skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bought Beginning Python from APress, read through it in a day or two, then just started hacking. From then on the only things I used were the official Python library reference and any existing code I happened to be hacking on. Occasionally I'd look up articles on the Web about something I wanted to learn more about (decorators, meta-classes, etc.)

The folks in #python are also very helpful.
Let's start with I have a documented security finding in Zones; I'm not sure if it's been published and patched yet, and I'm not pointing it out, but you can track me down on LinkedIn or, I don't know, a lot of other places if you need bona fides.

Then think about the difference between Xen and Zones:

Zones share a kernel.

Xen machines do not.

This has two security implications:

* It is possible for there to be bugs that will allow one zone to see kernel resources (files, sockets, pids, IPC descriptors, etc) from another zone. It is impossible for that to happen with Xen, because VMs don't even know about each other.

* The majority of Solaris (and Linux) kernel vulnerabilities in the last several years have been kernel vulnerabilities, which Zones don't protect you from. The Xen hypervisor is significantly smaller than the Solaris kernel, and has had a far better security track record.
Ask HN: Boston or Silicon Valley?
So I'm graduating in May and have a couple of great offers from places in both Boston and the Valley. I've interned in SV twice and love it. This is both a pro and a con in that I know the place well, but at the same time I'd love to try some place different and diversify a little. I intend to start a business at some point in the future, and as such imagine I'll eventually move to SV. Here's my pro-con list:

SV Pros:
- Gorgeous weather
- Amazing networking opportunities

Boston Pros:
- Closer to home (I'm from NY)
- Cheaper
- More diverse (less disjoint with reality)

Before I start a flame war over my last Boston pro: while I love the valley, I sometimes feel like it's disjoint with reality in terms of how people act towards technology. It's a nerd's haven and often awesome, but mildly unnerving at times and lacks some diversity.

Anyway, I'd appreciate some advice as to where to go given equal offers (factoring in cost of living to a reasonable extent). Additionally I'd like some clarification on a few things to help make a more informed decision:

- Is Boston significantly cheaper than SV (I'd probably be in the Mountain View area)? It's hard to find comparable areas for cost of apartments and such.

- What's the startup scene like in Boston? I hear it's a great place for a software startup, but how does it compare to the Valley in terms of opportunities and networking?

- Any advice on which of two hypothetical is better: big fish little pond or little fish big pond? Alternatively, would you rather be at an important team in a lesser-known company, or a less-important team in a well-known company?

- Any other factors I should be taking into account? I'm looking closely at what I'd be doing, what my potential employers' non-competes look like, and how open the companies are. One company is a private open-source company, and the other is a company of about the same size owned by a public company.

This is a really tough decision, and any advice would be really appreciated.

Thanks!
I agree that there's a logrithmic scale between usage-required and annoyance perceived. ie, that one click is a huge difference compared to literally doing nothing (but hitting a bookmark, or maybe it's your home page).

However, umbrellatoday has txting ability; which is not on goingtorain.com.
cough you're showing ignorance

They want a local resource. In sydney. There's maybe 1 or 2 (if that) legitimate jobs posted on sydney CL on a daily basis. Not everyone lives in SF!
The difference between 2-phase commit and asynchronous replication is 2-phase commit uses all or nothing approach and asynchronous replication does not use it.
Traffic is probably better. Traffic that actually makes you money is even better than that.
Gvke - 124 killed bomb blast pictures, 124 killed in
I used a now-out-of-print book by Aaron Watters: Internet Programming with Python. http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Programming-Python-Aaron-Watt...

Python totally changed my world.
Unavoidable.

How about this less scientific but more practical approach. Go ahead & listen to W Buffet, Cuban or anyone else because they made it.
You have a limited amount of listening you can do.

Then use sense, common or otherwise.
complaining about the appropriate [use] of the word "gay"

This is a fascinating one because that word is shifting again: "gay" increasingly means "lame" rather than "homosexual". What's fascinating is how this is happening even as society becomes more tolerant of homosexuality. Young people who use "gay" this way belong to probably the least homophobic generation ever, so the politically correct misreading of this shift is even more off-base than political correctness usually is.

The South Park guys captured this perfectly with their line, "This is gayer than sex with men!"

All this by way of agreeing with you that the subtleties of language far surpass people's rigid attempts to nail them down. Incorrect usages that gain currency turn into correct usages. It's more interesting to observe and admire these shifts than to try to stop them (a fool's errand).

Edit: Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. - Heidegger
Is there a way to log in/sign up besides OpenID? I don't have one, but wanted to use your site. I spent about half an hour trying to figure out which accounts of mine are OpenID enabled, and to get the url for my ID. I keep getting errors like "Open ID server can't be found", etc. so I imagine the urls that I'm putting in the sign up box are not the right ones. Then when I finally get signed up and logged in, later I try to log in with the same url and I get an error. Very frustrating.

Anyways, to summarize: Open ID seems to suck, and its very confusing (though to be completely honest I'm a little drunk which might have made this more difficult for me). I'd imagine most users would appreciate a simple, traditional login (I would have). Anyways, I really wanted to use your site, but after 30 min of failure I've given up. Good luck though.

Edit: For spelling/etc.
Why is BB(100) "impossible in principle", where we know BB(1), BB(2), and BB(3)? How is BB(100) different, besides size?
Unless you are an astronaut.
http://rubycentral.org/pledge

It's fixed now.
Eyes and Ears of India (Or any country for that matter)
Quick Note for the Impatient:
I propose a web-application to coordinate and schedule "a vigil for suspicious activities" by ordinary citizens across the country / world.

Detailed Explanation:
It was heart-breaking to see what happened in Mumbai. Although it is easy to blame the "system" for lack of "intelligence", it is simply not possible to believe that none of the citizens who were around the area where terrorists docked did not see them coming. Most probably someone who saw, did not think it was important enough to escalate to the police. ("Chalta Hai" attitude).

Such incidents can be reduced, if ordinary citizens keep their eyes and ears open when they are out in public places doing their regular things and escalate them when something suspicious is seen.

What I propose is a web-application to organize and schedule a vigil whereby volunteers can opt-in to keep their "eyes and ears open" at a particular public place for a particular time-slot.

Other volunteers can see what places and time-slots are already covered and opt to vigil some other area / time-slot.

BTW not sure if this post is relevant in this forum. Sincere apologies if that is the case.

What do fellow hackers think about this idea?
"This is the crap I'm talking about. It has to be easy, it has to be well executed, it has to inspire confidence. Fail, fail, and fail. "

I just realized how you can best help the Ruby community. FOrget your $$$. Offer to look after the RubyCentral Web site so that it remains stable.

Seriously; that's pretty much the only way things happen in OSS communities. Bitching is less effective.
FX-Trader
Fx-trader.info profiles forex trading systems, FX traders and the forex market in general. Fx trader is a news portal for active forex traders providing essential and up to date advice and information for forex traders.
FX Converter 
Fxconverter.org provides information, reviews and the location of various forex converters and forex currency converters online. This allows users to easily gauge current market rates for paired currencies and determine which are the best and most reliable.
I assume you weren't really picking on Schneier. He's a self-promotor in a pretty healthy sense. He has written much content on the human aspects of security useful to laymen. He does so without being arrogant or saying "I invented this". All in all, a good educator that doesn't talk down to his audience and can explain things so that his "grandmother could understand" (my favorite Einstein principle). He has interwoven this practice into his business, the beneficiary of his self-promotion, which seems to have done well for him.

I might even recommend Schneier as the poster-boy of healthy entrepreneurial self-promotion.
TudbcJRubyServlet
I don't have anything new to say about Boston vs. SV, but about this:

would you rather be at an important team in a lesser-known company, or a less-important team in a well-known company

... that's a no-brainer for me. I'd much rather be on an important team in a lesser-known company. By "important" I mean strategic to the business. Such projects tend to be a lot more satisfying, as well as more rational (assuming a basically functional environment). And the lessons they teach are better lessons.

I've noticed two things about less important projects in larger companies. One is that they often get killed before they have a chance to release or gain traction - and it doesn't much matter how successful they are. This is because they're starved for executive support. The other is that they tend to end up in technical ghettos, working on something that seems cool at the time but is divorced from users and the business, and so doesn't have much value.
With regards to Boston Pros, pt # 3 vs. Silicon Valley, you can always live in San Francisco even if you work in Mountain View. You can commute via Caltrain.
Vaporware 2008: A Call for Submissions
This is my recent job interview with one of the above comapany .
Aug - 1st Interview
Sep - We really like you but can you wait for 2 months?
Oct - I have another job offering .. I called the Hiring manager to confirm if he is really going to hire me.
his exact words :" Yes of coz , reject the other company . It's confirm we'll start in the new FY. Don't you trust me?
End Oct - hey , I need you to meet up w another dept hiring manager .. and when I spoke to the new hiring manager I found out that the role is totally different and doesn't fit my profile and my experience

Later did I know he hired someone else for the role.

Too big a company , too many employess , to value you is not the 1st thing in mind.
An automatic email if it is going to rain would be handy.
I just used one of his peelers to peel apples for an apple pie for thanksgiving. I have no idea if it is any better than your average peeler, but it works great for me ;) He has an amusing line if you only buy one - "one for the man with no friends." I think I'm going to buy a few of these and send them off to some ex-New Yorkers I know. They make great memorabilia for those in the know ;)
Madison, we have lift-off (on mobile ads)
Ngừng khai thác tour Thái Lan
Worked for me too! Gurgaon, India
Although that's still a moderate pain in the ass, and might be infeasible, depending on where you live in SF and how close your job is to Caltrain. Depending on public transit in the Bay Area (outside SF proper) is pretty rough.
Be sure to scope this commute out very carefully before banking on it, though. In my experience the Caltrain station was always at least one mile farther away from any endpoint than I was willing to cope with.

I guess there are local buses at either end. Emphasis on guess, however, since everyone I know in the Valley commutes by car, except for the truly diehard fifteen-mile-a-day bicycle commuter I used to know. Obviously she wasn't commuting from SF.
Typo in the "Our Philosophy" section. It should be 'make YOU work faster.'
aw you warmed my heart with your comment. Making Americans feel loved (for a bit).
Save your home by modifying your mortgage terms
Loan Modification allows you to negotiate the terms on your existing home mortgage down without refinancing. A loan modification is a process in which the terms of mortgage note are permanently changed by lender making the payments more affordable for the borrower.
I had a similar idea a while ago, and put the results of my brainstorming here: http://eiman.tv/misc/http-content-signature.html

The idea is to add a signed hash of the content in the HTTP headers, along with a way of verifying the signature. The point of it all is to make it possible to verify the source and integrity of content served from non-HTTPS servers.

Feedback welcome!
This is a good point. I find it important to think about how there has always been and always will be death and despair. It is, for better or worse, the natural balance to things.
It's important to note that throughout all time there has been tragedy, it is only now that we have super-mass-media and perpetual-second-by-second reporting that we are aware of it all.

People have a right to be happy.
I'm thinking about this too. I'm moving from Boston to go work at a startup in Palo Alto. Their offices are right by the Caltrain, but it seems even then, living in SF (which would otherwise appeal to me) makes the commute kinda suck.
Nothing good in Mountain View is more than a mile from Caltrain, though almost all of SF is far away from the Caltrain station. I exaggerate slightly, but pretty much all of Mountain View is within a few blocks of the two stations.

Both Palo Alto and Mountain View are extremely friendly to commuters. SF is, too, but it's quite a long way away. That's not to say I don't know a lot of people that make the SF to MV or PA commute. A huge percentage of Google and Facebook employees live in the city. Though Googlers have a shuttle service, with WiFi, so they don't generally take Caltrain.

But, I agree. Commuting sucks the life out of you...even with a train, spending two hours each day in transit just wouldn't be worth it, to me.
watchdog.net is looking for good people:

http://transparencyjobs.com/jobs/49/
I kinda hated Cambridge. It was dirty and expensive, and the weather was brutal in the summer and I hear even worse in winter. Weather has a much bigger effect on our moods than most of us realize, and SV ranks up there with San Diego and Hawaii on that score.

Food was decent though, especially for a college town. I liked Boston proper much better, but I didn't live there, and as with most cities I'm guessing your enjoyment will depend a lot on exactly which parts you live and work in.In fairness, I may have liked Cambridge better if I lived in Harvard square. I may have gotten sick of it really fast too, idk.

SV is also expensive, though it's probably not much more nowadays. The exception being that you may well need a car there (which is a hell of a lot less painful than having a car in SF or Boston, since parking is free and ample, but still an expense to factor in) whereas Boston has really good public transportation and you can likely do without if you don't mind walking a bit. Your best bet is to just check around on Apartments.com and Craigslist and compare rent for similarly sized units in similar areas if you're concerned about price.

If you're looking for investment for a software startup, or networking that might lead to that in the future, go directly to Silicon Valley. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Our startup was either the first or second YC company to get a single Boston investor as of this past August. The ratio of SV investors to Boston in YC startups has to be at least 20:1. I hear Boston is pretty awesome for biomed though. I imagine you can find great cofounders in either location, though in Boston you'd have to snag them before they left for SV.

As for your hypothetical, I'd take big fish little pond any day. The pond can grow much faster and larger than the fish. And even if it doesn't, it will almost certainly be more fun and rewarding. Assuming you're normal college grad age, you've got your whole life to be another cog in the wheel. Give yourself a shot of avoiding it permanently.
Er, and that distance is only important if you're going to drill through the Earth to see them. ;)

Otherwise the distance is upper-bounded around 12400 miles. At any rate, happy Thanksgiving wherever you are.
Business idea: A daily subscription-only film review e-mail written by a collection of recently laid-off movie reviewers.
I find that people generally underestimate how much more annoying things become with repetition. People say "I'm going live there/date her because it's only 45 minutes away". You think about 45 minutes, and it's not that much.

And then it's cool for a short period of time, but pretty soon days fade into weeks and every time you dread it, especially when you realize its 45 minutes each way. Suddenly you're spending 10% of your waking time (which is like 40% of your free time) commuting and before you know it you're looking on Monster.com/eHarmony again.

Just a cycle I've observed many times that seems to occur with 100% frequency, though oddly I've never had either a job or girlfriend who was over 15 minutes away.
> If you can't calculate the value of it, then it has no defined value.

That's not true. The Busy Beaver function is a counterexample: it's possible to enumerate all n-rule Turing machines. Each such machine either halts after a finite number of steps or does not. We can list the number of steps that all the halting n-rule machines take to stop, and the largest number that we list is BB(n). That's defined.

I think your problem is that you don't understand what "computable" means. When we say that the Busy Beaver function is uncomputable, we mean that there is no halting algorithm that takes any natural number n as its input and always returns BB(n). There are algorithms that return BB(n) for any specific n: "return [BB(n)]" is an example.

The reason that no general (finite) algorithm exists that can compute the Busy Beaver function is this: there are some Turing machines that never halt but that cannot be proven to never halt; that is, there is no sequence of symbols and accompanying interpretive framework that proves that such a machine never halts. BUT THEY STILL DON'T HALT. So when our algorithm tries to compute BB(k), and there's a k-rule TM in the class that I described, the algorithm freaks out. It has no way of knowing that it should ignore this TM, because it's mathematically impossible to know that. But it can't wait forever either. So it watches the weird TM for an infinite amount of time. The only way to get around this is to hard-code in special case handling for these weird TMs; but you can only do that a finite number of times ('cause the algorithm's finite), and the class of weird TMs has no finite description.

To the person whose comment is above or below mine: that's the difference between BB(1 - 4) and BB(100). There are no weird TMs with less than 5 rules. But there are almost certainly some with 100 rules.
"Is Boston significantly cheaper than SV (I'd probably be in the Mountain View area)? It's hard to find comparable areas for cost of apartments and such."

Mountain View is very nearly the same price as San Francisco. Because of Google it is among the most expensive places in the valley. I've lived here since we did YC last year, and I've enjoyed it. It's a lovely, quiet, and highly technology focused area, with good restaurants (as long as you like Asian and Mediterranean food), cool little groceries and produce markets (mostly Asian and Mediterranean, but also the Milk Pail which is close to heaven for fans of fresh food), a fantastic library, and even a decent cultural scene (though it is very much white bread small town culture...the performing arts center is excellent for such a tiny town; the massive tax base of the city insures most city services are excellent).

I don't know anything about Boston, but I've heard it's also quite expensive.

I'm paying $2145/mo for a two bedroom rental house a few blocks from downtown Mountain View (with a garage). It's pretty big compared to where most of the folks I know out here are living, but I moved from an even bigger place in Austin, so it was definitely downsizing for me. I've been shopping for a place in SF, and have found that prices are pretty similar for smaller places--$1600-$2000 for a one bedroom (sometimes plus small office) apartment in a decent location.

Salaries in California are enough to make up for most of the higher cost of living, as long as you don't have a strong desire to own your own home anytime soon.

"- Any advice on which of two hypothetical is better: big fish little pond or little fish big pond? Alternatively, would you rather be at an important team in a lesser-known company, or a less-important team in a well-known company?"

How long is a piece of string? We can't tell you what the best work environment is for you. You'll need to try it and see.
What school do you go to?
Good site, but what is different from Tada List by 37signals?
I've lived in Boston, then moved to SV, then moved back to Boston, where I live now (modulo a few miles).

IMHO, you're right on all counts about the pros and cons. I don't have recent data, but my impression is that Boston rents are not significantly cheaper (as they would be in, say, Alabama); savings will come from transportation costs. You can live without a car in Boston. Living without a car in Silicon Valley will make you feel like a second-class citizen. Obviously, Boston is closer to your folks if you're from NY.

If I were going to do a startup, and was able to honestly utter the phrase "I lived in SV for a while and loved it"... it's very hard to argue with Silicon Valley. Yeah, it's a monoculture, but it's a monoculture designed around what you're trying to do. Aspiring screenwriters move to L.A.; aspiring musicians move to Nashville; aspiring software wizards move to Silicon Valley.

But the most important thing is: you can change your mind. More than once. Pick the job that seems the best and don't sweat it. Sample Boston for a year or two if you want and make the move to SV later.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
$1600-$2000 for a one bedroom

Okay, I take back what I said elsewhere on this thread: Boston is considerably cheaper than this. My wife and I had a 2BR, an entire floor of a house with off-street parking, in East Arlington for $1400 a month. A mile walk from the Red Line, on a major bus route. For a cute second-floor walkup 1BR in Davis Square, Somerville -- literally thirty seconds from the Red Line if you run -- I paid $1150.
I had a long commute in Austin, and before that, in Houston. I'll never do it again. No amount of money can make up for the time lost, or the impact on mental well-being. Now that I'm transitioning myself out of "gotta work every waking minute" startup mode, and into "sustainable life that includes building a company, but also has time for friends and hobbies", I've realized I'm spending an awful lot of time on the Caltrain going up to the city to meet up with friends and do things (the kind of thing I like to do is see and take part in great live music, comedy, theatre, etc. in small venues, and pretty much none of that happens in Mountain View). Since I don't have an office to go to every day down here on the peninsula, it's kinda dumb for me to stay here.
7 Good Twitter Monetization Strategies (and 7 that Suck)
How is the uptime of the websites? I've always wanted to try dreamhost considering they have amazing packages, but there are a lot of scary stories out there