skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FORTRAN may well be eclipsed, but like the moon, it's still there.

This article gives reassuring answers to the question of: "If FORTRAN is the solution, what was the problem?" Portability and ease of use.

The latter is an open-ended problem, and there is still opportunity for progress in it today.
That's not quite his complaint. His complaint is that despite the project being quite well funded (relative to others), they don't seem to take an active interest in measuring results that they can be accountable to. It is somewhat remarkable that they wouldn't though if the goal of the Millenium Villages is to show others 'the way'.
Be very careful what you wish for in the last point.

Anything that makes students loans less "guaranteed" will make them much less available. Right now, the only way to "game the system" is to die. If you allow someone to take $250K of student loan debt and then just piss off and do something that "doesn't use that education" and have it discharged, think about how much harder it will be for some other middle class kid to get a student loan to pursue their dream.

ObDisclaimer: My student loans are long ago paid off, partly because I prostituted myself to ROTC to pay for 80% of MIT or so. Still, I'd have hated to be unable to attend MIT (my dream since age 11) because student loans were unavailable because the repayment guarantee became only as good as a routine personal loan.
Ha, I've never had my workouts compared to smoking. My workouts have many other positive benefits, which I think outweigh the risks. Smoking has no positive benefit other than it's something to do while sitting in bars.
How to create a multi-file uploader for your website
It's very difficult to determine what is "idiomatic", and how far to go.

For example, in ooc you often have to choose between classes and covers. When you don't need inheritance, covers is often enough, + you get to work on the stack rather than all on the heap (in that respect, ooc offers more flexibility than Java, and a little less than C++)

What would also be interesting is offering abstractions for parallelism in ooc, etc. and then differences in benchmarks would show for "idiomatic" implementations. (Very much like Haskell idiomatic solutions are sometimes faster than C ones.)

The challenge that programmers are presented with nowadays is much more than just rewriting a few tight loops in assembler ;) Concurrency and parallelism are the most important challenges for us now, imho.
Being able to target ads based on user actions leads to better ads and more money for the site. Without doing this sort of thing, it's very hard to make much money at all on web ads.

You'd really prefer to have to register to read every site?
I'm guessing the reason is that checks are simple, and you are in control of when and to who you give your money. The risk of your money being stolen is small enough that we generally don't worry about it, at least when dealing with things like paying the bills through the mail or paying for groceries (damn you, old woman in line.)
"To most geeks, the main problem with email is spam."

He lost me right there. You are not a geek if you have a problem with spam. Spam? I never see it. It all goes into my +inbox-spam folder and I spend < 1m/day scanning it before I delete the contents.

The problem with email is there is too much of it. Actually damn messages I must read and deal with.
Minor question: what's the RSS feed for the blog?

Safari lists two:

feed://ooc-lang.org/feed.php

and

feed://ooc-lang.org/feed.php?mode=list&ns=

The former one appears to be empty and the latter one doesn't appear to include blog posts (or at least it includes a lot of other stuff; I'm not sure). It would be nice to have a regular RSS just for the blog for us non-Twitter-aficionados.
Could it be that someone just clicked the submit bookmarklet?
US Math Scores Hit a Wall
This is interesting, but I'm struck by the sheer amount of serious analysis on this topic. It always struck me as very simple requiring no deep understanding.

There's an old saying on wall street, the harder it is to understand the deal the bigger the profit. The truth of this should be self evident. Add to that the fact that the people gambling weren't gambling with their own money. That way if they won then got big bonuses, and if they lost they simply didn't get bonuses. Clearly the only rational action in this situation is to go all in with other people's money.

Is it really that complicated? You wouldn't give your money to someone else and send them to Vegas, tell them to gamble if they win you split the profits, if they lose you lose your money.

You shouldn't invest in things you don't understand, and mind that old wall street saying.

But people do invest in things they don't understand, and pyramid schemes, and tulips, none of this is new. Sure some fancy math was involved this time, but that's only tangential.

I think everyone is concentrating on the fancy math because it's like magic, and then it's not their fault, it's not the same old story of everyone just being stupid again like in .COM 1.0, oh no - It's magic!
I think his point is the same thing I'm having a problem understanding. I went to the demo site and saw 17 scripts loaded on the page using firebug; I assumed from the description there would be only one.

Microformats aside, I'm trying to understand the solution to the hub part because that sounds like a problem many people would be interested in fixing.
I bought the Ruby 2 Parts I & II from PeepCode back when I was a complete Rails newbie. I'm still a newbie, but those screencasts are perhaps the best intro to the way Rails works. Those plus the Agile Web Development With Ruby on Rails 3rd Ed. are probably the best resources I've used.
There is one actually, (and now I must reveal the ugly blog hack I made to integrate wordpress with DokuWiki), http://ooc-lang.org/blogbackend/?feed=rss2

It should probably be linked on the website. Lemme fix that.

EDIT: Added link to rss and atom feeds on the blog.
Discovery of ‘magnetricity’ marks important advance in physics
del.icio.us, I would guess. Nobody know yet if Twitter is ever going to make a penny :)
Sure it's an application, not a protocol.

However, I still think that it's not the current application that will deliver most of the Wave's value. Just like it's not the Twitter website that delivers most of the value of Twitter, but the ecosystem of the clients using its API.
Earth and Jupiter in the Same Photo, From Mars
The problem jsHub is trying to solve is not "only ever load one piece of JavaScript in a page" it's "only have one piece of JavaScript for tracking, ad-serving, behavioural targetting, ...".

The reasons to do that are laid out in my blog post but the most important is consistency. If one piece of JavaScript gathers the data once and passes it to various vendors, then you know that the same data was sent, and was actually sent.
Economics as it is got going well before complexity theory was established.

There's an interesting difference between assuming perfect information and perfect rationality -- idealizations of existing scenarios -- and essentially assuming P=NP; the former makes the math easier at no real penalty (provided you remember not to confuse the map with the territory) but until P is proven to be equal to NP (which probably won't happen) the latter is more like sprinkling pixy dust to make it go.

The only school that really takes something like tractability seriously are the Austrians, but their math phobia leaves their approach unrigorous and not very useful outside of as an anti-central-planning argument.

The claim that a market will converge on an accurate price (!) for an "intractable" financial asset is pretty dubious; the price-discovery process is supposed to depend on lots of agents running their #s and taking positions depending on if they think current price is different than it ought to be...over time this process will push the market price toward an accurate price.

In the case of an intractable asset there'd be no reason to believe that any outside agents crunched accurate #s, which means that even if the price converged there'd be no reason to believe that the converged-to price had any accuracy, which isn't usually the case in most other classes of financial assets.

As noted towards the end they need to do some work about estimating "lemon cost" and otherwise establishing how close you can estimate with approximate methods.

(!) In general there's not much sense in talking about true or accurate prices for some good; price is what it gets, full stop.

In the case of most financial products the notion of accurate price is more justified: a product entitles the owner to some sequence of future cash flows, which can be assigned a value in some straightforward manner. When a financial asset's current price deviates from the value of the underlying sequence of payments in some substantial way it's usually due to some easily-understood dynamic (eg: inflation expectations, doubts about some of the payments coming through) which makes a minor correction to the price it fetches.

An "inaccurate price" would be one with no apparent relation to the underlying cash flows.
We use checks because it's the only transaction-fee-free way (aside from cash) to exchange money. Anything else for person-to-person transfers winds up taking a 2%-4% processing fee out of the equation. Until that changes, check usage will continue.
Too bad the article didn't answer the question very convincingly. I'm in Europe (Sweden), at age 34 I think I've handled exactly one check. Most bills are, of course, paid through Internet banking nowadays, although the bills still use the giro system. You just send the giro payment instruction electronically rather than on paper.
I like the concept and the sign-up was easy.

I noted that you can't run a test until you first save it, even though there is a Run button. You may wish to make this piece a little smoother.

I got a little confused by the queueing though. Was I supposed to wait when it said queueing? I did, but nothing happened for a while. Then I selected the browser type again and clicked the button to run the test. This time I had my results.

My problem was that my application requires authentication - in particular Twitter OAuth. Do you have any plans to address authentication in general. I didn't know how to work around it, so I couldn't evaluate the playback.

I tried to leave a comment, but when I submitted it, the message came back "Not Found".

- Scott
Send my banking info to a potential customer? Ask them to GO to their Bank and send me the money I request? This is a problem solver how? Sounds frustrating and awful.

The benefits of checks are huge:

1) They take time to process, so if you have to move money around, you can give someone a check and then go put the money in that account.

2) You control when the vendor gets paid. If you give someone a credit card number, they can just charge you. With a check, they have to ask ME for money, and I decide when or if I'm going to pay.

3) Signed, written, record.

4) NO FEES attached for the vendor. I LOVE getting paid by check because I don't have to give 5-10% away to some bank.
So lets say I maintain some medium-to-large corporate websites (because, well, I do).

I want jsHub because it makes my sites load faster, right? How much faster? Any way to get some test cases or examples?

Differences in hit counts and visits between products are indeed annoying, but it serves as a check. How else would we know if traffic dipped overnight or jsHub went down? Also, I think part of the difference in those counts is due to different algorithms for what constitutes a "visit" and different filtering for bots.

And for the microformats, I hope you realize that's an uphill battle. I can't justify redesigning my pages to use some new format without a material benefit.
It's interesting how probably FORTRAN will never go away.

First mover advantage case study.

What is also interesting is that between LISP and FORTRAN we seem to have the two lineages that combine all programming mechanisms that we are aware of.
CDOs are not necessarily just composed of mortgage derivatives. They can be put together from bonds, CDSs (synthetic CDOs), syndicated loans (CLOs), other CDOs (CDOs squared), a mixture of these and other debt instruments.
We don't and they're completely unheard of.
Agreed, I was thinking exactly as you were when I read the title. It's a little overblown from what it is, but I suppose it is a working allegory, however it is nothing more than a trick to reproduce the effect. It's akin to calling one of those coin collectors (where you put the coin in the slot and it circles a few dozen times, getting faster as it's pulled down the funnel shape, never learnt the name for them) charities use a black hole (I've actually heard it done).

It reproduces the effect, but in no way does it reproduce the cause. An ideal electromagnetic black hole would likely be an extremely strong halbech sphere, either concentrated to the interior or exterior.
But given that the people who might end up using Google Wave the most—office workers—are also terribly conservative when it comes to the tools they use, it's not surprising that Google has started with the bloggers. The fact is, the vast majority of the internet has no interest in early adoption.

In any case, it seems clear that Google Wave is still in heavy development. More than any other Google app, Wave deserves and needs its 'preview' appelation. The early adopters are the ones who are going to provide feedback. And even if most people are wrong in comparing Wave to Twitter (I'll be honest, I have not seen that comparison made once, but I don't read Scoble either), it's true that the Wave interface is not the most graceful or immediately-obvious thing to ever roll out of the Google garage.
There is no 'jsHub' to go down. The entire thing is JavaScript inside the browser. There's no dependency on anything at jshub.org.

Microformats aren't asking for a page redesign. They are just class names. Our argument is that a clear specification is many times better than obscure JavaScript variables inside a Omniture tag, or parameters in a comScore Beacon, ...

Finally, the whole point of jsHub is that won't have to tag your site again. Adding a new product to a jsHub tagged web site means just changing the plugins in your jsHub set up.
I am going to teach you something. It is important: please pay attention.

Pull out one of your checks. Can you locate your name on it? Good. You'll see two groups of numbers on the bottom of it. The first group of numbers, typically, is your ABA routing number. That tells me where you bank. The second number is your bank account number at that bank.

These three pieces of information are all I need to debit your bank account. There are a variety of ways to do it -- the simplest method is printing a "demand draft", which is essentially a check drawn against your account but printed on my printer. In place of signature it says "Authorized By Account Holder". (Signed, written, record!)

Every person who has ever held a check -- ANY CHECK -- from you in their hands, regardless of what is written on it, can debit your account at will. Every waiter, every grocery store clerk, every person involved in the processing chain.

Many people think checks are magically more secure than credit cards. Those people are not well acquainted with payment processing.
MEDICAL TRANSCRIPTION OUTSOURCING BENEFITS HAWAII
good list. I'll add

5 - There are strong criminal laws for abuse of checks. If someone misuses my Visa info, I have to go through Visa for complaints and maybe could get some response from law enforcement. With someone writing or modifying a bad check, I can go straight to my local law enforcement and they know how to take action.
Backwards compatible with C with object-orientation. When you include the name of another language in your own name, I assume you're either a subset or a superset of that language.

I have no real suggestions, but it's worth noting that some popular languages have names with no relationship to the language (Java, Python, Ruby). I think perhaps the most important criteria are that it's a single syllable, easy to say, easy to type and doesn't have unfortunate associations.
I think his definition of debt is the same as "not perfect".

There's a lot of evidence from successful people that good enough is good enough.
Del.icio.us was already an exit for them. (Acquired by Yahoo).
Cross-browser testing can be one of the biggest time/money sinks during the QA phase of a web-app release. $326 may not make sense for a small company, but medium to large companies will spend much more than that on manual cross browser testing. A 4 person QA team, assuming average costs (salary, benefits, taxes, office space, hardware, etc...) of $100/hour (which I think is low) burns through $3,200/day. $326 is a drop in the bucket.
Incidentally, this is why Donald Knuth stopped sending people his famous checks for $2.56
Never underestimate the power of cultural inertia. I think this is one of the big reasons checks are still widely used in the US. There is considerable inertia in the legal system, for example.

This is also the reason why there is an iPhone app that can submit checks using a photograph of the check. Many banks process checks by using their digital images, because it's cheaper. To save money, they spent the money on lawyers to make this kosher legally. The iPhone app just plugs into this process.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/local/USAA_Federal_Savi...
In my opinion, the first two reasons are valid. But the author forgots the main reason: There simply is not compelling reason for the majority of people to switch to a Linux desktop.

Nearly all the good Open Source desktop apps run under Windows as well. But there are quite a lot of good Windows and Mac apps that won't run under Linux. There's no good replacement and Wine is too complicated to be a feasible solution.

Commercial desktop ISVs don't support Linux for 3 simple reasons: (1) There's no standard decentral installer. This is the _most important tool_ for desktop ISVs in their sales funnel and Linux has none (or rather: too many half-finished ones). (2) It's not a single coherent platform but several different ones. And it's not going to change without a decentral installer. (3) It's easier and more profitable to develop web and mobile applications today.

There's nothing the Linux community can do about (3). But (1) could be solved and in the long run, also (2). If these two problems for commercial ISVs could be solved, the supply of desktop applications could increase.

Then, desktop distribution could also make money by reselling these applications. Then, it would also be rationale to advertise.

But that's not going to happen, for one cannot rationally discuss the need of a decentral installer with many Linux users (or Linux distributions).
OSS Multitouch with Nokia's Starlight & Scripty2
http://www.halhigdon.com/15Ktraining/Stretch.htm
http://www.indoorclimbing.com/stretching.html

stretch beforehand to prevent injury and after to remove lactic acid and soreness. it's been stressed to me on several occasions that stretching post-exercise is critical, and at our gym we do 10min of yoga after a 1-1.5hr cardio session. i'm still getting used to some of the exercises and my calves need constant stretching or they get tight and painful.
In the wild, you're more likely to find Python that looks like:

longvariable, x = 1, 2

However this won't work:

longvariable, x = 1, foo(longvariable)

So I like to keep things uniform regardless of the rvalue. Also violating the style guide, I like

longvariable = "hello" # some description of longvariable
x = 1 # some descrption of x
It crashed on me (or rather, became totally unresponsive) when I deleted the whole buffer with a "dG" command.

running iceweasel 3.0.6
The Next Big Thing in CAPTCHAs
I think you're getting out of scope. This isn't a 'life' theory, it is a 'business/management' theory. In terms of business/management, those scientists/engineers are losers. They will never rise to the top, and are destined to work for people less skilled them themselves.

Note that there isn't anything -wrong- with that. As you say, there may be reasons they do that, whether it is derived pleasure, or something else, but because they aren't actively gaming the 'ladder', they aren't going to move up it, and thus will always be losers.

I think this article works better, if you don't call them losers, and instead call them exploited, because there is such a strongly negative connotation associated with the term loser that it is hard to get past. The author is really saying that bottom layer is exploited (not compensated sufficiently).
Scala Case Statements as Partial Functions
I see. It still doesn't fit the scenario of SSDs as there isn't a single retailer.
You are correct on the technical side. On the legal side, there is clear support to protect fraudulent use of a written check. If you go to your local police station and try to file a criminal report on someone abusing your Visa or PayPal account, your most likely going to get puzzled looks as to what to do.

The laws are so strong that they have been co-opted in a seedy way to support the "payday check" industry. You write a post-dated check and if the money is not in the account by that date and the check bounces, the payday company uses your local sheriff's office to arrest you. This is a terrible abuse of public services but shows how strong the laws are.
Checks? How quaintly backwards those US of A are in some things...

Checks have been phased out in most of the rest of the world at least 20 years ago.
We don't. I'm 31 and I can't remember ever using a check. Heck, I hardly keep cash around. Why should I? Checks are for electronically impaired people. Need to pay? Use a credit-card. Need to transfer money? Use internet banking. Which, by the way, these days is accessible on your cellphone.

No fees (unless you are willingly using a the worst bank around) and a million times more secure than both checks and cash.
Tool of the Day: Annotate the Web With Layers
Gentoo: "We're Not Dead"
I know that prof. Appel is a really smart guy from reading his books on optimizing compilers - so I'm going to risk looking like an idiot here, especially because I don't have time to carefully read the paper.. but maybe someone can help me out here.

so he says that a buyer cannot determine that a CDO has been maliciously packed with bad assets because this is equivalent to finding the densest subgraph. Is there a reason why an approximate solution to the dense subgraph
problem could not allow one to conclude that a CDO was more likely to have been stuffed with garbage?

clearly if the problem is truly like encryption as Appel says then an approximate solution is worthless (an approximate encryption key would still give you garbage)
Hey, you're the designer and implementer. You need to explore what idiomatic OOC codes looks like. If you pick up enough users, they'll evolve it for you, but you need to start it.

If you're interested in abstractions for concurrency and parallelism, I suggest you look at both Cilk and Apple's block extension for C (used in conjunction with Grand Central Dispatch). There are many others, of course, but those perhaps are the easiest fit into your language.