skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I felt great these past few weeks.

I finished the last of my college applications and heard back with notices of acceptance.

Today I feel crushed.

The recent and current financial crisis has hurt my family to say the least. I guess I have been in denial until now but today my dad put it pretty frankly. Affording the school I worked so hard to get into would not be difficult, it would be impossible.

I am asking, pleading for ideas. For those that can afford it, I humbly ask for a small donation. I can't believe I just wrote that. I know so many others are probably going through so much worse.

I know this is utterly, purely selfish.

But every little bit counts, and if everyone donates just one dollar, well.. the effect would be tremendous. One of the links from "Best HN threads in '08?" said to take chances. Here I am, holding tight to a small shred of hope as I work on several alternatives and brainstorm ideas. I've worked so hard and taken so much pride in monetizing the internet since a very young age. It's been disheartening realize that it all makes such a tiny dent. I still remember the day I got a check from Google Adsense. It was $103.61. The money is still in my savings. I know there is more that can be done and I will work my ass off in order to peruse the very best education for myself.

I would appreciate any encouragement, ideas, and stories of your past experiences. Maybe I have this all wrong.

I don't really anticipate much. This is just a very selfish and uncreative attempt. But for those that have read this far, thank you so much for your consideration and your time. For those that donate, I promise to contact you personally and keep you updated unless you want otherwise. I hope that one day I will be able to turn this situation around and donate an equal or larger sum to charity when I can afford to do so.

Every penny counts.

Thank you so, so much.
Though I agree with the main gist of the article, the tone leaves something to be desired. For instance, the author seems to think that somehow free culture supporters such as myself dupe people into using Creative Commons licenses. Free software and free culture are about very specific sets of issues, so the Hometown shutdown doesn't really fall into the same area of responsibility.

Sure, many of the same people would be supportive both of free culture and data eviction measures, but that doesn't mean that the FSF should take up the cause. One may as well blame Greenpeace for failing to take action with respect to the Hometown evictions.
more generally "chicken and egg" :p
Modern Standard Arabic (The generalized approximation of what college-educated people speak nowadays) is fairly different from Koranic Arabic, but it'd still probably be at least somewhat mutually intelligible, so you could pass as being from some other part of the Arab world I suppose.

Spain would've probably been the best possible place to land during the Ummayad/Abbasid Caliphates (before about 1085 or so), but it was a very rough place afterward (the Almoravid/Almohad Caliphates were not known for tolerance, and the reconquest was even worse)
Venture Capital backed startups.
How to handle large data in DrScheme
I believe your ideal storage requirement, but what's the time complexity of your algorithm, and could you describe it in more detail than "clever"?

I'm pretty sure random reads and writes on any compressed form will be worse than O(1), and I'm pretty sure your sort will do O(n log n) of those, so I believe your algorithm is asymptotically (and in practice for n = 1 million) slower than chmike's two-pass algorithm.
Part 2 is a lot more useful (http://zohrob.com/posts/entrepreneurs-guide-to-email-deliver...). Part 1 basically says, if you want to run a mail server, use a dedicated IP for it. Part 2 actually goes into the anti-SPAM technologies that will make your messages appear as non-SPAM.

One thing that I would add to the section on SPF: don't say that any mail not coming from your domain is SPAM. It's a bad plan. Use it as a way to gain non-SPAM points if it does validate, but don't say that mail not coming from your servers is SPAM definitionally. Why? Because more and more people are forwarding mail and most mail forwarders do NOT rewrite the chain in a way that preserves SPF. Basically, if you deny all other domains, many people who forward their mail will see your emails as SPAM.
Hey, that's A BIT old. May 2005?
Firefox already supports this with minimum configuration required, much less Greasemonkey scripting.
Believe it or not, that was a big part of Yahoo's business model in the 90s.
I don't see why we should let them off the hook for that. Match.com has an enormous userbase. Surely they could have spread the word somehow through various means to provide me with more than 18 search results throughout the entire city of Chicago.
That's pretty much right. I'd call it de-glorified if anything since you can't do anything after you "pick" a color. But the only other free alternative to this app was to take photos of stuff, somehow (email, iPhone sync, etc) get them on my computer, and then use some desktop image editing software to check out the colors in the image.

The app is much more on demand and I think it'll be fun to use when I'm doing non-brainy stuff like grocery shopping or sitting in a train.

More importantly, it's been really fun to write since I didn't really understand CoreGraphics before I started. I thought the app would be really easy to write since the idea is so simple but it's actually taken quite a bit of grunt work and a considerable amount of crawling through Apple developer docs.

I plan on sticking the app in the app store just for fun. I couldn't find an app that does what mine does for free. I think there were two alternatives, one that cost 10 bucks and was pretty sweet and one that was 5 bucks and sucked. If mine sucks, at least it'll be free! And if even 100 people download it I'll probably extend it to be able to email color swatches to people and save favorite colors.
I think one can safely assume that any article containing the phrase "could kill x by changing only y" is worthless drivel. The author has hit correctly on the fundamental difference between the service, but veers into crazy town suggesting that changing one service kills another. I think humans have a replacement bias, assuming that new thing x will replace old thing y, a bias rarely borne by fact. Did planes replace trains? Where's my paperless office? Tools have affordances. If facebook didn't work the way it does, it wouldn't be facebook, and the same for twitter.

More importantly, why, exactly, does facebook want/need to kill twitter?
i prefer xubuntu

installed:
vim-full
dwm
mercurial
lighttpd
mplayer
mpg123
xpdf
ImageMagick
qiv
vifm (there's a vim-like photo manager, but i forget its name)
wink
vnc (server and client)
ssh server
gftp (the ftp cli sucks big time, unlike one in openbsd ... and no axyftp)
opera
swiftweasel
java 6 jre (for ameritrade)
adobe flash (for google analytics)

uninstall:
basically games, default bloated software, useless hypocrate softwares that only play free format, etc
How to make gunpowder, from Wikipedia. Warning, gross.

"Historically, nitre-beds were prepared by mixing manure with either mortar or wood ashes, common earth and organic materials such as straw to give porosity to a compost pile typically 1.5 meters high by 2 meters wide by 5 metres long.[3] The heap was usually under a cover from the rain, kept moist with urine, turned often to accelerate the decomposition and leached with water after approximately one year. The liquid containing various nitrates was then converted with wood ashes to potassium nitrates, crystallized and refined for use in gunpowder.

Urine has also been used in the manufacture of saltpeter for gunpowder. In this process, stale urine placed in a container of straw hay is allowed to sour for many months, after which water is used to wash the resulting chemical salts from the straw. The process is completed by filtering the liquid through wood ashes and air-drying in the sun. Saltpeter crystals can then be collected and added to brimstone and charcoal to create black powder.[4][5][6][7][8]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_nitrate#History_of_pr...
I've started using Tilda recently, its alright not quite as polished as Visor for Mac (Both of these are Quake style dropdown terminals) I'll have to try out Guake.
I don't see that option. I also can't vote people down, so I think I have yet to earn full privileges.

PS: Did everyone down-vote me because of the hypocrisy/irony? I thought it was a bit tongue in cheek.
Maybe that's what they did? This wasn't an official announcement. The POF guy obviously watches this space really closely, it's not too hard to believe he found out about it while they were still in seeding mode.
Is this one of the ways you're looking to "monetise the internet", begging? Shameless. Even assuming this isn't pure scam, three words: Get a job. Flagged.
A lot of schools will work with you to provide financial aid so you can attend. I would get in touch with your school asap, and find out what they can offer you.

There is also a _lot_ of scholarship money out there. They are out there for any demographic and interest you can imagine. I would start applying for anyting you think have a chance of getting.

Finally, you might want to consider going to a cheaper school. Remember, your education is largely what you make of it, not where you go to school.
Python's implementation is focused on code readability. One of Guido's initial goals was that no matter how insane the input, the interpreter must never crash. His emphasis on simple and clear code (and an intuitive bytecode) gets in the way of performance.

The Ruby interpreter is quite terrible, but a lot of people are trying to make it better. Give it a couple of years.

Also, you imply that both implementations are really naive. They're not. With languages such as Python and Ruby there is much less to gain with JIT compilation than with Java. Suppose you have this Python program:

def trivial(a, b):
return a + b

What can the JIT optimize? The function call? Not always, because the function can be redefined during runtime (unlike with Java and .NET). Can the function be inlined? No. Can the function call frame be stack-allocated? Well, maybe, at a significant complexity cost: most scopes in Python are essentially closures so you have to treat carefully there too (upward funarg problems). Obviously the "+" function call can't be optimized much, because you don't know the types of "a" and "b". And even if you did it wouldn't help much.

Not done yet!

Even IF you optimize everything using the NBOCK (Non Braindead Omniscient Compiler Kit). Now you know that you're dealing with integers, and you know where the function is defined, and you know the function's definition is not going to change, and you know all function arguments can be declared locally and you know only integers will be passed to and returned from the function. Can you now transform it into a few MOV instructions? Alas, no.

Maybe the integers will overflow. And if they overflow you either want to throw an exception or allocate additional space and transform the integer to a heap-allocated large integer. (And you have to do all the necessary cache invalidation.)

So even if you are omniscient there is no low-hanging fruit. In the end even the logic of adding two integers is sufficiently complex that it warrants its own C function and inclining becomes only marginally useful.

When you take mundane issues such as maintainability, flexibility, and portability into account there are very few reasons left for building a JIT compiler for Python. Note that all these optimizations are viable (to an extent) with languages such as Haskell, C# and Java.
There are much more eloquent ways to express your distaste.
Poetic Life of a Student
Dueling keynotes: Schiller at Macworld vs. Ballmer at CES
Elaborate more on your personal circumstances, it will elicit more sympathy. What college, what major, ect ect ect.
Agreed. There are loads and loads of scholarships that wind up going to a the best of a very iffy pool of applicants because no one knew about them. I spent every Saturday applying for stuff during my senior year of high school and wound up with about $20,000 for my efforts from winning 5-6 scholarships.

If college is so crucial to you, go hit the books and web and find out what you can apply to in the next six months.
Uxpython: cross-platform GUI - modern, stylish and enjoyable cross-platform UI toolkit
that's simple, because until now I haven't even heard of Linode; thanks for the tip
Is this serious? Come on, don't freak out, there are plenty of ways to pay for college.

How about applying for a couple of local scholarships? My Dad's employer had a couple of scholarships that I applied for and received, and I also got a small scholarship by applying to one listed on the university's website. There are work study programs or you can get a Federal loan.

I worked a couple of student programmer and computer lab proctor jobs on campus to pay my rent. They were low stress, I could study on the job, and I even learned some programming. There are many options. Hell, I hear there are actually some people that "work" and "save up" to go to college. I've even heard there are some people that are successful without gasp going to college at all. Maybe you could build something that people here want and they'd be willing to buy something from you, but straight up begging seems silly and pointless.

Anyway, I'm just saying, you sound like you are freaking out (or making this whole thing up). Most of my friends didn't have help from their parents, but they were still able to get a high quality education at Univ. of Texas through some hard work, not begging random people on the Internet.
Striking a Balance Between Convention and Performance
Go to the financial aid office of your college, say that you really, really want to go to their school, but you just can't afford it. Be ready to provide supporting documentation about how you can't afford it. And if you have competing offers from other schools that are way out of whack, mention those too.

Most financial aid offices will negotiate, oftentimes pretty drastically. IIRC, Middlebury almost doubled their grant package when we went back to them, by $8-10K/year more. I ended up going to Amherst because it was still cheaper, but they made up most of the difference. (And Amherst paid for about 2/3 of my tuition outright.)

Colleges really, really don't want to see you get in and then fail to go there because of money, particularly if you seem very excited about them. Particularly the better schools - many top colleges have "If you can get in, we will find a way for you to pay for it" policies. They're hurting too, with the financial crisis, but if they admitted you, they want you to go there.
I'm reminded of the "Ask for money, and you might get advice, if you're lucky. Ask for advice, and you may very well end up with money" maxim.
Compiz-fusion also has a nice widgets layer (similar to dashboard) that makes making python widgets a breeze.

Also the desktop cube helps when you're using 4 virtual desktops and can't remember which desktop had what running
Legal downloads growing faster than piracy
What do you think of this story? I get a frantic call from my friend at the airport. He's been captured by the TSA for bringing a nose hair trimmer onto the plane. He was taking his brothers two kids (whom I know nothing of) back home, but now needs me to pick them up at the airport. The line goes dead. I show up at the airport and there are 4 pairs of children waiting behind the glass to be claimed, conveniently arranged in pairs of GG, GB, BG, and BB. Each pair is equally likely to be the one I am supposed to pick up.

If my friend had told me "their names are Sarah and--" before the line went dead, I would mentally eliminate BB. Sarah could be any of the four girls. The three remaining options are not equally likely to contain Sarah, because the first one has two girls, and either one could be Sarah. So, the probability of Sarah being the girl in BG is 1/4 and of being the girl in GB is 1/4. The probability of the other child being a girl is also 1/2. It's not so much that BG or GB is eliminated in this case, but that the probability of her being in the GG group is better. But wait a second, I am not trying to find Sarah, I am trying to find the pair of kids that is his pair of kids. Is the probability that a group contains Sarah different from the probability that a group of kids is his? Maybe that's my bad assumption...maybe "at least one is a girl" is some precise formulation I don't understand that means the GG group isn't twice as likely to contain that girl. I'll get back to that. (Possibly her name is "at least once"?).

But what if he instead told me something over the phone that would eliminate the possibility of it being two boys only? What if when he had looked out over the groups of children waiting to be picked up before they blindfolded him and panicked and said "it's not the two boys--"? Is knowing that one of the children is a girl different from knowing they both aren't boys? I think it is, because the latter is a statement about the set of events, and the former is a statement about a single event. When we talk about the pairs of children, the set of events, we are not conveying direct information about the individual events. In this second case he is not conveying information about the individual events and the three remaining choices remain equally likely, 1/3 each.

Looking back to "at least one is a boy"- if we interpret that as a statement about the sets of probabilities, I would more precisely restate Eliezer's question as "Does the set of two children contain at least one boy?". This is why the important part of the story is the word "mathematician". The mathematician is talking about eliminating sets of events when he says "Yes". Ordinary people would just talk about the gender of a child.
Take a loan. If you can't, go work and save money until you can at least take night classes. This is how everyone does it. "I'll tighten my belt before I beg for help" is one rap lyric (Hov') I can really identify with. Life is much better when you're paying your own way.
7-Zip

Audacity

Dropbox

Filezilla

Firefox

Foxit PDF Reader

Google Chrome

Hamachi

Notepad++

Putty

Taskbar Shuffle

UltraMon

uTorrent
Manolis comments on Paul's post summed it up pretty well for me.

What feels counter intuitive is that announcing the gender of one child seems to increase the chances of the other child being of a different gender, but it's actually the opposite.

"Family with 2 children" ->
chance of having at least one boy: 75%
"but I have at least one girl" ->
chance of having at least one boy: 66%
"but the first one is a girl" ->
chance of having at least one boy: 50%
"but they're both girls" ->
chance of having at least one boy: 0%
Though you may well be in earnest, lots of users have flagged this, and I'm going to kill it. If you were an established user, I probably wouldn't, but your account is only a week old; you could be anyone.
I paid for college from a few different sources. I tutored, privately and in the learning center. I taught some classes. I had research assistanceships, and a few scholarships because of my grades. I worked a couple small programming jobs. I still needed some help from my parents, but how much was cut down to a fraction of what it would have been.

That's not my point, though. My point is that I learned far more from those methods of raising money than I would have if I simply had the money. There are ways to turn this obstacle into an advantage. Good luck.
I prefer console apps:

1.) Music: moc (Music on Console)

2.) Irc: irssi

3.) Editing: vim

4.) Mail/News: mutt
You know what's really scary? I saw this out of context, on news.yc/newcomments, and I didn't realize till I came to "pairs of GG, GB, BG, and BB" that it was a fictional setup.
Poll: Who among you on YC care to see someone breastfeeding?

The common thread argument is that it's a natural occurrence and shouldn't be obscene; this doesn't change anything that it is something that some people don't care to see as something publicized. Lately it seems that people are so quick to jump to the argument of "protecting MY rights" in this case to display something 'natural' that they completely forget to show consideration for the people who just don't want those sort of things on their screens everytime they want to leave a profile comment.

It's fine if you want to breastfeed your kid, it's not fine if you're pushing it in the faces of people who just do not want to see it. Time has proven the statement "your rights end where mine begin"
No, they don't.

Again, ordering is irrelevant in this problem. We want to know only the probability that there will be a boy/girl pair, not the probability that the boy/girl pair was born in a particular order.

But the same result can be obtained when taking ordering into account -- the key observation is that if you subdivide options 2 and 3 to account for sibling ordering, then you also must subdivide options 1 and 4 to account for sibling order, resulting in 6 total possibilities, of which 2 are M/F sibling pairs, 2 are M/M pairs, and 2 are F/F pairs:

1) M/m

2) m/M

3) M/F

4) F/M

5) F/f

6) f/F

Given the knowledge that one sibling is female, you then exclude 2 of the 6 possibilities (the m/M and M/m pairs), to obtain 2/4 = 50% probability that the pair of siblings is of mixed sex.

The mistake you're making is that you're including ordering on the mixed-sex pairs, but not including ordering on the same-sex pairs.
I'm not saying you don't have a point, but the last time that I bought a pair of glasses, the whole affair—getting the prescription, and the frames, and the lenses—cost well over one day's salary for me. I'm sure that even for someone making just 75¢ a day, $1 for a pair of glasses would be considered a bargain if it means the difference in being able to see.
See my post above. You can take ordering into account if you'd like, but the result is the same, given the parameters of the problem.
Most modern crops have been bred or genetically engineered so that they physically cannot survive on their own. They need petrochemical fertilizers to grow, pesticides to fend off insects & fungi & disease, mechanized tilling to penetrate the ground, and artificial supports so they can stand up and avoid keeling over.

In my sustainable agriculture course, I read that modern grain varieties put 60% of their photosynthesized energy into growing the fruit (the edible portion of the grain). Wild varieties put more like 3% into the fruit. There's your 20x difference in yield. But it comes at the expense of every other survival mechanism of the plant: modern grain varieties yield so much grain because they don't have working systems for anything, be it support, storm resistance, disease resistance, or general hardiness. They give us food because we supply them with a good amount of fossil-fuel derived work.
They could have just emailed everyone their sites in zip files.
Poll: Who among you on YC care to see a woman not wearing her burqa?

The common thread argument is that it's a natural occurrence and shouldn't be obscene; this doesn't change anything that it is something that some people don't care to see as something publicised. Lately it seems that people are so quick to jump to the argument of "protecting MY rights" in this case to display something 'natural' that they completely forget to show consideration for the people who just don't want those sort of things on their screens every time they want to leave a profile comment.

It's fine if you want to dress immodestly at home, it's not fine if you're pushing it in the faces of people who just do not want to see it. Time has proven the statement "your rights end where mine begin"