skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So Apple wants to block companies from allowing people to see content that wasn't paid for through their system. What's next, blocking paid websites?

Surely Amazon would just set up a website where users could access their Kindle books, bypassing the whole App Store problem. This is silly on Apple's part as it decreases the potential audience for their devices, and the ease of use.
So they're not falling over themselves to fix a bug which no one has noticed for 10+ years, and which hardly anyone is going to hit in actual use. Maybe they're spending their time fixing problems which are actually affecting developers.
Pandering much? This is Hacker news, you have to show how you assembled several packages in a creative way to get in. But, yeah: “outside” there is an alarming proportion of people who get upset for hours, failing at what I did blindfolded at 11.
There've been some psychological studies on averageness, and I believe one common case (though I'd have to look it up) is that people think of "typical" as a representative example in the middle of a distribution, something like a peak of a distribution and/or a median, and then imagine the distribution as a cloud of "stuff on either side of that".

So the intuitive answer to the question would require there to exist a "typical" stick. Once you pick one specific stick, of course things work intuitively: the stick's dimensions are x=A, y=B, its shorter/longer ratio is min(A,B)/max(A,B), and its longer/shorter ratio is max(A,B)/min(A,B).

An interesting question might be whether there's a definition of "typical stick" that in any useful way provides the answer that's intuitively wanted here.
First, let's not forget that Walmart is the largest retailer in the world, for several reasons. But skimping on state and local tax regulation is something that Walmart has done over the years. Most states (not all cities tho) want a company like Walmart, it provides lots of jobs (we won't take about labor wages), and creates perpetual economic growth in a neighborhood / city / region through a whole ecosystem of consumers, employees, vendors, shippers, contractors, etc. To entice Walmart, states give tax subsidies, devalue property assessments, etc.

I'm not saying IKEA doesn't have the same retail financial prowess with state regulators, but let's be fair, many corporations do what they can to get tax loopholes. Accenture, a global consulting powerhouse was incorporated in Bermuda strictly to avoid paying taxes on billions of dollars.
Really? Mine (yet) works fine. I'm using Google Chrome 8; my bookmarklet is:

javascript:(function(){readConvertLinksToFootnotes=true;readStyle='style-apertura';readSize='size-medium';readMargin='margin-wide';_readability_script=document.createElement('script');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability....);document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability...
Wikipedia seeks women writers
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation that administers Wikipedia, has now set itself a target of 25 per cent female contributors by 2015.
Any public-facing Java server affected by this bug that accepts floating point numbers from the user as a string can be hung by this bug.

This is going to be a big problem.
This is Shocking: Notion Ink Adam Used Stolen Concept in their Prototype Model
I assume this hits Clojure, JRuby, etc. harder because it affects all values which are converted to Strings, but only affects Java when one explicitly converts to Double?

So when a (Java) website expects an Int as input, it's not affected, but Clojure,JRuby etc would be?

Am I right, what am I missing?

(see the comment with

user=> (def d 2.2250738585072012e-308)

)
Does somebody actually see use cases for using Oracle RDS with new applications? Or is this mainly to support migrating existing apps to the AWS platform.
Our brains aren't exactly wired to handle uniform distributions too, I guess. Nature is full of normal distributions anyway.
Yes, tptacek runs a security consultancy. Why are you surprised? He's not wrong that the worst-case scenario isn't that bad, and he's a lot more "practical", for want of a better word, than either e.g. cperciva or me. (cperciva picks his serverside crypto algorithms for side-attack-resilience; tptacek points out that not having buffer overflows is asking too much of most software.)

This is not to say that I agree with him - the worst-case scenario isn't that bad, but setting up SSL is easy and the right thing - but he's not babbling nonsense or anything.
Yes, astonishing how Oracle (and others) didn't check their code when this surfaced in PHP to determine if they are affected too.
the best way to increase the signal to noise ratio is to install a third party filter program. FB Purity, is an excellent example, it filters out all the previously mentioned application spam, and also lets you filter out events, facebook places, tagged in messages, etc etc. You can hide as many message types as you like, you will notice a huge improvement, you can get it here: http://www.fbpurity.com
Sony PS3 3.56 firmware reported to be breaking consoles with upgraded storage
ew, resistive touch screen.

I've gotten way too used to my capacitative touch screen on my iphone...
Any secret sauce in not worrying about rails 3 forgery protection?
that would be a boon to the spammers though, as it would let them fine tune their messages until they can get through the filters
The underlying problem is that GIT was never meant as a centralized scm. A centralized source control system will never lose changes, even if one of the users messes up. This means that it distinguishes between normal committers and 'admins'. Only admins can do irreversible actions.

Git uses local, cloned repositories and users can do everything they like with them. Changes can be pushed and pulled to other repositories, possibly changing them irreversibly.

By using github you use GIT in a (kind of) centralized way. Suddenly there is an 'central project repository' again, that needs to be protected against damage. But as GIT was never meant to do this, and trusts its users, it has to be bolted on somehow... at least, that's how I understand it.

I hope they will get this right as it's very important for accountability.
No kidding, if I were GH I would be furious that that story was sitting at the top of HN (which is about as influential in the circles GH cares about as it gets) for the better part of a day.

It's embarrassing for both Andrew and for HN.
Indonesia Ranking Second Largest Facebook Population
I assume this is part of an Oracle deal (hence why you can now use both Oracle DB and MySQL); regardless, wouldn't it make more sense for Amazon to roll-out support of MSSQL before PostgreSQL as (I'm guessing) it's more widely used?
Yes, every project should check its strtod function. If it has a potentially infinite loop, be very worried :)
26 BlackBerry Apps to Learn About Any Medicine, Symptom or Disease
Thanks to technology, it is possible to have all the information about medicine, symptoms, and
diseases you need at your fingertips. Indeed, smart phones are quickly become miniature medical
reference libraries.
Suppose that the porn industry somehow manages to curb piracy, then they still have a problem: there is 50 years of porn out there that the internet can unlock at a cost that is surely much less than creating "fresh" porn. (I'm not a connoisseur but I assume porn from 2011 looks pretty much the same as porn from 1990)
Still, profit is only what is left after the accountants did their job.
I don't completely get it - if they are a charity in the Netherlands, does it automatically exempt them from paying taxes all over the world?
Hmm. Well, Quine and I will just have to agree to disagree, then.

But in this case, I would hardly call the counter-intuitiveness "strong."
No one I've ever met who has used Blackboard has ever expressed anything nice about it. Professor friends of mine actively avoid it; they use Wordpress instead. Others use Moodle.

In fact, it's so bad that my alma mater has put out a call for something else. http://webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan/ (Admittedly, they make it sound like it's due to licensing, but if people were happy with it, they wouldn't be asking.)

LMS strikes me as a problem best dealt with at the course level, not the university level. Give profs some web space and let them put up something and go from there. The centralized "hub of all courses" seems overly complex.
Some familiarity with Numerical Analysis is, in my opinion, a must to a practicing Software Engineer. The official course book where I took the course was Dahlquist,G.L., Bjorck,A. Numerical Methods. I didn't use it too much so I can't comment on readability, but it does cover the material well.
MSSQL being more widely used than PostgreSQL makes no sense to me; but regardless, it would have made more sense to pick PostgreSQL over MySql in the first place.
That appears to be an hg error message.

The git version is:

$ git push github master
To git@gitproxy:rip747/ cfwheels.git
! [rejected] master -> master (non-fast forward)
error: failed to push some refs to ‘git@gitproxy:rip747/cfwheels.git’

That makes no mention of -f (or any git commands at all).
I am a little surprised, but so glad that someone posted this article. As a matter of fact, the prime reason I joined Y-Combinator and Hacker News is because the business I am developing is a solution to this very problem that the adult industry's experiencing. As I write this I am busy with my application for the Summer funding round.

The article is really thorough and provides a great summary of the overall state of the industry. The most important point raised is that while the traditional avenues of generating revenue from porn are dwindling rapidly, there are still many new (and also undiscovered) methods of generating revenue, and lots of it.

In my opinion, the only way to go about this, is to work with the content producers, not against them. Tube sites all work against the industry, but surfers go there because they have what they want. Isn't it obvious that if there was a solution that worked WITH the industry that the benefits would be much greater for both the producers and surfers?

Apple charges peanuts for a track in their iTunes store, but they generate massive revenue because of the sheer volume of content sold. And it's not just because their content is cheap, but because its convenient and easy for the users, so people keep going back and back again. If you had a solution delivering porn on similar principles, you would be generating revenue and supporting the industry.
Just like with music, you will always get those that download illegally and those that pay. Same principle for porn. Just make sure its on terms the user is happy with and you may even convert non-payers into payers when they realize how much more convenient the new service is that trawling through the net searching for their stuff.
Ouch.

This affects JRuby, and potentially anyone with a JSON-based API running on the JVM with a JSON parser using the java stdlib to parse JSON floats:

jruby-1.5.2 > JSON.parse('{"float": 2.2250738585072012e-308}')
^C^C^C^C^C^C
^C^C^C

(not the most recent JRuby I know, but seems this is a JVM problem...)
I only have a basic understanding of IPv4 vs IPv6, so can someone explain to me:

a) what impact will this have on me as Joe Public internet user?

b) what impact will this have on me as a web developer?

Or point me to suitable websites that explain in quick skimmable chunks...
IS that the fault of the minority who thinks different and then angers the majority?

Or is that he fault of the majority who is so sensitive it cannot tolerate a minority that doesn't agree absolutely completely?
Depends on your market. You could go for print advertising with a publication that reaches your market (geographical, interest). You could try mail marketing. Don't forget billboards, posters which, of course range in size (and associated cost) from A5 -> huge.

Try spending a day noticing all the advertising you see. It will give you some ideas of your own.
NASA - NASA Selects Explorer Mission of Opportunity Investigations
If you keep a tight control on the number of shareholders you have there is no reason why you have to go public - of course the reporting standards are going to be lower for private companies, if you don't want that overhead don't go public!
That part has got to be exaggeration. You know, for example he makes a floor bot that randomly 'explores' the floor to map it out, and somebody says he taught it curiosity.

Otherwise you wouldn't be hearing about it in the background in a 1 second blurb in a promotional self-congratulatory anniversary short, you'd be reading about it in the top news story on HN.
I've been working with Oracle for the last few months. In some ways it is a fantastic product. In other ways it is mind-bogglingly backwards.

I mean, no boolean type? Really?
Faceleaks : leak your friends anonymously
Like many, I'm puzzled why one would pay for porn on the internet when so much is given away for free. I don't just mean the amateur stuff--the pay sites give away a ton of their stuff as samples.

I did an experiment once. I picked a particular model, and would follow links to that model whenever they showed up thumb nail sites, trying to get to the sample photo sets for that model--the ones that give you a dozen good photos and then say the full set is available at some particular paid site.

After my collection for that particular model had stopped growing, so I figured I had most or all of the free stuff, I bought a one month membership at the pay site, and grabbed all of that model's material and compared.

There was nothing there I had not acquired already from the sample sets via the thumb nail sites.

It seems to me one should be able to automate this. That is, make an application that you seed with a list of a several free porn sites, such as thumb nail sites. The application would crawl those sites, and follow the links to other such sites, looking for sample photo sets. It would use face recognition to build up sets of photos classified by model. You could pick specific targets from those sets, or point it at targets you identify in your own browsing, and it would seek to find as much free material involving those targets as it can.
Maybe it has something to do Bruce Schneier said once: Privacy is not about hiding stuff, but about controlling what others can see about you (I can't find the exact quote).

There is a huge difference between people who are looking for explicit information and people stumbling upon information.

I agree with you that the information is simply there. But I think context is needed for every little bit of information. And maybe posting this on a very public forum like this will loose some context.

Edit: found the article: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/privacy_and_co...
Sigh, I think it is a damn shame that you were put to -1 for attempting to clarify. I'm happy to get you to zero.

Personally, I prefer the term "Abolitionist" to "anarcho-capitalist." I'm an abolitionist because, just like the movement of old, I endorse the abolition of slavery. Governments consider people property (the US taxes worldwide income) and believes it owns the output of said property.
Nominated for Photographer of the Year - Magazine or Newspaper
A Canvas alternative. Anonymous Pictures on Facebook
Never read up on it, and this obviously ignores the sheer volume already out there, but I'd guess that some males may have an evolutionary tendency to favour 'new talent.'
Lessons for people not in the porn industry:

1. See what is new and working in other industries. And replicate them for your industry. Youtube's success gave rise to all the xtubes. The first few people to ride that bandwagon made it big.

2. Select a niche and focus on it. Dominate it. Then use the cash flow from one niche to venture into other niches. Then earn even more cashflow and start buying people out. This picture is an awesome example of parlaying to domination:
http://images.nymag.com/news/features/sextube110207_2_560.jp...

3. When faced with a threat - brainstorm on what dilutes that threat value. "Unlike recorded porn, live cams are immune to piracy..." (But live cams can't be scaled up either. You can only have so many people watching you live.)

4. Being a platform is always better than being a player. People doing live cam shows earn $1200 or so a month. The website where these live cam shows are streamed earn that much too - per person. But they have thousands of such people participating... so $1200*thousands. (Apple will always make more money than a single developer. Facebook will make more money than Zynga.)
Why the ‘Contact Us’ Page Always Goes Last
You can read them, but unless you have the dx it will be difficult. I much prefer the experience of goodreader on iPad.
I don't care - I just don't want to see these endless debates here. They are always the same and go 'round and 'round and nothing is ever accomplished other than pissing people off.
Why would a Java / JVM issue hang the .NET CLR?
Thank you for linking an article behind a paywall, no seriously I am happy you can reach this piece and I am sure it is very informative.
Microsoft says Yahoo is 'phantom data' phone bug source
You misunderstood me. You can access the Microsoft CDN from two domains: microsoft.com and aspnetcdn.com. The former has cookies, the latter does not.

From http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx#ajaxmicrosoftcom_ren...:

The CDN used to use the microsoft.com domain name and has been changed to use the aspnetcdn.com domain name. This change was made to increase performance because when a browser referenced the microsoft.com domain it would send any cookies from that domain across the wire with each request. By renaming to a domain name other than microsoft.com performance can be increased by as much to 25%. Note ajax.microsoft.com will continue to function but ajax.aspnetcdn.com is recommended.
6 Nice To Have Freebie Resources For Web Designers and Developers
Migrating.

There's a lot of companies with licenses and who have been scaling vertically and are approaching their max. The traditional ROI race means that they did their planning to minimise their licensing costs whilst maximising their hardware usage... basically companies plan for just what they need and barely leave themselves 10% for growth.

What then happens is that when they look like they're going to exceed their 10% spare capacity, they're faced with disproportionally high costs to continue to scale vertically by adding RAM or CPU when the box may already be maxed or not be able to meet demands.

Where this helps, is that Amazon can extend your LAN over a VPN to include an Oracle instance hosted by them. They can take away your capex and turn it into an opex in which you weren't paying for unused spare capacity. They can also liberate you from that expensive capex cycle.

It's a good thing, but I doubt anyone is going to be building new software this way, especially amongst the HN crowd (unless this really is 1998/1999 again).
Whether or not that is true, it's entirely irrelevant because it has nothing to do with morals.
I suppose the Netherlands have double-taxation agreements with many places in the world, see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Double_taxati...
Where i've found music for screencasts and podcasts
Why I love HN
Hi all,

I've been a (too) frequent reader of HN over the past weeks, just decided to submit my first post.

And I love it around here - primarily because it's very nicely focused on start-ups (of course! :) ), but also because it seems to avoid the trap many tech-oriented forums/websites fall into lately - every second story is about Apple.

Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, I find Steve Jobs very inspiring - as many entrepreneurs/start-up guys probably do, as well. But instead of being educational, it's mostly hype-hype-hype.

So anyway, nice to be here, I'm glad I found you!

Cheers
Because by all accounts this isn't a Java/JVM issue. It's a flaw in a commonly used algorithm for handling floating point numbers. Given that php and possibly gcc use variations on the same algorithm, and have the same flaw, it's not unreasonable to think that other languages/compilers/runtimes would also be affected.
> What are some topics in CS that I can self-learn?

Any. Pick ones that interest you and start googling.
Early adopters influence initial take up. Tumblr is way beyond this now. Once it's reached the high school kids, then it can't really be called "early" any more.

They'll only move on once the service is no longer seen as cool, and the early adopters have - at a modest estimate - absolutely nothing at all to do with this.
I'm really saddened to see that so many people have come to believe that thinking differently is wrong and should be suppressed. That coercion and violence against the innocent is the norm and that people who think that we should live free from violence and coercion are "right wing" and "brainwashed".

To tell him not to participate here because he thinks differently than you is to say that your mind is not open to new ideas and that you cannot bear to be exposed to anything that comes from a different philosophical basis than the one upon which you were raised.

Can you see how that is anti-intellectual?
Kind of like http://hackermonthly.com/

It's a print edition of the best stories from HN each month.
I guess because only a couple of weeks ago a similar issue has surfaced in PHP so it is not entirely unreasonable to check whether other runtimes have similar problems?
I would highly recommend iTunes University, its has many high quality recordings of lectures from many of the top universities. I've been programming for 10+ years and am self-taught, however I'm currently 'attending' the Programming Methodology course from Stanford University.
Way too long, must have been made by a 60 years old.
But you can go to 9 screens with the existing system: I press Control+[number] and it takes me to that screen--this is built-in today.
Those seem atleast the core fundementals! Maybe pick up compiler design, functional programming and software engineering/architecture
As the article "The PHP strtod() denial of service bug" (http://blog.andreas.org/display?id=9 ; linked by pilif in another comment) states, it looks like the code for the conversion is used in a few prominent libraries (e.g. Apple's libc, Android libc, GCC libio etc.). Therefore, it could've been quite possible that the mentioned code has been adopted by Microsoft, too; leppie just confirmed that everything works fine over there.
Flood affected Queensland about to be hit by category 4 cyclone
I wish github (and git in general) had a better way to view the history of your history, as it were. It's great that get let's you change histoy, but it can be quite problematic if someone messes up that history, especially if it's not caught right away. Yes, it's in the reflog, but so is _everything_, so finding the right thing can be quite daunting.
Thanks. Abolitionist is also a good word indeed. Another one might be political atheism.

The downvotes are OK though. People feel very strongly about certain ideas for society and mistake freedom for critique on the idea instead of just on the method (coercion).

For some reason parts of the world got over religious coercion. One day we'll hopefully have the same for ideological coercion.
Also see: http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/satellite/sequadrant.shtml

This is one big storm.
5 Reasons to Leverage LinkedIn To Increase Your B2B Prospects
B2B marketing boils down to one all-important fact: It’s all about creating relationships. Today’s demand generation has created a long

cycle in online lead nurturing. From first click to sealing the deal, trust and rapport are critical to the sales process.