skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's actually kind of fun to write a program in a language you don't know, just learning by Googling as you go. I did that when I wanted to write some add-ons for Warhammer Online. Someday, I'm going to have to properly learn Lua and its idioms and conventions and then go back and look at my Warhammer stuff and see just how horrible I did.

If anyone wants to laugh at my code, here it is: https://github.com/tzs/WAR-Whom

I also did the same thing with JavaScript. I wanted a calculator for Talisman building in Warhammer Online. At first I was going to do it as an iPhone application. Then I decided a web page would make more sense, and so was going to write it as a Perl CGI application. Then I decided it would make more sense to do it in JavaScript so that my server wasn't doing the work.

That code is here: https://github.com/tzs/WAR-TalismanCalculator

These were fun experiments, but overall I think I prefer to learn the way I learned C. I got K&R, read it, then went to the computer center (this was before personal computers were common), sat down at a terminal, and started hacking out some simple programs, with my K&R at my side. A couple sessions of that cleared up the few things I had misunderstood.

Unfortunately, I've never found a book as good as K&R for any other language I've wanted to learn.

I remember reading an article about "Digital Natives" and "Digital Immigrants". The thesis of the article was that people who grow up in the digital world have a fundamentally different approach to things like learning than do those of us who grew up pre-digital. They are the natives--they grew up with computers, and multitasking, and access to vast amounts of online knowledge. They don't want to learn things by sitting down with a book and reading it through chapter by chapter, and then go out and apply that knowledge. They expect that for any task they wish to accomplish, they can learn what they need when they need it by going to Wikipedia, or Googling, or getting help on IRC, and so on.

When I set out to write my Warhammer Online add-on and the talisman calculator, I was consciously trying to act more like a digital native than a digital immigrant, to see how well it worked. It worked out better than I expected, but not enough to convince me that the digital native approach is better than the digital immigrant approach.
flagged. This a thinly veiled job/recruiting advertisement.
The copyright lobby is certainly behind it, but I am sure that it runs much deeper. Copyright, in a way, is just an excuse, so that proponents can use reasoning that copyright creates jobs, incentives innovation, fights "immoral" stealing of property etc. The layman could hardly disagree... Try arguing for censorship in the same way.

Once in place, the laws can and will be used to repress criticism directed at government and corporations, and will be used to plug "inconvenient" leaks, put away whistle-blowers, and curb press freedom (just like in other oppressive nations). Even though that is obvious to outsiders, they cannot openly put that on their agenda.
I see now. (I had been afraid that my Google-Fu had left me, but apparently only my english skills were lacking.)
PHP Memory Limit Error
LunaTik crowdsourced $77000 in 3 days
Heres How a professor disproved Obamas Socialism to his class using their grades
It's amazing to think how ubiquitous MSN Messenger was as a teen growing up, and how its use seemed to evaporate overnight with the coming of social networks and cheap text messaging.

Funny to me how asynchronous messaging seems to be more useful to people - would not have predicted that.
Ahhh.. relief
Is this live yet ? Just tried to add msn contacts to my jabber client and we couldn't make it work.
Jstor detected the suspicious activity on their end:
http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor-statement-misu...
There are much better trolls than the one described here, that are guys using trolling to show a point about a controversial subject. For instance the flying spaghetti monster thing is a form of trolling, and it is a good one.

I think that in programming forums the biggest source of trolling is due to clueless people that still want to say something... in the real world they would be put at the door, but you can't do this in a forum, and even after a ban it is too simple to re-enter.

The simplest form of protection about this is to associate a cost to username creation in a forum. Even 5$ is enough. This time the ban is a real cost for the troller that will likely stop after the first 5$ rounds.

Another widely used form of "cost" is badges, that is, you start with an account that can do very little and it takes time (and a good comportment) to grow in features. However there is the risk of trolls opening N accounts in parallel just to have reserves of usernames, so it is also very important to penalize non used accounts.
Just a few remarks:
1) Don't delete your message.
2) Don't let anyone tell you what you can or can do.

Me? I could write lots of stuff about what I experienced over the last couple of years, but I'm done doing them the favor.
Maybe. But it's cute.
Thanks for this insight. Having no experience in these new JS frameworks, I'm going to eventually have to choose one, and based on recent HN comments I had almost dismissed Knockout since Backbone is "clearly" better. The points you raised are very informative and now I'm back to looking at Knockout.
Either people fell for good marketing or for the irrational belief that power does not change people.

It was George W. Bush who once said in an interview that whoever becomes president after him, what he will get told every day (meaning security briefings etc) will change him. I think that's probably true only insofar as you as a president accept the basic premise that you are the Chief Watchdog of The American People and have to use ever more centralised power to guard your sheep.

Edit: This is not really on topic concerning the issues raised in the article linked, I know. I am just replying.
Force of habit?
> Would you deploy bubblesort on the grounds that quicksort is a premature optimization?

Unless it turns out the sorting routine has a significant impact on the overall performance, I wouldn't care a bit if it used Bubblesort, Quicksort or Bogosort.

> You've just given me an estimated range of three orders of magnitude. As it happens, that is also the range I commonly get from people who have just "designed" a protocol with zero thought.

Argument by snark. The assumption is that a chat protocol is developed for certain payload sizes because there is a trade-off involved: you'd do things differently if you had to create a protocol that works for 5 byte messages exactly as well as it does for 5 GB messages. Under that assumption, it's perfectly reasonable to give a range of expected message sizes. And since Jabber was developed in the first place as an IM protocol, 5 to 5000 bytes seems about right, with the distribution heavily skewed towards smaller messages.

> When I'm trying to process 10,000 messages per second on a CPU, and most of the overhead is already in ingesting, parsing, and routing each message, a 50% increase in message quantity means I need 50% more CPUs.

Yes. So? How many people are running large enough Jabber servers that this is a problem for them? And why can't they simply buy another CPU?
I have never lived in California. As to Einstein, the columnist Charles Krauthammer remarked that one common attribute of the notables depicted in the campaign--Einstein, Gandhi, etc.--was that none had ever used a computer, let alone a Mac.
Come On, Microsoft: Siri Is Making You Look Terrible
I never expected Malaysia to be mentioned in the same breath as Iran and China.
It only applies to individuals or business that choose to use a simplified import procedure. Large imports pay between 0% and 18% on most goods; IT hardware import taxes tops at 12%.
Or as a shining example for EU politicians of what they can get away with. The the past decade we've lost much in terms of privacy in my part of the EU.

- We now have to carry ID papers whenever we leave the house. Fingerprints are recorded on our passport.

- Massive wiretaps are used by the police for "preventive measures" (on a larger scale than in the US).

- Trojans/exploits are used by law enforcement to gain access to computers.

- Encrypted hard drives are seen as suspicious (even though it's just a common sense precaution).

See also last year's rant by jacquesm (http://jacquesmattheij.com/Wholesale+Privacy+violations+in+t...).

It's very easy for politicians to chip away at our rights and it's very hard for us to get our privacy rights back once the precedent has been set.
Automated Testing of algorithmic trading strategies
What about HN voting specifically prevents the first case (agree/disagree) from happening?
How the 10,000-Year Clock Measures Time
Vlingo doesn't understand a single word I've tried saying to it (I have a Scandinavian accent), so while I don't really see myself using this stuff much, Vlingo is a non-starter unless it's recognition gets vastly better. I wonder how large a part of the potential user base it has problems handling.
Contrary to the popular saying here, brazilian payroll taxes amount to 56% of the salary in an annualized basis, not 100%.
Seriously, internet freedom and all is important. But please stay serious. Are you generally allowed to be openly gay in the US? Are you generally allowed to protest for your beliefs? Are you generally allowed to air your grievings with your government?

Then you are miles away from being in the same league as the nations you mentioned. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Internet freedom is an important societal interest _once you've taken care of more basic freedoms_.
No. Singapore might be closer physically, but it's not closer via connectivity.

Serving AU users from Singapore is much, much worse than serving them from LA.
Research Essay
FinalEssay.com has been helping students like you for more than 10 years, and over that time we've seen a lot of success. When the students who come to us for help succeed, we succeed. We've worked for more than 10,000 students.
Samsung Focus Flash Review
Let’s take a quick look at Samsung Focus Flash review to see if it can really beat the competition in the near future.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted, because what you said is the absolute truth.
Sorry to be slightly off-topic, but who would you recommend for Australian hosting, in place of EC2 US-west?
It's probably 99% of job applicants. Remember a bad programmer will go to more job interviews than a good programmer, because the bad programmer probably won't get a job. So the success rate of job applicants is not the same as the percentage for all programmers.
Reminds me of the following parable:

The tenants of a large well-to-do apartment block kept complaining that the elevators were always too slow, and they hated waiting in the lobby for the next available elevator. The apartment manager spent some time investigating the cost of installing faster elevator motors before he came up with a much cheaper solution: He installed large mirrors in the elevator lobby; the complaints stopped.
How much is Cedexis?
These are all great technologies, particular Kinect. Takes more than great technology to create the buzz. Consider the public excitement of the MS touchpad effort with the public excitement about the iPad just as an example.
"It’s wise of Google to quickly develop its own Siri rival"

I totally disagree. The worst thing Google could do is quickly develop a copy-cat.

Google should slowly and carefully evaluate whether they need a Siri rival and then create something that their customers will use that enhances their core services.
Volleyball Links
Welcome to volleyball links.com
Honestly, I'm surprised how cheap that is. If you take into consideration that computers cost between 2x and 3x more, bandwidth 4x more, higher taxes and almost the same wages, it's a steal.

I expected it to cost between 2 to 3 times more.

Our current providers tend to cost 4x to 8x that, so I'm really curious to see how the market will behave.
> Unless it turns out the sorting routine has a significant impact on the overall performance, I wouldn't care a bit if it used Bubblesort, Quicksort or Bogosort.

By your evident logic, then, Bogosort is the right default choice, because anything else is premature optimization.

> Yes. So? How many people are running large enough Jabber servers that this is a problem for them?

Well, the person I originally replied to appears to have been one of them. As are Google, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook, and Yahoo. I know one much smaller company I can't name who did field trials of XMPP on their embedded consumer device and promptly dropped the project.

Had I made the mistake of trying the same thing, I would now be in such a position.

> And why can't they simply buy another CPU?

And the server to put it in, and the space, and the power, and the cooling. I might be able to get a chip delivered for $200, but it's going to cost me another $400-800 plus people time to put it into service, and another $500+/year to run it.

Far cheaper to make the engineer spend a day or two to come up with something reasonable.
Being good listener and Rookie in Indian cricket team
Guns ‘n SOPA
It Might Look Like A Higgs But Does It Really Sing Like One
Qt 4.8 brings threaded OpenGL support, multithreaded HTTP
Bear in mind that the Samaritans do not see it as their place to stop you committing suicide, rather they exist in part to be there at that time so you don't die alone.
More than 100 million EU citizens have never surfed web
This is because all those who voted "for change" in 2008 all collectively forgot to ask the proper question: "just what is it specifically you want to change?"

Now you start to see the changes....
Bio-Assembling in 3D with Magnetic Levitation
The Samaritans in the UK don't offer that kind of help. They listen. If you decide to go ahead with it they will listen to you die so you don't die alone.
I wonder if they will invite 5:1 pro-SOPA vs anti-SOPA witnesses at the hearing again, or maybe they'll make it 10:1 this time, seeing how last time that strategy "failed".

That being said, I really hope they invite someone that isn't from a corporation at the hearing, like people from EFF. At the end of the day the corporations will follow their own profit incentives. If that aligns with the regular people's interest or not it's besides the point.
So it was copied from IBM.
Sad but true. Those who became "deer in the headlights" watching the ambiguous words "hope" and "change" float before their eyes in 2008 will likely be just as easily duped in 2012.
I voted for Obama in 2008 because of the major candidates, he had the best track record regarding civil liberties. I looked at the track record, and I was also deeply concerned that the approaches to health insurance law proposed by McCain would lead eventually to massive federal regulation of the sort we got under the PPACA.

The thing though is I don't think that it's just the security briefings. Obama didn't slowly change. He ran out of the gate running the wrong direction and by April 2009, the EFF was calling the way state secrets privilege was invoked under the Obama administration "Worse than Bush." Instead what have we got for our troubles? more bodyscanners at airports, mobile bodyscanners deployed at various places, the DoJ arguing in court that random body cavity searches in airports would be Constitutional (EPIC v. DHS) and that the President has the Constitutional authority to target any American anywhere in the world with lethal military force (in the Al-Awlaki case) and that state secrets privilege extended to evidence against the accused.

And through this whole process we are told that the Republicans would be worse and so we should just accept what we are given, and support our President as the fundamental protections of our liberty are assaulted again and again by the executive branch.

This is where the voting for the lesser evil leads, because a lesser evil unopposed for fear of a greater one can do far more damage than a greater one where such opposition exists.
I find the title of this thread (based on the line from the article, I presume) deceptive:
"What happens to a kid who's too smart for school?"

I'm used to reading, and seeing first hand, articles like this:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,699423,00.h...
http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/08/17/students-at-r...

Even the article says: "The prognosis for exceptionally gifted students in America is poor. The only federal program that provides money for gifted education includes no provisions for the exceptionally gifted, and it was just defunded. The one reform pending before Congress does not distinguish between levels of giftedness and creates no new educational programs."

I think it is incorrect to say Gonzales is the general case. The other side is mentioned, but only briefly. There is a BIG problem with what generally happens to kids who are "too smart for school," but I'm glad Gonzalez is getting the education he deserves at such an early age.
In a way, yes, the programming projects in ML seemed like a better measure of performance in that you have to actually figure something out. However, they have two (sort of) disadvantages vs normal homework:

1) you immediately know if you got it right or wrong when you submit, so you can to a lesser extent brute force the correct answer

2) with the exception of maybe the first assignment, they are all "fill in the blank" sort of programming assignments. You basically just have to find the equations they give you in the PDF, translate them directly to Octave, and bam you're done.
FAA OKs iPads in cockpit, 'even during takeoff and landing'
They didn't invent the tech but as they did with the iPhone they nailed the user experience and used their unique marketing prowess to sell it to the masses.

This Majel is Google copying Apple's user experience & marketing. But, again not the tech as it's been around for a long time. Though prior to Apple the tech wasn't sexy or exciting to the masses (how many talked about this tech prior to Siri?).
Pupils design apps to boost ICT skills
Not exactly sure where I got this from, but I once read: "Call me - it's simpler" translates to you wanting to do your thinking inside my ear instead of your head.

That being said, from my own experience, the only thing that phone calls get done like no other medium (apart from a direct conversation, of course) is build interpersonal trust. It can further be a good way to diffuse tension right away because instead of having a customer write pages of mounting tension, they get a reaction immediately and that alone is usually enough to make the first steps towards reconciliation.
Millions of users for everyone
1) They still control 90% of the "Office / Productivity" software market; They just got below 50% in the web browser market, they're still above 90% of the operating systems market for personal computers (a category that includes desktops, laptops, but does not include tablets); And something like 20% of server o/s market.

How can one construe that as "not dominant", I don't know.

2) It doesn't go up to Ballmer (there are no "likes of ballmer" in MS - there is only Ballmer). But it got at least two levels below (which is a considerable number of levels up from a "grass roots" start, anywhere from 4 to 8).
I think part of the reason for the letter though is Chris Dodd's statement that the US should figure out how to filter foreign content, and specifically pointing to China as an example. If the MPAA wants to say we should be more like China, I think it is fair to state strongly that we shouldn't.
Duygusal Satırlar
Indeed. Obama and Biden have been pretty big supporters of MPAA and RIAA, which isn't really a surprise when you know he received a lot of his donations from them. US really needs to ban donations from corporations and cap individual donations, otherwise it will always lead to situations like these, with the politicians, even in the highest Office, being in the pocket of the Corporations and signing new laws in their favor, regardless of what the population at large that voted for them wants.
Steve Jobs - Billion Dollar Hippy [bbc iplayer uk only]
Press Release Distribution
This is not a Press Release Distribution and I wanted infantile people to learn the basics of Press Release Distribution before proceeding down that path. If you have a couple of shekels to spend, spring for their step forward. You may need to make note of that.
And yet Malaysians laugh at the censorship regimes in place in places like Indonesia.

(Malaysia is an very interesting place to travel to. I highly recommend it at least once. Their ideas of immigration and customs are nothing short of inspiring....)

It looks like Malaysia has ordered 10 filesharing sites to be blocked by ISP's. If that's all, they are quite a bit less oppressive than the US already is with the ICE/DOJ domain name seizures.

I have only been to Malaysia once and entered through KLIA, but the experience regarding immigration and customs provoked a lot of thought into contrarian strategies.
If you think the key to maximizing freedom/civil liberties comes from voting for the lesser of evils amongst Democrats and Republicans, you are greatly mistaken. Both care only about extending their power and playing to the tune of their special interests. Everything else is just marketing.
That completely depends on your ISP and how they run their network. Decent providers should be directly connected into the right asian places.
Thank you. I still think there is something unclear or incorrect in the article, or maybe I'm just more confused than usual. ;)
I also like the way you spent the money. There are a lot of articles on HN about how to get rich. But you gave a nice example of loving your job and caring about society.
It's pretty likely that AU will have more expensive pricing than most places. Amazon doesn't enter a market and ignore the cost base that applies to everyone in the market place.
The closest long-term information we have comes from Biosphere 2. They spent a lot of time managing their ecosystem, and I think that would be true of any similar attempt for the next few decades. They had about 1500m2 per person, which included "water treatment / recycling and humanure." By comparison, ISS is 837 cubic meters, so assuming 2m for z gives a bit over 400m2 total.

We have a long way to go before getting that sort of volume. (Which, yes, is precisely what you said. I just wanted to work out the details for myself, out loud. :)

BTW, there's many people who have gone their lives without animal products in their diet, so I don't know what literature and research you are talking about.

I strongly doubt it will be economically viable to think of building (near) self-sufficient colonies for many decades. Brin's essay was very influential on me; it's much easier to build a self-sufficient colony in the Gobi desert (or the Sahara) than in space, so I would expect to see those first, if there's an economic need for the space.

If asteroid mining, or He3 mining of the moon, gives the economic impetus for a long-term off-earth location, then I look to oil platforms or McMurdo base as more relevant example.
Bulls pick up Richard Hamilton to be Rose's wingman
CPAN - As Seen From Space
Article not visible in US? Why post it here, then?
A Web Marketer’s Guide to Reddit
Agreed. It all went so fast that it is easy to forget where we came from, and the freedoms we lost in the name of
"protecting freedom". What was considered paranoid tinfoil-hat-talk only five years ago is becoming harsh reality today.
> There are no `Models` in the framework by default although there's a plugin which does fine job.

Can I ask which plugin you are referring to? I've been looking for something like this.
We bring you jquery.mentionsInput.