skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Didn't Joel write an article about that sometime ago? Ah, here it is: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000332.html The point of it is, use it yourself. If you use subversion or whatever else (seems you are familiar with subversion so go ahead and use that) then you can roll back changes, you can do diffs, you have a full copy of the source with revisions, and you can always tell rsync to ignore the .svn directories when you copy things over to production. Eventually something will break, and you will be the guy/girl with the magical powers to bring it back to a non-broken version and find what has changed. Eventually, it will trickle to the rest of the team that it's not a bad idea. Version control can be incrementally adopted. Just sneakily do a commit after other people's changes, and show people how it works. If not everyone adopts it, fine. There is certainly a strategy that's necessary to make sure you don't step on each other's toes while editing things. Use that to mediate between the source control crowd and the non-source-control crowd. Forcing it on others is likely to be counterproductive. Start using it yourself and let others see what happens.
http://twitpic.com/13y3d0

Opera reports that as Fraud
I would hope that recording lights are hardware operated, so that they cannot be disabled via software. When the camera is on, the light is on.
Here is one such case: http://www.scmagazineus.com/malware-to-blame-for-porn-on-sta...

I also recall a case of a teacher whose school computer had malware that ended up displaying porn in the classroom who was arrested and faced up to 40 years in jail. I'm pretty sure she was acquitted.
This is a really random article.
From this post, it sounds like they're dropping their on JIT for LLVM -- but I couldn't find any mention of this anywhere else. Does anyone around here know what the Mono JIT / LLVM situation is?
Ah, but for those of us very aware of the permanent trail we leave, cash has a lovely peace-of-mind of knowing that it's anonymous. I love going to the cash machine, pulling out $800 (the max), and making that my budget for the month for all purchases. Empty credit card bill at the end of the month, except for a few online charges. Something refreshing about that.
Private Company Valuations: Yodle, Inc.
Might be worth editing a warning into the title (that it might be a scam)?
They won't tell us that, because of privacy concerns :P
It gets worse:

http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2009/08/21/chase-insecure

Chase sent me this, too. If you visit the site in Chrome, it tells you it's a suspected phishing site.
Something like this, maybe? http://harthur.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/getting-the-color-sc...
There's so much wrong with this idea. Certainly, offer a certification that lets you opt-in; as nradov pointed out, there's nothing to stop this from existing.

Why should software be treated differently? Easy: Software lets you go from zero to over-9000 in precisely no time flat.

In effectively every other business, you need to produce before you can sell, which gives you a buffer time to see errors and fix them before they bankrupt you, or even to jump ship before the storm hits by never making enough. Plus, with software, can you really prove they bought what you sold, and didn't pirate it?

If someone crashes a cheap-duplicate car, you can tell, and you're not liable. If someone crashes an application, the only chance to identify it is to check their account. And even then, they could've modified your application, and deleted the modified version, so checksumming the app after the fact isn't proof.
Good to hear.

My point though was that Reddit was NOT just a "good idea that took off." The secret sauce was 2 dudes posting 80% of the stories for several months. Without that, no Reddit.
Uhh...which laptops have a recording light on them? Mine certainly does not.
More likely someone just filled in the default HTML for their app with Twitter's front page. The login form submits to https://twitter.com/sessions, so it doesn't appear to be phishing.
Intercepting communications is definitely illegal.

They can certainly have limits on what the laptop could be used for etc. and perhaps filter traffic. Possibly even track the URL's (depending on what the contract says). But reading personal emails will definitely be illegal.

When I go into a company to investigate one of their employee's you have to be very careful not to go near any personal email etc.
I hope the overall experience is better than current .Net development for Windows Mobile. I'm not a huge fan of XAML/Silverlight, but I can understand why they chose that for their mobile platform. XNA is going to be a huge hit too!
WebKit is LGPL.
The #DreamItPitch Contest: $1400 for the best 140 character startup pitch
This is interesting because there are a number of derived numbers that may be very different than you think. If you for instance think the rate of uniques that turn into paying customers is 2.5% it may actually be 5% which is a very different number.
Up to what point exactly? I don't see how reading someone else's email is suddenly okay with any kind caveat.
"I try to minimize ways for my customers to shoot themselves in the foot"
Of note, you aren't supposed to carry more than 10K USD in cash across the US border. Transactions over 10K have to be reported via an IRS-8300 (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8300.pdf), which requires the SSN of the person making the transaction, and I think there's some other entity that you might have to report them to now.

This is done (primarily) to stop money laundering and illegal activity such as drug and arms dealing, although I'm not really sure if its effectiveness has ever been proven.
Here are my top ten, mostly web-related in some way because of my interests. These are the "loud alpha geeks" - the ones who broadcast their interests via regularly-updated blogs or curated links. (There are plenty of "quiet alpha geeks" who are just as "alpha" but not as easy to follow online.)

Brad Fitzpatrick (http://brad.livejournal.com/) - creator of LiveJournal and Danga, now at Google working on PubSubHubbub, the Social Graph API, etc.

John Resig (http://ejohn.org/, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeresig) - jQuery, Mozilla, lots of other JavaScript and browser stuff.

Paul Bucheit (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul) - creator of GMail and FriendFeed, now at Facebook.

Ryan Tomayko (http://tomayko.com) - Ruby, Sinatra, now working at GitHub, has an excellent linkblog.

Simon Willison (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw) - Django, Python, also has an excellent linkblog.

Leslie Orchard (http://decafbad.com/) - Previously at Delicious/Yahoo, wrote books on JavaScript, Dojo, RSS, now at Mozilla. Follow his bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/deusx

Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/) - Atom, HTML5, Linux, Python, Greasemonkey, formerly at IBM, now at Google. Bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/wearehugh

John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) - Apple news and punditry, linkblog.

Sam Ruby (http://intertwingly.net/blog/) - Atom, Python, Ruby, Rails, XML, HTML5, SVG. Read what he reads at: http://planet.intertwingly.net/

Kevin Kelly (http://kk.org/kk/) - Whole Earth Catalog, WELL, Wired magazine, Cool Tools, various books. Compared to the rest of my list, KK does much more big-picture thinking about technology and society.

----

...and some of the not-so-loud alpha geeks who I wish posted more (but not really, they probably get more done if they're not blogging all the time):

Dustin Sallings (http://dustin.github.com/, http://delicious.com/dustin) - memcached, Python, Twisted, Erlang, Java, C, etc, etc, etc.

Tom Preston-Werner (http://tom.preston-werner.com/) - GitHub, Ruby, God, Jekyll.

Richard Johnes (http://www.metabrew.com/) - Last.fm, Playdar, Erlang.
Whether or not Valve Anti-Cheat System works, I believe its existence has reduced the number of players who assume every good player is hacking. In the old days (0.6 maybe?), chat was filled with hack accusations on death. These days, it seems like it is said less frequently, and mostly in jest.

Then again, sometimes it is very hard to tell if someone is wallhacking or just good/lucky, so I could just have a false sense of security on the issue. However, this sense (false or not) is enough to eliminate any frustration on death and just assume I need to get better.
As opposed to pocket electronics with integrated microphones? Think of all the embarassment that has occured due to pocket dialing, and now consider if that had been intentional. It's harder to block a microphone than a camera lens, too, and less obvious where the microphone is.
I don't agree. Flash does too much harm, and innovation wouldn't die if it went away tomorrow.
This is wrong. There are many 'cracked' (no-steam) servers for all valve games ( http://css.setti.info/ ) and even though Ive played many hours on these servers (CSS and TF2) I have seen only 2 cheaters.

Remember- you still have admins on these servers, and they can ban IPs...
Wall Street's Bailout Hustle
I realized that most of your examples here have a flaw. They assume you've got a normalized data store. But in the authors example, that isn't the case. The items in the order are properties of the order.

So, for example, your most popular query is wrong. You have to iterate on the orders and then iterate on the items. I doubt you can use an index for that. And you have to fetch the orders when you really only wanted the items.

I was going for the same sort of thing with the number of items still in stock. A better example might be asking how much of a particular widget has been purchased.
IPad: $14.99 for eBook - Who gets what?
A detailed look at the economics behind the iBookstore.
Right- the argument on the other side of the aisle is, "coders don't know anything about design and produce nothing but horridly ugly pages". They cite a few programmers that didn't meet some art-school design standard about font spacing and then want to take away the ability to effect design from the coders at all.

Functional and elegant rarely equate to a designer as they do to a coder. For example, I know that many of them would really dislike Hacker News. Not enough, "pop" or "zing" to it.
> RRAS, we found, only uses the machine base IP address for the outside of the NAT. It will not use additional IP addresses in the public address pool, no matter how many IP addresses are in that pool.

<facepalm> Why exactly did they gloss over this as if it was no big deal? </facepalm>

The way that I see it they should either:

1) Fix RRAS to use all IPs in the public address pool.

2) Fix ipnat.sys to use a lookup table that keys on external_destination_ip+port rather than just port.

3) Make an announcement that several users are abusing the network with excessive BitTorrent usage which is taxing the NAT. State that BitTorrent users will be kicked from the network if the situation does not improve.

4) Make an announcement asking BitTorrent users to limit the total number of ports their client is using. Most BitTorrent clients (even rtorrent) allow you to limit the number of connections on a global or per-torrent basis. There really is no reason that one needs to have upwards of 800 (or even 2500) ports at a given time.

In general, #1 and #2 should be done anyways regardless of how they solved the immediate situation at the conference.
Why populism won't win the U.S. presidency
Appetite for Destruction
Well as a whole you have to think of it as LGPL as that is the most restrictive license among the code. But there is a bunch of code that is under the BSD.
Does the TeX algorigthm reduce rivers in the text, or is that just a coincidence?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)

edit: re-reading this seems to follow naturally from reducing the size of the gaps between words, which the algorithm does.
I am able to access it from my office network.

It might be just that - a proxy.
I pay a few bucks extra a month to have my electric company remove however much energy I use from their conventional pool and buy it from renewable sources instead. It doesn't seem to have helped much though because they just put into service a new $2 billion coal-fired plant. :(
for those of you, like me, who have no idea what product the original post is talking about, I found the following on boingboing

Chumby is an exciting startup that's making a small, WiFi-enabled, squeezable bean-bag computer that is a delight to hack and play with. You can design your own soft enclosure, install your own OS, write your own apps, or just download programs that do everything from play music and video to run your Chumby as an alarm-clock.

Chumby's co-father is Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, the hardware-hacker virtuoso who broke the crypto on the Xbox and paved the way for all the Xbox hacks that followed (documented in his extraordinary book Hacking the Xbox). Bunnie is a passionate advocate for hardware hackers and software hackers, and it shows in Chumby's open design.

http://boingboing.net/2006/09/11/chumby-chairman-inte.html
I was just going to ask about Hypercard but didn't want to push it. I think we used a newer version on OS 8 maybe, but I had pretty fond memories of that as well. Maybe that was my first "programming" experience. I remember making a Zelda kind of game where you clicked part of the screen and it went to the next card. Really fun, but I totally agree it was overused and forced.
a quick timezone converter is on your command line

$> env TZ=US/Eastern date
Thu Feb 18 11:15:01 EST 2010

$> env TZ=GMT date
Thu Feb 18 16:15:41 GMT 2010
We've done some work in this space (probably less than the other high-end security consultancies). It's an extremely fun problem. It's also a flip side to the DRM/content protection problem. If you believe DRM can't work, you can't believe that it's possible to run a secure game client either.

You might be surprised how many dinky Flash games have variants of this problem, and the sophistication that web developers have to develop to create even rudimentary defenses to attacks on leaderboards and prize claims.

For what it's worth: I'm on DRM's side of this problem, from a CS perspective. Over the long run, I think the content protection people are going to win.
Qtcreator is the fastest way to write app for linux, windows, os x and meego.
Ohh yeah, I forgot Compete was US only. How especially useless.

For Tipjoy, Compete tracked each site that had our javascript or iframe. So any widget company is being extremely over counted.
I respectfully disagree for a few reasons

- Everyone privately buys and sells a lot of small things in the harbor where I live (fishinghooks, rope, etc.) and a digital transaction would be extremely cumbersome, if possible at all. Instead I can just hand a guy a buck and get a few fishinghooks.

- Not every business accepts creditcards or bank transfers. Believe it or not.

- There's a psychological difference between paying cash and swiping your card. When you pull 10 $100 bills out of your pocket and pay someone you instantly know that you're shelling out real money. If you swipe your credit card you don't. Paying in cash is a moneysaver, this has been experimentally tested by psychologists.

- And most importantly, I don't like my bank and other authorities knowing exactly what I'm spending my money on. Not that I'm doing anything illegal I just guard my privacy. When I go shopping for groceries I always pay in cash.
Study: States must fill $1 trillion pension gap
I do that exercise too, but as user stories before hand, instead of during development. But most of my work is for 3rd parties (doing contracting), so I'm limited in the ability to let my imagination run with new features, since they have to pay for it.
> Users shouldn't need to care what a Hard Drive is.

In theory, they ought not need to, but as currently constructed, they do need to because hard drives are terribly unreliable, and people expect to rely on them. If you explain to them that their thesis is being stored inside a little box that has a few discs of thin aluminium covered in rust and that they're being spun in space 5000 times a minute, then just sometimes they understand why they ought to have some sort of backup strategy. Some people will take your advice without understanding but most are skeptical of inconvenient claims and won't act without understanding.

It's like people shouldn't have to understand anything beyond that their car has a 'stop pedal'. But it's still really important for people to understand that they have brakes in their car, that the breaks wear out, don't work well in some kinds of conditions, and make certain sounds when they need fixing.

Sub-optimal conditions both, but a necessary artifact of current levels of technology. Now, ABS systems have reduced some of that wet-weather cognitive load with software. Online backup services are a start in that direction for hard drives. But until it comes as part of the built-in price of the computer (that is a sellable feature) and high-speed Internet is pervasive, people still need to worry about it. At least until dual SSD's are standard equipment.
There was an article here recently titled "Sniff browser history for improved user experience" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1125777

tptacek commented that it was a "batshit crazy idea," and that is exactly right. This article is an example of how to (really) abuse history stealing. As promised, a stronger variant I've been working on is coming soon.
Where's axod to say "languages don't have good parts, only programmers have good parts"?
Statistics of MongoDB users
I guess he himself was confused. Because when the Picasa buzz hack came out(use Picasa profile to find out a person's email), I posted a link to his Picasa profile, and only a few minutes later it was deleted.

So what Eric is saying is that privacy is fine and dandy for him...but the rest of us can go eat cake.
School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home Boing Boing
Or just be able to type 930pm/1035am without worrying about the colon
Angela Merkel moves to buy stolen Swiss data
I have no trouble believing the reports that the version of flash they submitted to the app store drained the iPhone battery in under an hour, as rumors indicated.

What rumors are you referring to here? Or is this more unsubstantiated anti-Adobe gossip?
Interesting. Do you know how/if I can get hold of the court documents relating to that?
Coming Soon: A Radiant Cooker That Can Deep-Fry Foods Without Oil
Fine, and good for you. Opportunities aren't uniform, though, and there are students who don't even have those necessities you mention, and have to work for those. I likewise was fortunate to have the opportunity to make my own money at a young age, and so I don't begrudge you that. What I take exception to is the implication that all students have such opportunities, are aware of them, and enjoy the familial stability required to exploit opportunities as they arise.
Well, yes and no. It isn't that big a deal with Webkit because it does a good job at being standards compliant. But what if the mobile phone market was converging on the IE6 rendering engine?
True. At least with cameras there's an obvious way of disabling it.

Yet there's just no enough market pressure to get manufacturers to include a clear electronic switch-off mechanism. Maybe with a few more stories like this one...
FarmVille, Mafia Wars maker Zynga worth $3 billion, says trading site SharesPost
Right.

And what's with all this "we" and "ban" talk I hear so often? What's the fascination with controlling the lives of others and looking up their skirts? How about freedom, live and let live, to each his own, and mind your own business? I think "we" should "ban" treating other people as property.
Well, the video and article mentions Google and Google Docs about a dozen times...I think Google provided some or all of the financing.

From their website: http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/09/X339/default.htm

Showcased by Google as highly innovative school [http://a.parsons.edu/~jenkc865/339/nyc_is339_cs.pdf]
Is saying someone is confused about something the same as calling a person "confused"? I think I would be offended if when I was confused about a new feature someone said I was a "confused" person...
You are dead wrong. Sorry, but before you go around accusing people of lying you need to get your facts straight.
Cognitive Dissonance: The Tasters "Weren't Entirely Happy"
Look, I'm not going to argue with you because you have no idea what you're talking about. Go away.
Would this include the email client?
Megan McArdle: Did the Stimulus Save Us?
One way to look at this is, "Look how bad this browser behavior is for users! We should eliminate it to protect them."

Another way to look at it is, "Imagine how horrific the impact of this problem is going to become as researchers and criminals weaponize it. There is no way this browser behavior is going to survive. Therefore, it is a very bad idea for us to rely on it in any way."

It's also a nice clean example of how weaponization, exploit development, and full disclosure can move security forward. The worse this problem gets, the more likely it is that it will get fixed.
That's with regard to a crime, however, not a school policy.

You may very well be allowed to die your hair blue, have a "legalize weed" bumper sticker on your guitar case, or an explicit novel in your backpack off campus, but if you do any of those things on-campus you violate school rules and can be punished.

Furthermore, even things you do off-campus can violate your school's code of conduct (writing about how much your teacher sucks publicly on Facebook), and you can be punished at school.
Are you familiar with Adblock, which has been doing exactly this for at least 5 years, since the days of annoying GIF animations?

http://adblockplus.org/
It would make black (that is, "free") markets impossible. You'd have to pay prostitutes with crack, which you'd have to pay for with antique silver dollars.
I agree that the registry is a mess and probably badly implemented as well.

But a few of the criticism coming from the linked blog seems of the form "the Windows Registry is only compatible with Windows".

Since the Registry is very specific to the current version of Windows the user is running I don't see why, from a technical point of view, should effort be wasted in trying to make it more compatible with other platforms or versions of Windows.

The registry is an abstraction and there's only a few supported ways to access it (regedit, .reg files and the registry API basically).
Design isn't pop and zing (I'm aware of the reference). Design is not a coat of paint. Maybe you're just joking, but it doesn't matter because even if you are, there is no lack of programmers who don't have any better of design fundamentals than exactly that poor an understanding.

My point is simply that before we complain about designers lack of coding ability, perhaps we should first educate those in our own trade about the fundamentals of design — because coders are no better at this. Glasshouses, and all that.
Farmville Farmers Outnumber Actual farmers 60-1 in the US
"Full HTML5 support"? Er, no desktop browser has full HTML5 support. HTML5 is not even done yet. How can they offer "full HTML5 support"?
And the nice concept of cookie stuffing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_stuffing
I think one reason for that is because of the sheer number of sensors included in modern devices. It would greatly clutter interfaces and physical form factors to include privacy switches for each kind of sensor.
Tried logging in using a throwaway account and got "403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it."
Yahoo And Microsoft Get Clearance For Search Deal
That's an extreme elevator pitch right there. I tried, but I don't think it comes across very well. On the other hand, less is often better.
Apache -- where solid mature projects go to live out their days.