skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The top answer is an excellent demonstration of the central limit theorem and why the question's assumption that rand() and rand() * rand() are "equally random" is wrong.

The central limit theorem is one of the most initially surprising and fascinating things in all of math. Please support the central limit theorem by learning about it on Wikipedia, or wherever fine theorems are discussed.

Edit to add: If you haven't learned about this enough to know that implementing systems that depend on randomness, like cryptographic systems, is really, really difficult and error-prone, please just use a standard library instead.

It's the most counter-intuitive thing in the world that rand() * rand() is less secure than rand(); shouldn't it be twice as unpredictable? But it's not. Cryptography and related fields are rife with counter-intuitive gotchas.
Ironically, I once printed an email with one of those on it (I actually needed to) and that stupid graphic logo is what caused it to print on two pages (otherwise it would only have been one page).
Firstly, the likelihood alone that any given CSS designer who follows up on your project actually understands the framework is not high. These frameworks make a very small subset of CSS people write. Certainly not a large enough subset for you to make that assumption by any means.

Secondly, this is a poor analogy because we're talking about 3 CSS classes- by no means a "wheel". I am curious as to what circumstances you would really save any measurable time using a CSS framework.
Yep, that's the paper. I'll try to read the book when I find some time (thankfully, "get more data" is good enough for now).

Thanks again for your help.
As a non-coder, it's tough to evaluate how competent a coder may be. For that reason, here's my answer to your second question: recommendations.

I personally recruit straight from the universities. Then again, I don't go the traditional route of posting on job boards. How do I know if the candidates are qualified? Anybody can draft a nice resume!

I go straight to the professors. Who knows each student better than their own professors?

You describe what you're looking for, and they'll point you in the right direction!

-adam
A 5-year-old librarian.
It is no longer a problem, unless you count Paypal requiring that he retains at least 5% of total transactions in his account (until the start of 2011) as being a problem. It should also be noted that many people have filed charge back requests for Minecraft through Paypal and their credit card companies, Minecraft has virtually no customer service, so when Paypal see sudden huge volumes of payments and lots of charge back requests it seems mighty suspicious. It seems to me like part of an investigation would be waiting to see if any more complaints come through and something bad is discovered.
I think the whole thing will end up revolving around whether or not giving paypal access to your bank account gives them carte-blanche to remove and / or deposit money at their whim.

I would argue that they don't, that they need an explicit instruction from me to do so, they will probably argue that they don't need any permission at all, that the permission once granted stays granted until explicitly revoked.
Is this couch in a separate room somewhere? To me a couch is usually put in a communal area that is usually populated.

If thats the case it would be both hard to have a nap and also really quite creepy.
This is my question as well. I do wish I could ctrl-click or mousewheel-click to open up a new tab with the link. Also an indication that "e-book" is an amazon link to the kindle version. I (naively, of course) thought there were free e-book links there! Like for SICP or the like. (Totally fine there's not, I readily acknowledge it was a naive hope :)
Sure I might consider that at some point! Yet another OSS project for me to maintain though... :P
Paypal will let you do daily withdrawals. The magic word is "auto sweep". You have to call and ask for it.

I have used Paypal successfully for fourish years now. Not to ignore your experience, but if I listened to my buddies on the day after they were dumped I'd swear off speaking to young ladies, too.

BrainTree is not viable at your scale.
End hover abuse now
An approximation of some of Norvig's recent thoughts (Feb 2010):

"(1) It just turned out that when Google was started, the core programmers were C++ programmers and they were very effective. Part of it is a little bit of culture. (2) Early Lisp programmers (Erann Gat) at Google actually noticed that other programmers were equally or more productive. It has more to do with the programmer; we're getting to the point where language choice is less important (as opposed to 20 years ago). (3) Lisp is optimized for a single programmer or a small group of programmers doing exploratory work... If I want to make a change in a weekend I'd rather do it in Lisp than anything else, but by the time you get up to hundreds of programers making changes are not a language problem but a social one. (4) Libraries."

Paraphrased from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE7k0_9k0VA#t=03m20s.
Really, Gene Simmons? Intimations of prison rape as a justification for correct behavior, in 2010? Why is this still OK?
It's one of the constraints of the competition unfortunately. They give us a "stock" Linode box that we can't upgrade (didn't know this ahead of time or I would've spent time on caching etc.).
I think most people switching from Lisp to Python do so for practical reasons. I suspect Peter Norvig probably wouldn't use as much Python if he didn't have to adapt to the Google culture.

I think Python is a surprisingly nice language in many ways. It falls into the category of being an "acceptable Lisp". But I think most Lispers still prefer the real thing and only use Python when they need to be pragmatic.
Google seems to attack this problem from a variety of expensive angles [1], [2]. But in the end, the simplest thing sounds best to me [3].

[1] http://glassbox-design.com/2009/google-goes-aquatic-photos-i...

[2] http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/17/another-reason-to-want-a-...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/6ceia/google_naps_phot...
(I wrote the classifier4j summariser, as outlined here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803020)

In your version you said you weren't happy with the HTML extractor. It's pretty hard to generalize that part, but one technique I found useful was having a flag that told the program to ignore all text until it found the first <p> tag.

In my testing, that removed ~90% of navigation text (although I note you are only looking in <p> tags. I had a flag for that too, but found it was unnecessary most of the time).

Also, I found regular expressions weren't terrible for sentence boundary detection. OTOH, there was nothing like NLTK for Java when I wrote it anyway.
He went on to explain that I should forge a certificate of some kind and “tender a particular payment” to “expedite the process”. Seriously?

Seriously. When a functionary in the host country gives you solution, doesn't matter if it's unpalatable or moral, you take it. He's looking for a payment. That's it.

You could get a letter of recommendation from Bishop Desmond Tutu and it wouldn't change a thing unless there was some money in that envelope.

Unfortunately, greasing palms is how a lot of work gets done in the world. And all the internet indignation won't change that, especially in a country with limited access.

Hell, even the US Passport Office does the same. You can either wait 8-10 weeks for a new one...or pay $100 and it will be ready in 2.
It isn't mine, it's DanielBMarkham's site.
How Porn Can Hijack Your Brain
I have a lot of semantic analysis and NLP stuff I'd like to do with this project. OTS is largely a crutch to get the project out the door until I can get something more scalable in place (if I ever get the chance!). :)
If it is simple I would love to see the examples from http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html#example__worki... converted to spawn.
"good at implementing" would include building for scale, wouldn't it?
Seems like a hammock might be a good alternative.
Why reinvent <table> ?
True. I thought about EgyptAir and Aeroflot cases too. Correct me if I'm wrong, but both planes didn't have FBW flight envelope protection either? That might have prevented pilot/child from upsetting planes attitude irrecoverably.

And EgyptAir co-pilot actually tried to overcome captain and recover till the end.

But I think those cases neither validate nor invalidate the need to screen the pilots?

Certainly they validate the case to have co-pilots.
That reminds me of a cool story, in Norvig's talk about Python...

When he finished Peter [Norvig] took questions and to my surprise called first on the rumpled old guy who had wandered in just before the talk began and eased himself into a chair just across the aisle from me and a few rows up.

This guy had wild white hair and a scraggly white beard and looked hopelessly lost as if he had gotten separated from the tour group and wandered in mostly to rest his feet and just a little to see what we were all up to. My first thought was that he would be terribly disappointed by our bizarre topic and my second thought was that he would be about the right age, Stanford is just down the road, I think he is still at Stanford -- could it be?

"Yes, John?" Peter said.

I won't pretend to remember Lisp inventor John McCarthy's exact words which is odd because there were only about ten but he simply asked if Python could gracefully manipulate Python code as data.

"No, John, it can't," said Peter and nothing more, graciously assenting to the professor's critique, and McCarthy said no more though Peter waited a moment to see if he would and in the silence a thousand words were said.

http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/2008/02/ooh-ooh-my-turn-wh...
Has anyone used WePay for collecting donations? I was considering it as an option for a project I was working on and I was wondering if anyone had first hand experience using it in comparison to PayPal...
From the paper-

Third, these results are strongly indicative of
a predictive correlation between measurements of the public
mood states from Twitter feeds, but offer no information on
the causative mechanisms that may connect public mood states
with DJIA values in this manner.
Designers: How to Get Hired
Hey it would be nice to add a discussions/comments page. Of course we can have the discussions here on HN but the site will keep it active for much more time.
My impression is that this is a recent thing. I remember about one year ago youku & tudou were very 'copyright-friendly'. PPStream is still quite good, but it uses a windows-only client.
Facebook flash games
> w/o destroying concurrency guarantees

Pods will provide more than that since you can provide concurrency guarantees with locks only. However, Pods should additionally help with:

1. Separation of mutation logic and value policy with the Pod handling the underlying juggling
2. Lock order acquisition guarantees

There is more to it than this, but stay tuned for Rich's upcoming talk at the Clojure Conj. :-)
More often than not he can. But there were successful cases of other crew subduing him and recovering the plane.

Anyway, the fact that pilot is in full command of the plane doesn't mean that he should be able to bring onboard whatever he desires, does it?
I don't know of any Lisp programmer who thinks Python in an acceptable Lisp. In fact, there are some things about Python that are completely unacceptable as far as a Lisp goes: (1) crippled lambda, (2) no easy way to pass chunks of code around, etc.... Obviously not having macros is a given in anything but Lisp. Ruby (because of blocks) is far more of an acceptable Lisp.
The strange thing is the URL is the onclick handler on an anchor link. If you're doing to track outbound analytics, Google has information on how to do this in a better way http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

PS. I do like the site.
I tried writing an extensive Common Lisp vs. Python paper (yes, I have seen all of the existing ones), but it got too big and out of hand. One of interesting developments in Python recently are decorators, which allow some interesting metaprogramming. This can do some things that Lisp macros are used for. It's still not Lisp macros, but it;s picking off the low-hanging fruit, which helps Python coders a lot.
Viva Chile They Left No Man Behind.
Anyone who boards a plane as a pilot, or co-pilot, has pretty much charte blanche.
Also, babies can understand a lot before they're able to compose language.

My son told his first joke before he could form sentences. He was about 10 months old; I was getting him dressed, lying on the changing table. "OK, give me your hand." He lifted up one hand so I could put it into the sleeve. "And now your other hand." He got this sly grin and lifted his foot.
Common Security Mistakes in Web Apps
There are several 'internet only' banks, or phone only banks. You have a similar amount of recourse with those.
A link for the lazy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
The search engine has also begun to understand which words are synonyms for others.

I was delighted the day I noticed it knew that "regexp" and "regex" were synonyms for "regular expression".
I'm a Clojure guy that just wrote my first Pylons app. Here's my impression:

1. Python doesn't suck. I was able to mix FP & OOP approaches to get to my goal fairly quickly.

2. iPython was fun to use, helped out a lot, but it's not SLIME.

3. Guido has an excellent goal with making code readable, and significant white space is not a bad choice. However, I find being able to analyze active data structures in a Clojure namespace to be a superior way to learn about a system.

4. Python's libraries are pretty good, and it's already been written. As a first impression, Python libs are much better to use than Clojure wrapped java libs. I'm going to look into porting SQLAlachemy to Clojure, it rocks.

5. Paster has a ton of functionality. I'd like to see a similar Clojure tool, maybe Lien can evolve into that.

6. I would like to see more FP constructs natively available in Python.

7. __method__ is an interesting convention. You can have an object implement the right method, and your object works with Python syntax. However, I find it to be a poor man's version of Clojure's protocols (Full Disclojure, I have a conflict of interests here).

8. Decorators are an interesting way to do functional composition, but I prefer comp and monads. Way more versatile.

9. INSERT MACRO RANT HERE

That's all I've got for now. I'm sure I forgot something.

SFD

edit: grammar & spelling
CSS frameworks are especially useful when you're using Sass & Compass (compass-style.org) because you can completely bypass having to add all these ugly and tedious class names to your HTML. Instead you can make a few mixins out of the framework's code and stick them right into your css. Your HTML & CSS will be semantically cleaner and easier to maintain if you want to make changes in the future.
And this was the scene that hooked me on the movie. It was the first time I have seen the field properly portrayed in cinema. The energy, mindset, and faithfulness to the technical details. It gave me that fire-in-the-belly feeling just watching it.
Honestly, it's really not that difficult to set up a merchant account. The only drawback (from my perspective) is the monthly fee.
The most interesting consequence of operating in china is simply the massive scaling ability required of even the simplest of websites. I expect some interesting technologies to come out of china in the next few years because of this.
Do you mean you can do daily withdrawals even if you're not using your own name as the donation recipient, but rather the name of your website?
"And you’re being a conservationist this way. Our precious digital resources will be preserved. Countless bits will be saved. This is one small step for a sustainable Internet."

The author should take a look at the header that come attached to each email message, with its dozens of lines: From,To, Date, Delivery, DKIM, DomainKey, Spam status/score/etc , MIME, Reply-To, Subject, Encoding, etc.
IIRC, HP is still sitting on three /8 networks - one from HP, Compaq, and DEC.
And you're probably just setting yourself up to get robbed, anyway, by some offshore crook - who'd be hard to go after once they took your money, because they likely know all about offshore shell company games and tangled layers of ownership.

Really, wait until the company has enough money that it can get dependable advice and representation.
Red Hat no longer requires a CLA for contributions to Spacewalk. We realized it was a bad policy:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/spacewalk-devel/2010-August/...
I'm still flummoxed that people give PayPal access to their bank account.

I give access to a credit card, knowing that I'll only be liable for $50, but nothing more.
I appreciate the sentiment, and generally think it's a really great idea and gesture, but personally, when I nap, I end up feeling 10x worse when I wake up than when I started. I can rarely think of a time when I've taken a nap and not regretted it.

But that doesn't mean I wouldn't encourage companies to do this.
I meant to write "w/o destroying concurrency guarantees and w/o adding undue complexity". With Pods you don't need explicit locking from what I understand, right?
What do you think about India?
This exact thing happened to me... I used pledgie + paypal to accept donations to help a friend out in Peru who's home had been devasted by flooding. Paypal froze my account, customer service wouldn't tell me what was up, only that I had to EMAIL the "Compliance Department" which doesn't do phone calls. The compliance department told me I needed to provide the paperwork to prove my non-profit status, which of course I could not do. I sent my friend the amount donated out of my own pocket since the money was locked down in paypal. After 3 months of emailing back and forth I finally got nasty with them and threatened all sorts of lawsuits etc etc. While they haven't reinstated my account they finally allowed me to withdrawl the money. That account is basically in a permanent restricted status and unusable.

PayPal is the new mafia.
Everyone Wants To Be a Special Snowflake
Ann Arbor, proud home of the University of Michigan, techbrewery.org, a2newtech.org, a2geeks.org, ARBSEC.org, etc. And Zingermans (accurately described by tptacek as a culinary "force of nature")!

Scio Security is solving the most important problem in computer security today - the explosion in online account theft and transaction fraud driven by phishing and crimeware.

We're an Ann Arbor startup founded by Arbor Networks [1], Barracuda Networks [2], and Zattoo [3] founders and alumni, backed by True Ventures [4]. Other stuff we'll take blame for: Google's first Android remote kill, dsniff, Linux NFSv4, OpenSSH (man ssh :-), public breaks of the world's leading firewall, IDS, anti-virus, virtualization, and state censorship (!) products, returning tptacek to the Midwest in '01 :-)

Right now it's just three of us with $1M to pit against the international cybercrime syndicates of the world. We're looking for a frontend hacker with web/mobile UI/UX chops and deep design/brand thinking to be our fourth, and always happy to meet excellent app and backend folks.

We'd love to hear from you at jobs@sciosecurity.com - or ping dugsong or jonoberheide on freenode/Twitter/FB...

[1] $100M+ revenue before we sold it this year :-)
[2] biggest content security appliance vendor by volume, with airport ads out the wazoo
[3] 0.5 -> 5M+ subscribers in 18 months
[4] 3rd top-ranked on TheFunded, investors in Wordpress, Urban Airship, Puppet Labs, Meebo, etc.
Look for personal blogs. Doesn't really matter if thy post once a month or once a day, as long as the quality of what they post is good and they seem knowledgeable. Take a look in their Twitter stream, it can speak for a developer lots of times (though don't use it as your only metric!).
Top JS Talks from 2010
Any chance we might see the draft? :-)
It occurs to me that if you have a big company, probably the best way to "spend money for the benefit of human kind" is supporting a research lab in this style. I think this beats even having a foundation like Bill Gates. (By the way, Gates does both things...)
But of course, nothing in Java forces you to use state and side effects.

Just because you aren't forced doesn't mean the language doesn't encourage particular styles based on the tools available.

If a library is designed with the "create object, set initial properties, call methods that alter the properties, retrieve the new properties" paradigm in mind where everything has its own custom structure, then wrapping the whole process in a function that returns standard abstract data structures (lists, hashes, sets) is going to be extra work. Valuable work, perhaps, but many programmers are not going to bother. On the other hand, if the library is designed with "pass arguments, return abstract data structure" then writing other functions in a similar manner will be natural.
I had the exact same experience. BTW, it only costs $250 to become a 501c3. That is my goal at wikiSPEEDIa.org
Exactly, it seems a lot of people don't understand what Paypal is. They're a high risk business, if you tried to open a bank account with an email address and name you'd be sent on your way, but with Paypal you can. This makes fraud a huge issue for them, so it's entirely reasonable for them to be locking accounts when something vaguely suspicious happens. Paypal shouldn't be treated like a bank (even if they're registered as one here in Europe) because they're not.

If they get even a whiff of fraud or a scam then they're sure as hell going to investigate, because if it goes wrong and it is fraud who has to pick up the bill? Paypal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry
Five Ways to Write Magnificent Copy
Ann Arbor, MI: proud home of the University of Michigan, techbrewery.org, a2newtech.org, a2geeks.org, ARBSEC.org, etc. And Zingermans (accurately described by tptacek as a culinary "force of nature")!

Scio Security is solving the most important problem in computer security today - the explosion in online account theft and transaction fraud driven by phishing and crimeware.

We're an Ann Arbor startup founded by Arbor Networks [1], Barracuda Networks [2], and Zattoo [3] founders and alumni, backed by True Ventures [4]. Other stuff we'll take blame for: public breaks of the world's leading firewall, IDS, anti-virus, virtualization, and state censorship (!) products; Google's first Android remote kill; dsniff; Linux NFSv4; OpenSSH (man ssh :-); returning tptacek to the Midwest in '01 :-)

Right now it's just three of us with $1M to pit against the international cybercrime syndicates of the world. We're looking for a frontend hacker with web/mobile UI/UX chops and deep design/brand thinking to be our fourth, and always happy to meet excellent app and backend folks.

We'd love to hear from you at jobs@sciosecurity.com - or ping dugsong or jonoberheide on freenode/Twitter/FB...

[1] $100M+ revenue before we sold it this year :-)

[2] biggest content security appliance vendor by volume, with airport ads out the wazoo

[3] 0.5 -> 5M+ subscribers in 18 months

[4] 3rd top-ranked on TheFunded, investors in Wordpress, Urban Airship, Puppet Labs, Meebo, etc.
What black magic does this website perform to read and modify cookies from other domains? I thought this mass reading and editing of cookies was explicitly not possible.
I agree, that would be great. But generally you'd just leave the REPL running in a terminal window for as long as the machine was up (in a screen session perhaps).
i for one will be investing heavily in tila tequila