skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you were doing Japanese poetry it might be a senryuu rather than a haiku. In English, I think a fair case can be made that the word "haiku" means something different than 俳句 does, and that's OK.

(For one thing, your notion of a syllable as an English speaker is related to the mora Japanese counts by, but they're not the same thing, even when counting for corruptions of English words. Patrick is 2 syllables, パトリック is 5 mora. This means every haiku you've ever heard much longer than is "acceptable", for a certain very proscriptivist form of "acceptable".)

This is a topic of accidental interest to me because one of my undergrad theses was on autogenerating haiku. (If there were a Turing test for haiku, one my program wrote is better than anything I've ever written. The next hundred were crappy. The great thing about it as a CS problem is that haikus force the reader to do so much of the work that as long as you have a good dictionary of seasonal terms to work with mashing a few of them together may actually result in something pretty, even with a very minimal understanding of grammar.)
But you don't have to enter a contract with anyone to get that licensed software -- you can just buy it at retail. MPEG-LA would have to come after you somehow via the software's shrinkwrap EULAs (which have never been tested in court at all).
> There remains a gulf between a language that sounded a clarion call for simplicity and has slipped a little from its principles and a language that chose the red pill and dove down the rabbit hole basically for the sheer beautiful hell of it.

I'm don't understand what the difference between Scheme circa 1975 and R6RS has to do with Python.

It's awfully circular to claim that Python is beautifully Pythonic despite that it's become less Pythonic even as it's adhered to its philosophy of simplicity. If anything, I'd think that a language that "reads like pseudocode!" to the uninitiated wouldn't require even casual programmers to look up syntactic elements in the documentation, the way some people talk about Python.
Trafford Releases Top Ten Bestseller List for December 2009
Throughout four years of university, I made it a habit to always visit the first class of any course I had taken the previous semester (even to the detriment of missing one of my courses) and pawning off my textbook at around 80% of List (Commons book store was around 65-70%). about 10-15% of the time I would get stuck with a book when the course required a new revision. I'd say about 30% of the time the new revision was just a scam to drive new revenue, 50% of the time it was minor touchups of some substance, and maybe 20% (at most) it was significant new material.

The reality, is that with very, very few exceptions, the textbooks that were recommended weren't that books that I wanted to hold onto for life.

(Exception like Radia Perlman's Interconnections, Stewart's Calculus Series, did find a permanent home with me - maybe a dozen books- but they were exceptions. Most of the great books for life I purchased as a result of my own searches.)

What I would love to do, in hindsight, is go back and talk to my professors and ask, _why_ on earth had they recommended books that were basically begging to be sold off to the next party as quickly as possible?

In a few cases the answer was obvious (textbook written by the professor. :-) - but in most cases it was like they chose the book at random because it was basically, acceptable, if not excellent.

Of course, with things like khanacademy, wikipedia, and other reference materials, Textbooks are slowly starting to lose their premiere place in the world. It will be interesting to see if that is another market place that will eventually yield to an "information wants to be free" meme.
One thing you could try is sending review copies to game journalists on the web - I'm not sure which ones are best for iPhone or mobile games, but these days most have at least a passing interest. If you can cold-email some of the reviewers with some kind redemption code for the game, and if you can sell the premise to them in a couple of lines (the good sites probably get a LOT of submissions like this, you need to grab their attention QUICK), you might be able to convince them to post a review or at least a news item.
How would you do a chi-square on this? Doesn't seem to me to be the right sort of test.

If you think its hex/ascii, you can try to do a hypothesis test on the max frequency of each digit/letter and see what happens there. But, for any test, you need an underlying model against which you test. What model are you thinking of?
Brain Maze - Mobile game using "tilt" + brainwave control
I really like lift webframework with scala, and I have used it on a couple of small websites for my department in work.

I haven't seen any problems with mysql, but then again the stuff I was doing was very simple.
Let's say that I'm implementing a login form via AJAX. After the "Submit button" click event, I fire up a jQuery ajax.get() to the auth script, and then store logged-in status as a session cookie. This seems reasonably secure except for the fact that the password gets passed plaintext via the network. Is my best option to md5() it locally via JS, before I send it over? It's for a charity website so I don't think it'll be a big target, but I don't think that excuses bad security.

Sorry if this is better for StackOverflow, it just seems appropriate here as I have gleaned some great coding tips via HN.
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Shareapic.net
Goodbye Sun / Hello moon / it's time to go to bed
The point is, if you make an ad that lies about your opponent, he can (and will) get an injunction against it. You don't get to lie on air 24/7 for two weeks and then file for bankruptcy after the election, is my point.

Also, a corporation isn't a silver-bullet-proof shield against personal responsibility. Kenneth Lay was convicted on (among others) four counts of fraud and false statements, and faced 20-30 years in jail.
I didn't know YC funded Reddit. Funny, given how much flack Reddit gets around here.
More in-depth analysis on BBC tech site here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8496263.stm
Ok, but we paid them. Look here: http://twitter.com/github They really have problems nearly every day lately.

I prefer to download a repo a bit slower than not at all.
Giant Snowdrifts & The Worlds Snowiest Places
While giant snowdrifts are a commonplace in some parts of the world the last few weeks have seen the UK hit by some of the worst snow in decades causing this giant snow canyon to form in the Lake District.
Charles Leadbeater: Cloud Culture - The Promise and the Threat"
Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more
I imagine your perspective changes a lot if you're out there on the ground.
I'm getting some serious future shock here - two weird science-fictional ideas, combined in an unexpected manner, seem to result in weird^2 rather than the expected 2weird.

It's apt that someone should mention Terry Gilliam's Brazil; This news item seems to evoke the same general feeling - being awestruck by a society that resembles a perpetual-bureaucracy machine.
So Java is basically a dead language now, right?
I have yet to see a Ruby "DSL" that didn't feel like Ruby

There are some out there though, for eg. FancyRoutes: http://www.railsinside.com/plugins/252-fancyroutes-a-nicer-d...
Great Public Service Announcement for seatbelts
How to design your product in 24 hours
"Amazing and unique experience"? Have you no shame, you fucking Americans?
I couldn't help but laugh at this unfortunate wording "He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton's balls."

I hope they mean Newton's cradle...
In the first QM lecture we were told that one cannot understand quantum mechanics, but can get used to it.
Exactly. Its about _trajectory_. Nokia is loosing the mind war. More and more teenagers (ok, just one market segments, but others show similar trends) are holding out for a 'cool phone' which less and less carry Nokia logos. Ask people who work in phone shops (at least in the UK), people come in excited about LGs / Samsungs / iPhones NOT Nokias any more.
No hype, no hacker's fame, just a boring and outdated stuff.
Data.gov.uk versus Data.gov – Which wins?
They took our codes
That makes no sense for a thin, hand-held tablet -- you need the wide bezel in order to grip the iPad (between thumb/fingers and palm) without your fingers touching the multi-touch screen area. On the iPhone/iPod touch you can cradle the device in one palm, but the iPad is physically too large for this. (Try holding a thin, magazine-sized hardcover if you want to see what I'm getting at: look where your fingers rest.)

I'd peg this as useful, but only on a desktop or laptop device -- not on a handheld. (Those rumours of a multi-touch iMac, maybe ...)
the only way to stop this is to name the VCs
Oracle now is

Software and Hardware, Complete

this Sun never saw

----

Bye bye Jonathan

Hi ex-playboy Ellison

IBM, HP?
With Symbian being open sourced, what are the chances of getting a virtual Symbian device going on the N900?
I didnt realise it never saved your progress - easy enough to fix tonight.
You mean "profit, profit, profit", surely? Revenue means nothing if your margin is 0.00001%.
Leading European VC, Mangrove Capital Confirms Association with Renault F1 Team
Siri - your personal assistant
Just because it piqued my curiosity, here:s a CPAN search for Mr Stross' software: <http://search.cpan.org/search?query=stross&mode=all>. Seems to be two packages, from 1998 and 2000.
If you're storing people's password in plain text in your db you should make your potential users aware of this so people (like myself) can avoid accidentally using your site.
Founders Interview with Marc Benioff
There is already a thread on this topic - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099722
MD5ing in JavaScript doesn't help, because the thing you're defending against is a man-in-the-middle attack. If someone can get in the middle and steal an unencrypted password, they can also get in the middle and re-write your HTML form to remove the client-side encryption code. To protect against man-in-the-middle you need SSL.
Some sort of indication of why this is interesting, in English, would be helpful.
Most of what data.gov.uk links to are pdf's, as http://dataformatchecker.heroku.com/ has been finding out. The data seems more appropriate for journalists than software developers.
Was this interview live or via email?
This is a tragedy of the commons thing. As a web developer, you have a moral responsibility to help your users stay secure online. Teaching them that it's OK to enter their Twitter username and password on any site that asks for it (when Twitter are trying to teach them what OAuth is and why it matters to them) is irresponsible.

Sure, it's cheaper to implement. But you should be better than that.
I don't get it. It leads me to a regular firefox start page, in english, with the option to search 'pages from Egypt'.
It says "Mozilla Start Page" and is the first post by a new user. Flagged as spam.
Or maybe this has been posted a number too many. I know it's the 3rd time for me.
Yes, this will work if you want to keep from sending the password in plain text. But you should make sure you send the request via POST rather than GET and know that you are still vulnerable to replay attacks--an attacker could just sniff out the username and hash, which they could present to you and still authenticate on your site (though they wouldn't know the actual password). Also, as far as md5 hashes go, rainbow table lookups work pretty well, so hashing alone won't provide great password security.

Another way to solve your problem would be post to your auth script via SSL. From what I know of SSL (correct me if I'm wrong, please), the handshake and encrypted connection is established before any data is sent, which will protect you against sending passwords in the clear and against password sniffing.
The Oh My God Particle
According to google translate, the arabic text simply says "Mozilla Firefox Start Page".

http://translate.google.com/#ar|en|%09%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%AD%D8%...

Unless there's something significant about the domain google.com.eg (Egypt, presumably) it looks completely pointless
The gesture may not have been entirely hollow (in Jonathan Schwartz's mind). Ellison is known to have a thing for feudal Japan:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/23/60II/main601722.sh...
Yes, but I'd like to point out something you did that is worse than misquoting a statistic: You painted AIDS as an African disease. Rather than speaking about AIDS as something that affects all of us in the world, you behave as if it is something that affects Africa only.

In effect, you contribute to a stereotype that the African is a disease carrier.

Yes, you did not mean it that way, but if you really want to contribute and help, you can start by pointing out that HIV affects everyone in the world, and it's not something African and it's not something that you should associate with Africa only.

In doing so, you are hurting Africa (in showing it to be a diseased continent) and you are hurting the fight against Aids (by making people think it is something far away and foreign).

My plea to everyone is this - when you talk about AIDS, talk about it as something that affects us and people around us, and not as something that belongs in some jungle. That's the tiny thing you can do to help.
That's not what killed them ...

* they sold SUN/Solaris servers, until the market started preferring cheap x86 stations with Linux installed

* while their moto was "the network is the computer" since before anyone saw that, they failed to ride the cloud ... it happens with companies way before their time

* they had a great start with Java applets but they weren't a company of creatives, like Macromedia/Adobe, and so they missed this opportunity

* Eclipse and the whole open-source community around Java practically took away their ability to sell any Java related tools

Open-sourcing Java was a good decision ... it was out of their control anyway. Open-sourcing Solaris was also a rational decision ... who would've used Solaris when Linux gives you almost everything Solaris does, and for free too?

Open-sourcing Netbeans was the only way to compete with Eclipse ... look at IntelliJ ... even they decided it's not in their interest to keep the core closed.

What they failed to do is to monetize these freebies with complementary commercial products. JavaFX is free? Cool ... why not sell a tool for designers that competes with the Adobe Flash environment?

Solaris is free? Cool ... sell kick-ass development / management tools that are only available for Solaris.

They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine ... based on Solaris, Java and MySql. I wouldn've liked that, but they didn't

Instead their bet was on support contracts. But big enterprises that go for this are going with IBM instead, which has a lot more resources. And small companies prefer to get their support from free online help channels, like IRC/mailing-lists.
Toyota: Software to blame for Prius brake problems
Why the downvote?* Some satire never hurts. But ... a corporation it's not a person it's a legal rappresentation of the people organization. Sometimes (almost always) big corporations are the business of congress man, or at least they are in the interest of those. So you have this congress were people vote, and the same people vote also trough a corporation, for the benefit of their monopoly.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia
State of comp.lang.lisp, are other groups this bad?
Keep Your Privacy with USB Security Tool
The lost USB stick containing health information of over 83,000 patients makes us realize that USB security is a crucial problem. We need to password protect USB stick to prevent leakage of our privacy.
losing not loosing
HP-EDS: the failed CRM project that cost it £200m ...and counting
I found the scrollbar to be a poor example of usability in that website. It was hard for me to figure out where I was in the page. Probably with other browsers works differently, but still!
I have a little book of things I want to open-source before I die.

So do I. And I'll be retiring in a few years, if you get my drift.

Where are good places to deposit stuff? Things that may not be worthy of (say) SourceForge? Things that may only interest a handful of people every year? Someplace where they will get cataloged by Google so every few months a single geek can be pleasantly surprised to find somebody else solved part of his problem, and is willing to share?
I feel so sorry for Amazon. They revolutionized online shopping and made everything so cheap without crappy products or ripping off the original producers.

:(
Most likely answer so far:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/axth9/i_found_thi...

It's most likely a random number as it is in UUID version 4 format. The version identified by the 4 and the b in the correct spots "6d4061b1b-a7ee-4a9e-b0ae-509617252b42" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_Unique_Identifier#V...). Person who placed the geocache probably wanted a way to google anyone who found it.
My understanding was that the point being argued was over whether the removal of the hay bales constituted continuation of the building project - which resets the 4 year time window - or if it was unrelated.

Given that the only reason the hay bales were there was to conceal the construction of the property, I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that removing them constitutes part of the project.
comp.lang.scheme (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.scheme/topics?lnk=s...) is OK; at the time I posted this, of the last 50 messages 1 in 10 were spam. And there was a lot of signal in the legit messages.
...Be careful: Are you sure this is something people need? Is this something YOU believe web designers want? What problem does this solve? Ultimately, how will get get money from it?

I think maybe the 'eye candy' has taken up more time than the quality of the product. Always remember Google, a plain white page, a form field and a 'search' button...worth billions...

Go for it!! get users, get feedback, improve it etc, but be sure you can answer the above questions...

Also, from my experience, dont rely on friends/family for useful feedback/support - find people that have the right way of thinking and draw from them...
You have far, far more intestinal fortitude than I do to go into that business. (It involves marginal work and low margins. Yikes -- software sounds so much better.)

I'd say "both". My reasoning is that you can use the B2C customers as the kindling to light the B2B fire -- they're cheap, easy to service, and numerous. Get them to do your marketing for you. (You can use your existing technology to quickly roll out linkbait mini-projects: web form + visual design + PDFification + a letter physically delivered to grandma = instant remarkable content. You can launch one of these a week: Send A Solider A Valentine, for example. That is probably a little late but you get the general tenor of the sort of emotional buttons I'd suggest you push.)

This gives you something to do while waiting for the phone to ring on the B2B deals, and will help you with SEO. Why focus on B2B over the long term? Well, it allows you to have much more predictable revenue, and having a lifetime customer value which could buy a pizza is very helpful once you start think of incremental-cost marketing options like, say, AdWords.

Mind if I give you the same advice I gave cperciva? Thirty minutes on that home page will double your sales. Heck, if you're in a hurry, you can do it in two: put a BIG OBVIOUS BUTTON on it. I don't know, 10 kilopixels of big. Maybe bigger.

If you have graphical talent, something I lack, I'd collapse the entire sales pitch into an illustrated:

1) Put in address
2) Type letter (We take PDFs, too!)
3) Pay money and it gets mailed

I'd put the API & login links in the top corner and the bottom of your textual description, or somewhere similarly discrete. (The audience for those is very different than the audience who you want converting within 90 seconds of landing on your site.)
Plupload - file upload using Flash, Silverlight, Gears, HTML5, Browserplus
JooJoo tablet now in full production, TechCrunch lawsuit moves forward
It seems that PLT Scheme it is still twice as fast, at least according to this language shootout.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
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The LackRack
What will happen when a software company downs tools for a week?
This advice seems outdated to me; I often rewrite my public history, and "git pull --rebase" handles it fine.
Implementing the sieve of Eratosthenes using channels in Go
Social tools take knowledge management to a new level
There are far better methods than the one linked in the article.

You can train a covariance matrix such that you can get a better distance metric. Particularly, you would use the Mahalanobis Distance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalanobis_distance

For classification tasks, there are two good ways of training a covariance matrix for distance metrics: neighborhood components analysis and large margin nearest neighbors.

The effect in the article is just a particular quirk of using the euclidean distance. You could, for example, get the same result by using a 1-norm distance.
Whoa, backup here buddy. I'm homosexual and I'm all too familiar with the HIV issue. I have friends who have HIV and we do not consider it to be some "jungle disease". And by the same token its not a homosexual one either.

So thanks for clearing that up for me.
Nice article. One correction: python does have 'yield'.
Pretty low unless someone is willing to put a lot of money into it. The problem with Symbian is gazillion bizarre corner cases and exceptional situations -- this makes it hard to develop for, and also makes making a proper emulator very work-intensive.
Does it not occur to you that if good governance is impossible than perhaps we should consider that governance itself might be a flawed concept?