skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I imagine that this gives the moral high ground back to the US Government? (sarcasm)
For me, this was very interesting, as it mirrors a lot of the work we've done at Constrex with our first product Tender.ly - currently being sold as downloadable software, but one which started life as a SaaS offering, changed from that, and will be returning to that as well in the near future.

However, we explicitly do not keep separate branches for the SaaS and downloadable versions of Tender.ly, as the last thing we want is divergent code branches. This is a bit different of a situation to GitHub, which has separate products, but makes our development a bit easier at the expense of a bit more up-front thought when doing the coding - which probably isn't a bad thing.

We ended up coming up with the same solution as GitHub - coalescing all the divergent code into sets of modules, which are then included based on the rails environment loaded at start-up. As we don't want purchasers of the software establishing themselves as competitors (despite the license conditions), all the SaaS code is simply deleted by the build scripts we use to release.

As an aside, JRuby + Glassfish + Rails is a very nice stack for selling downloadable web software - the same code runs on Windows and Linux with minimal changes, and some simple scripts to do the database setup. I really should write a blog post about it at some stage. Perhaps when the day is extended to 25 or 26 hours.

edit: Apparently I can't conjugate English verbs.
Saving this to read for later. I just wanted to say in advance that it's really refreshing to see a blog so well designed that I feel like I've _already_ clicked my Readability bookmarklet when I first arrive.
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Great post and I agree... I think newsletters fit with what people are looking for these days and the market is wide open.

A newsletter/founder that probably isn't big enough to make it on that list, but that I would highly recommend is Mark Hurst's Good Experience newsletter - http://www.goodexperience.com.

It is what originally inspired me to want to create a newsletter (which ended up finally being Hacker Newsletter - http://www.hackernewsletter.com) and is the only newsletter that I open and read each one. To me it is just like getting your favorite magazine, but better since I don't have to do anything but open gmail.
That shouldn't matter, they are just measuring pure volume on the other side. HN users may read more stories than Reddit users, but I wouldn't assume that.
I quit cold turkey last year. August 28th it will be one year exactly. I have been smoking off and on since High school. All off times were accomplished just by not smoking. Every time I have started back up It was not a big deal. I guess this time it is different, I came to the conclusion that smoking does nothing for you, it spends your money, that is all. I replace smoking with cycling, nothing too major but definitely something positive.
As for your goal of getting to X perday, bad idea, you always fail, I always failed, every smoker I know fails at that goal. If you are going to quit, then quit. Wht is stopping you from quitting completely?
Neither Street View itself nor the ability to move within it are useless. I use Street View to locate the entrances to unfamiliar stores, find parking, identify landmarks, etc., saving myself a considerable amount of time spent driving (and CO2 emissions).
Maybe easier for you (very debatable), but never easier for the guy who needed something exposed today to get his job done.

I have never been bitten by over-promiscuous code entries in Python. The times I've gone beyond the published API, I knew I was doing it so I knew I had to keep track of it. And I've gone deep here (replacing Django's database handling in their unit testing framework).

On the other hand, I can't count how many times I've been stuck in Java figuring out how to get around somebody's final class or private method that I really needed to tweak just a little bit or, worse, I needed access to a field I can see in my debugger. Needing to reflect through to get at it is STUPID.
Maybe a bias in who installs their measurement tools. One huge programming or startup site (techcrunch?) might be skewing the numbers towards hacker news, which could believably drive more tech-news readers than reddit.
> Note: This is NOT a Stack Exchange site. "Stack Exchange" is a trademark of Stack Overflow Inc and may not be used to identify anything except Q&A websites built on the technology of Stack Overflow Inc.

You should re-read the title, it says "stackexchange like site", not "stackexchange site". Also this site has the support of many from Canonical, the company that owns Ubuntu.

> Perhaps coincidentally, the private beta of the real Ubuntu Stack Exchange has just begun

But stackexchange is only for English speaking people. How about people from South America like myself or the rest of the world? Shapado supports many languages http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Shapado/stats and integrates with more services, including Launchpad from Ubuntu. Also, Shapado is open source which is more in the spirit of Ubuntu.
We'd probably survive a 500-character limit
Focus on your site/content and its security (SQL injection, XSS, secure password storage, spam prevention, etc).

There have been no remote-root sploits in Linux/ssh/apache in a long freaking time. If you get owned, it's probably due to your code, not some widely used open source component.
If you search the market for "Jackeey" you'll get several dozen wallpaper apps. I think the article is treating all of them as a single app, which explains the "1.1 to 4.6 million" downloads: they just added up the lower and upper bounds of the ranges for each individual app. And as I said above, they don't appear to be requesting permissions that would let them do most of the nasty things described.
http://www.raterush.com/pages/digg-reddit might explain this somewhat.

A huge chunk of reddit links are back to reddit, to imgur and to things like major newspapers and youtube. If only a few of these are not actually tracked by Woopra, the results would get skewed significantly.
A very nice list. Readable, explanatory, and full of good suggestions. Almost all focused on session / injection / xss attacks, but that's probably the biggest threat you've got. I wish I'd seen it sooner; most I've seen before, but the regex one in particular was new to me, and it really only takes one, doesn't it?

Anyone know of anything notable they missed? I'd love to know, and it could be useful to get it added to the list too.
MSR is one of the top computer science academic-research labs in the world -- their output, especially in my field of computer vision/graphics, rivals any university at all of the top conferences. As other comments have stated, they have an unbelievable amount of freedom in tackling projects and have managed to attract lots of very good people. This freedom, however, comes at the price of research not necessarily making it to commercial product (at least not right away).

But that's not the goal. This kind of research solves the "hard" problems, hopefully making it easier for engineers at MS (or at other companies) to make a working system. This is not to downplay the latters' roles -- as any engineer can tell you, making a working system for consumers is a very time-consuming process that requires a lot of manpower, engineering, graphic and usability design, etc.

The difference is simply in division of labor. Researchers push the boundary of what's possible, engineers fill in the newly excavated space with working and polished products.

Incidentally, while Google manages to hire all the best engineers/hackers/programmers, their research groups aren't at the level of MSR's yet. In part, I think this is because their research actually makes it to product fairly fast -- because the researchers have to spend a fair amount of time integrating new research results into products. I wonder if this culture will change...
ASK: Looking for an internal click tracking tool
I was wondering if anyone can recommend a click tracking tool for internal purposes. Preferably a php tool of some kind we can self-install/host.

I need to be able to create tracking codes or short urls for different links in our app, and see clicks, stats, etc.

What I'm looking for is essentially an internal bit.ly.

Or does someone know of a cheap service that provides this?
thanks
The God Project — Hinduism as an open source faith
Debian could probably provide a build server if they ask.

The have them anyway, and they build PostgreSQL anyway when it's uploaded to debian (although obviously that's not every commit).

But with ccache a rebuild is not very expensive.
That's the landing page of my project which is in an early beta stage. It's not perfect but something to start with (feedback is welcome): http://www.flockengine.com
It is highly non-obvious to me that the demographics who use Hulu and the demographics advertisers pay $$$ to reach are the same demographics.
Sorry, that's tl;dr for me.
Here's something from Android: http://code.google.com/p/compcache/
^ and $ also work.
And who's to say they were the real leaker? It's pretty trivial to copy files, it could have easily been taken from their computer without their knowledge or consent.
Whatever you want to use for the project. For a recent project, one of my coworkers created a domain specific language and the rest of us coded in that language. For another project, I use C++, because I'm leveraging an existing code base. Colleagues of mine use F# for program analysis tools, which they love. As you say, F# came out of the MSR Cambridge languages group, that's a great tech transfer story.

That being said, there are a lot of internal libraries or projects written in C/C++ or C#. So I see a lot of those languages. I've also been learning ASP.NET, in part so I can better understand cross site scripting attacks on applications written on that platform.
Yes, you're in the db. :)
Much ado about nothing. The incompatibilities between 5.2 and 5.3 are few and solving them even on a large scale project would take all of 5 minutes.
I realize Shapado is basically a clone of the software, but identifying it as "Stack Exchange" even with "like" after it is still a trademark violation. You don't see advertisements for "Toyota-like" cars or "Apple-like" computers for precisely that reason.
After trying to quit several times, I never got to a point where the cravings were manageable. It seemed I would have to learn to live with the cravings, so two years ago I attempted cold-turkey and made it two months while wanting a cigarette most of the time.

Then a great thing happened; I started to think about it less and less. After 4 months I almost never thought about it, and cravings were very rare. The two or three cigarettes I've tried since quitting tasted just awful and made me nauseated.

Good luck.
A number of HN Clojure users included :)
A sign of experience with open source: You become incredibly reluctant to hack directly on the source of a popular library. With great power comes great responsibility.

In Drupal, for example, there is a saying: "every time you hack core (or a module you didn't write) god kills a kitten." In the spirit of open source, we probably borrowed that saying from some earlier project, because it is generally true.

The standard Java String library is the same for everyone. [1] If you download Random Java Library X, and X works with the String library, you can probably be assured that X has been tested with the standard String library. As soon as you change one line of the library this is no longer the case. You must now face the possibility that your "minor" change will lead to side effects when combined with other things, and the responsibility for finding those side effects is now entirely yours.

Plus, the sheer mechanical tedium of preserving your patch, making sure to apply it to every new version of the library as it comes out, relearning how the patch works every few months, porting the patch when it fails to apply cleanly to a new version, figuring out how to distribute your personalized package to others because they can no longer simply `apt-get` your package from the canonical repository, dealing with the fact that the standard docs and the published books might not cover your variation...

Tools like Github have made all this stuff much easier, but it's still a bad idea to tinker with others' libraries without a good reason.

The more typical advantage of open source is that you can read exactly what your library is doing, which makes it easier to figure out how to work around it without actually editing it.

---

[1] Until it isn't. But at that point it will generally get a different version number, and an official release notice, and it will have a community that is aware of the change and will promptly coordinate to find and fix any new incompatibilities with other libraries.
> It's always easier to expose something later than to make it private later.

...if you're using Java, since (AFAIK) you can't switch between public fields and getters/setters. Python, however, has properties: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.2.3/descrintro/#pr... . Point 4 of http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html covers why they're a good idea, though you can probably figure it out from their description.
No, I have 2 recent cards, both running Radeon. From what I understand, the 2 projects have mostly merged, and in the future, Radeon is the driver to be used for all cards.
Also try switching sides when you're ahead.
I quit many times in many ways, each time because I wanted to stop smoking. It was only when I didn't want to smoke that it actually stuck. Maybe that's too zen-like, but that's my story.

Unless one is a chipper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipper_(tobacco)), it's an all or nothing thing. Just let go.
It kind of sounds like you're describing a sparse array.
"I have a degree in economics. I studied this at Oxford University, and have as good a grasp as anyone."

This provides a great theoretical foundation for his argument. Now all I want to see is a more practical one.
> How do I keep the server up to date?

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade
Useful data, thanks! I'm a little disappointed the pie charts don't include 'Other', which would have given a sense of how long the tail is.

Regarding the seeming discrepancy in data for Google's share, the reasons are probably: (i) more of Bing/Yahoo's traffic stays within their portals than Google's does, and (ii) Google is especially dominant among tech-savvy users, and the websites that were analyzed have proportionally more of such users (which would also explain why HN shows up).
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According to Engadget it's faster but I guess it will still have the flash to black.

"The new handheld...has a 20 percent faster refresh rate on its E Ink (yep, still E Ink) screen"

"The screen will remain the same 6-inch size as the last two Kindles, though the company claims page turns are faster and contrast is improved."
I think that some people don't get eyestrain using a monitor because their eyes jump around and off of it continually throughout the day. The eye motions and strain of reading is fairly different when you read word after word, line after line for 1/2 hour or more.

An analogy would be saying your arms don't get sore picking up a book but actually you're picking up a book 100 or more times in a row. Your arm will get tired.
we started and finished shipments of the zenPad. Why don't you check our website before "dubbing" as a scam ?
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"A search by The New York Times through a sampling of the documents released by the organization WikiLeaks found reports that gave the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing credible information to American and NATO troops."
I used nicotene lozenges with great success. However, it was a bitch to quit the lozenges because I stayed on them for way too long.

In the end, I wished I had just gone cold turkey. Quitting was totally worth it though (pack a day habit).
StackExchange must be lucky to have lawyers working for them for free ;)
I did some digging and ...

The article doesn't mention which app was malicious however they did mention that the app publisher went by the name of "jackeey,wallpaper".

I ran some queries and it seems like the developer that publishes apps under "jackeey,wallpaper" also publishes under "jackeey.wu".

A list of the apps published by this developer are here (most of which are wallpaper apps):

http://andbot.com/developer/jackeeywallpaper

http://andbot.com/developer/jackeey-wu

http://andbot.com/developer/jackeeywu
Ask HN: Advice for my startup - Best use of 14,000 email addresses?
I've built a few simple multiplayer games for Android and about 14,000 players have (optionally) submitted their email with an expressed interest in hearing about new related projects. Don't know if that's a lot but I guess they might be of some value if I can put them to use. My startup now became a multiplayer engine and hosted gameserver infrastructure, with a beta version currently released for Android developers (http://www.flockengine.com).

How do you think I could best use those email addresses?

They are all from people enjoying multiplayer games on Android, therefore it could be an interesting promotion channel for Android developers using my framework. Another idea could be simply to start building an email newsletter. I would really appreciate your feedback / advice!
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Hopefully nobody gets killed over this...
Does Android have the ability to remotely kill applications like iOS? If so, perhaps they did that, so your app just disappeared if you had it.

I was going to say "I can't imagine Google hushing up a security issue", but it does have the potential to get thrown in their face by Apple, "See, our walled garden is a good thing." (Not that I believe for an instant that Apple's approval would catch something like this.)
That's actually pretty similar to how we do it, too: we precompile models, controllers, and most other relevant private libraries, then we deliver it on a JRuby stack.

It's actually quite slick and works pretty well, unless you have a ton of non-Java compiled gems to deal with. We've been able to get through that pretty well or find alternatives, although it looks like JRuby's looking to support those libraries in the near future, too, which is great. Makes JRuby quite an attractive platform for this type of stuff.
I saw three great-aunts and one grandfather die before I was over 18 from cigarettes and related effects, so I never dreamed of starting.
hn.jasonz (at) gmail - would love to talk
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If a wallpaper app requests access to your contacts and millions of users install it anyways that is a flaw in Android's security model. After a while you become conditioned to just hitting Install without even looking at the permissions being requested. Just because users are lazy or even stupid is not an excuse for leaving them vulnerable.
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The Stop and Shops near me are delightful. Instead of scanning items at the checkout counter, they have handheld scanners to use as you put items in your bags in your cart. Checkout involves only having the handheld device talk to the store and paying. No need to take everything out, scan it and put it back in bags in the cart.
Summary: if your product isn't useful (or doesn't have utility in the economic sense) it's harder to charge for it.

Duh.

The unfortunate conclusion of this is that social media may just not be that useful to people. DHH even made this point at his startup school talk - saying that if people aren't that willing to pay for your app, maybe it's just not that useful. I believe they've also stated elsewhere that when they moved Basecamp (or was it backpack) to a B2B product instead of B2C it got way easier to make money.
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Wow, slashdot has really fallen far.

I know that I personally hardly read it anymore, but I used to read it many times per day.
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Probabilistic-Based Graph Models and Their Applications in Image Understanding
Hehe. You would be surprised (or maybe not) with the number of Chrome extension developers that don't consider https.
What’s Really Going on Behind Murdoch’s Paywall?
I think you could take a step beyond this, and use the performance of those pilots to judge whether or not to continue borderline shows like Law & Order or to dump them in favor of a promising pilot.
> It kind of sounds like you're describing a sparse array.

hmm not really. this: [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrolled_linked_list ] is what i had in mind
Well I suppose it's not quite as necessary evolutionarily to socialize with "blacks/hispanics/[ethnic]" as it is with women.
In my opinion, an email newsletter would be fantastic. Jason L Baptiste recently wrote a great article on that(link: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/email-newsletters-are-sti...).

You could target the gamers(focusing on the gamers that play multiplayer games) audience and have website whose target audience you're serving pay you for ads.

I remember there was a discussion on HN mentioning this topic, someone said that you could easily take 300 for a CPM for email newsletters.

Thus, if you do the math you have near 6k from newsletters.

Good luck! :)
The executives also have experience judging how much work a pilot needs to become viable--if a pilot is pretty boring in its present state but has a lot of promise, they can think of things to change to make it better.

Of course, just as often as not, this is how executives ruin otherwise promising shows.
In java private variables and functions are not accessible from outside the class.

Not quite - using reflection you can dig into private fields and do your worst to them, you just need to tag each private member's Field object with with field.setAccessible(true) before accessing it reflectively.

The only hitch is that you might get a SecurityException, but you can avoid that if you're running your code on your own JVM (by default, it should work just fine, it's if you're deploying applets or something like that where you might get the exception due to the different sandboxing rules).
This is wrong in so many ways...

Let me try to address some:

* Science shouldn't strive to be democratic; it should aim to be correct, regardless of what the majority thinks.

* Celebrities in Oprah divulging science? Oh please.

* Science does tell us what we should do and that is part of their job. It is your doctor job, at least.

But the bottom line obviously is that this article is just a propaganda piece trying to reconfirm the fake Climategate "scandal".
i "accidentally" quit.. had no intention of quitting permanently but i was working two jobs at the time.. i measured how much time i was losing to smoking.. 5 min/stick.. that it'd be good if i was being paid for that time instead; like another hour or so a day.

i used nicotine gum to avoid the trip outside to smoke.. at least i could get my nicotine fix while still in front of the PC.. was like this for months then transitioned to ordinary gum.. that's the time when my will was really put to the test.

worked for me.. never smoked another cigarette since i went down this road.. nicotine-independent now for two years.

btw.. i've been a heavy smoker (1.5-2 packs/day) for 22 years straight, before this.