skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know the "more and more personal" meme is getting more and more attention.

I "personally" think it's simplistic.

I tend to believe that one "next wave" will be users obtaining sufficient tools to fend-off the efforts of merchants to deal with them on a super-personal basis. I want to control what people know and what people don't know about me.

I have a number of different interests - social, political, technical and business. I like it when I can find something that it is well-tuned to one of these. I dislike it, quite a lot actually, when I get information that is tries to "bridge" these interests. Just as much, I don't want to have my airline tickets, my digital camera or my laptop marketed to any of my personas - it was the generically good at the lowest price (I'd suspect this is why a reaction to insurance-rate based on browser use resonated with people regardless of its truth).

I mean, historically, our modern capitalist society has evolved on the basis of creating more roles that people enter and leave (That Max Weber-101 folks). Job, friends and family were separated a while ago and most people would prefer they remain separate (we're far enough along that no remembers jobs passed from father to son but I'd assume it sucked). Indeed, I'd say there's a big demand now for easy tools to keep family and job separate.

It should be remembered that the ubiquity of the web is going mean that the new of "naive users" as a percentage of the total online population is only going to be decreasing from now or from a time soon in the future. Once everyone is on a social networking site, they will only become more selective about what they want from it.
Posted this on Dan's blog, but will add here too:

A counterpoint to the nobody really uses full isolation levels is VoltDB. Due to it’s unique single-threaded architecture, it can ONLY perform transactions with full serializability guarantees, and it does it with remarkable performance. Our head of field engineering, Tim Callaghan, used to be a die-hard Oracle user and he keeps saying how refereshing it is to actually not have to think about concurrency.
They never look happy when I see them. They usually seem like bored, apathetic minimum-wage bureaucrats.
It’s hard to imagine the common case would involve fatalities greater than double the occupancy. As an urban citizen, you’re still a bajillion times more likely to die in a car accident than due to an exploding plane…
Plastic Surgery’s Biggest Fail
This is one of the biggest fails of plastic surgery.
The New New Thing by Michael Lewis
Got 5 kills :)
Who/what is EY ?
Canadian scientists convert human skin into blood cells
As a writer AND a programmer, I applaud the creativity people are bringing to writing about Language. And I mean language in the programming sense. Ruby is obviously exciting many people out there and it's great to see the creativity didn't stop with _why's book. Perhaps it's just beginning.
Yeah, but the point is that anyone with half a brain would put whatever they're carrying out of reach of the pat down (ie places you'd have to do a cavity search for, however it gets there), so all that we're accomplishing here is feeling people up for that same impression of security (and, to drive people to the scanners to be photographed naked, which still won't find whatever is hidden in your body).
Middle Easterners are born Middle Easterners. TSA agents choose to work for the TSA. These people choose to participate in a bad system. If you make it harder on these people, they're gonna quit and it's going to be harder to hire TSA agents, putting pressure exactly where it needs to go.
I live in the nyc area. I have a background in web development and like talking to people about projects. To the best of my knowledge there isnt a site like this although ive brainstormed similiar ideas a number of times. However i lacked the resources and time to develop them. Id be interested in chatting with you about whatever ideas you might have. What is a contact for you?
Happypenguin.org: Hard drive crash, a cautionary tale
perhaps all laws should be subject to the 'eat your own dogfood' principle in some shape or form.
The Perfect Server - Fedora 14 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3]
Locking knifes are probably forbidden in Britain.
I'm not big on regrets. I make the best decision I know how and try to learn from my mistakes. Now, if you want to know my current frustrations and annoyances -- the things I am trying desperately to not have become regrets -- that list is reasonably long. :-D
For those that bill hourly, do you go off of a monthly retainer and sort of use that as a budget for hours? If I am starting to outsource (not off shore, just with partners, specific tasks), I'm just struggling about how to approach that from a billing perspective. I would like to make a small margin.
Congressmen usually assume that for every person that bothers to write in, there are ten people that feel similarly. So yes, concerted letter-writing campaigns can have an effect.

We even saw some of that in action with the bailout. Recall that the first bailout bill failed, despite heavy pressure from Wall Street, because of a mostly-Internet-organized letter writing campaign. Then they turned around and passed it with minor edits a week later, when everyone was celebrating their victory.

The problem is that legislators typically work on an out-of-sight, out-of-mind basis, so once they count up all the letters and cast their vote, they forget all about general public opinion. Professional lobbyists know this, and so they live and work in Washington and make sure to schedule regular dinners and outings with the legislators so that whatever concerns are on their minds stay on the legislators' minds too.

Ordinary citizens don't have this luxury, and the collective Internet hive mind isn't exactly known for attention span. I bet that if you got a Reddit-scale letter-writing campaign going and kept it up for a year, with every person writing in once a week or so, you'd see meaningful change in this country. I also doubt that you could convince a critical mass of people to write in once a week for a year.

Might be an interesting political hack, though, and worth trying.
The police said they are illegal, but I don't know why they make a distinction. It wasn't some sword, it was just one of the large swiss army knives.
>Have you ever tried getting help from a vendor that you know is selling something at 5% margins? Good luck to you..

Dell has incredibly good support (and if you want wipe your arse support, you can pay for it and get it). Their products are also shockingly well built. Seriously, Dell servers are just brilliantly put together.

They manage to combine small margins with a decent product. Everyone wins.

On the R&D front, Apple is a marginal investor in R&D. The iPhone 4 software is great, but the hardware -- it's a collection of off the shelf products. The same stuff that goes in that 2% margin no name device.

Which of course is true for Apple desktops as well. Apple once tried to do their own thing, and it didn't turn out so well. So now it's the same commodity parts that you would find in every discount bin white box brand.
> The more bizarre and nonsensical the "security" restrictions, the better protected officials are from blame when the inevitable attacks finally occur.

I believe that is true for other security theaters as well. A large bank, for example, instead of hiring in-house security experts, might contract out their security to an outside firm. Not because it is necessarily cheaper or the consulting company will do a better job, but because they can be blamed if something goes wrong.

A security breach happens, shareholders are up-in-arms, C*Os tell them "we hired the best, we payed them a lot of money, if they can't protect our data, nobody can."

The security firm in the meantime has to do their best to project themselves as "the experts". Usually carefully chosen stock photography of people in the business suits smiling and talking on the phone on the front page of their website, and the ability of the salesman to play and _lose_ at golf does the trick.

TSA does the same thing. They are the scapegoats. So when shit hits the fan, nobody can point out to the politicians and say "you fucked up". Security theater is not pointless, it has an exact purpose, and that is to protect and serve (the government) from future blame.
The great companies were built on this kind of arrogance.
I've worked as an academic hacker.

Amongst dedicated biologists, there's no motivation to release your source code. It's the job of a biologist to publish papers so that he or she can pull down the next grant. Anything that doesn't further this goal is going to get zero traction.

Publishing it doesn't help you get into Nature or Science. Sure, Sean Eddy (www.psc.edu/general/software/packages/hmmer/) is going to release his code, but he's a methods guy. The software is the focus of publication. The only way code is going to get published is if the journals refuse to publish results without code.
Neat, but you should check out PEP 8 at some point. An empty line between a decorator and the decorated function (flask) is confusing, and whitespace in keyword arguments just looks off.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
You might've missed this recent article on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1863927
My first guess was the demo scene (which sprang up from the warez scene years and years ago).
When the author says, "B- and C-level players" -- I think he means anyone who isn't adding real value. He's not referring to some unseen caste system.
Do any databases allow you to specify that a transaction needs a particular mode, and then that mode is implemented only for that transaction? e.g.,

START TRANSACTION MODE READ REPEATABLE;

or something like that. It would seem to be a way to only use the extra resources when consistency is paramount. Of course it would take a lot of careful thought to determine which transactions need this mode...
> My first computer was an ZX Spectrum and I'd gladly pay for a brand new machine.

So was mine! I had a Russian clone of it. I love Z80 assembly. I remember I also had a C and Pascal compiler for it. I had to spend 10-15 minutes loading it from tape. Then one wrong pointer dereference and had to start everything from scratch.
I would slightly rephrase the GP to "terror won".
Uhhh..what?

http://imgur.com/LH2Hi.png
I find iterative fixed fee kinder to people hiring out their first few times. It gives them strictures on what they can do so they don't shoot themselves in the metaphorical foot.

However, hourly definitely has it's place as well. I find offering both a good compromise.
Come along to the November Startup Sprint Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_141079939271952

There are a bunch of us trying to launch an app in November, there's a huge amount of really positive idea and feedback sharing going on.
"Posting them here won't change a thing, in any case."

I strongly disagree, David. Keeping this issue in front of smart people (many of whom travel extensively) is probably one of the best ways to initiate change.
Just sent you a email
That was an old typewriter convention. I learned typing on a typewriter in highshool. Wordprocessors in the 80's eliminated that convention. They would automatically perform the proper spacing.
Je ne regrette rien!
> Unless, IQ increase dramatically.

100 IQ is defined as the average in the population under study, therefore increase / decrease is impossible.
There's often differences between benefits for individuals vs benefits for the organization as a whole. If more people got fired so the remaining teachers could get paid more, the organization would be weaker while many of the individuals would benefit. Teachers (like everyone) tend to think of themselves as "above average" so no one thinks they'll be the one to be getting fired.

Union officials place priority on the organization, and not the individual.
Sorry, only supports English, German and French at the moment
Request sent! Thanks!
I find that using acunote to lay down the estimate (then remaining work with burndown) and freckle to track the hours and remaining budget works nicely.
Just a remark.

The others are (by their own descriptions) micro-frameworks, suitable for smaller applications with 10 URLs or so.

I don't think the attribute micro relates to the size of the projects you can create with these frameworks but rather the way they are written: Keep the core small and rely on external libraries for specific functionality.
Let's hope the next terrorist doesn't hide the bomb up his ass or ingest it, or else politicians will make sure those places are checked too.
OK, maybe the unions would be the ones lobbying the US government. That works really well too!
This is the third time I've clicked on a link on the HN frontpage today and been sent to a NYT login page rather than something interesting. I know that "(nytimes.com)" is behind the link but I feel it behooves the submitter to point out that it is required: that open access should be able to be safely assumed.
There was this girl, who I did...

Edit: Downvote? Really? Look there are some people who you don't learn fuzzy little life lessons from despite the bad times. There are some people who are just bad for your soul, who drain the life from you with constant drama, who you really could just do without.

My regret is not learning this in time to avoid being caught up with one of them, and when finding myself so, letting it go on as long as I did.
That aligns with my theory that these insane flight-security rules are mostly supported by constituencies that don't actually fly. If you take national polls, you get high support; but I bet if you restricted the polls to people who had actually been on a plane in the past year, you'd get much lower support. Instead, we have our flight-security policies dictated by terrorist-hatin' paranoiacs in Kansas and Montana who rarely themselves fly on planes, but love the idea of any policy that'll supposedly be tough on terrorism.
scaling twitter is easy. it is getting the users that is hard. I can say this because I was part of a service in 1999 that had more users and volume (bytes/hits/etc.) yet didn't have nearly the same issues.
That's a great idea, but if you're truly committed to civil liberties, you need to take it to the next level by faking an orgasm while you're being groped.
Anyone else find it . . . interesting that the article totally outs the guy's identity?

(I almost put "troubling," but I guess I'm not all that troubled by it)
(Flask for its HTTP request handling functionality)++

This is the _main_ reason I chose Flask to work on a new project. After using our in-house proprietary framework for a year and a half, I wanted to see if I could do any better. But the HTTP request part sounded boring. Enter Flask: it let's me grow the framework into exactly what I want it to be.
"Je t'aime" is wrongly classified as English. (Although understandable, since it's short)

How does this work? You claim it has "zero language knowledge," so how does it classify? Did it start out with nothing, and then train it on a corpus?

EDIT: nevermind, found your slides (http://polyglossy.com/presentation.pdf [pdf]) How big of a corpus did you use?
I don't think there's anything wrong at all with having a good public image, and being a part of the "scene" if that's what you're into. Just as long as it doesn't interfere with the quality of your product/service.
@duke_sam: If this article from Jeffery Goldburg is to be believed, there are TSA officials on record as saying the groping is directly intended to push people through the other scanners, all the while ignoring any cavities which could hide plenty of explosives or other contraband.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/for-the-...
Two more that come to mind: Burn Rate by Michael Wolff and Lucky or Smart by Bo Peabody.
I've built my startup entirely in Python + Pylons (1.0). Pylons is wonderful, I really like it a lot and I'm excited about its future too (move to Pyramid which is basically repoze.bfg).

The application I'm running is large, complex, and has quite a few moving parts.

I run it under mod_wsgi in Apache and use the Paster server when developing on my local machine. I particularly love the unit testing harness for Nose that Pylons provides.
Mexico City is fine. Friendly staff, the standard metal detectors. You have to take your shoes off flying into the US.
What you describe is the core of Marx's assertion that capitalism would collapse, as described in Capital, hinted at in the Manifesto, and other things. In fact, as I recall, Marx's "proof" of capitalism's inevitable demise and the nature of the socialist aftermath was, as he wrote in a letter to Engels, his proudest and surest achievement. I wish I could find it, but apparently my Google-fu is lacking today.
That's a good argument for why there's no point in any pat-down.

A pat-down that doesn't search body cavities is not going to find any terrorists, it just gives the impression of security.
There could be some payoff for releasing code: If other people use your code, you could probably get a citation for it.
Disclosure: I skimmed the article.

But, basically, the gist is right. The middle of the porn market has fallen out. The only movement is in the super low end stuff (the kind that advertises 6+ hours and sells for $5), with a little bit of action at the top end. The top end is kind of dying out, although I wouldn't go so far as to write an obituary for it. The parody craze is still limping along, and while there hasn't been a movie to cross over as well as Pirates/Pirates 2, there are still a few studios that can regularly command $30-50 retail for a blockbuster and turn a profit doing so.

If you read nothing but Xbiz and AVN, you'll get the impression that it's tube sites and piracy killing the industry, but I think the truth is that quality porn is a luxury good, and it's just not going to do well in this economy. The smarter studios are leveraging their existing assets (semi-current footage that can be repackaged into cheaper compilation DVDs, contract girls that can still move expensive films) to make it through the recession, and wildly trying any sort of product diversification (you can find everything from condoms to vibrators branded by the big studios now, on a much greater scale than before.) The smaller firms are finding pretty quickly that porn isn't a one way ticket to profit, which at least allows the big guys access to cheaper talent and inventory as they fail.

Government intervention is a persistent worry as well. Stagliano's trial and especially its vague ending have the edgier gonzo guys worried. Different groups in California are clamoring for more regulation re: HIV testing, and in a market where many of the producers just don't have breathing room in their budgets, that could have a serious effect.

On top of all that, Blu-Ray never took off like anyone hoped it would, and really none of the traditional studios made a big dent in streaming (except maybe Evil Angel.)

The people with the most sustainable business models seem to be those who embraced online from the beginning of their existence (guys like Brazzers, Kink, Reality Kings.) Which really follows the basic premise: if you can offer people lots of porn for cheap, be it hundreds of gigs of content for $20 a month or 6 hours for $5, you'll still do OK in this market. People are treating porn like a consumable now--the online guys follow the Costco model of giving you a ton of stuff cheaper than anyone else does, and the compilation guys are hoping you'll settle for single ply.
'Shiftability' n. The state of being unaccountable. Highly valued in financial trades. http://on.wsj.com/9jZZsL
I experienced this ridiculousness at Gatwick. I'm not sure what they expected families with prams and babies to do. The pressure to conform, as a crowd, to the expectations of the airport staff was intense and uncomfortable, especially around Christmas/New Years.
Good Quote: "No One Wins At Code Golf"
Here's a faster loading coral cache link: http://orestis.gr.nyud.net/blog/2010/11/06/why-i-bill-hourly...

(The site took > 60 seconds when I first tried to load it.)
Ask HN: Help me craft my unique value proposition
I am trying to articulate my unique value proposition but I think I have been too close to the development of the app for too long, that my mind is getting cloudy.

So I would love to hear some thoughts and feedback on some of the language I can use.

The coming soon page is: http://www.compversions.com

I have A/B tested a few different ones (there are four actually), so I would love if you could post the one you see and post your suggestions based on what you understand.

Also, if you don't understand it, please let me know so I can explain and we can go from there.

Thanks!
Uh huh.

In the US, politicians and the judiciary change laws. Those people do not read HN, and don't give a shit if a bunch of nerds who represent approximately .00001% of the electorate get their britches in a bunch over something or other. Posting political things here makes people feel good, but doesn't do one damn thing in the real world. To do that, you need to get out and engage with the political system. Clicking little arrows is, to put it bluntly, just wanking around.

And in any case, do you really want to go down the road where this site is utilized for the cause du jour? Want to see taser articles here?
The actions by certain TSA employees as depicted by recent articles on HN are reprehensible. No doubt about it.

However! I fly about every 2 to 3 weeks in and out of big airports and small airports. I have had pat downs and swipes and millimeter wave scans. I have even worked on next generation explosives detection technology(THz,Long Range, Surface UV). Yet, over the past 3 years of this type of mobile lifestyle, I have never observed or have been subjected to the types of harassment recent articles have detailed. Surely it happens, yes. But my experience both on the inside and out of this industry tells a different story. Privacy IS respected by people developing and deploying these technologies. Privacy IS respected by TSA employees who are concerned for the safety of each passenger.

Whether these policies or technologies are effective is another debate, but I just think there is a great deal of overgeneralization going on here. Maybe I'm just an outlier.
Engine Yard.

http://www.engineyard.com/
What do you mean by "see[ing] dotfiles"?
You should maximize the use of ready-to-use extensions once you know how things work, whether yours or the community's.
"Basecamp for designers" is pretty good I think. Can you explain the value of your product to us in a few paragraphs? Then we can try to come up with some language.
RockMelt Unveils a Web Browser for the Facebook Era
PostgreSQL can do that:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/sql-set-transactio...
Reverse.jar
I've used around 40KB of text per language for training.
Everyone thinks of the scene they had/have the most experience with as "the scene."
I've been thinking about doing this for a while - show up in line wearing a nice business suit, then slowly, one piece at a time, strip down to a thong, send each piece through the X-ray machine, and walk through with a big fat grin.
What I have seen in the real world is that different parts of those guarantees are used in different situations. ACID guarantees are often relaxed, as he rightly says, but for some transactions or reports it is absolutely critical to get it right and performance is secondary. A missed deadline or an error in an important financial report can be an existential threat to a company. That's why database technology is bound to be changing very very slowly for mission critical tasks. It's not an academic issue.
The US has strong minority shareholder protections.
I don't look forward to that. I think there's something to be said for privacy and intimacy.