skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are actually three ways other than obfustaction to protect your Java bytecode. I humbly suggest that you check out my article "Protect Your Java Code - Through Obfuscators And Beyond":

http://www.excelsior-usa.com/articles/java-obfuscators.html
Google age bias suit reaches California Supreme Court
Read my post way more carefully, especially the beginning. I carefully structured it to avoid the "singularly".

Responsible? Yes, along with all kinds of other entites. But all that isn't terribly relevant to my actual point, which is that the political capital that will be expended on maintaining those benefits will create openings to oppose the teacher's unions in other ways.

If you want names named, the SEIU is the biggest problem of the bunch. But it's all the same problem, unfunded defined-benefit mandates. It doesn't matter who is getting them when they exceed what society can afford.
Another exception is the Oregon Coast (where I grow up) It's bright yellow but pretty much no one lives there (relatively speaking). For example, the county I grew up, Lincoln County, is roughly the size of Rhode Island but has only around 45,000 people (figures from memory).

But it is extremely touristy. Highway 101 grinds to a stand still most summer days, especially when it's really hot inland in Portland / Salem / Eugene.
Mine still aren't available. I just tweeted them, so hopefully it'll be available soon.
Note: It's only limited to 50 registrations...
A number of customers have been able to get help from MSN's support line:

1-866-672-4551

May require having (or purchasing) a Windows Live Hotmail Plus account or other paid MSN account. You may also need to call back several times until reaching someone willing/able to help.
There are all kinds of disastrous applications of technology waiting for us.

like an microorganism or device designed to impregnate every women on the planet

or maybe people will start modifying their offspring to worship them

my personal favorite are tiny robots that interfere with the unjust use of force worldwide, causing the collapse of most governments
Profile: Martin Gardner, the Mathematical Gamester (1914-2010)
I don't think a javascript engine will ever be faster than .NET. Not debating the quality of the runtime, but win32 I/O Completion Ports and WSAAsyncSelect are up to par with Unix's (e|k)poll. With win32, your data will be hitting processor registers before the javascript engine ever has a chance to typecheck its arguments.

Never underestimate the sheer power of easily circumventable abstractions ;-)
clutches pearls and faints
the whole piece is totally disingenuous and it isn't anything new from what we've heard from them before.

the worst part is the end when he subtly tries to use the fact that it started out as a dorm room project as some sort of excuse as to why the company is having all of these problems.
Please -- the company that bought is vista and can't even get critical patches for 0days out in less than a month?

shipping software -- the time interval between "git push" and features live in users' hands is less than 30 minutes. Lots of companies do it. MSFT doesn't come close.
"There is a big difference between shipping software and deploying software on your own servers."

No there isn't. Features. Users' hands.
Here are the principles under which Facebook operates:

-- You have control over how your information is shared.

-- We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want.

-- We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.

[clip]

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahah. This is why Queerty and Pandora silently installed applications on my profile and had access to my data without me opting into anything (I've never used Connect or anything like it). Or why Instant Personalization was turned on automatically.

You pissed off a population of users, arguably who are tuned-into this discussion and many of which are technical enough to call you on your BS. The candy coated, lets see how little we can get away with, isn't going to work. In fact, it's only going to make things work.

If the new settings are good, good. Maybe they will avert some of the mistrust that many view towards them. I certainly won't forget the shit that went down on my profile w/o my permission in the last 2 months. Maybe an apology, an admission of a bad idea, etc would be more convincing.

At least Google had the stones to say, rather quickly, Oops, sorry, we shouldn't have done that.
Also, the Antarctic Peninsula.
The exact phrasing was "around 50", so I'd assume that there's leeway.
> This has resulted in some very amusing customer support emails.

Care to share?

Here is my most amusing customer interaction, long ago, when webcams were pretty new:

---

Me: Hello, camarades support, how can I help you?

she: Well, my cam doesn't work.

Me: Ok, what is your user id

she: randygirl99

Me: Let me have a look

Me: are you running an anti-virus package with a built in firewall ?

She: Yes

Me: ok, that's likely the problem, when you start the software you'll be prompted to enable outgoing traffic on port 2047, please answer 'yes'

She: ok, one moment

... some time passes, I hit F5 a couple of times ...

Me: ok, it works

She: oh, does it now ? Well, what am I wearing then ?

Me: well, to be honest, not a whole lot...

She: (screaming) You Pervert! ... connection breaks

---

The voice actor thing might have it's uses though, but their timing will have to improve a bit :)
Fit4Her.Net...The Smart Woman's Go-To-Directory.
I always want good results quickly. That's why i chose http://www.Fit4Her.net, the Premier Search Directory fit for women.
worked in this case, but yes.

But if it makes whiners happy, I could add something like this:

The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employers'; past, present, or future; views in any way. Etc etc.

I could go on in that vein at length or, you know, people could be adults.
Also, consider this: you share an article with your 300 friends on Facebook, liking it before you do. Your friends see the article, and of the first 20, 4 of them also like it. The next one of your friends will to see the article will have at least one friend (you!) who liked it, up to five. Not bad that way. If you're randomly browsing, of course you're going to find fewer articles that your friends have liked -- it's random!
Jerry, is that really you? Your books have taught me so much I feel like you're an old friend. Yes, learning to get those invitations is going "meta" in a very good way. I'll take any tips you have.
Well, for one thing, AFAIK Node right now doesn't work on Windows. This effectively brings (albeit a limited) Node.JS to Windows users.

And also, considering how HN is crazy about experimental languages, compilers, frameworks and combinations of them, I'm surprised with this question. The title of the post actually reminded me to the output of a certain HN title generator that was here a while ago.
I can't imagine any reason why anyone should trust Mark Zuckerburg at this point. I am glad I never made a Facebook account.
I'm so trying this out on the next person I interview. "You've got 30 mins, see how far you get".

...after 30 mins...
"How would you have improved this game?"
"Can you make a problem that cannot be solved in this game?"
Blog post from the creator:

http://newcome.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/node-net-node-js-imp...
It's hard to believe that charging over a thousand dollars for a single pair of boots is not a mistake. Especially when they wouldn't look out of place on Regretsy.
I'm the dude organizing it at twitter, and yeah, there is leeway. If we get hundreds of applicants, we obviously won't be able to let everyone in. But we'll let in everyone we can reasonably fit.
You don't have to use their dev tools but I am not sure why you would not want to. You get tons out of the box with Visual Studio Express...and its free. You are also free to use the command line to compile your apps, but again I am not sure why you would want to.
Why not just use IronJS? http://ugh.cc/
Google or Amazon are nothing like a startup, particularly a small one. We don't have time for 6 months or a year of ramp up time; instead, we need people to come in and start being productive far sooner than that. As I said upthread, this isn't insurmountable, but someone with 5 years in on .NET is going to have a rough transition to a rails/django shop.
Hmmm, investing with money we don't actually have, has that been in the news at all lately?

Besides, I seriously question the marginal value we're getting out of the part of the investment that's killing us, which isn't salary, benefits, facilities, or management costs. We've been trained by various things that the answer to "Do schools need more money?" is simply "Yes", regardless of context, but that produces pathological economic policies. At some point the answer becomes "No", and personally I think we long passed that point.

See also: "Do we need more money for crime enforcement?" "Do we need more money to fight drugs?" "Do we need more centralized power to fight terrorism?"

I am totally willing to reconsider that question as circumstances change. Reform things, start outputting better graduates (according to my rather strict standards which involve actual training to think and such, not just better test scores), and demonstrate that under these new circumstances the bottleneck is money and I'll be happy and overjoyed to reconsider.
oh, awesome. thanks for clarifying!
liked the idea.
events like this one should be announced 1 month before, so you can get prepared, specially if you live far from SF.
I just contacted johnw and took over the maintenance of cl-ledger.
Fascinating link.

The nuclear bomb was a needlessly confusing example--I could have just mentioned explosives in general. Evolution is all about weapons, and explosives make for damn good ones, and it's not hard to imagine a realistic organism that uses them, unlike a nuke-wielding organism. Only I'm not sure that no organism uses explosives. I was already wrong once today about what nature can't do!
Tell me what surprised you: iPad Edition
Tricky question, is winter when it is cold or is winter when it is December ?
Just turn off Dvorak while playing the game.
Nice! Good to hear.
I wish I could save the game!
The main point of the article (which was that Apple made no attempt to include or inform the user about iBooks) is completely false which confuses me. When the App Store is first launched, a big colourful dialog comes up asking if the user would like to install iBooks.
Presumably they have automatic safeguards against it, and these emergencies occur when somebody outsmarts them. I wonder if this can be generalized to an interesting theory--how do you prevent all-consuming self-replicating behavior in a system with minimal intervention otherwise? Is this question even meaningful?
Amazing fusion of visual-spatial reasoning and programming! A++
Bombadier beetle?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombadier_Beetle
Earl, a word of advice: stop posting in this thread.

You are not helping yourself and I think that by dragging scribd in to it you are also not helping them.

You are not making a coherent argument by any stretch of the imagination and people mights start to think that your attitude is representative of scribds. I take it that is not the case, but you really should have left them out of it.

So please, take my advice and let it go.
He's definitely not representing scribd but it certainly doesn't help.

And it isn't cool, agreed.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373849
Nothing more than a PR / shill piece with a bare bones disclosure at the bottom, "Washington Post Chairman Donald E. Graham is a member of Facebook's board of directors."

Time to read the NYT and WSJ for the real view on how mass print media views the privacy issue. I won't waste 10 seconds reading another Post piece on Facebook.
That was my first thought, too, but do people really do that?

Sometimes something on the screen would make me laugh, but other than that I doubt you could read much on my face while browsing.
Ruby Was Too Powerful For Them
I see what you mean. But I don't think that's what he meant by Lisp.

After all, if you believe that, then Python is a Lisp too[1]. And when people say "Lisp", they don't mean "Scheme and CL and [...] and Python".

Sure, like any class of languages, there is not a single syntax. But every lisp has a syntax. And the languages people associate with the class "Lisp" use parens. And in many peoples' opinions, there are better ways of representing an AST. Like indentation, for example. Or curly brackets.

1: http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html
It just seems like a drab, corporate BS message lacking any sincerity.

(tongue-in-cheek humor) I propose UNIX style privacy controls - user, group, world.
Strategies for Finding the Co-Founder of Your Dreams
I'm seriously curious about this as well. 300k a year for 5 years would buy at least a decade of time for working on startups for me with no reduction in quality of life... that's a tough sell to beat.

Although... none of the Microsoft people I know seem to be doing significantly better than anyone else I know. Maybe it's a local to Seattle thing, but the MSFT people near me are still driving Hondas to work.
You're being a bit of a concern troll here. The fact is, you're both mistaken. You're mistaken that shipping = client apps; people often use the word now to describe releasing a new version on servers. And he's mistaken in saying that there's no difference between the two cases.
I keep having an image of Donald E. Graham hovering over Zuke and waiting for him to complete the article in long script and then handing it off to some flunky to be typed. Then Donald says "good job Zuke" and pats him on the head and Zuke smiles and says "yeah...privacy - my ass". And both leave the conference room they were in laughing manically.

Of course...that's my imagination...it runs wild.
Arguing "and it's free" to a community of open source enthusiasts won't likely change any minds.
URLs are the uniform way to locate resources
How many of those libraries are thread-safe? A blocking-but-threadable (with arbitrary number of threads) API can be relatively trivially converted to an event-based one, at the cost of a thread and some relatively-automatable coding grunt work.

Honest question. I have no visibility into the .Net ecosystem and have no idea if threading is exceptional or normal.
Not just in the Referer field. Facebook widgets need to know which site they're referring to, so the widget code that site owners include on their site contains the site id.
Should companies in small countries produce iPhone apps?
Yes oh mighty and complex one. The problem is that we're too simple to grasp your controls. Asshat.

How about a simple radio button:
[] Share my information with 3rd parties
[] Do not share my information with 3rd parties

Put it right at the end there as an override in case we can't understand some of your more complex settings.
This game was a royal pain until I realized you could hit "space" to flip, rather than rotate, a piece.
To say that microsoft doesn't know how to ship software is silly, that's simple.

I'm not aware of that use of the word but I'll amend my dictionary, here we call that 'deploying'.

I had to look up what a 'concern troll' is, I can't really understand which part you refer to, the wikipedia entry writes:

"A concern troll is a false flag pseudonym created by a user whose actual point of view is opposed to the one that the user's sockpuppet claims to hold. The concern troll posts in web forums devoted to its declared point of view and attempts to sway the group's actions or opinions while claiming to share their goals, but with professed "concerns". The goal is to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt within the group."

Are you telling me I am using a pseudonym ? A sockpuppet ? Am I sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt ?

Or do you think it was bad advice that he should stop posting dumb stuff ?
I'm just wondering - how can you differentiate a crank for a lone genius?

There's examples of scientists who worked alone and were rejected by "the establishment". Darwin and Galileo are the classic examples. Though, their persecution had an obvious root.

Counter examples would include Newton, Einstein, Faraday, and above all Cavendish. Complete outsiders who had a big impact and were highly respected by their peers.

In some less scientific fields, though, it seems that the cranks have the upper hand.
What a powerful concept. It really does boggle the mind.
It's not fair to say that Lisp programs "modify their own instructions", certainly not in the sense that some assembly programs do. Lisp macros are better thought of as code generators, or as small compilers. They should never modify their inputs.

It'd be an error to modify code in Common Lisp anyway. But presumably, back when Lisp was mostly interpreted, it would have been possible. I wonder how much that was used.

Hey, in a dynamically-scoped, interpreted Lisp, would it be possible to simulate a closure by modifying code? Assuming that a list whose CAR is 'LAMBDA is a proper function, then one could simply replace the closed over variables with SUBLIS, at run-time. Then add in a level of indirection to get mutability. That'd be horribly slow, granted.
> Come up with a better way of representing an Abstract Syntax Tree in text, please.

Perhaps you could use indentation like Python or YAML, for example?
Many places. World Bank, Census, IMF etc. Do a text search on this page: http://uuorld.com/portal/ for "set:" Each set is free from its source but they require lots of tedious massaging to reformat.
Sometimes I wonder if laws like this actually increase discrimination. I had a professor who hired a female minority who had good qualifications and interviewed well, but turned out to be incompetent. He was fanatical about documenting everything, noted down when she made mistakes and actually tried a lot to help her fix them, but no luck, so he let her go, and then she sued. The suit was eventually dismissed, but he said it was very stressful and costly for him.

So I wonder if situations like these make people say, "Screw it, I'm hiring someone that can't sue me if they don't work out." Not a good thing, but I think a very possible secondary effect of this sort of thing.
Here is how: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Just put the laptop in front of the first person walking down the hallway. The first 30 seconds will be more invaluable than any heatmap.

Well, if that is your method then why not just shoulder-surf?

It's good to detect boredom, distraction, urgency. That pause in the cursor, was he confused? Oh, she just got distracted by somebody.

Erm, isn't it about the bare minimum for a meaningful usability test to ensure the tester doesn't get interrupted?

Sorry, I just don't see what the webcam overlay adds over any plain old desktop recorder (some of which, ironically, can add a webcam overlay too).
The equal footing argument is absolutely not true. iBooks uses private APIs to control hardware features like screen brightness that are not available to 3rd party developers.

If I was to submit an eBook app to the AppStore that had feature parity with iBooks, it would be rejected by Apple's reviewers for using private APIs.

See http://www.marco.org/500743718 for more on this
In fact, a lot of New Scientist online articles have this problem. I've stopped clicking.
Zuck.
I've lost interest in their API since they've implemented those ridiculous display requirements. After Facebook's and Twitter's recent changes I've become completely disillusioned about what the use of third party API's entail, especially social media. I don't blame them for looking after their self-interest, well at least not Twitter, but working with social media API's no longer seem fun or interesting. They seem like too much take and not enough give. It's clear they want ownership and control, and the only innovation they want is the kind they can directly benefit from. Again, nothing wrong with that, just not going to be their fucking lap dog.
> traditional syntaxes are a way of representing an AST in text,

Actually, no. They're a way of unambiguously representing said AST. The just happen to be a lousy way of doing so. Let's see why.

> and commonly considered to be "better" by the particular language's adherents

Interestingly enough, almost none of those adherents actually know their favorite language's syntax.

Why do I say that? Because very few people know the full precedence of expressions. So, they break expressions in unnecessary places and/or add redundant parentheses.

And, the few folks who actually do know their language's syntax know better than to actually use that syntax because they know that the person reading their code doesn't know it, so they, the experts, are forced to over-parenthesize.

> What representation is "better" really boils down to taste and opinion.

And then there's the problem of manipulating said AST. To do so for a traditional language requires a parser and a bunch of datastructures, which every project reimplements. Everything that you need for lisp is built-in.

And then there's the fact that Lisp's AST macro processing is built into the language processing scheme.

> Sure, you don't get to apply proper macros, but Java/Ruby/etc. programmers don't care about that.

The C programmers care, but they're used to being abused by C's macro system.
Trying and Being
We've been here before:

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130
Too bad I'm leaving SF on Wednesday... I think annotations are really cool.
Avalanche diagrams showing the effectiveness of various hashing functions
I don't think that that is true, at least not for Common Lisp.

How do you express any of the following constructs using only parentheses and symbols?

#:foo
#.(foo)
#+ FOO (bar) #- FOO (baz)

For the original Lisp, parentheses and symbols were all that was necessary. For more recent derivatives, that is not necessarily the case.
For the record, iBooks is doing pretty well so far: it absolutely beats the snot out of Kindle for the iPhone/iPad in pretty much every way (except book prices, which are much higher than Amazon's).

I'm surprised he didn't bring up book selection, where Kindle beats iBooks by far.
How does Facebook claim to make money if they also claim the above points?
Yeah. I'm not convinced.
Every developer in Sydney seems to be working on iPhone and Android apps.

Australia might be "small", but aussie hackers and their work are exported to bigger markets daily :-)
I don't think you're representative of the average person they'll hire right out of college (And I too do iPhone/iPad consulting/development for a living)
I got a ton of free toys and board games through ToysRUs.com (powered by the Amazon.com site) when I was in high school. Someone on the SomethingAwful forums had discovered a magic coupon code and we all benefited pretty nicely.
It's not on my site. It's because I'm trying to link directly to the favicons from the original site. I have a fix shortly (caching favicons locally). That also fixes some of the sites who prompt for logins when the browser tries to pull the favicon. Thanks for reporting it.
This argument is moot.

As long as humanity will want to kill eachother, everything will be used as weapons. Computers are used as weapons (hell would computerized bombs and missiles be possible otherwise?) boats are used to kill people. Airplanes used to kill people. So now robots, why not its the next step. Knowing the US government they will manufature them without any bit of encryption and with a radioshack remote control someone can hijack one of these :P
Here's another one:

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7584397130