skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dont doubt it, your SEC goes after it agressively, however that it is not illegal for US politicians makes the whole thing a bit of a joke really as they are the people who will have the most opportunity ot profit from some actiosn given that theyc an influence and cotnrol policy which would significantly affect share prices.
I've been programming since 1984, and it gets more and more exciting as it goes along.

I've gone from hacking together moving dots on a BBC Micro to being able to set up code running on a worldwide collection of servers (Google App Engine) that reads from multiple places and posts to a blog running on an engine that's used by millions of people all over the world. And that's in my spare time.

Think of all the awesome things you can do nowadays - Mobile phone apps, web pages, amazing games, and so much source code available for free for you to use in your own programs. It's an amazing time we're living in.
Most Debian/Ubuntu admins I know use aptitude these days, rather than apt-<tool> directly.
Queen's honours: People who have turned them down named
this has been a problem with AWS/EC2 for the last four/five years (since its creation): http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/nanog/users/105399
I doubt it had a lot to do with parking spaces. Cambridge has had huge growth in biotech and other high-tech in a lot of the old industrial area over the past couple of decades. Several of the more rundown areas have gentrified as a result. Parking in Cambridge varies. It's really tight in some areas--though those are mostly fairly accessible by public transportation. In others, it's not bad.
The same guy who teaches this course also runs the site codingbat.com. It has a bunch of puzzles in python and java to test your chops on.
Hah! So there is something on the front page of HN that I have referred to for years :)
Ahh, thanks so much for grabbing a cached PDF! I wasn't expecting to make the front page of HN and yes, my server went down. Great lesson in scalability!
The problem with buses for transport is they use the same infrastructure as cars. So, as congestion increases they become less viable. Light rail really solves 2 problems, it can transport more people than an equivalent investment in roads and it increases property values by decreasing the need for parking spaces while increasing mobility.

PS: Roads are really expensive if you compare road infrastructure costs to miles driven you need a ~3$ / gallon gas tax to break even. Anything less than that and your just subsidizing cars which does not lower costs it just hides them.
Swedish Meatballs
Swedish Meatballs recipe and history:
Who got the idea of Swedish Meatballs? A well known professor in folk lore in Sweden said the universal thought is to use all parts from a slaughtered animal. Because in the old days you couldn't afford to throw anything away. The not so eatable parts was chopped to minced meat and the idea was formed, Swedish Meatballs. And you could even put old bread and flower in it and it would last longer. At the same time the minced meat is kept together better and gets juicier.

Meatballs appear in various forms in many countries. Meatball was introduced in the 1700s, along with coffee and cabbage rolls, after Karl XII:s return from the Ottoman Empire.
Kajsa Warg mentions swedish meatballs recipe in her book 'Hielpreda i hushållningen för unga fruentimmer' meatballs of minced meat (veal, but also sheep or beef is said to work), bread crumbs and egg. They are seasoned with pepper, salt and nutmeg. Onions doesn't appear in the swedish meatballs until early 1940's.
Big Cookbook 1944 brings a host of different recipes for meatballs. Including beef, veal and even ham. Here are several variations with meatballs containing both yellow and red onion, white pepper, paprika, tomato paste and cream or milk.

The first conditions for ordinary people to start eating Swedish meatballs came with the wood stove breakthrough in the 1850s. Then you could fry the meatballs in a pan on the stove. Before this most of the food was cooked over an open fire.
The second is the meat grinder that came about the same time.

Hoped you enjoyed a short curiosity about Swedish Meatballs recipe and history.
Faster payments are customer originated, whereas Direct Debits are merchant originated.
I'm coming to Amsterdam twice a year during huge trade shows at RAI, and I have no particular problem getting parked in the centre, near the Dam and al. Really, Amsterdam is quite easy, not worse than Paris.
I have never been that interested by programming

Building things however, I love, and I dont think there has been a more interesting time in the world to be involved, schoolkids can build social networks that connect almost a billion people, a small group of people run a website that categorises and links most of the knowledge the human race ever had.
In case someone else finds himself hitting this performance slowdown, try this: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=32483
Fair-Use Guide Seeks to Solve Librarians' VHS-Cassette Problem
In this situation it is a direct debit so has very strong protection in place.

Yes a DD can be used to make a single payment, it can make a repeat payment of a varying amount or a fixed amount. it is quite a flexible system.
Yes it does. And it's pretty cheap too. I have an OpenPGP v2 smart card and an SPR-532 smart card reader. I will be writing up how I did it on my blog at https://grepular.com/blog/ probably next week. Need to find an hour or two to write the thing up.
What is with Romanians? Most of the metadata sent (see at the bottom) is in Romanian.
I've been using Ubuntu with apt-get for quite a few years now. What additional funcionality does aptitude offer over "plain" apt-get?
That's a pretty neat feature.
I am a 25 years old male and my demographic is supposed to be:

Male, 35-44
- Center Of Interests
Computers & Electronics - Software - Freeware & Shareware
Computers & Electronics - Software - Software Utilities

According to Google I am a cheap nerd older than I really am.
Damn...

PS: Where's the porn ? (Kidding, or am I...)
Don't see how a measly (relatively speaking for these giant companies) $250M should have been a major factor for Nokia to choose to focus on Windows Phones rather than Android.

Apple and Google are dominating the smartphone OS market and I don't see how two slow-moving companies will make a serious dent in the consumer market. How many people wold would give up their iPhone for a Windows phone, especially as an early adopter? I'd be very surprised if any Windows Phone gains serious traction with consumers.

The best shot I see for Windows Phone success would be in the enterprise market where easy/free compatibility with MS Office products and other MS products used at work could be a large benefit. But Apple is making headway here as well so it could all be for naught.
I don't think reversing a link-list and removing unique items requires any special Python knowledge. No magical API needs to be used, just the basics.

A white board interview shouldn't exclude naive implementations. After the naive implementation has been done it's reasonable to ask for less naive approaches.

Also the continual whining about white board interviews is tiresome. It's a fact of life that exists in almost any tech interview you do. Practice, get your friends to bust your balls before the fact, write itoa on a white board or detect a loop in a singly linked list and move on with your life.

At some point if you're going to get paid you need to demonstrate your ability, reality says the potential employer decides what type of proof is required.
Vasco, can you please point me to that website? I'm researching online payment solutions in Portugal and would love to see that implementation. Thanks.
How do you "require" that they use a pass phrase with their key? You can tell them to do it, but it's up to them if they actually do.
On one or two of those times he got away for being a minor... and allegedly when they got him for phone card and credit card fraud, they might have offered him a deal and he snitched on and betrayed the whole scene that actually built him up first.

See also comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3513015
Reminds me that there's a good failure and a bad failure. A good failure is over and you move on, hopefully with some learned lessons. While a bad failure is doing just well enough to be kept 'ticking over', and you're stuck working on something you don't really believe in.
nvidia gpus only, right? does it work with ati as well? CUDA is probably more advanced, so it's no surprise.
I hope this gets more attention and doesn't slip under the radar. It's this type of thing that can be used to set precedence and allow other states to take the same measures.

One by one, state by state, the entire country will be sewed up unless we are vigilant.
No, secrecy is not their recipe for success. There is no secret sauce. Great products + great marketing = loyal fanbase = profits.

When every other tech company out there is run by MBAs chasing short term profits and trying to appease shareholders, it's a race to the bottom with ever crappier products and smaller margins. (See: HP, Dell, GM, Chrysler, old Ford, etc) Dell used to be a company I could recommend by friends and family--now I tell everyone to stay clear of those cheap junk boxes. Apple doesn't play that game. When you're not trying to make $500 laptops, of course you're going to see large profit margins.

It also doesn't hurt that Cook is a supply chain genius. Apple has a lock on all the critical consumer electronics components.
The Case Against Conversion Discounts for Convertible Debt
The biggest advantage is when removing packages; its dependency resolution is (supposedly) much better so it's able to find and remove orphan packages more accurately without hosing your system.

It's also got a much friendlier set of commands:

$ apt-get upgrade vim # aptitude upgrade vim

$ apt-get dist-upgrade # aptitude full-upgrade

$ apt-cache search # aptitude search

$ apt-get install --reinstall vim # aptitude reinstall vim

$ apt-get remove --purge vim # aptitude purge vim

The list goes on.

It's also got an awesome ncurses based interactive interface if you just type:

$ aptitude

Great for sysadmins who miss synaptic or anyone who feels like a GUI is just too mainstream.
Improving Programmer Productivity (Mind Map)
Id guess so yes but also market reach. I have a UK business and currently our customers are manually transferring money to us every quarter because I couldn't find a simple, easy and cost effective way to retrieve payments.

I hadn't come across Adyen until you mentioned them here.
APIs are, as far as I know, not publicly available. Each bank has their own API—again as far as I am aware.

I have never seen any integration of this sort with a Swedish bank on an international site, but I don't know if that is because international vendors don't want to bother with integrating with a number of different bank APIs in X number of countries, or if you need to have a local (Swedish) account to be able to process payments this way.
Thanks for the detailed response!

That's interesting. I didn't know that a system was considered broken if, knowing plaintext (and breaking a hash function) allows an attacker to rewrite a message. Probably pretty basic stuff to you.
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It's such a huge amount of money. Patents are what they officially say. Obviously, they have partners and they don't want to lose them in the short term, so protecting them seems pretty harmless. But they will inevitably compete at some point in the future. That seems to be one of the reasons behind the "patent story".

The other two might be that they are making so much less money on every device they sell than Apple. It could possibly become a reasonable source of revenue (Google almost always talks about market share of Android, not the revenue).

The last thought, is the big picture of utilizing the emergence of tablets to become a predominant player in the industry. Beyond search. And somehow surpass Microsoft and Windows as the omnipresent platform. That seems really tough.

Time will tell.
Yea, I have been looking into shorting gold for a while now, but you really need to get the timing right to do that. It went from 1600 to 1900 and back to 1600 in the fall but there is so much volatility it's impossible to really know the market.
The midtown Atlanta example is all wrong. Yes, there are a lot of cars in Atlanta. Yes, there are a lot of parking lots in Atlanta. Are these parking lots required to sustain these cars? Not at all. The rates for parking vary wildly, because people only want to park near where they are going.

Those parking lots are not for cars, they are for flipping real estate.

Real estate in midtown has been booming for a little over a decade as small run down buildings are demolished and 10 ~ 40 story skyscrapers are built. That means huge increases in land value, which attracts speculation. When a lot with a small building is purchased, what happens next? If the building stays, it will have to be serviceable, and a tenant found, which will lock the property up until the tenant leaves. So the building has to go, and the property might need to be re-zoned from single family residential.

If you pave over that lot, not only do you remove unwanted structures and get the opportunity to re-zone, there will be some low-maintenance passive income generated from people using the property to park their car.

So ultimately, those parking lots are good for the city in the long run. They're useless eyesores right now, but are more easily converted into high density buildings, as they have been doing for the last decade. In fact the real problem with midtown is that there has been too much high density construction too quickly, and not enough people have moved in yet.

So as much as I love a naval gazing rant, reality is a little more subtle, and a lot more complicated.
A digital civil rights movement that prefers secretive backroom politics over public activism is not exactly the right organisation to protest secretive backroom politics...

This is typical for BoF. "They" decide what's important, behind closed doors. They are no different from ruling political class, which is both their strength (when it comes to lobbying) and their weakness (when it comes to representing the people who's rights they claim to stand up for).
That's not what distribution packages are for. The point of distribution packages is to run other packages in the distribution written in that language.

You're drawing a distinction between "apps" for users and "packages" that users don't directly use, and you're drawing it in a place that is not traditional for Linux. When someone installs Amarok (or finds it pre-installed by their distro) they expect to find a music player they can use, not something that only supports the music player needs of the distribution. In Linux, Perl isn't any different from Amarok. It's an "app" that many users understand and use directly. The packages you get when you install Perl using yum or apt-get are very much intended for users, unless Linux distributions want to depart from history and start treating programmers as second-class users compared to the "normal" users who would use a music player but would never use a programming language. If vendors need their own ancient Perl distro to support their toolchain, that's their problem, and they should figure out how to accomplish that and still give users a usable, up-to-date Perl.
By the way, you can opt-out from being tracked by Google's ads there from what I can see. Why do people say you can't opt out with the new privacy policy?
After reading the article I have to question whether it really was profitable. I think one of the mistakes that coders (and most business owners) make is to value a profit solely on the accounting values: (income from the application) - (direct expenses of the application).

However, the true way to value profitability is to take a more financial perspective (financial being different than accounting). A financial perspective would value the opportunity cost of working on this application compared to working on another application. If the team spent 10 hours a week on the application, and those 10 hours a week could grow their other products by more than $75,000 a year, then of course the application isn't profitable. It's actually losing money.

Another way to look at its profitability is to look at it from an operational standpoint. The employees on the team would be consider a fixed cost (yes, they could hire more people, but that just changes the fixed cost). The limited resource for this particular fixed cost is time, and from their article I can assume that their time was maximized (working as many hours a week as they wanted to). Operational theory says when a fixed cost is at its maximum utilization, higher marginal profitability items should be prioritized. Basically, they are better off working on other items if they don't want to work more hours.
I disagree with Ted. I believe he's thinking about this too narrowly.

The title of his post should be "Are Programming Languages/Tools/Utilities Less Exciting Today?"

From that perspective, one may certainly claim to be bored. What goes around comes around, as those of us who have been around long enough can identify when the processing pendulum swings from client to server to client to server over the course of time. Back and forth, side to side, the more things change the more they stay the same.

But that's the wrong perspective to take. It limits the definition of someone, as a programmer, with their chosen tools. How many Enterprise-Java-vs-Dot-Net or PHP-vs-Ruby/Rails debates have ever made a difference in that regard? Programming languages, server systems, utilities, etc. aren't the path to the future -- they're the results of the past.

I prefer to think of programming as usage of these tools in solving problems, creating businesses, or just plain creating mischief. With that, I see wide open spaces to be addressed (and not enough good engineers to do it.) Hardly boring, in my opinion.
Jelastic Newsletter – January 25, 2012
Schoolwork, Dating or Hacking Side Projects: Pick Two out of Three
Ask HN: What are some of the worst stories of entrepreneurs getting screwed?
Self-explanatory — curious about stories like Mike Arrington and the CrunchPad, Khalid Shaikh at YouSendIt. Are there others that I'm missing?
>If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing?

Generally speaking, yes, but there is the danger of creating a [filter bubble](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble).
I wonder if Mizonu has actually ever spoken to anyone in the tech field abou this. I haven't read the text of the bill itself, but judging from the article it sounds like a first draft of something a high school freshman would write on the bus 10 minutes before it was due.
Or better yet, don't run SSH at all. Leave it to the pros.

I had an experience about a year ago on one of my home servers that convinced me of this. It was a Debian machine that I kept religiously up to date (daily cronjob and manual checking). It only had an external SSH port, I used log2ban, and disabled all logins except for one non-root user.

I got the common ssh brute force spam. Then one day I happened to be checking logs, and noticed rootkit logs in the /root directory. My server had been hacked! Fortunately whoever had broken in had completely botched it and left traces all over the system. It looked like they had given up at some point, despite having root access.

I later discovered that the attacker had used a 0-day openssh exploit that had been released that very morning. For that time period of 24-48 hours between release and fix, my server had been hacked. I only wonder how many other servers were hacked by skilled people that didn't leave evidence behind.

So morale of the story - you can't secure anything that is publicly facing on the internet. And if you really need to do it, it requires constant vigilance, DMZs, and all that other stuff that is not worth it unless you're being paid.
Get your Geeklist name
As I said, "If there's a growing need for light-rail, chances are" buses being the better solution. I'm not arguing against light-rail in general. But most of the times light-rail is considered as solution in political debates, buses would do a better job. Cheaper prices allow for even more transportation capacities than light-rail. Light-rail is a good option when bus-capacities can't be increased anymore.

"The problem with buses for transport is they use the same infrastructure as cars"
IMHO this is to be considered as advantage over light-rail. There is no additional infrastructure to be built or maintained.
To be fair, the article explicitly says that he's not arguing against use of cars for low-density transportation, only in cities.
Agreed. I think commuting by bike on trails, small streets, or separated from traffic is must less stressful than biking on a busy street. Even taking a bus is a bit more stressful than driving (for me) because the buses are so infrequent. Missing a crucial bus can cause an extra 30-45 minutes of travel time.
Note that $250m just seems to be the quarterly fee...
I was an at&t customer for 11 years but in Q4 I switched to verizon because AT&T decided they no longer wanted to offer the plan I was grandfathered into. After three years of at&t not getting any good android phones on launch its no wonder the iphone is the only phone people are buying there. You HAVE to go to verizon, sprint, or tmobile to get good android phones without a six month or more wait, or importing them.
Why, it's simple! They just send him their private key along with the passphrase, and he tests it to make sure it works!

(I've heard worse.)
Apple’s grip on tablet market said to be loosening as Android shipments triple
Long term, the odds of WP7 outselling both are better than slim because Microsoft was thinking about the low end market when they designed WP7.

There are two standard screen sizes, 800 x 480 and 400 x 480 which is well suited for cheaper commodity devices.

Nokia sold 93 million commodity devices last quarter (that's about half the number of iPhones ever sold). The market is huge and neither Android or iOS is likely to go there.

Android won't because the development costs of adapting the OS to small low margin commodity devices would be borne by the manufacturers and carriers, and iOS won't because of Apple's branding strategy.

Nokia recognized that its core competency was manufacturing and hardware design, not user interfaces and software development. Considering that they were probably better at both than any other handset manufacturer, it is probable that other handset manufacturers will follow course, should Nokia see even moderate success with their strategy.

[edit] Nokia has sold 1.5 billion S40 devices. WP7 is what will replace them.
Excellent work! I have a very small (marketing-related) nitpick:

Would you consider hosting your project on github instead of SourceForge? I don't say this to be trendy, github just has a much more pleasing interface in my opinion. It's also faster, subjectively at least.
I think they were talking about Unity, not the entire Ubuntu distro.
I was expecting something more along the lines of this:

Human dynamics revealed through Web analytics

http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.4018
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Demi Moore hospitalized after inhaling whip-its full of nitrous oxide
Relaunched: the 6502 microprocessor
Yep. We agree that we need to work on improving the design of the feature and we will be doing just that. “X seats left at this price” is a better label, but may be too long to fit for the way it is currently designed, so we will need to think about how we can best convey the information better.