skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're spouting some fine bullshit. Suggesting that Harvard could expand to handle more students than it's handling now isn't "socialism". It's rational unless you're suggesting either that there aren't more brilliant students now than already go to Harvard, or that there aren't more brilliant professors now than already teach there. If both those are false, which they are, then Harvard can be seen as wasting its endowment on non-practical things rather than both growing and helping a larger community than it is now.
I've assumed that Facebook would be adding location to their mobile clients in the near future. In doing so, they won't hav to resort to the games Foursquare uses to try to get to critical mass. I also doubt that foursquare has any key infrastructure pieces that would be useful at facebook scale. In short, an acquisition doesn't make much sense, other than as an acquire to hire signing bonus.

I think the best positioned player in the mobile location based service space is Apple. They are well positioned to get paid well, no matter what service ends up winning over the most users.
http://narwhaljs.org
Extremely myopic, indeed. Peron was an authoritarian and a demagogue, but he improved most social indicators of the country. Sure, GDP diminished but that was part of the cost to make Argentina an industrialized nation. Also the infrastructure of the country improved significantly.

IMHO, it's quite hard to understand a right-leaning socialist government from the point of view of a US citizen. There's no reference.
From a Birdie: A Gift From The Heart (useful tools tool of the day)
Dear mods: This is an experiment. I posted this exact same article yesterday, but with a very plain title. I'm curious to measure the difference in traffic. Please don't kill it? Purdy please? :-) Thanks!
You have apparently misunderstood something here. Just because you are launching something that can scale to a million threads doesn't mean that it needs to spawn a million threads every time it spins up.

But if it does spin up a million threads over time, the performance of your scheduler won't be your bottleneck. There will be lots of other big ones (memory, stack space, etc), but not scheduling overhead.
Summary: dude gives a demo in front of potential investors hoping that the app won't break.

Except, wrapped in several layers of self-aggrandizing drama. An awful lot of hat for very little cattle.
The debate would be more useful for all involved if it were re-framed in terms of asking what problems TDD is well-suited to, rather than arguing over whether it's (implicitly, always) a net win or not. (This is also true for many other techniques, I think.)
Considering the consequences of a tax credit for new hiring
I suspect that book publishers introducing their own digital distribution mechanism would not make the traditional book distributors (e.g. Ingram) very happy, and you don't want a major channel partner getting angry with you.

Because Amazon merely is a competing distributor, rather than a publisher/vendor trying to go vertical, distributors have less leverage.
Assuming the story is complete, I hope they're lenient on him. From where I'm seated, it doesn't look like he threatened anything besides his own property. Since he was cooperative when confronted, the mall owners would do well to overlook his lapse in judgement on their property.
Thanks and the links work on the iPhone too.
That isn't his explanation why he thinks it's bad for writers, that's his answer why he doesn't link to kindle ebooks.

His explanation is summarised at the end of the article.
Russia plots return to Venus
This seems to have at least a positive reaction from a few folks who'd like to see something accomplished. So to get the ball rolling:

http://draftreview.tenderapp.com

It's a private site. If you want to join, email me at nate at inklingmarkets.com

Tell me if you want to be a reviewer as well.

Sound like a good place to start?
That was 2 years ago, this it TODAY. The situation has changed.

I am unfit to teach Dan Weinreb about Lisp, but let me silence others who are ready to jump on the Lisp wah-mobile.

http://www.cliki.net/index

---

Streams (user defined)

Gray Streams, simple streams.

Threads and locking

Bordeaux Threads

Modern networking: e.g. sockets, TCP and HTTP client and server, URL’s, email, etc.

Usocket, iolib, hunchentoot, drakma, puri, and Melbase.

Web Services (WSDL etc.)

Friends don't let friends use big-W Web Services. Use s-xml-rpc, cxml-rpc, cl-json-rpc or yason-rpc.

Relational database access

CLSQL, Postmodern, CL-RDBMS, PlainODBC.

Persistence (Lisp-friendly)

CLSQL, Postmodern, Elephant, CL-STORE, CL-SERIALIZE, ManarDB, Rucksack, Cl-Perec, Cl-Prevalence.

Meta-object protocol for CLOS

CloserMOP.

System definition facility

ASDF, or wait for Fare's XCVB.

Other general-purpose access to the operating system’s facilities

CFFI, Osicat, Iolib.

XML

CXML.

Math

Define "math".

Graphics

Define "graphics"; hint: everything from CL-OPENGL for realtime 3D graphics to Skippy, for generating GIF, to gordon and cl-flash for generating SWF/Flash files, to CL-PDF for generating PDF, and Lispbuilder-SDL.

GUI frameworks, platform-independent

CLIM is our standardized GUI but I use lambda-gtk to build Win32 and Linux GUIs with CLISP, Lispworks and SBCL. Failing that, there is LTK.

Text manipulation

Define "text manipulation".

High-performance (asynchronous) I/O

Iolib.

Access to printers

CFFI is your friend here. There is no portable implementation of the Lisp Machine HARDCOPY-FILE, but this is not stopping anyone from printing from Lisp. LispWorks has a print-command special variable.

Internationalization

Internationalization is a process, not a tool. I write "arabic" code in Lisp.

Unicode strings

Natively supported by all major Lisps now. CLISP, SBCL, CMUCL, Franz, LispWorks, and Closure.

Generating HTML

CL-WHO, HTML-TEMPLATE; there are pretty much as many HTML generating things in Lisp as there are Lispers doing web applications. Everyone wrote one, but CL-WHO is the best, imo.

X Window System

You said "GUI" above, and a few times you hinted at portability. Anyway. Every Unix Lisp supports CLX. There is Portable-CLX if you want to play with it. A whole X window manager was written in Lisp, stumpwm.

Foreign function interface

CFFI.

Regular expressions

CL-PPCRE.
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It's worth noting, though, that Google's implementation of Wave is written in GWT. Since GMail predates the invention of GWT, it's likely that it would be a GWT application if started today.
That's probably right. Do you think Amazon will inevitably become the iTunes of books, or is there anything that could stop this?
The legal fees are kind of astounding. $10-50K/month in legal fees for a 30 person company? We spend maybe $2.5-5k/year on legal fees for our three person company after the initial $20k operating agreement/TOS/PP/copyright. The $10-50k/m figure seems a bit outrageous to me. Can someone with more experience than me explain that in more detail?
The hardware itself automatically parallelizes execution of your program to some degree. When you say something like:

int i = 0, j = 1, k = 2;

The processor itself can execute these in parallel if there are available resources, because writes of literals to registers don't affect each other.

So even if parallelizing compilers only work for side-effect free portions of the language, that is still a decent portion of most code. If it weren't, then out-of-order execution wouldn't give much benefit, and all cpu's would have only one execution unit (instead of 3-4) - after all it only works on side-effect free portions too (more or less).

This is on a different level (fine grained instruction level vs. coarse grained module/function level) but I'm guessing the same arguments can still apply.
i agree.

there's a lot of issues in the history of argentina that are brushed by in an attempt to make this a simple economic policy debate.

for example, they were quite politically unstable. there was a coup in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. the ruling military government died in the 80s after a brief war. a prosperous economy is difficult to foster without a stable governmental structure, regardless of what that structure is.
How to Batch Convert Word to PDF Manually?
Because Harvard has the potential to expand out and encompass even more students while maintaining its level of quality. Unless you think no student rejected from Harvard is as valuable as the few it maintains?
Most string libs aren't that smart though - string comparisons are still byte by byte. You're now comparing something 15 times instead of 1. You can do an int32/int64 (depending on architecture) compare in a single op.

The point I guess is, you can keep 'em around as charstars, but eventually you'll have to do this cast to compare them...
He said he earns less than $250/y from affiliate links. The real reason is that the Kindle books give him much less income than dead-tree editions.
Menem, a peronist president in the 90s, undid many things Peron did. His government was a poster child for deregulation and what's called neo-liberalism. They privatized almost everything in a ruthless manner. The crisis of 2001 was a consequence of all those policies.

I am against publicly owned corporations and services but I'm against raw short-sighted capitalism, too. Some of the privatized public corporations had operating surplus, were not monopolies and were worth billions. Those were given to foreign investors who bought them taking credits over the same assets bought. Then proceeded to raise prices, perform massive layoffs, and vacuum capital to service companies owned also by those same investors.

I am quite against socialism (left or right) but you clearly lack knowledge on Argentina. The country is far more complicated that you might think.
20 rare and forgotten photos of the Apollo 11 mission
GWT 2.0 should solve most of your problems I suppose.

There are 2 things that can make a large app slow:
1) Load time
2) Rendering time

For load time all you can do is to maximize the use of ClientBundle and GWT.runAsync()

For rendering time, don't create panels willy-nilly, use tag-first approach if possible or use low level dom operation (DOM.createDiv, DOM.createSpan) if your widget isn't overly complex.

Make sure your listeners don't leak... other than that... nothing much I guess.
> 4) They're using their monopsony position to fuck over their suppliers (i.e. the publishers) in a manner that threatens a catastrophic crash in author royalties in the medium term (up to 5 years). NB: as a reader, you may enjoy the short term price benefit, but you'll pay for it in the long term in reduction of choice.

This is all based on conjecture, and it turns out to be bullshit.

Stross just asserts, with no data, that

(a) Amazon is a monopsony (Amazon sells $5 billion of books per year, out of a $13 billion ecommerce book market, out of a $30-40 billion total book market).

(b) the discounted price of ebooks comes from the publisher. In fact Slate (or maybe it was The Atlantic?) had an article within the last month about how Amazon is paying THE SAME AMOUNT for ebooks as for hardovers, and Amazon is actually losing money on each kindle book sale, but is doing so to build mindshare.

I like half or so of Stross' fiction, but his conspiratorial ranting annoys the piss out of me.
Yes, but the pyramid structure of wealth (concentrated at the top) definitely applies.
Exploring the Political Twittersphere
Why founders are best at startup marketing
Where are these talented and qualified people without jobs?
The Product Group, Cycles and Waves: Thanks for Coming
That's a weird way to ask it. iTunes has competitors, after all. Just today I bought a slew of mp3s from the Amazon store, because they offer incredible deals.

If you mean will Amazon become the majority store, the answer is that they will be unless something better comes up. Isn't that how it always is?
Recommending policy based on anecdote and emotion is a problem. The solution isn't to do more of it.
Matasano uses Ruby for many internal and external tools. With a little dash of IRB, you can have a lot of fun (just ask Mike...)
I'm just gonna drop my referral link here:
https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTIzNDY3NzU5

If you use that both you and I will get 250mb of extra space, so it's a win-win! =)
Windows Phone commercial airing now
How To Build The Ultimate Job Finding Dashboard with iGoogle
"...just ask India and China before they modernized and liberalized their economies."

Well, modernization and liberalization of economies have increased the economic divide in India. It's not that liberal economic policies are wrong, just that their implementations are always skewed by greedy corporations. A government's responsibility is not only to cater to cash sinks but also the people they govern, which especially in India, is the poor majority. Of course the GDP goes up, there is no question about that. But at what cost?
I think you are taking these quotes out of context. Charles Stross (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross) is a writer and the books he is linking to are written by him. He uses the affiliate fees (maybe $250 a year) to help defray the hosting costs of his blog. The affiliate fee issue is only of a small part of his argument against Amazon's business model.

Personally, I think that $9.99 is a fair price to pay for a DRM-encumbered ebook. There should be enough in that amount to pay the author, the publisher, and the retailer, especially given that they should get a larger volume with the lower price-point. Unfortunately, it looks like the allocations between the three parties are way out of wack.
I think this would be better if you could copy/paste txt into it. Most of the time I only want certain portions of txt read. Def nice for stories/articles.
Macros violate the property that any subexpression can be evaluated and understood on its own. This is meant to be one of the benefits of functional programming. I agree here.

The counterpoint to this is that they don't break this property as severely as side effects do, because these violations can be algorithmically understood at compile time. While understanding macros is not a computable task in the general case, it is in the specific case where the program successfully compiles after only a finite amount of time.

This raises the question: is there some abstraction that can give us some of the power of macros with less violation of the above property? Scheme-style syntax-case macros and Ruby-style code block parameters help with shortening common idioms. Python-style compile mechanism subversion (metaclasses) and user-defined infix operators help with DSLs.

Nothing else is quite as powerful as the macro (pretty much by definition). We might be able to get something almost as good, and a lot cheaper in terms of semantic overhead.
I'm pretty sure that's the number of lines in the rendering code, which is interpreted by the (many-LOC) raytracer.
The cross-browser promise of GWT will only get you something that runs in ie6. It might never give you something that performs well.

No layer of abstraction will ever cover up the fact that you have the world's worst garbage collection algorithm coupled with the world's slowest javascript runtime. At best, it can only make the semantics of your code the same across the various browsers.

It's the difference between getting an obese person to walk 26 miles when what you want is for them to run a marathon.

Also, at its core GWT is just the compiler, and you can (if you desire) choose to ignore the cross-browser abstractions and work at a lower level if you want the best possible performance. For example, a mobile safari app written in GWT (one that needs to fit inside a very small browser cache) might avoid using GWT Widgets to keep the resulting javascript as small as possible. It could be that the Wave developers took that route.
"They share a common set of flaws - both apparently tend to produce overcomplicated designs and generally "enterprisey" solutions."

Since when do platforms produce solutions? That's up to the developers...

So far in my experience .NET enables the slimmest and most elegant solutions of the frameworks I've worked with so far, especially when you take advantage of features like LINQ.
I am not sure how the "Java" meme entered this discussion, but it is based on Linux and Oracle.

http://www.millenniumit.com/capital_market_solutions/index.p...

And it seems the product is already in production use at other exchanges.

It could be so because they also list Sun as the first name in their useful links (http://www.millenniumit.com/useful_links/index.html) page that is conspicuously not in alphabetical order. They also list iPlanet, so, I suppose, the list is not updated frequently.
We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here's What We Learned.
All memcmp's are this smart. But that's kind of besides the point, right? 1 time, 14 times, if we're talking about L1 cache, we're really epsilon from pure reg/reg ALU operations, implementing effectively constant-time algorithms.

I agree, int32 is faster. Like I said, it's just not "much" faster.
I think the author was looking at too small a window into Argentina. It still is a pretty decent place to live and it will probably capitalize on Brazil's new growth spurt. Look at the most populous area, Buenos Aires, which has 1/3 of the population and an HDI of 0.923. It's a first world score.

I think Peron was quite positive, and the author forgets to note that before him Argentina was controlled by English companies who took the best part of the profits from the beef industry.
Quickly view formatted PDFs in your search results
Would you trust a surgeon who chooses to operate you with a hacksaw, a fork and a baseball bat?

I wouldn't.

Choice of tools say a lot about a professional.
I suspect it has to do with the financial nature of the startup.
True but I think the article's point was that you could maintain the same professor-student ratio and increase class sizes if you have the billlions that Harvard had. Instead they spent the money to make them seem more prestigious.
I'm pretty blown away at the $30-50k for the first engineering hires. I assume they are either:

A) getting LOTS of equity
B) really naive about equity

Are any of the startups here paying their first hires in this range? If so, what kind of equity package are they getting?
If education was truly that bad, I have a hard time seeing those improvements as social ones. They seem more like a side effect of strong authoritarian policy.

I don't buy the article's explanations thus far; though it appears to be one of a series and I look forward to reading more.

But I also am not swayed but your assertion that progress in a socialist country is too alien for we crass capitalists to gauge.
Yeah, you're probably right. I'm guessing the legal nature of having access to everyone's bank account is a tricky situation. But usually once you've outlined (legally) how you're going to approach something there isn't a monthly cost associated to that legal work.
Well, Robert can say whatever he wants about people and you are welcome to disparage him for it, God bless you both. But the reason why your question is another question is because it has nothing to do with my question, not even when phrased as an extension to my original imaginary dialogue.

My question is about people who reject some things for lack of empirical justification while accepting others without such justification. If you want to piggy-back off my question to criticize famous consultants, how about asking whether Robert Martin is actually Person B and not Person A?

I haven't read his work in enough detail to comment one way or another, but I certainly am open to the possibility that some of the proponents of agile methodology do so on the basis of very scant evidence while rejecting other approaches for lack of substantial justification.
No offense was intended - I was more referring to my experience with UX guys who don't know the basics of cognitive ergonomics - I did not mean to imply that you did not yourself.

Nonetheless, the main page is a pretty gigantic violation of basic cognitive ergonomics tenets, and IMHO trades way too much usability for what I perceive as mere prettiness.

Also, I'm very skeptical of the usefulness of the thumbnails altogether - the thumbnail communicates nothing (usually it's a screengrab of a wall of text) and doesn't tell me anything about what I'm about to visit.
Dennis watched Dodgeball get acquired by Google, neglected, and then killed. Foursquare is what Dodgeball would have been a few years later had Google given it any TLC (and it also might have been Twitter).

I think he might think twice before selling to anyone based on that experience.
I would be very interested in a data point of a successful startup headed by a non-technical founder whose principal role is to harangue and berate and exalt his tech team. Oh, and to make Excel spreadsheets
How To Wind Down Your Company
Unexpected Lessons from Porn Users
YC Comment on an Albert Einstein Autobiographical Note
That woman is so freaking beautiful I can't concentrate on the article. I had to firebug/edit html her picture out so I could get it done.

After reading it: It was a nice look into the strategy/numbers but I am not sure I can take anything away from it. Like (pretty much) everyone else here being a programmer/developer - I do not see raising $100k for my prototype as feasible for me.
Given the nation's ridiculous unemployment rate, and especially given California's even larger numbers? Probably everywhere, actually.
Could you flesh that out a bit, so we know you're not just spamming?
CarbonCrush - my crush on Carbonmade
CEA to award $10,000 for innovative app
Personal experience, I've been in this range & been offered 1-5% (declined because I felt neither was worth it).
With the right binoculars, you can see Steve Jobs standing way up there on top. I do get what you mean about that, but it seems smaller pyramids can be built next to the big ones, even if they do pay taxes (so to speak) to the bigger ones. Maybe the iPhone isn't the best environment for that? Or maybe the real money is in building apps for other companies who need their services extended to a new platform.
And because I was downmodded for that, here it is...

> So, to summarize: what have I got against Amazon's Kindle?

1) DRM. (It's unethical, immoral, fattening, and a royal pain in the ass. To be fair: this also goes for other ebook platforms.)

2) Amazon reserves the right to delete work from your Kindle. (Under circumstances which are now a little clearer and a little tighter, but nevertheless still present.)

3) Censorship.

4) They're using their monopsony position to fuck over their suppliers (i.e. the publishers) in a manner that threatens a catastrophic crash in author royalties in the medium term (up to 5 years). NB: as a reader, you may enjoy the short term price benefit, but you'll pay for it in the long term in reduction of choice.

5) Their actions may start a trans-Atlantic price war between publishers, to the detriment of authors (again, in the medium term).
Tell HN: Creators of Chef offering to help start-ups w/infrastructure
I thought this was interesting. Opscode, the creators of Chef, are offering to help a start-up or two design and automate their infrastructure.

If your startup runs on Ruby or Java (their requirement), you should strongly consider applying.

It looks like they might be using applicants as guinea pigs on a not-yet-released tool. Cool.
What a tragedy. It seems to be based on the particularly American binary reasoning that there are two kinds of transportation modes: automobiles and !automobiles.
(no affiliation w/the company)

http://www.opscode.com/alpha