skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"(which, for some reason, don't take an optional predicate)"

This kills me pretty much every time I use those functions. It seems like 9 times out of 10, I need the ability to pass in a predicate function.

This always struck me as a major oversight... does anyone know if this design decision was made for a particular reason?
How about these, from personal experience: Newspeak, Oberon, Modula, Pascal, Cobol, PL/I, Ada, and assembly. And how could I forget Basic? ;-<)
The article is interesting in suggesting that comprehensive immigration reform is a political landmine for this administration, as it has been for previous administrations.

The trouble is that the kind of "comprehensive immigration reform" which politically powerful constituencies are currently pushing is nothing like the kind of immigration reform which would actually be useful.
http://web2nam.es/ works pretty well too if you have some specific words in mind.
Tires of the future will be made with oranges
I whole-heartedly appologize.

Windows swapping algorithms suck big time. After coming back to work I need to wait for windows to swap eclipse/ff to ram... Wtf was it doing overnight that warrented a need for disk swap? Heavy thinking?

After leaving ubuntu on all night the performance tomorrow is as if I never left the keyboard.

Last job windows shutdown took 3 min, startup took 10. The system did suffer from memory leaks or appeared to since after like 2 weeks it had to be rebooted or it worked like crap. Coulda been antivirus pos software though. Reboots were also needed at times, just the nature of not having kill -9.

Another complaint: can't delete open files. Our av program broke our build caz we could not run cleanup scripts where applicable.

In any case after 3 month of bliss I have nightmares that next job ill be coding in windows. Maybe 7 aint so bad...
Your points concerning inheritance are good but "the field is young" seems like just a pseudo-profound explanation for the situation. CS as a field really can't be compared in this way to other fields - it's not really a science since it doesn't deal with the discovery of verifiable facts. It is more like some combination of mathematics, humanities, management and engineering.

CS has to connect very fuzzy things, human beings, with very exacting things, computers. The problems of CS aren't really about the age of the discipline but difficulty of the domain. For example, when you start to get into biology-as-programming-with-DNA, you are dealing with an even more complex domain and biologists look to CS for clues in this situation.
Tweetmag: a social media experiment to have a micro-magazine
BrowserScope: project for profiling web browsers
I'm not much of anything, but if you had to pigeon-hole me, I'll take agnostic pantheistic deist. But that's a stretch. Agnostic probably covers me more than anything else.
Start-up Claims SSD Achieves 180,000 IOPS
You know most average pc users think someone "sends them a virus", they ask "why do they write viruses to attack my computer?". You and I know this is the question of someone who doesn't understand the purpose(s) behind malicious software... but think of how well this image of a hacker writing a virus for your computer aligns with the billion-dollar marketing campaigns of anti-virus software corporations. They don't try to educate users WHY the malware is written, only to position their product as a weapon against the evil-doers.

So it hit me "the malware ecosystem is not as large a detriment to the windows platform as I thought, in fact it has somehow become not only 'ok' and accepted but continues to be proliferated as a 'necessary evil'" (keyword "evil" to imply it's intents are targeting YOU).

I agree with your statement that habit and familiarity play a large part, but what drove me mad was that I know despite the powers of habit and familiarity surely Apple's good word-of-mouth and powerful ad campaigns would educate pc users of a "better way" and they'd take it. But are "switchers" more so motivated by the poor performance of the pc or the great performance of the mac? I think more by the poor performance of the pc (in other words, if they don't feel that the pc performs poorly than they do not have sufficient motivation to take all the (superficial) risks associated with switching). The status-quo is windows, and to gauge how they feel about windows performance they check against the status quo. Those who identify with often breaking from the crowd and rebelling have probably already switched to Mac. Those who gauge their choices against thy neighbors and find comfort in numbers aren't yet convinced Mac is superior and in fact would argue that Mac is only superior because it is not handling "the load" that the windows platform is handling and once it does (if it does) it too will buckle under the pressure.

"good enough" is comfortable for them
> This can happen with any implementation of any class.

From the definition of a square (a polygon with four sides of equal length) and we are trying to infer behaviour. But the definition does not require a square to remain a square after transformation; a square with a skew applied need not be a square nor a rectangle. Treating the square as a concrete class-based entity cannot capture this reality.

You are correct, this could happen with any class.
The argument parsing file used by Lamson is pretty good.

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Ezedshaw/lamson/development/an...
the backend is indeed java
Zakta, a new search engine.  Edit, save, and share results.
Sweet...is there any way that we'll be able to go back and watch the broadcast from the beginning of the day (it's already 6 hours in)?
Of all the people who currently believe in wacky pseudoscience, how many do you think would be convinced otherwise if only they had free access to original scientific papers?
Yes, X11 is backwards compatible and that's been really great for the Linux desktop. But the article bashes Windows for rapidly introducing new APIs even though the old ones remain compatible; I'm just pointing out that Linux does that too.

Linux's graphics APIs have remained largely static: they are GTK+ and Qt. Nobody writes their own implementations of X11.

Your audio paragraph is completely divorced from reality. Sound servers were originally created to implement software mixing, which is not supported by OSS. When ALSA was imported into the mainline kernel, software mixing became possible without servers and they largely died out.

Now, ALSA is the dominant standard for Linux audio. Recently, the sound server PulseAudio was created, but apps use it through the standard ALSA API. To my knowledge, there is no distribution using a sound server other than Pulse.

You can't rely on sound being enabled, true. But every mainline distribution ships with sound enabled, and that means they support ALSA. If a user disables their sound subsystem and then complains they can no longer hear music, that's their problem.

The filesystem problem can't be blamed wholly on apps or kernel devs; IMHO the problem really lies in POSIX which doesn't specify a way to achieve what app developers need in a way that can also be easily implemented in the kernel with good performance.

Sure it does -- fsync(). To my knowledge, the only filesystem which has poor performance when using fsync() is ext3 in data=ordered mode (which is not the default).
You want to be able to say all(items, lambda x: x.is_cool()) instead of all(item.is_cool() for item in items)? The second one seems clearer to me and isn't substantially longer.
Steve Blank's issue isn't with how many years of experience the VC has -- it's about whether the VC has had any experience prior to 1995. Silicon Valley's rules changed in 1995, around the time of the Netscape IPO. Steve argues that entrepreneurs and investors raised after 1995 are unlikely to have experience running a sustainably profitable business. Their experience will be solely focused around "flipping" companies for a quick IPO or acquisition.
I can work hard, but I need regular vacations. This is from my experience, your mileage will vary.

I think the trick is to take vacation before burnout feelings. Otherwise, you spend a month just staring into a wall.

If you get vacation a bit more often, then you can do something nice instead (travel is always good; try e.g. scuba diving, wind surfing or hang gliding).

That vacation will probably be a memory for life.

(After writing this, I'm going to go book a vacation for February! It will also give me time to get back into functional programming again, I love that it is becoming popular.)
QR Codes via Google Charts API
Or maybe we just need better PR people.

A world with a few more Carl Sagans, Richard Dawkinses and others who are seriously scientifically literate but spend a great deal of their time working on explaining things to the public at large could hardly be a bad thing.
You seems misunderstood what I meant.

I meant if there is petroleum oil in Mars or Venus, it makes the abiogenic petroleum oil more possible be universal resources.
If you look below the main video, you'll see thumbnails for several others... these are each segments from earlier in the day.

Paul Graham's panel just started at around 6:00 PM EST, though. (15 minutes ago, as I post this.)
Lamson's argument parsing is directly addressed at the top of this article.
Personally, I find arguments against using debuggers to be absurd. More importantly, I think they tend to promote ponitification over science.

Using a debugger is, effectively, taking a scientific approach to understanding a software system. It's similar to using a microscope to examine bacteria. The programmer sets up an experiment, and then uses the debugger to observe the software system and learn about how it works.

The approach Linus advocates is one of "ponitification", where the wise pontif examines his scrolls, and makes a declaration of truth.

Its interesting to note that the barrier to understanding how software works via experimentation is much lower than the barrier to understanding it by reading every line of source code.

In the mail, Linus states that his goals in excluding debuggers from the main kernel sources is to discourage people from using debuggers to develop features, because developing with a sense of deep understanding results in better software. However, it also excludes one of the most useful tools for developing that sense of understanding.

I can't speak to personal motivations, because I don't know the man, but that type of behavior does smell somewhat of self-preservation. Ensuring that it is difficult to acquire a complete understanding of Linux, makes it more difficult for him to loose his position of influence.

Regardless of his motivations, however, lies the central fact that barriers to knowledge are detrimental to an open society.

Given the value that the linux community places on "openness", "freedom", and "egalitarnisim", and his position as a leader in that community, I would think he should want to eliminate those barriers.

If that increases the burden of incorporating change into the kernel, because the quality of developers is diluted by use of debuggers, than so be it.

This is equivalent to the notion that the burden of proof in acquiring a criminal conviction is placed on the state, not the defendant. Yes this means that everyone needs to work harder at justice, and that sometimes guilty people go free. However, in the end, it ensures that people actually remain free.
Really thoughtful article about balancing money with other things, purposelessness and self-discovery as a path to creativity, and creativity as a business strategy. All the things he talks about that relate to my experiences are dead on. I've had similar thoughts about keeping any business I start private, and bootstrapping instead of seeking VC funding. Who wants to optimize for current needs, or short term profits? I would much rather give people something they can't even describe until they see it for the first time. If it weren't for mathematicians who were mostly motivated by aesthetics, we wouldn't even have computers.

It's interesting that he describes having a kid as a way of avoiding or delaying self-exploration. I've found that self-exploration has been one of the hardest things I've done, but by far the most helpful, although I think that outside of solving personal problems the line between self-exploration and other sorts of exploration starts to blur. It's really about the exploration of appealing ideas for reasons that one probably can't explain to anyone else.
PG hit the SeatGeek guys with a good question.

Q; "Surely you must know the average variation in ticket prices over a month."

A; stall stall stall... "we don't know."
Rails is a Ruby framework, Django is a Python framework. Each one uses the strengths and idioms of its implementation language to be and become better.

These ports don't make sense. Clojure is not Ruby, there will always be a disconnect between Clojure as a language and a framework ported from Ruby.
Yes I am aware, but he doesn't like it. I do.
That was my snarky point.
free() under Windows XP can be incredibly slow. I once created a big hash table with more than 10000 allocated hash buckets, and freeing it took around 3 seconds (!) on a 3GHz P4. The same code on Linux and OSX took around 3 milliseconds.
Blog post by Souders: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/09/13/browserscope-how...
That page doesn't include any admins. The page is defined on line 2258: (newsop leaders () (leaderspage user))

Leaderspage is just below: line 2262. The line we're interested in is line 2266: (each u (firstn nleaders* (leading-users))
This line says "for each of the first nleaders* in the list returned by (leading-users), do the following:".

Leading-users is line 2276. It returns a sorted list of users by karma. When looking at a user and deciding whether to sort em, it asks two questions: "does this user have more karma than the constant leader-threshold*?" and "is this user not an admin?"

So if you ever find a user who has more karma than whoever is the last user on the leaders page, but isn't on it, either you've found an admin, or the code running this site has been changed from the 3.1 release.
Part of it is being my own boss, working on stuff I choose. But honestly a big part of it is the potential for profits to scale independently of, or at least at a very high ratio to, my effort/time.

Working for someone else you'll never make more than $X/year, where X is some general high point for your position/field/location/etc... That could be $50k, $100k, or $300k, but it's unlikely to be much higher (unless your position is CEO, investment banker, or thief (wait is that two or three positions?)).

By building a business, my hope is that the business will expand, I'll hire people, I'll have long term contracts, recurring revenue, and other mechanisms in place that will allow me to work 40 hours a week and make $200k one year, $500k the next, and so on. When you work for someone else in general your income will be fixed to some hours*$Y formula. Building your own business can free you from that limitation.
I was a very early user and the initial draw for me was gathering badges as quickly as I could. I gathered them all so badges stopped driving me toward checking in. Then there was mayorship. But, most importantly, it was seeing when/where my friends were checking in. And as long as my friends keep checking in and I keep checking in, why would I quit "playing" Foursquare? The playing bit, in my opinion, is simply the hook.

And let's not forget tips.
I thought his question about why they weren't using their technology to make money from buying underpriced tickets themselves was much more damaging.

The SeatGeek founder's answer to the question you're referring was actually much more useful than it seemed when you look at it in context. He was able to say that ticket prices for baseball games varied by 40%, on average, over a month... for sold out games.

Although pg seemed dissatisfied with this response, and was looking for ticket price variation for all games, why should the SeatGeek guys know that? It's not important to their business, because their service is only valuable when there's an active secondary-market for ticket sales, in other words, when tickets for games are rare, which most of the time is because they're sold out.
For a privately held entity, how exactly would you like a 3rd party to provide evidence? You have to either know someone on the inside or work by proxy. Assuming you don't know someone, your best proxy is the 10x valuation jump. The $145million valuation wouldn't come without proof of the revenue model to an unproven team.

They were executing revenue, and executing very well.
I spent about 3 hours on a domain name for my product, and came up with a good one (which I won't reveal here). For just the price of a domain registration. An automatic domain hunter (part of the domain lookup I was using) gave me some clues, but ultimately, I had to figure it out the hard way.
Interesting that the Washington Post didn't put a disclaimer about their ownership of Kaplan Test Prep in that article.
Yeah, if you let yourself get burnt out, even if you plan fun activities while you're on vacation, the burnout will probably take away from it. I went on a sailboat tour while I was on vacation while feeling burnt out, and I remember alternating between enjoying the ride and feeling sad.

I'm glad I helped you remind yourself to book your vacation. :)
"If two of them were Squares, I would expect height and width to mirror each other. Your saying you wouldn't expect it."

No, I wouldn't expect it, because I don't know about Squares. Don't be misled because this example are uses shapes we all learn in kindergarten. The real lesson is about all the abstractions we make up all day long building applications in the real world. Think of it as Frobulator and the false subclass MagicFrobulator.

Caches happen everywhere. Going back to squares and rectangles, I stated the collection was a column. Each rectangle rests on the one before it in the collection. When I narrow the column, I set the width of every Rectangle in the collection, but now unbeknownst to me some elements have changed their height. If the column happened to be in a collection of columns sorted by height, it would now be out of sort order. The original programmer would make a reasonable assumption (well, duh) that the column sort order would not be affected by a SetWidth call.

"Its still a Square (by my definition). The new Squares she has are still Rectangles too. Why did this programmer assume that changing a rectangle's length would never effect its width? This invalid assumption could have been made prior or after the introduction of Squares."

The definition of Rectangle states that changing the width would not change the height. I don't understand your objection.

I think using something as familiar as shapes is confusing the point.

Again, go back to Frobulator and MagicFrobulator. In 2005, I invent Frobulator which has two properties foo and bar that are mutually exclusive. I release Frobulator to the world and make a million dollars.

In 2008 you have a revelation that you could make a billion dollars if you could just simplify Frobulator. You decide that you only really need foo, and you can kind of obsolete bar by making it dependent on foo. You then market this as MagicFrobulator with the pitch, "Throw out your Frobulators! MagicFrobulator is the perfect replacement."

Customers buy your MagicFrobulators and plug them in and discover to their horror that they explode in a shower of Star Trek induced sparks. As it turns out, other systems have regulated themselves by setting and getting foo and bar independently. Now, Widgets set foo and screw up Gadgets who did not expect bar to have changed. Bar just happens to control the amperage, and so the Gadgets explode.
How do I refine my product’s positioning?
IPhone to run .NET applications via Mono
The highlight of this post was discovering the WTFPL, although the videos in slow motion of mario following the mouse were pretty incredible.
I think it would be important for them to know it, because the market for the non-active games might be a large part of the $15B market number they quoted -- meaning that SeatGeek is targeting a smaller market than they think. Also, getting people to purchase their tickets on SeatGeek might be a sort of impulse function based on the deviation of the ticket prices; if there is a low variation on most games, people won't be motivated to play the market.
Bing is the buggiest search engine, QA contest finds
Wow that is beautiful to look at...I wonder how labor-intensive it is for them to add new categories
I think the need to understand the rules before 1995 is a decent point, but the headline implies that people can't gain perspective from before 1995 without actually being there. Not true. People who are curious enough can find a way to understand it.
The N game has similar creations, but none approach this level of artistry.

Mario seems like a good target for 'variant' games. http://kotaku.com/5161778/japanese-gamers-invent-new-way-to-... has been a favorite of mine.
That's why I mentioned librarians. Professional catalogers have spent over a century trying to figure out how to organize resources so that people doing research can find relevant information, and classifications that are useful for everyone prove surprisingly elusive. The Dewey Decimal system is from the 1870s, after all. (Its flaws are well-known, now, and there are several other cataloging systems in use.)

I was thinking about a quote (I think it's from Philip Greenspun or Joe Armstrong, though in ten minutes of googling I wasn't able to source it. Anyone?) observing that programming seems to be in a pre-scientific phase (in the Kuhn-ian sense) -- there still isn't a broad consensus about major ideas, so advances often come via books and manifestos, rather than gradually through organized research.

(Edit: The closest match I'm getting is regarding AI. I've been reading about Prolog, so that might be where I read the quote...)
Poll: What timezone are you in?
Please use standard time in giving your answer. For example, my clocks are currently set to UTC-4 for United States Eastern Daylight Time, but I picked UTC-5. Also, if any of you are from timezones not listed, please leave a comment: the only +:30 timezone I put in is +5:30 for India.
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UTC (Greenwich)
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no base insults, just what my experience has shown me time and time again.
Are You Happy? Flowchart - I'm printing this out [JPG]
Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message
"PG just destroyed the SeatGeek guys"

I'm not sure the dramatics are called for.
I'm not too familiar with how various Linux applications are licensed currently, so perhaps someone else can enlighten me.

Does anyone know of any major GPLv2-only apps out there that would provide a major roadblock to porting this to Linux?
Agreed. Edited
Miguel de Icaza's statement was a little bold: "What's important here is that C# and .Net are considerably more productive development environments than the native iPhone language, which is Objective-C.". Does anyone have any examples of this being true?

Everything I have personally seen of Cocoa and Objective-C suggests it is extremely productive, compared to anything else (much less alternatives that could be "considerably more" productive). But maybe I'm wrong.
One of the best posts I've read in quite some time on HN - articulates what it means to be an entrepreneur almost perfectly.