skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, except #end doesn't verify you are at the correct level of indentation. This, instead, would be more appropriate:

def something:
...
end def

but then it makes indentations insignificant altogether.
Just as the quality of the language determines that of your code, the quality of your pen determines that of your handwriting. When I use a nice pen, my handwriting's pretty good. When I use a cheap pen, it looks like that of a six-year-old.
The three elements are the capacitor, inductor and resistor.

I think when they say "fundamental elements" they mean the fundamental passive elements of analog circuit theory (mentioned above), as opposed to active elements like op-amps or transistors.
The "three elements" are, I assume, resistors, capacitors and inductors.
Actually, no. In those games, its the lowest unique bid. check out http://www.bidster.com/ . This way, if more than one person choose the lowest bid, then those cancel eachother out, and the next lowest, but non-duplicated bid wins. There's a large number of these sites out there actually, but none-the-less a very profitable business. Might be less of a lottery though, because one could claim its a game of skill.
Designing Google Chrome - SlideShare
I am home for winter break and would be willing to write this for you in the name of science. Plus, it seems that you know Marcello Herreshoff, with whom I took Computer Science in high school. Email me the requirements for your tool to <zackster>:at:<gmail.com> please.
i don't know. i'd have to do some hand writing to find out.
That Washington Post article is excellent. It's too bad the student undertook it so close after 9/11... it would have probably been much better received, and perhaps even productized, today. I suspect he could tell a lot of large corporations things about their exposure that they didn't know.

On the topic of hosting, you don't say why you're not satisfied with the coasts, so I can't qualify my suggestions. Here are some unordered thoughts, perhaps they will send you the right direction:

1) Without doing a detailed analysis, I'd guess that Dallas is probably the best location to host a server outside of the Pacific/Eastern timezones. There are some very large colo centers (the infomart, http://www.infomartusa.com/ comes to mind) that resell space to large carriers/providers. Many providers peer with each other in these spaces, which is the internet equivalent of being at an intersection. Even if you don't colo at one of these centers ($$$) you're bound to reap the benefits from this, as your traffic will likely end up backhauled to a place like this anyway.

2) If you're talking about a decent amount of capacity (more than a couple rack-U or more than about a T1 of bandwidth) call a couple carriers and ask for maps. Sales often has maps / diagrams that are a little more detailed than the stuff you can find on carrier sites, and they'll generally be happy to give you some suggestions for spaces in the area that are served by their products (i.e. where they terminate).

3) Unless you're solving for a specific problem the variability of individual colo providers generally outweighs the differences in locations. That is to say, you'd be better served by a well run provider in your home city than a bunch of imbeciles 5ms from a PAIX peering point. Don't over-think the physical facility/location aspects.
ECE 576 Final Project: Speaker Recognition
Culture and community go hand-in-hand with Perl programming
Cloud Computing Is More Than a Computer in the Cloud
Use it or lose it. It's like asking if your weight has suffered from years of sitting on a couch eating pizza every night.

If you type a lot but you also continue to write a lot, your handwriting will be a lot better than if you write a lot less due to keyboard use.
Unless you pay for your colocation provider to do it
Taking higher level math classes is a good way to force yourself to maintain good handwriting. You quickly learn that if you want to have any chance of finishing a question, your going to have to write your solution neatly and in easily readable steps.
I wonder if someone can use the PageRank algorithm or something similar to determine which essays are the most prominent. It's hard to tell with this graph which is the most connected essay - is it "Taste for Makers", "What You Can't Say", "Great Hackers", or something else? It would also be interesting to correlate this with the Google PageRank for these pages, and traffic data (if it's available).
How Casual Game Startups Can Survive Recession
blog software: Moveable Type, LiveJournal.
CMS software: WebGUI
and many sites like Vox, TypePad, Slashdot, ...
That would indeed make it semantically valuable. I assume you'd have "end while", "end if", etc?

I can't say I'm a fan, but at least you'd be making it mean something if you did that.

(Also: why make it optional at that point? Seems like it should be required for simplicity's sake)
I can't make a claim as to whether entrepreneurship is noble but it's far more than "not completely useless".

Let's continue with your example. We have millions of true computer lovers coding for free. Let's expand that to include people pursuing their passion in any field for free. Now what? Now we have a collection of high-quality, but isolated research and tools.

How do I use this research and these tools to solve my problems? How do I use them to solve other people's problems? By putting in time and effort to connect the dots. That's what entrepreneurs do at their best: they bring existing things together to make something new to solve other people's problems. Where are these computers lovers firing up IDEs, eager to solve my problems for free?

And that's my point: craft and entrepreneurship go hand in hand. They're both better off by the presence of the other.
You'll never know if it's better or worse than it would have been without a computer. It might be worse, but it might also be better. Some professions who write a lot are notorious for their bad handwriting, e.g. doctors. And I dare you to read anything my grandfather has written, and he writes most everything by hand!
I tend to purchase electronics with wear and tear in mind. I generally select devices that I've found (or heard) to be reliable, and I don't think I've ever purchased with resale in mind -- I tend to hold on to them long after any resale value has gone.

Proper care and cleaning (damp cloth, mild cleaners) has kept my keyboards and palm rests clean well past their apparent age. I don't touch PC LCDs (this is tremendously important), and I try clean them before food, beverage, or other peoples fingerprints dry on them.
HBO figures its better to work with YouTube than to sue YouTube
Yeah, I know what colocation is, and am wondering why you would bother in this day and age. I could see it being worth your while if you were a big enough company to have a significant number of servers and the people to run them. But I really mean 'significant'. For most startups, being able to scale with something like linode seems more advantageous.
I used to be a customer of Data393 in Denver.
Infact, there's quite a few good DC's in Denver.
Data393 (data393.com)
Via West (which has 2 more in SLC and 1 in Las Vegas)
Internap (http://www.internap.com/contactus/seo/page964.html)

There is also ThePlanet in Dallas/Houston
There is the DC in St. Louis that slicehost is in, I'm sure you could colo there, no idea the name.

There's ALOT of datacenters out there and most of them will deal on the cabinet level and up.

www.webhostingtalk.com is the best place for this stuff though.
I'm hungry for some Hormel brand emcelettronica.
My handwriting has always looked like a spider fell in an inkwell and the ran across a page. After 10 years using a keyboard, all I can say is that my hand writing has gotten even worse. I do find that if I use a really good pen, it doesn't have to be expensive, that I can write reasonably well, bit it's still crap ... :)
In a way, there is a gross semantic linking in a Q/A type of way with the titles, e.g., Why do Startups Condense in America --> The Power of the Marginal. What Can Business Learn from Open Source -->How To Start A Startup + Inequality and Risk.
Dissertation Could Be Security Threat
A question to those here who have experienced both IT work in both the US and in India:

Over the past year, I conducted well over thirty technical phone screens in hope of finding a single, somewhat-skilled Java development contractor. The majority of those interviewed were Indian people who were working in the US on H1B visas. Interview results ranged from the mediocre down to the abysmal. The resumes of all these candidates claimed several years of work exclusively in Java, and many also purported to have had lead/architect roles.

My screening technique is an insult to a good developer. I ask questions that anyone who has written any decent Java code should be able to answer without pause. For example, I email a small snippet of code containing a try/catch block and ask the candidate to trace through the flow of program execution if the checked exception is thrown. Literally half of candidates think that program execution terminates whenever a catch block is entered and the contents of that block done executing. How could someone have written any quality code and not know this? I'm not asking Java trivia.

What's going on here? If I was going to travel half way around the world to work as a Java developer, I'd be sure to read a couple of Java books on the plane. Is there something uniquely American/Western about expecting people to "know their stuff"? I'd attribute my observations to general, world-wide idiocy except that the rate of ineptitude relative to claimed experience was far worse with Indian candidates. Perhaps a Mid-Western, Fortune 1000 company isn't a compelling place to spend six months on a contract? The role was to do back-end engineering work on a pretty large, well-know site -- something I would think would be compelling compared to the average "maintain a crappy legacy banking system" gig. If I claimed to be a Java developer and didn't know much Java, I'd be so embarrassed that I'd study every night to achieve competence.

I feel like such an Ugly American asking this question, but I can't discount my observations. What am I missing? Is there some selection bias in my data set that I'm unaware of? I also find a general lack of creativity in these candidates, but I attribute that to the rote nature of Indian education (at least that's what I've read about most schooling in India).

Note: I'm not trying to start a "Java sucks" language war here...When looking at a candidate for the long term, I don't care if he/she knows Java at all. However, when you claim to have done Java for five years and don't know basic stuff, I have to question if you know anything at all.
I hate my handwriting. When I have to turn something in, I always type it. Since I am studying mathematics right now, that means I format almost everything using LaTeX.
I don't think it's the job of the programming language to enforce style. Proper code style should always be used, but should not be forced upon the coder, and that's my major objection to Python syntax.
Marion Jones is Still Lying, Not to be Trusted
I have just completed a 252,000 word document on former Olympian (by method of fraud) Marion Jones, who continues to skirt around issues concerning her part in the BALCO steroid scandal and her drug-use prior to it.

I am attempting to keep Marion Jones from speaking for money, as this document spells out more truth than she will ever state sans threat.

The story begins with the october entries and concludes with the ones from the first week of december 2008 (63 in total).
There are some applications which benefit from custom setup hardware (cypto cards, extra NICs, etc...), you may want more network security than the single network or double homed boxes on simple public and private LANs (you may need isolated firewalled internal networks beyond what you can get from leased host providers). You also may want to drop in some of the various appliances out there for stats/analysis, spam/virus protection, google search boxes, etc...
Is It Surprising that P&G, Tide Struggle with Facebook Advertising?
Exactly, it says that at the top of the paragraph.

"For nearly 150 years, the known fundamental passive circuit elements were limited to the capacitor (discovered in 1745), the resistor (1827), and the inductor (1831)... He proved that memristor behavior could not be duplicated by any circuit built using only the other three elements, which is why the memristor is truly fundamental. "
Those weren't the people protesting. The people protesting were illegals.
I am using the revo2 for iPhone and pretty happy with it. IMHO it is one of the better designed cases for the iPhone. It also comes with a non-adhesive anti-glare and anti-fingerprint screen film. Also there are covers for the docking port and leaves almost no part of the device exposed.
Borland SilkTest (4-Test) uses indentation instead of brackets. Otherwise it is similar to c/c++. I don't know though. I still kind of like the curly brace, aesthetically speaking!
Care to share your language (spec, basic compiler, etc)
Shell/Ruby style (if ... endif) is not even considered because I'm no fan of it either. I think it already lost the battle to both C and Python styles.

It would be nice, however, to have some optional verification mechanism that allowed you to stay minimalist for as long as you wish, and to use closing tags for verification and/or aesthetical reasons - for example, when closing a superlong block.
I developed a relatively large web app with Python. Python's meaningful whitespace is the primary reason I no longer use python.

When one is working on a server, the editing tools are sometimes limited and they thus can make seeing the whitespace hard. In another, smaller, Python project, we had whitepace errors that appeared and disappeared like ghosts. Even if you have tools that make seeing everything easy now doesn't that you will have them later, on another system - especially, sooner or later spaces and tabs will get confused and be invisible.

I haven't programmed in C for years but the meaning of C programs is still obvious at a glance to me. After being away from python for a couple of years, the meaning of python program is opaque to due to the meaningful whitespace syntax. I know I could pick python up again if I tried but this indicates to me that python's syntax is not as natural as what Steve McConnell calls block structure. The end of a block is just as important to find as the start and so should be just as visible.

Writing one-line functions is, if anything, easier in Ruby than in Python.

Oh, and a syntax that requires as comments to show a normal program constructs is broken virtually by definition.

I can understand the appeal of the syntax. The syntax indeed appealed to me at one time and I enjoyed the rest of the language. But I think ultimately meaningful whitespace just does not work and will confined python to being a niche language.
Is that worse than having an investor that doesn't bring press?
Some additional info/clarification:

Several of us who are involved with the business are going to be moving, and it would be nice to know what kind of facilities will be nearby. The reason we're not looking at CA or east coast is purely preference, though I should note that Oregon/Washington are fair game.

For the record, we've been running on dedicated servers for almost 10 years now, and since we finally got around to making a business out of it we're looking at our upgrade options.
Just make sure you have for loops that use Python style "for x in alist" syntax rather than C++ style "for i = 0; i < alist.size(); ++i" syntax.
Whatever ruby uses...
When are your editing tools so limited you must use tabs mixed with spaces? That doesn't really make sense.

Just don't use tabs, ever. If you have whitespace problems you can simply grep for tab characters and remove them.
Why of course it's all going to me. Me and Bernanke are bros, go way back, and he's hooking me up before we drive this titanic right into an iceberg.
I've found that I really don't like this, aesthetically (mixing nesting styles in code looks bad)

Also, whitespace based indentation works in Python because Python statements tend to be fairly short. (The python indentation rules are easily understood.) Haskell layout has been somewhat more difficult to understand (at least for me). I have been writing Haskell code and usually it works, but there have been problems due to failure to indent when I should'v, which were incredibly confusing to debug.

In python, it's hard to fuck it up: after a colon, you always newline and indent.
It has

each i in list: ...
each i in generator: ...
each i in 0..9: ... # where 0..9 is a set, but this
# construct is optimized down
# to a plain incremental loop

or in case I choose C style:

each (i = list) ...
each (i = generator) ...
each (i = 0..9) ...
What Picture Compare Software Can Do
There is, unfortunately, pretty good evidence that caffeine inhibits neurogenesis.

Yikes. What is this evidence?
NOOP.NL: Managing Software Development: Top 100 Blogs for Developers (Q4 2008)
I was going to make a clever joke about his use of uppercase S in "Microsoft" but I couldn't think of one.
I'm hoping to finilize the spec after this discussion, once a decision is made.

Three important features of the language that probably make it distinct are:

1. You can do something like:

http_request('google.com') >> parse_headers() >>
decode_chunks() >> decompress() >> tempfile('tmp')

where elements of the pipe chain are special functions that run as if they were separate threads or subprocesses. In fact they aren't. This is implemented without involving threads or even seperate stacks. Similar to the way you play with processes in the UNIX shell, only you do it within your program.

2. Built-in multithreading:

proc1() && proc2() && finish_sem

which allows the compiler to analyze which parts of the program need thread safety.

3. You can do

each c in customers:
c.name + ' from ' + c.country >> std

and in case "customers" were marked as persistent in the declaration, this statement is translated to an SQL query for you. I'm not planning to implement this in the first iteration though. Hoping to polish the language itself before I can start building the "SQL killer" for it.
We've had good experiences with mailchimp as well.
Blaming "rote learning" for lack of technical capability of a considerable majority of a "regular" Indian programmer is simplistic.

If I may list the issues that are possibly unique to Indian programmer, they are, in no particular order:

* Money triumphs everything. Most Indian programmers don't care for the technology as long as money comes

a) in ever increasing quantities
b) from a reputed, brand-name company
c) offers foreign travel, with US being first choice.

* Admissions to Engineering courses depends entirely on how "HOT" the market is for that degree. couple of years back it was CS. Now it is Electronics and Communcation Engg (ECE), just because it allows you to compete both for CS jobs and Electronics jobs.

* "Work Ethic" - that can be quantified as pride in one's individual contribution, quality of output, constant drive to improve one's skills and knowledge as a distant measure after social status, money for many Indian programmers.

* Enjoying Programming for the sake of it is considered trivial pursuit and not "serious". For instance, being a Python/Rails/Lisp/Haskell programmer of some capability is a matter of pride in US etc. Not so in India. If you are not working on "Enterprise" stuff, all you get is a "oh.. ok".

Of course generalising the above behaviour to ALL Indian programmers is a disservice and wrong. As a hacker(if I may claim so myself) and a native of Bangalore, I'm proud of many excellent programmers I have met in the last 10 years and I feel that many of us are on par with hackers from elsewhere in the world.

To answer your "selection bias" question.
There are many reasons why you will not get a qualified hacker to appear on your radar. Getting a US visa is a huge pain in the neck. If you want a H1B you will have go through a lot of circus.
Any self respecting hacker would balk at paying upto 60% of their salaries to body shopping firms.

H1B applications are flooded on the first day of applications by big name companies and body shoppers. This leaves no space for a hacker (who by nature are content to be hacking on their own) to "hustle" to get into USA.

I wouldn't touch a lot of these H1B programmers myself. My own hiring processes back home in India have been similar to yours. I would typically give a programming test and a computer to the interviewees and ask them to solve them for me. A significan percentage of candidates from large, brand name companies would fail. Some of them wouldn't even know how to use command line SQL query tools.

So, your sampling population is the one which is contaminated by people who are largely motivated by the desire to work in US and not by technology.
...unless you discover the joy of doing your math homework in LaTeX. Beautiful results.
Probably because he's used to type the name of his old company MicroSolutions.
GPGPU!
My handwriting: lower case - bad and getting worse; upper case - rock steady. Thankfully most written applications ask for upper case anyhow.
We've been on dedicated servers for a long time, and we're at a point where cost-efficiency and flexibility are our two biggest factors.

We're expecting pretty linear growth, so scaling isn't a huge deal. Up until now we would regularly switch to a better server, stay there until we outgrew it, and then jump again. It's kept us relatively lean/current and our costs have stayed low as the cost/quality of hosting has changed (and we've gotten better at sniffing out good hosts).

Places like linode and slicehost would have been decent options in the past, but we serve 1-2 TB of data each month, so we like to have lots of bandwidth available. And while many dedicated servers offer that, our server admin is pretty picky about the hardware, so she'd like to be able to manage it on her own.

Out of curiosity, how easy is it to 'hook up' two separate Xen instances, assuming Xen is what slicehost and Linode run on? I'm not a server guy, but I actually share a slicehost plan (separate from this particular venture) with one of our fellow News.YC hackers, so I'm familiar with how excellent the company/service is. If they're really that easy to connect/scale then it might be worth the extra cost...
"There is one and only one good reason why you shouldn't: it's totally insecure. Except for that, it's simple but perfectly viable."

Given that logic...There is one and only one good reason why you shouldn't shoot yourself in the head to get rid of a headache: it'll kill you. Except for that, it's simple but perfectly viable. :-)

(note: I am not seriously suggesting that anyone should shoot themselves in the head. It should be avoided at all costs -- much like the one-line PHP web framework)
> In python, it's hard to fuck it up: after a colon, you always newline and indent.

But what about:

if True: print "Yep"

;)
My handwriting grew a lot worse when I shifted from a written diary to a typed blog...
If you look at the history of this fellow, he seems to have started his scheme when he fairly young and have run it all the way till he seventy. During that time, we can assume he ran the high life and basked in worldwide renown. By the time of the collapse, he was seventy and probably didn't have the either guts or the know-how to become fugitive.

And in ways, was already the perfect crime. If you could calibrate a fraud so it begins in your youth and collapses on your deather, you would guarantee yourself the life of Riley. It is only the folks who out-live who would suffer and so it is society's regulators who's job it is prevent such things. We've seen how well that worked.