skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Edit: re-reading the nlavezzo's comment, it really isn't as dismissive as I had initially read it, and the reply below is more because this topic really touches a nerve for me. I'm leaving it here because I don't want it un-said, but I don't want to target someone who doesn't deserve it. Sorry.

This encompasses a lot of my reaction when I first read this article a few years back, and before I spent some time volunteering with charities in the US. I was, frankly, angry. Most of the time, being poor in the US is not a matter of sheer survival (except for health care), but simply a very deep hole which is hard to climb out of. But possible, right? So why not just do it?

But these days, this reaction is what really angers me. It's still a fucking deep hole. And the psychological effect of being raised in these circumstances is what doesn't get acknowledged a lot. A lot of the time you have to be taught that it's even possible to dig out of it, let alone how. This is especially true if you were raised in poverty, by parents who were also raised in poverty, in a place where the schools are a joke and you don't know anyone who has been successful. It's very easy to simply despair in these conditions, and not even realize it might be possible for things to change, because as far as you know it's not. And while the rare person might be able to summon the willpower to escape this, I'd like to know how many people truly think they could if they had never even seen what success looked like, except on TV.

Hell, I was raised in an area which was simply rural middle class, not poor by any definition; and almost no one there could imagine that good schools, good health care, or a substantially better life were in reach. The idea of attending any private university, let alone an Ivy, was a joke. And we were luckier than 99% of the world, and knew it! For some... I simply can't imagine.

The dismissive attitude exhibited in so many tech forums towards the poor is just infuriating, both in the "lazy poor" category and the "it's not as bad as elsewhere!" type. If you're in that situation, it doesn't matter that there's someone out there worse-off. What does matter is if you were brought up to think success isn't possible, you despair of making anything better, and you've lost hope. I won't argue back and forth about "handouts" because a lot of the time that's used to be dismissive too. But making it known that it's actually possible to have a better life--that is what needs to be done.

(Tangentially, it's worth pointing out that Scalzi acknowledges the difference between being poor in the US and in the Third World, as in his followup post here: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/04/quick-followups/ .)
it can be unstable, though the new version has solved most of my problems with it.
What version should be promoted? As much as I like, use, and work on Python 3, a campaign to get distros to use 3.x would leave a lot of projects in the dust, broken and unusable, or resulting in a rushed conversion. On the other side of the coin, a campaign to promote a newer 2.x version is counterproductive to eventually getting everyone on 3.x.
I've been using the VisualSVN plugin for the past few years and have found it to be really pleasant. It's $50, but it's been well worth it for me. http://visualsvn.com/

Alternatively, it sounds like AnhkSVN has been making some great strides lately, but a bad experience with it several years back has kept me away from it. They're free, so they might be worth checking out as well. http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/
Identifying Improper Output Handling (XSS Flaws)
I think this is a majoy app that needed to be done since many years ago. I'll venture to say that 80% of php apps could fit this category.

Did you look at dabbledb ? they were in the right direction before being acquired by twitter.

Look at their intro video.... it is really good.

Made with smalltalk
Visual Studio has built in hooks for adding in source control support. It's not really MS's fault that few take advantage of this. Whenever you create a solution one option is "add to source control", it's up to your current source control extension to take and run with it if you do check that box. In Tools > Options > Source Control, you can choose your source control plugin.

With that said, I never use source control within Visual Studio. I always have good ol' bash running git off to the side. I much prefer my IDE not know nor try to do too much, it often ends up in disaster.
Google M&A Chief Says Deals Paying Off Huge
Either I don't understand, or you are mistaken. Clojure is significantly slower than Java and Scala in the shootout. Presumably Hotspot kicks in, or doesn't, more or less equivalently in all 3 cases. The dynamic languages (Clojure, Groovy, JRuby) are all slower than the statically typed languages (Java, Scala); what else would cause that?
Hopefully it survives as somehow as open source - it was a nice DSL for building a UI, and having used WPF the last few weeks, JavaFX script was much nicer to work with.
I did a little work on this a while back - an LFS system is a good place to start. I was a little ambitious though - I wanted a pure C/python system with no shells (at all - just ipython) and no command scraping - just enough to start SSH and nginx.

It's a lot of work - I think I ended up trying to write an iproute2 replacement using ctypes and quit. I wonder if anyone else would be interested...
IDEO - The Future of the Book.
Don't have kids before you're ready to and can afford to. It seems like a lot of these are related to kids.
We should note that the subsidy is just speculation at this point, inferred from their knee-jerk reaction to daeken's work.

That being said, I was just thinking that Emotiv could stand to make a lot more money by removing the subsidy(if there is one) and embracing Emokit. The existence of a FOSS SDK would lead to drastically improved sales for Emotiv, despite the(possibly) higher price. Their manufacturing seems to be saturated, however-the EPOC is significantly back-ordered.
Don't trash a layer on top of the world.
The Feynman Variations
>If you are already poor, children aren't going to make it any worse.

And yet considerable of his pain points are about not being able to cater for his child(ren)
As far as I can see the goals of most large military procurement projects, at least in the UK, are primarily political and then as status symbols for the relevant branch of the military.

What the people we put in harms way actually need to get their jobs done seems to be of relatively little importance.
State of mobile web development, part 2/3: progressive enhancement
Microsoft is launching Windows Phone 7 with a more restrictive development model than Apple.

The OS is just as locked-down as iOS, and as with Apple users are only allowed to install software from the official 'marketplace'; but Microsoft also restricts what license developers are allowed to release software under, and limits how many free applications they can offer without paying additional fees to MS.

The one advantage that Microsoft has traditionally had over Apple - the openness of their platforms - has been squandered.

Couple that with a featureset that is competitive with the first-edition iPhone, but nowhere matches current iOS and Android devices, and you have a recipe for a flop.
+1. If you use RHEL, a 'python26' package from a known good source like EPEL is the best place to get a new python that doesn't mess with your existing OS python.
Part one is here if you haven't read it yet.

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/09/state_of_mob...
Specially given his propensity for excessive self-promotion. That piece might have been written to spread his name around. Just like that dipshit in Florida who gained international recognition by threatening to burn a book.
This. Nothing in the essay says “being poor is thinking that absolutely nobody in the world is worse off than you are”.
I've never been anything near poor.
I was wondering how really hard it is to get out of poverty in today's society, and if people really wants it (i'm NOT implying that they don't want, i'm really just asking myself).

This is more for homeless-poor than just poor:
I would really like to try taking someone homeless, let him shave and dress him nicely, get him to an interview even for a shitty manual job, that'd make me feel really useful in this society, I could probably host him in small building we own in the city (no heating but still it's a shelter and it's not that cold here) UNTIL he finds something else.

"Unfortunately" I can't find any homeless guy in my city (smallish northern italy town), let alone the ones that truly wants to change their situation which i suppose are a % of the homeless people
I had started looking around, and realize there are APIs, but I was wondering if someone had looked into this previously, and perhaps could give me some pointers.
They were also told about this a while back:

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/massive-twitter-cross-site-scri...

Not quite the same flaw but very similar - caused by unescaped URLs
A bit leftfield, but...

Although it remains to be seen what will happen to languages - learn a second language (human) fluently.

I always thought that being a native English speaker put me at such an advantage compared to people from other parts of the world in business, but a lot of my peers in Western Europe are fluent in English and of course fluent in their own language, if not fluent in another as well.

If you're in the USA, it might be less of an issue (I'm in the UK), but I think it will be an increasingly important differentiator, particuarly if you work for a company which is looking to diversify overseas or is a multi-national.

It will also bring many other benefits
1. Freedom to travel lots of places (ok, you can get by on English in most places, but being fluent in either French or Spanish opens up a whole new world of places you can travel to confidently)

2. If you travel a fair bit, it just makes you a more confident person. (I haven't travelled much myself, but obviously friends etc have and those who have travelled are more confident, more outgoing and probably more likely to succeed)

3. Having being involved in work for clients overseas, although they can speak fluent English - there is kudos and also deeper understanding if you can speak their language as well.

As well as programming languages, learn a second human language, I sure as wish I had kept up some of mine. It will keep you in good stead for both business and life.
> The virtualenv/pip people seem to think so.

No. Unless those people are morons, but the guys who actually code them know they're tools for python developers, and maybe for sysadmins of python solutions. Pip and virtualenv for software using Python as a config file format? not a good idea.
This is ironic, right?

(I jest, but in-depth meta-analysis of community remains solidly, eternally and earnestly hilarious.)
"A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions" - Wikipedia

That's exactly what he did with that post. He doesn't have to convince anyone. He simply stated his principles.
There ain’t no such thing as a free service–for long
Psd2css Online adds a CSS Stylizer
One nice thing about the on-week waiting period is that it encourages at least some minimal amount of lurking before a first post. There are some non-obvious conventions on the site (such as not editorializing in a MetaFilter post or being relatively detailed in an Ask MetaFilter question) that more people would probably ignore if they could sign up and post within five minutes of joining. I know personally I spent a lot of the first week reading the site and answering AskMe questions, which I probably wouldn't have done if I could have just asked my first question right away.
Traffic problem solved
Over half a thousand researchers ventured to solve the problem of traffic in big agglomerations in a competition sponsored by TomTom and held under the patronage of the Mayor of Warsaw. The outcome? Accuracy improvement of up to 60% and an algorithm that can be used in GPS navigation devices in order to avoid traffic jams. And much more. See the summmery at http://tunedit.org/challenge/IEEE-ICDM-2010?m=summary
Chrome OS Planned for Devices Other Than Just Netbooks, Tablets
Ginzametrics (YC S10) at 30 Days
The introductory chapter to the Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe) describes this well. The sheer cost of lives among test pilots in the 40s and 50s is shocking by today's standards, but this was a generation that went through Normandy and Bataan.

That said, that doesn't explain why the aircraft of WW2 and the early Cold War took just a few years to go from drawing board to combat, in the days before advanced computer modelling, yet it took 20 years to build the Eurofighter. I suspect the lack of accountability of military contractors coupled with government collusion (jobs programs over national security) has more than a bit to do with it.
As Gaming Faces Supreme Court Case, Music Industry Defends Free Speech
Well, it's a matter of opinion, but I would define "all versions" as versions sharing a major number, i.e. code targeting 2.2 should run on anything starting with 2. As for trivial code, just look at the string operations part of the documentation and search for "new in" and "changed in". My connection is rather slow right now, to the point that the page I mentioned is still loading, so I won't look for more examples, but string processing should IMO be trivial parts of any language. Don't get me wrong, the changes have mostly been useful ones for 2.x versions, but I have been caught testing scripts on my own box that end up not working after deploying. Since then, I have been, as you say, more careful, but I feel I have a valid gripe when I expect string and io operations to be consistent across major versions without having to do a fine print and version check. :)
Oh, I fully admit that I'm not up to date with modern module language design, my answer was purely pragmatic - using static methods doesn't seem to have made my code less reusable in any way that's been significant to me, and I write large complex systems in Java. I think that making blanket statements like the OP (checked exceptions are bad, singletons are better than static methods) is a little absurd - Java is for better or worse a pragmatic language and using static methods instead of singleton objects makes my code shorter, clearer and easier to understand to mere mortals. That's a win in my book.

That said, I'm a closet programming language geek so I'll check out your references, thanks for the pointers.
Ooof, antirez, get someone to help you proofread these things because in some places they nearly make no sense.

"Stressing scalability so much put somewhat in shadow what in the 80's was one of the most interesting meters of software coolness [...]"

"Unfortunately I also think that our dude is part of the problem, since running crappy benchmarks is not going to help our pop culture."

"Apple to Apple, with the same mouth"
At the same time, if I know layoffs are coming and I'm likely to get cut, guess how much work I'll be putting into the company.
Not sure what you mean. A simple look at Vancouver reveals a modern, plastic accepting, completely automated and growing network of under and above-ground trains. Oh, and that isn't owned by the government. Could that be the issue?
People don't plan to remain poor forever. Some of them become poor after they have kids, while others hope things might improve in the future, since the life of the poor always fluctuates from bad to relatively better off.

Besides, who are you to tell someone they couldn't have children of their own just because they're poor? It's their right to conceive and adopt children, just as it's yours.

In fact, they could easily afford to feed their children and lead a happy life, wasn't it for the rest of the well off society that's making their lot worse than it is, by comparison. Being poor in a rich town is worse, both materially and psychologically, than being one of a larger poor community.
Throwing scraps down to the guys at the bottom of the ladder is to keep them from setting the house on fire. Ethically, stealing is considered a right if your situation is so bad that starving is the alternative. Don't agree with me? Consider that practically every religion on this planet reaches the same conclusion.

So while I don't think that throwing scraps to the guys at the bottom is going to be effective it still better than all the alternatives that have come before. Those tend to end up as revolutions, civil wars, or worse.
Looks good, you did a good job with it. Are you planning to sell it, use it yourself, or open source it?
I agree with you, but people who claim not to believe in moral absolutes, such as "it is wrong to steal someone's kidneys even if the law says you can," really should never protest any law, copyright or otherwise, except to say "I don't personally like that." To say "it's unjust" is to make a claim that, in their philosophy, means nothing.

Of course, as a Christian, I believe we're endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights...
So, the lack of privacy of social media is not so 1-way after all (picture Zuckerberg searching your personal info from his Dr Evil control room with government henchmen in waiting ;-). It's 2-way: anyone can peer into anyone's life. Sometimes for a good cause, sometimes not...
Google Docs is going mobile - Editing on Android — and the iPad, too
Startup Technical Debt
Let's be real though -- sometimes "shit happens." I'm not saying the majority of poor people are pure victims of circumstance, but there is also significant evidence that being poor and dealing with those struggles is permanently damaging to the human psyche. One has to look no further than an abused animal to see that this emotional baggage is a very deep part of the mind. It takes much longer to undo the damage than it does to inflict it.

You make a good point that poverty isn't something we should obsess over or try to make ourselves feel guilty about. If we are successful, we should feel good about that and have a healthy sense of empathy towards those that are less fortunate.
At the same time, I would've liked to frame it in a better way. This incarnation is largely preaching to the choir.
Obscene comments removed from Netscape 3.02 & 4.x before source release
Being truly poor is not being able to imagine anything else.

Both of my parents grew up with absolutely nothing.

My mother shared a bed with her sisters and wore nothing but hand-me-downs until she got married.

My father never had 3 meals in the same day until he joined the army.

They both tried to explain what life was like to us many times, but every story ended with, "Never mind. You just wouldn't understand."

They were so determined to escape their situations, almost every decision they made as adults was shaped by growing up with nothing. They worked hard almost every day of their lives so that none of us would ever have to experience what they went through. There was never any discussion or debate about what life would be like in our house: we were all going to finish high school, go to college, and build lives of our own. None of us has ever missed a meal or gone without anything essential.

I realize many people are just as determined as my parents were, but still don't escape poverty. There are no guarantees.

I just don't know how anyone can reverse the cycle without imagining that they can. Having no money is bad. Having no hope is worse.
if socket.gethostname() == 'your.domain.com': DEBUG = False

No.

The default setting should be False, and set True only for dev.
Wow. Compared to any job in the private sector, the process is more like an impeachment than a firing. No wonder it's so difficult to remove teachers.
This has been changed in Debian (the system vimrc no longer turns syntax or filetype on), but persists in Ubuntu.
Since the blog isn't taking comments, posting it here.

> doesn't work very well with is Python, because it preserves whitespace when it moves the code over the REPL.

If that's the only issue, it's easy to fix it. All you need to do is to replace multiple new lines with single new line.

let s:foo_text = substitute(a:text, '\n\s*\n\+', '\n', 'g') . "\n"

Here is my slightly modified slime.vim:
http://gist.github.com/589934

I have been using it on Ubuntu with vim and IPython and it seems to work fine. When I started using slime.vim for Python, I ran into whitespace issue and Jonathan(slime.vim developer) resolved it when I asked him on his blog.
http://technotales.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/like-slime-for-v...

You can search for Rahul in the comments.
Good idea, great execution.

How do you envision the site being used in the long term, and do you think there is a way to monetize it?
Twitter worms spread quickly thanks to blatant security flaw
As soon as you start auto-escaping everything, you need to introduce a dontEscapeThis() method that you can use to actually render the HTML you intended.

Having to do that would be enough to make me ditch any framework in favor of one that treats me like a grownup.
Implicit wrappers have long been an issue for this sort of optimisation, although I was pleased to read that the new JVM escape analysis feature seems to deal with that very effectively:

http://www.decodified.com/scala/2010/08/27/scala-rich-wrappi...

As other comments have noted you can generally degrade to writing near-Java code and the results will be basically the same bytecode. I'm sure there are exceptions but if you want to, you can avoid object creation. Implicit conversions are one of those cases which will not be called out as a warning or similar, though, so something to be careful of.
I get your reasoning about ASCII/TCP and it makes sense... apples to apples.

When asking for a performance benchmark, specifically about systems that are very dependent on communication protocol for performance, I think that it's more valuable to know how the best performing protocol of either side would perform.

As far as atomic vs CAS, I'd be more interested in the "right way" than the same way, so for my own interest, yes.

Re: Ratio, from your graph it appeared they were co-mingled. If each was done on their own then my point is moot.
> Perl is a more mature platform than Python, and backwards compatibility is taken more seriously.

That's a silly thing to say w/r/t Python 2.x. What makes people’s Python 2.5 code not run on Python 2.2 (or 1.x) is that new features were added in the mean time. New very shiny happy features that make life a lot easier for developers. Almost all python code continues to work from one version to the next, and it’s easy to write code that will work on all the versions from 2.2 to the present (or whatever), as long as you’re willing to avoid all the nifty stuff.

Basically by “backwards compatibility“ you mean “forward compatibility”.
Have you seen http://code.google.com/p/trimpath/wiki/JavaScriptTemplates?
Which code was explicitly broken by Python 2.6?
Correct. Ariel images show you things that are not visible to a driver or pedestrian. Much bigger privacy risk if you actually thought about it for a second...
JavaOne - Speedy Scripting: Productivity and Performance (Kawa, Clojure)
Hello, strace (an introduction to strace)
Interesting - at least two of the disadvantages are entirely self inflicted (inbred fear of inferiority, unwillingness to be inspired by people of a different race).

I'd be curious to see numbers for the jail sentencing claim. It sounds plausible, but numbers would be nice.
The site is good, idea is fresh. Just one thing, search needs more work, I will suggest you make regular search work first before going instant.
If you're at JavaOne, please note that this talk is today at 1pm, in Parc 55's Divisidero.
Intentions he's got, but I don't agree he stated his principles. Or rather, I don't think that "hacking is fun" and "you should be able to do whatever you want with something you own" are particularly compelling or rigorously declared principles.
Good work, but doesn't "Pure CSS" usually mean "CSS without JavaScript"?