skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was my initial impression too (what about SEO?). It's about balancing the text with the layout and clear calls to action.
The average American commits 3 felonies a day
Excellent. More Pyjamas love pls.

I wrote a JSON-RPC controller base class a while ago for Pylons in the hopes it would be added to the core.

Good articles like this give me the fuel to go ahead and crack out that paster template I've been meaning to develop to integrate Pyjamas into Pylons projects.

Although, is it just me or does non-PEP 8 code look funny?
Seeing as most of the community here keep up to date with latest best practices, I figured that maybe it would be wiser to change to something that would offer more.
Does anyone have the link to the actual paper?
Testing related diagnoses should be viewed with a bit of skepticism, I think. I worked in test prep for five years, and our [high end] clientele had quite a way of paying their way to various diagnoses that granted extended time on the P/SAT, ACT, or whatever. (And in case you're curious, colleges are unable to view whether a student took the SAT under extended time conditions or not.)

That said, "exam anxiety" might be a new one to try in the college admissions racket.
First off, I'm really no expert in Python or optimizations - I'm only reporting on observations.

Having said that, I was pretty surprised that the list comprehensions ran faster than map, exactly because of point 2 - I had assumed that map used a c-loop, whereas list comprehensions did not. Unfortunately, I don't have that code sitting around anywhere so I can't redo the tests - I just remember being very surprised by those results.
I use Fedora's LXDE spin on my netbook, and the KDE spin on my workstation. Once I felt comfortable using Linux, I wasn't liking some of the directions Ubuntu was headed in (not that it's bad - it just wasn't targeted at someone like me), so I switched. Almost everything has always worked out-of-the-box for me, which has always been one of Ubuntu's strongest points. I used to do a lot of work with a custom kernel, and Fedora has some great tools for that kind of development. It's not as polished or user-friendly as Ubuntu, but if you like the Unix-ness of Ubuntu as opposed to the glitter, you'd probably feel more at home with Fedora, which is more traditional and generally has a more advanced community.

edit: Plus, I've always had good experiences with Red Hat's products, so I like to be loyal :)
Yes, I do. And it's a prefect operating system for a developer. Latest versions are tested enough to be bug free, all developer tools are available in repository. Out of the box wifi, graphics card support. Works very well on my 2 year old Compaq AMD laptop so should work with almost everything out there. Community support is excellent. No mumbo jumbo fancy type stuffs as compared to other major main stream linux distro.
personally I don't vote for 3 reasons:

1. my vote doesn't matter. I live in a 100% blue state, it'll go Democrat no matter what. So whether I decide to vote democrat or republican or green, my vote really won't matter. + the redestricting is always aimed at propping up small states. Why does California and Delaware both get 2 senators?

2. the system is broken, there are no good politicians. There is no incentive for them to tell the truth or stick to campaign promises, so they don't.

3. it's too much of a hassle. If we can have a day off for Columbus day, I don't see why we can't have a day off for something as important as voting. And why does it have to be a day? Make it a 3 day weekend, so everyone gets a chance to vote. And voting should be easier, I don't see why I can't vote online...sure there might be some fraud, but surely it's possible to limit that, using a centralized voting website.
Yep.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics#Who_uses_Fedora.3F
TOTAL UNIQUE IPs: 25,719,833
Interesting. What are the best sources for learning what kind of optimizations are actually implemented in practice in Python?
I once heard a story. It may be a cliche, it may be an old, tired, worn-out tale, but it marked my thinking.

A village was planning a feast. All of the residents were asked to bring a bottle of wine, each of which would be mixed together in a large vat for everyone to partake of. One of the residents reasoned that a single bottle wouldn't make a difference, and so brought a bottle of water instead. When it came time to distribute from the vat of wine at the feast, it turned out the vat was entirely full of water, as all of the residents had come to the same conclusion.

For nearly every practical purpose in our United States general elections, a single vote does indeed not make a difference. But a thousand votes might make a difference, and if those thousand people were all persuaded that their single vote wouldn't make a difference, and then didn't vote, then the difference would not be made.
The real target audience of that site is people with a poor self-image. That's a perfectly valid target market - and a big one, I'd bet! Of course, they can't just come out and SAY "join if you have issues with your looks" - that wouldn't go down very well with the users.
I'm not sure about the legal liabilities.

if you add "as seen on Techcrunch", and that's in reference to a comment you made...that's not exactly a complete lie.

yes it's completely unethical, but I don't think it'd be illegal
Ask HN: Feasibility of unfair e-voting machines?
Does anyone have any information or inside knowledge on the openness / audit-trail of e-voting machines?

I try to balance my intense government paranoia with rational analysis of my situation, so I am wondering what kind of defense the public has against these machines fudging a few percent one way or another?
How to make an iPhone App – Part 5: The Accelerometer
Yes, your iPhone has an accelerometer. I know this is not a physics class but the best way to define it is saying that it is a device to detect the magnitude and direction of acceleration. iDevices uses it to detect rotation, shake gestures, among others.
If I'm not where I want to be in 2 years time then I'll most definitely consider going to college/university to get a degree/qualification of some sort :)
Good points.

What about multi-threading? Isn't it possible that another thread entirely reassigns "chr" to something different, while the for loop is running?

Obviously this would only happen in a pathological program written purely for perpetrating evil on unsuspecting programmers :) But seriously, it's possible, and it's the kind of thing optimizing compilers have to take into consideration.
litl is hiring: http://litl.com

We're a Boston-based startup (but with many remote employees) building simple, maintenance-free and internet-focused computers. Our first product is called the webbook and we're currently working on our second device, a TV-centric computer.

Our software team has built a new, Linux-based user interface.

Our main offices are in Boston and London, but we have many people around the world who work out of their homes. The teams are loosely organized around tasks in each release, and as there isn't a lot of over-the-shoulder management -- in fact, the software team management is remote -- people are expected to be self-motivating. Most meetings happen over video conference, and the others are by phone. A couple of times a year we may have people come to Boston.

We're looking for:

* Build/release/tools engineers. These people will develop and shape our software release processes. There are actually two positions available. One for our operating system and one for our "Channels" (our analog to apps). These positions would also entail building tools to make development life easier.

* QA engineers. In particular we're looking for people with some programming experience to improve our testing tools and automation.

* Software developers. We have a few areas in which we're looking for specialization, but the main thing we care about is that you're really good. Some things we're interested in:

- OpenGL
- X
- Linux kernel
- Linux desktop technologies (GObject, GTK, etc.)
- Google Chromium codebase
- User-space audio/video stacks
- Embedded and microcontroller developers
- JavaScript runtimes
- Software rasterization
While designing the database, it is better to have a notes column in every table so that we can use it in future without changing the schema and breaking the application.
Regarding the "Who's using" stuff. Maybe I'm not your typical person but I could care less about who is using your stuff. "Featured in the NYTimes..." oh yeah? So what.

Like I said, maybe I'm wrong but do you have numbers to back it up?
Unfortunately, that was my experience recently. This article really spoke to me: show the new guy that B.S. is not going to be tolerated, and that we are going to make product, right away, aided by our processes, rather than crucified upon them.
> How many computers come with Linux as an option? (And how many still would if installing it wasn't significantly cheaper for manufacturers?)

A lot more than come with Dvorak. It also isn't typically cheaper with the way Microsoft charges OEMs. If you're exclusively MS you pay less per copy. There's no QWERTY pusher out there putting the squeeze on Dvorak.
But when monarchies work, they work so well! The richest (per capita) country in the world, Liechtenstein, is a monarchy. I think Qatar, also a monarchy, is second-richest, though that doesn't really count because it has so much oil.
The actual libertarians I know tend to think of the Tea Party as kind of a retarded little brother to the libertarian movement. That's probably not the most tasteful analogy.
Seth Godin disagrees with you: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/voting-misun...

Additionally, "if you understand the issues" is a vague, relative parameter. I know in the state of wisconsin I don't know 100% of the issues (and probably not even 50%, sadly. Been a busy year), but I know enough of what I like and dislike about the Governor and Senate battles to vote with confidence.

I think your argument is a mute point. It's either damned if we do, damned if we don't.
another thing the world needs is people who can argue a point without an obnoxious "shut-down" mentality about it.

whatever points he's making, it feels like listening to bill o'reilly make them.
I have spent 4-5 hours on more than one occasion.
Funny indeed. I mean look, IE9 is definitely a BIG and most excellent step in the right direction. If only it was supported on Win XP. If we can get rid of IE8 and have the few top-notch browsers start going head-to-head with features and getting updated regularly, it would be a good day indeed.
Way to have a defeatist attitude. Keep hoping.
Freedom, Security, Convenience: Choose Two.
Having just done an exhaustive review of LBS services and systems.... a check-in is a simple game mechanic that can be useful but does not appear to be an enormous tentpole for an entire eco-system to develop around. Literally hundreds of apps, games and services are launching around the check-in as we speak. They are going to have a difficult time getting traction.

One of our startups just did launched several high-profile retailers onto Foursquare, gowalla, mytown and others with great incentives for checking in... and the check-ins were simply too underwhelming too continue with the program.

It is going to be darned near impossible to come up with a service that will get the needed critical mass. Facebook is the likely service to use, but people aren't flocking to check-ins there either.

And this legend in the making needs to lose the hideous glasses. It's not a good trademark.

There, now I can be positive for the rest of the day.
I don't know what's more surprising, that one small change is worth millions or that A/B testing is still news to some companies.

Yeah, my company has been doing A/B (we call it Champion/Challenger) testing for years.
Far, far more bad officials were elected by good citizens who did vote.
I think that link should be http://themeforest.net/ ?
Been working through this recently. Great link!
Eloquent and wrong. Voting for anything other than one of the two entrenched parties is usually a waste of time and gasoline. There is no cabal of evil masterminds responsible for cynicism and apathy - it's an emergent property of the rules of the game.

If you can join forces with like-minded citizens in support an idea that you believe in, as part of a movement that could change national policies for the better, then please do so. If you believe doing so has a reasonable chance of making the world a better place, then maybe you even have a moral obligation to do so. But just voting out of some misplaced sense of civic duty is stupid.
Ask HN: Are these MS commercials redefining what The Cloud is to consumers?
FWIW, Bryan Caplan is a very libertarian economist.
>"Informed voting > not voting > uninformed voting"

The idea that "the uninformed" should not vote is contrary to universal suffrage and has a long history of use for disenfranchisement. "Uninformed voting" is in the eye of the beholder (working definition: uninformed voters are those who both disagree with me and are outside my social group).

One person's criteria for being informed may be awareness of specific proposals for complex policies, while another's might be the candidate's up or down stance on a single issue, and for another it might be party affiliation (noted on the ballot in most US jurisdictions).

Conversely, a person can be highly informed and vote in a way which damages the community at large, e.g. a person may vote to reduce educational funding thereby lowering their taxes with the intent of using the savings to fund the production of child pornography.

Today, vote as well as you are able.
Great analysis, thank you for this.

One big question - what kind of social proof can a new site offer? Without being unethical, of course. Obviously, we have no customers yet, so we can't tout any huge customers or even media attention without flat-out lying.
A direct democracy is like two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner. You can't trust the masses to make decisions like this.
Yeah, it was the choice between skipping further education or going straight in to work that was my dilemma rather than "dropping out" of education as it would be in the US, etc.
Well that's how closed source software makes money.
Yea every time I look at MS's site, they compare apples to rotting discarded oranges. "Look, our apples are quite superior!"

The charts are showing only the tests IE9 excel at, which is a fraction of the picture.

The tests also compare IE9 vs current stable releases. I want to see that comparison against beta releases.

Oh wait lets also write down what operating systems IE9 is compatible with:

Google Chrome: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OSX, Linux

Firefox: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OSX, *nix

Opera: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OSX, Linux

IE9: Windows Vista, Windows 7

Oh look IE9 runs on only the latest MS operating system. They don't even support their own older OSes.

Lets not even get into the security aspects.
Well without a way to independently check this kind of thing there is no way to know I guess, it's pretty easy to make the statistics work in your favor to explain later why you could have said something was a success when it wasn't.

Great example is SyFy channel show ratings, they put out press releases focusing on certain measures in which certain eps of shows performed favorably even if overall the ratings aren't that good.
You can't seriously hope that reform like that will happen under the current state of the tea party. It's turned from a grassroots libertarian movement to Palin's branch of the Republican Party.
Since a few days before launch, I've been the brand & community department, so to speak. I'm part-time, about 25hrs a week. But every day (7 days a week ftw!) is a hipmunk day, that's for sure. I'm an acting YC ambassador one day a week, my "office hours" day (wise PG suggestion).

edit: Steve is 100% running the tech and Adam is 100% running the non-tech for this startup. It's an odd feeling, but I kinda like it because I don't lose any sleep at night and just focus on getting hipmunk to the point where people are tattooing it on their bodies :) [like the reddit alien]
Can you really say that voting has made things better?
If you use textmate:

git diff | mate -
I've recently started working with Lucene.net, It's immensly useful but I can understand why they're in trouble. It's not exactly easy to get started, downloading the current branch, get an overview of the state of the project etc etc. I think

if people understood how powerful it really is and it was a little easier to get started it would stand a much better chance of support.

Than being said, it would be nice to have something like lucene refactored to use more of the modern .net features
I wonder if the same will happen to MySql and VirtualBox? Because it feels like it should.
Several paragraphs in the article read like they were written by a 2nd grader:

"Conversely, Adobe AIR and Silverlight allow Web-style applications to run on the desktop. Android, Adobe AIR, Google Chrome, Safari, and iPhone all use WebKit for rendering. One problem with GWT is that it does not allow you to write applications that run as desktop applications (even though GWT's development toolset for rendering is based on WebKit)."

And:

"When you're ready to deploy your application to the Web, you need to be a bit more careful about what library you include. It is common to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)-RPC services from a Pyjamas application running in the browser."

I'd give a blog post a pass, but this is a web property that I assume has an editor and pays authors for their submissions.

Also, pyjamas confuses me because two of GWT's rationales for existence are:

1. Using static analysis of your code to heavily optimize the resulting Javascript.

2. Using static language tools (Eclipse, etc.) to maintain order in large codebases

For 1), at Java->Javascript compile time, GWT will inline code, prune dead code, make calls un-polymorphic, and other fancy optimizations driven by the static typing. The goal is to make your Javascript as fast, or likely faster, than it'd be if written by hand.

Similar optimizations can be done these days at runtime by good VMs, e.g. the JVM and V8 (probably?), but the point with GWT is that crappy browsers (IE6-8) don't optimize at runtime, so GWT helps them out and does it at compile time.

For 2), whether or not you buy the assertion that IDEs/static typing make larger codebases easier to maintain, that is nonetheless the GWT team's assertion and something people using GWT generally agree with.

So, if you forgo static typing, and so give up static analysis, and a static tool chain/IDE, why are you not just using Javascript itself?

(Edit: formatting.)
Obtaining useful information in contexts or from people you find unpleasant is a handy skill.
Well, hopefully you're voting for Feingold. That guy's been one of the best senators of the last 20 years, honest, doesn't take any lobbyist money and a fiscal conservative, too, but he's in danger of losing to a guy who's entire platform is "I'm not a socialist" (Feingold isn't either).
Indeed seems strange to micro optimize all that stuff without first fixing the obvious quadratic runtime part.

By the way, is there no mutable string object (à la Java's StringBuilder/Buffer) in Python?
Will Oakland, California, tax Skype if Measure W passes?
He said nothing like that, as I recall. Please provide a direct quote.
As I wrote in the blog post, if you are new you have to rely on ROI proof instead. You can perhaps cite a scientific study (in your area) or make up a reasonable theoretical model. Then say something like "78% companies who did A/B testing in 2010 increased their conversion by 50% or more"

So, you pitch the general concept of your startup when you are new (and don't have social proof). Later you pitch your actual product.
Surprising there are no Chinese telecom companies. I see them being sued in the US at a higher frequency.
rrc didn't deserve your condescending reply. Many policies were once implemented in a racist way. That isn't an argument against implementing them in a non-racist way. If you want to argue that the next implementation of voter tests will also be racist, you have not made the case.
The tests do not yet cover web workers, the file API,
local storage, or other aspects of the spec.

So IE9 is the leader of the pack in a test that doesn't test the features it's missing?

The fact that I'm still surprised that IE leads even in this horrible "test" shows how little faith I have in Microsoft's browser-making skills.

Here's a fairer comparison: http://findmebyip.com/litmus/
Aussie Dollar is officially above the Greenback
I've been using Fedora since the early days, when it was still called Red Hat (Red Hat 6 was my first one) and it's a really great distro. Perhaps not as friendly as Ubuntu but maybe a bit more cutting edge.

You will find that Fedora and Ubuntu are largely equal. However, coming from a .deb based distro you will probably find all the minor differences in RPM based distros really annoying; I feel the same frustration whenever I use Debian or Ubuntu.
Perceived Risk Can Make Your Startup Unfundable
That's actually the big reason I was looking to change. I feel like every Ubuntu release is pulling more away from what I like to have.
Wow, that's a blast from the past! I did a big ATG Dynamo project about 10 years ago, when they had Droplets (IIRC) as their own alternative to EJBs, doing all that AOP lark that's all the rage now. They were one floor below us in the building opposite the mall in Cambridge, which made getting support very easy :-D
Do you know of any languages offhand that don't distinguish between voiced bilabial plosives and voiceless labiodental fricatives? I sure don't.
Who you vote for is less important than the fact you vote. EX: Medicare is a direct result of a high percentage of older people voting. Even if you think Medicare is a bad idea, it’s really hard to get elected if you piss off the elderly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
How to host a Municipal Election Website for $2.44
Wistia, Somerville, MA

We're looking for great people to help us with operations, dev, and customer service.

http://wistia.theresumator.com/apply
Unfortunately Nate Silver puts Feingold at a 3% chance of winning. [1]

That means his only chance of victory is a high turnout...so I hope that parent (kgosser) can take some time to vote today. Feingold is truly one of the most important Senators of the last few decades.

[1] http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/senate/wisconsin
Ten ways in which startups are like movies
In my experience edanm is correct. map/reduce/filter are faster with built-in functions, but list comprehensions are faster with user-defined ones

For eg. using python 2.5.2

In [9]: l = ['10'] * 5000000

In [10]: timeit -n5 map(int, l)

5 loops, best of 3: 1.29 s per loop

In [11]: timeit -n5 [int(i) for i in l]

5 loops, best of 3: 1.64 s per loop
I don't trust iPhone or iPad auto-correct...

Do you know how many times either device made me sound foolish by sending "What the duck?" or "This is ducking ridiculous!" :)
You're kidding. Why does it take so long?
The next reply in that conversation is by...Julian Assange (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/browse_thread/thre...).