skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A better refutation is that I cannot predict the order of complexity for an algorithm written in Haskell that I could trivially do in C. Haskell presents immutable semantics, but underneath it all, the compiler will do fancy tricks to reuse storage in a way that is not trivially predictable for a beginner.

Except this is also true for C at this point. Maybe the order won't change, but maybe it will at that, if the compiler finds a way to parallelize the right loops.

C compilers have to translate C code, which implicitly assumes a computer with a very simplistic memory model (no registers, no cache), into performant machine code. This means C compilers have to deal with the register scheduling and the cache all by themselves, leading to code beginners have a hard time predicting, let alone understanding.

Add to that little tricks like using MMX registers for string handing and complex loop manipulation and you have straightforward C being transformed into, at best, with a good compiler, machine code that you need to be fairly well-versed in a specific platform to understand.

This is why I get so annoyed when people say C is closer to the machine. No. The last machine C was especially close to was the VAX. C has gotten a lot further away from the machine in the last few decades.

The implication here is that you should teach C as an end in itself, not as an entry point into machine language. If you want to teach machine language, do it in its own course that has a strong focus on the underlying hardware. And don't claim C is 'just like' assembly.
Huge fan of the Xbox, personally, but I'm inclined to agree with you.
Thanks for this insider knowledge (I assume you work at A). It feels better to know that my initial assumptions were incorrect.
Even though the MIT News Office subtitled the article with the phrase "new type of matter," could we please change the HN title to "new phase of matter"?

Perhaps this is an Americanism, but a "new type of matter" suggests to me that we've found a new family of fundamental particles besides the quarks, the leptons, and the gauge bosons.

What the article talks about is quite clearly a phase of matter called "color-glass condensate".
I think their problem is much worse than just being a question of improving data quality. They seem to get data from a lot of very different sources, and those simply do not fit together.

For example, in Stockholm Apple's map still shows most buildings as lying in the middle of some street. On the other hand, only relatively few businesses seem to be located in some kind of building. There seem to be quite obvious, and systematic, errors all over the place.
I have to admit, despite generally being a Google fan, I find a little humor in the fact that my Android phone can't read half their Google blogs. They open, but they won't let me scroll down. I have to stop a page before it loads completely (before it loads SOME element) if I want to be able to scroll. Makes me glad Blogspot is irrelevant to me.
Well the canonical example would be facebook, designed by a young guy specifically for young people.

I'm not sure what the mean age of the early adopters of stuff like pinterest is but I'm guessing under 30.
That second scenario sounds great to me. Reminds me of Burning Man. You'd be surprised what tools you can cut out of a gallon jug.
Apple and Google's Tax on Developers
Quote from your site:

> If you're outside the US, we're sorting out a system for international payouts, and have to ask you to be patient while we get that put in place.
In my opinion, this is Apple's attempt to avoid taking responsibility for the product it approved and shipped. I find it disturbing that Apple will accept the credit and not the blame.
> A solution that pleases both the sender having control over their files and the receiver having long-term access is tough to imagine.

It's that paradoxical? Having control of the file means being able to revoke access to it. If the viewer has long-term access, the owner doesn't have control.
These aren't 'prenup' demands, these are no-love separation demands. What points exactly feel mean to you?

Requests for lack of intimacy are understandable, given the no love situation.
It is strange that the household chores are described - at the time it would be 100% understood that it would be so even if it wasn't written down; apparently it was a problem in their past. I mean, at that time and place, wife not cooking for you would be reasonable grounds for divorce.
The "no belittling before our children" is natural as well.
Has anyone been able to buy this? I've added it cart like 20 times now. Half the times I get an error and it's not added, the other half I get an error when I click "proceed" and then it's automagically removed from my cart.

I was there at 12:00 and wasn't able to get it. So I wonder, has anyone actually been able to buy this?

Edit: 1hr later, still trying and still failing. I'm gonna give it an hour and then check again.

Edit 2: They just posted this: Google Play is currently experiencing very high traffic. Nexus 4 is not sold out and will still be available for purchase. Please try again shortly. Thank you for your patience. There is hope yet
Reasonable Expectation of Privacy
It's a matter of what your product is, really. If you have an innovative product that solves a specific problem or need , then it can work. It doesnt work for all products. Mobile development wether it is native or a web app , is hard ,and yes you have to go through all these processes on some plateform. Is there some money to be maid ? i definetly think so , but it is not really an el dorado with easy money. It is easier to make money on the "desktop" web than on mobile right now. Things may change in the future.
What's "family status"? AFAIK there is no protected "family status". The typical protected classes are race, sex, religion, age, and in some places, sexual orientation.
Silicon Valley has got to be crawling with older, talented-as-hell developers. People (or at least some people) remain awesome with age. I'd hire 'em.
Wikipedia has two listed as the number of Drudge Report's employees. I mixed this up the first time I read it as well.
Narcissism doesn't seem to me to be a life sentence sort of thing, although it can be. I think that the general point being made is that narcissists tend to be younger, and then many of us grow out of it. Whether it's the realization of my own mortality, being in a serious relationship, or (just even thinking about) having a child, I definitely can feel my perspective broadening as I get older, growing from the laser-like focus I used to have solely on myself, to now encompass the happiness and well-being of those around me.

So maybe it's not the narcissists are limited by age, but rather that age limits narcissism.
If you have built such a strong community that people are willing to help out for free I think that is much more impressive than being able to claim you did it all by yourself.
Yes, but don't jump to conclusions.

....

As others have been pointing out feverishly on Twitter: the problem wasn't them betting too much on HTML5. Their problem was developing piece of shit apps that happened to use HTML5. They tasked amateurs who didn't know what they were doing into building a hybrid native app container which in turn embedded HTML5 content. Plenty of other developers (Instagram and LinkedIn come to mind) have figured out how to do that right, and in a way where it is seamless to the end user and for all intents and purposes feels exactly the same as a native app.
I'm not saying that it's an easy problem. You have to find the right balance between which components should be native or not. It's clear from the other problems that Facebook's been able to solve that they know how to hire top-notch developers. They just failed to do so for their mobile efforts, which just reinforces the stereotype that they don't "get" mobile.

-http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4507960
> it is often at the expense of build/longevity

You can get very well built Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo (and more) laptops still cheaper than Mac hardware; and you can run Hackintosh or a Mac VM if you need access to Mac OS.

> generally I find Apple a solid buy.

So do I, all I was saying was that if he doesn't necessarily need an Apple machine then he could consider a Windows system.

> Such a '90s cliché

Yawn.
Sorry your feelings are hurt, man.

Real hackers build spam filters and search engine so people can find the information they are looking for. Spewing spam and tricking the search engines to prefer your content are two facets of the same disease.
> A voting system can only, at times, choose the most preferred of the options given. But it doesn't necessarily present us with the best candidates to choose from in the first place.

Reminds me of HHGTTG: "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
> Engineers are naturally skeptical, but this skepticism can grow out of control.

You've hit on one of the most important quality filters here. If someone is really, deeply intelligent, one of their analysis tasks will include a diligent try at making your idea work. The weirder your idea, the more curious about it they will be.
PyDev user here too. Although I don't use it directly anymore but through Aptana.

It works out of the box and also supports javascript/html/css/... so is ideal for developing webapps with a python backend.

Ninja looks nice, but nothing I saw in the screencast makes me want to make the jump.
I develop backend systems too. The data is not separate from the system. No one gives me a pass when the data is bad.
Like I said, the Air is more than suitable for coding however it might not be suited to music production, for that you might want a beefier machine.
You're making serious accusations against an individual and a company based solely on things you have read about on the Internet or heard anecdotally.

Wake up. Discrimination is not cut and dry, law is not cut and dry, and reality is not cut and dry.
I just bought a car for $1. The previous owner was frustrated by all the things that it wasn't great at. For a first car, I love the character of it, and learning how to fix, maintain, and control this beast. Like the article says, it gives me more experience and knowledge in this space, rather than reading textbook and articles about it.

In contrast, I love using LaTeX, even though it's a pain in the ass, because I know it's probably the best quality typesetting out there, and that people have spent decades perfecting it.
Point taken, but it's more like if you got an email saying "Devices on Google Play is available in your country starting at 12:00pm!" And then you went there it said "Devices on Google Play is not available in your country. Please check back soon."
Well, wait. I've always said this too: it shouldn't matter how I dress. But the truth is that dress is very frequently an indicator of how aware one is. It's a social consciousness that is sometimes reflected in other things (like being able to adapt to a new technology).

Look at this comic: http://xkcd.com/1139/ - the playground jerks call the guy a loser because he isn't playing the social game. They are right that he is "losing" the social playground game. He doesn't care, but that's kind of what these startups are looking for.
It's not clear from your comment if it was an interview situation

It was not. Added one word to clarify.
Bad example, that's a Ferrari GTO, it would sell for hundreds of thousands even if it was at the bottom of a lake.

And fashion means nothing, just that you read fashion blogs. The guys who invented the internet in the late 1960s wore 1950 dork clothes.

It doesn't matters.
Usually "married with kids" or "are going through a divorce" or "has really sick parents/children they take care of."

Note: It's completely acceptable to discriminate against your boss though. If your boss is going through his fourth divorce and has 8 kids, maybe you don't want to work there.
It's interesting to compare with other professions.

I was out for drinks recently with some people who were programmers as well as others some of whom were doctors.

The mean age was probably about 27. A 27 year old developer is a grizzled vet whereas a 27 year old doctor is considered a noob at the start of their career.
I am actually watching a set of cutlery gradually failing. My company relocated, and after spending lots of money on excellent desks and office chairs, facility management bought the cheapest cutlery they could get. After less than half a year, more and more of the cutlery is getting rusty. It looks gross (is it just rust or dirt?) and makes me wonder: If the quality is so bad, can I trust it to actually be reasonably "pure" stainless steel, or am I getting my daily dose of heavy metals. Also, the drinking glasses are corroding.
try a `gem update`. Memory performance should be much better now but I'm still curious about speed
Why does brainpicker run affiliate marketing scams on the side?
That's why even though I am skeptical, I gave them an upvote. Kids also have a ton of time and are very tolerant of things not working right on the first try. If I could amuse myself with Logo and BASIC (and later on, writing class notes and formula-solvers in graphing calculators), then I'm sure modern-day kids could take a system like Magikai to places I can't imagine.

None of the other frameworks I am aware of even consider kids as a target market.
What I did last time was click to "Proceed" from the cart, even if you get a "Oops, we had trouble processing your request" error and the button is no longer blue. Eventually I was able to order the phone that way, instead of refreshing the page which removes the item from your cart. This might not work this time around, but it's worth a shot.
Inspiring talk by Adam Savage of Mythbusters at the XOXO Festival.
You shouldn't ask because you can't discriminate "because of marriage to, or association with, an individual of a particular race, religion, national origin, or an individual with a disability" (Title VII).

You don't know if the interviewee is married to a Muslim, an invalid, etc -- if they are, you're open to a lawsuit claiming that was the basis of your discrimination. Just don't ask!
60-year-old shaves head, gets eye-lift to work in youth-mad tech-hub
The advantages that gondolas would have in Austin is the ability to easily cross the lake and climb the hills. All without expensive rail lines (limited to 2-3% grades) and eminent-domain seizures.

Although - having drunk people flying over your house during SXSW or Formula-1 weeks might not be attractive, because of uhh, biological contamination reasons...
> but I'm pretty sure you can't get sued for declining to invest in a company

Try this for example: "Our VC firm does not invest in companies with black founders. We looked at the data, and companies with black-founders have a measurably lower ROI."

Are you still pretty sure?
They are indeed.

> The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) only forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states do have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination.

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

Bullet point #7.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_i...
I love Jony Ive but I'm getting sick and tired of those videos, the same shit over and over again.

I agree with your comments - Apple is definitely a victim of its own success.

Recently, Apple products have not been as innovative as before (mainly just refreshed and updated product after product) and while I love Apple products, they're just running out of steam.

iPhone 5S in June? What on earth are they going to update it with? An A6X and Siri 2.0? They're out of ideas.
http://pressbooks.com/ and you don't even have to pay for it (if you have less than 6 books)
The thing is, children say this all the time whilst getting scolded/warned/informed too. While I agree one shouldn't be written off immediately due to age, my experience is that in the case of younger people, they actually are inexperienced and naive and simply pitch a fit, blaming discrimination and everything/anything else, because they fail to recognize that about themselves.
Report declares antivirus software a waste of money for businesses
"Antivirus software is now so ineffective at detecting new malware threats most enterprises are probably wasting their money buying it, an analysis by security firm Imperva has concluded in a study, that was carried out by the University of Tel Aviv. The team ran a collection of 82 new malware files through the VirusTotal system that checks files against around 40 different antivirus products, finding that the initial detection rate was a startling zero."
SIGGRAPH Asia 2012: Technical Papers Trailer [video]
>It sounds to me as if the problem is more with the writer's alma mater, and not "computer science curriculum" as a whole.

From OPs description, I would agree. I attend a run of the mill state college, but thus far have been pretty pleased with the CS courses -- even though they center around Java. I can't remember a single assignment that was graded based on writing definitions of polymorphism and inheritance (although we did have in-depth class discussions about inheritance vs composition) nor were we ever quizzed on language specific syntax. Every assignment we had was basically "build [x] using the tools covered during the week." The homework for the inheritance week was building a simple console game. Results were based on the code that you cranked out.

I do wonder why they're based around java, though. I don't really understand where it fits in the world right now. I know a lot of companies use it, and it's still one of the highest paying languages out there, but.. is that just for legacy reasons? Just because it's already deployed in so many places?

Additionally, I know it grew on the web, but now, I mean, with the speed of modern computers, and high level languages like Python/ruby/etc., what would the advantage of choosing Java be. If you need something faster, why not just hop to C++?

I've gotten a little off track now... but it's just something I've been wondering. And for the record, I'm not deriding Java -- I rather enjoy writing it -- I'm just curious where it fits into the modern world.
Can such a competitor not create a "Tom Jones in Skokie, IL" Google+ (along with a myriad of other fake accounts) to achieve the same result? Or, is that to difficult for someone with those intentions?

Edit: Also, "a lot" is a rather unhelpful metric.
Charlie Rose interviews Warren Buffett [video]
It’s cool in a lot of ways, but there are two big disadvantages over traditional attachments:

- The recipient doesn’t get a static copy of the file to keep alongside the email.

- The sender’s responsible for keeping the file available until the recipient has seen/saved it.
SEOs should be a laser focused thing, but it is more likely a catch all title for "internet marketers" and the industry seems to be fairly good at latching on to any buzzword in the online marketing world. SEOs last big bandwagon was social media gurus, especially on twitter. Now Growth Hackers? Um... yay... :(
After today, all Google interviews should start with: "So, how would you implement a shopping cart system?" Amazing that this can be this bad.
To go along with this point, SEO is just another tool in your marketing toolkit. To claim that SEO is the sole reason you're going to grow would be a mistake in my opinion.

What about the branding decisions made long before? Or the work put into the marketing framework? The work that went into creatives? And I'm not even getting into the coding that goes into bringing everything together.

SEO can provide growth, but only after you've used everything else in your arsenal to get the platform to the point that you are ready to start optimizing.
The Drone Arms Race Has Begun
Handwritten Samples from Prominent Typographers
In this case, Hanselman is the clear winner with three votes, whereas the other two candidates each have two votes. This is how our elections are held today.

This is dependent on the exact election taking place. With the US presidential elections, my understanding is that a plurality of electoral college votes is not enough to win, you need an actual majority. In the event of a simple plurality win with no majority, the result is decided by the House of Representatives (which may itself be tied).
Learning about Arrow's theorem definitely changed the way I think about elections in the US. It also changed the way I think about election news coverage. I used to be an ardent "horse race news" hater. I still am, in terms of how utterly it dominates election news, but now I see some utility in it as well.

Arrow and these others have focused how I look at the game-theoretic underpinnings of elections and the importance of being up to speed on exactly how candidates and interested parties are crafting strategies around the complexities built into the game. When people conflate the "message" of the candidate with the strategy (which is always) I still get irritated. I have a tendency toward partisanship and that kind of thing clouds my judgment. But the day-in day-out workings of the campaigns and PACs are more interesting to me now, because they shed light on what's fundamentally "broken" (from my point of view) in the underlying system, as opposed to what I simply find distasteful or disappointing.

Math!
Are you seriously saying that keeping up with fashion is an indicator of being able to adapt to new tech?
I wish I had read that 15 min ago.

UPDATE: Nah, I tried that, Now I'm getting a popup "Due to high demand, your order could not be processed. Please try again later."
UPDATE 2 : "Oops, we had trouble processing your request. We're working on fixing the issue. Please try again later."
I think the authors of "The Best" and "The Worst" are both right.

In fact, pretty much everything I own is either "the best" or "the worst" -- no middle ground. I identify the very few things that really make a difference to me (my laptop, my stereo, my kitchen pots & pans & knives, my jeans) and buy the absolute best I can afford. And I identify the things I don't really care about (the rug, the chairs, most kitchen utensils, my T-shirts, my toilet brush, my bike) and buy the absolute cheapest -- disposable, really.

So the real point is -- avoid the middle ground, which is muddled/confused life priorities. Do your best to figure out what actually matters and what actually doesn't, and spend accordingly.
I've also worked with developers in their fifties who are awful.

Age bias is awful, and I have worked with a lot of older developers who know their stuff and are extremely competent, but the idea that 25 years of experience automatically makes you a better programmer is wrong. Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.
The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using
Exactly, it's an indicator.

At the CEO level, I'd argue that you must look for people who understand the value of understanding their target audience ("customer") and taking the low cost / low friction action required.

Or, put simply, spend a couple of hours and $200 on cloths to look the part.

What, exactly, do you think would happen to a 24 year old hotshot banker who goes to an interview at, say, Goldman Sachs wearing Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt?
Pretty neat. A suggestion: instead of having straight white lines connecting the nodes (cities), why not add color that will change (say from blue to red), parameterizing time, so the trajectory is clear. Also it could be more visually pleasing to "smooth out the kinks", e.g. use splines. Other than well done!