skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recently a dutch study indicated that the false positives are actually by far the majority of the cases and on top of that plenty of child abuse goes unnoticed.

False reports out of revenge (for instance, between divorcees, jealous neighbours or oither idiots) are also very common, and the damage done to families because of that is significant.

The cure seems to be much worse than the disease here.

Friends of ours had a 'visit' of the dutch equivalent of the 'service' (I use the term lightly) who kept on suggesting that there must be something wrong. When the guy got up to make coffee the woman said 'you can tell me now', as though she was a victim too. Unbelievable, the way these people push their way in to peoples lives, guilty by default and if you are very very lucky you might get to keep your kids at their say-so.
Oh man why does everything have to be via facebook, twitter et al? I only do email...
Porting of Crenshaw classic to Forth:

http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/crenshaw/tiny.html

"Jack W. Crenshaw wrote the Let's Build a Compiler article series from 1988 - 1995. This document is a formatted version of that excellent non-technical introduction to compiler construction. These web pages were created in 2005, and port Mr. Crenshaw's original Pascal code for the 68000 under SK*OS to the Forth language on a 80x86 CPU, under Windows XP."

And porting to Haskell:
http://alephnullplex.appspot.com/blog/view/2010/01/12/lbach-...
New UI for Google Image Search
Again following on Bing's lead.
The problem with that avenue is that this sort of agency is very vengeful and they have the power to make your life very miserable. So if after you've won your injunction they find half an excuse to 'intervene' again they'll definitely do so.

It's rare that I would advocate to just let it be but in this case that would seem to me to be the safest option. Pick your battles.
I dunno. Exceptional though they may be, I can imagine situations in which it would be a net gain to write mp rather than map. I don't think "readability" should only mean "readable by someone who is unfamiliar with the program's conventions and is encountering it for the very first time". It does mean that, but it should also encompass "readable by someone who is working with the code repeatedly, as if it were clay". Devices (like long names) that help you read the code de novo can get in the way after a while. Map itself doesn't mean what it says; it's a convention, one I bet was introduced for brevity. I think it's reasonable for languages and programs to adhere to conventions and ask the reader for patience while first working with them, especially if the notation has been crafted to maximize the intelligibility of the code over the long haul.

One doesn't just sit and speed-read math in a single pass. Nor poetry. Good programs have that kind of density and deserve the same consideration; they are not newspaper columns. The trouble with the shallow notion of readability that says "I should be able to random-access any line of code and understand it right away" is that it results in less intelligible whole programs, which is a net loss of readability and of other things as well.

I wish more good programmers understood this. The bad ones we can write off, but too many good ones have been schooled to focus overly on the line-of-code. If you have a million lines of code, it doesn't much matter how readable an individual line is; nobody's going to be able to read the whole thing. What we should be striving for is to produce an equally functional program with orders of magnitude less code (which would automatically be a more functional program). This requires a quite different notion of readability.
The Burka gets a much needed Makeover
I think a good part of that is the fundamentalist Christian ('reborn') element in the United States which commands a fair portion of the vote.
Because it highlights the most interesting points of a much longer article?

I'm no Daring Fireball fanboy (the 1st derivative of an Apple fanboy?) but there is sometimes value in aggregation and summarization.
They wouldn't have to go through PG either, votes can be lifted from the URL log that your provider is required to keep.
If this were isolated it might not be such a huge issue, but it's happening quite a lot (relatively).

No it isn't. You hear about some of these cases because, rightly, it occasionally hits the media but in general it is not happening a lot (comparatively anyway).

People are getting too cagey over child nudity and prudish in general; but I don't think it is a result of either being a pedophile or sex offender.

I would pick the clerk as he/she is actually exhibiting bizarre behavior.

Not to my mind. They are reacting irrationally to images that disturb him/her; it does not make them a sex offender.

I see what you are saying; but I don't think it comes as a result of people being abused or secretly being pedophiles; it is more a reflection of a society where we are slowly becoming terrified of the "bogeyman" pedophile at every turn.

To put your point another way; if you saw, through a living room window, someone strangling another person whilst having sex with them would you call the police? And would it be because you found it sexually arousing? or is because you were worried about the person? See the difference.
It's the same strategy as Chrome. They could just have made another browser and pushed it via tie-ins, lock-ins and millions of dollars in advertising. Instead they rebuilt the browser from the ground up for speed and security. This prompted everyone else in the browser space to up their game too.

Google is betting that they benefit more from a lot of competitive browsers, than from having an iron grip on a single browser. Conversely, they can't allow someone else with an iron grip to hold the browser market back to benefit themselves. The same is true of the phone market.
Should We Pay Students to Become Engineers?
That whole article was pretty good. This was the most insightful part for me:

> On the marketing side, we’ve learned that having a great story is as important as having a great product. As a small company, you need to connect with your customers on an emotional level as well as on the physical level of the product. We sell DODOcase’s exclusively online which means most of our customers are buying a product without ever touching it. To achieve sales in this way, its important that customers ‘want’ to buy into the story as well as the product.
Somewhat related, though the exhibits aren't as nice- The National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland. If nothing else, it's an excuse to venture on to the grounds at Ft. Meade.

When I visited a number of years back, there was a guy selling cell phones on a little folding table outside the front door. Which seemed...odd...for any number of reasons, given the location.

http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/
Looks this has now been addressed with .Net 4.0. It's back down to 48MB.
Agreed. That is also a great place. And if you like that sort of things there's always my book.
It doesn't work very well in Finland. I guess I'll be using google for a while, since internationalization usually isn't much of a concern for smaller startups.
Groundhog Day - or the Problem with A/B Testing
(I'm one of the PiCloud devs.)

We use Django extensively for our web interface. Our Django code interacts smoothly with PiCloud (we 'self-use' PiCloud in several places on the website0.
Mi2N.com - NO CROSSOVER NEEDED
Promotions, or just having their superiors leave them alone. We have similar problems in France with quotas. Policemen are encouraged to arrest a certain number of people per year, or else. The problem here is that they are evaluated by the number of arrests (easy to assess), instead of the actual efficiency of their work (very difficult to assess accurately).

This evaluation method is of course as disastrous as lines of codes are for programmers. As a result, 1% of the French population has been arrested at least once last year. And this number is increasing.

Another example would be the number of American citizens that are on the Terrorist Watch List (I recall 4% [citation needed]). Official may get brownie points for putting one in, but never for putting one out. (Plus, there's might be an almost non-null chance that the guy might be, or know, a terrorist. Perhaps.)
Is it possible to hijack the 'middle click' on a link so that it opens the split view in a new tab?
I'm ashamed I didn't put this in my original post!

I can't recreate it on my machine at home although they both run the Debian testing branch and use Iceweasel. I'll let you know tomorrow but it's probably PEBKAC.
Mountains out of Molehills [News Infographic]
it would be great if this could open a new tab with the split views on 'middle click' instead opening all links in the same page
After reading the article, my first thought was "why I can't imagine that happening outside the US?". When and why did nudity become such a taboo there? It seems to be much more acceptable to show children violence than nudity, which I found absurd. I mean, which is more harmful for 13 years old child to see on TV, a breast or shooting?
IT Crowd
What JRuby C Extension Support Means to You
Here's a UX Myth:

Disabling back-button keyboard shortcuts won't piss people off and cause them to leave your site.

(Using Safari 5.0 on OSX 10.6.4)
(BTW it's probably "losing faith" that you meant to write)
BranchOut Unlocks The LinkedIn In Facebook
There's some Apple bloggers collecting evidence that this applies to all phones, with excerpts from manuals and such.

http://dontholditwrong.tumblr.com/

Interestingly almost all of them say "don't touch the external anntenna" (as in the old-fashioned stick out the top kind) yet no-one has connected these statements with the revolutionary design decision of making the external antenna into the part of the phone you hold.
I'm not so sure about that. I would assume that these laws mostly command support from those who consider themselves "Law and Order" types. They're often conservative, but I think it crosses ideological lines pretty well.
You can't top the episode where Jen borrows the Internet for a presentation. Fantastic series.
If you are not talking about "missing market or lack of customer acceptance" I am assuming you haven't gotten one of your products in the hands of your end customer.

I would suggest building a very simple feature set that you an launch quickly (MVP in startup terms) or even a quick mockup and ask your end customer (or who you think your customer is) what they think of it.

If you have a prototype a customer wants then you will be excited. Set some deadlines, targets, goals, and really execute on it.

That's my 2 cents.
The Dhammapada
Maybe you can't. But the first season was hilarious. All of it. This season is fine too. Mostly with the 'RAM Emergency' a couple of episodes ago.

— I'm sorry. There was a RAM Emergency. There was too much RAM.
>No it isn't. You hear about some of these cases because, rightly, it occasionally hits the media but in general it is not happening a lot (comparatively anyway).

I put on the relatively tag for a reason. I heard of about 7 cases in one year, each one of them completely insane. That's a lot relative to where I'm living in Europe where I've heard of zero such cases. It's also a lot relative to how many should have happened, also zero.

>but I don't think it is a result of either being a pedophile or sex offender.

No, most people behave this way because they've been horribly and dangerously brain washed into behaving this way. So how do you "fix" them?

Imagine some less extreme behaviors that people could do and how it would be greeted. Imagine some intimate situation like a young man proposing to a young lady in a restaurant. Suddenly some jerk walks up and loudly farts in his face. How would this be reacted to? I can think of a lot of potential reactions, all of which would be extreme enough to let the drive by farter know that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.

Now lets step it up a notch. Someone urinates on the floor in the middle of a semi-crowded area. Now we're talking jail time, right? Maybe the person grew up in a culture where this was acceptable or even expected. Doesn't matter, they did something more extreme than the last example and will be greeted with a more extreme result.

Now back to our clerk. This person looked at some normal family photos and reacted by ruining someone's life. I think this person finding themselves the subject of such an investigation would be appropriate and effective at teaching people that this kind of bizarre behavior is not acceptable and will not be tolerated.

>Not to my mind. They are reacting irrationally to images that disturb him/her; it does not make them a sex offender.

Neither did the person taking the photos. Remember, my statement was if I had to pick between the two of them. Would you seriously pick the author in that situation? Then I have some bad news for you...

>if you saw, through a living room window, someone strangling another person whilst having sex with them would you call the police?

Bad example. Enough people are into such behavior that I absolutely would not call the police. Further, if I did I would fully expect to find myself on the business end of a peeping Tom case.

But if we changed your example to me just seeing someone being strangled then I would call the police. Because I saw something extreme happening. I would not call the police if I saw two people hugging. See the difference?
Mobile Sites and Usability: An unlocked phenomena
I got TCed :)
Here were I live in South Africa we have probably the most expensive broadband internet in the world. This mainly because there are only two licensed telecommunications providers whom have access to the only two international internet links from here.

We already have a Wireless User Group, a free community based wireless network in some of the major cities. http://www.wug.za.net/
My first thought when I read this was if it would be possible to create a private satellite internet connection to the rest of the world.
Without knowing the technical details, I would guess that this is probably not feasible though. Although it would be pretty cool!
It is particularly odd since the actual Wired article was already on the front page of HN when this was submitted.
And don't forget about crippling the internet by googling Google ;-)
Unless you're in the UK where Vodafone have delayed the OTA update so that they can fiddle with it first.

It turns out that the Google mark really is meaningless.

Myself and most of my friends who I recommended the Nexus One to on the basis of first updates and vanilla software, we are now all running CM6.
If you want to compress your script, gzipping makes much more sense than minification.
Amazon USA sells more E-Books than hardcovers
Surviving K2, the World's hardest mountain
Surviving K2, the World's hardest mountain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zkC9IMQmYA
It shouldn't be a problem for a good minimizer (that checks script type).

However, if you're loading whole Python interpreter via Silverlight, script minimization is least of your problems.
This Jen (points to box), is THE INTERNET!

If you have access via an UK IP you can watch the series online: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-it-crowd/4od
It's weird, because they've always just clicked for me. I mean, you have text and you compare it to a pattern. The regex is just a crazy shorthand for the pattern you're looking for. What pattern should you match? Well, first write down examples of what you want to match and see what they have in common.

I think it's easier to get if you match a pattern to some text by hand, taking a simple pattern like ^a+bc$ and trying to see if it matches:

Here are a few test cases:

"aaaaaaaaabbbc" ?

1) ^a+ means it starts with 1 or more 'a's, so those eat all my 'a's and I'm matching bbbcc against 'bc' now
2) b* means 0 or more 'b's; those eat up everything but the c at the end.
3) c$ matches exactly one c at the end, so yeah, we have a match. If there had been one more c (or anything else), the match would fail because it wouldn't hit the $ (which is end of string).

aaac ?

1) ^a+ eats all the 'a's again.
2) b* ... what b? It's "zero or more" so yes, we can skip it.
3) c$ Yes, there's one c at the end. We have a match.

bc ?

1) We need one* or more 'a's at the start. That's the difference between + and . Match fails immediately.

acbbc ?

1) ^a+ matches the a.
2) b means it's optional, so we don't fail... yet. But we don't match anything, either.
3) c$ That c matches, but we're not at the end of the string yet. There's still "bbc" left to match and we're out of pattern. Fail.

You can do something similar with the tools other people have linked in comments. This was just to give an example pattern and a few test cases to get you started.

It's weird, though. Even though this clicks for me, I don't feel like I get monads at all. Yeah, I've read the 3 monad laws (great... so something being a monad means that I can monad it, un-monad it and do something vaguely similar to composition on monads) and I can do some very simple Lisp which uses built-in stuff they say is built from monads (like printing). But I don't know how they work internally at all, or how they're fundamentally different from all the other Lisp statements ("causes side affects" isn't terribly specific... why is printing to the screen a side effect? Is setq a monad?).

In other words, there's probably some topic for every programmer that they really have to struggle with. As easily as regexes come to me, I struggle to understand other stuff.

I've been at it for quite a while, incidentally. But I'm not going to give up any time soon. So keep working on it.
No, translate.

For a number of countries, native tongue subtitles of English TV shows is the norm. They're usually pretty good. So what you would have is a way for the program to translate English to the native tongue on the fly.
A cellphone might be a bad example - Apple iPhone is great (once jailbroken). Point taken nonetheless though.
I usually don't like british comedy series, that kind of humor rarely work with me. But this one, hilarious.
The internet episode was great, i've also enjoyed the ones with the smokers, the electric pants, the "i'm disabled" one and one of the latest with those finance guys playing rpgs.
Definitely thumbs up.
This is a very funny series. I've watched many episodes on 4oD (Channel 4's on demand service). One thing that's really worth observing is the collection of objects on the shelves of the IT department. There are many in jokes and great bits of hardware there.

Also, the actress who plays Jen is absolutely priceless in her delivery of many of the ridiculous things she has to say. Highly recommended.
> So, would this inactive/status flag provide a significant benefit over editing the name/description/readme?

You can always cram more data into another field, but now you've lost easy access to valuable metadata--this would be a hack, rather than a solution. Proposing for users to use a hack rather than a clean, semantically different, UI element is not good on your part as a designer.

A "Status" field benefits users as repository pages can have a prominent notification of the current status. You can also use it as a flag for searches to avoid having to wade through various abandoned projects before finding one that is being maintained.

And for the GitHub developers, it will provide a valuable statistic. Now they can track the progress and usage of repositories without potentially using assumptions like "Hmm, this repo has not be committed to for X days--could be abandoned?" or having to parse through the description/readme for keywords like "abandoned" or "no longer maintained", etc.

So yes, I would say that this simple metadata field would significantly benefit the users and developers.
Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police
I made an HN submission to the original article 2 hours before this link to Gruber showed up here. The original article was on the front page of HN (and still is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529931), but for some reason this submission has twice the points. Guesses:

* Catchier headline.

* Short attention spans mean excerpts are more highly valued on HN (despite lack of context, such as bugs in the original baseband, as pointed out by cligner below).
If you want to take advantage of 2D/3D effects, you can use CSS media queries to hide them (and related stylings) from incapable browsers: `@media transform-3d { ... }`

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/appl...
Fictitious femme fatale fooled cybersecurity
Many of the items are lent by fans on the show and followers of @Glinner (the writer) on Twitter.

@Glinner wrote Father Ted and Black Books as well.
If you have a prototype a customer wants then you will be excited. Set some deadlines, targets, goals, and really execute on it.

Yeah. Find ways to generate excitement on your side and actively seek it on a regular basis.

For me, in this phase I'm in, it's talking to entrepeneurs which really does help. I guess it's also about a supportive environment. Family and friends, people who believe in you and lift you up.
Unlike Google, Apple realized early on that they would need carrier support to get into the market at all. You only get that by having exclusives. Normally these only last a year. Why 5 years? I don't know but I've heard that ATT was paying Apple part of the data subscriptions.
codility.com made a parthership with http://humanway.com/ - together they offer value prop that you are looking for.