skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... My guess is that language snobs are INTP, whereas Blub programmers are more INTJ ..."

Do you really believe in the "psycho-babble" Myers-Briggs claims it tests? If you can show me any peer reviewed scientific studies that back the claims made by these tests I'd be more than happy to read them and judge for myself. Until then MBTI theories are as believable as any other pseudoscience.
PDFMiner: Python PDF text parser
For what its worth, I read the book and thought it was fantastic. Sure, there may be some artistic interpretation of the actual truth, but it was extremely motivating for me as an entrepreneur, thats for damn sure. The main takeaway I got apart from the importance of great mentors/friendors? That these guys worked their asses off to get where they are. Luck may be a small part of it, but pure perservernce is what saw them through.

Anyway, I thought it was a great read. Would recommend it, although with a pinch of salt since we have first-hand knowledge of some inaccuracies (see Joshua's comments above).
Show me the numbers please.
Maybe. Although, I have to say I don't find the nytimes interesting enough to bother doing the experiment :-)
I have the [dead] option on and I see often dead comments like this, so I was wondering too. Are some accounts banned or something?
I think a lot of people put too much faith in Meyer-Briggs, but I think psychologists tend to use it more than anything as an estimation tool just to get an idea of where to start with someone they're not familiar with. They can also be useful for describing some common personality memes, but a lot of times people mistake the categorizations as being predictive rather than descriptive and that's where they tend to quickly get into psycho-babble territory.
'Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good'
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257917
Incase you don't know, the author is 'Mr Haskell': Philip Wadler.

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/
Microsoft Launches Referrals When Google Referrals Are Retiring
Hacking their Model-Ts into snowmobiles and racing coups...
Just because a piece of software is really good doesn't mean ppl. will want to pay money for it. It's not an effectice piracy solution.
The fact that you don't own any Apple stock, discredits any opinions you have on the market!
The fact that you only have one way of programming in C, 'the C way', can actually be a blessing. I've found that I've been paralyzed by the flexibility of Lisp. There are so many different ways to do the same thing that it is hard to choose between them.
The author claims that mining Hydrogen from the surface of the Sun would be difficult, but ignores the solution of doing the mining at night.
I had a similar situation a few months ago. My goals were to get something up and running relatively quickly but it was my first python web app and I wanted to make sure that I actually understood what was going on underneath the covers. I used web.py (http://webpy.org/). Overall I've been pretty happy with it -- it is small enough that looking at the code is actually meaningful to me (although there is definitely some strangeness in there from my perspective) but I also can mostly just write the app and not think about the framework.
Is this the girl that gave that really embarrassing interview with Mark Zuckerberg?
Part Two at: http://www.research.scea.com/gdc2003/fast-math-functions_p2....
In 2007, consumers redeemed 2.6B coupons - less than 1% were distributed digitially
Today’s savvier consumers are said to be more impervious to advertising...Nope.
yup, same one.
Been looking for something like this for a while now. Thanks. Wonder if there is a Ruby effort underway.
The material doesn't change, but the homework problems do...or at least the order of homework problems/chapters may change.
Maybe you should start thinking in going to another field, where your knowledge is more required?
Thanks you all for letting me know your thoughts. ummm lemme think more.
Harvard Researchers Create Computer Language That can Penetrate the "Mind" of a Cell
I second webpy, especially for a project such as the one the OP is considering -- a small site where knowing what all the code does is at a premium.
Even Faster Web Sites, by Steve Souders
This is very nicely written. Just a warning, though, that it's not quite light reading.

Pop quiz: what's a morphism of functors?
Nietzsche's influence remains substantial. :)
Stewart isn't an "average textbook"
I thought Ramanujan died because he wasn't used to England weather.
Can you make money on YouTube? Yes. How much? No one knows.
Aside from the tags-and-filters system, none of that is a massive shift from what people already do.
D-Wave talking up "Orion", their 28-qubit machine
Look at how many people are killed each year by pollution from coal and other power plants. It's FAR more then nuclear. Plus coal plants release millions of time more radiation into the air then nuclear does.
I'm a little disappointed that they don't say which form of ionizing radiation it's using!

Alpha? (Probably not.) Beta? Gamma? If it's beta then that's quite cool, but if it's gamma then that's amazing - melanin a protein that can absorb gamma radiation??

Edit: Looked it up, caesium-137 makes beta radiation.
Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe.
Gotta differ with you on the OO point. There are quite a few fundamental differences, both in terms of low-level implementation and common usage. AS3 has true class-based object definition, packages and namespaces, for example. AS2's class support is merely an obfuscation of its underlying prototype system, whereas AS3 features real class objects, and prototypes exist only as an alternative inheritance mechanism.

I'm curious what it is about AS3 OO that you perceive as bolted on. Seems pretty well rooted to me. Btw apologies for my brash tone before, that was a bit dickish.
The Last Piece To The Smart Phone Puzzle | My Philly Network
Culprit found for lower sperm counts: soy (contains estrogen-like chemical)
I believe it is Sam Hsiung's project (YC alum - YouOS) with probably with James Miao? I wanted to donate so they could get a Mac and build an iPhone app but I'm in the hole a few grand myself. I love the 61, it has one of the best incentives/reputation systems I know - points with levels and each level gives you different abilities, like bumping up songs more.

http://www.thesixtyone.com/stammy/collection/
naa.. you are asking the right question.

but let me put it this way. isn't it time that we forget about frameworks, starting from scratch, a lot of code that does the same thing 90% and only 10% innovation? Maybe it is better stitching actual services and "plugging" in the actual difference.

The wheel itself never was invention. It was its use. I bet the time when technology will be obsolete is approaching. It is what we can achieve what matters, not whats in the box.
S.F. computer tech had turned life around
Symbian open-source strategy explained at OSCON
If you have an account, you can access your recently played history by going to your profile and then hitting the music tab. We're also working on an easier way to access your play history from the mini-player at the bottom left.
Arden: Final Results (economic study of price behavior within a MMOG)
Tipjoy (YC winter 08) Founders on Passing the Hat
Good luck Owen. I hope one day we will know the real story of how Digg was born and created :).
Fossil fuels kill 20,000 people a year in the US, that's a well established fact. It also kills around 100,000 people in China from mining coal, they don't even publish how many people die from smog but my guess is that it's way, way above the comparative 60,000 people who would die if they had US air quality laws.

The World Health Organisation figures put the death toll at 3 million people a year for air pollution due to vehicles, power plants and industry. Another 1.6 million people die a year from burning solid fossil fuel (coal) in their homes for heat. So 4.6 million people die from fossil fuels a year.

The death toll reported by Greenpeace, which has been criticised for being too high, since Chernobyl places the total deaths at around 200,000 in Ukrane, Belarus and Russia. However, going by official figures the total is only 4,000 people.

I'm sorry, but it's complete bullshit to say "show me the numbers" like the evidence hasn't existed for decades. More people die yearly in the US from -SAFE- burning of fossil fuels than have died from the worlds -WORST- nuclear -DISASTER-.

In fact, to compare the yearly death rate of nuclear reactors to coal reactors. Well 100 million people have died since chernobyl happened from fossil fuel pollutions and those are figures from the WHO, and 4,000 people have died from chernobyl that's 25,000:1 ratio in favour of nuclear power. -HOWEVER-, I'll be kind and I'll use unofficial figures from Greenpeace, and oh it's still 500:1 ratio in favour of nuclear power.

At its worst nuclear power is 500 times SAFER than fossil fuels, and official figures make it 25,000 times safer than fossil fuels. Those are the figures!

In fact, the World Nuclear Assosiation did a study on the safety of nuclear reactors and compared death rates between, Coal, Natural gas, Hydro and Nuclear plants. Nuclear had 31 fatalities between 1970 and 1992 in the US and UK, however Coal had 6,400 fatalities between the same dates. Those are people just doing their jobs.

So those are the numbers. The official ones clearly show that nuclear power is by far the safest energy source in the world.

Also the big horrendus disaster (how the media portrays it at least) at Three Mile Island, injured no one who didn't work at the plant. In fact, everybody in the 10 mile radius of the plant was exposed to the equivalent amount of radiation as a chest x-ray. That doesn't even go near how much damage a CT scan does to the human body, and you can have several of those a year without even having an insignificant (yes insignificant) chance of cancer.

Oh, before I forget. Coal plants release around 100 times the amount of radiation per watt than a nuclear plant does. The radioactive dust released from Three Mile Island was essentially insignificant, as said people in 10 miles only recieved a chest X-ray, however coal plants release 155 times that a year when operating safely compared to a major nuclear accident.

I'm so amused by those figures. Nuclear accidents are catagorically far safer than coal plants that operate safely!
Or, you can use explicitly use a reference variable or mutable variable: (# lines are input, - : lines are response)

type egg_carton = { mutable eggs: int }
let my_c = { eggs=12 }
let breakfast carton = carton.eggs <- carton.eggs - 2

# my_c;;
- : egg_carton = {eggs = 12}
# breakfast my_c;;
- : unit = ()
# my_c;;
- : egg_carton = {eggs = 10}

and

type food = Pancakes | Eggs
let eat f = f := None
let short_stack = ref (Some Pancakes)

# short_stack;;
- : food option ref = { contents = Some Pancakes }
# eat short_stack;;
- : unit = ()
# short_stack;;
- : food option ref = {contents = None}

I think the best part here is that OCaml doesn't use = to assign values, it uses a left arrow (<-) for modifying mutable variables and := for updating what value a reference is pointing to.
If someone can do it for free, then it will be inevitably free
Blackmail? Haha...wait...that's not a bad idea.
If Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened on a yearly basis, it (the ~220,000 people) doesn't even pale in comparison to the 4.6 million people who die from fossil fuel burning.

Since I was born, 92 million peoeple have died from fossil fuel burning (likely more as it's gotten cleaner) and if the nuclear bombings happened every year only 4.4 million people would have died from 400 nuclear bombings.
I say start shooting bacterial-fungi rockets at Venus/Mars and lets skip ahead a billion years to see if they're nice and blue/green like our planet.
Building stuff is really the only way I've ever learned anything about programming. Sure, reading a good book on the topic is helpful, but until you've built a few things using it, you don't understand the language|framework|technique.
+1. Feel free to use anewaccountname. The pair-word for it is right after $myaccountname on the login/registration page.
Promoting the promotion
No, it's that Digg was designed in a way that couldn't scale. There was no method available to keep it going with a larger community. The growing communities that aren't ready to grow - they're the ones doomed to die.
You know, we're a part of that. We might be the group following the blogs, not the instigators, but when a blog says something we jump on it, never once asking if it's the truth or no.
Great article which completely savages the myth that hydrogen cars are a viable solution.

But then he goes on to recommend methanol and ethanol without at all going into the problems associated with biofuels (effects on foods prices, efficiency, effect on CO2 emissions, potential capacity, etc.) Can anyone recommend an similarly well-researched article on biofuels?
223 mashups to discover, bookmark, annotate, share and collaborate.
Happy Birthday, Stanley Kubrick
Your last paragraph show you have the right hunch.

Erlang has a pretty simple binding compared to, say, ML. In the statement

X = Expr,
Body

Evaluates Expr, binds it to X and evaluates the body with X bound. This is akin to variants of let-bindings found in so many other languages. The difference is, however, that the binding can not be shadowed. If body contains, say:

X = Expr2,

it is taken as an assertion: Evaluate Expr2 and compare it to X, crashing the program if Expr2 is not equal to (in effect) Expr. What some miss is that this is not mutation, but binding. In

X = 0,
F = fun (Y) -> Y + X end,
X = 1,
F(4).

The X inside the body of F is bound to 0 and not 1 when F gets evaluated because any semantics apart from this would be silly in a functional language with lexical scope. And since Erlang has no concept of Let-bound scopes in functions it would probably give some of the problems you mention.

I guess the Prolog-history plays a part in the decision, but also the fact that explicit (single) assignment is a really good tool for weeding out bugs: Any use will explicitly refer to exactly one def. Several compilers that allow shadowing of let-scopes even go as far as including a warning when you shadow variables!
/agreed

I would like to add that there is a problem with the safety of nuclear power because of the way humans react to danger.

When nuclear power fails and kills people it kills a relatively large number of people. Coal is constantly killing people over a large area. Coal deaths don't make good new events, but nuclear deaths do. This makes people more aware of the dangers of nuclear power. This makes people more afraid of nuclear power, even though it is statistically safer.

It's the same thing with airplanes. People die in car crashes everyday, but it's world/national news when a plane crashes. Thus, people are more afraid of planes than cars.

I wouldn't say that it's the news' fault either, they are simply reporting on things people are interested in.

Modern computer aided design, pebble bed reactors, and reusing nuclear waste as fuel make nuclear power far safer than anyone in their right mind would require. People working to advocate nuclear power would do better to shift focus from safety to fighting this perception problem.
disclaimers: I didn't read the rest of the thread, and i don't use Django (I've been coding C, perl, python and ruby for years, and now rails).

I think the path of least resistance is to learn python and Django well, put some apps up, find out wehre the dev environment on Linux/BSD or mac is strong (editors, test tools, git/SVN), (and maybe make some decent money!).

Then branch out, start digging in to problems that web app frameworks solve, and solutions. These solutions would be the ORM, templating system, admin interface (Django's is admired and frequently copied), debuggers, performance profilers, testing stack, Ajax libs.

Look at the SQL generated, the HTML and CSS, how easy it is to rotate/analyze logs, DNS (subdomains, permanent redirects, etc), monitor/restart the proxy and servers, caching at all levels (pages and fragments, db queries, fixed assets in the browser). Also look at the mechanisms to plug in functionality, e.g. authentication, file uploads, multiple db connections, etc. That should teach you a lot.
A Lean Laptop Built for Speed and Handling Everyday Tasks
Similar, but it's not quite the whole picture. I've downloaded the materials from a wide range of classes, and the quantity of material and subsequent potential for greater understanding varied greatly.

Lecture notes are no replacement for a well-written textbook, especially if you're an autodidact attempting to further your horizons.
"[...] our addiction is enriching and empowering those who seek to destroy us. We are funding, if indirectly, the madrassahs that teach vile hatred of Western civilization and the backward cultures that create death-seeking soldiers for Islam."

I hoped this was tongue-in-cheek for a moment, but it does not seem to be. Credibility revoked.
Let's see: the Chinese have been eating soy products since the beginning of time, and China is the most populous country on Earth -- I would guess they have a high fertility rate, otherwise the one-child policy would not have been enacted...something seems amiss here...
Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On Fedora 9
MySpace isn't growing. But it is a real business.
This is one of my favorite sites. As someone who makes websites for a living, I'm very impressed by what they've put together. One of the better music sites that I've used (and I've seen a lot of them)
This has been somewhat understood for sometime, though the science on how phytoestrogens actually react with the human body isn't well understood. The article also doesn't make it clear that there are differences in various soy-based foods. The process that produces tofu (roughly equivalent to making cheese from milk) breaks down the hormone-like compounds, while more raw forms of soy (soy milk, various soy-based meat and dairy alternatives, whole soy beans, etc.) still contain those chemicals.

The interesting thing about soy, to me, is that it is one of the marketing miracles of our time. It was considered inedible in western culture until just the current generation, and now it is considered a "healthy" addition to just about any food. It was used for oil and other raw materials in industry, but not for food. While not as successful as corn (which is simply unavoidable in American foods), the soy industry has integrated its products into the daily diet of almost everyone. While I eat fresh tofu several times a week, I avoid mass-market foods that contain soy, and anything that contains soy in its various "raw" forms (soy flour/meal, soy milk, or whole soy beans). Soy sauce is problematic, as there are "quick ferment" processes used in most cheap soy sauce brands that do not break down the suspect compounds...properly slow fermented soy sauce is generally fine, though.
What a Space Shuttle launch looks like from a plane [video]
As I mentioned, tofu does not have these elements, and is the major source of soy protein consumed in Asian nations (boiled young soybeans, called edamame in the west, are eaten as a snack by some folks in Japan and to a lesser degree in other Asian cultures, and I believe there have been a couple of studies in Japan that indicate that men who consume it do have a lower sperm count and lower levels of testosterone, but I may be misremembering).

As is usual in US culture, with it's love of fads and quick-fix solutions, the soybean industry has convinced everyone that soy, in general, is astonishingly healthy. On paper, it actually does look really good: high protein, high fiber content, low fat, low carbohydrates, and no cholesterol (a positive when comparing to other animal-derived protein sources). But, really, soybeans in most forms are quite hard on the body. Since Americans don't, generally, eat tofu, the industry has found other ways to sell its products...as "healthy" additions to breakfast cereal, as a milk alternative, a protein source for meat alternative products like hot dogs, etc. I'm leery of anything that has been pushed that hard by huge corporations (corn being the most obvious example of an industry gone mad with power, and the entirety of the nation suffers for it). But I do loves me some tofu, and eat it all the time. As you note, if the Chinese can eat it for thousands of years without negative impact, I reckon it's safe.
Easy evaluation of data mining approaches
Mind Hacks - Magic and misdirection
I miss the Total Amount Tipped number they used to display on their site. It was an easy way to check on how their model was working out. Understandable if they'd rather not share, but it was cool.
python and ruby are much better languages than php. I highly recommend the use of one of those.
My knowledge of mathematics is dwarfed by anybody with a higher degree in the subject, and Algebra (the abstract kind, not the kind with lots of letters) was my worst subject, but part of me is a bit pleased that E8 might be related to an important bit of physics. It's a rather interesting structure, although not 'the largest' as the article claims, as there are some which (if I recall correctly), reach into million-dimensionality.

E8 also has some interesting properties relating to symmetry, so I'm not surprised that it gets used in physics. It's just a pity that the universe couldn't be related to A4, or A8, because I can actually grasp what's happening in those groups.

Even if he's wrong, it goes to show that stepping outside the mainstream can often times be the only way to starting out on a novel, and potentially revolutionary, approach.
How SmugMug uses Amazon EC2
I have an odd sense of Schadenfreude here, but I can't quite figure out why.
No one has ever seriously suggested using Hydrogen as an energy source - that's impossible. What we are suggesting is using hydrogen as a battery, until we get things like super-capacitors working. And, we can fill the battery with nuclear energy.

Nuclear didn't fail for technological reasons. It failed for political ones. Nuclear Breeder reactors are still, by a huge margin, the cheapest, safest, and most sustainable energy solution that the world knows. Using them to power the energy grid directly, and then to charge whatever portable battery we're using (hydrogen, etc) is sustainable for at least another thousand years.

Of course, there are huge technological hurdles to using hydrogen as a portable energy storage device. But, I think we're closer to production on hydrogen energy than we are with any alternative. Super-capacitors of sufficient energy density and low enough cost are (imho) at least 20 years off. Man made gasoline (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html) shows promise, but no one has ever done it - so we're a decade away from that at best.

The author of the article proposes biofuels, but they are arguably even more inefficient than hydrogen. Not to mention that we have millions of starving people on this planet already. When it takes ~26 lbs of corn to make one gallon of ethanol (that's about an acres worth for every 250 gallons) I really think we should be looking at alternatives.
Hacker, Counterfeiter Comes Clean Ahead of Prison Stint
Website is timing out for me...
That this trait could be bioengineered for space colonization, is the most interesting and exciting possibility for this discovery.
It's more fun listening to people who try to pronounce the periods.

Del-dot-issio-dot-us.

Or, my favorite, a friend who pronounced periods by coughing. We kept offering him water.

It's a bit ridiculous that icio.us was never set to redirect, though. What a waste of a domain name. Unless there's a good SEO reason to do that?
Are you suggesting that the existence of madrassahs that produce fundamentalists who are likely to become involved in what we call terrorism is a myth, or simply that the prevalence of such schools is overblown?
Complex stuff.