skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did exactly the same thing when teaching physics in college for many years. I made the numbers easy, but made people memorize formulas. No calculators or "cheat sheets" allowed, but you could leave an answer as pi/sqrt(2).

I would tell the students: "The numbers should come out easy. If you get something weird, then one of us made a mistake!"

This simple change made a huge improvement in comprehension in the class. It wasn't about "number jamming" any more, but about learning.
TechCrunch editor no-shows yet again. What’s with that?
I like that the site shows a modal dialog after a few seconds, telling you to buy his book "Make Her Chase You". Presumably in a car pursuing your RV.
"IMHO there's no sound generalization to make about risk."

Sure there is: if you never take them, you'll be mediocre. Conversely, you can't be good without taking risks. Of course, it's stupid to claim that you should always take risks. For instance, I feel that playing Russian Roulette won't make you great. In fact, I'd say it's downright stupid.
All true.

Ubuntu's avowed mission is to bring Linux to the Masses. For the masses, a computer still "looks" like Windows. Ubuntu being a Funded initiative unlike Arch(my choice), Gentoo, Crunchbang et all needs to fund the development of typography on Linux.

Yes, its possible to download msttcorefonts (with some creativity you could also get the Consolas set of fonts) and get Cleartype or Os X type smoothing - but as long as its not the default , i am afraid there is no pushing Linux onto the masses.
They need multiple dimensions for rating. Production values, humor content, information content, etc.
This was just on LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3662

Only a couple of comments right now, but it might be worth cross-referencing later.
Not hard. It depends one what part of the country you're in, but a lot of truck stops and state parks have RV dump stations.

Basically you just hook up a 3" diameter hose from your RV to a pipe in the ground, pull a lever, and in a few minutes you're done.

RVs usually have two waste tanks; black water and grey water. You dump the black first and follow it up with the grey to clean the hose (the grey is shower and sink water).

It's really not a big deal.
This must be common; in Israel they've got somebody or other who comes up with Hebrew words to replace the imported ones, and they even teach them to hapless students like me, who go and use them and get laughed at.
Improving code using code metrics
Speaker's Tip: Don't tell the audience you aren't prepared
i don't find this cool. it is not elegant, it is certainly not a useful structuring of the data: eg, the quantitative elements were a list of strings when some of them could have been a list of "experience_in_years".

yuck data. that's my response. sounds like code monkey to me not proud-of-my-code-and-product job.
Ask HN: Review my experimental API
The first amendment to the US Constitution pretty much covers that. There isn't anything much than the government deciding what is true and what isn't, what can be said and what cannot.
This reminds me of a company in Ottawa that posted a job offer in the TXT records for their domain. Admittedly that company shortly later on went bankrupt in a billing dispute with Bell Canada, but still pretty cool.
As Colin mentioned if your cipher block size is the same as the hash output size there are no obvious attacks.

In practice your options to accomplish this are limited since any cryptographic hash under serious consideration (ie: not MD5) will produce an output longer than the block size of common symmetric ciphers (64 or 128 bits).

That means you have to choose a mode of operation to chain two or more blocks together and since you are constructing a MAC you are presumably going to use an unauthenticated one (or else it's turtles all the way down, right?).

What are some popular options to choose from?

ECB: You've reduced the collision resistance of your hash function to the block size of the cipher since you can now attack the output blocks independently.

CTR: Intercept message without delivering it. Extract keystream directly if the plaintext is known. Forge any arbitrary MAC. Game over.

CBC: Make sure not to leak any information about the difference between padding failure and MAC failure or else you have a padding oracle which can do many magical things, including possibly forge an arbitrary MAC.

Building a secure MAC construction in the way you've described is harder than it looks, mainly because symmetric ciphers themselves are unsafe to use without authentication.
Amnesia is kinda slick, and works well: http://github.com/benschwarz/amnesia
Breadth-First Numbering: An Algorithm in Pictures
One data point: IIRC, a benchmark I ran comparing memory consumption for Lua coroutines (co-operative threads) used roughly 1.3-1.4x as much memory on 64-bit as 32-bit.

I'm not sure if 1.25-1.5x would be accurate as a rule of thumb, but 2x is almost certainly too high. (It will depend on the data structures etc. involved.)
Kickass skillz, yeah. I just puked a little in my mouth.
Alright, this is a good proof. I therefore concede the point regarding the values themselves.
"notes": "during the interview, we will ask you to complete an assignment in a technology you will not have seen before"
I imagine they might have some sort of trade secret claim, but I don't think that provides any protection from independent discovery. (IANAL)
He's not. I have mine set to lime-ish green, but the highlights are still blue.
Hiring For Startups And Planning For Growth
Bah. I still can't forgive Google for wrapping everything sent though Gmail or Groups to 80 characters.
I really should revive the Sluice project. Keyword filtering and setting aside items are two of the most concrete intended features (alongside de-duplication and same-link post stacking).

I have to admit I was interested in exploring the social side with my app as well, so I'm glad Google made that mistake before I did. =^)

I just want a way to manage my river of news so that the can't-miss items aren't missed, and the always-skip items are skipped, and above all I should never be blithely offered the same exact link with the same exact metadata more than once. Everything beyond that is negotiable.
no big corporate lifers here (you know what I'm talking about)

actually I don't understand what they are talking about .. ?
cheers, that thread syncs exactly with some "away from the internet" time I had - so sorry for missing it.

Because I haven't been able to vote properly at all for about a week I was worried I'd triggered some random filter (well obviously I have in a way) that was going to last for life ;)
If I could upvote this article 1,000 points I would. I have dreamed about being a nomad for years. Even if this guy isn't really giving an "objective" view, just the fact that someone has actually transitioned to living in an RV fills me with delirious excitement.

I guess it's not appealing unless you are like me and feel horribly constrained by the social "need" to live in one place. Houses are for people with families and such. I belong on the road.
If only I could upvote you :)
Do they have an exclusive agreement to supply calculators that can be used on standardized tests?

In a great many cases, yes. That's why they never seen to change or innovate, and also why they're coming down like a load of bricks on anyone who hacks their firmware.
plaintext: Send an email to jobs@trajectoryinc.com, attach your resume, have in the subject line "READY WHEN YOU ARE"

notes: during the interview, we will ask you to complete an assignment in a technology you will not have seen before
The domain tasting companies -- I read a profile of one, whose name I unfortunately have forgotten, but this company seemed to have a ~$17MM annual run rate by bulk purchasing domain names, running ads on them, and returning the ones that didn't generate enough income during a trial week. Really really scummy business, and stupidly lucrative -- the founder was running the operation with himself and two employees.
Data-Oriented Desgin
sounds interesting; add my email (it's in my profile) to your lists if you have any - that's something my employer might be interested in in the near future.
> What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it. But this idea is fragile. Certainly language is a key aspect of what distinguishes one group from another. However, a language itself does not correspond to the particulars of a culture but to a faceless process that creates new languages as the result of geographical separation.

Here I differ with the writer. Culture and language are completely intertwined. I personally think that as globalization happens, culture is disappearing. We are left with just a bad copy of American culture (as exported by Hollywood).

A good example of culture and language being intertwined is my first language. Culturally you are taught to have respect for people older than you, better educated or more senior. You are not supposed to use the word “you” towards those people but use another word (to signify respect). This cultural view is completely lacking in English and especially in the English world view.

> English is very user-friendly as the world’s 6,000 languages go.

English may be not be as difficult as some languages - but it is definitely not the easiest. English is a bastard language which is built from many languages – therefore it is not that consistent.
Yeah, I just don't like making fun of the drawing style. "This just in stick figures are crude, etc. etc."
"tptacek explained". Nice.
agreed. what's up with the "z"s also? "skillzneeded" really?
Prestidigitization!
I would think that is the case if you exclude the environmental disaster that is LA, and the ecological harm done by flooding the imperial valley with water from Mono Lake.
Pretty good list, although I'm not sure how else you would expect 'finally' to function?
I don't live in an RV full time, but I have stayed in mine for months at a time, living and working.

Even a small RV is pretty big compared to a car. 20mpg is rare in RVs -- most get much worse.

Sewer and water usually isn't a problem. And most RV dealers that work on these things are setup to deal with folks that live full-time in the rig. If it requires overnight repairs they'll usually just roll it out for you to stay in at night and pull it back into the shop the next day.

The laundromat is a pain, but most truck stops have them and you can always use a laundry service.

Having friends over is possible but tight. Most often you can go over to their place. OTOH, most folks find RV trips a real adventure. One of my first dates with my wife was an RV trip.

Winter usually isn't a problem (depends where you live, though); RVs have propane for heat and cooking.

Cost is an issue, especially compared to owning a house. A house or condo (usually) appreciates in value. An RV depreciates like a rock. After 10 years the value of an RV plummets even more (a lot of RV parks don't allow rigs over 10 years old).
Beginning Django E-Commerce
I would say that you are correct. However, the total impact of cities is significantly higher.
It would be interesting to see a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating combined with an optional tag classification system.

I don't think the average user will ever really tag anything. But as long as there's a sufficient quantity of interested users who would, I think you could get a lot closer to statistically guessing why people might like/dislike certain videos.
Great work on the add-ons! It's great to see how quickly you moved this out of Beta.
I think I owned that modem. Ah, memories.
When you say "magic", what do you mean exactly? Where is the startup action? Or where is the fun/excitement/nightlife? If you meant the second, read on.

Lots of people seem to be recommending SOMA. As someone who lived in SOMA for almost 2 years, take my advice: SOMA sucks. Due to the large warehouses and apartment complexes, SOMA throws away one of the city's best traits: its human scale and the "walkability" that brings.

- Want to walk to a reasonably priced dinner within half a mile? You have about 4 choices if you're in SOMA.

- Want to go to a corner store at 10 PM? You're out of luck if you're in SOMA.

- Want to bar hop? You'll take about 3 hops if you're in SOMA.

- Want to feel like you're a part of a living city and meet other people? In SOMA (not counting the Embarcadero), you'll see about one person on the sidewalk every two blocks after business hours are over.

- Want to enjoy the city's grand views and expansive parks? In SOMA, get an apartment in a highrise and never leave it because that's the best you'll get.

-------------

If you're looking for a livable, walkable, lively section of the city, then you should check out Polk Gulch, North Beach, Hayes Valley, the Haight, and the Mission. They all have pros and cons, but they're all better than living in SoMa.

However, this is all moot if you just want to check out the startup scene in SOMA and not actually stay there for more than a day or two.
for anyone who finds the Ubuntu mirrors to be too slow due to being hammered on the first day of release, we just posted a technique for quickly making your own private, temporary Ubuntu mirror on EC2: http://blog.jumpbox.com/2009/10/29/instant-ubuntu-mirror-usi...

sean
What are the details on water and sewage? My guess is this is a huge hassle outside an RV park. I don't get why the article didn't touch on this.
Where are you getting this info? iPhone 3G came out a year before the Pre...
great ebook on pricing: http://www.neildavidson.com/dontjustrollthedice.html
Great free ebook on pricing software
> Let's think of Python 3 as Perl 6 that got done on schedule.

That seems silly to me. Guido announced that he'd start working on Python 3000 part time in early spring 2000; that's eight and a half years.

Now compare the goals of Python 3 to the goals of Perl 6. Python 3 didn't really change much over Python 2, in comparison. Sure, Python 3 came out a little bit sooner than Perl 6, but it was also a lot less work to produce.
The no inherent virtue in "small town" America is really off the mark and inappropriate.

And as noted elsewhere, it isn't the per-capita environmental load that is important, it is the total load. Aside from CAFO and other agricultural environmental costs, the total rural load might be small. And you can't attribute the agricultural load to the people living there, because the food goes to the cities to be consumed.
No love for nokia n900 :( Though it is not out yet

http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/specifications/

Only comes unlocked in US, 3G only works on tmobile.
I am honestly having a hard time believing someone with decent eyesite can say ubuntu(3) is fuzzy while osx(1) is not,

ubuntu obviously chooses sharpness over balance (H and E), however osx has virtually every lowercase character heavily aliased, its blurry to the point where its almost 2 shades lighter than its supposed to be and there are individual characters A, u, B, a where it is almost a joke
Well, there is an interesting effect. Some of the jokes in XKCD are so bad that explaining them dryly has the unintended consequence of making them funnier. For example, http://bit.ly/UiiM5.
I would exempt Paul Buchheit because this is an integral part of all his talks.
I'd like to reiterate the lack of good debuggers for not just Clojure, but also free CL implementations. I haven't branched out much recently, but is sbcl/SLIME still state-of-the-art for lisp debugging in the open source world?
No, but my real time search engine that I created to compete with Bing! does. :)
The weakness of the ubiquitous feature matrix is that you can't just put a check mark next to "usability".
Article compared the iPhone 3GS, which is the latest model iPhone and hit the market June 2009. Note that "iPhone 3G" and "iPhone 3GS" are different models.
Very cool paper. A bit long.
From Scoble post about GReader:
>> 3. It makes me feel guilty. I have 1,000 unread items. Twitter doesn’t tell me that.

Actually, I happen to agree with this point. The feed reader tracks what is read and what is unread, and that can develop into a unhealthy habit to check "what is new" and try to "clear the feeds" from unread items several times per day.

Recently, my experience is that GReader (or any feed reader in general) tends to consume quite a lot of time, even too much time. So like Scoble, I am also looking for a better solution, which might include twitter (but twitter lists isn't it for me).
(i) turning on the radio (traffic)
maybe, if traffic is on right then and if they are covering this accident. Even then you only get one perspective, and that possibly filtered through several layers unless its from the guy in the chopper.

ii)Google maps - tells you if there is traffic and is wrong 50% of the time. The 50% of the time I pay attention to it.

(iii) visiting Pandora's blog - I highly doubt they managed to blog about this momentary outage. It was back up in under 5 minutes.

Google is getting much faster with implementing real-time search results, but those results have to be added to the web in order to search them. And who adds these things to the web? Twitter users.
I described the actual process in reply to another comment a few messages down.

You can dump the waste and fill up with fresh water at a lot of different places. Most Flying J truck stops have an RV dump and potable water supply, as do many highway rest stops and state parks. Some RV dealers have facilities, too. And there's always RV parks like KOA, but you generally have to pay a small fee to dump and get water here if you're not staying the night.

Also, the RV community is friendly and connected online. Some folks have installed dump stations at their homes for their own RVs and will let you use that in a pinch if you ask nicely.
For better comparison, here is Windows with ClearType switched on (#2):

http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/font-cleartype.png
The hat also resembles all manner of Safari hats and is pretty close to a stick figure representation of the black hat conference.

Ok, you went searching for the funny and never found it. Look, even in satire, implying someone is a racist is bad (I really hope this is satire and the "At some point" sentence is not actually serious).

As for the eww, check the forum http://bit.ly/4rD9cU for an explanation.
It's not that I expect it to work differently. It's more like: "oh, you can do that, that's interesting".

And the question is, how to exploit this behaviour. Does it mean that I can effectively rewrite return values? Can I access the original return parameters? Can it be used as a substitute of goto? (cascaded loops, that end up in return, which is than captured by finally)
The example of Gaelic here in Ireland is a poor one. The attempt to preserve the language has been badly handled. It is compulsory for every child to learn Gaelic through first and second level education, and never spoken afterwards (except for one or two areas totaling less than 1% of the population).

Many people end up resenting Gaelic after being forced to learn it for no practical purpose. This is a shame because it is a beautiful language to read and speak.
Why You Must Solve the First User Experience, First
Oy veh, I was looking at this and thinking this was a blog for a dude named "Bill Shrink", not a blog for bargain hunters (as in "shrink my bills").
Assuming that by "magic" you are looking to network for business opportunities rather than socialize and be a tourist, then you are probably better served by starting off with a scan of meetups and semi-organized gatherings that fit your needs and work back to a location from there. Since your schedule seems a bit open I would see if there is a major conference of some sort in the area that you want to attend. Arrive a couple of days before the conference to do a bit of preliminary face-to-face networking, work the conference, and then have a plan to follow-up in person with leads and related meetups and gatherings.

Depending on what your company is doing, your are probably going to be better off looking at the Palo Alto & Mountain View area for housing -- there are hacker houses and extended stay hotels available, possibly some short-term rentals, and SF is just a train ride away. Most of the bay area tech scene is not actually in SF and being mid-peninsula will give you more options.
Is it just me or does this not mention the keyboard, which is going to be a huge selling point for many Blackberry addicts?
Spontaneity? Or announcing a lack of preparation at the beginning?

As Jason notes in the article, spontaneity can be a huge boon. I don't immediately see how the latter can be, though it's possible.

I suppose paul may truly be an exception, but it seems that I would get just as much out of his talks (which is to say, a ton) whether or not I knew how much time he had spent in preparation.
Not really. It's just "unfunny" and "uninteresting description of unfunny".

Now, if there were an additional level of description, something could be salvaged.

"The writer of the explanation characterizes a 'full rugby uniform' as lacking any trousers, belt, or shoes to invoke homophobic stereotypes about the English."

...Meh, maybe not even that would help.
NYTimes Has Gone LOD (Linked Open Data)
All the kool kidz are doing it.
Was the Paul Buchheit one there? That's the one I most wanted to see, but it seems to have been skipped in the recording.
Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web
"Even in satire, implying someone is a racist is bad".

This bodes ill for The Producers, doesn't it?
BULK SMS LUDHIANA
How Critics Reviewed the Original Macintosh in 1984
Can we please stop this "analogy?" As someone living in a area full of small horse farms, it makes me want to scream every time I see it :-)

Cars didn't kill the equine industry: they just made it more profitable since horses went from being commodities to companion animals and, to some people, luxury items.
"Everything* just worked. We took a snapshot at 1.1.0, and we didn't update it. [* The JVM does SEGV on us occasionally. Internal error, which we have not diagnosed.]"

How are memory protection errors just a footnote?
http://jsonformat.com/ is my friend.
RE: Winter - My thought is that, despite having a heater, living in an RV might be pretty rough during a Midwest winter. I'm sure it could be done, but I'd wonder about the level of insulation, heating efficiency, etc. I would also wonder about snow accumulation and road handling in inclement conditions (including downpours and high winds).
You laugh but there is a lot of truth in that!

I have an Eee 1000 which had a 40gb SSD - there are two reasons that you can't get that today.

- SSD prices have gone up.

- You can't put the cheap version of Windows on a device with a large SSD, so in the interest of rationalising product lines you can only get small SSDs or hard disks.

If Windows can't be put on the device then at least the second pressure won't exist.
Hi folks,

This is the experimental project I've been working for last couple of weeks.

It is HTTP API to access IM networks.

Why do we need it? For example, IM status message is really interesting place to publish real-time status updates that haven't been exploited yet by web applications. Twitter is really not suitable for high frequency updates coming from media players or live scores of games. That kind of information doesn't have historical value and it doesn't make any sense to store them at all.

Here's the API documentation:
http://apiim.atamurad.com/apidoc.html

Simple tutorial:
http://apiim.atamurad.com/tutorial.html

Any feedback is appreciated.
wow dude you are pretty hilarious.