skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
3 out of 4 corporate sponsors are on the east coast (MA, MA, NY, CA).

EDIT: apparently thats uninteresting? I find it interesting considering the balance of funding in the industry. Not only do I expect more west coast companies, I expect far more of them. This could be due to (a) clojure is more popular there, (b) east coast companies have fewer opportunities for getting their name out, or (c) they are more likely to donate money. Maybe someone has some insight here.

EDIT 2: now, 4 out of 5 sponsors are on the east coast (NC, MA, MA, NY, CA) This may be biased by the time zone, as the day is just starting on the west coast.
For any company larger than 20 people, it matters more what group you are in than what company you enter. I've met miserable and extremely happy people from/at Google. If you end up as Peter Norvig's protege, I imagine it's pretty awesome. If you end up in the wrong group and you're not able to move, it probably sucks.

If you're under 35, stock performance and pay are not nearly as relevant as what you'll learn and the quality of people you'll work with, unless you hit an economic home run (e.g. enter the next Google on the ground floor).
Relation is not (necessarily) correlation
Yes but if I'm the one writing in memory database/analytics stuff I might want to use a Python/C combination to do that. Right now that's not an option because of the GIL issue.
I'm of the opinion that if you have to generate code, then there's something wrong. It may be that you're using a library or language that's out of your control, in which case fair enough.

The difficulty comes when you suddenly find yourself having to debug generated code and you find that it has become impenetrable and unreadable. The same problem arises when introducing a new programmer to the project as well.

This is why I favour Python and Ruby (edit: and Lisp of course!) type languages. You can meta-program your way out of any code generation requirement. Instead of refactoring a DRY problem by using code generation, you solve it with meta-code. This is what makes these languages truly agile.
There are three different approaches to evaluating whether or not Plurk should go ahead with a lawsuit.

There's the ethical approach: is this a matter which, ethically, is worth pursuing? In this case, we might answer by examining the nature and amount of harm done, and the intentions of the parties involved. The harm was limited by unusually quick action, and by the fact that it occurred in a market in which Plurk had no influence or prospective customers to begin with. Microsoft has given a plausible statement denying any intention on its part. Comments suggesting that a lawsuit should be pursued simply because that's the action expected from Microsoft in the case of a role reversal belie a prejudice against Microsoft which doesn't provide a strong ethical basis for a lawsuit.

There's the approach from law: Plurk must demonstrate which laws were violated, in which country, and to what extent. Has Plurk taken any actions to protect its intellectual property prior to this case? Does it hold any patents? Has it copyrighted its publicly readable code or released it under a license? And, if indeed there is a law which has been violated, to what extent would the damages be assessed? If Plurk can't point to some clear loss of revenue from the event, then they must establish an intrinsic value for their intellectual property. From a legal standpoint, that can be difficult.

Finally, there's the approach from likely outcome: statements like, "And no mater how expert or well paid their lawyers are it won't change the fact that they are in the wrong here" belie an extreme naivete in terms of the law and legal proceedings. Legal battles between companies are less often resolved by establishing the "rightness" and "wrongness" of the parties; more often, they are resolved in terms of resources: the company with the most resources wins.

"Hackers" have a peculiar tendency to believe that their expertise in generalized systems means that they can dive into a legal battle and understand the arena well enough to have an outcome in their favor. The term "IANAL" is almost always followed by a layman's legal advice. However, legal proceedings have little to do with programming. Microsoft's legal team for example could simply choose to bury Plurk in onerous discovery, and it would cost Plurk far too much money to even enter the courtroom, while costing Microsoft relatively nothing.

I don't see a winning scenario for Plurk from any of those standpoints.
Also .com.au requires a business number to register. There are other restrictions too. Similarly .asn.au can only be registered by non-commercial organisations.

Also many european business domains are restricted to eu businesses etc.

This is very common amongst many registrars... and is a good thing generally... I think.
I agree with you, but why can't this be used as an excuse to kill internet explorer?

It seems that IE has been a consistent impediment to web based technologies for upwards of 10 years now. There have been so many other things that have been horribly crippled because 'internet explorer doesn't support it'.

People are becoming more and more savvy from the standpoint of computer use, and putting up a redirect to install a new web browser... like Chrome or Firefox... is something the majority of people should be able to handle/understand.

I'm tired of waiting 10 years to actually use the technology that we have /today/.
Upvoted (this is a long-running joke between the Phusion guys and various people)
FTC accuses Intel of monopoly practices
Why multivariate owns A/B testing . . .
WebSockets have been capable of cross-origin communication since day one. (see: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol-...) "The |WebSocket-Origin| header is used in the Web Socket handshake. It is sent from the server to the client to confirm the origin of the script that opened the connection. This enables user agents to verify that the server is willing to serve the script that opened the connection."
I don't assume that U.S. law will apply. I am predicating my comment with this statement to make clear that the sort of analysis I am articulating would only apply if U.S.-style law applies to the situation. If U.S.-style law doesn't apply, then Plurk's legal remedies might be few, if any. This likely would be one of the trickiest issues in this case if a lawsuit ever sees the light of day.

The doubt on this point, by the way, would be one more reason for Plurk not to push the legal side too hard here.
Not that silly, that was why I clicked through as well. I was quite curious to see what sort of app they made.
I think it's more like saying that Zynga won the lottery
What's the chance this will get into IE?
Ok, I've never worked with Orbited. But I looked at the site, through the examples, and through the documentation, and I see nothing about being able to use WebSockets on, say, IE7 or Safari.

Orbited looks like an event-driven webserver, which is nice and all, but it doesn't magically give WebSocket functionality to legacy browsers.
The crappy scrolling on the Mac is what keeps me away from Firefox. I've tried extensions to fix it, but nothing worked. It's still laggy and slow and just doesn't feel as solid as on Safari.
Nah, he just won't be able to connect his facebook account.
There are two introductionary books on linear algebra I would recommend. "Linear Algebra Done Right" by Axler gives you a _very_ nice and rigorous way to the foundations (this text requires a small bit of mathematical maturity, so be aware).

After reading Axler's book you should go and grab a copy of Strang's "Introduction to Linear Algebra" to view the applied side of linear algebra (this is the book mentioned in the article).

Strang's book is a terrible choice for first textbook of linear algebra (for the reasons btilly laid out), but it presents very imortant view on linear algebra, provided that you have mastered the foundations enough to compensate for the lack of rigour.
I think this is a point that a lot of people miss, everyone is quick to blame those big corporate it teams that wont upgrade browsers that its their fault.

people dont upgrade unless they have a reason to, not because there is a better rendering engine or more plugins, by pulling your hair out and slowing yourself down to work on support for ie, you are also giving users a reason to not upgrade.

but (IT wont let you install firefox because x only works on ie6) works both ways, if the rest of the web shoots forward with these new technologies, companies will catch up.
Wired doesn't have girls posing in lingerie.
it doesnt magically give you websocket functionality, it lets you use the websocket api, then handles any fallback if thats needed.
The sad thing is, Safari is the new Firefox - once fast, now incredibly slow in its 3.0 and 4.0 incarnations. Here on a MBP Chrome is demonstrably faster.
>But Detroit has been suffering massive crime, drug violence, depopulation, failing city services, depression-level unemployment, steadily falling revenue, skyrocketing illiteracy, public safety problems presented by the rotting infrastructure, plummeting graduation and has been flirting with bankruptcy for years.

Of these, only flirting with bankruptcy and failing city services are things for which city hall is responsible. The rest are not things city hall can solve. Compare it to soccer. The goalie is there to stop the other team from scoring, but is in no way responsible for his/her team to score goals. You can't win with just a good goalie. Likewise, a lot of what you described are problems the citizenry, and not city hall, are responsible for. I challenge the best city hall in the world to go see what it can do in Detroit; that place is a disaster anyway.

The quality of City hall is orthogonal to most of Detroit's problems, but not to San Francisco's.
I agree that WebSockets is definitely the way forward and that stuff like Comet are merely hacks. However WebSockets is still premature: only Chrome supports it right now and even the server protocol isn't finalized yet. And the biggest hurdle is of course IE...
No they didn't. You just didn't read far enough down the page. http://qntm.org/?fictional#sec2, second item listed.
Google hopes Chrome will be the new explorer.exe (the shell, not the filemanager).
Really why by a book when you can just grab a PDF. I used Linear Algebra Done Wrong for my class this semester, and found it a pretty good book for being free. check it out: www.math.brown.edu/~treil/papers/LADW/LADW.pdf
Lots of talk about IE here, but IE users aren't the ones using these new fangled realtime webapps. Ignore IE. They can stick with comet.
There are also Flash shims available on the client side, so you can use a WebSocket API that falls back to Flash on legacy browsers: http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js
I agree on the goodness of image development. In the early 80s I had a Lisp Machine, and I would use an image for months before rebuilding it. Also, when I do Common Lisp using SBCL (not often), I have images pre-setup that I grow over time.

Unfortunately, my Smalltalk skills are weak, but it is a great language. About 8 years ago, I signed up as a Cincom Smalltalk VAR, spun up on it, but never had a customer want me to use it (except for Cincom itself: they paid me to rework some of the documentation).

Anyway, I just downloaded a Pharo + Seaside installer, and may play with it while visiting family next week.
A Swedish programmer creates an app to be used in Sweden on a Swedish network by Swedish people. Everybody wants it, but they can't. One person far far away has the power to suppress the app for no reason whatsoever, indefinitely. What a great system...
FLV Player 2.0.24
How will Google's new language 'Go' rank in popularity in Nov 2010?
Japanese Store Selling Custom-Made Robots That Look Like Their Owners
same for .it
Ah thanks. Just plain JSON RPC sounds simplest to me.
I had the idea, but didn't have all the resources! I spent two weeks trying to patch something together but couldn't get it to work.

If only we had met...!

That said, I think RedLaser as it exists now is a "one time thing." It's a product, not a company, and they're going to have to pivot into something more sustainable than "download this app."

So $1MM is great, but not as great as $1MM/year.

Microsoft manages this by charging for frequent and expensive upgrades, plus OEM deals. That probably won't work for an iPhone app.

There are lots of interesting ways they can go, however, so I am a little jealous that they're in such a great position.
Yeah. All he did was advocate violence, he didn't actually commit any. All around pal.
I think P meant steak, as you can use a piece of meat to trigger conductive switches...
Environment may be why women don't like computer science
Swagger.
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:u5ST-mAOJe1sjM:http://two...

Posted small 'cause I'm not clicking the original at work.
It's a two-fold problem. You have to make something people want, but you also have to inform people that you've made it.

Most people rely on the AppStore for the latter; I think there are more interesting models that people haven't exploited yet.
Plastic Logic raises $35 million - launching cool flexi screen ereader at CES
Uncommon - Custom design your own iPhone case
You can create your own or pick from hundreds of artist designs.
Given that he provides a quite useful (for me, at least) link to Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide, I don't know that "nothing" is entirely fair.

I guess one could also raise the question of the context being discussed, and therefore which meanings of "parse" are being discussed. The post appears to emphasize the importance of (human) communication, with the partially explicated implication that being able to parse human communication well is an aspect of communicating well. And that this appears to him to be at least somewhat related or correlated to the interest and ability to parse and to understand parsing and/or similar constructs in programming.

Anyway, I mostly wanted to comment so that people don't miss the link to the book. And mine's just another opinion, humbly offered. Regards.
I bet the Youtube link on all pages that promote Google Crome helped it more then all the ads for Safari for example.
Your platinum rule is messed up, because it requires you to know their thoughts
It is never too late. If you think some more about the bar code idea. These are actually couple more ideas related to this that you can expand and it will be even bigger than redlaser. For example, if you get the bar code for a book, it will display review and so you can determine whether to buy it or not. On the same line of thinking, you will find out that you can do even more once you "identify" the object by the bar code... email me. I am interested in building something similar.
I agree. I think it's important that a lot of the people with lackluster sales or disappointing results should take a step back and be honest with themselves about whether or not their app is actually worth buying. There is plenty of moaning and belly aching online from iPhone developers who are upset their apps don't sell well (such as this semi-famous one: http://gedblog.com/2009/09/28/losing-ireligion) but few thoughts from people willing to analyze their mistakes and faults.
I would disagree with saying that refcounting isn't "real" garbage collection.

But with that said, you can get all the gory details from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_sc...
FWIW, I found another app called FastFinga. It's not any good for doodling or drawing diagrams, but for the writing part, it trumps this app in usability (and non crashiness).
I've switched to Chrome primarily because my MB Pro is a little short of memory (should upgrade soon), and Chrome seems to use a lot less real memory (as reported by activity manager) than Safari does. Safari seems to get upto 300 Mbytes pretty quickly, while Chrome stays around 60 Mbytes. My personal experience is that that seems to keep the system from bogging down periodically. Once I upgrade the memory, we'll see.

One potential problem for Chrome, at least for the type of users we see here, is any potential issue with adblockers. Wasn't there some news items about Google possibly being less than thrilled with such extensions (understandably)? I know quite a few people for whom a good adblocking solution is essential, and they stick with Firefox exclusively.
So hypothetically, if Microsoft hired a US based corporation to create a microblogging site, and that corporation copied the source code for Twitter, re-branded it as Microsoft specified, and the site went live, Microsoft would be liable? Where is the line then? Are individuals equally liable if they use software that was lifted unbeknownst to them by a software publisher?
Here's a (very naive) algorithm that doesn't count references:

1. Start at some well-known root object. Mark this object reachable.

2. For each object that is reachable

2a. For each object that this reachable object has a reference to

2b. Mark this object reachable if it's not already.

3. If any object was marked reachable in 2b, repeat step 2.

4. Garbage collect every object not marked reachable.

To see an important difference between this kind of strategy ("mark and sweep") and reference counting, consider the classic example of two objects, each one of which has a link to the other, but are not visible to anything else in the system.
Either Alice on stack overflow is tying her profile there to her real-world identity, or she shouldn't be signed up for Gravatar. The whole point of Gravatar is to persist a single identity across multiple sites, so I cannot imagine why you would tie a secret or fake identity to a real identity (your email) that you did not want associated with it.

Technically, yes, this article is correct. The Gravatar FAQ even discusses this issue, IIRC. But in practical usage, I can't imagine how this would prove important.
In fact, I believe that the JVM and the CLR both run GC in a different thread altogether.
FTC Sues Intel for Anticompetitve Practices
Alright, sure, they do about the same on Apple's tests and Chrome wins on Google's. But I've seen tests (e.g. http://news.cnet.com/safari-challenges-chrome-on-web-app-spe...) of Safari on Windows that put it behind even Firefox in Javascript speed, on Apple's own tests!
Apple Wins Permanent Injuction Against Psystar
It is a server for testing purposes, like seeing how you site will look before uploading to your webserver
I'm looking forward to the summaries, but are you sure Knuth wants his videos on YouTube? I'd ask, first. Right now they are available via iTunes and SCPD-- I imagine if he wanted them on YouTube, he would have had them put there....
Venture Capitalists' Predictions for 2010 [pdf]
yes but at nowhere in the specification does it say that either the client or server is allowed to modify the origin from the actual origin you are serving / being served from.

This may be part of the specification that I am missing, but it seems to suggest that its using exactly the same origin model as original xhr, which is my complaint

as http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol-... suggests

"The Web Socket protocol uses the origin model used by Web browsers to
restrict which Web pages can contact a Web Socket server when the Web
Socket protocol is used from a Web page."

and http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol-...

"The first three lines in each case are hard-coded" (referring to the origin)
Just a follow-up for those who downmodded me for pointing out that the original complaint/post mentioned (virtually) nothing about de-obfuscation:

"Speaking technically, what makes our claim a little stronger is that Plurk's client side code was obfuscated to begin with, so someone went in there and had to spend some real effort to unpack/reengineer the JS code and prettify it on their end," [a spokesman for Plurk] said."
Obviously it doesn't help us with this specific policy. But

1. It's fun to be snarky; and

2. It's useful to remember that those who claim to be applying their wisdom to guide the rest of us are, in reality, no better than the unwashed masses. And thus, their promises to provide us with solutions that the best minds of the private sector couldn't execute are unlikely to reach fruition.
It's not so much that I disagree with him/her. In fact, I would love it if we could do away with memory sharing. It's just that it seems a bit utopian (especially the argument that the hardware should do it for you).

My understanding is that he/she wanted to have the hardware handle concurrency automatically. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to get around having software dealing with concurrency.
Firebug and the JIT
Marketers, specially Godin, are hardly technology laymen. I know, because I am one. Marketing is a quantitative discipline now; they have enough vocabulary to describe the various stages and strategies for data processing that "parsing" is hardly an excusable synonym for "mining".

Hell, they even have a rich terminology for parsing itself; ask any marketer what "scraping" is and they will know exactly what you're talking about.
Click to Flash isn't really an extension. Your browser sees it, like Flash, as a plug-in that can handle certain content. But instead of actually presenting that content, it draws a gradient and some text until you click on it (at which point it hands control off to the actual Flash plug-in).

Real browser extensions allow you to do a lot more than this.
It's around 200 for downvoting, but I think upvoting is a lot lower. Closer to 20, I think, but I've been able to upvote for a really long time.
iphone users are so gullible - when you are all said and done with paying for your iphone and your service contract and your 'redlaser' app, you're over 2k in the hole, and for what? a 'mobile cuecat'?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
Wow, NVIDIA is on the same list as Infosys, Nortel, and Perot Systems?

I find it hard to imagine that a company with such a great developer relations department (and a pretty strong stock price) would be so horrible to work at. I never heard any major complaints from my friends at post-merger ATI, and they were in a much tougher situation.
The problem is that you're also preventing yourself from being able to take advantage of multiple cores. Of course, it would be nice if hardware would divide those tasks up between processors automatically. But then they'd be threads.
I'd like to contribute my latest experiences about parsing, too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991454

I'm sorry for my english, though. It is not my mothertounge. If U have suggestions or corrections, please don't hesitate to tell me. I am hungry to learn.

(if u prefer, direct link to article: http://erikb.posterous.com/better-parsing-with-python-regexe...)
FWIW this is how Mibbit backend works - thousands of connections handled in a single thread.

You might as well not be running an OS and have Mibbit run straight on the hardware. All it's doing is handling network connections and some other data processing right? And don't look at me like I'm crazy, your OS is using valuable CPU time!
That's because it only installs for the current user, not everyone on your machine. The exe is located in C:\Users\[User]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
The Nexus One is Google's Way of Fighting Android Forks
Yes, you would certainly notice this as you plotted the points.
Interesting. A bunch of bellyaching because a game isn't selling well - and I can completely understand /why/ it didn't sell well. Heck, it's free and I still won't install it.