skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> C and C++ do the vast bulk of real work today.

That's true, but I just have to ask: so what? I, for one, don't subscribe to the theory that popularity equals quality. Although both C and C++ are immensely popular in terms of code written in them that doesn't mean they're the last word in language design.

> No other languages today can compare to them, and the ones that try still depend very heavily on one or both.

I don't understand what you mean by "compare to them". If you mean in terms of features - sure there are languages more advanced. If you mean in terms of popularity then I can only say I find such comparisons meaningless.

> Now, if we could reliably implement class-based OO systems comparable to,
> or even better than, those found in Java, C#, C++, Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk,
> for example, then maybe we could say prototype-based OO is more expressive.

We can do this (modulo "reliably", which I don't understand what you mean by) and that's the problem. You yourself explain this:

> However, all we end up with are multiple half-assed

That's exactly the case. Java, C++, Python and Ruby are extremely incompatible with each other. No wonder that JS implementations of ideas taken from those languages are still incompatible - although less so than originals between themselves. It's also not that strange that they are incomplete - given that everything you'd like to do in class-based system you can do with prototypes there is simply no need for frameworks being complete.

Can you post a few examples of what is possible in Java and not possible in JavaScript?

Also remember that language designers can alter syntax to better support their systems, so we need to exclude syntax from comparison.

> It's much more effective to implement prototype-based OO systems using class-based OO languages.

I don't know if it's impossible, but your examples are flawed. Of course you can write any language in any language, like JS VMs are. But that's completely different matter, I was talking about using the language itself in a prototype based manner. I suspect that, due to static and low-level nature of classes in C++ it's completely, utterly impossible to replicate JS object system inside C++. That you can write interpreter that implements this system is obvious and not interesting at all.

As a counter example, in Python you could, with careful use of metaclasses and implementation details of classes and objects create objects whose methods lookup order and semantics of would be the same or close to those of prototype based JS - in the language itself.

=======

Your arguments fail to prove that prototype based-ness somehow fails. It does not, in itself, fail in any way. As I wrote above, show what can be done with classes (single inheritance model) that cannot be replicated using JS or better IO prototype semantics - that would be convincing. The fact that JavaScript development is a mess - I won't deny it - proves nothing about prototypes and only a bit about JS.

By the way, have you tried Haskell, OCaml or F# and Erlang?
Drag and drop. When I drag an icon to a location and I miss, I think it's better to see the item animate back to it's original location rather than just disappear and "pop" back.

Having it animate back is just better communication for that particular interface.

You can see this on Google Chromes new tab "Most Visited" page, drag an item and let it go on nothing, it will animate back to its position.

Then there's sorting, it's much better (to me) when the interface animates to show you what the effect of moving one item to a new location will have on the rest of the items in that list, you can see this effect on sites like Trello when you drag around cards, etc.

I'm sure there are more examples of good uses of animation in interfaces.
They're sorry for having stopped playing the coupon/sale game therefore making it convenient to stop in and buy stuff anytime without feeling like getting "ripped" off (although each buyer should only buy when the value is "worth" it for the buyer... sometimes we pay premiums for immediacy) and taking away their inner feeling of getting a "deal".
I suppose the general idea for the colors is something like: green = best in category, red = worst in category, yellow = neither best nor worst?

In that case bubble sort and insertion sort should be green for the best-case time complexity ( O(n) vs. O(n log(n)) for quicksort/mergesort).

It might also be interesting to make the plot dynamic and allow the visitor to play with different implicit constants for the individual asymptotic bounds.
> while keeping everything both performant

Good luck beating the performance of a Fortran optimizing compiler.
By having coupons, it would be easier to schedule fewer cashiers and sales people on the floor and have them focus on stocking etc. When running weekend of weekly sales the stores could temporary increase the number of workers in the store. By taking away the ability to more easily anticipate surges in customers they lost the ability to keep variable employee costs down (without hurting their image and becoming known as a poorly staffed and slow store... "hey I need a tie now! I don't want to wait for a sale. Let's go to JCP. No wait, its going to take forever to get checked out, I'll go pay $5-$10 more from HIGHER END DEPT. STORE and save my frustration.")

EDIT: Yes, I realize that if the stores are measuring foot traffic and sales they should still see a pattern however I would be willing to bet that the graph would be flatter with fewer and less drastic highs and lows.
Irony:

The Verdict Is In: Nobody Likes Google Glass
Jay Yarow	| May 3, 2013, 12:43 PM
http://www.businessinsider.com/nobody-really-likes-google-glass-2013-5

I've Changed My Mind: After Using Google Glass A Second Time, I'm Blown Away
Kevin Smith	| May 2, 2013, 4:57 PM
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-glass-experience-2013-5

---

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/nobody-really-likes-google-gl...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-glass-experience-2013-...
Open Source Homomorphic Cryptography
You can pass some interviews by blindly memorizing, but it's unnecessary. If you understand a concept, then you can reason its big O. Memorization implies a superficial understanding that may be revealed later.

If you don't understand something, spend a few hours and implement it.

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."

- Confucious
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PPvTs45...
Math as Myth: What looks like the golden ratio is sometimes just fool's gold
Incidentally Bill Gates chose not to move Microsoft to the Valley (from Albuquerque, New Mexico) because he saw the way people changed jobs each year and figured this would not be good for his young company (From Paul Allen's book 'Idea Man')
troll article. nobody likes google glass, nobody really? I wonder who's buying google glass for thousands of dollars on ebay. It's a prototype device, that's not even available for purchase yet, and it's already being shot down? Lets wait till it is more polished and more people start using it before making such a big statement.
the model S performance competes against M5, E63 AMG PP, Audi RS5/6/7 and can't beat any of those in 1/4 mile or 0-60 times. i would disagree with "beyond amazing", it's at the rear of the pack in terms of acceleration and handling.

if you've never actually driven a fast car, i'm sure it's very impressive, but objectively, it's not fast compared to its competition.

it appeals to a different crowd, the kind that wants EVs. i bet most people who considered/bought the S perf have never seriously considered an M5, E63, RS, or even Cadillac V (since we're talking American cars here). all of those handily beat the S in every benchmark.
And still I get my neighbor's mail.
Thanks very much for the feedback from both of you. Some of it mirrors what we heard during our experiment. We're gradually going back over the website to clarify the communication of some of these points more clearly and fix some usability niggles.

As for the "gold", its something we would love to do, and we plan on getting there eventually. For now one of the benefits of using 3D printing is that we can fulfill orders on demand and there is very little cost of carrying inventory, using metals ends up negating this advantage.
Brain, Interrupted
Didn't seem to be a problem, YMMV of course.
Their desktop clients aren't open source. I personally haven't found any open-source git GUIs that work as well as GitHub for Mac or SourceTree (both of which are closed-source and now have Windows equivalents)
The USPS is really amazing. I enlisted its help for my sister's thirtieth birthday. Let me explain.

I used Zazzle to custom print 30 postcards, each with a picture I found on the Internet from one of 30 towns spread throughout the US, each in its own US state. On the letter side was printed a single large letter. Once my sister received all 30 cards they would spell out a Happy Birthday message to her. I also hand wrote a tidbit about each town. The cards were all addressed to my sister in FL. I stamped each card with a stamp of the state it was from, using one of the USPS's 50 state stamp collections. (The collection I used was from many years ago, but I found a sheet on eBay.)

Now the fun part. I wanted each postcard to be hand canceled from the town it was supposed to be from. I also wanted the postcard to show up at my sister's in pristine condition. So I placed each postcard into an envelope addressed to the postmaster in that town. The envelope included a second mailing envelope addressed to my sister and with postage, and a letter to the postmaster asking them to hand cancel the card, then mail it on to my sister in the second envelope.

Then I dropped all thirty envelopes in the mail in NC. I had no idea if this would work, but after about 3 weeks my sister received them all. The envelope which traveled the farthest was round-tripped through Barrow, AK. I also sent her cards via HI and ME.

Some of the cards went through towns so small that the last name of the postmaster hasn't changed in that town for generations (the USPS website lets you look up current and former postmasters).

This was a super fun project. I got to learn a tidbit here or there about all these small towns researching where I wanted to send them from and writing the postcards. I also learned some people collect postmarks. And that you can roundtrip postcards through the South Pole (it takes about a year).

Edit: here's what the cards looked like after she received them - http://imgur.com/f1MidVF
I run a small bespoke software development company with 2-3 employees and 3-4 clients. It sounds incredibly small, but nevertheless I was getting overwhelmed.

I evaluated various options and settled on liquidplanner, I don't regret it.

- I can enter that some employees only work a certain number of hrs e.g. Mon/Tue/Wed 3 hrs, Thurs/Fri 8 hrs. If I say a task takes "20 hrs" then it takens the availability into account in the planning.

- Range estimates for tasks, i.e. "this task will take between 4 hrs and 2 days".

- I prefer the ability to update a task with "I did X hrs already, I now prodict Y-Z hrs to go", as opposed to saying "50% through the task, which was originally predicted to be X hrs.". As you go through a task, your understanding of it changes. I think updating the past/future hrs more closely fits how you work.

- With many tools you can drag task bars to the left/right in the Gannt to make them earlier/later. I don't know why you'd want to do this? With LP you just specify how long it'll take and who's doing it, and its priority relative to other tasks, and LP tells you when you'll be doing it.

- I often have the problem that employees claim they're "finished" and having nothing to do. I send emails around with bullet points but they still seem to get confused. With LP there is a section they can log into at any time called "my work" which shows them an up-to-date view of all their tasks, extracted from the Gantt, in order of priority.

- My clients sometimes feel they don't know what's going on (if we're programming some back-end stuff, for instance). They get a better feeling when they see their Gantt. They can log in and do that. But I don't want my customers seeing each other, so they only see their Gantt. Nevertheless, the reality is that resources (e.g. me) are shared, so they're not actually independent projects/sheets. LP knows that I do task X before task Y, and task X might appear on one customer's portal and task Y on another's.

- What tasks and employees should I be concerned about, in terms of them delaying the project? I can select any task and selects its critical path. Because resources are shared between projects and clients, it can accurately tell me that in order to get customer Y project done on time, I have to finish tasks for customer X (or re-arrange them.)
My first thought reading the headline was: "No way! Nikola Tesla can't have been wrong. He was a genius!"

Then, reading the article, I realized it was about a car manufacturer.
haven't test driven one but it can't beat my current car in performance numbers, so ...

and the roadster just absolutely does not appeal to me. i don't like roadsters in general but it's just too feminine and it looks hideous with the top on.
also, my current car is an E63 AMG PP, that's the crowd i was comparing, i.e. me.
>Kurzweil eventually wants to help create a “cybernetic friend” that knows what you want before you do

I am not sure I want that. At least not as much as Google does. Kurzweil is going to help me click on more ads. Shreds any sense of him being a visionary.
The person probably thinks "I can afford a cup of coffee so I don't need your money". A gift on the other hand is meant to be given away so seems alright.
The follow-up is much more interesting:
http://www.chimerasaurus.com/2013/02/raspberry-pi-vs-aws-v2-...

However, the only thing this shows is that AWS micro instances are really slow. In the follow-up the author argues that while a small instance is much faster, its also much more expensive. While thats true i dont get the point, the pi is just not a good choice as a public webserver and if you were to use it that way you would need to co-locate it and costs would probably be comparable.

If on the other hand, you use both enviroments for heavy computing purposes it doesnt make sense to bill the EC2 instance with 24/7 as it probably would not need to be on all the time.
Interesting -- so braking system consumables should last ~4 times as long as on a fossil-fueled car?
I really like Google Glass.
The September one is a cute idea, but how many shutdown things immediately had a bunch of interns? For example, with Knol, there weren't any site updates or functionality changes for something at least a year before the final shutdown announcement went out, so how could that have had anything to do with interns? The spike in September is so huge I'm not sure interns explains it.

Maybe people are going on vacations (not necessarily Burning Man) and returning with renewed perspective and distance from things and are more willing to close down things. Not sure how one could test this...
I assure you people in Boston have friends.
I really like the top two answers.

A few points, when I was in school and that was only 5 years ago, I learned Fortran. I learned it because I was starting as a Mechanical Engineer, and one of the heat transfer classes involved solving differential equations via programs. If you wanted to get help from the egg head professors you had to take Fortran because that's what they knew. The Fortran class was Mechanical Engineers and Nuclear Engineers. I believe we were working in Fortran 77 & 90.

One of my friends from college is working on his PhD in physics. He spends his summers and breaks in Los Almos labs, and uses particle accelerators. Anyway - he told me that they use Fortran for their calculations purely because it was easier to translate to the language and it's all math.

Anyway that's just my $.02
Dropbox also has photos now, when you log in on the bottom left there was an opt-in for the beta testing. It's really nice compared to Picasa/G+'s "2 different photo services but not really" design.
Why we often view digital culture through insect metaphors
HTC One review: It’s now or never again
> Never heard of any of those.

Yes, and that'll be reflected in the hits data and be one reason they'll be rated so risky...

I love 'Ozymandias', but unfortunately it's become so overused it's cliche. So I picked poems that I was reasonably sure almost no reader would ever have seen (the exceptions: the _Julius Caesar_ quote, which I parodied; and the Basho haiku, which I gave my own rendering of) but were hopefully still good.
I'm learning Perl now, specifically for bioinformatics. Appreciated this article
Attache
Attache is a unit one wears and communicates with as many of yourselves you create in order to accomplish all that one wishes to think about and do. A group of yourselves listening and whispering to you in your ear.
I'm working on some open source projects that pertain to recognizing entailment in plain text. Entailment is the relation that holds when one text "follows from" another.

For example, "Carolina beat Duke" follows from "Carolina defeated the Duke Blue Devils once again". I have a demo here: http://ec2-23-22-22-135.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8001/demo

Here's an example app that uses entailment recognition to answer natural language polar (yes or no) questions: gavinmh.github.io/HelloTablet.

I'd be happy to talk to anyone who is interested in getting involved.
What is the salary you are offering?
Surely it can also click the ads on your behalf, and save you needing to know about them at all?
Wasn't that true before the Hotmail -> "Outlook" transformation? I.e. a Microsoft free email policy that as jacquesm notes could have good reasons behind it.
Rounding float to nearest integer, part 3
If you don't want to hand over your citizens at the whims of other countries, why should you expect any other country to behave the same way?
Related article

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/the-shine-starts-we...
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Yes, I am sure. Taiwan was my home for many years, most of my best friends live there and I still follow the local media in the local language and watched election campaign speeches for multiple candidates in each of the last two elections in person. What about you?

KMT leaders prior to Ma pushed for unification. During Ma's campaign in 2008, he repeatedly emphasized that he would not support any sort or unification or annexation. This created a rift between him, Lian Zhan and the rest of the old guard, but without that assurance he couldn't have won.

"The one China policy" has a specific political meaning -- it's intentionally ambiguous as to what "China" is (a country or a civilization). While the policy isn't exactly loved by most in Taiwan, it allows the peaceful continuance of Taiwan's de facto independence. Any formal break from the policy to formalize this independence is extremely dangerous as the article you linked to points out:

"Beijing has threatened to invade in response to any such declaration."

Also, it's important to point out the role of the US. The US has pledged to treat Taiwan as a country in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, but has stated that any support or defense of Taiwan could end in the case of a formal declaration of independence.
http://www.change.org/petitions/state-attorney-jerry-hill-dr...

to anyone who thinks Kiera's charges should be dropped, sign this petition on change.org...it still needs over 5,000 signatures. we have to save her.
Yes, Picasa's rating seems wrong enough to me that I called it out in the discussion as probably wrong. (Not sure how one would improve the model... how do you objectively rate or quantify something like 'stopped iterating generally'?) And it make not make 'any material amount of money', but it is still selling advertising and whatnot on Picasa: https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/166073?hl=en So the binary variable for 'profit' gets flipped...

Snapseed is not doing any better, though. IIRC Google already shut down an app for Snapseed.

I think Picasa might wind up being merged totally into Google+, although by my established criteria that would not count as a shutdown.
I wonder if all this data is searchable by the NSA/CIA. I reckon it would produce a map like this for personal mail:
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-s...

I'm curious how the map would look for commercial mail (catalogs/bills) and packages
I guess that little bobby tables has to receive mail, from time to time.
This is why it's a terrible idea to ask for some random algorithm runtime in an interview. It says absolutely nothing about programming or reasoning skill.

I'd rather ask a candidate to explain their favorite data structure to me and derive it's big-O complexity right then and there. Being able to regurgitate the correct answer doesn't count for anything in my book.
No, that part was OK. I just don't want to be included, by assumption, in the set of people needing protection or those who should be afraid.

Even if the comment merely describes an opinion about me (and others) without directly putting words into my mouth, that opinion still seems to say that something is for my "own good." I disagree with the prescription and I would like to be excluded from the idea.
I just got 'Test-driven web development with Python" from this sale. Django feels awesome! Got 'Two Scoops", too =P
Oh boy, another “found some bugs, (by the way, hire me)” post.
In my experience so far (Prius, 110000 miles) it is more like 5x. And the Prius brakes are tiny things, especailly compared to the huge brakes on the German cars I've owned in the past. The Tesla S is comparable to them in weight and handling, and the brake system looks comparable too. From the testing and reviews we know it has excellent stopping distance, so it looks to me like the best of both worlds. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets 10x the lifetime out of brake pads, depending on driving conditions of course.
>I haven't worn Glass.

OK, so this is probably a useless article, but let's skim ahead and see where the author did a rigorous analysis of customer feedback, compensating for known biases... and, OK, it's just a list of cherry-picked complaints.
At this rate when a student opens a Coke or Pepsi in school it will be considered an explosive device.
> You can bring US trends and concepts into foreign markets and face much less competition.

That's exactly what the Samwer brothers are doing in Germany: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/ins...
ALL MEAT DIET TO LOSE WEIGHT
ALL MEAT DIET TO LOSE WEIGHT
I don't think it's bizarre. If I'm a tailor and create a new suit, I can transfer ownership to someone else. If I create music then I should have a similar right to permanently transfer copyright ownership. To me that seems 'natural', and moreover it makes the copyright more valuable, providing a greater incentive to produce the music.
Worse than ads I think is the long-term (in civilizational terms) potential for this to be abused in the domain of politics.
Slightly academic, but this cheat sheet gives out some shorthand explanations to many of the methods in the Big-O document:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/39557873/Data-Structures-Cheat-She...
The Google Glass Backlash Begins: The Osborne Effect
More like, 'a study prompted by noting serious flaws in an Arthur column and deciding to do better, while borrowing perhaps <1/10th of the final dataset from Arthur's data' (he had ~30, I wound up with 350).
This is very shallow and of limited use.