skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The two biggest differences I noticed when I tried XeTeX was 1) the pdf files were much smaller than from pdflatex, and 2) I couldn't use microtype [1] with XeTeX.

I stuck with pdflatex to use microtype (which is awesome), and use pdfsizeopt [2] to crush the size of my pdfs.

(More details: LuaTeX also makes small pdfs and might be the way to go, but I haven't tried it much. The size advantage over pdflatex depends on the fonts in use. There is apparently microtype support for XeTeX in the works.)

[1] ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/microtype/microtype.pdf

[2] http://code.google.com/p/pdfsizeopt/ and my notes on it: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/compnotes/latex.html#...
15 Coolest Offices in Tech 2012
The author's argument appears to be that Dr. King's speech is too important to be protected by copyright. The author provides very little to support this position other than an appeal to emotion.

Lacking support with relevant facts, details, and rationales, the argument is, for me, entirely unpersuasive.

Although I am certainly not an expert on the history of Civil Rights in the 1960's, I was curious as to who Bill Rutherford was and what he did. Before I found much I came across the source from which the author lifted:

>“I think Martin Luther King must be spinning in his grave,” Bill Rutherford, who was executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when King was murdered, told 60 Minutes. “He gave his life for his ideas of justice, peace and love. He attempted his entire life to communicate ideas for free. To communicate, not to sell,” he says.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-319500.html
I think it looks great. And, it's in my interest for websites to cost as much as possible, so I have no problem with this.

I don't understand that thing nerds do where they brag about how they could have done it in a weekend for $15 and some Mountain Dew. Well, I do understand it ("look how smart I am"), but it's still obnoxious.
That's "Does not imply any _exclusive_ right to the preexisting materiel". The entire derived work is still copyrighted to the extent that the author exercised creative judgement while composing or arranging it, whether or not all the components are copyrighted independently[1]. The law you quoted just says that you don't suddenly acquire copyright on the components you used in creating your work.

[1] IANAL

EDIT: s/That/That's/
more looks like someone posted link too fast
Practical C Programming by Steve Oualline (O'reilly Press) is maybe my favorite beginning coding books of all time, and definitely the best introduction to C I've encountered to date.
here is a link to the post

something seems to go wrong with the github pages he uses

https://github.com/lrvick/lrvick/blob/master/posts/201201102...
I like the 3rd one with the bigger headline font.
Attend Selects CloudSigma’s IaaS
I really thought more would be using CloudFlare.
Simplifying the connected house through the web. GET /devices/lights
I've been reminded of this bizarre habit half a dozen times in the last week, most recently with an accountant, who's nearing his second retirement, who manages to slip in "when I was at MIT" at least twice a day - like nothing else in his entire life gives him the cachet he needs to validate himself.

And then it came up again here yesteday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APV_caBjO60 where Paul Reiche (the guy on the left) manages to slip in that he went to Berkeley every time he talks about his college experience probably 30 years prior. Even weirder, during his time in high school, he spent some time at LHS (Lawrence Hall of Science) and manages to turn that into a Berkely education credit.

Here's a guy who's incredibly accomplished in his own right, I mean he did Star Control and Star control II for goodness sake, and has to turn his time at a k-12 student resource center into a Berkely reference. It's like a weird form of academic credit Tourettes.

By way of comparison, the guy on the right, Fred Ford, manages to not do this and instead actually says "college".

On the flip side, if I ever move out to the Bay Area I'll have to start slipping in random institutes I've been at. "When I was at the Louvre" (I've walked two of the three wings" instead of "some art museums", and "when I studied music at the Music School No. 1 in Yekaterinburg" instead of "listened to a student performance while on vacation", and I'll save my trump card "when I was at Princeton" (I had a business meeting on campus once).

Come to think of it I could mine this sort of pseudo-academic inflation for weeks. Who knew going to the Ontario Science Center when I was 14 could give me so much street cred!

sigh
The best I can do is advise you a little on dealing with that $200k in student loans. The rest of this comment applies to just federal loans. For private education loans, you'll need to contact your lenders for details.

With that amount of loans, I'm assuming you maxed out your federal loans (which happens around $120k -- maybe a little north of that because of capitalized interest) and the remainder is in private loans. I don't know a whole lot about private loans, but, as far as federal loans, if you're making $50k with $120k in loans, you're certainly going to qualify for reduced payments, which will at least ease the monthly burden on you. You'll need to talk to your loan servicer, but, since the payments on income-based plans are based on a strict percentage of income (IIRC, 15% of your gross income is the max), based on the info you've provided, I don't see any problem whatsoever with you qualifying.

With your debt and income numbers, if you take a reduced payment schedule, you might end up with a payment less than the interest on the loan, which means you essentially never make progress toward paying it off. However, if you have this type of financial hardship for the next 25 years, your federal loans will be forgiven.

Now, if you work in a public interest-type job, there's the possibility you can qualify to have these federal loans forgiven in 10 years instead of 25 on the income-based plans. You'll need to contact your loan servicer for details on that.

Finally, because interest rates are essentially as low as they can get on federal student loans, you're going to be well-served by obtaining a federal student loan consolidation. Contact either your loan servicer or the William D. Ford Direct Loan program (http://www.loanconsolidation.ed.gov/) for details on consolidation.

This information came from three years experience at a company that consolidated federal student loans. I can also recommend the site finaid.org if you have any questions I haven't answered. I haven't read every word of every page there, but what I have read seems spot on. Specifically, you might find the following page to be of interest to you: http://www.finaid.org/loans/publicservice.phtml .

I hope this helped a little. Believe me, I understand the psychological and financial burden these types of loans can put on someone.
Nissan announces the world's first self-healing iPhone case
For some reason, even US published books in Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Srilanka, Nepal etc) are a lot cheaper and give good value for money. There are some compromises made in terms of paper and print quality, but I am sure that it is not that big a deterrent for readers.

Is anyone aware why a similar price point is not offered in other parts of the world?
If anyone (like me) is confused about the differences between WSGI, FCGI, CGI etc., this might be helpful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3937224/differences-and-u...
The case for treating PTSD in veterans with medical marijuana
Not by the James Burke I first thought of, either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burke_%28science_historia...
"Or daydreaming about another new idea." I also share this past-time. Just the idea of planning to sit down and think of business ideas gets me excited. :|
The Top Smart Cities On The Planet
It means that you have to make sure to deallocate any memory you allocate when you are done with it. Basically, the same as C and C++, as opposed to garbage-collected languages like Python or Java, which will automatically detect when you are done with a chunk of memory and deallocate it for you.
From what I can tell:

- It's hosted on AWS

- Their CDN is cloudfront

- 2 elastic AWS loadbalancers

- Apache webserver, probably with Tomcat

- Java session id in cookie

I assumed the site would have been either a Java or .Net site. I would have done it for $12 million ;)
I work in a digital agency, similar to the one who did this. 80% of the budget is spent in the requirements phase. More than a year doing designs, sending 20 people down to see the client every trip, business requirements gathering, market analysis, and such.

$18M over 24 months is only $750K per month burn rate. At the typical agency rate of $150/hr, this is 35 people working on this project. Only 2 of them are developers. :)
Most of the freely available technical books I'm familiar with (programming, machine learning, and maths) don't appear to have had an editor and don't seem to suffer from it. Perhaps it's because the people who write them (mostly academics) typically write a heck of a lot. I agree editors are useful but I don't think they're essential. If an author felt they needed one, they could be hired without going through a publishing house as an intermediary. Either way I don't think this point significantly alters my argument.
And your eyes won't bleed after hours of reading.
The failure of the FDA
It depends what mode you actually successful with. Many people just can not bring a project to completion little by little over time. It gets buried and forgotten. Others need the "do it now, or never" approach. I am feeling that may be me as well.
A better explanation for this language is at http://claylabs.com/clay/. The language focuses on improving generic programming by reducing template verbosity via "whole program type propagation".
Not sure about now, but for the summer 2010 batch, Amazon handed out a good chunk of AWS credits (enough to cover the hosting costs of most early stage startups for a while).
I suspect that the new model will be, sold for a very high price and never bought back, because that is the way DRM tends to work.
Aspirin for disease prevention? Not so fast...
I'm not sure that any book on the NLTK, even one written specifically for developers, could avoid the concepts you're referring to. These terms and concepts are inherent to the study of natural language processing. So while I agree that there are a significant number of NLP-related terms used, I think that has less to do with the book's audience and more to do with the book's subject matter. And the use of computational linguistic terminology is not gratuitous -- it's important to learn the jargon so you can look for the right type of help when you don't know how to do something.

On the flip side, the Python in the book is fairly straightforward, so developers should be able to dive right in with the code. In fact, experienced developers will probably find themselves skipping over many sections that are essentially lessons on Python.

Overall, this book is a good introduction to NLP and NLTK. That said, if you're at all familiar with NLP, you'd probably do just as well to dive right in and start working with the toolkit. NLTK is very well-documented and easy to work with. It's also amazingly complete -- tokenizers, stemmers, POS taggers, classifers, etc. etc etc. It also includes a number of algorithms that commonly fall under ML, data mining, and IR. If you work with Python and do any kind of work with unstructured text, you need to check NLTK out.
true. consultants address this shlep.
I can't agree that e-ink is a dead end. Perhaps you have never had the opportunity to spend some serious time to compare reading on an LCD screen to a e-ink display.

Tablets are great, but as long as they still have LCD (backlit etc.) screens they can't even be considered an alternative for anyone who actually does any serious reading. You can also pick up an ebook reader where I'm from for about 1/5th the price of even the most basic tablet.

If anything I think ebook readers are going to become even more popular. As e-ink or similar technology is refined and becomes even cheaper to produce I can easily imagine them becoming almost like disposable "throw-away" devices.

Also, in my opinion, your initial logic is incorrect. You talk as if "full-featured web-browsers like on the PC" is the "end-goal" for future reading devices. Well, we have always had that -on PC's- and they were the problem, not the solution. The e-ink display is the "solution" to the eye strain (among other things) that come with reading on a backlit display. So to suggest that is the goal seems to be as if we are going backwards.
This https://gist.github.com/1522657 has the slight advantage of working on comment pages as well.
Tizen to merge with Samsung's Bada
If they spent 18M for this then they should probably fire their CTO or whoever approved this budget. IF
so Legal Zoom did the shlepping for you. Though if you didn't need it rushed, it would be a smaller Legal Zoom fee + $800 CA annual fee (or tax, whichever it is).
I was with them for a few years. Reliable but slow - I don't think I ever saw more than 10Mbps in or out.
The Pirate Bay: PIPA/SOPA Won’t Stop Us
USA was just about the last place to accede to the international treaties on copyright, wherein copyright is granted at the time of creation of 'a work'. You don't have to fix the work in any particular medium to gain copyright - an expressive, creative mime could be a copyright work; or just a tune you whistled, or a cake, or ...
I'd love for Outlook to magically identify events in emails and ask to add them to the calendar. copy & paste of date/times from email to calendar seems so 1990's. (this is where someone politely alerts me to a simple option I only have to enable)
The estimated transition time between versions 2 and 3 is 5 years. We are about 3 years into these 5 years now. Many libs and packages already have ported to python3 and many others are working on it right now.

Python 3 is coming, there are no doubts about it.
The Ascendancy of the Application Layer Threat
When looking into NLTK to support a Twitter classifier, even though I had no NLP experience, the NLTK syntax/interface was sufficiently self-contained.

I was mostly interested in tagging and chunking and found it easy to reason about and use the relevant NLTK features with little auxiliary reading.

The only issues I found were with NLTK itself, e.g., Python version support, loading time, packages.
The in-house dev team is the secret here. You can pay each person $60k/year and they have management who will say "No, that's not possible with our resources".

Compared to the Four Seasons outsource model where anyone can say "I want that feature" and will be told "Sure, it'll cost an extra $1m of someone else's money".
How to cope with HTML5's dueling standards bodies
From Logins to Seamless Identity, a new paradigm for the web
The IO performance of EBS is terrible.
Right. Developers getting paid. You hear that sound? Listen real carefully. It's the sound of our profession being flushed down a toilet because your buddies are cheating businesses out of their money by charging too much for too little.
False presupposition in the title: Context is not a Tex engine, it is a format, either for Pdftex (Context Mk2) or Luatex (either Context Mk4 or Mk2).
In Icons Scraps Steve Jobs Doll
The service has been shut down for now. If you try to access the URL, this text is all that's there:

Hi there - thanks for your interest in our phone-based login experiment.
While we have concluded this particular experiment, we constantly experiment with new and more secure authentication mechanisms.

Stay tuned for something even better!

Dirk Balfanz, Google Security Team.
It's an expressive systems language with lambdas. So, anything you would be using C for + the power you get from lambdas and generic types. In a way you could think of it as Go with a more advanced type system, and without the garbage collection.

I'm looking forward to writing a game in Clay to measure its true performance in a realtime system.
Who doesn't like cheap meat? Externalities FTW.
I've always write with my real name in professional forums, like this. But I don't have a Facebook or Google+ account. It's the personal part that concerns me. I feel that social sistes have all the wrong incentives about privacy.

I could use a more private solution. Actually I think that it's something people want and sooner or later someone will figure out how to make a "more private social" site.
Best Hacker Conferences in 2012?
We can trade height and mass for velocity - by dropping down things from ballon.

So I wonder if it's possible to attach pulley to ballon with huge lift (according to http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/lift.html helium ballons have almost exactly 1 g of lift for 1 liter, which is 0,001 m^3). So ballon with 20 m of diameter will have over 4 tons of lift.

For 4 tons spherical lead weight with 0.62 m radius and 1.2 m^2 crossection and 0.47 drag coefficient dropped from 20 km this web calculator ( http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/airplane/termv.html )
returns terminal velocity of 1505.569 m/s which is probably a little too big because it's hipersonic so drag coefficient will increase, but still, it's over 1/8 of escape velocity.

Now to get a very strong, frictionless :) rope. Attach the weight to this rope, put the rope throught pulleys system multiplying the velocity 8 times, and attach the second end of rope to payload (very light - sth like 50 kg for example) lying on ground.

Now fly the ballon to 20 km, leaving payload on the ground, drop the weight down, and look how your payload flies to space.

Will it work? Probab ly not, because of rope-pulley friction..
B2B Content Shouldn’t Be Boring
Makes me wonder how may of Apple's Think Different personalities were paid for their "endorsement".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different
"MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices."

It's a nice dream, but it probably won't be what will happen. Not at first, anyways. Text-book publishers will continue to charge what they think the market will bear. They will completely ignore the fact that the cost of text-books is often spread over several students and several years via the used book market. With no used print editions available and perfect reproductions of texts available for "free", students will turn to piracy in droves. Then the publishers will blame the platform for encouraging piracy. This might not happen if publishers recognize that digital editions, if priced cheaply enough, might still bring in the same amount of revenue since every student is now forced to buy a new version of the text. I'm not hopeful that this will happen though.

Many subjects have text-books whose position in the universal cannon is unchallenged. They're so good, so well respected, or the competition so poor that practically everyone uses them to teach. Other subjects have no real cannon text-books because no single text has managed to distinguish itself. Other subjects are simply obscure or esoteric enough that professors tend to take a DIY approach to the course text, with wildly varying results. In any subject without an established canon text, a suite of digital text-book creation tools could be a great boon to writers. DIY texts that prove good enough to have broad appeal will face greatly reduced barriers to wider use. Of course, when you can deliver text-books to profs for the price of an email's bandwidth, it's going to become very hard to choose good course texts! Content creation tools are a great thing, but I hope somebody out there is working on content filtering tools for text-books too!
Outbound Linking from Your Business Blog
What freer licenses existed in 1963?
> I'm not in the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...

In the UK where we can't deport a "cleric" who is guilty of hate crimes, people can be deported to the US for breaking their copyright laws with no reference to the legality or not of their actions according to our laws. No doubt other countries have similar relationships with the US. Not being in the US does not mean you are completely shielded from the affects of US laws.

There are side affects too, you don't have to be directly affected by the law to have an effect on your life. If Wikipedia content came under the scrutiny of laws such as this and had to be taken down, being US based they would have to take the content down for all users not just US based ones.

OK the site could move all its hosting arrangements and its employees could all move to another territory but that:

1. is hardly practical

2. doesn't entirely solve the jurisdiction issue, unless you know of a magic country that will stand up to the US legal system, allows the current freedom of expression Wikipedia depends upon, has the technical infrastructure to support such sites, and that the relevant people will be happy to move to.
Independent Contractor Agreements: Beware "Work Made for Hire" in California
Since 1890 in the United States, the tort law has had concepts of invasion of privacy and breach of trust. Further on a state by state level there may be laws, such as COPPA 2003 in California, which required a privacy policy to be published. Canada and the EU have even more protective laws if you trade there.

I feel it is safer and more realistic to presume the first paragraph I wrote is the case and cover yourself with a privacy policy if you want to do otherwise as I mentioned.

As always, ask a lawyer if you want professional advice.
What 3 programming languages do you have on your phone, and pray tell, what kind of wonder phone is this?
Does this advice apply to those that are working at a dayjob? I find it hard as it is to focus on 1 idea
Just what we need - another bogus ranking based on press releases for cities that the "author" has never been to. Cue hand-wringing from politicians aiming trying to boost their "ranking" as a justification for spending/SOPA/plow chops.
I'm not sure how meaningful recruiter pings are; before I moved out of the bay area, I was averaging about 2/month from Google, and only once did the recruiter have a clear description of a position that was actually a good fit for my skills. In my group (at another big corp), the conversion rate of recruiter pings into actual interview offers is in the single digits. Recruiters are pretty bad at identifying candidates that you (the hiring group) want to interview, especially for more specialized positions.

It turns out that living outside of the bay area/NYC is a fantastic filter for recruiters. Now they don't talk to me unless they actually want me.
The most popular online Python book of years past, Dive Into Python, needed an editor badly.

Other online books have had technical editing done by the readers.
iTunes as the gatekeeper to information? I think not.
The Language Instinct is a great book, but unless the content of newer editions has changed significantly, it's more of an overview of linguistics in general, and language acquisition in particular. There's not much -- if any -- practical NLP. For example, looking at Amazon's statistically-improbable phrases (SIPs), I see nothing related to NLP, nor do I see any terms related to practical NLP during a quick glance of the book's index. The index includes references to a few pages on "statistics of language", but I honestly don't remember what those were about.

Also, the Language Instinct was written in the early 1990s, so although new editions have been released, it's a bit dated. It's a classic read for linguists and people interested in language, but I wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to NLP.
Is this a real product or a preview - what sort of error rate in transcription does one get; what's the training period? How many languages does it do; will it run on linux distros?