skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found Rutherfords Den in ChristChurch NZ quite an interesting diversion as well.. (And there's a delicious fudge shop around the corner - if that helps :P )
http://www.rutherfordsden.org.nz

From a glance at the site (haven't got the book yet) - I'm not sure if there were any entries from the southern hemisphere - if so - at least I could suggest one.

Any aussies reading have any suggestions from Australia? We have some good museums, (as well as Science Works, Discovery Center, etc) -- but I can't think of anything unique like that.. (The Snowy Hydro tour/scheme/workings were interesting - but i was pretty young then)
It's difficult to take a programming class without owning a computer and they are expensive too.

High fixed costs relating to an academic activity do not provide indicators to the ethics of the people who produce the required items.
US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
The G-8 Cites Recovery Signs
I was trying to be funny. At its best my sense of humor involves statements where you are unclear if I am being sarcastic or serious, because the statements rest somewhere in between. Kind of like my username.
The article's comparison to the SAT is misleading. Whereas the SAT is a reasoning test, the Gao Kao is a series of subject tests (think SAT Subject Tests or AP exams). The three mandatory subjects are Mathematics, Chinese, and a foreign language. In addition, students select one to three additional exams, and this choice depends on what they hope to study in college. Prospective science/engineering students will choose from Biology, Chemistry, and Physics; prospective arts/humanities students will choose from History, Geography, and Political Education.
Cool, but might I ask, why would I need this? If an email client can deal with html, can't it deal with CSS as well?
The presence of "freedom of choice" for the consumer depends on how you look at the industry. From a student's perspective, there is no real choice - you use the textbook you're assigned. Some professors will offer a few alternatives, but unless they're very diligent about always giving references to each book (and I had a few professors who did this well), the students who use the number-one book - the one the professor uses when he's lecturing and doing examples - will generally have a better idea of the material and the standard they'll be evaluated on.

From the professor's point of view (considering them as the consumer), however, there's quite a free market. They can get free evaluation copies of any textbook they want, and most schools give individual professors the choice of what book they use for a given class. So the problem then becomes getting professors to switch textbooks, which is tough. Most professors - especially in things like science - will teach the same courses year-on, and will become very comfortable with the material in a given book. They'll know what to skip, what to supplement, and what to offer additional comments on.
How you managed to amass 500+ karma points, I'll never know. I routinely see your comments voted down into oblivion. Kudos for persistence, I guess.
Most people in China don't live in poverty.

It isn't the 1950's anymore.
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It takes a hell of a lot of effort to release a textbook - time to (conceptually) design it, write it, edit it, have other professors edit it, etc. In the time it takes to do that, they could have banged out a few interesting papers to present at a conference.

As for advancing in tenure-track, I doubt it. As illogical as it is, tenure-track positioning is generally related to research skill, as opposed to pedagogical interest and/or ability. Most large universities would prefer to have great researchers (who publish works with the schools' name on them) who teach as needed and without passion, as opposed to the other way around.
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Beyond the Romance of Microfinance
Actually, I find HN to be the perfect mix of world news, economics, math papers and programming stuff, so no. And I don't fall into any of the "types" listed, I'm a CS-student (at least in one month I am), and don't have any serious plans of starting a company;)
There was a really good discussion on News.YC about this a while back:

"I was driven mad by the Chinese education system"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482257
facebook.com/TheMostInterestingManAlive directs to your FB homepage.
Use of proxies is quite common in Iran, and working proxy lists are being passed around on twitter.
The rust belt cities have been the victims of two great forces, one internal, one external.

The internal force is the incompetence of democratic city governance. Detroit had utterly incompetent elected leaders who in the 1960's and 70's allowed rioters to loot and burn large swaths of the city. Homicide rates rose by an order of magnitude. If you look at homicide rates in Europe, you have to back to the 12th century to find homicide rates as high as those in modern Detroit. Order and security are base requirements for economically productive societies. When the violence came, industries and productive residents fled. This process happened in major cities across the country: St. Louis, New Haven, Cleveland, Baltimore, etc.

Unfortunately, in a democracy the quality of government is proportionate to the human capital of the voting population. Now that the human capital has left, effective governance is even more unlikely. Thus the prospects for Detroit look grim indeed. The only hope is to put the city into receievership and grant a competent executive the authority to clean up the city (perhaps this would be a good job for General Petraeus).

The second factor is the American seinorage empire. Since the end of Bretton Woods in 1971 the primary export of the United States has been its own currency. China, Japan, Korea, etc, ship cars and steel to the United States. The U.S. ships back freighters full of dollars in return. As a result of China and Japan buying the currency, the exchange rate is artificially low. That makes it very hard for domestic manufacturers to compete with the Asian producers. What should have happened is that as American industries failed, we would have less exports which would weaken the dollar, making foreign products more expensive, thus increasing the profits of domestic manufacturers and stopping the cycle of decay. Instead, China and Japan continued to ship us cheap goods, and in return bought treasuries and financial products from Wall St. This greatly enriched the U.S. government and Wall St., but screwed over domestic manufacturers. The result was a growth in "service jobs" which were essentially jobs feeding off of the ever growing Washington bureaucracy. The United States is playing the role of 16th Century Spain. It exports a currency in return for foreign goods, while the domestic industries die.

The final blow to Detroit has been dealt by monetary incompetence on the part of Washington. The U.S. is currently experiencing a monetary contraction. Monetary contractions should never happen with competent economic stewardship. The government can always simply renominate the currency and avoid the problem. When a monetary contraction does occur, people dramatically cut spending on durable goods. Thus again, Detroit is punished for events completely outside of its own control.
So if we all read it, it's an intemperate, unjustified, mildly idiotic anti-M$ rant that wasted our time. But if we don't read it, it's just one understandably frustrated guy letting off a little steam. And that means whoever posted the link to HN transformed him from a normal guy into a global idiot.
Blocking content won't protect children or prevent employees from bringing inappropriate content into the workspace. Those that want it will find a way to get it. If they can't get it on their computer, it will be on their iPhone.

The only solution to these "problems" is to educate your kids or employees as to why the content isn't appropriate.
I disagree. Perhaps "NSFW" is too localized to actually be the name of the tag, but I think there should be a tag that means "give a warning before displaying this content." It would cover NSFW stuff, but could also work for spoilers, or answers to a quiz, etc. There's no way there could be culpability for omitting this sort of tag since it IS a value judgment, just like <em>.
What I require of a text editor.
This also reminds me of a quote from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582698 that has been on my mind:

More serious for China's long-term prospects is that the expansion was so fast, and the pressures to pay off the debts so intense, that many of the schools turned into diploma mills, churning out poorly qualified students. Mr. Zhang got his degree from a school of traditional Chinese medicine with no history of teaching computer sciences. He looks back ruefully, recalling overcrowded classrooms and a lack of materials: "I wonder if this education was of any value?"

It sounds like there is a huge opportunity here. If open-sourced course materials (such as MIT's OCW) could be combined with a degree-granting mechanism that had credibility with employers, then ad hoc schools, study groups, online communities, and even lone inviduals could succeed where these hastily retooled "universities" seem to have failed.
That's exactly what I thought of when I read that. However, it's possible to find your own satisfaction in less ruthless codes... as long as you accept that others may do whatever the letter of the rules allows.

For instance, I play Gen, but accept that I must fight a lot of Ryus and Sagats.
<em> is emphasis within the context of the page. <nsfw> is judgment within the context of the world. One of these judgments can be made reliably by the site owner; one cannot.
Having grown up in Michigan and since moved to Silicon Valley, I can say that Detroit and San Jose are not really comparable. The weather in San Jose is much, much nicer. It's sunny and warm most of the year. The four-month winters in Detroit, with their freezing cold and grey skies, are never going to have the same kind of draw.

Ann Arbor is indeed a nice town, and is a reason that people might want to live in Ann Arbor. Living in Detroit so that one might occasionally visit Ann Arbor an hour away makes no sense.

It's true, we're not talking about a landlocked post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland. But it pretty much is an industrial wasteland. An apocalyptic de-industrializing wasteland, if the ever-ongoing decline of the Big Three auto companies can be regarded as a sort of creeping apocalypse.
Agreed. Unless there's a compelling reason not to (conditional imports), it's definitely best to stick with Python conventions (a la PEP8). These conventions are what keep Python one of the cleanest and most readable languages out there.
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I don't buy your arguments. I see no evidence that Boston and New York were any more diversified than cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, or New Haven. Baltimore and Philadelphia had industries rise and fall for centuries. But both are now a wreck. Why? Economic change and transformation is nothing new. Why did so many American cities fall apart at exactly the same time? The diversification argument simply does not pass the smell test.

I think the strength of New York and Boston are due to a couple factors 1) crime never passed a certain tipping point at which most of the productive citizens left and 2) they both are traditional homes of industries that have done well the past thirty years ( finance and education). See my previous comment for the reasons why finance has outperformed manufacturing, - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=657765
re: BRadmin "Facebook Username Easter Egg?

facebook.com/TheMostInterestingManAlive directs to your FB homepage."

facebook.com/TheMostInterestingWomanAlive, on the other hand, returns Page not Found. This all works out ok for me, but my girlfriend finds it all a bit perplexing.
I always use this one: http://code.dunae.ca/premailer.web/

"Premailer is written in Ruby, with a lot of help from Hpricot"
I don't know that I can do justice to the idea, since I'm no bundle-writing expert, but see http://manual.macromates.com/en/language_grammars.html for the details.

The basic advance over something like an Emacs-Lisp package is that he built a declarative system (based on context-dependent regexps) for handling arbitrary languages, rather than making you write all the code to do so from scratch.

And he built things in such a way as to be able to handle languages nested inside other language contexts (e.g., Ruby inside HTML).

Couple that with a pretty powerful templating facility, and you have something that advances the state of the art.

I don't think anyone else has really taken as fresh a look at text editing for a long time.
I was in china a week or so ago and stories about the Gao Kao filled the papers/media and there were prominent stories about cheaters who were caught and the rest. That it was the the anniversary of the Tienanmen square thing, with no coverage at all on state media, was interesting to me.
One of the things not mentioned by the article is that the city of Detroit has an income tax on people working in the city, unlike virtually all of the surrounding cities. This is symptomatic of a wider dynamic, in which it actually costs more for companies and employees to work in the city of Detroit itself than in the surrounding areas. It isn't the cause of the decline, but it certainly doesn't help.
What's the best desktop virtualisation suite?
Enigma IQ Test - A Javascript Puzzle Game - Experiment Garden
Did you even read the same post that I did?

He's complaining about text books...

He complains about the price and then later advocates that professors should give away their content online for free instead of in textbooks. Yet he does exactly the same thing, has content in his books that he charges for.

I'm not suggesting that the price for textbooks isn't outrageous, While doing my double degree I felt like I was getting ripped off left and right, but the fact is - saying "give away your content instead of writing a book" and not doing it yourself makes you a hypocrite.

Sure, Seth blogs about his ideas, but generally they are collection of random thoughts, not complete contextual subjects laid out in concise logical order with examples... like a textbook.

I'll also note that his blog posts often allude to ideas that he covers in his actual books (eg, the Guy #3 post talks about Tribes and guess what one of the title of his books is called?). So my assertion that his blog is a marketing channel for his paid-for content is correct.
The argument you give is flawed:

(1) A productive society is one with experts. (2) Expertise is only accomplished with relentless practice. (3) The most productive society will be accomplished if citizens are made to constantly work at their discipline. (made one minor edit)

You haven't supplied a definition of the term "expert". It turns out that the word "expert" is usually defined in one of 3 ways:

(a) an expert is a person with unusual skills, talent, or productive abilities

(b) an expert is a person who has a lot of experience in a particular field, job, branch of inquiry, etc.

(c) both (a) and (b)

So you can unpack your reasoning in one of 3 ways:

Using (a): "A productive society is one with productive people. Productiveness is acquired only through practice. So a society that forces its people to practice all the time will be most productive."

Using (b): "A productive society is one in which everyone has practiced a lot. 'Having practiced a lot' is achieved only by practicing a lot. Therefore the society that forces everyone to practice a lot will be most productive."

Using (c): "A productive society is one in which everyone got productive by practicing a lot. Everyone gets productive by practicing a lot only if they practice a lot. So a society in which everyone practices a lot is the most productive society."

or using commutation, the above becomes:
"A society in which everyone practices a lot to become productive is productive if everyone practices a lot, so the most productive society is one in which everyone is forced to practice as much as possible."

(a) begs the question of how productivity is acquired. (b) begs the question of the value of large amounts of practice, and (c) is a tautology.

If you do much reading about the history of science, technology, or industry, you'll find that a certain level of practice/proficiency are very important, but that many of the achievements we celebrate were due as much to luck or circumstance as to doing huge amounts of extra homework every day.

So spending too much time practicing a few skills makes you worse off, because you limit the chances that you will have one of those lucky experiences that will lead to something genuinely new. Of course, you'll look really diligent and studious, and no one is going to tell you that you should work less or study less, but the economic concepts of "diminishing returns" and "opportunity cost" are valuable here.

You don't have to take my word for it, though. That was the theme of question #2 on this year's Gao Kao:

http://sun-zoo.com/chinageeks/2009/06/08/2009-gaokao-essay-q...
Net profit is a factor of many things that have nothing to do with the bot. How good of a system you have for getting new accounts/ip addresses, how well you can funnel money from one dummy account back to you, how well you avoid detection, etc.

Still, you can easily determine the mathematical certainty for a given win rate and sample size.
One reason to import something within a function would be for lazy loading. If I do end up having many different imports, I tend to group them by library/framework.

I've learned a lot by looking at the source code for guido's rietveld:
http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source/browse/trunk/codere...
I just listened to "Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires" ebook by Brian Tracy. You can find it on iTunes. Short and a fun listen.
"mindless, ignorant Microsoft bashing"

How exactly can a complaint over such a stupid program behaviour - a program installation overwriting a critical system file - be considered mindless ignorant Microsoft bashing?

I am really bothered by the strong pro-Microsoft bias I see here.
That's version ∞. First launch version 0.1.
Shutting down Iranian government websites is cyberwarfare
While reversing WMDRM (the older Windows Media DRM), I was beating my head against the wall trying to get around some anti-debugging tricks they had riddled the codebase with. Eventually, I came up with a trick: insert infinite loops where you want to break.

Any time I wanted to break somewhere, I'd inject an infinite loop and watch for the CPU to redline. Then I'd break in, pause the execution, replace the loop with the original instructions, step through it, put the loop back in, and do whatever I wanted to do. This eventually became an automated "nondebugger", which I've since used in various hostile environments.

It's amazing the random things you'll come up with after a few days of way too little sleep and way too much caffeine.
Hm, my profs used that textbook, but they were fairly careful not to use questions from it for graded homework. This let you use old versions for studying, without an impact on your grades.
When my mother decided her Power Macintosh was too slow for her, I decided she would use Linux.

I wanted her to have no trouble with viruses, malware and, most of all, I did not want to have to fix her computer and, if I ever had to, I wanted to be able to do it remotely from a remote terminal (I have ssh on my phone). I also wanted to use cheap commodity hardware and grabbed an inexpensive IBM desktop (built like a tank) for her.

She is very happy with it and she is enjoying her third major OS upgrade. She never noticed them.
Great article, it's rare that you see good introductory materials on binary patching (and other reversing-related subjects). If you're interested in learning more, I can't recommend this book enough: http://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Secrets-Engineering-Eldad-Ei...
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U.S. Births Hint at Bias for Boys in Some Asians
Hrm, maybe that explains why I've been annoyed with the syntax scanning. With really long lines or files, it seems to crash the app. This happens all the time when I am working with poorly formatted JSON fixture data.
He wrote a blog post (which I think was submitted here) that details the first week or two of sales. http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/blog/files/a_week_of_sizeu...
Keep Your Cash
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Matt you hit the nail on the head.

People like to think that if you can build a winning bot you can easily run it on a dozen computers and rake in millions of dollars. In reality, the logistics of running such an operation are prohibitively difficult--at least if you want to stay within the bounds of the law.
Well, that's just great, but in the meantime I'd settle for being able to use it without number portability. It's still not available to the general public.
I actually watched that exchange live on CNN and was really confused by it. Have you come across any good accounts of what was really going on there? I'm particularly curious about what was going on while she restated her question, it seemed like the translator was almost trying to shout her down. I am pretty sure she is at least conversant enough to know what was being said natively without translation.
The more I try using TextMate, the more I find myself using Aquamacs. There are some things that TM is clearly better at, but there are a lot of immature features:

- find in project is slow
- window and buffer management
- editing via SFTP (tho Aquamacs has horrible lag for me)
- syntax highlighting crashes on really long lines and files
- too many keyboard shortcuts... I often hit the wrong key and have it add a random code snippet to my JavaScript file (yes, this is probably configurable, but I expect good defaults from commercial apps)
You can support CSS and not the <style> tag. This tool converts a stylesheet to inline styles for you. One great example for usage is in an eBay auction.
That's very cool.

I will check how syntax highlighting is implemented in Emacs to check if something like this can be done and learn some Lisp in the process.

I keep hearing people state their love for TextMate but since I don run OSX and there is no Linux version, I am out of luck.

They could use their rewrite to make it compilable against GNUStep...
(This is my own, in case that wasn't already very clear... I hope for forgiveness on the basis that it's not totally rubbish)
I'll be interested to see how this plays with the carriers (t-mobile in my case). If I want to transfer my number to Voice, I'll need a new one for my phone. Does this result in a new contract or termination fees?