skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Once I made the mental decision to stop supporting Python < 2.7, I ended up with at least one code base that runs under both 2.7 and 3.2. Switching to print() ("from __future__ import print_function"), basing error objects on Exception instead of StandardError, and wrapping loops over .items() or .keys() with list() were the only significant changes, and all of the above are available in 2.7. Runtime for a typical job was marginally slower (8-11%) in my testing with 2.7 vs. 3.1; more than acceptable for me.

(There's some variation in output, thanks to Unicode, but it's a variation that this project could live with.)
Email is (still) the killer app
Great job...really interesting and timely project and an example of, to borrow a phrase, "just-in-time" apps that help document an event in a meaningful way.

Love the MongoHQ shout-out as well. Glad that we could be a part of the solution!
The 300 series is not well supported. Most people don't even know that 307 exists - they always use 302.
My only gripe with U-Verse was that they have had a ridiculously long-standing problem with DNS (this was a problem when I had the service installed in 2008 and there's nearly a 2-year-old thread on DSLReports about it). Downloads were super fast but the DNS latency made browsing feel painfully slow.

I threw the AT&T provided router into "DMZ plus" mode (which is the closest you'll ever get to bridge mode), then used my own wireless base station with Google DNS programmed into it, with no problems after that.

Last year I moved and can't get it at my house right now, and ended up back with Charter who is giving me 18/1.5 internet service for $40/month. I had been paying AT&T $65/month for 24 down/3 up before.
This study is hopelessly naive. It's like trying to predict the motions of the stock market.

I have worked on airline pricing software, and have seen the dirty bowels where your airfare is cooked up.

The truth is that pricing rules are so complicated that occasionally even the people who are supposedly in charge of these things are not entirely able to predict or explain the prices.

Airline cabins are broken up into a dozen or more "fare classes", with a set number of seats available in each class. As you move towards the back, things get cheaper. As fare classes sell out, the prices for all fare classes on the flight will be moved up.

Travel between a particular pair of airports does have a base underlying fare, but so many special rules apply based on day of week, length of stay, holidays, and more that prediction is a lost cause.

If the airline suspects you are a business traveler, you will be charged much more. Round trips within a business week are tip-offs. Saturday night stays mark you as a leisure traveler.

If you are traveling on routes that the airline is trying to promote, or on which they are competing on fares with another airline, you may pay less.

If you wait until the last minute to purchase, you will almost certainly pay much more -- unless the flight is nearly empty (and the airline can figure this out), in which case you will not.

If part of your journey connects you through another airline, special rates apply.

If you are military, special rates apply.

All of these rules and many more go into a soup and the "pricing engine" is supposed to sort it all out. Afterwards, there may be significant debugging as the engineers try to explain why some fares have been applied.

When a competing airline surprises everyone by having extra-low fares, a sudden panic may set in, and new, "high priority" rules may be put into place to override the pricing engine to be competitive. These new rules may or may not stick around forever, where they complicate future pricing puzzles.

Then, of course, the actual tickets are sold through various online intermediaries, where pricing enters a whole new realm of negotiation, bulk sales, markdown and markup.

Hey, it's better than the 60's, when all this stuff happened on paper, and it wasn't until an hour before departure that the airline even knew how many people would show up at the door of the plane.

Southwest was one of the first to bust through this morass. One of the many reasons that Southwest kicked everyone's ass was their ability to set prices simply and predictably, and the fact that all of their tickets are sold direct to the customer with no intermediaries.
Nice catch. Seems we need to improve our regex. In our view, only three digit codes are valid.
Conceptual distinctions like that are great. I wish more people could be up front about the multi-modal nature of software work.
Heroku was a lot simpler than us spinning up (or paying for) a VPS. The other technologies were mostly just for fun.
> They better get it right, or heads will roll. As British author Samuel Johnson famously put it, "The prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully."

Gee, sounds like a wonderful place to work. When can I sign up?
I pay a lot ($109/mo including 5 static IPs), but I am extremely pleased with Comcast's business class DOCSIS3 cable. 22/5 guaranteed, never seen less than ~35/8. No limits, no throttling/blocking, great SLA. When I first got DOCSIS3 I was dropping packets. Called them at 5:30PM and someone was at my front door 20 minutes later.
Objects won the popularity battle, to be sure. I think the jury is still out on whether OO is inherently a better form of programming in any other sense than approaches that are not built around objects.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest either way, but unfortunately true comparative research based on significant real world projects is always going to be hard to find. Most of us don't write industrial-scale code twice, and even if we did, we couldn't do it with the same team and starting from the same knowledge base in both cases.

I do find it interesting that as other non-trivial abstraction tools have become more widespread, the emphasis on using objects as the tool for every job seems to have diminished substantially, though. When all you've got is objects or plain old procedural code in otherwise much the same context, objects are a potentially useful extra tool in the box. On the other hand, now that we have everything from convenient array/dictionary types in many modern dynamically-typed languages to awesomely powerful and expressive type systems in various functional languages, things are becoming much more interesting again.
You've heard of irony, I take it?

Of course I don't think it's socialism - but everybody around me in Indiana damn well thinks so. Not that they know what socialism is, mind you - but they know it's really Evil, and it's something liberal people on the East Coast force down our throats in order to pay for all the welfare queens in the cities.... ah, hell, there's that pounding in my temple again.
"When one person in a typical mid-large group insurance plan (of the sort available to contractor "guilds" today) gets cancer, premiums for the group do not shoot up."

I didn't say they did. I said 10-person startup. And, regardless of the existence of an "exchange" or not, policies of that size will still be meted out case-by-case, and those little start-ups will get squeezed, especially if they have someone on board with a pre-existing condition.

There's no getting around that problem unless each state acts as a group insurance pool. You will ALWAYS run into the small business, part-timer, or self-employed worker problem. Full stop. No arguments.

"it turns out... you agree with me."

Let's get this out of the way from square one: I don't agree. At all. In principle or in general. I may agree in some finer details, but my ultimate pie-in-the-sky wish for America is for us to implement a mandatory system in which every man, woman, and child, regardless of age or infirmity can get covered for a nominal price, unless they are a religious or conscientious objector and chooses to opt-out, but must themselves still pay, like we do with defense.

"I disagreed with you that what we need is the Department of Health and Human Services to set prices for health care by fiat."

And, I disagreed that the free market cannot correct what is here _in practice_. Not some theoretical America where we didn't have a glacially large government or a sedentary populace with 50 Million uninsured that didn't eat Cheetos and Mountain Dew for dinner. I'm talking about the reality of the situation and how it will take more than EMR and telemedicine changes to close that 50 Million (and counting) gap, though I do agree that technology can play a non-trivial role in cutting administrative costs.

See, I have wiggle room and patience for negotiation.

"Please stop writing like this on HN."

You, I can see, don't.
Measure earth’s rotation with PlayStation Move
That is a pretty neat idea, I'm looking into it now.

--@slace (co-author of httpstat.us)
I switched my friend to U-Verse one year ago from Comcast. The switch was... PAINFUL. After repeated service calls and guys climbing the poll outside, the picture and internet worked fairly well. Did it work with our state-of-the-art home theater I just installed? NOPE. When we adopted U-Verse
AT&T didn't support 5.1 or 7.1 sound over HDMI. Only 2.0 sound would be available. I was sooo upset. I spent hours complaining to the tech support, they insisted it did support it. Higher level tech would reveal the cablebox is running a version of MS Windows that only supports 2.0 sound over HDMI. While all this is happening AT&T is running commercials all over the place advertising HD picture and digital surround sound.

EDIT: months later a box software update was released to fix the problem. AT&T was almost completely silent during the issue, and acted like they did me a favor when it was fixed.
JavaScript-based Vi editor
Good point, just updated my profile.

We put an ad on CL (they charge in SF) for a JavaScript developer and didn't get any promising resumes.

Everybody is looking for awesome JS folk.

It probably doesn't help that we are using fairly advanced framework like Google Closure for our webapp. Maybe that is intimidating for some people?
It looks like you can only enroll between July and august. Man this insurance thing is like the hardest block in becoming an entrepreneur!
I was 12 years old and wanted to play video games on our 386. However, being the typical 12 year old, I had no money. I had some cheesy little DOS helicopter game and decided that I wanted to do something like that.

I pulled up the source code to GORILLAS.BAS and played around with it for a while to learn the BASIC syntax and, instead, ended up making a silly little text mode game where the smiley face (char 0x01) had to eat the diamonds. Watch out for those flying dollar signs. They're dangerous!
I've used farmer's market milk but not raw unpasteurized etc. milk. It's not a big issue for me, though I'm completely disinterested in milk on its own. Most cheese is probably made with relatively unremarkable milk, though.

For cheese-making, I recommend starting with paneer / farmer's cheese, rather than aged cheeses. Gradually heat milk in a big pot, stir in a curdling agent (such as lemon juice), let it separate, then wrap the curds in cheesecloth and let them drip, maybe press them after. Real directions will be more specific (the book I linked has a great intro!), but that's the gist. Paneer is great fried with spinach and/or scrambled eggs. Also, try making bread with the whey.

Homemade yogurt is also good, particularly if you strain it a bit to thicken it ("labneh", among many other names). Buttermilk is even easier, since it's less finicky about being kept warm, and it's fantastic for baking - soda bread with lots of rolled oats, pancakes, etc. Having a lot of large jars helps; I've accumulated a bunch of half-gallon (~2L) jars from honey used for meadmaking. They're incredibly versatile.

I really like _On Food and Cooking_ as a reference, though it doesn't inspire me the way _Wild Fermentation_ does. I also wholeheartedly recommend John Thorne's books, particularly _Pot on the Fire_ and _Outlaw Cook_. The newsletter is good, too, if a bit sporadic these days.
INTERVIEW: Tom Silverman, Tommy Boy/NMS Founder
This is an amazing example of the sheer deluge in data. Is this because we just have an excess in CPU and storage?
Amazing looking service. However, there's a typo on the "About us" page, which I thought I'd bring to your attention.

"Joseph Walla
Enterepeneur with a soft spot for the public sector."

Good luck with everything though, you guys are going to kill it.
I am using JIRA (their 10 bucks offer). It is a bit slow on my 256mb linode though.
I have Verizon FiOS as well. As luck would have it, you are not required to use the router as your router (though I agree that the router is serviceable). I have an ethernet cable coming directly out of the FiOS ONT to my FreeBSD-based router. I use the Verizon router on my LAN as a MoCA bridge for my TV's set top box. Seems to work perfectly fine, though Verizon claims that their router is required for optimal QoS (I use ALTQ instead).
there is one point more important than these. when you try to avoid thinking about anything, naturally your /dev/random of a brain will present you with many thoughts inspite of your efforts. the most important point is to not get upset at yourself for not being able to achieve "no mind" instantly. getting upset with yourself leads to a negative feedback loop which completely undermines what you are engaging in.

I find a helpful illustration is a glass of champagne. the bubbles will keep appearing. note them, and allow them to float to the top, and dissipate. do not get upset with yourself when you find that they keep coming.
YAWN, indent & don't swear. What a nothing article.
The door thing ended up being kind of cool. We did it in a way that it reattaches almost seamlessly with some sunken screws.

So, it looks just as bad as it ever did except now it's convertible. We can remove the door's roof anytime we want. At least moving the bed back downstairs when we move in a few months will not be as big of a hassle.

The home is charming but I can't tolerate the neighborhood any longer.

Time to work on the resume and work on getting back out to California.
5 Tips for Young Entrepreneurs
5.1 and HDMI works fine for me. What did you spend hours complaining about? It either supports what you want or it doesn't, right?
Register llc
register llc
The tale of emperor has no clothes come to mind. Nobody would ever be brave enough to call a con when there is total hysteria within the Government on terrorism.
Anything similar for Python?

I am aware of this: http://docs.python.org/devguide/gdb.html only.
thank god i don't have to worry about buying that blasted fax machine!
I was very good friends with one of my old bosses. We'd known each other for years when he extended the job offer to me. I accepted and we had a good working relationship and our friendship remained as good as ever.

Once I quit and moved on we still remained friends.

We eventually grew out of touch after his company got huge and he became very busy. I still talk to him on occasion, though. He's a great guy and I feel honored to call him friend and to have been a part of the company.
Do you have plans to expand beyond New York or the San Francisco Bay Area?
Isn't Facebook also using some pretty bad ass technology (they did invent a PHP to C++ compiler after all)?

I come from a background in writing financial software so I'd personally rather reach a few users willing to pay for some bad ass software than to reach millions who receive (or perceive) such a marginal benefit from the software that they aren't willing to pay for it.

I got to play with some pretty cool tech (http://bit.ly/FredPatent) and get a decent cheque at the end of the month (to be fair I was probably paid more in line your pay scale than facebook's)

I'm sort of solidly in the DHH school of startups where you should be charging for your software. If your software provides value to people they should be willing to pay for it, or you should be attracting a valuable audience that you can sell to advertisers.

It sounds like catch.com is making money (decent size team, lots of press) so kudos to you guys building a great product.

edit: I saw on your twitter feed that catch raised $7mm. definite congrats on that one!
It might be, but it actually intrigued me. Whatever your tech is the site is snappy which is what really matters.
Graduates of elite colleges don't make more money
It will take a lot of work to steal me from Faxzero.
What kind of person admires 10 persons at once?
Congrats! This is awesome. Looks like a GREAT idea and looks like you executed really well. High five!
I catch it now. And may I say thank you? :) I've just met far too many otherwise-apparently-competent people that actually believe it. And a bajillion tea-partiers.

Thanks for the catch, everyone-else, my bad!
So it's necessary that it's impossible to exceed the speed of light.

For example if you had two objects each traveling at 51% of the speed of light (relative to third placed in between them). You only gave them a certain amount of energy, but if speeds were additive and you compared them then it would appear that their comparative speed was greater than the speed of light!

And that would imply an infinite amount of energy, which would be a problem.

Even if they were each traveling at 49% of the speed of light, so there are no issues of infinity, it takes a lot less energy to accelerate two object to 49% of the speed of light than it does to accelerate one to 98% of the speed of light (because it's a lot heavier when it's going that fast, so it contains far more energy), so you would have issues with conservation of energy.

Because of all that, speeds are not additive, and they get adjusted in a way that keeps conservation of energy exactly correct.

Therefor relativity is necessary if you want mass to be interchangeable with energy.
ha, thanks. I'll leave out my opinion on my own slogan idea next time.
Minor Details that can enhance Sales for Creatives
Growing in the business is a very important thing however; it is definitely a hard task. Finding clients is never an easy thing which is why web designers and graphic designers are always looking for more and more opportunities to grow.
I'm almost certain yOu could in parts of Canada in 1986.
We've built the editor/signature tool to try and add value. Are there any other features you'd like to see that might persuade you to switch over?
No.

"Family, religion, friends.. these are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business." -Monty Burns
What I like about this is that it's trying to help solve the number one problem in the software field. Which is not some esoteric or fancy computing problem, and is not a hardware issue, etc. It's the fact that the demand for folks who can do software, and well, far exceeds the supply of such folks. Especially ones who are available, interested and affordable. Trying to take even a tiny bite, percentage-wise, out of a very large pie is always promising.
I was making my costumer voice heard. There is no other recourse. It would be nice if it was that simple. Bool, if you will. But the fact was they were advertising something that didn't exist; like a phone company advertising '4G', doesn't exist. It's not right. These companies need to be called on their shit. People need to start getting upset. These companies walk all over us and are making billions. Meanwhile, we have the worst internet access and expensive of most all developed nations. Hong Kong is now serving 1Gb connections for $26 per month!!!
More interesting than reaching 500 million users with a team solving interesting technical problems using bad ass technology, and making loads of money? Probably not.
Note that it's not "insurance", either. The NHS is just another tax-funded service.
...an app which will likely be rejected under the new In-App Purchase regulations the next time they try to update.
I'm not surprised SWA doesn't show up in a study like this. The point of SWA isn't that they're always the cheapest, only that they're consistently and predictably cheap.
SD (Simple Defects) is more choice when I can. Distributed and works pretty well, and not too complex.
Only if the content being paid for is delivered through the app. If the app is just something like a remote control or a channel guide then I'm guessing Apple would let it slide.
As co-founder of an online fax service[1], I'll be watching HelloFax closely. It's a mature market, but most of the existing players are crappy, so I think there's a big opportunity here. It's a difficult marketing problem, though. AdWords advertising for fax related keywords is very expensive, and there are services out there that offer completely free faxes (even if they are cluttered with ads). Perhaps the signing functionality offered by HelloFax will give them enough differentiation to generate good word-of-mouth awareness.

[1] https://www.faxfresh.com/
Hmmm streamlining this very functionality accounts for a fraction of what my current project does...

Perhaps I should apply to ycombinator...
wow, I just discovered my fiance shares a birthday w/ zelda. This day now doubly rules. Incidentally she really likes zelda and we've been playing through zelda 2 together on virtual console.
You get a 10% discount, but the insurance company gets a 50-90% discount on most stuff. My kids spent 64 days in the NICU after being born three months early, and the bill came to $2.5 million. Insurance paid $600k. Our ER visits tend to bill out at $3-5k, and get covered at about $1k.

If you're happy about a 10% discount for being uninsured, the scam is working.
Ultima was so easy to patch that I wrote my own character editor in basic that worked on II, III, and IV (Apple II versions). You'd insert a disk at the programs's request, load a character and could edit virtually any property or inventory item. The Binhex style single byte encoding really did make it a "pleasure" to hack.
I don't believe it exists in a meaningful way, and I say that as somebody who paid for cancer treatment out of pocket.

In emergency situations, you really just go for 'closest competent solution' and don't spend time negotiating with more distant hospitals.

In non-emergency situations, you're still limited to a fairly small number of competent providers who are near your family/friends, and have the right skills.

And frankly, it's not like you can get a binding estimate anyway. The only thing you know the cost of, for sure, are the procedures they've already performed. But there's no certainty about whether the "cheap" place might recommend this or that and end up deeper in your pockets than the "expensive" place.

So not only is it nearly impossible to compare the costs, you're doing so while really only concerned about whether or not you'll die.

I hope you're lucky enough to remain an ignorant fool who believes that there is meaningful competition in the sector. But if you aren't, you'll quickly realize that you believe some retarded bullshit.
Related: Adafruit just pointed out that Johnny Lee was behind the original Kinect bounty-

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/02/21/johhny-lee-was-behin...
I love how this could essentially be used as a way to bypass physical signatures which are still required by some painfully-useless laws. I shall keep this in mind if I'm ever required to fax something.
I bike to work, where I sit and focus much of the day. Without the biking, I don't focus as effectively. Without the focusing, the biking life starts to feel unmoored after a while (days or weeks).
Some may argue (though I don't) that it is tantamount to price fixing, because doctors aren't free to have a "sliding scale" of care, even though about 95% of what they do are routine. Hell, even my plumber and mechanic have a book that they're more than happy to show me for what a service costs. My broken arm, though? I _deserve to shit bricks in fear of the bill if I'm a part time cashier with no insurance. Let that be a harsh lesson to me to become a rich computer programmer.
Thoughts on TV: Lost vs The Love Boat
http://groups.google.com/group/plt-scheme