skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a very common misconception, but we're all so embarrassed about thinking that way that we don't admit it.

I also had similar misconceptions about VC funding. I used to think VCs would just appear at my doorstep checkbook in hand, ready to invest in my great idea. Still waiting on that one as well...
I must be turning into a cranky oldpants programmer.

As I see it, this eliminates a large block of logic, but it doesn't actually make the program less complex.

That is, the program is still making the same decisions, and you still have the same amount of fragmented business logic handling all of your special cases; it's just no longer dropping into those special cases by way of a monolithic if/else statement.

On the other hand, this is potentially adding a dangerous bug in the program; if your dispatch table gets corrupted for some reason, or an OBO gets introduced (that never happens!), you could end up trying to jump to a random pointer address.

EDIT: Higher level languages, like Javascript, will handle it somewhat more gracefully of course. But, it would still cause an error of some kind.
Google can make known, trusted websites such as About.com, Wikipedia, Quirksmode, rank highly.

I thought this is what PageRank was supposed to determine algorithmically. I don't trust two out of three of your listed trusted websites, so this would devalue their service to me. Then again, they probably don't care much what I think, since I switched search engines months ago.
Your argument would get ensnared by that of the original post. If you take the description of Java's passing semantics, and s/object/thunk/ and s/primitive/unboxed value/, you get a perfect description of Haskell's passing semantics.
There is a precise term for that and you said it - pass-by-value. Recall that somewhere each language turns into assembly and that in order to pass a value to a subroutine you must either place values into registers or push the data of the object you are passing onto the stack. Passing by value is desirable if you want to make sure that your local value is not modified. This gives the called function the freedom to modify it without worrying about side effects and without worrying about explicitly calling a copy constructor. Pass-by-reference comes from C++'s pass by reference, which is really just some sugar around passing a pointer by value and referencing it with the * operator in the function body (hence reference passing).

I disagree that there is a right or wrong to this - C++ was made to be a generic programming language and thus gives many options to the programmer. If by "do it right" you meant "hide all options except the one most commonly used" okay. Otherwise I strongly disagree with that sentence especially because I use different kinds of "pass-by" whenever I program in C++ and will be using rvalue reference from the C++0x. Different languages suit different needs.
They purposely restricted that section to "personal information". If they don't tie your web history to your persona, they are free to sell it or do whatever else they want with it.
It sounds like you are someone who is not naturally angry who had a lot of cause for anger at one point in your life. I would be very careful in extrapolating from that experience to what will work for people who may have a natural tendency towards being generally angry.
One set of English-language terms are being used by two communities.

1) Those of us who are language users care about use of the language from the perspective of the question, "If this thing gets passed in and I change it, does that change flow back to the calling method." Our perspective of pass-by-reference vs pass by value may originate from experiences learning C. We're probably wrong.

2) This guy is from the community of compiler people. He cares about implementation, and is probably correct.

We need a spoken language abstraction that allows people to discuss the things they care about, and then be able to distinguish between them. The people in the position to cry 'get off my porch' are in the best position to point the rest of us is the right direction.
Crisis in Cosmology
I've practically no experience in all this. I dream of owning a startup, growing it and have it acquired by a bigger company and yeah buying expensive cars after that.

So here's some amateur advice :

1. If you are the one approaching then obviously chances of you getting a good deal would be less
2. If you do decide to approach, you should be able to make the company's decision making team salivate at the prospects of buying you out
3. In case the other company comes out with its own version, it can be a good thing for you because if the company fails again then they would definitely think of acquiring you.

P.S. What if D&D officials read this query of yours? :P
This is a common point of confusion. There are two distinct orthogonal language properties at play here:

1) Variables being references(pointers) to objects.

2) Function arguments being passed by reference or by value.

In Python, all variables are pointers to heap allocated objects, and these pointers are simply passed by value when calling functions.

In C++, it is much easier to understand this distinction as it provides full control to the programmer on both aspects.
Forgive my ignorance but how is this different from a switch statement? Besides the slightly different syntax, of course. Many modern languages interpret switch statements as lookup tables. And that in compiled languages the lookup table is generated at compile time and this approach generates the lookup table at runtime, possibly wasting expensive CPU cycles.

Basically we're dealing here with a special set of condition-action pairs. The property that makes them special is that the conditions are mutually exclusive, that is, the order of condition checks is not important. Of course, most of the time, non-exclusive conditions can be restructured to exclusive conditions as long as the conditions checks themselves don't have side effects (that it, they don't modify the state). This is a solved problem in software construction. For binary conditions, you use if statements (or the equivalent in Your Favourite Language), for simple multiple conditions, you use a switch statement and for complex state-condition check you create a class/closure that takes the state and determines if the condition evaluates to true and then another function executes the action and then you loop through the condition checkers. We're talking about concepts that have been around for almost half a century. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, read some books and learn how developers solved these basic software construction problems in the past.

The problem is, many developers are too smart for their own good. They come up with new "design patterns" while ignoring the mountains of experience and knowledge past programmers have built up. More often than not these "groundshaking new ideas" lead to huge pains one way or other later down the codebase lifecycle. This is why C++ is so hard; you can come up with many "innovative" ways to do stuff only to discover a year later that your "innovation" made your codebase completely unmaintainable. Don't get me wrong, innovation is really cool and I support it but it doesn't hurt to consult the existing knowledge (either by research or asking more experienced developers) before going down your path.
do you live in California / Arizona / West ? I noticed many angry people there. Almost always there are a few always angry developers/admins/whatever. Somehow never happens in the North-East...
Much of the narrative of this article seems to be predicated on the implicit suggestion that introverts are about substance, deep thoughts, abstraction, careful consideration, aforethought, judiciousness and balance, and extroverts mostly about superficial banter and infantile thumb-sucking that passes for discussion or decisionmaking.

To say the very least that could possibly be said, I think there is zero of the envisaged correlation here.
Suggestion: Improve specific searches. Broad searches work very well (try "partial evaluation") but various specific searches (try "read file .net" and compare with google; their output isn't stunning but a lot better) don't.
> the genes typically do not replicate across studies. Even when they do replicate, they never explain more than a tiny fraction of any interesting trait.

Epigenetics. Diet and lifestyle have large effects on how a genome is expressed. And even on how the genome is expressed in future generations.

I thought this was well understood? Why no mention of it in the article?
Some Rules & Restrictions May Apply: Inquiry into contracts & the Next Big Thing
So there are alleles that give one better facility at speaking tonal languages

Could you kindly provide references to a scientific study making that claim? I ask as a speaker of Chinese who learned Chinese as a second language.
No, I'm naturally a hot head. One reason I don't anger easily these days is because I have resolved a lot of my problems and I rarely run into anything as extreme as what my past held. So most stuff is "small potatoes" in my eyes. I'm a "bounce off the walls" type but I surround myself by people who aren't like that so it doesn't get fed. My youngest son is also something of a hot head, though less expressive of it in part because he is an introvert. We have found that when we are mad, the best thing to do is physically separate us. Doing so reduces tension by 50%. We feed on each others anger.
frankly at this point, it would be impossible for them not to know who we are.

That might be the view from your end of the equation, where you wake up every day and check your analytics stats. However, if you are ramen profitable, your current sales are probably roughly equivalent to the healthcare costs of the night shift on the janitorial staff at one of their offices. They're a large, publicly traded company -- they might not even know who you were if you worked for them. (Far stranger things have happened.) Its not like my bosses have ever come to me in the morning and said "Patrick! There might very well be some young buck working in his kitchen on the next big thing in examination management systems! Drop what you're doing and discover his identity so we can prepare to squash him like a bug!"

We could deliver exactly what they're looking for without all the risk of developing it from scratch.

I don't think you're thinking like a big company here. You see existing code and think "Yay, working features!" They see integration headaches. You're not tied into their accounting system -- that is going to take six figures to fix. (You think you can do it cheaper? Wait until you start working in a large organization that does everything in teams of highly paid people whose salaries and healthcare benefits start running the second the first of three planning meetings begins.) You aren't on brand yet, which is going to require a redo of all your HTML -- including a turf war between marketing, their product-side artists, and their web group. Oh, and you. You're a bit of a problem, too -- they can't absorb your code without you, but you upset the apple cart among multiple groups within their organization. Who do you report to? Who can you boss around?

When you start thinking in these dimensions, you can see why they might say "We'll do it in house, own it all, and not have to worry about any complications."
Would Google have paid low eight figures in a talent acquisition if they weren't?

In particular, they probably are the best people to join the Wave team because not only have they been doing real-time, they've been doing a real-time app that is very similar to wave, since they're both essentially documents (though wave is a little more like a series of sometimes-nested documents, but it's all the basically the same).
I conjuncture being angry is directly proportional to how smart you are
Gleemax was a steaming pile, but they really did a good job turning around after that. Their new DDI toolset is actually quite good.

I must admit that I've been very surprised at how well they've executed over the past year. Like you say, in the past they've been pretty poor.
Do you only have one potential buyer? Are you tied to one role-playing system? If so, that would be a problem. Support more role-playing systems and campaign types.

If you have more than one potential buyer, and you want to get bought, then start spreading rumors that someone is planning to acquire you. Put some time pressure on your potential acquirers. Once the rumors have percolated, start claiming it (without naming names, because some people are malevolent and will call to confirm). Preselection: buyers (like women) want you only when others do. If you're not wanted by the others, lie and say that you are. It is not unethical to do this. If someone is going to make a judgment of you based on anothers' opinion, you have every right to take advantage of that weakness through any means possible.

If that fails, just follow the competing product and make sure to be a bit better-- a few months ahead of the curve. They are following your feature set. Follow theirs. Buy a subscription and see what they're doing right. (Don't steal their ideas, but learn from them.) You still have a conceptual head start; you've been doing this for 18 months, and the fact that you guys are profitable at all (in gaming, in a recession) is a signal that you're very smart. You're also in a desirable industry and you'll be able to get smart college kids to work for you on the cheap (plus equity).

Once you can start paying high salaries, make sure that key players-- developers and story-writers-- are treated like kings (remember: you're not a big business, and your competitors are, and as a business gets larger the status of key creators declines) with 20% higher salaries and 500% more artistic/creative freedom than they would have at the big company. Become the boutique out of which all the best ideas come. You'll still have competitors chasing you, a few months behind you, but if you can develop the status of being where all the best ideas are developed, the best people will want to work for you. The "very competent" team that your competitors have? Those guys will be talking to you. Once you're established and have 10x as much artistic freedom as VP of Campaign Development at BigGameCorp, you might not want to be acquired.

By the way, the fact that D&D's publisher is trying to build a competitor is a good sign, not a bad one. That means you're working on something worth doing, which puts you ahead of all the pie-in-the-sky gaming startups. It's a signal, and remember that, although they're a competitor, you can learn from them and what they're doing.

Good luck. Why don't you send me an email? I have some ideas I want to discuss with you. pwnstigator at gmail dot com
$40? That's... way, way, WAY out of the range most people would pay to watch a movie as individuals. You would have to assume at least five people watching a movie in front of the same TV before you get any relative benefit whatsoever from the purchase.
If you disrupt an existing business significantly then they can't help but be interested in you and then ideally they decide:
- to reduce the number of players in the market (by acquiring you)
- that it's cheaper and quicker to market by acquiring you rather than develop inhouse
Evolutionary response of black snakes to cane toads
It's an interesting piece of software. I look at massive amounts of data all day and I'm constantly trying to glean out features of the dataset. Having a visual tool that can instantly represent the dataset in various forms would be indispensable. Right now I have to do a lot of custom visualization work in Matlab, which is great on a case by case basis. I would deeply consider something like Pivot if it can generalize whatever I'm throwing at it. But my two main concerns:

1) This being a MS technology, is it going to have the unnecessary overhead like other MS products (Excel, Vista, etc)

2) Are these "collections" free? Can we import our own? It seems like if the data was already pre-processed, then that wouldn't be the case.
I guess I should amend and say "they" who know about me are the web developers and the people in the tech team. Perhaps they have no desire to buy someone else's stuff and would rather build from scratch. That's what I'd do. So, you're right, the people with the purse-strings probably don't know who I am. Any advice on how to change that?

And I can definitely see the point about integration headaches. Technology acquisitions seem like they'd be a nightmare to me.
IMO as code gets modified by other developers, the table is easier to keep 'safe' since it is clearer that is what it's for, the sprintf and all the other methods don't tend to be in one place - as methods get added, the reflection issue is oft overlooked.
When I was interviewing java devs of all levels few (less than 10%, I'd say) could flat out say "it's pass by value for everything, for non-primitives you're passing references by value" but a lot more (roughly half) could trace the following code correctly.

Object x = null;
makeString (x);
System.out.println (x);

void makeString (Object y)
{
y = "This is a string";
}

Maybe it's just a disconnect between theory and practice?
It's not just Silverlight - I installed that, then tried to access the demo URLs and was told I needed to install Pivot as well. Which isn't available for the Mac.

http://content.getpivot.com/Collections/dogbreeds/dogbreeds....
Business is about making contacts with people in the industry you are in.

I would call the MD of the mega-corp and ask to have a meeting about potential business overlap and how you could work together. All very informal, no money talk or specifics. It's just to see if you could work with these people.

You've already got a lot in common (business wise) with them so you'll find it a lot easier to talk to them then you imagine. If you arrange to meet for lunch it will give them a clue that it's a more informal chat then three hours around a board room table.

Worst case you leave the office with a contact in the industry, best case it will lead to your fancy car.

Good luck.
while this form of education is outstanding for producing people that can do very well at coursework and following directions (as well as become excellent engineers/doctors/research assistants/accountants), it is very poor at producing people who can think for themselves and be creative thinkers. It certainly does not develop critical thinking.

If you are living in China, you are living under a political system in which the current regime dare not encourage critical thinking. As Taiwan democratized, the scope of common people to express critical thinking (about their government and about all other issues of public concern) increased greatly. In other words, the educational system in China is holding back critical thinking only insofar as it needs to be in line with the one-party political system. Sometimes dictatorships have mostly good education in all respects that don't threaten the dictatorship. See

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977549

for my submission of a long, interesting article by a Russian author who now lives outside Russia on mathematics education in Russia and the United States, and how each relates to the governance of each country.
I don't think you should be too worried about it. You've got a pretty loyal (and decently sized) user base. Plus all your existing users have their content tied to your site, so don't go writing any data export features that would even allow them to jump ship.

Its probably a hard pill to swallow, but you said it yourself: they know who you are, they've never approached you, and they are writing their own. Conclusion: for whatever asinine reasons, they've determined consciously that buying OP isn't in their best interests. You courting them isn't going to change that scenario.
This looks like a functional (The paradigm, not the adjective) version of the Visitor pattern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitor_pattern
2.5) That their intentions are "now or soon you must stop using this service which you like, and instead you can use our unfinished, very different service or you can fuck off".

We call it 'evil' (to some degree) when a big supermarket starts up on the edge of town, shuts down the small independent shops and offers you the choice of supermarket-butcher and supermarket-baker or nothing, don't we?

We call it 'evil' (to some degree) when governments or industry forcibly buy up houses and turf people out to build a railway or reservoir, and offer people the choice of whatever-the-government-wants-to-pay or nothing, yes?

Yes Google have turned it around very quickly, but in the context of the parent post "we like EtherPad let's use our massive amounts of cash to hire their developers and incidentally ruin their product but who cares" is not on the same level of goodness as "we like EtherPad let's use our massive amounts of cash to train our developers and make our product so good that people move over by choice".
Technical Analysis Basics: Trends and Trading Ranges
Doing something big vs enriching yourself
Or Germany, for that matter. No joke.
find how about $19.99? And on top of the movie you get all that extra stuff they add to DVDs?
I'd be very interested in knowing that this was the case. But I need more that second hand anecdote without a single specific reference.
The second version is slower too. Here's what I use for e.g. a state machine, which follows "don't repeat yourself" a little better than the first example:

# {state_name: state_action}
states = {}

state = ['start']

def reg(func):
states[func.__name__] = func
return func

# define and simultaneously register the states
@reg
def start():
state[0] = 'second'

@reg
def second():
state[0] = 'last'

@reg
def last():
state[0] = None

# run the state machine
while state[0]:
print state[0]
states[state[0]]()
[Sorry, could not answer earlier.]

1. Pollution is listed as one of the sources of the (alleged) artificial global warming, but not the only one.

2. Pollution and global warming may be related but they are different issues. For example, even if it turns out that global warming is not happening or is not a problem, pollution will remain a big deal and will have to be taken care of.

3. They are sometimes used interchangeably but this is a logical error (if not worse) and should be avoided.
I counter conjecture that if you plot smartness vs anger you'll get a Laffer curve shaped graph. If you're really dumb you won't realize that there is something to be angry about and if you're really smart you'll find trivial way to work around the problem without getting annoyed. The real problem is somewhere between those points where you are smart enough to realize every that is wrong, but just not smart enough to find the right thing to do about it.
Erlangs pattern matching is a superior form of this concept. Clojures multimethods also implement a similar style to erlangs pattern matching dispatch. Both of those avoid some of the objections described in other comments here. The code is still in core and is easier to read than a dispatch table.
I have no idea. My point though is:

1. "Real-time" is nothing new
2. There are people who have been working in 'real time' web apps for years