skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The documentary Very Young Girls may change your viewpoint. In particular, the median age of [corrected: entry into prostitution] in New York is 13.

It's unclear how that's relevant if the woman in question is 20+. After all, it's quite possible that she didn't become a prostitute until she was 18+.

The fact that early teen prostitution is a bad thing. does not imply that every possible response is a good idea.

In fact, bringing it up looks like an attempt to bully the conversation.
For a lot of the women I know, it's lack of interest. If they're really good, they learn to get over the chauvinism and laugh it off. ;)
The actual study [1] is only of 103 men in London and was conducted by Eaves [2] a London-based charity which describes itself in the paper as "a feminist organisation committed to working to curb demand for commercial sex acts." This all leaves me highly suspicious of the results.

[1] http://www.eaves4women.co.uk/Documents/Recent_Reports/Men%20...
[2] http://www.eaves4women.co.uk/
All I need to do is to point to a single example of a perfect program. I am sure there are a lot of perfect programs around us - built into phones, smartcard readers, TV sets. Nostrademus also pointed out a couple areas where bug-free is the norm. If we can go for simple ones, I have written a couple of them in my career - simple programs that do one thing and do it perfectly. I wouldn't be a professional engineer if I didn't pass those exams.

What you have to do, on the other hand, to back up your bold statement that developing perfect software is impossible, is to prove it impossible.

Good luck.
The person punished in that case should be the pimp. I realize that's sometimes hard to accomplish, but I can't see any amount of harm as justification for punishing people who weren't aware of their actions.
You got to do, what you gotta do.

Unethical, nonetheless.
We need to talk about email clients.
See also discussion thread on the new mailing list.

http://lists.ranchero.com/pipermail/email-init-ranchero.com/...
Same here, Firefox 3.5.7.
The Chocolate Scientists
I also have to come up with alternative ways for people to find the comments they're most interested in on big threads

I think this is the key. People come to HN because the quality of the discussion is high. With increasing community size comes dilution, but only of the average comment quality.

In fact, as the community becomes larger there are more, perhaps many more extraordinarily good comments, so long as the original contributors are all encouraged to continue participating. These great comments are really the key.

Consider the Netflix Prize. Entries were judged based on RMSE. This is not the right metric, though, because out of all of the thousands of movies in the dataset, only a few dozen would ever be recommended to a given user based on any conceivable algorithm. And the user only really cares whether the particular movie that they use the algorithm to select is good or disappointing.

Similarly, users come here to read the exceptional comments, and a community in which every comment deserved to get 3 karma points would soon find itself without users.

In this way, removing comment scores may be part of an effective solution, but it may not be the crucial component because it only indirectly changes the accessibility of excellent comments.

Instead, actively trying to make it easier for people to read what they consider exceptional is a goal worth pursuing.
I disagree. Being able to downvote comments to -4 (and no farther) seems like an excellent system to me, as it allows us to punish comments that are detrimental to discussion while preventing comments from being so downvoted that they have no hope of redemption (in the case of controversial but contributory comments). I'm curious - if downvoting were done away with, how would you suggest that we flag comments which are contrary to the spirit of HN?
IMO the cleverest part is that "for privacy reasons" he couldn't show any of his work. It reminds me of the woman who conned the Ivy League saying that she changed her name due to domestic abuse. Maybe somewhere there's a guy calling himself the greatest programmer in the world, but he can't answer any interview questions because it's all classified.
I guess the software analogy would be to say that all your code is covered under NDA, but that doesn't have nearly the power of this tale.
Now you're hinging your hiring decision on your ability to verify a person's hobby?

It seems to me that it would be both simpler and more effective to spend your energy trying to determine if the candidate can do the job for which you're hiring. Leave their hobbies out of it.
Before there were dozens of decent ad-blocking extensions out there I was a big user of Privoxy. It had an action called "deanimate-gif" that would display only the first frame of the animated image.

I'm not sure if Privoxy was downloading the whole image in the background in order to extract the first frame, and I don't know if deanimation used less CPU or RAM than just displaying the animated versions, but I loved the feature regardless.
bah. that's nothing! my team put over 3 billion rows into amazons cloud in a matter of hours without having to deal with the vagaries of sdb :)

to the best of my knowledge, oracle was the bottleneck because the oracle instance is an actual high volume production database and the IR process was restrained to minimize the impact to production users.
I wasn't thinking about these markets, but their mere existence proves perfect software can be written - it's possible.

What I was thinking was the bold statement that doing something right (or perfectly right) is impossible and its widespread use as an excuse for not even trying. A software developer must aim for perfect software, even if shipping it is not always economically viable. The fact end-users have been beaten into submission and now tolerate having to restart their computers after software crashes or to redo calculations because the results were absurd the first time is not relevant to this discussion. If they tolerate less than correctness, we shouldn't. The current security problems we have are entirely fault of people who regard immediate profit as more important than long-term quality.

And I take exception with anyone who suggests this is how things should be.
One of the problems with auto-generated content is that the setting is typically extremely static. If you could build a properly robust dynamic environment, the auto-generated content would depend hugely on how players actually interact with the (dynamic) gameworld.

I'm sure some would figure out the algorithms involved in such a game, but if you add enough fuzzy logic in, it could potentially keep the wool over most of the players' eyes..
I think that you are using this as a convenient cop out. For two reasons.

First, hardware (i.e. GPU) acceleration makes a significant difference only when decoding h.264. For h.263 and On2 V6 you shouldn't need hardware acceleration. GPU accelerated h.264 came in Quicktime X in Snow Leopard and is not available on all Snow Leopard compatible machines. The disparity in performance between Quicktime, and other player-codec packages for that matter, and Flash has been around for years.

The second, and more important in my opinion, reason is that Flash doesn't have performance and stability issues only when it comes to video. They are more apparent with video, but all kinds of content - games, sites, even sometimes ads - make the Flash plugin disproportionately task the system.
I agree about voice recognition getting much better.

My business partner's wife is visually impaired, and he wired up his house with a whole-house stereo, mics in each room, and a speech recognition daemon, attached to each mic. He then wrote a huge pile of scripts for things his wife might need to do.

Now she can ask the house about the weather, control the thermostat, check the status of the garage doors and locks, turn on/off lights, open/close blinds, make phone calls, change the music, and a few other things I can't remember.

It's all a tad too expensive to be a commodity, but overall I believe it cost him something in the $40k neighborhood, which is incredibly reasonable for something that makes his wife far more autonomous.
All anecdotal evidence i've seen agrees, I made an explanation video for one of my websites , and when it was over two minutes long no would even start it. I split it up into two videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLJHPMxgAWU ), and since splitting the videos I've out of 308 combined views i've got 195 new users.

I also helped out a little with waterloolabs, they make youtube videos of them doing crazy stuff, like playing half-life with real guns, or driving a car with an iphone. Hunter has always said "under three minutes" especially for "the tube", and looks like wistia's metrics agree.
China has been all out attacking various networks both corporate and government all over the world since at least 2003 so it puzzles me why this is news to anyone. Google knew all about that at the time, but they only publicly lash out now when they're on the the receiving end? Seems rather self serving.

Especially considering Google is not even as popular as the Alibaba Group owned Yahoo in China, let alone the many Chinese search engines.
The population that received grants in the 80's is still receiving grants in the oughts. The problem is that it is doing so at the exclusion of the younger population.
Didn't Larry Niven have something like this on the fly-cycles in Ringworld? They were of course a lot more than just umbrellas... but still a sort of air cushion surrounding the user.
The CBC recently aired a related documentary profiling Johns: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/01/11/f-prostitution-cur...
Contrary to what this story is trying to teach us, I think the real lesson here is that it's all about who you know. The key phrase was: "I liked the story so much I pitched the idea to a jour na list friend of mine". Yes, he needed a good story or something remarkable to pitch to his journalist friend, but it was his network of connections that ultimately helped his young, film maker friend.
I can do that in Vim...
It is possibly less obvious to see how becoming a victim of prostitution at the age of 13 reduces one's skills and prospects at 20, but I assure you if you watch that documentary you'll have a better sense of it. Such girls are unlikely to have a home to go often, having often been thrown out, and it's very unlikely that they'll have made it through high school, without which job prospects are even worse. They are also likely to have become addicted to drugs, which, while they make their work less intolerable, grip their desires for a long, long time.

If your argument is that someone could have, consciously and without any coercion, decided to engage in sex work, then yes, it is possible, it is not even necessarily wrong. But to turn a blind eye to the situation because it might not be harmful in every case, where there is ample evidence that it is very harmful in many or most cases, strikes me as more hopeful ignorance than rational policy.
I think Yahoo paid quite a bit more for Zimbra in the first place, so looking at only that for valuation, that would seem a good discount for VMWare. But yes, the numbers are unreal seeming !
I would suggest something similar but for voting, not for posting. Instead of upvoting or downvoting one would pick from a small selection of tags. That would allow for the distinction between "agree" and "informative", for example, or "disagree" and "spam".
These were exactly my thoughts. It's rare to have rain without wind. Even a mild breeze would distort the shape of the 'umbrella'. Strong winds would require it be pointed into the wind as with any umbrella, however without a rigid structure the air curtain would virtually collapse flat providing no protection whatsoever.

To work in all weather this umbrella would have to be able to manipulate its output from virtually perpendicular to the shaft to parallel.

Honestly, this might work with compressed air, but that itself would present serious problems; you'd likely only be able to charge it once a day and the cylinder would be heavy, but perhaps not as heavy as the original design. It would also enable the umbrella to have a shaft similar in appearance to a regular umbrella.
If a design document of mine had the word "grinding" it in many times, I'd do something else instead.

Another way to make people sink hundreds of hours into a game is to make it play well competitively. It's surprising that one of the prime examples of this (StarCraft) comes from the same company as WoW.
Our school system is incurably insane. Its actions are irrational, only tangentially related to its explicit goals. Reform is likely impossible, like trying to turn a cancerous tumor into a working organ.
Vim, cc, gdb, autotools, unix ;)
I don't think it's a scam, no.
Disclaimer: 'it' pays my wages.

As another poster mentioned, encryption is worthless without having some kind of validation of the other end-point you're communicating with. Granted, the CA industry has made some mis-steps in this regard (domain-only validation certificates as an example), but we're doing things to rectify this situation albeit slowly (the CAB forum and EV 'green bar' certificates).

Not only that, while the cost for certificates I believe can be justified, it's dropped significantly over the years to the point where even the labour-intensive EV certificates can be had for more reasonable costs. Site owners really should be factoring the cost of certificate(s) into the operational costs of owning and running a site nowadays - just as they must with the domain, hosting, dns, email etc.

That said people like Eddy Nigg and his company StartCom are driving down the costs of certificates (something I know isn't cheap or easy).
As another poster mentioned, you can get some basic certificates for free, or for not much more than the cost of a domain elsewhere. And with Eddy's efforts, yes - they work in 'most' modern browsers. More power to him.
Take a look at alien for converting the rpm, or rpm2cpio for extracting the tar.gz inside it.
Of course. I didn't say that is a good question, or that the answer should be taken into consideration when hiring. I just don't agree that it's easy to talk BS in that situation if the person asking it really wants to know the truth. (i.e. they don't ask it just because it's on the list)

Personally - I think it's a good question to decide which person you'd rather spend half the day with, if you have 2 equally good candidates.
I disagree; I suspect you could pitch such a crazy story to pretty much any journalist.
> "Man, you’re a good bullshit­ter," I say. "You knew that about me already," he says.

This guy deliberately lies to "friends" simply because it might benefit him someday. At best he's a drinking buddy; the author would be out of his mind to actually trust him.
I believe that was to keep the atmosphere breathable for the occupant, as IIRC the fly-cycles were capable of going supersonic. The air cushion was to deflect the supersonic airflow around the occupant. I believe it was to act as a sort of light-weight cockpit. However, the pressure exerted to form the air cushion acted like an airbag too, so it should have definitely deflected rain, especially considering that it was likely designed to stop rainfall at supersonic speeds.

I can't really remember this with accuracy, it's been a while since I read the series.
But the most expensive apps, like tomtom, are iPhone versions of expensive products, so even though the iPhone app version is high for an app, it's less than the alternative. That doesn't really work for iPhone only apps.
Remember, if you can see a DNS request, you can be a man-in-the-middle. Until that's fixed, CAs are still needed.
> There was a thread a few days ago where I found myself thinking "I feel like I'm on reddit."

Here's a little friendly advice: the frequent, unconstructive Reddit-bashing around here is boring, and typically just makes the basher look petty and/or arrogant. It has, regrettably, been done by someone in every single thread I have read here in recent weeks. I doubt I'm the only person who discovered HN a while back, signed up for an account a while later, but now participates only occasionally on HN while actively contributing to Reddit.

If you want the nastiness reduced around here, trying implementing an automatic 48 ban on any user who uses the word "Reddit" in a post.

And for the record, I wrote that before I noticed who I was replying to.

(Edit: Looking back over my own posts here from the past few months, I see that I have become part of the "negative commenting" problem. Strange: reading my posts on other forums, under this nickname or others, I post much more positively. I shall try to do better.)
He does claim to show that the losing side in several conflicts experienced higher growth rates after wars than would be expected from historical data (the American south after the civil war, Japan after WWII, etc.). Critics point to counter-examples, but as far as I know it's considered a reasonable (though not air-tight) theory.
Top 6 mindless money wasters
this is a perfect example of a project that will go nowhere.

The app would need not just coders but testers, designers, documentation writers, bloggers, at least one project manager, and so on. It would need a bug tracker. Repository. Wiki. Website. It will need a name. (I started a Twitter account, which I’ll turn over to whoever leads this once we know who that person is.)

oh my. surely a twitter account is needed for a successful open source project, right?

no, it needs none of those. write some code, put it up on github, let people hack on it, /then/ setup that stuff if you still need it.

trying to create a new piece of software (especially something as large as an e-mail client) by committee is a terrible idea. everyone will have opinions, they'll throw them into the hat, nobody will agree on anything, nobody will write any code, and the project will go nowhere. but hey it has a logo and a wiki and a "project manager" so that's useful, right?

a better idea would be to take an existing client like thunderbird, mutt, etc. and figure out what you don't like about it. i'd wager anything you don't like can be easily changed in the source code or even coded up as an add-on for thunderbird. i have a hard time believing the entire thing has to be redone from scratch.
Breathing... keeping hair dry... same thing :)
Sure, but CAs are useless unless they actually verify the identity of the people they're giving certificates to.

Verisign is the largest CA in the world and gave a certificate to a guy asking for a Microsoft certificate, without ever challenging him to prove his identity.

Seeing as a the signature in a digital certificate is legally binding in most countries, there's no reason for Verisign to not be prosecuted for signing something saying they verify or trust the identity of the random gent when it's quite clear they did no verification and have nothing to base their trust upon. Yet I doubt they'll ever be prosecuted for it.
The number we know is the original VMware valuation, which was ~$350M. The number we don't is the price this time around, because financial terms weren't disclosed. It seems safe to assume, however, that VMware is paying less, and AllThingsD's reporting validates that.
Remember that when Ventris figured out Linear B, the text turned out to be mostly warehouse inventories.
Clever satire on open source projects that go nowhere.

(If its not a satire, sorry.)
i'm aware of that, but that doesn't mean someone won't still try to drag him to court for them.
I'm not sure how to feel about this or if there's much of an applicable lesson for me to be learned from it, but it was an entertaining read.
This is just dishonest. QTKit was released 5 years ago and works just fine. If you want to cherry pick code from 6 years ago that was originally targeted at an architecture from 15 years ago you can do a lot worse than QT API.
The survey in the O.P. seems to indicate that most of those surveyed where quite aware of the possibility that they were participating in a harmful and coercive relationship. They thought it was more likely than not. And yet any of them will claim that they were not aware of their actions, were not aware of the possibility, were they to arrive in court.

In Canada, if I don't clear the ice on my side of the sidewalk, and someone slips and gets hurt, I am liable. As a result, people clear their sidewalks.

If one is engaged in soliciting prostitution, which is already illegal, one should accept and avoid the risks that they are participating in something highly unethical. Those who won't should at the least be forced to avoid doing something highly illegal. People already do this. Bar Bouncers. Medical Doctors. Military Officers. Public Officials. Heads of Public Companies.

It is a philosophical argument, but I just don't buy the idea that we are responsible only for what we know about, only what we intend, only for the consequences of our actions that we do anticipate. I believe we're responsible for the consequences of all of our actions, whether we like it or not. And, legally, I think that there's much potential value in stating that, if you engage in an activity that risks creating or perpetuating serious harm, then it up to you to make sure that you aren't.

---

As a related matter, have you heard of the Seven Dwarves of Big Tobacco?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQUNk5meJHs

And the testimony of Jeffrey Wigand

http://jeffreywigand.com/pascagoula.php
Look, let's not kid ourselves, the problem is not technical. I'm sorry, but this stuff isn't rocket science, and even if it was, this plugin has existed for over 20 years, so they should have figured it out by now. Just think to yourself how much better the browser has gotten in that time frame, and its roughly how much worse the plugin has gotten.

The reasons are clearly either politics or incompetence. Now, I'm not sure what those politics might be. I don't personally believe that its that Adobe is "angry" at Mac or something, but I for example know that they are absolutely paranoid about accepting changes to the core code (even obvious crasher fixes require a ton of approval and consideration).

It really is to their own detriment. Regardless of how big the Mac market may be (its too big now to ignore and getting bigger), its a very powerful market of people that matter: i.e. developers. If Adobe got their act together, they would wipe the floor with JS, HTML5, etc. I mean, they almost do now, its purely due to their inability that they haven't completely and absolutely taken over the web.

Of course, the same can be said of standards. Taking 10 years to have any sort of measurable change on the W3C side is equally unacceptable (and we still ended up with a video solution that guarantees Flash will dominate this field for the next 10 years). Its always funny to me when people talk about whether "standards" or "flash" is winning, because it seems like a race where both parties are running backwards.
I've seen an interesting way to do method chaining in haskell: The '$' operator: Basically it's a low-priority right-associative binary operator that applies the function to the left to everything to the right.

Using the example from the article, one could do it as:

sort -n $ uniq -n $ sort $ awk '{ print $5}' $ grep tcp $ netstat -n

I.e essentially the same but in reverse order.
Nothing like psychological diagnosis via Rolling Stone article commenters...

People need to realize that many of these psychological disorders are descriptive of symptoms rather than fundamental physical changes. So what if she's an Aspie? I don't know of any other Aspies who conned their way into the Ivy League.
Reading this right after reading Clay Shirky's recent "rant about women" was an interesting experience.