skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
docs.com is owned by Microsoft, so the use of Silverlight is to be expected. (Note: Not that I agree with it, but just wanted to point out the true owners of the site.)
What leads you to this conclusion? I am not a natural athlete nor a gifted writer, but I don't find one to be significantly less challenging than the other.
Yeh it' sensible if you have, say, confidential/classified information (we have to destroy most of our dead drives).

But I think that's mostly just overkill. I'm fairly sure that it is completely infeasible to recover data even for the mighty government. :P

I suspect the theory is that wiping a drive is prone to accidental failure/mistakes. Destruction is pretty unequivocally permanent :)
The first I've heard of SPF being antiquated. I always configure a SPF record first just because it's so darned easy.
So what was the result/conclusion?
I will be watching throughout the day to see what happens:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MFE
>There are a few markets where you might find a connected business to recoup the money you spent on software, but it's not a general business model for development.

I wonder if more startups should remember this.
I don't follow the logic as it pertains to retail. It's quite easy to get revenue per employee to be as close to zero as you want. Simply hire more workers. Investors in retail stocks are not looking for revenue per employee to be as low as possible. They are more focused on things like sales per square foot of their stores.

Razor thin margins are the goal but only if it is achieved through the right process. Hence, people look at other metrics.
Docs.com - Microsoft Office + Facebook (from Microsoft FUSE Labs)
The fatal problem: the train is arriving in N minutes whether or not the car is ready. Just as car loading is to be finished (no more people allowed), the last person trips and falls, twisting an ankle. Do you have time to help them on board? How do you get them out of the way?

If the car is not ready for whatever reason there is no fallback... that car has to attach or else there will be a collision. It seems far too rigid an approach to accept regular humans as a moving part.
Code Metrics with Metric Fu
I don't understand why people install antivirus software on their machines. I read once that their catch rate is something like 20-30% which strikes me as no better than 0% for all the good it does most of their customers. It just seems to slow down computers a lot and yield little benefit other than protection for the IT staff when things go wrong.

I could make antivirus software that does nothing and probably make people happier by virtue of the fact that I'm not taking their system's resources.
From the article: "All the major manufacturers told us they offer security or encryption packages on their products. One product from Sharp automatically erases an image from the hard drive. It costs $500."

This should not cost extra. It should be included in every single hard-drive-based copier.
Here is another approach. The passengers get on a helicopter which lands on a helipad on the train, and quickly get off. The disembarking passengers board the helicopter on the train and fly back to the station.

Benefits: Does not require complex and dangerous docking/undocking mechanism. Does not require perfect synchronization (unless there is a tunnel a mile from the station -- this can be avoided by planning stations more intelligently).

Once the train is in operation I'd like to see the insurance rates on the infrastructure.
Ask HN: Web Site Accessibility Guidelines for a bill draft?
The political party I'm affiliated to is drafting a bill on Web Site Accessibility, aiming to make the public websites adhere to accessibility guidelines, and I've been asked to give my opinion as an advisor.

So far we've agreed to follow the W3C WAI guidelines - is there a better set of guidelines we should be adhering to, or something else we should be taking into account? Anyone here is involved in website accessibility, do you take it into account when building your websites?

Thanks!
>Why do IT depts recommend installing this program?

My suspicion is that they need something to spend a lot of money on. That old "more expensive perfume = better" thing, to appease the managers. I could be wrong.
Trying to Padlock a Cloud
I wonder how many times it will take for this story to get resubmitted and not voted up.
I learned one during grad school which is meant to serve the school network but accepts requests from anywhere. I've just kept using that.
The problem is the length of the parallel track.
A high speed train does 200mph, if you allow 15mins for the people to transfer on/off the catch-up car then you need them to be parallel for 50miles!

And that's only with current trains, this system is only really necessary when trains get a lot faster.
Sounds a bit like how Smalltalk was banished from Viaweb:

http://xach.livejournal.com/146281.html
Looks like it's back up.
https://rightsignature.com

Upload a document and play with the tools. Very easy to use and the control you have is amazing.
It is a really shallow page, but the integration team you'll contact is solid. I've been really excited to see the progress of the closed beta. If you're curious what the payment flows look like, go here and click that link to buy some credits: http://www.facebook.com/?sk=games
Apple iPhone license essentially prohibits ad networks other than it's own
A recent study linked here showed that frequent password changes were no good (can´t find the link right now).
The ITA tool is pretty awesome from the mileage runner standpoint, although this is kind of a niche market.

I've used it for searches like, "find me trips between point A and point B that involve three segments on the outbound and two on the return, all on American."

When I wasn't trying to come up with some insane routing just for miles/segments, it still was better at coming up with routes/prices than whatever my old company's corporate travel service used. I would never let them book me anything once I found out I could take five minutes, look on ITA, and more often than not find a more convenient route for less money.
Agreed. Just fired it up in Chrome on my Mac and got the notification that there is a new version of Silverlight available.

Back Button.
McAfee Founder Hunts for Cures in Belize
You'd be making a trade based on how the market responds to news. Just because you care about this news doesn't mean the market will. Unless the settlements are enormous, the market never will.
Here's the original on SO http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1200882/ - the author looks pretty angry in his photo! :-)
I wonder how many years until androids cross the uncanny valley? It seems to me there are stages to moving through the uncanny valley.

The first stage is overcoming the first impression creepiness.

Next is maintaining the "suspension of disbelief" for longer and longer time periods.

At some point, I can imagine a video-only Turing test for android appearance. After five minutes of video, can a human tell whether they are looking at another human?
I don't understand how even having a 20% detection rate isn't better than 0%. Am I missing something? Are there a lot of viruses popping over the net that even the 20% detection is already too late?
Really tempted to do this...
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282791
Subliminal Cues Can Empty Wallets
Tutorial: Twitter stream API in Python
Depending on the type of site: viewers, clients, members, subscribers, customers, visitors, contributors, commenters, followers...the list goes on.
It would be a shame if your business were to 'happen' to catch fire, but luckily we can prevent that from happening... for a fee.
I am looking forward to sharing excel documents with my friends, they are going to have so much fun reviewing my formulas and charts mapping out the quality of our friendship.
Android Tablet Prototypes Support Flash
Given the cost in equipment purchases, user annoyance, lost productivity and purchasing the software itself it strikes me that you need much higher success rates to be worth all that.
i would hardly say they "stopped working", yeah?

this really does look like a recruiting video -- nerf guns? check. balloons floating away into the blue, blue sky? check. generic downtempo house musak? check. "why do i like working at redgate"? check.

they also all look really tired and i would too if my "fun week off" was compromised of building a "object-level recovery tool for sharepoint".
JS canvas code can just as easily peg your CPU at 100%.
Coming next: social network aware adsense.
Just out of curiosity, is there anything particularly bad about doing this? Looking through the guidelines they do in fact encourage self posting, so I'm wondering if there's some sort of "community" discouragement of this sort of thing.
Hmm, Microsoft using Facebook connect and not their Passport system, interesting.
Not at all - those are just some of the things I suffered from.

Bad blood flow? If you have issues with feeling cold a lot (especially in your extremities), regular light headedness etc.
Why would there have to be a hard drive? I would have assumed there was enough RAM to do a job, and that powering down the copier would clear it.

Who the heck needs the copier to remember their copying jobs long-term?
Which network do you want? (net neutrality in a nutshell)
I don't see the developer lock-in on the iPhone being much different from designer/developer lockin with the entire CS suite.

This just sounds like a poor sport who wasn't invited to the same type of party they are already throwing.
You have a point. Their market cap still dropped by 50 million in the last 40 minutes - whilst not being enormous, it's still noteworthy so far.
I think a code sample is really just a launching point for a discussion. Some people would probably use a resume the exact same way. When I've offered code samples to hiring managers, what I've tried to do is demonstrate technical mastery needed to help them get work done.

My goal is to explain design choices, trade-offs, and situational information. Stuff like, "I see you used this really weird and complex table function here - why?" I like to explain what I did, try to provide some general fundamentals as part of the explanation, "Well, we were able to eliminate x KLOC of Java by using this table function to simplify our db access layer. Over here on this other stuff, we did what amounts to some duct tape work because it was a one-off for a customer, who btw, based a purchase decision on our ability to provide this solution in a couple of days, which is why the code isn't commented in a nice way, etc." This type of conversation is what I'm expecting from a candidate as well.

But, you're dead-on on not being able to catch a destructive, lousy programmer if you don't know what to look for. If you put me a room with some rock star Lisp programmer, I'm not going to have the foggiest idea how to ferret out a conversation based on a code sample. I'd probably try to have the candidate teach me based on their sample.

Avoiding lousy, rock-star programmers . . . well, in reality, I simply haven't had to make enough hiring decisions to hit this too often. I have noticed that rock stars seem to be more ego-driven, code "hoarders" who struggle to explain their designs without being condescending, can't talk about people they've mentored (because they haven't), and seem squishy on details when you really dig into code. But you might be awesome and just a lousy communicator. In which case, you probably won't work well with me anyway and you're not passing the "culture fit" test.

So much depends on context. Right now, I'm driving a project with two other people working for me and I'm purposely making design choices that aren't that great - we are incurring some technical debt as a trade-off for meeting a big demo day deadline. Plus, we're focused heavily on iterating with our actual users (who on this project are prone to ask for stuff and then when you show them implementations tend to respond with "oh, what I really meant was . . .") In the past, I've designed db access layers that were used by larger team, so I had to do more measured, thought-out design and education of that team. The ways I would talk about both projects in an interview would be very different.
It's about time. The FB API was a nightmare. But there's 400 million people on Facebook, so FB integration is probably good for your site, regardless of was your site does. The new Open Graph protocol actually looks pretty awesome. This could be huge.
It's WAAAAAY more than 60%, I assure you. If the HN crowd is surprised (like I am!), the millions of people who don't know a hard drive from a monitor have absolutely no idea.

I'd guess that it's more like 99.999%.
The whole '26 pass' thing is based on a paper that created 26 different patterns of wiping the drive in order to default the different hardware schemes for the hard drives of the day. But that paper was written long, long ago, and I don't believe any of those schemes are used anymore.
Unless the settlements are enormous, the market never will.

Or if they lose big clients. My wife tells me all computers in PWC's NYC office are out.
Live example of Facebook ‘Recommendations’ Plugin
Here is Facebook's blog post on these plugins:
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/377
This is great. Any chance it will be adopted by Mozilla/IE/Opera/etc?
Even that bottleneck is going away; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL

Not quite powerful enough to run, e.g., Doom 3 or something.. but headway is being made.
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#privacy

If you are correct, there is a massive conspiracy at Google, where a single whistleblower would be able to cost the company billions of dollars.
If you use squirrelmail, you can send messages with wget. This avoids many anti-spam and configuration issues.

wget --save-cookies cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies --post-data 'login_username=username&secretkey=password' http://webmail.server.com/src/redirect.php

wget --load-cookies cookies.txt --post-data 'body=body here&send_to=recipient%40wherever.com&subject=subject here&send=1' http://webmail.server.com/src/compose.php

For a bit more, see:

http://mikemccabe.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/sending-email-wit...
I think it's clearly implied that profit per employee would be far preferable, but in the absence of good profit data, they're saying that revenue per employee is vastly more useful in judging a business from a business viability standpoint than, say, users, or even users/employee.

If the startup's goal is solely to be acquired, then users might be appropriate, but 37Signals has always argued that that goal is generally foolish, and akin to playing the lottery. Their mantra has been that startups should be trying to build a business, not an acquisition target.
You are.

Despite all of its shortcomings, AV is still pretty effective at blocking crap for non-technical users. Perfect? Of course not. But even a 50% catch rate is better than nothing.

At my current job, we see our fair share of 0-day and too-new-to-be-caught-by-AV stuff. However, we also see a great deal of infections from viruses that are at least 1-2 years old. Even stupid AV can catch viruses that old.
Google On Break Up: Cut Us In Half, They’d Demand Quarters
I'm very puzzled by the connection to Facebook. Why wouldn't Microsoft enable this kind of collaboration for business users first?
The stock is just following S&P 500 and not dropping on its own

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
Regardless of where your site is hosted, you should be taking advantage of a CDN to serve static files. For popular Javascript libraries like jQuery, use Google's CDN and your users might already have it cached if they've visited another site that uses the same library. For your own images (and maybe Javascript and CSS), host them on Amazon S3/Cloudfront, Rackspace Cloud Files, etc., so that users fetch these from edge servers near them.

If you visit any one of my sites from the UK, you would get the HTML from Dallas/Ft. Worth, but the images, CSS, and Javascript would come from a Limelight (Rackspace Cloud Files CDN) edge server in the UK.

If your site focuses specifically on the UK, you could eliminate all those calls to the server in Texas, but it wouldn't make that much of a difference.
How to share photos without uploading to photo sharing sites
Uhh .. It's like Google docs, but without that obnoxious "Don't be evil" part.

I wonder what they paid to get that domain?
The 20% figure that was "once read" about is pure fiction. Any up to date test figures reveal something closer to 99.8% of a 3 million sample testbase for the better AVs.

It's all a bit moot though as before this happened, McAfee was probably worse than anything a PC can get infected with. Now it's gone and proved it beyond any doubt.
Those are good points and legitimate use cases. But if they have small hard drives, how did the guy in the story recover "tens of thousands of documents" from 3 copiers? Why would a copier need to be able to store that many pages?

I mean, OK, hard drives are cheap, so maybe copier manufacturers just said "eh, even if they run huge jobs, they can come back and repeat them later. Only costs us a couple more bucks." But dang - they gotta address this.

EDIT:
Hmmmm. I guess I just forgot how freaking big hard drives ARE these days. Discussion below about how a "small" 20GB drive could store so many documents at such-and-such size... oh yeah. It's startling to remember how gigantic 20GB sounded 10 years ago.
For everyone interested to change their DNS check out http://code.google.com/p/namebench/
For me 8.8.4.4 and others are faster and work better then the one provided by my ISP, at least it feels that way.
Comcast requires that the sending address be a real mailbox on the server pointed to by your domain's MX records -- a catch-all address doesn't cut it. When in doubt, check the logs from your mail server.
So - I watched the keynote (http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/) and I have a few questions.

If I like a movie on IMDB am I liking the movie itself or just that particular movie's page on IMDB? (see video at 23:28) I would assume I am liking the movie, but it's unclear. Does this mean that IMDB now controls all movies on Facebook, or can I like it on flixster as well? If I like it on Flixster will it be represented separately on Facebook than when I liked it on IMDB?

This get's even more confusing when you introduce real people. For instance, if I like Toby Gerhart on ESPN am I liking him or ESPN (See video at 25:00). The status update Bret shows on a slide after liking Toby shows a status update coming from Toby Gerhart himself. What if Toby does not have a Facebookpage?

This seems very cool - but it seems like there are a lot of holes. Maybe I dont fully understand it. Can anyone clarify?
I did some benchmarks on a Dell Precision M65.

The hit from MacAfee was approximately 15-20% by my reckoning, in terms of time taken to run a compile and link cycle.

Worse still, as you pointed out, responsiveness is affected, which can be incredibly frustrating.
I mean McAfee in lieu of a less expensive perfume, like Avast. I'm assuming Avast is less expensive.... Avast is better, though.

(And is it just me or is HN freaking out right now?)
Heroku | Supporting Big Data: Part 1 (Taps Update)
Copiers these days can do so much more, they can print, have mailboxes (for storing, archiving, printing from or to), send emails, upload to and download from shared folders, integrate into your applications, send and receive faxes and so much more. And that's just the low end, I have no idea what the advanced features are.
More readable print version of article:

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/11/...
>> "In that case please don't read any books about patterns, or best practices."

I don't. I hate naming things as patterns with a passion FWIW. I'm not really sure you can really learn good taste from a book :/ All you need is the language reference, and years of practice...
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph
I agree with the other reasons posted. One more reason is one of expressiveness. When you have a "flat" simple form, it is easy to serialize as name/value pairs and send to the server in that fashion. However, when a form is more complex, with nested structure or with variable-length lists of data, it can be very difficult to come up with a serialization scheme that fits the name/value pair model. Often you end up creating your own mini language. If, however, you use a JSON object or XML node as your payload, you are free to transmit data of arbitrary complexity rather easily. So in cases where the data you want to POST/PUT is not flat, you will have much more expressive power encoding your data in JSON or XML and posting it in the request body.
Technically, WMDs was only one of a number of casus belli stated officially by the US prior to the war, which included Iraq's non-compliance with the terms of the 1991 ceasefire, its continued hampering of UNMOVIC weapons inspection teams, its repression of its civilian population, its attempted assassination of a former US president, its continued firing on US aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone and its harbouring of international terrorists. I don't believe the US and UK should have launched that war in the first place and I personally thought the rationale was a little shaky, but the historical record does show that it wasn't only about WMDs.

The legal basis for the continued US presence is well-established and widely known, so I'm surprised you feel confident enough to dare anybody to explain it to you. Subsequent to the invasion, the presence of US and other coalition forces in Iraq was legitimised by, in turn, UNSC Resolution 1483 (2003), 1546 (2004), 1637 (2005) and 1723 (2006), IIRC. The last action taken by the UNSC with regards to multinational forces in Iraq was to extend the mandate authorising their presence till December 2008. Thereafter, the continued presence of US forces in Iraq has been legally authorised by the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, which calls for US forces to leave the country by December 31, 2011. Whatever the moral case for a continued US presence in Iraq may be, the legal basis is sound.

Something else that's worth noting is that the Wikileaks video dates from 2007, during the height of combat operations surrounding the surge. At the time those sorts of engagements were a daily occurrence. This is no longer the case; these days the remaining US forces in Iraq are involved in relatively few direct combat operations and the overall level of violence in the country has dropped to a level where a slow US withdrawal is now possible without causing a security vacuum. From a US perspective Iraq is now a solved problem and the war is just about over. I must give credit to General Petraeus and his sane and unorthodox counter-insurgency strategy for that, for what it's worth.

So the stuff shown in the Wikileaks footage seldom happens in Iraq anymore. I would suggest that your time is better spent not impotently demanding that US forces leave now based on your reaction to a three year old video, but rather applying pressure on your representatives to ensure the planned withdrawal from Iraq happens on time and that US combat operations in that country end as scheduled on 31 August. I see no reason why it won't though, and in my opinion Afghanistan is a far more pressing concern on which to focus at the moment.
With fake SSL certificates signed by "real" CAs, cross-site scripting and other advances in phishing attacks, just educating users may not be as effective as it used to be. Malware is quickly becoming advanced enough that even trained technical users may be fooled. Many attacks don't require user interaction. AV products may be slow to respond and signature matching won't catch everything, but if it catches half of what shows up on corporate networks it can still save a lot of time and money.
DataMapper is inherently broken