skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
static char addrbuf[8][NI_MAXHOST]; /* XXX ugly thread-unsafe hack */

/* XXX: assume this succeeds */
inet_ntop(family, addr, cp, NI_MAXHOST);
Are you thinking of the "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" quote?

If you look at the full quote [0], it's actually quite reasonable and forthright. He's explicitly warning users that search engines, including Google, are subject to inquiries from law enforcement, and thus, should not be considered secure, rather than dismissing privacy out of hand.

[0]: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/my_reaction_to...
The key to the authors point is this sentence - "One of the greatest mysteries in the history of computer language comparisons is to me the question why most people are more interested in the relative speed of a language implementation, rather than in features like expressiveness, flexibility and orthogonality.". The author appears to believe having a lisp which ~5x-10x slower is a worthwhile tradeoff to make if the underlying lisp is simpler, more flexible and more expressive. PS: I am not suggesting that picolisp is simpler, more flexible or more expressibe.
While this may be a left-hand doesn't know what the right-hand is doing kind of thing, I don't think this is good.

It gets very tricky when companies try to be the arms dealers to both sides. You can't advocate privacy and provide privacy tools while at the same time promoting analytics and data-mining tools used because of a lack of privacy. Ultimately, the two sides conflict and the end result is often bad for both sides.

Case in point -- IronPort used to be a company selling spam cannons, and then they started selling anti-spam devices. They quickly realized they had to stop selling the spam cannons if they wanted to be perceived as the anti-spam vendor of choice.
Just disable Javascript, case closed.
Where I work, the Barracuda filter gave me this error when clicking on the link:

> The link you are accessing has been blocked by the Barracuda Web Filter because it contains spyware. The name of the spyware is: W32.Scrapkut
Your first sentence, in particular, is a great observation. Although it may not just be Zuckerberg, but the board in general.
This video was submitted recently, but http://searchyc.com doesn't seem to be indexing the site at the moment, so I can't find it.

Any idea what's up with http://searchyc.com ??
...which works if you always access your sites from the same IP. I like the idea of using a browser extension (or noscript or something like that) which stays with my computer.
Because a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I'm not particularly driven to accumulate wealth, but if my income doesn't keep pace with inflation my purchasing power will diminish, and if I don't save then I have no hedge against the possibility of unemployment or inability to work.

now, you might argue that things don't grow forever in nature, and you'd be right. But the natural world is not just about beautiful vistas and flowers every spring. From bacteria to blue whales, competition in nature is intense and unforgiving, and even dominant populations are subject to occasional catastrophic busts. Left to itself (as in a few unusual environmental oases) a population will expand to use all the available resources, even if the individual members of the population are limited by growth. Organisms generally grow to the extent that they have a good chance of reproduction. they will evolve through successive generations in whatever direction maximizes reproductive fitness.

Schumacher was an interesting theorist, but (like many other idealists) his vision of an ideal world depends on mutual abandonment of competition. I'm a big fan of mutuality, but there are limits to its scalability.
don't think Google should give end users a way to bypass the wishes of a site owner

You don't think users should have control over their own property?

If someone is using my site, I believe I have the right to have access to certain usage information.

You have the right to ask for that information. You have no right to compel the user to answer.
Moon Zoo - Live
How I got a real programming job right out of college
Evolving from beta to stable with a faster version of Chrome
I think purely from a strategic perspective you would definitely not want to have FB Connect as your only login. The people quitting FB right now are a tiny percent, but they seem to represent a disproportionate sampling of the early adopters that will drive the growth of your business. By limiting your sign up to FB connect only you have essentially blocked many of your early adopters from signing up.
Catalyst is surely a fairly solid web framework. Moose provides a more standard OO syntax...
I had issues in the past with scheduling processes in launchd. It's been a while, but I remember having these issues at least two OS revisions after Apple initially launched it. (The issue was related to starting a process and having launchd restart the process if it died. There were options to toggle this but it wasn't working for me, and I was reading the Apple developer docs on launchd.)

Also, I personally don't feel that using XML as a config file format is necessarily an improvement over what cron offers now. (I know that I'm skipping the fact that 'XML is self-validating,' but I don't really find a lack of a self-validating config file to be a major issue with cron)
Oh, I’m not begrudging your posting it; for one thing, it’s got me thinking about Hilbert (and Z-order) curves again. It just seems like an odd application in an area where, I gather, more sophisticated correlation tools are the norm.
Isn't this essentially what Pip.io is trying to do?
In Vienna, we flush our toilets with alpine spring water. One of the many benefits of settling in a defensible, well-situated spot and implementing urban planning for the future. The city was built for 4 million, and is inhabited by about 2 million.

Empires ftw!
The Underdog Effect - Why do we love a loser?
From the end of the article:

As I was writing this, Daniel, my two-year-old son, walked into my office, climbed on my lap, and said "Monsters, Inc. movie please."

So, here we are, I'm finishing this piece on the left side of my computer screen while Daniel is on my lap watching a movie on the right side of my computer screen.
How many people actually disable Javascript in their browser?

I'm curious, because I find it essential to do almost anything online nowadays. Even voting on HN uses ajax.
Unfortunately, most of today's "security" with regards to credit cards are merely there to deter the easy grabs. Any determined person could easily get anyone's details through a number of means.
Simple-kanban
IConji - Going back to hieroglyphes
I can't see that being easy. Since most of a social network is your relationships with other users, and those users may or may not exist on other sites (or may have duplicate people with the same name, etc), it seems like it would be quite a difficult problem. You'd also have to somehow convince one or more major providers to use it, but I don't see that being easy either.

That said, it would be a very useful thing to have if someone could get it right.
Just out of curiosity, what is the actual penalty to American Express for saying their page is secure while transmitting credit card numbers in plaintext?
It depends :)

If your data doesn't lend itself to an RDB schema, go with a NoSql/key value store.
Social, economic and technological innovation is disproportionately made by the supposedly naive.
This is pretty interesting to read over other people's designs. It's interesting to see what they want to do and then think about how, as a developer, you would actually accomplish that feature.
Minimalism + a regular site structure makes "responsive web design" much easier.
Mistakes in silicon chips to help boost computer power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drilling_fluid

I'm more interested in how exactly can the density/gravity work against pressure, as I assume this works. So, they will pump in the fluid into a gushing stream against it's own pressure...? Shouldn't that cement pump after it work really fast or something? I don't see how fluid itself can stop the pressure from gushing out everything, and possibly damaging the equipment further. Then again, I'm no expert on any of that.
Ask HN: How long before you called yourself a programmer?
The reason why i'm asking is because i want to get into the startup scene, but i'm not so confident when it comes to my programming skills and i'm doubting if i could actually call myself a programmer yet.

So how many months/years of learning did it take you until you could finally call yourself a programmer and apply for a job?
Blogul lui Constructparti
To compete with Google, Apple has to make Mobile Me free
Sure, but why not grab low hanging fruit?
While I don't know enough to refute the main fact, my gut feeling is that while that may be true, any company doing this time of work on the web needs to at least take care of the base amount of security (using HTTPS where applicable, not storing plain text passwords, etc.)
i got hacked by something almost exactly like this like 3 months ago. They uploaded a folder called .files with about 2K html files there to each of my folders.

Probably a few million crap files all together. Was a huge pain in the ass to clear all that crap out. After that point I killed all wordpress installs, since it has such a huge target on it's back.
so true! Every time i'm forced to deal with launchd for scheduling, I wish I was using cron.
American Express also limits password for their online banking functions to less than 8 purely alphanumeric characters (no spaces, no special characters). If this alone wasn't bad enough, this almost certainly means that somewhere deep in the bowels of AmEx's software stack there's an ancient system where the password field is in plain-text.
Or, give them away at the local starbucks / during lunch hour.
That's pretty terrible, but I'd say it's still more secure than most of the ways I transfer my credit card number. Twice I've needed a tow truck, and both times would you like to know how they charged my card? By picking up their radio and reading off all my info to the main office. All I'd need is a scanner to get dozens of valid credit card numbers a day.
Entitled much? You're using a free service and have the gall to make demands on how it is to be implemented?
You know my take on this whole facebook privacy issue?

"Use Twitter Instead!"
Thanks, I didn't know that branch predictions are now cached separately from instruction decodings. Hopefully evictions are a rarer problem.
Spam spam spam spam!
To which he adds the punchline: "Sometimes, it is simply impossible to resist a little multitasking."

Your selective quote there was a bit out of context for my understanding. It encouraged me to read the article in full, but afterward, I felt it was misleading.
I was quite happy with Firefox + Vimperator. All I show is a tab bar on the top and status bar on the bottom. It was great for XMonad.

I'll try out Chrome + Vimium for a bit, see how it works with my workflow and the muscle-memory of Vimperator keybindings.
I wholeheartedly agree with his post. My grades aren't stellar. That's partly because I chose to spend a lot of my time freelancing and in recreational programming. I got a real programming job with a very competitive salary, whereas my friends who only focused on coursework are jobless. I'm not saying this is the route for everyone, but I've found that programming experience isn't emphasized enough in universities.
User Needs and What People Pay For
If someone steals my card number, they're the ones on the hook.

Edit: mkull is probably right in the vast majority of cases
This is how Google builds their brand. To ensure that the insanity around facebook doesn't ever happen to them, they're handing out these tokens to the few thousand people that understand something about technology.

But if sites begin to customize themselves for you, show you JPG ads instead of Flash because you are a Mac user that never clicks ads, why would you opt out?
No, I wasn't thinking of that quote but now I cannot remember the article. It was around the time Google released Buzz and I think it was he who hinted that how the users got it wrong. Am I wrong to think that it was him who said that?
> but I'm getting a Lisp vibe: clever people use it, they develop cool new things with it, but it doesn't attain market success (aka secret weapon).

The difference is, (AFAICT) Perl 6 also aims to be easy to use for the everyone else. Damian is extremely bright and surely wishes to have (and (I think) has helped design) a language that allows him to do some frightening and epic stuff. Larry is also a very bright guy, and is very humble, and (again, AFAICT) still requires that Perl 6 make easy things easy. "Baby Perl 6" should be easy to pick up and use.

So, the only part of the Lisp vibe I'm sensing is: yes, clever people will use Perl 6 to do clever things. But also, people who just need to get their work done in a straightforward way will be using Perl 6 as well.

My prediction: Perl 6 will have a long and steady increase in use as time goes by. This is because although there's not a tremendous amount of hype, potential users will trickle in and say, "I need to do $x"; and then as usual, Perlers will come out of the woodwork with multiple ways to quickly do $x without much trouble, and bang: you've got one more Perl 6 user.
Drawing mathematical functions by hand
If facebook, with its more than 400 million users, and all the time its users spend on the site, can't figure out a way to make money on that without breaking privacy, then it deserves to fail.
AMEX isn't the only one with arcane password restrictions. Most banks limit the characters to an alphanumeric subset of ASCII with a few characters like _, and -. It makes no sense.

If that wasn't bad enough, look at how services like Mint have to interface with these institutions? When will something like OAuth come into play at banks?

I'd love to charter a bank on the premise of superior online service.
wrong.. if someone steals the card number, the merchant who accepts the fraudulent transaction is on the hook. Not AMEX
Funny you say that. Over the past week, I have been invited to join such a group and on two mailing lists such groups were announced. I actually looked into them a bit and decided they were too expensive for the value I'm likely to get out of them. It's not that I thought they were of no value, it's that the £££ they wanted from me was too much for what I thought I'd get.

With that said, I'm happy to help you alpha test your service.
Any idea when application shortcuts are coming to the Mac? :)
How to make installable web apps for Chrome
I dunno...

When I was in high school I wrote a subroutine threaded FORTH for OS-9 on the TRS-80 color computer; it was 2000 lines of assembly code and it (almost) worked right the first time.
I am in a similar position and would like to restate the question.

If someone applied for a job, saying he was a new programmer, what would you look for to see if he was worth considering for a position?
To be fair, in a way, you opt-in.

The website owner chooses to install it on their website. You visit the website, with JS enabled. If you don't like that the website uses Google Analytics, you are free to not frequent the website anymore, or to turn of JS.

Your mailing list or coupon metaphors really aren't the same. Instead, it would be more akin to buying things from Amazon, asking Amazon them not to send advertisements, but getting made when they send you a purchase update for the purchase you made.

A real life example would be complaining to a store about being video taped while you are shopping, and the store using that data to plan a new layout based upon customer habits.
I moved to Seattle with my dog, from Indiana.
She's anything but a city dog, and I think the next time I drive home, she'll be coming with me; I'll give her to a friend or my sister.
As dog-friendly as Seattle is, there are definitely dogs that can't do the city.
Yet people still grow fine lawns in the desert and other semi-arid regions.
In America it would be banned by the Thirteenth Amendment.
It depends on so many circumstances whether quitting is a big deal or not that it is probably not possible to say which without knowing a lot more about a person. Obligations matter a lot, savings obviously figure in there, the local economy and the job market.

What's a non-issue for one can cause many sleepless nights for someone else.
It seems like the good ones about Clojure and Scala are buried beneath the pile of whining about Java and Ruby.

Anyway, here's my 5 for Haskell.

1. Sometimes the type system feels backwards. What if I don't want the compiler to infer types for my variables? What if I want the opposite, where it does constraint checking on said variables? For example, instead of inferring the type of the elements of a list, it instead makes sure that they all belong to a particular typeclass. This is a subtle but huge difference that makes it difficult for me to program UIs. It can be done, but it seems to take more effort than it does in some other languages.

2. Allowing the construction of infinite values leads to some really frustrating errors sometimes. Sometimes you make mistakes of the form "let x = f x", which is valid in some situations and not others.

3. Monad should imply Applicative should imply Functor.

4. Bytestring handling bites you in the ass sometimes and you don't know it until your program crashes because you mixed things up improperly. Something is wrong here, when we are losing type information that should have prevented this.

5. Typeclasses should be automatically derived for trivial cases, like witness types, but there's a strong potential for abuse there.
> It's not that I thought they were of no value, it's that the £££ they wanted from me was too much for what I thought I'd get.

Care to elaborate?
I'd really like cookie sequestration to be a standard browser feature. By sequestered, I mean that cookies be bound to the domain in the address bar as well as the URL they are served from. So I would have different versions of the Google analytics cookie for every domain I visited.
Technorox
The Open Source music debate, evolved musician or misguided businessman?
My customers. Just a few hours ago I had one of them ask me on IRC what the status of the next Tarsnap release was.
Sure. I'm not objecting to the information itself, I'm objecting to paying more attention to it than is warranted (the amount that is warranted being so close to 0.00 for the average developer that it's hardly worth mentioning).

The best-case scenario for this information is for the vast majority of developers to ignore it, or to read about it and then do absolutely nothing about "the problem".

Even in the rare case where you happen to be that one guy who's writing kernel, library, or game code which needs to be heavily optimized at every level this particular issue is extremely unlikely to be relevant. And even in the super rare cases where it is relevant the given article doesn't provide very good advice on improving performance (hint: for a lot of cases it'd be better to rewrite your loop so you don't even have a conditional inside it).

In short, this article is silly trivia, nothing more, and roughly equally useful to the practice of programming as looking at pictures of cats with funny captions, maybe less so.

P.S. The real risk here is that devs become overly focused on a "problem", lose their situational awareness and ignore more serious problems they should be concerned with. It's the sort of thing that causes pilots to crash planes while they are distracted by a warning light they can't figure out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401
I run NoScript in Firefox and only sites I've specified have JavaScript enabled, and usually only for files served by that domain.

So I guess I'd count as someone with JavaScript disabled for the vast majority of sites where I am just reading something and not wanting to interact with the page.
I use NoScript. HN and GA are both whitelisted.
Passing the torch. FeaturedUsers.com is for sale.
IAd, Google and the reason the iPhone is coming to Verizon
There's a reason for iAd's description as the 7th Pole for iPhone OS.
"In many ways, Mobile Me isn't that good! By making it free, they will gain a lot of users, and therefore gain resources from Apple to make it better."

So, to summarize: the product currently sucks. By dropping the division's revenue to zero, while simultaneously encouraging more users to see a cruddy product that (let's be honest) represents Apple in a poor light, it'll be easier to convince Apple to throw more money at the product.

I think he just successfully argued against his thesis.
Exactly. MUNI (SF's bus service) is by many measures irresponsible, incompetent, and corrupt. It even runs a late a lot.
But the density of the city simply creates such a high frequency of buses, and coverage of routes, that it results in a very practical, pragmatic service to use.
Even really well off people often don't have cars in SF just because having a car is more of a hassle than taking the bus/BART/extremely occasional cab.
We know from Paul's blog (awesome blog, Paul!) that he really likes cars. When even he is thinking of ditching it, it says a lot about the service.

Sidebar: I currently live in Portland, which has an award-winning bus/rail service. And it is true, it's awesome. The drivers are polite, and often really care about urban planning/civic stuff. The buses are clean, the documentation/data/maps/API well-done.

But because Portland is so much less dense than SF, it still means that in many cases, taking a bus here is more of a drag, and cars more common.
(On a personal note, I've gotten way more into biking since moving here from SF.)
You don't think users should have control over their own property?

Oh, come on there is a limit. I mean; the only reason this is big news is because Google supplies a lot of sites with analytics. If a site uses another service then this opt out is useless (in terms of them not being tracked). Additionally they are providing all this data to the site directly - Google is just the aggregator some webmasters choose.

This is, in fact, about people preferring Google not having their information. Which is a fair enough point (if I visit XYZ.com I don't implicitly agree to provide my data to Google).

I think there is a fair gentlemans agreement in place; whereby website owners have a "reasonable expectation" to be able to see what kind of users are accessing a site. If we start calling that personal information I suspect it will start to turn into a Mexican stand off of users hiding data and webmasters trying to sneak it out of them :)

A friend of mine pointed out a useful metaphor: it is like a customer dressing in baggy clothing, using a ski mask and voice modulator and then sneaking into a shop to buy something with gold pieces - because they don't want to provide demographics to the shop owner. Sure it is their right; but it also doesn't benefit anyone :)
I wonder about this, same for my bank. My theory is alphanumeric plus one, maybe two symbols means there is a lower probability of some sort of SQL injection. Perhaps a greater risk for exposing one account, but lower risk for exposing many.

It's the only explanation I can come up with.
No, but I also don't disagree with him. He was right for the most part. More importantly, nothing has been done to fix the problem. Everyone blamed Google, but few people have actually attempted to fix the problem of privacy, or even offer up solutions.

At the end of the day, Google has done more good for privacy then all the users screaming at them.
I'm completely lost here. Are you saying this is built into Chrome without an extension? I've definitely never noticed anything like this. Got a post or link I can see somewhere?
The problem is not as pervasive as you might think, though it does happen.
Don Dodge, maybe? (although it depends on the definition of "recently")