skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Summary

Mark Frauenfelder talks about his undertakings from his new book, Made By Hand: raising chickens, beekeeping, making cigar box guitars, and more."

"Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make and the founder of BoingBoing.net."
Pretty kludgey way of adding statistical significance.

I would expect anyone on HN would be capable of running the numbers and generating the actual stats.

If not, it would be a good learning exercise.
The point was that if the data is public, more independent observers can perform experiments (as in your other example, taking their own arsenic levels). This may be funded corporations or citizen watchdog groups or whatever.

You're talking about arguing about whether certain experiments were valid and you can do that. Once you agree on a dataset, the mean is the mean and that's it. My point is that if ALL the data is released then some group will analyze it with all the outliers in and publish that.
Re: PDFs and Scientific Papers - YES, with DropBox and GoodReader it's usually just a few seconds to get my DOCs onto the iPad.
You shouldn't've been downvoted; you're absolutely right.

MacOS -- and I say this as a long-time user, since the System 6 days, and as an OS atheist -- only seems to have a better security track record in the minds of users because it hasn't been targeted anywhere near as much as Windows has.

As far as Google is concerned, they may just be banking on security-through-obscurity. Use a system that the bad guys aren't familiar with exploiting, and you're less likely to be exploited.
This is somewhat possible, I thought about this few years ago. I'm not sure if it helps much or at all with current compression algorithms though. Should probably give it a second some day.
I see > 1 day lags occasionally (aus, vodafone).
Lately we're trying to promote Ninite more for single app downloads too. Even for a single app Ninite saves you from:

- navigating confusing download sites (sourceforge stands out as an example)

- waiting/forgetting about a download before running an installer (all Ninite installers are ~200k, they get everything else once running)

- clicking "Next" through pointless multi-step installers

- mistakenly installing a toolbar in your browser

As for Spotify, we got a lot of requests for it because we have many non-US users. While Ninite installs apps in your PCs language we haven't internationalized the website or its selections for different markets yet.
Anybody have a good list for python?
Thanks for talking about this. Definitely aware of the AppEngine solution, but one of the reasons I was looking for a turnkey solution was for guidance in complying with CAN-SPAM as well as having them manage opt-outs, bounces, things like that.

Agree with the other commenter that it would be killer for you to open source your app :)
Unfortunate that the service requires a US based billing address, is there any way to work around that?
FWIW, I've not experienced this with AES encrypted OS X sparseimages.
Japan does not always pick Japanese stuff over non-Japanese stuff. Perl seems more popular than Ruby, everyone uses Windows, OS X, or Linux, and so on.

I think the appeal of the iPhone is that it is marketed like a luxury good rather than a commodity, like the Japanese-made cell phones are. The Apple Store in Tokyo is in the super-ritzy Ginza district, after all. (Although the same is true in the US; the Apple Stores are always in the high-end retail districts, and the iPhone is a luxury where its competitors are faceless commodities that you "pay" ninety nine cents for every two years.)

Another thing I see going for Apple is that, it seems, people in Japan are actually willing to pay for consumer electronics. In the US, we go for whatever's cheapest (go to Best Buy sometime, not a high-end item in sight), but the Japanese seem to be more discerning. At least in my experience.

(I am typing this on a Y30,000 keyboard that was imported from Japan. The most expensive keyboard I can find on Amazon is $100, and only because it has a shit-ton of stupid bells and whistles, like LEDs and a text display. This keyboard is a regular 103-key keyboard without a numberpad. No lights, no display, no wireless. Just a good keyboard. Only in Japan...)
Also good for your ~/.ssh/config file (so you get the same aliases on all your machines) and, if you're trusting (and I'm not), your private key.
In the context of Google, that is not a criteria.
Twitter from the command line in Python using OAuth - step-by-step howto
http://www.spibby.com/
I'm using it for a handful of internal projects. The selling points for these scenarios were that the server is cross platform, the server footprint is really small, and there is rich and mature-enough library support to use it from just about anywhere.

It's main purpose is to act as a quasi-cache for a bunch of database queries. A couple of batch apps pull chunks of data from a bunch of databases, essentially consolidating and precalculating a bunch of stuff.

The biggest strength we've found so far is that it is schema-less. We're not spending much time thinking about how to organize the data, just getting it and sifting it.

Hope this helps
Would This Be Useful? – Open Blogger/Journalist Database
Obligatory anecdotal confirmation:

I recently went to a neighboorhood meetup (オフ会) near my home in Kobe. At some point I got out my iPhone to look at the time. Someone said "oh, you have an iPhone?" At which point fully HALF of the other attendees pulled out theirs and began discussing.

Yes, sampling bias and all that, but it's still a bit surprising. One guy who didn't have one expressed his loyalty to an opposing carrier that doesn't have the iPhone.

Still haven't seen an iPad here, but it hasn't been very long.
Yeah, I agree, I still enjoyed it, met a lot of great people, and (I think) got a good education. Just meant to agree that the administration seems to be almost more of a hinderance than a help to those things.
Hey PG. Just wanted to let you know that the name of the alien was a secret... until 2 days ago. :)
For Django-based apps - you should definitely take a look at Pinax http://pinaxproject.com/

Satchmo has some interesting approaches to solving certain problems in Django (like allowing to override general site settings in admin) - http://www.satchmoproject.com/

For examples of more lightweight WSGI apps using Werkzeug:

Zine (blogging engine) - http://zine.pocoo.org/

Solace (forum similar to StackOverflow) - http://opensource.plurk.com/Solace/
Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster
Nice eye, I did not notice the furniture as much during the keynote.

> but it's still a very solid 1.0

I absolutely agree. Considering the rubbish that was tablet computing before the iPad, this device comes from a completely different universe. It's an awesome 1.0 effort.

There was/is quite a bit made that it's basically a big iPod. But having spent some time with the device now I have to disagree. It really is something different than a big iPod or what we've come to think of as tablet computing. The brilliance was in not trying to adapt a bunch of GUI metaphors meant for a mouse to a touch screen, but in building an ecosystem from the ground up around touch interactivity metaphors. This I think is what's made it click and seems to obvious in retrospect.
.. and that is one more reason for corporates to move to Mac/Linux
PAQ8 is definitely futuristic, by which I mean that it is incredibly slow on my machine and uses a ton of RAM :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ#Comparison
Perhaps not so well known (which is to say, I didn't know this): Woz was a UC Berkeley dropout, but after Apple went public he went back and got a B.S. in EECS.
I'd imagine that there is not as much of a hacker culture in terms of techy projects.
My $5 at work.
Steve Jobs introduces the Death Star
> I'd speculate this is more about politics, or dogfooding

Agree on the dogfooding.

<speculation>I think Google is planning a major attack on Microsoft's business / office empire. They have made it so simple to set up a new business using Google apps that it's almost unthinkable to me that I would go out and do an exchange setup. But this is largely still in stealth mode because Google wants to bring its business apps up to the point where they are a alternative to Office for real tasks before they really play this hand. And that means they have to force their employees to live on them every day, for everything. If they can't do it, how can they expect their customers to? And the best way to make it happen is to take away Windows entirely. Otherwise people will continue to fall back to Office and find reasons to sneak it onto their computers.</speculation>
Depends on if he's met Ray Kurzweil or not.
Is it possible to get all of them?

I can't choose to hide my ID/name/timezone/friends or friends' wallposts....
Listening to Mozart does not make you smart
Empathy Dropped 40% in College Students Since 2000
Acupuncture's molecular effects pinned down
I'm perfectly okay with them being fairly scarce with information until they have something built.

They surely have high caliber advisers at this point. The peanut gallery probably wouldn't be all that helpful as they try to lay the first foundations.

Once there's something complete to react to and build on, they'll release the code.
Generalists rock. Ping me on GChat.
That would literally be the worst PR writing I'd ever seen.

It's more like a throwaway line from a draft script for the Matrix.
Magic nucleus gives clues to origin of heavy metal
Man builds working computer inside LittleBigPlanet video game (2008)
I find the following interesting:

Charter School:

Able to kick out students at will for things like possession of drugs, or violence. So you immediately know, no shit or you are out.

1-year renewable contract with teachers, so only good ones stay.

Ability to keep school student size relatively small.

Sounds like a real business. Maximize your efficiency. Get the best workers, ensure they are the best, and ensure the best results given your merchandise. Ok not quite 1:1 but close.

Now how to do this on a national level to ensure the best everywhere!!??! I guess the moral of this story that I got is that once the students were properly motivated the flourished, until then nothing good was happening. It is not just teaching, but sparking a curiosity of why they should want to learn.
Design Patterns in Modern Perl
Ask HN: Who Celebrated Quit Facebook Day?
I held off deleting my never-used account just so I could do it today.

How about you?

Does anyone have good statistics on how many have quit today, and what percentage of people who committed to quit on quitfacebookday.com actually did so?
Wow, so your great grandfather was 65 when he had your grandfather, and your grandfather was 56 when he had your father? How old are you, if you don't mind me asking? That's an impressive lineage you've got there.

I asked my grandfather once if he ever knew someone in the Civil War and he got offended, but it could have just barely worked -- he was born in about 1930. Wow, you must have some interesting family history!
Mac OS X Leopard receives UNIX 03 certification: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-r...
We're using it for one of our subsystems (user history) at bit.ly. We've been quite pleased with the performance and flexibility.
And what happens when someone exploits Linux?
Market share: Windows 90%, Mac 9%, Linux 1%.

Where are virus writers going to put most of their effort?

Windows being as secure as Mac wouldn't help make it safer because a lot more implemented exploits are going to exist in the wild.
Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bee?
I've been particularly impressed with their amazing ability to avoid mentioning any details about the projects implementation.

The following is a list of features the future might bring (if I understand the project page correctly: http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html)

OpenID

I assume this is the standard they will use for authentication? What about this encryption business? Do they intend to modify the OpenID protocol to do some sort of challenge/reponse step and exchange keys?

Voice-over IP

I'm at a loss for what this means or how it is important to the project. Are they implementing a specific protocol, using a particular libary, or are they going to attempt rolling their own system?

Distributed Encrypted Backups

Backups of what? Distributed why? How?

Instant Messaging protocol

There are a plethora of existing protocols they could use. Since they haven't specified a particular one, does it mean they haven't decided which one to use yet? Are they planning to build their own "encrypted" protocol? Magic?

UDP integration

Whoa. Integration. With UDP? Mind-blowing. I'm assuming that they'll be building the broad-casting bits of the P2P architecture on UDP. It's what most distributed, encrypted P2P networks do.

Oh right, there are already dozens of them and have been for years. I guess these kids are just too young to remember:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE -
- http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/default.aspx (before it got bought by MS and turned into corporate turf)
- soulseek, gnutella, freenet, etc.

Wonder how they're planning to break that extra 10x
oops - the title really should be "Ask HN: What's your favorite free web conferencing tool?" I thought HN would add the "Ask HN" part for me, and now it's too late to edit the title. Anyway, thanks for the replies so far.
> I am typing this on a Y30,000 keyboard

Wow!
Which brand and model?
or project gutenberg, or websites http://www.biblegateway.com/
Don't use Microsoft Word.

Check out xmlresumé.
thanks for clearing that up. I wish I could try but no windows machines. I think type of site would actually be good for like non computer savy, I think a simple redesign could convey this message better.
Topre Realforce 87U. (I also have two HHKBs, which are similar to the Realforce. I have not decided which I like better yet; same keyswitches, but different in many other ways.)
A: "You are in denial"

B: "No, I'm not"

A: "Told you"
Personal computers are still relevant, Microsoft executive says
Better that millions of users worldwide see this :

<canvas>Please install a standards compliant browser, we recommend : Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome</canvas>

The reality is, M$hit are so far behind, that if they were to do the right thing and add canvas, it would just prolong the inevitable.

Let IE die with dignity, please.
On the Verge of ‘Vital Exhaustion’?
The Secret Powers of Time - RSA Animate
Cultural and generation differences explained with individual perceptions of time.
2011 Mini Crossman Review and Prices
When you open the machine up, you're going to check which parts are causing it to break, not just which parts are broken. You'll fix those parts of the machine as well, to carry on the analogy.

Not that any of this is going to happen in real life. But as long as we're speculating . . .
While this move may prevent infection by FR33_PR0N.wmv.exe, I don't see how it will prevent being hacked by China (the major concern).
Sorry, but that simply doesn't matter.

Case in point, OSX even had more security advisories published than windows for a while, yet the "experts" still mostly agree OSX is the safer platform;

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10444561-245.html?tag=rtco...

There's a very simple reason: OSX has around 6% market share, Windows around 80%.
Go figure which platform the kids are going to target for the time being. Also feel free to research on which platform the major, semi-automated botnets (Storm, Zeus) are running.
None of these closures actually close over any state. Is that feature going to exist, or are these really just C-style function pointers?
Much easier. They could for example setup Active Directory policies to disable the use of IE by default.
You have a nice ecosystem of Unix OS's. Solaris, OpenBSD, NetBSD, ... and a handful of major Linux distros: Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Gentoo, Debian, etc. Once you've gone Unix you have lots of choices, including the Mac.

Did Google roll their own Linux? Which kernel do you target? which apps?
Haskell.org is down
Additional DCI links:

http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_vision.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data,_Context,_and_Interaction
His article is a little weird. The Japanese have been into Americana products like Levis, work boots, boat shoes, surfboards and Harley Davidsons since the 70s. You can't get american made jeans or shoes in the US, but you can (for $800) in Tokyo.

Regarding electronics from the USA (China?), there simply have not been any worth buying until the iPhone and iPad.
> Apparently not.

No they absolutely don't. And cellphone "radiation" doesn't cause cancer, also. Surprised?

> But, you know, it is possible

Facts, please.

> and as long as we're injecting millions of people with pathogens,

The correct term is "as long as we're saving them from yellow fever, smallpox, dengue fever, etc., etc". Here in the 3rd world these diseases are killing millions of times more children than your imagined autism.

Oh my, why is HN such a nest for conspiracy theorists?
Many organizations have a policy that you can and will be terminated at any time for lying on your application. If she admitted it, bam.
If your claim is that the book you have recommended ... is the last word on the subject

That would be an audacious claim, considering the book is rather old and only 200 pages. I recommend it because it is a model of concise and accessible prose, good for laymen (like me) who want to get the basic facts with minimal fluff. As far as I know, none of its main points has been invalidated by intervening research. But I can see why its blunt statements of fact might be unpalatable to some.
Google SSL search beta
http://www.virtualbox.org/

Just run Windows in a VM. You could even rdp or vnc into a few test boxes.
Sure, but that just means it provides the correct library calls, has the right shell utilities, and so on. It says nothing about the pedigree, or the amount of security. It's undoubtedly a good thing, but it's not important in this context.
I'm in Tokyo, and the news here is full of the amazing new world ushered in by the iPad, and I know it sold out the first day; people camped out for two days in front of the Apple Store in Ginza to get one, and the lines were huge

I'll let you know if Ginza/Shibuya is an iPad-fest this weekend.
Engineering at Google is already 100% linux or OS X (at least when I was there in 2007), unless you were writing a client application targeting windows. This decision is about sales, marketing, HR, etc...
I agree--I think the google employee either didn't know what he was talking out or was taken out of context.

They could always do windows development and testing inside of VMs though.
If you can pick startups that well, I suggest a career in venture capital as an alternative to (presumably) engineering. :)
I'd really like to see a more powerful web interface to Hackage. For example, if I'm looking to pick out a library to use for something, I'd like to be able to filter the listings down to just the ones that build on GHC 6.12. Or the ones that have received an update within the last year. Or, for example, filter out packages with explicit parsec-2 dependencies, since I use 3 now.

Maybe there could be some kind of 'gold star' that would show up next to the package name in the listing if your package meets a certain number of requirements. Builds on most recent stable release of GHC, no outdated dependencies, no dead link to homepage, has a maintainer. Maybe not those exact requirements, but I think encouraging the community to meet a high bar of compatibility and portability is healthy.

Is there a rule against scraping Hackage? I am liking this idea.
I think its due to conditioning and the inertia of the surrounding environment.

Many [most?] smart people work 9 to 5 even though this clogs the roads at those times, so is optimally bad resource usage.

Even more so for religion or political affiliations, due to social circle.

It might be a rational response - the cost associated with overcoming these environmental factors is high, they are at a local minimum ?
Why Apple doesn’t do "Concept Products"
Too often, I see bloggers willing to give executives and public officials a pass when they are caught in a lie. The rationale is that the people are otherwise doing a good job, but the bloggers ignore the irony that part of the job was enforcing the rules and imposing judgments on others.

If you're a Dean who has ever kicked a student out of school for an honor violation, I have no sympathy when you get called-out for lying. Too many students get kicked out of school and have permanent black mark on their record for similar offenses; why should the Dean get a pass.

If you're a former President whose job as chief executive is enforce the laws of the country, then I have a hard time having sympathy when people find-out you've lied under oath. Too many people go to jail for perjury; why should the President get a pass.

If you're a former New York prosecutor famous for corruption cases, then I have little sympathy when you've been caught hiding funds to pay a prostitute. Too many people are vilified for this; why should an Attorney General get a pass.

All that being said, I don't judge this Dean, the former President, or the NY Attorney General. Instead, I judge the bloggers who have a double standard for people they like.
William Gibson - Still my favorite sci-fi author. Orson Scott Card a close 2nd.
As a non-scientist but one who takes their work seriously, I am still often in denial is because so much of the work in statistical validation seems to be trying to compress a multidimensional model to fit on a one dimensional scale that, even using accepted/established methods, always gives you a very flat understanding of the topic at hand.

Even those working most closely with the data sometimes seem somehow unable to present anything beyond the oversimplified model, but are dying to even take further than one dimensional and draw a line so they have a false dichotomy so they can paint things black and white.

This is practiced on both sides making results inherently useless despite scientific techniques and credentials of the researchers.

And so, for example, neither side in the climate change debate provides the public with anything remotely resembling a model they can develop faith in by subjecting it to reasonable scrutiny or trying to decide whether it smells right based upon ongoing critical analysis.
Unfortunately, not at this time.
As sad as it sounds we're currently using Skype's screen sharing (single person) and voice conferencing with Google Draw at the moment. Will try connectnow.acrobat.com as it looks decent.
Where do you draw the line when a BSD based OS has been customized to the extend that it can't be considered a BSD based OS?
Summertime Web Design for 100 Minutes a Week (#wywof)
http://www.businessinsider.com/ uses MongoDB http://www.businessinsider.com/how-we-use-mongodb-2009-11
You can scrape Hackage. The most efficient way is "cabal list" and its friends (access the Cabal database directly).

I do that for the Arch Linux package status page: http://www.galois.com/~dons/arch-haskell-status.html

Using http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/archlinux/0.3/do...
I grew up reading Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy. I can honestly say that it largely influenced me into my current career (programmer).

I really wish that Gibson wasn't so bored with capital F Future. I would love to see what kind of hard-scifi novel he could produce today.

Everything he wrote seemed so terrible and magnificent at the same time and I strongly believed that it helped shape the direction of technological progress for a generation. You can't capture the hearts and minds of an entire generation of teen geeks and it not leave its mark.
Jaeger-LeCoultre Replica Watches,Fake Jaeger-LeCoultre Watches