skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with trying to reason using the concept of "creating value" is that "value" is such a transient, subjective, and ephemeral thing. Human beings don't fully use logic when they assign value.

"Value" from the standpoint of markets is not the same as "actual benefit." I'm not sure you can really measure the latter. If you try, you start living Zen parables.

Let's take Adult Friend Finder as an example. It has "value" according to the market. We know because it makes money. But the vast majority of its users probably don't get what they think is the "actual benefit" they would've wanted. But is even that an actual benefit? I now have a relationship with mutual respect, love, and trust. I now see the goal of Adult Friend Finder as a trap. The opportunity cost and risk of disease involved with finding casual sex makes it seem less of a "benefit" to me.

It's like that story of the farmer and good luck/bad luck. http://www.timesquotidian.com/2009/04/17/good-luck-bad-luck/

So where does this leave economics? There's still all of the game theory, but the need for a more sophisticated outlook on human motivation is acknowledged by the field.
I thought the second comment was interesting:

>I believe the flaw in the argument is that the higher-level languages are actually more constrained, because they have made too many broad promises and are unable to tell when they can violate them without ill effect, even though it is obvious to the programmer. We might think that your example above would be a perfect case in which we could parallelize the loop... but what if sum() had side effects, such that it would produce the wrong result if not evaluated in order? What if sum() didn't have any directly detectable side effects, but called another function which called another function which did... sometimes, from code in a runtime eval? The compiler has no way of knowing this, so it has to assume the worst, and this is why it ends up being unable to make all the optimizations that one thinks it "should" be able to make. The human looks at it and says "duh, it's called 'sum'. If it has side effects, I'm going to smack somebody up the side of the head" and proceeds to optimize in the expected ways.<
For anyone who doesn't get the Amen Break reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
Play Is the Foundation for Religion
Death From Above 1979 works for me...
Seriously? The picture is one of the main reasons I don't like it. I find the google logo changes to usually be really interesting and clever, whilst the selection of random clip-art at bing to be a bit crass, and distracting.
"there are a very limited number of applications that require that sort of speed"

Plenty of software is not web-based or a cron job for Linux.

Java, C# are chosen not just because of speed.

You can get vendor support from Sun for their JVM stack. You can (try to) get similar support from Microsoft for .Net stack.

Then also there are personal preferences ::

. Static Typing can be a key part of how people build complex systems in a way they feel comfortable with. When my team codes that way, may bugs are picked up at compile time versus deploy time.

. JVM has really nice remote debugging

. JVM is much closer to run-anywhere than Python

. JVM exits with hs_err files logged
I'm quite interested. It's high time someone tried to get beyond byte codes as the building blocks of high level languages.

Why not something like Scheme? It seems to be as good a candidate as anything else. GCC used to use a Lisp-like language for its intermediate representation.
A Snippet of Bookmaking and Horse Racing history
Why would you bother or care about the opportunities of some guy who you might never meet again, especially if you are trying to meet a deadline or had a bad day or whatever.
Just discovered analord a few months ago. Love love love it.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3573820/AFX_(Aphex_Twin)_-_A...

(it's a vinyl release people, so unless you have a turntable this is the only way to get a copy)
Static typing hardly replaces unit tests.

And I think it's a stretch that people who use unit tests are just trying to compensate for a lack of static types. Actually, it's more than a stretch, it's false for pretty much any competent programmer.

If it were true, why would Java programmers use JUnit?
Busting the nine myths of cloud computing
So true.

[edit:] if only... Amend to: some day, we will program as efficiently as possible, and software will do most of the annoying housekeeping.
I don't think education has much to do with it. It's more of an intellectual curiosity and a capacity for independent thought two things which most people lack. How else do you explain children who take to computers at a young age.
Ask HN: Job scene in Canada
How is the job scene in Canada? For a developer with usual skills (PHP, Java in my case). I'm finding it difficult to find good jobs here in US currently, would like to try Canada.

Any suggestions/experiences?
> Possibly that should be partition-all from seq-utils

As of June 20th, there is now an optional padding argument in clojure.core/partition.
Feedity: Create RSS Feeds From Any Website
But... won't someone think of the children!

Sometimes it seems like that's all one has to say to create an environment like this.
Reading this story makes me wonder as to the basis for his complaints. Did the environment really change (and is it more than the current slowdown)? Did Beck's expectations gradually change? Are other leading consultants encountering thin times? Is there reason to think they will persist? It's hard to reason from anecdotes.
I seem to recall that pushing kids to perfection is a huge problem in modern society. We focus too much on everything being perfect when we should instead focus on making sure the child did his/her best. I suppose this is just another instance of that behavior.
I've never been able to find anything on there. They seem to have lots of commercial music but not much for my tastes.
I don't think Beck claimed it was a provable lemma; it was a leap of faith.
It also avoids the confusion that is fairly common in big cities which have the same road with different suffixes. Atlanta is notorious for its numerous Peachtree Street, Parkway, Road, etc.

However the downside is that cities can half thousands of blocks, and also I would assume there are times when blocks are developed out of order, which would make directions quite difficult.
Here is my site. There are 6 mixes i did earlier this year. I use them for running to.

http://chunkyslink.com
Some day, something like Python will be the fast low level language, there will be new slower languages that are easier to use than Python, and C will be a memory.

There are Smalltalks that ditched (in one case all) their "primitive" methods written in C against the VM internals because the JIT compiler turned out to be good enough. (Agents for the all case. VisualWorks also lets much of the Dictionary functionality JIT to machine code with no primitives.)

The evolution of programming languages will never end, not in our lifetime certainly, and probably not as long as we walk the earth.

You forget to mention a big factor: speed of cultural transmission. Considering what Lisp, Smalltalk, Self and other languages have been able to achieve for high level languages, why are we still dealing with poky high level languages like Ruby and Python? A part of it is cultural expectations. We still expect HLL to be an order of magnitude slower, even though that expectation is decades out of date, technologically. (HLL should only be 70-50% slower now.)
Indian , about to graduate in july , looking for some interesting engineering work [sorry for the plug, but as you mentioned Indian CS scene is non existent] related to algorithms , computer languages etc , pointers would be helpful...
I would like to see Bing do some more interesting things with this image to make it seem more like a personalised search engine.

For example, since Bing integrates with Live accounts, I'd suspect there is obviously some recording of previous searches by MS to help deliver better results.

Privacy issues aside, I think it might be quite clever for Bing's background image to be more customised to what you might enjoy based off your previous searching history.

EG, say I searched for puppies and dogs more often than the average person, having more cute puppy pictures as my background might make the engine be more appealing to me, even though I wouldn't know it directly.
Google to cut China porn results
/proc/slabinfo and Netfilter Conntrack Memory Usage
IPhone 3GS blows away iPhone 3G in 3D
I thought it was pretty sad too. I'm assuming it was some pesky teenager. Get off my lawn!
It'd match the string, the same way /a/ would match "abcdefg."

grep -o /ab+/ would only show "ab" from "abc"

iirc, /ab(?![^b]+)/ would match "abb" but not "abc"
As a long time Smalltalker, let me say -- we HLL language guys should get off of our high horse about static typing. Anything that you can do to move bugs from runtime to compile time is good for the maintainer. No, static types don't catch everything. But they are desirable if they catch anything at all.

Best of both worlds -- optional static types as in Strongtalk. I can imagine development methodologies that demand you statically type everything before you release to production. This way, you get fast duck typing development and the security of type safety for the maintainer.
Dude, you can start by creating your own new stuff. There's nothing stopping you.
"I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally."

For an individual who has studied classics, you would expect that he would know that all the ancients, greek and romans, considered virtue as a habit, not Aristotle alone. It was rather a cultural thing which is why the Romans emphasised training their pupils to be good citizens by teachers of great character so that they can imitate their habits.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal 2010 with Trial Resetter
The regular expressions built into many programming languages have the semantics of matching any part of the string, not necessarily the whole string. If you want to match the whole string, you're supposed to put ^ at the beginning and $ at the end, or something like that.
Google has grown less effective in many areas over the past few years. I especially hate that it no longer includes all the words in the query, which was originally one of the reasons for switching to Google. Yahoo and Bing are a little stupider in that regard, which means they let the user be a little smarter. No doubt, Google is king of the common query, but it should watch its base. If people need to go to another search engine to find something hard they might not come back for the easy stuff.
Here is another example of Erik's contribution: http://xml.coverpages.org/archsite.html#primFTP
Anyone care to try Duck Duck Go for a week and then send me some similar feedback? We're very open to ideas.
Search engine preference depends, at least to a degree, on personal taste and this guy is entitled to his opinions, but this seems a bit contrived. He complains twice about a horizontal scroll bar when he's using what looks like a very small window. Come on.

The complaint about wasted space is a little puzzling too because in the screenshots it looks like both Google and Bing have about the same amount of "wasted space". The difference is Bing has it on the left and Google has it on the right.

The only gripe that seems legitimate is the image search and it's a bit of a stretch to call the Bing results "irrelevant". The Google image results for a "chi-square table" are clearly better, but some of the images on Bing are similar or identical.

I'm very much interested in comparisons between Google and Bing. This might be the toughest competition Google has faced so far and it's a great opportunity for us to see where search engines can improve. This article, however, is a lousy comparison. There's almost nothing of substance here.

I suspect it's a link bait article designed to plug the book that's prominently displayed on the right side of the page. That's fine, of course, but it's still a lame post.
New Bajaj Pulsar 220cc to be Launched on June 23
Some folks have a natural urge to be obeisant to the powerful, no matter who or what the powerful party is, or what they have done.

That "essay" is a good example thereof.
We are dealing with "poky" high level languages like Ruby and Python because a lot of us find Lisp, Smalltalk and Self horrendous to work with.

Ruby in particular is basically Smalltalk + Lisp for regular people - it's taken a good chunk of the concepts and packaged it in a way more people are happy to work with.

First time I read about Scheme I was fascinated. Until I played with it a while and put it away and promptly went back to lower level languages (C, Pascal and M68k assembler at the time) because the syntax (or lack of ...) was just too alien for me.

Same with Smalltalk.

Yes, I discarded them over syntax. Speed never entered the equation - I dropped them before I got to evaluate performance.

Ruby is the first language I've worked with that could do justice to a lot of the concepts from Smalltalk and Lisp.

I very much doubt Lisp and Smalltalk has much hope of wider use than they see now - most of the important features are being added to other languages, and the remaining ones are not seen as useful enough by most developers to be worth the painful syntax.

The computational models and the work done on compiling them efficiently will contribute a lot though. Most Ruby implementations in the work and several Javascript implementations are all over PIC's and other concepts take from the Self project, for example.
Quick Test: VirtualBox 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0
Visual git tutorial I
Not sure what you mean by storing all possible n. Radix sort is O(nw) and for most use-cases w is smaller than log(n).
Highly unlikely to happen, since the upper bound corresponds to a well-known lower bound.
I'm a bit creeped out by the real-life explanation, if only becasue I JUST finished watching an episode of "House" where the same thing happens. Apparently this is a theme of late.
Hoax, yes, but a very good story.
Should you get Google Voice? Reviews from beta users
Apart from the trolling tone, the sole commenter suggests switching to the US version which is supposed to be better. How would one go about that, then? I didn't understand the hype about bing when first announced until I looked at screenshots - for some reason the extra features seem to be US-only.
I see. Several culture and subculture dependent interpretation issues here too.

No further questions. You may rest :)
Grown kids return to the nest, and regress
Video: How Twitter Can Make History
Economist puts dent in optimism: bigger crash is coming
Note to Usefultools.com team. When I click on the big beautiful screenshot of the site I'm reading about, it should take me to the site, not to the screenshot.
Opera Software reinvents complete irrelevance
Keeping poultry in cities
In an interview following his presentation, Vineet said HCL and other employers need to have a greater influence on the tech curricula of U.S. colleges and universities, to make them more real-world and rigorous.

Hahahaha .. if Six Sigma is more "real world" and rigorous than what they teach in good CS programs in the US, I am Warren Buffett.

God forbid Vineet here gets his wishes about influence with U.S. colleges, because if he does, bank on the number of great engineers graduating from these schools dropping precipitously.
Well I guess the list comprehension and list slicing features in the above example are more interesting than the for loop.
Google is Great OR Google Will Ruin Us All
> Lets be honest -- techno, trance, electro, progressive etc. it's all ultimately pretty much the same thing.

Electro sounds nothing like trance, even if you know little about electronic music. Compare Kraftwerk with Tiesto or ATB for example to see what I mean. You may need to listen to trance for a while to be able to distinguish between, say, Goa and Psychedelic, but saying that all genres of electronic music are ultimately the same thing comes across as ignorant. (I understand that any electronic music sounds like noise to some people, but it's a genre as rich and diverse as any other.)
This has been done dozens of times already, usually with better results.
For the example I tried (a table listing events) it's only picking up the site's "register" and "add to favorites" links and there seems to be no way of telling it to create a feed from different content.
It needs more work.
pointers would be helpful

Only if you're building a linked list using C. </bad CS joke>

Seriously though, how about a link to your profile/resume?
That specific python example is very readable for someone who understands basic math (sets and functions). The clojure example, not so much.
Thanks for the review, and posting it on HN.

What started out as a project inspired from a data mining assignment (back in uni), is now a simple service being used by paying customers, including US state government agencies, libraries, news aggregators etc.

Yes, many websites these days already have RSS feeds, but from what we've seen so far - RSS still has a long way to go before the average Internet user starts utilizing them.

We just introduced some new features, and revamped our service plans. More on our blog @ http://blog.feedity.com
DoS Attacks Trend Toward Politics
You can start by creating a product that changes India. Americans are predominantly the ones who do startups because America is the biggest player in the global economy, and no one understands American culture, desires, and needs quite better than America.

Look at Shaadi.com. A site like that would have fallen flat on its face in America. Conversely, a site like Match.com and eHarmony would be really unsuccessful in India.

You have a unique opportunity in India. There are tons of startups that could only be done in India, and not in America. These startups need to be done by Indians, not by Americans. The track record of American VC's in India isn't very good, they just don't "get it".

Historically, business in India has been dominated by the big family players- the Ambami's, the Birla's, the Tata's. This is because every business in India has a huge government overhead to deal with- it's hard to go above the mom-and-pop level without dealing with the corruption and bureaucracy that plagues India.

The Internet changes all that. More and more people are getting wired. The local politicians, the corrupt officials that want bribes, and all the other authorities can't control you in cyberspace. You instantly eliminate all that overhead!

So go and develop your idea! It's stupid to speak in terms of generalizations and stereotypes. Yes, there's a large culture gap between America and India- this makes it hard for Indians to innovate- it's hard to cross that chasm and understand our needs.

But there's nothing stopping you from developing a site just for Indians. The Indian version of cyberspace is basically like 1997. Everyone is still building these big "portals". Indian newspapers are still coming online. American companies are just using India as a bodyshop and not really serving India's needs.

Stop thinking about how India can cater to the US, and start thinking about how India can cater to India. Once India does this, India can control her own destiny and become the superpower it so badly wants to be.

--an ABCD
Profilo di Luca Falace su Yahoo
So is the ideal of innate genius dead? If not, should we kill it? Certainly a clear-eyed analysis shows that "genius" is really a set of exceptional skills cultivated through disciplined study. We should probably shelve the notion of genius as an innate, almost irrepressible gift and speak instead of expertise, talent or even greatness - terms that hint at the work underlying supreme accomplishment.

Perhaps we should kill the notion of genius, although the author seems to consider genus soley as someone who achieves the highest heights, while the traditional understanding of a genius is someone who is exceptionaly intelligent, regardless of their achievements. I do not know is such people do exist, however there are individuals with a very low intelligence hence perhaps it is safe to assume that there are individuals with a very high intelligence.

More importantly however, the author seems to disregard intelligence and emphasise work, while in truth both of them are needed as much. In the crem dela cream, most of those people got there by working very hard and putting in the hours, as most of them have this passion therefore, the winner will be the one who has a slightly higher intelligence.

Not in any way to undermine the effect of the environment, but the environment is something we can control as such it is a good bet many other people are on an equal level "nurture" speaking, but as we can not control our innate ability, then the winner I suppose is the one who has a higher "intelligence.
The Internet’s Payload
The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering
I usually like his writing, but that's the single most badly edited article I've ever read.
Will lawyers ruin cloud computing?
Discovery Academy - Troubled Youth Outdoor Boarding School
Discovery Academy is a therapeutic boarding school for at risk troubled youth. Provides treatment in an outdoor wilderness environment. Troubled teen therapeutic boarding school.
Microsoft shares look 'super cheap'-Barron's
Folk Memory: A Minimalist Architecture for Adaptive Federation of Object Servers
Activision’s Kotick: ‘We May Not Make Games For The PS3 Next Year’
Why did this get tagged with "scribd"? It's a direct link to a PDF, it has nothing to do with scribd.
This is why I still read el-reg. Underneath the satircal writing are some very strong points (most notably - why javascript? Why bother? and what a bad idea!) :D
Oh...an economist, not The Economist :)
The "power user" angle described in this review are worth paying attention to -- this may scare away many people who aren't that savvy at configuration and setup.
Something in between a honey pot and a tarpit; which hopefully helps you develop your idea further because it sounds fascinating--from the perspective of me, with my
no knowledge whatsoever of virology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_(networking)
This is a terrible chart of visualization techniques.
Please see "Visualization is not Periodic, Period!"

http://eagereyes.org/blog/2009/visualization-is-not-periodic...
You're being too hard on India. In every country there is a small % of talented programmers. Many of those smart Indian programmers are doing fantastic work in grad schools around the world. They are a huge part of Silicon Valley (as are Chinese ex-pats). Of course, there's a larger % of code monkeys. Indian code monkeys are, IMO, better than American code monkeys because they follow instructions and work hard despite their limited talents. Rote memorization and checklists and "process" are necessary to get less capable programmers to function.
I think you pick some good points from various websites. I know hierarchical discussions bother me all the time, especially the branching of replies to the right. I'm not sure yet what the right way is to make discussions work, but at the very least they should be linear.
"As the video shows, in our OpenGL ES testing, the 3GS is generally close to four times faster than the 3G. Results will vary depending on the application but this is remarkable to say the least."

It would have been cool if they had tested some real-world apps from the App Store. Not sure how they would be benchmarked, though -- load time?