skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you think it would have been better if they'd gone to a 64-bit format instead of 128-bit?
How to deconstruct almost anything
Get Instant Site Updates With Prowl [WORDPRESS]
Great work guys! Phusion Passenger has been allowing me to easily deploy rails apps to Apache for years in a reliable and manageable way. Especially with capistrano. It's very reliable software, and great documentation!
Low prices sending out wrong signals, price-thresholds and attracting pathological customers are surely important concerns which I have to think more about.

Thanks for your insight, Patrick.

// By the way, I had requested Patrick to share his thoughts and he was quick post to them here. Though I thanked him by mail and up-voted his answer at once, just wanted to mention a word here, about his quick response.
It's like pulling a fake gun near a cop. You can't be honest without looking honest.
> Obviously not having macros is a given in anything but Lisp

At least these languages (that I know of) have macros:

http://boo.codehaus.org
http://nemerle.org
http://www.perl6.org
Just a tip for those who are looking for a US-based alternative. I have just done a study of various payment processors here for our startup (http://commerce.exorbyte.com). While PayPal may appear cheap with their low flat fees on all cards, their monthly fees, transaction fees, etc. end up costing you.

My conclusion was that there are much better rates and better service with the company that provides us already our accounting software (Intuit - QuickBooks Pro). Their rates are about a third of what Paypal asked in terms of monthly subscriptions, even lower if you are referred by Intuit Pro Advisor (just say you are if you know one - or look for one in their online public DB).

I trust much more a company that provides more than just payment services than one that does that and only relies on payment fees to enrich itself.
Good luck,
Dan
Plantar Fasciitis Surgery - A patient's experience
Anything to say about MetaPython here, Dan?
The Great Deflation: Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened
Cool project, would be really nice to have celsius support though.
thanks contacted him.
Free freight is often on offer, but the real issue is that you don't need to pay import duty.
I have to agree with this one. I went round and round, with a (top of the industry) UX designer on a project we where working on. All of the profiles where called out to pop up a user summary when the user hovered over the profile thumb. While it was still usable it is annoying, especially for persons with disability (one of my UX specializations) screen readers like JAWS. I had to develop an entire library to trick JAWS into reading the site correctly because of these things. To me, if a user wants to see a summary of the profile, they can click, then provide an extender to show the full profile. They wanted to reserve the click for taking them to the profile. To me it is silly to kill usability because you think that a click is reserved for displaying the full information. When a link could be provided in the summary to accomplish the same task.
The big thing to consider is that programming, like any other art or skill, takes a lot of time to be good at. Even more time to be "great" at. Most will agree that in order to be an "expert" in something, you'll have to dedicate about 10 years to it. Obviously, you can achieve that in a shorter time-span if you work harder/longer but just keep that in the back of your mind.

That being said, a guy with a background in math hanging around Hacker News could very well easily learn programming.

I would start with general web markup: HTML & CSS, as they're (relatively) easier to pick up and much easier to teach yourself (as you can look at source code and what not).

If you want to learn programming, I say don't worry about the language that much. What you'll find is that you don't really learn too much about a specific language; rather, you will want to learn about overarching concepts in Computer Science (iteration, algorithm, conditions, objects, functions, etc). So, pick a language just knowing it's simply a tool for you to get that material.

PHP's popular. So is Ruby on Rails or Python. After learning one and excelling at it, it's not that hard to pick up the semantics of another language. I started with PHP.

----

Edit: Forgot book recommendations. For an absolute beginner, I think these books are awesome. They assume you're starting out at the very beginning and take you step-by-step, rather than just being a "language manual/catalog" like most books out there:

- PHP for the Absolute Beginner
or Python for the Absolute Beginner
What do you tell people with a bookmark for a weather forecast site in their mobile browser when they ask you why they should use your service instead?
How do fake charities impact them, exactly? Are they losing out on tax per transaction, or what?

I expect that when such organizations are uncovered, paypal gets a flood of credit card chargebacks (but can't recover the money from the "charity" because by that point the scammers have drained the accounts and moved on).

What is a "fake" charity, anyway?

The canonical example is "disaster relief" organizations which pop up after each major earthquake but just pocket the cash rather than assisting disaster victims.
Online Business Ideas: Web Hosting Review Business
Good to know that this is relevant to you, hope you get some tips/help out of it.
You'll need to disable adblock to make this work properly, otherwise about half of them fail.
I think 32 bits are fine, because I think IP addresses should be to 2020 what ethernet addresses were to 1994. We shouldn't forklift out IPv4; we should build a new city on the ruins.

More direct answer: yeah, I think 64 bits is a more reasonable addressing size, particularly if you accept the notion of second-class entities (that is to say, that the 15th heat sensor inside your toaster just might be OK with an RFC19180 private /8 address relayed through the toaster master control system's publicly routable address).
I found it odd that I needed you to provide me with a link that I expected from the OP.
I agree, I like Ruby better both for the syntax, the cleaner oo integration, and so on -- but a year and a half away from each, I can pick up the Python again a lot quicker. And python is friendly to scripting, low-level and embedded applications, which Ruby (Matz) is not interested in.
nice try google!
That works until you're sitting behind another NAT that uses the same internal IP range as the one you connect to over VPN - which is very likely since everyone uses 192.168.0.0/24.
In my experience, just starting to doze off is enough for a refresher. This may take all of 20-30 minutes in itself, I can often go to sleep at night faster than I can fall asleep during the day. Salvatore Dali was famously said to have held a spoon in his hand suspended above a metal pan and when he fell asleep the spoon would drop and wake him with its sound. Just lying down for a period with eyes shut and little external stimulus is a great refresher for me. Finding the time/place to do this is the hardest part.
Freedom 45: How I plan to retire in 13 years
I also wanted to learn to program and some friends recommended Ruby and Rails. I can't tell you if it's <i>the best</i> but it definitely does have a few things going for it.

1. A robust online community. This is not to be underestimated, 98% of problems I run into are solved by a quick Google search.
2. A number of strong tutorials and books, many of which are free online. I would link to them but there are already good lists out there for the googling.
3. Fairly easy to understand. I came from literally no programming experience. I've had a number of different jobs, but none was really computer related. My last job was managing a bakery.

With all that said there are a few things I'm glad I did. First and foremost you've got to have somebody willing to take the time to help you through when you get stuck. Fortunately geeks love to geek out. If you find a friend that will geek out and explain stuff to you, buy his beer as often as possible and ask away. Second, realize that it is going take a lot longer to do what you want to do than you wish.
OECD will celebrate World Statistics Day - 20.10.2010
Ha! I tried when I created the post to no avail. Both he and I created a link at the same time, so I deleted mine.
No, you aren't parsing this correctly.

Cabanac has reproducible research that shows people losing weight on (IIRC) 2500 calories per day and NO physical activity whatsoever, because they were bed-ridden.

MGU had a research once that had people gaining weight on 1500 calories/day and losing weight on 3000 calories/day with comparable physical activity (this one included running, etc.)

The "calories in / calories out" argument is very far from science. If you trace its origins, you'll see it's not much more than a folk tale. It's about as accurate as "eat less to lose weight" in terms of being predictive.

Gary Taubes "Good Calories, Bad Calories" has all the explanations and references you could need, if that interests you.
Driven entrepreneurs are not good guys
Beware The Farting Smartphone Spyware App
You can't have a link inside the description of a post. So, I just provided it as a way of helping people get to the page quicker. That's all.
Which one has a shorter line?
Cargo Cult Science :D
The Decline of Creativity in the United States
this was a few years back... so it's quite possible that I am misremembering. I do remember that it seemed like quite a lot, and these were the days before authorize.net was willing to hold the credit card numbers for you... between those two things, I decided that at the time, paypal was a much better option.
Cha-ching of Scraping: Data Brokers Digging Up & Selling Your Digital Dirt
My buddy that is still at a company that I was with a while ago sent me an email that one of the exec sent out to all of the development teams that basically stated. This company is not here to do for you, you are here to do for the company. You should ask yourself what have I done for the company and is it enough. I was floored, much less that it was sent at all, but an IT wide email, wow just wow. It also had some tips on why your boss knows what is best, which basically summed up was because they are not technical people.
Re: Meta - Perhaps, although the talk on Daniel Pink was something that was first shown to me in a class. After seeing it, I decided to read his book on my own time.

Also, for anyone who is interested in the book, I recommend just watching the video as it sums EVERYTHING up. The book just provides slightly more evidence and explanation.
Thank you. That's awesome advice. Yes, I know it will be difficult and I shouldn't kid myself into thinking I can learn in a short period of time what really takes a decade to learn, but thanks for giving me somewhere to start!
Very clever idea. If you are looking for a complimentary service to discover new books, you could signup with my site http://anynewbooks.com, and select categories like Programming or Business and Investing. The latter is one of my favorite categories, because there are always great new titles for it. (Warning for the tech crowd: you will receive one weekly email per category you pick, so don't go crazy. :))
Point 6, we are lucky to keep the ones we have, Guido is not keen on map, reduce, etc.
RE: Workspaces in Buenos Aires.
Have not used them, but went to an event hosted there, and it was a very nice place.
http://areatresworkplace.com/en/services/areadesk/

Also just found this online: http://coworking.pbworks.com/CoworkingBuenosAires

RE: Airbnb, I think they have a lot of work left in just living space to keep them focused for a long time in that.
Can we stop the PayPal complaint train now?

If you have a viable alternative to suggest, then yes, it would be reasonable to tell people to stop whining. Given that PayPal is the only game in town, and that there is no obvious competitor for use by individuals and small companies, the complaints need to be shouted from rooftops.

Ask HN: what about WePay, is that a real competitor?
Interesting hypothesis but I will wait before trusting my savings to this approach. If twitter mood can be correlated with stock market trends, I don't see how it could fare better than traditional Socioeconomics indices which measure mood in a much more controlled and accurate way.

Interpreting mood trends from Twitter data assumes some very advanced semantic and linguistic analysis of messages, which even my human brain fails to understand about 25% of the time.
Thanks for the advice, guys. I'll start with the HTML and CSS then... And then Ruby on Rails?
limmeau, great point. This is a push service, requiring little to no effort from a customer after signup. "Set it and Forget it" :-)
Quotes from PG's Essays:
If you look at these languages in order, Java, Perl, Python, you notice an interesting pattern. At least, you notice this pattern if you are a Lisp hacker. Each one is progressively more like Lisp. Python copies even features that many Lisp hackers consider to be mistakes. You could translate simple Lisp programs into Python line for line. It's 2002, and programming languages have almost caught up with 1958.
Macros (in the Lisp sense) are still, as far as I know, unique to Lisp. This is partly because in order to have macros you probably have to make your language look as strange as Lisp. It may also be because if you do add that final increment of power, you can no longer claim to have invented a new language, but only a new dialect of Lisp.
I think it is true even today
My history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
yeah, but from what I read, it's quite difficult to jack the bootloader to load Linux, and the hardware looks like it's at the level of the OLPC, which is pretty much unusable. (keyboard-wise, not cpu-wise)

I don't know of anyone who uses these seriously and really, before I buy something where touch is as important as a laptop, I'd like to either try the keyboard in person or at least hear someone on the 'net describe it. (I mean, for that kind of money, I'll take some risk... but I'd like at least some evidence that they might not be complete crap.)
Merchants of dissatisfaction
With Over 85,000 People Running Chromium OS, Chrome's OS Future Bright
Ten Things CEOs Need to Know About Design
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http://www.adbrite.com/mb/nai_optout_check.php?nocache=0.1742626
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.networkadvertising.org/verify/cookie_exists.gif

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http://www.adbrite.com/mb/nai_optout.php?nocache=5.057925E-02
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.adbrite.com/mb/nai_optout.php?set=yes
Set-Cookie: ut=deleted; expires=Sun, 18-Oct-2009 15:23:23 GMT; path=/; domain=.adbrite.com b=deleted; expires=Sun, 18-Oct-2009 15:23:23 GMT; path=/; domain=.adbrite.com untarget=1; expires=Thu, 15-Oct-2020 15:23:24 GMT; path=/; domain=adbrite.com
Peter Norvig here. I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook. I found that Python was very nice for certain types of small problems, and had the libraries I needed to integrate with lots of other stuff, at Google and elsewhere on the net.

I think Lisp still has an edge for larger projects and for applications where the speed of the compiled code is important. But Python has the edge (with a large number of students) when the main goal is communication, not programming per se.

In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice.
Ask his name, it's a common anti-corruption measure.
This gives you two options

- he'll give his name, great! go report him for corruption.

- he refuses to give his name, great! tell his boss. (repeat until people get fired or your application gets approved)
>- how about evolution biologists who thinks that evolution, a large statistical dynamic system process, has produced different bodies for males and females (or are you going to argue that as well?) efficiently reflecting specialization, and ignored for the reason of PolitCorrectness another available degree of freedom extremely important in the context of the specialization

I actually have no idea what the sentence actually said, but somewhere in there I think you're implying that some evolutionary biologists for reasons of political correctness believe that male and female human brains are identical. Like I said, most humans rationalize. I have no excuse for them. But in my experience, the stereotype is the opposite, see: http://xkcd.com/775/

>For many, many generations ... Are you, as evolutionary biologist, saying that female squirrels have the same abilities to develop such navigational skills?

Um. If the burrows were passed along paternally instead of maternally, and it was the female squirrels that moved about and the male squirrels that stayed in their borrows, I would expect that, yes? I'm not really sure what your point is. Or why you're talking about squirrel penis.

Surely you don't think that male and female specializations are the same across species, do you? Because if so, let me see you wiggle your chest air sack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sage_grouse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0M8pZnNlnI
What do you do when you are green, broke and connected? You share
The Economic Hitman Confesses Again
The Makings of a Truly Universal Appointment Manager
BrainTree is not viable at your scale.

More directly, Braintree will cost you a minimum of about $130 per month (with their vault service). Until you're doing a couple thousand in revenue per month, there are cheaper alternatives.

But you get something for that money - a great API.
Does Paypal give the money back to the donors after a certain amount of time has passed or do they continue to keep other people's money?
Obesity: Does light make you fat?
I think it is more the freerider problem; Bell didn't suffer it significantly because they held a huge monopoly, and had few other ways to expand, even if others would benefit freely from their research.
The German Pirate Party organized a protest like that a while ago: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl...
I'm the same... I'm 29 and have a new-born, I really struggle to make it through the day without a nap these days.

When I was 22, I could easily get up at 8am, and work till 4am five days a week, then go out and hammer it at night clubs until the wee hours at the weekend with a bit of a rest on Sunday.

Now I'm lucky, if I can stay away until 11pm.
Out of curiosity, what software do you use that still lacks support for ipv6? Most everything I use has been ipv6-capabable for years. Earlier this week iftop got ipv6 support, and so the last non-ipv6-capable software I use is rtorrent. There are only about 100 packages out of all of Debian that have ipv6 problems: http://bugs.debian.org/tag:ipv6

My experience converting software to ipv6 has mostly been of converting from gethostbyname(3) to getaddrinfo(3), and those are really the common cases for anything that simply needs to do dns lookups. Neither exposes an IP address outside a semi-opaque structure.
Not just that, but the product selection is different. For instance, I cannot buy my Joachim Witt CDs from amazon.com, I have to order from .de. I could not order some products from .ca and needed to use.com.

Granted, I haven't used amazon in about 3 years, they may have improved their global database system.
My favorite quote from that page:

Don't take Statistics and Intuition to the same party ....
I had to read this in a bit of a hurry (on my way out the door) but I would've liked to see an abstract up front in the essay (essentially the last paragraph first).

Also, for doing a JS based SPI, what's the preferred solution for a RESTful domain logic server? Is there a framework out there that simply doesn't contain the concept of a view/template?
Gabriel Weinberg's history of (mostly failed) side projects and startups
1) I hate paypal.

2) I would respectfully argue that your point about banks being safe due to regulation is quite false. On the contrary I would say that it is (over-)regulation that causes banks to lose sight of their reason for existence (hint: its not selling mortgages to fanny and freedie), protection of capital (a service they used to charge for - Remember monthly checking fees?).

Banks used to be in the business of protecting capital before the FDIC insured deposits for them at an insanely low price (relative to the risk the banks can take), thus killing the "Capital Preservation" specialized bank and entered free checking / free saving / free homes. Low reserve ratios and a never evolving asset classification (Mortgage backed securities were satisfying the reserve ratio for banks? Only government regulators could think up that one) allowed banks to play with everyone's money. Was it because of greed? Kinda. Exacerbated by having customers deposits insured? Now we're getting somewhere.

Your point is not necessarily wrong, since most regulation is just a standardization of norms and practices common in the industry. But regulation can be bad (as almost anything in excess can be). The real reason Paypal sucks is my next point.

3) The real reasoning for their horror stories lies in the fact that they are simply an intermediary (of sorts, I believe that Paypal, the intermediary, is separate from Paypal, the bank). Person X pays Paypal and Paypal pays person Y. There are many ways this system could break down, but the most expensive for paypal are:

- Person Y (the getting-paid) has their account hacked and starts scamming people on eBay, listing a lot of auctions and getting paid, never shipping stuff, and running with the money. eBay has made it harder to do this though, since you have to provide proof of shipping to get the funds released.

- Person X (The payer) - has their account hacked (or their just a terrible person) and they charge up $1,000 in online shopping. Person Y ships the merchandise and Person X files a chargeback against Paypal. Paypal must then freeze that amount, sometimes taking it out of your bank account, to make sure they have the cash in case they lose the chargeback claim (which is really easy to do).

In the end, I'm not really sure where they system breaks down. Paypal is over-zealous about trying to prevent fraud, but, unfortunately, they are at the mercy of the Credit Card processors. Its kind of amazing that they were able to create a market where they are bullied on all sides, by essentially bullying their customers.
why not use logs? in python:

>>> from math import log
>>> def isPower2(val): return False if (val == 0) else (log(val) / log(2)).is_integer()
...
>>> isPower2(0)
False
>>> isPower2(1)
True
>>> isPower2(2)
True
>>> isPower2(3)
False
>>> isPower2(4)
True
>>> isPower2(1024)
True
>>> isPower2(1025)
False