skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can only assume you didn't read Luke's article, with which I wholeheartedly agree. The crux - what do you do when you need to depend on non-Ruby libraries? Include the binaries of these? What if they depend on glibc (which they probably will) - do you stick that in vendor too?
You'd be better off shipping whole virtual machine images as your 'application' if that's the route you want to take.

All modern Linux distributions - RHEL, SuSE, Ubuntu and yes Debian too have packaging formats to handle dependencies. It's up to the distributions to package the apps, as a software developer I think you should be shipping just a plain tarball, which lists its dependencies but doesn't include them.

My main point was the idea that Django apps shouldn't have dependencies is wrong. Django is awesome mainly because of the ability to easily build on other apps. Doing this creates dependencies, and there's nothing wrong with that.
A speculative work which may shed some light on this phenomenon is Julian Jaynes' The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind - http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer... and well-summarized at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) - although the abstract does not even come close to the experience of reading Jaynes' book.

I am disappointed at the dismissive comments; perhaps those skimming he article failed to note Taylor's comment that 'religion is a story the left brain tells the right brain', and that she is capable enough to teach neuroanatomy at Indiana University's medical school - if she is not up to or interested in performing as much academic research, she has hardly become an anti-scientist.

It's quite possible to be a good materialist and still enjoy a spiritual dimension to life without evoking immaterial agencies or phenomena to do so; the different cerebration that seems to take place in the subordinate (usually right) hemisphere doesn't indicate less 'processing power' or 'buggy software'; it just processes incoming information differently, and the idea that there is nothing worthwhile to be learned this way is arguably foolish.

Indeed, there's a faulty syllogism at work here:
Scatterbrained mystics make unscientific claims about the right brain.
Taylor makes positive reports of improved mental state, following a temporary, documented inhibition of her left hemisphere.
Therefore, Taylor is a scatterbrained mystic whose claims are unscientific.

I don't see Taylor making any claims about immaterial causes or phenomena, either in this article or on her website, any more than the literature of Zen does, or any of the serious research into psychotropic drugs.
now go read and upvote "Chuck Moore: Geek of the Week" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745294 to the top.

I think Chuck really desereves it!
>Her message, that people can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life by sidestepping their left brain, has resonated widely.

We already have a method of sidestepping the left hemisphere: religion. But in all seriousness, I think she's right. You can achieve this so called nirvana without resorting to religion, which is an invention by us to satisfy our spiritual needs. Also I think the stroke damaged her left side enough to open her mind to this point. So I do not think she is delusional, just more open minded. Too much logic and reasoning results in more narrow minded thinking, but too little results in more unrealistic thinking. She happened to hit the perfect balance after the stroke.
Looks awesome. Wish I could be there.

Will this event be streaming on ustream/ some other variant for non west coast people?
I agree it is tough. Coming from java land it always seems like one is either mixing java in the html or html in java. I have also never been totally convinced about the separate people argument. Not that it won't work, but that company's that I am familiar with don't hire both people very often the developers build both the UI and the business logic, which of course further complicates the issue, because the developers are always taking shortcuts. Everything I have ever worked on is mixed up to some extent, and it works, and we manage to maintain it. Still the arguments in the paper are compelling.

It is possible to use ajax and Javascript without getting things to mixed up, but again the discipline by the developers I am involved with is sadly lacking. There is another article I will try and find to post. Humble Dialog that fits with this paradigm.
That does not look like a standard-issue Google monitor, but maybe it's a test machine with very low specs. Not unlikely considering the target market.
The Humble Dialog Box
Dumb article! Homeownership is dead because you could be foreclosed upon? This is news?

I bought my first house in the city about 12 years ago. First thing I did was paint one bedroom wall cobalt blue cause I loved that color. Lawns are a pain in the ass to take care of (and I don't much care for monocultures anyway), so I began ripping up the lawn in the back and planting veggies, strawberries, raspberries and prairie wildflowers that can take care of themselves. Added a computer room in the unfinished basement.

Sold that house after 5 years and move to the suburbs (bad idea!). I like to cook, so the second house had its kitchen ripped out and replaced with real slate floor tiles, nice countertops and custom cabinets within 2 months of moving in. Built a metal-casting setup behind the house.
Bought house #3 way out in the country and rented out house #2 for 2 years then sold it.

Hope to stay in house #3 until economy improves. I have 10 acres to play in and a small machine shop in the basement. We have horses, chickens, large vegetable garden, maybe goats or cows someday and can do whatever we feel like with the property -- like the outdoor clay oven I haven't finished. Next summer I think I'm digging a goldfish pond/water garden.

Try doing any of that with a rental! Not everyone buys to flip or to sell at a profit. Most of us just want a place to live in that we can hack to suit our current mood.
I'm a very active GWO user. I haven't tested A/Bingo yet, but based on the description, there's one other advantage you have: I don't have to rewrite erb as javascript in order to execute various tests.

If a lot of your view layer is written in erb (likely b/c it's not javascript-heavy), then to use GWO, you have to basically rewrite all of it in js, since GWO dynamically inserts client-side code into the spots you specify.

So if you have a display loop that uses a bunch of object properties in your erb, for example, you have to copy those objects/values to js variables and move the loop to js. It's all doable, it's just very non-DRY and just altogether unpleasant.

(The other option with GWO is to use the Javascript to load partials, which I do now, but which has some unusual properties, like lazy loading.)

Having the a/b decision be server-side is a nice thing. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

(Also, not having to pull out piles of GWO code every time is a nice thing too.)
It's not a difficult equation. If you consume more calories than you burn, those calories are converted to fat.

The problem is that people want to eat and they end up wanting more than they need. Controlling these urges is sometimes difficult. Especially if meals are high in sugar content. But we also like sugar.

The problem really is the curbing of desire.
Summary: 5 minute monologue by Dean Kamen on how and why idea -> success isn't the simple journey the media make it out to be.

Worth a watch, despite the lame title and unknown domain which led me to initially avoid it.
Marcotte's study says income increases by 20% after a suicide attempt but his support for this figure is the following:

"Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources: medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern that were previously expensive or unavailable."

Last time I checked, that's not how we define income unless he's saying that this additional support is what's driving a concomitant rise in income.

This finding is the opposite of what I would have expected - namely that the more serious the encounter with death, the less seriously the would-be suicidist would subsequently treat the pursuit of material success.

Unfortunately the study seems to be behind a paywall so we can't figure out whether methodological flaws have produced these results.
You are absolutely right. And when a corporation is damaged in this manner, it has the opportunity to show its actual damages for staffing, promotions, contracts, and everything else.

The issue with statutory damages is that they are awarded without regard to actual injury. They act, more or less, as a punishment or deterrent. So even if the corporation truly suffered no damages, it still can receive a few thousand dollars. (Note that taking statutory damages is an option: if your actual damages are higher, you can opt for those instead.)

I'm not necessarily saying that statutory damages are a bad thing. The problem I see is the inequality in their distribution: because copyright registration is costly, statutory damages are ultimately only available to the profit-seekers. One possible idea would be to cut out the registration fee, making it easy for everyone to register their works and thereby receive equal protections.
This is so far from the truth that you couldn't possibly be doing anything but repeating something you've heard without independent verification.

If you have to borrow money, then you have to pay something akin to rent, except you pay it on the money borrowed, not the property itself. Second, under standard mortgage amortization schedules, nearly all of your early payments go toward interest (and by corollary, very little goes toward principal).

Length of ownership, prevailing interest rates, and potential maintenance costs should all be factored into a home-buying decision. It is far from obvious that owning is better than renting.
Interesting. That's not much different than my typical day, although he started and finished about 1.5 hours earlier than I do. The key bits, though, are probably the notes about using his time for introspection and reflection. I tend to use those corresponding time periods of my day for reading email/rss or watching TV/movies - decidedly less wisdom-building activities.
I don't like these stories much because in most of these cases, the red light runners really were running red lights and they were jeopardizing other safe drivers.

If you see a yellow light you should stop. If you think the risk of running the light is worth it, suck it up and pay the ticket.

Everyone knows it is illegal to run a red light and everyone who does it is selfish and puts the lives of others at risk for their greed.
Comments like this are why I no longer visit Digg and Reddit, and I don't like seeing them on HN.

Also, please define "they". You can't just blame all of the problems in the world on a pronoun.
Oh geez, 1000 applications? Is ycombinator taking 60 this fall?
I'm sure the guys at Google have thought about this, but how will this affect the spam situation?

Spam didn't exist when the original finger protocol was implemented.
Consider that if you were trained from youth in mystical or magical ways of thinking, you'd likely be pretty unreceptive to reductionist arguments and glorification of the scientific method - at least, that's been my experience with hippies, astrologers and such folk. For a variety of reasons, a lot of these people seem deficient to me in terms of left-hemisphere functioning, although I am only an amateur psychologist and this is based purely on anecdotal observations. On the other hand, such people are quite functional is most regards, even though you and I would regard their thinking patterns as somewhat maladaptive.

I find Dr Taylor's views and attitude easy to appreciate, since I've had similar experiences and turning points, though not through such dramatic circumstances. I believe she makes excellent points, worth hearing - but I don't feel like any less of a materialist or believer in the utility of logic and scientific method.
They've basically created nested flatpages and added some UI. This should be called "nested-flatpages" and distributed as an app rather than a "CMS".
As far as I know, the statement about lines of code was first stated by Fernando Corbato http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Corbat%C3%B3 (Corbato's Law). "It's our experience that regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same! [http://web.archive.org/web/20080206153039/http://home.nycap....]

Python is generally considered to be 2 or 3 times as expressive as Java. I did some estimation on a compiler implementation in C++ and arrived at the conclusion that it could have been done in 20% as much Python.
"People who rent talk about the books that they've read, the trips that they've taken, the skills that they are learning, the friends whose company they are enjoying. Property owners complain about the local politicians, the high rate of property tax, the difficulty of finding competent tradespeople, the high value of their own (very likely crummy) house or condo, and what kinds of furniture and kitchen appliances they are contemplating buying. Property owners are boring. The most boring parts of a property owner's personality are those which relate to his or her ownership of real estate."

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/whe...
http://www.swivel.com/

is a site with a lot of different types of data sets, including health data. Their mission is to "liberate the world's data and make it useful so new insights can be discovered and shared." Whatever that means.
Justin.tv usually streams/archives the talks.
Justin.tv: PGA Championship Livestream
Science doesn't dictate anything to spirituality. Nobody ever decided to pray after reading studies about prayer reducing illnesses.
See http://kevinchai.net/datasets/
Get the Scoop on People with Spokeo | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Is Dvorak a Professional Troll?
After John Dvorak accused Vivek Kundra of being a phony, Tim Oreilly shortly afterward tweeted a link to a youtube video of John "explaining how he lies to get controversy" http://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/3271565056 and later stating that he is "trolling for traffic" http://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/3272103221 Dvorak responded that this was an ad hominem attack http://twitter.com/THErealDVORAK/status/3280289449 The question is still bugging me, Is he a professional troll?

Some virology podcasters were recently irked that he uses a podcast with a big audience to spread H1N1 hysteria.

Full podcast episode: http://www.twiv.tv/2009/08/09/twiv-44-no-hysteria/

Dvorak clip: snippet: http://susdomestica.posterous.com/no-agenda-equals-no-knowledge

(I debated whether this is Hacker News worthy but decided to submit for discussion either way as up/down votes will answer this question)
If you have, from prior experience, a particular expectation of the duration of a yellow light, and then the city intentionally shortens that time in order to give more tickets, it jeopardizes everyone’s safety. The explicit reason for traffic tickets is to make the roads safer by discouraging unsafe driving: cities who prioritize revenue over safety are abusing the whole system, and should absolutely be shut down.
Is that Charley the Charley Shattuck mentioned in the 7/21 entry at http://www.ultratechnology.com/blog.htm? Looks like he's still working with Chuck. Lucky guy.

The best thing about Forth is that it's the distilled result of decades of iteration on a complete programming environment by a great programmer. I don't know of any other examples of this. The worst thing about Forth is that it will probably die with Chuck and be mostly lost.
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Ask this question here:
http://groups.google.com/group/get-theinfo/topics
That's not really sound logic - if you see a yellow light and there's enough time to safely stop, you should stop. That's an important qualifier. Indeed, that's why the duration of yellow lights differs based on the expected speed that people will approach them - because it's not, in fact, always safe to stop when you see yellow. (As a thought experiment, ask yourself why we have yellow lights at all, and why they're not instantaneous).

What the city did in this particular case was deliberately shorten the yellow light to a lower time than is actually legal or safe - just to make a few extra bucks.

Now, if your argument was more that "well, the city's wrong, but most of the people who ran the lights are still guilty", then the argument is really similar to the one about the exclusionary rule (evidence in criminal cases can't be used if obtained through an illegal search). Without some way to punish the city, there's no disincentive for them not to keep screwing over people - in this case, in a way that actually increased the accident rate. There's got to be some pain felt for malfeasance, and it sounds like that's exactly what's going on here.
That was my first thought too.

Probably if it wasn't for spam, we wouldn't need a lot of the services we use nowadays (mainly as filters).
>What is this supposed to mean? ...

I didn't say anything about the intelligence of Java programmers. Like everywhere else some are brilliant and some are dumb as hammers. When I said "everything is too damned complicated", I was thinking of Java Web development which has a proliferation of one-size-fits-all frameworks which encourage bloated implementations. It could be that I have blundered into a tiny swamp and everywhere else is sweetness and light, but I dont think so.
Non-blogjacked: http://www.slate.com/id/2090424
I know lots of people who've been caught on red light cameras, but as far as I know, none of them entered the intersection more than 0.5-1 seconds after the light turned red.

Obviously, if you're able to stop safely, you should. But the point is that for lights with short yellows, it's sometimes hard to stop before the intersection without slamming on the brakes.
The research paper is available via the author's website: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~marcotte/economics%20of%20suicide...
Thanks for the source. It was probably more true then - the then-unimaginable resources available now allow very different trade-offs in language design.

(FWIW, OCaml is probably a better language for compiler writing. It hits all its strengths. Failing that, I'd still rather do one in Python or Lua than C, though.)
I've had the privilege of being taught an introductory algorithms course, and later a course on cryptology, by Dr. Agrawal. He's a great person to talk to and to reason out problems with.
OpEdNews - another Civil War era
Amherst's webserver has had finger symlinked into cgi-bin since I was there. In the olden days, when Amherst's on-campus social network still exported a finger interface (it grew out of .plans on a VAX), you could actually use it to read world-readable .plans off the web. It doesn't seem to work anymore though; my guess is that one too many people got fingered by someone who didn't like them and forwarded incriminating stuff to their boss or something.

It's a trivial BASH one-liner to actually expose finger over the web: drop 'finger $QUERY_STRING' into your cgi-bin.
uc irvine machine learning repository. http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/
it's where the netflix dataset is headed. you'll find many datasets there that have been used in scientific papers as well, so you can benchmark whatever tests you want to run.

the data wrangling blog also has a pretty good list of datasets: http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-...
This would be much more exciting if it was JSON. I'm not sure why new web-related standards still use XML.
Why would one want to stay in Starbucks at all - their coffee is awful, awful..
Hey, that's a great site even aside from the little animated cart.

Lot's of cool photo gear!

p.s. I almost bought 24 camera cubes, I was having so much fun clicking the button.
Perhaps the question should be "Do programmers still read printed books?". Because I still regularly buy printed books but a lot do seem to end up on the shelf unread or barely read collecting dust :(
Only four hours of sleep?
With webpages becoming more and more UI's rather than documents, I was thinking one needs something like an evolved morph.

ftp://ftp.squeak.org/docs/Self-4.0-UI-Framework.pdf
Yes x 2.
I believe he is. However, I believe a lot of news organizations/blog owners are trying to do it these days. They will have very controversial/eye catching headlines with no substance in the article to gain more traction. Dvorak is a few steps ahead, he tries to justify those headlines by pulling fake data.
"This finding is the opposite of what I would have expected - namely that the more serious the encounter with death, the less seriously the would-be suicidist would subsequently treat the pursuit of material success."

Or it could be the opposite. Once the person sees material success as just a game he might be able to detach from it and play it more effectively.
This is why I cringe when I hear people say that the current economic crisis is an indictment of capitalism; a proof that free markets behave irrationally. To believe that you have to ignore the enormous distortions government has created, not just with recent legislation but with things like the mortgage tax deduction that are so entrenched and popular we take them for granted.
Let's not forget that the Chrome Browser and therefore the Chrome OS will come with a lot of HMTL5 features build into the browser.

This will enable a lot of cool applications to be built that can be run on very cheap and efficient OS/Hardware combinations.
Successful professional troll is successful.
The mere suggestion of left-hemisphere dominance causing all of societies problems is rather ridiculous.

The lack of left-hemisphere dominance is known to greatly increase your chances for depression and for emotional and mental problems, all of which plague the right-hemisphere dominant left-handers.

I'm left-handed, so's my wife, and so are several of my extended family and several of my friends. I know left-handers who are deeply spiritual, and personally I'm deeply sceptical. We have all the same problems as everyone else, and then high prevalences of bipolar, schizophrenia and everything else to boot.

What she appears to be reasoning is that the loss of the analytical, logical, numerical verbal and certain language centres of your brain will remove all of life's problems. I'm sure it will when you're rolling in the money and your memoirs are being features in the NY times, but for everyone else I'm sure being unable to think analytically, logically or losing your grammar and vocabulary centres of your brain will only cause more problems, like the complete inability to be employed and probably the complete inability to concentrate on filling out welfare forms.

Seriously, if you're right-handed (left-hemisphere) dominant, feel lucky. Just remember that being righties, you might want to take a break more often than you think you do. Have a margaritas or two, I'm sure it'll get you to euphoria faster and safer than having a stroke!
Can't the same thing be said about people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? They twist and turn facts, drum up controversy and spread hate/fear.
Most journalists are. If they weren't, nobody would pay attention to them, and if nobody pays attention to them, they don't make any money. (Ergo, they can't be a professional without being a troll...)