skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Instead, use a "message reply" concept. For example, for your data you could send a tuple with a callback or a condition.

Then block on the condition, and have the lambda/delegate in the idle thread signal the condition. Make sure you hold the lock for the conditions mutex before sending the message though so that it is not a race condition.

#Sender

callback = SomeFunc

mutex.lock()

def worker():

# ran in main

callback()

mutex.lock()

cond.signal()

mutex.unlock()

send_msg_to_idle(0, worker)

cond.wait()

mutex.unlock()
The Future of Monetization on Social Networks
Hi HNers,

Please let us know what you think:

http://www.meosic.com

The basic idea is this: All of the following major brands have a million or more fans on Facebook.

Nike
Starbucks
Coke
Etc

What does it mean to be a fan of a brand? It means that you have a large GIF on your Facebook profile that is the image of the particular brand you have chosen to be a fan of. End of story. The business does not benefit in any meaningful way financially and nor do you as the brand fan. What if, in the space occupied by the GIF, you had a fully fledged e-commerce widget that enabled the following scenarios:

The business can 'push' new promotions or announce new products via the widget
The business can sell directly to customers through the widget
The customer gets discounts from their favorite brands
The business can gather intelligence about customers and do more targeted marketing
And may more...
We sit in the middle of all this activity and get a decent piece of the action. We have a patent protecting the intellectual property and a war chest large enough to battle anyone (except Microsoft or Google) in any court :)

Regards,
J.

http://www.gicleelife.com/blog_jkuria.php
and if i wasn't clear, the reason this is bad is because you wake up the cpu every 10ms to check. this is quite bad for power consumption, especially if it is a critical path in your framework.
A Sneak Preview of Wolfram Alpha + screenshots
New documentary on Pakistan's Swat valley under Taliban
Assuming we are talking 3rd party apps, the only one I use on a daily basis is Toodledo (the official app from the task management website toodledo.com - there are other apps that sync to toodledo.com also but I find the first party one best)
a computer can simulate interaction with world just as well as it can simulate your brain.

"actually discovered the underpinnings" is a vast overstatement anyway.
> 57 percent of computer science graduates are working as programmers; at 15 years the figure drops to 34 percent, and at 20 years -- when most are still only in their early 40's -- it is down to 19 percent.

That data is compatible with lots of things besides age discrimination:

* a job description that mostly appeals to the young

* a young and rapidly growing field where most of the 1988 CS grads are promoted to management, so that they can manage the 10x larger 1998 CS grads

* etc.
...the production of nuclear power has killed zero people in that period.

This particular assertion seems unlikely to me. People die while mining coal, but they don't die while mining uranium?
Meditation is something I would like to try. Recently I went to a zen dojo to try. They sit on this zafu cushion in a position I am not flexible enough to do. Even trying half of the position hurt incredibly. But the worst part was after the meditation, when one of the students asked a question to the master. The master then talked for a very long time, digressing on different parts of his life, mocking his students, and boasting about his superiority, which he tried to demonstrate by misquoting all sorts of people. I wondered if listening to the master was also pain the students are supposed to overcome. I won't go back there. I'll have to try meditation somewhere else.
I'd say for every bug we work out we create about 100 new bugs that lead further away from freedom. Starting over is sometimes exactly what a "legacy" system needs to get better.

Intelligent libertarians disagree all the time, the difference is they don't resort to violence or coercion to force their views on others. It's the whole point of creating a truly free society like the Seasteading movement is trying to do.
remember on Apple ]['s DOS, where you could include a control character in the name of a file (thus making it impossible for someone else to run a file unless they knew the "real" name) ?

I've got a dollar riding on one of the two "frosty"s having an extra character in their name...
NY Times is pretty in touch with what's cool w/ the kids these days. Ie. "the new Java language".
Most OSes and Linux distributions try to make it easier to be installed, by providing ISO images and live CDs from which you can install the OS/Distribution after you made sure everything works

But not OpenBSD! I don't like how they don't provide ISO images as an excuse to make people buy their CDs.

I understand that its not meant as a Desktop environment, but this also eliminates many tinkerers who would run OpenBSD for few days just to know more what its about.

Is being tinkerer friendly such a bad thing!
"Employers justify shunting aside midcareer programmers on the ground that they lack skills in the latest software languages."

I don't see what's wrong with that. Clearly, to command a higher salary, an employee has to offer more than someone who gets paid less. And if in fact that employee has less to offer than a more junior person, because their skills are obsolete, it's even more of a reason to let them go.

I guess it's not a very comfortable position to be in- having to always prove your worth to an employer- but I think it's unavoidable, especially in an industry that changes quickly.
Unreal ?
NetBSD 5.0 Released
Looks like Grappelli.

http://code.google.com/p/django-grappelli/

Edit: Of course it does, sehmaschine is project owner on both.
The article is from 1998, Java was 3 years old.
I remember hearing in a morning radio show people are saying that the iPhone is the best thing ever because it can play and record farts.

From a market point of view it is revolutionary but not from the technical side.
Does the report also analyze pure programming jobs, and not team lead, or management roles which previous programmers 'graduated' into, not necessarily became 'unemployed programmers'?
Twitter Brings Search On Site To All
BTW: They do distribute iso images. You just have to grab them off the ftp server.
Does that also mean the statistics provided by the author are meaningless since they are 10 years old and closely tied to the dot-com boom?
So, what do you think of the French Revolution?
Not sure I agree with this approach. I would rather have the waste of competition than 20 mediocre scientists coming together and putting out dubious research simply to protect reputations. Failure of an individual is much easier to stomach and forget.
The author impresses upon us that the scientific community is competitive. And that collaboration is rare. These are contradictory ideas.

In competitive environments, collaboration is far from unusual.

In competive environments, it is usual for collaboration to break out between competing individuals. This is especially true in the most cut-throat competitive environments.

In a truly competitive environment, survival depends on the individual gaining a competitive edge. The most effective way for the individual to capture a gain is by joining forces with competitors for mutual gain.

In a truly competitive environment its: collaborate or perish.

In conclusion, the scientific community is not nearly as competitive as the author is inclined to believe.
FairSoftware seems interesting, and quite possibly a great way to safely evaluate contributors who might be worthy of becoming co-founders, but I question the legitimacy and legality of FairSoftware based on spending 10 minutes browsing the existing projects. Most of them are single contributor projects looking to post blog articles and share AdSense revenue.

Can anyone speak to the legitimacy of this effort, and whether an existing legal single-member LLC should participate as an opportunity to gain for-equity labor and co-founders makes any sense?
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/courses/Computer-Graphics/09b/index....

Parallel course @ Tel Aviv Uni.
I'd like to second that experience, and to comment on some parts of it.

On one end of the spectrum, I am baffled by the drama surrounding the "weird shit" happening to your body. I had the same stuff happening during my meditation but I didn't find it to be all that notable. Yes, after several days you begin to isolate tiny little sensations (like weak electric current) all over your body. It's really just that and nothing more though. I guess I question the value of that particular experience - is it really such a huge revelation that practicing a small task over and over makes you better at it, sometimes enabling you to do things you didn't think were possible?

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I feel like people don't give enough credit to the experience of forcing yourself to keep a position in spite of searing pain. I am preparing to give birth soon and one of the exercises for pain management is to practice relaxed breathing while squeezing ice cubes in your hands. It's painful but also incredibly empowering to learn that pain can be overcome, and unlike meditating for days to achieve a few weird sensations, it's a practical skill. You don't have to commit yourself to a 10-day retreat or practice a particular form of meditation to achieve that though, there is a variety of ways to do it, none of them particularly mystical.
According to the article, your presenter was wrong. Singer's patent was an improvement on an existing machine that already had an eye-pointed needle (an improvement which had been invented over a century earlier).
"[a] coal power plant's radiation output [into the environment] is over 3 times greater" than that of a "nuclear power plant with the same electrical output".

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_station#Radioactive_...
I appear to have made a date mistake. sigh
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 84 – Getting The Unexpected
Twitter Blog: Twitter Search for Everyone
Someday Vista will stop hurting you :)
I can't find any modern numbers of deaths from uranium mining (though plenty of information about old mines, and a legacy of cancer risk increase around those mines, so there probably is a pretty good debate to be had about that legacy and how to legislatively insure the danger is removed in the future), so it seems to either be "none", or "very few".

I imagine some mining related deaths would probably happen if we completely convert to nuclear. But, the amount of uranium required is dramatically less, so far fewer humans would be needed for mining it. The sheer volume of coal required is a big part of the problem, and the processing of coal produces other opportunities for people to get hurt or killed. Uranium processing could also be dangerous...but again, the volume needed is much lower.

It's just a numbers game, really, when it comes to direct and indirect deaths and injuries, and we'd all love for there to be a completely safe, completely clean, completely free source of energy...but that's not an option. We have to choose amongst the candidates we have available. Nuclear wins in pretty much every category over coal. And, since solar and wind power are not yet feasible for a majority of the US, moving to nuclear is the best option in many cases. I'm not saying nuclear is perfect, but nuclear is certainly dramatically better than coal.
With a little bit of patient you can build your own OpenBSD boot media with minimal fuss. Actually I prefer they method over others as more tinker friendly but I agree, it's a different beast.
Create a filesystem in a database using Libferris and SQLite
There were plenty of people opposed to nuclear power before TMI and Chernobyl happened.
Death can be inspiring
Use Trusted Content Creation Services To Ensure That Your Content Remains King
An infopreneur can make a lot of money by providing superb content. As anyone that has been engaged in business will readily acknowledge, people that do business with you do so on account of the kind of content you have created.
True but on the flipside just because someone is young doesn't mean they will provide more value.

One thing that is interesting about this article is that it was written just as the internet/web boom was happening. It is important to note that a whole slew of industries and job tracks have been created since then. It is also very important to note that software development really wasn't a field until the 70's. So what we have is a young industry, thus younger people in it.

The age of someone that started development young in the early days of the web (mid-90s), let's say 1995, would be approx 32-33. Anyone older than that had to come into web from pre-web industries, thus lacking in ability to change and learn to someone coming in clean. But nowadays an industry really was born around the late 1990s that will get older and more skilled, as well as seeing young come in, at least in terms of web based development, game development and other recent web industries.

It would be like when radio started where people getting into it were young, as time went on it wasn't about age but skill and value. Same will happen with software or web development. Young will always be a key factor in software and web development but the position of the industry in time gives it a skew that appears ageism is more rampant. This article was even more lodged into a time where hardly anyone knew the web would change the world and grow fields and industry as much as it did. At this point the people that were going to go into marketing, radio, tv are now all going to the web.

So really, I agree it will be up to providing value and innovating but we will see the industry, especially the web industry, mature to where it isn't just the young running it.

I would say a prime is after someone went to school, and programmed for at least 8-10 years. This is when programmers start becoming efficient and product developers. The earliest that could happen for most people is late 20's early 30's.

Also, the best programmers are efficient and have a business and marketing edge. If you have that you won't need to work as long because you will be creating the companies and providing the programming jobs to old and young, or rather just skilled workers in the newest industry that is transforming all other industries.
Not just reputation building, but getting the researcher merit badge in the first place - the PhD. A PhD dissertation is expected to be the work of the student; it's supposed to prove that the student can do self-directed, novel research in their field.

Of course, people do defend dissertations based on work that was a collaboration with others, but I think we're considering a level of collaboration not usually seen.
He's not arguing for "real democracy" -- he's arguing against democracy altogether. He believes that capitalism and democracy are mutually incompatible.

Maybe Chile is a counterexample, I don't know, but I don't think he's looking to salvage democracy. He's looking to jettison it.
Is swine flu panic caused primarily by people who are not egocentric?
After all, if you are egocentric, then you would probably believe that nothing bad will happen to you.

If this is the case, then we can use the levels of panic vs threat in each country to compare egocentrism levels across countries.
Very useful; I always lose my manuals.

Would love to see an iPhone app; Ability to take a photo of the barcode/serial#, say of my stereo receiver, and get the manual right on my iPhone screen.
OpenBSD funds continued development by selling CDs. Is it really too much to pay $50 if you are yourself realizing value from the OS?

And if you're really a tinkerer you shouldn't have much trouble installing without the CDs.
Walmart does A/B tests too, they just make the changes to a single store to hit that same 1% of its visitors
Or, because programming is a meta skill, did these engineers start companies, products and are no longer programming because they are owners? Or did they pick up skills in other industries that they wanted to get into which was made easier because programming allowed them to peer into it from a unique meta perspective?

Also, sure if you are just working for a big company making desktop applications before the web as this article is from, then I can see there would be limited opportunity. How does the web change that?
If you do not have a TechNet/MSDN subscription and can't wait for May 5, try http://btjunkie.org/search?q=windows+7100

The first two results are the legit builds (both 32 and 64 bit). I tested with SHA1 against the signatures in TechNet and they are identical.

BTW, I do have my TechNet subscription, but I couldn't wait for today, so I downloaded those versions mentioned two days ago.

Finally, if you already have a beta key from the previous release, it should work with these ones.
Thanks for responding. What would you say is the lasting profound effect on your day to day life?
It's no good if you're of a competitive nature though, which I believe to be an essential trait if you want to do startups.

You don't see many buddhist monks creating successful businesses.
Yes but simulating the brain will never be the same as the actual "wetware" in operation. To my understanding, the simplistic reason that hard AI has failed and always will - while it uses digital computation as a platform - is that its a HARDWARE deficiency. I'm generalizing but AI people all seem to be algorithm gurus who feel that the next algorithmic breakthrough will be "the one" to create an AI. I think what they miss is that the physical manifestation of brain and body are in fact required to be conscious. Disembodied consciousness cannot exist since conscious beings (animals) have complex biological systems known as bodies that enable what we view as intelligence.

Yes, computers are infinitely better at rule-based computation than animals. No, they cannot pass simple tests of consciousness that a mouse can, and theres really no prospect of it happening because a better algorithm is created; fact is, animals and even insects don't think based on algorithms. Algorithms are models of the real world, not the real thing.

Being conscious means using ones eyes/ears/mouth/nose/skin to feel, hear, smell, speak to interact with the world around you. It means having agency and not just checking a set of pre-written rules in order to decide what to do next. Its a biological system that enables that.
Loading Scripts Without Blocking
When your entire research program is based on your having to convince your funding agency to give the bucks to you and not to the other guy, you create competition and moreover you are rewarding the people who are the most competitive.

This seems ridiculously inefficient. The belief that two people spending money and effort to keep at odds with one another is beneficial and furthers advancement more rapidly than collaboration seems broken. With all of that waste, I can't understand how anyone at the funding agency can say they are getting the most return on investment following this strategy. A more collaborative model would give them the dual benefit of not having all of this in-fighting waste, while at the same time benefiting from the super-linear growth in results by having two people bang heads together. I sense a sacred cow here.

As for how it can be done, what about allowing funding agencies to grant money to something akin to a research project trusts or foundations; something that spans multiple individuals and even multiple institutions, so the lines don't have to be drawn so sharply on who can participate and who can't. Something like the foundation model several OSS projects have adopted, perhaps.
This method has been the bane of my existence for going-on 5 years now. YMMV, of course, but here's my experience:

Back in 2004, we were decided to denormalize a set of records containing year, quarter, and 15 or so data points going back to 1996. Using this cross-tab method, we started out with 8 (years) * 4 (quarters/year) * 15 (data points) = 480 columns (a few more for non-denormalized data). 5 years later, we're up to the high 700s. Needless to say, this pretty much blows out your standard MySQL admin tools.

Another pitfall is, you really have to make sure you data is pristine (of course you should be doing that anyway, but reality is usually far from ideal, especially if you're me in 2004), otherwise you end up with doubling of values or values included when they shouldn't be. The generated queries are very very difficult to debug, again blowing out many admin tools and also text editors (unless you add pretty formatting in your query generator).

So what would I recommend instead? There are multi-dimensional databases or ETL tools that will properly put your transactional data in an analytical style data warehouse. Read Kimball's Data Warehouse Toolkit [1] (ignore the kinda ratty paper quality—the content is good). The key thing is to denormalize down to a star schema, but keep your facts and dimensions separate (things you'll learn in DWT).

There's an Java based OLAP server called Mondrian [2] that also may be worth your time. I ended up going with ActiveWarehouse and ActiveWarehouse-ETL [3], but I've felt some things a little more complicated than they needed to be (but that's another discussion—and I haven't kept up with their development lately, so it may have improved).

On a side note, recently I've started wondering if map-reduce style tools would make sense in this context, but I haven't explored using them that way yet, so I can't actually make a recommendation there.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Data-Warehouse-Toolkit-Complete-Dimens...

[2] http://mondrian.pentaho.org/

[3] http://activewarehouse.rubyforge.org/
Is Twitter the next Second Life?
Great find! Scary how it's still so relevent...

"High-tech companies save money by shunning most midcareer programmers and focusing their hiring on new or recent college graduates, who are cheaper and can work lots of overtime."

Not just high-tech companies, almost everyone. So screw 'em. If they're too cheap to value the contributions of their employees and don't want to treat them like human beings, they why would you want to work there?

"And the skills issue is a red herring; any competent programmer, if given a chance to learn on the job, can become productive in a new software technology within a few weeks."

Exactly. Like almost anyone here with any drive at all already knows.

If I didn't know better, this doesn't seem like a journal article at all. Seems more like a commercial for starting your own. Still spot on 11 years later.
Ask HN: how to manage golden handcuffs when changing jobs?
I recently accepted a position at a company doing lots of interesting things which I am very excited about. The pay is comparable, which is great for a startup environment, however otherwise it's very much a lateral career move.

I had originally planned to start this month, but due to some changes on their end they have asked me to start in July. I have a cliff coming up at the beginning of September, and given the recent increases in the stockmarket, I'm now potentially missing out on a decent chunk of change.

My question is what's acceptable in this situation? If I stay at my current job for another 6-8 weeks past the requested start date (to the end of August), I get my hard-earned stock. However I suspect I may be burning this opportunity if I do that.

Anyone had similar experiences on HN? How did you resolve it? Is it just an expensive lesson for me?
I can only remember two cases where I had to turn on the full-tail-call option to the Kawa compiler, and even then performance wasn't a problem. The SISC Scheme interpreter does reasonably well too, and it has full tail call optimization all the time.
Apple's implementation of font smoothing is really terrible. The way they emulate print rendering on-screen makes every letter blurry and unnecessarily bold.

Interestingly, font smoothing in Windows doesn't suffer from this problem.