skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything from leaving JTAG interfaces active (which many devices do) to enabling you to reflash a phone without authentication (which the iPhone does) could be considered vulnerabilities. We deal with these because they make more sense than the alternative.
I wonder if zoom-scrolling follows the mouse in the new version. If not, then Google Earth is still unusable and I'll continue only using Maps.
What's new here? My experience as a parent confirms the truism that schools are run for the benefit of the adults: teachers, administrators, and parents.

More then half the parent teacher meetings I've been to (K through 12) where with teachers who I would fire if they worked for me. Having achieved six figure salaries by surviving school politics they contribute as little as possible to their students while punching their ticket each year until retirement. The good teachers are not rewarded but penalized for not going along with policies created to benefit administrators.

Having excelled at politics as a teacher the administrators are interested in nothing more than having days without problems. A day where everyone behaves and follows the rules is the quest. Parents seeking accountibility from schools are a problem. I have never seen an administrator hold a teacher accountable for not doing their job of teaching the students.

The adults who are not in the discussion yet for improving schools are the parents. Every slackard kid has a slackard or absent parent. Too many parents see school as a babysitting service allowing them to concentrate on more important things.

My primary objection to the article is the statement that the main reason students don't succeed in college is that they are unprepared. The main reason kids don't succeed in college is because they don't belong there. Too many adults teach college as the 13th grade. Kids go there because it's the path of least resistance. Kids who were unmotivated in school are not going to be magically motivated just because they are now in a junior or four year college.

Johnny can't do university because all through his life the adults didn't give a shit. They were only looking out for themselves.
Has the goals remained the same for the past 150 years?
The argument that California's policies must be bad, regardless of the fact that they've produced the strongest private sector in the country, is equally fallacious.
Thanks, you're absolutely right.

My intention wasn't to detract from his means of self-fulfillment, but perhaps that is what I have done.
Maybe their next leak is more revenge from former UBS' Brad Birkenfield?
Yes, that is a reasonable point.

No, it doesn't count in this instance.

Is there a systematic problem? The answer to that question is complex; and the solution is not here. In fact; it is persisting the problem.

You actually see the solution in one of your other posts. The woman who uses the phrase "nigger brown". Such things are simply not an issue for this generation. It will not take many generations before people forget what racism was. People may tell you there is a systemic racist attitude in the society - but try going back 50 years. There wasn't a load of overt racism, but the systemic problem was apparent and troublesome. The improvement is dramatic.

In the next generations there is unlikely to be a gender issue; we are just in a transition where gender differences previously not considered an issue are a problem. It's not a fast process; but it is kicked off. And we are approaching the end game. A point where it is crucial to be less sensitive about specific words and actively reject true sexism.

In the short term the best solution is to avoid taking personal offence at things that mean or have no offence. It's unavoidable that people will be over sensitive; that is a systemic problem too. But we can work on that also. And by applying common sense the real sexist will become irrelevant.

Does the wording of the title imply a possibly underlying sexist attitude in the company? Not in the slightest (especially given the context). Suggesting it does is recreating a problem we are fixing. :)

I apologise for going on about it; but this is an issue that strongly concerns me. I'll leave it for now; wrong forum :)
"Microsoft, which had $5.41 billion in profit in the most recent quarter, hasn’t yet paid any damages to I4i. The unit that sells Office is Microsoft’s biggest, with $5.13 billion in sales in the quarter that ended Sept. 30."

Should that be read as an incidental fact (i.e. Microsoft's software sales are 5.13 of 5.41 billion) or does Office really account for that much of Microsoft's income?

Without more technical details the patent seems arbitrary to me (I thought the same at the time I first heard about it) but I would argue prior use shouldn't prohibit patents either as it encourages patents before development (indeed any beta software would then not be later patentable which would hurt a lot of startups who release before investment):

"Microsoft argued in defense that I4i had included its innovation in a product it sold to a client more than a year before it filed its patent application. That prior use would have rendered the invention ineligible for patenting under federal law."
> Plus there are other examples, like Hilary Clinton ordering diplomats to collect private information on the U.N. Secretary General, which was likely a violation of international law. This does not make the U.S. look good.

Actually, collecting such information makes HC look "not stupid".

The UN represents govts, most of which are corrupt bastards killing their citizens. The UN aids and abets such activities.

You can't blackmail an honest man.
This was a math class. The homework was just hundreds of problems that were just like the ones I aced.
These 'security holes' are not typically security holes which let people do things with the device without authorisation from the device's owner; instead, they prevent authorised people… from doing things

The exploits used to allow authorized people to "do things" are the same exploits that can be used to allow unauthorized people to "do things". There's no differentiation at all, except the intent of the person writing the exploit payload.

You might argue that Apple should give jailbreakers everything they want, but Apple won't do that. You can't seriously argue that Apple should hold off on patching security holes because they're being used today by nice people.
Mozilla shows off its concept Seabird phone (video)
That numbers I posted are just an illustration. I see what you're saying about being on the board, etc. and you're right, I haven't thought that part out ... this may be a deal that's better for "passive" investors, who don't want to really have to deal with control of the company.

But ask yourself, though. If you invested $200,000 into a company, wouldn't you want that company to become profitable or raise a larger round before it ran out of money? Wouldn't you be nervous if it spent $180,000 and YOU were its only hope?

On the flip side, often founders need only around $20-50k before launching something. If things don't go as planned, they may need as much as $100,000 due to unforeseen circumstances. Unless you can predict the future, a range would work better than a set amount. So I think it makes sense to set aside the maximum amount of that range, but have the option of raising the second round early, before using up the whole range. The reason that the founder has to explicitly draw money on the allotted amount, is to prevent "giving back the money to the investor" when they have found a better deal, which wouldn't be fair. But I think this scheme is fair to both parties. Why exploit the inefficiency of a founder to be unable to predict the future? Make your money on the actual rise in the company's value. Would you agree?
They would have if they set up their own network. However It would cost way too much money for them, that's why they only use CDNs and now they moved from datacenters to amazon cloud.
The tech is awesome. A lot of what the user can't see is just plain sweet. This is mostly leveraging a lot of other people's elegant tools (CeleryQ, RabbitMQ, Mongo, etc.)

The front end is missing a lot of obvious pieces which have placeholders. It looks like Franken-App (or Franke-App's monster, if you prefer).

You're 100% right, to be sure. Nobody else will care the way that we do, but I know that I personally find it hard to revisit something later if it's really bad at first.
This semester I'm teaching 8th grade level algebra. At a community college this is typically the second most populated course for the math department. Pre-algebra is the number 1 course. I have two students. Call one of them A and one B.

A is 27 years old, never had algebra in high school and hasn't had math in 10 years. She's going to college because her hands have arthritis and she can't continue to cut hair (her current profession) for much longer. I'm trying to teach her in one semester stuff that took me a year to learn when I was in eighth grade. I told her the class was going to be tough. I told her it would require a lot of effort on her part and that it would be frustrating. Her response was, "Well, I have a life outside of school and work and I'm not going to sacrifice it." I knew then she would fail. She dropped a few weeks ago.

B is Hmong barely speaks English, has 7 kids, a job and never went to school as a child. She's getting an A.

Is A's failure my fault? Is B's success my fault?

My experience is that groups 2, 4 as you label them are a large majority of the students I encounter. I can't force a student to be willing to sit down and do problems. And algebra is a subject that requires you to do problems to get it. If a student isn't motivated there isn't much I can do.

Learning is work. It requires effort. It's frustrating. Students at my college, for the most part, are not willing to go through the frustration, effort, and work necessary to learn. I'm a bad motivator. I've tried to be a better motivator. I believe strongly in the correctness of the Chinese proverb:

A teacher can only open the door to the house of knowledge, he can not make you enter.
That's one of things I hate the most about FF, just start the damn browser!
There was some genuine heroism and technical excellence involved in the Titanic, but I wouldn't want to reference that in a start-up, either.

That's the fun of marketing: other people can quite reasonably take other things from your references than the meaning you tried to evoke.
take the middle road. Jumping to launch a broken product isn't good, but waiting for perfecting isn't either. If it is workable, you hit a minimum feature set or anything, launch!

Also, do you get a prize for launching in Nov?

<3
Groupon Groupon
I would imagine that the other states' economies depend much more on agriculture than California's does though. Thus, California has a lot of farmers, but it doesn't get as much from a surge in agriculture prices like the others do.
https://github.com/mitchellh/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs.d/mo...

You can steal the hooks at the bottom of the file to use the indentation of espresso mode. This was driving me insane too.

Thanks to mitchellh for publishing his dotfile :D
Google launches sample site to show what sites can do with OpenID
I remember discovering this and deciding to eliminate it as part of an effort to compress the groovy jar file a bit more (long story, but basically I was running some Groovy in an applet, every byte counts).

I thought I'd found a jackpot and that killing this class would surely eliminate a nice chunk of byte code. To my amazement it makes almost no difference. With pack200 the redundancy of all these methods is totally stripped out. It took me an hour or so of work and I think it made less than 200 bytes difference in the end.
Place the gun somewhere everyone must walk past and then stand further back.
Yeah I was ready to stop at 'VB is easy to read' ;-)
Whatever you feel about Assange as a personality, it's pretty clear that this is the way things will be from now on - even if Wikileaks were somehow to be taken out of the picture. And it's much to our benefit, I think. The old school has for too long used secrecy as a cloak for mediocrity.
Is it just me, or is the stammering I remember from his presidency entirely gone now? He was perfectly eloquent before becoming President as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvknGT8W5jA&t=0m18s

edit: he did say "colonializer" in this video
Ask PG: HN Karma histogram?
All discussions about the relative value of HN karma aside, I'd find it very interesting to see a histogram of the distribution of karma values across registered users. It'd be a counterpart to the leader board at http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders that would be interesting to track over time.

My request is inspired by http://www.pandamatak.com/people/anand/blog/2008/01/on_data_analysis.html which I found via a link on HN this afternoon.
This is going to be a fun suit to follow. racketeering laws has some real teeth to it, but I was under the assumption that it was a criminal, not civil, offence.
I think the title is misleading, he's not looking to spill 'my' companies corporate secrets, he's looking to spill big business' secrets (and by secrets I do believe the intention is to reveal unethical behaviour).

I don't work for an oil company or an investment bank, two of which are targets of his next round. Change the title!
Google Beatbox
just listen
Some guy leaks some stuff that threatens established interests and we've got Forbes telling us that it's our problem within 24 hours.

Orwell would have been proud, indeed.
Nope. It's the worst on Windows, but it's bad everywhere (except my iPhone).

Linux package managers are pretty good, but if you try to get other software things get weird. Installing Dropbox on Ubuntu is surprisingly bad. You have to click through all these info screens and then have it download the proprietary daemon part. That's one of the reasons we made http://ninite.com/linux

I use a Mac, and we're working on a version for those too. The whole drag from a disk image to the applications folder is really confusing for a large number of users. And anything that makes you click through a .pkg installer is a pain too.
ICANN had no role in seizing torrent domains
I like when an image can turn into a video when clicked on, that way it acts as another screen for explanation but also a video if I want to watch it.
Started watching this a few days ago.

Although I was enjoying the talk, my wife (who doesn't know how awesome Jason is) pointed out that he was building a very big straw man when talking about the company where no one works.

She had a good point.
This sounds like a ludicrously silly joke, but dang, have you noticed how good mice have it? They've cured cancer in them dozens of times over, they've cured aging, and they've even given them magic pills to make fat mice skinny.

Douglas Adams was right. Damn mice really are the smartest animals on the planet.

(Seriously, I imagine this is because scientists can kill, breed, and experiment on mice without any ethical qualms. If you'd killed a billion people in science experiments over the last hundred years, you'd probably see similar results)
Django forms (or models) based on XML instead of ORM
And that it's Wesabe makes that point even more :)
Thanks for the comments everyone. I think you have reassured me that what he is doing is the right choice for what we are building.

He is indeed learning Drupal more or less from scratch so for him the investment in helping me build my app (using his emplyees time) is that he gets to learn a new platform regardless of whether our startup works out. When I worked on projects with him before he was mostly doing the back-end database stuff and my in-house developer was doing the integration and front-end.

It's good to know that for a review style website Drupal is not a bad choice. Even as a non-techie I find myself drinking the Ruby on Rails kool-aid (but at least I was aware of it)! The modules you mention are indeed the ones he was mentioning as useful for our project.
I generally think so too. It's also more likely to impose responsibility in such cloaked goings-on, as the actions may be revealed later. If what they were doing was justified at the time, it's not much of a problem; if it wasn't, they have it coming.

Secrecy has uses, but perpetual secrecy seems useful only to hide what you should be punished for.
Holiday Gift Guide – Great Spirits to Give as Holiday Gifts
OK, that was a bit of a stretch.

I picked an extreme example to illustrate how broken asking users is. Probably shouldn't have dragged the author into it though.
"First they came for the oil companies and investment banks, and I did not speak up, for I was not an oil company or an investment bank..."
Same. But I hate humans as well as love them.

I think the OP is able to see the bad and is missing the good.

I see awesome things in groups of people every day. And I also see really nasty things in individuals.
It doesn't make it clear it's fictional event. If I said "In 2014 taxes to be raised to 70%" most people I daresay would think "Who announced that?" and go to read more. It's sounds exactly like a factual statement. The article title is absolutely misleading and I agree that it's linkbait (furthermore I don't think it has any useful content either).

EDIT: I clicked on the link because I hoped to see what Facebook had to say about their rationale in making such a decision and to hopefully find peoples reactions to it. Instead I find one persons useless pondering about where Facebook may head in a few years. Linkbait!
Maybe they will be announcing that Roswell has some secrets, after all.
Not trying to blame you, just confirming that it was an avoidable mistake to support my point that you should gather as much information about changes as possible to avoid similar mistakes.
Do you know that the man in question is in fact autistic?

Austism and Aspergers are conditions that get casually assigned to geeks with eccentric or anomalous behaviours far too often. Given the degree to which the founder in question is functioning, it's medically unlikely that he has either condition.

Meanwhile, I believe that being averse to forming complex friend relationships combined with creating a culture of constant work (which many would describe as abusive) is sociopathic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociopathy
This isn't anything interesting. They took gene-engineered mice that lacked telomerase, and rescued them by giving them telomerase.

It's not life extension to fix a problem that you created that shortens life. Fixing premature aging != enhancing longevity in mice without premature aging.

"At Harvard, they bred genetically manipulated mice that lacked an enzyme called telomerase that stops telomeres getting shorter. Without the enzyme, the mice aged prematurely and suffered ailments, including a poor sense of smell, smaller brain size, infertility and damaged intestines and spleens. But when DePinho gave the mice injections to reactivate the enzyme, it repaired the damaged tissues and reversed the signs of ageing."

There is a therapy that extends non-genetically-crippled mouse life span by 50% that involves p53 and telomerase, but this thing above is not it.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/01/50-maximum-life-e...

The good rule of thumb is to never, never get excited about a therapy that rescues mice from an artificially introduced condition of accelerated aging. These things are almost never applicable to normal aging.
What's the aptness?

Is the job dangerous? Do they expect to accomplish something epic and historic?

No. It's bravado, nothing more.
iwr: I started to question that a while ago. I think the biggest reason that people go there to make public the information is the "Publicity" it gets. Think about it. You hear the word "Wikileaks" and you exactly what is going to follow.

Personally, I think people should be uploading to systems/programs like FreeNet and have that pass around up there. Then start using media (mediums?) on the web as a way to move it around faster. For instance, (and of course the irony of it) bit torrenting could be used as a medium.
I'm curious: Why don't people just use `new Object[]{arg1, arg2...}` ?

It's one letter longer than `createArray(arg1, arg1...)`, doesn't require you to include that chunk of code, is infinite in length, and allows you to statically-type it in your type of choice. Heck, it's the same code, just removing a layer of indirection.

edit: noticed it's one character longer, not the same length. Maybe that's why?
True, though for a lot of state policies, people seem to generally agree that they're bad, just not on whether they're bad enough to justify the pain of changing them.

The policies, good or bad, coexist with the country's strongest private sector, but that doesn't mean they caused it.
If you read the whole transcript then you will find that he does indeed want "your" company secrets. He believes in markets but insists they cannot function without good information to highlight bad competitors. This allows the good endeavours to continue, rather than going bankrupt due to the undercutting from companies that get an advantage from unethical or illegal behaviour.
I do hope your comparison of oil companies and investment banks to Jews and Gays under the third reich was facetious.
If you think we don't need any new languages then either you aren't doing anything interesting, aren't paying attention, or you just don't care.
What struck me was that he was designing a rogue-like game, but he didn't know about nethack. I mean, how can you claim to know about a genre if you can't name the single most popular game in said genre?
Very cool and well designed. However your branding of Stacked links could use some work. It's not immediately obvious what a stack of links is. I have never used that term.
I'm guessing one of the aims of this deal was to increase exposure. From the standpoint of adding 1000 extra customers to support which have very little future value (maybe some will take up bigger plans) for a relatively small amount of short term cash it doesn't make a load of sense.
Should Programmers learn assembly?
I think having a fundamental understanding of programming is helpful, but learning assembly is overkill (and offers limited benefit). Current popular languages are far removed from assembly.

It would be better to focus on learning current languages, programming patterns, concepts and styles.

Brett Miller
http://www.customsoftwarebypreston.com
Awesome, glad you liked it. Don't think the serious money will come with this one. I view web startups as an exploratory creative process (curious to see how network effects works with this one). Success will follow passion and persistence. Thanks for the encouragement.
Is this correct: "under the Patriot Act, GoDaddy and Verisign would not be allowed to admit involvement if they were requested so by the agencies in charge of the supposed domain seizure"?
I don't remember Wikileaks claiming monopoly on whistleblowing. The fact that no other has emerged yet, suggests that we badly need it/
Explosm is looking for mobile app devs, says they prefer small indie devs
Assange publishes. Insiders dump. Care to guess why?
14 stunning ultra geeky home cinemas
If you are really hungry, you should drop by to the restaurant Waldgeist in Hofheim, in Germany. Here you can order the biggest steak or biggest sausage in the whole world. And, if you are still hungry, you can order the biggest hamburger at Denny’s in Ohio.
I'm guessing that Orwell would side with Assange over the US State Department or companies like say, Exxon, Halliburton, Altria.
It was educational and informative. It wasn't until you mentioned it as being an ad that I went back to see who actually wrote the article. You increased it's effectiveness by focusing on it...and now even further. ;)