skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started working through this book with my girlfriend who wants to learn Python... it turns out most people don't know/understand what a terminal or shell is. This should have been obvious to me, but it wasn't :)

Any suggestions on how to explain what the terminal is and why it is necessary? I feel like there has to be a "pre-learn python" book that explains the basics of how computers work. This probably already exists though... anybody know?
The Death of Social Proof
Samsung Joins Linux Foundation with $500K investment
One shall find happiness at all costs, anywhere it can be found.

But, I wish for brilliant, hardworking people a better endeavor than a CRUD Web site.
So she saw the alert described in the article? You didn't really mention that.
Belshe left Google to co-found http://www.twist.com/
I think that's the theory behind Chrome OS.
Facebook, with few exceptions, allows you to pick your team. If you really want to work on something, you can. As for your last question, I joined a year ago, and from my experience, the meritocracy is extremely alive and well. You can go far, and get there very quickly, if the fit is right, and you are kicking ass.

Reading between the lines of your posts, I think you might have a pretty inaccurate view of facebook, as it currently is. Facebook has fewer engineers than you think, and it's -really- easy to have massive impact on features, or even the org as a whole, from day 1. Most of the teams responsible for major features/products are quite small. Some are frighteningly small. In many places, there are huge, ambitious, crazy ideas currently on the shelf waiting for 2-3 new people to join the team to take on.
One of the brilliant things about The Secret World of Arrietty is how water works in that movie. At Borrower scales, water is more viscous than we perceive it, and their soup and tea become thick gels. At one point, Arrietty brushes droplets of herself and they remain coherent because of the high surface tension. And this is all shown brilliantly through animation.
There are certainly examples of persecuted dissidents in both countries. What I'm missing in China is any examples of dissidents who've achieved any success, comparable to American examples of dissidents in prominent, even state-sponsored roles. And, in particular, any ability of ordinary people to read and discuss what dissidents write. You and I can discuss Bradley Manning here. And I'll agree he is not being treated in a justifiable manner. Can Chinese citizens openly discuss dissidents, and criticize their governments' treatment of them?

For example, after Angela Davis (Black Panther activist) was acquitted, she became a tenured professor at the University of California, where she has, for several decades, continued to unapologetically oppose the United States government. And she's hardly the only one; there are many dissidents who are professors at American universities, some of which are even state-run universities. Noam Chomsky, of course, has not been removed from his professorship at MIT, despite his political views.

Are there any prominent Chinese dissidents who are now tenured professors at Chinese universities, without recanting? If we compare to Davis's role as a minority-group activist--- can you imagine a Tibetan or Xinjiang activist, who opposes the Chinese government's rule over those regions, becoming a tenured professor in China? Being able to teach courses openly about those disputes? Being able to publish critical books through the university press, which any ordinary person can order online with a few clicks? All of that happens in the United States, but doesn't happen in China.

I'm not hugely into political theory, but I read some of it, mostly tending towards the leftist side. And I am able to buy any of this in the United States, completely openly, even stuff much more radical than what I typically buy. Not even in backrooms or dark alleys, but from Amazon, delivered to my home address with my real name on the label! I can buy manifestos openly urging the overthrow of the United States government (under Brandenburg v. Ohio, these can't be prosecuted as treason). Can Chinese citizens openly buy manifestos urging the overthrow of the Chinese government?
Precisely. Not necessary for every business, but entirely necessary any business that can't risk that kind of downtime. We've got (bare minimum) 8Kva UPS's on every netshelter on campus. The production side uses enormous generators and UPS's that I'd like to know more about.

All I mean to say is IT is far from dead, especially in these types of situations.
Pollan's rule is (at least as Bittman quotes it) five recognizable or pronounceable ingredients.
A lot of people "feel" fine but blood work shows they're insulin resistant, have various deficiencies, or are loaded with cortisol. Going by "feeling" really doesn't work. Also, the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming.
> Then... all three versions of ruby that I tried (1.8, 1.9.1, 1.9.3) had changes that broke my tiny toy code. So astonishing, I'm not even mad.

I think you confuse your releases. Neither 1.8.7 nor 1.9.3 did break anything major. The only two releases with major breakage that should have affected you in recent years are 1.9.1 and 1.9.2.

The changes in ruby that break compatibility are listed in the release notes of every release.

> Look at Python, with 5-year support for Python 2 before breaking compatibility with Python 3. And Java, well, I've never heard of code being broken (assert could have, but never heard it happen).

Not sure what you mean about Python. Python has roughly the same policy as Ruby about API breaking changes.

The changes between Python 2.X and 3.X are also way larger than between Ruby 1.8.X and 1.9.X. Porting our code from 1.8 to 1.9 was not much work.
DMAE. Does what it says on the can, it's absolutely amazing. Don't use it more than a month a year, though, our bodies don't default to this behavior for reasons...
Programmatic Access to AWS Billing Data
If you use a persistent PHP stack like mongrel2 + photon an opcode cache is just a waste of a php module.

http://www.photon-project.com/
Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.
Pentadactyl, Firebug are mostly the reasons I use Firefox. Also I like my privacy.
Take my money, HBO
IIRC keeping the accelerometer hot is a big battery suck. For this reason Tasker wouldn't let you use accelerometer input as a first-order input. You had to prefix it with some other, less expensive condition, like time of day ranges, wi-fi SSID visibility, etc.
Just explain it is a good way to use the computer with just text and a keyboard and it's useful because you don't have to write all the code that deals with graphics (also text is easier to test).

Having said that , I think there is some merit in showing somebody how to make their programs output to either a local GUI or to the web relatively quickly since they are more likely to perceive that as a "proper" application.
A standardized test is bureaucratic mechanism of control. It is a way to grade and rank a whole populace with a simple abstraction. They have nothing to do with learning.
I can't cite an authoritative source but I think the idea is the amount of unforested, undeveloped grassland on the planet is nowhere near enough to support the current meat intake of the world population. There are actually similar issues with organic vegetables too.

Of course if people wanted to eat much less meat, and if there were a lot fewer people, things might work better sure.
It depends. Some big but untechnical companies will think you're magic and pay you big bucks for very easy work. If you just want to collect a paycheck and go home you could do worse.
arn, thanks for leading this one! Let me chime in that salt no doubt drives caloric intake. One need look no further than chefs and fast food to figure that out. So, in my mind, salt is a double whammy: BP and a secondary cause of weight gain, cholesterol, and everything else that comes with weight gain.
"are there not Israelis who are also Arab?" Yes. And in fact, many serve in the Knesset, and the army.

"Why are you mixing citizenship with ethnicity?" It's the ethnicity that they use to profile.

"using the same scale, what is the percentage of violence committed against Arabs by Israelis?" I don't know. More Arabs are killed by other Arabs than by Israelis. If you're talking about just Palestinians, yes, it would be by Israelis.

"Don't some of those fall into the category of "terror attack"?" No. No. No. That's the biggest problem with education about the conflict. How do you define a "terror attack"? I define it as violent acts towards civilians with the intent of causing mass psychological damage. Israel does not commit such acts. They attack military targets in the Gaza Strip, and sometimes kill civilians, as any army in the world has had the difficult issue of doing. A British soldier stood up in the UN and proclaimed that during the last Israeli/Gaza offensive (operation cast lead), Israel did more to protect Gazan civilians than any nation has ever done previously (http://www.unwatch.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=bdKKI...). He was referring to the Goldstone report, which was later rescinded and apologized for.

"Isn't there a power imbalance which prevents Arabs from profiling and being able to restrict what Israelis can do?" No, not at all. Try getting into Egypt with an Israeli passport. Multiple acquaintances that have were harassed by Egyptian police. In actuality, it is much more difficult for Israelis in Arab countries than it is for Arabs in Israel.

"If Arabs were able to profile and exclude certain classes of people, wouldn't that help stop further "countless terror attacks" against them?" What terrorist attacks?

"If I understand your view rightly, I think you are in favor of having the Israelis out of the West Bank, as that would reduce the overall amount of attacks. Is that correct?" I am 100% for a two-state solution with two people living side by side peacefully. Settlements in the West Bank are an issue that needs to be figured out. You have to realize that these "settlements" are sometimes small, and sometimes (like Ariel) are large cities with thousands of residents. It's not simple to just get them to up and move. Remember, Israel did that (The unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip) and all they have gotten in return is more than 9000 rockets and mortars fired on Israeli citizens.

(edit) Ah yes, downvoted for the inconvenient truth.
I'm as much a fan of clear, meaningful titles as the next person, but when life hands you such an unforced, ambiguous, deliciously absurd title, I think it's best to savor it.
I just purchased a new Comcast internet connection two weeks ago, leased their default router, have a vanilla MacBook Air.

I'm happy to report that I was required to do precisely and absolutely nothing - beyond spending a few minutes unpacking the (largish) cardboard box they shipped me, plugging in a coax cable to the router, ethernet cable to my USB dongle, and then activating my account.

15 Minutes later I was online. I've got 2001:558:6045:ba:24b2:f727:e418:328f/128, and I haven't found an IPv6 network/host that I can't route to natively, though I'm sure they are out there.

Zero effort and, if I wasn't paying close attention, it wouldn't be clear to me which services are communicating to me over IPv6 verus IPv4.

It Just Works.

Looking forward to World IPv6 Launch day on 6/6.
I think the most important lesson to take away from this is how very awesome you can be if you have a great idea and you reach out to others for help.
I am an avid gardener. I have a pretty good idea of how long the plumbs I pick off the tree or the peaches or the grapes, or the veggies from the garden will last without decaying on the counter without refridgeration.

Note wilting is no the same as decaying. Most fresh veggies will wilt. It takes a lot longer to decay though.
Walker Twitter Highlights: May 21st – June 3rd
I'm actually not that familiar with C. What would be a better resource for someone who knows Python the best?
Mexico, Missouri is listed as having a newspaper called the "Memphis Democrat," which links to http://www.monett-times.com/. Moberly, Missouri (interestingly, a nearby town) is listed as having Mexico's newspaper, the Mexico Ledger, but that links to http://www.monroecity.net/ (interestingly, another nearby town) which is a dead link.
Testing -webkit-filter: playground for css filters
I meant fork(2). Maybe edit the source to optionally use execve?
Why is Ctrl-P so good in Sublime? (Asking this honestly, as someone who's not used Sublime...)
PHP still runs most of the highly trafficked Web sites on the Internet.

Rails is a permanent train wreck.
The other hundred of Ruby-based Web frameworks are adequate for small, CRUD-style applications.
(BTW, I like Ruby. It's a neat little language.)

In the end, it's either PHP or J2EE in 90% of the cases for high-uptime, high-traffic Web destinations.
"The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet." -James Oppenheim

(I stole this quote from the chapter titles of The Philosopher Kings, a documentary which I saw on a plane last week:

http://www.philosopherkingsmovie.com/about/about-the-film/

I liked it.)
It could be as simple as the performance loss incurred by an ORM is greater than the benefit of using it. You have PDO with PHP, which can be used quite adequately as an ORM itself (you can fetch a tailored SQL query into a class as opposed to working with basic arrays).

I'd argue that, in some cases, an ORM is only used as a reaction to the separation of concerns. Writing SQL mixes up your languages, so why not try to build that SQL in the language you're working with? Or maybe SQL is considered too difficult.

I quite like having full control over a 'raw' query without requiring an ORM's opinion on how it should be built.
My point is that knowing a decently powerful editor is a matter of basic computer literacy - it makes a host of things, especially but not only programming, faster and easier. Knowing vim or emacs or pick your editor that actually gives you some reasonable power is not something a newbie should be worrying about when they are learning programming, it's something they should be taught before they get programming. It's a matter of a few hours to train yourself on some tools that will make your life much easier.
This is the best, most reasonable thinking I've read on this study (From Jay Parkinson, the M.D. behind the startup sherpaa.com) http://blog.jayparkinsonmd.com/post/24488678085/when-i-read-...
Microsoft Roslyn Community Preview - code generation, analysis, and refactoring
I never said ignoring it was correct. I said that it is not always possible to take care of the problem immediately; cash and time are finite resources for me, plus I cannot control the weather. I'm saying after you fix the problem (or in the interim) break out the Terro Gel and dose the little sappers with boric acid.

If you think a few weeks of water damage warrants replacing the beams I am afraid you were ripped off by a contractor. Speaking from personal experience there was a leak in the bathroom when I bought my house that had been there for not a few weeks but many weeks. I ripped down the moldy sheetrock, fixed the pipe and let the joists air out. Sure there is water staining on the joists, but they are 8x2 oak joists (1929 lumber when dimensions were real) and the joists were dry by the time I had taken down all the old plaster and lathe in the dining room. When I buttoned up the ceiling they were dry and stiff enough that they offered significant resistance when I screwed in 2 inch drywall screws.
I don't think you should be taking votes on authentication schemes.

You should build the best possible product for the platform you are running on.

On Android there is an obvious default choice, and it isn't Facebook, nor is it a dedicated account.
Airtime Is Recording Your Conversations
"Have strong opinions - weakly held" is probably what he meant: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/strong-opinions-wea...

One should be able to hold multiple conflicting ideas in one's head (double think), each with varying amounts of evidence depending on the current situation. Furthermore, one should be able to switch between said ideas quickly and easily depending on what is needed to successfully complete the task at hand.

For example:

If you want high perf/dollar when doing a data analysis across billions of rows you know that you should run on a commodity cluster and with bare metal high performant C++.

You also know that if you want to get something done really quickly (elegant - not performant/efficient), you stick to what you know (Python/Ruby/Perl etc.) and get it done today. You know that if need be, you can just scale it out later with a more performant architecture.

Both opinions are strong. Both are weakly held. The best one wins depending on the situation.
So what? That will be a problem for Google to solve.
Why would anyone partition tables -- ever?
It's basically a "find any file really quickly" command, with fuzzy matching. Hit ctrl+P, type the filename (or part of the name) and it'll flash up the files that it's matching in real time, as well as display the most likely in the background.

The good part is that it'll ignore capitalisation, underscores, etc. and you can start typing something in the middle - "foo" will pick up Foo, foo, test_foo, widgetFoo, foobar and FooBar.
Space Shuttle Enterprise Damaged at Sea as Weather Delays NYC Intrepid Trip
I don't believe that. Maybe I'm "still too young", but I believe that you can design a system that's friendly to both the "95%" and power users. It may be hard, but not impossible.
Or youtube comments.

Places like HN, Metafilter & The Economist, where the comments are not utter trash are rare on the net.

You wonder if this person goes to a movie and want everyone to talk all the way through.
I think Udacity does a good job on this learning by making.
But your atmospheric concentration can vary. We could get back to the same atmospheric concentration of CO2 as it was when the oldest oil was laid down, but that doesn't mean we would like it. The earth itself would probably be fine though, and on a long enough timeline it might give a chance to some giant intelligent spiders, or something.
But if you don't know how to weld, solder, hammer, or hot-glue something together yourself, how do you expect to teach a machine to?

When my dad was an engineer, engineers knew how to work the machines. Because a technical drawing isn't just an illustration, it's a set of instructions to someone on how to make that part. For example, the engineer was likely to know, through experience, what tolerances the machines in his shop are capable of, and adjust the tolerances specified on the drawing accordingly (or if the tolerances are bigger than what is required, say "we can't make that part with this equipment").

A few years ago, my dad mentored some college kids who were incredibly smart and eager to learn. But he complained that they had almost never touched a machine in their lives. They didn't know how to design the parts properly. He had to teach them.
LinkedIn ios mobile app transmits user calendar data to LinkedIn’s servers
He means a web server with 32 gigabytes of memory. Citation: those are the stats of the server he links in his comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4071035.
"We pirate Game of Thrones, we use our friend's HBOGO login to watch True Blood…"

Yeah I am not associating myself with that. Perhaps something like "We don't currently pay to see your content".

Honestly as an Australian I don't see this happening here, the cable here is an effective monopoly and unless they get a cut of the profits they're not going let HBO do this. It might be completely against their business model as well due to the fact GoT has received more publicity here than any other cable show in some time. This has likely been driving sales for them and so would be bad for their business.
Good point about a projector. This could be used for seeing what furniture will look
Like in a room.
Next step: Take my European money, HBO.
Great and sound idea! But the pain is already aching if this kind of thing get through: posts will be made, bootstraps distrubuted and sources will be opened and the start of the era of "Please, Take my money whatever" will have began.
Lets hope for the best, take all our money HBO.
It's an attention grabber, sheesh.
Wolfenstein fans are especially excited about this post.

1 - http://wolfenstein.wikia.com/wiki/Tesla_gun_%28RtCW%29

2 - http://wolfenstein.wikia.com/wiki/Tesla_gun_%28WOLF_2009%29
It seems that some people are shocked that potentially copyrighted material is available..

..and others are shocked that the same content is not conveniently copyable.

Go figure.
I consider ubiquity and instant-ness (i.e., accessibility) to be quite important aspects in which the Web platform is superior to native platforms.

I don't know what you mean by "truly excellent software", but I'd rather make imperfect, useful software than perfect software no one uses, wouldn't you? And it is certainly possible, and nowadays routine, to create simple, elegant, well-architected, maintainable, efficient, performant, small-footprint Web applications.

Yes, the Web platform has all kinds of warts and scars. In and of itself, all else being equal, they are of course strictly a bad thing. But the principle of openness and cross- and backwards compatibility--the principle that technical concerns must be balanced against community concerns--that is their root cause, I believe to be superior to any of the alternatives we've seen, which have given rise to proprietary standards, walled gardens, dependency and upgrade hell.

I agree that "throwing" more code at problems rarely results in elegant and efficient solutions, but disregarding existing community concerns, like legacy software or standards, rarely results in successful solutions.
Setting a really large $HISTSIZE can accomplish some of this.

Though I'll admit to occasional traumatic moments when my workstation crashes and bash history is polluted with multiple shells filling it and the stuff I've been ctrl-R invoking (recursive reverse search) for months evaporates.
The road to intentional, formal, system administration education
I'm not sure that using an editor like vim is really "basic computer literacy".
It may be simple enough to learn vi but you have to get your muscle memory used to doing a bunch of things that are different to the average MS software or whatever they were used to using.

I actually know a number of competent programmers who've never touched vi at all.
The reason you want to learn a decent text editor is the same reason you want to learn to touch type decently fast--you don't want to have to think about moving around, or using your mouse, or swapping some words when you're trying to just write code.

Also, there is a difference between "easiest to learn" (e.g. uses keyboard + mouse) and "easiest to use" (e.g. keyboard navigation). In the hands of an expert, Emacs and Vim are more efficient than other editors--in a very real sense, they are easier to use, but only after you learn them.

Learning how to use an editor well enough to be efficient is an O(1) task. The benefit to using a powerful editor efficiently is O(n) to however much programming you do. Unless you don't plan on doing much programming, learning how to use a good editor is worth it.

There are some other reasons as well (e.g. Emacs is extremely consistent, customizable and supports every single thing you can imagine doing in a text editor, and then some). However, I think this is all secondary to just being more efficient and not having to think or switch contexts (e.g. never going from typing to using the mouse to using the arrow keys and back to typing).
Live Streaming of Planet Venus via NASA, Next Show in 2117
As an American I'd rather sign up for "Take My Money BBC."