skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first genuinely successful worm didn't strike until 8 years after the first modern overflow exploit. So I don't think that's a compelling argument.
They wouldn't be on the front page if it weren't for all the upvotes.
Not necessarily. If it's public information that I could obtain by visiting their page, I can't get in trouble for collating it and publishing it.

Having access to Facebook's API makes it practical to scrape massive amounts of data, however.
Financial reasoning and decision making peak at age of 53
While C++0x will have proper lamdbas and closures (I've said this how many times in the past few weeks?), I think it's worth noting the "proper" way to emulate a closure in C++ is with a function object. Example:

struct Summation {
int& sum;
Summation(int& s): sum(s) {}
void operator()(int n)
{
sum += n;
}
};

vector<int> numbers;
int sum = 0;
// give numbers some interesting values
for_each(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), Summation(sum));
cout << "sum of all numbers: " << sum << endl;

C++0x lambdas will generate code very similar to this. The need to explicitly define a named struct/class and function object is an obvious weakness of this technique.

Although I do agree with his overall point, which is that the need to use iterators for all sequences is a code smell. It forces the programmer to work at a lower level when they often just want to say "Perform this operation on my data."
I found this sort of interesting, mostly because it's written from a different angle than I usually think about health care. For instance:

> I'd rather optimize for the common case (random doctor visits) than for the edge case (major medical emergency).

In my case, I'd prefer to let health insurance work as insurance and have another tool to pay for routine medical care. The plan they opted out of is meant to be paired with an HSA, which is a pretax fund that pays for medical services. It also goes with you when you leave a company/insurance provider. I don't know what the cost difference was between the HSA compatible plan and the one they went with, but I'd like to!

My ideal employer would pay for a high deductible health plan and and fund as much of an HSA as they could each year. This is a better deal for me (and I suspect many people here). It allows me to make more nuanced decisions about how my benefits are allocated. If I have a cold, but it's not quite bad enough that it's worth the $80 or whatever out of my "retirement account" to pay for it, I'd rather have the $80. Similarly, if I injure my knee, rather than paying the $800 for an MRI I might choose to put it off and try other things (that one I've done, it worked out well!).

Health is one of those things that a health care plan isn't very good at maximizing, which is why it seems odd that companies/employees treat plans this way. The best possible things people can do for their health are: eat healthy and maintain an active lifestyle. Besides that, early detection of giant problems is a huge deal. Standard health plans don't really do any of that, unfortunately. Companies that want more healthy employees should address those things specifically, I think. Sadly, they're some of the first benefits to go (as I sit here sobbing about a 50% cut in my health club allowance for 2010).
Not that new.
You honestly think that Apple would deliberately hamstring javascript performance on the iPad so that people have to use native apps? I think it's pretty ludicrous to think they'd do that: their sales of the iPad are directly, heavily affected by perceived performance of the device. If it's slow, people won't buy it.

How many extra apps do you think that move would make people buy: 2? 5? So you think they'd cripple performance and lose hundreds of thousands of sales so that they can get people to spend an extra $20 or so at the app store, of which they'll get all of $6? If they wanted your extra $6 that badly they'd just up the price on the device.

I just don't understand this constant assumption that every decision Apple makes is anti-competitive and designed to achieve lockin. Isn't it way more rational to assume that they want to make the device as good as possible because they make money by selling devices, and that their decisions are primarily driven by that motive?
If you're planning to implement some of the ideas from this paper, check out the open source CUDAmat library for Python:

http://code.google.com/p/cudamat/
Is there a similar service/workaround that could be used in Europe? Tropo doesn't work in Europe, does it?
They must think they're not really competing, or they wouldn't have.
I think Rapidshare not being responsible for infringement must be contingent on what Rapidshare does to fight it.

Well they have damn good lawyers, since now they don't have to check filenames, check checksums, IP addresses, manually check lists of links (according to your post below) and whatever else.

So what does that leave Rapidshare with? Do they just have to manually check files when a copyright owner submits a complaint with a list of links?

(On a sidenote, I could make a pretty good link finder and make it send complaints automatically, there must be some good money in offering such a service to copyright owners)
It can't be a poor valuation of work, unless you subscribe to a labor theory of value. Our current economic system does not.

Things are only worth what people will pay for them.
Good question(s), I was just relaying the decision Google made:

http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/hello-html5.html
This entire class of problem obviously doesn't exist in Canada. Never had to even think about this in the 5 years we build our company.

How much mental bandwidth of creating a startup goes into these things?
Time to start donating to the EFF. They seem to be the only ones looking out for our rights online... They've surprisingly been on the ball, consistently, when these organizations (especially Facebook), do potentially dangerous things with regards to the separation of civil and criminal, to outright privacy violations.
I'm not sure how Chrome's treatment of custom search engines differs from Firefox's. In Chrome, you can associate a URL with a keyword so that when you type "keyword query" into the address bar, the %s parameter in the associated URL is replaced with your query. In what way is Firefox's better?
Most blogs probably aren't designed by professionals. Likely Joe Blogger's friend who thinks they have an eye for style and can whip up a wordpress theme.

The small tags are part of the original article that he scraped. Either way, it's odd, the font size get progressively smaller for each paragraph.
It isn't supposed to come from people who haven't participated in sister sites. They're taking ideas from within the existing communities for a reason. They're going to take a handful (or several) from those ideas. Those sites will attract more people in those new niches. In the next round of proposals there will be a bigger pool of users to propose what the next sites should be.
Part of me has problems with the thought that these things aren't necessary. One thing is to willingly turn down some comfort in order to become more independent in our minds. Another thing completely different is being forced to take cold showers for indefinite time. You would hate it. You would try anything at hand to get a hold on a hot shower.
The more you were forced to take cold showers, the more you would hate your oppressors and the damn cold shower. Specially when you can't see a hint that in the future you will have access to one hot shower.
Is Ev Williams The New John Sculley?
Ah okay, did not parse it that way at all. Thanks, much appreciated.
Preview of Fennec: Big features in a small browser - Firefox for Android
Are programmers freaking lemmings or something?

We're people, damnit. We choose to work overtime for various reasons. Some of which include: putting dinner on the table, keeping our jobs, getting our foot in the door, and so forth.

In my experience there are only 3 cases for working overtime:

1. You're a new, mediocre, or terrible programmer. You've been given three months to deliver a web site using a framework that practically holds your hand and wipes your ass and yet you still need more time. Everything seems hard. There's nothing you can do but brute-force your way to the finish line: stay up late and work that overtime to get it done and make up for all the time wasted googling, procrastinating, and debugging with a shotgun.

2. The suits messed up. They set a deadline without consulting you. They took on a contract with an incredibly short deadline because the business needs the money. They forgot to plan ahead for the big industry conference and they need something to show off to the other suits that will be there.

3. You've entered a culture of slavery. You just got your foot in the door at a big company. Unfortunately things have been sliding downhill and they never told you just how bad it has gotten during the interview process. Some people who stick to their guns will run for the hills, but you've got bigger responsibilities and cannot afford to take another month off job-searching. If you don't join in, they'll just make you look bad and the suits will fire you.

For me it's simple: if I can't get it done in 8 hours a day, someone didn't consult me for an estimate and its their fault. I may choose to work the overtime to get it done, but it's not something I personally tolerate. I value my life more than my work and my free time is important. But sometimes you have to do what you have to do to put a roof over your family's head and dinner on the table.

It's not as stupid as, "programmers love working overtime because they're passionate people!"

I'm passionate about what I do. But I'm passionate about life. Programming is a part of that. Slaving away to make some other dude rich isn't.
Older post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127736
Reputation, aka karma. People like being recognized.

(That, and Jon Skeet.)
The tool clearly states in which situations it should be used or not used but I'm pretty certain that overtime it will be misused.

If you want real-time mirroring of your data, I HIGHLY recommend that you use http://www.drbd.org instead. Lsyncd is great if you just have a select few folders with small files that change often (or large files that rarely change).
With all this talk about deleting facebook accounts, has anyone ever considered if it might be more effective to get an account banned? You could spam a bunch of people until you get your account permanently banned, I would think that banned accounts eventually get deleted.
To solution is to get a local SIP DID from a company like Voip.ms and point it to Tropo's SIP URI. I mention this in the README.
Demo of "fast" HTML5 in iPad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4

Edit: put "fast" in quotes per the suggestion below
Apple makes (much) more money selling iPad hardware than they make selling apps. They are not going to make more money by intentionally crippling Javascript performance, especially after so publicly touting it as an alternative to Flash.

If you're going to make up some conspiracy theory, at least make sure it has some foundation in logic.
Naive.
If you haven't quit the browser in awhile, this can happen. The good news is that in Chrome you can kill just the flash plugin without losing the rest of your browsing session (I usually do this by opening the Activity monitor and killing it from there; usually at that point you can see that the Flash plugin has gone completely nuts eating memory...)

Once the Flash plugin is dead, you can reload any open tab that needs Flash and it will come back better behaved. Until the next time it gets into whatever state causes that complete non-responsiveness.

Note that the alternative to this -- at least in Safari -- is just to have the browser crash completely occasionally. If you look at the crash dump, it's still the Flash plugin doing it, though.
Introducing the Linode Backup Service
to 1: Rapidshare is considered a provider/service. They cannot be responsible for things done "through" them. Same like ISPs or E-Mail providers. 3 plays into this. RS could not manually check all files and it obviously is not possible to automate it either.

to 3b: part of the claim was that "if a file is of the RAR format, that is a clear hint at being a movie file" which the judges identified as false (sometimes they ARE smart).

to 3c: most germans are on dynamic IPs that change all 24h.

everything seems to be intepreted correctly.
It would be nice when you link to a PDF to say so in the title ...
So you got a 3 hour canoe trip, and the execs/partners in your company received gigantic bonuses, right? Had you worked five days a week for several months you would have had dozens of opportunities to take that same canoe trip without working yourself to the bone.
That’s a accurate translation :)

I would add that 2) also refers to the business model of Rapidshare: uploaded files are by default confidential. Only users make downloadlinks public, not Rapidshare. (Is that true, by the way? Is the only way to search Rapidshare to search for published links somewhere on the internet?) Giving the user the option of publishing the downloadlink cannot be prohibited. (I would guess because such a feature can have legitimate uses.)
Biggest thing ever
If the data are public already, you're not really changing much by gathering them in one place. More important is the case of private data that are gathered by having a user enter their credentials. Using the private data in a way to which the user expressly agrees, regardless of TOS, should be legal. The problem arises when the data are used in a way counter to the user's wishes: like pretending to offer social network aggregation and instead publishing it without consent. That should probably be illegal.

I agree that it's not so clear-cut. Like a lot of legal matters, intent is also relevant, in addition to the actual effect.
I like the part where you addressed the glaring holes he pointed out in your argument and provided compelling counterpoints.
You're assuming that both the asker and the crowd are incompetent. No kind of Q&A site is going to produce good results under those conditions.
Isn't this caused by his personality and drive and not the fact that he writes software for a big, "important" name? If he wasn't writing software, it seems like he would probably sell, paint, drive (or any other "career") himself to death, right? I wouldn't encourage it either, but it's probably just who he is.

It seems like these type of careers just draw that type of driven person. This is just a guess, as I draw from my personal experience.
Mac OS gets multi-tasking
The WIFI is on-board. Ethernet,usb,etc are supposed to be provided through a docking station (which I haven't seen anywhere). If you view the video included in the article, they mention this as well as point out the WIFI led on the device.
MarsEdit 3.0 - Adds rich text editor
Spot on, reminds me about this story:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1954352&page...

Synopsis - guy from Kentucky buys 19 generators and rents a uhaul to go and sell them 600 miles away in Mississippi during Katrina. People line up to buy them because all the stores are sold out. Police arrest the man and confiscate the generators. This guy was doing his 19 potential customers a gigantic service and only wanted 100% return on investment, he probably could have sold them for more than that, but instead NO ONE gets a generator. Absolutely asinine, the guy is a hero not a criminal.
Probably a lot. It also adds to the reasons why people with kids don't start startups, unless they can get health insurance through a spouse.
Most people also have contractual obligations to give two weeks notice... nonsense article.
Something about the writing style in the Introduction section reminds me of this classic Dilbert strip: http://tomayko.com/writings/that-dilbert-cartoon
Really way too soon for me to start promoting my little side project, but I guess I could use some feedback on the idea before I start investing too much of my spare time...

Anyway, I'm planning on launching something I call the Starcraft 2 University (http://sc2uni.com), which (hopefully) will help people find tutors for personal training sessions (the idea comes from online poker where this is quite popular). I'd love some feedback on the idea - the site currently up is simply just for collecting some e-mails - none of my actual code is up yet (although I'm planning to go with this layout and "design language").
downloading lucene is a nice place to start if you're a java person
It's a one time bit of mental bandwidth. The amount of bandwidth is less important than the disincentive for starting a company/going it alone.

Health care expense are a big deal, they fall between mortgage and food for my family. It's just another thing I get to worry about when I think about employment.
That's a good point, I guess the orientation of the subpixels could make things weird.

They show both portrait and landscape mode in the video and it doesn't look like there's a problem though.
"This entire class of problem obviously doesn't exist in Canada."

Unless you need to go to a dentist.
I did that with my last job. I said I only wanted to work 3 days a week in the office, and have my salary reduced by 40%. Worked out great. Seriously, talk to your boss, they may be up for it.
Chrome is still missing features that are must have for me from a usability perspective. The number one is "full page default zoom" (eg. not just text zoom). For some reason this request is being ignored since 2008:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=32a8...
That sounds like they abused your monkey-brain's inability to measure the value of your time and that canoe trip. In short, that would almost make me more pissed off than no reward. No reward at all is cheap, a relative-pittance of an award is cheap and duplicitous.

The next time they ask you to work an extra 50% for a few months, don't. Instead work your normal hours and give them a banana; that would only be fair.
That sounds like a case for educating people better about privacy settings and the threat of identity theft, not for getting the law involved. If people publish something online that they probably shouldn't, it's hard to protect them from themselves without a lot of unintended consequences.
C++ vs. Lisp or JRM vs. Ebhakt
As with any sort of vote, it's not your vote (or account deletion) that matters, it's the number of votes you convince people to make. It just seems odd to me when people trumpet insignificant actions when they clearly won't make a difference. If you want Facebook to change their policies, you're going to have to do more than delete your account.
I've just been spending a lot of time with graphviz lately so this is quite timely.

Surely uses graphviz on the backend.

Would be nice if it could also generate RDF for the graph as well.
https://www.tropo.com/pricing/

"International Phone Number" - "$10 per month"
Big surprise: conferences about social bullshit for social bullshitters are full of bullshit

All the new-media types that spent the 90s pushing "Multimedia CD-ROMs" found their feet again with "the social" -- and now that they can no longer pretend that Second Life is relevant they've all moved on to the web.
Thanks...that makes total sense. I need to (sadly) give google gears the boot.
Works in any browser:

http://getfirebug.com/firebuglite
Correction: there are extensions now:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/search?itemlang=&q=...

EDIT: and they suck.
Does anyone have advice for startup founders with pre-existing conditions?

I am very close to taking the startup plunge but my Type I Diabetes makes it really hard to give up my current (awesome) healthcare.
You should do it!

Remember that Palin's Yahoo! mail account was hacked because someone figured out the answer to her security questions. Security questions are a dumb idea. Send me a fucking SecureID...
At the risk of losing even more karma, I took a look at the google help, and someone in the UK has been occasionally using my email (his full name - same as mine) instead of his proper email address (shortened version of name).

Google actually are addressing this by annotating emails to you with (yes, this is you), when a non-primary email address for your account is used.

Thanks Google.
Interesting. Your comment about C++0x closures inspired me to look it up on Wikipedia.

The verbosity of the fragment above is greatly reduced. You had to write 'sum' or 's' lots of extra times ('Summation(sum)', 'sum(s)', 'int& sum', and 'int& s'), and you won't have to do that anymore -- according to wikipedia your function will change in C++0x to:

for_each( numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), [&sum](int n) { sum += n; } );

Which is semantically much less to think about. It also still has the feature / annoyance (?) of having to specifically identify which variables to capture from the environment ('sum', as a reference; it seems you can capture variables by value too).

Fortunately, it seems the C++ people even thought of that annoyance, and allow you to write:

for_each( numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), [&](int n) { sum += n; } );

capturing references to all variables in the enclosing scope. Neat!
Not disputing they're going to make a lot of money from this, obviously when they wake up tomorrow morning they're each going to have tens of thousands more than they had when they woke up this morning. In that sense it "works".

But relative to other models the "pay what you want" is a terrible failure - any of those games could have singlehandedly grossed $30,000 to $60,000 from the number of sales they've had today, and that's going to lose a big chunk to advertising but still make them a lot more than $1.66 a sale.
As of 2014, there will be a perfect solution. Don't buy insurance and pay the penalty, which will be a small fraction of your income. Since you are an early stage startup, you won't have much income, so the penalty will be low.

In the unlikely event you get sick, the insurance companies will be forced to give you coverage.
or per Dollar (paid for the device)!