skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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They had a YouTube video ages ago; it looks like they finally made it into the store the other day:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...
HPC – The Next Twenty Years
You didn't understand the parent.

See my post below.

Also, of course the result could be due to chance. You could flip a fair coin 25 times in a row and come up with heads each time -- it's just pretty damn unlikely. Similarly, I'd bet what he's measured is really this: you have two equally sized groups, one treated, one untreated. In group one you get a rate of x, and in group two, you get a rate of y. How big does |y-x| and the size of the two groups have to be to conclude it was not just chance? As below, a t-test can help you answer that.
It's extremely desolate: it's very cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and dry year round, so nothing much grows out there.

Oh man, you have no idea; some really good shit grows in that part of the country.
He wrote a multi-threaded C++ app to parse the html and return a random sentence?

Rhetorical question; What percentage of an article need to be read for the article as a whole to be classified as having been read?
And the guys who will have to maintain that promptly shipped code will say a lot of "wtf?" and waste 10x more time on it.
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GNOME 2.28 released, adds Bluetooth support and more
Aw, your argument was good until you referred to digg-bait walkthroughs. :] Ideological and/or legal disabling aside, these seem to be implicit drawbacks of using a binary distribution. If you link some app against libfoo, you will almost certainly need libfoo at runtime.

Hm, no apt configuration needed, just install the -dev packages and you'll get the relevant .so too. This seems to be the correct case to optimise for, not the other way around.
I know you don’t want to start a framework war (and I don’t either), but for my work in Rails the first thing I do when starting a new project is install jRails ( http://ennerchi.com/projects/jrails ). Makes my life a whole load easier. Rails 3 is apparently planning to be more agnostic when it comes to JS frameworks, so if you’re not a Prototype fan this should be good news.
Jamie also worked under Peter Norvig, and this is what Peter said about Jamie:

". One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub. "

-- from http://norvig.com/21-days.html
For the last couple of years there have been different CPUs for Macs. First we had the G4, then the G5, followed by the switch to Intel. And even for the Intels there's lots of different subtypes.

And of course now with the switch to Snow Leopard we've got the 64-bit issue as well.

Yes, it does take a while, but these days it doesn't take that long anymore.
I think duct-tape programmer is not a very well defined concept. People who are careless and sloppy are the ones who will wreck a project. Duct-tape sounds too sloppy to me as well, but it could also be a metaphor for being pragmatic and keeping it simple.
"We’ve got to go from zero to done in six weeks"

This is my personal pet peeve. There is the iron triangle at work again, and when one of its points is fixed you still have two others to adjust, which seems to be forgotten here. Zawinski is trying to keep the scope (i.e. what defines the "done") and is sacrificing quality; he should instead try to make his life easier by reducing both a little bit rather than cutting just one to the bone.
Cortera: Measuring Business Credit With Community Ratings
Related discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=340107
Amen,

It's nice to hear someone with experience from before the "Unit Test is compulsory" explosion. Programmers should always test their work, but testing comes in much more of a diverse range than mere Unit Tests.

There are plenty of cases where Unit Testing is 'embarrasingly'[1] appropriate. These pin-up applications blinds Testing advocates to the fact that Unit Tests are often inferior to other methods or simply not possible.

An example where completely automated tests are impossible is PDF generation. One cannnot 'Unit Test' this. One has to build a framework to take test data, create less than 100 pdfs, and then a human has to eyeball it. Humans cannot eyeball more than 100 images and perceive subtle errors. Less than 100 output images means this cannot exercise every codepath of even simple applications.

Often I was working on a part of the Render Pipeline which was not currently exercised by the existing test. Do I create a whole new test suite to generate test images for each branch condition? If it is important, yes, I created a new end-to-end test. But if it was not, then I addapted some existing test input and used my best judgement and my knoweldge of the internal state. This test did not last beyond my short-term memory, and my own set of eyeballs. If a problem occured later, I would recreate the test from memory.

This is still TDD, but it is so much less straight-jacket than requiring Automated-testing. The tests are 'thrown away' effectively. But the tested code remains. I would also say that the coder knowing which portions to test is superior in many cases.

--------------

[1] Similar to :: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel . Network stacks, account balances, Frameworks are all embarrasingly unit-testable
The key is not to find "who gets HIV" vs. "who does not get HIV." Instead, we are trying to measure "who gets exposed" vs. "who gets HIV." Although we do not know how many people are exposed in each group, we can make sure that the number of exposed people in each group is approximately the same by increasing the number of people vaccinated. If we know that the same number of people are exposed (which is less than the sample size), then the number of people who get sick is much more significant.

By increasing the number of vaccinated people, the number of exposed people becomes more equal between the two groups since a few "more exposed/risky people were assigned to group A" will have a less significant impact.
> Consultants usually earn more money the longer a project takes, and their income is not tied to the yields of the project.

Well... that seems oversimplification. When I consult, I ask the price roughly based on the estimation of how much time I'm going to take, but ultimately it is the matter that how much value the client sees in the outcome. Note that the expected outcome and the price are agreed beforehand---if I bump into an unforeseen obstacle and take twice time as my estimation, I can't ask them twice price; basically the more I work, the less I make per hour.

So (1) I have a very strong incentive to make sure my part works in time, and (2) There's less incentive to finish the work earlier than the initial estimation. Thus I tend to put effort to write tests and debugging aids within the time frame (or, in other words, I try to negotiate initial time frame including those tests).

Certainly there's a different pressure on employees; they may adjust priorities and time frames more frequently.

So, it is true that consultants make more money the longer the project takes, but the incentive is in making sure it won't take longer than expected, rather than making it take longer deliberately. (After all, if the consultant is doing ok, there are projects in waiting list so it's not much point to taking one project longer than necessary.)
There are all sorts of risks, and it isn't obvious when it is worthwhile to get insurance and when it isn't. One risk is never launching.

Right. I'm not saying become paralyzed due to the risks. And I'm not saying do dumb things that mitigate a risk with an even bigger risk. What I'm saying is don't assume your conclusions. Things that other people might argue are important might not seem that important to you, given whatever perspective you have at the time. It is possible part of the reason they argue for using a certain practice is because they, too, didn't see it as important until they got burned hard for their presumption.

This is not to say they are important. It might be that people are just squawking to sell books or consulting hours or seats at a conference. But, to use a really dumb metaphor, if that many hens are squawking about the same thing, it might be time to look in the barn and see what all the noise is about.
Historically OS X shipped with ancient versions of Python that were not always complete. Same with Perl and others.
It's only since the last two or three releases of OS X that they included halfway decent versions of them.

I agree that it may seems somewhat stupid now, but there was (and perhaps still is) a very good reason for installing them separately.
Well, it makes a large portion of their game content useless. It also puts anyone who DOESN'T automate (maybe because they want to actually enjoy the game content) at a major disadvantage. Finally, if you don't have to spend lots of time collecting shit, then you have less incentive to pay the monthly fee for quite as long as you otherwise might.
"I create and choose the whole of my own reality".

This may be true, but it can't be known without massive self-awareness. I can only start off with that as a belief that may one day end up as knowledge from experience.

It's a good notion to use to test one's day to day experiences and see where they began internally to be manifested externally.
The article said there were molecules on the surface. (Either from meteors or hydrogen from the solar wind making hydroxyl (check wikipedia) and/or water with oxygen from rocks.) Quite a lot more than ever expected.

This is good, a moon colony might even be self sufficient in water.

(You have to wonder what other weird, really reactive radicals are on the surface from the solar wind? It will be fun to check for erosion on the equipment left by the moon landings. Any real chemists around? :-) This might be a future problem.)

Edit: The information asked for is in the article, btw. After the heading "Where the water comes from". :-)

Edit: A bit of syntax.
> With the code that I spent the most time designing (assuming I eventually came up with a good design), the more the requirements change

Your use of "assuming" is interesting. Sometimes it's hard to know if it really was a "good design" until after the requirements change...

"The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague." - Dijkstra
Didn't mean it that way, and why do you think so? How else to judge importance than by "people pay for it/make time for it"?
In Soviet Russia, that stronger man kills YOU!
Except that other packages always depend on foo, and never foo-dev as a matter of policy, even where it makes no goddamn sense (setuptools doesn't depend on python-dev, rubygems doesn't depend on ruby-dev, etc.).

I'd still have to either constantly be installing foo-dev packages despite already having foo, or succumb to the digg-bait technique of never letting apt think for itself.
I dunno, 1000 facebook friends doesn't impress me. Its easy to add people as "friends" who you don't ever talk to. I mean, communicating with people online is great, especially if your situation limits your interaction with people for whatever reason, but I don't see it as a substitute. Talking to people online is not, and IMHO never can be, the same as talking to people face to face. Thats why even internet communities often have gatherings and meetups.
Mood Linked To Cognitive Abilities [2002]
Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
Thanks for posting! Great look into game physics as well as iPhone game development.
I must admit, it looks fairly simple. Just using compass and GPS, presumably? I don't think it interprets the image from the camera.

Still, might become a hit.
I suppose I intellectualize it a little like Pascal's Wager - I'll never know whether it's true or not, but when all things are weighted it's far better to believe than not.
It comes down to the fact that noone really has priorities, much less ranked ones -- there is only the priority, and it's whatever you're presently doing.
Please give up on digg bait. It's an unhelpful useless addition that only serves to insult people. What does insulting primary digg users get you? It's now gotten you two negative replies, and derailed the conversation from its original purpose.

Sure, I didn't have to reply, but I'd like to keep this community interesting and most importantly, constructive.
Neat. Some time ago I made a little web site that can turn LaTeX into a PNG file for those times when you need a quick equation (or inequality): http://equationater.com/
19% of tweets mention brands
Microsoft WebsiteSpark
The Subpixel Favicon Generator
If you don't understand xor next, prev, it's just one line (one function) to rewrite. It's local complication.

If you don't understand how your object model interact with your threading model, you're DOOMED.
This device might actually give tough competition to existing netbooks. It appears to be smaller and more portable than your average netbook, with the added advantage of having an interface designed specially for the smaller multitouch screen it sports.

I sincerely hope this is real. We need someone besides Apple competing in the multitouch market.
http://www.ozyandmillie.org/d/20021105.html
http://blog.absurd.li/2009/09/24/on_smart_boys_in_programmin...
Why front-end developers are so important to the future of businesses on the web
I think most of the drug operations are in western Oregon, actually, which has an extremely different climate.
Basically Joel is saying that duct tape programmers are pragmatic programmers who’s priority is to get the job done.
Now from my experience in the office there are very few non-pragmatic programmers, and even fewer coders who don’t want to get the job done as quick as possible.

So that means that the majority of us are that duct tape programmers right? but these doesn’t fit, So what’s wrong? well I think there are different types duct tape programmer based on there how smart they are, and that only the really smart ones can successfully write systems without a single test. The remaining programmers use tests to ensure what they have done works, and also hasn’t broken something else.

So given the fact that most people work in teams of programmers of varied skill levels, it makes sense to write tests. And while this might slow the 1 or 2 super smart guys on the team, it will aid the rest of the team.
I get pretty annoyed when I see people dismissing client-side engineering as being somehow less challenging than server-side development - on the server, you only have to get it working on one platform (and for all but the most high traffic sites you can write code as badly as you like without much penalty). Client-side engineers have 5 different rendering engines to deal with, need to think about performance, accessibility, resizing, legibility... and that's before you even get to the huge domain that is modern JavaScript.
Except that both of those tools are the absolute worst at their respective jobs!

Standard duct tape uses an awful adhesive that depending on the humidity turn into a gummy mess or desiccates into flakes -- either way leaving a difficult residue and not actually holding. The loose right-angle weave of the coarse fibers means that it has zero shear strength on the most common axes, and is prone to splitting when under tension. The outer vinyl layer will separate on its own in heat, leaving a mess of fibers + adhesive behind.

WD-40 combines a solvent, a mild lubricant, and an adhesive (!) -- it's extremely prone to collecting grit and caking it onto surfaces. It will displace any better lubricant it is applied onto.
Like GetSatisfaction, stripped to its essentials this is "I have an authority domain and can rank for your brand name. Such a wonderful brand, would hate to see anything happen to it. $5,000 a year is cheap to you, isn't it?"
How Toyota Changed the World Book
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One game like that was published in 1985, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots "Crobots is a programming game released for the first time by Tom Poindexter in December, 1985. The robots are controlled by a program written in a stripped-down version of C. The robot's mission is to seek out and destroy other robots, each running different programs."

I played it as a kid, was quite fun, though my bots largely sucked .. perhaps should try again now that have more programming experience :)

EDIT: seems that it's a clone of a thing that was originally made in 1970s already, "RobotWar was a programming game written by Silas Warner. This game, along with the companion program RobotWrite, was originally developed in the TUTOR programming language language on the PLATO system in the 1970s" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar
Is there a better term for the standard adsense-fueled "Hack your Ubuntu iPod with Compiz Fusion!" articles that always contain big <pre> blocks of "sudo apt-get install ..." for the reader to mindlessly copy and paste?
BrandMurder: Redesign a Murdered Brand and Win a MacBook Pro, Xbox & Wii
When you think about it, its rather surprising that this has not already happened in a big way...
Good article. Many points come from usability guru Jakob Nielson: http://www.useit.com/alertbox

Edit: Reading through Nielson's site again after a long time, I recommend it highly. I think the article about paper prototyping is particularly useful: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030414.html
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I really like th idea of writing to discover. Learning by discovery and exploration has been my education. It is also the way that I write - to explore, not to convince.

I hadn't been able to articulate this to myself coherently until I came across this on the Khosla Ventures site (complete with Vinod Khosla's notes such as "this is commie horse shit" and "MBA bullshit" (!).

http://www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/What_makes_entre...
Google Sidewiki Allows Anyone To Comment About Any Site
U3-X is Honda's latest mobility device
In case this business model actually works soon enough you get dozens of websites wanting you to pay them for your brand.
I have friend like that and he saved my ass many times. When I was stuck trying to find satisfying solution, he was almost always coming up on the spot with something simpler then I was striving for, but upon close inspection good enough. If I pointed significant problem in his solution he either came up with fix or abandoned his idea without regret.

I like to think that I design better apis and libraries than him because I concentrate much more on what I want to have and try to weed out any inconvenience, but when I can't get what I want then he comes up with the idea I actually can get and is good enough.
I ordered mine back in July for a birthday last week! Gutted it didn't come in time. I'm imagining they must have had production issues and perhaps didn't anticipate the huge demand for these across the world.
Well, I am glad somebody is enjoying my wasted tax payer money.
Functional Programming at Facebook. (30 min video, CUFP talk.)
Starting up in the cloud
Could we please leave the politics to reddit, onreact? Please?
In case someone pops in without looking at the site, it's basically a way for small web design companies to get the MS Platform for free.
Honestly if you really want to create a good brand, create a useful product and be an honest company. Seth is wrong; you can control what people say about you. But you can't hack it with a system like this. And if your not a sleazy corporation producing bad product, you certainly don't need something like Public Brand.
> Any idea why the Mac crowd seems to shun binary packages?

4 different architectures (PPC/32b, PPC/64, Intel/32 and Intel/64) are probably hell on a binary-only package manager. Source-only is simpler and lighter on the architecture side, though it's much heavier on the client one.

Fink does binary packages though, I think.
Like I said in my first post, people enjoy killing each other... sure... but the urge to be lazy is even stronger than the urge to murder people that you don't like.
This is not about politics, this is about business. In a weird way but it is. It shows that while businesses in the US struggle some huge amounts of money end up in questionable channels abroad spend on some shady business that in the best case is NOT about killing people.
> It's only since the last two or three releases of OS X that they included halfway decent versions of them.

And even then, sadly the pretty decent versions don't get updated (OSX 10.6 comes with Python 2.6.1… 2.6.2 was released in April…), so you're essentially SOL between two versions of OSX.
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Twit nits: 12 top Twitter annoyances
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Motorbikes and the SQLness of SQL
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