skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for your explanation. I would love to go into detail the 'taken over' part, but I believe rude awakenings are best when you discover them yourself.
Web 3.D - The Market Potential of "Bits & Atoms"
The problem is that clean, compact, strictly algol-like languages tend to snowball into hairy, ad-hoc languages.

Thing is, it wouldn't be that hard. How many compiler textbooks involve writing a minimal language like that? Tiger or Oberon, for instance. It's just that people don't stop at a tiny-but-sufficient, because they usually have a completely freestanding language in mind. Embedded languages need restraint to be useful. (Incidentally, I'm hoping to write a Prolog-ish language with embedding in mind this summer, but I already have a bunch of projects going.)

Lua is one of few cases where the authors have placed such a high priority on embedded use that the language has been kept small, even when it meant (gasp!) leaving things out of the standard library. It's more like a sane Javascript than an algol-like language, though. (I love it, but it's not everyone's style.)
True, but perhaps we need to make it a little more obvious that it's a joke. Any suggestions?
Google's Stand for Digital Due Process
Who the fuck puts shit on a stick?
Nope there's no infringement issues, they're using stack overflow's software with some extra bells and whistles to allow inline latex equations
Pseudonyms: The Natural State of Online Identity
(My comment, reposted here.)

I recall a discussion on this topic a long time ago when I had a casual interest in anti-spam techniques.

The idea was that someone (JD) maintained a list of bad IP addresses. However, JD realised that some people might not want JD to maintain and publish his list, and would various means to stop him. (Lawsuits, DoS attacks, personal threats, etc.)

So instead, he would anonymously publish updates to his list as signed Usenet messages. The idea was that even though he was anonymous, he would build up a reputation for quality over time and spammers couldn't pollute his list by posting fake updates because those fake updates would fail the signature check.

The objection to this scheme was the man-in-the-middle problem. Under this plan, JD's first message to the world would be a unsigned PGP key over the same fakeable Usenet channel. What if, a spammer managed to capture all of JD's posts, including the initial key, and craft his own fake posts with the spammer's IP missing?

(In the real world Usenet, this attack would be a rather impractical, but that's beside the point. Just acknowledging the fact.)
That function is valid Lua.
the funny thing is the font definition is

font-family:Verdana;

which obviously reverts to serif without verdana. So if you are running linux without ms fonts installed thats what I thought hacker news looked like for over a year
really appreciated the list of tools.
Anybody with a similar list but with other tasks ?
RapeLay Video Game Goes Viral - Thanks CNN For Helping It
>"Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure," Ms. Eismann said. "Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?"

An interesting re-occurrence of Steve Martin's observation in a recently posted article:

"[It] was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances."
i am pretty sure the number of new uses of lua way exceeds the number of new uses of tcl, and i suspect the number of deployed lua instances exceeds tcl instances (there are a lot of games out there...).

i think you being author of jim is biasing you hugely in this. lua is the obvious solution here, not tcl.
"The most impressive beggars, however, get their own title: 'metro dogs'. They rely on scraps of food from the daily commuters who travel the public transportation system. To do so, the dogs have learned to navigate the subway. They know stops by name, and integrate a number of specific stations into their territories."

Score another one for science fiction. SF writers have talked about city-specialized animals emerging for a while now, and while you could certainly say that some critters have adapted nicely (pigeons, squirrels, depending on the degree of urbanization), dogs that know how to use crossing signals is, IMHO, a higher level.

See also their symbiotic protection of the inner city from the vicious dogs. Note that had the politicians decided to be rid of them, that would have been the end of them, so they actually passed a selection criterion there. Humans have, at least for now, accepted this breed as symbionts at the urban level. One could easily imagine them further specializing rather quickly, if they are not wiped out.
I should point out that the mathematical topics on math overflow lean very heavily towards sophisticated topics in algebra, though there are certainly many other topics represented.

Im repeatedly amazed at how many heavy hitters in math research are active on MO
The Post Academic Research Life
This was discussed heavily when 5.3 was released, which back-ported it and the namespaces this article mentions.

http://php.net/releases/5_3_0.php
Chrome Dev build comes with Flash 10.1 beta "integrated"
>against the current postmodern fashion, that ethics and morality do in principle fall within the scientific domain

It's very odd to think of this as a "postmodern" point of view. Aristotle would be a postmodernist under this conception.

>to put it mildly, we find the notion of murdering our young unsettling

It's not wrong because we find it unsettling -- we find it unsettling because it's wrong. This is the problem with Harris's program of research: it gets the cart before the horse. Facts about morality don't reduce to facts about how we feel or what we believe. (In the philosophical literature, this position goes by the name of "emotivism", and it's been pretty conclusively refuted over the centuries.)

Studying the psychology of moral judgments can't tell us what's really right and wrong, any more than studying the workings of the visual cortex can tell us what kind of objects really exist in the world. Human perceptual faculties are imperfect, and our moral perceptions and judgments are no exception.
Errr ... is the formerly private bureaucracy going to be replaced by ATMs or the like?

I'm not aware of any claims that this will result in a net loss in loan administration headcount.
Glad this list still resonates with researchers.

I have added an addendum to the bottom of the list promoting the Enthought distribution (http://www.enthought.com/) of Python, which includes most (maybe all) of these packages in a single distribution.
Http://alaetimes2.co.cc/index.php?mode=t&t=4636
Originally I wanted to write it in Cappuccino and I actually started learning Cappuccino for that purpose. However, I had used JavascriptMVC for a previous project and in the interest of speed I decided to go with that. Also, I was developing our API at the same time I was writing the Part Browser and I felt more comfortable in JavaScript than Objective-J.

I think Cappuccino is great though... It seems like Atlas is a killer feature and I think it will be a must-have for UIs that are more sophisticated than the Part Browser. Every time I had to build a UI element from scratch I wished I had access to Cappuccino widgets.

Incidentally, I highly recommend JavaScriptMVC. It's an incredibly powerful micro-framework that is excellent for small projects but also scales extremely well to large projects. I basically hated javascript until I started using JavascriptMVC now I think programming in javascript is actually pretty fun.
This is definitely in response to the geohot hypervisor exploit. When they say "security update", they mean they're addressing a threat to their profit model. Pirated games and cheat modes for network play will be coming out in the future. The more Sony slows that down, the more revenue for both them and game developers.

What's interesting about this is that there is a good argument to be made for the availibility of Linux keeping hackers from showing much interest in the PS3 for a while. They may have bought their ~3 years of no piracy by providing Linux support. The other thing they did well was closely integrating the drive firmware with the core OS security, something Microsoft did not do with the Xbox360.

I previously wrote up a technical description of the exploit below. The comments section is pretty interesting as well.

http://rdist.root.org/2010/01/27/how-the-ps3-hypervisor-was-...
TopCoder style crowdsourcing for startups
I use the arg list. I looked into buffers a while back, but they seemed overcomplex for what I need (same with windows). Checking the vim help just now, buffers and arglist seem (mostly) equivalent.

I'm curious: do you find there's specific advantages of buffers over the arglist? And, do you use buffers as well as, or instead of, the arglist?

The only problem I find is that if I start two vims in different xterms, sometimes I'll want to paste between them - so I need to use the system clipboard, instead of vim.
I think part of the appeal for an electric car for me is the much lower maintenance and higher reliability, if the EV1 was any indication. Perhaps that could be rolled into the justification for the price.

It's an electric motor, avionics (car-ionics?) and other things, not many moving parts. If you are truly paranoid about having "an engine breakdown" the motors are small enough that you can carry a spare. :)
Hi kmb - we're actually only charting the weight, no reps.

I decided to keep the app as simple as possible, 6 months from now looking back at your stats - reps and time spent really wont matter (i.e. if you're tracking your 5 rep max then, and your 5 rep max now, time spent wouldnt really change).

There is a lot of competition out there - specifically in the mobile space, and certainly in the caloric space. I'd rather underdo them all and focus on a bodybuilder's needs for now.

Thanks for the comments! :)
No, the curly braces have a different meaning (lists and tables, what JavaScript calls "object literals"). In Lua, it'd be

function sum(a,b)
return a+b
end

Close, though. (The semicolon is optional, and typically only used with multiple statements on one line.)
I've just finished cleaning up and merging the first 28 sections of the linked HTML (Preface, Chapters 1-25, Notes and Packages) into a single PDF filtered via Readability. 312 pages of PDF that looks better on my mobile than the official PDF does.

Unfortunately my PDF is 4x larger and misses out on the Contents and Index sections as well as the images. The actual Lisp snippets look fine.
Are they using the same CMS? SInce the White House was using Drupal, could it be something on the lines of an insufficiently customized template?
Why the Chinese don’t spend : The New Yorker
It's a hard question because there are other people who are equally sure that diverting the train would be the wrong thing to do.
But if you look at it from the point of view of say, having to count from 1-10 the syntax is horrible.

The real killer for TCL initially was having to build extensions into the binary. If a lib needed BLT you had to rebuild TCL with BLT, then another library need a conflicting add-in you ended up with multiple TCL installs and a dll-hell of trying to get the right libs to play nicely. Don't know if thats fixed.
Great list. Thanks for sharing.
How social media is reshaping our minds
My favorite tool for finding available domains while discovering product/company name ideas is http://wordoid.com - made by a HNer, I think.
Former Schwab CEO Pottruck, others, sue Keiretsu founder
Changing Your Security Requires Learning about Change
I think it's wrong to say "Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets". It's more of a democratization of the tools needed to do a successful photo shoot. Anyone can buy a DSLR, the strobist movement means good-looking lighting for cheap and excellent post processing tools are available for free.

This means that amateur photographers in many cases can do just as good a job as a professional. It's pretty much the same reason why magazines and newspapers are declining, the internet and social networks have lead to a democratization of news.

To be successful as a professional photographer, you have to offer more than what amateurs are capable of, and in addition be able to educate your customer why you're worth the extra cash. As always, it's about staying competitive, instead of weeping over the past.
With these examples, you really have to learn to use your imagination and exercise some charity in interpretation. If you personally find the details implausible, it's not difficult to tweak them a bit until they're to your liking. It doesn't contribute anything to the discussion to pick apart incidental details of his example instead of addressing his point.
Starting to trudge into this world myself, and I can definitely understand why there isn't a big rush of hackers into the production of physical goods. There are heaps of boring details to manage, supply issues to research, domain knowledge to learn, etc.

There is nothing intrinsically difficult about creating physical products, but you can liken to working with a very un-expressive programming language. You're spending a lot of time making very little progress, and it's very expensive to create prototypes as you go.

So it's slow. You don't get the same continual ego boost of seeing what you are building. And you can't hack it up over the weekend to the applause of your peers.
Dear LHC, usher in a "new era" in collaboration too -- open source all collected data.
I don't know if Nissan does it with all vehicles, but when I went to test drive a 350Z, the dealership let me keep it all day to see if I liked it enough to buy. It had exactly the effect they expected ;-)

For a new type of vehicle like the Leef, it would be an even better idea.
It has been fixed for over 10 years.

It is Tcl, by the way, not TCL.
The page on GOTO actually includes a nice XKCD comic that illustrates both sides of the argument rather well.

http://us3.php.net/goto

[Direct to comic] http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/goto.png
I would guess file encoding is not at all the limiting factor since often times opcode caches mean that the file is only read once anyway. The problem is that you get input for all sorts of other areas like forms, databases, web services, etc. most of which aren't UTF-16.
Tuy azaltici
Right -- I'm just saying that fuzzy logic is crap (at least compared to proper statistical inference; maybe there are other, better, uses for fuzzy sets).

Why use ad hoc schemes when you can just maintain a probability distribution?
Yes that's exactly it. Every photographer looks at a professional shot and says "I could have taken that". But what makes a great lansdcape photo (for example) is that some guy for 6 months woke up before dawn every day and humped his gear up the hill and picked the right moment to take the shot, then sorted through dozens of images to find the shot and that's what appears in the calendar. Sure you could have taken that shot if by sheer coincidence you happened to be on that hillside at just the right moment, with all your gear and your wits about you. But you weren't...
BrainTrust.io - Create a Private Community for your audience
Each question should have discussion surrounding it, I don't think the StackOverflow mindset is the way to go about this, however. The discussion on each answer is shoved below in an unnested order which makes conversation almost impossible. StackOverflow works wonders for easy questions with finite answers, not dicussable "research-oriented" math questions.
The question really isn't whether 100 miles would be fine most days it's what happens when you get stuck in traffic or you have to drive somewhere unexpected for an emergency. Without the ability to quickly stop at a gas station to refuel you're severely limiting yourself (and while I agree there will be more sockets in the future I think that's more a 5 year cycle than it is something that will happen right away)
Thanks HN: We’ve launched (the dating site about books)
>It's almost a Lisp, but one that has the libraries and installed base that it can be used for production work.

>e.g. it's easy to add your own control structures to the language

Huh? You obviously don't know Lisp. Between PLT Scheme and Common Lisp you have several metric tons of libraries. And Common Lisp is certainly used for serious production work.

And finally, Lisp like freaking invented adding your own control structures to the language.
yep this is a good point. But indeed I don't like Lua nor Tcl too much for this task. I would simply love to have an easy to embed Javascript implementation, but that does not exist.

If nothing will change under the sun I think I'll use Lua even if I don't like the language too much, but sounds like the sanest thing to do.
How is Google App Engine? Are there any pain points one should be aware of before using it?
HN folks were kind enough to alpha test and offer feedback. Thanks! Feedback is still welcome, of course.
"Ultimately, all China’s barriers to higher consumption are a product of the fact that for the past three decades its entire economy has been focussed on one thing: making stuff."

Which leaves out the elephant in the room: for those same three decades, the government has been focused on making fewer people thought the one child per family policy.

How can the author talk about the paucity of the social safety network without mentioning the 4-2-1 problem: 4 grandparents have 2 parents who have 1 child, who's obviously not going to be in a position to take care of all 6 above him?

That's a big reason why the Chinese personal savings rate is around 50%. The government isn't going to take care of them and there are strict limits on what their children will be able to do.
hi i encoutered a problem while installing moby and running moby from command line.
this is what i did........first i installed plt-scheme>=4.2 and then downloaded moby source.created a directory called work and placed the moby source there.then add a PLaneT local link to the moby directory by
$ planet link dyoo moby.plt 2 <<some-high-number>> moby
where i replaced some-high-number by 5

after this i navigated to moby directory
and
$ cd moby/examples

$ mred ../src/moby.ss falling-ball.ss

to which i got the following output

/home/deepak/work/moby/src/moby.ss:77:44: compile: unbound identifier in module in: Loc->string

=== context ===
standard-module-name-resolver

can u suggest wat went wrong??
is anything wrong wid my installation??????
The software is fine, but I wonder about the name Math Overflow. “Overflow" doesn’t seem particularly to have anything to do with the name math or with answering questions, so it seems it is only referencing Stack Overflow. Therefore, Stack Overflow might be worried about people confusing Math Overflow with Stack Overflow, and might want MO to change their name.
Yes, 50 years ago Lisp was 30 years ahead of everyone else. Things have moved on, tho'.
Sorry, I was unclear. I was thinking not of the particular situation, but of the advantages that made email become such a vital, central piece of many people's workflow (especially near the top). And that in spite of obvious deficiencies. I wasn't even thinking of the human interaction bandwidth reduction (even worse than phone), just how sometimes email fits so poorly with the rest of the workflow.

By 'trying', I meant Lotus Notes, MS Exchange, GMail, etc. I think we're not done there yet ;-). If someone can come up with a not-email that has its advantages ...
>What Harris is arguing is that, regardless of what I feel or what your hypothetical fascist feels about this problem, there is a definite, objective answer to this question, not to be found by comparing opinions, but by empirically examining nature and human society.

Ok, so now all he owes us is an explanation of how to do that.
PS3 machine owners could ask who owns the machine in their front room.

They own the machine. They do not own Sony's firmware.
He's loud and obnoxious (and often a liar), and very passionate about Apple products.
> I wasn't aware there were many "mini-Madoffs"; I heard about one or two, maybe three. Could you point us at a source to back that assertion up?

Off the top of my head: Wextrust.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/business/12wextrust.html

I actually did some contract work for them in 2007, shortly before they were busted. I was never paid beyond my retainer. I found out why it was so hard to collect when the story broke in Crains Chicago. Normally I'd fight to get paid but they're now in receivership and I don't feel like taking scraps from charities and individuals who were wronged for so much more than I was.

edit: I understand that's just an anecdote, not real data. Basically media coverage is rare if the scheme is less than $200 million. There are some larger ones that never get attention because very wealthy people get taken and don't want to be made fools of for investing into these companies. I've got friends who work in the real estate business who've told me about several in the Chicago area that have been taken down or are under investigation. It was shockingly widespread, and I'd estimate there's easily thousands active worldwide.

Here's an incomplete list of ones that made the press in 2009: http://madofffraud.boomja.com/Ponzi-Schemes-Reported-in-2009...
I use name.com for all registration and haven't looked back.
While managing pseudonyms at the level of code is easy, dealing with pseudonyms when building a community is difficult. Pseudonyms present a double edged sword: an online identity, but the possibility of multiple online identities (sockpuppets), the possibility of impersonation, and the egocentrism of having your pseudonym more valued than your content.
This seems like it might work to set back the anti-flash pro-html5 movement.
The Thinkers: Duquesne professor working to help autistic people work
You mean besides lock-in?
That reminds me of an interview I did years ago with a Computer Science grad student. His area of study was in compilers, and he said his strongest language was C.

So, I asked him: "what would you improve in C? What's less than ideal about it?" He couldn't tell me a single thing.
Tk has native "look and feel". I've written a Python Tkinter app and I was pleasantly surprised how good it looks on Windows.
Again and again, we're seeing moves from Google that are far more pragmatic than those from other companies they're competing with (Apple and Mozilla most notably). By supporting h264 (the dominant video format) and Flash (by far the dominant general multimedia format on the web), they're positioning themselves to be the one-stop shop for everything web software wise. This can only end well for them.
Hope it's still in a sandbox.
hmm I usually use the seeds to populate the database with mandatory production data and for the fake/development datas I usually make some rake tasks with the faker and populator gem.
Photography is different from other fields in that the typical unit of work is quite small: one photo. That means amateurs can overwhelm the professionals by shear volume. There are so many more of them, and they take so many photos; so what if 99.9% of them are awful, as long as there's a good filter to find the gems.

This of course doesn't work if you absolutely must have photos of some particular event, so there will always be room for professionals even if they're squeezed.