skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Python3 has the 'bytes' type, which can be used for the same things that 'str' was used for in Python 2.x . So you don't lose any functionality, just rename your types.

As an added bonus, the name 'bytes' makes it very clear, that you're dealing with raw data.

Strings have become a data-type solely for human-readable text. For these, it makes perfect sense to only support unicode.
Spellcheck the JS
> ...and a photo of a warning inside a Port-o-John mocking Afghans – "In case any of you forgot that you are supposed to sit on the toilet and not stand on it and squat. It’s a safety issue. We don’t want you to fall in or miss your target."

That sounds crass to Americans, but it's actually a big problem with Western-style toilets in countries that primary have squat toilets. Oftentimes people accustomed to squat toilets will stand on the toilet seat and it turns into a huge mess.

Even in nice places you'll sometimes see muddy shoeprints and mess on the toilet seats in Vietnam, for instance and it's a headache for people who want to sit on the toilet.
Can I get your opinion of my startup ideas?
Usually men use the term "politics".
Brilliant. Been on the look out for something like this for quite a while. Thanks for sharing!
"run one of the hottest bars in Ibiza"

"Sorry, but isn't it a bit of a stretch to compare "running a bar on Ibiza" to "running for the oscars"?"

No. Ibiza is to the European house scene (which is huge) what the Oscars are for movies. Except that the season in Ibiza is several months, of course.
I agree with the missing parts of the book (btw: anyone interested in that might find "Programming Language Pragmatics" by Michael Scott interesting), however, I think that there is not enough experience on using functional programming languages in an industrial/professional setting.
Suggesting that if you have a 'better' way of teaching, that there should be some impact outside of the classroom... seems like a perfectly valid criticism.

If the teaching is simply an end in itself and the students aren't measurably better with the new method, how can you objectively say that the method of teaching is better?

If it is better, it will produce better results, to suggest otherwise is nonsense.
I think everyone would like having people at work make brownies, and not bitch, and I think they would like it regardless of the sex of the bakers.
Comcast is everybodys whipping boy since the bittorrent blocking fiasco. They acted against their customer base and have been paying for it since. Why regulate beyond what Comcast's customers thought appropriate?
Have you ever tried to explain to someone who is not an engineer what the relationship between 'a phone' and 'Android' is? Coincidentally I've tried twice over the last 3 weeks - both times concluded, after 15 minutes, with them concluding 'oh, so it doesn't matter much, right, all phones have it, it's just different between different phones'.

Eh... yes, I suppose...
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Spices are a hopeless example of the paradox of choice, since they're all genuinely different things.

The kinds of choices I hate are the ones that have been deliberately and often artificially cooked up between things that are in essence the same -- or that I'd benefit from really being the same.

Two examples:

(1) Washing powder. My local supermarket has a whole aisle filled with essentially identical products in different packaging (many from the same manufacturer/conglomerate). Ironically, this proliferation of meaningless branding seems to push out genuine choice: despite the acres of shelf space devoted to washing powders, I can't buy an ecologically sound washing powder here.

(2) Travel insurance. The choices faced for insurance (and other financial products) are genuinely overwhelming: to sensibly choose between the hundreds of available policies I'd need to read and compare the T&Cs for each one. I'd enormously prefer there to be some central body mandating a minimum standard for travel insurance (or maybe 2 or 3 levels of minimum standards) and then just pick the cheapest policy adhering to my standard of choice.

In the absence of this, companies often appear to go out of their way to make it difficult to compare their products with others' -- mobile/cell-phone plans are a case in point here.

In short, the 'paradox of choice' should really be 'the paradox of pointless artificial choices'... but then it becomes more obvious that it's only a paradox if you were previously a sucker for economic theory at its purest and most crazy.
I'm currently (as in right now) using Modafinil as a brain-booster to keep me awake for an exam this afternoon.

With regard to this: "If, for example, students use such drugs to mitigate the consequences of procrastination, they may fail to develop mental discipline and time-management skills.", as lots of HN readers may know, procrastination's a bitch. There are infinite methods to counteract it, yet we (I) keep falling through the cracks and not doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Not saying this drug suddenly eliminates that (I've been brain-boosted while procrastinating -hey, isnt' writing on HN hours before an exam procrastination?-), but it buys me time and a little edge in my gray matter to keep me going.

"Instead of ferreting out and punishing students, universities should focus on restoring a culture of deep engagement in education, rather than just competition for credentials"

Well, here in Argentina, and this college particularly, although I'm doing it for credentials mostly, the main problem is not "the culture", but how contents are delivered by proffessors in the classroom. My studying plan is from '95, and little has changed since then in it (System's engineering, btw). Some proffesors are like mummies from the 70's, talking about Algol and Ada like it's the next hot technology. On the other hand, education's free, there are lots of jobs, and IT is one of the fastest growing areas of work nowadays (where is it not?). I currently have a job working for a company that develops products for MS and some other clients, using MS tools.

That said, I'm a bit concerned about my health, and will be taking routine medical checks. Nevertheless, I'm not an addict (no, really). Although I use it now and then, I don't crave for it, nor I need it all the time. It's just an extra help for certain situations, like taking coffee when you're asleep, or ibuprofene when you have a mild headache (that perhaps could be solved by going to bed for a couple hours, but you have to keep working/stuying).

Prohibition, like on many other things, won't do any good to anyone, except maybe the ones that sell the drugs.
The comments in this thread are so gushing that I suspected we were being scammed by vanity accounts trying to flog this guys wares (books), but they're mostly from big karma/long time readers so I was wrong.

Okay, so other than being a hyper-intelligent pan-galactic sex god, what has this guy done for us lately? (read as: request for more info and less gushing. Let's just take the gushing as given)
Yahoo is far worse. When they lose your mail, it's gone.

Yahoo Mail lost two of my accounts over the years. The first time was early in the service, and they seem to have lost all their accounts at once. Suddenly you couldn't log in, and there was an apology message saying that you'd need to create a new account. And that you couldn't get the same email address back, which is why my @yahoo.com address had a 2 at the end of it for several years...

Until they locked me out of it one day. As in, I checked my mail at night, then in the morning my password didn't work anymore. Since they have no human beings working for them, an entire month's worth of attempts to get access back resulted in nothing but a big pile of form letters and links to the Forgot Password page.

So no, you're mistaken. Yahoo does have this problem. If you have an account with them I'd strongly advise you to back everything up. Then switch to Gmail.
I spent the better part of the last decade without a wristwatch, mainly because I thought my phone was good enough.

However, about 2 years ago I reverted back to wearing a watch. I went with a Swatch Skin... extremely minimalist & thin watch that weighs almost nothing. As one of my friends described it, "it's not really a watch, but more like just having the time on your wrist".

I've really enjoyed not having to dig out my phone to check the time. I used to think the convenience was trivial and there was no reason to wear a watch... but I'm pretty sure I was wrong.
Sure, if you never adjust your watch for a year. The whole point is how amazingly accurate it is for a sub-$200, purely mechanical timekeeping device. Besides, it's pretty common for super-accurate quartz watches to become wildly inaccurate about once per year (dead battery)...
Sounds like a good idea. I should do that right now.
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I think he's trying to indicate that your parents may have some trouble dealing with Apple if they're not technically inclined. It just depends on their personality, they definitely don't have to be programmers, but they should be able to reason through a process, deal with third parties (potentially several people within third parties), and be willing to take on the potential legal and fiduciary burdens without getting frustrated or giving up.

Anyway, my advice is dangerous and I know little about tax law, but if you can afford to register an LLC for your projects, you definitely should. It's only a couple hundred bucks in most states and you can get tax ID numbers from the feds and the state. These are accepted in lieu of SSN and other personal tax identifiers. You can file as a disregarded entity and avoid most of the business-related tax overhead (as long as you register the LLC properly), and it will just be less confusing all around; the IRS won't have incongruent numbers for your parents, you won't get taxed outside of the correct bracket, and you don't have to have anyone's personal info floating around out there.
This has been around for quite a while now, and their privacy policy is quite bad. They keep all your information on their server, and have the right to sell it.
What's eye contact for, anyway? I can read body language reasonably well, but I always feel like people are expecting me to do something with my eyes and I can never tell what, exactly, I'm supposed to do with them.
On (lack of) correlation between technical brilliance and social agility
As with everything, if you want something you either buy it or build it. If the cost to use existing infrastructure is too high, demand for alternatives will grow. If this demand can supplied, great, if it can't, then nothing can be done by market or government.

You've correctly pegged me as a Libertarian =), but I don't know who should be the title holders of the existing infrastructure.
Surprisingly accurate, if a little short. I wonder wether todays white papers will fare as well in the future.
Although the technical details may lag behind the innovations of Amazaon, I believe the book gives a good insight in the way of thinking when designing your infrastructure/app for AWS.
You're quite right. In fact, I avoid all caffeine (even Tea) when taking it. Had some nasty crashes on Concerta.
HN Bug: Upvote own submission?
I noticed this when looking at new item page a bit after submitting an item of my own:

http://imgur.com/xqDoN

In the past I've seen a red asterisk next to items I've posted; for this item the voting arrow is present.

Needless to say I didn't attempt to upvote the screenshotted post...
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There's also a perception problem. If both parties expect to have problems, they probably will have problems. If you get stopped by cops frequently, especially if they're under pressure to justify why they stopped you, well, they can probably find something. And if you get stopped for small stuff (like the walking a dog without a leash) thing enough times, it'll get on your nerves. Doubly so, because there's nothing you can do to avoid it. So it's hard for people to be calm, which doesn't help anyone.

Please don't misunderstand, though. I came here from a small town and, due to unfortunate circumstances, we ended up getting frequent friendly visits from the police. The word "friendly" is not a euphemism. I mean that Darwin and the other guys on the force cared about us and wanted to make sure that everything was okay and that we weren't having any problems. They were great guys. They do a hard job, so when they have a bad day, things can really go to hell fast. So there are a lot of problems and the cops do have to take a lot of crap, both directly and from people second-guessing them. I do understand and respect that, but that's why I care to see that more attention is paid to avoiding perverse incentives in the law itself.
Shaking Down Science
I have been carrying a pocket watch for over a decade. They need not be that expensive; I bought one as a gift a couple of years ago for about £25 (~USD40). I guess it depends on the amount of niceness you require. They are readily available on the high street where I live, or on the net of course, so go and have a look.
Telecom4u
The guy who had a good run, ran down his good-will, and then got his whole team fired?
How to make sure your SQL applications scale
Makes every website except lolcats.com better.
You don't see "A movie by Douglas Trumbull" much... Not even "A movie by Industrial Light and Magic" (which would be most of them).
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A modern iPhone game is built on a billion of little pieces - programming languages, frameworks, computer chips... It seems hardly practical to credit them all.

Also I don't think Angry Bird depends on Box 2D. They could have used any other engine or written their own.
as a massage therapist, regardless of how recently they've shaved she'll encounter it all

As a guy who enjoys massages and has hairy extremities: no matter how much oil is used, the hair gets pulled. One of the primary reasons cyclists shave their legs is for better massages.
The thing that I object to is all too common: some really good developer makes something awesome, and then in a funk of false humility or whatever they think "no one would ever buy this" and then they think, welp, might as well just give it away for free.

It wasn't Angry Birds that devalued this guys contribution, he did it to himself.

Devaluing your programming contribution is an ebbing tide that lowers all boats.

----

In a separate issue. people say that the Angry Birds guys should stump up some chump change, because they had this hit. What about their responsibility to their actual employees? Why should this one guy get a handout over and above what they have done?

Does the logic flow both ways? If they put out a game that flops (and remember they did some 40+ games before hitting on Angry Birds) can they ask for the developer of any free frameworks they used to chip in and help cover their expenses? Of course not, it is ridiculous.

If the obligation isn't bi-directional, my guess is that the logic claiming the obligation is flawed.

------

Back in the dotcom bubble quite a few of the companies that hit it big gave Stallman free shares when they IPOed. Now RMS does a lot of strange things out of principle, and one of the more interesting things was that he would immediately sell those shares. Of course this was viewed as financially stupid, because he could have held onto them for a couple of months and got more, or a couple of years and got even more, or a couple of months more and got nothing. In retrospect it is a genius financial move, because he made money from it whereas a lot of people who went all in and then rode the bubble all the way till it popped lost everything.

But (amongst other things) what I think he was doing was stating basically that free software carries with it no such ties, there are no hidden strings saying "yes, have this and play with it, but if you hit it big I want some" - there was no obligation - and by rejecting the shares in that way he was making the point forcefully.
خلفيات بلاك بيري 2011
It's more like Wolfenstein 3D, without the enemies, the objects, the guns, or the wall textures.

I guess these people never played Doom.
Oh god, what have I started :(
I guess a few of us have been through a programming language concepts course, and felt that the matter is really interesting, but that it could be better connected to what's happening on the ground. This guy is vocalising that perspective.

Also, Racket is promising. I think this is the first time we've had a scheme platform that has this combination:

- Simple installation

- Solid package management arrangements.

- Multiplatform

- Nice IDE.

- Free software

- Easy access to unix api

Other lisps have had a couple of these features. But Racket is the first lisp I've seen that feels like a serious alternative to perl/ruby/python. It may lack a solid standard library - I haven't looked into this yet.
The Steve Jobs, minus the tantrums, random firings, and black mock turtlenecks.

I hear he can be pretty critical though, especially if you ask him to port his work to a more "modern" language.
Launch was good. But so was Disrupt. What indicates to you that Disrupt has been lackluster?
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Perhaps they changed their focus to the addons from the apps. Maybe they are relatively making more money with the addons than with the apps and decided to focus their strength on that?
I don't know.. When you look at your phone, people can assume you got a message or something. Looking at your watch can really only mean one thing.
Yes, it goes away. But it may take a little while.
A question: You've been on HN for about 4 months, so you probably know about karma and upvoting. Indeed, two weeks ago you asked about karma and had various points explained.

I can understand why you might not know how to create a poll, and hence your question here.

What I don't understand is this. Someone has taken the time to answer your question - quite promptly - and clearly you read their answer because you created a poll fairly soon thereafter.

Why did you not upvote them?
I rather got the feeling that the datastore was much better for certain kinds of things than SQL. However, unless you are an expert in both SQL and the use of BigTable, how would you know when to use the one over the other? Okay, so obviously SQL is 'designed' to be good at transactions (whether it is or not is an exercise for the readers), and BigTable is really good for fuzzy search.

I'm guessing that SQL is actually going to be more useful for anyone doing e-commerce (hence transactions) or anyone with familiarity with traditional SQL based persistence (even - shock horror - JDBC).

SQL is bland, BigTable is sexy. But another word for bland is mature...
My site has a lot of dynamic content, so complete page caching doesn't help, nor does query caching or widget caching, so I had to figure out an alternative to all of this.

I installed X-Cache on the server to use as an opcode/bytecode cache (20% speedup) and to use as an extension of WP Cache's object cache mechanism. The latter I found to be immensely powerful.

I just surround ANY section of code in the template file (for example a menu) with the following snippet. This way I reduced page generation times from 350-500ms to 50ms.

<?php
if (false === ($top-menu = wp_cache_get('top-menu','menus'))) {
ob_start();
?>

<?php
$top-menu = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
wp_cache_set('top-menu', $top-menu, 'menus', 86400);
}
echo $top-menu;
?>
Ask HN: Who's Hiring (March 2011)
Please lead with the positions' locations.

And make it clear if working remotely is a possibility.
This is what I meant about being a great community. Already had some great discussions with a few people. Unfortunately my net has been a bit unstable. Looking forward to talking to the rest, and hopefully more of you.
#startups is on irc.freenode.net
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If you're building it you should believe in the product or at least understand the problem you're trying to solve. If you can't see the value in your product then how do you convince others.
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Wasn't aware of this one. Thanks!
Yahoo Messenger 11 Beta Now Connects Facebook Friends Via SMS Chat
Taunton, England (near Bristol)

Java developers wanting a great working environment, in Taunton. We've an expanding thick client app, we're already market leading in the UK for public sector and currently looking to expand into other markets and product areas. We hired the last guy who responded to a who's hiring post on HN and now need another excellent dev wanting to work in Taunton.

http://www.covalentsoftware.com/company/careers.php
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My (sexist?) experience:

The few women I've worked alongside as a software engineer have been fantastic. Easy to get along with, able to focus on work tasks and still have a great lunchtime conversation, with no alpha-nerd pedantic B.S.

The women I've worked for (three) have been universally terrible. Each in slightly different ways, but all had a strange, overcompensating quality to them. I'll just have to say it: bitchiness. Strange, control-freak tendencies and subsequent drama.

I've worked for two great male bosses, two idiots, and one brilliant guy who was an asshole (but at least he could be reasoned with). I would take all but one of the male bosses over any of the female bosses.

My conclusion isn't that women are bad managers, or anything like that. Rather, I believe it shows that people with lousy people skills are distributed across both sexes, and promoting worker bees to management positions is not an ideal plan.
See nobody is disputing what all of us claim here.

But it's the usual perception of majority of companies that engineering, product development,... are cost centers and cost centers need to be minimized to gain profit.

It's what you get when you let the beancounters run the business. But people bitching here that developers at MS don't have it well off - are being ignorant about majority of industry where developers are still being under-utilized to everyones dismay.

And Microsoft's care of intellectual workers is top tier. Even the ones that are not well off (sitting in a room with 10 other people) are better off than 90% of our industry.

Indeed some people get to have anything they want or need - good for them. Even better if it makes the end result better. It's good that they don't get into situation as I have in multiple occasions - running a top priority, code red development effort which if fails it will take the company down, and then when I needed a new virtual appliance I got informed that I cannot get is since the ESX is out of harddrives and that there will be no purchases since the budged has already been spent.

And this is the industry standard - not the "I run bazillion node supercluster".

Hell where I used to work - two of the interns went and bought 2 24" monitors each out of their own money to use them at work.
It would actually be very cool to build a "Skype videoconferencing device" using the steampunk-ish parts shown in that picture.
Looks interesting... supports languages called Racket and Swindle...?!

obligatory:

http://wikifaqs.net/index.php/Admiral_Ackbar