skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One problem is that even if I found that VP8 performed very well at one or two particular clips (out of the 28 HD test clips available), I couldn't say for sure why that is the case. There seems to be no clear information on what clips benefit from what kind of features, and as I'm not an expert on video encoding technology, it'd be hard for me to deduce these things by myself. General conclusions could still be reached, obviously, but if I was going to such lengths it'd suck if I couldn't get more overall detailed results.

Anyway, I brought up the subject to some Xiph folks over at IRC. Maybe in the future the test clips will come equipped with more detailed information to help in testing. It'd also benefit smaller scale tests, since it'd allow one to identify possible biases more easily.
It heavily depends on management's alignment.
Didn't read the article; is getting rid of Balmer somewhere in there?
Hacking is not a form of protest. nor is it a medium for political change.
He's exaggerating about the 30k of course but it's true that these positions don't pay very well compared to what experienced programmers can get elsewhere.
The last one is terrible ... I have seen

#define TRUE 0
#define FALSE 1

back in the day.

Too bad there was no source control in the company then, so I could not find out who was responsible for that travesty and "talk calmly" some sense into them.
So they rewrote it in ASP.NET[1] and now rewrote it again in Node? Can someone explain to me how this helps their business?

[1] - http://highscalability.com/myspace-architecture
I should have stated I don't trust my coins in the hands of others.

Bitcoin, unlike other currencies are irreversible. You have one, and only one chance to keep them safe.

I rather be content with the loss of Bitcoins in my possession, _knowing it was my fault_, than losing them to a thief holding Coinbase's staff at gunpoint for the offline wallet's private keys.
If you consider cutting all charities out and not having plates on his car so he could park in handicap spaces a class act, yep, he was.
An interesting analysis, thanks! I hadn't realized there was an actual attempt at merging GCC and LLVM. What did happen when it was attempted? Are there mailing list posts or suchlike from the time, that would clarify things?
The way in which contracts are enforced or not enforced is a language issue though.
nobody will miss gcc when it dies. too bad pcc went unmaintained
I disagree. Building something people want is often a bigger market than need but that does not mean that you should forget about building products people need.

Firstly, this analysis only applies to consumers. You need to build something a business needs instead of want in order to succeed in the business enterprise. Enterprise is a BIG market. Building medical equipment like MRI scanners are not sexy like the iPod but that is something people need and people will pay lots of money for.

Secondly, you can build a product of need and then transition to wanted product. iPod started with need: to store a thousand songs in one device. This was not possible with other competing products. Soon, it became a symbol of need. People started lining up on the Apple store for new product launches. The iPhone heat is slowing down since Apple did not deliver what consumers wanted: a bigger screen.

Dropbox is another product of solving a need. We had to use our USB or email transfer our documents. As a result, we had many versions of the same document - not knowing which version is the most updated version. Mind you, Dropbox is a billion dollar business.
People wanted an iPod, no one needs an iPod. The point of the example is not irrefutable evidence, it's an anecdote. If you think that people need an iPod then you will do quite fine building things people need. (aka. want)

Many people need to fix their credit card debt. However, I'd sell NASCAR plates before I sold a product that told people not to buy NASCAR plates on credit. The only person who has really done well in the don't buy unnecessary shit on credit cards space is Chuck Palahnuik, but I don't think his book would have done very if the protagonist went about things in a practical way.
This reminds me of a TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...

And his book: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/...
I'll agree that the UI looks really nice. This is a huge upgrade from what they had.
Interesting points. I'd thought of these issues but hadn't heard them so clearly stated.

I don't know if this situation would be common but I have an idea of where it could work. Perhaps a web app you completely trust could talk to an API you don't trust over CORS. The web app you completely trust would only talk to the api you don't trust over XHR and wouldn't eval anything it got back.
Unless you also run and operate your own datacenter, the number of people you implicitly trust is fewer but still roughly the same as with a cloud provider. There's all the datacenter security personal, network and hardware technicians that could all possibly be "rogue".
Some programming strategies
I agree with him, and have been complaining about the same shit for ages (I work in bioinformatics too). Sadly, biologists don't care. We're treated as the number crunchers. The real problem isn't that we waste computational resources, it's that many biologists download programs, run their data through it, and if it spits out an answer rather than an error, they trust it. Since that program probably has zero unit test coverage, and the results may be fed into pharmaceutical decisions, disease diagnostics, etc, you're basically fucked if something went wrong. Lots of us have said this[0].

Minor quibble: genome assembly is definitely still an open problem that's computationally difficult. So is robust high dimension inference, but that falls more under statistics.

I've wanted to leave at least a dozen times too, for the better pay, for working with programmers that can teach me something, and to not have my work be interrupted by academic politics. But the people pissed at the status quo are the ones that are smart enough to see it's broken and try to fix it, and if we all leave, science is really fucked.

[0] http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/10/19/buggy-simulation-co...
A GA144 outperforms a Raspberry Pi by a factor of exactly 144 (that's how many equivalent cores it has) and costs less money to put together for the effort these guys put in.

Now, programming it might be a mindfuck, but that's another story.
I think in that case it would be better to make it variadic on input arrays, like map(makeInterval, array, array.tail())
It is very likely that the person who added map() to JavaScript knew about its meaning in functional languages, otherwise s/he would have called it applyToEach() or something like that.
He also ignores the situation where you want to upload it to an untrusted third party server where the javascript was obtained from a trusted server. Also the same problems of verifying the source exist in most closed source applications that automatically update so really nothing to do with javascript.
I worked at one data-heavy startup where things were on MySQL and even with a lot of consulting by Percona, eventually it just couldn't keep up with our needs, and the project was ported to PostgreSQL. I've worked on other projects that were less data intensive and MySQL worked fine though.

If given a choice, I'll take PostgreSQL any day, but I do understand that people are hesitant to change database whey they don't need to. If you are encountering trouble though, by all means, move on.
Man... Not trying to attack you, but I think you're in that terrible phase of life where you're a) educated enough to know a bit of history and a bit of social theory, and how to make nice sentences but b) not educated enough to have balanced, forgiving views about human society, so you just lapse into overwhelming, aggressive and largely-unfounded cynicism about everything. I feel for you. I've been through the same phase, and it sucks.

Keep reading though, and keep thinking. You'll get through it soon enough. In the meantime, try to find things worth appreciating. See the good in what people are doing. Go into a big box store, and instead of thinking "look at all this disgusting consumerism sucking up natural resources and destroying the world!" try thinking "wow, isn't it great we've managed to develop such efficient and powerful technologies that we can provide such a dizzying array of products for so cheap to so many people? And isn't it great that our society is so open and undiscriminating that we let anyone buy whatever they want, if they have the money?"
On one hand, this is excessive. Really excessive.

On the other, at least it's still a reset option. That might sound silly at first, but I lost access to an old MS Live account that I had foolishly left on auto-login on my Xbox for years and eventually lost access to the old Hotmail account (yeah, I made this account a long time ago) it was tied to. No amount of offering to show that I was the credit card holder for the hundreds of dollars in games or anything would convince them it was my account.

For the people to whom their Instagram account is really important, this might be a nice option (even if it is rather invasive).
Warning: A little shameless self-promotion coming.

I wrote a blog post called What Street Artists Can Teach Us About Marketing, http://www.lylemckeany.com/2012/11/05/what-street-artists-ca...

When doing some of the research for it, I came across this great quote from Banksy:

>We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.
Although Mojang did hire the core Bukkit team, the mod API they are working on is planned to be a new API designed from the ground up, rather than Bukkit [1]. Bukkit was designed within constraints appropriate at the time for the environment it arose in (for example, it is layered as: the Bukkit API itself, on top of the CraftBukkit server implementation, which is itself a mod on the "vanilla" Minecraft server jar from Mojang -- abstractions to help insulate Bukkit plugins from the volatile nature of Minecraft internals). They did design a fairly good API, the most successful in the Minecraft modding community no doubt, but having a new official API built into the game has a number of advantages and is their ultimate goal. Although there may be a Bukkit compatibility layer or a documentation on porting from Bukkit to the official mod API.

It isn't clear what will happen to Bukkit after the official API is released. The founder of Bukkit has said they intend to phase it out. But Bukkit is an open source project, LGPL, with many active contributors and a thriving community of plugin developers. Will be interesting to see what happens, although IMHO a proper, well-designed official Minecraft API can only be for the better.

[1] Source: Minecon 2012 API panel
I work with http://www.vittana.org, which has also found success with this model.

Overall our customer research has found that people find it a lot more compelling to give money to the individual than to hand money to an anonymous institution, even though on the backend it may be treated exactly the same.
Are you considering you loss of time/freedom in that cost analysis? I get that cloud doesn't always make sense in every situation, but in a lot of cases people don't take into consideration these other factors (loss time managing/maintaining hardware, actual hardware costs, etc) when making the decision.
It's his money, so he gets to decide what to do with it. Likewise, Microsoft Office was his product, so he got to decide what privileges to offer users. If you didn't like Office, did you build a competitor program? No? Then don't complain.

Seriously, the freedom to enjoy success and the autonomy to use one's own money and run one's own business however one sees fit, within the limits of the law, are like the fundamental principles of capitalism and basically the key to all modern economic and technological progress...
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My experience working as a scientific programmer is this: my colleagues aren't forthcoming. I could list case after case of failure to document or communicate crucial details that cost me days, weeks and even months of effort. But I won't, until I have another job lined up. If I were in the author's position (I'm in another field), I would insist that my colleagues--all of them, in whatever field I ended up working, were forthcoming about their work. This is non-negotiable. Being over-busy is no excuse. (It may be an excuse for not being forthcoming, but right or wrong, I couldn't care less--I would not work with such people if I could avoid it, for whatever reason.)

Academia rewards journal publication and does not adequately reward programming and data collection and analysis, although these are indispensable activities that can be as difficult and profound as crafting a research paper. At least the National Science Foundation has done researchers a small favor by changing the NSF biosketch format in mid-January to better accommodate the contributions of programmers and "data scientists": the old category Publications has been replaced with Products.

Naming is important to administrators and bureaucrats. It can be easy to underestimate the extent to which names matter to them. Now there is a category under which the contribution of a programmer can be recognized for the purpose of academic advancement. Previously one had to force-fit programming under Synergistic Activities or otherwise stretch or violate the NSF biosketch format. This is a small step, but it does show some understanding that the increasingly necessary contributions of scientific programmers ought to be recognized. The alternative is attrition. Like the author of the article, programmers will go where their accomplishments are recognized.

Still, reforming old attitudes is like retraining Pavlov's dogs. Scientific programmers are lumped in with "IT guys." IT as in ITIL: the platitudinous, highly non-mathematical service as a service as a service Information Technocracy Indoctrination Library. There is little comprehension that computer science has specialized. For many academics, scientific programmers are interchangeable IT guys who do help desk work, system and network administration, build websites, run GIS analyses, write scientific software and get Gmail and Google Calendar synchronization running on Blackberries. It is as if scientists themselves could be satisfied if their colleagues were hired as "scientists" or "natural philosophers" with no further qualification, as opposed to "vulcanologist" or "meteorologist" (to a first order of approximation).
no they objected to the entire idea of bitcoin as an 'intermediate currency'
The argument may not have been stated as well as it could have, but your response reduces to emotional scapegoating what is really a valid concern.

Let's say that during America's period of slavery, there was an extremely wealthy northeastern industrialist who donated a large portion of his wealth to improve the living conditions of slaves. He wanted them to have better food, better clothes, better medical care, etc. But even though his wealth was gained by legitimate free enterprise and not slavery, he had never called for the outright abolition of slavery, just lamented the poor living conditions of the slaves.

The industrialist's contribution should certainly be applauded, as it would certainly do good, but without addressing the fundamental injustice, it only makes a system predicated on vast suffering slightly more tolerable.

In short, hoping for the winners of a corrupt system to save the losers is foolish. If we had real free markets and real democracy, it might be a different story, but we don't. Our situation cannot be remedied by charity, welfare, or incremental reforms. We need fundamental structural transformation of our political and economic institutions. Anything short, however noble the aim, is equivalent to trying to make slaves more comfortable without freeing them.
I feel like people don't realize how innovative Microsoft is. Or choose to ignore whatever they hear.

It's stupid, what it is. Because the stuff Microsoft Research is working on is crazy cool.
Don't use the default CSS styles. Make it your own brand.
You mean neither of those ever had or will have security issues, because only stupid incompetent developers ever have those? That was pretty much the point of the parent comment.

Meanwhile on planet Earth every popular software package has had some issues. That's natural, security is hard and requires constant vigilance, and people are bound to err or oversee something from time to time.
Don't know, this is purely a thought experiment and, in fact, it doesn't matter: for whatever reason, Y distributes few pills.
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Maybe it would surprise you to realise that yes, child-rearing culture can be and is a cause of persistent poor educational outcomes and a large part of the poverty cycle. Watch "Precious" for a taste. Some poor parents are actually scared of and distrustful of education. Some feel jealous if they see their children succeeding.

Re: McDonalds, what's wrong with that? It's not glamorous but it's a solid job which teaches good skills. People need to start somewhere, people from poverty may have no experience with the very most basic financial and life-skills you take for granted: managing expenditure, keeping income regular, putting aside spare cash, staying in one job. Those are the basics people need to learn, and the idea is that someone from poverty who succeeds at that stage can pass on the benefits they gain to their children, who will do even better. Then in a generation or two more they can become a university-educated family.
Could it be possible to explain what does

Print "Fizz" [x%3*4::]

Since range is going from 0 to 101 I have the impression the result won't match the directive.
Why not:

{
id: 35,
name: "Kennedy, John F.",
predecessor: {
id: 34,
name: "Eisenhower, Dwight D.",
href: "/presidents/34"
},
successor: {
id: 36,
name: "Johnson, Lyndon B.",
href: "/presidents/36"
}
}
I have encountered situations where this is convenient, and I have yet to see it cause any bugs or problems.

In the places I have seen it used, the 'arbitrary' column typically has the same value for the entire group, e.g. for efficiently selecting distinct texts based on their hash values.

PostgreSQL has a similar feature using SELECT DISTINCT ON:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/queries-select-lis...
Somethings's up with your site. All I see are black boxes where your examples should be: http://imgur.com/N8vdzGX
Blacks were doing just fine

Citation?
The best revenge involves laughing all the way to the bank.
interesting rivalry between Banksy and Robbo
http://www.banksy.co.uk/QA/camden/camden4.html#
rasberry pi is a mess of firmware they won't release full documentation for. enjoy your enormous binary blobs
This post can be added to the pile of why HN discussions are getting more and more pedantically lame.

The post adds so little. And even in the post, it acknowledges this, yet has so many words/syllables/phrases to read through just for everyone, even the poster, to come to the same conclusion.

I really don't like being negative. I guess it's the negative pedantry that has bothered me to the point of saying something. If I'm in the minority and just venting, apologies (My comment might just be the ticket to get it out of my system).
Maybe it's your browser.
Midi jacket to create music through motion and touch
That's the biggest mass of pedantry I've ever read on the internet.

The author concludes with saying he built something he thought people needed and it fell flat. Obviously the problem was that he was too unsure they needed it, and it turned out they didn't.

A diabetic needs insulin. Should insulin companies shut down because they don't make something people want?

I call bullshit on the OP.

He implies that building a 'want' product is better than a 'need' product by using confirmation bias and focusing on Apple products, vs using concrete opposite examples.
Good list. My only thoughts:

Prefer itertools.izip instead of zip to avoid materializing a new list.

Appending the comma operator to the print statement suppresses the newline character and appends a space instead, which is how print 1, "world" works.

The only tip I'd add is using mapping keys in string formatting operations:

>>> d = {'cow': 'moo'}
>>> print 'the cow says %(cow)s' % d
the cow says moo
You quote version 3.23, yet talk about subqueries which didn't get added until version 4.1.

ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY was added in 4.0 but only applied to select list columns, the 5.0.23 mentioned above applies to the HAVING clause list not allowing them as well:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/server-sql-mode.html#...
I would say that should always factor into these equations, and I further would say that most companies large enough to worry about these kinds of decisions are indeed factoring those things in.

The cloud vs colo discussions have been done before on HN, but I still say the decision of one versus the other basically boils down to a relatively simple if-else/switch statement: If size of company is small and no sysadmins, cloud. If size of company is medium and sysadmins then cloud or colo based on due-diligence. If size of company is large and sysadmins and you need very high uptime then colo (Unless you're willing to spend a gazillion dollars for several access zones on EC2). Obviously there are going to be lots of if/else chains but you get my drift I imagine.

Now if you're a small start-up and have a likely outcome of tons of scaling needed in short order, your best bet might very well be scaling with the cloud and moving to hardware when you're more established (and if it makes sense from a cost benefit analysis).
Why not to read the code of various advanced CL and Scheme implementations?) MIT Scheme and SCM and CMUCL are good candidates.)
Pretty much the same in any large corporation I worked with.

Not only for contributing, but for using as well, and with every single version change the same process must be followed.
a similar discussion appears above.
Just Cryptography?)
The Myspace you're referencing to is not the current Myspace. The company was bought for $35 million in 2011 by Specific Media and Justin Timberlake. Same brand, different product.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230458400457641...
I think you might be mistaking innovation for invention. The stuff Microsoft Research is working on is indeed crazy cool. The stuff that Microsoft is commercialising, generally rather less so. Innovation, in the business world, doesn't just mean thinking up a bunch of nifty stuff: it means successfully bringing it to market.

Xerox was inventive. Apple was innovative. There's a world of difference between the two.

As far as Microsoft goes -- several years ago, I heard an embittered ex-Microsoft researcher opine that the purpose of Microsoft Research was to buy up the best and brightest people in the world, and then lock them safely away in a box where they could never deploy anything that competed with Windows, Office, or other entrenched cash cows. Although I have tremendous respect for what Microsoft Research is working on, I think there was some truth to this sentiment.
Looking at it in a different way: build the products YOU want.
From your second graph, Iran and Pakistan have stronger interests in Machine Learning than the US. (I am not surprised about India, South Korea, and China though).

Is the interest in advanced Info Tech that widespread in those countries or simply because the only people who could use Google in those countries are government-sanctioned researchers? Anyone familiar with the reason could shine light for the rest of us?