skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're using the upcoming Flex 4 for a new project and I'd compare Flex to GWT but not something like jQuery. It definitely has its trade-offs and benefits. The state management and skinning system is first class and there are some great micro-application architectures being created in the Flex world.

We have started to see the same sort of thing in HTML/JS land (Sproutcore/Cappuccino) but honestly, they come with almost all the same tradeoffs as Flash does.

I would say the File upload/download, animations, skinnable components, layout management, and more in an single well thought out package outweighs anything in the HTML/JS land currently. Sure if you want to patch together components you can get all of the same things, but that's like arguing insert flavor of linux is as fun to use as Mac OS X because it has all the same features.

I choose Flex for the same reasons I choose Rails. It's not a chore to develop in.
Csv2mysql builds CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements from csv files
This is all motherhood and apple pie and such, but I guess it deserves repeating from time to time. He's got that Clean Code book out, which is a pretty good read.

What I want to know is how in the heck do you get to call yourself "Uncle Bob"? What? Is there like an agile family, with uncles and nephews and stuff? If so, I want to be Cousin Dan
Is there any other information on what he's doing in the code and why? I wouldn't mind implementing something like this in a project I'm working on.
Apparently you can convert PDFs to a Kindle viewable format, if that's true then you can convert LaTeX documents by way of PDF.
You have to consider that in this case he is writing for a general audience. You also have to consider that he is writing in an environment where he has to distinguish himself from Chicago school absolutists.

Also, I think your assertion that asset bubbles do not occur absent government interference is wrong; or at the very least leaves out the fact that often it is the speculators themselves who are most demanding that the government aid and assist the inflation of the bubble.
You're bringing up some of the same points I did when I made the claim that college could be a bubble, except you were disagreeing with me back then.
Chart of the Day: Gawker's First Seven Years End Pretty Well
Could you imagine someone with no need for #1 (say she already got it from an online classroom) paying tuition to get 2-5?
University of Phoenix is nationally accredited-- and that's bad. Most universities are regionally accredited, which means if you get a degree from Phoenix and you want to pursue a masters at another uni, you're degree may not count.
first question, how does someone make a living risking "millions of dollars" and barely have enough money to afford a single flight?
Another point about online courses, it's would be like working from home as a one man startup. Unless your very driven, have good support around you or know friends doing the online courses as well, it could be a very lonely experience.
kamaloka as in "crazy bed" (spanish)? No idea what AMQP is either.
They could also use the bus and talk to people.

If they don't show up, they should pay the price!
That one's pretty obvious. Giraffes are herbivores, so their caloric input is both less efficient and linear with time. Most herbivores spend a huge percentage of their time grazing.

Lions on the other hand need to be in tip-top shape only a few hours per day to cover their calories.
keyword: risking
Only having the job for a week or two?
I think she was a trader making at least several hundred grand a year. But she lived in an extremely expensive apartment. In the few months after being fired, she spent her entire savings on living expenses. That's part of why I found her story so fascinating.
The fact that you're asking that question makes this idea worth that much more.
not to mention the economy as a whole...
He's basically taking advantage of a trick which is almost never used for compression purposes, so it can be used after any JPEG encoder to improve compression, since nobody else seems to do this.

Specifically, it abuses the progressive scan system. It's well-known that progressive scan in JPEG (which causes the image to load starting at the lowest detail and being refined up to full quality) doesn't just add to usability for the viewer of the image, but it also slightly improves compression. However, progressive scan allows you to specify almost any splitting of the coefficients--each of which gets its own Huffman table for compression.

To make this script, Loren did an exhaustive search of all possible splitting options on a large collection of images. He then collected statistics from this and used it to devise a pretty fast and simple search of the most common best-split situations to maximize compression. You can read the comments for more specific details.

Extra note: Loren has been the primary maintainer of the x264 video encoder over the past 5 years and is also an ffmpeg developer.
I don't think it will be this; rather, it will be the free and open accessibility to knowledge and discussion via MIT OCW, Stanford lecture youtube channels, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome

Maybe it's this? It's very common among hackers, and easy to confuse with insomnia. Well, it's effectively the same if you have to wake up early.
It is an apples to oranges comparison because Blackblaze is only including the cost of components in that graph for their solution, but they're including all of the research, development, assembly, and support costs in the other vendors' solutions.

What are the labor costs for testing all their hardware (with 10 sata controllers no less)? What are the labor costs for assembling all those systems? What is the labor costs of developing the system architecture? What are the labor costs of creating their storage application which reduces their need for in-box redundancy? And if you want to talk about Amazon there is data center rental, power, cooling, and ongoing administration.

In short, they're comparing the costs of their components to the costs of a ready-to-go solution from other vendors. Sounds like apples and oranges to me.
Got a kindle. Not in love. Waiting for iTab.
The GIMP takes advantage of this and lets you specify the coefficient (to an extent).
It's a real shame that the established players can use accreditation so well to prevent competition.

I briefly taught at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neumont_University, which used a more expensive hack to handle the accreditation problem: they bought an existing college. (Neumont is VC-backed; obviously that's not something you can bootstrap. It's also probably not something a $99/m model can afford anyway...)
And if you want to make a Python bytecode disassembler less useful for reverse engineering, you can consider the Python code obfuscator at http://bitboost.com/ . Or the elderly free demo at http://pawsense.com/python..obfuscator/
It's a good bet it's not enforceable. The lawyers tend to be paranoid because it can help, and hurts very little (you're a minority).
It only lets you pick the number of levels of progression if I recall correctly; it doesn't experiment with various different possible locations to split the DCT coefficients, only the number of splits total.
Krugman is a guy who preaches to the choir while ignoring anyone who might challenge him. Which is why he gets away with such omissions.

Take this paragraph...

"During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. "

That's a straw man if ever there was one. I don't think any economist has ever denied the reality of market corrections. In fact, while Krugman picks out a few choice quotes the fact is many, many economists have been warning about the housing bubble for years. He does eventually address this with one sentence on page 5 but then obscures the issue by quoting politicians denying the bubble (a politician is never going to predict doom and gloom even if they do see it coming)

In the end there were mistakes made in our economy but Krugman's using those mistakes to float a theory that the whole system is flawed even though the system created 26 years of relative prosperity. Just because deregulation went a little too far doesn't mean going in the complete opposite direction is wise.
I have a four-day weekend coming up. I just lost it.
The way I read the code it tries a number of scans scripts by passing them to jpegtran one by one and remembering the size of the output.

The best result is then used.
When you are thinking out a problem is language (human or computer) any part of it?

If I understand how most people think (which I most likely don't), they have an internal monologue going, like they are thinking about going to the store and they think in their inner voice, "lets see, what do I need? Some eggs, milk, cheese". I never have any monologue internally, I either see a little picture flash by, or more often my thoughts have no relation to anything I could describe as sensory at all.

For example, I just thought of what I wanted to get to drink because I was really thirsty from gardening. No words were thought, but in quick sucession I percieved in my thoughts the flavor and temperature of tap water, and then the cold sweet syrupyness of coca cola, and I grabbed the coke. I can't describe it really, it's very much a 'now you are breathing manually' thing, once you think about how you think you are changing how you think.
Mark Pilgrim's response to "Notes on HTML 5"
That's part of why I found her story so fascinating.

No disrespect, but that's not fascinating, it's stupid.

Basically, she had no savings. No rainy day fund. No retirement funds. No investments.

What's the first think Suze Orman types tell all of those women that watch her? Have enough set aside for 2-3 months living expenses - minimum!

There's simply no excuse for someone working so close to money to be so irresponsible with her own. I feel for her, but perhaps this is lesson learned.
At least she didn't have debt. (I assume since she wouldn't have been as worried about the extra sum).
I quit using Bing forever when it autocorrected "clojure" to "closure" and offered no obvious workaround.
Keep in mind that we don't really know the full story. There could have been a number of factors preventing her from setting aside 3 months of living expenses. Heck, she might have only been at her job for a few months. The fact that she had a job managing a lot of money suggests to me that she would know how to manage her own, and that it is more likely than not she didn't have the option to save up a large amount of money. Point being, let's not criticize based only on anecdotal evidence.
Sounds familiar. I'm pretty good at putting stuff off until I can't get around it any more. I alternate between periods of constant output and periods where I basically just surf the web and make up for lost time at night.

It's pretty weird though, I find that I am much more productive when the world around me has come to a halt.

It doesn't help that I am very easily distracted.
Did you encounter any problems while using Flex? Was it stable? Did it need to be restarted often, etc.?
"MP3 is already declining (thanks to Apple) "

How do you know that? And what format is supposed to be replacing mp3? It's the only audio format I run into on the Web (but then I don't use Apple products to play music).
"I’m a massive nerd, basically – I program computers and make websites for people"

I think the problem is the way he says it not necessarily what he does. I mean why start with "I’m a massive nerd, basically". Some guy with and MBA isn't going to start out by saying "I'm a dumb jock" and then continue to describe their work as "I sit on my ass all day and micro manage my employees". With this guys social skills I suspect he could make him self look like a boring tool no matter what his job was.
I remember when Netscape Navigator practically was the Web. "Yeah, there's this thing called the Web, you use a program called Netscape to access it". It's kind of like the relationship between PDF and Acrobat when they came out together, or the way PowerPoint is the only slideshow software most people know of.
Did you guys look into travel insurance? If you found the right package, it might cover things like additional charges due to travel interruptions, etc.

And since you are engaging in a publicity stunt you might look for sponsorship beyond JetBlue.
She was so addicted to her expensive lifestyle that when she lost her job she couldn't get herself to lower her expenses.

You could call her stupid, but I find it fascinating.
Funny that this other heist came up on rolfe-winlker's blog. Quite a contrast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk-1O31r1Q8&feature=playe...
I have posted this before, but if you care at all about memory and how it applies to writing efficient code, you owe it to yourself to check out this fantastic paper: http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf
Pathological Programming - Fractran
Here's a link to the PDF where you can actually use your mouse wheel to scroll:

http://www.starling-software.com/misc/icfp-2009-cjs.pdf
Well, not my college and not my degree. For my degree you had to work your ass off and there was no way around that. My major started with more than 200 people and about thirty something of us graduated. In some of the early classes professors would fail half the class without batting an eyelid.

And it was not considered a super elite school or anything. It was just an engineering degree in a school where the faculty took the subject seriously. So, I am very sure nobody in my major partied through it, in fact I was probably the biggest partier of them all but i still had to work my ass off for the difficult classes.

Of course there always are majors that can be partied through, we all know the bs majors out there.

Well it is possible that people with on-line degrees are in fact working hard, but it is very hard to believe. What is their incentive to fail people that do not learn the subject? What is their incentive to even teach the subject properly? For reputable universities this usually comes down to the personal integrity of the professor. They have academic reputations to defend and make sure that their students know what their supposed to know or don't pass. For on-line colleges the "professor" is a random badly paid employee, and the student is a customer that will stop paying if he/she gets pissed off.

The woman in the article studied 18 hours a day because the on-line school offered a flat fee per month so she just decided to take as many classes as possible to get her money's worth.
This had me laughing out loud:

"The same mistake is done on the Computer Language Benchmark Game. There's an Array sorting benchmark where Haskell just blows away even hand-optimized C. The secret is that the benchmark never prints out the contents of the sorted array. The C compiler isn't smart enough to recognize that the array is never actually used anywhere, but Haskell is, and so the entire benchmark basically compiles down to the equivalent of "int main() { return 0; }"."
How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade (WSJ)
Overcommitting to any one person based upon an OkCupid profile without even having messaged them seems like a fallacy too. It's probably best to narrow down a reasonably sized bucket of people to message, without too many hopes or priorities about which one you end up with.
I just ordered Krugman's book, so this is a premature hypothesis but: I think Krugman says things he knows to be false but thinks are worth saying in order to pull the median voter towards his line of thinking. His NYT editorials are not only written for a general audience, but are written at such a simplified level that they are absurd. However, they are instantly touted across the blogosphere by self-styled progressives. His Nobel is a big stick to carry -- I think he is using it in a utilitarian (from his perspective) way.
It would have helped if they'd published graphs next to it showing the same list of systems sorted by throughput and another sorted by reliability!
Exactly, and ironically a lot of those higher level languages are written in C.
But there I only disagreed with a specific point. That, by definition, you cannot apply the term "bubble" to college. I fully agree with you that many colleges are overpriced and/or worthless.
Aha, someone else. I would describe it as sortof pressure and stuff in there, like I'm feeling my way through a dark room and 'seeing' as I work the problem around in my head. All these people who say 'english' or something like that, how do you live? I would go insane after a day of that, it would be so slow and imprecise and completely misleading.

Here is another thing, tell me if this is true of you: I can't understand anything about how to solve a problem if I don't know completely 'understand' the context. In other words, I took several years of experimental physics at University, but it was totally bewildering to me. I understood the experiments perfectly (I mean, they aren't anything complex at that level), I understood the apparatus, I understood the mathematics and so on and on. At some point in every experiment, however, you had to decide whether your data supported or did not support the hypothesis. This is usually pretty obvious, but you were supposed to support it using chi-squared calculations and other statistical measurements of how well the data fits the hypothesis. I hadn't taken any statistics courses, so it seemed totally opaque and impossible to me to do this. I could never figure out what equation to use, or how to do it. I could follow step by step in the workbook and if I did so I would get a fine grade, but I was literally looking at the equations every 3 seconds as I worked the problem out. Anyway, I looked up the stuff in a statistics text, read the proofs and explanations of all the things I needed to understand, and suddenly it all made sense at once and I never had to refer back to anything. Once it 'clicks' everything is clear, like someone turned the light on in a dark room, before it 'clicks' I feel like I am suffocating.
Comparison of Python Client Libraries for memcached
It must be quite an education-system to teach math like that. Elsewhere, one might be taught that a variable in calculating those costs would be the taxes paid to fund the college. Maybe you haven't paid much yet but I suspect that your parents may have and that you will (unless you emigrate soon after graduation.)
So they are asking for JetBlue to give them special treatment? They booked 43 flights in 30 days. How about cutting their flights in half so that they are less likely to miss one?

I wonder what their backgrounds are that would make them good resource to interview JetBlue passengers and make them deserving of special treatment from JetBlue.
I think you've answered your own question. Flex sounds like a good fit for your project.
TweetSaver: Backup and Bookmark Your Tweets [Invites]
Are there any screen readers that support Flex content?

(that's not rhetorical; if anyone knows of one, I'd like to know)
It's a fair assumption by the time you're sending them the first message. After some chat you can differentiate between people you care about more and people you care about less, but from just photos and profile - not that much.
Gizmodo Unveiled [2002]
"Most importantly, this is a low-risk commercial experiment. Most media companies suffer from overblown editorial, an ad sales force with padded expense accounts, and overly complex publishing systems with a team of primadonna sysadmins to maintain it. By contrast, Gizmodo will be a couple of hours a day of Pete's link-picking skills, some automatically generated Amazon.com links, and $150-worth of Movable Type. Media has never before been this lean."

Beautiful...
As an amateur photographer who would love to do real in camera HDR photography this strikes me as being a really interesting development; I hope it marks the beginning of the end of the DSLR as _the_ professional choice, since they are often limited in bizarre ways because they are trying to conform to a mechanical model that does not map to what they are.
I tried this on okcupid and elsewhere, but short custom messages work far better than long generic ones.
I think that someone can have a meaningful discussion on recessions without mentioning the "dismal failures" of the Keynsians.

For the record, there are plenty of bubbles that have not been caused by government manipulation. For example, the Tulip bubble that happened in the Netherlands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulipmania) (not to mention bubbles caused by people like Madoff and other con men).

Also be careful. The government is always involved with any economic crisis and you can always blame a government action for making a bubble worse. If you believe that without a doubt the government is the cause of all bubbles, then no one will ever "prove" you wrong. If you are open minded and use the simplest explanation for a given set of facts (i.e., Occam's Razor), then you will find that not all bubbles have happened because of government manipulation.
Yeah, so they put up a website, why would the CEO of a large company want to meet with them?

I'm not saying he won't, but I don't see any value proposition mentioned on the site. If I were the CEO, I'd be thinking they're going to ask for even more after we have just exchanged 43 flights for $600? Talk about give an inch and they'll want a mile!
This specific website? Or just a degree delivered online?

In general, the only thing a CS degree tells me is that you had the fortitude to complete a CS degree, and perhaps (it's not a given) you might be able to practically apply some of what you learned.

Things higher up on the list of considerations include experience (side projects count for graduates), natural ability, hunger, and cultural fit.

Many in our technical team don't have even have a degree and of those that do, around half are not CS or IS degrees.
All PDFs that are linked to on HN link directly to the PDF, as well as to scribd. The title is linked to the former, the "[scribd]" is linked to the latter.
Babies And Dogs Make The Same Classic Mistake
Some hackers are also producing open source alternative firmware for commercial cameras:

http://magiclantern.wikia.com/
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK
How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade
This is just off-topic political opinion.
Indeed. Stupid and fascinating aren't mutually exclusive.

In fact, I'd say they're often highly correlated.
I suspect that if getting #1 from an online classroom or other bare-bones service becomes commonplace, then other institutions will evolve to provide 2-5.
Nobel prizes do not mean anything when polar opposite in economics thought have also won prizes, ie. Hayek.
Related to the whole Backblaze discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797995

and the Sun Thumper followup

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803136
Oops, guess I clicked on the wrong part of the link. Thanks for the explanation.
Well, there are also cons, but I hear that the single women at these events are under-represented, and a lot of the single men have good reason to be single....
Hmm, how often does JetBlue make the top of HN? Isn't the whole offer a publicity stunt by JetBlue and aren't these folks with the website doing their part?
Some people still say that the tulipmania is government's fault.

http://mises.org/story/2564

The story of Tulipmania is not only about tulips and their price movements, and certainly studying the "fundamentals of the tulip market" does not explain the occurrence of this speculative bubble. The price of tulips only served as a manifestation of the end result of a government policy that expanded the quantity of money and thus fostered an environment for speculation and malinvestment. This scenario has been played out over and over throughout history.