skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments?

I think the implication is that it's obnoxious when people equate "learning a little French grammar and vocabulary" with "learning to speak French". Similarly, many of these pop-tech articles don't appear able to differentiate between "learning a little JavaScript grammar and vocabulary" and "learning to program". (I'd bet that the principals at the companies mentioned do know the difference, but they have an obvious incentive not to emphasize it to the press or to their potential customers.)
Lol, skype banned my account.
zsh had me when I realized that

1) it's a drop in replacement for bash. All those scripts you have around have #!/bin/bash at the top, they will still work exactly as they always have.

2) You can selectively go back through your command history. You can arrow-up to go to previous commands just like in bash. But if you start a command (say, ssh) and then arrow-up you will then be cycling back through the last ways you entered that command. Super convenient.
I've done data-mining on customers, and truth be told, they'll send that mail without human intervention. You wouldn't be impervious to ye olde mail merge!
Germany has very strict information privacy laws when compared to the US. As far I know many German companies cannot use cloud based solutions from companies hosting in the US because of these laws. For example you are forbidden by law to save user data at all. There are exceptions (eg. If the service won't be able to function otherwise) but the discrepancy is still huge. I wonder if you have to comply to these rules per se when you host in Germany or not. I am no lawer. But maybe you want to consider the strict information laws ingermany before renting big servers...
Mr Null, the uncle of famous Bobby Tables.

http://xkcd.com/327/
You're completely right.

I also feel bad. I accidentally did one of the things I hate, off-topic comment on actually cool project, and would delete my post now if I could.

I commend everyone who worked on this for pulling it off - it can't have been easy. And if it allows them to offer redis on Azure, that's awesome, as long as it keeps current with redis proper.

It doesn't matter at all for consumers really, but in the server space I think the inability to run great open source applications is a bigger issue than even licensing cost. I hope, likely in vain, that they'll address this at some point in the future.
Why it took so long to finish Super Crate Box's Controls
Efficient Padding Oracle Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware
Great plan. I love it.

My only suggestion would be to figure out the free message volume and storage size...then half it...then half it again. Give the free plan a paltry size. I think it's fair to give only a taste and require people to upgrade to get the real functionality.

I'm sure others disagree with me, and I'd love to hear their opinions, but if the goal is paying customers then make people pay...
I think that's equivalent to asking everyone to go to chef's school and describing the upside as 'People will realize that peeling potatoes can be done in a quarter the time they're doing it now!'

It's just... why? These people aren't going to be doing any programming daily. Why don't you take all that money, and all that time and let each non-programmer go to a deep dive conference of their choice for whatever their discipline is. Seems like a much better use of resources.
Nights and weekends at first. Then I landed a gig as a network technician, where I had no office. I just got dispatched out whenever a client had a problem. Otherwise I could do pretty much what I wanted and work on my business. If you can do something like that and buy you more time while still getting a salary, it can help. I joked that my boss was my investor.
This is more of a SEO question.

I got 100,000 pages, all computer generated, but all high quality information as well (not scraped/duplicate content). Should I make them all indexable right away, or gradually so as to avoid any Google penalty?
Alexis Ohanian: Trying to mess with the Internet? Challenge accepted.
Reporting back from what our support team found out about this download issue:
If a user has his default download folder set to an incessible location (for example, a second drive that has recently failed), the auto-install script will have trouble.

Just drag the .crx file into the Chrome window if you're having the same issue.
You're offering no evidence that it's harmless.

Neither you nor zerohedge has offered any evidence it has any effect at all, harmful or not.

Stuffing quotes causes the bid to oscillate between 10.00 and 10.01 rapidly for a fraction of a second. So what? If it scares you, wait 3 seconds for things to slow down and then place your order. Or if you want to be daring, place your sell order at $10.01 and hope you get filled at that price. Worst case you gasp don't get filled at $10.01 and have to change your order to $10.00 (omfg, no!!!).

Tell me why having to wait a tenth of a second before cancelling a quote is horrible.

Why do you believe I think this would be horrible?

I have no opinion on minimum quote durations - it would widen the spread somewhat (by raising the risk and therefore the costs of HFT), but I don't think it would matter very much.

To go back to my analogy, it would be like demanding that Amazon put marginally better air conditioning in their data centers. It would have a small effect on the evil hellish heat they create (don't you know that satan loves heat!), while possibly raising the price of goods they deliver by a tiny amount.
You can become a medic in a few months which is not a doctor but still able to save peoples lives in a wide range of circumstances. As to musical instruments learning to play the bugle call takes a while but not decades. You can learn some basic piano songs to play at parity's fairly rapidly assuming a reasonable level of dedication.

As for math even something as simple as being able to make change quickly is both useful and in demand.
I believe the difference is in the overall angular momentum. (You can think that the quarks are somehow arranged differently inside the particle.)

You can look at the particle data group's entries[1,2] for \Xi_b^0, which has J=1/2 and for \Xi_b^*, which has J=3/2.

[1]http://pdglive.lbl.gov/Rsummary.brl?nodein=S060&exp=Y...

[2]http://pdglive.lbl.gov/Rsummary.brl?nodein=S062&sub=&...

-edit-

Also, found a line on wikipedia discussing the notation of baryons that confirms this:

>Baryons in total angular momentum J = 3⁄2 configuration that have the same symbols as their J = 1⁄2 counterparts are denoted by an asterisk.
People think optimistic STMs are faster than locks, because "locks are slow", but optimistic and pessimistic approaches are roughly equivalent when latency is low. Under low contention, both locks have low overhead, just like optimistic STMs. Under high contention, locks have high overhead, and so do optimistic STMs (due to wasted work).

Pessimistic STMs are built on locks. They make code involving fine-grained locking composable. So you can have many more locks instead of a global one, and recover gracefully from read/write conflicts and deadlocks. When latency is high, e.g. in distributed systems, optimistic strategies are more efficient. When latency is low, e.g. in SMP memory, pessimistic strategies more efficient. So pessimistic lock-based STMs are generally more efficient.

This implies that STM is not really a faster alternative to locking. It's a simply form of fine-grained locking that composes well. I believe STM will not eliminate the slowdown that results from fine-grained locking in freely-threaded Python interpreters, but it might just make them easier to write, which isn't a bad thing.
Patio11's article "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names"

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
Many of the people go into the army to get a college education because their parents or they can't afford it compared with perhaps most of the readers of HN whose parents paid their way....
> Funny that their entire press release assumes you are looking through a TeX or LaTeX lens :-)

I'm glad! This is a great way to filter out news sources that I actually want to read, rather than sensational 'ZOMG - Neutrinos are faster than light!!! Einstein was wrong!!!' drivel that was all over the place a few months back.

I mean, seriously - can you imagine someone like Fox News publishing news articles with embedded TeX?
I really don't think they have to do the mining in space.
Realistically, at 80% concentrations of metals, you don't mine the asteroid, you cut the asteroid. In fact, copper cathodes, slabs of 70% copper, are already on metal exchanges in Shanghai and London.

So what you do is, you break off small chunks and aim them--get ready for this--at Earth. A small meteor does not do real harm, and there are tons of them burning up in the atmosphere all the time. In addition, because you chose a high-metal asteroid, it'll get to the surface largely intact--rockier asteroids break up faster than iron-nickel asteroids.

Then, when it's on Earth, you recover it--maybe dredge it, if you sunk the rock--and separate and refine it.
I wonder how many people would find it odd if Sony a Japanese company did that. I know their a multinational and all MGM seems like a more natural fit.
Actually, the images are really nice. Pity they don't provide hi res (I'd pay). You don't see photo stories like this too often now.

This chap reminds me of the volunteer hospital visitors we have in the UK. People go into their local hospital (known to staff) and just sit with the ones who have no visitors that day and engage them a little.
Thanks, amirmc. This is great feedback. We will probably point About Us to Baydin.com home page directly.
But if you start a command (say, ssh) and then arrow-up you will then be cycling back through the last ways you entered that command.

Like Ctrl+R?
Have a look at the response headers from any reddit page http://www.reddit.com/ and you'll see:

Server	'; DROP TABLE servertypes; --

I thought it was some sort of bug or attack and reported it to them. Here's the response I got:

"It's a nod to http://xkcd.com/327/

Hope you parameterized your queries ;)"

I love when companies do fun things like this.
You'd be surprised -- I certainly was, about how quality a product someone can release in 54 hours.

Regardless, it really isn't about that. It's MVP at its truest sense. Does the world need this product? That can be answered in 54 hours, with enough talent, caffeine and motivation.

To cram everything in, you cheat. Use Django, Rails (or better), Flask, Sinatra, whatever. Use an off-the-shelf authentication schema (Facebook, Twitter, whatever). Get a themed template from Themeforest or wherever.

If you're lucky enough to have a designer, let them put polish on it. If you're lucky enough to have (or be) a developer, let them choose the language and framework.

At the last Baltimore SW, Dave Troy built and launched a couple of addons for (the not yet launched) Shortmail[1] service. Yasmine Mustafa (seen on HN front page[2] recently) was building 123Linkit, which was later acquired, and the winner, Parking Panda[3] was built and demoed (and looked spartan, to say the least), and they were recently featured by Mashable.

Things can happen, and 54 hours is enough. Getting everybody involved to see that isn't necessarily the easiest thing in the world, but it's a great way of whittling down even modest ideas into their smaller kernels.

[1] - http://shortmail.com

[2] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3881825

[3] - http://mashable.com/2012/04/20/parking-panda/
100 Days and Counting to NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Landing
In the UK the relevant authorities have I suppose purchased a music playback licence. Cafes and community centres have them. It isn't a big cost.
I think people are hearing "change the world" and attaching that meaning to two things. First that it must be an altruistic change, and second that it must impact all the world (and hence the entire worlds 7 billion population).
We migrated our infrastructure to Hetzner at the beginning of the year and we are very happy with the change. Also, the support is great (and fast).
LinkedIn For iPad: Tech Teardown (Backbone.js, LocalStorage)
Object.create doesn't have the constructor bit at all. Try for yourself, create an object from another using Object.create and see if the second is an instanceof the first (it's not).
Yes it is, because motives come into play. How does the individual who doesn't profit from copyright infringement harm the MPAA any less than somebody who profits? The MPAA and RIAA claim that they lose all this money and that piracy is wrong, yet by not taking action against somebody pirating a boatload of movies it sends a message that motives are everything.
He's making it more comfortable to go to war - both for the recipient and for us on our comfy chairs knowing someone did this for them.

Enact the draft for EVERY military action. It's only fair.

I know these are not popular opinions but they are true.

Where are the people sending DVDs to people in the peace corp? They make far less than people in the military.

Obama promised to promote the peace corp and I've never seen one ad, but plenty for the military.
Hubble Images Searchlight Beams from a Preplanetary Nebula
Ironically, your favorite feature is also your least favorite feature: The compiler is relatively simple and unambitious, resulting in fantastic compile times. Once you start doing advanced analysis and multiple passes, you suddenly aren't so speedy anymore.
Ironically, this story would itself make a great movie. One can only imagine how much this old man, who our society would write-off as "no longer productive", raised the morale of our troops who were otherwise lonely from their families.

For the amount of money spent on the war, the DOD could have purchased the rights to the films and made their own copies to distribute to the troops.
Ask HN: How much do I cost to Facebook?
I've been reading online that each user is worth around 4.75$ a year to Facebook. But how much does each user cost Facebook? Also are there ways that users of Facebook cause Facebook to suffer a loss for hosting their content?
I think another part of why people support (product-driven) projects last minute is that people are debating whether they want one. There is no consequence to wait for the last minute and I bet many people, myself included, are debating whether it is worth buying one.
We should add these to the list!

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

* No one has a name that is a reserved system keyword (Null, Nan, Unknown...)
I actually got a credit card receipt for $NaN once from a Pitney Bowes postage kiosk. I wondered if I'd need to send my bank a check for $0/0.

Picture at http://www.arcfn.com/2008/05/importance-of-software-testing....
separating API from actual implementation is always a good thing.

Like in Java, JMS API has many implementations
He has missed 92% of votes this year. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-presidential-primary...
It's probably a good time to bring up "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names": http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
GASP Erotic Thrills Tonight and My Nominations for the Sunshine Award
I am firing our security consultant for not telling us about this. Our entire organization is exposed. We have just learned that the man behind Skype is the same person who was behind Kazaa. And he knew this all along.
This is exactly why you should never mix data and code/markup. When the semantic barrier is broken, all shit breaks loose.

I've always wondered if SICP style scheme would cause these sort of problems.
The Everyday Lives Of Frugal Billionaires
I agree. In fact, I would go even further and say that a non-technical person could come up with even better ideas because they are not constrained by what is technically possible. They think you can do absolutely anything with software. Whereas an engineer might (even subconsciously) be discouraged because they know it would take a lot of hard work to do the thing.
Not exactly, but similar. If you want to see a demo, Ryan Bates highlights this feature (among others) with his ZSH screencast: http://railscasts.com/episodes/308-oh-my-zsh
I think all of these reasons are good and fall under the "change the world" reason outlined in the article.

People seem to be misinterpreting the article by assuming that these can't be factors at all. It's pretty clear that everyone needs an income. These should be interpreted as primary reasons and that I agree with completely.

If your primary goal is to make yourself money or get power, it is guaranteed that the rest of your company does not share your vision and if they knew about it, they would probably try to find other jobs.
Free resources for Entrepreneurs and Marketers
I worked at a company where we were replacing the user-facing component of our giant, ugly PHP storefront with a Rails version; in doing so, our developers implemented a JSON bridge between the two, allowing the frontend and backend to operate separately, using separate databases (and actually, they were in separate data centres).

As we were testing, we found that some products in our database would cause a JSON decoding error on the Rails side. After a few minutes, we realized the problem. We had a string field for something (product IDs, manufacturer SKU, etc). On the PHP side, the JSON encoder was using PHP's is_numeric() for each field to see if the field was a number (to determine how to encode it). Some of the SKUs, however, happened to be composed entirely of digits, and for those, PHP encoded them into the JSON as integer values. This, of course, broke on the Rails end, because Rails was expecting a string value and got an integer value.

In the end, we had to write a surprising amount of code to work around the brain damage involved, since regardless of what we tried to do PHP wanted, by default, to send things as integers whenever possible. I believe the final fix was to actually patch the JSON encoder library and special-case that field.
I was thinking of Memex.
Even if it didn't get better. PyPy with the JIT enabled is over 5 times faster the CPython. PyPy with JIT and STM enabled might be the same speed as CPython but with the advantage of being able to use multiple cores.
It's pretty horrible to make someone decide they need to go to war to pay for their education.

How about giving the well-off the same risk by enacting the draft for all college students when we decide to go to war?

Bet we wouldn't be in another war this century.
My IQ is lower than it should be because I have what you might call "ADD". The final IQ score is an average of scores from a few different tests. I score high on some tests and average (which is actually well below average for college graduates) on others. The resulting score, then, hides my strengths and weaknesses.

Suffice it to say that I would have a hard time getting a job based on my IQ score because I can't do repetitive arithmetic operations as fast as other people.
Even if it's 5 times slower on one core, it might make scaling to 16+ cores possible in some cases where it wasn't before. That at least gives you the option of throwing hardware at a problem to speed it up.
Hey Tom!

The app doesn't work this way (pledge money). It's simply a tweet scheduler which charges $5 to make changes every time.
Dear god, so many deleted answers from people trying to be funny instead of informative! (I am counting 4 from the last hour and 3 more from the previous years)
Honda car warns you if your driving style is likely to cause traffic jams
quarter results show that revenue is $1.058 billion, net profit (revenue-cost) is $205, = 19.38 %

revenue/user/quarter = $1.21, then cost is ~80 % = $0.97/quarter, about $3.9/year

of course, define cost per user. Total costs include marketing, pr, investments in new software and operational costs like coloc rent, power, hardware, network bandwidth, system engineering, etc.
Totally agreed. I've been working on a project that uses a similar model. You get charged a small fee for not meeting a certain requirement, and anything above what is needed to keep the site running goes to charity. (Ends up being about 95% to charity).

Also, there is gym-pact.com, which disburses your money to others who do meet their workout requirements.
This is the most stupid way I have ever seen to blame Microsoft for something.

Bet you're a Mac user?
> You can arrow-up to go to previous commands just like in bash. But if you start a command (say, ssh) and then arrow-up you will then be cycling back through the last ways you entered that command.

Or, if you'd like to do this in Bash, and any program that uses readline: In ~/.inputrc

# Bind the up arrow to history search, instead of history step
"\e[A": history-search-backward
# And the reverse (down)
"\e[B": history-search-forward
But then it's not worth a bajillion dollars anymore.

If you can only sell, let's say, 1 ton each year (worth $53 million), then the present value of the platinum needs to be discounted (because you have to finance the recovery cost upfront).

Assuming a discount rate of 5% (ridiculously low for such a high-risk operation), the present value of 1 ton of platinum delivered 364 years from today is 1 dollar. The present value of an infinite stream of annual deliveries of 1 ton of platinum is $1.1 billion.

The fact of the matter is that platinum has limited uses and even more limited supply, that's why it's very expensive. If you managed to find a huge supply of it, it wouldn't be very expensive anymore, unless you also found thousands of other extremely high-value applications for it. If you can find a way to make platinum entertain people, give them better sex lives, give them better food, help them get to work faster, help them teleport, and help them become famous, then you'd have a $20 trillion opportunity.
I don't know how open Craigslist is, but reading things like "you have to write a script that can scrape Craigslist" and "build a bot that visits Craigslist", all I kept thinking was : "violation of terms of service".
How to: Compete with Amazon S3 without Buying Hardware
We'd like to think that by funding the original Kickstarter campaign at such a high level, we helped make it possible for the product to be made in the first place. I'm certain that the project's owner is still going to make money on our units too.
This is really a fundamental problem: how do you indicate operation failure? This relies on two things: the range (the valid output values) of the operation itself, and the range of the datatype you're mapping the operation's result to.

If the operation and the datatype's range are not equal, then you can indicate failure inside the return value by applying special meaning to invalid values. But if the operation and the datatype's range are equal, then you need another distinct value to indicate failure. The difficulty is in recognizing which situation you're in, and as you point out, this is one where, effectively, the operation and the datatype have the same range.
Race, religion, political association, and the like are all socioeconomic factors which have been shown to have an effect on an individual's score on an IQ test.

The classic example goes as follows:

The testee is shown four pictures: a teapot; a saucer; a table, and a water pump. They are then shown a teacup, and asked to match it with the appropriate picture. The upper-class testee, for whom tea was always served in a cup on a saucer, selects the saucer. The middle-class testee selects the teapot, as the tea obviously goes in the cup. The child in sub-Saharan Africa recognizes the teacup as a cup, a so selects the water pump, as water goes in cups.

This is obviously a contrived example, but it shows how the biases of the test-makers can conflict with those of the test-takers, leading those from different backgrounds to score worse on the test.