skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is nice example, but you kinda missed the point.

This search algorithm is purposely making the search engine to sleep for maximum amount of time even if the results come faster. This is really done with the user in mind like you said and not the company. They are, "The users are not stupid, they will notice if some of our searches take longer than others"

I dislike wasting cpu cycles for unrelated reasons like "Users are stupid, they wont notice that it runs slow." so lets use this because it's easy to use without considering the effect on the users.
Comcast CEO - What we learned from Apple
Based on my anecdotal experience in the UK outside of London it's fine.

I'm not going to say I can't see what the fuss has been about as I've seen enough examples to know that there are real and significant problems, but I can say where I live (west of Scotland) for my use cases (basic searching and navigation) I've not had anything to complain about.
Source: https://github.com/trumbitta/mpuller

It's very young and messy, but it sorta works and so far is being fun to hack down.
I think this article raises a great point overall, but the Fibonacci example is a bit weak and smacks of a strawman. Functional programming tutorials that teach you to write a recursive Fibonacci or factorial calculator are not doing so with the purpose of teaching a useful function, or even a workable one - in fact, more often than not this is called out by showing its performance for moderately large N. They only use those examples because they're simple, abstract problems that can be used to elegantly demonstrate recursion in a relatable way.

If we're going to talk about real world, practical applications, then it might be more relevant to bring up a problem for which there isn't a trivial O(1) solution. A dynamic programming problem, perhaps? It's glossed over with a terse dismissal:

> “Advanced” discussions might consider engineering considerations such as tail-call behavior, or the possibility of memoizing results.

... But this is exactly why a functional programming language might be better than an imperative for certain applied mathematics problems. Note, I'm not saying that it is better, just that it's not such a simple argument. With a different set of examples, this article could have been written in favor of Lisp just as easily. I still think it's a good article overall, just that the point it tries to sneak in about Lisp and functional programming is a little shaky.
I wouldn't be surprised that Apple Maps works better in the Bay Area because Apple is based in Cupertino, so it's more thoroughly tested. It's pretty bad on the East Coast.
Quite the opposite, in fact. NetApp have contributed BHyVe (http://bhyve.org/ / http://wiki.freebsd.org/BHyVe), a full BSD-licensed Hypervisor, in the last year. They make regular contributions to several network card drivers and other low-level code. At least one or two FreeBSD committers are full-time members of NetApp staff.
Looks like we can add Last.fm to the list of companys that was neglected after an acquisition. This seems to happen a lot when a fat and happy industry leader buys a young an innovative startup.
Not enough coins. Money laundering is billions and billions of dollars. How does one anonymously move 1 billion dollars, without suspicion? Any large purchase or sale sticks out like a sore thumb.
Looks like it's gonna have a great lineup
TiddlyWiki5
You hit the nail right on the head. This generation cannot solve such problems. Probably neither will the next one. But the one after that, maybe they will get to grow without seeing the current jobs situation as The One True Way. Which in the end means Schmidt got it right - we need universal access to education. That is literally the only problem that we need to solve - leave the future problems for the future people.
BSNL Hacked by Anonymous India. Password=Password123
I get the same feeling listening to this as the tron-legacy ost by Daft Punk. Would label the album genre as 'epic coding music' ;)
Some great advice
How Patent Trolls Use Economics of Scale to Force Settlements
Thanks for taking the time to comment here. I'm curious of this is such a widespread problem, presumably organizations like the FAA and researchers would have survey data from pilots that demonstrate how widespread the problem is (I would think pilots unions in particular would advocate for such information). Are you aware of any systematic survey of pilots to assess how frequently this happens?
Dump: pastebin.com/wJtiyVx4
|| |||| ||||| | ||||| ||| ||||||||| |||| ||
The article casually confounds what it is programs do and how programs are written. Programs operate on data, and said operations can be more or less mathematical in nature.

Writing programs now, that's not mathematical in nature at all. There are an infinite number of programs that compute the same result. A program is good because it meets a number of criteria, among which efficiency and math soundness are not always the most important. Many of the criteria have to do with how the human mind works and how it intuits.
Ask HN: what hacker news app do you use on iOS?
What does Google's Zeitgeist tell us
you're probably alone with that opinion

psychonauts is one of the best games of all time, being released in 2005 on xbox it looked amazing, the artdirection is still great on the pc port today and with controller it plays amazing.

while bastion is good it's nowhere near the quality in writing, creativity and gameplay
How to "snipe" someone's PayPal account for fun or profit.
Step #1 - Log on to a secondary buyer-only account from eBay or use a family member's or a friend's.

Step #2 - Buy something from your target.

Step #3 - Pay for the item. This step is very important.

Step #4 - Proceed to the Resolution Center in PayPal and submit a false report claiming that the item was "significantly not as described".

Step#5 - Just wait two days for PayPal to terminate your target's account.

This trick works because PayPal unwillingness to investigate reports, trigger happy admins and their abysmal customer service.

Also, it will not matter if the seller can prove to PayPal that they never sent the item and thus, the buyer could've possibly known whenever the item was legitimate or not, even when the item is using a stock picture. The very accusation of an item being counterfeit from an eBay buyer is all the reason PayPal needs to ban accounts and ruin lives, especially during Christmas.

Well, i hope you enjoyed this and happy sniping everyone!
>Isn't the purpose of maps to find your destination?

He means that the actual searching (ie the querying to find) is not well implemented.

Besides that, no, the purposes of a Map app is much more involved: show you turn by turn instructions, public transit routes, bookmarks, etc...
Are bugs part of technical debt?
How Buffer Got 70% of Their Traffic Through Guest Blogging
It's true that in a competition where features dominate the performance won't make much difference, but what if your competitor realizes this and matches your feature set with better performance? You just lost pretty much all of your users when your users notice this and move as the competitors users and even if you try to push some new feature your competitor will do it too. So i'm just saying worry about the performance, because if your business actually is good you will get competitors at some point.

Though social networking is annoying because count of users in the network is pretty much a feature of the network. One of the things I think Google never has realized. With larger amount of users you have feature domination easily and the users will keep using your network even if it's slow.

Actually here in Finland we have one major community site which is one of the slowest and most bad mouthed service everyone use it because the users are there and not somewhere else.
Bootstrap progress bar update using jQuery/AJAX
I've tried it a few times and it doesn't seem like the tap zone is quite as big as it could be. Or my fingers are tapping the wrong place, possibly.
How Guest Posting Propelled One Site From 0 to 100,000 Customers
>It's crazy to think of all the energy that went into building great services like Napster, Audiogalaxy, and Soulseek, only to see them shut down by lawsuits.

Sure, though the same can be said for drug cartels too.

If record companies had put their efforts into turning just one of these services into a legal alternative (without completely ruining it), they'd be in the position Apple is in today with iTunes.

Actually they tried, and they didn't go anywhere. Napster was turned into a legal service, as was mp3.com.
2008 Sichuan Earthquake Likely Man-Made
If you do need/want to hide something, people will assume you are doing something bad, and therefore you are a scumbag.

This is sad. I don't buy into this "You don't need privacy if you have nothing to hide" argument. In my opinion OP was just trolling by wrapping up of a bunch of unrelated "things" in the statement.
JRebel Remoting to Push Changes to Your Toaster (in The Cloud)
Check this DEFCON presentation for Windows tricks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi0qUZCz6F0

Interesting demos start at about 20 minutes in.
There's an important difference between being able to unobtrusively compromise a machine by appearing to use it normally and between opening up the case and removing the hard drive, something that attracts attention in almost any setting.
That's right. The key point is that the rules for running a business change when you have a monopoly. Having a monopoly isn't illegal but the government doesn't want you abusing that special power with anticompetitive tactics.
news:yc is by far the best.

Because of its simplicity, I use it much more than I use the actual HN website.

I've even emailed chpwn (Grant Paul) the creator of the app with ideas for making it better and he was very quick to respond and sincerely consider my suggestions. In the end he chose not to use them, as he feared the UI implementation would not be intuitive.

http://newsyc.me/
I've found that in Melbourne that while Apples maps have a lot of data, its all very very stale. I live I'm the Eastern suburbs, a lot of the places of interest are very old. Shops that haven't been there for years are listed, and large points like Universities are completely absent. It makes finding a particular shop or business near impossible.

The road data is good buy very old. Roads that are listed have has buildings on them for years, dead ends aren't, just general mapping issues there. For some reason they've listed half the tram stops as train stations too, which doesn't really help.

I want to love them. The vector map tiles are silky smooth an very easy to navigate. The app is well thought out and easy to use. I just wish they'd used better sources for their data.
I was specifically speaking about my personal use. Maybe the "my point of view" in the end didn't make that clear enough.

My statements came as an individual Apple user which casually just disagreed with OPs, I don't think I'm alone there but it really doesn't matter.
You don't need to be good to program. You need to be exceptional to do math. Most programmers aren't that good at what they do, and I think they should focus on their craft. I struggle to explain to my colleagues who make 100k that they need to do memory tiling: or that their loop doesn't vectorized. Changing a float from a double in a BFGS is 2 days of work for these people. Let the chosen few do math.
Contest Lets the Crowd Create Your Next Billion-Dollar Algorithm
Not in case of those books you listed, but if you have some books about basics of technology which does not age that fast.

Seriously some old security books for example are good reading.
Real-life Oceans 11 story from Australia
I would not like that to crash anywhere, even if the shielding problem could be solved.

Might be more effective to use the nuclear power to power carbon capture on the ground.
Calling on Congress: Time to Fix Copyright
You may not be interested in license differences, but many downstream vendors are. Several have a "No GPL-3 code past the front door" policy, and others would even like to not have GPL-2 code near their products. FreeBSD's active progress towards being entirely GPL free is very appealing to these people.

FreeBSD has made significant progress here, and 10.0 is on-track to be GPL-free for all tier-1 platforms, including:

* Clang/LLVM rather than GCC

* New BSD licensed toolchain

* New text processing tools (sort, grep, etc)

* bsdtar - since picked up and used by several other operating systems
As a programmer you may not need to use algebra or analysis on a daily basis, but as a rule I've been noticing that the solutions that are more mathematically elegant also tend to be more pragmatic.
I find it disturbing that this article has been written in 2012. While I was reading it I really thought that it was at least 10 years old.

Computer science researchers are doing actual mathematics, and they are clearly more in what the article calls "Lisp school" than the "Fortran school". Research in functional programming is mostly mathematics. Lambda calculi (which was originally not developed to be a programming language at all), types, logic, category theory… Most of the tools used in programming languages research are mathematical tools, and they always have been.

The article is great and I mostly agree with its conclusion, but it seems to miss a lot about what is actually going on in computer science. I understand that it mainly talks about programmers and not computer scientists, but it's less and less true that programmers are not interested in what is happening in computer science research. Lisp invented a lot of the stuff that are now in almost every languages (conditionals, garbage collector, first class function, everything is an expression, recursion…) and it took many years to arrive here. But nowadays I see a lot of interests from the programmer community for what is happening in the programming languages research around Haskell, Scala, OCaml, and even stuff like Coq, Isabelle… ! In order to understand even a little what is actually going on with these research project one have to study (even if indirectly) mathematics.

Now that I have written this comment, I'm thinking that may be I have a skewed/distorded vision and that I'm not really talking about the same people as the article does. I don't know.
The split client and web interface gui were awesome. I used to leave the client running at home and would use the web interface to queue downloads while at work which would then download to my home pc.

They also had an ftp server search index where you could find even more obscure stuff.
InfoWorld: Couchbase 2.0: This Means War
Same goes for Macs really. Unless you have a firmware password set, resetting the root password is a few keystrokes away.
Congress could outlaw ‘stalking apps’ used by jealous spouses
Didn't go over so well the first time:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4796586
Diabetes Drug May Restore Memory In Alzheimer's
Stott Hall Farm is not a "nail house" - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M62_motorway#Stott_Hall_Farm
>democraticunderground.com is thataway. This is ycombinator.com, where people know they can improve their working conditions and get rich even if they are in rough conditions.

Yes. Where mostly white people of college education with supportive families and friends know they can "improve their situation". What a feat...

As for "getting rich", if they "know" that, then they are idiots. Most of them won't get anywhere near rich, the same way most startups fail.

Oh, and "100 hour weeks" programming in a startup (which I've done myself lots of times), is BS for spoiled boys and girls compared to "100 hour weeks" (and months and years) actual poor people have to work soul-crushing jobs, not as a "bet" to get rich but just to survive day to day life and feed their family.
I personally bought it because of Amnesia. Super Meat Boy was a surprise.. haven't played other games.
Isn't it the case with any other nix or bsd system? Boot into single user, mount filesystem, change password. I have been mostly working on Windows lately, but that's how I remember that.
In my opinion, Bastion is one of the best games I have played in a long long time. I really enjoyed its writing, creativity and gameplay. The soundtrack is utterly amazing to boot.
Yes, or generate hydrogen on the ground by water electrolysis.
Don’t let VCs (or anyone) define greatness for you
>And now you've told the people in the low numbered arrays that they deserve all the crap they're getting.

Well, a privileged upper array member to feel that way is somewhat tolerable.

The worst for me is when some idiot from the lowest numbered arrays, by an enormous combination of factors (which he mostly attributes to his "hard work" and "effort"), jumps several levels up, and then assumes that everybody can do it, and the other lower levels are just lazy slobs for not becoming rich themselves...
It states that in the article, "though a local myth persists that the road had to be split because the owners refused to sell the land during its construction.".
Pretty much, but OSX provides a nice GUI to do it.
A Pragmatic Approach to Problem Solving
What everybody - not just programmers - can learn from good software development practices and how one can apply a pragmatic approach to become more efficient and get things done while maintaining the best quality possible.
In an interview for my new book I asked Jason Fried of 37signals why $150/month was their highest price plan for Basecamp. Since I think plenty of large companies would pay at least double that.

His response was something similar to what you said about not feeling the need to make every bit of money possible. The Basecamp prices felt right to him and he was comfortable leaving money on the table to stick with pricing that matched his gut feeling.

That's not exactly what you were talking about, but I liked his way of thinking.
Checkout the gearboxes from Tamiya.
I'm going to start using this to explain multiple packages from now on. Thank you very much.
The article assumes you have enough access to boot the computer from an alternative medium.

They can't just "fix" that short of forcing full disk encryption.
I don't really see the point of this article. You don't need Fortran or C to implement the calculations of the Fibonacci as described in the article.

On top of that the article is missing the point that some elements functional programming (map, lambda) are actually making a numerical implementation neater.

It is not an accident that the original authors of R were themselves lispers and admitted having been inspired by lisp when creating R.

I think among others, those links will illustrate the previous point: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/html/interface98-paper/paper.h... http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/Compstat-200...
Funnily enough I love Psychonauts and find SPAZ boring, so it shows how different people enjoy different things! I imagine the more successful bundles are due to the amount of more mainstream games that everyone can play.
P != NP from the perspective of consciousness
That's wrong. Display technology doesn't matter much (and with hi-dpi "retina" displays it's mostly a done deal).

So, even if the display has pixels it doesn't matter, the interesting thing to eliminate is pixels in media (image/video).
They seem to agree on one thing: from a workaday perspective, math is essentially useless.

I would love it if someone had resources on how mathematics could actually be used as a tool by programmers.

What kind of problems would mathematics as a tool help me solve better/faster/more efficiently than the other tools in my programmer toolbox?
MySeeen: share another cinema, yours
Their definition of 'market' being 'all consumer computing devices', so obviously the picture changes rapidly after 2005 with the smartphone and tablet explosion. Its not really news that Microsoft are not doing well if you look at the whole universe of computing devices.

The headline is a bit misleading as it implies something more interesting, along the lines of 'microsoft not as dominant in desktop as people assume' ... but thats not what its about.

I wonder if Goldman's count X-Box as a consumer computing device? I bet they don't, not that it would make that much difference to the stats.
So you just have to force every piece of code on your computer to use that tool chain. "Dear Mr Zuckerberg, please make Facebook available in a form that allows me access without needing to rely on dynamic languages and uses a strictly defined toolchain (of my choosing)". Good luck with that.
Recycling?
They didn't go anywhere because their version of trying was making you pay the ownership price, but rent it to you.
>From the article, the source data is in pixel format. No codec format can be better than the source data.

Not necessarily true. For example if I have a bitmap picture of a printed circle, I can use software to find the shape and convert it to a vector representation of a circle (which would be infinitely better than the source image).

It works very well with scanned line art, for example.
Good Comment!
I disagree since a few years ago. Before i was a developer, or better said, a hacker. I wanted to solve problems. Right now, I more or less know hot to solve problems, so develop a product is kind of boring. From time to time something new comes, but is not usual.

Problem => Analyze => Solve (if makes sense to solve the problem).

After years, that is kind of repetitive.

So move up one level is thinking on products, and hacking in a more social level. Learn about usuability, psychology... how the people behave and what the people want. That are things that we the developers should know to be... Better developers.

Hacking is about understanding. Understand how the things in live work. Understanding why a product A success, and a product B fails.

So I will say that founders should be hackers.
Last.fm Radio to be killed off in most countries next month
Show HN: Desckit - A dynamic wallpaper generator that uses NodeJS and PhantomJS
Agreed. It's similar to comparing Intel to ARM. Outside of business the OS is becoming less important to the consumer than it used to be. IMHO the key for Microsoft is maintaining its hold on the corporate market. In that regard the key product is not Windows but Office.
The article assumes you have access to reboot the computer from a CDROM or USB stick, which amounts to pretty much the same attack vector.
Not true, I ran a Facebook campaign targeting developers and my conversion rates were inline with what you would see with other groups.
Apple has blocked things like "Google Voice" in the past claiming it duplicates existing functionality in the phone.

I suspect (And this is entirely speculation on my part) that if iOS Maps had not been under such a cloud of scrutiny since it launched, we might not have seen Google Maps.

With so many having major issues with iOS Maps, and Apple needing to do a lot of catch up, being seen to block a reasonable solution would be very, very bad. Especially the same week as the well publicized "Sending people into the middle of the Australian outback with no mobile reception instead of the city they put in" news on iOS Maps.

Not trying to sound conspiracy theorist here, but observing past behaviours and the likely influence of current demands.
I'd like to get enough to replace my Christmas tree with a Light cluster, but I'll probably start with having one as a visual thermometer/barometer/weather gauge, then two/three for ambient night lighting and maybe one or two as network health visual indicators.
How to create a Stopwatch in Java
Personally I loved everything about psychonauts (played the original xbox version), except the game play. Story, art, writing etc. etc. all amazing, and all rate among the best ever seen in a game. Unfortunately the actual gameplay let it down.

I agree that Psychonauts writing and creativity is better than Bastion, I found Bastion to be a better actual game all around.