skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the l&f yup, but designers won't necessarily know anything about improving conversions, which testing will do for you.
Natural Weight Loss Explained
Opera 10.5 Internal Build Leaked - Has Per-tab Private Browsing
Nonsense, if that were the case we'd heard about it by now. Also, the face tracking algorithms can already operate in far less optimal conditions than the one presented here so in _this_ case it shouldn't be a problem.

Forgetting that the algorithm was tuned to a specific color range however seems like an entirely plausible scenario.
I was rather skeptical of 1Password as well, but wound up checking it out after receiving it as part of a MacHeist bundle. It's since easily become my favorite Mac utility (tied with LaunchBar). A few notable features, rambled off in no particular order:

- great integration into (nearly) every Mac browser (Firefox in particular does not use the Mac keychain; Opera and Chrome are the two exceptions, and they're working on both as soon as extension support is available)

- built-in cross-platform HTML/JS password viewer (for instance, keep your 1Password keychain file on Dropbox and pop open the viewer on Windows to pull up a password; it uses AES for encryption and a JSON-based data store in a standard OS X package/folder)

- better in-browser password management (save after your login is confirmed, save multiple logins, replace a login)

- in-browser password generation (it also has options even beyond the Keychain utility's excellent generator)

- slick GUI app for managing passwords, secure notes, serial numbers, etc. (Keychain Access is a bit... odd in how it displays Web logins)

- cross-browser and well-implemented auto-fill (it supports credit-card auto-fill as well, which is encrypted just like everything else)

- go-and-fill one-click site login (sort of like launchbar/quicksilver, but inside Safari for accounts and websites)

- syncs to iPhone app over local Wi-Fi

- Very prompt updates and support (beta releases every few days, usually a same-day turnaround if a Safari/OS X update breaks something... the way they handled Snow Leopard's early release was rather brilliant also)

Even though I got it for dirt-cheap, I feel it would be easily worth the full purchase price, and had no qualms about upgrading to 3.0.
And it used fewer tokens.
They're also cheap as hell, have great support, and are honest. They're pretty upfront about CPU being their only contended resource. They'll go as far as corralling CPU hogs together into ghettos so they don't affect normal customers as much.

Classic shared hosting is bullshit in general, but Dreamhost makes the most of it. They're the only one I'd ever recommend.
Thanks - corrected. My written Swedish was always lousy.
Awesome? I'd say it's pretty sad that ignoring IE is practically required to do advanced stuff on the web without resorting to Flash.
I did a short and non-representative comparison between the ping times to my Linode in London (http://vix.io) and hosteurope.de. From my home in the Netherlands my Linode VPS is 10ms faster (~31ms for Linode versus ~41ms for hosteurope.de). Considering that hosteurope.de is hosted in Köln (Germany) which is about 190km from where I live the routing to London is a lot better.
Lessons I learned building an MPs' expenses crowdsourcing app for the Guardian
it's always difficult to comment on these kinds of posts because, obviously, they're pretty general, and the person doing the interview would need to use their own discretion, etc.

but having said that, one of the example questions seemed a bit odd to me. the idea was to find out whether a candidate knows how to use grep or similar. and the first case is fair enough - phone numbers with a given pattern. but a later example was reformatting code so that parentheses had spaces around them.

now anyone that tries reformatting code with a regular expression deserves everything they get. almost no programming languages have regular grammars, and even if they do, they are probably fiendishly complex (think of comments and strings). to make things worse, if you get something wrong you end up running the risks of introducing some kind of obscure bug in your code...

as i said, maybe i am being too picky. but that was the one example that jumped out as a red flag for the author's experience (which is odd, as i recognise the name, even though i don't really follow personalities on the web much).

edit: thinking some more, maybe i am being too picky. just last night i used sed to change some import statements in python code. but messing around with parens sounds like playing with fire to me. i vaguely remember, years ago, trying to enforce encoding standards with a regexp based rewriter for some obscure language that had no easily available parser. the memory is a blur, except for the pain...
All we have are two data points, and while there is obviously a skin tone difference between the two samples, that's not the only difference. Without more information we can't even be sure that skin color is the issue.

For example, the algorithm might just fail for the black man's facial features, which differ greatly from those of the white woman.

Can anyone test this?

Edit: By "differ greatly" I mean from the point of view of the algorithm. We don't know what features (as in data extracted from the image, not facial features) they're using.
Activity 'can prevent breast cancer'
Is there a Silicon Valley advantage?
XMPP, BOSH and the Strophe library (both the JavaScript and C incarnations).

Earlier this year I got tasked with implementing a system which involved multiple mobile clients talking to a rendering server. The mobile devices had a fairly beefy browser (Nokia N900), so the client was clearly suitable to be delivered as a web app. On the server side, we already had a realtime graphics system I had written earlier, to which the web clients would need to talk over a bidirectional connection with near-realtime responsiveness.

Being a C/desktop guy with little network experience, my first intuition was to do the simplest thing I knew how to handle: linking a small embeddable web server (e.g. libmicrohttpd) into the render server, and devising some cheesy custom application-specific protocol over HTTP.

Luckily, my work partner is not as stuck in the 1990s as I am, and he suggested we use XMPP. I was sceptical at first (XML? A server written in Erlang? Do we really need to go there? I just want to tinker with my pointers...)

He showed me some demos of realtime XMPP web apps built with Strophe.js, and I was rather impressed. Then we went over our system's client/server design and how it would map to XMPP, and I was sold.

We ended up using many more XMPP features than I had initially imagined, including publish/subscribe and multi-user chat rooms. Had we gone with my original approach, these concepts would have been implemented in some haphazard way in the render server itself. Now the rendering system just talks to the XMPP server like any other client. It's stable, scalable and fast.

Still, while BOSH in the browser is pretty amazing in practice, it does feel like a hack that's stretching the reasonable limits of what web apps should be doing over HTTP. Hopefully this time next year I'll be able to say that one of the best technologies I've worked with in 2010 was HTML 5 web sockets...
I could not figure out what was happening in the first minute of playing it, so I closed the page. And I'm not too dumb, so I think about 70% of people will be the same.

You need to explain better how the game works.
Sure, but there are theoretical limits to what runtime metprogramming can do whilst upholding the guarantees that a static type system provides.

For instance, in order to check that a particular function call conforms to the function signature, the function signature must at least exist. Type checking a call to a function for which not even the signature exists anwhere within the system is impossible.
Winter solstice:  A discussion of the astronomy for the nontechnical reader
people opening up to me and being friendly in general. as another commenter mentioned, people use your eyes to gauge things like sincerity and how much you like them (pupil dilation). let me put it this way: NOT making eye contact sends strong signals.
well you have already lost if you try to insert the password into the database without applying a salted hash function on it.
Just decided to try these guys out. You can't complain too much if it's free! Plus, their pricing seems like it will be reasonable once it gets out of beta.
Interesting article, and kudos to the Guardian, one of the only worthwhile papers left in the UK, for funding such a venture.
An old favorite ...

http://searchyc.com/five+phone+screen

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94990

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941925

My wife just watched me do this search and trawl through the results, and then she asked me why. Why spend all that time cross-referencing something when the search terms are so vague you need to go through pages to find the duplicates?

The answer is that sometimes I find other items of interest. I don't read HN fanatically, and sometimes items come and go without my seeing them. Occasionally, more than occasionally, one turns up in a search like this, so it's worth doing for the side effect.
The Egyptians were doing that way before the Romans. In general, having enough food to feed a standing army (as the Nile provided) gives a country a big leg up in the sacking & pillaging.
Google Appengine:
Probably _the_ easiest platform to develop a webapp on if you use Python and are okay with its limitations.

Tornado:
If you are going to develop on GAE, Tornado is the way to go. It is fast, well written, and only includes the core features needed for a web app.

I can't highlight how much easier it has made things for me since switching from Django. Debugging Tornado's source code was a breath of fresh air compared to Django's monkey-patched bird's nest of dependencies.
The Perl+Continuity solution also uses "first, second & third" style and does it nicely without sessions and adheres to challenge by being an established library: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=805

Here is a version using the HTML::AsSubs module:

use Continuity;
use HTML::AsSubs;
Continuity->new->loop; # This starts the webserver

sub main {
my $request = shift;
my $p = 'foo';

$request->print( aform( $p )->as_HTML );
my $foo = $request->next->param( $p );
$request->print( w_link()->as_HTML );
$request->next->print( "You said: $foo" );
}

sub aform {
form(
input( { type => 'text', name => $_[0] } ),
input( { type => 'submit'} )
);
}

sub w_link { a( { href => '.' }, 'Click Here' ) }
Here's one for JavaScript: http://appenginejs.org/
Bing Ballmer Says You’re Fired [video]
E4X - ECHMAscript for XML

This is in AS3, used in flex. It's a joy to process xml with it.
Solr for super-easy full text searching and Memcache for a no-brainer distributed queue
zsh - clearly not new, but I recently switched from bash to it. Spelling correction is very cool, and I like the tab completion a lot more.

Rails - again, not new, but I've really enjoyed it. I've built web apps in COBOL (had to at my previous employer), so being able to work with Rails has been a joy in comparison. I actually started playing around with Rails last year, but I never really did anything with it until this year. I like Ruby, although I'm not entirely sure I like it more than Python yet. It's growing on me, though. I like that I can have a basic prototype up and running in basically no time at all. When I was learning it, it was also nice that I only really had to learn one piece at a time. I tried out Django shortly before I began using Rails, being more comfortable with Python, but I felt that the learning curve was a bit steeper with Django.

Google Chrome - I'm not sure if this is the type of response you're after, but Chrome quickly supplanted Safari as my favorite browser. It's faster, the UI is slightly better, and my gripes are few and far between.
The challenge should be LOC total, including the LOC of the libraries used. That is the only possible way to compare apples to apples. Otherwise, what is to stop you from wrapping the entire solution into a "library" and just making a simple call-out to said library.

What is the total LOC of the implementation, period. Remove all ambiguity.
The Guardian's pretty well positioned for this kind of thing. We're owned by the Scott Trust which keeps us free from undue influence by shareholders and actively encourages long-term thinking about the future of journalism. We also have a very strong technology department - the site runs on an in-house custom CMS (Spring/Hibernate/Velocity) and we have plenty of flexibility to try out new things.

It's a really fun place to work.
This is the argument I should have used in the post, having slept now and my thoughts being more clear:

There are really three, separate things under consideration here:

- What is the expressive power of the language's syntax?

- How strong is its standard library?

- How strong is library coverage for common tasks?

The first question is what the second example tries to demonstrate, i.e. "How concise could this be made in Ruby?" The second question, I agree with you mostly. There are outliers like C++ with an especially poor standard library, but in general, that doesn't speak to the language's innate power. And in the third, I hit at in the post by saying that I feel this particular task is a bit contrived with respect to Arc: it shows simplicity in things that I wouldn't necessarily look for in a web programming language, but lacks things that I would expect (i.e. the ability to connect easily to web services APIs).
Why waste 20 minutes of a professional developer's time, multiplied by the average number of reviewers, with a bonus for bad advice due to inexperience?

You know those clients who think programming is easy? Writing and reviewing copy is hard. So is pretending that you're an unbiased fresh-minded user, in a group of novice reviewers.

https://www.mturk.com/

1) Tell me what you think the site is for. 2) Is this site attractive? 3) Try to perform task X, cancel before it asks for credit card info, and tell me what the most annoying thing was. 4) etc.

Send them several sites to review, including yours and your competitors'. Save $200 or heaps of everyone's time. Or pay a professional.
It's interesting that you shut the previous community down. Why didn't you iterate? Force people to provide X feedback for others in order to get Y feedback for yourself?
It would be possible to implement a processor that implemented this as a single assembly language instruction!

How low do you go before you give up? Silicon atom count?

I'd say that 'LoC using a language plus common libraries at least some developers use in real projects' is the most valid thing to measure.
Personally, I would not find it a waste to spend 20 minutes reading and providing feedback. I think it would hone my own writing abilities. Also, I wouldn't mind if I got bad advice. Live and learn.

I picture this as a good way to a) get feedback, b) improve your writing skills, and c) connect with other developers. Mechanical turk can provide a, might help with b, but in no way can provide c.

That said, it's definitely a good choice if you just want feedback on your copy. An even better choice is a/b testing.
I just didn't have the time for it and wanted to use the server resources for something else. It also just seemed like the spirit of the community had changed in a way that I didn't know how to reverse. Too many people who didn't know each other at all.
With respect to ambiguity: Wouldn't the LOC count have to also include the code of the interpreter or how would you compare an interpreted language where some method is "built-in" with another language where the method has to be implemented in a library?

Anyway, LOC count is a fetish that wreakes havoc in language communities like ruby. I'd be more interested in readability and clarity. Show the code to somebody who knows the language only superficially and take the time the person needs to figure out what the code does.
Virtualization With KVM On Ubuntu 9.10
The link between the first and the second paragraph says http://mps-expenses2.guardian.co.uk/ but points to the (old) http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/.
> deeply unsatisfying to "solve" the problem by blindly copying nature

The image that jumped to my mind, was the wing flapping airplane prototypes that, quite literally, never got off the ground, and that we all laugh at today.

Perhaps, in the end, our solution won't match natures.

That also leads me to another thought, which is the definition of the problem.

Going back to the airplane. If the problem had been defined as "to build a machine with birdlike agility and control", than we still wouldn't be there. Instead of patting ourselves on the backs, we would still be miserably failing, over 100 years later. But we didn't really need birdlike agility, we just wanted to fly, which, it turns out, is much easier.

The problem statement for a lot of AI research seems similarly ambitious. Do we really want to create some sentient being, trapped in a box? Or is what we're really after, a little more practical and obtainable?

I think folks like the military, get this. They have a definite objective that they are trying to accomplish. Autonomous desert navigation, autonomous urban navigation, autonomous enemy identification. These are things you can define, measure, and make progress on.
Thanks for the reviews from everyone. I'll use this to improve the game soon.
Perhaps the biggest news coming out of Copenhagen: Presidents and Prime Ministers recognize that greenhouse gases are a problem they have to deal with.

Shouldn't that read "...an opportunity for more taxation and control"?
It should be noted that Steve has said elsewhere that he can't use these questions anymore because everyone knows them. Thus, I wouldn't follow this template too closely. That said, it's a good way to get a general idea about how to ask these kinds of questions.
Trekking in Nepal
Specialized in Trekking and Mountaineering Expeditions in Nepal and Entire Himalayan Regions. We also offer a quality services for a luxury adventure seekers.
Absolutely amazing that it's possible to get this kind of application up in a week. Kudos to everyone involved.

That said, make the categorisation buttons AJAX, and can we have higher resolution scans? Or is that how they were supplied? The couple of pages I did had items on them that were basically illegible.
Trekking in Darjeeling & Sikkim
Your access to the Himalaya!
Information and guiding in Darjeeling and Sikkim
Well, from what I understood it works like this:

You lose when the blocks get to the top of the playing field. You need to make points by making blocks disappear. To do this you have the piece at the top of your screen. Click where you want to drop it.

Now all blocks under and on the same row will shrink. When you shrink a red block, it will disappear.

When a red block disappears, the blocks above it fall, which will start a chain effect starting at the lowest one (just try, you'll understand what I mean).

Enjoy!
Yeah it's a bit sad if people really downvote like that.

Anyway I'd like to have another point for the people who may think I desecrated holy shrine of Haskell. It's a quite long response and may seem like bashing but there's a conclusion at the end, so if you'd like to downvote please read to the end at least.

GHC is very nice piece of high-tech. I like coding in it and I am looking forward to have new cases when it would be the right choice. But there are not many, in my case.

Some of the difficulties are in the people's attitude which determines the quality of tools, docs and stuff. Most coders don't have big expectations: apart from the toolchain to create the code they need a platform to share the pieces of code they create. Such platform can be loved or hated (Gems, CPAN are mostly loved, Maven is mostly hated). What do we have here in Haskell world? Cabal, pretty coll stuff, except of one thing: upgrade is broken, so you have to eventually take care of your packages by hand. So it started great, but the actual implementation didn't catch some quality and nobody seems to care.

Next thing, a bigger piece of code: Darcs. Great idea, had some performance issues, probably fixed recently. Well it seems that at the time they were fixed lots of people didn't care as they were using git already. Yeah, git, whose manpage says it's "the stupid content tracker" and it really is. It has nothing like theory of patches which finds the coupling of code changes automagically. But git established some good practices which actually enable people to manage code changes in a very sophisticated way, even if these are crude hacks the end user doesn't see it. So git won. Worse is better? Maybe just pragmatic is better?

Now the cited Happstack & macid. Another cool piece of high tech which seems a bit unfinished (those limits and scalability issues). it's perfectly ok that something is unfinished. In fact, it's great that the authors were kind enough to share their hard work. But let's look what's the general attitude towards fixing the issues. It isn't: "let us help get rid of these issues". It's: "There are issues and I don't care, and you shouldn't care too". WTF?

Do you see a common pattern in those 3 examples?
- great theoretical idea
- nice implementation, but reached some limit
- "we left the rest as an exercise", "we really don't care", "it's cool already because it's Haskell"

Got it?

Looks like if you want to participate in improving the actual Haskell stuff you have no choice but accept such attitude. Which is unacceptable for many coders around, I guess. If you ask me, I tried, but was turned off. I can sacrifice my time for learning state monads as the knowledge gained will benefit me anyway, but I don't want to waste my time struggling with people's defeatist attitude.

Now the political incorrect rant ends. You can start breathing normally ;)
could you please send me an email? my address is in my profile.
Could you please send me an email? My address is in my profile.
It's a long term plan, to use to set research policy, budget allocation, and all the other things that people use long term plans for. Putting a date on it's completion just seems like common sense. If you're dreaming, you say "someday", but if you're a little more ambitious, than you set a date, so you can measure your progress.
What book would you recommend for Erlang? (I've done quite a bit of functional programming, but not exactly lately.)
I don't see your email. Did you put it in your "about" section?
LastPass works. That means I finally can have a working password in Chrome Mac.

Yay!

Good bye Safari!
This build supports the LastPass password manager. It works well enough.

I've been a 1Password user for a year as well, and am totally dependent on having a password manager... Last time I tried LastPass for Mac-Chrome it didn't work.

Worth noting that I sent an email to the 1Password developers and they told me they had no interest/plans in building support for Chrome on the Mac at this point.
It seems that the human race is the only one that does not feel threatened by eye contact longer than half a second.

An accident happened in Rotterdam Zoo early 2007 a gorilla jumped over 4 meter of water to attack a woman who did look too much at him.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/605817/the_great_escape_of_gor...
Special weird-looking glasses are now distributed to avoid this kind of problem again.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/17/gorilla-viewing-glas.ht...

This might be linked.
I've actually had webfaction before and was quite satisfied with them. However, I was wanting to use something with just a little bit more hackability. Thus, I'm looking for a VPS which will allow me root access.