skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That statement is probably less that a half truth. "Flipkart focuses mainly on best sellers" is a valid comment, assuming you follow the 80/20 Pareto Principle. If you're one of the 80% who buy Bestsellers (20% of all books...hypothetically), guess it makes sense. But an online bookstore by its very nature cannot be restrictive. I doubt Flipkart is.
Not after you're downvoted to a certain degree. Otherwise I'd have deleted it outright and made a better comment.
Why do you think that? Even a full scale nuclear war would not erase all of humanity, and compared of the past right now is the least likely of all time periods for major disasters like that to happen.

I can't think of anything that could happen right now that would wipe out all of humanity. Even a massive asteroid wouldn't.

(Note: I mean _all_, lots of disasters could of course affect many people in various places.)
I suppose it depends if you're in an "at will" state or not.
Privacy: leaks of logs, archived Facebook profiles etc.
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton
Thing with Python is that it combines a shallow learning curve with very quick payback. You can use it as a glorified shell script if you want, and very quickly get something useful done, then anything you learn will have an immediate application to your next project. That's how I got into it. Then you go back and realize, hey, this for loop would be better as a list comprehension, these functions would work better together if I put them in a class, and refine your code.
Open source + Patents = Intellectual Property

Closed source + Patents = Oxymoron
Sorry, but that article is just silly, overblown, pointless drama.

Or was that the point? It reads like someone was trying to dramatize something as a challenge or something.

Who's the audience? Anyone who actually programs would not be interested, anyone who doesn't would not understand it.
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No, it's not downvotes, it's time - I think you get around 1 hour to edit or delete it.
D'oh! Intel only! :/
25 Different Uses For FriendFeed
Actually, the Apple II/II+ introduced in the late 1970s was quite open and a period of innovation for home computing. Apple even included the schematics as well as source code listing for their basic interpreter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_2
> Apple's culture is that of the 70s, the dark ages of personal computing.

Were you even around in the 1970s? Those were the days... personal computers came with the complete source code listing of their operating systems, a complete hardware schematic, pinouts for all connectors...

Right through the early 1980s it was pretty common to know everything about a personal computer. e.g. Go take a look at an Apple I or II manual, or the VIC-20, or the PET, or the BBC Micro or the TRS-80, or the early IBM-PC.
You were down-voted, but there is truth to those words. Personally I find it helps to add an expletive:

"Just fucking do it"

Or as this post http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/29/do-it-fucking-now/ (which inspired me) says:

"Do it fucking now"
Exactly. This product is like a very, very early SoftGrid... which has been out for a few years now. It's now called Microsoft Application Virtualization (Softricity was purchased by Microsoft about 2 years ago).

This certainly isn't anything new -- software virtualization on Windows. VMWare has a s/w virt. product, so Does Altiris, and so does Citrix Xen. I suppose since these products are mainly enterprise focused, most people never even hear of them.
Maybe some sort of monetary incentive would help. Here's an idea:

RescueTime could hold some of your money hostage each month (say $20, or whatever is significant enough you'd like it back) and if you don't meet your goals that money gets donated to charity at the end of the month.

Though it's probably best to eliminate the root cause of the procrastination.
We likely can't predict tech for 100 years with any kind of detail. I think tech will be pretty okay, but ideologies will give us major problems, as always.
Apple made to drop iPhone advert
sabnzbd+ beats the hell out of unison.
Idiomatic Python: http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/han...

Probably the best complement to the aforementioned tutorials. Dive into Python is good but i hate the examples he makes.
Dive into Python: http://diveintopython.org/
And then I bought Python in a Nutshell, which covers a lot of things in more depth, with decent examples. Recommended.
I just have to make sure no one has responded to my comments on Hacker News then I'll almost be ready...
We are both in the realm of speculation about the author's motives here. I don't like this particular essay either, in fact I think it's horrible.

However, my troll detector is silent on this one. I agree with pg that the author isn't deliberately dishonest.
gitorious is like a subset of github and is open source
SBCL has an extremely sophisticated facility called a VOP (Virtual Operation) that allows you to write assembly with s-expressions and integrate the code into the compiler and runtime. The SBCL backend itself is composed of these VOPs.

Significantly, this means that you can write assembly macros with the full power and elegance of lisp. A trivial example is the move macro, which is used extensively in VOPs:

(defmacro move (dst src)
"Move SRC into DST unless they are location=."
(once-only ((n-dst dst)
(n-src src))
`(unless (location= ,n-dst ,n-src)
(inst mov ,n-dst ,n-src))))

Check out the SBCL source if you want to see some wild uses of VOPs and macros that expand into assembly code. In compiler/x86/arith.lisp there is a lisp/assembly implementation of the Mersenne Twister.

VOPs can optionally handle argument type checking and can be tuned to emit specialized code in various circumstances, such as when one of the arguments to the call is a compile-time constant.
Royal Society of Chemistry: £1,000,000 for 100% chemical free material
Where do the bulk of your clients come from? From google?
While the direction this is taking is ingenious, the concrete implementation is useless. There's a reason why genetic algorithms are automated - most of the mutations are useless, so it's a waste of person's time to look at all of them.

What they could do is have the system teach itself which types of mutations go well with people. body { text-decoration: line-through } is not something anyone would want, yet it's the first thing I got.

Edit: minor complaint - no UTF8 support.

Another idea - a flicker mode, with the original and evolved design switching every half second or so. That's how astronomers detected disappearing stars in the past.
The activestate download "http://www.activestate.com/Products/activepython/index.mhtml" for windows came with a nice helpfile which bundled a couple of tutorials, dive into python, library reference and lots more. A good place to start.
Two aspects of this essay by Keynes seem highly relevant today.

I. Keynes stressed the threat which the slump posed to ‘the social stability of every country alike’.

‘… a series of bankruptcies, defaults, and repudiations which would shake the capitalist order to its foundations … would be a fertile soil for agitation, seditions, and revolution. It is so already in many quarters of the world.’

The only place where I know this aspect of this essay of Keynes and his other writings has been discussed is in Donald Markwell’s book called ‘Economic Paths to War and Peace - John Maynard Keynes and International Relations’ (around pages 172-173).

II. Keynes ended by stressing the necessity of the monetary authorities of the big economic powers acting together.

‘…nor can any one central bank do enough acting in isolation. … the most effectibe remedy would be that the central banks of these three great creditor nations [the United States, France, and England] should join together in a bold scheme to restore confidence to the international long-term loan market; which would serve to revive enterprise and activity everywhere, and to restore prices and profits, so that in due course the wheels of the world’s commerce would go round again.’

As Markwell’s book also shows, this necessity of international economic action is one of the key lessons from Keynes’s thinking, at least from the aftermath of the First World War on.

Does anybody else think these two points from Keynes are of the utmost importance to our current global meltdown?
Something needs to be said: You will need to give the sysadmin the ability to suggest changes to your app's architecture. That's where real scalability and availability start.

All I'm saying is that sysadmin for apps is not just installing the right kind of software.
No, I meant as a change from coffee so he wouldn't have the association.
Yep, that's right. Bad on me for not sourcing my quote.
[Ask YC] - Javascript for python developers
All JS books I can find are either too basic. (Start with what loops are, ) or too esoteric.
Is there a book which teaches Javascript for experienced developers, and is preferable geared towards people who know Python already?

Ps. How can I get a set type behaviour in JS. This is the python code I want to do in JS ( http://dpaste.com/94047/ ), and cant find one simple way
Ask YC: A good IDE for Python programming?
I am trying to get into python programming for the OLPC, and would like to know what a good IDE for it would be? I am an experienced developer so learning the language or OO is not a hurdle (although functional programming will be new but not difficult).

My other question is an environment one - the OLPC isn't geared up for full blown dev yet so I plan to develop on an Ubuntu VM and then package up an activity and deploy onto Sugar VM and then OLPC. I'm aware that Sugar Activities need to use custom python libraries but I don't know how I would approach getting those libraries into Ubuntu and whether it would work?

Currently looking at wing IDE as an option, I use eclipse a lot and have tried the Jython plug in. I'd like something with code completion and ease of use so not looking for suggestions around Vi or Emacs!
That's always been GM's problem. They have perfectly fine designs, but have always been built shoddy. They build a reliable car, and then sabotage it by stuffing it full of ill-fitting plastic interior parts.

Every GM car I've been in recently has felt cheap. You know, interior materials don't cost that much - however much they are saving on this construction is nothing compared to how bad it makes them look.

I know many people who work in the automotives field, and the general consensus is that GM uses the worst production methodology out of them all. Parts have high tolerances (i.e. shaky, loose, poor fitting) and that leads to shoddy assembly, which weakens reliability of an otherwise sound design, and generally just feels like junk.

If GM tightened their manufacturing tolerances they would do wonders for themselves.
Yeah, that's a bit more convincing. I'm mainly skeptical about the idea of consciousness replication. My statement was meant to show that even if the brain simulation created a consciousness, it wasn't the same as my consciousness, which would still disappear if I were to die.
It is a (strong) rumor and I should have clarified it upfront.
Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (Jim Gray & Andreas Reuter) isn't just one of the best database textbooks, it is one of the best computer science textbooks. It is an Important Work.

On the other books, it depends on what you want. Alternatives to Date include Jeffrey Ullman, "Principles of Database and knowledge-base Systems" and "Foundations of Databases" by Abiteboul, Hull and Vianu.

As an introductory book, I like Database: Principles, Programming, Performance by Patrick O'Neil.

For more on transaction processing, as well as Jim Gray there is Philip Bernstein, eg "Principles of Transaction Processing".

Following the references is a lot of fun; see where you end up.
Interesting, don't know if that reverses entropy, though.
Maybe for some people it really is not an option, if maths and programming are not their strengths.
Also called strong AI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_AI
Re. monetary incentive: https://www.stickk.com/
That's why Eliezer Yudkowsky is working on friendly AI.

http://yudkowsky.net/

Though, that still doesn't rule out people misusing friendly AI against each other. Say some megalomaniac thinks it'd be much more convenient to have a bunch of friendly AIs around than a human population prone to revolt. In that case, friendly AI is not so great since it disrupts the power balance.
...since no one knows how to program AI

Do you think no one will ever figure this out? There's a bunch of stuff that no one used to know how to do but is common now. Why would AI be any different?
The $62,550 machine no one bought - Honeywell's Kitchen Computer remembered
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Ever since I first watched "ghost in the shell" years ago I've been a bit scared of a time when we will be able to plug our brain into a computer network... with the risk of getting it hacked.

I mean, you could always refuse to jack yourself in but I doubt I could.
Try Komodo - quite a good package. PyDev is good if you're already an eclipse user. I hear good things about Kate.

I'm an Emacs user myself - the power is addictive.
I agree with you that people liked scaling using a single big machine back then, and Sun had the biggest and best machines (and still does to some extent).

The problem is more that a ton of those people didn't actually need to scale.
too slow for recent content like tv shows. i typically find torrents of the tv shows i watch right after they finish airing on the east coast and download them even quicker.
'Nother vote for Komodo.
Internet Access Without Electricity, Connectivity or Phone Services.
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

-1984
Virtual captive - blending the benefits of traditional models
Nokia 3220 No Network Signal Problem
3220, 3220 network problem, 3220 network ways, 3220 no network, 3220 signal problem, no network, Nokia, signal problem
Software development outsourcing for SMEs: strategies that make a difference
Same for me.
Sometimes I refer to http://effbot.org/pyref/
Error in the article?

To determine a task’s utility and therefore how likely a
person is to do it right away, Steel puts together four
basic factors, expectancy (E), value (V), the delay until
reward or punishment (D), and personal sensitivity to
delay (P), in the following equation:

U = (E x V) / (R x D)

-> Those codes don't correspond to the equation. Any hints from someone who knows the source?
thanks I'll look up Komodo.
Trying out Rubinius in 20 minutes
tech will be erased certainly :)
Nope. BitTorrent is just a protocol for transferring files. Much like other similar protocols like http, ftp etc it makes no attempt to limit the type of files relayed through it and is a little out of its scope.
These are great. The Python tutorial is very readable.

You could use these side by side with any decent university course that you can find online. Here is a link to Caltech's introductory Python course, with exercises posted that ramp up in difficulty while surveying most of the Python basics. http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs11/material/python/index...

And here is MIT's intro course on Python as well. Theirs includes the solutions too. http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
Kurzweil is just replacing points on a graph with s-curves on a graph.

This doesn't change the fundamentals of the argument in any way.
Put yourself in my position: in England, which has very few totally local car manufacturers.

I'd buy a German car if I got rich (VW, BMW, Audi, Mercedes), a Japanese car (Toyota, Honda), even a French car (Peugeot or Citroen) if I don't. If I won the lottery I'd think of an Italian sportscar.

But an American car, what possible use would I have for one of those?

Change that.
I was put onto a Python project at work so I started with the best quick reference I could find (wikipedia!) and then went from there.

Started at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_syntax_and_semantics

Found most other details on here:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/
http://www.python.org/doc/

There's some good online tutorials to ease into some of the trickier details like metaclasses and descriptors.

I was already coding Ruby before this (and some LISP before that) so the whole dynamic language thing was familiar enough I could get away with mostly references. Your milage may vary :)
Cost of  Micro-Optimizing
Interesting argument...
DHT support is a huge reason, plus µTorrent's bandwidth-maximising logic is the best available. It makes a massive difference on large public trackers that are highly overloaded and unresponsive. You'll start downloading a lot quicker, and use much more bandwidth; because you can find more peers quicker, and make much better use of them.

The best implementations available are µTorrent, rTorrent, and Azureus, all with different strong suits. I exclusively use rTorrent in GNU Screen, but I don't download much from large public trackers.
Tell YC: Happy Thanksgiving everyone
Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Hopefully, you're spending time with your family & friends today instead of hacking on stuff. Even better, hacking on stuff with your family & friends =].
For the purposes of this discussion nothing you've mentioned falls under the serious banner. I mean no snark at all in saying that - just that those with half a dozen 12 CPU boxes packed with nearly 200Gb of RAM tend to be cutting their own path.
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Have you considered partnering with someone who does managed hosting? It's not unheard of for startups to get a contra deal.
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It's one of the cornerstones of the singularity possibility. If you didn't get that argument, you didn't really get the whole singularity movement...
Write off the first hour of work
She who must be obeyed and I just wrapped up our Thanksgiving dinner - tough day when your family is 10000 miles away. Anyhow, happy Thanksgiving to all.
The Big Four Cloud Computing Providers: Security Compared
This is begging for a link to Val Henson's photoset of her with this delightful monstrosity at the Computer History Museum...

http://www.valhenson.org/kitchen.html

(Context: Val wrote chunkfs and large chunks of ZFS, among other things)
What I meant was this is not HN!
If you feel I am wrong, please do down vote me once more!
There's people tweeting things like "#mumbai There's 20 commandos about to bust into the 5th floor of the X hotel"
The basic rule of thumb on predicting future tech progress: figure out a conservative estimate of how long until the tech comes about/matures and then triple that number.

I think two major issues will be genetic discrimination, which seems like it's on the verge of being an active issue, and whether we should begin restricting access to some scientific information such as sequences or viral patterns in the interest of security over freedom.
I don't know what all, or any, general intelligence algorithms would look like but they only one we have currently available, the human brain, appears to be intrinsically parallel.
ha, good one!

oh wait, you were serious?
The petulant tattletale attitude in the Mac community is really obnoxious.
Article nine: an interesting idea
Geek Thanksgiving - an APPLE apple pie.
Happy Thursday for the rest of the world.
Ask YC: Scheme vs Common Lisp - power/expressivity comparison.
I would like to read your opinions about the comparison of power and expressivity of Scheme and Common Lisp. I currently only know Scheme, and I want to decide if I should spend more time and effort on this route, or if it is worth learning Common Lisp for me.

Specifically, I want to understand if there is anything that can be done in Common Lisp that can't be reasonably easily be expressed using a present-day Scheme system.

One thing I read somewhere is that reader macros (which I don't grasp yet) are such a thing.

Other thing would be low level macros - but there are Scheme systems that allow you to use define-macro and gensym (non-hygienic macros). Is this (even if more cumbersome) as powerful as the Common Lisp counterpart?

Finally, Common Lisp has dynamic scope - but to me it looks like everything that can be done using this could be done using macros that capture variables (which some Scheme systems also support). Am I wrong?
Love it. Thankyou.
well, technically it was a reply to mine
US citizens do. Yeah, I know, the mind boggles. Boggles, I tell you.
Restaurateur tracks down bill dodgers on Facebook
TLDR : Use, don't abuse language, please.
Maybe as designers we can all agree
Good on 'em I say. Saying organic fertilizers are 100% chemical free makes a mockery of the English language and more importantly the science of Chemistry that directly or indirectly has saved everyone's arse on this planet at least once.
My answer is the same as the last time you asked me:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318592
I'll second the python challenge. Unlike Project Euler, this challenge required the participant to rely on finding and using some python libraries (for imaging, networking, compression, etc.) to solve the puzzles. So, not only are you researching the language to figure it out, but you're actively engaged in self-directed research to find out how to complete real tasks with python.

I've also read the "Dive Into Python" book, but that was equivalent to reading a book about an instrument without actually holding or playing one.
The Omega Man: "Math is built on randomness"
I pretty much begin doing projects in it. Started with some basic web scrapers, then I built a site in Django. Yes, I was one of those bastards that was learning Python AND Django at the same time, but it worked out for me.

I read the Python tutorial, and I have Python in a nutshell which I find is a great way to look something up and get a pretty good, detailed explanation on it.
Common Lisp's main advantage over Scheme is that it has been used commercially for years, and has thus accumulated a large number of libraries. Scheme was created as a more consistent and concise Lisp, and is better suited to experimentation.
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Not only does Kurzweil deal with the "S-curve", but unlike every article which I've seen so far where he was criticized he actually explains and defends his numbers. The main reason why I currently think that Kurzweil's numbers are probably the best estimation of the singularity is that I still haven't seen anyone else seriously trying to do the numbers themselves.
I agree.
Gmail filters, username+keywork@gmail.com, or outlook filters make it possible to "auto-organize" incoming emails.
I'd be curious to know the stats of filter use among Gmail regular users. I have dozens of labels and sublabels as well as dozens of filters in Gmail.

For the regular Joe, I don't think email overload is a real problem.
What would a modern depression look like?