skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
in the documentation it is written "While the cloud module works well as a drop-in solution for pure python code, it doesn’t handle python extensions written in C/C++. If you use custom Python extensions that PiCloud does not have installed, you’ll need to upload them to PiCloud."

As I am not an advanced user of python, I find this sentence ambiguous : If I want to use PIL or the GFX from swftools.org (I need pdf to png rendering and image manipulation), they are written in C / C++. And I think they are Python extensions ?

- So can I upload them ?

- Is there a list of installed python extensions ?
Call me grumpy, but that joke (the Real Programmer that goes lower and lower level) is a bit tired...
> See the pattern?

No.
Thanks for posting. There are some comments on the post on HN here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047762 -- the link was changed when I ported my blog from Tumblr to WordPress.
Who said anything about forced labor?

If the choice is between paying someone in another country the same amount you'd pay someone at home and not hiring them at all, the simple fact is, they're not going to be hired at all. The unspoken assumption, of course, is that we can let the whole rest of the world languish in poverty so long as we're sure that every appliance in our electrified houses and every damned faucet for our hot and cold running water was made by American hands in an American factory. That's even a consistent worldview--but you have to acknowledge what you have to give up in order to maintain that consistency. If we have to consistently choose not to interfere with cultures less technologically and economically advanced as our own, that means no interference. That's a hard pill for most people to swallow. What's more imperialistic--contracting with a Chinese company for manufacturing or "rebuilding Haiti" (in our own image, of course).
You're right, but given how little free time I have, the hassle of the paperwork for voting as an absentee (I'm still a student, just not at Georgetown) wasn't worth it to me.
"I'm more concerned about the potential problems related to food, water and air than I am about those related to petroleum, metals and minerals."

Those issues are not cleanly separable, if indeed they are separable at all.
Alas, now it's only 240.
>we could all live better with a lower GDP, is it not?

Yes and No. GDP is a measure of production, expressed in dollars. However, when GDP growth is computed, changes in the value of money do not have an effect. E.g. GDP growth from year-1 to year-2 is:

(volume produced in year 2)*(prices in year 1)
/
(volume produced in year 1)*(prices in year 1)

So reducing the price of something does not in-of-itself have an effect on GDP growth (or GDP stated in nominal terms). However, it's often the case that reducing the price of something means that there is more demand for, so more is produced, so (volume produced in year n+1) goes up, so GDP grows.

Summary: if the price of energy is reduced it will most likely lead to GDP growth - whether we could all then live better lives, I don't know. I'd like to hear a good holistic explanation of why GDP growth is required for national happiness..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gdp - see 'Adjustments to GDP'
I never suggested that a employer is a philanthropist.

However if an employer is the only one who will give a job, than, it is a morally superior outcome to starving.

Taking that job away will in fact, create an inferior moral outcome.
Just wondering, do you spend a lot of time thinking about sex workers?
I don't think anyone considers Jobs a morally exemplary person for that, but there's no point bringing it up in a totally unrelated discussion.
I'm not sure I understand you. The point is no combination of any known substitutes are close to competitive with current fossil fuel usages.

Coal is basically in the same situation as oil, contrary to what you may have heard. The good stuff is gone and it's getting more and more expensive already, when measured by joules of net energy per dollar. It's lower quality and harder to mine stuff.
I work in government contracting. Working on one of those projects right now. Let's just say the words 'value enginering,' are a very hated expression where I come from.
Angry porn user
Surprised that so few people have voted this up. Come on, not only Chile needs help now, but if you donate you might be helping to future disaster relief efforts. Thanks!
How To Walk With A Woman
How to walk with a woman

Gents,

It's a simple thing really. In today's world the chivalrous man probably won't be strolling down the street laying down his coat for every woman walking over a puddle of water. However, a nice gesture for the ladies you're with in any streetside situation is something that my mother taught me when I was sixteen walking with her down a busy avenue in Portland, Oregon.

It is customary in many places that the man walking with a woman should always walk on the side of the street with the most traffic so that in the case of a splash of water or an unruly driver the lady will be dry and safe from almost anything that could come from the unpredictable side of the walkway.

Do this with your lady, girlfriend, wife, or mother. If you like to hold hands everywhere you go, then whenever you two cross the street and the cars are on a different side just dance your arm over her head like you're doing a waltz and she's again on the safe side.

This way of walking with a woman will make her feel safe and you don't even have to tell her. One day you'll be on a sidewalk, she'll figure it out and ask why you always insist on being on the side with the traffic. You can tell her that you're mother taught you how to walk with a woman, and that you want to keep her safe even in the smallest - most unnoticeable of ways.

Cheers to modern day chivalry,

TGB
From that article:

"[...] Religion is the essential reason conservatives give more, and religious liberals are as generous as religious conservatives. Among the stingiest of the stingy are secular conservatives."

This latter group would presumably include most libertarians.
CSS Border Radius Generator
Syntax is important to me. Even if I know a language has certain great features, if the syntax itself doesn't appeal to me, it's hard for me to take it up. Go, Erlang, Scala and Ruby all fall in this category for me. Individually I appreciate certain aspects about each of them. But I don't care for their syntax. They repel rather than attract me.

I want something like Lispythonlang. One of you guys, go make that for me. I'll be taking a nap over here in the corner. K thanks bye.
The US passed laws against child labor when it did because it could afford to, ultimately. You don't find too many poor societies which spontaneously decide to build schools for everyone below the age of 18 and prohibit them from working. You might find a few where some foreign imperialists decided to build schools and send all of the country's youths to it, but I assume you're against that sort of thing.

Notably, the US also decided for themselves when to pass such laws--they didn't have the matter dictated to them by the countries they exported goods to.
$150 might be one week's food.
I think the concept of a lisp OS is a type error. Lisp has interpreters and runtime systems, that run on operating systems. However, Plan 9 suggests ways those interpreters could be better structured.

The core features of Plan 9 are that programs interact with their environment by naming things, that names refer to whatever programs or their interpreters mount on them, and that interpreters have a protocol to pass the buck to another progam when they don't know what a name means. To me, those ideas suggest a sequence of titles such as "Mount: the ultimate module system" and "Mount by wire protocol: the ultimate foreign function interface". I don't know what papers would have those titles.

The idea would be to decouple lisp interpreters and dialects from lisp libraries. If you could mount any functions that your favorite interpreter lacked, then diversity would cause smaller problems. You could write a single Apache plugin in C that spoke the apply protocol, and suddenly every lisp would support the mechanics of HTTP. Or, the web parts of your program could run in Arc on a PC, and mount procedures written in common lisp and running on a supercomputer for the number crunching. The various lisps might have enough in common to make those things work.
check out D, by Walter Bright of Digital Mars

it is older than Go

Bright is an old skool C/C++ compiler writer from the 80's. Seems to know his stuff. Co-authored one of my favorite computer games of all time too, Empire.
'What exactly stops any other function or method from doing something like this? This has nothing to do with actors.'

Richer type signatures than what you may be used to if you're coming from Java or C++. Haskell can write a function that can guarantee that it can not be used for launching missles (as long as you don't use unsafePerformIO, which I say for completeness, but generally you can ignore this caveat).

This is also related to the pure functions he talks about later; the author basically has a very Haskell/ML view of the world. Which may not be wrong, I'm just trying to contextualize it for you. Anything that doesn't have a strong "pure function" distinction will suffer from the "missile launch" problem, you are correct that doesn't really have anything to do with actors.

I tend to agree that there is a bit of a muddled point here; the author really seems to be driving at saying that pure functions and functions with labeled side effects such as we get in Haskell are what we need to build highly composable software systems. I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to this view over time. But the introduction of actors into this essay as a result ends up being almost an extraneous point to the main point that's trying to come out and I think the clarity suffers greatly. It's not so much anti-Actors as anti-anything-but-pure-functions.
From a policy perspective, I think one justification for banning child labour is to encourage equal opportunities for children of poor vs. rich families.
Because of the diminishing marginal utility of money, children from affluent families will have no pressure to work, and can therefore focus on school for a better future.
Children from poorer families will have significant pressure to find a job, as any extra money coming into the family will offer a large difference in living conditions. Without minimum working age laws, most poor children will drop out of school and never realize their true long-term potential.

This is to assume that labor does not provide an education in itself. We're also assuming that education are particularly effective or appropriate. Most 18 years old are still unable to do much else other than basic labors.

We're also forgetting to take into account economic growth. It may be that economic growth increase opportunity for education, as baser needs are being meet with increasing efficiency, allowing newer generations to get an education.

It may be that the level of education is proper for third world countries and that child labor laws and the formation of a public education system were an aftereffect of an increasingly affluent society, not the actual cause.
For syntax, ugly yet familiar is more successful than obscure yet beautiful nine times out of ten.
YCombinator pays entrepreneurs up to $600 in travel charges to have the chance for YC to interview them. What does that tell you about the value of lowering the barrier to pitch?
> get us out of the Great Depression ... WWII did, deficit spending did.

Absolutely false. Personal well being continued to fall dramatically through the war. GDP went up because the government was buying weapons, i.e. digging and filling holes. Unemployment went down because people were drafted, essentially enslaving the unemployed. The depression did not end in any meaningful sense until the war ended and government spending was reduced. Only in 1946 when you finally had the conditions that both the New Deal morons were gone and the war economy was being shut down did living standards begin to improve.

> the point is to evaluate the true cost of something

Only the free market can evaluate the true cost of things. A panel of human beings cannot possibly make a meaningful calculation: there is too much ambiguity and unknowable data. The things "worth the cost" win out and the things not worth the cost go bust in the market.

Your points about the government subsidies to the petroleum industry are quite valid, but you seem to miss that the basic failing is government itself. If oil related businesses had to carry all security and business risk related costs themselves, that would be clearly reflected in prices and substitutes would be more competitive. The problem is that somebody in government decided geopolitical hegemony is "worth the cost."
Is HubPages.Com (#89 in US) the most visited small web site in the world?
I wonder how long it will take for someone to comment on.... there, that was fast. A Clockwork Orange. brilliant movie/book.
Random weekend project: When's my next "fun" birthday? (date.js, CSS3)
I can give you a good holistic explanation for why GDP growth alone is not required for national happiness. According to some, Nordic countries tend to be happier. They have the highest taxes, they work less, have virtual universal health care, but at the same time, on a per capita and per hour basis, they're virtually just as productive. Not that I blindly favor such policies here, but I don't know, maybe there's something to be learned from them. They seem to have had stable growth since the 80s. (Note: I really want to stable "stable.")
I think most of what you are saying is overshadowed by two points that were made in the article:

1) Every bridge, road, factory, and in fact most of our economy is build on the (nearly) free energy that we get from pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground. I'm not morally justifying it, but if a couple hundred billion spent on war, allows Iraq to quadruple oil production, then we will recoup those hundred billion by using that (nearly) free energy found in those Iraqi hydrocarbons.

2) Regan's or any other era's budget deficits pale in comparison the the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security. The deficits are manageable, but the retirement and health promises are not.
Just goes to show you what red tape does. It's sad that servers that even the smallest startup uses are more advanced and modern than those of the United States government.
Related: Bot Mediated Reality: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028565
39-day voyage to Mars
Is the United States a Failing State?
My wife and I figured out today that the next time her birthday will be on a Friday, she'll be 42 years old. Yikes!

But it did give me an idea this simple website and a chance to screw around with date.js (http://www.datejs.com/) and CSS3 (esp @font-face with http://kernest.com).

Source code (what there is of it) is available here: http://bitbucket.org/look/fun-birthday
http + web.arc: an alternative combo for web development
Apple admits using child labour
Microsoft ZFS? No, thanks.
OO is the current dominant programming paradigm and has been for the past ~15-20 years. Functional programmers in general can't help but know about OO; most of them were OO programmers before they became functional programmers. Combined with the fact that being popular has advantages (more people working on core code, an increased ability to get a job in $YOUR_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE), which causes a desire to recruit more to their cause, you end up with a strong likelihood of seeing a recruitment pitch targeted at the largest recruitable demographic. In this case, this means promising fire and brimstone to the OO heretics unless you come to the light of FP. (The linked post is not that strong, but I've seen much stronger.) You generally don't see recruitment pitches for logic programmers or VDHL programmers.

You should listen to the functional programmer's complaints against OO, then make up your own mind. My programming has gotten a lot more functional lately, but there are certain domains where OO really, really shines and I still end up using it there (GUI widgets, etc). It's definitely not the right solution to every problem, though. (I am aware you did not make that argument, I'm just sayin'.)
Lesson from Madlibs Signup Fad: Do Your Own Tests
I think that the idea is to allow children to accumulate a certain base level of experience in an effort to prevent them from being the exclusive target of adults who know how 'innocent' they still are to the ways of the world. Obviously you can't make a blanket rule that applies perfectly to everyone, but the alternative is to have no rule and throw everyone to the wolves.

This to assume that rule-making will make children better off. It may be in fact, the opposite.

Another alternative is that children in apprenticeship will see how superior the adults are and will be more cautious of what deals that they accept. A skinny boy won't think he's stronger than the village's blacksmith.

We think children are naive, but that's partly because we refuse to expose everything to children, preferring that they will be innocent.

At one time, it was pretty necessary for children to be an adult at a young age. Now that we live in luxury, we can afford children to live out of touch with the world until it is time for them to enter adult society.

Think of the children swallowing traces of wines in France at an early age. They grew up drinking for the taste. Where as young American adults who turned 21 engaged in bringe drinking more often or for the drug effects.
Why does Reagonomics get such bogus credit for fiscal responsibility?

Bit of historical trivia: Reagan wanted to cut taxes and cut spending. The Democrats let him cut taxes but were going to give him a good thrashing if he tried to control spending. He decided he would rather be popular than have a fight, so he took the tax cuts and ran the deficit up.
Read up on: United States v. Shea, 493 F.3d 1110, (Ct. App. 9th Cir. 2007).

Knowing that someone used your password to send information is enough.

"The court of appeals acknowledged that analysis of the "transmission" element and its required proof was a novel issue for the court under the specific provisions of 18 USC § 1030(a) (5) (A). Yet, the court interpreted the word transmission under this provision by assimilating this term with the wire fraud crime, which also requires the element of transmission. Thus, the court used the Wire Fraud Act interpretation of the word transmission and held that "circumstantial evidence is sufficient to prove that the transmission has occurred." Therefore, the analysis concentrated on the prosecution proof that transmissions were associated to defendant's passwords, despite the employee's claim that the network was not secured and that other employees could have accessed those passwords."
Indeed. In the west, we have high safety and comfort standards, and expect children to spend their time learning and playing. These are luxuries, and not everyone can afford them. In places that cannot afford them, the alternative to sweatshops and child labor is not nicer work environments or idyllic playtime. It is crime, prostitution, or starvation.

I'm not exaggerating.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119125,00.html

Alien as it may seem to our culture of riches and comfort, there are places where these jobs are a significant blessing. Slavery is evil, and should never be supported by the west. But taking a job from a willing worker (or even a child), in a poor country is NOT helping him.
Crikey you guys are fast on the submit buttons. I hit the post button, try to answer one customer email before HNing it, and it is already here.
Baseless assertion? Those are President Obama's sentiments, although I happen to agree with them. Energy is an important part of any economy. I don't think you'd find any credible economist say finding innovations in energy would not likely yield noticeable economic effect, not to mention the compound benefit of foreign sales and investment, as well as jobs from the new industry. As for naval supremacy, I believe that's currently the U.S., but in case you haven't noticed we're still pretty vulnerable to economic problems.
Yes, that's what I think.

Google seems to emphasize diversity and thinking outside the box (well at least from what I can see through the PR window and personal stories).

I think having one language do everything is not feasible. Some languages are good for system programming and are good for performance computing (I use C), some are good for what is not performance critical but are more concise and clear (I use Python for that). Go wants to do both, but from what I see in their benchmarks it is the worst of both worlds. I want it to be as fast as C, but even then I'll still fall back on Python probably for clarity and concision. So ideally I would want Python to be as fast as C -- not going to happen anytime soon.

What a company should promote is a common protocol for encoding and transmitting data i.e. protobuf -- that is a much better thing to have than looking for one perfect language that does it all.
There really was an idea in there, I swear.

Most folks don't think about how the system they participate in functions. They just use it, and maybe even optimize it.

Here's a post where I had a little more time to dig in.
http://www.victusspiritus.com/2010/01/08/why-gods-a-hacker/
There is no need to throw out something that works well, however old it is. New startups will end up using the more modern stuff, just like older ones will end up with slightly older equipment. That's not a problem unless if affects reliability.

That, of course, assumes the government solution works fine, something the article says it doesn't.
Allegedly Thinkpads have that. But I run Ubuntu on mine so I don't have access to the fancy bios setting utilities from Lenovo. I just snap the battery out. That seems to work for me.
Singularity University, video report.
Untrue.

Year after year, Reagan rejected budgets Congress allotted and always sent it back for more spending, not less.
Email messages are stored in open human readable text on the email server, unless they are encrypted.

An Administrator on a Microsoft server with the proper permission level can open the mail directory on the server and see all of the user directories inside. Then simply open the directory and see all of the email message files. Since they are plain text they can be opened with a text editor such as WordPad and easily read.

Linux is the same.

I am not sure if XOBNI crawls the user mailbox on the email server. More likely, it is getting the information it needs from the Outlook .pst file that is on the user’s client machine. The .pst file is a little database just for Outlook to use.

I went to a Microsoft Office developers brunch a while back (good food) and I think I remember they said that they were opening a lot of their Office products to developers so they could make apps to tie in to them.

Here is link to the MSN Developers Network that might help you:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
I disgaree that only gamers get caught up in points. There are 80 million people (very few of which identify as gamers) who find value in the number of "points" hey have on their virtual farm. 40% of those people will log in on Monday to see how high their score is, and blow some time improving it.

Context can have a huge affect on what motivates people.
C'mon, it's not credible but it's a popular book that gets people to shift their perspective on money (I read it in 8th grade). I think it deserves recognition for that, even if the rest of Kiyosaki's stuff is pure shill.