skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems a spectacularly foolish idea. Believing that we understand the emergent complexity of any ecosystem to the point that we can predictably alter it is a fallacy we've repeatedly disproven, and yet this is talking about altering the ecosystem of the entire planet.
Let me tell you from long and painful personal experience that nobody in the industry has a "fail proof level of response", including Microsoft, which has outspent the rest of the industry combined by a significant multiple.

Your expectations are unrealistic.

The biggest problem this whole industry has right now is that it is excruciatingly hard to find talent. Nobody has enough people. Everyone, from Google through MSFT through Adobe though Apple through Cisco &c &c &c, is screwing things up because of it.
i get the feeling my machines have a busy day ahead of them.
It's not actually a myth. There aren't very many UNIX-based operating systems in the hands of the average user, who is the prime target, since the users are the biggest vulnerability in any system.

UNIX isn't inherently secure to begin with, in fact initially security for UNIX was an afterthought. It wasn't until it started gaining widespread use that the UNIX developers started taking security seriously. I went through the transition from having encrypted passwords in the /etc/passwords file, which everyone could read (or no one could log in) to /etc/shadow as security started becoming important.

That said, there was a virus around 8 years ago that specifically targeted a bunch of NCSA UNIX machines, and they ended up getting caught with their pants down -- there WAS a fix already available that would have blocked the virus, but the NCSA admins hadn't been diligent about installing it.
I love your point about chess and go. Is there any way to objectively evaluate that a game with no obvious degenerate cases?
Euler #2 (in Perl6)
Does anyone have any thoughts on using config software like Puppet or Chef? I've been having to deploy a few more servers lately and this is exactly what I may need, curious to hear of experiences.
Most recruiters don't know what a programmer is to begin with.
Cyberattacks, Hackers and the Increasing Threat to InfoSec
I would guess that’s why there is a “without any negative consequences” condition?

If I could, with the push of a button, kill any and all species which cause harm to humans without, in the process, causing harm to or even killing humans I would do it, too. Sure. No second thoughts about that.
I did some searching awhile ago and couldn't find anything. There used to be PyMag (http://pythonmagazine.com/), but they went on indefinite hiatus in 2009.

It's a shame there isn't a magazine devoted to python. As a guy who came to python via ruby/rails, I have to say the python community is much less organized on the community-building and marketing front. That said, it could just be that they're nose down, getting stuff done.
Bright orange text on white. Nice.
Dear Google Developer, Its Time to Leave Your Job
I know. It was a joke. :-)
Show Me the Headers
I feel like there's some sort of incredible potential here, if only we could get grinding games to correspond to some real world activity...
Countdown to Zero
You make it sound like they'll be fired if they don't use their new phones.

I feel 99% confident that won't be the case. I'll give you an anecdote: Google employees got G1's on launch day and I know that my buddy gave his to his wife (a non-google employee). He's still happily employed.
Readability is one of the hardest things to achieve in code, so you might as well make it easier. I admit Java is ugly- but you can locally determine what it is up to. The repetition of types is bad (been really enjoying how Scala got rid of that). But the "it is too much typing" kind of complaint is irrelevant if you have an editor or IDE that can paste, execute quick macros or add the boilerplate all by itself.
It isn't standard, however it is common there is a probationary period during which any employee loss means no fee is paid.
And just think, if the grinders actually made any money at it, they'd be the next economic powerhouse!
Syntax highlighting, auto complete and more within Python interpreter
Thanks to the general availability and utilization of vaccines against smallpox and polio, massive improvements in sanitation and emergency response, and long-term cardiac therapy, the death rate due to cancers is radically up.

Cancer is a horrible disesase. Which one of those changes should we not have made to end up in the situation we're in today?
> I'm trying to figure out whether this is a problem with my definition of "sure of"

I should this is obvious. If you're "sure of" false things a lot, obviously something is going wrong. Try not to be so sure of things.
Come on, Yan. Really? Look at the m-team at "InZero Systems", who placed this PR story in the Economist:

http://www.inzerosystems.com/company/principals/

* A "well-known international investor"

* A former president at Lockheed Martin

* A Russian inventor (of "medical, biotech, electric vehicles" &c)

* A "member of the board of the National Bank of Ukraine"

* A Russian tech entrepreneur, former founder of an online computer repair and support company.

This A-Team of computer security talent devised a cunning plan to set up a "honeypot" (it being 2002 --- oh wait) and then challenging the shadowy hacker underground to recover "a document" from it. Yeah, I'm sure the Advanced Persistant Threat guys writing zero-day browser malware are gonna get right on that.
I think crap is stretching it a bit, but I do think the iOS 4 release on iPad will be a very important update.
Noticed there was a bit of lag between any operation... Anybody have an idea if it was a platform issue or a data fetching issue?
Most of the terminal MS programs are not terribly competitive and are mainly made up of either students who did not have a CS undergrad degree or got one long ago and did not use it. If you have the cash and pass their basic entry tests (usually just the GRE, +TOEFL if from a non-English country) it shouldn't be a problem for you.

That said, a Ph.D. program (or the booby-prize/MS degree from it) is a completely different matter. But despite being the same degree, the terminal MS programs are a completely different program, and are intended for people with a background like yours who are trying to get further in their CS career.
what is the speakercave?
State of VC in five years?
My 70 year old father has a facebook account and doesn't have the slighest clue what do with it, consequently it goes unused.

They may 500 million accounts but they only get 150 million or less users per month. Of that, I bet 50 million of them make up the lion's share of the pageviews. 5 million are complete facebook nutters playing farmville and mobwars 24/7.

If Facebook is a nation of 500 million then the US is a nation of billions, if you count all the tourists and business types flying in/out.
I've been 'learning to code' since I was 9 (I'm 18 now). That's cool if you want to keep a personal journal about your experiences but you should know that no one is really going to give a shit about your fourth day. Instead of focusing on writing or worrying about what people think you should focus on learning because there is a lot to learn.
The Biggest Web 2.0 Flops to Date
Indeed. This is going to be a really useful app especially to those that have disabilities (mainly hearing impairments).

Best of luck!
I'm guessing you'll have to read the follow-up post.
No, you can't lock a gadget to the top of the sidebar
In 2009 the first case of dengue fever in America since 1934 (also called breakbone fever due to the pain): http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/07/22/dengue.fever/ and there have been 28 cases since.

The reason is that DDT is wearing off and we are getting more mosquitoes.
She is not just a random blogger. She has been a tech journalist for a couple of decades. And I remember her from years ago as one of the few who took the job seriously.

She has been following Microsoft exclusively for years. I think she was the one who broke the scandal a few years back about Microsoft having designated "minders" for journalists that said things they didn't like. But back when Linux broke into the mainstream in the late 90s she was one of the few tech journalists who "got" it pretty quickly. (She made the mistake of regurgitating Microsoft's position once, quickly got corrected, and then demonstrated learning and insight thereafter.)

I have no interest in Microsoft so I haven't read anything she's written recently. But she at least used to be on my short list of journalists who I could assume were more likely to have a clue than not.
Sure, most recruiters can get you good money at usually large companies that may or may not actually be a good fit for you. It kind of speaks for itself that you are leaving after a couple months.

I believe the best way to get a job you will love and get paid well to do it, is to aggressively pursue companies that you want to work for. This is really pretty easy nowadays, you find an email for the company and you write a great cover letter and you send it off with your resume. Doesn't matter if they have any openings or not. You should already know the companies products, how they work, contribute to relevant open source, etc.
A civilisation like game could work. Thinking about something like this in the past I like the idea of something that may run for some days and then have a winner. At which point it can be modified to remove any game breaking strategies that may crop up, probably changed enough to that copying the previous winner won't help. Then give everyone say another week to rescript their AI.

Possibly something like 30 seconds to 1 minute turns with allowing the server your querying maybe 5 seconds to return moves. Then you would just need some way to assess progress. I like the idea to the people can get beaten relatively fast, just the idea that everyone starts out on a massive map and bigger civilisations soon start to form by wiping others out.
Headline is misleading. "Nature" doesn't have an opinion, it's asking a question and reporting the responses of relevant experts.
In particular, while I fully support your decision to start a business, and I wish you the very best of luck, perhaps you should let someone else decide that what you've written is worth submitting.
I agree that the effort and money spent on conservation is skewed in favor of cute and furry animals. But there is a real upside to getting rid of mosquitoes. From the article:

Malaria infects some 247 million people worldwide each year, and kills nearly one million. Mosquitoes cause a huge further medical and financial burden by spreading yellow fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, Chikungunya virus and West Nile virus.
Oh please.

Gruber isn't a blind fanboy. Daniel Eran Dilger, on the other hand, while really insightful, can't seem to find anything wrong with anything Apple does.
Unfortunately its not African Gold but it is on the same road!

Its been a while since I was in contact with my cousin... so much so that I've only just noticed he's rebranded/rebooted the business (though still at same address): http://www.diaryplan.com/
Yes, just like AJAX. The demand for skills in what's currently a vague buzzword increases. To me this only demonstrates how misunderstood HTML5 is, as many of the features that fall under the HTML5 umbrella have been in use for years.

I'm still waiting for the cover of Time to be HTML5, just like it was for AJAX back when. At that point we'll know it truly reached its buzzword potential.

Note: I'm not saying that AJAX or HTML5 is vague to technically proficient audiences, but rather, the use of terms outside of that audience is/was. It'll be interesting considering all the incorrect context AJAX was used in, especially since it's much more limited in scope than HTML5.
If you knowingly agree to a TOS it does not matter whether it's unethical or not. When you sign you agree to the ethics contained. You are supposed to be reading the TOS to see whether you agree or not and once you sign you are being unethical if you break the TOS in any other way not specifically allowed in the TOS.
I hate nature's flying dirty syringes as much as anyone else, but most of the proposed solutions are either localized to a certain area, or species-specific, or both. Why wouldn't we just start with the disease vector species, then check to see if their eradication had an environmental impact?
The old spice container I have shows no aluminum in the ingredients list... care to revise or elucidate?
I'm unclear on how people rationalize blowing past technical TOS enforcement measures on a web app. Where, exactly, do you propose drawing the line? Because I think I speak for everyone in the room that makes a living doing application pentesting: there are very, very few technical countermeasures you will come up with that a consulting-week or two won't blow past.
I assumed it was their apartment/home base... sort of like the Bat Cave.
"Eyeballs"?
We use MySQL for example for logging a lot of stuff coming out of the game - for example texture usage, error messages, where people were shooting mostly, anything.

Also MySQL, SQLIte are being used for the caching on the server, and caching locally of the converted data.

PHP has been used for getting few internal sites, but I can't tell much.

So these technologies are not used in the actual games (at least ours), but are used in the internal tools to make them.
This. The parent's idea is similar to storing the user's password forever in memory for sudo. As any ol' neckbeard could tell you, that's a Bad Thing.
I think it is interesting that she equates buying a product to joining a community.
Yup. Also worth noting is that this is a proof of concept, a real attack would likely use non visible form fields and background automatic data transmission. I think most people would agree that there's a world of difference between a phishing attack and an automated drive by attack.
"...a growing trend in the world of security flaws: the role of third-party software. Many of Apple's flaws are not in its operating system, Mac OS X, but rather in software like Safari, QuickTime, and iTunes."

How are any of those third-party? They are all sold by Apple. Just because they also happen to run in Windows doesn't make them third-party.
There were a few ideas that I thought might help with those problems:

1) The goal is primarily to gather/produce resources, not to actually force combat. Combat is one strategy that could prove beneficial (since you avoid the cost of mining/production by just taking it from their wreckage), but with minimal effort, you should be able to outrun/avoid most of these 'pirates'.

2) By employing some sort of hosted code, you can organise some sort of a market for code snippets/components, encouraging people to share what they have done in a variety of ways, on teh basis that profitting from it being used by others outweighs the cost of others using it against you.

3) It doesn't need all that complexity to start, or even in the same game. But the complexity helps to some extent by making it harder for a single abusable game mechanic to control the whole system. Most people will focus initially on developing a good (or just workable) solution to a single aspect.
Sorry for the generalization. Among the 10 Microsoft employees I know, 9 of them have iPhones. I was pondering what their behavior might be in this scenario. Given a free brand new phone would they stop using their current iPhone 4 in favor of this new device. (Because I know they don't use their free Zunes.) That outcome could speak to the overall potential success of the phone.
The 500m figure was for active users. I'm not sure they announce exactly what that means, but typically it's a sign in during the past ~30 days.
Clickable:
http://www.collabrr.com/
Code First Development
Tell HN: AeroFS - File Syncing Without Servers
Conventional advertising wisdom revolves around brand awareness. Old Spice just got millions of people to say "Old Spice" to their friends a hundred times a day each with a big happy smile on their face. If sales are down, I'd bet its anomalous and/or too soon to tell. Look at the numbers six months to a year from now.
Even better: Use SSLH[1], so you can still have an HTTPS server, but also connect to ssh on port 443. Set it up myself and my boss still doesn't know.. :)

[1]: http://www.rutschle.net/tech/sslh.shtml
> Start qualifying everything.

For some reason I find it annoying when people do that. For example I often hear something like ("I don't know but, the library you are using is bloated compared to library X").

I frequently catch myself saying "I don't know" in front of assertions I make. This is an issue when talking to a less knowledgeable person, because the "I don't know" puts the more knowledgeable person at an immediate disadvantage, and lets the person with less knowledge have more of a say in how things should be run.

I find better just to confidently state something, and get called out for inaccuracies (it's certainly more memorable). Also think about what you said at the end of the day. It's better to recognize and admit inaccuracies than to hang onto your pride (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...).
It is only opinion. But no user visible file system, can't share documents between apps, no ability to have different users or even different set of Safari bookmarks on the same iPad, no ability to wirelessly sync, stupid screen of icons launch metaphor and more. Understand, I own one and love it (I think the pad form-factor is in fact game changing)- but the iPad is really a strange device.
1. Visually too 'busy'. My eyes don't know where to go, and the interface is probably too complex.

2. "Interact with others" is an incredibly non-descriptive slogan, call it "Realtime Digg" instead. I don't 'get it' soon enough. Visitors should see what this is and why it is awesome for them, within 10 seconds.

3. Entices me to start chatting, but then dissapoints me by saying I need to login first. I suggest you remove the login requirement for chatting.

Looks like an interesting concept, just needs a little more polished execution.
Sounds like an interesting idea. I would be interested in putting our affiliate program on your site. Feel free to ping me
There's a distinction that I've seen people miss, which I'll describe by example. Suppose you don't know Lisp, but you've seen many respectable people such as Paul Graham and Steve Yegge describe how great Lisp is for metaprogramming. This doesn't mean that you know the fact "Lisp => great for metaprogramming"! What you know is the fact "Many respectable people think => 'Lisp => great for metaprogramming'". This is an important distinction! It means you probably shouldn't talk about Lisp and metaprogramming, and if you do talk, you should make sure that you deliver the right fact, i.e. "I've heard that Lisp is good for metaprogramming", not "Lisp is good for metaprogramming".

> What I fear is looking incredible.

I'd rather that you fear being incredible (which it appears you are).

A resource that helped me think much more precisely about what I know and the level of confidence I have in that is the rationalist writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky. You might like to check out the sequences: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

When what you know differs from what is real, you have a problem where your mental map does not match the actual territory. The most important sequence, Map And Territory, addresses that: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory_%28sequence...

I also recommend to you the Reductionism sequence: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Reductionism_%28sequence%29

How often do you say "I don't know"? I think Voltaire was on to something when he wrote: "He must be very ignorant, for he answers every question he is asked."
Gruber has a knack toeing the Apple line, but you have to give him more credit than that. He bothers to lay out clear arguments in his posts, and I've yet to see him write something as contentless as this piece. I mean, what the hell is this:

But I never wanted to be part of the Apple community because I have had so many negative, hostile and condescending interactions with not just Apple fanboys, but regular Apple users. If that’s what “thinking different” was, I wanted no parts.

And she's bemoaning the lack of Internet Explorer on the iPad. Why, exactly?

I’d love to see Internet Explorer, Firefox and the Zune software (Microsoft’s iTunes equivalent) be ported to the iPad.
Die young, live fast: The evolution of an underclass
Yes. The "use original title" rule would work just fine in this case.
Do it, and most importantly: don't "cheat." Make sure your machine is 100% described by your tool. The closer to 100% you are without being at 100% the more likely you are to forget that single tweak.

Chef vs Puppet is like Emacs vs Vi. I use Puppet because it was the only game in town when I started, but I know a bunch of the Chef guys (hi Adam!) and they know whats up. The tools have different approaches but are rapidly converging on the same feature set, pick a simple role (say a webserver) and do the entire config in both tools and you'll know almost instantly which one matches your mindset better. I like to think Chef is a bit closer to the shell, things happen in order and you can rely on that, whereas Puppet is a bit more abstract and doesn't require you to micro-manage it as much. The golden truth is somewhere in the middle of this approach, Puppet for example just added some features to make ordering more consistent since people have really struggled with that in the past.

Chef is pure Ruby, so if you know Ruby you'll have a nice head-start. Puppet has the Puppet DSL, which if you are a sys-admin jives well with config style syntaxes. Puppet just released a pure Ruby DSL as well but it doesn't have 100% feature parity with the Puppet Language.

Provisioning and Bootstrapping machines is still a black art. I use a ruby script that sets some environment variables then launches a first run of Puppet, after that Puppet takes over and manages. There is no silver bullet (yet) for getting a machine into your Puppet/Chef cluster, though there are a lot of innovative approaches that look very promising. Depending on your environment (EC2 vs say Slicehost) I'm sure you can find a blog post that will get you going in the right direction. Here is mine: http://blog.onehub.com/posts/coordinating-the-onehub-cloud . This is already a bit out of date, we're migrating from iClassify to the officially blessed Puppet Dashboard (http://www.puppetlabs.com/puppet/related-projects/dashboard/) we just need to put some more time in to finish.

Testing sucks. You will need to come up with some repeatable environment you can run your configuration against. I use VMWare and just continuously restore to a snapshot. There has been some good development here, especially with Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/). This lets you write a shell script (or rake task in my case) that boots an instance, runs the config and then pauses for you to inspect. From here you can push another button and 'retry' the whole thing or destroy the VM and start over. It is annoying to get this going and you'll be tempted to just start on one of your machines but that is a bad idea. This tool is going to run as root, and after the first day it is going to run with minimal supervision. You need to be sure its doing what you expect.
It raises a valid issue though: The article's author is operating under the assumption that any replacement language must be totally interoperable with C -- both calling and being called. If you have some crazy stack-reassignment logic in a new language, it will break a native C function's ability to longjmp out of a calling function written in the new language.
is it a design pattern or an antipattern to call the main page just "Home"?