skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show me a tutorial on Python graphics on OS X that doesn't require installing an external library or learning about a really complicated graphics framework (Quartz 2D) and I'll believe what you just wrote.

Apple basic graphics was one of two commands:

GR or
HGR
Ask HN: How do you manage employee IT skills?
Hello All, I work for a semi-large international company and we have an employee driven initiative to create a searchable database of people and their skill sets. Since this is an employee driven initiative there is almost no budget for development, so I come to you to ask whether there is a way around wheel reinvention that does not cost a fortune. What do you use to manage employees and find the best fit for projects?
Exactly. SICP shows some similar code, though I don't remember which part..
Anyone interested in this really should read Aaron Renn's blog The Urbanophile http://www.urbanophile.com/ - he wrote the New Geography article. He writes mainly on the Midwest but uses it as a lens to examine urban issues. He's one of the sharpest urban thinkers out there.
Minimum and maximum values allow you to control the difficulty level. You can use default if you don't want to adjust anything.
That makes me feel really sad. My epiphany was your iron curtain coming down.

I can see how. In fact I had the same reaction initially (and my parents are graduates, but they don't know the first thing about maths, so they were no help to me either).

I have no idea why I wrote the program to plot a circle that made it obvious what sin and cos were.

In fact I think I might have misremembered my own story. I had a ZX81 first, and I don't think that had a circle function, so it may be that the ZX81 manual explained how you could use SIN and COS to do that.

But I think we can agree that google and wikipedia are wonderful things. The upcoming generations of programmers and mathematicians are going to be Gods. How could they not be with a library like that!
"At the point where the page would get split, just put an ad."

Most pages have more then one ad (header, sidebar etc) so its not as simple as that.

Also, like it or not, page views are the unofficial "Nielsens" for websites, the more page views the more popular you are when you're pitching your ad offering.
Indeed, there are dozens of examples of poor programmers.
EA did spurn off an unit named 8lb gorilla to make iPhone games.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/11/ea-quietly-opens-8lb-goril...
It is and there is no tax on people who don't have road crossing insurance. It's a risk that you can choose to take. If you choose to not have medical insurance and you can't pay for medical care then you might die, but it should be up to you choose if the risk is acceptable or not.
Really appreciate this. We are not a designer so this info is really helpful. Thank you.
Dear Marco Arment:
Two biggest differences would be Java interop (see http://www.cliki.net/Armed%20Bear%20Lisp) and concurrency support. ABCL appears to be a little clunkier than Clojure for calling Java.

Being a CL, ABCL places no restrictions about mutability on basic data structures and doesn't have the STM/agent functionality for concurrency built in.

On the other hand, Clojure doesn't have CL's condition system (http://gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-condit...).
Electronic Arts Acquires Playfish
Spa Capsule Massage and De-stress
What about video game-based homework?
And just fwiw, while I'm sorry to hear about your experience. I totally agree with the original article.

I found out about SIN/COS a while before I really understood what they were. :) I treated them as magic keywords and used to just plug in weird functions to see what turned out (sin(x)+cos(x), sin(cos(x)) etc).

Sometimes we take things like portability and platform-independence so far that we end up complicating things. As an example, with Turbo Pascal and DOS, I could just treat the video buffer as an array and write to it. Under Linux (even in the old days), I wasn't able to figure out how to access the console display as a array. The "right way" was to wrestle with Curses. I declined the invitation and stuck to network/command line programs. :)
The specific delusion that motion is action is but one instance of what I'll call "value generation bias".

Most people have a pretty poor sense of whether they are generating value, and therefore seek to reassure themselves that their time is well spent by taking pride in whatever accomplishments they can track and their peers can recognize. We need this validation in order to feel that we have a purpose, and are serving that purpose.

Successful entrepreneurs are characterized by a merciless drive to remove bias from their understanding of value generation. They do so by working in enterprises that inherently provide this feedback -- like startups that die if they're not generating enough value -- or by soliciting feedback from trustworthy sources like customers, advisors, or numeric measurements.

If you are the kind of person who places little faith in value assessments made without clear reference to a worthy goal -- grades, job titles, signs of social status -- and you actively seek out information that challenges your own value judgments in order to reduce your own bias, you are probably moving in the right direction.
Marco's post is doing publishers a favor. Focusing on revenue and not on your customers is how to die.
This very much makes me think about the line: "One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general. " from http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html . While it sounds like this dispute is more about the mathematical algorithm, that is very little different from software, and while the article never explicitly stated it I very much suspect they put their algorithm into machine code.

Things like this make me almost think I should be going into law. This will truly matter to a large number of companies, and probably more so to start ups than to larger more established companies that already have market share.
So, how exactly does one pitch the founder collective? :-)

Sounds more like a group of angels than the formalized process that characterizes YC and others?

Hopefully the gap they're going for is the $50k-$250k gap since < $50k is easier with friends/family and > $250k is closer to a regular angel round.
Nearly all python functions are available in the help file sorted by category, though I'm not sure about alphabetically. IDLE (a primitive python IDE) is included in the standard distribution, and the ipython repl is easy enough to install.

I also started using QBASIC in DOS at age 10 or so. But I really don't see how it was easier. I don't think being being preinstalled is that big a deal; plenty of kids download and install games, level editors and the like. They also manage to program for games, e.g. Warcraft or Quake.

Learning to program differently than we did is not the same as being harder.
Yes, try Simple HTML DOM:

http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

Its a little light on documentation, but has a familiar syntax and handles malformed HTML. I've used it in a number of projects and its been great.
I'm a bit surprised that EA didn't try to simply just win this market over themselves. With their stable of franchises it seems like it would be a feat they could have achieved. They even already have a casual focused online site, Pogo.com. I expected them to try to retool a team from that group into doing just Facebook games, but it seems like they didn't really even attempt it. I suppose they felt they just didn't have enough man power.
Even if the land itself is un-arable, one could always do raised-bed gardening with fresh topsoil.

I do wonder about the economics: many of farms that currently supply Detroit are presumably hundreds of miles away, so Detroit consumers have to pay for shipment, but they are also established businesses with economies of scale (large dairy farms without any neighbors to complain about the smell of manure, or whatever). How can urban farmers find niches where they could compete? How many Detroit residents could be put to work with this kind of project?
That's not true. You can't compare one business strategy with nothing and conclude that it's a good strategy. You have to compare against the alternatives.

If Newscorp has 10 million visitors per time period, and makes a net of $0.01 per visitor, that's better than nothing, but if they can go down to 1 million visitors per time and net $0.15 per visitor, it's better. Murdoch seems to think that they can do the latter. I don't have any data to refute him, and neither, I'd guess, does anyone else in this thread.

It's possible that Murdoch is totally off his rocker, but it's usually a fair baseline strategy to assume that the guy who runs a multi-billion dollar company has a bit of business acumen.
An Introduction to Python Objects
At Tipjoy, I needed to parse pages to find Tipjoy widgets to validate the owner of the widget. The configuration made sense, but left me in an undesirable position of parsing lots of pages.

At first I used regexes. I would find bugs, and fix them. The bugs affected the product in delaying confirmation of content ownership, which stinks.

I noticed that the bugs didn't stop coming, so I switched to BeautifulSoup. It was faster and better. I highly recommend it for anyone using Python.
Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart = Twitter has changed it all.
The crazy thing is, he just told the exact same story about beginning programming as I would tell. The only difference, is that I'm 21, and my first experience was drawing circles on a TI-83 graphing calculator in high school.

It has a graphing mode, where you can put in functions and it'll draw them for you. And it has a programming mode, with a very BASIC-like syntax that I wrote simple graphing programs, ridiculous text-based rpgs, and my own version of the oh-so popular Drug Wars.

Having no idea what a ZX Spectrum is, I can only assume that the likelihood of the author having one 30 years ago is about the same as the likelihood my having a TI-83 in high school, especially because the calculator was pretty much required for some of the math classes I was in.
There's a TED Talk on that: http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_ca...
This makes me wonder: Is it possible that some sites paginate their articles not just to increase ad views, but so that they can measure how much of the articles are being read?
The ACTA Internet provisions: DMCA goes worldwide
Helpful post but doesn't recommend specific software. What's a good off-the-shelf product/service for managing double opt-in, email timing, bounces, etc.?
I'm aware of that, I was mentioning what I thought were the strengths of stackoverflow in relation to a lot of the other Q/A sites that have existed before it.
The page view isn't "artificial" the need to have a second page (as opposed to one long page) is.
The article uses an interesting way to note speed differences, using relative (-20%) changes rather than absolute (0.8) differences. I've not seen that before and I'm not sure I like it.

For example, something -99% is 100x as slow as the original, while something +100% is only twice as fast. I think especially the average is wrong. With the above example, the average would be 0%, or 'no change', which IMHO isn't fair.
Thanks for the recco. I appreciate it. I hope you'll all check out the blog.

By the way, I'm a hacker myself. I wrote the only utility in the world I'm aware of that will actually recover data out of corrupted tarballs, gzrecover:

http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/coding/gzrt/gzrt.html

Along with other free software. Cheers!
Having worked mostly for small companies I have never done this personally in a real world environment, but this seems almost like a textbook case for a normalized SQL database. The database diagram is easy to set up and then depending on what development resources you do have available (I know you said its limited) you can make either a web based front end with fairly quickly with a competent developer or else an Access or similar based front end can be made by just about anyone that is computer literate.

If you go with the Access type interface of course it comes with some limitations, but it is more robust than many people give it credit for. It can serve as a quick prototype unit management comes around and assigns a good developer to write either a web based or custom desktop front end.
Not sure I understand the problem with Digg & Reddit: isn't traffic a good thing? Ads pay the same, no matter what path the people on your site took to get to it?
So CastingWords has obviously made MTurk work and work well, but finding ways to maintain quality levels and consistency has not been an easy process. We've had to give up completely on "quick and dirty" (IE super-cheap) transcription. Instead we focus on a much higher quality product. And maintain quality by using with many many (mainly QA) steps - the shortest, simplest transcript is seen by 14 turkers - and runs through a 7 step process. And with added audio length the pipeline gets even longer.
I think pxlpshr is making a comparison here between Stack Overflow and Startups.com, saying he thinks the latter will struggle to have merit since it lacks a couple of crucial traits that make SO successful. He only unintentionally conflates the two.
I wish Chris & the collective the very best, good to see different models being tried out in the VC space.
The behavior of hGetContents is documented at http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/S... .

If you write

do h <- openFile "foo.txt" ReadMode
x <- hGetContents h
putStr x

you'll get different behavior than if you write

do h <- openFile "foo.txt" ReadMode
x <- hGetContents h
hClose h
putStr x

In the first example, you'll print out the contents of the file. In the latter, you'll print out nothing.
I grew up in Detroit, so I'm a bit jaded, but I wouldn't recommend it. Many of the people who live in Detroit don't see the blight as a problem and actively fight anyone who tries to change Detroit.

Plus the city council is beyond dysfunctional... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TvgtGlcdTE&eurl=http://c...
1) As a child the most important thing is effort, not results. If you try really hard your teacher/parent will reward you, even if the results are crap.

2) If you watch "business people" on TV they're involved in phone calls, meetings, and deal making. No boring or hard stuff that involves solo work for hours on end.

Put together those two ideas and you get people who think their entire job is to make an effort by doing what "business people" do all day.

This is why someone could feel entirely satisfied with themselves, even if they haven't produced a single meaningful result through all their effort.
Nokia to launch its cheapest phone ever (Nokia 1280 for 2500rs)
He uses the geometric mean (the Nth root of the product of N numbers), which is mathematically correct in this case.
What's the biggest lie? That lies are somehow "evil".
Here is a wikipedia link about land cleanup...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioremediation

From the article:
"Not all contaminants, however, are easily treated by bioremediation using microorganisms. For example, heavy metals ...
Phytoremediation is useful in these circumstances, because natural plants or transgenic plants are able to bioaccumulate these toxins... [heavy metals in biomass] may be further concentrated by incineration or even recycled for industrial use."
This is a follow on of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=928348

Again, appreciate any and all feedback.
Something similar is also possible with macruby: http://pastie.org/690427
They would properly make more by jumping ahead of the game and starting to earn 75 million/year.
"The Feeling Of Power" by Isaac Asimov
I think many people feel lost in coming up with legitimate answers.

I suspect many people are completely uninterested in coming up with legitimate answers. They already have the answer they want, and look to science only as a source of arguments to justify their conclusion. And for very politically charged issues, chances are the anti-scientific partisans will massively outnumber the scientists, which would be fatal for a community-driven site.
Just include screenshots of a few sample sheets as images; there's no need for a screencast.
Sounds great. We need for ex-founders to help finance the next generation.
We've updated it so you have to setup your link the first time with an email address that gets added to our database. We'll see if that check causes any acceptance problems down stream.

Updated blog post/HN feedback here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930786
I've tried to use BeautifulSoup, but I wasn't impressed. Coming from Hpricot and Nokogiri, it leaves a lot to be desired. Mostly because it's not very tolerant of bad markup, which is a deal breaker when you're trying to parse random HTML from around the web. I'm also pretty sure it's a dead project.
When people argue whether it's necessary, useful or desirable for programmers to know anything about assembly language and the internals of CPUs, I always think of this story.
I noticed that when I use the expression "the ball is in their hand", I don't really care about the outcome. I'm just happy I don't have to deal with it right now.

It's funny how accurate the expression is, now that I think about it. Handing over the ball is a sure way to prevent you from scoring.
System Administrators: who we are, what we do & why we look at you that way
Firefox at 5: The Fall and Rise of Mozilla
Regarding a minimal setup python environment, which requires nothing more than a newbie parent to download, PythonTurtle or Squeak is probably what you want.

I think the issue is mainly just lack of knowledge that truly newbie friendly environments exist. Perhaps the solution is simply better advertising of squeak, or perhaps having it come preinstalled (as OLPC did)?

Incidentally, the animation info you seek (admittedly, not suitable for newbies):

http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/Animations

Or, if you want to generate movie files:

for i in range(numframes):
[...code to make frame...]
savefig("framedir/" + str(framenumber).rjust(8,"0")+".png")

os.system("mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vbitrate=1500 -mf type=png:fps=16 -nosound -of mpeg -o movie.mpg mf://framedir/\*.png")
We can hardly argue about CL when you know nothing about it.

Your "arguments" seemed like common set of misconceptions about CL, the "LISP is slow" is such a folklore that I thought you forgot to write it, that's all.
Thanks Joe, that makes perfect sense and would be a great option for me as a buyer. Every purchase I make there's a risk of failure over time. There's a perception of paying forever that's hard for me to get past with the current pricing scheme. I get web hosting cheaper (for multiple sites), and Dropbox feels more limited at this point.
I don't know what the X is. If I use dropbox for say 10 years, then the cost is pretty large and I'd likely never opt in.
I really liked the zoomed out screenshot of the demo website. When you look at it like that it is amazing to see just how little "content" there is and just how much sidebar and advertising there is.
The dearth of women in software development and the preponderance of women in biotechnology are probably not unrelated phenomena.
I live in Benton Harbor, which is like Detroit in a lot of ways, but smaller and on the west coast; it really is a very different, fulfilling, vibe.
Mozilla Developer Network - How do you develp for the web? (short survey)
A quick dig shows that these folk are behind it: http://www.killerstartups.com/

I'd say that not having their blog linked all over the home page earns them a credibility point.

(The TC post linked from their FAQ says the domain cost 'mid-six-figures'. Ouch.)
You keep believing in unicorns and Apple's tablet
That's a fair assumption. I hadn't seen it anywhere, could be a bad suggestion on my part? I wonder how many paying users they have so far though, that's the part I'd care about as a startup.

Different pricing models can open up the doors top bigger conversion rates though. They are probably considering different levels.
"When heated in an oven or with a heat gun, the plastic shrinks by about 5/8ths and becomes thicker and more rigid, while retaining the colored design."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinky_Dinks

Seems like you would be able to get pretty small feature sizes if you had a really high resolution printer to begin with...
I downloaded a worksheet and got a file without extension(named:download); I renamed the file to .pdf and opens fine. Would be better if I get a file name of worksheet-type.pdf

I also want to add - it would be nice to see the target age of kids based on the selections or select worksheets based on age, narrowing down to particular type.

fyi- the layout on the pdf is clean (and very kid friendly)
PG is wrong on the subject of patents though: the problem with software patents is that if you are building a car the price of having a lawyer work out if you are violating a couple patents is a lot less than 1%, but it would properly make it many thousand times more expensive for a startup to develop a piece of software (assuming that we don't count the founders time).

And unlike physical patents it costs nothing to produce the software once the innovation has been made, so there is no need for a small guy to have something to sell to a big company to ensure the innovator is getting something for his efforts.
Where can I get this "x86 Unix well ahead of Linux?"
With tracking software that I've used (omniture site catalyst) you can track the average length of time on spent page, which gives you a really good idea if the article is being read through or not, without pagination
This whole debate kind of seems like a livelock with no obvious solution.

If you make patents too powerful, you get people 'patent trolling' and producing a lot of vague patents with no intentions of implementing/putting to use/selling the IP involved; instead hoping to be able to sue someone for violating it.

If you make patents too weak, people invest heavily in reverse engineering instead of innovation/invention and take other people's ideas and make money off of them.

I find this to be a very frustrating and disheartening position to be in.

I almost think that there is something wrong with the idea of patents (not the idea of intellectual property) because it seems that they fail at both ends of the spectrum with regards to protecting people who actually produce useful things for our society and continue to push us forward.
Ask HN: Suggestions for ecommerce portal in Ruby?
I have been using magento (PHP) opensource freeware product which is really good and quite rich on feature set too. Any suggestions for a similar framework in Ruby ?

Of key interest would be the following:

- catalog management

- shopping cart

- payment gateway integration

- SEO features

- flexibility to add/extend modules.
I think HomeworkStack would be a runaway hit.
Whether or not your infringement claim was really based on reasonable evidence is something we'll find out in discovery, won't we? If you get Apple to remove my software from the app store, and I sue you (and I almost certainly will), and it turns out that your claim to Apple was frivolous, your liability is going to be sick.
I doubt the content aggregator will lose much of anything by this happening. What this will be a test of is how dependent content sites are on aggregators, or if there are enough alternate ways for them to attract traffic that they don't need any specific aggregator (Google).

And if the other traffic sources are better at delivering higher value traffic, then they may even gain from it.
Google to Acquire AdMob for $750 Million
Placebos are already routinely prescribed by doctors.

As usual with any good idea people have had it before you did.