skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And patching on Debian is trivial.

Patching is never trivial. The process itself may be trivial, but you have to actually do it. That latter part requires ongoing attention, which makes it non-trivial.

less likely to attract the attention of someone with the means and motivation to break in

That depends. Most attackers go for low hanging fruit. And the fruit hardly hangs low at google with their dedicated security team.

The most juicy targets are actually those little homebrew servers that someone once setup and then mostly forgot about. The spammers can often use these servers for months before anyone (usually the ISP, not the owner) takes notice.

If your server is listening on Port 25 then it's not stealth. It's very likely being scanned while I write this comment - perhaps to see if it's an exim vulnerable to the recent remote-shell exploit (http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2131).

So, to wrap this up. I also run mailservers for various companies. I also run debian. I even also run dovecot and postfix. But I'm doing this for a living, am subscribed to the relevant security mailing lists, harden the hosts before deploying them, and I monitor them.

If you don't have a dedicated or hired admin to do all that then hosted e-mail usually has the better value proposition.
Everyone thinks they have "the right idea and it'll pay multiples over the crappy returns the S&P has over the past 10 years."
My biggest problem when I self-hosted my mail is that when my server did something strange, I was losing Emails being sent to me.
The Mac App Store effect in graphs: an hour by hour look at new Evernote signups
The correct answer is your debugger.
The if(0==flag) is perfectly valid for avoiding if(flag=0) bugs.

Of course, I'd use if(!flag)
Honestly I am a complete noob to all of this. I am just curious what is the most versatile language and/or easiest to learn as a beginner.
How I use Pinboard as a scratchpad for interesting links
Surely one of the most unimpressive, boring people in technology. Her distinction: she was in the right place at the right time.
Verizon iPhone: everything you need to know
"W3Schools.com is absolutely not affiliated with the W3C." so who else had no idea? I'd always just assumed they were... heh.
And then their sons discover anime...
Important point. Current rumors [1] peg the ship date as the first week of February, which is still a month off.

[1] http://www.bgr.com/2011/01/07/verizon-iphone-launch-looks-se...
Sure, that's the basic rule for English prose. But dialog button labels are a lot closer to headings or titles than they are to sentences in a paragraph. (Note also that there's no period after "Do It")
Does it matter if your domain costs $3 more or less per year?

I'll gladly pay plenty more only to avoid being exposed to the ridiculous mess that GoDaddy calls a web interface.
By someone who knows what they're doing, sure. Consider, however, the patent for Linked List that was granted: Any programmer would have balked at it, but the unspecialized clerk reviewing it wouldn't have had a clue.
> Goals: Shame.

This is a very interesting discussion, but shame should not be a motivation or goal. W3Schools' company is a business and despite the somewhat lackluster quality of their output, improving the status quo, not shame, should be the real motivation behind this form of activism.

If you think you can do better while still remaining perfectly accessible to newcomers please do so, but live and let live, especially when the strongest accusations against the company are far from illegal or unethical. (Their certifications may be useless, but they aren't unethical, since they are not misrepresenting the entity issuing the certifications.)

StackOverflow managed to replace Expert-Exchange through quality and good ol' promotion, not through sabotage.

In my opinion, an effort to come up with such a replacement for W3Schools (or enabling an existing one to become much more prominent,) is far more noble, useful, and worthwhile than a W3SchoolsSucks.com or TruthAboutW3Schools.com could ever be.
Whoa Linked Lists got patented?!?! That's crazy. Do you happen to have a link about it, I'm really curious about this.

That's friggin crazy...
I'd argue that:

1.) There are bad feedback loops between speed / quality / price of patent examination and the amount of ridiculous patents issued.

2.) Increasing the budget to improve screening and throughput will lead to an increase in patents submitted - will this increase at a higher / lower rate than their budget? I.e. will new patent submissions bloat the office even more than now?

3.) We could try to increase patent fees to cover costs, but then you'll "hurt the little guy" and fully benefit the IBMs who can afford to blow money like this.

4.) The boundary is quite gray between trolls (IV and others) and institutions with near-troll behavior (IBM's if-it-sticks patent submission methods).

5.) There are higher ratios of bad patents in certain categories: process patents, software, etc.

Conclusion: I bet that reducing the scope of what categories are patentable scales very well in reducing bad patents than any method of trying to make a better filter, because better filters will just lead to more patents to fill the void.
The first thing that comes to my mind when someone asks such questions (quite often seen in IRC channels), is: "Well, why don't you time both versions and actually measure which is faster?"

Also, premature optimisation is the root of all evil ;-)

There is also an aesthetical side to it. Personally I find constructs like 'if (6.28 < theta) {...}' unpleasant to read. They look like thoughts turned inside out.
This is a sad day for all programmers, and also for those who have been molested in any way. I cannot honestly understand the true pain he must have felt, but I believe his pain was unlike anything most of us can understand.

What was most telling was his utter disgust for his parents, to the extent he loathed them even more than he loathed the person who molested him and caused darkness to reign over his life. And most ironic is that his parents believed abandoning him for the love of God was in their and his best interest. I am a Christian, and it sickens me what they have done because of what they believed as him not being "saved."

I want to believe him, that he took his life because of the "darkness" in his life, resulting from being molested as a child. But I am still puzzled that he never spoke a word of disgust about the person who molested him. This was shocking, considering he laid into his friends who couldn't keep a secret, he mercilessly criticized his parents, yet never mention a bad word about the molester, only the "darkness."

Unless, and this might be huge, the "darkness" is his father. He said his mother loves him at one point, but he never said a good word about his dad. He only criticized his father (while criticizing both parents). I am beginning to think his father is the one who molested him, considering everything in his letter.

The letter was very important, because it allows the reader to carefully study and try to understand what might have caused this young man to take his own life. Though being molested caused him much trouble and "darkness" throughout his life, I believe his parents are partly to be blame for his mindful decline into frightful and terrifying non-existence. And the big secret in his letter is probably that his father molested him.
But that's Japanese...Also, she doesn't even let her kids watch TV or play computer games.
Honestly, this is like arguing tabs vs spaces.
Out of curiosity, what were the things you did to make updates fast?
Also known as "Why asian children have grey hair by the end of high school". At least my asian high school valedictorian did...

I'm all for people pushing themselves to that point - I guess in asian families, it's OK to force that on your kids to show them where their limits truly are.
Are we talking about Blackboard, the company founded by Cal students?
Ask HN: We built a rock-solid, easy-to-use CMS. Now what?
background: 14-person marketing/webdev studio. We built a rock-solid, easy-to-use, easy-to-implement, extensible CMS.

We've entertained thoughts of releasing as a product to the over-crowded CMS market, mainly because we've had some rave reviews converting a few Joomla and Drupal sites to it; not to mention the positive response on new sites from ground up. Currently running behind about 120 sites.

It is proprietary now, but the door isn't closed on open-sourcing it down the road. While proprietary, the data formats are open and presentation is well separated from the system (making the move away from our product easy if a client wanted to go that direction). Clients are always shocked when we tell them "look, if you want to go in a different direction in the future, here is the database, here is your data in the database, here are functions to export to many standard formats."

Would like some ideas/thoughts on:
-stress testing
-security audit resources & methodology.
-experience with launching a CMS product.
-general advice (we are ad/marketing folks first and foremost, but have strong tech knowledge on staff).

thanks.
Ok in what world is what's described in the article a better mom? Forcing there children to learn something they don't want just for a college application or building "character" (can someone please explain the concept to me, my father is too liberal I suppose) is exactly what a parent shouldn't do. I am in a typical middle class Indian family, but the idea that goes around is "Its your bloody life, make good of it". My parents usually support me through things, even if they do not understand what I am trying to do. I may not have made it to the IITs or NITs (the formal definition of a successful kid in general in India) but I still love what I do and at least have a clear vision of what exactly I want to do in my life. I am not like those uptight children whose sole aim in life is to get a college degree to get a good job to get a good salary.

Also what's up with using "Asian" to describe only Chinese people, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and many other other countries with a lot different cultural background also comprise Asia.
The author herself is Asian... and it refers to not just Asians, but immigrant families in general. Though I didn't know that about Jamaican and Irish-American families, as she states.
I would say it is pure evil.
http://www.trypython.org/

then

http://tryruby.org/

If you like Ruby more, then check out Rails. If you liked Python more then check out Django and Pylons. Of course there are other languages/frameworks which are also excellent but these are languages with a lot of tutorials, and frameworks that have great communities and are industry proven.
I'd argue:

The ability for one man to know what "real innovation",
is always <,
the ability of a team with every incentive of faking them out to overcome.
Not sure what you mean by "safe" by default. Speed and performance have nothing to do with security, if that's what you mean.

The reason that the default Postgres configuration does not perform well is that Postgres runs on a number of operating systems, and it is not possible to make assumptions about the hardware and configuration of the host. For example, increasing configuration parameters like shared_buffers to any useful value will require you to tweak the OS'es kernel resources. The Postgres documentation does a great job at describing the process on a number of operating systems:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/kernel-re...
Apple just lured me into doing this, because of their new Mac App Store. [I've only tried out some free apps yet - TextWrangler looks interesting].
NASA's OODT Project Graduates to Top Level Apache Project
The architecture of MegaStore is so complicated... There are so many roles in the system, e.g. stateless replicate server, different stateful paxos instances, stateful co-coordinator, bigtable and other auxilary roles.

I suspect some roles are added later because the original implementation does not meet their design goal, as patch to normal software product.

It is a nightmare for operation engineers of GAE.
>Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do... be in a school play; choose their own extracurricular activities; play any instrument other than the piano or violin.

don't know how much of this is exaggeration but this is just sad and I feel sorry for kids that have parents like that.
Ship date is likely very soon, Apple didn't tell their retail employees they couldn't take vacations this month for nothing.
I think it depends on what you're trying to learn from your MVP. If you can get the data and feedback you need without building tests then I don't see anything terribly wrong with that.
Moodle seems to do the basic job if you don't want to deal with Blackboard.
Any modern should not allow 'if(flag=0)'.

Any non-modern language should flag a warning on that. And this warning should be set to be an error by any reasonable developer.
I think the author was trying to be provocative, but the beginning was absolutely trollish. As I was reading, for a moment I thought the article salvaged itself somewhat, but once it started again on the topic of grades it descended into troll-dom big time.
Upvoted because you're right that it is a troll, and it is sad and telling that the WSJ stoops to this level. However, I think it is worth considering that some of the ideas in the article have merit, and if the WSJ hadn't chosen the most extreme and inflammatory example they could find, it might have stimulated a very interesting argument here on HN.

I also wonder whether there is an element of anti-Chinese xenophobia here as well as the obvious for-profit journalistic trolling.
why wouldn't i just store cookie data in my local datastore, why would I want to use yours ?

Amazon offers simpledb, google app engine, both offers are very cheap, and wouldn't take much to create a simple datastore utilizing either of these services to simple key value pairs.. how would you differentiate ?

In all honesty.. cookies are usually lost between uses and not during the session, so I can't see the point really. If a user logs in , I usually set cookies based on loaded information at time of login ... so its a one time thing.
I think there's room to debate institutionalized vs informal learning methods. Tech skills in market demand evolve faster than institutions can effectively keep up with, which means informal learning is a requisite for becoming competitive anyways. This isn't bad either.

Informal education would rely on certification, internships, and on-site training, which are all cost-effective. I'm just saying a debate could be had :)
SelectOut.com - Mass online opt-out site - Anyone use this before?
I have to disagree. Passionate programmers have side projects all the time, school or work. But you can successfully be a completely mediocre (dare I say average?) programmer by just doing your classwork.

The typical Java and .Net business programming jobs out there require people who are absolutely lacking passion, otherwise they couldn't bear the day-to-day tasks. These jobs are not really desirable to good programmers, but they are the majority of opportunities out there.
Link to The Good Guys: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs
> We certainly do not advocate that anyone use w3schools as a reference or place to learn techniques.

The way the criticism is presented is childish. W3Schools is the most accessible introduction to web technologies that I've ever seen. It assumes absolutely zero knowledge. When you're literally just starting out, this is a big deal. You don't give a damn about standards, you just want to create and make cool things to show to your friends. It's a jumping off place. Criticism of W3Schools as a reference I have no problem with; clearly there are extensive inaccuracies, but telling beginners to learn HTML/CSS/JS from MDC is equivalent to telling them to RTFM.
I don't think that this is good that you are doing. W3Schools are good resource for great many people and if you can make it better, please do, but they are genuinely helping a lot of newbies learn the ropes.
I agree with post of acangiano here completely. Focus your energies elsewhere, this is not productive.
reminds me of the crap Blackboard pull so they don't have to compete on merit
No. If it matters you have a job involving oses or control systems or game engines and shouldn't be asking on stackoverflow.
My comment should really be an Ask HN. But is it conceivable to build a CM-5 class computer on FPGA boards ? Any idea how much that would cost if it was possible ?
I'm sure that will bother his ghost more than anything.
The article didn't say where in the education system the surveyed students fell, but as a highschool student in the US I know this is definitely true. The majority of the students who attend the school I go to, which is actually pretty equipped in terms of modern computers, know more than the teachers do about how to use computers (and I'm not talking about updating a status on facebook). Sure, there are outliers, like the few teachers who do program in their spare time, and the few students who don't really know how to do anything with their computers, but my statement stands.

As to learning about IT at school versus at home, I know that I learned more about computers at home but other students really didn't know much about computers until we were lent them by our school and used them in the classroom.
What about while? while(flag = 0) looks like a similar error, but while(foo = read()) is a common idiom.
I think you really need to re-examine 1 & 2. Increasing the speed and quality of patent review may lead to more patent applications, but would reduce the number of baseless patents granted. As for price, the USPTO was never supposed to be self-sufficient. Doing it properly means the taxpayer picks up the tab. That's just something you have to accept in exchange for living in a highly developed economy.

IBM's patents, as well as those of Google and others, are generally defensive. They're meant to provide ammo to protect themselves from patent trolls.
Yea, it's hard to say. Idealistically, I'm against NN on those grounds, but pragmatically, I tend to think some type of net neutrality may be able to prevent the internet from going the way of cable TV.

To put it in utilitarian terms, I'd say the net benefit of NN > than the losses of possible stifled tech innovation and new law for corporatism - the latter already bought by them anyway.

In the end - I'd love to have something like mandatory bulk-rate sales of the infrastructure rights, with a co-op managing a large % of capacity, for any company with X% of end-user customers (or similar measure).
Let me just add, aside from foolishness of this idea, only good thing is list of good resources, like mozilla's developer corner which I love for good javascript explanations.
So basically "Chinese Mother" in this term means tyrannical dictator who will drive their children to suicide/drugs/anorexia/obesity/(other reaction to mental abuse) and those that don't will look like huge successes and all those that did get driven to some coping mechanism are branded as been raised by "Western Mothers".

One of my friends had, I guess what would qualify as, a "Chinese Mother" for a father. He was a totalitarian... until he got kicked in the groin by his son at age 13 (with his leg that was in a plaster cast at the time) and missed three days of work (confirmed by my mother who worked with him) for "personal reasons". Suddenly, almost overnight, he was allowed to go to sleepovers, he joined the school play, his grades dropped because he was allowed out to see his friends. His dad was an arrogant douche, it's not a social or racial difference because he'd come from working class British background. It's a personality type and it's called a raging pompous douchebag AKA King Douche.

I fail to see how orchestrating my child's life will lead to my child being a success. It will lead to me being a success by proxy, which is really all what these parents care about. They're the football/hockey/soccer/(insert sport) parents that force their kid to every single game, to every single practice no matter what whether the child wants to be in the sport or not, because the parent never got the chance/almost made it pro/whatever narcissistic reason.

I've seen a lot of people with this type of overbearing psycho parent wind up deep in the drug scene because they never got their parents approval. Whilst the kids that don't have to fight for approval in every area of their life all seem to end up with decent lives because they learnt the necessary coping skills.
very well written, and very clear. thanks for the good insight, jon and bo.
Even though most questions are about gluing GUI libraries to databases, that doesn't mean questions about OS or game engines are disallowed.
Tech zing is probably one of the best podcasts currently out there. It's a staple in our coworking space.
>>why wouldn't i just store cookie data in my local datastore, why would I want to use yours?

The vast majority of my theoretical potential customers are the kind of buyers who need copy-paste solutions. This is most e-commerce sites and affiliate managers.

>>Amazon offers simpledb, google app engine, both offers are very cheap, and wouldn't take much to create a simple datastore utilizing either of these services to simple key value pairs.. how would you differentiate?

Technologically I would not be trying to compete. I would be competing on ease of use and having a system/dashboard that is specific to this use case. Infrastructure vs. product I suppose you could think of it as.

>>In all honesty.. cookies are usually lost between uses and not during the session

You mean between sessions? If so, that is the other major selling point. I am employing methods that will make the cookies as persistent as possible between sessions and even between browsers (yes, cross-browser cookies, via Flash storage).

The idea here is that if you already have a person logged in, you don't need this. This is for people who want to associate an arbitrary amount of data with a visitor and ensure (to the best of the service's ability) that it won't get deleted. I have a feeling my customers will be more concerned with this feature than any other.
The classification difference means That UPS is union and FedEx is not. UPS is not as profitable and is lobbying to get FedEx reclassified.
Depends on the language, interpreter, vm, processor, and compiler and their relevant individual optimization settings.
> I told [my seven year old daughter] to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic. Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful.

You might call it good parenting. I call it bat-shit crazy.
It's depressing that the article has to start with an exposition of her looks and dress.

I've never read an article about a male luminary that focuses so much on looks.
You don't solve a problem by running away from it. This guy would have been very useful. He just needed counselling, attention and love to overcome the 'darkness and his ghosts'. But I don't think he was smart. He might have been clever in class and books but smart and brilliant people don't take their own lives. Brilliant is misused here. Anyway R.I.P.