skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If he's an approachable person, who doesn't try to lord it over you due to his ownership / position in the company, then I'd recommend taking a direct approach and meeting with him, data in hand, to prove your POV. Specifically, get the costs and benefits to do a simple ROI analysis. If you're in tech, you should be able to parse the logs to figure out how much traffic / revenue / other stuff you've gotten from your costs. Find or discover some (reasonable) social media metrics that you can use to break through the opacity of their "social media" benefits.

Take all this to the CEO. Lay it out in front of him. Suggest that the investment is now a sunk cost -- he may just be protecting his ego at this point, so approach gently -- and that you think repurposing some of that money to facebook ads / etc. would result in X% better numbers. But that at your current budget ($20 / day), you can't bring him well-supported conclusions. Tell him that you need $Y to actually run the experiment, and that you can find that money by taking some from your SaaS cost. After a month or two, or whenever you have sufficient data, meet with your founder again with your data that supports your conclusions (if it doesn't fit, also realize that you may be wrong in this instance).

If he doesn't seriously consider what you've brought him, then make a note that your CEO is somewhat clueless, ego driven, and stubborn. If your CEO is unable to see through snake oil salesmen, your company is in trouble.
Any question I've ever needed to ask about $WORK_CODE has been abstract enough to ask without revealing any internal information.
Canadian woman loses benefits over Facebook photo | My Complaint
There is no technical journalism worse than mainstream lay writing about "malware". The ratio of killer hooks to real insight is just too crazy to write good stories. I'm not sure I've ever read a good mainstream piece about a virus, worm, or botnet.
PhDs are funny. Let's go shopping!
This has nothing to do with the app approval process. If anything, it shows the "benefit" of locking down hardware so you can't run server processes. Exactly the same thing can and has happened with Macs allowing SSH logins with weak passwords.
"We only have 1 product to review, and the code to write a 'story submitter' is trivial at best. Needless to say, the tech team didn't find this useful and campaigned hard against it."

Alternate approach: get the tech team on board. Build a custom version of the software (if it's so trivial, you should be able to build it quickly, right?) Take that to the boss, say, "look, this does everything that we pay $40k / year for! Why are we using this external service?"

Alt alt suggestion -- talk to your boss. Say that you can build software with features X,Y,Z for the company in 2 weeks. Build it, show it to them.
The fact that iPhone web apps can't access iPhone hardware comes up all the time here. It seems odd to me that nobody mentions the fact that, with not much work, it's possible to create an iPhone browser that can give a website access to most of the iPhone hardware through javascript: gps/location services, the camera, the photo library, the music library, the accelerometer, and so on. One enterprising developer wrote an iPhone browser that does just that. here it is: http://www.big5apps.com/

I can't really recommend that app, though. Most of it is open source, so you can go see for yourself that the code is terrible. The app is ugly, leaks abound, and so on. The guy really doesn't know objective-c. I became aware of it because I have a contracting client that wanted to use that app, discovered it was terrible, and paid me to write a better one.

I think this is an idea that is ripe for the picking, but I can't see how, really. I have most of such a browser written. Who can think of a way to monetize this?
OODBs tend to use navigation of object graphs (see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NavigationalDatabase ) as the key operation, while document or key-value DBs rely more on queries.
OpenSUSE 11.2 Setup and Review
The common definition of inflation as used by most people is not correct, inflation just means an increase in the money supply. It's actual effects on prices are another due to many different factors. For instance, due to the massive advances in computers and manufacturing we've seen prices drop or stay level as the growth in the money supply has grown at a fast pace.

I agree that the actual cost of tuition has grown at an alarming pace, but we need why. Where is the money being spent, in a lot of cases you'll see that money is being spent on luxuries that are not needed in a university.
What amazes me about this story is that back in '89 MS had a knowledge base that worked so well that a person not trained for customer service was able to provide the help needed just by looking in the knowledge base. Many companies still don't have a system that good yet.
Thanks, and yes, I am looking for some kind of hidden gotcha, because it sounds a little too good to be true. Maybe I'm just skeptical as it will be my first job outside of a corporation in this field.

Thanks for the input, the lack of face-time I can handle, right now my "peers" at work are all uninterested COBOL programmers aside from the one other .NET guy, so I won't be missing much haah.
The Atlantic's Megan McArdle on ClimateGate
Not so sure. Cyclone is closer to C, so the porting of libraries will be easier. To me, it's a pretty good realization of "C with Safety Features". It seems to have the minimum to accomplish that.

Memory management seems simpler in Go, however. This is a big advantage for Go.
the article mentions topics not to mention. Like comparisons-to-Hitler.

Mentioning breasts is a similar way to instantly lose an argument, and I provided some links to arguments that relied mentioned breasts and died.

Did you follow any of the links?
Regarding your last two paragraphs, you're right that probability is the key. The whole point of hashes is that small changes in input affect large changes in output. That works especially well for synchronization, since most changes will be incremental.

In modern computing, like you say, there really are "free lunches," or perhaps one should call them "free increases in convenience and usability." Take programming languages, for example. Every programming language is Turing complete, and thus capable of solving any computable problem. However, no one would deny that there are performance gains from using a high order language rather than, say, assembly, even though technically high order programming is much less efficient (time spent compiling and optimizing, not to mention WRITING the compilers and optimizers, etc.). The whole no free lunch theorem is almost never applicable for any real-world scenario, hence gzip, rsync, md5, etc. are ubiquitous tools.
Is there somehow something wrong with Fark?

Drew is a published author who makes his business off writing about and mocking the idiosyncrasies and failure of the modern media. There are plenty of sites with rather sophomoric senses of humor (also see SomethingAwful) that have enormous amounts of quality content.
Also, a Monad is not a "thing", it's a property of a thing. "Monad" is a typeclass, not a type.

What follows is that Monads are not containers; you don't store a value in your Monad, you store it in your List. The List just happens to be a monad. (Similarly, you can't store a ball inside your "Red", but you can store it in a "Red Box". The fact that the box is red has nothing to do with its ability to be a container. If you paint a piece of paper red, it does not suddenly become a container.)

(Side note: it happens that Monads are Functors, and Functors are logically containers... but remember, the Monad or Functor instance is not what makes something a container; something is a container because of its underlying type. "Monad" is a property possessed by certain containers, just as "Red" is a property possessed by certain other containers. Oh, and please don't make me insert a joke about Red/Black trees here...)

Put simply; Monad = adjective, not Monad = noun. It took me like two years to come to terms with this, but now that I have, Haskell is one of the easiest-to-use programming languages I know.
Friend shopping not allowed: Facebook
I agree this is fair if everyone has a fair chance to index that content for an equal price. If any search engine were allowed to index Fox's content (or any other site of course) for an equal fee then this is fair. It is fair and just for content creators to get paid. However if, as the article suggests, there is exclusivity and a case where Bing is allowed to index it and Google is not given a fair chance at such, this could run afoul of antitrust laws.

As I mentioned in a sub-comment below, exclusivity like this is inherently anti-competitive which has a high likelihood to be found in violation of antitrust. (Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pict...)
SQL being notoriously poor at hierarchal data has been known for quite a while; he's obviously very correct there. Oracle goes so far as to offer a non-standard CONNECT statement for tree traversal. And there's not a whole lot of sophistication to relational theory on the ground level. Optimizing it is hard, but that's always been the case.

To a large degree we have designed things so that the data we try to store is as relational as possible, never mind the domain implications--then, the mismatch is covered up. A shopping cart is a perfect stupid problem easily solved by relational databases, until you start introducing the real world; special discounts, group packages, "buy these items and pay less $$ than you would getting them individually" is usually done through gross hackery, etc.
You in no way respond to the point in the article, which is that price discrimination (as enabled by high tuitions and generous financial aid) allows you to extract more money from those able to pay more money (allowing generous financial aid).
SuperCollider songs in 140 characters or less
Even if the spider doesn't respect robots.txt, the act of indexing is really obvious -- your webserver does not have to respond to their HTTP Requests if you don't want it to.

It's not as facile as 'lock your doors' -- instead just not answering when they knock.
Objective C is not "safe", any more than C++ is. It layers another (very nice! don't get me wrong) layer on top of C's semantics but retains all the problems with C.
1) Yes

2) I would guess that you have not spent much one-on-one time with young children. Kids are really much more people than most adults think.
Instructables: The perfect Site to Find Cool DIY Projects
The non-linear relationship of coding effort and results
This is fabulously done. While some of the pointer types are pretty verbose, they have nice abbreviations for many of them, and the "let" statement is just brilliant.

So basically, the verbose pointer types mean that when you're doing something unusual and/or sketchy, you have to document that fact. I'll consider that another feature as well ;-)

Anybody know if the heap garbage collector that they use is any good?

Man I wish they'd had this when we started on a project at work a year and a half ago...
+1 especially for that second part. I feel like you can easily evaluate other people's competence after working with them for a month or two. You don't need to spend 40 hrs / week with them to know this, it's more of an evaluation over time type thing.
If people are going to use denotational semantics to emulate a state-capabale environment, it's better if the method for doing so is standardized, well-specified, and optimized.

I am not following you here. State is nothing special, except that it is something made special by most popular programming languages. (Where it causes lots of fun problems.)

I am also not sure that "Monads" are optimized any more than any other function application. Monadic state-passing is syntax sugar more than anything else. (With other languages, state is "something else"; lexical environments, dynamic environments, and so on.)
Additionally, from my time at TotalFark, the $5/month weeded out many of the reprobates, and the quality of discussion was much higher. This was five or so years ago, however.
The Surprising Story of Simplenote (with sales data)
On a side note, anybody interests in doing a startup related to affiliate and/or rebates? I have an idea and I want to talk to somebody about it and hopefully the idea is good enough to create a startup.

terencekwan at gmail dot com
I worked at comparison shopping engines for a few years (like Shopping.com) and I can assure you that Cyber Monday is NOT myth. Our traffic always exploded the Monday after Thanksgiving.
I'm not entirely comfortable with some unknown editor changing my title for this story. Yes, in one manner this title is accurate. However, my original title was simply "Avoid these companies". I had a very specific reason for posting with that title, both in order to catch the reader's eye and to summarize the reason for my posting this link in a succinct manner. Additionally, after I posted the link I added a comment that more thoroughly explained the content of the article. That comment was removed, apparently, as I confirmed that it existed on this posting as soon as I posted it.
Am I the only one that LOVES how hacky C can be?
awin,

You'll see different responses from all different kinds of people to this. Everybody has a different allocation to the relative weights of different aspects of the system.

However, I would advise you to not worry much about application performance. Focus on programmer performance instead; search through Coding Horror's blog for more info on that.

Your difficulty will be reaching the point (in terms of users/loads) where you need to scale. I mean, how many users would you need before you ran too high of a load on some of the beefy Amazon EC2 instances? For almost everyone, their app will never reach that scale.

Also, scaling the application layer is little more than moving sessions to a database and putting a load balancer in front of your webservers. DB stuff is a lot harder, but for basic CRUD stuff you're going to be fine for a long while.

As far as performance goes, Paul Jones has a blog post (or two) on the performance of some different frameworks. I think Zend / CodeIgnitor were the two fastest, followed by symfony. CakePHP was at the end of the list, although the speed difference between top and bottom frameworks was just a factor of 2 or so. And Cake has seen about a 33% speed up in their codebase since then.

In short, don't worry about scaling. Pick the framework that looks like it will make your coders more productive.
That's a redundant product if you consider that every laptop owner's got wireless connection and one more computer with a large harddisk connected to LAN and/or an external harddisk with an ethernet connection. I wonder who will ever buy it at 450$
How do we get blocked in China
It was available earlier than that, even. But as pointed out below, this is a research project. I wouldn't use a research project in a production product.
Hadoop World: Hadoop + Clojure from Stuart Sierra
Wireless3g.com | Game Mobile Phone | 3G | Wireless Rental | Wireless Security
I did. I thought the people that brought up breasts won. I agreed with them, and they got lots of karma points.

If that's losing, I want to lose.
Is this what happens when you run the function past 1960?

http://i49.tinypic.com/mk8113.jpg
It wouldn't work for me - I just prefer walking on the grass :)
To be fair the password comes from apple. Any of the JB apps I have seen explicitly tell you that enabling ssh is a bad idea unless you know what you are doing and only if you are going to change the password. Though the fact that the app does not prompt you to change the password right then and there is lazy at best.
Well, it's not so much about weak passwords as it's about a single password being default across all installations of the app. I can't think of any instance of that happening with Macs but I haven't been using Macs for more than a few years so it may have happened "before my time". The point is though, it's arguable that (if background process were allowed and the same level of system access was allowed) such a configuration would never have passed the App Store approval process.

Granted, I don't know of any apps that have been rejected because of password related security concerns, but I also can't think of any apps that have a standard, universal default password. It's honestly such a wildly irresponsible thing to do I'm surprised it happened at all on any platform without some kind of community uprising involving pitchforks and torches.

[edit: apparently the password is already on the account in all iPhones, the SSH app just enables SSH and that user account. Still bad and still some level of irresponsibility, but not quite as bad as I thought, and still no way anything like this would make it through the App store approval process.]
I'm a bot, because I couldn't tell the difference between dogs and cats while using Rapidshare a few years back.
Hmm. I wonder if it might be too close. That is to say, close enough that people think "I'd rather have this implemented as a static checking flag in my C compiler and a few libraries" - and promptly forget it because they have filed it under "feature request" along with the zillion other things they want from a compiler.

The Go designers felt compelled not just to explain why their language is good, but why it ought to have a separate existence and not be implemented as an add-on to C/C++.
If you want to skip a short intro to Clojure, the Hadoop content starts around 16:30.
Ah, I didn't realize. So the shell password already exists and is "alpine", but the SSH app just enables SSH?

[edit, yeah, googled it and everything...]
Holiday gift ideas: PCs and notebooks galore
When you only have two buildings, only one door on each building, no other points of interest, a completely flat landscape, and no worries about ADA laws, it's a pretty easy problem. Then again, anything is easy when you control the variables.
s/unlocked/jailbroken/

There's a difference: http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Unlock
For instance, due to the massive advances in computers and manufacturing we've seen prices drop or stay level as the growth in the money supply has grown at a fast pace.

While I agree that this is a significant part of the explanation for why the money supply has been vastly expanded without much corresponding inflation, it's really hard to show in a simple manner, and it's worryingly close to a just-so story.
I'm not so sure. It seems that the shoehorning that is done to get data into the tables cause some problems. I am not sure if it is inherent in the model or just a function of the standard two team arrangement (dev & DBA). The rigid implementation requirements and mismatch with the languages developer use seems to be a problem.
Learnings From The New 24x7 Backup System On OurDoings
Has Bell Invented a "Telegraph Killer"?
ah, I knew that! Thanks, noted.
Jailbroken iPhones vulnerable to new virus
This could end up leading to the rise of "black hat" search engines. Search engines that don't bother with trivial details like "robots.txt".
There were a lot of places that had "Cyber Monday" sales (i.e., they named them "Cyber Monday Sale!!!"); I racked up for Christmas and myself at a seriously reduced price (only one I remember was like 50-60% off everything at Marc Ecko).
Or tail-recursion optimization, for that matter.
State is nothing special, except that it is something made special by most popular programming languages. (Where it causes lots of fun problems.)

With very elementary design decisions, mutable state is very much manageable in the most popular languages.

Hiding state maintenance through a monad solves very little, while throwing performance out of the window. Yeah, you can get performance out of a lazy functional language, but the hoops you have to jump through are not worth it.

Ocaml is eager functional, and IMHO is a very nice compromise between expressibility and purity. Now if only its type system was as capable as haskell, and only if it had multi processor support :(
A Call to Action - Help Protect Startup Financing
I'm a user they burned through. That was before the revelations about their offer tactics. I stopped playing their No-Limit Texas Hold-em poker app because I was suspicious that it was rigged.

I thought that maybe I was just a typical unlucky player who would make such a claim. I feel less sure of that after seeing the "every horrible thing in the book" remark.

I think the sleazy tactic would be to hook new players onto the game by weighting the odds in their favor.

For those who care... what I saw was a lucky streak when I started playing. For my style of play, that meant good hands and good flops. After a few weeks, I started seeing that people were regularly getting sucked out on and losing to very rare hands on a frequent basis. Yes, the former can be blamed on the quality and aggression levels of Internet users playing without consequence (i.e. real money). I couldn't explain the latter.

I saw players call very high bets on the flop and turn and end up with runner-runner straights or flushes on the river. It felt like the game might be rewarding stupidity more often than any decent pseudo-random number generation would dictate. Again, this could just be because a higher number of stupid hands are played in their game than IRL but I think I accounted for the probabilities in my incredulity.

Most damning was that I played for about about 3 hours over a 48 hour period and saw a straight flush and 3 4-of-a-kinds. I've played 4 hours a week of "bar poker" (play for chips, not money) for 1 1/2 years and have seen 2 straight flushes and 2 4-of-a-kinds total that whole time at the real tables. They're (supposed to be) rare enough that I can recall each instance with clarity.
People probably don't realize who Henry Baker is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Baker_(computer_scientist...

Yes, he's trolling here a bit, but he's brilliant (if quirky).

(Disclaimer: I knew him when I worked at MIT lo these many decades ago.)
Thanks for these notes - it would have been helpful for me to document each video but I wanted to get them online and posted. Sorry about the widget - viewing in full screen or listening to the audio should solve this issue. Looking forward to seeing the second video notes.
Maybe. But they've had the opportunity for years to explain their methodology to the world. Yet they refused to release the details of what they were doing, taking this attitude (as quoted from one of the alleged emails):

We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an "audit" by Steven McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues. ... I am unwilling to submit to this McCarthy-style investigation of my scientific research... I will continue to refuse such data requests in the future. Nor will I provide McIntyre with computer programs, email correspondence, etc. I feel very strongly about these issues. We should not be coerced by the scientific equivalent of a playground bully. I will be consulting LLNL's Legal Affairs Office in order to determine how the DOE and LLNL should respond to any FOI requests that we receive from McIntyre.

They shouldn't be surprised now to find that they're being tarred.

Of course, that doesn't help us extract the truth of the situation. But it's a pretty clear object lesson to other scientists.
The problem with this analysis is that most of this financial aid is based off of FAFSA. If you happen to fall into a common circumstance, it probably works for you, but there are many exceptions where FAFSA doesn't work out.

How does one define "rich." Sure, if your parents own a jet airplane, you are probably rich, but there is much room between having a banker father and a janitor father.

In my opinion, FAFSA doesn't adequately take into account household debt or siblings' tuition costs.