skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I won't laugh much at a genuinely funny comedy if I've already seen it 10 times, so why would I laugh at 500-year-old puns that I've heard before...when even the best puns rarely cause laughter the first time?"

I've seen the film Animal House[0] about 20 times and still think it's funny. Part of the humor is the set-up and delivery. Yes, I know John Belushi is going to force potatoes out of his mouth, but when it happens it's still funny because of all the little details.

Same for A Night at the Opera. Dated in some ways, but hysterical in others. Grouch Marx is just funny, even when you know the jokes.

Now, my wife wonders how I can watch the same movie twice, since I what happens and how it ends.

My brother, though, compares this to listening to music; you know the words and how the melody goes, but you still like listening to a familiar song. Some people are that way with books and plays and movies, too.

[0] Yes, I am that old.
Wow. Blast from the past. I spent many years with Allegro and DJGPP. Shawn Hargreaves now works for Microsoft on XNA. http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/
(Evidently I am unable to count to 4. Sorry about that.)
Interview with a 419 scammer
Young Blood Reverses Signs of Aging in Old Mice
Yeah, he's a goddamn prince.
I disagree on that conception...somehow. Can someone explain?
http://securecoding.ch/?p=201001290042267
I found this too:

"Yup. Seen that one [UDT]. However, AFAIU, it focuses on moving large messages over high-latency high-volume links. 0MQ is focused on short messages on low-latency high-volume links."

http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2009-August/001...
I agree. But the name problem is only one small piece of the text problem. Text is a great deal better than punch cards and that is even a greater deal better than writing things on paper and physically setting the switches.

There exists a grotesque obsession with text and the tools to edit text among programmers.

My editor of choice can give me a great deal of help when writing HTML markup. It's actually quite amazing how good an editor can be.

But I can still jump off the track and remove a "<" where there really should be one. No, that's not really useful to me at all. I'd be much better off in a world where the angular brackes, quote marks wrapping strings, and other arbitrary delimiters of the ENCODING didn't really exist at all.

I'd much rather edit a DOM directly than through the looking glass of text.

An film editor would never open up his final cut project files and tweak them by hand. He has far better tools that more appropriately fit his domain. Why not me?
It isn't simply a factor of age and community size. A few years ago I was picking up both python and php for the first time for a couple of projects and as such spent a lot of time on both comp.lang.python and comp.lang.php (I said it was a few years ago). Both groups where roughly equally active, and both languages roughly equally old. Yet those two groups couldn't have been more different. In the python group people where, on the whole, polite, asked advanced question and got detailed answers. In the php group people where often insulting, the questions where almost always trivial and still the answers a best shallow and at worst completely wrong.
Will there be a call for some erlangbposts??? I rly want to know moar about erlang!!! I been waiting for the call so that finally hn will have decent stories vs all iMaxiPad crap.
Django-nonrel: Non-relational Backend Support For Django
Guess I was a hater hater. Bought the first iPod as soon as it came out. The white headphones got me a lot of weird looks walking the halls at my high school. It was a fantastic, well-made device.
Where does Slide or RockYou host?
I would like an answer to this. There's all this talk of down-voting submissions and user comments but i don't have this option.
The article says not to hash shared secrets, it does not argue against hashing passwords (with salts).
Take care of your friends and loved ones, everyone. Mental illness takes on all forms, and plagues so many people without ever showing to the outside world.
As for diff'ing two images (image A and B), assuming there's a picture that represents the diffs (image D), if you did a pixel by pixel comparison of the two images (A & B), if the two pixels differed in color, you could simply display that pixel in a complimentary third color on image D (or allow the designer to see all conflicting pixel in a single, consistent color which would show clusters of colors where changes had been made). Just a thought.
Remember the Solaris screensaver, how they used to blink around in a Conway game of life simulation?

I'll miss those little guys...
You'd probably like Codekana and Ngedit. http://www.ngedit.com/
I like Uncle Bob's rule: Leave the code in just a little bit better condition as when you checked it out. If everyone does that, it does wonders over time.
Which in turn means that even if the iPad is no revolutionary product (right now) it might well become just as big a thing as the iPod.
Yes, I realised it's old, but it occurred to me that the ideas proposed in it have aged well - don't you think?
"... My question to everyone here that has (hopefully) messed about with CNC machinery is: how did you get started? Are there any online/ofline guides you would recommend? ..."

The best resource is probably to contact your local hackerspace ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerspace Where do you find them ? ~ http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces Playing with CNC machinery requires a bit of up-front knowledge and semi expensive kit so a hackerspace good place to ask questions.

To give you an example of what you can do with CNC mills check out what vrogy builds with his own CNC mill ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/vrogy/sets/72157602307522809/ You can get a good idea of what he's using for looking through his flick set ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/vrogy/sets/
'Disrespectful' Google offered 'pittance' for flag, says designer
The docs are still up: http://docs.sun.com/

The same site, just rebraded.
"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated"
-Microsoft
Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?
I think it’s ok. I disagree with the sentiment but I think it’s the only polite way of voicing opposition. Much better than crowding the iPad submissions’ comments with noise. I think it’s useful to keep meta discussions separate from the normal discussions.

You can see that at least 64 people here agree with that opinion, so I would guess there are at least some people out there who are less likely to upvote iPad submissions after this.
Oh. It seemed to me the use cases pretty talked about password hashing.

I guess I should re-read :)
http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?a=153

You can look up the polar bears yourself. You'll find that the population now is about 4-5x the population in the 60s. It may be decreasing slightly in the past few years, but that's in the noise compared to the recent increases. There's no reason to suspect temp change has had an effect comparable to direct intervention by humans.
I think you might have missed out on the part about so-so backgrounds. When you're young and just starting out not having much background or experience is to be expected. That's not the case once you've been around for a long time.
My overall point with that sentence was that the more tech literate someone is, the less likely they are to benefit from the ease-of-use gains, and the more tech literate someone is, the more likely they are to regularly utilize their "lost freedoms".

This is utter nonsense. That's the same as claiming, that the more tech literate you are, the more ugly UI you need. Ease-of-use means being more efficient for everyone. Or are most tech
literate still punching cards?
iPad is not the device you will do your tech literate stuff: you will use your computer for that.

Why do people think that iPad has to replace something? Sure, if all one does is browsing, some emails, and a couple of games, iPad may be the he or she they needs. For others (including "tech literate" people), it makes a great complementary device, best suited for browsing, e-books, etc. I wouldn't want to hack in Ruby on iPad, but when browsing on my couch with my iPad, with its IPS screen, portrait orientation and amazing multitouch UI I couldn't care less about all the freedom it has not.
This is a tool to tilt the Hacker News frontpage towards a particular user.

As HN grows, there is more interesting content added to it. What if there was a way to get this content that would be interesting to you, with less of the pain? This is a tool to do that.

And if you're new to HN, or are a casual commenter, that's okay too. You just have to find at least one user whose comments and judgement you respect. Then you can look at the page tilted in their direction.
> Salted hashes are not that much better than unsalted hashes...

This statement made my eyebrows go up, and I pretty closely follow everything you say here on HN, and a lot of the things you say on Matasano.

Are you saying "not much better" in the relative sense, as in, "not much better because if all you're doing is salting, then you're still doing it wrong"? Or more absolutely, as in, "salting doesn't gain you anything"?
There may be hundreds of man years of research gone into LISP, but a lot of that research found its way into shedskin too. And the Self research is in there too. And his own research (Shedskin was originilly his Masters).
I'm not scared, but I think it is worth to look out, because this kind of scenario has already happened, for instance with web-based mail: webmail is convenient, limited, and pervasive. Plus, spam is evil. Result: most ISPs block the outgoing SMTP port without too much complaints.

Now, imagine that devices like the iPad are the majority (like Windows is now). Plus, viruses and netbots are evil. Result: Trusted Computing everywhere.

This is of course the extreme, very unlikely scenario. However, this is so serious that I think it is worth to watch out, even knowing that the odds are almost nil.
Say anything you want, just don't force me to pay for it.

> And screw these pointy-headed academics with their sinister hidden agendas, telling businessmen what to do.

If something is such a great idea, spend your money and get rich. Of course, I also expect you to take the loss if you're wrong.

What? You're not willing to risk your money?

Which congress critters do you think can run your life better than you can? Seriously - I want names.

Democracy? Would you choose Congress to run anything
Android On N900
> Tax cuts in capitol gains

Didn't Obama promise that during the SOTU last night. If so, what's your objection to Bush actually doing so?
Why not sign in with a camera?
Looks great! Thanks.
I think that you are missing the point of this satire. The rant doesn't seem to be directed to other people as much as the younger version of the author.

A lot of young developers who are smart and well meaning have the tendency to behave in a way equivalent to following the three rules... Their environment gives them very strong incentives. After all, who doesn't want to be popular among his colleagues and appreciated by his boss? They mean no harm and they may genuinely care about their project, but they end being destructive.

I am not saying I am smart (I am rather young and well meaning, and I am a developer though) and I recognized in some of the described behaviors myself from a couple of years ago. And, well, it was indeed bitter.

I have worked on a couple of projects, with great people, and NOW I know better than to rush to refactor the hell of some piece of code that works just because doesn't quite live to my high esthetic standards or stylistic preferences. However, I didn't see the light immediately. If I had had a chance to read that article, say, 3 years ago, I would probably have been less of a PITA for my colleagues and the world would have been a better place. Better introspection usually leads to more effective behavior (at least unless you are a genuine jerk, but then your refactoring frenzy is the least of two serious problems your colleagues have).

I hope to meet a lot of smart, young developers in the coming years, and I am pretty sure that at least some of them will be right in the "it isn't beautiful, let's refactor, RIGHT NOW!!!" phase. I will be able to send them a link to that blog post, and that is really awesome.
These numbers are disappointing compared to iPhone games. Look at Doodle Jump or The Moron Test as examples. Doodle Jump is over $1M in revenue (minus 30% App store fees), and The Moron Test is at over $500K in revenue.
I think flagging submissions is 100 or 150, and downvoting comments is 200. One can't downvote submissions, only flagging.
He only uses his funds to crowbar people and orgs into his vision. This man is and stays a big self centered prick.
I went back to school in a much more applied program (post-bacc at the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University) than my undergrad (Engineering at Harvey Mudd). One of the classes we had to take was a basic CNC programming class. We started with hand-writing a program to carve our initials into a block of aluminum, all the way up to designing a much more complex part in a CAM system.

Of course I haven't touched a CNC machine since. Depending on your project you may or may not be hand-writing G&M codes, but my understanding is that most professional work on anything but simple parts is done with a CAD/CAM package.
Well, every instruction in a Python program requires running through the interpreter loop. Then you have to decode, get the opcode arguments, then actually do the operation. For calling C functions from Python, you also have to extract the C types, call the C function, and wrap the result back up. Its not hugely slow, but yeah, it adds up, and its fairly easy to see why it compares poorly to compiled versions.
As one of the developers on the list (Slingstar) I'll throw my two cents in on the $1 vs $2.50 pricing. The vast, vast, vast majority of sales come while you are on one of the four featured lists. The "new releases" one is the only one that you are guaranteed to be on (and I have been on all 4 lists and it also seems to be the most important). However you get bumped off that after 20 games so if you are going to be selling more than 20-35 games a month you better hope you get on the top sellers or to rated. Top sellers is by number of units so a cheap game has an advantage there, and I believe that people tend to take into account cost when they rate things too (this game was totally worth a dollar, 5 stars!). I think a lower price point is optimism showing. People believe that they can claw their way on to the top rated/top sales boards and then stay there, and are willing to do anything to make that more likely.
> The first words he uses to illustrate cofounders you shouldn't bring in are "grey hair".

Not so fast. The actual description was "They all had grey hair and so-so backgrounds. Over the course of an hour, I learned one of the three was a relative who, after hearing about the idea, pushed himself onto the team as 'the business guy' and then promptly brought in a couple of former co-workers as co-founders. "
"The hard part becomes writing those constraints, not writing the actual solution."

Yes, writing constraints can be difficult, as can figuring out which constraints you need, and coming up with fitness functions for figuring out how good a given solution is.

Other difficulties include tweaking the various parameters of the GP to perform well enough to get reasonable solutions in a reasonable amount of time, and making sure you're not overoptimizing, etc...

The other thing I'd mention is that one should always take the results of AI research with a big grain of salt. Often the problems they work on are unrealistic toy problems that have little relevance to anything you'd actually do in the real world, and their statistical methods leave a lot to be desired.

There's huge pressure to get funding, so many papers tend to be unrealistically optimistic and misleading (but get published anyway).
I keep hoping that escalators will replace stairs, but they never do.
I'm solidly anti-text. And as a hobby work on non-text programming tools.

It's entirely unproven. But I hope one day I can say it's a better way to do things.
Tagsistant - A reasoning semantic filesystem for Linux and BSD
Historically, by the time inexperienced retail investors are hearing/thinking/talking about an investment, all the profit to be made is gone.

When everyone was flipping houses every 6 months, that signaled the end of the housing bubble. When everyone was buying dot com IPOs, that was the end of the internet bubble. By the time Glen Beck is telling every Fox News viewer to buy gold...

My point isn't to tell you what is, or isn't a good investment. Just pointing out that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing when investing.
Founder-GitHUb: Why Liberal Arts Colleges are failing to teach anything useful
That the rebuttal for pointing out flaws in the iPad is simply to say that one is not the target market for the device is ridiculous.
> even if it's just by voting this up.

Voting is cheap :)

As a rule I don't like these 'help my friend in need' posts, on HN there are relatively few of them but they're there all the same.

It's happened 3 times or so over the last two months, one was a guy that couldn't get his money out of the Apple app store (but it wasn't really Apples fault, the other a direct plea for money. I can't find the links right now but if you've been here for this long then I'm sure you recall the threads.

I'm going to try to explain why I don't like these threads without coming across as a cold-hearted bastard (which I probably am anyway).

Over the last two decades I've been in a position to help people plenty of times, and for the most part I've done what I could when I could, with a few exceptions because I thought that the parties involved were creating their own misery.

But I've never even thought of asking others to pitch in as well.

My friends are my problem first.

Using the six degrees of freedom principle anybody would have a great reason to pitch their friends troubles on HN.

So kudos to you for trying to help, but why involve HN?

Do you think I should ask you to pitch in to help my friends too?

We all probably know of at least one person that could use some help. For instance, my friends X and Y from Ontario, living in a house where it's -40 outside and barely able to pay their taxes and their heating bill.

I wouldn't dream of asking you to help them, not because I think that that would be wrong, but simply because you are too far removed from them, both physically and on a more human level.

I'd encourage everybody to help those in their circle of friends to the maximum of their abilities, rather than to start petitions like these to help people on the other end of the planet.

If you can do both, then of course more power to you.

I hope that makes sense.
"Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the hacker era of digital history"

Couldn't you have said the same about the games console?

Even now I can't program my Wii or any other major console, and that's been consistently true for over 30 years in games consoles. People knew then, just as they know now, if you want to tinker you get a real computer.

The difference is, now you'll be able to program for the device your friends use, where as programs I wrote on my PC stayed there and my friends with consoles could never use/play them.

(though it would be nice if you could develop from Linux and Windows machines too)
I liked this. Good advice, I, too always feel like I must be either producing or consuming, but I never think about...thinking.
I'm sure Amazon will be more than happy to sell its e-books for viewing on "Kindle for iPad" (provided Apple doesn't try to shut their app down as "duplicate functionality"). If we consider the Kindle hardware device as a way of priming the pump for digital book adoption, it seems to have worked.

It will be interesting to see what pricing looks like between iBooks and Kindle books (I noticed a number of $14.99 options in the presentation when most Kindle books are $9.99). Even though I'm a Mac/iTunes user, currently Amazon gets the bulk of my digital music money, because they offer better deals than Apple and have made the download to iTunes process pretty painless. My guess is they'll find numerous ways to operate within the new ecosystem the iPad creates.
Google attack highlights 'zero-day' black market
The Genesis of Attribute Grammars by Donald Knuth
By the sound of the web today, you'd think Apple pulled the plug on their entire Mac product line and now only sells iPads and iPhones.
"The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs--if yours are really good ones and theirs aren't. You think if they're intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don't give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do. They really do."
For web app passwords, brute force attacks against salted hash files are going to compromise so many passwords that the net effect to your business is going to be bad.

With bcrypted or even PBKDF'd passwords, you'll at least have a plausible response to a compromise, and some certainty that hundreds of your users passwords aren't going to be posted to a web page.
Yeah, I think I'll likely stay away from hand-coding the GCode. The parts I am making will generally have fairly complex curves and I can imagine would be a total pain to program by hand...
Here's another way of thinking of it. 15 years ago a kid might have had access to a home computer. The machine enabled pretty much all the tinkering that it could enable. The physical limitations (It was very expensive. Everyone uses it and you are not allowed to break it. Mom doesn't want you near it with a screwdriver.) were close to the limitations that mattered.

Today, a kid with an inclination has access to many, many tinker-able things.

A lot of that stuff is new. They can tinker on the web via a browser, which they can do with this device. They can get a Linux machine. They can get Windows. They can get OSX. They can tinker on Android. There aren't that many android devices floating around that aren't someone's phone. In 5 years, there might be lots of old Android phones in drawers that the kid can have.

The fact that you cannot write your own software on an iPad is an arbitrary limitation so people don't like it, but within the ocean of possible tinkering, it is a small drop.

The practical pool of possibilities is growing. The existence of another device, even if it more successful then the iPhone, is not going to change that.

Put another way, if you have the choice of either (a) creating another environment (say a webbapp) where kids can tinker or (b) fighting back the "direction" that the iPad is taking us in, choose a.
The attack isn't using brute force. The defense is against rainbow tables, not brute force.
Right, because nobody who ever played Nintendo went on to become a game developer.
Don't they mean ½?
> there are dozens of other brands of cough medicine out there, and I'm hard pressed to remember the names (or stories behind) any of them.

There's no need to remember that, they are all made from the same ingredients. Just pick the first cocktail that matches your symptoms, and that's it.
Why I wrote Arel by Nick Kallen