skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"band-aids like the moratorium become necessary solutions, alleviating the symptoms of a more fundamental design flaw: syntax and semantics which require human implementation instead being portable from one implementation to another."

Would it be easier to for alternative implementations (non-CPython ala Jython, IronPython, etc) to keep up if the syntax was portable between them? Yes, of course. Is this a "Design Flaw"? Not in any way.

Portable syntax between implementations is not a primary goal of Python (the language) so I don't see any merits for criticizing it for not taking a feature never previously desired (most of the alternative runtimes are relatively young) into account in the underlying design.

If you need to alter/extend the syntax to python at some point I'd advising looking at the python magazine article on implementing DSL's w/pyparsing noted here:
http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/Publications

If are in frequent need to alter/extend the syntax of the language you are using, and it is a non-trivial task, then you are using the wrong language.
That's a good point. In the US, it isn't really a big deal if someone gets your credit card number. You notice a problem, aren't liable for the purchase, and get a new card overnighted to you.

The one time this happened to me, Amex called me to tell me they thought there was a problem. I looked, noticed that there was, and I had a new card / account number the next day. Very convenient, and only an 8 hour or so window where I couldn't use my card.

Someone was careless with my card data, but it didn't matter -- it didn't cost me any time or money. So I guess that's why I don't get too upset about stories like the original article.
Yes, and what I'm wondering is if that's a fundamental limitation or if it's something that can be easily improved. The endurance of DRAM is essentially infinite and I have a feeling that's going to be tough to reach with memristors.
Amazon has observed exactly the same behavior. The average review for something on the internet is 4.5 stars.
I don't think it's very credible to hold Perl 6 up as the standard for how to encourage and enable complete implementations, considering that ten years in, it still has only partial implementations.
False. Unless they are taking my order over the phone which I block through caller id and take my payment in CASH and send my results to a random drop location, it is not anonymous at all.
To quote the Instapundit, "I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who say it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis."
I've read several collections of Asimov's short stories and I've never even heard of The Last Answer. I guess maybe it's not considered one of his best, but with its titular connection to his very best story possibly it is famous.
He probably informs clients of the terms before providing services.
Unlike many lawsuits, this one is a testable hypothesis. It is knowable whether favorable reviews disappeared, whether an algorithm or person triggered the disappearance, and whether this occurred after a sales-rep made contact. The phone logs, syslogs, and code repositories should reveal the truth in this case.
From Foursquare's Exit Strategy to Designing with Forces
Ask HN: Best place to buy and sell sites & domains?
Hello HN,

I was wondering what is the best place that you have experience with for buying and selling websites?

I'm aware of 'flippa', but don't have any experience with it, but there must be more out there.

Bad experiences, good experiences ?
Lang Lang plays Flight of the Bumblebee on iPad w/ SF Symphony (video)
Ok. I'll check it out. Thanks.
I have never used this service and from reading what it does, I probably never will. BUT, if were the kind of person into these type of things, I would feel pretty good about them. The explanation sounds sincere, honest and heart-felt. They have done their research and discovered what caused the problem. The credit card numbers were only in the source-code of the HTML, not actually diaplayed on the HTML page (I know it only takes 2 clicks to see the source, but how many people check out the source code of every page we see through the day ?). And they are telling us that they are well-funded to dedicate more resources on security. I feel pretty good about them.
I'm going to collect samples from potential mates and send them in to see what they're hiding from me.
It's like buying bottled water.
The Stanford IG report is amazingly damning; from memory, the SEC both determined he was running a scam and sat on that for years, and one of the guys who should have pursued him later became his attorney. Worse in many ways than Madoff.
Good point, I buy that explanation.

IMHO, anybody who's carrying around TOR and using it to bypass an employer's filters so he can get to porn has a real problem.

Several years back, me and a coworker looked at the company's DNS servers, curious what names were cached. We were pretty horrified. I guess this kind of thing is pretty widespread, more than "outsiders" would expect -- particularly from a cubicle farm where there's no privacy.
Yea Perl 6 is a new language, but Perl 1-5 were the same language just like Python 1-3 are. What should have been Perl 6 or even 7 just got released as Perl 5.12. Perl 5 isn't going anywhere, I can imagine in 10 years we'll be seeing Perl 5.27. It doesn't really make sense, if they wanted to write a new language but they wanted to use the Perl moniker for marketing purposes they should have called it Perl++
Agreed, I had software RAID on my last setup and it made a huge difference.
* It’s also advisable to ensure that your social networking passwords are all different and to generate difficult passwords that include numbers, capital letters and special characters, if at all possible.*

I'm inclined to think that Mashable's target audience involves non-technies, individuals who would find that sort of password recommendation very insightful, but in the end, would never come up with a password that complex on their own. And if they are talking to techies, who (I would hope) put some thought into their passwords, thanks for the tip chief.
This person did not answer their own question.

There have been a bunch of posts about "Company X will know too much about me, . . . "

No one ever says WHY that scares the shit out of them.
Thanks to whom posted this. I just bought one, but wish I could have bought one for my entire family...
You need to either:

1. Tap into existing communities that would be a good fit for your product that are already using other processes for transactions...

2. Provide some utility to the eggs (or the chickens) that doesn't require the other party.

3. Spend money on advertising to both sides.
I can definitely see the value from a sales/marketing perspective, but the trick is getting people using this. They're going to have a pretty big challenge consistently delivering value to their users and not becoming at best an ephemeral fad.
And now you have two problems.
Study: Students Addicted to Social Media, or Is it Brain Evolution?
Setting up smartphone emulators for testing mobile websites
Microsoft Releases Windows 7 Touch Pack For Free Download
Trick I used to use was to have RAID 1 for my homedir, and then try 3 different mounts for /tmp. The first was RAID 0. The second two were trying to mount the two RAD partitions. It made /tmp larger and faster at the cost of a reboot if I crashed. Which seemed to be a worthwhile trade-off on a desktop.
Intriguing, but it would be ugly to implement. It would be quite complicated to decide what it meant for _ to be present.
Mark Zuckerberg on the other hand is evil. :D

That totally helps make your case.
You Can Do What Others Do
Vmforce is coming... but what is it?
You mean like...StumbleUpon?
Hm, normally when you see the points counts on the homepage though they're consistent.
Why soldiers get a kick out of killing
I guess your comment is ambiguous: are you saying that we're being manipulated into paying attention to this instead of the Goldman case? Or that the SEC threw together a really weak case against an unpopular company ("vampire squid"?) in order to distract from the highly embarrassing facts about what they weren't doing (arresting someone for fraud) and what they were doing (spanking it).

Spitzer had unprotected anal sex with whores a whole lot, but that doesn't have much to do with the fact that he bullied companies into settling by conflating illegal practices (e.g. price-fixing on a million-dollar insurance contract) with hard-to-understand industry standards (contingent commissions).
Timeline of the Burrito
Dive into python worked for me 2 years ago, your mileage may vary. Then again, I learned from many sources, not just one.
This is some quality tabloid journalism from Techcrunch.

This surprises you?
If investors do intros it's definitely expected that they'll be allowed to invest in any resulting round if they want. I was assuming C wasn't an investor though.
Incorrect: ACL2, an industry-standard automated theorem-prover, is written in a side-effect-free variant of Common Lisp. It has both an implementation and users, including users outside of academia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACL2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG9XfJxMY8A

Country Music. Everything that can be told has already been told.
Microsoft wins piracy case against Chinese company
The cover of my Next Book
If Opera started charging $3 for Opera Mini in the App Store, would you be upset? You're paying for a nicer interface to something that is free, not the content of HN.
Arizona governor signs immigration bill
didn't understand it
This reminds me of a scanner darkly where the hero spy himself.
I'm genuinely curious -- I've never been particularly concerned about privacy on the internet, and it seems like the author's main concern is better ad targeting (which I see as beneficial, although I may be in a minority).

What are some other dangerous scenarios that people can imagine?
Exploring Dynamism
For those that can not find employment the only other option to stay alive if they don't get benefits (which they paid for with their previous labour as taxes anyway) is to become criminals.

Criminals cost society a lot more than someone 'on the dole'.

They can't just magically survive on air until a job comes by. Sure there will be some that might abuse the system, but that's possible with a 1 week period as well.

Some people do all they can to find a job and still find none (there was a story in the news today about a young British girl that took her own life after 200 job applications, I can't help but be reminded of that when reading about this).

This crisis is very real and far from over in spite of some bits of positive news here and there, it will take more than a few exceptional measures to get to the other side of it and extending benefits to those that are really in need of them seems like a very logical step.
This is here because it's funny like jumbo shrimp?
HN isn't socialization, it is... ummm, continuing education.
unrelated to the article's contents; this page's bright green background absolutely made my eyes burn while trying to read the article.
The Semantic Web when it arrives will be fully federated like the Web we have now.

The web we have now is not 100% federated. Our access and ability to publish on the web is controlled by a few large companies with some regulation by the government. Even if the Semantic Web takes off, I can't imagine that most people will be consuming that data autonomously. On the contrary, there will likely only be a few significant players be they browser producers or otherwise converting that information to be relevant to users, thus it won't really be the federated utopia so often espoused by the Semantic Web pundits. But hey, maybe I'm a pessimist. It's not to say we shouldn't care about privacy and about how big conglomerates with their own agendas use the data we give them, it's just that it's naive to think that there is some purely free form of the web yet to be discovered.
Because you're being a douchebag who is taking up way more space by having your laptop out and requiring a clearance to help prevent people from stepping into the danger zone where they might accidentally spill their drinks onto said laptop.
Hmmm.. I have to blink a few times to get her to switch directions.
Steam for linux testapp thingy
When there's high turn over at a company, it's almost always the fault of management. There's a great Russian proverb: don't blame the mirror if your face is ugly. When your employees are leaving after a few months, the one at fault is you, not professionals in other companies staying a few years on the job.
Given everything else we've heard about the no-fly list, I'm willing to bet that this is a false positive who should have never gotten on the list.
A prior employer looked good on paper, and on Google; in fact, I went into the interviewing process very skeptical of their industry in general, and came away with a surprisingly positive vibe about the organization and what they were trying to do. The employees I spoke with were top-caliber folks; asked smart questions, and had good answers for me as well. The interview with the owners was fairly typical and high-level, nothing out of the ordinary.

So, I came aboard. The principals had just left for an extended sabbatical (they departed shortly after I interviewed with them). Morale seemed excellent when I started, and there was a great deal of interesting work to be done. When they returned, the mood changed very quickly, and it didn't take long to understand why.

I spent enough time there to do some interesting things, and help them over a knowledge slump during an infrastructure forklift, but it quickly became apparent that the owners and I had different ideas about how people should be treated, and how businesses should conduct themselves. My personal google-fu failed me on this one.

I showed myself the door to take a position that I would have never otherwise considered taking, knowing full well how that would look on a resume, but also knowing I didn't want to continue contributing to their bottom line.

(I have a few items on my resume I do not enjoy discussing in an interview, and I've had to add this one to the list: being vague or evasive suggests you're hiding something, but any real explanation just invites the idea that you're the kind of guy who doesn't work well with others. But, such is life.)
I think Zed is being disingenuous (or just plain not reading anything that isn't code on the Dive Into Python site). One of his main points is that Dive Into Python is bad because it's supposed to be for beginners, and makes Python seem to complicated. But, here's the first sentence on the front page of diveintopython.org:

"Dive Into Python is a Python book for experienced programmers."

Not beginners. Zed's "I could see if Mr. Pilgrim had a giant disclaimer or something warning people that this isn't a beginner's book, but he doesn't." is totally unfounded.

Zed also laments that the first example requires readers to "suddenly comprehend" a bunch of random language features. But right above the example he links to:

"It probably makes absolutely no sense to you. Don't worry about that, because you're going to dissect it line by line. But read through it first and see what, if anything, you can make of it."

(I will totally agree that the example program is at best uninteresting and at worst confusing, but you don't need to know anything about ODBC to understand it. I certainly didn't when I first read Dive Into Python.)

Zed's brand of hyperbolic vitriol has never sat particularly well with me, but this article in particular sounds like he just has an ax to grind with Pilgrim. He certainly spends almost no time actually discussing how the book has poor design decisions, or why it is "weird," or what instructions are hard to follow, or what expert needs it is not fulfilling. There's almost no substance whatsoever here, just sanctimonious character assassination. I will never understand why this guy has an audience.
Moo's great, quick, easy.
It's been a long time since I took a psychology class, but I'm pretty sure that 14% of the population doesn't have an IQ of over 160. That seems high even for Lake Wobegon...
Well hang on, you're mad at the SEC because employees were slacking on the internet (breaking!) and they weren't going after the systemic fraud in the financial system..

Then you turn around and after a vulgar cheap shot, attack Spitzer for going after systemic fraud in the financial system?

I don't get it.

Here's the deal: The SEC has no incentive to launch a major bogus lawsuit over a rumored story-of-the-day that has absolutely no legs and that nobody will remember in a couple weeks. Thinking that they do presumes that A) there's an organized political arm of the SEC and B) said political arm is simultaneously smart enough to know about a report like this weeks ahead of time and dumb enough to misjudge this situation massively, damaging their brand worse by launching a bogus lawsuit to distract from a total non-story.

A defendant in a major lawsuit, on the other hand, absolutely has an incentive to try and turn the tables by virtue of something like this. The two are not equivalent.

EDIT: To clear up my point, I'd have absolutely no problem believing that part of the timing of the lawsuit was pushed by the administration to support the financial reform currently before Congress. That's an incentive that makes sense. "Oh no we were whacking it" does not.
Microsoft taps free Windows 7 Touch Pack | Microsoft - CNET News
Gizmodo’s Trade Secret Liability
*if he didn't "lose" that prototype on directions of his employer
Thank you for your feedback apsurd, we'll keep it in mind.
Thank you seven.
Nice!! Thanks! I learned about this site and service at TEDxB. I am very excited to try this out!
You can buy 10.
NPR's Planet Money recently did a couple of podcasts about Denmark which echoes the points you mention. They also point our there's little or no stigma attached to being fired from a job in Denmark.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/01/podcast_the_awesomest...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/01/podcast_tax_me_please...
http://www.overnightprints.com/

Cheap and fast.
It says that to have an IQ above 160 you need to be able to see it turn both ways without shifting your gaze.
at the bottom:

> UPDATE: To clear up confusion, this is not a new feature. The dispute process has been in place since Content ID first launched in October 2007. We've changed some text to make that clear.

Interesting though, they use the 'downfall' movie as an example.
I found Dive Into Python to be tremendously helpful when I was first learning, but I had used Java and SQL for a while before starting to learn Python.
not with every cell replication. that would certainly be pathological!
I have a command-line utility I was using to send myself push notifications from the command-line. So to do a compile I would type

make; phone

And poof! Instant push notification when it's done. Or I could

ifconfig | grep ether | phone

No more need to write down those pesky ether addresses to walk across the office and diagnose something.

I was considering trying to build a product around it, but decided the market was too small. I considered OSSing it, but the barrier to setting up a push server, etc., was too high for it to be useful.

Now I will retarget my little command-line script to target Notifo over the weekend. Watch this space: http://github.com/drewcrawford/Phone-Pipe
> AV is addressing the symptoms and not the actual problem

This is where you've lost me. Show me a piece of invincible software.

Even stuff like Java with its top-notch security model and with its managed code has been vulnerable to various zero-day exploits. Even virtualization environments.

I have a Windows workstation that's been running for 2 years, with no resident AV running and with the standard firewall. I do have a good AV, but I'm doing a scan every 3 months or so.

Never caught anything, mostly because I'm a technical user that knows how to stay out of trouble.

Give me a normal end-user using any of those non-MS platforms you mentioned and I'll show you how I can break his computer. Quite simple really ... "This game needs administrative rights to install. Please enter your password:"

Not to mention that the desktop managers running on Linux have serious security flaws that haven't been fixed just because the platform itself is obscure enough for crackers not to bother with it.
all publicity is good publicity.
Out of honest curiosity, is it a matter of principle for you, or do you really feel harmed by anything companies have done with your private data? Is it a worry about future harm?
The claim is 14% can see her go either way. But fewer than 1/10,000 can voluntarily change the perceived direction at will, when they want, without looking away.

Personally I find the first easy. The second, not so much.

That said, I don't think that this is particularly well correlated with regular IQ tests. And I don't think there is particularly good evidence that there really is something we should be calling IQ. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-is-intelligence.ht... for more on that.
And you have to be able to do it at will.
Huffpo does this to. It's pretty slick.
I can understand the point the author is trying to make, but this line was disturbing to me:

"The fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."

It brings me back to Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, wherein Jaron makes the argument that, basically, technology can only replace real life if we dumb down our expectations of real life.

This student's inability to communicate in the real world is a substantial dumbing down of communication. Communication on the net cannot equal communication in real life. When someone's interest in the net leaves them only able to communicate at the level afforded by technology, then there is a problem.
The key things for me in evaluating this would be...

a) How much is the opportunity cost? You've got to balance the pay cut with how much experience you're going to get, because in 99% of cases, even if the startup does well, you're not going to get rich.

b) What's the vibe of the team like? What's their pedigree and track record? Will you enjoy working with them for ridiculous hours? Will you learn from them?

c) Do you believe in the product? Even if it's something unsexy, does it offer an interesting challenge? Some of the 'sexy' products are also very unfun to work on by the way.

d) Are they approachable? Do they care about their employees? Are they being open an honest in how equity and salary will work? Do they offer the basic, but important, perks like half-decent health care, free soda, and company outings?

A gut feeling is usually pretty good indicator of whether it will work for you or not.
couldn't agree more. But, that's what readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) is for!
To get her to switch directions I have to focus really hard on her foot, the one on the ground. If I block out everything else mentally I can make it switch directions, but it is very hard.

I bet with practice anyone can get to the point where they can see her turn either way with more ease.
If one can buy 1000 ID's for $25-$45, actual password strength is probably much less important than using different passwords for different sites. Why bother running a password library or brute force program when you can just purchase the ids/passwords for so cheap?
Nobody is looking for a job for 99 weeks straight. In the first few weeks they look and get discouraged. Toward the end of the 99 weeks they will look again (this time with more urgency) b/c benefits are running out. I think unemployment benefits are a good thing, but nearly two years of benefits is way too long.

I know a lot of people on unemployment who make almost no effort to find a job, and the ones offered to them usually get turned down b/c they come with a pay cut. The only positive I can see in this is that a small portion of the massive amount of government money being spent right now is going directly to people I know.