skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the same argument as the long running feud between the 2 famous billiards players Willie Mosconi and Minnesota Fats. Willie was world champion and had won many tournaments. Fats never won any championships, but won a small fortune playing for money. When they played each other, Willie creamed Fats, to which Fats responded, "Big deal, how much money did he win?"

Computer science is Willie. Software engineering is Fats. It may not be elegant and precise, but it gets the job done and earns lunch.
So I'm confused. Is this related to the story the other day about the guy "stealing" their trading software? As in he was trying to blow a whistle on them, so they accused him of shenanigans and called in the FBI to try and discredit him a head of that?
Sorry, I should have given an example. I don't see how the above is ever likely to be useful, since the keys can be in any arbitrary order, but the fact that you can get something sequential out of a dictionary and revert back to tuple assignment is trivial.

What I'd like to see you do in Python is this:

>>> d = { 'key1': 'val1', 'key2': 'val2', 'key3': 'val3' }
>>> { 'key1': x, 'key3': y } = d
>>> (x,y)
('val1', 'val3')

Nothing like this is built into the handful of special forms that Clojure starts out with, but roughly halfway through core.clj, it gets added to the language using the same macro facilities available to any Clojure programmer. If Python manages to be as powerful a language as Clojure without macros, you should have no trouble at all.

user=> (def d {:key1 "val1", :key2 "val2", :key3 "val3"})
#'user/d
user=> (let [{x :key1, y :key3} d]
[x y])
["val1" "val3"]

(The order of key-value pairs is reversed to support :as, :or, and :keys, which let you do additional tricks while destructuring.)
In the short term, what you are suggesting may seem to make sense, but with the sheer size and breadth of the BBC website and our business requirements, the longer term picture is completely different. It might take a few months for a couple of talented JS dev's to 'fix' an existing library to add in support for a minority browser for which the BBC has what it deems to be a 'significant enough' user base, plus add extra accessibility features, and screen reader support, etc, which that library doesn't support effectively enough. But that's not the whole story.

What will have happened there is that library will have been branched for the BBC and then that branch needs to be maintained long term such that updates and patched have to be vetted and tested across our whole site before applied so they don't break this backwards compatibility. That starts to become a lot of work.

Plus you also now need to take into account that its not the BBC's project, its somebody else's and the BBC is just using it. For a big company with its own set of business objectives and varied project needs, its a risk to be relying on someone else's product. Its much better for that business to be able to steer its own products and have consistency between them and their road maps.

Please don't get us wrong. We did very seriously consider our approach. Its not a decision we took lightly. We sat down and rationalised all the options, risks and factors. If we hadn't have had some seriously talented JavaScript developers working at the BBC at the time, the decision may have been made for us.
Those crazy kids are a fickle bunch, and throughout history they've wanted to not be where their parents hang out.

But it looks like Facebook is trying to grow past it's original niche into the online identity provider for all. Which means someone else will have to fill the void to give kids a chance to discuss sex, drugs, and whatever other startling discoveries they seem to make on a daily basis.
Talent is overrated
There is a second moral to this story: the person you marry will significantly determine your success or failure as an entrepreneur. In my opinion, a nagging wife who is quick to judge and blame you is one of the worst threats to your startup/business.
"people can stop working jobs that value economy over safety"

Yeah, people who don't want to eat or have shelter can do that.
Why I don't do Time Tracking: I find many creative tasks require a lot of distraction time in order for my brain to process what I'm doing. Many times, it helps to "be productive" for an hour, then go use twitter for 20 minutes. When you come back, the solution is magically there.

Then again, maybe you could track "productive zoning out time" as one of your categories.
$18 Million for recovery.gov redesign. Could HN do it better and cheaper?
Probably a fake, as noted by this comment :

dude, your an idiot. if these shots were real, and you really were putting your job on the line, you wouldnt say ‘I was the last to leave the room’. it wouldnt be that hard to figure out who you are, would it? and as tristan said it seems like you forgot to ps in the mouse pointer. whats more, which google rep demos a new os on a kitchen bench?
I'm tired of people conceding that Alexa is next to worthless and then going on to use an Alexa graph to make a point. It doesn't work that way. It can't be either unreliable or of some small value depending on when it's convenient.

Extrapolation from too little data is fraught with peril.

The author of this article made this mistake. How is your argument any different? The Alexa stats you cite are an even smaller data set than what is used in the article!

I do agree that we just need to wait this out. Even with good stats there's no way to know whether Bing is a worthy competitor. It's obvious that Bing hasn't been a complete flop in the way Cuil was. So far it's good enough that people are going to try it out for a while, but what's really important is whether they're still using it in 6 months or a year.
I'm guessing teeth can join well to flesh without rejection (mine seem good on this anyway) and also don't reject implanting foreign matter (filings, those little diamonds chavs^W people have, etc.) they're basically a bridging medium; an interstitial that avoids rejection.
They didn't abuse anything, none of this actually happened. The article is a thought experiment written is a deliberately misleading style.
Bollywood gossip
Latest wallpapers of Katrina Kaif. Katrina kaif is the famous Bollywood Actress. In Bollywood she is known as beauty with brains. God has gifted her a Gorgeous face with stunning hourglass figure
You have to be from the US, UK, Germany or Israel to qualify. That sucks. You'd think that Amazon would at least cover the countries they are selling in.
I have 2 gmail contacts (actually I think they're googlemail?) out of 300+. I don't really see any clusters. But then I don't have many geek friends/acquaintances and those that I do know appear to use company email addresses mainly.
Native Drag & Drop w/ HTML5
And he doesn't have references to test against, so he's probably doing manual inspection. It's a form of testing, though, but definitely not a unit test.
Why do so few blog posts have a byline? Why do I have to go digging around to see who wrote the damn thing?
I think it's more to the point to say "during WW1". Finland wasn't directly involved.
When Poets Were Scientists and Nature Their Mysterious Muse
Actually this is not spam, I have nothing to do with the company and genuinely wanted the opinion of people on HN about it. I'll agree that it really sounds like snake oil, but I thought the idea was interesting nonetheless.

Regarding safety concerns, the products are not directly connected to the ground.

EDIT: spelling
What's Black and Red and Red All Over?
UK Newspaper Accused of Hacking Thousands of Mobile Phones
Do We Need a Firefox OS?
It doesn't take talent to rent a botnet.
CIA Drone Targeting Tech Revealed
Why everyone should use Safari for rich web development
If the insulin affects your fat tissue to increase energy pick up by the tissue itself (which we know it does), the result will be hunger. That hunger will lead to a) increased food intake, b) lower activity levels, or c) breakdown of other tissues to feed the fat. Thermodynamics holds, but the insulin is the driver in the process.

Two things I suggest you look at: Zucker rats. An obese strain of rat. You can semi-starve it from infancy and it will get just as obese. It will be smaller, but the body fat percentage will be the same.

The second thing to look at are overfeeding studies. It's very hard to overfeed people with protein. The only successful studies had to be done on prisoners, and they barely gained weight. With carbohydrates, it's the opposite. People would eat 10,000 calories a day and complain of being hungry. Weight gain is easy to introduce.
Yes, but what is rational can be dependent on the environment which you operate in, especially when dealing with economics which is not yet a science.

I'll give you an analogy of a research sample I got from a book.

Bee's by their nature or intelligence you may call it are trained to believe that light at the end of a tunnel is the escape. A rational and even sound analysis in nature.
Now if you put a dozen bees in a glass bottle, and point the closed end towards the window where light is shining, all the bees instinctively fly towards that direction of the light and eventually die of exhaustion.

In the case of the bees what was rational in one environment was render completely useless in another.
Homomorphic Encryption Breakthrough
Regarding safety concerns, the products are not directly connected to the ground.

Ahh. Then I find the claims that this product makes completely ungrounded.
I agree with most of the things you say. I've worked in finance for the last 9 years.

But to nitpick, the latency issue has got nothing to do with dealing rooms, which are rooms where traders, salespeole, quants and support staff sit. A human trader sitting nearer to Bloomberg's servers isn't going to make more money because they see the news 1us faster than someone a bit further away.

The fully automated stuff is where the milliseconds matter, and the data is analysed and the trades made on servers that are not on the floor / dealing room. They are, as we've both said, in a machine room or even an exchange's hosting facility, close to their own servers.

My point was simply that you won't get an improvement in "real time trading abilities" by scrapping / moving / doing whatever you like with the place where the humans sit. It's all about where the machines that run the algorithms and execute the trades are located. And that is not a dealing room (for big players at least).
Even if these aren't fake (which seems unlikely), they offer zero information. It doesn't even show the desktop, just a start up screen.
And, once upon a time, record labels paid radio stations to get songs on the air. That was outlawed...

Maybe this needs to be reversed. I'm sure there are some smaller labels who would be more than happy to pay the stations to get some of their tunes on the air.

Frankly, I think it's preposterous that it was outlawed to begin with, and the ramifications are clear: the only songs that get playtime are the songs that are "known" and the only songs that are "known" are the songs big enough to have a big label behind them. And since smaller players can't pay the stations to play their unknown artists, the big labels are able to make unreasonable demands on the stations because the alternative[1] is outlawed.

Note: the entirety of this comment is hinged around the assumption of validity of the quoted comment, I've not verified if this is true or not, I simply took the claim as true and ran with it.

[1] That is, the alternative method that would generate a profit, specifically, taking money from labels wishing to promote their artists, in exchange for the possible loss of listeners. When less listeners = less advertising dollars, the loss of revenue needs to be subsidized elsewhere, and accepting money from smaller labels (or even the artists themselves), is an obvious way to subsidize that.
Physical activity burns ridiculously few calories - if you eat extra 20%, you need to double amount of physical activity you have to burn it. Most people seem to think majority of calories they're eating are going into muscles.

So you have to choices - eat slightly less, or exercise ridiculously more. Gym twice a week won't have any significant effect. There are many good ways to downregulate appetite.

Sources:

> About 70% of a human's total energy expenditure is due to the basal life processes within the organs of the body (see table). About 20% of one's energy expenditure comes from physical activity and another 10% from thermogenesis, or digestion of food (postprandial thermogenesis). [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate#Biochemist...)
Yep, and you can get a case (Clarifi by Griffin) that noticeably improves the inbuilt camera to make this really easy.
This is going to get ugly very fast. Just last week we had people coming out of the woodwork to say they could clone StackOverflow over the holiday weekend.

There can't be a debate about this because the article doesn't mention any specific improvements.

There could potentially be a lot that goes into this. There could be new hardware costs, integration of existing systems so ease the publication of information, new payroll costs, office space, etc. For all we know they could be putting together a whole team of people to run this thing. They could be doing something that's basically like starting a new company. Or they could be paying way too much for a Wordpress theme. The point is we've got nowhere near enough information for people to make the argument that it could be done better and cheaper because we really don't know what "it" is.
Yes, I saw that. It does nothing to indicate your claim they actually are long lived relative other groups in the US.
Here’s How FriendFeed Will Generate Revenue
Aye, in the UK "real" businesspeople use Blackberries, us cool kids with iPhones love to flash our Moo cards.
Well all compliant browsers will play the media, by definition, so the remedy is effective. Safari wouldn't fail compliance they'd suddenly find the time to implement Ogg Theora as a fall back and if they've any sense the chip manufacturers would be falling over themselves to offer an optimised stack to court Apple.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bot
Actually it does show the desktop, thats how sad it is.

The guy made some rainbow colored Chrome OS logo which isn't even correct, google never uses rainbow colors beyond the "Google". It looks like XFree + some crappy mac-like window manager.
it's 100 symbols without spaces, so email shouldn't be that long, so may be:
a) several cipher symbols mean 1 clear text symbol
or
b) you must skip some symbols

my interpretation of "if you throw a pi at the wall, does it break into chunks of two" - take pi value in binary like 11.00100100001111110110... and assume, that 1 means keep symbol, 0 means discard it, but that didn't produce meaningfull email :(
Such interpratation just shows, that hint is not clear enough, too much variations.
Well, a cyber-strike would be a coordinated digital attack meant to achieve a strategic goal by force. So a cyber war, by extension, would be a prolonged exchange of such strikes.

So this could plausibly be one such strike in an on-going conflict that is far more 'real' than script kiddie squabbling.

Could have been a penetration attack to steal technological secrets.

Could have been a penetration to plant backdoors/loggers for later use.

Could be service disruptions to hamper a particular project.
(Take down the network serving No Fly List sorts of updates to get a possibly-compromised agent on a plane or over a border.)

Could just be a 'recon' attack to see what we have connected and how we react. A sort of digital equivalent to the kinds of 'disruption' that we financed and supported from Okinawa toward China for many years.

But I personally find it hard to believe that any state-sponsored cyber 'strike' would be limited to a DDoS on public-facing services. That sounds like a smokescreen at best.
> You can't get much more portable than bash.

I was with you up to this point, bash is not portable, and it is a hideous shell.

Any sane hacker writes all their scripts that are meant to be portable in standard bourne shell. Bourne is to bash as C is to C++. And people that put #!/bin/bash at the top of scripts that can be run by any bourne shell will burn in gnu/hell for the rest of eternity.
They have links (as always) to a few supposedly scientific studies on the matter, one of them suggesting an effect against oxidation. I don't really understand how grounding would help against that, I would even think that it would make things worse if anything.

It does make some sense though that we might have adapted through evolution to being grounded, with our ancestors walking barefoot and everything...

EDIT : one of the studies : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15650465
Realizing that I am more productive if I wake up early but I just love being a night-owl. A hard problem to solve.

Yeah, this one's stumped me for years, too.
Micro-Optimizations are bad? That is just a load of shit.

If you can prove that Firefox's optimizations actually make incorrect results in any way, I am 100% behind whoever claims that micro optimizations are bad. However by firefox making them it means that I don't have to worry about the nitty gritty details about what order of instructions will perform better without changing the code. Or things like loop unrolling that don't have to be done in my checked in source.

Yea I think this argument is about 30 years too late...

If anything this proves FF3 is awesome.

Regarding web standards... As much as I am 100% for having good web standards, what good is adhering to a standard when no one can use it. I use the acid tests as an indication that browser x, y and z are browsers I want to be supporting. Unfortunately I always have to support IE... Sometimes even IE6, so acid tests are just nice-to-haves at this point. I just can't wait till IE7 completely dies (hopefully it won't be as long as IE6).
Hardware makers support Google OS
Hard Drive weight increasing?
A Basic Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
Let's fix HN first, then we'll worry about another site.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...
TC have been publishing good articles, mediocre articles and quite bad articles. But calling them failure is laughable, I think it's a result of envy combined with fear. TC is their serious competitor, and they know it. If for nothing else, they are usually able to break stories sooner than others. IMHO, Register should better find a ways to improve themselves, their work is not that impressive either.
Renraku OS: It Lives
I think the duration of this outage was basically about waiting for the GFS team to roll in. They knew at 6:44am that they had a crashing GFS Master on their hands, but they didn't decide to try upgrading until 8am, and only escalated to the GFS team after the upgrade failed to help, at 9am. That's the story of this outage, to me:

6:44 AM --- A GFS Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) reports that the GFS Master in App Engine's primary data center is failing and continuously restarting.

8:00 AM --- The cause of the GFS Master failures has not yet been identified. [...] the GFS SRE decides to commence the upgrade immediately in an attempt to alleviate the problem.

9:00 AM --- The GFS upgrade [...] finishes, but the Master is still failing. The GFS SRE escalates directly to the GFS engineering team, and [they begin] live debugging of the failing software[...].

10:00 AM --- GFS SRE advises that the GFS engineering team has identified the cause [...] GFS Master is no longer failing and GFS Chunkservers, which hold the actual needed data, are starting to come back up by 10:30 AM.
The joke is that Steve calls everything shit.
Even things that are useful, usable and exceed the quality bar for most shipping software.

As with Steve's other notable traits, Lyons exaggerates it for humor.
I think this is bullshit. The facts on which it's based appear to be:

1. Someone working on high-frequency trading at Goldman Sachs was a Bad Person, as demonstrated by the fact that he seems to have leaked a big pile of GS's trading code.

2. The NYSE put out one report in which GS's trading figures were bizarrely omitted. (They've since blamed it on a "system error"; who knows whether they're telling the truth?)

From which the author somehow concludes:

3. GS probably hacked into the NYSE's machines or connections so as to be able to snoop on everyone else's trades before they committed.

Now, sure, #3 is possible. But the only evidence our author sees fit to provide is points 1 and 2 above, plus the observation that it sure would be profitable to do #3 if you could get away with it. (The reasoning, if you can call it that, seems to be: #2 suggests that there's more going on than meets the eye, and maybe GS were removed from the report because they'd done something Very Bad; Aleynikov knows a lot about high-speed trading systems; one thing an expert on that stuff might do that would be Very Bad would be to snoop on everyone else's transactions; so let's write a big long story that basically alleges that he did.)

So either our author has extra information that s/he isn't owning up to, or it's bullshit (and either wrong or just lucky).

The author's previous story alleges that Sarah Palin is addicted to amphetamines, on the grounds that she is quite thin and sometimes talks incoherently on camera.

Bullshit seems like the simplest explanation here.
Pretty much agree that it is a brilliant dissection of why WA has the wrong interface for its real market. The people who nominally need its interface don't want it, and it doesn't work very well at that level anyhow. The folks who would use it with a more direct interface are likely to become very frustrated with it.

Casting it as a "false affordance" was well done as well.
> However by firefox making them it means that I don't have to worry about the nitty gritty details about what order of instructions will perform better without changing the code

Actually, Firefox benefits the most from tweaks like this, because its engine is so slow. For whatever reason. That's why I thought this post was interesting!
Ask HN: SuSE Studio and similar apps
I recently got an invitation to beta test SuSE Studio, and after a few searches I found that there are several similar apps out there (one for Ubuntu, a few no-name ones, etc...). Basically the idea is a simple point-and-click method for creating a customized linux distro ("or appliance")

I'm waiting for it to finish building my first quick attempt before I really put some attempt into it. I was wandering if anyone here has any thoughts on the app? Have you used others before? What was your experience? I've had a goal of custom-designing my own distro for a while, and intended to do it from scratch, but if this is half decent, I might just use this.

Any thoughts or advice?
TiVo subscribers are dwindling; maybe the deal with Best Buy will reverse that.
It's not The Register that has an obsession with TechCrunch, but this particular writer.
Well if they're anything like MY non-techie friends, relatives, etc...they'll call YOU.
That's what happens when you violate the guidelines and add, "Could HN do it better and cheaper?" to the title.

Kinda like adding the expression "in bed" to the end of any fortune cookie to completely change the meaning.
Right. The guys who haven't mastered 65-year-old fission technology.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co...