skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the best thing I've read of Bruce's in a while.

The huge amount of social change -- instituted by the companies in question and others -- would have been science fiction or fantasy just 20 years ago. We've never dumped the personal details of billions to each other like we are now. People can wave their hands around and say it's good, or that it's bad, but we simply don't know. We do know that it's big. One of the biggest changes mankind has had in social structure and it's just happening simply because most folks haven't thought through exactly what they're doing when they participate in various forms on the internet. It's free, so they think it must be harmless.

Ironically, we could end up taking an old slogan and changing it around it for new usage: "Freedom isn't free"
If you think Minecraft is an impressive one-man project, have you ever played Cave Story? (Doukutsu Monogatari)
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Gold autumn, personality Mes clothing + Shoes,
Travel bag that grabs an eye coat + Chao packet
Free transport

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In case anyone has finished and is looking for more puzzles just for fun, you can try the original http://www.deathball.net/notpron/

No prizes though :(
The author either made a dumb mistake, or is being extra clever. H.265 is the in-development successor to H.264. It's probably true that, in the future, WebM's competition will be H.265, and his whole point is that you should make strategic choices based on future expectations, not just present state of the technology. I am not sure if he meant to make this point in an overly subtle way, or just got the name wrong.

Edit: looks like he fixed the post, so he was sloppy, not clever.
My last electric bill was $266 (also in an apartment). I don't think your costs are necessarily typical (and I know mine are not -- mine tend to be high due to medical-related expenses).
Very true. Did not think of that.
"So the argument I’ve heard against Google’s decision is that they are using an infrastructural technology decision (a new video codec) to placate or sustain Adobe Flash, at the expense of Apple, a potential or perceived rival."

The "argument" is a baseless conspiracy theory that is the desperate defensive clutching of so many Apple defenders, viciously taking up the fight against mean Google. The rest of the article is full of incorrect beliefs about the history of Apple, RISC, x86, etc, though I can't say that is all too atypical for an Asymco piece.

For all of the "it will just bring back Flash" grousing, note that Firefox will never support h264 without a major change in its licensing. Firefox is a dominant web browser. Nice that Apple, a MPEG LA member, supports h264 though, while simultaneously pushing Quicktime and iTunes junk on the web.

Sidenote -- Just went to view a movie trailer on Apple.com. What's with it trying to foist Quicktime on me? Apple still hasn't given up on that, and they're still licking their wounds about having lost to Flash.
Is it just me, or is this article all over the place? John Sculley and Apple and RISC vs. CISC, and in the end jumps briefly to some product I've never heard of (and probably never will again) called Flipboard (it "turns the browser paradigm inside out", apparently, whatever that means) as evidence that Google is making a grave mistake and lacking foresight. I simply don't see any way to take either bit of knowledge as having anything to do with Google's choice on this matter. It seems like reaching in order to come to a conclusion the author likes and back it up with a careful study of historical precedents.

I'm definitely not coming away from this article with a sense of foreboding for Google's future (and the only stock I hold right now is GOOG).
But it also doesn’t have ... a scruffy 30-ish white protagonist, ... or any of the other hundred things that plague gamers in practically every major release.

I find myself thinking only of Half Life and Portal. Half Life, in which people were crazy about Gordon Freeman (and he fit the part) and Portal, which did not do this in the slightest.

Has it become conspicuously common? I've fallen a bit out of touch with modern games.
That's a sizable operation and difficult to visualize. I'm guessing their failure points reduce potential damage to minimal levels. At AltDrive, we use ZFS RaidZ2 with a number of hot spares. Six drives would have to fail consecutively on a given machine before any data loss... we replace them as they occur. And we have inter-H/W duplication. ZFS is self healing and makes management easy. Additionally we periodically compare the integrity of the user's AES-256 CTR encrypted data against the database records and make corrections if necessary. From our customer's and white label provider's view, it just works.
http://altdrive.com
Behind the Scenes: Making Sesame Street's iPad App
Can you help me better understand the risk to an end user this represents? I just recently implemented some similar login redirect logic and want to make sure I'm handling the redirect value properly.
keeping google and facebook's actions fully in the light is good (and stronger privacy laws would be great), but it continues to be rather intellectually dishonest to allude to that eric schmidt quote in this context.

actually I think the recent twitter subpoena business showed him to be exactly right. hopefully no one was stupid enough to be conducting wikileaks business via twitter DMs:

Q: People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?

A: I think judgement matters… If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.
Because people likes far fetched conspiracy theories more than obvious and simple facts.
The only real thing he studied in this comparison is rehearsal and timing.

The British death marched to an unrealistically optimistic date while the Chinese were finished and testing long before the ship date.

Socio-technical systems theory is interesting but he doesn't explain how the Chinese did this better. The Chinese aren't exactly known for empowering their workers.
Which programming language is manageable by an 11 year old kid?
They announced it on the same day as Verizon's iPhone announcement.

The video codec announcement had zero impact outside of the tech-heavy sphere. In no universe would it have undermined the Verizon announcement. The MP3 diversion is spurious and irrelevant compared to the video issue: You pick your battles.
Nice finding, Neal. Want a job?

Oh, wait.
I also figured Malloc was sufficiently "diety-sounding"

I couldn't figure out what calorie-counting had to do with this. Then I realized you probably meant deity....

:-/ My brain is like that.
You can only edit posts for a certain amount of time.

Doesn't the requirement for homoiconicity become vacuous then?

The definition was:

> "a language in which the source code and the corresponding abstract parse tree have identical representations"

Now is:

> "a language in which the source code and the corresponding abstract parse tree have identical external representations"

Where external representation of source code is defined as the representation that's used in the interpreter or compiler, that is, the abstract parse tree. So the definition becomes: "a language in which the abstract parse tree has the same representation as the abstract parse tree"?

Alternatively replace "external" by "internal" everywhere in this post, if "internal" is the right name for CONS cells.
That's just search volume data. Maybe it's peaking, or maybe people just type the domain name or have it bookmarked.

Better data, such as hitwise or comscore, does show Facebook growth is leveling off. So you might be right anyway.
I wish people would stop calling this stuff "courseware"; it's not courseware. It's lectures on video, that's all. Courseware is a term invented in the late 60s to describe computer-based educational or training lessons, simulations, programs, tutorials, quizzes, tests, and games that when taken and mastered by a student, qualify for course credit. It's not about sitting and watching a prof give a lecture.
Ask HN: Would you use a Machine Learning Service?
Hey Guys,

I am a graduate student specializing Machine Learning. Next to that I am also working for a (european) Social Network site. Right now I am busy implementing implemented a system to filter spam for them. We were also discussing if we should make use of a company which implements a general propose spam filter for websites. But we think that by making use of the information that we have on our site and that are specific to us, we could improve the system a lot. I was thinking, that a lot of other sites could benefit from using machine learning, but that the field can be really confusing at first, with all the different algorithms and methods.

So my idea was to start a general propose Machine Learning service. The service would not require the user to have any knowledge of Artificial Intelligence whatsoever. You just upload your dataset and you are good to go. You can image how big of a disappointment is was when it turned out that someone at Google already had the same idea. I am have not been able to try their Data Prediction API yet, as it’s for US customers only at the moment. I think though that there is still enough room to do something differently then they do. For example allow different types of data (say images) or provide better customer service.

So my question to you guys is: Are there any of you who would be interested in such a service? And if so what is your application? Judging from the comments here there were quite some people who enrolled in the Google API beta. Did you just do so, because it’s Google (e.g. to compare it to your own implementations)? Are there maybe people here who would like to do something that is not possible in Google API ?
Will high reputation in Stack Overflow help to get a good job?
This fits right into the pattern we've seen in the game development scene for the last two years. It's getting cheaper and easier for indie gamers to go from zero to hero every day.
If you look at tools like Unity3D then its easy to imagine that the dream of so many people to be able to get a sustainable income from gamedevelopment AND gamedesign(people working as a coding monkey at EA aren't really living the dream, are they?) is closer than ever.

In a while i'll show HN my project relating to this. :)
Fantastic article. This is one of very few entries on this debacle that is actually informed and insightful.
The iPad2 “Magazine Display”
It's a somewhat complicated variant of reflected cross-site scripting, a.k.a. Javascript injection.†

The vulnerability in response-splitting is passing attacker-controlled newlines unmolested through HTTP header content. Newlines terminate headers. Attacker-controlled content in a redirect that is allowed to contain newlines enables attackers to inject new headers or to terminate the header portion of the request.

Here, Neal's using the attack to inject a false end-of-headers newline and then a fake request body containing Javascript.

The attack is trivial to prevent; just don't allow newlines (and, ideally, active HTML characters) in redirect content.

† The goal of an attacker is to coerce a server into sending her own Javascript; the same-origin rules governing browser security allow that Javascript access to the server's cookies, even though the code is under the control of an attacker.
>> This website's music is great - turn it up!
> Definitely. No one has ever said that, ever, in the history of the web.

Only if it's Freedom Rock, man!
Where can I find product images that I can legally use?
Hi, im currently working on a start up that lists the latest technology products. Where can I find product photos (e.g. nexus s) that I can legally reuse for my site. These are options that I am aware are available to me.

Google images - use copyright filter to search copyright free photos. Quality variable.

Flickr - same as google images.

Istockphotos and Getty - doesn't have product photos

Google images - use copyrighted images that are mostly reused by other sites, with the hope that if other sites are doing then it'll be fine.
If you're implying they are crazy for doing so, have you ever lost everything and tried to redownload it all? It's a huge timesink, I tell you.

As for de-duping, Dropbox does this. When you drop a Windows ISO or the Office installer into your folder, it hashes the file and realizes 'hey we already have this!' and you don't have to upload it.
Wterm - web terminal with jquery
Minecraft - 8 bit CPU
> "The attack is trivial to prevent; just don't allow newlines (and, ideally, active HTML characters) in redirect content."

Surely the more correct solution is to escape them properly.

eg in the example:

Location: javascript:

<script>alert(document.cookie)</script>

occurs because something unescaped the %0D%0A%0D%0A. If however you just leave it as it was originally, or alternatively encode it properly after you've decoded it.

Location: javascript:%0D%0A%0D%0A<script>alert(document.cookie)</script>

and everything works as it should.
SSDs store data by tunneling charges onto and off of floating gates. I strongly suspect that a TLA entity can recover data from the residual charges just as readily as they can from residual magnetism on a spinning media drive.

Having said that, like many others in this discussion, I'm skeptical of how practical data recovery really is vs. a theoretical issue. I'm guessing that the value of the data has to be extremely high before it would be worth while going to the necessary lengths.

It is usually much easier to use a $5 wrench, ref: http://xkcd.com/538/.
I've done my fair share of research on SEO as well during my startup and I can sum it up in one sentence.

Assuming equal on-site optimisations, he with more backlinks wins.
An interesting note here for those of who who like Minecraft: There has been another sandbox game called Dwarf Fortress out for a while now, which Notch said he used as a big inspiration for Minecraft. Dwarf Fortress lets you build out your world in millions of unique ways, liquid flow mechanics are accurate, gravity, civilization actions, pretty much everything.

However, one huge warning: The learning curve is 100 times harder than Minecrafts, and the base art for he game is asci!(although you can upgrade it with user made graphic packs) It will also take all of your processing power.
The fact that it needs to be pointed out somewhat belies that it is an obvious joke.
I feel Google's decision with h.264 is more related to its decision to pull out of china than Apple's decision to switch to CISC. Google decided to nix h.264 because it wanted to "do the right thing".

The current internet landscape with its open standards and pretty level playing field is a fertile ground that produced innovations too many to count. Google itself is a result of that ground.

A competitive, good open codec would ensure that the fast innovation we have known in the Net for years spill over into video applications. Think OnLive for retro and amateur games, made by 1 student, taking over the world. Or countless other ideas nobody has yet thought of.

I applaud Google for aligning their decisions with their values. I hope they stand by the decision, and inspire others to follow them.
Very good summary of the issue. I particularly like the point that <video> is, in and of itself, open and as such the establishment of a consistent baseline codec in VP8 could actually allow h.26x to flourish and innovate as the codec of choice for high-quality content.
Also compare Heathrow Terminal 5 with Madrid Barajas latest terminal. Both designed by the same British architectural firm, Barajas took about half the time to build, cost less and is an uncompromised design.
You're right; I wasn't prescriptive enough. Thanks for clarifying.
no one will mention digg.com these days...
Awesome! We need more tools such as this one to help people get the feel of different concepts in mathematics and physics.
http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=5925
When your laying in the bed
Is it more value in thinking about making coffee, a nice breakfast, and reading all the threads on HN
Are getting up and doing it....
Get to hacking and executing
Notch is amazing. In case you missed it the first time:

"Time-lapse screencap video of a games programmer"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810

Go Java!!
well. It's an FP RPG then ?
Http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Local-Investors-are-looking-for-you
Well at least he's honest, but this seems like an exceedingly bad reason to choose a technology stack.

No it doesn't. If you see the promise and potential value of a new technology that solves a problem, you jumping aboard to play could mean the difference between a problem being solved or not.

A lot of very powerful influential projects were started by people who wanted their end users to "play" with their technology.
How I built a toaster from scratch - TED Talk [video]
Nemdil Yahoo News
Except that quote's not accurate at all. Minecraft has sold 1 million copies lifetime. CoD Black Ops sold 7 times that amount in 24 hours. The franchise outsold Minecraft by an order of magnitude.
FPS = First Person Shooter, there's melee and range weapons. What is your definition of a FPS?

For Farmville part. Isn't there not much to do after the 'survival mode' at night?
If the workers aren't empowered, the success of the project is up to the leaders. Apparently the Chinese manager was more competent than the British one.
This is a great meetup, the only problem (for those of us that live/work in the city) is the PA location. Although sometimes they do meet at the DLA Piper office in SF as well.
A note to all the readers: the history part of the article is good, the technical Perl part is very ill-advised, partly due to when it was written (1999, prior to Gettext's plurals support). Please don't follow those advices if you are writing Perl.
also, add httponly to your cookies then javascript cant see them
As the end user...I only care about which one gives me the best experience period.
This is very impressive!
I tend to click print-view (if I can find one) each time I see multiple-page article. I'm not sure why anyone designing those websites thinks that paging articles is a good idea, but even if it is, it's probably not intended to benefit the readers.
Or Love (Eskil Steenberg) http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/
This is an almost cosmetic defense, because Javascript can still launch requests that will bear those cookies, even if it can't bank them for later.

HttpOnly isn't evil, but it's not a solution to the problem.
> Also, it does this with a high learning curve and without using any kind of reward schedule mechanics that are in vogue now.

The game has a reward schedule in the form of hard to find materials (diamond). It's not uncommon to spend half an hour strip mining underground looking for materials. 19/20 times you just find more stone, but every once in a while you find coal, iron, diamond, etc.
While Minecraft may be in first person and let the user use an bow-and-arrow as a weapon, calling it an FPS is distorting what the game really is. Shooting is a feature of it, but it is not what the game is known for.
FPS + Procedural generating soapbox then?

It doesn't sound like Farmville (also seems to have negative connotations here for some reason).
I can't remotely boot servers using a custom disk image unless the provider in question offers KVM-over-IP or something similar.
>open standard

>incompatible with open source

Does this make sense to anyone? It seems to me the word open doesn't mean much now.
what about step 8, just a question mark?
Was this discovered by chance or was it garnered through an exploit scanner/crawler of some sort? Looking at matasano I'm wondering if exploit scanning is a method of acquiring new customers.
Hey Dewbot,

Without trying to hurt your feelings, it comes across as though beginner level 'C' code will turn a deist in to an atheist and I find that hard to believe.

Of course it would be convenient if this were the reason but I know plenty of programmers that are deeply religious and that know how to use their C compilers with considerable skill, possibly even more skill than you.

Programming and religion are as far as I can see not related in any way, even though the polls suggest that programmers tend to be 'more atheist' than the population at large the existence of so many counterexamples is strong proof that there is no direct link between the two.

Your passage reads "and after learning C Programming and Algorithms (which I had in Semester II) I realized 'Why should I believe in God?' 'Why people need this God?' and that time I got strong reason not to believe in God.", and even though in my view you may have gone for the right answer (die hard atheist here) you seem to have reached that answer through a chain of reasoning that is very tenuous at best.

Typically people that change their belief system do not do that because of a particular programming language, consider the possibility that the inconsistencies present in many religions may be more visible to you after spending a year or two on 'hard' problems, it still makes me wonder how strongly held your beliefs were before you entered programming and I can't help but think that you would have parted with your religion regardless of learning how to program (or not).

If you feel like expanding on exactly how programming caused you to fall out of your former belief then I would be most grateful.
The trouble is that "best experience" is a vague term. The best experience today may be different from the best experience tomorrow, which in turn may not causally lead to the best experience of all potential experiences 2 or 5 years later. Figuring out how to get the best experience a few years out is difficult; it involves some measure of creating the future, and some measure of predicting the future.

It's too simplistic to argue H.264 as being the best for the user, hence it should be supported. Figuring out whether it is actually best for the user depends on a lot of variables, a lot of hard work, and some measure of work.
(1) This is a Neal Poole finding, not a Matasano finding.

(2) Reddit isn't a customer.

(3) Suffice it to say that the market for software security is such that we don't really have to do do much other than excel at our work to acquire new customers.
What scares me about this question is that such easy and popular questions (and answers to them) mean a lot of karma points to all of the participants before it goes into community wiki mode, while folks who actually can google their problems (and spend time actually working instead of reloading StackOverflow every five seconds) have low scores, since the questions they ask are complicated and thus rarely answered and even more rarely popular.
Read the first letter of each line, go to the appropriate place, click the top most picture to see a URL.
Development and testing of the Stuxnet worm
Indeed. If anything, the programming landscape already has way too many inaccurate first impressions getting in the way of real discussion.
Ah. Might want to let users know when it's disabled, even in Alpha. If I hadn't been able to ask and the questions hadn't shown up in twitter, I probably would have just left and never bothered to try again.
DropQuesting and customer engagement