skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of a story from all the way back in high school algebra. I had just got a ti-83 calculator that year and was having fun writing basic programs for it. One of the class topics towards the end of the semester was the normal distribution and we were expected to memorize the percentages up to 3 standard deviations. I hated having to remember fixed quantities, so I wrote a program to calculate what I later learned were Riemann sums on the equation for the normal distribution I saw tucked away in the textbook.

I wrote a lot of programs like that one throughout high school and into college, and for me it was far more educational to solve a problem once and for through automation than to memorize constants, formulas, or to solve particular instances over and over.
U.S. Senate considering to suspend habeas corpus
Couldn't they just manage a simple rocket to knock the fucker out of orbit? Like you said, .01c should be plenty to avert disaster.
If we had a space elevator, we could just power the elevator via solar power, and use the elevator as a power line to transfer the additional solar energy back to earth!
what about sales tax?
Interesting, it does look like a decent book. Also, it looks like you've targeted Python 3. Seems well written so far based on what I've read in a few chapters.

I'm building a list of free books for people to move onto after they finish mine. I'll put yours in the list.
Yeah. This title made it seem far more cooler than it actually is.

Because all it is, is a dumb terminal, really.
"When I want to know how many prime numbers there are between one million and two million, or how quickly my mortgage payments would bankrupt me if interest rates rose to 35 percent—that is, when I don't want to do my work—I can kill ten minutes writing programs to tell me the answer. Getting down to business, I use the computer to do my income tax. My economic life is a mess of $2.75 parking-lot tickets and $13.89 lunch receipts, which used to pile up like fall leaves until I spent a week burrowing through them at income-tax time. Now all I do is sit down at the machine for five minutes every few nights and type in all transactions of interest to the tax man—so much in from my employers, so much out to the credit-card company. At the end of the year, I load the income-tax program into the computer, push the button marked "Run," and watch as my tax return is prepared. Since it took me only about six months to learn BASIC (and the tax laws) well enough to write the program, I figure this approach will save me time by 1993."

Somehow I think we have failed, if writing basic programs like this is now outside the realm of most computer users.
I'd rather have a space escalator that way it could never break, it would just become stairs.

@see Mitch Hedberg
Christopher Hitchen's review of the book and YC discussion on it:

http://www.slate.com/id/2243112/pagenum/all/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094011
Zoschke's Razor:

The most boring explanation is usually the correct one.

I'm kinda hoping somebody makes a 'demotivational poster' out of that.
The Wedding ring is very important and a challenge for every bride Hot choose
It sounds like a beta version of Android 2.2 (Froyo) is out in the wild for testing — and it has some interesting features that I’m sure Android users will find interesting.

Hmm, how interesting.
It would be the US Constitution, where it gives all rights that are not explicitly enumerated to the states.
I'm still optimistic about my conservative, iPad-based portfolio.
Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites
"... or to the people." Let's not forget that. (Not that it's terribly relevant to your point.)
This is very wrong to assume. What if they have accessed the technology to travel without producing it, therefore not having reached any kind of peace equilibrium you are suggesting required for their species to survive and progress?

Any if you are going to play with the words just use the extraterrestrial one.
Falcon: a fast multi-paradigm programming language
Adjust for inflation (2.8% mean for 1997 to now [1]) and the $330k value of a PowerBook goes down to $230k in 1997 dollars.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+inflation+from+1997+...
You've got it backwards. In 1982 only the people who could write basic programs like this would put in the enormous investment of time and money to become computer users.

The fact that the electronics industry has managed to make it's products so much cheaper and so much easier to use that even (e.g.) the illiterate and innumerate can usefully enjoy them is a big triumph.
On the other hand, if you opted for the Nomad back in 2001, you definitely made the right choice vs. buying stock in Creative Labs.
5.0.382.0 (44999) Ubuntu

Couldn't be happier.
Nice-looking language, but not-so-nice looking license proliferation: http://www.falconpl.org/index.ftd?page_id=license_1_1
Nicely done! If you were inspired by this thread -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1291809 -- a shout-out would be nice. Glad to see the detailed implementation, either by inspiration or independent-invention, in any case.

But: only back to 1997?

What if I hadn't bought that Powerbook Duo 230 in late 1992? (~$2200 from Whole Earth Access in Berkeley, if I remember correctly.)
In my grandparent's youth, you could invest in "simple things" but nowadays, with the 12mo T-bill yielding 0.42% and an inflation rate of 2.3%, your cash strategy won't get you very far.
Check this blog next week with instructions to do it with [insert any service that sends emails].
Huh, I guess I had thought they'd disabled the light somehow...
I think it would be much more valuable to learn how the algorithms inside the graphing calculator work, instead of learning how to use a calculator. Integration, differential equation solving and root finding can be programmed in just a couple lines of code. It is amazing how well these numerical methods work.

E.g. solving the differential equation y' = y from t=0,y=1 to t=1 computes exp(1):

import math

def simple(f,t,t1,y=0.0,dt=0.001):
while t<t1:
y += f(t,y)*dt
t += dt
return y

def rk4(f,t,t1,y=0.0,dt=0.001):
while t<t1:
k1 = f(t,y)
k2 = f(t+dt/2, y+dt*k1/2)
k3 = f(t+dt/2, y+dt*k2/2)
k4 = f(t+dt, y+dt*k3)
y += (k1+2*k2+2*k3+k4)*dt/6
t += dt
return y

def f(t,y): return y

print "Simple:", simple(f, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0)
print " RK4:", rk4(f, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0)
print "math.e:", math.e

This prints:

Simple: 2.71692393224
RK4: 2.71828182846
math.e: 2.71828182846

Or perhaps Newton's method to solve x^2 = 2, solution x=sqrt(2):

def newton(f, fprime, x=0.1, n=10):
for i in xrange(0,n):
x -= f(x)/fprime(x)
return x

def g(x): return x**2 - 2
def gprime(x): return 2*x # derivative of g

print newton(g, gprime)
print math.sqrt(2)

Result:

1.41421356237
1.41421356237

Note that 10 iterations are enough to get all the digits that Python prints correct.

In just 13 lines of code we have tools for effectively solving any ordinary differential y' = f(t,y) equation and for solving f(x) = 0 for many functions f. Solving y' = f(t,y) where f(t,y) is a function of t alone gives us integration. E.g. integrating 1/t from t=1 to t=2:

rk4(lambda t,y: 1/t, 1.0, 2.0)

(but there are better methods for integration than general purpose differential equation solvers)
The problem with that, and the reason current research is focusing on wireless microwave transmission, is that you don't want a satellite of solar panels in geostationary orbit. Because then it's wasting half the day in the dark. Ideally you want a satellite to collect power 24 hours a day and then transmits it down once you're in range.
But I imagine at the time you would have still needed a computer?
Facts:

1) The stock-market itself is theoretically a zero sum game. So regardless of the instrument being trade someone is always betting against a trade. ex. over and above a long/short combo, even if person X is going long and person Y is booking profits. Person Y is theoretically betting against X.

2) GS is a clearing house among other things. Hence there is a high probability that on any given day they have hundreds of transactions that are long/short withing the same client pool.

3) Most transactions take place on a level 2 platform, i.e. the maximum someone can see if which company cleared the transaction, not which client etc.

4) Even if it is the same advisor, it would be illegal to disclose the transaction details of a client to another client.

5) I have never come across a retail investor that invests in CDOs and other exotic instruments.

6) There is a difference between hedging and naked/un-hedged trade. If someone is smart enough to be willing to trade an exotic instrument in the later category they better have the ball s to take ownership of the losses.

7) I wonder if people would have whined at all if GS did not make money on the hedge, since that happens in the majority of cases. Even in the case of GS. Like a number of other activities/sports a 30% win rate can be awesome.

8) This article is baseless is theory and practicality...

Because(Opinions):

a) Either they are trying to say, hedging should not be allowed. If it should be allowed the ones hedging should not make a profit(??). If they do make a profit they should feel sad about it.

b) If making a profit is a bad thing then, I guess they are trying to promote a way to eliminate losses. If thats the case I wonder what they would like to do. More bailouts or close the stock markets completely.. what would be the use if no one should make a profit??

c) I guess to make the article/issue clearer the next thing they could say is underwriting of any kind is also an illegal practice, since the institution assuming the risk is only entitled to risk and losses, go forbid if they make a profit, well we can see GS getting bashed for now :)

d) Anyone who lost money, even if they were GS's clients ought to have done their own due diligence too, if the people investing do not understand the inherent risks involved with doing business they are better of staying away from the markets as much as possible.

e) lastly, IMO the intent of this article is not to do anything but upset people who lost money or know someone close to them who lost money (includes all most everyone)to help gracefully without opposition let others implement speculative unhedged measures to curb speculation, hedging, profit making, angel funding etc..

Cheers!!
Stealth marketing: When you're being pitched and you don't even know it
Neeru Singh Bikini Candids on Showtime Magazine April 2010
Tagged as latest Bollywood Sexy Siren Neeru Singh covers Showtime Magazine April 2010 issue. Neeru Singh, Neeru Singh pics, Neeru Singh Bikini Candids
The cost is just hard to justify today when we have so many other real problems on Earth. Let's make sure people have access to clean drinking water, proper medical care, electricity, communications and whatnot before we start building the Death Star.
I think the light may be in hardware. It is on the OLPC.
So we should not speculate at all? That's a rather dull outlook.

I certainly agree that our dataset, re: "life as we know it", is horribly limited. Likely to the point of uselessness. But hypotheses are the foundation of any science, after all, and what little we do have to go on suggests that competition/predation, rather than cooperation/symbiosis, may be a more reasonable expectation.

But perhaps not. In which case, we'd be very lucky to encounter such an enlightened species.
Facebook would easily take over commenting if only they added threads, quotes, and other rudimentary commenting features.
The light stays on for a full second and is a bright green LED - impossible to miss if you're looking at the screen.
Nostalgic. Reminds me of the better days, the days when you could run any software you wanted on your Apple device, without even buying a signing certificate!
Evolution rewards the most vicious and aggressive species that is best at adapting to and use its environment. Since evolution is presumably also the process behind intelligent alien life I have a hard time buying the stable equilibrium of peace and natural harmony theory.

Just look at ourselves - wars in iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Palestina, etc. And these are peaceful times. As a species we are extremely vicious and aggressive and there's no reason to believe that evolutionary successful aliens would be any different.
I wish they had the original Mac 128k I bought in the fall of 1984. I painted all summer to be able to buy that.
I liked Bill Black's comments on the Bill Moyer's Journal last week. He said (my paraphrase) that if corporations are to have the privileges of personhood, most notably free speech and rights to political contributions, then they also should have the same consequences: As in losing civil rights for felony convictions, and the "three strike" rule, meaning I guess they should be permanently dissolved upon the third felony conviction.
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything
I don't quite follow your second sentence, but I agree that their staying at home doesn't necessarily mean they're peaceful (we're not); I was just noting one way that they might be peaceful.

But if they are traveling around, our own history suggests they're (probably) not peaceful. Then again, we have travelers who are traders, who are migrating, who are explorers, who are tourists etc. To travel doesn't necessarily mean you're expansionist; it's just that whenever you think of conquers, they were travelers - of course. You can't stay at home and conquer.

There's an interesting idea that to be conquered doesn't necessarily mean that your civic organization and culture is conquered. If your government etc works well, conquerers have often adopted it (ie they are conquered), and the rulers rotate, coup d'état. Military superiority doesn't necessarily imply civic superiority.

BTW: Headlines with puns or allusions are usually deliberate.
Yes, they confirm name changes, but I don't think they're very strict about it. Some anecdotal evidence:

My Facebook middle name is Emacs. It used to be 'emacs'.

I have three friends who share a Facebook account, which is probably against the TOS anyway. They change the name rather frequently. Last month they were named Krishanu Coke Zero Austin Steve.
The items on my "less good" list are admittedly subjective, but might be worth considering as you continue to develop the text. And in this case, I mean "less good" as "not bad, but not yet great."

For instance, should you be using printf style formatting when string.format is is available by default in 2.6, Snow Leopard's default python?

A weaker argument could be made for importing print_function from __future__, but I don't believe the added complexity is worth it, even if it eliminates a special case.

In Exercise 0, you might want to stipulate a python version, since some intrepid readers will search out the "latest and greatest" python, and they will download 3.x unless explicitly told otherwise.

Beyond that, I think some of your prose could be improved. For instance, "Notice I use a text editor called vim. You shouldn’t use it, it’s too hard to use for you right now." may be a bit off-putting to someone completely new.

The statement after your listing, however, is perfect:

"If a programmer tells you to use vim or emacs tell them no. These editors are for when you are a better programmer. All you need right now is an editor that lets you put text into a file."
How much did Microsoft lose by divesting itself of Apple stock prematurely?
I used multi-touch only once or twice but it seemed to work as expected in maps and browser on my N1.

When i first got multitouch on the G1 i was pretty much underwhelmed, everyone with an iPhone told me "but it doesn't do multi touch!". And then? What i never thought of.. Why would i want to use two hands to operate my mobile when every app has good means to zoom, etc. with only one hand. Most overrated feature on phones nowadays, imo.

I guess others use multi touch a lot.. but well.. for me..

Anyway, how do i see this non-working multi touch in a real app, again?
Because.. well, if this bug would be as bad as the movie makes it look like, a test at HTC would have found it instantly before production.
There's no conventional or nuclear way to generate enough directed energy to push a decently sized asteroid, on a straight course for the planet and within a reasonable distance of it, away.

An asteroid with a diameter of 2 km and a density of 1 ton/m^3 weighs ~410^9 kg. Travelling at 0.01c, it has a kinetic energy of ~410^22 J, or ~100 times the current worldwide energy production per year.

Of course deflecting it doesn't require you to fully stop it, but it's closing in fast and you need a strong sideways push to accelerate it fast enough to end up with enough speed to miss the planet. If we ever see an reasonably sized asteroid with reasonable speed on a collision course, we're as doomed as if we hadn't seen it.
Ask HN: Rate my micro-app (testing Open Graph)
Change the url's to create new Like items. Use underscores to separate words.

Cooked it up with Sinatra in 23 lines and one template :)
Note that I was talking about closed ecosystems. How do you explain the specific example I gave of the dodo?

There are many other examples from similarly closed systems, such as New Zealand birds, before man (since we opened them).

I would argue that the world formerly comprised many isolated ecosystems, which have began to open over our recent history. Although the world has shrunk towards a global-village - becoming more open within - I would say most is still too isolated. It also probably takes a long time for even a fully open ecosystem to settle down, possibly on an evolutionary timescale of millions of years. But once a closed system happens to come to a stable state, it stays there (til disturbed.)

OTOH, maybe constant warfare is another point of stable equilibria?
I can agree somewhat with your first paragraph, but "ourselves" is rather nebulous. I'm not in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, and if I were, I certainly wouldn't identify with the men who sent me there. There are 6.8 billion of us, which makes it kind of hard to lump us all together as "vicious and aggressive."

Evolution is neither. It does not have any such personality traits, and there are plenty of examples of symbiotic behavior in nature.

We just fill the gaps. If there's a niche to be filled, and an extraterrestrial species can fill it at our expense, then so be it.
I'm using Cyanogen's ROM too, and I don't think it helps. Run the Spare Parts app and select Pointer Location. If you touch the screen in two places and move them around it's pretty easy to get it to report bogus locations.
Post-Autistic Economics Network and Post-Autistic Economics Review
Space is already militarized today. It has been for 6 decades. Firstly, every ICBM arsenal on Earth is implicitly militarizing space, all of those missiles will fly through space if and when they are launched on some (hopefully purely hypothetical) future doomsday. Secondly, anti-satellite weaponry has been developed, tested full-up (on orbit), and deployed since the 1950s. By the Soviets, by the US, by the Chinese, and others. The Soviet Almaz manned space stations, for example, were military purposed and armed with a 23mm automatic cannon. Thirdly, modern warfare is highly dependent on space borne assets: communications, intelligence gathering, and global positioning, without such assets warfighters would be significantly diminished in capability.

No direct, on orbit hostilities have occurred, yet, but that's the barest scrap of pretension keeping space from being declared officially militarized.
Change the url's to create new Like items. Use underscores to separate words.

Cooked it up with Sinatra in 23 lines and one template :)
Given the highly logical minds required to develop technology that could let them traverse the stars, assuming them to make a decent cost-benefit analysis is not unreasonable. If they raided Earth for resources, it would either be because we had something rare, or because they're malicious sons of bitches.

You make it sound as if there'd be no reason at all. There's always a reason, and it's generally comprehensible even to us. We can understand the motivations or behaviors of non-human life just fine so far, and we have examples of our continued understanding all around, ranging from simple single-celled life forms to complex plants, animals, etc. . Why should life be incomprehensibly different "out there"? It can be modeled, motivations examined. Basic evolution will most likely still apply. They want to survive, and this is a basic logical tenet that weaves the fabric of the psychology of any lifeform.
Thank you. You're all right of course - I don't argue. You have my 1 point for your evangelism.

As I say before - I expressed only my personal opinion and I don't have any intention to start discussion or flame war on that matter. Can I express my opinion or it's not allowed? I simply don't like Microsoft/Google and the way they do business - is there anything wrong with that? Or we all MUST adore and love Microsoft and Google? Of course all these questions are rhetorical and I don't demand answers.

Wish you all the best.
From who does the power grid in space need protection from? Aliens who like to bully lesser races around?

I don't see anyone attacking such a power grid. Those capable of doing so could just sent some collectors up themselves and call it a day.
The outcome of shooting down such a device would be undesirable for both sides. One loses its power and the other will be frowned upon my the rest of earth.
isn't the problem with those HTC Android phones that you'll get such updates at least half a year later than most other people, which is time needed for HTC to upgrade it's Sense UI?
I have a dream, that one day, all clojure programs will look like a JVM stack trace.
It's not too heavy to be good in bed, but too slippery to play with in the bathtub without its rubber jacket.
Evolution is never at an equilibrium - it's constantly changing and experimenting through sexual recombination and mutation. So the premise doesn't hold IMHO. The dodo is an example of a species that was caught off guard in this evolutionary arms race, and was viciously exterminated by another species, namely us. Certainly there are species without natural enemies (swans, blue whales, man etc.) but they are the exception not the rule.
I've got to say, for a group that apparently aligns itself with the political left, it's strange to use such an insensitive name for their movement.
It's probably more like n log( n ) (see: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is...) and your point is valid either way.
adding a link to a likable would be nice. just a word is a bit boring.
"Is Windows 7 finally halting the Mac migration?"

-- No, Steve Jobs is!
"Update All" plus an exclusion list
Microsoft invested $150 million into Apple on August 5, 1997 (convertible preferred nonvoting stock which ultimately converted into 18.2 million shares of common stock). Bill himself appeared on satellite link at Macworld (1997!). 18.2 million shares today is $4.9 billion (split-adjusted).

I can't find when exactly Microsoft sold their shares, but it was sometime during 2003. Wolfram Alpha calculated the mean price of AAPL in 2003 was 9.26 (max 12.41 min 6.56), which is split-adjusted. The real price then would be 18.52 (mean). One split would have happened, so 36.4 million shares were owned by MSFT at the time of sale, so they sold for a mean of $674 million.

Someone check my math? It's 5am. It's difficult because a lot of the sources I used don't denote whether a price is split-adjusted or not, and Microsoft converted portions of stock at different times. It's a mess.
If too many had done that then perhaps the stock wouldn't be so valuable today. :-)
True, but the commerce clause is enumerated in the constitution.
I don't think ICBM arsenal is militarizing space just because it will fly trough it. And placing nuclear or any WMD in space is prohibited by Outer Space Treaty.

China and US has shot down their own satellites though.