skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like I'm wading into dangerous territory here ("I'm going to get downvoted for this"), but I think petercooper raised a valid objection (sort of). Not that I really want to be picking nits over all this and getting hyperanalytical over one line from fleitz's inspiring story, but...

You know why petercooper disregarded the "great, funny, vibrant, intelligent" part? Because those are qualities fleitz values in his new partner that are inherent to her. But the qualities of being "much thinner and younger" than some other woman are not. Those are the sort of comparisons you make when you view women as trophies, which, I hope we can all agree, is pretty douchebaggey.

Now I don't actually think fleitz is a women-as-trophies sort of guy. He got screwed over by his ex, so he's just happy to point out some things about this woman he met that make her different from his ex and make him happier. No problem with that. But at least you can see what it is petercooper is responding to, which isn't simply being "willing to admit that youth and looks are important to us in a partner."

(Also, I hope it's evident that this isn't the sort of thing you should admit, loudly, to your hot young girlfriend or whatever in front of a bunch of fat and old people. The idea that you should be honest about yourself isn't incompatible with the idea that there's a time and a place for everything.)

So anyway, yeah, I don't think the guy deserved to get trashed for his response. It was an understandable one to make.
Regarding transformations of returns, the initial implementation added an anonymous callback argument and converted returns into using it. But that takes the option of using the callback out of the programmer's hands, and is entirely non-obvious for someone calling the function (the number of parameters required is one more than those listed in the function definition)

I plan to write a follow-up shortly that discusses possible approaches of doing this sort of thing, and your suggestion is one of the ideas I'm going to explore. Thanks for reading & commenting :)
I'd imagine 'quality of housing' is directly proportional to 'cost of rent'

So I'd have thought that grades are largely irrelevent in this case, you could have a really stupid person with rich parents etc
The gaming platform 'Steam' collects a large amount of data from peoples machines. While this isn't 'benchmark' data in terms of performance, it collects what hardware people are using so they have a good idea what the 'average' specification of their users computers are.

See: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
Yes, it's feasible, if your startup idea doesn't depend on great code. In other words, if it's a good idea that doesn't require technical wizardry, but fairly standard stuff. And there are plenty of those.
Yes, and inflection is the general case which includes declension and conjugation. It's unfortunate that most people are only aware of the other meaning of inflection, having to do with tone of voice.
Most employers (here in the UK anyway) put a lot of weighting on education as a barrier to entry.

A lot of the time it's a formal requirement to a job application.
I can't wait for the Arc on LLVM! It is more portable than JVM ^_^
Ask HN: Does anybody know any outsourcing success stories?
Hi all, I'm wondering if we can balance the recent spate of outsourcing doom and gloom talk here with any cases that people can relate where the outsourcing of software development (to anywhere) did perform as promised?

My hunch is that outsourcing does work out, even if less than half the time, but that those involved tend to be quiet about it and move on with life and business.

Thank you.
Thanks for sharing this, it was extremely brave of you to do so.
Speaking of one's failures in public requires a high degree of
courage. Besides, from reading your other posts on HN, I thought you
were what I would generally consider a successful guy. But like you
said, there's always a flip side in every situation.
Youtube is hacked
Yea, I realize it is alot maybe and mights in there. There is other studies but this was the best one in terms of explanation[media]. There was this study: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...
I didn't post it because the method didn't sound solid.

But it is almost zero cost method, so I said why not give it a go.
http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/ is a good place to start. I think ESA has similar data but possibly not as easily available.
Actually, there's a congressional moratorium on precicely this example. Hospitals enrolled in Medicare/Medicaid prohibit practising doctors from hospital ownership.
Government data. Everything that is legally open, put in databases with a standard, open interface.
I think such a "general" posts should be considered an off topic here. Two reasons. Well-reading people, which I assume a majority here, might find that kind of postings on the top page a little bit annoying. Second - there are a lot of such stories in each other's life. It is not a reason to expose them on the HN.
Can you point to some of the better introductory talks? Thanks.
It reads like an affiliate advert for total immersion.
Hacknight Trailer
Hacknight in Malmo Sweden . Speeches and Interviews with Swedish thought leaders. Peter Sunde of Flattr and The Pirate Bay , Christopher Kullenberg of Telecomix , Samira Ariadad of Brand Magazine , Gustav Nipe of The Pirate Party , The Mandos Brothers , Raccoon from Telecomix , and Kugg of the Forskningsavd.

Covering several topics including i2p , blackthrows , fra , smile29 , mandos , pgp , retro computing and much more.
Yes the key quote is

She landed a good job with a consulting firm, but decided to go to the London School of Economics in 2008 to learn more about climate change

How is turning down a good job then complaining about being out of work reasonable behavior? Is there any demand for graduates with a MA in Climate Change? Did she even research that?
Oracle's importance to Java's future overstated
I appreciate that and have lived it for some time.

Now I am in my 30s, have kids, own a profitable business, etc. I have improvised my way here with vague goals that I have pretty much attained. I have a pretty clear picture of where I want to be next (at least as an entrepreneur) and have heard people who set goals do better.

You can write a business plan on a piece of scrap paper, or you can follow a format. I am wondering if there are formats out there for personal planning.
One small question: why wasn't the link to the original posting at Stubbornella rather than to a reblog? Did I miss the meeting where we decided there were no girls allowed?
With the school of Zen I am familiar with you pretty much do "just sit". The practice is called Shikantaza, literally "Just sitting" in english. With 10% chanting and bowing afterwards.
From experimentation using various "typical size" CSS, you can get a few more kb, which works out to about 3-7% extra savings for these file sizes.

Definitely worth it, particularly for high traffic sites.
Ummm, it takes a minimum of 18 years to raise a child. If you continue to "raise" the child through college, add at least another four. If you have more than one child, you hit the timer reset every time.

Getting married to raise a child is essentially a lifetime commitment, at least for one of the two getting married.
RSA ciphersuites involve the client generating a random session key, encrypting it using the server's public key and sending it to the server. The session key is then used to key the MAC and bulk cipher.

If an attacker records the traffic, then factors or steals the public key, they can decrypt the session key and read the traffic.

With ephemeral Diffie-Hellman, a random DH public value is generated for each connection and the server signs it with its public key. Each side then performs key agreement to generate the session key. Now, an attacker can solve the discreet logarithm and decrypt the traffic, but they have to break each connection separately.

The trick in the future is to perform Diffie-Hellman much faster (answer: write tuned code to work in an elliptic curve group) and then to perform EDH without the latency hit (longer term).
Good comments ... but shouldn't he have someone technical on tap to make sure what he's proposing is feasible?

For that matter, while I haven't read Blank's book (but have lived its opposite), won't you have more credibility when you step outside the office if what you're saying is grounded in technical reality?
The state of the mind which is best situated for coding (literally) or system administration is somewhere near Asperger's ^_^ so I don't think those skills - communication and people-reading which are the must for a founder could coexist with the narrow-focusing and persistence which would benefit a coder. These are two opposite extremes - the social mind and technical one. ^_^

btw, dividing of the tasks and responsibility is a good thing in general, and that is how (and why) YC works - they're searching for an appropriate state of the mind and help them to overcome people/business related difficulties.. (in the very polite and idealistic terms ^_^)
They just fixed in the last minute it seems
I went from no programming skills to now working in a development shop as a full-time Ruby on Rails coder. This took three years. To those saying "just learn to code". Well, it is a serious undertaking, but it can be done. I'm 40 and learned programming, Ruby, a bit of other languages, CSS, unix shell, sql, etc, etc, etc. It is a lot of stuff to learn to become productive. If you've got the time and energy, you should do it. I'm now in a position to build what I want and bring on a team. In fact, I've already started. Learn to code. And good luck.
But he'll have to talk to someone technical to know what the requirements of his ideas are, right?
Some interesting tips, but in my experience (also swimphobic) the technique wasn't the hurtle - being comfortable underwater was. Maybe his suggestion of goggles helps, but getting over this hump seems more psychological than technique. In that case, it's personal will/discipline.

I think learning in a swallow pool with my girlfriend would be the best bet for me.
I'm curious why they recommend against 4096-bit certs; they say they mentioned it, but I must have missed it... Is it just because it will make the size of the certificate bigger?
Choosing a First Machine Learning Project: Start by Reading or by Doing?
YourAM: Schedule Appointments In A Smart Way
There is a great self-help book I can recommend:
'How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life' by Alan Lakein

Its about planning and he gives a lot of useful tips, both long-term and short term.

see the discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023655
Very nice! Some points:

1- Can't enter one-time/recurring expense/income for past date. What happens if I'm late?

2- Currencies? Only USD? Not a big deal since I can just pretend your USD are my local currency, bus still... not elegant.

3- After entering recurring income, I couldn't edit it. There was no response when clicking on 'edit' here: https://cashcurveapp.com/recurrings. I use Chrome 5.0.375 on Windows XP.
He should build a moonbase with it.
Another sign: check the mysql queries. If they don't properly escape variables, danger.
Per #3, I noticed the I can edit in the box above. Didn't catch that initially.
Assuming you don't go the year+ path of learning how to code (note the saw of a little knowledge being dangerous), you need to find a programmer who you ABSOLUTELY trust and respect, without reservation or hesitation. A co-founder, hired gun, whatever. You'll need him to vet your ideas, the people who do the actual work, the technical project management, etc.

Buy this book: http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S... and read/skim it. If you don't "get it", accept what it says as Revealed Truth and then if you have any talent for this game you'll understand more and more as you play it.

The Joel Test is also a good thing to pay attention to and follow: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
This headline seems a bit misleading. The blog post is from today, describing a problem that the developer had brought to his attention yesterday. Perhaps this should be revised to the title of the post: "iTunes accounts hacked by shady developer?"?
Ask HN:  How did Google build their July 4th doodle?
They seem to be using one large sprite graphic and some JS for the animation.
It does. I certainly had heard good things about TI before Tim posted this though - if that's any help.

And the comments had some value (The Total Immersion creator and a US Swim Team Coach)
Another sign (and that goes for any software): bad commenting and bad naming. If the naming and commenting is good, you most likely have a programmer who cares, which is half of the battle.
If you want to outsource your coding, you should see if you are any good at specifying what you want and conversing with developers. Try little projects for $1000 or so, ideally things that will help you with your business but are not huge parts of the line of business. You should learn something about how developers think and what they can do for you, as well as where you need to become proficient.
As someone who regularly swims 100 plus 25 meter lengths in a session, I can testify that the Total Immersion book and swimming style can make a big difference. It's all about balance in the water and builds it up over a series of 'karate kid' drills that break the stroke down into learnable chunks that all eventually come together.
Agreed: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."
As another Book developer, this is probably true.

We have Free Books and Free Audiobooks, usually #1 and #2 paid book apps in the list. There is a bunch of fluctuation (competitors get featured, NYT plugs, etc), but the Top 20 is consistent. This is Weird with a capital W.

However, this is probably a very limited account breach- below #10 volume in Books is pretty low, 200-300/day or so. Top 5 is much higher, so it's telling that the hack didn't get apps into the Top 5.
Also, using data from $_GET, $_POST directly in Views.
If you can afford 4096-bit certs, or you need them, then you should use them. However, on my laptop, I can only handle 34 connections/second/core with a 4096-bit cert. Such performance is likely to be unacceptable for many uses.
Note that one problem here is that the success of individual surgeons is highly correlated with how often they do a procedure. I.e. a raw rate for surgical success won't necessarily tell you the odds of the surgeon you end up with.
Great read. Don't miss the last section, in which Google talks about the things they've been doing in Chrome and Android to make SSL seedier, especially in Google apps. In case anyone was wondering why Google made a browser...
I believe the situation has been like this for more than a week, I observed this more than a week ago, leading to the editorial slant.

Some proof, take a look here: http://www.appexplorer.com/a/367996918/

I actually started on June 14th, so about 3 weeks, without any reaction from Apple.
How To Read Code
This is really interesting. I don't vim much anymore but thanks for this!
also, the ones that don't use an ORM, instead go at lengths to invent it.
Wireframe a B2B product, get a freelancer to evaluate it technically, and then go sell it. One you have that first customer, it won't be so hard to find a coder to help either for cash or equity.
Please stop with the App store in the first position of HN. There are so much better article and stuff to know about. Thanks.
After I read this article several months ago, I went out and tried it out myself. Prior to trying it out, I could swim about 20m freestyle before becoming exhausted (yet run 10 miles without an issue). If he in fact learned TI well in 10 days, that would be an impressive feat. I swam for about 1 hour in the morning for about a month and am now able to swim several 100m without too much difficulty. Still, I have a long ways to go to become what I would consider effortless in the water (and even further to conform to the TI techniques). Although my technique is 10x more effective and efficient now, my main issue, though, has always been poor breathing techniques. Learning how to properly breathe was the most important thing I learned during the time - which oddly enough I did not learn from TI even.

Still, although far from an expert (yet), I'd definitely recommend the TI techniques to learn how to swim efficiently and well.
I'm referring to the source code. Also though ugly in terms of "eugh this isn't going to run efficiently. Mem usage will be crappy etc"

I've written a large amount of async code now, both in js and in java. I don't ever feel it's awkward, do you have an example of this awkwardness?
Youtube comments susceptible to XSS
To calculate the daily income of this guy:

$5 per app and he has 50 apps in the top 100. Daily sales are about 30 for each app, so total of 1500 sales per day. At $5, he's making $7500 a day.

In the 3 weeks he has exploited this hack: $157 Thousand dollars. I wonder who is paying for that.
There are no obstacles, rather there are several subtantial blocks of work to do, at least one of them non-urgent (rewriting the current Java compiler in Clojure).
Data point: In 1999, I was making $60k doing entry-level sysadmin work at a major pharma. Now it's 2010, and I have a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in cognitive neuroscience, and I'm making ... $60k again. (I like my job a whole lot better though.)
There's a reading group starting up on the University of Reddit (http://reddit.com/r/universityofreddit) - the idea is you each go away and read a chapter, then come together to discuss what each person thought, and any problems they had.

I think this is a great way to motivate readers and tackle leaps of understanding.

The course website is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/UniversityofReddit/comments/cktdq/cl...
Out of interest I went to check. I don't get a doodle, neither from the URL that automatically comes up - http://www.google.co.uk - nor from the more likely/probable one of http://www.google.com

Sometime it would be nice to know what Google actually does. I'm sure it's usually right, but sometimes it's wrong for opaque and mysterious reasons.
YouTube Hacked
Comedy Central censors Futurama's jab at Apple
I can still see it, they haven't removed existing comments yet at least.

I can't believe youtube got their input sanitation wrong. Given, that stuff is complex, but with their commenting volume (and quality, I might add) you would expect some due diligence
What about Wordpress? They don't use an ORM do they?
It may be intelligible 1000 years from now, but probably no sooner ;-)
Without any public reaction from Apple. I don't believe Apple comments cases regarding user accounts or developer accounts. So if they are investigating this, which for the sake of argument let's assume they are, the likely effect would be a sudden removal of these apps from the store. They need to do the appropriate research and investigation before they act.
I've just taken up swimming myself, and this is exactly what I was looking for: a good technique which builds up your stroke. I'll definitely be trying it out.

For anyone out there who wants to start exercising but hasn't started, give swimming a try. One tip that changed my mind completely about swimming: wear goggles. I'd never worn them before, but it really made swimming much funner for me.
What's your guess - how many times will the YouTube hack be submitted?
Ok, it looks like YouTube got hacked. It's been reported once, then there's a post to reddit, then there's a post by someone else just saying it's been hacked and don't go there.

So - how many times will it get submitted? It's on-topic, it's news, it's related to hackers, and no doubt there will be hundreds of posts about it, each saying very little new.

I estimate there will be 11 submissions of the same story. Any other guesses?
I read it for a first time in a couple of weeks by skimming over the exercises and sections I didn't want to read.

Then, some months after that, I read it a second time but I did the exercise and read every section.

In SICP, the exercice aren't there to "only make sure you've understood". There are actually a lot of new content in the exercises.. I don't particularly like that because if you can't answer an exercise, well, there is no solution :p (Of course, you can browse the web, ask people, etc.)

Or sometime, it asks, eva-lua-tor thinks that, L. Hacker things that, who's right? So, you answer.. but how can you know you've got the right answer?

Anyway, this is a great book. In my opinion, the chapter based on the evaluator is the most important and the one that has the most impact on my day to day life.
History of (computer) storage
You get more comfortable underwater with practice. I did swimming in college, and the first few times, I could't swim a full length because I always started coughing, taking water through my nose (very unpleasant), in my ears. Soon enough, you stop doing that - you just learn reflexively how to avoid it - and you get used to what you cannot avoid. And you start asking yourself what the big deal is when the beginners go though the same ordeal.

I'm not sure this was your type of comfort problem, but I hope it helps.
Cory Doctorow: What I Do
"8. The software messes with the error level"

I did this one recently, because I needed to use some PEAR modules that produced notices under E_STRICT. I somehow think all of these have similar exceptions.
I seriously don't understand why people hate any use of globals? I've written a 20k line MRP system that spans over 100 different PHP files. I have a global "$look_ahead = 90; // days". Every once in a while, someone from production planning comes up to me and asks if they can look ahead 45 - 120 days from now on. I simply change that variable and all is good immediately. Every single PHP file uses the global $look_ahead variable.

Sure, I could make a function look_ahead. Or I could pass the look_ahead value everywhere. Or I could have a DB setting look_ahead. But why would I make it any more complicated than I have to? Globals work very well when used as application preferences that rarely change but could.

Also, $company_address is a global. We're moving to a new building. That's a single variable I need to change. It'll change across every single report/printout/auto-generated PDF. And $db is always a global in my code. I've been coding for 10 years and not once have I had any issues because of that.

edit: Why the downvotes? I thought the proper etiquette here was to post a reply. It's not like I said something offensive.
In most European countries too. You can get a Computer Engineering degree, equivalent to an US MSc in Engineering, with a Software, Hardware, Networking or some other topic focus. Mine was Telecommunications :)

These degrees are a mix of various proportions of traditional Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and software craft, depending upon your focus.
The parent comment wasn't making a comparison. That was an absolute comment that Android has no consumers.

But to answer your question I don't know how many iOS devices are shipping each day. Do you?
Do they support basic HTML tags in their comments? If not, I see no reason why they shouldn't just replace > and < with &gt; / &lt; after sanitation for some added security
still not quite fixed - seems like the page is cut off at the end
I would say there is a part of CS that you need to know to be a programmer. CS is not a proper subset of being a programmer. There is a lot in CS that most programming jobs will never require.