skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still miss bookmark tagging from FF. In fact, I often keep a FF window open just so I can keep my bookmarks organized with tags.
The problem with "everyone leaves at 5" is that everyone's forced to come in at 8 or 9. Some people work differently. I'd take a 50-60 hour work week with flexible hours (and ability to learn new technologies, improve existing infrastructure and initiate "venture" projects) over a 45 hour work week with fixed hours and a strict adherence to a development methodology. Perhaps that's why I am drawn almost solely to technology organizations and could never see myself working anywhere else (e.g., consulting or internal systems development).
No. I'm saying that Goldman received $12 billion from AIG that it wouldn't have received if AIG went under. So wipe that money off Goldman's balance sheets before talking about the health of the business absent TARP, etc. The issue is claiming the company would have done fine without government support and selectively ignoring the fact it had just received a $12 billion dollar bailout in the form of a federal payout of AIG's debt to it.
Diagrammr: diagrams by writing sentences
If you like your work enough to put in 80 hours a week on it please ensure that the additional 40 hours reward you in some equitable way.

If you want to work the extra 40 hours for free you can do it for a charity (or your own startup!) rather than your for-profit employer.
Fair enough. But don't you think the coverage in this particular article was a little Spolsky-centric? I agree they're a team (equals), and don't mean to imply Spolsky was a Johnny-come-lately, but the RWW article really just mentioned Atwood in passing. I thought it was a little strange that his name wasn't mentioned til below the fold but, no big deal.
Health insurance options for startups
Interesting read on why Firefox won't ship with H.264: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_fr...
Going Google · Brad Abrams
THE FACEBOOK RAPE POLICE IS GOING TO ARREST YOU FOR POKING TOO MANY GIRLS WITHOUT GETTING POKED BACK
Hmm... I think not being a chump requires the ability to stop and reflect on the situation.

We are in an industry obsessed with "ninjas" and "rockstars". The same author who wrote this article bashing long hours has articles about how grades and good knowledge of math are all-important on his site. But these long hours and near-perfect grades really are just a way to compete.

So we are in this cutthroat competition. Understanding math you are unlikely to use in real work is a status marker. So are grades. Are they just that? No, just like a shiny BMW is also a good car. But competition in any well-paid career eventually becomes unsustainable (or close to it). Doctors and lawyers are already there, but their fields had more time to get to that point.
An oldie but goodie. This helped explain a lot of the often-praised features of Lisp and functional programming that had never made sense before.
Same. Every time he referred to the author as "Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy" I felt like closing the tab.
Schneier on Times Square
If you're on the dev channel, web inspector has improved immensely. It's seriously cut down on the amount of time I've had to spend in FF.

Great job pulling out some of the other annoyances. I've definitely been bitten by that one.

While both Chrome and FF's systems are probably better than it ever was, I still miss Galeon's old URL completion bar. It essentially behaved like tab completion in bash. So when you hit tab it completed out to the longest common match in your history. It was awesome for navigating to different parts of sites you visit often.
Sure; every last podcast. And Joel does have the expertise on the financing/startups side. And maybe I am underestimating his role on the strategic side.

But in terms of who has the bigger "voice", there's no comparison. Atwood is a great popularizer of tech-related topics; he writes short, sweet, lozenge-like posts that appeal to programmers as well as technical non-programmers; whereas Spolsky's focus has always been more narrow. And going by any metric you care to throw out there (Compete, RSS, Alexa, whatever) there's no comparison in terms of traffic.
Geez facebook. Bye forever. Account not just deactivated, but deleted.
Those are the max. speeds. In power-saving mode, I highly doubt the iPad runs at 1Ghz for anything.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of Javascript performance per Watt.
http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/

I have no idea if they use this for gmail or similar methods for other services.
I'm not so sure here, if hosting is legal then it seriously undermines the 'linking' theory, after all hosting used to 'trump' linking in the past in terms of 'how bad' it was according to a variety of court decisions.

The whole reason the linking was made illegal in the first place was because the 'hosts' were usually in places where prosecution was tough, rapidshare is a 'sitting duck' and they've just won this case.

edit: it might even be that this makes music lockers in Germany legal!
I agree with the EFF 100% in the article. But it's not always so clear.

What if I agree to developer Terms of Service that say I can't disseminate users' information, then publish a Identity Theft Target List with information pulled from the Facebook API?

Seems like that should be a criminal violation, even though I "only" violated a TOS.
The complexity of JS-based webapps is going to get higher, not lower.

Only if that's the winning tradeoff. If, in fact, "ability to run well on a mobile device that is desperate to conserve battery power" turns out to be a more valuable trait in a particular segment of the market than "has lots and lots of complex JS logic that takes power to run" then software will evolve accordingly.
I assume this is rare, but the lack of sanitization in this case paralysed a 22 year old woman.

"""
Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed.

Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.
"""

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html
It certainly matters but it might just be the right trade-off in this situation. Or not.

I think nobody would argue that performance doesn’t matter, it’s just that you can’t always have everything and then you better pick the right stuff. Apple probably thinks that JS performance is good enough. For now. And that’s a attitude I would have no problems with.
Or per pound.
Ohhh, yes it does. My company is currently working on a quite complex Web-UI and it's a huge (!!) difference.

As according to everyone the web shall displace desktop apps in about every area, this means that really complex web application must be able to run.

A slow browser will only lead to the webapps we have today which are not very complex in comparison to full fledged desktop apps (see Google Docs vs. Office, Mailclient vs. gmail, etc.).
Using Light to Heal Battlefield Injuries
The reason that it IS a BFD is that Steve Jobs is now saying they have "high performance HTML5" on iPad. This is evidently not true. Here is an app for which it makes a big difference, something I prepared on my MacBook Pro (with the iPad in mind) only to be pwned by Apple's anti-competitive exclusion of the JS JIT compiler from iPad Safari: http://grokware.com/ff.php
It was an implementation of Trivium, an extremely simple stream cipher. I was also thinking of doing Salsa20, but I got distracted.

The code: http://basecase.org/trivium/trivium.js

Demo: http://basecase.org/trivium/

Honestly, I lost interest once I got it working with simple test strings. If you do something cool with it, let me know!

Edit: Looking at it again, my code is badly undercommented – sorry. But if you follow along with the Trivium specification (http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/ciphers/trivium/trivium.pdf), which is a model of clarity, it should all make sense mod renaming of variables etc. The outstanding bug is that it assumes that any sequence of 16-bit values can be taken as a UTF-16 string, which is not true. Will e-mail you some general thoughts when I have a few minutes.
What's an "Identity Theft Target List"? A list of information about people to make identity theft easier? In that case, publishing a list like that should be the crime (if it isn't already), not the TOS violation that got you the data.
Surely it means they don't care.
The article appears to be taking the position that it isn't a legal minefield, saying:

"Personal and non-commercial activity" sounds ominous for professionals.
But it turns out it's not, exactly.

But it goes on to explain, case by case, how essentially any commercial use of the video produced from these products is in fact not covered by the Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere h.264 licenses. It seems the only kinds of professionals who are safe are those who are part of a supply chain where someone further on the supply chain is responsible for procuring the h.264 license, like employees of a movie studio where the studio itself has a license.
Doesn't that suggest that such code 'bloat' is actually less important than people make it seem ?

After all, there is not much to remembering that two functions exist for the same type, it's not like you have to remember that there is something 'completely' new, just a routing that is almost the same as another.
One Block Off the Grid: Group buying for solar panels
A very simple DSL implementation through Macros in C
I tries to write a very simple DSL implementation through Macros in C. This DSL lets children do some mathematical calculations and print them! Very basic, but i serve it as an attempt to teach people about DSLs effectively.
How exactly is that exclusion anti-competitive? Presumably Apple wants JS to be fast on the iPad just as much as anyone else does, and would only exclude something like that for a good reason.
That is quite possibly the least effective means of protest I can imagine.
I was actually talking about comparison of underestimated markets (like the parent).
That's one way to interpret it, but consider a company that pays you to sit in a broom closet, doing nothing, all day and forbids you working on your own code at home. Even if you draw a great salary, your skills after three years on this job may be equal to your skills five year earlier (i.e. you didn't learn anything but forgot stuff/your skills became outdated).

Clearly, some jobs teach you more than others...
Less ways than you can sound like a jackass in one article, apparently.
The asker may be testing out some of the answers, but in reality most of the problems to be solved during software development are about balancing tradeoffs, e.g. security vs. performance. The reason the best solution is the best may not become apparent for years, when the project needs to scale, changes hands, needs to upgrade, gets hacked, etc.

In such a case, how is the asker, lacking such experience, able to pick out the right answer except by number of upvotes? Same goes for anybody reading the page. I'm just saying a popularity-driven Q&A site has its drawbacks.
At 40, Brain and Body Slow
I'm still looking for words for describing how StackOverflow is so much better than it's competitors. I think it's more than just ill-will for Experts Exchange (though that's undoubtedly a factor). StackOverflow is built right. It runs smooth and the barrier to joining is damn near as low as possible. But what else gives it that extra something?
We need about 100 programmers to go out right now and start writing code that allows users to download and update information from their Facebook social graph. Let them fight a hundred legal battles instead of just one.

I've seen this coming for some time. There is going to be a war over who owns the data about each person, the person themselves or some service provider. I know that legally the service provider owns it, but I'm not thinking that is the way most people see it. This is a case where the law has gotten very far out of sync with the public (and with the first principles of natural law and personal property, but that's a discussion for another time)
I could see specific kinds of agreement violations being legally enforceable, but it seems safer if it was "opt-in" on the government's part which kinds of agreements can be enforceable that way, as opposed to letting anyone who writes a TOS be able to invent arbitrary new criminal offenses on the fly.

For example, there could be a law saying that anyone who disseminates information they agreed to keep private is guilty of an offense. That would make certain kinds of TOS related to information confidentiality legally enforceable. Of course, Facebook might then themselves be guilty of that offense with their retroactive privacy-policy changes...
> "It certainly matters but it might just be the right trade-off in this situation. Or not."

In principle, yes, but if you're marketing a device that is some kind of ultimate web-browsing machine, and you have to crank down JS performance to hit battery life... then the technology for your device isn't there yet.

Apple has made the claim forever that they don't execute until the right technologies are there (an argument they repeated for iPad) - and have frequently accused competitors of launching something before it's ready (IMHO, a valid point). This would seem to fit into that case - assuming JS performance is deliberately low as a trade for battery life.
They were not, this is relatively new.
The market in the US may crash in the next 9 to 12 months.

In fact, any market may crash, in the next 9 to 12 months. But that there was a property bust an a depression in 1873(!) after a world fair is a bit of stretch, I'm sure that the 'worldwide crisis' has as much to do with this as the worldfair does.

Interestingly enough, there was a depression following the world fair of 1928 as well, maybe it's time we outlaw these worldfairs, they seem to be causing depressions.
I have a friend, he writes software for NASA spacecraft. His job is not inherently physically demanding, but many of those who know him worry that he will "code himself to death" eventually. When crunch time comes, he buries himself in his work. Doesn't sleep, forgets to eat, etc., for weeks on end. He's ended up in the hospital multiple times. So, that's what I think of when I read the story of "John".

This has nothing to do with "not [being] happy with the tradeoffs". These guys are perfectly happy acting like this; being the hero. But it's absolutely not something I'm going to encourage my friend to do to himself.
Here are the relevant FYIs:

1. Microsoft is one of several companies behind H.264. To the extent that H.264 succeeds, they along with Apple et al. benefit directly.

2. zdnet.com is owned by Microsoft.

3. The above article is a piece of thinly-veiled MS propaganda.

4. H.264 is NOT an "open" standard. This is a patently false assertion.
Lately Facebook seem all to happy to trade the goodwill and trust of their users for control and monetization over their data.

It's getting a little creepy.
I don't know why more sites don't use Google's Ajax API and instead waste resources on making really bad search engines. Sure, users get more features if you roll your own engine (sort-by-hotness, hide self-posts etc.) but what users want are good results, not features.

I wish reddit, HN, and SO used Google's Ajax. I made a very simple JS/CSS tool to add a Google search box to any site: http://chir.ag/projects/drop-search/ - I use it on my blog and it works pretty well.
I don't think your list would be substantially different from a phone book.
its very basic, but i serve it as an example to explain how DSLs could be implemented.
I'm dragging others with me. It's the least I could do.
How?

I can imagine less effective scenarios.
1) Not changing your life at all.
2) Not touching your Facebook page again.
3) Dressing up in a chicken suit and dancing around a major intersection.
etc.

If you delete your Facebook page, it's one less user that Facebook can claim to have; if enough people do it, it could put a dent (however minor) in their bottom line.
Geek hipstr's tech and gadget category | hipstr
I agree, but the prevalence of FB on the HN front page is a little suspect. There have been at least 10 negative FB posts on HN in the past couple days. I think someone's got an axe to grind...
You presume too much. Think, man. Free high-performance HTML5 web apps are 1) not under their control and 2) not profit-making for Apple, as they bypass the App Store.
Listening to the plan for the proposal-heavy StackExchange site creation process on the podcast, it seemed to me that it relies on people being super motivated in desperately wanting a StackExchange created for their topic.

I wonder where this drive is supposed to come from for people who are indifferent to the StackExchange software because they haven't participated in sister sites much (or at all).

I mean, I'm even very familiar with and enjoy using the software (StackOverflow), yet I can't be bothered using SuperUser for my general tech needs, let alone creating a site of my own.
Fair enough - so how do I use google docs when I'm offline?

Alternatively, would you have suggestions on some other service that provides similar doc capability with html5 database?
I beg to differ. It's exactly the thing to do. Our only option is to vote with our proverbial wallets, and in Facebook's case that means leaving the site entirely, and not just deactivating, but DELETING, Facebook accounts, and encouraging others to do the same.

How To Delete Your Facebook Account:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

Believe it or not, there is a social web beyond Facebook.
ESR might have been relevant and interesting at one point - way back in the past. Now , he is just a blowhard with an inflated ego.

I am not sure at what point he "jumped the shark" but somewhere down the line his articles/notes started being about showing-off rather than being about substance.
I agree with you and I rate Firefox search bookmarks as an even bigger plus. Life is short and I don't want to waste it by having to go to a site such as wikipedia or a multi-lingual dictionary first and then search and wait for a second page to load.
That's different. It was a civil issue. This is where facebook is trying to make it criminal.
Correct me if I am wrong, this seems like a far leap from what the law was intended to do. The ruling would mean good for Facebook and bad for our society.
Not if you back it up with a donation to the EFF. I just gave them a few coins. Seems like the best value:effort ratio for affecting the outcome of this case.
I think ryanwanger's original statement is a sort of a false dichotomy. I don't think you can divide things into "luxuries" and "necessities" without a context. What might be seen as a luxury from one point of view might be a necessity from another point of view.

Drawing on what aspirant said, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a very good way to provide that context: at the level of physiological needs, you can consider "safety" level needs as "luxuries"; on the other hand, you would consider them as "necessities" from the "love/belonging" level.
I was also pretty disappointed about the reasoning. This blog post sums up what I am thinking: http://bit.ly/dkpQh1

In short: it's both the eco system, the low learning curve, the penetration of the internet, and the ability to gain more insights into what people are doing with your app that native apps will have a hard time competing with.
That someone is "people" and the axe they have to grind is "stop trolling the personal data you unscrupulously collected from us in the first place by hoodwinking us into thinking you actually MEANT the meaningless drivel in your privacy policy."
I think "Smashing The Stack" is a very important milestone, but I don't think it's the tipping point for buffer overflows. I think that'd be Sendmail 8.6.12 and 8lgm's syslog(3) overflow exploit.

For the first half of the 1990s, Sendmail was to Internet security what Wordpress is now: the dominant attack vector. Sendmail zero days were the bearer bonds of #hack. Whenever Allman's team fixed a flaw, the current version of Sendmail became one of the hottest targets on the net. 8lgm had been coming off a string of something like 12 high-quality advisories. An unpublished 8lgm advisory in 8.6.12 was a big deal indeed.

8lgm basically dared the Internet to reproduce their finding; they said "it's an overflow in vasprintf in syslog, but we're not showing the exploit". For the next 8 months or so, everyone was madly trying to cobble together stack overflow exploits. I remember sitting in someone's apartment at a party watching Mudge walk us through some example shellcode. I started Matasano with one of the guys who published the first x86 stack overflow.

My point is, well before Smashing the Stack, buffer overflows were a very big deal.

Let me head off a likely follow-on argument: there's no "Smashing the Stack"-a-like for heap overflow exploits; the techniques to exploit heap overflows are as folkloric as stack overflows were prior to Elias' article. That is to say, it's out there, it's not hard to find (especially if you can read and play with exploit code), but there's no solid cookbook. And yet there's a thriving ecology of heap exploits out there. So it's hard to argue that the '90s would have played out that differently without Elias' article.

This does nothing to answer the core question: why so many years between rtm's worm and Lopatic's HTTPD exploit?
The fine grained control makes me feel like I have more say in the process, even if in the end I'll probably just split evenly.
Same thing for me. The possibility to integrate search engines (or other forms) with a keyword is what keeps me in Chrome.

I have to agree though that FFs autocomplete feature is better. Chrome only seems to match addresses if you type their beginning.
The way Facebook is going, and with how many people absolutely fail to understand what security settings it does provide, it'd be pretty easy to cull a list of all residences in the past 5 years, city of birth, mother's maiden name, favorite band, favorite pet, first boyfriend's name, and a decent photo.
In a vacuum, the Humble Bundle can't really be called a success. As I'm writing this, assuming equal split, each developer and charity gets an average of $1.09/purchase - hardly a windfall, though I'm sure the actual numbers actually favors the charities more.

But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wonder how much attention the involved studios'll get for future projects as a direct result of this? Aquaria, especially, has been out for quite a while now - this can probably be more accurately considered a way of breaching access to any possible remaining audiences before launching their Next Big Things.
Keep in mind, however, that every labor, whether intellectual or physical, exacts a toll on our bodies. Read jwz's stories of being nearly incapacitated by injuries brought on by long days at the keyboard with poor posture.

I do agree, however, that many of us are lucky to have avoided the factory life. Read _Out of This Furnace_ sometime to appreciate the hell many immigrants lived through.
No. Attacks against machines running Windows weren't common until the second half of the '90s. Far and away the most popular targets in the earlier '90s were NFS servers. And nobody attacked machines by trying to infect them with boot sector malware.
I know its different. I was referencing a previous case that held that disobeying EULA terms can have farther reaching claws than simply breach of contract.
It's rather ironic for ESR to call someone 'contrarian.'
Say what you will about programming by gluing things together, but the fact that "answering the phone" and "doing voice recognition" are services that I can just use is amazing.