skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In __update_pos, he has a series of if statements which look at the image filename to work out how far it's supposed to move[1]. This is the canonical warning sign that you should be using classes. The worst part is that he has created Ball classes - they just don't do very much: http://code.google.com/p/pygaf/source/browse/trunk/ball_obje...

[1] Update: actually not - it's just working out the image rectangle. Which means that it's not updating 'pos' and that there's another 'update_pos' hiding somewhere non-obvious.

A much cleaner way is to have something like, say, a Ball or Bullet class which knows how far it's supposed to go. Ditto for all of the canvas.create_foo classes in the second half - you should have objects which set themselves up, have update, draw and think methods and so on, inheriting from a common class.

In terms of functions, you're pretty much on the money - there's a lot of function creation for very little gain in terms of readability or (at a guess) speed. You'd be better off either queuing dictionaries or strings as arguments for function generation, or else just using threads for your AI and having one method which handles all the drawing and updating within your environment.

In addition to this, there are lots of places (__update_pos in particular) where he should be using functions (or methods) and doesn't - anywhere where there's repetition and/or common functionality, in this case updating the position of an image, really should have a function. Doubly so within large function or method bodies, like __new_population in http://code.google.com/p/pygaf/source/browse/trunk/optimizat... - "if blahblah:" followed by a huge chunk of code is just crying out to be a function.
So fork it?
Campaign Finance API, Version 3: This Time It’s Congressional
Do you really think that those people were giving that advice for selfish reasons? I'm guessing that they had good intentions, and honestly believed what they were saying.
I think the standard model also tells you that you cannot do much, no?

Well, as a matter of fact...

--- No, not true.

The "standard model" predicts a kind of randomness which is fundamentally tractable. It comes down to Gaussian versus non-Gaussian stable distribitions. A Gaussian model predicts that total market changes mostly come from day-to-day, small incremental changes - ie, a Gaussian model is equivalent to Brownian.

In stable, non-Gaussian distribution, a good percentage of total changes come from a finite number of rather large changes.

In the Gaussian model, an investor has time get out before the going gets rough. In a non-Gaussian model, that investor doesn't. The last few years have made the non-Gaussian/L2-stable/"Mandlebrotian" model much more plausible.
This is actually fairly historic considering all of the controversy that arose over the translation of the original sea scrolls. Basically almost all of the translators were members of the Catholic church, so when they discovered that the scrolls undermined their faith they just sat on them for 20+ years so no one else was allowed to read them. (With the except of John Marco Allegro, the one non-Catholic who published his work immediately and then went on to use them in his next book as evidence that Jesus was actually a psilocybin mushroom.)
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So has there always been. Peacefulness as I understand it isn't boolean.
So, what general product do you think the iPhone was based on? The Blackberry, or perhaps the Treo, since that had a touch screen?

In order to say that Apple didn't come up with the idea behind the iPod or the iPhone, you have to generalize the category to the point that it was painfully obvious to anybody even remotely aware of what's going on in the industry. MP3 players are an obvious idea to anybody who has heard of the Walkman and knows that computers can store and play music. The idea of using a tiny hard drive in one is similarly obvious. So is the idea of making a phone that can surf the web and also be an MP3 player.

When people praise Apple's ingenuity with the iPhone and iPod, they are referring to the fact that almost everything other than the most fundamental idea was revolutionary or at least clever. In other words, every aspect of the product that actually affects its success in the marketplace was invented or re-invented.
I have found the app marketplace to be mixed bag - it's somewhat of a marathon, but more of a slot machine.

You can put in the hours, but you also have to have a little luck. If your app hits, then all that work pays off, if not, then it can be very frustrating.

I have 1 big hit, 1 smaller hit, and 5 losers in the market. Some of my losers took a lot of time.

You're willing to put in the work, so I personally believe you are a step ahead.

I never had any intention of crawling - but I guess I did, so I see where you're coming from.
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FYI: "ML" as in "OCaml", not as in Machine Learning.

* disappointment sets in *

I know extremely little about OCaml, unfortunately. Anyone have any reasons I should look into it / avoid it? My next major learning task is to dive really deep into Ruby metaprogramming, which'll keep me busy for a few years, but I'm always up for adding more things to my list.
I wonder if the security concerns could be limited by opt-outable warnings on first use. Let's say you gave a malicious site access to the camera profile. Would it be sufficient for an implementer of the profile to show a dialog saying, "Click here to upload all your photos to XYZ.com"? [Or, even better, show thumbnails of the photos which would be uploaded] Is it more real for users to allow specific access at a specific time than just a blanket "ok" at install time?

Is there a way to have one's cake and eat it too?
Would you consider Linux 2.6 'bleeding edge'? I mean, they have kept the 2.4 series going. Just because some development occurs in parallel, doesn't mean the new version is 'bleeding edge'.
I'm working on a series of tutorials that teach web designers how to take their skills to the iPhone and iPad and start building native iOS apps. Each tutorial will go through the full process of designing one screen of a fictional app in Photoshop and then taking that mockup and building the interface using UIKit. Both the PSD and Xcode projects will be included and each tutorial will cost less than most computer books.
Currently working on (4) from the SCM angle. My buddy and I have been lazy bloggers, but we're still coding.

http://timunionsteve.posterous.com/
Drought increases Democracy
Climate change has a positve side
I don't use RVM, and I've got a few excuses:

RVM doesn't work with fish. Fish is the biggest innovation in command-line shells in so long, and I'd rather drop RVM than drop fish.

Also, RVM hijacked my 'cd' command, so that 'cd' wouldn't take me back to my home directory any more.

I don't like things messing with workhorse commands that I depend on - 'cd' has to work.
Job: C++ and Java developer working on development tools in the data warehouse and BI space.

Extra curricular: An AJAX site on a LAMPP stack for aiding in teaching Computer Science. Students can create exercises and answer other students exercises. Academic purposes only.

Also working on a start-up in the Rural/farming sector to help with the sharing, transparency and analysis of information.

And planning out my next venture.. something to do with a service providing templates, distribution and collection of vouchers/coupons for small and medium businesses
It makes literally zero sense unless you know something about that crash and the financial markets of the time. In which case it makes perfect sense.

The Black-Scholes model provides a recipe for creating synthetic options that will (under the assumption of known volatility) act just like real ones. Which is convenient because you can create synthetic versions of options that people want to have but which are not traded. Leading up to the '87 market crash, lots and lots of these synthetic options were created. Then came the crash.

People can debate endlessly about why the crash started. But once it did, there is no question that trading algorithms attempted to close out trades that were necessary to maintain synthetic options. These large trades attempted to execute in markets that had seized up, and made the market much, much worse. The result contributed greatly to the crash, and caused the synthetic options to fail to work as promised. (Besides, the Black-Scholes algorithm guarantees that it acts like an option through a certain amount of variation in the stock price, and not for a particular time period. The volatility of the crash demonstrated the importance of this discrepancy.)

Now do you see how the Black-Scholes model contributed to that crash?
Building / re-building in-house pages for a company, for which I'm making a lot of entertaining utility code with APIs as simple as I can manage, which I'm finding is woefully scarce in the .NET world. Studying AI for my capstone essay. Learning on the side. Trying to figure out where the f&#@^ money goes.
PHP Dark Arts: Sockets
Half of the problem was that I was looking at the wrong function (update_pos() vs __update_pos()), so all I saw was one line of code...

Anyway, thanks for elaborating!
> By the time I got my PhD, the American Physical Society announces that they estimate that 3% of my graduating class would get permanent jobs in their field.

What was that percentage at the time you started your PhD?
Trainyard express is showing #1 top free and Trainyard (full) is showing #2 for me. Trainyard is also featured #1.

I'm not much into games but curiosity got the better of me and Trainyard Express is downloading.
I disagree. I agree that Android fulfills the license requirements of open source. But it delivers few of the practical benefits that were meant to stem from the term (control of your devices/computer, the ability to modify the software you use). So in spirit it is nothing like what we would traditionally call "open source" and it is certainly nothing to brag about vis-a-vis iOS.

I see no sense of entitlement in his complaints at all. They seem reasonable based on the difference between what I might expect from an open source project and what Google actually delivers. This is rare considering I tend not to like open source software or even the basic principle of it.
We are going to have them plus some other developer favorites starting Nov. 8th.

If you have any questions, email me: noah @ appsumo
how do you save your current application? After I edit and submit, there is no link to save a local copy of the application.
I worked for a large manufacturing / consumer product company as a .NET developer and the four people on my team all had top level MSDN subscriptions. ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx )

I think the number I heard for our team, just MSDN subscriptions, was around $25000 a year.
Did you follow the "it turns out" thread a while back? Some interesting a tuff was discussed then that you may like.
Interesting... dragging it in Firefox makes it look like it's an image (the whole final graphic gets dragged), but not in other browsers that I've tried.

Is that just how FF handles block (vs inline) links? I've never noticed it before.

And good job (to the author), they look quite nice :) The post is an interesting look into more sass code than I've seen so far (not that I've looked far). Makes me want to get into it more.
What occurs to me reading this is that there's a big untapped market for super-angels in areas _outside_ of Silicon Valley. Sure, there's fewer investment opportunities (to put it mildly), but the super-angels in these areas simply don't exist, and the VCs in these areas are often buffoons.

Is this a legitimate opportunity, or would it simply not be worth the effort to find the few needles in all those haystacks?
I'm trying to get my side project launched for the November Startup Sprint thing. I'm building an app to help make life easier for people with Diabetes (my wife is a Type I): http://diabeti.ca
City with a brain
contact.ly which will use twillio, dropbox, and other services to build a more modern contact, calendar, file storage system (and for marketing to ride on the hype of other companies).
"new users (who have an extremely difficult time of getting anything noticed) and longterm posters (those who whatever they post gets noticed and promoted). Long-term this is not conducive to a healthy, growing community."

^ Digg
I went back to grad school this fall, so I'm working on programming assignments, getting ready for midterms coming up, and making progress on an Eclipse plugin for my lab. It's a great mix of work in C++, Lisp, Java, Soar, and soon Prolog, but it's keeping me busy enough that I've put off side projects for now.
The HN Toolkit userscript [1], amongst other things, shows a preview of the new submissions page to the right of the usual front page links.

[1]: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Working on ShelfLuv - adding some features that were requested from the HN crowd
Ayn Rand wrote a pre-buttal, if such a concept exists, to the Unabomber's manifesto in which she identifies the implications of the anti-reason and anti-technology ideas of the Sixties and that it would not lead to peace and love but to death and hate as manifest in a creature like Kaczynski. Read The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution and Kaczynski's manifesto and choose your side because Kaczynski is correct as quoted in The Atlantic article; most people vastly underestimate the number of his supporters.
It's their dynamic nature. Static analysis is a big pain in the ass.
Home - tandiboyz
The trend is not to upvote stories based on their title, the trend is to attract more users into the story and the inherent discussion of it. I never upvote a story I haven't read or at least skimmed over and agreed its worth other peoples time.
I loved the travel aspect of my job when I was in my 20's. I did nothing but work on the weekdays and nothing but play on the weekends (in almost any city in the country.)
This is so great! My siblings and I invented "5 Clicks to Jesus" (as I'm sure many have) during some drunken family gatherings over the past two years. I had been vowing to sit down and code it when I got some free time, but you just saved me the trouble. Hats off!

PS Have you ever thought about analyzing the wikipedia graph to make the game more interactive? (I study combinatorics.) I thought it would be fun to have the game give you feedback ("Warmer! Colder!") as you muddle through.
Job: Improvements to the ORM in our framework.

Own: Crossword generator for latin words.
Heh. In related wsj news high fossil fuel cost fail to curb gasoline car sales because you only pay one week at a time, not noticing the much higher cost in total over lifetime.
Trainyard was at $1.99 at launch and for a while after that. I figured it was a low introductory price, but not so low that I'd get careless users who wouldn't put any effort into the game and would just give it 1 star reviews, which was a bigger problem back a few months ago before Apple took out "rate-on-delete".

These days, I feel like there are less tangible disadvantages to the 99c price point, other than the fact that you make less per sale. There's still the issue that users are willing to put more effort into a product they pay more for, and will even go to further lengths to defend it, because they want to justify their purchase and their taste.

On the App Store, it all comes down to perceived risk. If a user is unsure about an app, they probably won't spend much more than 99c because they don't want to overspend on a dud. Once a user sees an app in Apple's "featured list" or has used the lite version of that app, they'll be much more willing to splurge on a higher price, because they know what they're getting.

For Trainyard, I felt that there was no longer a big difference between the $1.99 and $2.99 price points, because by the time a user arrived at the purchasing page, they already knew they wanted it.

All that being said, there is a large contingent of users that seem to only buy apps at $0.99, but most of the time, your apps won't be visible to those users. The moment I reached the top 50, I knew I would have tons of that sort of user looking at Trainyard, so I did the price drop.
I completely disagree with this guy.

Doesn't bother me at all, and I get annoyed when contact information I need is not listed.
I think he was just using it as an example that would be familiar to the audience.
My employment isn't worth mentioning.

A minesweeper implementation for Emacs: https://bitbucket.org/zck/minesweeper.el . If anyone tries it, please let me know what you think.

Also, I'm working on learning unicycling, juggling, becoming ambidextrous, and finding a project to hack on next.
Primarily awareness building and PR for my recently launched startup - http://www.happybuy.com/

One good lesson thats recently been reinforced as part of this is that launching is really only the start of the journey. Gaining traction and building a business once the product is available takes as much if not more work.
Tonight: Upgrading MySQL server on AWS.
run it from an ssh, background it and disown it

Ack! GNU screen will change your life.

[ http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnuScreen ]
Combining 2 Android apps, "Speeding Ticket" and "Speed Limit"
Luck and Fates Role in Success
What four startups did Max Levchin found prior to Paypal?
I'm a bit loopy after a long day juggling work-from-home and caring for a sick child.

I think it would be fun to see:

- number of foot notes written (total and per essay)

- word cloud(s)

- number of words written (total, per essay)

- word lengths

there were a couple of others but I'm too tired to remember them now.
Literally right now? I'm coaching a friend of mine (high school sophomore) in assisting another friend (college freshman) in his CS homework. I'm a college junior, never written Java before this :)
Not reachable at 23.37 EST
> Everyone is a criminal and is subject to arrest at any time.

That's hardly new. Remember when everyone from union organizers to groups of civil rights protesters could be arrested and charged with vagrancy? Probably not, because that was before you were born; the US courts cracked down on that sort of thing in the 60s and 70s. It may seem like America is getting crazy dystopian, but people in your parents' and grandparents' generations saw things that would make your hair curl.
Awesome, thanks! I love hearing about people who invented the game - people tell me all the time, "hey, I invented that!" :-) I certainly did not invent the game, but I'm determined to make something awesome out of it.
His binary adder is awesome too: http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/
what makes it more modern?
I'm working on the new high score tool for http://playtomic.com/ since I moved the leaderboards over to mongodb/mongohq.com the other day.
> I don't really think they want to mess with Japan, US and Europe at the same time about that issue.

I agree. It wouldn't be in China's interest to piss off everyone else, particularly all at the same time. As you say, China probably just wants to do more value-added stuff.
I'm selling the majority of my stuff and prepping my condo for sale. I expect my employer to go out of business soon and I have to leave the USA once that happens (my work permit is non-transferable and the green card application didn't work out).
Noting the date of this submission in the title would be helpful to readers.
Same here, also couchdb and a few other apps I've found that were available as APK and o'reilly books.
Freshman CS.

"job": homework, trying to improve my grades.
personal: implementation of MIDAS [1].

[1] http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/midas.html
For those who don't understand the Black-Scholes references, here is a quick explanation.

What Black and Scholes proved in their famous paper is that if you start with a portfolio containing a certain fraction of money and stock, and rebalance the portfolio constantly as the stock price moves according to certain rules, then after a fixed amount of fluctuation in the stock price you will be left with either pure stock or pure money, depending on the eventual price of the stock. In short, this portfolio acts exactly like an option. And therefore the price of an option should match the price of the portfolio. If it doesn't match, then you can buy one and sell the other to get free money until they do match.

This is fine, but in the real world we trade options based on a fixed period of time, not a fixed amount of variation in the stock. The answer to this which finance uses is to estimate the volatility of the stock. Given known volatility, and a known time period, you can tell how much variation there is, and then use the Black-Scholes model to price options.

Mandelbrot's critique of this is that volatility itself is not constant. Therefore you can't really predict when the Black-Scholes portfolio will expire. In particular the model systemically underestimates the likelihood of extreme events. When this catches all of finance off guard, the result is frequently some sort of crisis.
And neither does "pro abortion choice". Basically everyone involved prefers oversimplification to accuracy, which is one of the top two reasons why the "debate" can't go anywhere.
The reason the USA can't do the second part is that China actually does have weapons of mass destruction.
RepRap Project
Git inside Git
That wasn't my argument at all.
My argument was pointing out the common problems with a bid based approach. In almost every locale, bid-based contracts are a bigger source of government spending waste than inflated government employee salaries!
I hope you submitted a bug against python-cheetah...?

(This kind of thing is what I signed up for when I installed Arch.)
Neat experiment, but it looks like they have a way to go. In order for this to be really effective, they will need to identify what needs to be transliterated within the context, and do a combination of transliteration and translation.

For instance, the first image has the Filyovsky Park metro station (Филёвский парк -- not too hard for you to recognize if you know a few Greek letters). Transliterated into Chinese, it became 菲列夫斯基帕尔克 -- "fei-lie-fu-si-ji-pa-er-ke" (apparently they transliterated the word "park").

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the Google Translate team starts to work with this.
Any reason this was downvoted? Typically in the 40-60/per hour range depending upon the work, if your objection was to me not posting this.