skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go is excellent for prototyping ideas, which is why it is my "language of choice" at the moment. But your argument falls flat when considering deploying "large scale" systems, which have multiple dimensions of ceremony before hitting production.
U.S. looks to replace human surveillance with computers | Security & Privacy
The final transformation into IBM 2.0 will be complete when most of the people compelled to use MS products are not the same people who chose to buy the MS products. Are we there yet?
I think the problem is that it's difficult to know what your computing needs are necessarily going to be ahead of time.

Maybe you are not generally a creative person but you wake up one morning inspired with a short story idea. Or maybe you have a strong reaction to something political and you have an urge to write an essay about it.

At that point you realise that all you have is a crappy on screen keyboard to write it with.
"Their smart phone patents score them $15 for every new Android license."

Not true. They only get $5 from HTC, and probably less from Samsung, because these sort of things are tied into other deals. So maybe they get $5 from Samsung on Android patents, but they give them $10 cheaper Windows 8 licenses, or whatever. Someone as big as Samsung would not have accepted to give up so easily and pay for the patents if the deals wasn't good for them.

And Microsoft was okay with that, because once they got Samsung to "pay" to them, they could just tell all the other manufacturers that "Samsung paid", and they'd all get in line. Typical "protection tax" tactics. Either way, Microsoft is not getting rich off Android.
That's just a tongue-in-cheek statement in the vein of "What the hell could Ballmer be thinking!?"
Might take a generation or so to die out till driverless cars will reach near 100% adoption.

I've heard that when electricity came about there were people afraid of touching light switches because they had something to do with electricity. I personally know a person (mentally healthy, over 80 years old) that does not want to be alone in the room with turned on TV because she's afraid of electricity.
Buses and trains are, sometimes[1], lousy modes of transport. A company could provide self-driving cars for its commuters. Being small means the vehicles can pick up passengers from their homes (or local coffee shops, or wherever) without that being annoying for the other passengers.

[1] I guess it depends what buses and trains you catch.
No, but you can make decisions now which affect the rate of short term growth later.

Or to continue the calculus analogy, you divide your spending on growth between spending that increases the first derivative and second derivative of value. The former is current short term growth, but the latter may lead to more growth in the long term.
FYI that URL is missing the last 's': https://bitbucket.org/plans
One problem that nobody seems to see is:

-) As soon as software controls something it's the question about if you control the software, or if the software controls the user

One of the big arguments rms always had about free software, but think about it:

Let's say i have a self-driving car, how do i know that there isn't a backdoor in there?
How about my car being hacked and being remote controlled?

How about my car being pulled over by the police by remote control if i don't stop?

And what about spontaneity in driving?

Will i still be able to make a U-Turn whenever i want?

Having navigated through big cities with cars i can tell you that it's more than just reading signs and staying on the correct lane...

Once we got self-driving cars then all of the above points will be issues and we should seriously think about all of this in my opinion.

If i could make sure that non of the above is valid i might still fancy it for boring highways. For cities or narrow situations i will always trust myself.
Why would you think that a self-driving car fleet will have less cost? They will be regulated just like taxis. Including insurance and most importantly medallions. Replacing the drivers will not cut the cost in an industry that creates artificial scarcity.
Ok, so what makes it better than a laptop then? The touchscreen which you don't use? I don't get what's new about it.
Probably right, but only if the premise is right: That the desktop and Laptops is dead and will be replaced by Tablets and Smartphones. And I doubt that.

First of all, and that is a standard-reasoning here, there will be for a long time be users of Laptops and PCs. People who work with that hardware like so many here. And of course gamers, cause despite all doom-prophecies the consoles never made the PC obsolete for the purpose of gaming.

Furthermore: Look at the numbers. For example: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUK23741112. That sales-downfall is not that much a fact the author believes it to be. Even if Gartners report is right and there was a decline this quarter, we are still talking about high volumes.

Though of course tables will probably impact that market, don't be too sure that they will replace that market completely.

If i were to guess, i would rather say there will be two quite healthy markets, one for pcs and one for tablets, with windows and its eternal foe linux still competing for servers and desktops for quite some time.
Unfortunately some people use words, without knowing their meaning:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
It's an old chestnut that buying a salesman's car with lots of miles is a lot better than buying the same vehicle from a housewife that only used it to go shopping and shuttle the kids to school.

Besides, who says that the driverless car isn't more like industrial equipment instead of the current consumer crap, made to go on "forever" to justify its high price?
The biggest thing that Gitolite buys me is the wild repos feature. When I want to create a new repo it takes zero effort. All I have to do is add a new remote and push and gitolite takes care of creating the repo, including setting up the the common hooks.

For larger orgs gitolite's advantage is mainly centralizing admin.
Chrome/Nexus 7: ~0.5

IE10/SurfaceRT: ~1.17

Note they both use the same chipset (Tegra T30). V8 definitely makes a difference, similar gap between Chrome and IE10 on my 2011 13" MBA in Parallels (.1/.4)
reduce() is just moved to a library instead of being a builtin, it's not really a big deal. And of course sum() is better, addition is just the typical example for exposition (he later notes that shorter forms are always better). Whether it's good form to stop using it only depends on whether you prefer more explicit for-loops.
Seems to work better with LXDE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItkWCmkxBv0
In that I suspect very few cubicle farm employees actually got input into their computer environments, we've been there for decades.
LIDAR manufacturer Ibeo currently make a ~12,000 euro LIDAR which they estimate, if mass produced, could cost less than 200 euros.

The cost of the extra equipment won't be negligible - but it'll be very low once this stuff gets widely adopted.

[1] http://www.its.dot.gov/research_docs/pdf/cicas_tech_docrpt2.... PDF, see pages 12 and 13
The Google car is a prototype. That $150k in equipment cost will be dramatically reduced by engineering for production and mass production.

The cost doesn't need to become negligible. The cost needs to become justifiable.
Mark Shuttleworth's big mistake
On the last point, a list comprehension is just a much a functional programming idiom--Python got them from Haskell! I use both in my code, whichever is shortest.

PS: map returns a list, no need to call list() on it.
Fanboy Theory: Why do people get so worked up over smartphone choices?
FIA do not own the rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_Group
I wasn't talking about insufficient test cases. Your remark about extensive unit tests is therefore quite irrelevant in this context as I don't question at all that the unit tests take border cases into account.

I am mostly concerned with "soft" aspects. Just consider the case where a student has to define variables, but picks variable names in a language other than English, or where control flow in a submission is more convoluted than it would have to be. Those are the cases I discuss in the article.

Moments ago, someone left a very fitting comment on my blog:

"I am taking the edX CS169.1 course and I find that I will consistently have a "less than elegant" solution that the auto grader accepts but that I feel is sub-par. The irony is this class has a large BDD/TDD aspect and is teaching RED-GREEN-REFACTOR, but with an auto grader once its green there is little reason to go back and refactor."
There have been a few news articles about people who have driven into rivers because "the sat nav told them to".

I hope Google is investigating these weird edge cases, and testing for them.
The desktop/laptop market is already pretty stagnant. It won't disappear, but no one is really expecting any growth, and many are expecting contractions as it becomes more niche. Its all about trends, not datapoints.
If driverless cars, why not a driverless buses ?
Yeah I can't really see the PC market outright dying either.

I think it will diminish as there are some use cases where a smartphone/tablet will suffice instead, but in the long term both will continue to coexist.

I guess the question is, if Microsoft doesn't manage to successfully grab a slice of the smartphone/tablet pie, how big will the rest of it be?
We looked at a lot of solutions for tracking in iPhone apps. We tried Flurry (http://www.flurry.com/) for a while, but they wouldn't give us access to our raw event data. After more investigation, we decided to go with Mixpanel. Their web interface is great for answering quick questions and we can export all the raw event data whenever we need to more heavy analysis.
What kind of stats/reports would you like to see on a build / deployment system
We are in the process of writing a build and deployment system for internal use. I want to put in some really nice reports and display for management.
Any suggestions on the best route to follow?
Yes, that's exactly the case for engineers/designers/project leaders ;-) Smart people have a choice and IBM is a poor choice for anyone with ambitions, beyond a steady paycheck.
To become IBM 2.0, Microsoft would have to kill its R&D budget, outsource everything to India, and focus on short term gains. Really, Microsoft is really far away from that, you could say they are even more forward thinking than Apple with one of the last industrial research labs in place (IBM and its consultants has basically killed IBM Research). Disclosure: Microsoft employee.
I guess the company owners would argue against it based on security concerns, especially if the courier is delivery packages that have high net worth
But that is my point. Even with a bit smaller core-market and for sure with a stagnant one, a company as big as microsoft has enough potential to survive and stay relevant. Be it with expanding via surface-tablets or whatever, but relying on their core-market. They are unlikely to disappear, contrary to what the article suggests, even without android-patent protection money.
what careers which make a positive contribution to society might be open to academic mathematicians who want to change careers?

Perhaps a few mathematicians might join the fight against innumeracy among programmers?
A sequence of 1M arbitrary numbers may take 3.32x10^6 bytes, but a sorted sequence of 1M arbitrary numbers is a different matter.
It will in countries that aren't completely bone-headed about it.

I guess a good measure of how corrupt a particular political environment is will be how long it takes to give in to the overwhelming reasons (ecological, economical and social) to allow the true, very low cost of self-driving cars to have its impact on the taxi industry.
Don't worry, it has not been removed: http://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html?highlight=re...
Go to your local newspaper about the fact the police won't do their job. That should move them into action
Download our App Jailbreak Wizz built by Appsgeyser.com
MS agrees w you and put together a very slick cover/keyboard for the surface.
There is this universal contempt for Ballmer that I don't understand. He has made several mistakes, but on the other hand:
He has held senior positions in MS for 30+ years, including 12 years as CEO now. Except a handful of quarters recently, they have shown revenue and profit growth. (It is expected to go up again, but who knows.) In addition, they have made countless 3rd party developers successful.

While we can all be happy about Apple and Google being more successful of late, give that man some credit for his role in more than 30 years of sustained growth.
I sometimes think I know Python/NumPy, but then I see Travis' company projects and I'm blown away.

Good work, Continuum Analytics!
Software as design
Everyone's missing that drones (flying cars) might take off too at roughly the same time. The challenge of making driverless cars completely safe (intelligent sensing and control) is also the challenge for flying cars. Flying cars would beat out road cars and so the reenvisioning of society is greater than what people like Brad Templeton have done. With flying cars, all investments in roads become useless and huge swathes of land become inhabitable. Real estate prices should consequently plummet and a worldwide financial panic occurs (this can all happen within 5 years). However, this will be a good thing since it will clean the current mess of unproductive activity that is land owning and leasing.

What the mainstream media also aren't realizing is that the technology for driverless cars is also the same technology that automates away most factory/farming/mining/retail/distribution jobs. The effect in the west might not be so large, but in the rest of the world it could be devastating, leading to riots and civil wars.
A class without methods is just syntactic sugar wrapping around a dictionary of attributes, so in that sense it could be simpler to use the dictionary directly.
No one is expecting growth because it's already near saturation. Attempting to use growth as the metric of health for companies the size of Microsoft or markets the size of (desktops+laptops) is some sort of pathology.
Thats true. Buy Microsoft Surface, Only if you know, what you are buying. Keep the Surface with you. It is going to be a Huge hit. Peoples will find out the drawbacks, not only find out- but there is a race among few Apple fanboys to write huge posts about showcasing negatives.
I just got a Kindle PaperWhite and it did not come with a charger, just a USB cable to plug into a computer for power.
> As a side note, I would highly suggest NOT
> building a custom analytics platform as a
> startup unless your model simply won't work
> without it.

Seconded. I work at a place that has gone down this path and there are a lot of pitfalls.

If you go with something like Mixpanel, then that software does what it does. If somebody wants to measure something that Mixpanel can't, they either have to go without or make a really good case for getting their desired figures some other way at huge cost.

Not so with in-house solutions. Because it's possible to constantly measure more things by investing programmer time, that's what happens. Be it product, marketing or finance, somebody always has another bright idea or another "I absolutely cannot do my job any more without this" measuring need.

Because this pressure to add features comes from within, rather than from outsiders, it's hard to resist. People will push you to ship "just this one thing" outside of the normal release cycle because it's always "so urgent". This happens to me several times every sprint because of our internal analytics software, and it's an enormous time sink when every "just this one quick thing" needs to be pushed through the QA and release process one by one.

Also, people are happier to put their faith into external products. If RJMetrics reports a higher-than-expected number of occurrences of event P, you assume RJMetrics is working correctly and the first question is "What bug in our system is causing too many of these events to happen?". If the internal analytics system says the same thing, it's an analytics bug until proven otherwise. As the maintainer of the analytics system, this gives me de facto responsibility for identifying and triaging the whole team's bugs.
It's easy to forget that durability is a trade off because nobody makes ultra-durable cars. But carmakers do plan for cars to last "only" a few hundred K miles before becoming prohibitively expensive to maintain. It's planned obsolescence, and it's not a conspiracy, just good economics and a consumer taste for new things.

But other vehicles are made to last much longer. why not cars? Also, computer drivers can be programmed to be much gentler on the engines and transmission.
Yes, that is now. But if Surface and a few more extremely expensive attempts fail, sooner or later MS will have to close the lab, fire many developers and concentrate on extracting value from it's existing shrinking markets.
If it's security concerns you can see UPS and FedEx trucks every day on the road, just follow one - or even just watch them leave the hub!

So that logic seems incorrect.
It's possible the incremental cost of a driverless car trip from a shared pool (like zipcar in that respect) would be higher than the cost of driving your own car, due to the fact that when you're not using your personal car it's just sitting around in your driveway collecting rust. That would be an incentive to reduce the number of trips.
Let me try to make my point by a "soft" analogy, in your terminology.

If a fiction book has a great, gripping plot and interesting, relatable, wonderfully done characters, then weird spelling and heavy sentences are not a big deal and can be easily fixed by a competent editor. But nothing can save a very grammatical and clean-written text that is just flat, boring, or makes no sense at all. Ask any publisher - which kind of books they prefer?

Similarly in software, getting the big picture right is much much more important than "elegance" in each individual line.
There is something I don't understand: The US (or at least certain agencies) have been involved in creating or supporting insurgencies in different scenarios (even Afghanistan itself) for most of the post-WWII era. There has to be an enormous amount of experience dealing with para-military groups and a lot of examples of how not to deal with one, e.g. the Soviets in Afghanistan.

I would have expected that experience to pay off in the current situation. Either supporting an insurgency is radically different from combating it or all that knowledge is lost in the cracks between the different agencies conducting those operations.
"The laws of mathematics." That's good! I've updated the previous post to use this wording, hope you don't mind :) http://preshing.com/20121025/heres-some-working-code-to-sort...
What is your argument that flying cars would beat out road cars? Flying requires way more energy and energy has always been scarce up till now.
man i was struggling to remember various commands, hat to run, etc and thanks for the comments, i remembered some more.

peek and poke ftw!
That comment on your blog is exactly what professional programmers do in the real world: pass the test suite and move on. After all, the goal of software engineering isn't to write elegant code; it's to deliver software that solves the customer's needs. And the customer's needs are tracked via the spec, not the style guide.
So you love people who since the 90s have been repeatedly caught and found guilty of fraud, insider trading, piracy and who cut deals with the police by turning in former friends and associates?

This is the side of kim people seem to have collectively forgotten over the last 10 or so years in which he has disappeared and was making tons of money from mu.

This is nothing but the same stunt yet again.
Too Big To Succeed? Three China Scenarios to 2050
A Retina-ready version of the deJong Attractor
There is always one place where A and B are near ideal. Usually as A gets better B gets worse. Currently this place is Berlin.
I don't have much to say about the technical aspects of this, since the first computer I used came with DOS and Dave!

But, your dad is an awesome and patient man...
I think that is a very good point.

While designing cars to last longer would increase the weight of some components, for example allowing more metal around the cylinders so that they can be re-bored a number of times, this could be at least partially by having a much reduced burden of crash resistance.

Some things could be alleviated simply by avoiding the maintenance / cost cutting shortcuts used today. For example fitting grease nipples to ball joints and greasing them regularly makes them last a great deal longer than the sealed units which are riveted to swing arms today!
intellectual horsepower necessary for the two jobs is that different...
It's very different, I know a lot of accountants and it seem to me that there intellectual skills are one step below then mediocre programmer's. You can't compare developers and accountants jobs in term of solving problems, creating something. It simply different worlds where accounting is something very small, narrow and limited.
Point well taken. You are completely right.
You don't actually need then sports package to watch Sky Sports F1, just the HD pack.
Do you like the tools?
I like the occasional reminder that Iran has never started a war. And it won't unless it plans to be obliterated, so don't worry about that.
I would say that if you want your own company you wouldn't work for any company because at the end of the day you are still working on someone else's product. Doesn't matter if it's Apple, MSFT for Acme Box corp.

However when you say "Smart people", are you saying that IBM's Watson, the latest Intel chip or the latest drug are create by stupid people because their company is not mentioned on HN.
Sure, I understand you weren't touting the fan itself as a benefit and I appreciated your overall writeup. I just had to share my double-take at seeing the ideas "will have a fan" and "worth waiting for" so close together.
Yes, I think MS still has room to avoid the fate of pandering to the enterprise. MS research continues to shine, but I recall that IBM research shone brightly in the 80's.

I hope that MS can stay primarily focused on people who make their own buying decisions, but I'm worried (eg [1]). "A computer in every home" would have translated very nicely to "a device in every hand." Alas, I'm not really sure what MS stands for these days beyond "backward compatibility" with its understandably addictive revenue streams -- which is also eerily reminiscent of IBM in the 80's.

[1]:http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Says-No-to-a-Comput...
The Sad State Of Video Apps
A Google Employee Walks Into a Bar ...
Anyone else having trouble getting Adventure Construction Set to run? (Seeing ACS in the list brings back so many memories)
R Reference Card [pdf]
That is pretty interesting. I guess that's still within spec for USB. The iPhone probably doesn't care as long as it's a few hundred mV above the battery voltage (which would max out at about 4.2V for a lithium ion cell). Also, it looks like the big drop occurs when you go over the 1A rating of the charger.

While it's an interesting measurement, I'm not sure how relevant the current sag is to overall quality. Devices really shouldn't be using the charger in the constant current range. I guess it does reflect the overall workmanship and thought put into the design.

Also, nice job doing those ripple measurements - that was interesting stuff! It's not super surprising that the cheap knockoffs fail miserably there. Probably cheap capacitors that are way too small.
Putting a satellite in orbit is significantly more complex than sending someone straight up and down again.
Every Good Startup Practices Constructive Conflict