skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Everyone" is saying that GMail's spam filtering works very well, but how about other mail apps? I've been using Apple Mail for several years, and it's spam detection works nearly perfectly too.
Lisp's 'car' doesn't mean 'Contents of the Address Register', as many think
I don't want to carp (just because this post is getting the upvotes) but this is a duplicate of my earlier post - plus this post has an "editorialised" title.

Feel free to keep the karma points (I have plenty) but please re-set the title to the original as per the HN guidelines.
(1) Well, you certainly have your problems cut out for you.

You won't be lacking in motivation, that's for sure :)

Where to start...

Programming is a method, a way of thinking, it has nothing to do with the actual language that you use to do it in, that's just a means to an end (though judging by the various language wars they are probably more like religious factions). Changing your site is great, but you'll have to set up a development and a production environment, and make sure you run those on two separate databases to make sure that if you do something you end up regretting you can revert back without your users catching any grief.

(2) Pick whatever feels best and easiest to you. That choice seems to have been made for you, since you mention 'rails', but really that's a framework for a language called 'ruby'. So ruby comes first, then rails.

Probably your best bet is to start off with making a list of the terms that you keep coming across (rails, ruby, framework, webapp) and so on, then read the wikipedia page on each of those to give you a feel for the terminology.

A 'hash' is a programmers trick to turn any object (usually a string, but you can apply hashes to just about everything else) into a more or less unique number. That way it becomes easier to find things, hashing is used for many purposes but one of the main applications in programming languages is so allow you to find in a very short time an entry in a list without having to go through all the items in the list one by one.

Your best bet to understand this stuff given the requirements of your situation seems to be to get a book on entry-level ruby, read that until it falls apart making sure that you do and understand all the exercises, then to move on to the rails framework.

You can test things out but I think there are better ways of learning how to program a given framework than messing around with a live website.

(3) As for courses, there are lots of tutorials available online, I would advice you to find a programmer buddy, preferably one that already has experience in the field that you are interested in.

4) could be, depends on how much time you put in there and how much background you already have. It sounds like a tall order to me, but when sufficiently motivated I'm sure you'll amaze yourself in what you can do in three months of really hard work.

(5) I completely agree with you there, hence the tip for a programming buddy. I'd look for that IRL though, and only use online fora as a backup plan if you can't find a live human being.

best of luck with all of this, let us know how you fared!

j.
Persevere 1.0 is now available for download
Underdog Palm Takes on Giants in Smartphones
Well, not really. Anyone who has ever ported a significant application between databases will tell you, the issues you encounter are little to do with SQL syntax, and everything to do with different locking strategies, the query optimizers making different decisions, etc.

I worked on one such project recently, it flew on SQL Server and ran like a dog on Oracle 10, until we used query rewriting and stored outlines to force behavior similar to the Oracle 7's rule-based optimizer. Or in SQL server, it's normal to create temporary tables on the fly - in Oracle it's normal to have a permanent temporary table structure and only the contents are local to your session and automatically deleted when you disconnect. I don't see any of that here.
When I first got a 'portable' computer with Linux on it, in 1996, I was trying to use 'tar', but didn't remember the right options to pass to it, and wasn't on line (so no irc or what passed for search engines at the time). Those days, the man page wasn't very helpful in showing the 'commonly used' options, so somehow I ended up with the partition specified, and overwrote the partition. Oops!
(OT) Did you know there's a petition to get mudge to be US Cyberczar? http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/mudge4cyberczar/
!sh <enter>

trying to get the last server I ssh'ed back and getting

shutdown -h -t 0

on a very remote server instead. My audible "doh!" and desperate "init 3" did not save me. Fear the !.
As for your quick meta tangent, I completely understand why the GP wrote that, it is quite normal for posts that even mention microsoft or one of their products, critically or in passing to get modded down.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944284
one possible solution is the one Mozilla Bespin went with where there's a hovering translucent scroll bar which varies in opacity depending on whether you're hovered over it.
"if we allow big corporations to claim these the rest of us will be communicating in black and white."

You're being hopelessly naïve if you think they'll let black and white alone just because.
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Psychic readings online are easy to find but genuine free psychics are not. I found an amazing free psychic website called MoonWhisper.com that I think had the best offering of free psychics and many other psychic related features.
In other words, if your characters contain more information your words get shorter, that seems to be a pretty logical consequence.

English clocks in at about 5 bits per character, so 140 characters is about 700 bits of data. The unicode representation of the Chinese text above is 378 bytes, and it can be compressed only a little bit (about 20%).

'Number of characters' is not a very good way to measure information density I think, especially not when 'character' is something that is variable length.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944259
So, let's vote yours up instead.

That feedburner bit should have been cut off by the dupe checker anyway. I'm sure cwan didn't do it on purpose and will delete this entry and vote yours up.
I think Google is a better place for people who can think out-of-the-box.
This has already been posted once. You can read the comments from that time here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823347
I think we've professional programming life till 40. After that either you become a entrepreneur or a MBA.
Federal Data Security Law: ‘Careful What You Wish For’
Road Map for an Application/Software Security Architect (Part 3)
PSD to HTML to WordPress
http://www.iwriteiam.nl/HaCAR_CDR.html
5 Ways to Prevent Breast Cancer
Comparing Go and Stackless Python
Go Local, Get More Vocal 
It is estimated that 30 to 40 percent of searches are local in nature. On top of this, search engines are increasingly showing local results for search queries with implicit local intent.
FWIW, when I take the tests I come out INTJ every single time and I usually "act like an INTJ" most of the time, which is to say, if the only thing you knew about me was I'm INTJ, you could meaningfully predict my sort of behavior a good percentage of the time ;P
The pragmatics of webscraping (ESR)
Traffic might have no value, but I don't always know what I will buy/read when I go to a website - so I doubt none of your extra visiters turn out to be interested.
Sorry, didn't see yours. Am deleting this now. The title however isn't editorialized - it's the term for the form of financing that Godin is suggesting.
I'm in INTJ. Does this test identify a sociopath?
The Debt Economy (should tax deductions on interest be eliminated?)
The Power Of Instant Approval
What's the best / most interesting piece of code you've ever seen?
Can India take on Silicon Valley as a global R&D hub?

Answer: Not in another 1000 years
Did Seth Godin just invent taxes?
US headed for massive decline in carbon emissions
Do you really think the creators of Go do not know Algol 68? They know it much better than does the article author, who admits he's "not an experienced programmer in either Algol-68 or Go".
voluntary taxes
And looks like someone's making an add-on to org-mode that implements the spaced repetition with an actual Supermemo-style algorithm instead of an inflexible fixed scheduling: http://www.mail-archive.com/emacs-orgmode@gnu.org/msg18554.h...
Well to answer your final point, there is never any absolute guarantee, but your best insurance against unemployment is to become really good at what you do. The second best is to make what you do be something commercially valuable. If you combine these two it's very unlikely you'll ever be unemployed for long.

Now to the first point. The most important part of learning is the process itself: ie learning the thing itself is less important than becoming good at learning. Once you have a sound grasp of the basics, the more diverse your curiosity and the deeper the insight you are able to gain into each specific technology, the easier it will be for you to pick up new ones. There's no excuse for ever becoming obsolete. Read widely, maintain your curiosity and keep learning.

Finally, the technologies you have picked may or may not be the way of the future. The future has a way of being unpredictable. Don't be so sure that you know what is going to happen that you close your eyes to what is actually happening.
Data as a Service Could Drastically Impact Success of SQLi Attacks
He "invented" royalties for investors. Typically the royalties go the other way, because it's not just financing, it's also production, distribution, promotion, etc. (for books, movies, music). But more and more that's changing. Most startups are generally self-sufficient except for money.

It's a sensible idea which, if put into practice, might result in funding of a wider range of startups. As Godin pointed out, a lot of VC funding is highly stilted toward businesses that can sell out in a short time frame (go public or get bought), not just businesses that can become profitable in that time frame.
...with the caveat, of course, that the API for making a native scrollbar give these indicators is not available to a JavaScript web application.
Higher education has paradoxically reduced social mobility
Royalty-based financing is not a new idea and one that is being increasingly explored (a trend that started on the east coast if memory serves). A few links: http://blogs.sun.com/sun4startups/entry/vcs_look_to_royalty_... and http://www.technologytransfertactics.com/content/2009/10/21/...

edit - more here on the origins of the idea: http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/10/07/royalty-based-vent...
And once you understand that lists can be nested things become really interesting
Piaggio USB concept - the electric and gasoline hybrid car
A Clojure Highlife
Most people will want to cash in their investments at some point. In order to facilitate that we'd need a secondary market in these instruments so people could sell them on. The price would then vary based on future earnings projections. Either that or the understanding is that the payments continue until some fixed point in time, or until the investors death. So, depending on how you look at it, these are either dividend paying shares, corporate bonds or a kind of annuity. All of which exist already.

EDIT: although I'm not sure if anyone's really doing corporate bonds that are linked to profits, that might be new.

Having said all that, I agree with Seth that society could do with being a lot more creative in how it funds businesses.
I don't think technology changes that much, fashion certainly does. So if you want to be 'hip', keep up with what's "in" and what's "dead". But if you just want to get stuff done, use what you like.
Nothing new under the sun?
Amazingly, integers are used for more than just primary keys. ("This is just an example. It could also be something... much better.")
You're confusing this with a lot of the garbage out there. This is based on Carl Jung's work and is absolutely valid. It's not "quantifying" personality; it's helping -you- understand yourself better. That's it.

Everyone is a combination of these things. The most introverted person in the world is sometimes extroverted, and the opposite as well. My wife is introverted around friends but extroverted at home; I'm extroverted with friends but introverted at home. You're answer "it depends" is absolutely valid and yet doesn't invalidate any part of Meyers-Briggs. You don't like to be pinned down and that's fine, but you have preferences, and that's all it's asking. You may be able to write with both left and right hands, but which one do you sometimes prefer? And if you prefer that, you might also prefer 'x'.

If you give it a chance, you might be surprised to learn something new about yourself.
To be fair, they had raised seed capital and a previous VC round before this pitch. They had already laid the groundwork and this was to show they are still getting somewhere.
Without a doubt quicksort. It was shorter, more elegant and a lot faster than any other sorting algorithm I'd seen up to that point.

Runner up for me would be K-means clustering, one specific implementation of it.
Amazing Transformers label Jaguar Flash drive
Ask PG: x comments display broken ? (or is this a new feature?)
Suddenly the new page no longer reliably lists which discussions have comments and which do not.
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not sure i'm convinced by the economics of this. amateur investors would compare this to other more standard investment options. let's say they invest a typical seed amount of $25k. assume they could earn approx 10% a year via "safe" investments.

as suggested in the article, you offer to double the investment by paying 4% of sales. that means you need to be bringing in $1.25 million in sales to repay the investor. using an (admittedly rough) assumption, let's say that takes 5 years to achieve. in the same time, if the investor had played it safe, their $25k would be (assuming compounded monthly interest at the 10% rate) $41k i.e. almost doubled anyway.

in the current economic climate 10% interest might be higher than expected and you could obviously fiddle around with all the numbers/assumptions to make it a more attractive investment but my instinct is that to sell this to the types of investors who would entertain something like this, it could end up being a more expensive way of raising finance than it initially appears.
About the Mac OS X v10.6.2 Update
The flaws of thinking "Just use Unicode"
It's pretty much the principle of dividends. With prefered shares you can even define the conditions of dividends, index them on the company's income.
Imagine how much you'll love the Internet when you're living in a small cottage in a remote part of the Swiss Alps :-)
Attention loss feared as high-tech rewires brain
You might be interested in a program called "molly-guard". It overrides shutdown/reboot/halt/poweroff with a shell script that detects if you're in an ssh session. If that's so, it will prompt for the hostname of the host you want to shutdown.

It has saved me a few times.
I've been hosting with them for five years (last two @ newservers). Their support is great and they even helped installing my scripts. I ordered 7 differents servers since the beginning to create farms and their load balancing mechanism is also very cool. Cheap and quality service. I'm a non-US customer, my site is a top 100 site in my country.
Oh, come on. We are talking here about densly populated Switzerland in the middle of densly populated Europe. There is no such thing as remoteness there :-)
Evernote Raises $10 Million From Investors
Jquery Basics Series - 3
Previous series I had discussed about jQuery effects. Now time to talk about custom animation with jQuery using animate(). This is very interesting using this we can make beautiful web projects.
Murat SARIKAYA
http://www.msxlabs.org
CSS Best Practices and Cross-browser Compatibility
What about the Yanoff List? The web-based directory was a big deal in the pre-search-engine days.

Yanoff eventually begat others like The Yahoo! List and etc etc. Now get off my lawn.
effective vs. good

I see 'effective vs. good' as an opportunity to satisfice.

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

Let's take the notion of satisficing and apply old 80-20 rule. About 80% of your life is not going to matter that much in 5 years. Your choice of toothpaste, the car you drive, which couch you buy -- these can be complex decisions, but they aren't going to have as big an influence on your life as the town you live in, the jobs you take, or your closest friends. It's a minority of decisions you make which will matter the most, so spend your maximum effort optimizing those. For the rest, let's just find something that will do the job.

I think the Go team decided that compilation time, efficient execution, conciseness, and concurrency were the areas that mattered the most for a systems programming language. Most of the programming world understands "Algol-derived" syntax, so why not stick with that? In fact, given that the majority understands that sort of syntax, this should also be considered an optimization -- one which is aimed at achieving as large a user base as possible.

(I wonder if one can consider Python to be an 80-20 satisficed language?)
Not exactly. Cappuchino tries to do it on the client side, while classical ASP.NET does it on the server side. The former has its uses, the latter is a terrible idea.
hm, there were certainly many pieces of interesting code I have come across in the past (e.g., regular expression automata, details of compilers [simple but fast like in Niklaus Wirth's compiler construction book], details of interpreters [Lisp SECD, Prolog WAM], etc.). PageRank was certainly among the highlights--clearity, brevity: one could immediately see that it was orders of magnitude better than the simple brute force method. Peter Norvigs simple Python script for a statistics-based spell checker is definitely a highlight, too.

Hard as I try, I cannot for the love of god single out one piece among them. Interestingly, I can immediatly name the worst piece of source code I have ever seen: SAP DB. (I don't even know whether it's still available online, but it was ugly {formatting inconsistent, somplaces littered with German comments, etc.}--there are shurely better contenders for this place, but the fact that one of the biggest software companies produced it, let alone having clients using it sent shivers down my spine...)

EDIT: PageRank, how could I have forgotten...
Equally amazingly, generations of Sybase programmers and DBAs have managed, somehow. Perhaps it's you?
I hate to break it to the author, but programming language design in general hasn't evolved much since ALGOL. It's not just Go. Sure, we have object-oriented programming, but that's really not anything earth-shattering from a language design standpoint.
my personal motivation:

* Do not read documentation before you begin to code. Start some project first.

* the app will be so amazing

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen !
An interesting observation.

edit. It's not just the 'new' page. The new layout appears to be a "discuss" link if there are 0 comments and an "x comments" link when there are comments on any submission.
Liked this part about decision making.

"It really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called -- which only a nerd would call -- a "regret minimization framework." So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have." I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that's very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, "What will I think at that time?" it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That's the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later."
While I agree with the observation, instant approval for the iPhone app store like YouTube for video won't work as long as Apple has restrictions on what API's can be accessed.

If that wasn't an issue, Apple would be able to rely on the power of the crowd to weed out apps for them.
A lot of internet and computer "crime" is centered around proving intent (as Erwin points out).

It's not necessarily your responsibility to determine the license of the information you obtain but if your downloading 100's of the latest top hit records then clearly the intent is obvious.

In this sense downloading isn't in any way illegal; but the combined act of searching for "XYZ song" and then downloading and using it is.
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I guess that depends on your definition of the word "remote". By American standards, Switzerland would be too small to have remote areas anyway since you can pretty much cross the whole country in a few hours ☺

But there are, in fact, areas which are only sparsely populated.
I understand your logic, but starting with the Drudge report in 1998 -- when they were the first to break the Monica and Clinton scandal -- it looks like the flowered garden is no longer and anyone can break a story.

I don't believe it is "getting quality information".

No, it is "controlling information."
> I was there alone recently, and I felt like a character in a Dan Brown novel.

A subtle nod, given that Brown's novels serve as a kind of poor man's Foucoult's Pendulum.
> {formatting inconsistent, somplaces littered with German comments, etc.}

I can see why formatting would not make it pretty but that would not say much about the algorithm, and why would German comments be ugly ? Programmers in different countries routinely comment their code in their native language, it's only natural really.
> We needed to build the technology that would run the store, and found the person who turned out to be the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com on that trip. A guy named Shel Kaphan, who built all of our early systems. He had help from others, but he was the architect, he engineered them, and just did a fantastic job.

I believe that many successful technical companies have a great technical wizard early on. Thomas Knoll (Adobe Photoshop), Jeffrey Dean (Google), Len Bosack (Cisco), of course, Steve Wozniak (Apple), Jim Clark (SGI - though he's gone way beyond pure technical to mogul), Parker Harris (Salesforce.com)
If you haven't got around to it yet, google 'worse is better'.
Would be interested in seeing that implementation, remember the URL by any chance?
Quebec's Disney-inspired solution to flu-shot chaos
“How empty would the first 10 Google search results be if one could no longer find anything from the 148 German publishers?”

That question makes absolutely no sense at all, from googles point of view nothing would change. There would simply be other sites now lower on the ladder that would move up. In fact, for every 'major' news outlet that does this a bunch of smaller ones will benefit.