skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure anyone wins from this. I don't see why we need government sticking up for free products. People have been choosing Firefox for years now and converting their friends. What's the point of forcing the issue through law?

I'm not sure why Microsoft is even making a web browser right now. I doubt there's a business case for it. So what exactly is anyone hoping to achieve with this?
Microsoft Statement on European Commission Decision
You probably want to instead post this at http://www.arclanguage.org/forum .
Spot pricing should almost always be below reserve instance price since the utility is reduced by being unpredictably available.
Python doesn't really have real GC, it refcounts. See the stackoverflow answer.
Tenacity is a key attribute in successful entrepreneurs
Except, say, CloudFront, which requires S3 as origin.
Trumpesni URL su Goo.gl ir Fb.me
In general, there are three factors that characterize a trade secret:

* is not generally known to the public;
* confers some sort of economic benefit on its holder
(where this benefit must derive specifically from its not
being generally known, not just from the value of the
information itself);
* is the subject of reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy.

Javascript code fails all three tests
Does it really use both zsh and ksh? If you have to install two different shells for their functions, why not just use a real scripting language like Perl or Python?
Where to Find Computer Science Lectures Online
Jekyll is a promising tool, but not having tags is a pain. Also, markup errors are silently swallowed when running jekyll --server --auto.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could develop for standards compliant browsers which had the minimum of bugs, and there was innovation in this market?

Microsoft's bundling of IE meant they had no incentive to produce a good product, and their lack of development has caused stagnation in the industry. Free markets are supposed to produce the highest quality goods at the lowest possible price. It obviously didn't work here, either because the free market theory is flawed or there wasn't a free market.

The EU is trying to fix this.
The single feature preventing me from using Safari on Windows as my default browser is an option to open new tabs instead of new windows without some sort of "special" click. My annoyance lvel over this missing feature is becoming unreasonable.
Computer model predicts the future in some of the world's most volatile hotspots
Passive Monitoring
Place Your Bets on When the Polar Bear Population Disappears
I wonder if this will result in more large companies creating browsers. If it takes around 2% marketshare to get on the 'main' list and you can get significant free advertising from it in Europe, perhaps it's worth Yahoo or Amazon creating their own browser, even if it's just a rebranded open-source browser or an IE shell created with minimal investment.
Python refcounts and it has a real mark+sweep collector for collecting cycles. It's not a dichotomy, you know.
Scotland's deer are changing shape due to hybridisation
In Linux they're identical :-)
If Health Care Reform Fails, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow
It doesn't hurt that Google has been pushing chrome via ads like crack.
A patent so broad, so vague and so far reaching that you can sue Frito-Lay Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. at the same time! They basically just listed the fortune 500 and went for broke.

Mike McKool, head of the national law firm McKool Smith and lead counsel for Eolas, says he hopes the lawsuit will put an end to the widespread unauthorized use of the company's technology patents.

Perhaps we should all get together and have a day where we make that true. One day without ajax, iframes, or plugins of any kind ought to do it.
Count me in (Eindhoven). Early January would be perfect for me.
Industries that will lose the most jobs in next 10 years
Stronger, Better, Faster Design with CSS3
High Blood Pressure,Causes of High Blood Pressure
Jquery.couch.js Cheatsheet
"In Houston, the exact opposite of San Francisco, I assume you'd get shot"

switch that to 'small town texas' and I would agree. Houston proper tends to vote to the left, not to mention we have our own budget problems now.
I'd love to attend, Utrecht is the right location (although I'm in Amsterdam).

I'm kinda fluent in Dutch if you can handle brutalised word order and a particularly nasty English accent in Dutch :-)
you can use categories as a yaml listing and that works.. just means the url for the post will become /cat1/cat2/date-title.html
Right but browsers are a case of the free market working. It turns out no one wants to pay for web browsers but people like building them so we have open source browsers to fill gaps in commercial offerings. There aren't any serious barriers to entry for web browsers so we have a free market.
Artificial Red Blood Cells for Drug Delivery
the following terminal command will change Safari's default behavior to open all "new window" links in new tabs

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

EDIT: as slig kindly pointed out, this tip won't help Windows users.
I don't really see what the big deal is. Isn't this how most species have come about over time? I guess this is an artificially created scenario somewhat, but I'm sure there are plenty of species that have come about due to humans importing animals from one place to another.

It's not like horses in the US where there are no natural predators or anything.

Now if they start coming across variants that can shoot lasers from their eyes, I'll be worried.
The JVM (and I presume the CLR as well) has a couple of different garbage collectors that support concurrent (i.e. not stop-the-world) operation:

http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/hotspot/gc/gc_tuning...

I'm no GC expert, but these get you good, fast, and mostly concurrent GC (in very high-pressure situations where one is running out of memory, then I think both fall back to a serialized stop-the-world last-ditch-effort).
KaChing Raises $7.5 Million To Turn Mutual Funds On Their Heads
> By effectively doing your own timeslicing, you remove the need for any locking or concurrency issues

Native threads do this timeslicing for you; that is why they were invented (so that programmers didnt have to mess around with crazy micro-management of that they were doing).

Can you imagine writing Chrome or FireFox using a single thread (it would be hard, and probably unusable)? :)

Threads serve an excellent purpose
Russia’s Market Reform Architect Dies
Market share doesn't matter. What matters is person-hours of internet usage. Chrome users are on the internet for hours every day. It's part of their job. IE users are on the computer maybe once a day at the end of the day to check their Hotmail accounts. Since I'm online much more, I'm worth much more to Google, because as I search in the address bar I come across many Google ads from my Google search results. Some of which I click on.
Any experienced Clojure people care to comment on why atoms were used instead of agents? You don't care when the counter is incremented, just that it gets incremented, so I'd assume that an agent would model the problem more closely. Is it an overhead thing or what?
Mark Pincus, for his part, made it very clear that he wasn't in this one to cash out. (Watch his talk from Startup School). He wants to lead the next mega-company.
I can't see why anyone would stick with safari giving that Chrome runs the same rendering engine, a faster JS engine and extensions.
I was using Disqus as well for comments on my gihub blog, but some random reason it started redirecting to itself. Didn't have time to debug it so just removed it for now.
Nice tip, but he says that the problem is on Windows.
Wristband Tattoo Designs
But you might be way less likely to click on ads, because you had more training in ignoring them, than those IE users.
I loved this. If someone created a geeky analogue to Maxim magazine and filled it with articles like this on a monthly basis, it'd be a real hit.
Under Kwame, I'd agree. The new guy seems like he's doing ok considering the hand he was dealt.
>Causation without correlation. ...Suppose the value of y is known to be caused by x. The true relationship between x and y is mediated by another factor, call it A, that takes values of +1 or -1 with equal probability. The true process relating x to y is y = Ax.

>It is a simple matter to show that the correlation between x and y is zero. Perhaps the most intuitive way is to imagine many samples (observations) of x, y pairs. Over the sub-sample for which the pairs have the same sign (i.e. for which A happened to be +1) y=x and the correlation is 1. Over the sub-sample for which the pairs have the opposite signs (i.e. for which A happened to be -1) y=-x and the correlation is -1. Since A is +1 and -1 with equal probability, the contributions to the total correlation from the two sub-samples cancel, giving a total correlation of zero.

It seems to me that this doesn't quite make sense. Sure, the correlation of the average of the numbers is 0, but notice that |x - y| <= |2x|, or that |y| = |x|. That seems like a rather large correlation to me, even though half the time, x and y are positively correlated, and the other half, they're negatively correlated.
Rofl. I gave up on the article after the first paragraph, so I missed that nugget.

Did he explain how you conduct a double blind trial on climate change? That's like asking me (an astrophysicist) to conduct a double blind trial on the Big Bang.

It's not possible to do trials on some systems, either because there is only one or because it's impossible to manipulate it. In those cases, you are unfortunately stuck with collecting data and building (physically reasonable) models where you try to match those data and suggest new data which are predicted by the theory that can be used for testing it.

It is important to do the latter. Just because you can adjust a bunch of parameters in the model to match existing data doesn't give a lot of confidence in your model, because of the feedback loop that causes you to work on the model until it fits the data. What you need to do is then say "given this model, we predict x" and then go and look for x.

From what I know about the climate modeling, it would be nice to see more of the latter. I know there are some things (development of regional patterns of changes) that match the models, but I don't know whether those were pre- or post-dictions.
If an intro to Clojure and/or musical programming (live-coding) sounds interesting to people I'd be happy to present and demo an audio synthesis system I've been working on. (http://github.com/rosejn/overtone) It uses an interesting DSL for reading and writing binary files, does some networking, and lets you define DSP graphs for synthesizing audio.
I'd love to see a lightweight version of Disqus/Intense Debate--they seem so bloated. No branding, avatars, voting, etc...just simple, fast commenting.
That's most kind of you, thanks!
or that its faster than all other browsers in my experience.
What a Bikesharing Program Should Look Like
Given the rate at which Chrome is revolutionizing browser related technologies, I even think Chrome might overtake Firefox in market share very shortly.
Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner!

When I first read the article, I thought the same thing. If each site had their own salt key (probably based upon a id), then this problem goes away.

It could get even easier if the domain name captured via the http referrer was used as the salt, then Gravatar.com wouldn't even need a UI to let sites sign up. This might make it a little more difficult for a site operator though, so ideally this would be a configurable option.
Computers don't work that way. Unless you have many CPUs, nothing happens at the same time.

Most processors in the future will be parallel architectures of some kind. Even my current laptop is a multicore.
Man, and all this time I thought it was because of their smaller brains.

OK, just kidding. This sounds like it could apply to any science or math related major, not just computer science. Also, it seems to basically say that people feel unfortable in cultural surroundings they don't relate to.

Also, I don't think I ever had a classroom with Star Trek posters, video game boxes, and Coke cans lying around. the whole experiment just seems a little too basic.
Ohhh, this is just screaming for a futures market.
I suspect that Apple doesn't necessarily care to have the largest browser market share on Windows.

If they did, Safari on Windows would look and feel more like a Windows application. As it stands, it's a very opinionated application, with foreign-looking scrollbars, text antialiasing that works differently from ClearType (they may have changed this by now, I haven't looked), etc. Comparing market shares between these browsers with the assumption that they have the same goals might be a bit off.

[edit]: I've also noticed a lot of people I know living over in the Windows world seem to harbor an uncontrolled hate-on for iTunes and Quicktime. Since these are often associated with the installation of Safari, that probably doesn't help Apple's position. Does Chrome come with any "unwanted" extras?
My masters thesis and a ICME 08 paper was somewhat related:

http://mixedrealitybilliards.com

I have not worked on that in 2 years. Let me know if you would like to revive it!
If you follow the link to the advisory board you will see they confirmed the earth was destroyed last year.

There's a comments section to discuss the topic.
I think he was referring to the "20 sweaty minutes in the back of a Volkswagen after the club and we forgot the condoms" part; but omitting that might fall under "unnecessary detail" rather than "outright fibbing."
Keep in mind these are fairly dense (judging from the ones I've attended in years past) and assume a reasonable amount of background - they're not google tech talks. 'Christmas Lecture' makes them sound universally accessible but that's not quite the case. It's helpful if you're familiar with the sort of topics covered in his Concrete Mathematics. Also if you're expecting a lecturer in the Feynmanian stratosphere, you might be disappointed. Certainly interesting stuff, with those caveats.

Edit: A few minutes into this lecture after drawing a graph and its Laplacian matrix on a bit of paper he says 'I'm not going to use high-powered determinant theory in this talk but if determinants scare you, too bad, just enjoy the jokes'.
"A Mathematician’s Apology", by G. H. Hardy
Oh, I didn't mean it as a criticism -- I'm afraid it has to be that way. My Common Lisp code that has been optimized looks similar (sprinkled with type declarations in various places).
Reminds me of one of George Carlin's show where he talks about how humans destroy planet earth. The earth is built to last, and will be there even if humanity is long gone.
Safari's Javascript engine runs faster than Chrome's on the Mac. I'm not sure what went wrong in the Windows port.
I sadly agree
Chrome is the new FireFox--the quickly moving upstart. A great thing as FireFox is quickly losing its shine.
You could email the Safari preferences file to somebody with a Mac and have them run the command.
I know this is schadenfreude, but I love this. As I see it, a city of people with backwards values is getting its just deserts.

Unfortunately for me, when the city eventually goes bankrupt, I'll probably end up footing the bill via my federal taxes.
Storage Highlights of 2009
One thing that isn't apparent to me is if these new Cloudfront features support Live streaming. Does anyone know if Live Streaming is supported, and how one would go about implementing?

All I can see from initial docs and tutorials is that you upload static flash content.
The reference counting causes the problem here. When multithreading means that incrementing/decrementing a reference count is no longer deterministic, you need locks, or all hell breaks loose. Adding a mark&sweep GC isn't going to fix that.

While I'm not familiar with the specifics of Python's GC, a mark&sweep phase is usually added to reference counting so that if there's garbage which contains references to itself but has no external references, it will eventually be collected. (_Garbage Collection_ by Richard Jones and Rafael Lins is an excellent resource on GC details, btw. There's also a decent overview in the O'Reilly OCaml book (http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/html/book-ora082.... )). In other words, it plugs the worst memory leaks caused by reference counting.

How to do multiprocessor / multithread GC well is still an area of active research. In the mean time, one simpler solution is to have several independent VM states, each running in their own thread (or process), and communicating via message passing. Lua makes this easy, but its VM is considerably lighter than Python's.
Which one is the bigger population that can statically accommodate this growth? the set of people who consciously shop for browsers with faster Javascript VMs and faster startup times, or the set of people who click on Google ads? Specially authoritative looking ones?

Let's be real.
The site comment equating the strong a-Santa position with cold oatmeal, gray pajamas, and a cheerless disposition made me think of Eliezer Yudkowsky's essay about joy in the merely real--http://lesswrong.com/lw/or/joy_in_the_merely_real/

It seems applicable to the article as a whole, as well as most of the reactions to it.
You're welcome. Watching video lectures is my most favorite hobby. I'll let you all know when I start doing this!
Interested. Utrecht and amsterdam are both fine by me. Sneek would be to much of a commute :)
Came in here just to post this, so I'm glad someone else already has. Miami might as well be another country. (I am from Miami and completely agree with that congressman who said this place was a 3rd world country)
Not true. At best they are equal. Most of the times chrome bests safari. http://www.manu-j.com/blog/chrome-vs-firefox-vs-safari-vs-we...
Maybe someone should just stab him in the fucking gut and shut this bastard up for good.
I've been a Mactard for years and a big fan of Safari, but Chrome has become my default browser on my Mac.

Chrome became the default on my PC at work as soon as I could get it installed a year ago.

The beauty of Chrome is its speed and elegance. Omnibox for searches, the behaviour of tabs (remembering which tab spawned the subsequent one), and the ability to use icons only for the bookmarks bar are three things that Safari doesn't do.

The addition of extensions for the PC have cemented its position there, and when those services are added to the Mac version life gets better.

Firefox does most of this, of course, but it looks and feels bloated and old on both platforms.

I will forever love Firefox for freeing us from Microsoft's IE tyranny, but Chrome is truly firing on all 8 cylinders these days, pun intended.
Gulf petro-powers to launch currency in latest threat to dollar hegemony
I moved from SF to Miami and the government is surely corrupt here as well, but not in the same way and scale as SF.
If Python can't get this threading thing worked out, isn't the language going to get left behind as parallel architecture marches onward?
"OK, but a Clojure purist would probably see those occasions as maybe highlighting gaps in that language’s coverage."

A Clojure "purist" is probably still programming Scheme. In other words, "purist" and "Clojure" do not go well together. As Rich Hickey often says, he is a "practitioner." He wants to Get Things Done, and Clojure reflects that. Dropping down into Java is not "cheating," it's one of the reasons Clojure was implemented on the JVM in the first place, and I've seen Rich recommend calling Java code to solve a problem multiple times on the Clojure group.
I love my Firefox. I don't think I could give it up for anything. The thing that sells me the most on FF is the extensions. I also build extensions and I don't really want to ever rewrite my FF extensions. It would totally suck...
Chrome's market share is a considerable jump to say it was released little over a year ago. I never saw this kind of growth for Firefox until the paid ads started appearing everywhere.

Chrome has attained in its first year the same average market growth of Firefox (roughly 4.5%) that it attained in 5 years with paid referral programs and advertisements everywhere. I wonder what growth Chrome will attain when it hits the rapid phase of its growth.

Also to consider is Microsoft is shipping Windows 7 in Europe with IE, Firefox, Chrome and another IIRC.
Horses where re-imported to the US after they were hunted to extinction by Native Americans. However, most of their natural predators had also been killed off by Native Americans so your point is still accurate.

Hybridization is actually not how new species are created, it normaly only produces fertile offspring when the parents are both membors of the same species just different breeds. This mixing will probably delay the creation of a new species by reducing the genetic differences between the populations.
Paredit Presentation
It's not like the performance increase is subtle.

The five buttons you have to click, each saying 'I acknowledge that this software may set my computer on fire' before you can even run an installer on windows has really cut down on program installation by the unwashed masses- in short, I think you are wrong.
One of the big pains of my work day is our accounting system which, while being great at what it does well, can be abysmally slow to respond to queries (the simple question of how much of X do we own now, takes it around three minutes to answer...). We know from experience though that internally it can deal with up to three requests at a time without it slowing down. If I only had one thread then three requests (which block) would take me nine minutes to process, with three threads I can get all the results back in three minutes.
That's not really constructive.
Legal liability and CIA Drone operators
Has nothing to do with "parsing", but otherwise an OK personal sentiment.

I have seen this abuse of the word "parsing" yesterday as well. Seth Godin released a new ebook of motivational posters for the distraught marketer, and in it they called the act of distilling insight from data: "parsing". That's almost like calling surgery "internal haircut".
Freakonomics: Pay When They Let You
Writing for Python 3 is fun.
> Can you imagine writing Chrome or FireFox using a single thread (it would be hard, and probably unusable)? :)

Firefox is single threaded.

Chrome runs each tab in its own process- also not multithreading.
Meh. You could roast everything on the surface with the energy of several large impactors. This would use orders of magnitude less energy than most of the methods described, and still kill every living thing on the surface. (As in everything on the surface is engulfed by molten rock, tidal waves, pressure blasts, and everyone dies in the space of a few hours.)

Lesson: leave the Earth's orbit alone, and just massively disrupt the biosphere.
Maybe we should call it a Dutch-Flemish meetup and pick Eindhoven for a central location?
These kind of argument sounds so familiar. Decades ago, when people worked on supercomputer, hundreds of millions dollars thrown to "parallel compiler", "shared memory machine" which aimed to reduce the complexity of parallel computing for programmers. But, it just doesn't work. If a programmer cannot aware of the underlying architecture of your parallel machine, the performance will get heavily harmed. That's why there are threads, message-passing, NUMA today.