skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Too late for what? This is the Internet. You're allowed to make an ass out of yourself sometimes.

I remember when I came on here and criticized Delicious and got in an argument with joshu because I didn't know who he was. If anything, I'd like more anonymity, because the people I do know I sometimes tiptoe around.
scipy still doesn't have a good submodule for doing manipulations with multivariate gaussians, which is a HUGE part of machine learning applications.

I'm referring to the analog of R's mvtnorm library.

Yes, you can use rpy2. Yes, you can roll your own dmvnorm (but be careful about the degenerate situations with zero eigenvalues that always arise in high dimensional problems with real data). It is significantly more of a pain to roll your own pmvnorm, because you are now talking about efficient computation of high dimensional integrals, which always seems to involve a trip to Numerical Recipes or the like (see the Genz and Miwa references when you do "?pmvnorm" in R).

Basically this is a huge thing to lack.

PS: yes, if you grep the codebase, you can find this: http://www.scipy.org/doc/api_docs/SciPy.stats.kde.gaussian_k...

But you need to write wrappers because it doesn't provide a basic interface to the multivariate gaussian density.

I could go on about other parts of scipy -- it has some advanced stuff but lacks a lot of basics...
These are all good points.

Even if one were to figure out just how to target the clinically-paranoid parental market, I doubt there's enough daylight between this idea and the cell phone. Cell phones are in continuous contact with authorities and come with video and audio. But kids actually want to carry cell phones. Having a cell phone gives you capabilities. Wearing a single-purpose electronic leash that's attached to your mom just leads to embarrassment.

Could one market this to the parents of kids too young for cell phones? What kid is that, exactly? Infants don't roam very far, and any kid older than three can use a cell phone. That cell phone will almost certainly be cheaper than this device, and the kid that can be trusted not to break, lose, or perpetually forget to carry this device can probably also be trusted with that cheap cell phone.
The Dead Zone: The Implicit Marginal Tax Rate
It ain't CPAN yet, but I think "no libraries" is an over-statement: http://golang.org/pkg/
Nice. Thank you. I just noticed...
A transport stream (that is used in digital TV and Blu-Rays amongst other things) segments video/audio into 184 byte payloads. It's not that much different really.
In Silicon Valley, the "pitch" level of nda is basically worthless and not much better than not having one at all. For this reason, anyone pitching for investment money will not be (or at least should not be) relying on any form of nda to protect anything that is truly proprietary (i.e., distinctive to that company and giving it a significant competitive advantage) and confidential, at least until negotiations reach an advanced stage and a strong comfort level is established.

That said, in almost every other context, confidentiality agreements are invaluable ways to protect competitive advantage and, indeed, if a company fails to use them, it may legally compromise the right to protect its trade secret information. That is why companies use these as a matter of course, both with employees and with contractors.

Such agreements do not protect abstract ideas (which are basically in the public domain for the most part) and do not subject the recipient to risk if the recipient had pre-existing knowledge of any information from a separate source.

Thus, the argument not to sign an nda really amounts to saying that the consultant doesn't want to be hassled with a small extra burden even while asking for the privilege of working with the company's most closely protected information. For 99% of the cases, this argument will go nowhere.

The fact that some companies that have essentially worthless information use nda's, or that nda's are sometimes abused, does nothing to change the above fundamentals.

Of course, if an nda is onerously worded, it should be negotiated (and rejected, if insisted upon) - but that does not dispense with the need of an nda that is bona fide for the needs of the situation.
I agree. There is a time and a place for signing an NDA. Don't sign everything that crosses your desk just to get the initial meeting and don't try to avoid signing one as part of finalizing a contract with a good client.

An NDA protects you as a consultant as well. That is, if you're smart enough to make sure it's bidirectional.

Always make sure every NDA has an expiration date for the obligation to keep the information secret (not just for the contract itself). Tech knowledge has a shelf life and you don't want to be on the hook for backing up 10-year-old data because it's impossible to prove you've destroyed it.

Note I am not in the web consulting business so there are slightly different sensitivities.
There are other control flow options available. For example they offer the following simple example of what they call goroutines:

ch := make(chan int);
go sum(hugeArray, ch);
// ... do something else for a while
result := <-ch; // wait for, and retrieve, result

You can actually set up any complex mess you want of functions talking to other functions through channels. This gives you coroutines, threading, etc. Looking through the spec, it looks like they have anonymous functions and closures as well.

While I agree that they need to add exceptions, they do have some interesting things in there already.
You have to love a project where the designers are sitting on irc fixing build bugs as they come in. (No, this isn't unique for opensource projects, but it's always great to see.)

Thanks for giving me something to do with all my free time for the next couple of weeks.
On that note, even insults are better when delivered using words with positive connotations.
The main selling point is compile time.

Sweet...
Just ask for an initial conf call to discuss the project, leaving out the most sensitive details. They can decide what is too sensitive. If they won't even tell you the gist of the project without an NDA, they're probably not a good client and you should walk away.
Another question: have you ever decided on a tone for a particular writer and then much later saw a video of the person talking which completely blew away all of your assumptions?
Just have to throw in some positive notes on this one. I use this actually from a VM on Mac Snow Leopard and it works great. Personally I don't install IE6 only on my VMs. With Spoon I can test IE6-8, Opera, Chrome, and Firefox all at once. So don't bash just nod with the first person who mentioned it doesn't work on OSX and move on.
i'm all for cross pollination.

i wish python would rip off ruby's fileutils library. the *nix function naming conventions are beautiful (e.g. rm, rm_r, rm_rf). python's mish-mash of os + shutil requires a deep dive into the docs to find the equivalent methods (os.remove, shutil.rmtree)
I don't see why it's interesting. Frameworks and APIs are currently more important than languages.
Darn. Would love to go guys but I have business in Las Vegas next week... seriously, it's for business.
1. My apartment was Reddit HQ before we got bought. Where else would we have put the backups?

2. As best I can recall, the only thing on the web nodes was a source code checkout. I don't think that's particularly sensitive.

3. As ig1 notes, back then we had unencrypted passwords in the database and database copies on our machines, which were our personal laptops, so a spare drive in the apartment was the least of our problems.
already in book form:

http://www.amazon.com/Twitter-Wit-ebook/dp/B002LUHZB4/ref=dp...
We already have a well thought out and award winning business plan written. But I'm sure we can all agree that business plans mean nothing without execution. And execution in our case, means design and development.
And for C, see makeheaders http://www.hwaci.com/sw/mkhdr/
Murdoch bets on survival without Google
Firefox Image Editor: 14 Lines of Code
Well I was just saying that people within our market understand what a great opportunity our idea is. However, for some reason, we aren't able to get the web designers and developers we need, interested in working with us, without providing immediate financial compensation.
There's nothing wrong with offering up your own NDA. You'll usually lose if you're negotiating with a company with in-house legal, but for small gigs, that's a fine way to handle the problem.

There's also nothing wrong with refusing to sign an NDA in the early stages of a pitch, and I should have been clearer about that in my rant above.

As soon as you're offered access to a client's network, source code, or data, though, it's irresponsible for them not to have you NDA'd.

For what it's worth, it's true that there are landmined NDA's that are really IP agreements in sheep's clothing, and yeah you shouldn't sign those --- but for the most part, a standard NDA isn't going to limit what you can work on in the future; it's just going to keep you from disclosing anything sensitive and client-specific you learn at the client.
Do you mean Columbia University in NY?
No problem. I know that it's hard to schedule a perfect date+time that works for 40+ people. Thanks for taking the initiative with the HN meetup.
Someone please get this job! :)
That sounds like "no" and "no". Thanks for answering!
They already support your editor: http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse/?r=release#hg/misc... :-)
From the article:

"Rupert has got dealmaker's flu, a bug he acquired when he bought MySpace and sold the exclusive right to index it to Google."

Is this a joke? If not, the author seems to grossly misunderstand search engines.
Bad Decisions May Be Contagious
BTW, the iPhone app would be more useful with editors. Even just a plain text editor would be very useful.
Do You Have What It Takes To Give A Realtime Pitch?
Those are nothing compared to d and r (relatively unknown) and my favorite: io.
Yes you can knock almost anything offline for a fortnight, however you're also guilty of perjury, which I know here in Canada can put you in jail for up to 15 years enshrined by the constitution.

You can be a moron all you want, and anyone who tries it is welcome to a hefty fine or jail time.
=> "egi"?
For individuals? Hell, they vary widely over time as well.
Rob Pike on "Go"
I like it! why over engineer a solution when you don't have to
to be true, a bracelet will not prevent your child from being hit/taken/abused, but it will certainly prevent the all-to-common repeated abuse that occurs from "trusted" babysitters and allow you to find them immediately (gps) if God-forbid they are ever abducted.

I am thankful you are in a safe town. Most in the US, not just rural, who go on the national sex offender registry site are alarmed at how many of these criminals are within close proximity to their house and schools.

PS. I have 3 children and have purchased the watch gps option from a company. It has very real design flaws but I am comforted in knowing my child cannot be taken without me immediately notified and informed with location.

As I said, make it a cool looking "apple-like" device and some of the house arrest images will go away, I think. Google the girls Dugard and Smart and the thousands of others that disappear or are abused each year and the business becomes compelling. I DO NOT wish to be an alarmist but bottom line is nobody thinks it will happen to them.
If Google had a choose their development stack today without worry about any legacy development, what do you think it would look like.

I think Python/C/Erlang or Jython/Java/Erlang would be a good fit.
For what it's worth, it's true that there are landmined NDA's that are really IP agreements in sheep's clothing, and yeah you shouldn't sign those --- but for the most part, a standard NDA isn't going to limit what you can work on in the future; it's just going to keep you from disclosing anything sensitive and client-specific you learn at the client.

That's what I was trying to say, but you put it much more succinctly. The main friction points we encounter involve what exactly is "client specific", as everyone likes to think their ideas are unique, which is rarely the case.
About a year ago, I wrote an iPhone app to propose to my girlfriend. She told me that she didn't want a ring so I had to come up with something unique. It worked -- we got married 3 months ago! :)
Winner declared in space elevator race
After spending most of the last night trying to model and fit a bunch of data with scipy, my main bottleneck was my understanding; working out what I needed to do. Once that was done, everything could be implemented in a single call. I don't think that's a particularly bad bottleneck at all.

There was some good discussion about this last time this was posted, and also current discussion over on reddit.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182676
http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/a2xzj/the_embarrassi...
It's unbelievably sad that that many people died, and so much collective knowledge was lost. But, it excites me to think that there are still probably a good number of hidden secrets throughout North and South America just waiting to be discovered.
I wonder how much stuff is written in C for speed and how much is just a Python wrapper for C code. The first problem isn't so bad since speed is what is increasing. The second problem is pretty big because new wrappers or Python equivalents would have to be written.
Absolutely. I especially "use the general tone of the person writing if you happen to know them?". And if I don't know them... all bets are off and I read as _I_ would use those words.
>I used to have a professor that claimed interpersonal communication fails 95% of the time.

Wiio's Laws (my favorites):

1. Communication usually fails, except by accident.

4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.

6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html
This is precisely why people are afraid of math - the more work you do, the smaller the end result. E = mc^2 is actually an approximation, but even the full set isn't very complicated, and imagine how difficult it is to get there. The other truth is that less code is generally faster, but not as small or as fast as a better algorithm, which is in turn not as small or as fast as a mathematical equation. The poster talks about moving across this space, which is actually a great accomplishment... but will probably get the best reception among great programmers or mathematicians.
The definition of "basics" depends on your domain. For the fluid dynamics and geological data that Enthought (the sponsor and primary developer of SciPy) works with, SciPy and NumPy provides all the basics.

One could argue that if you're going to call something "SciPy", it ought to cover all sorts of scientific computation...but, it is Open Source under a very open license. Contributing is very easy, and the team are very friendly to outsiders sending patches, and it's not hard to no longer be considered an "outsider". So, if you need it and SciPy doesn't provide it, why not develop it and contribute?

What I'm trying to say is that complaining about missing functions you need from an Open Source project just wastes your time and annoys the pig.
funny, I can always find malbolge.
>* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from a top-tier institution.

I always hated this requirement. I'm sorry if I don't have the right pedigree to satisfy people like this. I'm sorry I didn't go to the "right" school, wasn't born into the right family or just a failure in their eyes.
I haven't heard that name in a very long while.
Great idea. But short of paying a lawyer $X thousands to make my own generic NDA, where can I get an NDA that I can counter-offer with as you suggest? Any suggestions for good off-the-shelf documents such as this that protect both parties? I'd be willing to pay a couple of hundred bucks for a set of good documents like this. I'm an independent web developer like many here and have signed my fair share of NDAs.
Yes, the directions are definitely worse than they used to be.
How serious could it get?
Gems (like NeXT / OS X .app bundles) are self-contained, with the documentation and data resources alongside the code in a standard way. This makes it very easy to support having multiple versions of the same software installed simultaneously, with an optionally qualified import statement to disambiguate.

The FHS inspires maintainers to large amounts of useless and regressive tedium in re-separating the peas and the carrots into global piles. It's not so bad with traditional C libraries, but the brokenness is immediately obvious when dealing with the libraries of a language that has anything resembling a module system.

What's specific to Ruby is that their community somehow managed to not fuck up their packaging medium.
I appreciate your comments, becoming aware of what consumers think about this idea was the entire idea of this post question.

Respectful rebuttals:
1. Criminals and sexual offenders are everywhere (see national registry) and I don't think being concerned makes me a "paranoid parent"....FYI- I have 3 kids.

2. Building this functionality into a cell phone is an exciting thought.........but any criminal can just throw it out the window, it has to be affixed in an "alarm system" type way----I am open to ideas.

3. Business Week and TechCrunch---wow believe they agree---have both suggested that there are significant safety/value benefits to such a device. The real issue is that for kids older than 5 it must be cool and customizable so they like it.

Lastly, infants dont roam but are often abused. (i.e. terrible environments, screaming, not being changed often enough, shaking, etc.) that the parent never knows about because when they stop by at 5:30 to pick-up after work all seems perfect. It is a huge deal!
> "Actually, this being a democracy, there is nobody to blame but the electorate. Especially the left-liberal do-gooders."

...
That's a great point, and I won't even look at a new language anymore unless it has C linkage. Which Go does (as does D, OCaml, and many more...).
Just dropping in to note Kernest (http://kernest.com/), which uses @font-face as well, but without the Javascript that makes Typekit somewhat undesirable.

I tried it a few months ago and really liked it: http://shortformblog.com/tech/the-importance-of-knowing-kern...

Then I used it in my site redesign, which conveniently used a font Kernest was already using.

Kernest's weaknesses on the site are offset by its strengths in implementation and ease of use. Typekit, however, uses javascript for DRM when it isn't really necessary. Kernest uses a server-side whitelist solution which is much cleaner to load.

So there's my pitch for Kernest. Typekit seemed cool at first, but the cost struck me as too high and I'd rather use javascript for functionality, not design.
He doesn't need to be sarcastic. It's just the same effect if he's sincere. Even if edw519 is sincerely complimenting Joel on 'disguising a PR piece as an objective "how to"', that's not going to be a welcome comment if Joel didn't feel he was writing a PR piece, let alone disguising it.

A sincere compliment for doing something you wouldn't do intentionally doesn't make the recipient feel good.
To be fair, nearly all package management systems install to /usr/bin by default, and run roughshod over anything underneath them. At least gem can be configured to install in your home directory, and utilize dependencies that are already present. Apt is completely incapable of supporting anything like that.

The LSB is trivial spec-wank. A whole bunch of effort that doesn't address any of the actual real-world portability issues.
NANNY-KILLER-SPY CAMERA, BATTERY-POWERED, MOTION-ACTIVATED DVR
It seemed to me that the reddit comments were equally supportive, have the trollish ones been removed?

Awesome idea BTW. Sounds like a great girl.
:P Nice one, made me smile
Seymour Papert: Project-Based Learning
I'd be very disappointed if they were sold on ebay instead of listia ;).
No such organization would have their desktops update themselves straight from the internet -- you either have them connect to your own internal server for updates, or you do regular full system imaging -- both methodologies are straightforward and widely used for all major platforms, with explicit support from upstream.
SuperPoke Pets
The biggest problem with this is that your own web site/app depends on some other web site being up. Or am I reading this wrong?
PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Leaves Yahoo
Of course there are exceptions, but a remarkable number of kanji share their on-yomi based on a common component.

James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji I gives you the tools to write the kanji and assign an english meaning to it (same manner as suggesting that grass that makes you feel better is medicine), with volume II showing the readings in common.

I've only gone through volume one, but that itself saves you a heck of a lot of time in that you can write characters without repeatedly practicing them - you just need to use some imagination in creating and remembering stories.

I learned to read by reading. Once you have a large enough vocabulary you do pick up on the on-yomi patterns a lot better. Of course knowing this earlier did help - I studied radicals and their meanings before entering university and we hardly touched them there - it was more about brute force rote memorisation.

So I can read Japanese (and write it to an extent), but still need more work in speaking it.
Samsung may drop Windows Mobile for Android
> CPython is between 32 faster

When the CPython program uses GMP and the JavaScript program doesn't.
That makes the two of us.

I think, however, that he is already married.
Are you posting this from 2005?
He's still got a valid point - negative incentives to work are undeniable.
Road Trains get ready to roll
Right; it's hard to be both HTML and XML, so you need to use the XHTML serialization of HTML5 if you want use XML (which is what the example document appears to be).
I just looked at 4 NDAs we recently handled from megacorps, and all of them were very clear that the NDA covered:

* valuable or sensitive information

* that was disclosed by the client to the vendor

* that hadn't been publicly disclosed by anyone

* and hadn't been known to the vendor prior to the NDA

* and hadn't been disclosed to the vendor by someone else sans-NDA

That seems to me like extraordinary care not to be overbroad. These were megacorp boilerplate MNDA's, not something we had to negotiate.

Three of these NDA's, from totally different megacorps, used literally identical language to define "Confidential Information".
> the fastest dynamically typed language other than

You could select just those languages...

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
How many sites have Facebook Connect logins, Disqus comments or tons of YouTube videos? It's not exactly a new concept.

Though this particular implementation gives me pause, mainly due to its cost and the way it locks you into a model.
I have been a little obsessed with this idea lately, so I'm pretty excited to see some progress. "Training" cars to share the efforts of acceleration/deceleration, cut wind resistance, ideally reduce collisions, minimize the effects of "traffic fluid dynamics", and allow me to play on my laptop during my commute is technology I can get behind.
I remember talking to a guy working in this field when I was job hunting earlier. For all the talk of CPU speed, there seemed to be little interest in nontraditional architectures (e.g., FPGAs, etc), for the reason that their incoming data rate was the primary bottleneck.

Then again, I may have been talking to the wrong one. E.g., maybe a few've gotten some of those fpga ethernet boards? Still, I'd expect a little more VHDL demand than I'm seeing.
Perhaps time travelers exist, and this is just them accidentally blowing their cover?