skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't like the looks of the pylab graphs, I wouldn't put them in a paper. However, there's also PyX (http://pyx.sourceforge.net/index.html) which is a little more verbose in usage but makes very nice "latexy" plots that go well along with a latexed paper. And it can do some really advanced stuff, too, that I wouldn't even know how to begin thinking about doing in pylab.
I totally agree, this is far from being a major security hall.
I'm an Ops guy who just happens to write a lot of code, rather than a coder who happens to handle Ops, and I can testify that Rails is not fun to manage, from an Ops perspective.

Setting up a tightly version-controlled, centralized deployment for a full Rails app stack is more difficult than doing the same with J2EE, but this is partially due to the immaturity of the platform -- Ruby, and Rails, just haven't been in the mainstream for anywhere near as long as Java has.
The problem is UAW doesn't want to re-negotiate because it knows there's no way it will ever have its standard of living this good ever again. GM and Ford would probably insist on slashing wages by half. Already new hires who are not UAW are put on a different pay and benefit scale to reflect that a machine could do their job. GM has already volunteered 300,000 UAW employees for "early retirement" -- coaxing them to leave the line and retire early -- so they could be replaced with cheaper, non-union labor.
I find that matlab is a great program to try out new ideas and algorithms when you are just starting out. The plotting library is also very easy to use and there are many helpful built in functions for matrix, linear algebra manipulations. However the language itself is a horror to code in, its based on fortran. I still really hate the 1 based array indexing after using it for years.
What really helps in that situation is a good debugger, that lets you quickly look up blocks of memory (e.g. where the pointer references). Obviously it should be stable enough to handle bad pointers (giving an error message instead of crashing is nice).

The old CodeWarrior debugger was great for this. Lots of windows you could pop up for every in-memory object you cared about. sigh
I think I understand what you're saying. To clarify, my point was not that Obama is a hypocrite, but rather that I disagree with his policy of having candidates out themselves for having held potentially embarrassing ideas. That's what I was trying to express when I said "So apparently the change candidate wants to start by weeding out anyone who has ever spoken up against the status quo."
We use python for pretty much everything in my research group -- high-level scripting of simulations written in C; controlling experiments over serial, GPIB, usb; and data analysis and plotting for publications. I used Matlab for several years prior, but got really annoyed by the limits of the language when you try to do anything beyond matrix manipulation. Python + scipy + pylab is a pretty effective replacement for matlab prototyping and data analysis, with a much better general purpose language and FFI. Anything that needs to be fast you can write in C/C++ and wrap with swig or ctypes so that you can still use a high-level language to run all your simulations, and do the data analysis as well.
FictionAlley (Harry Potter fanfiction) was a 100:10:1 ratio - we usually had about 10-20 simultaneous users actually posting on the forums or fanfic sites, 100-200 registered users browsing, and 1000 simultaneous unregistered guests (out of a total registered userbase of about 100k). This seems fairly typical of most community-oriented sites.

Diffle (Flash games hosting) maxed out at about 1200 uniques/month, a dozen or two registered users, and about 6 that actually contributed content or games. Similar ratios, but fewer registered visitors because people go to flash games sites to play and you didn't need to be registered to play.
I will take your advise and mail the newsletter every month.
OpenSocial Turns One: My, How You’ve Grown
If you stop using 'is' and all forms of the verb 'to be', our intuitive sense changes. If you never heard of the verb 'to be' or any of it's forms, and never thought in those terms, quantum physics would not contradict our intuitions. Easterners raised on the I-Ching and Chinese language do not find quantum physics as counterintuitive as we do. When viewing western portraits in art, Chinese pay more attention than westerners to the background and less to the object. Never mind our intuitive sense, this 'cop-out' is what we keep seeing time and time again. Our intuitive sense arises from the way the unconscious rules in our grammar shape our thinking. It's not that our intuitive sense clashes with quantum physics, but the much weirder situation that any single sense we could possibly have about it does not conform to the experiential reality.

Far from being a cop-out, it's the bravest intellectual view you can take, and your only hope if you aren't down with the mathematics used in quantum physics. I wouldn't take it quite as far as reading the papers as only 'we found cool math'. Instead try 'we found experimental results such that no one set of mathematical models can (possibly!?) account for our experimental results."
When tourists run of out money they go home. That's why they are called tourists and not homeless.
Study: Stolen Web Content Sees More Traffic Than The Original
Not entirely surprising. Newspapers don't have large audiences of niche-focused readers. Put a particular story on one of those sites, and it will see more traffic.
GvR gave an interesting answer on Google's "Ask an Engineer" app, to a question about adapting Python to multi-core architectures:

http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=c9&t=ff&q=2f40...

His answer: threading is not worth it, and something Actor-like built on top of the new multiprocessing module should be written eventually. (Pythonic, no?)
Three points:

1) It's not either/or. GM can declare bankruptcy, renegotiate their debts and expenses, ditch ideas that are not working, and come back as a smaller, kick-butt company.

2) If you go here then it's just a big political hand-out for whoever has the most contacts. It's not a financial bailout anymore. Be honest about it, and expect a lot more applicants.

3) So you spend our money to bail out some business or sector. What is the evidence that the underlying problem has been fixed? I know Congress can attach a lot of feel-good riders onto the deal, like more green energy and better employee benefits, but what assurance is that? Are we fixing the problem, or just putting a band-aid on a gaping wound? 'Cause I got a funny feeling that if you write them a check this year, they're going to be back in a year or two.

They're an important company, and I hate to see them go. But I hate even more the idea that some companies are "too big to fail". Times change. If GM is able to change with them, then that's great. If not, then that sucks. But we don't have buggy-whip manufacturers anymore -- those days are gone. And perhaps the days of super-big American manufacturing companies are going away too. Maybe not. I don't know. But I know you can't force it to work if it's not going to.
1 - Release the paid version when it's ready. Early cash, and free users don't care if you have a paid version.

2 - No. But let's face it, no complex software is ever finished. And it depends on the bug. Someone wants to use Lynx to access your webpage? A chinese user on an unpatched Windows 95 behind the great firewall doesn't see icon next to "post a comment"? Wisely balance the factors and just do it when you think it can make money for you.

3 - No. For testing purposes (I presume you mean the user is testing the app to see if it works for him), just make it clear that feature X and Y will be removed in Z days.
Exactly. Moreover, most programmers will simply use high level primitives from some library where concurrency is deep buried, so they won't need to worry about it at all.

I suspect that people that talk about everybody using concurrency by themselves haven't thought what the future applications will use CPU power for. 3D graphics, IA, image and voice recognition... all these applications are susceptible to be encapsulated in some black box and used through a simple API. In fact, how many programmers are using right now complex APIs? I think it's a tiny fraction. It would be naive to think that suddenly the new generation will be full of highly skilled programmers.

Web apps is a clear example of heavily concurrent application where concurrency can be simply ignored most of the time by most programmers.
The world doesn't need another stock market charlatan, even one with flash graphics.
are you really advocating a ban?
I guess the sarcasm wasn't evident.
(1) Your "launch" should be introducing your premium version. In other words, the day you deploy your billing code should be the same day you leave beta.

(2) Let everyone use the site for free in beta. What you lose in concrete revenue you make up for in free bug reports, feature ideas, and feedback.

(3) Tell the free users the beta is ending and they'll soon have to pay. Feel free to give free accounts to some of the prolific community members, but don't feel bad charging people for your service. It's worth charging for - that's why you built it, right?
YouTube Monetizes Embeds
Hubble directly observes planet orbiting Fomalhaut
Here are two you tube videos you might watch to get a better idea of what I'm talking about. I'm regurgitating this guys ideas.

Robert Anton Wilson on 'To Be' and english without 'is'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCIqFAdI6eI&feature=relat...

Robert Anton Wilson uses language (per above video) to explain quantum physics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5h2hC0pLvk
Sometimes a one time upfront cost is optimal than a high overhead for all your operations. Its like sorting an array of integers (O(nlogn) so you can rapidly search it with Binary Search (O(logn) rather than having to do a linear O(n) every time.

It sucks for the people in Detroit and Michigan as a whole. Their education system has not yet caught up to the fact that the name of the game is "value added".

Also, now that "peak credit" has hit (shortly after peak oil last december) I do not see the trend of American families buying a brand new car every 1 to 2 years continuing. Much more effort is going to have to be spent making your manufacturing base as efficient as possible -- simply because the car buying cycle will likely be an "every five-six years" trend from now on.
YouTube Search Ads: A $1 Billion Business?
You're a condescending fuckwit.
If the US had free universal healthcare, would GM become viable?
If the GM employee pension fund owned large quantities of GM stock, shorted it and made a fortune, would this constitute a reasonable hedge against the inevitable demise of their employer?
Opal, their major EU brand, is profitable. Like BMW brought us the mini-cooper, a GM bankruptcy could bring us tiny turbo diesel cars that get 50+ MPG and run forever with non-chintzy interiors.

I know I'm dreaming. This money is going to be spent selling us the hummer H4 until gas hit $8/gallon, but there are entirely profitable segments of GM that could be swallowed up wholesale. The wealth-incinerating assets should simply die.
Q: What's the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman?

A: The used car salesman knows when he's lying.
1.)Slice up the company into smaller companies, based on make (Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, Hummer[!]), and let those fight on.

2.) Any government funds come with strings attached. Things like developing fuel/energy efficient vehicles(say, didn't we already pour 25 billion into the big 2.5 just this year for that?). Or gut middle and upper management.

3.) Trim the 1inch thick agreements between the unions and the big 2.5.
To my ears, you're describing "DLL hell", but saying that it isn't really DLL hell, because you can work around it, and because the problems are just as bad in some other languages.

Personally, I think Rails is pretty hard to deploy. There are just too many global inter-dependencies that need to be managed.
Valleywag Dies; Takes Internet Celebrity With It
All the more of an argument to let them fail.

If the "free market" does not think it is a good investment/risk ratio, why let the taxpayers take it?
> 1. it looks pretty

No, it doesn't. It looks flashy.

The UI appears to have been inspired by the Bratz website or similar. Playful tone is just plain inappropriate given the subject matter and it will drive people away. This is the most evident problem with the project at the moment.
Barack Obama Uses a Mac
To be blunt and disrespectful, after seeing the author confusing Cantonese and Mandarin, I am quite skeptical of the assertions.
who is trying to make you less dumb
I'm not entirely convinced there's a net benefit. Paying GM 25B to continue to use materials and labour inefficiently, creating vehicles that won't sell, provides a reason to give their workers a salary which they'll spend in their local economy, keeping second-order collapses like those that accompany the closing of military bases in isolated areas from happening.

If, on the other hand, we shut down GM and put its former workers on extended unemployment, those with the aptitude and will relocate and find similar jobs; those without retrain and join the economy in a different role. The materials that formerly went into unwanted cars will be obtainable more cheaply for other uses.

The point is debatable, but it seems obvious to me that even if some of the GM workers remain forever unable or unwilling to rejoin the workforce, the cost of supporting them will be lower without the inefficiency of supporting a company on top of them.

I've read, but cannot source at the moment, that when federal aid to farms really took off in the 1930s, they did the math and realized welfare to individuals would be cheaper. For a variety of reasons, they implemented price controls instead, and saddled the economy with a persistent market failure in food production that's now over 70 years old.
"Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles."

- Richard Dawkins
you. you aren't going to be given the choice, these are coming to a laptop near you...like on your lap
Please include subdomains in the domain section next to article titles. (blogs.nytimes.com) has a much more accurate connotation than (nytimes.com) for posts from blogs.nytimes.com.
I remarked earlier to my flatmate how much it said about our society that this wasn't the top item on all the major news sites. At least it's the first thing on Hacker News.
This article made me think of another quote my old physics teacher use to quote -

"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion"

- Democritus
"..but I always miss the colons off the end of lines"

Well, if you miss them so much, just put them in.
Yeah, that's what the interpreter says... :(
Scientists and engineers have long been the engine of progression for societies. I think it's a shame that people don't have more of an appreciation at the technological and scientific wonders of the modern world. But like you said "At least it's the first thing on Hacker News" :D
hell no, it's a pension mascarading as a car company, let the market decide.
An event horizon sort of implies a singularity doesn't it? Otherwise what is it the horizon of?

Any clump of mass smaller than its own Schwarzchild radius will have an event horizon, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all that mass needs to wind up as a point. Under what we currently think we know about gravity a clump compressed to that radius will wind up as a singularity, but it's possible that we might have something wrong about gravity which would result in black holes with event horizons but no singularities -- instead you'd just have some high-but-not-infinite density mass in the middle being prevented from collapsing by... something we currently don't understand.
In Chrome each tab is a separate process, which is mostly for stability (if one crashes it doesn't take down the whole browser).
"why let the taxpayers take it?"

It buys votes.
We have that information, it will show up soon.
you made me laugh man ROFL
And 640 kilobytes of RAM should be enough for anybody.

There will always be an increase in power demand. To think otherwise is short-sighted. If you could keep what we have now or have a sentient computer sitting on your desk, which would you choose?
Sounds like something out of a high school newspaper.

(unwarning: not a native en_XX either :)
Microsoft to spend $1 bln on R&D in China
The UAW won't exist if the big three fold.
Yes, it is.

Can you make it fit?
Soldier finds his voice blogging from Iraq
It is currently #3 on news.google.com and on the front-page of nytimes.com. It's not exactly being ignored.
You may want to check out wikinvest.com. They also annotate stock charts but are taking a crowd-sourcing approach to it (they are a wiki after all).
I have a theory about this: Misleading headlines often make people tune actually interesting things out.

I've seen a bunch of articles before this one, with headlines that make it seem like photos have been taken of planets in other solar-systems. On closer inspection they've often turned out to be artists' impressions, computer renderings, or similar things.

The net result is that today, when I saw this article, my reaction was a mix of "didn't that happen already?" and "are they real photos?".
We are adding other things, like what mutual funds and insiders are buying and selling. News and market are just a start.
Registry software will come in handy for all the new TLDs ICANN is about to approve.
Online advertising is now dead
I think Hacker News might have a significantly lower rate of lurkers, because of the fact that it keeps itself out of the public eye. OmegasEye, an old site of mine, had very little lurking, because the people who knew about it were usually its members. Hacker News isn't that obscure, but it isn't a site that attempt to make itself high-profile.
I'm not saying they would be mass-producing cars. I'm saying, creative innovative people will think of something nice to do with 200 mln and 200.000 good pairs of hands.
Space.com doesn't give the photos and they don't even link to the original paper. The article mostly speculates and link to themselves. Sorry, no up.

Wired did a much better article, and shorter, with less speculation:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/first-direct-im.h...

Original paper:
http://tinyurl.com/6fdeu5
or
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;1166585v1...
Oh, give me a break! I did approve the comment by the user who pointed out the mistake, kindly thanked him, AND struck the comment rather than try to hide it like so many other revisionist bloggers out there.
pic: http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display...
If they fixed union contracts to become reasonable and limited executive pay then I don't mind government financing as part of that solution, but giving them money when they are as broken as they are now is stupid.
Banks 2.0: Build, Not Bail?
That sounds like me about IDL... ;-)
Who the fuck cares. (sorry about the F-bomb) Im just tired of politics in general, and for that matter mixing government politics with mac vs pc politics - FUCK! get over it!

I care more about his policy (and how he executes) than if he uses a mac.
They do, but it's hard to find:
http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display...
Common mistakes startups make
First images of new planets
How to Put Off Work Constructively
I don't see how this is hacker news. flagged.
As stated elsewhere, the great danger is that a reorganization would fail due to tight credit markets.

In a normal economic situation, a GM bankruptcy would be good news. The company could be held in trust, re-organize itself, and become profitable for (some) creditors.

Right now, credit is tight, investors are skittish, and government resources are stretched. It's not that GM is too big to fail. It's that GM is too big to fail right now.
Hacker News has banned other URLs before, from what I know, largely based around the theme of "stories here are irrelevant/infactual/not hacker news." Valleywag was. TinyURL is. I think TechCrunch is similarly useless as a news source.
As amusing as comments like these are (I've seen another story today that had a "no" response), I'm worried that comments on Hacker News are starting to become diluted. A similar thing happened early on with Reddit, before it started its decline.
There's other options beyond using JRuby for doing true multi-threading in a dynamic language. Perl has had true threading support (perldoc threads, perldoc perlthrtut) for a while now.

I agree that for most cases non-blocking I/O and select()/epoll() makes more sense, but there are cases where true concurrency (threading or multiple processes) is needed and either memory needs to be explicitly shared (IPC is too costly/complex or memory requirement is high) or the cost of spawning a new process is prohibitive (you're dealing with an SLA).
Maybe we should take the "states as laboratories for democracy" concept to an extreme. Designate some state--I offer you my home state of West Virginia--and isolate it from the current system. Then try the craziest stuff we can think of and see what works. People are pretty risk-averse when it comes to things this big, so if we lower the ante (WV is pretty low, love it though I do) maybe the other 49 states will agree to go along ;-)
“The classic interruptive model is a pretty uninspired way to really get to a consumer,” Mr. Kendall said. “If we build ad products that really take advantage of how users interact on Facebook with each other, it will be much more effective over time.”

You know, a lot of people rip on Facebook here, but it's comments like me that make me just utterly love it and the people that work there. They care first and foremost about creating a good interface for their users, and making a damn good product. And I really hope this strategy works, because Facebook ads are the least intrusive I've ever seen on a site.
Can you explain how/why this would help my returns? I trade options from time to time, and don't really understand the value this service would bring, since it focuses on things the market has already priced in.
Very interesting tidbit: 37Signals is migrating all their products onto Phusion's Passenger (mod_rails)
What the RED announcement means for the industry
Ok. We get it. We've read that kind of message hundreds of times. We know the reddit/digg/slashdot decline cautionary tale. It's enough. Just stop. No more. No more!
Does anyone else find this search to explain the creation of the universe hilariously futile?

We will never find the answer in our lifetime. We can't even concretely explain the process by which warm water sometimes freezes faster than cold water (Mpemba effect).

Things just get more complex and the human capacity for understanding is so limited in scope that when I read "The Big Bang may now be the Big Bounce" I have to laugh at our utter lack of intelligence.

Of course, this is not to denounce the scientific process or suggest that we scrap it altogether, maybe it should just serve as a good dose of humility to scientists who love to make fun of those who choose to follow a religion.
I used a lot of visualized search engine technologies being pitched by different research groups or startups in my last job. They were all pretty (well, okay, they were 50 footers) but they all had the same problem: horribly inefficient as search engines. Which is, you know, what they were supposed to be.
Of course we know it. But that doesn't stop it from happening.

Sorry, I'm a bit of a worrywart. In the last week or so things seem to have noticeably declined. :-/

EDIT: Am I really harping on it that much? I didn't think I was. I'll try and tone it down a bit.
well if you already know one, you might as well spend the time to learn something else that would give your brain a level up.