skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Learning Haskell is a great back-door way to learn about math, specifically abstract algebra and category theory. You'll learn about why it matters and make tons of connections between subjects you never thought were related. Plus, coming from a programming environment gives you the context you need to understand why people care.
Are Android tablets ready to take on the iPad?
First, I think you're overestimating how easily people will adapt to having these robots around. I hope there's no stairs or elevators in between the official meeting and the food table.

Second, does this small factory have high speed wifi? In my experience, that's very rare.

You know what does work in these situations? Flying out to the meeting.

As a technologist and possible early adopter, it is really easy to see how YOU'D use something. It is far harder to put yourself in the shoes of another and judge it from their perspective.

That said, once telepresence robots are in place, they seem to be very sticky - most people don't want to give them up. [1]

A key quote from [1]: "the greatest barrier keeping telerobotics from conquering the office probably isn’t hardware or software, it’s red tape"

[1]: http://singularityhub.com/2010/08/23/exclusive-head-of-robod...
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Lets make the app fashionable use it for ur social media life. As they develop more features that are coming we can sed pics of anything in a good fashionable format.
I do like the fonts. Have a company contest from an event with a central email for someone to organize favorites. Teach the kids how to use the apps while you travel. Our daughter travels more than we do and has been in europe twice this summer. She texts us before calling to show us the fun things she is doing. Im looking forward to using this app.
Part of me wants to say something snarky about Perl to contradict or joke about things Larry said in this article, but Guido Van Rossum's keynote at PyCon 2012 really resonated with me. He basically said that Perl/Python/Ruby are all very similar and we should all just get along.
Yes. That's the difference between the people who try to bully a clerk and claim they are a big spender and someone who is actually a big spender. There are lots of people who think they spend a lot of money and that it affords them special privileges. But the people who think that have no idea that the scruffy guy in jeans and sneakers standing next to them is about to drop cash like that.

I think about this when I go to a trendy place like Buckhead in Atlanta. There are some big money players walking around - but they generally aren't the young people who look like a million bucks and look like they are loaded. Those people are broke.

But, I digress.
The Redirect [Commentary on Nathan Myhrvold interview]
We hate TelCos who lower the prices and even apply them retro-actively? That's news to me.

But more to the point: the logistics of making refunds on purchases like software are complicated. Most payment processors don't even have the notion of partial refunds.

Making a full refund is costly to you (payment processor took their cut of the transaction; they aren't too eager to give it back to you so either they charge you (and now you have a loss) or they swallow the charge but will kick you out of the system if they have to do it too frequently).

There might be more bad will generated by contacting the customers and offering them refund because that makes them aware of some event that they might not like.

Most people don't monitor the price of software they bought over time so they are not aware of changes so they are not upset about changes. I've bought a bunch of software over time and I can't tell how much any of it cost - I just don't keep track.
I have been learning ROR for the last 2 years. The two things I would go back and do more of is write tests and write more straight ruby.

Writing tests for your models should have you covered. You can skip testing the controllers & views.

The longer you go without writing tests the harder it is to start.
You don't need to use unescape in the fallback

if(!jQuery)document.write('<script src="jquery.js"></scrip'+'t>');
This isn't much different from what Facebook does showing friends all your likes and comments, except Facebook doesn't let you turn it off.
Neat. You should make it an app using the new 2013 excel applications http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp142161...
I commend the author for building something. I don't see this project solving a problem I have, but it looks to be an honest, if somewhat rough, effort.

A few suggestions:

- review PEP8 [1].

- no need to assign None to a variable before assigning another value

- Try to keep things DRY [2].

- use more descriptive variable names

- as others have stated, spell check your site copy

[1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

[2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DontRepeatYourself

* edited for formatting
No. You have to send a mail to privacy@quora.com and they might take mercy on your asocial soul and delete your account for good (no guarantees though).
interestingly, that's exactly what Radix sort was invented for - non-comparison sort in O(n) time
App.net is a subscription. What you describe makes a lot more sense in that context; A subscription automatically implies updates and support. Many consumers associate all purchases with support, but it really shouldn't be implied that spending money on something now implies commitments by its producer in the future. This isn't true because I'm pushing some notion of what rights user have or do don't have--its just not prudent to make assumptions about these kinds of things.
How YouTube escaped Google's anti-piracy search crackdown
I expect it happens more often than you think.

Yes, but usually not with any sort of press release from either company, or any other positioning that makes it sound like the "acquisition" was any indicator of success or strength.

Most startups are high-risk, and so it's blindingly obvious that there are going to be lots of ideas which are able to be implemented, but not scaled into a business. And we've all heard about VC's investing in the "team" more than the product, and how hard it is to find and hire really good engineers. So, a startup as sort of a long-cycle public job interview isn't the worst thing in the world.

Still, it would be nice (given the mindset of most engineers) to see the released framed in a more accurate way "Company X team being absorbed into Company Y", or "Company Y extends employment to entire team of Company X".

Perhaps it's just me, but I think most people see these "acquisition" press releases, and resulting "congratulations" rounds as somewhat of a poor veneer over the reality of what really transpired.
Xeon and Opteron CPUs generally don't have integrated GPUs. In fact, the primary difference between Intel's desktop and server LGA1155 CPUs is that most of the server equivalents have the GPU disabled (probably to save power).
He can't know that. To be clear, overpopulation is a problem - but the solution is not to stop trying to save those who are dying!
Also known as "low ping bastard" back then :)
Adobe Brackets Open Source Code Editor Architecture
The element that techdirt overlooks, and that I think they did their community (and themselves) a disservice by not mentioning, is the privacy element.

Because selling your personal details is a (relatively) invisible intrusion (unless the provider really screws up, ala Beacon) - there is a significant cost to the user (that cares about privacy) that is not visible to them. App.net is aligned only with the users from that position. There is _no_ incentive for them to resell their user's private information.

With regards to advertising - clearly that has to do with your pain points regarding advertising. We've heard lots of feedback from people who say they don't mind the advertising on Facebook, or twitter. These people also might even watch commercial television.

For those of us who stopped watching commercial television a decade ago (before "cutting the cable" was in vogue), who run ad-block religously, and are offended by "kmart specials" appearing in our twitter stream - we clearly have already reached our pain point, and are looking for something new.

For those people - App.net will be a consistent, long term, ad free, communications infrastructure.

There may only be 10,000 or so people there, and the other 5million (50 million? 500 million?) people may be on twitter. But, unlike Facebook, where it's important that all of your high-school friends, ex-girlfriends, aunts, nieces, classmates, and party-goer-chums are on the same site - I'm quite happy to leave them all behind and follow a small core of interesting technical people without distraction.
It would be great for things like pintrest if you said what the names of the apps / designers were in the alt information per image
PyPy Status Blog: C++ objects in cppyy, part 1: Data Members
Let's say you make twice as much as me. Would it be fair to charge you twice as much for a restaurant meal or a gallon of gas or a haircut, just because you make twice as much? Of course not - for any other good or service, your income is irrelevant. So why are payments based on income 'fair' when it comes to government services?

I'm not saying a progressive income tax isn't necessary, but calling it fair is laughable. For once it'd be nice to hear a politician say "we realize that whether your tax rate goes up a few percent or down a few percent, you're still going to be paying a whole lot of money for the same government services a good portion of our nation gets without paying a dime - and we appreciate that."
I would say, stop concentrating on calculation, and teach math. However, calculation is often a useful way to ensure you understand something. So, calculation will likely still be a part of learning math, but it shouldn't be the focus.
Exactly this, the fact that its available in open standards is a game changer for me.

The fact that it has been possible with various other technologies for years is not news (for me)
Emacs in Web With Dropbox
Are you implying that a person behaves differently whether they paid or not? I would instead guess that paid apps attract a generally nicer subset of people.
Space for 160 employees doesn't mean they'll have 160.. They just have room to grow a bit. 40 is a lot of employees, but with their funding they can afford it, and it may just be essential, we can't really know from the outside looking in.
Bloomberg: Research In Motion to license BlackBerry 10
+1. In fact our brains are wired/evolved to do so. Debating should vs. should not is ultimately philosophical at best. We should look at things like this from a framework of reality. Reality dictates people (including smart folks like us) will indeed jump to those conclusions and form opinions about others.
Again, when you post an old article, put the date in parens. In this case, (1997).
Think APP.net is a Twitter Clone ?
Then, You're Missing the Point.
... by Mathew Ingram,,GigaOm

http://wp.me/p10LZV-2jIQ
ASUS have been making better tablets than the iPad since day 1; the only surprise is it's taken this long for one of them to be a big hit. I have a lot less faith in the kindle fire team after their first effort.
Think of it like FM radio. It's free for us to listen but we have to sit through advertisements. XM and sirius said hey, let's have people pay to listen, so don't have to make them sit through ads. Basically just a different biz model. That model can work though because you don't necessarily need critical mass to have people consume your content. (Yes to a certain extent you do) But the critical mass needed for the next twitter like platform would require a huge critical mass for people to continue to pay for the service. Just my stupid opinion
I guess some people just love to hate Flash.

Yes. Flash has performance and implementation issues. And developers can't do anything to improve the situation.
Vs a democratic senate and democratic president is VERY different than VS a democratic senate and a republican president or all three republican.

His particular seat is not as valuable as being the brain trust and hit man in the Romney Ryan administration.
I'm not sure I agree. I follow the agriculture channels and you see the same kind of thing when a big agriculture company acquires someone whose products you will never see again.

You just only read about tech-specific acquires here because that is the focus of HN.
Seems obvious this has been a conscious choice in order to prevent inclusion into GPL licenced open source software, otherwise why not use a permissive licence like BSD/MIT which would satisfy ALL uses, both in open source and proprietary?

The whole thing which defines MS-PL is that you can take MS-PL licenced code and use it in a proprietary project without supplying source code (like with MIT/BSD), however if you DO supply the source code it must remain under MS-PL (thus viral, unlike MIT/BSD), in other words it was designed to be useful for proprietary projects (which is ground BSD/MIT already cover by being permissive) while preventing it to be used in conjunction with code licenced under GPL by having incompatible terms.
>Actually Quora is better than that (for me) in that it's a double hit on the hype on both Q&A and social.

well said. fuck Quora, as the OP suggested.

The best place to ask questions from the article like "What is the best way to hide an affair"--as if Quora could ever manage an honest discussion like that--is reddit.

Of course, you couldn't ask the question just like that. It'd have to be more genuine, a post on /r/AskReddit like:

"People who have had affairs: How did they happen?"

Reddit has the kind of simultaneous anonymity and validity to look at things in [1] a very accurate way.

[1]: http://www.alternet.org/inside-mind-serial-rapist
An excellent, informative, high value comment!

Someone could host emacs in virtual machines that have a bunch of real emacsen hosted with TTYs implemented in Javascript and a virtual filesystem that actually writes to Dropbox. Someone could probably make good lifestyle-business money doing that.
Dear god, please let me have the freedom to determine what degree of security I need on a site.

If you restrict my password options in anyway I will use your site less.
There are various prepaid MasterCard / Visa companies out there - including the company I work for www.paymentcardsolutions.co.uk
Send files to friends directly from desktop using SendRail
The Article is from 2011 what a joke!
Wait... that first link in your list from a month ago... that was actually forked to make the one for this thread. They appear to be identical. So if I fork it, can I post it too like I made it? I don't get it. I'm guessing there is some reason somewhere that makes this not a rip off? What am I missing?
I agree with pretty much everything you said there. I guess you could summarize my post as, "just don't call them folders."

I do like that idea though. Users often treat folders like tags. In a manner of speaking folders are tags, in that they label the contents. They just happen to be organized in a hierarchy. The tags get more specific as you dig deeper in to the tree.

I'll have a go at reasoning by anecdote. For some reason, the default behavior of the Finder search field searches your entire computer as you type. This always struck me as odd, because it is 180 degrees from what I wanted. I would frequently:

* Navigate to a relatively shallow point in a folder hierarchy

* Start searching from there, expecting that my search would be constrained to this location

I do this because I know (generally) where something might be, but I can't recall exactly where.

I ended up reconfiguring Finder to behave like this.

If you split the folder path by separator, you often get a set of tags. So, by drilling down in to a folder heirarchy, you're "scoping" your search by tags, getting more detailed as you go.

I think hierarchy may be the missing piece of the tagging puzzle. A hierarchy would provide guidance (and a visual component). It says, "start broad, then get specific". Imagine a workflow where you would navigate to a specific point in the tag tree, then create a document. Doing so would associate the document with the current tag set without any additional work. If needed, the user could add additional tags, drilling down as they go.

My most important point about "folders" is just that we should avoid referring to these new systems as such. If we want to make progress, we need to unhinge users' thoughts from old concepts.
I had one boss for whom I could check mark every one of those 31 signs.
It makes me think of nothing so much as Wikipedia's most legendary troll.
So instead of having websites that require "upper, lower, numeric and special" characters, we'll have sites that require "randomly generated word from two years ago that we hope you remember". It's just another constraint that will never be standard and will be near impossible to remember.
QuicklyChat (YC S12) Brings Push-To-Talk Video To Small, Remote Teams
Absolutely true. See also other people with 4 to 5 digit karma who confirmed it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Schmitz#Early_career

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Schmitz#Insider_trading_and...

One of the archives of his harassment and trolling in the CCC newsgroup, in German: http://arnold.babsi.de/KIMBLE.txt

In case you doubt this as well and don't know the CCC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club

He is not who you think or wish he is but I will just let you see for yourself... he probably gets lucky each new decade with people who haven't been on the web in the decade before. He is not even remotely a "hacker" nor a "freedom fighter". And a "hero", are you crazy? kimble, is that you trying to make yourself look like people actually like you?
How stable would the various colors of ink needed for pictures be? I suppose you could also print out a separate B/W version of each color channel for later reconstruction.
Pretty cool site; I was a bit disappointed that it was for mobile only.
Ask HN: Facing scaling issues with news feeds on Redis.  Any advice?
We just released a social section to our iOS app several days ago and we are already facing scaling issues with the users' news feeds.

We're basically using a Fan-out-on-write (push) model for the users' news feeds (posts of people and topics they follow) and we're using Redis for this (backend is Rails on Heroku). However, our current 60,000 news feeds is ballooning our Redis store to almost 1GB in a just a few days (it's growing way too fast for our budget). Currently we're storing the entire news feed for the user (post id, post text, author, icon url, etc) and we cap the entries to 300 per feed.

I'm wondering if we need to just store the post IDs of each user feed in Redis. And then store the rest of the post information somewhere else. Would love some feedback here. In this case, our iOS app would make an api call to our Rails app to retrieve a user's news feed. Rails app would retrieve news feed list (just post IDs) from Redis, and then Rails app would need to query to get the rest of the info for each post. Should we query our Postgres DB directly? But that will be a lot of calls to our DB. Should we create another Redis store (so at least it's in memory) where we store all of the posts from our DB and we query this to get the post information? Or should we forget Redis and go with MongoDB or Cassandra so we can have higher storage limits?

Thanks for your help in advance.
I agree this is a major issue, and in fact was specifically covered in an earlier xkcd (http://xkcd.com/792/) than the one cited (http://xkcd.com/936/).

It might be a good idea to enforce non-password reuse, but the proposed solutions seem fairly aggravating. In particular the 'webmaster' solution of requiring inclusion of a fixed string is extremely annoying (oops, sorry users who use cryptographically derived passwords (http://passwordmaker.org/)), and doesn't solve the problem since someone with your "main" password can probably guess the "derived" password (e.g., the main password with the mandatory substring appended to the end).

My solution as a user is to just use a password manager. I use clipperz(http://clipperz.com/), but there's plenty others out there.

* Edited to remove markdown-style links. Forgot it wasn't supported here.
Here's another competitor... looks like the home telepresense market might be ripe and ready! http://9thsense.com/
In my opinion it's fine the way it is. HN comments are compact and only separated by the bare minimum, which makes for easy and fast reading. Stackoverflow doesn't digest that well for me because it has a lot of unnecessary padding, boxes, user info, etc.
Yeah, in the US where that's 0.01% of a salary. Not so almost everywhere else in the world.
They miss the point when they write "Who's to say that App.net will always cost $50 per year? What if, a year from now, it needs a lot more to keep the service going. App.net has incentives to figure out ways to raise the price to bring in more money."

If it turns out that the price charged is insufficient to maintain the service, I'd expect them to raise the price. The alternative is for the service to not exist, taking as an axiom an ad-free service.
No, it's true.

http://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-...

I don't know what "deactivating" does, but the account is reactivated if you log in. I tried it and it didn't appear to do anything except log me out. I also sent an email to privacy@quora.com to have the account deleted, but it hasn't happened yet...
"If Ajax works something will happen here if you click the Send Ajax Request button"

<click>

"Internal Server Error"

Something happened. Ship it!
Take a step back
Not a bad idea, I have a USB missile launcher but I've been having a hell of a time talking to it via USB. :/
I'm no expert, but why does this have to be done on the password level? Why can't we just assign usernames to our own sites, and force people to login with those? I know that's incredibly annoying for a user, but it would at least guarantee the user credentials for your site are unique from any other site.
5 Lessons You Can Learn from a StartupPR Faux Pas
If you use a different password for every site, it's a given that you won't be able to remember them. Storing your passwords securely is a different problem.
I don't know why this is so hard or requires such significant investment up front. How is making a decentralized Twitter service more of a challenge than, say, IRC or Jabber? I know that the problems aren't exactly the same, but I would hazard to guess that they are on the same order of magnitude in terms of implementation difficulty.
I posted this a month ago but it never reached the front page. tagx emailed me about it asking if he could post it and I said it was fine. More distribution is better, right?
I take issue with the author's point that:

"A free-based service, supported by advertisers, has tons of incentive to keep its users just as happy as a fee-based service. Why? Because if it doesn't, people go elsewhere and the advertisers go with them."

For the average consumer internet site, happy users does not equate to happy advertisers. As Facebook shows, you can have "happy" users -- in that they don't leave -- but create a dismal product for advertisers. They cannot optimize for advertisers without compromising the user experience. App.net will never need to optimize for advertisers, so they can focus completely on the user experience, or platform experience.

Edit: Removed quote from code block. PG - Markdown parser?
In fact, it was forked about an hour ago, and the only changes seem to be the gh-pages branch, and are pretty much summed up by:

- <title>Ymacs by brettcvz</title>
+ <title>Ymacs by tageorgiou</title>