skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I'm biased, but my reading on the situation is that Obama's a born conciliator who's tried to loop in the R's on numerous occasions (Baucus-Graham negotiations on the healthcare bill, drastically altering the stimulus in order to get Snowe on board), while the current group of republicans in congress have been far more recalcitrant than recent minorities. Obama hasn't even made a recess appointment yet, and way more of his appointees are being held up than Bush ever had to deal with.

Kennedy worked with Bush on NCLB. Gingrich, although not in the minority, worked with Clinton on welfare reform (although Clinton did have to veto it 7 times before they would pass something he could agree to).

I just don't see any willingness from current republicans to share a victory with Obama on anything. Either they're personally committed to not working with him on anything, ever, or they're afraid of tea party primary challenges, or both.

The fact that the current republican caucus is primarily old white men from the south probably doesn't help, for reasons that are too inflammatory to go into too deeply except to note that I'm commenting on old white men from the south, not on republicans necessarily.
...here's an account created minutes ago, and pg can check this IP to see if it's from Argentina.

The HN lynch mob is pathetic.
foo()() doesn't seem better than foo.call
So drones fighting drones then?
Upvoted for Ender's Game reference.
...and here's an account not from Argentina. Have PG check it.

Your assertion that Andrew created these new accounts is sophomoric and pathetic.
I'd say the abuse is making the ecosystem less user-friendly. Users want things like Google Voice, or the ability for third party music apps (Pandora, Last.FM, etc) to play in the background. Blocking those things isn't user friendly. I'd also love to see an example of this mythical "massive fragmentation" that supposedly exists in the Android platform.
Are 'Test Tube Babies' Healthy?
What does being habit forming and having serious side effects have to do with media lethal dose? Just because you can take a lot of something without it killing you doesn't imply it's safe to take daily for extended periods of time.
"Information should always be free"

Wrong.

The provider of that information should be able to charge what he wants. It's capitalism.
You're relying your argument on an assumption. Fail.
Probably more like enemy hackers trying to hack into coalition drones!
Clickable: http://pycon.blip.tv/
The first rule of Tautology Club is: The first rule of Tautology Club.

http://xkcd.com/703/
This thread just confirms that HN are just wantrepreneurs. If you were a real entrepreneur, you would be running to pay for the education that Mixergy provides. This is an absolute bargain because learning from Mixergy will greatly enhance you chances at that dream exit. $25/month won't seem like much when you're the next Zuckerberg or Bezos or Gates. But it takes money to make money, and you're not going to become a great entrepreneur by avoiding resources like Mixergy.
Shows can certainly be educational and actionable, while still being entertaining...
How to include the fonts in your website legally
I'm looking forward to buzz supporting [1] atom:source [2] so that it's possible at least in principle to automatically ignore buzz duplications of the twitter/reader/whatever streams to which I also subscribe. That and salmon can help reduce redundancy while still allowing us to form the links that help make information discoverable and accessible.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/google-buzz-api/browse_thread...
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287#section-4.2.11
Why 97?
"The type of people who need to see these videos don't have the kind of money Andrew is asking for."

What sort of moronic bullshit is that? Can you not mow your neighbor's lawn for a few hours on a weekend?
That makes a lot of sense. But if that's your objective, I'd argue for making it $10 or even $5 a month rather than $25. At $25 you'll cut out a LOT of people who would be ideal viewers for these interviews.
He's assuming passwords are purged from logs, which from what I've seen, usually isn't true. (Although they should be.)
>There are rather a lot of Chinese and Koreans who are alive today because we ended that regime as quickly and decisively as we could.

Didn't we keep supplying oil (something like 70-80%) and steel to Japan throughout the first half of their China campaign?
Another strong competitor - http://www.tomedes.com
Yes, and we stopped specifically because of their China campaign, which then precipitated the greater war.

What point are you trying to make?
If your attention seizes on the fact that you are in the zone, you'll start noticing yourself drop out. Your attention is no longer on the task at hand and your mental energy pours into that self-awarenes. If you let the observation pass you by as a ephemeral phenomena, living and dying naturally, you flow with the self-awareness of flow.

Allowing the distractions to flow past you while you stay focused on the task at hand is what gives the optimal results. Trying to completely numb yourself to distractions won't work a well. That's why there's something in the Pomodoro technique where you make a hash tick and write down what you want to do later; it flushes that thought out of the queue. It also keeps your peripheral awareness opened up so that your right-brain-side can explore alternate avenues and come up with innovative, and occasionally creative solutions. If you stay focused strictly by blocking everything else out, you gain tunnel vision. In that state, a person crushes obstacles by banging his head against it enough times. Otherwise known as Brute Force and leads to Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Physical relaxation is also very important -- so good, supportive posture, deeper and relaxed breathing.

If you want to practice all of this in a deeper way, I recommend http://www.vipassana.com/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_eng... This concept and the way to enter "flow" is not new. It's pretty ancient. I've used the Pomodoro technique to configure my work environment, but mindfulness is what I practice to optimize my ability to perform.
If the sysadmin is truly unscrupulous, they might be flat out writing all successful passwords to a database.

Never lose sight of the fact that anything you send online can be stored by the site owner. Make your own judgments on how you react to that, but never forget.
I was going to email you this link but you didn't have an email address in your profile, so I'll post it here.

I believe it's much of the same material told from the conservative side. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/19/debunki...
What is mildly amusing is that Gnash has had H.264 HW acceleration available for months.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzU1M...

http://www.splitted-desktop.com/static/en/pdf/actu/Linux_wit...
Top-5 in LIQUIDITY PROVIDERS, not necessarily the same as in programatiC/algo trading. Goldman tops the list and anyone that's traded on a prop desk knows how much influence they have on the domestic equities market:

http://subprint.com/u/28
Dragonegg Successfully Self-Hosts
Great stuff. I'd just like to add that working with Clojure+OpenGL has gotten a lot simpler with Zach Tellman's Penumbra, http://wiki.github.com/ztellman/penumbra/. Penumbra is well integrated with Leiningen so getting an OpenGL app up and running now takes a matter of minutes if not seconds.

I've been porting the Nehe tutorials to Penumbra and it's been ridiculously straightforward. Being able to update OpenGL on the fly via REPL is also really great fun, especially if you're used to the slow and tedious nature of OpenGL programming with pretty much everything else, http://github.com/swannodette/clj-nehe.
The OP says you have to sleep long enough to go through all the sleep cycles. It does not mention how long you should sleep (through it does reference 100 minutes).

Anyone know the best length to sleep?
I will not use any service that requires me to use LinkedIn or Facebook. I don't care about my anonymity (it's easy to guess who I am), but I don't use those services and don't want to.

And for what it's worth, I will still be excessively disagreeable even if I have to use my real name. It doesn't matter to me what people on the Internet think of me. I don't know them, they don't know me, so who cares what name I use?
Mike Maples Talks Venture Capital And Thunder Lizards
"I am surprised by the amount of redditors that know all pros and cons of those drugs."

How can you not want to hack your wetware? Or at least not be curious about what may be possible?

I'm surprised more people aren't up on this stuff and trying things out.

Feed your head.
Think of it as similar to rebooting a computer to get it to work more smoothly.

My brain does not run Windows.
It's not about people being anonymous or not that causes the good behavior, it's that when people use their real name, they have risked something of value - their reputation. The way to ensure good behavior is to require that people take some sort of risk with something they value when they participate in your site. This might be in the form of a deposit, using their real name, or the loss of a potential reward.
Note to the reader: Illustrated does not mean pictorially.
This is a great article. Continuations are rarely understood, which is unfortunate, given their power.

I wrote an article for my compilers class that gives examples of how to use continuations (in Scheme):

http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with-continuation...

It covers basic stuff like exceptions and back-tracking search, and more advanced topics like threads, generators and coroutines.
The Pomodoro technique is a timebox mechanism, so it has benefits beyond triggering the state of relaxed focus. The sudden-death nature of a microtimebox like 25/5 and 48/12 is what forces you to eliminate the unnecessary. A person can stay in the flow and do lots of unimportant things beautifully. A timebox often means you make choices and then you keep going, staying in the present. Second-guessing is another form of distraction, as much as falling under Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Another important note: it isn't so much that you avoid distractions as much as you stay in the present moment. Hindsight and foresight may guide your actions, however, you can only act in the present moment.
I'm on the dev channel as well. Although I haven't had any problems with HN specifically, I have found that from build to build, problems of various kinds pop up and then go away again. Not surprising, I suppose, but worth remembering.
All discriminations have consequences on the bottom line.

All else being equal, discrimination on the basis of increasing diversity means lower performance in the market place, and loss of potential profit.

Discrimination on the basis of selecting the best employees for the job, will results in more profit gained.
Apart from 'irb/completion' I use 'wirble' [1] for colour highlighting of the output in Ruby/IRB [1]. I had to modify it to get it to work with Ruby 1.9 though [2]. I don't think anybody has done syntax highlighting for input.

[1] http://pablotron.org/?cid=28

[2] http://www.wedesoft.demon.co.uk/downloads/wirble.rb
1. The videos show these flying pixels in a grid using variable output to form images like the Mona Lisa -- but a perhaps more interesting possibility is using them for non-uniform sampling of an image.

Imagine all of them emitting max light output, and having none of them fly in the black areas of the image, and the highest concentration in the brightest areas.

2. This could be a basis for free-floating advertisements or information. Imagine walking around a giant outdoor mall (like the labyrinthine Irvine Spectrum) and having pixels appear above you announcing that the next IMAX 3D showing of Avatar is coming up, forming into a giant floating arrow saying RIGHT THIS WAY and floating towards the theater at walking pace.
This is not new, though. All it takes to start a nuclear war (which will inevitably kill millions) is a turn of the key in some bunker.

Eventually, war will consist of people hiding in underground bunkers controlling big robots to do the fighting. Then maybe we'll all realize how pointless war actually is.
The real problem is that it won't be too long before an individual can afford this kind of technology. The abstraction you're worried about will diminish dramatically at that point.
it's the multi-line history that is so XXXing annoying. i use the interpreter quite a bit....unless i need to write multiline for loops.
Okay. Give me an example of a psychotherapeutic technique and cite the evidence it's based on.

I know of one form of psychotherapy that has some evidence behind it. The rest has been repeatedly tested and found to work no better than talking to a sympathetic intelligent person with no psychology training.
Here's the obit for the chuck norris that was:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1965874/pdf/bull...
This literally does look like the shell I've always dreamed about. Experimenting with functions or loops is usually such a pain.
According to iPhone developer ChiliFresh

Not a phrase you're likely to see in many other situations.

Crap: I didn't read far enough. Here is the actual money quotation:

We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. If you believe you can make the necessary changes so that Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored) complies with our recent changes, we encourage you to do so and resubmit for review.

I know it's a form letter, but wow.

On a more serious note, I hate when people use the word 'censorship' for situations like this. It's not censorship when someone refuses to sell your soft porn.
It's not clear to me that medicine actually has "more capability" than a decade ago in the same way that computers are today objectively faster. Studies attempting to show improvement in outcomes due to improvements in medicine tend to be inconclusive or negative for most areas, though there've been improvements in a few narrow ones (like HIV prognosis). For most diseases, though, your probabilities basically haven't budged in the past 20 years.

In any case, I see the analogy as pushing the opposite viewpoint: in computers I get more capability for less money than a decade ago. I used to have to spend $2000 for a decent laptop, but now I spend $700. Why can't I get better medicine than a decade ago for >50% discount? Does the medical field not make technological advances in the same way as computing, that make existing technology get cheaper over time?
eh I don't think it's the end of the world, you gotta try different price points to see what works or what doesn't. + I don't think it'll affect the true fans who tend to watch these interviews live/same day.

Only change I would do, is make the time limit a little bit longer. Maybe 2-3 weeks/month, before a video goes behind paywall.

The monthly fees are kinda a downer though, until you think about it. Those people who want to watch all interviews, are better off paying a monthly fee, instead of being nickle and dimed to death with per video fees.

The whole idea here isn't to charge people, but to get more participation out of your audience. This way more people will watch people live/right away. And will be much more likely to discuss it in real time...creating more buzz about the interviews. Which should lead to even better guests.

+ think about it...the reason you are complaining that he is starting to charge...is because you realize just how valuable the content is. And if the content is valuable...what's $25?
Yes it has. It's pretty cool discovering something new, eh? What's more interesting is that these ideas are not really new. They are ancient. Check out "Mindfulness in Plain English" as an example.

If you want a modern book on how to consistently trigger this state, there is Josh Waitzkin, _Art of Learning_
Not everyone drinking the alcohol knew it was poisoned. If they knew it was poisoned, they probably wouldn't have consumed it!

"Depraved indifference to human life" is murder. Putting poison in something you know someone will probably drink, even if you tell them not to, is depraved indifference to human life. Murder. You should go out of your way to not kill people -- this is the opposite.

Like I said, if the death penalty is the punishment for drinking alcohol, fine. But the death penalty doesn't mean you can just murder people. There is a procedure to follow -- a trial, evidence proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt, appeals, etc. You can't just kill someone that committed a crime; you have to prove it first. The government needs to be held to a higher standard than the average man, and if the average man did this, he would be in prison for murder. What the government did, in this case, is inexcusable state-sponsored mass murder.

(Thought experiment: you have a party, and have a punch bowl sitting out. Next to it is a small sign that says: "Poison: do not drink." A few guests drink it anyway, and by the end of the night you have a stack of five dead bodies. Do you really think that you won't be convicted of five counts of murder? A disclaimer doesn't mean you can try to kill people!)
Springtime renews optimism, will it be enough to jump start the economy
ACTA "internet enforcement" chapter leaks
Public identification discourages dishonesty and rude behavior, but it also discourages unpopular views, political dissent, whistle-blowing and other valuable speech. On the balance, the positives of public ID outweigh the negatives on some sorts of sites, such as LinkedIn, but it would be a grave mistake to assume the same would be true on every sort of forum.
Sure, I don't doubt that. I'm all for supporting those public services sorely needed by society. But don't make it into the business's altruistic ideal it not really is. In the case of Whole Foods, I just don't buy it. Whole Foods isn't just about natural and organic food, the food literature in there is amazing. It's not the food that's great, it's the food description that really got people to buy.
For example: "Free-range" is no more than a little door which remain shut until 2 weeks before the chickens are slaughtered for food, and by then most of them don't even dare go out because they are already used to their crowded shed. Of course, customers aren't aware of these things, so it remains great business.
Http://www.squidoo.com/travian_cheats
You guessed correctly :)
I don't agree with this.

People without ADD experience significant benefits from using Adderall because it's an amphetamine--not because they have undiagnosed ADD.

Any amphetamine helps you think clearly through being more alert and ability to concentrate for longer periods of time.
"Flow" is a modern take on a very old idea. Atheletes and martial artists before that have been using various methods to enter this state.

Josh Waitzkin figured out a method for consistently triggering flow in his book, _Art of Learning_. The structure of his method depends on simple things, mainly behavioral conditioning. The method works. I also want to note, he has used it for both primarily mental tasks (chess) as well as physical (competitive push-hands).

One last thing: Deepak Chopra produced a game specifically designed to teach someone to enter the state of mindfulness (which, when applied to challenging tasks, gets you flow). It is called "Journey into the Wild Divine". It uses a USB sensor stuck on your finger to measure heart-rate variability, among other things. You can only advance through parts of the game when you can demonstrate the ability to consciously relax and stabilize your heart rate at will. It's a game specifically to teach flow, not just to reward or punish the secondary effects of flow.
Could you provide a citation about how modafinil has fewer side effects then, particularly, (black) coffee?

What I've found in the literature says that longer term studies on the effects of modafinil are needed
http://www.ccjm.org/content/74/8/561.full.pdf (2007)

While the WSJ ran an article, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870327860457462... , pretty much saying that black coffee is at worst a wash health wise (though I do note that they said caffeine has a pro-obesity effect and Modafinil an antagonistic effect (it's wiki article says as much)).

My point is that, from what I know, coffee isn't that bad. What information do you have that counters my notion or that modafinil is worth the unknown risks? Preferably with citations, please and thanks. I'm very curious about this topic for obvious reasons.
Eventlet: Asynchronous I/O with a synchronous interface
Ask HN: how to learn functional programming in Python
I have an odd question, to which I don't know if there is an answer: can I learn functional programming in Python?

First, let me answer to the obvious question that is coming to your mind: why? The part of the answer on why I want to learn functional programming should be clear to almost everyone here, so the real question is: why Python?

I know that there are a lot of better functional languages out there. The reason I chose Python is that for for my next project I decided to use Google App Engine, because I think that it is a very cost/time/resource effective way to implement what I want. And Google App Engine uses Python (or Java...)

So, to kill two birds with one stone, I'd like to learn functional programming directly in Python, so that I would be able to learn it as I go implementing my app. I already understand what functional programming is and how to program in a functional style, but going only with what I know I will surely miss something.

Everything I find for Python is object oriented (and I can understand why), but I really would like not to have to learn it in one language and then switch to Python (but I know this could be a better way).

Is this possible? Do you recommend not doing it this way?
Can you recommend books/resources/anything?
Everything is really appreciated. Thank you very much.
"it has four goddamn callable types [Methods, Procs, Blocks, Lambdas] that all turn into one another at different points, but you still can't pass around non-anonymous callables directly!"

Aside from the errors in this sentence (blocks, procs and lambdas are all just Proc objects, and you can pass around methods using method(:method_name)), assuming that passing around methods is supposedly common really betrays a python-centric point of view.

In Ruby, passing around methods by name is very uncommon. Running ack through 407 gems I see 116 instances of it, period. That's 116 times in some huge number of lines of ruby code that someone typed method(:some_method).

It's clear why this wouldn't be a common thing in Ruby: all of the Proc types are flexible enough that it's rarely necessary to pass around methods. I find it incredibly hard to believe that people who complain about this are actually encountering this while using Ruby as Ruby.
Chinese booklet scanned at 1800 pages per hour
The inverse of the assertion made in this article (i.e. anonymity leads to bad behavior) has already been theoretically predicted in "John Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad Theory": http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pat070381.html
Functional programming is a technique, and that technique is best expressed using languages designed for the purpose.

Python has enough elements of functional programming languages that it should be relatively easily done, but it won't be 'the real deal'.

The interesting thing is that this exercise will probably make you a better python programmer, mutable state, side effects and parameter modification are 'bad' traits anyway, and getting functions to always return the same result dependent solely on the input parameters is 'good'.

This may be of some help:

http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html

It's intended for lisp programmers to make it to python, but I think plenty of the stuff in there should apply to your situation.
On the other hand, see here for continuations made complicated: http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/Continuations.html