skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
because it was fake. if they're not going to be sincere I would much prefer people just stick to business.
apart from users erasing it

Very very important caveat, there. If you have three copies of the data, but all of them are in the same S3 account, a prankster who steals your S3 creds can delete all of them in about ten seconds.

Or, if you make a typing mistake, you can do that to yourself. Boy oh boy, will that be an unhappy day.

Diversify, diversify, diversify.
If you are hacked, someone could get your S3 credentials and delete your content. You should backup.
scheme@(guile-user)> ,L brainfuck
Guile Brainfuck interpreter 1.0 on Guile 1.9.2
Copyright (C) 2001-2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Enter `,help' for help.
brainfuck@(guile-user)> ++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.]
Hello World!
brainfuck@(guile-user)>
Asians, who are quite successful without the benefit of affirmative action/handouts/NAACP-style pressure groups/etc, are an inconvenient fact for race hustlers. Simple as that. The media consequently doesn't like to mention them in discussions of "racism".

No actual humans confuse Asians with whites.
At first I wanted to update the preview on-the-fly as the input changes, but then I decided to go javascript-free so that the page loads and feels faster. I will probably try it later anyway.
Yeah it's a bit tricky. A few points to chew on.

Race is a social construct. So it might have started as a ethnic marker, but it's constantly evolving. As it stands now, some say that your class actually defines your race.

For example, let's look at your point:
Asian Americans have had a tough time...when it came to product consumption

I would ask, what do Asian Americans buy? Besides specific ethnic foods, the majority of the product consumption (clothes, music, jewelry, cars, houses, technology) are what general well-to-do Americans would buy.

And, ethnically speaking, we all know who wears American Eagle and Banana Republic.
I have often wondered that myself. It does seem like engineers have less angst about it because they have been trained since school to play by all the strict rules, standards, and best practices that have been drilled into them.

It's possible that software development attracts more creative, nonconformist people than engineering because there is a much higher barrier for creativity and self-direction in engineering.
This seems to be the standard with academia. The US News & World Report's "Best High Schools" and "Best Colleges" lists minority percentages as part of their rankings.

They define Minority as "Black and Hispanic".
Asian Americans aren't a unified minority group. They're children of immigrants from Asia, which could include Bengalis from India, Uighurs from China, Hans from Malaysia, etc.
Top Green Companies
programming languages: J, Scheme, Scala
MonoTouch 1.0 goes live
MonoTouch allow you to make iPhone applications with C# using the Mono implementation of .NET
The Fruit Guys is a wonderful concept because fruit is a substitute for artificial stimulant and will lead to increased energy for a more productive day...
I would have to agree. I was surprised at the overall speed of this website. keep up the good work!
I think it is only possible to say whether one's work is great in a while after it has been done. It's a good idea to take up something that you really like and dive into it because the fact that you like the subject raises the odds of your success. It is quite useless to look for an area where the average chances are high unless you are interested in the subject matter.

In terms of the Mark's hypothesis that "our greatest life’s works will be inspired from both within and desired externally" I would definitely emphasize the "inspired from within" part.
Unless they're Russian, I guess.
I just swapped whose argument? Look at the names of the posters in this thread...

In any case the original article was about a woman who went through a nightmare to get a hospital to not perform unwanted, unneeded and dangerous spinal surgery. So to my eyes I was bringing the discussion back to the example under discussion. And pointing out that it has been well known for over a decade that spinal surgery is a generally bad idea to me underscores the horror of what happened to her.
wow. what really impresses me is mint isn't an engineering company - they're a marketing company that put some ajax on top of yodlee. yodlee's been around for over 10 years and they never built a brand or a community like mint.

mint is now #1 on my 'notes to self' when i get so focused on engineering my way to a solution i forget sometimes its' better to partner with a competitor and move on.

they outsourced the hard stuff (scraping/banking relationships) and then focused on building a product. nice work, brilliant execution.
I refer to this process as Pretty Printing ...

if you can, could you please use this term in keywords somewhere for older coders like me. Then we can find it via searching on those terms

Excellent app.
Why do you think he lives in a city?
So after his initial offer you remained silent and held eye contact, then he continued to give you a more favorable deal?
At the end of the day it's an economics question. How much might you lose in a worst case scenario if you failed to recover some vital data? How much extra will it cost to back up your data to a second place? If the answers to those questions are "everything" and "not a lot" then there is no reason not to backup your backups.

As a general rule important data should be backed up to (at least) two separate places, and in this scenario I'd consider S3 to be one place.
Google App Engine is really fast, especially if you don't abuse its datastore :)
You can refer to this discussion for a tool for s3 backup

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577717
I like Buxfer, and hope that it will prosper
Thanks, I definitely will! Any other keyword suggestions by the way?
Kaiser Wilhelm II spent a fair chunk of his life chewing on that particular nut, if I remember correctly. It ended rather unfortunately, though.
Race is a social construct.

No it isn't. The different races are well defined statistical clusters. If you do a cluster analysis of human genotypes or phenotypes (but give it no racial information), the computer will figure out races for you.

And you'll discover the computer agrees with human observers most of the time.
Linus on C++ (2007)
Do you see no limit to the externalities which may be imposed so that some people can make more money? Landscapers would be using gas-powered nose hair trimmers if it saved them a few seconds.

Do you think that the solution to the stink from the new pig farm next door to you is appropriately handled by you installing year-round filtered air conditioning?
It's not a hack. He's taking the piss.
It's been repeatedly shown that lighter skin is equated with higher status, even within Asian and Indian communities.

Skin color hierarchies have appeared just as prominently in other races and ethnicities. In Japan, members of the upper class have lighter skin tones than do members of the middle or lower classes; the author of this study concludes that “social selection for light skin color has had
some genetic effect” in a nation that was genetically isolated for almost 1500 years (Hulse 1967, quotation in abstract). According to an ancient Japanese proverb, “white skin makes up for seven defects” (quoted in Wagatsuma 1968: 129). In India, “this preference for light-skinned
spouses can be easily verified by the matrimonial columns of some of the Hindu dailies. Among the most desirable traits a bride can have are virginity and light skin, as evidenced by those placing ads.” (Hall 1995: 179).

- Hochschild, J. L., Weaver, V. and Burch, T, 2004. "Effects of Skin Color Bias in SES on Political Attitudes and Activities"

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/...

Basically, if you don't think skin color plays a significant role in what people consider a minority, you're just ignoring the evidence.
The OP doesn't really say how it happened. But overall, I'd agree with the OP that in lumping asians with whites is a mixed bag. To be sure, there are certain aspects of my experience growing up and walking around as an adult that's affected by my cultural heritage. Punishment was never "being sent to my room". Getting "A"s in school was a must. I didn't know what March Madness was until I was in college. Personally, to be lumped into a demographic I don't completely identify with is, to say the least, a little weird.

Asians are a mixed bag on this topic too. Some are strongly opposed to being lumped this way and have a strong ties to their cultural backgrounds while being quite mainstream. And others have rejected it feverishly since childhood to fit in while growing up.
"The pulses last for a billionth of a second, with an intensity of 100 milliwatts."

And this was in a vacuum "to reduce the interference of gas particles".

So I guess not.
Wow, so he does. This Tom guy thinks of everything. Thanks, salvadors!
The story's on point but is really a promotional piece masking as news -- which is disappointing. The Washington Post owns Kaplan University.

I'm all for online coursework but we're still a ways away from standardized testing for nationally recognized credit.
"White" has always been shorthand for "that set of ethnic groups that has almost the same level of privilege as the WASPs". The Irish, the Italians, and the Jews weren't always "white", either.
UX Designers: Join us on freenode
I'm betting I'm not the only hacker who finds himself constantly on freenode for various reasons such as troubleshooting in #css, learning about #django, #jquery or just idling in whatever open source project they're dabbling in today.

There is some obvious overlap here, but no real channel (that i'm aware of) where one can share a question or design and get feedback simply related to experience.

If you're on freenode and you could benefit from being a part of an open discussion of things related to user experience, please join us over at #ux.
TorProxy and Shadow
Oprah Winfrey is rich, educated, and privileged, but she's not white.
For waterways you could try to place random water sources and follow the gradient from there.
Very true. I think another point that was missed / omitted by the author is that Asians want to assimilate, while Blacks have history of celebrating their separate identity. Asians start with a love for capitalism and hard work and all the Ayn Rand-ish stuff (referred to in a positive sense here).

Minority, hence, refers to those who choose to/really are, quite different from the majority.

(BTW, Kal Penn, whether he realizes it or not, is to brownies what Obama is to Black people, and has a natural career in politics; it's there for him to take.)
Very true. One instance I can think of is using the firefox addon S3Fox for managing S3. My co-worker came close to deleting a prod bucket with 80K+ images.
It's necessary, because you never know when you'll accidentally corrupt all your data. Even if Amazon never fails, your application still can.
University education is very prime for a reworking. However, it will not be done the way described in this article.

I don't want to give out all of my ideas, specifically since I plan on working on this myself. However, a few leading questions:

Why were universities established? What problems did they solve? What problems do they still solve? Do they solve them well?

Universities solve problems P via method M. The trouble with what is mentioned in the article is that it simply moves M onto the internet, it does not go back and reevaluate the original set of P. And, again, if the solutions to the original problems are wrong, they wont do much better online.

The same is true for the newspaper industry.
Citation needed.

I was under the impression that Africans had more genetic variety between them than they do when compared with the rest of the world.

I'm also intrigued as to what this computer would make of Australian aborigines which apparently are genetically on the far side of Africans from Asians despite both being "black".
This doesn't explain how you could confuse the darker skin of an Indian (who is actually from India) with that of an actual (sounds odd when I say that) White person. I am also darker than most white people and I am ethnically Chinese. If that's what you're saying, then Indians should have lower status than Chinese people/hispanics/even some Blacks.

Unless you are saying that it's ok to generalize all Chinese people and Indians as an "average" (which frankly, I think is insulting to everyone). The article isn't talking about prejudice within races, it is talking about classifications between races and why it is odd to consider Asians (Indian and Chinese - not just the lighter ones) as "White".
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=terrain+generation&l=1

Seriously, I'm all for discussion of particular techniques, but your question is way too broad right now. Go read some papers or even just online tutorials or descriptions of how other software does it, and then lets have a discussion.
Just what I needed for my new clojure post on my blog. (My current syntax highlighter doesn't support clojure.)
that was 2 years, 1 week, 1 day, 9 hours and 3 minutes ago.
Doesn't this site have the word "News" in its name?
Couldn't paint what I'm painting now, if I didn't paint what came before it first --- even if what came before was utter drivel.

I will agree with this: Always work when you're inspired. Don't let it slip past you.

But: Always work when you're uninspired. The work is the source of the inspiration --- not contemplating the opening lotus blossom.
At $0.15/GB it's a no-brainer for the piece of mind. I once heard of a case (not with Amazon) where data was replicated in 3 locations, and data got corrupted in one location and was copied to the others, resulting in corrupted data in all 3.
Though this is a pretty nice and useful piece of code, I will stick to using SyntaxHighlighter for my blog, because it offers me the ability to include a plaintext view function and a print function. The plaintext view removes the linenumbers and all other info apart from the actual code.
No, I dont think it's that simple.

Generally speaking, successful Asian Americans who emigrated from Asia were already relatively wealthy and educated in their mother countries. Who else could afford to travel to the other side of the globe?

It's not really fair to compare Asians to minorities who were previously in the US because the Asians we see here were the cream of the crop. The poor, unhealthy, uneducated never made it here.
Mardi Gras beads are a good example -- nobody does anything for Mardi Gras beads that they aren't sort-of looking for an excuse to do anyway. Offering them a trivial reward just gives them an excuse.
Also, they're now free from the work, have $170 mil, and can enjoy their lives for a bit.
Did you actually read his entire question, or just the title?
The scientific categorizations of race may be based on genetics, but the racial categories used in the US is definitely socially constructed. We decided to use geography for some groups (ie, Asians, Pacific Islanders), culture/linguistics for another (ie, Hispanic/Latino), and colors (ie, Blacks, Whites).
WTF? L.A. Times, April 9, 1998? Why am I supposed to take time out of September 14, 2009 to read this?
For generating roads or waterways, try coming up with rules similar to the way they're created in real life. For example, water flows downhill and pools when it finds a local minimum.
Roads, on the other hand, tend to avoid steep grades when they can, typically moving straight and branching at right angles at regular intervals.

Read up on L-Systems, too. They're great for creating organic structures, be they leaves, trees, or river-tributary systems.

Oh and this may be useful: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=C...
Just wanted to note, before I piss anyone off, my tongue was firmly in cheek on that post ;-)
Haskell offers a lot of brain candy, but IMO you've already gained >50% of its benefits by understanding Ruby blocks - they're actually the most useful part of functional programming, carefully distilled and packaged to be non-threatening. :-) Better go with C first to learn what your computer actually does. When you go on to play with Haskell afterwards, you'll at least ask the right questions about the implementation.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51451

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=401544
I had not seen it before, so it was news to me.
The first couple of paragraphs are real stretches. The rest are vague anecdotes.

I don't know if he's got a point, particularly as I'm not in the US, but if that's the best he can come up with then I'll assume not until I see something more convincing.
HN isn't really into satire, unless it involves Erlang.
This is exactly right. This is why I don't understand many of the "just learn online" posts on HN. If you're going to college for only the information, then I think there's no reason to come. However, there is much more offered than just information.
While I agree about what college used to be and what it should be the reality is vastly different. College is turning into an extension of highschool where the grades don't reflect the students but the course/teacher/college. When I first arrived I read and signed a piece of paper, I believed in, about the honor code; how cheating undermines the student and university. The reality was cheating was so rampant I thought I was the only one that bothered to read that paper.

And I can see why it was so popular. Recruiters weren't interested in what type of student you were, just what your GPA/QCA was. I asked some of my friends why they chose to cheat and the answer was they 'needed' a grade. It wasn't what they needed, it was the job they 'needed' wanted them to have a minimum 3.5 GPA. I realized, a bit late, that college was not about learning, but getting a good job in some big company. I wasn't a great student, but I learned a lot through participating in projects and contributing something to the university besides tuition. I handed my CV out to a lot of companies and most just gave it back after reading my GPA completely ignoring my work on battery and solar powered vehicles.

Now when I give advice on college it's basically do whatever you need to to graduate, education be damned. As far as I'm concerned education is the last thing on the colleges' minds. Universities have raised the stakes so high it stopped being about learning and all about buying an education.
How many of those customers have VC funding? Github is completely bootstrapped.
Maybe you could let people or companies sponsor their favorite lines or paragraphs?
I guess you should look at an established provider of one-function tools like

http://www.network-science.de/ascii/

if you find yourself popular and wanting to monetize
When the only tool you know is C++, everything looks like a thumb.
Couldn't agree more. I feel the same and sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing joining a startup. I agree it is different when it is YOUR startup but on joining one that doesn't have time for your ideas it's pretty painful. In the evening I am shattered...can't put in the hours for my own stuff and all I do is watch it die. Biking (to save money) through the city watching the skyscrapers which housed my office once can't stop me from wondering: wouldn't it be better or easier if I would be stuck in one of those and having been paid 5 times as much for a fraction of the work I do now? I could still break the door at 5:30 and by 6 to do my own stuff relaxed...not mentioning that between the meetings at starbucks on the top floor I would be planning my work for home?

If it is your startup that is a different story I think...but I am feeling burnt out and seriously thinking on taking the easy way cause it might be more productive...less of a good story maybe but the goal is still there. And a startup is to reach it...but if it's not your startup it's someone else's tool and well said: you're just another cog.
I read the entire question, and there are plenty of great resources out there for rivers, as well as human settlements, roads, railroads, etc. Even a "I've tried method X and had problems Y and Z with the output" could produce interesting discussion, but this is just asking for links when a minute or two of Googling does a pretty good job of turning things up.
Sweet app! Much needed! Bookmarked your page :)
@audidude: FYI - your server (www.audidude.com) is either being hit really hard right now or is completely down.

Without access to the original post there, this noob can only assume(hope) the discussion is about the Tornado Web Server (http://www.tornadoweb.org/). I'm interested in alternatives to Apache, so am looking forward to you being back online. Gracias.
Philadelphia closing its public libraries
E-books catching on with readers
Thanks for posting this - I'm off for China for two weeks at the start of October (first leg of my world tour) and was concerned about the situation with the 'great firewall of China' and how it would affect my ability to contact home.

Looks like all should be fine with the exception of Facebook and Twitter!
Perchance recall the book? I'm semi-interested in retro approaches to the problem.
Note that from the article they never acutally ran the site off of s3. They copied everything over but the big traffic spike never came.

IMHO, CloudFront would have been a smarter option, we've found that S3 has very volatile latency when serving files directly to end users over HTTP.
SyntaxHighlighter is great, no doubt here. It has its pros which you listed, and a couple of cons:

* It requires to link to a js script which is not always possible.

* It doesn't work in many rss readers.
I suppose people push the "year of the linux desktop" meme since it generates buzz. I personally use Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows all in the same day, and feel great doing it.
Convert first month sales
Useful app. But just an fyi, vim has a ':TOHtml' feature that generates an html files from your code (including color scheme).
Independently, the video went viral in Japan

This doesn't surprise me; Japan has a long internet tradition of Mario-related hacks. One example is the "automatic Mario" videos, specially-crafted Mario levels that are set up such that they will complete automatically if Mario moves continually to the right, and the sounds created will match the background music. A particularly impressive example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0ib4GxLPw
For waterways, just simulate rain and erosion. Let's say you model your terrain as a height field.

1. Add rain in random locations
2. Have the rain absorb some of the soil from the square it starts in.
3. Let the water flow in the direction of the gradient.
4. Deposit som e of the picked up soil (maybe only with some probability based on the flow velocity?)
5. Repeat

If you just want rivers and lakes you can skip the erosion step and just simulate the water flowing. If you wanted you could add sources manually and have water always flow from there.
Again? Really? This article is ancient; it's posted on HN and Reddit every few months.

Furthermore, and more on topic: Linus is a great coder, there's no doubt about that. But he's a terrible front-man. The response is unnecessarily inflammatory and is also appalingly arrogant.

C++ has its place. Even though I, personally, prefer C over C++, I think C++ could have even had a place in the Linux kernel. Particularly, I think the whole File System interface could have been simplified if it were written in C++ instead.

I'm really tired of the arguments of X language > Y language. Languages have different purposes. There are times when C++ makes sense, times when C makes sense, times when Perl makes sense and times when Python makes sense. It's time to stop evangelizing about our tools. Nobody argues that a hammer is better or worse than a screwdriver.
I think you could probably find Linus rants about C++ from 10 years ago. He doesn't like it.
Effective IT Manager's Guide: Database Speedup