skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Emscripten: A JavaScript backend for LLVM (compile C++ to JavaScript)
I preferred Nitro over Rails when they both arrived in 2004. Nitro made it far easier to evolve an application from a single static HTML file to any degree of complexity (plus it was faster, thread safe, and more modular). Rails seemed better suited to a very specific genre of application. Great when you're building that app; less so when you needed to color outside the lines.

Ramaze picked up where Nitro left. All software is opinionated; I prefer the opinions built into Ramaze. Whatever tool you pick, whatever language you use, make sure the opinions it embodies align with yours, or you'll find yourself frustrated way too often.

But I really think the alleged hating on Rails has more to do with how some people perceive its more vocal proponents. Sadly, it all feels like being back in high school again. It's the "rock star" and "hero" nonsense that grates.

People would do better to scope out the various languages and tools, learn to appreciate the good stuff, steal the better ideas for their own preferences, and ignore the personalities and drama.

Code talks, bullshit walks.
you have to know a lot of things

sometimes those things are dynamically put together, so you can't grep for them in the source code

I completely agree.

Also: the rails guides are helpful, but the generated api docs suck.
Interview with Jacob Harris of NYT and how they use varnish to scale their apps
1. Seems to neglect time-value of money, which leads to overstated ROIs.

2. It also neglects that the people going to, e.g., MIT and Harvard, are making more money largely because they are people of sufficient quality to be admitted to those schools, and not entirely because they went.
yes, i've had it crash once in a rare while.

Vim: Caught deadly signal SEGV
I'm a sysadmin at a place that wants this sort of protection, and historically we've only used Blackberries.
Now that lots of people have iPhones, I'm explaining the "remote wipe" situation pretty often.

The best compromise I have at the moment is an iPhone optimised web interface. This lets you get your emails on the device without (much) danger of them ending up saved there.
I don't know ASP.NET at all, but this is the way I understood the article:

If a developer writes a cookie, it's not encrypted and the user can easily change it. Just normal cookies.

If a developer writes a session cookie, ASP.NET encrypts it behind the scene and stores it in a cookie. Because the user doesn't know the encryption key, he can't change the session cookie. The developer doesn't do any encryption himself, he just tells ASP.NET "Please store this value at the user, but he should not be able to tamper with it".

However, crypto is hard, so because of the issue mentioned in this article it is possible to tamper the data.

Could someone correct me if I'm wrong?
care, cout, sin, jif/gif. I go for what's laziest, because it's human nature.
Instrumentation and Observability
What was always funny to me was how very few bandwagon-hopping industrial designers ever seemed to actually get what made the iMac's use of translucent teal plastic cool: It's not all the same material. It's balanced out by a variety of textures, some transparent, some opaque, some teal and some white.

Most fashion-followers just specced a teal translucent instead of the beige they'd been using, left the design the same, and called it a day.
Do we really need every single one of these Instant Search copy cats to be posted to Hacker News? A few lines of JavaScript to submit a form for you after you type a few letters is not impressive at all.
I agree with you. I didn't build App Store Instant as a replica of Google Instant. With the APIs available, there isn't a reliable way to predict apps.

I built it because iTunes is slow. Try searching iTunes and clicking on an App (to read the description). It takes me 5+ seconds. This takes ~1 second.
Not the "refrigerator that knows when your bananas go bad" again story. Yikes, I hate that one. It's as worn-out as a "Cyber Pearl Harbor". I imagine if the terrorists ever strike the U.S., the first thing they'll do is take out all the banana-reading refrigerators.

Bad examples aside, this has a lot of promise. If they change it, it will be interesting to see how long it takes industry to come up with viable products. 18 months maybe?
'Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

'I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, 'so I can't take more.'

'You mean you can't take less,' said the Hatter: 'it's very easy to take more than nothing.'
I hear you man, but to me good engineering is also about the problem it is trying to solve and I did not find a reference to that in the original source, so was just asking for more information.
Yep, I was looking for the homepage of that site. Thanks.
Or cron-job the pruning.
yes, "-a" would lead to "-as".
The "barista" has different origins.

The Python case is similar to the widely used "fashionista" for females and "fashionisto" for males in the fasion. Thus it is expected to be "pythonisto" and "pythonistos" for male(s) until there is some gender confusion :)
Well, the main problem is that the user data we store is multi-valued. So each attribute can have multiple values in the same 'record'. As you can imagine, Rails doesn't help much in this situation, as it assumes that each column in the databas table has just one value.

http://www.oneis.co.uk/technology/object-store

Oh, and each application on a multi-tenant app server can have a completely different schema. Again, there's not much that Rails can do to help.

Rails was good to get going, and it helped for the relational stuff in the app. But unsurprisingly, if you try and use it for something it's not designed to do, it's not going to work terribly well. This principle applies to everything.
There was already a response from Microsoft - their NGO discount program was in place, they claim to advise governments to focus enforcement efforts on the producers rather than consumers of pirated software and so on. It's great they've responded again and perhaps more stridently and publicly. But I have a hard time believing this sort of thing helps much with the fundamental problem which is an authoritarian and coercive government. And I think it's naive to expect that it would.
Gamers Better at (Good) Fast Decision Making
Certainly in a very technical engineering school. But you can't honestly compare GCSEs to ESO or A-levels to selectividad: reasoning is far less important that just repeating facts (this was especially obvious to me with history, for example).
All anyone "officially" knows right now is that there is some place in ASP.NET where the stack uses AES/CBC to encrypt data that is then passed back and forth with clients, and that place failed to prevent padding oracles. 'brl is close with Juliano Rizzo, and downthread he suggested that this flaw allows attackers to 100% effectively forge authentication credentials on any ASP.NET application.
Microsoft mentioned Infodonor program (http://www.infodonor.ru), and they have Symantec here too. The program was created by TechSoup (http://home.techsoup.org/pages/default.aspx).
In the simple case, Rails likes you to have seven controller methods and one controller per table. Realistically I usually end up throwing a few more methods on each controller.

This is actually part of the reason I like Rails: it guides the developer towards what I consider to be better application design. I understand that a lot of folks don't agree, and that's cool for them, but I still like hearing why.
That's been obvious since well before Twitter was created.
Logically, book vendors could impose similar restrictions with similar language and achieve the same result viz. circumvent the first sale doctrine.

There's a question: would anyone buy such a book? If you were offered identical books, one you could resell and one you couldn't but it was half the price - which would you buy?

I don't know the legal history of the first sale doctrine, but I assume it's mostly based on public policy, and to support things that people were already doing: reselling, lending etc. An interesting data point is that software in the form of video games is regularly resold and lent.

IIRC, a distinguishing feature of the autodesk software in this case is that it is very high-end commercial software, and thus not a consumer product. Buyers and sellers in business transactions are generally assumed by the courts to know what they're doing, and so the courts tend not to intervene with whatever bargain they've struck. That is: this is likely inapplicable to consumer software like video games.
Really cool - reminds me of a book I still enjoy picking up from time to time called 'Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millennium'

It was spun out from a column on word.com back in the .com days.
Scientists teach robots how to trick humans
When I searched for GloSnake, it showed up briefly and then disappeared. I can't seem to get it to come back again.

(edit) When getting as far as "Glos", it shows up. If I type beyond that, it seems to disappear.
Seriously, other than Alinea you really don't have fine dining in Chicago

Moto,
Schwa
l20
blackbird
publican
avec

Those are just off the top of my head.
On the other hand, a lot of people who are social/motivated by team psychology already have other motivating options, like team sports, group classes etc.

The interesting thing in this idea (which I agree with the comment that it would be great for home equipment) is that it allows you to tap into your motivation circuits even when you are engaging in a solitary activity.
Yea not this specifically, just in general.
<spam>

I actually wrote a short-ass tutorial on that a while back, too. Mostly it's just JSNI, though. http://flax.ie/how-to-use-html5-audio-tag-with-gwt/#more-152

My engine code for the audio component is more or less the same as that, actually. I gave a small, quick explanation on that the other day: http://flax.ie/flax-html5-game-engine-development-diary-part...

</spam>

I found it fairly easy to do. We load the html for each sound object into the page, and then statically play/pause/stop/load them via the tag name. There's a JSON file, which contains a bunch of AudioContainer objects. When they're constructed, they construct their own HTML (so, the audio tag), and loads it into the page. Then we have a static-ish Audio service to make play/pause etc pretty easy. The JSON itself is made in our (as yet hypothetical) map editor. Must get to work on that, actually. ;)

I'm not massively happy with our solution, though. It works, but it's more complex than I feel it should be, considering that the actual implementation of it in js is so easy.

edit: I should point out that the entire point of the engine is so that you don't need Flash, which is why we're using <audio> rather than one of the pre-existing frameworks, like gwt-voices, which we would so totally use, if it didn't use Flash underneath somewhere.
Most of the classical music I know came from use in video games and cartoons - perhaps not as boorish and uncivil as TV commercials for Big Momma's House, but certainly not the concert hall either.

Nonetheless, I did develop an appreciation for the music, and as I grew older, was pleasantly surprised to learn more about it, and now, well, I'm married to a composer, and have gone to plenty of concerts, and will go to many, many more.

I'd much rather this stuff be available for use - and abuse - than for it to not be available. That's why I backed this project with $50. It's not a huge contribution, but for as much as I complain about copyright warehousing and the like, I might as well put my money where my mouth is.
Bollywood celeberties: Diya Mirza
I am surprised how well it runs considering it is a VM in a VM.
I understand the need to have the schema where it's being used but if you ever need to make modifications like custom fields (say an email field) then your schema isn't just stored in the DB any more. With Django your custom field declarations live in the same place as more mundane fields. If you port that models file to another machine and run syncdb you are going to be left with the same schema with the same restrictions.
I present you teh plan:

(Hotspot+JRockit)-Zombie = Enterprise JDK with paywall

OpenJDK = Free JDK without the fun/fast/secure/... stuff
Yes. Though that can also be a kind of fun. I guess it's not worth to fight over definitions.

Do you plan to progress to full power cleans later?
Los Angeles Mixergy Meetup
Absolutely yes. The answer is a succinct vector language that feels close enough to SQL to be learnable by database guys, but has high level primitives and unboxed basic types that enable automatic optimization and parallelization. The closest thing is K/Q from kx.com but they're clearly too bone headed to lead the game on this one.
The founder mass emailed a bunch of people whose emails he scraped from various popular blogs and HN hackers lists looking for a co-founder and started a reply-all mess.

Didn't even have the decency to BCC.

Pretty much shitcanned in my book for doing something so spammy and rude.
Look below: http://create.pulseapp.com/signup/free
Agnotology: Culturally Induced Ignorance
Found a bug in my code. Try searching now!
The thing that sets this one apart from the others is that it can actually generate revenue (via affiliate links).
Looking back, I do wish they had kept some of the UI elements from OpenStep / NEXTstep. I liked the dock on the right side (without all the desktop crud), the Workspace Manager was nicer than Finder, and the NeXT menu bar works better on bigger monitors than the Apple bar.

A modern version of the Librarian.app is what I miss most. It would have been so much nicer if that had been kept and expanded to include music, movies, etc.
Why Are Barns Red?
This is great! I've been interested in EEG, neurohacking for a while, at least in concept. Now that it's available for entry level hackers, what's the best way to get started? Does anyone know of good resources for EEG related signal processing, or algorithms applicable to brain waves, etc.? Thanks!
Bruce Leidl ('brl) works with Juliano, and just commented that this is a 100%-effective attack against any ASP.NET application's authentication.

It's OK to be skeptical about things (god knows I am), but it's important to be clear about where your actual knowledge ends. I think one thing that's confusing people is that the talk hasn't actually been presented yet.
I didn't mean to come across as attacking you as much as I did with the first comment.

The problems that you think exist with rvm don't exist. The problems you describe with macport and system ruby will likely go away if you use rvm.

What upset my sensitivity is that you make a negative assertion about rvm when you don't know if rvm even has that problem and it in fact doesn't.
they are probably going to kill Java... in a market segment where it has been chronically ill for years.

Java Enterprise is alive and healthy, thank you very much. No reason to believe that it will not continue to do pretty good for the next decade at least.
Google thought R = Arrrgghh? Lol...
How about "my voice is my password?"

That wasn't bad.
Looks like I failed miserably at asking this earlier, but I'm just looking for a reference to the stated design goals. If it is the reason you state, I'm just looking for a reference to it.

Asking "what Jeeps are for" was meant to get at the design goals and I did not mean to dis what is otherwise a very fascinating design choice.
one of the issues was if the designer was truly employed by Mattel between what was claimed as two separate periods of employment

I remember during the case this was a big issue...did the leave of absence and subsequent return constitute a termination of employment and reinstatement. At first Mattel argued that he continued to be an employee, and therefore they owned the designs.

Bryant went to work for Mattel in 1995 as a designer of fashions, hairstyles and makeup for its Barbie line. While at Mattel, he signed a "confidential information and inventions" agreement which gave Mattel the exclusive rights to all "developments, designs, know-how, data" and other items created by Bryant while he worked for the company. However, Bryant took a leave of absence in 1998 and returned to Mattel approximately 8 months later. It is during that critical time frame that Bryant contends he created "Bratz".

http://www.lexisnexis.com/Community/copyright-trademarklaw/b...

I believe they later agreed that there were indeed two separate periods of employment, but that the designs were still Mattel's because he came up with the ideas while at Mattel, and later sketched them during the leave. Furthermore, it was later revealed that he had used Mattel company time and resources to develop the idea after he returned from leave, including asking coworkers to help create a prototype, and using the phone and fax to make deals with MGA (http://www.iplawforstartups.com/startup-launch-bratz-doll-de...).
Regardless of the issue mentioned in this article, it could be argued that encrypting cookies, which basically means that you're storing data on a user's computer which the user is not allowed to even look at, is a flawed idea. If the user should not be able to look at it, why store it at the user's computer in the first place? And why must the app hide the data for the user?

(Unless I'm mistaken and there's other advantages for choosing encryption over MAC?)

Interesting, how could you exploit padding oracle when you're using HMAC?
Interestingly the German coach was never an extra-ordinary player himself. But he is very well respected as a coach in Germany.
I think James Bennett's post on magic is interesting: http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/jul/23/magic/

In particular, there is a comment[0] that I think is particularly worth reading:

There are two different definitions of magic in play here.

1. The use of advanced language features in a manner that might be confusing to a novice programmer.
2. The use of ANY language feature to automate some process that a programmer would not expect to be automated.

I am of the belief that the second is the proper definition, which is something that is not usually solved by reading sourcecode, as the question is "Why?", rather than "What?" or "How?".

[0]: http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/jul/23/magic/#c118751
Microsoft funds vigilante legal groups worldwide with a few partners. They've been doing this for at least a decade in my country. And this kind of unethical abuse is very common.

Note this PR release only says

> The policy is intended to last until 2012 but could be extended, he said.

I'm still highly skeptical of MS with these regards. And their statements sound very vague.
There is also a dated (yet still pretty awesome) python script that creates a number of graphs.

http://code.google.com/p/mail-trends/
Yep, so apply the patch. Now what do you do about your millions of insecure clients running unpatched, out-dated OS/browsers? How do you solve that problem? Security folks don't want to talk about that because it's hard. The client-side is a much larger number of opportunities and much weaker link in the chain. Yes, you need to deal with both, but it's hard to find discussion on the latter, and a lot on the former.
Not to my knowledge. The core reason is that in many countries, universities don't have campuses in the same sense that universities in the US seem to have. My experience is from the Nordic countries (spent a few years chairing various student associations), and we do have student unions, nations and subject/interest -based associations, but these are all different.

A quick rundown:

The student unions (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_unionism_in_Finland ) are part of the university administration, have 100's of millions in assets and provide basic services (healthcare, apartments, places to party) in exchange for 40+ euros per year.

The subject- and interest-based associations are separate entities that get some funding from the student union and organize events. They don't charge, and mostly get their cash from organizing events. However, since everybody lives around town, the interactions are more focused around specific events. The nations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_(university) ) are a lot like the student associations, except they are specific to people from a particular area in the country (not strictly enforced), have a bit more money (e.g. may have their own apartments) and organize activities centered around traditions and whatever is popular.

Thanks for a good question, interesting to see the parallels in other countries...
GazeHawk (YC S10) is hiring: coders & UX
From the article: "The attack allows someone to decrypt sniffed cookies, which could contain valuable data such as bank balances, Social Security numbers or crypto keys."

I'm pretty sure I already know my bank balance, so hiding it from me seems pretty pointless. And like I said, protecting an app from its users by encrypting cookies is a stupid idea from the start.
Appears to be fixed. Nice work :)
"Check the padding: it should repeat as many times as the value of the last byte."

Shouldn't that be 'at least as many times as'? After all, the 902th byte could be a 06h, too.
ESR knows very little about real gift economies. It's not always about abundance. In potlatch culture in the Pacific Northwest, originally the gifts had as much symbolic as practical value. The introduction of Western-style abundance actually ruined the whole system. See Lewis Hyde's The Gift for a much more thorough treatment, particularly the first two chapters.

As for Burning Man, it makes no sense to call it an "economy" when there is no scarcity. Every participant, with a few exceptions, has brought everything they need for survival in the desert for a week. Due to the nature of the event, few people are seeking luxuries.

Gifts at Burning Man are more about creating a mutually wonderful experience. Sometimes they take physical form, but more often the donation is directly related to experience -- art, performance, or a heightened generosity of spirit. This is not very much different from the change of attitude one might have at a potluck dinner, a block party, or a large rock concert where the fans feel themselves to be part of a particular subculture.
Microsoft to issue blanket license to NGOs
Apple just had a better respect for consistency back then IMO. iTunes 10 is a great example, now we have the minimize/expand/close buttons vertically down the side? Sure it looks cool, but consistency is much more important.

And just lots of other little things that added up. Like placing the close button on its own side of the window. So if you are clicking in that region, then you've only got one target so the app can more confidently know you really did mean to close the window. Now in OSX, maybe you meant minimize? Or how the trash can was always in the lower right corner, using the edges of the screen to its advantage. If you dragged an item that far down, then you only had one possible destination, the trash, so the OS confidently places the item in the trash without nagging you for a confirmation (like Windows does by default). No OSX doesn't nag you, but the trash can isn't taking advantage of the corner of the screen either.

Minor things, yes, but I still feel the Apple of old thought about these things more thoroughly.
PHP has a long documented list of shortcomings, but y'know what? Just like shell scripts, it is absolutely fantastic at small one-off but long-lived programs.
I have always liked (and often written about) an alternative: for HTML: http://example.com/test.html, for semantic data: http://example.com/test.n3 (N3 RDF format).

If a web app creates dynamic data at URL: http://example.com/stockfeeds?symbol=APPL then perhaps use something like: http://example.com/stockfeeds.n3?symbol=APPL to get RDF. Also, have standard (or commonly used) meta data to point to an equivalent RDF URI in generated HTML.
Ehm, the logic is right there in the headline:

The App Store is slow, so I built App Store Instant