skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Walkthrough: http://dropbox.pastebin.com/J5SkmzL6

A lot of people are stuck, and some might just want the extra 1GB, so I thought this could help. Of course, it contains spoilers.

(I am not the creator of the list, I just found it on twitter after I completed)
I see you didn't go for the:

JMP

joke there...
Curious as to what the 50 per month was from?
On craftsmanship
I have a sneaking suspicion that the finish line isn't, even with the hall of fame and all that. Oh well.
Eric Schmidt as founder #2? Sergey and Larry would disagree...
Hmmm, I thought your goal was to generate an argument amongst us programmers over which was the right "programmer" response to each question, thus proving that there is no single programmer personality. By doing so I supported your point and undermined the point I wanted you to make. Crap.
I made http://spotted.at using node.js / mongo. I used it because I wanted to see what all the hype was about and I wanted some real experience with it. But honestly I dont see what what node provides that eventmachine and twisted dont.
Anyone want to guess how much data they actually have stored?

Backblaze's pods are a data-loss nightmare -- lots of single points of failure which will wipe out many TB of data at a time -- and backblaze has stated that they replicate data across multiple pods. Given that the 10 PB seems to be the amount of raw storage backblaze has, I'm guessing that the amount of actual data stored is much less -- depending on what sort of erasure correction scheme they're using, of course. (They're still much bigger than Tarsnap, of course!)
Vacuum.js alpha (slightly inspired by nature/biology based computation)
This is actually just what I'm starting to use for inter-process communication with node.js, for a realtime MMO game. I'm dividing the (2d) world into squares, each handled by a node.js process which will each be responsible for all the game logic and computations within that square, with some extra logic for handling objects that span two or more adjacent squares.

All IPC goes through a single (per machine) routing server which handles routing messages to the various node.js processes, which may or may not be on the same physical server. Only communications are for objects around the edges of the squares, for collision detection etc. and for transferring websocket connections to another node.js process.

After a lot of thought, that seems to me to be the best way to work out a scalable solution. Have yet to see if it'll work well, but I see no reason why it shouldn't. Now if only I had enough users to test it..

Oh, and thanks for the great 0MQ library! :)
I use it for my domain name generator: http://impossibility.org/

162k searches and counting :)
I respect that Zed is doing this but I have one question about the post.

'... so that nobody picks on you ...'

This will be my 6th PyCon and I have _never_ seen anyone being picked on. Anyone care to enlighten me? Otherwise it seems like newbies aren't welcome (not true) and can't handle it without a guide.
LiteCommerce – Free & Open Source e-Commerce App Integrates with Drupal CMS
LiteCommerce is an open source and free e-commerce application that integrates with Drupal to make use of the powerful CMS capabilities. LiteCommerce for now, integrates with PayPal, Google Checkout and Authorize.
Interesting bit of geekery you found. I was mucking in there my self to see how they did it. Seems like they swing through a bunch of images to make that effect: http://images.apple.com/itunes/10-billion-app-countdown/imag...
What using a Lisp Machine was like
they encrypt all data and i dont think it would be wise of them analyzing their clients data for dupes...if somebody would get to know that their business would be gone.
I'm sorely tempted to use node.js for a project I'm starting now, but my needs require 100% http/s support and its latest release just rebuilt its http/s support.

Since a large portion of our solution is sitting on the browser in extensions, it would be nice to reduce our language footprint by one. If it were a year later, I have no doubt I would.
Ugh, sometimes I wish I could edit later. Make that "I don't believe for an instant". I hate responding on my phone.
Digg - All Topics - The Latest News Headlines, Videos and Images
The links from the article are fascinating. I had never heard of Arimaa before, and am quite intrigued.

And from the linked article by Kasparov (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-che...) comes this gem:

In what Rasskin-Gutman explains as Moravec’s Paradox, in chess, as in so many
things, what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and vice versa.
This gave me an idea for an experiment. What if instead of human versus machine
we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998
in León, Spain, and we called it “Advanced Chess.” Each player had a PC at hand
running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to
create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man
and machine.

....

In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a
“freestyle” chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other
players or computers. Normally, “anti-cheating” algorithms are employed by
online sites to prevent, or at least discourage, players from cheating with
computer assistance. (I wonder if these detection algorithms, which employ
diagnostic analysis of moves and calculate probabilities, are any less
“intelligent” than the playing programs they detect.)

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters
working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At
first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine
dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a
chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human
player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with
the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be
not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American
chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at
manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions
effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster
opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human
+ machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more
remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
I learned a new word today: dissemble. I come to HN to learn; therefore, it got my upvote.
It is a good point. I am aware of Huawei, although to my knowledge it is not used in Belarus to a noticeable extent. No doubt of course it could change if this hypothetic embargo is introduced.

There are however subtleties. The government and network operators use services of big system integrators in the region: Baltic states, Russia and Ukraine. The proximity of many vendors creates competitive situation, but if only Chinese vector is available, the only viable option would be Moscow-based Huawei suppliers. This is bound to create many problems with maintaining the existing infrastructure, and the vendor will be able to dictate the price, driving up the costs of enforcement and reducing its scope. If Ruissian dealerships are used, it also creates a dependency on Putin, relations with whom for Lukashenko have not been friendly at all lately.
I debated making a joke at all, but figured "What the hell, it's Saturday night".

I also figured Malloc was sufficiently "diety-sounding"
'Ask pg: blablah'

Of course, it might help if you put your email in your profile but it's not strictly necessary.
> There actually is, the information retrieval mechanism that is used to 'express' the DNA (actually, the RNA, an 'unzipped' strand of DNA, but who's counting) is a wonderful little nano machine called a ribosome, it's probably the most amazing structure that I know of outside of the DNA itself.

Actually I was going to say that one way to think of using that information is to compute with it, in other words, an organism is simply the result of a computation on its DNA.
Every web developer should check out node.js because of this test framework if nothing else
http://zombie.labnotes.org/
You must be careful when comparing the worst to the best. Farhad has been a crummy technology writer since he was at Salon, and this is basically the only site on which I read comments. I would much rather read a great story by a great journalist than any comment by the average Youtube commenter.
Ask HN: What ideas do you have for creating the ideal CAPTCHA?
CAPTCHA - Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

An ideal CAPTCHA would have the following:

1. Human Verification - Only be able to completed by humans
2. Additional Use - Example: reCAPTCHA

Human verification has to include something that can be done easily and universally by all humans (including disabled people), but be impossible for any machine to do. An additional use is simply a bonus, as it converts the time spent on the CAPTCHA into something useful.

We have a lot of different CAPTCHA's out there already and the most common one is reCAPTCHA. However, we should think outside the box in order to leverage other skill sets that we have that computers don't.

Personally, I find this area very interesting with many possibilities. What do you think?

Examples:

http://www.google.com/recaptcha
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2010-05-03-n58.html
http://www.arraystudio.com/as-workshop/the-captcha-alternatives.html
http://www.evengrounds.com/developers/alternatives-to-captcha
http://onlineaspect.com/2010/07/02/why-you-should-never-use-a-captcha/
I wasn't aware of the Amazon FPS. I am going to check this out and see how difficult it is to implement it. I guess the thing with using Amazon is whether people have more amazon accounts than paypal.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418329
Search for "Is it OK to be a Luddite? (1984) nytimes.com" on google, the printable version is the first hit.

I'd provide a link through google myself, but I'm getting frustrated trying to build a link to I'm Feeling Lucky with instant search turned on.
What alternatives do you feel would be better for the author to try out? Just curious since I read the 4HB and found many elements that seemed fairly well suited for those serious about weight-loss.
Ask HN: Appropriate Markup for Outcoursing
As a college student, I've gone to the point where I'm spending more and more of my time being like a consultant / manager. In order to make sure stuff gets done, I have had to outsource most of the actual implementation offshore (mostly SEO and web dev work). I don't feel comfortable billing as if I was doing the work and asking them to send in hours.

So what markup % is appropriate?
Is there another cost structure I should look at?
How do I log my own time that I spend on communication?
Amazon does this too: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business/asp/standard#...
Was it anything like the 'Method of Analogies' from KAISSA?
There might be something to this if Apple had a monopoly on the "Mobile Internet" (the portion that Wales is referring to) AND forced everyone to interact with the "Mobile Internet" through applications acquired through the AppStore - two problems with this thesis:

o Apple does not have a monopoly on the Mobile Internet.

o Apple's support for open HTML 5 protocols is stronger
than any previous generation of Mobile Platforms that
connected to the internet.

We can critique Apple in a lot of places with regards to their AppStore (though, it's gotten much better lately) - but, ruining the Mobile Internet is not one of them.

I seem to recall that the iPhone was actually the _first_ really decent phone browser that you could use to connect to the internet - if anything, Apple spawned the "Open" Mobile Internet.
I think he actually prefers to be e-mailed instead of seeing an "Ask PG" thread on Hacker news.

Google says his email is pg@ycombinator.com.
SqlAlchemy ProgrammingError 42000 and MS SQL
It'd be nice if they got the name of the codec in question right. Also, I can't see Google making the WebM decision based on technical details, as it is technically inferior (although just). Rather, I quite believe them when they say they believe in and will fight for an open internet. Whether that's a good decision for them as a company remains to be seen, but it's quite clear they won't hurt themselves as badly as Apple did with PowerPC.
Title is linkbait.

He doesn't like that Apple is the gatekeeper on their App Stores, as if the consumer doesn't have any other hardware options out there...
Amazing, a discussion of data without comparing the internationally accepted unit of "library of congress". I'm more interested in how many LoCs 10 Pb is? If we built a city of LoCs, how many acres would that city be?

These are the questions that keep me up late at night.
People who complain about its syntax, I suspect are simply too set in their own ways to change.

There is nothing about the Erlang syntax that is odd or foreign. Unless you come from another language, if you pick up Erlang as a first language you will find other language syntax as odd.

Not only that, but because it's a functional language you tend to think about functions in a more algorithmic way and a more proper process isolated way of programming.

This makes for functions that ALWAYS work as intended without side-effects.
A finite number is always finite, even if it's so large that you can't comprehend it in normal human terms.

You apparently misunderstood the point I made in the gp post. That has almost nothing to do with my argument. So, you are saying that any game where the scores at any moment are finite numbers is a zero-sum game.

Various economic activities are subject to many iterations across time.

"no one claims wealth is a Zero Sum Game"

Objectively wrong.

Okay, not enough words for the slightly uninformed to understand. There are people historically who have put forth theories based on the idea that globally wealth is zero-sum. I don't think anyone in economics takes them seriously any more.

Our culture is absolutely packed with famous people, it's pretty clearly saturated.

The >culture< -- meaning I presume, the general culture -- are you so soft-headed that you think this directly relates to the context of getting hired in a particular field or this discussion?

Exercise for the less than completely clued -- where in the previous discussion did I frame the relevant context of notoriety. Locate that, and reframe your arguent in that context. Then I might consider this intellectually worthwhile. As it is, I keep on having to explain things to someone who half-understands arguments.
Bought for kindle. Resonates so far, but doesn't seem to have any intention of telling me how to apply it's wisdom to my actual problems.
This is a great article on techcrunch on why the gaming industry needs to wake up and try new things and not keep on going for IP that has already been done before again and again. Sometimes gamers actually want new and fresh games not the next FPS.
The ones that don't know Python going into it are typically locals. I had lunch with two Atlanta residents last year that were big C# guys but their job wanted them to learn Python. They sent them to a few tutorials and picked out a few talks that they wanted them to learn about, then the rest was up to them.

This number is lower, but I've talked to a few newbies that travel to PyCon as an educational tool paid for by their company. They've usually done a tutorial or two on the web, but they'll load up on the in-person tutorials and then hit whatever relevant talks they can find.
H.264 is just not going to work for web video, even as a defacto standard. Firefox will never support it and it prevents any small time player from entering the browser game down the road.

It's also a serious risk for big corps who don't have a license. Keep that in mind when you criticize Google. You're asking them to expose themselves to liability (or pay huge license fees).

If we're going to the trouble of phasing in a <video> tag that will take years to become viable, we might as well throw in a properly unencumbered codec that will also take years to become viable. Why bother with <video> if it's just going to go rotten as soon as it gains critical mass and the patent trolls pounce?

Nothing critical is breaking today, we're just going to have to wait a bit longer to play with the shiny new video tag, which is well worth it to have it done properly. Just be glad that one of the tech megacorps is pushing for standards and freedom as part of their business plan. Usually it's the other way around.
I block analytics with AdBlockPlus because it often adds multi-second delays to page loading.
Out of curiosity, I wonder how long it'll be before we can simply compute every possible valid game, inserting every valid move into some type of tree structure, and have a computer simply walk the tree structure always aiming for a "win" leaf.

Anybody have any ideas on how big the data for that would be? (I suspect there could be some optimizations as some games that start differently could end up in the same state as some other games -- i.e. optimize for board state collisions).
Fitness is already a solved problem despite someone trying to reinvent it every year.

Here's an excellent pragmatic overview covering everything you need to know: http://www.liamrosen.com/fitness.html
I can't think of one off the top of my head without it sounding contrived!
If Wales had his way, the Apple Inc Wikipedia entry would read:

> Founders: Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne and DEFINITELY NOT Larry Sanger
Yeah, I got stuck at the same place. I got most of the way there on my own though, so I'm pretty proud. :-)
Did you people downvoting this comment actually read the entire article? "Teens seem to like it" (referring to "Team Edward" in his pseudo code) was without a doubt one of the most hilarious things I've read in a tech article. Lighten up... geez.
Me: "Cool, that was fun, and I got another gig of space."

My wife: "Yes, much better than forcing the kids to open Dropbox accounts."

(Which I did once, when I needed to share a big file!)

Doh!
no. if you want to execute, you should spend jan-dec executing your brilliant idea, and learning the technology you're building your idea with as you're going, you should also ask HN or hacker friends of yours that you trust what languages to build your technology out in, and stay in those technologies
We really don't need more posting of Tim Ferriss's stuff.
It's amazing how a single error in the article (or typo? "H.265") immediately turned me off to the rest of it.
Seriously guys, why is it so hard to believe that Google is dropping H.264 for the reasons they've stated?

Why does this have to be some secret conspiracy against Apple?
Actually, I think it is better said "It is who knows you".

Many have thought that the best way to get somebody to know you is through a resume. Really, the best way is through contacts. In my long career, I have had three "starting points" where I got a job without using my contacts network. And that was without really being conscious about it.

If you are in the programming profession (don't know about trading) then today's best way is to put up a web site with a project that you are building. Show your stuff.

(I can't believe how far off the rails this whole discussion has gone. And we aren't even to the "cover letters are more important that resumes" discussion.)
There's some relevant evidence at https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=877 but people are obsessed with instance IDs to the exclusion of anything else.
wipe is rather unlikely to overwrite the bits on an SSD. Even with TRIM (which wipe won't use, btw), the disk will prefer using a blank sector to one it has to erase. Reading the currently unmapped spare sectors is probably something anyone with a solder gun can do.
Companies send their employees to the training sessions, and since they're already there, they sometimes have them attend the conference too.
There's definitely a large spectrum, between countries where the government uses violent means to suppress political oppostion (including but not limited to Belarus), over governments that deport people who met with a "person of interest" to third-party countries where they get tortured (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar) to countries where people just feel that preemptive intelligence gathering without concrete indications is more a cover-your-ass thing than a useful technique to fight crime.

Note that Lawful Interception (i.e. interfaces for government agencies to siphon off data from internet providers), as it was established by US and Europe, was never a focused effort to provide data for criminal investigations but started out with different groups of users in mind (i.e., espionnage and possibly other uses that the average citizen would find spooky).

And, as the article explains, the same technology that is used to guarantee Lawful Interception in Germany/US/other countries is used for political suppression in countries that would perhaps lack the technical sophistication but have a budget and corresponding sources for these. (Although I'm reasonably certain that companies in China and Russia will be happy to provide similar technology to potential buyers).
I just took a look at this and I like the concept. I kind of wonder if my game falls in line with their model though. Users would essentially buy tokens on my app and then use them which could result in a reward. So they are buying a service for a small fee.

It seems like social gold is more focusing on assisting a community or a large virtual world. I don't have that, but I do see they also identify it as useful for services. I guess I need to look more into it. I think what I will do is release my beta to HN and ask what they think I should go with. Ultimately some form of payment will be required, but I am not sure if I am approaching it in the best way.
Moravec's "Paradox" isn't really paradoxical at all. What makes us say that computers are "strong" in some area? Answer: the fact that they are good there relative to our prior expectations. Where do those expectations come from? From looking at ourselves. Similarly: what determines where we say we're "weak"? Answer: seeing other things being strong relative to us. Computers, for instance.

Now, of course there are other points of reference for deciding where we're "weak". Doesn't that invalidate my argument? Why, no, because actually if we use those other points of reference the paradox rather goes away. For instance: Computers do arithmetic very, very fast. Is that an area where we're weak? Only if we compare ourselves against computers; we do arithmetic much better than chickens or tigers do.
I'm not sure its against Apple, as long as most Android tablets and phones have only h264 decoding chips too.

I wonder about timing though.
Minecraft’s story is even more impressive than the article makes it seem. The game was not developed by a few people, it was developed by one guy (“Notch”). He hired six people only recently and they started working together around Winter 2010/2011.

He now gets help with the business and support side of running a company but only one of the developers he hired is working on the game with him together. The other developer is getting their next game up and running.

What’s also interesting is that Notch does not want to run the business, at least not at the scale at which it is now. He hired people to do that for him.