skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Governments again failing to understand the technology they are regulating. Catching the foolish criminals only works a few times, they get smarter and hiding your tracks on the internet is fairly easy if you've got a good reason to do it.

The criminals will disappear in a puff of smoke and all that will be left in the mass invasion of privacy of the average person.
It's amazing how fast they converged; the first two (from 1997) look nostalgically mid-90s Web 1.0, but the 1998 homepage is recognisably a forerunner of the current one.
> Well the utter and complete non-existence of any commercial software on Linux...

Linux (I'm thinking of just the kernel itself here, but it's true of the whole GNU platform as well) has plenty of "commercial" software running on it. That is, it has plenty of software that people were paid to write, because it is supporting the business functions of many organizations. If "commercial" software is software that is purchased -- software that people are paid to write -- then GNU and Linux have no lack of commercial software.

They do have a dearth of software that is paid for by one particular business model: restricting copying in order to charge a fee. You are right that the FSF and many others consider this particular business model to be unethical. But don't confuse that particular business model with the practice of paying for software, which the FSF has no problem with and actually encourages. [1]

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
That certain developers consider needless complexity to be worthwhile is not a new criticism, and it's certainly not as Java-centric as we'd all like to believe. It's an old trope. Consider this "evolution of a programmer" joke which has been around since at least 1990, before Java even existed.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.humor.funny/browse_thread...
I agree. It simplifies message so much that it's hard to take it seriously.
No, Facebook has been working on this for a while
US cyberwar firing range to demo by July
KDE 4.6.0 released
Stop guessing. Use A/B testing to determine ideal price for your product
On Android app sales and fixing app stores
Different color menu bar, far more animations (which have a tightly sprung attitude instead of the previous more smooth transitions), the background color went more neutral grey, the background was augmented by a gradiential noise pattern, there's more of an emphasis on rounded corners...

It's a lot of minor details leading to a pretty tangible cosmetic effect. Also the scripts seem a lot more responsive on my iPad.

(edit: s/w/a/ ugh)
Our company's PHP framework has a system like this in our database logic.

We only use one implementation of it. Ever.
Earthweb (available for free from the Baen free library as an ebook) makes use of that very idea, although more as 'generic' stock markets than casino style.
I wasn't saying that you can't use different algorithms based on inputs/data/circumstances.

The issue I have is articles like this always try to make things stupidly configurable and general - like "I want to be able to hot swap this algorithm at runtime".
This is already on the front page with a link to the actual Facebook blog: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2143415
Excellent post. Knowing how and when to restrain yourself is the sign of a truly experienced developer. I certainly did the "planning for the future" thing a couple times before wising up.
JOHN is high
I'm surprised nobody is talking about Google moving to a curated model. I'm obviously comfortable with it, since I'm an iPhone owner; how do you Android people feel about it? That was supposed to be a major differentiator between the two marketplaces.
You are missing the GP's point.

No I'm not. I'm strongly disagreeing with that point.

The consumer who walks out of the store with an iPhone could just as likely have walked out with a Galaxy S, and vice versa. The applications angle of Android is very heavily promoted, so creating a caricature of a consumer that only wants to casually use it isn't valid.

What that means is nearly an order of magnitude difference in app purchasers.

What data is that derived from? It's worth noting that the iPhone is very strongly skewing towards free apps as well.

As an aside, where did the "1.3M" come from? Apple's recently quarterlies put the daily iOS device sales in the 350,000 range.
Gmail SSL support started as opt-in as well, and they didn't have to deal with a site anywhere near as complex as Facebook. Give it some time.
When Google Doesn't Have the Answer
In Java, there is not much space between hard-coding dependencies and implementing patterns which (also) make algorithms exchangeable at runtime. The first makes unit testing difficult, the second makes you look like a StrategyFactoryFactory fetishist. Often, link-time configurability would suffice, but that is hard to achieve with Java.
> why can't I ignore culture?

In practice, it's very hard to do. Try living in a foreign country for a time.
Frankly, that's almost a tutorial for Spring, it's only missing the container.

I've dealt with enough co-workers to know this isn't hypothetical. There's a slow backlash against this kind of thinking, but it's slow. 5 years ago, I was told that singletons and utility classes were always evil because they were "unmaintainable.)

On the other hand, I've been in situations where the factory/pluggable architecture was the right decision, especially in consultingware where you build the product for your first client, then you go after an RFP that's "pretty close" but don't want to end up maintaining two, and three, and seven code bases which often have the same bugs. That's the problem this pluggable architecture solves.

If you have 7 clients paying you a million bucks to have exactly what they want (out of a market of... say 25-100) and 50k a year in maintenance, this makes sense.

Most of the time, though, YAGNI.
I'd buy one just for the name. :P
I'm going to use "masturbatory" in casual conversations now.
The social captcha idea is neat, but sometimes my friends tag each other in pictures that aren't of them (cartoons - or places) sometimes to joke around with each other or get a friend's attention. I can see someone getting locked out of their account for being shown a picture which Facebook thinks has a given friend in it but in reality does not.
I tried reloading and I still have 30+. Strange.

Update: After a bit of usage of GMail it's been updated to 70+. Seems to be working now.
To me the real danger is that a programmer who has come up with the absurdly verbose answer thinks that they're a great programmer, due primarily to the absurd verbosity of their work.
"this post would be a good competitor for"

No XML, SOAP, EJBs, Connectors, Spring.... it barely qualifies as a (obfuscated) Java architecture.
Yeah, I hear you. If you can tell me the specific flight, I can probably explain. At this point, our prices should match.
Show HN: My first web app - SociaLeaks.com - wikileaks for the social scene
Please have a look at www.socialeaks.com and tell me what you think. This is my first adventure in coding (my background is not CS). I started learning rails about a month ago via railstutorial.org. When I finished that, I felt the best way to continue learning would be to just build an app from scratch. I came up with this concept while observing how crazy the world had gone over WikiLeaks. I thought this was a funny idea. I also thought it would be fun to build! So, here I am.

I built this in rails 3 and it is currently living on Heroku. It took me about two weeks to code, doing just about everything for the first time. If you were to look at the code you could tell the sequence in which I did things by how ugly it is :). It was definitely hard work but, as a learning process, it was absolutely worth the effort. My knowledge prior to this experiment was limited to HTML and CSS, I am now comfortable reading and writing rails code (though I find every day I have so much to learn!).

I do not know whether i will develop this further as it was really just a means to prepare me to work on some other (maybe commercially viable) projects. In any event, it would be cool to add rebuttals, email alerts, more ways to view and rank leaks (and people). What suggests would you have? If you spot a bug please let me know?

Thanks a ton. And many thanks to the folks in #rubyonrails for answering dozens of my really naive questions :)
So you still have to redeploy all your 15 projects, as opposed to just fetching the new gem.
Couldn't this "pluggable architecture" be written in any language?

This is more of a rant against "developers" with "really bad habits" than it is against the language.
I have have sort of made my own path.

I watched this video which is not exactly a tutorial but gave me some good comprehensive knowledge, there is a part 2 as well.
http://marakana.com/forums/android/general/230.html

Next I have been going through Hello, Android (Introducing Google’s Mobile Development Platform, 3rd Edition, by Ed Burnette) and will probably be doing the Apress Beginning Android book next.

Also check out http://www.reddit.com/r/android. Look on the sidebar as there are other subreddits of interest to you, especially http://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev.

Finally there is a tutorial in the Google documentation.

Best of luck!
It probably had more to do with the lessons learned from the Tunisia situation.
IMHO, the PR problem is twofold.

The first is that Perl 5 (the mature language) suffered greatly from the premature announcement of the Perl 6 project, more than ten years ago, which still hasn't shipped anything as stable and mature as, say, Python 3. (Several years ago, someone at my company showed up to work carrying a book entitled "Perl 6 Today". I asked where he'd gotten the time machine.)

The second is that if you look at blog posts and the like from inside the Perl community, such as it now is, you get the impression that it's the kind of crowd that thinks they're smarter than everyone else because no one else gets their inside jokes. Which comes from the top --- Larry Wall seems to think he's really clever when he justifies some of Perl's more dubious features by pointing out that natural languages do that too. But natural language has a full human intelligence at the other end sorting out the ambiguities, and even then, we still sometimes get it wrong. "Rakudo Star" is not that smart, much less Perl 5.
Startups Acquired By Facebook In 2010
The one thing I like about the new market is that it recovers from install hangs much better.

Often I get apps that download 100% and just sit there doing nothing (i.e. not moving into install phase). In the old market the only thing that would work was to cancel the the entire install and try again (i.e. re-download the app from scratch) until it worked. With the new market, leaving that app's page and coming back seems to deliver a reliable kick in the ass to the process when it's frozen. That alone is worth any annoyances. For everything else, there's appbrain.
You can of course ignore a language's culture, but then your code will look and feel surprising to other programmers who are familiar with the language and its culture. If you're the only person who will need to maintain the code, fine.
Building irregularly shaped gears
Hey thanks! I wish github had search through code bases!
Human Interface Subtleties
Linux.conf.au 2011 Day Two - keynote speaker Vinton Cerf
I feel this comment to be "right" (i.e., I agree with it), and I've published a received DMCA take-down notice, but I'm curious if there's any precedent for one getting in trouble (having their post regarded as another instance of copyright infringement, etc.) for doing that.
That's what the skip button is for.
Should We Abolish User Access to rm?
I'm a little anxious about not being able to recognize enough of my Facebook "friends."
It's a rant about Java culture. Culture is an important aspect of any language.
Yahoo! Contacted Digg To See If We Wanted To Take Over Delicious
Good post, I think more people should be testing different values (I remember reading something where someone kept doubling the price til they reached the tipping point).

Cheers
First stable version of LibreOffice - Release Notes, ver 3.3 Final (2011-01-25)
You want to hire a developer for language X. The pool of candidates is heavily influenced by culture X. Same goes for job seeking.
A while back as I was pondering whether to change my job or start my startup, I got a call from a Google recruiter looking for QA folks.

I had just spent 2 years working for a very large software company as a research engineer after the startup I worked for got acquired. I wanted to return to a role where I would be closer to customers so I could see my work benefit the end user first hand. I reasoned this meant joining a small product team as a developer or a larger team as a product manager. So I told the Google recruiter I may be interested in a product manager role, and may be a developer role if it was a smaller team.

I was flabbergasted when he told me "Frankly, you have no chance of getting those roles at Google in the near future." I have a Masters in C.S. from a top engineering school and classmates / ex-colleagues at Google in those exact roles, so I suppose this guy just wanted to hire me for the role he had been assigned, but what a shitty way of trying to do it!

May be this was an isolated incident. My friends who have worked at Google have uniformly had a good experience actually working there. So I hope Google finds a way to hire or train their recruiters better to avoid incidents like this.
Sniffers, Tunnels, and Puppets: How a VPN can improve your online life
They actually have face-recognition algorithms that only show you pics where the face is clearly visible now.
Sabermetrician In Exile
Sure, I've seen it in C# code. But I can tell that the people writing it were coming from an enterprisey Java background (because they wrote 400KLoC without using any part of C# that isn't also in Java).
The InterDependent Web
The article isn't buried in numbers, but the message is in there: don't stop adding value.

I've been a WooThemes customer for 3 years or so. I have bought 10 or 12 of their themes and the one reason I do it is because they never stop updating old themes. They have themes (like FreshNews) that they launched the company with years ago, and to this day it still gets regularly monthly updates to bring it in line with all the other themes.

This was something (as a customer) that I didn't expect and as a developer, I have a hard time figuring out how the maintenance cost isn't crushing their dev schedules (something like 30 themes total to maintain now).

BUT, this is exactly why I stuck with them and kept buying their themes as opposed to going to another strong alternative like Thesis. They just kept adding value.

From my customer-brain perspective, there was NEVER a point I felt taken advantage of, NEVER a point that I doubted my investment (short or long term) in using their product because they were clearly willing to stand right behind it in full support for the long haul.

You don't see this a whole lot... most folks release something (e.g. Mobile app, Web service, desktop util, open source project, etc.) and move on to the next big idea. The compulsive maintaining of all their company assets as they moved forward, regardless of what new opportunities came their way, was the only hook that mattered to me and has kept my wallet open.

Ignore the starry-eyed unicorn wording around WooThemes... that's not important (buy what works for you). I am just trying to share what happened in my mind when I went to spend a decent amount of money on a product incase it helps anyone else out there in the software/service game.
Your Facebook 'Likes' Are Now Paid Ads
Writing effective copy is hard, the section "Place keywords" was pretty interesting, although I guess some people would say it's common sense.
I tend to avoid using Facebook sign-ins for sites if they want permission to post to my wall. I think sites should explain what and when they post. For example, your site could post things like "Joe just signed-up for SocialLeaks where he can tell secrets about his friends!" (bad) or "Joe just leaked some juicy information about Nancy!" (also bad). So, out of curiosity, what do you post on people's walls?
"class-oriented" languages (such as java) attract such people.

OOP seems to be "difficult", so there are lots of "tutorials" around that "teach" OOP by introducing and combining all those brainless constructs, without teaching common sense. what you get is code monkeys who believe that this is decent source code.

every code base should have at least one person dedicated to simplifying it and questioning every design decision, so all this "just in case" abstraction gets the knife.
I would say Guitar and Piano are the instruments I would like to pick up
Market load time on my HTC Droid Incredible is about 4 seconds. The green carousel thing is laggy for maybe a second longer. After that everything is responsive. No '10-20 second lags' whatsoever.
Yes, price testing is very important at initial stages of launch. It becomes progressively harder as your product gets established.

After your product is established, the only way to test price sensitivity is to launch pro version.
Use Dropbox to sync multiple desktops and streamline your workflow
Perhaps your anecdote is a bit telling then.

Maybe this "pattern" is less indicative of someone who comes from a "Java" background than it is someone who comes from an "enterprisey" background.

It just so happens that the overlap between the two is huge.

I hate to always be the defender of Java but it irks me to see articles that claim to lambast Java but really are about this so-called "culture" that has popped up.
The flip side is that PEP 8 means that I can look at almost anybody's Python code and feel comfortable in it. I don't have to worry about editor settings or any other unimportant garbage.

If I was evaluating somebody's python, I would consider that a significant mark against it. I would question how well they understood the language and what hidden gems I would find as a result.
It's still early to tell, but we believe it is likely that they will struggle with their deliverability. Delivery is as much an art as it is a science, and it takes experience and constant focus to stay on top. I work for JangoSMTP and we often have clients come to us from minimalist services similar to Amazon SES because of their deliverability issues.
This reminds me of the joke about OOP and monkeys[1]

Really though, I think this is more related to culture that Java (and many Java books) tends to nurture. Anybody that's read a fair share of "Enterprise" Java code has seen FooBarFactoryFactoryFactoryImpl classes.

Hopefully as dynamic languages on the JVM become more popular, this will change. But I find many "Enterprise" developers aren't really interested enough to look outside the box.

"jRuby? I think I've heard of that, what's wrong with Java?"

"It's not a real programming language unless it's statically typed."

[1]http://www.codersatwork.com/
There's a "multiple inboxes" labs feature that would probably come in handy for this.
XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet
I agree with smooody! you can't just ask for permission when i have no idea what the site does.
Ask HN: Survey tool for websites. Suggestions pls
I am currently working on a new project which would be a survey/feedback site for website owners, bloggers, designers and developers. It would be like kissinsights. It would offer reduced pricing and extra features like graphical representation and location data to help you understand your feedback. I feel there is space in the market for my project, poplytics. Do you think i have a chance and what features would you love to see on poplytics. This would help budding entrepreneurs, designers and developers to get valuable feedback especially those with almost zero budgets. You can sign up for early access on poplytics.com
mirror: http://www.johnsphones.com.nyud.net/
Avoiding the Top 3 Application Security Mistakes
Sure I'll be more than happy to hear about new opportunities, unfortunately you haven't posted an email in your profile.
oh good point. it doesn't post anything to fb walls unless you tell it to. i should def make that clear. thx!
Keep in mind that this is secondary to finding the market that puts the greatest value on your product.
The programmers I'm ever likely to work with, are good enough that they can read code properly, regardless of if it fits into a particular 'culture' or not.
Reminds me of Gotcha!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089222/
You are basing your opinion on what data?
What do you do when one customer wants to deviate from the way the product works, and you can't say no?

Do you say:

if (customerID = 328281) {
...
} else {
...
}

Or do you go ahead and build the architecture that lets you specify which class or method to run per customer? The situation does come up often enough to have to make a decision.

I'm working on a project which has tended to say "if (customerID = ..." in the past, but I decided to move to the more configurable/pluggable approach. I'm actually not sure if I made the right decision.
Facebook is obviously showing only one gender at a time for their social authentication capchas, but I wonder if the correlation between last name and ethnicity is enough to collapse the space of possible answers pretty significantly.
No, I really don't think I miss your point. I should point out every film is not a deep drama with a message. The basic plot line for a Western has many people who don't deal with the villains for various reason, thus the need for our heroes. It would be a very short movie if the whole town took up arms against the bad guys.

To the second point, if someone is shooting at me, I take a little exception at my response being called "ruthless", I would say it is more in the justified range. Given everything, yeah, I would feel bad about it, but I would defend my family / friends.
I use an additional guideline: things that are created near where they are used can be abbreviated more than something that is created 'far away'.
How an entrepreneur quit his hedge fund job to start his own company
Opps, good catch :)
Why is it illegal to offer different prices for the same service (as this article says)?
Yahoo Messenger converts Google Maps links to Yahoo Maps - Anti-competitive?
One feature I've always wanted for any site with a login, is the ability to send a text message to my cell phone whenever my login/pw is used, with an option to text back 'no' to deny the login and kick off the user.

This way, when I know it's me logging in, I can just ignore the text, but if it isn't me (some hacker in Germany, for instance), I can immediately bump them off, and I don't have to wait for the damage to be done to reclaim my account.
Plus, in France, you actually get some time off.
Anyone know if this could be used for generating heatmaps? I'd basically need to identify the x,y offsets of elements on a page. I realize that these can be effected by the browser's width/height, but I'm hoping I can set those to generate the data.
You did exactly the right thing: made the pluggable architecture after you got proof it would be useful.
The Sapir-Whorf Hyptothesis applies to software languages as well as human languages...
That's fair, but I think many of us are used to seeing this come from the Java world so the specific example he gives (in Java) is apt.
I disagree to some extent. Sure, some people would overarchitect because culture says so, but I think the more important thing is that Java doesn't give the developer "other choices". If you, for example, make the factorial function in Python, you wouldn't have to worry about integer overflow, because Python does that for you. Therefore, a Python equivalent would be (in theory) easier to understand. The fact that you have to wrap a class around the function is also an example of "limitations".
You'll also have to do 'bundle update <broken-gem>', commit the resulting Gemfile.lock and hopefully wait for your CI build to pass before deploying. Doing that 15 times would be onerous.