skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You're making an attack on religion. I was explaining ID.

And you're still pretending they're different things. You might like to think that ID is just a thought process, separate from religion that one can use to assess anything but that ignores the reality that ID isn't used in that way by the vast majority of its believers.

It's used as a shield for creationism for those attempting to corrupt our legal processes. ID is a word, and it means what most people use it for, not what you want it to technically mean or what you thought it originally meant.

The purpose of words is to communicate, those words are owned by creationists, so if you're really attempting to just communicate and get others to think then it's up to you to choose a better word that doesn't already have massively negative connotations.

Trying to talk about ID in absence of religion is like trying to talk about hacking to grandma while ignoring the fact that to the larger majority of people hacking means committing a crime.
Gmail question: I like the old interface because the contrast between the buttons and background are easier to see faster. So I click "Older Version" in the top right corner of the screen to switch to the older version. The next time I close the window with Gmail in it, and go back to Gmail, I'm back using the new version. All thoughts/solutions very welcome and appreciated.
Balls Predicts Worst Downturn For 100 Years 
The schools minister said that the recession could be worse than that of the 1930s.
This could be the worst recession for a century, a close political ally of Gordon Brown has said.
> She often uses a video game analogy: Students are engaged, take as much or as little time as they need to at each level, and can't move on to the next level until they've mastered the one before it.

There is your elevator pitch.

This is brilliant. This lets kid move at their own pace without resorting to grouping by ability, and it turns school into a set of things to accomplish rather than a length of time to tolerate.
Apple is the new Microsoft, Google is the new IBM, Palm is the new Apple.
DVCS follow-up: managing the Python repository
The dude with the beard seems to have a slight smile, while in the photo of him without the beard he seems to have a more hostile expression. Does anyone else see that, or is it just me?
HN turing test
I wrote this:

http://stufftodo.dedasys.com

It's now open source. Have fun!
The HN submission title is the tag line of the article, just below the headline.

I would imagine a script that randomly chooses at low probability to post here with the tag line instead of the main heading. You know, just to mix it up so that we don't suspect it's a bot.
Recursion also takes a while getting used to if you don't have a math background. Another issue is the frequent use of abbreviations in functional languages as seen in the Erlang example. A bit more verbosity in function and variable naming is useful to make the true abstractions more clear.

On the other hand swombat's Ruby examples which use mapping, filtering etc. would be more elegant in many functional languages.
Well it is a matter of perspective. If you're a kid and your family has a Mac you just sit down and type python and you're in. Whereas how many 10 year olds even today have graphing calculators? Do kids even use calculators any more or is it all "new maths"?
Hey Craig -- could you be more selective about your submissions?
Could we get rid of this direct URL? It can be annoying.
Were kids held back for receiving "needs to improve" in a given subject?

If not, then this isn't really the same idea. I totally agree that having "did great" and "did not so great" as your two types of grade is rather ridiculous if there are no consequences/benefits either way, but basing advancement on mastery rather than age seems like a no-brainer to me.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123371 sounds like they're more interested in issue tracking software really. I want a time tracking/invoicing solution.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224473 is looking for a project management solution.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460677 is a developer looking for ideas and there's no relevant suggestions there.

Fair point about http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124856 I hadn't seen that and there are some good solutions outlined there.
Securing EC2 instance from Man in the Middle attack
Change Elevations: The Structure Of A Presentation
that is annoying, thanks for piquing my curiousity.
Christ, THANK YOU!!! Finally someone with the balls to say what needed to be said!! The object oriented emperor has no clothes. It creates problems and creates an industry to solve problems it created. Kind of like Christianity. It creates guilt so it can solve guilt by making people donate to the Church to relieve themselves of guilt the Church itself put on to them. Great scam, and so is OO. They will crucify you my friend, but you have spoken the TRUTH, and the history will adjudicate you accordingly!!

Princeps autum justice, ille in parce est.
Even if it was, that's not spam, so no cause for concern.
http://www.spoke.com/info/psQAka/CarolineCraig

edited:
perhaps this is

Caroline Craig
Associate Editor
Infoworld Media Group, Inc.
155 Bovet Road Suite 800
San Mateo, CA 94402-3115
Why a cold winter doesn't mean climate change is behind us
Fun With HTTP Headers
Adult Spam Makes Its Way Into Google Maps
There is a sizable minority here that thinks global warming is a sham. I have not yet seen them link to any authoritative sources.
Maybe this is interesting for you: http://www.billingsapp.com/
I avoid IE almost entirely, so I don't know enough to evaluate his proposed solutions/safeguards, but I'd sure appreciate some evaluation of his proposed protections from someone who does so that I can advise clients about self-protection.

Especially I'd like some help regarding his suggestion that one set IE so that "Open files based on their content and not the filename extension". But he then hedges his bets by saying, "However, that could reopen some old holes!" It seems a weak solution merely to await the "better": "better if web service operators took security precautions".

What prophylaxis do Hackers that use IE plan to employ, if any?
I'm a little confused what a percentage could mean, in this context. Does it mean you have a good understanding of 65% of the material you need to move on? Because that's not good, if you need an understanding of 100% of Foo to learn Bar, which incorporates Foo... this isn't to say that you shouldn't start teaching Bar in order to motivate students to go back and finish learning Foo, just that a % is a measure lacking in meaning.

I think a better way to gague knowledge is the A/C/F system a lot of my professors used in advanced math courses at Rutgers. An 'A' means you have a solid understanding of the material, a 'C' means you don't really understand it, but have a good enough grasp that you can move on and back-track to finish learning it as necessary. 'F' means you don't understand it well enough to move on, and should retake the course.

This requires a lot more thought on the side of the professor, but the motivation for students becomes a lot more clear: understand the material, and move on.
Don't be annoying, put it in feature requests. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Do you have a startup? Why isn't it not-for-profit?

Oh yeah. You want to get rich. Not "well off" but rich.

Question answered.

The people who start and run newspapers are NOT the same kind of people who want to be reporter when they grow up. One of the fun aspects of the whole "save the newspaper" conversation is that the loudest people in it, the reporters and editors who appear to be at the center of it, are in fact marginal players in the game and quite possibly have little idea what they're talking about.

How many editorials and op-eds do we see from the people who run the ad sales teams? From publishers? Very, very, very few. What does a beat reporter know about saving their newspaper? How many business reporters have actually ever run or started their own business?
What's more interesting is a response blog post by the author of one of the audio plugins that YACHT was pirating (esp. the comments): http://www.analogindustries.com/blog/entry.jsp?msgid=1232779...
It wouldn't be a bad thing if these automated submissions were adding value. Currently, they add much more noise than value and pollute the "new" page.
The top plan maxes out at 100k page views per day? They don't have anyone bigger than that? That makes me nervous.
I've been reading HN for several months now, and this is the first time I've seen reference to http://searchyc.com/. It would be more useful if it was featured in the top nav bar (but I understand it's not because perhaps pg didn't write it).
Your country's tax system is not alone in that regard.
Better version, with GroupBy and less lambdas uploaded to
http://pastebin.com/f201d8052
3-D Enthusiasm is Anything But Flat
This isn't about grading, it's about grade levels - K-12. Still, it's not a new idea, Ted Sizer has been promoting this since the 80's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Essential_Schools
Edit any web page in a browser - HTML & CSS
I like how it returns "Logged out.", but doesn't actually do anything.
As a Mac user, I'm a huge fan of On The Job (http://stuntsoftware.com/OnTheJob). You enter in a task and the charge per hour, hit play and go to work. You hit stop when you're done and it builds the invoice for you automatically.
I am guessing the assumption is that each service that allows hook specification also identifies the info it would be posting.

ie:
Enter a webhook you would like to be POSTed to when you receive a tweet. The webhook will be appended with the following url-encoded fields: sender, time, message.

Whatever URL you specify as your webhook needs to be able to handle it. The burden is on you to make sure that you integrate successfully with what is being POSTed. It is actually a pretty nice method of ensuring that a service can inter operate with a large number of other systems without the service provider having to know about them all.

I don't think the assumption is that you can just enter any old URL and it will magically work. I think the power is behind it is that it is simple enough that:
a) any service can trivially implement their end of it
b) anyone interested in extending the service can trivially implement their end of it

I'm sure someone doing part b will decide they need to take the post and form an XML message and relay it to a web-service, but it isn't really necessary.
That's actually an experiment I've been meaning to get around to coding up for quite awhile: create a user to submit every post from 37signals, Joel Spolsky, Seth Godin, etc. Also, factor in top stories from programming reddit, Slashdot with a lot of comments, etc. and see how well it does.

If anyone else wants to do it, I'd be really interested in the result.
Teamicide
We've spun this off as a seperate web app that we have been using internally for 3 years or so:

http://www.pipelineworks.com/

Designed for UK companies...
Gmail Now Tells You Where Your Email Comes From
I consider submitting -every article- from a large online magazine spam.
If you're an Emacs user then org-mode is has excellent time tracking features.

You have a normal org file with your tasks, I use one per client with 1st level headings usually being projects (you might find that one per project suites you better though).

So something like this:

* Project 1
** TODO Some task
** TODO Another task
* Project 2
** TODO yet another task

(the "TODO" keywords aren't needed for the time tracking, but I use them to
track what needs doing)

When I want to start work on a task I clock in by moving the point to
one of the task headings and hitting C-cC-xC-i. It adds a clock thingy
under the heading and the task shows up in my mode-line (along with
how long I've worked on it for). When I'm done with that task I do one
of three things, either clock into another task, clock out manually
with C-xC-xC-o, or mark the task as done (for TODO style headings).

So doing this means that all my task headings accrue clock annotations
(which org-mode collapses by default so I don't have to see them). I
can then use various functions to generate reports. My favourite way
is using a dynamic block:

#+BEGIN: clocktable :maxlevel 2 :scope file
Clock summary at [2009-02-11 Wed 15:08]

| L | Headline | Time | |
|---+-----------------------+--------+------|
| | *Total time* | *9:02* | |
|---+-----------------------+--------+------|
| 1 | Project 1 | 7:36 | |
| 2 | TODO Some task | | 5:32 |
| 2 | TODO Another task | | 2:04 |
|---+-----------------------+--------+------|
| 1 | Project 2 | 1:26 | |
| 2 | TODO yet another task | | 1:26 |
#+END:

You can hit C-cC-c at the beginning of the block and it will update. I
usually have several blocks under a heading at the top, one that shows
my hours for today, one that shows my hours since I last invoiced and
one that shows total hours ever.

I also org-mode for tracking my schedule, taking notes, writing documents (LaTeX output is great) and tracking all my tasks.

Planner-mode also has timelogging capabilities (using timelog.el) but
I prefer org-mode.
Our virtual cluster coordination software gets around the problem entirely by seeding the image at boot time with a key for contacting the coordination broker. Part of that process is informing the cluster (and the remote client) of the generated host key (the launching client even inserts that into your local hosts file if you want). Latest version works on EC2, we've been launching 100+ node clusters lately.

http://workspace.globus.org/clouds/clusters.html#secgap
Seconded. For some reason I'm always on the look out for something better to come along, but On the Job is the one app in this category I actually use.
> Based on the comments, it seems everyone thinks they're doing away with grades as in A, B, C, D and F. I think they're actually just doing away with grade leves 1-12.

It looks like this site is coming down with the same RTFA-itis that plagues other news aggregators. And I no longer have the down vote ability to help correct this...

Back on topic, I'm curious how slow progression or level skipping could be handled. I would think this kind of system would make it hard to synchronize lesson plans or teaching sessions, if all the students in a given classroom are in differing levels. The "little red schoolhouse" never really scaled up, after all...
those words are owned by creationists

Okay. We've passed the point of reason now. I concede.

<sarcasm>Yes. There are special words that are owned by special people. If you use their words, you must like them/take their side/want to be one. That's a much more reasoned argument than I was trying to make.</sarcasm>

I stand corrected.
I'm kind of interested to see what YongFook puts out with GumTrail (http://www.gumtrail.com/). Supposed to be "User Engagement Analytics". I'm curious to know how it will work and how different it will be from regular stat tracking software.
Intel's CoreI7 Highly-threaded Smoke graphics demo
Apparently a lot of the HTC smartphones (of which the G1 is one) use the same USB audio connector scheme. If Apple made any demands, it was to HTC, not Google... which strikes me as unlikely, too.
Have you (or anyone else) used this?

It looks fantastic...just wondering if anyone has any feedback on the good/bad as an actual user of the product.
At the risk of sounding like a reckless spammer, I recommend the company I work for: FreshBooks.

We have more than just time tracking and invoicing/billing. Including estimates, simple support tickets, document sharing, expense tracking, contractors.

We do not do full accounting or payroll. If you need those capabilities I recommend either checking out our competitor Xero, or checking out an accounting package that integrates with us.

I'm on support today if you want a walk though or something.
Toll Free (North America): 1-866-303-6061
Toll Free (UK): 0808-101-3408
Just ask for Zach.
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#zach
I love how searching google for "perceived iq" now brings up this comment as the third result.
That is a good solution, but it can only be used if there is an existing out of band way to obtain the key from the instance. I think that is unusual for the typical AWS user.
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The value of any form of hosting needs always to be qualified with "(to the degree that) downtime is kept in check.

The tricky part is getting an accurate assessment of likelihood and severity of downtime. Who's going to do that assessment? I don't think I want to ask my cloud provider about his reliability, my internal IT manager about his, and then enter their numbers into my decision tree.

What about internal(within your IT dept) backup for a cloud-based operation? I'd like to know how Hackers cope with the relative risks.
It was discussed at length about a year ago. The consensus was it's both not nice and a bad idea in the long term.
There are several greasemonkey scripts that do just that.

For instance: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Not to diss the idea, which is certainly interesting from an intelllectual standpoint, but I would flag your auto-generated user if I knew what it was.

There's enough noise on the new page already.
This is spam. I read HN in hopes of finding new and interesting topics that were thoughtfully considered and submitted by other HN members.

I don't read HN to read InfoWorld articles blindly submitted by an IW employee. If I wanted that I'd go to InfoWorld and subscribe to their RSS feed.

This type of submission behavior should be expressly discouraged on HN. It is selfish and not in the spirit of the site.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/18/giss-divergence-with-s...
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476757

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476641

Original information here:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-in-labs-add-your-l...
"Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson
I avoid IE too, but about 52% (and shrinking) visitors to sites I work with still do use IE so we still have to deal with it.

This is the first article I've read about this problem (thanks, HN.) Here's a quick summary of what I think I need to do about it: (corrections appreciated)

1) For any situations where you allow users to upload files which may be sent back to the browser as images, run some kind of check to ensure it's a valid image, e.g. ImageMagick "convert"

2) ensure you return content-type headers with the correct image type.
A manual way to do it is to have the init scripts print the key to console and use EC2's get console output operation.
Cable Companies Panic as Viewers Shift to Internet
I guess if you title your paper "Rich people tend to act like assholes", it's harder to get funding for your next research project.
You could modify the SSH init scripts to echo the host key to the console on boot. There's an API call to get the console output from a host.

You need AWS credentials to access the console output. I see it as a valid out of band method for getting the SSH host key.
I am a climate scientist and Matlab offers a lot to me : great matrix syntax, very fast algorithms (SVD, matrix inversion, FFT), large mindshare (cf Central File Exchange), and advanced toolboxes for statistics, spectral analysis and the like.
Not being a programmer by birth, I couldn't care less about the fact that it's not a general purpose language ; it is very adequate for my own purpose.

BUT... it is proprietary, pretty expensive, and at the moment I am considering problems that require parallel computations on dozens of CPU. Matlab has a Parallel Computation Toolbox that is a joke (<= 8 CPUS at a time, monopolizing the same number of licenses), and that is why I am considering Python.

Does NumPy enable parallel computations ? Is it reasonably easy to translate Matlab code into NumPy ?
Is there a good library of linear algebra routines (like SVD, eigendecompositions, inversions, LU, Cholesky decompositions, etc..) ? A large user community with a comprehensive archive ?
Yes:

It looks like Amazon may be updating their AMIs to generate host keys if they don't already exist. Amazon is also making the host key fingerprint available to the user through one of the only secure communication channels available to an instance of a public AMI--the console output.
Whats the big difference between a post made by a script or by a human? A clever title?
When I was doing my own information security consulting, I used FreshBooks and it was awesome. Enter your clients, enter your projects, enter your time, and it sends invoices. Very nice.
I saw it mentioned shortly after I joined 80 days ago. Here is a search for searchyc

http://searchyc.com/searchyc?sort=by_date

There are lots of references, including many that lament that it's hard for newbies to find.
I appreciate that some of the links I posted were not exactly what you were looking for, but I couldn't tell if they would be relevant, so I provided a selection, and a link to the search engine. It wouldn't've been a good use of my time to vet and summarise them.

I hope you get the information you need - it looks like you will.
I wouldn't be so hasty to call it noise, or more accurately call the manually-submitted articles from those sources signal. How much coverage would you say JoS, 37s blog, seth godin get here already? I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% of all new posts from these blogs wind up here.
The way it works at my wife's school is she ends up acting more like a classroom moderator as the students work through workbooks independently. She's there for one-on-one help if the students have trouble with the content.

Not sure if this is how they're doing it in Denver however.
the "Cneonction: close" thing is a quirk of Netscaler loadbalancers. It's done to nullify any "Connection: close" headers the webserver spits out, as the Netscaler wants to manage it better. It's scrambled instead of removed so that it doesn't have to regenerate packets (length is the same) and it's scrambled semi-randomly so that people don't just assume it's a misspelling and add compatibility for it.
"Thanks, dude, but that's not useful, actionable advice"

I completely disagree. We just witnessed an economic meltdown because far too few people took this advice, manifesting most obviously as massive overleveraging, but less obviously in many other ways.

I for one can very clearly see the actions I can take in response to this advice.
Antarctic Worms Create Antifreeze
Ask YC: How hard is it to keep a service like twitter online
There have been so many posts about twitter downtime lately that it is must be pretty embarrassing for them, and do some serious damage to their reputation. The latest one is on the frontpage now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476910

Not having worked with high-traffic websites I've been wondering why they're having such problems. I would imagine that if you have money (which they do) you could just throw more servers and a good SQL consultant after the problem. Is there a problem specific to their architecture that is hard to scale? If so what is the constraint?

I'm just puzzled that they haven't solved it, and hope they do.