skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a predictable move, as part of a United States Homeland Security directive […] includes the passage "…Toner and ink cartridges over 16 ounces will be prohibited on passenger aircraft in both carry-on bags and checked bags on domestic and international flights in-bound to the United States…."

Sigh...I know people in authority have to be seen to be doing something (or they'll be accused of doing nothing, no matter how assiduously they work behind the scenes), but these robotically specific prohibitions verge upon the farcical. Apparently this dangerous shipment was uncovered by good old-fashioned intelligence work in the form of a tip-off, which is the message that we ought to be sending - 'we have spies everywhere, fanatics can easily be deceived or corrupted.'

Personally, I don't think there was actually any intent to blow up an airplane. It's a possibility, of course, but an explosion in cargo airliner doesn't upset people en masse beyond sympathy for the families of the crew. And if it were a dry run, then the fake printer consumables would have been addressed to a dead address or a collaborator. That they were sent to a Jewish organization, and given that such devices have onboard electronics activated by current, it's a much more reasonably supposition that they hoped to blow up someone leaning over a printer.

The fact is that there are any number of electronic devices which could conceivably be packed with explosives and fitted with a detonator designed to go off when current is applied. I'm typing on such a device right now; I've never opened up this keyboard and for all I know it could go off at any moment. I count 13 similar devices on or underneath my desk right now, and some would be very difficult to detect even on close inspection. High-quality speakers, for example, are heavy, draw electrical power, and have big magnets in them by necessity, which would probably throw off many kinds of electrostatic detectors. Millions of them are shipped every day; we simply cannot inspect every last package shipped.

It seems quite reasonably to temporarily block all shipments from failed states like Somalia or Yemen. But adding each new bomb format to an ever-growing list of prohibited items is an exercise in futility. At some point one of these fanatics with a little more media savvy and imagination is going to hit on the idea of exploiting this reactive behavior and start sending out lots of dud bombs encased in popular or ubiquitous formats purely to provoke bans and cause economic injury - digital music players, handheld videogames, laptops all seem likely candidates. I avoided mentioning any popular brands but I think we can all imagine the the consequences if a few well-engineered explosive versions were 'accidentally' discovered by security professionals.

For that matter, with the holiday season coming it would be easy to throw a wrench into Santa's supply chain that would lead to grim-faced security workers impounding everything from Barbies to blankies. Let's hope nobody in Al Qaeda has read the Grinch That Stole Christmas.
This idea of "containment" may have worked well in the past, but is not as practical anymore. The world is so deeply connected, and technology so advanced, that international cooperation is far more essential.

Nuclear weaponry is but one of a number of salient examples. Even such staunch realists as Kissinger have come to recognize that they must be eliminated, and that intense international cooperation will be necessary to do so:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/610...
A very cool plugin. I really like the idea of the easier A/B testing of pages.

A question, though. Are there any ramifications for selling the templates/plugin with WordPress and the GPL?
Announcing a Node.js Book Project
I didn't like the essay much. The comparison with medeival medicine is a little shallow. One big problem he misses, is that unlike medeival medicine, computer science theory is well developed. CS has a solid theoretical foundation. The schism between engineers and academics mainly comes from the fact that "formal verification methods" are either not acheivable in practice, or require constraining a problem to a point where the verified software is not useful for anything.

Formal verification requires "ground truth". Something external that defines what the program should do, exactly. That's possible in some cases (a CPU emulator, for example, can be verified against a physical CPU). Most of the time, however, that doesn't exist.

That means what's usually necessary is a formal description of a formal semantics. Those things, almost universally, require either creating a Turing Complete semantic description language (to allow the semantics to be rich enough to express the solution), or a verry simple problem domain.

In the Turing Complete case, the formal spec degenerates to the program. That leaves you in a case where you are proving that the program does what the program does, which is useless.

The problem with simple domains is that they violate the law of leaky abstractions. All abstractions leak. Simple domains can rarely solve real problems. This is true even for cases like bison and flex. There is a reason most compilers use hand written parsers: they need to be usable by people. Once you move away from "I want a Boolean function that says if string S is in language Y" to "I want to provide usefull error output that helps people figure out the mistakes they have made, and I want to provide contextually relevant assistance in authoring code" the formal model falls apart.

So my prediction is this:

"Attempts to raise the level of abstraction (provided it's possible to escape to lower levels), will succeeded. Formal verification, however, is a myth".
ha... well I thought it was pretty comprehensive for audits... and i agree that checklist is pretty legit.
The article doesn't seem to indicate that the memory interference is permanent. It just says that it interferes with the receptors, so I'm guess that once it clears from your system, the receptors go back to... receiving.

I'm just speculating based on the article though.
Free Online Fax by PamFax 
PamFax is free online fax software used for sending free online fax worldwide. It does not require any hardware support it is compatible with Windows, MAC, Linux and Android. PamFax allows you to send 3 free online fax to test their quality of service.
I've seen that program, it looks like a great opportunity and I'm working on an application right now :)
nginx?
Backbone.js adds Controllers and History
You're only principled because you don't live in the US, and need to use air travel </sarcasm> ;-)
Huge Excel of All Online Activities, With User Demographics, Over Time.
I really have to wonder if Oracle even gives a damn anymore. They seem hell-bent on making Java as proprietary as possible and alienating as many people as possible.
Any idea of the release date?
Retirement on Rails
I was doing a search for a way to invite users with devise The third link the Google machine returned (https://github.com/salex/rails3-Devise-BCSD-Can-Invite) was to a complete Basecamp style demo using devise, cancan, and devise invitable. I always checkout the author on interesting projects; I found the author is retired and a year older than my mom (and I'm no relative spring chicken at 35).
Softlayer (my preferred dedicated host for years) does this as well. I agree that it's currently impossible to beat the combination of bare metal performance and cost efficiency with the ability to spin up cloud servers within one's own VLAN.
I choose to pick the obvious answer first.

(Military alerts like these are almost daily on the Pacific coast)
Can anyone who's worked on a well-written, large C project comment on the best way to structure headers and include files?

I don't like including stdio.h and stdint.h in every .c and .h file, but it seems like the "standard" way to compile with Makefiles is to compile each .h and .c pair as an object then link them together at the end. So you need the header files to use includes and such in every file or the compiler barfs.

Every time I try to structure a C project I feel like I'm doing it wrong and that there must be an elegant solution that I'm missing.
I just have a US passport. Haven't considered New Zealand, but will look at it. Found Wikipedia article with lots of info on working visa:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_holiday_visa
I appreciate your enlightened thinking. I hope that it does not fall on deaf ears.
Rushkoff goes to superfluid
It's not a cop-out at all. The only way to precisely define "bug" in your original comment is as behavior that deviates from the specification - you need a formal definition if you want to count them. You're right that if the user says "when I click 'save', your program formats my hard drive", "yes, that is in the spec" is not really a defensible response. The user doesn't care that this is a flaw in the specification and not the implementation. But there is a huge middle ground where the specification and the user's expectations disagree (since the user didn't read the spec), and both are reasonable. Counts as a "bug" or not?
The airplane itself is much less superfluous, but irradiates you far more than the backscatter machines. Are you sure you're not just putting a sort of halo of evilness around the backscatter machines because you dislike them for other reasons?

(Full disclosure: I'm not particularly bothered by backscatter machines as such, but I vehemently object to the paranoid, theatrical, and statistically silly approach to security that has provided the impetus for their installation.)
I was doing a search for a way to invite users with devise The third link the Google machine returned (https://github.com/salex/rails3-Devise-BCSD-Can-Invite) was to a complete Basecamp style demo using devise, cancan, and devise invitable.

I always checkout the author on interesting projects; I found the author is retired and a year older than my mom (and I'm no relative spring chicken at 35).
Agreed. I use 64-bit Chrome in Ubuntu 10.10 and it's unusable. I'm not sure if it's better in 32-bit, but there's frankly no way I'm going to compromise on my browser choice purely because of Adobe's incompetence. It usually freezes or drops down to maybe 5 FPS when I make a video full screen, it constantly uses a ridiculous amount of CPU time, it crashes tabs, and the font rendering is as shitty as ever.

I love when videos are on Vimeo because all of their videos play natively, and when I click on a YouTube video, I'm always hoping that it isn't one of the Flash-only videos that I need to switch to Firefox to watch. HTML5 might be in its infancy, but it already sucks a lot less than Flash, at least for those of us that aren't using Windows.

The issue isn't just performance—it's who I want controlling web technologies. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are open standards that anyone can implement. Whether or not the performance is the same right now, I have way more faith in Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera than I have in Adobe (and if they all drop the ball, someone else will pick it up). Adobe definitely has talented engineers, but they've demonstrated again and again that they're just not capable of making Flash stable and efficient. I'm not sure if this is the legacy cruft built up in Flash, a lack of interest in performance on platforms besides Windows, or just pure incompetence, but I don't care. They've had over 5 years (over 10 if you count Macromedia) to work their shit out, and they haven't.

Flash may have had a role back when web technologies just weren't up the task for displaying any kind of rich content, but that day has passed. It's telling that the vast majority of articles I've read defending Flash are written by people who directly profit from Flash continuing to be a relevant technology. Some are Flash evangelists, others are just people who decided to hitch their careers to Flash and are just now coming to terms with what a bad decision that was, and a few just plain don't understand what they're talking about (e.g. Dave Winer). This author isn't one of them—he's actually provided a reasoned argument, and the awesome CSS3 stuff he's been putting out shows that he's not just blindly defending the only tool he knows—but people like him seem to be few and far between.
Unless China has eclipsed us in naval warfare, specifically submersible stealth naval warfare, then it is extremely unlikely that they could get a sub within spitting distance of our coast without us knowing about it. And even if they could get a sub that close they wouldn't even think of launching a missile. Last I checked, America still has complete military domination when matched against any other sovereign. Nation building, otoh, is another story entirely.

[edit grammar]
You mean the present?
This is one case where Gibson was slightly behind. Japan has been looking forward to holographic rock stars since Macross Plus in 1994 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKcud4Qs4_U#t=4m50s) --just ahead of Idoru (1996).
Is Your Laptop Cooking Your Gonads?
> The ability to export my friends' email sounds good, but as with so many social product ideas (e.g., themed backgrounds for profiles), it stops sounding so good when you realize everybody has the same power.

Then why does Facebook allow this very feature to yahoo mail users??
Let’s Rethink Our Views of Storage Before It Is Too Late.
In the Kano Model this is called an exciter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model

The greatest problem with Customer Development and the concept of the Minimum Viable Product is that there is no rigorous classification for quality and value.

A great book to read with respect to product management is Agile Product Management with Scrum.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321605780

There are also slides here:
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/system/presentation/file...
Practical Tips for Not Looking Like a Resume Black Hole as a Startup
I think that advice is just outdated. It's a different situation now that it's a standard practice and there are optimizations supporting it (http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-2.95.3/cpp%5F1.html#SEC8).
Yes, when they ran the $100 offer a while ago, both myself and my better half signed up.

It's fantastic, we've both been in contact with 3rd and 4th cousins, for me they are from the US, South africa and Australia.

I now know I'm prone to type II diabetes, so have cut down sugar intake and had reports on dozens of other health issues.

I think the current prices are a bit steep, but if they do another offer @ $100 I'll be recomending to everyone I know!
Yes. Signed up myself and my daughter on DNA-day (the $100 special price). I have only logged in a couple of times though. Our results were great in that there was nothing special about them, so I haven't been compelled to learn more about some exotic mutation.
Thanks for sharing. I will apply. I already sent in my DNA a few months ago so they can already do the first prescrening on their site without both of us wasting time! ;)
The otaku subculture is getting creepier.
Very interesting, thanks!

If you happen to see this reply -- I have one last question you may have input on. My friend Google has been of limited use in figuring out the positioning of plasma when it comes to gaming. Not just burn-in (HUD's and such) but also ghosting. Comments? :)
as for a good follow up, I find myself referencing this list of Matt Cutts lessons fairly often: http://www.seoegghead.com/blog/seo/mattcuttsarama-a-summary-...
This disturbs me beyond words.

It seems like a real loss for humanity and a real gain for special interests (although it can be argued that humans can be manipulated as easily as this hologram for such purposes).

In any case, this isn't part of any future I'll be embracing.
Don't follow your dream
People interesting in this article might also like Eric Lippert's articles on the subject.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2010/10/21/conti...

They're more from a language design perspective rather than the more practical article here.
So, to confirm, Linode is NOT hoste by Rackspace?
I'm confused as to this selling thing as well... I can understand developing something like this for a client's project and selling it to them as a part of your work... but selling it to the community?

This is why I use Drupal.
If you were previously looking at integrating Backbone.js with Sammy, jQuery-BBQ, or another hashchange-based library, there's no longer any need. Instead:

var Workspace = Backbone.Controller.extend({

routes:{
"search/:query/p:page": "search",
"folder/:name": "openFolder",
},

search: function(query, page) {
...
},

openFolder: function(name) {
...
}

});

Which will properly route URLs like "example.com/#search/lemons/p7"
What happens when the terrorists put bombs in blackberrys or ipads or laptops? No more tech in your carry on? No more tech in your checked bags? Come on. This is so knee-jerk it is comical.
How Nature.com improves site availability with Zenoss Enterprise – case study
ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate
Don't politicize your titles. Flagged. Review the HN Guidelines for further info.
Hitting still targets is easy. Consistently hitting the same spot on a still target is difficult. What I'm saying is I'm impressed we can hit anything!

Think about the margins of error involved - how precisely do you have to know the Patriot rocket's position, vector and speed to intercept something falling from space? How do you take into account the fragmentation issues of a device like a MIRV? How do you account for any differences in the target projectile's path?

It's just an astounding problem to me. I very much dig the thought that I'm the same species as those that figured it out.
Relevant Ruby/Rails post: http://iwishicouldwrite.com/blog/2010/07/09/first-ruby-post/

Thanks for submitting, this is inspiring. Upvoted.
are you meaning two people on a project? if so, thats coming. if not, please elaborate?
That's a naive viewpoint. It's more of a concern in C++ ... if your codebase grows to massive proportions, and you #include headers within headers, then modifying a header can result in ~60% of your codebase being rebuilt. (At work, I deal with this pretty much every day.)

Including header files within headers is simply unnecessary, especially in C. You need to forward declare in header files, then include in source files where you actually use that header file.
Microsoft Tries to Prevent Asus, Acer from Using Android, ChromeOS
Really, let's not do this.
You've got to love nice guest posts with snarky anchor text links in the footer promoted on hacker news. Always nice to have an SEO Angel Investor (http://andyhagans.com)
Final release date will be some time in the spring. Until then we'll be doing regular electronic releases. I'd love to get your feedback so I can work it into those releases and the final book.
I don't believe that there's some natural conservation of credit/recognition.

I think this would be a function of the promotion/performance evaluation process and general company culture.
They're already working on Gran Turismo 6 when GT5 hasn't been released yet... a victim of the "just one more thing" syndrome.
It's not only corporate-climber types stealing credit though, it really can be just a complete failure to understand worker motivations.

At my last job, I was part of a major migration project that had taken something like three or four years total (I was only with them for the last two years). Because the project had come in so late and so overbudget, the powers that be set a seemingly arbitrary go-live date and told us to just get it done.

We all worked long hours for a long time to get this done, and when it finally went live we were told they wanted to take the team out for a celebration. That later morphed into "well, everyone else on the project (meaning client project, not my migration team) had to learn the new system too, so we should take everyone out to celebrate everyone!" completely minimizing just how much my team had done, since we had not only learn and adapt like everyone else had, but we learned it first and had to teach it to everyone else.

That celebration, btw, never ended up happening. Instead, there was an announcement at around the same time saying there would be no raises across the entire (10,000 person) company.

I got fed up and left (read: snapped and was fired) a few months later, but I heard from a friend that they had the same announcement this year ("no raises") on the same day that the company sent out an email saying "you should watch the Indy 500 this year, since we spent an assload to sponsor it".

That ended up as much more of a self-entitled rant than it was intended to be, but I think my underlying point still shines through.
I am forced to give out $20 "lunch for success" coupons to "encourage excellence".

What HR fails to understand is my employees are professional managers and this is uncomfortably similar to giving a dog a treat when it sits up and begs. Given their incomes are well into the 6 figures, this is particularly ridiculous.

My reports know I have to occasionally hand out these token treats to appease HR and are well aware that I reward them for performance in their bonuses, where it counts.

We've made it an insider joke - I now throw a meeting once a month and hand these wretched things out. HR is invited to it and the staff gush effusively over the reward. I swear they are more motivated by the charade than anything.
It sounds like the alcohol contributed to your hypochondria

[edit] lighten up, for the love of god. I'm taking the downvotes on principle here.

He "often wonders"? Seriously, he should get over it - there's nothing he can do about it at this point, and he's admittedly a highly functional person at an intellectually demanding job.

[2nd edit] Here's a desnarkified version of my original comment:

Life is hard, and you're going to screw some things up, but you compound those mistakes by focusing on what you could have been rather than what you could still potentially be.
When the continuation gets invoked by the event-handling loop, the stack is reset.

You're not compiling to C here: "the stack" may be a chain of heap-allocated activation records that are still live as far as GC is concerned. What you're describing might work but you'd want to test it to be sure.

EDIT: On reflection I agree that the setTimeout() approach should free the stack, however it's implemented.
The vast majority of managers I've encountered only focus on the stuff that is wrong, or was done poorly. The ROI on a simple "attaboy" is huge, especially when done in a group environment.

In our morning meetings, people update their status on the work they're doing. Even a simple "nice!" when warranted goes a long way, making them feel good in front of the group, and giving them a nice attitude for the rest of the day.
I planned on Malaysia this winter ($ allowing) rather than Thailand for various reasons, otherwise I'd join you.

Reasons include:

1. Money

2. Stability

3. I know more people in Malaysia
This is an awesome effort, thanks Paul!

Do you know of any production teams that use The Boilerplate as the basis for their markup? I'm about to have a design sliced to markup and I'd like to have it start with this ...
I use NetBeans to code Ruby and the debugging is great. You can set breakpoints, step through, set watch variables etc.

I don't have a ton of experience debugging with other languages (prob Java is the only other one), but what is Ruby missing?
Would be interesting if you could post the tech details about how you implemented it.
I've been experimenting with websockets in Clojure, Ruby and Node and so far I have found that in practice it's harder to do than the simple tutorials would have make it seem. For example, I realized that due to the same origin policy, the client and server involved have to run on the same ports (not just same machine) which makes it seem that the same server has to serve them.