skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do agree that the number of everyday things that can be reverse engineered has dropped, but likely if one was so inclined to reverse engineer something, he or she would find something to reverse engineer. I would go so far as to say that the number of things that can get a 13 year old into tinkering has grown, not shrunk. The internet has opened up communities that would otherwise be unreachable to our hypothetical teen.

For my own case, had it not been for the internet, I would've never gotten into tube circuits. I never would have been able to make heads or tails of even the most basic tube amp design, even given the schematics. On top of that, I probably would've either killed myself or caused serious harm to myself if I did try to poke around those circuits without having researched it. Tube circuits can have deadly amounts of electricity in them even when they're unplugged and turned off. The same is true for old (and new?) TVs, I believe.

I'm 20. PCBs were pretty much ubiquitous by the time I was old enough to really start digging into things. That never stopped me, and I don't believe it would stop someone that's 13 now and has the inclination to take things apart and figure out how they work.
I find this more interesting than the idea itself :)

So everytime someone 'creates' a chatroom it actually creates a drop.io and uses the chatroom associated with that drop.io?

FYI: I have asked the above to jmonegro in the chat: "yes, it's built around their streaming api. but the drops are password protected by a hashed function, so they aren't publicly available"
I just installed Clozure on a new Windows laptop (yes, I know, but it has 4 cores, and was inexpensive). On OS X and Linux I was used to running SBCL (or Franz).
Smug Ugly - Anil Dash [2007]
> Are those impressions also wrong?

Individually no. Your experience provides a sample of one case against the their proposition (at least for periods up to a few months). Whether this can be reliably generalised to others is still in question. To do fair test you would need also do a good sample of people trying to move from (up to years usage of) the N1 to the iPhone. You could see how they are doing after a few days, weeks, months...

It seems that for a some people, their first use of the iPhone was a life changing experience and it is possible that they have been so marked by it that they will always prefer that interface. Also different interfaces are probably a better fit for the way different people's brains work

(Edit : From my experiences the strongest iPhone fans seem to have a more personal/intuitive approach to things rather than being focussed on statistics or logic. Exactly the group who would be least impressed with the arguments I'm making).

With so many matters of personal taste/preference/experience involved I'm not sure if anyone's proclamation of 'the best interface' has more value than the 'best food' or 'best movie'.
Allowing any CSS at all is very risky indeed. There was a brilliant phishing attack on MySpace a few years ago where the attacker constructed their own "log in" link and used CSS absolute positioning to overlay it across the real "log in" link in the global navigation. They stole 30,000+ accounts.

Even if you filter out "position: absolute", there's a chance people might figure out a way to do something similar using enormous padding values or negative margins.

Your general approach (tokenise the HTML and use a whitelist) is an OK start, but you should be white-listing attributes as well. You should also have an ENORMOUS set of unit tests.

You allow object and embed which is very worrying - the allowScriptAccess attribute can allow Flash to make JavaScript calls to the parent page, for example.

Also remember this: you're not dealing with valid HTML, you're dealing with malicious HTML that might be designed to evade your filters but still be handled by browser's built-in error correction code. Since the most widely used HTML engine is closed source, there's no telling what kind of weird constructs might be error-corrected and rendered by IE.

HTML cleansing is a mine-field.
Patents don't prevent you from reverse engineering something you buy -- in fact it should already be made public in the patent application. Neither does copyright. It prevents you from using that knowledge in a new or cloned product.

Its more the DMCA and maybe-enforceable licenses you "agree" to when buying something that try to prevent you from figuring out how things work. And that comes perilously close to "thought police" IMHO.

I also remember taking apart rotary phones and realizing that you could dial them by hitting the hangup lever at the right frequency and number of times. If that had been "forbidden", I think it's very reasonable that my natural curiosity had just been rejected at an early age. This story reminds me of the TED talk about how you can't buy a chemistry set anymore.
The idea that any language lacks recursion is firstly very poorly supported — the only person who actually thinks this is true and demonstrated by any real language is Daniel Everett who thinks Pirahã lacks recursion, but there's a wealth of argumentation over whether this is true or not (for starters see Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues's "Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment" for a good discussion on this). Secondly, it's not crucial to any contemporary, wide-spread notions of Universal Grammar that languages have recursion in their structure — the theory of Syntactic Structures does not suppose, or even depend upon, expressions having recursive tree structures, it merely hypothesizes that the grammatical processes of a language can only employ structural relationships (and syntactic types) to determine when they can or cannot apply, but this idea has long since fallen into the dustbin of history as ever more non-structural phenomena (features, binding, etc.) became relevant to the grammatical theory.

Second, there has yet to be a demonstration from any known language that the language actually does not have an underlying tree structure to it — even the most free word-order languages such as Warlpiri display evidence of tree structure. NLP people may have a major bone to pick with core Chomskyan theory because of the incredibly difficult in parsing using it, but Chomskyan linguistics isn't about designing computationally efficient means of parsing sentences, it's about developing a good scientific theory about the nature of the constraints on human grammars. And I say core Chomskyan theory above because NLP people actually love various less core Chomskyan theory (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, for instance, which has plenty of work done on it in the parsing world; or Combinatory Categorial Grammar which has been looked at quite a lot in the computational literature). The fact that NLP people prefer other methods such as dependency grammars doesn't say anything about the theoretical framework Chomsky introduced any more than their preference for numerical methods of differentiation and integration in mathematics bears on the theoretical importance or validity of precise symbolic differentiation and integration. Or to rephrase that more concisely — just because your computer isn't powerful enough to calculate these equations doesn't make the equations wrong.

I don't know whether or not Chomsky should be #1 on this list, but I do know that you have no clue what you're talking about with regards to contemporary linguistic theory.
Interesting, in my experience these defining qualities for a laptop, in order: size, battery life, screen quality and keyboard quality.

I couldn't care less about CPU speed or harddisk capacity.

I think it is the main dilemma all laptop manufacturers are faced with, everybody uses the product in a completely different way, we all have our preferences, and they're all different.

Laptops are a compromise between all those preferences, I'm sure there will be others (like me) that will really love laptops with longer battery life.

And you can't really argue that longer is worse, shorter in a battery powered device is always worse, so longer must be better.
Perhaps there is a reason for the interesting Google "suggestions" when you start your search with "paypal is"

[ following the strategy on boy-/girlfriends at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043476 ]

Although there are customer service horror stories about Google itself, the stories about PP seem to keep on coming (as, apparently, do their policies/procedures).

I make a practice to process only that $ amount through PP that I am comfortable losing.
Dennett, Pinker, and Ramachandrans books of the last 20 years.
If I were in a hurry and there would be one 'best' tool but I was already familiar with another.

If someone asked me to fix something for them in an environment that I'm unfamiliar with, maybe even do not like, but the price of asking them to switch is higher than my inconvenience.

In the case that there are serious constraints on the amount of computing power available, say I want to build a data acquisition device that runs of a solar cell and a small battery.

And so on...
Any company who can build a laptop whose batteries last all day is going to make a lot of money, because it frees users from the constant worry that they're going to run out of battery power soon, and would enable genuinely mobile working. No longer would you always need to do your work somewhere in the vicinity of a mains socket.
I would say also try to play with both of them at some point. The Nook can be played with in most stores - and playing with it sold me on the Kindle.

The Nook was quite slow in switching pages, extremely difficult to scroll down, and the goofy color/touch screen at the bottom was more of a nuisance than anything else.
A Roll Cloud
Given that you wrote this about my stuff:

> remarkably poorly written, not well thought

That was really funny!
Latent appliance fetishist rejoice.

L. Ron Hoover and the First Church of Appliantology would approve. Of course, it did mention that it didn't vacuum, so maybe not.
This works:

<s
c
r
i
p
t>alert('xss')</
s
c
r
i
p
t>

I think older versions of IE might execute this - the LiveJournal XSS filter has defence against this one. At the very least though it should be escaped rather than being allowed through on to the page.
I've used zoneedit.com in the past and was pleased with the service. It's free for up to two or three domains, or it used to be, and the web interface was simple but did everything you needed it to.
Here We Go Again:  Video Standards War 2010
Certainly at my old university there where maybe 6 outlets in lecture halls that could seat 160. And if you wanted to use of them you had to sit in on of the 10 seats close enough to make it convenient. So if you weren't first through the door chance where you wouldn't get to plug your laptop in. The same is basically true for most conferences I've ever been to.

But really, for me it's more about the convenience than anything else. It's not so much that it's impossible to find a plug as the fact that it's annoying to have unplug your power supply when you get up, carry it with you and then find an outlet when you get to where you are going. Being able to go a whole day without having to even look for an outlet is to me a seemingly small, but fundamentally
vital aspect of my laptop use. Most of the time I don't even bother bringing the power supply with me.

Personally I'm never buying a laptop which claims less than a minimum of 5-6 hours battery life, no matter what any of the other specs might be.
Presumably Jared Diamond was talking about the New Guinea tribes in the lowlands that are in fact rather "paleo" and not about the inhabitants of the mountain ranges of the interior who practice agriculture and where the men don't, in fact, hunt very much.
We bought one of these last year, for my Dad's 70th birthday (he's a math geek). They are very special little devices.
Except 13 year olds pay attention to maybe-enforceable license and the DMCA a lot less than the author cared about the KGB - at least he was aware of them. I doubt any 13 year old knows what EULA or DMCA stands for.

Chemistry sets are readily available, just as they always have been [1]. The big difference is that now, video games are a hell of a lot more fun than any chemistry set.

1. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00007B8M6/
On further inspection, I don't trust your implementation at all. You're blacklisting CSS rules and attributes rather than whitelisting them. This means you wouldn't catch attacks like this one, for example:

http://www.davidpashley.com/blog/computing/livejournal-mozil...

I also don't think you're the right thing when you DO find something that's not on the whitelist - you should be escaping it rather than stripping it (we couldn't have a discussion about your code using your system, since our XSS examples would be stripped).

I'd suggest re-engineering to use a whitelist for everything.
That's a pretty aggressive reply, almost to the level of flaming.

The point is that random theories of drugs, atheism and terrorism are made up problems that average people can't do anything about. Discussing security is important and being aware of potential threads is necessary and important, but to a limit.

Taking care of the environment, eating healthy, saving money, improving things in your surroundings are things you can do to improve your life and your community.

The sheep/shepherd argument is too simplistic and while it's something to think about, it was formulated in a way that it stops the conversation, instead of moving it forward.
Wow. That must have cost you a pretty penny.

I've been wondering if anybody in my surroundings has one, I'd love to play with one for a bit.

Amazing little device, check out the exploded views linked at the bottom of the page.

Here is another nice picture:

http://home.comcast.net/~timewise1/curta/curta.html

and another link:

http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm

disassembly:

http://www.vcalc.net/disassy/
It's the top "watched/listened" story on BBC News right now. Hurrah for free publicity.
FTA:

> Eventually, some of the previously top-ranked songs began to creep back up, and previously bottom-ranked ones slid down. And people in the upside-down world downloaded fewer songs overall.

Funny how the article emphasized our sheepishness while relegating clear counter-evidence to the dregs of the article.

Also: why is the article titled, "Clive Thompson on How Group Think Rules What We Like", if not to trade on Thompson's presumed popularity? (Disclosure: I've never heard of him. Not sure if that should make me less or more susceptible to the groupthink of seeing his name in the headline.)
You should also keep the deletion after a week if it isn't used in the first week. (That way if people make a bunch they don't steal resources from you.)
"A male sex robot named Rocky is in development."

So can you buy one of each and mate them and produce the second generation?

Genetic programming ftw.
But you can’t get a ‘liberal arts’ CS degree.

Georgia Tech's Computational Media degree is one of these. The major is shared by their CS and Literature departments, thinking about programmatic artifacts as if they were traditional cultural media like poetry or music.

I was one of the first graduates from the program and it hit on something I'd really felt missing elsewhere, so take this as a recommendation if you happen to be looking for a university in the SE US... http://lcc.gatech.edu/compumedia/
Great idea on the contest - many students are facing beaucoup financial hardship, and this gives them hope. Honestly, a few students are working mostly on contests as classes start. And if digidorm can resist the decline in quality like hacker news, that is good news. We very badly need real world tools for students as they try and hack their way to a degree, so please keep thefocus on using digidorm to give students the tools and contexts to understand Higher Ed so that they might transform it....And the point below about whittling down your pitch is spot on.
I fixed many bugs - it should work on HN and most other sites as well.
> Our approach is to remove unwanted tags and properties

I'm no security guru, but isn't the best practice to have a whitelist of accepted elements rather than a blacklist of prohibited elements?
Should e-Books Be Copy Protected?
The CEO took it in stride, amazing.

The reporter on the other hand did not seem to realise how good a job he had just done.
have you seen the poster? http://www.vcalc.net/images2/Master21G-860x560.jpg from http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm
Nope. I honestly think that that this is one of the main reasons PHP is popular and is able to power even the most complex websites with ease.

Before PHP I did Basic (Atari), 6502 Assember, Logo, ACTION!, Pascal (Kyan, Turbo), C++ (Turbo, Borland) , Java, C#. After PHP I did JavaScript and Python.

First I've met PHP-like arrays in awk and was astonished with its versatility.

I still believe that data structure that allows person to make a queue, stack, tree, even graph easily without knowing any theory and planning anything is one of the greatest things I've encountered in programming languages.

I am very dissatisfied that python does not have standard ordered dictionary and strongly differentiates between tuple, array, set and dict even though they provide just overlapping subsets of odict functionality.
It wasn't Monday when I read that comment last night.
I guess the subject here can be replaced with any other sorts of digital downloadable products lile mp3, music, movies and videos.

There doesn't seem to be any harm. Those who are already thinking of buying it would continue to do so, and those who have no intention will just go for the pirated version anyway. It's not as if the content can't be found on any other websites other than the publisher/distributor.
this is so sad. git is so much better.
no it doesn't. the page does NOT have the encoding tag. so this is a matter of different defaults. safari, ff, and chrome have utf8 as the default. I guess IE has Western or smth
There are a few of us to share the cost, fortunately. An expensive gift, but it gives pleasure to everyone who picks it up, and will do so for a long time.
Victory From Adversity
What a wonderful thing to do.

This is the kind of machine that I think the patent system was intended for, what a genius design.
Yes, there are individual words that may not have a direct equivalent in another language, but a language like German is not significantly more concise when applied to a complete document. If you have a 100K file written in English, it is unlikely you would be able to reduce that to a 10K file in German without significant loss of information.

On the other hand, it wouldn't be unusual to find that 10,000 lines of Java could be written in 1,000 lines of Ruby (or Haskell, or Clojure, or...). Further, the effort of learning a new programming language like Ruby is significantly less than the effort of learning a new natural language like German.
The second part is a bit tongue in cheek :-) But yeah, I wish Apple didn't make those power cords...
I don't mind so much when I can learn something (about advertising).
>I don't see people arguing over hammers

I don't think the analogy makes sense here. Unlike programming languages, there's little operational difference between one brand of hammer and another. Maybe brand X is known to last longer than brand Y, but they will still be more or less identical in daily use (aim, swing, get thumb out of way).
Inspiration is Rooted in Action
I visited this site and found it to be very easy to register and get going. The site is a great idea overall. I think the scholarship contest is not only a clever idea but one that represents the site well. Digidorm is definitely worth checking out...Matt
Be Honest: What's Your Real Twitter and Facebook ROI?
No. Yes. It's very possible.

I used to think Google was evil. I thought it was evil because it was so big and had so much potential influence. However, that is ridiculous. Just like how we (Americans) have three branches of government to keep check on each other, there are different engines out there to keep check on each other. Bing (Microsoft) is taking some of the market share from Google. Google is taking some of the browser share from Microsoft. Everything is being traded so to speak. If Google were to pull some kind of "evil" out and "evilize" us users- I am sure we would never hear the end of it from Microsoft ect.

However, I would love a mouse that reads my fingerprints and checks my skin color to see if it is me using the computer so I don't have to enter a password.

But let me answer your question more directly.

Is Google evil? I don't know. I don't care. That's right, I don't care. Google could be evil, but I don't think it has the ability to do something in its self interest that the public would view as evil because it would be torn to shreds by competitors and bloggers. Image how good for Google a techcrunch article titled "Google abusing its power! Use Bing!" would be for Google's business. Not good.

Yup. Google can be evil, but can it actually do anything?
Do you have kids? I can't tell you how many times I've come across a drained laptop in my house sitting right next to a disconnected power supply. That happens with any brand of laptop, but after switching my kids to Macbooks, that MagSafe connector is worth an extra $100 to me, because I don't have to worry about a destroyed power supply cable, broken motherboard connector or smashed laptop when someone inevitably trips on the power cable.
> Oh, come on. Give me an instance where PHP is the right tool.

Even today, if you have a lot of HTML, and you want to add just a little bit of dynamic functionality to it, PHP is easy and fast.
Apple speeds approval process for iPhone apps -- one Boston dev's experiences
I think this is more of an example of multi-use tools that are good enough beat single use tools in a lot of situations. Now, the fact that the touch can be programmed/additional functionality added for cheap is a nice feature - but there is no reason there couldn't be apps (aka new functionality) for his keyboard or his mouse.
Fly a UAV with an iPhone [video]
Not really... the focus on advertising is much more Google-specific.

The real clunker in this story is that with such advanced technology (mostly AI-complete, as others have pointed out), humans are largely irrelevant, and therefore so is advertising as well as any work we might wish to do.

The only way to "fix" this would, I suppose, be to posit a truly symbiotic AI relationship, where these strong AIs can only exist with constant interaction with human thought processes. However, if that was the case, the author should really make this clearer.
Those who are already thinking of buying it would continue to do so

You sure about that? Sure enough to bet your livelihood (if you are an author, or a publisher)?
Contrary opinion? No, that's phishing
Probably just hardware envy, but that's what you get by swinging that huge vpenis around like that ;)
Actually I know a carpenter that would probably murder you if you took away his 'Estwing'.

So even in hammers there is apparently distinction enough to get people very attached to their tools.

And don't get a woodworker started about their chisels either.
Thinking about the laws and regulations making it illegal for anyone to fix something on their own, makes me think of the Harry Tuttle character from Brazil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film)

"...the real Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a renegade air conditioning specialist who once worked for the government but left due to the amount of paperwork."

I remember him sneaking into homes like a cat burglar in order to fix things without going through the arduous bureaucracy put in place to keep unauthorized repairs from happening. That is close to becoming a reality for anyone who wants to fix their own or their friends' stuff, with the DMCA, etc., standing in their way.
How Group Think Rules What We Like
Videos for MIT 6.00 - Python Version
Not entirely sure how new this is.