skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having been involved in "rationalizing" a systems of hundreds of emails servers dotted round the world down to something manageable I can honestly say that nothing about the weird and wonderful ways that email can fail surprises me any more.
http://docs.python.org/tutorial/

then do:

http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/

But, I'll also say, LPTHW is deceptively simple. Try doing it anyway, since if you know a language already you can blaze through it, and when you get to around 30 or so it sneaks up behind you.
The labor market is different than a commodity market, but that doesn't mean economics don't apply. There are switching costs, people are not fungible, and labor skills represent a huge time/money investment.

But this misses the point. We want our economic system to be as fair as possible, and in most cases (and certainly in the case of flight attendants), the "fairest" solution and the one that pays what flight attendants "deserve" to make is the fair market wage.
My favorite explanation of it is that if there is a distribution to the numbers, then that distribution should hold no matter what base you're working in (for natural things, after all, there's nothing special about base 10), and Benfords law can be shown to be a) a law that satisfies this base-independent property, and b) the only law that does so.
It is less than twice as hard to find both stones when you threw 2 stones than it is to find the only stone you threw when you threw only 1.

Suppose you are the guy looking for the stones. There are two stones in the desert. Everything being random but equal, you are twice as likely to run into a stone when there are two than when there is only one stone in the desert. Once you find the first stone, it is equally difficult to find the second stone as it is to find only one stone at the beginning (if you treat "finding a stone" as independent events where you don't learn about the location of subsequent stones).

So while the idea is interesting, the analogy is poor. I much prefer the wikipedia explanation which is similar to yours but much more logically rigorous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law#Outcomes_of_expone...

Response to update: Now I feel that you are convoluting your analogy. Can multiple stones occupy the same square? How is it appropriate to equate/compare "the number of squares you walk through in order to pick up all the stones" to "the number of times a digit should show up"? I apologize, but your illustration has become completely lost to me.
Inc.'s 30 under 30 List
Unfortunately, simply taking away visible comment scores isn't a perfect solution to the problem of voting with the herd.

Even without visible comment scores there are still some indications of how many votes a given comment has received.

Highly rated comments tend to be at the top of the page of comments.

This can have a huge influence, especially in long threads where people often don't have the energy or interest to read all of the comments, so they'll tend to only ever see (and, consequently ever vote on) the comments near the top.

Also, since most everyone knows that comments near the top tend to have more votes, seeing a comment at or near could sway someone's vote as much as just seeing the explicit vote total itself.

The other indicators of how many votes a given comment has gotten are that comments with a vote total of 0 or less are grayed-out and tend to be near the bottom.

Again, this could sway people to vote the comment down, as it's a cue that the community approves of voting that particular comment down.

Like voting on polls, voting on comments would be fairer were the order of comments completely randomized and there was no indication at all (explicit or implicit) of how many votes a given comment had gotten.

Unfortunately, unlike polls, the order of comments can't be randomized without completely destroying the threading feature of HN, and without making the reading of a comment thread incredibly confusing (as replies could then be placed above the comments they were replies to, or not, since the order would be random).

However, even stopping short of complete randomization of the comment order, some of the other indications of comment scores could be removed. In particular, HN could be changed so that highly rated comments no longer tend to move to the top, and so that lower rated comments don't tend to move to the bottom. And, of course, comments with low scores need not be grayed out.

If these changes were implemented, voting on comments would be fairer, but (obviously) scanning through a heap of comments to see which are the most approved/disapproved comments would become more difficult.
I think this comment leaves out the possibility that one can be well aware of both possibilities and prefer the suburban lifestyle. Having lived in SF, I can tell you unequivocally that I cannot stand the city lifestyle. Its crowded, loud and bustling - you have no space, no large yard, rarely a garage, and driving is a nightmare. While taking public transit or walking is a nice pipe dream, and maybe it works for some people - its just not a suitable replacement for owning a car when I want to buy groceries (more than just a day or two's worth), electronics, or anything else that might be cumbersome to carry.

Currently I live in the suburbs of St Louis and I cannot conceive of a better arrangement - I have a large yard in which I can grill, socialize in and enjoy - all the conveniences of modern living (big box retailers, etc) and on weekends or whenever I need a dose of culture I can drive into the city (or take the metro) to take in the theater, a concert or show, the casinos, nightlife, festivals... whatever.

Believe it or not - I don't want to walk to the grocery store and frankly wouldn't - no matter how close it was because I buy multiple weeks worth of stuff at a time and don't want to deal with carrying 25 grocery bags around. I would rather deal with the minor inconveniences that come with owning and using a car than deal with the hassle of not having one.
Show HN: My weekend project Tigger
Giacomo Casanova as a prodyct
For my first Django project I spent a few weeks porting an old php site over to Django and then another couple of weeks trying to get it deployed to my Linode server.

I really liked Django but the deployment process was very frustrating. I started with Apache/mod_wsgi which ate up a bunch of time but I eventually punted and went to gunicorn and nginx which worked pretty well. I also ran down a bit of a blind alley with buildout but eventually saw the light and started using virtualenv + pip. I used fabric to automate deployment and Ubuntu's upstart for process management.

In the end I got the process working pretty well, save a few issues, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. There was a period of time where I was waiting to get into the Djangy beta, and I was very optimistic that that would fill the gap for me, but that company eventually went away, helping to motivate me to look into Rails so that I could deploy on Heroku. (Note: There seem to be a couple of viable Django-PaaS options today, including Gondor.io and DotCloud.)

I'm finishing up my first Rails 3 project now and I love it, especially the Heroku-based deployment model.

P.S. The other motivator for me to jump to Rails was first-class support for HAML and SASS. I tried all the Python/Django hacks and got them working, but it was clunky as hell. There have been notable complaints of late about how fast Rails is changing, but I think the amount of innovation that has been going on in and around the framework is amazing.
Data!

http://www.pea.com/imd/airline-pilot-salary.html
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/McDonald-s-Store-Manager-Sal...

Maybe they start around the same, but they certainly diverge pretty quick.
Show HN: "Design dependant search" inspired by YC's 30 ideas we'd like to fund
It is interesting that venturebeat stories about Appsterdam are making it to the front page this week.

A few weeks ago, I submitted the original Appsterdam blog post to HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2476430

That post was killed within minutes :)
Yes, primarily for the team and our expertise in sports and mobile. However, there are some pieces we built for Fanvibe that we can apply to beRecruited - but not much on the user-facing side.
It’s All In A Name – And A Domain
Cereal really does have a lot more sugar than it needs to have. I have made a personal rule that I only buy cereals with <10g of sugar per serving (according to the nutrition facts label). Even that 10g is kind of a lot - it's about equal to 3 sugar packets that you would get in a restaurant.

Anyway, next time you're at the store, try to buy cereals with <10g of sugar and see how limiting that is.
Bad UIs Lead to Customer Dissatisfaction with Connected Cars
Virtual grocery store in a subway station. Groceries delivered to your door.
As noted elsewhere in this thread, the properties of wireless networks conflict badly with the design principles of TCP. We have a custom TCP stack that replaces some of the standard TCP algorithms with new ones carefully tuned for mobile broadband. It can act as a transparent proxy, presenting a standard stack towards the internet and a optimized one towards the radio network. The packet stream is still standard TCP though, so no client changes are needed.

The product is deployed in some >10Gbps networks, and shows very impressive gains for real live traffic.
Have you tried running the Law not only on the digits in base ten, but also on the digits in base 100? (I.e. the two highest digits?)
Doing everything in one's power to speak out and draw attention to these abuses is certainly a legitimate first step before giving up and running away, and Google certainly has a bunch of resources in that regard - they've a former VP (Al Gore) on their advisory board.

It seems to me that they're rather quiet on this topic.
Thanks Zed. I'll have a look.

(What's that about 30?)
Comparing something we understand pretty well (computer systems) with something we only half understand (organic life) is not very illuminating. There are also many ways, I am sure, in which large computer systems are like the Universe.
Keanu Reeves' poetry book: Get it from Book Soup
I only wish he was similarly strenuous in his interpretation of the 4th Amendment.
There's a nice discussion of this from Terry Tao (outrageously smart mathematician; has a Fields medal) at http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law-zipfs-... which contains, e.g., the following nice observation: if X follows Benford's law and Y is any positive random variable independent of X, then XY also follows Benford's law. (Tao goes a bit further than this and thereby sheds some light on why many things approximately obey Benford's law.)

[EDITED to add: Discussed before on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687241. There have been quite a number of other discussions of Benford's law on HN, too.]
LPTHW starts to get more complicated around exercise 30.
People also probably make enemies on HN, and vote against people who they think have particularly loathsome opinions or against those who they've gotten in to particularly acrimonious arguments with.

Revenge voting, spite voting, and fan voting would be mostly mitigated by making comments anonymous (ie. by not showing usernames next to comments).

But people could still intentionally or unintentionally give themselves away by, for example, either signing their comment or by writing in a distinctive style.

In any case, I'm pretty sure HN will never switch to completely anonymous comments for everyone, so this is all purely hypothetical.
If your use case entails people saving your site to disk then you have may not be able to use // for protocol relative links, but most people don't have to worry about such things.

I'm saying that those who need to worry about such things should and the rest of us should not. Nothing more and nothing less.
It will be interesting to see if the video game stores of the world, like the movie theaters and 'R' ratings, decide to self-regulate and prohibit minors from buying 'M' games anyway as corporate policy.
Why? Isn't Perl6 the "new hot" thing? You could rename Perl5 to Pearl Classic. (see Python...)
Seems to me that when you have a group of somethings that are constantly increasing in size it would be natural for the number 1 to come up in the first digit more often because in order to get to 2, you need to pass through 1 first and in order to get to 9 you need to pass 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 first. Therefore, you should get the distribution predicted by Benford's law. The way to test this theory, would be to run the numbers on values that are constantly decreasing. I'd expect the distribution would reverse itself.

If it proves itself true, then you could use it to test if a group of things is increasing or decreasing.
I posted a link a PDF of the opinion, but I wanted to highlight this quote from Scalia, writing for the majority:

"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones."

Opinion (direct link): http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf [PDF]
Try Dive Into Python 3[1] (although it deals with Python 3, it's more recent than the original Dive Into Python and a lot of what it teaches {to not say everything} is applicable to Python 2, and it touches on the potentially troublesome bytes-Unicode difference).

It's a good, well-informed, easy read.

[1] http://diveintopython3.org/
TripAdvisor Architecture - 40M Visitors, 200M Dynamic Page Views, 30TB Data
Build in the Cloud: Accessing Source Code - Google Engineering Tools
I think it's a bad idea to name your project after a very, very popular childrens' character and then go 1 step further and use the same color scheme for your page.

1, It's going to incur wrath.

2, It's really, really hard to search for.
Michael O'Leary is a brilliant example of a CEO who is almost the complete polar opposite of Branson in every way except one: he uses his own persona and personality in the media to really drive Ryanair's value propositions forward. His widely publicised (and blue-sky) proposals, amongst others, to have only one co-pilot per flight, ask passengers to load their own baggage, and have standing-only sections are great examples of this.

Edit: his proposal to remove all but one lavatory to make room for extra seating and charging for use of the remaining one is textbook.
> Scalia is a constitutional originalist. He belongs to the right-wing judicial camp that believes the constitution means what it says.

If that was true, surely he would have to believe that the 1st amendment forbids federal copyright laws?
I drive an Audi A1 Petrol with no electric hybrid motor and get more than 55 MPG, which begs the question, why do you drive your car like a maniac?

P.S. A friend of mine drives a Citroen C1 Petrol and gets 70MPG regularly, sure it's a tiny car, but still, I don't see how 50-55 MPG is so mind blowing.
Submit your website to multiple search engines with SubmitStart.
Making the jump into the NYC startup scene
LulzSec Disbands After Last Hurrah
Hi all

Big thanks to the excellent Skills Matter for hosting this meetup and getting the video out so quickly. We've been overwhelmed by the interest in SocketStream and the number of people who've already started experimenting with real-time games, wikis, and more.

Unfortunately the video cuts off at a crucial point: The last slides talks about how we want to do testing and scaling differently, and in particular how SocketStream is still highly experimental and subject to a lot of change in the future as we learn more and refine our ideas.

After playing back the video I also want to clarify the reference to Gmail I made at the beginning. We have shown an early version of SocketStream and the websocket concept to an ex-Googler now at AOL who's been involved in many projects at Google, including Gmail.

He loves the idea and mentioned he would let the Gmail team know about it as the '100% websocket approach' potentially solves many of the problems they had wrestling with AJAX and long polling. We would certainly welcome their thoughts and contributions, along with everyone else's. We have some big problems to solve in this space and are the first to recognise we can't do it all alone.

So please go forth, have fun, and see what you can create. We are already hard at work on the next version which will include support for the new features in Socket.IO 0.7, plus a website for SocketStream containing full documentation and an 'live' API guide. Please follow @socketstream for other exciting developments coming soon.
I launched my abandoned side project and got a paying customer within 24 hours
Definitely legitimate concerns. It grew out of reversing the word git since it's git integrated task management and adding an extra ger. I'll definitely think about changing it - maybe shorten it to tig?
Just a week ago, one of my co-founders accidentally leaked the domain name of the start up we were working on. It's a bit of a problem to register domain from where we are, so the time when I got to the registration, I found out that the domain name was taken by one of the local companies. We called them, and they asked us to come and negotiate. When we went to their office, the guy told us that he heard about our start up and he bought the domain for fun, he wanted to see us coming to his office and beg for the domain. Eventually we got the transfer code, but the whole experience was not pleasant.
I wonder how many times this has already been posted to HN. Not that I'm complaining: every time I re-read it, I'm charmed and delighted all over again.
And even if not, you can probably try selling it to the locals when you are going.
Don't let that stop you from trying the book. I started programming "way back when" in ASP/VBScript. These days we're a RoR shop, but I needed to pick up Python rather quickly for a side project.

LPTHW is structured well for beginners, but it just so happens it's structured well for pros too. The exercises are a great way to discover portions of Python that aren't intuitive to you. You'll hit roadblocks where your code won't run. That's when you'll really learn.
Can you share your experience with pulling out of US?
>This isn't a Unix pitfall, it's a Debian pitfall.

And that is an example of why I do not run Debian any more: (1) it assumes that I have nothing better to do than learn all of the details of the Debian system and (2) as soon as some complication like this dots-in-filenames thing makes it into stable, it is very difficult to remove because most Debian maintainers consider it-might-break-existing-code a winning argument.
Startup from Mexico, 8 app million downloads in 7 months
8 million dowloads in Nokia OVI, more downloads than the App Store. Want to know how we did it? We offer consulting and free advice. jaime@inodesoft.com
Having worked for an adult company (and doing consulting for a different adult company now), one thing that I always see is adult companies banning access and/or credit card transactions from certain Zip codes known to be risky for the Miller Test.

I always wondered about that though, since I remember hearing about a case that was overturned because the defense was able to show that the number of adult pay-per-view purchases in the area far exceeded the number of subscriptions to their website. Also (since I'm a developer and not a lawyer), I'd really like to know why it should even matter what the community standards in, say, Salt Lake City are if the website is based and hosted in California.
1) OP's opinions about flight attendant pay are his. Others think it's a bit more exciting to fly around the world than to manage a McD's, and that pay isn't the only measure of comp.

2) There are many things OP could do besides starting his own airline. Do some Kickstarter like thing for the ostensibly underpaid flight attendants. Do a Hipmunk like thing where there's a wage surcharge on each ticket, given directly to the flight attendants.

In short, do something to put money in their pocket rather than pointing a finger at Branson, the guy who is actually putting money in their pockets today.

Otherwise, it's all too easy to be generous with other people's money.
Perhaps you should let some of the open data citizen groups know about this so they can add more data. Also, if you haven't already then take a look at CKAN[1] for datasets to add.

[1] http://ckan.net/
[W]hile NetBeans and Eclipse feel engineered, Coda feels designed.

The comparison between Eclipse/NetBeans to Coda is problematic. The OP downplays the importance of who those apps were created for, when that is a fundamental part of the design process. Both Eclipse and NetBeans are just as designed as Coda, but not for web developers. Take the “Refactor” menu in Eclipse, for example: it feels like someone is saying “We know how miserable you feel that the code sucks right now and how hard it is to improve it. Here, have these amazing tools and fix it.” For a Java developer, having a refactor do in seconds what would take a whole day definitely has emotional implications in the visceral, behavioral and reflective levels. If that does not resonate with the OP, well, that’s because he doesn’t have the same sensibilities and issues a Java developer has, not a inherent fault of Eclipse.

[O]ver 80% of Linux kernel contributions are made by corporations, so it’s reasonable to infer that most open source software is built to feel an internal corporate need. Consequently, interaction design is underrepresented in open source.

While it’s certainly the case that open source has a lot of interaction design issues, the who-what-why-how of the kernel are not the cause. The Linux kernel is the least user-facing component of the typical OSS stack. As Linus points out in an excellent chat with Greg Kroah-Hartman¹, there is very little left the Kernel developers can do to help the typical user. The problem is in the “userland”.

Part of the problem is market. To be blunt, commercial software needs to sell, and usable interfaces are an integral part of that.

OSS needs to “sell,” too: it must be adopted by a community and, in some cases, it must find a corporate sponsor. One may argue that OSS projects are started to solve the problems of a single person, but the ones that become products must have seen wide adoption. Good interaction design is, just as for commercial software, another selling point. At the same time, terrible user experience is democratic. There are loads of unusable commercial and open source software available.

What open source really needs is not (just) designers, but design. Good design can only happen when people with a strong hand, a vision and any kind of design sensibility are in charge. And that’s true for any kind of software product, not just OSS.

¹. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__fALdvvcM0
I am doing all of it with Python 3. So far, very little needs changing to make the examples work. Very clean and concise. Thanks Zed.
I'd be happy to use two-step verification if I could. I've been regularly attempting to enable it since it was announced. Gmail refuses to accept any of my phone numbers because the country where I live (Kazakhstan) is not supported. Tried three major mobile operators to no avail.
People always talk about Google's "Do no evil" policy as being more fundamental than their other business concerns, but they've demonstrated in the past that it comes secondary.

http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code

The "Do no evil" policy has no use if they can't accept it into their legalese.
Has anyone used both this and raphaeljs? How do the two compare on features, browser compatibility, performance, etc?
Justice Scalia considers historical exceptions that were accepted at the time that the First Amendment was ratified. His view is that there was such an exception for "obscenity", but not for violence.
... Availability of libraries (IMHO). Perl 5 - CPAN (pass), + CPAN (omfg). Same thing with Perl 6.
Despite the name of the project being potentially bad, I think the project itself is awesome. How do I list tasks though?