skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DIY Financial Engineering:

1. Sign up for an Interactive Brokers account; state that you want to trade options.

2. Transfer >25K (day-trading capability) or whatever is reasonable amount money for you. Enough for you to care about but not over the amount where if you lost it all, you'd lose sleep over.

3. Now use the highest/lowest volatility scanner and buy/sell some options randomly in that list; max out your real cash to accumulate positions (do not go on margin).

4. Now figure out what the fuck you just did and how much money you are going to lose. This is the most important step, nothing motivates you to learn security analysis, risk management, Black-Scholes/Bionomial Tree option pricing, post-transaction cost analysis than the threat of losing your money.

5. If you get over step 4, then you probably have a strategy that turn over 7% monthly, or turn over 100% annually. Now automate it as much as you can with IB API.
You're not going to learn enough to become an entrepreneur from any school. You just fucking do it. http://www.cloudave.com/1171/what-makes-an-entrepreneur-four...
Twitter hack using HTML5 local storage
> I did assume poor people avoid work out of rational utility maximization.

I don't think anybody in their right mind believes seriously this to be true, nowadays. I mean out of the crazy free-market fanatics and maybe Goldman-Sachs bankers. I'm clearly not interested in proving you wrong, I've got way better fish to fry than convincing wingnuts.
Buy it Use it Break it Fix It Trash It
Most of this. It uses ptrace() to connect to the target and then make the target make specific system calls and ioctl()s on various fd's. I bet it could be ported to other unixes (assuming they have equivalent tty syscalls and ioctl's), but you'd have to change a lot of the details.

If someone wants to try a port to, say, a BSD that abstracts the syscalls and ioctls into a platform-specific way, I'd be happy to take a look.
I'm going to do something I dislike and play devil's advocate. You're not the only one here saying that Twitter is no startup, and while I agree with that assessment to a certain extent, you've pretty much described a startup with your points. A startup is no longer considered being a startup if they become profitable (twitter isn't), is acquired or merges into another entity (twitter hasn't) or becomes public (which twitter hasn't either).

Is twitter a startup? Yes. Would giving the prize to some other company be more interesting? Definitely. These competitions are often not fair, but honestly, who are we to judge?
Cutting people up in surgery probably has a much greater requirement of uniform continuous motion which implies more self control.
Note Slate - A low cost tablet device-
> If Maloof bought the original negatives and especially if the Meier estate has not retained any copies of the work then he's got an enormously strong case to having bought not just a copy of the work but the work itself and the rights to distribute it.

Copyright law doesn't work that way. This argument is expressly addressed in 17 USC 202: "Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied.

"Transfer of ownership of any material object, including the copy or phonorecord in which the work is first fixed, does not of itself convey any rights in the copyrighted work embodied in the object; nor, in the absence of an agreement, does transfer of ownership of a copyright or of any exclusive rights under a copyright convey property rights in any material object."

(Extra paragraphing added.)
I would subscribe to your newsletter.
I signed up for it and have played with the Ruby client library. While the limit of 2000 per month free API calls seems limiting it is enough for both play and possibly using it to generate some machine learning data for your own experiments (e.g., learn to produce similar results in a very narrow domain).
Two other regex-understanding tools I've found useful:

http://www.regexbuddy.com/

http://www.regexio.com/
Oh shoot, I accidentally downvoted you to 0. I'm sorry! I didn't mean it but I can't see how to undo like I could on Reddit; perhaps someone could neutralize my vote?
At this points, throwing engineers becomes throwing money.
What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI
ha! i just picked your book up off the new arrivals shelf at the library. glad to see you're on hn.
I don't want to include people with unreported income, but you are.

Your last statement sums up the cognitive dissonance that your argument creates. You are creating your own definition of a word which already has one.[1] If you don't know anyone who is not hardworking, yet has managed to remain employed for at least a year, you're not paying attention.

1.http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=hardworking
The application page: http://aquantum-demo.appspot.com/file-upload
How easy is it to pickup a gun and start shooting zombies in the head?
The problem is that the beam propagates so far that, unlike if you want to injure someone with a car or a handgun, you are far removed from the effects of your actions and are much less likely to be identified.

I'd say that in terms of the combination of the range at which you can permanently disable someone, the ability to conceal the device, and the low visibility of "discharge", this is one of the most dangerous things I can think of.
It only makes 10 requests/6 minutes. I don't think that has even has a minor effect on the site.
The point of the site is to make it easy to browse the news.
This article is a great example of what's so great about the Python ecosystem. I don't think I've ever seen something like this for the Ruby data structures (except for in the Hamster data structure project [1], which has solid performance data).

[1] https://github.com/harukizaemon/hamster
Ask HN: What skills can you learn online?
I'm thinking skills like magic tricks as opposed to skills like marketing/math. What are some neat things one could teach themselves in a couple weeks of study? Ideally they wouldn't require any products (like an instrument would), but as long as it's cheap or small that would be fine.
You should be comfortable hearing a sentence such as that. Horowitz is clearly generalizing, but a great company will always make a return on investment. Obviously in this particular case Groupon is going to give investors a smaller return now than it would have 6 months ago, but it's still a winning strategy. Great companies keep growing - which is more than a good reason to invest.
I think the biggest drawback with this framework is the hyperbole description.

If the offerings were sold as more direct and straight forward, perhaps it wouldn't have been such a disappointment. I expected more - based on the title.
Great to hear - please leave a review after you read it. Helps tremendously. Thanks!
There Will Be No HTML 6, HTML5 Is The Last Version Of HTML
The next release of Debian stable will have Python 2.6 as default and it is expected for the first weekend of February, so it is safe to start with Python 2.6 right now.
As someone who's learning both right now and not sure which to use, this is invaluable.
Not to diminish the scientific value of this discovery, but there's also another way to send messages to the future: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing
I downvoted you because you jumped right in at the beginning of the thread and made a bunch of posts about the Xoom, all of which sounded more like excuses to mention it than like informative posts. Acting like a marketing bot is as bad as being a marketing bot in my book. If people are interested, they'll respond or upvote. If they ignore you, they're not interested. There's no need to repeat yourself all over the place. (However, if this stupid pagination thing keeps going, I will start to be more sympathetic to thread-spamming.)
I did that too and got it up to the 114th generation. Unfortunately, the car has gotten stuck and the game seems to be going nowhere. So I'll never see the 115th generation...

http://i.imgur.com/bAnmY.png
Nice overview of some IBM accomplishments. Really liked the part about their role in Apollo 13.
My personal favorite:

http://gskinner.com/RegExr/
This is nice for visualizing an NFA and the minimized DFA for asome regular expression (note: regular!!): http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/. The aforementioned tool also lets you give input and highlights the current states of each FA.
If someone was holding a gun to your head and asked you what you want to do before he kills you, what project would you choose?
You go and get a Masters because of 2 reasons

1. Signalling to your future employer / Getting past the HR filter.
2. Networking with others.

Learning something useful is usually a bonus.
Get Free 6 Months License Key for Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2011
wondering how you compete with the MFEs from MIT / Harvard / Yale / [other top school] for that BSD quant job when on your resume it says "I read a lot of free shit on the internet" ?

you don't pay $100k for the knowledge, you pay $100k for a ticket to the party. everyone knows that.

of course, if you want to be an entrepreneur or trade your own $, that is a different story. but this seems unrealistic for any kind of mainstream career move.
Something that I wish the "let's just be happy and NAT everyone" crowd would understand is just how different your run of the mill linksys NAT is from a centralized and managed NAT, which we already have to deal with in some places (like some apartment flats).

Among the marginal annoyances that we run into with centralized NAT are

-there is no UPNP IGD. We don't strictly need UPNP, but it's nice when it's there because it's so much more reliable than STUN.

-tenants share mapped port space so there's no guarantee that protocols that require multiple mapped ports will be able to get some number of them (think BitTorrent or 16 player peer to peer video games).

-UDP mappings might expire after some ridiculously short interval, requiring another STUN set-up.

-many of these devices allow admins to set policies for mappings. You can be sure that someone is going to be playing your 16-player game behind a NAT managed by some eager beaver who decided to limit NAT mappings to 14 per flat.

-STUN just might not work very well at all, in which case you're stuck with a special-case connection through a packet repeater.

-Some will even do evil shit like fiddling around with your packet payload. One lesson I learned was not to ever include a player's RFC1597 LAN ip address or any binary data that happens to be the same as their LAN ip address in network packets. There are actually commercial NAT routers that will peer into your packet payloads and change anything that appears to be your LAN ip address to their own WAN address, probably in a an attempt to fix a NAT-broken protocol.

Commercial NAT devices are truly evil. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the primary 'value-add' for the majority of network library middleware packages in use in the video game industry today is NAT traversal for weird commercial NATs in apartment buildings.

This is your ISP NAT future. Good luck!
I would love to use 3.x but went with 2.7.x as I need Django, and cx_Oracle. Django is 2.x only, I haven't really checked cx_Oracle.
DIY Financian Engineering Lite Edition (TM)

1. Go to Las Vegas

2. Transfer >25K in chips (high-roller capability), or whatever is reasonable amount of money for you

3. Play the tables

4. Figure out what the fuck you're doing while you're doing it

5. If you get over step 4, you probably think you have a solid strategy for winning against a casino. Now, automate the task by getting people to pay you for your new book/DVD and public talks.
Facebook is alleged to be a Ponzi scheme. What is your ROI?
I found this text interesting: http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme

I thought it would be beneficial to discuss ROI from facebook ads. What are you seeing for your business ROI from Facebook ads?

I recognize there is a selection issue with this data; however, I suspect the average HN reader knows more concerning successful advertising campaigns than many.

So what are you seeing? Putting more money in than getting out?
Please, do start on the 2.8 collections. I'm curious to know what your problems are that an actual user of the collections would run into when using them.
I understand your concerns about the accounts (among other things, mine is newer) but I took the opportunity to sign up on HN (before I read only)to rate this story of a group to which I belong and that I find interesting. I wrote "Great Group!" because I find it useful, we talk about success stories, we exchanged views, opinions and demonstrates that the Startups Scene is not just in Silicon Valley
Except for Datalog, Prolog, SPARQL, XQuery, etc. which are non-SQL database query languages.
Are you trying to claim that attempting (and mostly succeeding) to heal people has the same psychological impact on a person as attempting (and mostly succeeding) to kill a living being? I'd venture that ending a life has significantly more impact than trying to save one, no?

When an animal goes into a slaughterhouse, the goal is for them to be killed. When a human goes into a hospital the goal is for them to be healed. I would say that the practitioners in both establishments probably have very different reactions to their jobs.
Vim as a python IDE : some neat plugins and TIPS
The problem is that the underlying distributed algorithms are not exclusively the domain of NoSQL systems and, likewise, one could easily use SQL with a key-value store, provided that one had access to a schema with which to resolve objects and their identifiers. Developers have been using non-relational data stores with SQL-based front ends for years.
The $AAPL Buying Opportunity is Coming
...which raises the question: Does anyone know when Django plans to migrate to Python 3.x? Django 2.0 perhaps, whenever that may be?
this is exactly what David Cancel said in his post Oct 2010
http://davidcancel.com/3-startup-lessons-i-learned-the-hard-...:
Believe me failing sucks really bad but there are no repeatable patterns that lead to startup success. None. Stop looking for one and just f*ing do it (#JFDI).
I was explaining my tradeoff within the context of the GWT RPC object serialization. My tree is a graph with nodes of type BinaryTree<E>, where E in my case is a HuffmanNode object containing a char and an int. My alphabet has 66 characters plus an EOM character. The number of total nodes in the tree is 133. Although the extra internal nodes have HuffmanNode instances that do not contain a char, they do still contain the int sum of the frequencies of all the characters under that subtree. The BinaryTree class itself has left, right, and parent references. So the way the GWT serialization format works out for this beast ends up being larger than the characters and frequencies alone.

I know what you're thinking: why not transform the tree into an Ahnentafel list and marshall it to a string containing only the alphabet characters in the appropriate slots, and use another chosen character to represent null slots, and write another implementation of the decoder that's driven off of the array? (Edit: Or, better still, transform it to a canonical Huffman codebook)

Yes, of course I could do that — and I actually want to. Alas, I have bigger fish to fry than writing the tree transformation code, the marshaling code, and the additional decoder implementation. So, when it's all said & done, according to the tradeoffs I was willing to make, my clients get to build the tree in O(n). I can tell that you're vexed that it worked out that way, but that's life.
Show me the maths.
The great majority of them should be intuitive to any competent programmer, imo, at least within a ballpark. Some of it is implementation detail (list append isn't required to be constant, and could be O(N) in a naive implementation, for example) but generally, you should have an intuitive feel for this stuff across languages.

Sometimes you can almost guess how a language is implemented just from profiling data.
sure! you find it useful. But why? If you would have explained all this instead of saying "Great Group!", you wouldn't have been downvoted.

You see, on HN we try to explain what we are saying and don't take much on face value. Also a two word comment is usually replaced by an upvote.
You should program in C++ then. Every single data structure in the standard library, boost, and 3rd party libraries dissected, analyzed, benchmarked, extended, rewritten, and optimized :)

But there's a reason you don't. I chose C, others chose Ruby, and you chose Python :)
Could early man only see three colors?
Facebook Just Landed $1.5B; Open Source Alternative Struggles To Raise $10,000
How Memory Chips Are Manufactured [vid]
Muscat Girls Muscat Girls – World Great Pc Wallpapers of the World
6rd is an improvisation on the motive of 6to4 and ISATAP: you have IPv4 prefix which you use as a carrier for the tunneled traffic, the synthesized IPv6 addresses have a part within them that allows to know which IPv4 within your domain to forward the tunneled traffic to.

If the IPv6 is outside of your 6rd domain - then the tunneled traffic is sent to the border relay, which decapsulates it and sends to the rest of the IPv6 internet.

More details are in http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5969 if you are interested.

Should be implementable with the firmware upgrade - assuming the memory allows for IPv6 code altogether - and, that the supplier decides to do the update (as opposed to shipping a new model).

A whole lot of el-cheapo boxes are supported by openwrt:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start

And there exists a 6rd-enabled image:

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=123059

So it is not all that catastrophic, IMO.
I chose Ruby then Python [1]. I use them both for the same kinds of things (especially functional programming [2]), but I'm surprised almost daily at how these similar languages drive such different ecosystems.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1947723

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130725
It would be great to develop an open directory for all DIY degress. For each degree path you would have a list of freely available resources summarizing what knowledge you need to cram into your head, like you have done. Huurmm... I really like this idea...
I think this line:

"On the other hand, as Robert Reich says, this could all too easily turn into a validation of the claim that what’s good for corporations is good for America, which is even less true now than it used to be."

sums up the nature of the problem with our political/economical policies. It appears to me that many people are stuck in the mindset that what is good for business is necessarily good for America. This may have largely been true before NAFTA and other free trade agreements but it definitely isn't true now. It's too easy to move capital and whatnot to other countries.

It appears to me that we are living in a society in the grips of regulatory capture. The political message to sell policies is that they are good for business. This comes with the implied message that it is good, necessarily, for America. I think too many people think in terms of an American company or a Chinese company rather than a company based in America or based in China.
Apple App Store reaches 10 billion downloads
For those like me who stumble upon this type of js expressions for the first time and are scratching their heads, John Resig (of jQuery fame) attempted some basic explanations in this old HN post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1154338
Before or after this article was posted?
thousands? if your average book has 300 pages, and you read 30 pages per hour, you would need to read for 10000 hours, doing it for 8 hours a day you need 1250 days. that's without repeating anything of course.
am i wrong? in what timespan did you read those thousands of books?
Start a start-up
The HTML5 Logo: What Do You Think?
I think it may be worth mentioning that an excessively passionate romance with macros may backfire at debugging time.

A crash in a code that is created by a macro expanded into a several thousand characters line is quite not easy to explore in gdb.
I like the idea of reading ridiculous amounts of things more than reading one thing ridiculous amounts of times.
The advantage of this would be sending a message which cannot be known until a point in the future - sort of like a time capsule with a lock that only opens on a certain day, but way more secure. While, for most purposes, merely storing encrypted information and only revealing the key later might be better, there are probably some things very paranoid people could use this for (a message that arrives after 100 years, for instance, could reveal all sorts of things, as the author would know that he would be dead by then). However, it's not very useful for practical purposes.
> Is there good comet support in existing frameworks out of the box?

nitrogen [http://nitrogenproject.com/] is worth a look
Even though MSIE and Opera have no support for Drag & Drop, multiple file selection or upload progress indication, I'm really pleased to see such a well thought-out file upload plugin that doesn't require the use of Flash.
Been a pizza delivery guy myself and there is not much to optimize since the core problem is delivery, which requires you to get in car, drive to location, give the pizza, get money and drive back.
It is only when you have multiple deliveries do you have opportunity to optimize your path of travel on the basis of traffic and distance between the delivery places.
Just because you have so much leeway, don't be sloppy in your choice of what to do with your free time. [1]

For example, if you're actually considering the pizza delivery scheme, first research the maximal amount of efficiency that you would possibly be able to add to the system. Then decide if it is worth pursuing. This does not apply if you are passionate about delivering pizzas!

[1] Consider deliberate choice to be general advice for those with lots of time and the goal of doing something substantive. Or if you are young, newly graduated, and thinking about jumping into a startup with some friends.
The number of directly connecting Iranian Tor users in Iran has dropped from 10000 or so to virtually zero -- they've blacklisted all the known Tor nodes and bridges. It's the latest twist in the arms race ...

"In a short few months, Iran has vastly improved the sophistication of their censorship technologies. Right now, the best option is to use tor through open socks/https proxies."
A flaw of the freemium model
Right - I'm using the best available data I can find. You seem to prefer ignoring the data we have, with the post-hoc justification that it isn't perfect in every way. Do you do this when the data supports your preconceived notions as well?

As for the "cognitive dissonance", your definition of hardworking is circular:

Hardworking: (adj) industrious, tireless, untiring (characterized by hard work and perseverance)

Industrious: (adj) hardworking, industrious, tireless, untiring (characterized by hard work and perseverance)

In a fact based discussion, one usually needs to construct a more precise definition of colloquial terms. There is no effective procedure for determining whether individual X is hardworking by the dictionary definition, and thus we cannot count the number of hardworking people. I constructed a definition which a) is measurable and b) which roughly agrees with my intuitive notion of what "hardworking" means. If you don't like it, replace "hardworking" with "Category H" in my previous post.

Sorry if my attempts at precision and use of facts interfere with your desire to confuse things and revert back to your preconceived notions.