skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. The reason I'll drop into R instead of python is often that I need to do some complicated analysis like adaptive multivariate integration over hypercubes (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/cubature/index.html) or general maximum pseudolikelihood estimation for multistage stratified, cluster-sampled, unequally weighted survey samples (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/survey/index.html).

There are currently > 3500 packages in CRAN, many of which can be found nowhere else. Being able to access java libraries is great, but I an access java libraries from all sorts of different languages. Until it is seamless to install and use these CRAN packages, I'm sticking with the standard interpreter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr9x6yLb8BY
Get Great Cupcake Recipes for Your Special Instances
Offers information related to great cupcake recipes. Helpful tips, tricks, and suggestion about great cupcake recipes.
Nice try MIT, but I don't really see this useful in the real world. Typically data that needs to be encrypted must be accessed by system processes to make any application useful. For example you want to encrypt the contact email, but you want to send automatic alerts to that email or a system needs to do an automatic credit card payment. Those are hard to do when you need the users password to decrypt the data.
On my computer
Linux 3.0.0-15-generic #24-Ubuntu SMP Mon Dec 12 15:23:55 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux RAM=6G
"Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz"

A simple comparison using binary-tree (from computer language benchmark) between ruby1.9.1 and jruby show that on my machine jruby time is half of 1.9.1

~/lang/ruby/jruby-1.6.5/bin$ time ./jruby --server -J-Xmx2000m algo.rb 18 gives
real	0m32.447s
user	0m38.478s
sys	0m0.904s

time ruby1.9.1 algo.rb 18
real	1m11.388s
user	1m11.192s
sys	0m0.148s

./jruby --server -J-Xmx2000m -v
jruby 1.6.5 (ruby-1.8.7-p330) (2011-10-25 9dcd388) (OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 1.7.0_147-icedtea) [linux-amd64-java]

the algo.rb file is the version contributed by
# contributed by Jesse Millikan
# Modified by Wesley Moxam and Michael Klaus

this is n=18, for n=16,17 ... results are similar. Half the computing time.
Sure, I understand all of that. I'm just saying it's unusual to see a lambda function throwing away the value like that.
I seem to alternate between firing up gvim (white background) and vim in a terminal (black background). I don't really notice a difference in terms of readability etc.
f.lux is also great for short and dark winter days. I keep my day temperature around 4,400K and my night temperature around 3,400K in the winter (and substantially warmer during the summer).
Most of us could add HN to the list of deadly amusements ;) Not saying that HN in itself is bad, but if you - like me - keep re-checking the front page for the latest posts, there might be a problem. The root problem in many cases is procrastination and a great book for scientific minds is Procrastination by Burka and Yuen.
Not a dumb question at all.

Short answer: it throws a syntax error otherwise.

Long answer: I don't know.
OH: "I finally figured out how to tell if my boss is lying"

"How?"

"His lips are moving"
Aaron Patterson on Pattern Matching and the New Rails Router
Be careful, pretty sure this is against Twitter's ToC.
The 11 Best Business Books of 2011
Light text on a dark background.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1891 vividchalk

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1143 inkpot
What were your favorite "business" books of 2011?
CaterJS: a script that helps to create maintainable JavaScript
Light on dark is nice except when I have other screens open - which is most of the time. If my text editor has a dark background, I find the lighter backgrounds in the periphery of my vision to be more distracting. Hence, I end up using black on white.
> No, when people say "duck typing" they're talking about dynamically typed languages

No, they're not. Explain OCaml's object system to any Ruby or Python programmer and they'll say, "Oh, it's duck typed?" Why do you think so many programmers (such as the one you "corrected" above) use the term "duck typing" for Go? Because they mean structural subtyping. Why do you think c2.com's wiki[0] gives OCaml and C++ template as examples of static duck typing? Because they are. Duck typing (like strong/weak typing) is entirely orthogonal to whether the typing is done statically or dynamically.

You don't have to use interface names in Go. Anywhere you type a name like "io.Reader" you can type the full "interface { ... }" declaration. It sounds like you're confusing type inference with nominal typing.

[0] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DuckTyping
A preview of a SOPA future and blocking of political videos
3 Common Winter Roof Problems & Their Prevention | NJ Roofing Blog
You should start drawing comics for these, it could be a whole new career for you.
Yeah, there are some killer packages that won't be able to run on Renjin without porting their C sources to java/R. That's a bummer.

But others -- like the survey package -- are pure R and run well on renjin. (Just do library(survey, lib.loc='/path/to/R/library') )

The central goal at this point is to support embedding packages like 'survey' in web apps or larger java apps. If you're looking for a seamless user experience for ad-hoc analysis, we're still quite a ways off!
Yeah, but isn't it that the premise of the article is that you would combine energy from various multiple sources like, I don't know, 10-30 per house? Water flowing in pipes, generated heat, gathered kinetic energy?

It would be interesting to see some calculations how much could be gained that way.
It looks nothing like what you're thinking of. Maybe the Iceland domain name taken?
7 Most Devastating Hacks (and how to prevent them)
Learning by Doing: Harvard Seeks to Reinvent its MBA Program
Drag and drop photos don't work

for me/on Safari
While this briefly has some attention: who's up for a generic Hacker News meetup?
There Will Be Rich Always: Finding a New Way to Think About Income Inequality
Top Physics Videos of 2011
Top Physics Books of 2011
I use light, but dark bg has a really big advantadge that you can see many different foreground colors. Its really hard to pick good orthogonal colors on a light bg.
Ask HN: what's your favourite startup/agency Christmas greeting?
Hi all

An agency I work with has just launched its 2011 online 'Christmas card' for clients and friends. It's a lot of fun (I'll post a link to it in the comments), but got me thinking: how do startups (and other agencies) have a bit of fun with their holiday greetings? Good examples welcome!

Steve
Every freelancer in my area is, by this definition, a "Desingineer." I'm in the midwest, so there's almost no other way to get work other than go full stack. Obviously, some are better at the back end and some are better designers, but they have to do it all.

Honestly, this reinforces the issue that startups do a poor job of recruiting outside of their 20 mile radius. For example, its early in the office, and I still see 5 people who have pushed high level applications, good front ends, and the occasional mobile app.
Possibly. Criticism is accepted. We are new to this and have no clue what we are doing to be perfectly honest. We just want to bring quality content, and if presentation is holding it back then it needs to be addressed. Thank you.
It's not suitable for all data. That doesn't mean that it isn't suitable for any data. When credit card payments are user initiated rather than automatic, it could have value.
Partly because MacArthur was looking (and talking) like he was going to press on into China as he stormed up the peninsula after the landings at Incheon.
So are they going to tell the pharmacies that the pharmacists are lying?
Yes, but I think this is cleared up if you consider that calling a generator function does not execute its body, but return generator object. It doesn't really matter if it's a lambda or a regular named function.
Patrick's Crazy but Brilliant Idea
This is wrong. Everyone knows that modern startups are looking for a Desingineerketer.
I consider myself a Designineer.
i don't think designers, per se, are that valuable.

this line of thought just stems from the conflation of graphic design and interface design. the skill in demand is the latter. to be good at it one needs to be able to be proficient in html, css, javascript, and have basic abilities in whatever server-side technologies are in use.

so, yes, these folks will be hard to find. just like any other good engineer, they'll either have a job, be kicking ass, or doing their own thing. c'est la vie. try offering a wage they can't refuse.
Including: "Our mobile phones will start to read our minds"
I really like one of his suggestions: tying congressmembers' salaries to the median income of Americans. That's a nice way of aligning incentives.
Come on, they don't exist. If so, who are some well known designineers?
The iPhone and iPad are successful because of design, attention to detail, and Apple's marketing muscle.

True; however, I would argue that the marketing portion of their success comes as a result of painting each new product as a picture of revolutionary innovation. It's part of the image. Take that rouse away and you might be left with a less successful product.

Simply put, Apple relies on the lie.
light on dark theme: tango, +f.lux, +stylish on chrome for replacing popular websites w/ dark themes.
Is there a port for IntelliJ IDEA?
My first thought was along the lines of someone could put together a much better interface for this and integrate it with Twilio. The Twilio part would take no time at all. The only real problem is recording all of the names. It's really too bad that the text to speech voices used by Twilio are so terrible. I'm really surprised they haven't looked at using some third party tech for that like the voices provided by Cepstral (http://cepstral.com/) or others.
$ sudo cp /bin/cat /dev/null
$ echo test | /dev/null
test

(this doesn't actually work)
Apple Sues Samsung Over Mobile Device Case Designs
Here's the 2011 one from all of us at Torchbox: http://sing.torchbox.com

(Yes, this is a pretty gratuitous plug, I know, but it's fun. See the FAQs link for how we built it).
I remember having a discussion about this with a buddy who noticed I used a dark themed editor. He cited some study, I don't know exactly what study it was, that said our brains work better looking at a white background. (Perhaps more neurons fire or something like that)

What do you think about this? Do you feel you work better with a black background, or do you just use one because it's more cool/retro looking than a white background?
The value of the lambda is the generator object. How else could you call list() on it if it was thrown away?
interface design. the skill in demand is the latter. to be good at it one needs to be able to be proficient in html, css, javascript, and have basic abilities in whatever server-side technologies are in use.

I really don't follow. A kick-ass interface designer can know nothing more than Photoshop. A front-end guru can be terrible at interface design. There's very little connection between interface design and the technologies used to implement it.
As a desingineer I'm always looking for the mythical startup that has cool technology, awesome people and a good chance to rocket to the moon. Probably as hard to find as desingineers.
Vendor Soup
Here's what we did the year before: http://vimeo.com/17915496
Queue ICPC Challenge (2012)
6 Things That Need to Happen in the Spider-Man Reboot Films
"We" didn't know that already; there was an implicit argument that there might ever be a point to building a linked list in Ruby, which, no.

Like I said, we're way off the rails here.
I suppose Iceland's domain registrar was busy that day.
I think the problem is not that one person can't have both of these skills, but that it is hard to play both roles on the same project unless you have a lot of discipline.

The engineering mindset and the UX design mindset optimize for different things. Even if you are excellent at both, it helps to have someone else forcing you to get the UX right when you're doing the engineering work, and to make the engineering possible when doing the design work.

The people who can do both at the same time don't differ in having both skills -- lots of people have them -- but in having the discipline to optimize for both in alternation.
SQLCipher - Open Source Full Database Encryption for SQLite
The Trim Comes Last
I am curious as to whether anyone saw this vulnerability ahead of time. Fidesz has essentially hacked the Hungarian constitution. Did anyone see this coming?

More fundamentally, would it have mattered if anyone had? A modern constitution needs to be written down. A democratic process must be agreed upon by all participants. By virtue of that, this set of political procedures is vulnerable to hacking. The hacker (or cracker, take your pick) can cycle through different attacks more quickly than the procedures can be hardened against them.
The link is a bit light on information, so I cloned the repo and pasted the README file from it here:

https://pastee.org/323xe

Basically, from the looks of it, it seems to run as a proxy inbetween your client software and the MySQL database.
Oh :/ Sorry, submitted with a bookmarklet and didn't see the anchor.
Cleaning Services Shoreham TN14 | House Cleaner
DARPA's Spy Telescope Will Stream Real-Time Video from Any Spot on Earth
Rails/master is now 4.0.0.beta
GUI Stencils, Wireframing Kits and Sketching Templates for iPad App Designers
I remember reading something similar 20 years ago or so: not that the specific background color mattered, but that a light background works better than dark, and that the contrast between the foreground/background matters (the higher the better).
I've been working hard at being this guy. HTML+CSS+JS(coffee!)+Ruby, years of professional experience doing UX and website design on whiteboards and Photoshop and Illustrator, successfully launching brand-new projects.

I also know a few guys I've worked with that are very strong in the same areas. It's more pleasurable to work with a team where every member will do well in all areas, even if we have a core area that we would prefer to be an expert in. I don't believe those people are mythical or hard to find.

The myth is that startups want those people, but don't have enough money to afford them. They want desingineers that are cheap. I'm personally tired of seeing "stock options" in startups that don't have a product yet.
King Khan Jumped from 300 feet Building.
Yes, it's puralizing a noun. It happens all-the-frickin'-time in English.

edit: as far as examples in detail, I have none, but I would honestly be extremely surprised if there were fewer than a dozen in the world's current state, probably hundreds through time. If I come up with one, I'll be sure to include it.

In the meantime: do you wish to argue that all such acts (name of culture => modified name as product => simplification dropping the modification) are offensive, or is this one somehow worse? I ask not to ridicule, but that this stance seems (to me) to be relatively new or rare, and favoring this instance as something far more offensive than I would find it if applied to me (Best Buy's Geek Squad being a mostly similar example, OTOH. I find them mildly annoying, but nothing more).

Basically, you (the collective-you, that is) have a point, but I and probably many others here think you're overreacting, though we might be swayed by a convincing argument.
I've tried to help him with it, but he doesn't keep his machine online so it is difficult. He still has dialup and refuses to upgrade.
"There is a psychological growth phase which involves separation, and that is one manifestation."

I wonder if this phase is actually about teen social structures and hierarchies as they've developed in Western countries. I'm reminded of something pg wrote in "Why Nerds Are Unpopular:" http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html :

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

So I wonder if a large fraction of the age group want to reject their parents because of the way they've been raised and schooled.

You obviously didn't argue that this phase is universal, but I still find the idea interesting.
I read the first six chapters and I really, really like it so far, great writing style and very informative!
have built a company in the middle of the country as well, and know this freelance type. Typically they are "okay" at design and "okay" at development. They work well for local small businesses but not for startups looking for top caliber design.
When you think this is a joke you should read Peopleware.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects...
Show HN: Our email productivity tool
It's especially poetic given that the HotSpot vm that was purchased by Sun, and developed by Anamorphic ('Animorphic' in some articles) Systems, was originally designed to run Smalltalk / Self.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HotSpotVm

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...
Whatever goes inside a lambda must be an expression. The parentheses around yield make it a yield expression. Otherwise yield would be a statement which is a different thing as far as Python is concerned.

You can also use it inside generators:

>>> def f():
while True:
xyz = (yield)
print xyz
>>> g = f()
>>> g.next()
# nothing happens as xyz == None
>>> g.send('huhu')
huhu
you should try splitting it into (i) a designer who does HTML, CSS (ii) a programmer and (iii) perhaps even a separate Javascript coder.

This is how the company I work for right now does it and it is EXTREMELY inefficient. I've been advocating them to go back to one person to do html/css/js/php.

I can see the above work for large orgs. But with a 3-4 person tech team, super specialization has not worked at all
If it wasn't collected under controlled conditions then it is not data, it is merely an anecdote.

If it wasn't collected under controlled conditions and is then extrapolated to a wildly different sample group, then it isn't even an anecdote.
Sure. I usually add a :default_scope with an order clause to my models, since it makes using :first and :last considerably nicer. If you want to do sort in the opposite direction, you can't just add .order to your calls (this used to override the default scope in Rails 2.3), since Arel will just translate that to the senseless "ORDER BY id ASC, id DESC".

The way around this is to use :reorder, but :reorder doesn't work the same way and can generate invalid SQL if you're prefetching included associations. So, you're left with :unscoped, but that's insanely insecure because it drops any foreign key scopes you had in place.

Likewise, it only normalizes identical order clauses if you use the exact same casing. This one is a bit more esoteric, but if your default_scope is to order by "id asc" and you reorder by "id ASC", Arel will produce "ORDER BY id asc, id ASC". If they match in case, however, it'll be normalized to a single clause.

I haven't found the time to attempt a proper fix to any of these problems yet.
'Reactionary' is a bit of a strong word. I think that this is an idea whose time has come and that both MIT and Stanford had these kinds of initiatives in the pipeline for a while. Stanford's success might have spurred MIT on a bit, but I'm sure they would have been on this path eventually anyway.

I just hope that other schools start moving in this direction and perhaps some standards or at least conventions start to take shape.

For example: it would be useful if there were tagged video classes and materials so that if I am confused by the presentation by one lecturer I could look up a lecture on the same topic by someone else. I find that seeing a topic from a slightly different perspective is enormously helpful.
I agree with this, however, what constitutes a "designer?"

Defining an engineer is easy: can build systems that optimize for function. Can build a UI that the user can understand to the point that the user can gain value.

How do you quantify design? How do you quantify a designer? If we had metrics, then it would be easier to understand which freelancers actually are "Desingineers."
Really glad that @headius is getting some recognition for his dogged work in this space. I know he's been up against a sometimes quite hostile Ruby crowd but has remained a gentleman throughout.
This is what I've been building at the startup I joined a few week ago. Thanks to all you guys for pushing me towards startups and we'd appreciate any comments on our MVP for improving email!
yield was first introduced as a statement similar to return. In Python not every statement is an expression; another example of non-expression statement is assignment, which was banned from expressions so that it couldn't be confused with ==.

Since then someone proposed (PEP 342) that yield could be used not just to yield values from coroutines, but to send one back in. yield becomes an expression, mostly used as the right side of an assignment. The parentheses are there because the grammar seems to handle the yield statement and yield expressions differently (the PEP mentions that "yield 12, 42" would have become confusing).
There are however even heavier elements that are hypothesised to be stable. In that sense, the periodic table is not complete.

probably very rare in nature.

I don't know the scope you had in mind, but this seems to suggest these elements may occur naturally on earth. Just to be on the safe side, I want to point out that they don't. They just don't occur at all on earth, outside of laboratories for near infinitesimal amounts of time.

The probability of them occurring naturally in cosmic-scale events is also extremely small. For all practical purposes, probably for at least a thousand year to come, these elements do not exist naturally.
That's old school thinking right there. I'd never hire a designer who doesn't know front end tech as well or better than they know photoshop.

The best designers will know HTML+CSS+Javascript pretty intimately for a variety of reasons.
If I'm going to stare into a light bulb all day, I prefer to dim it down by working on a black background.
If you liked the cartoon, you'll probably like the book that it's based on: http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Busi...

It's from 1985 and a little bit dated, but still I think highly relevant
For a long time now the first thing i do in a new text editor is to look for a nice dark theme.. i don't know.. it's somewhat more relaxing :)
Oblivion was probably one of the first i used in all those gtk based editors.

edit: Also, default colorschemes on terminals are dark, why is that?
Humble Bundle sales stats presented visually
I admit it's a stretch, but the combination really pushed me into blue territory.
Do you also take offense to calling it a kiwifruit? By your logic, it's just as disrespectful, and just as much of a cultural appropriation - dropping 'fruit' from the name of a fruit is merely rational and efficient (edit: once a large amount of the population knows it's a fruit, hence its inclusion at the beginning).
Court Orders Blog Taken Completely Offline For 'Harassing' Posts
Given how opinionated the dark background folk I've met have been (possibly just because they feel ignored by common windows editors) I'd worry about selection bias in a result like this.