skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Already am, Linux admin now. Coding jobs are hard to find yo'.

Which goes back to my point.

I can't code if everyone else is doing it in place of me. :P
Anyone know where to find a source tarball that compiles under Leopard? All I've found is a bunch of precompiled Linux RPMs...
Phusion Passenger is now Ruby 1.9.1 compatible
Access Denied: How to Defend Your Systems from an Inside Job - Cringely on technology
Here's another vigorous refutation of Ehrenreich's 'Nickel and Dimed' mindset:

http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2004_07/lamon-poor.html
The article doesn't really say what the test case should be.

I would probably write:

(is (not (malicious-site-p "http://www.google.com/")))

Since hopefully Google never blocks itself.
You're calling your libertarian credentials into question there; a _real_ libertarian (for extreme values of real) would reply that you do, it's just that in New Hampshire the pirates call themselves the IRS and the Department of Revenue.
It is standard; my wife and I share our accounts freely. I was just attempting sarcasm because it seems that all the women I personally know are compulsive spenders, especially in the shiny makeup/polish/perfume aisles...

Even if she spent everything in our account, that would still never be a reason to not be/stay married to her. Money/spaending is one of the least important things to get in a fuss about in a marriage. I would love her just as much.
Thanks for the pointer.

Also, my work is gasp enterprise java duck. Eclipse integration with JUnit, Ivy, svn, ant, etc etc, saves me lots of time. My cover is blown :(
IIRC, that bookmarklet has been around since I joined over 600 days ago.
Not at all! Stories/ideas/memes aren't owned.

Though, it's a duplicate:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=86875

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87148

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=91738

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87549
Brigham Young to 37signals - now that's a culture shift.
From parent link.

http://www.acapela-group.com/acapela-for-iphone-26-speech-so...
Ha! That happened to me early on once. It's okay, it doesn't ruin your HN citizen status as long as you don't keep saying silly things. (I was involved in a massive flamewar and utterly deserved repudiation.)
This stuff is good to know -- I have found the "sed -e" trick and doing pattern matching inside awk help cut down on typing quite a bit. They may even make the script more readable, once you become familiar with these idioms.

On the other hand, I don't know if these type of performance optimizations will have many real-world applications. For example, if you are calling grep and awk inside a loop, and find it unacceptable slow, I don't think you are going to see a big performance gain by calling only awk. At that point, your best bet may be to write that part of your script in Perl (or C, like I did once back in the times before Perl was mainstream).
I'm not at all sure about HR running password access - where would they get the skills and what makes HR departments a good choice as gatekeepers?
I suspect that the delivery is probably the problem for you, rather than the content. To me, the core of it reduces to:

* If you disengage your brain periodically (e.g., get enough sleep, have fun, etc) you will find you work better

* Occasionally one should look at their life on a macro-level, and evaluate their long term goals

I don't think many people would disagree with this advice, it is pretty common sensical.
Here is, apparently, Antonio Socci's blog: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goo...

[Original Italian text sentences alternating with translated English sentences:]

Nel microscopico la grandezza della carica dell’elettrone ei rapporti col protone: “i valori di questi numeri” scrive Hawking “sembrano essere stati esattamente coordinati per rendere possibile lo sviluppo della vita”. In the microscopic size of the charge of electronics and proton relations with "the values of these numbers," Hawking writes, "seem to have been exactly coordinated to enable the development of life." E poi la velocità di espansione dell’universo: se un secondo dopo il Big Bang fosse stata un pochino superiore o appena inferiore sarebbe accaduta la catastrofe. And then the speed of expansion of the universe: if a second after the Big Bang had been slightly higher or lower would be just the disaster happened. Diceva Albert Einstein che nelle leggi della natura “si rivela una ragione così superiore che tutta la razionalità del pensiero e degli ordinamenti umani è al confronto un riflesso assolutamente insignificante”. Albert Einstein said that in the laws of nature "is one reason so superior that all rational thought and human systems is a reflection of a comparison is absolutely insignificant."

The rest of the blogpost is standard "the world is too perfect to be of natural origin" ID stuff. Are the quotes above what were in the book (Indagine su Gesù) regarding Einstein's and Hawking's alleged beliefs in God?

Apparently, the original Einstein quote in English was: http://www.google.com/search?q=einstein+%22utterly+insignifi...

But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

This page http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/einstein_religion.html says the quote is from:

Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1999, pp. 24-29.

That page includes the book's preceding 11 paragraphs, in which Einstein states that belief in God is naive and childish.
'tis the message of the medium, nothing on the internet is secret to anyone on the internet.
`The Little Schemer' is also a reasonable introduction covering a subset of Scheme and recursive programming. It is quite light-hearted and entertaining to read.
You'd also be surprised that watching TV actually increases mental activity

I bet it increases it in the occipital cortex, where primary visual processing is going on; this doesn't mean it's doing anything for these kids' cognitive capabilities. Do you have a citation?
precisely. It's ridiculously obvious common sense wrapped up in a parable. I guess if that floats your boat though :/
But there is only so much space for romantic atmosphere inside a shop (the main issue, really), and existing automated coffee machines are..limited (then again, most people would probably just get ordinary coffee). On the other hand, that sounds like an interesting thing to hack together for home if only I wasn't in love with my french press :)

Also when a similar topic came up last week, there was mention of charging a fee (i.e. $20/day) for use of the table, wifi and a bottomless cup of coffee.

It would be interesting to see both of these implemented in an actual coffee shop, cause they're not necessarily something I have seen and are certainly one way to approach the problem.
There's a 'rename' script that comes with Perl that also does this, which may be useful if you want some really fancy renames. E.g. rename '$_=lc' *.MP3 to change case to lowercase.
YES, we support H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, AAC and HE-AAC (a.k.a AAC SBR), MP4 file format. All this formats are parts of the ISO MPEG-4 standard.
I doubt they implement or worry about technology to absolutely prevent anything the president ever emails from ever leaving the office. Copy + Paste into a new email solves that pretty cleanly.

The issue however, is what if someone unknowingly or accidentally forwards something the president wrote? There's easy-to-setup and use technology in pretty much all mail servers to check for and prevent that.

(I'd find it super neat however, if there were a program that took all of the president's emails and inserted extra random spaces/punctuation/etc. so that if there WERE leaks, they'd be identifiable.)
We already have something like this --- Google Search. See http://www.google.com/search?q=googel etc.
Long hot shower
It's more then that though. People subscribe to web applications for completely different reasons than people whom purchase virtual goods. The demographics, spending patterns, motivations to spend, lifetime value, upsell opportunities and a million other things of the customers differ. Comparing money spent on entertainment and money spent on tools isn't a good idea.
Interesting article. I was tempted to start boycotting Wal-Mart, but that is the nature of business.

I'm currently reading The Prize and there are many similarities between Wal-Mart and Standard Oil. I wonder if the government will ever break up Wal-Mart.

Is there a limit to how big a company can get?
How about "How to Design Programs"?
Yes, there are better books. The authors are very nice guys, but I regret most of the time I spend reading Simply Scheme. There are some online lectures by Brian Harvey that are worth seeing, though.

You could read HTDP AND The Little Schemer in the time it takes to read Simply Scheme and you would most certainly get more out of them. Scheme is a simple language...you don't need a 600+ page book with special constructs from the authors in order to grok it. The Dybvig book is also a better way to spend your time if you're just wanting a (shorter and cheaper) introduction to Scheme.

I'd also recommend most of the free online Scheme tutorials...schemers.org might be a good starting point.
Millions of Facebook users indicate that it might work with ActiveX/Java (tho I don't find it cool either). You're also inclined to trust a big and established site more when it comes to installing software on your computer.
How much are you worth on Twitter?
Another point about homeless shelters is that it is only a small percentage of the homeless that stayed in them.

I know that when I was homeless, I stayed away from homeless shelters for the vast majority of my time in any city, except for when I was entirely new to the city. I opted for staying in abandoned places and couch-surfing, as staying in the shelters is really hit-and-miss. Your few (and important) possessions are not safe,they often try to shove religion down your throat, and a lot of the people staying at the shelter are the mentally-unstable type of homeless.
I agree, a salary-level would be nice. It is just that sometimes it seems not a lot of people are making a living out of just ads.
Interesting. I had been pointing people at HTDP if they had trouble with SICP, I'll have to check this out.
Twitter Search Plus: Find Replies Inline with Twitter Search - Intridea Development Blog
!$ is the substitution in most shells for the last arg of the last command. I use it all the time as it's really easy to type.
Soon, Majority of Web Users Will No Longer Use IE
This doesn't really bring down the barrier to entry, that much.

Before you can even think about using this, you need to have registered. So I think it mostly brings down the barrier for current members, not for random people to flood the site.

This doesn't make it easier to submit your first story - which is the key.
htop can also do this.
People go to Starbucks because once you've learnt Starbuckish you can order your coffee exactly how you like it anywhere. They're selling ubiquity. It's the same business as Subway, you can get your "unique" thing wherever you are. Brands that (successfully) go for "cool" you see people wearing their logo on their clothing and accessories and I don't recall seeing anyone who wasn't staff ever sporting a Starbucks logo.

My regular Starbucks, where they know me and start making my drink as soon as I walk in, I go to because it's on my way home from work and it's open 24 hours. And Starbucks knew that there was this kind of consumer and that's why they're there. That's what they're selling.
World map showing it as percentage of population:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Internet_...

Still doesn't take into account urban/rural split. Urban China should be much higher, for example.
I didn't miss the sarcasm, but I agree with the downvoting anyway: There are enough people who honestly believe the way you were parodying that comments like this can be harmful by virtue of their effect leading these people to believe that their views are more widespread.

There's a reason why we don't make racist or homophobic jokes, even sarcastically -- the same applies to misogynistic jokes.
It is excellent. You would learn more (useful things) from it than from Simply Scheme.
I doubt that there will be a mass defect from the people still using IE6, but I'm always happy to hear that IE's use is on the decline.

That browser has been a thorn in my side for too many years now.
Rather than preventing the emails from ever being forwarded, all incoming emails are probably filtered against a white-list of "accepted" addresses. Otherwise, the emails are probably discarded. So, even if his "private" email address gets out, it doesn't matter. They'd change it, but only to stop people flooding the email server.
I did not personally get the impression that was what was going on. Steve Jobs is a celebrity and his insight into education, startups, business in general, and the mere fact that he can balance so many projects with impact is truly inspirational.
Linux Caffe Toronto
http://linuxcaffe.ca/
Agreed. And I'd say this thing about WalMart is better: I think there is more of a path at WalMart for people moving from the floor, to management, to corporate. Target doesn't seem to intend any floor jobs to lead to anything. They seem to court part-time people, be it part-time students, senior citizens, etc.
There's a certain minimum level of things that have to be done in terms of design, security, and even marketing that are extraneous to your actual functionality. I think the level for those things have risen over the last four years.
Microwave it.
I prefer products from Target over Walmart because they tend to be better designed and higher quality. Walmart is great when you want something really cheap, though, and quality isn't really a concern.
That's easy to say after the fact. If Google didn't have a comprehensive testing infrastructure, they'd have already made many worse mistakes than this.
Human Clones May Be Genetically Viable
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_... has some ideas.
Thoughts on the GRE by a Professor of English
Some of the best conversations I've ever had with people at coffee shops have started because of laptops.

"Whoa, is that one of those XO laptops? Do you like it? Can I try?"
Me too. Switched in April 2007 to openSUSE, now running 11.1...
The poster was talking about his project's traffic, not traffic in general.
I think their concern is only aimed toward accidental forwarding of mail anyway, which IRM would take care of. If someone wants to leak info, it's really no longer an IT security issue.
Looks cool. How would it compare to Amazon/Alexa search service? In theory they allow you to build your own search engine, but in practice you can't really amend their ranking formula and don't get access to the raw inverted index (with tf-idf statistics and such). Yahoo BOSS is in the same league.

Your service would be cheaper, though.
HtDP removes the romanticism from programming. Stick to SICP.
Tables vs CSS: CSS Trolls begone
Are you going to be at the Digital Signage Expo in February? If so, we should meet up. Email john at treefort dot com
VoIP ... DOSing the 911 call center

Wouldn't work. "911" isn't a real phone number; it's special-cased into the phone network so that if the phone network is overloaded the 911 call will get through and a non-911 call will get disconnected. VoIP services don't have direct access to 911 systems but instead proxy (once they figure out where you're calling from and thus which 911 center to route your call to).

If you tried to DoS 911 services via VoIP, you might make it impossible to get a call through to 911 via that VoIP service, but you wouldn't block landline 911 calls.
I wonder if there will ever be a "Youtube" method. Students watch the previously recorded lecture on video and bring questions based on that.
The docs for Amazon S3 state that a bucket can either be kept in the US or in the EU. How precise a location are you needing? (They're not going to have multiple data centers per zip code.)

Aside from that, I'm not sure what role you would expect them to take for archiving - isn't it your job to decide what data needs storing, and how to organize it?
That depends on the test.

A simple multiple choice test covering vary limited subject matter is one option, but we can do better than that. I remember taking a vary comprehensive series of tests when I was !10 years old that included such things as attempting to sound out words that don't exist in English. Granted, the possibility of extremely high quality testing in this country is one thing, I suspect the actual creation of standardized tests in the public school system has become extremely political.

PS: I think AP tests are fairly good indicators of their subject matter. Even teachers who "teach to the test" still cover the subject to an acceptable degree.
I assume you're asking about scalability in terms of pages per second or whatever, but what you should be more worried about is the scalability of your development effort. As other posters have said, speed of the platform is not the issue.

Rather you should consider what platform you think you can get the most done in the shortest amount of time - having friends that use the same platform counts for a lot. Similarly, many people think (including myself,) that you can get more done faster using RoR or Django than you can PHP, particularly if your project has any complexity.
Vista introduced features that let network admins have more control over machines on the network, and Win7 kept those features, and fixed many of the infamous Vista problems. So there is an incentive for corporate IT depts to upgrade to Win7.

For consumers, most won't intentionally upgrade. They'll do so by deciding they need new hardware, and probably Windows will come bundled with it.
--forest? Seriously?

Metaphors are sometimes confusing. Call it what it is. "Reflection" should have been called "type information", for example, and "--forest" should have been called "--nested".
The thing I most dislike about Python is the collection classes aren't sufficiently orthogonal.

What do I mean? Python has two main built-in collection types, list and dict. If you have a list you can use "in" to ask whether the list contains a value:

>>> a = ['a','b','c']
>>> 'a' in a
True
>>> 'zzz' in a
False

But if you're using a dict, "in" tells you whether the dict's keys contains a value (not the dict's value).

>>> d = {'x':'a', 'y':'b'}
>>> 'a' in d
False
>>> 'x' in d
True

To enumerate over a dict's key-value pairs, you use .items():

>>> d.items()
[('y', 'b'), ('x', 'a')]

But to enumerate over the key-value pairs in a list, you have to use enumerate():

>>> list(enumerate(a))
[(0, 'a'), (1, 'b'), (2, 'c')]
This is hilariously bad logic, and I assume it's tongue in cheek.

Your first point, the VC scenario: are you actually serious?

Here's what I mean by "serious": you actually think that the transaction you're sketching:

- group of good teachers goes to VC, asks for money

- VC invests in group of good teachers

- good teachers teach inner city students for no upfront cost

- good teachers -- and therefore investors -- profit by collecting a portion of their students' future earnings

...is something that'd actually happen.

I can understand if you were just trying to make the rhetorical point: "if education worked the way some speculate, it'd be profitable to invest in a scheme wherein you taught students for free and took a cut of their future earnings; you don't see that, do you? Ergo: education must not work amirite?"

So I really want to know: are you "serious" about your vc-funded educational scheme, or were you just going for the rhetorical point?

Your second point is equally hilarious, and I have to also ask if you're also "serious" about it.

You say: "...since spending billions of dollars on improving these schools and improving these students hasn't had any significant effect on their ability to learn, the problem is not how hard we're trying, but with what we think we can accomplish."

What you appear to be attempting to insinuate is the following:

- there's a class of people who are ineducable

- we know this is true b/c we've spent billions trying to educate them, with precious little to show for it

If that's not what you're trying to insinuate, you're free to clarify.

Assuming that's right, you've got a big jump in your logic.

We've clearly spent billions.

It clearly hasn't worked.

We can conclude: (1) the way we've spent the money thus far doesn't do jack.

We can't really conclude: (2) there's no possible way that that money could've been spent that would've worked.

For your apparent conclusion -- some people can't be educated -- you need (2), but you only have (1).

You tried to sneak your way to (2) by characterizing "spending money in various programs that we hoped might to improve those schools and that we hoped might improve those students" as "spending money on improving those schools and improving those students".

Nice work, when it works.

So yeah: are you serious about your second point?
not really a utility but a very handy one liner to check if someone is being annoying on a http server:

tail -1000 logfile | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Bots should stand out in the last couple of lines and have a linecount that is substantially higher than a normal user.
LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman: "We Can Go Public Any Time We Want To"
Thanks, glad you like it! It was on HN about 1.5 years ago. Maybe I should resubmit it. Maybe Reddit programming too. I was hoping to do some kind of freemium model someday, but I figure I'd need 10-100x the users first.
Poll: Best Revenue Model Focus For Our Startup
Edit/Stupid Me Our startup is Ramamia, easy and private sharing with your family.

We're having internal debates at Ramamia about which business model we should focus on. We could do both, but we're a small team + not a ton of funding and want to be focused, not divided.<p>Advertising:
Pros: We'll have a valuable segment in the family market. If we can target correctly, it could be enticing to advertisers.<p>Cons: We'll need a lot of scale to start seeing significant revenue from ads. At first we'll have to go through an ad network, which will eat even more of the margins. We're also not familiar at all with the advertising model.<p>Subscription Model / Premium Accounts<p>Pros: We're heavily leaning towards this. We've had users suggest to us features they would pay for. It's also a steady stream that can have a valid proof of concept without scale to hundreds of thousands of families ie- We can have somewhat stable conversion numbers, what they would pay for, and what they would pay. 2/3 of the team has prior experience with freemium/subscription biz models.<p>Cons: Converting users can be hard. It's also not straight forward. If we develop the wrong features for a freemium account + mess up pricing, it could go either way. Lots more trial and error.
Subscription Freemium Accounts (ala Flickr)
Agreed. I think this kind of attitude stems from thinking that unit tests are for TDD, instead of for regression testing.

This post seems more reasonable if re-stated as, "Here's the unit test that will keep that from ever happening again".
I can't stand watching a whole lecture in video. I tried for SICP, for various screencasts... I'd rather have a book, really, so I can decide on my own if I need to spend more time understanding a certain section and skim the other.
Beware of your intuition when reasoning about many dimensions
The official thinking behind the post-6.001/SICP foundation programming course at MIT [pdf]