skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks!

You're not the only one to mention Python 2.x, and we've learned quite a few things about the language since we started this effort. :) I have updated the web page to mention that we now have fully-functional xtpython2.6 in the lab! It will ship with the alpha 2 release, which is due around mid-may.

Even I was surprised that coming up with this was only a couple of days of work, because the two versions of the interpreter are very similar in structure, so most adapters could be reused as-is (Ruby 1.9 → 1.8 was more… challenging, to say the least).

I only started looking into web applications, and what can be done about them. It is a more delicate target than e.g. scientific computing, because many pieces (a lot of which are written in C) are involved at each request. Interestingly, while Django is currently seeing very modest speedups (4%) on the unladen-swallow benchmarks, Spitfire is up by 70%. Oh well, this wouldn't be as fun if my TODO list were too short, would it?
I think the author did have some interesting things to say. His idea of men going to extremes on either end of the productivity scale was interesting. His points that men occupy the top rungs of society as well as are considered expendable are interesting as well.

Completely disregarding centuries/millena worth of cultural, historical and legal issues seems a little intellectually dishonest, however.

Women have had difficulty for centuries across many cultures in obtaining property rights: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/a/pr...

Women have had to fight to obtain the basic right to vote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage

Women have also had to fight to obtain the right to higher education, work in certain categories of jobs, etc...

Dismissing all the cultural, historical and legal evidence to the contrary, and chalking it all up to evolutionary pressures seems a little dishonest. It's hard to evolve aggressive women, when aggressive women are imprisoned or killed. You still the effects of that in some very conservative muslim countries. I imagine that would have some evolutionary pressure on culling certain aggressive genes in women.

In fact, it seems dangerously close to, "well, men evolved to be stronger, therefore, only men should be able to be ['soldiers', 'policemen', 'construction workers', 'etc...'].
Ditto. No extra scrollbars on that page.
Finally, you may ask how the servos are being driven. Well, routers are used to send bits of information down a series of twisted pair wires usually. Guess what it takes to send packeted information? An IC that would work really well as a PWM! I did some haxoring around on this, and read what other nerds had done on the internet, and the next think you know I have a servo with a Cat5E plug on the end of it.

I'd love a lot more detail about this "then a miracle occurred" stage of the build. Drive a servo with an ethernet port?! Anyone know how to do this? That sounds crazy cool.
Rails was extracted from Basecamp. The authentication mechanism is something of their own MVC design.

The most popular authentication libraries do store salted nonce hashes by default.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesthetic_learning 15% of people are kinaesthetic learners.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_learning 20% of people are auditory learners.

Since the only remaining group is visual learners, 65% of people must be visual learners.
Are We in a Narcissism Epidemic?
Kill your RSS reader, and use my amazing system for browsing the Web.
For me I enjoy 90% of media from the cloud and have not purchased any additional storage drives in a few years.

This looks cool, but I do wonder if the advent of free streaming media (i.e. Hulu) has caused a large decrease in demand for the storage drive market.
Cassandra:a better analysis
It's now possible, even easy, to get 100Mbps Internet most places in the world (even the US), so a 54Mbps connection won't be adequate for much longer.

FWIW, I used wired between my main computers, and only use wireless when people bring their laptops over or something. Gigabit is faster than even 802.11n. (Although, incidentally, my Thinkpad doesn't support jumbo frames, and hence it's about as fast as 100Mbps ethernet in practice. intel--.)
Where I went to school there was another reason why students had virtually no in-person contact with their professors: pride. Seeing a professor during their office hours was considered a sign of weakness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_influenza#H5N1
I think thinking of them as a separate segment carries a certain danger. They're just computers; in a small form factor, but computers. Build a nice, simplified interface if you like, but there's little to no reason not to offer that simplified interface on larger computers, too. A person who may not want the full power of a computer may still want a larger screen and better keyboard.

There's also no reason to artificially limit the software load, especially if you start with open source. These machines are perfectly capable of a wide variety of operations, pretty much everything except video editing and heavy-duty graphics editing.

A netbook dropped back in time three or four years ago would be considered an excellent machine, except oddly crippled by the somewhat underpowered CPU (even by 2006 standards). But otherwise well-endowed on IO, decent screen, ample storage (especially the RAM), etc, all at a price that would have caused rioting in front of the stores come Black Friday.

I'll say it again, to be clear: There may be room for specialized interfaces for certain users, but there's little need to bind that to the netbook form factor. Both power-user and low-power-user interfaces can be used almost all the way up and down the product line. (Even the high-powered gaming machines could use a simplified interface just fine, as long as the owner could play WOW.)
Unfortunately you're incorrect.

Accidents are very strictly defined, and none have happened in the history of the US Navy.

There are incidents where reactor water is released into the sea. These are rare, and the radioactivity released is almost minimal. Please recognize that there are different types of radioactivity depending on the elements involved. The highly radioactive particles remain part of the fuel itself. The average volume of water in a reactor contains particles that have quite a short half-life and are typically not widely dangerous.

Finally, I was speaking of the US Navy which does operate differently than the UK Navy.
I agree with your point, and I didn't mean my post as contention. There have been, and will always be pirates, but I do think that there's a rise in piracy due to torrent software been much easier and more convenient to use.
The Need for Language Specific Packaging
Being able to get access to plaintext passwords is obviously a terrible security flaw. But would it be much less bad if an attacker got access to a lot of hashed passwords? A dictionary attack will get you many of the plaintexts in a reasonable timespan. Possibly users with dictionary words as passwords are also more likely to share them across sites; certainly the intersection is nonempty.

People with strong passwords might remain safe, but not necessarily. A bruteforce is much more worthwhile when you're trying to crack thousands of passwords at a time. If there's no salting and the hash algorithm is widely used, you may not even need to worry about getting exactly the original rather than something which happens to collide with it.

Obviously hashing is still better than no hashing, especially since there will be cases where only a few passwords are leaked. But if a database containing passwords is stolen, it may be reasonable to assume all those passwords are compromised, even if they were hashed.
http://www.industrialtechnology.co.uk/index.php?pageId=47...
So what's the problem?

This just makes college a little bit more like real life. You get out of it what you choose. "Beer and circus" or books and computers? Your choice. Less competition for those of us who choose, in college or in business, to turn lemons into lemonade.
No can do. 8% of our userbase still uses it. Not my decision to make, unfortunately.

I've used the javascript tool. "1 error, 2 warnings," with no explanations? I'd rather copy/paste the code into jslint and run it manually. It also doesn't find some of the things that the original jslint tool does.

Really, it's "awesome," but only if you haven't used something like VS's Javascript support. Sorry, but it's lightyears away. It's kind of like the difference between using nano and using gnome's default text editor...
A history of MIT pranks
Mea culpa, and I agree. We have since switched to the Ruby Benchmark Suite and the unladen-swallow benchmarks as a baseline, so future numbers will at least reference those, and we will generally try to publish our branches and scripts (also for potential incorporation in upstream).

P.-S. — The white paper was in fact written shortly before the “computed-goto” patch appeared, and you are right that the dispatch techniques are very similar. Ruby 1.9 goes a bit further, however, by allowing a selection of different techniques at compile-time, the default of which (on x86-64 Linux) will use the opcode addresses directly as “bytecode” (i.e. direct-threaded vs. token-threaded code according to current Wikipedia terminology). Koichi Sasada can probably tell you more than I do about the difference in performance for Ruby code—if there is any.
The Secret Of Google's Book Scanning Machine Revealed
I used to use a similar system as the author. Then I upgraded to RSS. It seems as if he didn't have good system for RSS, but then found a good system for bookmarks. I use RSS, but I also use tabs. Instead of reading blogs in Google Reader, I use j (next item) and s (star to read later) with one hand, and middle click with the other. I get just the interesting stories, on their sites, and I can wade through uninteresting stories quicker. I never check a site redundantly either.
Is it open source or do i need to buy the software
And yahoo's back in the game...
Yeah, I found that too. That just seems to be factory servos (big ones) with ethernet built in. The article suggests that there is somehow a way to reprogram the PHYS ics in the linksys to output PWM to drive the servos that were already in his rc copter.

I'd be really curious how this is possible since I use spakrfun serial servo controllers now that are expensive and require full serial ports to run that often aren't found on tiny openWRT-able routers.
How is that? It's my browser running on my computer. Shouldn't I have final say over what I do and don't see?

Nobody has a right to show me advertising, just as I don't have a right to read someone's content. If publishers have a problem with it they need to find a way to not display content to clients who are blocking ads.

But this isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about NoScript using my computer to interfere with other plugins. The behavior is unexpected and unwanted.

If the behavior is "ok" then the NoScript people shouldn't have any problem owning up to it, even broadcasting it to all their users. But I think we all know how that would play out.

It would be no different than if when you installed Firefox on your computer it made Safari break, or included some obscure option deep in its configuration menu like "[x] Break Safari."
How is using hash passwords "a lot of extra work"? Seriously, what part of that is a lot of work? The password reset feature?
My reasoning is that usually we call out things that can actually allow an attacker to compromise the site, and don't spend as much time on the million things that might make an attacker's life easier after that compromise has occurred.

The rest of your argument is a moot point, because I'm not asserting that passwords should be stored plaintext.
You shouldn't have executives in your startup.
Business Value Game - a workshop on XP2009
And despite that traffic jump, the statistic that's been mentioned a lot recently is that Twitter only has a 40% retention rate. So it has 43% more users, but only about a 17% gain in actual users that will stay. (Something tells me my math is off though, and I'm out of it from allergy meds)
I've been moving towards using aggregators, such as HN and reddit, as my RSS readers. I found myself not reading half the items in my blogs, and then finding the items I was reading in the HN/reddit feeds.

I now only have a few blogs (that don't come up on these aggregators; I only post links to them if they're relevant/interesting) and some strips I read in Google Reader and it works much better.

I've found that letting a community decide what I read much more productive for me (and there's always lists of "unapproved" items available) - you just have to find a community that seems interested in what you are.
Yup, the password reset is extra boring work. Although it is surprising that 37signals haven't done that.
Very true, and a point I didn't consider.
It's a really cool idea.

It's tough however. If your target audience is the main stream public, which it seems like it, then there will always be a mental barrier of learning how to operate yet another machine. Most of this audience don't even know what a server is.

Aside from that, you will be competing with every cloud-base service out there, even the ones that are not on the radar yet. You end up spreading your resource to develop interfaces for music, photo, documents, etc, while sites like flikr only need to worry about photo.

Personally I'd pick an easier battle field, but then again, what's an entrepreneur but someone who innovates and fights hard battles.
Like weaksauce suggested, some sort of auto-detection (although build an override too) would be a good start. A simple addition would be to make links clickable.

You could look into overlaying tweets onto a Google/Live Earth map (although this would only be useful for those tweeted from a phone with geolocational data).
I wouldn't describe that as intellectual dishonesty. He might be wrong, but he's not trying to trick you.
Isn't 40% a high retention rate?
At the macro scale, home windmills are a stupid idea. Anything can be done more economically at scale. Wind farms leverage economies of scale that don't work at home, so they can easily make more power per unit labor with the same hardware. If Jellyfish were efficient, they would be more efficiently used in wind farms.

At the micro scale, some people will buy them despite the economic inefficiency as a fell-good hobby project, but they'll never become widespread without being economical.

Also: small wind turbines make a fairly annoying constant noise. I'd vote to ban them from my neighborhood.
Why do I think this is a story made-up by someone pushing classical music? We all know Einstein is worshipped by nerds. Even if this were true, would you take Einstein's advice on fashion. You people who worship Einstein are pathetic. This story is NAZI. Do you wannabe's like Vogner too?
Good idea.

8:00 a.m. - Hacker News

9:00 a.m. - Hacker News

10:00 a.m. - Hacker News

11:00 a.m. - Hacker News

oh wait
I recall a mini-scandal in the math department of my alma mater. A department member (but not a tenure-track professor) with a PhD who primarily taught calculus courses was fired. By all accounts, he was a good teacher and required much of his students. However, I recall that the professors' union was opposed to allowing non-faculty to teach because it was a slippery slope toward faculty elimination. Nevermind that few math faculty members wanted to teach large calculus classes and that those professors probably weren't very good at it.

I understand the value of taking a higher-level course with a world-class expert in the subject, but calculus for poets barely requires a math undergrad to teach adequately.

Another sign that disruption in education is coming...
The comments are impressive... pretty much all of them are people rushing to the defense of 37 Signals.
This is a boring, windy, piece of garbage writing.
For a cool example of CRT simulation, check out Xscreensaver's Apple II mode, written by tlb.
I can't tell what is more impressive - Oprah or Twitter.
> Of the four YC partners, she is the best judge of people, and that's the main thing we're judging at this early stage.

"Best judge of people" is sufficiently nonspecific to not be a testable claim.

If you mean she is best at judging who would be the most successful if you fund them, you lack the evidence to make that claim, as you don't know what would have happened with all the people you didn't fund, which is almost all of them.

If you mean that the ones that she picked -- but you didn't -- performed better than the ones you picked -- but she didn't -- it's possible that she is valuable not because she is so accurate, but that you are so inaccurate.

The notion that YC is especially good at choosing successes is not borne out by your results, or you'd all be a lot richer. And as mentioned, you don't know which were the ones that "got away" -- founders that went back to school because they didn't get in, but would have been even larger successes. Reddit would have been in that group if you hadn't had a last-minute change of heart.

As for the relentless founders, was it really that difficult to recognize that Sam Altman was one of those people? For the obvious cases, it's apparent to all four of you; and for the less-obvious cases, you lack the data to know how many were false negatives. All you know is the false positives; but that's going to be the most common outcome anyway.

Being ramen profitable working on something you don't especially like is silly compared to what you COULD be making at jobs in the Bay Area. A website is not a startup, and most of them lack any major potential, barring irrational market exuberance.

Considering Yahoo! Paid 6 billion for Broadcast.com and 4 billion for Geocities shortly after paying 95 million for ViaWeb just shows the most important skill is finding someone with billions of dollars and talking them into throwing it away on your unprofitable business.
I don't quite understand what you are saying. What phenomenon are you trying to explain, and what is your explanation?
There is an obvious stopping point provided by the concentrations that naturally occur in water drunk by large populations. If chemical X occurs naturally at varying concentrations one can interpret poor health in areas of low concentration as suggesting that it is an essential mineral and that a little should be added where the naturally occuring concentration is low.

Conversely, if high concentrations are linked with poor health that suggests it is toxic and water treatment in areas with high concentrations should seek to remove some of it.

If however the concentration in question does not already occur naturally in water drunk by large populations, you lack the vital data on the consequences of low-level, life time exposure. You are basically stuck and should leave well alone.
Yes, Farmer John, there is another side of Swine Flu | Dog Stories | WayCoolDogs.com
If the password hashing scheme is secure (bcrypt, as tptacek repeatedly recommends) dictionary attacks become non-trivial and slow. It's still possible to brute force the database, of course, but the time required makes the attack less profitable.

I would thus argue that a secure hashing schema is significantly better. This is assuming the programmer uses bcrypt in the first place, which is a questionable assumption: even popular projects like phpBB use MD5 for password hashing. (The fools.)

If MD5 is used then I would wholeheartedly agree with you: I've used http://milw0rm.com 's MD5 hash breaking service plenty of times to know why I shouldn't use that algorithm in my own code. (One of my old passwords is in the database, but I'm not telling you which one.)
Yes, and no I think.

There are some serious advantages of building this kind of system one house a time instead of in large scale wind or solar farms.

The transmission costs, for one. If you generate the electricity in the same location it is used it is more efficient.

Also, this way the new grid can be created slowly using many small investments made by individuals instead of having to make one huge investment immediately.
> and her judgments about whom to fund have proven to be accurate.

As mentioned to Paul, you lack the data to establish what would have happened if you had funded other people instead.

> Sorry to disappoint you by not being an all-girl seed funding firm with thigh-high pink boots.

Start-up, not investment group. Referencing the lack of technical female founders, as mentioned in the article.

What you guys do is obviously not technical in the sense we were talking about if JL is better than the other three of you.
China has 'canceled US credit card': US congressman
This sounds suspiciously like a very annoying and universally hated feature from Microsoft Office 2000.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=Office+2000+clipboard

:-)
Techcrunch Adds In-house URL shortener
There's no reason you can't use a system like that within an RSS reader. I have a couple dozen priority buckets in Google Reader, used to similar effect.

That way, I can easily declare RSS bankruptcy on spammy, low-value feeds such as TechCrunch without worrying about missing something important.
Way Cool!

I did a hack a few years ago that made a PSX Dualshock pretend to be a buddy box. A PIC polled the joypad, then fed a PPM stream into a Multiplex 3030 xmtr. Having a centre-sprung throttle was neat - but other than that - it was not the best control experience ever.

From the eminent comfort of this armchair: If I was going to do this - I would have left the router on the ground and used a couple of XBee modules, with a micro (PIC, AVR) airborne to drive servos (4017 to spread 1 pwm pin to the servos)
Last month I visited Rhode Island for the 1st time. I went to the posh coastal town of Newport and I saw llamas clearing some properties' lawns! One of the weirdest things ever!
man 8 sendmail

ps. and yes, you will get into spam lists no matter what you send, and you will have to cope with it as everyone else does.
Ron Eglash on African fractals
I use Google Reader for low-volume sources where I want to read every post (mostly friends' blogs, a few high-quality tech bloggers, work-related stuff), and a Planet Venus page for high-volume feeds that I don't mind missing sometimes (Twitter, kottke.org, Daring Fireball, O'Reilly Radar, ...). The Planet site updates only twice a day (so I don't check it constantly) and only saves the last 100 posts (so posts don't pile up if I'm away for a couple days).
Here's a simple solution - get rid of tenure. Tenure was originally a protection for professors to speak freely without the fear of getting fired. The result however is an ossification of faculty that doesn't care because they've attained a level of job security not found in the rest of the economy.
Really, this isn't a hard concept to grasp: RSS is not email. You don't need to read everything. You don't need to feel overwhelmed. You don't need to feel guilty. What an RSS reader allows you to do is have a central location to categorize and read updates from all the sites you want to follow, and you get the added benefit of knowing what you've already seen. So what if you have 10000+ unread items across all feeds in your aggregator?