skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is relative. Your argument considers time as a non relative entity and the past and present as static points in a timeline. So the same "event" is one man's past and one man's future. It depends on your space coordinates from the coordinates of the even if this is your past or present or how back in past.

Disclaimer: This is deduced logic and not scientific information.
Interchangeable in what sense:

"And I think that Rails is a cool platform, I really do."
"And I like the ruby language. A lot."

How much clearer could he be?
I... What? What version are we on!? lol
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Abmar, our GSoC talks a bit about the first results his pubsub crawler gave
> Does this solution in perl work because of the extended capabilities of perl regexes?

Yes. It works because perl's "regexes" are not regular expressions (nb: almost no "regex engine" these days is limited to regular expressions). Actual regular expressions can express type-3 chomsky grammars, whereas HTML's grammar (and most programming languages's) is of type 2.
Hooray! I prefer FF's interface to Chrome or Safari, but it gets up to 6-700MB RAM usage on my Mac (with 'only' 2GB RAM) so I find I have to restart it to release memory when I'm running Eclipse, Tomcat and Photoshop at the same time... hopefully this will make things better.
Programming ability has a great deal more economic value than entertainment ability.
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Mozilla gave Firefox a curve as version numbers become grades.
How so, given how much money top singers/bands make?
As the comment by tchrist to this [0] downvoted answer says, as soon as back references were used (40 years ago apparently) regexes were not regular anymore.

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular-expressio...
Yes, HTML is not a regular language, and so cannot be matched with true regular expressions. As mentioned elsewhere, most "regex" libraries in existence today are not limited to simple regular expressions -- they simply wouldn't be powerful enough for many common tasks otherwise.

HTML is more accurately a context-free language (CFL). A regular expression does not allow you to do any sort of counting or stack-based matching in a match, which is required to do things like "I just saw <div>...<a>...<img> so I better see "</img>...</a>...</div>" later on.

The reason the linked solution works is because of the extended capabilities of PCREs, such as backtracking and things like that.
> When I need to extract data from HTML I use XPath. But to do so I have to use the combination of following tools

I just use lxml.html (handles 99.999% of the HTML out there, add beautifulsoup's UnicodeDammit[0] for wonky encodings) and then use lxml's built-in xpath support on top of that.

Plus extra bonus, if the datamining paths are simple enough you can use CSS queries instead of XPath.

[0] http://lxml.de/elementsoup.html#using-only-the-encoding-dete...
And data supports this theory. See some of Hans Rosling's Ted talks, as income goes to $60,000 in the U.S.A., happiness steadily increases, then levels off.
> Now I understood the reason _why_ you can't use regular expressions to parse HTML is that HTML is usually not regular. Is this true?

From the comments:

Q. "The answer is you can't. HTML is not regular so be definition it can't be described by a regular expression."

A. "Your use of REGULAR in regular expressions has been irrelevant and wrong since Ken Thompson first put backrefs into regexes around 40 years ago. /(.)\1/ parses non-REGULAR languages perfectly well. Please stop repeating this nonsense. – tchrist"
Watch series 1 of Mad Men. Spend 1 week observing all interactions around you. Return and rethink.
It's a sad day
Power law thing. Most musicians make next to nothing whereas the average programmer does ok.
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>Now I understood the reason _why_ you can't use regular expressions to parse HTML is that HTML is usually not regular. Is this true?

I believe the reason is that HTML is a Type 2 grammar by Chomsky hierarchy (that is, a push-down automaton), whereas regexp is a Type 3 grammar (that is, a finite state automaton). To put it simply, HTML has a frame/state stack, and regexp isn't advanced enough for that (instead it reads "left-to-right" - no subroutines or recursion).

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

I suspect you might be right about him "cheating" using perl, but not knowing a lick of perl, I can't say for sure one way or the other.

Edit: Apparently, back-references mean regexp isn't regular - that actually makes more sense now; they've never quite meshed with my understanding of regular languages.
The man in the moon is not really observing the future he just becomes aware of the event before the man on earth.

If it wasn't light that was being transmitted the man on the moon could warn the man on earth about what's happening before it's reaching him in the same way that people near the epicentre of an earthquake can use twitter to warn people further away before it hits:
http://recovery.doi.gov/press/us-geological-survey-twitter-e...
Relavant: Diaspora does (or did) exactly that.

http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/11/26/disalienation/

HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944628

Slightly less relevant: gender done right by, of all things, a social networking game.

Here's a review: http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=3053
Agree, why don't people concentrate on the core problem:

> FreeBSD's poor paravirtualized Xen support

instead of hacking around EC2? (I'm not a programmer)
"Also do these women who don't want to disclose their gender really need Randall Munroe to file the bug report for them?"

He's someone who gets listened to.
> all saying what a horrible person Mlynarik is

There's a big difference between saying someone is a "horrible person" and calling out specific incidents of inappropriate behaviour.
Those other options aren't always as easy to execute for everyone as you might think. Marketing, web site building, video editing, tour scheduling, public relations, accounting, etc.

That stuff is hard work and you have to be a jack of all trades. Each band is like a little startup looking for a technical cofounder.
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http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter01/

From the intro:

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I remember thinking of this one time as a teenager. Could we see a top down view of the rise of man? The huge caveat is that you have some capability of travelling faster than the light leaving earth, so that you can then look back and absorb the rays. It makes perfectly good sense that if you could travel faster than the speed of light you could use a massive telescope to peer back at the earth and see it's past geological events -- and I mean millions of years even, not just something trivial -- or given a strong enough telescope perhaps more detail could be seen. All of the information that left the earth as light is still out there, all over the universe.
"only way to go" ???

I've tried web2py on appengine, its one framework that would eat out your appengine resources very quickly - http://youtu.be/QOhZkoK1Cr8 (that's just two of us hitting the instance, CPU usage - 16% - 20% in minutes)

Other than that, ah we got globals everywhere !! really makes it hard for any sane IDE to understand WTF is going on. Models are loaded alphabetically. I couldn't get unit-tests working sanely (but that might be as the project I work on replaces web2py crud with their own implementation on top of it).

Why not something very simple - Flask or AppEngine. I found writing your webapp in google appengine way more "a good and clean way to go" than web2py.
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You seem to be suggesting that our culture can't be described as objectifying women unless all or most men are assholes to women in bars or engage in similar behavior, and in your other comments, unless such behavior happens exclusively to women.

Which is absurd. As others have pointed out, if even 10% or 1% of men behave this way, it creates a hostile environment. If 1 out of every 100 random people you encounter punch you in the arm, you wouldn't think of arm-punching as an unfortunate part of the culture? (If you don't like getting punched in the arm, maybe you shouldn't go out wearing those kinds of sleeves.)

And objectification is not limited to inappropriate behavior in bars and the like. Constant sexualization and stereotyping in advertising and other media create social expectations that many people aren't comfortable with. Yes, men are sexualized as well, but not to anywhere near the same degree, and usually in a different way (for instance, it's still pretty rare to be confronted with sexualized images of men that suggest submissiveness or vulnerability, but those characteristics are very common in images of women).
I don't understand your point. It goes both ways; most men would have a problem being forcefully harassed by an unattractive woman, and perhaps not when by an attractive one.

Her point is that she's being harassed by someone she does not want to be harassed by. Don't turn this into a bitter "you don't give unattractive men a chance" argument. The same concept applies with men towards women.
The only way to make this work is to offer small businesses a 'package' solution and not consulting.

Small business consulting sucks because of 1,000 reasons, but mostly because you aren't paid anything, aren't paid on time and are viewed more as a technology slave than a consultant.

The package idea gets around the later, but you still have payment issues.
Strictly speaking, everything we see happened in the past :)
Yes, but you could never signal faster than the information arriving on earth in a straight line at the speed of light.

To understand why picture the triangle between the start point (A), end point (B) and the moon (M). The distance AMB is larger than AB.

Google or Wikipedia 'light cone', pretty interesting stuff.
Algo trading network speed limit urgently needed - Bank Of England
" I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility."

I actually said nothing like this, did I?

What I actually said, a) he's has a reputation as a very smart individual, and for good reason, and b) his bug report specifically was not bullying at all, but was precise, accurate, and passionate.

For what it's worth though, I don't find his calling a developer to be a simian to be offensive, I find it funny. I don't find his imagery of reaching through a monitor to cut off the fingers of someone to be offensive, or threatening, I find it amusing, and illustrative of his frustration at being ignored once more.

I find your behavior in this forum, of repeatedly bringing up these lame examples of why he should be banned to be offensive. And more offensive in light of how you have not explained who you are.

But the truth is, I use Chrome. And when I need an alternative browser, I turn to Opera or IE. I rarely use Firefox products anymore, because they are horrible. And I understand why they are horrible, it's because you guys are off in your own world and have no time or need to actually listen to your users, us guys that have been telling you for years of your bloat and your feature creep and your memory problems, and all the other crap you've tossed in there.
I'm not sure he was arguing there had to be a specific correlation. But as you said, in major cities such as the one you've listed, it tends to be higher. No matter how you look at that, location does influence pay to a strong degree whether its direct or indirect influence.
Firefox add on page gets new design upgrade. Interesting
Noticed the same thing. But if you had to choose between putting that photo in a folder called "angry faces" or "happy faces", what would you choose? Of course, you'd hope the software would really be fine-grained enough to detect fake moods so you don't have to make that semi-arbitrary decision, but since it can't, I'm pretty happy with "angry".
The worst thus-far-linked example of Mlynarik's Bugzilla comments is from July 2010, after which one or more warnings were made. The June 2011 example that got him banned shows him as sarcastic and excessively dramatic, but he refrains from personal insults.

So the idea that he is rehabilitating, after warnings, is one interpretation of the linked reports.

Asa Dotzler has mentioned other quotes, but without dates/links for ontext. Perhaps they were in-person incidents? If so, that would change the calculus a lot (in favor of hair-trigger banning).

But part of a fair "next strike and you're gone" policy is being clear about what a 'strike' is. Was he warned not to use sarcasm, CAPS-YELLING, and excessive emotion? If so, he had fair warning. If instead he was warned not to be uncivil and insulting, then this latest comment didn't prove his incorrigibility.
Because God is a crazy woman and his name is Eris.
The reason is this: Advertisment!

Advertizers pay more if the ads are "targeted", the more information you have the more "segments" of customers you got. Google gets 98% their revenue from advertizing, which means they want as much information as possible to target as good as possible so that they can sell you more crap!

Just try to give as little information as possible everytime you deal with companies as google.
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In his defense, I had made a somewhat obnoxiously worded point about not wanting special treatment because of my handicap. I was in no danger. Those woods are rife with people making job offers and someone was bound to come along sooner or later.
I think the point of the argument is less about getting into fights, than it is about harassment; on the internet it doesn't really matter how big each person is (except where spam is concerned); so long as address info is private, even the most dedicated stalker's got his work cut out. The issue is this attribute is searchable; so a guy can list all of them women on G+, checking out their profile pictures, and possibly contacting them. A woman with an attractive profile picture could get a lot of unwanted messages / friend invites in this way, which would lead to feelings of harassment. Even the knowledge that people may be checking out their profile pics will be upsetting to some, despite there being no direct affect on the "victim". Admittedly, all this is also true the other way around, but typically in most human societies, men are more likely to stalk and women are more likely to be upset by the idea of being stalked.

However, all of that is beside the point. The simple fact is that if this information is not required for G+ to function, it should be optional. You could argue that you have the option of not signing up, which is fair, but not very constructive. As G+ is competing against FB, and their stance is that they have better privacy, this is something which is in their interest to put right.
Some discussion, plus links, from an earlier HN posting about a related SO post (which argued, roughly, that parsing HTML with regexes opened the door to Hell): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1487975
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Absolutely! His was the pefect bug report.
A chef cooks for his patrons, and a performer pleases his audience, just as a programmer codes for the user.
With his report you have a passionately described, no holds barred look into what you are causing the user to feel when using the software. Don't let it hurt your feelings, just take it on the chin and recognize that in trying to make something better, you have inadvertently forgotten the primary objective: user experience.
Oftentimes bug reports like this may just be a rant without relevant technical details, but the wonderful thing about this report, is that he gives you the best of both worlds: You have extremely insightful user experience along with the relevant technical details on how to address the issue.
Be grateful, and wish more reports exactly like this.
Having just done a C2DM implementation, the biggest factor would be that C2DM requires 2.2 or higher. I didn't fully explore how urban airship's helium works but they state support for 1.6 and higher. Beyond that, they also have a unified API to do push between iOS, Android and BBOS. We had already built out our own iOS push system, so the unified API wasn't an advantage. A bit more documentation from google on how to implement C2DM would have been nice, but there is enough out there to get it up an running.
Depends on the inspirational speech and the speaker's delivery. Most of the commencement speech or other inspirational speeches I've come across suck hardcore. A few TED vids are good, the Steve Jobs commencement speech is good, some other vids are good... but in general most of them suck. Its not so much the type of vid but rather the topic, delivery, and various other things that would make it good. I enjoy watching a good one, hate most of the ones I come across. That said, not a big frustration for me. I don't go out of my way to find them.
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We definitively can, but there is an issue: The light can be absorbed by some substance or refracted. How do you account for that?

You can account for that by recording every atom/photon on the space and then using some kind of miraculous processing power, to calculate how everything goes and estimate/verify the past actions.

For the processing ability, certainly some day we'll get there. For the possibility of getting the coordination/nature of any atom/photon in the whole space, this will need a discovery of something faster (way too much or may be instantaneous) than the speed of light that gives us the ability to recognize particles.

This is not amazing. This is sick. We'll be able to watch Pharaohs with an infinite precision. See how the earth was billions of years ago and how life evolved.
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Ask HN: I've lost all motivation, please help
Dear HN community,

I am a fellow hacker who has been working on mobile games for various platforms for a while (4 years). The games have been modestly successful and I do not have to worry about money for the next 10 years.

I've have always wanted to work on a "big game" - not the small puzzle games that I have worked on but on a big 3d game. However, not that I have the time to pursue such project I have realized that I am no longer interested in making games at all. I find them fake. I have turned 31 a few days ago and somehow feel that these games are probably not what I'd like to do.

I am totally lost - I can't find anything interesting worth hacking - how would you deal with this? How should I reignite my desire to work on stuff (like I used to a couple of years ago). How can I find this thing? I have been searching for a long time but can't find nothing...It seems like no project interests me. And I feel like I'm just wasting my time doing nothing...

Thank you so much for your opinions.
"Now you forgot the bisexuals! ;p"

You know, I thought that at firs too. I was going to say that it doesn't make sense to say a bisexual has B=0.5 and that we should have B_male and B_female. However, as I tried to think of a situation where you'd want to split that into two dimensions, I couldn't come up with one. As long as we read B as a relative preference it makes sense to say bisexuals have B = 0.5.
That said, his HTML chunker is, dare I say, gorgeous.

If that is an example of what should not be done, I wish there was more of them like that around.

Besides, lexing HTML in 234 lines grand total, most of them being whitespace, (169 SLOCs according to sloccount) is impressive. Writing even a basic non regex-based parser is bound to take quite some space.

To me the real conclusion is not: "don't try to parse random HTML using regexes" but "don't try to write your own wide-purpose HTML parser".

Or, as Tom put it in his SO answer:

> The correct and honest answer is that they shouldn’t attempt [trying to parse arbitrary HTML] because it is too much of a bother to figure out from scratch
'warnings which real programmers ignore' ... That tells me pretty much all I needed to know about that article.
Well, now I found duckduckgo so this little experiment may have unmeasurable tertiary value...
+1 for being hilarious sir.
Google Swiffy (SWF to HTML5)
HTML isn't even actually context-free, though you can possibly parse it as context-free (type-2) with some kludges. The kludges are the same as the kludges for parsing it in a regular language, though! (I.e. "all" you need to do is add backreferences.)

Recognizing paired start/end tags is equivalent to recognizing palindromes, and the palindrome language is only context-free if there's a finite, fixed alphabet. But the set of HTML tags a parser needs to match isn't finite. While there are a finite number of defined tags in any particular version of the HTML specification, a parser is still supposed to be able to match start/end tags it doesn't recognize, to distinguish the case of malformed syntax from the case of correctly formed syntax that uses unrecognized tags.

An easy way to see it is to try to write out CFG productions for HTML. The intuitive way requires something like backreferences, which would make the language no longer context-free:

html = '<' + tag + '>' + html + '</' + $0 + '>'

But in a context-free language you don't have that, so you instead have to do something like:

html = '<head>' + html + '</head>'
| '<body>' + html + '</body>'
| '<b>' = html + '</b>'
| ...

which of course only works if the number of tags is finite so that you can exhaustively enumerate them.
yes, i'm already using that, along with flashblock.
OK, so I read this bug report. I think it says a lot that the focus from you (and, it looks like, the representative rest of Mozilla) is on the perceived "bullying" (it's not bullying) and the "incivility" (give me a break), and not on the actual problem being reported by the user.

You want us to consider context when talking about his most recent bug report being banned? OK, then we should also consider context when reading the "...every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer]..." bug report too, because it's clear that this guy has had his objections and bug reports ignored a couple too many times.

Changing Command-F is broken ui. Period. You just don't do that. To an experienced, battle-weary developer, it's one of those blatantly obvious things that makes them want to scream at the sky.

Me? I would have just cussed at the software -- like I do every day at Firefox -- and then thrown my hands up, decided there wasn't much I could do because there isn't yet another option available, and gone on with my day. This guy is speaking for a ton of users who, like me, gave up the battle of communicating this kind of stuff over and over again.

I'm not writing this for you, though, because that would be a waste of my time. I'm writing it more as a caution to any other businesses that haven't yet fallen victim to this trap: listen to your customers, even when they're pissed off.

I wrote it here, too: http://robsheldon.com/ivorytower
You want to record / analyze every atom in the universe with a machine that exists within the universe?
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