skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of you needs to build a secret lair and plot to take over the world so that the two of you can become arch-nemeses. The Intel HT spat from a couple years back just wasn't nearly epic enough to hold my attention.
Ask HN: project ideas for a noob
Hi, I just learned programming for about a year. I am familiar with a few programming languages such as python, scheme and java. My experiences with them include 1 OO programming course using Java and 2 courses using scheme and python. I feel I want to advance working on some simple projects but not sure where to start. Ideally the problem is not too simple or too complex. I have been reading source codes on sourceforge but not many really suit me. (either uninteresting or complex) So no idea what I should work on. Could you please share your experience with me about your first major/minor programming project that made your friends say, "wow"?

PS, I prefer writing in python or scheme.
Infrequently Asked Questions about Perl
I find your comment rather astute. I have great eyesight and a high resolution monitor, but these diagrams are too busy to really be practical on a conventional PC monitor at this time.

The Amazon mockup is a great example. It uses 50% more screen real estate and nearly illegibly small fonts. I can hack it on my 1600x1200 monitor but that would be hell on a PC running at 1024x768 with low color depth (or no anti-aliasing) and a bunch of spyware/toolbars installed.

Amazon also uses the data from people clicking links and browsing to analyze customer preferences. You can't do that with all of the data on one screen.
This article gives the impression that the class of '09 is actually entitled to have wonderful, high-paying jobs. It's a job market, no one is entitled to anything. It sucks, but the faster these gen-Y'ers face the harsh reality, the better. There's nothing to gain in whining and denial.
Wow no one has said "thats why a recession is the best time to start a business"
nice concept--use gmail for productivity rather than switching to specific apps--but fluffy post otherwise.
Isn't that just an assumption? There are other reasons to fume.
Oh please. Only ~75,000 people live in Andorra and 80% of their economy derives from tourism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorra. You might as well compare the USA with Brunei.
the thing is, with a good quality SLR, auto is amazing for quality shots, especially if you take photos in a "bursty" way (ie 4-8 shots at once) because it'll sample a number of candidate good fstop vs shutter speed configuration points, and thence if you've configured it properly and chose a sane ISO, you can also construct a High dynamic range photo and hence with a little work, get the naked eye experience in the photo! (and you can always delete the one's that don't work well for you)

playing with fstop and shutter speed by hand is all well and good and fun, but unless you're taking art shots or action shots, auto on a good quality modern camera will definitely be very very nice on average.
It's the Konami Code. Here's a list of other sites that accept it (includes Digg and jQuery among others):

http://www.konamicodesites.com/
Apache Commons is very widely used.
I admit I haven't studied QM, but I believe that it's relativistic. Maybe you have confused General Relativity with Special Relativity? QM is incompatible with GR, but I think it's based on SR.
9, It was a Philips MSX. Programmed LOGO on it. :) so much fun making the turtle move around.
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum too, but I was 20.
"correlation does not mean causation"

Stop saying that.

First, you're saying it wrong: correlation does not imply cause. Second, you're misinterpreting the implication: a correlation certainly could indicate a causal relationship, but it doesn't have to indicate a causal relationship. In other words, you're not making an argument, unless you show that there's a reason that a causal relationship should be discounted.

In this case, the French spend enough money on public health and social benefits that there's reason to believe that the relationship is more than coincidental.
Assume we do this experiment. We can do it as many times as we wish, changing the positions, velocities, etc. of the bodies as we wish, until we have as many cases as we want.

Do you believe we will not succeed in detecting a pattern and predicting how any such system will behave?
I don't know what you mean by "fast" or "powerful" but...

I own and use an inspiron 640m. It's about 340 dollars with shipping on eBay right now. It's a core duo, runs 3D apps pretty well, runs pretty fast once you put 2 gigs of ram in it.

Some of you might be thinking how slow it must be... but for text editing and compiling? Computers aren't getting much faster nowadays, just more cores. The primary slow down on most computers is the hard drive and RAM. In that regard, it runs more than adequately. I can do normal computing stuff: Code::Blocks/OpenOffice, play some low-end games, watch movies (it supports 720p). Boot time is very good on Ubuntu 9.04 - about 40 seconds. It's also very light at only 6 pounds. Battery life is good too, on full bright I can get about 5 hours still.

At this price, you could get 5 or 6 of these instead of one high-end computer. Hard to go wrong with that. I would even recommend getting this if you like the idea of a net-book but don't like the small screen. I love this computer :)
That is an average of 5500+ dollars per year, ~463 per month. Depending on who you ask that is a big deal.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600632
The core mp3 player, however, is in actionscript.
About 8 years old. 'twas a windows 95 desktop computer. I feel like I missed out on a lot of great old hardware though.
Google Chrome TV advert
Unusually, Google have decided to promote their fresh, new web browser “Google Chrome” on good, old TV adverts instead of the conventional internet based advertising and other organic growing techniques; in which have been already spread throughout the web via Google’s own services (YouTube) as well as social networks like Linked-In...
My dad used to tell me stories about how I used to load up various programs on our vic-20 at the age of 2 (there was a spelling one with a black bird/raven, I don't remember the name of it)

My first earliest memories of computer usage was loading up Ghosts n' Goblins on my Commodore 64 at around the age of 6/7, I still have my old C64 sitting in my back shed :)
I've worked on a project like that before, and two IR cameras is usually sufficient. The user learns how to position the pen such that there are no obstructions. It really just involves facing mostly in a particular direction.
In a downturn economy, everybody is either looking for a way to cut their operating costs or increase revenue with no additional cost. Startups that improve efficiency are riding this wave.
If you have no ideas, then maybe just try a small unoriginal project to improve your skills for now. For example, try building something for the Google App Engine in python.
My first real programming project was a DOS TSR keylogger. When you start your programming journey in the computer underground: 1) you have no idea the magnitude of the problems being thrown around by your peers, everything is trivialized and you're expected to know a great deal of info about the inner workings of your programming languages and their execution model, application software, OS/kernel internals, compilers, network, hardware, file formats and .. bugs and 2) there is an absolute joy to everything you do; never underestimate the power of mischief as a great motivator.

I don't expect you to dawn a blackhat at this stage, you're probably too mature, and the scene is pretty much lame nowadays anyway. What you can do however is join a community that enjoys and fosters a healthy hacking attitude. Something very geeky and very focused, like the demo scene (if they're still as innovative as they used to be.) You need a group of friends, all of whom are hacking for fun and giving each other feedback. IRC is an excellent place to find such people. Something focused on a given subject and a given technology. Start with your favorite libraries and join their IRC channels. The Allegro game library scene was cool, write 2D games for fun. Once you master the basic usage of the library, you will see what more experienced people have done with it. There is a different, unique taste to seeing a master craftsman make something great out of the ordinary ("wow, he did that in 4k" or "wow, fake 3D".) This will motivate you to no end :-)

Take out the manual of your "battery included" language of choice (Python, PLT or Chicken Scheme) and step through the module list. Write small programs that use each module/library and pretty soon you will have tons of ideas. Just take a GUI library, a network library, a regex parser, a mime/XML/html parser, and an audio library; taken into any combination, you will have something that solves an interesting problem. Something as "big" as a web server can be written with just the system calls built into every unix :-)

Finding your own problems, to keep you busy, is also something you will eventually develop as you continue hacking.

P.S. DON'T start with a janitorial position cleaning up other people's code or doing manuals, as the "Hacker HOWTO" advocates. Fuck that, NIH and all, go out there and create your own bugs to fix. Have fun, eh? :-)
Here are a couple that I've found, don't know if anybody has experience using them.

http://thecoccinella.org/
http://www.miranda-im.org/
http://www.pidgin.im/
Find something that has a limited scope. ie: something that you /know/ you can do from start to end. A lot of things seem "too simple" but often, there are interesting ways to solve the problem which involve more complex thinking.
The best $20 I ever spent on photography was the book Understanding Exposure. Fantastic book and will improve your photos dramatically
You ever see this? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070814150630.ht... http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1367-2630/9/8/263
Be more observant in your daily routine. Analyze everything your friends and family say and don't overlook any problem they may have, because it could become your idea and something people want. Just ask questions and listen and something is bound to become salient.
Did you read the paper? The whole point of the thing is to make it non-parallelizable. That's what makes it hard.
Try livecoding with Snd or CLM or Impromptu (or extending them). You'll get a sense for code structures and tweaking your dev environment, and produce really interesting things.
Axum - A new parallel programming language from Microsoft
I don't think Bowman understands the difference between design and art.

As Nate Silver says, predictability = designability. If you can predict which elements will elicit a certain reaction from a user, then you can design an experience to elicit that reaction. Data isn't optional in design, it's the sine qua non. It's not a coincidence that design is a synonym for fate; without data design doesn't exist.
Layoffs Hit MySpace
Since you have an implementation I don't have to manually extract from a library deep inside the OpenBSD source tree I think I'm going to take a look at replacing bcrypt in an application I'm working on.
Well, it isn't, and no, I haven't confused General with Special Relativity, trust me on that :) Maybe you confused Quantum Mechanics with Quantum Field Theory?
Squids.
OH darn I thought it was all via jscript. Was excited for media streaming in iPhone browser if that was the case.

Maybe some form of jscript module soon will be robust enough to natively play audio files!
bcrypt's use of MD5 makes it insecure compared to scrypt

bcrypt is a key derivation function, like scrypt. It's openssl which bogusly uses MD5 as a key derivation function.
That takes me to a blank page with the HN frame (and the Konami Code doesn't do anything)?
A few standard 'toy' learning projects come to mind:

Try building a client/server chat program, using TCP/IP,
a mass-file Renamer, or mp3 tagger, including a GUI for your OS of choice.

In python, try building something using either google app engine, or implementing a full blog using django (with packages for all the useful features).

Build something that downloads stock data from yahoo or google, parses it, and charts it.

Most of those are more towards the 'trivial' end of the spectrum, but they'll make you familiar with the standard libraries, and the last 10% of 'polish' will sharpen your skills.
He called it pointless 'security theater' and recommended using a faster algorithm like MD5 to reduce delays at security checkpoints since terrorists will just print their own boarding passes anyways.
You should make a blog. It was my first project, and to this day i write my own blog software.

I just launched the latest incarnation as a Google App Engine blog using Django/Python: http://andrewljohnson.appspot.com
Cityscapes: Ubiquitous Computing
Where are you in the movie?
Good companion reading is "Not the comp.text.sgml Frequently Asked Questions List":

http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/sgml/faq-not.txt
This is too funny: just half hour ago I finished A Mile Down: The true story of a disastrous career at sea

Hope he ends up better than David Vann did :-)
I would put the laptop in a Pelican or a NEMA4-rated case to limit corrosion and extend keyboard/monitor/mouse cables through the case. Seal the cable exits with gland seals and filter the incoming air.

No matter what, you'll be dealing with a lot of salt air corrosion in a small boat on the ocean. I was trained as a Merchant Marine officer and know what a never-ending battle it is, even on large carriers.

Personally, I'd leave the computer in a sealed case and only use it in harbor. Too many other important tasks will take up your time when at sea.
If you have the same OS X as the system I just looked at, it's just several hard links to the same script... and it's a very small script, too.
Judging from some of the stories which come out of the EU, it seems that bad policies don't die there -- instead they are thoroughly enforced.

(see, for example, the endless variations on "this product is the wrong size to meet the EU definition of a strawberry", etc.)
I think I meant QED, sorry.
Actual lessons from Kiko Calendar (2006)
There are more things I want to touch on, but I'm afraid my posts are long and opinionated as they are. Just a few quick pointers and hints, things that must be passed on:

* Learn how to find good information. Hone your bullshit detector, learn who knows what they're talking about and who is full of it (many will try to sell you things, if not an actual product or service, then their personality: good hackers are selfless and rarely sign their work.)

* Get heroes. Find good hackers to imitate. I grew up wanting to be "like Terje Mathisen" ..

* Avoid fluff mediums. Best information is found in ASCII mediums :-P just my finding. Avoid the blog scene, most of it is written to pad an ego or a resume. Usenet is good, sparingly. Citeseer is good when you know better. The underground zines are good, with a grain of salt.

* Discover the past; everything you need to know about computing was invented/discovered before 1980. Mine the past, seek the originators, not the imitators. Nothing good happened since 1999; the greatest minds left the Science and went to industry, behind NDAs, patents and sold to "investors".

* Don't do the web, yet. Start working in the console, then perhaps do a tangible GUI. Don't do Unicode

* ACM, IEEE and Elsevier are bastards. If you need a paper, google the authors' websites and you can usually find it there.

* It's OK to be in hackmode. If you need to get away from society, you are allowed to forgo all human contact and basic hygiene until you figure shit out.

* Mathematics is easy. The smaller and denser the text the better. It's the long, repetitive hammer-into-your-head crap that probably bored you in school. Real mathematics is neat and compact. Get math books with answers to the exercises at the back. Don't cheat yourself.

* Save your first programs, even print them out. You will be willing to give up everything just to get them back, should you lose them (and remain a programmer ;-)

* Learn assembly language. Learn C. Learn how to write your own tools. Programming tools should be the first systems you investigate. Levine's book "Linkers and Loaders" is free online. You can find "Advanced DOS" on Alexie Frounze's site. K&R is online. Unix is good. Learn it well, at the kernel level. Familiarize yourself executable file formats. Get into compiler hacking early, it will enlighten you, but will also force you to learn so many different languages you will have no time for anything else.

* Share what you learned, even if you have to cringe at your own verbosity :-)
Hacking Primes in Mathematica
Sounds like someone is upset that Lessig is still smarter than him.
cut and paste from previous emails .. reuse also applies to support.
You mean, assume we take a bunch of charged particles with relativistic speeds and see what happens when they interact? That's what physicists do using accelerators. (Except they don't really observe the positions of particles at all times, they just see what goes in and what comes out, which is OK because as I mentioned that is all we can compute anyway.) When the velocities, and therefore energies, involved are really high you can't talk of any classical approximation because the quantum-field-theoretic effects take over and you observe phenomena like particle creation and annihilation etc. When the velocities are low you will probably observe non-relativistic two-body Coulomb scattering, which is mathematically no different from the Newtonian interaction between a planetoid and the Sun.
Given that, in the US, government intervention mostly seems to consist of busting monopolies, I'm just a bit wary of the statement that no monopoly can exist without government support.

It seems to me that it is in the nature of a "true" free-market enterprise to seek, as much as possible, to neutralize the operation of the market in order to ensure the enterprise's survival. And history seems to provide some examples of such -- all manner of cartels, trusts, etc. have been devoted to nothing more or less than bringing the operation of the free market to an end, as quickly and effectively as possible.
That's great pop up books always made me think a lot of work went into making sure they worked correctly and probably needed a lot of special fixes to get them to open like that.

This isn't your average popup either as seen on the first picture with the nice interactions. Although I do remember seeing many pull tabs.
I just have to say that this has to be my favorite blog interface/design. Very clean: all about the content.
You can still own your music if you buy Amazon mp3s.
Ah OK then yes, QED is relativistic and in the classical limit it should become classical electrodynamics.
I'd recommend spending some time with other peoples code. Open Source provides mountains of great (and bad) examples. The only way you'll really learn to grok the difference is to spend time enhancing other peoples code. You get exposure to a lot more code that way, since you can't possibly write hundreds of thousands of lines of code by yourself in a short period of time...but you can learn to navigate projects of that magnitude in a few weeks, and learn a lot of what those kinds of projects have to teach you.

Pick a project that interests you and has a large/friendly community, and make a plugin or a patch for it. You'll learn a lot about working with other developers, and a lot about the ancillary tools that are needed to build big and useful software but are rarely taught in school.
I did not read it, but I can't imagine what would prevent an attacker from running a parallel attack on multiple circuits/computers that aren't sharing any resources...
A series of redirecting pages would be fun. Get a few hundred people to form a link chain..
If you like math or math problems or complicated problems that require some thought you should check out http://projecteuler.net/ the first 30 problems don't really require a large amount of math knowledge and can be very interesting.

Edit: I saw you were going for projects maybe something using pythons cgi library on a web server to do interesting tasks would be nice.
Write your own URL shortener ;)
Why not build an iphone app to help people with OCD?
In particular, such an app would help alleviate problems with repeated checking. The user would use the app to take a photo/video of something instead of checking it repeatedly (e.g., you locking the front door).

The photo/video would be tagged with the time and place.

To actually try to cure OCD, one might introduce a probability that the photo/video will not be taken. One can have this probability increase over time as the user's condition improves.

Another possibility is to delete the photo/video automatically after some time interval, which decreases as the user's condition improves.
Strongly recommending project euler.

http://projecteuler.net/

Start from problem 1 and work your way up - they get gradually harder to solve as complete more. They are simple yet require flexing your algorithm-development muscles, which also help you to think about coding in an "efficient enough" manner: some problems can be implemented in ways that take 10 hours to run, or .001 seconds.
Yes, that should have been "imply". Sorry, I'm not a native english speaker.

So with that out of the way do you think there is anything wrong with "correlation does not imply causation"?

Denmark has high government spending too. But the average life expectancy is rather low compared to other similar countries.

"In this case, the French spend enough money on public health and social benefits that there's reason to believe that the relationship is more than coincidental."

Why?
As far as I know, this isn't the only instance of a law banning certain hyperlinks. If I remember correctly, in Germany it is currently illegal to link to software which can be used to remove copy protection. (for example, DVD-ripping software that breaks the CSS encryption)

Copyright holders can bill you (together with a cease and desist) or sue you if you don't comply.
"For a typical worker, that would mean earning $100,000 less over the 18-year period."

The biggest purchase the typical worker will make is a house purchase. Assuming "typical" means median, and assuming (big assumption) that the median worker buys a median house on a married two-income household, the median household is losing around $200,000. The median house price in the United States is $220,000.

The median college graduate family for the class of 2009, when they hit their forties, will be behind their expectations by about a house. Ouch.
The idea is to make the KDF expensive in space as well as time. While bcrypt costs a few seconds of CPU time, it uses only a tiny amount of RAM, thus underutilizing the resources you have available. Thus, you can parallelize an attack using lots of specialized ASICs but only a commodity amount of storage. Scrypt would require you to purchase lots of RAM for every ASIC, making a brute force attack much more costly.
A .NET language with asynchronous, message-passing concurrency based on actors. Neither the website nor the programmer's guide mentions Erlang at all. Interesting.

From the programmer's guide, it looks like it has a loosely C++-like syntax, rather than the Prolog-descended syntax that Erlang uses; while I can't say I'm a fan of Erlang's syntax, I don't see any syntax for pattern matching. That would be a big loss.
It's not just server-side or client side these days. Using Rhino I'm using JS for compressing JS files for production and generating documentation for said JS files.