skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What types of subversive hacking are illegal?
With the sudden advent of "patriotic hacking" we've seen "hackers" (for lack of a better word) take matters into their own hands and bring down corporate websites, etc. I've never engaged in this behavior myself and I'm curious as to the legality of various types of subversive "hacking" - DoS attacks, form spamming, or whatever other creative ways you can think of. Are there any good resources on this? Which ones could potentially get you in legal trouble? How easy is it to get caught, if you upset the wrong people?
If they had something better than AIR, would have written something.
Ah. Yeah, trust me, it goes away at some point.
Both positions are understandable. I'm just surprised that Oracle thought that they could play both sides like this. Pre-Sun they were all "yeah, what ASF said! Open licensing!". Post-Sun they take all of the historical Sun positions.

Again, it's understandable, but why are they so surprised that the ASF would respond like this? They are asking everyone to play a game using weighted dice. If you don't like Oracle's rules, you can go home. So how can they be surprised that ASF actually left?
Well, you lot made me feel all guilty about my list, so I trimmed it down.

I'd really like a good pair of noise canceling headphones, and if anyone has recommendations, some good fantasy / sci-fi books that I can just relax and enjoy.
As a web developer I appreciate the concession from an embedded systems programmer that I am in fact not simply a monkey, but the quoted section probably goes a bit too far.

For instance, terrible UIs on the web are just as common as terrible UIs in GUI applications. And making a cross-platform GUI application that looks good on all platforms requires familiarity with tools specific to each platform, which is much more involved than learning browser quirks.

The hardest thing about the web is probably how fast it moves, but that's also what makes it exciting.
Finding more homes for things I no longer need.

I actually have very little compared to most, but I can afford what I need and I only keep around what is used.

Anything I sell, I donate the proceeds to my favourite charities, but often friends or family can use the things, especially the tech.

So, I want to have distributed my pile of goodies by the New Year. I'm doing well so far.
It may not be that long: "do what you contractually said you would and open the TCK"

The rest, I have zero doubt, Apache can handle on their own.
Inspiration For Today | Woodlands Pool Builder
Just curious... are you using innodb or myisam?
also stackoverflow.com is a perfect place for this sort of question, too.
Ask HN: Distribution Channels and "Traction"
Hi all,

I'm fairly new here and have recently become addicted to HN (lol), but I thought I'd try to reach out and see if I can gain any insight. My friend and I have been working on our startup for the last 7 months. Our product is serving the non-profit space which has a culture of being slow to adopt, technologically backward, hands on, etc.

We had launched a pilot with a handful of organizations and gotten good feedback, but a lot of it was hands on work (services) that we did to validate some core concepts. Moving forward, we wanted to automate a lot of those tasks so that we can scale more easily and have now launched our "beta".

That was two weeks ago. I guess that's not really a lot of time at all, and knowing our market... there would be a much slower adoption cycle, but does anybody else get really discouraged at this time? Our issue is that it's hard to validate or test anything when you don't have a stream of feedback. We have been trying to hit up any channel we can (cold calling, tapping our networks, referrals, etc.) and so far it's be lukewarm.

Jumping from a "semi-services" role to more product focused feels like a step backward (as in, maybe the value WAS in those services offered..ugh), but we didn't want to go down the consulting road. Maybe we need an adjustment of our expectations and to continue plugging away at different channels.

Anyway, this probably sounds like a lot of babbling. Any input appreciated. Thanks all.
Re-purposing the TV Broadcast Spectrum
If that were what you wanted to say, there are much less snarky ways to go about it. Being snarky is the best way to get a marginal comment downvoted five million times.
Design Cocktail 3 - The ultimate bundle for creative professionals
Santa brings you the Design Cocktai 3 packed with cool new products that will make you happy this Christmas. He added more value but the price remains the same along with the quality of the products in it. This is one gift that you must get for you or for a friend.
Galois makes some pretty cool stuff, and it's full of smart people. Buzzing through the slides I felt like it wasn't so much the case that Haskell was essential for building a business, but rather it was the right tool for the kinds of things Galois was looking to build, or maybe Galois picked doing those things because it was really good at Haskell (it is) and it just carried out a "hammer looking for nails" situation. I write in Haskell, yes, but I typically use it for specific things I'm trying to do (languages research, writing parsers, evaluating funky theoretical stuff). I'm not to keen to the idea of writing web pages in Haskell (<3's Rails) for example, or generally trying to shoehorn it into something that I would use C or Java for. The mental overhead just isn't there with the other language, especially for small projects where thinking of doing something with Monads would take me longer than just writing the thing in C and debugging it.

That being said, I think Haskell is an amazing language for what it's worth, and it's a great way for other language designers to see how many theoretical language features can be worked into a real life industry-grade language. Also, it's good for learning just because it's so different from everything else and can give you perspective on your programming.
I wouldn't trust any free service not to delete all my emails, either accidentally or intentionally. Hotmail supports IMAP and POP. So even if you normally use the web-interface, open up thunderbird every few months a month and sync up.
"It's like maintaining a skyscraper built out of Tinker Toys."

OMG. That is such a perfect analogy. I've had that same though, but not in those words. I'm probably going to steal that.
I am not surprised Oracle thought they could. Oracle hasn't faced much opposition in its corporate history - their partners usually cave to whatever rules Oracle demands them to play with.
[unenthusiastically] Stop. Don't. Come back. -- Willy Wonka
Building Complex Machines Using LEGO: The Antikythera Mechanism
From the article:

"It may well be that the crust generates more low frequency waves in the build up to an earthquake but there may be other mechanisms that produce a similar signal but are not linked to quakes."
To be fair, I can probably count the number of communities that have full-time paid moderators (I mean moderators that actually help guide discussion and interact with the community, not just administrators) on my hands and toes. Being the best isn't hard when you have such little competition.
s/web//

Yes, it's a somewhat different skillset working with somewhat different software, but there's not that much difference.
Question: when are PHP's object destructors called ? I can see some issues with external resources if an object instance hangs around until it is garbage collected. PHP might not have an issue with this if it does GC for every page load, but other languages like the .NET languages can experience serious issues if you don't release external resources using a finally block, and rather rely on the destruction of the object to release them. In such a case, the destruction may take place a long time after the initial acquisition of the external resources.

My point is that object lifetime <> external resource usage duration in all cases.
There are lots of relatively coherent arguments already floating around the interweb around why composition is generally preferable to inheritance when it comes to code reuse; lots of people have strong feelings both ways.

I should point out, however, that many OO languages (like Java and C++) make inheritance much easier than composition, and as such inheritance seems more useful than it actually is, simply because it's all you've got. In languages that have better syntactic support for delegation and other compositional techniques, the usefulness of inheritance is significantly lessened. In other words, the usefulness of inheritance is more accidental (i.e. because you often don't have other good options) rather than inherent (i.e. because there simply aren't better options that are possible or available in other languages).
I never said linked lists were hard. I said that it's not necessary to know how to reverse a linked list from memory -- from scratch. I can look it up and get to it right away.
I agree, and on a related note I think part of it boils down to know your audience. They had marketers going and talk to a group who are largely power users. Of course the audience is going to be disappointed.
Working for any primarily software driven company is going to be challenging. Working in an expensed IT department is what most developers do, and the work is pretty pedestrian. This seems to provide the most clear line of delineation in software development.
I learned C, after having learned BASIC and Pascal. I was 14 and read somewhere that C was the main language of UNIX. It clicked pretty quickly for me since I thought pointers made a lot of sense. When I first saw p++ in a C book and realized that the actual value of p would advance sizeof(whatever p points to) rather than 1, it just kind of made sense.
A bit late, but hopefully you still catch the question. Are you a coder, and if so, how does dyslexia work with your coding abilities?
This article is pretty superficial, but I've been using tmux lately and my primary complaint is that you can't attach to the same session without syncing them. Well, something I've been doing with screen for 10 years because I find it handy is to attach to different windows within the same screen session from different terminals. I might split them across the same screen, put them on different workspaces, or even run from different machines. Why would I even want to have multiple views of exactly the same thing?
I find that it can be valuable in a GUI toolkit. If I want to change a small part of a UI component, I can subclass it, change what I want, keep the rest, and classes that used the old component can use the new one too, because of subtype polymorphism.

Composition can work for a lot of these problems too. It depends on the scale of the modification, I guess.
You are correct, except for "Hotmail supports IMAP and POP." No, Hotmail does not support IMAP. That was actually the source of a lot of Reddit's anger (MS devs didn't seem to understand that people want IMAP, so there won't be any support for it any time soon).
You sure? http://cl.ly/3a5v
Fair enough. But as someone who's conducted hundreds of developer interviews, I can say it's absolutely a huge red flag for me. Total failure would be a straight no-hire. I see it as something that should be very easily re-derivable. You certainly will encounter harder things that you need to invent (not just re-invent) during the course of any job.
Additional background information from a few days ago:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870415630457600...

Pretty amazed that he was able to negotiate a $600-700k job offer up to over a million.
Somewhat unrelated, but, while reading through this, I couldn't help but think "where else is facebook going to find engineers who have dealt with scale at a petabyte level?" Hmmm, the Google diaspora inside facebook looks more clearer now, doesn't it?
Wow. Yeah. Apologies. I did a quick google search and the first few pages were 'configuring IMAP on hotmail'... Checking again, the next few were "WHY THE HELL DOESN'T HOTMAIL HAVE IMAP?"

Anyway, hopefully they at least let you do pop without removing the message from your inbox.
I agree entirely. While I've specialized (and spent the vast majority of my time) in reverse-engineering, I also write fiction, do sound engineering, (used to) draw, have recently started playing the drums, etc. Am I particularly great at any of these? Not really -- at least not yet -- but that's ok.

As an aside, we've all heard the standard "jack of all trades" quote, but everyone always leaves out the last part of it, which I feel is most important, if only because of the way I can relate to it: Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.
Yup. I've "built a website" with Ruby On Rails but frankly wasn't too impressed with myself afterward. It was a worthwhile exercise because it got me to understand the basics of web development. I'd rather focus on learning the nitty gritty basics.
Best Google Chrome OS Extensions
Ask HN: Finally have loose change and spare time, but no sense of purpose. Help.
(Apologies in advance for the rantish nature of this.)

24, programmer at BigCo for several years, and I'm lost.

I've socked away enough coins to maintain my current lifestyle for the next 10 years, longer if I scale back a few things. (Believe me, it's pretty easy to do considering that I've never had car, house, or girlfriend -- and I plan to keep it that way for the forseeable future.) I've also freed myself of most of my other obligations that previously consumed my evenings and weekends.

I should be excited about this but I'm not, and I don't know why.

What I do know is that my current situation is unsustainable for long. I'm sick of corporate America and all its bureaucratic shenaningans, where I'm only learning the wrong way to get things done. I want out.

But I don't know what's next. I'm not in shape to start a company because I don't have any sort of overarching passion that will keep me motivated no matter what, nor do I have any monetizable hobbies or interests. I also have serious doubts about my programming skill, let alone ability to run a business. Everything I've been interested in making already exists in a form better than I can ever do myself. (That ought to be a wonderful thing in itself, but my selfish ego demands that I personally make a difference somewhere.)

Traveling around the world is frequently suggested here. I like to travel, and have done a fair amount of it. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm running away from my problems and not confronting them.

I realize that I'm blessed, maybe even spoiled. I've won the genetic lottery by having loving parents who encouraged me to work hard and do well. I've won the geographic lottery by having the opportunity to live in the USA, especially California. I've won the timing lottery by entering college when competition was less fierce and scholarships were more plentiful, and by graduating into a healthier job market just before the economy crashed. Life has dealt me a very good hand, yet I feel like I'm not making good use of it.

I think I have a variant of Early 21st Century Syndrome (cf. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/93yaq/anyone_else_here_feel_like_theyre_never_fully/c0bcp8m?context=1). I wouldn't say I'm suffering from depression or burnout right now, but I strongly suspect that if I just quit without a plan, I will be heading there. (Either that, or I'll end up wasting my time on video games and internet.)

I probably just need an attitude change. But that in itself just seems so hard...
Neither?

I didn't quickly skim it, but I didn't understand all of the proofs either. It is a couple thousand pages, so there is a large grey area between perfect understanding and having skimmed.

'Modern' books on logic or set theory are not nearly as well constructed as Principia Mathematica. (And the interesting part for me is the way that it is constructed).

I don't think Russel and Whitehead wrote it as a textbook...
I've kept email since I switched from Hotmail to POP3 in about 1998. The wonderful bit is I wrote a desktop application which scans any number of hard drives and finds all mail in the main 5 formats (Mbox, Kmail files, Outlook <2003, Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, Eudora). Then you can search it with SQL.

I haven't been able to find a customer for it but I love using it.

But the point is "Don't throw away all that old email, put it in a database so you can search over 100,000 messages for just a few results to look at".
It's all about Personalization in 2011: From Marketing to Product
I completely agree with your point. The way inheritance is always taught is through the "is-a" rule of thumb and I think that's so detrimental to the students that they'd be better off if they didn't know inheritance existed. The phrase "X is-a Y" often appears to make sense because of the real world (e.g. "Cat is-an Animal"), but it makes people forget that it may not make sense in the world they are trying to model. It may be that the relationship between a Cat object and an Animal object is completely different in your system than in the real world. If it is, then you run into the problems with future changes you already mentioned.

I also second your point on code reuse. Code reuse/removal of duplication is the main reason behind all programming languages and paradigms. Inheritance is a tool provided by OOP languages. Therefore, to say that it enables code reuse is basically trivial.
I wonder if the definition of the polymath is changing as our accessable memory is moving outside of the brain. So, now it's not the person who knows a lot about a lot, but the person who can efficiently query the search engine in real time and has the ability to work with the information coming back from it.

After all, rote memorization was not the polymath's main strength anyway. Now we're just unburdening them to an even higher degree.
He's also touched on this in Accelerando somewhat. He had corporations combined with AIs to create an economic situation far beyond human understanding.
yeah that's what I thought when I read it; a refreshing change to the normal presentation of the term and philosophy of hackers.
Facebook engineering have been posting some really interesting information in the last few weeks. I've always wondered how Facebook manages backups for their MySQL data. It never occurred to me that they might be using Hadoop.

Kind of unrelated but the comments on this posts make me cringe:

"please fix the issues with unblocked people being invisible or it makes you look like complete idiots as programmers since they are still blocked after being clicked unblocked.....I think my seven year old could have coded it by now.geesh."

and

"but dese details cud help hackerz"
Well I would hope so because the apply now thing still shows up on my new tab page.
Chrome Appears To Have Hit 10,000 Extensions
I agree with your complaints about the article, but the code example you give could be demonstrating programming with abstract data types in C just as well as it could be demonstrating programming with objects. In fact, unless frobnicate_foo is just a convenience function to look up a frobnicate function pointer in the foo_t structure and invoke it, I'd have to say that you're clearly demonstrating an ADT here.
That said, you need to have a firm grasp of all the basic security concepts before rolling out production code. You need to know how to avoid all the various injections.
A class describes how objects will behave once instantiated. Sometimes it does contain specs about the assembly process, but not necessarily. And the assembly process is described in "static methods" which are nothing more than methods on a "singleton" that's instantiated once when the application starts.

A blueprint in the real world, while just a piece of paper, it's an important physical object nonetheless. The analogy can be extended: sometimes you need to modify that piece of paper in real-time based on new requirements that arise. And the medium (e.g. piece of paper / source-code) used to express the blueprint doesn't really matter. What matters is what the blueprint represents: instructions for how the built object will behave / what interfaces it has and (for physical objects) how it looks like.
Replace Owner Profile Picture on Cr-48
As other sites have mentioned, it's not possible to replace your initial profile picture on the Cr-48. Until now.
The Lego Antikythera Mechanism
I'm sorry, I forgot to mention the large anvil on a rope hanging just out of frame.

Now that you mention it, it does kind of look more like a fox than a coyote. Considering the coyotes we do have running around town are all mangy and beat up:

http://triblocal.com/wheaton/files/2010/09/IMG_2845.jpg
Here we see the movement from "Only 200 lines of code! Does 8 jillion requests per second!" to "Does things correctly, works in the real world!". Welcome to life.
Announcing Fuduntu 14.7
tmux FAQ: "How is tmux different from GNU screen?"

http://tmux.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tmux/tmux/FAQ
Great! Now quit your job and take some time to just explore. I'm not talking about places; I mean thoughts, ideas, and projects.

Derek Sivers on "finding your passion": http://sivers.org/passion

By the way, have you already put in your 10 years of coding on projects that push at and stretch your programming ability? If not, you really have no justification to say you're not capable of being a good programmer, and just sounds to me like one of those things people say when they're having a down day.

Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years": http://norvig.com/21-days.html
The link takes me to a Google Docs login page
Seems like maybe you should look at joining a startup as you don't want to (or have the motivation) to run your own and want to stay away from big companies.

You also have prime location being in California, even if you think you are lacking in the programming abilities it wouldn't hurt to try and get a job doing that.
I'm no economist, but I believe the concern over manufacturing continuing to shrink as a percentage of U.S. economic activity comes from the question of whether the segments that are replacing it are things that bring money into the national economy. Do service sector jobs represent exportable economic activity? Are the sectors that replace manufacturing easily outsourced?

I think the issue is a little too complex than for a single rising trend-line to put us at ease.
Talking like that attracts employers who are not idiots, many people want to work with people like that.
I'm assuming this is on the CR48? So this means there is a built-in terminal system? I was wondering about that, if they'd allow you past the browser front-end or not.
What, it all does not matter? This is all just meaningless words on a computer said by somebody somewhere?

I think that is resignation. Every community needs a culture, forms to pressure others into doing the 'right' things, ways to be able to incorporate others. Once you loosen up and make it free for all this might as well be talking to the lowest denominator.
Well, I guess you'd never hire me then. Which is OK. I can't be anything but honest. Sorry. It's who I am.
As someone who has only dabbled in web programming and done webdev-ish work at a company that doesn't "get" the web, I was in shock to see how much I didn't know that was really the bare minimum:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-devel...
Thanks for pointing that out. My brain has a bad habit of skipping over extra letters. I've updated the title.
Techie's revenge lands her in jail
I recently switched from screen to tmux; this is the killer feature for me. We use tmux to pair program with remote employees, and this allows us to stay in sync automatically. With screen, we constantly had to tell the other pair which window we were looking at, which was a constant distraction. It also makes it easy to 'screencast' with multiple remote people.