skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is only fair to mention that this is Tiny C, not full C.
I do not think that a Microsoft product mockup (or one produced by a company working for MS) would use Google Maps.
I like it, very clean and simple. The # tagging allows to make it flexible.
Actually LPs have much less dynamic range potential than CDs. It's just that most producers do not utilize that range, they instead push all the levels to the top.

I used to have a link to a study that claimed that many "long term" popular hits (music that has remained popular for decades) has a common thread of being produced with a wide dynamic range. I can't find it now...
I just had a more detailed look at Keyczar and it's pretty awesome. Unfortunately it depends on pycrypto which is a tough dependency for Django as a whole.

We already have a mechanism for allowing you to "swap out" the hashing backend used for Django's get_signed_cookie and set_signed_cookie functions. It wouldn't be at all hard to write an optional keyczar backend for that. I think I'll do that. I'll need to extend the configurable backend aspect to cover other things within Django that use signing as well.
Mainly that "detonating PETN is actually very hard" and "no security system [...] on the planet, is designed to catch someone doing this". I remember his analysis to be more detailed than this, but maybe I remember wrong. There were also a post about the predator drone about a week ago, which had some good technical points, but in my opinion was poor from an intelligence perspective.
I believe the author was making the point that as humans we cannot always do what we plan to do. We run out of 'ego' before we run out.
How is it done? JS?
DC is only cash strapped because of gross mismanagement and systematic corruption.
Do you have some examples in mind for 1. pure technology play?

I ask because that may be where I'm headed - thanks!
> We try to keep Django's dependencies down to the Python standard library

Any good reasons for this?
I had to love one of the comments from the article:

Glass on glass = Dirt rubbing/scratching madness.

When it's off the screen will look like the back of an iPod Classic.
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go
That is in the title :)
I think the difference is that the calling cards are for a set number of minutes and a monthly internet service is just a on/off thing. The other thing I wonder about though is gift cards - I'm sure there have to be tons of dollars that expire on those all the time. Does the gov take a cut?
It's not clear to me either as trucks that carry you and other things are entirely different to a computing device which you yourself have to carry. I would suggest that netbooks are not something you can just dump something on, they are not a big truck. The author's technical expertise reminds me of someone...
What was irritating about it being HTTPS?
I think this kind of article is really interesting, because it gives us new ways of understanding the basics of complex technologies. The typical compilers course is designed to teach how huge monsters are developed (that is why we have a dragon book). It is interesting to see the minimum such monster and how we can improve on that.
Those statements are both true, and they support his point that the airport security systems have done some good. I don't see the problem.
Personal opinion: It's probably one of the reasons we're the most popular Python web framework, especially amongst people with no prior Python experience.

We may change that policy in the future (we've discussed it) but we're not going to change it just so the signing feature can get in to Django 1.2 - and I'd really like to get signing in to 1.2.
Bose Dynamic Automobile Suspension
I think a more representative test would be BDB vs SQLite, since they are architecturally more similar (e.g. there's no SQLite "daemon", it's a C library).
Except that he beats Andy Roddick on that 2009 Wimbledon Final. It is in Roland Garros that he beats Soderling in final that year.
Ireland: 35,000 USD fines for Blasphemy
Personal Productivity Checklist
I find it a stretch to say that unused minutes can be considered "unclaimed property". The cards basically are a contract where ATT will deliver up to X minutes of use within a defined time frame. That's really just a bandwidth agreement. What's next, will cable companies be required to rebate me for the hours of TV that I don't watch every day?
I love the theme. How do I get my hands on it?
The neurons that shaped civilization
See also Gearman (http://gearman.org/)
I was waiting for the punchline, but it never came. Okay, where is that money?
How to make Freemium Pay
You're right of course; the recent Wimbledon Final absolutely was a historic match.

However, if I had to choose a game to rewatch, this one would be on 4th place behind the ones I listed. Not to take anything away from the performance of the players, but for my taste the match had slightly to much focus on the serve.

Btw.: add US Open 2009 Semi Final vs Djokovic; and not just for the greatest Tennis shot ever where Federer runs back to catch D. ball and passes him with shooting through his legs ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TygKHUcT-Ek
the government is trying to stimulate aggregate demand by pumping credit into the system. they're just fueling savings (the negative household spending you see). so why not fund this demand to build up savings with a direct tax cut for the middle class instead of &^%ing bailouts for %^&heads? lots of economists are calling for a payroll tax break to both fund savings AND create jobs (since wages tend to be sticky companies could soak up some of the excess and fund job creation).
Stop Dumbing Down The World with Bad Interview Questions
KUOW High Bandwidth - SHOUTcast Radio Player
Nice idea!

You should let people drop in their RunKeeper user URL and scan their activities GPX data from there (it's all there).

Quite a few people I know use RunKeeper for cycling now because it's one less device to buy/maintain/ride with (running on the iPhone and all). In addition, the RK guys are likely to help you promote your service -- they're quite active with respect to their community.
January 1st of each year should be National Public Domain Day
While it's easier to achieve high performance and scalability with key-value stores, they also make it easier to create highly available applications. Replication, failover, and multi-master support are abundant in the popular key-value offerings. This was the reason I eventually decided to use Tokyo Tyrant for http://wasitup.com
More importantly, every pen writing interface I've ever used has basically sucked, including the Windows Mobile interface. I doubt that is a solved problem.
Great article... wish I read it four years ago, then again in hindsight it's nice to be critical of a journalist having knowing the content a bit. Particularly, this was quite comical:
"Nadal ... his way of always cutting his eyes warily from side to side as he walks the baseline, like a convict expecting to be shanked." soo true, ha.

Pretty accurate description of, "if you've only watched pros on TV, then you really have no idea how" fast the game really is or how hard they are hitting the ball, that suffering from TV you lose that extra dimension to viewing the game, also where he talks about the foreshortening of the court assists in lessening the effect these players actually have if you were in person.

Another area that I found interesting: "The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws."

"... a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light." Well, if you've ever really looked at Federer, he really is one of the skinniest out there, in both tennis and overall sports... even Tiger Woods who is the same height and weighs less than Fedex, looks at least to me, heavier than Fedex... can't deny Woods has more muscle mass than Fed and might well explain Fed's ability to float around the court.

Finally, what can we learn when he talks about what the game looks like to Fedex? It's almost like it really does depend on what's going on inside his brain, pistons firing like no other brains can.

Good find.
I've always thought it was standard practice to convert to non-left recursive form (when it will be implemented as a recursive descent parser, as it is here). I would have thought, that for pedagogical purposes, this would be of special importance. Consider the sum() function - why it always begins with calling term() is not clear from the grammar given (because they don't show the transformation):

<sum> ::= <term> | <sum> "+" <term> | <sum> "-" <term>

However, I have to admit that stating the grammar as they have is much clearer, in terms of conveying what the grammar is (as opposed to implementing it). I'm implementing grammars quite often at the moment, so this is food for thought.
14 Predictions for 2020
Google Targets SEO Practitioners
"Most of the other things I have read on this topic have taken a position of "Relational good, Key-value bad" or the opposite."

This is part of a rift between the people writing the posts and the people spending their time building Facebooks, Googles, etc. Almost everyone I've talked to who operates (not just plans to) at HUGE scale relies on a combination of key-value stores (commonly known as memcached) and relational databases. That way you get all the speed benefits of something like BDB, without having to re-invent alternatives to SQL queries in [your language of choice] wrapping BDB.
Maybe. Technology sharing is a big reason for a lot of these deals. For example the Chrysler 300/Dodge Charger uses a lot of Mercedes-Benz suspension components (though Daimler has since sold off their interest in Chrysler).

Incidentally, Ford has recently entered an agreement to sell Volvo to a Chinese manufacturer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/23/volvo-sale-ch...
This is a great idea. The H&F meetup is by far my favorite NYC event for both hackers and entrepreneurs. Looking forward to the new format.
Passur uses active radar and restricts access to its' apps outside US AFAIK.

Flightaware.com uses FAA feed (with a slight delay), but thus has full coverage of US airspace and a lot of other useful information (flight plans etc), but its' map sucks.
Sheldon State Community College in Alabama had their information rejected when their paperwork said that 14,500 jobs were created with the $27,502 they received.

Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Good. By the way, the time.sleep wouldn't even have worked -- the big deal with timing things on the web is that unless you run some kind of autobanning script, they get unlimited attempts. I'm pretty sure that if I get a hundred-thousand-similar-attempt dataset I can calculate the mean time to such accuracy that the random sleep time doesn't hamper me at all.

And I can collect that data over such a large time you might not even notice.
The TV example is different. The cable company doesn't sell you X hours of TV, it sells you 'as much TV as you want' each month. Whether you watch constantly or not at all, you got what you paid for.

The calling cards are good for X minutes. Is it legal to expire those minutes? Seems like gift card sellers have been restricted in their ability to erode gift card value.
This might be old, but it very excellently done. One thing I like about it is that the assertions an conclusions are backed up by 1) real-world experience 2) deep understanding of programming language issues.
Dance Your Way To Fitness & Achieve Fitness Through Discipline
Roadmap for Balsamiq in 2010
James Cameron's Pocahontas (Avatar)
You want 'set smartcase' as well as 'set ignorecase'. On its own ignorecase makes incsearch unconditionally ignore case.
Escheatment isn't new. If you abandon a bank account, the bank escheats it to the state.

If you then notify the state that they have your money (such as via http://ucp.dor.wa.gov/ ), then you can file a claim, and they'll give you the money.

Phone cards are basically just (small) deposit accounts that are withdrawn against for one particular purchase. It makes a lot of sense that they'd fall under the same law.

Your "slippery slope" example on the other hand doesn't seem to match, because ISPs charge a fixed price for daily access. They don't (currently) take a deposit and then debit that account based on usage. If they did, then it seems like it might fall under the same laws.
The Most Useless Machine Ever
I don't see how that is relevant in this instance. It very well might be the truth, but I hardly find it relevant to this discussion. The question poised (does unused minutes on a calling card a) have value, and b) can be viewed as unclaimed property) is independent of the quality of the DC gov't. Sure, they might not be bringing this up if they had more resources (for whatever reason), but that doesn't necessarily taint the question.
The syntax too complicated bit bugs me. Haskell syntax is very minimal, more lisp like than C like. The syntax is "different" than traditional imperative languages but coming from Lisp/Scheme/F# background it was very easy to pick up.

I am not sure I buy that lazy evaluation is too costly either, as it is actually what buys performance gains in some areas. That was a broad statement and it doesn't hold everywhere but I just want to say that it isn't cut & dry like you make it sound.

I would say the only argument he makes against Haskell that I totally agree with is its inference engine. I have very mixed feelings about type inference. It is very nice because it makes everything so concise, yet I often find myself writing function types just for clarity. Also type errors are not fun to track down as he shows in the slide.
What if there is no defined time frame? If you can buy minutes in the form of a pre-paid card, why wouldn't it be property? You could resell it. And it's a "pre-paid" card, not a "minutes contract". That makes it see that it is a stored cash-value card. The only difference is that the value is removed from the card in proportion to calling minutes as opposed to dollars spent.

What about the case of airline points? Those are used almost interchangeably with cash. Hell, didn't American Airlines pay Citi in points once?
Seems like they should have put a better validator on the zip code field for the data entry form. It's tough to count on tens of thousands of different people with varying degrees of seriousness to report accurately, but little things like requiring valid zip codes (that match city/state) go a long way.
Damn Max!

But hey, if you're going to fail, might as well do it spectacularly. I can't imagine a more horrendous way to fail than giving all your users a surprise charge of $200. I guess you could break into their house and kick them in the groin, but I'm not sure that would be worse. :)
A lot of them cap usage, though (at least officially). The phone card could just be structured as "$X for Y years of access, with a maximum total usage of Z" to get around this.

It seems more likely that the difference is that cable companies usually bill later, whereas prepaid phones obviously bill up front.
why would you need a license for a fully automated vehicle?
Five Entrepreneurial Lessons from 2009
Reads in MySQL are quite fast.
Labour Contraction Timer (bash script)
I don't know if it's accurate to say that power plants and jet planes can't be done by small companies. Instead of one big company, the work could be split among a number of smaller companies.

I don't know the history of Boeing or the major powerplant constructors, but I'd guess that a lot of them have formed over time from the consolidation of smaller companies.
George Graham reviews AAA for NPR, and always includes a note about the dynamic compression at the end of the review. Highly recommended if you like this genre.

http://georgegraham.com/reviews.html
Thomas is the security consultant, I sell bingo cards to 60 year old women, take with appropriate grains of salt: the timing attack is impractical against almost all Django installations, and is difficult to exploit Internet-wide in an automated fashion (like, e.g., you can do for Wordpress vulnerabilities).

However, the impact is probably severe if your installation is vulnerable (i.e. if the bad guy can get sufficiently local access to your site over the network, and if you allow him sufficient rejected attempts). This can happen in plausible circumstances. For example, if you host on Slicehost and the bad guy is sufficiently motivated to pay $20 a month and buy himself a slice in your data center, congratulations, it is highly likely you are vulnerable to timing attacks in this manner. (This vulnerability is by no means unique to Slicehost, I'm just using this as a practical example of how a dedicated adversary can plausibly exploit a common deployment scenario.)

If you're vulnerable, the bad guy can compromise signatures given a long enough time. I am not a Django guy but I am a Rails guy, and one common pattern we have is to store things in the session where the session is serialized into the cookie. For example, we might store the authenticated user_id there. (I do.) The signing is what keeps someone from swapping out user_id = 12387 (their freebie account) for user_id = 1 (my all-powerful admin account) and convincing the system that the user logged into their browser is me. If you can forge a signature, free admin for you.

Given that this vulnerability has catastrophic consequences for vulnerable users and you probably encourage coding practices which make users vulnerable to it, I'd put it pretty high on my list of things to fix prior to release. But again, I am not the security guy.
Social Tips for Geeks
Social Network Removes 5,000 Users For Putting On Weight During Holiday Season
I think the issue is cost reduction and margins. They have to run things a bit thin. Partially why they get so hungry for gov't contracts.
A recent example comes to mind - Etherpad
It's relevant because this amounts to nothing more than another cash grab. There would be no need for ridiculous new taxes like this if it weren't for the incredible mismanagement. And before someone asserts that it isn't a tax, keep in mind that the reason rates are where they are is because companies expect a percentage of the service to never be used. Rates will go up because of this.
Yeah, I figured that after I read up on the timing attack and saw that it's based on statistics over many runs. Crypto is hard!
Not saying there isn't gross mismanagement and systematic corruption, but not being a state also puts DC at a serious disadvantage. They don't have access to state funds, or any government programs that only work through states (though many government programs working through states do make a point of including DC, not all do). Also, they lose out on a lot of corruption not having senators at all. Senators regularly ship large amount of pork back to their state. No senators, no pork.

A large city in your average state can get away with a lot more corruption and mismanagement than DC could. They'd have state government, certain national programs, and national representatives to fall back on. DC gets none of that.
So it looks like the difference between a startup and a small business is that the priority one for startups is technology or new business model (innovation) and small businesses focus on the operational returns (optimization)
Tonido Backup User Guide
There's some really good discussion of this going on on programming.reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ald1m/calling_c...
U.S. Reaction to Swine Flu: Apt and Lucky
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1030348
Do blogs drive public perception of a business?
How to Make an iPhone App
Freakonomics: Courtroom Incentives
Making a game with Ogre 3D
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As much as I like Haskell, I would be nervous about using it in a AAA-class game engine. The space leaks that lazy evaluation can produce could end up even harder to debug than usual in such a complicated product.

Please note I said "nervous", not "I would never consider it ever". Another couple of years of development and I might be less nervous; Haskell has been making a lot of progress lately. Some stuff in the absolute inner core might still be C or Assembler, but I could see the bulk switching to some other language.
New Year's Resolutions: Potheads, Planners and Players
I'm wondering about this as well.
Tell pg: URL Dedupe Bug / Make No Little Plans – Defining the Scalable Startup
Tech4000: Zynga Investor Calls Scamville Debate Irrelevant And Unfair
Every pre-paid card I've seen has in the fine print an expiration date. If there are some that are totally open-ended, that does change the argument a bit.
I think that the issue is compounded here by the fact that Django is a framework which will be used in hundreds or thousands (or more) of applications deployed all over the world. Any security issue with the framework itself instantly puts thousands of apps at risk.

If you have a single app then you can discount this kind of attack, but when you are producing code that will be used in thousands of other apps, it would be irresponsible to do so.
Seesmic Acquires Ping.fm
Transitioning: the "Ugly Duckling" phase of a startup
I just want to say that it is really refreshing and awesome to see a framework developer/author/team reaching out to the community as a whole for this kind of review, rather than requesting feedback from a small group of committed contributors.
Do devices that can detect plastic explosives through clothing exist?
Hack: a vital behavior
Microsoft offering 50% upgrade discount to Windows XP and Office XP users
Control iPhone with Apple's MAgic Mouse
If you're still at Edinburgh, I'd recommend discussing this with your DoS, especially if they're an Informatics person. You might be able to find projects being run by AIAI (http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/) or other institutes inside Informatics that are interesting to you and you can contribute to. If nothing else, this will help make contacts and looks good on your CV.

There's also the Entrepreneurial Club (http://www.edinburgh-entrepreneur.man.ed.ac.uk/), which again will help you make contacts and give you a place to discuss ideas and ways of achieving them. There's also http://techmeetup.co.uk/, the local $LANGUAGE user groups (I've found http://scotrug.org/ really useful) - there's a huge number of tech/web meet ups in Edinburgh that offer really good opportunities to make connections.

If you can afford it at all, I'd definitely recommend finishing your BSc/BEng at Edinburgh - if you're intending to stay in Europe it's a very well respected university, and there's a pretty good geek/tech culture in Edinburgh. I think maybe you just need to push beyond the lectures a bit and make contact with it?
I can tell you're pushing for terseness in the signed text (every character does count), but I'd definitely consider explicitly describing the cryptosystem and version you're using in each cookie.

Also, is there some code elsewhere ensuring that the separator character is always escaped during signing? I don't see anything explicit, but I could definitely be missing something; I haven't messed with Django internals much..