skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just an FYI. Panama City is a city like all other cities in any developed country. Most of the provinces are equivalent to "towns". If you do move to somewhere in Panama that does not qualify for this description, you're basically living in a real rainforest LOST style. With the amount of bugs you get in a rainforest, I'd regret not taking the scholarship if that's the case :)
Disabling Javascript (or using NoScript if you want to be fancy) goes a long way towards making some bandwidth-heavy sites more manageable.
I didn't realize until now how valuable comedy can be not only to entertain but to keep things real. Watching him makes me feel like there is still a boy out there with guts to shout the emperor has no clothes. Making fun of journalists doing a bad job, doing stupid or even harmful things serves to keep them in check. At least those with a shred of self consciousness and decency - not the contract killers. The killers at least get some public humiliation - not that it gets to them that much.

I don't watch Jon Stewart to make me laugh. I enjoy his show because he uses funny as a weapon. Like the kid in Kick-Ass trying to be a superhero. Jon fights injustice with the only weapon he has - his wits and charms. The things he points at are funny (or make me cry) - not the gags so much.

Jon and his writers and fake correspondents are doing what they do best - make jokes - incidentally they also make them at the expense of those who need them most - who need to be put to their place once in a while.
pfSense RRD graph for last 6 months: http://i.imgur.com/NhTyw.png

Looks like it's ~10.7 GB down and ~5.95 GB up on average per day.

Definitely give Opera Turbo a shot, I use it all the time when accessing the web over tethered 3G and it speeds things up so much.
Language Wars (2006)
It wasn't supposed to be. I was being sarcastic. Guess sarcasm doesn't translate well in the interwebs.
It seems to me that one of the main benefits of desktop apps is that they are tightly coupled to the platform. Great cross-platform apps are very much the exception.

So my vote goes to web for cross-platform while heavily optimizing everything else (everything client-side, at least) for the one platform it natively runs on. I don't see great user experience coming through a different route.

If you do need native capabilities client-side, hybrid apps that embed a UI built using web technologies are a potential option sometimes, too.
Amazingly, a killer app of OSes is possible
Did you see him interview Jim Cramer? You can't tell me that was scripted, and it was a moment of pure journalistic brilliance in my opinion.
I think you mean non-transitive. But yes.
May I suggest using the W3C geolocation API to get the user's location and pre-populate that? It's Simple to get the Coordinates, and then you can probably use Google's geocode API to get the address.

I just tried to use this while traveling and I don't really know my address.
(founder here). We have some more ideas on how to better pair founders and at least make sure people don't make stupid mistakes. That would be an improvement for many first-time founders, maybe not good enough for the experiences HNers, but they can manage on their own usually :-)
I love the delayed delivery feature. My friend works as a personal banker, and often has to stay late calling on prospect lists* (which had a conversion rate of near 5% - it was really a waste of time). When he was done he was supposed to email the branch manager with the results of the night (appointments, sales, etc.). He liked the OT, but most of the time he already had his appointments and sales met, so I suggested the delayed delivery feature - send the email at 7:30 with your results, get the OT, but don't stay late.
What could they do, though? Make PowerPoint Viewer (with a few editing features) and sell it for, what, $2.99? That seems like a tough sell against $9.99 Keynote, though it could have some limited success. Still really not where I want to be on this platform if I'm used to dominating the office suite market with huge profits.
the headline's a bit absurd; the idea that Microsoft desperately needs anything is ridiculous. when you have an installed user base and a cash reserve equivalent to the population and treasury of a small nation, "desperate" is just not the word.

the irony of this headline is that if Microsoft were truly desperate, it'd be because they'd shrank to a fraction of their former size, in which case, they'd also be flexible enough to become relevant again.
Shameless plug: Djangy.com fixes all of these problems. We're focusing on customer service + all of the other things that suck about app engine.

In private beta now, but if you're in need of something better than appengine right NOW, email me and we can get you in.
ThatHigh.com - pun intended!
Yeah, but Amazon wants to make the Kindle enormously useful to go to their web site and buy books from them.
I've been doing python and ruby full time for the past 8 years. In that time I can count on one hand the number of bugs which got into production because of a lack of static typing. The gain in productivity from using dynamic languages in that time far far exceeds the cost of those few bugs.
GDC, I'm assuming? I figured that's why there were way more volunteers than the conference could possibly have required.
How to Implement 80/20 Rule on Your Web Properties
No, Jean Brouwers -- he was a legend in the CAD space at the time.
I snuck into a bunch of concerts
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dncp1/iama_guy_who_snu...
This is an incredible story. But I think it's important for everyone to remember the context of who this hero is.

He manages the F22 fighter jet program at Boeing. That means that he's in charge of building gigantic killing machines that are only built so that they can be used to kill or threaten to kill human beings.

This man did an incredible thing on the road and I'm not trying to diminish that. But he's not a 100% good person: he works with weapons fully knowing that his work has probably resulted in many deaths of innocent people.

Edit: Hey downvoters, I'm being totally serious here. Please reply to me and we can have a discussion; downvoting my opinions silently (because you disagree? or you think I'm trolling? or you don't like what I'm saying?) is rude and not good for the community.
What was Dr. Watson's original name?
oh yes they do, in delhi.
It is depressing that he is a game changer.

Not because of the quality of his show and the fact that he has writers. Him having stupid gags is perfectly fine. Having writers watch the gazillion shows on TiVo with him and deciding what is the funniest thing that happened today - this makes the show great.

What depresses me is the sad state of the media. It takes a Jon Stewart, a simple, smart, sincere comic, to show how poor they are doing their job as journalists. He gives a voice to the people who watch the occasional news report and think - WTF! - why is Obama's daughters school menu a part of the news?! There are two wars and half the budget used to pay for them - borrowed money. People getting swept by hurricanes, toxic oil spills - and the politicians and media making it worse - not better. The media should at least show the ineptitude and bad decisions for everyone to see - not what Paris Hilton had for breakfast in jail.
1) It's much cheaper protect yourself from nuclear war and meteors while staying on the Earth (e.g. digging down) than move to the Moon.
Moving to Mars/Venus is even worse than Moon.

2) If you want to "insure" our civilization from disappearance -- focus on developing smart machines that can travel anywhere and carry our civilization accomplishments to other places.
Sending people to other planets/asteroids is extremely inefficient in comparison with other options.
Don't kid yourself. You were called into those meetings because, like at many companies, there was a promise of time in return for extra time put in but, like at many companies, that promise was never intended to go both ways.

The first meeting was because you dared to utilize their promise and get some time in return.

The second meeting was because their usual course of action in such first meetings backfired on them and you were in the room to get brought back into line (specifically, back onto salary.)

You didn't mention quitting in response or forcing them to give you a raise in acknowledgment of your efforts. Did you?
Excuse me, UCSC students in the 1970's. Those interested can read more here: http://physics.ucsc.edu/people/eudaemons/eudaemons.html
I'll further focus on one point in the post: The author took it as a given that the code with short column names was "less readable". Why? Surely he wasn't repeating the literal field names again and again in the code?

In the last DB-intensive project I worked on, we used constants in the code that had to deal with column names. This was extremely useful when changing our database schema -- no names to hunt down and change, just change the name in the one place it was used in the code.

In this case, this method gives you both a readable name in your code and a short name to repeat in the DB.

Just a thought.
Thanks dudes!

What I have done is disable images in chrome then use the ad block extension. Let me see long this my last purchase will last.
Necessity, three years ago. A pitfall on the way to breaking free.
Alright, a few ideas of mine though are really just about learning things for me. Here's one though that I really wanted to work on, but got bogged down in exactly how to go about doing it.

I started work on a fully extensible browser. My idea was to create a bare minimum browser, then extend that with plugins created in a scripting language like LUA. The browser would only run with the plugins the user selected, so someone could use a browser that only had features they wanted and used. This was also in response to perceived bloat in current modern browsers. This was a rather large undertaking, and it never got beyond a simple browser with basic cookie management.
That sounds like a lot of bandwidth if you're not downloading any videos. Is there any chance there are background services (that you know of or that may have been installed by other software) that might be doing a lot of send/receive that you're not aware of?
Tell people you have a bold vision of the future. And that you're planning the launch of a company to make it happen.

(btw, if you don't have a bold vision of the future start thinking harder)
Evolution of Apache’s websites
The value of education goes beyond landing one a job. Simply having well-educated citizens is of value to society -- especially in a representative democracy, where our level of education has a direct impact on how wisely we choose our own leaders.

I would happily pay triple my current taxes to live in a country where President Palin was not even a remote possibility.
I have seen so many sites related to finding a cofounder. In my opinion, there's an oversupply of them.

I know a lot of people looking for a cofounder but most of them are non-engineers.

My guess is a lot of these sites may have a lot of seekers but very few actually find one. It's a like a dating site where it's mostly men.
ihackernews is probably the most visited site on my iphone. nice work.
"Python is fast enough for our site and allows us to produce maintainable features in record times, with a minimum of developers," said Cuong Do, Software Architect, YouTube.com.

"Python enabled us to create EVE Online, a massive multiplayer game, in record time. The EVE Online server cluster runs over 50,000 simultaneous players in a shared space simulation, most of which is created in Python. The flexibilities of Python have enabled us to quickly improve the game experience based on player feedback" said Hilmar Veigar Petursson of CCP Games.

So, yeah, you're completely wrong on all counts.
And if you think multicore is the only way to do multiprocessing, you should probably go back to Operating Systems 101, or study the actual reasons why Python is or is not good for multiprocessing. The correct answer would have been the GIL and multiprocessing limited only to blocking IO calls.

At any rate, if you had actually used this for a real scaling problem, you would have realized that you spend 95% of your time waiting for IO on most web processes, so the choice of language is almost irrelevant so long as RAM usage doesn't get exceedingly high.
The Eudaemons and their Roulette-beating Shoe Computers
My university, for a while, had a mailing list to which everyone forwarded events that happened to serve food. If you worked it right, and were a sufficiently desperate postgrad, you could eat for free for most of the quarter.
When I was in 8th grade I was really into security and decided to try my luck at hacking into the teachers terminals and downloading the bimestrial exams into a floppy. I got all the exams but one. Erased my tracks and went on my way passing all the exams (as did the rest of the class)... The day before the last one, I decided to try again, but I got booted out of the system before erasing my tracks and got caught with the floppy when I tried to leave the school.

Funny thing is that the biology test had to be remade and the teacher made it really difficult as it had pissed her off. Most people did mediocrely (though I think only the class dumbo failed), but my parents made me study biology all that day to make sure I was punished. I got an A.

Also I was supposed to get expelled for my breach, rather than that, I got extra credits if I spent a week in the summer helping secure their network, and I didn't have to take any computer classes (which consisted of "hey lets do html!") the rest of that year.
The Peanut Butter Cookie and the Lungs of Doom
Indeed! The interesting thing is, due to overwhelming requests there was a selection process for the volunteers where you'd basically defend why you're a good choice for this.
The discussion is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820891
Generally I will use lists for fast and loose vectors, in unoptimized code, and tuples for more firmly "typed" data, or performance enhancements.

I don't need more and I don't need less: the two seem well-balanced for me.

As someone who abhorred Perl, Ruby looks a little frightening. Python looks and feels clean, especially for blocks of data.

In OO though, self.whatever appears more frequently than I'd like.
"Anyone else leave a time bomb or easter egg?"

Years ago I had a client who promised me thousands of dollars to develop a website. At first he tried to convince me to work in exchange for a percentage of the company, but when I refused he said he would pay me cash.

I built the site but never trusted him to pay me so I included a "delete script" that would erase all the code on every html page of the website when a set of three unique parameters were passed to a specific page of the site in a URL.

When I was nearly finished with the site he suddenly called to tell me he was on a plane to meet investors and needed me to upload the site to his live server "immediately" so he could do a demo in a few hours. I uploaded it just as he asked, and then he seemed to become invisible or unavailable for more than a week. Hmmm ...

After many unsuccessful attempts trying to get him to respond to my calls and emails I finally decided to trigger my delete code. He called within the hour to ask what I might have done to "his" website.

I told him he does not own the website because it was still mine until he paid for it. He claimed that I had agreed to wprk in exchange for a percentage of the company, and I laughed.

Eventually he asked if I had a copy of the website that I could send him if he paid me, and an hour after I said "yes" the full amount appeared in my bank account.

I sent him new copies of the html files (without my delete script) and thankfully I never heard from that dishonest unethical opportunistic client ever again.

Lesson learned: Never trust a programming client to do what he promises, even when it is in writing.

From that point on I have always asked my clients to prepay for my programming labor. Most of them complain at first, but I give them a discount when they prepay, and that's usually enough to convince them to trust me to do what I say I will do -- instead of me trusting them to pay me later.

When they learn that I'm honest and always send a refund when they overpay, they never complain about my payment system again ... but they really appreciate the price break I give them when they prepay.
Google says Street View cars got e-mail, passwords
> I would like to hear what you really think.

I think this war is unjust and unnecessary. US troops are nowhere near as evil as Nazis were, however, as the Iraqis themselves that commit crimes under US supervision are no match to the German counterparts in my extreme A.

Extreme B is evidently false. Trading a dictatorship for an invasion followed by chaos and civil war is not exactly a choice Iraqis would have made. Right now, I would oppose the withdraw of troops. Not before schools and hospitals are built, not before universal secular education and healthcare, from cradle to grave, are instituted and then about 20 years so that nobody will be willing to give up what they have grown up with. In the meantime, building a fair and competent set of laws and an enforcement system to match them. Then you may retreat and be sure that place will not collapse into an insane theocracy.
FREE SHIPPING (just pay $79 per year)
Emacs.. META-F and META-B do just that. And META-D removes the entire word. Replace CTRL for META and you do one character instead of one word.

That mapping alone makes learning Emacs bindings worth it. Most editors can be configured to honor them.
"The algorithms tend to hold me pretty far from view, with a karma score of 30 something."

There are no algorithms that care about total karma.
Because it's still missing features that might seem essential if you decided what was essential a priori instead of empirically.
"Sales tax or 'Sales and Use tax 'SUT' is the responsibility of the customer not the vendor."

Wouldn't that imply that a vendor could just not charge sales tax and not be fined for it? Which doesn't seem right.
It seems that with Google owning Adwords, it may put them in a situation where their most profitable option would be to link to these aggregator sites to collect more ad impressions and clicks.
That's really very incredible. I started implementing it in clojure, but I node is really well suited for this. Thank you for sharing the code!
WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil
SWIX focuses on social media metrics... http://www.swixhq.com
One third of iPad users have never downloaded an app
Looking for quick advice on an Echeck / ACH processing.
Sorry, I am not sure where else to ask. I am going to be doing mostly payment processing, so I will need to be doing direct payments into people's accounts.

I have procrastinated in this part of the process, but I would really like to be able to send payments by Dec 1. Only a couple dozen a month at first, we'll see how it grows.

Looking for something with flexible integration, this project is in python if that matters. We will also be accepting infrequent medium sized deposits.
I haven't kept up with VS since it also doesn't apply to my target platform, when you say that is changing do you mean it /has/ changed in the latest version, or that it will be changing soon?
From observation, FU money is unlikely. There is probably an inverse correlation between the likelihood of FU money and the likelihood of multiple funding rounds.
Tips on giving a big speech
> if Americans did indeed know "the truth", we would already be at war with half of the middle east and possibly Russia

That's a pretty big claim. Elaborate? What's this big truth? Not that America could possibly win such a war..

> assuming that the American public has an aversion to war is a dangerous one

I'd wager that the American public would have quite a healthy aversion to total war against a serious opponent, should they ever experience it. Adventures to these pathetic third world countries don't count. The day America invades a country with ICBMs is the day an awful lot of US citizens become a lot less hawkish.
Couldn't it just be that you suck at writing PHP?
Chinh nha
chinh nha
"Not to understate his heroism, but had this gone horribly wrong he'd probably be a Darwin award candidate."

It's not heroic if the stakes aren't high.
Back when they first started the "Buy a large popcorn and get unlimited refills" thing at the movie theater, I would simply save my bag from previous movies, wipe them down and bring them back the next time.

Unfortunately, they changed it to "1 free refill" and then even amended "Same day only" to the promotion. So I stopped doing it at that point.

I don't mind hacking the system if I can figure out a way to technically follow all the rules.
Well Red Hat have suffered from thousands and thousands of such bugs. Don't believe me? Check for yourself:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Abugzilla.redhat.com+...

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Abugzilla.redhat.com+...

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Abugzilla.redhat.com+...

(There are many more searches of this type you can do).
If you really do want to be a professional game programmer then I'd recommend biting the bullet and starting with C. It's a fundamental requirement for programmer at any game studio, and it's absolutely the closest interface you can get to the low-level workings of a machine without resorting to assembly. Learning about the heap, pointers, arrays, addresses and offsets isn't particularly fun, but neither is it particularly hard. I would be far more likely to employ a junior or intern with a solid understanding of these concepts, than someone with a fancy python graphics demo but who couldn't implement strlen()

That said, if you do want to dip your toe in the water and figure out if programming is for you, I'd really disagree with the suggestion of using Python as your language, particularly if your intention is to later focus on C/C++. Python is great, but its structure and constructs do not map particularly well to those languages. A better first step would C# (native on Windows, Mono on other platforms). In most ways its syntax is virtually identical to C++ and shares the same project and compile/run concepts. If you are using Windows, you'll also be using a best in class debugger and the same environment as you would in C/C++.
Putting a Price on Professors
I think it does!

You probably know that an asterisk stands in for a single word in a query, but if you add more asterisks then it stands in for more words. However, there's not a one-to-one correspondence between asterisks and words skipped. A "few" asterisks means skip a "few" words, and more asterisks means the words can be farther apart. So you can search for foo NEAR bar with something like foo * bar.

At least, that was my understanding, but I can't seem to find that spelled out anywhere online after a quick search just now, so I could be way off.
Right on man. Lead by example. A good product can be conceptualized, planned, and built anywhere. If you do something cool, people will pay attention.
I used 4.8 gigs down, 7.3 up, in the last 9.5 hours.

If I wanted to reduce bandwidth I guess I'd get netflix so some bandwidth goes via the mail.

Reducing bandwidth to 7 GB a month sounds extremely painful. Bye streams, videos, most images, torrents, even pandora.
My faculty even allow people to attend its courses as a regular student for some money (not much, ~35 Big Macs).

But of course, you need to be close to a university with decent linear algebra lectures, have enough time and so on. That's harder.
ELIZA!
I think that saying 'Oh the irony' in a 'sarcastic' comment is far too meta to be understood in almost any context.