skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, but the connotation to "IT cost center" is, "thing to be cut to smallest footprint possible".
Not just PEP8-compliant. Some of these are just plain bad.

The first one I was greeted with when I opened the site was:

> print eval('+'.join(map(str, [1, 1])))

If I ever saw this in production code, I would lose my mind.

It's the kind of one-liner I'd expect to find in an obfuscated code competition. It's not intuitively understood, shows a lack of basic Python functionality (the builtin sum() function), and most of all, it's SLOW. As in, 54 times slower than a simple sum -- tested on xrange(1,10) -- on my development Macbook Pro.

That said, clicking through some other examples, there are a lot of great Python examples on this site. Just beware of some of them, and always make sure you test new code yourself.
Open-source community of window farmers
I remember the amazon self-published spam-book problem (people scraping wikipedia etc. and self-publishing thousands of low quality e-books on the kindle marketplace) And I wonder how this will translate for Small Demons, when someone with an SEO mindset will try to leverage this system? We'll see new "optimized" books, full of celebrities names, brands, products, companies, etc.
> Maybe from their standpoint it would be more beneficial to google users who are used to typing in 'hacker news' to visit this site, but since when did that matter to google?

from google's point of view, a user who types "hacker news" into google is almost certainly looking for news.ycombinator. therefore, it is highly desirable for the site to be the #1 result.
4 Reasons Why I Chose My Lead System Pro
78 dollar laptop running Windows 7?

Hmm...
Book Review: How To Win At The Sport of Business by Mark Cuban
great comment clarifying the discussion
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Wouldn't making more content easily available curb piracy? Look at the examples of Spotify, Netflix & Steam. There's plenty of anecdata about pirates going legal once the legal services are convenient/cheap enough.
Skin Bleaching
I could spend a lot of time explaining why python, eclipse and pydev make a good development platform etc., - but I think you need to explore your own thoughts a bit more. It seems you're unstatisfied with something and think that Linux is the answer, but you don't know why. Tell us more about your goals first.
His eBay comment was about getting good at the skill of selling things and making money. He does not advocate this as a business but rather a way to practice. It is not risky at all. He tells you to buy 1 iPod and sell it. When you sell it buy another and repeat the process until you feel like you improved your messaging, sales pitch, pictures, etc. Worst case scenario you get stuck with 1 iPod. How is that risky? Did you think he was advocating this as a business? He's not, just practice.

Also, if you don't like him that's fine but why not still try to learn something? The reality is in life they are going to be plenty of people you don't like, plenty. If you can't learn from others because of your own personal bias you're going to hold yourself back big time.
Creator of "Dogcow"!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow
C�mo Aprender Vela
the videos of the build are pretty cool -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6TAguL2nFU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk7vO7uDjeI
I turn notifications off excepts for texts and calls from my friends. Otherwise, my cell phone is a push-only device. Who cares if someone mentioned me on Twitter? Who cares if I have an appointment? Who cares if some bank wants to sell me some bullshit product? Not me, so I opt out. I just want to use Google Maps and read my RSS feeds on the train.
In general, one should be aware of the six principles of persuasion as outlined by Cialdini in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion of which the "exploding" part is an example of "scarcity". These principles are just as relevant to buying a house or car as negotiating for a job.

For the record, the six principles are:

* reciprocity (hey, they flew you out there, right?)

* commitment and consistency (they get you to agree in principle to working for them before they make a concrete offer)

* social proof (look at the great people who already work here)

* authority

* liking

* scarcity (this offer is strictly limited)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini#6_key_principle...
Al Jazeera Sport frequency
the point of ads is not to be maximally useful, it's to maximise some function of (usefulness to you, profitability to the advertiser).
#3 is great, but I don't see anything about Dropbox in my Pragmatic account. Looked under FAQs couldn't find it there either. I'll keep looking but in the meantime I'll just download and then upload to Dropbox.

Update: It's under 'edit profile' right before the last listing about Kindle settings.
And apparently my password is "Too long".
Cudos to his girlfriend for conditioning him that well.
The Psychology of Human Misjudgment is available online (or an iteration of it is at least):
http://www.rbcpa.com/Mungerspeech_june_95.pdf

Also avaiable: A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business
Charles Munger, USC Business School, 1994

http://ycombinator.com/munger.html
hi escape,

Can you email me with your site URL? aaron@linksprint.com. I think I can help you.

Cheers
The difference is Nissan.com is not selling knockoff Nissan cars.
Do you think there aren't enough pictures on the site?

Did you see the process section?
Indeed. Where's the due process? Where's the right to a trial? The right to face ones accusers and see the evidence presented?
My Account --> Edit Profile. Scroll down to "Dropbox Settings".
Upgrading flash does ask me to close Spotify.
it's not about deaths. it's about lives.
Dietrich Dörner, The Logic of Failure.
I think skymt got it right. Polls have shown that as Spotify has been growing on the Swedish market during the recent years, music-piracy has declined enormously.

What they did right, was to provide a service that was easier to use than piracy, with the right price. That's the key. It may not get everyone to pay, but it'll get you the large majority.

Now, we're all just waiting for a Spotify-for-movies. There's no Netflix or Hulu over here, as Sweden is far down on the priority-list.
The Robin Williams book is great. I used it as a text several years ago for a class I taught. A very good overview.

I was a bit surprised to see the Edwards (Drawing on the right side of the brain) book. Pleasantly surprised. One of the things I've always stressed to my students is that learning to draw is actually learning to see. People think the can see things clearly and objectively, but what they are actually doing is recognizing. (There is a small motor skill component to drawing, but seeing is by far the most important.)

If you want to communicate visually, you first have to learn to see.

Design theories and formulas will only get you so far.

Those students who learned to do a little sketching improved dramatically.

And yes, it is hard to do. It is a process as deep as you are.
TorrentFreak is a news site, much like Ars Technica or zdnet. Yes, they focus on torrents, but they themselves can in no way be claimed to be offering infringing content (even if you believe a .torrent is covered by copyright).

Yes, I agree with you that the general public may be dismissive of what they say due to their championing of a technology largely used for copyright infringement. It certainly is a PR issue. That said, TorrentFreak is not really in the business of trying to convert skeptics. They're a site that specializes in preaching to the choir, much as boingboing does. There's a legitimate place for sites like that. They get the knowledgeable masses fired up about opposing bad legislation and illegal government seizures, which is never a bad thing.

As for torrent sites in general 'providing access' to pirated content, that's a pretty fuzzy area. Google itself offers a torrent search [1]. Are not they, too, 'providing access'? Where do you draw the line? Yes, sites like thepiratebay are well-known for their brazen encouragement of piracy. That does not, however, mean that they are guilty of copyright infringement. My concern with making simple links illegal is that it breaks the Internet. It imposes upon site maintainers the responsibility to ensure that no links on their site direct people to content that the US Government deems unlawful, which is crap.

When we accept facilitation of a crime as a crime unto itself, we are conferring upon the authorities the trust that "facilitation" will not be overly broadly interpreted. I don't think we can do that, given the USG's behavior. Thus, I resist any attempt by them to claim more power to decide what content is and is not acceptable.

[1] http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=003849996876419856805:erhh...
For small files when you're working with someone it's easy. For large files though it's a pain - you have to wait for it to upload from your end, and then for it to down on their end.

This is pretty annoying if they're sitting 10 feet away, and you can get it done faster if you just pull out a USB stick and do it that way.

There really needs to be a solid way to share P2P with someone on the same network.
Ok. Both great points. And very true.
>One thing Wei may not appreciate is Sun taking the time to stick rhinestones all around the edge of the casing he so lovingly created

What's wrong with her personalising this? That piece of editorialising was unwarranted, I'm sure he was delighted that she fell in love with it enough to put her own mark on it.

To the critics below: it just made me sad because if my boyfriend made me something awesome like this and I wanted to decorate it, I don't want him to feel bad if others comment on it - as if it were something so girly to ruin his hard work (and I own zero rhinestones).
You're right, putting columns next to each other is unnecessary.
"This isn't HN getting some sort of preferential treatment, this is just the effect of having a userbase full of hackers"

Of course it's preferential treatment. And if you scan the last month or two of Matt's comments they are general in nature and not specific as in:

"I think I know what the problem is; we're detecting HN as a dead page. It's unclear whether this happened on the HN side or on Google's side, but I'm pinging the right people to ask whether we can get this fixed pretty quickly."

You don't think "pinging the right people" and "get this fixed pretty quickly" is preferential treatment?
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Actually, much as I've blasted[1] Google over the years for not doing anything (like abuse-desk staffing) that requires People Not Algorithms...

Giving occasional personalized help is a great way to avoid a total black hole while still creating an escalation path. It's like having EXPLAIN QUERY stack traces on NewRelic. You don't need a deep trace of every transaction; you need a deep trace from a few representative squeaky wheels, and you use that information to improve the underlying self-serve process. This is something Google, with their "1/3 of the company parses logs", excels at.

You'll note neither Matt nor Pierre offered to do anything special for PG. They didn't say "Oh! I love HN, and we want it to succeed; I'll go push out a manual override that makes sure we use only the one crawler you unblocked." They gave him exactly the info he'd get from Webmaster Tools plus general knowledge, and told him how to use Webmaster Tools to fix it. Maybe they'll go figure out how to implement that "you're blocked!" hover-over in SERPs, but again, that would benefit everyone, not just HN. There's no special treatment here.

[1] http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2008/04/troubleshooting-a-post...
Startup Incubators: Here, There and Everywhere
Their sample code page (https://developer.v.me/docs/sample_code) indicates they are using Chase Paymentech underneath. V.me appears to be a service layer abstraction (read: middleman). It will be interesting to see if this gains traction; they obviously have the name recognition.
I thought I'd read the whole article since some are still commenting on it. First of all, if someone were to post an article on HN about a new technology that gets recursive compression (you can compress something 80%, and then do that again and again) because "they have a new algorithm", they would be laughed off the front page. Some people just don't know that that is impossible. Is this is what is being claimed here? There are three ways to get "unlimited detail" in computer worlds. 1) magical compression. 2) algorithmic generation 3) hierarchical composition, and as we know, 1 doesnt exist.

Looking at the article, this is clearly using method 3. Lets look at this "new" hierarchical composition. Hiearchical composition is when any given space is composed of smaller objects, and those smaller objects may also be composed of smaller objects.

When you do this in 2D games from 1980, we use the technical term "tiling the crap out of everything". You have a bunch of obviously repetitive pieces. If each tile is 16x16, and there are 256x256 tiles on a map, then one could say that there are 16 million pixels in the world, on a computer that had only 1Mb of memory.

So that right there is your clue that this guy is a fraud. 42 trillion voxels? Are they 42 trillion unique voxels, or are they tiled? [1] Right. (a "voxel" is the 3d equivalent of a 2D pixel).

The thing about tiling is it doesn't just apply to pixels or voxels. Tiling is just a spatial subdivision algorithm that splits space up in to 2d or 3d grids. You can store a color in each grid cell, and then its a voxel. But you can just as easily store the head of a linked list of polygons. And you can also store a pointer to another tile array, and that tile array can then store voxels, or polygons, or more tile arrays. When you do this, its a hierarchical data structure.

Do games/graphics programmers know all about this? Yes. Do we use hierarchical composition? Yes! All the time! Do we use axis-aligned hierarchies? Yes, e.g. octrees? Do we use regular grid composition all the way down? Fuck no. Why not? Because splitting up space along predetermined, regular, axis-aligned divisions is fucking awful for modeling interesting 3D worlds [3]. What you get is a brick world: [2]. Such rigid, regular, axis aligned hierarchy fits the real world poorly.

[1] http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/featured/gameinform...
[2] http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/featured/gameinform...
[3] Ok, minecraft being the exception =)
Umm...Yes.

Seems like "bending over" to me:

"but I'm pinging the right people to ask whether we can get this fixed pretty quickly"
Quantum computing and energy programming primer
Ask HN: Do you guys misplace stories, too?
At least once a day I read an interesting story on HN, click "back" to look at the comments, and... can't find the story I was just reading.

It's still there, of course, but the a:visited color is light grey. A color that's not only difficult to see, but that HN has trained me to ignore in comment threads.

Am I the only one? Maybe a nice dark grey instead?
9 Reasons Wired Readers Should Wear Tinfoil Hats
I would seriously disagree with verbally accepting an offer and then reneging. It's unprofessional and although unlikely when you're just coming out college, it can follow you through your career.

I've been in this situation before and what's worked for me is to play the same game they do. If they tell you that they need an answer by a certain date, you tell them you're very interested in their offer, but you have already setup other interviews that you want to see through, because it's the right thing to do. Leave it at that.

Don't try and get the date changed, just be non-committal, and tell them you'll do your best. Job offers are very rarely yanked because you didn't met the first deadline for an offer.

When they call you 2 days before the deadline and ask if you have an answer, tell them you need "X" amount of time and then you'll give them a decision. Don't say "Can I have two more weeks", say "If you can wait until Jan 15th, I will give you an answer then". Recruiters have been jerked around before and if you provide your own deadline (and hold yourself to it) they'll often go along with it.

RF
60-Second Adventures in Thought [video]
If you're just doing it for the money, stop reading HN and go into finance. If you're quantitatively inclined, hedge funds, if not then i-banking and PE.

Seriously, if all you care about is money, go where the money is. It's certainly not in writing blogs and posting on HN.

My bet is people here do what they do for reasons other than money. It just so happens that HN-type talent is in high demand so one can usually earn some good money.
Programming, Motherfucker - Do you speak it?
* Learn JavaScript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/learn/javascript

* JavaScript. The Core: http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/ecmascript/javascript-the-core/

* Learning Advanced JavaScript: http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/

* JavaScript Garden: http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/
While you are correct, there is due process that is supposed to happen for the trademark owner to claim that domain name back. That's part of what ICANN does.

The US government simply taking them by force is not the way these things are supposed to go down.
The book is a marvel. I read the first edition when I was in college and it taught me more than two semesters of basic drawing taught by an indifferent "modern" artist. In most books that try to teach drawing as a mechanical process, as opposed as a purely "creative" exercise, they seem to leave out a "magic" step that makes things possible. Turns out that it isn't magic, but it is fairly subtle. The books makes a process explicit that is too often left to subliminal happenstance.

Don't mistake, the process is still hard, and requires much effort, but it does remove a lot of the magic feather aspect.
People are probably downvoting you because it's totally off-topic, in addition to be a really well-worn question. This is something you can easily Google and get hundreds of answers for.

That said, the answer IMO seems to have something to do with the fact that some very important communities ready for a different VCS model, and some very good and influential developers answered that call at roughly the right time. For example, both Mercurial and Git were started in direct response to the Linux Kernel having their bitkeeper license revoked.

Github is really a killer app for git, and that's probably one reason it's gotten as popular as it has.
Have you actually used street view? I have never seen a street with less than 5-20 meters between each position.

According to a quick calculation that would give you a minimum apparent speed of 170 mph. (15 f/s * 5 m/f * 3600 s/h / 1600 mph/m/s)
You have to think globally, not locally. For example, laws against murder and pillage are laws against the freedom for market forces to govern individual behaviour. However, the imposition of a police state restricting these behaviours makes individuals more free because they can act with little fear of murder and pillage.

Likewise, any law restricting speech is a restriction of freedom in the small. Some (myself included) argue that it increases freedom in the large. You may not agree, but I hope you appreciate my argument that there is an argument to be made and that it is not “obvious” that enacting hate speech laws are antithetical to freedom in the large.

As for the not relevant to the discussion bit, I was responding to that specific comment, which brought them up.
Finally connecting the dots: codecademy.com != codeacademy.org. I saw the former when it launched on HN, then the latter a few days ago on HN and was a bit confused that it didn't seem to be linked to YC at all. Now I finally see they are two different entities with a common goal but very different approaches.

To make the matter worse, codeacademy.com redirects to codecademy.com.
Recent legislation allows the seizure of domain names effectively by fiat, without any tinge of due process. Arresting a physical body and putting them on trial is still burdened by such ancient, outmoded traditional ideals, and so is rather more difficult.
The Readable Future
Powerful Testimonials -- The Key to Generating More Referrals
Great! Snapped up a few books. Thanks for the heads up.
Interesting. Are you a fresh college grad?
Now we need a warrant to snark on the internet? I thought the line was funny and not all that serious. And even though I don't share the appreciation of rhinestone bling I agree the personal touch shows how much of a success the gift was.
And this is why I have a deep respect and admiration for Mr. Torvalds
Http://www.banglamdfarid.com
banglamdfarid.com
I do understand the thought but I think it is not a good gesture to do. You could always cap crawl-delay at a reasonable maximum and additionally allow people to fix mistakes through the webmaster tools (eg if they told your bots to stay away for a long time but in the meantime want to revert that).

Maybe instead that hostload could be parsed from robots.txt? It sure seems like the better mechanic to tweak for load issues (while traffic/bandwidth issues are still unresolved).
He's done the same thing for nearly everyone that's asked about something Google-related here. So yes, everyone on HN gets special treatment.

Answering people's individual questions doesn't scale to the entire Internet, so Google really has no choice but to address problems on a case-by-case basis. In this case, Matt reads HN and personally wants to solve the problem. That's the only way Google could possibly work, so that's how they do it.
That image has one hell of an alt text.
I think the problem is more about visibility, adoption and becoming industry usable language (community, framework, library, learning curve, etc.) then being groundbreaking. Language being too innovative and too different from mindset of developers in my opinion would create barriers for adoption.
Take a look at functional reactive languages and value they offer for web or even to regular UI scenarios (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2057). There are a lot of research and real world languages done, but adoption rate is really low.
On another hand if you do hit a sweet spot by simplifying existing scenarios and piggybacking on some popular concepts (example of node.js library using JS and simplifying web developers workflow) you instantly get adoption and visibility.
> For example, laws against murder and pillage are laws against the freedom for market forces to govern individual behaviour.

These laws exist to avoid citizen A encroaching upon (and unfairly limiting) citizen B's freedom. Citizen A being a xenophobic assbag does not, in and of itself, restrict citizen B's freedom. If citizen A acts on his xenophobia, there will likely be laws allowing citizen B to get redress (and if there are not there should be), but making xenophobia itself illegal is thoughtcrime, and it is a restriction on freedom of speech with little to no justification (and value) outside of emotional appeal (one of the worst basis I know for lawmaking).
With the ability to broadcast internationally immediately, and the 4.3 degrees of separation that they claim people now have in the modern world, its little wonder logically (although still pretty amazing that we've come this far) that the owner of the camera can be found. If 200 people see this post even, and there's only 4.3 degrees of separation between people, probably less with geographic and language concentration, then I'd almost be shocked if you couldn't find the owner.

Still, very very cool.