skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It reduces friction.

Between python programmers, yes.

But it increases friction between those that are 'in' and those that are not (yet). And even some of those that are 'in' have their reservations.

I completely understand the reasoning behind it, but the number of times that I've run in to practical problems because of having some kind of delimiter is 0, the number of times that I've run into some kind of trouble with python because of not having delimiters is starting to add up.

This may be a factor of inexperience, time will tell. But it is definitely a new 'source' of bugs, and sources of bugs are in my opinion things that you avoid like the plague when designing a programming language.

Even in 'C' (or C++, or anything that derived it's syntax from those languages) I always found it both wrong and inconsistent to be able to say:

if (a)
b++;

To me that's asking for misery, you could remove that whole if(a) line and the whole thing would remain syntactically correct.

I think of the { } just like I think of guardrails on the highway. They don't make stuff prettier, sometimes you can't look across, but they certainly keep you safer.
Knight News Challenge deadline extended until December 15
The description of the treaty based on the supposedly leaked documents makes it sound absolutely horrible.

I'd be tempted to say that it must be a nasty rumor but if that was the case, the logical course of action by the government would be to make portions of the treaty public to lay to rest the concerns.

They haven't, which leads me to wonder if it really is as bad as the rumors indicate.
100% correct. Multi-market economic discrimination based on self-selection by time of purchase - 95% of those who would have ever paid $20 have already purchased the game, others will now pay less than that. They could have as well just dropped the price to $5, but they would have never got any free PR without this stunt.
Sad. I used to read it when I had the chance, but now I pick up the FT out of principle.

Worth quoting Paul Krugman: """

1) The WSJ editorial page is wrong about everything.

2) If you think the WSJ editorial page is right about something, see rule #1"""
Grand Unified Field Theory (geeky guest comic by Dresden Codak)
How People Count Cash
Nah, me too. I hit that donate button without even a double take. Bravo author.
I know this is not 100% related to the topics we normally discuss here, but i like to find out how things work differently across the world and this is a great example. It is also a good reminder that the world is far more complex and diverse than we sometimes think it is.
I will take free-bsd based OS X over any linux distro, but that's a personal preference.

Are you saying you don't like Linux on the desktop because you don't like the GNU userland (coreutils, et. al.), and prefer OS X's hybrid bsd-forked set?

What do you mean by calling OS X 'freebsd-based'?
The thing that kills me is the websites that slurp this data and then will spit back info for literally hundreds of dollars.
The first hard drive my father bought was 5mb. It connected to an Atari 800 through the Atari's 4 joystick ports. It's price was somewhere around $2000. That fact is utterly meaningless when comparing the price of HDs and SSDs (which are significantly more expensive than HDs) in the marketplace. Today.
I can't believe Tom Lubbock - a long time art critic - could sound like such an art debutante. Hirst is one of the most significant artists of the last two decades regardless of his technical prowess.

Being a good artist doesn't demand technical prowess any more than being a good Web developer demands you have a strong knowledge of computer science.

I'd dread to imagine how this reviewer would have approached the works of Rothko or Picasso in their respective times. This reviewer is just another modern day naysayer and we've had too many of them throughout history.
Building a 30 million kWh Social Power Array using Facebook, PC Power Management
See also:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881278

http://searchyc.com/berners?sort=by_date
What I find fascinatingly baffling about Google Wave is that it's partly one of the most impressive communications tools I've used, and partly a compilation of features I saw removed from other sites for being poor design.
I think when they say spin me, slice me, shade me, etc. they mean the developer, not the end user.
I bought the guy a coffee too.

Amazing. I wish my command of the english language was half as good as this guys. I'm really gushing here. I just cant get over this post.

Wow.
I'm mainly interested in Machine Learning algorithms. I've read the first 75 pages of this book, and skimmed most of Mackay, and I prefer this one. It goes into a lot more detail on the performance of different algorithms, how the handle sparse data, error rates and high dimensionality.

McKay's looks like a good book, but appears more applicable to pure information theory rather than ML specifically.
As someone who sells a lot of Flash-based websites centered around photography, I don't really see myself integrating this into one of our designs.

I'm sure the AS behind it is impressive, but it's a little too gimmicky for me (and my customers I'd guess).
Hm. I can't go along with the general love-fest over World of Goo.

I bought World of Goo for $20 in large part because of the hullabaloo around it, and completed it in an evening. It was basically a bridge-builder derivative, where it's fun to overcome all the challenges, but once overcome, the desire to improve on them with economizing / scoring is a lot less. I got about 6 hours at most play time out of it.

If I valued the games I've enjoyed for replay value with a similar price / playtime equation, such as Far Cry or Far Cry 2, I'd have to conclude I should value them in excess of $500 apiece. First person shooters, when executed well, completely blow away puzzle games in replay value.

I would rather value WoG at about $2 at most. I'm not sure I'm any better off for having bought it, other than knowing that I don't want to play it again.
Why have you ruled out the possibility that it solves a problem you don't have?
Can be shortened to: Super rich get wealthier.
Has anyone been able to download the game?
Yes, and while they're at it, why not offer a MacBook with Windows instead of OS X? Why not offer a subscription music service? Why do they insist on making premium products?

Why not make one of everything like Dell and let the market decide?
Since this book is so math heavy, can anyone recommend a free pdf book that can be used as a math intro for this? I like the book, but I get a little over my head with the math in some sections.
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881666
If you still have any I'd like one at [username] [@] gmail.com. Thanks!
If you have any questions for the site admins, ask away.
OK, so.

A couple months ago I bought a new MacBook Pro and picked up the 256GB SSD option on it. The drive's Toshiba (Apple ships Toshiba and Samsung drives -- I don't know model numbers).

So far it's been wonderful. Everything in this machine (processor, RAM, etc.) is a significant bump up from what I'd had before, but the SSD performance boost is still easy to notice; even though it's not the fastest drive you can get, the impression I have from watching the various videos of people with Intel drives is that the difference -- for the sorts of things I do -- is basically negligible (in order to notice it I'd have to be regularly writing huge files and timing the process).

Typical time from turning the machine on to having a desktop in front of me is around 15 seconds; that goes up if I have lots of peripherals plugged in (as I often do at work, where I end up using every available port), but still makes my older laptop painful even to contemplate.

Of course, both boot time and cold launch of applications are really just for show (though it's all very fast). The real point, for me, is the sorts of mundane but read-intensive things I do all the time: grepping over big log files or large codebases, getting status and diffs out of local checkouts, etc. There's just no contest here; that stuff happens stupid fast, and by itself would make the SSD worth having.

It should be noted that I haven't really paid attention to or particularly cared about write performance; the only time it would be noticeable is when pulling lots of stuff from a remote repo (lots of small writes to a bunch of files), but any write-performance problems with that get drowned out by things like network latency.

I'm also not particularly worried about wearing the drive out or anything like that; Toshiba's estimates for the lifetime of their drives are almost certainly a bit optimistic, but a more conservative and realistic number (confirmed by various places where I've seen it discussed) is that I'd need to sustain a pattern of writing around 20GB/day to have a significant chance of wearing out the drive in five years.
I stopped playing with it when I realized that the option to turn off instant-typing-relay wasn't implemented yet. Sorry, instant deal breaker. I've ^H^H^H'ed far too many obscenities directed at friends and clients for that to fly.
You're right, "rejected linux on netbooks" was one of Microsoft's PR pushes, and I was simply noting that Brandon did not internalize that opinion in a vacuum.

It used to be that Linux netbook models cost less and/or had higher specs than the XP versions. Then Microsoft offered deep discounts for XP licenses, and added draconian restrictions on what specs you can ship. Why the hell else do you think every goddamn netbook ships with a 1.6ghz Atom, 160gb HD, and 1gb ram?
Tom Lubbock. Says so right up top. He also writes the Great Works series.

My opinion is separate from Lubbock's, but I'll chip in and say that "significance" is a crock of shit in the art world, up there with "important". Art is either good or it's bad. In my opinion, Hirst's is bad, and I've never seen a good argument explaining otherwise. He sells controversy. He's like Warhol but less inspired, less attractive, and less witty.

Picasso was controversial, but it was never doubted that he produced bad artwork. He was a master of realism in his before he attempted anything more. Rothko I don't understand myself, but I saw a gallery of his work over the weekend and it looks impressive hanging on walls. It doesn't speak to me, because I don't get what makes his work impressive, but I see it and can imagine there's something I'm missing.

Hirst's paintings here look like paintings by my friends. That's the point of the article. Whether or not his other work is good, these paintings are bad, and they're shown here only because he is "significant". Lubbock isn't necessarily saying Hirst is talentless. He's saying his paintings lack merit. No amount of significance detracts from a bad painting.
I'd probably start with phone components from Bug Labs:
http://www.buglabs.net/products

Maybe start off with some of their modules for a base phone and hang out on their forums for a while.
The Jamming Concept
Six Percent of All Web Traffic Goes to Google
but why should it be this way at all? The fact that their compensated wealth has become totally disconnected from the reality of productivity makes this a pretty shocking way to run a world. But one very compatible with our simian social organizing.

Or to put it another way, why should someone who is (arguably) producing most of the value have to stand for getting rich slowly, when the clueless middle managers fail upwards into nicer cars & long vacations, and sociopaths -- who seem to spend most of their "workday" jockeying for position, power, & prestige rather than doing useful things -- get 6, 7, 8 figure salaries & giant stock options?

The real crime is that the productive, competent people are encouraged & incentivized to coast because of the ludicrousness of the system.

Sounds objectively like a bad bargain to me.

So much so that those productive losers should start a company & try to keep the sociopaths out. in fact, if you buy that web -> lower barriers to entry -> less need for predatory sociopathic apes. They'll always try to get in, but that's another story...
Bananajour - Local git publication and collaboration
Stay out of the middle
FYI for those interested in working with this data in a Geo-enabled RDBMS: It's pretty easy to get most of this data into a database on your own using GeoDjango.
A simple non-TIGER tutorial is here: http://geodjango.org/docs/tutorial.html

Even if you're not interested in using Django in the long run, it's a quick way to get the data into a familiar system and poke around with it a bit.
You are not the only person in the world.
You get what the person before you searched for.

Some of these articles describe it in more depth.

http://news.google.com/news/more?um=1&cf=all&ned=us&...

*Edit, Comment has apparently been deleted.

Someone named Icey had asked that I should "start by saying what the site is."
He did the same sort of hatchet job on Scala a month ago.
He's not, but it's a fair point that this is no gift horse for him.
http://hbmobile.org/
Sounds like Radical Honesty. I've considered it before, but never really tried to practice it. Honestly though, its not necessarily that they are boring (though sometimes they are), but often I just don't feel like talking to anyone. Talking itself can be boring, since it rarely leads to action.
This is where I would go when I build my own phone. Wrap it in metal with a hinge to mimic a standard flip phone.

http://www.opencellphone.org
TypeError: 'int' object is unsubscriptable

You have to use str(pal) first, I guess.

Your core point is right, though; his clojure uses number->string + reverse, and the Python can too.
> Or you could just actually pay attention while driving, and, if walking, look both ways before crossing the street.

Yeah, tell that to the blind people who have almost no chance of knowing that a hybrid car is sitting at a corner waiting to make a left turn...

I do pay attention and watch what is happening around me and the closest I have ever come to getting hit by a car was when walking through a parking lot and having a Prius back out of a spot and almost run me over. I had passed the car and noticed the driver but did not hear an engine noise that normally lets me know I need to remember that car once I am past it. The driver of the Prius was not paying attention at all. The only thing that prevented me from getting hit was the fact that the car cleared the space it was backing out of just as it tapped my legs and before I realized what had happened they were driving away.

There is no excuse for a car in motion to be silent. None.
I wonder what could be so possibly threatening to national security to disclose information about copyright law?
i've never felt as happy about not working in a large organization as when i finished reading this
A lot of those possibilities are preventable though. If you backup through an automated rsync, why not used versioning (ala rdiff)? Why not periodically swap out the disks on the backup machine so that if the disk gets hosed you have some data backed up, even if it is old data.

Some of the things like 'locking the keys in the car' can be mitigated by making sure that you test you backup system.

Obviously you can't prevent everything, but to say that some of these issues are 'unavoidable risk' is like saying that an oil company exec would say, "shit happens," to reports that one of their oil tanker captains crashed a ship while drunk.

The real problem is that backup is usually an after-though.
PayPal payments are pretty difficult, but credit card payments don't have to be hard. Example:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/139/weeblypro-screenshot.png
If it's government mandated/enforced/funded, it's probably safe to refer to it as a "positive right".

Otherwise, I agree.
Then we agree, I think. My point is that it is quite possible, even easy, to describe experiences with a language ("It was easier to communicate in Spanish in Madrid").

But it is rather pointless to debate languages in isolation ("Spanish verb conjugations must lead to more powerful novels", or somesuch).

The same applies to programming languages, I think.
I think people who think Google Wave doesn't get it will be eating their words later, much like those who thought the same thing about the iPod (most of the geek communities turned their nose up at that too).

I can see instant usefulness to Wave. I have my invite, and one of my colleagues does too. I can't wait for my other cofounders to get access so that we can use it for real work. Email really just sucks in so many ways.

Edit: It's worth adding that a lot of articles and pundits seem to be comparing Wave and, say, Twitter. Wave is nothing like Twitter, nor does it aim to be anything like Twitter. No, we're not going to start using Wave instead of Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc... because that's not what it's for! Wave might end up being useful for social communications too, but the most important pain points that it resolves are business pains, problems that people encounter when they're trying to work together remotely.
Magical Results and P=NP
For what it's worth, an ostrich egg yolk is a single cell with a volume of about 500 cubic centimeters. You could fit a small point-and-shoot camera inside (although the pictures would probably suck). :)
Could someone comment on the state of the Tiger data. I tried to use it for an online trailer tracking application in the late 90's but it was very poor quality.
or perhaps more readably, pal == str(reversed(pal))
Gonna have to disagree with you there. Wave solves a slew of little nagging issues I have with other mediums all in one go.
Are we also calling end of season sales as "Gift Horse" now? (Ps I like WoG)
Can you say 'Begging the Question' ;-)

Frankly, I really don't think Krugman is any position to criticize. He has a terrible track record himself. The worst thing is that his actual work in economics (e.g., international trade theory) is really good - but he makes completely unwarranted and unsubstantiated claims well beyond anything theory supports. Then, those suppositions are given credence just because of who he is.
> Between python programmers, yes.

Optimizing for any other audience would be ... strange, especially at this point in python's lifecycle.
It's such a great treaty for everyone that you're not even allowed to know what's in it. That really inspires confidence.

The question is, what can we do to fight this band of scummy bastards who are trying to take our online freedom of speech and thought away from us to save the livelihoods a bunch of coke-addled record company executives? Anyone know?
This is a very cool idea, but when folks express power savings in units of kWh/year it makes my head spin. So...

100 kWh / year == 100,000 W / (years/hour) == 17.1 W.

so we save 17 W per computer. This is good, though less impressive-sounding.

Another way of looking at it is that a kWh of electricity costs something like $0.10. Saving 100 of those a year is ten bucks per computer. $10 per PC per year is nothing to sneeze at if you have a lot of computers.
If I hadn't already bought it twice (once on PC, once on the Wii) I'd certainly buy it now. Great game.
Ah thanks :-)
I wonder if there will be a tax revolt at some point, and a company like Zynga builds the social network around the games. Getting games right seems a lot harder than adding in some photo sharing and feed features.

I think social networks are a lot like IM clients. I switched from AIM>Skype>Gtalk because at each step someone offered a new tool that integrated chat. Zynga has found the special sauce for addictive games. I'm sure most of their players would create a new Zynga social network profile if it got them $10 in free poker chips.

The hardest thing about creating a new soc net is getting a critical mass of people. Zynga has that all tied up.
That's probably cheap compared to all the monks you'd have to pay to write that down on parchment.
It's been a few years since I read it, but the WSJ had some of the best primary reporting of any periodical on the market, and certainly the best of any daily.

Yes, the opinion page was bad, but I thought the purpose of a newspaper was news.
High Quality Ruby on Rails Example Applications
I tried this a few days ago.

I searched for 'python' and got back 'django' which was a little spooky.
>in python it can not, placing most of the burden of making sure the indentation is correct on the human.

Surely you mean "On the Ide"

> Especially when programming using tabs you'd better be very careful not to hit a delete by accident

Not if you are using any sane editor.
I think it's only a matter of time before they change the current system. The NFL seems to have struck a good balance between on-field refereeing and instant replay, while still giving coaches an option to challenge calls.

Here's another good article on the subject: http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=jp-replay101009&pr...
I happen to believe that Krugman is mostly right, and a darn good writer. (but I am a Social Democrat who likes to read right-wing newspapers because they are usually so well funded :)
That's kind of a leap, and an obfuscation of a relatively straightforward concept.

A "freedom of speech" right doesn't give me anything I don't already have. That is, I can already speak, and say basically anything I want. It just so happens to be codified in US law. You'll note that it says nothing about a freedom to speak at a high level, a freedom to persuade, or even a freedom to have people listen.

The "right to not be imprisoned without a fair trial" is a negative right (if you're suspected of a crime, we will imprison you) with limitations (but you'll get a fair trial). The right to a fair trial is not a positive right, it's a limit on a negative right.

You can think of negative rights as restricting natural rights. There's no natural barrier to me taking a steaming shit on the sidewalk in front of the white house. There are negative rights, however, that restrict my ability to do that.

Positive rights provide you with something you don't already have. A right to health care, for instance, will provide me with access to medicine, doctors, and other services I might otherwise have to go out and find on my own.

Negative rights generally have more obvious consequences (and repercussions) than positive rights, which is why I and many others like to make this distinction.
"Install our [untrusted native code] and make the world a better* place!"

(* assuming that your old, inefficient, Windows desktop computer, and monitor are on 24/7 and you don't have power saving enabled, and you tell a lot of your friends)

"If even 0.1% of all users on Facebook (300,000 users) install Enpower"

This reminds me of a recent article pointing out the fact that there are numbers less than 1 (or 1/10 in this case) [ http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090928/1101596338.shtml ].

"The Nellis Solar Power System generates 30 million kWH annually"

I have a different perspective for you - 30 million kWH is also about 3 million gallons of gasoline (as burned in internal combustion engines), which is about as much gasoline as this country consumes in 10 minutes. So, not really that much.

EDIT: toned down the vocab, it was too judgemental
Yeah there were lots of Y-Combinator folks on at that time. ;)

I've definitely had some spooky results as well. Once, I searched for "Modest Mouse" and got back "Some sort of mouse based circus."

That cracked me up.
Who is up-voting this?

If you read this article you can clearly see the lack of knowledge the author holds in Python language itself.
If you gonna do a ... VS ... you better know both sides pretty damn well otherwise it leads to being a somewhat worthless comparison IMHO.
O
/-+-\/
/ |
| \
/ /
/ /
_________ _________
/ BEST / \ WORST \
/ IDEA / \ IDEA \
/__EVER__/ \__EVER__\
Seems like an awful lot of server just for an address book.