skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The redesigned Walmarts are actually far more pleasant to shop in. It's been a while since I've been in one, so I forgot exactly what they changed. It was definitely less suffocating and the signs were prettier. Who needs good business practices when you have good typography?

In any case, I don't really buy into the whole "Walmart is pure evil" thing. It's cute how some enlightened cities do everything they can to prevent them from moving in so small businesses aren't hurt, then they wonder why their lower income residents are doing so poorly. I think independent retailers are great and I support them whenever I can, but they're clearly more expensive, and it's silly for the people who can afford to have a conscience to force that choice on those who can't.
I'm a long-time blosxom user. I can't stand not having plain-text files for my entries (via Emacs). I use Markdown and Smartypants for HTML styling. The plugin architecture is still unrivaled in blog software, imo. I've used three or four of the hundreds of plugins and written 8 or 9 of my own (specific to my needs). Still loving it.
You're not alone. It's also for 24/7 news junkies meets ADHD generation. Daily updated blogs weren't short and frequent enough, hence Twitter.

Personally, when I'm not working I prefer to lose myself in a book at the bookstore. Being able to block out everything and completely focus your mind on learning something is refreshing and energizing.

My good friends will always be good friends, and despite being far away, when we visit every year or two, it's just like old times. I don't need to be up on every detail of their lives every second of the day in order not to forget who they are or our friendship.
Bad guys don't have the freedom they used to be, let's face it most of the world is closely monitored and American Idol gets better ratings on the news.

You want bad guys? Go to Africa.
Ask HN:  Is mobile internet a threat to creativity?
Creative ideas seem to come when the mind is doing nothing in particular. That's why long walks for example are helpful in that regard.

But mobile internet threatens to take away these periods of extended idleness, thus threatening creativity.
They have to find a killer
You must have missed this part:

"How about a collection? If an author writes enough essays, eventually they can be collected into a 200-page book and distributed commercially. Many authors are experts on only a single subject and should not be encouraged to continue scribbling."
Yes, that is my understanding. The officers of the company are personally liable for the cash if there is no other source of funding.
Mouse Gestures Redox - Emulates Opera mouse gestures and now has rocker gestures for the mac.

http://www.mousegestures.org/

Speed Dial - Emulates the Opera speed dial home page.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4810
I'm not sure I agree with this catagorization but the article does make me interested in learning more about Herschel.
Companies rebrand/change their logo all the time, where in the article does it provide data comparing the rate of change of company names in down times vs the good times?

This is just fitting a convenient 'depression 2.0' story to some logo redesigns; if this happened two years ago, the same redesigns would be interpreted entirely differently, perhaps it would be about 'increasing market share in a more globalized world'.
"Never" is far too strong a word, but in some cases, you might be surprised.
It worked for shrinkwrap software, where release cycles are large. It has not worked for web software, where releases can happen daily. They can never catch up.
"Dell to Discontinue Our Favorite Hackintoshable Netbook, the Mini 9"
My understanding is that the choice is completely optional.

While Vidoop is legally responsible for paying them, I can see how some employees would rather have valuable merchandise now than wait what could potentially be a very long time for their wages in cash.
Errr, subprocess has been around since 2.4...
You probably have to roll your own version if you want it. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090421184939AA...

I haven't looked too far into this domain but I would imagine that it is not too difficult to do on a smallish scale.

On the actual form itself have some kind of scale and position marker in the top left and bottom right corners to give you orientation and scale of the scanned image. Then do some image analysis at predefined positions on the page. (of course you need to take into consideration the scale of the sheet and the orientation to make sure your offset vector is going in the right direction and distance per question.)

edit: this may be what you are looking for:

http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~a3seth/udai/OMRProj/
I'm quite glad we nabbed that particular hire (your potential intern), and I think he's very happy with his decision as well. Ironically, he was probably one of the better informed people we've hired lately in terms of being aware of what his options are.

I seriously doubt I could do 2x better in industry, especially considering cost-of-living calculations. And our location is an asset, liability. Seriously; a gorgeous beach across the street from the office? And you can actually afford a place on the water if you want? You can't beat that.

I think you're basing your opinions on a mental image you have (and most people have) of who we are and what we do that is inaccurate.

As mentioned in the article, we were a separate company purchased last year. We still operate fairly independently from our corporate overlords (someone actually used that reference when we were first meeting them). We have exactly one layer of management for any given project. Our customers work with a PM at most, but usually also directly with the engineers.

While I'm sure your criticisms are quite accurate for many large government jobs, for us (and a number of others I know of doing some similar work), the situation is quite different.

In regards to people working here because they don't know their other options, let me put it this way -- in the company's entire existence, we've had exactly two employees leave for another job, and it was to another small contractor, not the commercial sector. I'd suggest it's unlikely that the retention rate is so high just because we're all so ignorant of our options. There's a lot of reasons for it -- I'd be happy to talk about it more at Defcon if you're there this year.
Doing a little more online research, it seems like I am looking for a free/open-source solution for OMR (optical mark recognition) using a generic image scanner or PDF (instead of a specialized device that just scans OMR forms).

I wonder if there are computer/machine vision hackers who might know where to find (or put together) a good solution.
For what it's worth, I agree. Survey's show only 40% of new users returning after a month. But Facebook was more like that, and it's not dead yet. There's the Stephen Fry | Sockington style Twitter mediated humour, and that's fine but it's not enough to make me put up with the inane "I'm drinking coffee now! OMG!" drivel from so many people I vaguely know. Question is, what proportion of people enjoy that? I suspect that if I worked in a cubicle my need for displacement activity would make me an avid twitter user.
Does Zed realize that Guido's response was a joke? http://blip.tv/file/1931026

On a more serious note, I think that high bar to getting things into python is a good thing. What if Zed's changes were accepted, as is, into the Python codebase today? What about when the next guy comes with his alternative APIs for option parsing and email along with a new standard for templates? Should they include them, too? How many completely different APIs for the same thing should they include in the standard library?

Any software system as large as Python is going to be imperfect -- it is constrained by backwards compatibility and conflicting requirements. However, Zed is free to build whatever he wants outside the core and make it available to the world. If it catches on enough, maybe his followers will go through the social process to get it into the core. This process helps to ensure consensus, consistency, and quality.

For a thoughtful response from a core Python developer, see Brett Cannon's blog post: http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2009/05/staleness-of-standard-lib....
Interesting.

I actually use Ovi to host music online for free, because MySpace won't work properly.

Ovi is good!

Other than that, I have a couple of software projects which would be ideal for a Symbian smartphone, so this is great.
Ask PG - What is the worst and best score of a submission/comment?
I think everybody want to know, at least "I" want.
so would India outsource its work to say Sri Lanka??
YAWN - yet another web2.0 network
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If it was an llc, they would not be responsible for the wages except in extenuating circumstances I believe.
Criminal Law Illinois
Criminal lawyers and criminal attorneys can be found at the Lincoln law group of Salvatore C. Miglore and Associates, providing criminal defense lawyers and offering divorce law representation.
Around 1995/6 I played with GNNPress, a browser/editor that implemented the "original" vision of the Web: you could GET a page, view it, WYSIWYG edit it, then PUT it back to the server. Unfortunately, that vision isn't really compatible with templating and CMSes, since you want to edit the "source" version of the page, not the "object code" HTML that comes out of the CMS.
Silicon Valley Google Wave Discussion lunch tomorrow (5/31)
Come, Bring a Friend and let's discuss Google Wave over lunch.

Please use the following link: http://www.socializr.com/event/976099347
to RSVP

Feel free to forward to anyone who might be interested.
Err, that should be: "asset, not a liability". You get the idea.
wow. 50-100 tabs? I find it useful with less than a dozen.
Minnesota Storage Facilities - An Overview
Minnesota storage facilities have a wide range of storerooms to choose from. The sizes range from as little as a 5x5 to as big as 10x20. Hence, it is very easy to find a storeroom that caters to your specific needs.
Find advisers and mentors who have run and scaled small businesses. Talk to them casually and ask if they'd be willing to offer advice on occasion. That's how I did it, and I built to 15 employees while avoiding many (but not all!) of the common business basics blunders due to their assistance. If you find their advice valuable, you can even formalize a relationship with these advisers and provide a token number of warrants in exchange for a bigger time commitment.

I'm always happy to help people get started so feel free to email me.
Facebook-Style Expanding Textboxes With jQuery
thanks!!!

I just found a webpage with a python script to do cel shading.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/emilio.aguirre/

and also a Blender toon shading tutorial here http://download.blender.org/documentation/oldsite/oldsite.bl...
True, although in a way it would have been nice for the web to have evolved to be the CMS, instead of the opposite direction that it did take.
All the essays in such a book don't have to be from the same author.
According to my old COBOL professor, it's notoriously hard to outsource COBOL development. Apparently Americans were the first and (for the most part) only to rely on big iron so much to need mainframes.

Side note: I had my class in COBOL in 2005, my dad took it in roughly 1975.
The best training regime for X is actually doing X. If you want to work in TV you get a job as an assistant. If you want to be a ski instructor, go work at a resort. Etc.

Go work for a successful, multi-person small business, the kind you want to build yourself someday. Study it from the inside. Be useful & dedicated, ask questions, and make it clear you want to learn as much as you can.
I was just lurking on #gamedev and found a nice 2D graphics program called Graphics Gale (for pixel art). There's a free version and a shareware version. the shareware version is around $20

here's the link http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

Anybody knows a better free alternative for this?
I'm wondering what will happen to all the open ID's that were created including mine and all the accounts they were used on. There's no info on their site.
I expect we'll be just fine.

From my own experience, when I'm tired I want simple, easily-digestible input - stories to read, video-games to play, websites filled with fresh user-nominated content. Without internet access, I'm just bored, not creative. On the other hand, when I'm well-rested and feeling alert and active, I can't not be creative - the idea of sitting down and passively consuming ideas would be just as torturous as being creative while tired. I've got to write code, take photos, go for a walk, something.

If worst comes to worst, we'll always have the shower and the toilet as enforced creativity timeouts. :)
I've had similar frustrations with PrototypeJS. I've tried contributing, but them choosing to include the patches is solely based on their mood as far as I can tell. I've even went so far to completely rewrite the AJAX portion (without drastic changes and shifting to better event handling+aborts)...

There are a lot of frustrations in doing that and it pretty much being moot on the politics of the community.
It's interesting to compare the Python situation to that of Perl.

With Perl, there's a dozen solutions on CPAN for every problem, and you can pick and choose to find the best one. In Python, there's usually one that's had the blessing from above, and like-it-or-lump-it, that's the one everyone's using.

But the end result is, with Perl, in the long run, even though it's more work, the community ends up eventually filtering through the choices and homes in on the nearst-optimal solution. With Python, the higher-ups make the decision and you get what you get.

What's striking is that even with all its faults, Perl still can often win. Python fans look down at the playing field and they say, "How can this be? How is Perl still scoring goals? Python's got more equipment, a more detailed playbook, fancier training facilities, bigger crowds of fans, even snazzier jerseys. Perl's team is scruffy, scarred, and unkempt; they train on old equipment, and half the time they don't even seem to be taking the game seriously. Yet they still manage to score!"

As an aside: I like how even though Zed said he's done with the over-the-top persona, the real Zed is still showing through like always. :)
I think it's driven more by their respective business models. Google is more focused on incubating fresh ideas and growing those ideas into the next established market where as Microsoft tends to reiterate on accepted ideas, Market the @%#* out of it, and our favorite (step 3) profit.

Why is it that the big money is there to eek out a Nth of a percent but not available for fresh big ideas? I'm not at all disagreeing with you, I just think that's an interesting point. I wish the world were the other way around it might be a better place (or maybe there'd just be less "big money" for having tried). Maybe if MS let smaller groups run wild more often they'd see more of these elusive "innovative ideas".
That's a good reason to use OpenID delegation. As long as you remain in control of your domain name your OpenID can never become invalid, even if the provider you delegate to goes out of business.

https://myvidoop.com/help/what-is-delegation

Of course that's only a good solution for relatively technical people like us. Perhaps someone should create a service that automates this process for the average internet user: pick a domain name and OpenID provider, pay your $10 (per year), and you're done.
The Twitter Explosion
Owed wages have very high precedence when all creditors line up for whatever's left... but if there's no cash and no one to loan/invest more money, employees may not be made whole.
Jump in head first, when something comes up that you don't know, crack open Google and do a search. If you can't find an answer, go ask around the more knowledgeable people you know or post on HN
While it can be taken too far, there are reasons for that attitude, too. I think the most important one is that until you sit down and try to write a patch that actually meets all the relevant needs, you don't have good odds of making a really strong engineering criticism. Any idiot can sit on the sidelines and throw stones.

For instance, Zed says he wrote an options parser and it sounds like he wants it to ship with Python. Well, has he made the API reverse compatible? If not, is his really so much better that it's worth breaking reverse compatibility? Should we now ship two option parsers? These are questions that are easy to elide over in a blog post, but must be solved in the process of building a real patch, and criticisms that come from a true, honest attempt to build a real patch are much more valuable.

(Also, note the distinction I draw between simply replacing the option parser Python ships with because you have something better, vs. balancing the desire to not break old code against the better choice. Presumably Zed doesn't have years of code written against the options parsing module that Python ships with; those who do will have rather different priorities when it comes to deciding whether to ship a new one, if it breaks their code.)

At work, I frequently come across old code, go "This is stupid!", and replace it. Somewhat less frequently, I come across old code, say "This is stupid!", but discover in the process of replacing it why it was done that way. (No comments, of course.) It would be easy for me to go yell "It's stupid!" in both cases, but until I actually spend some time fixing it, my criticism is objectively less valuable.

There are other reasons too, this is just what I think is the best.

Let me repeat my first point so it is both my first last: This attitude can be taken too far. But the seed of the attitude is there for good reason.

See also: http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy (Note I don't think Zed has "stop energy"; he has code and he is pushing for things to be done. But I think this is related to the "show me the patches" issue, because in the general open source case it is one of the easiest ways to throw stop energy at somebody.)
Illinois Criminal Lawyer
The law firm of Salvatore C. Miglore and Associates, located in Wheaton, Illinois covers criminal legal matters including juvenile crimes, white collar crimes, retail theft, and divorce law.
The staleness of the standard library and adding new things
Take Charge of Your Shopping Situation
One facet which the internet has completely revolutionized is that of shopping. Prior to virtual reality, people had to rely on physical shopping centers, catalogue shopping or 24 hour television shopping channels to do their shopping.
how much time does it take to type 140 characters?

If you want to say something thoughtful and not generate noise into the tweetsphere, it takes a long time and a lot of tries to express your thought intelligently in 140 characters. At least, it does for me. I agree with you, however, that he should try it. Twitter is one of those things that are hard to explain because of their simplicity.
The Wizardry of Id: a profile of John Carmack's programming (David Kushner)
Hang on is your sql LL? in which case writing a top down parser is not too difficult.. especially if you use flex for your scanner...
In terms of what it does for me, it's a solution, since it gets rid of the problem I have. Isn't it?

Either way, I'd like to hear other solutions. I'm not content wasting my life away with busywork assigned in school, and I do not like the fact that mild academic dishonesty is necessary to combat that, so I would gladly listen to other suggestions.

By the way, 'mild' is mild. I'm not talking about stealing code or copying projects or anything. I'm talking about (every so often) asking a friend for answers to questions on near-worthless homework assignments.

As a side note, I'm not exactly sure why I'm being downvoted. Is there a more reasonable way to discuss this?
Great advice, but alas, I am not in a position to do that at the moment due to prior commitments.

I'm interested in learning as much as I can right now so that when the time is right I'm as prepared as I can be.
make sure you check the licences... different licences apply to yacc and bison generated parsers...
It's not hard - just ask someone. Seriously. The mechanics aren't particularly hard, and if you act in good faith, the vast majority of mistakes are fixable. Step one is by far the hardest (assuming you're including "selling it to customers" in the "make something people want").
I don't think this is a very valid comparison. Sourceforge is not popular as a repository for a number of the more "modern" languages, and seems to focus more on "end user ready" projects than modules, plug-ins, etc, which is perhaps the primary delivery format for projects in the script-y languages.

Even if you included more repositories, though, still - what's the point? It's good to see trends, yes, but at least try and keep them in the same general domain. No-one is going to be making a choice between developing in C or in Ruby; they are different worlds in so many ways. And even counting projects is a bad metric in itself; someone starting a C project might be expected to have some reason for doing so, and thus he might be likely to at least half-finish it; Ruby "projects" are so easy to start that many developers don't seem to feel the day has really begun until they've tossed off half a dozen crappy new gems.

Nice talking point I guess but I wouldn't read much into these. And personally I am happy to see the fast rate of change and evolution. I would like to see it accelerate even faster. In particular I am hoping to see a mass migration towards a more distributed, federated project hosting paradigm; hopefully the next step after everyone is comfortable with git and the other DSCM systems, which will render this kind of "trends" article even harder to write :D
I second OpenFire, though it has an annoying LGPL license. Ideally, a sub-protocol can be written for Wave as a subset of the IM/XMPP Transfer plugin.
Er, I don't get this. "MUCH CASH MONEY DOLLARS DO YOU MAKE DAWG" has never been a sensitive topic for me or my friends, and none of these founder-related questions would be either. Then again, maybe it's different in the US.