skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because of the title I thought it was and obvious flag (what does it have to do with HN??!). After reading the article I think I was wrong. It's not very hackey, but at least it's tech news, and of a very extravagant kind.
Yeah you missed the point.

The article is about how humans consistently believe in something outside their normal knowledge, not about the validity of atheism or any other belief/non-belief system.

Very interesting the 10% of atheists who pray weekly. I wonder how they do that? a form letter? "Dear whichever deity this may concern, please..."

Now even God is getting junk mail. Geesh.
Well, yes. That is the point of the article. Atheists say that Christians are obviously irrational, and Christians argue that atheists are more irrational about some things than Christians are. I wonder what the average atheist would make of this information, but I'm not surprised that most of the people writing about it are theists.
> But it is not the only way, at least not until HN explicitly forbids meta-posting.

I hope we don't, there have been some effective meta-discussions in the past. For example, one lead to the banning of valleywag stoies (I know pg posted a poll on it, but iirc. it was other users who were complaining initially).
My new project - RubyEncoder
Hi there

I've just released our new project which is an encoder (script protection) for Ruby. We needed to protect some of our own scripts, so we decided to push it further and make it into a product.
The major labels' new physical media format: the microSD-based slotMusic
Your remarks about pair programming may be true. However, I have trouble believing this makes it a poor advertisement. Consider a hypothetical expert programmer who like pair programming but hates Ruby. Such a person could easily say what you just said.

And I know one fellow--who lives in Canada--who might not care to relocate his family to Jacksonville. He could easily write what you just wrote, this time about the fact that the offices are in Jacksonville.

All of these things--pair programming, Ruby, Jacksonville--are going to cut down the number of talented programmers who want to work for Hashrocket.

Given some set of working conditions, I believe the OP does a good job of explaining why the advertisement does an excellent job of attracting the kind of people who would be interested in working for Hashrocket.

The people who don't like pair programming, ruby, or Jacksonville are not the "market" for the ad.
It's almost counter-intuitive, but I was a lot more exhausted after the half-Ironman than after the Ironman. I pushed myself a lot harder during the swim and especially the bike leg at the half-distance race. At the full race I was more easy-going, making sure I'd finish.
Technorati Confirms: Blogging Continues To Be Pitiless Work That Doesn't Pay
If there's any relevant point to be made here, it's that apparently some people really don't have anything better to do than watch a yard sign.

I wonder if there's some way to harvest these attentive-moron-hours for some more useful purpose.
Ah... as in Grey skies...
PHP vs. Lisp: The Gripes About Lisp Are Valid
I'd say Mechanical Turk, but this might actually be too pointless for a Turk task.
> the market has already voted with its dollars that it doesn't think that the underlying assets are enough to cover outstanding obligations.

What obligations? We're talking about bundles of loans. There's some cost of servicing, but they're cash-positive.

We don't know what the default rate will be and we don't know how much can be recovered from forclosures, but do you really think that the folks who paid $0.22 on the dollar for Merrill Lynch's portfolio are going to lose money? (We also don't know whether Ford or GM will pay off its loans.)

I'd happily pay $0.25-$0.30 on the dollar for a piece of these packages.

However, if I'm not allowed to buy these assets for my benefit, why should I be forced to pay through taxes to buy them?
again, what i was saying in my initial post was that all humans are irrational to some degree, which is why this boils down to a giant ad hom. just because a person is irrational does not mean that arguments or ideas that come from that person are necessarily irrational.
List comprehensions aren't syntactic sugar. They're actually faster outright than for loops are. Especially if you're aiming to use the resulting list.
Triathlon Training Tips - Even When You're Not
New Horizons in Data Centers
This could actually work as a startup idea. You setup a ustream webcam, and for $99/month the startup will have some low wage worker monitoring your feeds and in case of burglary or fire they can call police. Or better yet crowd source it and have people monitor the feed to earn "bounty" for catching a particular event. i.e. $1000 bounty if you catch some burglars in action.
This is neat.

Of course it would be just as easy to write a python script to generate and compile the LaTeX file instead, but this is neater in some situations.
There are some highly idiosyncratic bugs/problems I'd rather find the solution to on Google because finding the solution myself wouldn't be very edifying.
T-Mobile’s Google phone may offer free e-mail
downmod all you want, it won't make your bank accounts any safer. does anyone remember when the FSLIC simply disappeared in the 80's?

"the FDIC’s reserves reported it had US$45.2 billion of reserves covering 1.01% of all deposits. This is considered historically low."

"FDIC Chairman Sheila Blair said yesterday that they may need to borrow money from the Treasury due to “short-term liquidity issues”"
State Of The Blogosphere: Get To 100K Uniques, Make $75K/year
> I don't think anyone argues or don't understand this concept.

The author of the original complaint clearly didn't. As he wrote: "I asked the question on Usenet, trying to explain that not everyone I wanted to give programs to had Lisp on their computer."

Lisp is the run-time for lisp "executables". Just as one can't run a C executable that depends on a dynamically loaded libc on a machine that doesn't have a dynamically loadable libc, one can't run a lisp executable without the relevant run-time.

This isn't an odd concept. Many windows programs depend on dlls.
Does anyone know of Clisp web server hosting?

I want to run my Clisp servents without any overhead.
Can the Zune Zoom?
Human cloning gets green light in Australia
I really hate to be the one to say this, but what is with all these links to stackoverflow? These features are all well-documented in the respective specifications, and to call them "hidden" is just silly. So why the 30 upvotes?

I don't expect the discussion in a stackoverflow thread to (currently) be more intelligent or interesting than a discussion here, or a blog post which actually shows such "lesser-known features" in a more coherent fashion. Taking that into account, it seems to me that these recent submissions are simply an attempt to improve the quality of stackoverflow. Call me selfish, but I don't think it's right to (even temporarily) decrease the quality of Hacker News in an effort to improve the quality of stackoverflow.
Angry IT workers: A ticking time bomb?
is it? python3000 has deleted some unnecessary stuff. i dont really see your concern. it seems gvr is still concerned about the opposite of what you claim.
I hope there's some requirement that the phone be open or a button pushed before the phone transfers data. Otherwise it seems like it would be easy for someone to steal data on a crowded subway.
I missed the "Thus: GOD EXISTS!" line, apparently.
That's to protect against cross site request forgery. This is setting sensitive attributes via post. If a post has the authentication token, it can still set sensitive attributes.
There are a bunch of interesting papers that have been written on these topics. Cornell has been having a series of symposia and lectures over the last three years about the social science of online networks and communities. Some of the speakers/papers have been really good.

http://www.socialsciences.cornell.edu/0508/events_06.html

Most of the papers aren't linked to, but you can at least find the speakers and then Google their home page or look for the papers directly on JSTOR or whatever.
Here's another neat example of short-circuit or:

function getFoo(f) {
if (f) {
if (foos[f]) {
return foos[f];
} else {
return f;
}
} else {
return "error";
}
}

Is (almost) the same as...

function getFoo(f) {
return foos[f] || f || "error";
}

The difference in behavior being if foos[undefined] is set...
OK, I agree with you that escaping by default only stops some attacks, and if the developer's response is to simply disable the escaping every time they need to display HTML it's not going to be much help.

However, I would argue that nearly every Rails app does have susceptibility to these "trivial" attacks because Rails does not force you to think about when you want to display HTML.

I also agree that people disagree on this. But I still feel the default should always be the secure one.
Why AI Failed (and a comment by Bill Gates)
I used to work on automated surveillance. I can't wait until someone puts these services in the cloud to everyone will have access to the tools the feds are making. It actually doesn't make any sense that someone would be watching such a boring feed to catch the person in the act.

You need an intelligent DVR to find when the scene changes in a certain area, or an active system to detect if the sign has be taken. A pixel diff isn't enough considering wind, lighting changes, etc.
Memoirs of an Early String Theorist
Need some JavaScript puzzles
Hi guys,

I'm learning JavaScript and I need some puzzles that can make me a better JavaScript programmer. I mean I'm looking out for programming puzzles (e.g. Project Euler or TopCoder) but I'm looking out for language specific puzzles that can make me a top-notch JavaScript programmer.
a) Any puzzles you can recommend?
b) Any programs that you can suggest that can make me learn JavaScript internals in greatest depth.

Please recommend anything. I know some very best programmers lurk around here so any help will be appreciated. Moreover, to people who've been using JavaScript for sometime, please recommend programs that you wish you had done earlier to understand internals in a better way. Thanks in advance.
The financial and political news will fade. To be honest I think a lot of it is relevant. The political news is often regarding technology policy. The financial news impacts us all. The economy is going through some really rough times. This affects startups, which is one of the hacker news core subjects.

I have been on hacker news a long time and still don't see a shift or pattern to indicating a decrease quality in news. I think people might be over exaggerating just a little.

Its been said before, if you want to see better content, find it, post it and vote it up.
Yep. Most of those "tricks" are just applications of very basic algebraic principles (mostly the distributive property). It's sort of sad that math is in such a state that this kind of thing becomes novel.
Startup Metrics for Pirates (AARRR)
when did i ever say that was the point? all i'm saying is that the tone of this article is retaliatory, not explanatory or even-handed.

it cleanly sets up the argument that atheists believe in nutty things, so their belief in atheism is also nutty too. christians don't believe in nutty things therefore their belief in religion isn't nutty either. etc.. this is because the 'negative' focus is on the atheists, with only positive focus on the theists.

and no, i'm not an atheist.
in a massively multicore world, parallelism is more important than concurrency, and the two are not the same

I think you're right in a technical sense - parallelism is indeed the great goal, and that article used the term slightly sloppily. However, the degree of parallelism in a program is limited by the ability of the human author to cope with all the concurrent interactions. So fundamentally, the two boil down to the same problem.

One approach - that taken by Erlang and (from what I understand) Haskell - is to force people to write programs in a special way (pure message-passing or pure-functional), such that they become (almost) embarrassingly parallelisable.

Another approach - that taken by Scala, and my personal favourite, Clojure - is to keep the existing paradigm (JVM threads in both those cases), and encourage people to write large parts of their program in styles which make concurrency easier (Actors, STM, immutable values, and so on).

There's something to be said for both approaches: Erlang- or Haskell-style "purity" keeps you well-behaved, and gives you a lot more parallelism "for free". On the other hand, there are processes, tasks and other systems which are fundamentally sequential or mutable, and forcing you into conceptual backflips to cope with this can grate.

I don't mean to put one approach above the other - and I'm aware that my summary is woefully inadequate - but I do believe it's a valid debate this article is engaging with.
in a massively multicore world, parallelism is more important than concurrency, and the two are not the same

I think you're right in a technical sense - that article used the term slightly sloppily. However, the degree of parallelism in a program is limited by the ability of the human author to cope with all the concurrent interactions. So fundamentally, the two words boil down to the same problem.

One approach - that taken by Erlang and (from what I understand) Haskell - is to force people to write programs in a special way (pure message-passing or pure-functional), such that they become (almost) embarrassingly parallelisable.

Another approach - that taken by Scala, and my personal favourite, Clojure - is to keep the existing paradigm (JVM+threads in both those cases), and encourage people to write large parts of their program in styles which make concurrency easier (Actors, STM, immutable values, and so on).

There's something to be said for both approaches: Erlang- or Haskell-style "purity" keeps you well-behaved, and gives you a lot more parallelism "for free". On the other hand, there are processes, tasks and other systems which are fundamentally sequential or mutable, and forcing you into conceptual backflips to cope with this can create pointless friction.

I don't mean to put one approach above the other - and I'm aware that my summary is woefully inadequate - but I do believe this article is engaging with a valid debate, and to pick it apart on sloppy use of a word is to miss the point.
Newly-formed San Francisco Selenium meetup group
Danah Boyd: Joining Microsoft Research in January
Python decorators explained
Nokia N95 8GB UNLOCKED with gps navigation
The greatest advancement that Nokia has included with the phone is the ability to utilize a WLAN or HSDPA (3.5G) connection which is up to ten times faster than the commonplace 3G network.
If there is one thing more boring than stories about politics, it is self-posts complaining about stuff not being appropriate for News.YC.

And what could be more like reddit than such a completely content-free self-post being reflexively upvoted till it reaches the top spot, with several times more points than the next story?
Inte's Ct: C/C++ for Throughput Computing
Ok, I'm not sure you've noticed the past few years of Intertubing, but Google has the second most coveted authentication token on the net. I'm not sure what a techmeme.com is, but I definitely know that Wikipedia has logins, and admin logins, and like 3 levels of authentication above that.
All the attacks that occur in the outputs that you can't auto-escape, because they need to contain HTML by design.

It's not the "escape" that's the problem, it's the "auto".
Nobody's panicking, are they? My company chose Rails, and I'm mostly happy with it. I'm just calling a spade a spade.
Gotcha, the HTML sanitization problem. Django doesn't even attempt to solve that, which is probably a bad idea since it inevitably means people will use the various insecure libraries that are out there on the 'net. The trouble is it's /really hard/ to do right - I'd be uncomfortable shipping a sanitizer with Django because I'd worry that some weird undocumented IE parsing error would allow nasty code to slip through and result in a 0-day exploit against the entire framework.
Ask YC: How to find a business minded cofounder?
First time post... Sorry if it's been asked before.

Say I have a killer idea, but it would require a cofounder that had a bit of domain knowledge, and a lot of business experience or school and the ability to sell.

Is there an easy route to find this person?
Like I said, simple tests always have false positives.

Of course a lot of poor coders can do fizz buzz.

But, if you can't code fizz buzz in under five minutes, I guarantee you are a bad coder.

It's a simple way to eliminate half your applicants. Sounds good to me.
Company in Oz replaces lightbulbs with CFLs for free - makes money selling carbon credit
Here's the docs: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=728072011

Any ideas as to cost? It'd be neat if you could pay via Amazon's infrastructure rather than talking to salespeople.
TimesPeople, the New York Times' social network, launching tonight
If anything there would be an abundance of biz-oriented people. At every social event I go to, there are 10 people handing me cards saying they're looking for developers.
from my mobile device

that poor guy just typed that whole thing with his freaking thumbs
This does compete somewhat with Amazon's SimpleDB offering.

This is getting interesting for Amazon and Google - with their offerings do they want to offer foundation compute/storage services, or services higher up the value chain (i.e. databases, whole apps)? If they push down the path of offering both, then they are potentially competing with their own customers (at the two ends).

(As an aside) Amazon use Oracle in their own infrastructure:
http://www.oracle.com/customers/snapshots/amazon-oracle-berk...
This is brilliant. One of the best ecologic business ideas I've seen in a while.
Maybe the best solution would be to show a scalable picture of some coins, and ask them to hold a coin up to the screen make the image output the real size.
On that note, I highly recommend "The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer". It starts at zero.

After I finish my third (in 13 days), I plan to look at longer things, and will definitely check out "Going Long".
I am the only one here who already has trouble keeping up with my barebones twitter account, facebook and email (WSJ social network is tempting)?

How about a site that let's you put up a "Gone Fishing" message on every single one of your social networking sites in one click?
Ask HN: Hack a healthy, yet not expensive, meal.
Hack a healthy, yet not expensive, meal. I know most entrepreneurs are money-constrained, but I believe that an entrepreneur should eat healthy meals. It affects your brain over the long term. So can you advise healthy meals that are still within the 2-guy-in-a-garage budget? Thanks.
Adventures in Webpage Content Injection With Python
You are correct in that I did not understand the matter when I first asked the question. However, the replies that I got did nothing to really answer it; it was just handwaving.

That was ten years ago. I understand Lisp systems quite a bit better now, but I maintain that it is a valid question. Why? You have made the point that C programs can be built to rely upon dynamic libraries, and indeed they can, and this is similar to Lisp programs relying upon the Lisp runtime.

However, C programs can also be built statically, and not have to rely upon additional libraries being present. This is not only possible, but fairly common, especially for simple programs.

If a Lisp novice is trying to build, say, "Hello World," and expects a static executable as a result, why is that so much to ask? In fact, it is a lot to ask of Lisp, but if you are new to Lisp, you are not likely to understand why.

I wouldn't expect a novice C programmer to write "Hello, World" such that it depends upon dynamic libraries; moreover, a novice ought to be able to stay busy learning C and writing ostensibly useful programs for quite a while without doing dynamic linking.

Unfortunately, it seems that too many Lisp novices don't get the answer that you have provided (which is quite a useful answer). Instead, their question is brushed off as irrelevant. At least this has been the case in the past; I could not say if anything has changed.
I'm sorry, there are no such people as "Web natives"
I bought a cast iron skillet for 10 bucks (http://www.amazon.com/Lodge-Logic-4-Inch-Pre-Seasoned-Skille...) and it's the best thing ever. Fast to heat up and start cooking and easy clean up. Best thing to make for me is pan-seared yellowfin tuna steaks over veggies like asparagus or broccoli.

Get a 5oz tuna steak of sushi-quality, marinade it with some soy sauce and sesame oil, sprinkle on some seasoning and sesame seed and just sear it on the pan for 2 minutes each side. Delicious, healthy, and fast.

Same goes for chicken. Blackened chicken, easy, done. The cast iron skillet goes from stove top to oven. God I love this thing.
Henry Ford's book is indeed truly brilliant.

It's to business as Lisp is to programming languages.
awesome. security & setup is greatest hindrance for wireless, and this makes it intuitive
Oil Prices Up More Than $16
Related to this news: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311371

The one writing is Danah Boyd. Thanks a lot for posting it here bootload!
Battle Over Stolen Goods Sold Online Goes to Washington
They are not running those out of the bank balance. They're running them out of the profits of the profitable businesses, which are still very profitable.
What the Bailout Means for You
Hmmm... By public profile I mean a publicly accessible facebook profile, for example... not a public figure....
Would it be worth a group of hedge funds buying say 50% of MS and forcing it to pay all it's spare cash as dividends? What would the return on investment be on this?

(Let's assume it's worthless for MS to re-invest any money in R&D etc. Assume they'll profitably sell Office and windows for another 10 years as they slowly die.)
When did she start using capital letters?
Wow, what a great resource. Thanks for posting!
Memagent memcache proxy: consistent hashing and replication without client library support
Not exactly on topic, but... one of my future startup ideas is a robotic garden: basically, some kind of a transparent container with a controlled atmosphere and temprature, watering system, and nutrient supply that would produce a supply of fruits/vegetables year-round in any location.
This is one of the most practical resources on split-testing ever. Of course, I have my own $.02 to add here: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/one-line-s...
Written a dozen years ago, yet still interesting.

I often wish I had taken a bigger interest in math, because AI really, really intrigues me. I'm finishing up a CS degree, but that hasn't stopped me from thinking how it'd be interesting working toward developing true AI. Unfortunately, without lots of knowledge in neuroscience and very high-level math, that's something I'll probably watch from afar.
Because this:

http://ag.org/top/Beliefs/Statement_of_Fundamental_Truths/sf...

is so much more rational than belief in astrology.
As far as I understand, a stock buyback is very similar to a dividend. Another way of giving cash to investors.
No problem.

All gains for small businesses are capital gains. Treating capital gains (as opposed to wages) differently is a characteristic of personal income tax. So I think they were referring only to individual investment in small business.

The way the document is written is a little creaky, so it does seem to suggest what you thought it did, that there are "business capital gains" that businesses pay a special rate on.
Rice and beans. There are 1000 variations.