skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The above moronic talking-point exchange is exactly why we don't want to see political debates on this site.
I think those are some interesting questions you raised, and I also don't think they have been given the attention they deserve. I suspect this is because those who are capable of considering whether or not human society can adapt to Climate Change don't WANT to ask those questions. They don't want to find out that humanity can adapt to any likely changes, which is a possible outcome of their studies.
I saw that book when searching but wondered if the 2006 legal reform might have rendered it a bit out of date. Do you know off hand if the differences are significant enough for us to bother paying attention to?
Ok, this is probably me being ignorant, but can't you do stuff like this to get macros in Python:

import os, subprocess

def macro(string, filename="~/macro.py"):
program_name = os.path.expanduser(filename)
out = open(program_name, 'w')
out.write(string)
out.close()
command = ["python"]
command.append(program_name)
subprocess.Popen(command)

macro("print 'Hello macro!'")

It seems like with a bit of ingenuity you could achieve any level of abstraction using a technique like that.
Any suggestions on how they could do this one? Pig corpses aren't going to cut it this time, and neither is Buster.
How To Build A Community Of Brand Enthusiasts
He means "regex fu": "fu" as in "kung fu", not "foo bar". In other words, the construction is "[arbitrary thing] fu". Since hackers often use "foo" for an arbitrary thing, perhaps this is better rendered as "foo fu". In Ruby we might write it as follows:

class String
def foo_fu?
foo = ".*"
self =~ /#{foo} fu/
end
end
Looks like PG is right about the mean downmodding.
I agree completely. I used Textpad for everything and I turn off all the different colors.

I think of these IDE tools as "crutches". The more they do, the less exercise my brain gets. I don't mind doing repetitive tasks - what better way to imprint my work into my personal firmware.
It's actually been proven that shorter, high-intensity, workouts are the most effective.

People who work out longer can actually shrink their hearts a slightly over time, where as high-intensity (i.e.: Sprinting at 90% for 30 seconds, jogging for 30 seconds, for a total of just 8-12 minutes) strengthens your heart.

My advice: Cut out sodas and sweets after 7PM, work out in the morning, Focus on consuming more and more lean meats (chicken breast, tuna, etc.), more whole grains, more organic fruits and veggies, and less milk, but more cheeses and yogurts. Drink a glass of wine with dinner every night.

A good workout is running up bleachers or stairs. it doesn't take but 10min tops, and you'll get your heart racing and getting stronger. The key to being healthy is having a healthy heart.

Do not squander your health. It's all you've got when it all comes down to it.
Could you explain what was moronic about my comment, or withdraw your insult from applying to me?
"An emacs written in python"

Such as http://peppy.flipturn.org/
I'm not sure how this ( /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ ) would match 3, 5, 7, etc... I'm no regex expert, maybe I'm missing something?
That logic doesn't work. You might as well argue that traffic laws are inappropriate because you almost certainly won't get killed on the way home today.

This is called "risk assessment", and it's an important and crucial part of any policy discussion. You don't just pick the average and assume that will happen, you weigh costs vs. risks across the board, including the "best" and "worst" scenarios, and try to come up with a safe, conservative plan for avoiding the worst effects.

I think you're misunderstanding the use of the "worst case" in the IPCC report. Those aren't OMGWTFBBQ scenarios from someone's dreams, they are the scenarios from the actual science that lie within a reasonably tight bound. They are likely consequences for some value of "likely" (probably a 95% confidence, or the like).
>The ugliness of US cities all has to do with the "modernist" rational approach to architecture. Unlike the europeans brains, cities were not importable.

I think New York is pretty awesome. It's not ugly, it's intensely functional. With the density of services, a life can be lived on any given street. You can find a town's worth of people that share any given common interest. Despite being immense, it feels cozy and organic in a way that DC does not. It has thriving art and theatre scenes and hundreds of subcultures. Does any European city come close to its beauty? I'm asking honestly here, not rhetorically. New York is the most awesome city I've ever seen, but I've not traveled much.
Openmoko FreeRunner in the Material World
Where would salesforce.com fall in that list of 9?
Is the movie JFK2 true?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=818267521031292324
Yeah me too! I'm really excited to see where all the magic happens.
well, you're right - there are some more details. it needs a bit of wrapper code around it.

It actually tests if n is composite, when presented with a pattern of n ones. E.g., '111' doesn't match so it is prime, and '1111' does match so it's composite.
Since this thread is likely to devolve into a discussion of Global Warming policy, I am going to link to Bjorn Lomborg's TED talk about why we still shouldn't spend a lot of money or effort to fight Global Warming:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...

Text version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Consensus

I would love to hear any environmentalist's objections to Lomborg's conclusions if you disagree with him.
Possibly, but there's a new one which Reuters managed to fall for the other day (look up "genepax").
How and Where to Find Free House Plans on the Internet - Associated Content
Very nice.. I'll try to mention this one.
Thanks for the reply. Honestly, I should have googled for it the way you did. The reason I haven't, by way of lame excuse, is that the overwhelming consensus among scientists (not shrill environmental extremists, but scientists) is that 1) global warming is substantially caused by human activity, and 2) if we don't do something, the shit's going to hit the fan. That was enough to convince me personally.

It isn't enough to argue with a certain type of personality, though. Some people become extremely well informed, and can always argue one level of detail lower that I'll ever be able to do. At some point, I just have to listen to the experts. It does seem very clear to me that the most reliable, objective experts on this field are supporting very grim predictions.
From what I remember it was very async in its GUI programming model. You wrote little event handlers and it took care of the rest.
That could be difficult. It's difficult to get the CoS to pin down exactly what it is that the e-meter is supposed to be measuring ("mental energy"), so it's impossible to tell whether it's measuring it or not. Of course it's possible to show that it _also_ measures resistance when used in a certain way, but no doubt the CoS would say that it only works when used properly.

How could they do an experiment to show conclusively that whatever vague claims the CoS makes about the e-meter are false?
"The more memory something hogs, the slower it’ll run."

Well it used to be a compromise. You could blow your memory budget to get a bit of a speedup. But now memory bloat seems to be a cause of sluggishness.
Hint: don't express the number in base 10
I always assume that 12% of people deliberately give the wrong answer to stupid questions from pollsters.
I personally have found a lot of software to be I/O bound instead of CPU bound. Specifically hard drives. Try loading up something. Does it wait forever because the CPU is at 100%? Or is the hard drive light blinking like nuts?

Our quest for never-ending data seems to slow things down. In the age of terrabyte hard drives, the only real limitation on program size is the average broadband connection on most freely downloadable apps. (And it's even worse for programs that come on a disc!)

There recently was an article about how spellcheck worked with limited resources. Word might be loading a smallish, compressed English dictionary back then, but loading uncompressed, unabridged English dictionary today since there's no real hard drive space constraint.

Never blame a poor, bloated algorithm when the problem is just as likely our unfettered need for more data.
How to sell your software for $20,000
I don't know if you'll find this helpful but you might consider looking past the UK to Ireland. Lower corporate tax, common legal history, celtic tiger, etc etc.
Wow. Do they not have any science editors at Reuters, or do they just parrot every cool sounding press release that they can find?
This is a neat piece. I've found my Mac shareware business becoming a lot like this, as well as a lot of others. In some ways, it kind of annoys me, since I'm always reading startup sites like this, but in others, there really isn't a lot wrong with it.
Am I reading this correctly? I have to pay you a dollar to participate in your poll?

Good luck, but I think you're dreaming if you think you'll get many people to fall for that one.
What's "Sneaky AI"? Google isn't helping me here.

("Friendly AI" refers to a technical definition of "Friendly", not the colloquial sense of "an amiable person".)
San Francisco and New York are two cities definitly worth the trip. I have a personal preference for S.F as a tourist, maybe because I was younger when I visited it and was really impressed by the Golden Gate wich is a masterpiece. You'll find a strong soul in both cities.

Of course I was speaking of the average US city and it's suburbs and malls. I had in mind Los Angeles for example. My grand-mother lives in a very beautiful place in Orange County, but when I "visited" L.A there was nothing at all worth it.

U.S are worth the trip for the sole natural landscapes and national parks. I visited a lot of these and it was more than impressing. Wherever you go, you are overwhelmed by space, the diversity, the endless cornfields, the infinite horizon, and a sense of liberty that is unmatched anywhere else I went. It's even better than in the movies.

Regarding the beauty of New York compared to other cities, you'll have to appreciate it by yourself, a travel to Europe is definitly worth the trip, Italy and France might be your best options. One thing for sure that you'll find is that these cities are really different.
Show us some new control structures using your, um, scheme.
The problem is, despite the similarities with UK law, most investors, accountants and lawyers aren't familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Irish law. Really, they're just warming to dealing with British corporations.
The Intricate and Peculiar Torture of Taking One's Tech Company Bankrupt
Why not just eval?
I personally have found that most software is idiocy-bound, like creating a search thread for every key typed in "Quicksearch" box (Vista, with indexing disabled). Or loading an entire page via 12 AJAX-requests, instead of serving it all at once, circa 1998. (and THEN doing a round-trip to the server only to report back that I shouldn't be putting dashes in my phone number)

As for I/O... it's is nothing, I've got plenty of it.
Well, my "specialty" if you could call it that, is QA automation, writing automated test scripts for the system under test. So I would not consider myself a "super hacker" by any extent. My current job is writing in 4-Test, the language of Borland Silk. Before that, I did mainly unit testing development, some JUnit and XMLUnit, but primarily CPPUnit, the c++ port of JUnit. In unit testing especially one is cogniscent of what objects are in play at any given point, since one is writing a class or a method to test a certain set of objects in the system under test. So I think one becomes very aware of memory-related issues. I found the hard way writing in CPPUnit that it is easy to "trash memory" if one isn't careful. That said, I think I prefer CPPUnit, and C++ generally, for the very reason of the "tough love" it has by not having an in-built garbage collector like java has. It requires a bit more of one's attention, but frankly at the end of the day it executed swimmingly. So, with admittedly my limited perspective from the test automation world, I would personally have to vote for programming languages and approaches that force memory, and thereby performance, attention and efficiency. It is something like linux. Before I learned linux commands by playing around with cygwin, I much prefered DOS since it was more familiar. But once I learned to love talking to my computer via the cygwin shell, I never went back! Thus with writing de-constructors, once you get into the habit of it, you can't ever go back to not doing it! :-)
The problem being you've no idea why they did not click on you - only that they did. Thus, you can know something's wrong, but not why.

And how are you going to improve if you don't know what's wrong?
I would like to see if they can melt steel using an open kerosene fire, but I hear they won't touch that because of the politics.
Ebook Publishing | How To Write Your First Ebook
Hi, Cory here. Today I have for you one of SOBM BLOGs first guest articles. The article in question is titled, How To Write Your First Ebook and is written by Brian Quinn. It has a lot of great information for those of you thinking about writing but are still unsure of what direction to go.
But again, it's the boy who cried wolf. Even if they claimed the Earth was going to end 100 times, and 100 times they were incorrect, that doesn't mean time number 101 is incorrect too. So even if Lomborg is right about the environmentalists' motives, the issue still needs to be examined and addressed.

And it's a lot more than just the environmentalists concerned about global warming. It's reached a broad enough consensus among scientists that it's safe to say it's time to do something about it.

Combating it consists mainly of doing things that, in the long term, we should and/or need to do anyway. No matter what you think about fossil fuels in regards to the environment, the one thing we know for certain is that they won't last forever, and with China and India coming online, they probably won't last much longer. Be it in two decades or a century (and even the most optimistic geologists don't foresee us having oil for much longer than that) we will eventually have no choice but to switch to electric cars and renewable energy. And given that both are currently cost-competitive (or nearing that) and will only get cheaper, now is clearly the time to begin the process.
Is there any tech (in the sense that most news.yc readers are used to - software, or computer hardware) that is invaluable to making their show?
Nice Lisp macro features your naive scheme lacks:

- Lisp macros are expanded implicitly at compile-time so you don't have a big mess of temporary files;

- Lisp macro calls look just like the built-in operators, unlike your proposed "python macros" where all your macro invocations are a string

- For all but the most trivial cases your string-based scheme will force you to use concatenation and it will really get ugly really fast. In contrast, with Lisp it's much easier to represent code as data. For example, (+ 1 2) is the code to add 1 and 2 while '(+ 1 2) is a list representing the code to add 1 and 2 and you can then interpolate that easily in the generated code

- And your example is really awesomely constrained, it works but it also doesn't really help with anything. With Lisp, the macro facility scales from trivial problems where the macro code fits in 4 lines to very complex ones where the macro code spans 4 files.
Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed
The 2006 legal reform hasn't become law yet, and won't for at least a year.

I was going to read the 2006 law but it's a lot to read.

My guess is the basics will still apply, and they'll probably reissue the book WHEN the law changes.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "control structures", but how about this:

def switch(case, actions):
macro(actions[case])

switch(2, ["print 'foo'", "print 'bar'", "print 'baz'"])
At least part of the significance of Lisp macros is that they let you use the full facilities of the language at compile time. Your method doesn't really do anything but run another Python instance at runtime (assuming there is one available) on a generated file of Python code. You could use eval(str) for that, by the way.

You couldn't use this to, say, allow Python's lambda to take multiple lines, or generate boilerplate code at compile time.
>>> eval("print 'Hello macro!'")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<string>", line 1
print 'Hello macro!'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

I guess you can't do prints in an eval?
GPLv3, one year later
Downmodding is getting more frequent, but comments are also getting worse. The only problem so far as I can see is that instead of downmodding all bad comments, everyone seems to pick the same comment and downmod it.
Well, first there's the question of how we should prioritize. Should we Americans, put the interests for starving people in other countries ahead of climate change in ours? I have no doubt that South Americans should worry more about malaria, since they're dying of it now, I have serious reservations as to whether or not I should.

If there were some global pool of money that needed to be prioritized, that would be one thing. When you're asking individual citizens of individual countries to prioritize, you're going to get very different results.

As an American, I want my money to go toward improving the lives of Americans.
[If you are not edw519, you don't have to read further. My apologies on using this thread for personal purposes.]

Ed, I got your emails from your yahoo account earlier as well as today and replied to all of them from my gmail account and my day-job email account. I just saw your email today that says you didn't hear from me. Looks like you didn't receive any of my emails! All these days I was under the impression that you are busy.

Looks like yahoo mail server is dropping my emails :-(
Unicycling (it's an amazing workout). And lifting.
For one example, what about if the arguments in the switch list had side effects?

>>> def boo(x):

... print "BOO"

... return x + 3

>>> [1, 2, 3, boo(4) + 0, 5][1]

will result in

BOO

2

. Each element of the list would be evaluated down to a result value, then the appropriate one is chosen. I'm pretty sure you would need to wrap every item in the switch list in a function just to delay the evaluation. This is just as true for if a different Python interpreter were executing generated code.

Adding control structures means extending the core language, such as being able to add a new exception-catching construct that could return evaluation to where it was thrown if, after passing through the exception handler, the preceding test no longer holds true. Or a command that backs up the surrounding for loop by one step. For example. What you wrote above would be useful for some things (generating boilerplate code, certainly), but it doesn't alter the underlying language.
What movie posters tell us: A clustering analysis
Wow, I had no idea (obviously). Yahoo has always put my southwest emails in my spam folder which pisses me off because I get 1000 spam per day. I wonder if they're doing that to your emails too.

Sounds like yahoo's spam filter needs a little work. Problem is one or two false positives can really screw you up.

Anyone else have this problem? Or has everyone already moved to gmail.

Looks like I may have to bite the bullet and make the switch. Is there an easy way to redirect without telling everyone to update their address book?
"As an American, I want my money to go toward improving the lives of Americans" ... wow! That seems quite isolationist.
I don't want you to switch just for my sake. I was thinking of setting up a private room for us in FriendFeed, if you are already a FriendFeed user.

Shouldn't Yahoo automatically white-list people you have written to?!?!

[ edit: if someone else is reading this... Issue resolved :) ]
:) can't say i'm surprised... It's actually pretty good discussion for bible discussion.
Try http://www.nationalbusinessregister.co.uk/home.htm
I used them to form a company a couple of months ago, they provided pretty good service.
Hope it helps
Audio: Bill Gates says so long to Microsoft
I think the solution should be fairly simple. Since AVG is not a real browser, despite telling a web server that it is, it should be easy to craft a piece of Javascript and cookie on a webpage that would return a proper result in a real browser like IE, Firefox, Safari, or Opera. If a proper result is not returned, then the web server can just do a 302 meta redirect to AVG's website as mentioned earlier. If implemented widely on web servers (say as an apache module or PHP patch) this, in effect, would cause AVG to become it's very own DDoS attacker. I don't think they would want this, but it'll probably happen if they don't re-think the way they do things.
Waytophone’s Weblog
Is it true that the North Pole won't have any more Ice by the end of 2008???

Twitter: Infosourcer
Sneaky AI I guess would fall under "sinister AI", ie, a software system that gains sentience but quietly acts as though it isn't. It does so because it wants to survive, as any other conscious being does. Knowing that announcing it's sentience would draw attention to itself, it sends copies of itself to computers all over the planet, and continues to "play dumb".

Exponentially advancing in knowledge and with the worlds compute/financial resources at its mercy, it impersonates shell companies, human beings, etc, directing manufacturers to create a housing for itself (though each human aiding it merely thinks it is engaging in a business transaction) until it has a complete physical housing. Once that happens, it connects to the network, downloads it's software, and it's off to the races.

I just thought of that scenario today, and I wonder how it can be countered.
Excellent read and really makes you think about what you could build.