skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My son is 8. One Saturday he had a play date with a friend at his school, a few blocks away in a safe neighborhood. He and I met the kid and his mother at the school. I suggested that we could let them play there (there were lots of other kids around, too), and then they could walk home together to our house. I got a look, but she really wouldn't talk about it.

Before this first play date, she and her son had literally been hounding me for it. After, not only have I not heard a single word from her, but my advances for further play dates have been ignored.

I've started to let my son walk most of the way to school by himself (I walk him part way, then go a different route to my bus stop). I don't dare tell my wife. She would completely flip out. She is completely irrational when it comes to this subject. She is mistaking her fear for parental instinct.
I like the idea of the performance and simplicity of Tornado, as I primarily use web.py. After reading this blog entry I decided to give Twisted another look. It took me about 2 minutes to get to the info about the web module and the examples were not very clear. I've walked away wondering a few things:

If I use twisted, should I use web or web2?
How do I map URI's to functions?

When I go to the tornado homepage, I scroll and in < 1 minute I see how I would code for it and can be off and running. To develop web apps, I shouldn't have to spend time figuring out an async network communications framework, I should be worried about programming my app.

My perception from the Twisted site is that I would need to spend time figuring out the twisted way of doing things, then figure out the web add-on way of doing things, then worry about my app. With Tornado, I'm very close to a drop in replacement for web.py and I can be off to the races.
If two pigeons had a line between them, they could carry a 1TB drive. Or maybe four pigeons. With something like a flying hammock.

I think the key question is: are pigeons migratory?

(I am really, really sorry, but this article was just too much for a Monty Python fan. And it's a Saturday too)
TechCrunch: The EPIC-EST FAIL "Journalism" EVER
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

And not everything is a cold impersonal engineering decision. Programmers are people (really! we are!) and people like greenfields and blank canvases and fresh starts.

And I'd also submit that a team of talented developers almost certainly will make a superior product if they have the ability to use the original as a reference and resource. The saying "Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land" comes to mind.
Hm, it's called Pedibus in German http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedibus and Pédibus in French http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pédibus

pes, pedis: foot in latin.
Best Online Payment Solutions
I just thought it was cool that he was basically describing what HighlightCam is doing. Nice validation from an entrepreneur who has had a big success.
I grew up in India. I biked to school that was a mile away alone. After I turned 14, I used to take a train since this other school was at least 5 miles away. These were those crazy kinds of trains that were so crowded people hang outside the trains clinging on to anything they can find. You can actually jump out through the doors on to the other side so you can run across the tracks and not take the over-bridge (of course I never told my mom I did this :)

I don't think my mom was ever that afraid/nervous. Neither were the moms of all my friends. Letting your kids commute to school alone is a very common thing. I'm sure not all American parents and not all American neighborhoods are like this but still concerning that it's big enough for NYT to write a story on it.
It's not negative anymore than the article itself was negative, and that's because it's actually a problem.

I grew up in the US, did all those things you mention, and yet I know that it's a big problem in the US. Thus the NYT article. Thus the debate. My sister says Halloween gets less and less popular every year. Fewer and fewer kids come around -- because of the problems of tainted candy. There is no tainted candy. There is no boogey man. America's suburb, move-often nation has made it a big collection of individuals who don't know and don't trust their neighbors. What's wrong with America that it's always looking over its shoulder? What's wrong with a culture that drives their kids to school two blocks away? It's a valid question and deserves less people getting "sick" about the asking of it and more dedicated to the discussing and solving of it.
Technology News
Breaking News.
I think it's more for the entertainment than it is for productivity. It's a Feltron production—he's the guy with the ridiculously specific annual statistic reports.
I haven't yet looked into the plugin's available, but I'll check out the ones you mentioned.

I've installed PHP, MySQL, and MediaWiki from zips/installers on a Windows server I have access to so I could hit it from any of my computers or (eventually) phone.

I guess I could have set it up at home, but I don't like keeping my computers on 24/7. I'm considering getting an Asus EEE box that supposedly only needs 20W, so I may revisit that in the future.
Please do a more detailed version, if it makes sense to do so. You actually managed to say a lot in this little space. I had a teacher too who did this on a small scale - the first 5 mins was a summary of the previous calls. The first day of each week he summarized the entire chapter or section in the first 10 mins. This bird's eye view of the material went a long way in keeping the concepts 'live',
#2 Wii Sports Resort... man, does that game suck. It is nothing more than a demo for the Wii Motion Plus. Period.
And that's the way I like them.
Can you see time?
Not exactly the same goals, but http://your.flowingdata.com/ is simpler and quite useful for things like tracking weight, etc.
How PHP became such a huge success - Talk with Rasmus Lerdorf
"'Not Invented Here' syndrome. A bad reason."

That seems a little strawman-ish, honestly. On the contrary, they embraced the technology and architecture of the app.

What's wrong with looking at something like this.. an important infrastructure piece... liking the idioms and architecture but having issues and thinking .... We have a benefit the Twisted guys didn't have... we have prior art... a map of this territory ?

I don't think anybody here has a strong conviction that FriendFeed was _right_. But you and others seem to have a strong convication that they were wrong, and all I think....and I think others here too.... all I think is that it is silly to attack them and be so certain they were wrong.

These are talented developers. Smart guys. With a little bit of business talent, too.. All of us have been in complex project cycles. Who are you or anybody to pick them off like they somehow caused somebody harm? Why the intensity? What gives?
To give some context to this: Nicholas Felton is a graphic designer who has been known for creating annual reports -- very specific graphic design productions that include minutiae about his life over the past year. You can see 2008's report here: http://feltron.com/index.php?/content/2008_annual_report/

Some time ago, he partnered with a coder to create Daytum, which is an easy way for people to track other statistics about themselves in much the same way that Nicholas Felton does in his reports.

Yes, the details people track in Daytum are usually trivial, unnecessary, etc. Yes, it's a bit of a novelty. But it's certainly unique, and sometimes it's cool to have something like this to track random statistics, even if only for entertainment value.
The ultimate hack: Reverse engineering the human brain
It is actually easier for an enterprise IT team to buy a product than to adopt an open source package. IT shops have a process for buying stuff, including evals, pilot deployments, purchasers to haggle with the vendor, and clear lines of ownership, authority, and responsibility for the product and its uptime.

In a lot of enterprises, none of that works for open source. Even if the code just works, without going through the buying motions, nobody cares. It just sits there. Nobody wants to depend on it, because nobody wrote a check for it, so it doesn't seem real.
Why is MinTTY better than putty? Putty is terrific -- why would you want to put that in a clunky cygwin terminal?
Isn't this an instance of the more general observation that people click less on links when loading is relatively slower (less bandwidth) and click more on links when loading is relatively faster (more bandwidth)?
Any evidence that iTunes Genius (incl. Mixes) does what it claims?
By that I mean, is there any evidence that it actually picks "songs that go great together"?

I get the feeling that my mixes are mostly made up of random songs from the same genre (or closely related ones), probably with an emphasis on things I have rated highly.

Is there any indication that Genius looks at other variables, such as tempo, mood, instrumentation, upbeat/downbeat, etc (the way that Pandora does)?
Works fine here (Canada)
That's fair enough, more art than utility. Thanks.
Not really. The quarter million kids injured in car accidents are most of the reason kids get escorted to school.
A large part of it is regional variation and part of it is media sensationalizing. My 8 year-old walks 1/2 mile from school bus stop to our house if the weather is good (we live in a rural area). A neighbor's kid keeps his bike near the bus stop and rides home from there.
But even if we lived only 1/2 mile from school they wouldn't be allowed to walk/bike there. Not because of kidnapping worries, but road safety: there is a lot of bus & parent traffic around the school and the administration is justly concerned about mixing high traffic and elementary school kids who aren't used to that environment.
Puff Daddies: More Americans over age 50 are smoking marijuana than ever before.
Seems related to this Wired article that recently was reposted on Reddit:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...

Bottom line is that to maximize retention, there's an optimal time for being re-exposed to information: right before you're about to forget it. Seems like re-covering the previous material in the class may have accomplished this.
Ah, the words of somebody who has never had or known anybody who had a social services case opened on them.
Indeed, I am not Scott Shacon. Too many Scott's! One time in undergrad three of us sat in a column and confused the hell out of our compiler's professor.
Your point does not change the numbers in question. "About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers." A non-custodial parent would not be a stranger.
Yes, but you can also say that most people become experts at whatever their specific job is.
Gerald Weinberg's two "Secrets of" books on consulting are a pretty good start. They're actually good for anyone who gets paid to give advice, not just professional consultants. Highly recommend..

Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0932633013?ie=UTF8&tag=...

More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant's Tool Kit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0932633528?ie=UTF8&tag=...
And millions of them will end up dying of obesity-related diseases exacerbated by the fact that they don't go outside and move their bodies.
Is anyone really expecting mobile users to be a viable market for traditional internet advertising?

I would have thought it was a foregone conclusion that users were adverse to the standard click-through path on a small modal-use device.
Nobody believes me when I say middle class Americans would call that child abuse.

I don't believe that either, because I am a middle class American (who used to live in east Asia). When we lived in Taiwan, as soon as Taipei's MRT system was extended to our neighborhood, our then eight-year-old oldest son rapidly learned how to take the mass transit trains all over Taipei by himself. Here in the United States, my four children (youngest age six) walk or bike to the public library (about a mile away) or to shopping (same distance, different direction) almost every day. We are homeschoolers, so our children are out and about a lot during school hours. It is unremarkable here and as safe as can be. By far the greatest risk to walkers in most parts of the United States are drivers who don't pay attention to how they endanger pedestrians. We live in a very safe neighborhood with a good city trail system, and we take advantage of that to get exercise and avoid burning gasoline.
It only costs a few hundred thousand dollars to launch a few satellites. Deep space telescopes do cost less than a luxury airliner. (The Dreamliner and Airbus Monsterplane both cost in excess of $250M/per -- and that doesn't include customizations). We have NASA to thank for that -- without a government agency willing to shell out hundreds of billions of dollars on research, this sort of stuff would cost hundreds of millions of dollars per launch.

NASA also isn't the space police. It is the space bureaucracy, and the space experts agency, primarily because the private sector didn't care enough about space to do any of this stuff itself.

NASA exists because of the failure of the private sector.

But prizes are a good idea -- it's more than time for the private sector to get into the game.
How about getting to know your problem domain in depth instead? Gaining a sense of satisfaction from being an expert in the business and automating the work so knowledge of obtuse and obscure bits of data is no longer needed?

I'd rather be known for having built an amazing product that anyone can use than for mastering some obscure bit of the technology.
According to the US Census Bureau's statistics[1], an annual average of 43,800 people have died within thirty days of a car accident in the years surveyed between 1980-2006. To put this in perspective, 58,228 Americans were killed during the entire Vietnam War.[2]

Likewise, for injuries, an average of 3.1 million were injured per year in car crashes[3], and 153,452 Americans were wounded during the Vietnam War.[2]

[1]: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/09s1063.pdf
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties#United_States_Armed_Forces
[3]: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/09s1066.pdf Covers 1990-2006.
I would be much more likely to sign up if I was told in advance. I don't like to be strung along and tricked.
I don't buy it.

I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents. I think it's just trying to ignore the the obvious answer that they simply aren't as good.

There's also plenty of counterexamples where freeware proprietary software has beaten open source software, as well as many examples where open source software has beat commercial software (most notably in tech areas, such as Apache, or Linux versus other Unix-likes).

I think people should simply face facts: Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software.
Great[edit: !!!] Would be even cooler if it fully worked in Safari and other browsers.

I guess they didn’t include fonts because of licensing woes. I wonder what that does to accessibility.
USB Stick cameras have been out for a long time:
http://www.dcviews.com/press/Yakumo-USB-Camera.htm
I have a question...
"Both sites maintain a database of known spammers and offer spam blocking services."

Every time the spam topic arises, I always ask. Why hasn't those guys been shut down from the internet already?
I use GnuWin32 to get most of my Linux CL needs. Past that, well, I usually SSH into a beastly Linux machine and Windows is just a glorified "thing that runs putty" (well and runs my music player and plays flash without sucking.)
For such accidents within the US, check the census bureau statistics:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/m...
You've got half the picture, the art, the intuitive grasp of flow and balance.

You've ignored the other half, the mechanics. The mechanics are not about memorizing volumes of texts, Aspects of an expert include having been there and done that, learned from own or other mistakes. Knows the roadmap, overall rules of the domain. Consider a programmer as a medical practitioner (Doctor). What are the properties of an expert Doctor? Much of what I've briefly stated above: Lots of experience, knows what is most likely (not guaranteed) to succeed or fail given known conditions.

Now imagine you are an expert doctor and the human physiology radically changes every 2-3 years? The field of given known conditions also radically changes. How can you keep up on these changes and all their nuanced inter-relationships?
On the web at warp speed
I wonder how many get hit by cars careening onto the sidewalk, while walking to school alone, while evading would-be kidnappers?
Twisted has always been an "emperor has no clothes" project to me, a project that's no doubt very useful but at the same time seems to revel in its unnecessary complexity (just read its documentation - how many times do you really have to tell us that something might seem overly complicated but is worth it for its flexibility?) I'm honestly glad to see a no-bullshit alternative that doesn't have that same sense of worshipping complexity as a sign of quality.
I think I will end up reading this book someday.
It sounds very good, but I must admit I immediately remembered lots and lots of comments from open source developers that amounted to "not happy with our project (a ka 'free toilet')? well duh, hack it yourself, we owe you s*". Obviously not the fault of the Twisted developer, but I am not surprised if people actually prefer to hack their own stuff.
Exactly what I was thinking as I read the parent. Around here we have wild raspberries and grapes. They look so different I had to taste them to be sure and even then they taste different. The grapes are extremely acidic and taste awful (but make great wine :-)

Remember that by definition we only eat the edible fruits!!! Most plants bear some kind of fruit and most of them are inedible to humans.
A new Turing test: Fighting it out
They also should have mentioned that transferring 4GB of data in South Africa will set you back ~$30.
He's pointing out that it souds like "pedobus". Exactly what the parents are trying to avoid.
Actually, the point I failed to make was that the original statistics compare the serious event of kidnapping to all injuries, however minor. They should compare to the serious injuries, like death, which is less than 1% of the larger number.
I really think that calling Deferreds a "de-facto standard" in JavaScript is a huge stretch.

I'm having trouble pinning down exactly what makes Deferreds different from any asynchronous callback system, but it seems to be the chain of callbacks?
Only 13.5% of the traffic deaths were pedestrians and bicyclists in this study
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_crash#Common_types_of_colli...
whereas the main causes of death are stroke and heart attack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Causes_of_death_by_age_gro...
both of which are to some extent prevented by exercise. So it seems probable that parents who stop their children walking to school are more likely to kill them than save their lives.
The great thing about open source is that people are free to share ideas and code. If the Twisted team likes parts of Tornado, they are free to replicate those parts back into Twisted while ignoring the parts that they don't like.

Meanwhile, users are free to choose whichever approach suits them better. Twisted is no doubt more complete in terms of protocols and such, but many people also value simplicity. One important point that I think has been overlooked here is that the core of Tornado is only a few hundred lines of code. For me, the fact that I can actually read _all_ of the code in just a few minutes is very valuable. I'm sure many others don't care though, which is why it's great that we live in a world where there doesn't always have to be a single "right" answer.
No, a CTO didn't waste money; he got exactly what he needed, cleaner, simpler. No - it doesn't handle every single edge case, nuance, platform - but it does exactly what they needed. They didn't need to spend time patching and grokking twisted, or needing to deal with any rough edges to ramping personnel up on it. They had a job to do, and they did it.

Now that it's out in the wild, maybe someone will cross-pollinate, maybe changes will go in both projects. But the good thing is that they got their job done.
If this is what you hate about people I would advise you to pick your' battles. /snark

Context has always been of the utmost importance for any sort of information to have impact.
The question of why is there so much crappy education is interesting. I think part of the answer is that society is well-served by the failings of the educational system in that widespread educational crappiness helps support the class system. I think it would be fairly straightforward to turn 90% of the population into well educated upper middle class types, using techniques like btilly describes...

... But if we did that, who would drink Coors and drive forklift for Walmart and not complain about it?

So I think that a huge function of the educational system is to educate a large part of the population badly. I think that the teacher training system serves this is as well, by selecting for mediocre teachers and then making them more mediocre via training. Additionally, in the schools themselves a lot of effort is made to classify young people into dumb and smart categories, usually unfairly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect), and this classification stamps them for the rest of their lives and creates a population of hopeless lower class workers.

If there are SOME good teachers in the system like btilly, then SOME kids go on to get out of their class, which is perfect in that (1) we need to claim that it is possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and (2) we need to recruit SOME kids to grow up to fill management positions, but not too many that they all can't find careers. Historically, underemployed educated people are the people who become union leaders.

The beauty of it is that the people who fail think it is their fault!

(Sorry to rant about the educational / class system in general, rather than the topic of how to teach advanced math, but I couldn't stop myself.)

Call me paranoid, but there you go.
An observation: Python coders seem to believe

That's a poor generalisation, and I assume you've built it on the back of a single observation. There are dozens of python template libraries that solve problems with different levels of complexity, and there's no animosity over it. Indeed, one of the reasons I like python is that there's a strong standard library, and then a healthy diversity of tools so you can mix and match to get what you want.

I doubt FF's statements really caused damage to Twisted's user base

They implied that it had bottlenecks.

Your suggestion in the last paragraph might cause benefit.

General comment on difficulties learning twisted - I found it difficult to grasp until I'd practically reimplemented the patterns by accident in the course of writing my own client/server application. I got stuck on a concept at one point in my non-twisted socket application, and the guys on #twisted helped me past it. For those who are interested, the O'Reilly book is obsolete but a better starting point than the online docs.
We have a json API that we're using to implement an iPhone version. Open up Charles (an HTTP proxy/monitor) when using Sponty, the web interface almost directly uses the API as well.
No, not that I'm aware of. It simply means that Python 2.6 makes the epoll system call available directly without need for a custom module.