skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not too sure I agree with the specific notion that availability of distraction destroys creativity. Here's my (off the top of my head) take on creativity:

Problems 1: You come up with an idea, and tell yourself, "that's a good idea, I should remember that!" and then you don't remember, or you tell yourself that you need to focus on fixing these bugs at work, or on whatever other task is at hand.

Problem 2: Your mental energy is sapped by whatever you're currently doing. It's like the classic Stephen King quote about how working simple manual labor (laundry) was fantastic for creativity and writing.

The solution to problem one is to always have a means of taking notes, one which you will definitely revisit. This frees you from wanting to focus off-task when you need to be on-task, and it allows you to revisit and refine your thoughts. Problem two is tougher. Find a job doing exactly what stimulates your creativity. Let's face it, though, that's not as easy as blogs and Dice make it out to be. The only advice I can give is to quit your job and do exactly what you feel like doing until you've found a problem you want to solve, but that's not a very constructive path.

I've found that by simply doing whatever I want each day, I'm exposed to way more interesting problems that I want to solve. I listen to things like podcast while performing tedious, manual labor (cycling, weight lifting, cleaning, wrenching, etc), and I feel like it's both easier to get the tasks done, and I'm left with a feeling of better variety of mental exposure. I'm currently experiencing a much more creative/inventive period in my life than I have in years.
That's a hobbyist RC car, meant for adults with money, not kids. I have a friend who has a similar model, and he spends time buying new parts and upgrading, like any other hobbyist. It has a gas motor and I suspect this one does as well-it goes as fast as their Humvee on the limiter. A cheap toy store model wouldn't last a week in those conditions and wouldn't hit the speed to make it effective.
Change the title to say "page," not "pg."
Rob seems to have done a great job translating the python-ness to ruby-ness, but Zed did the hard work -- he created the approach and wording for Python.

I haven't tried to compare them, but my interpretation of Zed's comments is that most of the text is still Zed's.

Edit: You might be short shrifting Eco's translator. Reading his stuff is hard enough, translating must be a royal PITA. </tongue-in-cheek>
Ask HN: Online music store related legal matters
For some time now, I have been thinking about a little different way of selling music online, but I have no idea where to start with the legal matters and how to avoid getting my pants sued off. Can anyone recommend any books or other resources?
The LtU post makes it sound quite interesting, but what browser do I need to view the video itself?
I love these suggestions. Thank you for the feedback. Specifically the Khan videos I think are really helpful.
Somehow, the Federalists have managed to change the conversation from, "should the state provide this service?" to, "should the government provide this service?" I don't quite understand why the state governments should not make their own choices, and people can move to the states that they find have the most acceptable laws to them.
The guy in the live chat said they look negatively on large numbers of submits. I think this is a poor idea for two reasons.

1) This will simply encourage people to develop offsite and submit when they have working code. On their site they allow recruiters to see what applicants are typing in real time, and pushing people off site will render this function useless.

2) In interpreted languages like python my work flow usually is incremental change and test, so very high numbers of submissions will not be unlikely. I don't think that kind of programming should be discouraged.

There should be a Test button as well as a Submit button. The employee understood my concerns, so hopefully they get that worked out soon.

Another criticism: The problem desctriptions seemed poorly worded to me.

It is a good looking site either way. I'll be keeping my eye on it.
Great point. I will add those as well. Important context.
I think a big aspect of creativity is finding new connections between things, applying a technique to a different domain, and combining ideas.

I think you need alternation, between stimulation and boredom. And the stimulation needs to have interesting ideas in it. Though, depending on the type of person you are, you won't find it novel (and therefore not stimulating) unless it does have new and interesting ideas in it.

But to be fair, I find my mind does tend to wander to creative problem solving if it's not occupied. i.e. boredom does help me. I think it might be that working out new ideas is hard work, and it's easier to be distracted.
I'm looking forward to seeing how Clojure improves with invokedynamic in Java 7, and lambdas and closures in Java 8. Hope the ramp to maturity for a Java 8-based Clojure is a quick one.
Apologies for the mix-up. Point well made.
That is just illogical.

The "banks" mistakes and failures do not justify the crimes committed by the "robbers". If you forgot to lock your car one day, it would be acceptable for me to steal said car if my intent was to teach you to always lock your doors?
There is some degree of truth to this, but it is balanced out by the fact that Internet gives you so many more ideas to combine. Creativity is essentially combining different ideas, and technology puts at your dispisal a constant stream of new ideas. You can follow in great depth the ones that tickle you.

The majority of people will always passively consume. That's nothing new; it's possibly a lot more visible now with a lot of content-free blogs/twitter/etc.

But for those so inclined, technology helps a lot. For one example, look at how many free programming languages are available for use now -- things that you can build billion dollar businesses on. It wasn't like that in 1985. And a pretty promiscuous combination of ideas that was required for this to come into being. Or just consider open source in general.
I was under the impression that the extraction and purification of rare earth elements was such an ecological catastrophe that environmental protection laws in the US had made the existing mines in the US so unprofitable that they shut down.
True, but the barriers can also be of several types, which would matter when looking at how persistent they're likely to be. For example, if China dominates because its reserves are significantly easier to extract technically (e.g. closer to the surface, higher concentration), that would be a different situation than if it's more due to environmental or regulatory policies, or to labor costs.
Ask HN: Git Interactive Tutorial
I've been using git personally for quite a while now for version control, but now I'm on a team of multiple developers, working on a huge piece of software, and dealing with tons of branches... Needless to say, getting used to the workflow and proper way to do things when collaborating on a much larger scale is a bit difficult. Is there anything out there that teaches you how to go about using git properly like an interactive tutorial? I've been shuffling through the git book, but I learn much better by doing and I feel like if there isn't an interactive tutorial posing situations and teaching you the proper way to checkout, pull, rebase, commit, merge, etc then someone should work on creating it! I'm thinking something like Rails for Zombies but for git workflow and conventions.
I'm sure I could write a simple phong shading ray tracer faster than I could build a copy of this web site. Re-implementing a well known and well understood algorithm is easy, making a working and popular application that people enjoy using is hard
I hope the system recognizes C and C++ as two different languages. That would be one hipster feature.
This is not an issue for the government to address. I don't think that people should let them stand by and die, but good governments don't have the powers necessary to give out free money to people they think deserve it. Communities would be expected to handle it in the way most palatable to them. How much more room would Americans have for charity if their paychecks got 50% fatter due to eliminating income and payroll taxation?
This story is old, and false. http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp
They could also put a live REPL next to the editor and record the interaction with that.
That is not necessarily a math puzzle. Sounds more like a programming task formalization using math notation if you take the brute force search approach. Using math concepts helps too phrase interview questions in a non-ambiguous way, like "write a function printing all prime numbers in the range 2 <= n <= 1000".
Facebook and Google Static maps
The nice thing about MPD is that it can be controlled by all the clients you want, and MPC (the default client) is excellent for scripting.

OF course, for manual control ncmpcpp - which is ncurses - is easier to use.
For an example of 100% unemployment watch Idiocracy.
There have been Common Lisp and Scheme implementations in the JVM for ages (Kawa, ABCL, and many others -- I wrote one myself called Skij). It's not clear to me why Clojure took off when those others didn't. But if reinventing Lisp is what it takes for Lisp to get traction, I'm for it despite my CL roots.
Law enforcement officers get passes all the time for life-affecting (and even ruining) behavior, with stepping over the line being just a few bad apples or a problem of perception that is routinely flagged as "followed policy," but once civilians get even close to the line it's a first-order travesty.

If civilians have to endure "you can beat the charge but you can't beat the ride" harassment from LEOs, they can get a little sketched-out once in a while. Populist actions like this are pretty much the only checks remaining on LEO behavior.
A simple solution to the Social Security Problem: Legalize Illegal Immigrants
SkyHook for one: http://gigaom.com/2010/09/15/skyhook-sues-google-in-a-locati...

Another example is their book scanning: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2008/10/googl...

Although the way Google does it is differently than other companies. Since Google makes their money by giving away information they aren't so much about enforcing patents, but rather in blindly infringing. Their modus operandi is to do run all over your IP and then try to back you into a corner if you try to assert your IP.

If you don't believe in IP, of course you'd side with Google. Because neither do they. But if you believe companies actually have legitimate IP then you'll tend to see Google as one who simply copies or steals and then says, "What? Patents are bad. You're being mean to us -- we're the good guys!"

It's not in their best interest to respect IP. Their best interest is to make everything public -- except for all the data they've collected. That of course is holy.
Share things you're willing to do for $5,$10,15,0r $20
It worked with my Chrome on Mac.
Don't you think that Fox News could destroy the Tea Party almost as easily as they created it?
I guess there is some truth to this. I usually have my best ideas while I'm jogging / walking.
See, I've been jogging the same route (with minor variations) for almost 4 years now. Around 20 minutes after I started walking I can feel ideas pop up in my head. I've had some of my best ideas of the past years while jogging.

So that even helps combining two useful things for me: I process the happenings of the day, and I stay in form.
There's boredom, then there's freedom from distraction.

I'm free from distraction when walking the dog in the woods by myself. I'm bored when stuck in line at Meijer's behind the guy whose credit card expired yesterday. The latter is excruciating and exhausting.

But aside from that: Scott Adams has a weird way of mixing some decent insight, like his thesis here, with some really inane stuff that sounds like late-night college freshman bullshitting. I mean really: "You might see the best-seller lists dominated by fiction "factories" in which ghostwriters churn out familiar-feeling work under the brands of famous authors. Got it." Has he never heard of Charles Dickens? Probably not, actually. But those fiction factories have existed since books got cheap enough for the mass market.

Not saying he's wrong - I guess I'm saying he's got nobody in his life willing to shoot down his pretty arguments before they hit the Wall Street freaking Journal, and that's a little sad.
While I agree with you, semantically, the author did already address that.

"Technically, HTML5 is a specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (Footnote 2). Many pedants will claim this is the only correct usage. For the rest of us, HTML5 is a useful term to describe the rapid changes that are currently happening to the Web platform."
It doesn't really matter what the LAWYER says. It matters what the COURT decides.
The problem isn't cash, its capital goods, and flooding the system with cash will just cause damage to companies who are to small to move fast enough to acquire large amounts of the flood.
In pg's ANSI Common Lisp, he defines a ray tracer in one page of code, creates all the necessary functions for spheres in another page, then inserts 28 spheres and prints out the world in a dozen lines of code. There's part of a page of utility functions, like creating a point structure. You can examine the code here: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/acl2.lisp . Search for the first instance of "surface".
You don't need to recreate his brain. Collect all the recordings of his voice and photos of his body. Model his body, particularly his chest, throat, and head, until you can accurately reproduce his voice. Then model his speech pattern based on the recordings of his speech, and all you've got left is to hire a few good writers and scientists to write the script.
What? No Lisp option?
I've tried Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on mine. The page loads, and the player loads, but the video does not.
I submitted the same Java code 3 times. Compiled ok only on the third time since I poked around a bit and found I have to call my class "Solution" in order to pass compilation! The guy in the live chat said he'll change my # of submissions to 1 instead of 3, since the challenge didn't say that the class be called "Solution". Hasn't done so yet. My score is 52.5 when it should really be 57.5. Hopefully they fix that. Am on to my next challenge.
Java 7: Too Little, Too Late?
New phone, big hurrah.

Is Samsung going to strangle the upgrade support on this phone too? It got tiring as a (former) first gen Galaxy S owner watching every other phone keep up with the Android release lifetime to the point that the Galaxy S was the last super model Android phone still running 2.1 by a year.

I eventually ended up on an HTC Evo, but that was an unrelated move.
My disagreement was with the claim that "the Flynn Effect is in full swing". The recent small downwards trend you acknowledge is incompatible with that claim. From everything I've read on the topic, the Flynn Effect ended in the US about 20 years ago. FWIW, I administer Raven's APM tests in the course of my work.

Please speak for yourself about trolling wikipedia. I simply responded to the lazy GP's need for a citation with a google search of a relevant phrase. That said, the very article from which you quoted a sub-section has this in the header:

"Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations"

This claim carries a citation on wp.

Your link at the bottom about educational attainment is completely irrelevant to the discussion. Intelligence and formal schooling are two different things.
Like mentioned before...you have to opt in to typing your phone number on your Facebook page, and it is visible to the people you've shared your Info page with, it doesn't get there by itself. More crying about nothing to make Facebook look evil?
Oh, now we understand the confusion, haha. We shortened "page" to "pg" because of the 80 char limit. Sorry for the confusion! We'll change it now. Thanks for letting us know!
Great Talk as well. Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415...
That's really interesting. If there is criteria beyond the solution you produce, they should really list that clearly on the site. If I don't know that and I'm applying, I might be only half-focusing while doing other things and take a long time and maybe not come up with the perfect solution right away.

I think this kind of extra testing could be detrimental because it's going to stress people out. Give a hacker a fun challenge and set him to work, he'll probably do it better and faster than if you set him in an empty room with a big timer and people scowling at him.
Just FWIW, This is still mostly HTML:

(trtd ,@body)
(trtd (vspace 10)
(color-stripe (main-color ,gu))
(br)
(center
(hook 'longfoot)
Use JSHint with

/*jshint asi:true, eqnull:true, laxbreak: true */

and you'll make everyone happy :)
Defcon panel: Anonymous is here. LulzSec is here. They’re everywhere
Where do jobs come from?
Interesting, but as a (potential) candidate I wouldn't be very happy if each company had its own coding challenge, since it would make getting a job much more time consuming than it already is.
eqeq: true

see http://www.jslint.com/lint.html
I remember reading a long article/blog entry once, and it claimed that we living humans are descended from 80% of all the women who ever lived but only 40% of all the men.

Haven't been able to find it again, though.
The point: we, the Ruby community, are suffering our own success. Popularity leads to people leads to bureaucracy leads to mediocrity. See "JSF".

Isn't this (rubylang.info) a great example of lack of bureaucracy? Someone isn't satisfied with the current ruby-lang.org, so instead of trying to go through lots of bureaucracy, they rather make something completely new?
If in doubt, I'm a Teapot serves well ;)

What's the HTTP error code for "ambiguous input, please select from one of the following unambiguous suggestions"?

Just returning an error isn't helpful, you want to help them resolve it. So you want to return something, and this isn't success (in an application sense) as you didn't do what they asked of you, you're doing something else. But it IS success in HTTP terms, the request made it to the server, got processed fine, and came back fine.

Application codes != HTTP codes.
A good approach is to have a well-determined, public salary policy, as described by Joel Spolsky in http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html
The talk is also provided in other formats:

http://tele-task.de/archive/lecture/overview/5819/
Google Maps directions from Japan to China - Look at #42
Then the company can hire the guy who posted a solution on his blog if the problem is hard, or not care anyway if the problem is simple.
I'm 35 and I'm learning Clojure these days after many years on Java and web programming (JavaScript and now mostly Groovy and Grails). When I was on the University I had one class which included programming in Scheme. I absolutely hated it at that time, so I skipped it completely. Now I regret it :-) ... Clojure is a good alternative for me, feels much closer to what I already know (JVM-based languages).
So there may be some spectacular aurora on the way, and apparently we're on track again for the next solar maximum.

Seems to be relatively inconsistent where we are, one moment we're heading for a mini ice age, the next moment we're on track with normal predictions again. Perhaps the reality is that we just don't really know enough to say that we understand solar activity to the point of making reliably accurate predictions about it yet.
Wow! Thanks a ton :) Fixing all of them. Please check up the site in 20-30 mins, everything would be up
Yes, thanks swanson
Except that I don't want to, nor do most other developers out there. Not because they necessarily lack interest but because there's a pretty good chance they're busy enough already.
Might want to tell your co-founder that pictures of hot chicks on his blog might not give the most professional impression:

http://sp2hari.com/
Then why are all the icons in the iOS interface the same shape? I wonder if this isn't a oversimplification.
Code is sexy :)

Edit: No offense intended.
The current bureaucracy is flawed. It is not community owned but government by a "core maintainer" group where decisions are not publicize nor is there a roadmap anywhere.

I went through the necessary communication channels BEFORE I started this and what I experienced from that is the result of rubylang.info.
Competitor Codility (funded by Seedcamp) who launched a couple of years ago was discussed quite extensively at the time:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1039140
for starters I doubt joe klein, a jew, wants holocaust 2.0 implemented.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I don't think JS has tail-call optimization. At some point you'll likely hit an error similar to too much recursion, but it would require a scope chain in the thousands.
You can say the same thing for any OSS project but then why is open source so damn popular? If you don't want to contribute then that's your own decision. No one is forcing you to do anything.
Members of Bin Laden SEAL team killed in Afghanistan
Something makes me think there is probably an easier, albeit more boring way to perform step #42
This is just an example of one of Spain's problems: We waste to much time an energy arguing about who has the biggest dick. Barcelona or Madrid?
What I've seen is fascinating— I wish the video were faster, or available in a format that didn't completely shit the bed every time the stream hiccups. (The "other formats" available are Real and... Real HQ.)

Edit: As I discovered elsewhere, there is MP4 available for individual segments of the talk, just not the whole thing. I'm set.
LOL....I agree. Makes you wonder...if this is an easter egg, or someone really put this in with a straight face.
Thanks Michael. Great comments.

I will definitely stay in the game for sure. :) I know it is important to motivate people. But, to the people who work so hard for your vision, I think founders need to take care of those hard-working employees. I feel frustrated because I wish I could offer what they deserve.

I think, start-ups need strong team with good talents. We are fighting with big companies and well paid jobs. If we just wanna take people who are willing to take high risk to join the start-ups, we are gonna miss out a lot of great talents.

Start-ups are fun, and we can attract great talent. But, we all need to pay rent and survive. I am just hoping that we could find a balance, pay the talents a fair salary, and enjoy the fun start-up ride together.

Josh :)
One possible counterargument to the state-specific approach is that if you have a handful of states that really do well, a majority that do okay, and a few that really screw things up, it's unfair to the residents of the states that chose poorly. They may never be able to move to a better state because the decisions of their current state left them in a financial position too weak to afford life in a different state.
They're not collecting the digital canon from companies.
thanks, good information!!
I don't own a smartphone and therefore have never installed the facebook app yet I can see my list of contacts with their mobile phone numbers. My guess is that this page just lists your contacts that are sharing their mobile phone numbers with you and it has nothing to do with using the mobile Facebook app.
Actually health care costs are growing far larger and faster than the cost of social security.
Did you check that link yourself? The only other format for this talk is Real— not all of us consider that an alternative.
ApplePy - Apple ][ emulator in python