skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mobutu Sese Seko was the president of Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Nigeria is a different country from Zaire/DRC. They don't even share a border, they have no ethnic groups in common, and their post-independence political and economic development are very different.

Furthermore, as a citizen of the United States of America, I am offended by the suggestion that any other country can surpass us in national hubris. National hubris is our core fucking competency.
A 747 pilot doesn't make 40 times as much as a checkout clerk because he is a warlord who somehow holds her in thrall. His skills are simply much more valuable.

The amazing thing is the difference is at most an order of magnitude less than that.
A rather misleading title, IMO. Actually it's completely wrong.
Seems like we're having a discussion right now... Online. On my other screen I'm following Apple's special event in real time. The technology is already here.
This makes me wish that American (local) governments worked in such a way that what DC did to support this infrastructure-wise could easily be applied to _every_ municipality.

I'd love to see this type of stuff for my city, state, etc., etc...
No, they are saying that Pickle as it is currently designed is too powerful. Depending on the goals of Pickle, it may be possible to reduce its power by redesigning it to do no more than its goals.
Nepalese Teen Invents Cheap Solar Panel Using Human Hair
Isn't this more accurately called a Delta Robot?
Neither are most of the professors. In fact, I'd assume that most of the professors aren't even there primarily for the teaching.

People keep assuming that universities are an education business. They aren't. They're a research business, with education as a side job. The only reason they do that is to provide grad students (indentured servants) to the professors, who themselves are only as good as their last grant.

For one, just look at the operating cost of the top research universities. I pay $50,000 a year at my university. That's a drop in the bucket of the actual operating cost. What really pays the bills? Grant money, patents, etc.
Hadoop World: NYC 2009: Speakers Announced
Just curious. What do you use your panels for? Personal use or do you build stuff to sell.
StumbleUpon Lag Issue Finally Solved
Inexpensive User Testing
Note that you are automatically granted a license for various always-okay uses, including fair use, use in source code identifiers, and various other pre-approved uses.

There's a general problem for high-profile open source projects with valuable trademarks. Registering a trademark can be a useful measure to defend against lawsuits from other people who claim ownership of a mark, or to prevent abuses like companies misleading users by selling (fake) "official" Drupal support or licenses.

But trademark law is very different from copyright law, and it's a lot harder to make trademark licenses compatible with software freedom. For example, you can let anyone modify and sell your copyrighted work while still retaining your own rights. But if you license your trademarks indiscriminately then you risk invalidating them. (This is because trademark law was originally intended to protect consumers by allowing them to trust that a mark was associated with a particular manufacturer.)

Some projects like Mozilla and Drupal have dealt with this by creating legal licenses that attempt to balance community freedoms with the requirements of trademark law. When I worked on the Audacity project we registered our trademarks (mainly as a defensive measure after a company with a similar product started using the same name) but did not craft any explicit license. Most open source projects don't bother registering their marks at all, which is probably the best approach in most cases.
So what's news? Unpickling is safe only if you are very sure the pickled data was created by yourself, with the same version of Python. It has always been like this.

Typically you pickle when you wish to offload some objects to persistent storage. It's similarly typical to compute the message digest of the pickle data with some salt padding and store that in a place that you consider relatively safe wrt. to your security needs. Then you don't need to worry about unpickling malicious data.
A Viable Career as a Freelance Logo Designer?
It's a play on obnoxious stereotypes.
meetup.com.

Most of these are really simple problems if you're targeting the subset of people who care enough to take the initiative for their own education. In that case, the problem is not what to replicate, the problem is what to get rid of. One thing to get rid of is spending tens of thousands of dollars on tuition. Another is having to convince bureaucrats in the admission office to let you in.

People will still move away to study if they can't find a community of peers where they live. The more self-directed students, though, don't need to pass through the admissions barrier or become part of an institution.

The social aspects of college could actually be improved this way. Instead of being stuck with whatever 20-somethings were selected to the same college as you by merit of income level and admissions fiat, you could work with a self-selected group of ambitious full-time students and even experienced professionals trying to maintain and further their education.

You're right--you have to build a social system, not just a technical system--but it's not impossible to build a better social system than the university. Technology's only an enabling factor, not the whole solution.
I don't know what "the digest of pickle data with some salt padding" means (when you say "salt", you trip the "talking about crypto using words only lay programmers use" sensor), but it sure doesn't sound crypto-safe. There are a number of easy-to-make errors with digest schemes that allow attackers to make constrained modifications to documents without breaking the digest.

Long story short, don't do this; instead, PGP/GPG encrypt and sign the pickled file. GPG is strictly better across all axes than hand-hacking your own protection scheme.
And I'm saying "pickle isn't really designed to solve the problem they're saying it's bad at solving".
That is the form. Pick and place is the function.
Población - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
I have been messing with genius for music in my iPhone and feel that pandora does a much better job. It might be because genius has limited options and has to search for songs within the library you own, but still, I have seen very weird/not pertinent genius recommendations. I hope the app genius recommendation is better.
This is one of those things where results outweigh logic and decency. This post would almost certainly not have seen renewed interest in the last few weeks if the date/time were easily noticeable. It's quite a common "trick" on blogs now. Some people just immediately leave if they're on a post that's over a year old.
this isn't directed at you, but to your opinion that seems to be prevalent amongst others. It seems like when Ars does this, it's ok, but when a newspaper or AP wants to do the same thing it's somehow not ok? Why is that? I'm not trying to be argumentative but rather looking into what Ars is doing differently that makes it ok?
Your point escapes me. All the OP is saying is that getting into YC made it easier to override his initial fear of failure, after which the process took on a life of its own. The subject of the sentence you quoted is not "The YC partners personally" but "The experience of YC" (cf. the title of the post).
Huh, what are you doing where start up of processes are so critical?

If you must have fast startup, use C. Or a client connecting to a running server.

If you meant start up as in the learning process of learning some new library, well. I feel your pain.

But that is the reason we do computers, isn't it? Always new stuff to learn, never ending...
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Discussed at length:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813103
I (also) never said it was evil, I said it doesn't scale. But that being said, I have seen many tools start out being used just as you say, benignly, in places where they offer convenience for simple cases. Open classes a/k/a monkey patching falls in this category for me: a tool that works well for certain straightforward cases. However, programmers seem to have a reach that exceeds their grasp of the limitations of their tools, and over time people push the tools right out of their sweet spot and into trouble.

That's not the tool or technique's fault, of course. If people want to amend core classes with hundreds of kitchen-sink convenience methods or eval much more complex string manipulations... You might easily say that is the fault of the programmer for making a poor choice.
Thanks for the comments, you're right, I'll definitely change the copy on the site.
I have a few reams of paper (about 2000 sheets) you can buy for $40 if you want. That's even better value than the book you suggest.
Learning lessons from mistakes I can understand.

Failure? What's that?
Though Baz Luhrmann set that to music, Mary Schmich originally wrote it.
OTP History by Lennart Öhman - Part 1
Blogs and baked goods
If you own a domain that's an OpenID provider, you won't be able to use that.

Aren't there OpenID users who host their own identities exclusively for themselves? Is there danger in letting people do this? (I seriously don't know much about OpenID practices.)
Introducing the Pre’s smaller sibling: The Pixi
You obviously didn't read the site:

Impress your employer and peers with a résumé that says: I created my own programming language.

That's why ;-)
Great shopping experience is not having an awesome interface so that I can browse all day long.

No, great shopping expirience is having an awesome interface that helps you to find what you're looking for as fast as possible.

Big text, big buttons and a clean layout help a lot.

Notice what he did to the blue button bar at the top?
This is one of the changes that should get adopted immediately, it's a no-brainer. It looks better and works better than the original.
My attempt at defining scams would be something like "when you're actively using an information/knowledge gap between you and your customer for your advantage".

By that definition, casinos aren't scams: they are quite honest with the "house always wins (but we'll make sure you're having fun)" business model. The gender prediction would be, because this guy knows he's as good as flipping a coin, while anyone paying him to do so will be believing that he can actually do something (otherwise they'll just flip the coin themselves and save the $50).

The "are you going to heaven" guy might actually, honest to god, believe in what he's saying = no scam. (Although if he was, he'd probably be more likely to be explaining how joining his religion will secure admittance to heaven)
I sure do take this as constructive criticism :)
The idea of the book is to build a simple language not the strongest or more complete one ever. I'll add more details and change the copy on the site. Thx a lot for the suggestions!
I'm a little confused. First, OP says

In most instances, there is no technical solution

then he says

there's a lot you can do at least to diagnose the state of your data

If you're going to "diagnose the state of your data", why not clean it up. There's so much that you can do at entry time, at retrieval time, and at any time between:

- wash non-printable characters
- wash illogical (depending upon context) characters
- trim leading and trailing spaces
- verify check digits
- verify lookups
- verify against standards (USPS, etc.)
- add Soundex, Metaphone, levenshtein, etc.
- build a context suitable hash
- add Soundex, Metaphone, levenshtein, etc. to the hash
- wash standard keywords

Has OP actually spent much time being responsible for a data base? If he had, he probably would have spent half of that time keeping it usable.
OTP History by Lennart Öhman - Part 2
yeah reddit sensationalism > me
It's a California thing. Why did you ever leave? Come back, we'll forgive you.
Since they're updating Genius today, I'm curious to see if there are any significant improvements.

LP looks terrific.
Right at the beginning, I decided to drop the multi-disciplinary graphic design title. Too much to focus on, too much to try and market and frankly, way too much competition.

I often wondered why more people don't find their niche as freelance designers. I made a nice living a few years back as a freelance designer for hair salons (truly ironic as a bald guy!). It made it so much easier because it's a much smaller space, and the word of mouth in that industry makes marketing effortless. The problem with freelance is that it is hard to scale yourself.
I write in cursive at least twice as fast as I can print, and it's more legible than my printing is at even a moderate speed. The loops aren't just there to frustrate the students, they eliminate the need to pick up the pen or even slow down as much as sharp angles force you to. I don't really have problems reading neatly written cursive either.

The only time I ever print is for other people's benefit. My handwritten notes are at least 95% cursive.
Founder of Dog Fish Head chews corn, spits it out (for beer)
ITunes  LPs: a preemptive strike against the major labels’ single-file albums
Recent talk by newspapers & the AP have been to put up all or most of their content behind paywalls. What Ars is doing is placing long form/higher cost content (e.g., long form PDF documents), exclusive features (e.g., ability to vote other users into the "hall of shame"), exclusive events (e.g., live chats w/ popular writers), and an ad-free experience behind a paywall, while leaving the majority of their content on the free, ad-supported site.

And critics of the newspapers (or at least my criticism of the newspapers) plans to go paywall isn't that it's bad or wrong, just that it's a bad idea if it's all-or-nothing since readers will simply substitute. If newspapers were proposing something closer to what Ars is trying, I think you'd hear less criticism and more curious interest...
YC isn't in the business of offering personal counseling :) It's much simpler than that. When you get into YC, it's very easy to tell everyone you're "all in". After that, you can't weasel your way out of failure. You can't go back and say "yeah, I sort of wanted to try this thing, I never really wanted to anyway". Any failure will be absolutely apparent. So you'll fight like hell not to fail. That's all there's to it. I'm still a coward, I still can't bear going back and saying I failed, and that's why I work so hard. YC just helps you say "I'm all in" to the world.
I've typically heard "Naija" as a synonym for Nigerian.
Because it would drive up the cost of software, it would spur the requirements of better requirements definition at the outset.

It would also kill most in-house development, for that matter.
Clickable link to save you time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_Intelligent_Signal_Test
I disagree. While a bit cursory, it's a good little pick-me-up before I start the work day. Makes me thankful of modern medical knowledge.

Why isn't there a YC-funded space amenity startup?
To clarify, deep technical reviews will not be behind a pay wall. Getting those reviews as PDFs however, will.

Content behind the pay wall will be additive and complement what's already there. John Siracusa's going to have a subscriber only chat, for instance, but his massive Snow Leopard review was (and is) freely available.
SF Tickets for 'Geek Reading with Randall Munroe' on sale now
I'm so glad the meaning's changed. Now the next time someone calls me a nigger, I'll thank them because I know that's just their own special way of telling me they figure me for a good basketball player. Yes!
I ctrl+w'd at "your own freaking awesome programming language."
right everything is always as it was before, but you get more options if you're a subscriber. There are not and never will be pay walls at Ars for normal standard content.

We'll be doing exclusive chats and some new types of content that only subscribers can see, but the normal Ars bread and butter will be free for all.
For those in/near SF, the tickets for the SF stop are available now. I'll be there, anyone else planning on going?
I like Pandora for playing music I don't already have, but usually it seems to end up in a ~20 track loop (I made that number up, but I feel like I hear the same songs a lot). Granted, I have only made a few Pandora stations, and have only made a few Genius playlists, and both were used for "gym" music like Beastie Boys, Eminem, etc., so it's not like I'm pushing any limits here...

I guess I'm saying that the new music from Pandora is a big win. Now imagine if Genius could mix in streams of music you don't own, while giving you an option to buy tracks with a click... that would be a killer feature.
Are Young Children Cruel?
Ask HN: Outsource or build it yourself
I know most of you are probably technically advanced enough to build a full scale website yourself. However, what if someone's technical expertise isn't quite up to par. Would you recommend them trying to learn everything and build the site themselves? Or take the easier route and outsource the programming?

I'm curious to hear the pros and cons of in-house vs out-sourced. I've always been a fan of doing the programming yourself because you know the product inside and out and you're able to customize it exactly the way you want. But I've heard that the cheap labor costs offshore, and freed up time to focus on other aspects of the product could make outsourcing a very viable option.

Thoughts?
Maintainable PHP Framework: a Rails-esque web framework
Good. A lot of speculation Steve would stop doing these, but it's a good portion of his job to turn on the charisma for the press and the pubic.
Healthcare Reform: An Entrepreneur's Perspective
Why we need healthcare reform, from the perspective of a self-employed entrepreneur with an individual healthcare plan.
Heh, I can't wait to come back - just waiting until my project gets beyond mămăligă profitable.
Not dissing the article itself, but this is the second article on psychology in the last hour. Is psychology within the interestes of HN now?
How to not piss off users: An Email Bill of Rights for WebServices Users
Apple's site doesn't have to focus on discoverability. Compare for example, Apple's store section vs. their actual product pages - the former is a lot busier and "harder to navigate" than the latter. When you get into the business of selling a bunch of stuff in a discoverable way, your design needs change.

Keep in mind also that the Apple Store sucks at discoverability for non-Apple products - Apple does a marvellous job funnelling you towards the MacBooks and iPods, but a poor job exposing, say, third-party accessories. This works great for Apple, but would be instant death for a company whose entire bread and butter is selling third party goods.

Now consider that Apple has how many core products? What you see on the root store page is it. Everything Apple makes and sells is right there. Now compare with how many products Zappos is in charge of selling and you start seeing the scale difference.

You are comparing apples (no pun intended) and oranges.
Open-Source Deep Packet Inspection
How Wired's Evan Ratliff (the Vanish contest) Was Caught
The 'select' part of that statement is an ideology.
We've done things a bit differently than what most newspapers and the AP have talked about. For one, we've worked really hard to enhance the overall reading experience for subscribers. They get a better "window" into the free content. It's ad free, they can read it on the pooper when they print out a PDF, etc. There's also full text (including 23 page reviews) RSS available. We actually wanted to give subscribers free Kindle subscriptions too, but that wasn't possible.

The content that is behind a paywall is going to be less broadly appealing, and supplementary to what's already freely available.

The most interesting thing, and probably the most daring, is the whole editorial round table thing. If it works as planned, we'll basically be giving subscribers a great deal of influence over what the site publishes, and vast amounts of information that media sites don't generally give out. There's already a planned discussion, for instance, on the economics of producing long form content, all because subscribers consistently ask for more of it. We may not be able to deliver it as much as they or we want, but we are going to involve them in those discussions.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Although I prefer meatier sources than blog posts, and usually try to submit journalistic news articles or scientific research papers, I find that blog posts get the most readers here on HN.
No pictures? :-(
Nobody else finds it ironic that this is posted on an SEO blog?
I had the same problem with Pandora, and ultimately realized that you need to seed your channel with a large, diverse collection of artists in order to avoid getting trapped in a small loop like that. I don't want to futz with setting up channels that much, though. Still, I've discovered some good music with it.
I'm guessing because it's possible for the data to be corrupted in just the right way so as to construct some system-crashing (or critical-data corrupting) system() or eval() call. Though that's a pretty extreme paranoia.

As you state, the python files themselves could also be corrupted in such a manor and then run in the interpreter, or a compiled program could get corrupted in just the right way to execute 'rm -rf /' though it's not likely.
Worth the price of admission:

"Magellan, for example, lost eighty percent of the sailors on his Pacific voyage, and survivors described how 'to chew their rations, they had to keep slicing the swollen tissue of their gums away.'"
I'm in NYC. Right by Shake Shack. There's a monthly HN meetup that's always good
Yeah, I liked that part too.
Besides the great points that sstrudeau brings up, I'd also point out that there is a big difference in how the offers are presented.

News organizations are just about calling their online readers freeloading cheapskates who need to start paying for news again (while in the same breath saying that their news are essential to society, all the while misunderstanding that readers never paid for the news itself to begin with).

Ars instead are presenting you with an offer of even higher quality content, which you can opt-out of and still have access to their current product.

Long story short: Ars are doing it right, news corps are doing it ass-backwards, misunderstanding their own business, their readers and their product.
Except that every comment below yours doesn't relate at all to the original post, which says something. There's nothing in the original post about the layout and usability of Zappos's shoe collection view or search results layout. The letter's complaint seems to be with the usability of the main landing page. And beyond that you didn't ask for a comparison of your product with Zappos, you asked for feedback on yours. Seems like a clear hijack to me, even if you didn't intend it.
Fire the "web designer"
That's basically why I use fish after many years of zsh. zsh can probably do more, but I don't need to configure fish to get something useful that works the way I do. (The only config I've done on my current install are a bunch of aliases and a custom prompt)
Jobvite Secures $8.25 Million in Series B Funding
when you're actively using an information/knowledge gap between you and your customer for your advantage".

Explain to me when you aren't doing that. You've basically described every consultant, lawyer and expert in existence with that statement.