skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my favorite static analysis toolset (Radare, http://radare.org/), there's a nice feature similar to this. It "zooms" out on a big file by summarizing portions of it into chunks and displaying colored ascii characters in a chart to represent the block.

With the entropy and ASCII printable filters setup, it makes repeating patterns and TEXT sections pretty clear.
Test setups and design smells
Programming Communities
People say JavaScript community, but mean the community of people who actually contribute to JavaScript
Freedom of the mind is something like 1984 thought crime. What the FSF wants is the right to modify any program, which is completely different, and I think FAR less important.
Jon sounds similar to a spoiled child when someone else brings the same toy to 1st grade show and tell. Jon, you're not unique and there are millions of future programmers that will start learning to code in the next few months, curriculum just has to adapt and change to make it easier for newcomers to grok. It really grinds my gears when he basically said anyone doing programming grunt work shouldn't be programming. Everyone has to start somewhere.
$100 million startup accelerator: The Blasting Station
I agree that there has been loads of good thinking around the government, I was just unaware that any of it had managed to filter inside.

While you are at it, can you try and get the whole government onto github so we can fork it ;)
This post starts with a legitimate gripe about XSLT being classified as a "functional" language but then it devolves into a merit-less rant. It makes me wonder what the author uses XSLT for. It sounds to me like he's trying to use it as a general-purpose language. It is not. It's an incredibly single-purpose language for translating one XML document into another, and it makes no pretense of being otherwise. I've been using XSLT in large, multi-file projects for years (so I'm exactly the kind of programmer who "likely knows [he's] right"), and there is absolutely no substitute for what it does.
"Active term commitment" = "contract with time on it"

If your contract is up, you're fine.
You could look at the source, but it's obfuscated (sorry). Also, it's not github'd (sorry).

If it makes you feel any better, a different extension of mine has 7000+ users and no complaints of evil things being done:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bgonpegbhnjepleakg...
I participated in round 1.5, arrived in July 2011 and stayed in Chile until the end of March. If you have the right expectations you can make Start-Up Chile a fantastic experience. The biggest mistake I and others made was to compare it in any way to accelerators like Y Combinator or TechStars.

Unless you have well in excess of $10K in the bank (credit doesn't count) expect to be constantly stressed about cash flow.

Don't expect to have any of the $10K that you bring left at the end of the 6 months, you won't get 90% of everything you spend reimbursed.

Don't expect to have any pressure or external deadlines from Start-Up Chile to actually ship anything.

Don't expect to find mentors that can help you with all too common startup killers like co-founder disputes.

Don't expect to be impressed by the quality of all your peer teams and startups.

Don't expect to be impressed with Santiago as a city or the food, culture and natural beauty in the surrounding area. The best bits of Chile are well outside the central part of the country.

Don't expect to find a technical cofounder or a development team in Chile.

Do expect constant change, mixed messages, a little chaos and inflexibility on things that seem trivial to you. Startup Chile is run by a team of good people with great intensions that are probably the most entrepreneurial people in government. However they are not entrepreneurs, they are a government department with lots of rules and regulation that is effectively run by committee. Sadly they don't have the leadership or the power to make Startup Chile as good as it could be. Start-Up Chile would be much more effective if a startup veteran were given $40MM to turn Chile into a startup hub by investing it in 1000 startups independently of government, but that was probably felt too much for the electorate to stomach.

With those expectations set hopefully you can come to Chile and focus on building something awesome and creating a strong support network for yourself rather than wasting any time being frustrated by imperfections in the programme.

I've been quite negative in this post to provide some balance to all the positive press which you've already read. Overall I'm grateful for the experience and I have recommended it to my friends, some of which are now in Chile. There is also no doubt in my mind that Start-Up Chile is doing great things for the country and I think more developing world countries should replicate the approach.
Could it be argued that publishers' book are astonishingly similar to free open source versions i.e. they are trying to make money off by packaging free public domain information?
Just a quick point: AT&T (GSM) iPads were always unlocked.
I like it - will use it in addition to instantwatcher and streamingsoon.

I just hope I can remember the url next week though, not sure how to recall "stant" (or what it means).
Thanks for those wonderful screenies. I just intended to request further infos on the Stallman/4chan "relationship" but your posting cleared some things up. 4chan is still after all these years one of the most fascinating places around.
The ability to "Travel and form relationships" is critical, but these are orthogonal concepts to what the FSF is fighting for. Beyond that, the technology that has enabled that ability is something the FSF is fighting -- facebook and twitter -- because they don't provide source code.

Now, I wouldn't call the ability to use facebook or twitter a "freedom" either, but I think not restricting their usage is also something that is more important then the "freedom" the FSF is fighting for
Raid of Dotcom mansion was videotaped, footage nowhere to be found
We don't treat any other profession this way. Do civil engineers have a specific bridge they'd like to build before they become engineers? Or do accountants have a specific balance sheet they'd like to create before they get their degree?
In retrospect, I too went through a short burnout period. I was the only server engineer in my startup, working 10-12 hours 6 days a week. On top of that, I was leading a personal project to help college student organizations stay more organized. It became too much, as all the little micro-failures just rolled up into a giant ball of frustration and stress.

My bosses at my startup immediately recognized it and told me to take several days off. Since then, I've consistently made personal time everyday to keep my perspective in check: read a book in the morning, workout in the afternoon, meditate for 5 minutes, and leave work promptly after the expected amount of hours.

To get myself back into "beast mode" (which others would call "the zone"), I've done what some other commentors suggested: learn something new. For me personally, I decided to take on essentially low priority micro-projects within my startup that are interesting problems (i.e. integrating DynamoDB within an EventMachine process). I've built up my confidence back to near what it was before, and I'm feeling damn good these days.
You might find this useful: http://corte.si/posts/visualisation/binvis/index.html

and related: http://corte.si/posts/visualisation/entropy/index.html (visualizing entropy in binary files)

I used his software on an unknown format from the 1988 game Circuit's Edge to find out if/where the file was encrypted or compressed. It works well and was able to give me a (very) general idea of where in the file I needed to look further.

Edit: Nope, I remembered incorrectly. I used it on the game's .exe to tell me if I was dealing with a compressed executable. It turned out that it was compressed and so I went on a search for an ancient unpacker.

See before and after:

edge.exe packed: http://imgur.com/PlHGl

edge.exe unpacked: http://imgur.com/jeFLb
I think it's more a question of markets. Kickstarter aims for a far smaller market of educated die-hard fans. These huge Kickstarter records are in big part due to a limited set of fans who are willing to pledge 10.000 or 20.000. At a rate of roughly $30 per game sold (for traditional publishers) that equals to more than 600 sales for one user.
In addition to that, the budget for the game is greatly decreased since there're less marketing costs.

Traditional publishers, in contrast, try to aim for a huge market, and then also need to market to that huge market. The broader the market, the simpler the game has to be. Angry birds is a good example of that.

Disclaimer: I'm currently working with friends on a game too that, much like Angry Birds, is a easy to understand simple game idea that tries to appeal a big and broad market. I'm a huge fan of insanely complex games like dwarf fortress, minecraft, or (hopefully) the upcoming notch game, though.
Spanning Backup saved me
300 Domain Prefixes and Suffixes (and More Ideas) to Help Create Your Name
French ODDNS: Decentralized and Open DNS To Defeat Censorship
Perhaps the lack of a good substitute is why the author is so frustrated. Also, given that he works for a XML document processing company, I don't think he wants to use XSLT as a general purpose language.
Okay thanks. I will make some modifications.
Yeh this is mirroring other replies, but the 2 main things for me are:

1. Exercise, I used to run, but I find it much easier to go out for a cycle now, sports are also great

2. Some Perpective, The fact is if you dont finish X library or fix X bug, the world is going to keep spinning, I remember reading somewhere that its a pattern for people to make themselves feel incredibly busy almost entirely due to their ego, when you feel like you just have to get a bunch of stuff done you feel important. I noticed that in myself and when I looked at what I just needed to get done, most of it really didnt matter that much, I am now in the process of learning how to prioritise in a way that doesnt assume 200% of my time
> Anyone seen any good schemes?

I've been meaning to look at HXT, I've read it had something like that, but I have not needed to transform XML in a long time so it's fallen by the wayside. On the other hand, TFAA qualifies himself of "Haskell programmer" and does not use HXT so maybe it's not that good.

An alternative I've thought about (but not implemented on grounds of having absolutely no need for it these days, as noted above) is implementing what I consider the good part of XSLT (tree transformation via template matching through XPath selectors) in Python on top of lxml. Something akin to Flask, where the app would be a group of templates, and the routing would be a sequence of XPath assertions (instead of http PATHs + methods). Along with a few helper functions or methods (to easily recurse into the rest of the tree), this ought materialize most of XSLT's strengths in a general-purpose language (making extensibility trivial), and template groups would improve modularity significantly.
Not sure about the whole government :)

But we're getting most of our code up there and beginning to convince others that code funded by taxpayers should be released as openly as possible.

We've received some interesting pull requests along the way, eg. https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/pull/1
Re: "What is their business model?"

In an interview with Sara Lacy, [1] Kevin Systrom notes that:

- "27 million people is not too shabby, but it’s nowhere near the scale you need to make a massively large business."

- they plan to build a tool for advertisers, because using the iPhone app is a "terrible experience" for them

[1] http://windonaleaf.net/post/20464525754/instagram-perform-ad... (via Shawn Blanc)
Back 8 or 9 years ago I architected and worked on a team to write a very large and feature-rich application that depended on XSLT for a ton of UI-deriving functionality.

I found it extremely powerful.

I have never used it again, because the power it afforded me was not worth the heartache.
Node.js: Understanding process.nextTick()
3 Month Loans, 3 Month Payday Loans, loans over 3 months
Quick 3 Month Loans no fax, 3 month payday loans no credit check payday loans over 3 months
I don't buy it. A designer with Photoshop is no more empowered then a designer with Photoshop and its source code. The only people source code matters to (and helps) is programmers, but then we start leaving the realm of the FSF and start entering the realm of open source, which is rooted in practicality.
> It's an incredibly single-purpose language for translating one XML document into another,

In the same way ColdFusion is "an incredible single-purpose language for translating databases into web pages": it's not, the difference is that XSLT has no alternative whereas CF has a billion.

> and there is absolutely no substitute for what it does.

That's the issue, XSLT is not "incredible", there's just very little alternative.
The brushed dither look would go great on a T-shirt or a poster for a metal concert, but your target market is presumably already irritated and frustrated and your goal is to help them not be. Warmer, gentler, less confusing and less busy are what I'd want.

I can't find an obvious "begin here" spot on the page.

Your splash should also inform me whether this is a basic chat thing, phone number, or some sort of collaboration tool like GoToMeeting (now THAT would be cool).

I get the suspicious sense that you will not be able to provide your service to meet its demand with your current price structure (free still costs me time). That would keep me from even trying it because if it was any good, too many people would use it for me to get the attention I need.

That may not be the case but you have to address that concern somehow on the front page to get people to try the service to its potential.
Looks good, but I prefer Firefox for most of my debugging. I hope someone eventually makes a similar extension for Firefox, integrating with Firebug (see http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Firebug_Extensions). There is xqjs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xqjs/), but it doesn't look nearly as polished as this.
I just don't get that memories of bubbles are so short. This everyone-learn-to-code is just like 1997 or so, a few years before the big IT death.
I wonder how the quality of the Boundless Learning textbooks is. Previous auto-generated books from Wikipedia and other open sources have have been completely useless. Basically just poisoning search results and making a little money off people who don't know what kind of book they are buying.
I guess i need to start doing my online drug deals through a less obvious source...

I was surprised that there seemed to be no mention of chat transcripts, or no relationship history. Perhaps these things are not retained centrally?
"stant" is for "instant".
Notch Live Streaming 0x10c
One more competitors (and this one is doing great)

http://forgetbox.com

you can read an interview (in french) of its founder :
http://www.jaimelesstartups.fr/forgetbox/
I see you just launched an API. Looks like you're working off a dump of WU's data? Nice dataset there.

For the back-of-the-envelope calculations I always do, I would probably just write a script to scrape WU's data myself and do the HDD/CDD calculations manually. It's a shame that there's no free trial of your data (~50 request/day or similar). It would make me far more likely to fall in love with your API. Then, on the not-inconceivable chance that I write energy software in the near-future, I would be far more likely to query your API instead of rolling my own solution.

I definitely agree with you that we need to bring more computation to energy. I'm gifting someone a Nest thermostat later today, which embodies the kind of innovation we need. The fact that the Nest is considered as innovative as it is shows just how lacking we've been in this area. It's just an Android on the wall, after all!

Thanks for posting. I take it info@energyauditsoftware.com reaches you?
The problem with the wave-particle duality is that it's a poor description of the phenomenon that's often more confusing than it is enlightening.

Imagine a biologist describing a creature which has human-butterfly duality. If you measure its number of legs, it turns into a human. If you measure its number of wings, it turns into a butterfly. If you measure whether it can ask for a cracker, it turns into a human. If you measure whether it's brightly colored, it turns into a butterfly. It's constantly shifting back and forth between these two completely different species. Of course, it might be simpler to just call it a parrot.

The problem with many explanations at quantum mechanics is that they present light or matter as shifting between being a particle and being a wave. A common symptom of this is that people say light has a wave-particle duality, despite the fact that the properties that they're describing are universal and not just related to the nature of light. A better description is to say that everything follows the Schrodinger equation and that, at certain limits, we see a set of properties that we refer to as particles while, under a different set of limits, we see properties that we tend to call waves. It's not that light switches between being a wave and a particle; the terms wave and particle are simply not complete enough to describe the properties that light possesses.
Asynchronous Cake Cuttting - a Fair Algorithm
When Dan Ariely found the key to human nature
I think the idea is to differentiate between mutable and immutable data, ie. "worked on" and "final". I don't know what that would give you with regards to GC though.
The True Cost of the 10 Largest CEO Severance Packages of the Past Decade
> Then that's your own fault. I check my privacy settings every couple months

It's grandparent's fault for not being enslaved to FB's pain-in-the-ass purposefully exploitative system the way you are? No, it is FB's fault for being a purposefully exploitative pain-in-the-ass.
Just because someone has an idea before you doesn't mean your idea is not worth pursuing. Execution is sometimes more important than being big or first.
We do treat _creative_ professions this way. But reasonable people can disagree about whether programming is creative.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck with this.

Any chance on getting similar standards applied to the ordinance survey data?
The limits depend on the rules of each round. That being said, so long as you incur the hardware costs and legal fees during your 6 months in the program it should be reimbursed. However consult with your rounds rules first, and when in doubt ask your account executive.

As for how easy, I'd say it depends on what you are used to. Finding a place, now that there are two full rounds in Chile, is getting harder. You'll have to look on a bunch of sites (I recommend homechile.cl) Sometimes you can get lucky doing door to door to apartments. In June the first participants in the second round will be starting to leave chile so it might be worth asking the community then.
Dear Michael, please don't insist on calling program languages bastard childs.

Sincerly, someone who understood that programming lanugages are tools.
I think it's vital !

I simply quit poorly designed website unless I badly need them.

You can have a look at this website : http://startupsthisishowdesignworks.com/
Wow, I wasn't aware there were any XSLT "fans" out there. I wonder where the author has been hanging out to find them.
Google Consumer Surveys: a new way to earn online.
Related post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3551345
Flat 10% Discount on all Footwears by Yebhi
Block it, and use another browser for fb and fb only. For very-light users like me (as in, keep a nearly empty profile for the people that use it as default communication) it's not even inconvenient.
Yes, clearly she was asking for it...WTF!
That's the last straw. I haven't done anything with my Facebook page in a while, but now I'm just going to delete it.
Samuel Beckett used to drive André the Giant to school
That one has a Yahoo! style exclamation point ;)
F.A.R.C. L’instrument de la vengeance
Considering these comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mquaes

YES (let's call it a minor annoyance, would be worst if he posted more often).
The only description of the service in that article comes from the publishers' complaint, and makes it sound like Boundless provide little more than a photocopy of commercial textbooks run through a ransom-note filter.

Yet "When asked to describe how his company pulls together the open-education content to produce its digital textbooks, Mr. Diaz declined to elaborate on the process" and so the publishers ended getting to establish the first and only concept of the company to a huge audience. And it's not like people can check out the website for themselves, since it's in closed beta.

Staying quiet here really doesn't seem to have been the best strategy.
That shit be old, man. Well, not the code... the blog.

Lesson 1: your research project is not an open-source project. Until it's done.

Lesson 2: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

That said, if you want to see some very odd-looking code:

https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/jupiter/sys/20...

Scroll down to the RSA implementation around line 2500. You won't learn anything. And why does a self-compiling compiler need an RSA implementation, anyway?
Neither Dell nor Apple gives away their products for free. Nor will they at any time in the future, so the textbook for laptop metaphor is invalid in this case.

What I alluded to is that should Dell engage in a product comparison campaign with Apple, their approach would probably do more to highlight their shortcomings rather than convince a potential buyer that they should choose price and configuration over experience.

Those two companies may be in the same industry but they are selling very different products to different demographics. It would be like Chevrolet comparing their free tote bag for every purchase with Porsche's optional carfit luggage kit.
Be careful, though, I had it installed and blocked myself for a few minutes when mistyping my password. I've switched to SSH keys completely since, but be careful not to set too low a limit.
I think the author of the post is completely underestimating how many different fields require some proficiency in managing data. I work in biology (genomics and proteomics) and I teach a summer course to biomed PhD students where I try to convince them that it is essential to learn some aspects of data mining, including a scripting language (Python/Perl) and/or R/Matlab. To be successful in bio-medical research these days you need to be able to reach out to available datasets that relate to your work and combine them with your own observations.Each experiment is also producing a lot more observations than in the past so you need to be able to handle larger datasets as well. My impression is that anyone who does not have some proficiency in programming will not be able to compete in these areas of research. This does not mean that we have to be able to do great code and build great software, a small increase in programming skills really goes a long way. My impression is that this is not just true in biology but it is happening everywhere (ex. business intelligence, social sciences, marketing, etc).
There are, I have met a few. Not one myself, but I do like the fact that it escapes properly, which most people working on templating solutions havent bothered to do.
They were going to be sued anyways. Why make it easier on the publishers. Also, they've been at it for little over a year so they're probably still in that period where business processes are vulnerable to outside competition. But I highly doubt that they are in the business of copying textbooks and presenting it as their own work. A business model as such does not raise $10M. Just ask any professor who peddles those over-priced "class packets."