skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not particularly vested in this conversation (US Citizen). But I found Kirk's point the most compelling so far.

The point I particularly found interesting was how the UK and Australia already have provisions in their immigration policy for "highly skilled" workers. This sounds like a more equitable solution which would hopefully cover those like startup founders.
As Om Malik said http://gigaom.com/2009/09/23/dopplr-commits-hara-kiri-sells-... -- this kind of feels like death for Dopplr. Can we name a great Nokia web service or software?
Crawling the web at $2 per million pages
Eh. I disagree.

I've been including Eventlet in a lot of my comments lately, but not because I have any affiliation with it (I don't). But it has quite literally made asynchronous coding so much easier that going back to deferreds or callbacks is a huge inconvenience.

My comments previously reflect equally on deferreds and callback-based asynchronous programming. Of course those make async programming hard.

It doesn't have to be that hard.
Letting Your Servers Adjust the Thermostat
Principles of Effective Research (Advice)
Set Up Ubuntu Linux for OpenCV
> watching Perl 6 try so hard to kill [perl5].

I see no basis for this interpretation. Perl 6 has not been detrimental to Perl 5. Perl 5 and its ecosystem has remained perfectly competitive with all relevant alternatives. What was supposed to have happened in Perl 5 in recent years that didn't?

Perl 6 is an ambitious attempt to create a new language and infrastructure for the next ten years (unfortunately on a shoestring budget). The only valid question is whether this was something worth pursuing at all.
Back in my student days long ago, a friend of mine who was working on a very difficult assignment hatched a plan to include a SIGSEGV handler that would print "NFS server not responding, still trying..." for use on the day when we had to demo the results to the TAs. The NFS system was pretty flaky and his hope was that the TA would move on to the next demo and get back to him, giving him time to fix whatever problem was happening. Not sure if he actually put it in though.
A company is giving its customers good service. Is this fact altered by their motivations for doing so?
Blodget interviews Marc Andreessen On Innovation
If you're writing any kind of significantly complicated asynchronous process, what is the difference between following a bunch of Deferreds and following a bunch of callbacks??

The difference is that in co-routine based code (such as concurrence or eventlet) there are no callbacks. Co-routines are all about message passing which leads to much cleaner and much less code in most applications.

It's not uncommon to see 40%+ boilerplate callback-handling code in a twisted app. Those are not needed in a coro-environment.

Asynchronous coding is hard.

Actually the established patterns for implementing asynchronous code are hard. You get to choose between threading-hell (deadlocks, races) and callback-hell (code-bloat). I have no idea why these abstractions grew so popular, my guess would be because they are "closest to the metal".

But they are not without alternatives; co-routines, actor-based concurrency and erlang exist - all of which enable fairly straightforward "Do what I mean" development.
Snake Oil, Object Stores and Dinosaurs
ROTFLMFAO

I once tried to log in to facebook with lynx... they were ready for me!
You do realize that if you are out of status at any time, which you will be if you are working part time on H1B (you obtained for a different company) for your startup, you are illegally living in US. Moreover, if you apply for an extension or move the H1B to your own startup, you will have to mention that you were out of status because you were working for your own company, which will make you ineligible for H1B. If you dont, and you get caught you will be barred to enter US FOREVER, because you lied on an immigration document. Do you also know that you cannot get an H1B visa for your own startup no matter what, unless you can show somehow that you can be fired (which only can happen if you give away most of your equity to someone else). Even if you are not making money when you are on H1B for a different company, but if you signed a contract, signed a cheque, or were responding to customers, you are out of status. You can think that how can anyone would come to know that you were working at the backend, but are you willing to take the risk of getting barred to enter US forever?
Equity in Communities
I call crap on this. He wants more work in journals so academics can sort out their pecking order. The rest of us dont want an emphasis on traditional journals because they are an expensive and time consuming gateway to the dissemination of ideas. I really hate to track down an interesting idea, only to be presented by an abstract with the real paper behind a fee wall. Some authors are considerate enough to have an online version, but not all. I say other disciplines should "grow up" and embrace the online publication of papers.
Evidence for what you say in your comment? Citations, please?
It depends on how dispensable those common and reasonable things are. There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and one strong quality of a language is how well it gives you one overarching, consistent cat-skinning paradigm that is sufficient to skin cats. If it does, then it can be excused to some degree for not supporting other methods of skinning.
"Zephyr" isn't an animal, but "a breeze from the west."

Anyway, I'm voting for "(Zippy|Zesty) (Zebra|Zebu)".
That's true, and I'm kind of disappointed in myself for not thinking of Zappa. I do think the Velvet Underground might be a better example, because you have to explain less -- people know they're influential.
It's the opposite of Gandhi's nonviolent resistance. Instead of acting as a moral foil, they act as a moral mirror. Both methods force to the surface judgments that people have already made but have avoided acknowledging. When people read about "a man slathered in Vaseline and covered in pubic hair and toenail clippings storm[ing] in and... desecrating a place of worship" and find themselves wondering which side they're on, they can't deny that they have little respect for Scientology.
Peter Landin Obituary
Pricing A Project
Another problem is that a nuclear weapon isn't just something you buy and keep in a lock-up until you need it, like, say, tanks or guns.

They need maintenance - the physics package decays (literally). For example, in fusion bombs, you have to replenish the tritium in the core, and in fission bombs you have to periodically replace the plutonium core.

There's a section about this in the Poundstone book "Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb", and I don't recall the precise details, but this was a problem for arms control too. How do you count how many bombs a country has, when "bomb" is a loose term and bombs are kept in pieces, constantly being dismantled, replaced and upgraded.
Term sheet tune-up
Interactive Pythagoras Trees
Fascinating. And the first I've heard of Turkey being taxed as chicken.
Why you should use four different digits for keypad locks
SAT Mathematics 2009 average scores per group:

Asian: 587

White: 536

American Indian: 493

Hispanic: 461

Black: 426

Overall: 515

from here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125121641858657345.html
They've actually never had an "a" release, because they didn't start the sequential letter thing until Dapper Drake. And they've already had two "h" releases - Hoary Hedgehog and Hardy Heron, so they're definitely not afraid to reuse letters.
3. Scalability wrt. data sharing, backing persistent data, replication/redundancy strategies, etc

...

We have some plans and quite a bit of mostly-working code that implements a paxos-based framework

Don't. Seriously, don't go that route, it's a huge waste of time. Instead: Keep your server shared-nothing and make it interface with as many different breeds of Message Queues on the backend as possible (AMQP, Stomp etc.).

That's what any non-trivial comet app needs to do anyways and any kind of intelligence inside the comet-server beyond dispatching between the backend-queue and the browser only gets in the way.

The canonical setup is:

Browser <-> Diesel <-> Message Queue

Diesel should be able to maintain connections to multiple Brokers on the backend in parallel, for failover and load distribution - and that's it.
or it was a very clever move for Nokia to pick up some class product talent to teach them the ways.

Dopplr is a stunning service, Nokia can (and should) learn a lot from them. The CEO is ex-Nokia too.
Wow. I wonder what their price point will be. The dual screen layout makes a lot of sense in this formfactor - book mode, laptop mode and tablet mode - pretty slick.
The Pinwheel Galaxy Captured in Dazzling Color
Everything he said!! I did the same thing, but for free with only time...

Except my site has 13k users. The only problem so far is the users are still using the old site because my new site isn't up to 'their' standards yet. I currently have about 400 users on my site out of the 13k promised. I only expect my site to flourish tho... Do you expect your site to flourish and grow?
I'd love to know what caused so many high profile entrepreneurs to get involved with Dopplr. Hoffman, joshu, Saul Klein, Martin Varsavsky.
FTA: "So what's he going to do now? Not buy a house or anything crazy"

He just sold for $170 million and buying a house is crazy?
This article is a little silly. First it moves the goal posts from making nuclear weapons to making advanced nuclear weapons (e.g. Plutonium implosion designs), with the justification that only implosion weapons are suitable for ICBM delivery.

However, this analysis is inaccurate, naive, and misleading. Look at the history of nuclear proliferation. South Africa, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea all successfully acquired nuclear weapons production capability, the later 2 fairly recently. All but North Korea and South Africa are sure to have built advanced weapons.

Also, there are 2 parts to the equation implicit in this article: a nuclear warhead and an ICBM capable of carrying it. Unfortunately, it's just as easy to keep working on the 2nd part to make bigger rockets with heavier payload capacity, even if you are never able to figure out how to make an advanced, lightweight warhead. India has the capability to launch a dead-simple gun-type Uranium bomb to anywhere in the world, for example. North Korea's missile program is maybe 10-20 years behind India's. And North Korea has been sharing its missile technology with Iran.

It's naive to think that we're safe merely because the technological road is difficult. At best it's just a matter of time, given concerted effort.
While most Microsoft products are pretty lame, there's one exception in my book: ONENOTE. I've used about all the notebook variants on the market and Onenote is the best by far in terms of flexibility and collaboration. I've been using Onenote on dropbox and it's a great way to sync all my thoughts across all my machines.

This little digital notebook could essentially function as a hip version of ONENOTE where you could archive all your digital goodies, and hopefully sync them to the cloud via an always on 3G/4G connection.

The future is looking bright for us hackers!
yeah... iPhone 3G S
Right, but those message queues themselves implement Paxos or have some master election scheme, etc (if they promise replication/failover). You have to get that durability somewhere.

So, we're internalizing that queueing behavior into diesel.

(You can tell us not to do it, but it's pretty much done. :-)
Moblin 2.1 for MIDs (and phones) Demo Video
Ask HN: Created my first Ruby Gem. How'd I do? 
Last weekend I was working on a Rails project and realized that I was creating the same utility function for the third time in a row. In the spirit of DRY, I figured it was time to package it up into a gem that I could drop into any project.

The basic problem was creating a place to quickly and easily shove config values and application wide state. CONSTANTS in the environment work ok, but can't be modified by the run time. What I ultimately wanted was memcache, with persistence.

So I created the entity_store gem, which allows you to drop a persistent key/value store into any rails app in about 5 minutes. After initialization, you can use commands like:

# Get key value.

e = EntityStore["testkey"]

e = EntityStore.testkey

e = EntityStore[:testkey]

# sets key named 'happened' to a Time object of now

EntityStore[:happened] = Time.now

EntityStore["happened"] = Time.now

EntityStore.happened = Time.now

Everything syncs instantly with the database, so state is preserved even if the server goes down. Additionally, it allows you to initialize with some defaults for keys - which works great for getting initial state going on your app.

Overall, packaging up and publishing the gem in a decent state online took longer than actually writing the functionality. Talk about yak shaving! But it was fun... hope someone else finds it useful.

http://eatenbyagrue.github.com/entity_storage/

Any ideas for the next version would be greatly appreciated.
Unless the number of people receiving treatment hasn't gone up accordingly.

And specifically: the number of people matching the socioeconomic profile of the people who were committing the crimes that have seen such a sharp drop.
It says it'll only halve the key length (eg, from 256 down to 128). I think the most promising factoring algorithm would involve finding a halfway point repeatedly so it would complete in about 256 steps, but I have no idea how to find that solution.
This is blogspam, http://ragbag.tumblr.com/post/187708731/arial-helvetica-on-f... is the actual source.
I use Ovi to put my MP3s on line. It's really good!
>> " The site has never grown to huge usage, but core users are passionate about the service"

I never really understand how these things manage to sell for so much, having so few users.

>> "Dopplr cofounder and CEO Marko Ahtisaari was previously the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia."

Oh... I see...
I think your comment is tangential to the central thrust of the article. He's not really stating anything one way or the other about the free availability of papers online. That's an issue that will exist whether papers are published in journals or in conference proceedings. (Both options are expensive and time consuming, just in different ways.)

The main idea here, paraphrasing Fortnow, is that computer science needs to put more emphasis on publishing longer-form pieces representing bigger chunks of work in a context that allows for them to receive more thorough review. The conference publication model is fine for an emerging field: everyone is still sorting out the basics, so publishing small bits of work frequently is a good idea. But, Fortnow argues, once a field becomes established, encouraging frequent publication of small chunks of work in settings that have become highly competitive leads to incrementalism, low quality peer review, and other ill effects. Encouraging longer submissions, each representing a larger chunk of work, and each of which can receive more attention from reviewers, will hopefully have the effects of encouraging researchers to pursue riskier work and of putting reviewers more at ease with less derivative papers.

I think that's what he was saying, anyway. Or at least part of it.

The issues of open access and how to fund scientific publications are certainly important, but I think this article was really focusing on other issues.
Real World Haskell: Bryan O'Sullivan's inspirational call to the FP community
See also the wikipedia article on race and intelligence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

Note that while the causes of lower intelligence of some groups are disputed (environmental vs genetic), the implications for recruiting scientists and engineers is the same regardless of the cause.
Many of his symptoms sound just like severe hypoglycemia. My wife has similar, but much less dramatic things happen to her when her blood sugar crashes. Really interesting.
As a deterrent to invasion, use as a super-mine against ground troops would be perfectly adequate and requires no fancy delivery system; just adequate security as to exactly where it was located.
It's a good strategy. Do it if you can get it for a good price.
An interesting chart. I thought I had read in international comparisons of education that children (perhaps not adults) watch every bit as much television in east Asia as they do in the United States, but play outside with neighborhood friends less than American children do. But that would be from an older source. It would be good to fact-check this, as I'm not completely convinced that there is a lot less television-watching in Taiwan (the other country where I have lived the longest, and not on the submitted chart) than in the United States.
How about Time New Roman vs. Georgia? It's always puzzled me that they look much different on screen, but fairly similar when printed.
From the 'obvious wear' or 'tracking substance added' risks mentioned, it also seems you should, after entering the proper code, touch every other number redundantly as well.

I suppose with 10 transparent markers that are distinguishable under detailed inspection (such as fluorescing to different colors under UV light), you could even work out the right order on the first try: "traces of orange have transferred to 3 other keys, so the orange key was pressed first; traces of green to 2 other... (etc.)"
18 Resources to Help you Write Better Blog Titles
I was under the impression that Arial was a cheap knock-off of Helvetica. They took a similar font and reshaped it so it could stand in for Helvetica.

Clearly this is uninspired, much like a KDE theme trying to recreate Mac OS X. There's no actual law that says such a knock-off must be inferior to the original but a) it's off to a bad start, and b) even if it ties with the original it's got the taint of being a rip-off motivated by greed.

The full history of Arial, from a link someone else posted:
http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html

Note that Red Hat has in turn commisioned a font that is "metric compatible" with Arial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
I assume that this will only work if you've executed the program inside of GDB, not if you load a core file that was dumped earlier outside of GDB?
I won't argue about semantics of theoretical in theoretical computer science.

It is my experience that people in casual conversations automatically assume topic to be complexity theory, despite I'm in Europe.

Or maybe I will, just a bit ;) Because in fact, in casual conversations noone seem to be insiting, or in fact using adj. theoretical when talking about languages, semantics, logic, universal algebra, category theory. This is computer science after all, no need for special adjectives. It would be a bit like calling category theory a "theoretical mathematics".

Fact is, major part of the community uses term exclusively in the meaning we talk about. It could be argued if rightly and people outside may justifiably think in broader sense. Maybe better words could be found instead of theoretical, such as "analytical", and in fact I recall one of European departments reorganizing into two institutes, one for "Analytical CS".
Sorry, that wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to the incompatibility of free software and commercialism. I was referring to Ubuntu's gradual shift away from their promise of always being free. Specifically, I would point out the recent "branding" updates to Firefox - that basically trick the user into accepting packages that merely promote Ubuntu. There's nothing inherently evil about it - but it was out of style for them, I think. There's also constant additions of packages and kernel modules that aren't REALLY 'free', etc...

So what I really meant is that as Ubuntu gains popularity, I've noticed more and more that they're concerned with things other than providing a truly free OS. Not that I blame them - it's only natural as a company grows. But sometimes it worries me what will eventually become of Ubuntu.
the last of the epic trolls

Really, wired? My experience with 4-chan has generally been that whatever you say about/of/to them, they'll try their damn hardest to prove you wrong. Give them enough time, and order will rise out of the chaos that is Anonymous. Sure, it will eat itself, and descend back into the depths of madness eventually, but something will rise back into its place.

I would bet, given another decade or two Anonymous, whether it be the 4-chan brand or from other meeting place, will do something that tops even this. As the Internet and networks in general are rising more towards the public eye, the memembers of Anonymous, who are mostly young, technologically adept individuals with questionable morals, will gain more and more relevance. Like it or not, there is a draw to Anonymous, and where there is technological interconnection it will exist and thrive.
Good to hear you like it Travis.

We're getting there but we're not there yet - we're doing that last 10%. I'm sorry but I don't think we'll have something usable in 10 days.

I'll bump you up the list and make sure you get an invite.

--Rob
How to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours
At the risk of being downvoted, let me rant: We need to reinstate hard-assed, traditional, back to basics curriculum. Period. Get rid of teacher credentialing systems and touchy-feely bullshit, and have kids start memorizing formulas, diagramming sentences, and reading classics again. And have them do A LOT of homework. And quit telling them and their parents that the primary thing is to have fun and feel satisfied -- it isn't.

Then we won't have a goddam brain drain -- it is an embarrassment to the American people that we can't educate ourselves.
Marko Ahtisaari's primary credential is that he's the son of former Finnish president (and Nobel Peace Prize laureate) Martti Ahtisaari.

Dopplr always seemed like a startup that's been tailor-designed for a Nokia acquisition exit. Glad to see it worked out for them.
So, really, on what basis are you calling people who want a simplified process lazy?

So I assume you've got all your code written, marketing pitch nailed down and customers are all lined up waiting for you to finish your GC from the bigcorp? Don't act like the need for a green card is the only hurdle between you and The Millions.

The point I am making is simple: there are LOTS of obstacles to "making it" and getting an employer-sponsored green card is BY FAR the least significant issue you need to solve.

What else do you want to be successful? Free healthcare for entrepreneurs? Dedicated highway lanes for entrepreneurs? Look, the US is already one of the most immigrant-friendly societies out there, there are great incentives to start a business as compared to most other countries and American culture is very forgiving to those who fail but try again. It's freaking awesome here. Stop complaining and get to work!
"because the genetic effects on cognition are so tiny"

Did that quote stun anyone else?

'Tiny' implies a comparison. The only other thing to compare these effects with, would be more well-studied factors, such as nutrition, environment and sleep. And if effects such as those dwarf the effects of genetics... well that's just not something that I can recall ever being hinted at.
Self-Adaptive Modular Robots interesting examples by Yu,Nagpal
In my experience a google sitemap gets my blog in there pretty quickly too.
Dopplr Commits Hara-kiri, Sells to Nokia