skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
User Experience. No one said there was a problem to solve, but someone did say it was a tip to help polish things up for your users experience on your Web site or app. See Pownce, they do this same trick.
We had a party with these berries but I was the only person it had no effect on. Everything pretty much tasted the same.
Many developers have no choice but to use windows thanks to corporate policy ... I am not saying that is a good thing, but its the way it is (at least where I work). I resorted to doing Rails dev using Emacs + Putty, which was easier than developing the app on windows!
thanks! really helpful
How to calculate Cost Per Customer: Free Worksheet
Better python version:

print ''.join(chr(i) for i in range(256) if re.match(r'\w', chr(i))

Learn to use list comprehension.
Google's Fear of Facebook will be their Undoing
The garbage collector in X++ and the CLR
Not wanting to be a dick, but you could have chosen a less misleading name for the software considering it doesn't meet the Open Source Definition.
And most professional programmers don't continue to program at the high school level -- or so we'd like to believe.
The IE6 Equation
Creative Commons needs help to define "non-commercial use"
The thing about the free meals is that empirical evidence suggests that they get more bang for their engineering buck.

I found out first hand that if you feed me, I'll be in the office a lot longer. I will still work the same amount because I will take more frequent breaks to stretch my day out to accommodate dinner.

When I actually do work, I'm well rested and well fed. I'm easily over $10 dollars worth more productive and I used a lot my extra break time to attend mind-expanding Tech Talks. It would be more expensive NOT to provide free food!

That said, this is also one of the key reasons I chose Microsoft. I actually like spending some fraction of my life off campus being a normal person.
I would have preferred if he had just lied.

Would it have changed your opinion, then, if he did lie?
1. where is `sorted()`.

2. where is closing `)`.

3. DRY principle is more important than a couple of parentheses here and there (there could be a heavier function than `chr()`).

And I know list comprehension (and generator expressions, and dictionary comprehension, and set comprehension).

One of versions I've considered for Python was:

print ''.join(sorted(c for c in map(chr, range(256)) if re.match(r'\w', c)))

And even:

print ''.join(sorted(c for i in range(256) for c in (chr(i),) if re.match(r'\w', c)))
Can Dropbox Be Trusted?
My co-worker was reviewing Dropbox as an option for our company's file backup, sharing, and syncing and he came across this language in their privacy policy:

Business Transfers. Dropbox may sell, transfer
or otherwise share some or all of its assets,
including your Personal Information, in connection
with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or
sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy.

https://www.getdropbox.com/terms#privacy

Perhaps this is a question for a lawyer (maybe we have one reading HN...), but doesn't this give Dropbox too much freedom with my data? Would you still use their service with this policy in place? Am I overreacting??
It's also a problem with Windows itself. It really is a nasty environment for coding non-MS-based software on.

If I want to support Windows I have to setup a (virtual) machine with a license code just to have any basic functionality. As someone who doesn't work with Windows anywhere, this is a huge hurdle. Then there's the hoops I'd have to jump through just to get a decent shell and a compiler ready.

Oh, but the fun doesn't end there. Which version of Windows are we talking about? More than one? Ah, well, each of these will require its own machine (virtual or otherwise). With matching keys, of course.

Supporting Windows is a pain and when it's not required for what I want to do, I'm simply not going to do it. Period. I have better things to do with my time.

Letting people who want this code running on Windows do it themselves and having them submit patches upstream is a perfectly valid choice.
I used Tcl in the 1989-1993 timeframe as my default application
configuration language. I stopped doing this when I realized the
maintenance problems I was experiencing with my Tcl-based
configurations were never going to go away.

Then for a while I used Apache httpd.conf style markup for configurations.
That worked better but I missed being able to do the macro-style programming
you can easily do in a dynamic language. I tried XML for a while until
I realized that it wasn't much better and didn't make things easier.

Then I started doing more with Python and Ruby applications and found
that in most cases I could easily just extend whatever configuration
scheme the application used for my purposes.

These days I'm using Lua in everything I write that doesn't already
use Python or Ruby for the same kind of things I would have used
Tcl. Lua is efficient, easy to read by others and plays very nice
with the surrounding environment.

So far Lua is working out pretty well but in fairness I spend a lot
more time thinking about configuration issues up front than I did
20 years ago.
import MySQLdb

db = MySQLdb.connect(blah)

cur = db.cursor()

cur.execute("SELECT foo from bar where baz")

Spend your time customizing a data access layer to fit your needs, not shoehorning an existing framework into a situation where it'll never quite fit.
Of course. I meant, 'less of an agenda than Orwell.'
Tablets of taste-modifying 'miracle fruit' go on sale in Japan:
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/jan/1287541.htm
The "Miracle farm" in Taiwan
http://www.miracle-fruit-senyuh.com.tw/farm.htm
I'm Taiwanese and have no idea this farm's existing in 10 years after I saw this news and do my research for it.
how do i get free games on my 3g iphone
anyone there
It did a few years ago and I kept the name since then.
"Cold sore virus" Argh! Can't we just call a spade a spade?
You are overreating.

The second paragraph defines Personal Information to be information that personally identifies you, like your name and contact info.
It looks to me like "Personal Information" refers to just that, your personal information (name, address, phone number, etc.), not the files you store in your Dropbox. (IANAL)
Installing an Operating System on a USB drive
How can this be a misattribution if he didn't attribute it to anyone?
Ask HN: Feedback on my Weekend Project
The site: http://pikagame.com/

Over the past month, I've been working on this site during the weekends. It's a flash games portal, similar to the many out there in an already saturated market. You might be wondering why I spent my weekends working on it if I already knew this so let me give you some background info...

Two of my college friends both run very popular flash game sites. Both of their sites are ranked by Alexa in the top 5k and they both earn a decent chunk of change from relatively easy work (adding a few games a day). After looking into the market myself, I was surprised by the number of really crappy flash game sites and even more so by how many of them were profitable.

In the end, I decided that it would be worth it to spend a few weekends to give it a shot, adding a few improvements of my own to (hopefully) improve my chances of it succeeding. The idea behind my site relies on rewarding users with real world items for participation. Players earn points for playing games and other social networky things, which they can in turn use to redeem prizes.

In the end, development and design took a month of work primarily during weekends and it did not impact progress on any of my other ventures or client work, so I really lost nothing but time. At the very least it served as both design and a programming practice, something I'm sure we all can use.

I'd appreciate any feedback or thoughts on the site. If you have a weekend project that you've made I'd love to see that too. (maybe for more inspiration? =)
Underhyped??

Songbird has been getting consistent, solid press since it was in Alpha.

OpenOffice 3 got so much traffic on launch the servers crashed for days.

I don't think I've stopped reading about Dropbox since it started it's public beta.
Stealth Start-Ups Suck
Brain-boosting drugs for healthy people
Upvote because I want to see this discussion. Honestly, it seems to be a simple "If we get acquired we don't need to ask you for permission", but it does lean a little harsh.

I think though that if you're going to be storing say, customer CC info, you don't want to be using a service like dropbox regardless of their policies. I don't think they are the right choice - you should be handling the security of this information yourself, or use clauses like dropbox's yourself to remove liability.

As a business, this would be the more worrying clause though:

We may employ third party companies and individuals to facilitate our service, to provide the service on our behalf, to perform Site-related services (including but not limited to data storage, maintenance services, database management, web analytics, payment processing, and improvement of the Site’s features) or to assist us in analyzing how our Site and service are used. These third parties have access to your Personal Information only for purposes of performing these tasks on our behalf.

Why? Because lord knows where the heck your information is, and if some admin from a company three steps removed gets his laptop stolen, it could come back to haunt you.
Chrome three times faster than Firefox
really? While I agree that Tesla was much more of a genius (and that Edison did both himself and the world a disfavor by not putting up with him) I do think there is a place in the world for Edisons. (though I think they need to be careful to treat their Teslas well.)

Tesla, while brilliant, was also kindof crazy, and from what I understand, had poor human and business skills. He died penniless, and getting funding for his work was always a problem. (a travesty, I think, after his early successes.)

The optimal solution, I think, would have been for Edison to keep his ego in check (at least around Tesla) - I bet if Edison had handled the situation better, and managed to keep Tesla happier working for him, Tesla would have had a much more productive life.

I mean, If you are lucky enough to have a Tesla, and he gives you something as awesome as AC, I'd set aside a portion of the resulting money for his future projects. Buy him a lab and some assistants (and whatever else he wanted) and let him focus on his next idea, rather than on trying to get funding.

Edison could have done this... From what I understand that was kindof his business model, only he failed to keep Tesla happy.
"but what isn't simpler than Java's type system at this point?"

Haskell's type system. ;-)
I wrote up a little blog entry about DropBox's place in the enterprise here:

http://blog.infowranglers.com/blog/_archives/2008/9/16/38803...

I'm NOT a security or legal expert, but my concerns would be more about the security of sensitive data, rather than concerns over the possible sale of personal information (it's been a while, but I don't remember Dropbox asking anything too intrusive.)

You cannot specify your own AES key, which might be a worry to some people. The DropBox team suggest sharing encrypted disk images if this is an issue.
Backup the data in an encrypted form?
In hard times, fear can impair decision-making
The article implies that Google may not have an iPhone. Let us be assured that all concerned parties have iPhones.
Technically, that's a generator expression. :-P
I live in an apartment building built in 2006 or so.

The heating system is undersized and uses the same hot water as the shower -- if you want a non-frigid shower, you have to remember to turn the heat off first and turn it back on afterwards.

The doors don't fit quite right. Every single screen in every window is undersized by 2 inches in one dimension. It's also really drafty, which may explain why the original builder is replacing every single window in the 300+-unit complex. (One wonders if a lawsuit happened somewhere in there. Unfortunately, they did not get around to replacing our windows before winter set in, and did I mention that it was drafty? I need to get over to the hardware store to buy plastic wrap for the windows. To think that I dreamed of never having to do that again when we moved out of the 1920s-era house...)

My favorite feature is the built-in wine rack, which adds class to the establishment until you try to fit a wine bottle in it. Which is physically impossible, because it was misinstalled.

But I still feel lucky compared to my sister, who moved into a similar complex in the Midwest where the builder had failed to build the exterior porches with the proper slope, leading rainwater to collect against the walls at the inner edge of the porches, leading to failure of the siding, water leakage, and the exciting possibility of... total porch structural failure. Fortunately, my sister moved out in less than a year.

These little incidents make me worry that a lot of those leftover houses will be slums. They were built terribly, in terribly planned neighborhoods, by people with little past experience and even less future in the construction field. What profit was there in building the houses to last? Nobody was planning to live in them for very long. They're just tokens, built with less care than a poker chip. They were built to flip.
Looks pretty good. There's not really much to it to comment on - attractive design but fairly generic Web 2.0 these days so I'm fairly immune.

Hardly a deal-breaker, but if you redesign at some point I'd consider making the navigation smaller so people don't have to scroll to play games if they have 800px vertical resolution (such as on a typical 13" laptop).

Your images don't display under "link to us", you might want to fix that.

I think there's a bit too much on the front page - if I were you I'd consider dropping the tabs near the bottom, which seem largely unnecessary to me.

Perhaps you could also offer points for referrals to try and make it go viral? Although, admittedly, it might encourage people to abuse the system.

Edit: One more minor thing, your "More Features" link is a little ugly and doesn't match the rest of the site, and clicking the clicking "Sign up" and "View Prizes" in the pop-up doesn't work correctly.
You should have a look at Liskell and pluggable typesystems.

Apparently Haskell also has some support of dynamic typing.
Some interesting pricing stats in iPhone apps
Math geekery with tangibly beautiful aesthetics, that guy should charge.
Freelance Web Developer Best Practices?
Sorted is unnecessary: the range function generates them in the right order.

The last ')' character is missing. Sorry about that. I have been spoiled by show-paren-mode.

The DRY principle is great when applied to large swaths of code but in this case, seriously, it is faster and more concise to just write it again. Either the language optimizer will optimize out the extra work (not in CPython though...) or it will not. Either way, your functions would be slower as they have to explicitly allocate either two lists or a list and a tuple unless they are optimized further, not to mention that the added structures will make optimization challenging.

Principles are great in theory but try considering practical aspects once in a while.
An old one.

Here's a Wordle for PG's essays: http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/34828/Paul_Graham's_Essay...
What do laws have to do with this? Almost none of the examples have anything to do with laws (cell phones in restaurants, please) and the ones that do are irrelevant because this is being partially described as a tool for enforcing the law.

Laws can never be universally and compulsorily enforced because laws are merely guidelines. "Don't do X because if we catch you will be punished with Y." I imagine many of us, myself included, commit multiple crimes per day, including various felonies. If these laws were enforced with omnipotence, everyone would be in jail. Or life would just be a lot more boring.

Many of the "pleasantness" policies and laws this technology wants to enforce are merely products of society; you can't fix society with more gadgets. In fact, I don't think you can fix it, period.
Thanks for the excellent feedback! The referral idea is a really good one, I hadn't considered that yet. I'm not sure if referrers would find points as a suitable incentive to send traffic but it's certainly something I wouldn't mind trying.

As for the "link to us" section, it looks like it's working for me. What browser are you using?
Only looking at the site, it seems you could do better than make me wonder what "real prizes" might refer to, before signing up. Probably emphasize the reality up front.

Now, after reading your entry here. . .

Well, hm. I think the only question is: how well are you doing compared to your friends?
Try nxhtml if you haven't already. Its "better" than mmm for some uses.

What I really should do is figure out a way to open sections of text in their own buffer (and corresponding major mode) so that changes in that buffer would be reflected in the original selection.
Ah, it was a problem my end - my Adblock was blocking it because of the 'banners' subdirectory. Apologies.
But that would largely eliminate most of DropBoxes usefulness. A large part of what makes DropBox attractive is it's integration with the operating system.
I think it kind of odd they are celebrating the bill gates arrest, is that something that is considered to be 'cool' in MS culture? Please educate me.
Not a problem - thanks for the prompt response.
jinja2 is as fast as mako. mako is popular, though, so I don't begrudge anyone choosing it as a default for a project.
oh, maybe I'm wrong to block ads & popups. too real for me.
Assuming "stacking memory chips on top of the processor" means local stores for each processor, it's pretty much a given at this point. That's how GPUs work (~16k local), and that's how the PS3 SPUs are (256k local).

It's extraordinarily painful to code for, but hey, all performance optimization is an exercise in caching. So it goes.
The very fact that there is no explanation of how the storage is done in detail ought to make you worry. It certainly looks as if files are identified by their (cryptographic?) checksum across accounts even if those accounts are not sharing anything officially.

To do that, and to distribute that data from a single point means that someone other than you have a key to read those data. You will have to protect your data by encryption yourself before uploading.

Perhaps you should evaluate Tarsnap from http://www.tarsnap.com/ which is in public beta as of this writing. It provides a neat backup service and has a publically readable/accessible description of what measures that are taken to protect your data from adversaries. I have not tried it myself, but I happen to know that Colin Percival knows what he is doing.
jinja2 also lets you easily change your delimiters to make it suit your style, which is nice.
Install the app and then the first thing the app does at first run is make an api call to get the key and store it into the encrypted store. Pass the md5 hash of the swf as part of the call to get the key to make sure its your own swf thats making a call to the server.
What the hell do the paranoids expect? 'In the case of a merger, acquisition, etc, we will delete everything and start over, or ask personally to each of our customers' ?

And as noted, Personal Information is the stuff you give them at registration.

Furthermore, please don't put extremely sensitive data somewhere on the cloud with little to no protection. Common sense.
"... Her retrospective “volunteers” were former American soldiers enrolled in what was known as the Vietnam Experience Study. In 1985 almost 4,500 veterans of that war volunteered for extensive medical and mental examinations ..."

I'd like to see another study with a broader selection of participants because the sample chosen is already self-selected.
Survival of the fittest
Ouch, are you speaking about the 0.9.8 update? I have on fairly good confidence that there was nothing deliberate, but I'd be interested to hear what has been said on your end.
I love the way this site polarizes each opinion, either that ultimately you were right or "your people" were right.
Fedora is an app? Since when?
The whole point of the example is to demonstrate that chaining of expressions is cumbersome in Python, so imagine some other function instead of `sorted()` and use it.

DRY is not about performance; it is about: I've changed here some code and oops I've got a bug because I forgot (or didn't know or it is impossible to decide whether it is the same code or not and therefore should we change it or not) to change it in other places.

Performance:

$ python -mtimeit -s"import re" "''.join(sorted(chr(i) for i in range(256) if re.match(r'\w', chr(i))))
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.29 msec per loop

$ python -mtimeit -s"import re, string" "''.join(sorted(re.findall(r'\w', string.maketrans('', ''))))"
10000 loops, best of 3: 60.8 usec per loop

My variant is 20 times faster. However performance doesn't matter in this case.

I'm all for practicality but principles are condensed experience and it is dangerous to ignore them without a good reason.
"... Upvote because I want to see this discussion. Honestly, it seems to be a simple "If we get acquired we don't need to ask you for permission", but it does lean a little harsh. ..."

Good point considering ValuesOfN (Stikkit & I want Sandy) and Pownce are shutting down leaving the users to gather up their data and find somewhere else to play. Contingency of service is something I'd be thinking about.
I agree. And the article says at the very end, "So for now, at least, the free lunches are still a go."
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
- (Never actually said by) Bill Gates
No. Yes. Yes.

Next question!
hi all,
arash (from dropbox) here. as mentioned elsewhere in the discussion, the terms are referring to contact information, not data.
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Cheap Airsoft Guns
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I actually like it. It may not have many good games on there yet, but this works to keep things simple and you can tell what you are going to get in each section and page quickly and accurately.

League tables are always a good idea, so good to see that. Plus having community forums would be good too. It would help if you allowed feedback on games as an indication to new visitors what is popular or fun.

Also, for new visitors, why not try something different but fun such as a quick personality test that can be used to then recommend some games.
Premier League Predictions
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> You are overreating.

That explains his weight gain. But what about this privacy issue?
I think the big question is whether or not Windows 7 will be any good. XP is still very popular which means a large percentage are using the stock IE. If the next release gets widespread adoption (or fuels the Apple fire) then hopefully IE6 will be on its way out.

Has any tried using that JS file in production? Recommended?
There could be nasty side-effects twenty years down the road, so I'd rather abstain.

It would totally suck to be forced to take those drugs to remain cometitive, so I hope they will keep those drugs in limited circulation until their safety can be proven beyond doubt.