skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I don't think 'in this day and age' that my searches are guaranteed to remain private.

However, I would much rather put that information in the hands of people that aren't going to use naive arguments such as 'if you have nothing to hide...'. As such, important mail comes to my own server on my own MX records, as such it may pass through a couple of hands before reaching me, but in the majority of cases, those hands will be hands I cannot remove from the loop (the sender's network admin & ISP, my ISP to a degree, etc). My searches go to ixquick, who understand that people may want their searches to be 'private'.

Most of us that value privacy don't have some foolish notion that our privacy is absolute and guaranteed. We just value people/services that realise that privacy isn't something to be thrown aside when a couple of extra cents can be earnt.

And yes, before you point it out, I know I'm paranoid, you can take it up with my doctor - oh, wait, they don't discuss patient cases with random strangers, again something google tried to subvert with their google health project (whatever happened to that? maybe they realised they couldn't profitize it legally)
For $200 you can't even buy a device that only does Twitter. I'm guessing the Apple tablet is going to be around $1K minimum, which will make this $500 (soon to be $400) tablet look like a bargain.
Google has a Finance API here http://code.google.com/apis/finance/

also if you choose Yahoo http://code.google.com/p/yahoo-finance-stock-data/
Hamstrung by Delays, Fitbit Explains and Tries to Deliver
The real patent story behind Apple vs Nokia
There is a pattern - yes, even on HN - of saying "I'm bad with names" or "I'm not an artist" -- and then turning around and denigrating those skills that other people have taken the time & effort to develop.

Perhaps, but if that is the case, then I don't doubt someone corrects them and they learn. Then their stance becomes "I'm bad with names and while I understand it can be an asset, I don't believe it is worth my time" and "I'm not an artist, but I understand how designing a UI is tricky work and I'm glad we have someone who is good at it. If I had to design that UI, it would suck.".

The next stage of enlightenment may come when they say such things to equivalents of their historical selves and someone yet again adds something to their understanding, for instance by pointing out how they could understand these skills better and how that are perhaps even more worth then they thought. Or by pointing out that while they were paying lip-service to the concept with their 'I respect that' utterings, they actually still seem to look down on the skills.

Finally, some people really are unmovingly convinced of something seemingly ludicrous, but they can defend that position, even when we disagree. Instead of bashing them for not conforming, we can sometimes learn from them, because they make us reconsider a core assumption. Perhaps 'marketers' really are all lying scumbags, but we don't see that, because people like you keep nuancing and defending what they do, which keeps hiding their actual natures.

Edit:
To explain that last paragraph some more: sometimes there aren't multiple levels of enlightenment and you were right in the first instance. While everyone is busy sketching complex, nuanced, faceted, balanced accounts of the issue, all they are doing is in fact trying to straighten what is bent beyond repair. Why? Because society asserts it is straight and we try to fit in.

As an example, most atheists (want to) allow for religions in their world view. Everyone, them included, bash those 'intolerant' atheists that firmly hold there should not be any room for any religion. But the latter party may simply be right in asserting that humanity will be best of if we started a hundred year effort to get rid of all the religions. If that were the case, then a seemingly simple view would yield the best results, while all the nuanced accounts turned out to be nothing but fog.
I've yet to see any decent, unbiased, independent analysis' of climate change from any side.

I've yet to see a single climatologist tackle the Milankovitch cycles and argue that it won't be the greater cause of global warming. I've yet to hear any evidence to disprove the theory, but I've heard lots of evidence to prove it and more just keeps on coming out.

So please, prey tell, why isn't insolation variations of over 20% causing global warming? Why is it the human emission of CO2 that is being attributed as the sole/major cause of global warming when it has been conclusively shown to have less than 1/10th the forcing effect of variations in the Milankovitch cycles? Please where is this magical heating coming from that CO2 is providing?

Why is the hundreds of years of work on the Milankovitch cycles being wholly ignored by climate scientists? Perhaps because it clearly states that there's likely to be a short-term ~5C raise in global temperatures regardless of what we do.

When climatologists actually acknowledge these facts, I'll then believe what they have to say. Until then everything I do to save energy, to recycle, everything is to help our physical environment and to prevent the export of our waste to third world countries that we're using as waste dumps for our hazardous materials. When climatologists acknowledge that regardless of what we do the planet will warm, and that it's in our best interest to prepare for these changes and not ignorantly claim we can defeat them, then I'll believe they're truly trying to help people and not make a cheap billion dollars at our expense.
Interesting choice for a first comment in a one-week old account. Well, welcome to Hacker News, whoever you might be.
Gnome to Split Off from GNU Project?
English is obviously not this guys first language. I wonder if that helped contribute to its "un-success". It would probably a huge help if someone helped translate his site and documentation to correct english.
I've done this too, but to be honest its not worth much. If you need minute by minute data then you probably need it to be real time (this is 12 minutes behind) however for most technical strategies you can use end of day data. For this I find google's data to be the most accurate, and easiest to scrape. here is an example url:

The base is http://www.google.com/finance/historical?q=
then the symbol such as goog
then you need to specify a start date by adding the query string "startdate" to the url
along with the query string "enddate"
and finally you will always want to dump it as a csv: "output=csv"

a note about the dates, It should be formatted in such a way that it is [Month][Day][%2C+][Year] where Month is the first 3 letters of the month.

all together it would look like this:
http://www.google.com/finance/historicalq=goog&startdate...

I should note that has been some changes since the last time I've ran the code to scrape the data, but i don't think things have changed dramatically.
wow when did google get that finance api?
The real identity crisis of the web
I'm just responding to this.

>The second half of this, that normal kids on Ritalin and Adderall will be overstimulated and unable to concentrate, is just plain false.

Not that I've taken Ritalin, but some folks I know have taken it particularly for the off-the wall overstimulated feeling they get on it. Perhaps it's false. But then it would just be a placebo effect and they may as well have taken cod liver oil.
On Fear and Faith
If enough people think like you do, the terrorists won.

They are not out to blow you up. They want to destroy your way of life - your freedoms and the notion that government serves the people. The want the opposite.

And they are winning. Blowing people up is not the objective: it's the tool.
Fixing PostgreSQL's default encoding on Ubuntu 9.10
I think the reason that is so is that the HN system encourages certain behaviors which lead to better discussions whereas the slashdot system is more of a passive filter on a noisy feed, which is inherently a losing battle.

HN survives mostly by being small, self-selecting, and somewhat obscure. Slashdot, for all its flaws, is remarkable for being large, well-known, and of consistent quality. Most comparable sites would be well on their way into the gutter at a quarter of /.'s age.

I'm aware of only three viable means of maintaining stability in an online community: slavish adherence to the Peyton-Jones Law (viz. "avoid success at all costs"), iron fist moderators and a tangible cost to participate (cf. the Something Awful forums), or whatever secret sauce /. has.

HN almost certainly doesn't have the third, and the Powers That Be have better things to do than implement the second. I seem to recall pg describing the slow growth of HN membership in very positive terms, so I'm pretty sure there's a deliberate strategy here.
GNOME dev proposes vote on split from GNU Project
This is fine rational for a forum post. But as tc points out, few have any experience being "handled" by law enforcement and react with primitive defense. I love dogs and don't show fear around a clearly well-trained police dog. But I've never had one take me down either and have no idea how I'd react.
Or as I like to say "JavaScript is Scheme in C drag".
Somehow, this reminds me of an Asimov tale. A planet called Solaria, in fact:

The Solarians specialized in the construction of robots, which they exported to the other Spacer Worlds. Solarian robots were noted for their variety and excellence. They also exported their grain, which was used to make a delicacy known as the pachinka.-- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria

No offense to the Japanese of course; all I'm saying is fiction is often an extrapolation of stuff all around us.
Horror! I didn't know such atrocities existed shudder ;)
I tend to think that a lot of human activity comes down to seeking status and exercising status. "Buy local" is seeking status and "act evil" is exercising status. I'm sure it's more complicated that than, but I think this is a good framework for getting a rough draft of understanding the behavior.
You should have pointed out to them that fuel efficiency and pollution from automobile engines are worsened by having to decelerate/accelerate. In other words, if you force someone in a car to slow down (or, heaven forbid, stop) you're tangibly increasing the amount of damage being done to the environment.
While true I think it's important to really know a technology before moving on. You can do fine only learning one new and popular stack (language, popular frameworks / API's, debugger, etc) every ten years. Now days, if you really know, Java, Ruby, Python, or C#. Net it's not hard to get a decent job, but there is little need to know all of them.

The trailing edge of the programming wold moves slowly so you have a few years to move onto the next trend before you become obsolete. Often you will make less money during those transition periods, but it's still worth.

PS: I only point this out because compared to the average American you can make a great living programming as a 9-5 job. You can step above that, but it's not required.
After reading that post I'm still confused about why they want to "split off."
In garbage collected environments, 'memory leaks' usually mean keeping references to objects even when they're not needed anymore.
i updated the http://crunchpad.com page with a few extra reasons why I wouldn't buy:

#1. The only way to pre-order is with PayPal, and since PayPal Buyer Protection only lasts 45 days, and the JooJoo says "Pre-orders will ship in 8 to 10 weeks." that means if they "forget" to ship, you are out of luck.

#2: Every single image seems to be a rendering, not a single actual photo.

#3: They only sell to United States, yet they only use kilograms for weights, talk about amateur hour.
Fine-grained locals clearing - Clojure
Because they realised that Richard Stallman isn't just eccentric, he is crazy.

The easier and more rational option would be to just institutionalize Stallman. Unfortunately some people are opposed to that because of sentimental reasons.
Using bpython shell with django (and some Ipython features you should know)
I wish, it was a classic self homegrown PHP "framework".
UFC 107 Live Stream Penn vs Sanchez Online review at Kaboodle
It's worth noting that studies have shown that applying "willpower" works exactly that way. Specifically, making conscious decisions to override subconscious impulses depletes cognitive resources in a measurable way, with some evidence that doing so repeatedly increases the amount of willpower reserves in the long-term.

As an aside, I wouldn't assume that people are "entitled jerks" as such--even if it's all just social status signalling, they're almost certainly not consciously aware of it.
Corporations and governments are great when they are needed. The problem with corporations and governments is that once they are not needed anymore they don't go away.
1. Banks are more reliable than hosting providers.
2. For a small personal site you don't need anything fancy, just make sure you've SFTP'd the files to your disk and snapshotted the DB once every couple months. My personal site is backed up by Rackspace cloud, but I still do an occasional rsync just in case they fuck up.
The JooJoo looks amazing but I'm not going to gamble by being an early adoption. When a company already has one lawsuit and their product is not shipping yet, I don't want to chance my $499. I could care less if the JooJoo makes Arrington cry nor do I want to chance my money on a pre-order on a product that may never see the light of day..

I'm going to wait for them to ship in 8 to 10 weeks and see what people say once they actually own the tablet. If it's as amazing as it looks, then I might have to buy one. If Chrome OS will run on the tablet then I'm even more apt to buy one because I trust that Google will keep their OS more up to date. For now, I'm going to not be an early adopter and take the safe road.
No, but just remember - when you're working for people younger than you, it's probably time to become an entrepreneur or director. Very rarely does "programming" offer a salary commensurate with the level of seniority older people actually have attained.

When you're middle aged and not paid what you're really worth, it borders on pathetic, not just merely sad.
And what, exactly, is your evidence that his is legally insane? Everything I've heard and read from him seems extremely sane. More sane that what I've heard from the opposing camp. Is it because he eats toe cheese? I admit it's pretty strange, but so what? Judge his words and writings. Let his principles stand alone. Then tell me he's insane.
yeah, when TC announced $200 price for the crunchpad I thought it was a bit out of control considering AT&T covers about half the retail price of the iPhone.

i'm expecting to pay about 1-1.5k for the Apple tablet and i think i'll be fine with that if it delivers a great tablet experience, hopefully unlike Apple TV for the TV.
I'm confused about what would that mean. Is there anything they can't (and want to) do? Or is it all just talking?
Ask HN: Generally speaking, Do Indians Startups Suck at Marketing
I ask this not as a bitter person but as a straight forward questions. These days I am working a lot with lot of multi-location teams and more often I get this remark sometime frankly on my face or behind my back. Is this something of a stereotype like "German engineering" is great or this is actually means something.
Stallman isn't crazy. He is an extremist just like Ghandi was an extremist. I think many years from now we will view Stallman as our times Ghandi - - someone who was extreme, but fought for a good cause.
You couldn't care less. Or, is it that you do care?
I think the website is Beautiful, at least.
While event delegation doesn't work 100% of the time (e.g. when another piece of code that uses capture instead of bubbling such as google maps API), I wouldn't consider it a hack. Of course event handling will be slower but we can test how much slower :).

You can do that with jQuery as well and that's an ineresting performance comparison in itself. E.g. $('.class:visible:not(:eq(1))') vs $('.class').filter(':visible').not(':eq(1)').
I suspect it heavily depends on the size of the DOM tree and the number of elements.
I'm using FF 3.5 on a Core 2 Duo laptop and running my mouse across the graph back and forth uses an entire core. Behold, the power of javascript!
Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle by R. P. Feynman
Let's see if I understand the logic.

A is a bad idea. B shares the characteristics that make A a bad idea, therefore we should do B.

Wrong.

The fact that unions, govts and corps tend to go bad is not an argument for expanding any of them. It's an argument against expanding all three of them. The continued existings of broken {unions, corps, govts} is not an argument for creating new {unions, corps, govts}.

Interestingly enough, I've never had a corp tell me that I couldn't do biz with another corp, union, or govt. Unions, on the other hand, exist to keep me from doing biz with a corp.

Yes, govts are even more pervasive in their "you can't deal with" powers, but that's not much of an argument for unions.
On Planet GNOME, GNOME's blog aggregator, some contributors talk about software that isn't "Free Software". Stallman complains on the mailing list that as part of the GNU Project GNOME shouldn't be "presenting proprietary software as legitimate".

In a reply, Philip Van Hoof states that he believes that the GNOME community has a different philosophy than Stallman and the FSF, that this has long been an unresolved issue with GNOME, and proposes a vote to separate GNOME from the FSF and GNU.
I wonder how many programmers really know about lisp and other "old technologies". Perhaps, programmers not only need to stay on the cutting edge but also learn the "old way"?
I agree with you that a shell scripting language should be in every programmers toolkit (even DOS command prompt and batch files count). Also if a programmer is dealing with the web or web applications then JavaScript is a must. However I must disagree on the other two languages, they do not need to be added to the list.

Regarding PHP, you don't actually need to know it, as once you know C (and HTML) you can easily interpret a PHP script, and make any minor modifications if need be. I would only say to learn PHP if you intend to actively develop in it (i.e. contribute actively to the development of an existing open-source PHP application), as I've found that the existing PHP applications to be sufficiently completed for my liking.

As for Perl, you can just substitute Ruby or Python (both of which are on the list) for all of your text processing needs. Like the author I prefer Ruby, but both languages seem to have a reasonably powerful text processing library included.
I think we might have different understandings of what makes one an 'entitled jerk.' Aristotle believed that people who did wrong but believed that what they were doing was right, were ethically worse than those that knew what they were doing was wrong. He argued that to confuse vice for virtue signaled more fundamental problems than simply the inclination to give into temptation. With this understanding, not being aware that you are an 'entitled jerk' simply makes you more of a jerk.

Note that I'm not implying that every who buys organic produce is an 'entitled jerk.' People and their motives have to be judged on an individual basis.
Very similar topic on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1048004/start-programming...
I'm not quite familiar with GNOME. What are the proprietary softwares that they bundle ?
'Pandemic' just means a new strain reaches the same widespread distribution as old strains. No one doubts that the new strain has done that.

The troubling subtext I saw in revere's comments is the suggestion that we're in some sort of unique crisis where it's irresponsible to give prominent coverage to substantive doubts about Tamiflu. We're not in such a crisis, and even in a real crisis, we need to retain our skeptical faculties.

Tamiflu is a relatively new drug (not many decades old) with known and potentially-unknown side-effects.

It's being used being to treat a disease for which, whether new-strain or old-strain, 99.9%+ of all sufferers recover completely. (Recent CDC estimates are that 1-in-6 Americans has already had H1N1/09, with up to 10K deaths. That's a 99.98% survival rate.)

And, the strongest case for Tamiflu's effectiveness seems to be that if given promptly at the right early stage of infection, it might make symptoms a bit less severe or duration a little shorter.

People with a high risk of complications may still find the costs and side-effects worth it, but for everyone else, it's important to know and emphasize how tentative and limited the evidence is for Tamiflu's effectiveness.
I'm pretty sure that was deliberate on the part of the author. Sometimes they need a foil - makes for a more compelling story.
Google opens up a Dangerous Doorway
42 year old programmer here. just wanted to say "fuck you". thanks.
> I can't because I don't know enough about all the diff types of unions.

In other words, you don't know enough to support your position. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, but ....

> In any case, that's irrelevant. What you're suggesting is that having an ideal and working towards it is a waste of time.

It's quite relevant. Unions have been tried many times and the end result has always had certain characteristics. If you're going to argue that this time will be different, you have to explain why and what you're going to do different.

And that's where background knowledge is required.

No, it's not enough to "believe" - Tinkerbelle logic doesn't work in the real world.
you're right. i should have said "first class functions" (which narrows the field somewhat).
It's interesting that your test shows that insert after is slower on jQuery 1.4 than on 1.3 since the release notes for 1.4a says "append, prepend, etc. have been heavily optimized." How about adding append and prepend to the test suite?
It's interesting that you should mention banks. Banks routinely go under, and in almost all cases your deposits are only 'safe' up to a certain amount. Most data stores are worth well in excess of that amount, so if you could not reasonably expect a bank to hold on to a very large amount of data it stands to reason that you should not trust some service provider with data that has serious value without a secondary system in place.

After all, their liability will almost certainly be less than the value of your data, in which case there are two reasons to keep extra copies, both business continuity reasons and direct economic ones.
Is there a story here? I read the article twice and still don't understand what's NY Times-worthy here...
We sure need more "crazies" like him.
"I plan to keep on coding until my body fails me in a way that makes it impossible."

What is great about programming is that, as technologies progress, the odds that you will be able to keep programming until you just die keep getting better all the time.
No. Of course, I'm just 23 and I learned when I was 17ish, so maybe I have no relevant experience. However, the people who taught me learned in their 40s. Anyway, I expect to have to learn new things about new languages and new ways to program every few months for the rest of the forseeable future. So, no, there is no age limit, and if there were... it wouldn't be 24... it would be much closer to 110.
Richard Stallman frequents our lab-wide mailing list (csail-related@lists.csail.mit.edu) and once explained how he browses the web:

"My access to web pages is by sending mail to a server which does the equivalent of wget and mails them back to me. (Once I get the page, I can view it with various browsers.) I transfer mail a couple of times a day and usually have no net connection otherwise." (11/8/2009)

A little extreme, but an interesting hack.