skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result."

Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many. I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq[0], so I can't bring myself to be upset about something that is a drop in the bucket (not to mention indirect, rather than direct, responsibility) in comparison.

Clarification: I am not suggesting that you either disagree or agree with the position I present here. I'm just presenting it.

[0] To spell it out: Afghanistan started their war by knowingly allowing al Qaeda to plan and train for the September 11 attacks in Afghanistan. The American invasion is therefore a retaliation, and not a war of aggression, so fair enough. My feelings on the war in Iraq are that it was a waste of time, effort, lives, and money, and was driven by the American and British governments knowingly and intentionally deceiving their publics. If the country I live in had tagged along for the ride, I would be rather upset about the situation, but if some foreign government wants to self-harm it's not my problem.
A diversified stock portfolio is betting on economic growth. The economy has grown consistently for the last six hundred years.
Right. So seeing a questionable video involving a few asshole US soldiers means that it's perfectly okay for hundreds more to die needlessly.

what the hell kind of reasoning is that?
Sex Sells - Explaining the CAP Theorem to Management (NSFW)
I've started a new chapter in my life: http://www.mathgladiator.com/hacker-to-hustler/
He's a cofounder, though I'm not sure how much he is involved these days.
One interesting possible side-effect of a post like this is that it points out the extent to which Perl is or can be used for more than something extremely simple.

I suspect there may be lots of programmers who've used Perl, or seen it used by coworkers, for throwing together quick scripts, but don't think of it as suited for larger projects, or as having any particularly interesting or advanced linguistic features.

Chromatic lists features that are built into Rakudo Star, but he also lists how they're available as add-ons to Perl 5. That may bring positive attention not just to Perl 6, but to Perl 5 as well.
plagiarism is copying the exact expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
I like the fact that smaller investments go a great deal in funding tech startups, bootstrapping is more viable now. The iterative approach is also critical since most founders cant build the product in one shot
That certainly isn't true. For example, stocks were not the best asset class in the 2000s (bonds did much better this past decade). The linked page is just giving broad "stocks are generally better", but isn't doing decade-by-decade comparisons (which would be interesting to see).
The article said he co-founded it.
YC plug, but I really always thought DropBox did a great job - one of the things I most appreciated was the key example - they put it in terms of an item that everyone recognizes and a problem most people (if not all) have probably dealt with. I think the present version is even extended a bit from the original (now includes some computer files info)
In my long history of development I've seen VERY few rewrites that were successful. I've seen probably tens that ended up wasting a lot of money and time and probably about two or three that proved to be worth it.

I really think the problem is that most devs don't know how to read code. Sure there are some programs that have pathological problems in them, but those are relatively rare. It is often just design choices or programming patterns that a particular dev doesn't like or understand.
A server on Amazon (dedicated) is only about 70$/month, is that an option as well? Pretty much no maintenance, just restart if it crashes.
"Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many."

This makes Wikileaks just as bad as the people they are trying to "expose". It really makes me question many of their past articles.

Why release a video of American soldiers killing innocent people when they themselves don't have the decency to respect human life? They don't know or care about how many people could die as a result of this information. It could be 0, 10, or 1000.
There is a difference between code which disagrees with your preferred conventions, code which is ugly but right, code with serious architectural flaws but which is good enough for right now, and bad code which has bred until it is an inescapable tar pit of unnecessary complexity.

The ability to tell the difference comes with experience, as does the ability to abide the first three.

However, I have found that experience has changed my approach to the last away from "complaining" and toward "fire and brimstone sermon".
Maybe it is __less__ fundamental, but the point of this discussion (which you are confused about) is that it is __still__ fundamental.

Maybe you won't die, but humanity wouldn't exist without it. And don't pretend that most people don't have a primal urge to have offspring, or at the very least, a sexual relationship.
I tried the addon (FF4 only), you don't really have to organize them all the time (at least from my experience).

If you have 1 tab open, and then click on a link, and open it in a new tab, it will automatically be grouped together with the "parent" tab.

One personal problem I found, it's just that I need to see the tabs all the time, while in this way the other groups are hidden: to see them with this addon you have to click the addon icon (navigation toolbar) or access it by shortcut.
All coders should be schooled in the arts of negotiation. Sustainable pace is the only environment I will work in.

If a boss or customer is pushing for a new feature, the answer is to cut something else. Just because they want it doesn't mean they must have it. "But I might lose my job! But they might think I'm an amateur! But they... but...". No. Sustainable pace means working reasonably. Yes, there will always be others willing to say yes to everything and work insane hours. And they will continue to write crap code.

You've heard the old adage "Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two". Mine is "Good, fast, or cheap. Pick one, and it better be Good".
The information that they are obtaining here isn't sensitive at all, in my opinion.

Yes, I'll gladly tell people what browser I use at work, what my wireless network name is, and so on. This is nothing critical to security. I won't discuss actual secrets, but these aren't them.
I understand your point, but isn't the idea to be better? It's hard to argue that information should be free when the direct results of this will be human casualties. I mean, that's how it is being played and will be played.

Note, I'm speaking literally when I say "hard to argue". I think it's the correct ideal and I think our government could use doses of unexpected transparency but it's the Fox News I'm thinking about.
It was about why NYC may be supplanting Boston as the number 2. If my theory about the reason is correct, then the trend will be pretty significant.
Why is what OK? For law-enforcement personnel to ask you questions? Or search you? Both of these are established and legal and common. Saying they shouldn't be able to search your laptop because of the Internet is like suggesting police shouldn't check suspects in violent crimes for knives because of the availability of guns. Instead of making more vague regulations about what you can and can't be asked at the border, there is a very simple remedy for government agents asking you questions you don't want to answer - simply not answering. That's a legal right Jacob Appelbaum had no trouble taking advantage of.
Have a look at Test Cricket
Firefox is a single-process application, and won't let you start another one (at least sharing the same user data; you can run a different build, but you can't share/use the same user data).
I have found that experience has changed my approach to the last away from "complaining" and toward "fire and brimstone sermon".

Oddly, I've found that experience has changed my approach in the exactly opposite way.
Will I? (Self-Talk and Motivation)
You wouldn't really expect the White House and Pentagon to sit and watch as a bunch of "kids" are revealing their dirty laundry !? All the classified "dirty laundry" -- not security related stuff, like nuclear launch codes, but rather "shameful" acts.

They are very good at propaganda and so went full steam with it. A couple of themes emerged from that effort.

1) "Obama knows about these problems and is already handling it". This is a great use of propaganda. It both makes the leaked documents "un-interesting" and it makes Obama look good. I've heard this one on the radio and in a couple of other sources. It is often regurgitated verbatim without any supporting evidence how Obama has improved the situation.

2) "This will hurt our troops". This is also a great propaganda line because it plays on the existing framework of "support our troops". Nobody wants to hurt the son or husband of their neighbor in their small town. Wikileaks is not exposing cover-ups and mis-management of resources, death of civilians, it is "hurting our soldiers". This appeals to the middle America. "Those Wikileaks kids might as well just shoot our boys in the back" kind of feeling.

3) Now, in the Defcon case. They just hope to scare any hackers or anyone thinking of contributing or collaborating with Wikileaks. The implication is that "you might also get a visit from FBI" or "You might get randomly search everytime you fly. Are you prepared to make that choice?" Again that is very effective.

Now I am not saying that there is necessarily a unified, centrally controlled propaganda campaign, it could be just an emergent behavior from a bunch of govt. agencies.
"I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq."

If you don't live in Russia nor China, what makes you think that the U.S. won't converge towards tyranny at some point in the future and start using their fantastic military machine to invade countries at will, building an empire that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could even dream of? If that sounds impossible, let us not forget that Germany in the 1920s was quite different from Germany in the 1930s.

I remember the huge demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in Europe in early 2003. Hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Barcelona. The biggest protests since Vietnam. And, then, one year later, the Madrid metro bombings "forcefully" convince the vastly anti-war Spanish electorare that it was intolerable to have a handful of troops in Iraq. Just because you don't live in the U.S. nor the U.K. do not rule out the possibility that you might suffer the consequences of the reckless invasion of Iraq.
That's an odd way of looking at it. To me, this is isn't even close to any sort of moral dilemma. You want to make a game and you want to make money. So you build a game thats fun, viral, and keeps people coming back. Last I recall, that's called making something people want and serving the market. There's no possible way to entrap or addict users beyond most of their free will. If they love your game so much that they keep coming back, what exactly is the problem? People WANT to have things to come back to, because there is inherent JOY in doing it.

Furthermore, building hits that can bring people back is not an easy task. It looks easy, but companies like Zynga have mastered the process and dominated the industry. You can deduce the business process of anything into a few simple sentences, yet it grossly underestimates the task at hand.
Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro unveils strange telepresence android
I was in a similar position about nine months ago. I was on a shared server, and now I'm rocking a VPS with a pretty good confidence level. Here's what I did.

First, I picked a Linux distribution. I went with Ubuntu because of ease of use.

Second, I ordered a copy of "The Official Ubuntu Server Book" (http://www.amazon.com/Official-Ubuntu-Server-Book-2nd/dp/013...) and read it from cover to cover. In some cases, I had to read chapters several times to completely understand it, but because I did that and took copious notes, I feel pretty good about things now. P.S. If you do read a book, take notes. I refer to them almost everyday.

Finally, I picked a VPS provider. I tried Slicehost, VPS.net, and Dreamhost, but finally settled on Linode. I picked them because I heard great things about them, and they haven't let me down. Back then, it was something like 386mb of RAM for $19.95. Now, they're even better. They offer 512mb for the same price! With Slicehost, you only get 256mb for that price. At VPS.net, it's 376mb. So Linode is the best deal, hands down.

Oh and Linode has an excellent user library with how-to articles on doing EVERYTHING.
http://library.linode.com/

Hope that helps some!
The pages for the tutorial at http://x10-lang.org/ are in HTML, but they still force a file download.
Evokes thoughts of the Internet's very first foray into annoying marketing campaigns.
>as a close friend of the reddit team and heavy duty open source developer also hangs around in.

I know the significance of what he contributes to Reddit, I've been on Reddit for a long time and ran into him because of IRC. He's the one that got me my job :P

I'm not surprised at all that he called your bluff, he's quite the playful fellow. I was amused when he shared it with the rest of our dev team (the video).
Wow, way to make me feel terrible about not having more serious side projects while I work full time :P
I dug up information on the median household income, and the growth of the S&P500, since 1975. Built a spreadsheet based on 10% of the median household income, twenty percent being a huge, huge cut into the money a family could spend at the median levels. Check it out:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=t1GNFHQzYRcc4aWOlvZq...
Really? You know that my parents were piss poor, and it is just through luck (and hard work) that I've achieved anything in life.

But yeah. I was recently insulted by an American person (apparently referring to someone you just met as “[Racial expletive] are the worst people in the world” is okay as far as white South Africans go). Apparently my mere existence as a white South African is offensive to some. Two months ago someone said that my first language did not exist. WTF? 6 million people speak it, I am pretty sure that it is a real language.

What would you have white South Africans do? A third immigrated and almost a third is in squatter camps. The third that is rich doesn’t really help the rest that is dirt poor. Should we just organise a mass suicide like a sect or something? Would that be acceptable to you?
To take that view to the extreme: say I invented a new synthetic drug that was addictive. People love it because it is servicing a need in the market, but do I not have any responsibility at all for its potential side effects?
What ever happened to Apple taking the lead, standing up, and doing the right thing, damn the consequences? One of the reasons why Apple fans have been so fanatical about Apple products is because they know Apple will do the right thing. Unlike say, Microsoft.

So now Apple is just like any other evil, scheming mega-corp. It's pretty sad actually. Like the day the music died, Apple software has died.
Granted. But aside from the last decade, the article does claim that stocks win. (from 1930 to 1996). The recent decade is astoundingly bad...especially considering all the neat, new things we've gained..
Programming as Writing
Make more food. Leftovers!

Every time I make pasta, I boil the entire box and make too much sauce so I can eat later.
I said it was our military's stance, not my stance.
Wait, some code really does suck. The difficulty here is that "sucks" is a "catch all" that can include a lot of types of flaws. These might be flexibility, error-proneness, security, performance or maintainability/confusion.
In some cases the suckiness is an appreciated trade-off against time-taken and is bearable in maintenance. If this is the case we should try to be more diplomatic about the problems when assessing the code.

However, some code does suck. There is a certain type of easily preventable badness that slowly manifests itself in a project that isn't being effectively maintained.
Case in point in my current world of "joy":

public class MainForm
{

public static Form FormInstance;

public MainForm()
{
FormInstance = this;
}
}

If you're wondering, there are over 200 references in the code to MainForm.FormInstance.
And for about $200 a barrel, you can use nuclear power to make that same hydrocarbon fuel out of thin air.
Look. It isn't rocket science. Unless you are proud of the work you're doing and do not feel guilty because of it, you should find other work - or in this case different software to program. Only write software you would not only be happy to use yourself but that you'd be happy if your family members used it as well. This is simple common sense and basic human decency. Good luck with your work!
On Web Typography
the brand new ones are the basic Kindle aren't they? He has bought the DX which is the more expensive one with a larger screen (said to be more suited to PDF files)
The scheme cookbook is sort of old and out of date. I believe it targets a pretty old version of plt scheme (v301) (now racket which is at version 5). Anything that uses set-cdr! will not work and a great deal of the api has changed since then. It would be great if someone updated it for the latest version of racket.
Sure, you could take it there. But the reality of it is games do not have physiologically addictive properties the same way drugs and alcohol do. If you look at the cases where gaming addiction severely impacted a person's life, you would be looking at a few outliers who probably had contributing mental factors (like most addiction problems).

We aren't talking about drugs though. We're talking about social games. If there are stories about people's lives being ruined by Farmville, I haven't heard them.

But in your example, yes, you would have a responsibility for the drug's side effects. Thats what the FDA is largely responsible for.
I really hope this latest internet vigilante project from Paul falls flat on its face. To say that his RBL project failed to stop spam is a candidate for 'understatement of the decade'; it not only completely, unutterably, miserably, and totally failed to even slow down spam in any measurable way, but it created an unending series of headaches for system administrators and customers caught in the middle of warring ISPs.

Coincidentally, just a few minutes ago -- just before loading up HN for the first time in a while -- I received an email from one of my clients asking me for advice. Their domain provider has been listed by SORBS, the domain provider is arguing that the listing was unwarranted and is refusing to pay any of the $50 "fine" that SORBS may request, if they request it. I have had to handle situations like this at least several times a year, and I'm not even an ISP. Another of my clients, a while back, briefly had their DSL IP listed in an RBL. They don't run a mail server from that IP, I vigilantly monitor their network for any signs of abuse so I'm fairly confident that there are no zombies on the network, and everyone's workstation is configured to send mail to an outbound mail server. Despite all this, the temporary listing in the RBL caused intermittent email disruption with misconfigured recipient servers that were incorrectly checking email headers for intermediate IPs listed in the RBL (mostly, ISPs using Barracuda Networks' latest bits of vomit). I contacted the RBL through the appropriate channels, and a few days later the block was removed without any other response or explanation from them.

This is absurdity. This is not how a healthy "internet" can work. This juvenile "my network, my rules" approach is no different from opposition to net neutrality. This isn't a small network of universities and hobbyists anymore; this is a global network of businesses that, for better or worse, rely on this system to handle important and time-sensitive information.

I would argue that, if you're an internet service provider or are otherwise accepting payment from customers for the purposes of handling some aspect of their electronic communications, then you are duty-bound to take every reasonable effort to ensure that all communications destined for them are able to reach them, and all of their communications are able to reach their destination. That means, for example, not subscribing to RBLs for the sake of lightening the load on your mail server and silently dropping email without notification to your customer.

There are better ways to handle spam now -- greylisting, user-configurable controls, etc. -- and issues in DNS are already being worked on by groups providing services to end users. I would really prefer not to see the adoption of another RBL-like system, since the first one managed to fail so spectacularly at all of its goals.
Thanks for the recommendations. I hadn't really looked a lot into which VPS to use yet; I saw a post recently which linked me to Slicehost, so I checked it out without really having yet had the chance to do much comparison yet.

I just skimmed over the linode library that you linked, and I am impressed. I was going to ask you for more information about installing and securing Apache (nothing against ngenix; I just have more experience with Apache), MySQL, and PHP, but it seems they've beaten me to the punch. Though, if you do have recommendations for any of that, please do pass that along. More information is always appreciated.
No, the point of this discussion is the claim that "sexual love is a human need as fundamental as food and shelter". That's an exact quote. "As fundamental as" is a comparative phrase which means sex is on the same level of fundamentality as food and shelter in the hierarchy of human needs. Since food and shelter are necessities for survival on a daily basis and sex is not a necessity for survival at all, it follows that food and shelter are more fundamental needs, hence the statement under contention is false.
An image histogram in 30 lines of code
Sad to say blacklisting malicious domains to mitigate the damage from e-mail based phishing attacks targeting .edus is something I've had to do in the past.

I'm definitely interested in seeing what kind of community develops around this patch. If a good .edu focused anti-phishing feed shows up I'd strongly consider using it at work.
This is supposedly everyone with publicly searchable profiles so I'd be truly impressed if 329 million people adjusted their settings, and not at all surprised if the 500 million figure did something cute like classify visitors as users, eg: digg and their "40 million users" of which 0.0047% liked the current most popular story.
Actually I didn't know about those articles. I browsed through the site rather casually and focused mostly on specs and prices first. I didn't think to check the "community" link (expecting it to be forums, which wasn't exactly what I wanted) until you prompted me to go look for your link.

The information there seems great to get started. Many appreciations to you.
Using a debit card with the PocketMoney iPhone app keeps me honest.

I know as soon as I've bought something if I've blown the budget.

And for some reason, debit card feels more like "real money" than the credit card with its elastic limit.
Yes. I was most worried about the Kindle's rendering, but I guess size could be an issue too.