skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Granted, there could be some confusion if a head is contemplated as a gift item, but that's a risk I'm willing to take."

That's why it fun to read Scott's stuff. Right there in the middle of a 'serious' discussion on finding a new name for a phone he drops this little LOLbomb.

I think calling it a memex would be interesting as well...going way old school. ;-)
For a while, maybe 5+ years ago (7? I can't remember clearly) it seemed like Perl was stagnating a little. This was about the time Ruby really seemed to take off, and some neat Python projects appeared (e.g. Gentoo Linux).

Now, even though the core language hasn't changed, there seem to be all sorts of clever Perl modules appearing which take advantage of a lot of Perl's highly flexible nature.

I really like Ruby myself, and really hate Python (even though I have to use it at work) but when the other languages fail me, I can almost always turn to Perl in a pinch and get it to do what I want. I also have to admit that the potential power of Perl6's syntax is a little astonishing; I think I would pick Perl6 over Ruby, for example.
I am using it with gevent to have efficient long polling/WebSockets. A gevent-websocket sample is included in gunicorn, and I use that as a basis for my WebSocket implementation. It's been a long time since I last used Apache for a deployment.
Universal Music Group Now "Declaring Legal Jihad" Against Grooveshark...
For what it's worth, a quick search on dice.com gives the following:

- perl: 4448 results
- python: 1988
- ruby: 1087

So I don't know... apparently there are still many jobs out there that require Perl. It may be that people use it less for new projects, though.
Putting it into context:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/trimming-our-privacy-...

The policy is still the same, the wording is less "lawyerly".
that link was submitted by an alpha tester. he submitted one of the picture/question challenges, and in exchange, he gets rewarded impressions of his link.
1) I had to Google this, but I don't think James Hansen was part of IPCC

2) I agree scientist are people too: you need to distinguish between their work (e.g. their papers) and the rest of their lives. Only the formers have to undergo scientific scrutiny. Outside of that they are normal people like everyone else.

3) When a scientist speaks about something which is not his field, of course his titles and such don't count for much. But my impression is that people complain of scientist even when they speak of what they know, and back their statements with evidence from their studies.
The human submitters get to see what answers people have submitted. So, they can see that you typed "yellow car" and then decide if that is a legitimate answer. It's all crowd sourced. If you submit a challenge, you OWN that challenge, and you can see your hit and fail rates.
So your grouse is ActiveX doesn't work in Firefox?

Why not also complain that vendor specific -moz and -webkit prefixes don't work in IE?

FWIW, Outlook Web Access works perfectly well (in "light mode") in Chrome and Firefox, and I can download from MSDN just fine.
thanks for the catch, i really appreciate the screen cap!
To be fair, Windows and the Windows ecosystem is so huge that it would be almost impossible for one guy to sit down and say, OK, this is how Movie Maker is going to get installed, and this is how it should function, and this is how Windows Update Q52324 will get installed, and blah blah.

My point is that it's easy to think Steve Jobs is in compete and total control of every pixel on an OSX screen and has intimate knowledge of the tiniest details about how every bundled app works, but the truth is probably closer to "Jobs hired a bunch of very smart people to do it for him, and managed them in a way that allowed them to function without the bureaucratic paralysis that plagues Microsoft." Which is a state very different from "dictatorial death grip."

(Though I won't argue that Jobs is indeed a benevolent dictator, and a damned good one).
You can see it on Pikk.com and on my blog kapauldo.com.
No, a true windows believer would defiantly sign up for GMail.
the human in charge of maintaining that challenge will see answers come in and decide to accept them. If you sign up for an account, you'll get a dashboard, which shows you stats on all of your challenges, how many impressions you have, etc.
How about you just click download?

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta
I don't understand why HLL don't have some sort of standard abstraction on top of sockets. Is it because it's a fundamentally "leaky abstraction" or should it be done? Seems to me that most HLL attempts to abstract networking try to be too high level.
Has Apple ever followed the HIG when they didn't feel like it? It's a brilliant idea, coordinating UI across disparate apps from multiple companies, but I seem to recall that going all the way back to the 80s Apple has pretty freely disregarded the guidelines when they thought they had a better idea. (And at least some of the time, the "better idea" got worked into the next round of HIG, so maybe that's ok?)
You're right, it's all in the way you execute. But starting off with the word "clone" doesn't sound good.

I'd say Google was "a take" on search engines like Altavista, Facebook "a take" on social networks like Friendster. They didn't start as "clones".

Maybe it's just a matter of phrasing but I was surprised by the number of replies like "go ahead, clone it!". Being inspired by, revisiting... are words that sound better to me. Between his decision on cloning and the outsourcing, it doesn't bode well.
right now there is a set of seed data on there. there will hopefully be new challenges being entered every day, then i plan to use a quarantine, IP logging, etc. strategies to prevent catalog attacks. this is crowd sourced, so ihope to have a lot of people contributing challenges and grow the catalog base. also, i've got image mogrification working, so after a few days of use, each challenge can be modified to prevent automated catalog attacks.
Back-end Ruby devs, front-end devs, full-stack devs - San Francisco, CA, USA

Here's the standard boilerplate from our job postings:

CrowdFlower is changing the way work gets done. We build a quality control system that distributes work to half a mlilion people around the world, and analyzes the results to guarantee the highest possible accuracy. We have a real business model, our revenues are growing, and we're venture-backed. We also have a sweet office in the Mission at 16th and Valencia. It's taco time—all the time.

We offer an array of excellent benefits: health insurance, new MacBook Pros, 30" monitors, free drinks and snacks, indoor bike parking, and flexible work hours. Also, we boast the biggest collection of office plants this side of the Mississippi.

But really, there's no more exciting place to work as a developer right now.

If you're interested in learning more about what it's like to work here, email me at tyson@crowdflower.com I'll spill all our secrets!

Here's our job list: http://crowdflower.jobscore.com/jobs/crowdflower/list
Ask HN: What makes a programming language 'hard'?
Some programming languages seem easier to learn than others. I've often heard people (myself even) saying, "I choose [language] because it was easier than [language]."

What do you feel makes a language easier or harder to use?

It it primarily a documentation issue? Are lower level languages more difficult than higher level languages by their nature? Is it a syntax issue? Or are some languages just harder than others?

my programming background: I only work currently in Ruby. I did some C/C++ in high school, but I hit a brick wall after a point. I wish my teacher had required the k&r book. After high school I tried perl and cgi stuff for web work, but it was too confusing to me at the time. I picked up Ruby about 18 months ago very quickly, starting with _why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby. I had never seen documentation so clear.
Software Engineer – Cupertino, CA

Apple.

Working on the iWork team. Our apps are the top grossing on the iPad app store. The job is dealing with how documents are persisted to storage; lots of interesting problems dealing with a scale that most other iPad apps aren't anywhere close to yet. You'll also be working on iWork for the Mac. It's a fun, distributed team and your work will be used by a huge audience.

Sorry, no telecommuting.

http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?method=mExternal.showJob&...
Developers - Newton (~Boston), USA (no telecommute, sorry)

TripAdvisor is a super popular website in the Boston area -- we recently became the most-visited travel site on the web with over a million unique visitors per day.

While we have huge traffic, happy users and are crazy profitable, we're not standing still: We just launched a cool Facebook Connect implementation lets you see where you friends have been and ask them for advice. It takes advantage on our existing Facebook app which has quietly collected of the BILLION pins our community has collectively placed into online maps -- odds are pretty good that we'll find you someone to ask.

Marketing ended up calling it "Trip Friends", and there's a lot of great press about it: http://www.google.com/search?tbs=nws%3A1&q=%22trip+frien...

The bit that's interesting to me is the careful (at least retroactively viewed) plan that led here.

We built this app on Facebook which allow people to put pins on their map. It was done in the fury of initial Facebook apps which were land grabs -- no real sense of what the data'd be used for, but with a sense that a footprint in that space would be valuable. Also it turns out that a with a finely tuned UI, people love to put pins on maps! It taps into some baseline lower-reptilian instinct, which explains our consistent 8 million monthly users.

Fast-forward about 3 years and we've got about a billion pins worth of data. Enough data that it's the single most painful table to deal with! And our CEO comes up with what to do with them: use them to identify which of your friends can help you plan your trip. As aside, TA is so profitable that we can worry about making your experience better rather than using sleazy tactics to just keep you on the site.

After about three months worth of work, our small team built a Facebook Connect implementation that taps into the data we've got in pins and ties it together into a clean UI that people love. It's simple, barely needs explanation, and just plains works.

If you're the sort of person who might want to be part of this sort of thing (large datasets, great UIs, big ideas, small teams), please drop me a line: sanj@tripadvisor.com
I'm a Windows person, but I've got Ubuntu on a netbook.

It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to get the repository for XBMC set up so that it would let me install the program.

Now I'd like to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.4, but I don't have quite enough space in the SSD to do it. I'd like to cut out some software that I don't really use on the netbook. But I can't figure out how to make it actually get rid of things that I uninstall. In particular, since installations are hierarchies of dependent packages, I can't see how to tell it "get rid of this and anything that it depends on, that isn't required by something else".

So for now, I can't upgrade my Ubuntu installation.

This sounds like your typical family member who can't get Windows to work right, doesn't it? I don't think that Linux has done anything better. They've done it different, and people who know the system can use it very effectively, but those of us who don't know the incantations are still out in the cold.
Very interesting! Its great to know that it takes years/decades to get to systems like Twitter. The media makes it look so much like a "it-happened-overnight" story.
yeah, the ads right now are low quality, but remember, the ads are revenue shared with the blogger. so it's a way to monetize your comments. if it gets traction, i'll be experimenting with deals, coupons, localized offers, etc. the current ads are really just there as a placeholder.
I don't think Perl is dead, as computer languages are significantly harder to kill than zombies. I would not at all be surprised if some critical infrastructure that must run lets a bunch of people gets killed is written in PDP 9 assembler. Just seams to be the nature of the beast.
I think what he is saying make sense. For instance there is a huge mountain of evidence for anthropogenic global warming and the need to cut down our emissions. I'd say on 9/10 things I probably agree with the scientists, with the exception of GMO foods which to me are a really bad idea with potentially catastrophic consequences.

However, I have a problem with laymen needing to sit down and accept whatever scientists say for the simple fact that science is not some pristine incorruptible institution dedicated only to truth. Scientists are PEOPLE and are subject to the same political issues, careerism, bias to not make funders angry, etc. that everyone else is.

Science is subject to a lot of influence from the people holding the purse strings, which are often industry. Take the recent story that came out of Harvard Medical School about how pharma has been influencing the ways that drugs are being prescribed: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-co... - should we non-scientists not question scientists, physicians, and other "authorities" when this type of thing is happening?

It is a GOOD thing when people question what scientists say. What is needed are better ways for scientists and non-scientists to engage in dialogue, and more often. Believe it ot not there might be a few things scientists can learn from the non-scientists.

I think that a lot of this gets discussed by regular people on broadcast channels (talk radio, cable news) that are really terrible mediums for communicating complex ideas. It would be nice if TV and radio weren't so cluttered with advertising, which makes it almost impossible to do more than make short statements. The exceptions that are good for communiating ideas through broadcast (such as Michio Kaku's radio show) prove the rule by being commercial-free.

Another note, scientists have to understand how political discourse and beliefs work. The domain is NOT based on rational inquiry and peer review. There is no "correct answer" as to whether Social Security should be privatized or if the US should withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. The work of George Lakoff is a must-read on this topic; we form much of our political beliefs based on non-rational moral frameworks that stem from our childhood and our ideas about the family (strict father vs. nurturant parent morality), and mapping our ideas about how the family should work onto the "nation as family" morality.
Twitter ‘Approving’ Apps for access to xAuth
Good thing they missed the coffee shops and the Hacker Dojo. We just dodged a bullet, eh? ;-)
Just goes to show how out of the loop I am when it comes to Apple. I read the title, wondered if it was about the internet echo test command, and then wondered, how the heck would they screw THAT up??!
A lot of scientists, interestingly, are willing to admit a luck factor, especially when it comes to doing something Nobel-Prize-level world-changing. Some really did know exactly what they were doing, and it worked. But a lot of scientists frankly admit that the big career-making thing they did wasn't even something they thought was important at the time--- and sometimes nobody else thought it was important either, and it languished in a journal for 10 years before someone else noticed it had big implications. Of course, that's not purely luck, because they'd never have had that opportunity to get their work belatedly discovered if they hadn't done good work on interesting problems, and published it. But there does seem to be some element of luck in the work turning out to be huge. There are plenty of people in exactly the same position who do good work on interesting problems, write a good journal article, and it doesn't turn out 10 years later to have unexpected but important implications, winning them the Nobel Prize. Just sort of how it happens; you can't always predict what is going to turn out to be important.

I could be wrong, but my impression is that wealthy businessmen are somewhat less willing to admit the role of luck than famous scientists are. Due to real differences in the role of luck in the two areas? Due to political considerations (the implications of admitting that wealth disparities aren't all due to merit are more political than the implications of admitting that scientific fame isn't purely due to merit)? Due to the self-deprecating scientists being humbler personalities? Dunno. And I could be wrong on the aggregate difference; I haven't done a survey or anything.
Consumer Watchdog Group Goes After Google - "Don't be evil" Video
Mostly you're right, but I object to the claim about Excel being better.

While Word was better than anything else I had found to use at the time (Word Perfect was a buggy mess).

However, I claim that there were better spreadsheet products available. Certainly the one I used, Enable, was quite robust, and was more capable than Excel.
You should really check out the SDL bindings for Perl. It's getting to the point where the dev versions are almost comparable to PyGame. There's some really cool stuff going on.
i only collect answer data for the purposes of improving responses, nothing else. (not a huge fan of luis von ahn, for reasons i'll keep to myself).
I use hamachi for going between work/home machines. Super easy. I'm only on mac/linux machines, though. I haven't used it on Windows for quite a while.
My .emacs File (Steve Yegge)
What do you mean by trying to hard? I agree, but I've been trying to pin down what exactly it is.
Compare Helpdesk Pricing, Vision Helpdesk is most economical
Vision Helpdesk Tops on Web 2.0 Helpdesk Software List published by ChadConnects.com – an SEO Company.
tl;dr - the article is about the susceptibility of SSL protected websites to man-in-the-middle attacks due to the CA trust model being only as strong as the least competent/trustworthy CA that a given browser, well, trusts.

Background: Browsers check for a man-in-the-middle attack by verifying that: a) remote site's certificate is signed by a certificate authority (CA) that the browser trusts; b) the URL matches the common-name attribute (CN) in the site's certificate.

So, for an attacker to get around this check, they need to: a) forge/spoof DNS (relatively easy); b) get a cert signed by a CA the browser trusts with a matching CN of the site to be spoofed (supposed to be relatively hard). (There is also Extended Validation, I won't go into that here.)

Unfortunately, these days, browsers trust _a lot_ of CA's, either directly or via chained certificates. Some of these chained certificates may be surprising to you.

https://www.eff.org/observatory
Stopped reading when he said he didn't know Yo-Yo Ma.
I saw somebody not too long ago say something like "I wonder if 30 years from now, ringing someone on the phone will be considered as rude as we now consider showing up on their doorstep unannounced to be".
Dogpatch Labs SF taking applications
If you are interested to know more about the IPCC inner workings and exactly what was wrong, here it's an article from a British newspaper (Guardian) from one of its members:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/15/ipcc-error...

The crucial bit:
"The IPCC does not carry out primary research, and hence any mistakes in the IPCC reports do not imply that any climate research itself is wrong. A reference to a poor report or an editorial lapse by IPCC authors obviously does not undermine climate science. Doubting basic results of climate science based on the recent claims against the IPCC is particularly ironic since none of the real or supposed errors being discussed are even in the Working Group 1 report, where the climate science basis is laid out."

and about the Himilayan glaciars mistake:

"This is of course not the proper IPCC projection of future glacier decline, which is found in Volume 1 of the report. There we find a 45-page, perfectly valid chapter on glaciers, snow and ice (Chapter 4), with the authors including leading glacier experts"
So long as Verizon happily issues new CAs to Etisalat, the following is a weak measure, but for the moment: is there a way in various browsers to declare that you don't trust specific CAs? I can't practically remove the Verizon certificate (in my Certificate Authorities tab, I don't see Verizon, but I do see GTE Corporation which was its previous name, so I'll guess they're the same...), but could I declare "don't trust certificates containing these certificates"?
FYI, I think "apt-get autoremove" will do what you want -- list packages which were installed automatically as a dependency and are no longer necessary. (I'm not sure how or if you can do the same thing with the package management GUI.)
This is no good for those of us who aren't native English speakers - I keep getting the words wrong (writing English is not that beg of a problem as small errors doesn't destroy the readers understanding and if you don't know a word, hey use another), and my English is better than 70% of the rest of my country.

This will go where all the other captcha replaces have gone - nowhere, sadly.
One nice thing about the web (as opposed to say a book or magazine) is, if you own your blog, you can make its defaults look like whatever you want, and your readers can override that to make it look like whatever they want.
Making an exact (more or less) clone of a successful product isn't especially unethical to my way of thinking, but it is stupid. The original product has a "head start" in the marketplace and you're almost certainly going to be playing catch-up in terms of market share and (here's the less part of "more or less") features.

What does make sense is a near-clone with a killer feature added. Google was like Altavista, but with results that are actually useful. reddit was just like delicious/popular, but with voting. Myspace was just like Friendster, but with uptime. Cheap/free when the competition is expensive usually counts as a killer feature, but isn't always the most effective way to make a profit.
agreed. I guess a better term would be "believable upstanding citizen"
I've played with ZeroMQ on some small projects, and I've been quite impressed by it. Basically, ZeroMQ was designed to send millions of small, mostly-asynchronous messages at extremely high speeds. If you feed it messages very rapidly, it sends the first message immediately, and queues the rest in userspace until (IIRC) the network card is ready to transmit another packet. Then it sends all the queued messages as a batch. So you get both high throughput and low latency.

There's some built-in support for common topologies (client/server, publish/subscribe, pipeline), and if you're willing to use the undocumented XREQ/XREP socket types, you can build more exotic topologies.

Most of the value in ZeroMQ is the actual C++ implementation, so other languages generally just wrap the C++ code. The zeromq API is tiny.

I haven't used it on a big production project yet, but I hope to do that soon.
Beta signup form broken? It looks like all the input fields from "website you'd like to use" onward (including submit button/links) are missing.
No Buck's of Woodside? :-) BTW, anyone else noticed the prominent black numbers written along the top of the walls in there? I asked a server what they meant and they had no idea.
Plan 9 has dial[1] and friends, which kinda does to network connections what printf did for output. And, not surprisingly, something similar is in Go[2]. Of course, we're talking libraries here, so if you really want it in the language, then you're out of luck. Although any sufficiently advanced language should make this transparent enough anyway.

[1]: http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man3/dial.html

[2]: http://golang.org/pkg/net/#Conn.Dial
The difference between getting assignments in college and industry