skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...Zuckerberg believes that people will be better off if they make themselves transparent. Not only that, society will be better off."

I happen to agree with this. Most of the thoughts that people share with each other are completely harmless. Allowing those to be visible by everyone helps us to learn more about ourselves and our society. It's a good default as long as people are aware of what they're doing. Even if people realize what their default settings are (which I think most people understood when they were being set but might have forgotten), there should be a visible reminder of who you're sharing with to minimize mistakes.

We currently live in a private-by-default society, and changing that would be a good thing.
This does look really cool, and they appear to be doing it right (IMAP + OAuth), but I'd feel really weird about giving a third party access to my Gmail account and letting them futz around with messages. I'm sure they're very careful and all, but if there were ever a data loss bug -- especially one that wasn't immediately obvious -- I would be very, very unhappy.
Oh, I never said that going to college would help, I'm just saying that your "aim for the kind of life you want" advice isn't helpful to most school-leavers.

I'd agree that if a kid leaves school and doesn't know what he wants to do then going to university may not be the best option at all. Taking a few years off to do something else is a great idea and shouldn't be stigmatized as much as it is.

Heck, if you really want to shake up the education industry then perhaps it should be compulsory: have a university that won't let you in until you demonstrate that you've spent eighteen months in the workforce doing something impressive.
Mining and analyzing online social graph data
"Now why do this? Because if your way of interacting with the database is encoded in a consistent JSON format, then the server can analyze it easier to decide what to do."

It could also parse the SQL query.
I've noticed this as well, although I don't think that programming and socializing use the same parts of the brain.

It feels like programming directs all brain power toward the analytical/introspective aspect of my brain, during which the social aspect gets cold. Then when I have to socialize, it takes awhile to warm up. They are completely different states of mind.

Dunno if this should factor into whether I should become a programmer as a career.
"I understand the position you're in, BUT".

"Something like that [...] WOULD MAKE UP FOR GIVING THE PHONE BACK RIGHT AWAY".

"I want to get the phone back to you ASAP [...] BUT".

This was not Apple asking Gizmodo for a favor. Gizmodo had a legal obligation to promptly return the phone.
Good intentions, horrifically bad judgment in marketing message.
Ask HN: Competing with Free
I've spent the last few months building a web-app which is currently in closed beta.

Today I found out that a few months ago a competitor lauched who is offering their product for free.

I've taken a look at their offering, and I'm fairly confident that my product is better, but I'm wondering if anybody has any advice on competing with a free product.

Or if you can point me to examples of other paid products which are winning out over free competitors, I'd really appreciate it.

I'm not giving up, as I mentioned, I believe I have a better product, but I may need to tweak my messaging/marketing/other to answer this new market challenge.
I didn't find out about the pop-ups until about 2am, and was exhausted, before I finished writing the post I accidentally closed the tab, and lost the ad, because Google yanked it, presumably. I'm still not certain about how it was occurring but it was all javascript, about a dozen different script tags, with the exception of this one piece that called the flash.

My main focus was on the point that Adobe was targeting specific users, with the pop-up.
You're threading an interesting needle here, between saying they weren't offering to give Apple the phone, while (in earlier comments on this thread) saying they weren't refusing to return the phone. What's the word you would use for their action in response to Apple's request?
Top Collection Of Professional Wordpress Themes
The performance implications of transactional memory. As programmers, we’re used to assignments being cheap.

For most business apps, "hundreds of cycles" is still dirt cheap. I should know. I've worked on Smalltalk apps with in-memory transactions. To my knowledge they work very well, and this is not an issue! Matters like this are swamped by generic issues involving network, DB, and disk access.

Another thing he's wrong about: there are frameworks in sufficiently powerful languages that don't necessarily require applications to be rewritten. (Example: properly implemented MVC apps in Smalltalk. Such frameworks could also be implemented in Lisp using macros.)

The reason why this stuff isn't more popular? Business apps could make good use of something like this, but the people who maintain these apps just aren't concerned about the issues STM solves. (Or they aren't aware that they really do have a stake in those issues.)
Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage
Id say more "score one for the regulators". At least in one country. Without them this (and presumably other things) would not have been caught.
Please do! The number of vaguely interesting Ruby blogs that are updated frequently has taken a tumble in the last year or two. I need more to link to ;-)
One example is online dating which is a very competitive market. The free product (such as OkCupid or PlentyOfFish) are arguably better than the paid product but a large segment still uses the paid product. eHarmony markets itself as being a site for people serious about marriage. True markets itself as the only dating site with background checks.

The key obviously is making users aware of why your product is superior and convincing them it is worth the cost.
I think the doctor comparison is apt. You're basically asking for Facebook to give the sort of fine print that gets read quickly at the end of pharmaceutical ads. Barely anyone would accept the new default if you said:

Possible side effects of this setting include: Getting fired for your political beliefs, inability to get a loan due to a status update that indicated financial irresponsibility, and a speedy end to any political campaign you attempt to start.

This seems like a pretty big double standard. Twitter is public by default, but no one is setting the same bar for informed consent. The issue isn't the change from private to public; I think most people who accept that default understand that their posts are no longer private by default. I don't see why explaining more is necessary.

This privacy change happened in December, by the way. If it weren't for Instant Personalization, this firestorm never would've happened.
How to jump through hoops and make a Chrome extension
The one movie that tried this tactic (Snakes on a Plane) didn't do that well.
Appleseed: distributed social network with focus on privacy and security
I will second the parent comment. I feel that there's a large number of people who have needs for this kind of product, but haven't recognized it: the need is latent.
Unlike active needs (the bingo card creator program, for example), people don't just go searching the internet for latent needs. The number of people who are actively searching for "appointment reminders" are probably less than 1% of the total number of people who have the need. That's why latent needs are very hard to harvest in online marketing. How are you going to tackle this problem?
Partly because the news isn't the product, the audience is. And partly because it's too annoying. It'd be just another thing demanding attention. Unless their journalism magically becomes way more valuable to me, I'd just leave. There's already too much news to assimilate.

The real irony is that the customers who're loyal enough to hit the paywall are the last ones the NYT should be charging. They're already paying attention in spades. Punish your real fans. That's the ticket.
This 'issue' is beyond trivial - at the speed the Street View car is moving and the rate at which they hop wifi channels, they're unlikely to capture more than a couple of packets.

The fact that they bothered to respond says a great deal IMO about Google's priorities.
C now. JavaScript will likely grow in use. Python is also clearly growing, in relative terms. About any other language, I'm not as sure.
So like, how exactly did this accidentally happen?
It's not like skynet's running those vans and just decided to sniff the traffic of open wifi nets it passed.
<cliche>power corrupts and...</cliche>
That's true, but why would someone advertise for Adobe? The linked content goes to Adobe's page, on the topic, http://www.adobe.com/choice/?sdid=GXRVD, as well as use the same ads as they used in the papers yesterday.
Journalists are the ones who free that information in the first place. The less remunerative that career is, the less information there will be. I think it helps to consider your subscription to be more of a donation than payment for a product. Then again, I work for a non-profit news organization. (Feel free to donate.)
Google Looks To Improve Maps With 300 New Staffers
"I don't think I'd pay for information that's just a different presentation of the same news that everyone else is covering."

The New York Times does plenty of original journalism.
Considering Facebook has north of 400 million users, how big of a dent do you need to be noticed?

A few thousand people quitting on May 31st just won't matter.
Even if they aren't legit, it says a lot about his public persona that people automatically assume they are.
I can't imagine this doing anything but backfiring.
Another audio service I'd like to see: human powered text-to-speech...that scales.

Quick mockup: http://audiothink.com

Concept: User provides prose and a narrator reads it. User pays based on the number of words. Narrator posts audio files to user's private podcast. User subscribes to podcast or dials a (Twilio-powered) phone line. Service uses Mechanical Turk workers to do the narrating. But that introduces hard quality control issues. How does one automate the outsourcing of...art? I thought maybe if I set up a good qualification and reward system the service could have quality safeguards - but that's hardly a solid foundation on which to devote months of hacking. So that's where I stopped.
Hacker News tries to set a higher standard of discourse than Reddit.

In these sorts of threads, it is polite to readers to post

After edit:

if a comment is substantially edited. I give examples of this in my threads. The possibility of posts being edited is one reason why I always select-copy-and-paste to quote text from other people's comments here, to avoid introducing misquotations through my own typing mistakes.
Or, The ESTJ's guide to managing an INTP.
He wasn't offering to return the phone and he wasn't refusing to return the phone. He was trying (successfully) to get Apple to acknowledge that they lost the phone, that they want it back, and that it wasn't a marketing stunt, all in a way that Gizmodo can report. I guess his point at the end was "you thought you could blackball us, but we showed you we don't need your help." Not very classy, IMO, but smugness isn't a crime.

I am not a lawyer, but I am curious about the legal ramifications of the case for many reasons. I am trying as best I can to interpret the email literally and objectively, because I think that's the only way that it will be interpreted in court in any future court cases on this matter.
Google to bring Encrypted Search
But recordings of those calls are not always legal, and when they are legal to create, they are not always legal to use in court. There are much stricter laws around phone recordings than emails (because laws take half a century to change, and email's only been in wide use for 25)
"Partly because the news isn't the product, the audience is."

This doesn't make sense in the context you're using it in. If a company makes all of its money from ads, then sure, the audience provided to advertisers is the product. In this case, the Times is asking for the readers to pay money to read news, which pretty clearly makes the news the product.

Most of the investigative journalism that has a national impact seems to originate from the New York Times and the Washington Post. If that isn't valuable to you, you're not paying attention.
Hi Evan,

This is perhaps a silly question, but now that you have a solid base of ruby-in-ruby is there any room to re-optimize certain critical sections (hashes, sockets...) in C? Perhaps using a custom API that preserves most or all of the flexibility that is Rubinius's hallmark?

I presume that since you still support most compiled gems that linking to C code is still possible. Just wondering if there might be a best-of-both-worlds solution out there.
Oh, I wasn't criticising your piece! I just see a bigger story in how the ad was delivered rather than to whom. Anything that gets around my choice of not opening popups is evil to start, but I'm very intrigued if this really is coming through Adsense or some other mechanism. If Adobe can take advantage of it, perhaps more insidious agents could too..
That's pretty good, but how do you distinguish a rescheduling from a new appointment? Are most customers scheduled at the same time every week for long periods of time? If so, that makes lots of sense.
I hate the general journalism bashing attitude being taken here. What Gizmodo did is unquestionably good for society as a whole, regardless of the legal technicalities.

Apple tries to maximize their profits by duping their customers. In the affidavit the Apple lawyer complains to the detective about all the sales they're going to lose when people find out about the new phone and don't buy the old model. But those lost sales are ill-gotten gains. That money comes out of the pockets of ill-informed customers that would not make the purchase if they had all the facts available to them.

It is exactly this kind of market manipulation that a free press helps protect us from. When a journalist writes a bad review or tells you that there are better deals elsewhere, he is "hurting overall sales and negatively effecting earnings" of that company, but it is benefiting consumers and society as a whole, and creating better more efficient markets.

Legally there might be some dispute, mainly because of the BS "trade secret" laws written by businesses for businesses, but morally I side 100% with Gizmodo's right to uncover and report the truth.

On a side note, the idea that cops can go around "seizing" cell phones and cameras without even having warrant is disgusting. And he doesn't even want the property returned, at the end of the affidavit he invokes some surely insane law to have the property "disposed of".
I think you should give Central Desktop (www.centraldesktop.com) a try. Disclaimer: I'm an employee.

Upload a file to Central Desktop, check the people you want to notify, and they'll get an email. Any replies to the email get attached to the file in Central Desktop, and CC'ed to everybody involved.
What is a Botnet and how you can prevent your computer from becoming a zombie
It's cool that Google is already starting to copy features from Duck Duck Go ;-) Next stop: promising not to keep a log of our searches, or assuming I want to be "signed in" on Search, just because I am on Reader..?
I'm not sure about 'animated' unless you mean a powerpoint-like slideshow like what jasonkester suggested.

I like "Show them exactly what you mean".
No. I considered it when the privacy issues first arose, but then I realized I'd miss the little things. For instance, my phone syncs profile pictures with Facebook, so when my friends or family call me, I automatically see a picture of them without me having to set (or take) pictures manually. Instead, I decided to take a more active role in my privacy on Facebook. Yesterday, I removed a lot of information from my profile and severely restricted my privacy settings.

Lastly, I added an activity ("Monitoring my Facebook privacy settings") to my profile and shared it with my friends on Facebook and Twitter (and even posted it here on HN) to raise awareness. I think if enough people added that activity to their profile, it would be just as effective at making a statement while still allowing me to keep in touch with my friends and family.

For those that are interested, the page for the "Monitoring my Facebook privacy settings" activity is here: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Monitoring-my-Facebook-priv... Clicking "like" will add it to your profile as an activity.
Why don't you just show us what you've made? We seem to be your target market anyway.
So this is the true barrier to entry to STM: it requires a radical, deep, fundamental change in how people program, in order to work.

Writing massively-parallel code requires a radical, deep, fundamental change in how most people program. I don't think there's any getting around that. STM seems to work pretty well in Clojure, which uses mutable references to immutable values exactly as the author describes. It does require a different programming style from imperative languages, and doesn't pretend to have a way around that.
Yep, you'll be able to do Selection or Window capture just like Grab :)
Facebook's Mistake: Confusing a public with the public
"And he doesn't even want the property returned, at the end of the affidavit he invokes some surely insane law to have the property "disposed of"."

Wow. Three seconds of research would have told you that this "insane law" does discuss the disposal of Chen's property... back to Chen. He's asking that as a courtesy to Chen, to make sure he gets his stuff back as soon as possible.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=pen...
Frameworks can be very useful in not reinventing the wheel. However, I think parts of the fairly popular Three20 framework from Joe Hewitt iPhone aren't designed as well as I'd like. I don't use it - I find that we end up using categories for mini-frameworks. Frameworks aren't a magic cure for app development.
That's a pretty good endorsement :-)

I'm a little confused though. S-crypt seems to be a symmetric encryption algorithm and to store passwords you need a one-way hash. I'm obviously missing something. What is it?
Not addiction; dependency
A Lament for the Class of 2010
Steve Jobs made personal appeal on 4G iPhone
It was definitely coming through Adsense, the code on my post was within the ad, which had multiple indicators that it was indeed from Google. The only proof that is left is the DoubleClick header, and the link within the "url" variable.

I'm also a bit perturbed that someone could emulate what Adobe has done, and use it as an attack vector, with widespread consequence.
Great job Ev and Howie
> "just a different presentation of the same news that everyone else is covering"

I think this sentence betrays a severe misunderstanding of both the intent and the power of journalism.
The term as used by Apple dates back to the late 1980s and NeXTSTEP.
Great example of when you DON'T put shit in writing! Take note, fellas.
Wait. What? Apple asked for the phone back. If I take your phone away, and you ask for it back, and my response doesn't offer to give the phone back to you, what's the thing I can be doing other than refusing to return the phone?
Ironic that they're using taxpayer money to do an Orwellian media buy telling taxpayers they know where they live.

Reminds me of the 1985 film "Brazil" by Terry Gilliam. Which, by the way, if you haven't seen yet you should rent it this weekend.
That's also just one idea.

It's very easy to track which customers are rescheduling. It may be the case that a timely reminder prevents them from doing so. So that's another technological response to the problem.

Here's another: it is probably the case that rescheduling well in advance is better than rescheduling late. The earlier you reschedule the more economic value your original time slot has. So, it may be that a nudge like this gets you to free up your original spot while it's still saleable.

Those are just random thoughts off the top of my head. I just don't agree that this basic business problem admits to no technical solutions.
The code was compiled with -DDEBUG and instead of recompiling without it was put on the vans driving around.

Honest mistake, they are owning up to it, and removing the data. The amount of data that they could have picked up while moving around driving is very little and it is available to anyone with a wifi antenna and some time to drive around. I'd be less worried about Google than about the kid a couple doors down that just found out about nmap, wireshark and kismet.
We had a "Genius Hacker(tm)" where I currently work. He got projects done quick and they stayed working for a long time. He left and we needed to extend some projects or something would break on another. Everyone agreed, it was some of the most horrible code any of us had ever seen. Also, over-engineering is an understatement. He still plagues us years later as we find his legacy floating around.
How the sex bias prevails
There have been other threads here about programming as a career: if you prefer introversion, programming is one of the careers where results count over interaction. And you can use your skills to get money to do non computer-related hobbies, if you prefer.

I consider myself fortunate that my performance reviews focus on how well I can produce and debug production code under deadline, not abstract areas like meeting management or proposal generation or (the horror) net promoter score (google that).

Recommended article: "Caring for Your Introvert"

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-f...
The author is presuming that the IMs that an anonymous person on the internet claims they have access to are real.

Why quibble about whether he said those words, when he has expressed them so damningly in his actions.
Thirded. I've used FlashDevelop exclusively for a few years and used MTASC before that. There's really no need to pay for Adobe's tools to make Flash content.
That's quite some benefit you've got there. The letter doesn't seem to be more proof than Steve calling and asking for his stuff back whilst gritting his teeth. It could be fake Steve calling, but having it sent to Apple, c/o Steve Jobs, 1 Infinite Loop should put it in the owner's hands.
It isn't a big deal. The question is, why is Google seemingly making such a big effort on this front, when they're dismissing other concerns (like what they're doing with your searches) as not a big deal?

I mean, I'm not one who's particularly nuts about Google and privacy -- we've known they're in the data mining business all along, anyway. This just smells very strongly of a PR move.
How the Apple iPad Was Dreamed Up - in 1988
OK, looks like I was wrong about that last line.
Adobe might have to pay a lot of $$$ not to be banned from goog
In fairness, implementing it on Google's scale is not really the same "feature", and since Duck Duck Go isn't a self-contained search engine, you can still question how end-to-end secure its final implementation is.
Do these laws have any tests for determining if the owner of a "trade secret" is protecting the secret appropriately? I'm not looking for a defense of the clearly unethical and illegal behavior of Chen, Hogan, etc. I do worry that a person in a bar I'm drinking at may accidentally leave a trade secret lying around. I can't imagine Coke allowing an employee to take home the secret formula.

Thanks for your analysis of the pertinent points of this case. Just one more thing I have to keep on my mental list of "things that can get you 5 to 10 in the 'Land of the Free'".
I've currently got 3 invites, if anyone is interested.
Antenna size is not the problem with reception. It's white gaussian noise over the deep space channel progressively overcoming signal power as the spacecraft recedes. The channel capacity never drops to zero, but as power drops, data rates get lower and lower.