skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is naïve, but it wasn't an uncommon belief that Obama might have personally authored at least a few of those tweets, and certainly nobody stopped anyone from believing that. Not that I care either way at this point what he does or has done with that Twitter account.

I know plenty of other politicians and public figures have ghostwritten Twitter accounts. I was rather bummed to find out that the Mayor of LA had one ghostwritten while his office initially acted like he was either writing them himself or giving direct approval to tweets not written by him (and even a little drama over that whole incident).
If they are really trying to save screen real estate by shrinking the width of scrollbars, they have wasted lots of it between the empty spaces between the windows.
I agree with you. With modern computers scrollbars are only to get sense of the length of the document.
美利坚合众国（英文：USA ），简稱美國，旧称花旗國，是由50个州和一个聯邦地區组成的聯邦立宪制共和国。美国本土位於北美洲中部，东濒大西洋，西滨太平洋，北靠加拿大，南接墨西哥及墨西哥湾；首都华盛顿哥伦比亚特区与除夏威夷州和阿拉斯加州之外的48个州都位于美國本土。

This is half of the first paragraph of the simplified Chinese entry for the United States in Wikipedia. I cheated a bit to bring it under length: the 英文 portion actually spelled out United States of America. It clocks in at about 138 characters.

A rough translation from someone who is not literate in Chinese just to show you the information density:

---

The United States of America (English: USA), referred to commonly as the United States, formerly known as the United States [editor's note: anachronistic Chinese 花旗國 rather than 美國], consist of 50 states and one federal district, forming a constitutionally established federal republic. The United States is located in the center of North America, bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean and in the west by the Pacific Ocean, on the north by Canada and the South by Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico. The capital is Washington, DC. It is comprised of Hawaii, Alaska, and the 48 contiguous states.

---

[Edit: I was curious so I checked in Japanese, too, to substantiate my feeling that it would be at the midpoint between Chinese and English. Yep.

アメリカ合衆国（アメリカがっしゅうこく、英：United States of America）、通称アメリカまた合衆国（合州国）、米国（べいこく）は、北アメリカ大陸および北太平洋に位置する連邦共和国。
イギリスの北米植民地が1776年7月4日に独立を宣言して成立した国家である。

---

The United States of America (insert pronunciation guide in Japanese here, English: United States of America), usually referred to as America, the United States (the US), or another way to say the US in Japanese is a federal republic located on the North American continent and in the north Pacific Ocean.

The United States of America was founded a nation when the North American colonies declared their independence from England on July 4th, 1776.]

---

And, for the comparison to English, here is what fits in a Tweet:

The United States of America (commonly referred to as the United States, the U.S., the USA, or America) is a federal constitutional republic

There wasn't enough space for the period.
Too much duct-tape, imo.

SPIT and SLURP are just one argument functions without much control. If the language was a bit more Lispy, they wouldn't even be standard functions, but something left to the programmer. For example:

1) There is no control over input file character encoding.

2) No provision for reading from non-file streams; say, you want to "slurp" input from a socket stream, N octets or up to a certain EOF delimiter. You have no control with clojure in that regard, at least with SLURP/SPIT, you will have to use Java modules with weird dot and bracket syntax.

3) What happens if the file you're attempting to read doesn't exist? what happens if there is no input in the file yet (should you block or return an error or return EOF?)

4) What happens if the file you're writing to doesn't exist? create? err? What if it exists? truncate? append? err?

Separate between files, streams, sequences, and I/O methods and you will have a clean user-extensive framework for I/O.

(defgeneric slurp (stream
&optional &key
element-type
external-format
if-exists
if-does-not-exist)
"Reads contents of element-type from stream")

And now in haste, implement that for files, reading back character input in the given external-format encoding.

(defmethod slurp ((path pathname)
&optional &key
(element-type character)
external-format
(if-exists :supersede)
(if-does-not-exist :create))
(with-open-file (file path :element-type element-type
:external-format external-format
:if-exists if-exists
:if-does-not-exist if-does-not-exist)
(let ((buf (make-array (file-length file)
:element-type element-type)))
(read-sequence buf file)
buf)))

We have provided sane defaults for file existence conditions, and we can call it as this:

(slurp #p"/etc/passwd") ;; read file in default encoding

(slurp #p"/home/mahmud/sales/mideast2009Q2.txt :external-format :utf-8)

(slurp #p"/var/log/hunchentoot/access.log"
:if-does-not-exist :error)

Then, you can just write more methods for any new stream you need to deal with. You can refactor the GF signature to take length as an argument, then for socket streams:

(defmethod slurp ((stream socket-stream) .. length)
(let ((buf (make-array length .. :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8))))
(read-sequence buf stream)
buf))

None of this is new ground, btw, the API has existed for 25+ years, just USE IT.
Ruff Poker | Poker Strategy | Poker Rules
Players from the U.S. and around the world are welcome to play at Full Tilt which is one of reasons that they are one of the largest online poker rooms.
Duby is a particularly interesting language, essentially offering an improved Java syntax. Unlike other X-on-JVM languages, there's no runtime library or type system which slows things down.

But the really cool thing is doing the equivalent of meta-programming by making the compiler support plugins.
I've experimented lately with both a company info@ address on a company homepage and personal e-mail on my own homepage.

Given Gmail's excellent spam filter, I think the practice of disguising an e-mail address is no longer necessary. I haven't received spam on either address.

Has anyone else experimented recently and found something different?
The problem was not that they invented this stuff, but that people took it seriously. Let's break the cycle with Go.
Titan Poker | Poker Bonus Codes
Players like Mike Matusow, Chris Ferguson and Phil Ivey are regulars on the high stakes tables. The largest pots in the history of online poker can be found at Full Tilt Poker. Whenever you play at a real money tables you will earn Full Tilt Points. These points can be used to buy into special tournaments or purchase merchandise from the Full Tilt store.
Yeah, more generally the advice could be not to be so attached to any of the stacks, just know the stuff that doesn't change that much (algorithms, protocols, etc.) and get your stuff done with whichever tool is at hand.
It's really trivial to code for it, so I'd guess it never fooled anybody with half a brain or the will to alter a simple regexp.
Or for a more quantitative approach, with 1.7 Chinese characters per English word[1] and an average English word length at 5.1 letters[2], then somewhere around 420 characters.

(But of course, it really depends on the nature of the text.)

[1] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002379.h...
[2] http://blogamundo.net/lab/wordlengths/
The default behavior of most apps is to not show scrollbars unless there's scrollable content. So it would be inconsistent to have a web browser behave differently.
Whatever floats your boat I guess...
I like Tkacik’s piece better than Pinker’s.

These two Blink reviews from 2005 are worth mentioning too:

- http://www.tnr.com/article/blinkered

- http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17954
When I absolutely had to print out code, 17+ years ago, I remember it being 66 lines on a US letter sized sheet (don't care to calculate what pitch that would be, or the font size -- whatever HP LaserJets would print by default if you sent plain text ASCII data to port 9100 directly. My university also had those terrible green banded fan-fold paper line-printers that was like 200 columns wide and maybe 80-100 lines. We referred to both of these as "pages".

Now, I don't know anyone who measures code in "pages". This isn't a good metric when most projects are made up of multiple files. It's as good as measuring productivity in LOC.
140 characters in Korean also go a long way. My Korean-speaking (and Chinese, for that matter) Twitter followers manage to write the English equivalent of entire paragraphs in 140 characters (and unfortunately, some of them like to rant in multiple tweets in a row instead of going to a blog to do so).

So while I see some tweets in Korean that are similar to ones in English where the message is short and to the point, they're side by side with those paragraph-like tweets that break how I read twitter because they're addressing something more deeply than would be possible in one tweet in English. I can only speculate this 140-character difference both ways also causes differences in use with other languages.
RedBean: On The Fly ORM For PHP
Why is it a strange question ?
You make a very good point and I appreciate the suggestion. I suppose getting caught up in the new and cutting edge is really less important than understanding those core concepts and ideas as you've mentioned. I suppose in some light I've already done this and just hadn't realized it. My last job was my first experience with the Microsoft Stack and I worried about picking things up quickly enough. However, even the limited experience I had with VB, PHP and MySQL had exposed me to enough general programming concepts that picking up ASP and SQL Server proved to be far less difficult than I had imagined. Thanks for reminding me of this.
The ones who are dumb enough to fall for it are too dumb to bypass your spam filter anyway.
And where on the list are the types that aren't obsessed with data and in love with polls? How much should we move them up to compensate for their relative lack of participation?

If we presume that the prevalence of polls of this sort has increased here at HN, and we presume that attitudes toward polls correlates to personality type, what would the results have looked like for an earlier HN? Is there possibly a type that drools only for accurate data? (one-tenth smiley)
pylons
That's right, miniscule short-lived sound bites for self important people who love to be "followed" by others.

Even though this sounds like it could have been invented by politicians I feel some relief that Obama does not waste his time on tweeting things like "Humbled".
Austin Maddocks' First Site - Home
Silent auction software
Silent Auction Software to help increase donations from charity events
Third, he applies a quote from Linus Torvalds about the Linux kernel to distributions (or programs).
Another very good idea and something I hadn't thought of. As I mentioned, I'm only 1 week into the new job, but was given wind of a new project coming in that's going to require a classic ASP webapp to be migrated over to ASP.NET. This may be a great opportunity for me to do just what you've outlined.
http://exploits.astalavista.com they have a new section that accepts submissions
On the contrary. For that reason I use plain Engrish to obfuscate my email address. Something like
"To get my email address, append @gmail.com to my last name."

I was tempted to use a Python snippet for that, but decided that maybe some non-geeks should be able to email me too.
And this woman finally meets the man of her dreams (needs)
There's nothing worse than non native scrollbars lagging, not doing as you expect them to.

Flash scrollbars, these 'infinite ajax scrollbars', and this google scrollbar all fail miserably IMHO.
Rails-like console for any Rack based ruby web app
You realize every time you speak ill of someone in their absence, you're dead to all those present? Specially a former lover.

Where I grew up, badmouthing women would cost you social-face, then your jaw meets with a high-speed pavement.
What game?

I suppose I was referring to the fact that I jumped on board with using the Microsoft Stack starting with classic ASP when they were well into ASP.NET 2.0. It was also a reference to the fact that I had one programming class in High School, never went to college and didn't get my first programming gig until I was 26.

What really makes you think you have to keep up with the latest technology? Are you just trying to keep up with the other code monkeys, or do you really want to learn something?

Very relevant question and something I hadn't paused to consider. At first thought, I'd say it's a little of both which tells me I should really take some time to evaluate that and go from there.

Thanks for your suggestion with Lisp as well. As someone else pointed out, it should be more about learning underlying concepts and ideas of programming and less about the language, framework or etc. I would imagine there are some great fundamentals I could learn by taking on a language like Lisp that, as you mentioned, would be well outside my comfort zone.
It isn't really fair to compare Drupal to Django. One is a CMS and the other is an MVC app framework. The article pretty much beats up Drupal for not being an MVC app framework.

If you are looking to build a website, Drupal is awesome. If you are looking to build a web app, Drupal is painful, and something like Django (or RoR, CodeIgniter, etc) is a great solution. Comparing the two is like comparing a hammer to a saw. They are both good tools for different jobs.
Absolutely not, so that's why my email address is in plain sight where ever I go.

Spam filters are there to take care of spam, not silly rules that are trivially easy for computers to deal with but harder for humans (who might be scanning for the '@' character on a page simply to see if there is an email address there).
Title would be better as "CVE-2009-3379: Mozilla Firefox Multiple Vulnerabilities"
Why think when you can measure.

http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfus...

That said, I use Gmail, and simply don't suffer enough from spam to bother with any other method to reduce it. (And I say this as a guy who was employed writing anti-spam filters for a while.)
The link is wrong, it should be http://nikhilmisal.com/2009/11/16/200-javascript-jquery-tuto...
Actually, I'm pretty sure this is another version of the Picasa scrollbar, which has been around for a few years:

http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20090102/PIcasaMac-main_610x449.p...
Disclaimer: This is just my opinion, vaguely based on my experiences, and there are probably counter-examples that proove me wrong in certain circumstances.

Memory footprint is very much of a concern not because we wouldn't have memory -- we do -- but because we still have disks that maybe fast by the 90's standards. And all that bloat gets partially loaded to memory at some point or another. And offloaded to swap or discarded, and then again loaded when needed. Disks kill performance.

And if you do anything complicated with your computer you'll end up to the disks eventually, if not for anything else that Linux kernel favors I/O buffers by default so a big file copy can turn much of your running image dirty.

That's why it can take seconds to start up a Firefox or a half a minute to start Ubuntu. You can speed that up with hacks but it doesn't cure the underlying reason.

I think the magnitude of the problem is pretty much revealed in the blog post where RES-SHR for gnome-terminal is a whopping 9 megabytes. How the FSCK can a simple terminal possibly waste 9 megabytes of actual memory? Why the hell does my Nautilus process that is effectively doing nothing but display a few fancy icons on my desktop consume 12 megabytes of memory?

I'm not kidding. There's no reason we couldn't have a system that boots to full desktop in less than a second. There's no reason we couldn't have these programs take tens of kilobytes in size, eating at most hundreds of kilobytes of memory -- with the same user experience. We just need to scoop up all program data in one big disk read and then unleash our horde of 3GHz CPU cores at them.

I sometimes wonder how much faster a Linux desktop would be if it was compiled with -Os rather than -O2/-O3. The CPU speed isn't the bottleneck, a typical Ubuntu desktop does nothing CPU intensive. I suspect that even a high-level bytecode environment would probably increase the responsiveness of the system in spite of being interpreted because the program code would take less space and fit better in caches.

It's NOT all right to dismiss this as a non-problem just because we have loads of RAM.
I just checked my website before remembering that I don't have any colour on there at all. None.

It's all black, white and grey.

I am a diversity badass it seems.
I'm guessing that most people check which lists they're in. I do. (I'm only in 11 lists so it was easy for me.) If so, the point about the viral loop doesn't stand.
Egypt launches Arabic web domain
Thanks for the link, I've added it to my bookmarks for stuff I wanted to review in the coming weeks and will definitely be checking it out.

I also see what you mean about being too quick to jump onto the bandwagon. I realize it's in debate right now, but there IS talk that Linq to SQL will be replaced by Linq to Entities. So with that (and the comments people are posting about learning the meat and not the seasoning), not diving into it a year ago when I first heard about it may not have been such a missed opportunity after all.
City Wi-Fi switched off over movie download
The scrollbars are ALWAS there. Even when not needed. Taking up valuable screen real estate. Just for the eventuality that they will be necessary. In the future.

Maybe not misguided, but not an ideal solution either. Google's seems better.
It's nice to see a design critique where the author actually acknowledges that it's ultimately impossible to judge the success of a design without knowing the context in which it was created.
As several others have noted below, I need to take a step back and figure out if I'm wanting to be on the cutting edge because I'm really motivated to learn or if I'm more concerned with keeping up with the trends. I know that for the foreseeable future, I'll be working with the MS Stack as it's my means of living. Of course, if they stick with what works and don't deviate from the norm too much - it would be much easier for me to spend time to learning something like Lisp (as someone had mentioned) or digging into another platform or language as you've suggested.

I did sign up for the iPhone Dev Program and buy an iPod Touch at the same time the Dev Program launched, but stress at my previous job left little motivation for me to program in my free time. My dev license/subscription ran out and I sold my iPod a while back, but perhaps it's time to revisit it or the Android platform.

I definitely have some options and some stuff to think about. Thanks!
Retaking The Streets
Half in U.S. Would Pay for Online News, most other w countries would pay more
The Wikipedia paradox
Simply-Buttons v2 : p51 Labs
That space is already there for aesthetic reasons (visual separation of content, etc.).

You'll notice that the scrollgadget is overlayed ON TOP of the that separation space/margins. Very visible when switching beteen a very short (non-scoll) wave and a long, paginated one.

Genius!
Yes, data are helpful. Regularly updated data: more so - because they would enable us to see whether/when spammers are adjusting their methods to accommodate our latest obfuscations.
Meta-comment: It's actually a good way to increase your site's popularity; invent a game to take advantage of people's inclination for playing monday-morning quarterbacks without providing any real value, but feeling productive (gee, I thought real deep on this one!) nonetheless.
Kudos to netsetter for developing a good marketing tool.
There are thousands of paradoxes like this one.
Indeed. With the xorl title I was expecting an article about quickly setting a register to zero and various other optimization tricks.
You can redirect I/O in Clojure, so you possibly can spit/slurp things other than files. I was sure you could use with-input-stream and with-output-stream but I don't see it now.. oh well. Anyway, this (taken from Wikipedia) works with standard I/O and I can only assume ti works with file I/O too (if not, then I agree this is a flaw in the Clojure library design):

(def bit-bucket-writer
(proxy [java.io.Writer] []
(write [buf] nil)
(close [] nil)
(flush [] nil)))

(defmacro noprint
"Evaluates the given expressions with all printing to *out* silenced."
[& forms]
`(binding [*out* bit-bucket-writer]
~@forms))

(noprint
(println "Hello, nobody!"))

In any case, I see nothing wrong with having these things part of the library. Sure, you could write them yourself, but everyones busy these days, so common tasks should come packaged with the language in the form of a standard library. This is one thing that attracted me to Clojure - an extensive library (and even more so if you count the Java libraries that you get with it, at little extra effort).
Quantum algorithm for solving linear systems of equations
Note to Microsoft: when a top-tier competitor snaps up your recently discarded "trash" employees, perhaps that's a prime indication you made a mistake.

I don't know what's going on with the top leadership at MS but there doesn't appear to be much. They've done some good technical work (Win7 for example), but they keep making huge missteps. Windows Mobile is a train wreck. Bing was a step in the right direction, away from the horrific Live search, but MS has already started patting themselves on the back instead of buckling down for the remaining hard work it'll take for them to make bing better than google. MS is quietly bumbling into becoming a dilbert company, if they continue on this path at some point they will hemorrhage talent at an unsustainable rate and find themselves a company of increasingly diminishing relevance and prospects.
Whoa that's pretty cool. I use a mix of javascript and html entities on my company's site. Seems to work pretty well.
What do you mean by "simple math captchas"... where the distorted characters display something like "2 + 3 =" - and I'm supposed to type 5 or five?

Or are you simply using a simple math question (un-captcha'd)?

I've been experimenting with my own db of questions that can be answered with a word - including simple arithmetic and simple reasoning such as "Which is warmer? Hot or cold?" - and finding almost no spammer cares enough about my sites to develop a decoding table for comment submission [that would of course change if I were Amazon, etc.]

All of this is moot, of course, if some spammer were to care enough about auto-registering/emailing my site to get porn-visitors to solve the questions/captchas in order to "see more".
Unfortunately, when copying and pasting the right-to-left version, the text becomes left-to-right again (i.e. backward).
If your mouse has a proper acceleration curve (as, for instance OS X does, or Linux can be made to), then moving the mouse slowly → small movements, and tiny targets and small movements are pretty easy to manage.
Abs exercises
Try these effective abdominal exercises using our 3D video animations. Learn from the tips of professional athletes
A Commercial Handyman is Indispensable for any Commercial Establishment 
Commercial establishments like restaurants, company offices, retail showrooms, rented apartments and hotels, will need regular maintenance and also there will be many things that malfunction that need repairing. The perfect solution for all these problems is to hire the commercial handyman.