skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Any even moderately complex app is going to leverage database-specific performance enhancements that can't be abstracted away."

I'm not sure I totally agree with you here; I run what I would consider to be a "moderately complex" app (basically an e-commerce site) using PHP and MySQL with no data abstraction layer (if I had my choice, I WOULD use one...). We don't leverage any database-specific performance enhancements directly via our queries (we do use indexes and the like on particular tables to help speed up certain queries though), because MySQL is generally better at it than I would be. Granted, I'm no DBA, and I can see how some people out there really CAN tweak their own queries to be more efficient than the database system optimization might be. But in general, in the ideal situation, I'd much rather have clean, portable code, and once in awhile have to avoid the abstraction layer (any good database abstraction layer will allow you to write your own SQL if you wish, and if it doesn't, there's nothing stopping you from not using the abstraction layer for that particular query) then to not use the abstraction layer at all.

I guess my point is, in general, you don't start out optimizing; you optimize where you need to optimize when you need to, and the benefits of using an abstraction layer for 90% of the stuff I would do far outweigh any possible downsides.
Something like throughput in trials on some standardized machine could be an interesting criteria - it would test both your hashing algorithm and your permutations.

Having said that, I'm betting that the EY people chose this particular problem since highly-optimized algorithms are easily available to all - meaning that the amount of HW one can throw at the problem (and luck) will likely be the determining factor in who wins.

Which HW should someone use? Well, EY has a cloud computing program, and it's right there....

That is, I think, the point of this contest. Make a problem that's hardware-intensive, so that people will try deploying it on the EY cloud platform and get them into the proverbial front door of the product family. They're not interested in novel algorithms; they're interested in getting people onto their platform, and getting them used to it.
That is a sadly long and storied history, which Stephen Colebourne describes best:

http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pi...

There is some hope that the legal shenanigans will stop once ORCL finishes taking ownership of JAVA.
As long as they take the rest of PHP with them when they die, I'm all for it.
That's exactly what happened to me (and a lot sooner than 25 years after high school). On graduation from Gymnasium (would be 12th grade here), my friend and I happened to run into this guy who would pester us in 7-9th grade. Worse for my friend than me, and nothing like broken fingers, but just random physical violence every now and then. We hadn't seen him for a couple of years, so we said hi and started talking and he says "I'm sorry I was such an asshole back then." It increased my respect for the guy immensely.

So yeah, you grow up and as part of that you realize you did some shitty things. So if you decide you really want to communicate with the people you were mean to, the first thing you do is straight up apologize. If they don't, I think his incredulousness is justified.
It doesn't stop cancer, it stops cell death from radiation, which incidentally may allow higher doses of radiation therapy.

Of course, given that the purpose of radiation therapy is to cause cell death from radiation, it might be self-defeating. (Then again, if it protects normal cells better than cancer cells, it might be useful).
"It doesn't explain the guy who broke my fingers, because he wanted to know what it would sound like."
The text is a bit too strong, and should be revised from the arrogance of 2006 :D Just copy-pasted it.

Indeed I haven't. I have to change that, thanks for the tip.
For DB intensive apps querying a wide distribution of changing data, say, an accounting or project management system, you are absolutely right. An heavily-abstracted ORM is the wrong tool for the task.

But how many web apps require this? If caching can easily prevent the bulk of your database hits, then an ORM like Django is a great tool for the job, saves a large amount of work, and scales beautifully. This is especially important for the typically short dev cycle that Django targets.
You're right, I should have included wrestling. Some of the habits wrestling instills don't work in a fight (like going to your stomach instead of your back), but overall it's an enormous advantage. The speed at which a good wrestler learns BJJ or MMA is startling.
20 Jobs That Are (Much) Better or Worse Than You Thought
"If you're right, though, what exactly is his point?"

How does the overall point of the paragraph / article change when we change the job title of the people who create the templates?
I think the problem is due to age-segregation of years, we shouldn't do that. It encourages Lord of the Flies-esqe social structures.
Hmmm... so that's why my radiation oncologist says don't take antioxidant vitamins.
Last time I checked on Debian, no. But it was more or less painless - just edit a couple settings on the config files and you are good to go. IIRC, I had to adjust memory footprint (telling PostgreSQL to feel at home and use all it wanted to use) and tell it to trust the disk subsystem and the UPS (turning synchronous writes off). From that point on, it withstood a huge beating.
I concur. I'm glad the SEC investigated it as it did seem possibly hinky but I felt fairly confident Cuban was in the clear. Had the SEC not investigated it, it could prove to have repercussions down the road as a point of evidence in other cases.
Re: programmable - is it safe to assume that given sufficient understanding of DNA and biology one could in fact build what they want from scratch?
It's free software, right? Why would Oracle be in any obligation to support and put money in it? And why would Oracle not supporting it be any kind of problem anyway?
Adding caching should be a large task, because cache coherence is hard. If you do it the trivial way you are almost certainly not figuring out which cache entries need to be invalidated during an update, and getting wrong answers.
In practice, you would probably have different filesystem tables, so that system:conf+share/filename would be distinct from projects:conf+share/filename. The meaning of the same tag may be different in different contexts.
Rajeev Motwani's death due to accidental drowning: US police
Title should be changed to "...$2000 a day..."
Naturally.

You might be interested in the filesystem research associated with plan9. :)
> With Haskell and OCaml, a lot of testing can be pushed onto the type system.

Yes. There's even a paper about how to guarantee the balance invariants in a red-black tree with the type system. (Can't find it now, it's probably written by Ralf Hinze.) You can see an implementation at http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/smk/redblack/rb.html
"If you're a U.S. company dependant on MySQL to run your business, tell the DOJ about it so they "have a talk" with Oracle about not killing it."

MySQL is free software (free as in freedom). Oracle can't kill it. They can try all they want, the codebase belongs to all its users.
It depends what their goal is. Most of them seem initially to have the goal of improving the startup scene in a particular region. But, as they then discover, there's nothing regional about the seed funding business. Founders come from all over, and leave afterwards for wherever they get more funding.

The way to help a region is to be the place where they get more funding. I tried a thought experiment about that (http://paulgraham.com/maybe.html). The problem is, it would cost a lot more.
I wasn't France in WWII, I was Britain.

Off topic: actually France and Britain attacked and declared war on Germany. So probably neither works as a metaphor for a victim of bullying.
The nulls point to a lacking type system.
I love Google reader, but this new "feature" is the first time I'm thinking about looking elsewhere. It's so irrelevant which people "like" something I'm reading, I just can't fathom how they could think it's a good idea to shove that information in my face. The thing that amazes me is that there are so many other ideas they could be pursuing with Reader that play to their strengths. For example: lots of my RSS feeds talk about the same thing. A link gets put up here on Hacker News, but then it also gets discussed on Slashdot, Wired, etc... Google is good at automated content analysis. Why not experiment with ways to combine and merge feeds based on the content so I can read everything about a single topic in one spot? That would be truly useful and something you can't get anywhere else.

In some sense, I feel like these new features are a bit lazy on their part. They're sort of avoiding doing anything innovative or novel and instead are just jumping on the social networking bandwagon to give the illusion of progress.
Agreed. From my studies, it seems that miracles are generally seen as demonstrations of power over / understanding of the laws by which the universe operates, they needn't be magical in nature. More akin to me being able to change parameter of a computer program I wrote becasue I have intimate knowledge of how it is built and have access to the source code.
You'd need a halting problem solving IDE for this to work in general.
Software Engineering: An idea whose time has come and gone?
LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites
That's very true - analytics cannot entirely replace talking to you customers. We still do that all the time.

They supplement each other quite well, though. Talking to your customers can help negate the form of selection bias you bring up, and looking at aggregate data can help you figure out if the needs of the most vocal 1% are worth pursuing right now.
You can turn it off. I spend a lot of time in Google Reader, so efficiency and lack of distractions is very important to me. I turn off widgets that I don't use in most of the sites that I frequent.

The way you can turn it off it to install the Stylish extension for Firefox (which allows user specified style sheets on a per-site basis), use Firebug to find the div id or class of the widget you don't like, and set it to "display: none !important".

Stylish is similar to greasemonkey, which means that you can usually find someone who's already done what you're looking for, and shared it. Here is my stylesheet to make Google reader minimalistic: http://userstyles.org/styles/12663 and here is what it looks like when installed: http://bit.ly/minimalreader You can temporarily disable it with a single click when you want to use any of the hidden widgets.
Reminds me of the professor who admits that his favorite programming language is `Ph.D. student'.
It is really a shame that all of these issues exist around such an amazing piece of technology. I am avoiding creating an app for the iPhone because I flat out don't like the fact that they have the final say in what users can get on their phone.

The device is a mobile computer and I can install any program I want on my laptop so why shouldn't I be allowed to install anything I want on my iPhone?

The only way I can see of this changing is for the users to change their opinion and side with developers. Only, then will Apple be forced to change anything. I hope that users realize how much they could benefit from more apps from more developers and less Apple control.

Until then I will start looking into Android...
Again, this is article has a title which is extremely misleading. Ethnicity is improperly cited as cause, instead of traits that are commonly attributed to immigrants. Paris Couture was never "toppled" nor "redesigned" and this group did not exclusively create American ready-to-wear (to which the title infers).

If you look at the large trends of the last hundred years of fashion, the success is largely cultural (non-ethnicity-based) opposed to any other factor (this includes innovation through new fabrics or new sewing techniques which has been cited in the article as the determining factor). Fashion reflects the cultural and emotional sentiment of its target market, and does not impose any cultural designs, as the article stated at the end (basic law of demand). Furthermore, the Jewish-American "advantage" (tailoring trade skills, work ethic, innovation, optimism) can all be attributed to immigrants in general.
Perhaps reading out bills aloud before they are voted on would help? (Not that law-makers would pay attention, but it would at least slow down the flood of legislative text.)
here's that program for you, in shitty perl: http://gist.github.com/149173
Excellent article, very well put imho.

It's interesting to also look at this as an argument for more modern, rails-like dynamic frameworks that enable the transformative result rather than trying to control programmers.
Yet. I usually opt for producing some graphviz format, though. Produces nice looking graphs.
That isn't a graph, it is a graphic.
I think worrying too much about reverse compatibility may be a bad idea. With access to relational features, the filesystems would probably be organized completely differently. Probably better to have a clean break.
and here's a probably slower, brute force perl variety: http://gist.github.com/149173
My theory: They rushed development of it because they were afraid someone else would beat them to the punch (very simple app). So they didn't test the ad-portion adequately enough.
The Online Disinhibition Effect
I've been using this for years. It is a fantastic way to build up hierarchies. XML, maps, JSON, UI code etc. It is very concise, fast and produces clean code which also just happens to correctly indent when you apply code formatting.

School s = new School() {{
add(new Student() {{
name = "Bobby";
age = 15;
add(new Pet() {{
name = "Fluffy";
}});
}});
}};

vs.
School sc = new School();
Student st = new Student();
st.name = "Bobby";
st.age = 15;
Pet p = new Pet();
p.name = "Fluffy";
st.add(p);
sc.add(st);
No wonder. Apple is the equivalent of a "gated community". They guard everything that is proprietary 8nadmost things Apple are) like no other company and they can get away with it because everybody loves them. I hope this will give the competing services a boost and people will quit Itunes.

Remember when they banned Opera from publishing an iPhone compatible version of their mobile browser?
I particularly like the description of "The Present" That is so true in terms of people seeing reality in black and white.
I use this. It's a great alternative to django-mptt. Lighter-weight and faster. If you are using Django-mptt, you can migrate your Model to a Treebeard ns_tree simply be renaming two fields.

There are no bundled tag libraries or forms in Treebeard, so you will have to re-invent the wheel here. However, the django-mptt tags was broken anyway. It didn't provide enough info to create a proper nested, unordered list. Also, the mptt MoveNodeForm works in Treebeard with just a couple tweaks.
I agree, but it seems natural using the same paths. No patches to the concept would be needed.
Aquaponics: A Locavore's Fish Farm?
Please don't compare standard bullying to sexual assault. The two experiences are not comparable.

That being said, often the best thing for a person to do is to "forgive and forget", since letting go of anger is the only way to properly conquer it. Even families of murder victims move on after 25 years. As a human, you have to.

Agreed about the Martial Arts though.
I'm not the only person who uses this! I wish I knew this had a name when I proposed it; everybody I was working with thought it was strange. I think it's a good mix of performance and query-ability: you can do quite a bit here using LIKE matches. Of course, the main assumptions are that the dataset isn't huge, and the hierarchy isn't changing often.
Well, a democratic site doesn't imply that there's no censorship; a true democracy would permit the majority to censor the minority. But anyway, even without any editors stepping in to ban certain links, the site doesn't really function according to the wishes of the majority because there's no down arrow on stories. Getting to the top of the front page doesn't require majority support, but just enthusiastic minority support.
Re item 2: I talk all the time about my use of OSS in my products and when I do contract work. I don't list the names of the hundreds of people who have contributed, though, unless I'm talking to other geeks, because most other people don't give a crap about who wrote what. Also, nothing I have is "based on" anything written by one guy in a few months. I don't think I know a single person or company for whom that is true.
I just sent that link to a group of parents that I am going to be homeschooling with (and to my parents who think it's "a horrible idea"). I didn't get anywhere near the abuse this individual received, but I had my share, too. I have met so many people in IT and science that are still colored in some way by the "socialization" they received in school.

I worked for one of the most miserable human beings I have ever met. Brilliantly smart, but now that he was on the other side, he bullied everyone around him (including his boss, who eventually fired him). I have had many coworkers who had been beat up so often, knocked down so often, that when they have an "out of the box" idea, they simply don't share it.

I want my kids to be brought up in an environment that encourages learning, and peer learning via our co-op. I went to my High School reunion for almost the same reasons MarkCC didn't. I was amazed to learn of the fate of the individuals who gave me so much crap. A few were dead because of their behavior.
What's your negotiating position at that time? Before you accept money you have alternatives, you can get by with no money, you can look for money elsewhere, etc. Once you've committed, gotten the money, hired the team, spent the money on advertising or building out or customer aquisition... your negotiating position is much weaker.

If you're going down that path, be prepared to look objectively at your own performance, and be as ruthless about the changes that need to be made as your backers will be. It's my observation that a breakdown of communications between the board and the management team is the root cause of the management being replaced.

But yes, once you accept funding it's no longer your company; you are answerable to your shareholders.
What an AWESOME posting. Cannot upvote this enough. Balancing focus and diversification in portfolio is definitely the key to success. Rock on!
I think you mean the first world war.
The Coming Apple Tablet-Netbook-Smartphone-Kindle Stats Problem
Complete Yale courses now on iTunes U
Do you have any idea how many man-hours go into the preparation of WWDC talks?

Because preparing for TechEd, PDC, WPC is cheap, isn't it? Or their presentations are not any good?
The truth is Apple knows that people will pay for those things, so they charge for them.
One thing though. I love this technique but the home built Eclipse compiler is not fully Java language compliant and it will reject certain forms of this as invalid. Specifically, the sun and eclipse compiler treat "this" differently in these code blocks. My project will not compile under eclipse because of certain usages of this pattern when combined with inner classes. The bug crops up when you need to pass the parent to the child object being initialized in the static block.
To be technically correct, France and Britain had a well-publicized mutual-defense treaty with Poland (among others), and when Germany attacked Poland (knowing full well of the alliance) the signatories had no choice but to declare war. In fact, Britain and France gave Germany an ultimatum to pull out of Poland before initiating hostilities.

Furthermore, Germany actually didn't even bother declaring war on Poland first before launching their first attacks.

In other words, this was not a Pearl Harbor, Germany knew full well what they were getting into. Yeah, Britain and France were not iconic examples of bully victims, but if you're suggesting Germany is, you'd be mistaken.
I believe the point the author was making is that it is standard practice to replace the CEO and founding management team regardless of performance. They just prefer to have their buddies at thee helm. In other words it has more to do with cronyism than business results.
I love this quote:

"I have a finish date in mind, and I’m not
even going to share it with you. When I
come in one day and tell you the project
will end in one week, you have to be
ready to package up and deliver what
you’ve got as the final product."
Can someone explain how this isn't insider trading? I don't really know what the rules are but after reading that article this is what I understood:

Cuban gets an email and has a private conversation with Mamma.com CEO where get gets told there will be a PIPE.

Apparently PIPEs dilute existing shareholders and drive stock price down.

To protect his assets, Cuban trades based on the information he got. The rest of the market did not have this info.

How is trading based on a personal conversation that gives you early and unique market insight not insider trading?
Seconded. Read GEB.
I think Palm knew good and well this would happen. It might be a trap for an antitrust lawsuit/investigation against apple for uncompetitive practices (which this seems to be a clear-cut case of).
I've done some work with CUDA, so I'll just tell you ahead of time: it will probably be decently fast, but not nearly the kind of speeds you'd get from something like matrix multiplication. The problem is going to be that you need to fit the data to hash in "shared memory" (which is sort of like an L2 cache on the GPU). The standard shared memory size in CUDA is 16kb. Also, because of the way that data must be allocated in shared memory, you're not going to be able to get many string permutations into shared memory at once.

However, I think a good solution (if you're going to use CUDA, which I was thinking about doing as well) might be to load one permuation of words from the dictionary into the shared memory, and then have each thread compute one permuation of the various capitalizations for that string. This way you're mostly working out of the "cache" and that's about the best thing you can do on CUDA.
If Execution Is What Matters, Where Does That Leave Ideas?
It's not necessarily your code just because you wrote it.
Why is he so angry with Goldman Sachs? The firms survival of the crisis appears to indicate that they did not take excessive risks out of greed, and thus are not directly complicit?

Hmm, come to think about it, it reads a bit like anyone in finance is a greedy bastard who deserves bad things to happen to him.

BTW, same guy as in this story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538849 .. good read.
Interesting.

For short trees and in-memory management another option would be:

electronics
/televisions
//tube
//lcd
//plasma
/portable electronics
//mp3 players
///flash
//cd players
//2 way radios

Where depth levels are represented by slashes only.

Replace with indexes and you have a shorter version.

Let's see what else we can come up with just for fun...
IBM patents "Communication between browser windows"
Your high school crew may be worth networking with. Mine really wouldn't be.

"but they might actually now be real individuals who have real values"

I disagree... with the word "might". I'm sure they are. My real point is, so what? Are real people so hard to find for you or something? I don't seem to have so much trouble. They're just people and I can find much richer sources of "people" for any given purpose than a high school reunion.

You're rationalizing an emotional belief. Love your high school all you want, I don't care, but don't fool yourself into thinking this is some sort of rational position. Mere coincidental colocation ten years ago is not even remotely the best way to choose anything.