skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
eh, it seems to me like more for-profit companies should put more of their marketing budget into charity. Now, I mean, not just any charity, but a charity related to their field, something that their customers care about. I mean, I know I've donated prizes to a few programming contests to good effect... and I pretty regularly see my competitors names as mirrors when I go to download open-source products.

And really, how many banner ads would it take to gain the credibility of getting on the EFF "thanks" page? (I'm not there just yet... but I do have, for example, a LOPSA member discount.)

The other advantage of taking it out of your advertising budget is that the legal status of the entity you are giving to doesn't matter. From the for-profit corp's perspective, they are buying advertising.

I mean, when I do it, at least, I don't write off the retail "value" of the thing I gave away as some sort of charitable donation; I think that's scummy, 'cause it cost me some fraction of that to provide. I give away the service, then whatever it costs to provide that service, obviously, is part of the cost of running prgmr.com and is written off against any income, just like what it costs to run the for-pay domains; except these don't have any money coming in. I'm getting good (and usually pretty cheap) advertising; I don't need to run some tax scam, too.
Listing Google New on Google New, would be the new thing today.
Start with:

http://eloquentjavascript.net/ (has pdf download)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/A_re-introduction_to_JavaSc...

Most JS books are geared towards browser scripting. I would still recommend "JavaScript. The Definitive Guide" by David Flanagan.

Also watch all the Crockford Videos on JS: http://video.yahoo.com/watch/111593/1710507

After that all you will ever need is:

* JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford (must have)
* https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference
(extensive, lots of examples and hints)
and now they can grow revenue up across the base and increase effective $/user with:

1. More time on site through more features, more facebook connect implementations and more platform support

2. More efficient and targeted advertising with better technology (Google did this very well and are the envy of everybody)

3. Taking a bigger slice of platform revenues by forcing the use of Facebook credits, which means they get 30% of what Zynga et al make (Zynga made more than Facebook in '09)

Your argument assumes that $/user will remain static, when in truth it is very early days for Facebook in that regard. I think their $/user run-rate is good atm considering how shitty their ads are.

Point 3 alone could more than double $/user in the next 12 months. Point 2 is the jackpot that could see them surpass GOOG revenues in due course.
Ask HN: Confused if doing Master's in US a good way to get entry
/throwaway

I want to be in the Valley and do my own stuff there. I already have couple of web projects I am working on. I know I can work on my own projects from here as well but there just is not the atmosphere here. My former boss is the only person I know with whom I can talk about tech stuff and he shall be in States soon.

The thing is getting the entry to States is very time consuming and pretty hard as well now. Someone suggested me I do my Master's from US and after that I can get an H1B from some company. Besides my former boss (I was working with him while I was pursuing my Bachelor's) might help me on that regard as well.

tl'dr: Is getting education in States a good way to get an entry and subsequently citizenship considering it will leave me in neck-deep debt?
You get to set the domain when setting cookies so its not a huge issue either way.
One option would be to have these settings as optional with default turned off.

A first time user would then have a very simple browser and yet the more advanced user could add features they prefer.

In a way this is what plugins are for but installing a plugin for a tiny feature seems like overkill.
I was doing my pre-sleep reading of HN on my iPad and got out of bed and on my computer to thank you and tell you that I'm very happy you guys have the balls to say no and choose what's best over the public opinion.

You guys have made caught up and surpassed in many ways every other web browser out there in a staggering pace -- seriously, congrats to that. Chromium is my default browser and I love and look forward to what you guys are doing! :D
I read Managing Humans a while back, when I was a programmer, and liked it. Then, a year later, after I'd started working as a manager, I read it again and found it amazing. Seriously, having seen how things work as an actual manager, I was able to relate much more to all his stories and characters, which are spot-on, and got a lot of help from this book.
Glen don't add it. It adds further OS dependencies to chrome. If someone wants to make a plugin they can. Maybe Google can offer an award for people who product much needed plugins. It might be a way to promote the extensibility of chrome.
Stay strong and keep fighting the good fight. thumbs up
The real problem is with the coders that you don't eat lunch with — the authors of the shitty gems that get pulled in as dependencies.

For your companies' code reopening a class should be a huge flag in code review (something like gerrit should be in place at every large company), but it's not sustainable to police the dependencies of the libraries you use, especially when the default in the Rails community is spray and pray.
The chances of anyone requesting this feature being a linux user are slim.
Benenne den neuen Computer | Facebook
or "better to repent than regret" (I believe that is also an english saying, though I may be wrong)
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People who wouldn't use that feature and aren't tech-savvy won't bother making the argument against it, so it falls to the tech-savvy ones to make the point already made in these HN comments, that if they catered to every small request the browser would end up too bloated.
Google was the first search engine that was Good Enough that leapfrogging it became impractical. Facebook may well turn out to be the first social network to get to that level. Or maybe not.
You can return the favor. Throw an "anti farewell party" after they have you back and invite everyone on the extended team. Maybe not necessarily a party, but you get the idea.
Yeah, I hear ya. When I was in Milwaukee I had a reputation. Out here I have to start over.

Right now I would be happy with zero debt ( even good debt ) a new macbook pro, and about 2 months of savings to cover net 30.

Moving just before the worst economy ever was a tough move, but i think it will pay off.
Death toll in Pakistani floods surges past 800 (AP)
In Austria there are Höhere Technische Lehranstalten (HTL, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6here_Technische_Lehranst...) which offer vocational education (but the whole educational system is very different from the US and other countries, which is reflected in the problems faced in the conversion to the Bologna system, i.e. bachelor/master etc.).

Over 5 years, students (usually aged 14 when they enter the school) receive practical training in programming as well as a theoretical foundation, though in no way as thoroughly as in any university program.
In the first year of the informatics branch they let students enjoy the beauty of programming linked lists in C, which is quite tough for many.
It is also very hard to replicate the current FB's infrastructure, for a new company.
All this has happened before, and will happen again.

Here's my personal favourite, from when Mozilla dropped MNG support: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574#c672

I remember being upset that MNG was removed. I never used it, but I might have! Maybe! And an extra 300kb or so isn't really that much, is it? And you can just drop it in instead of libPNG, there probably won't be any security or compatibility problems, and if there are they'll be easy to fix, right? I'm sure the other browsers will support it soon.

Hard to be the bad guy, I guess, but you guys are doing the right thing. Have you read Jim Collins' Good to Great? Look up "rinsing your cheese".
Universal popularity isn't necessarily that useful. It really just matters that everyone you know is using it.

Just as Facebook used the collegiate social scene to grow, I think theres a lot of potential for a competitor to take a similar route. Find a relatively self-contained community and attack it. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a Facebook killer eventually emerges from the university system just as Facebook did.
from the parent: "You can probably buy real clientsides in IE or a popular plugin for far less than six figures."

I'm pretty sure that what the parent means is that you could buy a plugin, or rather the company that writes a plugin. say, adblock (okay, adblock might be more than six figures... a less popular plugin that is still fairly widely used.) along with the rights and credentials to upload a new version. (of course, you'd pretend to be a legitimate business to do this.) Now, I don't know how IE works, but FireFox has a mechanism to automatically update plugins to their latest versions. You now insert your malicious code into the plugin and cause the auto-update to run. Assuming the infection isn't immediately obvious, you will, within a few days, infect nearly all users of that plugin.
No, that comment just helps to explain how trivial these things would have been to work around. That's the whole point of the article, that these guys missed all the most obvious things that you need to do to secure your application.

There are no deep, tricky issues explained because absolutely zero effort was needed to find a half dozen breathtakingly bad practices floating at the surface.

So yes, of course it's trivially fixable. The problem is that it wasn't trivially fixed and they thought they were ready to release it.
Just jump and build a block under you feet, you don't need stairs ;)
Slimming Drugs Cost NHS £50 Million
if you understand all of the internals of how jQuery is written, you probably understand javascript pretty well. Javascript: the Good Parts will get you through most of the tricks that jQuery uses.
tl;dr ... a minor objection tough ... it is not at all impossible for 70 percent of drivers to be better than average, you just need the lower 30 percent to (on average) be really bad
Facebook will be worth more than Google because Facebook has solved the chicken and egg problem. In order to leave Facebook for a same or better experience, I need all my friends to move as well. However, I could switch to Bing tomorrow and not need anything/anyone else to move with me for a better experience.
Depends on the course - the one I did was heavily theory/maths based. We had to do a lot of development but we weren't taught that much about good development practices - those kind of practical issues are pretty much orthogonal to CS and are much better picked up in a practical environment anyway.
Paul answered: "Because the future is in people."

As opposed to the present or past?

Paul writes a lot of thoughtful stuff but that throw-away line doesn't make any sense.

Any profitable venture is always about the people. When has that not been true?
I haven't seen my actual desktop for ages. I always have applications, editors and viewers running.
and what of friendster and myspace? both of them had the same advantages.
Personally, I think that Gosling got what he deserved considering the pain he inflicted on myriads of developers with Java. (Yes, there are some nice technologies in the Java platform. But Java language is not one of them.)
Android Is Like ‘peeing in your pants for warmth in winter’ says Nokia
It varies by location, glassdoor's values are accurate.
It looks like a classic case of poorly managed expectations - the technologists would prefer an approach like the one you outline (and this was what I was expecting), however given their visibility they had to deliver a working application that people could download and install and have it do something.

While meeting both of those objectives in those timescales might be possible it would be a truly remarkable achievement. Not surprisingly it didn't happen and they released something that pleased nobody - all we can hope for is that they learn some lessons and move onto better things.
That's what I found interesting when looking into OneSocialWeb, their focus on already existing protocols (XMPP plus some XEPs http://onesocialweb.org/developers-xmpp.html), instead of adhering to Not invented here.
Well, that's what they call a "lifestyle business". But it doesn't say what kind of lifestyle that is...
Well that certainly dragged the loonies out in the comments, didn't it?
I'm actually thinking as younger generations come and find a new place to hangout I think Facebook can be unseated, not easily but in the same way other social networks have fizzled. Google is just a utility, and I think most people really don't care what search engine they are using, just bing and yahoo.. hasn't really given anybody a real reason to switch. Where as when it comes to social status, and hanging out where the cool kids are.. this can cause a shift very fast.
If you'd like to check daily (as i do) the progress of the minecraft sales and other statistics just go here: http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ (official data taken from the minecraft site graphed with Google Chart API).
eh, I think much of google's lead is also the infrastructure, and I don't mean the servers. If you showed up at my doorstep with a giant wad of cash and said "build a better search engine" well, about 2/3rds of the people I'd want to hire to help me are already working at google.
"Comment 32 by orphenshadow, Jan 24, 2009
I love chrome, but this is one of the main reasons it is 2nd behind firefox."

Clearly.
I have clearly had this happen a few times, and the results in either direction were not good.

You might just be happy that it's a good company and leave it at that.
I agree. I see Google overall lost its "irreplaceable" status. They had it about 5 years ago when their search was clearly the best, and it would be difficult to live without Google. But now, if Google suddenly disappeared tomorrow, we would adapt pretty quickly.

Moreover, organic search itself lost some of the significance. While still important, we can search for new things in Twitter, Facebook, aggregate sites like Techmeme, or go to primary sources directly.
I've heard anecdotally he is quite the baller.
Now, that is what killed friendster, so I'm not saying it'd be easy. but computers are getting so cheap so fast that the longer you wait, the easier that will be. Unless facebook can double in compute complexity every two years, this barrier will fade with time.
It also depends on your speed on the sidewalk. The faster that you speed down the sidewalk, the more risk you put yourself at of running into people pulling out of drives (or making turns on the road when you speed out into the crosswalk) just because they are not used to something that fast being on the sidewalk (you don't see people walking at the same speed that you can be zipping around on your bike).
yes, but they entered the market at a point in time when the masses were not ready for social media. Myspace was for kids, friendster was for early adopters.
How many software include tricks to get around firewalls by punching holes (http://www.h-online.com/security/features/How-Skype-Co-get-r...). Is this unethical because it circumvents an explicit user wish? Do people even know that they have a firewall, or know what a firewall is, or do people even have control on the firewall settings (at work for example)?

Of course they want to run e.g. skype, who doesn't, right?! I know that there is something arbitrary in all that, that's the point.

I didn't say it was ethical to circumvent the user wishes. I said that some people might reason in such a way that it makes them feel morally excused for exploiting something which is perceived as an unethical technique in order to perform a licit goal.

The main points behind this mind setting are:

(here "you" are the application devel, not the evil guy, of course)

* point out the user de facto doesn't have control on his privacy settings by disabling the cookies, since the Bad Guys (TM) already have a hack to go around it.

* point out that the user is not even conscious of what privacy and security risks are, and often run a browser preconfigured by the sysadmin, nephew, whatever, which might decide to conservatively block cookies "because they are bad".

* you are not exploiting the cookies with the purpose to invade user privacy. You are just building an application X (see grand parent question) which exploits the same hack to get around the 'default paranoid settings'.

* you feel stupid to limit your application functionality just to obey some obviously bugged rule. It would be like skype saying "oh, there is a firewall, I know how to get around it, but I won't because it's unethical since people have the right to setup a firewall according to their wishes".

(of course these points are valid once this technique becomes mainstream, and all tracking sites employ it)

I'm not saying that behaving this way is ethical or not or less unethical. I'm just supposing that there might be some uses of this technique which are not directly intended to trace the identity of a user for malicious reasons (marketing etc) but for providing some functionality to the average user of a particular product (who asks for it).

People might be pissed out because some features don't work. They don't care why. Application providers are also pissed off when half of their users cannot use a given feature because some sysadmin/security software/nephew hacker decided to impose some restriction (settings, firewall rules etc), even if there are valid reasons for the restriction (settings, firewall, etc) to be be there.
You should see his PowerPoint presentations ;)
What keeps bothering me is - why nobody sees the danger Google represents to Facebook.

I mean if Google wanted to - they could IMHO mow down Facebook. They have waaaay more personal information about all the Facebook users that are also Google users (I believe that is majority of Facebook users), which would enable them to leverage that information and create a much better user experience.

If they could really put their mind to it that is. Unfortunately Google cannot seem to manage that kind of focus - beyond adwords that is. And forget Buzz - that was a miserable failure and probably even wasn't ever meant to be anything beyond Proof Of Concept.

However Google just might be working on a FB killer as we speak. In my oppinion Google has better infrastructure, more resources and is in a position to really give FB a run for it's money.
what about free speech?
... but the world doesn't know how to do anything you'd need a huge stone castle or a massive trapped dungeon to fight against...

Yet.
I don't know about you, but I never had a real-life friend on Myspace or Orkut, while now a lot of them are on FB, even non-geeks. That's the fundamental difference. To unsettle FB, something completely new and much better would need to be invented, surely not something on the level of Myspace or Orkut.
For an awful lots of people (the majority?), I would posit that Facebook has a lot more information about them than Google.
Eh... I don't know. I think there is actually a disadvantage to everyone being on the network. I left facebook when both my mother and my stepmother joined. I don't think I'm alone in this need to compartmentalize my personal life in ways that facebook doesn't support.

Now, my professional life, well, I'm on linkedin, and I like it quite a lot. But facebook has lost it's compartmentalization, and I think that's bad. It used to be just for college kids, which is a great niche, everyone else wants to be in the same place as the cool college kids. But if mom starts showing up at the local watering hole, I think the kids are going to find a new place to hang out.

The thing about linkedin is that yeah, I want to compartmentalize my professional life to some extent... but it's one way compartmentalization. I mean, while I don't really want all of my personal life to bleed into my professional life, I mean, my business partners and customers don't need to read about my relationship problems. Not that I'm ashamed of my personal life or anything; it's just unprofessional, and I think impolite to shove that in their faces. But the other way around is fine; I'm okay with casual friends reading up on what I do at work.

Really, the compartmentalization of my private life is very complex, and I'm not a very private person.

Just my opinion; I'm clearly not an expert at this sort of thing.
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Build Your First PHP for Android Application
True, but people that swerve into the bike lanes (where they exist) are performing a road rules no-no in that they have not stayed within their lines. 'Peer pressure' is for drivers to stay out of the bike lanes, so where bike lanes do exist, there is a bit of a layer of protection vs. just a large shoulder.
Facebook | Haseo Ovan
Sepi........
The Rise and Fall of suck.com [2005]
A crawler using wget and xargs
Is mathematics invented or discovered?
Might be risky for him - I don't see why it's much of a risk for Oracle shareholders.
Ask HN: What are the other premier ad networks beside The DECK, etc?
I am researching a bit about the so-called "Premium" Advertising Networks; so far I managed only to find these. Oddly, my Google results returned mostly USA-based ads network.

- decknetwork.net
- fusionads.net
- buysellads.com
- carbonads.net
- federatedmedia.net

Do you know what any other premium ads network out there? I'm sure there's somewhat similar network supporting the Spanish/German/Russian sites as well.

Any help is appreciated.
There's no law that says a blog post can address only 1 topic at a time.

These are related issues that inform one another.
That's what religion is already, in some sense. Any time you honestly question it, and poof - it's gone and you've learned something. The problem is getting people to honestly question that which feels comfortable, religion or otherwise.
I'd love to hear if someone else is trying to start something in Italy, either to target the italian market or as an offshoring strategy.
How to listen to podcasts with increased speed on your iPod
You're right.

Have you ever heard of "Simpson's Paradox"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox

It says that often, things that look like overall trends can be split into sub-groups, in which the effect is gone. For example, take the "Public Schools perform worse than Private Schools" idea. If you split both school populations into the children from wealthy parents vs children without wealthy parents (ending up with 4 groups), you'll find that the test scores are the same for the "wealthy" kids, whether they go to private or public schools.

In other words, it doesn't matter whether kids are going to private or public schools, what matters is whether they have wealthy parents or not. It just so happens that more kids with wealthy parents go to private schools.

More details about the paradox, and a link to a study on private vs public schools, can be found in the Wikipedia article.
ruby -e "'=XX===============================' =~ /X(.+)+X/"

Why does that hang in Ruby? In Perl it's fine...
Please read the whole comment I linked to.
I was talking about things like the OP saying that browsers could delete things by prefetching (GET requests) or that update_attributes does a double assignment which are simply not true