skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Full-text search of Unix files?
I have a lot of notes organized as text files in a directory hierarchy on my Unix machine. I would like to index and search these notes, using full-text search and approximate matching (so grep does not suffice). I prefer a command-line utility. I am looking for a simple application that works out-of-the-box, no fuss, no muss, so something like Lucene seems overblown. Any suggestions?
"Tech. Money. Internet. 25 and under."

Well Alex sounds a bit like a d-bag.
3D Satellite Viewer
I'm not saying he is wrong, and since I'm not from (or in) the USA, I can't really argue. But from my point of view, the author present alot of facts like : "In the last 10 years or so, the number of people forced to work as contractors has increased exponentially." without offering any "hard" data or links to his sources.

Is he using real data as a basis for his arguments?
I remember reading one of the "hacking exposed" books (the exact one I can't remember now), where there was an incident where an online store used values in the webpage itself to handle the prices of goods. In the example in the book, the hackers had replaced $45 list price with $1 giving huge discounts to the purchasers. And to make things even worse, some of the hackers would order dozens of shirts (at $1 each) and then return them for full price.

It might have been an earlier edition of this one, but I do remember the bright red cover:
http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Exposed-Web-Applications-2nd/d...
Audio System used for Obama's Inauguration
Yeah, this always drives me nuts.

Assuming that someone's rating is only an estimator of their true rating, and then clipped to an integer - the more ratings there are, the less the maximum.

You never see something with hundreds of ratings actually score a 5.0, even if most people love it. And the fact that there ARE hundreds of ratings of that thing, and not some comparison thing, is also important.
A New Credit Crunch Victim: Chickens
Halliburtan just moved their headquarters to Dubai. I wonder what they are going to do now.
Read the rest of his post - he mentions specifically that performance issues would probably be the number 1 reason to not use HTTP. Bear in mind also that most applications are low-bandwidth, latency-insensitive, and do not need to make optimal use of available resources. This makes HTTP very quick to implement, nearly universal in compatibility, and fairly foolproof.

I think he was complaining more along the lines of "why are we running a custom protocol when we're just passing along a bunch of strings?"
DO NOT replace [:] with list() next time you see it.

While the article explains some concepts well, [:] is no less pythonic than list(), though the latter might be more readable for people completely new to the language. In fact, it would be helpful to become very comfortable with python slices early on, because they allow you to easily manipulate any sequence, not just lists. For example, you can reverse a string using slices in one line:

reversed_string = orig_string[::-1]

Staying away from slices, you're leaving that power behind.
I second the nomination of Bishop. It is the standard text. It is only two years old, and Bishop will teach you machine learning the way that the field practices it nowadays. In my lab of fourteen people, we must have six or so copies of Bishop.

I don't understand what is impractical about Bishop. If you are looking blindly to use an off-the-shelf machine learning implementation, that's one thing. Machine Learning has been described as the study of bias. If you want to understand when to pick certain techniques, and develop appropriate biases, then read Bishop.

"The Elements of Statistical Learning" by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman gives more of a statistician's approach. The treatment is simply less broad, and also more dated.

You can also look at Andrew Ng's video lectures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E
He is very well-respected in the field. For certain students, watching a lecture may be preferable to reading a book.
A term like "lookup engine" is certainly not commonly used in the field of information retrieval:

http://www.google.bg/search?q="information+retrieval"+"looku...
I made a subjective statement, leaving out the research and reasoning that changed my opinion, on purpose. I don't think this is the right forum to discuss the limits on terrestrial resources; I've participated in those threads on reddit and they're interminable, and they never seem to prompt a single genuine bayesian update.
Bootstrapping was never sexy. It's not sexy now. What's going on is that most VC firms have no idea how to actually identify themes or teams in which to invest and times like this expose them.

Unlike Dan, I'd love to get funding, even as we have a revenue model that doesn't require scale to get profitability. What VC funding does is dual risk mitigation - money reduces my personal risk of paying the bills and the very act of investing in the company makes the opportunity less risky by providing a cushion to try and make a few mistakes. I am, and most entrepreneurs, are grateful to bear less risk so that they can focus on making a great product.

At the end of the day, however, I'm well aware that eBay didn't need a dime of the Benchmark money they took, and that allows me to say no to the scrubs that come a-knocking.
Did you really just say human lifespans have been growing exponentially?
Sign the Petition | No Stimulus
Having worked at eBay Motors in the past, I can tell you that what these guys have accomplished is far from easy. The catalog work necessary to present results in this format is far from easy. Good work and great start. Congrats, guys.

I think the long-term trick for a company like this one is driving organic traffic. They'll need to create a good bit of quality content to start ranking in Google search results. Without it, they'll be forced to buy traffic.
Github teaches us that "great" is better than "good"
Is this more immediately obvious? I would have expected list to be defined as list(*elements) and called like this list(1, 2, 3)

I guess that this allows me to type help(list) and figure it out, but I would have done that anyway to identify an operator.

Clearly the answer is a .clone() or .copy() method...
My startup is a niche social news site...and I've learned that the "voting" isn't really the point. It's just something to do once you get everyone together in one place.

You've got to get people who want to "hang out" together. Give them some shared purpose. And, above all, add value.

I think some of the sports news sites have found a solid formula by taking it a step beyond just "social news" into creating an actual network of sites that get just a bit of extra push on their site. This helps the social news site brand itself based on the quality of the sites in its network, and it also gives it a bunch of go-to friends to lean on for good stories, comments and the like.

Mix has none of these things. It's a generic place to submit stories.

And honestly, if it wasn't for Diggnation, the Kevin Rose saga and the "lineage" of Digg, that site would be in the same boat.

And without YCombinator, Paul Graham and his ethos, I think Reddit would as well. These sites had stories and solid tech that resonated with the first waves of users that got them going.

What's Mixx's story?

When it launched, I think there was some speculation that the Mixx folks thought they could pull away enough Diggers to get just big enough to be useful/profitable.

What's their story?
That's true, shortly off the plane realizing exactly what health care is available for the poor in the US, gave me a decidedly uneasy feeling.

I won't even attempt to defend the US health care system.

Suffice it to say, a much longer topic is the set of laws and regulations that maximize freedom, prosperity AND a high minimum of social services for everyone.
Google Suggest Thinks the Internet is "Terrified of Chinese People"
And also don't confuse "Indians" with "low paid". I'm not Indian myself, but I've had plenty of colleagues who are, and get paid as good a salary (if not better) than most Americans in the same job. I'm not sure I like this constant association with being Indian and being paid in pennies.
Ran a quick test, and it looks like Twitter has already enabled frame-busting on the status submit page.
Out of all the people that have filtered through the Hackers and Founders Meetup this past year, the only people that I know of that took funding were the 2 Y Combinator companies we had speak at an event last fall.

As far as I know, only one member has been actively looking for funding for an enterprise app. It may be selection bias. But, the rest of us are bootstrapping.
IBM Uses Amazon To Leapfrog Microsoft On The Way To The Blue Cloud
My abundance of ramen noodles, lack of $$$ to take girls out on dates and bulging belly from giving up the gym membership all point to "no" on the "sexy" question.
If you treat the number of ratings as an indicator of quality, you need to account for the time the item has been available for rating as well. Otherwise you underestimate newer items.
I've been using Sass since it came out and I love it. The author's tips are great - I came to the same conclusion myself. I think you could easily overdo nesting in Sass if you're not careful but like he mentions, it's really not necessary. It's been very handy for me on a recent (large) project - it's readability has been a great time-saver.
I heartily recommend writing your own encryption algorithm, for the same reason that I recommend performing your own surgery. If you think you're good at something, then why should you let only people with life-long expertise do it?
This makes no sense. Vegas is popular because it is a central destination that is both cheap to get to and has a wide "scalability" in terms of spending. You can go as lavish or as run-down as you feel like, and that's part of the charm.

It's pretty darned expensive to get to Dubai from southeast Asia, and not to mention if you're talking about "hub of entertainment" you already have major cities like Shanghai and Macau. Why would the 1.6+ billion people living in China head all the way out to Dubai when there are plenty of "global" cities right on its doorstep?

Not to mention these cities are actually based on real industries, real exports of real goods, and have an economy that doesn't rely on hype and speculation.

Dubai has no future. It doesn't even have that many oil holdings, nor does it sit in the middle of a large industrial economy. It has no reason to exist at the scale that people seem to think it deserves.
I learned on a TI99-4a, too.

My wife got me another on off Ebay a few years ago.
Cuba's answer to "U.S. hegemony"? Linux.
Update on Portland Ten (Founder defends her approach)
This is confusing for beginners and should be avoided.

That doesn't follow.

Beginners need to learn list slicing to get anywhere with Python, and by the time they've got through [1], [0:10], [2:], [:5], [:-1], [0:10:2] and so on then [:] is just another use in the same pattern.
What Interface Engineers Wish Designers Knew
Sort of disappointed that this "one time only" exploit wasn't used for a massive twitter rickroll.
That article makes some good points, but boy is it chuck full of over the top drama.

No it is not in any way reasonable that the Obama presidency has already failed.

The announced plan isn't much of a plan, it's more of plan for a plan.

The end result could succeed or fail, we don't know yet.

The plan that's being speculated on, will most likely not work, because as stated there's just not enough willing and available capital to save the banks.

But the administration's eventual plan might work.

It feels to me like they are stalling for time.

Who knows their plan A might work, and if it doesn't there's still plan B, a.k.a. what Sweden did.

No one should be surprised that the president isn't whipping out the Swedish solution within weeks of taking office.

Surprise socialism, does not make for a good start of a presidency, not in America.

But bank nationalization might very well still happen.
Speaking of Amazon -- I'd rather buy a book with lots of 1s and 5s than a book with straight 3s. Wouldn't you?
Unfortunately, it seems to clash loudly with one of the Ruby or Rails plugins I use (most likely rails.vim, and its RAbbrevs). Being admittedly fairly ignorant when it comes to vimscript, as well as being impatient, I removed snipMate for now. If you have a quick solution for such woes, I'd love to try it.

I'd be willing to maintain a fork on GitHub that avoids clashing with rails.vim (or whatever the issue is), if we can figure it out. Maybe I'll actually properly learn vimscript as a result.
Sadly, the proggit comments are overwhelmed by debate as to whether a small error like this means the author is an idiot. What makes this happen? It's not just debating the color of the bikeshed, it's questioning the qualifications of the Nuclear Power Plant architect on the basis of the bike shed.
I'm curious, how did you become a product manager ? (what is your background).
Incidentally, after you posted that, it got modded up.

Upon further reflection, it wasn't really that great of a comment.
See if Beagle fits for you (it can do stemming, for example).

http://beagle-project.org/Searching_Data

There's a commandline interface to it. I'm not a beagle user myself, but it looks like something you should at least check out.
More tech start-ups funded (and controlled) by VCs are shutting down as VCs try to get their money out.
Startups started by people who have a business plan to actually make money ,sell real product to real customers, rather than just attract VCs and cash in are doing rather nicely thank you.
This "Don't Click" virus may have the great benefit of giving CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) the sort of front-page news that will spur developers of social sites to adopt safe(r) cookie practices. ...and more and more sites are adopting at least some cookie-based social features.

Demonstrations that the (apparently) innocent "Don't Click" virus is poorly defended against at Twitter will likely mean that more nefarious and damaging are being cooked right now. Neophyte developers like myself keep having to remind myself that there more stringent rules need to be applied to surfing from same browser as used for database access such as phpMyAdmin:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209457

For other noobs like me, the wikipedia entry should strike the fear of black-hatting in you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery
An easier solution is to give each item a number of implied mediocre ratings (say 10 3s) to start.

1 rating, 5.0 = 35/11 = 3.18;
90 ratings, 4.5 = 435/100 = 4.35

The downside is that, since items with few ratings get mediocre scores, if there isn't a way for them to be visible, they won't get out of that rut. So a better approach might be to feature (on a "top 10" list) seven high scorers and 3 "rising stars" selected purely on average score.
> I wonder if it was really a con (which implies intent from the beginning) or if they just got carried away and were then in denial that they were seriously overextended.

I think the latter. It's far too elaborate for a con. And people are very good at persuading themselves that bad things won't happen.
Watch Criminal Minds Online
Laser Printers are a Big Source of Indoor Air Pollution
I came here to say the same thing, it is a very well written story in my opinion, which manages to be accessible, while at the same time retaining accuracy. Well done Jacquelyne Froeber and the editors who worked on the copy.

As for whether this is a big deal: Yes - in terms of science, although not necessarily a big clinical deal. Other strains may use different receptors, but this is the most common. There is also the mystery question embedded in the story: Why didn't the other strain he was infected woiith rebound
I'm guessing, but a function that can copy any object is unlikely to be as efficient as one that works with known types.

Of course, even if true, that may not matter.

See, I'm all about the weasel words today.
Why There Isn't a Perfect Ebook Reader
we only have developers
edit(I'm assuming, since i'm always wallowing in python or rails, that google desktop, regain, don't have the control over stemming and tokenization that you want...)

here's regain

http://regain.sourceforge.net/

to my knowledge, Aksyonoff's sphinx only hits mysql and postgres.

The ferret lib for ruby lists this funcitonality, i haven't tried it

http://datanoise.com/articles/2006/9/5/fun-with-ferret
Would you find such a feature to be useful?
> would you have thought it had a chance?

Sure... we had open source projects in 1999, too. Ten years is not that long ago.
You could say that, but that would be to define God as random chance - and if you want to define God in that way, I suppose I could say I believe in God. Probably not a very useful definition, however.
But the author didn't just yell wrong, he provided examples exposing the flaws in both scoring models.
This is the line of reasoning Fox uses to justify reapeating innuendo without bothering to corroborate stories or check facts. It's an embarrasment to journalism.
It was totally random. I was an English major / mass communication minor planning to be a reporter until I started playing around with HTML while editing my college newspaper (way back in 1995). I snagged a grunt job at Cooking Light magazine putting their content online, and just went from there. I don't know of anyone who set out to become a product manager, but it's a great career for certain people. Having an engineering, UI design, or even customer service background helps a lot. For consumer-facing web sites, just being a very heavy web user is an absolute requirement. Some MBA's are good in the role, but too often they see the role as a stepping stone to other opportunities. Hope this helps.
You could probably still have some success using this technique- http://aplus.rs/web-dev/insert-html-page-into-another-html-p... - which masks the fact that you're embedded in IE.
It's a safe (politically, legally, physically) place in an unstable region to base your headquarters or send your workers for R+R.
Monaco has survived for 500years for similar reasons without a great deal of mineral wealth.
I'm sorry, how is this different from just having an abbreviation using iab?
Since when 1 million users is not an audience?

mixx is a top 1000 site in Alexa.

Compete measures only American audience.
I have to admit that slices were the hardest part of learning python for me. Mostly because it took me awhile to find as clear an explanation of their "pass by value" behavior, to borrow C terminology. Slicing incredibly powerful, though and should be given greater attention in intro materials.
Google gives users a clean desk.  Yahoo gives them a messy house.
"Tell the president, your senators, and your representatives that reform -- meaning a reduction or suspension now, and a more rational approach to avoiding their use to lower wages in the future -- of H-1B can no longer wait. Our jobs depend on it."

Is anyone going to buy into this garbage?

There is an infinite amount of work that can be done. The world is in no danger of running out of work, jobs, or good jobs. The United States is much stronger because many of the most talented people want to come work here. And here's the big thing the author misses with his rah-rah-keep-our-jobs sentiment: Additional workers in an economy create NEW jobs.

Simple example: Town of 100. 10 new people move into the town. Population now 110. They create additional demand for food, housing, entertainment, and other services. So the restaurants hire 10% more cooks and waitresses, the builder hires 10% more construction workers, and the bars hire 10% more bartenders. There's more openings for plumbers, maintenance men, and new businesses. Since there's more demand for people, businesses pay a bit more for them - now these people have money. Some of their money they spend on computing/technology - which creates more money for R&D, engineering, design, coding, etc.

Trying to limit highly skilled people from coming into your country is a really, really dumb idea. If some percent of the H-1 program is being used to get unskilled workers over to the USA, refine that. But I'll tell you - a good friend of mine just got her green card after working in medical devices on an H1-1B for years here in the USA. She speaks fluent Japanese and near-native English and has made a positive difference in New York City's medical community. Then she spends money eating out, on fashion and handbags and salons, on books and movies and DVDs and Broadway, and all sorts of other great things. She makes her $60,000 per year or whatever, and spends $55,000 back into the American economy, creating jobs for people across all social classes. Those people then have more money to spend in all sorts of sectors - including technology.

The more talented people in America, the better.
Isn't calling them "lurid rumors" enough?
Wikipedia follows a different model than all open source software projects. Even if there are a large number of contributors in an open source software project, there are still a disproportionately small number of arbiters. Any random person can submit a patch, but there's no guarantee it will get in. The larger the project, the less likely it will.

Wikipedia is everyone can be a contributor, and everyone can be an arbiter.
Huh, I've almost never seen [:], would never think of it. Do people really use that? I mean it takes a lot of work to make python cryptic but I guess if you're determined anything is possible.

use deepcopy or list().

I don't even use [] or {} to create empties anymore. I much prefer explicit esp since there is proliferation of container types and it's silly, inconsistant, and confusing that dicts and lists have syntactic exceptions.

newlist = list()
newdict = dict()
newdict = defaultdict(str)

etc.

And to anuraggoel. not using [:] is not avoiding slices. just as not using
string += "ext"
(esp in loop) is not avoiding strings.
> Take a look at the posts on my blog.

what blog ? where blog?
Clickjacking has been known about for over a year. When will companies start to proactively fix these kind of exploits? It always seems to take a "sample" exploit first.
Hereby proving that one thing that the money should be spent on is economics education in schools ;)
The author seems to be complaining that MySQL doesn't use HTTP.
One of the larger problems with Portland are the consultants and business coaches that network like crazy but don't develop any skills. Connections do not equal competence. The best and the brightest in the service industries rarely need to network because they have built up an impressive track record over 20 to 30 years. In Portland, you seem to get a lot of 20 somethings that spend all day blogging and tweeting about their skill but have never honed it.
I am their target audience. I appreciate the candor shown in Carolynn's responses. And, I would likely benefit from the program. I have even considered interviewing.

But I just can't get over the fact that they're having a contest and making you pay for the prize.
Why Are Thread Safe Collections So Hard?
Looks Like Facebook Just Took The Top Spot Among Social Media Sites
That's one of the problems I have with information theoretic approaches (Shannon's entropy) being used in discussion of evolution. You're really measuring two different things.

Also the creationist sophists love mis-using information theory for faux-arguments against evolution.

Perhaps Kolmogorov complexity would be a much better measure for this.
FirePython: Firebug for Python
i think tptacek's account has been compromised
Even better - fftdc.com is still available. Quick! Register it!
> charging stations all over the state.

According to the map, over half of the state has no stations within 100 miles. Moreover, between the LA basin and the SF bay area, the stations are placed so they're only useful for folks staying at the station or just going to the next station.
No ISP network management amendment in final stimulus package