skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't seen any issues with simple mode, but I would echo that. It can seriously mess things up if anything goes slightly wrong, so you need rigorous testing in place.

Advanced mode can remove code you're using, it can rewrite variables you don't want rewritten, etc so you need to be sure everything is understood before you start.

But the rewards are worth it...

No compression: 92K, YUI: 56K, Closure Advanced: 47K.
"The meditation-trained group averaged aproximately 10 consecutive correct answers, while the listening group averaged approximately one."

I call bullshit. Normal untrained adults would do far better than this on adaptive n-back. If this is true, it means sitting and listening to Tolkien is more damaging to your working memory than having a screwdriver jammed into your prefrontal cortex.
It's a double-edged sword. The big advantage of the platform is leverage: you get to leverage their technology and their existing user base.
wasn't it steve-jobs who had earlier potificated : 'i would rather be a pirate than be in the navy...' why so serious ?
Ask HN: CISSP without experience ?
To qualify for the CISSP certification one needs to have say 5-10 years of industry experience thats what the website says. So If I do not have any experience but I want to get into the security industry as a fresher or at least attain a few certification to prove my worth what path should I take... Can or should I go for the EC-Council CEH (Certified ethical hacker) certification ? Any tips from anyone in the security industry is much appreciated. Thanks
I'm pretty sure the C example will not compile with a C compiler.

Which may seem like a nit, but the reason is because the semantics of Haskell and C are extremely different. Furthermore, the semantics strongly influence the design of the language. In Haskell, whitespace denotes function application, because the most common thing to do in Haskell is to apply a function. C has semicolon delimited statements, because imperatively executing statements one after the other is a very common thing to do in C programs. In Haskell, you cannot guarantee the exact order in which things happen without going to great lengths (monads, etc.).

In short, I don't think offering a skinnable syntax buys much, and is likely to just generate greater confusion.
You're very welcome.

This link may also be of interest: http://transfixedbutnotdead.com/2010/01/14/anyone-for-perl-6...

From the links in the post you can find Perl5, Ruby, Javascript and Python comparative examples.

Been playing a bit with Io (http://www.iolanguage.com/) recently so was planning to add a comparative post for that as well.

Update: I just copied over my Io example i had brewing into a gist (http://gist.github.com/372559)
The default is a day, but if you go up and change your date range you can get it for current day as well.
I work for an insurance company and I can confirm the part about shopping for new home and auto insurances (at least the company I work for has a very significant discount if you have both at the same company).

OTOH I didn't want to raise my auto insurance deductible... in my case the savings was 1/5th of the amount the deductible went up... it depends on whether you're confident you won't get to use the policy.
50 upvotes and no comment so here is my "I hope someone will make nice analysis on this data, might be very interesting, at least nice to look at" comment.
Ask HN:How many screens for coding at one's best?
Hi,

We are doing dev and are used to our 2 screens (2 * 19") but we are planning to buy new ones to improve our comfort.

Our work: 100% coding. No video. No image.
Our OS: Windows 7 + VMWare (Linux)

We are unsure about the right move 2 * 24" or 1 * 27"?

What is your screen configuration now (Pros and cons)? By your experience, which screen type is better for reading code?

Thanks a lot for your feedback.
Some More Useful Facts About Tires
This is a fascinating comment. As someone who thinks he gets abstraction I'd love to hear some real world examples on the off chance I'm deluded. How do we know if we're actually non-abstractionists?
Congratulations, you have just invented... the compiler. ;-)

More seriously though:

Interestingly of the two languages that come close to this model - lisp with minimal syntax and perl with very flexible syntax - one remained in academic obscurity while the other became wildly popular.
Obviously you didn't read the article. He was using it in the sense of "sucking visitors from the home page to the meaty content of the site," not in the colloquial sense.
DSP Board + LEGO NXT + Webcam = Robot Playing Tetris
This also has a lot to do with the watering down and "subjectivization" (for lack of a better word) of the humanities. Even at Harvard, which is notorious for grade inflation, math and science courses still give Bs and Cs for middling work (I know some very intelligent people who've received Cs in physics and chemistry courses there). The inflation is mostly in the humanities.

Also flagrant is the bifurcation of the economics major. There's a "serious economics" track for those who want to go to grad school, involving quant courses and math up to real analysis, and a watered-down/easy-A economics track for the mediocrities who want to be investment bankers.
Edit: Apparently it was five thousand, not ten.
You don't understand the definition of a public good. The key to a public good is that it is non-exclusionary, or at least partially non-exclusionary, and would suffer from the free rider problem if provided by the market, and so would be inefficiently under-produced.

You say that health care and education generate more wealth than they cost. That doesn't make them public goods. Education primarily produces the extra wealth for the person who gets the education. This doesn't make it a public good, it just makes it something worth investing for each individual.

Also, look to rural India if you think the market has trouble providing education.

There are bits of health care that fall into public good, like vaccinations, but public health and health care are mostly entirely separate things.
> What bugs me is that I can't imagine that every phone that is lost or stolen makes it's way to gizmodo, so how on earth did they find out that that phone was a prototype? Or did they really have a bunch of 'misses' before this 'hit'.

It looked different. iPhones only come in a couple designs, it's not hard to tell when it's different.
Though this is tangential to the story, I would like to second the recommendation of this paper. On the way to arguing for his thesis, the author explains the function of the modern banking system and the "shadow" banking system in clear and cogent terms. He relates contemporary banking practices to older ones and explains shows how they are similar in the event of a banking panic. Very good (but long) article.
Barnes and Noble has porn on their magazine shelves.
Is there anything special about the p2p features in Flash that couldn't be implemented with HTML5 WebSockets, WebWorkers, etc.?
Ironically, Mac hardware has pretty impressive Linux support. Aside from some (admittedly very frustrating) touchpad issues, I have had great success with sleep, hibernate, wifi (once I replaced that trash nm-applet with wicd), nvidia, etc.
Ke$ha perhaps?
If that was Apple's sole reason for not wanting cross-platform "shovelware", absolutely. But it isn't.

It's more like Apple doesn't want meta-platforms on top of iPhone PS for completely different reasons (control, independence, etc), and aren't willing to compromise because nothing about more cross-platform shovelware intrigues them.

The AppStore is at a place right now where quantity is not an issue; quality is, so that's what they're going to optimize for. Who knows, maybe they'd be more welcoming of cross-platform apps if the AppStore had a quantity-problem (probably not, if history is anything to go by).
If an HR department can google his name, then it will close career paths to him.
I speak English and Spanish and was using the Pimsleur CDs to learn Japanese. I can't recommend it enough. I gave up when I had no one to talk to and yet after several years, I still remember quite a bit.
Not for a high tech company on the cutting edge who would test their machines in public. If he worked for someone else and was now applying at Apple, would he be hired?
Earth's core has its own pole (and it's at the equator)
Shellsort is not O(n log n) but not O(n^2) either
I thought I recalled Knuth showing shellsort was better than O(n^2), but worse than O(n log n). According to this page, shellsort is somewhere around N(log N)^2 and N^(1.25). The proof is in Knuth, TAOCP.
People have different sensitivities. What you may find "no big deal" may be a huge deal to other.
Measuring The Value Of Social Media Advertising
I thought I recalled Knuth showing shellsort was better than O(n^2), but worse than O(n log n). According to this page, shellsort is somewhere around N(log N)^2 and N^(1.25). The proof is in Knuth, TAOCP.
I completely agree.

It appears people are taking this statement the wrong way - Porn isn't allowed in the appstore, so his statement is bullshit. Of course we can install our own apps / porn on Android! That's one of the best parts.

But we (android community) get to dodge the THINK OF THE CHILDREN bullshit that Jobs is trying to stir up because it's not allowed in the default distribution method.
It may have saved his job since it sounds like it really was an honest mistake and now if he's fired everyone will be on his side. There's no way Steve can fire him without looking like a heartless bastard. Google would hire him in a second and get a huge PR win.
JavaScript Things I Wish I Knew Much Earlier In My Career
Without turning this into a political discussion, it's worth noting that the actual "bank" part of this should end up turning the government a handy profit: http://www.freep.com/article/20100330/BUSINESS07/3300313/Ban...
That's what the wise marketers preach.. you must sell an emotion, something that enhances a person's narrative/ego. Otherwise you are selling a commodity. I wonder how this applies to my blog!
VC funding tale of 2 continents. US - Venture backed. Europe - Venture fXXked
Woman Gives Her Autistic 9-Year-Old Marijuana
minus potential legal fees?

now that apple legal is involved...
Expert Profile: On the Direction of Algorithmic Trading and AI
Google Attackers Gained Access to Computer Code
There's a presentation that Larry Wall gave at Google that has a lot to do with the internals of Perl 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzIWdJVP-wo Actually, to be honest, I don't recommend it, I found it surprisingly dull in delivery (sorry, Larry), but the contents were very interesting.

I actually think describing Perl 6 as "having macros" is accurate, but gives the wrong impression. It doesn't "have" macros, it's made of macros. The whole language is made of macros and you are nearly begged to extend it with more grammar. Or you can throw theirs away and write your own for something. Or you can throw theirs away, take some of it as a base, and extend it.

It's a wild, wacky experiment that needs to be done. Whatever happens, we'll learn a lot. My intuition says "collapses under its own complexity" (especially after trying to add a few grammar-modifying CPAN modules) is the most likely result, but I fully support with no sarcasm someone trying this out in case my intuition is wrong. It's not just Lisp redux, it's something new.
As Platforms Go Mobile, So Will Documentation
How much money in PR do you have to spend to make up for the "disappointing" events because everyone already saw the phone. This is not some little matter of secrecy, this is big money. It also affects the media that covers Apple events. They lose money because they don't get the page views.
Why did you start the graph at 2.6? I understand you want to prove your point, but please don't lie with graphs.
Pretty much by definition you'd have to be told by an abstractionist ^_^.

More usefully, look at some APIs that have earned serious respect, especially by people who clearly are abstractionists. If you don't "get" too many of the reasons why, then you probably aren't (yet) an abstractionist.

This also applies to languages and idioms in them. If you grok SICP, you're probably an abstractionist (if you don't, I wouldn't say you necessarily aren't one).

The best self-test, and it's eerie when it happens, is that you design a greenfield (new) architecture and start building it, and then discover that it solves problems you didn't realize you had. I suspect this requires a fair degree of experience: it happened to me in the mid-90s, having stared programming in 1978 ... although maybe I got a taste of it in 1992. But it might have happened earlier if I'd had a chance to do a greenfields project earlier.

Some facility with abstract math is a good sign, e.g. can you do pure algebraic manipulation, especially outside the context of solving a real world problem?
Ask your local whitehats for advice. Bonus points if you can get to a meetup and start making connections.

I am pretty sure that making positive associations with local white hats will be more likely to get you your first security job than a certification will.
>His answer on why 42 is as disappointing.

Actually I think it's quite brilliant. With all the religions, myths, legends, verbal stories, calendars, moon phases, planet alignments, mathematical projections, physics... these things of complication, what if the understanding the universe is just as simple as 42!?
It's a great idea and I don't want to appear too critical but:

* Was he only wearing the t-shirt & jeans for one session? Was he sure that was what caused the effect?
* $4000 in 7 years? The numbers don't really add up. He was out selling for 2 days a week for 7 years, that should be 700 sessions more or less. He really only made less than $10 a session on average?
The problem is that 42 was the answer to an earlier question - once DNA had worked out 42, the original question and universe was replaced by an even more incomprehensible one.
And so he has no memory of the original reason for 42.
Perhaps it's the type of question computers are not good at answering.
Chronotherapy to repair sleep disorders
Natural Weight Loss - 11 Ways to Take Off Extra Weight
You can download the data to play with at the end of the post.
A possible idea for improving that: Maybe it might make sense to allow users above a certain reputation threshold to vote stories down? Or even just limit story voting to people above a certain threshold.

What good newspapers, periodicals, etc have in common is very good editors that set the overall tone. The crowd, on the other hand tends to go for the sensational, populist and mediocre consensus. I appreciate all your efforts to evolve HN to try and avoid that though.
It was an SE/30. By sheer coincidence, I have one too!
I started a friend finder for Twitter (on appengine) a while back, but never fully fleshed it out.

http://tweetersyoumayknow.appspot.com/
I find that the physical separation between two monitors helps reinforce the idea of separate workspaces for me. Running two windows side by side in a single workspace has never been comfortable for more than a few seconds.
15 controversial Indian Businessmen of all time
Good ol' Rick. Doesn't look a lot older than he did in the late 70's.

I don't think he ever got enough credit for masterminding the Lisp Machine development at the MIT AI Lab; it was really his baby from start, though there were several key people working on it with him (Moon, McMahon, Cannon, Knight, etc.)

He's a humble fellow and one of the best.
I have found pomodoros [1] to be more helpful than hiding hosts. It's easy for me to focus on putting 25 minutes into a task. It's not easy for me to just stop using my browser for anything other than dev/test work.

[1] http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
Web start-ups often fail, so why are these guys launching one? (Redbeacon)
I suspect Apple will do a watch or in-car device. Both are ubiquitous electronic personal devices not yet Apple'fied. For it to occur, it depends on some new technology to come along that Apple can integrate into them better than others.

-- I think a watch will happen when rfid or other eps devices replace cash
This seems a little silly to me. Any hardware features Apple adds and new technologies will force them to rethink their industrial design, and I'm sure there will be new additions in the next decade. (front-facing camera is one addition)

If you put it that way, flip phones should have hit the limits of industrial design a long time ago, but phones like the RAZR changed things pretty substantially.

It is also Apple's choice to maintain one consistent look for a product line for several years (think iPod, iMac, MBPs...)

Also, I wouldn't say that the original iPhone and the 3G/3GS looked the same at all...
I don't know. The primary cause of high wages seems to be high productivity.
Steve Jobs: “Folks Who Want Porn Can Buy An Android Phone”
All the discussion, rumoring, and conjecturing make the platform fun. A few guys take it seriously, but I think most of us just like to play in it for fun.
That's true. I suppose you just have to be willing to keep up with any changes they make to their TOS. For instance, Apple limiting the development languages on their new Iphone/Ipad/Itouch OS.
When I was a grad student, 2 years ago, I was the teaching assistant for Operating Systems. I was responsible for all the grading in the class and the professor told me to give everyone A's no matter what on the assignments and quizzes. Most of the students had little to no understanding of the material. The professor said he was up for tenure that year and he was afraid that if we handed out bad grades the students poor evaluations of him would keep him from getting tenure.

I wonder if universities put to much stock in the opinions of the students. I'd imagine that the professors eveluations would be heavily skewed towards the negative if they grade their students performance accurately. I'd expect, if grades were some how a normal distribution which they probably weren't, that the students doing poorly in the class would give the prof low marks and the students doing well would give the prof meaningful marks - some percentage of which would be negative.
"Test Your Software, or Your Users Will
Test ruthlessly. Don’t make your users find bugs for you."
At my current workplace, this is seen as a feature, not a bug! (having the users find the bugs). And no, I don't work for Microsoft.
I love their approach.
Panel Discussion on Django and NoSQL
This same article is already on the front page here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279068

To be fair the article is hosted on a different domain but the content is identical.
> C has semicolon delimited statements, because imperatively executing statements one after the other is a very common thing to do in C programs.

Actually that would be an argument for making newlines delimit statements, like in, say, Python. Instead of requiring extra work by the programmer.
Good point!

However, for coding, you can display a lot more lines with a 27" than a 2*24" config.
That does not counter his argument. Demonstrating that highways are more expensive to build in some areas than others does not show that building highways is useless.
Extreme Example: If the total cost of universal healthcare is less than the total benefit of universal vaccination then it can be a net gain even if every other dollar was wasted.
Google drops the http:// from Chrome
websockets has no passive mode
> "Are you that great?". No, apparently he's not.

That's not really fair - there are plenty of very good motivations for writing (and reading) fiction other than immersion in a sustained imaginative world. By that criterion, "Avatar" is a better film than than, say, "Casablanca," because James Cameron knows more about the flora of Pandora than Michael Curtiz does about Morocco.

Adams is a great writer precisely because of his lack of pretension, his humility, and his irreverence -- I'd be disappointed if he didn't regard his own work with the same outlook he had for everything else.
I understand the definition of a public good. Take education: a significant part of the benefit that flows from education is externalized, that is society as a whole benefits as well as the individual. As a result, in a pure market people tend to under-invest in education.
And some of us don't want to give way on 3. That means we need to learn to compromise. Ideology is neat and tidy; real life is not.
The TC article linked from cultofmac is on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278769
I have a theory about the second half of that graph.

http://imgur.com/nmEsW.png

I could be wrong, but surely home computer access plays a role in evening the playing field and raising the bar.
The most important line in the paper:

"As a rough rule of thumb, the average GPA of a school today can be estimated by the rejection percentage of its applicant pool:
GPA = 2.8 + Rejection Percentage /200 + (if the school is private add 0.2)"

Interesting the more students a school rejects the higher its GPA seems to be. To say it another way, the more selective an institution is the higher the GPAs. ie. If you get smarter students, they tend to have higher GPAs. Example my econ professor has been looking at the actual distribution of performance in his class. He does not find a bell curve. Additionally he asserts there is no reason to expect a bell curve in a college course, as students tend take courses they are both interested in, and good at. The consequence, since you don't have an even distribution of stupid students to smart students, you won't have an even distribution of grades.
Bump Key How-To
Even without vaccinations having a heathy population reduces the spread of a wide range of dissease.
PhoneGap for the desktop
PhoneGap can now run on Mac OS and Windows.
Apple has been known to do planned leaks when it suited them. (The iPad leak during CES is an excellent example) but its usually just letting a friendly reporter know a few details from the specs, not 'accidentally' leaving a phone at a bar or anything like that.
Create your first Ruby Gem and release it to Gemcutter
My understanding is that Perl 6 is the polar opposite of lisp, in this sense: In lisp, the code is always and everywhere already in a parse tree, and can be manipulated easily by, e.g., macros; Perl 5, on the other hand, is the most unparsable language possible: see http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393. What perl 6 does is own the parsing problem, and respond by incorporating super powerful parsing tools. Unfortunately, I believe that perl 6 retains its dynamic syntax, so parsing of perl 6 itself is still an uncertain adventure, and not something one can incorporate unconstrained into one's metaprogramming. I'd love to be wrong about that; am I? If so, can someone recommend a tutorial on perl 6 metaprogramming?
Yes.

Web sockets are implemented on top of a HTTP verb, e.g.:

{Regular HTTP handshake} {Socket negotiation} {Data sent over the open connection}

Unless your browser also accepts incoming HTTP connections it won't be able to accept incoming requests. It's not UDP as you know it, so you can't just fiddle with DNS or a router and re-direct packets to another JavaScript P2P client.

Hopefully that'll get fixed one day. Direct P2P from the browser would be incredibly useful, but there are real problems with cross domain DNS abuse. For example it's possible to use IE6 visitors to run a search engine spider without their knowledge or consent because of the (reasonable sounding) same-domain-cross-iFrame-read permissions.
Riptano - First Company Focused on Cassandra « myNoSQL