skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be honest, I am disturbed by the philosophy in your post. That stopping a natural cataclysm has side-effects isn't really something to be surprised of. If you don't take it into consideration then you just made a mistake (and a stupid one at that).

But to turn that into a system of thought and to consider non-intervention to be the default - I don't see the logic in that.

> I think the best thing we could do is educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control

Excuse me for wanting a cure for cancer. Yes, using a nuclear weapon is not the brightest idea in the book, but this doesn't mean the problem is unapproachable. A couple of directions that might be usable in the medium future:

- lowering the content of water in atmosphere in an area is something we can already do. Microparticles that facilitate rain are a pretty scalable method. This could be used to steer proto-hurricanes away from shore.

- large amounts of high-entropy energy are freely available in space.

But what I want to know is what good do you thing would do to "educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control"?
Yeah, exactly! Just like a single distribution of Windows can't possibly compete with the thousands of branches of Linux out there.

Oh, wait.
If you served http://example.com/foo.msg as text/plain, older IE versions used to helpfully assume the user wanted to view it in Outlook Express, which exploded because it only supported some binary monstrosity and not text/plain. Dots are not special in an abs_path, and you can't make an interoperable network by assuming your peer does everything the same way you do.
Right. Rectennas ought to be able to get vastly higher efficiency numbers (Wackypedia claims 90% but its un-cited) than solar panels (~40%, again Wikipedia).
Similar discussion from a couple of days ago (a couple of comments down from the top):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693293
Python is a really clever small(ish) language and VM that can be embedded in C other programs and serve as glue code for modules in C. It's also grown to be a good scripting language for the technical crowd. C++ started out as a way to have decent OO on top of C as a preprocessor. There are far too many features in it for my taste.

Ruby: lots of nice things, but err on the "bag of features"
side.
Lisp: syntax stripped of almost all sugar. Stripped down to the
basics. Scheme is the Ariel Atom of programming
languages.
Smalltalk: add just enough syntax sugar to lose some power of
Lisp, but retain enough to be a complete meta-language.
(Not enough syntax to please most of the non CS crowd.)

I interpret "not just a bag of features" as another way to say that there are unifying design concepts, as there are in Smalltalk and Lisp.
1. Lack of documentation. While there is some documentation on the web (and the free translation of the O'Reilly book is quite good), it's probably too little, too late. There are very few books published in English, and one of the most accessible of them (Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith) is IMHO one of the most poorly-written programming books I have ever seen.

2. Haskell seems to be getting most of the attention in that niche. (This is arguably the biggest factor.) Its community is somewhat small, and it doesn't have the general presence, marketing, word-of-mouth, etc. that Haskell does, and it had years and years to do so.

3. There are lots of cases in the OCaml implementation where they could have made it much, much more friendly to people trying to learn its typing, but didn't. ("Error: This expression has type t but is here used with type t" is baffling.) The exception system has a lot of rough edges, too - Debugging a program throwing the exception of "Not_found" without any context provided is rather irritating.

4. It cuts more than a few usability corners for sake of pure speed. Some people consider this a feature, but I don't like it as a default.

5. Its support for concurrency is not great (though this may have gotten better lately).

OCaml is one of my favorite languages, but there are a lot of ways it could be made nicer. While I don't use the .NET languages, it's at least reassuring to see that other languages are using the good ideas from the ML family.
Getting Into Games -- A Follow-up
Seems like this dude messed with the wrong people. If there's one group that has the clout and the connections to make your life a living hell, it's the bankers. They're in direct contact with your credit rating, they go deep in government, and they have tons and tons of money. It's a bad idea to piss them off.
You might want to look at Lua, FWIW. It focuses more on being a "really clever small language for embedding in C". (It also actually has tail call optimization, non-broken lambdas, no need for a GIL, etc.)
You should check out Martin Atkin's book "Tour Smart." It should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in live music in just about any capacity. Seriously, a really, really good read, something I wish I had when I was still gigging.
> “The reason I uploaded to svn.xp-dev.com was because it was not blocked by Goldman Sachs security policy,” Aleynikov wrote. The phrase, “not blocked by Goldman Sachs security policy,” was crossed out and he added: “I wanted to inspect the work later in a more usable environment.”

I'm not necessarily defending Aleynikov, but to me this just sounds like a case of paranoid security measures causing exactly what they were intended to prevent.
note the date of the article

Ah, that explains a lot. I totally missed it.
Bonnie isn't that good at characterizing system IO rates
YouTube has also added a closed captioning feature, but I'm not sure how it is done. I assume this is also working towards video search.
True, but I would have preferred if he had actually provided examples of how the men could have barked "smarter."
Follow-up on the 'Firefox v3.5 fiasco'
I think you'd need a reservoir to hold the hot water before it drained for a heat pump to be effective when the inflow occurs before the outflow (as with a dishwasher). The reason that the coil systems are relatively efficient is that they are pulling cold water past hot. Using hot water to heat the warm water in a tank will be much less efficient.

If you're interested, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency
Good reference. I have been with friends in years past for their U.S. citizenship swearing in. I recall they had to turn in any other passports they had (at least they were told they had to). I guess I'm still confused.
The Fine Line Between Informing and Spamming Your Followers
The best way to attack that problem is by using common sense, some women have very heavy periods so it leads to the conclusion that they will periodically (pun unavoidable) be indisposed.

No heavy math required, said period being 28 days.
For some reason all this google analysis reminds me of priesthoods in old cultures trying to make sense of the weather.
The real story: http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSTRE56806T2009.... ShortFormBlog contributes nothing.

The point of the story is that media moguls became moguls for the glamor. Bigness is not an asset anymore. The future moguls will be mini-moguls. It mentions new media, but doesn't try to make the point that media moguls are a dying breed because print is a dying breed. This is Reuters and it probably doesnt want to make that point.
In your example there are ways to do development incrementally. You could generate some files that only use a tiny subset of the features of Parasolid, in only one version. Once you have that working you can add feature and version support incrementally guided by your customer's priorities, which they might not even be aware of themselves but can easily be found by testing your code on a sampling of their most important files. Your incremental progress is loading of files with progressively more features, closer to your customer's files. It might turn out that you can avoid implementing every version and feature of the format, and it's much easier, faster, and more accurate to figure this out by testing working code than trying to write a spec ahead of time.
Worse is Better -- being a better product can't make up for a lack of momentum.
I suspect that the reason why some drain heat exchangers incorporate a significant amount of brass, is to act as a heat reservoir.

You'd often be better off putting that money towards a solar hot water system. Thermomax evacuated heat tubes work almost anywhere, and aren't subject to the same service life limitations as photovoltaics and batteries.
like? :) can you give examples? :)
Maybe you don’t hate spam as much as I do, but I’ll root for the state attorney general.
Semiotics - The Anatomy of a Brand
did you solve it yet ?
meh on the article, but loved the dog pic. too bad there's no attribution in his post:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/51588518@N00/8492351/
Right, for this particular case the math is simply overkill. In the general case, autocorrelation is a reasonable simple method to determine the periodicity of a time-series.
The website and the idea are really great. I can only advise everyone who doesn't know what 419 scam is to read this.

The sad truth though is that it works, there are people who still fall for this (419 scam) and there are also people who buy stuff when they see advertisement in their inbox (ad emails) - even if it's only 1 in 10000 it is enough.
I'm surprised that isn't my roommates tumblr page. He's a chef at one of the best resturants here, just had his jaw wired shut after a hit and run. He's been making the most incredible food for himself.
Powersat and a couple of other companies have some ingenious engineering that reduce the weight of a power sat to 10 tons, putting the satellite within the launch capabilities of SpaceX and the like.

I have been skeptical because the cost of a launch has always been high relative to the costs of trucks going to a ground based solar array. Powersat, however, says that its satellites will be economical when launch costs drop 50-75%, which seems achievable.

There is a second part, "running the numbers" at http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/07/running-the-numb...
I was thinking of the the Kremlin analysts who used to scrutinize the placement of individuals on the viewing platform for the annual May Day parade.
it is very impressive that they spend so much time and energy in tracking down the scammers. great job. it must be fun, a bit risky also.
Heh, thanks again. I had no idea that was actually the case with regard to legislation... a commercial Redfin was just one of my random ideas where I was wondering why nobody was doing anything given the kind of interest there might be in such a service. Now I know the possibly unfortunate answer :(
At one place I worked, the system for getting things done:

1. If you want something, say so.

2. If you don't get it, yell.

3. If you still don't get it, yell louder.

4. If all else fails, add the magic word, "fuck".

They're no longer in business. I WONDER WHY!
Let me know what wasn't clear. Most employers who use OSS apps - including R, SciPy NumPy and other statistical languages - are comfortable with staff fixing bugs in those languages and distributing their modified copies of the works.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt Sees No Need to Quit Apple Board
I am aware of this story. However, if you were to take a look into what he was writing about (as mentioned in some of the left notes), you'd see such claims are just plain silly. If he were to build a weapon, the history would have taken a different shape.

The health, yes that is a fact, he was "weird", but show me a great mind that wasn't - Mozart, Beethoven? However, he didn't hurt anybody, unlike Edison, who invented the electric chair "just for fun."

Thus, I wouldn't trust anything US and War departments says. They knew he was capable of a lot of stuff, so they normally seized everything.

Thus, you have to understand that such claims that he was working on some kind of "weapon" were coming only from the government of the US. If I were Tesla, I would have been going crazy myself - everything stolen, no credit, no name, no money, no support and publicity of crazy scientist - this was of course a great plot to demoralize and ruin credibility of Tesla and takeover his patents, since no one would support or fund "a crazy guy". Edison was taking the credit for his work for years before.

You know the US govt credibility? The same guys who said that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, that socialism and communism were the same as witchcraft while adopting all the systems, that broke Yugoslavia apart, that Serbs were doing mass killing of Albanians in Kosovo, bombed Serbia, with depleted uranium and cassette bombs, schools and hospitals, passenger trains, biggest factory of cigarettes (later bought by Philip Morris for $1), and of course denied everything...The list is long, and this is only my perspective, there are many others.

Since the Kennedy assassination, US has been the most corrupted country and non-democratic in the world, so I wouldn't trust what they say about the greatest scientist of our time. For the name of God, they've named a corner after him, yet have done everything to "fight immigration" while they have become what they are because of the immigrants.

Sorry for the rant, the topic is just distasteful once you gather a lot of facts. Also, encyclopedias are not really based on facts, but on what majority agrees (public opinion), and you have to keep in mind he was left as a "mad scientist" in the public eyes.
It's not just individuals who should worry. Google also has information on what pretty much every company in the world is working on!
which ad provider do you use?
I'd love to hear other people's speculation as to what they're doing. I think that they're going to build a massive suite a cloud-based apps, potentially even offering things like your iTunes library wherever you are on the internet. And I wouldn't even be surprised if pro-level stuff like Final Cut & Soundbooth made its way to the cloud at some point.

It makes sense to me as there's a big overall shift in that direction. Thoughts?
They also rail against firewalls, though, which do work.

Also, antivirii may be a poor solution, but they don't do nothing; the antibiotic analogy is apt because they are not a preventative solution, and because they don't work on everything (you can't, for example, use antibiotics against the flu), BUT they can help every once in awhile.
Hacker "wars" have been going on for a long time. Within that community there is a lot of status and class battles going on. Anti-sec is just another one of these. It's a group that's trying to look cool with high-profile hacks, and veil themselves in secrecy so as to elevate themselves above others.

They're probably little different other than their defacement banners.
There is a very simple rule: If you are a nobody and you get approached by somebody with an offer you are being scammed.

The only reason it works at all is because people don't stop to think "Hey, I'm absolutely nobody, why aproach me ?". That and greed...
You might be surprised. Keep in mind that developing for IE6 isn't necessarily difficult if you don't care about standards compliance or cross-browser compatibility. In a corporate environment where IT is a cost center, it's often acceptable to support only a single browser company-wide if it means saving money.

Also, a lot of corporate IT shops are not doing anything particularly interesting technology-wise, and have already built IE6-compatible frameworks that make most of the front-end web development they need to do easy enough. On the other hand, upgrading to IE7 would mean exhaustive testing of all existing applications, and the support of "the business" to expend resources on the project. It's much easier to do nothing for as long as possible.

Just to add another data point - I work for a SaaS company serving the financial industry, and 25% of our user base is still on IE6. (We still have major clients running Windows 2000 too, but that's another story.)
And precisely who is working on it.

I share this growing sense of disease.
I know, doesn't that sort of defeat the point?
Is it your assertion that Lua does not have momentum?
Not stock. But you can get it:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8207
His advice on
- giving music out for free at un-DRMed format in exchange for email
- and using the email address to sell premium goods such as signed personal items..etc

sounds remarkably like the advice in the Seth godin's "Permission Marketting" book.
Hacker Housing: Open Spot in the SF 'Hacker House' Starting in Early August
I'm returning to school on the East coast, and my room will be vacant at the Hacker House in SF in early August. If you're a coder and want to be around like-minded coders, this is the place for you.

Email me at johndevor(at)gmail.com if you're interested.
For any This American Life fans here, there's a great episode about these guys: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=3...
FireFox add-on, Debug PHP Using Firefox with FirePHP
hire a few good looking girls/volunteers to stand with signs in bikinis?
Free is not, and never has been, a defense to antitrust. Indeed, free offerings are generally considered very good evidence of antitrust: the company at issue is abusing its market power in one market to increase its market power in another market in non-competitive ways (i.e., by using money earned from a separate market to undermine the target market through under-priced goods). The obvious worry is that the products will stop being free (or so cheap) once the company has achieved sufficient market control.

It does not matter what the end user can do, antitrust focuses on what the alleged monopolist is doing.

Also, choice is not a defense to antitrust under the Sherman Act. That's a common misconception among non-lawyers. Choice is only weak evidence, at best, that the an alleged monopolist's activities are not anti-competitive.
Now with 80% less deadly lighting fixtures!
This could have been really funny. It wasn't.
If Apple want to verify whether users really want to delete files, then make a popup or dialogue or whatever prompting users to confirm. That would make a bad user experience, but at least i would understand the idea. Using two keys instead of one is not verification !

Anyway there is another protection layer: the recycle bin ...
Personal firewalls actually don't work, and the reason is usability. iTunes has 6-12 different executables with different names that require approval. How is your average personal going to tell whether a program with a strange name is part of iTunes or malware? Existing solutions do not address this problem. Also, users get asked to approve applications so much that they start to ignore the popups.

One possible solution to this problem is to crowd source program analysis. The firewall popup would contain a rating system and user comments, and the user could make a decision from there. Security companies are making too much money off of crappy solutions at the moment to switch to this though.
Although a short witty and borderline un-HN comment, you managed to make me laugh and save me the time of reading the article. I'm convinced that this is the correct way to do humor on HN :-)
and low key security:

http://twitter.com/ronin_the_pup
IPhone 3G 8GB refurb now available for $79
And a followup was just written: http://scalability.org/?p=1688
Then they'll do it 4 months prior. Your intent is sound, though.
I've been living there for the past week and can attest that it's a great place to be. Mostly quiet (but still cool) roommates with plenty of space. They say you're a product of your environment .. this is definitely a good environment to be in.
Googleogists are the new kremlinologists.
Google's been remarkably open about how they make money. When Chrome came out, their chief economist said the key was owning a scarce good that is a complement of a free good, i.e. the sole right to place ads on pages, which is the complement of the web pages themselves. Anything that increases usage of the web increases demand for web advertising, which in Google's auction system jacks up the price.

The revenue equation here isn't quite right though: it's not "Revenue = Amount of Time on Web", it's "Revenue = Amount of pages viewed on web". Each page is an opportunity to run across Google advertising. That's why Google has focused so heavily on making the web faster, Chrome, ChromeOS, guidelines for webmasters, and hard latency constraints on the search engine. If you let people search faster, they'll search more often.
None of those systems have overlapping marketshare.

WinCE is targeted at very small devices, like handhelds, GPS units, and smartphones.
XP Embedded is targeted at computer-based devices used in non-computational settings for limited tasks (i.e., ATMs, arcade machines, kiosks).
Vista is an upgrade to XP.

Expecting a bug-free OS from Google is a stretch. Remember Android? Google put a chunk of brainpower and marketing muscle behind that, and it's nowhere close to being bug-free...and it's already been out for a year.
I was not mislead by the headline. It is open to more than one interpretation of course, but it is accurate (and sort of humorous) as written.

The whole point of the article is a discussion about the line between "exploit" and "incredibly boneheaded app implementation" and where the responsibility should lie.
I think they'd be 'worse' monopolists than Microsoft.

We already know they're worse monopolists than Microsoft. Whenever Apple has ever owned, or nearly owned, a market, it's been bad for consumers. Apple charges higher prices, has egregiously bad license agreements, has notoriously poor interoperability (ever tried to integrate Mac OS X into a heterogeneous network with LDAP or NIS? I have, and it was not pleasant, and it was at least as bad as integrating Windows into the same network, and in many ways much worse...at least we could buy products to make the pain go away on Windows, not so on Mac OS X; this from an OS claiming to be a UNIX I found particularly galling), and one-size fits all product lines.

Apple makes beautiful products, but if they ever really won in any particular market, I suspect we'd all come to rue the day. And, of course, Microsoft did eventually fall...nobody outside of a few small niches realizes it yet, but Microsoft is no longer the dominant monster they once were. They now have to compete just like the rest of us to hang on to those revenues.

Microsoft's arrogance was borne of market strength. Apple's arrogance is baked right in, and never goes away, no matter how well or badly Apple is faring in the market.
Even firewalls in the enterprise corporate environment have the same problem. Network architects (well the bad ones anyway) know what they need to do to the firewall to achieve connectivity but dont know what security side effects those changes have thus rendering the firewall put in place to have no effect at all. This equates to 1000's upon 1000's of dollars spent simply to be rendered useless by silly decisions. I guess having said this the fault is more heavily placed on the user and not the equipment in this case.

I think if you look at the plight of anti-sec the equipment and the software is as much to blame as the user controlling them in many of the cases
Best language for low level graphics manipulation
I'm about to start prototyping an application that will do a lot of low level graphics manipulation. What is in your opinion the best platform to interactively play around with software that manipulates images and that will have to show the results of the manipulations after each of several stages ?

Performance is somewhat important but since this is the prototype stage not paramount, I'd rather have a very good 'workbench' at the expense of performance.

Is there an open source framework for such projects ?