skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A sensible reply, Daniel, but I'm on the other side of the fence. I think hard objects and explosives scanning technology is going to be standard in the future. We've only got primitive and crude versions right now, but I think this sort of scanning technology is the answer to the problem. With good enough technology and alerts system, security at all high risk venues could proceed automatically with a few people monitoring outputs and response teams nearby.

Implemented as well as it could be, this seems like it'll be less intrusive than the current way of lining up for metal detectors. Also, less expensive and less invasive. From the comments, I guess I'm in the minority here, but I'm for this kind of technology.
Fair about Clojure, I was assuming Common Lisp. Point 3 I consider not much net change, though, as the same is true of Python, and pretty much every other competitive language.
At learnection I had a board of my uncle and another VC guy, who were helpful but I didn't use them at all to the degree I should have. Other than that, no real advisors/mentors.

For Zoofoo, Email client, Yahoo store thing, Namesdatabase & Kangadoo I worked with the same partner. The "Wall" (never launched) was with a different partner. And nth Club was with another partner. The rest is/was solo.
> just change .com to .co.uk and you'll get the same page on Amazon UK

This works for other locales as well, like Amazon.ca. However it will not work for Kindle ebooks.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe the bit twiddling trick would work on floating point representations, would it?
US Government Site Hosted on Amazon EC2
cperciva, there are actually two common scams involving charities and paypal. The first is the risk of people donating to fake charities as you mentioned. The second is the risk of criminals using stolen credit cards to make donations to charities; in other words, testing to see if the stolen credit card information is usable. The headaches caused to charities are very painful, prolonged and costly (charge backs).

There are other similar and/or related scams involving "charities" (both legitimate and fake) but I feel this is the wrong place to discuss them.

The trouble the OP has with "donations" to an open source project tend to be very common with paypal and they often result in a false-positive in the paypal "fraud detection" (risk management) analysis. I know of one example where a prominent OpenBSD developer needed some fast hardware. He does full builds of the entire "ports" tree (i.e. all software ported to OpenBSD), so buying powerful (read: expenseive) hardware was really needed. One person stepped up with a donation/gift of the needed funds, and sent the payment through paypal...

The first thing that happened is the donor got a call from paypal because the donation triggered a false-positive in their "fraud detection" analysis. It might seem like an annoyance, but this is actually a good thing.

The next thing that happened is, the donor got a call from the credit card department of his bank, mainly because he used only a credit card with paypal. Yep, there was another false-positive alert on the fraud detection system of his bank.

During these two false-positives, the paypaly account of the open source developer receiving the funds was locked. In this case, the mistaken lock was resolved very quickly due to the two separate phone calls, but it was still a pain in the ass.

There is hope. The way to get around the paypal "requirement" of an open source project needing to be a vetted and registered 501(3)(c) organization in the US (or equivalent in other countries) is to have the payments classified as a "gift" rather than a "donation" in paypal parlance.
"Renting" also has tax benefits in some jurisdictions since you can write off the full rent instead of depreciation over time.
Thx--I may do that (remove it). I was alpha testing it for a friend.

Update: removed.
Factor supposedly has macros; from my cursory knowledge of the language I could see them being as convenient as Lisp.
Python HTML Parsing benchmarks (using Arc90's Readability)
Are you violating any copyright laws because you're using Amazon's images?
I can bang out work much faster, more professionally and downright efficiently than I ever could at 20. I'm 39 and I can, and do, run rings around kids right out of college.

I always have an answer for people who try to act like putting in long hours makes them a better employee, or more dedicated, "if you can't get your work done, give it to me and I'll do it, and still leave on time every day. Then they can cut your salary and give half of it to me."
It can also save you a 2a.m. phone call.

Some simple, "If you see message X, it means Y, so you should do Z. If that doesn't work _then_ call me."

Your debug-level messages can be esoteric but, make your error-level messages reflect what's broken from the perspective of the SA, who hasn't seen your source code.
I'd like to take the opportunity to plug my own appengine-magic library: http://github.com/gcv/appengine-magic

It abstracts away almost all the boilerplate App Engine for Java requires, and makes Lispy, interactive, REPL-based development trivial to set up for App Engine. I have not yet finished making Clojure wrappers for all of App Engine's services, but datastore, memcache, and user authentication are already available.

I'll be giving a talk about it at the NYC Clojure Users Group meeting this coming Wednesday (October 20th).
Looks like you were startupping since 2000. Except NamesDatabase there haven't been any other exits. So how did you feed yourself until then? I am guessing your later projects were taken care by that exit.
So who does check the ID?

If it's not the super trained government appointed guardians of our safety - the clerk at the departure gate ?

Surely there should also be a TSA agent standing behind each pilot throughout the flight if they can't be sure of the pilots identity?
Correct, it would not. (I'm assuming IEEE floats)
Sinatra?

But before implementing a 100% pure, view-free server, consider that delivering an HTML view for each resource can be handy for testing and administrative tasks. It's the exact same information one might get from JSON or XML or YAML, but it's still nice sometimes to be able to fire upa standard browser window and do stuff on the server directly.
Ask HN: Please review my startup Video Marketplace
Dear HN community!

Please help with reviewing project I am currently working on: http://videolla.com Its a marketplace for paid videos - think tutorials, screencasts, independent films etc. Anything you would like to buy iTunes, but cant. We developed a simple embeddable youtube-like player that allows to sell/buy quickly right within blogs. Mention "NH-rocks" as promo code on signup - I will switch you to $10 plan if you will ever want to use it for real(it also have free pays as you go plan). videolla.com/tour is 70 secs video tour

Thank you!
How old are you? I used to be unable to take short naps and would always feel terrible on waking. Sometime in my late 20s-early 30s this completely changed and I have since grown to love the 15-20 minute nap. Likely there was some kind of shift in brain chemistry; it would be interesting to know what it was.
Wow, great list! My biggest take away was all of the times he says "perhaps I should have stuck with it". You never know where a project can go unless you stick with it.

Back to hacking at my project...
Clickable http://videolla.com

http://videolla.com/tour
Instead we reward people for being smart -- for learning more and more details about trivial libraries that will be deprecated in ten years' time.

Having memorized a lot of facts is not what I think of when I hear someone described as smart. I think of the ability to find and synthesize new information. Memorizing facts is often a waste of time that could have been spent working out their implications and deriving new knowledge.
"I'm pretty sure we can open source all of our code, and it will be business as usual."

For everyone working on something trivial, which is most people, you're right. I don't think it would really work for important complex algorithms, etc., i.e., Google is not going to open source their search algorithm.

It sounds like you're saying that Google, after coming up with their version of search, should've just opened it up to the world, because everyone has the "right" to know what they're up to. Do you think they'd be in the same position today if they'd done that?
You do NOT have to be a 501(c)3 to accept donations with Paypal. Just register as a regular business and use the donate button. What may have happened here is that you registered with PayPal as a "non-profit" to get the lower transaction fees, but that's NO-NO if you are not a 501(c)3.

Supporting documentation:
https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...
Click on the pricing tab, then open up the "Standard Rates" section at the bottom. The relevant quote on this page about the donate button is this: "If you are not a 501(c)(3), you can still accept donations with our standard pricing."
Interesting, but this isn't the first time any major government site or webapp has been hosted externally.
Enterprise HTML
Recognition only works when it’s authentic
From a purely aesthetic standpoint, IPv6 addresses look nasty.

IP addresses are supposed to be used by machines, not humans (considering network administrators are not humans). Humans should deal with domain names.

They vary in length,

IPv4 addresses also do. strlen("10.1.2.4") == 8; strlen("192.168.123.234") == 15.

The physical addresses don't vary in either case. IPv4 is always 32 bit, IPv6 is always 128 bits.

they're hard to remember,

As an administrator, you can make the particular addresses that you need to remember simple. The last 80 bits of the address are entirely yours, and the first 48 bits are fixed for your entire organisation. With IPv4 you end up having multiple very different /24s dispersed through your organisation, and having to fit your important servers in whatever free address space you can find.

So, for example, you know that 2001:db8:1245::/48 is the prefix for your organisation. It is only one you have to remember. Then you can set your DNS to 2001:db8:1245::1, your web server to 2001:db8:1245::2, etc... Not hard to remember.

they're a little bit harder to parse and print than v4s

This is the sort of problem that you have to solve only once (and it was already solved), then use that function/library wherever you want. See inet_ntop(3) and getnameinfo(3) (as a bonus, these functions work identically to both IPv4 and IPv6, the application becomes agnostic to the address class being used).
I don't fully agree, you can have a dropdown menu that works for both hover and click. If it's a desktop user he gets the menu for the hover otherwise he has to click/touch whatever.

The twitter incident had nothing to do with the overall message.
1776: "Then it's agreed, gentlemen, in order to secure our rights as a free people, we will risk embarrassment, imprisonment, expropriation, bankruptcy, bodily harm, exile and hanging."

2010: "Of course I'll waive my rights. I don't want to miss my connecting flight."
This, incidentally, is the major problem I have with Google's latest Image Search interface. Most of the screen is tiled with hover-sensitive areas, and it's not safe to leave the mouse pointer where it is while you browse the images because something will expand into the foreground, blocking out other stuff nearby.

I think it's called Midas Touch Syndrome.
I wish I had a good reason for ditching the public inbox. I don't. The proximate cause IIRC was I moved my server and had a disk failure. But that really isn't an excuse because I'm sure I had backups.

It actually got traffic too. I don't know what to say other than that it didn't feel like a startup at the time.

nth Club isn't a bad idea -- it just requires sales work that I don't want to do. I thought my partner (who is into golf) would be doing it, but that just has turned out not to be the case.
Yup, and when I pointed out a few weeks/months ago that I keep a "PayPal-only bank account" and regularly sweep funds out of that account to another they can't touch, people said I was being paranoid!

Well just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they can't get you!
I follow this maxim: Small actions should have small consequences. The best UI should allow for arbitrarily small actions that result in arbitrarily small consequences (e.g. the scroll bar, multitouch, drag/drop). We live in a continuous universe† and this makes for the most natural and easily discoverable interface (i.e. the user can tentatively test things).

†At least it appears that way on the macro level.
With floating point, the first 9 bits are sign and exponent. You could thus check with:

int ispoweroftwo(float x) {
return !(*(int*)(&x) << 9);
}

This only works for exact powers of two, though. It's possible to get something that's really close that will fail this.
Did anyone else think "don't you just check if it's on the positive real axis?"
WarSquare - Foursquare Powered War Game (built in 48 hours)
If you want to read up on PageRank and other search algorithms, this book: http://www.amazon.com/Googles-PageRank-Beyond-Science-Rankin... goes into more detail.

Larry joked that Sergei just wanted to see how cool he was by measuring how many people were linking to him.
You don't need to pay import duty on books imported into the UK because they're exempt (and zero-rated for VAT). It's solely a matter of shipping costs.
Why Japanese love robots that are feared by Americans
As the author gets, this kind of napping isn't just about sleep or even rest. It's intimately related to creativity.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

(Gaston Bachelard)
مسلسل سيلا الحلقة 38
1990: a junior programmer who doesn't know any better:

IF NOT(MOD(X,2)) THEN...

2000: a senior programmer, using OP's slick bit flipping approach:

def power_of_2?(number)
number != 0 && number & (number - 1) == 0
end

2010: either a master or a lazy programmer, having pity on whoever has to maintain it:

if !(mod(x,2)) then ...

Now that clock speeds are so much faster, can we all just go back to being lazy and focus on the real problem at hand?

[EDIT: Oops, I confused "power of 2" with "divisible by 2", rendering my entire comment stupid and pointless. But I won't delete it because so much is hanging below it already. This is a perfect example of what we hackers can never allow ourselves to do: wave our hands at the trees because we're so busy looking at the forest. I promise I won't do this again, at least until tomorrow. Now I'm going to close my browser and get back to work :-) ]
Trick-or-Treat: 13 Brilliant Eye-Candy Visualizations of Halloween
A mix of tradition, paganism and lots of fun, both for youngsters and adults. That’s Halloween, a date which also inspires designers from all over the world. Illustrations, icons, wallpapers, themes and so many other stuff, always spreading out in this time of the year, so, I decided to bring today a rounds-up of some cool infographics about Halloween.
Haskell on Javascript: The UHC compiler
For startups: How and when to give a media "exclusive"
You can get a pretty big, random chunk of the public timeline with statuses/firehose or statuses/sample

http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api_methods
> Or people will just stop using planes.

Unfortunate and ironic from a safety POV since driving is much more dangerous than flying on commercial flights.
Do people really expect interviewees to write tests during interviews? I've never seen that from either side of interviewing.
OO code, on the other hand, is rarely reused.

This is true in situations where OO is done wrong. OO is supposed to help us implement types, and you can do this portably. You can write bad functions, too, that have too much dependency on things specific to your framework. This is not a matter of FP vs OOP but of writing portable code, which neither approach forces you to do.

FP vs OOP is not a real conflict anyway. The two are compatible.
For almost all typical programming jobs out there, isn't asking a question such as this like hiring someone to flip burgers and expecting them to demonstrate how to butcher a cow during the interview?
If it's a significant amount of money you should probably talk to a layer of some kind before you "give up waiting :)"

However, chances are this is one of those wait 7 years from the event then close the acount and keep the money.
Campaign to raise awareness for Salman Khan, educator to the world
Ask HN: Twitter Vs RSS?
I find it that every blog actually is now connected with some twitter account which gets updated each time there is something new. So following a twitter account seems easier than subscribing RSS feeds. Is it just me or RSS is really dead ?
This article seems to be following the "Microsoft frameworks are for simple programmers" theme that I've been seeing more and more of here on Hacker News.

I don't know if that's bad or good since I've never really had to work in a .NET environment but I would hate for this article to be the embers of a forthcoming flame war.
The article is decent, but the HN-bait title is a work of art.
Europe Hot Married Chat Rooms
The reason the McDonalds signs lost the "billions served" isn't because corporate just stopped caring. McDonalds, like most successful mega corporations, doesn't do anything without numbers and studies to back it up.

What happened is the marketing message changed. No longer does McDonalds need to prove that they are legitimate fast food vendor by telling everyone "hey - we've sold a lot of hamburgers!". If anything, they're now trying to gloss over the notion that they stamp out 2 million of these uninspired little blobs every hour.

The consumer climate has changed and now "billions served" doesn't sound nearly as impressive as "we handmade this one for you".
The worst (for me) current example of hover abuse comes from Google Images.

Try searching for something on Google Images, then click the search field and try to refine your query. Didn't work? Well, that's because you moved the mouse away from search field (so that it doesn't cover what you type), but Google then accepts hovering over an image as a sign that now you want to use your keyboard(?) to move through images.

The problem is that (probably) about 95% of screen are images that activate this (keyboard) mode on hover. So, to do a second search on Google Images you have to be extremely careful about where you park your mouse before searching.
Great show! Worth the trip. Everyone was great but the most memorable speakers for me were Groupon, imeem, and airbnb. If anyone is wondering if they should fly out to see it, DO IT. So much better than watching streams.

thanks ycom

~mrC from Cambridge, MA
In several circles I have heard "smart" defined as knowing facts and "intelligent" defined as a measure of being able to learn. Hence, you can be intelligent but not smart and smart but not intelligent. I think we want a balance of the two with a lean towards intelligence. It is all semantics anyway, but you seemed to take issue with the specific term "smart", and this is probably what he meant.
HP has two /8 blocks. Many people who at one point owned Class A blocks have given them back over the years. What's crazy, though is that the US Department of Defense still owns eleven /8 blocks.
mod(x,2) will tell you that it's even, not that it's a power of two.
9. INSERT MACRO RANT HERE

Macros are the main reason I decided to create Adder, a Lisp-on-Python with minimal impedance mismatch. Unfortunately, the first macro-heavy program I wrote turned out to be really slow, because macros engage the compiler, which, of course, is in Python.

When I first tried it, it took something like 50s at 2.4GHz, virtually all of which was the compiler. (The compiler runs at load time; obviously, saving the compiled code for the next run would help.) I got it down to...let me try it now...7s at 3GHz, but that's still too slow for a 200-line program.

If anybody's interested, the code's on Github [1]. To see the macro-heavy example, look at samples/html.+, which is an HTML generator. The framework takes 169 lines; the sample page starts at line 171. To see the output, run:

./adder.py samples/html.+

[1] http://github.com/metageek/adder

(Edit: it requires Python 3.x.)
True, and there are many things we all are ignorant about.

However, we act to inform ourselves while this guy asks for a bribe.
The state of Common Lisp libraries has gotten a LOT better in the last five years.

And a lot (perhaps equally LOT) better still in the last couple weeks, with Quicklisp. Not that I've tried it yet :)
I don't get why this is so annoying. Would you prefer to get random, untargeted banners for home mortgage refinancing or mesothelioma lawsuits?

At least if you allow them to target you, there's an outside chance that once in a while an ad is exactly what you're looking for.
"Make payment easier" is a bad idea. The difficulty is designed to make it easy to track. Making it easier makes money harder to track, which is a Bad Thing.
Yes but with Paypal between fees for changing currency (2.5%) and other fees it quickly adds up...

Plus, you have to convert to a business account (additionally to having to send a lot of different documents to prove your identity) if the amount is more than 2800$ and then it's 3.5% fee.

So yes internally in the US paypal is cheap but once you go cross border it's expensive and it's a headache
So what if Google doest it
Funny site! Is the tide turning on Google?
So in the 15 years they started using statistical methods for understanding language, googles ability to understand language is at about an 8 year olds level. So it is learning about half as fast as a human child. Not bad and an excellent opportunity to predict it's growth rate for the future.

If this is a linear learning curve, in another 15 years it should just start to be able to 'understand' the nuances of Shakespeare and Ulysses among others.
Yes, but we must solve the problems correctly. The question is whether a number is a power of two, not divisible by 2.
Expecting the bit arithmetic would be for some positions. But asking a programmer to design and implement an extremely basic algorithm doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Was mchammer really at Startup school 2010?
Ron Conway made a brief joke about mchammer coming and dancing on stage. Anyone know if he was serious? Was mchammer really there?
I don't think a function named 'power_of_2?' can be any less clear about what it does regardless of its implementation. There are ways we can keep the different forces happily balanced (intellectual gratification, clarity, well-placed verbosity and maintainability)
It can, but that was not its intended purpose. That is, you can figure out a way to map your task to a dependency hierarchy and save it to a Makefile, but why do that when you could use something designed for that?