skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bullshit. Load a hour long quicktime video from blip tv using safari. It will hang your browser every time. This is on a latest gen Macbook Pro
Twitter Closing New Venture Round At $1 Billion Valuation
I don't think jrockway is referring to the software on the laptop, but rather software that the US government is buying. If the source code is available (especially as open source), malicious code should theoretically be less likely to make it in.
I find it funny that Luis also posted:

http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2009/07/hottest-people-in-cs.html
I think the common complaint is that that it isn't really Lisp all the way down - it's Lisp syntax that drives the JVM. Therefore, it is a False Lisp; it dresses like Lisp, and convinces the unwashed that it's Lisp, but it's actually leading us astray.

See http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42 for more.
If you think about it, this is basically outlining. You know, that thing your English teacher always bugged you to do because it would make your essays more coherent. If one insists on writing code before understanding the problem, this is probably one of the better ways to do it. Recognizing that function names are obviously correct because you know exactly what their purpose is in relation to the whole is a good sign.

When I first started programming I wrote a lot of code without much planning, and it was good because it allowed me to learn a language faster by interacting with it. When what should have been pretty straightforward programs started to get unwieldy, I realized that I had to do something different. Now I go at it with pencil and paper before writing any code, and I find it much more productive and fun because the level of understanding is better.

It's so easy to write code and it seems like it's so easy to change, but with any non-trivial problem I think that this is really an illusion. There are many times when it is useful to write exploratory code without much planning, but I think it's mostly useful for learning a new environment or banging out a minor variation of something you've done before. Otherwise it seems more useful to do some fairly systematic planning, even if it's for a prototype that may get completely reworked over a number of iterations where requirements are explored and may change.
Cloud Portability: Force.com vs Google App Engine vs Amazon
1024 by 2012
Finally a market for "(hardware) honeypot" laptops.
Confirmed to be false...

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...
Efficient Market Hypothesis and Supermarket Lines
Orchestr8 Releases structured data mining tech
Bing grabs 10 percent of search market
Arrington should give Calcanis the boot. There's nothing he does that Arrington should share revenue with him for. The TC brand and and promotion is what makes the thing successful. Calacanis may have convinced him to put on a conference initially, but that doesn't entitle him to any ongoing share in my mind.

It's not like they built a company up together from nothing. That'd be a real partnership and loyalty would be owed. All that happened here was that Calacanis convinced Arrington to create a new revenue stream from his existing, very successful, and related business.

Arrington is a sucker if he gives Calacanis anything but token remuneration at this point.
""... or pass on to my kids." and "... roughly 75% of the books I read I'll never read again." are mutually exclusive, no?"

Not in the least. I may not want to read them again but still consider them worth passing on.

"..."buying" a book for the Kindle is more akin to "renting" the book"

This is exactly why I love libraries. I specifically want to own (outright, no string attached) books that I will want to read again or have some other retaining value. The Kindle gives me all the negatives of the library system (no ownership) with all the negatives of the commercial system (expensive, wasted money).

I wish the Kindle were more of a utility. Everyone buys one and it can be used to buy, loan, and trade books. Amazon would make money because the Kindle would be the TRUE iPod of the book world. However I'm not holding by breath for this to happen (at least with the Kindle); but I am hoping that someone else sees this opportunity and beats the Kindle into the ground.
I think they have Internet there, too. SCNR.
Is the semantic web just hype?
Do you think the semantic web is just hype, or is it noteworthy?

http://www.webepags.com
Skype Founders Sue eBay, Investors
The font from Screenwriter ]['s 70-column mode in hgr2 for non-80 column Apple ][s may qualify as the first subpixel typeface.

http://books.google.com/books?id=zBIvBTsHbtUC&lpg=PA118&...
As much as I'm sure you're correct, I'm not sure my wife's discovery of said account would go over too well... It was for research into online reward systems, I swear!
-Yelp "Elite Users" get the little title next to their name if they post enough useful reviews. Likewise Amazon has their whole 'Top Reviewer' thing.

-Messageboards where members can give each other validation points, and then the amount of "rep points" someone has is displayed next to their name.

-Foursquare has the reward of making a user the "Mayor" if they post enough reviews about a certain area, and gives users 'badges' for completing different tasks. (I've never actually used it, but its something to that effect.)
Hygienic macros are a bigger deal in Scheme, where everything is conflated into single namespace (you know, the land of LST). His rant about macros and namespaces is a good hint he didn't practice Lisp that much.
http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/matzs-keynote.html

He sounds confused.

Started with BASIC: 'I could Make Intelligence'. ???

Then he found Lisp in a magazine article and 'fell in love with it'. 'BASIC aristocracy' vs. 'Lisp democracy'???

He liked Lisp from a book, but 'unfortunately he did not have a computer that could run it'. In University he used Emacs Lisp and it did not make him 'happy'. Parentheses? No? He had no problems with it. Macros? Partially. 'Smart people just underestimate oridinarity (sic) to use Lisp'. 'We are too ordinary to use Lisp'. Aristocracy. He is happy with aristocracy, as long as he has power.

The whole video is so painful...
Distinguishing humans from computers is an inherently unsustainable problem.
1. Big User Base
2. Big Money Invested
3. ???
4. Profit!
find one of those incredibly annoying app ads in your status feed. there should be a little button in the upper right corner. click it, and a menu comes down. one of the options allows you to not see anything more from 'mafia wars' or 'farmville' or whatever the latest stupid thing is.
> I have yet to hear a valid reason for why a modern standard library for Common Lisp is a bad thing.

Imagine the standard, cross-platform GUI you'd get in 1994 (the time of the ANSI spec approval).
Pretty slick. If you want to go even simpler, you can make a a stand using scissors and a business card: http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-business-card-iPhone-...
There is no link with computing as in running a program. The link is the perception changing technology that lets us accomplish previously difficult tasks in a simple manner.
Absolutely. It only stops people who are half-heartedly malicious: bots stop and attackers get past either way. You now get the malicious uncoordinated person, but you also get a simpler code base and the peace of mind from knowing that your login system can't fail just because of a free third-party api.
Most first-world countries have zero or negative population growth when you don't account for immigration. This seems to be a result of economic development. Most countries are also economically developing over time so you can expect the population growth rate to peak and decline as this happens. It has happened, in fact.

Of course, this development is dependent upon the presence of natural resources which may interfere with the food supply (i.e. biodiesel or ethanol fuels).
All these questions are technically unanswerable because information to answer the questions is not given.

For example:

Q2, I feel that blame should be given to both parties, and possibly even the driver, but all that depends on information that was not given.

The car company should test the stuff that it buys better, the company that made the cruise control should test their stuff better to avoid errors, and it should 'fail safe', in other words it should fail in a way that minimizes the risk of accidents.

Also, an error is pretty ambiguous, clearly it is one that seems to have a failure mode that is disastrous, but any driver should normally be able to disengage the cruise control if it would malfunction, so maybe the driver should carry some blame too.

Similar stuff applies to the other two examples.

For instance in #1 it might have been the producer of the cake (not neccesarily the supermarket), it might have been the delay between the purchase and the use, it might have been the person transporting the cake from the baker to the supermarket and so on.

In Q3 the error was made by the employee, but it may have been due to bad training, working too many hours or one of many other reasons that would change the take on the situation.

To assign 'blame' with this little information and so many unanswered questions is un-doable.

There is a reason why accident investigations take a while, all those questions need to be answered. And the reason is not to assign 'blame', even though in a litigious society that is how they are used, the reason is to make sure that we learn from these errors and change our procedures to make sure that it will not happen again.
I use SuperGenPass, which is just a js bookmarklet... It works equally well on Firefox, Safari, Mobile Safari, and Chrome.

http://supergenpass.com/
It is highly useful for EULAs and Terms of Service.
Worth noting that this was only a single-blind test, with a sample size of 1 violinist.
Possible answer for #3:

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/facebook-is-profitable-again...
Thought that also. There is an option to say you're married looking for "friends" ;)
"Tengebalizing" is a funny neologism.

You might be interested in reading the old Stoics, who advocated precisely the type of mental control over your own perceptions that you seem to have happened upon.

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is a good place to start. After that pick up Epictetus and Seneca.
One thing I saw in the comments:

> If they still have 30 million in the bank of the 55 million, why are they raising more money?

Answer: it's always easier to raise money when you don't need it.
As I said in my other comment I don't think this is really comparable to founders of a startup. Techcrunch50 may be a separate new corporation (I don't know), but it's really just a product of an existing company. This is like a consultant and a founder parting ways.
> Jen says researchers suspect that treadmill running is more intense and leads to improvements in muscle aerobic capacity, and this increased aerobic capacity, in turn, affects the brain more than the wheel jogging.

So the subjects didn't know how to lift and the researchers didn't know how to instruct the subjects to lift. The suggestion that a proper 20 minute lifting session would be less intense than 20 minutes on a treadmill is ridiculous. Done correctly lifting will leave you gasping for air.
Jon, no offense at all.

I just looked at your site and realized you were the guy I've been feeling sorry for all this time since you were one of the early production adopters. I'm glad to hear it's been a pretty smooth experience. I can stop carrying around that guilt. ;-)

Oh, and since this thread is about Web Frameworks, try Harbor (http://wiecklabs.com). :-D

Lesson learned about being to vocal/open too early, but Harbor and the related projects are seriously good stuff if I do say so myself. Also look for a major open-sourcing of a user-management/authorization system built on Harbor in the next day or two at http://github.com/wiecklabs.
Stop seeing the world in color. Black and white is so much simpler.
What does it mean that it's "sub pixel" ?

Given that each character is several pixels tall and wide, that seems like a misnomer, unless I'm missing something...
Your bottleneck is you, or, why I’ve stopped worrying about performance
There was really nothing more to discover about relationships that late in the social network game.

At that point in time, Facebook's networking features were equivalent to Myspace and Friendster, and still is today for the most part aside from some fancy bells and whistles.

The only way you could break into the market was to find a niche, and the Ivy league exclusivity at the beginning was that niche. Facebook was not a pioneer in this field as evidenced by sites such as ConnectU and Orkut.
Is it wrong that I chuckled at this revelation that gives new meaning to your nick, "randallsquared"?
As much as many of us despised him as a teacher, I do admit Luis von Ahn is pretty creative and brilliant at the same time.
Click "Hide" next to the item in the feed you want to hide. You'll be able to either "Hide Julie" or "Hide FarmVille."
If you want to compare repository sizes you should compare the size of .git directory only.
Big-oh of 3n? 5n?
Arbitrage supplies liquidity at all prices, including prices where most trades might not otherwise occur. Liquidity is required for businesses to systematically eliminate risk, therefore it is highly valued as a source of stability for most companies who deal with financial instruments.

Knight has some thoughts on systematic risk in his book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit.
Read the bipolar lisp programmer, it's quite an interesting insight.
http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm
I think they started the conference together and any partnership should have been worked out beforehand (and probably has been). Deciding down the road that what person A brought to the table was the reason for success and person B was just a "consultant" is the most common way that feuds between founders start. Because it just as easily could have been what person B brought to the table that made the thing a success.
Nice soap opera.
The estimate is nonsense. Africa's population has trebled (or whatever) yet the green revolution never happened in Africa. The continent is overwhelmingly fed on pre-green revolution crops grown in pre-green revolution ways with low fossil fuel inputs. The old ways scaled up. (Though arguably at great cost to natural habitat.)

Certainly there would be many more farmers (less efficient) without this gent's green revolution advancements and the food would be more expensive, but it's baseless to assert everyone would have starved otherwise.
viruses (the biological type)
Here is a report on working hours of teachers.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

Teachers work 24 fewer minutes per weekday and 42 minutes per Saturday than other professionals. They worked a little bit more on Sundays, I'd guesstimate about 10 minutes based on the graph. (The weekday and saturday numbers are given in the text, the sunday number is not.)

Table 5 suggests this works out to about 7 hours and 15 minutes per weekday, and about 1 hour per saturday, maybe 1.5 hours per sunday. That's just shy of 39 hours/week, for 10 months/year.
Facebook reporting that they were cashflow positive likely increased the certainty that Twitter could do the same.

The only problem (depending on your point of view) is that they've probably priced themselves out of an acquisition by all but a few of the companies who might be interested in buying them. Once you've raised that much money at that kind of valuation, the terms of your exit are fairly constrained.
For Twitter to turn down Facebook's acquisition offer, they must have a damned good plan for beating them in the "status" war, because FB is on the attack and gaining ground.

What is that plan?
I think you have a valid analogy of Lisp to Linux, but you you should finish the PG book before you make any final judgment. The power of Lisp comes from its "simplicity", its extensions, and the magical Aha moment you get while coding in Lisp (it's like obtaining zen only to realize new and bigger doors have opened before you and there is a vast ocean of new knowledge to gain) - the Aha moment is rather special, to the point that I don't know how to describe it, that's why you should try to have it yourself. Like other comments have mentioned, Scheme and CL have different purposes (Scheme is mostly used in academia and is very simplistic while CL was geared to enterprises mostly). I really don't know why Lisp flavor wars arise, I suppose is the price we pay for being among passionate people, it can hold back a technology for sure, but if that war can be turned into a logical debate of merits, great things can come out. On that note, I do like Windows 7 a lot, but I will stick to Linux because I have learned so much (shell scripting, network administration, socket programming) ever since I started using it that it's not even funny, and there is some fun in being able to fix something yourself instead of having to report a bug to MS and wait for them to fix it.
Modularization is indeed independent of programming discipline. That is basically my point. Breaking a program down into the correct components is all-important, but most of this happens well below the module level. Unless the system has been over-engineered to death, as OOP encourages.

Three cheers for not being swayed by appeal to authority, but I'm curious about what you think counts as "business OOP" that doesn't count as "enterprise," as "enterprise" seems vague enough to encompass pretty much anything.

Your critique of lists and conses is again centered on the notion that documentation and encapsulation should be done in code and enforced by the machine. These things may well be necessary to build an economy of software modules in a closed source world, but the original article is just one example of the brain damage that this sort of world creates.

I'm glad you've been exposed to functional concepts, and I don't think that business developers are idiots, but I do think they live in an environment that is by and large toxic to good programming practices. I'm not paranoid, I just see a lot of evidence for the validity of Conway's Law.
With most laptops being assembled in China to begin with, does it really matter?
They're not in the "status" war. Facebook wants to sell hypertargeted ads to businesses/people/brands.

I think Twitter wants to sell a premium service to every small business in America that will render most forms of local advertising completely moot.
I remember that one. And man, did it look awful on a color TV. You really needed a dedicated monochrome monitor to make that one work.
But with a $1 Billion company at your hands, would YOU want to sell early?

Furthermore, Twitter has repeatedly said they do not want to sell and, instead, want to focus on making money that isn't coming from VC's checkbooks.
Boiling Apple down to its adjectives
I think the fact that SVN adds almost 100 megs of crap to your checkout does suck. But yeah, I don't think it's a deal breaker. I switched to Git for the features; the smaller "checkout" sizes was just an additional benefit.

Thanks for posting your results, I think it's very cool that you are not a Git fan but took the time to really look into it.
For a few generations. Eventually, the survival of the fittest kicks in, and those people who avoided birth control (from a stronger paternal feeling, etc) will restock the population.
It didn't mention it because the study wasn't about martial arts. It would also likely be difficult to get mice to do martial arts.
The whole point is that there's more to languages than just "technical correctness". Lisp is great technically and theoretically, but in other respects it is quite a ways behind (for instance) Ruby. So Ruby has some big problems (speed, to use everyone's favorite example) but just saying "Ruby is slower so we should all use Lisp" is a bit ridiculous. That's what he was trying to say.

(He's also not a native English speaker, so i cut him some slack on that front.)
... So they should stop running the banner ads they don't have, switch domain names and create services that make money? Brilliant.
while it might be fun to turn against your savior, it hardly applies to any real-life experience (hopefully :-)

I'm guessing that you don't know the reason cops hate taking domestic-violence calls?
It especially keeps out the people who pay smart people.
Clojure seems to have most of what he wants- I wonder if he's aware of it.
That is a great recommendation...I have actually read pieces from Meditations which is extremely congruent with my statement...I am happy that you enjoyed my neologism!
I agree that thoughts cannot control the world with our thoughts, however keep in mind that Since the early 1930's, psychologists have known that the brain emits electromagnetic waves . There is no scientific evidence that it has any impact on materialistic outcome but there is no evidence that it does not either. I know it is totally unscientific and I would say more philosophical thinking but there is a possibility that someday we will discover that our thought might have some impact on the outer world. This is one of the main concept that new age philosophy manipulates. Also our thoughts not only control our action as far as our body goes but also effect biochemistry of our brain that might affect how our body reacts to it. For example depressing thought might lead to certain physiological disorders.
"to say nothing of the business risk of outsourcing a key stage of your signup process to a third party."

I thought you meant that Google would have actually considered ditching their own captcha in favor of recaptcha for google sign-up.
You are showing your ignorance of how TC50 works.

I had the opportunity to see some of the backstage action, having been a presenter in the past. Without betraying anyone, all I can say is that the conference wouldn't be the same if either party was to leave.
Wow, I just realised that this could be the edge that Android apps could have, since it's possible to download apps from any source.
I think you're right that it's basically outlining.

As a practice, it started for me when I first started working on writing some literate code. I would basically write a paragraph about what the function should do, then write up the function definition, then move on to the next program.

It has definitely made my code more coherent and feels like a necessity for anything more than a few hundred lines.

Lots of stuff I write I still just dive in and code because it's "obviously" simple. Sometimes that simple problem grows into a mess of 1k+ LoC, sometimes not.
Reputations one year after the financial crisis
Really? It's always seemed to me that Facebook wants to own your address book and inbox, while Twitter wants to own real time news/search/intentions. But maybe that's just what you said from a different perspective.
This isn't however what usually meant by 'superintelligence', a philosophic device predating the now-popular singularity school.

Imagine a puzzle that can't be solved by "normal", human or otherwise, intelligence in infinite amount of time, but can be solved by superintelligence. Speed of thought plays no role here, nor capability of particular specimen. We talk about the limits pretty much in the same key you'd talk about the limits of functions in mathematics. That's what his virtual opponent was addressing.
One good implementation that has not been mentioned is http://www.kongregate.com. More good examples are http://www.Yelp.com and http://www.Mahalo.com.

I almost feel like http://www.thewhuffiebank.com is also a good example of an attempt at microreward and reputation system on a grander scale.
It means that the anti-aliasing is done with the positions of individual RGB components in mind instead of treating whole pixels in a grid as the fundamental abstraction.

It allows for smoother anti-aliasing at the cost of some portability (things change if the display is rotated, not all displays have the same sub-component configuration, etc).