skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shrima Rai
Most of the people recognize Shrima Rai as someone who is wife of Aishwairiya Rai’s brother Aditya, however there is much more to Shrima Rai.
Is the python api still broken? I tried storing some gzipped binary data, it stored, but fetching it out always ended in encoding failures. Has this been fixed in the python interface?
http://pda.physorg.com/speech-speechsynthesizer-frequencytra... should work. In fact, I prefer this layout to the 'normal' one.
it seems possible from the diagram on the linked page. why shouldn't it happen?

i am curious whether the analysis stages can improve the code.
Can you talk about the metric(s) by which they measure productivity? I would appreciate it.
What's the value of knowing what server someone runs on?
I want one.
R2D2: Not a droid
Replication is important because initial results are often wrong because of misinterpretation of the results, experimental error, or experimenter bias. Others in the field want to make sure their work is on strong ground.
good point on burning all the hydrogen. i hadn't thought of that.
Searching for news.ycombinator.com, I get:

ERROR: Web server not shown in header.

If I search ycombinator.com, I get:

Apache/2.2.14

In the first case, I would recommend either parsing the user input to try and return some reasonable results, or just return a more direct error message.
Wow, I've never heard a story of someone who had to fight this hard to become a programmer. I admire your path and the fact that you were able to adhere to it, and I hope your work gives you a lot of enjoyment.
This argues for using something like the customer's Net Present Value instead of LTV. For a startup, the "interest rate" used to compute NPV is rather high because $200 in five years isn't worth very much to a startup today.
Yes, problematic. I guess though that if the box in which the wire is rolled can be fully pulled out of the wall (after unscrewing of course) then maybe these problems won't be so bad.
More security theater that inconveniences everyone and fails to catch the next act or creative stupidity: blow up the plane 70 minutes out. I have some, but not a great deal of experience with explosives and I dont believe what you can put in your shoe, along with your foot, can bring down an airliner.
> Elected legislators have simple incentives. Loudly claim responsibility for anything good that happens to their constituents. Deny responsibility for anything bad. If at all possible, deny the existence of anything really bad.

Yes!

> Avoiding blame is the primary reason law codes are so complex and hard to read.

There's another important trick - delegate the actual regulation writing to an agency. That way, the legislator's fingerprints are not anywhere near the actual rules. And, said legislators can also take credit for intervening with the regulators.
Ask HN: What did Santa bring you?
Just as it says: what did Santa get you for Christmas?
Am I crazy to think that cutting the world in "US" and "the rest" is profoundly dumb?

I mean, putting in the same bag Benin, China and Germany? did anybody loose his mind?
The developer here. Just saw my page views explode from this link. Thanks for the feedback (you're right - there's not much of a point, it's just a playground). BTW, I'm also releasing the engine it's based on here:

http://www.sideroller.com/wck/
ah very interesting ... i guess replication studies are often done as like a 'step 0' of a new original study, just to make sure that the new study is on solid footing and not based on results that are tenuous
The 10,000 hours thing is actually early on in the same book.
He does, in fact, mention it: (although only briefly)

"Aim to recover your CAC in < 12 months, otherwise your business will require too much capital to grow."
True, but even if you got $200 in NPV in five years (maybe $300 of nominal dollars), you still wouldn't be able to spin up fast enough and would take a massive infusion of capital to scale.
I've put up some google custom search engines by collecting the 20-40 most active delicious taggers for a topic, e.g. clojure, and counting their tagged domains.

Works ok, a little better precision, lose some recall vs. generic google searches, but need to renew the list of domains pretty frequently
What extra value does this provide me over just checking the header in firebug? Firebug also gives me a lot more information than what you are providing.
to me, his observation is "people will buy stuff they don't really need." gullibility is an undying human quality that makes many businesses work. the video professor doesn't keep running infomercials for kicks. somebody's buying.
I am very much looking forward to release.
i was working at a smallish financial institution, they asked anybody who doesn't want to do databases and unix shell scripting, step back!

So my first languages were APL, C, awk and a few 4GL databases, oracle, nomad.

Now, i would start with ruby and python, then look at erlang, clojure, scala, haskell, ocaml, F#. i.e. lots of FP
Yeah, I think I'll have to see more evidence before I'll believe this exists.
I loved ZZT! I reverse-engineered the save+level file format and found out how to turn off the level editor lock flag for the official maps, too. :) (I remember finding funny comments in the source.)
Forgive me, I don't watch fox nows, and generally do not find myself making a fist over the scandal of the minute. If anything, I'm intolerant of the tabloid nature of the press, and the people who find themselves filled with righteous indignation over every single sensation in the news.
Telecom Expense Management
Offering utility expense management solutions, including improved management of your utility, telecommunications, waste and lease expenses.
markmail, krugle, imdb
New London Movie Tour - bus tour of London film locations
A new tour is to launch in London in early 2010 taking visitors to famous London film locations. The three hour guided movie tour by luxury mini bus will visit more than 60 central London film locations from over 40 movies including The Italian Job, Bridget Jones, The Da Vinci Code and Sherlock Holmes.
trying to scam a company whose products are open source on a day when they are trying to give back to the open source community seems like a pretty fucked up thing to do...but hey, maybe you want to piss off a bunch of hackers and make open source companies look bad?
You are right they are not new. Yahoo was one of the first to do rigorous testing to derive these rules and publish them. Along with YSlow, these rules are what kicked off the discussion on those hundreds of other sites. They are also under regular review and testing as we discover new tricks, so check back often.
I work as an EEG technician, with a background in electronics, and computer programming. This technology is most certainly possible, but in fact a real reality.
The results are usually a result of part classical conditioning, and part cognitive neurology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfac...

This is not a huge leap from other devices like cochlear implants. Some of the newer implants use coils to avoid having wires pass through the skull.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant
I've always considered myself a 'global citizen' after living in the US for 15 years.
During a 10 day trip to Germany. I was thrown out of a bar for asking directions in english, yelled at by some crazy dude in a train station for stealing their jobs and people crossed streets just to avoid a dark guy.

When I landed in Los Angeles, the minute I saw a mexican american immigration officer, I almost cried.
I was home. No one will question me why I am here. The mexicans, the chinese, the Indians, the whites and the blacks. They are all my people.

I might have my curry everyday but my spirit is american.
Looks very much like Philip Wadler's Links: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/links.html

Also, looks like it's done by people active on the OCaml mailing list. They are smart guys.

Worth checking out.
I was going to recommend Matt Blaze's crypto.com as a better resource, but it was apparently moved to the CDT and is now dead.
The expectation of market clearing for programmer wages is completely implausible here.

Going independent requires additional skills beyond the programming productivity that we're supposedly trying to measure, is perceived as riskier (and it's generally understood that most people are irrationally risk-averse), and may involve additional practical complications, such as if our hypothetical programmer relies on salaried employment to provide health insurance for a family. So "would this programmer make more independently" is pretty much an irrelevant question.

As for moving between "regular" jobs, there's little evidence that most hiring processes can distinguish programmers by productivity, nor that most organizations measure the productivity of employed programmers in a useful way. Switching jobs also has practical obstacles, such as the disruption of relocating, and avoiding the perception of "job hopping". So as far as we can tell, salaries have little relationship with productivity, which is kind of the whole point.

Fundamentally, the article makes the mistake of taking principles that are simplifying assumptions in economics and then arguing as if they're universally correct. This is roughly akin to an argument like "Things tend to fall down, so it's a fallacy to ask why helium balloons float."

Of course, you can simply define someone's productivity as the market value of their time and thus "prove" that order of magnitude differences in productivity between programmers don't generally exist, but proof-by-redefining-the-terms doesn't really make for a persuasive argument.
This is a great strategy if your lifelong dream is to get rich off a legal settlement. It's not at all instructive for startups.

Note the delay from filing the patent to having it issued: theirs was unusually fast. The last patent filed in my name took over 8 years to issue, and Arbor had very excellent IP lawyers. That's 8 years before you can even file a suit.

Assume you instantly find a deep-pocketed violator of your patent. Add up to a year just to get to the point where you're ready to sue, and several more years to pursue the lawsuit. Spend --- according to this article --- several million dollars just in legal each of those years.

Then flip a coin to see if you get anything back.

Patents are a waste of time for startups. If your company is even around for the entire window of time needed to execute this strategy, you've done something wrong.
Me too! http://www.loup-vaillant.fr/projects/ussm/

Not as polished, of course, but usable enough to make my web site. Improvements coming soon.
When I was 11 I grabbed a small book on Visual Basic so I could write a keylogger to steal my sister's AIM password. It was fun, learning about how to use the WinAPI and various other components, even though I didn't really understand the abstract concepts behind it.

I did VB, ASP, and dabbled with the .NET framework until I was about 14, which is when I started to get into languages like Java and C.

After studying Java for a couple years, I started learning about buffer overflows and shellcode, so I did x86 for about two years. At that time (I was 16), I had a job for a VoIP security company in Texas, and I published various exploits for VoIP phones. I think I was 17 when I gave a talk on overflowing SIP at Toorcon and Blackhat.

I did PHP and Perl for about a year after that, but I dropped that pretty quickly when I found out about Ruby and Python. I'm running several web-based startups now, and I love it.

I'm currently 19.
Hmmm... while that may be, many people are taking his books as nonfiction. Perhaps he should consider that, and be more careful, lest he spread potentially damaging information to the masses
The idea that a lot of companies fail after achieving product market fit contradicts a lot of advice out there... I wish the author would have referenced some real world examples because I'm struggling to accept his claim.
Very impressive business card in 3D Video
Mac’s render color differently than non-Mac’s. That is a positive thing that a lot of people like about the Mac when using applications, but if you have a MAC, the coded page display you see inside your browser is not always what was intended by the developer.

I believe it has to do with the gamma settings on the Mac monitor which I believe can be adjusted.

It can be corrected for on the developers end also (with effort-time), but I wonder how many non-mega sites are taking this into consideration. As you found out 90% or so of the world sees red and green as intended, yet you saw black on dark red.

If the Mac’s Gamma is altered across the board for all applications I would assume you will lose a lot of the slickness that attracted you to the Mac in the first place.

I’m surprised no-one has written a plug-in for the Mac browsers that will ensure that just coded page content, flash, and pics render in the browser on the Mac Screen like a non-Mac. I assume this could be marketed as a browser enhancement for $$$. Call it something cool like Leopard Fangs.
Let us agree that this discussion is pointless due to lack of reliable performance metrics. In general, biological systems are orders of magnitude better than systems engineered by humans and, hence, I mentioned that we have a lot to learn from Nature. Sure, a hummingbird does hover but it can't attack enemy tanks like the Harrier does. We're talking apples and oranges here. However, look at the size of the brain of a hummingbird and how little power it must consume when compared to the powerful computers that run the control algorithms necessary for the JSF to hover. It's humbling. But Nature had millions and millions of years to come up with such solutions, and we, humans, have been flying for merely 106 years. Maybe we'll catch up.
I would remind my younger self to dare more and more boldly as the resulting gains can be great and the resulting losses are usually indifferent.

In general I wouldn't want to change anything for there is really no experience in my life that I wouldn't have needed for growing, that wouldn't have tried to teach me something.

However, the outcome of this teaching is gradually learning life. But you can't learn any quicker than you want to, and you will want to learn no more than you dare to receive.

Thus, dare more and take whatever lesson that comes out of it.
Yeah welcome to America, where if you don't fit in -- you fit in. :) We're the pound-puppies, mongrels, and half-breeds of the planet.
Enough Waiting — It’s Time for Amazon to Buy Netflix
It could just be a simple project.
In what possible sense has AIMA replaced PAIP? PAIP is crammed to the gills with substantial pieces of Lisp code that do interesting and useful things; it focuses as much on the "programming" as on the "artificial intelligence" and has a lot specifically about Lisp. AIMA has code snippets but not much more, and actually they're generally (always? I forget) pseudocode, not actual code in Lisp or any other language.

AIMA is a fine book. PAIP is a fine book. I don't see how you could possibly use either of them to replace the other.
Practical Common Lisp, or even better, Programming Clojure.
The video wasn't so great -- a lot of generalities and hand-waving, but it's necessary to have that kind of video to give folks a high level overview.

Loved some of the sample apps, though. "Here's a web page" -> 1 line of code. "Here's a web page that interacts with the user" -> 2 lines of code. "Here's a complete Wiki" -> 13 lines of code.

You gotta love ML.

Now for the criticism. I think I would have moved my meta language out into some kind of hybrid html/xml languages instead of trying to sock too much into the language layer. I'm more comfortable with templates or DSLs executing against a server stack layer than an integrated language that tries to describe it all.

Hope that makes some sense. Lots of dense material I glossed over.
Google Chrome: It's a browser, just doesn't do that HTML thing.
Fair enough. Consenting adult sexual preferences.
Don't wait to be handheld, say no to social validation.
Superstition says giving knives as gifts is bad.
The "high-level architecture" is a specialized architecture. The problem with a specialized architecture is that it is pitched as doing one thing really well (e.g. execute lisp) but, by the time it is implemented, it is late to market and slower than the "ossified crud" architectures. High level architecture CPUs have been tried several times and have failed every time. The article pines for one instance of a lisp engine and refers to several more. A non-lisp example is the Intel iAPX 432
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432. Lots of people have created Forth engines, but none is used widely http://www.ultratechnology.com/chips.htm.

General purpose CPU architectures beat specialized architectures because they are more flexible and are simpler. Flexibility means a broader market. Simplicity means faster execution and fewer bugs ("errata") in the CPU itself, where it is very difficult and expensive to fix.

Interestingly, the current CPU architectures seem to be the sweet spot: going lower level with VLIW http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_long_instruction_word has also been tried repeatedly and failed repeatedly.

Specialization is for insects. - Robert A. Heinlein
http://elise.com/quotes/a/heinlein_-_specialization_is_for_i...
I'm very disappointed that people have downvoted you without explaining why they did so. I too was shocked at that paragraph.
So basically, sometimes he says things that are flat-out wrong, and he doesn't care as long as they're thought-provoking falsehoods, and people read it anyway because it's fun and engaging and thought-provoking in a way completely unrelated to accuracy.

In other words, he's basically an entertainer. Debunking Gladwell is like "debunking" the historical accuracy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
What was your first tweet?
I guess it would be impossible to know that I run Apache as a reverse proxy to Nginx, but I was still hopeful it would pick it up.
Got change for a $100,000 bill?
Not useful for me. I would prefer to use the command-line over your service, if I wanted to know the server running a site.

beewulf() { curl -s -I $1 | grep Server: }
> Right wingers watch fox and never need to learn about evolution

Stereotype much? (BTW - There are several "right"s in the US, and only one of them, a fairly small one at that, disagrees with evolution. Others do think that teaching preschoolers how to fist is objectionable, but it's not clear that fisting has much to do with evolution.)

It turns out that Limbaugh etc often cite NYT articles. I'd guess that a reasonable number of folks actually followup on such cites.

The reverse - not so much. Otherwise "good people" wouldn't assume that "the right" is as cocooned as they are.
If You’re Nervous About Quitting Your Boring Job, Don’t Do It
I see that "OpenCL" is listed above the LLVM box on the Ocelot page, but I'm not sure why; It is known that several OpenCL toolchains (Nvidia, ATI, RapidMind) make use of LLVM, but it is unclear in what capacity they are used. For the sequence you described (PTX->OpenCL->GPU), there would have to be an OpenCL backend for LLVM. As far as I know, no such backend is publically available, and another compiler would be necessary to take the OpenCL source code down to PTX (from whence it came) and then the driver would JIT that PTX for your specific GPU model.

> i am curious whether the analysis stages can improve the code.

Ihe conventional wisdom is that any series of analyses that takes you from representation X, through one or more other representations, and back to X can only make things worse, assuming that the JIT from PTX to GPU machine code isn't horrendous. This is because any analyses, optimizations, and transformations need to be conservative to maintain correctness, and high-level semantic information about the parallelism inherent in the application is usually lost in each translation step. In this particular case it might not be so bad, as long as the LLVM IR is rich enough to faithfully represent the Cooperative Thread Array (CTA) semantics in PTX and not flatten them to SPMD code. My intuition, however, is that it's not; LLVM was designed as a fairly generic virtual machine that would faithfully represent most CPU-like execution models, and hardware CTAs (also called 'warps' in Nvidia parliance) are mostly a GPU-only phenomenon. CPUs have SIMD units (e.g. SSE, MMX, Altivec, NEON), but the execution model there is fundamentally different than the GPU.
Security or theater: no electronics on international flights?
I think it's general for open source, most source contributions aren't very good in the first round.

The trick is to keep potential contributors enthousiastic enough to take your comments well and rewrite the patches to conform to the standards of the project. I have had the same observation as antirez, but haven't found a solution yet.
Styling with SVG
Perhaps the Wave protocol could be adapted to this sort of purpose. It seems designed for it, really.
Kindle 2. Haven't tried PDFs. I got the international version which comes with its own troubles (less and costlier books, no blogs, etc), but I have been managing to hack around so far.

Good news, its quite fast here in Mumbai and I am having fun. I mostly work on the go at coffee shops and I have always liked referencing a book more than the internet, and with kindle now i have my library on the go.
'Listening to her Dutch friends, she assumed that Americans were fat, loutish, naive and sexually repressed. “But then I came here and found it was all false,” she smiles.'

So very true. The same would apply to British attitudes towards the US. Spending a short time travelling around the US cleared away all my misconceptions, thankfully.

As a side note, I suspect that attitudes might be equally uninformed the other way around, that is about Europe from the US. Europe is incredibly diverse yet I often read opinions from the US treating the continent as a whole.
Entrepreneurial DNA Transcends Context
Some examples?
redundant, use netcraft.com
Spoofing the referrer header is trivial and so wouldn't offer any protection in this case.

I do, however, wonder if there would be any benefit to scraping the beewulf site. Retrieving and parsing the relevant headers yourself is trivial and would remove from your hypothetical clone app any dependency on beewulf.
"Cute" maybe, not smart.

It doesn't seem easily replaceable (or even inspectable for damage)

It's not portable / it's fixed to that particular socket. So, if I occasionally need an extension cord in the garage and in the den I need to buy two of these instead of only on cord.

It's more complex, almost guranteed to be more expensive and more prone to break down.

Winding a cord that tightly probably damages it unless it's specially constructed.

Doesn't look like it can be all that long. 50',75',100' ext cords are common.
perhaps a better name for the article would be Don't Quit Your Boring Job Before You Have A Decent Replacement Revenue Strategy.
Can't wait till someone tries to get explosives on the plane weaved into clothes.
Already asked: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015120
If true this is insane. Why not just sedate everyone and handcuff them to the seats because the way things are going that is the logical conclusion to this inanity.
Mythbusters did an episode where they made exploding pants didn't they?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2006_season)#Episo...
That's a good point. What I meant to say was that the other browsers don't have to download it.
Agreed.
The problem is that nobody (or hopefully, very few) people ever took 'MP: Holy Grail' as historically accurate.
As someone with a degree in Decision Science my main issue is not so much with Gladwell, but the fact that most people I encounter assume since it's in a book which references scholarly articles that it's true.
I've noticed this on previous visits. I tend to close the site before reading anything due to it.