skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. It makes your name public and therefore allows people to search for you.

It only appears to make your name public if you have a public profile. I logged into my other gmail account and tried to search for my main one from buzz and couldn't find myself, because I don't have profiles set up for either accounts.
Yep. The only reason it caught on was because it was made available through a tool everyone uses already.. kind of like how Internet Explorer is used..
Wow!

"Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence."
Obfuscated opt-out is pretty much the definition of 'evil'.

(since it didn't seem to come through when the other guy posted it)
For those who want a Friday laugh. Pics from Macworld.
All I know is that I "git push --force" all the time, and it has never caused anyone tracking my repositories to complain or stop sending me patches. I assume this means git handles it fine. (I just tested this, and git does handle it fine. It says "forced update", and everything works normally. The reflog stores the old pre-force-push tree still, so you are free to revert and push -f the "old" tree, if you really feel the need to.)

Anyway, "git push --force" has the potential to lose data, but less potential than "rm -rf .". You will destroy your central repository, not anyone's actual work. ("Destroy your central repository" sounds bad, but isn't. The important copy is the one on your disk.)

A clean history is better than never using "push -f" IMHO. The manual authors apparently disagree.
You're confusing psychologists and psychiatrists, the two have little association with each other. Psychiatrists carry the prescription pad and diagnose diseases, psychologists typically deal with functionality issues and work with their patients through the solutions.

Psychologists typically diagnose behavior issues, they're not medically trained whatsoever and rarely tackle conditions as a "disease". People with phobias and addictions are typically best served by psychologists as a psychiatrist usually throws pills at the situation and treats nothing.

I'm not disagreeing with your point, just psychologist should be substituted for psychiatrists as they control the DSM-V.
http://www.sublimetext.com/
My text editor of choice for windows for the last six months.
I wonder if he is unaware of iPad keyboard support, or if he's hoping that other people are unaware of it (and will overlook the inaccuracy.)

I also wonder if the lack of a stylus alone would make the same difference for him.

Or maybe a built-in keyboard is what he really thinks is a necessary element. I wouldn't agree with him, if so.
It's been tried in a lot of different settings, generally with very mixed results in my experience.

I started my career at Acxiom (think data warehousing/personal information data mining/etc...). Each division in Acxiom was split up into business units that all operated fairly autonomously. If you wanted to use company resources outside of your unit, you had to pay for them in real dollars from your business unit.

It led to all sorts of really bizarre product development. The particular product I was working on was one of three (that I knew of) within the company all doing almost exactly the same thing with very minor differences between them. One customer would ask for the tool and far to often business units would just start building it themselves.

Really the issue seemed to be that the failure rate for these business units was pretty close to startup failure rates. Which is simply intolerable for most companies. Your business shouldn't essentially be a big VC firm fronting a lot of small internal 'startups'.

I've run across several other examples at various levels of scale. Microsoft, in some ways, is organized along the same lines for one instance.
It's sad to see such a proud and innovative company fall so far. Smells like a quick play for money.

Come on SGI! Innovate again! Don't just follow the buzzwords. Build some cool visualization software for OS-X (Because really that's where the creative/scientific community has gone), build some affordable gpu cluster thingy. Build something that helps people get their work done.

Just build something worthwhile.
I don't really see what the big deal is.

I'm going to leave it enabled. I'm aware that it's public, and I'll just make sure to treat it as such. It seems unlikely that I'll publish any content other than syndicating my Twitter feed (much like LinkedIn), and all of that information is public already.

My life on the web is open to everyone, and that paradigm isn't going anywhere.
Sometimes, in conversations with others, I hear them say with complete confidence stuff that I know is total crap. It's like I just can't get over how absolutely wrong they are and yet how absolutely right they believe they are.

So I start wondering how many times I do exactly the same thing. I mean, how can I know what I don't know? How much is there? How do I even know if something I really believe is true or not?

It's hard to think that everything I believe about the world might be completely untrue. In illusion. An ... imagination.

Sometimes I am faced with a situation where if I convince the other person of what I believe, then I also believe that person will be better off. For example, if a car is coming and a child is entering a road, Instinctively, we think to call out to the child or try to stop the child or yell at the car to stop the car, but what if the underlying belief: That the child is better off not being hit. Is false?

What if the child may be better off for being hit. Perhaps it makes the child stronger later in life or through her recovery, she meets the man of her dreams and they live happily ever after?

We don't know. I don't know. How can I know what to do?
I've found Acronis TrueImage (Home edition) to be as unobtrusive as it gets on Windows. It starts and stops when told, and so far plays nice with other disk IO. That's not a formal review -- I just haven't noticed it running the way I've noticed backup utils I've used before.
AutoHotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com/) - It's an extremely powerful, scriptable hotkey application. It's one of the few things I miss on Linux.

The other thing I use a lot is VirtualBox, because I can no longer bring myself to do actual development on Windows.
Agreed. They have a small window of opportunity to survive googlegate (or should we call it buzzgate).

Based on their first post on the blog, it looks like they chose the "duck in the sand" approach, classic PR non-speak: ignore the issue, sidetrack it, ridicule it. That's what 99.9% of corporations will do.

Again, they have another 24 hours to do something completely different and acknowledge the problem head-on. It will hurt for a week, but they'll be much better off long-term. Will they have the class and the guts to go for it? I hope so, but I'm not holding my breath.
NaN === NaN being false is extremely handy. If you are trying to track down a rogue NaN in some code, equating a variable against itself finds it immediately. This is also the same in most other languages (I use it all the time in C++).
Coopers Rock is awesome. Have you ever been out to Seneca?
The article claims that "Companies don't understand privacy." It then goes on to explain how users don't understand privacy. If you are publishing something in public on the Internet, you should expect people to be able to see it. Perhaps companies like Google and Facebook should be doing a better job of educating users that, yes, if you publish something publicly on Facebook, people will be able to see it, but I don't think it is the companies who lack the understanding of privacy.
I am no fan of Javascript, but most of these WTFs make sense to me. The 111111111100 one is unexpected, although there is probably a good explanation. (Like "alert takes a string, you passed a number. nasal demons.")
Why not? The Miller-Rabin primality test is both random and, for all intents and purposes, predictable.
I built something similar (not quite as pretty) for parsing SWF tags in Ruby: http://github.com/daeken/Arienette/blob/master/swfTags.rb

Also in that repo is the beginning of a Ruby compiler for Flash, as part of an implementation that was intended to compile Flash apps to native iPhone apps, before Adobe announced they were doing the same thing. Might be of use to someone.
Why? Each conversation takes it's own route and is started and evolved by different users/criteria. I wish instead of merging threads we could see a 'sub nav' of related threads so we could jump from thread to thread within the same topic.
I should not need to understand the subtle privacy interplay of several different and seemingly unrelated Google products just because I use one of them (Gmail).

I entirely agree with this, although I'll point out that IIRC Google Chat did the same thing in terms of modifying gmail but no-one seemed to really object to that. Buzz seems to be different because of the privacy issues, i.e. Google didn't communicate well what would happen (specifically a public profile that included your follower/followee lists) if you clicked "yes". That there's a new link on the left-hand menu can't really be the main issue, is it?

As far as FUD, I'm specifically referring to comments like this:

There is absolutely no way to opt out of Buzz.

http://twitter.com/etherial/status/9023625277

It IS possible to opt out of Buzz, ~ its just that its counter-intuitive and once you've hit the "Yes" button, somewhat difficult to undo.
I thought this article was going to be about what would happen if Google suddenly exposed all the hidden connections among the people who run the government.
How projects really work (version 1.5)
Any new feature, product, whatever that exposes private information should be opt-in. Period.
Comparing Central Banker Salaries
I've seen some very high-functioning and low-functioning people with Aspergers, yet even though I'm rather socially mal-adjusted and am seriously not a group-person, I can't compare myself to an "Aspie" after having taken psychology and sociology for years. It's still a night-and-day difference if you know what you're looking at.

I think the true issue with these self-diagnosed "Aspies" is that they truly have no clue, they just know something is wrong with them socially and want to attach a name to it that's not 'anti-social'. These people rarely have the social issues that a real "Aspie" does; IE they lose most of their social-awkwardness on a one-on-one basis.

Like I said, I've met "Aspies" and they're generally as awkward one-on-one as they are in a group. They don't read many of the physical clues that allow seamless conversation, so they tend to wait awkwardly long at the end as if they're waiting to see the speaker has finished. It's almost like a satellite-link on a news program, there's always that 3-second pause between one person talking and the other responding.

I'm anti-social in groups. I simply dislike large gatherings of people I don't know much (even work colleagues), however one-on-one or in a group I'm fine and talkative. I've been at family gatherings where there's easy been upwards of 100 people in an area no bigger than a large yard where the population density could be measured in the square-foot. Yet I'm sociable, it's not that I can't socialise, it's that much of the time I'm simply unwilling.
You can use it to find Eric Schmidt's email:

http://picasaweb.google.com/109938146389129062343

I doubt it's his real one though
China Sees Growth Engine in a Web of Fast Trains
Wouldn't that have more to do with the fact that javascript uses floats for everything? It's probably exceeding precision at a guess.
Strike three if you count OpenSocial. I have no idea if you should though.
Which countries have the biggest debt problems?
Kevin Trudeau in contempt of court for e-mail attack
And with landing pages that have obscene conversion rates (which is why people feel raped IMO).
How Information is Actually Getting More Expensive
A reasonable number of these "wtf"s are just more examples of people failing to understand floating point. sigh
As far as getnumberoffiles vs. getNumberOfFiles, unfortunately, it doesn't really matter, at least for the near future, because methods and functions (and classes) are case-insensitive anyway :(
You can't argue against someone's reality. However, you can get them to believe in your reality.

For example, what is easier - convince you a) that the Martians are attacking or b) that I believe the Martians are attacking?

a) Convince the girl that she is interesting and sexy or b) convince her that you believe that she is interesting and sexy
Prior related thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047500.

This answer is pretty unorthodox by the normally staid standards of federal court practice and seems aimed as much as anything at generating sensationalism for the defendants' side of the case. I also note that the background of the lead attorney defending South Butt, Albert S. Watkins, is varied and colorful but does not include any mention of trademark expertise (http://www.kwmwlaw.com/albert-watkins).

A reading of this answer suggests that the defense case may be pretty thin, and I would therefore speculate that the main strategy is to try to force North Face through extraneous means (i.e., by generating unending bad publicity) into dropping or settling the suit.
And what about Sun's VirtualBox? It's free and pretty good from what I hear.
Feel free to comment even if you aren't developing for Roku or similar
The fact that somebody paid $140 million for a Picasso makes it expensive but not necessarily valuable ;)

Nokia's CES2010 keynote video is quite interesting if you think about mobiles. Apparently they have implemented mobile applications for local businesses in India for ordering and advertising products. I still think the acquisition is about Google on mobiles.
EC2 Storms
FTA:

Thinking about a typical victim of college dating violence, you're probably imagining her, not him.

Yes, that's because the typical victim of dating violence is female. The article doesn't seem to show any sense of proportion, as if the existence of a woman abusing her male partner "disproves" research concentrating on the much more prevalent case.

For example, from wikipedia:

Men kill their female intimate partners at about four times the rate that women kill their male intimate partners. Research by Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD RN FAAN has found that at least two thirds of women killed by their intimate partners were battered by those men prior to the murder. She also found that when males are killed by female intimates, the women in those relationships had been abused by their male partner about 75% of the time.

I don't like when a problem that is largely committed by men to women is equivocated like this -- "it could happen to anyone!". Well, yes, but it probably won't.
Should we even offer a freemium product?
"(x=[].reverse)() === window // true"

Didn't understand this one at first, but I guess it is easy: first x becomes the reverse function of arrays, then it is called with this === window. So it amounts to window.reverse(). Just looked it up, and reverse() works in place, so window.reverse() === window - although it is potentially different from before.
NaN === NaN is guaranteed to be false by IEEE 754. Hardly a wtf.

Actually most of these posts seem to be the author misunderstanding floating point numbers. Perhaps he should learn what he's doing before he blames the language.
Wrong -- it adds the list of people you exchange email with to the list of people you follow, which is publicly visible by default. There was no way for anyone to see who you exchange email with until this happened.

The fact that you can go back and block your "following" list from public view is irrelevant -- the list of people you exchange email with should never have been put on that list without your explicit consent. It's a unilateral change in the terms of the agreement you have with Google. Letting Google publish a list of people I follow in Google Reader is consent to publish a list of people I follow in Google Reader -- it is NOT consent to publish a list of people I email or who email me.
Knowledge and startups
I didn't know that! very useful, thank you.
In addition to the strange style, I think it's interesting that they demand a jury trial. That seems to support your theory that this is aimed at generating a lot of bad publicity.

I am confused by remarks like "although the client looks 14 and acts like he's 12 at times". "Hilarious", but I would keep remarks like that on my blog rather that in legal documents. Maybe I just have too much respect for the legal system...

"Williams Pharmacy" is also listed as a defendant. Who is that?
This happens to me quite often but if I think a bit about it, I'm not 100% sure either why they're completely wrong.

If you want to get into the conversation (not recommended as it gets ugly quite often when people are completely sure of something * caugh...republicans... caugh*) it's actually better to argue on why they're wrong to be COMPLETELY sure rather than argue the opposite point you might think is right.

They will have far less argument to explain why their point is completely right than to show that yours isn't right either.
Buzz: A fine enabler of foolishness and spam
So, I like Buzz, and Google's integration with Buzz on the mobile version of Google Maps is great. It's really easy to post location-tagged blurbs (buzzes?) and to see what people are saying near you (little dialog boxes show up on the map, which you can click to read). The ease of use may be a blessing and a curse.

Within hours of mass roll-out it became clear that Buzz was enabling a lot of foolish and spammy activity. For example:

A guy near me posted, "Just chillin at my house" (which revealed his real name and address along with the comment).

Several people ranting while on the freeway, "HOV FTW!!!". I'm hoping those are from passengers (yeah right). Of course, texting from your car is nothing new, but come on. Keep your bad judgement private (especially when it's attached to your real name).

Several posts along the lines of "Need computer repairs? Email me at selfpromotionalguy@gmail - $50". While there may be some value for someone in this type of post, my gut reaction is: Do Not Want.

The spam component is the most worrying to me. Viewing posts on the map already offers fairly limited value without being crowded with spammy noise. Fortunately, posts disappear from the map over time, which means the life of a spam message is limited. Still, it's trivial to set up a few accounts (and if a few, why not a few thousand) that post things like that every few hours. And if you can, you can bet someone will.

So, my point is that Buzz seems to make it really easy to be publicly foolish or spammy and that has an adverse effect on the value of the service. What do you think?
This topic was also posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118779 — I’m adapting my comment from there as it is relevant to the issue of the topic disappearing.

I’m not why this topic has got so little interest. Maybe because it looks like a UK-only issue? EMV chip and pin has been introduced in Canada, and the authors say it is being adopted in the USA. The scheme is designed to put liability with the card holder, so insecurities should be given widespread attention to stop banks from being able to blame their customers for problems with the system.
I work at Rackspace and we see choosing our email solutions as alternatives... http://twitter.com/solevangelist/statuses/9028774642
You're entitled to your own opinion, not to your own facts. (Some TED speaker)
But then you won't know if all the JavaScript that your rails applications use will actually work in a browser. Some browser testing is still needed.
I haven't read the article, yet, but in response to your comment, I am reminded of how, often, people are encouraged to be and rewarded for being "certain". AKA "assertive".

Frequently, when I qualify the knowledge I'm sharing with comments about my level of certainty in it and/or its sources, I'm criticized for being some combination of "too verbose", "uncertain", "confusing" (even though, when people actually pay attention to me, they usually say afterward that they have a much better understanding than they did before), etc.

The world is complex, sometimes. But there's a lot of pressure to ignore that complexity.

And then people wonder why things go to hell in a hand basket. And EVEN THEN, all too often they don't really want to know. They just want to know who to blame, and what pre-packaged "solution" to implement.
You jest, but the Canadian school systems are currently implementing a text-ed program to educate the kids on harassment issues, what to do about unsolicited messages (harassment again essentially), but also trying to teach relationship and sex advice mixed in.

I know I was taught 'netiquette' in high school when I took computer courses, however I wouldn't be surprised if a full netiquette course gets implemented in the near future. Although I wouldn't be surprised if here in Canada it gets merged into the text-ed program as cells and computers are progressively getting closer to meeting in the middle.
In tech companies market position matters. You can't just have everyone working on their pet project, because they all have to fit together to form a cohesive unit with adequate positioning and power. Except for the occasional market manipulation, that's just not true with hedge funds.
Upvoted, because I find it to be both.
This suggests that you don't actually know what the === operator is. To summarize:

== - 'values are equal' - in this case, are these two numbers equal? The IEEE spec would say no. I agree!

=== - 'both sides are exactly the same' - or, in more technical terms, are both the values and types of each argument exactly identical. In this case, the answer is yes, absolutely. === is not a numerical comparison and should not be.
Is there an advantage to doing that as opposed to using isNaN()?
Your idea is an interesting one, but:

a. It won't get implemented (of course, neither will mine)

b. I don't think people would skip across multiple threads before bestowing their wisdom upon us

I believe chance dictates who gets to see which thread, and I'd rather have more minds in one thread than have them split between separate threads discussing the same thing. I hate wasted time and repeated discussion, I'd rather see a single conversation rather than seeing the same points made repeatedly in different places.

Personal opinion only, of course, but as a programmer I hate wasted effort and duplication. DRY - don't repeat yourself.

Having said that, it's ironic that I'm making the same point here and now as I've made several times in the past. Nothing will change, and people will continue to submit things without checking to see if it's a repeat. The same points will continue to be made several times over, and time will continue to be wasted.

ADDED IN EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112661

So even though it's comparatively trivial to find such repeats and duplications I'm not going to bother any more.
Your instincts on that are wrong. There's a skilled postgrad fellow with papers to his name proving or disproving pulsed laser ablation of lipofuscin in nematodes for ~14k, for example. You should read the DIY Bio piece here for how people reduce costs for OTS items. There is huge bloat in OTS biotech prices, which can be traced all the way back to government funding of research if you care to - standard budget management, etc, etc.

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/diy-bio-growing-mo...
The question is who failed to understand floating point: The authors of the JS specification, the authors of the JS runtime, or the people writing the javascript that demonstrates the 'wtf'? Is the answer "all three"?