skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Text Messaging Emerging as Tool for Air Traffic Communications
That story was in "Surely you are Joking Mr. Feynman".
Exactly. I went to www.oracle.com/investor and couldn't find it.
I think your best salesman its your own website, a link in your website for ads information its all that it takes, I dont see why you have to pay someone else to do it, unless you are so small then you go with adsense but if your main income its ads you should be in control.
Yeah - magic to me would be implementing blocks i.e.

arr.each { x | ...};

at that point it would be a different language rather than a clever fluent expression happy library.
Premiree - More premium, less free
Forgive my ignorance but why not wrap the fallback_algorithm() call in it's own try/catch throws a more explicit exception??

try {
this_might_fail();
}
catch (exception& e) {
try {
fallback_algorithm(); // throws ExceptionB
}
catch (ExceptionB& e) {
report_crash();
}
}
My experience has been the opposite. Yes, you can get Oracle XE on a limited set of platforms (still no OS X support for any current Oracle databases), for free, although the default configs leave a lot to be desired. However that doesn't compare to the large number of free and/or open source Java projects, libraries, tech articles, forums, etc... that IBM has supported. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/.

You also need a registered account to do pretty much anything on Oracle's site, in stark contrast to IBM's developer tools and sites.

Also if Oracle's SQL Developer is them being friendly to devs, then I wish they wouldn't:) That thing is one of the ugliest, most prone to crash, DB tools I've ever used.
Its now about "cost-free" tools. The open source community can produce those -- if anything, Eclipse/NetBeans could just be extended with more plugins.

Its about open specifications and standards. Sun had been hyping Java 7, but hasn't been going through the Java Community Process to "debug" the spec, and allow for OSS developers (like those at IBM) to develop spec-compliant tools of their own. If Oracle continues down that trend, it will see Java lose its most important asset: a community of developers who believe in open standards.
Then don't be a PHB. PHB is a stereotype and a caricature. Being a good leader is all about people skills, and what you're looking for sounds a lot like what a project manager could do. Note "could": once you step up to management, you become the chief architect of your own job. If you project PHB on it, that that's what you'll be.
Caustic Graphics' ray tracing accelerator - explanation and demo video
Bound to Burn: Focus on Higher Carbon Sequestration Rates
I would definitely be concerned about any future innovation of MySQL. Perhaps, it will get folded into Oracle's Express edition and then slowly phased out over time. Any advances that put MySql even remotely close to Oracle in terms of scalability are unlikely to occur.
"you'll quickly see that only one, Peter Eisentraut, works for Sun"

True, but Josh Berkus also worked for Sun until last summer. So maybe it's correct to say Sun has been a major backer.
Personal finance is not about more willpower
Don't worry, programming is still hard. And once these "idea people" take a look at Objective-C you can probably up your rate on everything.
Yes, one area where MySQL excels is it doesn't cost $40k per server to have an unlimited (e.g. wired up to the internet, so anyone can use) license.

PG said in one of his rants, "Do you know of any start ups choosing to go with Oracle? I don't either."

A whole new generation of companies (like RoR dev shops) are using Postgre/MySQL as clusters/shards and have no intention to ever moving to Oracle. This way, Oracle still captures revenue from them. (If they are paying for support).
"I wonder what it will mean for other open source stuff"

Looks like it's time for the open source model to prove its stripes. One of the main selling points for using software with an open source license is that you can get someone else to service/extend it for you even if the originator of the code goes out of business or shuts down development.

It will not be surprising if Oracle wants to take some of the Sun open technologies in a more proprietary direction or just show less interest in continuing development. That will mean we will see whether or not the purported benefits of an open source license prove themselves or not.

The main challenge will be forking, assuming Oracle continues to develop MySQL, for example, but only in ways that do not encroach further on Oracle's existing DB market. If people want features that Oracle does not want to provide, it looks like forking will be the only option.
Your point is lost under a sea of attitude. Shame.

@lbrandy: Awesome, if slightly mislabelled, work.
Thinking about these large acquisitions, it's hard to imagine that Oracle now owns Solaris, Java, BEA, Seibel, Peoplesoft, MySQL and of course their own Oracle DB.
Predictable, I suppose. Sun's sales and marketing people take yet another good thing and fail to sell it.
There's benefits. First they can start making MySQL a gateway drug into Oracle. e.g. aligning syntax, a clear demarcation of features between the products, upgrade programs, documentation, support, etc.
I disagree and I am glad that so many great men and women before me also feel the same way. Giving your life to something you believe regardless of the reward you might see in your immediate future is what has brought any human endeavor worth caring about to where it is today. Consider newton deciding to take up apple vending (a practical and beneficial job) rather than continuing to scratch his itch.
As a Minnesota voter, I think the one reason I would have liked a run-off election in the United States Senate race is that there were three major-party candidates running in the race. (Minnesota has three "major" parties by state law, and all three are capable of winning statewide elections.) So it's a little unclear to me how a pure Franken versus Coleman match-up would have come out if a run-off had happened here in Minnesota at the same time as this election cycle's run-off election in Georgia. Georgia knows who its two United States Senators are. Minnesota is still in doubt, months after the general election. I now like run-offs in major statewide races like that, when the margin after the general election is very close.
Do only poor journalist wankers write link bait article titles?
I did a little research to make sure he was right, and I've convinced myself that he is, so I've added an update at the top to correct it.
Yet another generic, vacuous article about twitter, of the skeptical variety. I suspected there might actually be some insight in this one since it got posted here, but it's as inane as the rest of them (deliciously ironic given most articles of this type scold twitter and it's users for their inanity). For once I'd like to read an article that at least muses on why folk tend to be confused when they first join twitter or why it seems to have a marmite effect (i.e. you either love it or you hate it). I'm getting quite tired of this sort of banality however.

goes off to check his twitter feed for something more interesting
Twitter twits tweet twits twitter tweets.
This question is an artifact of not really deeply understanding Javascript. Yes, your jQuery loop looks different than the Javascript loop you might "normally" write... but it doesn't look all that different from my Javascript code that I was writing before jQuery was even a glint in Resig's eye.

jQuery uses Javascript more deeply than what you get out of a "Learn Javascript in Ten Minutes!" tutorial, but it's still just using the language. It is a library, not a language. If Javascript didn't have closure support, jQuery would be up a creek without a paddle. (We all would; without that feature JS programming would be an order of magnitude more nightmarish.)

And if you don't understand how it is using the language, you will not be able to use jQuery to its full advantage. There's no substitute for understanding.
I found out I'm #1766. Yikes! Oprah should put me on retainer, she could have been way ahead of the game.
http://www.albumbud.com
Google Appengine System Status
I don't think it is. It just think it largely replaces an internal domain-specific language (the DOM) with an better, more convenient one abstracted on top of it (jQuery). Using jQuery for the DOM feels much more natural and more like JavaScript than the ugly W3C interface.

I honestly don't think jQuery differs too far from writing ordinary JavaScript. Yes, it has a nice design, but it ultimately works because it plays to JavaScript's strengths rather than its weaknesses, and many of its other design decisions are forced by the limitations of the language and good practice.

In fact, one of the reasons jQuery is so popular is because it doesn't use one of JavaScript's most powerful and most misused tools by playing with the core language, whereas Prototype and Mootools make much more sweeping changes, blurring the line of where the library end and the language starts.
The site looks all right, its just that I pretty much know that info from my favorite bands.
CTRL+F and Outlook 2010: will Microsoft follow Google into design by engineers
You'll never know the opportunity before its popular because before its popular it doesn't look like an opportunity.

Time is going to pass anyway, so just do it now. "Too popular" doesn't mean there's no more value to create.
"Sooner or later, people will run out of fresh, attractive ideas that can be done easily, without becoming a decent programmer."

And some people, who never would have considered programming had it not been for iPhone, will turn out to be damn good programmers that continue learning and making good, useful software long after the iPhone glow has faded.
A simple guide for protecting your virtual privates... digital underpants howto
Maybe they are relying on the (now invalid?) assumption that tracking is always legal while seeding is not.
I did not know you wrote that blog also. Your the man swombat.
The Google Bay
I apologize for the attitude, and it wasn't directed at you, but it's driving me crazy how prevalent the confusion is as to what a genetic algorithm actually is.
Eclipse, that was (one of) the best Java IDE when I was still in Javaland, was originally an IBM project that they've released as open-source and they've been a major contributor to it afterwards. So IBM doesn't always charge for their tools.
Oracle might be buying it to keep it out of IBM's hands, they - IBM - could've (not) killed but perhaps damaged two birds (Sun, Oracle) with the one stone in a Sun buy.
Would be nice to see the actual paper, and understand how they went from correlating resume's from "a leading online job search site" to employers and the wages they pay their H1-B employees.
I didn't think it was an attack at all. But he did show ignorance of what Brazil is. So do you, in fact. Manaus is in the middle of the jungle and is a very large industrial centre. So buying radio equipment in the Amazon is not really that amazing. Walk into any indigenous camp and you are very likely to find a satellite dish.

I'm not angry nor emotional, I just find it silly that it would seem so amazing to some people that this could happen in Brazil.
> Looks like it's time for the open source model to prove its stripes.

Errr... it already has, over the last 10 to 20 years. That doesn't mean that projects don't go through ups and downs though, and Sun has, as of late, been contributing to stuff like JRuby. It won't die if they pull the plug on the paid developers, but it might be a setback for the project.
Even when Josh worked there I think you'd be hard-pressed to make an argument that Sun "backed" PostgreSQL in any strategic sense.

It's true that Josh is an extremely vital figure in PostgreSQL's community, but he doesn't contribute code as much as he advocates and interacts with the user community. Those roles are extremely important, but the people who hold them are pretty much beyond outside influence: Josh will always act in the best interests of PostgreSQL regardless of who signs his paychecks.

On top of that, these types of evangelists don't usually play a part in the technical direction of a project. I'm not sure exactly how closely involved Josh is personally with PostgreSQL's technical direction, but I can tell you for a fact that any attempts a company might make to steer a project through its evangelist are misguided.

Either way, though, there's no question that Josh is incredibly important to PostgreSQL. But, still, that's a whopping two contributors out of over two dozen.

We can go back and forth about what level constitutes "major backing", and that's fine. But at least now we're talking about some data instead of just hand-waving; that was my point in posting the initial correction.
But just tracking gains them nothing, surely?

They need to hold a seed themselves to get the bandwidth benefits? Or have I misunderstood what they're doing?
this article's entire argument seems to be based around the idea that people only use twitter to broadcast mundane personal updates. that would get old very fast.

5 seconds of actual "journalism" would have evaporated this premise pretty quickly.

but hey, why actually try something out when you can just write a crappy fluff piece based on your preconceptions?
not really a new feature, you could always search for torrents... just a feature made easier !
martial arts training twice a week and calisthenics in between for core training.

the martial arts training is about an hr of warmup and basics and half and hr of running forms (standardized routines).

between the martial arts, I try to do core workouts at home which include exercises with the chinup bar, gymnastics style static exercies, like handstands, planches

i think consistency is key. even if you dont have time, try to do something, anything. i find that i feel really crappy if i miss my workout or training. it definitely keeps me energized.
Using another language as your target (such as an Objective-C compiler outputting C, or Stroustrup's original C++ implementation, Cfront, outputtting C) guarantees no relationship to the target language. If Objective-C is a strict superset of C (which I have no knowledge of), it is not because C was the target language.

Also, it's not accurate to call something a "preprocessor" just because its target language is a subset of the language it supports. It's a compiler - a source-to-source compiler, yes, but still a compiler.
The bit about the PhD in microbiology caught my eye here--to people getting bored with "blub" programming: perhaps look into a field like bioinformatics, meteorology, and so on. You'd be working on difficult, "technical" things, but you'd be able to leverage your existing skills and simultaneously assist with the (inevitable?) computational aspects of that particular research.
I used to work over at iWindsurf and iKitesurf and we had planned on doing something like that but it never went through. WeatherUnderground has been allowing user's to upload data from their personal weather stations (PWS) for years. The niche, I think, in this idea is allowing anyone, anywhere with or without special equipment to issue a weather report. There's a massive data storage and standardization challenge with it though.
I doubt Sun planned for this. If it hadn't been for the financial downturn, Sun's acquisition of MySQL (with its 12 million customer base) could have been Sun's path to new profitability. Maybe not a guarantee, but I suspect they were hoping for growth rather than a buyout.
yes. but now: sue Google, instead of 4 Swedish young men ! :)
That said, I was a bit disappointed by the proposed shutdown date of "thirty to forty years" mentioned in the article... that they would go through all the trouble and resources of making an ultra-efficient plant, then run it for less than a century.
Is she using IE on her Apple laptop?
VCs Maintain A Voice By Setting Thresholds
Oracle tried to buy open-source MySQL
Using Free Blog Themes To Spice Up Your Blog
Is the O'Reilly brand dilluted?
I'm at MySQLConf. The Oracle deal is all I've heard talk of so far, and I don't expect that will change over the next few days.
The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part V: Happy 100th Birthday Silicon Valley
Also, this doesn't seem to be an apt analogy; I'm no expert on machine learning (certainly) but it seems to me that "face detector" is simply a catchy abstraction that does not necessarily contradict the underlying technicalities of your production.

My issue with your titling "Genetic Algorithms" is that it is not simply a more convenient, abstract way of expressing what you did: it is in fact a contradiction of terms with the underlying technical details of what you did.
Thwart Social Media Identity Theft
Big iron: The ultimate cloud platform?
Treating configuration values as templates
Thanks. I was looking for a "search in book"-type link but couldn't find it. There are some excerpts on e2 that I found, but not of the passage that I was thinking of.
If that pattern is correct — and there isn’t much to suggest that it is, but bear with me...

No thanks.
That was Informix, not Oracle.
New jQuery Plugin - ImageSwitch, amazing effect with simple code
jQuery plugin - ImageSwitch is an easy-to-use, simple and fast plug-in to create effect when you switch between images. Minimize the arguments you need to input and still give some beatiful effects.
G1 Garbage Collector
My revised headline for the article. "@oprah signs up 1.2 million people to twitter; 800k of them to dumb to actually follow @oprah."

She only has 377k followers. If people signed up because of her you think they would follow her if they could figure it out.
I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I'll take the 6% pay cut over more entire projects being outsourced overseas.

I have no desire to see San Francisco become the next Detroit.
"all variables are conventional"

s/conventional/continuous/. I can't type at night.
Other websites that became books:

I Can Has Cheezburger?, Garfield Minus Garfield, Hot Chicks With Douchebags, Suck.com, Indexed, Sleeveface, Passive Aggressive Notes, REAL Ultimate Power

http://www.avclub.com/articles/why-buy-the-cow-27-popular-we...
Congresswoman Waddles Into Israeli Spy Storm
AT&T needs Apple more than Apple needs AT&T
http://albumbud.com - Sharp, clean design. I like the music metaphor in the header. Good tagline 'Keep tabs on your favorite musicians'. I wonder if it could be more specific, like 'Get notified when your favorite musician releases a new album.'

If all I want is one RSS feed, I shouldn't have to sign in to try the app. Maybe make registration optional.

Good search results. I found both artists I searched for. It would be nice if after I added an artist, Album Bud told me the most recent album. Just an idea.

Glad to see you've open-sourced the site. Good luck.
> (Speaking of which: are there any commonly used publicly verifiable random numbers, like a die roll, but outside of any party's control? I presume there must be a need for them in a number of situations.)

Just use next week's state lottery's numbers and similar things. That is fairly impartial and hard to influence. Though that might be too few bits and too much latency for your liking.
This is not Newton's method; it is a random walk with pruning. Newton's method is a very specific way of finding roots of a function.
Consider volunteering your skills for a non-profit and getting into a leadership role. I've done that (without the intention) but it is amazing how involved you can get with the mission/issues of a non-profit organization (where you don't have any financial stake - e.g. salary). Yes, I primarily help with technology analysis/implementation but they listen to me when it comes to marketing (sometimes). Non-profits are interesting because they draw positive-oriented individuals from a wide spectrum of careers. You can learn a lot just by showing up and listening.

My managers recognize it officially as a potentially valuable career growth action (on my own initiative). Not only has it helped me do better at my job, it helps me feel better (diverts some workaholicsm towards something good)
And what will happen to VirtualBox? Oracle has server Virtualization software too...
QuickPwn 3.0: Jailbreak iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 3
QuickPwn 3.0: Jailbreak iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 3
Dude, I am half-Brazilian and I have lived in Brazil when I was a kid. Yes, there are a lot of ignorant yanks out there, but I am not one of them.

My point has little to do with Brazil or Brazilians. The point is that people with little technical know-how and few resources are hacking the U.S. Military satellites. If the satellites' comm systems had been designed properly, this should NOT happen. If amateurs can do it, then imagine what the enemy could do in case of war.
Does this mean we'll never get Solaris' ZFS open-source enough for Linux?
A theory is not needed for further investigation.

On the contrary. Every experiment is backed up by some sort of hypothesis. (Otherwise it's not an experiment. It's called "divination": You're noodling around with some equipment to see if something "interesting" turns up. And it always does. The human mind is very good at finding "interesting" patterns in random noise.)

Hypotheses don't always have to be in accord with the body of existing theory. When Planck invented quantum mechanics, it was essentially just a mathematical trick that made no sense in the context of Newtonian mechanics. It was a free-floating rule of thumb: Gosh, if we pretend that light comes in these "packets", we can compute the observed experimental result! And that experimental result was so solid, and the fit between quantum theory and the result so perfect, that eventually the rest of physics had to be unraveled like a sock and reknit around that one hypothesis.

But the hypotheses that are connected to theory are much stronger. (They gain strength from all the experiments that went into confirming the theory.) If one's hypothesis (e.g.: "you can get fusion at room temperature because of mumble mumble catalysis mumble the influence of unknown impurities in the palladium mumble mumble") doesn't manage to score a big experimental confirmation (e.g.: making enough heat, consistently, to boil one's tea) or to connect itself to the body of existing theory... it's very vulnerable. Because there's a much simpler, well established, experimentally-supported theory to explain these results: These folks have a hypothesis ("cold fusion exists"), they do the experiments, they cherry-pick the results which look good and they find reasons to discount the ones that look bad. They need not even be doing this consciously. (Believe me when I tell you: This happens all the time. In every lab I've ever seen.)

Finally, when you ask me to avoid "derision", it suggests that you don't understand how science really works. Derision is the pillar on which science is built. (Though we usually prefer the politer term, "skepticism".) The central principle is "I don't believe anything which hasn't been replicated by a skeptic, because people are too trusting and hopeful and are blind to their own mistakes. Frankly, your equipment is probably broken and your students are probably ignorant; I only trust myself. And, come to think of it, I don't even trust me very much -- I should convince my skeptics to replicate my results so that I can believe me."

Of course, the best scientists manage to think this way while also appearing as kindly, smiling, eternally optimistic sages. ;) You wouldn't think, to look at Einstein, that he had balls of steel, a big ego, and a vast reserve of skepticism, but he surely did.
How Twitter Helps Me (Specific Use Cases)
Three Key Ideas on Freemium Business Model