skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very true - we do have a long way to go. And I am pretty sceptical of that "is sixty years old today" claim myself - that's a pretty short window.

But "significant investments wouldn't likely help much"? I rather think they would, actually. There is a lot of research to be done, a lot we need to know. This is going to take significant investment; it is hard to think of any comparable research project that hasn't.

This guy, Felix Dennis, is over 60 now. He's worth somewhere north of half a billion. What else does he plan to use the money for? He even says, and I quote:

"Could you turn the clock back for me by forty years, I would willingly swap you every penny and every possession I own in return. And I would have the better of the bargain, too!"

If he believes that, then why not at least throw the dice on aging research? Just 20% of his (largely unnecessary) loot would have an unimaginable effect on the project. Especially if he could shame other rich old coots to match him. And who knows, they might find something quickly enough to give him his extra life. As opposed to doing nothing, that is, and all those zeroes in his bank balance being transferred directly to Her Majesty's Finest the moment he predictably keels over. Why not try and throw a spanner in the works? Mix things up a bit? See what the judicious application of Amount of Funds A to Promising Line of Enquiry B can come up with?

Maybe I lack the perspective of being a grizzly rich old goat but geeze, with their own lives on the table you'd think they would find more productive uses of their money than paintings and bonds. Where altruism fails, naked self-interest should start kicking in. Why isn't it?
I would ask for a bottle of Krug served in a sapphire encrusted gold bucket of diamonds, for me to sip while they tell me a number first.
In Python you dont' have to type 'end', just kidding although for some reason it reminds me of VB for this reason. I wish it didn't but it does. Why have an end be anymore than 1 character on a serious note, that is lots of keystrokes extra not needed.

But more seriously Python is a growth like Javascript. It has grown and adapted to every change it has been required because it has a very rapid iteration time and is great for wrappers to core C. It is clean and maintainable.

For this it has made huge inroads to system administration, game development, tool plugins, web development, command tasks and everything else. I have yet to have one instance where there weren't numerous libraries for every task. Even if you don't want to use a third party library there are many examples of how to do it.

Python is really at it's core many things. It is a functional language, it is an OO language and it can be procedural. It can wrap intense lower level libraries or port in a C extension for speed. The same code you wrote for your desktop api, can be used in a desktop app, a service, website, a web service, a tool plugin, at the command line or any way you need it.

It can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

Like Javascript, Python is based on a core few types, lists and dictionaries (objects). All the languages that seem to permeate like viruses have this basic computer science fundamental. It just is as simple and clean as you can get. Ruby also has this but it came a bit later.

And finally, it is named after the great Monty Python.
What's in Pogue's Travel Bag? Literally.
To handle this you could have a duress code that you could hand out that would make the system appear to be decrypted but only show the files you want shown when the duress code is used. That's the way most situations like this are handled. Now if they already know you have the data, then this won't work. If it was super-secure information (national security), you could give them another duress code that deleted ALL data, rendering you and the laptop useless. They might kill you for that though.
I wonder beyond just city names, what extra data is needed to get an implementation running. What map data is required, how about GPS data? What is the geographic taxonomy... suburbs, zones? I'd like to get something running, but want to have the code as comprehensively implemented as possible.
It's not an interview, rather a book excerpt, and was published two years before the link you provided.
The best tool I know to do such things is i (debian package iprint):

tetha@dev-server:~$ i 12
12 0xC 014 0b1100 '\f'
You're right - my comment was intentionally snarky, and deserved all the downvotes it got.

You're right - these are idioms. Idioms for working with current hardware. Essentially, these are machine implementation details, and while, yes, we currently have to program machines to get anything done, not everyone finds that kind of work rewarding or interesting.

I didn't mean to degrade the type of person that finds this interesting, I wanted to point out the divide between the hardware hacker and the, for a lack of a better term, math hacker.

I hope that clears up my intentions!
Take advantage while you can, back everything up on a physical drive. Worst comes to worst, migrate from your drive to another service.
What protocol do they use on the msgpush account? Push IMAP? Something else the iPhone supports?
The facts clearly cannot be copyrighted. What can be copyrighted (or at least leveraged for monetization) is editorial voice, brand recognition, and timeliness. TMZ broke the Michael Jackson story, and their reward for being first was huge levels of traffic and citations. If anything, this was INCREASED by citations around the web.

The "copyrights" the newspaper industry is trying to claim are more an irrational death rattle than any sort of sensical business plan. The newspaper giants are done for and everyone knows it. Even if they could get these laws passed and enforced, would anybody pay to link to or cite a news source? Of course not. You would either cite a source that waives these ridiculous fees or start calling up sources yourself. Mark ignored these claims because they will never amount to anything.
I don't understand - isn't this push? Shouldn't you be notified immediately, rather than pulling every 15 minutes?
It depends on the question. The parent poster obviously closes his browser, otherwise load time wouldn't matter for him.

Furthermore, your question calls for a yes/no answer, which is hardly contributing to the conversation.

As for the why he closes the browser, I don't know. Maybe RAM scarcity... But it isn't wonderfully interesting to have that kind of anecdotal conversations here.
Google is good at many things. Uptime is one of them. Individualized attention to support requests, not so much.

I use Google mail for my business. In ~2 years it has been inaccessible to me twice, both times for less than an hour. I got access back at the same time as the other millions of people who were locked out.
NetBeans Showstopper: Running Tests
NetBeans seems to be really lagging behind Eclipse and IntelliJ when it comes to test execution ...
Find a convenient tin-pot dictator and make sure to give him a good amount of money to keep out of your affairs.
http://legacylocker.com/
Hello webdesign and banner-ads from 1999. At least put some effort into syntax highlight your code samples.
Actually, it's 8%.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=667909
How does python compare to ruby in terms of web development?

I get the impression that there are more 3rd-party libraries in Ruby, so it is easier to get web code up and running with ruby.
no they kinda fake exchange (I don't know the technical details behind it) ,since push IMAP is not supported on the iPhone.
Why language X is better of Y makes no sense. Every language has its benefits and downsides. Python has been slighly longer around and has a bigger user community which resulted in more available library code. Ruby and Python is pretty much interchangable in the sense of features as they often steal from each other and vice versa.

Ruby

- follows TIMTOWTDI

- Mutable strings etc.

- has a greater emphasis on code generation ("meta")

- VM's are much slower than Python (there is no Psycho etc.)

- emphasizes code clearity and readabiliy (human cycles are
more important)

- Libraries are much less mature

- ...

The lists of differences could go on forever. A comparsion and "why" is difficult. I think they are too similar and the people are too polarized.

A language is a tool to solve a particular problem. In the case of Python you have higher momentum of the community and the switch from C/C++/Java to Python is often easier than to Ruby. (Wild statement of me with tests from a sample set of 2 test subjects ;) )

Probably the best characterization I can come up with is.
Python is already on this "Enterprise" trip where companies use it a lot and so forth. Ruby has some interesting companies pushing it (Twitter etc.) but is not compeletely there yet, it still has more "hacker" and "monkeypatch" feeling. Oh wait, we call that "ninjapatching" in Ruby ;)
I wouldn't suppose people would mug him for his data. But having got the laptop, the data may very well be trawled through for email addresses to spam, credit card numbers to defraud, salacious photographs for blackmail, etc. Someone who mugs you is extremely likely to pass the laptop to a fence, who will then make the most of it.

Yes, the data will get wiped and the laptop sold, but the data will also be mined to see if it's of value. I assume the author doesn't want someone going through their underwear draw.

In the UK computers must be recycled, but recycling companies are required by law to shred hard drives. It was extremely difficult to get them to save the magnets for a youth project robot building exercise.
Here's an example where a web developer may find bit=fiddling useful:

- How would you, compactly and discretely, represent in a cookie the days on which a user has visited your site this month?

(I am decided not a web developer, but this is a question I'd ask a web developer on a phone screen were I to hire one).
I always write the most elegant demos and proof-of-concept code, and it goes down hill as it gets fleshed out. Later, I go back to rework it into a library and driver; all software can be made into a bunch of libraries and a "driver". Each library has a useable API, the driver code looks tight, but individual libs look really horrible behind the scenes.

It's all engineering tradeoffs. The elegant things are sometimes slow or bloated, and the fast things are hackish and dirty.

One thing that repeatedly screws me over is data representation. SQL tends to creep into the object system, because it's far cheaper to store and ID than a whole object. However, it's easier to store a whole object in memory than to make repeated trips to database.

Language conveniences creep in; it's far easier for me as Lisper to parse a SQL row into a list, even easier to make that into a class instance. Regular expressions; keep those fuckers out of your code if you can help it, for anything but the first stage of a parsing script, regexes should be done without.

One thing I found out is that "cushion" code, stuff that is meant to make your programming easier, remains in the program and never leaves. Instead of forgetting a horrible backdoor in the code, it's far easier to refactor it early and put the necessary debugging features in place. It's tempting to leave out error checking when you're not even sure you need the function to begin with, but we should be careful. I found out today that my FIND-USER function returned a valid USER object with a valid USER-ID but not login name or password. You chould actually go to www.mysite.com/home/USER-ID/ and be served a fresh account outside my billing system. Fuck me DEAD!

P.S. Flow is a double-edged sword. If your code is brittle and academic, there might come a point one night when you type a few more forms and the whole things springs to life. It's beautiful to watch your creation come alive, you never want it to die, so your brain selects the kinds test data and you babysit your toy to full function avoiding all the embarassing crashes in between and possible throwing in the occassional IF-test to save face before yourself. You go and go, putting in more stuff and watch a few more milestones far from the distant future drop dead at your feet as you pass over them between coffee and cigarette breaks in that glorious night. Congratulations, you just caught the flow, here is hopping you will enjoy the next month of frustrated rewriting and fine-tooth combing through your inspired mess ;-)
"..strange ad-hoc combination.."

For instance?
I think you meant something like dovecot, instead. Postfix is an MTA, not an imap daemon. I'd very much like to see a dovecot extension to do push.
I think you missed the point, their key innovation is to use a content preserving warp on a frame-by-frame basis to recreate almost ANY motion path they like ( provided that the path is close enough to the original path of course ).

The software you listed are simply a part of the system which they developed use, the tracking/scene analysis part of it. And you are right, that part of the software is not overly difficult to write, in fact you can throw together a Harris Corner detector + RANSAC to find correlation between the points and it'll do quite ok. In their case, they decided to use the Voodoo camera tracking system available here:

http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/docs/manual.html

which is comparable to the software you have listed

What I'm most interested in is the speed of processing their warps. From my experience of playing with ITK/VTK, generating non-rigid warps using b-spline, MFFD or any of the current algorithms takes a LONG time if you take the image content into account. I need to read the paper more carefully to find out.
Don't both Gmail and Google Docs come with offline support these days ? If it's access to data you're worried about, you could also use other apps to backup this data. e.g Thunderbird for email. I remember a fairly recent Lifehacker article about a python script that downloads all your Google Docs, which might be a decent solution when run with a scheduler.
I chose Ruby mainly because of all the syntactic tricks and weirdness but despite slowness.

You might choose Python for exactly the same reason; e.g., I wouldn't use Ruby on teams with >2 developers, especially in Google. Python is more straightforward but at a (small) price of freedom.

Example: you can rapidly prototype in Ruby using blocks and extend basic classes (even integer) using monkeypatching. I was fascinated by this, yet I wouldn't monkeypatch when working with other people so that advantage goes out of the window.
Just using Fibonacci for testing out VM performance is a bad idea. You need a broader viewpoint. That said, every language shootout is basically rubbish as there are so many variables who play into this.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
"I love string methods. Not sure if Ruby also has them"

What do you mean? Of course Ruby has a String class and plenty of methods on it, but I'm not sure if that's what you're talking about.

Ruby comes with an XML library standard, sure, but it's pretty bad. In my experience most people use competing libraries, of which there are several high quality options. You can get a walkable tree from the core library but you'd be better off with one of the superior third-party libraries like hpricot or nokogiri.

(edited badly written original)
What Is a Master’s Degree Worth?
They're both equally Greenspuned to usefulness.
Did you report the bugs?
For me it's very simple !

I can READ other people's Python code with greater ease than Ruby, Java, C#, C++ or even C. At the end of the day, the quicker I can assimilate library code the quicker I can use it well and the quicker the module gets completed and fully tested. Of course, with Google and Eric Raymond raving about it, the confidence factor increased further.
Be careful not to let emotion enter in to issues like this. And be especially careful before using terms like "scientifically obvious". Scary things lie at the end of that road:

http://www.crichton-official.com/essay-stateoffear-whypoliti...
The guidelines mention "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it", which may be what happened.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When Is a Browser Not a Browser?
python is easy to learn like php and ruby have sometimes strange looking syntax like perl for newbies.
A good programmer doesn't have this problem and will love the goodies and syntactic sugar from ruby.
I know someone who drives a Ferrari and really enjoys it - and he's nearly 50. You've got to be pretty old before you're too old to enjoy driving a nice car.
Stenographer Schools and Stenographer Training
Found a site about Stenographer Schools talked aobut online programs and colleges that offered seemed pretty reliable.
Jonny Lee, the brain behind many of the wii-mote hacks, has a $14 "Poor Man's Steadicam" that he came up with:

http://steadycam.org/
Rubygems is a separate system from deb/rpm, but works roughly the same way. Typically it doesn't do binary packaging the way they do it, though, and if native (non-ruby) code is required it is compiled during the install.
If you choose to disregard the privacy issue, don't get too attached. Their privacy policy states that they plan to charge for the service once it's out of beta:

"Information collected may include: contact information such as your name, phone/cell numbers (during the course of technical support incidences), e-mail address(es), e-mail password(s) (to monitor your mail account for new messages), an identifying question for security check purposes, billing information (if you choose to join our service post Beta) and information related to those of our service(s) in which you have expressed an interest."
I upvoted this article because the conversation on this page is interesting and provides a lot more information than the original article. I always look at the comments before reading an article on HN, and often feel that they are more valuable and insightful than the linked page. This is the case here.
i'm also excited about lsb. i ran into a situation the other day where they would have been extremely helpful
Secrets of buyer behavior in a recession
See http://pypi.python.org and convince yourself :)
Flash game design postmortem
...strange ad-hoc combination of other languages.

I call bullshit, sir. Ruby is objectively less strange and more consistent than Python. Some has to do with the fact that Python is older - hence has more baggage to carry. A lot of it, though, just has to do with poor/missing design choices. Specifics?

- ruby 'block' passing convention is much cleaner and more powerful than python's 'for'/iterators.

- python's global functions are stranger and more ad-hoc than Ruby's strict object-orientation.

- ruby's mixins > python's multiple inheritance

- python underscore (and double underscore) naming conventions to overcome simple language features

Don't get me wrong: i love python - but primarily because of the faster execution and larger community - not because of the language itself.
I've sent some feedback to EB, but will post here especially with it being now open-source:

--

There should be a page of installations for various countries it has been setup. This may prevent duplicated efforts for various countries, and better promote existing implementations.

Also, non-programmers would be interested ie potential webmasters or administrators. Even a hosted version could be a good business model. As such, check out http://nationbuilder.com when it's released stemming from http://whitehouse2.org

And multi-language? What if I'd like to do something for a single country in two language versions.

--

Also, only Business Reviews, Lost and Found, and Real Estate listings, when clicked bring up actual data. Otherwise, the user sees an information measurement screen before reaching any data. This intermediary step detracts from the site - why can't there be an aggregation of all information from that category in an added feed column that's also available in RSS. This would be especially useful for cities just beginning and when there's not a lot of data, or, when all subcategories are of interest to a user. For example, an rss feed of all police calls for an entire city would be of interest to reporters.

Even Craigslist has an aggregation, per city > per information top-category:
http://telaviv.craigslist.org/jjj/ .. with rss
Both for windows

Virtual Dub
http://www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm

AviSynth
http://avisynth.org.ru/mvtools/mvtools2.html
Street musicians collaborate across continents
You wouldn't. I wouldn't. We are not most people.

Many people will give their password to anyone who asks, and most will give their password to someone who offers them a candy bar.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3639679.stm
php syntax is much more perl-y than ruby
I recently picked up "The Fabulous Showman" in a used book store, a good read for entrepreneurs.
Machsend - P2P file sharing in the browser
Tool tickets
Tool is an American rock band in Los Angeles, California. The band comprises drummer Danny Carey, bassist Justin Chancellor, guitarist Adam Jones, and singer Maynard James Keenan. It was formed in 1990.
A Ban on Imports
Personalized News Reaches a Turning Point
Interestingly you can deliver vorbis audio natively, via Java, and via Flash 10 (see https://launchpad.net/fogg), so for audio you only need one format for 99% coverage.

And despite that fact no-one talks about it, Vorbis is actually state of the art, competitive with both AAC and AAC-HE at their respective sweet spots but without the problem of AAC-HE degrading badly on decoders that only support AAC (e.g. Apple stuff).

(Vorbis is also patent clear, used widely by big companies, well supported in hardware, and music seems to have moved away from DRM so it basically trumps every objection made to Theora.)

For video, though people like to talk about H.264 as if it was a single codec, it's actually a family or toolkit designed to go from web video on small portable devices up to Hollywood Blue-Ray on 100" projector televisions. (I've seen people seriously claim Theora is unsuitable as a standard web codec because it doesn't handle film grain as well as H.264. Film grain!) Unfortunately you can't encode one H.264 stream that'll work on everything as encode and decode complexity ramp up harshly as you move up the profiles.

I predict that since the iPhone (and similar) is the hot platform right now, and it doesn't have Flash, you'll see a lot of places following Kroc Camen's lead and encoding twice, one for Theora and one for iPhone compatible H.264 which will then be deliver by Flash for non-Theora platforms.

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

The kicker here is that iPhone compatible H.264 is far from the best possible quality you could squeeze out for desktop use, but is more than good enough for most folks so the two videos will be basically equivalent in quality.
Some really nice points. I would love to use ELF and GOT rewrites for languages that I hack on.
Not all hackers are dudes.
You're right, that was ambiguous, I've edited my post to clarify.

The behavior I'm referring to is loading XML into a tree shaped data structure, so you can reference particular branches when seeking or adding content, and not have to think about about tags (well, once you'veran it though BeautifulSoup or a similar cleaner).
I have used both, Python more than Ruby.

Python's iterators are more usable in many situations than the Ruby block system. I can return an iterator, stick it in a variable, call another function with it that returns another iterator, and so on.

Python's classes also seem cleaner and less magical than Ruby's. For example, a method on a class is just an attribute that happens to be a method. Much more intuitive than Ruby in my opinion.

I'm also fond of Python's idea that "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it".

I agree that Python does have its fair share of strangeness, but that fades away with time (you don't notice it).