skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How can someone can contribute to such a big part of the open source community and take someone's life? It's like being bipolar on some level.

I didn't know about this guy until today and now I'm freaked out about reading open source projects discussions :P
That's not remorse, that's just a psychopath's idea of restitution. Thinking that you can (somehow) make up for murdering someone by cloning them does seem in my non-expert opinion to be the kind of empathy-free insane troll logic that only a psychopath could come up with.
Show HN: Fqwiki - Qwiki cloned with a single HTML file
Making it politically viable for a government organization to inadvertently fund people like Osama Bin Laden in order to gather intelligence is hardly what most people think of as reform even if it could be effective.
The Startup Pyramid
> No, you misread me.

If one person "misreads" you, it's their problem. If everyone "misreads" you, it's your problem.
Ok, so Seinfeld's contribution was a quote from a few years ago that gave me the idea and a link bait headline, but still...

Let me know what you think.
Maximum Number of As using only n of the keystrokes ^A, ^V, and ^P.
A big part of it is that the people at MIT are rigorously prescreened, and many courses/tests are graded on a curve, with the cutoff for an A being .5-1 std. deviation above the mean score in many classes. By competing with basically only above-average people, it means that it's relatively harder to get good grades than at many schools, even if the material is the same.

But yeah, another big benefit is just being able to interact with so many great people.
Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness
Ditto. Kindle rocks.
Playing With Your Food
You forgot "Just buy the fucking dip"...
Plan Do Check Act sounds like exactly the kind of crap that some jerk would come up with in order to sell business books. Take something bloody obvious that everybody knows, come up with some fancy-sounding (yet understandable to any six-year-old or middle manager) jargon to explain it, then somehow blow it up to two hundred pages with repetition, examples, case studies and testimonials.
tl;dr
1. “I am thinking about starting up for last 3 years”
2. “I have got this great idea, but I cannot share with you” types
3. “I don’t like my job, so I want to become an entrepreneur” types
4. “I want to make money” types
5. “If I had the money, I would start my business” types

Nailed it.

I agree, but #3 is not always true. Sometimes, people solve a problem in their workplace by leaving a starting a company. I guess Bhatia and Hotmail make a good example.
Yes, if an article was older than 7 days you only got a summary with the option to get the full article (maybe a PDF too?) for $1.95. Not unlike buying an archive article now (I think its greater than 90 days now).
It can't possibly be true that the software of the Volt is 10 million lines.

First, it's not a reasonable amount of code for the task at hand. 10 million lines to monitor various sensors, and to control various systems? Really?

Second, it's not reasonable that any team could have produced that much code in this time. How long has the Volt been under production? A few years? You'd need a huge team to just crank out that amount of code in that time, and it would be of atrocious quality.

It's gotta be a journalistic exaggeration of some kind.
And while they clearly anticipated Twitter, they put in the wrong Twitter handle @times versus @nytimes
1. Have a clear vision about what do you want out of your life?
2. Don't worry too much if you yet to find how to get there. Be in constant search for the "How"
3. Never ever compare yourself with other people. Set your own standards and live accordingly.
Open source it? Are you joking? We're talking about an industry with a history in jealously guarding secrets. They will give away nothing and collaborate in nothing. In their eyes, open source is preposterous.

Besides, if something goes wrong, who will be blamed?
You wouldn't use a named Ruby method for something like this. You'd typically use a Proc or block.

[1,2,3].map{ |x| x * 2 }

or if you wanted to reuse the block for other things

transform = lambda { |x| x * 2 }
[1,2,3].map(&transform)
(Lines of code / car) * number of cars = total lines of code

Right? Right?
It could certainly appear in the source of an XSS scanner that tried to inject code like that everywhere it could find.
Apple brings AT&T and Verizon together in latest iPhone commercial
good quote (the guy was Mark Z's operating systems teacher):

"It is, after all, my firmly held conviction that the goal of academia is to broadly disseminate good ideas for others to exploit."
Reiser could have been out of jail for several months now, if he had accepted the first deal he was offered:

Judge Goodman essentially confirmed the nature of
the crime from the bench. He said that he initially
agreed — prior to Reiser’s trial that
began in November — to accept a voluntary
manslaughter plea deal. Goodman said he would have
given Reiser the minimum, three-year term. The
maximum for that heat-of-passion crime was 11 years.

Reiser refused the offer, which required him to
produce the body and explain the crime, the judge
said. Had he accepted, he would have likely been
released next May, the judge said. "That deal was
rejected by Mr. Reiser. He chose, if you will, to
roll the dice," Goodman said.

Defense attorney William DuBois said, "It’s beyond
me" why his client did not accept the original
offer.

The judge said he would have approved the deal to
bring immediate closure to family and friends of
the victim, and to prevent the young Reiser boy,
who is now 8, from having to testify. The judge
said it would have also spared taxpayers the
expense of a trial.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/judge-says-reis/

I agree with DuBois. Consider the three possibilities:

1. Gamble with a trial, get lucky, and win. Get out as soon as the
trial is over, end of April 2008.

2. Take the involuntary manslaughter deal. Get out May 2009.

3. Gamble with a trial, and lose. 25 to life. Make a deal then, and
maybe get that knocked down to 15 to life.

Would anyone here have rejected the deal in his situation? Remember, you know that you are guilty, so going to trial means you are betting that you did such a good job of hiding the body and other evidence that they won't get a conviction.
The main goal of the high-ranking templates seems to be to add links to specific sites (to boost their PageRank). Those links are unobfuscated for the search bots, with the encoded JS serving to replace them for humans. So mortenjorck's suggestion would still apply.

However, including any JavaScript is arbitrary exploitation, but perhaps there's less of an incentive once the Google-bombing aspect is removed.
The Upside of Hunger and Sleep Deprivation
Exactly. I don't even need to read Gruber any more because I invariably already know where he comes down on any given Apple issue. Wake me when Gruber makes a post that isn't pornographically pro-Apple.
Facebook Competition  free shoot valued over $700
For those who don't appreciate exactly what psychopath means, see http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html
The omission of my complaint does not indicate my approval. Though, at least in the cases of TechCrunch articles, those are actually news (in some sense of the word), not static content that anyone in the past few years could find in seconds if they cared enough to.
Psychopaths Among Us
A classic read since Hans Riser isnin the news again.
There's also a countervailing bias that I suspect is far more important: most wrongly-convicted defendants have no way to prove their innocence, and so we never learn that they were wrongly convicted. Many criminal defendants are not sophisticated about the law, and their cases are handled by overworked public defenders. The courts in many states are extremely stingy about giving defendants access to evidence or legal appeals post-conviction. So even if potentially-exculpatory evidence emerges, the convict often can't do anything with it.

This is one of those statistics that will never be known with any precision, but even if the number of known exonerations is small (which I don't know to be the case) that doesn't prove that the number of innocents in jail is small.
Be happy - that's the ultimate goal in life. The way you find it is up to you.
I really appreciate the approach of the Python dev team. It's methodical, deliberate and patient; the exact opposite of how I feel the PHP team has managed that project. Features in PHP seem to be decided upon and implemented in a rather hasty and whimsical manner. A couple of examples come to mind:

- PHP access syntax is completely inconsistent.
Accessing a method/member of an instance is $foo->bar; a static method/member of a class is accessed as Foo::bar; and namespace access introduces yet another syntax, Foo\bar\baz.

- Another example is the introduction of anonymous, first-class functions.
For five major versions, functions were not first-class, and existing libraries and frameworks were written to accept function names in-place of the actual functions. One point-release changed all that, and the result has been a predictable clusterfsck of inconsistency. I wish the PHP team had planned for a long-term adoption of this feature: first-class functions are a fundamental part of a language's character, not a whimsical bolt-on.
Some distros moved to ReiserFS by default, too.

SuSE, who later realized it was a mistake and moved back to ext3?
Ask HN: Completing a side-project...
Hi HN!

I've been working on a side-project (a web-app) for several months with a few friends, and it's starting to come to the point where an alpha version can be released. My goal is to turn this into a startup.

Could anyone point me to decent information, or give advice?

So far I've created a splash page (like what UseHipster did), a Twitter account and a Facebook account.

Cheers!
True, but you still end up with similar performance to a tree.
Comstock is a recurring name throughout Stephenson's works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle in particular comes to mind.
Under-promise and over-deliver.

Never attribute to malice, that which can be attributed to ________.

Your true friends are those who care how your life turns out.

Genuinely asking someone "How does that make you feel?" or "How do you feel about X?" will make you instantly likable, diffuse almost any tension, defensiveness, or aggression, and is always appropriate when you don't know what to say.
Mathematician, Artist, Maker, I find myself looking for a job...
if you like academic jokes, check this other one: http://phdchallenge.org
Visualization of the perfect email regex: http://goo.gl/p80Ky

Regex source: http://fightingforalostcause.net/misc/2006/compare-email-reg...
You write:

"Dangers such as?"

I find it hard to believe that you do not know the dangers. Please google "php sucks" or "php security" and you will discover thousands of articles that address what I referenced above when I wrote "the dangers that arise from using such an easy-to-set-up language as PHP".

I also just posted a long comment up above in this thread, where I post quotes from several articles that have described the insecurity and disorganization that PHP makes so easy to achieve. You can view it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131602
This http://www.relfe.com/media_can_legally_lie.html I think turns it on its head. Its trajectory was quite the opposite of Singh's libel lawsuit. Zenger side of Atlantic isn't any rosier.

It was established that, deliberate falsification of the news (by Fox) is the agency's legal right, and so is firing reporters not willing to lie on purpose (about health effects).

Law totally beats me. Thankfully I am not a lawyer.
The contrarian in me would want to send him something so stupendously and awesomely good that he'd actually want to publish it but couldn't.
I can produce the exact same results from any Journal.
Motion Math
Accounting Tweak Could Save Fed [Reserve] From Losses
also to access TLDMs ruby gives us Object#method, but it's kind of gross.

class Foo
def bar
p 'baz'
end
end

bar = Foo.new.method(:bar).to_proc

3.times &bar

This can also be used if you have a function such as puts where the object is passed in so you can do things such as...

[1,2,3].each(&method(:puts))
#instead of
[1,2,3].each {|i| puts i }

but that's ALSO pretty gross, and usually considered poor form.
Sorry about that. Should now be fixed.
There are several solutions that can be tried, and most of them have been mentioned in this thread already. There is whitelisting, various automated checks, trusted sources, encryption, warnings, attempts at education, etc.

None of these suggestions are worth a damn until the WordPress team acknowledges that WordPress security is a major problem, one that should be a top priority for them.
There are several problems with this:

1. said entrepreneur is likely to be from a similar background, eg having served in the same agency, and thus being exposed to the same culture, and from this might very well be a bit desensitized to human rights abuses.

2. a cheaper, but also more ethical, solution isn't necessarily available. An organization with fewer morals has more tools available to it, such as nonempty death threats, which ultimately lower costs. A cheaper solution has to cut somewhere else to compete.

3. sometimes an organization cannot completely keep tabs on employees, especially an intelligence organization.

Simply put, this is the wishful thinking wherein the thinker believes that the private sector will correct for any nastiness and then creates a fantasy to support this belief in the specific case being discussed.
The thing that you have to realize is that the classified world is more like a club than an open market (as is the military contracting world in general).

Merely having a bunch of money in way qualifies you to bid for a large military contract.

Most if not absolutely all of the staff of private military contracting firms are ex-military of some sort. So you basically start out, for good or ill, with the ethos of the military and the baggage of the military. The only question is what kind of supervision will you give to more-or-less-the-same-guys. That's it. So the whole privatization theory is essentially a "let's do it faster with less supervision" equation. There's no way human rights enters into that equation.
Depends. Even great companies can be too expensive. But the stage doesn't matter, like Horowitz said.
There's plenty of those. The fact that he's going it solo, vs. working on a contract makes this something uniquely different.
The downvoting is probably due to your tone, I read your comments and agreed with you but god why do you write like that - why do you keep quoting people with "You write" style opening lines? it sets the tones of your comments off in the most horrible light.
Awesome. I use iTerm instead of Terminal primarily for its "Send Input to All Tabs" feature, and it's nice to see the project continue with these performance improvements.
No, its never my problem if people misread me. This isn't a game. If I said something that was true, and you misread it, then you are the one who is losing something, or missing something. Not me. I still have whatever truth or insight I may (or may not) have started with. Whether you now have it or not is something that effects you, but it does not effect me.

All the same, I'm happy to explain myself at greater length, and I've made some attempt to do so in this thread.

Still, you raise an interesting issue. It is rare to see anyone on Hacker New write "I'm not sure I understood you, could you please clarify what you wrote?" What is more common is to downvote a comment. A request for clarity might advance the conversation, whereas a downvote tends to bury a conversation. Among friends who trust each other, the more common reaction would be "Could you clarify that?" So downvoting becomes, in some sense, a measure of the distrust on HN, or, at least, a measure of the maximum level of good faith we are willing to extend to one another when reading one another.

The thing that surprises me is that the tendency to bury a conversation is so strong, as opposed to the desire to extend a conversation.
A similar article that basically boils it down to one step: http://rejectiontherapy.com/awaken-your-motivation-in-one-ea...
Check out the source:

"This code is not pretty, but it doesn't need to be. It's only been 6 hours, but based on funding patterns I should be able to raise a few million off of this ;).

Yours,
Banksy The Lucky Stiff"

I concur, hard to see how a product that isn't particularly innovative and that I often find quite annoying merits an 8 million dollar investment.
Looking for a co-founder for awesome mobile app startup
I'm Romil Patel (@RomilPatel) currently looking for a co-founder (CTO) for a mobile app startup.

Ideal co-founder will be handling much of the coding, very awesome coder, knowing the iPhone SDK.
Domestic Use of Aerial Drones by Law Enforcement Likely to Prompt Privacy Debate
I didn't know anything about this project but as a long-time iTerm user, I'm in!
been using this for a few months now. Fantastic, and George is a great guy and maintainer for this app. Very quick to respond and updates frequently.

Biggest wins?

* 256 color

* xterm mouse reporting

* more configurable - why do I need scrollbars when I always use screen/tmux?

* split panes - as good as screen :)
Or, here is another:

------------

But PHP has more than a few security bugs: in many ways PHP is fundamentally flawed. The program, whose initials originally stood for Personal Home Page, was designed without much thought given to security. Many of the PHP features that make it really easy to write a Web application also make it really difficult to write one that's secure.

All of this matters just now because Stefan Esser, the founder of the Hardened-PHP Project and the PHP Security Response Team (which he recently quit), has threatened to make March the "month of PHP bugs." By that, Esser means that he is going to be releasing a series of security bugs in March that show the world just how unsecure PHP actually is.

What's driving Esser is both a desire to make PHP more secure and a good touch of anger and resentment at the current PHP developers who have taken many of his security patches and incorporated them into the program without giving Esser any credit. You can read more about his motivations in his blog entry and in the interview that he did with Security Focus.

How will this affect users of the Web? Well, a recent "Month of Bugs" project aimed at Apple identified a number of security problems that the company was apparently unaware of, but it didn't result in any serious worms or threats to Apple users. This month of PHP bugs might be a similar bust. On the other hand, Apple was able to push out a fix to these problems using the Mac OS Software Update feature. PHP has no such feature, and many ISPs run kind of elderly (and buggy) versions of the program.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/garfinkel/17538/
"An iTerm2 exclusive feature. Type the start of a word and press Cmd-;. A popup window opens at the cursor position with completion suggestions."

Surely that is best left as a shell feature...

EDIT: if the author is reading this, you link to a page which describes the incorrect way of enabling 256 colors in Vim (http://kevin.colyar.net/2011/01/pretty-vim-color-schemes-in-...). It suggests using `:set t_Co=256`, but that is generally considered by the Vim community (#vim on freenode) as the improper way of doing it. The correct way to do it is to just set your TERM env variable correctly (iterm does come with or support terminfo that indicates 256 color support, right?).
Looks like they're saying it was an accident and will return to its rightful place.

http://twitter.com/#!/googlereader/status/28595016557400064
I wish more sites used the j/k shortcuts in particular. It would make skimming the headlines of a site like Engadget far easier.
it's really bizarre to me that my post above got voted down at least once (maybe more). it seems to me that it adds quite a lot to the discussion: information about the main subject of the article most people don't know, and a link out to the full paper that's buried on page 2 of the main article. why was it downvoted?
I liked this one more:

“Zuck [...] went ahead and built Facebook, and just to prove how useless everything we teach about efficiency and careful software design in CS161 really is, he implemented it in PHP.”
It's less javascript than PHP you've got to worry about; that javascript obfuscation article was a nice example of how much you can mangle a language to hide things.

For example, in your Wordpress template, put the following snippet in:

<?php echo urldecode('%68%74%74%70%3A%2F%2F%67%6F%6F%67%6C%65%2E%63%6F%6D');

This will display "http://google.com on your page.

Okay. So how about looking for urldecode (a perfectly useful function, with uses not restricted to hacking)?

<?php $f=chr('117').chr('114').chr('108').chr('100').chr('101').chr('99').chr('111').chr('100').chr('101');
echo $f('%68%74%74%70%3A%2F%2F%67%6F%6F%67%6C%65%2E%63%6F%6D');

... And so on, ad infinitum. Looking for particular sequences (%68%74%74%70%3A%2F%2F --> http://)? Add numbers together at run-time. Looking for a block of these together? Spread them out, or construct them from innocuous-looking things.

It's a game you're not going to win.
There are two different walls of text here and I'm not going to respond to both but your argument has gone from "PHP sucks" to "Wordpress sucks."

Basically my point is this: every bit of software you run on your web server is a security risk. You shouldn't run themes, or any code, really that come from sources you don't trust unless you audit it completely. I don't think the blame really lies with PHP or Wordpress in this case.
Some Samples of the Essay Introduction
The essay introduction is an important element of the essay. This is the doorway into the essay. Therefore, it needs to be written well. As there are many types of essays, students should know how to begin each one in a different manner to persuade the reader to continue.
The issue I see with Qwiki isn't necessarily that the product is poorly executed or annoying, but that it quite literally useless. It makes research less efficient and more difficult.

If I actually want to learn about something, I either want a truly cinematic experience (like BBC's Planet Earth or Carl Sagan's Cosmos) or I want to get the raw details (Wikipedia, books, etc.). Generating a video of already-existing content that's neither truly cinematic nor efficient makes very little sense to me.

EDIT:
A good example is the Khan Academy or Open Courseware actually. Qwiki is great for summarizing information you already know (why would I need a web site for that?), while human-generated content can actually disseminate topics to an extent that fosters learning.
what kind of code? Assembly? Could be 10mm lines.