skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Won the server markets? According to http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/06/17/june_2009_web_s... Microsoft is a solid #2 but Apache serves more than half of all domains, and more than half of the top million domains. It doesn't look like Microsoft won the server to me!

That said, I don't know what would have happened without the monopoly abuse. Open source makes enough sense that it could have done well. However the meteoric rise in open source happened in large part because the whole industry was willing to do anything to make Microsoft lose. That is why everyone jumped on open source the second it became clear that Microsoft would be unable to retaliate for a bit.

Therefore I suspect that open source would have eventually succeeded, but not as fast, and likely not in webserving.
Computers? I think it depends what angle you squint at that one from.
not sure if software is free, but check out http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/09/virtual-composer...

it also mentions a book that presumably discusses the algorithms. book: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/?ttype=2&tid=10661
Ask HN: Guiding Novice Programmers
Over the last year, I have been approached by intelligent colleagues with little-to-no programming experience. They want to understand code (at least to be able to read it within our application), and have tried to self-study but have not been able to feel confident or reach the level of understanding they would like.

I've read some papers on the subject, but does anyone have success stories for this situation, and how it worked for you? I am pretty removed from the time when I did not really grok how to program, so I don't think I've been the best help. I once recommended 'Learning Python', but that spoke more towards my appreciation of the language than being a good primer.

Thanks,
Mike
Yep. Spend your self-education time on something more productive than recataloging the bugs in Internet Explorer.
What parallel-dimension US are you living in? In mine, banks just see stuff like this as an opportunity to collect more fees!
I'm not sure it's easy to provide the specific information you're requesting, but Glenn Greenwald documents the influence Goldman Sachs has over financial regulation in the US:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/16/goldman/in...

The lack of transparency in the case of an obvious and massive conflict of interest is just as frightening as any specific cases of wrongdoing - which, anyway, would probably result only in the show trials of some low-level traders or officials.
Having a degree makes you look good in the job market, compared to someone with the same skills but no degree, so you go get one. Good choice!

Now, many other people wisely do the same. The more people have degrees, the more pressure is applied on those who don't to go get one. Awkward, that.

So, now we have a huge demand for degrees, plus a lot of degree-seekers who (to be honest) aren't really cut out for college. But that's no big deal! The market hears and obeys, as enrollment goes up, standards go down, and bottom-tier schools admit anyone with a pulse. Hooray, everyone's getting educations, isn't this great? Who cares if they're learning anything.

Oh dear, it seems we've stumbled into a Nash equilibrium wherein the competent people are still competent, the incompetent are still incompetent, you can't tell them apart by seeing who has a degree anymore, and now everyone has student loans weighing them down. Alas, game theory, she is a cruel mistress.
You missed my point. Most users each probably have a different subset of Word.
> If the inflation in education continues, I cannot imagine what kind of degree it will take to get a job in the future...imagine everyone being a PhD?

It's the opposite actually - when everyone is doing the same thing, you don't differentiate by doing the same thing plus more of that same thing. You differentiate by doing something totally different. Writing open source software, freelancing, and traveling for four years would lead to much more interesting and better credentials than four years in most universities.
Where are the high-end restaurants of software development?
This looks neat, but it appears to be an 'academic' exercise. I couldn't find any source code written for the JOP (the only project in the Links section was down) after scanning some of the pdfs. I did, however, notice the 64 journal publications the creator has on the subject.

OTOH, he definitely appears to have put a lot of work into this, and I would like to test it out, if I can figure out how.
"... the competent people are still competent ..."

Sadly, one could adduce many reasons this no longer remains true.
How to hire the best people you've ever worked with
Get them to start on something small rather than to dive head first into a huge application. If you don't have overview, and that's a really big issue in the beginning you will never build up confidence. Baby steps are small steps. Then once they master that build out the scope.

Maybe isolate some small part of that application and make a little unit test around that so you can understand the whole.

That way it still has some relevance to what they want to achieve.
As an aside... have you ever stopped to think about the Quantum Immortality idea? I mean, really think about the implications.

It's probably the most fundamentally horrifying idea I've ever seriously entertained.
The upshot of all that is that you can expect job hunting to become more time consuming. After all, if a masters (PhD less so) is essentially meaningless (and I believe that's a point that in some branches of science is a thing of the past) then you'll have to prove on the spot that you really know your stuff.
Duck typing in F#
Then measure worst case latency. I don't see what the difficulty is.

If you're purporting to improve the performance of something, but you aren't always measuring the impact your changes have on the actual performance of that something, you're working blind.
Building Parser Combinators in Scheme
Go try it !!

Who knows, you just may have found a loophole. And if not I'll come visiting, promise ;).
Scientists Write Memories Directly Into Fly Brains
Thought-experiment mashups
Online papers on consciousness
1998 was a milestone, that's true, but 1989 was a much more important milestone, it is when the GPL V 1.0 was written.

The fact that 'open source' got named in 1998 gave it a lot of publicity, but Linux and a whole bunch of other stuff would not have existed in their current form if not for the 1989 version of the GPL.

Open source/Free Software was a movement long before it had a name. MS took too long to take it serious, and the effect that universal net access would have on accelerating open source was very large.
Pocket-Sized Workout Pal Is Data Geek's Dream
Freebase Parallax
I'm glad to see that they move away from the 3d app icons with the angled shadows and use larger, flat icons in 2.0.

The older-style icons are a pain to make and the Android icon design guidelines are way more complicated than the iPhone icon guidelines, so no one bothers to follow them.
As a white male, I felt pretty good in graduate school (for computer science). I was often the only white in my graduate classes. While there were plenty of Chinese, Koreans, and Indians, there weren't any whites. This made me realize what a great opportunity I had. The whites were mainly in liberal arts, business, marketing, accounting, and English. What does that mean for me? It means that my peers, mainly other whites who I'll be competing against, will probably not have CS graduate degrees. Good for me, but probably bad for the overall state of the country.

I worked the entire time during my school career, and that experience is what employers really care about, but I believe it helps that I have a graduate degree when interviewing and getting through the HR door.
Your rephrasing doesn't make any sense. Bill Gates wants to convince people that hobbyism can't create good software, and he needs the money. Why should the audience (pirates) care about whether hobbyists make a living, as long as they get their software?
In addition to Douglas Crockford's book, which is excellent, I'd also recommend the 2nd edition of "Professional Javascript for Web Developers" by Nicholas Zakas.
Make sure they're familiar with the documentation tools and web sites (e.g. for Python, they should know how to "pydoc" library calls, and how to find stuff on python.org, so when they see a library call or a new construct, they may be able to figure out what it's doing).
Isn't C++ Compiler written in C?
JQuery Browser Rejection
No, I got it all right, that's what I meant. Each user subsets word for themselves in to what they need/can handle.
Is the Pill giving geeks an unfair chance?
You know it did not use to be like that. Things changed just recently. It is interesting because I went to college exactly as things were changing so I saw the difference first hand.

When I started college in the 90's personal computers and the internet were just hitting the mainstream and people started hearing stories about how computer nerds were getting rich. So of course the computer science and computer engineering majors had huge in coming classes.

The first intro classes that start the cs and ce majors were pretty large. But that did not phase the professors. Just because everyone wanted a degree did not mean that everyone was getting one. So those first classes had some shocking curves. There were rumors that more than 50% were failing the intro classes. And then another 50% of the survivors would fail the next intro class. Huge hordes of pissed off students were leaving cs for econ, bio, social science, etc.

But the professors were unapologetic. They simply said that you cannot pass their class unless you learn how to program and if 50% do not learn than 50% will fail.

The funny thing is that those intro classes were not really that difficult, but you just needed to know how to program to pass them and many people couldn't. After that classes started getting really hard, but then the people that remained knew what they were doing, so the curve normalised after the first year.

Anyway, I started in a major of about 200 people and I graduated with about 30 people. Many people that graduated with me had started earlier than me having taken more than 4 years to finish the major. But of course we all knew what we were doing, and our diplomas meant something.

But for the class years after me things changed. I think someone in industry told the school that they need to graduate 10 times more people each year. They made everything easier. Classes started getting large throughout the major. People were not failing as much. I met people junior to me that were taking the same classes I had taken yet all the assignments they were doing were much much easier than the ones I had to do. They started using a lot of high level tools without knowing what happens under the hood. Nobody even knew about pointers. So then my degree started meaning less and less.

This has to end. The solution they have now is that the really good people are supposed to proceed to grad school, but life is too short for that. I think they may have to use two levels of undergrad degrees -- one really challenging that exposes you to all levels of computer science, and another easy one that is for people that will be the future "X certified professionals."
Alternate title: "Is the Pill raising our species' IQ?"
Pack Up Your Data and Leave Whenever You Want, It’s the New Rule of the Cloud
But to rule the country you need half of the votes, and no matter how many parties a country has, alliances form between them as to present themselves to the population as a viable alternative to the parties currently in power. People who dislike the current government do not want to throw their vote away on parties outside those two main alternatives - changing the alliance in power takes precedence.

We have 7 political parties represented in our parliament("riksdag"), but in effect you can only choose between two alliances who each has joint policies. Which have now become about the same by the process described in the article. So the choice we have is between the guys who want to lower the tax by 1-2%, or the ones who want to raise the tax by 1-2%. The rest of the difference is rhetoric.
I almost thought I was reading an article in The Onion while reading that...
I like http://www.xul.fr/en/ tutorials.
Agreed. I'm building a GWT app right now. I know Java inside/out. I don't know all the browser quirks and JS very well. I could spend time to learn it, but GWT seems to solve the problem for me so far. I have hit a few cross-browser issues with some CSS and Regex, but I was able to identify them and solve them fairly quickly.

GWT may not be the solution for you if you aren't a Java guru, but if you are, it is a godsend if you need to develop ajax ria apps quickly and you don't want to learn (deal with) all the browser incompatibilities and js nuances.
Tornado is a web framework on its own, it handles the polling and the replies internally. This nginx module is just a helper to the framework behind it. It keeps the connections to the listeners, waiting for the framework to signal it, and then sends the message back to the listeners.
The problem is that the college/grad school credential is a legal requirement for a vast number of well paying jobs.
Thanks for the review of Crockford's book.
I think it is related to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_costs
Wow. This is one of the most racist comments I have ever seen on hacker news.
Many browsers and OS combinators suffer problems when Flash objects are on a website.

Please add a [FLASH] tag in future.
It is one thing to make a product no one wants and complain about making no money. Expressing dissapointment over not making money off of a product because it is universally stolen is a reasonable sentiment.
This is the common thread that I have seen through these boutique shops–they all have an owner who is a technical leader who creates a strong culture where (excuse the pun) failure is just not an option.

Wait, what's the pun I'm excusing?
Liquid Metal project, Lime language: Java for FPGA co-processors
I'm trying to understand. Are you saying that the competent are being held back?
There's also http://www.musopen.com/
I'm honestly asking, what is racist about my comment? It's about race, but why is it racist? I don't mean to be racist, nor do I want to be a racist. I removed the article.
In addition to the skill/change thing, there's something I've been told by a Linden Labs employee (when they closed the casinos in Second Life) is that there's a specific provision for "game tokens" versus real money. That is, as long as all you can earn from gambling is tokens the government doesn't really care. Casino chips, however, are basically proxies for money and thus cannot be considered game tokens.
If what you're saying is legitimate, then you need to extrapolate more. There are too many loose ends in your post....
Don't you just love drive-by readers who downvote all your comments in a thread, and never leave a reply indicating why they disagree with you? Because I sure do...
Google Ready To Open Wallet Again After Q3 Profits
Migration from one country to another also generally requires credentials.
What’s the relationship between cost and price?
Depending on how 'sophisticated' you want the music to be, there are more & more decent online Flash/JS sequencers that you could record.

http://beaterator.rockstargames.com/beaterator.html

http://www.lilyapp.org/about/

http://www.ampledesign.co.uk/va/

There's also this collaboration site: http://www.kongregate.com/collabs

For more ideas, have a look through CDM:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/
This comes off as bitter, almost, but not quite as bitter as the linked-to diatribe from the actor who played Starbuck in the original BSG.

There indeed have been some cultural changes about how sci-fi is handled on TV and in movies. But it has been mostly in increasing its complexity. Moving away from the standard "[genre]... in SPACE!" model.

A crude but effective spam filter is when someone says "[Broad social group] is ruining [something]", it is unlikely that a good point will be made. This seems to fit solidly within this bucket.
I want to echo the sentiments of others regarding the value of continuing to use those libraries. A lot of real world programming is about knowing when to use libraries and which libraries to use.
Your post assumes that only "whites" are your peers, and that in competition, non-"whites" are somehow automatically disqualified; and that lack of CS accredited "whites", as opposed to non-"whites" is "probably bad for the overall state of the country", i.e. that the relative status of "whites" has a moral worth.
MIT Press Bookstore: Loading Dock Sale
I hate browser rejection of any kind. Even in a worst-case scenario, just setup a browser redirection that sends IE6 to a stripped down version of the site. There are a lot of people who have no choice about their browser and can't update for various reasons; why punish them?
The USA has been able to get away with printing dollars because it sold things people wanted (an had to pay for in $) - the article alleges that this is no longer true.
Agreed, and SharePoint tends to be backed up on the DBMS backup schedule, which is usually more frequent than the file-share/NAS schedule, which is another bonus.

It's the "non-sanctioned" aspect that tends to cause issues down the line, not moving to SharePoint from MS Access. I could've been more clear in that section of my comment.
The (vast) majority of programmers are not programming DSP-style machines, so like I said, and I still stand by it, C doesn't map well to the full functionality of the von Neumann architecture.
When I traceroute youtube the last host my ISP owns is actually named google-10ge.bredband2.net. My ISP peers with google by AS29518 SKYNET-AS to AS15169 GOOGLE.
I agree. The people I see at my college are proof that you can get a degree and know nothing. I am getting a degree, but I'm going to rely more heavily on being able to show potential employers that I have practical experience working on different web startups. That is far more valuable than waving around a degree for the simple reason that lazy people have cheapened the value of the degree.
transit bandwidth tax

What tax? Sure, Google doesn't have to pay for transit while us mere mortals do -- but that's just because Google provides its own transit.
Shame is the right word here, as this is exactly what I feel every time I hear about another country adopting some convenient mobile payment method, from cell payments to mobile walletc, etc .

Why are we so behind? Imagine the opportunities? And then I realize what a drag on progress our parasitic banking system has become.
Sun and SGI would still be in business as well.

Sun is still in business. They're just owned by another company now.
His $2/hour in 1976 is ~$8/hour in 2009 dollars.
As far as I can tell, opening the universities to the masses damages the classes, standards, and student-faculty relations to the point where those who really 'ought' to be at university rather than at technical colleges don't benefit in the same way as previously. Perhaps this is just elitism, but I get the feeling that the 'bright' entering students are still the 'bright' graduating students, but gain much less deep knowledge than in the past. Of course, this applies to all disciplines, not just CS. As famous mathematician S Novikov said in 2002:

"In the West, however, there was also an abrupt fall in the level of college and school education in physics and mathematics in the last 20-25 years, and in the USA the decline in school education was apparently particularly steep. I can clearly see that contemporary education cannot produce a theoretical physicist capable of passing Landau’s theoretical minimum." (http://www.mi.ras.ru/~snovikov/cris_en.pdf)

Basically, this education crisis seems to me to be endemic to developed societies. I don't have a clear thesis on this yet, but it seems that when a society progresses from "Education is a route from poverty to paradise" to the anti-liberal "Everyone should receive fourteen years of education" that the quality of education rapidly declines.
What Moves Markets: The Seven Hundred Million Dollar Man
If his peer group is in fact white, then it's not racist, just a statement of reality. And as for competition, most people only care about competing within their own peer/status group.
And yes, it is bad for the economy if whites are significantly under invested in engineering. It's bad for the economy if anyone or any group is under invested in engineering. Anything "assumed" or implied by his post, is added by you, not by the original poster.

Let's save the racist card/downvotes for when someone actually makes personally disparaging remarks about someone of another race, not when someone just makes earnest and frank observations about society.
As a student I agree that there should be a way to differentiate ourselves -- but I think there already is.

I started thinking Med school but I liked computer science so I did a Combined Major in computer science and microbiology. I found computer science as my passion, and more specifically I'm fascinated by machine learning.

Now I'm doing a Combined Honour in computer science and microbiology with a minor in statistics. I'm choosing courses that emphasize artificial intelligence and machine learning.

It will depend on the university but I think any student who really wants to differentiate themselves can do so. If not through their specialization choice (i.e. majors and minors) through course choices as well as activities outside of courses but still within the university system like research.

Of course there is always freelancing, open-source and code contests.
Candian Computer History: FP-6000
>>> doesn't matter how many players there are. suppose there's one ice cream guy. where is he going to put his ice cream hut? in the center. let's say another one shows up. where is he going to put his hut? in the center. the logic repeats.

No it doesn't. With three sellers in the center, the one in the middle is close to very little people. He's in the worst possible spot and he'd better move anywhere else. So that's no longer a stable layout.
Haha, yes, it's quite the mindf#ck.

Want more? Think about this: If the idea of QI is valid, and the Large Hadron Collider keeps breaking down when we try to power it up, it would solve the Fermi paradox. To achieve technological development to the point of electromagnetic communication, you'll need curiosity. And that same curiosity would eventually lead to the destruction of your species.
There is nothing so significant the US exports which allows free reign printing of dollars. The US doesn't sell it buys - in fact it's the highest consuming country in the world. Even if there were exports the US could sell there is nobody which can afford to buy significantly. That's the economic drawback of having the near top currency.
Florence Henderson started a computer tech support service?
What you saw as an implied worth for whiteness was my view that most of my peers in school were not US citizens, while most of the white programmers in the university and workforce were and are. Many of those students didn't plan on staying in the US. My wife, who is Asian and a math major, wasn't born in this country, nor were many of our closet friends so I feel as if I have an inside view of these type of things. Not being a citizen seems to have drawbacks. How many job positions have you seen that say no sponsorships, no H1's, or US citizens only? I see this as an advantage for me, a US citizen, English as a first language, programmer with a CS graduate degree.

My previous positions and my current position with a large US company, have and is, composed of nearly all white developers. In effect, my peers are white, and probably most of the HN's community has a similar experience.
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