skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly my thoughts -- it seemed like a crazy research project, generating an interpreter written in C, and ones for jvm and clr. And it has 3 different pluggable garbage collectors apparently.

But I'm impressed that it actually runs my code, in contrast to the other alternative Python implementations I've tried.

Look forward to seeing more of sandboxed mode, which has been a much desired feature of CPython for many years now. And stackless mode. I just hope they can get the executable size and build times to a reasonable level.
Or maybe "given an automatic adjustment to the lower rate."
"How to accept a compliment. Thanks or agreement feels egotistical."

Say thanks and smile.
As someone who does a lot of work wireframing sites and is always trying to make the move from wires to HTML and CSS take less time, this looks great.

Would love to see a fluid-width grid be introduced as an option down the line.
Midnight Hacking: How to form a doers group.
> Filtering the cables to reflect what one group deems "incriminating" would be just another form of propaganda, something Wikileaks does not wish to engage in.

Exactly. And it is certainly news to me that anyone here on HN is critical of WikiLeaks as they have done what any journalists do: by shining a light on the worlds most powerful for the benefit of all of us. There is no real difference between how WikiLeaks or The NY Times achieve their goals, except WikiLeaks is not beholden to anyone, so the have more credibility. Unlike Bill Keller and the NYTimes, they don't work with the White House to see if it is OK to print something. Because they are a stateless entity, they are able to break more stories than any news agency, and this year have broken more than all of them combined. But they have done so at great personal sacrifice. Julian Assange (and WikiLeaks) whatever your personal feeling are about them, have made an enormous personal sacrifices so that we may all benefit. Aside from the usual arguments that have been soundly debunked about the dangers of mass dumping un-redacted documents, what fault could anyone at HN possibly have with WL?
Inflammatory stuff by someone who seems to have never dealt with burn-out near the end of a project, or the fact that sometimes work is work, and you just have to push through it to get back to the things you find exciting.
"How to accept a compliment. Thanks or agreement feels egotistical. Trying to act as humble by playing it down doesn't seem to be received well either."

I'm now in the habit of accepting and reflecting. Not only is it generous, it also tends to be true. "Wow, Bob, you got N done really fast and you did a great job, thanks!" "My pleasure, Steve - I couldn't have done it without Mary's help." Getting in the habit of forcing myself to give others credit _really_ opened my eyes to how solo efforts are still group efforts: "My pleasure, Steve - I couldn't have done it without Mary picking up my other clients' work during this project."

Worst case scenario, where you're convinced it really is solo work or where deflecting 'correctly' takes too much explanation, accept and deflect to the praiser. "My pleasure, Steve. Thanks for saying something."

I'm not sure this approach is "right", but it's what I've been doing in the face of the dilemma you mention.
If your lab is raided, and they have no other means of tying you to its operation, and they can make the case to a judge that they should be able sequester your credit card history and the order details of scientific-sounding companies within it, then yes, you're in bad shape.

I think in most cases criminals are suitably stupid enough to make law enforcement's job much easier. Like, for example, busting someone who is trying to break into a lab with a security system, and then finding a meth lab in their mobile home.
off topic: I like the fact the content renders perfectly on my phone, as opposed to most others with tiny font and fixed width.
that's a pretty convincing argument.
Looks great on Ubuntu here, possibly because of the higher-than-average DPI?
If Christy Walton alone gave up just one-eighth of her wealth, she could fund the wage increase by herself.

For a year. This is an incredibly irresponsible comparison, demonstrating the author's confusion of the difference between wealth and income. The $3.6b impact is annual. Christy Walton's share is total.
Good catch -- thanks. I was thinking it meant they'd get the new price but you're right; it's the other way around.
Yankees Accidentally Leak Personal Info Of 20,000 Season Ticket Holders
Reading your first link, one would think the patents in the Benson and Flook cases would be patentable, since both had claimed practical application. We see here that in most cases the Supreme Court does not get to decide what is and isn't patentable.

The Supreme Court's Bilski decision essentially smacked down the Federal Circuit's State Street decision. But again, this would only matter if the patent office and lower courts respected the Supreme Court.
Interesting, if brief, article. I'd like to know what's meant by "key signing parties themselves generally don't involve computers, since that would give adversaries increased opportunities for subterfuge," though. Maybe I'm not cryptographically paranoid enough, but what's the harm in allowing computers on-site?
This would matter if there were more than 12 licenses. As it stands, it takes less than a minute to look at every possibility on the chart.
It took them 40 servers to run 1B aggregations per second? Great --- Citrusleaf recently did 250M aggregations per second with one amazon large. And, oh, we're fully clustered and reliable, so you can snap in new servers with no maintenance.
- Either crack a joke and direct the conversation to something else, grin and bear it, or if possible calmly slip away for a few minutes.

- What you say is not nearly as important as listening. Let their words be your guide. Sometimes just good eye contact, nodding, and "I understand" are more than enough.

- Acknowledge the value in their reasoning and then pivot into a discussion about it. "Hmm... I've never thought about it like that before. I like what you say about a, b, and c. But have you considered for x, y, and z..."

- About close enough to make solid eye contact (say 15 feet or so) then a second or two after. The lack of good eye contact is usually the issue.

- "I have to say I really enjoy chatting with you Dave, truly, sometimes it's crazy how our minds seem to run on the same train of thought. I have to catch a meeting in 5 but let's continue this soon. How about lunch later this week?" And then just a natural progression from there... if you guys both have significant others, couples night out.

- Flip the table. If someone did something you admired and you thanked them, how would you feel if they didn't express some gratitude back? If you're charmingly self-deprecating that's one thing, but if not it could seem like you're basically saying "your opinion does not matter." A warm thank you is never egotistical.
Clandestine chemists would prefer not to send their glassware to 15 Methlab Lane, certainly. But most of the clever paranoid tactics are for the acquisition of chemicals, which the DEA has a very tight grip on. In some cases, precursors of precursors. A chemical supplier can pretty easily divine illegal applications from the order combination. Glassware suppliers cannot. And I'm a laboratory glassware seller, so I can say that with some certainty.
His comments are provably false. There are countless scientific studies showing the benefits of various strategies for increasing productivity as well as increasing your enjoyment of your work. (e.g. how to make masturbation feel better, how to make programming more addictive, how to enjoy yourself while doing the dishes, etc etc)

He even suggests time-boxing, a very popular strategy for countering procrastination.

Suffice to say, he is yet another unqualified non-expert giving opinions on stuff he doesn't know anything about.
I don't believe they've ever pulled an app that had already been up on the store for duplicating built-in functionality.
wget --spider

is probably your friend
Working memory at 5 is a better predictor of academic outcome than IQ [abstract]
Some useful Nginx optimizations, but I've always found that the bottlenecks are far worse elsewhere. Nginx is a champ at serving static files, and I have it proxy all requests upstream to Apache (and use mod_wsgi because the majority of what I work with are Django apps). Optimizing the DB schema and queries have had the most positive performance increases by far, followed by Apache tweaks, and then finally Nginx config changes. But I really love the setup I use for how easy it is to get a Django app spun up.
A Google Chrome extension that enhances history.
This chrome extension enhances history search by adding some of google search operators (like inurl, intitle, site) and allow date range filters. You can also delete single, multiple and specific day items even after conducting a search.
How to Score a Google Onsite Interview
I didn't really interpret it like that. While there's certainly situations where one feels burned out and lacking motivation, I think his point was more about entire fields of work that you find demoralizing.

For me, this is mostly doing design work. It's a necessary evil on small projects, but I really struggle with it a lot of the time because I'm not especially good at it, while I think I have a pretty good eye for what looks like shit and what doesn't. With programming, even the most menial tasks I can get lost in much easier.
Like many things, knowing what you're worth (how much you should charge) and estimating project time take practice. The more you do it, the better you get (hopefully).
On the same theme of general interest talks by specialists, I'm quite a fan of the Long Now Foundation podcasts.
My thinking room is my neighborhood, where I can take a walk while listening to bird calls (and occasionally coyote howls) or at least the scrunching of snow under my feet.
The lesson is: don't let your open source name and trademark get captured and held hostage by a third party organization. If a company open sources a project and it gains significant outside developer interest, the courteous thing to do would be to pledge the name as well to a community organization.

The actual code of the open source projects Oracle took over is almost unimportant. They acquired powerful brand names, then discarded the communities. In case of Open Office at least, the community value was greater than the brand name.
I think he's alluding to mining bitcoins with electricity (cpu / gpu farms). The energy companies certainly haven't come out behind.
Show HN my Hackathon Project: Visual Craigslist w/ HN's algorithm
The concept was to rethink the way we browsed Craigslist and shopped online. The main section, the "homepage" is a tree map of recent craigslist posting sorted by popularity using a slightly modified version of Hacker News' ranking algorithm.

The newest page is a masonry view of the realtime stream of the craiglist posts as they are added to the system (much like Hacker News' newest page.)

The top page is the masonry view version of the homepage.

The game page is a FaceMash-like game for the posts, which influences the overall scores and popularity of items.
The state of Google Native Client - investigation by an OLPC developer
You say "the patent bar is usally quite good at rebutting" and give a link to someone making unsubstantiated claims that the Supreme Court doesn't know what it's talking about.

Engineer, lawyer, whoever you are, a logical argument traces evidence from A to Z, such that another logical thinker, even from another field, can follow the argument with sufficient effort and study. Though I am not a lawyer, I do not see this blog post as an effective, logical rebuttal to the Supreme Court. I see no compelling reason to side with those who choose to ignore Supreme Court precedent.

I haven't read Bilski in its entirety, but on the very first page of the syllabus I read them slamming down the State Street decision and reaffirming Benson, Flook and Diehr. If software patents will not be subject to any categorical challenge for years to come, I think it will be in spite of Bilski, not because of it. I'd be interested in any detailed arguments to the contrary.
Yeah I had a column for comments too, I just didn't paste that column into the google spreadsheet.
[The following assumes there is a causal relationship...]

As a reader of Mark's Daily Apple and a follower of a Paleo diet, this study surprised me. Yes, the study can be argued against, but I have a more fundamental issue: "optimizing" your diet may be impossible. The needs of the human body and the composition of nutrients/macro-nutrients in food are both wildly varying and neither was "designed", so it's possible that strategies which keep you in great health in young/middle-age will produce ill-health later on. There's little evolutionary pressure exerted by grandparents on grandkids and prostate cancer is usually a very slow growing, late stage disease, so it shouldn't be inconceivable that a young/middle-age favoring diet harms late-stagers.

That said, prostate cancer (which my father had) has a very high survival rate, so I'd happily trade a litany of conditions potentially caused by a "non-good" diet for prostate cancer caused by a "good" diet.
I wish I could do this. I don't know any coders in real life. I guess that's what I get for being the programmer at an art school.
http://www.google.com/search?q=first+customer+site:mixergy.c...
"Then I added a little padding time because everything always takes longer than expected."

If you are implementing something which is almost exactly like something you personally have implemented before, then your estimate will be almost exact because you should have tracked how much time you spent on the original ... and assuming that too was a re-implementation of something you'd already done the R&D on. IOW, this is at least your third time.

If you are implementing something for which you have references that are very close to what you are building (but you didn't build it) and you already understand them, then you can make a reasonable estimate of the time to implement. In this case the OP's advice works .... add some padding. The more granular your breakdown of the problem, the better you estimate will be.

But when there is R&D on the problem, you are not talking about 'padding', but 'factors'. If you are doing something that is new to you, but you think you have (or can find) decent references, then you can estimate based on how you hope it will go (based on your breakdown of the problem), and multiply by 2.

If you can't find references, then factors of 3 or 4 beyond your ideal development scenario will be more realistic.

It's worth noting that if you are in the last scenario, then you probably weren't a good choice for the project. Also, 'agile' pricing would be better, but either fixed pricing or giving clients some idea of what to budget is more typical.
Stuff nerds read
The New Global App Menu in Ubuntu 11.04
At the moment. Laws can change.
On the other hand, here are some organic ways that I've found useful for strengthening my level of concentration, independent of my programmming focus:

- working out regularly, especially running long distance

- playing games competitively (eg: chess, bridge, go)

- training your mind/memory or practicing mental arithmetic

- eat blueberries daily (random tip from Nelson Dellis, the current US Memory Champ: http://climbformemory.com/2011/01/05/blueberries-rock-my-bra...)
>Your human relationships should not be treated as if you were a spy behind enemy lines. If you think this is an appropriate framework with which to reason about your human relationships, you are doing something /very wrong/.

I agree with you on this, but I think (or at least hope) the author's intended message was a bit different. If someone is going to be operating like a spy in the sense that they're lying to everyone around you to manipulate them into having the desired interaction with them, it is at best incredibly dishonest. I think the analogy the author used is a bit over the top, because where being a spy is about lying and using social interaction as the means to achieve your own ends, in the case of learning to be social, being social is its own end. If you scale back the analogy I think the takeaway is more along the lines of "you're out of place, fake it until you make it".

The blog post, overall completely misses the target and really is about becoming a "functional anti-social" rather than actually learning to be social. I don't think of this as a malicious article, its just written by someone who doesn't have the understanding necessary to give advice yet. Back when I forced myself to stop being an introvert I was often conflicted by the fact I felt like I was lying about who I was when I was just was biting my tongue or making an effort to talk to someone. The author seems to be of the mind that everything other than blurting out exactly what you're thinking is at the same level of acceptability, so you might as well run with it.
They did during the Google Voice fiasco. A bunch of third party GV apps that were already approved (GV Mobile was one [1]) were pulled. Since rectified, but has happened before.

1: http://www.seankovacs.com/index.php/2009/07/gv-mobile-is-get...
Code under another license can be freely linked and distributed with software.

This misrepresents the LGPL. LGPL doesn't allow static linking. It's not a small detail.
An early release of Facebook's development tools
The concept was to rethink the way we browsed Craigslist and shopped online. The main section, the "homepage" is a tree map of recent craigslist posting sorted by popularity using a slightly modified version of Hacker News' ranking algorithm.

The newest page is a masonry view of the realtime stream of the craiglist posts as they are added to the system (much like Hacker News' newest page.)

The top page is the masonry view version of the homepage.

The game page is a FaceMash-like game for the posts, which influences the overall scores and popularity of items.
Finding the right peer group at first can be rough. One point I made in the post that should be underscored is being 'the first follower.' If you scour your town enough, there is probably someone who is looking to get started. I recommend going with their plan first.

People in the doers group I've met through meetup.com, other friends, and other networking groups. If you stick around long enough, you'll find the right people.
The issue with this is that Google lists them according to titles.

But there are many videos with nice nuggets that don't appear in the title.
Using this module and WP-supercache's gzipping feature has made a wordpress blog network I run astonishingly fast.
Show HN: Minimal Lisp in ~70 lines of Haskell
Suppose that instead of just programming a general purpose computer, algorithms are oneday developed to program general purpose robots. Should those algorithms be patentable? Or is "a program to separate seeds from cotton" just a mathematical concept?
A throwback to simpler times. Back then many datacenters were just a room where you had a couple of desks with some PC's on them. Maybe a Sun pizza box or 2. And people would be there to listen to the machine play "Fur Elise" when the power supply failed.

In today's datacenters where you have lines and lines of racks receding into infinity, and where you need to use hearing protection whenever you need to get in for 5 minutes to power-cycle some stubborn switch, I don't see a solution involving "Fur Elise" being too useful.
This is hardly a surprise. Most "learning" in school is actually memorization. This is a skill I do not have and have not been successful at improving. For example: My short term memory is limited to two or three unrelated pieces of information. When I was working at Subway, I managed to improve this to four or five after months of daily practice. I left Subway to go to an out of state college. My short term memory went back to normal within a month. I went back to Subway for the summer, I was not able to regain that skill before school started again.

I'm definitely biased but I find memorization to be pretty useless as a primary method of learning. Unfortunately, testing actual learning would require the teachers to fully understand the material they teach and have the time recognize when someone was faking knowledge on examination. It's far, far easier to test memorization.
I started the same thing here at school, I call it hack fridays.

And since I'm part of the campus CS group, we even have food :)

I highly recommend doing something like this.
We call that Sunday's Hackaton here
Summary: Bits don't automatically have meta-data attached to them. OP uses "Colour" to describe this meta-data and explains why it's very important when reading the law. Computer scientists are Colour-blind (bits are the same no matter where they come from), while the law cares about origin, how information is obtained etc.
An example of how computer scientists actually use Colour is for user input - information that users input have special properties (such as the requirement for validation).

I really enjoyed reading this post! It brings a novel way to view meta-data.
funny that even "I don't care" has many implementations: WTFPL, http://unlicense.org/, CC0 (which wasn't invented for code), etc.
What impresses me as I get older is how little, good or bad, is correlated to a person holding religious beliefs.

A fair number of people think that a belief in God makes them a better person. That may be, but there are a lot of great people who don't believe in any higher power or afterlife, and I don't see a correlation either way. My suspicion is that most good people who believe in God would still be good people if they didn't believe in God or an afterlife. There are others (on the atheistic side) who argue that belief in God is unreasonable and a sign of a feeble mind, but there's no evidence for that either. I do think certain strains of belief (i.e. fundamentalism) appeal to the worst of humanity, but these don't account for most religious believers.

I think one of the major issues is that the common religious labels (Christian, atheist, Buddhist) are so broad as to be effectively meaningless. You can be a smart, liberal, universalist Christian, a spiritual atheist who believes in life after death, an observant Jew who believes in reincarnation, or an intolerant, conservative Buddhist. (For each of those descriptions, I can name at least a few meeting them.) So any claim made about "atheists" or "Christians" or "Muslims" as a group is going to be nearly meaningless. I definitely think there is a lot in religion that has immense transformative power (for good and bad) but the mere matter of whether a person has religious beliefs or not or belongs to a religious organization seems to say very little about that person.
I don't understand the tone of this comment. The article says that too many people show up to interviews that are clueless, so they try to have less of them. Your solution to this problem is for them to ignore their process and invite you in to Google anyway. And you don't even seem to want a programming-related job. It doesn't make sense.

I need a fuckin' job, like, yesterday.

So it seems like you should contact a recruiter in the Leadership team, rather that post to HN?
The other day there was an article about the importance of motivation in intelligence and success. From my understanding of what this article is, that's a glaring hole in the theory.