skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. But they also can't prevent others from doing what they want with it, within the law of course (ie fair use).
My experience from learning English, Spanish, Portuguese, some Japanese and French, and a little bit of Chinese is that mostly-phonetic writing systems are not actually difficult at all. I suspect I could learn the Kannada script well enough to read aloud fluently in a day or two, but learning Kannada well enough to speak it in conversation would take me at least three months, probably more like three years.

My talent for scripts is very unusual, but I think that any person could probably learn a phonetic script in maybe a few weeks at most.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Dark Web Design
I guess it's an assumption that if you try to buy it from AP, then you have already concluded that the text is copyrighted by AP. I doubt they have instant access to everything they've ever written...
I've learned lots more from hanging out with grad students than I ever did from dropping out of college.
Doesn't the Android already have Python and Javascript builtin, or am I mistaken?

Compare this toy with NewtonScript and weep:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041010175535/www.cc.gatech.edu/...
Very straight forward. The point was to see the coworker realize on his own that by his own standards he spoke no languages at all.
Life altering???

Honestly, if anyone knows why this is supposed to be life altering, please tell me. I don't get it at all. Yes, it's cool, but it's a loooong way from life altering.
It is my understanding that the law says nothing definite about what is fair use, it only gives guidelines about what shall be taken into consideration when determining whether it is. That's a big part about why exercising your right to fair use exposes you to frivolous lawsuits that you have to be able to defend yourself agains.
Yeah I agree that they do now, I am just curious about how it came to be that way.
I seriously doubt the "criminals" who did this didn't know Defcon was taking place. They most likely were attendees pulling a prank to make a point.

There's other similar shenanegans at Defcon, like the Wall of Sheep, which sniffs network traffic for unencrypted logins and displays them (with most of the password obscured) on a projector screen.
I don't think the people at the front desk are aware of which contracts for vending machines or ATMs. They could have had 4 guys bring it in and make up a slick story about how they had a work order to install the machine and the front desk would probably not have the authority to act in any direction other than send the info up the chain.
This was the first book I read of Vinge's and I didn't think it was that great. Later I read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep, which I thought were awesome. These are the smartest science fiction books I have ever read. After reading these, I ordered all the rest of his books. I also really liked Marooned in Realtime and The Peace War.
The patient allegedly had no contact with bush meat, but got it from someone who did. Am I the only one concerned that sooner or later an entirely different virus will come out of bush meat and that one will be airborne? It's pure luck HIV is not easily transmissible and Ebola kills too quickly.
I strongly agree. The NSA has an extremely tangential role in how this is happening. TC has many sponsors, all of whom are interested in hiring extremely sharp programmers, and the NSA participates as a member of that set. This particular contest was sponsored by the NSA, and the next might be sponsored by Intel or AMD. That's just how they pay the bills.
China to surpass US as largest manufacturer sooner than anticipated
Ask HN: Book recommendations for Linux 2.6 tcp/ip
Sorry if "book review" is an annoying theme that often comes up, but I respect the opinions here, and I've found the reviews on Amazon to be a bit confusing.

I'm a long-time C programmer that has dabbled in Linux programming, OS development, and networking. I'm very interested in doing some serious hacking of the TCP/IP (ipv4 and ipv6) stack in Linux 2.6 kernels. So although I'm not new to the whole scene, I need some serious help before I can understand the source code enough to do what I'd like to do. Can anyone here recommend a good book that you think matches these interests and my level?

"Linux TCP/IP Networking for Embedded Systems" (http://www.amazon.com/Linux-TCP-Networking-Embedded-Systems/dp/1584504811/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249270908&sr=1-1) is probably my best lead, so far. It has some poor reviews, but despite the "Embedded Systems" in the title, it looks like a good general primer that's about at my level. Any thoughts, especially from owners of the book?
For me, the most important sentence was near the end:

"The Leaf car battery can be charged to 80% capacity in about 20 minutes, compared with almost three and a half hours needed for the G-Wiz."

Seems totally reasonable for an intra-city commuting vehicle. I can't see why something like this (even with a 100mi range) wouldn't be popular in NYC, LA, or Boston.
Then the article "lies" in the same way: "If the top 5% is the absolute largest population for whom rescission would make sense, the probability of having your policy cancelled given that you have filed a claim is fully 10% (0.5% rescission/5.0% of the population)." Let's assume his numbers are correct. Is 10% high or low? Who knows. What is the probability of the applicant having lied, given that they have filed that type of claim, and what is the probability for the rest of their customers?

The whole "evil insurance companies" thing is ridiculous. Companies are amoral and profit seeking. Insurance companies just take groups (as regulated by government), provide them level of coverage (as regulated by government), figure out the actuarial risks (based on factors regulated by government), spread those risks around members of the group (with a low-risk members subsidizing the high risk at the level regulated by government) and sell insurance product designed to maximize their profit within a competitive marketplace. A similar product to what he is suggesting, that covers pre-existing conditions already exists in CA as a shall-issue product, it's called a small group coverage. It's also many times more expensive than individual insurance.

Should an individual insurance product with transparent pre-existing condition coverage exist? Absolutely. It's going to be more expensive than today's individual coverage, and that's why an insurance company could not successfully sell it against existing competing products in the current individual marketplace, even if regulators allowed it to. It's up to the government to set up or to allow insurance companies to setup such a group/coverage/underwriting-criteria combination. It's also up to the government to get rid of perverse tax incentives that subsidize group policies and drive people away from individual policies. Of course, grilling insurance company executives on TV is so much more fun than actually doing work.
Yeah but with "China", "NSA", and "hacking" in the title it must be an interesting article.
How Gawker Ripped Off My Newspaper Story
First thing I noticed was a UI bug. I thought I was forced to enter something in the "contain/start with/end with" box. I almost left the site before I realized that it was optional.

Second, it is very slow. It makes no sense to me that the processing is done with AJAX. I'm already clicking a button to submit info. Would it really hurt to generate everything on the backend (which would presumably be much faster) and reload the whole page?
As far as I know, the NSA just gets some free advertising space, and before the arena matches you get the opportunity to chat with a member of the sponsoring corporation/organization, so they get to tell some really good programmers about NSA job perks.
Do you know there is "Understanding Linux Network Internals"? It's a fat beast but covers the subject in great detail. I had to write a device driver and needed to use a netlink socket for high speed chunked data transfer; for that particular purpose, I found ULNI to be too verbose and learned everything I needed from the Rubini book, the Love book, and various Linux Journal and LWN articles along with the requisite snooping into various sources.

Robert Love's book is a joy to read, very compact and quick, piecemeal introduction to the higher levels aspects of the kernel. Corbet, Rubini and Kroah-Hartman is good for some quick hands on. Supplment them with various other stuff online and linux/Documentation; nothing will force you to learn FAST like a buggy driver or a piece of unsupported hardware. I find casual academic hacking boring, and none of what I read makes sense until I am found by a very interesting problem.

Good luck.
You're confusing what's important to you with what's actually important.

"Programmers who don't understand the memory hierarchy write slow code" is just nonsense.

Most programmers today use languages where they aren't even aware of, or able to manipulate in any way how and when memory is managed. And this trend will continue as the hardware their programs run on are increasingly virtualized.

Let's face it, virtual memory is a done deal, its now fundamental until we find computer hardware architectures that don't ever have address spaces that exceed the physically addressable memory. With virtualized kernels, possibly its a better solution to boot operating systems that have no concept of constained memory resources, and let the virtualizer do the paging.
The latter point isn't entirely true - at its core, buying insurance isn't necessarily about using more than you put in over time, but rather mitigating risks (hedging). That's not necessarily how everyone treats the current system, or for that matter how it's set up, but there's certainly a tension between the "insurance" model and the "health savings account" model (and the current system sort of tries to do both).

In terms of insurance companies being run as non-profits, let me ask two pointed (and I assure you, not-meant-to-be-trollish) questions:

1) If insurance companies should be non-profits with set salaries and so forth, why not just have the government do it at that point?

2) Two recently prominent examples of non-profits set up to further socially useful goals without actually being government agencies are Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those didn't turn out so hot. How would you set up these non-profits to avoid the same sorts of problems?

Actually, I should throw in a third: does anyone know of any examples (successful or not) of a non-profit insurance entity or cooperative?
Wow... imagine being one of the hotness=2 guys. On further investigation, the hotness seems semi-random.
I used the title tag (How Gawker Ripped Off My Newspaper Story) instead of the actual title (The Death of Journalism [Gawker Edition]) as I found the latter to be too sensationalistic.
Using psycopg2 with virtualenv on Ubuntu Jaunty
Polaris Ventures Makes A Hire To Bolster Its Dog Patch Labs
They are referring mainly to the algorithm's competition, which is dominated by current competitors in the IOI and ICPC.

There are indeed design and development competitions, but for the most part, Topcoder isn't what you think it is.
The whole "evil insurance companies" thing is ridiculous. Companies are amoral and profit seeking.

Wrong. Industries have distinct cultures, usually formed through self-selection due to the sort of people who choose careers in them. Compare police officers and firemen, for example. Similar sorts of work, but wildly different cultures due to self-selection effects.

Now, what sort of culture do insurance companies have? I think that there's good evidence that it's a sick and cancerous one.

Otherwise, good point about the necessity of government intervention in this market.
Couldn't Kobe get surgery to fix that?
It is, but it's a bargain compared to a Verisign SSL certificate.

If you stick to ASCII and take the generally accepted average of 5 letters per English word, the AP are charging $12.50 for 200 bits. VeriSign's "Secure Site Pro with EV" costs $1499 for 256 bits and it's only good for a year!
You have to meta it one level. The reason C was taught was because it was close to the machine without actually being assembly language. That's pedagogically useful because it exposes the student to all the properties of the Turing machine without having to be too specific about implementation (not that MIPS assembly isn't also a good choice). Similarly, the reason to teach Smalltalk is to teach OO, the reason to teach Lisp is to teach Lambda Calculus. The only reason Java is taught is because students demand it because they've heard that if you know Java you can get a good job.

Now, that doesn't imply that Java shouldn't ever be taught. But the reasons for choosing any language should be academic reasons. Particularly, it is bizarre to see academia trailing industry in language adoption.
simply not true.

you do not need to understand how your compiler works, or how De Morgans law is responsible for all those NOT gates in your CPU to produce useful and meaningful CS.
Maybe not your friend, but there are people in this world who truly have "photographic" memories. I had one such friend at university and it frustrated me no end that we could go to a lecture and then he would go out that night and do no study whatsoever while I would study hard, and he would show up the next day with much better recall than me. Not just important concepts but any small detail about exactly what was on the board at the time ... he could just read it off from the mental image in his mind with no effort at all.
I have now become accustomed to using COND which I would find a way to emulate if I had to program in another language. I find too many errors in simple if statements.

Plus, the switch seems to be inviting trouble, considering Duff's Device.

Oh, and I consider performance better if i get the correct result.
Washington Post journalist writes about a coach who helps integrate younger people and their tech expectations into the workplace.

Gawker writes about it.

Journalist (well, Editor first) gets peeved, and writes a massive rant at Gawker and technology in his profession.

If I were to tweet this, it would be #irony.
I'm sure you're not the only one but what is there that we can really do about it? Worrying about it seems somewhat counterproductive - though with nasty bugs like H1N1 (and its future mutations), SARS and some form of avian flu, I have bought a few boxes of N95 face masks and hand sanitizers just in case. Some days I figure it's excessively paranoid, on others, I figure that an insurance policy for something catastrophic that costs under 50 bucks is a pretty good deal.
Dirpy runs a transcoding platform written using a bunch of libraries that include libavcodec, libavformat, and libavutil, which are some of the same libraries that help drive ffmpeg.

For a more detailed list of a number of the open source software projects in use, check out the Dirpy about page.

http://dirpy.com/about.py

And of course a huge thanks to all the contributors to open source software the universe over. And thanks for your question :).
In a way, that sort of relates to my point. We have ignorant people, and people susceptible to propaganda due to education. It would be expected to take yet more time to develop a population of educated people resistant to propaganda.

On the other hand, I find that sources such as the Unabomber tend to define "resistant to propaganda" as "believing what I believe" (similar to the way many people use the word "smart" to mean "believes what I believe", especially in political contexts), which, for lack of a better word, I can only call an immature point of view.

Anyhow, it hardly seems fair to refer to someone as "propaganda resistant" when the reason they are resistant is that they literally can't perceive it. That's like crediting my dog for not falling for [your favorite obviously false ideology here]; that's not really a plus in her column.
N95 masks are made to protect others, as in surgeons wearing them to protect those they operate on. Not the other way round.
lambdas in an array or hash :)
Google Launches A Major Offensive Against Microsoft With “Going Google”
I love how the journalist originally treated the Gawker post as a badge of honor.
It's a copy of the article's title...
Armchair travel with Twitter search
New Tricks for Defeating SSL in Practice
You claim that "the only reasons Java is taught is because students demand it," and it appears your objection is based on this claim. Do you have any support for this claim outside of your personal belief? My undergrad made the switch to Java right before I graduated, and they are a counter-example to your claim.

Also, I doubt your claim about C is true. C was used because it was close to the machine without actually being assembly. I suspect C was then taught because it was used everywhere.
>> Rubini

I dismissed that book just because I thought a book on "Device Drivers" wouldn't cover the networking modules specifically, and that's really all I'm interested in at this point. Was I wrong? Do they cover it in detail?

>> Robert Love

Ooh yes - I've looked at that book before and almost bought it. You say it's a "compact and quick piecemeal introduction to the higher level aspects of the kernel". Would you say that book is at least detailed enough for me to start confidently modifying the source code of the networking code once I'm done? It would be nice to understand the kernel as a whole form a high-level, but what I really need is a detailed look at the TCP/IP stack.

>> Good luck.

Thanks!
Interesting. What about Puppet? Also, this really seems like a hammer for small architectures. What is the "critical-mass" where it starts to make sense?
"In my opinion, our current momentum doesn't make us too volatile. That's just my opinion, though, but that might just be a reflection of me being fairly young."

I'm only 30 myself, which definitely moves me out of the flush of 18-24 but hardly qualifies me as an old fart. I sometimes think that going a bit slower could be helpful to society, but the truth is that we don't have forever to dilly-dally where we are. If we're going to win the sustainability race with the high-technology solution [1], we need to get there before the resources run out.

[1] http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2417
Interestingly, the tulip craze was one of the early and more memorable things I've found stumbling the web. I believe some people were comparing it to the dot-com bubble.
Some iPods explode
Kind of agree, but nothing really new under the sun...
What you're describing is what most would call "skinning" or "theming", whereas "user interface" is generally considered to penetrate much deeper into the functionality of the app. Decoupling UI requires an incredibly abstract description of functionality. I've never seen a practical and generalizable example of such a thing.

Skinning, as you point out, often demands modification to the DOM, a task to which HTML and CSS alone are unsuited. It can be done with JavaScript, but it's much more practical and reliable to use a server-side abstraction a la ASP.NET or Seaside. This is more or less the point made by the original article.
Apparently, according to the CDC, it works both ways. http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/respirators.htm - N95 respirators were the only masks recommended by the CDC to mitigate the risk from SARS
EVs can only charge that fast with a special high-power line or a dump pack.

You can get at most 1440W from a 120V 15A outlet (80% max allowable according to NEC) or 5760W from 240V 30A. No matter what magical battery technology you have, you can't charge faster if you don't have a bigger input. You can get range/hour of charging by dividing the power by the wh/mi; the Nissan is probably 100-200wh/mi, so 7-14mi/hr from 120 or 28-56mi/hr from 240V
MIT recently switched to Python. That fact is the other favorite cause for this discussion.
Computer-trading worries grow as NYSE builds new datacenter
I think you mean, "You must have worked really hard on those 2 Rails projects to make them so good."
I don't understand how he gets his conclusion. The switch statements ran faster by a factor of two or more. Isn't that a significant improvement in performance?
Haven't really tried puppet. We're a ruby shop, which helped the choice ;)

For the critical size in terms of servers, I'd say 1 is enough if you need to start/stop it often. But yeah, the benefits only show up after at least 3 of them I'd say.
I get tired of writing this shit, but I do so because it seems like its not getting through.
Alas, it is becoming safer to make war than love! (Slogan for the new millennium?)
I assume a lot of people's work time involves computer use, but wouldn't be counted as such on this graph.
Filling your gas tank is equivalent to ~0.5megawatts; your house is 50kilowatts (usually a 240V 200A service), so we can't use electric cars in the same way we use gasoline cars. They're only useful for trips around town, which is what, 90% of miles driven?
And to think people say Java is verbose!
I think it's a reasonable rant. Look at it this way: which one - the WP reporter, or Gawker - has created more value? Which one has added (slightly, as in all these things) more to the sum total of human knowledge?

Perhaps economics of the former (Washington Post) model is on its way out. But if it is, might we all not be the poorer for it?
The new models could look a lot like Politico:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/wolff200...
More Reasons to Ditch Your iPhone
How Wolfram Alpha's Copyright Claims Could Change Software
Now on YouTube, Local News
Bottomless contempt for the genuine concern from people about how the internet will affect their livelihood is not the best way to encourage support and appreciation for the value that tech (and its creators) can generate.

After hundreds of articles posted here about old media struggling, followed by thousands of comments deriding the old for not realizing how old and lame they are, its time to think of ways to ease this transition rather than being contemptuous as it guts another industry.
Define "timeout".
I think his claim is based on the belief that Java has no academic merit (in the context of the other languages he mentioned) - it's just useful for development.
Are those med/law students actually living at home or in their own apartments?
"The first goal of college must be to get a proper basis for getting started with a job, and preferrably a career."

"I think the solution is to get more serious about packaging the education part in a way that doesn't force you to bundle in all the extras."

He is arguing to replace colleges with vocational schools.

An undergraduate degree is not job training. It's introduction into a community: the community of educated people. The classes are a formality. The main thing is induction into a community, a culture.

The fact that colleges have been marketing themselves as providing job training, using economic arguments like "See how much money you'll make with one of our degrees", is the real problem.
I think they mean "life altering" in the "altering the real world" sense.
>I think the "Java <-> C"-debate is an instance of the problem "Should studying computer science be mindwreckingly hard or should studying computer science make you able to program things?".

Your wording is heavily loaded. In any case, learning computer science should absolutely not be about learning to program.