skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All bark no bite as far as I'm concerned. Activision is just trying to get Sony to drop the price by threatening to pull games. This doesn't really make any sense, because Activision doesn't really produce many (if any?) PS3 exclusives, so making a game for 360 and not making it for PS3 would be crazy, since it doesn't require as much work to port a game as it does to write it from scratch.

PS3's graphics and processors seem superior if you look at current games, but we all know it is difficult to program for. I think we have seen the Xbox's incline, and will start to see 360 sales falter just a bit as it tops out. When this happens PS3 will begin getting more titles and more exclusives due to it's increased graphics and processing power benefits (Kind of like the PS2).

If you want a good example of this, compare the graphics of inFamous to Prototype. These are very similar games, but inFamous is exclusive to the PS3. To me it looks much better.
That's not Facebook invading your privacy, that's other people invading your privacy.
Ask HN: Adding 2 + 2 on the Cloud ?
I realize the title may be a little provocative but here is what I am looking for.

Let us imagine I have a complex python/basic/lisp/fortran/matlab program that can take two inputs and produce the result of an algorithm implemented in that complex program.

How do I go about setting up a service on the cloud where the program can be run by others and billed to me ?

Is there a basic tutorial somewhere on this topic ?

Thanks in advance,

Igor.
Readability Project ported to Python, PHP
Is a Truste web privacy seal worth it?
I was looking into getting this for my site. Truste is a non-profit. Does this look like something relevant? As a web consumer does it really make people feel more secure on a site? Are there other alternatives?
You can't type "mailinator.com" in Facebook chat
GPUs Will Have 20 Teraflops of Performance by 2015
I absolutely have to listen to music when doing pretty much anything. I usually start with something jazzy or even classical (ever listened to gregorian chants? awesome) then move on to progrock (or what else should Mars Volta be called) and I end up either at minimalism or some techno.
Silence is distracting!
Here ( http://files.getdropbox.com/u/196807/peaktraffic.tgz ) is a proof of concept of HashFold that I used for my solution for the facebook puzzle ( http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php?puzzle_id=8 ).

It's written in python. You can run it with './peaktraffic input'. It has 5 different use cases for HashFold: a counter, two different filters, an adjacency list builder, and a cluster finder. The README explains the solution, but does so in terms of MapReduce.

This code wasn't written with the intent of public consumption, so take it as you may.

Any questions, let me know.
Perhaps it seems that way to you because you are more familiar with Algol syntax than Lisp syntax, or because you have gone on to learn the more advanced Lisp features. But Scheme syntax and semantics, for example, are arguably at least as simple as that of an Algol language. Scheme has been used successfully as a first programming language in high school computer science courses: http://www.teach-scheme.org/
I love it! I have been looking for a RSS feed like this for quite a while now. Good Job!
“It’s always been at the back of our mind to move to this model, but we never had the incentive to do it..."

You may have the incentive, but do you have the capability?

Fixed or value based contracts not only require better expertise, they require different culture. Even your good people have become do indoctrinated with the concept of fleecing the bill that they may have actually forgotten how to compete by simply getting the work done efficiently and effectively.

Good luck. Better yet, good luck to your customers.
"Some objected to the way I asked the question...."

Here Atwood links to a very insightful blog post by Paul Buchheit: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/question-is-wrong.h...

To continue the quote:

"...but it was a simple question asked in simple language."

Yes, a simple question, with two perfectly valid interpretations, as described by Buchheit. When I first read the question, I interpreted it the "wrong" way. The simple language that is used to ask the question is too simple, to the point of not being specific.

"I think what they're really objecting to is how unintuitive the answer is."

No sir. I am in fact objecting to the wording.
When they showed the 10-year-old pitcher as a 4-foot-tall sticker in the living room, I literally cringed with horror. It looks fantastic, and fits well, in a children's room, but it looks absolutely vile above an Ikeariffic couch.
How do you build the hash table at the first place? "We look up the key in the hash table and get a value (referred to as v2)."

Do you know Haskell a bit? Try to write your examples in real Haskell, a friendly type system helps a lot to clean up your pseudo-code.
This reminds me a bit of the lastfm music visualization http://sixdegrees.hu/last.fm/index.html . Flipping either on the vertical and horizontal axises puts them in a position to line up somewhat. I wonder with a more full data-set from Netflix if the similarities would increase.
On #5, the code isn't doing what the author may think:

(let [#^int a 2
#^int b 3]
(cons a b))

a and b are not hinted to be primitive types. Type hinting is purely for objects. Use hinting to make it clear to the compiler what sort of objects you are passing into something (e.g. a constructor that takes a String). If there is confusion, clojure will do reflection.

The right thing to do in this case, is the second thing that the author mentions:

(let [a (int 2)
b (int 3)]
(cons a b))

a way to see that a and b are really primitive is:

(let [x (int 5)]
(.shortValue #^Integer x)) ; exception: "can't type hint primitive..."

There's a post on the mailing list that goes over this much better than I did (and where I drew the examples): http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

I understand that this is really beside the point, that the author finds type hinting syntax unattractive, but I just wanted to clear up confusion (if there was any).

EDIT: clarity
Finite maps galore: imperative code strikes back
looks like it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Xenon_in_...
the line breaks make it hard to read.
So it's under the radar. That doesn't change the fact that aggregating full content without permission exceeds the bounds of "fair use".
Convincing GigaOM
I will not argue the first point, but as for the second one: how does that one author determine what is 'the Pythonic way'? I think

[sum(week) for week in partition(7, 7, daily)]

is 'the Pythonic way' and I find that quite a bit easier to comprehend than

map(sum, partition(7, 7, daily))

The reason for that is as simple as it runs counter to what people usually preach: it is less concise. In the former, it is immediately clear that you are partitioning a list of days into partitions of weeks and summing over those weeks, resulting in a list of weekly sums. The extra word 'week', repeated twice, makes all the difference: all ingredients for comprehension are readily provided. The latter case, on the contrary, requires you to do a few mental operations to expand the expression into something meaningful, mentally adding the concept of a 'week' to understand what the code is doing. You need to do that everytime you read the code, which makes it less easy to understand.
Don't Let Your Board Get Too Crowded
I've yet to use one of these site and have a feed actually work for more than a couple of weeks. Anyone have better experience?
Finding Similar Items with Elastic MapReduce, Python, and Hadoop Streaming
thank you... added the "among .NET developers" to the title of the post
you need anything that gives you a competitive advantage.

1. getting professional help on writing your resume is a big plus. there is a huge disconnect between the things we programmers think is good to put on a resume and the things that people who read your resume think is important. Most things get ignored, other things get the wrong emphasis, basically the wrong things get communicated unless your resume is very carefully done.

2. interview coaching will help you a lot too, for when you do get an interview.

3. the correct attitude. you seem focused and have a good idea of what you are looking for, so that is a big plus. also keep your cool. the minute you begin your appearance goes from eager to desperate, it's over.

I personally know the author of a book called "Excuse me, your job is waiting" (http://www.amazon.com/Excuse-Me-Your-Job-Waiting/dp/15717452...). She helped me write my resume and it made a difference. Companies are hiring now, they are just being really picky.
You are missing the difference between disparaging an idea versus a person. They are totally different situations.

Shame on you for thinking that disparaging people is valid revenge for people who merely poke fun at ideas. Talk about making it personal.
When does one get the privilege of downvoting?
A reframing which makes intuitive sense (to me):

There are two bucket containing a number of balls. A third of the balls contain iPhones inside, two-thirds contain only navel-fluff. The balls are mixed at random. You have to chose a single ball from one of the buckets.

Obviously the chance of any ball you pick to contain an iPhone is 1/3 regardless of which bucket you choose from - even if the buckets does not contain the same number of balls.

But when you decide on one bucket to pick from, the host takes the other bucket, and removes half of the balls. However, he doesn't remove balls at random - he primarily removes balls containing fluff.

After this you are allowed to reconsider your choice of bucket. I think it is pretty obvious now that there is a better chance of finding an iPhone if you chose from the other bucket, where the host have removed some of the fluff-balls.

The critical point in the Monty Hall problem is that the host eliminates a bad choice, but he always eliminates it from the set of doors you didn't chose. However, this is a subtle detail in how the store is told. If for example the host randomly choose between opening any door containing a goat - including potentially the one the protagonist chose if he happens to choose a door with a goat behind - then it doesn't improve the odds to choose a different door.
Wow, I just lost a tiny bit more faith in humanity. Thought that was past happening from seeing things online until I saw the long stream of just... voidless pseudo angry toughness venting ranting whatever it is. All of it, in its real-time glory.

Damn. At least I'm listening to the smoothness of Mix tunes for power coding sessions.
Facebook Appoints ex- Googler (Again)
Greg Badros’s major responsibilities at Google, as a senior director of engineering, included engineering AdSense that started off back in 2004 and helped the company’s revenue grow up to billions. AdSense proved to be one of the biggest cash making programs for google. His capacities to engineer complex programs could probably be one of the main reasons why facebook decided to track down Greg Badros and add a highly skilled professional to its team.
If you disagree, could you tell me the practical applications of genetics and how they affect the lives of most people?

As far as I'm aware, all genetic engineering has gotten us is GM crops and a some drugs which only affect a few marginal cases. Hopefully that will change in the future, but I prefaced my statement with "so far".
You obsess about that stuff or you end up broke.

So are you saying that, ultimately, profit is the most important metric? ;-)
You need to have fierce loyalty to the people that help you do great things in life. When someone works with you, and especially when they work under your guidance, they're making you successful and the company successful. In return, you do what's right by them, keep them informed, equipped, protect them, stand with them, and so on.

I've got fierce loyalty pretty high in my ethics, but there's a lot of pragmatic reasons too. On any one event, you could blow it off, but it's pretty obvious on the whole who goes to bat for their people and who doesn't. It's not something you make a calculation on - "Hmm, no one will know or care if I don't help this particular time." It's a way of life - take care of people that take care of you. Feels good inside, world sees it, recognizes it, and treats you well. A good thing, top to bottom.
It's easy to take the "upvote what you like" shortcut, I do

These principles are (were?) pg's whishes regarding comment threads. As time passes, the proportion of people who had been directly exposed to these ideas dimishes. The previous post was intended to them (and as a reminder for the rest of us, me included).
Willow Garage: The Personal Robot Will Be Open Source
IPhone 3G S, the best phone out there, but power users should wait it out
No, I regularly find modern registration forms that won't accept mailinator or even hotmail addresses (and your service is probably more akin to mailinator than hotmail).
so personality doesn't correlate with competence, but does that mean we should discount it?
You always meet them again.
That was not my experience, but you and I probably have differing opinions of "detrimental", and I'm not sure how you would correlate abuse or "community detriment" with your data.

We tend to be patient with individuals (even semi-abusive ones) before resorting to crude methods such as banning.
There's a chasm you have to cross to become "senior", whatever that means. One of the biggest skills you need to learn is not technical. That skill is understanding exactly how to apply our limited resources.

Should we worry about how well a certain module was written? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes the answer really is, "It runs well and isn't hurting anything, so let's leave it alone. Opening up that can of worms dumps 47 new issues into our queue and now is not a good time to do that." Or the answer may be, "This has to be made right before we can add these 27 other things to the system or we'll all be in deep sh*t." How do you know which? Experience. Understanding the big picture. Understanding your customers and users. Understanding your dev team. You get the idea.

Taking on a lead role is not selling out if it's used to expand your horizons and make you an all-around better dev person. When you return to full time development, you'll be light years ahead of those who never had to manage the whole project. A little perspective goes a long way.
"Our landmark recognition engine, in fact,
can provide input data to these 3D reconstruction systems
and enables them to be scalable to a large number of landmarks."

This might be revolutionary, as being one of the first automated systems to aggregate visual data into intelligent sets, making it scalable from local to global.

http://www.google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/google_landmark_recog...
But that's tangential. If you are doing exploratory programming, what does unit testing get you? How can you write the tests before the code if you don't have a spec to work from in the first place?

A lot of the pain of strong typing goes away with type inference - and strong typing means you get much better tool support, e.g. you can see a problem right there highlighted in your editor, you don't need to wait for the unit tests to run on your nightly build!
Well, it is targeting specific keywords that usually have a lot of emotion behind them. These aren't all from one person, not even two, but countless multitudes.
The 360's processor is based on the good part of Cell, not the impossible-to-program parts.
When told of this, Paul Erdos, one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th century, said, "That's impossible." Then, when presented with a formal mathematical proof of the correct answer, he still didn't believe it and grew angry. Only after a colleague arranged for a computer simulation in which Erdos watched hundreds of trials that came out 2-to-1 in favor of switching did Erdos concede that he was wrong.

Can somebody please verify this from source, seriously !!
yeah all of the cpu's for this gen of consoles are from IBM including the Wii

Someone can correct me, but to me the main difference between the 360's cpu and PS3's cpu, besides the number of cores, is that the 360's cpu cores are more general purpose while not all of the Cell's cores are equal... The Cell has one main core (PPE) and 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs). These SPEs are not as powerful as a normal core (and I think one of them is reserved for the OS), and (I think) they're main purpose is solely for graphics (well mainly good at dealing with floating point nums). If I remember correctly, the 360 has three general purpose, equally powerful cores (PPEs) in its version of the IBM cpu.

I can imagine someone from IBM probably selling a Sony exec on how the Cell processor can save money by having Cell do both general processing and handling all the video rendering without a separate GPU... which we all know didn't quite work as well as Sony had hoped, since PS3's had an NVidia chip plopped in last min (this probably explains why programming for a PS3 really sucks since Sony wasn't planning on having a separate GPU)
Review My Website Designing
Four legs good, two legs bad.

If you simplify too much you're at risk of losing the original intent.
There is something - mucus.

It doesn't fool them like you suggested, but rather it catches and tangles the viruses and physically prevents them from infecting a cell.
How is this different from their own RSS feed? I think it's just saving them bandwidth.
Are there any communities where this ideal has been met with a simple voting system?
It depends. I might listen to ambient or trance when I'm working because it's designed to fit in the background, or I'm not interested in listening to it as music. But when I'm not working I listen to a lot more prog rock or metal. Or prog metal.
Now remember kids.. swearing makes you look like those people.
How is it easier in UTF-16? Most "normal" Unicode characters fit in two bytes, sure, but you can't just count bytes and divide by two if you want the right answer. It is just as difficult as UTF-8 to implement.
Fair enough. Do you think it's better to not be a code monkey and be unemployed than be a code monkey and have a boring-ass job?
Maybe something using Amazons MapReduce and DevPay or FlexiblePayments?

I wouldnt know how to set up what you want but maybe you can find something in their forums.

BTW: I've used their EC2 and S3 services and I'm very happy so far.
Long exposure shows Roomba’s path around your living room
Everyone agrees that your odds get better. Most people intuitively guess that the odds go from 1/3 to 1/2. It's getting them to understand how you got to 2/3 that's the problem.
This sounds like a paid AMI.

Edit: In retrospect that's not what you want, since for paid AMIs the bill goes to the customer.
What do you mean by "billed to me"? Do you mean you pay for the costs of user's computations, or users pay you to compute an answer?
The Story Of Twitter In Picture Form
I wonder why they didn't just contact the Police?
It might not feature their advertising, their FeedFlare (if on FeedBurner - a great way to drive people to comments sections), special formatting, or tracking graphics that they use for statistics.

Before the inevitable "But I don't care!" responses, whether or not these things are interesting to us as readers is not relevant - they're still differences that could cause publishers to be unhappy and cry foul.

On the plus side, since the HN news is just an aggregation of many sources, it could encourage people to find new sources and subscribe to them directly in the long run. As a content provider myself, I'd be happy with this aggregator if it was indicated in each post what the original source is.. if that's missing, it needs to be added. We want attribution even if we're being syndicated ;-)
I don't believe this is correct. First a virus does not cause a cell to mutate. It's more akin to handing the cell a new set of work orders, but it doesn't mutate the cell's DNA.

Second, I think the "port" is not that the RNA is similar, but rather the virus has a protein key on it's surface that physically allows it to enter the cell.

In the micro world things move by atomic forces. In this case the virus has a protein on it's surface that is the same shape as a protein on the surface of the cell. The same shape means the electrical charges line up, and the virus is drawn toward the cell by electrostatic forces.

If the charge pattern does not match up, the virus will not be drawn toward the cell. Remember the virus has no ability to move.
Hey doesn't the Monty Fall problem also have the same answer as the Monty Hall problem - since the host falls and opens that door which always contains the goat, its same as saying that he knows which door contains the goat and opens that only.

Please correct me if I am wrong !

EDIT: Saw the soln in the pdf and not able to digest it though. Well if Erdos wasn't able to see it...
oh man, hasn't everyone had this stunt tried on them at least once? I guess I'm kindof an impatient jerk about money, though, 'cause I'm pretty quick to say "Ok, well, I'm not working on your project until I see a cheque"

you need to be especially careful of this if you are using a third-party broker or body shop. I find that going direct means that you usually deal with people who are much less slimy.

The key to getting paid is the willingness to walk away. First, if you are doing work before getting paid, remember you are giving them a loan. Never loan someone more money than you are willing to walk away from. And cut your losses early. If they won't pay you after one month, they probably aren't going to pay you after two or three months. stop work. do something else. If they decide to pay you, great. you win. If they don't, well, you are only out one month rather than 3 or 6 months, so you don't lose quite as much.
These are tough questions, and I'm not sure I'd trust random message-board participants (like me ;-) to answer them. People pay operations-research consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars for this.

Something to consider: good code is an asset, and it's a compounding asset. The better your programmers are, the more likely that they'll produce code that they can build upon, and build upon, and build upon, all with relatively few bugs, so that you can go faster as time goes on and the product grows. Mediocre programmers often produce code that requires more maintenance and slower development as time goes on. Either way, the effect is exponential and not linear, which makes it hard to compare against linear differences in salary. Probably should run an IRR comparison against your cost of capital and decide based on that.

This, BTW, is why companies like Google try to find the best talent they can, no matter what the cost. Productivity compounds, and not always in obvious ways. In addition to writing good, solid code, top developers also attract other top developers to work with them, and they create a culture where high achievement is expected and you can't just slack off. These are intangibles that are really hard to put a price on.
There's about 10,000 little painful lessons like this, that you usually learn by making the mistake and cursing repeatedly and vowing never to let it happen again.

If you're lucky, you'll be able to pick up a few of the 10,000 painful mistake lessons from reading about them or being taught them. But most of us are rockheaded and insist on making the same mistakes as everyone else until it's happened to us. Better to learn from a close associate or someone else's story when possible, but people aren't so good at that. But life goes on, as it were. Making those mistakes is where a lot of your skill and lessons come from.
I bet that for every unemployed MSc/PhD from a respectable CS department you can find >100 unemployed code monkies.