skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that trying to explain all this stuff (big sweeping gesture) to people without technical backgrounds is beneficial exercise, for several reasons. Any major programming or business work is going to involve quite a bit of communication, with people as well as computers. Being unable to comfortably explain how your creation works to a potential client is a great way to get rejected, and is probably at least as damaging as being unable to be on the same page as a collaborator. Also, explaining something to someone else can help you discover aspects you don't fully understand, and often they have useful abstractions that may not have otherwise occurred to you.

His Python explanation is a bit mystifying (particularly the hand-waving about static vs. dynamic typing at the end; if he was going to just skip them, he probably could have avoided bringing them up), but to his credit, this can be really hard to do well.

For one example, I'd compare the difference between an interpreter and a compiler to an interpreter standing between two diplomats and a translator slowly rewriting poetry or legal documents. The former has more immediate feedback to work with (raised eyebrows, for starters), but has to do everything on the spot, while the latter has a lot more time to rewrite things concisely and elegantly. In this sense, an interpreting person who is quite fluent in both languages and excellent at reading body language might be comparable to a skillfully optimizing JIT-compiler.

I think mail-order packaging could be a useful metaphor for part of the efficiency difference in static vs. dynamic languages: a static language determines how much space something will need in a shipping container, while a dynamic language saves time by putting most things in roughly the same size boxes and loading them up with plastic shipping air bubbles. Granted, this is only part of a complicated issue, but it's still a useful abstraction, without getting into a bunch of details about boxed and unboxed types, type systems, pointers, and other implementation details.
Here is a very interesting review article discussing genetics and its unproven role in East Africans' ability to win marathons:
http://www.fims.org/default.asp?pageID=782860264
I have so many tags. Can you not just take all the tags, see which ones I link/use the most, and then prioritize my news on that basis? Clicking tags seems like it's waste of time and is too much tunnel-vision.

Neat concept, definitely.
All I have to say is, no up button in the file manager == unusable.

Not that that is the only problem, it's just that is the final one that drove me over the edge to Linux full-time.
Q: When are Tcl and Python faster than C? A: When they invoke faster, better libraries.
We use Plimus and are very happy with them.

I would recommend you avoid SWREG and other Digital River properties. Our experience with DR was very unpleasant and a quick Google search on "swreg scam" and a review of this summary: http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/07/04/swreg-customers-bew... should tell you why.
Ruby/Rails book recommendations by skill level/background (newb to haxor, Java refugee...)
Design Patterns in Dynamic Programming - slides by Peter Norvig
Cryptic, but full of ideas
Cryptic, but full of ideas.
Tinymail.me - simple email protection service against harvesting bots
Good service? Tinymail.me is an email protection service to keep bots from spamming or automatically harvesting your email from forums or classifieds.
How do people handle unlocking features that should not be available unless a license has been bought?
I was about to try and finally learn some lisp but now I am scared... Are there really nearly 1000 symbols? All in the same namespace? I thought you guys were always trashing php for having too many symbols.
I don't really know Tcl, but the most interesting part to me is how there wasn't really any deep magic needed to make the Python version fast -- this benchmark is almost entirely in the regular expression libary's court.
Feedback would be nice ;)
Randy Pausch's most inspirational quotes
cuill?
Foxconn snubs Linux users
Good question. Certainly admirable, and perhaps it took tremendous courage to push on and be so public. On the other hand, the folks I've know to be heroic do not see themselves that way, so it's tough to try to use motivation or mental state to define "heroic".

How do people here define "heroic"?
On a startup failure
Yes. How sweet it would be to have C-competitive performance without having to make your code ugly, sacrifice safety, sacrifice brevity, or sacrifice anything, really, on a regular basis.

AFAIK this is the idea behind numpy.
I heard that rumor too. If so, I'm impressed.
Craigslist stops displaying posts after a month but that doesn't mean they delete them...unless they are the dumbest businessmen I've ever heard of. They've got terabytes of old data that they constantly mine. That's my guess anyway, I don't buy their "we're like a non profit" facade one bit. They are smart, savvy, and very tough competitors. Read their terms of service if you don't believe me.
I definitely agree having been through it. It wouldn't be worth doing very much without the moving.

I don't see family as much of an excuse. Can you really not get away for three months? It's not that long.
I never read Tuesdays With Morrie, but I was stocking books when that thing was out. It was a pretty big hit.

Not that that has anything to do with anything.
FCC Approves Sirius, XM Merger
Allow users to make their story upvotes public.
Project Ed(ucation)
Seeing as how the Python and Tcl interpreters are both written in C, this really just seems to imply that the C code wasn't written very well.
This is most definitely the first time I've ever heard anyone say the the problem with air travel today is too little government interference.
Why do good ideas come to us when they do?
Canada's wireless auction brings in more money & new competition (& North Korea)
If I had stock in Apple, I'd be selling it now. I've worked as an ER nurse for 15 years, and I know what sick looks like. Steve Jobs is ill: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/07/26/business/26noce.... If it's not cacer, it's something else, and it's bad. You don't loose that much weight by doing pilates. His zygomatic arch and clavicles are very pronounced. And, if you look at where his pectorals were 5 years ago as opposed to where they are now, he's lost a lot of muscle mass. Men shouldn't have droopy boobs.

I hate to say it, but in my experience people who try to beat cancers with special diets usually die. Granted, chemo, radiation and surgery are terrible, and if someone doesn't want to pursue that, I can certainly respect that decision. But, to try and beat cancer with a diet as opposed to the best medical science is madness in my opinion. If you want to beat cancer, go to the experts.

I certainly respect Steve's decision to not talk about his health publicly. But, I have a sneaky suspicion that if he was honest about his health, Apple's stock would tank hard.
Same thought here. I don't see what the point of pulling in my delicious data is if you don't actually do anything with it. If that were a big help I would just open delicious up in another window and type out the tags I wanted.
I had a program like this on my Amiga, but it worked in realtime--in addition to being able to do fourier analysis on songs or generate from imported images, you could draw/erase on the canvas as it processed. It ruled. I had hours and hours of fun with it, and added it (subtly) to almost every recording I made at the time.

I've been meaning to make a tool like that for Linux ever since...but somehow never got around to it. Unfortunately this program doesn't fill the void, either, since it seems to have no realtime drawing mode. The good news is that systems are so fast now that I could do it in Ruby or Perl and it would still be plenty fast (the Amiga version was in something odd like Pascal or Fortran or Forth or something, and had some limitations on first-gen 8MHz Amigas...it spun nicely on my 25MHz Amiga 3000, though).
FYI, I specially created this account to post on this thread, because I was scared of being called a racist and didn't want that tarnishing my normal account.

I think it is funny that you talk about how we "should not be scared of things 'you can't say" and about how we should "try to get an accurate view of reality" when you have basically created a sockpuppet to post this. If you really believe these things and think rational discussion about them is important, you should be using your normal account.
Starting a venture
pls let me know any possibilities
I'm intrigued that everyone testing websites for colorblind accessibility is using the colorblind page filter. It's very awkward when you have more than just websites to test (think everything from applications to documentation), and when you want to do it on your own without submitting anything to another site.

There's a few apps I do recommend in lieu of the website:
Color Oracle (http://colororacle.cartography.ch/) for all platforms

Sim Daltonism (http://michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/) for OS X

General color accessibility tool: http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrast-analyser.htm...

A whole slew of other tools: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200709/10_colour_contr...
Google Code blacklists Mozilla Public License
Larry Wall On Perl, Religion, and...
Stupid article. Nobody ever claimed lossless will destroy MP3. It will be supported in some MP3 players for those people who want it. Why does everything have to be about one product destroying another? They will coexist.
Finding at risk customers
Thanks, I meant to look up gossip protocols after reading the article but forgot. Your comment reminded me.
I think this is possible with developer relations.

Trying this approach with consumers could backfire horribly if someone misunderstands the details or tries to twist them out of context.

That's a lot hard to do with a developer audience.
TechCrunch is being cryptic

Yeah, this is surprising... especially because Arrington would never lie to drive traffic to his site. Oh wait. TechCrunch.
I don't think you understand what Google is. Google is a company that owns a popular search engine called "Google Search". They also have other properties, like GMail and Knol. What exactly is the problem with that?
i agree with mixmax in that i really appreciate them being open and forthcoming about the problems, and giving detailed explainations -- on the flipside, im wondering what the outage will do to potential customers and those who are currently using the service...its a bit scary to think that they are hosting some very serious businesses and everyone went down for many hours
I would expect an aricle about "secrecy" to be open.
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really interesting article from the psychology perspective, although what id really like to know is what percentage of new ideas (yes i know, different from insights) are developed in the shower...i'm guessing its fairly high
Recaptcha already does this: http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/

Didn't you basically just reimplement that?
A quick search turned up at least one project to "extract" the version of Henry Spencer's regex code from Tcl here: http://www.straatinternet.com/opensource/hsre

I wonder how much of the difference here between Tcl and Boost can be attributed to the DFA vs NFA algorithm and how much to the underlying string representation (Tcl's flat DString buffer vs the rope used by the Boost program).

I suspect that for these regexes and for this size text (100k) we're really just seeing better cache behavior.
Top ten things that suck about Django, revisited
Google needs to update their code of conduct... it's terribly out of date. http://investor.google.com/conduct.html
You could open a hamburger stand.
"Data integrity testing was being performed?" I expect.
It's "evil" to provide a free service without features that a few users want?
Parameter expansion in Python
Didnt know about that :-/
too bad

thanks for your feedback
I always thought all the license proliferation was stupid. If I were Google I'd only allow MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL, and LGPL.
This is cute but it's only "O(1)" if you have hardware that supports the parallel "drop" operation and you represent your data in base-1.
>Studies of IQ highly correlate with latitude. People of northern Chinese and Mongolian origin score higher than the Vietnamese. In limited studies, Intuits score higher than Native Americans from Central America. 60,000 years is actually quite a long time, and the skills necessary to survive harsh northern winters are very different than those needed to survive in tropical jungles.

Hpw about Ashkenazi Jews, whom have the highest IQ and yet do not originate from a high latitude?
> Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”

I never get tired of personal accounts of dealing with Steve Jobs. Every story I know has a few expletives and some awkward parts that only someone like SJ could pull off.
Hammer drops at last: FCC opposes Comcast P2P throttling
Chrysler to get out of leasing business
Intelligence is a grand notion indeed. Check out the notion of multiple intelligences

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...

IQ scores are useful for assessing mostly logical intelligence, and to some extent visual spatial intelligence.
Inside Chernobyl, a strange new lifeform is blooming
While MSFT might wage war against Open Source, they recognize it's a deep pool of talent to recruit from.

Now if they could hire away the key Apache developers, they would in a heartbeat. They did it to Borland in the 90's. That's why Ballmer was tossing around chairs, b/c he saw Google using the very same strategy against him.

At the end of the day Money talks!
Glad to see Jeff blogging about Django again. His initial posts (esp the "Django for designers" one) were one of the few in plain English and a great intro for me at the time, as a designer that had only worked with php and Rails. I've worked at two startups using Django since with very little time getting up to speed once it's up and running but he's right that it's still a bit of a bear to install, especially locally.
This is exactly the kind of RFO I would like to get from our telephony providers after an outage. Detailed, honest (no point lying -- you just had an outage!), and taking steps to improve matters in the future.

Everyone has outages: it's what you learn from them that counts.
Xobni and LexisNexis integrate with LinkedIn
Snort signature for DNS vul
How to Fail in Business, a Guide to Success
Consumer prices may be lower, but how much of that comes out of an individual's taxes?
Start with:
http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Professional-...

Look up some examples here:
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails2

Once you have something worth of deploying, follow this:
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_deploy

Need some recipes?
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_arr/advanced-rails-recipes
I think you mean "Inuit" not "Intuit" ?
"If that were a big help I would just open delicious up in another window and type out the tags I wanted."

Well, then many apps would not exist if developers thought this way.

What about Meebo or Pidgin? Why not login to GTalk, Yahoo chat and the rest in separate windows?

It becomes hard when you have to read news by tags from delicious, faves.com and every bookmarking site. (yeah adding more sites soon) :)

Users tend to forget about keywords they want to read news about. What if you have a 15 keywords to read news everyday about? I have have seen people who tend to forget to search for some info on Google when they have a list of things to search for (I am one of them too). The same thing applies to news.
I thought the house thing did not play out so well for a couple of people recently.

And even in a normal economy, I don't know about the house: going into debt basically means selling your soul to "the man". For the rest of your working live, you will be a docile, scared cubicle worker, because you can not afford to lose your job (bank would take the house, huge losses). Doesn't seem worth it to me.
Home Pest Control
As homes and developments move closer and closer to their natural habitats animal pests may come to your property and home hunting for food.
What is a "blood on the streets" situation? Surely investing in a revolution is not a good idea, because usually all property will just be taken away from you anyway?
The question mark isn't being used to end a question, he's using it to ask for confirmation of a statement. He's writing in a way that mimics how people talk to each when they meet face-to-face.

For example:

Jack: I wonder what Jill's favourite flavour of ice cream is.
Sam: Chocolate?
Jack: Yes, that's the one.
Yeah I have noticed that. Reading his stuff reminds me of junk food, kind of nice at the time but not long before either I want more, or regret having read it. I think its the journalist style writing that I find unsatisfying (his books are one of the few I end up leaving lying around, unfinished and never seem to want to pick up again).
I was very frastrated from my empty boring life with my empty pockets, I tried every thing, I did job, I did business in over 78 niches/categories but failed then suddenly I got information about picmoney.com . Its amazing and totally changed my life into a multi millionaire.
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A very small data set:

On my street, there were 8 black children. All 8 scored above 1200 on their SATs -- 5 of them scored 1500 or above, with one garnering perfect score. One (myself) scored a perfect score on the ASVAB (Military IQ test, as you put it -- I have not met anyone else, black or white, who has done this). Two to MIT, one to U Chicago, 5 to four-year public institution (although three of the five were accepted into Ivy League schools, and indeed offered scholarships).
actually, the NY Times site generally hits you with the registration required page once you have exceeded a certain number of page views within a certain timeframe. I don't know what the exact figures are, but I have been caught out reading a page, switching to another page which put me over the lmit, and then not being able to reload the page that I had already viewed...
Yes. How sweet it would be to have C-competitive performance without having to make your code ugly, sacrifice safety, sacrifice brevity, or sacrifice anything, really, on a regular basis.

SBCL, Haskell, Java, and OCaml all basically provide this.
I find your posts to be a bit over-generalizing and lacking of supporting evidence.

Examining the physiques of West Africans versus East Africans makes the genetic explanation pretty obvious.

What's obvious and could you share it with the rest of us?

From the article shared below (http://www.fims.org/default.asp?pageID=782860264):

"In a study of the demographic characteristics of elite Ethiopian athletes, 38% of the elite marathon runners were from the region of Arsi, which accounts for less than 5% of the Ethiopian population 2. As shown in Figure 1, these findings were mirrored in Kenya, where 81% of the best Kenyan runners originated from the Rift Valley province, which accounts for less than a quarter of the Kenyan population 1. "

"These initial studies of elite Kenyan athletes by Saltin et al. 6;14 demonstrate that factors such as increased childhood physical activity and hard training are probably the major contributors to the superior performances of Kenyan runners"

"The concept of ‘black’ athletic superiority is based on a preconception that each race constitutes a genetically homogeneous group, with race defined simply by skin colour. This belief is contrary to the assertion that there is more genetic variation among Africans than between African and Eurasian populations 24."

"interesting that Ethiopia and Kenya do not share a similar genetic ancestry, as defined by mtDNA 22;43, but what they do share is a similar environment: moderate altitude and high levels of physical activity. Few other regions of the world have such high levels of childhood physical activity combined with such cultural/financial importance being placed on distance running. This information clearly implicates environmental factors as being more influential than genetic factors in the success of East African distance runners. In an economically deprived region such as East Africa, economic factors also provide an additional motivation, if not a necessity, to succeed in distance running. In summary, it is unjustified at present to regard the phenomenon of East African running success as genetically mediated; to justify doing so one must identify the genes that are important. To do so also disregards the intense training regimens for which East African athletes are famous 56."

conclusion: not based on color of skin, nor based on genetics.
The team looked to the example of photosynthesis as a model, said Casadevall. If plants can use the green pigment, chlorophyll, to absorb energy from the Sun and produce a usable form of chemical energy, they reasoned, fungi might be able to use their melanin pigment and radiation energy in a similar way. They even devised the snazzy moniker, 'radiosynthesis', for the process.

let me be the first to say: Holy Shit
there's no telling what this could lead to in our understanding of how radiation affects living cells (cancer)
Anything other than Digital River.

e-junkie + paypal and/or GoogleCheckout is one non DR option:
http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/07/23/cost-effective-soft...

Plimus, Avangate and Fastspring are others.
"Remember, these are averages, and all groups overlap. You can't deduce an individual's intelligence from her ethnicity. The only thing you can reasonably infer is that anyone who presumes to rate your IQ based on the color of your skin is probably dumber than you are."

http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=217812...
I think the golden rule is make money...corporations are machiavellian. of course they want to appear benevolent, that's good for PR.
There are already people preferring Linux over Apple, so at the most, it is a matter of taste. Not that some Linux apps could not be improved, but some Apple software sucks, too (what is up with the FileManager???).
E-Gold Founder Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering
Net Neutrality Gains Traction In 2008 Senate Races
always save twice what you think you should and borrow half what you think you can

pithy, I'm going to steal this if you don't mind. I like it a lot.
Under Pressure, ISP Admits Secret Web Snooping in Kansas
Qik mobile software field-tested with Nokia phone in remote Chad
Burn Fat 4 Dummies Review
Burn Fat 4 Dummies - find out how good it worked for us in our Burn Fat 4 Dummies review
Bringing it back full circle: From Paul Graham - "Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had."
Can you tell us of a past situation that you have lived through that was "blood in the streets" so we can get a better idea why this isn't one?
I wouldn't be unhappy at all if Branson left the planet. As long as he comes back again, on his spaceship:-)

(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_SpaceShipTwo )