skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading that, I wonder if trie-s (i.e. judy arrays) would beat hash tables in this exercise... (and I also think that hardcoding the results wasn't cheating)
This is "cool", but realistically a grid of these is slower and bulkier than a phone.
As much as I'd like this to be true, that's just a blog post linking to a fluff piece that takes a quote out of context.
standards of reliability of the software industry

Standards of reliability? Are you talking about the same software industry I'm familiar with?
> statically compiled

Ah, of course. I forgot what "compile" actually means!

I don't know, these words seem like a really thin gloss on their English equivalents.

A Japanese mathematician I know will mentally translate all the terms in a Japanese-language math paper to English. "It just sounds silly otherwise." I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese programmers do the same thing.
How Mobile operators + Facebook + OOH = Pull Marketing
avk, saw you demo this at the East Bay Ruby meetup, looked pretty slick...
Familiar food can be a comfort when you've been eating unfamiliar food for days. But yeah, if that's all you eat when traveling, you're doing it wrong.
Religion Survives Only Due To Atheists
IMHO, a single, simple, and flexible language has greatly helped the web become ubiquitous. I think that javascript has been a key ingredient to the web's growth and it might not have been the same if a more "powerful" or "standard" language/jvm was shoehorned in.
We are proudest because construction of the rocket effectively doubled our military power. Baaa.
This will obviously vary depending on how much the school focusing on CS or CE, but I'd stress mastering the basics of several programming languages in different domains (e.g. C, Java, PHP, Python, Lisp). There is a lot to be taken from each of these, even if you think they suck on their own.

I don't think you can effectively give a talk about "using and knowing the tools" without being too specific. If you're specific you fail. Instead, I'd focus on simply drilling it in people's mind that they should feel incredibly comfortable using their editor. It's the only thing they will always be able to control and it's the only place you'll be modifying your code. I'd encourage you have them pick an OS, and a standard library for each programming language and get super familiar with it.

I'm not sure interaction in the form of social coding would work in a single presentation. If this were a regular thing, sure. I think you can provide greater value doing something else.

One thing that I feel is often missing from my fellow students is confidence. They're all a bunch of babies and school is torture for them. I think an interesting talk (and judging by your experience, I'm sure you could make it awesome) would be to emphasize the confidence and empowerment that comes with mastering a programming language and doing some cool shit with it (a side project). There are too many people in my classes that are always sinking, who have not yet realized that they can actually do cool things because they're too busy sucking at class. They need to learn something really cool on their own, which will drive them to learn and finish school because they'll finally see dots starting to connect.
What makes me a good investor:
1. I am an Engineer, with a keen sense of problem solving
2. Worked on 4 new products from conception to final product
3. I know there is a need in India to encourage people to start taking the entrepreneurial path, I am ready to provide the platform and I understand the risk.
4. There is an inherent approach in India by investors to only go after IIM's and IIT (Best Colleges in India), which doesn't make sense in long run. I have seen and faced this and I am sure I can change it.
5. Finally, I am passionate about Ideas and making India better.
An Update for Google Chrome's Developer Tools
I think the best part is:

3:10 to 3:29

Steve:

I asked him if he would come up with a few options.
And Rand said:

«
No.
I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me.
And you don’t have to use the solution.

If you want different options, go and talk to other people.

But I’ll solve your problem the best I know how.
And you’ll use it or not, that’s up to you. You’re the client.

But you'll pay me.
»

Steve Jobs (NeXT Inc.) paid Paul Rand $100,000 in 1986 to create the NeXT brand identity.
I'm not sure resistive screens "royally" suck. They aren't as good as capacitive, but Nokia still uses them. Maybe only "suck"?

The pricing isn't clear. http://utouch.en.alibaba.com/productgrouplist-209605425/capa... has a range - I'd guess $250 might be about right.
Sass isn't for me
I'm just waiting for that inevitable 3 AM post in which Arrington reveals all.

It's always those very late night posts that are the most interesting.
Although I disagree with most of Nathan's points, there is a really good discussion going on.
Making of the Original Computer Graphics for Star Wars
Mark Rocket. When you are born with such a name, you pretty much have to come up with something like this. :)
Http://egotvonline.com/2009/11/30/hot-links-for-1130/
Tips for choosing your free chat usernames
When it comes to using free chat network, one of the aspects that gets our least attention is chat names that we use to identify ourselves in the chat networks and chatting websites. The only way the other members can identify you in the online chatting sites is through your username. People infer a lot of things from the names you choose for chatting online. Most of us do not give it a lot of thinking as we consider it as a very trivial issue. However, not many of us realize that our chat name has a lot of influence on our one chat experience.
> Sure - speed++, but at what cost?

it only has to be written once. i think it's an important enough problem to warrant such code - definitely could use a few more macros though
At my company we rolled our own too.
The hard part was tracking down all the brain-dead servers that seemingly worked fine with browsers, but were off spec.
Large Hadron Collider became the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth
Maintainence for your website by our professionals
I must be dyslexic. Whenever I see a post titled "Why X Matters," I can't help reading "X doesn't matter."
Unlikely, but possible.
Thank you, Lionhearted, for gently bringing some maturity and perspective to this thread. Dubai is an amazing and special place, not to be dismissed lightly and put into some prefab category.

A friend is working there now. He loves Dubai because it rewards hard work. He finds the pace faster than in the US. More buildings going up, more vision, more investment, and less red tape.

I hope that whatever economic problems Dubai has will soon be resolved. And I trust that over time Dubai will solve some of the problems which annoyed this author.
I'm merely pointing out that an honest complaint about the Perl syntax for creating nested arrays applies equally well to Python.
I just happen to be vacationing in New Zealand right now and must say I did perk up when I heard the nightly news anchor boastfully announce NZ's "entry into the space race." After watching the launch and the reaction from the gathered crowd, which I believe included a Labor MP, I couldn't stop laughing for the rest of the night.

The news from this corner of the world is fantastic. Virtually nothing goes wrong, there are no enemies and every trivial news item gets a front page on some or all news papers with prime time tv coverage (which this launching in fact did.) I couldn't tell if the anchor was serious about NZ entering the space race or there was some serious tongue in cheek going on. I suspect the later as everyone I've encountered here has been fantastically friendly, warm and generally happy to be in NZ and proud of it's stature in the world.
Ruby on Rails 2.3.5 Released
I'm not one to say that coloring grids of squares sounds fascinating to me, but nandemo's point still holds -- as far as mathematics goes, it's pretty concrete.
I've seen that line referenced a couple of times here recently. I'm pretty sure it derives from Jerry Weinberg's Psychology of Computer Programming, which contains a story about some programmers defending an incorrect program on the grounds that it would process more cards per minute, to which Weinberg replied, "But your code doesn't work. If mine doesn't have to work I can do a million cards a minute!"

One of my favorite software stories.
This is kinda cool but the pictures are the standard interpretations of what mathematicians imagine. I would have liked to see some non-standard approach with a bit more abstraction.
Thanks! Looking forward to the next one and speaking again soon (esp. on JavaScript testing). Did we talk afterward? Are you a freelancer?
While I respect your opinion, I think your missing the point.

The point is that in both cases, a movie was made about religion that was also (an attempt at) a comedy.

That aside, I agree that LOB was more insightful, but I think there is something interesting about what Dogma did. It was an attempt to look at the modern day implications of taking the bible literally. You can say they sucked at it if you want, but its a neat idea.
Example implementation of Common Lisp's list-length function
The article was thin on facts and read like wishful thinking. The key piece of info was that the unbranded stores had 1/3 the traffic of branded stores. From this the author concludes that people dislike the Starbucks brand? I would have thought the opposite!!!!
Creately Blog - 10 Google Wave invites to be given away
Criticism on Emacs' manual
Are there any good sets of HTTP compatibility tests which test deviations from the spec which show up in existing servers/browsers?
Ask HN: Browser Plug-in Adoption Percentage?
A friend of mine asked me whether I knew of any stats detailing the average percentage of users that will download a plug-in to view website content. I couldn't find anything, so I thought I would ask HN.

Is there any study, or evidence out there that details these percentages? For instance, when faced with the prospect of downloading a plug-in such as Adobe ConnectPro to view website content, how many visitors on average would download it, and how many would pass?
an interesting premise given one of the commandments is no false witness, not to mention some of the eastern religions.
An easily understood proof of Cantor’s Theorem: http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/prime/articles/cantor_theorem/...

"Take a minute to ponder what this means. Cantor’s Theorem shows that given any set, there is another set which is 'larger' in the special sense of being a bigger kind of infinity. Hence, there can be no 'largest infinity' either! The kinds of infinity are therefore 'infinite!"
Not to mention the "winning" entry did exactly the same thing: found an `n' # of words which works for this input only, then created a fast algorithm that works for this input only, but is incorrect in general.
sweet as bro :p

I'm sorry for the slightly off-top response, but what does "sweet as bro" mean? Is that some sort of slang that I am not familiar with?
"Hi. This you? LOL" Twitter Attack Snares Kevin Mitnick
If a Google Wave invite post makes it to the front page, something's definitely wrong with HN. (Esp now after all thought of invite have long since got it)
More on Mathematical Diseases
Google invites used as a ploy for registrations. Great job, guys.
20 things worth knowing about beer
Since when are judy arrays synonymous with tries?

Judy arrays were only invented and publicized in 2004 and the only public implementation is GPLed.
I really like the first paragraph of this article, but at this point:

"Art starts to happen when we project these personal maps back out on the world. Each of us has an impulse to express his or her experience of reality."

He lost me. This is the kind of formulaic definition of art you hear all too often. The reason art isn't math is that there is no such formula. Art is contradicts itself. It's messy and evades attempts to pin it down.
It has also been merged into node. This thing is starting to be a case study for optimized C network servers.
With some pointer arithmetic, I would imagine so (with tries, not sure what judy arrays are)... although it might depend into how quickly memory can be allocated/accessed. Assuming the text is a set of lower-case alphabet character strings, you could define a 26-ary trie with very few instructions to do each characters' lookup...
I find myself in a mentoring position to interns at my day job. They are very talented and have no big responsibilities like a family or kids. If I was their age, I wish someone told me how frustrating it is to have not tried my hand at being an entrepreneur.

Do I tell these interns the frustration I feel and that they should think long and hard about whether they want to join to big corporate world? The big multi-nationals offer good compensation and is relatively secure. However, I wonder if they will eventually start feeling frustration down the years and start thinking the same thoughts as I am now?

Anyways I've chosen my path. I have a family that depends on my stable income, I realize how important is for a parent to BE a parent, and accepted that I no longer have the energy to work three jobs. (day job, family, plan B) I'm trying to bring up the kids to live the life I wish I had...

But it doesn't mean I've given up on 'plan B'. I'm sure as the kids get older, I would find myself with more time. Just need to stave off the burnout by not trying to do too much.
This sounds like an embrace of the famous "worse is better essay".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Personalized, Real-Time Web Content
Who turns their car off at a red light?
Debian – The Universal Operating System
What happened to Mangan's blog?
I like the idea of this because there are benefits for both the employer and the freelancer. For employers, it's a labor model that's pay-as-you-go like cloud servers. For freelancers, you're motivated to complete tasks and not watching the clock for 8 hours waiting to run away. This doesn't fix the problem of stability for hired work or benefits like retirement or med insurance. Cool post!
The author has stated that his account was disabled. Some info:

http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/11/what-happened-to-mangans-bl...

http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/11/google-censorship-rears-its...

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/11/where-did-dennis-mangans-...
Totally agree. I normally don't like to play the pundit on the side shouting "I told you so," but in this case I think Arrington et al deserve the criticism. They've had the hype machine running full blast for a year now. The TechCrunch name alone guaranteed that early adopters would buy the things in massive numbers. However they couldn't cross the finish line with the product. The CrunchPad therefore doesn't deserve any more attention than any of failed consumer product ideas that never saw the light of day.
Doing the math here. A/B Tests with conversions are modeled as binomial variables. So the standard error of the conversions here is sqrt(p(1-p)/n) where p is conversion rate and n is number of hits (p(1-p) is standard deviation of binomial distribution). Calculating standard error for both of your versions - sqrt(0.002*(1-0.002)/2834) = 0.0008 and for the other SE is 0.0017. Now since there are large number of trials, you can model the difference of two binomial distributions as a normal distribution, standard deviation of whose is sqrt(se_1^2 + se_2^2) = 0.0019.

Now the way significance is checked is by using single tailed z score (we are testing if the difference in two distributions is statistically significant and greater than zero). Z score in this case is p_1 - p_2/std that is (0.008-0.002)/0.0019 = 3.1579 which is way larger than the critical value of 1.65 (which corresponds to 95% confidence).

So, the difference is indeed statistically significant. A note of caution is that some theory says that you cannot model a binomial distribution as a normal distribution until you have at least 10 successes or failures, which is the case here.
What new syntax are you talking about? There is no new syntax in HTML5.
So once all subterfuges have been published, no subterfuges will work any more?

In a world with a finite number of spies, most spies are not being watched by other spies at most times. And spies assigned to watch a particular target spy are generally less highly trained than the target. Simple tricks to avoid attracting attention from casual observers are still useful.
Out of curiosity, what's the lowest score you've seen on 17x17 so far?
In this case, they do. As do <foo> and <bar> and any other element you can come up with.
Does open source undermine innovation?
Yeah, MRI is Ruby 1.8.

I imagine 1.9 would perform a great deal better. Since we're scraping entirely on single-CPU machines, the GIL probably wouldn't hurt us much. We rewrote the scheduler and our interface to the HTTP client using Scala, however, so now we're pretty wedded to the JVM.

However, if we were to use Ruby 1.9, we would have to spend more time investigating HTTP libraries. From our experience, it's worth it to have workers threads NEVER block directly on IO. We saw a huge increase in reliability by having worker threads (1) send a request to an event-based client, running in its own thread and (2) block on a future with a set timeout, waiting for the callback. Having individual threads talk directly to the sockets, in either MRI or Java, wasn't a promising approach. If sockets got wedged (and they do, even using very reputable HTTP libraries) the event-based approach keeps on humming, while the blocking approach grinds to a halt.

There exist several event-based HTTP clients for Java that all work well (though some significantly better than others). Compare that with Ruby, where we couldn't find anything that mature.

That's not to mention all the concurrency primitives available in Scala, Clojure, and the underrated java.util.concurrent.

Even if Ruby 1.9 might look much more competitive to JRuby in synthetic tests of concurrent performance, in the real world the Java ecosystem features tons of libraries that helps one write reliable, predictable code quickly.
Can you list _worthwhile things had workable implementations before HTML 5_ and the stuff they implemented before HTML5?
<canvas>? <video>? local storage?
You got it. 'sweet as bro' is popular New Zealand slang... translates roughly to 'awesome, man'
Google Web Analytics
I think it would be possible to do this yourself (adjust the scroll acceleration/velocity) by using a constant size-viewport and implementing the scrolling in javascript. I haven't tried it myself, but the touch(start|move|end) events are pretty fast.
I would be willing to bet that that implementation is slower than a hash table.

(Yeah, I do have some data to back that up - I wrote & benchmarked an autocomplete implementation for a financial software firm. String tries were roughly 10x slower than binary searching an array for a 20k word corpus, which is probably around the size you're dealing with here. They have terrible cache locality - each character makes you follow a pointer, which is probably a cache miss, and the total size of the trie is on the order of 26 * 8 * 20k = 4M. They become a bit better if the number of distinct words in the corpus is small (so that everything fits into cache) or if the number of words is huge (so that your hashtable or array blows the cache anyway).
I'd just throw in that if someone uses your code to try to reproduce what you've done, they may actually just be reproducing a bug -- or in the sinister case, reproducing a faked result. So a more general point in this whole discussion would be that making the code available isn't always as important as making the mathematics or other theory behind the code available, and "reproduction" becomes "reimplementation", or some other corroborating element of the process as described by timr a few comments down (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968456).

(Of course for large software endeavors that isn't practical either. So mattheww's point about trust unfortunately resonates.)

As for the proprietary issue, I think sometimes it might actually help reproducibility: if you can just drop a few lines of script into Matlab and examine them, it's potentially a much smaller task with a lot more battle-worn, common-ground code factored out than examining or re-implementing a full library of open code.
1/3 volume of a typical starbucks location might be par for a locally-owned shop.
Nice work from the Kiwis!!!

Too bad the artivle didn't compare the amount of resources and man power put to the Atlas and the Atea projects.
> Landsdowne never got a Starbucks, but Benicia, California and a lot of other towns got plenty of Starbucks.

In New Delhi, there are often two or three Café Coffee Day outlets located a couple of meters away from each other. Strangely enough, they're all mostly full.

Oh, and McDonald's. There's a McDonald's everywhere.
Gotcha, that's what I figured :)

Thanks.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
So today I decided to delete my Facebook account.
Nfl ticket tickets
Get the detailed information about nfl ticket and browse nfl ticket tickets for up coming events at Ticket Luck.
I dislike the usage of the word "stalk" to mean visiting someone's online profile. Stalking is defined to involve an element of unwelcome harassment that isn't present by visiting someone's online profile, even if done obsessively.
Resistive is what was common before capacitive came along - I'm sure we've all played with them extensively at some point. Take my Garmin GPS for example, it's got a resistive screen that, coming from a daily iPhone user, just doesn't work. I have to practically stab it with a fingertip to get it to register, and even then it's pretty consistently wrong, and will often think I'm tapping the button next to it.

Argh.

The iPhone set the bar - and manufacturers have responded. I doubt you will find a single manufacturer now who is trying to peddle resistive touchscreen phones in their new products. Nokia, Moto, HTC, etc, appear to only have capacitive touchscreens on the roadmap - for good reason.

Most tablet PCs are feeling incredibly dated for the same reason - IMHO the next product to enter this field will need capacitive sensing, or die.
Starbucks (and Sameness)
I have a hard time believing this about Australians:

"...Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. "
Microsoft Has No Plans To Fund A Google Boycott
Some CRU scientists "conspired" to not release raw segments of data without processing. They didn't want to give it to "skeptics" because these "skeptics" were anomaly hunting the data to try and make an unscientific argument sound scientific. Other raw data of questionable value was not kept.

While certainly not the best practices, it's understandable.

As for reversing, we can produce a reasonable approximation of the original data because the "shady operation" was linear interpolation and the adding of a small corrective constant. (Cue dramatic musical hit). Of course we cannot recover the exact values, but we can reproduce likely approximations of the data. This is not deep stat here, it's interpolation and corrections.

Go look at the code if you don't believe me. The article you're commenting on goes into

P.S. I am not addressing the substance of your argument with the claim, "You are libertarian." I am addressing all your points as directly as I can. I'm offering the reason to other readers of this thread as to why I think you're persisting in this argument. This event would be a greater problem if there weren't multiple lines of evidence reinforcing the conclusion.
SASS is bad because it got addicted. Starts with math, leads to variables, then someone suggests recursion and iteration. Suddenly you've got a really crappy programming language instead of a useful tool designed to make bullshit easier.