skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
actually, he doesn't make any assertions that Python is more flexible than Perl (which would be rather doubtful), only that it is more readable (which, as a perlista, I'm sad to say is probably true).

but I also get the sense that this is the first time he's seriously delved into a dynamic programming language. much of what he's saying about Python is exactly what bioinformaticists were saying about Perl in the late 90s / early naughts.
Walk safely while you type on your phone [video]
You don't pay pilots for the 9999 flights where nothing happens and the autopilot works fine. You pay them for the 1 flight where the autopilot either fails or encounters a situation it doesn't know how to handle, but amortize it over all the ones where it goes fine.
There seems to be a misunderstanding in this article that Lord James is a member of the government.

As far as I can tell from his Wikipedia page he is a member of one of the houses of parliament, but has never been a member of government.
I recommend "A Fire Upon The Deep" and "A Deepness In The Sky" by Vernor Vinge. They're epic, emotional, and gripping, but also have some quite excellent hard science and future culture speculation. Also his book "Rainbows End" for something a little closer to home... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge
Your College Major May Not Be as Important as You Think
Tech Tussles: Apple vs. The World
>Code should not be Documentation.

Code is for humans to read, that it compiles/interprets to a program is a side effect. Otherwise we'd all be passing around binaries (or byte encoded files) with our thick stacks of documentation.
This was a great episode as usual. Always insightful/helpful material on TWiST.
Typically, how many relationships are necessary to succeed as an entrepreneur?
Forget "ageist," this seems idiotic. "mind blowing?" People who have been living with technology for decades have seen many "mind blowing" innovations, and they understand that "iphones and gmail" are probably going to be just as ephemeral as innumerable technologies of the past.
People tend to over-invest in negative externalities (because someone else pays part of the cost) and under-invest in positive externalities (because someone else enjoys part of the benefit).

Pollution and climate change are two stark examples of the former. Because I don't have to pay my share of health care and infrastructure costs for the exhaust coming out of my car, I will tend to buy a bigger car than I would if the cost of that car included those externalized costs.

Gas and carbon taxes are mechanisms to internalize those negative externalities. They create an incentive for drivers to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, which creates an incentive for automakers to manufacture more fuel-efficient vehicles. This is why European cars are on average much smaller and more fuel efficient than American cars, despite the fact that Europeans and North Americans drive roughly the same annual distance (17,000 miles and 18,000 miles, respectively.)

Another mechanism is the American CAFE system, which arguably does a worse job because it gives automakers an incentive to find loopholes in vehicle designations. We can thank CAFE for the preponderance of SUVs on the market.

On the other side of the coin, education has a positive externality because some of the benefits of an individual's education accue to society as a whole. Given straight market forces, individuals will on aggregate under-invest in their own education, and the economy as a whole will suffer from a lower mean worker productivity.

Every industrialized country quickly landed on universal public education because the aggregate benefits to productivity that come from a universally educated populate more than offset the higher cost to educate everyone. That is, even though average taxes are higher to help pay for education, average incomes are higher still.
I also heartily recommend "Cyberiad", a timeless collection of short stories.
"Take you to lunch" is a common phrase in American business (and social relations in general). The taker buys lunch for the taken.

The implication is that the taker is making life easy for the taken, all the taken has to do is show up.
Re the commerce clause covers [intra-state marijuana production, distribution, and use].

Sure. As I recall the court's main reasoning was that as a fungible commodity, there is no such thing as purely "intra-state pot". That's sensible. For example, suppose that 19 had passed and everyone played by the rules: lots and lots of marijuana were produced and consumed strictly within California. That will nevertheless have enormous impact on inter-state price, production, and distribution patterns throughout the US for a substance in whose trade Congress asserts there is a strong public regulatory interest.

That decision did not overturn California's medical marijuana laws. Those are still operative. They are the authority by which, for example, dispensaries are owned and operated that do not violate any California laws.

From time to time the federal government does take action against the medical marijuana industry but, mostly they leave it alone. One suspect that part of the reason for that is because the last time they cracked down heavily, they gave rise to medical marijuana laws like California's. The original distribution co-ops / businesses were not authorized under state law. They were in defiance of both state and federal law. They largely arose out of the AIDS crisis after it was realized that marijuana had both palliative and therapeutic benefits for many patients (with no lawful substitute coming even close). The feds tried hard to shut down those scoff-laws and parts of state law enforcement helped. In response, first many other wholly unlawful medical distribution efforts sprung up (like mushrooms overnight). Second, the state-level medical marijuana law went on the ballot and won soundly.

The feds toned it down rather a lot, after that.
You're still alive? ;) Please please please can you add the following to the app:

* make it work with iOS 4 multitasking (so leaving the app and coming back doesn't cause it to restart and you lose your place)

* Add an option to email a page (in addition to the existing "readability" and "open in safari" options). An instapaper option would also be nice but I don't want to get greedy :)

As it is now, if you want to read something later, you have to open it in safari, then email it to yourself or add it to instapaper, then return to the app, where you've lost your place because of the aforementioned lack of multitasking.

Thanks for the otherwise-wonderful app, though -- I use it all the time.
Five Years Of Linux Kernel Benchmarks: 2.6.12 Through 2.6.37
Human migration hinges on sustainable interplanetary resource acquisition and processing; infrasttucture seems the priority first.
I live in Mt Vernon and as DC and Greenbelt aren't especially convenient for me, I'd be willing to meet with some fellow pythonistas if anyone is interested.

Working remotely, I also spend a few hours at City Cafe most days if anyone just wants to sit with another coder while working...
Hadoop++: Making a Yellow Elephant (Hadoop) Run Like a Cheeta
Tractor Trailer Insurance-call 18005133135 
call 18005133135 to Save Your Time And Money on Your Tractor Insurance Needs. Avail Our Benefits And Features Designed Just For You
Seems to me, though, that if you're not bringing a technical co-founder, you'd better be bringing cash to the table. A technical co founder can exchange time for code. Without them, you need some other medium, which is invariably cash (or connections to cash).
http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7459

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_effects_of_cannabis#...
That might work out well for Facebook. I don't know what percentage of their user base would care enough to do so, though. And at this point, with all of the ridiculous things that have happened with their privacy, it might even seem extortive to me. It's one thing to tell everyone their stuff is public unless you pay from the beginning, but publicizing what one would otherwise assume to be private data late in the game and then charging to reprivatize would be underhanded.
PEP8 is wrong on several counts. It even understands this the first section (after introduction) is "A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds" which is about the spirit of pep8 readability and consistency and explains some situations when you should violate pep8.
Suggestion Chain: For when you want Google to be a little more specific
Electronic Health Records on the iPad (AMA)
Our studio was commissioned to build an iPad app for the Ottawa Hospital that gives doctors and nurses full access to electronic medical records (EMR). An iPhone version has been commissioned as well.

We're a pretty small team of only five mobile developers and are all recent university grads. We were up against giants in the space like IBM and Telus Health. This was also our first foray into healthcare.

We wanted to share. Feel free to AMA.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Trio+helps+hospital+results/3768201/story.html

http://selectstartstudios.com/work/ottawa-hospital-emr-client/
Looks like a good reason to really know the people you decide to partner with before you go into business together.
sorry we will miss you -- this site is a good place to get connected: http://startupbaltimore.org/ Also check out our google group: http://groups.google.com/group/techinbaltimore?lnk=srg
Andreessen Horowitz VC firm raises whopping $650M
I've found that cofounders can be both a blessing and a curse. I started something on my own that failed because I lacked the discipline to lock my brain in to work mode from 9am to 5pm. Working in my apartment - sometimes still in whatever I slept in - made me blur the lines between what was life and what was work. If you have a cofounder, at the very minimum you'll have to get dressed in the morning :) Hopefully, you'll also have someone keeping you accountable to deadlines, questioning what you did that day, and so on. Not in a manager style, but because they genuinely need to know what you've done every day.

But I've also started things with cofounders that didn't work out (I wouldn't say "failed" because they were more false starts than outright failures). You really do have to think of cofounding like a marriage, because you and your cofounder have to have the same set of goals. In 10 years, do you still want to be working side by side with this person? Could you take direction from them if you ultimately decide they should be the final say on something? Do you have the same exit strategy? Do you want to live in the same city as them? Do you want a small company or a big one? What kind of culture do you want your company to have? When are you both quitting your day jobs / consulting?

It may seem like discussing these things are premature when you're hacking in a garage, but the answers aren't nearly as important as the questions. You don't want to have a vision for selling a 50 person company to Google while your cofounder sees your startup as side income to his day job. And you definitely don't want to see your startup as an 80 hour/week gig while your cofounder sees it as a 10/hour week gig.

I follow Seth Godin's advice on partnership: 50/50 is a bad idea, period. Business requires decision-making, and someone should be the final say. If you wouldn't be okay deferring to your cofounder (even when he is wrong), maybe it's not the right cofounder. And ownership should be a factor determined by both time and money put in, not one or the other. Your agreement with your partner should stipulate how much time you'll be logging for the project, and ownership should be tied to actually "showing up".
That's exactly why we're doing this :-)
Oh thank you for that link. Just watched a few of their other commercials. Hilarious!!
Tell HN: ACM Digital Library allows online comments on published papers
ACM Digital Library now allows online comments on published papers. For example, see http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=278298.278306
Or as Steve Yegge claims, the programming language doesn't matter nearly as much as the tools:

http://vimeo.com/16069687
Annoyed by about:blank when a page doesn't load? Vote for the Chrome bug report.
Create a Mobile Site in 5 Minutes
MobStac makes it dead simple for long-tail publishers and bloggers to create mobile sites helping them reach their audience over mobile browsers across a wide-range of devices.
It's a sound defeat, but it's not a landslide. 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been 70-30.
Fair enough. When I think of scientific uses of python I think astronomy, atmospheric physics, finite element analysis and linear systems using existing techniques...

Existing techniques in general really. Fields where the interest is the data and the implications of the data. Fields like ML and NLP where the algorithm/technique is the thing of interest then yeah sure the code is important.
do you know about the Beehive in Canton? It's a coworking space you might really like, lots of hackers work there remotely http://beehivebaltimore.org/
I think he just has to deal with security of his website. He has a huge readership and therefore always a possible target.
They can't vote in certain elections, but are otherwise still full memebers. See here:
http://www.uaw.org/node/158
Embedding the grammar directly into a language through operator overloading is similar to Boost.Spirit's approach: http://boost-spirit.com/home/
I like it, nice and simple and the feminine style is smart for your demographic. You may want to play that up by having a guys vs. girls aspect. The styling could use a little work (background vs. foreground contrast, the quotes on the title are a little tacky) and polished typography but it's a great start. Is it custom PHP or a script you used? I've been looking at a similar structure on a different topic using Wordpress but this is probably a much cleaner setup.
thanks! We are also working on a Startup Weekend next year that this is intended to feed into...
Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden got his commercial pilots license. You can assume he didn't do it for the money:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Dickinson#Aviation
Sorry, how does that work?

People aren't pirates or not pirates - there's nothing that says that once you become a pirate that's you for life. I'm sure there are people who've pirated stuff on here who also buy stuff. One incident doesn't determine your future behaviour.

The decision point is different for each person for each medium and each specific product. You may be willing to pay $5 for the new William Gibson but I may think it's worth $20. If they price it at $10 I think it's a bargain, you go looking for a torrent. We both read it, you love it, I hate it. Next time our valuations on it may be completely different and our actions completely different.

And with each transaction being an individual thing it all comes back to what you see as short term profit.
2 letter .co.uk, .net.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk domains are being released.

I should have phrased the title to include the various .uk full domains, and I've amended it as per your suggestions :)

You're wrong about the two letters though, one letter domains are also being released. You can see the full (PDF) list here: http://www.nominet.org.uk/digitalAssets/46540_domains-to-be-...
Ask HN: Is It Me, Or Is Submission Quality Suffering?
I've never spent much time upvoting submissions in the past, but the quality of posts has, IMO, gotten so rotten in the past couple of months that I have made it a point to go through the new submissions a few times a day and upvote links that are worthy of HN. I call upon the HN veterans to please do the same. Maybe it's time for a week of Erlang posts?
Just a heads up, there's a typo. Under "Operating Systems", distrobutions -> distributions.
Right, just Americans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_hooliganism

I think all nationalities can go a little crazy over sportball.
Andreessen Horowitz Doubles Down, Raises $650 Million Fund
Read the Cryptonomicon. It's an awesome work of fiction, and it involves lots of geek interests. Alternative suggestions are Microserfs and JPod.
It's actually quite disappointing to see that the Linux kernel performance essentially never increased over 5 years. A lot of nice functionality was added, so at least the lack of a net loss is quite fantastic.

I wonder if this report might give the kernel folks the boost they need to be truly innovative moving forward.
It's weird to have images instead of text/css for your Nav and Logo. You may want to change that.
It's certainly a balance.

Think too about the "crippling long-term debt" on the other side of the contract, too.

Loans are built on standard contract law. There are penalty clauses and associated costs with exiting the contract, and you (from whichever end of the deal you're on) have to expect that those exit clauses might be exercised.

When thinking about these "strategic defaults", consider the responsibilities of and the systemic risks that occur on the origination. If you're originating or are repackaging what may be questionable loans or derivatives, or are incurring excessive leverage, isn't that also a systemic risk?

It's a balance.

The folks that are severely upside-down (and staying that way) won't be consumers, they'll approach indentured status. They'll be paying for the losses they've taken by not walking away, and (given that these folks are taxpayers, and if they have any money left) in taxes, and (indirectly, economically) by not being able to buy the products and services that businesses are looking to sell (meaning a slower recovery).

If this topic is interesting, here is some "light" reading out of the University of Arizona: "Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis":

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1494467

And playing devil's advocate here, if you're +not+ exercising what you're entitled to within a contract (and from either end of the deal), then what does that say about the sustainability and efficiency and equality of the business system?

And yes, this sort of legal and contractual mire can bury a country and an economy. As we're seeing.
The danger of NOT bringing on a technical co-founder is that you're then dealing with a different type of developer/tech person. This technical person is generally the type that gets (or could get) paid good money.

So as Travis mentions in his comment, if you don't have lots of cash on hand, you could run into problems. There is really no shortage of jobs available to developers, and chances are many jobs out there will pay much better than what you can afford to pay at your startup. Unless you find the perfect person who doesn't mind making less than he/she probably could and is still 100% dedicated, you'll probably have a high turnover rate.

In contrast, you can generally assume that a co-founder is going to give you 100% all the time as they theoretically have a lot of skin in the game.

In many startups, you probably don't need a technical co-founder, but you probably should have one anyway.
I'm a long time Python programmer and I am currently using it for scientific programming (for my PhD).

I've shopped around a lot for alternatives to Python and looked at Ocaml, F#, Boo, Clojure, Common Lisp, Haskell and Scala.

There are a couple of things still keeping me with Python:

* The REPL, especially IPython,

* Numpy & Scipy,

* Networkx & igraph,

* jpype for fairly seamless JVM integration (this way, I can interact with Cytoscape), rpy for fairly seamless R integration,

* ZODB,

* IPython's parallel processing framework.

The .net environment probably comes the closest to providing everything here, but the REPLs need a lot of work and the graph libraries have more complicated interfaces which make them a pain to use on the command line.

Python is not without its warts but when I recently had to spend time with Matlab again after a few years, I was reminded of just how nice the Python ecosystem is in comparison.

Update: I should add that if you rely on one of Matlab's toolboxes, you might not find any decent alternatives outside of Matlab. You can always use a bridge like MLabWrap to access Matlab from Python.
I agree about Python's libraries. Normally, I'm a Ruby programmer, because I like Ruby's syntax and the Rack/Rails/Sinatra web stack.

But if I need to do scientific or linguistic programming, Python is absolutely amazing. SciPy, NumPy, Matplotlib and NLTK support a rich and deep ecosystem. And it's vastly nicer programming environment than Matlab and Octave.

(Of course, GNU R is also pretty useful if you're doing pure statistics.)
For a group that are putatively so diverse in their opinions, I've found that when I hear their talking points on the various issues, they speakers seem quite consolidated and repetitive to me.

Honestly, I think that this is just so much self-congratulations on the part of the Liberals.
fu.ck
It actually looks like this is the main bug report on the issue: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=9682
I have been using ocaml for about 5 years and earning moneys with it for the last 2 years. I love the language but for scientific work its hard to beat python. Ocaml just doesn't have the libraries or the community support to even be on the radar.
Or maybe the IQ test that gave him a score of 190 had puzzles that engaged the same part of the mind as chess does, which he's already trained.
By this logic you wouldn't call a US Senator a member of the US Government?
I think you're reading something 'go softly' into my comment that is not intentionally present.

I'm all for rigorous and/or difficult training, there's nowhere near enough of that. Nurture does not imply wishy washy formless ness.

This is not about left vs right, liberal vs conservative. That needs looking beyond now, I think many are ready to move on from that now.

Creativity is not just drawing pictures. Creativity is physics, maths engineering, language. It's the spark of self expression and contribution, rather than dead reproduction.
No, I'll definitely check that out.
When I thought about the issue, it became clear to me that one person's 'quality post' might be other persons unnecessary spam..

If you look at all the top stories from RSS, its difficult to call any of them universal spam.
Social Networks as an Attack Platform
Thanks; do you have an example of when it's not accurate?
Which is why we use Python. We're a web app (Django) doing big data aggregation/processing (Numpy).
ha.ck :-)
If you like parentheses, Scribble[1], a tool by the racket guys, does what you're asking for. I haven't used it extensively but the few times I've tried it, it has worked well. Here's an example scribble file[2].

[1]: http://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/index.html
[2]: http://git.racket-lang.org/plt/blob/HEAD:/collects/scribblin...
What makes him tell that MS is killing the DLR and Iron languages ?

From my understanding both got funded by MS then passed on the community (the IronRuby mailing list is pretty active these days), but I wouldn't say MS killed these projects.
If you like Foundation, you might like the Ringworld series by Larry Niven. Ringworld is a classic.

Robert Heinlein's books are great. Some come to mine are The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers (much better than the movies), Stranger in a Strange Land, Double Stars, and The Puppet Masters.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is amazing. The Earthsea series are fun read if you want to get beyond SciFi.