skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seriously pissed me off, especially the fact that this guy was allowed to teach a subject he didn't know anything about.

Calculators have their uses, simple sums are not what they were made for. Fwiw this whole thing played out in rural Canada, Algoma district. I think they must have thought me to be an exceptionally cruel parent for wanting to teach my child how to do sums in his head or on paper for slightly more complicated ones. Fantastic piece by the way, that pdf, you should post that separately.
You can preorder several video games. But maybe it's illegal if you don't know yet if you're really going to build the product.
Wedding Photographers in Las Vegas
>> "I wonder at the sheer human waste in leagues of emasculated coders churning out verbose Java/XML/SQL 'business' apps in cubicles, forced by convention to work in an ugly way - those businesses would be much better served in terms of efficiency, quality and innovation by using a good language, and their staff much happier."

Surely the whole point of that setup is that they can get some productivity from mediocre programmers. Big businesses would rather have 10 mediocre programmers than 1 superstar programmer, and things like Java allow you to do that easily.

It's a good balance between power and not letting programmers make stupid mistakes. That's why it's so successful.
The core team is two guys, but they hired/contracted additional people to help with QA/porting:

- Allan Blomquist (Wii port)
- Paul Hubans (QA and Production associate)
- Maks Verver (Linux port)

http://goofans.com/world-of-goo/about-2d-boy

http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/world-of-goo/credits
>> "I think lisp like languages have less crud, and so the idea is clearer."

Part of being a good programmer is being able to see through crud. Personally, I don't really care about crud. It doesn't bother me. I think it's a good skill to learn to be able to recognize and understand code that's within a bowl of crud.
That's a good question. To me the closest thing I can get to describing it is onion rings. You remember one thing, and then you remember something that came before that, and so on.

Try to remember the first time you met someone that you know well. It's sort of like a small movie with moments played backwards until that person wasn't in my life, then a bit of jiggling around the 'focal' point, and then some really hard thinking to try to pin it down, pulling in all kinds of auxiliary data to make the final determination.
"Is it just going to be Azure for you?"
He does not know anything about foo, let alone on Microsoft's offering on foo, yet he's already decided that he's going to use foo from Microsoft, and asumes it's the default.

That's why I wish to see MS die in convulsions, the more the better. I probably even won't take it without convulsions.
LFrit toaster, designed to make your life easier in the kitchen
If you wrote/created/designed it, you get to pick the license

I do get that part. But it doesn't help me understand the merits of any particular license.

Thanks for your attempt to explain the GPL to me. I already knew what the GPL says, I just don't see how it achieves its goals of increasing my freedoms.

For instance, I'm not allowed to use the source code of some of the software google has linked to GPL code. Even when I pay for using it (like when I run my code on google's servers), I lose all freedoms related to some of the code covered by the GPL.

If they let me download their code, they would have to let me use the source and sell it as well. But they can simply not let me download it and force me to run the code on their servers exclusively.

So, in this scenario using the GPL means that I can not view or modify the source code of the software I build on. I have to pay for using it, and I have to abide by further arbitrary rules included in their terms of service, taking away even more fundamental freedoms.
>Our argument is quite simple: don't demean people. Demeaning women? Bad. Demeaning gay people? Bad

This is an empty argument because those who oppose gay marriage would not accept the assertion that it is demeaning. You could just as easily claim that allowing gay marriage is demeaning to heterosexuals. But let's pretend everyone agrees it is demeaning. Isn't it acceptable to demean someone (fines, imprisonment or other punishments) when someone makes some type of transgression? In the case of gay marriage, the moral transgression would clearly permit some of this.
If "fast-casual" is actually an industry trend, that makes me very sad. I like the full dining experience; it's pretty much the only reason I'd willingly go out to eat.

If there's no "experience" to the act of doing so, what's left is in most cases a commodity that can be made, or reasonably emulated, at home or wherever without all the trouble.

I think there's some startup parallels in that too.

Doing business with a vendor is often valuable when the vendor offers truly substantive core competencies and a breadth of experience spanning a problem domain, not just because the vendor has a competitively priced deliverable to sell you.
Six Years of Patch Tuesdays
I put my hand on my heart and tell you, after programming for 15 years in C and C++ on windows and linux, I am happy to throw it away after seeing how much better the same things can be done in 'lispy' languages [scheme, clojure, ruby]

Have a look at PGs 'on-lisp', 'the little schemer', the SICP book + video lectures, or 'practical common lisp' - they have example after example - finding fixed points, data query language, numerical approximations, symbolic algebra, pattern matching, logic languages, momoizing all expressed very clearly.

An excellent article you might enjoy is 'Functional Programming for the Rest of Us' : http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html [by a YC alumni, Slava]
I recently looked up Berkeley (Haas), Stanford (GSB) and Harvard (HBS) and was really surprised by the statistics.

I think the most shocking of all was enrollment. My gut said that Harvard would be the most selective but when comparing metrics like pre-enrollment salary & GMAT, Haas and Stanford were more selective. I wouldn't expect such a big difference in enrollment percentage and class size but there is.

Haas '10: 6.3%
Applicants: 3779
Enrolled: 240

GSB: 6.7%
Applicants: ~5400
Enrolled: 360

HBS '10: 10.3%
Applicants: 8661
Enrolled: 900
Funny how American morality/ideology is being applied to condemn something (normal as per the Taiwanese) happening in Taiwan. As someone mentioned in Reddit, if non Americans were to object to some American custom, say people hugging in public, Americans would (be justified) in flipping them off. I am sick and tired of people telling other people how they ought to live to satisfy some bullshit political correctness agenda.
VisiCalc turns 30 and SocialCalc turns 1.0
Little joys of life: a list
The diminishing marginal utility of money leads me to prefer Forrest Gump's philosophy on the matter:

"So then I got a call from him, saying we don't have to worry about money no more. And I said, that's good! One less thing."
my fault again, there should be 100 millionaires with $100m.
Actually, the figures here may be pessimistic. It takes a certain kind of person to submit their e-mail address when there is quite obviously no deliverable being explicitly promised to them for immediate purchase & download. If there were one, there might have been higher conversion.
Everything has its place in software development, may it be closure or design patterns.
> If it can't tell you if an idea is good, and you can't trust it if it says the idea is bad -- what is the point, again?

The point is not to prove the idea is good, but to prove that the idea isn't bad. In other words you can't prove that email addresses will convert to sales, but you can prove that no email addresses will convert to no sales. It's useful to know if your idea will produce no click-throughs, which will produce no sales.
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Scan Of Infant's Genome Yields A Surprise Diagnosis
Presumably this is to some extent experimentally testable, if we can construct lab analogues of the conditions?
WebOS, with its cards metaphor, is extremely impressive. The Pre is not. When Palm gets the hardware fixed/updated and the software optimized, I think they will have a very good Blackberry/iPhone competitor. The interaction and interface design in WebOS is great, and in some cases better than the iPhone. And RIM has shown that it is incapable of developing a good UI for touchscreen devices.

All the things you list above are hardware features. None of those help the fact that Android is kind of crappy.
Nokia 1661 unlocked
Nokia 1661 with very beautiful, slim and sexy handset with very simple feature which let you talk as much you like and for entertainment you can enjoy its FR radio with stereo sound. The powerful and dense support of network supported and 1661 is 2G network of GSM 900 / 1800.
The Pre needs a serious software upgrade. The processor itself should be fast enough, the application layer is a bit too webby, so probably wastes a few bogomips with all those layers -- but still, with some clever load optimizing and caching, at least launch time should be faster (and/or appear to be faster).

I just got one yesterday, and both speed and build quality are slightly disappointing. One of the main reasons I got one was due to the fact that it's much cheaper on a monthly basis (well, here in Germany), and I thought about having another mobile platform to develop for (my iPod touch should suffice for most iPhone dev work I'm going to do).

But the app catalog is somewhat disappointing. That should've been settled before the device was released, especially if you want to be compared to the iPhone.
I've found that as I started corresponding more in the "real world," email took hold as the most important tool I have. When I was a student, less so, because all I used it for was holding passwords, subscribing to a list or two, and occasionally communicating with a teacher. All my friends were always nearby so it wasn't a major issue to just hang out all the time.

But since then, everyone I know has moved somewhere else. If you want to seek out a deep long-term conversation and you can't get in physical proximity to do so, email does that quite well.

I think mailing lists are a powerful tool as well - they should probably be used more. I hate using Facebook, even though it's valuable as a Rolodex replacement.
Unless, I guess, a few who will take this occasion to put their lucky numbers.
Terradata ( database ) running on SSD ( 55,000 IOPS )
"...who want to do statistics", right? Are there any good use cases for R for other stuff? (Or some interesting ways you used statistics as a "working programmer" recently?)
Did you make this total counting Paypal fees ? For example, all 0.01$ orders went only to Paypal, not to them.
Oh come on. It's easy to piss on stuff that could be better, but Android is actually a fine platform to develop for, and plenty of applications are showing up. Sure, not as many as iPhone, yet, but there are some pretty cool ones out there.

And it's not "the only hope" - there will be more Android phones out, and the whole thing will only continue to improve.
That's very true. And here I am, such a dunce for buying a scanner without checking for compatibility.

I figured Canon would be up to speed by now, but unfortunately not so. Fortunately scanners are cheap. No more Canon for me.
You have 256mb of RAM to work with, most of which you would like to use for rendering webpages. Do you really want to blow a huge chunk of it on something that just gets you an inconsistent look-and-feel? A handheld device is the last place you want two completely different file-picker dialogs, and you can't cover that shit up with theming.

Do you really want to be shipping second-party Gecko in the when Webkit is better and you're already paying people to work on it?
Firefox Add-ons Donations - Stats from trial
Continuing the analogy, that was more of a hostile takeover.

<joke>Yeah. Bugger should have taken the deal and bought himself some bling.</joke>
Giveawayoftheday: One Commercial Software Will Be Free for 24 Hours Everyday
Giveawayoftheday.com offers different commercial software for free everyday. Pretty cool. Keep an eye on it and you will find the software you want for free.
Every developer who creates desktop apps should work with a rather low spec machine for a while, maybe even for a whole day per week.

Moore's law yadda yadda, but while it's great that we don't have to include inline assembly anymore, some of the waste we're seeing currently is just abysmal.
It's really pity that people nowadays consider that there are "blockbuster" games, to pay 50-60 dollars for, and "cheap games", to pay for a cup of coffee price.

Originally, the term "indie" was just this, independent developers, without a publisher, and most likely people working on new concepts, interesting ideas that you can't do on the mainstream game industry.

Unfortunately, marketers are now abusing the "indie" label, for any "little game". And thanks to that, "indie" is now slipping to "cheap". So if a game is not the latest "Gears of Halo 2010", most of people will say it's only worth a few dollars.

That's sad.
Your definition of "functional programming" is unusual. Wikipedia defines it as:

"A programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data"

Wikipedia goes on to consider Erlang and Scheme functional programming languages, so it would seem your definition of what consists a functional programming language is more narrow than the norm. Most people would consider Clojure to be a functional programming language, just not a pure functional programming language.

I'm also not sure why you describe a language with macros as being "Inflexible". I've used Clojure and Haskell extensively, and Clojure wins on flexibility. It's a dynamically-typed Lisp, after all.
N900 is a great platform, free as everyone is asking. The point is that is not for US because of the subsiding US people is looking to have.
700$ is the same price of an iPhone, the two are on the same league (more or less depending on the feature) but it seems that the marketing of 199$ + n hundreds $ in 2 years contract wins.
The only reason I can imagine (not being in US) for this being reasonable is that there is no reasonable dataplan without phone "embedded in".
S60 is OK from the user point of view (barring the UI from 1990), phones are cheap given the features, but programming for it is a nightmare...
I moved to Taiwan last year, and I can confirm that dancing girls are very common in all kinds of irrelevant contexts, particularly expos. It's weird to me, but I haven't heard any women here complaining about it.
The Old New Thing : Thinking inside the box
E-mail is broken in many ways (not just SPAM and overfilled inboxes) but I think there is not yet anything better. Facebook, twitter, social nets are still in the process to become effective ways of communication.
Google Wave seems promising, not as the "the new e-mail" (I think that is just hype) but as a collaborative way of working.
IMHO e-mail will be replaced for such a type of tool (similar to Wave) where you will have elements of e-mail, IM, tweets and social networks.
The only thing that really sucks about the Pre's hardware is the build quality. The battery life sucks because the software is too slow, wasting CPU.

You're right that I list only hardware features, save the point about the unmolested software. Android is kind of mediocre -- it's way too much like the Sidekick platform with a Windows Mobile strategy. I think it can get a lot better, but only if it gains a lot of users on good open hardware, where they normally get continuous updates direct from upstream and can try out experimental software on their own. It's the same with Apps -- Verizon selling millions of these without locking them down in their usual capricious manner could really get some high-quality shit in the app store.
That graph is by incident, to make it meaningful you'd have to normalize by distribution. In an absolute sense Nvidia caused a lot more driver problems than others but if you don't weigh that with the relationships between the number of installations then it's hard to say that the problem was an Nvidia problem or that there are serious issues with the Vista driver architecture because all manufacturers had these issues.

I'm not current on the relative distributions of say Nvidia vs ATI, but all the machine here have either Nvidia or Intel graphics in them, not a single ATI one.
America’s Chinese disease (not quite what you think)
It's an introduction for those already familiar with some of the concepts that have to be extensivly explained in introductions for, say, social scientists.

I have to add, though, that I (as a non-programmer and aspiring social scientist) liked this tutorial much better than many other R tutorials out there. In know a little bit about programming but that was enough to pretty much understand the whole tutorial. (I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm an outlier so don't expect many other social scientists to know about basic CS concepts.)

(And boy am I happy that I now can feel confident ditching SPSS in favor of R. That gruesome SPSS!)
I don't specifically know of any overviews, but the main principles are fairly simple:

- Split the system into small components that do one thing and do them well.
- Give each part of the system the minimal set of privileges needed (if necessary by running as different users and set filesystem privileges accordingly). I.e. qmail has separate binaries for inbound smtp, pop3, managing the queue, local delivery, remote delivery and more.
- Make each part of the system communicate only via well defined interfaces (using pipes in qmail) where it is explicitly assumed that you can't really trust the sender.
- Don't ever use library functions that don't length check things. Then again he uses his own stdio replacement, and his own string functions.
Sounds like a bit of a gimmick to me. Why would I want to talk to him? If I have a problem and need phone support, this isn't going to cut it obviously, nor is it intended as such. I suppose we'll have to wait and see how it works out in practice; maybe it will prove useful for some purpose that was difficult to foresee.
The Firefox add-ons blog just posted some results from their "Contributions Pilot" where they were testing accepting donations for add-ons.
http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/10/19/contributions-a-lo...
Interestingly, the $5-$10 range seems to be the sweet spot there as well. In this case though the add-on author suggests an amount to donate which might skew the results compared to Goo's results.
PayPal took it all, but they probably ended up losing money on most of those transactions ($0.01) as well, they’re not the bad guy.

Heh, Paypal... I could say I don't care so much about them losing money....

Anyway, I'm glad this is going on a little longer; I'd like to see if the average increases, and I get to buy more people the gift [of Goo].
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Props to you for getting around and seeing that much of the world as a person living there. It sure makes your argument carry a lot more weight.

Where are you in Canada ? (West, East, Middle ?) Have you gotten used to the winters yet ?
"The issue here is that objectifying women, at a tech-corporate-sponsored event"

No that is not what I was replying to. I personally would not like a tech event with go go dancers either. I just think it was drawn out of proportion to compare it with racism and slavery.

And sorry, but cheerleading is almost the same as go go dancing. From the photos, I didn't get the impression that the dancers were actually stripping. Again, I don't want to defend the use of it at a tech event, but it annoys me that there is the assumption that all women would automatically have to be offended. in fact, many men would also be offended - some would like it, some would be offended. In general it is a bad idea to organize an event like that. But I think the reactions are blown out of proportions.
Hah. I tried to google it, too.

Maybe it's an xkcd reference?

http://xkcd.com/305/
www.wetriffs.com
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I had to go and look up 'faceball'. What's that go to do with hacking ?
There are some huge holes in the Android APIs that make writing well-produced games extremely challenging. The Audio APIs are particularly shitty, making it basically impossible to have worthwhile soundfx. I just looked and it's now finally possible to read incoming Audio without waiting for the user to finish recording! (though they still don't call it streaming)

That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) makes it particularly hard to just implement things yourself in 'userspace'.

People have been saying "there will be a glut of Android phones out in a few months" for well over a year. This is the first Android hardware that isn't obviously a pile of shit -- it's actually better than the iPhone in many ways! Now we get to see if the software can live up to it.
AMD shows off new triple core chips
I believe just about every newspaper, rating agency, and practically everyone else who uses an Apple product would disagree with you.

I will agree with you that Apple is not big on customer service. But, when the bar is set so low, they are the tallest dwarf in the room.
Now why on earth would that get you modded down ?

I fully agree with you.

I'm a male and I would have been quite disappointed at this whole thing, and I certainly don't get 'upset' at seeing scantily clad females, the beaches here are full of them.

The problem is the context, as if women on a gathering like that have nothing but 'decorative' functions, and as if all men would find such a display appropriate.

I also think that regardless of how far from 'home' this happened if that's yahoos' approach to this kind of event anywhere that it reflects bad on them as a company. The apology that is linked to from here is actually pretty weak.

It shows a certain disrespect.
I'm going to sound like a bitter old man when I say this but, well, get off my lawn: I would rather turn away a thousand customers with $0.01 ~ $1.99 in hand than give one user the impression my software was worth only $1.99.

"Pay what you want" is teaching your customers "You know what? Most people pirate our games anyhow, and why wouldn't they. They're not worth anything. We can barely bring ourselves to charge for them. You know, its so exceptional to receive money for these, if you give us a penny, we will award you karma points."

Offering someone a penny for their labor is not generous. Why are we teaching our customers to frame their purchases like that? Or like the app store, where software is a disposable commodity item which is overpriced at $2.99?
Science to stop age clock at 50
1999 Microsoft Store vs. 2009 Microsoft Store
If SAP Built an Electric Car...
My mother has a PhD in Cognitive Linguistics and is working at UCSC. She is using R, she hasn't programmed before, so I wonder how well she is doing with R. Well, I will meet her again around Christmas, maybe I could help her out a bit with R, I'm sure there's saomething she has missed, since she's a non-programmer.
Don’t tell me about your product