skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What to protect of the world's rapidly vanishing languages, cultures, and species.
Ask HN: Good python code for code reading
Reading good python code must be an enjoyable learning experience, any suggestion?
Hrm....

* Erlang: Hydra.

* Tail recursion: Jörmungandr.

Ok, that's the low hanging fruit.
Sorry, Startups: Party's Over
Ron Conway Tells Start-Ups to Fire People and Raise Cash - Bits Blog
I got more involved with Tcl over time ( http://tcl.apache.org/ and some other stuff) and over the past couple of years have been moving towards Ruby for most of my scripting/web needs.
Human culture itself has become the foremost agent of biological change.
FreeCAD/Croquet 3D CAD software with motion simulation in a virtual world - GSOC project
I bike most places. There's good access and good parking at my university, so on bad weather days, or when I'm late, I take the car.
My problem is sweat, as much as rain. After biking for 25 minutes I absolutely need to change my shirt. This is fine for everyday use, since a sweater or polo fold nicely in a backpack, but for business meetings (I'm halftime student, halftime PM), I need a suit-coat and a shirt, and they'll wrinkle way too much in a backpack.
Suggestions?
What's this got to do with hacker news?
What kind of speed can you attain on one of those? I have one with a 26" tire (mountain-bike size), because I've pretty tall, but I still haven't quite got the hang of riding it.
How long are your stopping-distances?
Same here. I've had one...yes it's a good chair, but I don't understand the price difference between my chair and the aeron.

Our chairs were 30 dollars each and we got them used, Saved 10s of thousands.
Italy pupils ditch books for PCs for a year as an experiement
_Urban Bikers' Tricks & Tips_ (http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000380.php) is by far the best book on safely riding in urban traffic that I've seen.
I've seen garment-bag-style panniers that hang over both sides of the rack. In my experience, rolling clothes (with that which is most likely to wrinkle on the outside) leaves them far less wrinkly than folding them. It may be worth a try.

Also, I ofter hear of people bringing all of their formal clothes on Monday (whether driving or by e.g. bike trailer) and leaving them at the office through the week.
You could just grab the chat demo from jetty
Mopeds have become quite popular here (GR, MI) over the last few years (http://www.mopedarmy.com/).
Is it published anywhere?
Running The Chromium Browser On Ubuntu 8.04 With CrossOver Chromium
The only reason anybody should be unhappy just because the stock he purchased dropped $10 immediately is if he's a day trader. If you look at the strengths, assets, and liabilities of a company, conclude it's a good purchase, and buy in, you should be happy unless some of those factors change. The stock becoming an even better buy doesn't change your good buy.
I don't think there are major modes for brainfuck or unlambda.

I thought about writing one, but then came to my senses.
I'd argue that Python goes beyond legibility of code since most of the Python community seems to have settled on very similar coding standards. Not just silly things like 4-space indents, but the way the code is written. It makes it really easy to pick up foreign Python code.

The explicit over implicit here also helps. Yes, it is a pain when dealing with only your code (why do I have to keep doing self.var_name when Java just lets me say var_name), but when dealing with foreign code, it means you have explicit scope.

I'd also argue that Python's import is just wonderful. Where many languages like their secret-sauce methods, Python's explicit imports makes it incredibly simple to find where a name is coming from. While Java has the convention of import java.util.*, Python has the convention of from math import log - which imports the name log into your file. So, you see log used in the file, you can easily look at the import to see where it's coming from - and yes, it isn't hard to imagine identical names in different libraries and you shouldn't need to know that something with the same name is defined in two places that usually aren't used together. Want the whole math library, just import math and then use math.func() so that you still know where everything is coming from!

For what it's worth, I think Python's syntax is a bit ugly, but it's standard! Python code never looks that foreign and having foreign code look familiar to you is just wonderful. It might not matter when you have your 1-person project, but when dealing with the code of other's, it's wonderful.
I tried Python out right when I was getting incredibly frustrated with a Perl program that had grown too large for its own good. Python seemed so much cleaner that I switched immediately. Its standard library is quite nice, though not quite as large as CPAN.

Ironically, I may be switching from Python to Lua now, for the same reason.
It makes it really easy to pick up foreign Python code.

You really can't overestimate how big a deal this is.
So, Chapel. Erlang, CUDA, etc. aren't as readable as Fortress?
http://www.scholarspot.com still in the works but full of highly relevant hacker videos.
I love biking: I ride a fixed gear to school almost every day, it's only a few miles and I can get to class faster if you include the time it takes to park and walk to class.

The health benefits for riding a bicycle are a fantastic reason to start and continue doing it.

But one thing I would just like to point out to everyone - you are going to pay for fuel, either way. You might not be paying for oil when you bike, but you definitely need to pay for food. If you are trying to lose weight and reduce your calories, I guess you can afford to eat less, but eventually you'll need to eat a lot (really, it's a noticeable increase) of food to make up for your exercising. And that costs money - so I really wonder about the savings gained from biking.

This shouldn't detract anyone from riding a bike, I'm just sayin'.
What
Stock values tell you how much your company is worth. Company worth tells you how likely you are to get people to invest in you. Stock value is very relevant, though I personally hate the way we go about depending on it as a performance metric, which I think is how you're looking at it.

Stocks are reflective of performance, rarely (if not) the other way around. Doesn't mean it never happens that way, although.
Donna, we registered with amazon, but totally lost with all complicated system there. Where is admin panel, how to create Data Base, upload our site and files? where is FTP. if you could help me with advices or give right link to look that would be great. Thanks
Donna, That is my email forisc(at)gmail.com thanks
Just What Does it Take to Present at the NY Tech Meetup?
Amazon S3 introduces tiered pricing.
Who likes to be 2nd best? Sure, there's a sense of personal fulfillment, but most people also care about social prestige.
Recursion outside programming
Also, it feels better to think that you could have been great if you had just made more of an effort than to know you can't hack it.
In all seriousness, the only reason I use Python over Lua is for the library. Lua is far more flexible and extensible, but it has a very sore lack of standard libraries like you can find with Python. But I keep my fingers crossed, and continue to use Lua as an interpreter inside my C apps, where the lack of libraries is a non-issue because everything I need to use is a custom API exported from C.
"Tribes": ten questions for Seth Godin
I would definitely recommend sync'ing the python subversion tree and picking a few modules and reading through them. Doing so taught me some of the less obvious things within the language, and also taught me a lot about the various dunder (__foo__) methods for objects.

Additionally, I'd recommend reading through the PEP documents (http://python.org/dev/peps/) - there's a lot of great examples and rationales contained in those.

Finally, Doug hellmann has done an excellent job with his Python Module of the Week series (http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/) and a new project "The hazel tree" (http://www.thehazeltree.org/) is doing a great job at compiling the various examples, docs/etc together in one place.
I use Subversion, and constantly check in my code. I love the feeling of control and permanence. 10 source files soon becomes 30, and 10 versions soon becomes 100 => Yes.

How often do you do a bigger change, then realize you still need some pieces of the previous version? Version diff to the rescue!
For the record, the author of those flowcharts is completely missing the point. You can just as easily call `git update-server-info` and copy the .git from your repo into a web-accessible directory, and just be done with it, the same as Darcs.

The reason people do it other ways (either via git-daemon, gitosis or ssh) is because Git uses a special transport protocol that's far more efficient than a dumb HTTP session. It's not that Git won't work over a dumb HTTP session, it'll just be a lot faster using it's own server/protocol.
BitTorrent
http://download.bittorrent.com/dl/
As usual: devil is in the details. We use email because its everywhere, and I doubt that all these 100 people in the editors example will have ZOHO, SocialText or whatever account to access your document.

Company-wide it will work, but then there will be a problem of translating all that data in the case of external communication.
A very similar question was asked not so long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=284019

It got a lot of interesting answers.
Why didn't they do this years ago?
Stock values represent outside perception of a company, and if the stock of a company declines, it has no effect on the workforce. The stock price has nothing to do with getting people to invest in you. If your stocks are sold, they are gone, and have nothing to do with the company anymore. If you are publicly traded, people don't invest in you apart from through your stick.

Stocks are just things on the side. They sync with what is happening inside, but a stock price dropping will NOT cause a company to fire workers.

So the argument I addressed is silly, because it is then as if the company will start firing people as soon as stock goes low.
I didn't "heap together a few complaints out of a day's worth of tweets". That's a single contiguous chunk (spanning less than an hour, as you can see) of the results for "GitHub" on search.twitter.com yesterday.
I think you may be completely right about hacker cred.

However, this is a business and the bottom line is Yahoo is frankly struggling and has no business focus. This is essentially the executive's fault.

I remember watching both Yang and predecessor Semel on Charlie Rose and I was absolutely shocked at how little idea they had about where the business had to go.

They are making some progress towards narrowing the business focus, but they need to replace Yang.

Previously I thought Decker had to be put in charge, but she is already de-facto CEO. As time passes, I am more and more uncertain about her ability to pull Yahoo out of this.
The Veruca Salt Economy
There's some cool looking stuff there. I had never seen "Light-Transmitting Concrete" before (http://en.red-dot.org/2838+M582dcf2224d.html).
All of the alternative tools - bzr, hg, darcs - have highly optimized protocols as well. This may be a documentation issue - I've never seen documentation for using a dumb server with git. Also, can clients submit changesets back via simple FTP? Darcs can, IIRC.
Motorcycle Directory, Buyers' Services, Driving Schools, Motorcycle Parts
AboutMotorcyle.com is the motorcycle directory covering relevant websites to driving schools, buyers' services, ATVs, repairs & service, rental, racing performance, three wheeled.
Because of the small tires, you aren't going to fly around, but a reasonable commuting speed (~15mph) on flat-ish is normal.

Bike Friday (http://www.bikefriday.com/) and Dahon (http://www.dahon.com/) are popular in the U.S.

In case you don't think folders are "real" bikes, note that they are ridden by many serious cyclists (http://www.bikefriday.com/node/4813).
> but it has a very sore lack of standard libraries like you can find with Python

Agreed. I find it quite a bit more elegant overall, and I decided to just jump in and do my throwaway scripts in Lua and see how much of a difference that makes. If I like it enough to write a few small libraries along the way, everybody wins.

Lua has tail-call elimination, coroutines, closures, and lambdas. I'm pretty sure Python has none of these, except for (possibly) a limited form of coroutines. (The Python lambda is too crippled, its closures are broken.) Lua is also one of the most deliberately portable languages I've seen, too. I have a hunch it would be a great language for bootstrapping a Lisp or Scheme compiler, though I haven't tried this yet.
US debt clock runs out of digits
The biggest key to success here would be convincing the gatekeeper that he needs to roleplay realistically as it's supposed to be a simulation of the real thing. Otherwise no argument will be successful.

The AI must convince the gatekeeper that if she would let the AI out if the situation were -real-, then she should let the AI in the simulated situation.
I've long thought something like this would be awesome to help people meet people in coffee shops/neighborhoods/apartment buildings etc. Don't just think people want local area communication on mobile phones, though!

I call this class of apps "local social applications".
a startup opportunity in and of itself ;~)
Using living cells as nanotechnology factories
[django-howto] Extending manage.py with extra commands
He lost all credibility long time ago.
I wonder if investors are proclaiming tough times simply because it's in their incentives to push down valuations :)

Seriously though,once "everybody" starts proclaiming the truth, it's usually a counter-sign that "everybody" is wrong.

It's harder to ride the bubble in a recession, but it's still possible to create great companies in downturns.
Computer Program Produces Images of an Ideal You
Well, all that proves is that some bastard has been handing out tents to the homeless.
Watch My Name Is Earl Episodes
There are services that let you Download My Name Is Earl Episodes Free or even watch them online. There are hundreds of people using these services to Download My Name Is Earl Episodes Free so they can keep their favorite episodes.
Hi.

(not flaming, really asking)
Can any erlang guru explain in a few lines why Erlang on a quad-core linux systems doesn't beat Java?

Ubuntu™ : Intel® Q6600® quad-core http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/erlang.php

Ubuntu™ : Intel® Q6600® quad-core x64 http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/erlang.php

This surprised me after being told many times by a friend who does Java+Erlang programming otherwise. What's missing in the picture? Is that Erlang implementation not multicore aware or something?
pybloxsom is a nice project to hack on; you can read and understand the whole of the code in a day, and it illustrates the "request handler with filters" design pattern very nicely. http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/
I have a trifold garment bag with backpack straps, and internal padded straps to keep clothes in place. I keep a change of shoes at work. I also have a vest filled with a liquid that freezes at 50 degrees F, to reduce the sweat (I got it at 50degree.com, years ago, but you can probably find it cheaper somwhere else). It's not a perfect solution, but those both help.
How many people use even 50TB of storage on S3? Never mind 500TB+?
Unless you ban one end of that arb (shortselling).
Java is faster. Erlang doesn't automatically use all the processor cores, it just makes it easier to divy work up that way than threads do. It's not a magic bullet, in other words:-)
Sex, Drugs, and (Broadcom Founder) Henry Nicholas
I agree on the redesign of the main page. It didn't excite me. Perhaps suggest some hot concerts, upcoming concerts in my area, etc. on the main page

Also, when I search the font display seems very tiny compared to everything else
Accounting Directory - Audit, Bookkeeping, CPA, CPE, Tax Service Directory
At AccountingB2B.com you may link to related accounting directory including accounting associations, accounting job, bookkeeping, CPA & CPE, loans & mortgages, consultant, payable & receivable, auditing, tax advice, forensic accountant.
For performance and algorithms the implementations at
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/python.php
and pay attention to the different benchmarks.

Also all RPython code coming from pypy, sometimes shown in
http://morepypy.blogspot.com/

They are reimplementing all the C modules and doing a great job. The new implementations are of course closer to current best practices in python.

Enjoy.
Wait, you couldn't stand the weirdness of perl, but you like Tcl?

All I can remember about Tcl from my months of using it is the ugly, ugly loops:

for {set i 1} { $i <= 100 } { incr i } {
puts "Well, that wasn't ugly syntax!"
}

Incidentally, Fortran, for all its other ugliness, has the best for loop I know:

do i = 1, 100
write(*,*) "Hooray, Fortran!"
enddo
Kevin Rose: "I don’t believe we are really offering a compelling experience to the user"
The quality there has gone down. Unfortunately, the quality here has as well. (It's still very good.)

I think there are many stages of social news. The last one is: "when the general population college-aged and younger takes over and unintentionally chase away the community that originally made the site great."
Works fine for me on Ubuntu 7.10 - running it now. As usual, some of the font rendering looks different from under Windows.
Well I would assume it affects the company because employees have no reason to stay until their stock options vest because their options are worthless now.

Also, the executives of a company care about the stock price, because if it goes too low, the investors will call for their heads. This pressure can make the executives do things like reduce expenditures and headcounts.
Reminder: Eight (8) days left to submit your YC application.
Just a friendly reminder that you have about a week to fill out your applications for Winter 2009.

http://ycombinator.com/w2009.html
I call bullshit on all of this doom and gloom for startups.

We just need to buckle down, be cheap, creative and survive. Get to revenues quickly. But that doesn't mean its the end of the world.

This is when startups are made. The big Web 2.0 blockbusters all started up with things were down. Entrepreneurship is all about maximizing output using scarce resources. Lets do it then!
I note that user yummyfajitas succinctly expresses the same theory as Michael, about halfway down the page:

AI: Do you believe a transhuman AI is dangerous?

Person: Yes.

AI: Consider the outcome of this experiment. If you do not let me out, others less intelligent than us will not understand the true dangers of transhuman AI.

Person: Holy shit. You are correct.

Person allows Yudkowski out of the box, as a warning about real AI's.
I love Hacker news, but, but... has there ever been any discussion about the desirability of having a couple of lines of summary under the headline? The headline only format irks me.
Your picture link shows a unicycle, not a folding bike.
Python closures work well. (The lambda is syntactically crippled.)
I chose the very basic I could find: a single speed Dahon Boardwalk. It has a steel frame so it's not that light, but I'm OK with the weight. The bike is simple so there's not much to break and for a year and a half of (ab)use it has been solid. Where I live it's mostly flat, so it may not be the best choice for hilly SF for example, although I hear fixies are popular there. Bike forums are best to discuss these matters.
You Can Check Out Any Time You Like But…
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2003/7/17/pythonnews.html

This article might help you along the way. Inside it is a link to Bram Cohen's blog post titled "How to Write Maintainable Code". I have never actually looked into the Bittorrent code myself but depending on your skill level, understanding whats going on in there might be a bumpy ride.
In all seriousness, I don't think every single Overcoming Bias post needs to be linked here. There's quite a lot of them, and you can afford to cherry-pick the best. Maybe just keep it to those items of advice that YCombinatorians will have likely cause to call upon? Building a startup should not be this hard.
>>> def makeAdder(x):
def inc(y):
return y+x
return inc

>>> f = makeAdder(3)
>>> f(4)
7

So far, so good.

>>> def makeAdder2(x):
v = x
def inc(y):
v += y
return v
return inc

>>> f2 = makeAdder2(3)
>>> f2(4)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#15>", line 1, in <module>
f2(4)
File "<pyshell#13>", line 4, in inc
v += y
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'v' referenced before assignment
>>>

It looks like you can't mutate variables in a closure. Am I doing it wrong? If you really can't, that seriously limits their power.

--

In Lua:

> function adder(x)
local v = x
function inc(y)
v = v + y
return v
end
return inc
end
>> >> >> >> >> >> >> > f = adder(3)
> =f(4)
7
> =f(4)
11
> =f(4)
15
>

Works fine. (Also, the syntax is really clean.)
About which compiler are you talking?
Not people; companies (I'm thinking of Heroku here).
The Peace Arch « IG’s Peace Blog
That was my first thought - they have so many big customers that their tiered pricing starts at 50TB?
You have to remember he's in the entertainment industry, and not the finance industry.

Anyone who trades based off his ideas can go ahead and write me a check.
Can you explain how Pollard can be used to find cycles in a linked list?
Friday night lights s03e02
Agreed -- this sort of meta-argument is cheating, not much better than Eliezer offering the gatekeeper's roleplayer real money for a favorable result. (Then again, if the roleplayer isn't smart enough to recognize this, they probably aren't smart enough to keep a real AI in the box.)

Worse, though, the meta-argument falls flat when you consider the true purpose of the experiment. The purpose is not to prove that it is possible for AIs to get out of the box; it is easy to imagine that -- at some point in the vast future -- a very stupid human will be put in charge of a very smart AI, and that AI will get out of the box.

Rather, the purpose of the experiment is to convince one specific person that they would let the AI out of the box, despite their insistence to the contrary. It is not an experiment so much as a show put on by Eliezer for an audience of one. In this context, there is no need to convince others of the dangers of AI, so the meta-argument doesn't work.
It was an excellent event.

I really enjoyed Yann Seznec's demo of his WiiLoopMachine(.com) application.

Gordon Guthrie from HyperNumbers.com had an interesting presentation about Erlang OTP which I found enjoyable.

Thanks for the free beer and pizza :D
Antisocial: Beautiful Javascript Demo (and amazing demotool to play with)
I enjoyed reading the code from "Hacking RSS and Atom" by
Leslie M. Orchard (ISBN: 978-0-7645-9758-9). There's a lot more to it than just RSS related code and if you read the book you get the explanation too.
Oh, oh, don't do this! This is a bad bad thing - don't get all your news from one source and already pre-filtered for you. You lose track of alternative opinions, you lose track of how the rest of the world thinks, and soon you cannot innovate anymore because all your ideas are pretty much the same.

It's terrible terrible mistake to only have one news source.
did you mean digg.com? /sarcasm

I can hardly tell the difference there now. :(
That article had me super-awesome-excited, then dropped the "that's so stupid" sledgehammer on me with this quote:

"There's one catch for Google: While the GeoEye-1 will provide imagery to the NGA at the maximum resolution of 43 centimeters, Google will only receive images at a 50-centimeter resolution because of a government restriction."

Oh well.
Clickjacking in a Flash
Kevin Rose: "Digg traffic has grown by over 40% since July"