skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It didn't matter. The Crunchpad would have basically been a neat tech-toy for the people who had the disposable income to toss at it.

The world is littered with "almosts". You could just as easily argue that the ultimate failure of this indicates that bloggers should stick to blogging and not try to build companies and products.

I'm not saying I wasn't intrigued by it, and probably would have bought one if it ever shipped, but the TC guys shouldn't strain their arms patting themselves on the back for not shipping a product.
Advanced Haskell Data Structures: Red-Black Trees
My girlfriend is bizarrely obsessed with drip coffee and lives at 700 Broadway East (i.e. literally above Roy St. Coffee). For some reason, she doesn't like espresso. I agree Vivace is better.
I understand where you're at and I respect it - bad things happened in Dubai and should be addressed. When I came in and commented, there were lots of sentiment against Dubai. Heck, there's "Fuck Dubai" comment at +12 right now. So I knew pretty well that if I offered a perspective that the article isn't representative of everything happening there, there's a good chance it wouldn't be well-received. The reception's actually been a little more positive than I imagined it would be.

So why do I write it? Well, after traveling a lot of the world, I don't think it's so simple and black and white. Some horrific stuff happened in Dubai? Yes. Mark it down. Don't forget it. Work to change it. But does that make the place completely morally bankrupt? I don't believe so. A lot of lives have been saved and aided greatly there. This is of course not simple, black and white, with us or against us, good or evil type thinking. Bad stuff happened there. Good stuff happened there. The article didn't mention any good stuff and made it seem like it was all really bad stuff. So I offered my own experiences.

But is there bad stuff there? Oh yeah. And let's not forget that. Someone gets promised a 500 euro salary, then gets paid only 90 euros? Wow, that's criminal and sickening. The people that did that should have very bad things happen to them. But yet, I'll still write in that I know firsthand people who had their lives changed their, including unskilled laborers that made a hell of a lot of money. I've done a bit of blue collar manual labor in my life. It's not enjoyable, it's hard, but it pays very well for unskilled labor. There was some of that happening in Dubai, and it offered a lot of opportunities that helped a lot of people.

I knew a girl and her sister who were Sri Lanka, whose parents came to Dubai as basically house servants. I'm not sure what the father did - maybe landscaping? - the mother was a maid. But their daughters were able to go to decent schools and were on their way out of poverty. There's stories like that too. The article paints Dubai as a hell hole filled with callous people, blinded to human suffering by their own greed. Yes there were bad things there, that ought to be changed. But the world is not simple, black and white, good and evil, with us or against us. A lot of good happened there too.

You seem like a nice and considerate person, and I think you and I are fundamentally on the same page. I came in to voice an opinion that seemed like it would be unpopular, because it seemed worth it for people to think about. Cheers and thanks for having a conversation with me.
Senator seeks to use gambling laws to rein in Wall Street
Smart folks with a good product.
The newest Wordpress brute force attack
'print' is 5 characters long, 印 is 1 character long. Though in most fonts, CJK characters are twice as wide as Latin, so better make that 2 chars long. 5 chars vs 2 chars over an entire program adds up. In non-indentation languages, that can mean 3 lines can be put onto 1 line. Shorter programs are more readable, have less errors.
I've read Larry Wall on the natural evolution of human and computer languages but I don't think anyone can demonstrate that Perl is the product of a clear, informed linguistic process that makes it superior to, say, Ruby or Python.

And further, there's a reason that legal contracts normally avoid limericks (feel free to insert the obligatory "counter-example").
Same as

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=969061

isn't it?
For the sake of everyone reading along from other parts of the country, it bears mentioning that the street containing the first non-Starbucks Starbucks ('Cryptobucks') is jam-packed with coffee shops: http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

I'm a little perplexed by the report that the 15th Ave Coffee and Tea is doing so poorly since their store is constantly packed with people. The only thing I can imagine is that your typical Starbucks does the lion's share of its business on the strength of 'to go' orders, which the new Cryptobucks locations are expressly designed to minimize.

The coffee at the new places is definitely better than your average Starbucks, in any case. It's also better than a fair number of independent coffee shops in the same vicinity.
You think Apple would just rip the lid, keyboard, and trackpad off an Air, throw a touchscreen on it, and call it a tablet?
For a couple of reasons this code doesn't look like a very reliable one...

Almost identical cases don't reuse code (not even a define). There are also sections like "`if (usual[ch >> 5] & (1 << (ch & 0x1f))) break;`" without any comments. The code hardcodes the http methods for some reason so that the detection code spans ~130 lines (454..580). Looks like it will accept "HXXX/1.1" if strict checking is off. This double check is... interesting:

if (!parser->FOR##_mark) return 0; \
assert(parser->FOR##_mark); \

Sure - speed++, but at what cost? Otherwise... cool code - I like the MARK / CALLBACK macros.
Given the choice between a Po' Boy with extra Chuckle and a Big Mac, I'd take the Big Mac any day of the week.
Enjoy Friends Seasons 1-10
That's pretty close to doable today:

Supermicro 1U 230 barebones chassis is $200 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101...

$50 for ram and <$100 on storage for a HDD or $200 for a small SSD. Bulk prices would take that down by probably 10-20% today so you could probably do this for $300 today. I believe Dell is selling systems like this as private integrations just not retail, I'd imagine their costs are substantially lower.

Bump the CPU to a 330 or whatever, bump the ram sure but you're still talking $300 when a normal 1U HP server is <$1k list and is vastly more bang for buck. The cooling and power density arguments aren't going to be very persuasive (IMO) unless the price is there as well, hence my hope for very low per-unit costs, even if there are chassis/bladecenter components as part of the package.
Well, this one has text ad info in to the url:

utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch)&utm_content=My+Yahoo
My theory of the fall of Starbucks is that this is just one instance of a trend I refer to as "The Conspicuous Consumption of Knowledge". In this case, knowledge of the locale is a point of pride, customers of independent coffee shops know more about the places they frequent, and they know it better than anyone else, and can impress their friends by introducing the wonderful little place that they have found. But you see the same trend manifesting in other ways as well; whether it's knowing the right shoes, to renewably sourced power; it's what the customers know, or think they know, that makes or breaks the experience. And much of the time, they want to know these details so that they can display their knowledge in social situations.
Watch New England Patriots vs. New Orleans Saints Live Online in High Definition
I'm the author of that library and tutorial. The session state is definitely on the server side.

Jim Duey
But if you encrypt everything by default, nobody is going to turn that off either.
Call for new SIAI Visiting Fellows
Building and Installing a Hadoop/MapReduce Cluster from Commodity Components
The parent hopefully reflects the workings of large, established scientific organizations.

I did only a bit of work for a very small shop and where I worked coding standards were completely non-existent.

I think that using Matlab is a good way destroy the ability of anyone else to review one's work because of Matlab's nature as a closed, ad-hoc environment.

Some scientists could learn a lot from software best practices.
The dark web (guardian.co.uk)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962504

Exploring a ‘Deep Web’ That Google Can't Grasp (nytimes.com)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491277
This interview is from a couple years ago, but the article gives no indication of that aside from this note at the very bottom in italics:

This article was originally published on the User Interface Resource Center (UIRC). For more info, please see http://uxmag.com/uirc

Just FYI...
Http://www.funny.com/
I wrote a simple genetic algorithm in C, took about 30 minutes, but I suspect a break-it-down approach starting at small blocks and working up might work better.

It did 13x13 really fast but I have a hunch it might not work very well for 17x17...

( Link: http://pastebin.com/m51149dd9 )
Anyone in any hospital could have told them that. At my hospital, no (few?) people find our computer systems efficient for patient care. This study is essentially a formalization of that observation.

For the past 5 years, I've been tempted to start an open-source, highly-modular system for hospitals to use for patient care, administration, and billing. Such a project wouldn't make anyone rich, but would certainly make you famous.
Vinod Khosla: Smart Grids Are Overhyped
Prostate Cancer Drug Treatment A Breakthrough In Medical History
Combinatorics isn't, but... coloring grids of squares?

Not that I really have anything against abstract mathematics. It's still very cool, but it's just not going to get me very excited - or at least this exact branch of it, I guess.
Not entirely sure what you're saying, but i touched python only once in my life and didn't like it a lot. :) (Still completed the task though.)
Living near the University of Maryland and NIST and etc, there really are a bunch of opportunities to work with professors and researchers in high school - it's really quite great. I hope (slash think, but knock on wood) that I'm going to be able to work with either another math professor or a theoretical physicist over the summer. :)
Love the comparison to an Atlas V!
Dubai’s Improbable Tale (NYT photo essay)
Frank Zappa explains the decline of the music business
Clever use of ## in preprocessor directives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_preprocessor
I, for one, really appreciate your use of the phrase "ate it up" just after talking about him being a bite expert... :P
First, the notion that anyone could "peer-review" software for correctness is obviously absurd. See the post above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968727

It's hard to believe that the parent has high rating. Seriously, as science uses more and more software and computers, science is going to have to move closer to standards of reliability of the software industry as well as scientific standards of reliability. Is that not obvious?

Uh... also... the parent also distorts the linked article, which readily admits peer-review isn't a panacea ("Worse, the concept of 'peer review' is increasingly being treated in the popular discourse as synonymous with 'the findings were reproduced and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.'"). Did parent even read the original article???
Introducing the Illuminato X Machina a modular motherboard
How to Copy from a Secured PDF File?
How to copy from secured PDF files? Here is the solution.
IPhone Web Apps: Scrolls Like Molasses
This is a list of old game releases
Ruby views without a templating language: HTML-to-HTML using CSS Selectors
Hi Kleine2,

Please mail me at pk@roorky.com. We can discuss more on the same idea. :)
sweet as bro :p

http://www.rocketlab.co.nz/

According to their twitter http://twitter.com/rocketlabnz/ the 1st stage booster has been recovered.
Pricing Banner Advertisements in an Online Social Network
Here are Your ADC 2 Winners
Earlier in the year I posted a hardware story on a homemade Arduino laptop from Liquidware Antipasto with an OLED screen and a keyboard ~ http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2008/09/thanks-y-combinator.... Well this time it's modular motherboards. You can also read a Wired article on the topic ~ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/modular-motherboard/
Google Names Winners Of Second Android Developer Challenge
Fresh 5 Minutes Makeup
I'm unfamiliar with the Freshbooks API. Could a web app use Freshbooks to bill users without the user ever leaving the web app (i.e., totally behind the scenes)?
I don't follow. If you mean url to talk to a sports scientist you will probably need to just call into your local sports institute/academy and have a chat.
If Rubinius doesn't blow all the others out of the water I'll be surprised. Ruby in Ruby feels right.
Midtown Atlanta, as in where Georgia Tech is. Already had one HN person think I was in Midtown New York
Google Letting Gears Go – Declares HTML5 As The Future
Steve Jobs on Paul Rand and the NeXT logo [video]
I was expecting to deliver such a fine fine spanking to the dogs too. Oh well. Piss on them.
Georgia Tech doesn't really have a MIS focus for an undergrad degree. They have a MBA-esque degree which is a 60 hours masters which is however.
Howard Hughes retired the Spruce Goose after the test flight.
As you may guess, I'm unhappy about it. In astronomy, almost everyone uses IDL, which is a proprietary, closed-source language. (It also sucks, but that's beside the point.) I think this is bad, because it locks practically the entire research field into a closed platform. (Though GDL is working to be a replacement. I don't know how conformant it is, though.)

Still, I think this is less of a problem than the high-level scientific code. Most of the low-level functionality is pretty simple and (hopefully) much better tested than most scientific codes.
awesome post.
I really agree and almost totally believe that constructive failure is a very important factor for both personal and professional growth. In fact, that is one of the reasons I am willing to have a go and work without any salary or income of any sorts, and try to build a good (great? only time will tell)product. I think we all should get out of our comfort zones and then try doing something which almost ascertains our failure.....but also has some good chances of success......
For that matter....even if you succeed....at such a risky venture.....you would learn so much from that success if you know for certain that chances of failure are really high...and of course the confidence boost would be awesome too...
I was bored so I looked up the guy I was talking about:
http://reason.com/archives/2009/05/15/a-forensics-charlatan-...

edit: This may have a reference to the sandwich being thrown away (based on the google search summary) but it's in PDF and I don't feel like parsing through it to make sure. I'll just leave that as an exercise to the reader.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1086763
MRI is Ruby 1.8.x, and YARV (or KRI) is Ruby 1.9.x. "MRI 1.9" is a misnomer.
Is this the future of the Pizza Box Server ?
Using Google's Closure Templates in Scala and Groovy
It doesn't work with standard permalinks that feature hyphens in the url, and none of his examples show links with hyphens. Most blogs out there (wordpress) are using hyphens in their permalinks.
"I can make it arbitrarily fast if I don't actually have to make it work": http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2009/09/29/i-can...
I believe I saw a documentary or special on Discovery (I think) about the building of the Burj Al Arab. They hired in a fancy designer to decorate the interior, and the Sheik or whoever was in charge, in all his vast knowledge, complained about the design being too bland and apparently forced her to redesign it.

I hate it when people who don't know what they are doing have a lot of power, and worse when they start telling people who do know what they're doing how to do it.
so says the guy with heavy investments in ethanol.
A different question would be "who can come up with the smallest c in 6 months", which probably wouldn't yield the true answer, but for a $1M prize it might come quite close (and could lead to some interesting theoretical advancements).
Where I'm from (Rural north east US) StarBucks did a horrible job adapting to local coffee tradition. They were trying to create a market for more exotic coffee drinks that simply aren't in demand here. The preferred choice for most people is donut or bagel + coffee and usually via drive through. StarBucks failed to educate customers here they offered regular ole' coffee at a reasonable price. Everyone assumed it was $5 drinks. (and they had to stop down the road at a competing chain to get their precious Boston Creme donut or Everything bagel) I believe we had about half a dozen StarBucks within a 50 mile radius at one point and there are maybe 2 left now.
I need to dig through my old computer and find my college lab assignments where we built a basic HTTP/1.1 server. For the request parser, we had to create a lex file for a grammar that include actions for all of the verbs, and also be robust to accept non-standard verbs, i.e, return a 400 code.

I doubt that my yacc'd program would be only 124 bytes in size, but it would be interesting to get that old code and compare the results.
The only reason the CrunchPad mattered was because it gave TechCrunch and CrunchGear something to write about.

There are already tablets available which have the feature set the CrunchPad would have, below the price point they were trying to hit (i.e. http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.31523 )...
Just a piece of trivia, the Viaweb folks didn't start their own store on it -- http://www.paulgraham.com/vwfaq.html (scroll to the last question).
For one Ruby that just works, use 1.8 for legacy apps and 1.9 for recent or new apps. Consider the alternatives only to augment or if they are needed for a particular requirement (e.g. JRuby for Java libs, MacRuby for Cocoa, etc.)
For the most part, they don't exist! Only the <=> operator in that list actually exists. The rest are combinations of perfectly sensible operators.

"Why does Haskell have (.) . (.)?" It doesn't. It's just a combination of legal characters that happens to also be a joke.

(And as wacky as <=> may appear, in the context of Perl, with its separate string vs. numeric comparison operators, it's not even that strange. It is a combination less than, equal, or greater than operator. "cmp" is the equivalent for strings.)
What I can't comprehend is how can any wealthy hard working person who truly worked their way up, from the first-world, can go there, enjoy it, and ignore-it-all.

In my opinion all those people that enjoy it and knowingly ignore are just as guilty. They contribute to the slavery and condone the policies.

UPDATE: after reading the entire article, I'd have to say this comment sums it up:
"All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world." She adds: "It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month."

If this is true, then I'd accuse these people for truly building what we see as Dubai.

And the point about globalization makes all of us in first-world countries just as guilty.
In my opinion, the computer scientist is focused more on the academic and completes his work in the form of a paper. On the other hand, the programmer actually builds a product that is intended to be used. They ignore this distinction at my school (UMass Boston). The general consensus seems to be that programming is a lowly task.

Perhaps your experiences are different, but at the end of the day there is a sharp conflict of interest between the computer scientist and the programmer. Both want to solve problems, but the computer scientist seems more interested in some math problem and the programmer is more interested in building cool shit.
Not sure why everyone thinks that Starbucks is taking this step from a position of weakness. As far as business is concerned, I think it's a good strategic move for them to explore this growth channel regardless of their brand's strength. Many other companies have a successful strategy involving both private label and branded products.

Amazon Shoes Category vs Endless.com (vs Zappos.com)

Essentials Baking Co. vs Trader Joe's bread (in Seattle)
The Crunchpad would have basically been a neat tech-toy for the people who had the disposable income to toss at it.

At the price point which they were planning to sell it, it would have been the same price as most netbooks. Since it caters to a similar audience ("casual" computer users), it is possible that if it had launched, it would have been popular.
This is what the RubySpec project is trying to address.
Does nobody learn about thermodynamics in school any more? It's not like an economic system is not susceptible to the same laws that govern any other physical system. If some people are living like kings then there must be others that are living like slaves.
College Job Network and Corporate Recruiting Solution
The mission of UGrowU is to be a one-stop solution for entry level recruiting, internal employee growth, and expertise while establishing a professional growth network, and job opportunities for students and early career professionals.
Elements of Composition
Suggestion of David Stanek:

http://www.traceback.org/2008/12/17/coding-lessons-can-be-learned-from-writing/
Real-world benchmarking of key/value stores
Regardless of the state of the current process, how could review become anything but better from increased openness?

Increased openness is definitely a direction scientific computing needs to move toward. The trick is conflating that with "peer review" which often, for all its merit, is strongly tied to red tape and frustration. It's impossible to peer review software not because it's impossible to verify techniques but because without some level of trust somewhere it becomes impossible to publish, to communicate.

There's definitely a startup in there. There are tons of opportunities to kill off scientific journals as they are.

The challenge is that you can't kill peer review at the same time. Peer review is still, at the end of the day, critical. It's not a holy sword of truth but instead more like rinsing your plates in the sink before you throw them in the washing machine.
I'm disappointed that the student who hardcoded the results was disqualified. You should get points for finding bugs in your professors' specification.
Sponty: Could it be the new Foursquare?
Given the difficulty, should he not be offering more?
The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White
Suggestion of Davin Stanek:

http://www.traceback.org/2008/12/17/coding-lessons-can-be-learned-from-writing/
Spammer Responsible For 1/3 of the World’s Spam Fined $16 Million by FTC
An artist-mathematician illuminates a world of infinite beauty
Google Dumps Gears for HTML5
I know the tablet PC is like the dream device of the future, but do people really think these things will be useful?

I can think of only couple niche uses:

- replacing a notebook for people who like to sketch ideas

- replacing a doctor's clipboard

- doubling as a wacom tablet (cintiq) for designers

A touchscreen PC with no keyboard is extremely limited in utility and ergonomically awkward at best. We're already carrying around android/iPhone devices and slim, lightweight laptops--what does a tablet PC add to that mix?

Unless a company completely reinvents the idea of the tablet PC, I think these devices are destined for failure. Maybe Apple has something up their sleeve?