skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really, really interesting to me. I like the syntax so much better than standard Java syntax, and it apparently compiles down to JVM bytecode just as efficient as Java would produce. Hard to go wrong with that combination!
This can't work. There are pages on the internet that google does not see and should not see. And the proposed solution (centrally managed TXT records) would not work for those pages.
Also, it only moves the problem from the CAs to google.
Seattle, WA

Wetpaint

We’re working on a platform of new services and tools aimed at a revolutionary new way of doing publishing. Systems that can spot breaking news, predict the amount of traffic a piece of content will drive and figure out where, when and how to best distribute this content.

We are looking for a software developer and a test engineer. Details here: http://www.wetpaint.com/page/jobs

Feel free to contact me about either of these, or anything else on that page: ecarrel@wetpaint.com
That is what this did this morning... Googling 'Comic Sans' gave you all your results in Comic Sans. Looks like they have pulled it now.
Somebody brought up the example of the sun to "prove" that radiation is not dangerous. I merely pointed out that we are protected by a magnetic field, so not all of the radiation reaches us. I don't see the relevance of pointing out that space kills you anyway, without radiation, hence my reaction.

For what it is worth, the article explicitly mentioned that the current levels of radiation is not dangerous. Yet the pro-nuclear crowd has to fall over themselves making up stupid examples of daily safe exposure to radiation.

For what it's worth, that kind of argumentation really is like saying "drinking water is safe, therefore we shouldn't worry about Tsunamis".

I wanted to believe the pro-nuclear-crowd for a while, but as I said, their useless comparisons make me lose faith. For starters they don't even seem to understand the difference between radiation and radioactive isotopes.

Edit: yes, isotopes, not particles, I was too lazy to look it up in the dictionary.
I didn't get it, but then I realized that I don't have any of the MS fonts installed. Good riddance.
I am sorry the site was down. I agree, soon being on Facebook will be equal to still being on Friendster
Most people are shy in front of big audiences... this remains true on Facebook as people accumulate ever larger friend-lists. Of course, they're probably all just as addicted as ever. I'm a 'light' FB user, I've only posted one pic, only been tagged in one, post a status update about once a month, comment about once a week, never sent someone a friend-request, only have 60 or so friends, and even I check the thing 2 or 3 times per day.
to be honest I kinda like that.

Life is short, so use the best calling card. -> then explain why it's the best.

1. Record your calls, etc...
Where do you write code during this awesome weather in SF?
The weather is so good, so if you don't write code at home or office, what are some good open-air places with WIFI and possibly electric plugs?
Tesla Roadster 2.5 Sport review
Gmail kinectified
Media6Degrees is looking for Java Engineers in NYC.

http://media6degrees.com/2010/12/server-side-senior-java-dev...

The Server-Side Developer role requires in-depth experience with the following:

Server- side Java (5.0, 6 strongly preferred) including multi-threading, concurrency, etc.
Application Server or Servlet containers, Tomcat 5.5 or later strongly preferred
TDD, Unit, Integration and Functional testing.
Strong working knowledge of browsers and web technologies
Experience with IoC containers; Spring/Spring MVC strongly preferred
ORM; Hibernate strongly preferred
JUnit
Java Profiler, JProfiler perferred
SQL; MySQL 5.1 strongly preferred
Continuous Integration; Hudson strongly preferred
Maven 2
IDE, Eclipse strongly preferred
Subversion
Linux
Photoessay: Images from first planetary orbits
as does Firefox.
Also, check out the Ask YC Archive curated by the noble Gabriel Weinberg: www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

A real treasure trove about basically everything and anything you'd be interested in for entrepreneurship, job finding, programming, school, life, ...anything.
It's plausible that the two are related. The fewer real interactions people have on the site, the less they'll be active. Automated content fills its space, and soon there's little social engagement.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=ascii+art
the logo is really ascii text
Brooks further cites a study claiming that there is "no correlation between accumulating large wealth and high IQ."

Both claims are wrong. The result Brooks cites is after "controlling" for education and income.

Excuse me, but finding no correlation between wealth and IQ after "controlling" for income isn't exactly a surprising finding. As a matter of fact I'd say that usually accumulating large wealth is a direct function of income.
No. It says use the highest available protocol.

The highest available protocol is not necessarily the fastest. There might be other than pure speed reasons to introduce the next Pickle protocol.
Not really. If your program writes its logs to /foo/bar then daemontools does not do anything for you.
Quebec City, Canada

We're looking for mobile (iOS and Android) developers as well as Web (Ruby, Rails, Sinatra) developers.

http://www.mirego.com

Also, we have a nice little "life @ Mirego" website we built to explain why you should work with us :) → http://vie.mirego.com
Yup. Title courtesy Yahoo via way of Reuters
This should definitely take place at the aggregation level. There are great tools for this already. This is definitely an implementation detail we developers should delegate to the systems guys.

Not to mention, it's just less development work to send out messages with, say, different syslog levels and be done with it.
And because caching systems are typically a means for speeding up reads, where the article only focuses on writes.

Python 2.5 -- including pickle's (faster) bin mode

Starting simplejson dumps...
done: 31.7636611462
Starting cjson encode...
done: 3.80062890053
Starting pickle dumps...
done: 10.4873199463
Starting pickle dumps (protocol=-1 -- force HIGHEST_PROTOCOL)...
done: 5.98110699654
Starting simplejson loads...
done: 138.709590197
Starting cjson decode...
done: 1.85300803185
Starting pickle loads...
done: 5.24735999107
Starting pickle loads (protocol=-1 -- force HIGHEST_PROTOCOL)...
done: 3.66428518295
This is a partisan political post, and not that well written. Judging by the tone of this and his other pieces the author probably believes that conservatives ended slavery.
Facebook is not boring but I do think the Fan pages have way too many updates. They get in the way of updates from my friends.
True. Ironically, filtering based on who you interact with most frequently has the side effect of hiding from you the true number of people whom you're connected to.
Everyone should breathe for a moment.

According to the Angel Capital Association, 60% of their members charge ~$400 to pitch. Also, no one complains about the $18,000 for 3 minutes at Demo. That's a pretty hefty fee, but many get value out of that event. The entrepreneur HAS to be the one to make that value judgement for themselves.

The MassChallenge team and others like them are providing a great service and it's up to the entrepreneur to figure out if their making the right decision, not some self appointed guru.

I have a hard time understanding those self appointed guru's who claim to have the interest of the poor struggling entrepreneur at heart. Entrepreneur's are a pretty tough lot. If an entrepreneur can't make the right decision about who they should work with, they will likely fail anyway.

After all, being a CEO is about making the right decisions. If you can't do that, it's better to find out early.
Object Tracking Algorithm Learns From Mistakes [video]
I Am Offered a Possible .NET Programming Job Position, Should I take it?
I have been contacted and presented with a job opportunity from an HR rep in what looks like a good company.

The only problem is that they are a Windows shop, using .NET. Nothing wrong with this, just that most of my experience has been programming on Linux using languages such as PHP, Python, C, Java, Ruby, and using various open source technologies.

I feel like I could easily pick up programming in a windows .Net environment, but do I want to?

I like the company and the people already, but I seem to have almost no interest in programming in a Microsoft environment.

I am wondering if I have false data about Microsoft programming technology and have an erroneous opinion that it just is not very interesting.

Programming on Linux using open source languages and technologies seems great to me, and programming on .NET just seems dreadful - but I haven't done it. Just wondering why I feel this way - and if I really should feel this way - and if anyone else feels this way too.
Ah, I see. I guess I'm just trying to flesh out the difference between all the terms I hear thrown around all the time that seem to overlap; day-trader, quant, HFT partner, etc. I see it's not as clear-cut as I thought. Thanks.
Four physicists arrested by Homeland Security after particle collider b&e.
Nothing. But, as said, a lot of (most I saw) employers are not like that and, more important, a lot of people are not like that. I was employed and the only thing I learned, even though my bosses were reasonable, was that I cannot stand that situation. I love startups, I love getting my team to the top and that top is limited by my employer (at least in short term). That makes me really not like being employed.
Am I the only person that doesn't want logging to block or buffer? Streams are great until you realize that when the thing that you are piping stdout to blocks then your program goes to sleep too... all because something couldn't process your debug logs? Files have the same problem... no space left on device, so all your apps have to crash!?

Using non-blocking IO is a solution, but then when the fd is unwritable for a while, you buffer data and your machine runs out of memory. So also not good.

I'm a big fan of the strategy Varnish uses. It mmaps a block of memory, and then treats it as a ring buffer. A separate program can connect to this and read the logs to a file or a pipe, but if that program fails, you don't stop serving web pages. As long as allocated memory doesn't randomly disappear and the Universe doesn't implode, logging adds no overhead or risk of failure to your app.

Logs are essential, but I don't necessarily want a failure in the logging system to break my app. When you use files or pipes, you run this risk.
I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.
Assuming the bitrates are the same, 48fps will require 80% of the bandwidth needed to handle 60.

To the best of my knowledge, H.264 only supports two GOP structures (short = 6 frames / long = 15 frames), both of which operate independently from the playback speed.

In other words, a short GOP setting produces 8 blocks per second running at 48, and 10 per second running at 60. Assuming a constant bitrate (I know, I know), the throughput of the entire system needs to increase by an additional 20% to handle 60. And that's where things fall apart.

Consider the iTunes store, where I believe HD rentals top out at 720p. Or most HD broadcasters, who skew away from the 19.39 Mbps ceiling on the ATSC MPEG-2 spec in favor of programs encoded at 13.something Mbps (the legal floor) thereby allowing an SD channel encoded at ~6Mbps to be delivered in parallel. Does this exercise in bandwidth maximization impact the quality of the HD component? You bet. Do the networks care? If an additional SD means they can dramatically increase the number of ads served, then no, absolutely not.

So regardless of how great the acquisition setup, and how awesome the playback system, there's always the network in between them to consider. And with providers moving toward bandwidth caps, I see picture quality going down, not up. So, streaming 1080p60 H.264 encoded at (say) 7-9 Mbps? Choice, yes, but total fantasy for the time being.

Of course, Cameron is talking about making theaters competitive, so maybe that's his point. Given that BluRay has effectively failed as a universal home standard, and that instant-availability is hugely favored over order-and-wait programs, image quality of filmed entertainment at home is now tied to network limits.

The real question, then, is "are there enough cinephiles who actually care?"
The equivalent of using pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL or pickle.dumps(obj, protocol=pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL) -- any negative value will force highest protocol.
In other words, if your business operates a monopoly granted by the state, you DO have a special set of legal, moral, and ethical obligations that don't apply to less privileged organizations.

If there were such obligations, they would be made specific in the regulation. It's pointless to set the rules for the game and then get upset when they are followed. I personally find the price gouging distasteful as well, but those are my ethical beliefs and they in no way compel the behavior of others.

Hence my claim that the regulations should be the subject of the discussion, not whether some particular company is acting in accordance with our personal views.
I think what made facebook appealing in the beginning was the "post an update, get an immediate reaction" phenomenon. The number of posts was small enough and the number of friendly eyes high enough that the probability of even the smallest discourse was high. Add to that the fact that one's list of "friends" starts relatively small and encompasses a higher ratio of people who are actual friends. Over time, one's list of "friends" expands to the point where a user's feed is comprised of non-relevant information. For me at least, it lessens the desire to contribute content knowing that that content will be diluted in the huge sea of updates. The same holds true for reading my news feed; I don't want to comb through lots of posts to find a few that are interesting.

Note: I write this post from my own experience as a college student. It may very well be different from how others use facebook.
Obvious April Fool.
Information Overload – How To Deal With Mental Obesity
This seems like something that would be much better if integrated into a tool like Fabric or Capistrano that already knows how to send SSH commands to a bunch of different servers.

Does anything like that exist? I guess the downside would be fixing problems if your command failed in 1 or 2 of 10 or 20 servers… Then you'd have to open up a separate session to those servers to figure out what was going on.
Life360 - SF - Head of Geolocation

Life360 is turning smart phones into the ultimate safety devices. We currently have close to 2,000,000 registered family members and are adding 20,000 / day on our Family Tracking apps. We are looking for an awesome geo location dev to help us take advantage of all the location data we have coming in to the system to provide even more value to our users. So if you are an awesome developer who wants to get their hands dirty working on some really interesting geo location problems, shoot me over an email: alex@life360.com.

Cheers,
Alex
Calling 911 Crashes Evo 4g
Galois CEO Testifies Before U.S. Congress
Page load speed does relate to profitability, but your language choice most likely won't move the needle so far that you notice a difference. My startup's Rails-based homepage averages ~11ms render time.
Sounds like an opportunity to learn something new.

That being said we had a Perl fella move into C# for a couple of years. Now he is back on Linux doing Ruby and said he couldn't be happier to be off the Microsoft stack.
I would rather count on the media player (Blu-ray player or whatever) or TV to do it than in the source. Think of it this way: in NTSC, DVDs were either had hard 3:2 pull down for 24Hz to the 29.97Hz to show on the interlaced CRTs of the time. But now that we have TVs that can show 24Hz, if you play those DVDs they still have the interpolated frame artifacts. While if you left it up to software pulldown in the DVD player (which they basically all had, since I believe it was part of the standard), they can now be shown at the proper frame rate without interpolation.

Most theatrical DVDs released after the early 2000s were 24Hz, as far as I know and depended on the DVD player to convert to NTSC. So now in modern players, they're outputted at 24Hz for 120Hz and 240Hz TVs.

The only downside is if you get crappy TVs and/or Bluray players that do horrible pulldown, I guess. But I've gotten hardpulled down DVDs that look horrible as well (I'm looking at you, BBC).
The biggest problem is that web2py openly encourages learning practices which do not transfer over into general Python programming and, in fact, are the literal opposite of how actual Python programmers work. Things like magic imports seem great at first, of course, but in the long run A) get you lost quickly if you ever have to write real Python and B) have the same problem any bit of hidden magic does: sooner or later something's going to go wrong and you're going to have one hell of a time figuring out which bit of implicit "helpful" code is causing it.
Calling 911 Crashes an Android or two is how this link to some forum post should read :D That being said, it could be useful in light of this to have some other police numbers in your phone, or try calling an operator or something if this happens to you. Land lines also lose power sometimes.
Video: The Merb team on becoming a hacker
No problem, Wikileaks and Anonymous will pick up the slack.
Some do, some don't. If you manage to make your living doing what you believe in and not dancing to the tune of $ or clients, you are 'the man'. But I guess most of us don't have that luxury.
I can certainly understand the perspective that ultimately the responsibility for the loss will have to be borne by the folks who didn't do their homework or didn't take enough care in their backup strategy.

However, that wasn't the assertion that I was intending to respond to :) I've seen this "its not the perpetrator's fault" argument used several times in the last few weeks, the most recent that I remember was the kid who hacked the PHPFog site. The same argument was used there, and indeed was spouted off by the kid himself - it wasn't the hackers fault the site got hacked.

This line of reasoning seems dangerous to me, as it obscures a criminal or unethical activity by the ultimate result of that activity. Wrong action is wrong action, regardless of who didn't cover their bases.

Should the producer take more precautions, and will they ultimately be burned? Most assuredely, but lets not forget the reason they were burned in the first place - somebody maliciously acted against them.
http://clarus.chez-alice.fr/ENGLISH/history.html
I made a standing desk out of a cheap shelf system back in January [1], and haven't looked back. About the only change I've made since putting up those pictures is swapping out the Apple keyboard for a Kinesis Freestyle.

I'd like to build some small shelves off the sides of the top level to add some speakers, but beyond that I've been extremely impressed with making the switch.

[1] http://elasticdog.com/2011/01/shelf-made-standing-desk/
Android and 'Open'
Is it just me, or if you are studying the "extreamly-intelligent" as in the image halfway down, its best to learn how to spell extremely. And the rules on hypenation.
They don't have to go anywhere. Most communication will continue to happen through gossip, as it should.

Facebook is stupid because it has become a social obligation to "friend" people on it, and like you pointed out, way too hard to set up effective privacy measures.

Normal people are scared of public speaking.
The current certificate infrastructure does not intrinsically depend on DNS. No scheme is resilient against bad actors at the top of the hierarchy; yes, there are (bad) CAs who offer only DNS-equivalent security today. But that's not an SSL/TLS problem; it's a "we should delete CA certs for those CAs" problem.
You should try http://sublimetext.com

It's sort of like textmate but also cross-platform, so in theory you won't have to learn another editor. I'd learn it myself if I wasn't already used to textmate.
I do not disagree with any of this. Upvoted.
Agreed, I think the other point is that people hardly go to people's facebook pages anymore. When I first add a friend, I might go check out their profile. But after that, it's all about the news feed and what everyone is doing at the moment. When you can comment from the news feed on whatever post your friend just put out there, why is there a need to even go to the facebook page?
Usaar333 - Here’s some food for thought:

There is a difference between -capable- and -willing-. Years ago I hired a brilliant developer that didn’t do anything because the work was below him.

A good interview should determine culture, willingness, and competence. If your dev-group works with b-trees daily, then include it in the test. For me, hiring someone who knows the answer is less important than hiring someone who can find the answer. In a dynamic - always changing environment - I would rather hire the latter.
Right. One of the ways people earn social capital is by exhibiting creativity to peers. danah boyd has written a lot about the kind of identitive performance that social networks enable.
We basically need a developer who can own QA, but we expect this person would also have opportunities to do from scratch development on some of our projects too. It's a hybrid role that requires just the right person, which is why we are reaching out here. What we are looking to avoid is someone who "puts up with" the QA because they are interested in the software development side of things. We would really like a QA person who also wants to dabble just a bit in regular "from scratch" development.
It's not at all inconsistent to believe that there is a moral obligation to do something, and also that government should not force people to do it.
The Fredrik I'm standing at right now can go all the way to 150cm, just make sure you get the correct version. There's a short one and a taller one.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60111123

If you look at this pic you'll see the tabletop plus two shelves. The shelves and tabletop can all be mounted at different heights. I mounted the shelves below the tabletop and my tabletop is at 104cm but can go much higher.
The funding and failures of Color, Silicon Valley’s $41 million startup
This is a non-profit event that spun-off from Andrew Gwozdziewycz's Hack and Tell in NY. It's been going strong for three months and has already seen some really great presentations.

If you're in the area, I hope you'll stop by!
Based on the PyPi page for cjson, the comments seem to indicate many problems still persist, notwithstanding new updates that have yet to be pushed
This is nearly impossible with current US immigration laws. You can be a founder of the company (i.e. an investor), but you cannot legally work for the company, or you violate your visitor immigration status.
When you become profitable, it easy to optimize/fix CPU usage and speed (or at least it is not disruptive for your entire product) - it very hard to fix scalability part (including optimizing for memory usage).
The article makes some very good points, but I would love to make a copy-editing pass over it.
PHP.net download page - April Fools
All games are toys.
"We basically don't have a choice but to use some form of power generation"

Humans seem to have done well for thousands of years without electricity. Just saying. Don't bother to reply with death rates and so on - it is a complex subject, but your generalization is definitely too simple. The fact is, there are lots of alternatives. Maybe we need nuclear power to sustain three TVs per household, though. Is it worth the price?

As for fertilizer, I can produce you some fertilizer without any help of nuclear power, too. I do it every day.