skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dunno...

Is "genius" some kind of IQ score that is measured abstractly? Can one be a "genius" behind bars or homeless? Or is "genius" measured by actions, as in inventing something like a filesystem? If the latter, does one piercing insight net you the genius title for life, or must one keep it up?

I can see how one definition of the word "genius" might be the realization of creative and intellectual potential, and one could consider this type of genius a temporary title that must be "renewed" through ongoing and active creation and intellectual activity.

This particular definition seems to be in harmony with widespread HN values, namely that it is not enough to have ideas, one must also manifest them to earn full admiration. In which case, Mt. Reiser might well be a former genius for the purposes of ongoing realization of creative and intellectual potential.
To me, genius is more a particular point in time where someone has the intelligence, aptitude, drive, and time to put something together of staggering importance. Any of those qualities could recede just as quickly as they were brought on. I suppose if one is a considered a "genius" during these times, they could be called a "former genius" after them. Though once you're recognized it seems polite to forever hold the title, kinda like President or something.
Ironically, most of the base64 "encrypted" code is easier to read than the Wordpress core...
Mark by Mark Zuckerberg - Fashion for Men
Copy on write can be very dangerous if not used properly. Besides concurrency issues (not specifically for python, because of the GIL), in the case of slice taking a small slice from a big list would keep a reference to the list even if it is not needed anymore. In pathological cases this can be as bad as a memory leak.
We never thought about hiring VO talent. We just thought about people we know that might have the right tone.
This is what scares me about Microsoft Research. Since Google's research adds direct value to what it's doing, it is quite unlikely to disintegrate.
1) Try to improve yourself in some way every single day. Even if it's the smallest thing, making a conscious effort to be a better person in some way will put you far ahead of most people.

2) Make a strong effort to always leave things better than you found them. A fraternity advisor issued a challenge to me my freshman year. He challenged me to be able to look myself in a mirror at the end of my college career and be able to say that the organization is better for my having been there. I now challenge myself to this with all that I touch.

3) When being criticized, keep your calm and listen. If you result to defensiveness, you'll miss the point. Listen, reflect, and then form your opinions. Criticism is generally not meant as an attack, but comes from people trying to help you.

4) It's better to fail chasing your dreams than to succeed in not.
We cannot display colors on a screen at all. Color is not a physical quantity, but a perceptual thing.

For example, try finding the RGB values for orange and brown, try explaining why your monitor can show deep blacks, even though they must be lighter than the 'black' you see when the monitor is off, or why the 'color' of some object can change depending on lighting conditions or the content surrounding it.
There are plenty of private intelligence agencies. It's an industry pretty much like any other. Few are dumb enough to compete with the CIA. Why hire a private agency in Afghanistan when the American taxpayer is already paying for those services? If you run a private intelligence firm, just how desperate for customers/donors do you have to be to get an article in the New York Times?
And this is why I love git.
IQ isn't static, so it's quite possible for someone's IQ to dip out of the "genius" range. Interpreting Reiser's increasingly bizarre behavior as signs of internal dysfunction, it's quite possible he would no longer test as a genius. Certainly, turning down a 3-year plea offer and insisting on acting as his own counsel would be indications to this layman of sub-genius performance.

Since we're talking about a headline instead of a clinical diagnosis however, I'd suggest the author was using that phrasing as a more concise way of communicating "formerly known as a software genius, then famous as a convicted murderer, and now working on a shtick as a mad scientist."
When you really wasn't one in the first place, I guess it's pretty easy. Regular media prefixes any computer dude that ends up in their pages with the word, it's not like it means anything in the context.
It seems to me like join makes sense in any context where you have multiple elements that you want joined. With strings, you happen to have a separator. But you might also want to join several lists into one flattened list. (Edit: I know there are ways to do this. The point is that join could be unified around this concept.)

Even if you disagree, the line between methods and functions in Python really isn't standardized.
I suspct if left completely up to Sinofsky or Ballmer MSR would shut down (or be substantially smaller). I think as long as Gates is alive and/or has large influence, it will be a relatively big part of MS.
Thanks. Those are great!
I think the availability of PHP in shared hosting plans was the main factor. Perl was almost as ubiquitous, although a lot of Windows based shared hosting plans didn't support it. Any host that had MySQL had PHP.
The big question is, does your startup need the money and if so, what for? Since it sounds like you want an angel investment and not VC. my recommendation is to consider forgoing the money if you can, because you already have misgivings and don't need the distraction.

The long term goal isn't to take on investors, it's to make money. Strategically, a person without high tech startup experience doesn't bring the expertise and connections which a more specialized investor would. A person with a background in banking is less likely to have long standing relationships to help recruit your next CTO.

Good luck.
Why Google Will Get The Best Groupon Ever: 80% Off For Groupon, Inc
All the news that's fit to width!
That's probably why explicitly calling transform inside the block, or making transform a method of the objects you're trying to transform, is more idiomatic Ruby.

You're right in that list comprehensions are semantically equivalent to combining map and select, not just select.
Predicting What's Next For Facebook
Who on Earth was voting this up? Does nobody comprehend the concept of a not-easily-exploitable market anymore?
this blog is sketchy, flooded with ads and obviously trying to drive traffic to it. Why not just post the github link?
You can join several lists into a flattened list as well:

reduce(operator.add, list_of_lists)

You can not say sum(), sadly, because it forces a restriction that you only sum numbers.
Tried to insist that I'd been there done that with Hackintoshes to a kid that saw me in the hostel lobby using my macbook and that it wasn't worth my time to fuck around. (Only reason I'm not using Arch or FreeBSD) He didn't seem to 'get it'.

Maybe it's a contractor thing, I don't know.
Learning is like money: You might not know exactly when you're going to use it, but sooner or later you'll be glad that you acquired it.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551776

An interesting set of slides. Also interesting is the URL. Is this seriously the only copy of this slide deck?
What is your exhaustive definition of "malicious" in this case?
Live broadcast of LA Hacker News Meetup
Ask HN: Why so much Python today?
I am seeing a lot of Python posts today. Interesting as most of them may be, I am wondering whether anything out of the ordinary is going on.
I believe it is helpful to provide, at a minimum, the general area being addressed "making hiring easier," "making photos more fun," or "making your bbq chicken taste better"-- there is no way anyone can deduce exactly what a company is doing from those above descriptions but they help make sure your sign-ups are actually relevant to your service.

Hipster might have seemed mysterious, but there were plenty of screenshots going around that explained exactly what their service provides. Plus, their sign-up landrush is uncommon.
Yup. When MIT released their courses, I eagerly checked them out, hoping to see what I missed at my big state school. Turns out I missed nothing. The courses were in many cases less rigorous than the ones I took. They were utterly unremarkable. Yet everyone I know who actually went to MIT loves the place. The magic just isn't in he courses you take.

I'll give them more than prestige, but academic superiority? No way.
I stopped hosting my personal rant blog and went with wordpress.com free hosting. I have given up trying to patch, update, comb through every plugin, theme, whatever. Having said that, I don't care if the hosted wordpress blog gets hacked. Losing some written word is something I can live with as long as the server isn't mine.

I have entered a period in my life where I only trust static code. I write all content in a meta markup language, I run a static page compiler on the directory structure and upload the created html and resources to the server.
Exactly. A functional description of genius, i.e. one that is applied to subjects meeting certain criteria, is the only description that makes sense. Let's not forget that genius does not describe a particular brain configuration, but rather a specific perception/archetype that exists in some cultures.
I also have one spam site example. http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+phone+service
Look at 3rd result for internetphoneguide.org
News trends around these parts tend to move in surges. Apple one week, Python the next, Apple and Python the next, and something sinful the week after that.

I'm guessing it's just a surge.
Why you should pay your web developer on time
I also have one spam site example. http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+phone+service Look at 3rd result for internetphoneguide.org
You are being downvoted because you are blaming PHP for problems created by Wordpress. This has absolutely nothing to do with PHP and everything to do with running untrusted code, which many other people have pointed out.
If you are not sure how to practice this (like me), here's some instructions from http://altmedicine.about.com/cs/mindbody/a/Meditation.htm

1. Find a quiet and comfortable place. Sit in a chair or on the floor with your head, neck and back straight but not stiff.

2. Try to put aside all thoughts of the past and the future and stay in the present.

3. Become aware of your breathing, focusing on the sensation of air moving in and out of your body as you breathe. Feel your belly rise and fall, the air enter your nostrils and leave your mouth. Pay attention to the way each breath changes and is different.

4. Watch every thought come and go, whether it be a worry, fear, anxiety or hope. When thoughts come up in your mind, don't ignore or suppress them but simply note them, remain calm and use your breathing as an anchor.

5. If you find yourself getting carried away in your thoughts, observe where your mind went off to, without judging, and simply return to your breathing. Remember not to be hard on yourself if this happens.

6. As the time comes to a close, sit for a minute or two, becoming aware of where you are. Get up gradually.

I just did it for the first time for 10 minutes. I am surprised by the number of thoughts that flashed through my mind. I think doing this really help clear up the queue of things your subconscious wants to bring up but you have not had the time to get to. My temples and forehead feels really oxygenated. I think the deep breathing is a big part of it.
8 of the Best Free Linux e-Learning Tools
Why Google Needs Its Own Steve Jobs
I think of it in these terms: If you're implementing a key for a std::map, you have to implement operator<, which in turn implies that std::map is tree-based. Similar for unordered_map, which would want operator== and a hash function.

Either of these interfaces are effectively describing what the internals are going to look like, even if the official standard decides to be coy about using the terms "tree" or "hash map" when describing them.

In the case of Python, the fact that {}.keys() has no guaranteed order (for example) already implies that dictionaries are hash based and would have similar characteristics to any other hash map.
FTA: He proposes that in 12 years, when he is released, that he be allowed to clone his wife and provide her with the good childhood she missed.

There is a fine line between genius and madness. Where is the remorse for his actions?
Not meaning to start a fight:

Anyone know numbers for Android app downloads?
How do you have your prompt (PS1) set up?
I can tighten up the headline: "Hans Reiser: Delusional."

It is obvious he lives in a totally different world than the one most of us live in. I would call it "anti-world" because really bad things happened when it collided with "normal-world".
The triumph of hacker culture
1. The answer to "What do you do?" is "Whatever it takes".
2. What do you want to achieve? Figure out the gap between where you are now and achieving it. Figure out the first step, however small you can take that'll bring you closer. Take it.
3. Look after your body and your health. This may sound boring but this can make _such_ a massive difference to your life. Eat well and get fit. Do weights and cardio if you can. Your health, your confidence and your prospects in general will be greatly improved.
4. Drive hard towards your goals but live a balanced life. Enjoy your friends and your family and keep learning broadly throughout your life.
5. Old cliche but important - treat others as you would wish to be treated.
Sports Writer Tracks Down His Online Haters
> from the oversight and human rights perspectives it seems like a really bad idea.

Well, it's not like the government has a very good track record wrt human rights either.
Actually, this is a terrific idea from the oversight and human rights perspectives. Let's consider a hypothetical for-profit corporation to which the government would outsource these operations. Under a broken system (what we have now), the management of these companies would have some sort of non-business relationship with the government officials responsible for awarding the contracts. Moreover, these companies, under a broken system, would keep their books shut, offering less transparency than we already have.

Now let's consider the best case: these companies compete with each other for government contracts, which the people award. This type of system would compel the companies to maintain high levels of transparency, especially with the SEC and IRS now taking interest.

The reason the government is so inefficient is because they don't have any external auditing agencies. The SEC and the IRS, for example, will never put the CIA or FBI through the same rigorous audits that they would put private companies through.
Get your rejection on with the Journal of Universal Rejection
Best by far that I've found is SelfControl by Steve Lambert - thanks Steve!

http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/

It's OSX only though I'm afraid. It blocks at the network driver level and survives a restart. I switch it on for two hours or more, after one check of my email, before starting work in the morning. This initial two hours of inability to visit distracting sites usually gets me in the groove with whatever I'm working on. I then find I'm less likely to get distracted throughout the rest of the day and more able to stay focused on my daily task list.

I've been developing a system designed to get my procrastination under control. Fifty percent of this procrastination takes the form of reading posts from HN. So I feel your pain! My system is based on a modified version of Bill Westerman's GSD system (http://www.utilware.com/gsd3.html). I've got a draft blog post that describes it and the software I have used recently to help me focus. It's helped me finally get round to building what I think is going to turn into a pretty useful app for managing résumés.

I'll post a link to the blog article soon so keep an eye out for it here on HN.
There is nothing says you have to take the first money offered to you (even if you can work out the deal, legal, etc). You should talk to other angels/VCs who may have more relevant expertise.

Alluding to the fact that you have a legitimate interested investor may also make you more attractive to these other investors and get them to move quicker. Or folks more experienced in angel/VC investing may co-invest with your existing interested party. This may also help ensure that everything is on the up and up.
AndroLib, which InfoWeek and Engadget seem to quote as their source for Android Market statistics, estimates 2.7 billion.

http://www.androlib.com/appstats.aspx
Yes,

The "intelligence community" is a community - whether a given actor is in or out of government does not seem as important as whether they in the community.

Secrecy grants it's possessors the ability to act very informally.
Or to put it another way: The OSS project is likely able to make that $10k go pretty far. (Not as far as >1B, but still)
When i see the tote bag, i think of

http://designobserver.com/images/features/jacobs.jpg

which, if you ask me, is beyond hilarious and the most ridiculous self-lampooning brand statement ever.

Jacobs
by
Marc Jacobs
For Marc by Marc Jacobs
In Collaboration With
Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs

The relevant paragraph from the original article[1] here:

Marc Jacobs skewered his own eponymous empire with his "marc by marc for marc" tote. This fascination with cheap bags seemed like part reaction to, and part extension of the high-end handbag frenzy that gripped the fashion industry for much of the 00s. It had all the same qualities of exclusivity and brand envy, but also seemed at least in part to be an acknowledgement that things had gone too far. Was Mr. Jacobs’ self-mocking tote a mea culpa for the astronomical hand-bag prices he had helped engineer at Louis Vuiton or was it a sly attempt to mainstream the phenomenon?

[1]: Paper, Plastic, or Canvas? (Dmitri Siegel) http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=7917

edit to include alt content of the image link.
We probably need outfits like this. The CIA seems to have completely lost the ability to do human intelligence. They get punished when they deal with unsavory characters, which is a necessity in that business. So they don't bother, and rely instead on signals intelligence. Nobody ever got fired at CIA running a program to listen in on jihadi phone calls. But you're not going to pick up everything through signals intelligence.
Diverse problem solvers can outperform high-ability problem solvers
There sponsored tags, and a banner ad or two if you're not logged in or have very low reputation. There is one square image ad on some pages, but they lead either to another StackExchange site in the network, or to an open source project. Each quarter new projects can apply for free advertising.
Generally speaking, SciFi authors get the feelings right, while the minutia is laughable in retrospect.

The rogue AI is a jetson-esque malevolence, but we are starting to see our systems rise out of our control: automated financial institutions that run on a paperclip maximizer ideology, crowdsourced privacy-ruiners.

But, to further your point, most cyberpunk authors have progressively limited their scope to a more obtainable vision. Bruce Sterling’s current prediction entails the "Favela Chic” rather than any futuristic nightmare.
Very true. Forgot to mention that if you sell options, you have unlimited loss potential; so by definition, this fear should motivate you to learn about delta-hedging and risk management very soon.
Education & the Feature Phone, or Why We Should Build More Simple Texting Tools
I almost wish this weren't a joke site.
I was in a small meeting at an investment bank with Jobs when he was at his lowest point (1994? 1995?). There were probably three of us in the room with him. He was literally begging us to use the NeXT platform for even just a small test project -- offering to do whatever would be needed to get the deal done. I swear, it nearly brought a tear to my eye -- seeing my industry idol so desperate. Fast forward 15 year and Apple's market cap is higher than that investment bank's market cap. And let's not forget about how Steve turned $5mm into billions with his Pixar investment and nurturing.

Great people bounce back. Steve Jobs is like flubber -- he gains more momentum with each bounce.
You only know about non-classified private companies.

Classified private companies today have pretty much carte blanche in similar fashion to the CIA or FBI.

A friend of mine was unable to resolve a labor dispute with his classified employer because he could only sue them using a lawyer with clearance (and then his manager coerced him into signing a termination agreement... using a baseball bat! Again, try and sue?)

This was not a small, fly-by-night operation either but one of the largest government contractors.
The description takes a different direction, but it made me laugh out loud nonetheless:

Consider the purpose of a bag, of a sack: we most often use sacks to carry many individual objects in the form of just one object – we want to represent and encapsulate many distinct entities into one vehicle…. You should definitely get yours – for as Goldman Sachs certainly knows, grouping individual objects as one has all kinds of wild benefits and will allow you to circumvent all sorts of annoying obstacles.

See: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/01/05/pm...
You forgot foldIT, which actually demonstrated that human heuristics still beat the best ab initio or forcefield simulations.

Also, the facebook layout is awful.
I don't think you can blame the templating system when the plugin system is vulnerable to precisely the same issues, namely arbitrary code execution—except, of course, that the attack profile is so much broader for plugins since people will only have one template running (or two if they're using a child theme), but typically, many plugins.
Pycon is on the horizon?
Where is the remorse for his actions?

Weird? Yes. Uncomfortable? Yes. Not living on the same planet as the rest of us? Yes.

But perhaps that's his way of showing remorse. Give her another chance at life, one that he took away.
Would that have been First Boston? Didn't they wind up buying over a thousand of them at one time? Apparently it was great to create apps.
Government has a terrible record but with the government, there's a slim possibility of sunshine appearing sooner or later. With private industry, it's even less so.
Find out what you really like to do. Then find a way to make money from it.
Bullets are dangerous when they hit a 1m^2 target, 1w lasers are dangerous when they hit a 1cm^2 target. Aiming at a 1m^2 target at 150m is hard, aiming at a 1cm^2 target at 150m is next to impossible.
every day we take another step toward idiocracy
It almost isn't, you can click items to buy them
No, it was a different investment bank. They eventually bought one or two NeXT systems, but the developers that championed them were considered 'radicals' within the company. As with many other IBs, this one was a Sun company through and through.
First impressions of node.js by Sam Ruby
> Reiser's increasingly bizarre behavior

Reiser's behaviour has always been bizarre by "normal" standards. It's only recently that it first tipped over (murder) and then was put under pressure and showcased to the world (investigation and trial), but there is little indication that he would he behaved more "normal" if a similar situation happened earlier in his life.
That's why you should plan to lose all of that money. The goal is to extend your capital loss for as long as possible while executing trades, so you can learn how to trade options; which will teach you better than a FE program can because that's what FE is all about, numerical methods/pricing model/back-testing for derivatives and hedging.