skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey ivan, I will be launching my startup at techcrunch50 this year, looking for someone to come on board with co-founder type equity prior to closing funding email me at sid dot Viswanathan at gmail if interested -sid
Banks writes under Iain M. Banks when he writes sci-fi, and just plain Iain Banks when he’s not. We also found this confusing.

If this is confusing, then you're a bit dim...
Following the Tao does not preclude change.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

It precludes desire; when the Tao leads you to take an action, the action passes through you and onward through the things you acted with. It precludes judgement; the change that action has made in the world is. But action itself is niether praised nor reviled. The body will change the world as much as it will --- Taoism asks for the mind to remain calm and fluid, and the self to vanish.
I'm tried to minimise the length of "user@host fullpath" too. This is what I ended up with (in zsh):

PS1='[%(?..%?)%(?.. ! )$PR_GREEN%2>>%n%<<@%m$PR_NO_COLOR $PR_BLUE%30<...<%~%<<$PR_NO_COLOR]%(!.#.$) '

path is limited to 30 characters and the front is trimmed with '...'. There is a host, because I work on at least 5 at the same time every day, but the username is cut to only the first 2 letters (so it's either vi, or ro, or something else at uni). The return code is only visible when it's non-zero.
great book by a great writer but flagged it anyway...
OpenBSD has had plenty of vulnerabilities, including a couple of remote ones.
A Canticle for Leibowitz: A Review
I'd say the Lib Dems are basically honest. Problem is they're batshit crazy too.
I note you never comment on anything but keep submitting links to 'keepingthedoor.com', why is that ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=renai42
Do you have references and pointers? Is this going to hurt me when I put two non-storage servers live running 2009.06?
How To Not Get Your Blog Hacked
I found one and have posted it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=807692
'those who don't know history...'
Python 2.x -> Python 3
Ruby 1.8 -> Ruby 1.9

Do you actually know anything about languages other than PHP and want to change for legitimate reasons? Or are you just jumping on the bandwagon because it sounds cool?
The Message  the media
Windows was originally built without security as a major focus.

This is misleading. Windows NT was built with security in mind. Windows Xp, Vista and 7 are descended from NT.
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/lispbox/

Lispbox makes it really easy to download and get going with Lisp.
Hm, I think, that prompt should give you some hint of the environment and context in which the command you are typing will run. Username, working path, machine hostname, at least, of course (well, it isn't really necessary to show hostname, if you never use more than one machine, and so on). On the other hand, I don't like stuff like current time, number of running processes or system load, because they are not part of that context. They are constantly changing, and not only by actions and commands in the shell; when you are done typing and press enter, they won't be valid.
For some added context, the normal rand function in PHP uses an implementation based on libc.

PHP provides a second, safer, function, mt_rand, which is based around an implementation of the Mersenne Twister.
How to be a Samurai designer?
This is very topical for me. With Lisp, if you have a marginally obscure problem, there is often no answer presumably because no one else has encountered that issue before. With Python, there are 1,000 people who ran into the same thing.

My current problem: Using CL+SSL apparently has a bug which makes it not possible to make an SSL connection with it. So I guess no one using Lisp is using CL+SSL to make an SSL connection. Frustrating.
Small UK town is 'online crime hotspot'
Sometimes it feels like: "Lisp - Go away". And sometimes I'm just fine with that.
The OCaml community doesn't have anybody who promotes the language with quite as much gusto as dons, to my knowledge, and its library situation is a bit messy - there are nonstandard community replacements for the standard library[1] because Inria is just not going to fix some major warts. It has libraries[2] (and a pretty good library manager[3]), but OCaml has been around for quite a while and hasn't ever seemed to aquire critical mass. That degree of blatant fragmentation probably makes people wary.

Haskell seems to be stealing its thunder now. There are numerous "intro to Haskell" / monad tutorial / etc. articles out there, and the OCaml community seems very quiet, by comparison. I don't particularly care for Haskell* , but its designers and users have done a good job of ensuring people hear about it, and get at least a roughly accurate first impression of what makes it noteworthy.

* I don't like laziness as a default, I've been burned a couple times by portability issues (and the way that "whatever GHC does right now" has become a de-facto standard means that portability issues are probably not a priority), and it's academia-centric "avoid success at all costs" attitude doesn't sit right with me.

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/
[2]: http://godi.camlcity.org/godi/toc/toc-3.10.html
[3]: http://projects.camlcity.org/projects/findlib.html/
>>> Below is a chart comparing unique visitors (U.S.) for Blogger to Wordpress.com. Blogger is leading, although Wordpress’ numbers don’t include the millions of people who have self-hosted Wordpress blogs. <<<

But that "although" is quite substantial, isn't it? The point of wordpress is that you self-host the installation, so not including those into the statistic is quite misleading.

But I agree, blogspot is quite good, and you can even map your blog to unique domain name.
So you can generate energy by releasing the "shuttle magnet" into this thing - how do you then get the shuttle back out?

Isn't this like getting the energy by having two magnets attract,, and then you supply the energy back by pulling them apart again?

This seems to be nonsense.
Poorly written, lots of grammatical and spelling errors, and some just plain bullshit speculation, like so:

Since Wordpress is a self hosted solution there's an advantage to making sure it works on the most systems possible, keeping the requirements for hosting it low. To do this the code has to keep a certain low IQ to accommodate the many varied circumstances it might be installed on. While I don't know of specific instances where this happens I have to image[sic]...

So, you're assuming the code has a "low IQ" because it needs to run on a lot of platforms. Does the Linux kernel have a similarly low IQ? What about the Apache web server that serves the majority of the web? What, pray tell, is a low IQ for code? I've written a lot of code in my days, and none of it could ever pass an IQ test. Does that mean I write shitty code?

Then, in the very next sentence, you go on to say that you have no specific examples, and just decide to "image" some. Why not just say, "I don't know what I'm talking about, so I'll just make some shit up."

That was all I could take. I couldn't read any more.

I'm a proud user of Wordpress, and talk like this just pisses me off. Feel free to pontificate all you want about the future of blogging. I'll do so as well:

* Wordpress will be around for much longer than you think, just like built-by-hand "homepages" are still around today.

* Twitter has not killed blogging, RSS feeds, email, or anything else.

* Proofreading will continue to be a skill that serves all bloggers, twitterers, and writers in general.
Track how many times your logins into GMail - A gmail gadget.
I'll show my age here and say that in my CS program, we had (like many) a 'final project' where we assembled a wire-wrap computer from a Motorola 68hc11, some ram, rom and a handful of logic gates, then wrote a rudimentary os in assembly. Even then the 6811 was woefully obsolete. The lessons were timeless.
If mt_rand is really that much better, what is the point of keeping them both? Shouldn't they just make rand map to mt_rand?
I always start wondering if Jason thinks it good for time-strapped startups to spend 3+ hours each week watching podcasts.
Hrm, I think you've misunderstood wu wei. Wu wei has nothing to do with immutability. Quite the contrary. Wu wei achieves great things by applying the least amount of force at the location of greatest leverage -- by piggybacking on the strong currents that are already loose in the world. It only appears to the unaware and the ignorant as if nothing has been done. In reality, the master is always upwind of correct action. Much of this can be achieved by simply being quiet, paying close attention, and doing what comes naturally without deliberation. I see very little similarity with FP.
Fundamentally, I think it is the cathedral (INRIA) vs the bazaar (Haskell.org open source) leading to long term efficiencies for the Haskell community.

Also, the OCaml community seems more fragmented, so its harder to organize group efforts. Haskell hackathons are happening every 4 months or so, in the US and Europe (we've had 9 in 3 years). I don't know that the OCaml open source community has held any similar kind of event.
There seems to be some kind of law that, for anything to do with crypto, numerics, or randomness, a language must ship with both a broken default and a correct implementation hidden deep in some library known only to the pure of heart.
There's also Jane Street Core http://ocaml.janestcapital.com/?q=node/13

What's also weird is that OCaml doesn't even have a big following in France, the French are well-known for championing their own ideas in the face of whatever Les Rosbifs are doing.
sandbox name: jdietz
No not all of them. I think there can be a tenancy to think the way that one learnt to program gives the best grounding: this is a bias. For my money there are different types of programmer and depending on what sort of project you are doing you might want different mixed. That can mean knowing both your strengths and weaknesses and those of your colleagues.

By far the best attributes of programmers are the want to constantly improve their code and experience. However sometimes a wealth of experience can lock a programmer into a fixed way of thinking. I know quite a number of C++ programmers who seemingly don't seem to get OO for instance. Others may not approach a problem in the best way.

You journey seems to imply should new programmers follow your path to get an understanding of machines. A lot of this technology is not relevant. Multicore systems are fairly modern, and hacking java bytecode is probably just as good preparation as hacking a Tandy. In face many of those old microcomputers were much simpler that even some VM architectures.

It sounds like you may have been hired into a team precisely because of this sort of experience you have. However not every optimization these days is a low level optimization. I note the YouTube architecture and how much of the service was/is written in a scripting language.

It wouldn't take long to find an opensource project that you could easily make use of these skills. Far from being a dinosaur there are whole industries that still use this sort of knowledge: but perhaps not on the desktop.
I get the impression that it may have been more popular several years ago - OCaml, Caml Light, and predecessors have been around for a rather long time, and have been used in education. It has a long, parallel history to SML.

I'm not sure about the above because I can't read French, but I remember reading it somewhere relatively 'official'. (Perhaps in the translated O'Reilly book?) Either way, having half the stuff written about your language only available in French is probably not a strong life sign.
Is This The Real Answer To Google’s ‘Unexplained Phenomenon’ Puzzle?
thanks. thats what i was looking for.
How To Get IP Of Your Choice To Bypass Country Specific Censorship
This trick allows you to use popular anonymity network TOR providing you an IP address from country of your choice, we will be configuring TOR to have an exit node of our choice so that we can control our IP's country as required.
Metadata vs Data: a wholly artificial distinction
Probably a matter of mitigating risk. Despite its drawbacks, rand() is used a LOT and works...well, "good enough".

In the interest of making sure the code you wrote for PHP3 will work on current/future versions and not have anything unexpected happen.
interesting, but the C.Elegans has 302 neurons [ http://ims.dse.ibaraki.ac.jp/research/C_elegans_en.html ] so I'd expect a simulation of the sea slug (bound to have much more) to include more than just 7?
Suggest PG: An RSS/Atom feed per item in YC/lists would be just great
Recently, I found myself looking at these items more often (especially /best && /active), while almost ignoring the "mainstream".

Having feeds for these filters would be just great.

Thanks anyway for this great operation called PG/YC ;-)
> Tuesday, May 20, 2008

I assume PHP still has this issue?
I wrote a comment on the site but might as well post a version of it here as well:

It's been a while since I read Use of Weapons, and when I did I had already read a few of the culture books before so I had some understanding of the universe.

The plot is "confusing" since it tells two stories interleaved between the chapters. One story goes from the chronological end of the story backwards, telling the story of Zakalwe's work with Culture. The other story tells the story of Zakalwe's origin. The two stories meet at the end of the book in the defining moment of the book.

Personally I prefer books (and stories) that are not obvious and require some work for the reader. But most of Bank's other Culture books are easier to follow, such as the first one Player of Games. These will also tell you more about why Culture acts the way it does and doesn't always take the "short cut" of nuking everything until it glows.

Besides Player of games I think Consider Phlebas and Excession are some of the really good ones. A lot of the other books are much slower paced and read more like dramas than "Syfy" space action.

Personally I find the universe of Culture to be one of the most interesting in SF literature. The books are also independent on each other and can be read in any order. Since characters don't really go on from one book to another you're never sure who'll die, which I find heightens the tension.

Many of the books also read like a bit of a puzzle. This may be frustrating for some readers, but for those who enjoy books like that it can be fun. (Personally I tend to find them a bit slow.)

I've long wished that there would come a movie or game set in the Culture universe. Since the stories are independent they could make one without "destroying" any of the characters or books which already exist.
The reason I use blogger rather than wordpress is because I don't really want to host my blog myself (seeing as to how its updated about once a year, self-hosting makes no sense). However, i still like fiddling around with the look of my blog and in that respect blogger lets me customize to the hilt whereas with wordpress (.com), I only have access to one set of themes and plugins (or atleast that's how it was when I last looked, which was a couple of years back).

Also, I don't really see how Blogger is inferior to Wordpress.
>If you listen to the WordPress people, the answer to this is 'be extremely zealous about updating your software', which is the same as saying, devote half your life to learning and understanding WordPress administration.

Apparently this person has not used a recent build of Wordpress.
In Scandinavia it's not uncommon to do one semester a year, working the rest of the time, graduating in 10 years.
IgniteATL - a "mini TED" of the southeast
"I'd always find it funny how all of the panelists' opinions were completely tainted by their own self-interest."

Why would you start a business selling MP3s if you thought the future of the music business was subscriptions? And vice versa.
If you're talking about Ramadan, I'd say it's mostly habit reinforced from an early age.

I have lots of will power in general but limited self-control. Yet fasting is a piece of cake. It wasn't always like it. I remember when I initially started around the age of 9 I would fast till noon instead of sunset. Then gradually by the time I was 11 I could fast till sunset.

I've read in several places about monks and their years of meditating literally changes the circuits in the brain giving them hyper self-control. Check out the book Evolve Your Brain.
Is this human working for free?
I was very lazy about upgrading my WP installations. I was lucky to never have been a victim of a vulnerability. For some reason, I thought the process would be a PITA, when, in fact, it took me about 15 minutes to upgrade three installations to the latest release.

That said, I don't use any plugins, so I didn't have to worry about compatibility issues.
it's still built around TV broadcasts which is kinda stupid nowadays

Not really, for a number of reasons. One of which is that the OU's target audience includes people who might not be able to afford a multimedia PC. Another of which is that a broadcast creates a shared experience in time - the class can all be kept "on the same page". Dealing with a class who're all over the course would make it much more expensive.
I meant Windows 95 and 98. NT is one of the vast improvements I had in mind.
Great post, again!

I think if you read the article again with categorizing all things into symptoms and cause, you'll get better understanding. Most people confuse between two and try to instill symptoms into themselves and mostly end-up at wrong end. You cannot simply say that from tomorrow I'll be more determined on my goals. There has to be passion, love and solid drive for what you do, as mentioned at the end of article. I think veterans and people who have been constantly successful at what they are doing would agree that love for what you do is an important component to success otherwise you will simply run out of your breathe by constant push without any passion.
So it's a good example of software built with security as a primary focus that still has vulnerabilities. I can think of few examples of software that has never had vulnerabilities discovered. OpenSSH maybe?
These are all 'commodity' applications that exist on all desktops. It's inevitable that free/open source versions will gradually replace their commercial counterparts, actually this is already happening:

* Image Edititing - GIMP (ok, ok, it still a long road to catch up with Photoshop, but it's already good enough for most users)

* Video Player - VLC & Co

* Chat - Pidgin

* Downloading/FTP/Torrenzt - uTorrent, Deluge, etc

* Software Developmnent - most tools are already free

* Music Player - Banshee, Amarok... event iTunes is free
USB Virüs Scan - USB Aygıtlarına Tam Koruma | iYiblogcu
$2 Deluxe Hugs, a lesson for startups
Next Wheel of Time book: Read chapter one
I was going to post the very same thing. I went from 2.6 to the latest version in about 10 minutes, at least half of which was downloading the update, the pushing it up to the server.
My old wordpress installation was hacked some time ago, so (following the lead of cperciva) I wrote a minimal blogging script which doesn't require PHP/Mysql and just generates HTML. The admin interface is vi.
I have to agree with the analyst quoted on page 2. There's too many specific parts and themed items on many of these new kits.

I remember when the space kits came out (like Galaxy Ranger) and we all cried foul when they introduced the little engine and wing thingies. Those aren't LEGO!

Now everything is a custom molded piece and barely has any mounting studs on it. And let's not even mention Bionicle. Now get off my lawn.
I'm in North Jersey, but in the city a few days a week with clients. I'd definitely be interested in meeting up for drinks with people.
Why is a two year old article that isn't really that insightful on the front page, other than the fact that it bashes Microsoft?
Checkout the "Lego Batman" category.

I'm not sure exactly what happened with this, but as far as I can tell, Lego released the awesome "Lego Batman" video game, and then were unable to extend their license deal on the actual lego batman sets, so had to stop selling them (Like a month after releasing the game!)

Whoever is responsible for allowing that to happen should hang their head in shame.

They now go for seriously crazy prices, since everyone has the video game, but cannot buy the lego sets.
A better title would be "20 years of UI convention stuck in the back of my head and getting used to the ribbon takes time".

The piece contains nothing but subjective opinions and does in no way justify a conclusion that the Ribbon sucks. Yes, it is different. Yes, it took some time getting used to. Yes, I am more productive now.

The author (despite saying the opposite in the comments) clearly just wants things to remain the way they have always been and if the new Office 2007 UI is really that hard getting used to, why not just stick to Office 2003?

There are even free plugins from Microsoft to deal with the new Office fileformats.
4 years of pain in the ass medicial school
3-5 years of SUPER pain in the ass residency where you work 15-20hr days for $40,000.

Then depending on your concentration you can make between 150-300K.

Both my dad and my brother(who is in med school) chose medicine because of the medicial needs in the family than the monetary compensation.
Making real random data using a computer is hard, very hard.

These are pseudo random number generators, I take it that everybody using them understands that the 'P' means that you can not rely on the output of these pieces of code to be truely random.

One of the first online casinos used a PIC to sample a noisy zener diode to get to something less predictable.

And even with that as the source concept it took quite a bit of tweaking of the design to get really random bits, it's surprising how much hum from your powersupply can make it through to the bits of your a/d converter.
Between Banks and Alastair Reynolds, I think that Welsh SF has hit a great stride in the last few years.

I wouldn't normally say something so vacuous but I'm compelled to: I agree with everything you said, Hast.
Why do people always feel the need to overgeneralize things ?

From http://uitrends.com/2009/09/03/command-line-interfaces-dont-... :

command line interfaces are back again, hiding under the name of search

No, they are not. Yes, it's also a box in which you type text, hit return and see results. But a command-line tells a computer to do stuff, a search box tells a computer (Google) to retrieve stuff. By stating that search engines are the new commandline, well, it's not as silly as claiming the web is the new OS, but it's close.

The only reasons I can see why they make these generalizations is either that they don't understand what a commandline does, or it simply brings them more attention. I suspect the latter.
This is great. It seems this is taking our relationship with computers to the next level. The big problem is humans are not perfect decision makers. What would happen if the system suddenly react to a thought which is completely foolish.
Yes, effort is to ensure that all relevant results on an issue are reported, rather than some results being buried in a file drawer,

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

so that later meta-analyses of published studies produce misleading aggregate results.
I think that they mixed their message a bit, but I believe that the point they were trying to make about the Google search box is that there are more commands like "define" and "translate" that are getting integrated into the search box.
The second have of the blog post was about Ubiquity which I believe most people would certainly define as a CLI.