skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both India and China would fit I think.

I think China's intellectuals need to show more spine in demanding intellectual freedom in discussions of national policy before I would credit China with a healthy respect for education and intellectualism. It's still not clear whether authority and stability or truth and freedom are the paramount values in China. I think all people everywhere ultimately learn to cherish freedom, but some places have more grass-roots demand for freedom at present. In this regard, India compares very favorably to China at the moment.
Turkey also seems to have some respect for education.
Interesting point. Where does "obvious" recording stop and "covert" recording begin? Can you break the law by simply having a high-sensitivity microphone?

And note the recent case of a man being charged with indecency for being nude in his own kitchen - but visible from a public place. So if anything conceivably visible/audible from a public place is now classed as "public", a laser mike on a window, or a zoom camera recording mouth movements (which can be reliably decoded into speech) might arguably be permissible.
PHP is sane?
Cute, but completely wrong.

Wasabi started out as a VBScript -> PHP compiler, allowing us to keep the existing FogBugz source, but run it on Unix and Linux, where ASP wasn't available. Once we had that, it hit us that it'd be pretty easy to add a VBScript -> VBScript compiler, at which point we could add language extensions. So we did. This allowed new code to take advantage of things like macros, better declaration syntax, lambdas and so on, without rewriting any existing code. Finally, because it was clear that ASP was dead, and specifically because we didn't want to rewrite FogBugz from scratch, we modified Wasabi to target .NET.

The whole point of Wasabi was to avoid rewriting FogBugz to support other platforms and technologies. I have no idea where you got the idea we rewrote the entire program; if we'd done that, we'd have just done it in C#.
PHP is somehow a more sane language than classic ASP? They are contemporaries of each other, and both were pretty popular in their day. PHP has continued, while ASP has been replaced by something significantly better than either.

P.S. If the company you're applying to is upset by you having worked in a proprietary language, they're hiring for the wrong things.
Interesting, anecdote, but user tests show that you are in the minority. About 80% of people immediately scroll down when they reach a new page with sparse content at the top of the page.
Further:

To say "I'm done with this branch", merge it to master. This is natural; you already do this.

git branch --merged master # list branches that are "done"
git branch --no-merged master # list branches that are "not done"

Now you never need to delete any branches if you don't want to and you can eyeball their status without introducing any misbehaviors or gymnastics.
At 4.5 pounds, this is 50% over the weight of a typical netbook.
This should be interesting
Even better if it has three modes:

1.) Everyone else seems silent to you
2.) You seem silent to everyone else
3.) Modes (1) and (2) simultaneously

I'm also curious whether Fred originally wanted (1) or (2) more [assuming (3) is not an option].
Could someone please explain how CINIC could enact a man in the middle act with this inclusion?

I am vaguely aware of MITM attacks: that someone sends you their public key while pretending to be someone else. And this means the data you send is encrypted in a way that the MITM can see.

However, I'm unsure how CINIC's inclusion in Firefox's root certificates facilitates this. Perhaps I'm not the only one?
If it's gonna be aimed at techies, it'll have to be geekier, if it's gonna be aimed at regular humans, it's gonna have to be friendlier (ie. "It's a Visio Doc..." vs "It's a microsoft office OLE doc"). I guess that's the main choice to make as to direction right now.
More sane than any proprietary language, yeah. And more accessible than C++.
I actually find the trackpoint on my Thinkpad to be quite good for gaming. Like a joystick, it allows infinite rotation without having to pause or otherwise adjust.
Does this make more sense than targeting LLVM? It doesn't seem easier to maintain, and you won't get the advantages of the optimizations/work already done.
I wonder about using something like Facebook Connect for commenter accounts, and using the person's full name that Facebook provides. People might be less likely to post useless or trolling comments if their real name (indexable by search engines) and even a link to their Facebook profile were attached to their comment.
Some cool tips to make search in Google more effectively
If the processors are responsible, then they were doing it right before the acronym PCI ever existed. To become compliant costs money (audits, quarterly scans, self-assessments, etc.) but it's not that expensive and it's what they are in business to do. If the processor is not compliant, no one will do business with them ("Hey, look, we store your clients' CC numbers in an unencrypted DB... come do business with us!"). The cost, you as a merchant pays, is based on risk and volume. Online (non person to person) transactions are the most risky, so percentage-wise they'll always cost more... PCI or no PCI.
Surfing the Bitplane (explanation of CSS coke can)
"rm -rf" is dangerous. A versioning system should allow you to get by without doing dangerous stuff.
or you could use http://followthatpage.com/, although that polls for changes at most frequently only once an hour
It's a little hard to explain, your feet are more in touch with the ground. You are now balanced as engineered by nature (most shoes have the heal at least slightly higher), you walk and run as engineered by nature, your toes are independent (rather than being crammed together)...and it just changes how your body feels.

It's not a controlled experiment, I'm also eating better and excercising more.
I think getting something quickly out there and getting some feedback from the market, like they are doing, is more important in the short-term.
Are you being sarcastic? I honestly can't tell.

At any rate, in a Common Law system like the US's (and most other British Inheritors'), the outcome of a court case like this decides the law. The system relies on the judges to interpret the constitution's protections of rights. What they say goes. Of course, it can be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court but then that's the final word and the lawmakers don't have much to do with it.
I call BS; $10 says they won't exist by summer. Initiatives like this are usually announced when it's time to cut costs. While a virtual office can be a wonderful thing, it imposes significant problems too: how are you going to train new hires? existing issues can perhaps be handled by teleconferencing, but do you really want to have brainstorming sessions and involved discussions about future strategy via IM (or whatever)? How do you keep your contributors from thinking to themselves 'I'm practically freelance anyway' or handle the work-life balance issues?

I'm not saying it can't work - I've been an enthusiast and advocate for telecommuting ever since I got a modem. But it's not a panacea, and it doesn't work in every employment context. Color me very skeptical.
The framework is its ecosystem, too.

I agree that Rails shouldn't include this in the core.

Regardless, I don't have to write this code, core or not core. That's the problem. It really adds up if you have to spend time on such small stuff.
Cloud Application Platform
This is the most level-headed view I've read on this subject. A worthwhile read.
GitHub were crushed by the release of HipHop. Too bad, I wished to test the HipHop translator.
"All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"
If the officers in question just do their work normal within the law they should not be afraid to be filmed, the behavior of these police officers is at least fishy in that perspective. Also it had to occur sooner or later that they arrested the wrong person, a criminal defense attorney no less.
Video on managing apps in the cloud
Everyone must have small monitors. On my average-sized LCD, I was able to see a lot more than just the tip of the iceberg.
Nanopool, it's in the article. I don't think they have a US distributor. I wrote and inquired about it, if I lern anything interesting I'll post it.
That's the kind of logic that got us into this mess. At no point, regardless of the situation, should a police officer be above the law.
Gaming and App Developers' "Overwhelming Disappointment" with Apple iPad
Would be a pretty nice laptop if it wasn't completely hideous
For an example of blogs with very high quality comments, see, e.g. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/461879a.... It's an essay describing the use of blogs and blog comments to solve a difficult open mathematical problem. The average quality of the comments made in that project - more than 800 comments in all - was extraordinarily high. Several strongly research-oriented blogs in mathematics and physics routinely have very high quality comments, e.g., the blogs of Richard Lipton, Terence Tao, Tim Gowers, and the n-category cafe.

(I should perhaps disclose that I'm one of the authors of the linked article.)
The reason is that such thing not existed. It had to be written, and it's really standard stuff.

Also, by the way, but I'm unable to download this, and there are no tests for this, as well as it clearly breaks the XHTML/JavaScript convention.

Thus, even if it's easy to write, it's not easy enough to pluginize it, make accessible for other developers, write tests and keep XHTML/JavaScript separation.
Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor
You know what you have to do when you're on a date in a loud restaurant / bar?

Get closer to one another.

SCIENCE!
I skimmed the article, being knee-deep in number crunching and having already read an earlier article about optimal parking. The author threw "socialist" in the title as red meat to bait people into reading. Made me look!

It sounds like a ploy but it hints at something real, namely "scientific socialism" where certain individuals claim the power to engineer the lives of others, by force if necessary. As it turns out, force is always necessary, and this turned much of the planet into a bloody abbatoir during the 20th century.

Math and science make me humble, not arrogant. Familiarity with distributed systems, computability, chaos, probability, trade, and the subjective theory of value have enhanced my appreciation for purely voluntary action, and my disgust with the top-down application of force.
Yes, I think this has been a semi-frequent issue. I see it sporadically, other users claim to see it rather frequently.

I think the table might need to be upgraded, or possibly the water glass needs to be optimized... It might also be related to the napkin holder ;)
That's what I hate about Adwords. It's a vampire that sucks every last drop of profit margin out of small businesses like this. Bidding on keywords becomes a race to the bottom and everyone loses except Google.

There's no value in this. There's no efficiency gain. It's monopoly rent-seeking and I would like to see that monopoly broken.
Startup metrics for pirates (5 minute video)
I followed your deletion instructions on Firefox on OS X, but it keeps coming back like some sort of zombie totalitarian (Hitler?) Even after restarting Firefox, if I go back to the dialog, CNNIC is back.
What happens to the other 20%?
What CGI mechanism are they using to host a blended PHP/C++ code base?
they got it out quickly, now it's time to take feedback and to change things to perfect the product.
Yes, they certainly do. In the TGIF presentation itself there isn't too much back-and-forth (although the panel members may have different opinions), but people will discuss it themselves after. For something as big as the China issue, it was probably discussed in some other channel(s) as well.

As far as email lists go, the discussions can get quite lively, although I wouldn't generally call them flame wars - civility still holds in general. But they can definitely get long; the term centithread gets thrown around a lot. When I was there one of the longest I saw was about people putting open chocolate milk back in the fridge, and whether or not that was a terrible thing to do :p..
I really could not justify not doing web stuff in PHP anymore. PHP is THE web language. No, Ruby is not going to take over, and no, python is not going to take over.

Those two would have been the main contenders for the space, but they both had their shot and their 15 minutes of fame, and rather than rapidly growing to dominate web development, they nichified.

PHP however is being improved, being cleaned up, and most importantly, being speed optimised.

PHP is what you can trivially easily outsource - try to do that with python or ruby.

This right here is basically the move that is going to cement PHP as the web language. The largest sites are using PHP and are going to stay with PHP. Nothing will take over from PHP. The battle is over.
> If the company you're applying to is upset by you having worked in a proprietary language, they're hiring for the wrong things.

In a perfect world, sure. But in the real world, the guy with actual experience in the language/framework used gets an interview first. Then the guy with experience in any language/framework the interviewer immediately recognizes as relevant. Then the guy with experience in something so obscure it's not even on Wikipedia (which Wasabi wouldn't be had Joel and Fog Creek not been famous).
It needs to have a significant differentiator from just googling the file extension.
We need to see eyetracking or scrolling heatmaps of this page and see how users interact with it. Clicktale has some cool tools for doing this.

Studies I believe show that if things are on the edge of the fold and flowing off the bottom, people will realize they can scroll.
I'm running 4.0.249.78 (36714) on Win 7 64-bit right now (where I get a slightly different problem than I described), but my description is from the latest build on 32-bit Win 7.

Hey I realize most of you guys like the single omni-box, (I consider it a waste of real estate), but at least make the second FireFox/IE type search box optional. Let the user decide.
I don't know why, but it's worth comparing it with ... http://code.google.com/ and http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/

I really can't put my finger on it, but the message from those pages kind of show what kind of companies they are ...

* Apple doesn't care much, but here, a clean design with links to resources

* Google is like ... hey, we're cool open-source people, come join

* Microsoft is like ... "we partner with open source-based businesses and communities", bla, bla, here's a list of news
I browse slashdot at +4 and I think the comments are pretty good/insightful. They are a bit too slow on the news sometimes, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_is_the_Vaguely_Relevant_Ar...
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but the date is right at the bottom of the post: "(Published Nov 10th, 2004)"
It would seem they forgot to make the project public on github.
Cuban's missive missed the mark
After reading Siver's post (http://sivers.org/punish), this development seemed like a perfect data point (though I am unaware of the extent of threats etc which drove them to take the decision)
175 Million Users Login To Facebook Everyday
I use python as much as is practical. Did you expect that at Microsoft?
Ad Inventory Optimization - Breaking through the closed walls
Every content network has walked this rope at least once ad inventory optimization. Direct sales team can only sell 40-50% of your ad inventory at any given time. The rest is filled with different ad networks, big and small.
This is the most awesome HN thread ever.
On thinking about it a little more, I guess when you visit a site with SSL, and that site subsequently sends you its public key, which in turns allows you to send it encrypted data, Firefox will only accept public keys signed (authorised) by those companies in your root certificate list.

This means if, unknown to you, CINIC impersonates a domain which uses SSL, and you visit that domain and assume your SSL connection will be safe from prying Chinese officials, you're incorrect. Incorrect because Chinese officials could have created that bogus SSL certificate, and it would be accepted by Firefox because Firefox now accept CINIC as a root authority.

Any confirmation, in case I'm spreading inaccuracies, would be appreciated.
I highly doubt the cone-of-silence as he defines it is possible either. What's more interesting is the Quirky site/idea itself. Quirky is like http://www.halfbakery.com/ in action, so I guess it is fullbakery. I wonder why startups like that don't make it to HN. Do people not know about HN?
I have no idea where you got the idea we rewrote the entire program ...

I think the mythology of Wasabi has become larger than life and pretty heavily distorted.
gr8 tips
Third paragraph from the bottom of the post says they'll be releasing the source in Github this evening (probably pacific time).
PHP is what you can trivially easily outsource

Yes, you can... but be careful - you might end up with this: http://paste.lisp.org/display/76132

That's real production code I removed from an application I was hired to extend and debug. Eventually, I convinced the client to scrap it and let me write a replacement with Rails.
Adobe is in a battle for developers, who buy its Creative Suite software to make Flash apps.

A fine example of how a comma can completely alter the meaning of a sentence :) Most of the articles points are valid, but there's an awful lot more to the CS series than Flash; it's by far the most well-integrated content creation system (everything from vector graphics to video, on both PC and Mac).

A decline in Flash use would, of course, hurt Adobe, but wouldn't cripple it, any more than the failure of Quicktime to become a widespread internet video standard inhibits users of Final Cut, Motion etc.
The traditional way companies like DuPont have trimmed their workforce is to close a factory and move it 60-100 miles away to a new one. Those who are tied down will heavily weight the cost of commuting vs finding a new job (in a good economy - in a poor economy, commute becomes less of a factor).
"I call BS; $10 says they won't exist by summer. Initiatives like this are usually announced when it's time to cut costs."

Statements like "...we’ve decided to conduct a little experiment..." and "For the next month, anyway." don't really make me think they're doing this for practical reasons.
You're comparing apples an oranges. PHP is no more sane than classic ASP. They're both pretty awful.
This is the reply where I pick apart the French in the previous comment, and show that it doesn't say what the commenter wanted it to say.
Industry Black Lists: How a Black Mark Can Derail a Job Search
You can say someone is wrong, sure. That's not the issue. The issue is disregarding what someone says because of previous things they've said.

> So basically he didn't get anything but #6 (facebook) and #10 (which is more of an insider joke than a prediction) right

Okay, you're good...

> Remember this next time you read Yegge's rants.

Logical fallacy.
Oh yes, it's dangerous, and I rarely use it. It's funny, I just cd'ed into my ~/version/loom and saw a directory "58" sitting there dated 2008-08-17. I'll probably keep that one. Then there's "86.12.before_prune" dated 2009-05-20. I could "rm -rf" that one pretty safely, since my prompt shows my current directory as "~/version/loom". Here goes!

laptop:~/version/loom$ rm -rf 86.12.before_prune

FEEL the adrenaline rush! ;)
Multiple users and the iPad
Cue Adobe. Once they get off the high horse.
Internet uprising overturns Australian censorship law
And the reason why police officers have badges that uniquely identify themselves worn on their uniform.
The x86 instruction proprietary extensions: a waste of time, money and energy
His strongest argument to keep Flash relevant is "the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers".

Boy, they are in worse shape than I first thought. They will open source the parts they own of this beast, the problem is it will be too late to make a difference.

Sure, he brings up the fact that they can update the majority of Web clients in less than a year. But what was it they said about the currently fastest growing web-browser out there? 95% of browsers updated within the span of a few weeks? (I don't recall the sources, sadly)

And this one is almost too good to not take out of context: "We strongly believe the Web should remain an open environment with consistent access to content and applications". Oh well.
> It's a valid point to make when someone goes to make inaccurate predictions: you have to take that into consideration for future articles.

Nope, that's a logical fallacy. Lots of people do it, yes. I'm guilty of it myself. But that doesn't mean that it's correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
HTML and CSS for the design challenged
This sounds rather similar in principle to Python's Shedskin compiler, which turns ordinary Python code in C++ code, using C++-based runtime replacing the ordinary Python runtime. This works extremely very well on a certain class of problems. http://code.google.com/p/shedskin/
I think it is pretty cool service. Not sure about pricing. With english being my second language, I would definitely appreciate some corrections here and there. Good idea, keep working on it.
FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! I say we arrange for wrestling matches between the executives of Apple and Adobe.
Ahhh, they should have held off on that wiki link.
i'm not able to have it successfully recognize a file. i sent it a txt file and about 2 minutes later (finally) it returned with "Sorry, couldn't identify that file."
?
Wow, Michael Pettis melts one particular face in specific and lays out a historical precedent analogous to China's current horde of foreign reserves. Without cribbing his article too much, my main takeaway is the underlying economic imbalances at play in China that have resulted in their accumulation of foreign reserves, particularly 2 trillion US dollars.
By the way there's another trick I sometimes use when I really really want to delete a directory but I also really really don't want to make a mistake:

cd ~/somewhere
mv the_thing_i_want_to_delete ~/tmp/go_away
cd ~/tmp
rm -rf go_away

I'll also use Tab to command-complete the "go_away", and pause slightly before pressing Enter.

Sometimes I'll even just let it sit there in ~/tmp for a few months before clobbering it.
Have you considered adding a statement about privacy, ie what you do with the file once it has been uploaded? When/how it is discarded.
I see this as a fundamental concept of programming abstracted to the application level. When you code a function you strive for modularity, for your function to be re-usable as a building block. But if you're not careful you can make your function take too many inputs and do too many calculations. The same truths apply in code as in life. Keep things small, manageable, and re-usable, and Good things will come to you.
We are still working out the best patterns for web browsing. The web is still surprisingly young. That 20% will learn eventually. Make it easy on the eyes, space it out, consider your use of typography, and avoid TL;DR. These concepts seem like they will persist.

To use those design tenants we just need more space. If that means moving the meat of the page below the fold and keeping a nice hook up at the top then I believe that's the way future web design patterns will go.