skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Considering this was developed in 1997, this is actually an ingenious way to get "Joe Q User" to call tech support. They boot up their computer, and music randomly starts to play, they get scared, shut down and call tech support. It certainly won't work every time, but considering that this has to happen all within BIOS while the CPU is melting, it's a reasonably good idea.
Start-Up Chile started 9 months ago and Junar is the only one of 23 companies that has attracted investment, and it is an Argentine company. No entrepreneur from the USA has been successful.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations try to solve problems by identifying a specific point of intervention and applying their efforts against a theory of change. Unfortunately, Start-Up Chile refuses to identify a specific point of intervention, as Steve Blank advised after his visit to Chile last December:

My sense is that Chile has not yet “declared a major.” Saying that you support entrepreneurship and innovation is a start, but the sentence needs to be finished. Entrepreneurship and innovation in what field? …. alternative energy? materials science? food science? cellulose outputs? video games and film? South American web commerce hub? automated mining? UAV’s?

Start-Up Chile lacks focus and rejects Steve Blank:

We accept projects from all business scopes ranging from biotech to energy to mobile and beyond. Throughout the 2010 pilot phase, there have been a number of Start-Up Chile participants who exemplify the diversity that the program strives to seek.

The second part of the Gates Foundation principle, applying efforts against a theory of change, implies that the government should justify intervention into a healthy free market by identifying the supposed “market failure”; in other words, telling a story that describes a process in which the intervention will be phased out and the free market revives.
More: http://brophyworld.com/startup-companies-in-chile/
Upvoted for the insight on why I'm having trouble finding a K&R equivalent for Python.

I bought "Learning Python" because it covers both 2.x and 3.x, but found it absolutely unnavigable as a reference. It might work well for people who want a tutorial they can go through step by step, but for someone who just wants to quickly find and absorb info in the process of doing something else, it doesn't cut the mustard.
More than anything, simply respecting the 'say it to my face' rule would be a good start. "See a psychiatrist" ... "asshole" ... etc... are not really necessary.
...and it's intentionally structured in a way that mirrors K&R!
Mercedes-Benz 2011 Model Terbaru
So You've Changed Your Mind
And the Ent division is going to keep growing. For example, the PSN issues will likely boost xbox live's user base.
"During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. "
> They pride themselves of creative thinking, they hire lots of academics, even economists and sociologists. Some of these people should be able to figure out a reasonably cost effective way of organizing these things without making the place resemble a 19th century cotton plantation.

Wait, so being offered a job that pays reasonably well with decent work conditions but for which you must solve for yourself the problem of how to get to work and what to eat for lunch is now considered oppressive? On the scale of, say, being whipped for not working hard enough?

Are you suggesting that if Google provides any perk at all they need to provide it to every employee or contractor at every company they contract with, including the guys who cut the lawns and the guys who sell them stationery supplies?
Well-made point. But I don't think it's the only reason for to buy an iPad.
I agree with the tags/colors suggestion.

For example, I am in the office all week, except tuesdays, when I'm available by conference call.
I think you haven't heard of OnStar, have you?
Previous discussion (including a few Blackhat links, though I haven't looked at those).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018703
Wow. Is this what HN is getting reduced to, that the top-ranking comment is filled with ad hominem attacks?

Whether you agree or disagree with the author's motivations, at least be civil. "Nitwit", "liar", "What are you 8?" ... ugh.
On Sandy Bridge graphics,X server freezes or flickers everytime anything interesting happens, like screensaver or suspend or console switching. New graphics bugs are reported daily. My X has frozen hard 6 times in 2 days.
Nvidia drivers have some trouble also.
In short, 2011 hardware is not compatible with Unity or Compiz at all. Legacy Metacity is slightly better, and disable all power management to get a mostly stable system..
Q: How do you know if there's a vegetarian in the room?

A: Don't worry, they'll let you know!
I've always seen it as a way to key people in to the fact that this is something one did just to try it out, and not something one is emotionally invested in. Communicating that may, in theory, get people to be more honest/brutal in their opinions rather than trying to "be nice" about it.

It doesn't necessarily mean "look, I did it in a weekend!" but "hey, I was messing around with this in my spare time..."
I'm reminded of this quote from Nassim Taleb: "The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."
Quick tip:How to disable Protected View on Office 2010.
They're hiring unskilled labor and giving them a role at an extraordinary company.

Really? They're hiring labor, but treating them as if they have no association with Google. They might as well simply be contractors that work for Jim's Labor Pool.

But why would they take fast food or something of the sort over this?

I don't know what they're paid, but at least from this article I get the feeling that fast food has more upward mobility. I know at least a couple of fast food workers as kids who moved up the ladder and eventually have owned their own profitable franchise. I have a feeling there really isn't much upward growth in this job.

I imagine the cleaning crew that vacuum at Goldman Sachs at night get treated way worse.

Quite possibly, although they're also likely not GS employees. Probably contractors, often contracted by the building.
Networking is extremely flaky in my home LAN. Since I set up a new box with natty, my box had been crashing my actontec DSL modem. There are some workarohbds online for disabling ipv6 and restarting wifi when he module crashes and the indicator Applet loses its connection to he network-manager service.
Raymond Hettinger is a great Python educator, and also very active on the mailinglists. He gives talks, too:

Easy AI with Python: http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/71/

Four powerful examples of composing Python tools: http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/schedule/event/86/
Does anyone know why the borosilicate cookware is no longer made? It was great stuff, while it was available.
Write data to a file and then load it at startup. Genius!
Thanks for the recommendation, serialx; this (along with Essential Reference) is contending to be my next purchase. :)
Like K&R, the official docs were written by the language designers/implementors. I think that's important: it eliminates a level of misunderstanding (between the designers and the writers).
We are asked to have opinions on far more things than we can possibly digest and reasonably evaluate ourselves. For this reason, we outsource most of our opinions to others we trust - our family, our teachers, our friends, the media, the state etc. This is the basis for propaganda, advertising, public relations and the like.

The fact that repeated messaging on one side of an issue will shift public opinion in aggregate towards that side is well accepted. This does not contradict the idea that some people will reach that same position independently.

It does suggest, however, that when comparing two populations the one subject to just one side of a subject since birth will be more likely to agree with that side on average than the population subject to no messaging or messaging from the other side. This fact does not actually suggest anything about correctness.

As an aside, I understand this is a heated issue for many, but I'm not sure your tone improves the discussion.
There's nothing suspicious in itself about ordering laboratory glassware, regardless of the type. If your lab is raided, the presence of glassware will be used to build a case against you for manufacturing, whether you bought or stole it.

Getting caught while stealing glassware from a lab is a much larger risk than having someone at a for-profit lab supply company play junior detective with your glassware order. This might not be entirely obvious while high on crack, though.
I submitted this about 9 months ago...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552067
Ah very very cool. I was think about saying something about dylan (the PLOT language by Dave Moon is something too look at too). Dylan has a BASIC like syntax do you think this will be easy to adopt to C like syntax? Is the C syntax set?

I really like what I see with Rust. Keep up the good work.
Chill dude.

We call ourselves hackers or entrepreneurs because we question the status quo.

All this guy seems to have done is do just that. I dont think he deserves any of what you just called him. Who made you the jury and executioner here on HN?

Whatever you call it, social experiment or whatnot, it seems to have gotten out of hand and the guy got fired. And he blogs about his experience. Lets not read much more in to it.

As for people getting fired because of what he did, would you blame someone who blew the cover on a sweatshop and in turn cause the sweatshop being shut down? Google is a better employer than a whole lot of others, but these actions sure seem heavy handed.
Are you saying there hasn't been a significant anti-labor campaign the last 40 years?

Take a look at attitudes towards American Labor in the 50s-60s and now. Big difference, right?
Dive Into Python would be perfect for the OP's requirements. I touches on many aspects of python with code samples and is done in a concise way.
What's been working for me over the past year is Swedish snus. It has definitely broken me of the 20 year addiction to the process of smoking cigarettes. It's amazing how much of the addiction was to everything about smoking other than nicotine. Snus is a borefest. Avoid any of the American snuses (Camel/Marlboro), it'll turn you off to the idea before you get started because they're sweet and gross and barely have any nicotine. I recommend the "General" white portion and/or mint, and the mini-portions are unnoticeable.

Easy to reduce on because you know exactly how many milligrams you're taking (like methadone or something) because of Swedish labelling rules. I'm hoping to be off snus within the next three or four months, but there's no big hurry because it's pretty cheap and very safe in comparison to other tobacco products.

Internet ordering directly from Sweden is easy, and some of the fancier US tobacco shops are starting to carry it - so you might get lucky.
Yup, I totally forgot to include his talks from the various conferences.
http://www.rmiia.org/auto/auto_theft/statistics.asp

Also, I remember seeing a 60 minutes (or some show) on south american cities where a high percentage of the cars on the road were stolen from the US.
Do something big and different...something that will get you noticed. Make an impact on your campus, like starting a club. Whatever your interests/passions are, put your drive and work ethic behind it and really have fun with it. If you are a CS guy, work on cool open source projects.

Don't forget about grades. I think going to a less-than-stellar school means grades are far more important.

Lastly, every single school is unique in its own right. Figure out how your school is positively different than, say, Harvard, MIT, etc. For example, I went to a huge public school, but I really wish I had gotten the smaller 1 on 1 interactions you sometimes see at community colleges. Differences like that. Exploit these difference so that if the issue of where you went to school ever comes up with an employer, you can soundly give them a solid reason.
Folks hear Microsoft and think operating systems only, which I think is a mistake.

They're diversified enough to stumble in one area and make up for it in another. OS/Office Software/Search+Advertising/Mobile/Entertainment. They aren't General Electric, but they are diversified enough to ship a crappy game or OS, or miss on a product launch and not have it torpedo the bottom line.
PyPy 1.5 Released: Catching Up
but if 'object' is a local variable in a Java-ish language, then there is a fairly straightforward data flow analysis that can do a good

But if it's not, and/or if it can be adress taken...
Obama Administration punishes reporter for using multimedia
Is it really so hard to install Redis?
Patent insurance is the knee jerk reaction to patents, and more or less impractical.

However, the patent pool concept this article discusses sounds like a way to more or less provide patent insurance, which would be an amazing thing if it reached critical mass.
Is Cursive Dead? Not on Your Life
I don't mean 'deserve' in a legal sense, just, when you've got captive Oompa Loompas in front of you anyone'd feel curious. As for evidence, Google took it, right? But you thought I meant /legally/ deserve which, sure, there's no sign any wrongdoing.
Really, I didn't figure "I'm a stickler for privacy concerns, but this example doesn't particularly bother me since it's on par with others of its kind, especially when they may be trying to make it an even more social service than it already is" was particularly meandering. If you're baffled by the idea that I can be generally concerned with privacy and bad user agreements, but not take any special exception to this one over others, then I don't know what to tell you. Some stuff is worth losing your shit over and some isn't. This isn't.
I'm sorry, but this 'they wouldn't care' garbage is so obviously wrong that my 'someone is wrong on the internet' reflex has kicked in.

You have never done anything that is legal, ethical, moral, and fine, but you still don't want the whole world to see it? You've never seen a tv report or a youtube clip where somebody took something perfectly fine and tried to make it sinister to get more views? You'd be ok if I decided to truman show your life? And, thinking you'd be ok, you're then willing to inflict that same decision upon others, who might feel very differently about attention than you do?

Star Wars Kid didn't want the world to see him goofing off. I don't want you to have videotape of me bumming around the house on the weekend. An employer would probably prefer that their public image be a planned and staged PR event rather than footage of the christmas party winding down. There's nothing illegal going on, there is nothing sinister about these desires, we just don't want you presenting us to the world in this manner. Why should we?
But it's pretty obvious that your car is equipped with OnStar. Plus, you have to pay for that service.
Oh, so THAT'S what that is! BRB, calling tech support.
It is a way to convey that the project is somewhat unfinished. Because it is mostly a personal project, the project may not be entirely accessible, it might not be the most scalable, it might not be locale sensitive or otherwise reminds the projects user's that it's not a finished production product.
tl;dr be a liberal buddhist vegan
Show HN: Make your own HN in TextChannels / opinions?
The back of the book is not just a copy and pasted version of the standard python docs, it is more of an annotated reference. People pay money for this stuff because they either want a different viewpoint or more indepth coverage on certain topics.
Zed Shaw disagrees: http://oppugn.us/posts/1272050135.html , and I think he has a point.

"The book is weird, uses antiquated technology, has horrible examples [...]"

Dive into Python has code examples which use ODBC:

"He has a [...] book that purports to teach people programming that still, in 2010, references a piece of crap technology from the 90's. Yes, he actually used that technology to teach Python in the beginning of his book six years ago. [...]

Meanwhile, Mr. Pilgrim's book hasn't been updated in 6 years even though it's [...] online and people can send him patches. [...]

Dive Into Python isn't just bad because of the use of ODBC, it's also just full of bad initial examples. Take a look at your first Python program and boggle at all the bizarre stuff a beginner has to suddenly comprehend:

- A function, with a giant doc comment right away.

- Weird underscore variables with a bad font making it look like one underscore.

- A list comprehension for-loop to join a string using a format string off a tuple.

- A dict, formatted with backslash chars that aren't even needed.

Holy crap, how in the hell is that a good first example? Even worse is it starts a trend within the book of using ODBC as a theme to teach Python."

Edit: Snipped strong language.
So you want to change the scope of the argument to: all Google employees are plantation slave labor?

Ask yourself this--if any plantation slaves were alive today, would they agree with your comparison?
Can't help. I am poetic soul :P
I'm an American (but grew up in Panama).

My experience in the U.S. is that Americans tend to believe a company has no moral responsibility beyond maximizing profits and not violating laws. Even when companies do violate the law (Enron, Horizon, Chevron, etc.) there is a segment of society that rushes to minimize the wrongdoing.

My anecdotal experience on HN is that a lot people on the site defend the pursuit of money over what I consider greater moral considerations. I can understand the perspective of the person you responded to. His/her comment was inflammatory and you are right about that.

To answer your question though, I do believe that it is roughly true that pursuing riches makes it harder to be a moral person. It's not impossible but I do believe it is harder. It is my belief that in a majority of cases one's morality and perception of what is right/wrong/acceptable changes for the worse as they acquire more money.

I believe it is true that the love of money is the root of all evil (as a rough approximation).
I love searching in pics like this.

A few sliced bodies:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2819425/Sliced.jpg

And, more interesting, a few seemingly undercover agents:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2819425/agents.jpg
Why is there nothing as annoyingly effective as leechblock for chrome? Why? It's almost as if Google prefers you to get lost in the web, rather than work.
Please call it "at-will employment". "Fire at will" is a command given to riflemen.
I don't think a facebook presence if obligatory, but really is well advised if you want to reach a portion of the net-using public that sees facebook as _the_internet_.

If you skip FB, you're skipping a lot of eyeballs potentially. If you get those eyeballs, it's up to you to keep them interacting directly sans-facebook afterwards.
Do the users still prefer the old version of the software?
Wishes the voiceover was by Morgan Freeman.
That was the drama the author threw in. It was cheap.
The Right Moment to Start a Company
I don't want to disagree with your opinion of the cause of your friend's psychosis, as you observed the process and I didn't, but as a general statement I'd like to put out there that the time of life when schizophrenia presents (late teens, twenties, early thirties) correlates with the years when people usually experiment with drugs. This has been true since before LSD existed.

http://schizophrenia.com/photos/szage.onset.gif

from

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8178665?dopt=Abstract
The melting temp of borosilicate glass is higher. In glass production, most of the cost is the energy expenditure required to keep the kilns hot (they never turn off). By dropping to a lower melting point glass, they can shave a substantial amount off their energy bill.
Obama Birth Certificate Faked In Adobe Illustrator - Official Proof(Video)
FINALLY! I can stare at my screen at say "zoom and enhance B4" and have a face pop up.
Page Optimization - It's just half the battle
I worked for a large, international financial data company that was busted for something very similar. In essence they had a large amount of contract employees on premises (hired through a temp agency) that had worked for them for years, at desks amongst the regular employees, with the same email addresses as the regular employees, etc. They were indistinguishable from regular employees except they did not get pensions, paid leave, or any of the other perks of regular employees.

When a few were made redundant due to cutbacks, they promptly lawyered up and were able to settle for a year's worth of compensation, which is what they would have received as regular employees.

In short, if you're a contractor but have a desk in the office and an email address with the company in some cases you are more or less an 'employee', and this has been backed up by courts in the US from time to time.

http://employeeissues.com/ic_vs_employee.htm
It looks exactly like WhenIsGood. Am I missing something?
Excel takes 154MB in disk... that's why!
I found the phrasing uncomfortably mushy/emotional despite agreeing with the message.
That's what hacker news does.
Someone does not know what a zero-sum transaction is.
when i post weekend projects it usually is 1.5-2 weeks. It's not supposed to mean something for the time it took to develop, it's more of a generic term to describe something that is not finished. It's a warning to readers that they shouldn't be too harsh on details and also that it's not meant to be a business (but if it does i would be all too happy).

I would gladly use another term if there was one
A clever hack, which nobody should ever use
Annual WEBby awards nominees
A Google employee is contributing to short-term disability fund with every paycheck, and in case he slips on cafeteria or bus floor, state of California will cover their portion of worker's comp.

A contractor is not eligible for worker's comp, hence any possibility of injury at workplace would make Google liable for contractor's entire medical bill.

http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_independentcontractor.htm
I hope I never have to work for someone who'll fire me if I tell them I'm interested in issues of class or race.
I've read many Ruby books over 6 years. The best, in my opinion, is David Black's "The Well-Grounded Rubyist". I read it just last year as an experienced Rubyist. I thought it had a fantastic, no-magic take on the language that offered a better perspective on scope, metaprogramming, and general language design than any other book I've read. That said, I haven't read the Matz book.
> And yes, please keep this post up so other companies know not to hire you either.

i think this is an interesting common characteristic of attacks on the articles author - the direct or subtle reminder that he failed to act in his own self interest vis a vis employment. this is how capitalists want us to frame everything - in terms of narrow self interest.
This is a small feature but could be an indicator of very big things for Apple. If the iCloud rumors are true then there could be a huge opportunity for keeping your desktop and smartphone/tablet in sync, and this would be a big advantage for Apple and MS since they control desktop environments.

For example, say I have a Pages document open and go to leave the house, the same document could automatically be available on my iPad in the exact same state I left it in without me having to do anything.
"I'd pay you even less, but it'd be illegal!"
I actually haven't, but it is not available here where I live.
I used the Quick Python Book (Manning), which was perfect coming from Ruby. If you're coming from anoth dynamic scripting language, I highly recommend it.