skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
give her Coda. Its fantastic for beginners! It will break down the CSS file visually so you can pick out each element you create. It also allows her to see all of the options she can implement and allows her to implement them without code, and then look at the code that was generated., AND it has a CSS book built right in. (plus others.) I started with Coda, and then switched to textMate once I felt proficient. good luck.. maybe teach her microWorlds..
A lunch on urban (re)generation: in praise of cities
It's been a few years, but I'll take a shot.

1. SVMs are useful for categorizing items.

2. SVMs can only categorize on 'linearly separable' sets. That is, if you were to plot the items from the two sets on a plane, it's possible to distinguish the two sets by drawing a line on the graph and everything above the line is in one set, while everything below is in the other.

3. The kernel trick is adding dimensions to a problem, so even though the problem isn't linearly separable in two dimensions, it might be in 3 by setting the right values in your extra dimension.
Do I enjoy using Win7? No.

Would I trust Win7 code more than... other code? Very yes.

This is basically like asking me, "which would you trust more: code that you're reasonably sure Mike Eddington fuzzed, or code that you're pretty confident he hasn't."
A screenshot of a Lisa would do nicely too.

I am happy this is only for the netbook version. It's a usability nightmare when you have a 30" monitor (or a couple big ones).

Actually, with two monitors, OSX becomes pretty disorienting.
I meant 80% of the winter 2010 YC batch. It might be an over-estimate, but it certainly seemed that everyone we talked to about their tech was using rails. We started using Django, and almost no-one else used it - they were all on rails.
> No company in the industry has spent more to address security than Microsoft

Then they sure did a shitty job.

One thing that comes to my mind ... those obnoxious UAC screens. I've never had problems on Linux or Mac to type my password for escalated privileges ... but UAC I had to turn off because it was too annoying.

Also, until Win XP SP2 no firewall wasn't included in the Windows distribution. Not to mention all kinds of services that are active by default without the user needing any of them.

I'd sure like to know where those money went.
Knowing a little about how the process works, you usually do not get to speak to that actual congressman, but instead one of their staff workers who does their best to sound sympathetic without committing to anything.
As an option, please. It's really bad with big and multiple monitors.
If someone thinks they are smarter than Stephen Hawking. That someone is wrong. Q.E.D.

(I know. Complete misuse, but funny.)
It's also a rather easy problem.

Web billing systems have existed for ages, I don't see a reason why those shouldn't work on a phone.
As a teacher I can attest that it's impossible to find decent programming "text books" for Python, PHP, etc for classroom work. Most of the books you see on the bookshelves at Great Big Book Chain may be great books for programming language autodidacts, but they don't get adopted in courses because they universally lack relevant exercises for newbie students.

As a result, instructor's have to create all of the questions and exercises for the course---he/she might as well work without a book. At MIT, the Intro to Programming Course (using Python), doesn't have a textbook because, say the instructors, there are no good textbooks for Python. If Zed can come up with well-paced and instructive questions (Little Schemer-style), he's got a winner.

BTW, If you plan to contribute questions to Zed's book, try to put yourself into a newbie state of total ignorant bliss. Remember that the ideas you take for granted and think of as "simple" are completely daunting to beginners. Pacing is everything.
Here, let me help you with that: how about, by spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per release to have 80% of the software security assessment industry test their products on the dot release?

How about, by delaying the release of major revisions of their code, on multiple occasions by multiple months, to re-audit for vulnerabilities when a single instance of them is found during last-minute testing?

How about, by forcing every single developer in the company to be trained in writing secure C code? (Book jacket of very popular secure coding book: "Required reading at Microsoft - Bill Gates". Hacker News comment from former MSFT developer a couple days ago: "That book actually was required reading at Microsoft.") Or by deprecating the worst of the old C string interfaces, then banning them across their code, and then auditing against that?

I can see where the disconnect is between you and me on this issue. I've actually worked with them on some of this stuff. Far less than many other people in my field. But the UAC and firewall stuff isn't even on my radar.
>People like linear status orderings. They exist in every culture and get reinvented when there's no culture present at all.

You're right, I think I was just letting my cynicism towards the United states bleed through with that comment.

>That's why we're prepared to believe things about IQ that we'd never believe about processor or compiler benchmarks.

That's a brilliant parallel, but also a stunningly-accurate one.
It takes initiative and a great product specifically built for the problem. You can't just plug in a hard to use product (for the dev and end user). It needs to be as easy to buy the mobile web app as it is to buy the iphone app store app. ie- one click. have you ever tried to put CC info in on a mobile phone? its hell.
Because you cannot make criminal case against company. (I assume that this is the case even in US. And from practical standpoint it makes sense: how would you send company to jail?)
I remember when I studied music and regularly had to compose, well, anything. I found the best mix was to take some time away, go for a walk, a meal, a drink, anything, and then equally to sit down and compose anything no matter how awful.

Clearing my head and then forcing myself to work turned out to be about the only thing that regularly fixed creative block for me.
I really envy people who think the Daily WTF stories are phony. They must have been so lucky to work all their careers in jobs with no WTFs...
I rarely tell people what I do because I hate those stories. I don't care that you broke your printer and your 4 year old niece fixed it by putting more paper in. Yes, she is super smart for actually reading the error message that said "Out of Paper".

I also can't stand it when somebody tells me they are just completely computer stupid. And that's before we've even said hello.
Hand-wavey non-math details:

Imagine a wall with illuminated colored shadows positioned randomly on it. The colored shadows are created by semi-transparent colored balls some distance from the wall. Each set of balls of the same color are the same distance from the wall (e.g. the red ones are 1m back, the blue ones are 2m back, etc).

Now, you are just looking at the wall. You don't know there is anything not on the wall (i.e. the higher dimensional objects projecting the pattern on the two dimensional surface). You just see colors interspersed seemingly randomly.

In order to make sense of all the two dimensional randomness, you can up-project the points to a higher dimensional space (i.e. try to re-create what projected them down in the first place). That's the kernel trick. You're projecting lower dimensional data into a higher dimensional space.

The goal of all this is to make your data linearly separable (i.e. so you can draw a line (2d) or plane (3d) or hyperplane (4d+) between you classes (colors) of data). You can't separate the colors when they are random points on the wall, but you sure a heck can separate the colors when you see the colored balls grouped by individual color at specific offsets from the wall.

That's a very simple 2d to 3d projection where you would draw a plane to separate your colors. For more interesting classes of data, you'll probably end up in much higher dimensional spaces.
Do you have plans to take advantage of the upcoming front-facing camera?

Not right now, but sure it makes sense at some point, I would guess you would want to be able to switch between the two cameras while streaming. I think the new api would make that pretty easy.

Do you have an idea of the timeline for the Android app?

Sorry, I don't have any idea other than "soonish".
This is a billion dollar market. Rest assured initiative will not be in short supply, once the first serious mobile webapps (read: proof of concept) pop up.

Apple will do their best to hinder progress as long as they can but I doubt they can delay the inevitable for very long.

The next gen of phones will likely already provide a near frictionless web performance. From there it's only a matter of being "allowed" to hook into phone APIs via javascript. Apple will naturally deny this while Android will embrace it aggressively.

From that point onwards Apple has a serious problem on their hands, as far as the iPhone platform is concerned.
"She's not troubled, she's a dancer"
- Sir. Ken Robinson on a child whose parents feared she might be learning-disabled, thus demonstrating that different types of intelligence exist. Look up the speech on TED Talks; it is incredible.
Note: Link is to a video / wants to fire up the MSNBC player, IIRC (I backed out), without a surrounding page/text.
http://vim.runpaint.org/ and seconding Vim wiki (http://vim.wikia.com/)
As an Eagle Scout, I feel pretty strongly against those policies. However, as a practical matter, there is one vital number to keep in mind: 62, the percentage of BSA units sponsored by religious organizations* (as of December 2007, according to Wikipedia). And the largest sponsor (overall, not just among religious groups), by total units and total youth: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I hope the policy will change and indeed firmly believe that it will. But it needs considered in context.

*that's not to say that all 62% would necessarily be alienated by a policy change
A Pulitzer Proves We Still Need Journalists
I think SinkFloat is a cool idea.

At the moment, the blog has pretty much no interesting content. Put something intellectually stimulating on there before submitting it to HN again if you want some traction.
One of my best friends in grad school was a creationist. We discussed the subject exactly once. He realized that I knew rather more about the debate than he did, I knew there was no percentage in pushing it, and we both knew that neither person was going to change their opinions soon. So we found other things to talk about.

I got him through his topology qual so he could get a masters. (He went on to get a PhD in math.) He introduced me to Linux. On the whole I think I got the better long-term bargain.
It's describing a technique for classifying data into one of two categories (A or B) statistically, based on existing observations of data from categories A and B.

If we could just draw a straight line or plane that separated all of the A observations from the B observations (that is, A and B are "linearly separable"), keeping as far away from both as possible, we could say that any observation that hits the line is 50/50, and anything on one side or the other has a particular statistical change of being either A or B depending on how far away it is. (The fact that it's straight makes the statistics easy.)

But not all data sets can be separated easily with a straight line or plane; sometimes they're best separated with some kind of curve ("non-linearly separable"). The "trick" here is to create a higher-dimensional curved surface -- basically twisting our original space where A and B are -- in such a way that now we can make a straight cut between A and B on the twisted surface. The way our cut intersects the new curved surface corresponds to the best separating curve in the original space. (The hard part is picking the mathematical formula or "kernel" to create the twisted surface.)

So, for example, in the video all of the A points were outside of a particular circle and all of the B points were inside the circle. We create the curved surface above and copy all of the A and B points over. This allows us to separate A from B with a straight plane; its intersection with our curved space corresponds to a circle in the original space.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine
Agreed. It's good to see him take this benevolent dictator approach and have the ambition of outdoing OSX in the user experience department. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Shuttleworth-...
Rather than hand out tips on how to resign, imo, he'll be better off asking for tips on how to accept a resignation gracefully or at least on how not to respond to a resignation letter
I thought the A4 was a result of their acquisition of PA Semi a couple of years back.

There's no evidence of that.

It doesn't really make sense for them to develop the chip offsite, and then buy the company after it ships.

Perhaps consider it the world's longest job interview.

Especially when they've already got the team to do it internally.

It's not clear to me how much skill overlap there is between PA Semi and Intrinsity.

Since everybody loves unfounded conspiracy theories, here's one: PA Semi's hotshot circuit designers went to Agnilux so Apple had to buy Intrinsity as plan B.
Thanks for sharing: this is a pretty succinct summary of a much better way of approaching the world than the "everybody sucks, only I see the light." It's almost NEVER true, and the people who I know that are right often enough to say that, never would.

"To know that you do not know is the beginning of wisdom."
"Nobody's ever done that before."

Have they in fact done it? There's been a lot of saber-rattling from Russia while Putin's been in power that stinks of "please still consider us a military powerhouse". Bombers flying while they don't have the funds to keep their stockpile in working order, etc.

Let's see something more than CGI.
What Makes People Happy? TV, Study Says
Finance, though it's obviously not a secret weapon anymore.
Or, you can ignore all of these tips, give 2 weeks notice, send a nice note to the team, and trust that no matter what happens afterwards, you're not going to look bad.
What would happen if China revalued the yuan? The past offers some clues
This seems to be sort of a primer on rhetoric - how to effectively address an argument instead of dismissing it as merely stupid. He touches on a number of rhetorical techniques somewhat informally and I like his treatment of the subject. If you found this interesting, I'm in the middle of a book on the subject of argument and rhetoric that is actually quite engaging, called Thank You For Arguing by Jay Heinrichs.
Isn't Calacanis' basic script pretty much well what the guy in question emailed to him?
"What would it be like if Linux, or any real multi-user networking operating system with a sane design, were the standard operating system? I bet money we would not have tens of millions of Linux PCs in botnets, even with a large population of unsophisticated users. No botnets pumping out phishes, spam, and malware, no drive-by infections from merely visiting infected Web sites"

I call BS on this quote. I have no reason to believe that, e.g. firefox on linux is any more secure than firefox on windows. There is no reason a botnet needs root access on a linux hosts. The only reason we don't have huge swarms of linux botnets is that hackers get more bang for the buck by targeting windows.
Some apps and stuff:

Coda or Espresso, (html IDEs)
Adobe Creative Suite, ('nuff said if working with Bitmaps, Flash, Vectors et al)
Terminal.app, (CLI love)
UNIX (tm), (a full blown unix under the hoods)
CSSEdit, (css editing)
TextMate or BBEdit, (programmers' editor)
Scrivener, (writers' editor)
Navicat, (MySQL admin)
MAMP and MAMP Pro (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack),
MacPorts (app repository),
Vim, Emacs, MySQL, Postgresql, Python, Ruby et al (familiar unixy apps),
Automator (task automation),
Omnigraffle (graphs),
sips (CLI image editing),
Pixelmator (image editing),
Transmit 4, (ftp client)
Little Snitch, (application firewall)

Just google for the above...
Re: PA Semi, I thought so, too.

My guess: if apple made the purchase of intrinsity after they delivered the a4, its probably because they see ongoing value with the chip/team. Future products and all.

But two chip acquisitions?
"Bad" is more of an attitude than anything you learn. You can be a good programmer before you ever know what Python is. And you can be a bad programmer even after writing 84 monad tutorials.
eh, he says "Co-founders are both the most important thing that your company needs and the most likely reason your company will fail."

I'm not entirely convinced of #1; a good employee can do nearly all the things a co-founder would, but when they do leave for a real job, (and they will, just like a co-founder will) you have the option of continuing rather than laying down your arms.

Really, I think it comes down to the quality of people you can get. If you /can/ get someone better as a co-founder than as an employee, then yeah, having a co-founder might help your survival chances a lot.

The quality of people you can get as a co-founder depends largely on your sales skills, though. so if you are as bad at selling as I am, you might actually be able to get /better/ people as employees than as co-founders. Of course, if I was better at selling, and worse at hiring, this would be reversed.
We all have vastly inflated images of ourselves. Every single person.
I don't think they'd be having any trouble if they had done that before dissecting it, publishing what they found, outing the engineer, and publicly demanding Apple submit a request for the return of their own property.
"What we now think of as the atom – consisting of a nucleus and its electrons – was first described by John Dalton in the early 1800s. Later that century, scientists found that they could strip electrons out of the atom. Then, in the early twentieth century, they found that the nucleus contained even heavier particles, which were dubbed protons and neutrons.

"Fast forward to the 1960s, when theoretical physicists proposed that protons and neutrons have building blocks of their own – particles called quarks. Shortly thereafter, researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory conducted experiments that demonstrated that quarks really did exist."

Reading this passage I found myself struck by how glad I am to have read the Feynman Lectures on Physics in high school. He does such a great job explaining what made people ask the questions that this author presents in a "suddenly, people thought there were protons, neutrons, and quarks" manner of talking. If you haven't read Feynman's lectures, do so. I don't know that ignorance of physics has the same repercussions of, say, numeracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy), but it certainly provides a healthy background against which to read these types of articles.
I totally understand that last part, about evidence custody stuff. I find it vaguely totemic, in that the "one true datathingy" must be preserved. (not on your part necessarily, on the whole court system in general). Good on you guys for getting data back to the suspect. I presume that if it all comes from Images anyway, it would be trivial for me to bring in a couple TB of NAS and say, "data please" and just get raw image dumps.

I think to clarify my above stuff: Rules of evidence should state that images of the computer files in custody should be made available to suspects in some short amount of time after they are processed, due to the easy copy aspect of digital media, and the critical nature some data on the drives.