skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I support your argument, you have to be careful it doesn't turn into arrogance.

I remember one time being promised by the tech lead on a project that an inexpensive networking solution would be just as good as the expensive kit we had used for development. Turns out he couldn't make it work - the cheap kit just wasn't as good as the expensive stuff we had developed against.

However, I was the one standing in the customer's office being shouted at by three of their unhappy managers as their time critical project was delayed until we got the proper kit ordered and the tech lead sulked back at our office.

Sometimes expensive kit is worth it.
أداة ستينغر لأزالة الفيروسات من العملاقة مكافي McAfee AVERT Stinger 10.0.1.972
Why wouldn't Mint.com / other personal finance apps come to Asia?
I have been waiting for someone like Mint.com to come to Asia (I reside in Singapore), and am frustrated with their complete ignorance of the market.

Recently I realized that its because Yodlee (which powers Mint.com's data) doesn't have any presence / connections with banks in Asia.

Now, I know that Yodlee uses things like screen scraping / OFX etc to connect with the bank's data. My question is - how do they overcome security issues like second factor authentication etc?

Also, if we had to cut a deal with a bank for access to their data through OFX - who should we be speaking to?

any guidance on this will be hugely helpful. thanks.
As joeyh said, jumping to an IDE seems premature. But another problem is the lack of need. Back in 1980, there just were not that many games and other apps. A computer was more or less an extension of electronics and was driven by "How does this thing work?". Now, computers are appliances. And even the most reliable appliances, as the old Maytag adverts used to show, require trained "technicians". But I, too, wonder how to recupe that wonder of "How things work" for the up-and-coming ranks of hackers.
strlen() is not declared pure in the OS X headers.
sadly Quicktime is broken beyond repair, i.e. you can not do HTTP range requests to allow seeking in videos beyond the part that is already downloaded. On top of that Apple knows about this problem but ignores it. They even went one step further and just fixed it for H.264 in Quicktime X. (note that they stopped supporting 3rd party components in Quicktime X)
How does the free Kindle thing work? I only find one for 2$ on my Android Kindle app. I don't think I have ever seen a free Kindle book.
Probably, though original story was about an application that got a lot of press from those people.

Personally I've had the majority of my traffic from bloggers, though I haven't yet travelled to the U.S. to get more. Several of the successful U.K. businesses travel to U.S. regularly, though I'm not sure if that is cause or effect.

YMMV
Only on architectures with such instructions. x86 doesn't have anything like that (well, maybe in x87), and I don't know of any others that do.
In search of serendipity
> they're

luv how "they" are a friken bureaucrat... like it's any of their business what is and is not debated and discussed in democracy.

have spent many years in commonwealth and state bureaucracies and have never heard anyone even entertain the idea that silencing debate (although in my view that is often the point) would be used as the publicly stated reason for censoring or denying an FOI.
Fart joke myth busted using Frink
Writing a Ruby Extension with C
So you are the one to blame if I get matched up with noobs and leavers in a game ;)?

PS. I loved the space jam game when I was kid!
About 30% of the time I fat finger and click on the story link instead of the comments on my iPad. I don't know if that would be fixed with a bigger font or a bit more padding between the story and the comments link.
I would consider the landlord's involvement in this decision to be an "abstraction violation." When I lease the apartment, I make a guarantee to return the apartment to you in the same condition that I received it (with a fine to be paid if I do not). It should be my choice whether to assume the risks of a subletter, temporary or long-term.
bump. Almost by definition, a healthy startup cannot afford the best there is. But I think what Dru may be getting at is to get the best you need. A few years ago, I had a project that blew through 3 dozen developers over a 15 month period because everyone checked out okay until they started to code. Then they'd crack and say "Oh, this is beyond my abilities". Ultimately, we found two developers that did the project in no time (and whom we now treat as well as we possibly can). We were lucky. I suspect a lot of projects sink in the mire of mediocrity.
python 2.2 raised the flag for me
the ALP.

the real question is who has their ear, for internet censorship i would say it's the christian lobby, for this logging crap would say both state and commonwealth law enforcement agencies (chiefly AFP???).

the latter certainly have form (e.g. http://www.theage.com.au/national/investigations/private-spi...)
Germany doesn't have the kind of crime problems America has, so naturally it's not going to be a big issue.
Have you tried using PowerShell for something non-trivial? It's equally prone to this kind of problem as Unix command lines.

As far as I know you don't even have a single standard cmdlet to create a user in AD using PowerShell - you have to install the Quest tools for managing AD through PowerShell to get a sensible set of commands.
we get what we vote for. do something... anything... stand up for yourself.
It helps to 'turn off' Spotlight:

3G: Settings-General-Home Button-Spotlight search

3GS: Settings-General-Spotlight search

At least my 3G is almost usuable again.
All this awesomeness makes me only more motivated, want me to be part of it more and more!
If you aren't a criminal, you're probably about as likely to be incarcerated in the US as you are to be eaten by a crocodile in Australia. If I were you about be more worried about American crime rates than incarceration rates.
Well, it looks like the article made foreigners think they're going to be incarcerated if they set foot on US soil, and there are a lot of immigrants in the startup community.

You can always find a connection if you use your imagination.
How "Jimmy Choo" "lost" his name - a tale of investors
Compiled languages are too complex
Open-sourcing is not enough. Honest researchers should also publish all data sets for peers to validate results. When I was in grad school, it was a disappointing fact that very few academics in the machine learning field did this.
how do you take the screenshot of the website? can this be used to make png / jpeg to get a thumbnails of websites?

Also finally how do you create pdf, is it some pdf printer?
I've still not found a useful/complete aggregator of all technology events. If anyone knows one please post.
Lotussia Travel Announces Special Offer on Pu Luong Nature Reserve Trekking Tour
Lotussia Travel announced today that guests who join the 4-day trekking to Pu Luong natrure reserve will receive a complimentary spa package at AQ Luxury Spa, as well as a free dinner at the Ha Hoi Boutique Restaurant.
more to the point, nearly all residential leases explicitly prohibit subletting already, so regardless of city law, you are violating your lease by renting out an apartment on the short term without the landlord's permission.
Bandwidth over the course of seconds and bandwidth over the course of days are not comparable. If you are using the fast bandwidth provided to download a file and have it nearly instantly, that's great. It is wonderful to be able to watch YouTube videos without buffering, to get entire webpages in the blink of an eye, and to install an OS over the network without wishing you had splurged for the Cd's. But as soon as you provide something like that, you get some asshole who thinks that it is then his right to use that speed /constantly/, doing nothing but downloading files day and night. If everyone does this, there is no more bandwidth to go around: the expectation is that users will use "up to 5MB/s" only for a few seconds, not for days at a time. You might even say a fair allotment of the finite bandwidth resource might be "5MB/s, or 100MB/min, or 1GB/hour", despite those numbers not even remotely multiplying out. And this is, in fact, how many ISP's are now trying to solve the problem of people who don't understand the concept of sharing: "burst rates", where as you use bandwidth it slows down over short time spans.
Stab-language (JVM based language similar to Java/C#)
What are your projected revenue numbers for the first, second, third and fourth years?

Where are you getting your users?

Where are you getting your money?

Who will own the software? The IP?

Make a spreadsheet showing your projected income, followed by the amount of money ending up in each pocket. Do this as a cash-flow projection. Now divide your revenue figures by 10 and see what happens. Can you live with that?

Now compare with borrowing 25k at 10%pa. You end up with all the revenues, but you might not cover your loan. Where does that interest percentage break even with the deal you are getting?

What do you bring to this deal? Why should you get any money at all? Why not sell them the idea for $X and then move on to your next idea?

That's your homework - no doubt other HNers will have more to add.
Certainly observed by this African watching both continents.
I suppose with kings and stuff, one advantage could be that they are prepared for their jobs from childhood onwards. If only there was a way to keep them in check if they run wild.
Out of curiosity, how did you pick the name? The word "contagion" gives me the chills and I imagine boils on my skin. Although now, imagining this, I'm motivated to exercise to keep myself in good health =)
Important Steps to Know When Choosing a Blog Name
The name mislead me to believe that it had something to do with haskell. I guess I thought too deeply into the anagram.
Cool, I'll give it a nice over later and update it
Could be difficult depending on how sites implement CSS. Some would be much easier that others, but hard to find one solution for all.
Lastminute Angebote
I got the feeling the flash rockstar and flash game engineer descriptions are swapped...
Hi chunkbot,

Wanted to reach out to you through email but was unable to find any contact information.

We'd like to work more closely with you on perfecting the online product demos feature. Would you be interested in testing it out on your website soon? Please contact me at peter@catonmat.net!

Peteris
I double the size of the voting arrows but they are a little blurry. I'll address that when I have more time
eh, from a sysadmin perspective, the real advantage is that perl5 is perl5 and it has been essentially the same for what, 10 years now? If you are stuck on a RHEL system (or anywhere else where you expect the server to remain up without major revisions for 3-5 years) maintaining the two or three versions of your scripting language is a pain in the ass. (yes, you have to do this on RHEL 5 if you support python, usually. the base system requires a pretty old python runtime, so you need another if you want the new stuff.)

I remember working on perl when you still needed to keep both perl4 and perl5 around on a system... today, though, perl5 is the scripting language you can depend on having, that you can depend on being there and compatible.

This is also the major resistance to perl6. Goddamnit, perl5 works. I don't want to go back to the bad old days when i had to write everything in sh (or test it across two major revs of perl) if I wanted it to run properly on all systems.

I know that the language writers always claim backwards compatibility is a priority, and it is, kindof, but, for example, don't try to upgrade the base python on a RHEL5 system. you /can/ but it's a /huge/ pain in the ass and it means you will have to do more work every time yum or some other python-dependent base bit is upgraded.

for us, perl occupies the niche that bash occupied in 1997. Now, it /can/ do more, but we are utterly dependent, at this point, on the bash replacement.
My Dad used to propose the jury duty system of democratic representation - you don't get elected, you get randomly drawn - not as a candidate, but as a member of parliament. Shorter terms, but a larger parliament. Interesting to think about, but somewhat impractical, I guess.
Litle bit offtopik question: any idea why is Google so anti-Ruby lately? I mean stuff like no Ruby projects in 2010 Google summer of code.
The chance of being eaten by a crocodile in Australia is about 1 in 20m in any given year (a lot less if you stay in the lower 2/3s of the country, essentially zero for > 95% of the population).

The article above indicates that many innocent people in the US are encouraged to plead guilty. I'm inclined to believe the opposite.
Hi DrJokepu,

I couldn't find your contact information so I am replying here. Can you reach me at peter@catonmat.net?

I'd like to know more about how you'd use stackvm at your startup, so that when we launch stackvm we already had a usable product!

Peteris
The Cult of Deaf and Dumb in the Vatican.
They could ban renting apartments but anyone should be able to rent a spare room, provided you live there yourself. That would rule out the wannabe hotel keepers and make it easier for people to rent their own space, which I believe is the original point of couch crashing.
Understanding YSlow – A Firebug Extension to Improve Webpage Performance
The market is created by laws, laws are created by politicians, politicians are elected. That's how a democracy should work, anyway.

City planning is something complicated where I'm not so sure a pure market-driven solution would be optimal. Markets only allocate resources well when there are no externalities. They do nothing towards a fair distribution of wealth. A good example of poor city planning caused by the market is the housing bubble.

I don't know the situation in New York, but if hotels were in fact crowding out the poor from the city, it would be perfectly legitimate to ask if this is desirable.
The perl community have been searching for the best way to overcome the perception that "perl is dead". (The constant bickering that it isn't the case reminds me of the holy grail http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071853/quotes?qt0470614 )

They need to focus on "Where perl has been" while it has been out of the limelight because, believe me, perl still rocks for productivity and performance.

Moose has revolutionized the object system (a system that was so flexible that it just gave you the parts and said "go build it")

Perl::Critic has created a baseline which all production scripts should be above.

PSGI and plack have changed the way you build and deploy and perl webapps.

In fact, the perl community and the current stars of CPAN have come so far, and have had so much going on that I have difficulty keeping up with the massive strides they are taking, let alone summarize those changes here.
I have created a bookmarklet. Try it here:

http://blog.arpitnext.com/tools/creat-pdf-bookmarklet.html
Picture here: http://techfreqnews.com/?p=298

Reminds me of my Palm Pilot.
Ruby doesn't provide named function arguments. In my experience, Rubyists tend to do what Perlers do: use hashes to create quasi-named arguments to functions.
GiveMePink - Exclusive quality videos
fxj meet jsFiddle (http://www.jsfiddle.net), jsFiddle meet fxj.
سوق العقارات العربي
I think there are other motivations involved here. Much of what's called open source these days has commercial aspirations. Often a lot of source code is developed and then published when it's quite far along, after the sheer volume of it provides barriers to entry. It's not really open source in the sense of leveraging the advantages that collaborative development in a community brings.

In academic settings competitive aspects of research likely produce the same sorts of issues, and in compsci there is likely commercial interests involved too. Come up with a clever new NPL technique for semantic searching and the VCs come out of the woodwork.

However I agree with the author and commenters that both code and data ought to be available to all, mainly because that's the only way to make progress. Research is hard, very hard, and building on the half-baked ideas, good and bad, is the only way progress is made.
All fair points, though many people still write web sites with just pages, rather than web applications. (I do, for example.) Still, I agree that some kind of layout for columns would be great. As a non-designer, however, I find most of the grid systems immediately overwhelming. (For example, I'm looking now at the front page of 960gs, which I didn't know, and I want to cry. I have zero idea what I should or could do with that.)
In some cases yes but what about when my mother-in-law came to visit when my daughter was born? The nearest crappy legal hotel was 45 min away and cost $140 a night. She got a one-week sublet two blocks away (family on vacation) for a week for $500.

Regardless of the savings in money, the big difference was the proximity.

Now that will be illegal and she will either visit less often or not stay as long.
That was one of the 99.9% of statistics that were made up on the spot. The point is that being incarcerated for no reason is way down on the list of worries for Americans who aren't criminals - far below random encounters with criminals who haven't been incarcerated, for example.

And where does the article does not indicate that many innocent people in the US are encouraged to plead guilty?
Re the SSL error, I think the problem maybe that you've forgotten to configure your server to send the intermediate CA certs. Without these certs the browser can't build a path to one of its pre-configured trust anchors.

To see what I mean, you can use openssl or this online tool: http://certlogik.com/sslchecker/

If you examine your website with it, you'll notice that only one cert, the server cert, is returned.

Now check, say, www.godaddy.com and you'll see a chain of CA certs returned in addition to the server cert.

Your web server docs should provide the details on how to add these CA certs. For example, I think Apache uses SSLCertificateChainFile.
There are some well known public data sets used for this purpose, such as those in the UCI Machine Learning repository. Unfortunately, not everyone is using them. And even if they do, it is often impossible to reproduce the results as pre-processing of the data is not described well enough in the paper, or because the authors add random components (such as costs) to the data without describing the distributions properly.

Publishing scripts for the complete workflow starting with the raw data and printing the table with the results in the end would be the best. But I've seen academics working in a way that is completely orhogonal to this - copying & pasting data to Excel or Matlab (or even re-typing them) and doing the analysis by hand in the GUI... I don't have any doubts they would be able to learn how to write the script, but I'm very sure they would put up heavy resistance to do so.
> They do nothing towards a fair distribution of wealth.

What is the "fair distribution of wealth"? I personally believe that you are only entitled to the wealth you yourself created (or which someone voluntary gave you).

Isn't that a fair distribution of wealth? Or what other metrics do you use?
> The perl community have been searching for the best way to overcome the perception that "perl is dead"

Release. Perl. 6.
Learning a modern IDE is more work than learning an 80's BASIC environment. The difference is that with the latter, I could write working programs and get stuff flying around the screen with minimal resistance.

There's a lot of value in that simplicity that is still there somewhere but isn't generally accessible for anything "productive" by today's standards.
We want to be sure where the next paycheck comes from instead of trusting we'll be fine, somehow.

And, damn it, we still can't be sure.
If anyone can develop a language that gives precise control at the level of the individual memory address in hardware, suitable for writing device drivers and operating systems, and yet is also possible for someone with only a weekend's experience in programming BASIC to instantly understand every possible nuance of the language, I'll be very impressed.

This is like complaining that the tools to repair a watch are really difficult to use well, and that we should do our watch repair with a hammer and chisel. Choose the appropriate tools for the job.
> Why are European countries and Japan so different, though?

For a Japanese person, the conviction of a crime (and the shame it brings) is much worse than the jail sentence. If you are convicted of a crime, your family usually breaks off all ties with you.

Other countries (such as Singapore or China) has laws that are more harsh - which ensures that people do not break it (e.g. execution for drug offenses instead of imprisonment). If a person receives corporal punishment for vandalism, he will quickly stop without progressing towards further crimes (or run back to the USA with his tail between his legs).
Not worth reading. The author makes a completely unwarranted leap from C++/Java to C, then proceeds to "prove" the lack of readability in C by giving a expression that screams for a preprocessor macro.
Hacker Newsletter - Week 29
LinkedIn has one too... We really need some open platform to manage our identity online!
> randoms, particularly people from out of the city who often aren't aware of just how loud they are

Doesn't stop anyone from in-town either. I lived for a year in a place that the upstairs neighbor stomped everywhere as he was morbidly obese and had to use the toilet frequently. The neighbor on the right played rap and hip-hop at max blast from midnight til 6 am, often leaving it on all day when he left to work. And the couple on the other side had rough sex nightly. And even more interesting is that this place was in a decent part of town, not some slumhole.

> frequently moving in and out as neighbors
You mean, like a hotel? There is one two blocks away from my house. Never been a problem. Or, are you more refering to something like transients? My subdivision has a lot of them, Bosnian families moving in extended family, finally getting their gov't grant, and moving out. Hasn't been a problem either... well, except for this one guy, but that was resolved and he wasn't a transient, he owned the home. Is your stance from a fear of strangers and foreigners?

I don't see your arguemenst fit into the equation at all.
Any time I've tried to tinker with a program written in C, I get mired in variables and functions with nondescript names referencing other variables and functions with nondescript names.

I don't know if it's a difference in conventions or language design, but I've found C# code to be even easier on my head than Java, which it borrows heavily from.
> You can always find a connection if you use your imagination.

That game is called "6 degrees of hacker news".
> But that's not all; prison labor is now used as cheap labor to compete with foreign countries, instituting a new age of under-the-radar slavery.

This is BS IMHO. Would you rather see prisoners set free or do nothing all day?

Do you really think that a person will come out of a 6 year prison sentence (without working a day) and then start working and be a productive member of society?

In the old days in my country there was a sentence called "hard labour" - which meant that criminals got a shorter sentence and learned valuable life skills (if they were co-operative) or learned how to make big rocks smaller (if they were uncooperative).
And there's no shame in that, and there's no reason why you should be instantly able to hack around with C code. It can be very low-level and very tricky to follow - that's the consequence of its power. The right tools for the right jobs.

As an aside, it's quite possible, of course, to write ridiculously tricky code in any language.
Are Job Portals Dying a Slow Death?