skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I am aware. I was at a Usenix conference where Rob Pike presented a paper on it, back when it was a bright idea out of Bell Labs. It is the curse of brilliant people that they see too far into the future, get treated as crazy when they are most lucid and get respect when they are most bitter [1]. I was working for Sun Microsystems at the time and Sun was pursuing a strategy known as "Distributed Objects Everywhere" or (DOE) but insiders derisively called it "Distributed Objects Practically Everywhere" or DOPE, it was thinking about networks of 100 megabits with hundreds of machines on them. Another acquaintance of mine has a PDP 8/s this was a serial implementation of the PDP-8 architecture, Gordon Bell did that in the 70's well before serial interconnects made sense. It was a total failure, the rest of the world had yet to catch up. Both Microsoft and Google have invested in this space, neither have published a whole lot, every now and then you see something that lets you know that somebody is thinking along the same lines, trying to get to an answer. I suspect Jeff Bezos thinks similarly if his insistence on making everything an API inside Amazon was portrayed accurately.

The place where the world is catching up is that we have very fast networks in very dense compute. In the case of a cell phone you see a compute node which is a node in a web of nodes which are conspiring to provide a user experience. At some point that box under the table might have X units of compute, Y units of IO, and Z units of storage. It might be a spine which you can load up with different colored blocks to get the combination of points needed to activate a capability at an acceptable latency. If you can imagine a role playing game where your 'computer' can do certain things based on where you invested its 'skill points' that is a flavor of what I think will happen. The computers that do shipping, or store sales will have skill points in transactions, the computers that simulate explosions will have skill points in flops. People will argue whether or not the brick from Intel or the Brick from AMD/ARM really deserves a rating of 8 skill points in CRYPTO or not.

[1] I didn't get to work with Rob when I was at Google although I did hear him speak once and he didn't seem particularly bitter, so I don't consider him a good exemplar of the problem. Many brilliant people I've met over the years however have been lost to productive work because their bitterness at not being accepted early only has clouded their ability to enjoy the success their vision has seen since they espoused it.
Very cool! I'm not completely sure how it would support comprehensions over more than one list, though (as in the permutations example).
From the example it looks like he doesn't connect the graphical answer to the calculus answer or to the obvious answer. I really hope he actually explains it in the book, because physicists are notoriously bad at being mathematically correct.
No it's not. But generics came straight out of MSR while LINQ was heavily informed by Cω, an MSR research language.
2012 Side Projects
And don't forget http://www.minix3.org/ which, although unix-like, certainly tries some new things (e.g. the reincarnation service).
Of course the recommendations are made from the friend he just made! It's just traversing the public, non-privacy-violating graph of mutual friends, and suggesting a small (and possibly random) subset of nodes near to him.

There's no conspiracy. He just doesn't understand how much information is encoded by that first friend he made.

On a different note, as I've put in other comments, Facebook officially does not make privacy violating recommendations. In other words, it won't use private information other people have generated, like what profiles they visit or what messages they send or what contacts they have, to create recommendations for a person who can't access that information.
The DRM makes pirating less comfortable. If you could just go to some website and download the app and drag it into iTunes to get it on your device (that’s what dropping DRM entails) pirating on iOS would be very comfortable, probably on a level with using the App Store.
The Lottery of Life: Where To Be Born in 2013
That list at the end reads like my personal checklist (even the Japanese, in particular). Let me attest to the value in all those activities.

You pretty much stole my attention for the evening with that explanation. Good thing I've almost finished this short story outline! Look forward to an email from me.
Huh, well no one I know has jailbroken their iPhone. Battle of the anecdotes!
Why, may I ask? Isn't that a bit like saying to truly understand the human brain, we'll need to transcend the use of English?
Declaration matches usage.
> "Apple doesn't have a history of taking action against services offering adding UDIDs to developer profiles for money"

They do! I blogged about this a while back, so the links below are for iOS 5, but they have definitely done it in the past.

http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/08/apple-takes-steps-against...

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/05/apple-closes-develope...

http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/05/udid-activation-and-ios-5-bet...
the more "primary keys" one gives to services, the more cross-referenceable you are.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/maskme/dpkiidbpeij...
I liked this one; It goes a lot more into detail:
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Arduino-Getting-Started-Sk...
Is India’s ultra-cheap Aakash tablet doomed?
Our watchdog process calls the EC2 APIs directly to identify how many instances are running, which ones are spot instances, etc. Boto, the AWS client library for Python, makes that pretty easy. The watchdog isn't very sophisticated -- it just checks to make sure that the correct number of instances are running in each auto-scale group. Our application servers aren't very efficient in certain respects, so we don't trust metrics like usage/load to make auto-scaling decisions.

If I was doing it over again, I'd just use Amazon's auto-scaling features for all of this. At the time we built this, EC2's auto-scaling didn't support some of the features we needed. Since then, they've made it a lot easier to do things like set up a repeating schedule for auto-scaling, rather than using metrics.

We only have one EC2 AMI that we use for all of our servers. That AMI is pretty basic; it only does enough to connect to our Puppet configuration management servers. Puppet then configures the boxes as web servers (or databases, or...) and adds them to the appropriate load balancer.
Resolutions The Most Successful People Make And Then Keep
Why I'm not a programmer: I guess I couldn't "hack" it as a programmer, so I went into system administration. :)

No, but seriously, as much as I wanted to become one, it didn't work out for me.

But I still get to write scripts!
It's only been in the last few years I've realised how lucky I've been: born in a stable, prosperous country to stable, intelligent parents.

I think the "birth lottery" is the single biggest stroke of luck there is. It's so influential that people just don't see it. It's the elephant in the room.

I'd be interested to see this list modified by profession. Australia might be #2 on a general basis, but it would be hard to argue that being born in the USA gives you the inside edge on getting ahead in the web industry, for example.

Only one thing worries me:

> Small economies dominate the top ten.

They also dominate the bottom 10. Might this be a sampling effect?
You've been posting this stuff all over the thread. How about a link to the source of "Facebook officially does not make privacy violating recommendations". I'd also like to see them define it the way you have, because as written that is pretty vague.
LinkedIn has been similarly creepy to me. Someone I have never met with whom I share zero common connections has begun showing up in my recommendations because I viewed their profile once months ago.
This one: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Arduino-Getting-Started-Sk...
The other comments about theories of how this works are insightful, and I encourage you to read them.

I also wanted to point out the Facebook acquisition of mysterious Kuala Lampur startup Octazen:

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Facebook-acquire-Octazen-Soluti...

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/19/octazen-what-the-heck-did-f...

They were supposedly masters of scraping and contact importing. I would love to know more about this story, but there is not much published about it.
I assume he is saying Google knows just as much about you as Facebook.
I would adjust the tone for the "I am in Arts" section. Saying "I think you have math issues" is not the kind of welcome you want to give to people who do, in fact, have math issues.

I like the end, where you emphasize that math is a great exercise in abstract thinking and modeling. But I would start with something more neutral saying something like, "Many people had suboptimal experiences with math in school because it was often presented well, and some teaching styles don't work for some people. And some may have just always found other things more interesting. However, my goal with this book was to make math more accessible and interesting to many people by presenting material in more a more intuitive manner and emphasizing the core skills of abstract thinking and mathematical modeling of the real world."

That's definitely not perfect, but it's something to start with. Try to imagine that you're someone who never found math all that interesting and always thought that literature or history or art was far more interesting and meaningful, and that possibly you had some bad experiences with math and got the idea that you're not good at it. Now try to imagine what might trigger those bad feelings about math and turn you off to a book, versus what might make you decide to give it a chance. If you don't trust your ability to imagine this way, try to find a close friend who is in this situation and will be honest with you.
If this was reddit I would have upvoted you!
Can people stop submitting Google+ links? I see no way to get past w/o opting into more G+ stuff.
I don't believe this is true. I've set up a Facebook account, and provided Facebook an email address only, and had reasonable "Friend Suggestions" appear presumably based on the presence of that email address in other people's address books.

Facebook says that they save the contents of your address book, and that it might be used to suggest friends in the future: https://www.facebook.com/help/241275309301947/.
I think the tone from his blog posts is that this might not be the last thing. He is probably right. Close can only be determined if you know the rules.

What the heck kind of review process plays all the way through a game? What if you had a 100 hours of content or secret rooms?

If it was routed to someone overseas and they have lesser abilities to communicate with developers, then Microsoft should have just closed submissions for the holidays instead of causing frustration.
I would imagine that they cache the page contents and hence hit a URL only once in a certain period of time, thus skewing any analytics built around this.
Android lacks things like X11, so it would be non-trivial to port.
> Facebook officially does not make privacy violating recommendations

How do you know this? Do you work for Facebook, or are you just guessing?

It seems to me it could be a combination between chaz's explanation and yours. If the friend he added is also friends with the OP's grandmother, cousins and other friends then it seems OK that Facebook would "recommend" those people to the OP.

But then, why those people and not all of his other friend's friends? Could it be using the contact list of the recommended friend's to prioritize those recommendations over all others?
You keep saying that, but it is very obvious that if people searched for me it would recommend them to me, it's been shown to happen.

So yes, Facebook might officially say they don't do it. But they do. Facebook has no interest in user privacy, their track record shows it again and again.
Please see academic paper here on Mathematics of Digital Republic.

http://www.ysenate.org/academic.html
libs:

- PayLib https://github.com/rutherford/PayLib (about to be gutted and rebuilt)

sites:

- Kickstartit http://kickstarter.greatsuccessmaker.com

- Ghost Messenger https://facebookghostmessenger.appspot.com/

bones:

- nltk on app engine https://github.com/rutherford/nltk-gae
I would buy it, but it appears you don't have an ebook version? I can't really keep physical books because they take up too much space (small apartment).
Our #1 requirement has been to keep up with the growth in traffic on the site. We've been growing so fast that there's literally no way we could have ordered and racked equipment fast enough. We were also a very small team -- a year ago there were only about a dozen people in the whole company. At this point we're much larger, which gives us room to consider more options like colo or multiple cloud providers.

AWS certainly feels pretty costly when you compare colo prices to the list price for on-demand instances. But one of the reasons I wanted to present our work is to show that you can use the cloud for a lot less than the list price. It takes work to buy reserved instances or run spot instances, but that does make it much more cost competitive.
Reddit. I don't like that word.
There's just a lot in new versions of RDP. Audio, printer, and video redirection. Clipboard sharing. WPF effects support. Etc....

Its cool that these Android clients support all this, but I'm surprised.
I figured as much. But my grandmother has no smartphone (nor have I), and nobody from the list of recommendations was directly connected to her. And there are people missing, even if the phone number matching was the only way. These two things are what I find weird.
Wow. Disgusting.

I can only assume this is deep rooted in chauvinism.
I'm a programmer because I'm curious and lazy. I see a problem, do it once out of curiosity (or because I'm being paid), then never want to do it again (curiosity satisfied, now it's boring). Avoiding "over and over again" is what keeps me from homicide, and incidentally, employed.
Try an incognito window. I don't understand why Google refuses to let people read public G+ content if they are logged into their Google account but haven't opted into G+, but I've seen a lot of people report it.
But piracy is a feature. It's good thing. Paying for stuff sucks. From a user's point of view, if Apple's walled garden approach prevents piracy, then that's just another reason their walled garden approach is bad.

Edit: I'm not even playing devil's advocate here, this is just honestly what I think, and I think what most people honestly think. Stuff is better when you don't have to pay for it.
Open in an incognito window. If you're not logged into a Google account, G+ links work fine. Rather nasty user experience.
In the Navy (submarines) we would always say that "such-and-such procedure is written in blood"... and often it was. Either blood or millions of dollars worth of damage and time wasted.
I think one of the problems is whilst Facebook doesn't use 'private information other people have generated' it does leverage information your friends have shared in non-obvious ways to a layperson.

If it's unclear or people don't understand how Facebook is making its recommendations and as a result become creeped out then that's a problem - whether or not those recommendations were created according to the privacy policy.
Thx for the feedback. I am just added the following paragraph to clarify.

It is important to see the connections between the three different ways of finding the answer: the intuitive notion of download speed that we are all familiar with, the graphical notion of slope and the more abstract calculus notion of function derivative.
But users do. If you have my email address in your contacts list on Hotmail and you allow Facebook to search for friends in your Hotmail account (most people do I think), then I think you're illegally passing on personally identifiable information.
A diceware passphrase is much more secure than a regular English sentence.

(http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html)

And substituting some symbols for letters doesn't add much security. Depending on the mode of attack there are precomputed sentences with a variety of substitution.

Be careful with GRC. Some people don't have a high opinion of his analyses:

(http://radsoft.net/news/roundups/grc/20060119,00.shtml)
Meanwhile, most of my sidebar is full of Christian "like if you love Jesus" ads. No matter how often I mark them "uninteresting", they keep coming up, despite Facebook likely having plenty of information pointing at my non-religiousness.
I can appreciate the fun of doing things like implementing a list comprehension and the excitement of both applying macros in a useful way and being able to tell other people about it. I found the tone of the linked article to sound self impressed to a point I personally found distasteful, and after reviewing it again I don't see any mention of Clojure's built in for special form, and thusly reacted in a snarky manner.

But everyone should get an opportunity to see what you can do with things like macros, how useful list comprehensions are in general, and how a homoiconic language can make the simple things slightly less intuitive but the hard things vastly more tractable. I certainly have no business in detracting from your enjoyment of Clojure, so please don't allow me to.

Instead of being snarky may I offer some constructive criticism:

1) You don't mention the Clojure `for` special form, which is a built in list comprehension.
2) There's a significant amount baked into Clojure's `for` special form. How does it compare to your macro? After reviewing the macro again I think you'll find there's some differing behaviors over when members of seqs are realized and bound between your implementation and that in clojure.core.
3) I think reflecting on what the real power here is: that you are able to dictate the hows and whys of evaluation at what time, and discussing that matter, can make more salient the power of LISPs.

Please do continue to enjoy what you are building and what you learn, and don't let the jaded musings of crotchety old men like me get in your way!
"if I had chosen instead to be a lawyer, or doctor, or some other “accredited” profession, I very likely would’ve helped a grand total of zero people in my career thus far, and couldn’t for another five or so years given that I (likely) wouldn’t even be in law or med school yet."

I get what he's saying, but that part is a little naive. You can always help the people around you.
Works for me without any G+ advertisements. Are you logged into gmail from the same browser?

Here's a dumb mirror of the post content: http://ahcovl.pen.io/
Thank you. I will adjust the "I'm in arts question" shortly. Your suggestion is very good.
About the conceptual map in the website ( http://minireference.com/miniref/lib/tpl/miniref/landings/im... ) - Does anyone please know a similar map for CS concepts?

Thanks!
In our investigation, we've found AWS to be around 5x more expensive. Being able to save 63% during off hours (or, let's just say, reducing AWS' bill an average of 30%) doesn't really seem to make much of a difference - and that's with paying a large amount upfront.
Explosively Cool Chemistry Behind Fireworks
Basically I feel more comfortable managing my own encrypted vault rather than sharing it (even encrypted) with a 3rd party.
You can always use a proxy if you're that concerned. Do you also block Google ads, Youtube's embedded videos (Google owns Youtube), and never search with Google?

I understand your point though. My posting this on Google+ is ironic actually, given the lack of privacy I'm complaining about.

Edit: Wait I think I misunderstood. You mean "get past" to read the post at all? I thought "public" meant that everyone (even when not logged in) could read it.
Requires dedicated IPs, one per domain. Otherwise the correct certificate cannot be resolved correctly.
The pitch "textbooks suck" seems so disrespectful and tasteless, it literally makes me avoid that book. Most of my uni textbooks did not suck at all.
Actually, the friend is completely unrelated from my other friends and family. I met him through an online game and he's not even from the same country.

I don't mean to make this a conspiracy theory, but I don't understand how Facebook can conjure up so much information to identify most of my relatives.
I don't so much see myself as a programmer (and I'm not one professionally, still at university) but rather an engineer. An engineer who works with software, I love building software but the joy I get out of programming is no different to that which an EE would get when building an appliance. It's the actual building of something useful, solving a problem, that instils my love of coding. I'm an engineer who has a passion for software would perhaps be the best way of putting it.
I actually clicked "Buy Now" before I realized this was a physical textbook and cancelled. To me, it's almost inexcusable to market this sort of text to this type of audience and not have a digital copy.

Shouldn't the barriers to entry be much lower for the author to get this out electronically?

I see that the author is responding to comments here, so if you're like me and will buy it if it comes out electronically, please let him know in the comments that he can count on your purchase.
> The app wants permission to see his contacts, and he

> grants it. Maybe he's not paying attention, maybe there's

> a useful feature that needs his contacts, maybe the

> software asks the phone for permission, and the phone

> allows it without asking Bob. Whatever. Facebook now

> knows Alice's phone number.

IIRC the app simply doesn't install if you don't grant the permissions.

Facebook doesn't find my real friends. Well, the phone I have attached is a prepaid card I haven't given to anyone and I have no real friends in my phony FB account, so I guess there's no way they can find me.

If I had an account with real data I wouldn't link my phone to it. Not any phone that my real connections know.
Second that, I would purchase it if there was an ebook version.
Remember to place yourself in context! You and your friends are probably around the top 10% of people with technical skills on the planet.
It's very easy for them to withhold some data though. I doubt if it's really everything that might build my "case".
The website isn't readable in IE9.
Um... not exactly sure what the point of that was?
Anaheim, CA (That's right! Orange County or the OC) or Boulder/Denver, CO (full-time)

SendGrid http://www.sendgrid.com

-------------------------------------

We've revolutionized the cloud-based transactional email space by efficiently powering the infrastructure for tens of thousands of companies that rely on us to send millions of emails every day. We have been growing really fast since launching in 2009, and we want you to be part of the awesome company we are building.

-------------------------------------

All Jobs - http://sendgrid.com/careers.html

Software Engineer (multiple teams) - http://bit.ly/TFo9IC

DevOps Engineer - http://bit.ly/10KPjU2

SDET - http://bit.ly/VYTxPZ

Sr. Linux Engineer - http://bit.ly/TFoACF

Software engineer - Platform - http://bit.ly/S3Q5Zy

UI/UX Designer - http://bit.ly/Uk84YY

-------------------------------------

PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python Twistd, Flask, Rails, MySql, Hbase, Dynamodb, Linux, SOA, Agile

-------------------------------------

If you don't see what you're looking for here, reach out to us. We're always looking for talented, happy, hungry, honest, and humble people.
Neat!

How does the hardware setup work if I have to use headphones in my apartment?
This is a response to NATO's missile defense activities. ICBM enhancements.