skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Somewhat surreal in places, e.g. the last part of #14:

How is a hacked computer different from one that hasn't been hacked?

What is a name?
total industrialised country public sector debt is now expected to exceed 100% of GDP in 2010 - something that has never happened before in peacetime

Are we in peacetime?
ActiveRecord 3 does all the method chaining goodness, thanks to Arel :-) It's really nice, check it out.
Of course, how is a "real name" real? I can walk into any courthouse and have a brand new "real name" in an hour. I could just tell people my "real name" is something else. I could make a fake ID card, too.

The point is, "name" is a meaningless concept. The only way to know someone is through your own interactions with them. The only way to know who you're interacting with is by being there in person. (Or with pre-arranged crypto... but I digress...)
If you have something with a fairly simple architecture then I would stick with Heroku or Slicehost, they are both very affordable.

If you need more flexibility I would go with EC2 (or EC2 through Engine Yards Cloud stuff)
I'd say that there's no difference between the legal concept and the regular one.

I don't know how in the US, but in Europe it is illegal to write publicly "Joe Average, a murderer", if the person had no trial, yet. Regardless of the widely available proofs.

After the fact - once the jury decided you are innocent - it is extremely hard to get your good name back.
F# Code
You can program in a functional style using python to an extent BUT... python in many ways puts up roadblocks that make it a less than fulfilling thing to do.

I would say you could become familiar with functional programming in python but you can't experience the full depth of functional programming, for that given your general goals... I would suggest looking at clojure ( runs on jvm and gae )
Anyone tried HostGator? I'm wondering what kind of Rails hosting you're actually get for $5/month.

I'm using Dreamhost at the moment and my Rails app is crawling and barely usable.

Can't justify spending much on hosting at the moment, though, so HostGator sounds interesting if they don't throttle your resources as aggressively as Dreamhost seems to.
the thing is, you browse the first half dozen articles and there's no programming in there. You can't expect it to help you become a better programmer if there are no good code examples to follow. Anything else is just lip service.

IMHO you'd be better off with Bently's "Programming Pearls".
The what is easy, it's the how I have trouble with ;^).
That was my thinking. And it is fairly trivial to do, on most sites. There are already plenty of ways of grabbing a stream for later viewing. If I am doing that just for me, for my own use, I see no issue with it.
Well, maybe Obama could do a better job of cracking skulls and of outmaneuvering republicans so that they have no choice but to work with him..

But I'll just reiterate that we're dealing with a party here that attempted to filibuster raising the debt ceiling, and then filibustered implementing PAYGO rules that same afternoon. They filibustered appointing that bipartisan deficit reduction commission after the original idea had been pitched by republican senators.

So, yeah, there's room for improvement in how Obama's handling these jokers. He could do a better job in exposing what they're doing and forcing them to be productive. More televised meetings with them would be my advice, and he seems to be going that way with the healthcare summit next week (that republicans may decide not to show up to). But they're still the primary jokers in the picture. IMO.
Is there anything finance-specific in these kinds of books that I'd learn from reading them, or is it just data mining / statistical inference applied to stock data in the obvious way?
Perhaps it isn't the most popular example, but isn't Runescape done in Java?
When I visited London and saw notices with "There is currently a Good Service on All Lines", my immediate reaction was "why is this news?" By announcing their successes it seemed to underscore their users' low expectations of the system.
I think we are just getting adjusted to the specifics of "digital goods" in light of the internet.

"Digital hoarding" is using same logic we use upon physical items. Except that, when what you need is also kept in millions of copies on the internet, you realize you don't actually need to store it locally.
I agree. For most people, Slicehost or Heroku are plenty (Slicehost being cheaper, but less Rails focused). Another good name is Linode. I've read somewhere, that people found them to be better, performance-wise, than Slicehost.
Implementing reload in Google Chrome
Am I the only one who thinks the default font is a bit small? A minor quibble, perhaps.
Because 97 is two less than the product of two ones (eleven) and one number less than ten.

The same calculations lead me to believe that the world will end in 2012!
A trial is expected and required for allegedly consuming illegal substances.
Yeah, the title is misleading. Not all videos are available.
Ten Challenges
If you want functional programming on the GAE, aren't Clojure and Scala more obvious choices? Both were designed with the functional style in mind.
Why You Should Confess Everything Before You Get Caught
It's pretty impressive how quickly the Ruby community has turned this around.
Never used hostGator, but hostmonster is way worse than dreamhost, fyi. In the end I built my own setup using a Rackspace Cloud.

I've also used mor.ph (like heroku) and just really don't like the restrictions that come by running on someone else's box and by their rules. Building a server up from scratch is not for the faint of heart, but can be very rewarding (and informative), not to mention cheap if you don't count your own time.
Linode is awesome. The CPU power you get is crazy compared to other providers I've tried. They don't seem to overload their host boxes. I just ditched a $250/mo dedicated server and got everything running on a $40/mo Linode with no hassles.
What's your monthly bill for Rackspace Cloud?
I will thank you a lot if you investigate the problem. The Windows installer comes with PyGTK, so it is supposed to be stand alone. Can you file a bug and help me fix it?

Thanks,
Noam
Object-oriented vs. data-oriented programming
I found the cycle is 30 minutes in experience in my sleep testing. The reason they picked 100 minutes is because it is a multiple of 30. 30+30+30+(falling asleep+waking up) = 100 minutes.
In fact, you might take LinkedIn and Facebook as good counterexamples: do we want an internet where the only discussion is the kind of conscious-of-being-public pablum you get at Facebook and LinkedIn?

There's plenty of things that go into discussions working versus not working, but I don't think real names have much to do with it. If anything, my impression is that real names are usually a net negative, outside a very narrow range of sites intended to foster IRL activity. It doesn't even require being particularly politically controversial to stifle participation if real names were attached--- the threshold at which it has a chilling effect is far lower than "gay-rights activist in Saudi Arabia"; people quickly start dropping out of discussions if their name would be associated with them at a much lower threshold of, basically, anything they wouldn't want their mother or boss to see.
Cisco and HP Divorce
I am always depressed when I read virtually any proposed law dealing with the internet. My only hope is that eventually the generations that grew up with computers will age into politics as previous generations age out, and we'll stop seeing these types of proposals.
I wonder how many of these recommendations are sponsorship-based. Linode is curiously missing in favor of Slicehost. Considering the recent discussion here regarding changes to Slicehost's pricing options, this seems like either a striking omission or an outright plug.
Ask HN: How does Ookla Net Metrics (speedtest.net) works?
How does Ookla Net Metrics (speedtest.net) works?

I am trying to find out if it is better than open source software like iperf. Also, please post any links which describes their algorithms or their method of measuring capacity.
Penn State students raise $7.8 million in fight against pediatric cancer
I know Antonio, no chances Linode is missing for something related to sponsorship. But indeed yes I think Linode is very worth to mention, as it works well and especially since Slicehost has not EU datacenters, while Linode provides UK datacenters. Really important if you want to deploy, for instance, for Italy.
The Real Story Behind Fusion Energy
Works fine on 5.0.307.9 beta OSX
So far only one video appears from 2010. The audio is great, much improved from last years audio.
Hi retro, I tried to include companies that I had some experience with or that had been really recommended to me by people I trust. I use Slicehost for most of my sites, and I'm very happy with them, and that's why I included them. Some people say that Linode is just as good, or even better, but I haven't tried them first hand for anything Rails related. I actually mentioned Linode in the Slicehost paragraph, but didn't include them in the ordered list. Given the many mentions and recommendations (including Peter's below) I edited the post and included Linode along with Slicehost.

For full disclosure:

REFERRAL HOSTS (3):

HostGator

HostingRails

Slicehost

NON-REFERRAL HOSTS (6):

Linode

Brightbox

Rightscale

EngineYard

Mor.ph

Heroku
I work for a company whose main site is a flash RIA. It's true that our site doesn't work out of the box on mobile flash enabled phones, although in our case it's mostly due to memory constraints. However we've created a new interface reusing most of the code we had already written for the main site, but optimized for mobile devices and without all the embedded images and memory intensive features included on the main site.

Doing that took about 2 weeks of serious dev time. Meanwhile, the native apps we're writing for each platform have taken 6 months each and still need a fair amount of work. HTML 5 is out of the question because it is missing some critical features (mainly content protection of any kind), so mobile flash is great for us.

Having had the chance to use flash enabled mobile devices on various websites, the complaints listed in this article are valid; I wouldn't use it to play flash games, but it is usable for media consumption, even YouTube's. Normal, non-mobile YouTube videos play just fine in mobile flash, for example.
"Half of all premature deaths of working age Russian men are due to alcohol consumption."

Color me skeptical on that. The average life expectancy of Russian males in 2008 was 61.83, whereas the retirement age in Russia is 60. I can't find statistics on working age males specifically, but the general breakdown of causes of death among Russians as a population suggests that cardiovascular disease and cancer (which could include conditions caused by alcohol consumption) would swamp deaths caused by alcohol consumption itself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Health

I'd be genuinely curious to see any stats you have contradicting that analysis, however.
Keep security issues in mind if/when opening those links to .pdf files.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10168266-83.html

it looks like there's an unpatched critical vulnerability in Acrobate reader that even fixes of a couples of days ago don't address.

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-07.ht...

I wonder if it is much safer to use Preview.app on OS X instead?
> Much of what we use today is maintained by private institutions, non-profit or not.

Agreed.

> Government may have built the technology, but it is the entrepreneurs that realize the benefits of the internet.

Agreed. Both the public sector and the private sector played an important part. Entrepreneurs built on the foundations provided by DARPA (tcp/ip internetworking) and CERN (http and html), and we're all the better for it.

> On the flip side of government inventions, we don't know what will happen if the government have not funded the creation of the internet.

What we do know is the walled garden approach of private sector companies at the time, such as Compuserve. We also know that Tim Berners-Lee tried to get private sector hypertext vendors interested in the WWW, but none were interested.
You agreed that much of the medical spending which insurance pays for is not a necessity. So while health care costs are increasing quickly, they do not meet your criteria for being a necessity.

Increasing the marginal cost of medicine to the consumer is not the same thing as increasing unit costs.
Consider a $100 pill; if a customer has gold plated plans with no copay, the marginal cost of the pill is $0. If the customer has a plan with a $101 deductible, the marginal cost is $100. In both cases the unit cost is $100.

Switching a customer from first dollar to high deductible coverage will cause the consumer to consume less medicine, but will have no (direct) effect whatsoever on the unit cost. This lowers aggregate costs directly (since consumers consume less), which in turn reduces demand and indirectly lowers unit costs.

Also, note that you originally claimed health insurance costs went up 15% / year. Now you claim health care unit costs go up 15% / year. Which is it?
I agree some stake is useful, but reputation is one with poor properties. For one thing, it's not clear to me that the damage suffered is actually well correlated with behaving well versus poorly in the forum; rather, a dominating effect is simply what kinds of forums you choose. You will suffer a negative effect to your reputation if you participate in a hentai forum; whether you participate there as a troll or a valued user will not cause much additional effect either way.
A nice use for a tumblelog, although there are code snippets sites that are also handy references for stuff like this (e.g. http://snippets.dzone.com/).

Anyone got any similarly focused tumblelog recommendations (for other languages, ideally)? They make for great "quick bite" resources.
XML is mentioned way too much on that page :(

Open standards are great, if they don't suck.
i've just googled around trying to find some performance numbers, but failed to find anything. does anyone know how this compares to gcc? (more intersting would be an article that explains what optimisations gcc is doing that llvm doesn't do yet).

ps congrats to dragon egg ;o)
Plugins and Extending Ruby Code, Examples from MongoMapper Plugin System
Yeah, great documentation. It's rare to see such extensive documentation for a newly released project, and I must say I am enjoying reading through it.

Funny, just heard about LunaScript[1] the other day, and it seems they both make HTML/XML first class. Personally, I want to go the opposite way. I don't want to know about HTML or CSS being generated at all. Templates are a good first step, to separate logic and presentation, but I would prefer just to describe GUI widgets and callbacks. Django's forms are a nice step towards this type of thing, but I feel it can be taken farther.

[1] http://www.asana.com/luna
I like it since it can do everything what Skype does + fully integrated with other pbx features
This is a fascinating demonstration on how to scan fragile books.

However, it did leave unanswered how they scanned the folded (double-width) pages.
RightSide Capital- New Seed Fund Will Make 100-200 Investments Per Year
Works fine in Google Chrome 5.0.322.2 dev
But the rate of technological progress is accelerating, and sadly we can only expect the gap between policy and technology to get bigger with time. By the time the new generation gets into politics, maybe Internet regulation won't be the hot-button issue; but I'd bet it's going to be something even worse — for a random example, how about the ability to tinker with the genome to make new life-forms. I can't imagine that's going to be unregulated for too long.
I think this is going to hurt viewership, thus making the site less attractive to interview subjects, and thus further hurting viewership in a feedback loop.
"the generations that grew up with computers will age into politics as previous generations age out"

With respect, I keep hearing things like this, usually framed as "things won't get better until the Baby Boomers die out." It's wrong. Greed and stupidity are not correlated with age. There are young greedy and stupid people out there as well as the old ones.
> we'll stop seeing these types of proposals.

We'll stop seeing them when politicians get the message that they are vote losers.
Does it still happen? Because for me it works fine.
(The add-apt-repository command added a strange 'n' line which I removed, but then it worked. No 404.)
I'm hoping that the changing mindsets will result in more systems thinking & realizing the limits of control.
Sounds like the problem is more that the same password is used in multiple places. If you use the same password on a bunch of websites you can be almost certain that it could be easily compromised somewhere along the line.

If you don't use a password manager, it is extremely difficult to not reuse passwords and it's just not going to happen for the lay person. Here's the advice that I give to friends:

1. At the very least, you should have a secure password for only very reputable websites that control valuable information.

2. Use a unique password on your email account.

3. Use another password to sites where security isn't that important.
What's the backstory? Is there more to it than a domain name change?
Perhaps one outcome of nuclear power (and other developments) is that the main conflicts now are not nation vs. nation but nation vs. network - and in that division it's only the nations that hold nuclear power, so far.

I doubt networks will respond by creating their own drones. Building a drone may not be too hard, but building one that can be operated from the other side of the world is much harder. Furthermore, it turns the conflict to an arms race in which they will find it extremely hard to beat wealthier nations.
"My only hope is that eventually the generations that grew up with computers will age into politics as previous generations age out, and we'll stop seeing these types of proposals."

I thought that might happen with regards to drugs, but yesterday's stoners have become today's busybodies and know-betters.

I have no expectation that next-gen grown-ups will be any more enlightened.
> I keep hearing things like this, usually framed as "things won't get better until the Baby Boomers die out."

I don't think that means the same thing. Baby boomers are people over 50 or so; digital natives are people under 25.

Just about everyone turning 18 today is a digital native -- someone who's grown up with the internet and takes it for granted. Very many of these people have no time for crap like ACTA.

Incidently, over half of male voters under 25 in Sweden voted for the Pirate party in the European parliamentary election. If this is a glimpse of the future, I welcome it.
HOW TO: Deal With Negative Feedback in Social Media
I've read in another report that some of these systems' controls are already modeled after PlayStation/etc - this way they get to build on game manufacturer's years of usability testing as well as make it easier for recruits to learn to use the system.
hah. If your brain ran BSD, you wouldn't have to sleep for the next 650 days in a row... which would mean you'd have fatal familia insomnia, death guaranteed in a few years.
I thought people said that Obama really understood technology!
I once overheard a woman on her cell phone say that it was "hecka-busy" in the store.

I fear there may be some who can't bring themselves to say "hell", and there will be confusion between the hecka- and hecta- prefixes.

The all heck will break loose.

:)
You're right. I've gotten good results from Progressive. That's my one example.

The issue isn't so much that it's impossible to run a quality call center. It clearly isn't. The issue is that call center economics are rigged to favor operations that poorly serve customers.
Worth knowing about in general. In this case, it seems unlikely that Texas Instruments will be hosting malware-infested PDFs.

From the first link:

In its blog on Trojan.Pidief.E, Symantec advices users to consider disabling JavaScript in Adobe Reader

This is the case for most Reader vulnerabilities. In Linux I have moved out everything in Adobe/Reader9/Reader/intellinux/plug_ins except SearchFind.api. I only ever once had to reinstate the plugins to fill in some PDF-based form.
In practice, Io does follow the principle of least surprise. By default, blocks aren't activatable and methods are.
How Small Businesses Can Use Twitter To Save Costs
It was really the main goal of the project, to provide a drop in replacement for gem hosting from RubyForge...this is the culmination of that and working together with the RubyGems team to make instant gem deployment (gem push) available out of the box when you download RubyGems.

There was a lot of work involved with this over the past few months... We transferred ownerships of gems and logins over from RubyForge, setup redirects for the docs site now at http://docs.rubygems.org, and a lot of effort went into getting code from the gemcutter gem merged into RubyGems proper.
I actually have one, but it's more about a language's irregularities than anything else. it's fun and concurrently interesting to read. it's also useful, especially if you want to avoid some bad scenarios and random behaviours. here you go: http://wtfjs.com/
I managed to get halfway through Godel Escher Bach. Glad I'm not alone in not having finished it.
Obama isn't congress, the senate, or the democrat party. He is not king obama.
Paul Buchheit’s lucky streak as an angel (and a founder)
As others have pointed out, the best course for your goals (learning functional programming and using GAE) is probably going to be Clojure (or Scala).

Python has taken some idioms from functional languages, but if you try to really code in the functional paradigm you will but heads with the language. Statements and expressions are very sharply divided. Lexical scoping is broken. Lambdas are one line only.

Guido even suggested removing filter, reduce, lambda, and map from Python 3k[1]. If that isn't a signal that the functional paradigm won't be nurtured, I don't know what is.

[1] http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196
Investing in an open mobile development platform
Actually the whole reason that this particular pile of excrement is being negotiated behind closed doors is that treaties are an end run around the legislature. For the US, treaties are binding law of the land once ratified by a two-thirds vote of the senate (not the house of representatives) and signed by the president.

So long as the interests driving a piece of legislation can keep it out of the news until it's a _fait accompli_ , it's not going to cost any Senator votes he hadn't already lost.
Very relevant article just went up on TechCrunch as well: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/21/why-you-should-confess-ever...
I can't speak highly enough about Brightbox (the managed VPS service Antonio recommends).

Somehow they have managed to tread the fine line between a very comprehensive and well configured service with great addons (Comprehensive management Gem, load balancers, CDN and managed very high performance Master-Master MySQL cluster for all accounts) and flexibility (root access, install what you want on the boxes, no need to re-learn "their way" of server management).

I'd like them to add PostgreSQL and US locations in the future, but for a high-speed, reliable host they can't be beaten.

(A satisfied customer)
Graph Algorithms with MapReduce (presentation)
I was going to comment on the bad audio; I've never watched PyCon before. (I didn't know Python this time last year.)

Are there transcripts of last year's bad-audio videos available somewhere?