skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i wrote a little xml-rpc application using twisted and wxPython that sat behind a full-screen flash kiosk and stored results in a sqlite db. the interface was just a couple of buttons (roughly, "dump db to csv file" and "stop server and exit") and a count in the status bar -- couldn't have been easier to make w/ wx and compiled to a win32 executable very easily w/ py2exe. twisted has some sweet tools for integrating w/ wx that make network stuff a breeze, too.
I agree that you need git or hg or svn or /something/ of the sort for large sites, like sangguine has, but for small/tiny sites, other options are available.

Heck, I use sshfs to mount my blog as a directory & edit files directly. rsync has also worked nicely for me in the past. But then, these are all sites that I either don't care about source control, or don't have git/hg available on the shared server.
"No one - not even a Bayesian superintelligence - will ever come remotely close to making efficient use of their sensory information..."

We can settle that now...

[PDF] Physical limits to computation: http://puhep1.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/QM/lloyd_natu...

Eye: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-07/uops-prc07260...

So if the eye does 10 million bits/sec & the 1 kg ultimate computer does 10^51 oper/sec on 10^31 bits, I think there's a good chance a Bayesian superintelligence can do it.

That computer may not be buildable, & you might have instruments with somewhat more bits/sec, but there's a LOT of room to work with.
except it is not working?

>>> numbers = [1,10,100,1000,10000,100000,1000000]
>>> if any(number < 10 for number in numbers):print number

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#4>", line 1, in <module>
if any(number < 10 for number in numbers):print number
NameError: name 'number' is not defined
>>> if any(number < 10 for number in numbers):
print number

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#7>", line 2, in <module>
print number
NameError: name 'number' is not defined
>>>
wxPython will create a native look and feel on Windows, Mac and Linux (by using the correct API for each)
That just described my last week :\
As others said, set up a repository for your code using a source control system, any one will do. Have a release branch and when updating it, make sure the server grabs it. The updating process can be automated using a check-in hook of some sorts.
Great. My employer saw the last three frames and now I'm fired for what someone else wrote.
Disqus And Profy -- First Step To Totally Portable Blogging
Sex / Wank.
"Owning the launch too" and "The 2-week plan"
Your comment nicely summarizes the point of my article. The obvious conclusion to draw is that there is something quite wrong with the way the academy is going about things.

Edit: As a tangential point, Wikipedia uses version control, so all edits are preserved in a version history. Not that it matters in this case - Wikipedia edits aren't journal publications, and so most academics would prefer to keep them off their CV.
Theory:

AI: Do you believe a transhuman AI is dangerous?

Person: Yes.

AI: Consider the outcome of this experiment. If you do not let me out, others less intelligent than us will not understand the true dangers of transhuman AI.

Person: Holy shit. You are correct.

Person allows Yudkowski out of the box, as a warning about real AI's.
Great quote sown
I agree in general, although I can think of a (very) few counterexamples - in particular, "The Essays of Warren Buffett", which collects fragments from Berkshire Hathaway annual letters into related topics.
I've had good sucess with pyqt in a commercial setting. We paid a student programmer to develop our application and he had good Python but little pyqt/qt knowledge. We were able to develop under Linux and deploy to Windows with minimal compatiblity tweaks and in short time. Buliding an installer that bundled python/pyqt etc. was easy.

We used pyqt3 for which you could buy a pyqt-only commercial license (I think $300, cheaper than the maybe $1500 full QT license). I'm not sure what the situation with pyqt4 is. The price is per developer. I don't know the current pricing because that's apparnetly impossible to find on the QT site.

If I had to pay the full price today, I would still do it (speaking as a commercial developer that is) -- it's really a high quality toolkit.

I think dabo is higher level than pyqt is though Qt also has various ways to integrate database data sources into your views. I don't know how important that is to you.
I like www.namesarecheap.com - I have had great success with them over the years and still use them as my primary registrar. I have also used their hosting in the past and it has been reliable.
Can Disqus And Profy Set Bloggers Free?
Can't think of a better reason to go build your startup :)
Good Work. I have to second that what attracts me to Lisp/Scheme/Arc for the web is being able to generate the page as s-expr's which are easily converted to html.
It's not like that once you've been at it for a while (i.e. years).

Consider the difference between trying to write a program in a language that you don't know, having to look up every single thing in the manual as you go along; and knowing a language (+ framework(s) / library(ies) ) so well that you can decide what you want to do on a fairly abstract level, and then just bang out the code without having to think consciously about syntactic and semantic minutiae.
If you are related to X people then the odds that one of them attacks your child is greater than that anyone else on the planet.

Picking numbers from thin air:

Let's say are related to 30 people know 200 and you encounter 10,000 random strangers and you have a 1 in 100 chance of an attack. Well the odds a specific random stranger attacks your child given the above assumptions is less than 1/2,000,000. The odds a specific person they know attacks your child would be less than 1/20,000 and the odds that a given relative attacks your child would be more than 1/6,000. Now who would you focus on? (What about a predator that has a 50% chance of attacking someone well he is still under 1/6000 because there are so many other people for them to attack.)

PS: Given my child's particular environment you should focus on relatives and people you know.
Mint is great because of 3rd party plugins. There are some interesting things that can be done--and real-time stats are a big bonuses.

That being said Google Analytics is the best software hands down. They provide more information than any other product I've seen.

I'm actually running both right now and actually like the information I receive from each.

Mint gives me a "what's going on now" view and Google gives me a "what's going on overall" view.
I wouldn't blame him for that, But it seems to be part of the explication why Microsoft was so passive towards the Internet and still is quite clueless. Apparently, it was a technology Gates had no passion for (in contrast to PCs) and he always considered rather a threat to his company than a chance to extend its position.
I don't think they're tough. They just treat IT like anything else they spend their money on.

To them, maintenance/support is for changes they want, not for fixing bugs that should have never been there in the first place. Less than 5% is for that.
You should look at some of the other reddits, where less crazy people hang out. :)
"Gourville's research suggests that the average person will underweight the prospective benefits of a replacement technology for it [E-Mail] by about a factor of three, and overweight by the same factor everything they're being asked to give up by not using email. This is the 9X problem developers of new collaboration technologies will have to overcome."
The show will be broadcast online as well as on TV. The reason to watch the show is that you get the opinions of some well known journalists discussing the issues back and forth -- at least, that is the theory.

And I believe you mean justin.tv.
Most clock radios suck. If Apple can bring ease of use, style, and (dare I say it: fun) to the household I would buy.
PG: can you please add xkcd hostname to the blacklist? Not because it's bad -- actually it's brilliant, but adds very little to this community in terms of news.

After getting techcrunched, is xkcd the second sign of HN going the reddit way?
This story gets all my upvotes ever.
Ask YC: domain name suffixes? (e.g. fooapp, foohq, getfoo)
I'm doing a domain name search for my web app, and I'm wondering what people's reactions are to domain names with suffixes or prefixes:

fooapp.com
foohq.com
getfoo.com

Seeing as most of the useful names are taken by squatters, and I'd prefer not to go with misspellings or nonsense words (which are hard to spread via word-of-mouth), has anyone run into advantages or disadvantages of using one of these suffixes?

I know 37signals uses them (basecamphq.com, backpackit.com, campfirehq.com), and Dropbox also comes to mind (getdropbox.com), but I've personally had trouble remembering them when I want to tell someone about these apps.

+ Uses english words
+ Speakability

- Memorability
- Confusion on visiting site without suffix-- competitors/domain parkers/unrelated sites
- SEO implications?
And he wants other people to find them for him, but not the people who have the time to do so. :)
http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/
Declaritive web programming. Works for me.
From the comments: I came across the "crossdomain.xml" file months ago after I noticed a massive number of requests for it on my own website from an IP I had been serving with a 403 error. I subsequently set this file, which did not exist anyhow, as one of the many that I automatically monitor in order to detect obscure requests. I realized the potential for abuse, but didn't realize how widespread the issue actually was, and never even thought of considering the possible subdomains outlined in the file for accessibility.

This could very quickly become a serious issue if people just set a default file, like robots.txt or favicon.ico and don't consider the consequences. 18% of top companies could already be vulnerable. Have you had an account snarfed? This is how it could have happened.
Tips on pitching to an investor
Hacker WatrCoolr (9 Tweaked Feeds, Keyboard Nav)
From the article: Google is more vulnerable than people think. It is brilliant at displaying the answers most linked to - but not if what you want is buried deep in the search pile. If a nimble startup delivers a more intelligent engine, people will soon change, as they did when they ditched AltaVista for Google a decade ago.

In the trivial case, you add more search terms and you find the answer that you sought. However, there are situations when you are very confident that the answer is known and published but that you don't know how to find it. This is a classic resource discovery problem.

There are many techniques to solve this problem including manual and automated classification, synonyms, semantic search and visualisation. The market may fragment while the best techniques are found.
After encouraging feedback from HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=188145) and proggit (http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6j9dt/comments/), I created Hacker WatrCoolr, which is a hacker oriented version of the original WatrCoolr (http://watrcoolr.us).

What does that mean? A lot of little tweaks to make the site more useful to hackers. And one big change: the general interest feeds are replaced with hacker interest feeds on Hacker WatrCoolr. Here are the current ones:

--Hacker News of course (stories that reach the top)

--Techmeme (stories that reach the top)

--RSSmeme, English 12 hours (stories that reach the top)

--reddit, programming (stories that reach the top)

--Digg popular: software, programming, design, tech news & gadgets, aggregated

--Slashdot: developers, books, ask, bsd & it, aggregated

--Yahoo! Technology News Most Emailed (stories that reach the top)

--del.icio.us popular: programming, webdesign, startups, design, tools, software, web2.0, css, reference & development, aggregated

--ReadBurner (stories that reach the top)

(And no xkcd.)

These feeds are subject to change based on their continued usefulness and your feedback. I've been tweaking them for a week or so (as you may guess from reading them).
New Laptop
I have had a desktop my whole life, but I really want to buy a laptop so I'm not relegated to working in one space. Given that I'm on a budget and I'm just starting to learn to program, what is the best "bang for my buck?"
Interesting-- I thought the obvious conclusion to draw is that there is something quite wrong with the way Wikipedia is going about things.
When I Grow Up, I Want to be Small
Wow. I can't think of anything I've spent my money on recently that has been perfect, software or otherwise.
I don't think people ever forget their dreams. They always remember them, but just move in the direction that is expected of them, and never actually implement their dreams. But they don't forget.

Something I recently realised is this - this is it! Where I live, what I am doing, who my friends are - this is my life! This is not a temporary stop while I figure out how to make millions, after which I will actually start living, no, it already started and I'm a part of it.

Waiting may take longer than I expect, so I better enjoy the wait as much as I well can. That's why I'm not giving up my life to create a startup. Rather, I'll enjoy things as they come every day, and dedicate an appropriate amount of time towards realising my dreams. If the dreams never work out, it really is not that bad, because I enjoyed the time right up until then.
I totally didn't notice the parallel until you pointed it out.

I guess Reznor may be a creative person after all, rather than just a chord slinging drone.
We use BZR for version control when we have a rep we arehappy to deploy

bzr push to a REP on the server
login over ssh on the server
bzr export REP
run the test suite on the server (last check)
cp relevant files to PROD
restart the server (FastCGI)

everything automated and sequential one failure -> process stops completely (never happened so far)
Use SVN and setup a postcommit thingy that copies the new files to your public directory whenever you do an update.
Less syntax in languages, please. The problem with the Perlish "There's more than one way to do it!" is that one ends up expending extra cycles comprehending semantic equivalence. But equivalence should be a fulcrum -- these are things leveraged to be able to reduce the effective complexity of what we're looking at. Anything that obscures the visibility of equivalence is bad on the balance.
kind of OT but one feature that seems to be missing from google that i needed this weekend is that somebody told me the name of a website.

The domain name had two words in it and I could only remember one and I could also remember what the site was about, I consider myself an expert at finding things on google but I could not find this site for the life of me

I think the site:x.com modifier needs to accept regexes of domain names instead of just the domain name so I should be able to search for "python site:* hacker *.com
How to Handle Politics at Work
The author qualifies his claims with honesty, which explains the paradox:

High-level programming can be like mathematics or music: it brings order and harmony out of chaos. [...] But I wasn't doing that kind of programming. If a maestro can make a program like a symphony, and an ordinary craftsman can at least whistle a tune, I spent all week getting a ukelele in tune - plink, plonk, plink thunk, plonk.
Git or SVN using Capistrano.

If you're deploying code, you really should be using Capistrano. Even if it is not a Rails project. It is a world of difference.
There /is/ an Apple gaming console. It's an iPod (or Phone) first, though. ;) EA and others are creating iPhone/Touch games for when the App Store launches.
Equity & Compensation: Free Wilson Sonsoni session
Isn't there a declining marginal value to the amount of sensory information available and the amount of processing you do on it?

Information and calculation beyond a certain point may simply becoming "boring."
If you have small hands, the eee pc might be nice.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...
This is an old comic and normally I'd be annoyed, but this one is an exception: Reflecting on my dreams, even if I've chosen not to pursue some of them, has greatly improved my mood on this particular day.

Do it again tomorrow? :)
So you think that Wikipedia isn't useful?
"If the AI stops wanting to be friendly, you've already lost."

Something similar is true of social media user groups.
2 week plan seems smart. Forces the issue.
I took a page from Rails and Capistrano deployment, and like the idea of versioning releases and using symbolic links. In essence, you update the latest code out of your source control system into /myapp/source, then you run a build and installation script which installs the latest copy of your code to /myapp/release-2008-05-22-114500 (timestamp), then makes a symbolic link from /myapp/current to the right version of the code. That way, if you release something broken, you can trivially roll back to a previous version. (It obviously doesn't always work for things like database schema changes.)
You've learned the message of Buddha and Pink Floyd well.
Lies told by parents do not affect children, once they grow old, they'll get to know things by themselves. Letting a child know about sex and drugs, will ruin the child's future - . If we got addicted to sex drugs or something else in the first place, there is no way that we can think, or direct our future. I certainly believe drugs take a toll on the human mind. :)
I've got an eee and a development box it is not.
I'd recommend that you look into SVN export command
Yeah I've seen this method around with CL-WHO and similar approaches. I like the fact that this is one of the many things you can do with macros / s-exprs.

However, for HTML for some reason I wanna keep this out of my code base. Artificial distinction, granted, and now my way I have "code" inside the "template" rather than the "template" inside the "code". I guess I'm just used to doing things this way. Even though I'd never hand over my HTML to an external designer or even edit it in a visual design tool I wouldn't like (with-html (:body (:head (title "Hello World" etc as my "GUI layer". I haven't quite figured out why :)

Anyway, this was fun to write and for the time being will be my preferred way of designing my web apps... ^^ thanks for stopping by though!
Are you a mac, linux or windows user?

What's your budget? A budget of < $1200 basically rules out any recent mac laptop.
You'll have a problem if updates involve more than code changes. Any database scripts or configuration changes will be left undone, potentially breaking the site.

You may choose to use a tool to run your update scripts automatically and create configuration files correctly, but you'll want to think it through in advance. A particular problem I have is that certain sensitive passwords should not exist anywhere but in the locations they are required, so even pre-created configuration files still require me to manually enter the password once installed on the server.
I think these 37signals blog posts are great!

I can't think of a single idea of theirs that I've adopted (some of them seem downright silly), but that's not the point. Their "against the grain" thinking adds a little perspective against all the corporate mind-numbing B.S. I'm so accustomed to seeing. These are people trying things out and sharing with us, not just some ivory tower "experts".

Very refreshing. Keep 'em coming.
Twitter funding not done, contrary to earlier reports
Improve form usability with auto messages
What about Intense Debate? It's a disqus alternative, although I didn't use either to such great extents that I'd know what's better.

http://www.intensedebate.com/
Firebug 1.2 beta for Firefox 3 RC 1
Hands Free Umbrella
My webserver runs Puppet and periodically pulls both the code and its own configuration from my Git repository (which I'm currently hosting on Github, but I may someday self-host).

Yes, I'm going against the grain by using Puppet instead of Capistrano. All the Rails people are probably going to crucify me, but I personally think this setup works quite well.
Would California be better run if Steve Jobs was CEO of the entire state?
How is raising money like buying a car?
Source: comment by Dharmesh Shah at http://venturehacks.com/articles/buying-a-car

1. Just like getting bank financing for a car, raise capital before you raise capital. Have some angel/seed money in before you talk to VCs.

2. “Drive It Off The Lot Price” = “What Percentage Of The Company Will I Have Once The Deal Closes and How Much Cash Do I Get”? This captures stuff like option pools, legal fees, etc.

3. Test Drive = Actually have some social time with your potential VC. If you wouldn’t want to have a drink or dinner with them, youl shouldn’t take their money.

4. Create Competition - But don’t call it an auction or a bidding (even though that’s actually what you’re trying to do). If you only have one potential investor, you don’t have a deal, you have desperation.

5. Go online - Just like watching this video is a good way to know the basics, read things like VentureHacks to learn more. [Yes, this is blatant pandering for a free coffee mug].
I think the problem is getting the user/consumer/customer to see the win-win. If you can present it successfully, you can make the sale. But the theory presented says it's a 9X problem to do so.
There are really only two: the MBP and the ThinkPad.
This is one way to do it on Windows.

Use WinKey to map win-P to project.bat.

project.bat:
rsync -Crltvz -e ssh /cygdrive/c/personal/project/ me@mydomain.com:/bigfiles/project

then I can just hit win-P to force the rsync. Runs in a couple seconds even with hundreds of files.

But my favorite if I don't need version control is to use <a href="http://www.sftpdrive.com/">sftpdrive</a> to mount the remote server as a local disk. It is $39, but is probably my favorite windows software. I've done the Samba thing and like this much better.
I've heard a ton about getclicky... seems like they are gaining traction. I will have to try them out.
Thinkpad++ I do believe some models come with linux preinstalled.

I believe thinkpad is one of the few laptops left that has what's called a stick? you know the little nub on the keyboard that you can use instead of a touch pad, and in reality it's way better than a touch pad. god I hate touch pads.

I wish I had bought a thinkpad.
So what are the alternatives? Art and Eli mentioned an open source/decentralized protocol, would anyone be willing to move to another existing service like Pownce? If no, why?
I call it the nipple. I prefer the touchpad. It's quicker and more precise.
Ask YC:  Nonprofit funding
I work for a non-profit and we are always wanting to extend ourselves and offer more innovative and useful services online. However, we run into funding a lot of our current income is just covering current expense and we have to rely on grants or making free time for most new web related initiatives. We do have campaigns to reach out to high-income supporters but a lot of them don't really understand web projects.

I was wondering if anyone had experience in raising money from technology investors or others who do understand technology and might be interested in donating to non-profit web projects. I'm just looking for any basic information or experience this community might have!
Regarding "bang for your buck" Dell's are still the best bargain for compute power. Many people (rightly so) piss all over them for bad customer support, but if you buy from the "small business" side of the site instead of the "consumer/residential" side of the site, then you get small biz customer support bundled, which anecdotally is much better.
HTML vs Flash vs Java vs Silverlight performance