skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, realistically I'm not sure if it would make a difference since GPA is such a tenuous concept to begin with. To quote Dressel, "A grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material." This quote is actually from 1956; today it would be inaccurate since most classes factor some combination of attendance, homework, and participation into the grade. (To get GPA you just average all of those together using an arbitrary weighting scheme.) That's why (IIRC) GPA only accounts for about 3% of expected future earnings.

If you really wanted to figure out the value of the SAT you would have to use a much more robust measure of cognitive development than freshman GPA. However, it doesn't look like anyone is going to undertake such a massive project anytime soon. Incidentally, Alfie Kohn has some really good stuff to say about grades in both Punished By Rewards and also in What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?

Also, I should have mentioned above that there are some meta-studies that find that degree of validity depends on the person's race, and that if you take the person's race into account the test can be useful. I have multiple objections to this though, both practical and theoretical.
Not just "easier to get at" but also "locked in so M'soft and Yahoo! can't as easily buy them."
Seems to vastly over-simplify the problem down to an alleged evil-doer that wants to destroy the world. The markets are a lot more complex than that; short-selling has value as a tool to correct excessively high prices. Correct (as in "reliable" or "indicative of actual value") prices make the market move efficiently. Efficiency isn't some abstract good, it's what makes raising capital possible. It protects buyers from buying over-inflated stocks. It increases liquidity, etc.

Of course, there is some point at which any practice can be destructive, but the problem isn't short-sales; it's abusive short sales. And there's no one evil-doer.
Mail API supports sending mail, but I don't see a way to receive mail to the app's domain... am I missing something obvious?
http://www.dailygreenproject.com

Daily Green Project offers environmental earth friendly products while donating 10% of every sale to various non-profit and eco-friendly organizations. You shop with the earth in mind, so we then take that mentality further in donations and service projects in making a difference. This will begin to positively affect people who shop online as well as those who receive donations from the 10% we donate from each sale. So the strength of Daily Green Project is threefold: giving money to something you believe in, positively effecting the environment around you, and donating to charities that help to make the world a better place for everyone.

Daily Green Project members will also be doing hands on work to help non-profit organizations like Habitat for Humanity thrive in their giving. To support this program, we will take $1 of every sale and put it in our “DGP Fund”. This fund is for us to use as if we were one of the organizations you chose to donate to.
A Windows solution, but WebLog Expert works great for us: http://www.weblogexpert.com/
bah, we can't do any NumPy on appengine!
Why Is Less Than 99.999% Uptime Acceptable?
Or an open source project to create a compatible framework... That way you could choose from many hosts :)
I like ruby as a language, but not the implementation. And as a matter of fact, matz knows and acknowledged he is not a good implementator.
Python as an extension language: Not all beer and sunshine
http://xkcd.com/353/

Now more intelligently. It is very expressive (little code says a lot) and the code is really easy to read. If you already know how to program it takes a few hours to get your feet wet and from there the "batteries included" philosophy makes it easy to start writing real python.

More technically, my favorite features in no particular order:

- list comprehensions

- functions as first are first class objects (you can pass functions around just like any other piece of data)

- functional programming tools

- indentation determines scope (some dislike this, I don't like curly braces), and this makes the code look nice

- slice notation

- powerful native data structures (lists, dictionaries, sets)

- args and *kwargs

- awesome standard library

I could probably keep going...
I think the best book for learning Perl is 'Beginning Perl', 2nd Edition by James Lee, published by Apress.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159059391X
News Flash: A Google Product Came Out of Beta
Google, the deadline for the Android Challenge is just 7 days, 1 hour, and 56 minutes away.

Couldn't you have waited a bit over a week to release this? :P
On the contrary, #perl on freenode is extraordinarily helpful.
Maybe Google could speed up the process and make the app engine framework open-source :~).
Have you ever coded in Catalyst/DBIx::Class? Pure joy.
Inside Intel's New Chip - Atom
I think you're confusing CompSci with Calculus. CompSci just has A and AB--see the list of courses at http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teacher....

It's a shame that they're discontinuing AB; it was actually pretty good when I took it.
Everytime I login for HuddleChat it says "Page you requested is invalid". Has anyone tried ussing that app?
That would be totally awesome, and you could make the case that it benefits them to have their App Engine platform become a more standardized/open framework!
well, as an individual, you can buy healthcare. for example, ehealthinsurance.com. or you could join a group that helps negotiate cheaper healthcare, like the freelancers union.

there are definitely options, you don't need to be in a large company to have health insurance. its just standard for a company to help pay part or all of your insurance costs. its a perk for working at a big company that you don't get working freelance or at a small business.
Twitter and Ubiquitous Computing
I wonder how Steve Yegge's Rhino on Rails might fit into this...

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rhino-on-rails.html

It would be super fun to play with a well-supported server-side JS framework. He mentioned open sourcing that code eventually too :)
Just got my invitation! Looks like they're opening the flood gates! Woohoo! :)
Started with Webalizer, switched to Google Analytics.

Webalizer's ok, but it's missing a bunch of features like sane user agent string parsing (to give an overview of the browsers accessing your site). It also displays most of the stats by page hits (such as country and user agent) rather than "visits" or unique IPs, which I think is a better way to group.

I've been pretty happy with Google Analytics so far - it has a ton of options for sorting and grouping data (like viewing users' paths through the links on the site) and good IP geolocation. Plus, the JavaScript tracker gives you stats on visitors' screen resolution, which can be handy. On the downside, all our data is belong to Google.
This is insane. Am I the only one having deja vu about Windows versions and locking in the 90s?

This is (potentially) a much much deeper locking to googles cloud (its not just an OS, its your hardware too !).

Of course, it seems django - like, maybe that is enough to avoid the trap?
It looks like it's not yet supported (that I can tell). I need this functionality as well, so hopefully we'll see more soon.
Apple is just absurdly, incredibly far ahead of every other pc manufacturer out there. They'll come to market with "green" laptops just when "green" is meaningful to consumers, make a huge splash about it and get an amazing amount of free press. Meanwhile Dell can't figure out which shade of gray sells best to small business buyers on the first Tuesday of the month and HP can't load enough crapware on your pc.
apachelog is a nice python module for parsing log lines from apache. it works as a great base for doing your own analysis.
http://code.google.com/p/apachelog/

It's based on this perl module:
http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/~peterhi/Apache-LogRegex

To manage log files, use cronolog

edit:
I use cronolog to break up the logfiles daily and then I run a python script (which uses apachelog to handle the nasty parsing) to create a summary dictionary of parameters from that day. For example:

{num_unique_ips:140, num_pageviews:532, ...}

I pickle that dictionary and save it as a file. So every day has a raw log file and a "summary dictionary" file. To make plots I go through the summary files and unpickle them to extract the quantities of interest.
In the situation of the former, an individual has had something
and then that has been taken away from them. In the situation of
the latter, it is a case of the child having not had something given
to them that you judge to be fundamental.

Let me see if I have your logic correct here by extending it a bit into hypothetical-land. Suppose you have blue eyes, and suppose further that the culture of the world is such that those with blue eyes are never chosen for white-collar jobs: only for lower paying blue-collar ones. There is nothing intrinsic about blue-eyed people that makes them poorer workers -- with the proper training and experience they would do equally as well as their hazel-eyed brothers and sisters; that they are never trained and chosen for the good jobs is just how the world happens to be.

This situation is morally acceptable because nothing has been forcibly taken away from them. If we were running around stealing food from the mouths of those with blue eyes, then it would be wrong because it would be violating their property. However, as they never had a good job in the first place, there is nothing wrong with a world that denies them the opportunity to aspire to one.

Do I have that right? (I'm pretty sure I do, as you can substitute "poor parents" for "blue eyes" above, and my second paragraph is a very close paraphrase of your counterargument.) If so it's an odd place for a line in the sand: Taking what you have now is morally wrong, yet arbitrarily* removing opportunities for what you may have in the future is perfectly acceptable. (* Arbitrarily as in: without regard to your capabilities or to your past choices.)

You have a very long and loud argument against government, largely on moral grounds... But I'm not talking about government, I'm talking about the morality of poverty itself, specifically in children who have no responsibility for their situation.

It is perfectly possible talk about whether their situation is just or not without invoking government: Suppose you had access to a magic button, and pressing it will -- at no cost to anyone -- give every child a fair start, where their life's success will solely be the product of the wisdom of their choices. Is there a moral imperative to press that button? Would it be wrong, in the way that theft is wrong, to turn your back on it?

If yes, then what we end up with is a debate along utilitarian lines: At what cost must we address the wrongs done to those born into poverty?

If no, well, that is where I throw the 'nasty names' around.

p.s. : A total side issue, but I don't see that taking stuff off a dead person is "stealing" from anyone. ;)
Care to elaborate?

You can't say you know someone who was "fucked" by doing something, and then not tell us what fucked them-- that's teasing!
Ask YC: Flex Vs JavaScript UI tools
There are several alternatives in JavaScript e.g.YUI/Dojo/JQuery UI/Tibco GI. Still none of them matches look and feel of Flex. Also ActionScript is very much similar to JavaScript; so there is not steep climb to do if someone plans to use Flex for UI.

What are the disadvantages of using Flex on UI side vis a vis compared to JavaScript/HTML UI.

p.s. This is for application developement and SEO is not at all my priority
Anyone else concerned with zellunit posting a link from zellunit.com? Or does that happen a lot around here? Legitimate question.
Read the first post. They had to harden Python to allow third party code to run on their network. Other languages (once hardened) are coming...
How To Be Content With Your Life in Tech
Ask HN: What sorts of theory work best in practice for you?
For a lot of the programs I develop, I find I need to break out a lot of theory just to understand what implementation strategies don't provide reliability guarantees or what are bounds on how (in)efficient any algorithm I use will wind up being. This is mostly in the context of graph based heuristics for a grab bag of different problems

How often does this happen in your favored domain, and what conceptual tools do you find most helpful?
better to let us white hats find the flaws :)

no buffer overflows or fork bombs in this sandbox baby.
Just got the invite - 12:03am Central.
It supports django templates.
#!/bin/bash

sudo awk '{print $11}' access_log | grep -v 'yourowndomain.com' | grep -v 'bloglines.com' | grep -v '"-"' | grep -v 'feedburner.com' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20
If you have $3K to spare, you can purchase Google Urchin 5/6 (Analytics was based on it) and keep all the data. As a bonus, it also analyzes log files.
I don't know about the language tests, but CS AB was pretty worthless - the are two of them, the "AB test" and the "BC test" (not to be confused with Calc, which has the "Calc A" and "Calc B" tests). CS AB mostly came down to learning basic Java flavored OOP. Most of the time is spent on Java syntax and searching for missing semicolons. The BC test actually gets into some meaningful data structures and efficiency, but is still not really worthwhile.

In general, education seems to me to have very little to do with schooling, and a lot to do with culture. Most of my "really smart" friends learned on their own or from their parents. The ones who focus on learning things in class just can't keep up with the self-motivators.
Free trial for Urchin 6?
http://www.google.com/urchin/download.html
for me (compared to php) python is easier to debug and it's easier to organize and abstract your logic.

not to mention I think there are cooler libraries out for python than for php, and it's more versatile (desktop apps, utility scripts) instead of just being web-centric
that is encouraging I guess. I was a bit worried it would be even more proprietary then it is. It looks like the main way they will lock you in is with the google apis to google services, which isn't related to them hosting your app, it seems.
Damn, am late :-)
Python is certainly the more flexible of the two languages, but if you're really familiar with PHP you may be able to write your app faster in it and get it out there faster. But there's also long-term time savings to consider as well...

I haven't really done much in Python yet unfortunately, but I've worked quite a bit in Perl, PHP and Ruby, and personally I don't find any of them mind-blowingly different from one another, syntax aside. Some have more succinct syntax for looping and other things, but no major paradigm-shift IMO (like the one from imperative to functional).

Most of the complaints against PHP (just like MySQL) are about things that were solved years ago, but continue to linger on anyway. I like to think of PHP not so much as a language though, but more as a wrapper around C with memory management and a more flexible type system. Looking at PHP that way shows why many of its inconsistencies exist (e.g., in function names). It's also of the "structure is optional" philosophy, which requires more discipline to code well in.

Anyway, I think it comes down to figuring out whether it would save time now and later to use PHP or Python.
It'll be free unless you go over the limits. The limits are high enough for most.
Although having Patrick and John was surely a huge benefit

And Phil Kast (who also wrote the News.YC bookmarklet).
Got mine.
when it went live...I got following message

Unfortunately, space is limited during Google App Engine's preview release. As we expand, we'll invite more developers, but for now you'll have to wait.

Would you like to be notified by email when space becomes available?

url wasnt working 2 hours back
I think they already did (kind of). As far as I can tell from a quick glance, this is Django on top of Google's infrastructure. But they aren't about to open-source their infrastructure.
Nearly all (good) startups start small, but lots of YC-funded startups have now raised more than Google did initially. I believe 9 have done series A rounds, and many more have done big angel rounds.
Probably not. Just sign up and you will likely get an invite an hour or so later. I was a bit late as well
Arc's goal is to be a language used by people 100 years from now, and only as a side-effect, something neat for you to build your web app in.
this is good news for heroku - Amazon will probably be interested in them
Small U.S. firms make big global sales
As someone whos only significant experience is in PHP and Python, I hope I can be of some help. I started with PHP when was 13 or so. When I was about 18, I discovered Python, and haven't looked back since.

PHP is designed primarily as a web language. As such, it's pretty simple to get it up and running which is great for new web developers. The language itself, however, is pretty bad and programming concepts beyond syntax are better left to other languages. That said, I learned a lot with PHP and I think that dealing with it's idiosyncrasies and pitfalls has made me a better programmer overall.

Python, OTOH, is a general-purpose language that has recently gained popularity as a web language. It has greater applicability, but it's a little more difficult to get up and running on a web server. It's great for a new programmer, but not necessarily a new web developer. Since you already have a bunch of experience developing web apps, this is probably a non-issue.

We can debate advantages and disadvantages of the two languages all day. In the end, everyone is different and everyone has their own preferred language. Obviously, my language of choice is Python, Paul Graham is a LISPer, and I know someone who swears by PHP, even though he's used Python and Ruby/Rails. It doesn't matter. I say go ahead and give Python a shot. The worst that will happen is that you've added another tool to your toolbox.
Developing and deploying an application on Google App Engine
fat fucking chance at present. Processes must return data within a few seconds, so unless I can take up an arbitrary amount of CPU-hours in those few seconds, there won't be an awful lot of simulation or analysis going on until the TOS changes.

Not that I expected otherwise -- there are plenty of people (like, say, my officemate) who would pay a few bucks to run a few million simulations on Google's infrastructure. (I would too, but it'd have to be a lot of nodes, since I have my own farm of client machines due to the way I arrange consulting)

I hear they are actually CPU starved these days, which quite literally boggles my mind... if Google can run out of cycles, anyone can. But that informs the current deployment and limitations if it is true.
Also, consider that Python has a lot more non-web uses that PHP does. You'll derive more benefit from Python proficiency than PHP.
Actually, the "two more weeks" attitude can hurt a lot.
Has anybody been able to put their app online?

I keep getting Application Identifier: App already exists. Even when I pick random App names. Odd.
But they aren't about to open-source their infrastructure.

Wouldn't matter if they did -- you can't open-source a bunch of contracts with trucking companies, nor would any sane company want to open-source their testing routines for the hardware they build in house to manage the mess. Parts of the infrastructure are, however, published as patents :-)

Google's operational efficiency in deploying new capacity is the crushing advantage they possess over 99.999% of the companies on the planet.
The service is completely free during the beta period, but there are ceilings on usage.

I understand these articles are written in a rush, but this is plain wrong. From Google's site, it seems pretty clear to me that this will be true out of beta:

Every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this - does this mean the tech cost of a web-based startup is now $0?
I did too, but I got an invite email about an hour later. Maybe I just got lucky.
Open Calais PHP Class (Semantic Tagging)
I don't quite understand how hyperthreading saves power. Is it better than doing OOO execution because there's less hardware required? I could imagine that instructions targeted at two virtual CPUs could be interleaved more simply and flexibly.
Looks like this will put a lot of web hosts out of business...
Why add another post? You could have commented on either of these...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157443
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157451
I'm a bit surprised you don't find any big differences between Ruby and PHP. But then again it might be that I haven't looked at PHP in the last 4 years.
Interesting that this lets apps integrate with Google user accounts. It's pretty cool, but I don't know how I'd feel about typing my Google user name and password into a site which isn't obviously owned by Google.
There's one part of the article that states:

"Instead of getting caught up on the idea of creating the perfect product, settle for an okay one."

As hackers and creators here, I think we'll have a hard time getting over that point. The suggestion to release early can sort of apply here, but the goal is to build something better and better - perpetual improvement, and settling into the mindset of "why make it perfect when I can make it cool" is probably not the best startup advice.

Still, the moral of the story is still a great take away. When doing any sort of sales, be it to customers or investors, sell the benefit, not the features. People don't don't want A/C, they want comfort.

I loved the marketing thought put into this article. It really makes it easier to get into a consumer's mind.
Running Django on Google App Engine
I can't say I ever expected those two concepts to be put together, but after reading the article I can see the connection - not sure I really agree with it though.
You should check with Netcraft's reliability rankings next time. 2 hours is an awfully long time for a "big guy".

Sure, downtime happens. Routers are upgraded and power bounced (30 seconds of downtime if the admins are good), UPS infrastructure is kept up-to-date and in working order (minutes of downtime), and server components break. The last one is possibly a lot of downtime...but hopefully MTBF works for you and the server that you keep for the average lifecycle of hosting servers (about 30 months) never fails catastrophically.
"... I wonder if this -- coupled with Django going 1.0 soon -- will create even more buzz for Django? ..."

Prophetic suggestion ~ http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/django.html & http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157648
The Challenge of Staying Focused in a Startup
I know Python's indentation is a big turn off to most people coming from another language; it seems almost invasive of the interpreter to pay attention to whitespace. But you get used to it, and it becomes quite nice.
Given your comparison of PHP and C I assume you think of an aircraft carrier as a canoe with more guns and metal and stuff. ;-)
Learn it and find out ;)

http://docs.python.org/tut/