skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Math" is just reasoning about any formally defined system. Programming is a fucking subset of math.

So any competent programmer necessarily has some kind of mathematical inclination.
Narcisystem
Surf the web at work, be more productive
Isn't that what the Open Source PhoneGap is intended to accomplish? It's a cool idea, regardless. I'm working on a small brain game that I'd like to port to desktop, as well as various mobile devices. And the process is looking pretty daunting.
Too many April Fools Day jokes from Google, sigh.
I'd love to see a reference on that Challenger remark -- seriously.
To be fair, the ability to solve very difficult algorithmic problems is not particularly related to the ability to do many, many different kinds of programming.
I definitely find this to be true, I think it's more to do with the fact that you're working for yourself and setting your own guidelines rather then having set hours or a strict set of tasks to do at a regular job.
Here you can download all latest versions of MYOB from all regions
Of all those, I tend to think T. Boone Pickens is the one who's most likely to turn out right.

The question is, if someone turns out to be right, does he get removed from the list?
3 Things To Look For In A Credit Card
Hi, Dave from the JIRA team here. Joshwa (above) is correct with our pricing and features. JIRA hits all the issues on your wishlist. To elaborate:

1. Lots of progress on our UI. You can attach screeshots using our capture applet and upload other files quickly. Devs can fill in optional technical bug details later or even hide them from the create issue screen. See http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/issues_cr...

2. No user account needed as you can create and comment on bug reports via email. JIRA automatically gives you a user account as well so that you can use the web interface. See http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/issue_cre...

3. Yep, flexible email and RSS notification schemes. See http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/notificat...

4. We get the same outcome but associate with test cases rather than including them on the ticket. JIRA is designed to integrate with other systems and has quite a few test integrations already available so that you can associate test cases with bugs. We also support automated regression testing with our CI server, Bamboo. Check out http://www.atlassian.com/beyond/ and http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRACOM/Add+Test+Cas...

5. Screen capture utility available. See http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/screensho...

6. Programming API is available and have been quite successful in terms of the integration our customers have come up with as a result. Check it out here http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+RPC+Servic...

7. JIRA lets you link associated commits with tasks and bugs. Subversion integration details at http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JIRA+Subvers...

All installed JIRA editions support unlimited users and we offer hosted options too. JIRA pricing is cheap and our tool is in use by over 14,000 customers. Check out http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing.jsp

Late to the party I know but I hope this can help future users.

Cheers,
Dave
http://www.atlassian.com
His first sentence maybe, but his second asks why school experience doesn't count for the formula.
Chatterous (YC W08) launches im/email/sms group API and widgets.
"Here's the thing: Fog Creek is extremely profitable"

If I buy from them, I'm going to negotiate for a lower price.
in Python:

for i in range(1,11): print i

Python FTW? ;)
Congratulations Kenshi and Wilkins!
Softimage for example - once they have done the port to WINNT and showed the world it can be done on that platform they have sold Softimage to AVID - which recently sold it to, where all good applications die, Autodesk (Microsoft in shadows)
"How small? How simple?"

We advise startups to launch when they've added a quantum of utility: when there is at least some set of users who would be excited to hear about it, because they can now do something they couldn't do before.
- normalized vectors are a succinct way to represent a direction in space, whether it be 1D, 2D, 3D, or any other D.

I'll only add that they are called versors and one can read more about their magic in any material about quaternions.
Install Mac OS X on VMWare
Has anyone been successful in running Cocoa via this setup?
Has anyone been successful in running Cocoa via this setup?
To give one answer, I wrote a blog post that I think is interesting about Twitter as a protocol. This is ringing more and more true as new apps are created that use Twitter's tagging structure as a backbone for their app's data structure and communication.

http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/25/design/algorithm...
because people go on a social networking site to socialize, they focus their attention on their profile page, most people won't even let their eyes wander to the ad portion of the page
Anyone know WHY? What are they paying 600m for?
Chatterous has become essential for us really. Feels almost like a "utility" at this point. Keep up the great work, guys.

We've been playing with the API-- at the moment we're using it to send SVN commit notices and production code releases to our team. Seems cool so far.
PoF has another advantage.

If you are at PoF, you are searching for a date. PoF makes a lot of money selling ads for better dating sites, something it's users are almost already looking for.
w00t!!! Chatterous FTW
And in case you're wondering.. no, this isn't an April Fools joke.
"And he's pitching his new Scala book. And his new Scala book is published by O'Reilly. And O'Reilly runs the Web 2.0 Expo. ®"

Timing is priceless.
Vector Math Tricks (Distance of a Point to a Line, Explained)
How do websites in general make money? (Or do they? Do they have revenues but not have earnings?)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542656
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8142600/the-Stock-Market-Reaction-...

Sorry for the scribd link. It's the first copy I found that wasn't behind a pay wall.

The gist is that within a few hours of the Challenger crash the stock for the company responsible for the component that failed went down far more than the stocks for other companies involved in building challenger. Interestingly, the equity value the stock lost (~200 Million USD) is almost exactly the same as the estimated total loss in profit (fines, lawsuits, updates to safety standards, lost contracts, etc).
It's telling that so many programming related April Fools jokes have been Ruby oriented in some way.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you... then they fight you, then you win.
Maybe he meant per hour.
If this is not a joke, it's funnier than an April Fools hoax.
Chatterous looks cool enough. But I'm sorry, as soon as I clicked through and saw the default (Kubrick) Wordpress theme, I killed a kitten.
http://andrewchenblog.com/2007/09/26/5-things-that-make-your...
HTML is now encrypted at the source and then decrypted using Javascript on the client

That is obfuscation, not encryption.

When you provide a function capable of 'decrypting' the ciphertext with the ciphertext, I don't really think it can be called encryption anymore. It's kind of like saying: smNOSPAManek@fas.REMOVETHISTOOharvard.edu is encrypted ...

If it's just Javascript, this should be pretty easy to fix (technically at least), right? I don't know the details of boxee's architecture, but there are plenty of free Javascript engines.
Twitter U.
I am almost positive that this is an April Fools joke, but maybe not?
martoo on the equivalent Reddit post had the best thing to say about this:

"There needs to be a special term for an attempt at an April Fool's Day Joke, which is in all of its points true and then ends up looking like a joke made by an author at his own expense."

http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/8966h/ruby_is_the_futu...
I don't know why we hadn't done this yet - but I am now sending svn commit notices, website errors, and all of our other msgs to a Chatterous group.

It took 5 minutes, and is super handy.
It's far from a trivial task but one thing I keep wondering about LLVM is - what happens if they worked on (optional) incremental parsing/compiling?

Seeing the errors as you type is pretty handy in Java so I figure it'd be pretty nice in C or C++.

It also means you'd have enough information about what's happening at the point you are editing to do some pretty impressive things in terms of autocompletion - there's still a lot of autocompletion in C++ that there is no open source solution (as far as I've seen from looking around for a while).

And with the appropriate debugging hooks you could implement something like edit-and-continue from Visual Studio. I haven't used that in years, but it'd be a nice feature to have.

I think that templates would make it a complex problem, but I can dream. Or I can start hacking away when I get some free time :)
Sesame Innovations: Four Decades of Helping Kids Know and Gr
The LP's I do take roughly 60-90 minutes. When I'm not focusing on school, I can log on to IRC or AIM and find a day's work within 30 minutes if I don't have any lined up before. $175 in that time frame adds up. I fill my role well.
Yes, what a brilliant idea. "We'll encrypt our content using a standardized language which by definition runs on several open source platforms. That ought to trump those user agents."
Lean Startups: Web 2.0 Expo session followup
Check out this mail and the thread around it: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-02/msg01823.html
They've argued this many times on the gcc list.
"Investors now want to know that you're not going to be paying tons and tons of money for servers because you decided to build in a stack that isn't as efficient as possible," he said.

I've never used Scala and I'm a Ruby dev but I'm still not sure I totally agree with that. Scala is probably great and very efficient but you probably don't need to be thinking at Twitter's level out of the gate.
Senate majority vs. national debt
On a related note, Visualizing Quaternions is a great book.
The very title of this article shows the religious nature of much of the hype around dynamic languages. Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" another language which was never designed or meant to be suitable for the same job?

I am curious though whether they tried running their Ruby code using JRuby ... if the bottlenecks were (as stated in the article) in the ruby VM they might have got the same result just by switching VMs (pure speculation).

And ...

> "The biggest selling point for certain organizations is that Scala is 100 per cent compatible with your existing JVM code.

No, it's not. There are problems with quite important features like annotations etc. which are now very important in the java EE space but Scala cannot do them. This was one reason I've used Groovy so far in a lot of situations.

Having said that - I'm seriously looking at Scala because groovy has plenty of faults: the complete lack of any static type checking at compile time and very poor IDE support and error reporting all weigh down on the productivity benefits to the point where it's sometimes a net negative. Scala could end up being the best of all worlds.
People don't like ads interfering with their social interactions. It's much more intrusive to be hanging out with your best bud and see an ad for Old Navy than it is to be shopping for stuff and see an ad for Old Navy.
This is clearly a response to Boxee, and I think Hulu will continue to try to block Boxee using technical and/or legal means. It's not in the interest of Hulu or the studios/networks to cooperate with Boxee. The Boxee approach significantly weakens Hulu's position. The only alternative to a legal/technical block is an acquisition or formal partnership, but there are a number of issues with such an approach, including the acquisition price ($6-8 mil min given Boxee's recent $4 mil financing), the fact that another startup could emerge and use Hulu's RSS feeds, etc.
The value of public embeddable chats, at least to me, is the ability to participate without having to sign in for anything. Meebome works extremely well for this.

A possible application to look into is integration with BlackBerry Messenger. It is very powerful and would seem more appropriate for a chat session than over SMS.

Good luck.
>Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" another language which was never designed or meant to be suitable for the same job?

That would be a question for the journalist who made it up ;) I am sure the answer was "cause it sounded cool !".
In this case, it'd've been a joke cued up several months ago, when this story first broke.
It's also the case that headcount is far more expensive than servers.
Face Sitting | Ask Naughty Nikki
it seems that the article ignores the trade off in cost between efficient code and development time.
that's pretty much how "the Reg" operates.

Without regard to the tone of the article though, Scala and Lift are worth spending some time with.

Lift still has a ways to go in terms of providing a turnkey stack in the same vein as a Rails or Merb stack. If you thought putting together a Ruby dev environment had a lot of pieces, get ready for Lift...not so much Lift's fault as its the nature of the heavyweight JVM toolset world.
You can compare anyone with anyone else. You just can't equate them.
The Google strategy for India
Holding on the Best and Brightest
Advertisers want two things: people to buy stuff via some conversion funnel that starts with the ad, or "brand lift".

The best way to get people to buy stuff is to find intenders - those people who are about to buy something in your category. Think google adwords. This doesn't work too well on social media, because people are interested in hanging out, not on thinking about some purchasing decision.

"brand lift" - advertisers in this bucket are super sensitive to their brand image, and they won't be getting the lift they want if it's next to some random comment stream.
But doesn't that quote at the same time draw the very distinction between math and programming that Jeff is talking about?

"Knowing some math can enable you to write some programs" - two separate activities, one benefiting the other. So, as a thought experiment, a non-mathematically inclined programmer with strong engineering / design aesthetics who implements an algorithm that has been prescribed by a mathematically inclined person may often produce a much better result than the mathematically inclined person would on their own.

Programming is related to and benefits from mathematics, but it is not only mathematics. It brings a whole range of skills into play.
From what I've seen in the past few years the graph looks a little better when inflation is taken into account, but not so much that the shock value is taken away.
Because they try to profit through traditional business channels. By effectively leveraging social pressure, these things could be a gold-mine.
Ask HN: RSS feed for posts with more than 5 pts?
1) The HN RSS feed is a fire hose (poor signal-to-noise ratio)

2) Posts with more than 5 pts (it doesn't have to be exactly 5, it's just hypothetical) are usually worth reading

3) What do you think of an RSS feed that captures the top x% of HN posts?
Yeah, sorry. I mainly did it as an exercise to find and suck down public data as a result of some bullshitting with Ian.

I'm going to guess that even if it's inflation adjusted, it's still exponential growth. I'd use inflation adjusted, if it were easier to find, but historical debt outstanding is what I found first.

Even then, it was interesting seeing how it matched up with the senate majority and how it compared to the past.

I find myself wanting to see these graphs when I read some article in the papers, or someone goes on ranting about economics or politics. Does anyone else have these inclinations?
Slump Is Putting New Stresses on Libraries and Librarians
I've been in data centers hosting Google systems. This picture looks very similar if not identical to what I've seen, so I'd say it is most definitely real.
I got bad news. The question was to find the distance between a point and a line SEGMENT.

Luckily, since you know some math, and you understand what a dot product is, and how it relates to a projection, you can trivially extend your solution by checking to make sure Q is on AB, and then adjusting your answer if its not.

:)
That's cool and all, but I think being able to do this natively in Ruby wins:

p *1..10

Edit: you may need to do a "require 'pp'" first.
It very much depends on the problem domain, but 2,3 and 4 are the real dangers.

The solution to 2 and 3, for me, is to repeat this every time I'm dealing with a potential client : do they value their time more than their money? People who value their time are quite willing to commit money to save it / use it better.

The solution for 4 is way wrong. You never ask people how much would they pay for things, because the answers are always wrong. You price things high and bring down the price until you're making sales and about 5% or so of your customers are complaining about the price. That's as close as you'll get to a scientific pricing strategy.

I asked a couple of customers how much they'd pay for a new software product I was writing. They all low-balled the figure. In the end I priced it 5 times what the highest suggestion was, and it has sold well. If I had been receiving 5x less revenue, I would have given up before the product took off.
Without being inflation adjusted it is not too revealing.

Here is a link to CPI since 1913: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt

A quick modification would make the data more powerful.
I've seen them two deep side by side. They had custom racks that reminded me of those racks of trays of food you'd see in large production kitchens. There were four systems per level/tray.
No liquid cooling? How efficient is the power supplies?
From the article: "The first surprising thing was how fast the national debt has grown in the last 30 years."

The sharp incline coincides with Nixon's 1971 end of the Bretton Woods system. Domestically the dollar has been off the gold standard since 1932, but up until 1971 foreign banks could still redeem US dollars for gold. Since gold is a limited commodity there's a limit on how much we can spend or borrow. Once that tie was broken, we were free to run unlimited debts.
Also, perhaps it should adjust for population growth.
Scala tries to be pretty good at both. Java like speeds, with type-inferencing, first class functions, and a more flexible syntax to improve programming productivity.
> particularly one that centers its business largely around being a venue for public criticisms of other companies?

Companies such as that is vitally necessary. If you ever had dealings with a large shit company you would understand (e.g. a company that does not pick up the phones). The relationship between a large company and a consumer is completely asymmetrical.

Most companies can only be encouraged if they receive bad publicity. I do not have experience with GS but I have with a similar site (http://www.hellopeter.co.za ).

Also, it is a free speech issue - if customers of a company wants to voice their complaints about a company it is their right - GS only provides a platform for that.

EDIT: There are some companies (e.g. telephone companies, bad webhosts and banks) whose relationship with the customer is that of apathy or hate. Sites like the above is vitally necessary for that.

Some companies also have a customer service model that is based on crises management and extinguishing fires. To get your problem handled you have to create as big as a fire for them to encourage them to respond.
We're serving ads so working across as many browsers as possible is important to us. Also from a customer service perspective, telling a client that ads won't work on their site because of feature X in browser Y isn't always the best option.

IE8 isn't that wide spread yet so it hasn't been a problem in practice, but we are working on a solution to address this in case the inprivate blocking becomes very popular in the wild.
Unfounded claims, no research, nothing. After years of suffering websites running on JVM web stacks, I am very sceptic of this Scala for the web rant. Plus he extrapolates Ruby to Python and PHP just because. The JVMs (there are several) mostly trade-off memory for speed. Go check the Language Shootout page. It doesn't scale in my book.

So unless Scala has some secret ingredient to use the JVM more efficiently, this looks to me as yet another fanboy rant.
Or nominal GDP .. how many years worth of aggregate economic production is the debt?

And don't forget Social Security, Medicaire, gov't pension liabilities, etc - they are important parts of the numerator ..
If PoF is a launchpad to premium dating sites, how do people end up on PoF in the first place? I assumed SEO, and I searched for "dating" and "online dating" but PoF didn't rank high. Maybe they go after more niche keywords.
One Server to rule them all
http://home.inklingmarkets.com/
>The use of logic as a tool for rigorously validating philosophical arguments, which was the original basis for the connection between philosophy and logic, is still a pipe dream.

That's not strictly true. The Arab and Scholastic philosophers constructed a philosophical world-view, largely based on Aristotelian logic, which internally consistent fairly comprehensive. What resulted in its downfall, was not the failure of logic, but the desire for absolute truth. All forms of logic, whether mathematical or syllogistic, require argument from premises, which means that ultimately one must start with first premises that cannot be proved and must merely be agreed upon (making truth a matter of consensus.) Descartes tried to rectify this situation by assuming away all assumptions and proving first premises in a vacuum. He didn't get far (made too many logical fallacies) but he started a fad that overtook the philosophical realm and continues to this day.

My point being, that the problem wasn't the language (despite what the deconstructuralists might say,) which, if common and well defined presents no barrier, but changing ends in philosophical discourse.
I think that users care about speed as much as anything, and being fast cheaply is a competitive advantage.
I, and I think lots of others, all have had this on a todo list. I think the reason they never seem to get built or take off is that there is such a lag between their establishment and their payoff.

I assume the trick is to have some dedicated submitters for a year, and then to really push the interesting right/wrong answers into the right social news sites. That should get them over the hump. I hope this site manages to do that. Bookmarked.
Ahh, yes. Good catch. In the algorithm, simply clamp AQ_len to be >= 0.0 and <= AB_len. (Notice that you compute AB_len as a side effect of normalizing AB.)
Having 2 RoR products in the time it takes you to build 1 Scala product is the true competitive advantage.
The one thing I can tell you for sure, having done affiliate marketing on the big 3 search engines and the big 2 social networks, is that users on social nets click often but don't convert. The click through rates are lower than you'll see on Google, but not as much lower as you might think if you do a good job with the ad and the demographic targeting. But the conversion rates are beyond abysmal.

That seriously depresses CPC bids, which will prevent Facebook/Myspace from really monetizing well from that source. It's a shame too, given that the reach is massive.

I think it's because people just go to social networks to hang out. They specifically don't want to buy stuff, and when you try, you're like a telemarketer calling a college kid at a frat party.

I was really on the fence about whether or not Facebook would ever be able to somehow find a business model that didn't involve people whipping out a credit card somewhere (i.e. not freemium, virtual goods, etc.) until I tried that experiment.