skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did something similar a little while ago and shared my zshrc setup/config with a basic set of files that people can use as a default and override.

http://naleid.com/blog/2009/05/13/shared-zshrc-file/

The repo to clone is on bitbucket:

http://bitbucket.org/tednaleid/shared-zshrc/
It would send a message - that the developers of Gnome don't think being Stallman-like free is not a big deal.

If, however, they do entertain such toughts, I will start using the "free as in Stallman" fork that will, undoubtedly, become available the week following the inclusion of any not-very-free software and that will be maintained by many of the same developers who do it today, with a lot of common code between forks.
More info: http://github.com/mwotton/Hubris
subscribe free link anyone?
How many times should you shuffle a deck of cards? [pdf]
Actually they have researched the possibility; but they haven't found enough soot deposits to justify the theory.
Sharepoint, Excel Services, Analysis Services, Reporting Services.
Temple - Template compilation framework in Ruby
Is it even -possible- to buy Windows without gigs worth of crap preloaded on?
The opening line is provocative, but I didn't read the article because I'm not a subscriber.

Do they have evidence to support the claim that google will sell these to the public, or is it just a guess based on the rumours?
Nothing you have said or linked to provides evidence that this article is what you describe.
Malicious code attacks Linux users
I've never had to subscribe to read the NY Times from Britain. Is it different for overseas visitors?
Could this be for a tablet PC that displays media content (i.e. magazine, newspapers, etc) and is ad-supported, helping it beat kindle etc on pricing?
Very clear article. So clear you can actually draw additional points from it (not called out by the author). One of the problems of using regression on time series is the model is much better at modeling a grand mean than getting the variation right. So if you take an recent upward trend of something you are measuring and then use regression to get data for past points you don't know- you are likely to predict a fairly flat past, almost no matter what the nature of the original data. You need to (at the very least) cross validate by holding out a large contiguous interval of the past where you know the temperature and the proxies to see if the model tracks.
In other words, it's a patent to turn a computer into a television set. Sad.
Here's a way to easily do it with style:

http://datatables.net/1.5-beta/extras/TableTools/
I don't think this is good advice, and I wouldn't advise anyone to follow in this person's footsteps.

Smart people should think about doing stupid stuff, not necessarily follow through and do it. Selling TV wall mounts online is not a very great contribution to human progress from someone who was experimenting with ferromagnetic fluids. This is advice on how to stay alive and make a living, not advice on how to achieve your full potential and help humanity.
How Python is killing Lisp
In what context is disabling a device for ads considered a good thing? It's terrible in terms of user friendliness, especially when you're very likely to have paid money for the device.

Unless Apple is about to start giving ad-supported devices for free, a conjecture that would be jumping the gun.
Holy shit, I am witnessing myself turning into a cantankerous old fogey as we speak.
"If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Played with it last night. Still can't hold a candle to the iPhone and you'd think they would at least be able to match it since they have it right in front of them to copy.
my bash, GNU bash, version 3.1.17(1), does (3)(2) kill job-completion; and (3)(3) ls option-completion (but no description). So it's partway there.
That is fine if you want to pay for the full Microsoft stack and are already in a full Microsoft environment. It doesn't work so well when your data lives in a non-Microsoft environment, you have poorly organized legacy tables, and or is a real need to establish consistent business metrics and terminology.

The reporting system I described was created in an organization with all of those problems. It has no ongoing licensing costs, fits smoothly into the existing non-Microsoft server environment, allowed me to hide the details of convoluted legacy table structures and data split across databases, and got different parts of the business to use the same metrics.

I consider it a sign of success that multiple people who moved on from that organization later contacted me and said that one thing they really missed is the reporting system that I had created. And yes, some of those people moved into Microsoft environments that use the standard Microsoft stack of solutions.
Hey man, I'll be very happy if I'm wrong and the Droid takes off.
You're going to believe a blog that considers "hacking into someones facebook account" to be friending them, getting accepted, and then writing down their friends. I couldn't stop laughing while reading this fallacious article. incoming downvotes
Here's a couple of links giving some background:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/12/10/why-cant-i-...

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/12/12/larry-bergm...

I can't give a good explanation of the financial aspects, but they've been trying to apply pressure to a bunch of journalists by publishing private information about them.
Everything you said is true, but being independently wealthy is a good way to be able to be able to work on the "academic" problems that you want to work on. Not that he couldn't have gone the researcher route at a school or business but that does not afford one as much leeway. After the site is up and running he can hire or outsource much of the day to day stuff if he is not looking to expand much.
Did you read the story?

You're describing a technology to make a web page that can save data in Excel format. The story describes how to help users set up complex Excel spreadsheets that run a web report behind the scenes whenever they are refreshed. I believe that the latter capability is much more useful to users than the former.
Everyone I know on T-Mobile with their iPhones loves it (They've never seen 3g, but TMo's edge is quite a bit better than AT&Ts)
This man is a buffoon.

http://www.phmainstreet.com/mba/

I know, let's name my company MBA so I can present myself as Tim Bryce (MBA).
I considered this aspect but I'm using these tables for statistics. Basically I am giving each user of my website a table for storing statistics about their site usage. Some users however, never really "complete" the process and don't really use the website, thus they have no need for statistic tables. So I have the idea of saving space by creating statistic tables as they are needed.

I'm going to try the "create if not exists" first and if that causes too much MySQL server load I'll just create the statistic tables at user registration and save processor usage at the expense of disk usage.
Wordpress.com implements Twitter API (for posting and reading)
That's ironic, it's great here (for iPhones) in the states.
> and when the neurons grow that's increasing your potential brainpower

No, not exactly.

> I get the idea that as a baby you think anything is possible

Also, no.

> But what I don't get is this: say you read an article about something you didn't know before, doesn't your brain make new connections (synapses) between neurons? How are those and neuron growth different, and how does the synapse learning fit into the paint model? Or am I misunderstanding how synapses work?

Exactly.

The thing that is growing by pruning is the ability to learn. NOT the learning itself.

A babies brain is disorganized, and doesn't have thought like an adult brain. Over time it learns how to learn, it learns about cause and effect. It learns there is an external world, and that it can effect that world.

It learns that it can reason about that world - if I do this, this happens - and I thought of it.

It's like having raw hardware, without software. A baby creates the software on the fly.

Later in life it fills the memory of the program with information, but the program itself is learned early.

And by program, a better term might be firmware, since a person can learn new way to think later in life. It's the machinery of thinking itself that a baby creates.

That's why the environment during infancy and childhood has such a massive effect later in life. It's why babies in almost any situation will adapt and mange.
Spacewalking Astronauts seen from Earth
Apologies for the paywall. A search on Google News for the article title should allow full access.
Anyone with eyeglasses is a cyborg.
>He explained that his company’s tests of AT&T’s data network were done with handsets other than the iPhone, which does not allow non-Apple programs like his to run in the background.

Wow, that's a huge error.

The iPhone doesn't allow non-Apple programs to run in the background either. This is a big issue for app development actually and we've been clamoring for a background task API forever.

We get interrupted, and rerun fresh when a call comes in or a person leaves an app for any reason (such as "executing" a URL such as a tel: or twitteriffic:)
Question: Can the automatic paging of output interfere with piping or redirecting output? Or does it maybe work only in output going to the screen?
Personally, it's the double learning curve of having to learn Lisp and Emacs. I understand the basic concepts of Lisp now, but could someone point me to a good introduction to learning Emacs, Slime, and Lisp all at once? Does Practical Common Lisp do that as well?
Our iPhones don't make us cyborgs, hackers like Steve Mann are cyborgs.

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

http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann/

http://wearcam.org/pictures.html
Clojure Analysis
> I find that this problem will present a lot of opportunities in the coming years. Too late to do anything about it? Stay tuned.

Care to elaborate?
Suitably, his business relies on people doing stupid stuff, like spending $170 on a mount you can get from monoprice for less than half the price.
I recall reading rumors when AT&T's network quality first became an issue that they were upgrading the radios at base stations in major cities, but not the backhaul capacity. Not sure if it's true, but it would explain why you get full bars without any bandwidth.
See Andy Clark's book "Natural-Born Cyborgs".
There are certain things that usually just come with practice, emacs and slime usually seem to fit in that category. Once you have gone through the tutorial most of the time you just look up things or figure them out until you remember what to do in a specific situation.

There probably are some screencasts for introduction to emacs, slime might have some available as well.
I just started playing with it on Mac and now I'm wondering why does GUI exist. Here goes my final...
No, I'm just saying that the default state is to have neither control nor awareness of decision-making. Actual conscious decision-making is possible with effort and, to the extent that morality is a well-defined concept, it applies only to conscious minds.

In which case they are culpable for not forming good habits (and we are back at Aristotle.) You're not going to get very far telling me that people are not responsible for acting like jerks because either you deny human moral choice altogether, or at some level they are.
Inc.'s Best Business Books for Business Owners of 2009
But ECMAScript is killing Python. The writing is on the wall.
Advertising through disabling features? That's against Apple's (and Steve's) ethos. He wouldn't venture down that road. This is probably just to prevent competitors from doing that.
How Gordon Ramsay saved his Restaurant Empire
Conference organizers must learn to record from the computer more than from the camera. I understand there are some difficulties with different frame formats, but, as a last resort, one could at least record a screencast (QT animation is a lovely format for that) that could be later synced and combined with the audio track.

And it would also free the camera to record the presenter more closely.
Wow. This is so contrary to my own personal experience. I have a droid and a non-iphone at&t phone. The quality of verizon over the at&t one is significant, and the coverage in the chicagoland area is vastly in favor of verizon. If this weren't NYT, I would think there is some astroturfing going on.
Well, Motorola can just go back to writing their own operating systems for mobile pho....um, never mind.
Yes, but at least the ads are likely to be targeted and contextual rather than the blanket-cover approach of conventional TV ads.
how he did it:
-equity infusion of $9M
-tax payment extensions from the British gov
-cutting corporate staff by 35%
-renegotiating rental contracts with the Blackstone Group.
-Cutting costs at restaurants (no flowers, using cheaper cuts of meat)

the result? on track to earn $8M in EBITDA by year end.
Nodebox 2 Beta (like Processing, but with Python/Jython)
I think the point is that you would not have "paid good money" for the operating system itself.
As a non-lisp programmer, what scares me away is the syntax. I don't think I could ever wrap my head around the (admittedly succinct) examples I see online, because it takes so much effort for me to figure out what's going on in even a few lines of code. Comparatively, I was able to understand what was going on in most python scripts before I knew the language. Is this something that just takes a while to get down? Or are some people just naturally prone to the syntax?
I feel like it wouldn't be the worst way to operate a free cyber cafe. Overall not a fan of the idea, but I just don't see Apple doing this to all computers.
Advanced programming languages (Haskell, Scala, SML, OCaml, Scheme)
It has apparently been confirmed conclusively. Here's the TechCrunch article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/12/google-phone-unlocked-c...
It was pretty obvious that "contempt of cop" was his real "crime".
I think to say "haskell is a bit of a monster" you would have to qualify that you are talking about the current ghc haskell implementation. Haskell 98 seems like a realtively simple language (maybe Monads and laziness make it a little complex)
I used bash on Linux for 8 years because it was the default on Debian. I wish I'd been persuaded to change to zsh 9 years ago! The 1 year that I have been using it, I've really appreciated it.
GNOME Developer Suggests Split From GNU Project
The reason this syntax scares you is simple: it's different.

At the very root, Python syntax is nearly identical to Java, C, etc.

The syntax of Haskell, OCaml, etc, is a deviation from that of Python, Java, etc, but not an incredibly significant one. Perhaps you may find that the syntax of these languages scares you but you think you could probably learn it after a bit of mind-wrangling.

Lisp, on the other hand, is old. It was developed over 10 years before even C came to being! So the syntax is completely different, and requires you to actually learn it instead of just assuming that your knowledge of other programming languages will pull you through.

In summary, it's not a fault in you. It's just that you are used to C-derived and influenced syntaxes, but not to Lisp; and the syntax of Lisp is different enough that you need to actually learn it.

Here's a crash course:

(f a b c) is the same as f(a,b,c).
'(a b c) is kind of like ["a", "b", "c"].
'(1 2 3) is just like [1,2,3]
(defun x (a b c ...) ...) defines a function x(a,b,c).
(+ 1 2 3) is just like +(1,2,3) = 1 + 2 + 3
(setf x 5) is just like x = 5
'(a b ,c) is just like ["a", "b", c]
if L is equal to '(1 2 3), then
`(10 20 ,@L) is like [10, 20, 1, 2, 3]

Now, to be honest, I just showed you nearly 100% of the 'syntax' Lisp has. The rest is already understanding the language (knowing how to def. functions, how to do loops, etc).

By the way, what you might find interesting is that I once showed this to a friend of mine who knew nothing about programming. I showed him how to write a basic program in Java (with a few subroutines and a loop), then how to do it in Lisp. He exclaimed, "Argh! If I can do it like this, then why do I need all those fancy weird words like public and void and what not and braces and... eugh!"

Sorry for that longish post, I hope you found it at least a bit informative. ;)
It seems very unlikely to me that Apple would install advertising into their operating system or applications. It would be premature to guess that they would ever implement this patent.
Partly to self-promote but my easiest and more profitable business is a funny shirt site. http://BangBangPanda.com. I just put up the design and an company do the hard part of making the shirts, taking the payment, and shipping.
Everyone says that the parens melt away, and it's true.

However, using the language means the syntax, semantics, std lib, and community. So it's ultimately a very personal choice.
Question for the author. Why are you working at Google if you are wealthy from selling wall mounts?
Pink Army: open source anti-cancer drug development
Money != happiness. Working at Google is probably significantly more intellectually stimulating and satisfying than selling wall mounts...
22 musical pieces written with 140 characters of code
I read the story.

My comment was a reply to a comment (not the story itself) which I felt was germane.
You don't have to learn Emacs. Also, Common Lisp isn't the only option. Try Scheme, this one: www.drscheme.org.
Hello, (former) fellow python fans. ECMAScript, formerly known as JavaScript, is doing very well. So well Python developers started to show their concern for about 2 years. You could read it on PyPy blog and Python mailing lists.

The new ECMAScript VMs are getting faster and already beating Python's. And they are getting faster with plenty of room to improve. The language is cleaning up, with a major milestone reached a few days ago. They have the biggest installed base in the world and there are more developers. The language fits in precisely the same slot as Python.

The writing is on the wall. Down-voting what you don't like doesn't make it go away and it should be very un-HN.

EDIT: Read again the name of the story title if you think my post was flame-bait.
If it is ECMAScript, then the writing is mostly "on the browser". Python's writing, however, is everywhere, including the wall. So I would say this killing argument is premature.
Disclaimer: I'm still a total lisp newbie, take all of this with a grain of salt.

As I see it, the biggest hurdle to learning LISP isn't the syntax per se. Lisp's syntax is so simple, it's easily learned in a matter of minutes. The whole language basically boils down to lists and dotted pairs, and lists can be boiled down to dotted pairs if you squint at them the right way.

The real obstacle for newcomers is that you have to completely rewire your brain. The vast majority of us were taught programming with BASIC, C, Java, or something similar. With those languages, programming is like following a recipe. Do step a, then do step b, etc. Moreover, imperative languages use a familiar "verb" and "noun" paradigm. That's natural and intuitive to most of us.

With lisp, everything gets turned on its head. Everything happens at once. Code is data. There's no syntactic sugar because there's no syntax. You have to completely relearn how to look at computers and programming, and start over as a child. It's incredibly rewarding once you start having those "aha!" moments, but there is a decent-sized conceptual hurdle for people that are used to procedural programming languages.

It seems that the majority of the lisp community suffers from the curse of knowledge. For experienced lisp people, lisp is so natural and intuitive that it's hard to understand why other people have such trouble with it. The OP is correct, lisp could really use more resources to bridge the gap between lispers and the outside world.
Then to continue that paragraph it says 'The presentation of the advertisement(s) can be made as part of an approach where the user obtains a good or service, such as the operating system, for free or at a reduced cost'.

I assume their logic is somewhat like we have ad-subsidized web sites (i.e. most of them), so why not ad subsidized devices? Shown on page 4 as part of the 'Advertising Control' components is 'Buy Ad Free Version'.

My guess is that this would be tied into a reduced cost iPhone. If you look down the page though, they show plans for how it would be integrated into desktop MacOS.
Well - this comment is quite interesting. The parent one looks like a one-line "meh" comment. I'm quite happy to downvote the original and upvote this one...

But is it really killing python? The language is basically the same (almost-dictionary based, easily extensible types / prototypes, etc.). There's a big difference though: afaik there's no real library for ecmascript that would integrate it with the os. There's simply no way to use ecmascript standalone on a typical system. ecmascript is good in places where you need an embedded scripting language, but lua is not enough. Unfortunately neither of them is useful as a general-purpose language right now. Once someone produces a serious repl-like environment and a set of sys / os / file libraries - it can compete with python.
I've been meaning to try zsh. Maybe now's the time. Thanks for sharing and reminding me about it!
First off I don't think that doing anything with a lava lamp
as referenced in the article qualifies as "high achievement".
But the author does have a point that has been played out in business over and over and that is: Find a niche market and
do it well, become the dominating player in that niche and you
can make a good living.
> If it is ECMAScript, then the writing is mostly on the
browser. Python's writing, however, is everywhere, including the wall.

"The writing is on the wall" is an expression not meant to be taken literally.

> So I would say this killing argument is premature.

Actually many of us are working with ECMAScript outside browsers, often coming from Python and similar languages. Interfacing from C and C++ to V8 is incredibly easy. Have you ever tried to make Python modules?

Also ECMAScript VMs have plenty of security features that come extremely handy, like security. Python security, in particular sandboxing, is almost impossible to achieve and the work-arounds you need kill performance even further.

As a former Python fan, I could go on and on for pages. But I doubt this would change your mind so it's preposterous.
This is how you end up with a small fortune in the food business: start with a big one!
I wrote 2 Springer-Verlag Lisp books in ancient times, and have about 25 years of Lisp experience.

That said, Ruby has mostly replaced Lisp in my toolbox. When I do use a Lisp family language, it is most often Gambit-C Scheme to build small standalone executables - and sometimes Franz or SBCL Common Lisp.

BTW, I consider Python and Ruby to be fairly interchangable - use whichever you like best. Both are great languages with great libraries and supporting open source projects.
I've got to agree with that, myself. I guess my point is, the chemistry that went into the ferrofluid project wasn't trivial. And I could have made many "greeting card companies" in the time it took to develop one ferrofluid company.
For us, yes.

But not everyone cares to be intellectually stimulated to be happy.
Also:

Until you start getting into the most complex (and powerful) aspects of lisp, the last two lines of syntax are rarely used. You get get a very long way without understanding them, but once you do lisp will become one of your favorite languages.
Transliterating python to haskell
Business Opportunities Are Everywhere
This weekend, I was sitting at a Malaysian restaurant with my girlfriend when it struck me how easy it’d become to come up with new business ideas. This is probably one of the best Malaysian restaurants in Queens, and is just run by a small family.
Need icons for filetypes? Hotlink from stdicon.com