skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? Mini-hell? He posted a request for the author to take it down, the author agreed in the very first reply to this request, and as far as I can see, it was acted upon in less than 12 hours.

The flap that followed was a disagreement about the style of Zed's request. A semantic argument, which is pretty far from an ongoing personal torment.
For a new startup, would you honestly recommend going with pyramid? And what about Django.. do you think it'll go faster to prototype and develop with pyramid?
What bothers me is that nowhere in that email, or nowhere on the site, I see a single reason for this move. Why? Why do it?

The only explanation I see is that developers wanted a nicer codebase. I've been on Pylons mailing list forever, and I can't recall a single practical issue or a feature request, which was decided to be hard/impossible to do due to architecture limitations. It just never comes up.

This is a classic case of redesign for the sake of redesign.
Review my startup / Validate my idea
> That tells me they're not that smart.

The problem with your example is grouping all dolphins together.

This reminds me of some prominent speaker's example of space Aliens testing for human intelligence by beaming up 100 people and assigning them the task of building a computer.

You'd get very different results if you beamed up 100 random people from a shopping mall, vs. 100 random people from MIT.

How smart would YOU look if you were raised by yourself in a zoo habitat? There's an enormous amount of "intelligence" which depends on cultural transmission of information at specific developmental periods. Language is one well-known example; IIRC, if a child is neglected linguistically around the age of 2-3, they can't make up for it later and will never quite acquire a "human" level of language.

What if the adults of your tribe were wiped out, and the children grew up and had a makeshift society afterward? This is effectively what has happened repeatedly with whale and dolphin pods.

Further, dolphins don't all know each other. So tribe X may not inform tribe Y of a dangerous location.

Dolphins who have knowledge of the slaughter may avoid it in the future. They may try to keep their pod away from it. Maybe the pod doesn't believe them, and the leaders "march" in blithely, as happens with humans all the time. Or maybe there are no survivors to warn others. Or maybe they are traumatized and become loners and don't talk to anyone after that.

As for your "commando" example, there are countless counterexamples where humans DON'T join up to go on the offensive, because of personal risk.

And there are countless examples where humans keep doing something dangerous where there is a high probability of getting killed.

Children are highly intelligent, but innocence and lack of experience can make you an easy target for a predator. And there are institutions, like "tough love" camps where parents ship their kids, some of which have a horrendous history of child abuse, and yet they still operate.

Where are the commando raids on Catholic priests? Guess humans aren't too smart.
The Making of a Miracle Drug
The type of people who normally do this sort of stuff do it for free. The sort of people who do this kind of stuff because of the publicity being generated have the tendancy to not even do it for free, but to refuse any prize money offered to them. A large portion of bug bounties paid out to people who find bugs are gifted to the EFF for example.

A 10k bounty to not release this might stop a few people from doing so, but all it takes is for a single individual to say "fuck it, I have a steady job and a nice place to live, giving MS the finger is worth more than just a measily 10k to me", and it's game over. Once that single person releases their work microsoft has paid out (no doubt numerous times) 10k for absolutely nothing.
There are any number of self-destructive behaviors that humans are drawn to: haagen-dazs, cigarettes, wars.

It could be very hard to justify our stockpile of atomic weaponry to another intelligence.
CSS Selectors you Must Memorize
Night-vision goggles allow you to Kinect the dots
That's only true if you don't think your mind is a function of input from external sources.
This is the Site I've been working on for the past year: Mis Indicadores http://misindicadores.com/

It's in spanish, and it's pretty much a collection of finance and business indicators and statistics, mixed with inflation numbers, stock market prices, unemployment statistics, national figures for Mexico, etc. If I had to do a TLDR for it, I'd have to say it's all the finance and economy indicators I need day by day, all showing several interesting statistics (maximum, minimum, median, mode, etc.)

Now the site's been going well lately, it's slowly building nice steady traffic, so I've been thinking about making a version in english, maybe with a new name and url, but I've been having my doubts about it, since I'm not entirely sure if there's already a service like it online.

Also, the site's completely free at the moment, since I haven't really found a way to monetize it yet, and I'm not in a hurry to do so, but any advice in that sense would be much appreciated as well.

Thank you!
First Five Days into November Sprint
That's not enough. As we've seen, government income can occasionally spike. You also need a flexible way to cut expenses further.

It's probably not possible to economize on government budgets, why they periodically go bust (debt is cleared by sticking it to the creditors). It happens more often than people think. In the last century, the US did in 1971, the USSR was bankrupt at the end, Russia itself reneged again in 1998.

The worrying trend is that, to prevent smaller bankruptcies, the US, EU, Japan etc. are prepared to stake their collective solvency. I call that the real systemic risk. What was the terrible scenario evoked by the financial papers back in '08? Could it be any worse than the debt collapse of all the major economies?
>I admit my first thought was "Wait...How did they put that hoodie on?"

Stretchy head holes?
The bit that gets me about the defenses of Emde: He "punched" Shaw.

Admittedly, this is a point that people defending the guy (and from the current state of the project's readme, himself) only acknowledge in the most grudging way, but it's there - Edme wronged the guy.

But I'm to take it that Shaw is wrong because he's not friendly in his response to that?

It's trite to make remarks about Asperger, social dysfunction among geeks, etc., but there is something remarkable about the Yeah, I did something blatantly wrong, but he was mean to me when he told me to stop doing it, and that's what's important! attitude put forth and defended.

In most parts of modern society, the honest response would be along the lines of, "Dude, you're being a dick."
This reactive limit thing bothers me when my family buys on eBay. Decide your ACTUAL limit up front if you already have all the relevant information :)
Conwy Wales
If my understanding of the device is marginally accurate, I understand it offloads almost all of the processing to the 360. So, I would imagine the raw data coming out of it is like getting raw input from 64 mice at the same time. If anything is done directly on the device, it is probably "stabilization", like muting the background and focusing on a central moving object, but actual tracking and number crunching is done off of it.

Here's a video of a guy looking at his room with IR goggles. This observation makes me think that there is a Lot of data to be crunched to get an accurate use of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7nRKU0nFxA
Art is an interesting cultural phenomenon, but not something that even all humans are very interested in (unless you define it very loosely). I wouldn't be surprised to see animals produce some form of art, but neither would I surprised to see a species as intelligent as humans — or even more intelligent — that didn't give a hoot about art. Let's reframe the validity of this test in terms that we don't have thousands of years of cultural baggage around: If an alien species arrives here and teaches us all sorts of miraculous things, would we feel compelled to conclude that they are not intelligent beings if they aren't very interested in the works of Rothko?

It seems particularly likely to me that an aquatic species would not have art at least until it was very advanced, since they don't have the tools or media for creating it that, say, a caveman did.
He could probably also just not upgrade the OS. I imagine it will take a long time before the X-based apps he relies on stop being supported on X.
Wouldn't it be better if Node.js was based on Webkit (not only the V8 engine) so they don't have to reinvent the wheel for every HTML5 spec? Is it to encourage the idea that Javascript doesn't have to be tied to a browser environment? Would it be too complex to maintain?
Why would Shaw need to win Edme's cooperation?
Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science
I'm sorry you feel that way, as the developer of Pylons, I really don't look at this as killing Pylons anymore than the lack of any new functionality has killed Pylons 1.0 in the past 6 months.

Pylons 1.0 has been in maintenance mode already (effectively), 1.0 was in fact nothing more than a few tweaks on 0.9.7, ie. maintenance release with a 1.0 version number and finally killing a few deprecated things.

The FAQ explains why when attempting to extend Pylons for new functionality, I hit a dead-end:
http://docs.pylonshq.com/faq/pylonsproject.html#why-not-just...

Finding a path forward for extensibility that didn't hit this forking problem:
http://lincolnloop.com/blog/2008/apr/4/reusable-django-apps-...

was a very major concern of mine. I think this will address that, and when Django makes the changes necessary to remove the forking problem I won't be at all surprised if it requires porting your apps...
Humans do climb Mount Everest for fun...
While AliceML is quite nice, the main advantage that SML has over the
other major ML-family languages is, IMHO, that it's simple, well-defined,
and has several fairly-compatible and high quality implementations.
http://xkcd.com/309/ xkcd just about sums it up.
I would most likely subscribe to a service like this. In fact, I was recently working out a deal with my friend where I would pay her to go grocery shopping every other week and cook for me twice a week. So, this is would be perfect. Now, I would still want a few things out of the service:

1. Healthy choices (nutritional info would be phenomenal, though I know it's likely not going to happen with chefs).

2. A way to filter out meals that contain certain ingredients. This is important for people with allergies. Some dishes you can tell, but recipes vary. I hate when I get secretly surprised by a dish was cooked with butter (lactose intolerant).

3. $10 - $12 per meal. When I go out for lunch, I usually try to stick to $10. I could go for $15 for dinner.

4. In Chicago. :P

I don't mind walking, I actually love getting out. I'm mostly concerned about healthy eating.

Some things that might sway me, but aren't deal breakers:

1. Vegetarian options.
2. Variety of size portions. I hate that most American restaurants give me way more food that I want. I feel bad for not eating it and having to pay for it.
Sorry you didn't see it, I'll try again:
http://docs.pylonshq.com/faq/pylonsproject.html#why-not-just...
Hope it has a notification light and a flash!
Yes, I know about that. I just doubt that it's as effective at expressing precise meanings as methods available for humans ("area within 100km radius from 33.593316 135.943022 is to be considered unsafe," and let's not get started on bordering the area with 3 meter high fences topped with barbed wire).
> See, this is what we get when we confuse science and activism. Should a "researcher" have any more weight with the public about what they consider "morally acceptable"?

There is something to be said about a scientific approach to morality but for the purposes of this discussion, is it not sufficient to posit that the scientists are merely making a logical connection?

Given 1. Prevailing morality protects persons (humans as of writing);
2. Dolphins show a significant amount of person-like traits.

Therefore, by prevailing morality, dolphins should be protected.

It is obviously not quite as straightforward but neither does it require a great faith-based leap in logic.

…

As a sidenote, this is interesting to see on such an entrepeneurship-focused site:

> This is like when your chiropractor tells you that you have a bad back -- and need many more chiropractor visits.

Should "founders" not try to sell their product either?
Sneak preview: sharemovies
As a United Statesian, I might question the practicality in the foreseeable future. I would certainly point out that a belief in mankind and its freedom is the sort of thing that can be invoked for a decision to invade Iraq, or to imagine that a US-style constitution is now practical for Afghanistan.

There is this to be said for patriotism, that a more particular commitment has a better chance of realizing itself in action rather than sentiment. Obviously, one should not use it to excuse bad actions. G.K. Chesterton's remark that "My country right or wrong" is equivalent to "My mother, drunk or sober" certainly applies.
A remarkable man, well worth hearing about.
Google Search date parsing bug? (+Search injection vulnerability?)
Tweet digest – week 44
The McGurk Effect [video]
I think "She brought this on herself" is pretty close to "She was asking for it." And most of the facts in the comment go not toward the severity of the crime she was convicted of nor necessity of such a severe response, but merely toward showing that her behavior was provocative and that she failed to take many precautions.
If you took away all the parts that make her an unsympathetic defendant (blaming it on the kids, destroying evidence, lying about actions under oath), would you still support this outcome? After all, the exact same thing could have happened to her if she hadn't done those things, but still refused to settle. In other words, do you support making an example of a guilty person by punishing him in a way that far exceeds the damage that he caused? If so, in what situations is it justifiable? Would $150,000 be an appropriate fine for single graffiti tag?
After a certain period of time, you can't edit a comment you've made. Not sure of the exact period.
Depending on what you're prototyping, it could very well be done faster with Django. Django provides a bunch of 'generic views' which can make tossing up lists of objects from the db very fast to get started with. Then usually you end up fully replacing it all later, but it gives you a good start.

My views haven't changed since I answered this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/48681/pros-cons-of-django...

If your app doesn't clearly fit into the sweet-spot's for Django, the argument will be less compelling. The pyramid code-base does have a lot of maturity behind it, it's not completely brand-new, so I don't think it'd be a problem to develop against it to be able to utilize its additional extension points.
It doesn’t seem right that pages created today can show up on Google as if they were created in June, 5 months ago. That’s why I used the phrase “Search injection vulnerability.” The odd thing is that the page announces it was created today, hence what I assume to be an error in data parsing. I could be quite wrong about that, if there is an incorrectly formatted date somewhere else in the HTML.
ImageMagick doesn't have a very fast image processing implementation. Granted, I suspect that even the fastest canvas image manipulation implementation (such as Pixastic) cannot beat ImageMagick in speed.
Agreed, and man hier is always there if you forget something, don't have to go track it down on the web.

However, I found these useful too when I was learning it. Sometimes it just helps to read different explanations of the same thing till it sticks:

http://linuxcommand.org/lts0040.php

http://rute.2038bug.com/node20.html.gz
SF CoFounder Search & Product Feedback, tomorrow (saturday) at 3pm
N is a Number : A Portrait of Paul Erdős
That's a good point. I hadn't intended for the argument to have such a strong emotional overtone. It just occurred to me as a known-to-be-invalid argument that the comment resembled very closely. I'll keep your law in mind from now on.
This is a good Offer HN opportunity. (I know, I know, that's so last week.)

You could tell people that they can email you with the max they'll pay, and you'll go and bid for whoever has the highest max. And I guess you should say that you'll definitely bid at least the second highest max you heard, so that we don't end up shorting Bing.

(eg. Someone gives you a max of $5k. Someone else gives you a max of $4k. But the highest bid from anyone at the auction is $2k. So you bid $2500 on behalf of the $5k person and win it for them. If the $4k person and the $5k person had gotten different proxies, Bing would have gotten >$4k, but because there was a sort of pre-auction, they only got $2500. By saying that you'll definitely bid as high as the second-highest emailer, you avoid that problem.)

Just make sure you vet the person pretty well so you know they'll actually pay.

I'd do this myself, but I'll be on a plane back from Rubyconf that evening.
Could be something in it then.

If it was high profile enough, the restaurants might even cover the lunch in exchange for the plug on the site.
The fact that she was both wrong and stupid is beside the point. The real issue is the absurdity of the punishment, which is both cruel and unusual in that it's wildly disproportionate, and totally unparalleled by any other form of statutory damage.

Cases like this are exactly why the Framers insisted on jury trials in the first place. Through the principle of Jury Nullification, jurors retain power over the law through sanctioned refusal to convict - even when the law has clearly been violated. This check exists as the last line of defense against lawmakers who are abusive, corrupt, and/or inept. For example, the ones who authorized these monstrous fines.

In 1972, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the jury has an " unreviewable and irreversible power... to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge.... (US vs Dougherty, 473 F 2d 1113, 1139 (1972)). However, this ruling went on to note "The fact that there is widespread existence of the jury's prerogative, and approval of its existence as a necessary counter to case-hardened judges and arbitrary prosecutors, does not establish as an imperative that the jury must be informed by the judge of that power".

In other words, the judge is free to 'command' that the jury rule only on the law, not on its justice. And the jury is free to ignore him - but only if they're aware of the option.

I don't know if the 1972 ruling has been superseded. Assuming it hasn't, it appears that none of the judges (or the defense lawyers) made the rules clear. So now we get a legal fiasco, ridiculous public expense, and at least one ruined life.
We have 3 regular members and we're looking to get at least 3 more interested individuals for tomorrow's meeting.

The meetings have been great resources so far and we're all psyched for tomorrow. Come join us!
Agreed, and I think it's a justified rancor. There are some things you're expected to know as a literate person in this day and time, and some guy can't just expect his ignoring them to be covered with a shrug and a "my bad" when he's called on it.
"... Wylio founder Dan Evans tells TechCrunch that the startup plans on adding more features like customizing the color of the Flickr photo credits, tracking photo use as well as building the option for user accounts in near future. ..."

I've specifically chosen a license to try and block companies like this.

"... We may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website ..." ~ http://wylio.com/legal.html#tos

Does the Creative Commons by-nc-nd preclude companies using images in this manner?
My point is that many people violate laws every day without receiving such an absurd punishment. The fact that somebody violated a law does not give society — much less the recording industry — a right to do whatever it wants with them.
You Suck at Powerpoint
Probably a good idea. While the lure of doing stuff now is justifiably strong, spending time building your foundation will pay off heavily and there's nothing better since SICP is working for you.

Pretty obviously you should work your way through chapter 3, and you owe it to yourself to discover the coolness in 4.1 at some point. And then if you want to do Clojure, Haskell or other languages with laziness that sets you up for SICP's introduction in 4.2.

4.3-4 get into research areas Sussman did in times past (don't know about Ableson), chapter 5 is one of many useful introductions for how things work all the way down to the metal. Someday, you can be pretty sure you'll be damned glad you learned that level of material, although studying it from a C centric perspective is also useful since it's so ubiquitous.

Anyway, have fun and I wish you luck on your projects.
The way I do it is to write all of the code locally and use git/svn/hg/whatever locally. I then rsync my changes to the virtual machine when I'm ready to test.
art is not what you learn in "art class"
yep, this pretty much lost me with no USD conversion
I think it was dumb of them to pick that fight, but that in the extreme they are invoking, it's not an idle or frivolous threat.
The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. -Abraham Lincoln
You might consider filtering out a few of the more sexual nouns.

I'm not saying frogorgy.com wouldn't be a big hit, but it's a bit niche.
No, I'm serious: the arms race we're talking about in DirecTV's case happened entirely in the living room.

They did something with consumer hardware that made tampering with it economically infeasible.

The exact same technique they use is available to Microsoft, should they be willing to pay to integrate and (more painfully) license it.

What Pay TV providers did to stop Pay TV hackers is an open secret, but I don't work in Pay TV and don't know exactly how "open" the secret is, which is why I'm dancing around this argument rather than just killing it with facts.
If you agree with 'jrockway, then you must also believe it's perfectly ethical for me to listen to your cellphone calls.

Otherwise, this argument is a bit more nuanced than either of you are acknowledging.
This is not at all an apt comparison. With Django, you're buying into its templating, routing system, its ORM, its view/controller paradigm, its central app configuration, its core request delivery system, whatever it does for caching/sessions, and all the admin stuff. With Pylons, you've bought into some choice of templating (usually Mako), routing system (Routes), some choice of ORM (usually SQLAlchemy), its view/controller paradigm, its central app configuration, its core request delivery system (Paste, PasteScript, etc.), caching/sessions (Beaker), and it doesn't come with any admin stuff.

Pylons' change to Pyramid most certainly does not replace that whole stack. It replaces exactly two of those components, the view/controller paradigm and central app configuration. All the things that don't change at all are: templating, ORM, routing, Paste/Pastescript, caching/sessions still on Beaker.

So this nothing at all like moving to an entirely new framework, Mako/SQLAlchemy/Beaker aren't going anywhere.

edit: the routing changes a bit, but its an improved and higher performing package with mostly complete feature parity. I'm looking forward to using it.
And additionally, when the paper opens in-browser, the location and browse history that got you to that paper is preserved. So when you're in the web browser and see the pdf of the paper by I.M. Smart and A. U. Thor, you can tell whether you got it from Smart's site, Thor's site, or somewhere else.