skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The original poster is precisely correct from my experience.

The only time I purchased a cable online was when I bought someone a gift that required the HD cable.

All the other times, we ran around the corner to Shopko and paid whatever their price was because we had a new HD system setup and wanted it in HD. Now.

I really don't think it's a casual purchase for most people, and I certainly never considered buying more than one at a time.
Here are some interesting articles on patents I have found:

"Rewarding Innovation Efficiently: The Case for Exclusive
Rights"
http://innovationforum.gmu.edu/2008/papers/reward.pdf

"Removing the Property from Intellectual Property and
(Intended?) Pernicious Impacts on Innovation and
Competition"
http://papers.isnie.org/paper/150.html

"What's Wrong With Royalty Rates in High Technology Industries?"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1104315

"A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1354849

"Rethinking the Development of Patents: An Intellectual History, 1550-1800"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=863925
The HDMI cables discussion reminded me of Dan's site. He has some good pieces debunking various 'magic tech' devices, cables and magnets included.

Also assorted hardware hacking, in a "more computer failures should involve smoke" vein ...
WePay, the Online Group Payment System
It'd be better if he didn't tell you right in the article that it was a joke.

http://www.foolsmedia.com/
Great Experiences are Invisible
I'll be attending from CCNY (CS student). Not sure what to expect though, so I'm excited to find out! Right now, I'm doing a lot of functional programming, so I'm not sure what type of web-based hacking I'll be doing in vanilla Scheme, haha.
Is a day and a half enough to cover this year's spate of awful, unimaginative online April Fool's jokes?

noprocrast: yes
maxvisit: 1
minaway: 2880
You are right that knowning low-level detail of a language is great and I have badly explained what I meant to say in my first post (Mostly because I'm a terribly bad english speaker). Here is what I meant to say: C++ is archaic for a lot of reasons; just read effective C++ of any book and you'll find subtile bugs that you need to avoid.

My point is: I don't say whether C++ is bad or not but when you compare it to scheme or python, for instance, you clearly see that there're some archaic parts. Some programmers only know C++ and have closed mind on everything else. If they start arguing about the glory of those "c++ design error", it's a huge hint that it's a C++-only programmer.
It takes a lot of noise to alter the digital signal like this. If we're talking long distance, like a telephone line, the signal gets weak enough that it can happen regularly, but on the cable from the DVD to the TV the voltage drop is ridiculously low. Noise doesn't affect your signal by 4 volts unless you have a serious problem with your system.
What if 10% of your visitors still use IE6? You're basically giving them the finger and send them to your competitors.

Exactly. IE6 is a pain, but the extra work is worth it to me so as not to send away potential customers. Perhaps when IE6 gets below 5% marketshare we'll revisit the issue.

BTW - if any of you guys are getting hung up on a particularly nasty IE6 bug, feel free to drop me a line (within reason). I'm adept at fixing them.
That's unfortunate. I guess it goes to show how much value those "Hacker Safe" badges are. But how do you know they store your password as plaintext?

I was talking about the way they handled it in general. They didn't email any customers, and they still don't know which cards/orders were affected. I think they should at least be able to tell me which customers have been complaining (ex. those who made orders between DATE_A and DATE_B)

Also, they deleted data that they previously assured me would be kept & accessible (last 4 digits of credit cards, so that I can check the appropriate bill). It took me over a week and at least 5 different CSR's to find this out- I was given the runaround before that. Live support & phone support both told me they couldn't help, and claimed that the email support team is the only group that could. Over a week later, I still have not received a response.
Surprised you didn't know.
That is true. I have no administration permissions on my computer at work. Installing another browser is just not an option. Hence the problem (I would not be using IE6 if I had the choice!)
Yep, this issue bit me. There's no real fix, but to keep sshfs working you can grab the Leopard static binary: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/MACFUSE_FS_SSHFS and mount your volumes from the command line.

This has happened before; I wish MacFusion weren't so fragile.
An excellent place for purchasing av and other sorts of cables at sane prices is monoprice.com Ive been very happy with the pricing which is consistently the lowest I've seen and the construction quality both. Sanely priced does not imply any loss in construction quality nor does the contrapositive hold, though US consumers are conditioned to view price as a signalling mechanism for quality to various extents
I'd say your company got gypped if they spent $400k on such a fragile piece of software. What company produced this software, so the rest of us can steer clear of their incompetence?
I think your understanding of cables is off.

All signals are analog. Every single one. (Actually, I take that back. With the exception of quantum computers, to date, all signals are analog).

A "digital" cable doesn't just work or not work. It is possible to receive spurious bit errors for many reasons. For example, you turn up the volume to your awesome surround sound speakers, which causes more current to flow through your speaker wires that happen to be running parallel to your horrible HDMI cable. The increased current causes interference in your low-power HDMI cable, causing bit errors in the transmission.
Absolutely... give me some time though I have to find it. Its a special regular expression where basically the regex engine can't decide which greedy quantifier to use leading in an insanely long evaluation. I opened a firefox bug for it a while back.

Ok found the link:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520086

Strangely this does not crash google chrome. Impressive!!!!

Err, correction, the regex now runs reasonably fast in the most recent of regex engines but I think on a long enough string it should still fail.

The string "dead:parrot(skit = 123372398547895743957574395743957439579435" now kills the browser.

However, unlike firefox in which regex runs in C space not JS space, google chrome/chromium recognizes that the page is unresponsive completely and kills the process, only the one process is unresponsive the rest of the browser works. Good job google!

Edit: This will kill Opera, Firefox (any), IE (any)
Also, when you're buying a $3,000 TV, $100 for the cables doesn't seem that bad, relatively speaking.
At this point, it's less of a compatibility issue and more of a:

- Security issue (this is internal to the installation site of IE6, and doesn't affect development all that much)
- Performance issue (if you're doing something complicated in JS, it won't work in IE6. It will just be way too slow)
Compact discs use something far better (in that context), a combination of two interleaved Reed–Solomon codes called CIRC, which is error-correcting (and not just detecting like a CRC). All digital A/V systems have to implement this in order to read a CD. It's made to be strong against burst errors which is why it can handle scratches on a CD pretty well. Samples can also be interpolated if something's really unreadable.

Even with an error-detecting code, there comes a point where there's too many errors to know if you received a valid code word or if the errors just "canceled each other". If 000 and 111 are your only valid words, it's still possible that a 111 gets turned into a 000 (3 consecutive errors) and there's no way to know about it...
It's monads!!111!!!
I looked at these but didn't think they were particularly cheap for hobbyist, home theatre use. Maybe for fitting out desktops for a callcentre of whatever.

I bought an Acer Revo instead, bit jazzier design, can still be mounted behind a monitor and has NVidia graphics card and HDMI output.
eh, this is more reddit material than HN
When I made that comparison, I meant that dreamhost users are presumably more tech-savvy than facebook users, and facebook users don't seem to have a problem with the password reset structure.
Thinking Non Compete Agreements are Un-Enforceable
Good but not great discussion of trying to start a new company if you've signed a non-compete having worked for a bigger company
Where, Iran?

What if you want to iterate over the return value of document.open? It's perfectly legal ECMAScript.

If I write a program that randomly crashes when I type in the URL of your website, should you be liable for that? Of course not. Any crash is Microsoft's fault, not the web developer's.
I believe they didn't know what program to use to edit .txt files.

Yeah.
Twitter,  Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal
sad.. but true
BlueCoat documents this fairly well here: http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2006/07/think-your-ssl-traf...

When the SSL Proxy intercepts an SSL connection, it presents an emulated server certificate to the client browser. The client browser issues a security pop-up to the end-user because the browser does not trust the issuer used by the ProxySG. This pop-up does not occur if the issuer certificate used by SSL Proxy is imported as a trusted root in the client browser's certificate store.

The ProxySG makes all configured certificates available for download via its management console. You can ask end users to download the issuer certificate through Internet Explorer or Firefox and install it as a trusted CA in their browser of choice. This eliminates the certificate popup for emulated certificates...

Edit: Transparently pushing trusted CA certs to end-users in a typical corporate environment is easy with group policy settings.
Caffeine is a dangerous drug
Actually, I think that it takes the exact same amount of noise to flip a bit as it does to transmit a bit.

Through the principle of superposition, if you transmit a 0 with X watts, and I transmit a 1 with X watts, our combined signal will be somewhere in the middle, which can cause a bit flip.

I am not talking about voltage drop from end to end, which is a separate issue. I am talking about interference occurring adjacent to any point on the cable that you pick.
Moving Hoptoad into the "Cloud"
>> "It is possible to receive spurious bit errors for many reasons."

Surely that's why there's error correction layered on top?

Instead of arguing about what might happen, why not find an HDMI device that'll show you how many unrecoverable bit errors it has detected in the stream... Can't be that hard to do.

If my hard disk can send data over a tiny crappy unshielded cheap USB cable without a single bit error, I'd be willing to bet money that an HDMI cable isn't that much different.
Some Yahoo email accounts hacked in China, Taiwan
I also wondering why this “People want the basics done well” cant be applied to the car industry. Manufactures are selling so advanced vehicles restyled every year(and you are paying for that!)All that advanced systems for auto-ething and so on. While I just need good car that i can comfortable use for years… I dont really care if it will give me 21 or 22 mpg or 300 or 301 hp!

Does anyone else want car produced by 37signals? )))

(Hope reposting my comment is ok, i am really interested what do HN audience think about that, sorry for bit offtopic)
Isn't HDMI supposed to do error correction on both sides, though? I could be totally making that up, I thought I remember hearing that a while back.
(FYI I'm a Phusion Passenger developer.)
I find it interesting that you think the shared socket performs better than letting a proxy distribute the load. I've also done some tests and I find that the shared socket harms performance on high concurrency situations because of the so-called thundering herd problem. The problem is that all Unicorn workers select() on the socket, but when a client comes in all workers are waken up, all of them try to accept() the client but only one succeeds, and the rest goes to sleep. We're working on some pretty heavy performance and scaling optimizations for the upcoming Phusion Passenger 3 and we've found that avoiding the shared socket gives us much better overall performance.
It'll be nice if the kernel provides an interface for performing select() and accept() in a single atomic operation but until then I think the shared socket isn't that good.

From what I've seen so far, peoples' experiences with both Phusion Passenger and Mongrel/Unicorn can vary drastically. Some people noticed a huge response time drop and performance increase when they switch from Mongrel/Unicorn to Phusion Passenger, others experience the opposite. I guess it depends a lot on the server. Phusion Passenger has got some pretty heavy users though, e.g. the New York Times Obama real time election results page was running on Phusion Passenger. The Dutch national TV broadcasting organization is running all their Rails apps on Phusion Passenger and they get huge spikes of traffic whenever something is mentioned on TV.
My first reaction to this headline was "Surely there is never any circumstance where this is genuinely a smart thing to do, no matter how clever" but I confess I wasn't thinking in terms of security vulnerabilities.
Google: Do No Evil? Sure. But First Do No Stupid.
If it was written to work with IE6 (as was a lot of software in the day) it was likely written in the era when IE6 was THE target market. Simply put, IE6 was the only game in town, really. If you wanted to make dynamic applications that were worth a damn, you wrote it for IE6.

That said, I agree that in this day and age, it is inexcusable.

One other point, you may be unaware (as I was until pointed out to me) that 'gypped' is a racial slur against Romani (or broader, Italians).
Okay, so, I live in San Francisco, but in an unfashionable neighborhood. Please tell me if I'm living a mediocre life or not.

Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but you're basically saying that if there's some constraint at all on my life, it's mediocre. Seriously, fuck that. There's always someone with more freedom. This is hardly more enlightened than keeping-up-with-the-neighbors.

What it's really about is accepting constraints with grace. And a big part of that is knowing yourself well enough that you can make the right choices.
The graphic is totally useless, the same information could have been conveyed in 30 lines of text. An "infographic" should have some kind of graph or chart or something that adds insight, not a picture of 9 playstations and a dopey flow chart.
There is a Google group that we all use to discuss when the next event was a few weeks ago. We must have all just forgotten to post it on HN. Join the group though if you want to help choose when the next date is.

http://groups.google.com/group/hn-chicago
It's great to see Rails still evolving:

I like the new feature that shows the sql for named scopes:

User.published.to_sql

http://edgerails.info/articles/what-s-new-in-edge-rails/2010...
Cthulhu's Pet? Giant Isopod Found Attached To Underwater Robot
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164161
Thanks! It's really quite hard to get a comparison of tools that take some usage to understand.
Social Network For Forex Traders Currensee Raises $6 Million
I forgot my password and when I used their system instead of having them generate a temporary password for me they sent me the password in an email.
Poll: how did you come up with your username?
I am wondering about people's usernames on Hacker News. These are some interesting questions about your username. Please select all that apply. Feel free to elaborate in the comments.
some fanciful word(s) I conjured up on the spot
it's nothing, just random nonsense I don't care about
exclusive to HN and not any other site
used across 1 or more other sites
a shortened or abbreviated form of my real name
it has to protect my anonymity
has some special meaning
have 1 or more additional HN usernames that I've used in the past year
My network cable that handles all my data doesn't have gold plating or shielding because the cable as designed is sufficient to operate at Ethernet speeds, temperatures, humidity, etc.

If you want to operate a faster network, or one in a harsh environment, you will be using shielded cables with gold plates and more twists per inch.
I urge you to take a broader view of the word 'hacking.' The park was created in an act similar to Guerilla Gardening. I think of it as Urban Hacking :-)
What is wrong with conveying those 30 lines of text visually like this graphic does?

Perhaps some people will respond better to the same information in this format as opposed to pure lines of text.
Sensor automatically detects emotions & updates your Twitter/Facebook Status
Thanks for posting that link. As someone with a 1 year old and aspirations of having my own software business, the video provides tremendous inspiration and food for thought.
RabbitMQ on iMatix disbanding AMQP
Bedroom furniture, master bedroom furniture
Find some interesting idea about bedroom furniture and master bedroom furniture at http://www.profileinteriordesign.com
I have been banging on for a long time that as soon as someone produces a decent home computer that is actually designed to be a consumer good then the price of computers as we know them will start to rocket upwards.

We probably need to start thinking about just what constitutes a good developers platform so we can all get behind it and achieve some sort of economies of scale.
Cars are a much larger signal of status to a wider group of people.

Not to say that there wouldn't be a market for a 37signals car, but it'd be much smaller, I'd think.
Glass Fireplace Doors Screens
Fireplace Company of Wilshire Fireplace comprising a lots of fireplace equipments like traditional, contemporary, antiques and antique reproductions to their California locations.
Dear American Website Owner
my real name
Have you ever gone into a Best Buy or similar and seen the cable selection? The "cheap" cables are $50, and the Monster cables are sold right beside them. Many people compare prices on the TV before coming into the store, but are not armed with good information when the salesperson tells them that their $1200 TV is worthless without $250 in cables.
Let's start with PNG alpha transparency. If you allow yourself the use of PNG alpha transparency it makes many things possible and many things much easier or more maintainable. There are hacks to make alpha transparency work, but none are universal across all the ways to use image asset files.

As for basic CSS, yes, if you know the major pitfalls then IE6 isn't so terrible (when it was released a decade ago it was a breath of fresh air actually), but even that requires a constant vigilance against dozens of bugs that are a minefield for anyone who is not anticipating them due to years in the trenches. Oh you might be lucky and avoid them, or you might stumble upon them and rue the day you ever posted such a dismissal to HN.

Javascript has a number of similar pitfalls that are hard to be aware of and are fairly arbitrary limitations to place on your development. Frameworks paper over some of this stuff, but some of them are hard limits.

In my case for instance I am the lead dev on a VOD site showing feature-length films. You could watch one film on IE6, but if you watched 2 without restarting it would usually crash. We weren't using some bloated JWFlv player, we had a minimal, custom flash player designed to squeeze out maximum performance. There's absolutely nothing we could do about that, and just the support costs of reading emails from people whose browser crashed when they were watching movies was not worth it.
There was a good twitter oauth script written by jaisen mathai which you many find useful, unless you don't like PHP. :)

http://www.jaisenmathai.com/blog/2009/03/31/how-to-quickly-i...
Possibly a startup or even established company whose focus is related to your mechanical engineering knowledge. You might be more valuable as a subject matter expert who programs, than as a beginning programmer.

If not an ME-focused company, then one that uses your peripheral skills, e.g. a trading company that needs good mathematicians (who code).
Here's another crash bug.

Just link the following URL as an image somewhere on a page (works on third-party sites that pass image URLs directly to browsers):

http://grack.com/crash.py

There's a crash in IE's URL parser that takes down the browser if it attempts to process this URL: "ms-its:%F0:". The above script returns an image to every browser, but a Location: redirect to IE6. If a site doesn't proxy images for its users, it'll send them to the link and take down the browser. Known by Microsoft, doesn't require scripting, still unpatched.

Source, for anyone interested:

#!/usr/bin/python
# http://grack.com
import os
import sys

if os.environ["HTTP_USER_AGENT"].find("MSIE 6.0") != -1:
print "Content-Type: image/png"
print "Location: ms-its:%F0:"
print ""
else:
print "Content-Type: image/png"
print ""
print open("crash.png").read()
And I'm sure your users will instantly recognize that.
Intent matters. You won't get in trouble for exploiting buffer overflows while taking a computer security class, but you sure would if you used it against someone maliciously. (And, like it or not, intentionally crashing someone's browser is malicious (and the intent is not hard to prove, given that it's done with $.crash).)
Both of these are examples of a bad signal to noise filter. People think they know what they want, but they don't.

Compound this with the fact that nobody trusts salespeople (with good reason; they very often aren't trustworthy). "Car salesman" is sometimes used as an epithet. The main difference is that people like to pretend they are clueful about cars--partly for status purposes, as someone else noted--and go for the advanced features. Whereas not too many people know or care about the composition of a tennis racket.

What particularly bothers me is the lack of attention paid to durability. This is the primary reason why things "ain't made like they used to be". Following the original article, using shoes as an example, there are really only two large makers of durable dress shoes left in the US, and only one of them makes shoes that aren't ugly (Alden).
There is this weird thing called error detection/correction.
I'll stick around for the second installment, I guess, but this was a bit too basic for my tastes.
> Actually, our system was originally created to produce unthinking worker drones. It's built directly on the Prussian education system

The welfare state was designed by Bismark to accomplish the same ends.

Beggars can't be choosers.
Yeah, the last line of the article: "I’ll show you how this lets an attacker use a NULL dereference in the kernel to take over the entire machine."
Not under HP-UX on a "PA" processor. The page at 0x0 isn't neccessarily unmapped or marked noread/nowrite/nonothing. As I recall one or the other HP C compilers has a way around this, but unless you take care, you won't use that compiler flag, and you end up having NULL pointer de-refs.
I actually love sass the way it is currently, what benefits does this new syntax have for previous users of sass? I see how this new syntax could maybe help new users since it is more aligned with regular css. What I am most interested in is support for sass to minimize duplicated sass/css. Sass is great because it allows for semantic css styling where you include mixins of common css, but that increases the size of the css. What would be great if sass allows us to write semantically, but when you deploy, it should minimize the css.
Car Cheap Insurance Quote UK &#8211; Are you thinking about getting one?