skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it."
The DuckDuckGo approach of just blacklisting a few of the larger and more egregious content farms seems like a decent band-aid. It's not a real fix, but it cuts out a large number of the bad cases, since at least for me, a handful of large content farms account for most of the times when I've accidentally clicked on a Google result and then realized "oh ugh, it's one of these sites". Spammy blogs are the other big problem, but there's no easy band-aid for that one.
Worse yet, if your friends like something or run an app, they can get to your personal information because your friend has endorsed something.

This means either cutting your friends out of your private data, selecting your friends based on their computer savvy, or being as vulnerable as the most insecure of them.

I say again: Facebook is the devil. It's a brilliant platform that should continue to grow for years. It uses your own friends to make you do things you would not normally do (like join). As a platform it has no other goal than total domination of the net.
I've been through the Facebook API docs many times and don't recall reading about this.

If thats true it really needs to be better communicated by Facebook.
You're not going to see a startup get accepted that is essentially a competitor to Facebook -- it's too late for that.

Really? In the recent video of Scoble interviewing pg pg mentioned that yc funded a privacy-oriented social network company that failed.

So I don't think a facebook competitor is out of the realm of yc funding.
The most boring thing about these speculations about beings from other planets is the absolute lack of imagination. Most times people imagine something like a vertebrate with human-like appearance.

Why assume that the evolution of any form of life in a different environment would repeat so closely the evolution of life on earth? It could and should be completely different. In Cosmos, Carl Sagan speculated about life in other planets based in nitrogen and sulfur, with huge bubbles gathering nutrients and other smaller ones preying on them. Now this is what I call imagination.
Sometimes there is another team out there that knows a better method to determining what color to paint the shed. As an open source developer, you are more than welcome to disregard feedback regarding your code provided it is publicly available, but when you don't make it available, how can it be called open source?
Then why bother with OOP to begin with?
I had your reaction. Trust me on this, it works. I would tell you to like BCC so that I can spam you to prove it, but I took off my like buttons right after figuring it out. I thought it was a huge violation of my users' expectations, which I had been explaining as "Like this and your friends on Facebook will see it."
US legislating to make all web devices accessible
>risk installing it on my server

What risk do you perceive?
I would say a theory is a hypothesis which has been tested. A thought experiment can be part of hypothesis creation.
Index Ventures Buys Into Etsy, Triples Valuation To Nearly $300 Million
With imagemaps, there's no longer a legitimate reason to ever need to "click" on something that's transparent. Therefore, the browser should not allow objects that are not visible to receive "click" events.
It's no exception. We're always building on platforms. It just depends on how risky/unstable/new the underlying platforms are. Without platforms, we wouldn't be able to build skyscrapers.
A typical CS-undergrad set of topics:
-How to Program

-Algorithms & Data Structures

-Functional Programming

-State Machines & Computation Classes (NP-Complete, Turing Machines, Regular Languages, etc)

-Complier Construction

-Physical Computer Architecture / ASM

-Operating Systems

-Computer Networking

-Parallel Programming

And then some other recommened topics:

-Database Systems

-2D & 3D graphics

-AI

-Crypto
A few of these have been floating around for at least the past couple months. One of my friends clicked through and ended up "liking" some picture of a stupid tattoo, and earned an educational lecture from me as his reward.
How high is the "iAd for Developers" conversion rate?
This has been a known vulnerability since at least July 13. Interactive demos: http://erickerr.com/like-clickjacking

This would appear to be (among?) the first malicious use of the like-jacking vulnerability.
Holy... it's true the ARM dominates the mobile phone market indeed. Most processors are ARM.
But if you're dependent on Facebook it can also cut you off, or at least not support you anymore. It's not about preventing competition, it's about your supplier becoming your competitor.
"basically encourage many of the best and brightest to lock them selves into using facebook like Zynga originally did?"

Yeah, god forbid YC companies make bets that let them become 5 billion dollar companies.
Here's one: stop using facebook.
It depends greatly on the area, but some parts of Switzerland have a requirement that all new citizenships must be approved by a local referendum. I'm not aware of many other countries where to get citizenship, the municipality you live in has to approve it in a popular vote.
I once tried to convince my bus driver that hacker is a title worthy of a programmer or that a programmer can be called a hacker.

I gave up trying to convince her. (Incidently, she have a computer-loving husband, and also worked with programmers many years before)

I figured if the ignorant want to be ignorant, they will.
Academic Search Engines
A little post about vertical search engines dedicated to support researchers in their hunt for papers.
The DuckDuckGo approach of just blacklisting a few of the larger and more egregious content farms seems like a decent band-aid.

I really like that they take a pro active approach to issues. It was one of the main reasons I switched.

Spammy blogs are the other big problem, but there's no easy band-aid for that one.

A lot of "spammy blogs" are owned and operated by the same people. The whois data is usually enough to tip you off. I do not see why some spiders do not do a whois query and black list the owner/company; at least for a set period of time, and allow appeals.
Less fluff per character:

Nature article - http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v2/n9/abs/nchem.724.html

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_difluoride
This somewhat demonstrates why GET isn't supposed to be used to change server state. Somewhat.
Zucker News?
Facecombinator?
HN Connect?

(Disclaimer: I loathe facebook)
The question I have is how do these guys plan to make money off this scam? There doesn't seem to be any ads on this page or any affiliate pages.
Connecting to a wireless network on boot in Ubuntu
Facebook already does ban on a domain basis, but of course that's not a fix at all. These things are "viral" by the nature of the Like button since it posts on the user's wall automatically, so it's very easy for the "spammer" to make a new domain and get going again very quickly.

The easiest fix to the spreading of this issue is FB not broadcasting every single time you like something... but they're not gonna do that, we already know. So, the spam will continue.
By the time I hit the second entry, TAOCP, i realized this list is a joke and save for some really smart people, no one else will gain much from pursing that book in it's entirety. Much better off with CLRS or even the first part of Algorithm Design Manual. The list is a classic list of books-i-wish-i-read-but-never-had-time-to.
In python the convention tends to be:

a.inverse() -> mutates 'a' to its inverse
MatrixMath.inverse(a) -> returns the inverse of 'a', leaving 'a' unchanged
Having a global len() function is very, very linked to polymorphism. You can call it on anything that has a __len__() function defined (i.e., any class that implements something like a "HasLength" interface in Java terms).
I HATE dealing with first class functions in Ruby. I understand that it was a design choice, but man, in Python you can pass a function or a lambda and you just don't have to worry about which one you're calling. In Ruby, () will explode on a Proc object. What is with that?!!?
I'd be interested to hear why you're more interested in hosting Diaspora instead of Appleseed?
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This sort of thing is hard without getting into tons of specifics. Now, I was raised on good old normalization and all of that, but it doesn't mean that I'm a master at it. It's possible that there's a good way of relating this that I'm just overlooking. Or maybe I should have just denormalized it from the start.

Okay, so we have a domain object, Foo. Foos represent individual instances of a Foo that a user has, but we want to keep general information about the different standard types of Foo, so we also have a relation between Foos and FooTypes. Oh, and each FooType can have a few different sizes, and some FooTypes are the same sizes as each other, so we also need a FooSize. Not only do we need to relate the number of sizes that each FooType could have, but when a User has a Foo, we gotta know which sized one they have. All this stuff... it's complicated.

It probably would have been much easier for me to have just done each FooType up as a document, with an embedded array of sizes, and then each Foo gets a document, with its own copy of the data. Yeah, there's nothing saying that you can't store de-normalized data in a relational database, but if you're not going to use its features, why not just use the tool that's designed for that use-case?
1) I did mean YC. Sorry about the initial mistake. YC companies seem to do a great job of turning ideas into products. I guess it happens because there is no corporate redtape, infinite market sizing, or corporate apathy in a YC startup that exists in larger companies. I believe YC is much more efficient at turning ideas into products than large companies. Which is why I feel that YC can act as the fast throughway where the best and the brightest from google/ facebook etc depart temporarily for a year or two and return to the fold with a successful product. Large companies have a lot of policies meant to push the average employee up which end up holding their best employees back. Working in an autonomous setting within YC or another group would allow the best and the brightest from the larger companies to create products quickly. All this being said - my comment was definitely armchair analysis - I am not related to either the large companies or to YC.
2) Porting to Arc was meant to be a joke.

PS: You need to chill out.
It's clickjacking. That was 2008. This is clickjacking with a like button. I wrote about it in early June ( http://www.h-i-r.net/2010/06/viral-like-jacking-on-facebook.... ) and it was already somewhat old-hat by then. In fact, I think I covered the same technical details this person did.

It's not really ingenious. It's just scammy behavior and yet another fine reason to run NoScript.
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Returning from Oslo, Norway
Immigration officer: Why were you visiting Norway?
Me: I was there visiting some friends.
Immigration officer: Why do you have friends in another country, sir?
Clickjacking (the name of this exploit) is one reason many sites have frame-busting JavaScript.

Of course the whole point of the Facebook "Like" button is to be embedded on other websites, so frame busting is out of the question. I'm not sure if there's a quick fix for this. Browsers need to disallow clicking of transparent iframes.
"First, neglect air resistance..."

http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/death-rain1
And lots of NoSQL databases do have these kinds of value-add features. For example, FourSquare writes data into Mongo (and Postgres, as well, actually...) because it has location features built into it.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Geospatial+Indexing
Yea, you can make scala look like haskell, java, or perl with relative ease. Up for debate whether thats a good thing or not.
I find that most often the "spam" that comes up on searches is on the user-submit-enabled sites -- vimeo, myplick, authorstream, slideshare, scribd, etc. -- and it's their lack of moderation that is the issue. (Do a search right now for "watch colts vs packers online" and see what I mean.)

Blacklisting those entire sites would seem to be a real disservice to the legitimate content that is uploaded, but then again, if the site administrators can't keep their content in order, why are they getting crawled by the G so often anyway?

The real deal is this, in many cases: the spam that's created on those sites during certain times is foreseeable and follows a particular pattern -- it's created based around news or events, such as sports, movies, sex tape outings, etc. -- so it would seem easy to get rid of the spam before it hits the search engines, right? One option is just to expect an influx during certain time periods and increase moderation during that time. Another option is to prevent new users from publishing content until they've submitted moderator-approved non-spam content first.

But that would mean those sites don't get the impressions... and impressions-->ads-->$$$... so where's their incentive?
Can you link to the Facebook developer docs for this? I've been playing with their api and haven't seen anything like this, just getting name and uid of friends. Not saying your wrong, just curious.
That's a great story. I'm not sure how many people can say they got a hard sell like that from both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for one piece of software...
(sigh) I wish calmly and rationally stating your opinion got people's attention, but it doesn't.

Fact is, cochlear implants are very obviously a good thing, and the arguments against them are stupid. There are many issues that are polarizing, but where the right answer is completely obvious to anyone who is thinking clearly and doesn't have a hidden agenda. This is one of them.
Lots of straw men, lots of flawed premises. Google didn't choose Java because of VM security, they chose it because everyone on the planet knows it. Can the same be said for Objective-C?

But every step of the way, they're going to have this giant anchor of [UniConf] Dalvik tied around their neck, and Apple won't

Kinda like... Objective-C and a limited library?
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I always thought it was intended as a "all" symbol. All your privacy, all the control, all these different apps plugging in.

SELECT * FROM user_preferences; -- type thing
Save so much time and energy with this tool. Realized how much more I get done on a daily basis because of it and almost felt guilty not to donate a few bucks.
That was posted 8 days ago; I don't know how far away they had it from working but a lot can happen in that timeframe if you have people working like it's a startup.
You can call a proc with []

p = Proc.new {|str| puts "Hello #{str}" }
p["World"] # prints "Hello World"

:)
As an American in China, you have no idea how many times I've envied the Singaporeans. China goes out of its way to gouge Americans for visas - a visa costs about $150 for us, maybe $30 for a Canadian or European.

I'm told visas are about equally expensive for Chinese entering the US (although the US does a much more thorough background check to ensure the Chinese person has consistently had a good job with regular income), so I guess the feeling between the 2 governments is mutual.

The visas for foreigners here are also of relatively low quality - they have a short duration. And the rules about what a person can obtain are constantly changing. I've spent so much time, effort, and money dealing with visa issues, I've really contemplated marrying my Chinese girlfriend. We're not really ready to get married from a relationship perspective, but we're both pragmatists and it would save us money and headaches.
I'm one of those subscribers, and the first issue was great. I always seem to let my RSS feeds go, but I read all the emails that hit my inbox...

If I subscribed to more newsletters, I imagine that it'd end up being the same, though.
Haha, the funny thing is that the scene has been around in one form or another for more than 30 years. In 2007 a pre db with 27 years' worth of releases was leaked[0]. Prior to the creation of IRC in August 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen, sceners used BBSes as their primary method of communication.

Links:

0: http://torrentfreak.com/27-years-of-warez-scene-release-info...
Not particularly. If Facebook used POST internally to implement the Like button, the result would be the exact same.
In what situation is it actually a good idea to employ a large number of bad programmers, rather than a small number of good ones? We shouldn't be making trade-offs for the sake of bad ideas ;)
Clever use of app engine to poll Heroku. :)

<shameless plug> You might also want to check out PiCloud (http://www.picloud.com/product/#features), which offers low-cost pay by millisecond python-based crons</shameless plug>
Case study: couchdb at cern
I'm currently using mongodb for a new project at work and the biggest surprise for me is that there is no elegant solution for doing the SQL equivalent of COUNT(DISTINCT field). Count exists, distinct exists to return the set to you, but the combination isn't there.

The only solutions i have found are to check the length of the distinct query, which takes too long for a large result set, or to write a map reduce function which takes longer than I'd like and is a large amount of code for functionality that should already exist in the db.
What is FB's consideration in this deal? Is it simply preferred access to acquisition targets and promotion of their platform, or does this relationship preclude (formally or otherwise) YC from funding startups that want to compete with FB?
First, thanks! Second, I think you're right on your last point. But I think there's a pyramid at play that means you won't keep more e-mail newsletters than you can handle.

I only subscribe to a couple of real life magazines and newspapers - these take up to an hour each to read. Below this, I subscribe to about 10-20 e-mail newsletters I read frequently. Then about 100-150 RSS feeds. Then 800 people on Twitter.. I'm assuming other people are similar, but I could be wrong!

At each level of this pyramid, the content becomes more granular, river-like, and easier to ignore. If RSS is overwhelming me, I "mark all as read" for that day. With Twitter, I don't even bother "catching up," I just swim in the current river of tweets when I have a spare minute..
I'm a fan of the complete ingenuity of this entire concept. We've all seen and played the timeless smash and grab player-controlled games that have dominated our obsessions since Pong. However, in this day and age with video games becoming more and more complex, I love this simple idea. Instead of letting the player with the best reflexes, or an ability to seek out glitches in game play become the best, this concept attacks it from a completely different means. A game where creativity, humor, engineering, and street smarts all combine into one to form a brand new niche for gamers.

I've read all of the comments thus far and I have to say that I agree with many points on both sides. However, I would have to definitively say that if you want to control your player, this concept isn't for you. This is of course through the basic player moves that so many people are used to. Click A for jump, B for attack, different combo moves etc. Yes this appeals to many for great gaming, but I would argue that it is a gaming genre that may be at it's absolute peak. Even with today's most complicated games, there is a certain amount of creativity, street smarts and ingenuity in how you play the game.

What I love most about these arguments is that the creator (argued most notably for by dave_chenell) is telling you that you in fact DO have control over your character and the fight. It's just a higher level of control than one is used to. Basically, the 'player' gets to play 'god' in creating characters. By changing the slightest drawing, weapon accessory, and proportions (as is my understanding of this algorithm), one has complete control in how one should act in an all out brawl. If you want your gorilla to have great grappling moves, provide him with powerful arms, etc. I would argue that this feature gives complete control to the gamer.

This game type wouldn't be for anyone, that is certain. However, look at the massive amount of popularity games like Armadillo Run (http://www.armadillorun.com/) have received. You don't have any control over the armadillo in this either. One must use their knowledge of physics, materials, and common sense in order to build a device to complete the objective, like a puzzle. This graFighters idea seems very similar; spend some time playing to learn how the game works, and it'll be just as addicting.

I understand that this concept isn't for everyone and it'll be tough to spread word to gamers who are willing to give it a shot based just on concept alone. But let me ask these gamers something. How many times have you been bored maybe in class or talking on the phone, and you doodle some complex robot. Maybe you give him a lightsaber for good measure. Wouldn't it be nice to put him to some use instead of tossing him away with your class notes?
I figured if the ignorant want to be ignorant, they will.

I think you lost twice.
Are you kidding? Try comparing IE3 to IE7, and Chrome 3 to Chrome 7...
I actually use this trick for good, not evil. It's a way of styling certain unstyleable elements in old browsers. But you have a point -- it's useless in modern browsers. That said, what is the standard? Is 5% enough?
You seem to be describing vim's hjkl (left, down, up, right, IIRC)
I feel like he really dropped the ball on negotiating the sale. It seems like he didn't make any counters, and didn't use their competing interest to reap a higher price.

I was expecting at least a cease and desist or lawsuit would be involved.
Probably my favourite 'Folklore' story (though I've by no means read them all) - I especially like the extra $50K kicker when Switcher was sold, something Jobs "swore they would never do".
3 Things Steve Krug Didn't Tell You About Usability Testing
There are plenty of corporations/business entities out there that have been started up on seed money. Think of grants, scholarships, donations, non-profits, etc. In this age of freeware vs. corporate models is this such an incredulous concept?

The idea behind many huge movements today is to be a part of something. If you take a risk to donate $5, you could potentially lose it yes, but you could also say that you helped launch something big.
Just tried your site with an open mind (hadn't heard of it before now). Alas, Google Realtime returned much better results. After the top few links, in fact, your results seemed to be unrelated to the query:
http://48ers.com/search/?q=sanebox
vs
http://www.google.com/search?tbs=mbl%3A1&hl=en&sourc...

Any idea what went wrong?
what's the protection against this?

Well, you could open these links in an Incognito window which doesn't have access to your Facebook cookies.

Obviously this solution doesn't scale to normal users.
Facecombinator is an awesome name
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No problem. I should have sent you an email about the Shoes 3 release on Whyday; we were working up to the deadline and I kinda dropped the ball on the PR front. But I'll be hitting you up for the 1.0 Hackety Hack release, that's for sure.

I surely do the same thing you do for Twitter, but not everyone is like that. People that follow a lot of people tweet repeat things because they understand others treat Twitter like this, but then people who read it less get mad.