skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hashing for privacy in social apps
In my mind--probably not the majority opinion, but so be it--it's really the opposite: Python is a dynamically typed Java. So it's not that Java has been underrated but rather that Python has been overrated. I do not like working with either.

Also, I'm not quite sure what generics have to do with algebraic types.
The original post suggests he will be a lottery pick, perhaps first overall. Whoops. The writer caught his being undervalued but overestimated the math skills of basketball GMs.

It's hard to avoid the Linsanity now.
So what if he hasn't played against an elite defensive team. That is irrelevant to determine whether or not he will succeed. How many players would do well against an elite defense team? Probably not a lot, otherwise they wouldn't be an elite defensive team.

No one is saying that he's going to be another Stockton, Nash, Wade (although Magic Johnson did say that Lin reminded him of Stockton and Nash), and he doesn't need to be in order to succeed. If he can keep the caliber of his game up to NBA standards, he can accomplish what he wanted, which is to play in the NBA, and that's all that matters. His performance over the past 4 games is saying pretty strongly that he can play at this level.

Remember, he just played against over 10% of the league already and has been the best player on the court. If the Knicks elite players can get their act together, then Lin only needs to contribute positively in order to maintain a strong career.
Apple's simplified product line is a very good thing, but they're only hurting themselves by not throwing a bone to customers with more specific needs.

I don't think so. People seem to believe ANY lost sale is lost money, but it is not so. Every sale comes with what is called an "opportunity cost" (wikipedia it).

Making stuff for tiny niches is not worth it if you have a nicely streamlined production run going.
From whose perspective, though? The new tab button should be really obvious in a production browser, and in Chrome 17 it isn't. If this is a change suggested by the Plus team, it's a bad change.

Usability first.
Blocks.

Ruby gets a lot of things wrong, but blocks are one thing they more or less do well. Everything good that has been built from/for Ruby owes a large measure of its success to Ruby's block implementation.

Python programmers are definitely looking up the power curve at Ruby.
This is truly frightening and interesting at the same time. How are so many of these Trendnet IP cameras just exposed to the public internet with their own IP addresses? And I'd like to know why do so many people use security cameras to record video of nothing in particular (empty warehouses, the street, etc).

FYI these cameras were found to have a backdoor to view the images:

http://www.webpronews.com/security-cameras-hacked-2012-02
This was actually my attempt at learning Haskell moreso than writing something useful. I plan on adding back jumping and clause learning soon. Thanks for the Chaff link, though! Will save me some time. :)
Under your 'Account settings', go to 'Authorizing applications & sites' in the first section (Security).
The way I would do it is to push the processing out to functions, too. Something like:

verdict = get_verdict(the_thing)
if verdict not in blessedsolutions:
return

I'd advise against running returns onto the same line - I find it makes it harder to read, particularly when you have a lot of checks like this.
How facts are wrought...with a fact-checker
Yeah I hate the freezing up and ram hogging. That was the main reason for me switching to chrome. I miss my old extensions but after a few months you realize life goes on without them.

Sorry to see you get downvoted by the Firefox fanboys.
i gave up on watching/reading the traditional news outlets years ago, which today seem more like the yellow journalism of days past. I prefer to read news from slightly more factual, and less sensational, outlets like Reuters and BBC. Note that I said "slightly" so a large grain of salt is still required, and the bullshit filter still needs to be turned on. And don't get me started on HuffPO.
Would running through an unencrypted socat tunnel (http://freecode.com/projects/socat) defeat the DPI?

If yes, you could setup a tunnel on port 80 and then run openvpn or tor through it. Technically it works as I've done this for a friend in China (but China wasn't doing DPI on SSL handshaking).

I posted this same question on the earlier Iran shutdown thread but was probably too late to get a response (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577901).
Great find, GBond. I found it an interesting read. Thanks!
I generally write docstrings like "Return the n-fold frobulation around the center (x,y)." That's one line that way and about a half dozen in Javadoc style, without the latter adding much to pay its freight.

What would be worth putting inline but with auto-folding, to me, would be examples.
Great find, GBond. I found it an interesting read. Thanks! I don't know how to do this, but can someone write a script and test it against the past 4-5 NBA drafts to see how accurately this guy's formula works? It would be really neat to see the results. Anyone up to test it???
iPad for Air Force pilots
If a clause contains only a single unassigned literal you can only satisfy by assigning the value that yields this literal as true. Therefore it isn't necessary to make a choice in this case even though unitprop checks. You can avoid a considerable part of the search space by implementing this simple check.

Very clever otherwise!
Have a look at IPython for a more code-exploration oriented experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipython (Sadly the homepage doesn't quite get the simpler sell points across as well. http://ipython.org/)
But not all editors have this, nor is it widely used in editors like Emacs.

And GitHub doesn't have it so it can make it harder to get a big-picture view and see the structure of a module when evaluating different libraries online.
Did you ever get it done? There are some animated/interactive Escher pieces on http://wonderfl.net/tag/escher , but no Metamorphosis - it looks difficult to animate...
He's also currently ranked 2nd in PER right behind LeBron James who by most metrics is the most dominant player in the NBA. PER is a metric for player efficiency adjusted for pace and time played etc. Pretty nuts.

http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/statistics?&act...
They've since fixed it. There's also this solecism: "nobody wants to think about the poet [...] pouring over actuarial tables". Though it's true I don't want to think of my favorite poets destroying perfectly good actuarial tables by pouring over them.
> What makes JavaScript popular is how good it is.

If you are trying to be sarcastic, you are not doing it right.
You can gain energy by mixing fresh water and salt water, or you can use energy to extract salt from sea water, but you can't gain energy extracting salt from sea water.

Edit: “The desalination battery is essentially the same device, but reversed,” explains La Mantia, who worked again with Cui and other researchers, on the new study.

The desalinated water that comes from the battery still contains too much salt for drinking, La Mantia says: “We removed up to 50% of the original salt, but we need to arrive at 98%.”

PS: Reverse osmosis uses more energy the saltier the water is so depending on how much energy this process uses it could be useful as a first stage prior to reverse osmosis filtering even if it can only remove 50% of the salt.
IMHO, decorators, although very useful are a big departure away from python's "simplicity" in syntax. I remember having lots of headaches several years ago wile trying to fit it in my brain. Even after I realized it is something as simple as JavaScript's myfun(fun(){}), my brain somehow continued denying to absorb it.
By my reading it doesn't choose a literal until after unit propagating as far as it can.
One more EDA programmer reply, here... Tcl is super easy to embed as a shell for users, either in the terminal window the application is launched from or in a GUI text window. No doubt Tcl's embedability and historical connections to EDA come from Ousterhout's authorship of the Magic layout editor.

Lately I've been trying to embed Ruby the same way, and while I've succeeded, the process has been painful. The "event loop" is a particular challenge. So as far as I can tell Tcl is still leading in this regard. Can anyone chime in about Lua? I've heard some positive anecdotes.
> If you look at their financial statements firefox is pretty much a google puppet.

Firefox does get most of its funding from Google currently, but there are alternatives. I'm pretty sure Microsoft would also be happy to fund Firefox in return for putting Bing by default there.

> Try konqueror for something more like what you're describing.

onqueror uses WebKit, and Google is the main contributor to WebKit, so you aren't getting away from Google that way.
"The way I would do it is to push the processing out to functions, too."

This is indeed a good idea to isolate code away, but wouldn't alleviate a deeply nested control structure. It would make it somewhat more easier to look at, though.

"I'd advise against running returns onto the same line "

I usually follow PEP8 and place returns and continues on the next line, but the code examples I posted earlier had to be a bit condensed to conserve screen space, that's why ;-)
Spray-on antenna to revolutionize the mobile industry
It's not like everyone can benefit from new features thrown out by browser vendors every two minutes so what is the problem? Stuff stays around for a while. If you want to reach your userbase, you use the common subset of functionality.

Everyone pushes features galore these days to the point no-one knows what "HTML" is objectively defined as. People do know what subset works consistently across all browsers though, which Firefox supports reliably.

As for Firefox's UI - they maintain consistency between platforms. Apple like to throw absolutely horrid curve balls every OS release and change just about everything for the sake of some misfeature they decided to make their users suffer (scrollbars in Lion being one of them). Also TBH compared to the ABI stability of Windows and Linux, OSX is a pile of shit to develop for so things are going to take time if you have to sync a lot of code across a lot of platforms. If they didn't bother - so what? At least your browser world didn't cave in due an OS release.

Regarding the whinge about scroll bars. I'm sitting on a Windows 7 machine at the moment and the scrollbars work the same as they did 16 years ago i.e. how I expect them to work and consistently with everything else on the machine. New scrollbars is not a feature - it's an annoyance.
I find that the best way to fix this is to write your program as a library, then the part that you're supposed to run as a script which imports and runs it. No __underscore__magic__ required.
And programs should never have bugs, and car accidents should never happen.

Sometimes sh*t happens. It's all about how you deal with it.
Wow. Thanks for the constructive criticism.
Well there is a small company that created a credit card reader using it to enable smartphones to act as Point of Sale machines. They call it "Square".
I must respectfully disagree. I work with web-based systems and find the dynamic typing of Python to be its biggest strength.

The ability to just throw another property onto an object before sending it to the template-engine saves so much engineering work, it totally overcomes the downsides of not annotating required types.

I can see where it may be an issue, but I think the documentation should focus on what function calls need to be supported, as opposed to type-checking i.e. "This function takes an object with the read() and update() methods."
Thanks for your comment. I fixed the link (didn't notice that) and seeing as I'm still in the works of a pdf version of my resume, I said so on the site.

What do you mean by "do" words?

Also, I'm thinking of also setting up a mailserver on maxmackie.com so that won't be a problem in the future.
My absolute favorite thing about Tcl is its simplicity. Just do "man Tcl" (it's built in to Mac OS X). That one man page describes the entire language and it's only 12 paragraphs long. There's a wonderful simplicity and symmetry that comes from the core "everything is a string" tenet.

That said, I haven't used it for a new project in over 10 years. I still kind of miss it though...
Offline files with HTML5
Emergency measures to deal withteeth trauma ~ Of Dentistry
How good are they? You could try watching the movie,or better yet, read the book. They did well.

Unfortunately for the As (and fortunately for those of us who embrace the statistical analysis of sports) other teams caught up and surpassed their approach. But it's still going on. In every sport. And there is much evidence that it works.
This.

Firefox is the only browser shipping a fully standards-compliant implementation of IndexedDB. IndexedDB is one of the most important features of HTML5. Clearly Mozilla is moving fast enough, their priorities are simply different than the grandparents.
>"A weak player can bring everyone else down and a strong one inflate everyone else's stats. But maybe that just makes the statistics that matter more complex"

That's exactly it. People often argue that something or other isn't accounted for, but the statistical methods are sophisticated.

Besides, it's not about being perfect, it's about getting an edge.
> Gecko is old

All browser engines are old. WebKit's code begin in 1998, for example, and IE and Opera also have plenty of code from the 90's.

They are all huge C++ codebases too - there are big burdens for all current browsers that stem from the code's age and size.

Gecko does have the additional task of keeping addons working (which WebKit doesn't), but on the other hand WebKit has the additional task of maintaining a stable embedding API (which Gecko doesn't). Perhaps IE and Opera don't have those burdens, they are closed source so we can't tell.

> I don't envy the task of the Mozilla developers

For the reasons mentioned above, you can say the same of all the other browser developers. Or, also for all OS developers, even a relatively recent OS like Linux is quite old and has all manner of baggage in terms of maintaining compatibility with legacy kernel modules and such.

Big, long-term projects like Gecko, WebKit, Linux, Windows, etc. are hard!
I find that it's a problem with most languages. Beyond a certain point a project will start to need infrastructure, documentation, code style guidelines and tests - especially when there's more than one developer.

My personal preference is for building a large project as multiple smaller ones, or else leaning on other libraries as much as possible (eg. Numpy, Scipy, pygame)
Ok, well my series is focused on teaching developers how to create their own simple frameworks to suit specifics needs. It will also explain fundamental design principles using popular sites as examples of why their design works.

Anyway, I'm halway through making my series so I'm gonna launch that and if it's received well I'll probably do a bootstrap customisation series too.

Slightly controversial question, but how much would you be willing to pay for a series like this? I think I paid €80 for Michael Hartl's rails tutorial series and I was satisfied with that price.
Altucher is my hero. I'm always happy to see his posts on TC.
Cannon Fodder 3 - RELOADED
The common wisdom isn't that clutch hitting doesn't exist. Hindsight reveals that some people perform better in "pressure situations". The issue is that it's unpredictable and seems to be unrepeatable, and hence not applicable to models.

Your example is a good one: name someone who has a "skill" at draining game-winning buzzer-beaters.
Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted?
+1 for effort, but this is really very unethical. Literally all those cameras are broadcasting without their owner's permission
I used CarWoo to buy my car. The price I paid was a clear $1000 under the "Great Price" that True Car suggested, and under the estimated Dealer Cost.

Nevertheless, I don't see these services as viable long term -- it's a race to the bottom. With manufacturer sales incentives, the smaller dealers are bound to get squeezed out by volume/commodity dealers.
Just replace Java with Haskell, and you've got yourself a nicer Python replacement.

Less code than either Java or Python, far more compile-time guarantees than either, and nearly as fast as Java when speed matters (speed takes a bit more effort in Haskell than in Java, but compared to Python, it is a no-brainer).
Car dealers have haggling advantages over purchasers:
- You buy a car perhaps once every three years, perhaps once every ten. They sell a car at least once a week.
- You are basically alone; they are a team.

My sister started buying cars via fax quotes about 12 years ago. When she's figured out what she wants, she sends requests for quotes to every suitable dealer within 100 miles. (Now she uses email, of course.)

They still don't expect this minor effort to put them into competition with each other, and it seems to have worked in her favor every time. It's nice that TrueCar is automating this; perhaps more people will use it.
What if I forgot how a bubble sort worked because I took algorithms so long ago? Does being able to implement it after seeing pseudo code count as being able to do it in my sleep? Am I a bad programmer because I don't remember how exactly an n^2 sort works?
I tend to agree with you, hell i'm basically an analyst by trade.

but for the other side of the argument you should check out mark cuban's post http://blogmaverick.com/2010/10/03/building-teams-using-quan...
I'd also say that ruby has done a better job of moving forward. Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. I think JRuby is more mature than jpython, and I know this will start the flames, but I think ruby is clearly better for web stuff; not just rails, but the whole ecosystem. Edit: I also think bundler is better than what is going on in python land.
I think Tcl is beautiful example of a certain point in the design space and extremely useful pedagogically. It's not that it has unnecessary deformities (warts) the way that PHP does. Someone could make a much better PHP than PHP by just cleaning up a bunch of nonsense that's only there because its designer didn't know what he was doing. I don't think that's the case with Tcl (or Java, for the most part.)

It's just that solving a complex problem with a simple tool can often be more complex than solving it with a complex tool, even if the complex tool requires a bit more up-front learning.

Working with Tcl makes it very clear that spending some of your complexity budget on closures pays off big.

As far as what makes for a popular language, clearly corporate support is the key factor in some cases, good libraries in others, but I can't really explain the rise of Python except by its design.
"Weirder languages (e.g: Haskell)" sounds like something a Blub programmer would say.

How is Haskell "weird"?

I've used Python for many years, but only recently have I migrated my last Python niche (simple scripts) from Python to Haskell. I've found that even there, Haskell has become more productive.
On most projects I have seen where python was seen as problematic, I think that having types ala C++/Java would not have improved much. The real problem is that the function is not documented, nor is the function expectations. Typing in C++/java does not replace that (more advanced typing systems do much better, though).

Package management and generally deployment is certainly a pain in python. I think it is one of the main issue in typical "corporate environments"
base64 encoding binary files is just wrong when you could as well "push" the files' URLs over a websocket connection. that way you can take advantage of gzip compression and caching on the client.

it also looks like the server-side code uses the blocking fs.readFileSync() call to read the entire file into memory... but maybe it could have some uses for small dynamically-generated data. if so, not sure a "file" abstraction is needed :)
Why is customized software so expensive?
The central point is that "viable" doesn't really apply to a huge class of products and things. There are times when a user wants a problem solved, but in other instances they are looking to add a little something inessential but pleasant/fun/nice/funny/beautiful/lovely to their life, even just a moment to connect thoughts or with other people, not because of a job offer or order pizza, but to add variety to life. In the morning do you just cover up, dress appropriately or love fashion? There are businesses placed at many points in Maslow's hierarchy. Software is going to be completely omnipresent and there will be fewer exciting startups tackling problems at the bottom of the pyramid. Look at the facebook valuation. For that business, they will have needed an MDP. Talking about minimum viability of social networking software is a muddled discussion. That is why I like the idea of MDP. Nice observation.
Org-mode performs a similar function to markdown. Not similar to a WYSIWYM editor for markdown.
The Internet of Things - the stars have aligned, it's happening
The most apparent disadvantage would be the fact that it bipasses traditional caching methods.

And this should be considered a fairly big disadvantage if what you're pushing is publically cacheable. Consider places where a HTTP URI might be cached: client memory, client disk, forward proxy, CDN/reverse proxy, server memory, server disk. A web-sockets delivery mechanism would miss out on half of these caches. Of course, if the files are private and requested infrequently by the client, then a push mechanism might well be preferred.

In-browser file zipping could have a positive impact on transfer speeds

Yes, you really should be compressing your content on the wire (although compressed images, even in base64, might not benefit much), but I'm skeptical that a JS gzip library could compete with the browser's native decompression code. Has anyone done any profiling of JS gzip libraries?
Actually, a point guard led team winning a championship is rare. It's the reason people watch Rose[Bulls] with suspect. The last time it was done was with Piston during the Bad Boy's era[late 80s, early 90s]. So, although individual accolades accompany Iverson, I doubt anyone would predict him to win multiple championships without significant help[well except the media].
Apple seeks to ban Samsung's Galaxy Nexus
No, it's an argument for python over ruby.
Why should this be any more illegal than looking at someone elses website?
As one of my algorithms teachers said, "I don't know how it could have possibly taken four people to come up with DPLL; it's so simple!"

Anyway, nice work! A few comments on the Haskell:

- Line 16 isn't necessary; that if/then/else is handled by the previous case.

- You can change line 16 to "dpll s@(SolverState f r) =". This both pattern matches the argument (so binds f and r), and binds the whole argument to s. This allows you to remove lines 26 and 27.

- Line 22 can be written as "let n = negate l". Further, that entire do block is unnecessary -- you could replace the whole thing with a let or a where if you liked.
I released early with just one theme, but I'm adding more soon and we'll see if some of the people who signed up for selling today upload some items as well. I'd like to get some competition going!

Thanks and stay tuned :)
could be worse, could be your university has high-quality webcams installed all over campus and they're visible from the global internet: http://www.albertwavering.com/creepumd/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodie#United_Kingdom
I tend to agree with this analysis. I work in a datacenter and I noticed that people transition from shared cloud to self-hosting (or dedicated cloud) if they have nil or few traffic spikes.

Those who are already self hosted use AWS to absorb traffic/computation spikes.
Understanding the Rails Asset Pipeline. Is there a problem?
My message to Zuck and his $28 billion