skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying that Microsoft ships perfect software, because what I'm saying is that it's impossible to ship perfect software.

When you write it in C/C++, anyway.

(I think Microsoft has almost solved this problem, though, with their heavy investment in the CLR and languages like F# on top of the CLR. Even C# is fine, compared to C or C++. You can still write insecure software in managed languages, but it will be because of a careless design, not forgetting to tack a "\0" on the end of a block of memory.)
Scientists turn stem cells into pork
How satisfied are you with Kerplunc? Their unmetered VPSen look like an incredible bandwidth deal, almost suspiciously good.
They should try to contact the crawling team directly. It's obviously a bug.

While it's satisfying to fix with a block, or vent in a blog post or tweet, actually getting to the bottom of the issue with the MS crawl team can fix the problem for other sites, too -- so that's the most civil and community-spirited response.
Original source here: http://eloquentjavascript.net/book.txt

Neat stuff :)
First of all, the Dvorak vs. Qwerty situation isn't as clear cut as it is commonly made out to be

Indeed. Reason Magazine did an in-depth article on this a few years back.

http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors
http://www.speedtest.net/result/683977929.png Not bad. I know many around Texas with equivalent speeds.
ok, so how does a routing error cause this?
Our Mysql boxes were hammered thanks to this bug. Pages that weren't supposed to be crawled because they're resource intensive were all getting hit. Very frustrating, we ended up blocking all msnbot traffic in Nginx.
I especially like the notion of only hiring partners. It's a perfect example of measuring OUTPUTS like "total job cost" and "time to get it done" vs measuring INPUTS like "hourly rate"
Why are they routinely using IE6 (or any IE)??? Firefox + NoScript + AV = much harder. Acrobat is bloatware, there are alternatives. Scripting should not be allowed in Acrobat by default. Using IE6 with scripting enabled is just asking for trouble. Ultra sophisticated meets ultra outdated.
The National Dairy Council: sounds like an official, government-backed organization. It turns out to be a brand owned solely by the American Dairy Association.
Always this tangential choice of words that don't quite hide, don't quite tell the truth.
Wrap this in a seemingly serious research paper, and you've got yourself a new "fact" that the average Joe sure can't debunk.
Also, nodding your head occasionally will do wonders.
why not just take the caffeine after the nap and avoid the risk? Does waiting the additional 20 minutes for the caffeine to kick in really change the benefit?
I read it that way too. But I am still very curious where and in which context Linode was mentioned in media.
Caching proxy?
In Lincoln, NE you can get a one bedroom apartment with utilities included for $425 and if you are happy with 15' x 20' one room apartment you can get one for $275. There is a college here so finding interns is fairly easy and there are lots of small startups. However, once you start growing you might have trouble hiring enough people since there just aren't as many people who want to be in Lincoln as there are people who want to be in Silicon Valley or the east coast. I'm not very social so I don't know how good the socializing is here.
DARPA: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk
"it's impossible to ship perfect software."

That is simply not true.

It may be very difficult, it may be insanely expensive and it may require an immense effort to thoroughly inspect the whole stack that is under the software (down to the hardware level, that is, with some attention on how external events may influence the hardware) but no. It's not impossible to ship perfect software, specially if you restrict the definition of "perfect" as doing what it's supposed to do, no more and no less.
Why mess so much with your sleep cycles? If you look at the long lives of souther mediterraneans you don't see any of this stuff. Instead: good diet, don't overwork, big naps.
Facebook Now Running Virus Scans on Users' PCs
JQuery 1.4 API Cheat Sheet (via abcphp.com)
That's simply false. RAM is the constraint of interest for plenty of single-server websites that are running MySQL as a backend. You want a bunch of memory for the database, plus enough left over to accommodate your web app. That often means wanting a 2-4 GB machine.

Linode is something like $55/GB RAM per month, while prgmr.com is $14.
The answers WSGR gives where?
No, they just recommend using alternative browsers and to switch often. Although the BSI warned against lots of things in the interest of privacy, mostly Google products (Chrome Beta, Google Wave, ...).

On the other hand they have the power to intercept and analyze the complete data- and phone communication without anonymization. They of course use it not only to find malware and security risks, as was intended in the bill, but to provide 'suspicious' data to the police and intelligence services (http://www.golem.de/0901/64639.html).

We also have data retention for all communication data for six months and have planned a nice censorship infrastructure to block domains (against child pornography for now), not unlike Australia or China.

But at least IE has only 40% market share... (http://www.browser-statistik.de/)
Misdirected cookie? What does that even mean?

Sounds like web session data is stored on a mobile browsing proxy instead of on the phone devices, and that proxy forgot what session mapped to what phone.
If you go by monthly cost per GB of memory or especially storage, Linode is one of the most expensive options out there (~$60/GB RAM, $1.25/GB storage).

They do have pretty graphs, though!
In the Mediterranean especially were my Mum grew up in Italy, all the farmers, who live long lives took naps in the afternoon. This is a common practice all over the world
I'm not sure if it's your site or not but auto-play music is one way to ensure that I close the tab immediately and never return.
The idea is that the caffeine will stop you from feeling drowsy when you wake up. Wheres the risk?
Someone ought to edit

&utm_content=Google+Reader

out of the link so that the visits from HN aren't reported as referrals from Google Reader. By the way, this also tells me that the poster found the article in their reader and copied the link directly from the reader.
VC Seed Funding is Dead, Long Live VC Seed Funding
Dan Bernstein couldn't do it. But sure, let's argue about this point. A lot.
Python, Ruby, and Java web applications are riddled with domain-specific vulnerabilities. I'm sorry, there simply aren't any easy answers here.
The risk is that if you want to fall asleep, but are unable to fall asleep within 20 minutes then the caffeine will have kicked in thus wasting your time trying to fall asleep
Use punchy verbs to liven things up as occasion allows

Neither Zinsser, nor Orwell (who wrote the famous essay with similar advice) say the use of such words is to be 'punchy'. I don't know where you and the angry commenter I replied to get that from. It's not advice meant to be make your prose 'punchy' but clearer and better. 'Punchy' is, frankly, dismissive.

Latin words are, of course, unavoidable and necessary in English. They're hardly all bad. Many often sound more 'formal' and important and are thus overused, though. The advice offered is really a call for vigilance and care - it's easy to slip into the overly-ornate style. It's particularly relevant to the foreign students Zinsser was addressing.

No style rules are immutable and absolute. But the guidelines offered by Orwell and echoed by Zinsser and many others form an important baseline. It's not supposed to be a narrow rail of a style you should never stray from. You're better off learning it well, though, before you do.
> It's the person who reverse-engineered your invention and did it a different way

What is 'a different way' though? Can I create a different implementation of MPEG4? Or is MPEG4 an implementation of 'video encoding' or 'video compression?'

In one instance, I can just find another algorithm for encoding/decoding MPEG4 files/streams. In the other instance, I need to create an entirely new format.
Ruby Fibonacci Shootout
Some bits that caught my attention:

"... What exactly is seed funding anymore? Entrepreneurs want less cash because they want to control dilution and preserve exit options at lower prices ..."

"... Are there inherent risks in taking angel money? If you have a VC that’s bought into you and your business then it’s far easier to put together a bridge round with a VC if you need that $1-2 million to get to your next milestone. ..."

"... But unless you get top-tier angels who have deep pockets don’t assume that angels are necessarily a better option than VCs. ..."

"... When we funded our two seed deals we used the Y Combinator Open Source Term Sheet and were highly entrepreneur friendly. ..."

Reads like a pitch for potential YC startups.
The point is that Obama isn't embarrassed about the patent system because it is broken. He's embarrassed because the patent office's infrastructure is behind the times. There's a distinction.
Unfortunately, that article isn't really so much a defense of Qwerty as it is a defense of free-market fundamentalism. The writer doesn't seem to care as much about usability as he does about attacking the credibility of as many free market-mistrusting Dvorak supporters as he can track down. Not to say that he's necessarily wrong, but the article is really only superficially about keyboards.

Ultimately, it is indeed not as clear-cut a situation as it's made out to be, either in Dvorak's or Qwerty's favor.
Mea culpa. No harm intended, just had never read the guidelines.
Send the ISS to Mars
Yes, agreed. MSF is great and who I donated to as well.
Or - in Safari - you can put such a style sheet in your user/library/safari folder for viewing it according to your preferred font (selecting it in Safari Preferences/Advances).
Well, they did use the example of two people getting each other's accounts. Seems like a routing issue of some sort to me. Probably something to do with a transparent proxy getting stuff screwed up.
For me it was "want to make a fish swim realistically with inverse kinematics"? Break out the Jacobian Matrices.

Although, to be intellectually honest, I went only went as far as to research this, and no further. I just didn't see it as worth the time.
Reading this article reminds me of a small company in Ann Arbor, MI called Menlo Innovations (http://www.menloinnovations.com/), which pair programs exclusively. Their founder has spoken at our university a number of times about the effectiveness their methods. In my eyes this article quantifies to some extent what he's said.
Infrastructure 2.0 In The News
I took "caffeine naps" all the time in college, usually just before all-nighters. Mind hacking was popular sport in the late 70's. I remember trying one or two "blotter naps", also. Good morning!!
Please say a prayer for your rural friends who are trying to survive on DSL: http://www.speedtest.net/result/684003092.png

Edit: Forgot to tell you "the downside": it's $65/mo :/
PS: Sure there is "an alternative": ~satellite~
I just did a speed test in Atlanta, GA and got a speed of 25Mb/s according to speedtest.net:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/684004348.png

So it seems that at least some high density areas in the US do have such speeds.
Based on this article, I would totally consider moving to Ruby for my Fibonacci number needs.
I don't agree, even an "awake nap" can be refreshing.
Complaints rolling in about Google Nexus One
Do you have 3G access there? I was able to pull down 3MB/s over my mobile phone. That's a possible solution.
If you are already sleep-deprived, the risk is that you won't wake up, or wake up and decide to go back to sleep. The caffeine prevents taking too long of a nap.
On an empty stomach I find that strong coffee affects me faster than 20 minutes. More like 5 or 10 minutes.
The bitmap matching really sucks though. It won't match images that have been taken straight from larger images.
UK is a member of the EU.
This is really typical of Google. Their customer support is notoriously horrible. It's a regular thing for users to report in the support forums that Google has shut down their AdSense or Google Checkout account without payment to no avail, and it looks like the same thing is now happening to Nexus One owners.
Willow Garage to Give Away 10 PR2 Robots
I like the motto on the second one: "The Perception Of Security Is As Good As Actual Security", but I can't help feel that what that really needs is to be in Latin. Can anyone help me out on that? (Suitably pith-ified, if that would help; I'm looking for the ideas not a literal word-for-word.)
Ask HN: Your favorite guide/learn-to
Hey guys, I'm currently writing a guide similar to Learn You An Haskell and Learn You Some Erlang and I've been looking around for great examples beyond that.

So my "question" is: Link to some learning guides for programming languages that you had fun with.

Bonus: If the guide isn't dry/boring!
All in the name of good/elucidating discussion! I already know what I think, and why I think it. By slipping into the "devil's advocate" role once in a while, it forces you to think about your own views again from a different light.

I mean, we're mostly white collar upper middle class males here. The cultural overlap is huge. It would be pretty boring, not to mention unchallenging, if I just agreed with everyone all the time ..
ohh I use firefox with adblock plus so never got to know. Its not my site though
"Aurora" exploit in Google Attack Now Public
QT on Google Native Client
(Via http://www.reddit.com/user/markmuetz on Reddit.)
1997^H^H^H^H1961 is calling; someone just picked up the rotary phone. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521...
Not "copied" exactly - skmurphy posted the same comment in both places. (I do this sometimes too, especially if the comment is in a moderation queue at the original site.)
Rank Country Pop.Density
---- ------------- -----------------
1. South Korea 493/km^2 (21st)
2. Japan 337.4/km^2 (30th)
3. Hong Kong 6076.4/km^2 (4th)
4. Romania 90/km^2 (104th)
5. Sweden 20.6/km^2 (192nd)
6. Ireland 73.4/km^2 (??)
7. Netherlands 396/km^2 (24th)
8. Switzerland 188/km^2 (65th)
9. Denmark 127.9/km^2 (78th)
10. Czech Republic 132/km2 (77th)
...
18. United States 32/km^2 (178th)

Sweden manages to be #5 with a smaller population density than the United States.

source: Wikipedia
The GiveWell organization gave similar sentiments: http://blog.givewell.net/2010/01/13/haiti-earthquake-donatio...
100 Incredible Open Courses for the Ultimate Tech Geek
Wanklage
How much of that is oversold vs actually upgrading the infrastructure to support people using most of the promised bandwidth? AFAIK, in most of those country the infrastructure supports people using 100% of the bandwidth.
M$ never promised to not be evil.
And it's nothing new. A couple of years ago I used to have a domain that I put a blanket disallow on. Live search indexed it but neither Yahoo or Google did.
Waterproof your gadgets on the cheap
FCC orders wireless mike changes to make room for next-gen wireless services
I think he's saying that if someone came into your house and said it was theirs, and had the ability to enforce that, it wouldn't be your house anymore. No, you can't ethically say "I claim this piece of land for my own. Oh, look! There are people living on it already. I guess I get to enslave, rape, torture them." But if ethics are not of any concern to you, then you can certainly say it and do it, and the land will then be yours.
Following your doctor's advice on these issues is a sure way to ruin your health.

I actually don't agree with that. While I am willing to believe that the average doctor's understanding of nutrition is incomplete, I doubt the average punter's is any better.

Most people I personally know that "self-medicate" with advice they found on the Internet or read from some popular pseudo-science book seem to be engaging in magical thinking, and/or doing a great job ruining their own health by themselves. Perhaps you run with a more informed crowd.
Reasons to Ditch Your Digital SLR
Digital Electronics and Surveillance Products That Make Our Life Simple and Safe
Today we have a wide range of digital electronics products that make our life easy and effortless. There are many other gadgets that make our life interesting. There are many products that are used for security and surveillance. These products help us increase personal safety. The market is flooded with many products and brands.
China wholesale product - Foot air Pump Multi Purpose Bicycle Motorcycle Sports
> The simplest way to understand this is to realize that you are basically living "inside" the running exe that you're writing.

Ah. Given what I already know, it sounds a lot like opening up a Python REPL, importing all the code you need, and then starting the main loop of the program.

> You're looking through a glass.

Heh, through debugger-colored glasses. :)

I see what you mean though. With C++, if you find your problem, you stop the whole show, go back to your source, take a stab at a fix, recompile, and then run once again in the debugger. With Lisp, you're just there the whole time.
I don't think this "CPU Intensive" task is the kind of CPU-intensive task you actually care about. I haven't done any formal experimentation, but I'm guessing this is a better test of how many instructions are generated for a call/ret sequence, and not how well normal CPU-intensive operations would work. I would think some code that did a fair amount of number crunching/lookups in a tight loop would be a much better test.

But, then again, it doesn't really matter. Is Ruby fast enough to work for most uses? Yes. If you really, really, really care about execution speed, would you use Ruby? I don't know. If you care that much about execution speed, you will probably do more benchmarks than I care to think of.
This is an interesting idea and I wouldn't mind seeing it, but it's also a year and a half old. There have been rebuttals published far and wide, including in the WaPo itself three days later:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07...

Why the repost, if I might ask? A couple of quick searches have turned up no noise from Benson himself on the topic since then.
obviously: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/
yeah that can happen. I've also noticed a slight psychosomatic effect - even straight after drinking coffee I feel more awake simply because I associate coffee with alertness
yes absolutely. Its only risky if you are a polypahisc sleeper and rely on these naps as part of your sleep
Interesting. Sounds like you run, step into, and then modify this big blob of binary data (from the inside!) until you've shaped it into what you want. Weird. :)
As I recall, the warning about overuse of Latin derives from Fowler and goes through Strunk and White (might be mistaken about the latter), where I think the contrast is drawn with words that are described as being more "vivid."

I stand corrected on having used "punchy" in a way that appears dismissive. I am in complete agreement with the rest of your analysis as well, including with your admiration of Mr. Zinsser. Believe me, I spent years trying to master style, and I highly value the guidelines put forth by Mr. Zinsser and others to assist in that process. As long as they are not treated as rigid rules, they are most salutary (or is it healthful) for our learning.

Gratias tibi ago.
It's actually extremely hard (in the performance sense) to do a reverse lookup of every inbound connection. Remote DNS servers can have terrible latency problems, and your framework needs to be prepared to have hundreds or thousands (or more, for a big site) of lookups in flight to avoid starving the valid connections. A netblock lookup is a single firewall rule.
I think you misses the author's point. His main point was simple: don't give earmarked charity. Let the people who understand the problem direct the money where it needs to go.
Daring blogger tests the limits in China
Human missions to Mars will not be just a bit harder than a trip to the Moon and back, which takes a matter of days. They will be incredible multi-year journeys -- more like the voyages of Magellan than Apollo.

This seems like hyperbole to me. Getting to Mars takes less than a year.
Yes, feedback is important. You can't test everything.
Slide Door Operators from Chamberlain LiftMaster
LiftMaster slide door operators are designed for use on single and bi-parting slide doors and fire doors. Industrial, and heavy-industrial uses.
Find a niche market and dominate it, works every time.
As a racing driver I think this guy understands the concept of "steering into the slide". In the case of blogging in China, if you're going to be a little bit courageous, it's probably better to be a lot courageous.
> Han Han, China's most popular blogger

He is much much more than that. He is considered to be the symbol of 80's Chinese. He is widely, household famous, well known to all Chinese no matter age or gender, and quite influential to contemporary Chinese culture. If you want to understand how the new generation (I mean post-Mao generation) thinks he is really the key figure (not even one of)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Han

Notably:

> Han won first prize in China's New Concept Writing Competition with his essay, Seeing Ourselves in a Cup (杯中窥人), on the Chinese national character.

The NCWC is not described on wikipedia, but it has a huge impact on every 80's Chinese, it's extremely popular in middle/high school courses (at least during those years). It's kinda like worship of a rockstar.
We need a TheFunded for incubators and accelerators. A site that allows founders to rate these programs and their interactions with them similar to what http://www.thefunded.com/ does for venture capitalists.
If you are afraid to defend a view because your average karma on some website will fall below a certain level, then you are not the type of person that should be defending views.

Say what you believe in. Karma, comment average is unimportant.

I rarely vote anyways, so if I ever lost the ability (which I don't think I ever have), I would not care. I'm here to talk, not to vote.
If we're going to start making unrealistic space requests, let's start by cutting the US defense budget by 35% so we can fund real science.
Sorry, in the original Fortune article WSGR was vague in their responses to questions about the side fund they were running that did equity investments in their startup clients.
Yes, I wouldn't want to let the person think themselves out of anything before a discussion can be initiated. Better to drop them as fast as possible into the sales person's lap for
an intelligent discussion..
Venture Hacks moderates their comments so I wasn't sure they would post it and I thought it was an appropriate comment on the blog post as an HN comment as well.
Everything you write makes sense, but only in a world where music prices aren't set by psychotic rights owners. Regardless of market influences and reduced cost of distribution, the majors demand ~$0.70 per track. This is why major label mp3s cost $0.79-$1.29 just about everywhere.

When you have that baseline which you can't control, profiting from a discounted mp3 album isn't really possible. Costs of distribution are lower, but they exist. Your profits can quickly become costs unless you stay at the standard pricing levels.

I cite these prices based on what I've seen working at a music startup & based on others' summaries; i.e. http://daringfireball.net/2007/09/more_amazon_mp3_store

I'm definitely not arguing that it should be this way, but describing the status quo.
I wasn't able to view the full text of article when I directly clicked on it. Accessing it via Google circumvented that: http://www.google.com/search?q=Daring+blogger+tests+the+limi...

Edit: does anyone know of a userscript that can automate this process (accessing the article via Google) for all the popular news websites that use this method of limiting access (WSJ, FT, etc.)?