skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Getting the indentation right should be the least of your worries if you have a good editor

I never understood that. The whole problem for me is that the indentation being the only thing denoting blocks the editor can't know for sure how things should be indented, since it's not simply cosmetic.

I haven't written a whole lot of Python but how do you even refactor python code? In C I can just copy paste a block of code from anywhere to anywhere (no matter the coding style in the source and destination file and the level of indentation) and then hit C-M-\ in emacs and have it reindent everything properly. In Python you have to make sure that everything is at the level of indentation it belongs to. If you refactor huge chunks of code it's easy to miss one fubar tab and have code subtly broken and introduce weird regressions.

Also, regarding the OP and "focusing only on your code", I think we all feel that way about the language we're the most familiar with. For me that's C and I can't say I've had a "missing semicolon" compilation error in months of heavy use. Once you're used to the syntax it becomes automatic.
It sounds like what you might be asking is - it worth it to risk taking the time and effort to write a book? I'm going through the process right now, so maybe my thoughts can help.

I'm writing a free online book, "Clojure for the Brave and True" (http://www.braveclojure.com/), that has been picked up by No Starch. A couple of the chapters, "Start Using Emacs" and "Functional Programming" have done pretty well here on HN. I've made about $1k on leanpub so far for the unfinished book (ebook buyers will get the full No Starch ebook when it's ready).

The main thing that has worked for me has been to constantly get feedback from readers. Every time I release a chapter I tweet it, send it to my mailing list, and post it on reddit and G+. The comments have been overwhelmingly supportive. If it weren't for that kind of enthusiastic feedback, I'm pretty certain I would have given up.

Other people might have other ways to stay motivated, but this make the project much more "real" for me. I feel proud to provide my readers with quality content, and that they would choose to spend their time reading my work. It also helps to get those leanpub emails saying that someone has paid for the PDF - it's very encouraging when people pay for a free resource. To sum up this point - try thinking about what kind of process will make the risk worth it for you.

The second thing that's worked for me has been to write in a way that I, personally, find entertaining. When I sit down to write, I crank up the Lady Gaga and let out my inner idiot. It's way more fun that way, and people seem to like the result.

I hope this helps!
Practice of TDD
I'd gladly accept your help with improving our Catalan translations! :-)
Feels exactly the same about Lisp and other languages.
TL;DR Don't steal pics off the internet for your business. It'll cost you money. We were too stupid to read what a "copyright" was.
>"Going back to the comparison with textbooks, there are a good number of people who could teach themselves subjects purely out of textbooks if they were motivated. But even after mastering several subject in this way, your employment prospects and marketability are not significantly increased."

I intend to put that assumption to the test. I suspect that once GRE subject tests start falling, both my prospects and marketability will jump dramatically.
They want small JS files so their designers can have a 2MB background image...
What are people using these days for compiling their static assets (js minification + concatenation, etc)? We have been using django-pipeline but it has been a nightmare.
I was mainly talking about mixing tabs and white space for indentation. Many people set their tabs equivalent to different numbers of whitespace, so when the whitespace and tabs mix, it becomes an issue if the previous developer had tabs set to 2 spaces, but you have them set to 4.
> After all, they did the work, so they deserve to be compensated for it.

The problem is that many Open Source projects aren't created by an individual, or even a single company. Large projects have hundreds of contributors. If a project requires copyright assignment, all these contributors have fewer rights than the maintainer of the project.

If a project doesn't require coypright assignment, and uses a single license, all contributors have equal rights to the collective work.
Bitcoin Abe is about the best thing I've found.

https://github.com/bitcoin-abe/bitcoin-abe
"Whether or not this is true, it’s outrageous that small businesses are forced to spend money that does not go to the state nor help with incorporation."

How does a journalist end a story with "whether or not this is true"?
JavaScript Closure Uses part IV
How is this news to them? Have they never read the creative commons licenses and realised that they don't have all the rights listed by default?

I'm not sure how these guys ended up making money by writing web content and didn't know their copyright ABCs...
Beware, awful overlay asking you to subscribe to their emails (which probably are more of this crap)
Excellent write-up!

I don't think enough people appreciate (or understand) your point 4. I am fairly good at algorithmic optimizations and pretty good at your implementation optimizations, but I do not have the math to do much mathematical optimizations, so spending any time on these kinds of problems gives me a visceral understanding of your point 8.

But I've talked to too many people who don't understand that such problems exist, and therefore don't see the point of any optimization (and then wonder why others consider their products to be hideous monstrosities), or believe that micro-optimizations or algorithms are the best you can do. In reality, all three are closely tied together and, in fact, applicable to almost any problem.

Your points 6 and 7 could be elaborated more. Or at least stamped on the foreheads of some educators of my acquaintance. One of the things I learned from what math education I have had is that you won't really understand something without seriously using it.

I hope that this was actually part of your PhD research, or if not that it didn't delay you too much. And if you're out in the "real world", all you have to do to succeed is to forget you ever heard of your point 10.
"I’d like to say that we’re just the unlucky victims of an isolated incident"

No, you aren't the victim here.
2014 may be the year we lose the web
You've missed the point. NumPy and friends are a mass of C code with some Python bindings.
Bog-standard CRUD? If we're just talking that, then I'd say it's symbol manipulation, potentially with some basic transformations thrown in. I'd put it on the level of algebra.

Depending on what he's actually doing with that data, though, the level may change. Got links?
Eh, this argument is at least 10 years old now, isn't it? I don't even remember the last time I had a problem with whitespace in Python. Just use a decent editor (vim!) and you're golden. :)
Don't be a pedant. The author uses the word in the sense of the slang expression "insanely great."
Amidst the glamor of CES, a search for simplicity
Sunrise Calendar gets iPad app
The Bitcoin-Mining Arms Race Heats Up
Not quite unlike me. ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6201175
Indeed. Having seen JS job listings that include rhetoric like "work with our hand-rolled pseudo-framework! it's sort of like Backbone but with a special socket layer baked in specifically for our app!" I can't run away fast enough.
Little sisters have a way of growing up.
> These attitudes haven't changed much since 1990 at least.

Why would they?

A blatant oversight is a sign of incompetence and by making such incompetence public, you're threatening their job security. Why would anyone react positively?

You're better off making the disclosure anonymously.
You used a photo without attribution or permission in order to push your own content. Just because you found something doesn't mean you can use it.

The author of this post works for http://www.contentfac.com/, a digital PR/branding firm. How did they not know this? If I took a logo they made and used it for my own company, I'd expect them to have the exact same reaction.
I first wanted to link to their homepage, but its just a sign up page for updates.

Their Vimeo has some more nice looking videos like this one: http://vimeo.com/60564990

Too bad they aren't exactly spilling beans on how their tech works, what it takes to run or any details for that matter. I guess we'll have to wait, unless someone else has more info.
The original fine was $8000, which the author reports as nearly $100 per hit. While I agree with copyright enforcement of stolen photographs, I do not believe this is a proportional punishment.

I'm also surprised that hotlinking files still counts. I'm hesitant to endorse anything that criminalises linking to a web resource.
And it give you a hint that a good photo is not something of trivial value.
I disagree strongly with this statement, having "taken" a couple of courses on Udacity. I didn't complete any of the courses, and from Thrun's point of view I'd be another example where they can improve. But this is an erroneous metric, both because students gain without completing the course assignments and because an in-person classroom only motivates you to do assignments by nature of having you pay $$$ for the credential. Unless Udacity credentials dangle you a job offer, there is much less incentive to do the work.

Does that mean the class is a failure? Not at all. I found the format and interactive quizzes to be superior to the college classes I took. In addition, you got to skip around to take what you needed, and work on what you like. It doesn't fit credentialism, but as a resource it was unmatched.

I didn't do any of the assignments for CS101 or CS253, which taught python and building web applications, but from there I was able to build a webapp far more complicated than their assignments required (basically I chose my own assignment).

http://sudokuisland.com

I'd never have been able to find the time and patience to sit through a university class just to build a side project, not to mention cash investment. I can honestly say that without Udacity this wouldn't have happened. For the woman quoted knocking the lack of human contact: sorry this wasn't a social club for you.
Depends on the purpose you use them for.
Does the author of the article really not understand that LLCs are not corporations? LLCs can't be "incorporated." Very sloppy reporting.
Its interesting that its more difficult and expensive to create an LLC while in New York than to create a corporation.
This is a brilliant question, any package about that?
Flagged, because this is a complete non-story. It's not interesting, it's not well written, they probably feel like they've come out ahead by getting lots of views for their crappy blog. I know everyone on HN wants to pile on and show how smart they are that, but it's basically just long-form flamebait and we've been sucked in.
Is IPython notebook on the roadmap?
The foundations of good code
Laying The Ground For A Successful Reporting Project
> I guess some things will never change, unfortunately.

I feel this way too sometimes, but if you step back you realize things change all the time. In America people banded together into worker's unions which fought tooth and nail to be treated fairly. Unions in America clearly have some shortcomings, but it did manage to move the needle from Grapes of Wrath style living to a more equitable and humane existence for workers.

Clearly these workers (and elsewhere in Asia) are starting to organize. Perhaps they too can enjoy a larger portion of the fruits of their labour.

Of course, the downside of constant change is things can get worse too and it's often very difficult to know which direction makes things better and which direction will makes things worse. Indeed, most won't even agree on what is better and what is worse.
Most places I know of running WinXP are completely cut off from Internet, using personal media like pendrives is prohibited and the identity of a user is confirmed with physical "PKI card" or something.

They will use their XP's long after the universe dies, I think.
Few things jump out at me..

1. It cost $3000, not $8000 - what the lawyer originally demands doesn't have much to do with how much it costs. Still a lot of cash? Sure, but less than half the title.

2. If publishing material is your business, it's pretty strange that you don't know some basics of current copyright laws. The list of "even ifs" is a bit worrying/misleading. Someone knew the image was copyrighted, since that's the default unless it's expressly royalty free. DMCA safe harbour is meant for providers that display user-generated content, not publishers who write and (presumably) edit blog posts.

3. What would the author of this post do if their copyrighted content (maybe a blog post?) was published on another site for profit? Maybe they'd send a nice takedown notice, maybe they'd ignore it and hope for the exposure, but maybe - especially after a while - they'd have a lawyer ask for some money, if they thought it was hurting their business.

So, yeah. Heed this lesson if you publish stuff, and use the heaps of royalty free images out there. Or (gasp) pay for them.
What barbed-wire frames teaches me about customer service
Any good editor should be able to figure out the indents when pasting. I'm not an emacs user, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a plugin with smart python pasting.
You might as well ask what normal Google search is really for, since any text Google links to is also, in your words, “illegal”.
Hackers Expose 20,000 Eastern European Cybercrime Forum Members
I can surely help you translate the homepage. Just give me a contact mail.
Watch live coverage of today's Orb1 launch starting now on NASA TV
Actually, looking at it on my laptop it looks far better if I zoom up a couple of notches.
I'm offering to translate the homepage :)
NSA and GCHQ activities appear illegal, says EU parliamentary inquiry
Yup. It's just the two of us. So far. If anybody wants to join: tristan@senseplatform.com.
Servicing technical debt sometimes costs more than refactoring. Sometimes not. A good manager/programmer can decide which situation they are in and act accordingly.
Caffeinate(8) Mac OS X Manual Page
Nanotechnology Used to Build Unbreakable Condoms
Next year? Try right now:

https://moot.it/blog/technology/riotjs-the-1kb-mvp-framework...
So how does an apology make anything better?
Glad I'm immune to such modal boxes.

Before I can even consciously notice them, my reflex action is to press escape or click on the close icon :)
Yep, an interesting comparison is found here: https://speakerdeck.com/tedtieken/signing-up-and-signing-in-...
Awfully late to displace iOS/Android
Udacity, Thurin's MOOC platform, is interactive and was designed to not simply follow the lecture style of current classrooms
:) the destiny of all anarchist dystopias is to be commodified as a glossy coffee-table book. sorry guys...
> If refactor huge chunks of code it's easy to miss one fubar tab and have code subtly broken and introduce weird regressions.

That is just one of the many issues that can come up when refactoring large sections of code, and is one reason that people write tests. For people to point it out as the entire reason that they can't use Python seems to be making a mountain out of a mole hill.

For example, I don't like that I can't use "if $?" in Ruby and I need to explicitly write "if $? != 0", but I don't go around bashing Ruby on that basis. For some reason people feel that need to do that with Python though. I don't really understand it.
"roll your own solutions" - that's part of fun!
> at some point you will have to pass the ownership to another, younger, dev that might not have been taught into this older technology; or port your script to a newer hardware, and eventually deal with an sub-optimal or incomplete VM.

We're talking about Python 2 vs 3 here, not upgrading your system from Cobol to Clojure.
if you unit tests take that long, break it up.

or you are probably doing functional testing in your units.
They mean +/- 1% in terms of error.

That's really accurate considering we're talking about the universe.
Hiring bias is alive and well. My cousins, one guy, one girl, are half South Asian and half white, both with a long "ethnic" last name. The girl cousin always had trouble getting a job deserving of her skills until she married a guy with an easy to pronounce non-ethnic name. The guy cousin always got called for tech jobs, despite having a degree in English with no mention of tech on his resume.
Percussive maintenance
Yeah, I got the impression from the very first line ("What’s lamer than a crappy photo of Nebraska? Having to pay $8,000 in copyright infringement penalties for it.") that this article was written by someone who didn't really want to think things through.

I mean, if it was a crappy photo, why did you use it in the first place?
The threat to Bitcoin thought impossible is now at hand
Thanks. The second link is thorough yet also very concise.
Depending on how deep you want to go, here's a fast little blockchain parser that will parse the blockchain into a SQL database or text file(s) for your viewing pleasure:

https://github.com/znort987/blockparser
It wasn't actually part of my PhD. But it didn't delay me too much in the sense that I was able to stop on time to finish my PhD work. In fact, over the next 4 month period I wrote up my thesis and coded up the prototype as well, which I hadn't done in the 3 years prior. I do conjecture that my performance in the PhD work relates to the time spent on the 17x17 but besides certain specific items, it's just conjecture.

I'm in the real world now for good, and I might be lucky that things in the class that would invoke the reaction this problem did, are few and far between. I'd like to find something that I can enjoy this much while being profitable, but, oh well, a man can dream, right?
I didn't see one.
"but it's still a mess (IMO) at the core language" - and the whole version 2 vs 3 adoption problem.
Every app has its own framework/DSL.

What a "framework" that isn't your app gives you is the ability to have a common language to describe and build your app's framework/DSL.

The larger the team, the more important a framework becomes. The smaller the team, the easier it is to have "less framework" that you aren't totally defining yourself.

That said, the real benefit in most frameworks is the solved problems. They might not solve them in the most optimal way, but is reinventing the wheel adding the most value in most cases? Nah, probably not.

Then again, sometimes reinventing the wheel is fun.
So you don't report it at all? That would be irresponsible, as the holes would remain.

Or you report it anonymously? Then, depending on how you got the access, they may find out who you are anyway from the logs.

It's a reasonable course of action.
Just curious about this:

"I've made about $1k on leanpub so far for the unfinished book (ebook buyers will get the full No Starch ebook when it's ready)."

What happens if you burn out and decide you can't finish the book? Do people get their money back or did they pay less for a beta/unfinished copy and accept that this is what they're paying for?
Does it really matter if 10,000 enroll with an 80% completion rate, or if 160,000 enroll with a 5% completion rate?

The numerator is the important metric here, not the denominator.
It would be very interesting to see what types of things people go on to do with the knowledge that they've gained from MOOC's. The value created based on knowledge that otherwise wouldn't be accessible would be a very interesting metric to try and measure
Yeah, also who needs type checking when you can simply write dozens of unit tests!
What's really frustrating is when I get a seemingly personalized email, and then six of my coworkers say that they got the same email. Do recruiters really think we don't talk to each other?
Are there any issues with filing articles of organization with an address that you know will change?
"Iran, North Korea, United Kingdom"... a certainly very intentional juxtaposition of those country names there. Certainly makes you think.
We switched to the google pagespeed module for nginx and stop worrying about it. It doesn't do minification very well but it does concatenation and takes care of a bunch of other stuff as well, like image resizing, CSS concatenation etc.

We used to use the HTML5 Boilerplate script but it was horrendously slow on EC2
The Python engine is IPython underneath the hood. Any code or visualizations that work in IPython notebooks should work in Sense.

There is a difference though. In our experience, we've found that the notebook style development, with code inline, is awkward when doing serious analytics. It's harder to use version control, editors, etc. We have opted for the dual pane experience common in R and Matlab. The output however can be rich and interactive just like an IPython notebook and is always saved.
I think it makes sense to have two different structures. One with more formality, procedure, and capitalization requirements, and one with less but also a thinner shell of limited liability. It shouldn't be easy to set up an entity that insulates you from liability without following procedures to ensure that it is actually independent and capable of paying its own judgments, etc.
I'm not following, is this just snark or am I missing a point?
You have made the fallacy of presuming that technology is neutral.
Maybe depends on the social network. Seems like I had more LinkedIn invites after shaving.
[show HN] My little todo app, inspired by the bullet journaling concept
Well, while this particular incident hit people who "Should Have Known It Better" (and maybe deserved their fate), on the base of the same laws there are countless other victims - parents of blogging kids, normal "everyday" people who just aren't fucking lawyers expected to differentiate between a freely usable and a restricted image - being extorted by ridiculous claims.

In Germany, we had nasty trolls who got their pictures (e.g. for cooking recipes, but there were also lots of similar schemes) high up in Google Image search and sued countless people for extraordinary amounts of cash.
In a conversation-oriented forum like this, the context of a remark is important. It was in response to a claim that this was some sort of libertarian fantasy, not radical thinking overall. I think it's pretty safe to say Krugman is not a radical libertarian (hence the "even Paul Krugman").
How is this heteronormative? I didn't see any reference to gender in the entire article.

Also, you're really stretching the "discrimination to the mentally ill" thing to the point of silliness.
Just one? I feel like the victim of a cheesy "one weird trick" advert re: the link title.
Me too.

Lua the language and LuaJIT the third party vm are great. But there is no general purpose standard library. Like in C one has very limited libraries that are shipped with Lua - that's fine. Though I really miss a good website with a list of additional up-to-date libraries and a community around it.

Lua needs a better project website, like PHP where you can post code examples as comments. At the momemt the Lua website is stuck in 1999. The wiki software is bad, the only way to stay in touch is the mailing list, etc. The LuaForge website is outdated. Finding various libraries is pain. Many libraries are hosted on servers that don't exist anymore or are for Lua 4 or 5.1 but not 5.2.

A lot of users use Lua in closed source software as embedded language (video games, Adobe programs, etc.)

Imagine if all those libraries that you find for Python would be available for Lua, it would be great.
Easel is a GitHubber. GitHub has acquired Easel.