skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using the word 'blueprint' is a bit deceptive. Source code is not a blueprint, because it is the end result. A blueprint provides all the information we need to build the house, but we can't live in a blueprint (i.e. a blueprint does not fulfil the same needs as an actual house, even though they describe the same thing). We can 'validate' our (now-built) house against our blueprint using a tape measure and a spirit level.

In software, the only analogous process we have is formal specification and mechanical verification.

Just to be entirely clear, code is not a "specification" because to suggest that it is would be like building a full-scale model of a house as a 'blueprint'. If the blueprint is functionally identical to the thing it is describing (i.e. you can live inside the blueprint just as well as you can inside the house it describes), then it's not a "specification" (or a "blueprint") in any useful sense.

So I don't even really have an opinion on the "software is design" explanation. I don't think of software like that, because I don't generally do "exploratory coding". Rather, I'm just objecting to the (often abused) notion of software having anything analogous to a blueprint.
Basic sight, locomotion, independent operation for years without human supervision. And they taste great.
Classic snail-mail, of course :)
Getting started with AMQP and RabbitMQ
Want me to ignore the conflict of interest & write a glowing review of TC50?
The first paragraph begins with a whole bunch of flawed assumptions.

"The basis of this discussion is the observation that NPE is quite common"

Not in my code. Use design by contract and NPE is no longer aproblem

"...most of the times it is "fixed" by writing code to check that offendingObject != null before whatever triggered the NPE."

Not in my code. When an object is null you figure out the appropriate response to that. Either it shouldn't be allowed to be null at this point, and you find out why that is and fix that, or it should be allowed and you react appropriately to it. What's the problem?

"a simple solution to NPE is to replace NPE with a default "behavior" for all/any methods that are invoked on null object references: do nothing."

Except that doing nothing is impossible. Inaction is an action too, look at your average contrived ethical conundrum for illustration.

How is NPE different from any other sort of bug? You find a problem? You fix it, preferably just after writing a failing test case for it.
I used Windows Server 2008 for development this summer and generally had uptimes of 2-3 weeks...only had to restart for updates. Never had any problems.
Convert WMV files to BlackBerry 
Converting WMV files to BlackBerry is the basic function of iMacsoft BlackBerry Video Converter. It can easily convert WMV files to BlackBerry as well as converting AVI, MPEG, ASF, MOV, RM etc. video files to BlackBerry.
Download Games
Download games more than 100 for free to your PC from 4 different geners: Action, sports, puzzle and arcade games.
You and others agreeing with you are making the (self-centered) mistake of assuming that you are the market.

You are not.

As they indicate in the about page Google intends the target to be people who flip through magazines and when they see a title that interests them or a picture of someone they recognize they then read the article.

Whether that market exists or will be the actual market (if any) of this "product" remains to be seen.
The Science of Taking a Punch
A yearly simulation competiton focused on control system design for cleaning up debris. Interesting, but I didn't understand the problem spec well from the landing page.
same feeling, esp. after get used to Apple's font rendering engine ...
Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented
The Deal of the Century - The Inside Story
Do we infer the lack of needed standards?
Except in ES5 strict mode :-/
Php User Class
Hm, this feels like comitting hara-kiri, but I actually found the eight queens sample:

http://www.genyris.com/wiki?page=default/eightqueenssource

A lot more readable than the 'regular' lisp version:

http://obereed.net/queens/algorithm.html

By automating the process of converting between 'indented' lisp and 'regular' lisp those that want it can have it and those that do not can simply ignore it.
Great (best I can remember but I have bad memory) machine assisted teaching.

I could see many textbooks/subjects maths, physics, anything that fits the pattern "look at this" -> "what do you think will happen" -> "this! is what happens and why".
The Plague of Entropy
Crashes with accented chars.
http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/search?q=á
From the article:
"
When developers are writing code, entropy is low. When we submit bugs, we increase entropy. Bugs divert their attention from coding. They must now progress in parallel on creating and fixing features. More bugs means more parallel tasks and raises entropy. This entropy is one reason that bugs foster more bugs ... the entropic principle ensures it. Entropy creates more entropy! Finally there is math to show what is intuitively appealing: that prevention beats a cure. "
A prime example of useless JavaScript. Why not simply use HTML for a simple website like this? I did not see any benefit from JavaScript on that page.
Mint acquired by Intuit
You can still do it, and without a Y combinator or anything like that too:

var ninja = {
yell: function () {
var yellLocal = function(n) {
return n > 0 ? yellLocal(n-1) + "a" : "hiy";
}
return yellLocal;
}()
}
Sorry, but if you thought it wasn't against the guidelines you'd have done this with your regular user id, also it is patently stupid to ask for someone to mail you and not to supply an email address.
For your first question, I want to learn how to do the things I need to do to fix the bugs and issues I run into.

For the second, I definitely expect to pay for this.
There is a guy called 'Musatov' on Sci.Math that is doing this very thing. The idea of mathematics being a representation of our line and line liberties is interesting in this regard.
There's no upside to jumping through the SEC's hoops if you're not public. It is literally paperwork just for the sake of it.
The linked download section features nothing new for a web developer.

But its nice to see a centralized approach to do a "best practice" in web speed. Though in its infant stages (e.g. the image optimization articles are very old news and lack most of the modern techniques described in http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/15/clever-png-optimi... and http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/25/png-optimization-...) this could be a good checklist for web developers.
Maruti Suzuki to Launch Eco-Friendly Car
I was a Seedcamp finalist and winner. I am also friend with quite a lot of YCombinator people.

1. Seedcamp seems more business oriented than YCombinator. Hackers and good code are appreciated but not as much as paying customers :) You tell me if this is a good thing or not.

2. Raising money is indeed harder in Europe. No doubt about it. But for European startups Seedcamp is still the safest bet as Seedcamp folks are more than connected with US VCs and angels.

I love Seedcamp and our company (uberVU) owes them so much. There are clearly some things they can improve but so far its by far the best experience any European startup can have.
This is the main reason for so many people being busy with re-inventing the wheel.

To some extent that's the programmers mentality of 'I can do that better', but plenty of times it actually isn't better and the 'oldies' got it solved quite nicely.

The one thing that came by recently where I thought that there actually was something new happening was the thread on improving on quicksort (I can't seem to find the thread :( ).

Another instance that comes to mind is the ever improving compression ratio of lossless compressors, just when you thought the lemon was really empty someone comes up with something extremely clever.
Sri Lankan company attempts new take on the Online Travel experience
Isn't the whole point of Chrome to take advantage of OS level protection mechanisms so that stuff coming from the web doesn't get the chance to mess with your machine. I believe they're doing completely different things in this regard on each OS, basically building sandboxes from scratch.
The "more readable version" does have some parentheses, doesn't this make it hard for beginners? Sometimes you use and sometimes you don't. The site is inaccessible right now, so I have not read everything, only parts of it via google cache...
Free International Calls At Local Rates To Various Countries 
The free local access-number based VOIP service is pretty straight forward to use and all you need to do is to dial the provided local access-number and then once connected follow the IVR instructions provided by the gateway.
Fashion dresses 
Welcome to Share Your Fashion. Here you can find fashion from around the world, edited and ranked by people who have a passion for fashion, just like you.
bookmarked for later reading. So far the introduction smacks of rocket science fun, look forward to the details. Couldn't help but admire the authors view on his gaming company sale, as extra resources for his real passion ;)
>>> 1.0e400 == float("inf")
True

I don't know, if there is a difference. Maybe the interpreter can evaluate 1.0e400 a little faster?
Background:

This is about the choice of CPU scheduler in the linux kernel.

CFS: Completely Fair Scheduling, current default.

BFS: Brain Fuck Scheduler, written by the infamous Con Kolivas, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=799147
Given the average duration of a post here it will be pretty influenced by post time.
He/she might be deported, that's not a very smart thing to do.

When you're illegal somewhere your best chance is to lay low until there is some legislation that favors you.

Here in NL there was a guy from Turkey, that had started his own business. Very very successful, in fact, so successful that a newspaper decided to use him as the poster child for illegal immigrants that should get a passport.

Not that long afterwards he was deported, simply for having become 'visible'.
Set the highlight color of your () to white. Solved.
Is it just me, or is having to download a file, run a terminal and execute 5 commands just to get flash not a sign of a 'proper desktop OS'?
Having been on the receiving end of Canada's 'skills based system' I can testify that it is less than perfect, to put it very mildly.

After waiting for five years for paperwork to come through we packed up and moved back to the Netherlands, I could simply not justify having my child in school with a potential culture change in case our application would get denied in the middle of his secondary education.

The Canadian system is on paper very entrepreneur friendly but in practice a lot less so.

For maximum irony, after they figured out that we really did move back to Europe and took our investment with us (as far as that was possible, some of the real estate is still up for sale even today) we got our papers within a couple of weeks. So, after we left it was no problem to give us our status, but as long as we were there there wasn't any way to get the process unstuck.

Total frustration. If you plan on moving to Canada, make sure you get your paperwork BEFORE you start anything or make any investments, no matter what the local, provincial or federal government promises you that they will do, once your negotiation position is hollowed out by your investment or move their incentive to give you any status disappears.

And make sure you apply for health care within 30 days of moving there, otherwise you are in for a world of trouble.
I see it as a sign of restrictions by adobe.
of course - 2nd for SS-18 targeting U.S. :)
Yes, it has been a few months since the last person tried this.
> This is the main reason for so many people being busy with re-inventing the wheel.

I don't know about other people, but I'm reinventing the wheel to learn better.

An algorithm you reinvented only to discover a better version later will stick to your head. And it's also fun doing it.

Also, a library or a tool you "reinvent" is many times better for your needs considering that assembling software pieces is not actually like putting together Lego blocks (although corporates are still trying).

Quicksort reinvention is also useful, because that standard qsort you've got laying around there might not behave as you expect (like glib's qsort that uses merge-sort instead) or it might not be optimized for your datasets (because you know, depending on the partitioning function you might end up in the worst-case scenario quite a lot).
I believe you're assuming more things about the programmatic interface of a circle type than is necessarily true. An ellipse with equal major and minor radii is a circle. That much is mathematical fact.

Equivalently, a circle is a special kind of ellipse. As an ellipse, you can certainly ask it for major and minor radii. But "more information" is an implementation detail. If Circle were a subclass of AbstractEllipse, which itself also had a concrete Ellipse subclass, Circle might implement both major and minor radii "properties" in terms of a single field. But again, this is just an implementation detail.

All this is only practically useful if there's a reason for considering circles as ellipses, or for specializing behaviour for circles. For example, the circumference calculation for circles is much simpler than for ellipses, so we might want to specialize it. Since our values are immutable, there's no problem in capturing this optimization in the type and overriding the appropriate method.

(I'm assuming immutable values throughout, to make it clear.)
PCDOCPRO, Fix Common Registry Problems
PC DOC PRO made to solve the windows registry problem. PC DOC PRO will remove all dead files and safely make the backup of all the registry files and repairs them to make pc work faster.
Unexpected Windows Crashes, PCDOCPRO
PCDOCPRO - excellent software to heal your PC. If your system is getting slow by damaged window registry files, then PCDOCPRO makes your life easier. It cleans all the damaged files and makes your pc fast.
The examples are all interactive, and there are segments where you are invited to complete solutions, and the code is then eval'd and tested.

I'm finding it a wonderfully interactive way to learn.
> I don't know about other people, but I'm reinventing the wheel to learn better.

That's an excellent reason for doing so. But the GGPs point was I think people reinventing the wheel simply because they are not aware of what was done in the past.

> An algorithm you reinvented only to discover a better version later will stick to your head. And it's also fun doing it.

That's very true. I played around with clustering for a while, then decided to get serious about it which means downloading and studying all the papers that I can find in open access journals or on websites of the authors. That way you get the best of both worlds, first you gain the experience of doing it yourself and appreciating the problems of that particular domain, then you get to see how others dealt with those problems.
10,000 unread articles.
Could India Save Billions With FOSS?
Seven years. What a colossal failure for the IEEE. Any insight on why it took so long?
Centralized info for web page optimization. I wonder at the efforts spent on page speed improvements, versus letting tech improve and publishing tools handle much of the implementation details.

I think web masters, sites and developers should focus all their efforts on content quality,and check a box that the page loads fast enough now.

To the contrary of this, I consciously admire optimized page loads, that flicker into existence. But this is secondary to the "knowledge payload" of the site.
I'm pretty thankful that you share your experiences and conclusions on your blog posts.
Whenever I go for a walk, I normally leave folding@home running. If you have a particularly powerful GPU you can run folding@home using your GPU, which yields better results. If you're interested in GPU folding, I would recommend checking out Bit-techs features on folding
(
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2009/06/15/what-is...

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2009/08/03/how-to-build-the-bes...
)
"fuel"? It's the first (that I've seen) well described, reproducible test that includes a howto for retesting in this debate... Whether someone improves BFS (cpu jumping) or CFS (general performance) because of this post, we win. Great!

Edit:
And that's what happened (more or less) - in the first response:

2.6.31-bfs221-smp - 408.38 fps

2.6.32-tip-smp NO_NEXT_BUDDY NO_LB_BIAS - 418.07 fps
Metrorail Crash May Exemplify Automation Paradox
that only applies if you want to pick up a Reddit user ;)
What about the google founders then ?

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/business/Googles_Newest_Plane...
Fear of Everything Else
Please, stop with the Esquire links.
Additionally, you can fool people with some simple tricks like what was mentioned.

In the Loebner Prize the programmer and/or person being "tested" was allowed to pick the topic. One of the programs that won did so by picking the topic "silly conversations" and having the machine output gibberish. The judge thought this was a person being silly (how could a computer be silly?) and rated it a human. Someone who knows anything about AI/NLP won't fall for this though.

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/loebner-r...
And good bosses. And savvy interviewers.

In fact, just about anyone who has the standing to make professional decisions that impact you.
It seems to work well, but the design and layout could use some work. Some parts seem lifted right from Reader, while others seem like they were stuck in as an afterthought, like the article content being underneath the article list. Some trivial things also make me not want to use it, like the tabs being misaligned by a few pixels, and the little inconsistencies in the design.
The most critical components of page load optimization are simple tick-the-box items when setting up your application that need to be automatic for every web engineer, but aren't. They are mostly not a matter of having the tech improve. They are mostly not involved with "publishing tools" at all, insofar as by the time your CMS is in the picture it is way too late.

Partial checklist:

It takes something like four lines in your web server config to turn on gzip. Did you turn on gzip?

It takes perhaps ten lines of code to splat all your Javascript and CSS files into one file at deployment. If you were running Rails, this would be about fifteen keystrokes or so. Did you do it?

You should be loading your static assets from 2-3 hosts to maximize how many can be loaded in parallel. This is, again, two minutes of work and doesn't even require you to actually possess multiple hosts since you can just create multiple DNS entries pointing to the same one. Did you do it?
Agreed. I figure this is happening because two of them got huge numbers of votes.
There's also the 'extras' repo

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/documents/reposito...

Not entirely sure if it contains Flash, but I'm pretty sure it has Acrobat Reader. So things are coming.
spam, who on earth voted this up ?
Menstrual cramps relief | Menstrual cramps | magicbag.ca
Did you mean Python?
PSD to XHTML , CSS or HTML Conversion Services
PSD to CSS convertions at best prices. Our PSD to XHTML or HTML conversion services will also take care of all cross-browser compatibility issues. All the pages will be delivered only after W3C validation to ensure that your web pages meet the industry standards.The process involves both slicing and coding with W3 standards. We also help in the conversion of PSD to Joomla, wordpress and phpBB.
I'm curious, how did you get in and through college (tuition, enrollment, etc.) without an ID or a bank account?

I lived in NYC myself. Besides not having to drive, is it really a better place to be for undocumented immigrants?
I think you're going way overboard with your cynicism and criticism of OOP - cynicism bordering on paranoia. I've read your other comment, alleging that OOP "was pushed by manager types who just wanted as many reports as possible".

The dominant paradigm before OOP was procedural programming, and it had (and has) real problems: tendency towards storing data in globals, lack of a machine-checked mechanisms for subtyping, less discoverable APIs (often a namespacing issue), and difficulty in sharing code when representing abstractions where many kinds of values need to be treated very similarly but with little differences, GUI widgets in particular.

OOP is unmistakably a better approach for a large class of problems, primarily because it encodes good procedural practice into well-defined concepts that are checked by the machine, either at compile time, run time, or both.

Functional programming has a different kind of benefit: whereas OOP helped modelling values, FP helps modelling algorithms. Because strict FP demands pure functions and immutable data, you can reason about complex functions and expressions knowing that there are no side-effects that can bite you. The benefits of FP over OOP aren't as clear as OOP over procedural programming, as taking the strict approach makes state management problematic and limits freedom in data structure design and ultimately algorithmic complexity, but the benefits are very clear in certain areas.
It's not the first, there is also: http://lwn.net/Articles/351058/

But, I believe, that test suffers from one fatal flaw: Hyperthreading was enabled, and as far as I know BFS does not support hyperthreading. (Support means: know that that the two CPUs are really the same, rather than treat them as if they were two different physical CPUs.)
I can't even read the headlines on many of the thumbnails...
Well, investors depend on what the CEO says. What he is trying to avoid is sounding optimistic and then falling short of expectations. The up then down in the stock price looks bad.

However, its a good point that we should want a correct representation instead of a pessimistic one. We should seriously wonder about a CEO who drastically under predicts performance just as we would one who over predicts it.
Essential storage tradeoff: Simple Reads vs. Simple Writes
Microsoft: No TCP/IP patches for you, XP
Does it have access to 17+ kPackages, like Debian does?

What about the tools duality? GNU and Solaris concepts are sufficiently different to require two set of binaries, and $PATH split-personality.

Also, Sun (or Oracle) is firmly in control of kernel development. There's no community yet, nor signs of an emerging one, so there's some danger of standing in abandonware land.

Apart from that I like OpenSolaris fine. However, its chiefest advantage is zfs, and btrfs should be there in 3-4 years. So the clock is ticking.
California Motorcycles Crash Attorney
Get the compensation you deserve. California Motorcycles Accidents Lawyers. Demas and Rosenthal are California motorcycle accidents attorneys with over 16 years experience helping victims of motor vehicle accidents in Sacramento and entire Northern California region.
Ah yeah - sorry - I'm just deliberately ignoring the "official" benchmarks from Ingo and Con... At least until one of them publishes a benchmark that shows their own solution loses in some scenario ;)
Aiken and the Mark I
Thats a very good point. There is always a huge gap between signing deals/PR and booking revenue, more so when you are dealing with bigger players like operators.

Its unfortunate that nobody here talks about real numbers...
Insurers shun multitasking speech devices like smartphones and netbooks
Accelerated C# 2008    (book review)
Not just that, but are people who start with "How's it going" generally writing better? There are a number of ways this data can be misleading... many of which fall under "correlation vs causation."
Hmmmm... I never knew it din't work in RSS readers. But I guess that's not too much of a dealbreaker right now. Perhaps if my feed subscribers increase, I'll switch.
atheist vegetarian zombies??
Breast Cancer Realities in America in 2009