skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This presentation was awesome. In particular, the hydration/dehydration explanation at 51:35 was deliciously evil: replacing ones and zeroes with tabs and spaces to not just obfuscate javascript, but actually hide it from human view altogether.
By that definition so is Windows. And OS X. And any computing platform in the history of the world.

MS can release a free competitor on Windows and Apple can release a free competitor on OS X. Nevertheless, these are pretty solid platforms and no one has ever suggested developers are sharecroppers. Due to its nature, Google is far less in charge of Android than MS is of Windows or Apple of OS X.

If you stretch a definition enough, it looses it's meaning.
Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big [pdf]
Something like FriendFeed? e.g. http://friendfeed.com/leolaporte (Facebook bought them last year.)
Windows is surely a better server than OS X. Also, the tool set for web development on Windows is very mature and stable.

Google is making a business decision here: it is too expensive for them to support Windows at the level of security they desire, which is likely a higher standard than most software development shops, and perhaps many banks.
Showcase your website at This Week In Startups meetup June 8
Not load.

Frequency.

Basically the entire US hums at 60 hz. (There are about 7 independent grids each humming separately.)

The grid is kept very synchronized, so the 60 hz is the same at every house. But the 60 hz is not exact, it changes slightly up/down. But when it changes, it changes everywhere.

So what they do is record the slight variation in the 60 hz hum, and keep it long term. (Like it's 59.9992 then 60.0001, etc, etc.)

The effect of the 60 hz, is to have a slight wobble in the DC voltage made by a power supply. This wobble then translates into a background noise in recordings.

Then compare the exact frequency of the hum to your long term recording and look for a match.

Even on a battery operated device the hum could still be there, because the local power line makes a slight electric/magnetic field, which is picked up.
Some people are too scared to be left out of their walled garden.

Hopefully with the new online store with send-to-phone feature and as Android numbers continue to gain on iPhone, people will realize the Android is a very solid platform to develop for.
I suspect that this new unwritten policy is to prepare for the introduction of widgets in iPhone OS 4.0. That would explain why they want to get rid of widget-like apps, why they would try to keep it low-key, plus the timing fits. That the app store reviewer said that Apple 'doesn't like' widgets anymore is probably meaningless; I doubt he knows about Apple HQ's plans or motivations any more than this developer.
I would love to see an ergonomic couch!

Edit: (Sent from my Aeron)
Some buildings have their own conditioned power; should be immune. After this, probably most federal buildings!
They're not real investors, they're assorted people on the internet not expecting any real return.
Ah this is slick... I hadn't heard this was in the works.

So are there plans to sell this mag through bookstores like B&N or Borders? I'd like to pick up a copy of the real mag (I just bought issue #1 online - would be nice to be able to snag locally though).

Also, does anyone have info on how often they plan to publish? Monthly? Bi-monthly? Is there a yearly subscription price and anywhere to sign-up? I only see the option to buy one issue right now.
Does a "coalition of the losers" ever win?
Beyond Compare 3 -- which I'm a really happy user of -- seems to be much more powerful. For example, it can actually merge files. And there's clearly been a ton of attention paid to its design.
The resources tab in the developer tools is a good start. But I'd love to see the ability in the extensions API to inspect (and manipulate) the HTTP stream.
I absolutely love the use of the scroll effect. It feels very smooth and natural (Chrome).
Jetstar to trial rent-an-iPad service
Duh, silly me.
Maybe it's too risky for $200,000. How about $5? 1400 people thought it was worth $5. Another 1000 thought it was worth $10. 2500 people - almost half the backers - gave $25. Only 600 people (10%) gave even $50.
Same result here, but we went a different path. I bought the iPad for myself, but pitched it to my wife as a casual computer that she could use to browse Facebook, the only thing she really cares to use a computer for. When I got it home, I was immediately frustrated by the setup process and saw it as a foreshadowing of frustrations to come.

When I gave it to my wife, it took her 5 minutes to say that she'd never use it. And she gave one reason. You can't chat on Facebook AND do something else on Facebook. For example, you can chat and browse your friends at the same time. She handed it back to me and grabbed her 13" MBP and never thought about the iPad again.

It's a shame really. A device pitched as the greatest wife-computer of all time, and my wife hated it within 5 minutes.
Mustafa Abu Al Yazid
According to the Nat, the third ranked key personality Mustafa Abu al-Yazid has been killed in the drone attack in Pakistan tribal area. According to the sources it is a major blow to the Al-Qaida.
The $3000 Shirt
There is a traveling exhibit about Jim Henson that has plenty of content like this. Recently there was a movie showing of his commercial work and other experimental films that were fascinating.

Check out the Smithsonian exhibit here: http://www.sites.si.edu/henson/
The use for a particular application with particular hardware can be patented. And if the hardware spec is broad enough ...
Faraday cages don't block low frequency magnetic fields. You would also need some mu-metal.

As a side note http://www.science-products.com/Products/CatalogA/Filters+Di... claims to be able to get rid of the signal.
So Apple isn't evil, until they hit me?

Classy, very classy.
There are only a handful of active lovd by less forks and none of them have apparently removed the pervasive, unnecessary monkey patching.

If you don't know what I'm referring to, start reading the code, notice that there are a bunch of weird, non-standard methods that don't seem to be defined anywhere and notice that core classes don't work the way you expect. Then, maybe you'll end up needing to do what I had to, grep the project to find all the monkey patching here: http://github.com/stevenbristol/lovd-by-less/tree/master/ven...

That mostly undocumented plugin, which introduces changes used extensively throughout the app, is not the kind of thing that should be presented to new Rails developers as a good practice.

Aside from the monkey patching, lovd by less does provide some very good examples of how to approach a variety of things in Rails, but the monkey patching is so pervasive that it's unavoidable.
web programming in a CS program?

I think you are falling in to a trap a lot of people fall in to. There are a ton of cliche comparisons I could make, but I'll spare you.

If you want web programming, you should just get yourself enrolled in a technical school that will teach you all of that in 2 years.
Creativity in Business
So far there's not much to move on to. The only leverage they have is work slowdowns and strikes as their product line skills are of value. Guangzhou isn't a place I would be comfortable leading even a passive employee rebellion. Hopefully, you would simply be carried away by security. If you gained traction and kept coming back for more, well...who knows. The root problem here is equity distribution by the owners of these factories and the buyers have little to no concern about who's pockets their money is going into. The U.S. has terrible equity distribution and we look real good in comparison to China. The bulk of the Chinese are tired of this. They were promised a strong middle class and it hasn't happened yet.
I would actually just prefer it if they were paid more. Apple isn't exactly strapped for cash...
>I like the fact one of the features for this app. is: "Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are all supported".

If this thing ever gets traction, it will be because of this new 'multiplication' feature. Nobody I know uses division, and every calculator out there has some form of addition built-in. Of course, emacs already has it - try `M-x multiply-the-left-number-with-the-right-number-and-return-the-result`.
I don't begrudge you bringing this concept to a different platform (kudos for that), but if you arrived at this idea of your on volition, it's a startling coincidence.

Having said that, I'll definitely be sharing a link to your software to all my Linux-user friends. The document-as-a-calculator concept is a fantastic. There's tremendous demand for it as well.

http://www.google.com/search?q=soulver+for+linux
Seems like it should have some minimal horizontal rules to guide one's eyes back and forth between a formula and the corresponding answer. Not necessarily all the time, maybe just when the density of formulas crosses some readability threshold (if that can be determined well).
"Windows is surely a better server than OS X."

I've been unable to find anything equivalent to Puppet or Chef on Windows. Might I enquire what tools you use for managing Windows servers?

That said, I doubt I'd ever actually use an OSX server. There's little difference in functionality between an OSX server and a Linux server, and Linux servers have no licensing costs to worry about. Currently we're developing on OSX and Linux desktops, and deploying to Linux servers.

"Also, the tool set for web development on Windows is very mature and stable."

For .NET, maybe. Not for something like Ruby, I'm afraid. Also, we haven't found any good way of deploying to Windows. I'd be curious how you manage deploying applications to a Windows server.
Cool. I've been checking out Financial Math masters programs. Any info about where your friend went and how she felt about it would be appreciated!
So Android isn't even a contender, yet just last month we got the sales numbers posted and they were of the charts.

Methinks the person hasn't actually tried it.
Not a serious reply: Well, for one, IIS was designed to run on Windows servers rather than *nix.
This reminds me of "doubling" in Roulette. If you bet $1 and win you profit $1. If you lose, bet $2. If you win you win 2 - 1, if you lose you bet 4 and perhaps win 4 - 2 - 1 = $1. With an unlimited supply of capital you will earn positive returns for any reasonably positive probability of winning even if significantly less than 50%. Similar to the Parrondo's example the result requires bets that depend on capital which depend on previous iterations of the game and so the different games are not truly independent.
The most disconcerting part for me was about attacking services inside a firewall using JS, starting around 45:00. He explains how somebody once wrote a page that, if you load it, would log in to your wireless router (if it had the default password) and hijack your DNS and all your requests.
I've used MailChimp and I think it's great. No issues with spam. I use their RSS-to-email feature a lot, and it saves me tons of time. Haven't tried any other delivery services.
For .NET, maybe. Not for something like Ruby

This is ignoring PHP (one of the biggest web dev languages) and Python which do just as well on both.

Also I have never seen the need to develop on the same platform as your server (if your using a local server, well, then that makes sense - but it's not the best workflow and, in addition, that is not a limitation of the development but of the server requirements :))

I won't disagree Ruby is better on Linux though.
Also, a 3 person company does not need a dedicated CEO.
You can't see any alternatives to the current system? Really?
Dynamic symbol table duel: ELF vs Mach-O, round 2
Why did DynDNS say this was a phishing website?
While I understand that this is a serious debate, I have but one suggestion: If you don’t like Facebook, don’t join it! I’d like to remind you that Facebook is both completely free and voluntary. If you don’t like the Privacy Policy, delete your account.

You know, if I had a dime for every time someone responded to a similar discussion by saying "well, if you don't like it, don't use it, 'cause nobody's forcing you to", I'd probably be a lot better off than I am.

It's not that it's an incorrect statement. On the contrary, it's almost always true. What bothers me is that it doesn't really contribute anything to the discussion. Is Apple doing the right thing with their anti-Flash iPhone policy? Who cares, nobody's forcing you to use iPhone or develop for it. Is the privacy of an average Facebook user steadily eroding or not? If so, why is Facebook doing this? Who cares, if you don't like their privacy policy, don't use Facebook.

Enough people doing that is bound to draw some of Mark’s attention.

Why do you think so many people are making a fuss over Facebook's privacy issues? It's not just about one's own privacy settings, it's also about raising awareness. Sure, if I had real use for my Facebook account I could keep fiddling with my privacy settings until they're just right, instead of deleting my account. But just because those details will probably go over my 60+ year old mother's head, doesn't mean she will want everyone to have access to what used to be private or to what she expects to be private.
I don't think it's ever reasonable to expect a business to do something that is not in their self interest; their existence is predicated upon selfish behavior. When companies take socially conscientious actions that would appear to go against the company's best interest, they are almost always doing so after weighing the relative benefits of increasing public goodwill and maintaining direct profits and finding goodwill to be of greater benefit.

I would argue that the same thing applies to individuals; that no rational actions are truly outside of self-interest, because we do what makes us happy, even if the action itself would appear to be selfless.
Asynchronous concurrency in Clojure : agents, futures
Facebook 0, Google 1
Disappointing. Nothing but respect for Billy Hoffman, but this talk has very little to do with Javascript and almost everything to do with the browser security model. Being able to using request timing to sniff things out of someone's email spool is an "evil part" of the browser and of the application architecture of Gmail. It's not a facet of Javascript.

The only thing in this talk that seemed uniquely Javascript-y was his explanation of di Paola's Prototype Hijacking attack (where you override the Ajax calls to sniff requests). But this is an issue in virtually every dynamic language; it's not a specific flaw in Javascript.

I want to be careful here, because I've had to give this talk a bunch of times --- the one security talk at a generalist conference, which is always going to devolve into a survey talk. I'm sure his audience loved it. I'm not sniping at Hoffman. But on HN, when you say "Javascript: The Evil Parts", I'm really wanting to see something about the evil parts of Javascript; like, I don't know, maybe automatic semicolon insertion being exploitable.
Futuristic mega-projects by Shimizu
I'm saying that's generally unacceptable. I can think of a few exceptions, such as online bullying where the off-campus behavior directly produces on-campus behavior, but the school's jurisdiction should generally be limited to the campus and school-sponsored activities.
Trapster hits 6 million - bigger than FourSquare, Gowalla, and Loopt combined
There's a right way Apple could have done this.

1. Just like with the infamous 3.3.1, announce that there will be changes coming to the developer agreement that ban "widget desktop" apps, and that apps of that variety will no longer be approved after July 1, 2010.

2. Grandfather in existing widget apps and make it clear to developers that they will only be able to make maintenance updates to their software and that no significant new versions will be approved.

I've actually bought Jobs' "sacrifice for the future of the platform" politic up to a point, and gradually phasing out approval for a type of app fits into that.

Sniping your developers does not fit into that.
Will be interesting to follow Diaspora; I think all the publicity could increase their chance to build something big. But I think their motto/tagline needs a serious rework (it would already help to cut out the "do-it-all"):

"The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network."
Versions has barely been updated since launch.
I'm sorry I don't buy this argument: When someone searches for "sushi stockholm" on Google, they aren't saying "Show me a map with all the sushi places in Stockholm". They are saying "I want to know more about getting sushi in Stockholm. Can you show me a webpage that can show me that?"

That webpage could well be the Google Maps website; and to level the playing field, Google could use a similar blue-link to the Google Maps page that highlights sushi places (or alternatively, show a map from the author's website).

I wouldn't, however, hold my breath. On the Internet, it's NEVER going to be completely fair. If they could, simple, personal geocities-based recipe sites would prevent AllRecipes and BBC from taking over "their" expertise (some of those old homepages had seriously awesome recipes!)
Documentary: The Century of the Self
It's refreshing to hear someone advocate using real life descriptions
I still don't understand what the definition of a widget is.
One day, I would love to read an article that actually answers this question.
I use Araxis Merge. It's expensive but it's hands-down, the best merge / diff utility I've ever used. All the rest look and feel like toys in comparison.
Also Balsamiq has some pretty great software. It does one thing very well and for relatively little cost. Mockups
"I predict that the profession known as "author" will be retired to history in my lifetime, like blacksmith and cowboy. In the future, everyone will be a writer, and some will be better and more prolific than others. But no one will pay to read what anyone else creates."

Hopefully the future for authors isn't that bleak, but I do see a major change on the horizon. I'm somewhat surprised that the "Social" websites like facebook haven't become breeding grounds for copyright infringement like the old social apps (IRC).
"[A] platform that can change at any time cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action ..."

That sounds pretty damn immature to me.
Supreme Court Still Considering "Business Process Patents"
Can you add QR codes for linking to the original source?
But this has almost nothing to do with Javascript! The problem here is that the browser engine to which your Javascript context is attached will make virtually arbitrary HTTP requests based solely on the contents of the DOM.

If you think faking HTTP login and action requests from Javascript and the DOM is bad, Google "samy nat pinning", which you can do without JS, and which will trick many soho routers into directly allowing remote users onto your network.
>> You might not own your data, but at least no third party owns ALL your data.

It seems that one of their biggest priorities is for each user to have full control over all their data, rather than preventing other sites from owning any of your data.
If you are in the contractor market, I'd be interested (as both hirer and seeker). If you're doing fulltime positions only, not interested.
7 Lessons Learned While Building Reddit to 270 Million Page Views a Month
I too am a layman on this topic, but here goes:

When you make a recording in most environments, because of power lines and equipment nearby there will be a mains hum in the recording at about 60Hz. This is true even if the recording device is battery-powered because it's in an environment with mains-powered devices.

But the characteristics of this mains hum will change slightly over time depending on the load of the power grid (Edit: It appears this isn't correct; see ars' comment). So apparently what they're doing is recording the power usage over time in one place, and correlating it with changes in the hum in recordings. Since they're attached to the same power grid, the variations should be similar at the two locations.

If the changes line up, then the recording was probably taken at that time. Similarly, if it lines up with time T=X for part of the recording, then to time T=X+10sec later in the recording, you know that about 10 seconds of audio were edited out.

Again, this is my interpretation, and I welcome corrections.
4.7 Million New Places to Charge an Electric Car by 2015, Analysts Say
I'm told that chess teams will sometimes do this. Usually, the nth best player on each team play against each other. The same strategy you describe can be used to increase the team's chance of winning the match. I don't know if it's considered unsportsmanlike.
Fine, then. Announce changes to the developer agreement, and stop approving widget apps. But don't suddenly pull existing widget apps from the store as if they've suddenly become dangerous to users!

That's not preserving the user experience or maintaining the flexibility of the platform. That's madness.
Mobile OSX 4.0 is bringing multitasking to the iPhone. I think it's a safe assumption the iPad will get the same brand of multitasking soon (next week?), not least because they share apps.
Yeah, I agree. Anytime you start saying that your software can "do-it-all" you're bound to run into problems. I still can't see how this has mass public appeal--anyone outside the HN/tech scene isn't even going to understand 1% of what any of that shit means.
I'd like to say I feel bad for the developers, but I can't. This isn't anything new. Many of us have been saying this for some time now. This isn't any different then the Bikini App situation. Even the article mentions eating the author's own words. What they fail to realize is that Apple's T&C are changeable. They are Apple's, not yours, and they can be whatever they want with no regard for your app.

As a user, this is bad. I don't want to buy an app because I can't rely on it. If Apple should remove it in the future, I lose the functionality I've come to rely on. As a user, I'm not in control of the applications I install. Apple is. This means if Apple suddenly changes it's mind, I lose the application and whatever data it supports.

This is not good for me as a user, and has influenced my buying habits.
Wife-computer?!?!
Wordpress user: Be careful where you get your theme from
I'd love to have a "dashboard" of environment-reactive tattoos I could check from time to time.

"UV levels today look nice"

or

"North is that way"

or even

"This thingie looks radioactive"
Modeling a Piano with Mathematics and Linux - Interview with Pianoteq
This is high-scalability, not google. Sorry, I submitted it directly from my RSS reader, and it appears as though HS is using google for their feed (feedproxy).
Rejoinder in equivalent tone: you mean, the servers that ran rexd, the "run any command for me without credentials" RPC service? Or the servers that had remote calendar managers that would run commands for anyone who knew what the semicolon character meant to the shell? Or the ones that got confused if you sent FTP commands in the wrong order and too fast and would accidentally upgrade you to root instead of logging you off?
[2007]
TLDR: "Zuck is a cool guy. He's rich, too. Some people don't like him, but they're being silly. You should go read about him on Wikipedia."
Windows is surely a better server than OS X

OS X is pretty Unixy and has the ability to run virtually all the Unixy server stuff that runs on other Unixy platforms which are generally considered top tier server platforms. It's entirely possible that Windows is a better server, but you can't expect people to accept a statement like that on its face. Please provide some evidence.
Paul Dirac Anecdotes
I’m Starting to Hate Email
Old School Goes New School with Slackware 13.1