skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It sounds to me like your saying that if someone wanted to work an 8 hour day, they'd have to match what you do in (say) 12 hours ?

Which if they do this over months the 8 hour worker should be more productive over all.
Facebook has undeniably value. Connecting with other people is a pretty universal trait so it's no wonder Facebook has those half a billion people. That's what I use it for, too.

However, unlike some of those half a billion people, I do care about protecting my private life somewhat. Yet I'm willing to give up something for the value I find in the connectivity that Facebook provides. Depending on what personal information is at the stake, on how Facebook acts, and on your privacy expectations that something clearly varies.

For me, keeping any of Facebook's potential negative impacts to the minimum comes down to sanitizing the privacy settings and rechecking them every other month or so (or following any of the facebook privacy news articles) for new changes.
Demystifying agile, top 7 myths.
Hmm back in the day, an "app" was native software on Mac OS X, and these days I still call "Safari.app" an app. It does have a ".app" extension, after all. I think this is the definition that was the predecessor to "native software that typically runs on a smartphone, and most commonly the iPhone."
Europe to Invest in Massive Solar Power Plants in India
The Asian Development Bank has roped in the European Investment Bank to invest in large-scale solar power plants in India. The ADB is committed to arrange finances for India’s ambitious National Solar Mission projects.
Arggh, language dilution is frustrating. I wonder if someday "secret" will colloquially come to mean "public information", similar to what happened to the word "literally". :P
I like it! The filtering of search results is great! In terms of design, I think you can not have a bottom section, it can be integrated to the main page, just maybe small fonts.

The domain name will be tough to relate to UCLA. You want to consider something closer, like uclacourses or ucladir, it would be easier to SEO too.
If it involves learning a new language/framework/API etc, a good idea would be to work out the examples/exercises given in the book, and create a github repo for it. Keep pushing in your code to the repo regularly as you work through the book.

You can also include exercises that you have found elsewhere on the Internet/other books. You can arrange the code according to the sections.
I had an extremely old-fashioned British English teacher in 7th grade and our biggest project was the creation of a commonplace book. I hadn't heard of it before nor since, but I still think of that project.

It seemed so random -- Page 1: recipes. Page 2: names of pet. Page 3: a family tree. And yet, it was somehow perfect. You could open any page and read something interesting. Or you could contribute some new knowledge. I feel the blogs and newsfeeds of today lack that disorganized-yet-interesting feel.
Mozilla is working on an Audio Data API, and hopefully it will become the standard in the future. Take a look: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API
It's not a problem at all, there is zero readability cost to all of
those parens. Nobody with any experience coding lisp has any trouble
reading it. Personally, I find lisp code to be considerably easier to
read than other languages that I otherwise prefer.
There is also PyXLL, which allows you to call python from Excel.
http://www.pyxll.com
India’s Pakistan Obsession Stumps Obama
As I see it Lua only make sense for:

* Video Games / Graphics engine scripting

* MySQL administration

* Maybe also if you want to add embeddable scripting to your app, but then why not go with more popular choice, like Python?

Choosing tables as a main datatype rather than associative arrays is a best choice in Lua design!
A lot of people have been asking for portrait sliders. The only ones that are out right now (at least that I know of) are the Blackberry Torch and Palm Pre line.

The Torch is a 480x360 device, and the the Pre is a 480x320 display.

AFAIK the Venue Pro is the only device on the planet that has a full size touch screen (800x480 like the Samsung Galaxy S line, Nexus One, etc...), but yet is a portrait slider.

Beyond that, virtually everyone who has used it, has been impressed with the build quality of the device.

Now you may not prefer a portrait slider, but it's absurd to say that its not a device of interest. I don't like virtual keyboards, but I won't sit around saying the iPhone has no interest because of my personal preference.
Just wondering how the classifier works. You presumably calculate the probability of each symbol matching the one I have drawn, but I wondered if you did any a priori modelling of the likelihood of me drawing any particular symbol. For example, I went and drew a simple capital theta, and it was number 5 on the list after some fairly esoteric shapes, all with similar shapes. At the point, where there are several very similar shapes, I'd have thought having a good prior distribution helps accuracy more.

Are you using click data to model what people are drawing, or just to retrain the classifier? It's also not totally obvious you should click the right one — I only realised after I started writing this comment.

Also, I noted Greek letters are displayed in italics. Did you train on italics only for? People don't tend to write italics, which might be why Greek letters are not matching well for me.
I actually saw some (military contractor or related manufacturing) companies which continue to pay full salary (plus the employee gets whatever active duty salary and allowances). These companies also donated stuff like satellite links to their employee's unit so they could have Internet access.

I would probably do this at my company (even outside of defense), purely to be more attractive to NG/Reserves candidates -- a lot of them have great additional experience and training which is paid for by the government, and especially if they value their military career and security clearance, are unlikely to get involved in anything untoward.
Spy on blackberry
The Blackberry spy software is installed as a hidden programme in the target Blackberry phone. It is generally compatible with all models of Blackberry phones.
Spy on android
Android is on of the latest software that is giving rival to its contemporaries in term of being a popular cell phone operating system. By providing an open document development platform, Android offers ability to build extremely innovative applications which are written using Java programming language.
I agree, latency is way too important in that scenario. I made that as an experiment, I never thought of it as a professional tool.

I am curious about your Boss DR-110 emulation in HTML5, are you going to publish it somewhere?
You're missing the point. It's not about disallowing importing the address book from Gmail to Facebook, it's about making it more difficult in order to force Facebook to offer reciprocity.

You will always be able to export the CSV version of your Gmail address book yourself and feed it wherever you like. It's just slightly less convenient and the experience is not so smooth anymore.
Thanks for the feedback.

> It would be good if they can go into the demo and then sign up afterwards and keep the site they created in the demo.

The way we have the demo site setup at the moment it's not possible to do this. Currently it's a single public site that gets refreshed periodically. If in the future we created a demo site on demand per customer this would be a good idea.

> Also, it would be great to see a list of add-ons

We're working on it!
More time spent interacting with a site means more opportunities for advertising (in all its forms), and that's what these companies live by. You don't think Google wishes they had a successful social product similar to Facebook?
The Python in Education “special interest group” has a mailing list and a overview webpage http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/ which among other things includes links to books and resources targeting beginners.
http://common-lisp.net/project/cells/ (Cells) is a data flow language where values are determined by formulas similar to spreadsheets.

So instead of a spreadsheet with a programming language, go the other way around!
Cells - A dataflow extension to CLOS
What if I turned off Javascript?
they have ~500 million users[0]. that's ~$4/user/year.

[0] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Great thinking. Let's just keep taking up the arse because otherwise we might be inconvenienced! I know that TSA has gotten worse literally every year but we wouldn't want to be inconvenienced. Far better to just hope that it works out on its own!
This takes me back to my last (long term) job. I got tapped to fix a departed worker's spaghetti code, and in the process, got VERY familiar with Excel VBA, to the point that I started goofing around with my own ideas. I must have dozens of "empty" spreadsheets with nothing but code in them. What's fun is, you can drag in just about any COM library on the system to play around with.

For a spreadsheet, Excel's a not-too-bad IDE!
I have seen various websites which use referrers despite this drawback. They will simply block you if your browser doesn't send a referrer.
I went to a school where OO was taught with Smalltalk (late 1990's). The pressure had been on the school for a few years to switch to Java, because that was the language of the future, and Smalltalk wasn't used in the industry anyway, and why were they sticking with such an old-fashioned language, and were the teachers too stupid to learn anything new.

So in the end they caved, and I was in the first class that was taught the Java curriculum. The teachers had spend the larger part of their summer at Java courses and writing a syllabus. The result was a bunch of people who barely knew the language they were teaching, causing most of the time in class to be lost to mundane details like working with the JDK and API issues. (I remember asking how to execute an external program and nobody being able to tell me).

YMMV etc., but my advice: please let the teacher decide for himself what he feels most comfortable teaching and focus on programming fundamentals rather than complain about not being able to use a tool that is hip and cool in some circles. (read the 'the scene will kill you' article that was on here a few days ago, it holds for not only 'the startup scene' but also for pretty much all niche programming scenes, forum scenes like slashdot, reddit, HN; actually it holds for pretty much every scene in the world).
Europe assumes argue on universal Internet access
because your couple of extra minutes are more important than everyone else's who may be waiting - same type of problem as the people who hold subway doors delaying hundreds for the sake of a few
That sounds like fun, can't wait to hear about it! Keep an eye on updates to the library, and if you run into bugs (you will) don't hesitate to nag me, or even solve them :)
It doesn't matter that they are "just doing their jobs". They have choosen to work there, they have signed up for what their employer does. If they don't like it then they should quit. If a large percentage of their staff are unhappy and complain, then they might change it
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These tools would tend to damage the idea of an HTML document. Really nasty for accessibility.
Yup, because everytime we went down Stockbridge in Edinburgh I would go into the shop to see the bones in my feet.

Luckily we lived abroad mostly in oil camps or I would be four legged by now...
I put in more than full time effort for three years as a partner building a small business in a country where I couldn't actually own it. In the end all I could have was a private agreement with my local partner... but I didn't realize that until I was already emotionally and financially committed to the enterprise.

In retrospect, I learned a great deal from it and am doubly motivated to become a good programmer and have a stab at the software business. It was a costly way to learn, though.
I was in Kenya a couple of weeks ago and the flight we took flew south from Luxor in Egypt - what stunned me is how empty that region is - literally nothing but sand and rock for hour upon hour with the thin sliver of the Nile running through it.
Leading scientists say backscatter X-ray may be far more dangerous than thought
Community is surely the big win for Python. If you manage to get a 17 year old interested in programming, then where better to take the next step than start hacking on some open source projects written in Python?

Where does a 17-year old go next with VB.net?
Many of these apps were ported to the iPhone on the basis of previous success on dumbphones. I don't know what it's like in the US, but these were a big business in Europe. Jamba/Jamster was a big name and their adverts on music television have been bugging me for years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamster
It’s Time for This: ActiveRecordEngine for ASP.NET MVC
"talk this kid out of his enthusiasm for Python in defense of -- heaven help us -- VB.Net."

I don't think that's the point nor is it what most people are doing. In an introduction to programming course, the language is a tool in which the concepts taught are illustrated. Letting the teacher use a tool that he is comfortable with will by far outweigh any advantages that using another language will bring.

Think about it this way: to learn how to drive Formula 1, does it matter if you learn how to drive a stick shift in a Ferrari or a Toyota Corolla? IMO no. (in this analogy it would be safer to learn in the Toyota, but I won't take it that far in the programming case...).
>they're trying to do their jobs.

Their jobs are immoral and should be illegal and yet they still choose to do it. I have no respect nor mercy for such people. Stop using the idiotic "trying to do their job" as an excuse. The WWII war trials proved that you are responsible for what you do. "Just doing my job" is no excuse.
What's the problem with brute-force attacks? Why can't a simple incorrect-password timeout prevent them?
great... the other i was wondering if there is some way for people reading HN to meetup in Bangalore.
What's the course's angle? If it's an intro course like it sounds, you're probably going to have a hard time. Like it or not, an intro course is for teaching basics that are shared across all languages, with an added goal of inspiring students to want to learn more.

My high school programming course started with "Karel the Robot." (http://karel.sourceforge.net/). It's not even a "real" programming language, but it worked quite well to teach the basics of state, control flow, functions, etc. My "Aha!" moment was shortly after that when I pointed and clicked my way to a not-horrible PacMan game in VB.NET.

Then I was sold. I'd made something fun that I could put on a floppy and show off to my friends; All without knowing the first thing about pixels, graphics contexts, layouts, or (heaven forbid) html and css. I just had a timer, some images, and a big switch statement for keyboard input.

If your teacher is trying to ignite his students' interest in the same way mine was, you're going to need to convince him that accomplishing the same thing is as easily done in python. From what I've seen it's not -- UI libraries are hard. (His choice of VB.NET almost certainly implies there will be some simple WinForms drag and drop UI work happening)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while python is a great language, it may not be the best tool for this job. I can't tell without seeing his lesson plan, but based on my experience learning to program, python wouldn't have left me feeling as empowered (at the start).

Intro to programming isn't about languages, it's about showing people that they can make the computer do their bidding, so that they can work less and/or have more fun.
Just created one for Mumbai too:
http://groups.google.com/group/mumbai-hn/
It was indeed - I always available for a chat if anyone wants :) gordon@hypernumbers.com
Wow! Really? (I'm not a Pythonator.)

Same reasoning as Java?
A F#$#@$* men
I think this paragraph should shed a bit more light on what the author meant:

But if enough people can get to space, they’ll see the planet for what it is: a fragile, magnificent ball with a thin shell of atmosphere protecting it from the entire Universe… and no artificial boundary lines to be seen. We made those ourselves, and we put an awful lot of stock in them. Remembering that fact might also be an important way to make sure our species endures.
You'd throw a 17 year old with 40 hours worth of 'introduction to programming with Python' into hacking on Django or Scons? Good luck with that.

(not that I know of any open source projects in VB.net, but still)
Most users...don't really understand / care about the privacy issues

You are completely and utterly wrong.

I was surprised too, but check out the slides that were posted by the Google UX guy the other day showing their research.

http://www.slideshare.net/padday/bridging-the-gap-between-ou...

Users are circumventing Facebook to protect their privacy, using email and self-censoring (this is further along in the presentation). There is also anecdotal evidence presented at the beginning of when they are presented with the not-so obvious consequence of general sharing they are actually quite horrified.
Stripes and Hierarchies: Wearing Your (Social) Rank on Your Sleeve.
Ask HN: Keyboard layout while changing countries
I'll be probably changing countries soon. Different countries, with different languages, have different keyboard layouts. It may be a bit of a silly question, but it has popped up in my head: should you keep your original country's keyboard layout or should you adapt?

Adapting means losing quite some speed for some time and if you change countries each few years may be a bit frustrating.

Not adapting means you keep your typing speed, but you'll have difficulties with other peoples computers and maybe problems to write some symbols (eg. writing ß in an american keyboard).

What other issues are there to consider?
Chal padee hai ek leher....gaon gaon aur sheher sheher!
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Great! The article seems to suggest that this only works from amazon origins (e.g. EC2 or load balanced EC2 instances), not arbitrary servers. Can anyone confirm or deny?
The problem with that is that MIDI is a very strong standard, as bad as the format itself might be. Every single synth or keyboard out there exports to MIDI, and most of the time ONLY to MIDI.

Also, the MIDI format is not slow to generate or to read, it is actually designed for speed (and may other perks) and any implementation of it would be very likely faster than any other format you could come up with. Of course, you would still have to deal with its complications and the many particularities and edge-cases it has.
> * Maybe also if you want to add embeddable scripting to your app, but then why not go with more popular choice, like Python?

The Lua VM is extremely lean, and it has been designed from scratch for embeddability in C and C++ programs (it is written in the common subset of C89 and C++).

Furthermore, if your code runs on x86 or x64, you can switch to LuaJIT which is amazingly fast. LuaJIT has the same perfirmance profile as Java (but it is mre frugal on memory). The Lua interpreter is about as fast as Pypy, the fastest Python JIT compiler.

See http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/code-used-time-used-sh... for the details.
carmack had always been a childhood hero of mine, having seen wolfenstein 3d as a kid showcased in the computer section of sears (yes sears). Carmack just entered steve jobs territory for me. This is going to change everything.
The thing is that if you don't remember later what you've read/studied, why make the effort?

Anyway, I also thing «so what?». Even if you think you've forgotten, things do stay in the head, and next time you pick up the subject everything is quicker. Not to mention when learning in one place helps you in others.
According to the fascinating book "Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Medicine-Doctors-Doing-Hippocrat...) Doctors were doing more harm than good right up until the 1950s and some even after that due to receiving training earlier.

Basically this changed with the germ model and penicillin (which was discovered by accident and then used by Fleming to create entirely ineffective but very profitable vaccines until one of his students, against his wishes, purified it and put it to actual use as an antibiotic).

There's some disturbing anecdotes in there, such as doctors not bothering to wash their hands while delivering babies, even after they knew it could lead to deaths, because their patients were too poor to pay for the time it would take.

Even today, it is evidence based medicine which is the new big thing. Actually testing out what works in a scientific manner with double-blind test and rigorous statistics rather than fumble through on gut feelings dressed up as science or experience.

I take comfort in the fact that while out profession is still at the quack stage, that there is something at it's core. At least we're not psychotherapists or homeopaths, though sometimes were too close for comfort.
I used Mockingbird a while ago (& loved it) but since then I had forgotten all about it.

I got the email notification about these upgrades this morning and it was poorly written. You might want to re-visit the text and look it over. I've deleted it now so can't quote you specifics but I remember seeing lines advising that services would be available until Jan 2010 etc.

It would have also helped having a line at the top simply stating what Mockingbird is for those of us who may have forgotten.

(great product though; I'll be trying it again now I've been reminded it exists)
I spent maybe five years being paid to write Lisp code in the early '90s and I can remember what a lot of the code looked like and, just your like that image, I really don't recall the parens that distinctly.
I'd bet it's Admob in all of them. It's at least in one of them: http://s4.appbrain.com/screen?id=5092928457190719555&i=2

It can't be Mobclix, because it's extremely unlikely that he already got October's payment.
This isn't a "news." That article is dated aug 12th 2010.
Risk Reduction Strategies on Facebook
+1. In the past 24 months I've used Rackspace, ThePlanet, SoftLayer, Slicehost, Linode and the terrible Mediatemple. I'm doing all future development on Linode. Their basic VPS is pretty quick for the price and it's online almost instantly. It's still just basic Linux, so you can rig everything you want - no awkward managed interfaces to worry about.

I would consider switching to a different company, but for now Linode scratches my itch better than the rest.
"The TSA is conducting a survey, why did you opt-out?"

With a straight face:

"Because I get sexual gratification from having my genitles fondled. Your job is sort of like prostitution, but you get paid by the pimps rather than the customers."

Then walk away.
I have no problem getting rid of international borders. Just install a global government of my choosing to control everything. No one else will have a problem with my choice, right?
Removing parentheses from the syntax removes the notion that lisp programs are lists of lists.

You can play around with significant whitespace all you like, but you have lost the simple representation of a list. How many hideous grammar hacks will you add to get this back?
It's profound because it's a reframing - we lose assumptions by viewing the Earth from Space.