skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have a point, but I think you take it too far. E.g. I consciously use a toothpaste with triclosan and use nothing else with that antimicrobial, especially anything having to do with food preparation or dish washing, where it's also popular. That way I only skew the population in one area, my mouth, and don't present it with a skewed population from eating.

The antibiotic cross-resistance issue is very real, since one common albeit imperfect mechanism for that is active pumps in bacteria that try to keep the concentration of nasty stuff inside them at a tolerable level. E.g. from Wikipedia: "Some bacteria have innate resistance to triclosan at low, bacteriostatic levels, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which possesses multi-drug efflux pumps that 'pump' triclosan out of the cell."

And the point of using simple vicious stuff like chlorine is well taken, I seriously doubt anything at all can develop resistance to that. Alcohols, I'm not so sure. Stuff like silver ions are interesting (and I use that for stored water), just don't ingest them in any quantity!
I'm sure the original talk by Hawking was inspiring, but this summarised version reads like an edulcorated sci-fi dream, somewhere on par with "some day we'll all have flying cars". Sadly, all the substance seems to have been squeezed out of this one to leave only fairly trite and obvious ideas.

Would be interesting to see a transcript or recording of the original talk.
Shareaholic for Twitter, Facebook, Google...: Add-ons for Firefox
The rise of the iPhone generation
Saying 'hi' is harder in a diverse society
This code will cause problems with some parts of Django. I forget where, but I have encountered problems writing code like this before because sometimes the save method gets called by things which expect it to take its optional parameters. This is a more robust (although certainly uglier) version:

def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
if not self.pk:
pass # new object
else:
pass # old object
return super(MyObject, self).save(*args, **kwargs)
Maybe it's the added sugar in the placebos that makes them so effective?
IM is another good reason to have background apps. I'm still amazed that Apple hasn't bundled IM into the iPhone. The third party apps suck as they require the push notifications.
Nokia and Apple battle
How to Fit a Large Program Into a Small Machine
When I saw it was jwz being linked to, I was worried I would have to suffer through a green on black web page. Oh, the relief.
That's only a theory and as far as I know it's very poor at explaining a lot of the asthma increase we're seeing.
Don't worry, it works the other way as well.

At my last job, I had to fix software defects in hardware.
Interesting; I did not know that. In the US, every DRL that I've seen lights only one pair of front lamps (usually the headlamps at partial power, but some models light other front lamps).
Apple’s App Store: From 2 To 3 Billion Downloads In Just Over 3 Months
I am using .NET for my startup app (nowhere near done yet so no link) which is a CRM/scheduler for service businesses. I was going to use Ruby on Rails like the other cool kids but I have more experience with .NET, my area is all .NET and I like a lot of the new things out (e.g. ASP.NET MVC), plus I am enrolled in Bizspark. I also had a fair number of issues fighting the Rails mentality (or rather, trying to shoehorn my thoughts into Rails) so I switched to .NET
The Chikitas' home page
Most anything that substantially alters most every merchant's costs does affect you. You may not see it as a line item on the reciept, but it's in there.
We do when we are in a different civilized country than the one that issued the bank card.
http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/9841

It's been reported before and they consciously chose the current behavior. I don't agree with their decision, but it is something they're aware of.

EDIT: There is a way to subclass models.Model and not have it be an abstract or real model (I don't remember at the moment) and you could, in that subclass, do a force_insert or force_update based on the PK status so that everything in your project inheriting from that subclass would have that behavior.

basically:

def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
if self.pk:
kwargs['force_update'] = True
kwargs['force_insert'] = False
else:
kwargs['force_insert'] = True
kwargs['force_update'] = False
super(MyModelBase, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

So, one can modify that behavior if they want to without having to patch too much - maybe someone can comment on subclassing models.Model while not having Django consider it a model (I think I got it from the Pro Django book if someone has it available).

EDIT2: modified the code to make sure that force_insert and force_update couldn't both be True.
why do they suck? Haven't had any problems with Beejive.
I wonder how many people googled "ArrayDB" because of this.
im a casual player and i plot 10 moves. 20 isn't surprising to me.
Human beings did not evolve from the apes.
You can build your own now with OpenSim:

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

The interesting part is you can now (sort of) teleport between different servers taking your identity with you.
...and what about weebly? They use the 'W' too. Apart of the logo, I honestly prefer Webriq.com over as it offers a lot of functions. And with their recently released Universal template, you can create any sophisticated unique template in a matter of hours. See my example: http://szenaone.webriq.com/home
I'm sorry, I don't get it. For session cookies, the client cannot do any validation of the cookie, so it's a completely different domain.

Also, unlike session cookies, SSLv2 never had a hard expiration date after which it could be unconditionally rejected.

However, I did just realize that for perfect security, there must be a service disruption on change of version. Otherwise you may be upgrading an attacker's forged v1 cookie to v2, if they submit a request before the v1 expiration.
A geek meets the Ikea Lillabo Train Set
Have you updated the year in your site's copyright footer?
Just a reminder to update the footers of your sites to 2010 (unless that bit is dynamic in your site).
CoffeeScript 0.2.1: Significant Whitespace, Splats, Existence, Object Compre...
CoffeeScript 0.2.1 is out this morning, with a slew of language improvements over the previous gem.

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

* Python-style significant whitespace to delimit blocks (no more periods).

* Better conversion of JS statements into expressions -- you can pass a try/catch right into a function, for example (not that it's a good idea).

* Splats, for variable numbers of arguments in function definitions and function calls.

* Object and Range comprehensions, to augment the existing Array comprehensions.

* A Ruby-style block syntax for passing functions as the final argument.

* The existence operator, which returns true if a variable is not null or undefined.

* All functions are named functions, to help ease debugging.

* Array splice literals, to complement the array slice literals.

All of your feedback from the previous post has really helped shape the language. I'd love to hear more.
Anyone able to ballpark how much the founders would clear from this deal?
I now know more about hand-sanitizers than I ever did before. Thank you.
Some on the spot observations +1 for this:

It is as if Steve Jobs™ has kidnapped them, implanted something terrible, and returned them – as iZombies.
Yes, and in fact that's how openings work. Each opening is a sequence in which both players are making an optimal response to the previous move. If a player deviates from the opening, then by definition he just made a suboptimal move.
A highly informative overview of current FIDE ratings may be found here: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6027. Basically, this is a system by which chess grandmasters get rated based on their tournament play over a lengthy period.

The top chess players of recent years (post-Kasparov) are the trio of Kramnik (Russia), Topalov (Bulgaria), and Anand (India), with Anand being the current world champion and with Topalov scheduled to play him for the title in the very near future. Each of these guys has been at the top of his field for at least a decade and Magnus Carlsen has done nothing as yet to displace them from the very top. Even when it comes to the FIDE ratings, all these players are neck and neck (Carlsen: 2810; Topalov: 2801; Anand: 2790; Kramnik: 2788).

What is amazing here is not the absolute ratings but the prodigious nature of Carlsen's ascendancy to the highest rating in the world, which can be seen by comparing the following graphs showing the ratings progress from 2001-2010 for each of these players:

Carlsen: http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014;
Topalov: http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=2900084;
Anand: http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=5000017;
Kramnik: http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=4101588.

As the graphs show, Topalov, Anand, and Kramnik have each had a 2700 or greater ranking (more or less without fail) for each of the years from 2000 through 2010. They are the old guard who have dominated the game for years. They have significant variations in their play (for example, Kramnik is super-methodical and cautious, preferring to grind his opponents slowly while opting for drawish variations in his manner of play while Topolav is a tremendous risk-taker who frequently likes to bust up the positions with wild variations and super-aggressive tactics) but the chess world has lived with this for some time now and there is nothing new here.

In contrast, Carlsen has moved in a virtually unbroken upward line from about a 2000 FIDE rating in year 2001 (when he was 10 years old) to his current 2810 rating in year 2010 (he is now 19). Thus, he represents the child prodigy coming into maturity as a breath of fresh air to the chess world - though he is not the world champion, for him, it is all potential future greatness and this has stirred tremendous excitement. It doesn't hurt that Carlsen is likable and is being mentored by Kasparov, who is perhaps the greatest grandmaster of modern times.
My theory concerning the increasing placebo effect is pharmaceutical advertising. We are increasingly hearing the message "pill X will cure problem Y"; this primes us for the placebo effect.

Just one of the positive effects of drug ads.
Can open source engineering work in a commercial project?
Obecalp: "Ms. Buettner, 40, who lives in Severna Park, Md., with her husband, 7-month-old son and 22-month-old twins, envisioned a children’s placebo tablet that would empower parents to do something tangible for minor ills and reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics and other medicines.

With the help of her husband, Dennis, she founded a placebo company, and, without a hint of irony, named it Efficacy Brands. Its chewable, cherry-flavored dextrose tablets, Obecalp, for placebo spelled backward, goes on sale on June 1 at the Efficacy Brands Web site. Bottles of 50 tablets will sell for $5.95. The Buettners have plans for a liquid version, too."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/health/27plac.html
A questionnaire at the end would be more useful if grouped by purpose and influence on price, i.e. answering yes here and yes there gives an option to charge for comfort 3x amount :)

Possibly an idea for a weekend project...
Hide Spy Camera in ID Card |Gadgetsin
Dead or not, I still seem to make a pretty good amount of money out of it. A store I made a few years ago still earns me a couple of hundred bucks a week and I haven't added anything new since the day it went up. Certainly not bad for a dead project.

I don't use second life anymore, but it seems to me that the truth of the situation is more to do with it having evolved past the initial stages of media hype and settled into a stable and diverse online community. I'm waiting for a what happened to twitter article in another 5 years.
My mother buys at least 1 book per day on average from amazon. (she can read very very fast)
Oh, good idea. I might do a follow-up/edit with that. Thanks!
This seems to me like a unique opportunity for next-gen startup incubators and the coworking movement to lease space at rates that would enable startup entrepreneurs to use the kind of digs that are normally completely outside of their reach.
My personal experience building two startup consumer websites has been that ORMs have been a mistake. Perhaps in enterprise environments where you have a large IT staff and want to isolate DB specifics and the whole data access layer ORMs may make sense. But for a nimble startup with a small number of talented programmers I think ORMs hurt more than they help for a couple of key reasons:

1) performance matters immensely to user experience and I can hand write much better SQL than any ORM I have seen can generate. Additionally I find it easier to predict how well my SQL will perform than to predict how the SQL generated by my ORM will perform.

2) I will likely never switch databases during the lifetime of my company and so switching SQL dialects is not a problem I face.

3) There is an impedance mismatch between tabular data stored in databases and object graphs that most ORMs represent.

4) The specifics of every ORM I've tried always left something to be desired. Hibernate was wicked complicated. Django didn't support multiple databases, SQLAlchemy was error-prone. I'm sure these specifics will get fixed over time, but for me they've just provided further disincentive.
Amazon S3 may not be readily classified as a key-value store. It seems better sit between distributed key-value store and distributed file system.
Domain specific news aggregator for Ruby
There is nothing new here. A DBA does not like that a database is subjectively misused, and then gets pissy and arrogant about it. E.g., "You’re just being lazy or scared of SQL." I'm not a fan or O/R-Ms myself but I do not feel compelled to shout it from the rooftops. shrug
Towards a smart, place guessing Foursquare/Gowalla client
Six Lessons Learned from Launching – and Closing – a Community
For me, the answer to this question is a resounding 'yes'. Not only it is working, it is sustainable. Google is taking a page out of Apple's 'Think different' campaign and showing all of us how to do it.

But I still see a lot of miopic behavior in the media. The battle is not between Apple and Google. It's more like: (Apple + Google) > (RIM + Nokia)
I'm not a chess player but I'm pretty sure that's not how it works.

20 is only the depth of the search, the width is variable. Good players can prune the game tree aggressively -- i.e. they select only a few candidate moves at each step -- while still getting a good approximation of the best move.
Clickable Links.

CoffeeScript: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

Previous HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014080
SQL: Requires your vendor to wrap in basic programming constructs or wrapping the SQL yourself in the code of your choice.

No ability to create dynamic functions on the fly. Why can't I do something like:

SELECT something, {some custom function here()}
FROM sometable
GROUP BY something

I almost want something macro like in there. I previously worked on apps that had fluid, ever-changing business rules. Where you might read in several range values to check some other set of values for inclusion in that range, count the values in the range, or average them, or check them for thresholds, etc. In Oracle, you can easily write your own custom grouping function, but you can't do it on the fly. I probably should have written the code to dynamically parse the intended SQL and build the dynamic SQL and custom function on the fly. Live and learn.

Analytic function windowing. Every time, I have to re-grok exactly how to do it properly.

Hierarchies. SQL sucks for doing this simply. I've used proprietary stuff (CONNECT BY in Oracle) and built my own nested set models as well. Both are fun technically and work, but are hell to support - during code reviews and sessions I see the eyes start to glaze over whenever I've dealt with hierarchies in SQL.
What is the point of this blurb? It has no real "meat" nor is it a review of any sort.
For readers in the future, here's a link to the article instead of the whole blog:

http://www.dabeaz.com/blog/2010/01/python-gil-visualized.htm...
Web Laureate Insight, "Aardvark: Ask I Did"
High School Students Competing Against University Students in the Imagine Cup
Why I’m Going Public
Yes, you're quite right. We are apes. (though that may also depend on your classification philosophy [1].)

[1] http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/feedback/oct02.html
When I read this article, I got hung up on the part about the scientists studying the biochemical pathways of the placebo effect. How interesting. It saddens me to think he doesn't get much funding.

And then I had this thought: What if he developed a pill that caused an artificial biochemical release of the chemicals responsible for the placebo response. A non-placebo that triggers a placebo response in your body. Hmmmm. How would you even a test such a pill?
My first job after majoring in math was to work for a software company in hollywood. Have you considered working in something graphics-oriented? It doesn't have to be games, there's a lot of math-related work in the film industry. It will take a little bit of work to break into this field, but it's a really good fit for math majors who have some programming experience.
I pretty much use div and span with ID and CLASS to achieve what I want.
I've successfully used cleverreach, which is a german company, because a client asked me to. It worked really well, importing addresses from CVS, personalizing, campaign monitoring, click rates, etc:

http://www.cleverreach.de/frontend/index.php?flang=en

For preparation I handcoded an html-table layout with some css which I later turned to inline css using http://premailer.dialect.ca/ because other css gets stripped out by gmail and other web mail clients.
I would have to disagree. Consider this case:

1) I am on IRC on my mobile device and my coworker says there's a problem with something on server-x
2) With IRC in the background I open an SSH client to login to server-x and check on the issue. Seeing a service is down I switch back to IRC.
3) I tell my coworker on IRC the service appears to be down down.
4) I bring up a browser window to verify that the web server on server-x is not responding.

... etc

This type of workflow will not work on single tasking mobile devices, and it's not an unreasonable use case at all.
Please tell me if I am wrong or incorrect here but...

How come someone like Hawking can make statements like this when he is not a evolutionary biologist? And how come people will take him seriously when he hasn't gained the ethos.
TalkerApp launched
By the late '90s, for example, the classic antianxiety drug diazepam (also known as Valium) was still beating placebo in France and Belgium. But when the drug was tested in the US, it was likely to fail.

?

Really? Does this pass the smell test? I've never taken Valium [1], but I'm pretty sure its effects are strong and clear, to the point of creating serious addictions.

[1] On second thought, I probably have, as a pre-op, and yes the effects were obvious and unlikely to be replicated by a sugar pill.
Just don't use threads in python, use multiprocessing!
Moving along. Nothing to see here. Just another mediocre anti-tech or anti-connected rant.
Thanks. I must have mangled the link during the submission process. Can someone fix it?
Yeah... I am on the same side of the fence as the author but I've also had very little success at evangelizing SQL and stored procedures to OO devs, so I've pretty much stopped.

One point that I do think makes sense is where he says "just use flat files". Not that I'd actually advocate that, but if you're going to completely paper over the set-oriented nature of your data store, why not use a "NoSQL" (key/value) database and be done with it.
Not so diverse- the article indicates almost all activity is porn.
Normally new media is initially funded by porn (printing, photography, phonograph, moving pictures, wire recorders, the internet) and evolve into something else. Second Life has done the opposite. Sounds like a dead end to me.
That's great. What does the store sell?
You have to pay for them, you count on third party servers staying up, screen names aren't managed in the phone's central address book, messages get separated out into different areas, etc. On my Mac Mail already knows if who I'm emailing is on IM--that's the kind of functionality that I expect on the phone.
The best solution I have found is a hybrid solution -- ORMs for fast, common operations, and SQL by hand for special or highly complex operations.

It also depends on the ORM you use. At my last full-time gig, a manager became persuaded that the ORM should be used literally _everywhere_. They gutted the stored procs I had written and replaced it all with CakePHP ORM. The result is a program that takes twenty seconds minimum to generate a page; some loadtimes would extend over three minutes.

Cake's ORM is not impressive as far as I am concerned and it's quite slow; if that's the ORM you're using, I think you're better off using SQL almost everywhere. SQLAlchemy seems to have good, tunable performance, though I've also encountered more than my share of strange errors and anomalies with it.

The other downside is that in most cases, it's a _lot_ of work to learn the specific syntax associated with an ORM well enough to allow one to perform a complex query. Many ORMs barely support complex or important DB operations, yet they have adherents who demand insane compliance with ORM implementation.

Even ORMs that are touted as "simple" or "easy" are usually not simple or easy, and of course, the people involved in those ORMs get really, really pissed off if you suggest that docs should improve or errors shouldn't happen as often or whatever.

It's just about getting a programmer with good judgment. Some tasks would benefit from a good, tunable ORM. Many wouldn't. As far as you've written in an ORM, converting between DB engines is that much less work, so it's worth it sometimes. You just have to be sane about it and I think it all ends up okay.
What does "it was likely to fail" mean. But it didn't. ...witness, yes, countless addicts. I've worked professionally (as biofeedback therapist) with scores of users of valium (and its cousins), and the withdrawal can be tricky/agonizing.
Can it be because he is not talking about evolutionary biology? He is taking a wider view of human evolution.
Tell HN: My friend, unimpressed with formspring.me, made her own version
Best Buy Optimization Is A Big Stupid Annoying Waste Of Money