skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely started off as a CPC who wanted to jazz up his website.

A decade and a half later, turns out they'll pay you for this sort of thing. Not making snowflakes fall down, but programming in general.
By knowing the content you could style the regions of each page individually. This would, however, require something like a <style> element on the page to customize the regions or a stylesheet per page.

Or by javascript. But I see this as a more challenging approach than CSS. (Breaking a paragraph across 2 DIV elements would be a challenge.
> A person doesn't get better from a visit, they get better by being left alone with medicine.

A possible rephrasing of the sentence above would be that, putting someone suffering from a protracted disease into a solitary confinement with medicine is the path to betterment. I don't think it works that way. There is a reason why even otherwise healthy person are not held in solitary confinement unless as an act of (sometimes disguised) punishment.

You mentioned that emotional health is an elusive concept. It is not, it can be measured, and the measure stands up to a quality that is acceptable to the disciplines of empirical sciences. I think your hesitation to acknowledge it, stems from the fact that it can be defined significantly by the person/patient, while that is true, it does not make it elusive. Many people can voluntarily control waves emitted by the brain. The fact, that brain signals can be so controlled, does not make epilepsy a fictitious condition.

>Depending on others to feel good is not the sign of a mentally healthy person.

EDIT: Responding here to prevent deeply nested threads. By your standards most humans would be unhealthy. The need for social interaction is well documented, and not only among humans. I am an introvert so I get by fine with a level of interaction low enough that it might bother someone else, but that does not mean that those who need it are unhealthy. There is a full spectrum and both extremes are considered deviant.

>I thought it was apparent that social interaction shouldn't be necessary to get better.

EDIT2: I think that's the crux of the argument/disagreement.
Social interaction has been deemed a necessity to well being. Can someone not recover from a disease without interaction, sure some can if it can be cured in a short enough duration, no otherwise. Does everybody need the social interaction to get better (stay well)? No, a percentage can do without it. In fact some spiritual school of thought see that to be the ultimate and difficult to attain target frame of mind.
Black eyes happen for a reason, though.
True, but did it cause their success? Clean search-only website (not a portal); fast results; no pay-for-rank: their idea was to help.

(BTW: I'd love it if the algorithm won the day)
There is a huge learning curve with Rails, insofar as it is its own "opinionated" framework with numerous conventions, if well-chosen, that are unique to Rails. You can deploy web apps in Rails without adopting all of these things, but you will never be respected by Rails developers (I've heard devs say "that's not the Rails way" countless times). Usually these conventions are chosen for good reasons (even though they frequently change), but impose a significant cost since you have to learn:

(1) Ruby the language

(2) Idiomatic Ruby as perceived by Rails Devs

(3) Rails conventions

(4) Appropriate plugins/addons

All of them take a decent amount of time to learn (well). 3 & 4 also change pretty frequently.

So, it is possible you "grok" everything quite well (I'd guess that you do), but haven't learned all the specifics that make things tick the "Rails way."
My answers in 31 lines of code: https://gist.github.com/1025860

I am either misreading the third problem's description, or I have a bug I can't for the life of me see, because the answer my program puts out is not accepted.
Thanks for the links. I'm completely open to doing the shared house thing, which is what I've done up until now. It tends to be much less expensive. The reason I'm not looking to rent a room in a house right now is that I've given myself a deadline of the 1st to move. Finding a room to rent is difficult on short notice.

If anybody knows of an open room in a house in Mountain View, please contact me privately.
Ah, that's the part I was missing. When I didn't see a digit in the first leaf I thought I had it wrong.
The second basic question of software engineering
A fork to Rails to make HAML a default would consist of one line added to the Gemfile that says "gem 'haml'"
I think this is the case: In the fifties, there were a lot fewer people who were as rich as your dad, than there are people today who are as rich as you. At the same time, more people today want and can afford cars and other expensive things. Thus, even though we are constantly using resources more efficiently, you are competing with more people for resources today than your father in the fifties.

This is natural and a good thing: If Earth can't sustain very many people buying cars every 2 years, then we can't buy new cars every 2 years. We have to use resources more efficiently. It's a similar situation with fuel: For a long time, we built stronger engines that consumed the same amount of fuel, instead of building engines that used less fuel for more efficient use. Later that trend reversed. A similar thing happened with computers and their energy use.

I hope my kids won't have to buy more than one car in their life.
So, he's right in that there seems to be a flaw with respect to the base64 encoding, but he's wrong about how much. It's one byte of hash that's lost when you add the padding back (it decodes to 184 bits), which is explained by the following code:

encode_base64((u_int8_t *) encrypted + strlen(encrypted), ciphertext,
4 * BCRYPT_BLOCKS - 1);

It does indeed look like it's cutting a byte off the ciphertext when it's encoded.

Edit: I think I know what's going on with the key length, too. It just so happens that len(base64.decodestring('x'72)) == 54 -- just below the key size limit. But I don't see where the key is getting base64 decoded in the code. Digging...

Edit #2: The b64d('x'72) == 4 behavior I saw was coincidental. What happens is that subkeys can be up to 72 bytes long but will not affect all bits of ciphertext. This is valid and by design:

/* Schneier specifies a maximum key length of 56 bytes.
* This ensures that every key bit affects every cipher
* bit. However, the subkeys can hold up to 72 bytes.
* Warning: For normal blowfish encryption only 56 bytes
* of the key affect all cipherbits.
*/

Edit #3: The hash truncation occurs in the reference implementation as well. This is in disagreement with the paper, and reduces the keyspace by ~4.16% -- that's ungood. Wonder why that was?
Big data and the semantic web
The irreplaceable Space Shuttle
Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Ask about Growth
How to Bootstrap
I only answer as another "hobby philosopher", so please take it in that spirit :) I would argue that just by the fact that you know someone, and know them to be a "decent" person, you'd feel empathy (depending on your personality type also). Part of the reason you don't go "all out" for everyone, is because thankfully you don't "know" everyone.

I really think boiling it down to a simple "give-take" relationship is oversimplifying the dynamics. It goes far beyond that.

A person may visit someone who is sick out of religious convictions, or because being generous makes them feel good, same reason you have many people who volunteer or help push someone's stalled car on the road. Others may be do so to simply pay it forward, maybe to help cultivate a relationship, or with unspoken expectations of the favor being returned had the tables been turned. Yet, others might just be doing it because they have something to gain from the sick/dying person or somehow feel bound/compelled to do so...
I personally would value visiting a friend who it sick and does not have a lot of family/friends to care for them vs one who has a lot of people to care for them, I'd probably leave the latter alone until they recover, or contact a close family member to avail myself should the need arise.
I don't know whather to cry because it'll be cold, cry because skeptics will be wrongly smug dumbasses, enjoy the cold I prefer, or enjoy skeptics being dumb as always.
"And another thing to note is that that money is in the form of military contracts with American companies"

This.

People are usually oblivious that it's another way of transferring money from the government to the military industrial complex, not just supporting the single democracy in the middle east.
This reads like a load of pop-IT-psychology nonsense. Take a few terms and adapt them to whatever preconceived notions you have, and whammo, there's your thesis statement.

I've had the job titles "Software Engineer", "Software Developer" and "Computer Scientist" but I was basically doing the same job each time. A job title doesn't cause a fundamental change in behaviour or capabilities. If it does, then you have a whole other major problem.

FWIW, I always refer to myself as a "programmer" socially as it seems to be the simplest form for people to understand.
Some people prefer math over code.
Some people prefer code over math.
Some people are not specialized in either but are good at other stuff.

News at 11.
Probably, but they can sure ask to FB to take his app down.
This doesn't quite capture the picture because Europe often have public subsidies as well. For instance the publicly owned "Innovation Norway" in Norway has a budget of NOK 1,5 billion, which translates to about US$60 per capita. Most of this is spent on subsidising entrepreneurial ventures.
> You're absolutely right that the main difference is the astronomical difference in scale, but you're ignoring the fact that internet sales are entirely on-demand,

Huh? How is ordering something from a catalog not "on-demand"?

> whereas mail order sales still require a physical catalog to order from. This may not sound like a significant difference, but the instant-on internet fundamentally altered the way the public buys the majority of its goods in a way that mail order businesses never could.

I don't buy it. I grew up during the "catalog" days. Every house had several catalogs for various types of items, collectively covering pretty much everything that said household would buy.

During my time, almost all of these catalogs had 800 numbers so one could order instantly. That said, during earlier times, depending on where you lived, sending in an order form was no big deal because there often wasn't a local supplier.

Remote commerce is not all that new. Heck, folks even bought houses via mail-order.

In other news, boomers, hippies, yuppies, gen X etc did not invent any sex acts either.
I assume VC per capita is a used as a metric because it's a useful way of assessing how much economic value the whole country can extract from the startup scene, in the same way that GDP per capita is a more useful measurement than total GDP at assessing a country's quality of life. Israel may have a similar concentration of startup companies in a city (like Tel-Aviv) and the math would then work out to a higher per capita VC investment than London.
Go the F--k to Sleep, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson
Why your idea for an Internet start-up will not get stolen
Yes, upbringing and cultural pressure move the boundaries but the underlying rules are the same: No person would tolerate always giving for long.
Steve Gould gets it in the neck
The third problem is looking to partition the entire sequence of numbers into contiguous subsequences, all of which add up to the same sum. In other words, if the list were 23415, you subsequences could be 23, 41 and 5, all equaling 5. But the subsequences have to use up the entire string and they can't overlap.
You can have your sexy app up in a couple of weeks. But maintaining it still takes time, no matter what language/framework you're using. Upgrading to a new version is in the end maintenance (security fixes, underlying framework improvements, and the refactorings that go hand in hand with upgrading).

If you go with rails you still can get to a point very quick, with the downside that you have to spend time for upgrading. But both the elegance and maturity of rails 3, in regard of it's age is quite unique. The older it gets the prettier.

[2]. Agreed. I've been working both on client projects and in startups. If you have 10 Rails projects from clients to support, this is a nightmare, (rails 1.2 - 3.0, from mongrels to passengers). It's hard to charge clients for a rails upgrade.

[3] I developed rails since 0.14 full-time. I think rails was/is very conservative regarding trendy things (except coffeescript).
This is one of many reasons why Apple don't preannounce by much, if at all. I bought my ipod touch on the first day it was available, the day it was announced.
> equally good chance that it won't be.

probability = ??????

is not at all the same thing as

probability = 0.50
Google creates $280-million solar power fund
Your high school had a linguistics department? A geologist on staff? An economics teacher? A statistics teacher? A biochemist? An anthropologist? A sociologist? A sign language instructor? An oenologist? [1]

My high school didn't even teach calculus at the time. [2] And I was lucky that they had even had, e.g., a physics teacher who could actually teach physics. [3] Many do not. I know this because if you mention physics to a random college student they will generally tell you stories about their clueless high school physics teacher and how that teacher made them hate physics forever. ;)

---

[1] "Oenology for Poets", though it did not go by that name -- it was colloquially called "the Wines course" -- was the runaway favorite of all the intro courses at Cornell:

http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/facultybios/facu...

Needless to say, my US high school did not offer lectures on wines. I wonder if the situation is different in France or Germany. ;)

[2] Not that it mattered; My math teacher helped me convince the school to let me take math at the local university instead.

[3] Not that it mattered; My physics teacher was clueful enough to take me aside on day one, give me a copy of PSSC Physics and tell me that when I got bored I should read this book. I was a very lucky high school student to have such clueful teachers.
Glad to hear your opinion on this.

What frameworks, in your opinion, are stable, relevant today, easy to use, and has a good community?

I've been doing some client-side scripting with Ruby lately just for fun and I've also played with Python in the past. I haven't used Rails or Django. After reading all of this, I'm leaning towards Python/Django but haven't used neither web framework I'm curious as to people's opinions.
> #pip install python-levenshtein
> from Levenshtein import distance

That doesn't seem in the spirit of the challenge.
If I ever decide to go into the pub business I think I'll name it 'Point B' :-)
Your emotional state is yours to control and change. Depending on others to feel good is not the sign of a mentally healthy person.

Editing aswell: I'm sorry, I should have been clearer but it's quite lengthy to always be precise and include the necessary disclaimers:
Of course everything has its limitations. Humans are social beings, so we like social interactions. During the limited time of sickness, I thought it was apparent that social interaction shouldn't be necessary to get better.

Example: I think it's possible to feel good when doing a walk alone in the park. I think it's possible to feel good when being alone sick. Suffering is often a distinct choice: Do I pity myself for standing in the rain or do I love the feel of fresh, wet water?

Edit2:

Can someone not recover from a disease without interaction, sure you can if it can be cured in a short duration, no otherwise

I think you are giving humans too little credit. Social interaction is very important, but it's quite possible to live alone. People don't actually go mad when you leave them alone - given that they are adults and they have sufficient other sensory and mental stimulation. People get used to a lot.

Example: Someone living completely alone at home, getting his meals delivered because he is too fat to leave. I'm not saying his life is awesome, but if he gets sick, there is no reason his recovery should in any way be significantly slower than the one of social people.

It's all a matter of getting used to things, self pity is usually the only culprit of an unhappy life.
I definitely see this in indie games. Things like the Nordic Game Fund are really nice compared to what's available in the U.S., although Canada is also pretty generous with funding small videogame startups (especially Quebec, which has additional province-level funding). In the U.S., you can only really make it if you: 1) bootstrap; or 2) target social games or "gamification", which are the only things VCs care about. Companies more in the Playdead (Denmark) vein rarely get funding, although the U.S. does have quite a few bootstrapped success stories--- just looking at Santa Cruz, CA, alone, both Gaijin Games and Team Meat, makers of bit.trip and Super Meat Boy, respectively, are recently bootstrapped and successful.

For early-stage seed funding, there are also all sorts of target-agnostic entrepreneurship programs in Europe, which will kick $20k or something your way if you have anything approximating a reasonable business plan; makes it much easier to just strike out on your own without having to do consulting work to fund it. On the other hand, the fact that the U.S. has more than its share of successful bootstrapped indie-game companies suggests that either the culture or ecosystem is doing something positive there even with VCs being absent.
"Rails is very hard for the beginner to learn"

compared to what? Have you tried to learn Spring MVC? No way rails is harder to learn than that. Are you comparing it to no-framework php files?

Forgive me, but I fail to see how the main point of the original article is even valid.
I don't think that's surprising is it? Silicon Valley is known to be the best place for VC in the world. I'm sure if you draw arbitrary lines around the hottest investment communities in Israel the numbers would also be much more even.

That Israel as a country beats us in per capita investment is an interesting figure which we should all consider.
>But maintaining it still takes time, no matter what language/framework you're using. Upgrading to a new version is in the end maintenance (security fixes, underlying framework improvements, and the refactorings that go hand in hand with upgrading).

Pointing out the obvious here but using matured languages/frameworks tends to have less of this problem.

It's like dating: stable -> boring and reliable while dynamically changing -> exciting but scary.
This article eerily parallels a conversation I was having just last night about Groupon and Square: Groupon's a bunch of bottom-dwelling parasites whereas Square has already done so much to make it easier to accept credit cards, and their products are poised to add more and more value for small businesses.

I remember the first time I walked into an Apple Store after the iPhone had been released. Apple employees were using Win CE based handhelds with Symbol barcode scanners. It struck me as odd — and as something that was going to change. And when Apple figured out how to do it for themselves, with the iPhones or later the iPod Touch or iPad, then someone, maybe Apple, maybe someone else, would figure out how to make something that seemed like science fiction — employees able to check you out while you stood there, without going to a cash register — into something that anyone could do. It might only be 90% as good, but it probably only cost 10% of what those specialized Symbol devices cost.

Square has become that thing. I would have thought Intuit would've gotten there first. PayPal might have gotten their first. Or VeriPhone. All of them should have gotten there first, but I think there were probably huge Innovator's Dilemma style cannibalization and ego issues at work.

In the end Square was the company. I think these guys, as the author does, are the good guys. They're earning their keep. The people who work there are entitled to be proud of themselves, because they are very much poised to do very well by doing good.
Looking around the solar system, we would have to conclude that significant climate change in either direction is bad for life. None of our neighbors appears to support even microbial life, much less complex species. All the evidence suggests that the conditions for life lie in a narrow band, which we are sitting in nicely for the moment. We manipulate the climate at our peril.
I still don't follow. Digit value rather than ASCII code... you mean Base64 digit value? If so, do you just ignore the pad char? (I mean... by "non-digit leaves" you are referring to the leaves represented by '=' and only those?)

EDIT: I understand now... jeez that was a run-around! Ascii encoded decimal! Thanks for the clarifying replies all over.
Citigroup hasn't yet explained how the attack happened
The Slowest Loading Tech News Sites: Scobleizer, PreCentral, Cult of Mac
SAMSUNG NEXUS S LATEST ANDroid PHONE PRICE AND FEATURES
Alan writes useful things, but this is pretty much meaningless. He says so himself: "Developer are programmers to a greater or lesser extent. Computer scientists are programmers to a greater or lesser extent."

Why put ourselves into different camps? Why can't I write poetical Rails code during the day and read the latest research papers on type theory at night? Placing ourselves in these artificial camps hinders us from exploring new places and ideas. This is why I'm tempted to call myself an artist or inventor (though to much ridicule) instead of a programmer or developer or computer scientist.
Site fights retail bias against Windows Phone 7
Very true.

Most people don't know but the most controversial weapons that Israel has used in recent years, such as the cluster bombs dropped in Southern Lebanon [1] and the white phosphorous used in the Gaza Strip [2][3] were both made by the US and given to Israel through the US Military Aid program.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5299938.stm

[2] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/arti...
So some of mobileme is rightly dying (web hosting/gallery), most of it is coming to all of us for free in a cloud server-based package, and he thinks it won't include iDisk? He says Back to my Mac/iPhone are very popular, then later says they have a "minimal chance of survival". Sensationalist, self-contradicting article.
LulzSec hits U.S. Senate, throws a “DDoS Party”
> When you get 2x your normal business walking through the door it's kind of hard not to make money.

That depends on your margins. A half off coupon that you get half the revenue of means you only get 25% of the revenue for your customers. That can be very hard to make money on, regardless of traffic.
Brain training boosts working memory, but only in some people
The Ingredients of Fine Web Apps
Britain says `sure, let's try that!'
not decentralized?
Facebook accounts from pron.com (hacked by LulzSec)
It's not about being able to add code to every piece of your stack, but understanding what all of its external interfaces do. How many programmers you know can do that with their stacks?
Very nice. I've been thinking of something like this for my project as well. The problem I face is how do you securely exchange the key.
How can you possibly know that you were back to exactly what you were before, i.e. in terms of your cardiovascular system condition, etc.

Also, I'm not sure about the bicycle, but if I stop now after a few years of training with weights, I will still be stronger than when I started for a really long time, like years.
Hotmail accounts from pron.com (hacked by LulzSec)
When it can look good and easy to touch (which isn't in the normal laptop way). Dell have some laptops with a double hinge, which I doubt is good enough for Apple.