skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's really interesting, thank you!

Open ID is straight out for me, it's too foreign a concept for most non-technical people that I've talked to (and even some technical ones).
Surely in six years, Ogg Theora will be just as good as H264

Theora is a generation older than H.264. There are features in H.264 that help compression that aren't in Theora, plus Theora has a few other problems (e.g. motion vectors no longer than 16 pixels). So a good H.264 encoder is always going to beat a good Theora encoder. Perhaps they'll be able to create a truly excellent Theora encoder that will mitigate the format's deficiencies as much as possible, and outperform the majority of H.264 encoders, but I wouldn't bet on it. The open-source x264 encoder is already very good, and is only going to get better. And the increasing use of H.264 for TV broadcast and Blu-ray surely means that there's going to be strong competition amongst the vendors of commercial H.264 encoders.
I didn't say that.

Remember that in the various flavours of democracy, the indivdiual votes and make their opinions heard. These individuals, regardless of their company affiliation, can vote.
> Not much, it still doesn't make any sense to read or hear.

pvg points out below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097310) that my source had a nonsensical ending; the actual ending makes a bit more sense.
The court's decision, as I understand it, was that people do not lose their right to free speech merely because they exercise it while involved in a corporation. So, the logical extreme is that people should not lose their right to run for office even if involved in a corporation, right?

People seem to want to spin this as "people involved in corporations gain a 'free speech' right that they wouldn't have if they were just a rich person", which would seem pretty bizarre, if it were actually what was said.
Well, you can either keep bugging them to no end, or you can wait for a week or so then politely bug them again.

Remember, this company has a million other things to do besides hire you. So while it's the most important thing to you, the reality is that it's probably lower on the importance ladder than lots of other tasks.

Ping, wait, ping again. AND, if you never hear from them, is a company that rude really one you want to work for?
Caste as a social construct is far from abandoned and forgotten. It still exists in many cultures and is a major cause of discrimination and hardship.
This is a straw man, since the federal gov't is a republic rather than a strict democracy.

And what would you propose as alternative to permitting everyone living in this country long enough to reach adulthood to cast their their own vote?
One of the best comments I saw on the page was that, if one person has the right to free speech, then groups of people also have a right to free speech. However, it also seems clear to me that if one person can have a seat in congress, multiple people can't have that seat. This argument would allow the courts to strike this down while keeping the Citizens United decision in full force.
Touch Based Web Browsing Will be the Death of onMouseOver
Yea, in this case I am suggesting that he shouldn't go file for a patent himself. It is expensive, a distraction, and offers no meaningful protection against deep-pockets.
The passage of time won't make Theora any better or worse compared to H264. There may be some improvement in the quality of encoders, but the standard itself cannot be changed (at least, not without massive breakage).
It appears the only difference between this campaign and that for any other clothing company in Diesel's market is the use of the word stupid.

Same models. Same situations. Ha ha ha, sex sells.
Exactly. Trying to conflate Freedom of Speech with eligibility for public office can't be anything other than intentional misdirection.

US Constitution, Article 1 Section 2:
No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

Does a corporation pass any of those tests? So why the heck do they make out like this is some kind of crisis?
The Python community is very vocal and explicit about the conventions developers are expected to follow, more so than any other language I'm aware of: PEP 8, Zen of Python, non-stop critiques about whether some code is "pythonic" enough.

Yeah, that's the "this is the way we do things" part, but that's a different issue. Things like PEP-8 and a measure of how "Pythonic" something is helps make one of Python's biggest strengths, the "batteries included" easier to accomplish and easier to understand, because there is a consistent standard. Of course, not all code, even in the stdlib, is up to that standard, but it's more consistent than a lot of libraries you'll find.

The point I was making, and the difference from a lot of language communities I've seen is that there is little of this hyperbolic "That's not even possible in [insert-language-here]" nonsense. The Python programmers I tend to interact with don't really mind if you don't use Python, because at the end of the day, almost every language has the necessary features to Get Stuff Done.
far from demonstrating the absurdity of the Supreme Court's position taken to a logical extreme (to paraphrase your characterization), it does no more than take a straw man position out to a logical extreme and therefore illustrates nothing

This is a much better explanation of the view point you expressed originally - probably the best I've seen so far. I agree with you here completely. I still think it's a clever hack, but I concede that my original argument wasn't very strong.
Graphics, and especially color, make comprehending percentages very easy. Visual learners will instantly understand those graphics better than "75% said option A and 25% said option B".

The graphics also make comparisons easier. Comparing 50% and 75% visually is much easier than looking at text.
nice and clean UI, i have used kohana php framework before, its very clean and easy to use, idea for side projects.

one thing i noticed is that you haven't have a customized 404 page(maybe you need to put your app in production mode:(.
the question wasn't "does this prohibit the freedom of speech", it was "does a corporation have the freedom of speech" in the first place.

No, that wasn't it.

The question was, "when acting in concert as a corporate body, do people retain their freedom of speech". Nobody has shown a compelling reason why people acting together shouldn't have the same rights as each of us has individually.
I guess you are talking about this or something like this
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081021093944.ht...

But I think analogies are a nice way to come up with hypothesis at best, not conclusions.
First thing I install on solaris, probably my favorite unix tool also ;) Can't imagine doing giant database imports without it.
I really like the idea.

I've casually been working on a similar project except with PHP.

-http://github.com/breck7/brecksblog

-http://brecksblog.com

It's 1 file, under 250 lines of code, and powers a fair number of blogs now. Also uses a file for storage (no database needed).
>>> def print_a(inst):
...	print inst.a
...
>>> class Foo(object):
...	def __init__(self, a):
...	self.a = a
...
>>> Foo.print_my_a = print_a
>>> f = Foo(5)
>>> f.print_my_a()
5

Not sure why my previous post was downvoted, unless maybe your definition of monkey-patching is different than mine.
Ironically, it did the opposite for me. I used to read and enjoy Reg's blog posts. Since he made the change to the new format, I don't think I've read anything he's written there: it doesn't work like anything else any more, and while his blog was one of those I enjoyed, I rarely go out of my way to find content like that when there are many other blogs competing for my limited spare time.
I thought the standard argument was that online courseware doesn't reduce class enrollment, but attendance. Not that either is a good reason to stop putting course materials and lectures online.
Yes, the four justices that dissented had arguments too, but I personally think one needs to stretch quite far to find McCain-Feingold constitutional. The text of the decision (including dissents) at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf gives all the arguments, and is very informative. (But reading it in full would probably be a waste of time...)
For your claim to be true money must in some way be related to the ability to exercise free speech. Consequently, an absolute interpretation of the 1st amendment means taxation is a violation of free speech. Time to abolish taxes, then?

In practice freedom of speech is a sliding scale. See the public school system. There we have determined that education of our youth is more important than absolute free speech. Perhaps democracy is more important as well? We make these pragmatic decisions about the 1st amendment all the time. The suggestion that it is an absolute is completely untenable.

Further, if you continue to adhere to a strict constructionist interpretation of the constitution, will you make a public statement against hostile takeovers by shareholders? The text of the thirteenth amendment reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." If we really are treating corporations as people protected under the constitution, you shouldn't be able to take over a company against the management's wishes.

I hope I've made it clear that absolute interpretation of the constitution in this case is not a valid interpretation. Regardless of the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold, literally interpreting the 1st amendment is an invalid argument against the legislation.
Probably because your comment lacks information. "Tufte rehashed" tells me nothing. Who is Tufte? Is that a company? A person? A blog? What's their link? Is it just an inside joke I don't get?

Just adding context and links to your comments would make them more useful.
A Python Context Manager for Timing Benchmarks
Analysis of a busy iostat report
I love it when The Onion predicts real life and reminds us how absurd things can be:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/supreme_court_al...
Googling gives 2028, which means that any short term royalty-free license is just bait and switch.
The same seems to happen with learning languages, and generally, learning.

It's much harder to learn something drastically new as an adult, as you don't have free time, you perceive a year as a short milestone etc.
Advertising for products is of course fine. The reaction is against playing in the political arena with an agenda motivated by their profit rather than the overall good of the country.
Not if the hammer is immobilized by the slide being held racked back
Tufte writes meticulously and in detail about specific topics. This post is a bunch of vague generalities on a indeterminate topic. Saying it's a rehash of Tufte is like saying 'I'm feeling ambitious and stabby' is a rehash of Macbeth.
I easily program software 50x faster in python than C. If I didn't, I would be using C for speed.
No promises, but I might get around to it this weekend. I've been meaning to write something for a while. The tmux man page is quite thorough, but there are a few things that might be confusing if you expect it to behave like screen, such as layouts.
So... How do you arrest a corporation?
Me too :)

If I hear anything interesting elsewhere I'll post an update here.
The limited liability granted to corporations is an excellent reason why they shouldn't have the same rights as a person. After all, they don't have the same responsibilities.

But a more basic reason is that a corporation is not a person! It's not a group of people, either, or they would call it a collective, co-op, or a partnership -- it is its own thing and there is no inherent reason whatsoever why it should have any rights at all, including the right to exist except as explicitly allowed by law.
Calling a corporation "people acting together", or just "a group of people" downplays the fact that corporations are indeed made up of many people but with only a very few of those people able to exert any real control over the whole entity.
Why Google is bad for the newspaper business
Just in case you actually haven't run across him before -

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
Monads in Action
Well, I didn't downvote it, but you can't do this with _everything_ in Python, like you can in Ruby.

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> class Numeric
irb(main):002:1> def wtf
irb(main):003:2> puts "hey"
irb(main):004:2> end
irb(main):005:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):006:0> 5.wtf
hey
=> nil
View source:

<meta content="Be Stupid. Smart listens to the head. Stupid listens to the heart. Also, if you really have to, peruse Denim, SS10 apparel, Diesel Black Gold and Diesel Kid." name="description">
I didn't read more than a few lines. White on black gives me a full-blown migraine. Many other people also seem to find it literally painful to read, not merely unfamiliar or jarring.

Consider me your education on different contrast ratios. ;-)
There is a drawback to this, obviously. If your codebase is some scattered mish mash of Python, PHP, Actionscript, Javascript, Java, etc, your ability to reuse code diminishes at the language boundaries. You end up having to write very similar code to deal with the same objects on the client side and the server side in multiple languages, producing more code to maintain overall.

Unfortunately because of the nature of the web I haven't seen any real good solution to this yet. At minimum, you're usually dealing with some combination of Python/Ruby/PHP backend and some amount of Javascript/Actionscript on the frontend.
(20 square years / {your age in years})

What is a square year?
I was like this four years ago (the first few months after graduating). My idea, and my plan, was basically "lock me in a box and make me write cool code, and I'll be happy".

It's not true. I've discovered that I need my input and my work to be economically validated. Someone (preferrably myself; but someone else is better than nobody) needs to make money off my work. I don't think that's a bad evolution :-)
Clojure: Controlling run-away trains, onions, and exercise bikes
This doesn't look Y Combinator affiliated. Is it?
and that's called Redis
Facebook | Nikola Adžić
Stupidity is not an insult. It's an attribute

Of course it's an attribute, just like ugliness. Yet calling someone stupid or ugly most often is an insult. It doesn't matter whether it's accurate or not, whether it's about an attribute or something else: a statement is an insult if it's perceived as such.

What you call "stupidity" is often just a lack of curiousity - such people are the workers of society, the ones who don't get bored.

I think that lack of curiosity has less to do with intelligence than with upbringing. However, it's just my personal opinion and I would be interested in finding out whether there are any theories or studies about that.
I don't care about the ruling. I'm explaining a flaw in the guy's logic.

I completely agree with you in that companies should be able to broadcast whatever message they want. After all it's the responsibility of the citizens to determine what's right.

But I think you're missing the point of my contention. I'm simply saying companies cannot be treated as a citizen in a government designed to serve the people. I'm saying companies are entities, and they are not a human being. They do not need to be fed food, or sleep, or care about people's suffering (unless it would be fiscally wise to do so).
Compare my tmux.conf (http://pastebin.com/m2394d7a2) and my screenrc (http://pastebin.com/d7bb649a5).

Granted, my screenrc is a hotchpotch of cut-and-paste and default stuff from lots of places, but that's actually the point: I could read through the tmux manpage and set up tmux the way I wanted, without cobbling a conf file together from the blog posts and mailing list emails of wiser people.
Who is going to publish something that they consider obvious?
So you suggested he not be an asshole and it offends you he proposes you cease being an idiot. It's the sort of discourse that promises further Great Insights.
I don't disagree, and I'd love a free open-source video codec that compared favorably with H.264. I wouldn't be surprised if we have one soon. But we don't yet.
Given that corporations are directly accountable to their shareholders, I wouldn't be amazed if this actually turned out to be a better model than the current one (where a congressman gets elected and can basically do whatever they want until the next election without immediate consequences).

</half-joking>
[Job] Be employee #4 at a profitable, well-funded, fast-growing SF startup
NoSQL Means Never Having to Store Blobs Again
It's pretty clear he meant that he was holding the slide back, preventing the hammer from moving forward.

But would that always work on a Glock, which has an odd striker arrangement instead of a traditional exposed hammer, and doesn't have a way to decock it without pulling the trigger?
Tmux uses some non-standard escape sequences, e.g. ctrl- and ctrl-shift- arrow keys. In version 1.0 it's impossible to distinguish between ctrl-left and ctrl-shift-left.
There are two different phenomena here, one they studied and one you've observed.

There are intelligent but different people who experience some social rejection but have their own interests and eventually come around to being accepted after puberty when they are obviously more intellectually and emotionally stable than the formerly "cool" people. That is probably the majority of readers of HN and their kids.

What this study is talking about is social rejection among kids who are not that intelligent or self-driven. In school, you may remember one person who, though not "geeky," did seem slightly off. Kids jump on this quickly, lacking any absolute ideas about behavior and only knowing what they are used to.

For geeks, this rejection can become a strong drive and badge of honor among ourselves. But for "normal" kids who just happen to be out of sync with their peers, and have nothing else to define themselves in terms of, it is a big problem.
Php or asp which is better
I am having a difficulties on which technologies is better and more robust.

I worked very hard on a project that took me two years. Then I ran into a person that said , "I have been studying the wrong technology". I need your input, did i study the wrong language?
Well they aren't a person who shall be a Representative. They're a corporation that shall be a representative. The Constitution doesn't say that only people may run for Congress, only that if a person chooses, he has special restrictions.

Now, the state election laws may make it impossible for them to get on the ballot, but the Constitution doesn't put any restrictions on a corporation that shall be a Representative.
This sort of thing depresses me. The vast majority of people don't understand the SCOTUS decision, or even know what it was really about, or what the basis for the decision was.

Furthermore, few seem to understand what the concept of a corporation having some of the legal attributes of a person is about, and how it has almost nothing to do with the SCOTUS decision.

And you see the constant misinformation that corporations are legally obligated to follow whatever path leads to the most profit.

It's just depressing how little people understand about the society they live in.
Thanks in advance, but the major issue is with security, which one is the most vulnerable?
No, I am not, but I know a few. Depends on the markets you trade and the analysis you do though.
Could the IPad make computer science obsolete?
I've wondered if Feynman's counting rate -- http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf -- varied with age.

(tl;dr While a grad student he got interested in this question of subjective time rates and started counting in his head while doing different things. The story doesn't say if he ever tried it again decades later. Unfortunately I don't remember timing myself the first time I read it -- enough time's gone by that I could have looked for a change now.)
I tend to prefer languages which are expressive.

"Brevity is the soul of wit."

Therefore I like Python for imperative programming and its extensive libraries and far prefer Haskell to any LISP dialect for functional programming. Haskell is elegant in a way LISP wishes it could be.
I fail to see how that is flame bait. It's actually a quite insightful statement that is worth repeating: Python, Ruby and all other languages exist for a reason. The reason is that other languages, including Lisp, are not considered to be equally useful for the tasks for which a specific language is being used. Python is not only not Lisp: it's not Java, not Haskell, not Erlang, not ...

Whether it is a good reason, and whether these considerations are sensible, is a separate discussion. Whichever way you put it: they exist and should be acknowledged.
I should probably try to learn lisp. I primarily use emacs, so it would make a lot of sense. Some of the ruby/rails stuff out there for emacs really isn't very good.
1. I don't care what most people object to. I was explaining why the line of reasoning: treating companies as people, is wrong. Sure they could put money into PACs, they can bribe too. Doesn't mean it's right, certainly doesn't mean we have to tolerate it.

Companies do not share the same needs as a human citizen. Companies, as individual entities, do NOT share the same interests as a human citizen. Therefore companies cannot be given the same right to serve or lobby the people's interests.

Companies accrue their powers from means unrelated to potential agendas they push. Which means the voice of their agendas can potentially be inflated.

Secondly even if their agendas are directly related to how they get their power, then their agenda is directly related to corporate interest, because they get their power from profit.
McCain-Feingold wasn't just about expenditures. The government argued it could ban or confiscate books/movies based on who paid for them, or a tiny proportion of candidate/issue advocacy during election season. The first three paragraphs of this piece, by a major McCain-Feingold opponent, capture the overbroad reach of the FEC's claims:

http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-myth-...
Certainly says something about their target demographic.
ScreenShell. It leverages screen to create a viable REPL-buffer for vim, for any language that has an interactive interpreter.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2711

Here's an article describing how to use it with lisp:

http://www.ktaylor.name/2009/11/vim-screen-lisp-programming-...

And finally, some key mappings to bind <C-c><C-c> to sending the current paragraph or selection to the interpreter, from any mode.

http://gist.github.com/278733
This is very entrepreneurial in reality. An excerpt from the PDF linked on that page:

"Whereas stupid is being the guy in 1978 in a Ford Transit driving around and visiting shop owner after shop owner trying to convince them to sell brand new denim pants made to look worn."

It seems like the entire campaign is about dismissing our risk averse society. This is a pretty consistent theme in the stories posted to HN. If this theory was wrapped up into a dry blog post made by some "important" software development figure, people would be gushing all over it.
Kundalini Yoga
It was just a joke, no offense intended. Apologies to any Rubyist who was offended.
> That people even feel this comparison is appropriate is what has me depressed.

I agree; you can replace the term "DSL" with "API" in almost every case without losing any essential meaning. (You have to give the hipper-than-thou language pseudo-advocacy, but that's no loss.)