skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lets see...

* Still using close to or over a gallon of fossile fuel to make a gallon of ethanol? Check!

* Still less efficient a fuel than straight petroleum products? Check!

* Still uses a FOOD SOURCE to create GAS? Check, double and tripple check.

* Oh and is still a massive source of government spending in subsidies that could easily be diverted to programs that help the populous instead of corn fat cats? Check.

There is literally nothing good about ethanol as a vehicle fuel source. It's disgusting and perverted how much this gets pushed as "the environmentally safe" fuel source.
here's the version I came up with, based on one I did in python. It's very similar to jaysoo's - needs a call with no args to terminate the list. I'm curious if there's a way to do this somehow without the terminator.

I'm not a JS expert by any means, so if I'm doing something stupid in this code, I'd love to know.

var say = function(word) {

words = [word];

func = function(word2) {
if (word2) {
words.push(word2);
return func;
}
else {
print(words.join(' '));
}
}

return func;
};

say('hello')('bob')('how you doing?')();

*note I have the function 'print' aliased to console.log for convenience.
The CSS-based techniques both work in IE6, which is pretty amazing. And you can combine them.

But don't use inline styling. Bury the rules in the cascade with some parent class so they can't be easily filtered.
There is some hope.

While I can't provide huge amounts of detail, some TV stations are seeing the writing on the wall. I've spoken with one in particular who realizes that a) NBC/CBS/ABC is going to become a cable / internet network at some point, leaving the local station that much more time to fill. Also b) most people aren't turning to TV news, except in extraordinary cases where it fills a real need. (TRUE breaking news, think 9/11, local standoffs, fires, earthquakes, etc.)

They're talking about giving reporters 2 days to do 1 story. Each story is double or triple the length, and hopefully even more times the quality of the traditional 1:30 package. They're hoping the quality of the story can be spread via Facebook / the internet, and then have people come back and watch the newscast because it's a place to find out about quality things happening in their community.

The current problem? The news staff doesn't want to do that. They want to stay on their current course.

These signs point to a new hybrid form of journalism that excites me. A longer, in-depth story where appropriate, but also the bite-sized chunks which blogs have somewhat perfected.

Will it work perfectly? Not tomorrow. I'm confident, however, that it will work at some point in the future.

Anyone else who reads HN and who's looking at solving the same problem should get in contact with me. I want to talk to smart folks about the future of journalism. My specific slant is the video part, but I'd love to hear from smart folks thinking about all angles.
Keeping Up With The Pythonistas ~ tdavis' list of key python blogs
If you have to ask that question the answer is no. Entrepreneurial endeavors are not for the scared or unadventurous, and that basically describes anyone who answers "yes" to the questions in the article.
I think that in its length, this thread has attenuated reality a little bit. The reality is, the New Yorker piece was more spare, less breathless, and better reported than a typical TechCrunch posting. The New Yorker byline is not the only thing that makes Kottke think the article is awesome.

The other side to your argument is, yes, the New Yorker byline does make Kottke think it's "correct". It does the same thing for most people, probably including you. It probably is correct. You said it yourself: credibility is important. TechCrunch has done a lot of stuff to burn credibility instead of building it.
One could say the same about journalism in any subject. It's cheaper and often as profitable to pump out shallow celebrity gossip and infotainment than to put out factual reporting and well thought out commentary.

If you're wondering at a higher level why this is so, the simple answer is that almost all modern journalism is ad supported. Attracting eyeballs matters for the bottom line, how much people value or even believe what you report is irrelevant as long as you can mantain viewership.
Patent troll

Take a look at "VS Technologies" website here - http://www.vstinfo.com/index.htm. Looking at the source code it was built with Microsoft Frontpage 5.0 ... nice.
>It just looks a lot nicer.

Maybe I'm just not used to it yet, but I liked the way Vimperator did it: having the hinting number also be in yellow made it easier to see.

It's possible there are ways to configure this; I haven't checked thoroughly yet.
Anecdata II: I get about 1,500 spams a day to my Google-managed email address, and have found a worrying number of emails in my spam folder. It works really well for you, sadly less well for me :-/
While I applaud the direct personal response, I feel like the content says "we don't see a problem." If users see a problem and you don't, smaller competitors can eat your lunch. I'm kind of hoping for some competition in the field.

In terms of adsense, if you really think about it, adsense content on a page should probably be a slightly negative ranking signal (not just not a positive signal). The very best quality pages have no ads. Think of government pages, nonprofits, .edu, quality personal blogs, etc. If no one is making money off a page (no ads) then whatever purpose it has, it is likely to be non-spammy.
Interactive Infographic Visualizes Twitter Ecosystem
Thank you for a good laugh on a Friday afternoon in cubicle-land
Agreed. That league would include Yun Ye, Frank Schilling and him.
This is super cool. Call me a late adopter, but this seems to be "the" app that might finally make me buy an iPad.
Disclaimer: I have a 5 year old child, whose into Lego etc., so I know the market this is targeting.

Question: Are you guys planning on supporting Android, since personally I'm leaning towards an Android tablet.
Sorry for picking USA Today, I was kinda lazy about searching alternates, here are many choices:

http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&...

I drive a mid-1990's car and I accidentally discovered it performed much better and got significantly better mileage when I filled up at a remote gas station that didn't use ethanol. All the stations in the city use ethanol :-(

This is a 50% increased allowance which the fuel industry will definitely take advantage for the higher profits.
Designing good experiments: Some mistakes and lessons
I was going to come in to post this. Regular expressions are the first thing I think of when it comes to this, and making a pattern to match [AT] instead of @ is just a few keystrokes away. Make up a few permutations of popular replacements and you've just defeated 90% of email obfuscation in 15 minutes.

And yet I see seasoned programmers who should ostensibly know a little about regex using this kind of obfuscation all the time!
Will Google Change With Larry Page, Not Eric Schmidt, as CEO?
It really depends. Like most pentesters, I'm looking at two factors when I consider a stack like this: first, how big/complex is the exposed attack surface of the stack, and second, how well tested is that attack surface.

For many applications it seems entirely possible to do better with a single multi-tenant app stack than you could with OS virtualization with the same service model. In particular, if, to get the same service model, you had to customize your OS virtualization stack, I'd tack sharply towards preferring a multi-tenant app stack.

I can easily get my head around auditing the Ruby interpreter and its deployment on a Unix host. I've done projects assessing custom virtualization solutions and they are gigantic and complex to test. I'm pretty sure interrupt timing isn't going to screw up Heroku, but that's a flavor of the kind of stuff you have to test with full virtualization.

Finally, I have to add: everything is going to have bugs. You can fully virtualize every customer and every app and you will still eventually be exposed to something bad. The measure of the team is how they handle the exposure, how they fix it, and what they learn from the experience to make the next one harder to find.
An explanation of what's new:
http://faq.waybackmachine.org/whats-the-difference-between-t...
But these files don't run on devices and aren't even publicly available.
Book review: The Comingled Code: Open Source and Economic Development
Economist.com book review on The Comingled Code - a history of Open Source Software and its potential for economic development.
Spam is not only in the organic search but also in the image-search. I observed a site that steals 140.000 (!) images by hotlinking (also some of my pictures). First the pages itself seems to be "clean". They only set hotlinks to blended search images, and they got a lot of traffic, that sure.
Then they switched the site: on the top there are two porn-ads (it was xslt*us)
I wrote a spam report and posted it an webmasterforum. But it took about 10 days until the site was removed. Hope this gets better...
And: hotlinking is a great problem.
Overheard at a 500 Startups event: 500 startups isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion startups.
If you're using a fairly recent kernel, 2.6.26 supports linux containers natively. You can "boot" a VM in less than 200ms, then start whatever process you need to start. I think when people think of virtualized instances, they think that the VM boots all kinds of other unnecessary processes.

Given that one could compile custom kernels on EC2, I think it's quite possible to run LXC on top of amazon instances. When I run "top" on my vserver running on top of vmware fusion, running on my laptop, I really only see my sandboxed process and nothing more.

Also, I see that heroku keeps these "disks" in a squashfs filesystem file. It seems like you might gain better performance if you just had all the files on your filesystem, used vservers, then use something like vserver hashify to prevent file duplication (to reduce space usage).
"Apple doesn't sell computers"? The iPhones and iPods are arguably consumer appliances, but they aren't out of the Macintosh business yet.
Matt,

I'm sure that Google does better than it did in October 2000. They'd be something horribly wrong if that wasn't the case. That's not relevant to the specific concerns people have about what's happening here and now.
Because that wouldn't solve the problem for clones of other sites, or clones in other languages. And the Stack Overflow cloners could just make other websites. That's why a primary instinct in search quality is to look for an algorithmic solution that goes to the root of the problem. That approach works across different languages, sites, and if someone makes new sites.

To be clear: the webspam team does reserve the right to take manual action to correct spam problems, and we do. That not only helps Google be responsive, it also improves our algorithms because we get use that data to train better algorithms. With Stack Overflow, I especially wanted to see Google tackle this instance with algorithms first.
Best product video I've seen, short and sweet yet tells exactly what you do in a very life is celebratory way (the humor with the newspaper bit is brilliant).

Is the voice over a founder, and can you share more about behind the scenes?
I would love to be able to build my own PC that runs OSX.
> When is the corn industry welfare for billionaires going to end?

I'm generally not a fan of state-operated welfare programs, but labeling this welfare is unfair to welfare... this is just plain ol' fashioned corruption. State-run welfare programs can have some benefits if they're designed okay. Corruption... not so much.
From Slashdot:

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1960862&cid=349...

"In Florian's paper, he points these out as Sun PROPRIETARY / CONFIDENTIAL. However, it looks like several of the sources come from Sun's mmademo, linked here [java2s.com]. In this rendition of the document, each source file's license is a permissive one by Sun (i.e., not proprietary / confidential)."

IE, the header in the distribution may read incorrectly that the files are SUN proprietary.
These days college students think that one person doing ten people's homework is "collaboration", so I can imagine a lazy Googler decompiling some Sun class files. "After all, they're only tests, not real code."
I don't think it comes to that. My working definition of art is 'human creativity in matters beyond functional necessity' - and the point (ideally) would be to selectively present phenomena/experience for the betterment of the audience.

Here black and white images of everyday urban life have been selected as subject matter. Why? (obviously the images are well framed, but is that all there is to this art? Mechanical_Fish's answer above is reasonable, though)
We've definitely discussed this. Our policy in search quality is not to pre-announce things before they launch. If we offer an experiment along those lines, I'll be among the first to show up here and let people know about it. :)
We should look at ourselves when we ask why. Especially in tech, everyone just loves to be opinionated. Look at at least half of all the blog posts that make it onto this site, for instance.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127498
De-volatile Your Memcached. Upgrade to Membase
Sending spam is a means; the goal is to have people click on ads, buy stuff, download malware, etc.

The distribution of the probability that users click an ad is highly skewed. I suspect that it has probabilities close to zero for people who use "these 'obfuscated' e-mails".

If that is the case, spamming those users does not make economical sense.
New startup - Listen to the web
It's more than that though. This article specifically says that HTC and Motorola have also been sued for patent infringement. Even if Google can afford to pay for these types of lawsuits, this could really hurt them strategically in working with telecoms and other vendors in the future. Anyone wanting to build a new tablet/phone will have to consider this as a huge risk. Could have much bigger strategic aspects than just the IP
Oh, bugger off. Person hosting the screenshots isn't the person who submitted the article, first of all, and hosting something on your home machine certainly isn't HN inappropriate, even if it doesn't hold up terribly well.
Apple still sells computers like GE still sells light bulbs. In the meantime, Apple themselves announced the shift to consumer electronics when they changed the name of the company 3 years ago.
Didn't notice that - that's good to know. That's actually exactly how I'd expect a good search engine to behave. As annoyed as I am when I get a junk result, I'd be even more pissed if Google dropped terms from my query just so it can return a more popular site.

Of course, then all the content-copy farms will respond by copying valid content plus word lists - hopefully Google knows how to detect that.
After reading that I have no need for more details, where the sources came from, or what the latest "rumors" about Schmidt are.
You could've fixed the "here" link for Hacker News. Why not replace the java2s.com with http://www.java2s.com/Open-Source/Java-Document/IDE-Netbeans...?
I don't think anybody referred to Acorn Computers as PCs (so, no, not only Apple).

PC means different things according to the context, but the main ones are

a) IBM-compatible PC. Which means Windows/MS-DOS.

b) Personal computer, which means Mac

The 'I'm a PC' advertising campaign, while quite entertaining, seems a bit outdated now IMO. Probably because compatibility issues aren't much of a headache these days for Mac/PC owners, who primarily just go on Facebook and check their email. Seems weird that Windows users would still think of themselves as 'PC' people.
Google Maps was a successful acquisition/competitor clone. Google Finance is also successful (a clone of Yahoo Finance basically). Those are the only two others I can think of off the top of my head.

I don't think Google is particularly below average here though; I think it's just a risky strategy to clone something. You often miss a critical non-obvious piece of the puzzle, because only the surface of the business is visible when you're copying it.
I purposely abuse the term "welfare" because of it's weight and how it's contradictory to be extremely wealthy but yet receive government assistance.

"heavily subsidized" and "high import tariffs" don't quite paint the right picture of the obscenity that's going on, they soften it.
The M-Project – Mobile HTML5 Application Framework
tl;dl another apple experience fluff piece circa 2007.
Peter Shor on Physics Stackexchange
As long as we're making informed guesses:

"For an imaging spacecraft to provide truly persistent surveillance capability, the satellite should be in a higher orbit, requiring large-aperture deployable mirrors, in the range of 10-20 meters in diameter."

[i.e., need to hover longer over one site -> {higher orbit, larger mirror} -> need bigger rocket]

From page 10 of:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/57862449/NPS-Space-Systems-Progr...
If "we" didn't click on the TC stories or vote them up, they'd probably get the idea pretty quickly. Just sayin'.
The filenames weren't so much easily guessable as a change Heroku made last month accidentally exposed files. Relying on unpredictable strings isn't a fundamentally bad architecture; it's not an exaggeration to say that the whole web depends on that design.

My recommendation to Heroku might start with auditing every Heroku tool to make sure it calls "setproctitle".
The reality is that Kottke is mostly wowed because of some decent prose.

I read the post and wonder how much of this is true (if "correct" is too alarming a word). How objective is Auletta about Schmidt? How reliable are the unnamed "associates" whose mention thrilled Kottke?

I don't have an opinion about whether this post is accurate because I don't have enough information to make that judgement. This post doesn't provide that information, and I haven't happened to read Auletta's book, or even any reviews or criticism of his book.

I don't dismiss it like I would anything remotely questionable from TechCrunch, but I also don't buy in because of the brand in this case. I see Kottke and people in these comments making firm declarations of confidence based on, according to them, some clean prose and a brand name.
Apple is probably top dog here... they made more in profits than Google's total revenue for 2010 Q4.
Even though the author has a valid point on what Apple is selling, there is no reason besides a completely selfish one on Apple's part for them to disable features and discourage customization.
They should be able deliver everything the article mentions as their strengths while not disheartening power users if they tried.
> have found a worrying number of emails in my spam folder

Sorry, but just to be sure - am I getting it right, those emails were false-positives?
And, as server tech improves, both hardware and software, their extreme scale becomes less interesting over time.
Cracking Manipulation Proof Locks
With 335MM, you can spend 31K every single day for the next 30 years.
It would be great if there was a combo of internet archive wayback machine + google fastflip-type browsing
http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/
I've had my public email address, with no obfuscation, on quite a few very high traffic pages.

Remarkably little spam gets through to me. I actually see more spam in my non-public gmail account where, I suspect, the spammers are simply name guessing.

Long story made not much shorter -- I would guess that scraping isn't that big of a strategy any more.
Even though I agree with point 1, 2 and 4, I'm not with you on point 3. Why take OO to an extreme when there is no technical nor functional reason to do so? The best example is Math.Sin(x) vs. Sin(x)... There is no valid reason (IMHO) to go for the Math.Sin() approach in PHP. It doesn't add anything, except more keystrokes.

Of course if your language is entirely OO (like C# or Java), you can't avoid constructs like Math.Sin(). Even though I prefer C# and Java above PHP, it has always annoyed me that I needed to prefix those kind of functions with a class name. I understand that it is a trade off in language design and forcing you to think in objects is mostly a good thing (if you leave functional programming out of the equation). However, if your language supports functions outside of objects, why not use them?

[disclaimer]I didn't look at the actual code, so I'm not sure if there are functions that indeed should have been (static) members of a class.[/disclaimer]
$3,000,000 per employee, most of whom are sales reps? They can get 2,000 employees for much cheaper than that. They were going after the user base and ridiculous profits.
Web-based Email Shows Signs of Decline in the U.S.
a modern look is nice, but it doesn't really add any functionality that was missing. how long will it take for them to offer full-text search? could someone else provide it?
Another iPhone game rip-off: The Blocks Cometh
From David Pogue, keys to pitching him and other journalists
I can't remember getting false negative but I'm started to get more and more false positive for spam with Gmail unfortunately. All emails from LinkedIn, my alumni association and recently Facebook go to spam, even after clicking "Not spam" repeatedly. The annoying thing is that these are emails that I received in my inbox, opened and didn't mark as spam for years, but they are now considered spam with apparently no way for me to get the engine to learn.
Writing multiple short blog posts is also easier. Re-blogging is also easy. Bad writing tends to drag on for paragraphs with no real point. Good, concise writing is difficult.

Also, good writers like Ken Auletta are expensive.

Techcrunch couldn't justify this style of writing for every post, though it does have Lacy, Carr, Gilmore et al as high-level editorial
I'm thinking you haven't read Newsweek lately....
Much more than the content, yes.
People don't suddenly become stupid when they learn how to program. Plenty of "techies" can analyze Apple's strategy just fine. Similarly, being a non-"techie" does not automatically bless you with deep understanding of what Apple's doing.
Malware from .co.cc, hidding PHP inside javascript files
Ahh.. Dupe, then. Thanks!
Seedcamp London 2011 - the Teams
Which platform was this?

"For example, one Node.js platform provider that has been in the news recently was hacked in the past few days and all of their user databases were deleted. The reason why? They accidentally published their database password on GitHub. Oops."

This doesn't really surprise me, considering everyone and their mother is currently building "Heroku for Python/Node.js/[hot technology]".
500 Accelerators? Sure, why not? It's a big world. But 500 Y Combinators? There can be only one!
Really really cool. It's a bit like a hyper interactive Photoshop filter. It reminds me of an old tablet paint program that allowed you to load a photo up, then paint over it by hand, the result was something not entirely different from using a palette knife filter. This has an entirely different feel to it that's insanely cool.

Great work!
Personally, I'm waiting for it to mature a bit more before I jump on board. It certainly can't hurt to learn it, but for me, right now, it isn't the right time.
Hack on Lush website exposes credit-card details
I meant to say that the filenames were easily guessable after the random strings were exposed by 'ps'.

Relying on unpredictable strings works fine, so long as you keep them away from prying eyes. But that requires attention to detail, and can get harder over time (witness, say, Firesheep, which made it a whole lot easier to hide "secret" login cookies than it used to be).
Show HN: WerdMerge: A Portmanteau Generator With Phonemes