skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're claiming that the averaged temps will be completely different from other, non-averaged temps. Given what averaging is all about, I find this hard to believe. Something doesn't seem right here.
It can be educating to look at the history of Reia (Python/Ruby-like language for Erlang VM). At first its author tried to hard to make Reia indentation sensitive (like Python). Finally he reconsidered after discovering several limitiations: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2009/03/indentation-sensitiv...
Basically, yes. This search gives several similar hits from the past few days:

http://searchyc.com/apple+tablet+confirmed
great job but...
(1.0-2.0)+((((3.0+4.0)x(5.0-(6.0/7.0)))x8.0)x9.0) != 2087
Kelpie - A little web server in PHP
Some time ago I looked for something similar and found Pyflakes, which uses Python's compiler module to do some simple checks. This looks more promising. I have patched Pyflakes and I usually use it when refactoring code (check out http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19361 for more info).
So much happened... and only DOW survived almost unchanged
Doesn't that mean that winning side of military conflict gets even more corrupt afterwards?
Google and China: Flowers for a funeral
* We could get on an airplanes with little or no hassle ( no liquid restrictions, you could keep your shoes on, etc )
Evolved Electronic Brains Starve for Acid, Entertainment
Hmm, I see. Thanks for pointing that out - I'm still working on getting my intent across properly for this kind of thing.

Since it is too late to edit it and add a disclaimer, I guess this thread will do.
So what are you doing now?
Google Hack Attack Was Ultra Sophisticated, New Details Show
I'd like to see tech/medical breakthrough lists. I try to remember how fast things are changing, but aside from some flashy phones, I'm having trouble feeling in awe of the last decade at the moment. Anyone have any links?
Climate change and its perceived influence on the mankind is a very controversial subject, and today most of people's suffering from poverty and misgovernment has nothing to do with it.

The fact that a lot of people today suffer from poverty and misgovernment is indeed not entirely due to climate change (although there is dutch disease/resource curse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse)

However it is not hard to realize that those suffering right now will suffer even more were climate change effects as severe as some scientist predict, is it?
"An earthquake has no one to blame"

I agree. However, you can get spin doctors and loonies who manage to convince others that some group is to blame. Once they have done that they can manipulate the situation in a direction that pleases them. Witness for example demented Pat Robertson who makes the superstitious claim that the misery in Haiti is a direct result of a pact with the devil when Haiti's people (then slaves) overthrew their French masters two centuries ago.
The amount of code that uses floating point is a rounding error, pardon the pun. And generating RPN instructions really is easier than a register architecture - RPN is just a post-order traversal of the expression tree. Targeting a register architecture requires you to allocate the registers yourself.

You're also assuming that there is no intra-procedural stack modification that may be in effect while a function is being called.
Twitter is a mullet. It's not just a fad, but a fad that will embarrass us later.
I wonder how many of those 9M even own a computer. Haiti is the poorest country of America, with a GDP per capita of only $790.
It really is a big deal when you have an unknown amount of customer's hand-coded 32-bit assembly that needs to be reviewed in order to target the platform. 64-bit is an orange in this comparison of the Apple; that's a separate architecture.
No. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI
It's "so what" because it hurts the portability of other software to the platform. It's a bad business decision because it increases the costs of third parties supporting the platform.
You are among the rare people which are willing to learn, again and again. You'd be surprised how much people (outside HN :-) just won't learn. They are Blub programmers. They will be stuck with whatever Blub language you give to them, even C++. I'm glad you didn't, because I'm not sure I wouldn't.

EDIT: Maybe there no such thing as a Blub language (right tool for the job etc). However, Blub programmers do exist: half of my co-workers and maybe even myself (to some extent).
Monospace under Gnome is, I believe, Vera Sans Mono. Apple ships a slightly tweaked version of this font in 10.6 as "Menlo."
There is a danger when your first and second language are too different: you may dismiss the second language as being cryptic, especially if it is more concise than the first.
Fully Charged Batteries
You can hop directly to the original mailing list post here: http://lists.openwall.net/linux-ext4/2010/01/04/8 (the entire thread is a good read for anyone curious about file system benchmarking).
i spent 4 years, and it isn't realistic at all...
Why startups form at a constant rate -- making sense of Kauffman study
In Europe, maybe. Where there was - even after the devastation of the second world war - still enough infrastructure left to rebuild. Where both the Soviet Union and the US wanted to win over allies becasue Europe hat just become a cold war front.
After a bit of googling I found this:

The caller ensures that the stack is 16-byte aligned at the point of the function call.

“At the point of the function call” means just before the CALL instruction is executed, the top of the stack. No further explanation is given, but an inference can be made: the Darwin kernel is using SIMD instructions to quickly move data on the stack, possibly during context switches.

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~weinrich/papers/method_dispatch.pd...
I hope that 500 Internal Server Error isn't due to EXT4 file corruption. :-)
The last I heard Rod Brooks said all the pacbots software was written in Lisp.
It is quite different when you sell your tech to a government that oppresses people, don't you think?

Or do you think that sanctions as a political tool should no longer be used?
can't good memory become very helpfull in programming?
and how good is the the author working memory ? my point is that being smart is not the only important capability for programming.
Learning R via Python…or the other way around (with video)
Thanks! Even more valuable tip since the link is a redirect to "digitizor.com" which seems to be currently down.

Why is that link pointing to google in first place??
That was depressing. Or rather the end was depressing. Her sentence is way more than she deserved.
Most compilers produce exclusively SSE instructions for floating point these days (unless you're explicitly generating code for machines that don't support it). But the stack doesn't need to be aligned at the call site for this, it can be done in the preamble of whatever function uses it (it costs one BAND instruction).

The stack is not aligned at function entry because the CALL instruction pushes the address on the stack, thus having alignment at the call site forces the stack to be unaligned at function entry, however, it is unaligned by a known amount so you can produce aligned addresses by subtracting a constant value (skipping the BAND instruction). The featured rant misses this point, you get aligned addresses just as easily at the bottom of your frame as at the top.
Your loved ones could greet or see you off at the gate.
Ask PG: What have I done wrong?
tl;dr: Now my votes are broken, and I'm sad. (edited: "dl;dr" -> "tl;dr" - sorry.)

================

I've seen this complaint made several times before, with people finding that their votes are apparently not having any effect. I've watched the discussions, not feeling I have anything to contribute, wondering what they may have done to trigger the secretive "vote-ignoring" logic that you tinker with.

I understand that you need to stay on top of the problem of people gaming the system, and that being too open just makes it easier for people to screw around and make the voting system less valuable.

But generally I rely on high-quality items bubbling to the top, so when I see a comment I think is valuable and yet which is low down in the pecking order, I upvote it. I take care, I try to add value, I invest time.

And now I've found that some of my recent votes haven't made a difference. The comments I thought were worth boosting continue to languish. The people I thought were worth rewarding haven't got the karma.

I've wasted my time trying to make the site more valuable.

So, while I'll continue to believe that things are partially random, but biased to having better stuff near the top, I'm no longer as confident as I was. I'll continue to scan the new submissions to see if there's anything interesting, and maybe I'll click on an up arrow, but I'm pretty disincentivized about bothering to spend time trying to add value.

The message is that my time isn't valued. You've encouraged me into taking without giving back. You've encouraged me to react without thinking.

If that's the message you intended, I think that's sad.

Here are two links to earlier discussions - there are more.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233460
You can’t get a 1200dpi monitor but you can get a 250+dpi one if you start looking at medical displays. Obviously the more detail, the more accurate the diagnosis. They tend to be greyscale only though, and excitingly expensive ($10k+).
Why the negativism?

To clarify; I didn't mean to talk down the author nor the site. I was just expressing my surprise (and partly envy) about the success of such a seemingly trivial project.

My laugh/cry statement was about the fact how I (and many others) struggle in comparison. Seeing a site like this take off is a bit disconcerting. But well, you can't blame the lottery winner.
No they couldn't. Not in any airport I'd ever been at.

You always needed a boarding pass, or a pass saying you needed to accompany someone (for medical reasons, or for minors) to get through security.
There was no hacker news.

(I don't even remember what I would have been doing instead.)
From gmane linux-ext4 mailing list
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.xfs.general...
Practical Business Lessons From Social Psychology
I think that's a pretty good analogy.
I'll second the old IBM fetish. I spent so many hours on old IBM PC/RT terminals that I can't stand any other font now. It just feels like a programming font. I even drew a mimic font for MS-DOS.

Vera Sans and Menlo are pretty close.
The amount of math which you need in programming may not enormous, but it is certainly not limited to boolean algebra, and it needs to be internalized. For instance, if you don't understand that a function is a mathematical object like any other, you won't understand some very useful things in day to day web programming: closures, lambda, `map`, `filter`… Without those, my web site generator[1] would have been much more complicated.

[1]: http://www.loup-vaillant.fr/projects/ussm/
Right, "just make your stack frame a multiple of 16 bytes" was wrong; I should have said "just make your stack frame 16 * k - 4 bytes long". This is basically free because the size of the stack frame is known at compile time.

Realigning the stack at runtime though, is expensive and complicated.
> We were all excited about part 2 and 3 of the Matrix coming out

Oh, to be that naive again.
IBM 2010: Customers in Revolt
I switched over to the Bistream Vera family ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera ) since it looked decent and had bold/oblique for the monospace font. I also switched some of my other applications over to use the variable width fonts in the family for consistency.
Microsoft, being microsoft.

Heck, what a bunch of chinese HR activists worth anyway? It's not like there is not a billion and a half.

\sarcasm
I thought that was going to be a link to the Star Wars Holiday Special (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCNGjKnTzaQ) as a testament against George Lucas. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
Speed up Ajax with HTML5 Web Storage
All of the Pixelmator Team ... just returned from a nearly three-month vacation. ... I hope that you can find it in your heart to grant us the time we took

It it just me, or does begging off on vacation time like that seem... distasteful?
>Why? Do you have any other historical examples of consumers from one country pressuring another country to reform its government through boycott?

I don't know of any example but do you really need a precedence to follow for everything or can you not take extraordinary steps to counter extraordinary circumstances?

>And why China? China has a significantly more organized and helpful government than most countries in the region (say, the ones in which most of your clothes are made, or where some of the raw materials for those gadgets are mined).

The subject of this thread is China's human-rights record. More on next question.

>But most importantly, why do you feel the need, as an American consumer, to act on the relationship between China and its citizens?

You can't have double standard in reference to human rights. You (government, not you as in _you_) can't cry foul about communism and human rights record and use it as a reason to sanction some countries and even use it as (one of the) reasons to go to war at the same time blissfully do business with China. As far as human rights go, China is one of the worst offenders out there, and by human-rights I don't only mean not being able to search the internet unrestricted. If you say something against the government or try to start a movement, they will hunt you down and kill you. You can't even talk about those killings they will hunt you down and kill you. You don't hear about it much because they do a very good job of keeping things tight - do some digging around and you will see what I am talking about. You can start from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China

If any other country did what China does, there would have been massive sanctions if not war. But of course, no one wants to fight with a nuclear-powered military strong nation.
This story is a precursor to the book and movie deal. Pity about the sentencing.
I wonder if any of the developers have given thought to their mistakes being used by a government to hunt down its own citizens. That's got to be at least a little bit unsettling. Most of us make mistakes, fix them and never have to deal with serious consequences.
Conficker worm still spreading, Akamai says
The only checks I've had that don't go through are when the signature goes through the Account/Routing/Check number space. I'm guessing the errant pen stroke messes with the OCR they use.
Gran Turismo 5 only uses 80% of PS3 processing power
My current favorite monospace font is Incosolata http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html It's an amazingly legible font and looks great and small and large font sizes.
You want to single Microsoft out on this one? There are millions of companies, both private and public that do business with the Chinese government.

As for your comments about sanctions, my comment was actually not about China at all but rather the Microsoft bashing that was taking place. I have no further comments on sanctions or China.
You didn't fly through Columbus, Ohio then.
I've been a big fan of Droid Sans Mono for a while now. My preferred coding font: http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-font-family-courtes...
I was surprised to learn that this isn't in the FAQ (http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
As far as I'm concerned... this is the new canon for the entire series.

Thank you for saving my love of Star Wars.
The 1755 Lisbon earthquake suggests otherwise. If the disaster is big enough it can wipe out a country.
Here's my question: how did Luke end up stuck slogging in the desert with his grouchy uncle while his twin sister got to grow up a princess on a beautiful world?
Oh... I was hoping that was a link to "George Lucas in Love"
The History Of Winter Tires
I dunno, I think it's everything. This kind of thing is typical of Microsoft -- they just don't care about anything because they know they'll be making money anyway.

IE is a tool to leverage their monopoly and kill competition. It's _supposed_ to be a PITA so that people dedicate all their time to IE and its competitors get left out in the cold (meaning that you must have Windows to use the websites you want to use).

They just don't care about quality and they're not even a little bit apologetic about it. I'm willing to bet there are thousands of known, serious IE bugs within Microsoft, and the bosses won't let anyone fix them because the bosses don't have any reason to fix them.
Same problem: Black boxes bearing results. Same solution: open sourcing the whole thing.
While we're talking about the voting system - could you please specify more clearly in the guidelines in what circumstances downmodding is appropriate?
Not any more than this:

"And because Spider has been so successful and other Pixelmator releases were also very strong, we have made lots of money."
Terminus is what works for me. Still very clear and nice on the laptop screen.
http://fractal.csie.org/~eric/wiki/Terminus_font
Is it not safer to assume it is a bug first of all before claiming that pg is wasting your time and not valuing you?
That attitude almost always gives rise to evil, though, because it's much easier to make a lot of money off of dishonesty and run like hell when you're found out than it is to do otherwise.

"the love of money is the root of all evil" - 1 Tim. 6:10.

EDIT: Can someone justify these downvotes? I was hoping HN hadn't caught the reddit disease where any time religious texts are quoted or even mentioned downvotes fall bountifully.
A minimal ImageJ Plugin in Clojure: image inversion (with Java comparison)
Look at it like voting in America. Yeah, it probably doesn't mean squat, especially if your views contradict the local majority. But you still do it, right?
Portland, OR would let you go the gate without a boarding pass...
I'm not sure if it's useful (and it's only a guess) but I think there are two mechanisms at work here:

1. Minor technical problems at Amazon affecting [at least] a few vocal customers

2. Rackspace running a PR campaign in favor to their newly launched cloud product

I'm not sure to what degree these two are connected but the timing seems a bit suspicious, with a bunch of pseudo-benchmarks (paid by rackspace) cropping up almost at the same time as these reports about EC2 problems.

As a matter of fact there has always been some variance in EC2 instance performance, as anyone who has run more than a few nodes can confirm. It's the nature of the beast.

None of the reports I have seen provided convincing data for serious large-scale problems. A peek on a few hundred instances simply doesn't cut it when amazon is said to be running around a million of them. To add a datapoint of my own; we are running almost a hundred 24/7 instances here for batch media processing and I can't see a difference in performance between now and November'09.

And even if the reports are true I'm not exactly worried. Amazon is the first and largest cloud operator, so it's just natural that they hit scaling barriers before others do. If there are problems they will fix them and move on.

Ofcourse all this sounds much more exciting when you wrap it up under a sensational headline, along with a few meaningless but colorful graphs...
It looks like the type of forwarding URL that sometimes appears on Google search result pages, presumably for the purpose of tracking user behaviour.
I wouldn't click on the results with anything but Lynx.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Data ARE freely available on the web. Basically all of it.
Sceptics (I hate calling them sceptics: they don't deserve this term) like to repeat they aren't but don't be fooled by them.
PharmaSecure, using SMS to detect counterfeit drugs, just raised a $2M round
More along the lines of: "Be amoral".
I'm not sure that you quite understand how poverty works. There are no resources in Haiti, not even arable land. No human capital, nothing to trade. Even if it were possible to build earthquake-resistant buildings, without engineers, out of mud, they couldn't--because the mud was literally all they had to eat:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/29/food.internation...
Chill out man. First, it could be a bug. Second, no doubt HN is a special place, but it's still just a news forum. Get back to work, go out to play, don't make this your life.

</patronising>
I think there are more freelancers on rentacoder, which is just my guess based on the average number of bids on projects. But you might have better luck on Elance in terms of quality. There is also ODesk.
OK, so I just got the name wrong. I just tried `pygame' on its own.
No, I'm not attacking MS (that was my first comment in this thread). I am just pointing that giving a tool to someone you KNOW oppresses others is very different from selling to a neutral buyer.

I've had conversations about this kind of thing with a friend of mine has a software business in SA. We had a debate about whether selling software to the Zimbabwean govt. is moral. I think in doing so, you enable the systemic oppression of people which is clearly not the right thing to do.
Even if you don't have assets and flow to cover it... That's what http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoring_(finance) is for and surely there's a company out there that'd do it for free / for publicity.
>The milder forms verge on tautologies.

Exactly. The hypothesis is clearly false in any articulation strong enough to matter.
Haiti is not yet Somalia. By the '90s, purely humanitarian intervention in Somalia was untenable.
U.S. May Take Formal Measures Against China Over Google Hacking
I take this claim with a pinch of salt. It's a neat idea: exploit IE to install a sniffer that picks up Gmail passwords etc. on the local network, but the only "ultra sophisticated" bit of this I can tell is that the hackers did a really good job of covering their tracks.

The article mentions that your average cybercriminal is lazy, and I can believe that - you're only going to put as much time in to an attack that you're going to get out in financial reward. But if a commercial hack was going to bring about the same financial-level of reward, I bet the cybercriminals wouldn't be sloppy.
don't projects like pydev (which has been completely OSS for a while now, and is even written in java, like the code Steve attached) already provide this?
I know what you mean but HN has also been a place where like-minded people could identify one another for possible real world collaboration. That's much more than just a news forum.
That and the hundreds of thousands of dollars Microsoft spends to have it continually re-assessed by external consultants.
Not my experience in US airports. That restriction didn't exist at most airports (any airports that I boarded or arrived at) until after 9/11.

Watch TV shows from the era (Friends, for example, or the Jet Li "Romeo and Juliet" movie) and you'll see the same thing: we used to be able to see people off at the gate. Such people still needed to go through security, of course, but they did not need a boarding pass to do so.
Game venture capitalist and Electronic Arts trade barbs
Try Ctrl-F5 on pages where it seems your vote doesn't count. It's most likely stale cache.
OpenCandy Builds Online Marketplace For Free Software Downloads