skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would you find this surprising? C is usually less than 10x faster than the next tier of languages; Java, SBCL, GHC, C++, etc. 10x sounds like a lot, but considering languages like Ruby are often 300x slower than C, and they still perform just fine, you can see that Java's "slowness" is almost irrelevant.

Also, git spends a lot of time doing IO -- waiting for your hard drive to spin around is as fast in C as in Java.

(BTW, this is not advocacy for Java, rather, it's advocacy against using C when extremely good languages, like Haskell and Lisp are nearly as fast and are much easier to write.)

Edit: Ob-shootout-link: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

For these benchmarks, Java is as fast as gcc. Git is a different workload, so I'm sure JGit is not equally fast as C-git, but it's not going to be unusably slow either. (As time goes on, C is a solution to fewer and fewer problems.)
The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next
My Tiny TodoList: A simple open source todolist written in PHP and jQuery
It depends. I know it exists in finance to a similar degree. I think it has to do with how insular the particular industry is. Tech is often very insular, because all you need are some hackers. My start up, for instance, doesn't need salesmen, or scientists, or accountants, or even a receptionist or whatever else. I really only care about one or two skill sets, so I could just assume that every salesman alive is a moron and still succeed just as well.

I feel like it doesn't exist so much in many broader industries. Great businessmen realize that success is about getting people who are good at what they do and giving them everything they need to succeed, and then staying the hell out of their way. In a biotech company, for instance, some of the skill sets required are science, sales, accounting, politics/lobbying, manufacturing, etc.

Successes in an industry like that sort of requires you to be willing to admit other people are as smart as you and know more than you about many things.
The Fight over the Google of All Libraries
Try Request Tracker for ticketing. Try Tonido Workspace for your collaboration needs.

http://www.codelathe.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/05/key-requi...
Learning a complicated algorithm to deterministically answer a question doesn't really help you understand the subject better in your first year of calculus. I'd rather have classes focus on different ways of understanding the simple parts of the subject, like the different applications of integrating polynomials or simple trig functions. Or even simpler stuff, like ways to think about functions other than a graph of x versus y. Or other ways to intuitively understand why d(f(2x)) = 2f'(2x). Or the relation between integration and big-O notation.

An intuitive understand of integration by parts is more valuable for a math student than this algorithm. (Although I doubt most high school calculus students could explain integration by parts a year later.)
The user who uploaded the Connections series has also uploaded other TV shows James Burke worked on. You can find all the episodes here
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=JamesBurkeWeb&view=p...

Also, there is a fascinating episode of the show that deals with the history of computers (punchcards as a way of holding information) which is available here http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0C43386079D8B683

I hope you all find it as interesting as I did.
I remember my elementary school did this once. They set up a (weak) electric fence right next to the playground. We had fun with that...
But they won't let you. If I try to give someone money, and they refuse, it's their loss, not mine.
That's exactly been my experience with lawyers, in the many times I've talked to them. They don't give you an opinion until you pay them for it.
Angels Finance 27 Times More Start-ups Than VCs
I don't think any external observer would try to argue that this wasn't plagiarism. The newspaper just has a vested interest in defending itself from such a serious accusation.
I did write a thesis on macro hacking and embedded languages, and it wasn't theoretical enough to be useful. The stuff I had for the compiler's phase ordering problem was done better by other people.
I'm not sure if the t'Hooft page is a joke or not. Looking over the Herring Box is a humbling experience. A common hope that a lot of children have is that even though there was no way that anyone could read every book in the library it might still be possible learn everything by choosing only the good books. The herring box makes me feel like even this goal is impossible. People really are discovering valuable knowledge at a faster rate than any one individual could learn and comprehend it all.
What is the daily life of a programmer like?
An intuitive understand of integration by parts is more valuable for a math student than this algorithm. (Although I doubt most high school calculus students could explain integration by parts a year later.)

Symbolic integration has a "problem solving" feel to it in high school and teachers generally focus on this part -- making many students feel stupid in the process if they can't figure it out.

Why not just tell them there's an algorithm for it and allow them to use a program to do the symbolic integration whenever necessary while solving an applied problem?
"Poor Charlie's Almanack - The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger" is a fun read. Probably not worth buying, but your local library should have a copy.
Why is it that any article about any female in computing, regardless of who they're working for or what they're working on, will always mention at some point the high male:female ratio in most technical fields? What is it about this topic that makes people want to come back to it over and over and over, no matter how many discussions they've had on it previously? Eg., even though this article's title is completely generic, the very first thought I had upon looking at it was "this will talk at some point about the dearth of women in programming or startups or something-or-other", and lo, my prophecy was fulfilled.
I'm actually looking forward to it, but I'd agree it's definitely a niche product - something that looks awesome for scientists and engineers, and pretty much irrelevant for everyone else.
He who controls your information controls your destiny
The Idea seems to be taken from Surfer Dude (2008) movie, staring Matthew McConaughey.
they used to do the same thing in santa cruz around the lagoon. it was pretty wonderful. one saturday morning walking through i saw a goat give birth. it was at once the most disgusting and cutest thing i had ever seen. LIFE!
Absolutely. It's pretty infuriating when nerds completely dismiss advanced degrees as "meaningless credentials", yet in my experience they're far more apt to do this than the general population. Most people are deferential to experience and higher education, but nerds seem to actively reject the notion.

In particular, I love how commenters on HN will unhesitatingly dismiss any peer-reviewed, published scientific paper with a dismissive sneer, and the comment that "correlation doesn't equal causation," as if they were the only people on earth to whom this axiom had been communicated, and that the scientific establishment was completely unaware of statistics, untrained in even the most basic aspects of hypothesis testing.
I took the course in Jaipur, and went up to Dharamsala right after. Taking this course totally changed my life. What can be more important than understanding and coming to terms with your thoughts and conscious mind? I have been able to handle very difficult emotional situations (e.g. fear, despair, panic) much better because of taking this one 10-day course.
As the one who directly responded to Matt about the Lessig issue, I still stand by my statement. Indeed, many of the thoughts in Matt's post did in fact occur to me, and I still decided to make the argument that suing Lessig is a bad idea. I find it amusing that Matt decides to believe with no evidence that my views and the views of others are not thought out.

On a different note, I agree with the idiocy of arguing about fair use without any background in it. You will however see that I never brought up fair use in my writing. All and all, I'd say that Matt has badly mischaracterized the discussion that went on. I invite you to review it for yourself.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586154

Also Matt, something to consider about the Lessig issue. Even if he loses, Warner's loss will be bigger. The more exposure the public gets to big business's senseless ideas about copyright, the quicker it will be killed off. When did RIAA's suits against individuals stop? When some court cases got serious publicity. The RIAA won the court cases in question, but what mattered more was the fact that the public was exposed to what was going on. The current iteration of copyright law and precedent is outdated and eventually it is all going to change. In the mean time they should just keep quiet and earn as much money as they can off of an outdated system. Suing Lessig strikes me as an effort to change the direction copyright reform is moving in. That simply is not going to happen.
> One wrong keystroke (step over instead step into) and you throw all your work away.

That's what breakpoints are for, set the breakpoint just before where you "step too far" and try again... I personally find the "printf" technique too limiting, because it's not always obvious which variable is the one that had an unexpected value, especially if your programming to a commercial OS's API. Also, inserting an IO function will sometimes cause a subtle change in state or code compilation that causes "Heisenbugs."

But then again, I got spoiled by the debuggers in older environments like THINK Pascal, with "Observe" and "Instant" windows. It's only recently that IDEs like Xcode and Visual Studio finally attained functionality like that... (FYI, automatic variable watching and the ability to run "immediate" code while stepping.)

My big gripe with using debuggers with modern code, however, is the notion of using accessor functions. It makes what looks like only one line of code involve multiple jumps to other places, making "Step Into" a much less useful command...
First mover advantage doesn't mean much unless there is a strong network effect at play...
When I read PG's comment, I thought his comment about psychologists was about your assumptions of other people's thoughts, not the throwaway line about disease.

I stopped reading your post when I felt your arguments were depending on a piling up of assumptions on other people's mental state - their motivations, comprehension and intentions.
The Doctor of the Future
Think what happens when you put these things together. You can see your doctor immediately without wasting time in a waiting room. A robust database helps your physician make more accurate diagnoses. Advances in robotics cut your recovery time after surgery -- and could even lead to operations assisted by remote experts. This is the vision of the medical system of tomorrow. And it's emerging today.
I would say that learning "problem solving" is more important than learning how to type a formula into integrals.wolfram.com (which you should certainly use if you have an actual applied problem). Plus, if you want to go on to multivariable calculus you will need to understand the principles rather than just being able to get an answer to an integration.

I agree that calculus seems too "magical". But we should solve that by explaining more of the intuition and heuristics behind solving calculus problems, rather than teaching people to solve problems by brute force.
I knew it!

But had never taken the time to look this up and verify it. Somehow, in the back of my mind had I held out hope that all this time spent working on these things wasn't wasted on something a computer was 100% capable of doing in a blink.
Whoa, I have a new goal in life. One of my favourite things ever is pulled pork and barbacoa looks like it could give it a run.
Then again, if you eventually sell the goats a for food into the local market you are likely to reduce emissions on food transport.

Of course, I have no idea what the demand for goat is in that area (surely there are some Indian restaurants that can do a "mutton" curry), or whether the US has the same idiotic regulations that the EU does that forces the shipment of animals for slaughter.....
We've been over this ad nauseam in the case of digital music. People have been paying to hear music or see flickering images on a screen for a long, long time. As long as the transaction was centered on a physical object, like a CD or a DVD, we psychologically attached the value to the object. When the object became an inconvenience, we realized we were paying for something intangible.

So we got cleared that little cognitive hurdle, no problem. Now it's normal to buy music on iTunes. This New York Times article does its best to confuse the issue by concentrating on buying intangible items that are virtual representations of real objects. That drives home the contrast between real and virtual in a way that music doesn't, since it's easy to accept that music is intangible, but we're used to thinking of otters and swords as tangible items. Yet in the final analysis, it's no different from music; it's just a clever way for a journalist to take something commonplace and make it seem weird.
http://lighthouseapp.com/ is on wave like github is for the source
More interesting, that site craches my firefox.
There's plenty of problem solving left in the applied stuff.

And not everyone who takes Calculus in high school goes on to learn multivariable calculus. High school Calculus should be more applied IMO.
I was referring to the fact that they use it at Google as a Git server, not the speed of Java.

LE: I am a Ruby developer and know what "fast enough" is. Also I know that Java/JVM is quite fast, JRuby is sometimes faster than Ruby 1.9.
The semi-closed demo was far more impressive, but I am not sure to what extent it was secretly scripted.
Doomed Engineers: Careers even worse than yours
Perl Catalyst Web Application Framework Reaches Version 5.8
I use Blueprint too. They have a very good support. I integrate with Compass/Haml/Sass and all my frontend coding suddenly becomes like backend coding
Taking x2 as long as C is a great achievement, especially with Git, which is already extremely fast.

But they've done it by optimizing hell out of Java - it's far from idiomatic java, more like the C-style java you see in the standard Java libraries (but to be fair, C-Git has also had hell optimized out of it).
I made this a few times recently. Goat curry:

~2lbs cut up goat meat, browned in a small amount of oil
4-6 potatoes, peeled and cubed
2 onions, diced
5-10 dried red chilis, crumbled
Lots of curry, garam masala, coriander, cumin, chili powder to taste
Salt and pepper to taste
1 bag frozen peas, added 30min from the end

Add water and stew. Keep adding water as time goes by, adjusting to desired consistency. Stew for at least three hours.

Tasty goat!
The point of using URLs is that URLs have a reasonably strong assurance of (global) uniqueness and are somewhat self-documenting -- the same reason XML namespaces are URLs.
Ask YC: Anybody used Rhomobile? "Build once, deploy on any smartphone"
Just wondering if anybody has played with Rhomobile; or if anybody can tell me if their claims are legitimate.

If you're not familiar with them, here's some info:

http://github.com/rhomobile/rhodes/tree/master
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10202598-94.html

Thanks!
cool. thanks for sharing this nice example code.
Here's a Bloomberg article with his thoughts on derivatives: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=arSa...
It makes what looks like only one line of code involve multiple jumps to other places, making "Step Into" a much less useful command...

Hence you have to decide to "Step Into" and potentially waste a lot of time, or "Step Over" and miss your bug. This annoys me.
Ask HN:

Q1. How much woukd you value Alpha today?

Q2. Should Google buy them right away before they get too big?

A1: $2B

A2: Yes
Forgot to mention Frank Rosenblatt of the Rosenblatt Perceptron - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Rosenblatt - killed in boating accident.
Hacker News is more of an experiment in sociology than reddit is.
I say this because Hacker News has additional features intended to guide the community into a certain direction.

The latest of these features is the delayed Reply link.

Other features like this: conditions as to when downvoting a comment is available to you, when you can create a poll, etc.

These sociology experiments are very interesting and I would really like to know how effective they are.
This article could also be called skilled and unaware. While the authors assert that those who are unskilled lack the metacognition to realize that they are unskilled, the skilled also seem to lack the ability to realize just how skilled they are. Each study shows the top quarter vastly underestimating their ability. In each study, it looks like once you get to the 65th percentile, people start underestimating their ability. While there is some variation in people's perceptions of their abilities, most people seem to think that they just fall in an above average range whether they're brilliant or not.

This is really interesting and has broad implications on how we interact with the world. For example, if you're brilliant, but perceive yourself as above average, you won't think you're entitled to brilliant pay - just above average pay. Likewise, someone who is far below average, but thinks that they are above average will likely believe that they are entitled to above average pay. And that has implications both social and political spheres.

However, this might just be another manifestation of the middle class effect that we see all the time. People, generally speaking, always see themselves as middle class in America regardless of where they actually fit into the social hierarchy. In both situations, one of the factors might be that one's peer group is usually less of a cross section of society and more a cross section of one's own class and therefore it's likely that you'll be somewhere in the middle of that smaller grouping. Likewise, one's peers are also likely to be of the same intelligence level and therefore that becomes skewed.

Before I get jumped on with that last bit, I did read the part where the unintelligent not only misplaced their percentile, but also couldn't figure out how many they got wrong. But that's also influenced by where you think you placed relative to others. If you think you placed above average and the exam was meant to test a variety of people, you're decently likely to assume that you scored better than you did.

Well, maybe I'm full of hogwash. Still, it's really interesting to think about what it means socio-politically when people assume that they're in a different place than they are (intelligence, production, etc.).
The Sequel Dilemma
And it goes beyond intelligence. You can become passable at something fairly quickly, even competent. However becoming really proficient at most things takes years of work and effort.
Using Dropbox as a Host for Static Websites.
I often don't hazard an opinion at all, because the thread leaves me feeling I have too little sure knowledge of the relevant facts to offer an opinion.

Which is very sensible of you, of course. As a professional, you have to act with a certain degree of professional detachment and care. Your words matter in ways that mine do not. You charge money for your words, because they have a power and authority that mine lack.

But what you seem to be saying is that we, the general public, have a choice: We can discuss legal issues amongst ourselves. We can not discuss them at all. Or we can abandon the discussion of legal issues to lawyers and people who can afford lawyers.

Does anybody really think it would be a good idea for the public to just be quiet and leave the issues of IP law to credentialed experts? Isn't that just how abominations like the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act happened in the first place? It turns out that large media companies can afford to hire a lot more experts than the EFF can. And that just because a lawyer understands more about law than you do doesn't mean he's more inclined to use that power in your interest than you are.

Lawyers understand the law. But citizens make the law (very indirectly, of course). And citizens suffer the consequences of laws. So it's our job to care about laws. Even if our mental models of how they work are a little... rough.

(Of course, it would be great if the public had better grounding in legal education, just as it would be great if we all knew more quantum mechanics. This is why so many people love Larry Lessig in the first place -- the guy writes books for non-lawyers.)
Hacker breaks into Twitter accounts of Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher
What I want is what these relationships are in Hindi so I stop calling relatives by the wrong title.
I think you need the flashblock extension as the site has a lot of flash videos embedded onto one page.

I have flashblock installed and the page loads fine.
I just skimmed the article, having received treatments of Bayes' theorem many times over the course of my almost-finished college career; however, I think this is neat, because making use of visualization/imagery is a good approach to teaching and understanding statistics, which the human brain is (typically) not capable of handling well.
Who cares who came up with what? Eventually that'll be too hard and pointless to keep track of anyway.
Ex-Employee Sues Zynga For Discrimination, Wrongful Termination
Shiny, Happy Consumers
My thoughts: 1980-1983
I agree with Paul: 1980-1983. We'll see a double dip.
While New Zealand is not a world hub of IP, this should be closely watched. It will be extremely interesting to compare the terms of the 'rebooted' legislation with the existing incrementally altered system. I can't guess whether it will cut down the typical 'function creep' of incremental legislative extension or result in a major rebalancing in the same direction as the function creep (ie on behalf of copyright holders). I'll be surprised if it results in a tilt in favor of consumers.

To the extent that HN has members or members have contacts over there, I hope someone will advocate alternative models such as Creative Commons licenses and similar, and argue on behalf of their legal utility. Another copyright issue that is little discussed is that of authorship. In Europe, if I write a book and you buy it, I may sell the copyright to you outright but I retain the right to be identified as the author. In the US no such right exists.

I'm kinda stating the obvious here, but I hope people will pay close attention to this. It's not often the legal codebase is thrown out and rewritten, and this is a 'use it or lose it' situation for NZ citizens, whose participation and reaction will be closely studied by legislators and copyright holders elsewhere.

Given the depressing manner in which US legislators have catered only to large copyright holders to undermine the original intention of the copyright process and basically cut off the natural flow of IP into the public domain, this has long-term implications for all of us.
Thoughts on Haml
Musician/inventors who scratched their own itch
An Evening With Eliot Spitzer
Display realtime Twitter Tweet stream with QueryPath
The new QueryPath library, a PHP cousin of the jQuery JavaScript library, offers an efficient API for working with XML, HTML, and HTTP. In this article, Walk through a simple example and build a small script that workes with the Web services API of the popular Twitter microblogging service, to execute a specific search on Twitter's server and print the results as HTML. Such a tool can be added to an existing Web site to show recent Twitter activity on a topic of interest.