skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could do ob_start(); include '...'; ob_end_clean();, but it turns out that die() (say, in a custom error handler) () causes an implicit buffer flush. So it's not a foolproof solution.
But you would never `include()` a PEM file.
I think it goes even deeper than that, even for non-distorted stories the whole news industry seems to bend backwards to prove they have an added value up to the point of making itself perceived as being the source. Adding a link to the source reveals they're just part of the echo chamber.

I sincerely hope this culture of linking to sources, first spurred outside of research to the general public by Wikipedia and its need for credibility, and then even more fueled by microblogging habits triggers a revolution in news outlets, bringing them back towards true journalism.
Wait... so can you not use online check-in and get your ticket at the airport?
Sorry for missing that!
Ignoring Business Basics Can Kill Your Dream
No chance. The problem was a missing <?php tag -- PHP syntax cheching would NOT have raised alarm, because everything before a <?php tag is not considered PHP.

Forcing every file to start with <?php is just PITA for developers working on templates.
I wanted to joke about something like that ;) (Even thought I much more prefer vim, it happens to me from time to time to see a i/j/whatever in my file and getting random errors)
I like the filter UI, but I'm not sure how much of a differentiator for the service they are from subreddits.

You sound like you might be on the way to a key differentiator from Reddit with the idea of actively courting respected people within respective communities to curate their corner of the site, but the tough problem isn't so much finding the right curators as persuading them you offer something better than the skinned vBulletin or phpBBS with thousands of members they're already running...

A "Hacker News of New York Politics" wouldn't stand out for UI or precise filters though, it would stand out because or a relative lack of people battering each other over the head with slogans and Bloomberg and Giuliani popping in to offer their opinion every now and then. The former is achievable through aggressive moderation; the latter is a tough ask.
that's just a stable time loop. an unstable one would be one that splits into multiple futures.
> servers have far, far fewer security mechanisms in place than even XP SP2

According to your reasoning, IE6 is the most secure browser because it has the most security patches. If you have fewer vulnerabilities to start with, you'll end up with fewer, simpler (and thus more reliable) security mechanisms.

Windows has improved a lot. I suppose 2008r2 is reasonably secure and should be able to stay secure when exposed to the net, but the internal complexity of its security mechanisms is huge and, therefore, a lot can go wrong.
How to easily receive notifications about GitHub commits in Google Talk
I have not found a quick way to notify my mates about commits on GitHub over Google Talk we all use. I asked about it on StackOverflow and they didn't have an answer. That's why I decided to create an tiny webapp based on Google App Engine to do that job. You can use it without registration and installation, just look through README to understand how it works and how you can use it. The job is in progress, but the basic functionality is there now, so you can receive notifications about commits. Source code is available from http://www.github.com/skible/gitport. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me over email: sergey@skible.com. Thanks!
I suppose you could also write a quick bash script to ensure the first 5 characters of any .class.php file matches "<?php", but it wouldn't be very generally applicable and wouldn't fix a problem like this for a file named config.php
I'm far from being a PHP expert, but wouldn't writing critical password/data in a file instead of directly in the source code, avoided that issue? I mean, we would have seen the code to read the file.. and not the pass?
You gave a significant chunk of their profit to Amazon; it would be nice if they still gave you the PDF (which is the bonus for ordering directly from them), but not doing so is just "not nice", not rage-worthy. If you really wanted it, you could have cancelled your Amazon order and placed your order with manning...
If they're clever, that password isn't the actual password, it's a salted hash that the Database class breaks down to the real password before connecting. In theory, that hash alone shouldn't be enough for a breach, unless someone is able to figure out how it's encrypted and salted.
Context: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht... is/was reasonably well-known, and people have been speculating on which language he meant ever since [EDIT: see reply by dpritchett]. Steve Yegge doesn't quite come out and declare his preference, but...

Sadly, he's not written anything on his blog in a while.
Tokyo Hacker Space could use your help
They made a typo. Then they didn't test on their local machine. Then they didn't test on a dev server. Then they didn't test on a staging server. Then they didn't test on a live server. At no point did they do any form of testing.

Judging by the mistake, I wouldn't be surprised if they edited the file live on the server.
Yes, that's what I said in the second sentence of my second paragraph above. But since you bring it up again I'll point out that this update is not available for my iPhone 3G that I have retired and now use exclusively for kids games. Instead I have to manually sign out after an install.
I need to do this experiment for myself. I just don't believe it...
Get rid of all that text on the homepage. Just put the video up. It's a new concept, so seeing it in action is important to convey the value.
As a programmer, all I need is:

1. Money (to not have to worry about it)

2. A challenge

3. A great team
A huge problem that the Khan Academy fails to address is the digital divide. Often the children who attend schools who are the most at risk do not have access to computers/internet at home and community centers are often hard to reach both due to their distance and the danger in their traveling there.

I, a CS masters student, and my wife, a PhD EE, who attend University of Texas at Austin run an after school program for middle school kids to teach robotics and programming using lego mindstorms.

The school is one of the poorest in the city, but also has an integrated math/science magnet program within it. Our students are a mix of both the local children and the magnet kids who are bussed in.

At the beginning of class we place logic problems on the board and we were surprised to find that often the kids not in the magnet program solved them correctly often on par with those who were supposed to be the best and brightest in the city.

However when it came to programming and using the computers, the non-magnet students lagged behind the others at a pace of almost half the speed. Though they both were able to mechanically develop and debug their robot equally well.

I meet with the parents throughout the program and the correlation I noticed most prominently with those that suffered with programming was if the kid had easy access to a computer outside of school.
So.. where do I pitch a googler ?
Attn MEAPs: I was notified this morning of the following:

"We are pleased to announce that The Joy of Clojure is now complete! As a MEAP subscriber you can download your copy of the finished ebook right now! "

I was starting to wonder if I was going to ever get a final copy.
Go to https://www.dropbox.com/developers

They have an official API libraries for iOS and as well for Android, Java, Ruby and Python.

After reading the documentation further help can be found in the API Development forum: http://forums.dropbox.com/forum.php?id=5

P.S. You should apply for a Developer Key, and you should implement OAuth authentication (for getting a token for the user who'll use your application).
You lost me at "bordering on criminal negligence". They gave away a lot of details about how their internal systems are structured, but surprisingly little as far as actual usable data. Passwords can be changed, API keys can be disabled and regenerated, local IP addresses can be switched up. No user data was revealed. How is this even close to criminal, let alone catastrophic? This is pants-down embarrassing, at worst.
Comet Chat In 6 Lines Of Erlang [video]
Breefield, what was the event you were trying to add? Did you make sure to put the correct start and end times?

Working on an error page now.
... while on this side of the ocean i couldn't even accept a position at a northern europe bank because i can't afford relocation at the moment, and everyone tells me people are hiring like crazy in NY/SV. Life can be bull sometimes :(
> How can you look at this code and make any statement about general code quality? The stuff that was exposed was pure initialization code that would look the same anywhere you look.

No it doesn't. Having to modify live code just to change configuration options is bad. If I want to add a new slave, or change some configuration option, it should have no affect on running code. I shouldn't be changing any software logic, and that's exactly what editing this file does.

Their are standard ways to avoid this. But no, if changing your config file means changing what essentially amounts to changing the executable of your code, you're asking for trouble.
I've never used it, but does the Jabber service hook not work with Google Talk?
This goes back to the popular post about Reddit being down to one developer. The war for talent comes down to a) having the resources to pay for top talent - Google or b) cool and fun concepts to work on which have enormous potential - Hipmunk. Getting hooked up with nice hard wear is great but at this point it seems expected as everyone pretty much does it (except for the bootstrapped start-up).
We all travel through time at varying speeds all the time:

There are two twin brothers. One brother goes on a space journey traveling at 99% of the speed of light. The space traveler stays on his journey for one year, whereupon he returns to Earth. On Earth, however, seven years have elapsed, so his twin brother is 7 years older at the time of his arrival. This is due to the fact that time is stretched by factor 7 at approx. 99% of the speed of light, which means that in the space traveler’s reference frame, one year is equivalent to seven years on earth. Yet, time appears to have passed normally to both brothers.

Question: Did the traveler go forward in time or did the Earthbound brother go backward in time when they meet up later?

Question: How is it possible that one of the brothers shifted 7 years and yet they can meet in the same universe?
But the point of the article was that in at least one of the three stories mentioned, the journalists appear not to have even read the press release for the study in question.
Clearly they should ban vim from their development process! ;-)

No, joking aside, the normal way to handle this is to have the perimeter server (nginx or varnish) catch any 5* responses and turn them into a user-friendly error-page. That way you never expose sensitive stack traces to your users.

So, this is standard stuff and easy to fix. However who of us hasn't screwed up on a similarly trivial issue before? I wouldn't judge them too hard on this one, happens to the best of us.
Bill Gates did make quite a bit in the education market. Find one school that does not use MS Office.

Also, Apple was, and still is, notorious for donating or offering heavily discounted products to teachers and schools. Why? They would get familiar with and used to using their products and purchase them in the future. It also gives them great publicity.

Many other companies do this as well. My campus computer store sells software at 90% discounts for the same reason. Sometimes giving things away is where the smart money is at.
Randy Pitchford of Gearbox talks about Duke Nukem Forever
If the custom error handler was never set, the PHP notices wouldn't look like that.
I suppose you could add some code to Varnish to tell it to squelch any and all 500 responses.
Yegge has since admitted that NBL was Javascript.

Clojure hits the sweet spot between Yegge's "JVM languages shall inherit the earth" rhetoric in the fabulous "Rhinos and Tigers" talk and his longstanding fondness for Lisp. Clojure will probably never eclipse JS in mindshare even if it is a wonderful language.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht...
duh, isn't this the very reason why .XXX was formed? They want to segregate porn from the rest of the web.
I think he was referring to his (rather extreme) metaphor which fits the phrase "bordering on criminal negligence" much more closely than tumblr:

"Imagine if the super to your apartment complex accidentally mailed a box full of duplicate keys to a local methadone clinic."
The difference between agility and speed
I don't think it does the job. I tried it before. I filled in my Google Talk ID and clicked Test Hook. Nothing happened. May be there are some settings I could change to make it work?
[now] they were ready to hire a CEO. But they would only consider one person: Steve Jobs

okay I lol'ed, that caught me off guard
I believe the main reason you're seeing it with php apps more often, is because php is a very common platform.
Wishing for a "talent-detector": I could make billions.

Seriously, how can you call it a war when the territory is so poorly delineated. Searching for "talent" is like capturing neutrinos. So shouldn't it be termed a "Crapshoot for Talent" or "Gold Rush for Talent" or such? Add to that the interaction problem (an excellent worker in one environment may wither in another).

Metaphors matter! Choose your weapons carefully. Oops, sorry, it isn't a war! Choose your garden shrubs carefully.
Don't edit files on the production server?
> If you have a separate (ini-style) configuration file, every time you get a new request...

it will just pull it from the cache, not needing to be parsed or read from disk.

Configuration stored in a PHP file is bad. Changing working code simply because you want to add a new slave is a horrible idea. It would be like having to recompile Apache from source every time you want to add a new vhost because all the entries are written in C.

Interpreted languages like PHP, Python, Perl, etc all make it easy to put config options directly into the language. When your app is small, it's fine. But as it gets larger, move it out.

But yes, that they didn't even catch this is in testing is the real problem.
It's interesting how much the high-tech industry that made remote and distributed working possible is still bound to a locality.

Outside Silicon Valley, and outside the US, there is also a lot of talent, which would dream of earning even half of what a Silicon Valley developer does, but cannot move there for some reason.

Ample opportunity here for smart companies.
This is on par with "Alien Autopsy" and 9/11 conspiracies. That said, it invokes the "crazy Russikies" stereotype, so it must be true.
The disk buffers make the operation cheap but not free, i.e. keeping the information cached is the right thing to do.
This looks like a vim switching mode mistake to me. Oh humans...
Our solution is to store environment-specific config data (such as DB name, username, password, etc.) in the Apache config:

SetEnv DB_USER=kermit
SetEnv DB_PASS=Shhh

And then connect to the DB using code such as:

mysql_connect(getenv('DB_NAME'), getenv('DB_USER'), getenv('DB_PASS'))

Environmental config data should never be stored in source code.
How did others feel about the iTunes link?

It started my iTunes as I clicked it (a bit frustrating), but then I thought it might be great for increasing the number of people who buy the app.
I'd like to know who else is planning on using .xxx?
This was a good post. #2 was the most annoying to me. I noticed that the main problem has to do with Chrome remembering your user behavior which affects your results.
The thing is, on joyofclojure.com, it says:

"[...]The Joy of Clojure can now be pre-ordered, which gives you access to the entire book as a PDF now, plus other formats including the printed book once they're available."

Which is misleading because you only get the pdf if it get pre-ordered FROM MANNING.

And, yes, you are right that I give a part of their profit to amazon, but I still give them money.

Maybe you are right that it is just "not nice" and not rage-worthy. Still, I don't like the idea of a company being "not nice" to someone giving them money.
That wouldn't have caught this though, this code wasn't even executed, just sent as plain text.
Honestly, that is not a ridiculous idea. If we remove the standardized testing, the community developed textbook would explode.

In many of my college classes I spend more time using wikipedia than my textbook.

Furthermore, I know many teachers who have written widely used (assigned reading in over 1k classes) who want their books to be available for a greatly reduced price if not all together for free. Unfortunately the publishers ban this and the writers must relent since the only way to get their book known is if it comes from a major publisher. They justify this mostly based on promotion costs, but this is not even close to their profit margins.

Books are expensive because there is little competition, particularly with k-12 schools, largely based on political lobbying.

Of course, we aren't likely to dissolve lobbyists anytime soon; but the idea of socially conscious startups is to dream big.
... and an Aeron chair!
Newer Macs use PCI-E for the SD card interface, so it could potentially work, though you'd need a very fast SD card sticking out the side of your Mac all the time.
I agree with you, but the problem is we will never know about the times when others may have found a bug, reported it and moved on. In this kind of situation, it's only the negative stories which will get out.
Static code analysis is nice to have, but at least they should have some form of automated testing.
Libya: French military jets on 'reconnaissance'
> Again though, PHP apps storing configuration info in PHP is a fairly common practice.

This isn't a problem with PHP. It's a problem with ANY app storing configuration options inside the actual language. It would be like storing vhost information in C and forcing you to recompile all of apache to get a new site up.

Yes, config options are easy to add to interpreted languages. I see it happen all the time, and not just in PHP. Perl, Python, Ruby.

The problem is that to change the config options, you are essentially changing what amounts to the application, and if you break your config, you break your application.

The standard way of storing config options in PHP is with .ini files. At least, in my circle. Sure for quick scripts, we throw it in the actual code, but whenever we have to manage more than a few config options, it get's moved out.

I realize I'm expanding on what you said a bit. =) I just want to make it clear that this isn't a PHP problem. It's a basic programming problem.
Does the person not use syntax highlighting? A missing <?php tag would cause the PHP code to be highlighted as HTML code which would look very strange to anyone who has edited a PHP file with a syntax-highlighting-enabled editor.
Does this "War for Talent" mean that I don't have a hope of acquiring talent through outsourcing? I just looked (briefly) at the Philippine job boards, and unless I'm doing something SEO heavy, there didn't seem to be too much there.
Do not store configuration in code. Store it in files that aren't part of the software. Store this file outside the web root.
Ugh. Probably something having to do with this:

https://github.com/github/github-services/blob/master/servic...

raise GitHub::ServiceConfigurationError, "jabber hook temporarily disabled"
A Political History of SF
Depends on the company and what they do but there is a lot of advantage to work at the same physical location at least some of the time. If this wasn't the case I think the market as a whole would have worked it out and you would see far less concentration to the one physical location.
I'm really beginning to wonder what the hell is going on at Tumblr. Constant downtime to where their down message is the new fail whale, cases of severe downtime with poor communication, and now this.

Hopefully the shape up. I'd have serious concerns even running a personal blog on there.
Here's my pet peeve that I don't see on the list: not giving me the results for what I searched for the first time around. For example, yesterday I searched for "OCUnit coverage" or something similar and Google said "showing results for 'JUnit coverage'". (I don't mind suggesting another search query, but I expect the first hit to assume that I didn't mistype.)
As a programmer, all I need is:

1. Money (to not have to worry about surviving with basic treats from time to time)

2. A challenge

3. A great team

4. Equity (to make the sacrifice of #1 be a bet that pays off over time to more than offset the choosing of the harder path with a tighter belt)
IRobot sending robots to Japan to help with nuclear crisis.
I just requested a refund for MEAP for "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja", that I ordered almost three years ago. I didn't expect it to take that long...
Good point.

Just like you'd want to have a well described (preferably automated) way to restore from backups, you should also have one for resetting all passwords. Such a process is also useful for protecting against disgruntled employees.
Great!

Also, I was wondering if you made those little arrows by hand? If so, you've got much more talent than me ;) By arrows are always pretty ugly.
yup, nobody cared...
A very good point
I like the design a lot (good job!), but I think you should work on the navigation.

It's needlessly confusing and doesn't feel right even after one understands how it works. I was about to suggest how to improve it technically (move everything into a sidebar-tree), but then realized that imho you should just scrap the hierarchical "community" concept altogether.

Why not adopt a tagging approach like Quora? That way stories can belong to multiple "communities" (tags) and users can filter according to their interests.

I think quora invented something very powerful here, a forum based on the same principle could very well become the next reddit.
Looks like PHP returns a 200 when it encounters a fatal error.

Edit: Here's a way to force 500 for fatal errors in PHP http://blog.kevburnsjr.com/php-fatal-error-500
no?

Bugs can arise when a system or code base is being used in a manner that was not originally envisioned by its author.

That's not a bug, that's something more akin to failure due to scope creep.
Actually, PHP returns a 200 when it encounters a fatal error.

This explains why it was indexed by Google.
And a funny fact:

For both of my comments, the score keep oscillating from +5 to -4. Which doesn't talk a lot because, if it continues like that, at the end, I will probably only have ~1 which won't give any clues about the opinion on HN-users. (i.e. people don't care about it vs half agree / half disagree!)
I meant in reference to the analogous hypothetical.

Tumblr isn't guilty of criminal negligence, but they are guilty of a very serious failing of basic security precautions. Luckily there are other layers of security at play preventing this from being a catastrophic disaster for tumblr. However, if a group of thieves break into your bank and drill into your vault you do not go home and rest easy because they only managed to drill through two feet of your vault's hardened steel and there was an entire 3 or 4 inches more. Less so if you'd done something dumb like leave the keys to the vault in a coffeeshop.
Yes it's the other sense of "allowed"

ie porn sites will be "enabled" to create and use a new .xxx domain rather than they will be "permitted" into it.
Someone mentioned e.g. ha.xxx last time this came up on HN. (That is, yesterday, when ICANN actually made the decision.)