skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Staring someone down is seen as hostile, but giving eye contact has a profound effect on how people react to you.

For a long time I had problems giving eye contact, and many geeks I know are like that - we often look down or to the side. That makes us seem maladjusted, weak/insecure and/or submissive in many situations, and people change the way they react to you accordingly. It also makes people not particularly interested in walking up to you to start a conversation.

Looking people straight in the eyes, as long as you don't overdo it, makes you seem approachable, strong and self confident. Just that one change of looking people straight in the eyes more had a big impact for me on making me more social - I'm still bad at approaching people and start talking to them, but when you give eye contact the number of people who will start conversations with you can easily skyrocket.

What I mean is not staring at people incessantly, that's creepy, but keep eye contact until either they look away or 4-5 seconds or so. During conversations, keep steady eye contact maybe 70% of the time. And avoid "jerking away" - often when someone is insecure about maintaining eye contact you'll see them pull their eyes away quickly, often turning their entire head away, as if you caught them doing something they shouldn't. It doesn't give off a positive impression.

You'll see peoples demeanor change when you meet their eyes. During my commute most people walk around with vacant expressions on their faces. Get eye contact, and smile, and you see lots of people light up like christmas trees. The same happens when I talk to people - staff in shops in particular, who often seem downright robotic normally, tends to light up, and start holding proper conversations and telling me all kinds of things about their life after I started making a point of giving eye contact.

I'm in London which is unusually "cold" in this respect even for Europe, so you might not see the same effect, but try looking around you to see how few people give eye contact to shop staff; it'd drive me crazy to work in an environment like that.

Of course you can use it as a kind of dominance that freaks people out. If you're able to keep eye contact until the other person always breaks off, then you will see a lot of people adopt a more submissive attitude to you. Personally I'd rather they just see me as someone approachable and nice to be around.
How the Asians Became White (1998)
Am I mis-reading that graph or is it the case that twisted.web handles half the concurrent connections that tornado does /and/ more slowly? Is it possible that twisted performing "almost as well" as tornado might be exaggerated?
Wow, is that cerenkov radiation?
> In our test, we used a simple lamp with a light metre placed half a metre away,

A light metre is 1 / 299 792 458 or 3.33 x 10e-11 seconds
Yeah, a lot of Mandarin TV shows are subtitled for that reason (which has the side effect of showing you how terrifyingly quickly literate people can read characters).
I think this is a good thing, and it is a good thing seeing lots of energy poured into each of these approaches.

I wonder if the Zen of python "There is only one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" might be influencing the community's feelings about another web server in python.
Agreed, Tornado seems to handle 100% more connections and at 50 connections offers a 15% performance improvement.
I think it's interesting to see people's reactions here -- a good dose of "oh no Intuit" paranoia. But honestly, did anyone not see this acquisition coming? I was expecting them to have to pay more, honestly, but I think it was fairly apparent that Intuit was the obvious buyer and would do what it takes.

The other odd angle to this paranoia: How big do people really think the market of "people who don't trust Intuit with their financial information" is? For millions of people, it's already in Quicken... the step to doing that online, especially for a non-technical user, is not that big.
hi,

the comment is not meant in /that/ way; rather APL used special symbols for representing functions/operations, i.e., it had its own non-ASCII character set (google for details)

AFAIR, there was also a java programming puzzler with unicode in comments: since the unicode support is (was? probably there have been some changes since 1.4 footnote:1) beautifully added on top of the parser you can get seemingly strange errors from the parser/compiler. (please google for details, too)

1: please correct me if that is not true anymore, has been quite a while since i read the puzzlers...
The article suggests the small town folks were following outdated procedures, while the boston team was following modern procedures.
Greenwashing & The Deal Behind the New Good Housekeeping Seal
10 mistakes startups make
Yes, yes, yes. I'll be sending out an email to the stdlib-sig later today proposing a logical "breaking out" of the stdlib from "the core". We can offer a "mega pack" download, but there's various (and all good) reasons to offer a split core/stdlib download as well.

Not just downloading though: it has to be broken out in source control. We should have a single, shared stdlib in a logically "split" location for all of the implementations to leverage. It should contain the minimal number of the best batteries.
Nice, thanks for pointing this out. That's pretty sweet.

I haven't paid attention to Perl in a while... Perl is kinda like that cute girl that you dated in high school, then had an amicable breakup with when you went off to college. You're always glad to see that she's doing well, but you're off on new things by now.
You just swapped your argument from the majority of modern medicine to a specific case. Spinal surgery is also a moving target, the risk / reward line keeps shifting as better treatments shows up. Still in a wide range of cases it's a bad idea, for now.
You say that, but I remember going to Oracle sales conferences in the 90s with lasers, employees lined up wearing black uniforms, Vanessa Mae playing her electric violin and a VP on stage ranting about bringing Oracle's rivals to their knees while the crowd cheered and punched the air.

Hell, I was only there for the canapes...
GitHub's gists can indeed be embedded to blog posts, but only using an external js script. This won't work with blog hosting providers that don't allow JavaScript (for example wordpress.com).

Also, this method won't work too well when the post is viewed in an rss reader.
The Secret Of Being A Great Apprentice
I remember one of the biggest hassles to moving to Python from Perl was figuring out which libraries to use for some common tasks (making an HTTP request, forking a process, parsing XML). There frequently seemed to be one library that was heavily documented but deprecated, another one that had everybody talking but wasn't quite ready, and sometimes a third or fourth of indeterminate status.

After doing some projects in the language, I began to get a feel for how to choose among competing libraries, but it made the transition to the language less fun than it otherwise should have been.

Having a useful, agreed-upon standard library would be a terrific help to developers moving over from other languages.
The reason is that Mint was created for an exit like this. They had no clear business model other than getting as many users as possible in order to scare Intuit. They have a great product, but I see no plan to make money with it.

Of course they have the thing of suggesting credit cards to users, but it doesn't seem that they were making any money on that...

In summary, if Mint was profitable, they wouldn't sell the company in the first opportunity.
Do mechanical and chemical engineers have this much mental anguish over their professions?
I've spent the last two weeks at Python conferences in Argentina and Brazil, have been following the news from DjangoCon, and like to think I've got a pretty good pulse on the Python web community.

I'd hardly characterize the Python web community's attitude as "anguish, pain, dispair." I see a lot more excitement, curiosity, and shiny-new-toy-syndrome; I think most reasonable Pythonistas agree that Tornado is a bit net positive to Python web development.

Those on the outside tend to mistake impassioned discussions for anger, but those who've been in this community for some time know that on balance there's a pretty strong collegial atmosphere. We compete, sure, but we're also friends and the spirit's friendly. Nobody thinks they're the be-all and end-off of web development; we all recognize our software is just yet another stepping stone along the path towards something better.
Your Life In Pictures with Jon Wheatley, Founder of DailyBooth
With a government healthcare system, it won't simply be a cost/benefit analysis. There is also the all important question to be answered: "does this create jobs in my congressional district?"
They couldn't charge that much consultancy time then ;)
Which has better test coverage and more users than the Tornado stack. Honestly code quality would be the least of my concerns with twisted. If there's a python project where the critical parts can be labeled "mature" then twisted is it.

I criticize twisted for usability and documentation problems. But as the underpinning for something else (with hopefully better usability) it seems perfectly adequate.
Nice! Just need a default "colour on black" version without fiddling with the CSS.

I wish this had been around when I was doing my last blog post; would have saved a lot of messing around with TextMate's HTML generation.

Bookmarked!
Essentially, someone wrote a game that allows you to play randomly generated Super Mario levels of arbitrary difficulty, and the contest was to write an AI that gets as far as possible on those levels, in real time. This is the winning entry.

(They actually ran two separate contests, but the videos of this agent were released around the time of the first contest, which I think would have discouraged new entrants for the second. Independently, the video went viral in Japan and picked up half a million views.)
Is this dangerous for people using a lot of stick tape?
I think there's something wrong if a profession has so many people jazzed about it, but so many are unhappy about their jobs. I also think there's profit potential in this.
I hope they do manage to pull something out of this. At $31M invested, a $170M sale could end up getting sopped up by investors. Anyway, congrats to them and I hope it works out.
Wow, that's a big shift! I like the idea of the best professors nation-wide rising to the top, so that all students can benefit from their captivating lectures rather than be stuck with their boring local professors.

What I don't get, is how you overcome cheating on online exams. Of course I think the best answer is that we need to introduce apprenticeships into more career areas, and stop viewing college as a four year block of time, where you prepare yourself to be a productive member of the workforce.
I'm using this CSS for my own "colour on black" blog:

color:white;background:black;border:solid gray;border-width:.1em .1em .1em .8em;padding:.2em .6em;

You basically just swap the color and the background styles. Also, for best results select the "fruity" color style.

By the way, the CSS and the style are remembered in the cookies, no need to re-type them on each visit.
Note: This is not a business advise.
Do you have a source? Where do affiliates hang out and talk about business models?
Cool little app. One little improvement I thought of though, is to move the inline styles into the header, even if you're just using class names like "code1", "code2", etc.

It would just make it a bit easier to read the source code or change the code colors if you ever needed to. It should also give you a small decrease in the actual code size, which could matter if you were posting a lot of code on a heavily-visited site.
Social, not computer, networks transmit happiness and solace
10 Jump

20 Goto 10
Too many options. If I select [c#] it would be nice to have [vs] chosen by default. And [perldoc] doesn't need to be in that list.

Also, it looks like you're looking for keywords. That doesn't work for class names. Pattern recognition will probably do a lot better.
Well, I was interested enough to download and run the OSX version. Fails with some library issue, even tried off the disk image which the help says can be done.

I'm sure it's great but not exactly a good first impression for this mac user!
Umm...no offense, but how would you prefer that people be nice to you?

Did you just hate your job? There is no sense getting mad at the people that were trying to treat you like a human being. I also spent many years working in service industry jobs. People talking to me like I was a person and not a piece of shit that was somehow below them made all the difference to me.

To each their own, I guess.
Robert Sawyer's Alibis
i think it's clear that race, as referred to in socioeconomic contexts, is more of a class indicator than a marker of ethnicity.

white == rich, educated, privileged.
asian == (newly) rich, educated, privileged

hence asian == white
Yeah, we're saving our own spare water (extra from a glass; leftover water from cooking, etc.). We have a jug in the kitchen with a funnel. But we're in an area with mandatory water restrictions.
Stay (always) connected: Broadcasting your life to the world
Aw, sorry. I didn't realise it was satire. I think I need my satire to smack me in the face before I notice it.
Why education is about more than jobs
ah i thought this article was going to be about brainfuck (esoteric as esoteric gets..).

hello world:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.
The reason I wrote this tool is because some blog hosting providers don't allow to inject custom CSS or javascript into the <header>

There are already quite a few solutions for those who can modify the header, the most famous is http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter
It would be really nice if somebody could write a breakdown of these webservers for the uninitiated like myself. I'd like to know when to use which tool.
Aside from that, Asians have relatively light skin. I think the psychological factors that go along with having dark or light skin are at least as important in this equation.
Just in case you didn't already know: your employers are idiots.

Know that you know that, you know how to process data from them.

It's not a problem going to work for idiots. Lots of good people do. It only becomes a problem when you allow them to determine how you feel instead of deciding how to feel yourself.

If you're burnt out at the moment, solve that problem. But don't lay it off on them. They aren't capable of earning that much blame.
Somebody hasn't tried Brainfuck or Malbolge.
Ask HN: Is it necessary to backup S3?
I have a consumer Saas Web Application that uses S3 to store user's documents. Do you think it's necessary to backup the S3 data to Rackspace Cloud?
I tried J a few weeks ago and was really delighted. Since then, I have spent a few hours learning the many verbs (the way they call built in functions). It is really a great experience.
Next time you return to the site it will remember your language and style selection.

As for highlighting, I'm using the Pygments library: http://pygments.org/
New York Times pop up add says your computer is infected, download malware fix
The advantage is price. If you're running two medium ec2 instances you're going to pay $288/month before bandwidth.

5GB of S3 storage is $0.75/month before bandwidth.
Nice work.

Quick suggestion though (for ease of copy-pasting by end-users):

From the resulting rendered html with line numbers, the line numbers are also copied into the clipboard, which is undesirable. Suggest you put them in separate elements like dpaste does it, for easy selection without line numbers: http://dpaste.com/hold/93427/
I think YCombinator is a solution to that problem. They're profiting by finding talented people that are unhappy working for someone else.
Thanks for the advice, I'm taking it.
The story says that to use the original APL you needed a special keyboard, because it used mathematical symbols that are not in ASCII.

J doesn't use any non-ASCII characters, however it uses ALL punctuation characters you can think of :-))
I got this on my home computer yesterday. I had a bunch of sites from hacker news open and I couldn't tell which one spawned it. Now I know. Kind of scary, it looked fairly authentic, certainly authentic enough to fool someone like my mother.
Agreed.

I have waffled back & forth on embedding gists in my blog posts because they don't show up in RSS readers. Also, if you have a long blog post with multiple snippets of code you have to create a new gist for each one. It'd be nice if each 'file' in a gist could be embedded separately.
SMS services to make your standard cell phone smart
the 10/10/10 baby would be cool to have if you're a computer and sci-fi geek (and what are the odds of that not being true). 101010=answer to everything!
Do it for free using Google's App Engine and dry drop http://drydrop.binaryage.com/ Here is my test blog running using that setup: blog.innovationpower.ca
Thanks!

Great suggestion, I will see what I can do.
Traits of Successful People
Search for 'Mandelbrot' or 'Peitgen' and 'fractal landscape'.
I've seen this technique applied recently. The founders had plenty of people interested in the angel round. Yet, they refused to put a price on the investment, deferring it to a future funding event. Even many savvy investors that understood why they were doing this and found the contracts to be clean, decided not to invest as the founders were saying "I need $x hard cash from you now and some time in the future you will know what percent of the company that translates to." It may be a good way to go, but its a hard way. Its much easier to be prepared to name your price, raise only what you need and live with it.
Seriously? They cite Indians as well (ie those from India) and they definitely don't have light skin - nor do many ethnic Chinese for that matter - depending where in China you're from). Being ethnically Chinese, it is somewhat insulting to be arbitrarily grouped in with being "White" in order to make some twisted social policy argument.

Why don't people say they want more Blacks and Hispanics in universities (presumably those are the targeted underrepresented groups). Or does not classifying Asians as essentially "White" mean that this undermines the whole thesis for affirmative action to correct racial prejudice?
It has nothing to do with comprehension it has to do with the footage looking like it was created with Maya.
Convertible debt sucks for angel investors, they are taking far more risk than the VCs but are only getting a 20 to 30 percent discount.
I am not sure online learning is for everyone or for every age.

College is much more than the classes. And I believe the "suspended reality" when attending college actually helps learning. And I don't count being able to answer online multiple choice questions as having learned something. Education is not cramming knowledge in your skull, and a course is not just going through the cartesian description of the subjects it covers. And lastly what makes a class good is not only the teacher but what emerges from the group in terms of dynamics, attitude, atmosphere and feeling. I would believe that if watching a lecture by Feynman on the web is inspiring, being in is class was much more.

If what the article describes really is the future, I probably would have dropped out and become a mechanic or something.
Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors.

Will they also be the last generation to listen to radio now that TV has been invented and the last generation to drive cars now that airplanes have been invented?

OP overlooks a whole bunch of other needs that colleges fulfill. The interaction with other students, both in class and at home. The interaction with professors. The contacts made. The opportunities to explore many new things by virture of actually being there.

Technology is great. It moves us forward in many ways. But in many situations, nothing is a substitute for actually being there.
Why there should never be a "year of the Linux desktop"
Hogwash. They were in a unique position to give trusted credit card reviews to their members, and collect the affiliate fees. Just because a site doesn't have ads or offer a premium subscription doesn't mean it has no business model.
This was actually never clear to me. It's the first time I've heard it expressed that way.

I had always thought it was because Asian Americans have had a tough time having a voice as a unified minority group, and hence, there was no cultural identity clearly different (when taken as a group) from mainstream America when it came to product consumption. And hence, that's why Asians get lumped into the White category in demographics.
The misleading graph doesn't help their case, either - tests were run at 1,5,10,25,50,75, and 100. The graph mistakenly spaces them evenly apart. In reality, twisted.web died after 50, while Tornado still worked @ 100.
These kinds of popups always humor me. They put so much effort into making them look EXACTLY like a Windows program or dialog box. And I'm using OS X, they stand out like a sore thumb.
I'm starting to think this meme has some PR money behind it: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Also if you're planning to do any real Comet stuff, this is an extremely small-scale test. Should try with a few thousand concurrent requests to gain any real insight.
How would you feel if one day that data was lost ?

There are already documented cases of Amazon losing data in S3.

The Amazon S3 SLA does not cover data loss at all, only service unavailable situations, which they will cover by crediting you.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3-sla/

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/10/09/amazo...

And even if all this was not the case you have a responsibility to your customers you can not outsource that responsibility.
You can put all the marketing spin on it that you want, but S3 is still just another webapp. Architected by humans, operated by humans.

If you think the humans at Amazon are somehow above making mistakes or bad decisions, then there is no need to backup your data.

If you don't fully trust the humans at Amazon, and what to be able to have access to your data, on your terms, at any time, you should back it up...
Sofar I have never heard about S3 actually losing data (apart from users erasing it). They store everything 3 times. But I would have a look at the cost/MB. Documents are usually small and important (thus, worth to backup).
I have read that SmugMug, for example, stores it's files just on S3, with no backup.
With the fruity style, keywords seem to render white (on a white background) so they go invisible.

Is this intentional for black backgrounds as you mentioned? If so, changing to fruity should change the default CSS.
http://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+s3+dataloss
Playboy Playmate sponsored by a watch company
Yes, the "fruity" style (and to some extent "native") is for dark backgrounds.

Changing the default CSS if they are selected is a good idea, thanks!
Creative inspiration is not a bolt of lightning that hits you at random. It's a process of cascading train-of-thought. If you never get that train to leave the station, you're never going to get anywhere. You need to stop procrastinating and force yourself to work to put yourself in the necessary conditions for creative work to happen. Sitting around, watching movies, eating cheezy-poofs isn't going to do it.
I'm no F# guru but is there any reason you have omitted #light from the top of the source code?
TechCrunch50 Feed
You should register an onChange handler for all of the form elements and update the preview automatically. Specifically, for the drop down box used to pick color themes.