skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As long as people keep buying I'd assume.
I agree with you. I have an Asus Transformer that I use 99% of the time in laptop mode and never had any ergonomic issues with it because I just use the touchpad on it most of the time. As you mentioned, every Win8 hybrid I've seen includes some non-screen pointing device (touchpad, thinkpad nub, whatever).

So really this should be titled "Using an iPad as a laptop is a terrible idea, because iOS has no concept of a non-screen mouse-like input device, unlike Windows 8 and Android which do", but I guess that's getting a bit long.
The author here - yes, cr4zy, it seems to be isolated to Promoted Posts. I actually put two samples in the writeup. One is a contest and the other is just a status update. Both have the same problem. Furthermore, the contest entrants basically all seemed legit. It was only the Facebook Likes that seemed to be bot-ridden. If this were just freebie-chasing then I would think the non-contest posts would not be having the same issue.
One other thing I might add is to make sure your product isn't overly technical. Non-technical solo founders can do great if they are building mostly crud based applications.

As soon as the idea advances to include sophisticated technical elements it's nearly impossible for a solo non-technical founder to run the business without a competent technical co-founder.
I disagree. I am the People, in the We the People. I am the one with the First Amendment protections. The first amendment protections are the reason for the fair use exclusions existing. If there's a conflict between my free speech right and nebulous(-but-real) "synchronization rights", I win. In theory, anyhow.

There's no damage here. When it comes to footage of my kid dancing, large multinational corporations don't have an interest to "balance" with mine, because they aren't invited. Presumably we are talking about a legal copy of the song in the first place. Their interest ended at the point at which I got a legal copy. We are not talking about a situation in which they are not being paid.

I'm actually well aware of this sort of thing and not generally in favor of the total abolition of copyright or anything, but the very idea that massive corporations even have a stake in this sort of dispute should be shot down.
Whenever I meet a new kid, I mentally classify them as either a "one marshmallow child" or a "two marshmallow child" based on what I think the result woud be if they took the marshmallow test. One thing I have noticed is that there is a strong correlation between one marshmallow kids and one marshmallow parents.
A style guide for Python code
As the author, I meant no disrespect (and I often come across as ignorant through no fault but mine). My point was that the Promoted Posts draw a disproportionate amount of foreign traffic and only involving Likes.
I don't understand why certain for-profit products are allowed on Kickstarter and others aren't. Is the decision-making process totally random? Or is it just up to the particular whims and desires of those at Kickstarter making the decisions?

Sorry to gripe, but I've seen far too many undeserving products (I'm not making any judgment about this particular one) make the cut while deserving ones get rejected. And if you have a web app you're trying to fund, forget it. Why hardware products make the cut and software ones don't is a complete mystery.
I've been following the "math wars" for years, and used to be a regular participant in some of the email lists with messages quoted by other participants in these threads. I've read writings about mathematics education by Boaler and by Milgram, and have used those for preparing the mathematics classes I teach locally, and I have had a lot of email correspondence (mostly on email lists) with Wayne Bishop. I'm amazed that the root page of Boaler's faculty website at Stanford is being used for this kind of writing. I'm trying to get to the bottom of the actual facts involved. For that purpose, I'm sharing this same link among my Facebook friends, who include several innovators in mathematics education.

I appreciate the links that droithomme has shared in this thread. Yes, there is a lot of passion about what should be done to improve mathematics education in the United States, and one of the chief issues of contention is how to gauge the effectiveness of new programs. I'm pretty satisfied with the results of the homeschooling materials I chose for my oldest son (who is now a programmer for a startup). Over the years I've learned a lot from some of the same friends I'm asking for responses to this link. I hope we can puzzle out who is really coming forward with better evidence about what effective mathematics teaching is, because the United States could certainly use better mathematics instruction than it now has.
iOS presents a programming model of MVC where the view can be anything. This is basically the same programming model as on OS X and similar to the programming model for windows if you use MFC. I found iOS libraries to be more traditional OS like and more mature. In contrast, Android forces you into activities, layouts, and intents. Layouts basically don't let you layout out things on a pixel basis unless you use the deprecated absolute layout. So Android is forcing you to try to write apps that work on a wide variety of devices and that interoperable with each other and they do this by forcing a different programming model on the programmer. How one transitions from one screen to another in iOS is how you would expect it to bd done in OS X or Windows. Android forces it via intents instead. Basically on iOS, I feel more in control except when the documentation is intentionally obscure but on Android I feel like I am programming in service of multi-device support, interoperability, and have to seriously limit the APIs I can use because over half of the devices out there are 2 major versions behind: no hardware acceleration and an animation system that has been replaced.
I am curious, is that $30K/mon revenue or profit? Per developer or total?
The Unraveling of Affirmative Action
I think C++ is the right tool for some problems (single-threaded algorithms locked to a core, no context switching sounds like a good fit for C++).

I think many problems are not well suited to C++. Google prefers python for the first attempt at a problem allegedly for the ease of prototyping.

I think Chuck Moore (of Forth fame) frequently propounds an important idea when it comes to improving HPC performance. Of course, Chuck Moore doesn't do HPC optimization that I know of. But he does talk a lot about thinking about the whole problem and avoiding premature optimization. As such, it sounds like the hash join algorithm is not well suited to some parallel problems - so what? Pick the right tool for the job. Picking a hash table could be premature optimization if the problem demands massive parallel scalability.

It seems flowlang.net is right to say that massive parallel scalability will rapidly become a must-have at most companies.
This is a special case of a more general rule: Do things.

I'm going to try to write more. I already have learned a lot by:

* photography. If you spend time thinking about the photographs you take, and use what you discover in that process to change how you take future photographs, you will learn a lot about the world around you. You start to see things that you previously ignored.

* painting / sketching / drawing. Totally different from photography. You are free to represent what you want how you want. Your work can range from highly introspective (can be great while your subconscious brain is solving some other problem) to very literal. I haven't kept up with this because the professional world doesn't look kindly on developers who are splattering ink across a page when they "should" be coding, but it was very helpful in my college years.

* music composition. You think you know something about music? Try to compose some! You will listen to music differently. The deeper you go, the more you learn. Music is an unimaginably vast subject and conventional music theory only gives you access to a tiny fraction of the space that music occupies.

* (audio) Field recording. Have you ever taken the time to listen? To really listen? Probably not. You can get audio recorder apps for your iphone, or use a standalone digital audio recorder. Take these recordings home, and listen to them on decent headphones. Then go back to where you made the recording. Think about how the recording and what you hear are different. We selectively filter out a lot of the world around us, particularly in the audio domain.

* electronics. In support of my audio hobbies, I've built several audio devices, ranging from simple synthesizers up to rhythm machines and modules for larger systems. In the software world, we lose track of the physical world. It is mind-boggling how much effort you have to put in to source parts for a moderately complex project.

and finally:

* Coding. Those of us who code understand software in ways that people who don't do not. It doesn't make it any easier to use other people's software (sometimes harder), but it does change the way you think about things.

TL;DR: Don't just learn stuff, try doing stuff as well.
My company uses Spine for pretty much exactly that reason.

http://spinejs.com/

It's written by Alex McCaw, it's fantastic, and it even has a set of (again, modular) pieces to help develop mobile compatible interfaces.
Yeah, the allegations are flying fast and thick between these two, and nobody is impressed who doesn't have a political stake in the outcome.
It is. But if you keep reading and just look at his sales graphs (assuming they are not tampered with or biased in a way I can't detect) his overall point is very hard to argue with. By its own benchmarks and predictions, Elop's reign has been a massive disaster.

Personally I think that the crucial mistake was that they should have had Android devices ready to ship as Plan B and that Plan B should have been executed the minute Microsoft delayed or restricted them in getting to market decent Windows Phone devices. They were promised special access and privileges and then when it came to the crunch, were forced to ship devices with pathetic specs - WVGA screens, single core processors, no NFC, lots of other design compromises.

Now they are in the situation where MS has betrayed them multiple times, now treating HTC as a preferred partner right at the crucial time when Nokia's do or die last gasp effort with their Windows 8 phones are imminent. If there weren't insults enough already that should have been the last straw for them to start shipping Android devices. But whether because of his allegiances, general incompetence or otherwise, Elop has not executed this strategy, and he's absolutely culpable for that.
"90% of Everything is crud"--Ted Sturgeon

Much of it is rubbish. So is almost every painting, almost every book of fiction, almost every poem, and for that matter, nearly every person you meet of the appropriate gender. Like grains of sand. But when you find the rare nugget of gold... It makes up for all the time you spend panning dirty water.
Leaked Reddit Chat Logs Reveal Moderators' Real Concern
This is a HUGE no-no in research, as research MUST be, for accurate information, anonymous.

Are you sure that this is an invariant characteristic of good research? What is the authority for conducting a research project in a manner that doesn't allow another researcher to check the raw data?

To the contrary, these days there are several very responsible researchers who call for much more open access to research data sets (yes, those could protect subject identities at the individual level while still being traceable to a specific site for follow-up) to promote better science.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/data-detective-makes-hi...
Apple vs. Google is the Most Important Battle in Tech
This is a good article, but one thing just kind of bugs me:

"Non-technical solo founders need to be extremely product focused. They're not purely business-y or marketing types"

Marketing gets short shrift in the tech world, probably because tech is one of the major industries in which the marketing function and the product development function are separated to a large degree. But true marketing, as a discipline, is very much product focused.

In fact, the discipline is often said to encompass "Four P's": product, price, place, and promotion. Many people -- not just in the tech world, to be fair -- tend to conflate the "promotion" function (advertising, communications, messaging) with marketing in general. In fact, promotion is just a subset of marketing. It's an important subset, but it's a subset nonetheless.

The best marketers are well grounded in, and can draw upon, the full-spectrum marketing skill set. Finding one of these marketers can actually be very valuable to your company. Having this full skill set can be very valuable to you, whether you're a technical or non-technical founder.

[A (hopefully) interesting side note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix]
Add Australia to that list, where you can pay $80 per month for a connection with a 50GB download limit.

http://www.telstra.com.au/internet/home-broadband-bigpond-el...
Did any of the kids eat one marshmallow and then trick the study administrators into giving them the other two marshmallows? Those are the kids that are going to be founders.

Maybe I'm reaching.
> The market for mobile Windows 8 is embryonic, and will remain so for longer than is relevant to a Nokia turnaround

This is the key problem. Even if Windows 8 is a wild success on phones we're probably talking 15% market share over the next 12 - 24 months. And that will be split between multiple OEMs. Nokia in its current form is just not sustainable long term on 5% market share, or even 10%. What they need to happen is so unlikely (say 30% market share of Windows 8 phones in 12 months) that it's truly insanity to bank the future of your company on it.
Marketing is mostly about deception and half-truths, and promoting a product effectively means maximizing the positives and minimizing/omitting the negatives: "Look at this shiny car!" (engine leaks oil) "Buy our shiny lightweight computer!" (can't change battery) etc...

That's life. Being ultra logical is the slimy oddity, not the nitty gritty of life.

When you're dating, applying for a job, or trying to get elected as town mayor, you don't throw it all on the table right away and say, hey, I've got a bowel problem, I occasionally pleasure myself to pictures of vegetables, and I have a prescription drug habit.. even though all of us have various things of this nature under our hats (well, maybe not the vegetable one..)
The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent
A Space Shuttle on the Streets of Los Angeles
Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Baroque Cycle, and Anathem?

Michener's novels? (How does "past sci-fi" differ from "historical fiction")

Alternate history novels like Fatherland?
Disasterville? The six stages of Zynga's decline
CNBC Features Erie Drive & WiOffer Alliance
CNBC headlines our new alliance with Erie Drive. A design-driven online boutique featuring emerging artists and design trends, Erie Drive will be featured on WiOffer's Hero Page.
The purpose of my "final-sounding judgments" is to cut the crap in the short term that keeps getting dumped on Mozilla by you and others with an enlarged sense of entitlement, and an unjustified assumption that NaCl/PNaCl + Pepper is somehow "better" in the large, and so should get free support from non-Chrome browsers.

If you think overcoming some hurdles enumerated by Maciej will get PNaCL and Pepper support into Safari (where, BTW, Pepper is closest to porting cleanly by any measure, e.g., patch size), you're dreaming. Remember, I did not coin the funny "Active G" phrase. That shoe was fit by the guy you're trying to suck up to here.

If an indefinite-future-tense, and therefore worthless, promise from me to be open to portable SuperPNaCl in 2020, will get you to stop bashing Mozilla and flattering Apple, then here it is. Indeed my plan is for JS to evolve and mutate to be that portable object format for native code to compile to.

Emscripten is a promising sign along this path. And the PNaCl folks are targeting JS too, I hear, so this looks like a common goal.

Now can you stop defaming Mozilla?

/be
Since this thread is young and full of expertise, I'm going to ask a question about a nuance of Moore's Law that's been bugging me for a while. (I study CS and currently have very little background in physics and electrical engineering.)

Over the past few years I've read engineers talk about the manufacture and design of CPUs in terms of an XX nanometer processes, where XX is some ever smaller integer - presumably representing the density of transistors in the CPU, or something proportional to that.

But for many decades, we've known that there are fundamental physical limits of computation as-we-know-it with Moore's law predicting a smooth logarithmic curve until that point, doubling every 18 months.

My question is why does it have to be a smooth increase? Don't we have enough computation and understanding now to leapfrog straight to the physical limits using standard run-of-the-mill CPU architecture? After all we can manipulate individual atoms and I think we have transistors made of a just few atoms or less.

Why do we have to go through the 20 nanometer processes then presumably through the picometers until finally stopping at some point maybe in the femtometers (where the lengths of many atomic nuclei can be expressed in single digit integers). Development that Moore's Law presumably predicts will take multiple decades to reach.

Why can't we build processors using modern CPU paradigms on the atomic scale earlier? Is it mass-production issues? Or some physical bottlenecks? Do we need to continually develop ever slightly more dense processors at great expense slowly or can we skip the interval and develop straight at the atomic scale?

I just feel like at some point there should be step function straight to the physical limits of processors as-we-know-them. Why hasn't this happened?
Disclosure: friend of the author and article submitter

Let's say there are three use models for Windows 8:

-- pure tablet mode (horizontal touch only)
-- pure desktop mode (keyboard and mouse+trackpad only)
-- hybrid mode (vertical touch with keyboard and mouse+trackpad)

The first crop of machines designed specifically for Windows 8 are enabling that third "hybrid" mode. It's not just something they -can- do, it's one of their key selling points: traditional input PLUS vertical touch in a laptop-like form factor. Gestures, multiple-finger touch, the whole shebang.

Unless vertical touch is not going to be used whatsoever in hybrid mode, it's going to invoke a kind of physical strain that hasn't been seen in typical personal computer use.

So! Vertical touch is potentially problematic and it's only seen in two real-world scenarios: iPad+keyboard and (soon) shipping Windows 8 hardware.
Incidentially, I completed ls's set of -a-z options recently.

http://joeyh.name/~joey/blog/entry/ls:_the_missing_options/

(Well, actually, I never got around to writing -z, but it's clear what it should do, and any ls hackers are encouraged to finish that up.)
The answer: yes, they really think they do. As a Belgian living in North America, I find myself repeating the same thing over and over again: Europe figured this shit out 30 years ago. Just do what they are doing.

But then they insist it couldn't possibly work. So they do dumb things like requiring bike helmets, but not reflectors or brakes.
This.

I run into the situation more often with 'du' (when trying to find which subdirectory tree has excess junk in it), to the point that, while 'du -h' is human readable, it's not particularly sortable so:

du -hs $( du -s * | sort -k1nr,1 -k2 | head )

.... which will return the human-readable output, based on numerically sorting the full numeric output. Eyeball comparisons are easier as you're aware that results are already sorted by size.
Seems like there is a lot of inventing the wheel.

Plus, if you want to put your logs in PaperTrail without using Ruby, there is this for winston: https://github.com/kenperkins/winston-papertrail
You'll lose people that are mildly interested and clicked "buy" out of impulse.
gobble.wa@gmail.com made a similar post to the freebsd-questions mailing list a month ago. In his case the question was how to print an md5sum along with the file names in a given directory. I saved it because I thought it was a clever hack.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2012-Se...

A lot of times I catch myself in the mindset of taking a step back and saying "here are the set of tools I have at hand to accomplish a task" without realizing that I should simultaneously be taking a step "in"--so to speak--and acknowledging that the tools I have to work with are not immutable tools cast of iron; they are malleable and can be re-tooled to suit my purposes.. and that sometimes going that route can be the simplest--and in fact "best"--solution.
To be clear (and I don't think you are implying this, I just want to be explicit) -I'm not suggesting that the adults impacted the development of the child's impulse control - I'm extrapolating from the cited paper towards a quite different conclusion. If their conclusion is accurate, that children are rational actors in the face of uncertainty (that is, if the children asses that future rewards are more or less likely to happen based on their assessment of the other adults in the children's life) - then what I'm suggesting is that the original study had a group of rational players, and what the scientists were measuring, wasn't impulse control of the children (which I'm suggesting might be innately consistent across the group, or at least not revealed in this study) - but instead, was identifying how reliable the guardians and adults in these children's life were. It stands to reason, that children growing up in stable households, would have a better chance of being prosperous in life, than those who grew up in unstable, unreliable homes.
Would be interesting if there were. I remember always having a knack for having the cake and eating it too as a child.
The point of the OP was "patterns for fast python", i.e performance. It's absurd to claim that you "advocate abstractions over performance" in the context of achieving performance, so your comparison doesn't make sense to me. Just because you don't advocate performance doesn't mean that these aren't the ways to achieve performance. In addition, it sounds you mostly agree with regard to rewriting in C... use it as a last resort. It sounds to me like you are just trying to disagree.
It says "Even for the ruling elite of the USSR, the taco is approached in a brief encounter, surfacing as trauma.", but I don't really understand. Why is it brief and why is it surfacing as trauma? It's trying to say something but I can't decipher it.
tl;dr Author doesn't have experience with Windows 8, only iPad, which is unergonomic when used with keyboard.

Sounds like there is an opening for someone to do something better. Like Windows 8.
He has additional ideas - the problem is they're mostly nonsense. For example, if you look at the page where he tries to explain what he means by program lattices and lattice based computing, he gets the definition of a lattice wrong! (despite actually linking to a correct definition!)
Nokia had huge such benefits.

A gigantic brand (outside of north america), amazing relationships with carriers, etc. The article mentions these.

Through a series of horrible mistakes these benefits have been squandered away, but that does not mean they did not exist before.
Windows 8 and the app economy: Microsoft's vying for iOS and Android developers