skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This another classic example of how people can make lots of money simply by making a game that gives people a chance to do illegal things. Personally I don't view that as a healthy thing, but I know there are those that say that giving people a chance to "try out" murders, muggings, etc in a game is healthy.

But I think Torn's TOS (http://www.torn.com/tos.php) says it all:

Torn accepts no responsibility for the actions of its members i.e. Self harm, Vandalism, Suicide, Homicide, Genocide, Drug abuse, Changes in sexual orientation, Bestiality. Torn will not be held responsible and does not encourage any of the above actions or any other form of anti social behaviour. Although Torn is highly addictive we encourage you to spend time with your family and loved ones, do not forget them. Remember Torn is just a game, if you hit someone with a hammer in real life, they may not just go to hospital.
Ballmer: Microsoft never recovered from Vista blow
Is this idea novel to the people protecting security? If so, that is kind of scary. If not, why issue this warning? Is this some kind of bureaucratic CYA in action?
Purely Functional Lazy Non-deterministic Programming
Thanks. Many apologies, I had no clue ;(
QuickCheck is cool. But don't make the mistake of thinking that it proves that the properties hold universally.
Debt is effective slavery. Ask anyone that has a second mortgage and two car payments. Is their job to blame? No way! Their spending put them into literal slavery to a financial institution.
How are strong opinions outside of Brian Eno's domain?
It's very difficult for to understand the mindset of someone who admires a computer company so much that they'd read blog articles about its stationary.
That unsavory practice is specifically counter to employment being slavery, BTW. Why do employers offer health coverage? In many cases, it's because they use their benefits packages to compete for employees. (In other cases, it's by a legal mandate of course.)

If employees were slaves, there would be no reason for employers to compete for them.
Deeply held beliefs make it easy to accept the absurd
Surprised they didn't mention the most famous Luddite of all, Ted Kaczynski (unibomber).
I agree. The angst you are feeling is not due to your employer, your employment, or your employment contract. You are just too weak to go out on your own.
I have been involved in court cases. Here is my experience: you don't win. You don't get your money back for legal costs. At best, you get to decide when to walk away, let go, and get back to your business if your lucky enough that its still viable after all the energy and money you put into the fight.

Courts do not decide to "accept a suit". A judge acts on "evidence" presented by each side, they do not provide their own advice or due diligence in the case. A plaintiff files and the other side defends. Both sides immediately assume costs. If the court does throw the case out for lack of standing, jurisdiction, or other preliminary matter, ok, the defendant "won" that round, but you don't get your money or time back. If you want your money back, you have to either counter sue or petition for it. This puts more time and money at risk.

Its a very tough call to decide when to give up or fight. This guy made the decision that his name was not the most important aspect of his business and decided not to fight very early. I think he acted on common sense. Sure he could have waited and gotten drawn into a suit. He decided not to and that is a sign he wants to focus on his product and users, not worry about a moral victory over a name.
Nice to see that they are actually making changes to their process, after all the criticism they received from the Jamie Zawinski incident: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851425

It's one thing to say they're developer friendly and make apologies, but it's great to see Palm doing the right thing and following up on their promises.
An Interview with David Moon and Daniel Weinreb
he does say people should not use commercial software

Commercial != non-free. Stallman doesn't, to my knowledge, have an issue with the former. He rather dislikes the latter.
Study suggests a more detailed model of visual cognition
That's a separate issue about file formats and whether they should be closed or open. Whole different argument.

You can have closed proprietary programs and have completely open standard file formats.
The unfortunate reality is that there are no INTELLECTUALLY gifted and talented students in most schools. There are only slightly more who are musically or otherwise artistically gifted and talented. Truly gifted students should be moved to schools specifically catering to their needs. As there are so few of these students nationally, it would need to be a boarding school in my opinion.

The students being discussed in this article and in the response are just AP. Not gifted. We throw that word around too much, and it has come to mean nothing now.
Proving test coverage is just as (in)feasible as proving correctness. This is the elephant in the room for testing: it relies on programmer intuition to enumerate cases. It's easy to neglect a case both in the implementation and in the test. This is why tests are better at finding regressions than new bugs.
the simplest and most efficient architecture

Actually I think in most cases the simplest and most efficient architecture is when your server
creates a process for each specific type of thing it needs to do and then simply delegates incoming requests. http://www.okws.org/doku.php?id=okws is a good example.
Why did it take them so many years to recognize this ?
Or is it normal from their parts ?!
[12 < x < 24] year old computer [geek | programmer | hacker] makes [$500k < y < infinity] with [Facebook game | iPhone app | social network]

Don't you guys just love how easy it is to be successful at making money on the Interweb?
There is an old saying, "Anything with science in the name, isn't." That applies here. Reading it I am reminded of the old linguistics argument that every other field is a branch of linguistics because they have to use language to express their discoveries. Fine, but is studying linguistics an effective way to make progress in learning other subjects?

Have you noticed how seldom physicists bother arguing about how fundamental they are? The value of what they do is so obvious to them that they don't need to defend it.

For a more detailed contrasting view read http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-makes-it-science.h.... FWIW in the list of great science discoveries there I nearly included several CS results (specifically the halting problem, the Church-Turing hypothesis and the identification of NP-complete problems) but none quite made the cut.
It clearly depends on the context.

In the case of an Asian factory worker with no options better than living in factory dorms and working extremely long shifts at often dangerous tasks for little pay to make toys that stock Wal-Mart, the slavery label may have some truth in it. Toni Morrison has spoken a lot in these terms recently, and had a big impact in my thinking as she laid out her evidence.

In the case of an American white or blue collar worker with a limited public social safety net it has more similarity to a feudal system. Matt Taibbi alludes to this in an interesting blog post today: http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/10/06/michael-moores-pr...
So I've got a process running as root. I want it to spawn a new process running as user1, in /var/fred, with a pipe to stdin and direct stdout to /var/log/greg.

First I create the pipe, then call fork. In the child, I chdir to /var/fred, open /var/log/greg, run fdup2 on the pipe and on the handle to /var/log/greg, setuid to user1, and then finally call exec.

Show me an API that can do that without fork.

All the popen / spawn / system functions are not system calls but rather library functions which operate by calling fork.
How copy editing is done at the New Yorker
Sometimes those token "freaks" show up and kick the shit out of everybody.

That's what happened with the three Tarahumara went to Leadville, CO in 1993 and took first, second and third places in the premier 100 mile trail race. Seven came back the next year, wearing hats of their sponsor Rockport, but sandals made of tire-treads instead of Rockport shoes. The slowest of them finished 11th.

AFIK, they lost their sponsorship, and were unable to come back the next year.
I really think u should read <a>http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/2009/09/mono-not-chasing....

The larger Mono projects on Linux are built on the language and CLR features implemented in Mono; and don't rely on Microsoft libraries like WinForms. And as far as language features are concerned, the downloadable Mono compiler even implements part of the C# 4 spec.

Also, the popular Linux/Mono apps hardly work on Windows.

Actually I need not have replied; "....as it'll always be lacking in features compared to Microsoft's implementation" -- i just realized this was pure trolling. Try /.
Great business card design on recycled cereal boxes
I find it hard to believe that it would cost $350 million to convert the drawings and diagrams to metric. I would do it for half that price!
I'd say that you can't have computation without physics. I am willing to bet that it'll eventually be proved that computation is inherently a physical process: information is just one form of energy, and computation is the process of converting energy and entropy into information. Computer Science is then best viewed as a subset of Physics.

If I could study ANYTHING without worrying about getting funding, I'd study computation as a physical phenomenon. I think the answer to P vs NP lies somewhere in the laws of physics; solving NP-Complete problems in polynomial time on the size of the problem input is either possible in our physical universe, or it is not.
As a relative recently said, "You know the Internet, right? Let's do something and we'll make a lot of money!"
Judging an idea based on how happy those who believe it are seems like a dangerous heuristic.

If you are judging the truth of a premise sure, but for an attitude to take?
Yes. But it's closer to that goal than coding up test cases by hand. (If `closer' is a suitable expression for comparing infinite distances.)

SmallCheck and Lazy SmallCheck seem also to be worth a look. But I did not use them, yet.
Django-Lean: Split Test Django Applications
Seriously ridiculous hacks
Sensible.

Though writing a test case for an evolving API might be of benefit from time to time, because it forces you to use the API (and thus see if it is sensible).
I've always felt that RMS is basically an extremist (every movement has them). But I think that's actually a good thing. Yeah, he says some crazy things, but his ideas are always worth listening to. It's for the best that most of us don't take such a hard line, but I think it's a good thing to have someone like RMS constantly calling us out when we stray too far from the vision. The end goal should still be a world unencumbered by closed software. We don't want to get so busy implementing .NET that we forget about that.
I agree. For small projects I use the same pattern but in the global namespace. I normally also create an intentional closure when initiating the object, this way I can refer to the parent object regardless of whether it's methods have been copied away or not (like when you assign an object method to an event handler)

var testObject = function()
{
// Make sure the 'this' object is always available
// to the object's methods via the 'thisObj' variable
var thisObj = this;

this.publicVar = "This is a string";

this.alertBox = function()
{
alert( thisObj.publicVar );
}
}

object1 = new testObject();

window.onload = object1.alertBox
The metric system is simpler and better than the imperial system in every way but one. And that one is that there are more 12s or multiples of 12 in the imperial system, and so it is easier to split imperial measurements of every day measurements into thirds and quarters. And that is frequently very convenient. (The champion of divisibility is the acre, which is 22233511*11 square feet.)
You touched on the biggest weakness of RMS point of view. If you write software, you have to fundamental right to make it free or not. If you are on the receiving end, you only have to agree with the terms. RMS turns the roles around, and wants to make the user the owner of everything.
Will Hyperlocal Ever Scale? One Entrepreneur’s Story
I would like to think of web apps being kinda like memes rather than words. Word's dont go viral, memes do.
Legal threat closes free UK postcode feed
It's easier to learn to use the testing tools themselves on an artificial project, but I find that trying to build testing into an existing project teaches you different (and perhaps more useful) things. It really brings in to focus how to write (or rewrite) code to be testable, and you learn much faster when it's actually a huge win vs. when you would just be going through the motions. If a technique only works on (say) blog-post-sized Ruby projects, then that should be a red flag. Testing is a means to an end.
A patent for the proverbial genie
Sheer bloodyminded cultural momentum has a lot to answer for.

Thankfully, excepting the occasional conversion flub from NASA and structural engineers, Americans that need to use the metric system usually know how to use the metric system. So don't dismiss quite all of us as backwards wankers quite yet...
They're not, read again.

It's just that it does not generalize from Brian Eno to 'leaders in other fields'.

There are people that it applies to and there are those that it definitely doesn't apply to, in other words, being a leader in one domain does not automatically qualify one for comments on other fields, that varies on a case-by-case basis.

Brian Eno is exactly the kind of person for who it does seem to work.
Even if it did cost that much, did they learn nothing from the mars orbiter disaster? Pick a standard unit and stick to it. And make damn sure all your contractors use the same unit. Seems like the unit that every single country in the world is on would be a good one to choose.
Nasty banking Trojan heralds new wave of smarter crimeware
For software in education, for the state, or being used to access computerized tools needed for governance it certainly is a problem. If I can't access a government website because it's build to conform to the standards of a proprietary browser then it's everyone's problem. Same with using proprietary office applications or patent-encumbered formats.

The fact that a lot of public records are stored only to be used in proprietary software is a disturbing trend.
There is a whole bunch of these games now that allow you to train attributes and gain experience. I remember being hooked into MUDs, but those were really geeky. Now everyone has been turned into MUD players because they are much more approachable now.
I lost a lot of respect for Miguel when I learned about his political views in Mexican politics.
You know what has improved the quality of my code? Having every error on my live servers emailed to me. I feel compelled to fix it because I know that an actual user has had a problem.

I tried to do unit testing for a project. I'd write a method, then write some tests for it. Some observations:

* I thought that writing the tests would give me refactoring ideas for the actual methods. It did not.

* Running my test suite prior to each deploy saved me from shipping a bug once. Once.

* Writing tests is fucking boring.

This was all code that I knew the purpose of in advance. I have no idea how one writes tests when doing exploratory coding.
James Surowiecki: US consumers won't stay frugal forever
Theoretical breakthroughs in physics often have an immediate impact on the theory community, or are solving already 'big' problems (QED, QCD, etc). These tend to be recognized very quickly.

Engineering breakthroughs tend to take a bit longer to be recognized because determining whether they are significant takes much longer. There is a necessary grace period to see whether the breakthrough actually has impact.
Being lean & rapid experimentation: why some startups succeed and some die
I'm not convinced of that. I think that to some extent it was RMSs traumatic early career experiences that set him on the path of extreme inspiration that drove the development of some of the most impressive amounts of code by a single individual.

It takes real conviction to literally dedicate your life to projects like this, and RMS has that to spare.

He's not insane, he is just the opposite of politically correct, and while that can be charming in a person that is not the perceived spokesperson of a large community when you are you'd do well to moderate your language.

If you don't it costs because it gives your opponents plenty of opportunity to claim the moral high ground.

The funny thing here is that if RMS really wishes to see closed source vs open source as a battlefield then his way of going about waging the war aids the enemy by giving them a couple of really good opportunities to get him bad PR.

I don't think that's smart.
An observation from ~2500 years ago:
"People with opinions just go around bothering each other." —Siddhartha Gautama
VisTablet/Aiptek/Waltop under Debian Squeeze
About 15 years ago now, I remember watching a PBS news show where this question came up. One of the guests said that we would never leave the Imperial system because all the land in the US was surveyed and alotted in Imperial. The switching costs away from that were deemed too high.
the cost of converting outweighs the benefits according to some people.
Brute force? You can write a solver in 15 simple lines of Zimpl code (pun intended), that uses state-of-the-art constraint propagation and all that.

http://www.zib.de/Publications/Reports/ZR-05-51.pdf
A sneak peek at the new CS7004 embedded systems MSc course hardware
That's until you lose another space probe or two.
The Dangerous Perceptions of the New FTC Rules Explained [Part One]
That's a very interesting observation. The same goes for lots of other organizations, governments and so on.
First of a multi-part series explaining the dangers of the new FTC blogger guidelines for users on the web.
This reminds me of Doc Brown in 1955 before he invented his time machine. (In Back to the future)
Like "the right to read" or "Why schools should use FOSS"? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html .
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html . The essays on intellectual property? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-literary-patents.html

I'm sorry, but however much I disagree with a lot of RMS's opinions the man has been making spot-on predictions about the development of proprietary software for over 20 years and time has only been proving him right. While many of us appreciate de Icaza's efforts on GNOME, all Mono has done is provide more validation to a fundamentally proprietary platform, when that effort could have been spent creating a FOSS stack that could rival Java and .NET while trying to solve some of their problems.
"If the question begins, 'Why don't they…?' the answer is money."

-- Robert Heinlein
Replace linguistics with neuroscience (or more generally biology) and language with the brain (or more generally the body). Does your conclusion change? What does learning mean if we understand the biological processes that underlie it?
Ask HN: Really great Python code
So I've got an intermediate fluency with Python, but it's time for me to start writing some serious software and I'd like to get a feel for how things are Actually Done in Python.

Sifting through books is fun and all, but it seems to me that the most expedient route to cutting my teeth would be to dive into an existing code-base.

Is there a well written, publicly accessible Python project somewhere that can be perused to the end of getting an advanced feel for the language?
As there are so few of these students nationally

This seems to imply a definition. What definition are you talking about here? What is the source for the definition and the estimate of the frequency of such students?

P.S. As a point of information, I will mention that I have one child in the Davidson Institute for Talent Development Young Scholars program,

http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/

which has its particular definition of eligible students. To the best of my knowledge and belief, a typical school district in Minnesota (where school districts are considerably smaller than counties, unlike Maryland) has no more than one or two students who have gone through the enrollment steps for the Davidson Institute Young Scholars program. How many theoretically eligible young persons any one place has is unknown, as far as I know.
I always enjoy it when people have "going viral" as an important step in their business plan because it serves as a great warning that you're not going to get paid.
Thank you for the clarification. I'm not sure if that makes things better or worse -- now, without specific case law, it will be impossible to know whether you are in compliance.

For instance, is a disclosure page enough? What if you link to it at the bottom of the post? What if the disclosure itself is at the end of the post? Does the disclosure need to be on top? Does it need to be on top and more prominent than the rest of the text?

In general, I'm very uncomfortable with the creation of regulatory hurdles for bloggers. The penalty for the infraction itself isn't the only regulatory hurdle - it's a hurdle just to become familiar with the regulations that exist and confirm that you are in compliance.

Taken to the extreme, this makes it more challenging for any private citizen to use any form of media, including blogs and social networks, to express an idea, opinion, or endorsement.
That freedom stops as soon as you share it with someone else. While you can do whatever you want with your creations, those you share it with can also do whatever they want with your creations.

These fundamental freedoms can impede progress, and so the US constitution allows congress to enforce limited-time monopolies for authors on their intellectual creations. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
Why I Would Hire Game Developers for my Startup
My old boss used to pester me in this way all the time...funny thing is, he was the IT manager for the branch I was in.

Now you know why I still have to use COBOL quite a bit :(
It's only half a Shuttle launch. There has been ~100 launches. So this would add 0.5% to the budget.

They lost $125 million alone on the Mars Orbitor. Add the other crashes, and I think NASA has already lost more than it would cost to convert to metric.
Calorie Postings Don’t Change Habits, Study Finds
I use the created_at dates to do the segmenting upon running the report. It's not the most efficient way to do it, but it works.
You really don't think that universal computability is an important result? You've got 10 for every other century :p