skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is mostly content-free.

"A GCHQ historian, who would not give his name for security reasons, said: ''JRR Tolkien is known the world over for his novels, but his involvement with the war effort may take a few people by surprise.

''While he didn't sign up as was probably intended, he did complete three days' training and was 'keen' to do more.

''Why he failed to join remains a mystery. There is no paperwork suggesting a motive, so we can only assume that he wanted to concentrate on his writing career.''"

So, he didn't do anything more than three days training without further follow up, and that somehow translates in to an involvement with the war effort ?

The only nice bit is near the end, where they relate that a bunch of captured enigma machines are on display but only to the staff of the GCHQ.
I've just started running and to see Eddie Izzard do this after 5 weeks of training... it's a seriously impressive feat. I dare say being in the public eye helped - if Joe Bloggs from Balham tried, it wouldn't be quite so motivating to keep going, since nobody would care if he stopped!
hardcore dsp goodness.
You are a little off-topic here, but you may no know it. The number you are referring to is (I think, but your number is a little high...) for the average (specifically, the r.m.s speed) of an electron which is one of many (classical) things all at the same temperature (that is,in thermal equilibrium), at the temperature of the human body.

If you're not familiar with these concepts, re-read the above but skip the stuff in parentheses.
Zero spam ?

HN does pretty good but even there sometimes there are more than 4 flagged but not 'dead' spam on the new page.

Tough job!
I don't understand what's the big deal with these tablets. IBM/Lenovo had a Thinkpad tablet PC for years, it's called the ThinkPad X Series Tablet
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...
[I hope that the link works]
Chocolate-Covered Rice Cakes
Even rice cakes can be drastically improved through one small change.
I find this device really interesting but it is covered with a thick layer of marketing bs. I just signed up on the zii site but there is still barely any developer info available.

They are for sale now though, so I might get one. If Android runs on them then it might be a good way to get an interesting development device.
Twitter Matters: Keeping Up with Weak Social Links
Video magazine adverts launched in the US
My experience is that business owners (of necessity when dealing with lenders, customers and their own doubts and fears) have trained themselves to tell white lies. They'll say to everyone "Yeah things are going great, business is booming, I couldn't be happier!" when actually they are totally stressed out.
As for one Chinese proverb: "Never try to stop someone from doing something unless you didn't try the exact same thing and failed."

The body is a fragile yet a very resilient machine. Amazing how it adapts to physical demands. The brain is more amazing having the ability to fool the body that the physical necessity is real and not just a will to prove something. It proves that a strong body is nothing without a strong brain.
I actually thought you were recommending a piece of software that had a punny name...
My favorite VPS host just got favoriter. There is nothing in my credit card statement that I am more satisfied with than my linode subscription.
RestWiki
Time for them to build their own android phone...
Norman Borlaug's Complicated Legacy
A case study in using HTML5’s sectioning elements
4) I think of the table name as describing the tuples it contains, not the table itself. SQL reads better that way.
Re http://ironbabel.googlepages.com/6502.html

Assemblers don't compile, they assemble.

Neat hack though!
Couldn't we just have the compiler automatically figure out this propagation, and then toss a warning if one could ever reach the top level of a thread? I mean, it seems like a much easier problem than ML-style type inference.
Google.cn
Also, he ran for a cause, so I'm sure that helped.

Still... wow!
catch (IOException ioe) { throw new MyObjectXYZContractException ("Can't do XYZ", ioe); }
A cursory look leads me to conclude that Noop has no primitive types. This results in Int (capital I) typed variables all over. While this follows the naming convention to which I adhere -- CamelCased classes -- there is still some cognitive dissonance. This might be a silly point, but I have not yet had coffee.
Top 4 mistakes hiring new programmers
I think it's wrong to expect corporations to have more moral obligation than my own government.
Sprint is on CDMA as well. AFAIK Jpananese providers use it too. CDMA is generally quite popular in Asia. Besides, it doesn't really cost that much to have GSM/CDMA versions of the same phone.

GSM is mostly a European phenomena which is unfortunate since it is vastly inferior to CDMA. I used to be on Sprint and Verizon for years and got used to crystal clear sound. Now, even after 3 years with AT&T and T-Mobile, I still cannot get used to the pathetic voice call quality of GSM handsets (I tried Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry and Apple).

Verizon doesn't have the latest phones because they never allow customers too much freedom at exchanging data. Even their basic phones come with crippled Bluetooth (so you can't upload your own MP3 - have to pay Verizon for that) and disabled tethering. With something like iPhone they'd have to disable most of the phone to make it fit their corporate dogma of controlling everything users do.
Ask HN:  Visual FoxPro for charity POS app?
I need some technical advice for a pro bono legal project. I'm helping a local charity, staffed almost entirely by volunteers, to negotiate a software development contract with an independent developer. The project is to build a point-of-sale and inventory-management system, to replace the antiquated custom-build system they have now.

(The charity's management has already explored off-the-shelf and FOSS possibilities, after another developer's prior attempt to build a new system ended badly.)

The developers are proposing to use Visual FoxPro 9.0. I'm vaguely familiar with that platform, and have just read the Wikipedia entry and the Microsoft landing page.

YES-OR-NO QUESTION: Granting that there might be better tools than Visual FoxPro 9.0, is that at least a not-unreasonable choice?

Thanks in advance.
Indian Party Wear Sarees, Designer Sarees
If he wasn't "running" to his best, that would be my definition. Pacing yourself because you know you have another one is running a different race entirely, so the two are totally not comparable.

It would certainly be interesting to see how fast he could run one in a few months time once his soreness dies down.
When I was in a PC support position, there weren't any quotas; we just had a print server because it was much easier to organize and configure that way. Anyone wanting to set up a printer directly was more than welcome to, so long as they didn't fuck it up and then come crying to me when it didn't work.

You can do this in windows by setting up a TCP printer rather than connecting to a print server.
It's not pedantry it's verity/accuracy.

Oh, perhaps that was pedantry?
I will not be doing the marathon, but will do some of the skating, and probably go the skaters party! The marathon runs beside where I live, so I'll give you a thumbs up as you go by ;)
I typically use 3 categories of exceptions when building frameworks or libraries.

Two are unchecked RuntimeException extensions to indicate operating environment issues, and, implementation issues (aka bugs).

Finally, if the api semantics seem to indicate it, api level checked exceptions indicating misuse of the api (aka user errors). Typical example are cases where the api semantics require return values which preclude uniform application of an 'error code' as a viable means of alerting user error. I don't believe it is a good practice to throw an unchecked exception in these cases.

Both checked and unchecked exceptions have their uses.
impressive!

JavaScript is one of the few languages where you keep being surprised with what can be done with it. For the longest time I saw it as pretty limited, then one day somone shows me an apple II emulator in javascript.
Yes, it is a good choice to develop small database centric applications. In a certain way is similar to Delphi ou VB but more database centric than VB.However it has been shelved by Microsoft in favor of .Net, so support may be a concern in the future.
Exactly. Gay codes are not that hard to break.
BERT and Ernie: Scaling your Ruby site with Erlang
Why does everyone seem to think this a black-and-white issue?

You answered your own question. Inappropriate use of checked exceptions is built into the heart of the Java standard libraries, which means that (a) every new Java programmer is taught, consciously or subconsciously, to use them everywhere, at least until the programmer is very explicitly educated about their badness; (b) even experienced Java programmers must deal with them every day, and 95% of the checked exceptions they deal with are an unredeemed pain in the ass, so before long the very sight of one makes you flinch. It's Pavlovian.

In a language community where checked exceptions were a completely optional add-on which was only used when appropriate, they might have a much better reputation.
Getting Started with MongoDB & MongoMapper
I did it anyway :) http://pygments.appspot.com/
Ask HN: check out my micro app - pygments syntax highlighter via HTTP
That number will be dropping to one (Bell) after this year when Telus switches to GSM; the CDMA/GSM switch for Telus is supposed to happen in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics (and they'll probably run parallel networks for a little while like Rogers did with its GSM/TDMA switchover a decade ago).
Man, I had never heard of this guy before. That is absolutely incredible. Thanks for posting that.
750 vertical pixels of header image is a bit much to scroll. I almost left the site thinking it was broken or contentless.
CodeForAmerica.org
It would also likely be difficult to get mice to do martial arts.

Cute.
The Man Who Found Quarks and Made Sense of the Universe (Interview w/ Gell-Mann)
Security Alert – Personal Antivirus | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
This article is a little bit misleading because it's not really copy protection.

The BBC aren't allowed to encrypt content at all but they're proposting to encrypt only HD content over DVB-T2, known as Freeview (OTA for Americans).

There's two things which they're asking for (feel free to correct me if the transport stream technicalities are wrong).

Obfuscation of the service information data with a huffman code lookup table. The SI allows transport stream demuxers to work out how to split the transport stream up with information like video types, audio tracks, clock info etc...This can all be worked around easily.

The other is full encryption which won't be allowed because it will delay set top boxes and there won't be any on the shelves during the World Cup, which is basically an HD flagship event.

There's no encryption on satellite nor on cable anyway so it's a bit of a moot point.
Losing Your Hunger
He redefined what it means to run a marathon, that's all.

Ermm, no he didn't. Or if he did I can "redefine" running a Marathon to walking to Starbucks in which case I did 2 Marathons today. I bet there are many people who do a 10-hour Marathon in a day's shopping...

Good for him raising money for charity, but there are people in the world like Dean Karnazes who really do run 50 marathons in 50 days - and Karno has raised huge amounts for charity himself.

(3:40 Marathon runner)
This is an unofficial API for the Pygments syntax highlighting library, version 1.2. It's designed to provide syntax highlighting for web applications that don't have Python installed. I made it so that I can use the Pygments Python library from http://heroku.com, which is Ruby-only.

I saw something similar on HN a few days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821526), but it didn't have an API. So, I made this one, which is _just_ an API :)

Feel free to use it for your projects. I also open sourced the code (http://github.com/trevorturk/pygments), so you can fork, improve, host your own, etc.

Enjoy!
I've heard that roughly 30% of Google search are searches for domains, just like this cnn.com example.
Does DRM have a measurable effect on piracy rates?
o god, watching the video demonstration will dissuade you from wanting to buy it. It's definitely _not_ sleek, it looks like its at least an inch thick and controlled by a remote.
Tool of the Day: Stay on Budget with ManageMe7
There is no scientific evidence that it has any impact on materialistic outcome but there is no evidence that it does not either.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence, especially if you have a cottage industry devoted to looking for evidence, fruitlessly.
1. US Army standard for marching is 2.5 miles every hour with a 10 minute break, so a 3 mph pace. So 26 miles in 10 hours is about what a soldier is expected to manage, with pack. Pardon me for not being impressed by a 10-hour marathon, repeated however often.

2. The slower the speed, the less the stress. Elite marathoners run maybe a couple or three a year. In my young and skinny days I managed four sub-three-hour marathons in about 7 weeks.

have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiannis_Kouros
This doesn't answer your question, but photons definitely can interact with (bounce off) electrons.

All optical properties we see macroscopically (light interacting with objects) can be broken down to photons interacting with electrons. The Quantum Electro-Dynamics theory (QED) explains this. There are actually some really great and entertaining free video lectures about this, given by Richard Feynman: http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/45

Now, I think what you were referring to is that we can't see electrons in an optical microscope because the electrons are smaller than the diffraction limit imposed by visible lights wavelengths.

So, in my admittedly limited understanding, you can't see an electron with a light microscope, but almost everything we consider optics is determined by electron-photon interactions.
Thanks for the all the compliments. We are certainly working on the "meat and potatoes".

It was designed in house, by myself: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/mike-cuesta
Apple's iTunes LP "TuneKit" format uses HTML/CSS/JS targeted to HDTV
Valuing ambiguity in software design
Yeah, I don't really get all the hate. Maybe it should be reframed to "Eddie Izzard runs over 1000 miles in 50 days for charity"
The repeated "your device might be different" is interesting. Perhaps it's not finished yet? Maybe they could stop the UI looking so clunky.
Secret Of The Masons: It's Not So Secret
I love this type of analysis even thought I will probably never need to use it.
This actually made some sense for me. Yes it did start to read like sarcasm, but no-one (and no company) can ever be brilliant at everything.

Trying to do everything perfectly will lead to burn out, but leaving some things badly done will leave you exposed.

What I took from the article was to be mediocre in almost everything you do is a sustainable approach - want to take payments, use paypal, sales and marketing? Adwords, some PR puffs and a voip number. Mediocre still means a job is done and to an acceptable standard. If it is quick and dirty, it is a lot better than not done at all.

As long as you do one thing better than mediocre, and everything else is covered, you stand a chance.

But yes, there is a lot of judgement between 'this quick and dirty is an acceptable mediocre' and 'this quick and dirty is worse than nothing'.
I assume you're referring to the supposed lack of Tank Man photos on the Chinese version of Google Images. That's not the case: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen+square

Also, it's inevitable that the name Tiananmen Square conjures up different associations in China and the west. Similarly, I imagine that Waco is a city to a Texan, but to me it's a siege.
Adphilia: Site Representation Firm Launching New Sponsorship Platform
http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/
Every time I see a new programming language come out, I can't help but think of the Tower of Babel.
Ask HN: Please help with an AB test. (Live results in comments.)
I am confused.

They say, this is made by google, and up to now, the google announcements I saw were very solid projects. Did I miss a lot of google announcements which are not solid projects?

On the other hand, the state of this language looks... early? I am not sure. I don't see much code (yes, those 40 lines linked to on this page really show the new and innovative powers of this language), and I do see a lot of 'we propose this and we want that' (+ the usual language buzzwords), which feels much more like a language brainstorm, or maybe the state where the results of the brainstorming are settling down... but nowhere near a solid project...

So, sorry to sound very unexcited, but at this point.. who cares about yet another language in a very, very early state?
Jung provided the underpinnings of Joseph Campbell's works on story and story structure. He essentially reverse-engineered story and laid out design patterns that nearly every story follows. I've found that the study of this concept is a very rewarding one in terms of appreciating and understanding movies, video games and any other media that represents a story.

More info here: http://www.cerritos.edu/fquaas/resources/English102/hero.htm
Yes, but it's also correct to say that he wrote a compiler.

He is taking the assembly code you type in and translating it to machine code, then he's translating the machine code to JavaScript source, then executing that source directly.

Translating a program from one language to another is compilation, by definition. While the first translation step could also be considered assembling, the second cannot.
Perhaps he meant Google's book scanning effort, similar to Proj. Gutenberg?
Except... Verizon is the #1 US cellular carrier.

So even though they don't seem to be innovating or seem cool to hackers, and that from our perspective they are heading "downhill" ... from a pure business perspective, they are succeeding, aren't they?
Configure gnome desktop environment using gconftool in ubuntu linux
Here is a nice article which tells about the gconftool. Using gconftool you can configure your gnome desktop environment by giving commands in the terminal. Let's start about learning about gconftool. GConf is a configuration data storage mechanism scheduled to ship with GNOME 2.0. GConf does work without GNOME however; it can be used with plain GTK+, Xlib, KDE, or even text mode applications as well.
My last day at my full time job was Tuesday, now I'm working on my own projects. It's a lot of fun so far (except for testing in Internet Explorer - this works in 8, haven't tried 7 yet).

I wanted to get something up quickly to test my tool chain/environments and I thought that running a simple experiment was a great way to do that. I'm AB testing two versions of requesting e-mail addresses from visitors and I'm happy to share the results with HN.

I'll post a more detailed (anonymous) breakdown later on but you can see the initial results here: http://theplanis.com/app/abtestresults/
The Alan Turing petition: a story of Web 2.0, Gov 2.0 and media savvy
Hacker News continues to keep me informed. I was just looking two or three weeks ago for a refresher course on Python and found everything outdated. Stellar.
I want to cheer the headline, but how useful is this data when so many wildly different professions are lumped into the #2 occupation?

Professional worker--lawyer, doctor, scientist, teacher, engineer, nurse, accountant, computer programmer, architect, investment banker, stock brokerage, marketing, musician, artist

Is it really of any value to anyone to lump the "Overall well-being" of an artist, computer programmer, and investment banker into the same category?
I don't think the Wii's target market really crosses much with the people who would really use ROMs on a PC as a substitute for the real thing...
I think things would've been very different if Be Inc. had just kept being a desktop OS company. They didn't need Apple to succeed -- they could've just accepted that uptake of the OS would be slow, and just kept at it.

Guess that wasn't good enough for management though. They had to go out in a blaze of "Internet Appliance" glory.
I almost did the same thing.

But then I started resizing my browser, expecting the site to immediately become useless when I did so. I was pleasantly surprised.

I don't necessarily like the design / layout, but it appears that they did it "the right way".
Use Javascript to change the caption of the submit button from "OK" to "Confirm" the first time it is pressed and then submit the form on the second press. That way, the data doesn't reach your server until the user has confirmed the purchase.
> My mediocrity undoubtedly teed you off a little, but did it prevent you from finishing the essay ?

Indeed, the author is correct, I finished the article (which, to be fair, had some interesting points) -- but will I return in the future or subscribe. To that, the answer is 'no'.
Ironically they're trying to subvert their own contract terms.

They've agreed to broadcast unencrypted "free to air" content, but now they're trying to encrypt the program guide data in order to force set top box makers to pretend(!) that the data really is encrypted by rendering their products useless if they dont.

It's yet another new low for DRM.

Hopefully the regulatory body will reject this bit of tomfoolery.

More info here on the tech-savvy MP's blog (particularly in the comments, which refute the fear of this making set top boxes any more obsolete, and provide other details):

http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/2009/09/personal-video-recorders...
"He redefined what it means to run a marathon, that's all."

No, not even close.

What he did is impressive, but stupid. He is doing a lot of damage to his body. If he were trained properly, he wouldn't be having all the physical problems like the missing toenails and the blisters.

Also, anything much longer than a 6 hour marathon is basically a walk (for a middle aged man in decent health). Maybe it's just a pet peeve of mine because I'm a runner, but it just feels like bad "running journalism".

I'm much more impressed by someone who sticks to a proper training plan and finishes a single marathon in a respectable time for his/her age.
The difference is that information is more freely available.

First result in google cn, a wonderful recount of the history of the square: http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/31133067.html
when is the book of how this happened coming out?
Maybe it should be reframed to "Eddie Izzard walks over 1000 miles in 50 days for charity".
I agree. They might as well have described him as 'Turing, the WW2 scientist who discovered Gaydar.'

I think the Telegraph should be capable of better journalism that this.
You really think Twitter is worth one billion dollars? Why?
The most difficult part of in-line skating is telling your parents you're gay :)
I think there's been quite enough written about it now.
This is either bad advice or bad satire. I'm fairly sure it's the latter.