skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a strong warning sign. Anything to the effect of "we want rockstar developers" suggests something unsaid-- that they consider most of the applicants that they get to be of low-quality, which says more about them and the mismatch between what they think they offer and how the market perceives them than it does about the applicants.

It's like writing "please be cute" in an online dating profile.
P.S. http://fare.livejournal.com/142410.html seems to have some good arguments, too. (Though not on the exact same issue as this thread.)

Also the comment by gls (Guy Steele I guess) http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/blog/Objec... gives an interesting perspective on the union example.
I've used OpenDNS since they became publicly known and have never gotten a redirect that I can remember. Did I configure that somehow?
Demo an iPhone app on your TV
Test your Django skills
Interesting. Parser combinators might actually be a "proper" example that can't be transformed into either a loop or a single trampoline chain... I've never tried to implemented one, but I can imagine some parts to be easier when done directly with closures (try one path, if it fails just drop it and try another one). On the other hand - which parser-combinator needs more than 50 or so levels of depth...

Hopefully someone here did it / can comment :)
Why would a developer be traveling frequently?

Also, business travel sucks, especially if you're entry-level.
Legacy code isn't always bad. All code becomes legacy code.

Poor legacy code is a liability, and legacy code that leads to suboptimal technical situations (e.g. using C++ in 2009) is a pain.
Analyzing Y Combinator
I live on Earth. Also, North Korea uses the Korea Exchange:
http://www.mapsofworld.com/north-korea/economy/stock-exchang...

My point is that North Koreans, like anyone else in the world, communist or capitalist, have very little of their value in the form of paper currency. Whether it be goats, rice, gold, stock, bank accounts, etc.. They may value themselves based on a nationally recognized currency (the won?), but that doesn't mean that most of their value is in the form of liquid cash.

The theory of currency recognizes the value of a currency based on its level of trust (to be paid back). Soo in a country like North Korea (ESPECIALLY), citizens probably rarely maintain their worth in the form of paper currency. Because they don't trust it (whether they consciously realize it or not). If Americans don't trust the US dollar, you can imagine that North Koreans don't trust their own currency. Educated or not, brain washed or not, that's common sense.

Another example. I personally trust the American dollar very much. But how much do I have in the form of liquid cash? About $50 in my wallet. The rest of my worth is in assets, stock, savings, 401k, car, tv, intellect, etc. Just not liquid cash. So if America changed currencies all of the sudden, I'd say, "Rats, I just lost $50."

Sooo, again, my point is that this probably doesn't change much for North Koreans. Especially since most of them probably have very little personal wealth anyway (paper cash or other forms of value).

Heavens.
30-year Scandinavian study shows no link between cellphones and brain tumours
Infographic: A hierarchy of digital distractions
I think that for Warren Buffet, "things" refers to multinational corporations :)
In one, your skill is greater than the opinions of others. In the other, the opinions of others are greater than your skill.

To me, the choice is clear.
You should read "Snowball" if you want to know more.
He's buying more stocks.
and from Vietnam !
You understand that NXDOMAIN redirectors are getting copies of cookies, right?

wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bankofamerica.com has address 208.69.36.132
wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.matasano.com has address 208.69.36.132
You're also thinking too web-centric. DNS is not only used by web-surfers to construct URLs in their browsers. Things that make sense from a 'how to I find this webpage' sense do not make sense from a 'how does my non-web client contact the non-http server' sense.
What's the advantage of using one of these api's over the api of say the gateway directly like authorize.net? Is it the fact that they are adding more value into the api and making it into more of a framework for managing members?
I think the latter's assumed to be better: you get lots of sex, and although you don't get many repeats, you get a lot of access. It'd suck once you fell in love, though.

On the other hand, the former could be spun into a good situation. If your reputation is that horrible (worst in the world) and widespread, people would sleep with you on dares, find out that you're actually awesome, and you could marry the one of them you liked the most.
> On the other hand - which parser-combinator needs more than 50 or so levels of depth...

Oh, that's easy: Just have a combinator that repeats somehow, but complicated enough that you don't want to do it as a loop.
Bleah. Also: why did I have to shrink the text size in order to read all the text in both text boxes on this page: http://www.thewonderfactory.com/news/index.php
Using their DNS server shouldn't require much user input. Nonetheless, most people use their ISP's DNS servers, and let me tell you that Comcast support will always tell you that your computer is at fault if there is a DNS issue. Google is entering a domain where poor customer service is the norm.

Edit: just realized the pun... totally unintended, but funny to see an 'Easter Egg' of sorts hidden from you in your own post.
Working on porting Diablo to the PS1, there were tiny
bits of inline assembler scattered everywhere.
Eventually the light dawned: the original programmers
had been struggling to understand C's signed/unsigned
integer conversions so they fell back to the x86
instructions they were more familiar with.

Dang, is that telling. Both shipped Diablo games have been know to be rife with security related bugs, and that kind of coding artifact gives a good indication of the quality of the programmers at Blizzard North it seems...
I do not know whether Don Knuth is in the same category. (Though if you have to convert it to some linear scale of greatness, he's in.)
It would be interesting to do a study of which browser people think is fastest (based on a trial of all the browsers somehow perfectly skinned to look like other ones).
I don't really notice whether a page renders .1 seconds faster. But I do notice when a browser starts up quickly, and how smooth its responses are. And while I love Firefox to death, it is falling short of the mark in those areas of everyday use, compared to Chrome and Safari. If it were not for the addons, I would have dumped it by now. It makes me sad to even type that :(
And antimatter? (Or at least anti-electrons?)
Depends on what interests you. I think massive distributed systems processing huge amounts of data using exotic network technologies and super tight code are interesting, but it's not everyone's bag.

C++ is still used a lot because it's fast and allows you to efficiently communicate with the hardware and OS. I'll admit it's ugly, but it's a good choice for certain systems. On the pure analytics side, most quants seem to be moving to more modern and flexible languages, where prototyping ideas quickly is more important than latency.

Jane St Capital uses OCaml extensively (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2336889538700185341...).

I'm curious to see if Google's Go makes any inroads. It seems well-suited to building these types of systems and does away with some of C++'s baggage.
Mobile.twitter.com launches (set UA to Mobile Safari first)
You can also read about Claude Shannon in "You and Your Research" [0] from Richard W. Hamming. An excerpt:

"One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to. Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn't know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, "What would the average random code do?" He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think."

[0] e.g. http://www.chris-lott.org/misc/kaiser.html
Privacy Policy Changes
OpenDNS may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and
in OpenDNS' sole discretion. OpenDNS encourages visitors to
frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy.
If changes are made, notice will be given in the OpenDNS sites
and the OpenDNS blog at http://blog.opendns.com/ and we *may* send
an email to registered using to notify them of the change. Your
continued use of our sites and services after any change in this
Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

So you may have a notice pushed out to you, but you may not. If you use OpenDNS to make the DNS request to to view their blog to read the new privacy policy, technically you have already made use of their service under the new terms. Oops.

Edit: emphasis in the quote was mine
I think that you mean access to cookies. I doubt that Comcast is stealing your Bank of America cookies, but it's troubling that they have access to them. [Not necessarily my cookies, as I'm not on Comcast, and I don't use ISP-provided DNS anyways]
Isn't your rebuttal obliquely preempted by "Trying to satisfy the typecase without using an else clause would then point up the need to handle all the other possible implementations of IntSet"? More explicitly, I'm thinking that the commenter explains the advantage of TCO over your solution: "And trampoline provide you full PTC at the cost of a (local) encoding that must be followed by every single bit of software that you want to use PTC with. [...] Now why should the user have to be doing manually what the computer could automatically do a better job at? " [http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/blog/Objec...].

Your use of dynamic dispatch is better for extensibility than suggested typecase, but you're still mucking about with a trampoline that a compiler could write for you.
Amputee Gets Real-Feeling, Thought-Powered Cybernetic Fingers
That's OpenDNS, not Comcast.
That's what people hired into Accenture do. "Travel" and live out of hotels for most of the year, while they try to cobble together a really bad project and try to avoid losing their minds.
Former Kaplan Exec Plots to Re-Make Test-Prep Industry Online
My favorite part from sec 03. "Most people can't even figure out how to program their VCR"
Blogs Are Godless Communist Bullshit
In my opinion, this model is not the best for optimizing performance. First, it's expensive, performance regression testing is tricky as heck, to get accurate data you need to go to extremes. Second, it concentrates most of the effort on not falling behind which can distract people from the idea that it's possible to actually exceed previous performance by significant margins, even with additional features. Third, sometimes it results in wasting effort tracking down and "fixing" tiny performance regressions without touching the code most responsible for slow performance.

In my opinion it's better to invest in a robust performance profiling infrastructure that gives you the ability to find out the parts of code that make the biggest contribution to the performance (or lack thereof) of your product. From there you can allocate dedicated performance improvement time budget to improve performance as much as possible. I suspect that with such a model you'd be more likely to end up with better performance at less cost and on a more dependable schedule.
Blargh. Anyone care to share it anonymously?

http://pastebay.com/ ?
That was on OSX - I always ended up going back to Firefox, because it felt faster. I'm no longer using OSX as my primary, so it doesn't matter much anymore to me :) Just pointing out what I'd noticed.
You still need a monochrome [0] picture that looks good at low resolution.

[0] Or rather bichrome.
(The h in `Neandertahl' isn't quite right.)
It's not like people not using Google DNS is losing them money.
So he lived together with one woman first, another one afterwards. Not my definition of 'harem'.
Arduino dual core
A shield that contains a second Arduino with a ATMega chip. It turns your arduino on a "Arduino Dual Core"
IIRC, Comcast was getting into this too. I'm referring to the specific practice of NXDOMAIN redirecting. Not just OpenDNS's practices.

http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/geekery/comcast-dns-hijack-...
From #31:

Yahoo - Simple and still the best.

Times have changed.
The Ack Textmate bundle on the site is pretty awesome as well.
Part of me deeply admires 37 Signals for their success, their people, and the quality of the work they do. Yet another part of me detests how they've always tried to sell themselves as some sort of movement, when in fact they're a business trying to make a buck, just like any other. Not that there's anything wrong with making a buck... let's just leave the "manifestos" to Marx and Engels.
> If the entire peer-review process was "hacked" we can't trust any climate science?

Pretty much. We don't know how the data was adjusted and the original data seems to be unavailable. Given that, what's to trust? Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but without data....

There is other data, from folks that disagree with the CRU folks....
This is the same thing that Apple does to impassion customers and drive their employees to ever greater heights. They create a facade of purpose built around their products and services.
Wait, what? Chatterous is most definitely not closed.

More info:
http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/chatterous-raises-angel-fu...
Google Global Translate Service Coming Over the Next 24 Hours
Only one monitor per seat?
Way back when I played go with a few friends in college, we started calling it "baduk" (the Korean term) because the term "go" always took a second to register if you weren't already expecting it based on context. It's a really unfortunate word to try to borrow into English. To name a language "Go" when they knew most of their users would discuss it in English was just stupid.
Twitter Blog: New mobile site
One of the projects I work on has close to a zero-tolerance policy on performance regressions, but this is applied per launch and not per changelist. Basically, by the time you launch your feature, you have to show that you're not causing more than a percent or two performance regression (ideally zero, unless you add a lot of value). However, it's up to you whether you want to achieve this by optimizing the hell out of your own feature or by finding code elsewhere in the project that's slow and cleaning it up. You'll know your own code best, obviously, but sometimes the low hanging fruit is in ancient stuff that hasn't been looked at in a while, and a profiler will find it for you.

Obviously this only works with collective code ownership, but you should probably have that anyway, since it makes refactoring so much easier.
It pisses me off when Apple does it too.
Fair point. Edited.
Anyone brute forced it yet?
What's Linear Algebra?
Non-Expert Annotations for Natural Language Tasks (w/MTurk)
Come on don't tease like that - share!
Neat list, but just keep in mind that many of these (20-40%?) are inaccurate. Many startups listed as active have actually failed, but they kept their site up.

Also, a vast majority of the acquisitions shown here were for talent. They generally involve very little actual money and in many cases could be considered company failures.

Still, I'm happy for the successes. But in startupland there are many magic tricks to make things look better than they are.
What are the reasons that the `official' information is kind of closed?
Because:

http://milkandcookies.net/2008/07/12/?lang=en_US&cntry=US&source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3D123%26lang%3Den-US&geoloc=-45.001,-53.175

is pretty readable and useful!
Design Blogs
Haha yeah i reckon ay. You should post that comment onto my blog rather than on here :)
I am more likely to reply.
It depends on the language and the programming paradigm you're trying to approach, but I feel that TCO is important only in functional languages, and they don't matter much in in OO.

Haskell is a language that absolutely depends on TCO as the functional paradigm lends itself to recursion, as the preferred form is that there be no mutation of state within functions. Recursion is evidently the better form for traversing data structures based on recursively enumerable types.

Having said that, in practice very few OO languages use inmutability. The very purpose of OO is to model entities as objects and such objects provide interfaces for changing state, which is about as impure as it gets. Whether you feel it is better or worse than a functional approach, it is the modus operandum in OO languages, including Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, etc.

My own reality is that rarely do I work with recursive data structures at a productive level (not the case at the library level, where trees and lists are the norm), hence I find very little use for TCO. TCO is also very kludgy on arbitrary data structures with lots of twists (undirected graphs, meshes, etc.). Worse of all, it is very easy to get TCO wrong and actually having to use the stack.

The nice thing about implementing a function iteratively is that it is easy to see where state is being altered on every step. This is irrelevant in a language like Haskell which has a wonderful syntax for pattern matching which makes end cases and control flow very explicit, but it is decidedly very un-OO. Most pure OO languages, on the other hand, have ugly and expensive pattern matching (instanceOf and friends are pretty much what you have). I'm not convinced that TCO works very well in practice in the current OO languages. And if you're doing something that's altering state all the time it's very easy to structure a function such that it can be tail-called without having to preserve state.

In short, Ruby, Python, and Smalltalk don't have much place for TCO. TCO is not idiomatic, libraries are not made for it, and it is counterproductive to use TCO on languages that expect you to alter state all the time to model entities (unless you like recursing with 10-ary functions, which happens a lot on functional languages and it is not a pretty sight). Modern iterator patterns a pretty and work well, so it makes sense for languages that prioritize iterators over recursion to get one of them right when the other one hardly gets much use and can be easily done wrong. In my own experience (and it may not be yours) recursion is nice for 5-liner functions, but try to get a 50-line function to do TCO properly and you're probably in a world of hurt.

I do have to admit that, generally speaking, once you get the TCO to work more likely than not the function is correct and modern compilers can optimize them very aggresively.
What's really cool is that 18% of YC founders are now millionaires.
Is this true? Evidence?
For the emacs folk, I use this:
http://repo.or.cz/w/ShellArchive.git?a=blob_plain;hb=HEAD;f=...

But there's also (last I looked, may be more now):
http://www.rooijan.za.net/?q=ack_el
xHTML encourages well written, consistently formatted, code which is probably its most important feature.

Many of the HTML5 features you mentioned I don't see as being features that belong within a document structure language. Geolocation and Crossdomain XMLHTTPRequest are browser issues they have nothing to do with a document and don't belong in a spec for a document definition.

Native sound/video and offline support, of course, I agree with. But, if your application doesn't have the need for either of these features - what does HTML5 offer?
> Google does not have a spotless track record in customer privacy issues, nor is there any reason to believe that because they're behaving in a particular way now, they'll behave the same later.

True, but most of the records are deleted after 48 hours, meaning that they no longer exist for Google to decide to mine years later once they change their policy. Other than that, this only becomes an issue if the entire internet starts pointing their DNS queries at GoogleDNS, which I doubt will happen.
Bing's current search results:

Internal Server Error - Read

The server encountered an internal error or
misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Reference #3.271ff648.1259895038.0

... snazzy!
I was on a flight so I wasn't able to respond. I actually have a much more indepth description of this preso on my blog

http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog
I did not understand how 2.6x of 15K will be 650K, can someone please explain
He's assuming YC has 6% equity in the companies. 2.6 * 15k = 0.06 * 650k.
url should be: http://warvo.com/2009/12/36-creative-design-blogs/
Given the growing fraction of the web that's now not English (read: Chinese) this could be revolutionary.
This is going to be revolutionary given the growing percentage of the web that's non-English.
Is Bing.com broken for everyone else too?
2.6 * 15K = 39K, however, as yc only takes a 6% stake, The total value of the companies have to be 39K/0.06 = 650K for yc to make the line.
And its back, carry on
It's less offensive if you just read it as

> User satisfaction is related to a combination of quality product, meet[ing] requirements, delivered when needed, and appropriate cost.

A lot of code I have seen has weaker mathematical roots, so I got no problem with him stating it how he did.
Bing just crashed
What's wrong with using C++ in 2009?
Yea, because your ISP totally wouldn't do the same thing.
Back after 30 minutes of downtime.
I would see it as a feature - most of the time Google's (spell|domain) correcting is very useful if I have miswritten something.
org. is interesting. It looks like the Apache server isn't set up correctly.
"Bandwidth hogs" join unicorns in realm of mythical creatures
Agreed. Here's the latest gem — settlement of class action against Yahoo:

Yahoo! will pay a $20 refund (“Refund”) to eligible Class members who are out of business.

...

XI. How Will The Lawyers Be Paid? Will The Class Representatives Receive Service Awards?

Class Counsel will apply for attorneys’ fees of $4,170,000, plus reimbursement of expenses of approximately $100,000, and for service awards to the three Class Representatives of $10,000 each. Yahoo! has agreed to pay those fees, expenses and service awards, in the total amount of $4.3 million

https://secureweb.rustconsulting.com/inreyahoosettlement/
I don't know if it's rendering or if it's disk access or what's going on, but I installed the Django docs locally expecting it to be pretty much instantaneous to access. With Chrome, it is. With Firefox there is a very noticeable and very annoying delay.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Our RSS feed has moved
I liked this post quite a bit, but I think that essentially what he's complaining about is that bloggers write from their own perspective. That's the whole point of blogs, isn't it? They're one person's voice?
I had forgotten all about "Web Shaka" (YouOs). Far and away the most classic name for a company. I hope they are doing well wherever they went.
IMO it's usually the longest wait that is most irritating. It was never the 1 second load in games that annoyed the crap out of me, it was the 2 minute load to initialize everything. Every subsequent load in the session felt like the first, regardless of length.

I know full well that the .1 second that Chrome may be faster is negligible, and largely irrelevant. It's that IE took forever and Firefox wasn't significantly better, Chrome however was a dream, any load or delay from that point on was never associated with the original painstaking load.