skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're looooooong. I read through "Learning Python" and came out a better Python programmer because of it, but it was an epic journey that may as well have involved hobbits and a wizard.

I also strongly disliked the author's choice of examples. In particular, the examples for metaclasses and decorators were repetitive and un-Pythonic. If you want private member functions, you're probably better off using a language like Java that supports them rather than trying to hack them in using one of the several ways explained in the book.

If you can handle the length and the trailing off of example quality near the end, it's a solid and comprehensive coverage of Python the language. In terms of the 3.x/2.x split, "Learning Python" covered both comprehensively. The differences aren't huge, and it's mostly just a matter of the example code being adapted to work in one or the other.
Yahoo: Facebook's Open Compute Project also violates our patents
Well see part of the problem is that it takes more experience to know your way around C++; it's just bigger than Objective-C, even if you only talk about the "commonly used" parts. If you know C and are reasonably familiar with OO, you can easily learn all of the important differences between C and Objective-C in a week or so. And since it's a true superset, everything you know from C carries over. C++ is just more complicated to learn the ropes of.

So I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of people criticizing C++ probably don't have much experience with it, but that's kind of the point.
A dozen people? That's awesome. Thanks for the support!
Ask HN: Fame and Fortune for Solving a Hard Problem
Possibly the most difficult scraping problem of all time: find a certain type of data from anywhere (everywhere) on the web, recognize it, parse it and bring it home.

Together we will disrupt three of the largest companies on the planet. (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html)

Name your price. I have the cash.

my.data.problem@gmail.com
From the article:

> InfoQ: What about running a real-time app on the JVM vs. on Node.js, with respect to debugging, monitoring and operations?

> Answer: I'd say monitoring and operations are really the concern of the environment in which you deploy vert.x than vert.x itself. e.g. if you deployed vert.x in a cloud, the cloud provider would probably provide monitoring for you.

This makes it sound like a toy. How can I deploy something to production when I have no way of seeing what it's doing? How is a cloud provider supposed to provide debugging/introspection for JavaScript running on the JVM (by means of a brand new facility)?
1. This has not been my experience. I've sent my resume to these kinds of companies "non tech" companies, at various periods and have had no trouble getting gigs with them (I was consulting at the time.)

2. This is pure prejudice. It may be true for many people, but it is not universally true. Some people go to college having no idea what they want to be. That was me and I studied physics but it quickly became clear that software was what I cared about (originally I thought it had been electronics.) It wasn't the exposure to physics that made it clear I wanted to do software. Plus the terrible "exposure" of college to Economics, Sociology, Philosophy, and History turned me off of those subjects for a few years... then later, I started reading up on them, and have become more proficient in 2 of them on my own than I would have been if I'd majored in them in college. College doesn't make you more well rounded. You can sleep thru all those classes. Its not like you can't order all the literature you want from amazon.com, or see great paintings at museums or on the internet. What it does is force you to spend time on things that are outside your subject area-- and that would be valuable if college delivered anything useful about them, but it doesn't. Those classes are a full employment program for liberal arts graduates.

3. I think you're speaking from a lack of experience here- because if you'd ever started and grown a business, you'd know it has an impact on many aspects of your life. For instance, my deep love of history and economics were as a result of starting and growing a tech business. Economics is important to business, for obvious reasons, history less so. Further, your response shows a form of anti-intellectualism that is the real crime of colleges. They actually teach people not to think, in a way, but to believe. The anti-business perspective is a real shame, because its actually anti-life. (It was my study of philosophy that helped me understand that.)

4. A degree shows nothing, and is not required. You only think a degree is required for advancement because you've not been working in the real world. What determines advancement is performance usually, though often politics and the external state of the company with regards to your area of it (Eg: having a good year or not.) Nobody remembers you don't have a degree.

5. Starting a business is better than being an employee of a little startup, which is better than going to college. But yes, you can do either while going to college, though you're trading off the amount of education you'll get in favor of spending time at college.

6. People who need their life experiences broadened by college aren't really going to get it in college. Oh, wait, you're talking about partying, right? At any rate, I think you've got a false dichotomy going here. Whether you are broad minded and well rounded is determined whether you are curious about things and follow up on that curiosity, not being forced to sit thru some really low level "education" in subjects you're not interested in. It comes from pursuing your interests without regard for which subject matter they lead you to.
It does not help that a lot of American companies do not use any of these methods, they use front to back in sections.
Mobile first design is history repeating
Yes, it has the word “mobile” in the name. However, it seems pretty clear that if you discount the “mobile” bit many of the principles are just sound design practice and it becomes nothing more than a simple guideline everyone should be working anyway.
But it works the other way around, too. The expected value of a random company is not that high unless the candidate considers themselves to have a good chance of success. Given how opaque the hiring process is from the point of view of an applicant, how do they know if it's worth spending their time solving a random puzzle?

Investing time in open source software is a better use of time from the point of view of a candidate, as they can show the same code to many different companies.

So it comes down to who is more in demand. Is your company so desirable that good programmers will invest a significant chunk of time just to have a chance with you? If the answer isn't an automatic 'Yes', maybe you should rethink your hiring strategy.

It also doesn't seem particularly hard to automatically filter out candidates with no GitHub account, or a GitHub account but few contributions.
Speaking of git submodule rm, here's a basic script I use for that [1], based on Stackoverflow's answer [2].

1. https://github.com/byrongibson/scripts/blob/master/git-rm-su...

2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1260748/how-do-i-remove-a...
Doing it in blocks seems wrong. Instead, you should have 10 people board the plane in order of their seating, back-to-front, but have those 10 spaced evenly over the plane, so they have at least one row between them. They're all spaced out so they don't interfere with each other.

Then again I avoid airports these days because of the TSA.
Except we're not allowed to stand up during taxi. (And for the most part, I think that's a good policy, if everyone was standing up with their arms over their heads holding a rolling suitcase, a slight swerve could actually hurt people.)

Also, sitting down with a rolling suitcase on one's lap isn't really practical either.
The correct link is:

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm/
I talked to a crew member once who said that before they allowed carry-on luggage the boarding process took less than half the time. She really missed those days.
Smaller venues in the US are more like that, although I doubt the wine would work. And I've been to one convention (really, that's what these are) at RAI in Amsterdam that was just about as bad as anything I've seen in the US.
I admire Penrose greatly. And speaking as someone with a physics degree, I can say I've always had serious misgivings about the standard model and a lot of QED myself.
Ask HN: Your relationship or your dream?
I created a startup that has been growing for 6+ months. Just voted a top small startup in a major US city, building a respectable customer base, getting press, and we have plenty of non-zero numbers. Myself and 2 team members now. Truly love this and want to do it everyday.

Then last night, my partner of 9 years was given the exciting news he was accepted to medical school across the country. Great school just not in a tech hub or a place the startup can continue to grow. The startup needs to stay in the city I'm at for a while. The team, networks, mentors, local buzz, etc are all here.

We talked about it and are committed to making this relationship work long distance, but we also talked how the odds are not in our favor. I'm worried it will come down to a choice between his dream, mine, or ending our relationship.

Lots of thoughts/emotions going through my head right now, any personal anecdotes are truly appreciated.
You need to keep in mind that you don't actually type out the entirety of XCode's methods. For instance:

self.window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]];

Was about 45 key presses in Xcode. And this is a fairly short method, take something like animating a view with a block and you're looking at way more typing to do it in Ruby Motion.
I agree entirely. Income increases by the unique value that you can bring to the table, not the degrees you have hanging on the wall.

If everyone in the world studied the exact same subject in college, incomes would remain the same as if those people had not gone to college at all. The market forces would remain unchanged.

What I mean by work is to work to set yourself apart. Maybe you need to hit the gym to become unique that way. Maybe you need to work on your singing skills to become unique that way. College can also bring you unique attributes, but it is no more special than any other avenue, at least with respect to income.

Again, college has nothing to do with it on a macro scale. I won't deny anecdotal instances can use college to their advantage. It definitely happens. Random degree holder is not going to be any better off though.
Facebook or Microsoft: Who Is Better At Capturing Value From Ecosystem?
Sorry if I seemed offensively skeptical, it wasn't my intent. I was wondering if I was missing something obvious ...which happens more than I'd like to think about. I agree with you on the lines of code. I think SeL4 is about 9,300 and I can't come up with something much longer (I don't think CompCert can really count because it's really just a lot of separate smaller programs running in succession, and generally one probably doesn't count Coq code as part of the program being verified, but everybody's got their own opinion).
Super Moon May 5 2012
What You Need To Know About Secure Password Schemes
I've never seen an ad come up during an X-Files episode, neither on my machine nor on the XBox. (Which is odd, now that I think of it.)
I'm definitely grabbing Programming Collective Intelligence[1] and Machine Learning for Hackers[2]. Any recommendations based on those?

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do

[2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018483.do
Depends how strong you are - I have a copy of "The Road to Reality" on my desk at work, but not sure I'd want to carry it about!
Is that supposed to be bad? The programming style will be the same. If threads are done right, and the JVM can manage their affinity well (especially on NUMA architectures), it's best to use them and pass a relatively small amount of data between them, then they can provide much better performance than accessing the same large piece of RAM from many threads (that's what happens if you simply replicate a single event-loop thread with asynchronous IO).
Of course by this definition of wrong, Newtonian mechanics is wrong, which didn't stop me from taking a 400 level course on it.
RubyMotion looks awesome, but I'd really love to have IB support
I'm not anti-Milken by any means, but based on Connie Bruck's "The Predator's Ball", Drexel Burnham Lambert was scurting a lot of regulations when it came to appropriately labeling the types of deals and securities in which they were engaging. Milken might not have been running any blatant frauds or insider trading rings, but he was at the very least misrepresenting DBL's activities and or avoiding proper filings altogether.
No doubt is Nokia in trouble. And having followed the smartphone embryo that was Nokia 770 (with Maemo) I wonder why they were so late to really embrace this path. When they did, it was too late. What really happened in Nokia between 2005 and 2008?
Finding Nimo: Rap Star's Journey with 16 Slum Kids
Judging from the photo, iphone looks too thick compared to Galaxy S3. And the roundness makes it unlike the iPhone, which means the designs now diverge away.
I would have killed for this about 2 years ago, but now that I learned Objective C, I'm comfortable enough with its quirks that I can just use it to get stuff done..
Having to learn the nuances of RubyMotion in order to do stuff I already know how to do, is probably very very low on my priority list.
what a terribly written article which almost lead me to a [Certain Road to Death]
This Week's Big Data "Big Ten"
I was thinking weight would be the biggest problem. Maybe with new materials its not a problem.

We have these automated warehouses and factory floors with robotic carts that can precisely navigate, pickup and deliver loads without a lot of infrastructure needed, that's kinda where I'm coming from.

I'm thinking the solution would have to work with the existing sized doorways for it to be adopted.
A Bayesian Approach to A/B Testing
thank you. I'm glad you found it enjoyable and valuable. Did you stick around for the jazz trio too? I can't match the name 'hiccup' with who you are in real life :)
Not case closed. Given that you lose a lot of useful tools (Interface Builder, Storyboards and such) and that Objective-C can be pretty quick to code with Xcode I would contend that given expertise in both a complex application would take less time to code in Xcode/Objective C.
They're still not as good as real full-height keyboards, and while they're the best chiclet keyboard I've ever used, I'm not 100% certain I would ever choose them over the old IBM keyboards, or my favorite, the PowerBook G4 keyboard.

But they're not bad, and I definitely don't have a problem with typing on them for extended periods of time. I've spend entire weekends using my X120e, and the keyboard was never annoying or disruptive to my typing.

If this is going to be your primary computer, I wouldn't commit until I've definitely tried them for a while. I actually spent like 30min+ typing on various demo computers at the local shop, just to get a comparable feel. They had multiple Lenovo laptops, and while yea, the big full size keyboard was great, the chiclet keyboard wasn't a problem.

Another reason I bought my X120e is Lenovo didn't skimp out on key size, whereas most netbooks would. All the keys were full size.

So do I regret my decision? No, thankfully.
In my earlier post I was referring to publishers -- they are partial owners on the content.

I agree that their business models need an overhaul, but simply pointing a finger from afar, and telling these entrenched organizations to change won't get far. These industries are too big and entreneched to just dies either. The most practical answer is to have some sort of compromise.

It'll be hard to go back to pre-DRM, too. You can't unshift a paradigm like DRM for big media
Very important, though once you hit a certain size, it gets hard to keep everything on one floor (most people won't believe what hotels will do to cram multiple events into their venues).

You can offset the need for spreading out the coffee by having a fancier snack station in the sponsor room.

One big draw to the sponsor room (especially for summer conferences) are free ice-cream snacks. We had lineups to get into the sponsor room.
Another embarrassingly bad extremetech article.
People are somehow prevented by law to modify their car from hardware to software already. In most countries, changing your intake or doing an ECU remap is less dramatic than bolting on a turbo on a NA car but it is nonetheless exactly the same: your car is no longer complying to characteristics from when it was homologated. Therefore if you do so you can basically only drive it in your backyard and not on public roads, unless you take on you (and your wallet and patience) to have those modifications homologated as a special case.
Javascript completions in Emacs using CEDET and Firefox/mozrepl
Every concurrent request gets its own thread, whereas this seems to be one thread per core.

Also, the servlet API is crazy, partly because of all its baggage. There seems to be a lot of exploration around what the right API is right now, but its pretty clear the world wants something new.
I don't think the OP was trying to say that server-side validation shouldn't occur.

That being said, your statement makes me think that you are overlooking an important aspect of client-side validation: instant feedback for the user. It's not necessarily just about saving bandwidth and server resources, but providing a clean and responsive user interface.
I've heard nothing but good things about Javascript: The Good Parts, so I'm picking up a copy.
The original speech° is very well worded. The science publishing industry is definitely going to see some changes soon.

Technology will play a key role no doubt, but I think the bigger issues are cultural. The problem to solve, if we want to get rid of the big publishing houses, is how to rank the world's scientists. Ranking is important if you want to pursue a career as a researcher and because funding agencies use these rankings when allocating el casho.

The issue is bigger than open access. It is the very nature of scientific communication that is about to get an upgrade.

_________

° : http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/speeches/david-willetts-public-ac...
淘力网
Facebook and Google Have a New Frienemy
Roger Penrose has fundamental thoughts about the physics and AI, not simply callling them wrong wrong in the sense of falsifibility..Read his books.
Hasn't this been around for quite some time? g.co links are used on all of the official Google twitter accounts.
it says Quake2 in the body
As someone who has developed and released iOs apps in Titanium before (write JS / coffee, compile to native app), I am curious about RubyMotion's performance. One of Titanium's weaknesses is that it is extremely inefficient in certain views (e.g. tableViewsRows) to the point where if you are loading/sorting any appreciable amount of data you can only display a few labels within the view without the app grinding to a halt -- on average iPhones.

I am not sure if the RubyMotion approach is different than Titanium -- does anyone know whether it is faster and why?
I'm aware that many dislike Elop (and there may be many good reasons), but I'm still in awe of his "burning platform" memo[1].

He lays out the horrible situation they are in: pressured from the top of the market by Android+Apple and at the low end by a huge wave of asian cell phone makers.

Compare his very clear eyed approach to the ongoing and incoherent messages coming out of RIM.

[1] - http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-ra...
Would anyone care to explain the downvote? Did you miss the egregious misspell of "renaissance"?
Ramblings like this are a premier example of what is wrong with engineers today. If you are afraid to learn or use tools outside of ruby, you are not a true engineer. The world does not revolve around ruby.

Get some real iOS development under your belt before you make these broad assumptions.
Math is NP hard! Let's go searching!
Show HN: My Weekend Project (Turn a website into a set of PDF's)
There are lots of theories and examples of alternatives to DRM that protect the rights of both the creator and end user.

Such as?
A list of places to get DRM free ebooks: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_stores#Dealers_and_Pu...
But you can already do that in gdb and lldb.
I agree, but it seems like the feds would have wanted to keep his status as a CI under wraps. I question why this is being published.
Maybe I am missing something, but how can you possibly have an async SQL driver without threads like this? This sounds like a case of your Node.js database driver hiding the exact same behaviour described here within C code.
The real alternative is to have a mock seating area with ov erhead bins. Everyone gets settled, the the bins are loaded and locked into place, and the passengers walk on without hand luggage. They then know where to sit, and don't spend time futzing with the bags and bins.
>What all the JVM Node.js clones are missing and what Node.js sets apart are async libraries. There is no async (MySQL) JDBC driver for starters.

Would you call Node.js's MySQL drivers "production quality"?
You might want to start by looking up the way sperm is being produced. It will help you clear the confusion with the link between the mother's age and birth defects.
You Design It, They Do It
I had a friend in prison some years ago. He said the worst thing wan there was nothing to do. Most people slept 12+ hours a day & when they got out they couldn't adjust.

So yeah, I feel any productive activity is a damn good idea.
I'm not finished with the article, but so far it reads like "Look at this Ruby code! It's much nicer than this Objective-C code! See! SEE!!"
I never thought I would be able to upvote someone on HN for a reference to Bernhard Karlgren. I spent many fond years with GSR and Wang Li's dictionary in the stacks of UW's Asian Library. Good times, though programming is perhaps better as a job.
The REPL/debugging looks "better" than iOS obj-c, but I'm not seeing any other "better" here. Ruby syntax is not "better" than obj-c syntax, it's just different.
Haven't there been studies proving that a prison sentence is a poor deterrent? I mean, on the face of it, the fact that there are still prisons full of criminals sort of points in that general direction. (At the very least, it shows that people do a poor job of comparing risk of prison vs. reward of wrongdoing.)
You can't unshift a paradigm like DRM for big media

Yes, you can.

DRM was pervasive in the music industry. It no longer is. DRM was pervasive in the ebook industry. We are beginning to see signs from publishers (Tor books being the most recent example) of a willingness to sell ebooks without DRM. "DRM-free" has become a selling point for smaller companies in the games industry.

It is not easy, and it is not fast, but it is possible, and it is happening.
It doesn't really surprise me at all. I don't imagine most members of anonymous to be hardened criminals who are ready to go to prison.
Don't worry, you don't need a sense of fashion to work here. It was one of the first things I asked in my interview - if it was a pre-requisite, I would have had no chance :-)
Not really, typically you'd have one thread handling all sendFiles through a single selector over the destination sockets. As a matter of fact, it's actually really painful to do sendFile in Java from a single thread, because when the channel isn't ready for sending, rather than returning EAGAIN and letting you busy-loop or wait/retry or whatever, it throws an exception. So you have to use a selector to do sendfile, and in that case, why not use multiple tasks with the same selector?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/renascence

/insert snide remark here/