skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
REPL is not the same as standard streams (STDIN, STDOUT).

You can build a REPL with standard streams, but you can't use a REPL like the WebKit console as standard streams. Where is your STDIN?
What is the differentiation between using this and using Solr? ElasticSearch?

What does "real-time" mean in this context? Is it indexing database content in real-time? Is it in reference to the look-ahead, predictive query completion LinkedIn has?

What would compel someone like me -- a dev who has ownership over the very significant search piece of my company's primary product -- to give this serious evaluation?
SIFT is not enough for this task. There are many computer vision researchers working on this application (automatically inferring location of an image), and accuracies are pretty low right now, except for popular landmarks.

The problem is that single SIFT features are not very distinctive, and so you need many of them in common between two images to get reliable matches. So you essentially need images taken from very similar locations. You can ameliorate this requirement slightly by using fancy tricks in how you aggregate SIFT features together, but the fundamental constraint remains.

This precondition is satisfied at popular landmarks, since there is a good chance that someone's taken a photo from the same location you're standing at, but in general, this condition is not that easy to meet, and hence the poor accuracy of current approaches.

Finally, SIFT is great only for roughly-2d, distinctively textured areas. However, a lot (maybe most?) of the world does NOT fall into this category -- many things are either not textured, not distinctive, or are 3d. Something other than local descriptors (of which SIFT is the best known example) will be needed to understand these kind of scenes.

If you're curious about this line of research, a good place to start is the IM2GPS paper, which was the first major work (that I'm aware of) to look at this problem:
http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/im2gps/
Though as film/tv actor, he also has an interest in seeing it succeed - if SOPA will help the film/tv industry as its proponents claim.

It would be great to see some film/tv identities with more clear-cut loyalties to come out in opposition to SOPA.
The existence of a relationship is surely public. What is not public is approaching people in an unsolicited manner and disclosing that you're seeking reference information from them about a person. What if the person you contact is their current boss? I suppose it might help your salary negotiations if you cause the person you want to hire to be fired. And the idiocy of penalizing someone because a potential "blind" reference rightfully ignores your intrusiveness is beyond the pale. I wonder what Brian Halligan does to keep tabs on his wife and kids. I should look up his wife's contact information on the Internet and contact her for a "blind" reference.
Powers of two. If an image needs to be scaled down in hardware it will be successively split in half, so 256 becomes 128 becomes 64, etc. The machine can handle any image size, but doing so requires it to simulate divided pixels with new colors and this "error" becomes more noticeable as the image is scaled repeatedly. Powers of two divide cleanly.
Ask HN: Best Intro Programming Book?
I want to get my 17 year old nephew an introductory programming book for Christmas. Probably about Python, but it doesn't have to be. What's currently considered to be the best intro to programming?
Steve Jobs Wins a Grammy
Tips memilih baju hamil
Everyday there seems to be a new post on HN, complete with inflammatory headline, criticizing Coffeescript in someway because it doesn't work in the exact way the author expected.

There are lots of people throwing in their $0.02 on how the language should work without having joined the mailing list or seen any discussions on the thought process behind its features.

I'm not saying the suggestion made isn't reasonable, but I can understand glib replies like this from the author that don't make too much effort to explain his stance more than 140 characters.
Mine vary as interests come and go... for a while, it was a lot of athletic stuff: mountain biking, trail running, powerlifting, brazilian jiu-jitsu, etc. Lately it's been more hardware hacking... (re)learning some basic electronics stuff and hanging out at Splatspace and building stuff.

One of my projects is this thing:

https://plus.google.com/photos/114301088526097505896/albums/...

which is just an opportunity for me to build something that I'll use for electronics experimenting, while getting my hands dirty and using the band saw, drill press, dremel tool, etc.

And then there's this stuff:

https://plus.google.com/photos/114301088526097505896/albums/...

https://plus.google.com/photos/114301088526097505896/albums/...
LinkedIn Violates CAN-SPAM
Our company has a google apps account and recently terminated an employee and got rid of his email account. Now I get all his old email to our catch-all. LinkedIn will not let me unsubscribe from his updates to this email address without logging in - which I obviously can't do nor is it legal to make someone login to unsubscribe. Anyone from LinkedIn please take care of this - I get 5+ emails/day from his updates and groups he was in. This is a violation of CAN-SPAM.

Thanks.
I don't mean that by learning to develop for iOS I have learnt what I could have learnt studying at University. I think that everything I have learnt in the last few years which I wouldn't have had I attended University has/will be vastly more important and useful.

I could be wrong, there are still many years ahead of me, but I think what I have gained by not attending University is much more than what I would have gained by attending it.
Heh, I thought it was probably the implication that Paul was a career politician although he is primarily a gynecologist. He continues to deliver babies when he's in Texas and he has spent a few terms out of office (practicing medicine) since he was first elected in the 70s. Maybe that's a self-interested assumption that exposes my own leanings, though.
I understand. If you don't have parens on method calls, how could you use an anonymous function that is not the last parameter? For example:

doSomething(->
# stuff happens
), onerror
Khan Academy is a training/teaching company. I don't think it's a leap to assume they will be providing online tools to write code with (eg http://c9.io/).
What are you doing in CS if Haskell "crushes your spirit"? Go study finance.
You're mistaken: "Phase III would test the effectiveness of the vaccine in a larger group of about 6,000 volunteers who are at risk of becoming infected. Half would be given the vaccine and half given a placebo. Participants would then be tracked for three years to see how many in each group become infected." - http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Health/20111220/canadian-hiv-vacci...

But more interestingly, why would it be "highly unethical" to do so? They're practicing informed consent, so everyone who gets a shot knows that there's only a 50% chance that they got the real vaccine. And they know that the vaccine isn't guaranteed to work (quite the opposite, in fact, based on the track record of similar trials here in the States).
The opposite is also quite true: Best way to Vet a company. Find someone who used to work there...

I always get sort of angry about the whole reference thing. It seems that employers are entitled to reference checks but candidates somehow are not allowed to reference check a company?

How many times have you heard the story of someone who got hired into a role to find out on their first day that they are the 4th or so person in that role in 5 months... It's OK for companies to lie, or not fully disclose the truth, but oh boy, if a candidate's reference doesn't check out...
With open source software money usually spent on adaptation. And this adaptation often done by local companies. So in this particular case instead of paying microsoft and usa goverment, munich government will pay local german company of trainers who will explain how to use particular open source software. Another local company will develop custom integration with whatever CRM government have and hopefuly part of this code either as patches or modules will be contributed back to community.

I totally sure their decision is right in long term.
This super virus was created simply cause the "scientists" could. What, they gonna learn infection rates from ferrets?

Personally I would destroy the virus and hope everyone forgets about it. Not because I'm afraid of terrorists- I'm afraid of it getting out.
I agree - in fact the problem was solved by removing some unnecessary type-checking code.

The point I was trying to make is that it's easier to learn the basics of types and logic in a strict system. Implicit type conversion and polymorphism can easily result in misunderstandings when you've just started learning to program.
Upvote from me. It's a sad day when Kiddiescript is somehow magically elevated to the status of a real programming language.
Mirah for Android Development
I'm just putting the finishing touches on Hello Python (http://manning.com/briggs). It's not out in print yet, so I don't know whether it's what you're looking for, but you can get it on Manning's MEAP program.

The basic theme of the book is that I replicate the path that most programmers follow when they learn how to program - start with something small and build up. I cover games and a couple of Python's more important tools, like Twisted, Pyglet and Django.
Vaccines work because they infect people.

Really.
I have commented (at length) on this earlier, so don't have much to add. But a further thought did occur to me: JavaScript has "loose typing", that is, one is not taught the difference between say, an int, and a double, or even a char, and the fact that there is no such thing (really) as a string - "strings" are just a lazy shorthand for a char array. Loose typing is not just incorrect - on some level, it is immoral, IMO.
Let's not forget that the hijackers' greatest asset was a unique, tragic coincidence, covered five years ago by the very same magazine: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/norad200...

Were it not for a scheduled drill that happened to bear just enough similarity to what was actually going on to confuse first-responders, the terrible events of that day might have been limited to the air. The chances of such a coincidence happening again are so incredibly low as to be nil.

That's what gets me—we were basically just outrageously unlucky that day. The universe rolled all ones. And we've structured our security procedures with the idea that straight ones are rolled every day.
OmniAuth - A flexible authentication system utilizing Rack middleware.
For website design, I'd recommend two books: Mark Boulton's "Designing for the Web" and Jason Beaird's "Principles of Beautiful Web Design".

It really comes down to practice. You could try imitating the websites you like (implement but not release). It's good practice and will actively show you what tiny details go into each website such as layout, typography, gradients, shades, texture, colors, and so much more.
I've worked for the same small cluster of entrepreneurs, who are all very close personal friends, for my entire career. If you cold called people I'm professionally related to, and not on my list of references, then changes are very good that you're calling someone I currently work for or with. And chances are very good that my employer will find out.

Now, I have an excellent relationship with my company's owners and would certainly not get fired for such a thing, but others in my position might. And regardless, that's not information that you have any business giving out to my current employer. That's a discussion that must happen on my terms -- if my boss found out that I was interviewing other companies from your sloppy hiring practices, I would be pissed.

edit: Just realized that if you're going from LinkedIn contacts, you might be calling one of my current clients. That would be absolutely disastrous for myself and my employer -- yeah, go ahead and throw them under the bus by instilling doubt in our customers, thanks.
Look at how MoonScript handles this:
http://moonscript.org/reference/#the_using_clause_controllin...

I didn't want to change the default semantics, but I wanted to have a way for the programmer to be safe if they wanted to, so I created the `using` keyword for function declarations.

You explicitly declare what you intend to overwrite in the lexical scope, including overwriting nothing at all with `using nil`.
Well, fine, but Python2 had the inverse problem--you couldn't mutate top-level variables without awkward "global" statements.
SOPA is a disaster but there seems to be far too much groupthink going on to consider an obvious point: if people treated their internet with more respect we wouldn’t be ending up here.

Forget ‘copyrights’ - forget boogeyman #1 RIAA and boogeyman #2 TPB -- if there was even a modicum of respect for treating others - people who work hard to produce content - fairly, treating them the way you’d want to be treated yourself, things like SOPA would never have seen the light of day.

But instead we get movies posted to streaming and torrent sites before they are released. Entire albums leaked before they drop. iPhones jailbroken so apps can be ripped off. Game-consoles hacked so that people can play games without paying for the service. The list goes on and on and on. It’s a culture of petty thievery. The definition of sharing needs to change, for sure, but it's new definition will never be like the start of this paragraph.

What we have now is a totally unbalanced system. As noted elsewhere, it is like the older generation who thought a one-way relationship with planet earth was as reasonable as it was convenient - take whatever you need, dump whatever you don’t - nothing bad will ever come of it and if it does it’s always someone else’s problem.

“I don’t need to pay for this movie - plenty of people already have.”
“I don’t need to recycle - so many people are already doing that.”

“So even if some bands don’t make it, there’ll always be other bands. They need to adapt”
“We’ve got so many species, is it a big deal if we lose some? That’s evolution isn’t it?”

“I don’t feel bad ripping stuff off - I spend plenty of money on media anyway.”
“I don’t feel bad about dumping garbage in the woods - I pay my taxes.”

When you live like that, you live with the consequences of having no regard for the balance of the system - and you reap the whirlwind you whip up.

I don’t support SOPA - but I also think the total lack of respect for the side of content-producers is a miserable state of affairs - and amounts to a enacted prejudice against people who produce content, shamefully defended with the language of equality and freedom. If one wants to release stuff for free and seed their own torrents - they have every right to choose that ‘business model’ - but to force that choice, to force artists into situations that make them into sharecroppers - is consumerism every bit as wicked and morally empty as capitalism has been. “Let them eat cake!” [Let them sell t-shirts] Does it make it okay because Ashton Kutcher says so? To cover his investments and enhance his street cred?

I don't have a solution for SOPA. I do have ideas about how to ease piracy in a positive way - but no idea stands up when most people don't give a damn - and they don't. Reading some of the exculpatory comments on SOPA/piracy threads has made that embarrassingly clear.
Best music phone in the World
I also highly recommend John S. Denker's "See How It Flies" (http://www.av8n.com/how/), which along with more "aviating" tips has a good discussion about circulation, the Kutta condition and the Kutta-Zhukovsky theorem. The Wikipedia page on the Kutta condition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutta_condition) is also quite informative.

I especially like this part from See How It Flies:

We have seen that several physical principles are involved in producing lift.
Each of the following statements is correct as far as it goes:

* The wing produces lift “because” it is flying at an angle of attack.
* The wing produces lift “because” of circulation.
* The wing produces lift “because” of Bernoulli’s principle.
* The wing produces lift “because” of Newton’s law of action and reaction.

... Do we get a little bit of lift because of Bernoulli, and a little bit more
because of Newton? No, the laws of physics are not cumulative in this way.
There is only one lift-producing process. Each of the explanations itemized
above concentrates on a different aspect of this one process.

I think this is the crux of the matter. It's sort the same story as in the recent HN post about the hazards of determining cause and effect in medical research. The laws of physics set up a situation where the solution satisfying all the constraints is that the wing produces lift. But just like you can't pull out one equation out of a linear system and say that the solution is X=13 because of this one equation, one can't say that a wing produces lift because of any one physical effect.
Case Study: Building the Stanisław Lem Google doodle
500 karma points is needed to vote down.

to create poll go here: http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Out of curiosity I researched this a little. Sweden abandoned the wealth tax in 2007.

However, the neighboring Norway has a 1.1% combined wealth tax on income above about $350k. And according to [1] "from the income year 2008 the full market value of shares reg- istered on the stock exchange are in the shareholder’s wealth, whereas unlisted shares are valued based on the company’s taxable wealth".

Other countries that have the wealth tax are France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Netherlands and India. Some of them have limits on the wealth tax in place, e.g. in France the amount cannot exceed 50% of annual revenues.

[1] http://www.kpmg.no/arch/_img/9585751.pdf
>"If you're having trouble hiring, it's probably because you're not paying enough. It turns out that talented people are worth paying a lot for."

But if you reward hard work and expertise then the shareholders won't make as much money just for being rich ...
First, your code snippet is wrong: you need a space before your first paren.

In coffeescript you can do any of the following, or a few other variants:

doSomething ->
stuff
, onerror

doSomething(->
stuff
, onerror
)

doSomething (->
stuff
), onerror

doSomething(
->
stuff
onerror
)

doSomething (-> stuff), onerror
> Nullified jury cases were one of the tensions that led to the American Civil War.

Sure, but in that case it was Juries refusing to enforce the (truly odious) Fugitive Slave Acts.
This is a largely correct article debunking one of the main atrocities in aerodynamics education today. I approve heartily!
I use prosody -- http://prosody.im/

It's one of the most recent and feature filled XMPP servers out there. It's also relatively easy to setup and maintain.
Radical thoughts on startup equity distribution for early employees
Well, the problem is that I don't see how it would be possible to have a keyboard like this that would be really fast to type with.

Even a visual keyboard, as on a tablet, that could arguably display any set of symbols, would still not really be a solution. You can only show less than 100 keys at a time, and you would have to switch layouts all the time, e.g. to get to that special 'alpha' or '!=' key.

I find full UTF-8 support in identifiers a regrettable idea because these symbols are generally impossible to type quickly. This makes programming languages less universal.

And I'm not even talking about symbols that look nearly identical but are actually different Unicode characters.

The only solution that I would find acceptable, personally, is to display certain identifiers or ASCII strings as fancy symbols. 'alpha', 'beta', '!=', 'ab / c' would be displayed using symbols, but the raw text file would contain the ASCII name. When editing a symbol, the actual name would be typed in.

Or a syntax similar to Tex would be acceptable: '\alpha', '\dot', '\frac{10}{100}'.

The display can be fancy, but the source file shouldn't be, IMO.
If you're in the US, you can always take a minimum-wage job.
It sounds like a good idea!

But: What if they instead do research secretly. Then on research success, they publicly notify the journal of what they intend to do and that it will take 5 months to research. Then 6 months later (an extra month to look plausible), they publish their successful data.
how many thousands of artists can't make a living (and don't even try) - because they would be just ripped off

Um, I don't know if you know this but artists being "ripped off" by the entertainment establishment is not exactly unheard of. In fact (though I don't know firsthand) I believe it's par for the course.
What have you learned? Learning how to create software and learning computer science are vastly different.

In software you learn design patterns, good practise, basic data structures(So they know when use a linked list or an array in different situations) etc It's very relevant to business programming

In cs it's algorithm analysis, advanced data structures, AI, machine learning, mathematical logic etc

However I eventually found that cs becomes useful in designing software. It helps in choosing what data structure, or what algorithm. It gives an edge which you don't even know about unless you've been exposed to it. If I have to(Which isn't often) I can rigorously calculate the Big O growth rate of a function as opposed to just guessing(By looking at the loops). I suppose you could just benchmark...
http://indextank.com/documentation/faq
FWIW this is how CS works:

top_level_variable = null

f = ->
top_level_variable = "hello"

f()
console.log top_level_variable # prints hello
The Other Side Of Open
I thought it was Groucho Marx?
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx

Although apparently the sentiment even predates his usage of it by about 60 years.
By "readily available at the command line" - have you forgotten that the context of this discussion is for a language to use for a first year programming course?

A not insignificant portion of the people taking those courses will not be command line savvy.

Also, I think that the fascination some programmers have for tools that are cumbersome and difficult to use is unhealthy.

The tool should not itself be the problem.

The tool should be a force multiplier that lets you solve other problems more easily.
Please elucidate what information could possibly excuse the fact that is trivial to completely run around the "no-fly list".
My son liked "Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners", which teaches python. He preferred it to Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way".
The Most Important Graphs of 2011
"To people on HN it's a huge plus, but to real world users..."

I think the opposite. If HN readers tastes' are similar to the average founder in the Valley, they are vastly more likely to use Macs and iPhones together than the average real world user, who is much more likely to use Windows/iOS or Windows/Android.
You're mistaken if you don't think a shit ton of people dislike Python exactly because of significant white space as well as it being the source of a great many bugs.

As for Smalltalk, yes, they do like them, since faking them by passing literal hashes is a common pattern.
Impressive teardown. They really went all out -- I was expecting more off the shelf, pre-tested modules (especially the wi-fi) but it looks like they developed a wholly new design with lots of room for growth. Including ZigBee in the thermostat means it will potentially talk directly to newer utility meters and ZigBee-enabled devices in your home. So the v1 feature set just scratches the surface of what they hope to do. Exciting!
I've had a Bank of America Visa Credit Card where I added a second person and the name was wrong (I had given the correct information over the phone), no SSN necessary. I have a Capital One card and no SSN was required when I got a secondary card made with my full real name on it.