would be frustrating to lose a monitor just to have one app full screen. Hopefully they fix that. For now I'm good with Spaces. Actually I think Spaces are gone since Lion and they're something else now.
Don't Miss the Wave of Consolidation - the Successful CEO's Most Important Job
I would reserve GAs (at least in their naive form) as a last-resort option. They are extremely inefficient solutions because it doesn't exploit any structure in the problem.

Essentially, a GA solution consists of:

1. Select a random point(s) in the search space, hoping that you have arrived at a sufficiently good solution.

2. If none of the solutions are not good enough, generate a new set of points by combining the best available points and adding a bit of random error.

3. Repeat the above until time has run out/u've hit a good enough solution.

However having said that, GAs can be a good option if 1)not much is known about the function you are trying to optimize, or 2)the crossover/mutation functions are designed to reflect some problem structure, or 3)the search space is small enough.
IT workers go offline to avoid recruiters but still get jobs
So I may come off as a grumpy old man, and I do sympathize with the op ... but in this day in age, it's only that much more important to keep manual backups of serial numbers, passwords, installers ...

I trust Apple, Windows and Linux enough to not ruin my life, but not enough to keep me 100% safe.

Passwords: Personal & Business kept in LastPass and a copy in KeePass (synced in dropbox to 3 devices). Client passwords stored in Keepass + manual copies on digital client folders (secured files) + notes in a locked safe.

Games + apps: Digital downloads loaded into Raid 5 array, backed up on server, backed up onto DVD. serials/usernames/download links saved in cloud mail server + keypass

Documents: Saved to external HD, saved to raid 5, rsynced to private VPS, rysynced to downstairs server.

There is absolutely no excuse for losing passwords and misplacing things like that. That part of the story I believe it all the ops fault.
Are power users such a small segment? The other two customers you're talking about here are very mythological in nature afaict. Enterprise? Where? Enterprise customers don't install the latest Ubuntu distro firmwide - they are just getting Windows 7 (maybe). They don't do Linux on the desktop by definition. And show me a 'regular user' whose Ubuntu install wasn't courtesy of some zealous grandson or nephew or boy/girlfriend or whatever.

Seriously, I want to know who these people are who have been using Windows their whole life, and who aren't technical, who at best could just barely grok that you can't run Windows apps on Linux, and who nevertheless are going ahead and installing this piece of shit. I want to meet one of these people and take their picture because, to me, it would like having my picture taken with a fucking unicorn. While you're at it, let's have a tablet running Unity that isn't someone's science project. Because all of this seems to figure a great deal in justifying the reasoning behind whatever wrong decision at Canonical folks are trying to justify this release.

Or, you know, every time Mark shits on the floor with this sort of thing we can try to figure out why it's actually not so bad after all.

Ubuntu was great back when Canonical was bringing innovation that benefited actual existing Linux users (your so-called 'power users') by smoothing the rough edges, with a view toward making it easier for people to make the switch to a Linux desktop. Somewhere along the way they lost the plot, and now it's just gimmicks and bullshit. Gimmicks and bullshit that are supposed to attract the layperson but haven't, and instead just piss off the people already using the thing (who are flocking to other distros btw).
I think it will get better for two reasons:

1) It's been a black eye for Apple and users are complaining

2) Apple has a lot of money to throw at the problem
Everything you can say about an entrepreneur, you can say about a talented criminal.

Only difference is the direction of effort.
Nice talk Jan!
You'll get a prompt to update directly eventually. Not sure how long it takes or what triggers it. iTunes is now a purely optional part of the process.
Centro Pompidou em Metz - França
This fun puzzle illustrates some of the ideas: Bob wants to send Alice something valuable in the mail. Unfortunately the postal system is very corrupt and very efficient. Any package containing a valuable item will always be spotted by postal workers. If the package doesn't have a lock the postal workers will steal the item. Also postal workers will always spot any key sent through the mail and hold it indefinitely. So even if a locked box is sent through and Alice receives it she will never receive the key when it comes through hence she can't obtain the package contents. How can Bob successfully deliver a valuable item to Alice?

Answer: Bob puts the item in a box with a lock and sends to Alice. Alice receives the box, places her lock on it and sends it back to Bob. Bob removes his lock and sends the box back to Alice. Now Alice removes her lock and obtains the package contents.
There's a $15 program that will replace ⌘-tab and it has an option to just look in the current space.
http://manytricks.com/witch/
Under those conditions, I'm surprised he isn't asking for a decent chunk of equity up-front. You said it yourself: "this guy would need to take a risk." Compensating a risk with a fixed payout is more than a little shitty. Also: think hard about the incentive structure you're building for yourselves here. If he gets equity when a) the startup gets through a second funding round in 6 months, and b) you also decide to continue his employment, the rational thing for you guys to do is ditch him in 5 months and 29 days if the company is going well. If I were him, I'd be really careful about getting into that situation.

You've got to remember that the fact that nobody else is taking a salary is a choice you guys have made, it's down to your personal financial situations, and it's not something you should hold over someone else as a justification for not paying them. Especially if you need him that badly.
> there's a smaller, apparently more vocal segment who hate it (and perhaps have more time on their hands to make themselves heard).

This is a general problem in local governments all over America. The people who already own real estate wield more influence, and their self-interest is in keeping prices high.

There may be many more people who favor denser development and who would become residents / property owners if increased development made it affordable. But potential residents don't get to vote, only actual residents do.

While it's hard to prove, I would not be surprised if local zoning laws are one of the biggest impediments to social mobility. Part of the growing split between rich and poor in America is geographic. If you can make the leap into the richer places, there's much more opportunity.
Pandora founder Tim Westergren appeals for your urgent help
"Fast by current standards" is probably irrelevant if you're running a scraper: You'll be bandwidth-limited, and if you solve that you'll likely be disk I/O-limited or RAM-limited.

Getting back to the overall question: Yes, lots of us have done this before; fifteen years ago every geeky college student had your proposed setup.

The other responses are correct: From a business standpoint, you're crazy. Not only will you find that bandwidth and power cost you more at home than they do at a datacenter, but your inconsistent, unreliable homebrew infrastructure will consume maintenance time and replacement parts at a rate that slowly but surely eliminates all "savings". It's hard to appreciate that, because you've got little experience at keeping network infrastructure running long-term, and even less experience at billing yourself for your own work at market rates, so failure events feel rare and inexpensive to you. But I assure you that NOCs don't buy all that expensive capital equipment for no reason.

Having said that, I get the impression that you don't really care about uptime or reliability; you're running spare-time hobby projects. If so, then the question is whether assembling your own homebrew "distributed datacenter" out of PCs in various closets is educational. My feeling is that it isn't, not anymore. The ability to run production-quality systems on cheap consumer hardware is not a valuable skill and is no longer worth practicing - not when production hardware can be rented by the hour for pennies. You can practice installing Linux and tuning the LAMP stack on Linodes or AWS boxes and get all the same sysadmin skills, but in a realistic production environment. You can practice debugging disk throughput problems, or networking problems, or DNS headaches on real cloud infrastructure for a few bucks a day. Who would play with a toy bulldozer if a real bulldozer was available to rent for a dollar per hour?

(The counterargument is that homebrewed "infrastructure" is a great toy because it breaks all the time and you're forced to practice lots and lots of debugging. After all, I learned a lot of stuff this way - I had to; the "cloud" didn't exist. But my gut feeling is that this kind of "practice" feels more valuable than it actually is.)

But of course, hobbies are hobbies, and far be it from me to argue you out of your own happiness. If you just can't resist the fun of turning your home computers into a compute cluster, go for it! It's a better way to spend your time than MMORPGs.
Can I ask if you can plug in 2 external displays to your X1 on Ubuntu? (my latest Thinkpad did not allow that and I had to switch to something else because it's kind of a show-stopper for me.)
How do you use xmonad with Ubuntu?
I'm starting to be feel embarrassed using my mac in tech circles again :/
Apple apparently ripped off iPad clock design from Swiss Rail Company
It would be far easier if they simply sold the new version.

Relying on the good graces of the user population hasn't prevented them from integrating Amazon advertisements, and won't likely prevent other bad decisions in the future.
It's not useless, it saved me a bunch of time.
It is much like torrenting a movie you already own the DvD for, because it is easier than ripping your entire collection one by one.

Ethically I think it is obvious such a thing would be completely reasonable. Technically almost certainly not.
But that's exactly the problem, that there is no way to securely verify over an insecure connection that the keys you've associated with A are actually A's keys.
Shift+click the "plus" button and it'll maximize. I've been using BetterTouchTool's window movement abilities to set hotkeys to maximize and halve windows. It'll also do an aero-snap-esque thingy. Pretty useful

Cmd+tab is pretty nice, keep in mind you can use Cmd+` to switch between windows of the current application. It's a bit different than the way Windows does it, but once you use it for a little bit you get used to it and Windows feels a bit awkward ;)
Apple fanboy rant on Reddit
How does Apple find dates, times and addresses in emails
Their new notification system looked familiar to some of us when it was added.
I've always found Amazon a bit weird/frustrating with regards to i18n/localization.

As a user, I should be able to decide, independently,

* What language I want to use the site in.

and

* Where orders should come from.

In other words, if I'm an American living in Austria or Italy, I should be able to just go to Amazon.com, have the site in English, and have it route books/whatever from the nearest/lowest tax place. In some cases, that'd be Amazon.it, in others, Amazon.co.uk, and in some cases, it'd have to send things from the US, incurring higher taxes/tariffs.

Instead, Amazon.it and Amazon.de are very much only in "the" local language (Italy actually has areas where German and French are official languages), and routing does not seem intelligent at all.

Frustrating.
A different issue, but one that's burned me several times is when things go wrong with resque (or sidekiq), life goes to hell pretty quickly because redis needs to fit everything in memory. E.g., if a third party resource goes down and jobs hitting it all of a sudden start exceptioning and get thrown into a retry queue, all those stacktraces sitting around in memory accumulate very quickly. redis fills up, the OS kills it, it starts back up, loading an older DB, and then restarts processing all those jobs that just failed, without an exponential backoff. And this process will basically repeat ad nauseum.

I'm not sure a whole lot can be done, other than resurrecting the old debate over something like diskstore. And while EC2 is memory-constrained, dealing with this situation isn't a matter of just adding more memory, because that will be filled up as well. redis would either need to be able to spill over onto disk or the processing model would need to be changed. We ended up doing the latter, eschewing stacktraces for retried jobs, adding monitoring to disable queues that have a very high failure rate, etc.
I've seen GA's work as a way to tune parameters on an SVM, with pretty good results.
Thanks! I understand what this service is: free "cloud" backup, no guarantees. I have no problem with the latter part, given the former part. I'll use it accordingly and appreciate your gift.
In my particular case I don't think there was an inventory limitation issue. Reason is websites with Adsense addressing the same niche were serving extremely relevant and targeted ads while my Android app with Admob just gets junk. The obvious question is how does the Admob banner know about the app's contents? On the Admob site there's a note saying that the app's description will be used to target ads. However this doesn't seem to work or I'm misunderstanding. Either way my ads still suck.
A peek inside Apple's A6 processor
A Digital Tomorrow [video]
This got me thinking- is there a use case for client-side ML?
Claiming that nobody who disagrees with you knows what they are talking about is also a symptom of religious thinking. You sound exactly like your description. Have you made any arguments yourself that don't beg the question by saying that patents are good because they were intended to be?

You said you've never met someone who knows what patents are and still opposes them, implying that nobody who knows is opposed to patents. I provided a proof by counterexample of someone it would be difficult for you to argue doesn't know what he is talking about.

And you haven't. Instead you claim that I don't know what patents are. I do know the difference between a design patent and a utility patent (and a trademark, and copyright). I've seen good and bad examples of each. Yet I still oppose software patents, support reduced terms for all of the above except trademarks, and want to see a much higher burden of proof for a patent to be granted, and higher still for a lawsuit to proceed. I also argue that independent invention should be a defense against patent infringement that doesn't require an army of lawyers to raise. Yet somehow you will try to claim I don't know what I am talking about.

The real test to distinguish rational from religious thought is the willingness to change one's mind. I'll tell you what would change mine: a plethora of incontrovetible, scientifically sound studies that prove that the harm done to and risk imposed upon small innovators and market competition is worth the benefit to society; or a solid implementation of the changes I'd like to see, that subsequently results in a collapse of innovation (collapse of any business alone does not count as a collapse of innovation). What would change your mind?
Samsung Asks for JMOL, or New Trial
Date a management consultant and use his/her FF miles + starwoods points = almost free trip.