skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
they probably have this in SQL because of the ease-of-use to run stats on it though.
You can read the first chapter of the Autumn 2010 edition free, from here https://kindle.amazon.com/work/2600-magazine-quarterly-digit... The maturity and tact of Goldstein's essay was so encouraging to me that I gladly paid $4 for that issue. $10 for a volume (four quarterly issues) seems totally reasonable to me.
Although I have never built a "complete website" on the node.js stack, the time that I have spent developing on the platform has been very enjoyable and I've put a decent amount of effort in. There are many articles as well as github repositories that can teach you what you need to know to get up and running. I recommend https://github.com/ry/node/wiki and http://expressjs.com/ for reading on the subject. Good Luck!
Number of years is mathematically irrelevant. Number of generations is mathematically relevant. Bacteria produce new generations prodigiously.

Consider: antibiotics were invented less than a century ago, and bacteria have already evolved a resistance to penicillin. That's probably more than humans have evolved for 100,000 years. 100 years is like five generations for humans, but billions of generations for a bacteria. 760,000 years? That's tons of time for bacteria. Especially since bacteria are pretty simple; more complicated life has a much harder time evolving.
Performing math in your head requires concentration and a working memory. These improve with practice and are useful for more than just math (like following complex writing or multiparty discussions).

With computers, people won't perform the basic calculations in their head. But their strategy-forming about what, of the gigantic possibility space, they could or should ask the computer next will still require the same old concentration and working memory... and more.
The Skinner Box
Quitting doesn't mean forever. For example, didn't you, David Winer, quit blogging in 2006 ( http://scripting.com/2006/03/13.html#whyIWillStopBlogging )? Now look at you!
Arg, that term "pop"
What really upsets me about ALL these things is that it seems highly unlikely any of these privacy violations would have caught any known terrorists, foreign or domestic.

It's just lazy law enforcement covering itself so it has an after-the-fact method to hunt people down easily, just like all the security cameras in the UK are not to actively prevent crime, but just to have a trail afterwards.
I'll check it out!
The truth value of "You must learn JavaScript" is true if and only if "You must learn HTML" is true.
Gmail Smart Mute Blocks Annoying Emails
Unfortunately, it does when language is used to denote specific technologies.
AVG Free Update Bricks 64-Bit Windows 7 PCs
Oh god no more URL shorteners.

I hate the www thing too. The explanation is that you cannot have a cname on a root domain. They coud get around e problem by just hosting dns for you themselves.

The other issue is that you end up having t have yet another service to redirect dom.ain to www.dom.ain as well. Sometimes dns providers will do this, but not always. (Dotster doesn't do the right thing, for example.)
This brings me back to the days of working at a planning & architecture firm where I edited Illustrator maps with 500,000 objects in them.

The thick white outlines do a good job of ensuring that the letterforms aren't impeded by other design elements.

The cleared-away areas around cities are a good use of "white space" to increase the hierarchical dominance of major metropolitan areas.

There are some nice detailed observations here. Bookmarked.
A minor, slightly pedantic, point about the physics:

Electron density is the quantity that determines x-ray absorbance, not mass density. Of course, a correlation exists between the two, but they are not exactly the same thing.
Sorry, Chrome.
PSA: Botched AVG 2011 update might be why your PC won't start today
Want to make a bet that we'll see JavaScript used to script a game within the next 5 years? I'd bet money that we will.
I do hope that's not an up-and-coming web color scheme or site layout, as that web site dances the edge of Angry Fruit Salad.
Well, consider the '3 strikes' law in California - commit three felony offenses, go to jail for life. Several other states have similar laws (Texas was the first in 1974) but California's was enacted via a ballot initiative, so the voters had a direct say on the matter.

It passed with a good majority: lots of politicians thought it would be a good idea, the police and prison officers unions supported it (surprise - more work for them, and they are very powerful lobbying groups in CA politics), and it seems like a nice neat solution to a complicated problem...but in practice it doesn't work very well. Now our prisons are so overcrowded that we have to ship people out of state and the conditions have been ruled unconstitutional, plus keeping all these people imprisoned costs us a fortune and our courts are so backlogged that people sometimes go free because we can't get them into court within the time required for a 'speedy trial'. Nor has the three strikes law had much effect on crime or recidivism that we can tell.

Voters have watered it down a little bit, allowing some people to go into drug treatment programs if their crimes are not violent. In the recent election, the Republican candidate for Attorney General ran on a platform of repealing the law, because it just doesn't work very well. He lost.

So it's not just congress or state representatives. This kind of thing will always be a problem. I was going to say '...until people are more aware civics and the law,' but somehow I don't think that's going to change much. We could spend more money on education and suchlike but most people vote with their hearts instead of their heads.
This helped me find another really cool way of handling this. INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
Although the latter changed (by definition) just in time for the Battle of the Bulge. Patton later commented that it would force a complete change in infantry tactics.
Don't be naive, 'the use of force' has been the only thing keeping governments in power since civilization began.
It wouldn't be for a modern American high school student in an advanced English (wouldn't even have to be AP/IB) class. At least, I'm confident that 75% of the people in my AP English class would have known 85%+ of the answers. Dating myself slightly, that would've been back in '94.
Why you need to do a hackathon
I'd use the word arsenotolerant instead. The cells still preferentially utilize phosphorous when given the option. The prefix phile generally implies that they require such conditions to live, like a thermophile isn't viable at a temperature below (roughly) 40 C. This organism would have no trouble growing in the absence of Arsenic. =)
Can somebody explain how this could possibly matter to HN?
I'd also argue that certain type of software skills don't become obsolete, and that a sufficiently experienced developer shouldn't have too much trouble picking up the 'latest and greatest' technologies. It's not like it actually changes fundamentally every few years!
Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach also has Python code examples.
Multiple leases I've signed had provisions about failure to take possession. If I didn't move in right away, or moved out early, I still owed the full rent for the lease period, but the owner could rent the place out to somebody else. (whether or not that's enforceable in a particular municipality is an entirely different matter)
If a device is bricked, it can't be repaired, thus making it as valuable as a brick.

The problem that this update causes can be repaired either by following instructions from AVG, or by reinstalling Windows. It's not bricking anything.
That's like an extra 1% tax on all my purchases, just for privacy. And it goes out the window if I use a "loyalty card" or email coupon.
Those roman numerals don't help with the multiplication at all.
Put your money where your mouth is!
http://www.longbets.org/
I'm not familiar with the Maps API, but the site does it for you:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&... (from searching Texas)
Since 2005 JavaScript has become the underground Lingua Franca of Internet.

And now the underground is reaching the surface, JavaScript isn't that slow anymore.

At this point, I see no solution to escape it. I agree, unfortunately, you must use JavaScript. Or die in obscurity (that later one is a little bit an exageration).

It simply "makes sense" to have the client do as much of the job as possible so that the server does as little as possible.
Interestingly enough, many students there currently are all about 'keeping tradition' and are very adverse against change. There's an uproar currently over potentially required purchase of dining hall plans. In the not too distant past, they had such as well from what I understand, but now students want to keep things as they were.
The outsourcing of activities generally has less to do with quality than with cost. Of course, the cost is relative too.

A company I used to work for outsourced a large chunk of the work force to Poland. Poland was chosen because they were technically sound, generally, spoke above-average intelligible English and, most importantly, valued the American dollar about 6 times more than we do.

This meant, generally, that they could hire 6 Polish workers for every American worker we laid off (if you ignore the fact that many of the American workers were longer in the tooth, and hence higher on the salary scale, which made it even more profitable a deal.)

The main worry about moving somewhere with an economy that isn't horribly weak is that as our American dollars infuse their economy, and more Polish outsourcing companies are stood up to attract more American dollars, we inflate their economy. The cost of living goes up, the value of our dollar becomes less strong, and the benefits to having moved work there becomes less appealing. This could well lead to a tipping point when American companies pull out, which I worry could 'burst the bubble' and leave Krakow Poland in worse shape than if we'd never been there.
I can't imagine the zine is taken that seriously. The content has been elementary for most of it's existence. This sounds more like the paranoid types drawn to hacker scenes and less like the kinda folks that write exploits.

Try Phrack if this is your thing. Their articles are still amazing quality and contains much more information on the topics 2600 readers are interested in.
>They would still have to think of these ideas in order to test them.

Text has background, envelope, whitespace (leading, kerning, etc.), font, outline, fill (and probably other general properties too). It's not A/B testing but I could see engineers iterating over variations - should the envelope follow the curves of the text or be a box or blob, etc.. All spacing, be it kerning or border-width can be iterated over, colours too - indeed thinking of this makes me want to write an Inkscape plugin to help in font choice.

You can level your objection again but I don't think one would call thinking what shape an outline could be "design" per se. Indeed if you're just presenting alternatives to a user and looking for the one with the best feedback I think you arguably have done away with a design stage.
Have they been proven to be ineffective?
High quality games from unknown designers - NightStalkerGames
Ask HN: How would you link to specific parts of a page?
Hi all,

The other day, a friend and I were eating lunch and I was dropping my usual, subliminal "so, any cool neat ideas for websites?" type questions. He always seems to have complaints about the web, which are good for somebody like me (always looking for fun projects). After some discussion we started coming up with a pretty neat sounding idea.

The idea is to be able to highlight some text on a page, and create a permalink to the page that shows those highlights. For example, you're on Wikipedia and see a sweet quote, or really important word, and you want your buddy to read it. You could copy and paste it to him, over AIM or something, and then send him the URL, too. Or you could just send him the URL and say "scroll down to the third paragraph." Or, you could use this idea and highlight that quote or word somehow and create a permalink to that exact word. It would function exactly like HTML anchors do, but without requiring that page to have an anchor where you want to link to.

I don't know if anything likes this exists in a pure Javascript form or not. I know there are browser plugins that can kind of do this. I know some blogs append anchors to every paragraph for this. But, that doesn't really matter, I'm just trying to figure out how this would be possible without using those methods.

I was thinking in terms of Javascript, but I'm not sure if it's quite possible. I'm pretty sure you can't load up the page being linked to in an iframe and run javascript on it. I know you can't ask that page to load your JS.

Does anyone have any ideas on how this could be possible without a browser plugin?

Edit: I have also thought about a bookmarklet. This would allow you to generate a link to a certain area of a page, using whatever algorithms you had to find that area and create a link. But, I don't know how it would work in the opposite direction: going from link -> area of page.
Not to mention that coffescript will work on any javascript runtime, not only browsers. It works on rhino, on node, for scripting Qt, and anywhere you can run js.
Jason Calacanis on how to name your startup (and land the perfect domain)
Video: My keynote from RubyConf about why I continue…
Oh! I take it back... good value!
Ben is a decent fall-back when Leon is still under copyright.
That's pretty cool. Good work.
I'm not gonna lie, I read this almost entirely for the letters to the editor section. So hilarious.
Matt Haughey on how he began/runs Metafilter (may 2010)
JavaScript is not the only language available for the browser. ActionScript (Flash) is also available in many browsers, albeit fewer every day. Also, most browsers have a Java run-time for "applets."

Anyone sufficiently motivated and competent could write a browser plugin that holds a run-time for Python, Ruby, C#, whatever. The problem is getting people to install it or to get the browser makers to include it as a default. By historical fluke JavaScript got baked in to browsers early on.
If my current employer were to suddenly let everyone go, I honestly wonder if half of them wouldn't fall into the "unemployable" category.
Lieberman Introduces New Censorship Bill In Kneejerk Response To Wikileaks
The only exposure people have to Chrome revisions are if they dig down into the about info (and there it's just a single version string, there is no per major version branding) and in independent news reports. Typically a Chrome user would have to read google's Chrome release notes blog to find out what new features a major version change entail.

From everything google does there's no indication they care particularly about the major version number other than as a guide for major development milestones. Typically the average user is never exposed to the major version number. Indeed, most users will experience major version updates with absolutely zero fan-fare. In contrast, Firefox and IE make a much bigger deal about major version numbers. They use per-version branding, they notify the user when they've updated versions, and they put out press releases with the hope of getting a lot of coverage when they make a major release.
This article made me realize that Google's engineering/metrics based approach is more suited to some tasks than others. There are far too many possible views of the map to "design" by hand, but the algorithmic tricks that Google is so good at can handle it no problem. Even if a traditional usability expert could design a map of a given location at a given zoom level better (e.g., http://www.kickmap.com/), they couldn't pull it off at Google Maps scale.

Very good article, and the visual aides helped a lot.
Any use that plays off, and thus introduces a potential for confusion with, official SXSW sites risks running afoul of trademark law. The bottom of every sxsw.com page reads:

"SXSW" and "South By Southwest" are registered trademarks of SXSW Inc. Any unauthorized use of these names, or variations of these names, is a violation of state, federal and international trademark laws.
You quote:

>Give two programmers the same "idea", and you'll end up with two different products

Do you or the parent have a citation?

I used to work in patents, the number of independent recurrences of the same idea in a particular field is often pretty high. All truck drivers appear to think of digital number plates for example.

Exact details may differ but I'd expect the majority of programmers to come up with a lot of crossover if implementing a well-defined idea.

It depends on what you mean by idea of course - is it "we'll make a game" or is it "we'll introduce digital scoring to board games" or "we'll allow bartering in our MMORPG".
For sure. I think it will feature in the US, then Europe, maybe Northern Africa?

Australia would love to follow the lead of the US but not sure if we'd be able to justify the cost too early.
Having the calendar automatically switch modes between Depart and Return can be confusing at first in some cases. E.g.: (1) click Dec 15 for Depart date, (2) click the Return text field, then click Jan 5 as the Return date, (3) remember that Jan 6 (not Jan 5) should be the return date, so click Jan 6, (4) wonder "what happened???".
> Well, consider the '3 strikes' law in California - commit three felony offenses, go to jail for life.

Three strikes is one of the most misunderstood laws on the books. The first two offenses have to be deemed "serious" offenses - which, if memory serves, only includes a violent felony or child molesting.

If someone commits two violent crimes and then commits a third felony, they're probably not someone who was going to wise up. A guy who commits third degree murder once, gets out of jail seven years later, commits aggravated assault, gets out of jail five years later, and then commits a third felony just doesn't get it, and is obviously going to keep committing crimes.

There was a famous case people were outraged about where a guy got three-strikes life in jail for stealing a stereo system. What the newspapers didn't report enough was that he'd already mugged someone with a knife and stuck up a convenience store at gunpoint. I think there's a pretty reasonable case that that guy was going to keep doing stupid violent stuff until you locked him up forever...

(I did a little research into this - I was really against three strikes at first, until I actually learned more about it. It actually seems pretty sensible. The overcrowding problem at prisons is largely unrelated to three strikes, and has more to do with prison sentences on some offenses that you could probably just issue a fine and move on)
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/07/the-principle-of-le...
It doesn't matter how scrumtrelescent MixPanel is, cross-site javascript inclusion from third parties is extraordinarily unwelcome on a site that exposes full access to my banking to the DOM.

How you can not understand this and still work at a fucking bank? (even an affiliate one)
The article doesn't talk about it, but I wonder about companies that do credit checks as a pre-req for employment. Being unemployed can lead to problems paying bills, especially over the long term. (For younger individuals, this might be problems paying back student loans, which aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy.)

Bad credit means not getting a job which means further problems paying bills... well, you get the idea.
What an Irony.
10gen Raises $6.5M to Dominate the NoSQL Space
I'll grant you my elementary school math was better than most, but I think the point that this isn't very advanced stands.
They have been moving a lot of their infrastructure over to EC2: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/netflix-migrating-more-infrast...
Reid Backs Legalizing Web Poker
Of course. As there are in any other speculation about finding live ETs. We don't have a good model.

By analogy, if you could drop a modern human explorer on Earth at a uniformly selected random time in its history up 'till now, at a random spot it would almost always be uninhabitable.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/how-habi...

Time is really, really long, and we're biased not to recognize that, especially when it opposes our "space is big" arguments.
Today's Coding Interview Game
Kindle purchase is definitely worth it to me. The foreward is an interesting discussion, and brings up my own feelings about how I enjoyed 2600 being out of the mainstream, but it does seem like a time in which it can now be more socially acceptable and open.
I find it ironic that he talks about how using the "right tool for the job" is a falsehood when his products have C backends. Did I miss something?
Or less detectable life-forms. I.e. we're wired to ascribe intelligence to human-like intelligence. Something radically different or developed might not look like intelligence to us.

E.g. Are those proto-stars in a nebula? Or is that some transcendent intelligence's weekend project or substrate or waste matter?
Sounds like a disaster.
Thanks for the response. How do you like the MailChimp API?
This may be what I'm missing at work. I am always fearing that I will break something. Maybe I can coherently explain to the boss what we need to do now. I like it.
The pivotal moment|Investing in start-ups
Web related jobs are often filled with recent college grads, 20-something hipsters, and all kinds of dogmatists who are just uncomfortable with anybody who doesn't fit in. It wasn't like this during the dot-com 90's where I worked with fun motley crews of developers.
While I don't object to amazon booting wikileaks, I don't think this message helps. The only message I would have posted, if I posted at all, is that we keep client customer support matters confidential to protect the privacy of our customers, and possibly not even written it in a way which confirms wikileaks was ever a customer.
Or the 55 year old started their programming career at age 45. I've seen it happen...

Edit: or whatever age would result in equivalent industry experience
These results are potentially biased by the fact that starter packages were originally only available for C++, Java, and Python (at least when I took a look at it back when the competition started)
The number of Flash-enabled browsers is not getting "fewer every day"; it's growing. The ratio, however, is probably falling, given the rise of mobile and decent alternatives for things like video.
Generally I see the people who took up the programming challenges belonging to these groups;

Problem Solver. These are the group of people that all startups are looking to hire. In a way they love the programming challenge and want to prove themselves. They could potential rock the startup! Sometimes a bigger ego comes as a package for these talented individuals, be prepare to nurse.

Job Seeker. They just want to get job, since you mentioned it. They will google, hack, etc.. anything to get it out so they can secure an interview. If they are to do it on the spot, not sure how many can really pass it again. Much work is required to filter them to find the one. Personally, I feel if they have some form of problem solving approach, like rare diamonds they can be processed further.

Ideally a few good Problem Solvers mentoring and supported by a few learning Job Seeker delivered the best results for startups. I have never operate a successful startup before, dun take my word for it. :)
I think you're right. I'll try to come up with a simpler example and update the piece. Thanks!
I wish all the people who talk about "quitting" and who would "like to quit" would just quit and shut up about it. Jesus, who cares, just don't use it if you don't like it.