skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've wanted and want this feature so hard it's unreal. It's also based on Webkit which is amazing because it is the most ACID-compliant browser last I checked, supports JavaScript, Flash, all the usual horrible-but-necessary-for-getting-most-sites-to-work bobbins. All I want in my life is to be able to control Webkit with my keyboard inside Emacs buffers. I think the only logical step is to start work on this project.
I agree with you completely. Recently we created a small web app (http://hnwatch.scalien.com, Hacker News Watch) which already had a python back end for crawling and text processing, so we decided to try out python instead of choosing php which we were already familiar with.

We decided to use apache+mod_wsgi as it seemed the most performant option to use, and then we realized that you cannot use python as you would php, but you have to use a framework to do even the most simple things.

What's worse, with mod_wsgi python caches the interpreter between page requests, which means it also caches modules with errors, and randomly runs several versions of the same file!

So we hacked mod_wsgi to not to cache, and also created a minimalistic framework (150 lines) so that file deploying is like with php and you can easily use GET parameters, cookies and even mixed html and python code between <? and ?>. The only drawback is that python use indentation, so you have to be careful when writing one-line codes etc.

Now it is working correctly, but I was constantly wondering that nobody did that before us. Still I'm not sure we shouldn't use php again :)
Cross referenced to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=787323

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698356
I would rather they do something like this than start creating all sorts of subsidies to particular industries (or even worse, particular 'industry leaders').
I know that there have been cameras in the schools where I live(a 4,000 people town in Tennessee) at least since I was in sixth grade(six years ago) and in the buses since elementary school. Our school district is quite short on funds as well.
Crowdsourced product development
If freelancers establish an S-corp or LLC and pay themselves regularly using a payroll service it should make it much easier. I have done this since I went independent 5 years ago and it has helped greatly when dealing with banks (I got my mortgage before I went independent though but I would assume it would help with that).

This eliminates the majority of the complaints banks have. The income is well documented and steady, and you can have money in the bank to show them.
"And freelancers appear to make less than their W-2 counterparts, as their up-front income doesn’t reflect the business deductions that will lower their taxes later."

This line makes no sense at all. Almost all freelancers will appear to make MORE than their W-2 couterparts and it isn't until you factor in payroll taxes and things like retirement/healthcare benefits that you figure out what a freelancer actually makes.
I've never thought SF was about predicting the future, and I believe I've read my share of SF. For me, it was about two things: escapism at the soft end, and philosophy at the hard end.

I won't talk about the escapism, but the philosophy aspect is more interesting. Usually, it's about changing one or two things about our world, i.e. the present, and seeing how things play out. "What if" scenarios are briefly explored, poked and prodded. IMHO, short stories usually end up being the best format for this kind of intellectual experiment. It's a little like how study of history lets you reexamine your assumptions about the present, by contrast with back when society, communications, technology, etc. were different. It lets you examine the human condition: what changes with circumstances, and what stays the same. Good SF does similar things, but permits using imaginary technologies, societal arrangements, rather than relying on specific histories.
Quite an interesting twist on Bach.

ba dump dump chs :)
hey if secretaries get their own day, why not programmers?
Interesting video. $10,000/mo actually seems a little low. I wonder how long it takes for the initial crane construction.
Here's the evidence of fraud:
1. "I'm trying to produce commercially and distribute to the districts. We've already sent a couple out to the districts to test for feasibility." means they have built and distributed prototypes for evaluation.
2. "Two teens in Nepal, Milan Karki and Harihar Adhikari, have developed a low cost solar panel from human hair. Silicon dioxide, cupreous oxide, copper wire, glass, plywood and black hair is all they required to prepare the solar panel." a cupreous oxide (US spelling cuprous oxide) cell produces 2.35 mW per square meter and they would need a panel 120m x 120m to produce 9V at 18W.
3. Their panel is just about the right size to contain a commercially available 9V 18W unit which can be purchased from a company like Maplin in the UK.
4. If they have distributed panels that supposedly produce 9V at 18W and the panels are the size shown in the photogrqaphs, this could only happen if they have concealed conventional silicon solar panels inside the prototypes. Either that or they haven't distributed any prototypes.
5. Based on the information published so far, including direct quotes from the inventors, these students do not understand the science behind their own invention.
The ring came off my pudding can.
Please also note the watch he promimently displays on his wrist.
> Are you suggesting that python is more complex to use than x86_64 assembler?

No, but twisted is much more complicated than regular python. The inversion of control and the fact that until quite recently it was almost impossible to write code for using the framework that was easy to read/understand by experienced python ciders who were not familiar with the idims and conventions used by the project. Twisted generates more WTFs per minute than any other bit of python kit. Some of this is due to a tradition of poor documentation within the project and some due to the nature of the code. Twisted is a complicated system, and sometimes this complexity is not worth embracing.
I meant 1.25 mW per square meter.
Absolutely awesome. Waiting for the patched Emacs to download now (the ability to embedd arbitary x windows in Emacs is in itself pretty damn cool) and playing with Uzbl, it's damn cool. Right now the only two apps I use most days are Emacs and Firefox, maybe it's time for Firefox to give in :p
Winging It
Looking at where he came from, and where he is now, he's got plenty of reason to flaunt it. He came from the slums, and made tens of millions! (It doesn't mean it's not tacky, but he's got the street cred to say he did it (mostly) by his own skills.)
Yeah, and why not anyone else? You'll soon be out of days in year if you're going to give them away that easily. So make sure you only give one to those, who have not voted for you already.
The Buddy System: How Medical Data Revealed Secret to Health and Happiness
> "Current economic conditions rule out the possibility of past, present, or future time machines. The interest rate would always be zero if time travel were possible, because of the arbitrage opportunities that time travel would permit. Positive rates of interest are positive proof that time travel, unlike space flight, is pure fantasy."

Huh?
They don't see the content coming or going. That to me is pretty significant.
Because cheap webhosts support it. I would never have bothered learning PHP were it not for them.
I don't see any connection between these two things. They may as well do both at the same time. The difference is that making someone's day is meaningless and useless to those this day has been made for.
I read 1-star reviews for entertainment, but don't trust them, they are often hilariously inaccurate.
Things I'd Do If I Ran a News Organization
http://finance.google.com/finance/info?q=GOOG,LON:TSCO

http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=GOOG&f=...

:)
I wonder if OpenID would be more popular if they called it "OpenLogin", which seems to be what its being used for.
In general, I really liked this article, and found it thought-provoking.

However, saying that Marie Curie was included in the science books just because she was a woman is insulting and untrue. She was one of the all time greats--the only person besides Linus Pauling to win not one, but TWO Nobel Prizes. Despite extremely meager resources, and at great personal cost, she discovered, isolated, and named two new radioactive elements, polonium and radium. She also discovered thorium, but didn't get official credit for it. She discovered radiation therapy for cancer. Her work laid the foundation for the the work of Max Planck and Niels Bohr and the nuclear age, both its helpful and harmful aspects. Without her work, there would have been no atom bomb, and no nuclear energy. Her influence is vastly important and far-reaching.

Parents don't want their children to swear because it's vulgar and coarse. Well-bred people used not to swear at all, but it has become increasingly common among people of all backgrounds.
That's sort of like saying no discussion of physics is complete without mentioning the latest article about how physics suppresses perpetual-motion researchers.
meh. sounded kind of one-sided to me.
Honestly: 30 days? $100K revenue from a new tech venture when you're 16 working in the afternoons and can't code? Reaaallly?

I realize these were crazy times but .. I smell a fish.
You should. It's Saturday.
Here is another data point. I tried F# for a GUI application some time ago. F# OOP is confusing, with a lot of syntactic variations and limitations on what kind of expressions you can put where. Subtyping doesn't work well because you have to upcast everywhere. I started again in C# and it was much better. Not only is the OOP better but also the IDE.

F# is okay for data processing like you describe, but Ruby is better.
Facebook's OpenId implementation is dumb
Comparing a language like PHP to a framework like rails makes no sense either. That was my point.
Bootstrapping is always interesting. Thanks!
Maybe OpenOffice.org doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but I was pretty happy with Writer. I wrote my girlfriend's thesis in it and it looked very good. I admit that I had some issues with it, but they were caused by the fact that Fedora shipped a beta version; the older version worked fine.

At one workplace we were using Word (2003 IIRC) and I can say that when it comes to styles it sucks. It doesn't really support styles, or if it supports them they're too complicated to use. Nobody knew who to use them, so we did the formatting by hand.
Especially since many "vegetables" are fruits in the botanical sense; tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, bell and hot peppers.
FWIW, I know of someone who set up a corporation, hired themselves, funneled some of their savings through the corporation back to themselves as income, then once they had 3 payslips (what the mortgage companies wanted), they got the mortgage they wanted. They had to pay income taxes on the money, of course, but they could effectively create any level of income they wanted that way.

Thankfully I didn't have to go to such crazy extremes. I went to a mortgage broker and they somehow made the mortgage company happy with three years of tax returns (on a normal, non-self-approved rate too).
The NY Times consistently prints these 'millions in minutes on the Internet' pieces. They did the same think with Markus Frind, Mr. Plenty of Fish, and I've seen others as well.

I know it's fun to rewrite the same story over and over about how you fall out of bed into a pile of money, but it gets a little old for those of us who know you really fall into a pile of hard work and meager reward.
Pong (130 lines in Clojure)
I wonder if there are photographers that specialize in the "I'm a rich douche" headshot. Probably pays pretty well...
The actual data presented in the article suggests that anti-oxidants may aid the spread of cancer (metastasis) by reducing oxidative stress on dispersing cells.
It's not obvious to me that this is a win for Tornado users.

There's a cost to adding a dependency on Twisted. It's one more thing to download. There's more code to understand when something goes wrong. And so on.

What are the benefits to me as a web programmer? If I understand correctly, my application will work as it did before. If that's true, then Twisted did not add any win for me.
Nice one! he he
Almost everyone else does have their holiday in Russia. It is an old Soviet tradition to celebrate every kind of work.
Hacker Day would've been better.
He lives in Santana Row (also where Blue Lithium used to be located), I saw him while I was visiting my sister a few weeks ago and she and her husband told me has a massive ego as well (they've met him a few times).

But I guess given where he came from and what he's accomplished he's earned the right to act however he wants. I personally think being humble gets you much further in life, but that's just me.
You did Alan Turing a big favor. Now you're slightly less indebted to him than the rest of us :-)
There are several async programming libraries for Python including Allegra ( http://laurentszyster.be/blog/allegra/doc/ ), libevent-python (and other libevent bindings to python), the standard asyncore module and more. Why should Facebook use Twisted instead of one of these other libraries?
Effective artificial light hasn't been around long enough for any evolutionary adaptations to it. Normally, people were awake when it was light and slept when it was dark. When camping, I normally wake at the crack of dawn and go to sleep pretty early after sunset. At home, when not working (which means without a fixed schedule) I tend to sleep from 4 AM to noon. When working I can adapt fairly easily to any working shift, but without the external focus I always drift back to the 4 AM to noon. I have tried to maintain other schedules (as I have mentioned previously on HN posts on sleeping), but they never work out for very long.

As for the point of the article, sleeping the 4 AM to noon shift seems to be stable for me because I never seem to "crash" on that schedule as I sometimes do on others. I can stay up much longer than 4 AM, even completely miss a sleep period, and still be back to 4 AM to noon the next day; I cannot do that with other sleep schedules.
The mortgage companies ask for 1040s from previous years, so they're generally looking at your take home after taxes. When I was self employed, my take home was generally substantially less than it could have been, because I could leave money in the corporation. I suspect it's similar for most people who use corporations intelligently.
Sorry, your 10-40 should report your corporate income as well if you use a LLC or S-Corp so it would still be represented there. (this is why they call it pass-through taxation) Unless you had a C-corp which doesn't make any sense for a freelancer.
Some parents I have spoken with prefer the death due to head trauma over sexual torture.

There's also the guilt factor. If something common happens to your kid, it's an 'accident'. If your kid gets kidnapped, people put more of the blame on you. I mean, I have lots of designs for safer transit, but it's a lot easier to keep the kid on a leash than change people to focus on the safety of automotive travel above the need for a status symbol. Why do only pros wear helmets?
This is why we opted to buy a house before we'd saved as much of a down payment as I would have liked. I went (partially) through the mortgage process as a self employed (or homeless, as far as the banks are concerned) individual, and it was a nightmare. I accidentally became employed about a year ago, and we opted to buy a house three months ago to take advantage of the fact that we could land a mortgage without jumping through too many hoops. Even still, I had to show quite a bit of paperwork from my self employed time.

I can now safely lose my job and still have a mortgage.
The reason I think that folks who build their own stuff are right is that they understand their problem domain better than anyone else.

The author says communication could have cut their time down considerably. That may or may not be true. Getting into a debate with an external project about what should or shouldn't be the correct way to fix/change the external projects code can be a huge drain on time and mental energy. You can't fault a group for deciding not to bother.

Not to mention that if you become the person responsible for a piece of an external project you are suddenly not just supporting your use of that piece you are supporting everyone else's use of that piece. That leads to more debating/discussion about the right way to do it. If you have to find a way to scale fast it might actually in the long run be less time to just write it yourself for your specific needs not an entire communities needs who have different scaling issues than you and different goals. Many times One size does not fit all and convincing someone else of that is just too time consuming to try.

The author did bring up an interesting point about friendfeed developers not even trying to communicate though so I can understand what prompted him to write the article.
Oh, you're right. Gah.
(Although it's on the shortlist, I didn't read 'Flow' yet so I may not be able to speak with authority about his work.)

Hey cool, thanks for the link. It's been a long time since I was in school but back then every homework assignment was 100% what we covered that day. So if the "lessons" became unclear many folks just got further and further behind and for many there was no recovering at some point because the teachers never wanted to deviate from their schedule. Btillys 1/3 1/3 1/3 structure really resonates with me because I can imagine I would feel confident and never get in over my head as the complexity of the work escalates. (And if I fell behind I could use his 10 minute improvisational time to get clear) But back to the confidence, Video Games Designers want the player to be challenged but also to feel confident and of course this balance has to remain throughout all levels of the game. Video Game Designers have long used MC's work to help them incorporate this balance. So, yes I do believe the relationship between ability and challenge is part of MC's agenda- there is more, of course. It is my understanding that Video Games are the most common contact most people usually have with MC's work.

I made a connection between the successful feeling of playing video games with the successful learning experiences in Btillys class's and it would be interesting if Btilly is aware of MC's work or if he had ever thought of what he does as MCesque. In closing, I think you and I are saying the same thing here. Thanks for the comment..
Funny this article refers to hard SF, but does not mention the branch of SF into which econonics fits: soft SF. And some soft SF writers, like Le Guin, do have a strong background in social sciences, and do write things that at least glancingly cover economics.

But the best example I can think of is Barnes's _A Million Open Doors_, set in a world that has just been exposed to a disruptive new technology. The resulting crash of its markets is a central theme of the novel.
There's a small explanation here of what he meant: http://www.robertgraboyes.com/writings_files/Bank%20at%20the.... His point definitely seems to be more intelligible after reading that article, but he seems to have a very limited definition of time travel. First, it must allow travel both ways. Second, one must be able to change the past. Third, the changed past must be the same as our past (Think of each new time travel instance as a new stack frame, with the stack variables being history. If one were to go back in time and change the past, one could create a new "stack frame" that leaves the history intact in its own timeline.)

However, one doesn't need a rather weak economic argument for the impossibility of time travel -- analyzing a light cone shows that causality will break down at speeds greater than that of light. Thus, traveling greater than the speed of light is equivalent to time travel. Using the Lorentz factor, we can trivially derive the fact that achieving a speed greater than that of light for a particle with finite mass requires an infinite amount of energy -- thus, time travel is impossible (assuming Einstein's Theory of Relativity is correct, which we are pretty damn certain about).
> Theoretically they should be the same; they all run on the CLR. But I think F# lends ...

I think you are misunderstanding this part. Tail call optimization can (sometimes) allow functional code be as fast as its imperative equivalent. It's not a magic bullet that makes it faster than the imperative code.
Bach was so far ahead of his time it's kind of unbelievable.
I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous.

It would be called noncommercial open source software or noncommercial free software.

The point is to separate the aspect of buying software from the availability of its source code and whatever freedoms are associated with that.
This video appears to contain two mistakes:

- Since the second half of the piece contains so many short notes, the measures are physically longer on paper than the earlier measures, even though each half takes the same amount of time to play. When the piece is broken into two halves, the animation is forced to put the breakpoint partway into the "short note" portion to make both "sides" (a misnomer, I know) the same length.

- The reverse playback version would, I'd think, be playing the notes "upside down" to work right. That is, notes that were low should be played high, and vice versa. I'd actually have to cut out and read sheet music on a real moebius strip to confirm this, however. (The video only gave one camera angle of the strip.)
Paul Buchheit: Evaluating risk and opportunity (as a human)
ConceptBase Now Available Under BSD License
Remember webclasses?
"The" screencast? Maybe in 2004 there was The One Rails Screencast, but their numbers are now legion.

Referring to a screencast that's four or more years old so as to knock something today is dopey. It would be like complaining today about PHP3 speed and syntax.

Seems pretty clear Mr. Lerdorf has very little knowledge of Rails, and likely very little interest in changing that.

"But when they needed to do something real, they thought, 'Oh crap, I don't know Ruby very well!'"

Pretty sure that's true for people who hear good things about any [Perl|PHP|Python] framework and decide to pick it up. Usually people then just learn the language.

PHP might have a brighter future if its BDFL wasn't so myopic about other languages.
That's a very negative way to look at it.

The benefits you get are seamless integration with all the other twisted tools and a solid foundation under the relatively new Tornado stack.

And a bug in twisted will raise many more eyebrows than a bug in Tornado - hence they are more likely to be discovered by someone else before you.
Stealing identities on Hacker News
Apparently Kansas is the best of all possible worlds. And look, Wired credits Kansas State U. for the results.
Drive Free Rides
Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria "talk" (video)
Exciting New Future
Employment Information
Funny I thought you meant Emacs is a _text-mode_ web browser, thus a web browser being a _read-mode_ Emacs.
Is the code for tornado.twister available anywhere?
http://hurl.it/hurls/7249f0ef9428c30c52e8e739eace1ba365fa24c...

Ah, I assume you are relying on the MIME type to be application/json, which is far from universal. A heuristic JSON detector shouldn't be hard.
It only gets interesting after about 4:30 - before that it's simply building a crane using an existing mobile crane (that just keeps getting longer and longer).
Most of the people I know who use macbooks can't tell an ethernet cable from a shoe string, let alone a bit from a byte. :-)

Disclaimer: Mac/Linux user here. And my main machine is a macbook (actually a MBP).