skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to have to disagree with the premise of this and the last post regarding history. History is fun, but not ultimately particularly useful. It's fun in that the "whys" provide narrative value to the facts of history, but as to why it isn't that useful, consider three points.

1. All history that you know is viewed through the lens of biased historians. Historians are extremely biased. All of them. Unlike the sciences where there is a reasonable control on bias (that is, experimentation and truth), in history there is no such control. The field becomes swept up in fads and memes and patterns, and looking at each one individually you would never know that it isn't just Truth. Since historians are the only ones who delve deep into the facts enough to have opinions, but there is no control on their opinions and biases, you essentially can't use any of their output for decision making today.

2. The devil is in the details. Almost always, the lines of implication and causality between two events that are connected (the "why") are extremely subject to minute details that are ultimately unknowable at this point in time. Identifying which of them are the true ones and which are only apparent is an exercise in futility, and creates a ripe environment for bias to exercise its magic (keep in mind that most humans are essentially rationalization engines, and are essentially blind to contrary evidence when faced with ambiguous data sets). The devil being in the details also means that any given scenario that you are faced with will differ very, very significantly from any prior scenario in thousands of details. History only operates at the level of the broad stroke, the gross events that have a literally incomprehensible number of details that could be important or not.

3. Lots of things happen due to chance. More things than people are willing to admit. Humans are wired to seek out patterns. Often this means humans find spurious patterns. Basing your decisions on things which are unknowably determined by random events is dumb.

I doubt if this will convince many of you, based on the responses these posts have generated, but at least keep in mind that your time is valuable, and learning the details of history may just not make your life one iota better.
Western Australian Dev Interzone Games Close To Liquidation
I definitely agree. I'm moving my Rails app to the mustache template language so that I'm forced to keep every single piece of logic (and I do mean that. Mustache allows only conditional statements, for each statements, and the outputting of variables) out of my HTML templates.
Working perfectly for me on OS X snow leopard. It compiled cleanly.
The difference is quite simple.

Microsoft started off with an unpopular operating system, and forced it down users' throats by tying up with the hardware manufacturers. Users don't have much of a choice in the matter. I think they lost contact with their end users at some point. Today, they're stuck with the NIH syndrome, and keep running around in circles, without making an effort to understand the way the market/ competition has changed.

Google started off making good useful (and I'd say innovative) products like Google Search and GMail. They got their users to like them and focused heavily on keeping up with their customers' wants. They post pictures of their office, and talk about their "cool" work culture, and manage to get the public drooling all over. Microsoft didn't think any of this was important. At some point, Google will probably start becoming a sloppy uninteresting company that forces new products down their existing customers' throats. Still, a smarter successor.
This is so awesome. It's like I'm living in near future cyberpunk novel. With vigilante hacker groups fighting the evil and oppressive corpora^H^H^H^H^H^Hgovernment.
So I guess Anonymous is more like a "brand name" for unconnected groups that perform terrorist actions and have a loosely shared ideology, rather than the title of any distinct, traditional faction having a centralised control and command. Yet it does seem that governments and certain sections of the media like to perpetuate the idea that there is a single shadowy entity called "Anonymous" responsible for all these actions. Anyone know the arabic word for anonymous?
Lazy/bad developers will always find ways to put business logic and presentation in places they don't belong. I like systems that -- rather than enforcing arbitrary and inevitably leaky constraints -- aim for maximum productivity and power in the hands of capable developers.

Let's take a real case: Smarty. To my eye, XHP is going to take a huge slice of the PHP template system market away from Smarty. The reason is that XHP gives you the native constructs of PHP (sans mind-bending hacks -- try referencing a class constant in Smarty) while staying at the right level of abstraction for fast development: chunks of valid XHTML.
Neuro Science Shows Human Beings Fundamentally Connected (V Ramachandran)
Always remember that you are a problem solver first and a coder second. Sometimes you can solve a customer's problem without writing a single line of code.
"It would be like punching mist."

Or, as Anonymous likes to put it -

"Trolling /b/ is like pissing into an ocean of piss"

/b/tards only have two real motivations, lulz and rage. The only intelligent response is to ignore them and hope they'll go away. It's like a bully who is stronger than you, anything you do in response will only enrage them or gratify them. The basic skillset anon has is the ability to hide behind proxies and withstand disruptions to their preferred comms channels. They're not particularly good at either, but their sheer numbers more than make up for it. Anon is just good enough at hiding to make it very laborious to hunt them down. When LEA resources are already completely inadequate to deal with terrorism and paedophilia, anon just isn't on the hit list. As regards deterrent, there are a number of /b/tards currently being prosecuted for their involvement in raids, but nobody really gives a shit. Most /b/tards just view them as dumbfucks who shouldn't have been so stupid as to get caught.
Hooking SuperCollider up to Emacs on OS X
I'm happy to have written code for a system I know nothing about. :)
More likely they'll set data prices such that a VoIP call costs more than a circuit-switched voice call. This wouldn't even be evil, since a VoIP call uses more bandwidth than a circuit-switched call.

Also, VoIPo3G generally sucks: http://gigaom.com/2010/01/19/iphone-the-lack-of-voice-over-3...
Why is the car company called Toyota, if its founding family goes by the name Toyoda? The former is more auspicious. The written form of Toyota requires eight brush strokes—as opposed to 10 for Toyoda—and eight is considered a lucky number.

This is so comprehensively wrong I don't even know where to start. The kanji for Toyota (豊田) and Toyoda (豊田) are identical. Bitwise identical, even. (And I count 18 brush strokes, which leads me to think that someone thinks the decision was between トヨタ and トヨダ, which is backwards: the pronunciation does not get decided when you need to disambiguate for writing katakana, it gets decided on naming, and anyone who reads 豊田自動車 as Toyoda Jidousha is reading it wrong and has been for more than eighty years now.)

Toyota Motors sometimes prefers to use the katakana version of its name (トヨタ) in preference to the kanji, but that is basically a branding thing ("it scarcely matters what you pick as long as it is consistent!"). They'll write it with kanji every once in a while too, as will newspapers and the like referring to their country. (This is very roughly similar to newspapers referring to William Jefferson Clinton as "Bill" -- it is an acknowledged correct name other than the canonical one.)

Other companies in the Toyota group standardize on the kanji (such as 豊田自動織機 -- Toyota Industries Corporation) or even on the romaji ("Toyota") versions.
Anon's preferred tool are the array of open HTTP proxies available. They provide relatively weak anonymity, but in scale it works well enough. LEAs have to subpoena the proxy owner and their ISP for logs, usually the owner has very poor logging anyway, often they're based in a foreign jurisdiction... There just aren't the resources available to go after them in any real numbers. They can (and do) go after a couple of people to make an example of them, but they always seem to pick on the low-hanging fruit who didn't go through a proxy.
looks like E4X, which security is a problem

http://sla.ckers.org/forum/read.php?2,20408

Any code mix operation & data is dangerous. That's all how overflow exp, injection and XSS works
Tell HN: Enabling buzz exposes your full name and contact list on google profile
This caught me by surprise, so I thought I'd share it. You can go back to your google profile settings and uncheck "Display my full name so I can be found in search" and "Display the list of people I'm following and people following me."
I think the privacy settings are all around lacking, but this "feature" was pretty opaque to me--they gave me an option to "save" my google profile when enabling buzz, but since I already had one set up I thought this to be an irrelevant step. I had to poke around for a while to realize that my profile had been changed.
The advantage of having a direct-to-consumer approach is that I can see a market for non-wedding occasions, where there is no official videographer. Baby showers, graduations, retirement parties, it wouldn't surprise me if some people even wanted it for a funeral/memorial. It's a pretty neat idea.

[Edit: just thought of another one - military people posted overseas, I can see people at the family gatherings like Thanksgiving wanting to send individual video greetings]
The article claims that it's stored in DOM and can manipulated as
such. To me the big win though is that using this means things
should get escaped properly by default.
A quick overview of an app I built in 9 hours based on the new Twilio SMS API
The most amusing element of this story is how seriously it's being taken. That's because no one in the media discussing it knows or understands who these "/b/tards" are.

To see someone call them the "internet superheroes" is hilarious. If that is at all an accurate description, this is probably what their costume looks like:

http://bayimg.com/NAKiIaaCf
You can say a lot on 140 chars, also if something's junk you know quickly to not read it. It also doesn't take a lot of screen room, thus there's a lot of data available without a scroll down.

It would be interesting to have a 140, 700, 5000, unlimited character filters in Buzz. If its display algorithm was used well, it could work out if long posts from a particular person were usually not worth reading to most people.
"Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs."- Bill Gates.
Belgian advertising agencies go on strike over "spec" work
Digging into the iPhone's Voice Services
I'm sorry about that. We get a lot of spam comments so I was constantly checking the Wordpress page to approve comments. For some reason a HUGE chunk of them didn't show up until just now. I approved all comments that weren't spam. The ones that were there when your comment wasn't there were people who had commented before and were auto-approved. Again, I'm sorry you felt that way, it was not the intention.
Little known fact: Human rights is a fake concept in a collectivism culture. It looks like an intimidating export of 'U.S. Imperialism'. If you care about human rights in countries like China, don't express with the word 'human rights'. Use something else instead
Just by including jQuery in a project I was able to shave a total of 22kb off a range of files without much trouble. But the current release version, minified jQuery is about 23kb. It's a balancing act.

EDIT: Also, in the next version of jQuery, they plan to separate out the core code such that you can include only what you need, so that 23kb will drop to only what you need.
Mandelbrot Fractal Set Trip To e214 HD
I was just thinking about Google v. China and PayPal v. India.

This kind of stuff is not necessarily new: think of the banana republics, the royal charter companies, Hearst and the Spanish-American War, and so on. Heck, the Boston Tea Party is comparable: a trollish, grandstanding intervention in government business.

What seems new is just how open it is: that Google, for example, appeals directly to the public when it argues with China. A hundred years ago, similar things might have happened, but I think only a few thousand people would have had such a clear view as everyone who reads a general-interest news site does now. It’s a lot harder to idealize power plays with our post-Watergate (if that’s the line) popular love of reliable muckraking.
ION is the integrated GPU chip, the CPU is usually an Intel Atom. ION does a remarkably good job decoding HD video if hardware acceleration is enabled within the media app.
The difference is that I still don't really get what Wave's about, and I think a lot of folks agree. I still remember the first time I saw Google Maps--I got it instantly, and I was blown away. And the intial value proposition of Gmail (a gig of storage) was obvious too.
Launching with the “minimum viable product”
I'm reminded of this Google Tech Talk, where the speaker (Jon Bentley) refers to a colleague's praise of someone who "adds function by deleting code": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMnn0Jq0J-E

Edit: Fixed quote
Delete those people making those annoying ads. ;-)
ATV
Audio visual equipment design, sales, installation and service. Professional AV install, rental, and leasing of projectors, screens, sound, cctv, audio, plasma, video conferencing.
"Not everything that counts can be counted" Albert Einstein

Other people's opinion of you may also have an affect. How do you chart a marriage or raising a child. (See also http://xkcd.com/523/ )
It doesn't matter to a lot of the people that use it. I don't store their passwords and I pipe everything going on in the server to the user's web browser. User's are invited to snoop TTY's.

But yes I agree totally. It's meant to work with cloud servers so if you grow weary or distrustful of the box, tear it down and start over. One thing I've been playing with is API integration. Not that its any more secure, but I think fewer people would confuse an "API key" input field as a "Login here" form (which some have).

Security aside, I'm slowly attempting to monetize this and to be quite honest I'm more interested in people giving me their money than their passwords. I can't pay rent with passwords.
For me at least, the main benefit by far of fewer lines of code is fewer bugs and maintainability. Code kilobytes rarely matter (though I concede "k" can be relevant on the web).
A line deleted is worth 2 written.
The State Of HTML 5 Audio Support
So developers pay this guy to use an API that wraps the functionality of another free API and then charge them for it?
Uniform - Sexy forms with jQuery
According to the video, it's not a free API; it's 3 cents per message.

See also: http://www.twilio.com/pricing-signup
That's how I felt when I was taught Java in CS 1-3. We used Emacs in the first quarter, then switched to Eclipse in the second. I found that Eclipse obfuscated the process--I was never really sure where files were and what was running--so I switched back to Emacs.

As for the language itself, everybody is always forgetting that languages aren't "imperative, functional, or object-oriented", they're imperative or functional, with the option to apply object orientation on top of them. It seems to me that many people put the cart before the horse, so concerned that we understand the concepts of classes and inheritance that they brush over the important stuff: the functions and the data.
You are definitely right about the bias, although I don't think that proves uselessness. You may be right in saying that history is not particularly useful (although I disagree), but I think you go too far in dismissing learning the details of history as not making your life "one iota" better.

Many fascinating events have taken place, and reading about them, even biased accounts, is wonderful and inspiring and most definitely makes my life better.

I was even prompted by your post to look up the etymology of the word iota. My life is better now, by more than an iota. My time is certainly valuable, as you say, but I am happy with what it just purchased.
AjaxTask - Rails plugin for managing background tasks
PayPal’s Block Transaction To/From India Could Last Few Months
Cast Iron Valve, Import Cast Iron Valve, Cast Iron Valve Product List
Cast Iron Valve from major suppliers in China. View Cast Iron Valve product list and import Cast Iron Valve from China.
Sorry for the misunderstanding
N.B. Despite the title, submitter is did not build the app; this guy did: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=progrium
It was an easy way for me to illustrate how many lines of code I culled. I make it sound amazing, but the majority of changes involved turning 20 line functions with for loops into a simple 2 line jQuery snippet.

Also, jQuery means rarely declaring in-function variables therefore avoiding memory leaks.

Happy coders all round :)
Of course, the idea is that it won't be kept in those hands for too long--or rather, the same money won't stay in those hands for long.

Hey, somebody has to buy those yachts!
Useless. They wouldn't find anything on the kid's computer, in all likelihood he clicked a link on an anonymously created website that ran a script from his browser. Once he's released all he need do is post his story on a blog and he'll be international news within a month.
link? I'm just curious. Would love to read more about BG's thoughts on coding.
This isn't nearly as high-speed if your T-shirts aren't a size or two too big.

A better method is to reach behind your head and grab the collar where the tag is, and then pull up and forward. It has a tendency to fold your ears the wrong way, so take it easy.
The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'
Revolutionary new web application: TechWankers Buzz 2.0
What's a little sad about this story is that is news because it's so incredibly rare - someone returning from the American Penal system and being able to live a productive life. It's disappointing how a supposedly "civilized first world nation" is so overly focused on revenge and punishment, and so little focused on rehabilitation. So many jobs, these days, will not consider you if you have a felony record. And, it's getting easier and easier to do a background check - so, a single misstep in life and it basically eliminates your chances to every recover.

It's nice to see someone make good after screwing up.
that's a great quote. i'll probably start using that.
The Machine Stops : E.M. Forster
In a previous job, we used Apache::ASP, which is basically PHP-style <? ?> tags, only with Perl in the insides. We got an awful lot of mileage out of simply re-writing the default <?= ?> equivalent to automatically HTML-escape the contents, and adding a new <?! ?> type thing to pass through the inside unescaped.

It's less "cool" than this, certainly, but making the default reasonably safe and forcing you to ask for the dangerous level of output rather than defaulting to dangerous and having to ask for safe is a lot easier to implement.
To Show or Not to Show (At a Startup Conference), Part 1
I run several twitterbots. The ones that autofollow back used to attract large numbers of spammers (until I fixed that). The others don't. I guess the usual spam strategy is "follow - wait a few days for reciprocation - leave if it doesn't happen". So the amount of Twitter spam you see probably depends on your willingness to follow back anyone and everyone just because they follow you.
Sony Ericsson Vivaz | Sony Ericsson Vivaz Mobile Phone
Rasmus Lerdorf's analysis of XHP
Interesting. Especially since the Google veep and product manager made a big deal this morning about choosing privacy settings.
The idea is to delegate responsibility of paying for infrastructure resources (SMS) from the developer to the user. At $5/mo for 160 messages, that's roughly what you would be pay using Twilio directly at 3 cents a message. The unused texts do count as profit, but most of my other services are free so I'm hoping this might help support them.
I might be crazy but I swear I didn't see that they addressed everyone of my concerns... wtf?
You know you are doing it write when you do that.

For added value combine with sloccount when removing code (I removed $200k value from our software, fixed 8 bugs, and removed that stupid limitation about green text today)...
Results 1 - 10 of 10 for flockdb

Wow. I'd like to know more about it too.
See also: Rasmus Lerdorf's discussion of XHP: http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/54-A-quick-look-at-XHP.html

"...when you combine XHP with HipHop PHP you can start to imagine that the performance penalty would be a lot less than 75% and it becomes a viable approach. Of course, this also means that if you are unable to run HipHop you probably want to think a bit and run some tests before adopting this."
Good catch. LOUSY default on Google's part.

I previously had a Google Profile, but of course back then it didn't have a checkbox about people following me or people I follow.
Scala does basically the same thing with XML:

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/131

...although I doubt it does escaping by default. Should be simple enough to add while you're converting the scala.xml.NodeSeq (iirc) to text.

For an API that required both XML and JSON output, Scala's built-in XML support had us wishing the JSON version of the API was as easy as the XML version.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/01/2433845.htm?si...

This is probably the only article I've read that is pro-filter.

"Oh, and the ones with the government contract to implement the filter."

The government body ACMA will maintain a list of blacklisted websites (which already occurs, although pointless at this stage). I understand it will be the responsibility of the individual ISPs to choose how to block those websites.
Titanium Derma Roller – Medical Micro-needling
f you are looking for a natural process for repairing the scars and for skin regeneration, there is an excellent method available today in the form of Titanium Derma Roller Medical Micro Needling Therapy. Derma Roller therapy is ideal for both skin regeneration and scar repair. Unlike laser treatments and medium and deep chemical peels, you will have to be prepared for longer recovery period and associated down time.
They have the fullscreen Flash slideshow view that uses higher-res photos, and defaults to downloading the next one every 3s. It used to be ridiculously awful: super slow, never preloading images, and if you wanted to see the title or description it would shrink the image down to 300px. Now they've improved it to be merely mediocre, but it still doesn't preload more than the next image, and you have to click through to the standard photo page to see anything else.

I think they're just obstinate -- the standard pages haven't really changed since maybe 2004. Besides, Flickr was never about looking at images -- it was originally a MMUD, and it still basically is -- there was a moment of truth back in ~2005 when the site was invaded by users from the U.A.E. mass-spamming groups and pools in a huge clusterfuck, and the site encouraged that rather than reject them. Meanwhile you would get your account hell-banned (NIPSAed) if you posted illustrations or screenshots, as if you were posting porn. This practice only really stopped a few years ago, not long before they started hosting short videos.
$10k might very well buy the next facebook, in the startup stages. It wasn't always this big. All it takes is the right idea and some money to pay the bills.