skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the bill is ridiculous. But not because of the "intent to annoy or offend" text (which seems to have gotten the most people annoyed and/or offended). That part is quantified later by describing the means by which you would do that (obscene language, threats, etc) to be unlawful. I think it is ridiculous because, as others have pointed out, there already exists other measures that can be pursued to deal with threats and the like. And also because "obscene" is such a subjective term... even the courts can't define it. They just "know it when they see it". Even if it was written better, I still don't think it is a necessary piece of legislation. My point really was to make sure we are focused on the right negative aspect of the bill rather than just the "annoy and offend" part because I don't think that is really their intent. Arguing against that part doesn't really attack the main issue and can cause the message to be lost. That was all.

Edit: I think DanBC put it best... or at least more to the point.
plaintext + gzip is preferable to binary.

The early adopters of XML saw their choices as semistructured text vs nice parseable XML. The third choice, creating grammars, was ignored.

Grammars for most configuration or data transfer or protocols are trivial. Certainly since ANTLR 2.x. Much more trivial than any equivalent XML-based parse and validation tool stack.

FWIW, ASN.1 is worse that XML. Not a defense of XML; all uses of XML are incorrect.

For my own work, I use a format descended from VRML that I call ARON (A Righteous Object Notation).

It concisely describes groves (trees annotated with key/values) and supports most commonly used datatypes. So it's a bit more concise that JSON or YAML and a lot more strongly typed.

Here's an example test file:

http://code.google.com/p/aron/source/browse/trunk/test/cronk...

I use ARON for all my own projects, as you can see, it's not really polished enough for others (yet). As this example shows, I mostly use it to loft Java object graphs. I haven't reimplemented VRML's prototyping (DEF / USE) functionality in this branch (yet).
Namecheap.com seems like a good option. However, I have a few international TLDs that they don't manage, so I ended up going with Name.com (http://name.com). They too ran an anti GoDaddy campaign and the service seems straight forward enough w/o all the stupid upsells that GD does.
Our experience in creating product videos with Xtranormal
Socrata Releases New Cloud-based Mapping Solution Mondara
It seems to me that Yahoo has bitten off more than it can chew. I bet Facebook can out-lawyer them at this stage.
I'm a practicing physicist, so I'll give a bit of advice. The only reason to go into physics is because you love doing it--but--you have to go into with your eyes open. The job market is extremely competitive these days for faculty and national lab positions. Depending on your subfield, there may or may not be industry jobs. If you're not having fun and you finish, then what are your options:

1) Medical Physics
2) Wall Street (though I hear that it's getting harder to go directly from physics phD to wall street and more people are getting a masters in financial engineering first)
3) Software
4) Management Consulting
5) Science Policy
6) Etc.

While the salary for all of these can be good, you have to look at the opportunity cost--you're looking at ~6 years for grad. school. Someone else might be able to tell you if it's worth sticking around to pick up either your masters in physics (or to take some graduate courses in CS)--but if you don't love it, my advice is to get out and do something that you're passionate about--What do you mean by SV type stuff?

Now, with all that having been said--one thing you might want to consider is that the first year of a typical physics grad. student is fairly hard with coursework and such and you might want to try to pass quals. and try research for a year before making your final decision--are you interested in theory or experiment? Did you do research in undergrad.?
Life in a lab can be rather different from coursework--also, even course work tends to be more interested in advanced courses such as GR, Quantum Field Theory, etc. than in the typical Jackson courses....

Good luck!
It has gotten better.

Install - http://railsinstaller.org/
Learn - http://ruby.railstutorial.org
Ikea Manual for Building an Urban Neighborhood
There is a difference between not telling that a story is not true (raganwald) and explicitly telling that a story is true (Daisey).
"Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days."

This is true if you are already an experienced web developer. You already know the problem space well and have an intuition about good solutions and approaches. Someone handing you Rails as a tool can certainly speed up the development time.

This is also only true if the application is trivial; you can only create a simple "first cut" of a product in a matter of days.

"Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming."

I think Ruby is a great first programming language; it has a cleaner, more consistent syntax than some other languages with fewer gotchas and edge cases (I'm looking at you, JavaScript!).

Rails, on the other hand, has a lot of magic, so that if it is your first programming experience, you will probably approach programming more in terms of memorizing and repeating the magical incantations instead of having an understanding of how the system works and practice in designing and crafting good systems of your own. So in that sense, Rails (and the state of web programming in general) may make it harder for people to get really good at programming.
Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zj50DmBFp0
I personally like to drink and code because it is a natural way to alert me when to call it a night.

Also, I am a bit of an obsessive 'pre-thinker' so it helps get over that hump and get me coding.

Strangely, I wake up more refreshed after those nights than when I 'just want to get through one more TODO'.

Remember: Lots of checkpoint commits to your local repo...you'll probably have to trash the last couple. and you should avoid committing to the master until you've had a chance to clean up in the morning. Alarms are good for this.

That might be a good time to use a BAC calculator and post your findings...one 'measurement' per commit and judge the code later. If you do this, please post a graph. I would be interested in seeing this data.

And may your Ballmer peak become a Ballmer plateau!
He agreed but pointed out that there's no reason to be upset with the lawyers. It's congress who's allowing them to get away with it.

There's more than enough blame to go around. The law profession should take more responsibility for what it's involved in.
Edible musical instruments made from jell-o
Sweden, Paradise Lost: Part 1 – General Wiretapping
I still don't get the popularity of Starcraft. Is is the blowing things up or the playing against friends? There are a ton of games that let me blow things up while taunting my friends. As someone who doesn't play Starcraft am I missing anything?

...

Or, with less snark: Instagram is fun. Using it makes me smile. Do I need a better reason?
Aren't some people doing this as evening courses--given the state of the economy? If so, the opportunity cost is wiped out--it's more a question of the debt amount, relative to the salary increase....
BYU professor develops translation app for Olympics
I find that significant white space is a problem mainly when going between editors, and also mainly because of space vs. tab problems. E.g. if I copy-paste from vim in Terminal into TextWrangler (free BBEdit) then all the tabs have become spaces, which python will throw a fit about. Similarly if I copy-paste code from a website or blog entry.

In languages with () or {} I can hit a key to reformat copy-pasted code. In Python I have to do it manually.

When it comes to moving blocks of Python code around inside one source file, then it's a simple matter to hit the plus/minus indent hotkey.
came along early and people dont even know there's other apps. its like the "i want an iphone4!" meme.
they dont care to search (and the app stores aren't all that well organized anyway), they just care to have "the app people talk about".

Even if it's actually not very special in any way, technically speaking.
Only 8+ Years of Rails Experience Required
Guess they're only willing to hire DHH
The idea was that you'd hand hack the performance critical parts. And I believe the correct term is transpiler.

(Which can be really useful to have if your language sucks and it'd be easier to edit bad code in a better language. (Or in this case your language is slow and it'd be better to just hack the parts that need to be optimized before you compile the binary.))

Of course; the right thing is to use something like Cython.

After all, if you don't get a performance increase anyway you may as well just hand hack the parts you need to optimize as C modules.

EDIT: I'm aware I called it a compiler in my earlier post. The transpiler comment was in response to you putting "compiler" in quotation marks.
Google app engine Python hello world example using Eclipse
SkyDrive Command Line In Browser
With zero knowledge of statistics, here's how to think about it - Wilson wants to construct some score. That score can be as low as 0 and as high as 1. So he wants some interval [x,y]. The center of that interval would obviously be c = (x+y)/2. Wilson first decides what c to pick. So Wilson says, the center c must be decided by the proportion of upvotes. But then he thinks, c must also be close to a half. So he says, okay, lets figure out c using some sort of an average. So he chooses two weights a and b. The weighted average would then be a times half plus b times the upvote proportion. He chooses those weights in such a fashion that if you have lots of data, one of the weights vanish & the other becomes unity. So the weights matter only if you have too few upvotes & downvotes.

Having figured out the midpoint c, Wilson has to actually figure out the lower bound x and upper bound y. Now he draws a distribution centered at c....ok so at this point you would need to know what is a distribution, and why you would need one, whether that distribution has a skew & whether its homoskedastic & so on...which is stats 101, so I won't go there. But if you've gotten this far, you should be able to atleast see the intuition behind Wilson's procedure.
Wilson's 1927 paper is freely available [1]. I can't say I have brushed up on my statistics enough this decade to verify the math but the basics as I read them are as follows:

- You have a normal distribution (bell curve) of data points, in this case quality scores.

- You wish to sort these points based on their respective vote totals. Any given data point has pos positive votes out of n total votes for that item.

- You have a confidence interval, e.g. 95%. This confidence is expressed in terms of the bell curve, so a 95% confidence is within 1.96 standard deviations of the mean [2].

- You have a Ruby function accepting the aforementioned n, pos, and confidence variables and returning a decimal value representing the normalized confidence_interval_lower_bound, that is the quality score that our input data point has a 95% chance of meeting or exceeding.

- Given a set of data points, evaluate the ci_lower_bound for each, and then sort them accordingly. The results will give you a best-guess sorting that accounts for the fact that some data points will have more votes cast for/against them than others.

[1] http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/tmp/Proportion/...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.96
These guys are super epic, looking forward to another fun event.
Does that mean that FreeBSD will become a bit of a second-class-citizen with the release of 9.2? Or are similar optimizations available and planned there?
Year 1 is supposedly pretty different from subsequent years - you should at least stick it out until you fall in with some research group or other and see how you like it. As a bonus, you can get your Master's!
Philippines: The country that never sleeps
While I agree it's a good wake-up call to people inadvertently sharing more than they'd like with the public,
I don't think it matters so much that the data was already public, so much as the way the app puts that data to use.

Most other location-based services have some sort of unique value proposition or special utility using the location data, or are targeted to a specific genre or use-case.

Girls Around Me, although you could claim it has its own "use case," does nothing more than show you everyone who's checked in near you, with no qualifier other than the fact that they're female.

This, to me, is an inherently creepy service and an aggregation aimed strictly at hormonal males, with the dangerous side-effect of exposing females who may or may not be smart enough to defend themselves.
I think there should be a http://fixing-it-motherfucker.com in the vain of http://programming-motherfucker.com

"Are you strategically servicing that equipment?"
No, I'm fixing it motherfucker.
In case anyone would like it at a higher resolution, or cares to add their own interesting events, the source SVG file is in the public domain:

http://www.mediafire.com/?h57lwc1c7poesw0
Postgres was just not popular enough, I think; it's still considerably less popular than MySQL, and familiarity and operations counts for a lot. So I think the number of "marquee" names falls about in line with what one would expect. Facebook is very nearly out of the running because of its PHP lineage, Amazon has very close ties to Oracle, but Google could probably have easily gone either way, but MySQL is popular, so it probably got there first.
Here is some handy regex:

/^([\w\!\#$\%\&\'\\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+\.)[\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+@((((([a-z0-9]{1}[a-z0-9\-]{0,62}[a-z0-9]{1})|[a-z])\.)+[a-z]{2,6})|(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}(\:\d{1,5})?)$/i
TSA Employees: Tell Me Your Story
I'm new to all of this, so does this mean that other databases don't have this kind of performance?
A Virtual Call Center for Any Businesses
I think it does a good job of humanizing Peldi.

I do front-line support for many of our products. Partly because we're small, partly because it's important for me to get a real understanding of what users are saying.

What I have discovered is that users come in being theatrically angry. They greatly exaggerate the extent to which they are affected by problems (verified in logs), they say that they are in an emergency situation with a dying relative and need support NOW, they say they will make a bunch of bad press for the product, a few of them openly extort, death threats, etc. Maybe years of AT&T have trained them to behave badly? I'm not really sure.

Anyway, when I respond to support requests as the owner of the company, a person who has both the technical competence and business authority to actually solve the problem, not some support drone somewhere, the tone changes completely. I've actually had customers apologize to me.

So yeah, the pictures probably seem over the top, but you're probably the type of person who is polite and reasonable when they e-mail someone for support :-) Peldi has probably gotten some cranky e-mails before about downtime, and this is probably the "ward off the death threats" page.
Ask HN: iPhone App : me or outsource
I have a prototype of an app done. But the interface needs serious improvement! works but not good enough!

- should i go ahead and hire someone. (should be affordable. simple app. 1 frame). simple app but something i would like to use personally!

- work more and delay the launch! mobile world moves fast!

what do you think!
If you're talking about worth in terms of cash, I would run don't walk away from the PhD.

If you're talking about worth in terms of cherished personal values, I would try to figure out if I want to be a scientist or an engineer. If it is a vocation.

Through my master's program, this was on my mind while doing my thesis. I ended up deciding against choosing a narrow specialty and becoming a miner, so I headed to industry to become a maker.

Neither choice is the less noble.
This is actually quite a useful technique yet equally unknown method of figuring out product viability from your own user cohort.

The overall concept...

- Not sure if a some FizzBuzz feature is required on your site?

- Not sure if people are interested in your awesome newsletter series on Blue Widgets?

- And in any event, after you've created FooBar... What will the take up be if you add it to your site?

Well, before you spend 4 days coding your new and exciting product, only to find out that no one actually wants to use it... do some market research on your own visitors!

How?

Easy... put the feature on some of your sites pages and purposefully 404 it, and when they click through, record the event.

Just provide some message saying "Ooopsey, looks like we are having some problems!".

Run the test until you are sure that either: it's working, or it's a total flop.

Guess who's already doing this? TripAdvisor. Listen to Kaufer explaining how at TripAdvisor they purposefully 404 their users into figuring out if something is worth doing.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/founder-stories-tripadvisor...
Doing an extremely effective job of publicly resolving problems is an really good tactic. Customer service is one of those things that is really only evident when things go wrong.

There are much worse things in the world than for businesses to look at every mistake as an opportunity to pick up points on the customer service front. At the very least, it keeps you from the all-too-common opposite perspective on mistakes: defensiveness.
I actually have a feeling it makes peole dumb. Seriously.
No more self thinking, it's all about riding the wave, feeling like you're doing something "cool", yada yada.
No, it is not common. It's even an antipattern on Google's Android design guidelines:

http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/pure-android.ht...
It is still lost opportunity. If you have the drive and desire to work hard in the evenings, you could just as easily pick up another job instead of going to school, bringing us back to square one.

Some things are more important than money. I enjoy learning new things as much as the next guy, so I often value education above income. However, I am not sure it is a wise choice if money is your only motivator.
That is merely a patent application, not a patent. Also, an example of misleading tech journalism that dcurtis didn't change on his website even after multiple people pointed this out.

I guess the hypothetical reality is more interesting than real life.
I seriously wonder why someone hasn't created an app/escrow service to mimic/enhance 900 numbers.

Experts enter, hours available, and their price per unit (minutes, hours, whatever).

Users would basically pay the experts premium to cut through any and all communication filters to get ahold of that person right then. If the expert doesn't answer his phone right then it would text them to respond with 3-4 digits for a set time (clients chooses time range) to reschedule (or deny).

If you find yourself not taking calls the system will automatically increase your cost per hour until it is worth your time to just answer the damn phone (it will be eventually).

Think of it as a simple handshake service for payed phone consultation.

In the speaker/entertainment industry you quickly come to realize that pretty much everyone has a price to get their full immediate attention, it doesn't matter if it's Bono or Tim Cook. Not to be crass but everyone is pay-for-play at some dollar amount.

Anyone from Ilya Grigorik, to Gary Vaynerchuk could probably set a price point that would make them very happy and generate calls.
Hi, yep. It's just that I wasn't aware of your presence before I wrote that compliment on your work. :)

Is it possible for me to connect over email with you?
Oracle tends to be pretty opaque in their pricing, and part of that is because with any sale this big, there's always going to be a lot of negotiation.

Sure, it's going to be expensive, but only schmucks pay full price for a 64-core license.

Still, it's good to see the best open source database out there delivering cutting edge performance. Great work!
So, I had a couple of questions about Dev Bootcamp as it seems like a great idea and the cost is definitely in balance with what you get but...

Do we know how many of the people are getting actually job offers after completing this program? Obviously that's partly on the individual but I would be interested to see the statistics.

Secondly, it seems like this program is no longer "Free". I noticed that tuition is around 11K and they give you back 5K of that. I think the last session used to be 5K and they will give you the 5K back if you get recruited. Can someone confirm this?
Using tabs instead of spaces is not a recommended practice for Python, or most white space orientated languages that I'm aware of. Adopting that best-practice would seem to alleviate most of your concerns that you've listed here.

Most editors even let you handle that on a filetype basis, so you can use 4 spaces for Python, and tabs for your C files.
I think he gets that Instagram is fun and easy. He was saying there are other, similar, fun and easy services. What makes Instagram special? Why didn't the other services make you smile?

"Starcraft::everything" isn't what he was asking about. He wanted to know about "Starcraft::All RTS Games".
What platform are you developing on?

For me, Django installation on any recent Debian-based distro is as easy as either "sudo apt-get install Django" or, if I want to do things the right way "sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv; virtualenv --no-site-packages project; source project/bin/activate; pip install django;"

In all fairness, as I type that last part out, I suppose it's not all that straightforward, but on a fast internet connection, it's something I can do in under a minute.
irc.freenode.net #startups

It's the "official" un-official channel.

It's easily my favourite channel. Currently has 458 users joined. Hit us up!
What I meant by dynamic allocation was allocating an array of the necessary size. Last I checked, the Ada solution was to always allocate the largest possible array you would ever need every time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in Ada if two arrays are different sizes, they are completely different types.

In practice, this means your Ada written image viewer can show you 1000 thumbnails, but no more. Or 10000, or some other hard limit. And you can only view images smaller than 2MP. Unless the author made the fixed sizes really large, but now you're burning 10MB of memory per image even if they're all tiny gifs.
What counts as "good"? By your definition it's one that can provide helps with indentation-based blocks. :-)

I can't depend on having a "good" editor. I have 2 work machines, 2 home machines, ssh to a VPS, ssh to a bunch of machines at work, etc. So as often as not I have to use vim to do quick edits of code. I also am generally forced to use Apple's Xcode for Obj-C applications, but use other editors for anything else. Working on my own toys vs. working at work, vs. being in school instead of a commercial entity with nice software licenses also means I can't depend on having the same text editor available, other than free ones.

I'd prefer to use a programming language that was easy to read and write in just about any text editor. The only requirement I can't easily escape is that the editor must support auto-indent. (So MS Notepad is out.)
same here. And btw.. The instagram app can't be moved to the SD card on my phone at least. too bad.
I need help for the NovaLight Challenge to the web from 2000
> Hmm... that last one might actually work.

LiveJournal would be a huge corpus of prior art from the pre-Facebook days.