skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never meant to imply OOP when I said message passing. I guess it was the wrong term to use, because its got too much of an OOP ring to it. What I mean is that events or packets of data or what have you are passed between independent agents. The communication is loosely coupled fropm the agents and the agents all function independently (they often work together, but the "function" independently).

If I say "Hello, Bob", this "message" or communicatable data is passed from me to Bob. But coupling is also low - Mary and Peter, who are standing nearby, can also hear this - unless I whisper.

Basically, the events or messages or data packets or whatever you want to call them are simply sent OUT for whatever to pick them up and do with them what they will. The messages can be directed though (say to Bob vs simply yell) and the listeners can be restricted (whisper). In this respect, I see the world as independent threads of execution which communicate through some (anonymous, if I hear someone yell "Fire", I don't care who) message dispatch system. Something like this: http://didntread.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/components.png

People are made up of sub-agents, which themselves are made up of smaller, independent agents and so on. Cells communicate with nearby cells through proteins and chemical reactions and electrical signals - these are messages being passed (anonymously) between agents.

Now, if each agent was a single thread of execution, then you have discrete points where communication and interaction occurs. You said that this is not how the world works, and you are right. Imagine instead a network of connected operations, where when one operation produces some result, it passes it to all the connected operations. When an operation has received all its inputs, it can execute - concurrently, in parallel with any other operations which also have their dependencies met. At some point, these operations too will complete their processing and their output is propogated to connected operations. In such a system, when a message is received or when an interaction occurs, the network of operations (the agent) can process it immediately. No longer does the agent have to wait for a certain discrete point in a sequential processing system to communicate or interact - it can do so as soon as some data is available. These entworks do contain state, just like you said the agents in the real world do, but instead of having some fixed memory buffer contain the state (well, technically, you could have that too..), the state is maintained in feedback loops between operations (think of a flip-flop in electronics: the output of a logic gate is fed back as its input, either directly or indirectly through other logic gates).

What I have just described is a dataflow system and THAT is how I think the world works, if it were a programming system.

Note that some things ARE inherently sequential - the operations are still ordered by their dependencies. Maybe the operations themselves process their data in a number of sequential steps. This is fine, because certain things require ordering to make sense or to work well.
Clickistrano helps you perform Capistrano deployments using a web interface
Yep. Working at a startup company in the city right now, in fact.
Palm has an app store, it's just devoid of content.
23andMe Leading Way to Democratized Disease Research
Nice metaphor. But Electronic Frontier Foundation appears to disagree: "New technologies are radically advancing our freedoms, but they are also enabling unparalleled invasions of privacy." http://www.eff.org/issues/privacy
Where's the stage when you love every language except PHP and C++, because languages are fun and enabling, and have those beauties?
the only 'joke' is that you fail to realize JC is getting great workers for pennies and they are actually enjoying it enough to stick around.

He is laughing at you.
Fair enough. I'm guessing you don't live in a country where $7/hour is alot of money. In some countries, that's a great salary.
The flaws in the iPhone are almost always made to improve the user experience. The flaws in Android seem to be made out of incompetence.
The authors of the paper mention the unlikeliness of a direct application of the models to zombie outbreaks, but go on to elaborate on other uses of the model.

From the actual paper: The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious
disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken
literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or
diseases with a dormant infection.
This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first mathematical analysis of an outbreak of zombie
infection. While the scenarios considered are obviously not realistic, it is nevertheless
instructive to develop mathematical models for an unusual outbreak. This demonstrates
the flexibility of mathematical modelling and shows how modelling can respond to a wide
variety of challenges in ‘biology’.
Any idea if this applies to the dev phone? If it does, developers are screwed.
Interesting example! Especially because the steering element of these motors is so counter intuitive - you push left to go right and vice versa :-)

I agree with you about the direct connection between the user's movements and the speed, but the direction of the twist required to go forward/backward is fairly arbitrary (it seems), so it must be learned rather than 'intuited'.
Well, if the code thats produced is good, then I agree with unalone - it doesn't matter if the programmer is good or not.

Of course, if the code IS bad, then sure, but would that not kinda go against what I was saying in my comment? Its all about solving a problem in the simplest, cleanest, most complete (ie, the problem isn't solved when corner cases are ignored) way. If a language is truely good, it will help programmers, good and bad, to achieve this. If the bad programmer then manages to produce good code, then (s)he is indistinguishable from a good programmer. (The difference between the two then becomes that the good programmer can do this with most problems, while the bad one with only a subset).
America’s (Very Small) Small-Business Sector
Hmm. Despite my using a pejorative phrase for the people who don't accept global warming and calling it a "foot-stamping rejection of problems", you appear to think I am a global warming denialist.

I don't think the "stupidity" here is mine, and I am gratified to avoid your up-vote.
I definitely agree. My comment was vague (and was meant as joking stab at the parent). A good language will aid the programmer with whatever task the language was designed for. A text processing language will make writing bad crappy text processing code harder compared to writing good text processing code. That doesn't mean that writing, eg, a GUI in this language will be easy, however.
Sensationalism. Why would you want to tie up your iPhone for the duration of the car trip? What happens when you receive a phone call or text message and you're about to switch roads or take an exist?

I'm still waiting on the TomTom HOME application being ported to Linux and Mac (it's Java).
It occurred to me that this means there is a real advantage to academia's "publish or perish" phenomenon. It means that when an experiment's results are not what was hoped, those results are still likely to get published. The experimenter would like to have his name on some ground-breaking results, of course, but, failing that, he still must have publications. So he publishes anyway. Not so true in industry.
Just wait while it will be relatively easy to replace WM on devices like this - http://www.htc.com/www/product/touchpro2/specification.html - like the process of downloading and installing (replacing windows) linux in 90's.
If you have time, you could check out sites like ehow. some ehow writers make more than $2k per month, but the difference there is you write once, and earn money every month (ehow shares its adsense revenue with its writers)
So, wouldn't it be more practical to work on a model for something that has real life applications instead ?

And I don't get the "allegiance to political parties" thing, unless this means that we should interpret those with certain political affiliations as zombies.

It's a tempting connection but I don't think it will hold.
Locate Author Evan Ratliff and win $5,000
Python solutions to the 99 Prolog Problems
I missed this! Thank you for posting the link!!
Heh.. How about Dracula cape!?

(I saw it in the previous announcement, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743881)

Ed: Also PG could clarify what he scribbled on there.. http://c0139491.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/photos/231... I deciphered only 8 first characters from the first line (Happy ha*); also, G in PG looks exactly like my handwritten &, which is lovely, but nobody will believe me I haven't forged that.
"99 Prolog Problems" is a set of problems to solve in Prolog to teach yourself the language. It works well as an educational tool in other languages as well.

Original problem set: https://prof.ti.bfh.ch/hew1/informatik3/prolog/p-99/
It's not an "announcement". Quite the opposite: Nokia has explicitly denied FTD's report that they would be abandoning Symbian. However, phones equipped with Maemo 5 are definitely coming to the high end of Nokia's range. (Symbian's strength is that it works with substantially cheaper hardware than any of the competing smartphone OSs, which is great for Nokia, as they are particularly strong globally at the lower end of the market and in emerging markets.)

The important point is that Nokia is adopting the Qt toolkit across the range. Both Symbian and Maemo will have Qt at the top of the stack by 2011. At that point, the underlying operating system won't be particularly relevant to application developers anymore: C++ software written to Qt (with the upcoming Orbit touch UI framework) will be just a recompile away from being ported to Symbian.
His argument doesn't appear to be "don't build", it appears to be "tread cautiously". If your business model depends on filling an obvious hole in someone else's product, you need to be wary of the idea that the first-party will fill that hole. Joel Spolsky outlines this well in the Stack Overflow podcast, though he's usually talking about plug-in ecosystems.

And yes, people making iPhone apps or Facebook apps need to be careful of this. If Facebook decided to build in a friend-ranking feature, the company that makes that Compare People app is hosed. If Apple decides it wants to add ebooks to the iTunes Store, then a lot of iPhone apps are in trouble.

Heck, any recent news about App Store shenanigans should make people nervous about their app existing only with Apple's permission. If Apple doesn't like your app (for any reason), it won't get approved. And if Apple decides to pull your app, you're paying for the refunds (and Apple's keeping it's cut of the sales).
Performance Analysis of Thirty-Eight Linked List Variations Versus STL
Mr. Canoe - disappeared
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7512487.stm

Here's some disappearing tips:

Plan before you go

Do research from different internet cafes or libraries

Tell no-one your plans

Use pay-as-you-go phones

Apply for no memberships

Cash is king

If you believe you are compromised, you are

Nice of the BBC to help us out with this information
U.S. Indicts 3 in Theft of 130 Million Bank Cards
As the proud new owner of pg's old coat, I wouldn't say no to that.
I'm glad that you are correcting me. I like to be corrected, because it means that I'm not relying on invalid information and I very much like learning new things, especially if related to something which interests me - like dataflow.

Sorry, HN wouldn't allow me to reply to your comment for some reason, so I edited mine.
Why are you so disparaging about a company that's trying to innovate and make money?

You can use NAPTR/LOC/TXT records for any domain name you like, providing you have sufficient control over your DNS zone.

However, many domain owners either don't have this ability, or lack sufficient knowledge to manage them. Many people, even businesses, don't even own domain names. .tel comes with tools and services that make it simple.

In terms of privacy, you can encrypt specific records that only certain friends/groups can decrypt and read, so you can absolutely keep your phone number private. As a bonus, you could become liberated from it and can change it seamlessly, without having to tell any of your friends.

I believe I heard that Michael Jackson used to change his number on a weekly basis - obviously an extreme case, but you get my drift.
"Kaye" appears to be a typo. "Alan Kay" was interviewd by Fortune Magazine's "Fast Forward" column in the July 12, 2004 issue: http://slashdot.org/articles/04/07/13/1226206.shtml
Nokia is actually committed to Symbian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

They denied the "announcement" made in that article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090812-702406.html?mg=...
In other words, they couldn't get the money they wanted, so they petulantly shut down the service. When they got push-back from doing that, they came up with this scheme.

If they actually can get this model up and running with everyone in the world being able to see their data, I'll be curious how that goes, especially as I'm not familiar with what sort of data they keep. Do they track the IPs of people who use tr.im links?
Tim Toady: Looping in Ruby
TIMTOWTDI applied to Looping constructs in Ruby for interesting examples
I am from Pittsburgh.

This has needed to be said for a long time. I believe Pittsburgh will grow in tech prominence in the time ahead. If nothing else, it is an easy city to maintain "ramen profitability".
There's a bit of a difference between east coast schools being historically Christian institutions that have gradually shifted towards secularism over a few centuries and colleges that were founded in the last 30 years by politically active televangelists.
You're right, it doesn't, but see my other comment.
I'm curious - how did they wound up with per product user accounts in the first place? I would have imagined that as soon as you had >1 product, there would be a strong desire for single sign on - amongst othr things - to help cross selling, and to avoid multiple invoices.
Seems like the most important aspect of higher education from a student's perspective is the community you build while you are there. Nothing stimulates thought like being surrounded by intelligent, motivated individuals.

Social interaction over the internet is becoming richer, and surely it will play a vital role in changing the face of education. My fear is that the credentials-based hiring practices that are rampant among employers will pervert what could otherwise be a useful extension of quality education to the masses.
By "they", I assume that you meant the founders. Did the founders have personal losses to be cut?

> I'm pretty sure the investors would rather have their money back than nothing at all.

Did you ask them? Are you yourself a VC investor? Its rather possible that investors saw promising talent and wanted to buy 2 years of their time.
Are Gamers More Evolutionarily Advanced?
Solving the Santa Claus Problem in Erlang (2007)
I don't see how that's a publicity stunt. It's an offer that seems to take into account "We want out of this business, we're losing money, and we don't think this is at all monetizable". If I straight-up say "I'm desperate and need cash and think this is a piece of junk, and it's costing me money just to hold onto it", then I can expect low-ball offers.

Economically speaking, if it's a choice between shutting down and being bought out, anything more than a dollar is a good deal. Yeah, it's a dick move and it's taking advantage of someone, but it's not a publicity stunt.
Depends on if you're paying.
Want to Green Your Music Collection? Go Digital
I'm not sure, I mean, they ARE code, just not sequential imperative code like we are used to. I would argue that they are DATAFLOW languages, since electronic circuits function in the same fashion (a stream of data is routed, NOT a stream of instructions applied to some data).
Saw you at the first HN meetup, but missed the subsequent ones. I work at CMU.
Is it just me, or has HTML5 strayed away from defining how content should be interpreted and rendered in favor of defining how the resulting page should interact with the system it's running on?

Even the video element is made awkward by codec issues, thus depending on the browser implementer or underlying platform to function properly.
$7/hour is around R55/hour in South Africa, which is actually a great salary for most. But that figure is just for the top earners, I doubt most of the guides earn anywhere close to that.
We're slowly building out our network of writers across greater Europe's 45 territories. Media is a marathon, not a sprint... ;-)
Sorry, I've read the article but I'm still a bit confused. Search engine aggregation has existed for a while. Besides rounded corners, what differentiates this search engine?

"Phoenix is pretty, but that’s not really the point. What matters is that it suggests new kinds of functionality with a new kind of search experience."

Which new kinds of functionality? How is the search experience new or different?
"Online stores group products by who sells them."

Do you really find this to be true?

1) Go to http://www.newegg.com -- while brand/vendor is one selection criteria, so are many of the technical specs and options. They even offer advanced and power search.

2) Amazon is no different: While Brands are promoted (because consumers are trained to that) they offer power on the left side here (below brand): http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Cameras-Photo/b/ref=sv_p_4?ie=...

While I don't think that the statement in the RFS is accurate, there is no doubt in my mind that the online product finding experience has dramatic room for improvement and innovation.
Storage Security: It's not who's responsible, it's Who's Responsible
if only there was a summary of this article edited for brevity and targeted at a 7th grade reading level, for a mostly retired middle class audience.
Private retainer-based medical collectives
RichardDawkins.net hacked; spam sent to accounts
Very encouraging, thanks :)
Iff they have more children.
Similar to the sibling, I see 5-10% as being a fairly solid impact.
I'm currently in an AlphaLab company.
Yeah of course it is philosophical, but it there is economic question behind it.
Yes! A modern dataflow processor! I really hope this is successful.
To understand the situation a bit better you should listen to this Podcast that covered the story behind it which is quite a bit different than what is being spun in TechCrunch.

http://techzinglive.com/?p=101
How is "open content" more revolutionary than textbooks? In other words, why hasn't e.g. the widespread availability of math textbooks lead to a revolution in math education, putting price pressure on a math degree from, say, Harvard or U. Chicago?
Search for answers to Google's power leaves UK Internet firm baffled
It depends on the context, that is clear. There is no universal solution to that question.
Might be easier. The more we rely on social networking, the less identity you have to manufacture by actually going out and planting evidence, and the more you can manufacture just by procedural generation at the target site.
Fun paper, but I don't think destroyed zombies ever resurrect. The fatal decapitation or brain destruction shouldn't put the zombies into the R set, but should just remove the zombies from the population altogether. I'll have to see if octave can run their matlab code :)
i suppose my point is that building an application based on a website's provided APIs and services shouldn't be considered "filling and obvious hole". if you don't want your developers to do something, tell them not to or disallow them from doing it.

it is of course a company's prerogative to implement new functionality and features, but if you're essentially killing off a large swath of applications that you asked/allowed to be developed, its a bit of a dick move and worthy of at least a little whining. imo.
PG recently implemented a brief "cooling off" period for comments, where there was no reply link. The purpose was to prevent long, nit-picking back-and-forths.
Oh it's great, and if I'm a shareholder in AT&T or Apple I'm pretty damn happy about it. (The retention rate is a total unknown for a device that's 2 years old. Even a shitty free-after-contract clamshell has a 2 year retention.)

But it's not a massive change in the power balance between carriers and phones. Carriers aren't going to offer massive concessions for something that brings in a few % more users than the other 50 phones in their lineup average. Don't forget that overall, the iPhone isn't even in the top 10.
Cogito ergo sum, baby
It also shows the correct state of merge/rebase in the prompt as well. In many distributions, it's installed as /etc/bash_completion.d/git when you install git from a package management system, you just need to source /etc/bash_completion to get all the benefits.

The OP is an example of wheel reinvented, poorly.
Look how fast the earnings drop off. Once you get around the 20th spot, you're < $100/mo.
The so called von Neumann computer design is the way most of computers are still made. The computer defined in the First Draft Report on the EDVAC was never built and its architecture and design seem now to be forgotten.

This intrigued me to read the original: First Draft Report on the EDVAC, June 30, 1945.
Here are some interesting insights: Pp. 16-19

"5.3 At this point there arises another question of principle. In all existing devices where the element is not a vacuum tube the reaction time of the element is sufficiently long to make a certain telescoping of the steps involved in addition, subtraction, and still more in multiplication and division, desirable.To take a specific case consider binary multiplication. A reasonable precision for many differential equation problems is given by carrying 8 significant decimal digits, that is by keeping the relative rounding-of errors below 10exp(−8). This corresponds to 2exp(−27) in the binary system, that is to carrying 27 significant binary digits. Hence a multiplication consists of pairing each one of 27 multiplicand digits with each one of 27 multiplier digits, and forming product digits 0 and 1 accordingly, and then positioning and combining them. These are essentially 272 = 729 steps, and the operations of collecting and combining may about double their number. So 1000-1500 steps are essentially right."

Point 5.3 is essentially a parallel computing but von Neumann abandoned this idea. This document is worth reading in original.

I posted some information and link to the Report here:

http://blog.thstart.com/2009/07/first-draft-report-on-edvac-...
I think going head to head with Apple on the high end is a mistake. Google just isn't geared up to ever produce stuff that's quite as beautiful as what Apple consistently manages.

On the other hand, there's a ton of space below that, and a ton of space to make Apple clamber ever higher up the value chain in order to capture the margins they want, keeping them out of the mainstream market.
Wasn't this the point of squidoo, ehow, wikihow, about.com?