skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, I see a need for some type of local email/sms/update service. You could throw classifieds or something like it in there. My university has an alert system when alerts happen. I would love to get that for my local town.
Hopefully the model you envision is what happens to all media, like music and (albeit much later) TV and movies.
sounds good...hes not cheating anybody.
He is just trying to get into the first 1000 by having a program execute his order at the right time.
Lots of people like Ruby+Rails or Python+Django, so these are obvious choices. Also, if you choose a system that lots of people use, it's easier to get support from the net when things go wrong (as they are bound to from time to time).
i disagree a little with the advice above as a recommendation for the original poster. i'm not saying that web.py is better or worse than django or ror, but i think that as a "learning experience" it's probably better to go with one of the larger packages. learning to use a big package will teach you a lot. once you have that understanding, sure, go with web,py and cut your own path.
It's not tough to do well if your aim is really to "discuss something rationally." Most of the time, people are not trying to discuss anything in particular, or understand anything better; they're just trying to socialize, and whatever they're arguing about is just a medium in which to play games of flag-waving and oneupmanship. (I know that sounds dismissive, but I'm not trying to crap on it; I do it too. It's just the way it is.)

It's silly to look at the result and say, well, you would communicate better if you did X, because that's not the goal.
Do pardon me if I'm being obvious or not addressing your question, but the following examples spring to mind:

pets.com, etoys, et al. -> zappos,

altavista, goto, yhoo, et al. -> goog,

broadcast.com, real media, "quicktime TV" -> youtube

These examples were all established a few years after the original players came in fully loaded with cash, hype, etc yet failed to solve or even identify underlying problems.
Ebooks are "typeset" in the e-reader. Formats are necessarily reflowable.
We'll, I'm not sure we should be spending $12B on higher education. Let's convert that to freely available online courses. If people want the full in-person college experience, then maybe they should pay for it themselves?

Isn't that a bit simplistic? Sure, one might make the argument that a Literature or History major might be okay with only online courses but there are any number of fields (engineering among them) where a hands-on approach is essential to understanding the material. "Pay for it themselves" just means that only the rich will be able to afford college. It's in the state and national interest for us to be able to train engineers, so certainly the state should be supporting higher ed. As for the amount, $12b divided by 132k positions = $92k/position (which also includes energy costs, rent, etc). You think it's too much?

We aren't getting our money's worth out of the $4.6B for the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive line item.

How much should a body that governs the worlds eighth largest economy cost?

$32B for Health and Human Services is full of charges to cover illegal aliens that the Fed can't (or won't) keep out of the country, but California has to (or chooses to?) cover the bill.

Specifics?

* Tort reform would help too*

Specifics? And what would this involve cutting?
Last updated at 17:55 on 15 October 2009 (PDT).

Shame, really.
Please don't. Please get them off the IE stack and onto a browser with a rendering engine developed by a company with an incentive to improve the web. Chrome, Firefox, Safari - all are good. Please dump IE.
Forensic analysis of recent Victoria's Secret photo
Quality of your audience is key. You can always grow the subscriber base later, but you can't increase the quality too easily or at all. Look to serve a valuable demographic or niche sector. Someone here said banking. Women is another. Techno geeks like ourselves are another. Sports fans are another. The really high end and rich are another. Urban is another. General spray and pray traffic is just complete shit on a cpm basis. You need a lot of volume.

I would say that Email Newsletters are the most valuable. Thrillist gets $270 cpm for a dedicated video email. Their normal ads in the emails are somewhere around $30-$60, so lets say $45 average. If you have 10,000 monthly subscribers, you could do the following. Numbers used are for a smaller newsletter who can't command a CPM like thrillist:

One weekly "dedicated" email (4 per month) at $100 cpm- 4x100x10 $4000
Ads half filled at $30 CPM, 20 emails a month, so 10 opportunities due to half filled- 30x10x10- $3000

That's 7,000 per month off of 10,000 subscribers. 10,000 subscribers isn't terribly difficult to achieve. You can live pretty comfortably off of that.
I never understood what sensual pleasure a physical book gives you, and I'm a big big reader of books.

It could be that I have no psychological anchors like your grandfather gift, your lovers notes and so on some people have. Some people love sniffing the glue and the ink chemicals too.

Quite the contrary, I love books content, not continent.

I hate having to "break" a book for reading it because otherwise you won't have uniform lighting on the page, in fact you never have in a book.

I hate having to sustain the weight of a big novel.

I hate having to wash my hands because it gets dirty with the poisonous ink.

I hate having to carry around tons of books when I move.

I hate not being able to change the font size or the format in shorter lines so I could speed read it better.

So I started digitalizing my library long ago, and I'm not going back, I'm not the only one.

I met a man 10 years ago that had 1000 digitalized books library, I remember being socked when he showed me. Now more and more people are doing that and is quite normal to see.
One way to get ideas is to visit your local library and go through all the technology magazines of +- 3 years ago.
Sans Serif Fonts for Web Designers
There is undoubtedly specialization, but I also believe in a linear continuum across efficiency. Any programming problem, at some level, ends up including solving a constraint problem: how do you fit your solution elegantly into an initially unknown problem space? Greater expressive freedom and abstraction are often heralded as wins in programming languages perhaps because they both promote though toward elegant solutions and then provide the structure necessary to easily build them.

I think that this kind of test is not so different from testing something like Sapir-Whorf. Does using language X by itself help someone to solve problems more quickly/elegantly/efficiently/effectively?

So, instead of considering specialization to be multidimensional and therefore impossible to quantify, I'm thinking of it as something you'd "just" need to control for. Randomization across a large number of programming problems could possibly get a handle on that control.
Weird, I thought this would be more common, I use:

~/Dropbox/code/<language>/<project name>/

it's all backedup and available immediately on all my machines, pretty handy. sometimes I use git inside of dropbox, but I'm still learning git in a real way so not all of my code is in it.

This is a fun thread to read, I'm starting to question my methods. At the very least seems like there is no reason not to have everything I write inside of git (or some version control).
If there is only a horizontal scroll bar you can scroll with the scrollwheel.
Read/watch all the Amy Jo Kim presentations you can find online.
LAMP, WordPress with nice URLs in ubuntu
I think any big-name distributor would want at minimum some sort of fixed term contract. Or else, the author could pull their book (or series) to a private site (and pocket 100%) the moment it took off.

Amazon and friends do have something to offer: eyeballs, and their good name. So they can negotiate.

I think you'll see newbies entering through what used to be called "vanity publishing" via Lulu etc, getting picked as a rising talent by reviewers, getting in the press, and finally being offered a contract by Amazon. This latter will become the equivalent of the old status of "published author".
Personally I would rather use a ebook reader as target practice for taking a squat than ever read a book on one, however that's personal preference and is a world from an equitable arrangement on digital publishing rights.

Authors have the ability to score a 50/50 revenue share on digital publications and make it a standard, which would be a phenomenal step in bringing fair payment to writers. It would put a writer five times further ahead than any artist selling on itunes, who's lucky to get 10 cents for a sale.

The reality here is that publishers are trying to take a cut of a pie that doesn't belong to them. I legally own digital publication rights to all my works, unless expressly stated in a contract that I'm signing them over, in most backlist publications those rights were never even considered, unless the contract stated the author was selling 'all' rights. The publishers here legally have no right to be interfering, and so far (quite rightly) appear to be losing the battle. If authors switch to fully digital publication to get a decent revenue share, as a writer myself I'll have to back them and, perhaps I'll have to pick an ebook reader off the floor and try to keep my pants on, because as a reader I want quality works and they're only going to appear if authors can continue to make a living. If the publishers get their way and cut the profit the authors can receive, then we might as well abandon all hope of another literary masterpiece.
Setup, configuration, and maintenance of DNS servers isn't simple. They need to run as root on a server with a static IP.

Hosted DNS solutions cost money, don't always support all record types, and rarely have programmatic interfaces.

In short, it'll make my life easier. Hopefully yours too.
Not exactly... if you're already logged into Google, then they make you re-login to Groups. If you log out of Google entirely, you can read it as an anonymous visitor. In other words: they're only bugging people with login prompts who they already know.
bfc.rb : Compile BrainF*** code to Ruby, C, Haskell, Scheme and LLVM
Simply put, in the New Model editorial professionalism is just as irrelevant as in the Old Model.

Like the old model, editorial professionalism is simply to bring return customers and provide a larger market base to your advertisers.
Yeah. I personally have nothing against paper books - except they are heavy and waste space. And when you think about it, you're holding what amounts to a 5mb data file (with multiple immutable passive display screens) and it's about twice the physical volume of a 500gb hard drive and doesn't mass much less. Wildly inefficient! A micro-SD card the size of your fingernail could store a thousand times as much.
XBMC (xbmc.org) now has plugins for weather. If you could make this a plugin for that I would love it to death and I think it would be downloaded a lot.
While you're waiting, might as well ask if Craigslist could create a geo for you. It doesn't seem to be too difficult for them to add cities these days. You'll probably need to make a good case though.
Using lists instead of vectors brings the Clojure version down to around 10X the speed of the CL code.

user=> (#'i27.palindromes/big-test)

1000 X ' amanaplanacanalpanama '
fast : "Elapsed time: 183.748 msecs"
Follow-up: http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/329-The...
there was an essay/article going round a few years ago describing how stallman had an entire account on cvs and would simply check it out wherever he was...
On Christmas Day Customers Purchased More Kindle Books Than Physical Books
Thanks! I added Gowalla on the list! I am more interested in the data modeling and algo and good examples like Gowalla.
Ha, that's precisely how I organize it too :)
Most authors don't know how to nor want to self-publish their books. Publishers also have extensive back catalogs. So even if a distributor (like amazon) started to provide the same services, they would have to compete with the publishers as they, as a distributer, would need the publishers back catalogs.
I'd like to see figures on how many of those were free though - a comparison of dollars spent on ebooks versus physical books.
I didn't understand that part of the post, but also don't know much of the history here. Was Genera + Dynamic Windows running on these so-called "Lisp Machines", or was it in competition with the Lisp Machines?

And if Kent was such a big fan of Lisp, why was he writing "impossible do on Lisp Machines" programs in Teco? They could be written in Teco but not in Lisp?
By snippets, I mean little bits of useful code or short scripts that I don't use frequently, but find myself reusing them regularly enough to keep them around. Generally, I don't keep these in version control, and as such, they're not posted online.

I might consider moving them all to using gists, but I'm not quite sure if that's ideal.
Almost the same. But i have one more level above ${company_or_topical}, ${language}. I don't really know why, kind of a personal tradition.
Thanks I will send you an email! Is that UWaterloo like in the UK?
Plus a /open_source/ folder for sources of OSS projects i follow or hack on.
In 1982 the CEO and Treasurer of my company (SAIC) bought me a Xerox 1108 - definitely a great box, especially because it was back in 1982.

Lisp purists will probably slam me for this (with adequate justification) but I prefer the modern Lisp ecosystem with:

* both free/open source and commercial Lisp environments

* free deployment using open source systems like SBCL, etc. (In ancient history, I only used my 1108 for marketing prototypes and research because there was no reasonably priced deployment strategy)

* when I do want a persistent heap setup, I use SBCL and dump new images as I work. I don't often use this mode unless I have a lot of data that I am using over a long period of time - otherwise reloading source at the beginning of each work session is OK.

* emacs + slime is a good environment

If you want image based development, I would suggest that you try Squeak Smalltalk (liberal open source license) or Cincom Smalltalk (modest cost, good support and features, and a good deployment strategy). I think that using Cincom is totally free until you start making money with it.
In the sort of system I envision the author could pull their book as soon as it became popular, but it's unlikely that an author using their own web site or social network would be able to compete against the large marketing and delivery potential of companies like Google or Amazon. Perhaps there would need to be a minimum term.

Even so a system something like this would be a win-win situation for authors, distributors and readers (and more arguably for the environment in terms of reduced need to chop down trees and transport books around). The distributor could also supply additional services at a cost, such as the ability for readers to have their private libraries in "the cloud" as a dropbox type of system. So I think the distributor would have sufficient scope to add value around the product that an author may not have much incentive to leave prematurely.
Thanks lots of videos - will need three days to view them! :)
That has no bearing on the organization of the directory tree of your code.

I already keep my projects (public and private) in version control (on GitHub).
Why would he do that, given that Guile is GNU's flavor of Scheme?
He was clearly guilty of much more than tax evasion. The rule of law failed in regard to most of his misdeeds.
Last I tried, with a Curve, it was flaky and basically impossible to get working on a mac. But it seems to vary significantly with the OS version and model of blackberry.
A film by Charles and Ray Eames for Polaroid
Django Pattern: get_allowed_or_404
In Django, a common view pattern is to protect access to a resource by user ownership. This article discusses how to allow staff to access any resource while still restricting regular user access.
1) Come over on a student visa. Major restrictions, you have to go to school full-time and you can't work anywhere. But in the meantime you can apply for jobs at places that might sponsor an H1-B visa and/or greencard.

2) Apply for a job at places that might sponsor an H1-B visa and/or greencard.

3) Marry a U.S. Citizen.
One branch of Lisp Machines originated at the MIT: the CONS and CADR Lisp Machines. If Kent was at the MIT and was using Zmacs and ZMail, those ran on the CADR already. Lisp Machines from Symbolics, LMI and TI were later based on the hardware and software from the MIT, but they used new processors and the OS was extended. MIT stopped developing the CADR and bought the machines and software from TI and Symbolics, then.

Kent said that he implemented things in TECO that people thought were possible only on the Lisp Machine. Writing software on the Lisp Machine was usually easier than, say, in TECO.
At Tiny Rates, Saving Money Costs Investors
Jay,

Sent you email. I may have something for you.
then let IE choke.
I have a system that works well for me, basically separating small test/experimental bits of code from code for customer projects. I'll talk about the layout of book code later.

I keep small test/experimental bits of code in sub-directories of top level directories labeled Java_stuff, Lisp_stuff, Scheme_stuff, Ruby_stuff, Python_stuff, etc. Each test/experiment is in a well named sub-directory. These small experiments are useful for both learning and for later reuse on real projects.

I keep each active customer project in a directory with sub-directories for documentation, code, and test data.

For work on books: similar to customer projects: sub-directories for source code, for figure files (OmniGraffle and exported vector PDF files), for code examples, and for Latex (or OpenOffice if I can't use Latex).

I also keep a temp directory for downloading, building, running, and perusing source code for projects that I read about on the web. I periodically delete stuff in temp that is older than a few weeks old.

Finally, not specifically for code: I use Google documents to make copious deployment notes which I use for reference for future projects.
Or indeed, you can set it to blink green when you haven't got a message but do have signal coverage.

BlackBerries are great!
>>Most authors don't know how to nor want to self-publish their books.

I'm cheaper than an existing publisher if the author is willing to go digital only. Hmmm, maybe there's an opportunity for small publishers to make a comeback...
Lisp Deserves a Fresh Look (2006)
See also http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/07/photoshopped-iranian-missile...
Can you share one of your sites? I think we're all pretty curious to see. We won't make fun of you.
That is a good point, and one that I had forgotten about.
One day Harmonix will make Wavelength with a bundled keyboard and everything will be right in the world.
"""Some of these sub-directories are actually symlinks to encrypted DMGs, again depending on who owns the IP."""

That is how I handle customer proprietary data also for customers who want their work encrypted.
Google Groups would definitely be the simplest, although not 100% like craigslist.
Some rural towns have a radio hour that's basically craigslist. If there's a local radio station, I'd guess you'd have more luck with this format than with a website. (Hat tip to "This American Life".)
The dropbox comment sounds a little cheap. Making $12k and going out of your way to avoid paying $10 for a quality app?
Perhaps myhometown.stackexchange.com could be a good start? The format is relatively simple (just Q&A). All the hosting is taken care-of... so one could set up a stackexchange in an afternoon (just seed the questions and do some basic design).
He does supply the source code, though:

http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/src/
BTW, I also use git for almost all of the materials in the parent comment. I use a very small managed VPS for my git repositories.

For extra backup (in addition to git remote repositories): I have a script that mounts a EBS volume on my always running EC2 instance, does an rsync to the EBS volume of almost everything but decrypted sensitive files, and then unmounts the EBS volume. EBS volumes are reasonably reliable.
Magic Tricks based on deep Mathematics
I don't understand the criticism really. I would expect Victoria's Secret to photoshop pictures.
I don't know if I back the argument, but I'd suggest that widespread knowledge of a class of people being wiped out greatly increase the stress, fear and terror struck into the hearts of all others in that class who have yet to get rounded up. furthermore, if they flee, communities get uprooted. and, though I hate to say it, whilst the killing of a man is in some cases justifiable (self defence, death penalty if you're into that kind of thing, which many societies worldwide are, etc) i really cannot see any argument for systematic killing merely based on race.
Very brilliant, including the followup. This is forensics at its best.
It isn't about criticism, it is about forensics, using reasoning and computer algorithms to figure out what people did. It is an intellectual challenge, not a criticism.
(a) This fairly qualifies as "contortions", and (b) if an enterprising blogger found out that they were doing this, they could construct a convincing post that this was a security vulnerability (for instance, through timing).

If you like, you can also suggest that they simply SHA1 passwords, and keep a database of well-known passwords and their SHA1 hashes. But again: a lot of effort for almost no benefit. The list-of-worst-passwords is a very solved problem.
$12b divided by 132k positions = $92k/position (which also includes energy costs, rent, etc). You think it's too much?

Those 132k positions also include support staff as well as junior colleges. Yes, $92k/position average is too much. I also highly doubt it includes any form of rent, since the gov't probably owns all of the land it uses for schools and would have made a killing on it.

How much should a body that governs the worlds eighth largest economy cost?

I suppose that would depend on what that body does. We're currently spending 3.8% of the budget on this governing body, which seems awful high to me. Drill into the line item, it'll blow your mind:

Judicial Branch: 2,001 people, $2.2 Billion budget. That's over a million dollars per person, per year, average!!!

Specifics?

My mistake for touching this political hotbed, but if you haven't heard of illegal aliens obtaining free health care in emergency rooms, there is plenty of info on the net about it.

Tort reform. Specifics? And what would this involve cutting?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort_reform

Basically, malpractice insurance is a huge cost, some doctors pay more for that than they take home in pay. Not to mention unnecessary tests that are performed simply for protection against lawsuits. Tort reform ultimately cuts payments to lawyers. But, congress (both state and federal) is full of lawyers.

I'm not hopeful for tort reform. Congress doesn't have a history of passing laws that negatively impact themselves personally. They've even exempted themselves from the "universal healthcare" legislation: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124536864955329439.html
I've posted this on HN before, but I wrote a long essay about problems with account-karma-moderation systems: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000

Probably too involved for your project, but there are some problems you should be aware of from the get go.
I would love to see an analysis like that of this photo I first posted to my blog (http://socialtech.ca/ade/index.php/2008/03/beware-the-big-ba...) which generated the usual claims of "Photoshop" on Reddit, until I posted the original version, which kicked off many more claims that it was 'shopped (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6byul/to_all_the...)

Even though, to the best of my knowledge, the photo is 100% real.