skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am using hg (distributed is better than centralized) now but it is so funny because svn just barely took hold in 2004-5 and 4 years later you are a boring old fart for using it. Git and hg should be boring old fart tools in abut 2 years then.
No, he asked about protocol design.

Ideally, a theory based on which engineers built something, but not the other way around, i.e. when something exists and some theorists are trying to build a de facto model of it. Edit: a theory that involves infinities.

Spot the contradiction in this sentence. Even if I would like to argue with you on unedefined problem you have, I can't satisfy your requirements when they're contradictory.

I see PDE's in TCP papers, I don't know what's your problem.

Of course I expect you will dismiss that as too "astral" of an example, but ask Vint Cerf if he did not need any calculus. And then ask him (or Lloyd Wood) again about his new suite of protocols designed for guaranteed connectivity in spite of enormous latencies in orbital and interplanetary internet (with cisco routers with PDE-optimized buffer sizes orbiting already on several satellites).
I know the Perl guys were moving in this direction, but nobody else seems to be onboard.

That's what I meant. As far as I know, nobody else is taking it seriously as a primary VM for their language.
In what respects are they less convenient exactly?
Githooks Ruby Gem
Among many other things, there is a question whether space and time are descrete or continuous, or in other words, whether 1/∞ particularly exists or not. It has implications even in understanding how intelligence works, that is, whether brain is a discrete machine or not. I don't know if i has such broad and important implications.
If you are interested in the true environmental benefits, then a diesel Jetta is a better car than a Prius. The Jetta is just as good as the Prius for fuel economy in real world driving, particularly if you have a significant freeway component to your normal driving. In addition, diesel drivetrains last longer, are less energy and resource intensive to build. And as a side benefit, the turbo diesel VW engines will out perform a Prius in acceleration and real-world driving. In addition, diesel engines have the most fuel flexibility to run on bio-fuels, and bio diesel is the easiest to make, positioning yourself well for future technology changes.

Diesel is not new or it revolutionary. 50% of all new passenger cars in Europe are diesels, they have been continually refined to the point where they are a quiet, powerful clean running powerplant.

The only drawback is that your neighbours and co-workers will not know you made the environmental choice, and you won't get HOV lane inclusion.
My exact words were:

The engineers who designed these systems all made frequent use of the notion of infinity, particularly in their use of limits and calculus.

Do you disbelieve that engineers make frequent use of limits and calculus?

Do you disbelieve that notions of limit, derivative, and integral are contingent on the idea of infinity?

Why should anyone answer your questions while you continue to ignore mine?
hmmm, I would write the equivalent to your perl as:

>>> re.sub("<", "&lt;", "something < other")
'something &lt; other'

which seems much more readable and consistent to me than s/a/b, though the s/ syntax is great for vim users like me.

I don't think this has as much to do with your programming knowledge as your python knowledge?
Edit: Were you being sarcastic? I don't think it's exactly the same, because being able to compile many languages down to a single language is easier than also having to go in the other direction.

Original comment: Yeah, that would be one solution, but I think the shared VM helps so you can easily access libraries written in different languages. I remember why (of Ruby fame) trying to run Ruby code on Google App Engine back when it was Python-only. He discovered that Ruby bytecode is nearly identical to Python bytecode. Like me, he didn't understand why Python and Ruby still need to be on separate runtimes.
As an observer, I appreciate the debate, and I'll add that it doesn't seem to me like you're talking past each other. Giving the other gentlemen the benefit of the doubt that he's something of an expert on this subject, it seems he's very clearly understanding your point and offering his opinion to the contrary.

I, myself, have nothing much to add in the way of hard facts, but using logic, I think that sleep-as-an-energy-saver seems off. Sleep seems like a highly vulnerable state for early animals. If the only initial benefit of sleep was energy conservation, it seems like animals that simply chose to rest would have an edge upon those that slept. By resting, they'd conserve the same energy, but would stay alert and responsive.

And it interests me that animals that cannot rest (sharks, for example) still sleep.
well, I don't disagree that there's a tradeoff there - the s/ and =~ syntaxes are super neat, as opposed to the readable and consistent python style.

I can see that as a reason for preferring perl's syntax, but I just don't understand hating python's regex, which is what my question was about.
Diesel prices > gasoline prices.
I think the most important point here is not the speedup itself, but the fact that Google is officially backing Python. That'd give Big Corps confidence when adopting the technology.
No, he asked about protocol design.

Why didn't he just ask about discrete mathematics, then?
Watch French in Action for free (legally!) here: http://www.learner.org/resources/series83.html
His style annoys me, and I have the same annoyed feeling when I read Gatsby. He gives the sense that...something is about to be said...but isn't. He's always almost saying something, and three essays later, I've learned nothing but that he's in apparent denial over his drinking problem. Compare Hemingway who wrote similar choppy sentences, but always conveyed information.
Well, he might be a lot better off talking to his friends about their experiences. Historically, Scholasticism was a big part of the background against which the 18th-century empiricists were rebelling, so from my perspective they're almost opposites.
Google to launch microblogging search engine?
My favorite way, though, is just to make a grid of pairs of integers (numerator, denominator), and then count them by spiraling outward on the grid. This yields duplicates, but that's ok.

Or just enumerate the naturals in base 11. Denote 9+1 by "/". Interpret "/" as a negative sign when it's the first or last base-10 digit, otherwise as division. Pick an associativity.
You're probably talking about USA and while the prices are higher here as well, that's only because of taxes which are bigger for diesel.

By how much more does diesel cost in USA compared to petrol?
Single Logout: the other half of the identity equation
I really wanted to like this PDF, but the grammar is at times so bad it is often quite hard to parse.
It would be interesting to apply Eurisko-style techniques to a hopeless problem like translating natural languages or playing Arimaa. I don't think it would work, but the computer might learn things that humans don't know.
So basically Freenet but without all the extra security of it?
Wikimapia Beta - "Let's describe the whole world"
Linux first to support USB 3
Very poor article:

"As that system failed, the plane's computers automatically reduced the pilots' ability to move the plane's control surfaces -- technically known as going to "alternate flight law."

Ditchey said alternate flight law is meant to protect the plane by reducing the ability of pilots to make a mistake, but ultimately it also may limit the ability of pilots to save the plane."

Um, no. The alternate law has reduced protections against the pilot screwing things up and would allow the pilot to, for example, stall the aircraft. It's Normal Law that limits what the pilots can get up to.

If the journalist has thought about it for one second it would have been obvious. No one down in Blagnac is going to follow the thinking "Hmm. In the case that we've lost computer control of the aircraft let's introduce a new set of laws that limit what the pilot can do"
No, bozosort chooses, then swaps.

Amisort chooses, checks if the elements are out of order, then swaps if they are.

Totally different idea.
$0.50 to $1.00/gal more.
Each element can be swapped at most once with each other element. So the number of swaps is less than n choose 2, i.e., quadratic. (This does not mean that the run time is quadratic, since pairs can be chosen multiple times, and left alone each time because they are already in order.)

EDIT: Whoops, I lied:

3,2,1 -> 2,3,1 -> 1,3,2 -> 1,2,3

2 and 3 switch twice.

Anyways, the (whole number) quantity sum_{j=1,...,n}(|x_j - j|) seems to be decreasing under this sort, and it's initial value is O(n squared), so I guess the algorithm should have performance O(n squared), but it will be slower in reality because random choice is not O(1).
Oh, that's really nifty.

I first got embarassed by not knowing of that direct way here: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/recognising-countable...
When I first found a porn movie on TV one night as a kid, my father watched about 5 minutes with me and went to bed. There was remarkably little mental pain and suffering :D. Not all cultures are so scared by sex.
That wasn't sarcasm; it was a rhetorical question to illustrate a point.
There are a number of Parrot languages at various stages of development. As soon as they mature a bit, you might find people taking them pretty seriously. :)
WordPress Versus Workflow
Programming languages, compiler design and construction, operating systems, networking on all levels including protocol design, traffic analysis, etc; multithreading, games, browsers, document management systems, financial applications, telephony, CAD's, a lot of web development - are among the areas I worked in during my career. (I never touched signal processing though.)

Although in some narrow areas I've seen non-trivial calculus, but I barely remember anything that involves infinities and is significant for the solution.
Try Linux Mint. It is based on Ubuntu and adds many of the inconveniently uninstalled apps (Java, Flash, etc.) For most people it just works perfectly right after the install. On my X41 Tablet my boot times are in half the time of XP and I have no issues. Add Wine to run those pesky Windows apps you cannot live without and you are set. And, of course, it is free. There are many wonderful Linux releases out there. If you have the time, try as many as you can to see what works for you.
How to blow your investor pitch
This is fairly basic information, but a great example of smart slide design. Fantastic presentation.
Isnt that the JVM? don't know about fast though, but fast enough for me.
I want to reiterate that sources for a reimplementation of AM are available. It's a start.

http://github.com/akkartik/am-utexas/tree/master

(earlier mentions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=405112 and
http://lesswrong.com/lw/10g/lets_reimplement_eurisko/usd)
I disagree. Python regexen are a royal pain compared to how they work in Perl. You know what would be pretty funny is if a rogue group of guerilla programmers hacked Perl style regex match and replace syntax into Python.

Heheheh, boy would that get some bees in some bonnets on the Python dev ML. :)
The only problem with digital copies like this is that I can't underline. Maybe it's just the habit of underlining, but I can't read as well (academic reading) when I can't underline key points, specific words, and particularly interesting passages.
I disagree: all the "problems" are commonly discussed, but actually discussing the fixes is awesome.

Great slides.
The author had a good point that you can't rely on any Business or Ultimate version features if Home is all your remote users will have.
Thank you for adding so much to the discussion.

(That was sarcasm.)
Everything you need to know about Twitter. In one tweet.
Infrastructure. It's somewhat harder to find a diesel gas station, and also somewhat harder to find a mechanic to work on a diesel.

This is at least true in the U.S.
One perl nicety is that the VM will optimize to only compile the expression once. Python's re.sub() has to compile the expression every time, since it's just a string argument rather than a language construct. You can manually cache the result of re.compile() -- it's just not as sugary that way.
It's usually one or more of:

1. Using a simple prototype VM seemed easier during initial development

2. When the language was developed, no suitable common VM existed

3. The language developers thought they could do it better for their specific case, i.e. the point of the implementation is to showcase new VM strategies

Remember that a language and an interpreter are separate things, and usually an author who wants to try an idea for one has to find some suitable stand-in for the other in order to get started.
That would be great. But I'm wondering why the authors of other major dynamic languages haven't chosen to collaborate and use Parrot as their primary VM.
my eyes hurt from trying to read the text
DOM selectors API in Firefox 3.5
Thanks. Your #1 and #2 seem to be very common.

It looks like we're at a point now where many dynamic languages are attempting to transition to a more advanced VM. This includes Perl, Python, Ruby, and some implementations of JavaScript. I assume they all want to take advantage of the latest VM techniques, and they're all making major changes anyway, so again I just wonder why they don't seriously consider collaborating now.
Dark days: A first hand account of the Iranian presidential election
Erasure Coding and Cold Storage
My favourite point is "Flatten the whole strategy and offer a single version of Windows 7 for $50." Why would they sell windows for less than OSX? (Unless I am mistaken while the _upgrade_ price for leopard may be just $29 I bet the new price will still be at least $129). Why is it that everyone wants to be one of the biggest software companies in the worlds financial advisor.
Skype is known for their insane obfuscation (to prevent reverse engineering of the protocol), though it doesn't sound like that's applicable in this case.
Digital Urban: Google 2009 - Advanced 3D Geo Apps for Web: Earth API
What Open Source shares with Science
Thanks for the tip on RepositoryHosting :-)

Their price rocks.
This is true, and would make me significantly less paranoid about logging in (to wherever) at public terminals.
Michael Sandel: Markets and Morals
Things a Startup Founder Will Never Say
Yes, but he also got lucky.

"...but too much is left up to chance for a one-man development shop to earn a steady living."
Macros do more than just control evaluation of their arguments

Yes, but I was commenting on your example: it was what the macro was doing to control evaluation that caused it to depart from your function-centric intuition.

As for the general point - that macros "can make understanding code harder" - I haven't heard any argument that doesn't apply just as much to functions mutatis mutandis. A function adds complexity too. You have to understand its name. You have to know what each of its arguments is there for. To truly understand a function, you may have to look at its source code. Therefore functions can make understanding code harder!

Except, of course, that they make it easier, assuming they're used properly to organize a program, and people who have experience with them consider them indispensable. Same for macros. Most of the objections people bring up are exactly this sort of pseudo-argument that, if it were true, would in fact be a reason to avoid higher-level languages.

If you're really making a general claim to the contrary, please come up with more than a single trivial example that is confusing only at the beginning of the learning curve.
Don LaFontaine: The Voice [video]
good point, the positive/negative approach is a nice departure from the standard bulleted list of advice you find on a lot of blogs.
You can make it larger by clicking full screen. Totally agree it isn't optimized for that small form.
Things A Startup Founder Will Never Say
Inside GM: Mystery of Crap Interiors Solved
Note that I said, "even if we can trust Facebook". I consider the "if" a significant word in this context.
I read this a few months ago. I found it a fun read, but not necessarily the best single book on the topic. I'm not sure what the best single book on the topic would be (probably an aggregation of stories like Founders at Work fits that bill), but this one does quite a bit of hand-waving about the actual hard stuff. As a jumping off point for other research, it's probably as good as any.
Twitpocalypse: quick php bugfix
That's actually untrue. If you look in the implementation of the `re` module you would see that it caches the compilation of any regular expression.
I've found Preview's (Mac; built in) annotate feature to be a great portable way to highlight inside PDFs.
That was my big take away too and my sense was that in another forum, he would have used the term hack. But it's easier to explain it away as a crack to convey that users should observe caution, share it quietly, and also to piggy back on a commonly held notion that it won't break or otherwise harm any system (such as the service being used).
It sets up the punch line nicely.
Twitter "twitpocalypse" affects Mac, iPhone apps
"Other innovations revealed the sophistication of Conficker's creators. If the encryption used for the previous strain was tough, that of the new version seemed virtually bullet-proof. It was based on code little known outside academia that had been released just three months earlier by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

Anyone know what this refers to?
I may be wrong, but I believe there's a feature in Kinde 2 DX that allows you to do that.
I wish he didn't mention hacker news in slide 7
and in slide 11 ...fuck never mind - its arrington.
I was simply replying to the seeming assertion that it's wrong to develop a queueing solution which integrates with Django. Writing queueing solutions in Python is easy, and integrating with popular tools should be fine.
blame Chris Yeh from PBWorks, he is the one who made it
Just to add to what Alex3917 said. I spoke to someone who had an older model Prius than I did. He had owned it for a while and said that he noticed a bit of fuel economy decline, but that's it. But, like I said up there, I've had mine for over 3 years and it still gets 53 MPG.

As I learn to drive it better and let go of the need to go really fast, I get better mileage as well.
It's been done, by Andrew Dalke, using a Python extension toolkit he developed:

http://dalkescientific.com/Python/python4ply-tutorial.html#p...

He presented it at PyCon a couple years ago, response seemed to be "that's cool".
The App Store Needs A Genius Feature, ASAP
I'm not in that situation, virtually the whole software industry is in it. If you think "policies" can address that, we have a very different worldview.

The real point though (which remains unaddressed) was that the argument against higher-level abstractions is wrong because it assumes that what is true of a single function written at a certain level of abstraction will remain true if you try to build an entire complex system out of them. It won't. Therefore, as complexity grows, we need the ability to create new abstractions. There is something perverse about the argument that we should eschew powerful techniques for doing this because they'll make large systems hard to understand. It's like saying we should avoid water because dehydration is bad.
If you can get away with it, use Gnumeric software http://www.gnumeric.org/ as your spreadsheet ;)

Actually I can see a day when MSFT contributes to Wine because as they have stated, they are hoping to preserve all their past API's and version it based on OS release. So in that sense all of it will be a legacy eco system.

The cynical part of me thinks they will name a free software project as Chardonnay first, or Whyne, before they consider a merge.

It sounds very doomsday like but we should be realistic too and acknowledge where the computer industry is headed.
Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple
According to Wikipedia, a monopoly "exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.".

Given Skype's market share (not Voip in general, but free worldwide voip calls), I would say they do have a monopoly.
Mostly, because they already have a VM that works.
I guess, but many of them seem to want a more advanced VM. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656594)
I believe after the first formula in the text:

In the vicinity of the correct root, the method converges exponentially, meaning that it gives twice as many digits of accuracy at each step

should instead be converges quadratically
I have a feeling that, unlike the founders, the VCs know these things.
I think hiring Guido and making Python one of the few allowed languages at Google already counts as officially backing the language. But yes, this does seem to be another step in that direction.
How much of the source level semantics do you want to preserve? If you don't care about many of them then it's not too hard to do (although quite pointless). Just compile to an array of bytes, and a turing machine emulator or equivalent, in your target language of choice, and you've converted.

The hard part comes when you want to preserve source-level semantics and provide a natural-feeling translation so that a human can understand, read, and write the source.

However, with a VM you don't have that problem. With a VM, a lossy, one-way transform is sufficient. You can easily throw away information as you compile, since you're not targeting humans consumption for the output. You can replace, say, overloaded functions with mangled names. You can turn multiple dispatch into decision trees of conditional statements. And so on. With a VM, you would want to keep enough high-level detail to efficiently JIT stuff, and it's a bit of a challenge to decide what detail is sufficiently useful to include, but it's not insurmountable.
Extremely simple sort algorithm with sub-cubic expected running time. [pdf]
Algorithm: Pick two elements at random. If they are out of order, swap them. Could check every n-1 steps to see whether array is sorted.

Expected running time is O(n^2 log(n)).

See Section 3.
Someone at Wired.com just found pg's "The Hundred Year Language".
My specific argument is about locality, not abstraction.

A function call (in a lexically scoped) language without side effects can be completely understood only by looking only at the function definition.

A function call with side effects now requires extra knowledge: you need to know the state of the world (or some subset) before it is called. Side effects make a program harder to reason about, and can pose a problem in a team.

Similarly, a function or macro call (ignore side effects) also requires extra knowledge: you need to know not only the definition of your function/macro, but also the definition of all macros enclosing the current one. This also makes it harder to reason about.

So my argument "favors" Haskell over Python and Python over Lisp. It also favors Haskell over Liskell, and Clojure over Elisp (due to lexical vs dynamic scoping).

Regardless, I'm not trying to advocate against lisp use. I'm just making a point that the non-locality of macros can make it harder to reason about, and that could be a problem in a team environment.
the DX cannot highlight or annotate pdf files, at least not currently.
Not sure about underlining, but highlighting and annotating has been there since Kindle 1.
The Underworked American Child