skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Macros (and their more hygienic cousins) are not always a good idea. They make it very hard to understand what the rest of the program does, unless you can grep the whole thing. Lispers will violently disagree with me here.

Regarding decorators, no they don't seem to be that useful. They do bloat the documentation, if not the language; and you don't ever really need them.
When I was 11 coca cola ran a competition where you could get a free movie ticket if you collected 20 (something like that) caps. All the kids were collecting caps from bins and recycle places so they were hard to find. A friend and I got 2 tickets each, trading all our caps in on the last day.

We found out that at the trade in centres were packed on the last day and that the caps went into opaque bags. The promotion came back at some point (I think it may have even been immediately). We figured we could use (much easier to find) RC cola caps instead. It worked. We got about 10 tickets each.

I don't think you could motivate kids to do stuff like that anymore.
What about emulators?
Oh, don't worry about that. That list is more for foreign investor while it is good to understand how your country looks in general. While my country is listed 26th only in recent years situation has improved.
We had DOS based terminals in our college computer lab. Each of us had a different working directory, but the directories were all accessible by each other. Once I and my friend opened a directory of a girl student and created a batch file named "cd.bat" which prints some garbage texts on the screen. Whenever she runs "cd" command from her working directory, this batch file would get executed!
Facebook - Breaking Your Privacy Rules
Indeed, it's too bad that the transition has been taking so long.
You still made a profit ;p stop looking in the back mirror OR just build something to take on facebook ;p
django + appengine is something I am suspecting. Personally, I had good luck with sticking with tornado + appengine. Tornado is pretty raw and atleast keeps an option to port the code over if I have to. Datastore and dns are still suckers in the performance.
This reminds me of the opening scene in Juzo Itami's <i>Minbo-no Onna</i>. Nobuko Miyamoto's character does something similar with the yakuza.
But in Altavista, you could have searched on foo bar, "foo bar", or foo NEAR bar; I still wish Google had the latter option.
"Read the source to jonesforth (http://www.annexia.org/forth) and/or write a Forth in C, it will teach you quite a bit."

:) That is actually what I did last month. (The assembler source doesn't always translate well to C, so it required a lot of careful thinking about what is going on and how to expres it in C.) I think I ended up writing three Forths, and I did indeed learn a lot.

I did some of the other things too... used to have LiSP, worked through the first few chapters of EOPL, did the Crenshaw tutorial too back in the day.

I still feel that the way I do things are, well, hackish, and incomplete, and suboptimal. I was kind of hoping that there would be a Book that would solve these problems...
My father-in-law was an astronaut. He's a smart guy, but he grew up in some podunk town in Virginia, his family was decidedly middle class, and he went to a public high school. But he worked hard, got accepted to the Air Force Academy, and eventually became an astronaut. Then the Challenger blew up and NASA and the Air Force parted ways, so he was no longer an astronaut. Instead, he's spent the last 25 years reaching his current position: 3-star general who will most likely be promoted to 4-star and end up running Air Force Space Command or something similar. The trait that I've observed most in him since I met him ten years ago is his unshakeable belief in his ability to get the job done. He's probably the most quietly confident person I know.
Crashed countless high profile parties. An example: when I was living in Bangkok, after a Fado opera I walked right into the royal after party. Spent some time chatting with a princess and the queen.

Treat the velvet rope as a suggestion. Walk on in casually and confidently as though you have 100% right to be there, half the time nobody will stop you...especially if you are dressed properly.
The UK and Spain are in the EU. EU citizens can freely move between member states (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Market_(European_Union...), so your girlfriend can legally live in Spain for as long as she wishes.
Sold instructions on ebay about how to beat a little known tax law [it's now plugged]. A friend went to work for the tax man and in training they were told about me and how it's so important to not let these tricks get out, as it could cost the country lots of money. I promptly stopped as I didn't realize I was on their radar!

Reverse engineered an algorithm from a huge international company who kept it under lock and key using publicly available data and used it with their competitors. They still have it under lock and key.

Bought textbooks at fundraising sales and sold them to university students the next year for a 3000% markup.

Others I'd only tell in person :)
http://emerose.com/timing-attacks-explained

For others, this helped me understand the basis of timing attacks.
These stories always make me think of another bug that is unbelievable.

The bug is in Binary Search - one of the most fundamental algorithms in programming. It's been around in a published implementation of Binary Search since 1986, and the implementation of Binary Search for the JDK was broken for 9 years. This bug was only discovered in 2006, when someone's program broke.

If you haven't heard of it, read more here: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...

Quick Summary - to get the "middle" element of the array, the line is this: int mid = (low + high) / 2;. This overflows when low + high is larger than MAX_INT, causing havoc.
Well, how was it during all those decades when TVs were ubiquitous but PCs were not?

Pretty bad. Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Eliminat...
Iphone app turns your to-do list into a game
Thank you for the feedback. It's worth noting that if you don't have flash, it won't work. It currently relies on flash for persistent socket connections. I'm working on getting it working with websockets.

But it should work on chrme, which is also my browser of choice.
No degree will guarantee you a job. Professional degrees (law, engn, accounting, medicine etc) will come close, if you want to work in a profession.

Every other course will just give you a better chance of getting a job, and help you perform better once you get there. A math grad can solve all kinds of problems that other people will just shrug their shoulders at. That's always useful.

Academia in general is a dangerous career path though. Too many people on the ground floor (i.e. every undergrad who can't think of a better thing than grad school), too much glamor keeping them there, very bureaucratic organizations, and a complete mismatch between work (research) and funding (students).
That's correct guess.
Software and literature are very much the same, and yet there in no such a notion as patents in literature. (Copyright is not a patent) The main reason is that freedom of expression is a human right, and there is no freedom within a patents system.

Words are keywords, and they are public domain. Sentences are snippets and they are PD too. Paragraphs are functions and they are protected by copyright, but the ideas in there are PD too.

I see no space for patents in software because patents shouldn't protect ideas, and if we omit ideas, nothing is left in software. Again, software is literature.

Humanity will undergo a new rinascimento when software patents will be suppressed, because development will be free at last.
To be fair (I'm a native french speaker), I feel english is a very utilitarian type language. It's fast and efficient, simple, no frills or anything. I've been trying to teach my wife french and some things in french aren't that useful, why does every word need a gender?

On the other hand, I have to say, I always felt french to be a better language for songs and writing.
Fun indeed! Unfortunately illegal in France afaik.
HP Official Announces Its Windows 7-Powered HP Slate 500
I was applying for a temp position and said I knew Office 97 when I only knew 95, and not the advanced stuff.

The temp agency had a computerized test for Office, which displayed a real Office UI and a text bar above that would say things like "Now, print this document." If you selected anything other than File, Print, it would immediately score against you and move on. Whoever wrote the program thought they were pretty clever to have it register a mistake once you picked a menu option, and not to let you hunt around for the right answer.

I soon realized that as long as I kept the mouse button down, I could move the cursor through all the menus without triggering a "selected" event. By going through the menus I found the answers easily, and I was able to score 99% on the test (the one error I made happened before I figured out the cheat).

Oh, and the company I went to work for hired me from the temp agency.
Creative media & technnology compilation by Google creative lab
Of note to this audience, apparently they are using Django to power the site.

http://twitter.com/jacobian/status/28451128673
Microsoft desperately needs a damn good new strategy
My experience with Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone 7) emulators is that because of the huge variety of devices, they only give you an idea of whether the software will work on the OS. The issue is, of course, that each family of hardware is different, and Microsoft often allows the vendor to tweak the OS a bit.

It strikes me as an advantage to developers, at least regarding hardware, that Apple controls the whole package. You can develop in an emulator and know how your software will behave on the device.
Very handy. And exquisitely executed.

Also, perhaps you've tweaked it since some of the other comments, but two-finder scrolling (MBP trackpad, Safari 5.0.2) works great for me. Took me a while to figure that I needed to shrink window enough to see scroll bars (and thus be able to scroll and manipulate luminosity.

I've got it bookmarked, so if you are generous enough to keep it at aurlien.net I'll definitely make a lot of use of it. Great work && great service.
Include more details about how your data is stored and accessed. Is the timeline viewed through your website, if so is the data exportable? Or is your entire timeline sent back via SMS as well.

You don't have to describe it in words, maybe a single picture of viewing the timeline in text message\browser would be good enough. To serve as an illustration. And help increase the conversion rate of people giving you information. [ Maybe add a simple privacy policy that reassures users you aren't collecting cell numbers to signup for monthly subscription services as well ]

The linked article about psychology apps was extremely interesting, you should submit it to HN if it hasn't been.
http://dambr.com - a quick and simple RSS/Atom feed reader I'm writing to replace Bloglines when it dies at the end of the month.
Your attempted humor is, at best, misguided.

Anonymous throw-away logins are not supposed to be used for this.
What I don't really get is: how can you even become a good programmer without getting really good at typing as a side effect?

I never learned how to type, I just got good at it without trying since I've been using computers for >20 years.

Surely most if not all good programmers have at very least been using computers for a long while before becoming good programmers?
Excellent point, and often (as now) overlooked. PHP does have some brilliant design choices, for example attaching itself to the Apache process, terminating when the request ends - this makes a lot less vulnerable to issues like memory handling. Some extensions may leak like a sieve, but since it's all cleaned up when the request ends it never really becomes a problem.
Well, it's not just Office, it's a great deal of games and specialized software. But yes, I'm afraid Apple can live with Macs not supporting Windows.
Not now, perhaps. But with more sites like Wikileaks and more leakers, if we can be sure no war crime (and Wikileaks is not about just war crimes) can remain hidden forever, we may hope people will think twice before taking the easy route.
The San Diego Reader have a New Real Estate Rentals Site
It's because a little VPS won't give you a fail-safe system. For a SaaS startup you'll need to have several machines in a redundant cluster and ideally you'll also have machines in at least two data centers. The people who use App Engine for their business all have the same dream: Build the app, click deploy, and have Google handle all the annoying server stuff. Obviously, App Engine isn't quite there, yet. It's not fast enough, it's not stable enough, and it has a limited feature set. Clearly, we're early adopters. However, App Engine is going in the right direction and once the problems are gone people will ask "Why not just use App Engine?" (or whatever other PaaS) instead of "Why not just use a VPS?".
Indeed. That's actually how we managed to rent an apartment, since she was legally allowed to live there.

I, however, was the stereotypical undocumented alien, living in the country illegally, not learning the language or integrating with the culture, stealing jobs from the local economy, sneaking across the border into the land of opportunity.
Microsoft is making a ton off of Xbox Live subscriptions. So much that it has made their entire entertainment division profitable (even though they lost money on xbox and xbox360 hardware sales).

Let's not forget that Microsoft was the first to build the modern comprehensive online console gaming experience. In addition to being a big revenue stream, monthly subscriptions also have the advantage of being very sticky: there are no sudden movements in this stream of revenue, but gradual trends.
To be fair, you can get a pretty decent computer today for < $500. That is still quite a bit of money if you're poor, but its a far reach from the $2000 you might have paid several years ago.
But the govt needs funds to make your lives harder, don't you see? It's that old yin-yang thing.
I prefer http://aspseek.org
My complaint mixed two things - one, I'm not convinced that decorators are a special-case "feature" that would come for free with better lambdas. Two, does Python need tuples, dicts, AND lists? (I know it's had them for a long time.)

Python seemed really refreshingly clean compared to Perl and C++, the languages I'd been using previously. I still think it's a decent language, but Python is to Perl and Lua is to Python along those lines. I've moved on.

I'm probably still just annoyed about Guido's position on tail-call optimization, though.
مشاهدة مباراة انتر ميلان و سامبدوريا بث مباشر 24/10
<blockquote>"Nothing has been as intriguing as the possibility of working with you," Rose wrote to Jeff Fager, the executive producer, in a letter that is unusual for its self-awareness and tactical brilliance. (Rose has saved the letter and gave me a copy.) "You can't imagine for a romantic like me what it means to come out of North Carolina, the birthplace of Murrow, and walk in the footsteps of Murrow and Collingwood, Cronkite and Sevareid, Wallace and Safer, and to play on the same team as Rather and Fager."

But Rose resists, quoting Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. His PBS show is like "the battered, twisted ruined tin pot steamboat ... rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her." The show, like the old vessel, gave Rose "the chance to find 'your own reality -- for yourself, not for others -- what no man can ever know.'"

"In the end," he told Fager, "I have not finished the journey."
</blockquote>
Wasn't it obvious to them before the meeting why you hadn't filled it in?
> Macros (and their more hygienic cousins) are not always a good idea. They make it very hard to understand what the rest of the program does, unless you can grep the whole thing.

So does object-oriented programming, more often than not.

I'm not sure that's a sufficient argument, especially if there's no other way to do static metaprogramming in a language.
At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, thank you. I'd much rather read another book in the Laundry series or Merchant Princes (or a return to the universe of Singularity Sky) than a retread of Iron Man. Even if Downey is brilliant as Stark.
I'd rather not belittle anyone for preferences which admittedly, like music choices, are subjective. But I truly loathe the Mac keyboards, and I'll tell you why. It has nothing to do with platform bias.

Mac keyboards are not designed for touch typists like me. There is no contour to the keys, they are flat and too large and make your hand move too far. They are also not sufficiently actuated, as Atwood points out in this post. They're made for people who hunt and peck and mash the keys using their biceps instead of their fingers. Since that's not me, I hate them. They have an "iffy" actuation instead of a decisive one.

They'll take my IBM Model M and Unicomp when they pry them from my cold, dead, fingers.
Don't you mean lost on the three people that upvoted pmarin's comment?
Thank, you, great points. A 3-5 image illustration should be able to describe the process.

Privacy, security of information, and portability of data is an admired business touchstone. All data will be linked to the originating address, and available on an account page as CSV, YAML, and GIF charts for download. Users can do a true delete of the text file created for their unique text address as well.

I'll write some policy/terms before I begin to open it for beta users.

That article (and the audio) is just a gusher of possibilities. I'll submit it now.
Conversely, you can probably become a citizen of an EU country that doesn't have stringent requirements and go live in England (I'm not sure if the requirements are set by the EU itself, though).
I don't think that's the case. As an 80s home computing revolution kid, quite a lot of kids were into BASIC etc. To a certain extent we've lost that now.

We grew up in a time where you could buy a computer and you pretty much had to learn how to program it. Now, you can get away without needing to learn.
Didn't you get the memo? Those are evil, not just naughty.
NPR: Mental Health Apps: Like A 'Therapist In Your Pocket'
I've got a blog up to track my progress. It's at http://www.box2cash.com/blog
when writing "select project" (shortcut : sp) or "select task" (shortcut : st), it lists them so you can choose a task already created.
America has better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility then rest of the world.
Http://hitbio.com - your bio in your search hits. Search for yourself, tag and reorganize the results, and share. Solves problem of people searching for you and not being sure about which results apply to you.
Everything is a suggestion. As long as you look like you belong, nobody will stop you 95% of the time.
Which keyboards are you talking about? Key travel is not the issue, it is the actuation and positive response of the switch that matter.
Were you not a member of any loyalty programme? If you get silver or equivalent status they let you use the business class checkin regardless of the class you're actually traveling in. No need for any tricks.
"search was totally and completely useless"

Often I feel that in recent years the quality of the results are declining again. Now if you search for X, you get a lot of webshops, which tell you the price, but not any other useful information. Or if X is not a product, more and more of the results are pointing to all kind of aggregator sites which are again linking to each other instead of useful content or links. Or the similar case is when all the results on the first page are the same content on different pages.

So perhaps there is a market opportunity again. Anyone? :)
Amazing Collection of Airline Spoons
A classic case of worse is better.
I use a Unicomp too. I actually don't think they increase resistance, they increase actuation and positive response. That is what reduces RSI in this case.
Lockpicking skills come in handy in those situations. This reminds me of the time a friend got locked out of his car, but his trunk was open. The car only had 4 doors, however, so it wasn't much use.

In the trunk was a broomstick, some rope and a, erm, we call them "parrot wrenches". Fortunately, one of the rear speakers could be lifted up a bit, so I fastened the wrench to the broomstick with the rope and slid it through the small hole (it was just enough to fit). Through that small hole, I manoeuvred to the rear door lock and pushed it up.

All my friends remember that MacGuyver moment to this day.
IPhone App for French Strikes
Wikileaks Unlike Cryptome
The Mundane Credit Card Gets a Modern Makeover
Yes, Safari Version 5.0.2 in my case.

Works in Firefox, though.
You guys rock! Great suggestions, keep them coming in :-). We are incorporating your feedback on the website..
http://www.snapspans.com/Baltimore-MD/Florists

Explanation: a big list of business info, in which the AdSense links are often the most useful, relevant content.
theft?
Sameas the author, I was pretty shocked to find out MS Office Live (the Office web app) doesn't work on iPad, when Google Docs obviously does.

MS's corporate customers have iPads, and Blackberry devices, and whatever else. They can and will want access to their documents remotely, via real mobile web apps rather than RDP style kludges that don't work on small displays. And Microsoft does nothing to support these guys?
Almost everything sold today is by means of artificial scarcity ... do you think oil companies are happy with alternative fuels and hybrid diesels?

Related to book authors: they need a way to make a living writing books, at least part-time.

Also in a fair society, brilliant people should be rewarded accordingly.
Before dropping out of college 25 years ago I took an ASM programming course. The processor was the PDP 11. The official terminals were dec writers to an emulator but I happened to have access to a PDP 11 unix box.

I cut my teeth doing Z80 ASM hacking on a Timex Sinclair and had no patience for this required class.

I wrote all my assignments in C and dumped the intermediate output. The grader always gave me nice comments like "well structured code."
Oh, Microsoft has a strategy--it's just different in every division.
How long should a JavaScript function be?
you can embed your own C code without the hassle to handle HTTP/S (or forkbombs) using KLone web server; it can easily handle thousands of requests per second.

p.s. I'm part of the company whom made it.
This reminds me of the time I hacked an online game to get a high score:

http://www.korokithakis.net/node/96
In highschool some friends and I came across a method for duplicating items in Diablo II and we sold the items using PayPal by advertising in the chat rooms. We didn't do the actual hacking of the game, but it felt like hacking to get paid hundreds of dollars for essentially digital toys.

More recently my friend and I wanted to throw an Ubuntu release party (also my birthday party) so we decided to walk around campus and recruit Ubuntu Girls. It was surprisingly easy, we wore Ubuntu shirts and hats and just walked up and asked "have you ever modeled before?" invariably they giggle and say no then we follow with something to the effect of "I don't believe it!" and "would you like to try for a good cause?" We ended up with 5 really fun girls to serve the drinks at the party. We are part of the Florida Ubuntu Team but we did it all on our own, we even had to print our own shirts (which was the only payment for the girls).
I wonder how many terrorism charges you'd be up on if you did that in the US these days.