skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1. XMPP is not battery-friendly on mobile devices (this primarily has/had to do with the absence of push notifications, it seems).

I never really understood this complaint. Why are the notifications sent via XMPP's TCP channel not considered "push"? How do you expect to get push notifications without an open TCP connection anyway?
Honest question: So I'm hired as a consultant. Someone gives me a database login to an Oracle machine. I haven't been presented with a license agreement for the Oracle database system, nor have I signed anything indicating I agreed to give reverse engineering rights away. How am I bound by the Oracle end user license agreement?
Ask HN: Premature optimization – when to use?
I know the old adage, but I think I have a use case where it is false, so I want to see what HN has to say about it.

Fist of all, this is a private project, something I am working on with me as the only user. So the whole market fit issue shouldn't be relevant*.

So I am working on a webscraping project, mainly through trying to apply what I have leared through the learn python the hardway course. So far so good, everything is working well. But when I deployed my first spider, it took an hour, and returned ~20 million lines for one year (I want to get data going back at least 5 years).

So its working the way I want, but I am thinking, should I start looking at my code and see if there are ways I can speed it up?

Either way, it's not a problem, I have spare computers I can set to run the program for hours on end.

But should I waste electricity running a hack, or should I try to start optimizing now?
Features and Benefits of Standing Seam Metal Roofing – LGC Roofing Blog
Ofcourse if i (or anybody else) would write a chat protocol today i would make
changes. But i'm not even sure if i would abandon xml. I'm in the same boat as
you and think xml is too verbose and all that other stuff but i've recently
programmed some xmpp projects and i came to the conclusion that xml actually
realy does work well. And i didn't even use a library like sleekxmpp because
i wanted to know everything.
I'll just say: good luck designing something that'll be able to grow for 20 years
and still work today. You can realy feel where the X in XMPP comes from.

I have to mention the Conversations people. For me they are a big reason why i
use xmpp. It's not only the client which is very good, but the stuff like http-uploads
fix some very real problems in very little amount of code.

Also once axolotl-xmpp works and prosody 0.10 is released i see no reason not
to use xmpp honestly, which i will regardless, even if everybody uses something
else (like WhatsApp) i will simply write myself a transport server and continue
to use Conversations.

While i don't use it, projects like biboumi are realy cool. With a simple
combination of biboumi[1] and httpuploadcomponent[2] you now can share files
in irc-rooms.

I still have more to say. I hope that once i have my perfect chat-setup i will
write about it.

[1]: https://github.com/louiz/biboumi
[2]: https://github.com/siacs/HttpUploadComponent
That's because plugins are going to need to be white-listed (modifiable via about:config). The win64 (beta) edition of Firefox only allows the Flash Player Plugin, for example.
You and lawnchair are exactly right!

Somehow this CSO is unaware of binary static analysis, ala Veracode. You can still get plenty of false positives from binary SAST, but it's NOT de-compilation.

My question would be whether binary SAST falls under the prohibition against reverse engineering. I wouldn't think so, but that's one for the lawyers unfortunately.
What in the world is going on?

Why did this article just disappear off of the front page after receiving 318 up-votes in 2 hours?

How does post to drop from position #1 to somewhere below #150 in less than 1 minute, unless it was deleted by HN moderators, and if that's the case, why did it happen?
I don't think you can plan this for more then 5 years out, if that. The industry is moving to fast lately - new ways of doing things are constantly coming out, new frameworks, etc...

I like to watch the job boards (regardless if I'm looking or not) careers.stackoverflow.com, cybercoders.com, dice.com - search a keyword (angularjs, docker, nodejs, etc... ) and see what you get - if it looks like there's a good amount of demand, run in that direction.

Personally, my money is on frontend (angularjs, react), nodejs and mobile (react native, obj-c, swift) - all signs point to an increasingly mobile world - it's time to start learning those things to stay relevant.
I think part of the problem is culture has changed. A joke that is racist or homophobic that would have been considered hilarious 30 - 40 years ago may simply not considered all that funny anymore. It may still be that PC culture is going too far, but I think it's not the whole story
The Guardian – DevTools reveals they are hiring
I've been writing Python a lot coming from a Scheme/SICP background too, and I've slowly come to a sort of solution to this problem that works for me.

Basically, what it comes down to is realizing that a lot of the libraries and frameworks out there are smoke and mirrors: they provide an initial solution to a common problem, but when you start getting into the details of your problem, the problem you are trying to solve, you end up working around their crappy configuration points. In short, you stop coding and start configuring existing code which is poorly designed to solve your problem.

So what I do is I stop using those libraries. I zealously guard my dependencies, only letting in things that are solid, well-designed, mature, and minimally invasive. I use minimalist frameworks, eschewing ORMs. Most of the time I avoid classes, opting instead to use closures and namedtuples. The result, my code is fast, flexible, easy to understand, easy to test. I migrated around 30,000 lines of code from Python 2.7 to 3.4 in an afternoon--my unit tests caught a few issues and once those were fixed I didn't see any regressions in the following months.

I think the wall you're hitting isn't Python, it's the culture and libraries a lot of people use for Python. But there are a lot of people who don't use those things. Next time you think of reaching for pip or Django, stop yourself: do you need that? Maybe it provides a short-term solution to your problem, but in the long run it's neither a beautiful nor efficient way to write code.
Columbia House Owner Files for Bankruptcy
Folks,

There are FOUR VERSIONS OF FIREFOX WITH A SWITCH TO DISABLE THIS if you're so inclined. You can use: Nightly, Dev Edition, Unbranded Stable and Unbranded Beta. All of which have a switch that you can set to disable addons signing requirement.

In contrast there are only two versions where this is a requirement, Stable and Beta. If you doubt the usefulness of this you haven't seen a browser being hijacked by malware overriding search results, inserting all types of toolbars and more. This will prevent malware from sideloading extensions. And this is good.

The signing process is not the same as the AMO review process. The process takes only seconds and the signed addon is returned to the developer. They can distribute as they see fit.

Now, lets face the fact: Simple signing process that takes only seconds and will help prevent lots of malware, not the most nasty ones but a huge lot of sideloaded crap. Four versions of the browser for those power users who want to disable this.

Now, can someone explain to me without hate why this is a bad thing?
I can understand the argument that I shouldn't be upset with my cat because he claws my feet under a blanket; it's his natural instinct.

I can't understand the argument that I shouldn't be upset with a human being because they're stupid, and make stupid decisions. Humans are capable of introspection, education, and change.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect more of my fellow humans than of my cat.

But I guess I won't be mad at you.
Politics & FUD aside...has anyone evaluated the technological feasibility of what they're asking for? It sounds like unobtainium. A backdoor that the manufacturer maintains that allows the State to unlock whatever data they like -- how does that not pose an unacceptable risk of future data breaches and security compromises?

This is insane. I quietly hope the explanation is cynical motivation that they expect these arguments will be effective, because I am otherwise genuinely terrified that these people are in a position of power with such a poor grasp of the technologies in question as would be required to actually believe what they're saying.
Has anyone ever seen anything similar - i.e. embedding hiring links/contact info hidden in HTML/JS?

Or indeed has anyone had any success on either side of such hiring tactics?
That ejabberd does something doesn't mean it's the proper behaviour. Maybe it's a bug?
>I must ensure that every every disability is accommodated.

>> The poor man!

Did you not read the next sentence? The point was that most of the "disabilities" are bunk:

> Most disabilities that I am asked to accommodate seem to be unspecified and are remedied by providing the students with a separate, quiet location and an extra 30 minutes to take an exam.
There's no reason to expect "enjoys the experience of driving" and "is opposed to taxation" are descriptions of an individual that must be found exclusively together. That's the issue I take with your original statement.

I also see no reason to expect that it is inevitable that self-driving cars become mandatory globally, but that is a different point entirely and not one I'm interested in pursuing right now.
Some of the measures the OP is railing against can help stop students from needing suicide prevention counseling, counseling which is not 100% successful. If we can help reduce the number of students who even contemplate suicide, I'd say that's a noble goal.

And I personally think the point is very relevant. OP says students are coddled and campus stress isn't a big deal. GP brings up statistics showing that campus stress IS a big deal because it can lead to suicide. Seem very relevant to me.
You mean nobody outside of farming. From what I have read, the smaller farmers who have to deal with that shit certainly care.
> Why would X x Y idle connections (X: TCP connections per app, Y: applictions) prevent your radio from sleeping?

In the worst case, if the pings aren't sent at the same moment and all applications have a timeout set to, let's say, 30 minutes, your phone will send a ping every 30/(X*Y) minutes. I don't know what the usual X and Y would be, but if they're high enough your radio will always be up (check out these slides, 23 in particular: https://www.igvita.com/slides/2013/io-radio-performance.pdf)

And that's only counting idle applications. If you have one that periodically polls a server, it gets even worse.
This is one of the things which is frustrating about Mozilla.
I love that they stand for open protocols, free software and user privacy, but I don't love what they prioritize.

Reviewing extensions is critical to their user-experience.
If this really doesn't have an team of paid staffers, that's unfortunate.
Have you tried not taking crazy people seriously? Stop feeling like a victim.
Before the web, people changed channels or got up during TV commercials,

Many people still don't realize it's trivial to have a DVR automatically skip commercials, but advertising companies and TV networks sued TiVo to make sure they will never implement it.

Modern web ads and trackers are far over the line for many people today,

Not just "over the line," but for over 5 years now, advertising networks have allowed exploits to be delivered over their advertising networks. There's nothing like browsing a website then having a drive-by crypto locker installed on your machine.

As of 2015, blocking advertising isn't a moral question, it's a question of do you value your own security.

But publishers, advertisers, and browser vendors are all partly responsible for the situation we’re all in.

People say "trust the wisdom of the free market," but they forget the important part: free markets always become corrupt and always accumulate power towards the top. A market without government oversight and intervention is just a way to exploit and abuse people for profit with no repercussions.

It has never been easier to collect small direct payments online,

That's more tricky, isn't it? We've all viewed some article at a tiny city's online newspaper then been hit with a "SUBSCRIBE TO PODUNK DAILY ONLINE TO KEEP READING, ONLY $24.99/month." It's not sustainable for every small thing to receive direct payments and we don't have a clean disaggregation of a common "subscribe to internet publicans" pool (like iTunes Match, but for writing? Still useless if you get 0.00002 cents per page view—but, that's basically online advertising again).
For general sanity: $150,000,000
Suicide prevention counselling should be one of the last lines of defence, not the first.

Reducing stress is an overall better policy, as long as it doesn't get in the way of receiving an actual education. I think that's an important conversation to have.
Yes, quality alternatives and things exported from other cultures are very important here. Like I indicated in my comment MSN was the choice for groups more open to western cultures. Communication, sociality and tools used could be very culture sensitive.
Original has been deleted, cached version available:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ntXM0Rl...
A good recourse for tools for everything from Security audits to analysis to fuzzing is :
https://packetstormsecurity.com/files/tags/tool/page2/

Other then that learning the proper lingo gives you the proper search terms when looking around. Looking the txt zines gives you some interesting search phrases aswell as sometimes bug hunting comes up. Also do some deepweb diving or darknet hunting (which ever term you like).
can't tell if this is spam that got through to my rss or what
Allowing people to implement viewers for file types that run in the sandbox as plugins seems like a good idea then. Not that I mind that a PDF-viewer is already built in, but firefox can't support all file types.
> Flux is also quite verbose, which makes it inconvenient for data state, state that is persisted to the server. We currently use a global Backbone model cache for data fetching and saving but we’re also experimenting with a Relay-like system for REST apis. (Stay tuned for more on this topic).

What do they mean by this? I _think_ I've been doing something similar on my projects lately. Using Meteor as my backend pub/sub model, and React.js as my front end. Ties together pretty nicely although there's a range of other issues I'm still trying to work out (1 test frameworks for both React and Meteor code, etc..)
“I personally don't think SICP will help you much with Clojure. YMMV.”

—Rich Hickey, author, Clojure programming language
I think it is a very common use case to have a folder for an app that will do something and not have an app need permission to your entire folder. But google doesn't think so. You had responded to my comment which talked about such a use case.

I think it is obvious that purchase orders are an example. Have temporary hidden storage via an application data folder may be useful, but I am talking about folder level permissions for an app.
What is the rationale behind removing the configuration switch, though? Is there supposed to be some contingent of users who are not sufficiently tech-savvy to be trusted with choosing their own add-ons, but sufficiently tech-savvy to go and edit something in about:config, which really needs to be protected from their own stupidity? This sort of "mother knows best" approach is something I would expect from Apple, not a company that claims to put you in control.

Nightly comes with obvious stability and security problems; I don't know about "dev edition", but wouldn't be surprised if it isn't kept up-to-date at the same rate or comes with some presets regarding UI layout or otherwise that are annoying to someone who is not intending to primarily use it as a testbed.
How to win in binary option profit bot
Exactly it's just a loan, buying a phone on credit and paying it off monthly. It's like saying buying a home with a mortgage is buying a subsidised home, just ridiculous.
Ask HN: Any movies that changed your life?
For me pursuit of happyness, it had a profound impact and I learnt to appreciate things I have.
The name "Wagner-Fischer" is new to me. I usually cite this as Levenshtein [1965]. Even the Wagner-Fischer wp page notes that Levenshtein was first by a long shot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner%E2%80%93Fischer_algorit...
How is ad blocking an ethical issue? I get to control my computer, at least until some legislation passes that says I don't.

Even if I don't control my computer entirely, how about my DNS? I have a lot of the more intrusive domains (tynt, doubleclick, etc) set up as 127.0.0.1 in my dnsmasq config.

The "whose computer is it anyway" question seems key here. In order to make advertising possible, we have to take control away from owners. That seems like a generally bad outcome.
people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price.

This is the crucial point to me. How can I agree to a website's trackers before I know they exist?
The attitude I'm detecting here is this: A University is an institution, and how dare its constituents feel like they have the right to determine its culture and how it accommodates them. Students must bow to professors. They must accept the diseased puritan work ethic that infects American culture at all levels, whose main political forces are conservatism and other reactionary politics. If you are suffering, it's your fault and no one owes you any consideration. Crush the individual because the institution, the society, the culture owes them nothing.

This is an authoritarian reaction. People in power complaining that they are losing their power, their place in a hierarchy that places the student body as subordinate to them.

How about this as an alternative point of view: University Students demand respect and a supportive environment. Professors balk at the idea of treating them like there is any merit to their opinions on how they should be treated; reduce them to disparaging caricatures.
I was disillusioned with the college experience almost as soon as I began. I started college in 2007 after ~14 months deployed to Iraq, so it was a significant culture shock to be dropped into such a coddling environment.

Having to talk to three different people, and sit down for meetings, just to get the authorization to schedule my classes drove me crazy, while wasting time with mandatory "awareness" (alcohol, sex, whatever) classes made me question the point of it all.

In the end I chalked it all up to me being a bitter old 21 year old freshman, and took the opportunity to talk my way out of as many silly requirements as I could.

I do feel a bit vindicated seeing others take notice of how emotionally vulnerable college students have let themselves become, but I still hope there is a solution which fosters an environment of growth and challenge without going too far in either direction.
>We're talking here about rape and sexual assault though.

No we're not we're talking about “sex by surprise”.

One accuser, Anna Ardin, may have “ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups,” according to Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett, writing for CounterPunch.
I've found a movie that caught my attention, but I couldn't find any link to the imdb page - I wanted to read more about it, so I decided to select the title c/p and Google it - but what do you know, you can't select text.

Please fix this.
It's not that they are whiners. I'm a whiner. I complain about things that I find to be deplorable all the time.

But I also think I have a reasonable conception of what deplorableness is. And that includes persecution of nonbelievers for suspicion of heresy. Some people have founded a non-theistic religion regarding certain elements of social conduct, and its adherents act rather poorly towards those who do not share their beliefs.

They can believe what they want. But they can't force me to kneel before their altars.

Also, allow me to take a moment to endorse the use of the tilde ('~') as a "sarc mark".

~I'm sure it will catch on any day now.~
You're ignoring the part where he's holding her arms down and forcing her legs open. He's no different than the "dragging women off the streets" rapist, he just didn't need to do that in this case.
I know if there's a controversial post that gets a lot of visibility, the IA staff takes a snapshot. They're useful in times like this where content is edited or deleted.
What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance".

It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to put up online (hosting, funding its creation), someone is paying X+(ad company overhead) for it.

If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible.

Advertising isn't free. Insofar it works, for some people, it's basically coercive via psychology and simulated peer pressure.
15 years ago it was common to get a "fk you" price quoted by a cable company or other provider when they don't want to serve you.

Back then, few people called their bluff, but today the internet is more valuable than it was before. Now, for instance, if you spend $50,000 to get fiber optic to your house, your property value goes up by at least that much. In many places that are a buyer's market people are finding they can't sell a house at all if it only has DSL.

Similarly if you work from home doing computer stuff, faster and reliable internet (i.e. not DSL) can greatly improve productivity and lower your stress.

For more and more people you find it is a no-brainer to put $50,000 on their home equity line, so what happens is they say that want it anyway, and then "big internet" finds some other excuse why they can't provide service.

Lately there have been huge increases in the "fk you" prices being quoted because the last thing big ISPs want is for people to raise their expectation.
Courts of which country? There are a lot of countries out there, some of them allowing reverse engineering (especially in Europe for example).
Not really. This is dead code, U1 was discontinued. It's more like if MS opensourced Bob.
In switzerland (or at least Geneva) judges are elected.
Shipping Provider Tracking
Welcome to your Airbnb
I agree that it should, but it doesn't.
Will Oracle take legal action against researchers who did bugs in Java?
IMHO you are not. People from your company that weren't making you read EULA and promise to comply with it (in writing) will be responsible for your behaviour that breaks the EULA.