skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of interest, how many people here reckon they can tick the top box for more than 60% of the categories (I say 60% because some the top categories seemed kinda optional, like writing a blog, publishing a framework...)?

I think I'll print this off, put it on my wall and use it as a road map for the next ten years (ok, maybe not on the wall, maybe in a drawer where nobody else gets to see it until it's finished ;) )
37signals Product Blog: Apps that bring Campfire to your iPad
Made me laugh: "animals? were a freaking zoo!"
What's your point? Try to hold these two thoughts together in your head: whoever was charged with protecting this information was negligent, and whoever actually leaked it is responsible for their own actions.
Maybe he should consider actually locking his bike up correctly in the future. I notice from that picture he hasn't locked his wheels, which tend to be pretty prominent targets.
They used to ask for your Slashdot username!
BIOMETRICS RFID DNA NWO WTF
It also works for Land of Lisp! 24.95 -> $9.98

It's been mentioned here a lot of times during the last few weeks.
That's not true either.

The end points can be encrypted by every techonology imaginable, that only prevents people who shouldn't be able to access the data from accessing it.

The guy who leaked this stuff was granted access to it. He had the passwords to open everything he leaked, so the problem is not (a possible) lack of encryption but the fact that he was able to access so much without anyone noticing. He seemingly downloaded more files than one person could read in a year, how was this not noticed?
Does the Zencoder credit expire?
Ok, but how does that invalidate the methodology of the matrix? Finding one or multiple counterexample(s) to the 'natural progression' that is a fundamental part of the matrix doesn't mean it 'doesn't work so well'. The examples are not important, the point is to identify various orthogonal paths of natural progression, each of which is of relevance to a skilled programmer, and to give someone who is making an assessment of the skill level of a specific person handles for what areas to look in.

I'm still not sure of your argument; if you've heard of the higher level concept but don't know the fundamentals, that obviously still says something about your skill level and drives as a software engineer. It's kinda useless to try to list what exactly it could mean in this concrete example, the point is that the model allows systematic evaluation of skills.
"Claiming that these things were restricted to teachers, or have changed because of teachers unions is nothing but the post-hoc fallacy."

The difference is that you don't have the entire town calling the CEO of IBM to get an employee fired for explaining what a condom is. While the same social norms were behind both corporate rules and also rules for school teachers, the rules for school teachers were many times stricter because of much greater pressure from the community. And if you look at the union rules for firing teachers, it's pretty clear that they were crafted in part to make it more difficult for a teacher to get fired due to a few parents putting pressure on the principal. Because if these rules didn't exist, then most principals would take the easy out and fire that teacher every time regardless of whether or not they actually did anything wrong. Because unlike at IBM, the principal doesn't lose any money for firing a good teacher; all that happens is they get rid of a headache, so the incentives are aligned to reward principals for harming students. That's why the protections currently offered by the unions are needed.
And in Steve's defense, his number should be lower, but I think he lurked for years...
Five Questions for DHS Concerning Its Online Censorship Campaign
Using metal does seem to be the bulk of the strategy; the chassis and carriage will be aluminum.

I agree that the article isn't very clear on why existing cars aren't recyclable, and how this improves it. I could imagine that there are subway cars being produced in the past 10-20 years that are harder to recycle due to a bunch of plastic components, perhaps. Or, there might be issues in how the cars are constructed that make separating out the recyclable components unreasonably expensive?

It does seem to be the case that, whatever the reason, subway cars often aren't recycled. For example, New York repurposed a bunch of its old cars by sinking them to make artificial reefs: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060818-subwa.... Presumably they would've recycled them instead if the metal were easily reclaimable and had significant scrap value?
Oh why don't they have the latest edition of JS The Definitive Guide on sale?? Beware: don't buy the old edition which is on sale (it's four years old). The 6th edition is available for $25 for both online access and pdf version, so I just bought that - http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781449393854.
http://www.furk.net/

http://www.peerharbor.com/

I haven't used these services and can't vouch etc. etc.

(It's notable that two others I was thinking of, httptorrents.com and imageshack.us have either gone out of business or have cancelled the service. So predictably it's a pretty spotty market).

And, at the risk of breaking rule #1, have you heard of usenet?
AOP and Dynamic Languages: Contradiction in Terms or Match Made in Heaven?
Mozilla Is Designing a New Programming Language Language Called Rust
> "This unions vs. education meme seems to mostly a US phenomenon as far as I can tell."

Further, we've had teachers' unions for generations. (AFT was founded in 1916) But every now and again, there's a flurry of stories about how education is 'broken', and teachers' unions are the problem.

This is all followed and subsumed by the stories about how we all know schools are broken and teachers unions are the problem (begging two questions in the classical sense), but charter schools (specifically) are the solution.

(Despite studies having shown since the last round of this meme, that while some charter schools are superior most are inferior, and overall their average performance is notably lower than the public schools they're supposed to 'fix'.)

It's enough to make you wonder where it all comes from.
Microsoft "embraces" (doesn't prohibit) windows phone 7 jailbreaking
Indeed. It's mostly an article about Warsaw getting some new subway cars[1], which isn't particularly interesting vehicle (well, it is, but they are so much same for anyone outside the engineering/railfan world), so they had to come up with some catchy headline… Most subway cars in the world are "recyclable" in the same manner (and perhaps even efficiency). I don't see anything very special here, it seems to be just a modern lightweight subway car, made mostly from aluminium.

[1] Not interesting enough to make it to HN, IMHO.
Auto Transport Utica, New York
I played with boost::lambda, and I found the resulting code less clear than a simple for loop. I also had difficulty gaining an intuition for what I could and could not do with it. Rather than constantly asking myself "Can I use boost::lambda here...? Will it look better or worse than the alternative?" I just decided to never use it.

While I prefer a functional style of coding, I recognized that it was silly to adhere to it if doing so made my code worse - C++'s support for what I wanted to do just wasn't there. If what I wanted to accomplish was several lines of code, I wrote a separate function or function object. If it was brief and I could not express it with combinations of existing functions, then I just wrote a for loop.

I didn't play with boost::proto, so I can't comment on that. But! C++ has real lambdas now. So, problem solved. (Once the compilers catch up.)
Nope. Use it as long as your Zencoder account is active.
In that case, I'd be very careful about validating the idea before jumping ship. Talk to potential users, non-techies, ... These are all the things I personally find difficult, but I recognize they're necessary once I'm outside my narrow area of expertise.

What it came down to for me was: If I don't try, it will gnaw at me forever, and I was reasonably certain of some value. Of course, there can be regrets either way. But I've only had the "itch that must be scratched" feeling about technical ideas, not business ideas. I think you are in a different situation since you are a techie with a business idea.
> We are going to build an infrastructure that will allow consumers to order food from their cell phones (via a text-interface, rather than voice), drive to the restaurant and pick up their order.

That sounds like a much more promising business than "a site where users submit news and sites, vote them up and write comments about them". I don't mean this is in a snarky way, I'm a reddit user too. Am I missing something?
You made the assertion that "democratic republics work better [with a lot of classified documents getting leaked]"

I don't think you can just state that without justification. Anything juicy enough to be a revelation will probably also cause diplomatic problems for our country. Is that helping us? I think almost everyone in this country agrees we wouldn't want to see Iran or North Korea with nukes, we just disagree on what should be done about it. Diplomacy on those issues could well be more difficult now because of this leak. Why is that a good thing? What benefit has outweighed that cost? That now you know what our state department's negotiating plan is?

I get why certain things should be leaked when it is necessary, but this seems to me to be one guy with sour grapes dumping reams of data for no clear reason and some tidbits of it being interesting.

And what happens after X millions of pages are leaked when the one super important thing (ala the Nixon papers of today) are leaked and nobody cares? Has that made it a better place?
I have plans for getting much better tabs, but I'm not there yet.

Regarding number two, check out http://www.songsterr.com, I don't think I'm ready to compete with them yet :)
If you can understand splay trees, I don't think linked lists will give you the slightest problem.
Not quite. I believe that the emphasizing scalability and efficiency over actually making something is wrong.

I also believe that teaching algorithms before logic and engineering concepts is wrong.

I would rather hire someone who has made more apps than someone who has excellent knowledge of algorithms but has made no apps. Would you?
this is actually pretty close to an already existing service in Denmark called just-eat.dk, except it focuses mostly on fast-food, and you order over the internet.

So pg missed the boat on this one. Fortunately I haven't seen this anywhere in the us and it will take some times before these guys will branch out of the country, if at all.
That's right, but the article is about Google search, so the referrer will be hidden only if the user comes from https://encrypted.google.com
What's not true? I pointed out something that may be the case because I thought it was relevant to the discussion.
I like Steve's answer:
"Steve: Ten years from now I hope that we would have either sold the company for gazillions of dollars, or realized we could not do so and tried to come up with something new."

The application content seems remarkably normal. Even the Restaurant idea. Nothing stands out other than the 'Animal' question. Like, within the realm of most of us at HN (even if the quantity of YC applications has raised the bar since Summer 2005). Thanks for posting this.
Like the other post said, I really wanted boost::lambda to work. However, I found that anything more complicated than "_1 * 2.0" became write-only code, so in practice it was useless.
Over the period of time the average unemployment rate in Germany has been notably higher than in the US. It seems unreasonable to compare the performance of economies on spot years. If you want you could compare the 11.5% unemployment in Germany in 2005.

I suggest that criticizing governments who live with long term unemployment is pretty reasonable.
There's also

git stash -p

:)
Aim of a transit authority isn't to get most of the metal back, but to dispose the vehicles as cheaply as possible. To conform with environmental regulations, labor safety, etc., is quite expensive. That's why you can find so many old German trams across the eastern Europe. German authorities eagerly "sold" their old trams for pretty much any cost (like 1 euro and pick-up), rather than scrap them, which would cost money and not bring that enough in scrap.
I find the number of poeople who end up not working on the startup interesting. We also saw that on a few of the other yc posted apps recently. As a college senior I try to put myself in their shoes. I think a good barometer for startup success could be how good the offers they are willing to turn down to start it. If nothing else, the need to validate their decision could add extra motivation
Thanks, seems I'll be bughunting tonight :)
Has there been any effort to put the multitudes of clojure.core functions into various sub-namespaces? It's seemed sloppy to me that there are just gobs of functions which are totally un-compartmentalized.
Last night I couldn't sleep, so I started reading random cables from this recent release. Boy was I surprised by the information I found.

In one instance, it appeared the US Ambassador to Russia/Georgia had been invited to a local tribesmen's son's wedding and goes on to detail every bit of information about his encounters, very confidential chats and even forecast what will happen in power struggles because of his conversations with various top ranking guests.

In the cable he even verbally outlines the structure of the house, how many exists there are, location etc.. as if to mark a military strike on the location should there ever need be.

All of this led me to beleive this ambassoder is royally fucked. The fact that Washington has suggested embassy counselors will be called back/removed from their post is probably very true and otherwise, these kind of information leak will put them in great danger.

I'm not sure how WikiLeaks determines what information, such as names, should be censored while other names are fully visible. This is quite disturbing to me.
Ruby is nicer to read than Python. Here's how each language reverses a string:

# Ruby

string.reverse()

# Python

string[::-1]

Which looks better?

Edit: I'm not sure why this is being down voted. It's a true statement.

Edit2: With all the down voting on Hacker News recently, I'm about to quit sharing my knowledge here. Maybe pg will do something about this. It needs to change otherwise good people will stop posting here.

Edit3:

irb(main):002:0> x = "hacker"

irb(main):003:0> puts x.reverse()

rekcah

>>> x = "hacker"

>>> print x[::-1]

rekcah
It certainly sounds like it would have made more profit, but less likely of getting bought.

Reddit was a fantastic idea to getting acquired.
That was not my point. My understanding of the discussion: someone pointed out a potential result of the leaks is that government employees may not communication frankly because of the leaks. You brought up encryption as a means to counter that. I pointed out that encryption of the communication itself does not necessarily mean it is stored encrypted. I brought that up because I feel it takes encryption out of the discussion; I don't think it's relevant to the original point made.
I think it's probably got more to do with an (understandable!) nervousness by policymakers about what would amount to a second semi-official chain of command inside such an organisation. The union leaders would have an awful lot of leverage over the government and I can't see any politician giving that away willingly.
So how on earth did it get from that to what is currently reddit?
Steve Jobs Talks (in Playboy, 1985)
Agreed. In the US today, we essentially have a single payer, single provider education system. There's simply no motivation for improvement on either side, leaving the kids to pay the price.
Not what I meant. I'm familiar with several dozen languages and I try to get acquainted with at least one topic and programming language outside my comfort zone every six months. I've been keeping with this routine for about 3 years now and what I've realized is that almost all those things he mentions have absolutely nothing to do with being a good programmer. There are certain meta-cognitive patterns that are far more relevant for being a good programmer and it's hard to gauge these meta-cognitive abilities by just running through a grid of requirements.
US shutters 82 domain names citing counterfeit goods sales, copyright problems
Will your startup do better if it's easy to pronounce?
In Massachusetts, we have school choice. You can choose another public school to send your children to. There are availability limitations, but since the chosen school gets more public money, they accept as many as they can. The schools that are not getting chosen do try to improve (at least the ones near me do), and this statistic is one that talked about at election time.

Of course, parents choose schools that they can get their children to, so it will probably be nearby.

Not sure what other states do.
Boston/Cambridge HN meetup 5:30 today
There is a common misconception that secure code has to be by definition less readable and harder to write. The upvotes on the parent comment suggest that even HN readers think that way.

I believe that this is a false dichotomy. Good practices and separation of concerns often increase code readability. For example I think the updated version of your code with explicit parameter binding is much more readable than string concatenation.
Balancing portfolios is basically a universally recommended practice. If you manage your own portfolio, won't you have a similar "churn rate" to the index fund?
Electorates around the world are apathetic and too fixated on their own lives to vote or know their candidates, that's why.
Look, the A B and C bit shouldn't be taken too seriously, just some kind of law against firing 'em for random, arbitrary and capricious reasons while still making it easy for them to be fired for doing a bad job.
Microsoft weighs new TV service
How Dropbox Won
I'm going to generalize here, sorry.

The comments section of this blog post illustrates the problems I have with the .NET "community", as a "part-time" .NET programmer.

It's full of "what a waste of time!" & "why would anyone use this?" comments. It illustrates the lack of vision and inventiveness in the community. I guess "because I could", or "because I wanted to(.|learn)" wasn't good enough.

Aside from a small minority of brilliant folks like Hanselman, the .NET community is pretty bleak, boring, and stale. It's hard for me to get excited about anything in that world when I know they're just cribbing features that have been around the OSS world for a few years (I'm looking at you ASP.NET MVC).

Why work with engineered ripoffs, when I can just use the real thing for free (and without any ridiculous licensing)? The real thing (Rails/Django/PHP/etc) is more organic and agile, oh and it's freakin' FREE!
If this is copyright, I'd rather be wrong
Indeed. If an army stops obeying its government's orders, it's not a government any more!
For being too liberal, or for bringing his private political beliefs into the classroom?
The reason we don't allow soldiers to strike isn't because giving them better working conditions, benefits or compensation would threaten national security (it would merely be more expensive), but because not having soldiers available 100% of the time would be a threat to national security. We don't need the same availability from teachers.

Mr. Spock would've immediately made this distinction. He also would've objected to the whole "teachers union -> bad education -> bad economy -> bad military" handwave. I like Dilbert, but as I've said before this is why Scott is writing cartoons and not proofs.
> We were rejected after our interview, but Paul called us the next morning as we rode back to Charlottesville to say we could join YC if we came up with a new idea. That idea was reddit.

top of the article ;)
Here is the git repo (over http) for my Haskell implementation which exploits the technique to be linear for LL(k) (the Zip module is where this technique is implemented). The constant overhead for the implementation is still extremely high because we need to compute a fixed point computation on the whole parse graph for every input token. I'm working on getting all that down...

http://david.darais.com/git/research/der-parser-3/
> One person's "basic precaution" is another's "failure so spectacular it demands an example be made of its author".

The American Government and it's diplomatic services are currently being made an example of.

> You aren't OK with a world governed by the ethic you just alluded to.

That's an assumption.

> You're only OK with invoking it to make a haphazard argument.

I think it's pretty solid. If you are in charge of material that you deem important enough to stamp it 'secret' then you should take basic precautions, if you do not then you only have yourself to blame. Not locking your house is stupid, even if burglary is wrong.

> I absolutely do place blame on the people charged with protecting the information that got leaked.

Good.

> But that has nothing whatsoever to do with WL's culpability.

Indeed, it doesn't because as far as I know they're not culpable. The investigation in to the leak has so far been limited to those in the employ of the US government, and again, as far as I know wikileaks and its associates have not been charged with any crimes or even misdemeanors related to these leaks.

The 'if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear' mantra cuts both ways. I don't agree with it when applied to the general public, and I just as much don't agree with it when applying it to the government. The difference is that I would expect the government to at least be somewhat capable when it comes to dealing with data that is deemed sensitive.

So maybe your point is that crypto is pointless because no matter what information will be leaked and therefore the recipients of the leaked data should have culpability but that is a world governed by an ethic that I'm not ok with.
Fork bombs are childish pranks. That's all I meant. People didn't used to post such things here.
Metaphor: Marxism. Presupposes an inexorable progression of skills, instead of a constellation. Check out database - administration is apparently the ultimate skill!
Sorry, it is my understanding that if you value your data enough to protect it in transit that you should protect it equally strong at the endpoints.
In retrospect there will always be strategies that will beat any index fund. But can you identify such a strategy beforehand?
Fantasy Christmas Team Gift List
Life after Google Summer of Code
Consider putting a down arrow next to "last.fm" to show that it's a dropdown option. I had no idea until I read this comment.
I have since rewritten the Haskell implementation to compute fixed points on cyclic graphs without using pointers or Monads. Check it out if it interests you (git repo):

http://david.darais.com/git/research/der-parser-3/
Note that the article is from 2007.
Police, Firemen and Hospital Workers operate on the same readiness principles and are still allowed to unionize. The National Labor Relations Board strictly regulates how and when these workers can strike.

I find it very difficult to believe that the military and NLRB couldn't find a set of rules to govern military strikes (doh!) that wouldn't jeopardize our national security.

I'm not saying that I think the Military should be able to unionize, they work under a whole different set of rules and values then the rest of us. I just find your argument a bit lacking.
New York Times Event Shows the Promise of Big Data