skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(I posted this on the website's comments, but anyway:) It would be terrible etiquette if a big website like Facebook were to take money to take away someone else’s username/unique URL so that someone else who wasn’t fast enough could have it.

As much as I understand where you’re coming from, you were simply too late to get robertjmoore, and the person who did get that Facebook URL should not be penalized because of your willingness to pay cash.
All of this talk hinges on the premise that shipping computers without FireWire is some kind of visionary move for Apple, part of their legendary forward-looking philosophy. Now they're shipping a machine with FireWire. Heavens. Surely this is some sort of meta-visionary move.
> Look it up.
No. You're making an extraordinary claim; the responsibility is yours to demonstrate its veracity.

> 700 million from the US to Africa
Define your terms. I suspect that you're talking about one very specific type of aid from one very specific entity, e.g., direct economic aid from the US government itself. But what about aid in the form of charity from US citizens, or donated work by doctors? What about indirect aid, such as the way the US supports the UN (and other organizations like WHO), which in turn do a lot of work in Africa.
Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
In Montana right now, diesel is about $2.39/gallon versus $2.59/gallon for regular gas.
I'm disappointed that Ruby isn't getting this type of attention. I think that Ruby strikes a good balance by allowing highly readable code like Python, but tolerating denser syntax for when you don't feel like talking to a 3-year-old.

However, it is good that Google is putting it's weight behind this project, because anybody who uses anything built on Python (which has weaseled its way into virtually everything nowadays) is going to experience a performance boost.
Conficker uses RSA encryption with MD6 as its hash function. This isn't really necessary, but the worm authors were just having some fun by using unnecessarily cutting-edge cryptography.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD6

MD6 is one of the leading contenders for the competition to be named SHA-3, the replacement to SHA-1 and SHA-256/512. More details on the contest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-3
Having digital copies of my books sounds great, but as a college student I'd like to sell some of my books back at the end of the semester. I'm not sure how interested the book store would be in gorilla-glued spines.

I was recently reading a very detailed instructable [1] that describes a system to scan books without cutting the spines for ~$300. I'm planning on trying it out later this summer.

[1]http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-...
I resent the suggestion that python has weaseled its way into anything. It rather slithers, wouldn't you say?
Where "Someone"=="Bruce Sterling"

And it also happens to be an interesting response to pg's essay, as it brings up the question of the "main branch" of evolution in programming languages, which, in choosing Lisp as the basis for his own 100 year language, pg seemingly ignores.
Well.

The whole "people don't write applications in Lisp, they use Lisp to write a new language and then write applications in that" point has been brought up already, so I won't try to argue its pros or cons (thankfully somebody else can get flamed from both sides over it).

I will say that I think Python does something interesting, in that it removes some of the stupidest problems teams usually run into. Consider projects written in C or C-like languages: hugely disproportionate amounts of time are dedicated not to actual issues of how to design applications, but to things like where to put braces and how to use whitespace. Python sidesteps a lot of that petty bickering because the requirements of syntactically valid Python impose consistent solutions to those debates from the start.

Also, culturally, Python programming style tends to go quite a bit beyond that. For example, most large projects simply use PEP 8 as their style guide, doing away with an even larger class of stupid infighting.

As to FP and whether Python hates or supports it, unfortunately it is the case that if you put five FP proponents in a room you'll get at least twelve mutually-exclusive definitions of FP. So I think that tends to be a rather silly debate to have :)
Robert M Stanley - Phoenix SEO Guru
> "When I'm starting on a new algorithm, I sometimes find it's both fun and instructional to begin by trying to see just how simple-minded an algorithm I can write. I think I do this just to prove to myself that the problem can at least be solved. From there, anything else is mere refinement."

This is excellent advice.
I grew up with the long summer break (in Canada), and can't imagine how boring my childhood would have been without it. It was a great time to meet and make friends with the neighborhood kids, build forts, go exploring, go to camp, etc, etc. Some things can't be learned in school.
I only jokingly implied you could be in such a mess. I also can assure you it's not the _whole_ industry.

Some of us employ techniques that make it easier to maintain large chunks of code. I refrain to describe them as complex because complexity is something to be avoided like the plague.
Parrot 1.0.0 was released in March of this year. Give it time.
Learning programming or even learning how to operate a lemonade stand have far more economic values than a school system churning out ton of quadratic equation walking calculators.

Reading is not that hard to maintain even. What kind of a social environment the school is to discourage such disinterest in maintaining reading skills? Where is the internet? Where is the texting? Where are the blogs, or the twitter even? Literacy should be stronger than ever before.

Mathematics? For god sake, what reason do we need to learn useless concept like cosine, sine, and tanget and how to do the quadratic equation? What everyone probably need is an education on how to manage their money and do financial calculation, but beyond that, it is mostly unneccesary. I serously doubt business manager, nails shop, and musicians need to know that.

Programmers at the very least need to know algebra. If he want to do cooler stuff, he can learn on his own, just like how he learn all his tools and programming languages.

Other field may required lot of mathematics. If you need mathematics for your career, why not take a school specialized in making engineers out of you?

Schools, are the very least an hinderance to the economy. It is a test, a fake test at that. It have nothing to very little to do with the performance of our economy.

The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need English Literature 101. English literature is probably the scientist know, but is it revelant to his career? No.

If schools want to be useful to the economy, than make them churn out skilled work force for whatever their economy may need and do it well. We would still have schools like grammatica and mathematics that will equip people with the basic essential(Let face it, it is hard to go anywhere without learning how to write and read and do basic mathematics)

For those who still want a scholar's education(English, Social Science, Alegbra, the work), well...you still have the money to pay for such an education, right?

Let forget all the government beucracry, rules, and abritary grading guideline and start schools like the Hacker School where young and old alike get to learn technologies and skills in fast and furious courses like the Art of Unit Testing or Rails boot camp or whatever.

Our profession doesn't have guilds or unions, occupancy licensure, and all that bullshits that other professions have. If we program, than we're programmers.

If some bold hackers can show the world a successful example of a trade school where teachers teach because they know their stuff and teach well not because of their bullshit degrees and license that said they're teachers. This can be an example to other field to replicate.

Than our frailing education system will begin to rebound and starts to produce workers who are not quadratic equation walking calculator but can actually do real work!

Now, all we need is a little less regulations(actually just abolish all laws regarding education) and the privization of government run schools and their so called educational standard.
The problem isn't the time spent in school, the problem is the school itself.

We teach people to be the status quo, we don't encourage them to excel.

For me, summers were spent learning about computers and all the magic spells that I could cast to get them to do whatever I wanted them to.

For some students, school is holding them back. If we want to fix things, we need to abandon this psychotic idea that all students are the same, that there are no dumb kids and that you can just dump 20 similarly aged kids into a room that has somebody standing at the front of it talking at them and that they will somehow come out of the situation better for the experience.
I think it's interesting how the success of projects like this sometimes seems to depend completely on a single person having the right combination of interest and skill.

The Jython project was just the coolest darn thing until, from what I can tell, the lead developer got tired of maintaining a mature project with a hairy codebase and left to join (start?) PyPy, an even more ambitious project. So Jython was stuck in a coma with a pre-alpha 2.2 release for like half a decade, while CPython marched on, and no new maintainer was able to bring it back to consciousness -- despite huge demand for it, since Jython at the time was the perfect solution to problems in Java and Python. Finally Frank Wierzbicki came along a couple years ago, squeezed out the stubborn 2.2 release and is on the verge of version 2.5, at which point we can consider Jython back open for business. There's a kind of similar story with Psyco, and I think that one also concludes with PyPy being the "right answer" to the original problem.

But back on topic -- in some ways, the dynamic-language communities are collaborating on common VMs. The JVM team is trying to make things easier for other languages with "invokedynamic", the .NET world is keeping up at least (DLR? dunno), and LLVM has good traction as a compilation target.

However, I doubt we'll see anyone devote significant effort to porting Python or Ruby to Parrot until Perl 6 lands and provides a compelling demonstration. Meanwhile, PyPy is getting close enough to its goal that we might just want to wait and see if their JIT-compiler-generator solves all of these problems in one shot.
Fun read. All human nature is sexual, so not all suicide bombers are Muslim, but nearly all Muslim suicide bombers are male, and that is so because of the shortage of women. Rich men have more wives, mistresses, concubines, because a woman would rather have one-tenth of a rich man than all of a poor man. Industrial societies are monogamous because a working class man isn't all that bad. And also why gentlemen prefer blonds.
In a recent Australian election, one of the candidates had an old boyfriend sell a set of semi-nude pictures taken in the 1970's into a paper. The paper, of course, ran them as a front-page news and everyone was left questioning the moral issue. Basically : so what?

End of the story was: she didn't get elected, but then she was unlikely to be elected anyway. And eventually she produced evidence that the photos were fake (by releasing a photo taken around the same date which showed her with a different haircut), and the papers had to retract the story and officially apologise, which they of course did after the election.

What I am saying here is that you don't need digital cameras and the internet to get nude photos circulated, and that I think it will become the norm for just about everyone to have embarassing photos lurking under the closet, and will become a non-issue for employment, politics and more. As long as it is plain-vanilla pics in your underwear, I doubt it would cause any long term effects.
No, it is exponential in the number of digits of accuracy as a function of the number of iterations performed.
New Viking settlement found in Canada
Good info, thanks. I think you're right about Perl 6 needing to be finished first. It's too bad, because it looks like some opportunities might be missed by then.
This article compares the US to a whole lot of school systems. There is nothing wrong with that, it’s just possible that if you constantly change the point of comparison you end up comparing the US to fictional countries – without the reader even noticing. There are huge differences between the school systems in different European countries (and, e.g. in Germany, between the different school systems in different states inside of those countries) that make those kinds of comparisons dangerous.
You're still not answering my questions. Do you believe that no engineers use limits or calculus? Do you believe that limits and calculus are unrelated to the idea of infinity?

Now you seem to be saying: "I have never, myself, seen the concept of infinity used to solve a problem in a way I deem significant. Therefore, infinity does not exist and is not useful to anybody."

If I said the same thing about the number 65536, would it force you to program only 8-bit processors for the rest of your life?

Based on some of your earlier statements, I'm going to guess that we're using different definitions of the word "infinity." I'd guess that to you, the word "infinity" means something like "the largest possible number, denoted ∞." I'd also guess that, in your claim about calculus above, you mean something like "I have never seen a calculus problem whose solution required you to write down an ∞." Am I right?
I used to be a massive evo-psych fan, but somehow reading this post with it's tabloid 'aren't we daring to be politically incorrect' attitude really rankled me. I think it was reading Douglas Hofstadters 'Metamagical Themas' that made me more favourable to political correctness - and more likely to see articles like this, which no doubt have a lot of scientific fact behind them, as presenting those facts to push a particular worldview.
They are known as the grass-eaters: Japan's Generation XX
It started off pretty well, but then didnt go anywhere.

I dont think any of our languages are hundred year languages, although COBOL and FORTRAN are in their early fifties. Mostly they wont survive because they arent concise enough to express our ideas in a hundred years. List comprehension in Python is way more concise than the same operation in C or assembly language. Why should we worry about the bookkeeping details of a container in 2100. But we wont be doing programming then. Our AIs will. I aim to be a philosopher of computation by then. I'll tell the AIs old war stories.
Aha -- I almost suggested that they could do some memoization, and indeed they are doing just that. The last 100 unique patterns are compiled and stored in a dictionary for future use. You could still thrash badly if your regex "working set" is more than 100 patterns, but for most people it's probably Good Enough. (Plus you could override re._MAXCACHE if you really want.)

Thanks for pointing out my error, and getting me to read the actual code instead of speculating. :)
Does it actually bring up any points? The only added text I saw were three jokes that didn't add anything to the essay.
Speaking as an immigrant from Europe, I was surprised just how much Americans value summer jobs for kids, even blue collar summer jobs.

In Europe working kids is considered a sign of coming from the lower classes, the people that might actually need the income. And upper class families would be embarrassed if their kids worked blue collar jobs.
This seems to miss an important point: choice. Most middle-class Americans get to choose their jobs, within reason. Most American schoolchildren do not get to choose their schools.

I went to a charter high school whose curriculum focused on letting us do individualized projects catering to our interests. Its 7-hour day (8:30-3:30) seemed far less oppressive than the 6-hour-and-20-minute day at my public middle school. I've kept up with it after graduation, and they now offer after-school classes and programs until 5:00, and summer courses. And kids go, even though they don't have to. Why not, when their friends are there and the programs are stuff they're interested in anyway?

Similarly, I don't mind working long hours at the Googleplex, because my friends are there, they give me food, and the work is interesting and meaningful.

When those conditions aren't met, you'll find many fewer people bragging about how much time they spent at work. Some working-poor people will work two jobs to make ends meet, but they don't brag about it, they complain about it. It's only because a relatively large number of Americans can now work in jobs that they find challenging and stimulating that we get the workaholic American.
A Mozilla contributor in Iran posted his own response to the election news:

http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2009-06-13/dark-days

It's rather chilling.
I have no idea where these people get their "scientific facts" from. Blond hair evolved in Sweden so that women could advertise their youth under all their heavy winter clothing? Why aren't Inuits (Eskimos) blond then?

At least half the stuff in there seems either like urban legends or dubious speculations to interpret limited data.
I remember seeing an interesting study somewhere (sorry, don't have the link) that found that (IIRC in elementary school) segregating the better students did not help them. It only made the poorer students perform worse.

I think that there have been similar studies which show that elementary school is a very different animal from what we think (i.e. similar nonintuitive results) and that it needs some kind of restructuring.
Paul Gatto Gallery
Paul A. Gatto, his paintings. Oils, watercolors, pastels, giclee prints , personalized, custom sizes, limited and open editions, figues, lanscapes, etc.
I agree. You could just as easily argue that Scandinavian people are fair because it helps camoflage them in snowy environments. Perhaps all the black haired ones got eaten by bears and wolves.

There's a kernel of truth behind most of this, but it's wrapped in tabloid watercooler talk.
The problem isn't the time spent in school, the problem is the school itself.

That's my take on the issue too.

http://learninfreedom.org/

I also tended to learn more in the summer than during the school year. Something needs to be done to make the school year more worthwhile for such students.
You're the exception, not the rule.

For the other 99% of children, the benefits of longer school years are well documented. Even for the "exceptional" children (who usually aren't as exceptional as they make themselves out to be), longer school years are good -- the question of time spent in school is entirely independent of the subject matter studied, or how it is taught.
I'm not at all surprised that the GM executives are too tightly wrapped up in their cocoons to drive their own products (with the exception of heavily tweaked versions). Given their inability to recognise the shift in the auto industry over the last 30 years, it's obvious they aren't in touch with reality.

I think the article has a good message for developers, especially that the old rule of 'Eat your own dog food' is of utmost importance. If you don't use your product, how can you know what your customers experience is like?
Voted up for the last slide (#11).
Nate Silver says that the analysis is flawed: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/statistical-evidence-...
To focus just on your comments about mathematics, let me point out that going through at least algebra at a minimum is valuable for everyone in a modern society.

First it is highly helpful in handling even basic household finance. Second, you cannot hope to understand even basic statistics without it (and with the way the media throws out statistics it is very dangerous not to understand at least the basics if you want to be a participatory citizen). But far beyond all that, it goes a very long way to teaching you how to think and how to make reasoned and rational decisions.

Also, I think you vastly underestimate the number of jobs that require going far beyond algebra. Virtually all technical jobs of any kind requires calculus. This includes almost all engineers, virtually all scientists, and most analysts. Also, most finance jobs involve math far beyond algebra. Remember that even fully analyzing interest rates involves calculus (or at least formulas derived from calculus, and a good analyst should know where they come from). And that is again before realizing that the mere study of math helps teach you to reason and think.

I am focusing only on math here, but I think you will find anyone in an advanced society will benefit greatly from algebra and far more than you seem to expect need calculus. I also disagree with most everything else you said, but I will just focus on math for the moment.
I can't defend the Esquire piece but the Great Gatsby is my personal favorite American novel.

It's a story that seeks to describe the great divide between the middle and the upper classes.

I'm really not clear what you mean by "something is about to be said...but isn't."

It's a novel. Do you mean that you didn't understand the purpose of certain story events or do you literally mean that nothing is revealed in the story.
I'm pretty sure the mutation in the single gene which determines how much melamine is deposited in skin, eyes and hair is due to vitamin D levels.

Vitamin D is produced in the skin when exposed to UV light. People from the north don't get enough of it, even with today's modern diet and vitamin D fortified foods.

The Inuit get more D from their fatty marine diet.

And blonds are not universality preferred. Try it, if you're darkish go to the Scandinavian nations and see what kind of attention you get from the opposite sex.

Rarity is preferred, blonds just happen to be rare in most of the world except Northern Europe.
Why aren't Inuits (Eskimos) blond then?

Evolution need not give you what you expect.
Thanks. I feel like the cold sweat realizations of "after the meeting" are all right there in this slide show. Nice to have them before the meeting...
I dunno man, my way of thinking is that if you're not screen scraping, regexes shouldn't show up all that much and if they're not showing up that often, Python's way of doing it isn't so bad.

Not much of a condolence if you're screen scraping, but still.
Hey, Just a Minute (or Why Google Isn’t Twitter)
Avoiding Credit Card Fraud
Actually, you're quite right. I guess it's been too long since I've read pg's essay. I thought this was a response, rather than a re-post. So, that makes me wonder whether pg thinks Lisp is on a main branch...
@tdm911's guide to twitter: Use it as you wish. There is no right, wrong or otherwise. This is the best thing about twitter!

Please note: This doesn't mean I will enjoy you spamming non-stop or endlessly RTing celebs. Your choice though and my choice not to follow.
It sounds like much of what these communities provide could be had by just going out and meeting your neighbors ...?
the single logout/login should be done in the browser. One login on launching it, and then all your passwords get automatically filled in by the websites in the question. Logout is done automatically after a custom period of time or closing of the browser.
Spam – not what friends are for
Is this the Japanese equivalent of what we would call metrosexual?