skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Securecode is theoretically optional in most cases, transactions that go through it generally cost less than non-securecode ones but it shouldn't stop all transaction processing in most cases.
Push on green may have legal implications if you are trying to become a publicly traded company and need to have manual oversight for change control (sarbox/cobit nastiness.)
Relaxed Twitter Search
Anon is somewhat taking credit: http://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/14068450506833922
A script that populates your database with a set of test data. It can be as simple as a bunch of INSERT statements, or something much more elaborate.
more: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/display_myths_shat...
Well they could add up how many terrorists they have caught
'Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!'?
Facebook New Profile Photo Hack
TextWrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/) is freeware and performs admirably for what I need. Coda (http://www.panic.com/coda/) is commercial, but apparently also quite good.
RIM has extremely talented engineers and developers, but it does not have a culture where engineers can say "We are doing the wrong thing" and have any decision-makers take notice. This is the fundamental problem with RIM. They have completely failed to effectively use the talent they have. If I were another technology company, I would definitely be trying to poach talent from them.

(Disclaimer: I'm a former RIM employee.)
automatic data creation, useful if your app requires some data in the database to function.
Maybe it's just how I see it, but "unlimited" is a "hard limit". If you don't provide unlimited service, then say so, it's not rocket science.
Some of these seem actually well thought out, but some of them feel pretty unrealistic. I don't think most of these are actually going to happen. My guess is that the bandwidth tiers will be somewhere pretty high so that it only causes problems for big downloaders. Most "Web 2.0" (think Google Docs) apps are already pretty modest with their bandwidth usage - you can use them pretty well even in mobile data networks, so I don't think that's going to affect people's behavior that much. I'd say streaming video and bittorrent would suffer the most from these caps.
That link 404s for me. Copy+paste error?
They are used in many more situations. A lot of problems can be reduced[1] to or contain a sorting problem. The same cannot be said about font rendering algorithms.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_(complexity)
Ask HN: anyone here founded a company in the US while on F1 student visa?
We are a group of international students on F1 visa in the US, we've built some android apps that are getting popular. So we'd like to set the legal things straight and found a company (primarily for not messing up our personal finances with app/ads income, and not violating our F1 visa terms)

We are wondering if anyone on HN ever successfully founded a company while on an F1 visa in the US, without any legal troubles (financial, tax, immigration etc.) later on?

We know it's best to ask some lawyers about questions related to this issue, and we are contacting some lawyers too. But it is always good to know if there are any real life examples from the HN community :)
> without invading the fetal privileged space (which is what we currently do, and which is high-risk). [emphasis mine]

The standard process is amniocentesis, and according to wikipedia, that has a miscarriage rate "as low as 1 in 1600", plus an unspecified risk of infection. While that's almost certainly higher than the risk due to drawing the mother's blood, I wouldn't call it a "high-risk" procedure.
I think the problem isn't about learning new things - it is repeating information which may not even be as good as the original article.

I'm going to work on building a site that will be the Best of HN. Somewhere people can go to see the best article on AB testing or Design. If a better article comes along, it will receive more votes and become the new #1.
Oh the amazing things I could write in JavaScript, inside Rhino, inside Java, inside JavaScript.
Anon had (sort of) taken credit on twitter, but the message was quickly replaced with "We cant confirm anything because we'll lose our accounts again."
Thanks a lot for the detailed recommendations. I am not a developer myself or even the entrepreneur type. I would like to follow interesting people that can give often non-trivial and insightful tweets on technology, technology market, computer science, physics, and of course any stimulating tweeters.
From computer science and programming I would love to see tweets from

Just to give an example of my test Norvig, Knuth, Stallman and similar people. I guess I am out of luck on these ones :)
Microsoft Montage turns your search terms into a single-page magazine
Wil Shipley has explored this approach: http://blog.wilshipley.com/2009/08/pimp-my-code-part-16-heur...

I also swear I remember reading another example of this on his blog, but I'm unable to find it, so I'll paraphrase from memory (which is somewhat murky, so caveat lector):

One of the features of Delicious Library is that you can use your computer's built-in webcam to scan barcodes as a way of adding items to your library.

The traditional, mathematically-inspired computer science approach to implement this is to frame the problem as: "Given an image with a barcode somewhere in it, find the barcode, and then read it." The problem is that a general algorithm that accepts entire set of images with barcodes in them is prohibitively slow, because you have to deal with skew, perspective, lighting, focus, etc.

The approach they ended up using was inspired by biology: it's OK to fail some of the time as long as there's feedback. They went with a much simpler algorithm that takes a fraction of a second to succeed or fail. They run it continuously against new frames, and indicate to the user whether it has succeeded. Since the user is standing there with the barcode in front of the camera, they'll reposition, try different angles, etc, until there's success.
There is nothing better for code editing on the mac than Aquamacs.

It's emacs, so there's a bunch of cool stuff, and it's so awesomely hacked and configured that it looks&feels just like a normal mac app.

Hell, because of it I've started using emacs everywhere.
The other critical factor is that "digging straight in" is _fun_, at least for people with this mindset.

Reading documentation, on the other hand...
c.l.l. is the best newsgroup I've ever used.
Rendering text is even more useful than sorting.
I see.

Now the cynic in me wonders if they're genuinely involved or taking advantage of the fact that everyone basically assumes it's them. ;)
Actually, the way I think about free software is that the GPL gives the software unalienable rights. Free software cannot be enslaved or killed, and neither can its progreny. BSD licensed software, on the other hand, is free, but anybody who pays for the upbringing of its progeny can enslave or kill that progeny at will.
we've just included a screenshot of it in the post
When I absolutley must code on my ipad I use Mides. It's quite good as far as ipad code editors go- but coding on an ipad is still a terrible experience.
"We have a strategy to promise that everything and anything provided that there is no firm specification or explanation and provided that we provide no date for implementation.

"This gives our customers a sense of security that if anything should happen to become important in the future, they will have purchased from a vendor that has a vision for embracing the technology even if there is no roadmap for actually implementing the technology.

"And although they may not ever end up benefitting from the technology, their careers are safe because they made a decision that, at the time, was prudent, namely to standardize on a technology that was thought to be on its way to becoming ubiquitous from a vendor that articulated a strategy for achieving ubiquity."

tl;dr: "F.U.D."
So I take it they just hashed and didn't HMAC. Was it just plain old MD5(password)?

Unrelatedly, does HN HMAC?
I agree with author's observation. My personal open-source projects are developed 95% by me, and sometimes overhead of collaboration (documentation, discussions) outweighed the contributions I've got (small patches that I had to refactor anyway).

However, this should not be interpreted as a reason to drop free software or that closed/for-profit software would fare any better. I don't think that the "long tail" of projects in sourceforge graveyard would attract enough commercial interest to fund several developers.
Moggi used monads in category theory to define computations with side effects in functional programming. The basic insight is that in addition to the values of various types in functional programming, there are "computations" of various types. Examples of "computations" would be exceptions or continuations. Each monad defines for each value type a computation "containing" that type, and the whole type system of values you started with can be embedded in a new type system with new computation types.

Monads in category theory are an algebraic device for embedding a category--usually a cartesian closed category--of types of values into a new category with types of computations. However, the correspondence between Haskell monads and category monads are related by a series of adjunctions.

Suppose that C is a cartesian closed category and M:C->C is a monad with natural transformations e:1->M
(the unit) and u:MM->M (the multiplication).

We assume a fixed choice of products and compatible exponentials: for each type A of C,

A x ( ) -| [A -> ( )]

Here's the adjunction

MA -> [[A->MB] -> MB]
---------------------
MA x [A -> MB] -> MB
---------------------
[MA -> MB] x MA -> MB
-----------------------
[A -> MB] -> [MA -> MB]

The final map is given by currying, but it can also be motivated as follows if you think of the exponentials as internal hom sets. If g:A -> MB is in C, so
that g:A->B is in the Kleisli category C^M, then u_{MB}oM(g):MA->MB. We can write this as the lambda term \lambda x\in A A -> MB.u_{MB} oM x

This lambda term corresponds to composition in the Kleisli category C^M of C, and belongs to the internal language LL(C), the simply typed lambda calculus determined by C. Under the Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondence, the lambda term corresponds to the required map of C.
I think they meant to say real-world performance, not actual performance. GPU acceleration affects real-world HTML5 animation techniques, especially on mobile devices. It depends on what's being measured. iOS has GPU acceleration support in animation effects, while Android has a JIT enabled JavaScript VM. (iOS restricts code execution which prevents JITs from running, at least in 4.x). The importance of these features greatly depends on the application being executed.

Software and hardware acceleration frameworks matter far more in mobile than on the desktop, where battery life, memory, and CPU tuning are crucial and painfully clear when you care about speed.
What if he actually is the smartest person in the room? Maybe even by far?

On the other hand, if you have that kind of attitude it will probably be mutually beneficial if you stay the hell away from him so it's a good strategy.
Not down from Germany.
This was exactly my thought. Jesus wept.
Thanks for taking the time. It would be nice if you could give us a few-words sentence of why you follow them.
It's just come back up.
An excellent article - these are lessons most people learn the hard way. I'll second the recommendation for using Chef or something like it to manage your system configuration. It makes building new servers based on your configuration trivial (say if you wanted to move VPS hosts). Additionally, if you use Chef, you can use Vagrant[1], you can replicate your production or staging environments locally in VirtualBox.

Also, not to pimp my own stuff, but I wrote a thing about generating test data with Ruby some time ago. I've used this strategy a number of times and it works really well: http://larrywright.me/blog/articles/215-generating-realistic...

[1]: http://vagrantup.com/
How I handle email
I think we are well aware of the arbitrary definition, and it misses the point. A software developer hacker/engineer/programmer solves problems, using the software as a tool to that end. There are surely several domains in which they may work, but the real skills -- the ability to put together code, debug, etc and not the memorization of the business rules of each domain -- are what makes the programmer.

I can understand if a hiring manager wants somebody who has some experience in some OS, in using Dreamweaver, in knowing the Java language, or in some other platform. These are just toys, though. I agree that that experience is a bonus, but the real core skillset has nothing to do with any particular toy. The hiring manager will easily miss good developers with such a narrow-minded focus.

And certainly, strong experience in any of the items of this list should not suggest that the developer cannot also do GUI programming, web programming, JavaScript, or any of the like. These are simply environments. Everyone has to learn the local company's codebase or some business's specific rules.

I have never seen an educational institution use these terms. Nobody gets a serious degree in "systems programming" or "web frontend development". If they do, avoid that institution!

What you want in a developer is the ability to learn, the ability to think, and the ability to communicate on things that make some hardware operate. But call them a "systems programmer", and we do a grave disservice to our industry. Distinct skill set? No way. Don't let the pencil-pushers carve us into tidy little imaginary fields. They do that because they are trying to measure the work. As someone who has experience in all the levels from our computer's digital circuits up to databases and sideways to some pretty graphics and sound, I can assure you that these definitions are ridiculous. I provide maintainable solutions.

I am not a systems programmer. I am not a web developer. I am not a game designer. I am a software developer: I can do all these things and more -- and specifically, I personally have, so I know the differences.

I do not hire people because of the toys they have used; I hire them because they are capable of learning and extending mine.
A small point, but with respect to one click rollbacks that is something you get "for free" with capistrano: cap deploy:rollback
If I'm told by a machine that "X will miss you", I do consider that disingenuous. There's a programmer using a program, trying to get an emotional reaction from me by the entirely speculative claim that another human being - probably emotionally close to me, but more probably not emotionally close to them - will miss me, suggesting an emotional connection human->machine->human where none exists, trying to exploit my natural tendency to anthropomorphize. And that kinda rubs me the wrong way.
Christmass shopping has begun in earnest?
10% unemployment yet every startup in NYC struggling to hire
I work with Jason. If you're interested, ping me and we'll be happy to tell you about it. vladik at clockspot dot com
Does anyone know how much traffic Anons botnets could generate? Surely it would be nowhere near enough to have any kind of impact on Amazon's cloud infrastructure..

Must be because of something else such as human error and just really bad timing?
How to Get Started with Bitcoins
Probably just a BGP thing. The Internet is practically duct-taped together, sometimes the glue gets a little soft.
http://gawker.com/5712646/advisory-notice-no-action-required

is this a joke or what? I never do understand gawker.
Where is that from? That's not in my post, and not in the podcast transcript…
I doubt much/any of this will come to pass, speaking as someone who has always had to deal with download limits, it's really not THAT big a deal.

We here in Australia have been subject to tiered broadband pricing since day 1 - I feel pretty comfortable in saying that whatever pricing US carriers come up with, it will be much lower than here in AU, simply because you don't need to haul most of your data thousands of KMs via undersea cables. My ISP has a range of ADSL2+ plans from AU$50/month for 150GB data through to AU$120/month for 1TB data. (There's also an entry level 30Gb for $30 plan for your grandparents)
I came here to post about exactly that. My jaw dropped while reading... not because it was flagrantly unethical, or abusing the law, or anything like that, but because it reminded me so acutely of the stereotypical movie villain who enlists the help of some hapless bystander and then impassively murmurs, "Thanks," while shooting them.

I already know this is going to get downvoted because Hacker News (wisely) disapproves of feckless criticism of big corporation business practices, and every time I post something like this, no one realizes that I'm just sharing an observation as opposed to making a hard judgment, but I was so surprised by the similarity between reality and fiction here, and so pleased to see that someone else had made the same connection, that I'm posting it anyway.
My guess:

Expect raw capitalism to re-invade the world. However, this is not going to come in the way of political structure changing, but rather resistance to political structure.

It's not going to be headed by One Megacorporation by any mean. They're just along for the ride.

All the pieces are coming together. A radical ideology, a working knowledge of economic, a technologically sophisticated community, and a new kind of technology that the community can revolves around.
Http://www.freechromethemes.com/
Soylent: A Word Processor with a Crowd Inside
If it was really that easy a decade ago why was there no marketing done to reach people like me?

Show me pricing lists and contracts from 10 years ago indicating it was cheap as Twilio was 2 years ago. I can't see anything at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://voxeo.com :(

I suspect the infrastructure was there for the 'big boys' and that indie devs and 2-3 man shops who wanted this sort of functionality were ignored in favor of 'enterprise' development shops and projects.

OK - rereading your post here - yes, you got 'distracted' by big deals. But it's the focus on getting the basic fundamentals as easy for people to use as possible which has created the Twilio loyalty and fandom they have relative to voxeo/tropo.

Twilio has (imo) about a year to add some more features that people are asking for before people jump ship. They should not waste that goodwill and rest on their laurels. But it's going to be easier for them to grow their success with smaller shops and indies in to something larger as those smaller shops and projects grow to larger needs than it is for 'enterprise'-focused groups to prove to the smaller players that they 'get' the independent developer market.

You can suggest that this is 'just' marketing/evangelism. I suspect it's a bit more - a focused simplicity on getting a few core things down first rather than trying to offer multiple services on day one. That doesn't appeal to everyone, but I think it's helped more than hurt in Twilio's case. Simply by having more options up front you're forcing people to have to learn a lot more about stuff on your terms when making an evaluation. For example, Tropo's APIs - 'webapi' vs 'scripting'. Huh? What are the differences? I don't find an adequate explanation of the strengths/weaknesses of each model.

Both services have their place, but developing a rabid fanbase will serve Twilio better longer term as opposed to pure technical superiority.
Focus on a real problem. Especially problems for which people are willing to pay to solve. Design a solution for real people and not just yourself.

Solutions that create markets are very rare and are best tackled once you know how to create a solution to a real problem first.
There's a really easy solution to all the noise ISPs are making about bandwidth.

If a provider wants to sell me a 384kbps line, they should offer 120 gb per month. If they want to advertise a 20 mbps line, they should sell me 6.3 tb per month. If they can't provide the capacity, sell me a slower line and I'll be happy when I get bursts of speed. Regional monopolies should be compelled to have transparency in pricing.
Current counter-examples would be health care, energy, food, raw materials and land.

Food might start to go down at some point but I don't see land and raw materials declining for a little while, though if telecommuting from Utah or outer-Mongolia becomes easy, land might well get cheaper.

Health care's an odd thing. Maybe enough biology research will bring the price down but so-far it's increased the price. A lot of this comes because of a market that's happy to absorb a higher priced replacement for a given item if the replacement can claim superiority in other ways. This sound OK but it's had truly poisonous results. Open source biology could eventually have an impact here.

Energy is a long story in itself...

Still, it's interesting to think about these tendencies.
I'm planning to use this git-based deployment workflow sometime soon:

https://github.com/apinstein/git-deployment/

Seems pretty nifty.
Oh? Gosh, I must have misread it. I admit I was in a hurry, and what he said sounded so much like what other proprietary enterprise vendors say when promising vaporware that I got the exact wording confused.

UPDATE: Look, I am NOT making fun of your post in any way. I think it's fair game to poke a little at his comments given that there has been no other mention of this, no roadmap, nothing. But I respect your post and the fact that you pushed a little further and tried to find some corroboration for his statement.

I'd like to think that somewhere in Oracle-land, there's a white paper from the Sun days talking about this idea, and maybe they're even trying to make it fly right now. And good job teasing that out and asking some intelligent questions about what it may mean.
I wouldn't generally hire a self described "Web Programmer" to work on the guts of VMWare if I worked there.

When people describe themselves as something, it is to indicate what they are interested in doing. Hiring a self-titled "Web Programmer" to do VMWare work is probably not a good fit, not interesting for them. But it is not unreasonable to find that they are capable of doing the work if they wanted to. We need to be careful about categorizations.

I see your point about basket weaving, but when I went to school, I did not see a class for it in my CS curriculum, and I also did not see "systems programmer 101" or "web development 101". These are applications. In CS, we learn how to navigate in all these fields, whatever their rules... that is, out in the field, we can learn enough of basket weaving to create a software model for it. The point is that we can solve the problem in software.

Really, it is because of this nonsense that I gave up on recruiters entirely and learned to go directly to the technical hiring managers. The good ones do not use requirements checklists with bullet points like "knows C++", "has programmed in linux", and "knows basket weaving".

Edit addition: This thinking would be career-limiting on me because I have adopted a mindset that boxes me in, focusing in the wrong things.
MacVim.
Some examples of what this can do would be nice. (No, I'm not watching a video, sorry.)

At first glance, the manual requires knowledge of Cobb's notations - try to make this unnecessary, as many systems administrators won't know it. (I'm in academia, but my degree is in Mathematics instead of computer science; the notation looks trivial, but it's one more obstacle.)

In short, the project looks interesting, but it was hard to evaluate at a glance.