skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point Schneier is making is not that we shouldn't have any fear, or ignore threats. Rather, that living in a free society means that sometimes we choose to live with fear, because trying to stamp it out would force us to give up too much "essential liberty". That's what it means to "conquer" fear: to control it, rather than letting it control you.

"...the question is how much liberty we’re willing to give up to prevent such attacks."

Indeed, that's exactly right. Or, to phrase it another way: how much fear are we willing to endure to preserve our liberties? That question is politically out-of-bounds, because the idea that we should respond to fear with courage, rather than ever-increasing security measures, is not acceptable to politicians (either Democrats or Republicans), the Washington press corps, etc.
UK local news could be walled up along with everything else
Hit any key at the end of a lesson, and it will bring you to the next one. I should add tab navigation for "fast forwarding" though...
Google Streamlining its Approach to Digital Copyright
FriendLynx helps you find your Facebook friends on Twitter
This is great. We just turned on reserved instances for http://gri.pe (select "always on" in the billing section). It costs $9/month to keep three instances warm all the time. That's peanuts compared to saving the 10s warmup time if your traffic drops off for a minute.

Another huge item: up to 10 minutes of background processing on a single task queue callback:

No more 30-second limit for background work - With this release,
we’ve significantly raised this limit for offline requests from
Task Queue and Cron: you can now run for up to 10 minutes without
interruption.

Make sure you turn on the new warmup handlers for your applications too. With this, AppEngine will deliver a request to /_ah/warmup and let it complete before serving traffic from a new instance.

XML:

<inbound-services>
<service>warmup</service>
</inbound-services>

YAML:

inbound_services:
- warmup
Simply because, in my direct personal experience as an employer, and as reported many, many times over, most people who apply for a programming job can't actually program.

When we are hiring we always insist on code to accompany the CV/resume. We set an incredibly simple coding task - it should take no more than 10 minutes, usually 2 - and require the code to be submitted with the job application. Without it we find that 9/10 (roughly) applicants can't program the simplest of solutions. With the requirement, 9/10 can. Yes, we get people who clearly cheat.

======== ======== ======== ========

Clickables:

https://indinero.com/jobs/backend-engineer

http://www.quora.com/challenges
GitHub Holiday Special: Try out private repositories free for a month
Because it's trendy, and Facebook did it!

But, on a serious note, it shows a little bit of drive and willingness to put forth some effort into your application. It also serves as an initial filter, helping the company to target potential employees that perhaps think like they do or, something. It also filters out people that can't actually program simple solutions.

How is it not useful to have some sort of programming challenge?
Breakthrough Chip Technology Lights the Path to Exascale Computing
There's really nothing I can take out and still be Fanorona. (Well, maybe Undo, but that'd be insanely frustrating.) Maybe an ad-supported version.
I think it makes a lot of sense as an investor to cash out with such a high valuation. Especially if this is a bubble that ends up bursting the in next few years.

However part of me wonders if this isn't a bubble, what will Groupon look like and be worth in 5 years.
Microsoft badmouths Google over fed contract win
I know what I want for christmas now! I have seen and made Stirling engines before, but none that are so beautiful and efficiently low-temperature differential.

Does anyone know of some other good kit vendors? Something cheaper than ~$134 would be ideal.
not working under safari 4.0.4
To the contrary. If we stop flying until the TSA changes their policies, it will encourage the airlines and the rest of the travel industry to put pressure on the TSA and the government.
Speed wasn't that important: Python made up 20% of the top 100.

I wonder if the Python programmers recoded their bottlenecks in C or C++. Would the rules of the contest allow that?
Potential Amazon boycott over Wikileaks: #amazonfail 2.0?
Depends on how you define "alien", right? Alien as in different from human, then this qualifies. Alien as in extraterrestrial (ie. not originating on Earth), then this doesn't.

The bigger question, in my mind, is can you evolve a sentient species (in a few million years) from this microbe? And what would happen if we threw this microbe on Mars or Venus? Would natural selection allow it to thrive there?
bicycle discovered constructed entirely from wood: proves metal not required for transportation

http://www.leevalley.com/newsletters/woodworking/2/3/article...
Review our new social game, theWorldChat: Chat using your FB pic.
It's not just that. Look at the life progress in our world. How long until we're trucking around the galaxy? Not long...

So given that, if life were on another project, well, we'd expect them to be trucking around the galaxy too by now. And they're not.

That leads to the reasonable conclusion that there are not aliens at the same level as us in this galaxy.

Note: For aliens to be at the same level as us and not trucking around, they would need to be hopelessly close to use in evolution. Given how much has happened in just the last 10K years, that seems extremely improbable.

Hmm, this was supposed to be a reply to another comment...
I've read the difficulty is that you need to manage redraws yourself:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial/Basic_anima...
>but I have no idea why public bathrooms don't do this.

IIRC the toilet cubicles in London that descend into the ground have this sort of cleaning system, basically the toilet and wash hand basin are mounted in a "McWash" and the whole things gets jetted down and dried after use (I don't think it would be after every use, just perhaps once a day).

Wet rooms would be perfect for this sort of concept.
Apple Kills Faster MacBook Air Replacement Drives
Ask HN: Appropriate Intern Hiring for start up
With a limited budget for our start up we contemplating hiring interns. This would allow us to have free labor while also providing real world experience to perspective students. What is appropriate for the kind of work to let them do? What is appropriate where it benefits both parties and doesn't take advantage?
Does LastPass have any advantages over using 1Password + Dropbox?
I'm with this guy, if I have Ideas I learn to implement them myself, if nothing else even if I got other people to do the work I know what they're going through to do it so I can plan for it, and as issues arise I can help not just sit around trying to motivate.
If you have the chops to do multiplayer (either by turns or bluetooth/network-based), you can charge a premium for that.

Play the CPU for free, play your _friends_ for 99 cents.
Ask HN: Best question and answer software?
Hi, anyone got any suggestions for could software that allows users to ask questions and others to provide answers? Similar to Yahoo q and a.
Thank god. Now maybe my TaskQueue jobs for pre-caching Ajax content (for serving to Googlebot) will actually run to completion.
What is the source of your confidence? Do you have evidence for this?

TDD advocates make assertions based on a certain common sense ("tests are scaffolding") but I don't see the present evidence supporting such assertions.

The thing is that TDD also often calls for not spending a lot of time on "Big, upfront design". I could just as easily argue that without a coherent design, your next iteration is going to be longer and that the critical thing is to master good design principles. But that belief also needs evidence behind it.

Programming is ultimately a mysterious thing and so looking at real, long term data is good, especially after you become good enough that everything seems clear to you.
As you say, it depends on the problem. Working in mathematics, if I have the algorithm, turning it into code is almost always very easy, but getting that algorithm can be very hard indeed.

Even if we put the number somewhere between 25-50% depending on the project, that is still a long way away from just having an idea. That still constitutes substantial progress and a solid start on execution.
See also http://pulsememe.com (top 10 story list generated from Pulse news app usage)
I badly wanted something like this and almost got started building one. Glad someone did it, and looks awesome. Congrats!
If you want to continue this discussion, my contact info is in my profile. Take care.
Use "structure", not "design". As in: "The human body's structure is...", not "The human body's design is...".

There is no need to use the word "design" to refer to the complexity of the human body. "Design" implies a creator; "structure" simply describes those aspects of the human body (or life in general) that makes it "work" and does not imply a creator.
What a company does with its capital is its investors and stakeholders business, and the CEO is accountable to them for same. What a city does with its capital is its citizens business (not "everyone's") and the mayor is accountable to them for same.

You're assuming that the citizens of Portland want local government to exclude source/location from consideration as a factor when purchasing software services, but do you have any data to support that? (Or else you're simply assuming you know what is in their best interest better than they do which seems overly paternalistic.) From the limited amount I know about Portland, I would strongly expect the opposite to be true.
>I wondered how well a suction system would work and it seems like a failure equals a broken robot.

Have the bot mounted on a tether like a pendulum lamp, it pays out an umbilical, Mission Impossible stylee, and when it reaches the floor it moves on suction cups. It basically belays (sp?) itself like an inertia reel climbing harness. Or optionally it could reel in the line if it "feels" itself begninning to fall. Not infallible but should help.

Or give it airbags?
Review my startup: real time analytics, services for Flash and now HTML5 games!
This last week I've been rolling out a huge update for my little startup Playtomic. I added a bunch of stuff but the two big ones are:

- making the analytics real time... which was quite a challenge at 8 billion events/month

- finally finished my JavaScript API for anyone who's making HTML5 games.

- shiney new website that showcases some of the awesome companies and developers using it ... if you've ever played web games you'll probably recognize some of those names

If you're making HTML5 games I'd love it if you could come test out the new API, it provides analytics, leaderboards, level sharing and a bunch of other bits and pieces.
If someone offers you a sandwich then you take a bite. If you are particularly enthusiastic or quick to react, you take a really big bite and bite their hand off.

It signals extreme enthusiasm and keenness. I hear it all the time (UK).
and instagram? people are crazy about it
This is very interesting and well written so someone "dumb" like me can learn a lot about planning and optimisation from this. Riht in the third paragraph I just realised why some SQL query I wrote is so slow, embarassing but true, heh!
A new green file format: WWF
Google Admits Algorithms Are Subjective
A safe system is one that has redundant subsystems, so the complete failure of any one subsystem does not cause the whole to fail.
China arrests hundreds of computer hackers
More informative link: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/12/happy-holidays-f...
i think he means any company would jump on it.

it's like giving a hungry dog food. the dog would bite your hand off, along with the food.
Currently AIUI they use ion exchange resins as filters. Which is okay, but they run out eventually. A sludge pond might well be a better solution (although that's best left to an environmental engineer -- do we have any on HN)?
Hackers Take the Kinect to New Levels
We already knew that because we have had wooden boats, carts, and planes (gliders).
The problem with offering equity is that it's often just a dangling carrot that never materializes. I've worked for several startups offering stock options over the years and observed an alarming pattern: programmers are treated as commodities to develop the idea, then laid off before the product launch. The C-levels reap all the gains and the product builders go collect unemployment.
I would say that that's what rabbis do. It's not hearsay, they interpret ancient scripture and tradition, some of which is more modern than others.
Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior
WordPress Security Hacks and Tricks
True. It is possible. I'd make the following points against it:

- Facebook knows where you live too.

- Yelp is also copying groupon..

- There would seem to be little chance that the deals could remain all that great for long, especially if they don't lead to repeat business and loyal customers.
I'd like to see what the total revenue for all ten of these are, because for the most part, almost none of these should be on the list of Top Startups of 2010...
I like this a lot! Thanks for putting it out there! The whitespace around the pages bugs me a bit, but I'm not sure what would be better in its place.
Homeland Security ICE Seizing Sites for no Reason?
Interesting article about how the US government is stepping in as an attempt to prevent copyright infringement on the net, but are innocent sites being caught in the cross-fire?
The developer who uploaded an app version can download that
version's code using the appcfg.py download_app command.
This feature can be disabled on a per application basis in
the admin console, under the 'Permissions' tab. Once
disabled, code download for the application CANNOT be re-
enabled.

This sounds awesome too.

(source: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkReleaseNote...)
The Nature article is out; they make a compelling argument that it is NOT incidental.
> This sounds really, really cool but it's still an organism that uses DNA

Are we 100% certain of that? I'm not a biologist, however it seems to me that DNA is in part defined by the usage of Phosphorus. Maybe we need to redefine DNA? Or does this organism not use DNA at all?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#Properties

Please correct me if I'm not understanding correctly!
New AppEngine SDK 1.4: comet support, reserved instances, longer bg task timeout
A quick search gave me these 3 PHP solutions, http://digitizor.com/2010/12/01/stackoverflow-clone-php/

I thought Stack Overflow actually licensed their software where you can start your own Q&A site on whatever. Might be something to look into.
Yes, it does. However, there are other, nicer ways of doing this. For example, you could use a comment that is broken over the line. Using tags like that is asking for trouble in editing, particularly if your code is shared.

But this advice was intended more generally. If you look at the code, and indeed the full source in the spec[1], you'll see that this is a coding style used for all elements; even elements that will never be rendered. It is ugly as hell, easy to break, and difficult for many people to parse.

That's why I recommended avoiding it.

1: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-secti...
In the bad old days of early web development, browsers that didn't understand the script tag would display your code in the document. They allowed html comments inside the script tag as a workaround for it. We always had to write <script><!-- //--></script>

http://javascript.crockford.com/script.html
Feedback on the new site is very welcome:
http://playtomic.com/

You can preview the JS API here:
http://playtomic.com/api/html5
I think this is really well made and only have a few comments on the speed test portion.

I'm not sure if you scale the dial showing your speed, but at 100 words per minute, it's not maxed out, but it is at 123 words per minute (I'm assuming the max is 120 words per minute). I'm assuming so that people can target 60 wpm? I would actually suggest it go either up to 100 or have it go up to where 50% would be the target or average, and maybe scale past that.

Also, for the accuracy on the test, typically it is measured by whether the word was correctly typed after the spacebar is pressed to move to the next word, not a character by character as it's typed (as in, type tou<delete><delete>hough<space> and it's correct). I've always thought it odd that it was done this way, but I naturally correct while I'm typing and that had negative consequences on your test.

That said, you've got something really, really solid here, worth way more than $9.95. It almost lends itself to a subscription model.
Why do you keep insisting that people are "forced" to buy these things? Nobody has been forced to buy Microsoft. If your job required a Microsoft product, and you didn't want to buy Microsoft products, you could find a new job. You were not forced to buy from Microsoft any more than anyone has been "forced" to buy from Apple.

I've known plenty of people whose jobs didn't even require the use of a computer; if you are so picky about the software you use, perhaps you could consider a line of work that doesn't involve much computer usage.
RIM aquires The Astonishing Tribe (TAT)
Ha, eBay has it's own local product search now. Google does too.
Amazon doesn't, Facebook doesn't, Yahoo and Microsoft? Nope.
I smell more acquisitions.

Krillion (old), Retailigence(new), Goodzer (brand new).

Who's next?
The Pacific Series DVD Review
How To Code HTML Emails
Gmail's support for CSS in HTML emails kinda sucks. Who knew?
Dozens of other companies followed Amazon's strategy and went bankrupt. Plus Amazon had an easy way to monetize traffic. Traffic alone isn't worth anything unless you can wring more money out of your visitors than it costs to service their requests.

Google's existing advertising business works despite the low value of traffic because Google is collecting their cut from a huge swath of the Internet, and because the one kind of traffic they own - search - is the most directly linked to actually buying things, and thus the most valuable.

Youtube is almost the opposite - expensive to service and totally unrelated to monetizable actions.
I started as a performance software person, from memory and cache conscious algorithm design in grad school, to network stack testing, to web server/db server/client-side performance testing and optimization. It is an excellent way to develop that feel for the big picture of how things are working. In enterprise software, there used to be a lot of low hanging fruit and it was fun to get "heroic" results with simple SQL tuning.

The flipside of that experience and mindset is that now, as I try to shift my way towards more functional and declarative programming styles is that I sometimes get sucked into the premature optimization black hole - I overthink rather than just doing some simple exploratory programming.

I keep telling myself I'm going to implement some fairly large project using nothing but lists and a Lisp to break it down.
I disagree - I think Groupon represents a paradigm shift.

Thinking about the problem that the site solves:

1 - It's changing the concept of advertising;

In contrast to traditional advertising, people actually want to receive these deals from unsolicited companies. It's 'solicited spam' - and works because most people love a bargain.

2 - It's changing the concept of sales conversion;

People are parting with some of their cash immediately. Because of this companies are much more likely to achieve conversion to full customers. Even if users don't redeem their deals (which is likely in some circumstances) the client companies are still making money.

3 - It's changing the nature of sales;

Because Groupon offers financial incentives to users to get others to purchase deals. The entire user base of Groupon become a proxy-sales team on behalf of Groupon's client companies.

I think the issue of sustainability / scalability (in terms of companies offering deals through Groupon) is largely moot.

Groupon provides a bump to sales and marketing - and I therefore think Groupon will remain useful in the arsenal of marketing tools available to any company.
This is really the key for them.

I was at a talk by the UX lead for RIM and that team had about 9 months to coordinate/finish all the UX efforts for OS6.

UX (and UI by extension) have a long way to go at RIM. OS6 was their first foray into seriously creating a quality User Experience, which means they bringing lots of brand new ideas to the table. They still lack a holistic integration of UX throughout the company and this is crucial to achieving a good UX and allow TAT to achieve their full potential
Coming soon: A WWF file viewer that uses the revolutionary capabilities of ink to allow you to read your files away from your computer. This will cut down on the green house gas produced while generating the electricity needed to view your files!
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963307
This release solves almost all problems we had with App Engine. Users now don't have to wait for an instance to start, so the site will always be fast. Also, DeadlineExceededError now can't lead to mysteriously broken instances, anymore (thanks Guido!). And with the Channel API we can build real-time collaborative apps.

Now we only need SSL support and here we come, blasting everyone away who wastes time on maintaining his own servers. :P Well, at least until the next feature is needed, but not available, so let's hope this won't be the case. ;)
How-to: A simple Client Portal in Wordpress
In my direct experience as an employer most people who apply for a programming job can actually program. I think it comes down to a question of degrees. People who spend their time on heady research projects might well proclaim me as someone who has "clearly never written a line of code in his life" (it's happened). And yet I've had competent programmers that I ran ask me how I got to be so good. Truth is I'm probably middle of the road - I know plenty I look up to, and plenty I could teach. Hell, my mom can program (she writes her own shell scripts at times).

I think the practice of "write this program before we'll talk to you" is largely driven by technical staff who don't understand how to run an interview where a discussion of theory and practice can suss out someone who doesn't actually have the experience. Hell, even if they don't have a language under their belt if they can pass the theory & practice Q&A I have every confidence that they can pick it up and fake it enough in the meantime.

I've had bad hires before - lazy, conceptually challenged, addicted to crystal meth - but all of them could have passed a functional programming test. Sure, you'd like to be hiring the "excellent" programmers - but a basic functional test isn't going to highlight them anyway - and may very well drive them away from you.

I should note that I don't have a problem with asking for code samples - that's a good practice I think, I do it myself. Just the complete this arbitrary test style.
Suppose Monopoles were discovered. Nothing really rules out their existence, Gauss's Law for magnetism is just an assertion that we've never seen a monopole, it's possible to patch up maxwell's equations to get monopoles. To some people, the existence of monopoles is 'obvious'.

It would still be a very big deal if monopoles were to be discovered, even in trace amounts, and no feasible way to make more of them.
2010's biggest IT security SNAFUs
Idea Freezing Points
Everyone should watch that talk. It's the most compelling I've yet seen for the relevance of applicative programming. I was not convinced, but I was closer than I've ever been to being convinced.
I've missed a day and I'm currently on the 708th link.