skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to clarify, he recently moved from Yahoo Research to Microsoft Research when the former imploded. Same with David Pennock and others. The Yahoo folks in New York mostly switched to MSR (founding MSR-NYC) and the folks in California mostly switched to Google.

(I used to be part of that research group but I left at the end of 2010 to start Beeminder.)
I wish more venture capital went into this than smartphone apps. Now that has the potential to change the world for the better..
Snow-mo: unique snowflakes with WebGL
You've spelt 'thoughts' wrong.
The Only Thing That Matters
This obviously isn't an accurate article. The writer occasionally writes for ExiledOnline, a formerly expatriate paper in Moscow. Exiled is in the Hunter S Thompson tradition of gonzo journalism. They are more interested in conveying the truth than being factual.
Java GC is one of the finest pieces of engineering. It can be configured and tweaked in million[1] ways to provide one with the behaviour that he wants to see.

[1]http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/vmoptions...
What's wrong with last xkcd (Frequentists vs. Bayesians)?
Given how easy "Likes", "Follows" etc. are to manipulate, I very much doubt it.
Why? Because Java is awesome.

But seriously, this just highlights one of the downsides of following "coding standards" religiously.
People buy smartphones for apps. People want fast access to lots and lots of apps - hence the popularity of the Android/iOS experience. I think de-emphasizing apps for more Twitter/Facebook spam is a bad move and consumers wont go for it.

I also think WinPho8 looks absolutely crap. Despite what MS bleats about making the phone about "you" and making the screen more bespoke etc, I actually find the live-tile layout incredibly bland and repetitive - everything just looks like a blue or yellow square with some simple white wire frame figure inside - compare that to an Android screen with a stunning live background of a Galaxy rotating (in my case) and a grid of unique, beautifully well-designed app icons that carry so much identity and flair - no comparison at all IMO.

As for integration with XBox/Surface etc, I think this is a niche market that wont affect the overall picture.
I am not a lawyer, I don't have a clue about law and licenses. Even though it is prohibited to use Pancake for commercial websites with this license I won't kill anyone because he is hosting a small blog making a few dollars with AdSense or developing some small scripts for friends for little money. Just in case someone would like to use Pancake for a online shop or something making bigger amounts of money I'd like that person to contact me.
Installing and building F# and MonoGame on the Mac
Reminds me of the FactoryFactoryFactory pattern.
A not-to-do list would be a great idea. Probably the most useful day/life planning tool.
Or ififtpiftpmbp as I like to call it for short.
creating inheritance by using name conventions is really good idea!!
More information [2007]: http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2007/11/07/and-the-longest-jre...
Someone on StackOverflow suggested we think of ugly Java class names as poetry; he provided an example:

InternalFrame InternalFrame

Title Pane,

Internal Frame

Title Pane.

Maximize Button Window,

Not Focused State.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1697215/what-is-your-favo...
The US taxpayer didn't make a dime. The military industrial complex made a metric shitload.
Where are you sources?

The article says this:

"That makes it almost as important to their business as the cocaine trade, which is worth about $2.4 billion."
When there is high memory pressure, the default behavior in Erlang is to fail rather than continue garbage-collection?
> Is this code available on github?

It's in the source code using the google Chart api [https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/index]

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">

// Load the Visualization API and the piechart package.
google.load('visualization', '1.0', {'packages':['corechart']});

// Set a callback to run when the Google Visualization API is loaded.
google.setOnLoadCallback(init);

// Callback that creates and populates a data table,
// instantiates the pie chart, passes in the data and
// draws it.
function drawRealtime() {

var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable(headings.concat(likes));

var options = {
title: 'Realtime Like Count For Mitt Romney',
hAxis : {textColor: '#ffffff'},
colors: ['red','#004411'],
legend: {position: 'none'}
};

var chart = new google.visualization.LineChart(document.getElementById('realtime'));
chart.draw(data, options);
}

function drawHistoric() {

var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable(headings.concat([['1:59pm',12049076],['2:16pm',12048948],['2:30pm',12048820],['2:45pm',12048681],['3:00pm',12048559],['3:15pm',12048421],['3:30pm',12048297],['3:45pm',12048182],['4:00pm',12048077],['4:15pm',12047946],['4:30pm',12047807],['4:45pm',12047660],['5:00pm',12047509],['5:15pm',12047380],['5:30pm',12047247],['5:45pm',12047105],['6:00pm',12046942]]));

var options = {
title: 'Recent Like Count For Mitt Romney',
legend: {position: 'none'}
};

var chart = new google.visualization.LineChart(document.getElementById('historic'));
chart.draw(data, options);
}

var headings = [['Time','Likes']];
var likes = [];

console.log(headings.concat(likes));

window.setInterval(fadeAway,1000);

function init() {
drawHistoric();
window.setInterval(fetchLikes,1000);
}

var start = 0;

function fetchLikes() {
$.getJSON('https://graph.facebook.com/mittromney?fields=likes',function(data){
console.log(data.likes);
if(likes.length==0) { data.likes+=10; start=data.likes; } else {
$("#count").text("-"+(start-data.likes));
}
likes.push([new Date().getTime(),data.likes]);
drawRealtime();
});
}

function fadeAway() {
var opa = $("#romney").css('opacity');
$("#romney").css('opacity',(opa==0 ? 0 : opa-0.02));
}

</script>

It's all in the fetchLikes() that use the JSON api of the facebook graph.
It's launched through this : window.setInterval(fetchLikes,1000);

After the graph API has been loaded.
I am not convinced this is important.

Look at the scale, against a base number of 12M+ facebook likes, losing hundreds is a rounding error. The OP seems to be getting the slant on his graph by manipulating it in rather grotesque ways.

P.S. Yes, people seem to be dissociating themselves from the Romney loss (and the man himself) in alarming numbers, none more so than within his party. But this does not seem to be a valid measure.
Yes, but it goes deeper and I can't give it enough justice by typing this on my iPad.

The thing to understand about Nulls is that most often they denote non-fatal errors that have to be either explicitly handled or otherwise they get ignored. That's why nulls are evil, because NPEs take developers by surprise, at the worst possible time.

Monads are useful for dealing with errors. It's a tool, or a design pattern if you will, that makes the developer either deal with exceptional state or make it somebody else's problem. Developers that are not familiar with monads are doomed to implement it badly [1]

If you're interested for more and are a little familiar with Scala, I've attached an URL for an awesome explanation of this topic [2]

[1] https://gist.github.com/3889970

[2] http://james-iry.blogspot.ro/2007/09/monads-are-elephants-pa...
The posterior distribution is only half the story. A true Bayesian uses a utility function to make decisions. How much you care about the worst case vs the average case is in the utility function. That's exactly the problem with frequentist methods: you're still making assumptions, but they are implicit and hardcoded in your choice of method, instead of explicitly stated and tweakable. With a particular choice of prior and utility function, you can recover many frequentist methods, but in most cases those will not be the prior and utility function you actually want. For example maximum likelihood estimation corresponds to a utility function equal to the likelihood (i.e. the probability mass), which at the very least should strike you as ridiculous for continuous quantities (maximum likelihood can still be useful as an approximation technique if the problem is intractable with your actual utility function). With a frequentist method, you are using a prior, you just don't know which one.

For some problems you might be able to get the correct decision in a very roundabout way by setting your alpha to the right magic value, but (1) it's not clear how to find the right alpha and (2) in general you cannot encode a complete utility function into a single number.
I think you hit it on the head. You are a perfectly down the middle, average, American. You have time to read and post on HackerNews. You are almost certainly not in the population to which the secret ballet is most beneficial.

The moment a non-secret ballet becomes a large-scale option, then the most vulnerable will be targetted. One there is a way to confirm that someone infact did vote the way you wanted, then you're good to go buying the votes of those desperate enough. You might be 'broke as shit', but you're also average, which means you're not -really- broke as shit.
Some people like to document their code with long name instead of comment. It's an internal class anyway. Why would anyone care?

JDK has a superb auto document building tool to extract all the classes in JavaDoc and letting people to find internal classes easier.
Can Swiss Federal Railways now turn around and offer a license to Samsung for $9.99?
If requests hits the 90% and urllib2 the 10%, then requests should be the standard library and urllib2 a module. I think his point is more to point out good modules that most people should use, and should become common knowledge of what people should turn to when trying to do something. Java, for example, has several date and time options but Jodatime actually does what most people want to do with dates and times.
If Apple had licensed the design before they shipped their OS, they probably would have paid the same per unit cost as everyone else.
As good or bad as the Java language may be, I think plenty of people are turned off by the Java culture that encourages this to happen. This is a little bit of an understatement since Sun setting the defacto coding standard gives a very strong message to followers.

The rest of the world might simply say blah.bah.frame.paint and be done with it.
And I'm sure that's exactly what people would do. It isn't fair, but we're ever going to have the year of the linux desktop, somebody needs to start owning these little mistakes and quirks.
For new projects the use HTTP at a high level, I believe that there is no reason to prefer urllib2 to requests.

Probably it won't replace urllib2, but it has attained critical mass and won't go away soon.
Seems like automatically generated class name. You shouldn't ever see that as a Java developer unless you work for Sun, since this is internal package. The name, though long, seems pretty consistent with the rest of the names in the package [1].

If you look at it once more I guess that it is used as a Painter for MaximizeButton located in InternalFrameTitlePane of InternalFrameTitlePane of InternalFrame.

How would you name such thing?

[1] http://javadoc.bugaco.com/com/sun/java/swing/plaf/nimbus/pac...
Also, in the package com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus, there lies the infamous class InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState (http://codenav.org/code.html?project=/jdk/1.6.0_22&path=...). Quite a precise name for a class that has only 36 lines.

Talking about design patterns, the folks that develop the Spring framework apparently tried to put as many of them together as they could: there is a class named AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean (http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/spr...) in the aop package. And, the class description is no less than "Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons".

Take that, GoF.
I'm not sure whether FSF commented on VLC, but http://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance was a complaint about restrictions imposed by the store's terms of service, not about proprietary system code that must be linked in. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs always made a pragmatic exception about doing that, because many early Unixes shipped with proprietary standard libraries and didn't support dynamic linking at all.
Narcissism, Consumerism and the End of Growth
>More importantly, now that both you and perhaps Scott Adams have commented on my blog, I am very happy. If only I could think of some way of getting Berke Breathed to comment here, I think I could just retire!

Could someone point me to the "perhaps Scott Adams" comment? (is it in response to another blog entry?)
Democracy is, more or less, the only way to get human rights for citizens (a little simplified, but not by much).

So you're saying that rule of law, women's right, etc (see e.g. the UN declarations) are just Western propaganda -- other people don't want it?

Afaik, everyone and their dogs try to emigrate to where they can get these rights and the good economy that comes in an open, democratic society... (and/or bleed in the streets for them.)

Thanks for a good laugh. I'll still assume you're a troll or from the 50 cent army.
A friend of mind posted this article on Facebook earlier:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...

The summary is that in the aftermath of this election, Democrats and their allies are not just celebrating the fact that their preferred Presidential candidate won, but taking mean-spirited glee in the disappointment of Republicans - largely enabled by the preeminence of social media (for example, the "White People Mourning Romney" Tumblr).

The linked site is a pretty serious example of this phenomenon. The message behind it is essentially, "Ha ha, look how all the Republicans are dissociating themselves from Romney since he didn't win! What losers!"
Steve Yegge has written Java poetry before: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...
A lack of secret ballot could easily be challenged by businesses that threaten or have 'layoffs' for those candidates or positions that workers vote for.

I'm not as worried about the mob showing up and telling me 'vote this way or Jimmy here will say hi', but instead "candidate X will benefit your job. We're not sure you'll have your position if he's not voted in"
I think "close()" is the appropriate name, as it's analogous to closing a file.
How exactly would you disrupt that hiring system?
I was thinking about collecting job seekers feedback "Did you get reply from recruiter?".

But that may disappoint recruiters, and they are paying customers, not the job seekers.
Here's a query for [\w{60,} lang:java] on Google Code Search:

http://code.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=%5Cw%7B60,%7...

E.g. TraversableResolverSpecifiedInValidationXmlNoDefaultConstructorGwtTest , DeleteContentTypeXmlDocumentResponseDeleteContentTypeXmlDocumentResult , and so on.
Crashed? It was a public event (Open Tech Talk). Why sensationalize the title?

http://events.linkedin.com/open-tech-talk-new-1129669
Why not just add an atexit trap that automatically cleans up open logs?

http://docs.python.org/2/library/atexit.html
How do HIDDEN CONTROLS help beginners? Why would anyone, let alone beginners, roll the cursor into random empty areas hunting for critical functions? This thing presents a screen with no controls or options on it at startup, and just sits there!

And "first iteration" is NO EXCUSE. Microsoft has had DECADES to refine its GUIs, and through the mid-'90s they made excellent strides.

The steaming pile of shit depicted here represents total loss of that talent, inspiration, and even common sense.
http://andrewgelman.com/2011/04/dilbert_update/#comment-5917...
This is a ridiculous arguement. You must have a lot of old bumperstickers on you car.
This one[1] from .Net comes quite close. Though, it was almost decade ago, they might have passed Java on class name length by now.

[1]http://weblogs.asp.net/rchartier/archive/2004/02/05/68350.as...
Technical Redundancy - A Crucial Business Requirement
Having spoiler tags on everything that possibly discusses a movie is silly. The movie was released 9 months ago. By now, either you cared about the movie enough to have seen it or don't care enough to care about spoilers.
You've most likely already seen this, but, if not, it's a relevant, great read:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431
you know... the one that "Actually performs the painting operation."
Ah, naming things. One of the two hard problems left in Computer Science.
I have yet to ever have to use multiple outbound IPs from the same machine for an HTTP request from Python. It might be "fairly common" for whatever you do, but in terms of the general population, it's not.
There is actually a lot of research suggesting that inequality in a society is itself the cause of many problems. This is not surprising to me, since, after all, it is ridiculous to speak of wealth in absolute terms. $20k doesn't mean anything.

You may call it envy if that's how you see it -- if you indeed are interesting in learning about the many problems of economic inequality, I recommend the book The Spirit Level (http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resource/the-spirit-level).
There was a TED talk recently exactly about that neglect:

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_why_architects_need...
Victory has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan
Bad data is not the same as no data.

For example, the fact that somebody is willing to manipulate a statistic is information in itself, and could be correlated (positively or negatively) to an outcome.

Part of working with big data is analysing all your signals coming in, and being able to determine which are useful and which aren't.

Social media may be a noisy, biased signal, but I doubt it is so noisy, or so biased, that no useful information can be obtained from it.
Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lBBjkcfKuE#!

"Crashed" is an overstatement. "Went to" might be better.
I just did a quick analysis of a system with a large number of globally exposed names written in C.

About 1000 functions in all (so that's just the globals), of those a hundred have names > 30 characters. There are some real 'gems' in there, consistency - even if self enforced - has a price. The record holder weighs in at 53 characters, it (fortunately) drops off quickly after that.

There are only 2 things hard in programming, cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors.

Personally I think this name is bad because in spite of the enormous length it still doesn't tell me what it actually does. It just uses a lot of characters to indicate its spot in a hierarchy.

Names like these are what gave rise to jokes like 'Q: What is the spelling of bureaucracy? A: J-a-v-a'. Which of course does a dis-service to java the language and the community behind it.

I can see why they're funny, but you have to realize that when you get out of the trivial program length domain into projects that are 100's of thousands of lines that this problem will sooner or later rear its ugly head. And I have not yet seen any really good solutions.

The things that can help you to extend your runway a bit in this respect are:

- be consistent

- reduce scope wherever possible

- pick short names for primary objects

But even with those rules you'll have a 53 letter name in there somewhere... I'd be very wary of casting stones in situations like these without knowing exactly how the person that picked it originally made their choice. Chances are there were a whole pile of external factors dictating this monstrosity and the guy or girl (or the code generator!) that did it never was happy about it either. Laughing at others that have tackled some problem is easy. Coming up with real solutions and doing a better job of it is a lot harder.
I burned through 2 entire seasons of Walking Dead on Netflix on the Surface. Definitely prefer it compare to the Netflix app on my TV, Xbox, and the browser(ugh!).

When more stuff like HBO, Showtimes, etc are available I would definitely see the Metro thing replacing my HTPC setup. Add Kinect support Microsoft!
Created a page to track this about a day ago:

moinnadeem.com/romneylikes
I heard on the grapevine that it's NP-complete.
linked version:

http://www.moinnadeem.com/romneylikes
You don't need to represent the actual length of the solution in a finite number of bits, you just need to represent the solution itself. The solution can be represented as the set of edges contained within it. Each edge is either present or not, so a solution can be represented as a bit set the size of the number of edges in the graph, or at most n^2 bits where n is the number of vertices.

For a practical idea of how you'd do this, I think you'd just modify your binary search based on the possible circuit values. Basically, figure out what number excludes half of the remaining solutions, rather than just half of the range, and use that in your binary search.
I am fairly sure that most of the streams and sockets would get closed when the interpreter exited regardless.

Also, in accordance to the principle of "explicit is better than implicit," it's generally better to avoid messing with global state (such as atexit) behind the scenes, and to provide a way to shut down the logs manually.
LeafStorm got to it before me :)
People say Gimp has a different/worse UI, but roughly similar capabilities. Do you have a citation/basis to claiming Gimp is so much weaker?
What shell should I use?
That's the billion dollar question.

Despite the heartache, most job seekers could care less about getting a dear john, especially weeks or months following.

HR's problems as an industry run far deeper. Employers spending too much time and money for too little long-term result; applicants spending too much time (and money!) for too little long-term result. Find a way to fix that wicket and this other little problem becomes that much less important.
hey gavinjoyce,

Thanks for the advice! A default url based on the referrer could be cool!

It doesn't work on those sites because they disallow iframes to show their pages. Anyway we will work to find a way around this.
Public domain? I swear, I feel like I'm living in some kind of bizzaro world where everything copyrighted, trademarked, patented, cursed & sanctified... How is this even a dicussion?! We debating whether shaped are worth suing over & crying designs are worth this much. Am I the only one that sees how hilariously messed up this situation is?
IETF Trust chair MIA, recall process started
Startups, I want to challenge the concept of having a “Plan B”
Very useful. Great idea.
System.Windows.Forms.IDataGridColumnStyleEditingNotificationService

Interesting. It's long, but it's also pretty clear on what it does, and doesn't have any repeated words.

Reading this, I would guess that it's a notification of when the user starts editing a column, and indeed that's what it does. "Informs the System.Windows.Forms.DataGrid that the user has begun editing the column." is the official description in the API.
The Federal government would be insane to legalize drugs at the federal level even if they wanted to do that. Better to try a test out and see how it goes before doing it across the US. But, with this last election we are going to see if this experiment works by proxy of legalization in several of the states.