skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, wait a sec. A good share of people is complaining about the lack of Microsoft's willingness to push the new shiny stuff - how much time did it take for them to come up with a MVC framework? - the other share of people is complaining that Microsoft pushes too much of a new stuff.

C'mon, people, give me a break - yes, there're lots of new frameworks coming from MS. Well, that's what I would expect the company to do in order to give their developers some other options to be more productive. It's not like MS' competition is sitting around and doing nothing - Google has their own not-invented-here syndrome, Ruby community produces new frameworks every other week, PHP community clones whatever Ruby community produces... Technology isn't frosen and is always a moving target, that's life, get over it.
Welcome to the Pit of Despair...
I had to do that few months ago when I bought a .it domain, but good for them if they finally changed it. Now they should start accepting CC from abroad, so I can stop asking my dad to use his for my italian domains...
The landlord of the pub I worked in once used to say: "There is no such thing as common sense. It's all experience"
Laying off people who weren't and aren't contributing anything productive

Saying that UK public services are inefficient is one thing, probably true.

Saying that the layoffs can be confined to people who "aren't contributing anything productive" and be extension health, policing, education, research etc will not get worse at all is an entirely different thing, and I don't think it's true.
Good point. Some people are definitely looking for full time, others are just looking to get work done. Some are explicitly looking for contract/parttime and they indicate that too. F/T is what many want, but not everyone. It rarely hurts to ask - offer part time hours and see if they're open to that.
Huh? I don't see how this person is a "blackhat". Just because they are playing with your server and trying to find holes doesn't mean they are intending to maliciously exploit them.

I also don't see how it is social engineering. What did the attacker convince you of?
It is easier and quicker to scroll down than to find how to navigate to and then load several different pages. If you don't like it, don't scroll.
For the un-initiated, sendfile() is a system call that sends data between two file descriptors. The intent is to make the kernel do the read/write cycle instead of the application (user-level) code, thereby cutting down the number of times the data needs to be mapped between kernel and userspace memory spaces.

The manual page: <http://linux.die.net/man/2/sendfile>. A related Linux Journal article: <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6345>.
She's your mother - I mean, I guess you really don't have to friend her? but it seems pretty rude to me. I didn't mind friending my mom. the problem that I hit was that facebook broke the compartmentalization between my mother and my stepmother. I love them both, but, uh, let's not mention one in the other's presence, you know?

I mean, if facebook was providing me something meaningful I would have found a way to deal with it. But as it was I was mostly leaving my wall questions and my facebook mail unanswered; It really was better, I think, to leave rather than have people expect me to answer questions and then have those questions drowned out by mafiafarmcow updates and pictures of cute cats. (I know, you can filter some of the crap... but you know what? I already know how to use procmail. I already have a 200+ message a day email inbox, I don't need another.)

So the thing with my mom(s) was sort of the last straw. Everyone has my email; I went from mostly ignoring my facebook to deactivating it.
Rapid Innovation: The Philosophy of Betaworks Founder John Borthwick
All of the above, and add the "return to high-school" mentality that users start to slip into.

Facebook's policy of not telling people when they've been disconnected, while understandable on their part, is a bitch on the receiving end. Wifey got unfriended last week by someone and it was a week of bitter gossip, self-questioning, and teeth gnashing among friends. What a waste of time.
Brain-hacking art: Making an emotional impression
I'd love to write a blog post about this, but you don't have any contact info on your profile or site. You can contact via me email (it's on my profile) if you're interested.
Challenge: Make a game, sell 1 copy by Oct 31st
...by getting scolded by more senior programmers for playing amateur hour and allowing authenticated, unauthorized actions?
I thought this sort of thing would be interesting to HN because of the focus on the business side and getting out a MVP (MVgame?).
Sizing up China's cities
Just woke up and saw this. Awesome. Congrats to Peter and everyone else at Shapeways, this is great!

This just made my space a lot more interesting. CloudFab doesn't exactly _compete_ with Shapeways, but when explaining what we do, we've had a lot of people be very skeptical on the whole mass customization market. Hopefully this makes people take it a bit more seriously.
You can use Insynch for free, it syncs your home directory with Google Docs.

Request an invite here, they will give it to you quickly:

https://www.insynchq.com/
If you become well known for something people will beg you to consult for them.
I tend to think of Microsoft is backwards because of their reluctance to allow the Internet to be important. For a decade (say, '00 to '10) they basically ignored all the good things about the Internet and tried their best to keep "the old way" relevant.

They're slowly getting better (see IE9, Bing and Office Live...all good, but also all very recent) but it's absurd how far behind they are on the Internet.

I don't doubt that there are cool, modern projects going on at MS. But they corporate push over the last decade has definitely been: ignore the Internet.
Yes, .Net is actually a nice environment for hacking. C# is a very good programming language, the standard library is very well designed, it's fast, but the what I really like about .Net is how seamless it is to work with multiple languages at the same time. It's ridiculously easy to write some parts of the code in F#, others in C# and some others in Python. This way, I can always chose the best language for each problem without having to use the same language throughout the whole project.

(I also do a lot of Common Lisp fun coding as well so I'm not exactly a Microsoft fanboy, just to provide some context).
It doesn't seem absurd to me that a few college friends want to hack together a project to fix a problem they see. I think it's great, regardless of whether they succeed. Nobody is forcing you to join them.
On the same train of thought, Barrelfish is a pretty cool project... http://www.barrelfish.org/
Create great websites without any SEO? (Case Study: WooThemes)
This is a great post and shows how awesome of a community we have. The Diaspora guys are a bit behind when it comes to solid programming, but Patrick (among others) reviewed the code, noted flaws, reported and advised them on how to fix them, then wrote a great post explaining what was wrong to help others avoid the same mistakes. Stuff like this is both educational and helps the programming community move forward. Thanks to Patrick.
Wow. Excuse me for sharing something I found enjoyable.
This type of "article" shows you a creative approach on something, in this case it's creative speculative fiction. It may or may not increase your creativity, but it can be considered "food for thought."
It's not exactly a video from the College Humor website.
But I assume HN is strictly for objective, impartial and purely informative links?
In general, there are far more opportunities in places with more people. Toronto, Ottawa, Mississauga, and Waterloo area are quite ideal because you have a few good universities (such as UT and Waterloo), a few good companies (Google, RIM, etc), and what seemingly might be a good startup city (Ottawa) thanks to Nortell and a few big name hi-techs shut down.
Shapeways' prices are actually fairly competitive. 3D printing isn't cheap.
Tool of the Day: Identified: Socialize your Job Search
Search is practically necessary for using the web. Social networking websites are neither necessary for using the web nor for socializing.
I think it's great. Get BizSpark or WebsiteSpark to cover your licensing costs during development; start with el-cheapo $20/mo hosting which gives you reasonable bandwidth and MS SQL option - and you are all set. If three years down the road (that's how long *Spark lasts) you will find yourself thinking about licensing costs - you aren't doing it right: in three years of startup it's either you're getting enough profits to cover your licensing expenses, or you're in deep trouble no matter what license is.
"I might be able to excuse this since they're fundamentally still in alpha"

I wouldn't. Authorization is the sort of thing that has to be done first.
The Future of Technology Starts Here
If I could give one piece of advice to every startup who is worried about server security, it would be this: read the NSA's two page pamphlet for hardening Red Hat Enterprise Linux [1] for a quick overview and then move on to the ~200 page complete guide [2]. The principles are generally applicable to most Linux systems.

The NSA's guide is good enough for low value targets. Besides, these are your tax dollars at work, so you really should make use of them. :-p

[1] http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/factsheets/rhel5-pamphlet-i731....

[2] http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/os/redhat/rhel5-guide-i731.pdf

On the web application side, you're going to want OWASP. http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page

EDIT: Just thought of something.... There were several privilege escalation exploits for the kernel made public around this time frame [3]. I'm guessing that's the reason why his kernel was silently upgraded. :-p

[3] http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-988-1
Ah fair enough, thanks!
"The Java community embraces open source, and as a result, patterns become an integral part of their vocabulary."
Generally good advice; but apply good judgment on using patterns. Learn when to use them and don't go overboard. We (the java community) are getting bad reputation for overusing patterns.
Borland was (almost) killed by its own stupidity. Their RAD tools were miles ahead of anything that MS had, but they got buggier and buggier with each version and their C++ compiler had and still has poor standards compliance.

I felt like I had taken a step back productivity-wise with VC++6, but it was solid compared to BCB.
The way I read your link, he was sued for something else, and this practice came to light during discovery.
They didn't mention it on the emails at all. It was the contrast between 'my son is named x' and 'i kill u' that scared me. What I should have mentioned in the blog post was that there were other messages they left as comments in the code they submitted.

So at the moment you have to leave an email address to take an open test. (This will change soon to no address required). The guy consistently signed in with a fake email address, email to which was bouncing. I blocked that email address, which amounts to not accepting it to let someone sign in for an open test. This is just a soft warning, of course. So the guy appended a character to the address, and left me the message: "Why have you blocked test@example.com? Too bad codeboffin!" I just don't see why they couldn't have discussed it on email on which they were already in mid-conversation with me.

I presume the social engineering was coming. I would probably have told the person anything he wanted to know about my security setup by then. I don't think I would have been as open to anyone else off the bat.
Cloud computing was mentioned, we weren't looking at your specific machine but at a computing environment where the commodities are cycles, cores, bandwidth and storage.

In such an environment firing up another instance of your process to match the number of free cores available should be done with as little horizontal communication between processes as possible.
I'm pretty sure that Amazon, at least, is testing the hell out of their layouts. You may not be able to comprehend the guy who thinks "Fabric softener!", but he's probably out there, spending more money than the people who prefer less random products.

...not that that makes you crazy, though. Maybe crazy people just spend more money online than you do. :)
Did you HAVE to chase every new API as soon as they came out? Did MFC suddenly stop working? Did the Win32 API go away? Why couldn't you just keep going as you were until you really wanted to rewrite to new APIs?
I think it refers to the already-discounted prices. Technically, you're still saving. You're just not saving any extra.
For hackers, Makerbot just slashed their price for their 3D printer. Their starter kit is now 649 dollars, and the ultimate kit is about 900 dollars. Apparently, they're going to announce a new 3D printer. http://blog.makerbot.com/2010/09/22/makerbot-cupcake-cnc-sal...

(Not afflicted with makerbot in any way and still too poor to afford a Cupcake CNC)
When investors band together to get better terms, don't we just call that a VC or a hedgefund?
Summary: The author of the article has a web app that allows you to administer programming tests to job applicants. The two languages currently supported are C and C++. As part of that process, (I'm guessing) the code needs to go through some sort of compilation process.

The author of the article had left a default whitelist on the production box that whitelisted /dev/random as being readable. The attacker compiled a program (took a test I'm guessing) that included /dev/random. The author found out based on ip and sheer luck that the attacker was a user of the system that he had corresponded with previously.

The reason I summarized this is because I wasn't totally clear on what codeboff.in was from the article. It makes sense how an attack like this could happen. The author seems to really know his stuff and the attack vector really was a small oversight. It's pretty unsettling to me, though, how persistent/insane this attacker seems.
<hand-waving>
My impression is that .NET just isn't that much for-fun, mainly because the community isn't based in the hobby arena. A decent package repository might help this (I guess there is one, but I don't know it) -- something like PyPi for python, rubygems for ruby (is this correct? [not a ruby programmer - yet!]), cliki for common lisp (okay, asdf isn't so nice), etc.

My impression is that .NET development, at least in the web arena, is quite backwards. Another observation to add to my first, is that .NET developers (at least where I work), aren't working on their own projects in anything else, so aren't benefiting from the way of working that RoR (CRUD, HTML templates, gems, etc) seems to have.
</hand-waving>
I'm surprised at some of what's being said in this string of replies as well as what's being upvoted. Not you in particular, but I want this to be seen by people in multiple child-threads and am posting here.

1. $60k is pretty much a ceiling for earning potential for many if not most teachers. It can take a long, long time to get there with no hope of going beyond.

2. My teacher friends universally make under 40k.

3. They often have to spend their own money on supplies to subsidize the lack of funds in the system.

4. Many if not most teachers work more than 70 hours a week during the school year when factoring in grading, meetings, correspondence, athletics, extra-curriculars, and other events.

5. Many teachers clean up urine and vomit, are verbally assaulted by students as well as parents, are in a vacuum absent any meaningful feedback on the quality of their work, and deal with customers who almost never fully appreciate the service until ten or twenty years later.

I could go on, but I'm not sure I understand how $60k as an typical top-end for a difficult and essentially important profession is inordinate and even less so how one can fail to see the need for supplemental funds in many cases to allow the teacher to fully do his or her job.
I agree, but would add this.

Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done.

Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate developers to hack stuff together quickly (I know MFC and COM aren't all that easy but they were easier than just using the WinAPI). Which is why businesses liked the Microsoft stack and hence 9-5 developers flock to them.

What's interesting is that in recent years Microsoft has been infiltrated by other schools of thought. It's like there's a three way war going on. On the one hand there are VB.NET people using WebForms, EntityFramework, VSS and SharePoint to hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years. The TFS, SQL Server, BizTalk and Dynamics people want to bring in some enterprise style rigour to the whole thing. While the C#, Linq, MVC crowd are trying to keep everything loose and open.

I doubt this is any kind of conspiracy to retain mindshare. It's just that Microsoft got big and Bill Gates started stepping back, so it lost much of it's direction.

I sense a real but rarely articulated confusion among the 9-5 developers about all this new stuff. There are 3x the number of frameworks and tools coming out of Microsoft these days, which ones will all the enterprise recruiters be looking for in 2 years? Nobody knows.
> Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java.

That would be lying though, and it could get you in to a whole pile of hot water. Such 'technical tricks' may work a few times but eventually you'll have a real problem.
I was a bit harsh there, sorry.

It does have some food for thought. Sorry for the over-reaction on my part.
Totally off topic but I love the concept of code boffin and wish you the best of luck with it.
Ergo we plan to add options so that Redis can do this automatically for you. You'll be able to say, start N instances. And when clustering will be available you can configure all this instances with a single common configuration.

For now this should be done manually, but you have 4 or 8 cores so it's not a big problem IMHO.

The idea is that there is no difference between the instances you have among different servers, and the ones you have locally. Given that every instance can hold a set of unrelated keys, why centralizing it in some way if completely separated threads can lead to max performances, and simpler code?

Note that 48 independent threads or 48 processes are actually the same thing more or less, but nothing prevents us from starting N threads at startup if needed for some reason in the future, each with completely separated state.

I don't understand your parallel about starting N operating systems btw...

Anyway, this is not a problem just with Redis. Programming languages like Ruby are a mess with the usual conception of threads. And most Ruby programmers also think far too high level to really deal with a low level stuff such as synchronization. A shared nothing model with message passing, and one interpreter per thread, could lead to the maximum benefit while retaining the more abstract interface to the programmer. Believe it or not the time for old-fashion multi thread programming is gone (I hope).
I don't see how this is any worse than trying to keep up with the latest version of some OSS library. Whether it's MS that's revving or open-source developers, changes happen, and if it's a breaking change in a shared library, sometimes you get hurt.

Just yesterday there was a "goodbye python" article posted here, that blamed the fact that so many Linux installations have old installations of python, and so many things are broken when modules in the installation get updates.
It's in the best interest of Microsoft that governments and government-sized and super-sized corporations procure systems that need indefinite upgrade$. I think that it is unfair to only pick on Microsoft because watch as that aging but curiously mission critical mainframe, Oracle license, and the entire fleet of Dell, HP, Apple, or fill-in-behemoth-brand-name hardware-software-network combo is going to need upgrade$ too.
Or even change the number of processes on demand.
Thank you, that's a perfect summary.
My only worry is that the newly rich author won't work on this fantastic project anymore.
The Premium Pricing "Problem"
Yeah, it's all about context switching, which is just unnecessary work. Doesn't matter if you are serving 10 dynamic HTTP requests a day on a 16-core super machine. Does matter if you are serving the same file 100,000 times a second from your phone :)

(I do wish it worked for any fd to any other fd, because I have to write that code myself rather frequently. Example: copying data from a pty to the real terminal.)
67% of NFL players from the SEC accepted money under the table in college
In the world of collegiate athletics, students are increasingly treated as commodities rather than pupils. Allen Sack, former National Champion at Notre Dame, discusses drawbacks of this shift in values as well as what the future of college sports might look like. (for the lazy: title statistic is at 11:15 into the video)
Idea Informer feedback widget is now integrated into Joomla 1.5
Idea Informer has developed a feedback module for Joomla 1.5. This extension allows the webmasters who operate Joomla based websites to integrate a free feedback widget into their projects quickly and easily. The core idea of Idea Informer module for Joomla is to let webmasters improve their websites basing on suggestions of their visitors.

Previously the owners of Joomla based websites were not able to set up a feedback widget; with the introduction of Idea Informer module for Joomla 1.5 it is not only possible, but also simple and free of charge. You can find a demo project with a complete instruction on how to integrate a feedback widget into your Joomla 1.5. project here http://joomla.idea.informer.com

Idea Informer (http://idea.informer.com/) is a free and easy-to-use feedback tool, which gives an opportunity to improve the website basing on customers ideas. In order to receive feedback from website visitors you should sign up on idea.informer.com and receive a code for an interactive widget to be installed on your website. The service provides a platform for a dynamic dialogue between the website owner and the visitors. Suggested ideas can be supported by other users who vote for them thus moving the best ones to the top of the list; hence a webmaster knows opinions of the majority. At the moment Idea Informer is used by both startups and popular websites, e.g. http://funny.pho.to.
OneSocialWeb would seem to be the next most significant project. IMO, they have a leg up since they started with XMPP and have released code as well. I see junk in the code as well (like catching and swallowing exceptions) but then what code doesn't have junk in it.
Yes, true. But, I think, social networking websites was born just due to lacking of social interaction (among real relationships) on web while people was spending more and more time on it for searching valuable information. Facebook just brings social information in real life on web and make social interaction much easier (although I think it only keeps us further away from real life).
>It can be written in a few lines of efficient user code.

I'm not sure he's understanding what this is. There is no copying needed here at all. The kernel could make the hard drive write to a place in memory, have the NIC read from that place and just manage interrupts between the two. The kernel wouldn't have to touch the data at all. This may not be how Linux does it (given the requirement for a memmap'able file descriptor) but that would be possible at least. I don't think you could do anything near this in user code.
Why does package design so rarely allow us to get to the last drop?