skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually we just skinned them, sliced them lengthwise, cut out the woody core, and ate them like cucumber spears. I have a strong gut and am not bothered by extremely bitter things but most everyone else was pretty repulsed by the entire affaire. I prefer them that way, no matter what you do (the boiling, etc. . . ) you'll still end up with a bitter, kinda gross mess of stuff to eat. Might as well just pop it down.
Reading in a Digital Age
The Panchatantra: a collection of ancient Hindu tales [PDF]
http://books.google.com/books?id=jB0YAAAAYAAJ

This one is "Weaver as Vishnu" on page 46.

Note: the HTML version is in Sanskrit, the PDF in English.

Edit: Of course, there are many other works of Indian mythology. The big two being the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which if you consider it a single work, is the longest text ever written. The heart of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita.
Only someone who had "bought 5 iPods, 5 Macs, iPhone, etc" could possibly take Jobs' rhetoric and allow it as justification for a ridiculous policy.
I was intrigued when I thought this could have been about computer networking.
Buffett Defends Goldman Sachs
I haven't actually eaten Peyote, that's interesting that there is a different effect. I wouldn't turn any down if I cam across it but San Pedro is so easy and cheap to come by and since it's mescaline as well I can't imagine it's too different. Thanks for the info!
Perhaps buzz will become embeddable and replace wave for things like this.
Never. Just tried it; seems pointless to me.
http://panchatantra.org/

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/jataka.html
Eliezer Yudkowsky also suggested this, at least regarding this African myth: http://robinhanson.typepad.com/overcomingbias/2009/02/an-afr... .

I'm a little unsure about how much is the myths and how much is just survivorship bias. A lot of old gruesome European fairy tales stopped getting told after the rise of liberalism and the free market, so it may just be that the myths reflect the current status of society.
Geek myths

The next build will work flawlessly!
Exclusive interview with Ray Kurzweil [MP3]
Not to mention all the different woods.
Designers & Developers Join Forces
I first read this title as Catastrophic Design Differences, which isn't far off. The author is biased in favor of Google Maps (it's a bit hard to differentiate between Google's 1st and 2nd level city markers), but I like the comparison.
Wow, I disagree with this so much that it makes me realize I don't accept that a programming language is a tool. A compiler is a tool. A language is a medium for thinking. Different ideas arise when working in different media. This leads to a thousand different little decisions about how to move forward, resulting in different programs - potentially vastly different.

Technically, of course, these languages are all equivalent because you can write an interpreter for one in another. But that also implies they're not equivalent conceptually; that's what "interpret" means.

The influence of the medium on the program is so acutely obvious to me that I wonder how anyone could miss it. Here's one thing I think obscures it: when we compare programming languages, it's almost always by juxtaposing implementations of a program (or code snippet) that we already know how to write: something clearly defined and well-understood. But this is precisely when you're least likely to be influenced by the medium. (Someone porting, say, the Mona Lisa to watercolor, or fingerpaint for that matter, doesn't have to make big decisions about what to paint: it's clear what the picture should look like because it already exists.) It's when you don't yet know what the program should do, or what direction it should evolve in, that your ideas are going to be deeply conditioned by the medium in which it has evolved so far.

In other words, the way we compare programming languages is designed to overlook all the most interesting and subtle differences between them. Maybe that's why people come to the conclusion that language doesn't matter. Every time I hear that I wonder how deep that person has really gone. One wouldn't think much of an artist who said that medium doesn't matter.
A "how this differs from PEP8" summary would be useful to me, assuming it differs.
Parallel programming for servers
Don't drink the water in Boston without boiling it first.
There's no "why". There's no justification for the word "improving" either. No interesting content really.

Even the man page is better: http://linux.die.net/man/5/resolv.conf

"Optimised" resolv.conf has one line - 127.0.0.1 and the host runs a local cache (dnsmasq / bind / djbdns / ...)
The Knowledge Age – Learn To Appreciate It
Pretty amazing idea. Now if they could fix the "Cannot allocate memory - fork(2)" error...
Facebook also uses it for their video platform

"Facebook uses the H.264 video codec and main-profile AAC (also known as MPEG-4 Audio) for audio, muxed inside the MP4 container."
I made myself a Flash app a while ago that creates POST requests and has a little profiles system. I would not be able to fix half the bugs I find without it.

Since both my app and this website have unavoidable network delays, I think I'll be retiring my program. That is, when the "Cannot allocate memory" bug gets fixed.
There are quite few disparate collections of stories and myths from India.

My suggestion would be to start with the Mahabharata, it is a whole literature in itself and is at par with some of the best in the world.

Start with a summarised version(The version by C Rajagopalachari is quite popular) and if you like it you can explore it in-depth with the version by van Buitenen or Kisari Mohan Ganguli.
The book's author was interviewed for an hour on Wisconsin Public Radio, this past Tuesday. (I haven't listened to it, yet.)

http://wpr.org/kathleendunn/index.cfm?strDirection=Prev&...

The following day, the same show interviewed another researcher on the differences between male and female brains particularly in children (it's less than has been thought, per the researcher; IIRC enculturation makes up part of the difference). I heard part of this one, which clued me in to the previous day's interview.

http://wpr.org/kathleendunn/index.cfm?strDirection=Prev&...

The (RealAudio -- sorry) streams are freely available. WPR members also have the option of an MP3 download.
The liberal front page of the WSJ might like it, but the conservative editorial board doesn't; here's the most recent house editorial on the subject: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22his+achievements+include+h...

Here's Wikipedia on the Journal's split personalities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSJ#News_and_opinion
PG: "I changed the way downvote limits are handled..."
I'd rather read a "Crossbrowser websockets in 5 minutes" article
Platform Control
This chart is a little confusing. They should have listed h.263 instead of FLV if that is what they meant.
I would love to have access to gmail's log data to check something similar (I study sleep). In my case, the first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing before going to bed is checking my email. I bet I am not the only one.
Wikipedia claims an average power consumption of ~12kW per person in the US (but it's marked as needing a citation). Assuming a wind power density rating of good (500W/sq m), you would need to harness all of the energy in a 24sq m area per person. There are >300M people in the US. Plastering turbines over that 30% of the landmass would serve only half the population.

(Note: I'm no expert and maybe there is some glaring oversight in my quick calculation.)
"Advanced" network cards support IPMI with a protocol called RMCP, which runs over IP and can be delivered remotely. The cards implement IPMI/RMCP with an RTOS running on embedded RISC CPUs. Like every card with an embedded RTOS-running processor, they're coded in C.

There are two things that fall out of this.

First, when you write a protocol stack in C, you create memory corruption flaws. It's hard to name any piece of C code that has avoided this problem. Microsoft spends tens of thousands per dot release to have some of the best testers in the industry fuzz bugs out, and they still slip up. Dan Bernstein managed to let an LP64 overflow slip into qmail.

So, thing one: the trend towards more advanced network cards (and storage processors and motherboards and offload boards and etc etc etc) moves us to a place where our underlying hardware is vulnerable to software flaws, even if our operating systems and application code is extensively assured.

Secondly, the x86 security model moving forward is based on the idea that the chipset can assure that known-good code is running, and that the known-good code can use new chipset features to sandbox code, either in VMs or with runtime protection features. This model was designed mostly to defend against attacks originating from application and OS flaws.

But that model fails badly when the assumptions it makes about attack vectors fails. So, for instance, if you can take over the RTOS running on a network card, then however much Intel and AMD have planned to eventually deal with IO-level attacks, the systems deployed today get trounced by the DMA controller. Right now, if you can program the DMA controller, you win.

That's (I think) what Rutkowska has been saying for the past several years. She's right, of course. But the reality is that anything we do to address this problem architecturally is going to be unsound for years to come. So the immediate thing we need to do is test our complex hardware to raise the cost for attackers of discovering and exploiting these kinds of vulnerabilities.
Kind of lost credibility in the first sentence. The only reason Ajax is so simple now is because libraries like Jquery simplify the complex problems of cross-browser compatibility with a simple, common Api. This is all possible thanks to all those long confusing posts on Ajax that the author doesn't get.
Thank you.

I wonder why Cambridge (where I live) is not listed? The surrounding towns are.

edit: according to http://www.mwra.com/02org/html/whatis.htm, Cambridge receives full sewer, but only "emergency backup" water from the MWRA.

edit2: a commenter at http://www.wbur.org/2010/05/01/water-main-break/comment-page... says Cambridge gets its water from Fresh Pond.
Agreed regarding an "events" tab at the top of the page or even a way to call out events on HN more so. There's certainly a lot of churn regarding news stories, so I've typically used our own Twitter handle (http://twitter.com/hackersfounders) to post updates from those who attend and if we change the location (depending if it's rainy outside, we'll go somewhere else other than Shake Shack). I'm also a HUGE fan of Anyvite to organize all the invites.
Wow, that's one big pipe. Though, you'd think the pressure inside the pipe would be greater than outside it, nullifying any immediate risk of contamination from other water sources.
Well tell us about your closure epiphany. I want to know the details!
"Bias" is not the only kind of survivorship out there. If these myths keep people alive, the cultures that follow them will stay alive. I suspect that the story mentioned above is part of a larger group of stories with healthier morals. The Grimm's fairy tales you mentioned are similar: some of the older, gruesome ones have morals like "Don't travel alone if you're a young woman, or you'll die," or "Don't convince people they're in danger when they're not, or everyone you love will be killed." Those are healthy myths; a village that believed in them would probably be safer than a village that didn't. And once those myths were no longer necessary, they'd disappear, along with some of the more noxious stories.
What is a "Failure to Implement"?
sorry, but that doesn't mean that there's a war with a single winner who has already won. people are encoding videos like this because the popular ways of playing videos are through flash and through the iphone.

once HTML5 video picks up, if a major browser (firefox) doesn't support h.264, we'll probably see people encode more than one format, unless something else gains widespread player support fast (vp8, i'm looking at you).

i don't think h.264 is going away, but i don't think it's surely a lone winner going forward.
Apologies, I heard that claim on the news in passing ... perhaps it was a projection and I missed that bit.
> Indent your code blocks with 4 spaces.

I had this notion it formerly was 2 spaces (too little, IMH-once-bitten-O). Anyone know when it changed, if it did ?

P.S. In http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/msg/f6a86d1... , back in Aug.2008, GvR says "Most of it [Google's unpublished internal Python style] is simply PEP-8 with 2-space indents."

(I dislike 2 spaces, once bitten by missing an indentation bug. I try to stick to 80 columns - both for print and side-by-side on screen - and think that more than 4 or 5 levels of indentation is "doing it wrong".)
It says "advanced degree". I think that means MS or greater.
Introduction to the Polymath Project
This is factually incorrect. There are various work permits available to students of US universities (CPT, OPT), as well as work visas for people with degrees (H-1B, etc), but people with STEM degrees from US universities with job offers don't have a green card (permanent residency) immediately available.
First, when you write a protocol stack in C, you create memory corruption flaws. It's hard to name any piece of C code that has avoided this problem. [...] Dan Bernstein managed to let an LP64 overflow slip into qmail.

To be fair to Daniel, the bug you're talking about only exists in a configuration -- unlimited RAM per process -- which he explicitly recommends against. Saying "nobody will ever want to send emails larger than 4 GB" isn't entirely unreasonable.

Leaving that aside, I name the Tarsnap client code as having a protocol stack which avoids memory corruption flaws. Can you prove me wrong?
Hurl inspired Twitter's API console: http://dev.twitter.com/console

It's open sourced, and contains some great code: http://github.com/defunkt/hurl. I used it as an inspiration when working on my first Redis project using Sinatra.
That caught my eye too. But the proposal also says:

It will be unlawful for any person, corporation; organization local, state, or federal law enforcement officer; local or state government; or any other entity to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes.

Of course, the cynic would say those restrictions will be easier to remove once the biometric ID card is already in place.
12kW is not a power consumption but a momentary rate, power consumption per person is rated in KWh per unit of time, or in oil equivalents, about 8 tons of oil per US citizen per year.

Also, wind power is not delivered in cross section on a surface parallel to the ground but on one at a right angle to the ground.

There are other forms of renewables besides wind, such as hydroelectric dams, geothermal power and solar. A combination of those would be called for anyway.

And since it is much cheaper to save a Watt-hour than it is to make one conservation is where it all begins, currently the US uses about double the amount of energy per person compared to the rest of the developed world.

I'm fairly sure the US could increase its 7% in renewables to a much more significant fraction without any breakthroughs in technology, say up to 20% or so. That alone would be a major relief.

Right now there are iirc about 35GW of installed power in wind turbines in the US, that's about 25,000 turbines.

I've been out of the wind energy scene for 5 years now, I was mostly interested in the smaller scale anyway, but there is a surprisingly large amount of energy in wind power and we are using only a very small fraction of it.

Keep in mind too that the total energy consumption of a country is used to power lots of different stuff, transportation is going to be the hardest to convert, but anything that runs off the grid is fair game for being powered by renewables, and in all those per-capita energy uses all those different categories are lumped together.
I don't think its biased. Google is clearly more legible and useful. Bing is so so but way too many quirks and unuseful stuff, less legible, Yahoo is just insane. I don't think I've ever used Yahoo so I didn't realize just how bad it was.

Very interesting reasons and analysis of the small differences that all add up to Google maps market dominance.
Apparently, Bill Gates saw this coming a long time ago...

http://www.scripting.com/disruption/mail.html

Key lines: "The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a "services wave" of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users...This coming "services wave" will be very disruptive. "
They said that they are augmenting the water supply with sources that are not suitable for drinking:

MWRA is activating its emergency water supplies such as the Sudbury Aqueduct, Chestnut Hill Reservoir and Spot Pond Reservoir. THIS WATER WILL NOT BE SUITABLE FOR DRINKING, but can be used for bathing, flushing and fire protection.

From here: http://www.mwra.com/updates/leak.html
If you read past the first couple of paragraphs, you'll find that the water needs to be boiled because they're pulling from unfiltered (or less-filtered) backup sources.
http://pathdependent.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/konquero...
Agreed, but this is kind of an "80-20 rule" thing. 80% of the time is spent on those 20% of activities, and 80% of people are basically just doing email, browsing, Twitter/Facebook, and media/entertainment. Even people who do more complex things with computers spend part of the day just doing those things as well, which is why there is an opportunity for a dedicated product focused on these 20% activities (and why Apple and others think the potential market for iPad-like devices is so enormous, despite the product type being extremely limited by design).

Also, even Apple does not think everything falls into their 'walled garden', so they'll continue to develop and sell normal computers for the other 80% of activities. But these new kinds of products reflect the shift in the set of activities that dominate modern computer use. The shift allows them to create a viable product that mostly ignores 80% of computer activities, and moreover, by omitting those other things, different design decisions can be made (e.g. walled garden app store) to make it much easier for them to meet the new set of requirements demanded by these media consumption type activities (e.g. battery life, appliance-level reliability). Those design decisions don't work with normal computers, as the requirements are different (e.g. completely general purpose use very important, battery life less important or unimportant [desktops]). So I think it is a mistake to think that even everything from Apple will be walled.
Warren Buffett's Advice for Entrepreneurs
Groklaw has the story here,
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100430223358785 ,
with plenty of back-story links, including search for prior art. One of them says:
The patent is for "user interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects"
FROG Recognizer Of Gestures
This is an accelerometer based gesture recognition system written in Java. This System accepts plug-ins for accelerometers enable devices (you can write one for your own device.)

Currently plug-ins exist for a few smart-phones and for Sun SPOT.

This is a project we, the class of 2010 of the Computer Science Department at TCU, built as our capstone project.
Very interesting — and precisely what I would have guessed beforehand. Here in Norway I see a lot of talk all the time about Twitter in the media, but nearly none of my friends use it at all. The only time I heard _everyone_ talking about Twitter was when living in San Francisco last summer.
That's a good tale. I wish there's website with parables and tales like this.
I e-mailed Chris and Leah a friendly notice last Sunday about these errors and never heard anything back...
I thought this article was great. The topic was interesting and while the treatment may have been a little light, I think that was the point. The author's literary style had the curved teeth of some of the most gripping New Yorker pieces. I'm not sure if I agree or disagree but it was a pleasure to read.
Hmmm. So given that you guys just broke it, can anyone explain what it did?
Don't they mean Flash already won since it represents 99% of web video (and 99% of H.264 video as well).
Ha! Maybe I should try bidding for their work - sounds like a nice client to have ;o)
Don't forget OpenStreetMap http://www.openstreetmap.org/ a Free wiki map of the world. It has a very unique style that I think is very nice. One of their statements is "We make beautiful maps"
Network interruptions don't have to interfere with Gmail use either -- just enable Gears (on the Offline tab in Gmail settings) for offline use.
It used to be illegal to use an SSN as an ID number for other purposes (e.g. in place of a separate employee or student ID number). Now it is not.

A bad mechanism put it place with a good policy will almost invariably be abused in the future; it's easier to change policy than to create a mechanism.
I will be the dissenting opinion here. Wait a year, and I think that Wave will be mostly complete (but not necessarily out of beta :-) and generally useful. Being able to embed Waves for discusion lists, etc. on plain old web sites and have Google provide the persistence on their servers may be a 'killer feature' of Wave.

I was at a friend's house for brunch today and mentioned the embedded Wave feature to another non-technical friend who has a very plain web site - this would be perfect for people like him: no change required in using cheap hosting.

Wave is also yet another platform for developers of web services (via Wave Robots), and I think that this will be another 'killer feature.'
Keep Rambo Happy: Don’t Screw Up the Intro Email
Or Firefox will get forked, and the fork will support using host OS video playback facilities, so will play whatever the host OS supports. That will get H.264 support in Firefox (or whatever new name the forkers give it, since they won't be able to use the Firefox name...) on 95+% of the desktops. Once someone writes a Flash video player that hooks into the host OS's video interface, that will get H.264 support for forked Firefox on 99+% of desktops.

My money is on Ubuntu doing the fork, if Firefox remains stubborn.
This is going to cost Buffett a lot of credibility if Goldman comes out looking bad (and I don't think the SEC would make this move unless they have what they need to follow through).
I updated my VMware install of Ubuntu to 10.04 and now no keyboard input is recognized. I looked around and there are fixes, but this sort of thing ruins the whole experience from the start. I know that VMware probably doesn't officially support 10.04 yet, but 10.04 is supposed to be a stable release of a major distro. I want to love Linux but it never seems to get to the "it just works" level.
That means "no".

You can count a "no" for me too.
This looks more like Windows 3.1 than an iPad.
It also says Buffett has $5 billion invested in GS.
I've always seen python style guides requiring 4 spaces. (With exceptions for 8!)

Ruby has standardized on 2 spaces.

I've noticed in my own experience that 2 spaces is not enough to read python quickly. 2 spaces works fine in ruby because whitespace isn't significant, you can find the end of a control structure by looking for the end keyword.
I liked how Charlie Munger said at the meeting "just because what Goldman did was legal doesn't make it ethical."
Like this really: http://web-sniffer.net/ (but you can store urls looked-up in your user history, alter headers sent, add parameters, ajax, follow redirects, use Basic Auth, and have permalinks)