skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So by the looks of it as a 28 year old I'm pretty much the exact mean for stack overflow.

I love the fact that "war stories" has the highest average age (of 35).
Can anybody explain how that could happen?

The difference between "shrinking since 1977" and "growing a percent a year since 1977" is so huge (at least 50% productivity) that I cannot believe that this is true.

Are people working fewer hours than the statistics bureau is aware of? If so, what do these people do in their spare time that does not show up as a "hey, that's funny" at the statistics bureau?

Or are there scores of 'died, but still reported as working' workers?

Alternatively, if the productivity is in "output per unit of capital": how do they hide using fewer resources from the government? Stockpile oil amd machinery? Or do they produce more, but sell on the black market?

For at least one of these, the estimates that the statistics bureau makes about them would, by now, have to be off by at least 20% or so. I think they would have noticed that.

On the other hand, I can easily see them as underreporting productivity growth by a few tenths of a percent each quarter, especially when reporting shortly after each quarter ended.
Premature scaling
Not nessarilly. The majority of possible videos are highly improbable, so from an information theory standpoint, it should be possible to have lossless video compression.
Here's a home automation-ish problem I've got right now:

We live in an on older (70ies) apartment building, with a wonky central heater, and people with varying levels of tolerance for heat and cold. Some of us suspect the heater is kind of broken, because it's hot when it's warmer out, and sometimes seems to pump out less heat when it's cold.

So... it'd be interesting to collect data: interior temperature for all 6 apartments, and exterior temperature in the shade. And do so cheaply. Ideas?
20 of the Best Free Python Books - Part 1 - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site
XDR? ASN.1? Everything old is new.
The absense of detailed methodology makes me doubt the worth of this number dump. As a start it would be good to know the number of users that led to the average numbers. And anything about the representative quality.
Girl fighting our evil side, died and it’s own us
Is public shame the best way to deal with bigotry?
I'm not disagreeing about the complexity, but you can choose to use a sane subset of the language and do away with all the other stuff. Map, filter, anonymous functions and type inference already puts it way ahead of Java in terms of productivity. You can absolutely choose to ignore the rest of the language.

In the end a language like lisp is much simpler but the paradigma shift is what makes it a bit difficult for those imperative programmers like me.

It's not very fair to compare Scala with Clojure - static typing might not be everyone's cup of tea, but over time, I have come to appreciate it's power when dealing with certain classes of problems.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality will teach you how to think properly, and discover people's motives. Great book.
There's been a lot of pseudo-scientific bullshit spewed about porn and masturbation by people looking to justify their moralising, and frankly from the summary I can't see how that book's going to be any different.
Facebook had to overcome a pretty steep disadvantage to beet e-mail. The main difference I see is that in e-mail, everything you see (in theory) needs your attention, whereas in facebook, nothing you see needs you attention, but everything is avalable when you want to give your attention. Unlike e-mail, people can join the conversation without an explicit invitation.
Although if you're running this over HTTP, you might end up compressing it with DEFLATE (either directly or with gzip), which partly involves adding references to duplicated data... I'm not sure what the use case for this format is meant to be, though, so that might not apply.
"Inner Game of Tennis" is excellent. I have also heard good things about "Learn to Draw: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" but haven't read it (yet)

Actually "Pragmatic Thinking & Learning" is excellent and I totally forgot about it. I'd probably swap that into my list.
Tongue in cheek: How many millions of lost GDP will it cost Greece, a few years down the line, to have a workforce not trained in standard business software?
I felt sick after two transitions. Why would you create something that triggers potential customer's motion sickness?
sigh. Why do we always want to declare a winner? Anyone who has tried to store binary data in JSON knows that MessagePack does indeed have a use case. And anyone who is working with browsers knows that JSON/JS is the king there.

> MessagePack is not smaller than gzip'd JSON

But gzip'd MessagePack is smaller than gzip'd JSON, so?

> MessagePack is not faster than JSON when a browser is involved

Using it in the browser was never the use case for MessagePack. JSON these days are used for far more than browser-server-communication.

> MessagePack is not human readable

Fair enough. Although I don't consider JSON without newlines to be "human readable" either. I'll have to pipe it through a beautifier to read it.

> MessagePack has issues with UTF-8

MessagePack only stores bytes. It's up to you to decide how to interpret those bytes.

> Small packets also have significant TCP/IP overhead.

And?
This is the kind of thing going on with the Omap5.

http://www.phytec.com/pdf/OMAP5_product_brief.pdf
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (http://www.amazon.com/Siddhartha-Hermann-Hesse/dp/1613823789). Not really a superpower but did help me understand lot more about life and how everything is connected. I have read it multiple times and the interpretation has been different each time - a new insight into the way we see life.
Shoe mall
For several years I was using Notepad++ (and before that PSPad) on Windows and Gedit on Linux, but I recently switched to Sublime Text 2 on both platforms. I also use NetBeans, mainly for coding in Java.
Ask HN: What advice do you have for a new Computer Science graduate?
> We tolerate it today because we've grown accustomed to it and we accept low-bandwidth distribution channels such as today's "broadband" Internet connectivity.

Many people do not accept this unless "accept" means "have no power to do anything but use the lines provided to them by companies; while complaining and campaigning for more bandwidth to be delivered".

> Connectivity is considered by many as "good enough" because you can shove a lossy-compressed 1080 video down without worry over a connection measured in the paltry few megabits per second.

When I'm watching movies or TV I almost never care about the resolution. I wish the plots were not so obvious or the characters were not so cardboard-cutout or with silly motivations or that the film was a bit morally braver. I might wonder why a lighting decision was made, or I might wonder whether it'd be better without that music. But I hardly ever think "This movie would be a better movie if it looked better".

See, for example, Clerks. That's a lo-fi movie which is significantly enhanced by being lo-fi. All the slightly wonky acting is excused because the movie reminds us that it was shot on a personal credit-card budget.

See also the discussion about "The Hobbit" with some people saying the double framerate has made some things "too realistic", thus de-immersing them from the experience.

> Even the most avid technophiles (broadbandophiles?) among us chuckle to ourselves when we upgrade our connection from 25Mbps to 35Mbps. We know it's in large part for ego, so we can post screen caps of bandwidth meters.

Well, this is a good point. Consumers appear to buy big (or small) numbers. "Megapixels? MORE IS BETTER!!" even though it's not true. Thus, we've ended up with a "Bandwidth? Bigger number is better! Price? Lower is better!" even though that says nothing about contention or reliability or fair-use allowances. We end up with odd situations where a user buys an "unlimited" account, manages to get full speed for 8 minutes, and then has their connection throttled for the rest of the month because they've gone over their fair use allowance. That's a rant worth having.

I'd be interested to see if there are any competitions for "compression of video" - these could go alongside the Hutter Prize.
I noticed that. I wonder if it's nudged a bit higher by younger generations not being as fond of the war analogy.
Nice, but it feels like jmpressjs is actually somewhat restrictive compared to impress, am I right? jmpressjs feels more slide-oriented, whereas impress is more like prezi - position it yourself wherever you like in 2D space.. is this correct?
Through the magic of the voting system it has now been reopened.
There are lots of valid reasons to dislike Fedora, but "working out of the box on new machines" seems like an unlikely one.
Full Show 12/27/12: GOP: the Ruling Party of Billionaire-istan
Seems like this could be useful as an alternate API format. I'd like to see sites offering plist (bigger than JSON but dead simple parsing in Cocoa) and serialized formats as well as JSON and XML and all that.
It's lovely! Well done.

I really strongly suggest you find a use for it that is not presentation. When I'm presenting I want people to be listening to what I'm saying, or getting information of the slide (or from their handouts); I don't want them thinking "Hey, that's a nice transition, I can't do that in powerpoint, I wonder what they used; wait, did he just say 27% up or 27% late? Wow, what was that group for?" etc.

I liked the way it told me after a few seconds that I needed to use arrows or the space bar. And it kept the back-button functionality.
I guess this is getting downvoted, because... it detracts from the discussion, or something.
I backed the 'wireless sensor readings to internet' device Twine (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...) so I'm going to put down a couple things about my experience.

-- Production delays --
I waited almost a year longer than expected to get my unit. Because I just wanted to tinker I wasn't bothered. Ninja Blocks say their units are manufactured, just waiting for the enclosures. This might not be a problem for them.

-- Battery eaters --
Twine eats batteries like nobodies business. Two AA batteries last about two weeks. On the forums this seems like the typical experience. Ninja Blocks looks as if the central 'Ninja Block' can be mains powered. But will the wireless sensors have a short battery life?

-- Web app --
Twine has a website that the device must communicate with to report data and push rules to it. There's no (out-of-the-box) way to get it to talk to a local server via a clean API.

This was a big disappointment for me mainly because their web app is very limited:
- No data logging (just reports the latest figure)
- Rules can just be triggered over thresholds (ie when temperature reaches 20c then X) not when temperature changes
- For moisture the actual resistance isn't reported, just a wet or dry condition. This renders it useless for plant watering.

Twine can make a HTTP request when a rule is tripped. I plan to play with this but it's not that useful if it can't just HTTP request every time a value changes as I wanted to log temperature (plus it's a GET!).

The Ninja Blocks apps look better and appear to fill the gap between reading something then doing something. Twine can really only report something (twitter/sms/email/HTTP supported). But I'd caution that until you get your hands a device like this you don't know of its true limitations.

-- Sensors --
I didn't up my kickstarter amount when they announced new sensors. I wish I had, as only the temperature sensor is nearly useful. The other built in sensor is orientation... ? IMHO they should've thrown in the other sensors and maybe upped the price to increase satisfaction.

I prefer the sensor pack that ships by default with Ninja Blocks.

In spite of the above I'm optimistic about Twine as it really is early days. This space has massive potential if it can break out of communities like ours into the mainstream. I just hope Supermechanical doesn't get distracted and focusses squarely on their flagship product.

Ninja Blocks? I won't be ordering but will keep a close eye on what those who receive the first units think. Their approach so far seems to be a better path to market than Twine's crowdfunding and their presentation superior.
And I as well. Well not quite crash... If I wait 30 or 40 seconds the browser becomes responsive for a second or two.

Ah there! Finally caught it and was able to close the tab.

So basically it freezes up for an extended period of time.

Latest patched FF, Win8.
You are aware that the same man who created winamp also created gnutella, right? Sometimes geeks have different projects, sometimes some of those projects are more subversive than others.
A third party is free to go through googles transparancy reports, there take down requests, and use the engine itself to validate what got taken down. As far as I am aware, Google is the only party devoting the resources nessasary to go through their DMCA requests.
Nothing, the R Pi just has a different host triple and lands you more pageviews and ad impressions. /cynic
The Pintrest testimonial on the msgpack website is a very good example of use case: serializing and de-serializing for memcache. The don't claim to be using it for browser-server communication.
Spring - Rails application preloader
Well, I guess it's more to do with older people having more experience and seniority thus having more stories to share.
Really? Could you expand on that?
I've read it this year and haven't found it special. A little tiring, actually.
Paraphrasing: "Isn't the logical type, in fact, `:if`?"

Yes.

Clojure's types are, generally, of the solution domains. The primary solution domain being: computation. That's the domain that all of Clojure built in types belong to.

The nature of Clojure and its community discourages the use of platform types for modeling the problem domain. Sometimes using platform types is desirable for optimizations like protocol dispatch and well-known structured fields. However, even when you're doing that, you're still operating in the solution domain. You're making an explicit decision about representation and evaluation: data structures and algorithms.

However, any substantial application is going to need some custom code for inspecting and debugging values. You'll wind up designing some schema and writing some custom validation. There can be tools to help you with this: consider XML's (very ugly) XSD schema system. Or consider W3C validators for HTML and CSS. For an example in the OOP world, look at AstValidator.java in the Google Closure code base. You simply can't escape it. A rich, strong type system can give you a leg up and get you 70% of the way there, but it will actively fight you when you want to go the last mile.

When and if you need it, you can basically make your own type system, tailored to your application.
Running "very smooth for you" doesn't mean much. For one, it doesn't do much anyway -- some circles, some boxes, some bordes, shape tweening, and a soundtrack. You could do this stuff in 1080p in 10 year old hardware if you did it native. Heck, you could probably even do it in an Amiga 3000 circa 1992. I sure remember an O2 (I think it was called) by SGI doing far more impressive real time stuff in 1996. And that machine had about 1/5 the capabilities of my iPhone.

The thing is, it uses quite a lot CPU power for what it does (and no, it's not "technical issues" with individual systems: it tends to do so in general in every system), and the animation isn't always smooth and far from 60fps.

And the suggestion that he's "using a browser that doesn't properly support some of the required CSS3 features" only reinforces his point, that when it comes to web technology it's a large step backwards from what we can achieve in native systems.
"What about female candidates? Would you agree there are likely to be gender and ethnicity biases in an interview question that discusses American sports?"

Don't you agree there are gender and ethnicity biases in posing these questions?
The secret is not found in a book. It can be spoken and shown, but not written down.

Those of us who know it have a saying. "Who the HELL do you think I am!?"
Spot on. And to those arguing that it necessarily implies violation of morals, if happiness and a clear conscience are also what I want, where does the trouble lie? Consider your utility function in its entirety and not just a local optimization like "I want to succeed with my business".
This is my problem with self-help books... you must try to replace years of your own learning, rationalizing and understanding with someone else's ideas, absorbed only through a few hours of reading. Naturally, it falls apart quickly.
Can anyone who read the article say in less than ten words why Canada's productivity has been underestimated for decades?
Can anyone explain in less than ten words why one should learn Scala in 2013?
"How to talk so kids will listen and how to listen so kids will talk"
>This is a good academic post, but why are we still writing mutable-shared-state concurrent code?

Because not all concurrency problems can be solved with message-passing and immutable data?

Not to mention that you also need to implement said mechanisms in the first place, and that needs to take into account what the post describes.

Oh, and it's not "academic" at all. It's a rather casual post. Nothing academic about it.
Economics in One Lesson (Superpower: Understanding the fundamentals of economics...and wandering down the dark,Austrian path eventually)

Austrian economics is the opposite of a superpower. It's a mental device for rationalizing the present state of the world so that you never have to act.
Hi, Frozenlock. I'm interested in the topic of home automation, but I know very little. Can you recommend any extra reading besides the standards that you mentioned?
The Future of Leap Seconds
I'm not affiliated with Ninja Blocks, but here's what I did in my previous zero-bedroom apartment with a Kinect: http://nitrogen.posterous.com/home-automation-and-lighting-c...
Or, alternately, it will teach you to be a really paranoid bastard ;-).

CONSTANT NEVER-CEASING VIGILANCE!
Alas, there's more to commercial success than mere innovation.
One thing I've found helps a LOT is encapsulation and return type annotation.

If you change a public method, SBT will recompile all users of that class even if they don't use that method. If you change a private method, it's smart enough to recompile only the one file.

Annotating your return types both saves the compiler the effort of figuring out what you meant, and also prevents you from accidentally changing the return type and forcing recompilation of a bunch of client code.
Seeings as the Receptor is rack mount, I assume you have a rolling roadie case you're wanting to keep it in.

This is what you are looking for: http://www.powermax.com/parts/code/PM_CU_XS
The version control in Squeak, based on Smalltalk-80, has been in use for over 16 years, probably even 32 years. The community of Squeak has been entirely happy with it, it could perhaps be made even more convenient with more diff analysis tools. For every snippet, even a single line in a method, all the versions are kept around and the blame for the revisions to a previous version, including deletions, is always clear. The last version is active (there is no compiling fase in smalltalk, only auto compile for adaptive compilation). So your question is never relevant unless one wants to merge back after a fork. In that case diff tools should give a human the entire history, diffs and all its dependancies that are affected to see what happend when and how. It is indeed useful to see changes going back 40 years. In the case auto-merge-back is possible, the S unit test runner must check if it worked, but such a situation occurs only once in 10 years if at all. So to me there is not much to be desired in a version control system than the current method version control of Squeak.
I hadn't thought of these individual achievements as being that big until I saw them all together in one place and now I can say that this has truly been a breakthrough year all across the technology sector.

Every year we seem to be accelerating our speed of development when it comes to technology, I'm only 19 and in my life I've seen us go from 56kb/s internet to 1gb/s internet, go from the rare NASA launch to regular private company launches (don't forget, SpaceX is not the only private company engaging in these kind of activities, there is also Virgin Galactic in the UK who are breaching the barriers facing them very quickly.) and medical breakthroughs across every sector.

We live in the golden age of human history up to now and I would be willing to place a long bet that in 100 years, we will look back on the last 30 years as the dawn of the modern age.
This is all worse than a joke.

Krugman is a US citizen, purporting to advise the US government. He is not in a position to advise the government to break the law. No economist is, for the very reason that Economic analysis pre-supposed the rule of law. If you throw out "obeying the law" you throw out the field of Economics, generally speaking.

Second, there is the empirical fact the the US debt is subject to being held by insitutions that are constrained by law as to holding only certain classes of securities. Your pension fund cannot hold XXX rated t-secs if they are below investment grade thresholds. So, the who would hold 17trillion of US debt after a default? Talk about too big to fail...

And furthermore, there are stronger constraints on policy set in in the constitution that prevent 'interference with contract' which generally speaking includes financial contracts. It is not the case that the government can dis-regard the Constitution and appropriate value through cynical public policy.

And just as a general point, now that you've sunken to this desperate level, take a look around at the company you are keeping? Seriously. The rule of law trumps economics. Full stop. (Ask the 2009 nobel prize winners).

Lastly, taxes as an "asset class" if you want to condier them that are a "derivative" of corporate and personal earnings (at first approximation). The are, like any derivative, dependant on the value of the underlying assets. They are therefore subject to the same constraints--ie, unless corporate earnings are infiinite, taxes-as-dervatives cannot be infiinte through logic/math.

This is all unimpressive rubbish that you put forth here. The reason I didn;t walk through all of this before is it is a waste of time even giving Krugman the attention.
Unlike FreeBSD which is targeting servers

FreeBSD isn't just targeting servers. There's also a lot of work happening on embedded systems, and one of the larger projects the FreeBSD Foundation funded recently was strictly desktop-oriented -- providing support for Intel graphics chipsets.
No, they wouldn't trivialize the problems. Both message-passing and immutability pay a price for performance in ways that matter for real-world problems.

Example 1: Algorithms that operate on large matrices. Immutability means (1) that you can't have destructive updates of small parts, but need to copy the matrix in its entirety, and (2) that you can't have in-place operations, increasing your memory usage (and thus decreasing L2 cache performance).

Example 2: Caching expensive operations. You want to share these among as many threads as possible to maximize hit rates, but you also need to avoid serialization bottlenecks. This is incompatible with both pure message passing and, say, the standard implementations for immutable maps.