skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This actually shows a useful IRC channel for once. Some nitpicks about the Perl 6 features mentioned though:

<jnthn> bytes($string) # how many bytes

This would ofcourse be 100% dependent on what kind of character-encoding you use so I checked some reference material: (http://search.cpan.org/~moritz/Perl6-Str-0.0.3/lib/Perl6/Str...)

$s->bytes returns the number of bytes of the NFKC-normalized
and UTF-8 encoded $s. This is subject to change.

While UTF-8 is a good default encoding, it seems odd to tie standard functions into things which cannot be presumed. Without having the ability to specify encoding, you will have one function for UTF-8 and a different one (roll your own?) for every other encoding out there.

This, together with "This is subject to change", strikes me as slightly inconsistent and unreliable function.

<sjohnson> will Perl 6 contain a switch / case structure?
<japhb> sjohnson: given/when.

I honestly don't see how in a C-style language, using different names for the exact same construct found in every other C-style language adds any real value.

Apart from that, Perl 6 seems to be moving forward. I still think it looks kinda lacking compared to languages I like to use, but like mentioned in the IRC excerpt, language debates tends to get kinda pointless ;)
I'm inclined to agree with you, but simply using multiple processes + IPC wouldn't have really affected this bug: you'd run into the same issue with one process reading from a shared memory region while another process memcpy()'s into it. That might be less likely to occur than with a multi-thread model, but it's still quite possible.

I think the lesson from the original post isn't "multi-threaded == bad"; it is that you should be very careful when accessing the same memory region with two concurrent threads (or processes), even if both of those threads are performing seemingly-innocuous operations.
It makes sense. For some evolutionary reason our brains find many peculiar tasks to be very satisfying and in order to "find the fun" games are designed to tap into those. For example there are a huge amount of "organizing" games, such as Tetris, that play on the fact that for some reason people love to assemble things to be perfect and just in the right place. The games industry has been like a big research experiment to find these obscure things that for some reason people love to do. Now we can use this knowledge to improve existing products' usability.

The article already touched on the Nike iPod software, but another similar example of using a game for self improvement is the RPG bank toy that exists in Japan. http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/06/bankquest-bring/ With this bank/toy the money you put in also exists in a virtual world and so you can buy new armour for your avatar.

The Sixty One http://www.thesixtyone.com/ steals quite obviously from some of the recent developments in games as it will mimic Xbox Live and give you achievements for doing various music rating tasks on the site.

Myself I've considered a few ideas to use games in my work. When I was writing a tool to automatically compile help files for our code I considered trying to build in some sort of leaderboard that would show during a build who had commented the most in the hope that it would encourage people to comment every one of their functions. However there were too many technical issues to iron out at the time and so I didn't proceed with it. I think the overall concept though was a smart one (unless people started doing useless comments...)
I think we're this '' close to an avalanche of puns here as well. I only hope the leaves hold.

Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555296
I often hear basic income heralded as a sweeping reform. Perhaps one should try to position basic income as relatively small step to contain bureaucracy: All means of state welfare (and we have a lot of them in e.g. Germany) will be combined into one; and as the state already knows how much money you make for tax purposes, it just re-uses that knowledge to determine your basic income allowance.
Perhaps I am wrong: I thought the battery pack mentioned in the article was basically just some AA-style cells packed together for your convenience.

Anyway, I share your sentiment.
>> "This actually shows a useful IRC channel for once."

You'd be surprised. The log isn't uncommon, especially on freenode, where you often end up being able to chat to really knowledgeable people who have built very cool stuff.
The problem isn't that people know nothing about statistics. The problem is that they think they know more than they actually do. It's fairly easy to get past your "intro to stats" class with only a passing familiarity with the subject and no deep understanding. Only once you truly grasp stats do you realize that you don't actually know anything.

Any statistical formula will predict its own failure. That's kind of mind-blowing, and the implications aren't always grasped after just one semester (or quarter) studying the topic.
New lower costs for music digital stream in the UK
Yes but those are boring and lack imagination (no offence meant to you but speaking from a global brand perspective)

Ovi is different yet not overly complicated or difficult to pronounce or remember.
I've read this before. Zed does not provide any details on learning or understanding statistics in this rant.
We have de facto certification. It's called moving to silicon valley :)
I'm sure I've previously read about these sorts of people being employed by various intelligence agencies. Maybe it was just in some fiction novel, but it would make a lot of sense.

I think they were referred to as flashers. That is people who could be flashed a face, and remember if they'd seen it before. Very useful for going through mug shots to see if they had any known aliases associated with the same photo/face.

Can anyone provide any more information?
I wonder if this is a "feature" of women or all minorities? For example, do male nurses show the same egolessness as female programmers?
Tesla Motors Now Worth Half of GM's Value (On Paper)
If more than a decade of being an immigrant in an EU country (happily left it) has learned me something, it is that - concerning the immigration - the statements of (EU) politicians are lip service.

Consider this statement: "Highly skilled migration into Europe increases our competitiveness and economic growth," said Jacques Barrot, the EU's justice and home affairs commissioner. "Such migrants are always welcome in the EU."

But then you read "Those approved under the visa would also be offered wages at least 1.5 times more than the average gross annual salary in the country they will work in." Further, in no article concerning this topic could I find if someone can actually become a permanent resident and even a citizen of some EU country.

Let's face it, (almost) no employer (no matter if we are in recession or not) will pay that much (would you?). And (almost) no employee will be ready to live in uncertainty, from one visa renewal to the next one (would you?). But, that's how it should be: Voters should be sure that "immigrants will not take their jobs" and politicians can tell to the businesses "we are doing something".

If you are facing this problem "The EU's working-age population will shrink by more than 50 million by 2050, and many officials say only a steady influx of newcomers will offset the impact of low birth rates and an aging population." your laws must be more inviting.
Here are a couple of really interesting web pages about 'face blindness'.

http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/
http://www.prosopagnosia.com/main/stones/index.asp
If I were to guess, I would assume that it is the indeterminant nature of the durability that is the killer.
There's defamation-specific insurance out there, typically called "media liability insurance," which fills that need. I believe Chubb Insurance just released a new "MediaGuard" policy that's supposed to have pretty broad coverage in that area.

For reference, there are two main risks covered by liability insurance: "defense" and "indemnity." The former pays the costs of a legal defense, the latter pays a settlement / verdict. Most media liability insurance policies cover both, but can charge different premiums based on the "retention" for defense and/or indemnity, i.e. how much you have to spend before the insurance kicks in.

If the big worry is paying lawyers to defend a "frivolous" suit, then focus on the former; if the big worry is a "large verdict," then focus on the latter. A common way to save on the premium is to have a sizable retention -- like $20,000 or more -- but then have good coverage after that. If you get sued, you might have to eat the first $20k in legal fees, but won't get bankrupted by the legal fees or the verdict.
Interestingly one can imagine the book's Oceania to resemble North Korea. I.e. it's "just" an isolated dictatorship in England; the image conveyed of the rest of the world is just propaganda.
Well, yeah - the author's a religious conservative (hired recently to keep some representation of Team Red in the NYT editorial pages), and he's shamelessly grabbing random data and trying to make them support his political goals.
From The Past To The Future: Tim Sweeney Talks (EPIC: Unreal, Gears of War)
You know, I've read a bunch of Zed's articles, and I always end up thinking that he's the source of most of his problems. There was a talk I saw him give (can't find the link) to a bunch of college kids where he basically said "phone in your job, do the stuff you love on your own time, everyone else is retarded and they'll never understand you."

Great attitude you have there. I know guys like that; guys who are extremely egotistical, are always right, and know everything about everything. They're team killing, energy sucking, wastes.

He may be able to hack like a dream, and "thanks for Mongrel" and all, but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as him. I think from now on I'll do my best to ignore Zed's perspectives on life; they're more than a little skewed.
Perhaps stats of his business? I guess of his website.
And everywhere else, people have to put up with crappy programming? I think this system leaves a bit to be desired.
Robert Reed wrote a lovely SF novella, "Do I Know You?" (published in 1993), set on a space station where everybody has a brain implant that lets them look up basic biographical information about everyone they meet (at least, every other station resident). A long-term visitor to the station is jealous of how everybody there seems to be a close personal friend of everyone else, and gets the implant for himself. Hijinks ensue.
$10B Overvaluation.

There fixed.
Or take #nethack. While it's "only" about the game, the channel stays focussed, nice and knowledgeable.
Reminds me of the film clip Alan Kay showed at one of his talks. It was taken at a Harvard graduation, and it shows many, many Harvard graduates, students, and faculty saying that the Earth was warmer in Summer because the orbit takes it closer to the sun.

http://www.sigchi.org/chi98/chikids/vol2/headlines/head2.htm...
Please correct spelling: Porche -> Porsche. Thanks.
A paper entitled "Memory-Centric Data Management" by Curt A. Monash is worth reading:

http://www.monash.com/MCDM.pdf
The only thing that really matters here is the write load and the distribution of your reads. The read load can easily be handled by a memecache-like cacheing layer unless it is completely random and you don't have enough RAM. The write load will determine how fast keys get expired out of the cache layer (plus the associated read load this creates) and what sort of i/o throughput your persistence engine will require.

To be completely honest, if memcache, memcachedb, redis, and tokyo cabinet are not getting the job done then you are probably doing things very, very wrong...
I studied CS and I got past my "intro to stats" class with only a passing familiarity with the subject and no deep understanding (aside from the probability aspects of the course).

The professor was very poor overall. I was able to cram enough to do well, but I retained very little after the final. I would love a deep understanding built from the foundations-- the coursework we had was a lot more obtuse and "take my word for it".

In a sense, I felt I got a better foundation for statistics from a freshman sociology class than from the Math professor.
Obama's Web Transparency: not for everybody
Since Microsoft was probably willing to pay a premium to keep other advertising platforms out, the drop from $15 billion doesn't seem that bad for them. Earlier investors probably bought in at a value below $10 billion.
Another avenue to consider is a column-oriented database like Metakit, MonetDB, or FastBit.
Wouldn't the solution be not to refund the money yourself, but take the Paypal route from the outset?
As a minority Irish musician, I find that this seems to have a dampening effect on my ego. (Not 100% sufficient to keep me from making a fool of myself occasionally, though.) It's also caused me to be very, very paranoid about whether or not I "get it" and as a result I've had bouts of beneficial studiousness. And yes, I have to do better to win respect, and sometimes I am judged by my skin color, not my actual playing.
Um, I noticed that you the item number you used was 625256 but the URL has 625255 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625255)

But then I have no idea what language or query that is so I probably misunderstood
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626941

which links to

http://thenextweb.com/2009/05/26/confirmed-facebook-accepts-...
How Juxtapoz magazine sparked a lowbrow art revolution
Of all the characters I've read and watched over the years Winston Smith is still the one I relate to the most. And Orwell really understood women. I've had many deja vu's back to the novel 1984 over the years and it was usually watching some woman responding emotionally to some speaker or some event and the deja vu goes back to the scene early in the book where the women are responding to the daily pep rally from Big Brother.
Flock 2.5 Delivers the Promise of Social Media on the Web
interesting stat. But calling it a predictor may be a stretch as it does little to help either side make decisions as to how far to push a case. Once your making oral arguments in front of the highest court, there is little room left for such a stat to be useful.
The talk is from CUSEC, probably this one: http://vimeo.com/2723800

As for his "attitude", I've actually met him and talked to him face-to-face. His internet persona is a put-on and he only talks like that to piss people off. In actuality, he's a really nice guy who is super-smart and who does not take shit from people. It's actually too bad that there aren't more of him in our industry. Scope creeps, memory leaks, etc. would be a thing of the past.
What is happiness?
Just add another game to weed out useless comments.

(Obviously designing such a game might be difficult.)
Seems to be. Here's more info:

http://thinkingconcurrently.com/2009/05/21/running-bespin-on...
This guy writes about as well as J.K. Rowling.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=585153

Cereal Killer respectfully disagrees.
They should save those $100M, Bing will be another failure.
I use PayPal to sell subscriptions. If the card fails it will make two more attempts in three day intervals before cancelling the subscription. You should have been able to cancel any subscriptions when you log into PayPal. Your experience seems quite outside the norm.
Why can't you just pee before the movie like normal people?
You are who your project yourself as, and to the billions of people who haven't met him who may stumble across his stuff online, he comes across as a selfish dick. IRL he could be happiness and teddy bears stuffed with sunshine, but so far as I'm concerned if the industry was full of people like him it would be in ruins.

Also, that was the exact video I was talking about, so thanks.
It's caused by tilt/angle of Earth, correct?
I think a better way to help would have been to spend the time writing a blog post introducing some core stats concepts and showing how to use R to do useful things...
Poverty’s Two-Way Street
600 days ago & HN was still worried about turning into digg. Plus ça change...
Starbucks & ATT: Multi-Channel User Experience Gone Wrong
> - Baguette/Brie at the gas station is better than what you'd find in most French restaurants/Boulangeries in the US.

The gas station is not making the bread, they are buying it from a local bakery. Since there is a demand for good bread the random places like this can move enough inventory to get daily delivery, which keeps the bakery running, etc. Oddly enough, I found croissants in Paris to be uniformly mediocre. I can get the same level of quality without really trying here in the SF area and can get better than any I found in Paris by going to the company that supplies Thomas Keller. The best I have ever found were in small villages in Perigord (Belves FTW...)
#Haskell is another room that is useful. There is constant deep, on-topic discussion between experienced users who will also go out of their way to help newbies, without rockstar cliques who are too important to allow that in their channel.
"I honestly don't see how in a C-style language, using different names for the exact same construct found in every other C-style language adds any real value."

Did you notice the next line?

"<japhb> sjohnson: and it's quite powerful."

That implies it's more than just switch/case. If it's not quite the same thing as switch/case, then it's appropriate to give it a different name, even if it fills the same functional role.
A vertical web in a widescreen world
Why do we now find ourselves in a world of wide computer monitors? In almost every area where we have a lot of content to work with we find ourselves scrolling vertically. It seems that except for entertainment purposes, vertical screens would better accommodate typical use.

Did the widescreen phenomenon come into being due to stylistic influences and perception or is there a solid case for widescreen being more useful than tallscreen?
Can anyone recommend a decent (read "not boring") book on statistics?

Something along the lines of "Naked Economics" for the stats realm ...
"Most of the people I met in Shanghai argued why Tudou was stronger, while those in Beijing argued YouKu had the edge."

Wonder who the writer talked to? When I ask my local Shanghai friends which site they prefer, I get the answer YouKu more often than Tudou. I won't claim my informal poll is better or worse than the writer of this article, but I question the conclusion.
Knowing what I know now, that would make sense. Hindsight is always 20/20, and I was more trusting then than I am now -- which still doesn't explain why Paypal gave him money from my account when they could have clearly seen (and in fact I faxed to them multiple times, and emailed them dozens of times) that I'd already refunded the guy the money for the motherboard he said he no longer wanted. If I knew I was going to get scammed, of course I would've approached it much differently.
I'd go farther: don't try to read from memory at the same time that someone else is writing it. In the absence of explicit guarantees of atomicity, don't assume that any guarantees exist.

The interesting discovery in the article isn't that memcpy() can leave things in an intermediate state, but that releasing a JNI array triggers a copy even if the array is unaltered.

But this looks like a bug in the program (or the VM): either that copy back to the heap should not be occuring, or there should be some locking here. What if the data was changed? Would the Java thread just be expected to deal with all intermediate states? Alternatively, if the data is read-only, don't write to it!
Next iPhone edition(s) may be tailored to host-country's telecoms
This is what happens when all the hype moved on the next language. What remains is a kind, good community. But it's too late, a language also needs momentum and hype.
Facebook VS. Tonido
This effect has actually been observed for quite awhile. For some inexplicable reason, people associate Google with integrity and correctness. We've observed people get objectively better results from non-google sources and then say Google's was better. When asked why, they basically special plead the case for Google (e.g., "This isn't what I meant to search for but it's very interesting." is evidently a real excuse offered).

It's a very weird effect. Ignoring everything else, Google certainly wins at cultivating brand loyalty. They're up there with Apple's brand loyalty in that respect.
"I used to work for a company"

Note highlights... Company, not government.

That's data protection, not politics.
A Feb 6, 2009, dissing of Resig. (if that's what your web dev world needs)
I need an automatic Ross Douthat filter.

He knows so much about women.

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend's parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point--"Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?" she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn't sure what to say, but then I wasn't sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business... and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered--"You know, I'm on the pill..."

From his book Privilege, page 184.

See: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/fear-of-reese-withersp...
A weak article, but the story is interesting. It has been better covered in the Economist:
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=1...
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...

And if you are really interested in capital machinations and strategy, I would recommend reading all the Economist stories in chronological order (use Google rather than their lamentable in-house search engine) for the blow-by-blow treatment. It's a great story which will likely become the subject of a book next year, and might even make a good movie. Sadly, one German investor was so badly hit by Porsche's aggressive financial strategy that he committed suicide after losing billions of Euro when Porsche made its famous 'short squeeze' play.
The Problem of Design by Negation
7.4 billion: Sun Microsystems. Creators of SPARC, Solaris and Java.

10 billion: Facebook. Creators of an applet that lets you water plants.

How the fsck does this happen?
This is the worst bit:

He added that he was being singled out for a paper that
was a chore to write and brought him no added prestige.
"Who cares? This is a review article," he says. "I'm
never going to write another one, because of this
bullshit."

Review articles are invaluable, at least in my field. Collecting results that are disparate in time and space not only saves other researchers time, but the process of arranging the article often clarifies the presentation. (N.B. this probably only applies to theory-oriented fields.)

And it "brought him no added prestige"? It must have been pretty bad if no one noticed...
If many languages/libraries have SortedCollection, or a collection which is always a sorted sequence, why not have something like a "TrimmedString?" It'll be a string that's always in the trimmed state. That would eliminate lots of "trim()" calls.
I like having a wide screen that scrolls vertically. Humans naturally find it easier to look side-to-side then up-and-down, and most web pages do place the most important content at the top, such that it can all be displayed on one screen by looking side-to-side. For reading long passages of text, I can read longer lines and scroll less-often.

The possibility of having to scroll side-ways would, in my opinion, be a much less intuitive action, especially if people are already used to scrolling vertically.
The 4 levels of making code work