skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm looking for a way to have machine learning algorithms on google app engine (GAE). Ideally, it would be Python 2.7 + Numpy with C or C++. Is there a hack to do it? Do I need to rewrite C code in Numpy code? GAE allows .pyc files - can I use inline C inside Python/Numpy and compile it to .pyc, then deploy the whole thing on GAE? What are my options (beside switching to Java, that is)?

This should be like ~4h project. Many people on HN are interested in data mining and web apps. I'm guessing it would be appreciated contribution here.
By charging for Not Free services like multiuser video calling and providing extremely competitive long distance calls on the PSTN.
Thanks for the recommendation! I didn't know about them, and I hated the fact that I had Comcast. I'll be planning a switch.
"Just check Seth Godin's main page"

Loads and runs lightning fast for me. Of course, I'm using RequestPolicy, so I don't have to load all of the third party crap that he includes from addme.com, google.com, sethgodin.com, facebook.com, quantserve.com, youtube.com, feedburner.com and scorecardresearch.com
The problem isn't the infographic it's people spouting bullshit statistics. This is hardly a new problem, learn which sites are trustworthy and which are not.

The only 'problem' is that infographics are really good at getting across a message and far more human friendly than just statistics.
This is a very important point. I've got an incredibly simple app on the market, but because of some good publicity, it's gotten some good download numbers. On the flip side, I'll see great apps that've gotten < 1000 downloads simply because the author didn't get out there and write to every blog in sight.
Hi, part-time Khan Academy employee here (I didn't get your email, just going off what you've written here).

Probably WebGL exercises are not quite what we're looking for because all of our exercises are supported on browsers down to IE8. That said, it's still possible to make fun, interactive exercises like these:

http://www.khanacademy.org/exercise/derivative_intuition

http://www.khanacademy.org/exercise/congruency_postulates

If you're looking to contribute using C and Python expertise, then KA exercises are probably not the best way to help out. (Although the backend for the website is open-source and written in Python; it's possible you could help out if you're looking for a long-term project.) If you're still interested in making exercises, then the best way to get in touch is in the chatroom here:

https://www.hipchat.com/g2m3UVDtY

(This weekend the room is a bit empty due to the holidays but there are often some people around at all hours.)
I did this and deeply regret it. There isn't a good way to manually size and position elements in code. Doable, but not in a pleasant way. The real pain is doing all of that manual labor a second time over for an ipad version.
I upvoted to get the thread noticed. Not even because I think 4 hours will make a difference but because I saw the comments on your site and there were a few other people who seemed interested in doing the same thing. If this thread getting upvoted spreads the idea around then I'll be happy.
There's the productivity aspect, too - Ada projects have this habit of taking rather long :)
I (and a few others, I think) hang out in #cobol on irc.synirc.net (which is Something Awful's "Cavern Of COBOL" channel)
Best wishes for a peaceful new year to Hacker News participants around the world. The other country I have lived in besides the United States went through a complicated process of making 25 December a civil holiday

http://www.gio.gov.tw/info/festival_c/law_e/law.htm

but I am aware that in many parts of the world 25 December on the Gregorian calendar is just one more day of the year (as it was to my Puritan ancestors in New England). Whether you get the day off work or not, I wish you much happiness and much sharing of new ideas on Hacker News in the new year.
That is pretty impressive. 3 weeks. I hope your app didn't have to do anything database-related (sqlite/CoreData - that can suck up time)
Yeah, I think SOPA might be the decoy.
Downvotes? Really? Any counter opinions on this?
Just donated $10 to Wikipedia in support of @jimmy_wales stand against SOPA and keeping the Internet free.
If you really can enjoy the same level of semi-instantaneous knowledge of "virusdom" as AV companies, then you're the 0.00001% of the population. Your solution simply doesn't scale in the real world.
You're not crazy, just principled. Good rational explanation of your position, too.
The biggest benefit I've seen out of Yammer is in the fact that it increased employee interaction, not just document sharing. After my company rolled it out, I was shocked at how many of us took to it. Everyone knows the reason: it looks and feels like Facebook. When we encounter that look and feel, our minds go into "sharing" mode. We get comfortable because it feels like a comfort zone. We share documents, but we also joke around more. Our interpersonal relationships got better, and I'm sure that had a positive impact on our work.

I don't think Google+ will have an equivalent effect because few people visit it habitually, and when they do, most posts are fairly formal/professional instead of playful/casual. Despite Google+'s intentions, it doesn't encourage a relaxed mindset.
I spent two weeks traveling in Xinjiang in 2006 and everything I saw suggested that it was an occupied territory. The most obvious sign is that the population almost everywhere you traveled were ethnic Uighur, but the police forces were all ethnically Han Chinese. Prior to visiting Xinjiang, I had lived 1 year in Beijing and Handan, Hebei for 6 months. The other detail that caught me off guard is that for 1.5 years, I had not seen a police officer with a gun. Every police officer in the East of the country had a baton, but no gun. In Xinjiang, not only were the police of obviously different ethnic origin, it was not uncommon to see them armed with handguns and occasionally with an assault rifle.

I don't know anything really about the issue discussed in the article other than hearsay, but there is no doubt in my mind that Xinjiang is undergoing "ethnic cleansing" by dilution. AFAIK the same is happening in Tibet.
I hope everyone is having a better xmas than I; this year is joint first worst xmas ever.
Tiger Mom Long Distance
I wrote a 30+ page guide/book called Building iOS Apps From Scratch a few months ago, here's a link if anyone is interested. http://designthencode.com/scratch/
Yeah. In this competition collaboration was discouraged. That does keep politics/alliance building skills out of the equation at the cost of worse overall final products.
A 40-year-old puzzle of superstring theory solved by supercomputer
ill add one: when you console.log elements they are 'live' in the console.

so for eg. log an element, alter it, and then log it again both logs will show the new instance of the element.
> Journalists will love it.

This is probably the most important point. Boycotts of SOPA-supporting companies, as many have pointed out, do very little to stop the bill from passing. What they do succeed in doing is making sure opposition to the bill stays high in the news cycle and enters public consciousness.
Bloody hell,one piece of advice-don't ever use "bloody good" or any other phrase with the word bloody in it.That's the real world,not a Harry Potter movie.Good luck!
Think Money Leads to Educational Results? Think again.
Backbone patterns
Anonymous' AntiSec Has Taken Down Stratfor, Claim 200GBs of Emails
Care to expand on the good publicity angle? Was it a blog? Was it pure luck or a well worded email? etc.
yeah, exactly, will be in HK next Wednesday! :) So glad you are following our story.
JQuery Transit - CSS3 animations for jQuery
The #startups channel in irc.freenode.net is full of HN'ers, and usually active.
What's your code written in?
Last time I checked Protect IP didn't have nearly the same support as SOPA. I guess that's changed?
Top 5 Unknown Android games of 2011 (all indie)
Are you running into merge conflicts with other people?

Generally, we avoid any merge conflicts with XIB files. We have a small team so basically anyone who is dealing with it has an 'exclusive' lock until they are done.

That includes avoiding having a feature branch that makes changes to XIB files that might change in the main branch. Merging XIB file changes isn't for the faint hearted - and the likelihood of having a working XIB file at the end of a merge is not 100%.
It seems they are variants of the same idea, which if passed separately would likely have their language reconciled in 'conference committee' (where members of the House and Senate merge the language). If both reach that point, passing the merged version is almost certain.

Right now neither has been 'killed'. They're due in January for more action: either continuing House hearings (SOPA) or a Senate floor vote (Protect-IP, if Harry Reid gets his way).
Business, Casual (2005)
This would be a perfect opportunity to get some lawyers in a room and try to use the DMCA, son-of-SOPA (whatever passes), etc and try to bludgeon copyleft infringers with the new IP-is-our-god-now laws. Especially if they're using a website to distribute binaries without source - start sending takedown notices
Any London hackers who want to get involved with a charitable project should check out Interactivism. http://simpl.co/interactivism/YP
Thanks for the tip. I just turned off the Like buttons.
While I sympathize with the writer of this post, I don't really see what recourse he has? If the license allows for 120 days before they have to release the source code, what could he possibly do?
Using the PCRE library as a lexer in Php
I also read The Lean Startup, but didn't like it much. Actually it didn't teach me anything new. Maybe because I read it after reading the "Running Lean" by Ash Maurya and "Start Small, Stay Small" by Rob Walling. They cover the same ideas and are more practical.
Pretty similar situation here. Was told to experiment with mobile apps first, but after deciding to use my own computer went native instead. From a background in PHP and only very limited knowledge of how Obj-C works, I managed to get an app mostly finished in the best part of a fortnight.

The biggest hurdle was actually trying to create a native form; something which is remarkably difficult to find good resources for compared to other things.

Had I tried to learn in my own time, without the pressure of having to get something working at all, I would have spent months reading textbooks and learning how to write basic hello world apps.

Instead, I made more progress than I could ever have imagined just by being given a challenge and an idea of what to make. And that's sometimes the best learning experience you can get.
Perhaps generate individual keys using some secure random process. Then you can check your logs now and again and if a few particular keys are submitting obviously bogus data you can just remove them from your records and block them in future.

As has been mentioned elsewhere there are other risks by the fact that your allowing people to enter data into your system using an actual language (SQL) as opposed to a few POST vars (assuming your webservice sanitizes input properly).

There are just many more possible attack vectors with mysql , one of which would be sending massive crossjoins or similar to the DB to crash it.
PG, I suspect that you'll do a better job of explaining why SOPA is bad than some other people, and you have more credibility than most, but taking a stand against SOPA by itself isn't enough. The root cause of SOPA is a culture of piracy and a lack of participation by leaders in technology to develop better enforcement regulations.

Laws like SOPA are going to continue to be proposed until a better solution to copyright protection is enacted. If we leave those proposals to be constructed by media companies who don't care as much about the integrity of the internet as they do about their bottom line, you'll just keep getting new laws that overreach and threaten our freedoms. The fact that we're facing SOPA is bad, but it's the direct result of too many people pretending that copyright protection isn't an important issue that deserves better solutions, both by arguing against the rights of creators, and failing to proactively help create a better system of enforcement.

If you really want to do something powerful to stop SOPA-like legislation in its various forms, your essay should also aim to remind people that we're facing this legislation because people engage in piracy, and that we need leaders in the tech community to be more proactive about improving the DMCA if they want to have a voice in what shape copyright protection takes. It might seem like SOPA is "the problem" but it's really one party's proposed solution to a very real issue. An argument for why SOPA is bad without proposals about how to meet the needs of the party for whom SOPA is a solution only sends those people back to their misguided drawing board.

I respect the stand you've taken against SOPA. I'll be really excited about it if you use this time to push the dialog forward on behalf of tech and content creators.
On our platform the only problem has been having to perform count operations, the way we do it scores can be listed in unpredictable fashions and MongoDB is inherently bad at counts.

Aside from that the read:write ratio massively favors reading for us and caching makes that a negligible operation most of the time, and (unless like in our case you're providing leaderboards for games you don't control) MySQL and Memcache should carry you fine.
My wishes that next years will be better. May 2012 bring everything you hope for.
Here's another intriguing thought: will our present tech industry favorites be doing the same thing to whatever the next big thing is 50 or 100 years down the road? Or will we be the first industry to break the cycle?
Quora, where else
The notion of programming languages being “too powerful” rests on fallacious assumptions.

The faulty reasoning is this: If Hacker Hortense does something with powerful language L that Newbie Nathan finds confusing, we assume that language J won’t permit Hortense to do that, and therefore if we standardize on language J, fewer bad things will happen.

This reasoning is faulty. First off, if Hortense and Nathan don’t see eye to eye on how to write programs, no language will solve the problem, because you have a disparity of experience and/or education. If what you want is code Nathan will like, and you don’t want to raise Nathan to Hortense’s level, you have to drag Hortense down to Nathan’s level with coding standards. And you could have done that in Language L just as easily as J. If you ban L, what will you do when Hortense implements Parser Combinators and Monads in J?

The first flaw is the assumption that language features introduce complexity, when in reality it isn’t the features, it’s the solution to the problem that confuses.

This indirectly leads into the second fault with the reasoning. There is a hidden assumption that Hortense is going to write so much code, and there will be so many “problems” Nathan will have with his code, and every problem we eliminate is one fewer problem in the result. This is not how software works.

Let’s say Hortense writes some code in L, and Nathan complains that there are seventeen things he doesn’t understand. Ten of them rely on features of L, seven are independent of the language. If we tell Hortense to rewrite things in J, we cannot assume that the result will have seven things Nathan doesn’t understand. It might have even more as Hortsense works around J’s deficiencies.

For a demonstration of this, look at any modern Java Dependency Injection Framework. These complex and opaque software machines are made up of of XML, interfaces, and classes. They exist in no little part because Java lacks the reflection and meta-programming of languages like Lisp or even Ruby. Are these thing simple by virtue of being written in Java instead of Lisp?

Imagine for a moment that DI frameworks don’t exist, and that Hortense had built something in Lisp with macros for dependency injection. Nathan is nonplussed, so Hortense rewrites it in Java and rolls her own DI infrastructure. Will the result really have fewer things that Nathan doesn’t understand? Or will it be even more inscrutable thanks to the accidental complexity of working around Java's limits??

The “problem” is not that some languages are too powerful, it is that people imagine that teams of programmers can work together on complex problems without communicating, and some people assume that when there is a disparity of experience of knowledge, that people can work together without educating or learning from each other.
Just to add to your list:

Ben Stiglitz (Terminal.app, Apple employee) at RubyConf 2008 introducing Forth: http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/forth.html

I also recommend checking out Factor. It grabs ideas from EVERYWHERE (Forth, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Joy, etc.) and wraps them all up into a nice package.
If Sonic is an option, inquire with them. Stand up company with a good product and good policy. If you want more than my word for it, Tim O'Reilly has tweeted favorably about them. (Of course, a 1 Gbps trial rollout in Sebastopol doesn't hurt!) And Google has used them, IIRC, for their trial rollout in the Stanford area.
Why do you love GoDaddy? You're in an absolute tither about people exercising their right to deal with a merchant of their choice.

As for your argument about censoring the censors, it's daft.
These are scary times. There are widespread attacks on our democratic institutions and on our economy. All three branches of government are participating. Congress pushes SOPA. The administration refuses to prosecute the bankers. The Supreme Court upholds Citizens United. The regulatory agencies are ineffective because f regulatory capture. There is so much money passing through lobbyists hands that few in Washington are immune.
-track down an example app to hack around with. this was the single biggest thing that got me from the hurdle from a Hello World app to a production full featured thing

-learn objective-c yes there is no way around it! try rewriting your favorite python or C example to get your head around some of the translation

-stackoverflow is your friend

-it's easier to get started working without Interface builder, so you can do that just to learn a thing or two with a sample app but then do the same thing using IB; it will be quicker and cleaner in the end. this may be the hardest thing to start to wrap your mind around as it involves lots of clicking and less hacking

-design is everything. if you really want a quality app it's key to go from the bare bones to something a designer put skill into. once you get the hang of IB this can be a quick and amazing makeover. find a good designer to collaborate with.

What I did was make a simple app highlighting each skill I wanted to learn (Tables, Pickers, etc.).

Realize that a lot more time than you think will go into submitting to the store, provisioning, and getting your ducks in order there. Don't leave one hour to do this the first time. Also don't asume because it was easy the first time it will be the next. XCode gets very confused with multiple provisioning profiles sometimes. Things expire. etc.

I read the O'Reilly iOS book and Tapworthy along the way. And an Objective-C book or two; but I don't remember which.
That's a fantastic guide. Thanks, Mike!
Can you invite me to Quora please?
Ultimately, we need another/more physical medium of transfer.

Mesh may yet have its uses (though beware of signal localization).

If nothing else, dust off NNTP and sneakernet.

P.S. I'm not advocating rampant infringement of reasonable rights and obligations. I am saying that we should ensure transmission, even if laggy, in the face of autocracy.
And especially with storyboards in iOS5 you can now get a good idea of an app's flow at a glance.

Xcode's a shining example of an IDE that knows how to do one thing and do it really well.
The Herding Of Cats
2 Days Loss From Transfers Out Of Godaddy.com: 37,000
Sure you can, it doesn't error until it's evaluated, and haskell is lazy, so the failure can occur some distance from the original undefined, and can occur only some of the time.
One of the best books ever!

An eye opener next to 'a little Smalltalk'
This article was nice but it could have been great with some code exaples illustrating the benefits of static analyzers. It would have been realy great with examples of what one tool could help with that another would miss.
120 days is HTC made up number. The GPL does not set such a delay. Therefor HTC delaying the release, HTC violate the GPL license which several components, like the kernel are licensed under.
Turntable is blowing up, in a good way, as near as I can tell. They closed their 'B' round a couple months ago: http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/SF2011/2011/09/13/turntable-fm...
So, if I can find ten people who claim to believe what you do but really say other random things, does it mean you no-longer have a message or merely that I've managed to distract from it? And who have I distracted, you? Unlikely. Just myself and whoever listens to me.

Similarly, only you and the Fox news crowd are confused about what OWS is.

And yes, there's a lot you pretend you didn't read. Like anything you can't counter. The truth hurts.
One way of summarizing what you just wrote is:

"I spent two weeks traveling in Xinjiang in 2006 and saw only ethnic Han policing the majority Uighur population, often unusually well-armed for Chinese police. Therefore, I think it is reasonable to report that the government of China is warehousing Uighur protesters in military prisons until party officials develop organ failure, whereupon prisoners are screened for blood/tissue matches and then murdered for their organs, which are removed while the prisoner is still alive."

Put in that light you can see the problem with this discussion: that Uighurs (like many other populations in China) are subjected to intense human rights violations does not imply that a monstrous organ harvesting program is being run out of Chinese prisons.
My biggest piece of advice is to just do it. Jump right in and start writing some apps. You'll never get good if you don't actually build anything, for the most part, so just jump in and build something.
Extremely important to note: this is a patent application, not a patent. That is to say, this has no legal effect, Microsoft cannot use the patent application to sue anybody, etc. etc. Also, the claims (which are the heart of any granted patent) are likely to change before this gets issued as an enforceable patent.

standard disclaimer: this does post does not constitute legal advice.
Try to buy a "junior chemistry set" that provides real chemistry. Or a Pyrex flask, for that matter.
You work very hard at maintaining your irrational thoughts.
I flagged it too, realizing (because you wrote that comment) that there is absolutely no reason this article belongs on HN --- even had it been well-sourced, what the fuck did this have to do with HN?

Thanks for pointing that out. I've largely given up on flagging during the SOPApera.
I think you are mixing up the cases here. The Sibal affair was the one from the government. If you read the linked story you'll find two cases - one civil and another criminal - which are behind the directives by the courts. The government is not a party to either case.

I don't have any sympathies for people who try to stifle the ability to express freely, but I also don't have any sympathies for misinformation and needless rabble rousing either.

As part of my work, I do interact and advise members/organizations of the legal framework and, trust me, there are a lot of good intentions there, but sadly that alone is not good enough and we wind up with lousy outcomes. This is the reason why I look unfavourably on a purely black and white view of these things.
Anonymous AntiSec Takes Down Stratfor
Ingenious tactic by the supporters of the bills, killing one might not kill both.