skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please don't 'dude' me. My breath is perfectly even. And at this point I don't think I was even replying to you. The things you said make make a program short are simply inaccurate and not the significant factor in making programs shorter. That's all. Nobody made their programs shorter by the 'tricks' you describe. And it's not a ZX81 thing. To read the keyboard on, say, a 6502 apple ][ you have to do a store to clear the strobe, a read to get a value and a check on the most significant bit of the value to check for keypress and then you need to mask out the actual value. I don't need to go into endless detail about the rest of them. The primary factor is the size of the instructions and the size of their operands (8 and 16 bit addresses).
Gemcutter + openSUSE Build Service cooperation
Interestingly, this reminds me of two programming languages you probably never thought about: TeX and Metafont.

TeX is an entirely macro-driven language. It processes an input file by reading a token (usually a single letter or a backslashed \command), and then either executing the token if it is a builtin operator or replacing the token with its macro definition. Since it is always processing the first token on the list, it has no operator precedence concerns (in essence, everything is in prefix notation).

Metafont (the programming language Knuth created for drawing fonts) is also a macro language, but it allows for infix notation as well as prefix. When you define an infix operator macro, you can choose a precedence level (primary, secondary, tertiary). For example (I'm not sure if this is exactly right), addition might be a tertiary operator, multiplication a secondary operator, and exponentiation a primary.

Having used both of these languages fairly extensively in the past, I would say that the easiest way to avoid the issue of operator precedence is to disallow infix operators. However, if you do think that infix operators are worth keeping in your language, you might look to the Metafont parser implementation for ideas--if there is anyone who has something to say on parsing, it is Donald Knuth.
Ask HN: What are the good alternatives to Google Groups?
That is pretty much it. Any suggestions?
I can recommend Nirvanix (http://www.nirvanix.com/). They have very nice API which allows you to do image processing on their servers (so on uploaded images).
Despite Risks, Carmakers Integrate the Web With the Dash
about time, should have been a feature 5 years ago
No limits. Before I switched to software development I paid my bills as a Jazz guitar -player and -teacher. Observation: the "too old" only applies indirectly when you're "grown up" schedule is already very full with everyday activities. Even then I watched people with no time to spare but with lots of enthusiasm and determination making progress. Some physical learning gets slower with age, but the speed of learning is not important at all IMO/E.

I line up with others here in recommending private lessons, at least for the beginning. Getting quick feedback in what you are doing is essential, especially for the motoric part.

I picked up viola da gamba with 39 and might have lacked some physical abilities to do the bowing well from the beginning but thanks to my teachers I got smoothly over these problems.

Another thing: start playing with others early. It's like chatting away in a new language. You learn best/have the most fun when you have to make sentences and express yourself.

Get yourself an axe and enjoy!
Add Cooliris to your Website or Blog and Enhance your Graphical Experience
Sorry to appear anal, but in riddles like this, details matter.

Did you mean "it's" or did you mean "its" ??
There is no such thing as "too old for music." Rather, picking up something new helps keep your brain nimble. You have no reason at all NOT to do it - and, hey, you even have a free tutor!
Will be interesting to see a follow-up post on how this impacts your sales/adoption... hopefully you can post a graph with a nice hockey stick in it :-)
I wonder what limitations there are to using standardized testing for evaluating "progress"?

Any heuristic you care to use is significantly better than the traditional metric for school quality, which is spending per pupil. (This metric was selected because optimizing for it optimizes for the outcomes teachers unions desire. American public school exist to employ union teachers and sometimes cause education as an industrial biproduct.)

This puts me in mind of the metric my day job used to track productivity for several decades: hours worked by the engineering staff. That one had perverse consequences, too. (Having a bad quarter? Need a good statistic to report to the head office? Start a deathmarch!)
Your pseudo-code is a little weird (it recurses infinitely?) but I think that what you're referring to is memoization, or basically caching your function calls' results for equivalent arguments. I don't know if any languages support it out the box, but I do know that any language with first-class functions and closures will allow you to make a simple "wrapper" construct so that you get this feature anyway.
It's not a teachers job to teach "smart". It's a teachers job to teach the subject, which gives the students more tools to make themselves "smart". I'm not sure if there is any way you could design a schooling system that teaches "smart", short of outlawing homework so students have more time to teach it to themselves. (I'm only half joking).

There are a number of levels in teaching (and learning). You learn the basic facts (or processes), you learn to apply them in simple situations, and you learn to apply them creatively. This can be tested by multiple-choice tests, or more in-depth tests, but multiple-choice is fairly reliable and very cheap.

Besides, the difference between a "good" and "bad" student is pretty easy to measure, if you look at the broad population.
Hacker pierces hardware firewalls with web page
I do agree on the if statements; they're fairly complex, although easily readable. I wonder how that'd end up feeling in the real world. It'd definitely irritate me at first, at the very least.

As for assignments, this would actually be a nonissue. For example, x = 5 + 10 would be parsed as:

(x = (5 + 10))

Same with a = b = c + d:

(a = (b = (c + d)))

Edit: Hmm, I was just thinking about this, and this order of parsing could potentially cause issues. It'd work for most arithmetic, but in the case of complex operations (specifically operator overloads on things like matrices) it could cause problems. I need to think a bit more on this issue.
Adobe Reader vuln hit with unusually advanced attack
Get the best car insurance quotes
It is vital for every car owner to have an car insurance quotes policy to protect oneself against the dangers that can ensure if one should meet with an accident.
Goodheart's Law (not to be confused with Godwin or Murphy's Laws): "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes".

Randall Munroe (xkcd) has make a similar observation.
I don't remember having problems with the way operator precedence work in any languages I worked with. May be I don't write complicated programs as you guys do.

Most of the time operator precedence works according to the BODMAS rule. Doesn't it?
I've recently been doing some research into building one of these things myself. Some resources if anyone's interested:

http://www.angelfire.com/blues/heli_project/
http://www.pabr.org/chromicro/doc/chromicro.en.html#iprc_rxt...
Niche Blueprint 2.0
Niche Blueprint 2.0 is a very unique and extremely high quality course that you’ll be able to use with great confidence.
I think a poll is a bad way to make such a decision. First, the poll options seem written in a way that would skew the answers towards "no precedence" (too many good sounding options towards that end of the continuum).

Second, I have never programmed in an infix-notation language without operator precedence, and I imagine most programmers are like me. I can't possibly know if I will continue to make stupid mistakes due to my intuition about precedence for just a couple of days after learning the language, a couple of months, years, or forever.

That said, I would encourage you to try the language without precedence and ask early adopters about their experience. If it is at all possible to have precedence in your way of doing things and it turns out to be needed enough, you can implement it later.
1/7/10

Why in the world would one choose this as the date format, if not 'forced' to do so by faithful reproduction of an external title? It seems that even on SparkFun's site they would use 2010.01.07.
Infografika: aukščiausi pasaulio pastatai
I think this will be the case with most people - they can't jump until the likes of Django/SA/scipy etc. move over to support Python 3.
How does the carrying cost become unsustainable?

Are the future generations paying the tax to themselves or to China? My gut sense is that who owns the debt is important, but I'm asking because I honestly don't know.

I also feel like what you use the debt for is important.
Cute, but twirling is not really the best way to harvest energy from a human. Even if your goal is a really really small generator.
I see your objection, an annoying obsession,
but, in fact, I mean, the context of possession.

=8P
Bug that depend on the phase of the moon
It's not a teachers job to teach "smart".

Yes it is, by definition. Once people are "smart", in the Feynman sense, there's no need for anyone to teach them a subject - they're self-motivated learners that will seek them out on their own.

You learn the basic facts (or processes), you learn to apply them in simple situations, and you learn to apply them creatively.

Although somehow intuitive, I don't think that's a good model. What are "basic facts"? What is a "simple situation"? What does it mean to "apply facts creatively"? All of these are vaguely intuitive but not well defined, with no epistemological basis. There is a much better definition of learning - the ability to create models of our experiences, test, and refine them. I know of no reason a cheap test can't be devised to test such learning, nor of any attempts to create one.
I went through this same problem a while back. The hard part was the direct deposit, most companies didn't offer it. I finally ended up using http://www.achdirect.com/
I'm not sure I would recommend them - their support was horrible, and the dinged me with a $100 "hidden fee" - but they were the only company I found who had an API for both billing and direct deposit and it did end up working eventually. BrainTree rejected my app too.

I wrote a ruby active_merchant plugin to interface with ACHDirect - ping me if you want the source.
I'm about to implement Recurly http://www.recurly.com/ on my own site, on top of PayPal Website Payments Pro.

Recurly abstracts my gateway's API stuff and stores payment details so I'm not tied to my gateway - much like I wouldn't use a Comcast email address to have the freedom to change TV providers.

Worth a try. Note: I'm a potential customer of theirs and have no other affiliation.
I'm not as pessimistic. I believe that by understanding the process it is possible to make allowances for this. It's just one of many challenges one must face in the pursuit of real excellence
A lookup on their ip says rackspace.com does.
It would probably be more effective to twirl the phone too. Easier, less space taken by the ring. You just need a system that makes sure you won't drop the phone by mistake.
Of course the counter point is that OS X passes the POSIX compliance tests, so this is apparently not considered to be a big deal.

But instead of us debating hypotheticals, perhaps you could list some of the "a lot of carefully coded applications" that break without this. Facts are always preferable to hyperbole.
Hypermultitasking
Micro optimizations. Fighting the wrong battles for the wrong reasons.
My bad, I assumed you would pick the opposite parsing order as default, because we read left to right.

I'm not sure if I could get used to

3 * a + 1

getting parsed as

3 * (a + 1)

It would also be really awkward when considering slots/accessors/etc

person.name = "Jack"

surely should never be:

person.(name = "Jack")
If the rumors surrounding the iSlate are correct we may see a new line of web sites that are touch optimized, multimedia intensive and built for leaned back browsing.

In general, web sites not built for PCs (mobile, TVs, tablets, refrigerators) is one thing I think we'll see lots more of in 2010. OK, maybe not refrigerators.
Closures are the functions with "private" data preserving values between two calls of the same function. It is not impossible with dynamic scope - but problem is again accidental name clash. As it is the same problem as with macros - I guess it can be solved on similar way - using functions with generated unusual and unique names of variables.

On the other side, with dynamic scope, functions are as expressive (or almost) as macros and they are the first class values. For example, one can implement "if" as a function. http://kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.com/2009/01/two-definitions-...
Pop Art Exhibition at the Tate Modern
AVR dev board with a bunch of bells and whistles, http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

Bus Pirate http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

3 Axis accelerometer with SPI interface, http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

Digital Temp Sensor, http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

Pressure sensor, http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

XBee adapter board and Xbee module, http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...
I mean without these "johnny chung lee wiimote goggles" :) It would be awesome doing the same using only webcam head-tracking.
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Chinese girls and Thai women want to meet men from USA, Canada and Western Europe for long term relationships and marriage
6 Fitness Programs to Get in Shape
+1, websites for mobile phones, optimized for TVs, and taking advantage of HTML5.
Hindi Karaoke Songs CDs
Clojure now available in Ubuntu repos
I'm surprised you would say it is overly focused, because I am worried it is too broad to cover all of computer vision -- it is a huge topic with many different areas (e.g. 3d reconstruction, image processing, object recognition...).

I started it because I always have questions about computer vision implementation or "best practices" and I didn't find any other suitable forums. I also like the Stack Overflow model. I hope that in time the site will help people to share CV knowledge!
The job fair is being held at the Hacker Dojo hackerspace, which is one block north of the YC offices.

Date: Jan 16 @ 10:00am

Location: http://bit.ly/hacker-dojo-map

Bring your laptop & side projects to show them off!
that's probably true...but i need people to take me seriously before i can get donations to pay for the domain name...
Hindi Karaoke Songs CDs
Hindi Karaoke Songs CD shop - Indian karaoke DVDs - make a custom DVD of your favorite bollywood karaoke tracks.
My grandfather started learning how to play the violin in his 70s.

I don't think you have much of an excuse.
Are you talking about a quine? A program which outputs its own source code?
How do you define success in the music industry?

To me it means the following things: making a career out of playing music (even just for the short term), being profitable both for yourself and your label/team, being heard by a large amount of people (this includes touring and sales) and getting mainstream radio/tv play. And managing to make more than one record that gets at least a 50% positive critical response.
Specifically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

Check out his entire youtube channel, it is full of interesting software/hardware hacks.
Don't forget the Natural Language Toolkit ( http://www.nltk.org/ ).

Rails is just a web framework. Killer? Yes. All you need for many apps? No.

And yes, both Django and numpy are also killer packages ... with Django probably being the inspiration for merging Rails with Merb.
A bit too extreme but I think he highlights some key points. I do think FB will flatline.
Hindi Karaoke Songs CD shop - Indian karaoke DVDs - make a custom DVD of your favorite bollywood karaoke tracks.
The headline immediately made me think of this: http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/...
Another way to do this is with Reverse Polish Notation (as in forth); it has an avid but non-mainstream following.

I'd say it's only a problem if you want to go mainstream.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that parsing order just plain wouldn't work. I'm starting to think that while doing things left-to-right could generally work, implementing some sort of simple precedence would probably just be easier. Thanks for the insight. It's threads like these that make me love asking this community for input.
I am facing a similar problem.

So had checked X.com - but discarded them. Because they don't work with credit card transactions yet - only PayPal. Which would mean at least half the transactions being lost...
I have my doubts about the capabilities of the software behind this thing - mostly stemming from my (unfortunately correct) hunch about the Nook:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/06/the-hp-slate/

The preview video reminded me too much of the Nook video, where everything was demo'ed at a speed far slower than any real use. For the Nook this turned out to be deliberate, as any semblance of real user speed would've exposed the embarrassingly slow software that was completely unable to respond in real-time.

Hopefully Windows' performance and response time would be better than this video makes me fear. If I were building a product like this I'd make sure the demo video shows a user absolutely going to town on the device - after all, isn't touch supposed to be a faster, more intuitive way to interact with our machines?
Regardless of hyphenation browsers could also do a much better job at implementing line breaking (affecting ragged left, right, centered, and justified text.) I've done some experiments with implementing the Knuth & Plass line breaking algorithm (as used in TeX) in JavaScript, and it seems to outperform the browser line breaking algorithm on quality. I guess browsers use a simple line breaking algorithm for performance, but I hope that choice is revisited some day because a good line breaking algorithm makes text much easier to read.

If you're interested you can find my experiments at:
http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/myfit.html
The most complex "proto-syntax" yet discovered in another species
This is my Arduino shopping list, for anyone already with an Arduino: almost exactly $100

Arduino Ethernet Shield	$45.95

Arduino ProtoShield Kit $16.95

GPS Shield $16.95

Joystick Shield	$4.95

microSD Shield $14.95

total: $99.75

(I realise I dont have a GPS unit for that shield or the joystick parts - but they will be in a bin somewhere at work :))
It's hard to generalize from a single instance, but you may have something there. It is striking that both means of expressing large numbers of ideas - vocabulary and syntax - only occur in us. I would guess that they were driven by the same evolutionary pressures and benefits.

There was an article about a (potentially) intermediate "proto-syntax" language used by an animal. Even since your comment, I've been wracking my brains for what it was. I can't even recall what type of animal it was... ah, now that you prompt me to put it into words :), I can google "proto-syntax": http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091212144710.ht...

And just submitted (I seem to have come to it from reddit; it hadn't been submitted here yet): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036802
We seem to be at loggerheads on two points.

1 - I'm focusing on basic proficiency (a bottom up approach - you learn the basics then the hard stuff is easy), you are focusing on learning through break-through discoveries (the top-down approach). (I may be creating a false hierarchy, but I'm going to run with it).

2 - I am focusing on teachers directly teaching students, while you focus on teaching students to be self-motivated learners.

Now, I can't think of any way to teach self-motivated break-through learning. The closest thing I can think of is to make subjects interesting (getting teachers who are enthusiastic about the subject, and providing interesting text books (yeah-right)), and give the students free time to pursue their own interests (which is why I half-jokingly suggested outlawing homework). The other model I've seen (don't teach properly so students have to learn) seems a little perverse to me.

(oh, the basic facts -> simple application -> creative use? Fact - past tense. Simple application - what did Spot do? Creative (or complex) use - Why did Spot do it?)
Offtopic: Can I use recurly outside the US? I'd need it for a b2b website and have nothing but a German bank account and credit card. Thanks!
Meeting the challenges of portable lighting needs - The Inova way
Inova specialises in the field of portable lighting solutions. It has always been a
challenging area. One of the main reasons is that portable Inova Flashlight has to offering satisfactory lighting effect to a variety of outdoor as well as indoor environment. It requires a vast research to come up with lighting solutions that will cater to all possible environments.
I don't. It's an excellent question though.

There may be literature out there on this -- please tell me if you know of
any.

You probably want to look at examples where this has been done and try to
abstract a method out of those. Neil Strauss's The Game (about pick-up
artists) is a marvellous example. And Colvin explains in Talent is
Overrated how Abraham Lincoln deliberately practiced writing by analysing,
simplifying, and trying to reproduce others' writing.

If I were to attempt an answer, I'd try something along these lines:

1. Figure out what an excellent outcome is.

For writing, this might be a collection of articles/books. Tricker for
entrepreneurship. Are Page and Brin examples of excellence for
entrepreneurship? Could you model them and be successful without being in the
specific situation they were in? Is Branson a better example? Is it likelihood
of success, imapct, or profit that you want to optimise? It's worth noting
that many things that have a tradition of deliberate practice -- chess, music,
and sports -- have simple measures of excellence (win, make it sound nice,
win).

2. Break out the outcome aspects that matter.

Good writing not only has clear and lucid prose, but a storytelling structure
that engages and entertains the reader. Entrepreneurship involves, amongst
other things, identifying a solution, producing the solution, marketing to
customers and investors, inspiring employees.

3. Compile specific examples of the aspects.

Get articles with excellent prose and books with excellent stories. This is
harder for entrepreneurship, but probably doable.

4. Modify the specific examples into exercises.

Rewrite the article into bullet points so that you can later write the prose
from those. Split the story into pieces and write on cards so you can later
practice arranging the story. Specify the requirements for a web-app that's a
solution to a problem so that you can practice implementing it from that.

5. Perform the exercises and evaluate your performance. Repeat.

This is where the deliberate practice takes place (though performing these
steps can also be a form of deliberate practice -- for meta-understanding of
performance improvement in the field). The time-span of each exercise can vary
enormously -- from seconds to months (for some things that can't be easily
simulated).

Of course, this process should be iterated and refined. I think it would be
much easier to do this with a partner that have similar goals.

What are your thoughts on this?
BTW it is presently available only for karmic.
Remind HN: SparkFun's $100 free day kicks off today (free Arduino?)