skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: I wrote a book about the earthquake and made Branchrock Books
Since my friend introduced me to Hacker News, I've been hit with a flood of information about design, coding, entrepreneurship, and being independent. The "move fast" article on CFDY and the articles about 99-cent eBooks were especially inspiring. I knew I wanted to write an eBook about something and then use all of these new things I was learning to make a site to publicize the eBook, but I just didn't know what to write about.

Then Japan was hit by an earthquake.

I thought about writing an eBook about my experiences that day and talked about it with my friend Pat. He told me I should go for it. Of course I was nervous at first, afraid that it would look like I was trying to take advantage of a terrible situation. I'm not.

It took me about a week between blackouts and brownouts to write the book, design the cover, reformat and publish it on three major markets (Amazon, B&N, Lulu), and design/code the site (my first 960.gs project!). I could keep tweaking the site design and content, but I want to get this out there now or I'll be tweaking forever.

My book tells a good, solid story and has gotten fantastic reviews from my alpha readers. There's a lot of media coverage on various aspects of the quake: the nuclear plants, the tsunami effects, the future effects on the economy, etc., but I haven't seen much on how it's affecting individuals in Japan. Every day, people ask me what things are like here.

Enter: Shaken and Stirred. The story of my day on March 11, 2011 when the first earthquake hit. Available now for the Kindle, Nook, and PC (pdf).

http://www.branchrock.com
Looks interesting. I like the name a whole lot.
Clickable: http://www.branchrock.com
If there are no PHP files in the web root then what does your web site do?

Every block of PHP code must begin with '<?php', regardless of where it's located, or whether it's included from another file.

I do agree with you that this is a silly behaviour. But it's nothing to do with the web root.
Nothing, beyond economic incentives. The great developer can also move to Mumbai, Bangalore and earn $100k/year at a hedge fund, Google or Oracle. Top talent is not a lot cheaper than the US.

To clarify, "good developer", I meant a person you would trust to write CRUD apps.
There is, but you need to be at a certain karma threshold.
That TED talk is here, if anyone else is following: http://vodpod.com/watch/5736793-tedtalks-eli-pariser-beware-...
Sure there is, APC. But that aside, Linux won't read that file every time, it will end up living in the disk buffers that it maintains.
"Sequencing has gotten exponentially cheaper to the point that these types of projects are feasible (the paper you cite is actually a proof of concept for their metagenomics pipeline), that everyone is just sequencing this shit out of everything. "

Well that's exactly why I'm excited, but your phrasing makes it seem as if this is just a matter of course. Game changers in many fields often arise because some previously expensive resource becomes economically more accessible (cheaper). You make it sound like "The Model T Ford is just a low-hanging fruit of cheaper gasoline." Nothing is exciting if you pull that angle.

Regarding (1): Yes, and that "lack" is why I currently have a job (employed as a computer scientist helping analyze big data). If nothing was "lacking", analysis would be as easy as a biologist pushing a few buttons in a spreadsheet-like program, and nobody would need a computer scientist helping them.

Regarding (2): That's only a technical issue that is the main contributor to (1) -- were it not for short reads, analytics would be much easier.

Regarding (3): From some reports (can't confirm right now but can look for a citation if you're interested), I have seen exactly the opposite -- that the estimates of biological variation from metagenomic data are actually skewed towards higher diversity than expected. Could be due to errors in the pipeline, and is being worked on, but some of that variation could also be explaining legitimate biodiversity.
Well, based on the code that was dumped, it looks like they're using their own error handler which was ignoring display_errors (search for "Use of undefined constant" in the dump).
How to prevent a leak like Tumblr’s
Then, if you accidentally edit your front controller file so that it starts with 'i?php' instead of '<?php', it will get exposed.

This is what happened with Tumblr.
Wow, that's really great. Thanks for the insight!

Was this project done as a thesis paper or was there an alternative purpose for undertaking such a long project? I'm pretty impressed with the execution of your team.
How to prevent a leak like Tumblr's - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2343561
- Nope, in PHP you don't generally put code in the web root.

- PHP and generally all the frameworks based on PHP are strongly encouraging putting code outside of the web root. Just take a look at directory structures in Zend Framework (http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/learning.quickstart.crea...) or Symfony2 (http://symfony.com/doc/2.0/book/page_creation.html#the-direc...)

- ...and almost everyone that uses PHP professionaly does that.
Amateurish? Incompetent? It seems a bit extreme to make those generalizations because someone made a typo in a PHP file that managed to hit production.
>discovering a new way to think about the structure of space

Enquiry into the quantisation of space is hardly new.

From http://www.jstor.org/pss/187807:
"A solution of the Zeno paradoxes in terms of a discrete space is usually rejected on the basis of an argument formulated by Hermann Weyl, the so-called tile argument. This note shows that, given a set of reasonable assumptions for a discrete geometry, the Weyl argument does not apply. The crucial step is to stress the importance of the nonzero width of a line. The Pythagorean theorem is shown to hold for arbitrary right triangles."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno%27s_paradox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Weyl raised the "distance function problem" in respect of space comprising discrete parts
Jeremy's right -- publishing source documents is becoming a regular part of the process. DocumentCloud has accelerated that. At ProPublica we make a regular practice of it. Here's an index of documents we've published alongside stories:

http://www.propublica.org/documents

(Disclosure: I work at both ProPublica and DocumentCloud)
AMD says DirectX is hobbling PC graphics
The web has very little to do with this in my mind (other than making it even easier to link to sources). References to primary sources should be included whether the article is in digital or print form.

Poor science reporting may be worse these days than ever, but it is not unique to online content.
FTA : "If Google Ventures invests, the employee that referred the startup gets the $10,000 in cash."

Seems like a win-win-win for all 3 but hinges on one criteria -- How many startups does GV invest in ? Is this number expected to increase dramatically?

GV in one shot will increase the quality (current employees won't pitch crap) and quantity of investment opportunities its going to see.

Smart move GOOG
Throwing down a challenge in the preface. That's a great way to sell a book to developers.
The Forgotten Millions
This incubator states that they are going to target charter schools as test beds. I assume that means they are already creating contacts for interested schools.
One of my fears is that since some charter schools have agendas that vary greatly from publicly funded schools, E.G. religious charter schools
Even if they just put in the author, venue & volume/issue or, for annual venues, year, that will generally be enough information to find it without a full citation.
Maybe I went a little overboard with those words. However, it's not so much the typo; it's the fact that the typo caused passwords to be visible.
Please name at least 5 of them.
As someone who hangs around in the reddit dev and downtime IRC channels, several-hour outages do happen on a monthly basis, as well as loss of some features more e.g. commenting. Reading between the lines on each outage, it was due to building the site on shaky hardware foundations. It just wasn't explicitly mentioned until now.

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
Organisasi Ilegal, Negara Islam Indonesia (NII)
Heh, Mr. Wilson forget to mention that a primary qualifier for getting headhunter cold calls is quality/quantity of comments on HN.
Is part of the problem that a lot of professional media is from a print-oriented perspective, so that in the journalistic/editing mindset and initial target medium hyperlinking isn't possible?
Since all that really can be deferred from the dumped code is that someone made a typo in a globally included config file (whether it was outside of webroot or not can't really be determined). The obvious issue is that obviously there was no process for testing code prior to deployment. This could have been caught using a standard Dev/Stage/Production environment setup, or even a quick test prior to deployment to Production. Other possible ways to catch this is with proper Unit Testing (which would have broken when not a single service would work due to no config params coming through), or a proper Continuous Integration environment to handle all that.
I wonder if the 'i' has anything to do with vim
"The only solution I see to this is pre-commit syntax checking for committed PHP files."

How would that have helped here? The file was obviously still valid syntactically. Try it for yourself: create a PHP file that looks like

i?php
$config_data = array();

and run it through PHP's syntax check (php -l /path/to/file from the command line). It will verify that the script is valid. However, the content will still not be parsed as PHP.

One way to fix this is to store your configuration data in another file format (eg: YAML) outside of the document root. Since the configuration file doesn't try to be parsed as PHP, it can't be leaked in this way.
Looks like they're offering up a Macbook, a cinema display, a red Swingline stapler, and Dr. Pepper in the photo. #devporn
Another quick comment to solving the "selling to public schools" is community involvement. PTA groups often can play a powerful role in determining the agenda of the schools. Too often they stop at bake sales for carnivals, but in some cases they can be very effective in lobbying for change.
If one accepts that errors like these happen, I guess it would be a good idea to have an automated way to quickly change passwords on all the services that are used. Does anyone have some citations for literature on how to deal with that?
English is not my first language but:
"So nobody could be more surprised than I that a Lisp dialect ..."
shouldn't it be "than ME"
Spin refers to both intrinsic spin angular momentum and orbital angular momentum, http://books.google.com/books?id=3_7uriPX028C&lpg=PA31&#....

I think of intrinsic spin in part as being an ability to impart an angular momentum (magnets, how do they work!?), though I'm not sure how well that really works in practise it's just my mental model. Also it's interesting to speculate about charge-spin separation in electrons (spinons, holons).

I have a pet (completely unworked) hypothesis that spin somehow exists across dimensions we experience and other dimensions - that the property could be a coupling with a "spining" (or spin) particle in a dimension outside Minkowski spacetime.
Makes me wonder if Quora was set up for continuous deployment from the beginning? The systems used for this type of thing (tracking pushes, tests, start/end times etc) always seem to be highly custom-built. I imagine it'd be a lot easier to build this as you build you site from the ground up, rather than retrofitting it in afterwards.
I don't recall the details of a nice article I read a few years ago mainly about RAM and ECC but as storage size grows, the probability for any one of its bits to flick "by itself" raises. Data reliability and self-correction becomes an essential part of storage.

I've played a bit with ZFS myself and really enjoyed it. It's like the sum of everything we learned about filesystems and storage and previously used to shoehorn into various historical filesystems, only this time it's a clean and simple implementation.
That custom error handler was never set, because the code you see above never even executed. The reason was, like said many times already, a miss-typed opening PHP tag, which tells PHP where PHP code is. If that tag is missing or miss-typed the code is just returned to the browser like HTML.

The point is that no server configuration can save you from an error like this.
I used to teach English to young kids in Korea about ten years ago. The curriculum was set by the school, and a common task was doing word search puzzles. Some students were adept at finding words, and many other students would try to get through the task as quickly as possible by cheating off of them. Aside from the obvious strategy of rule enforcement, one way to discourage cheating is to simply give each student a different puzzle. The words to find are the same, but the arrangement of letters is different for each student.

It is trivial to write a program to generate word search puzzles, so I decided to make the problem more interesting by adding a difficulty parameter. I could generate puzzles with a range of difficulty by varying the following factors:

* direction -- more difficult puzzles have answers in diagonal and/or reverse directions

* density -- more difficult puzzles do not necessarily have the answers uniformly distributed in the grid but can have dense groupings

* dummy words -- since some students search for any words in the grid, you can fill it with words that are not actually target words to make the task more difficult

* decoys -- you can fill the grid with slight deviations of target words in order to make finding the actual target more difficult
Again though, PHP apps storing configuration info in PHP is a fairly common practice. If that's the way you store that information, any typo that takes your configuration file out of "PHP mode" is going to leak data. Before today, I'm sure a lot of PHP coders didn't consider that when dealing with configuration files for applications: they chose to design that way because it's simple to deal with.
Yeah, my solution is to have a separate config file too but have a config file solely for password and never check that file into the repository.

Of course whenever someone does a fresh pull of the project, that is one file that they'd have to create for themselves. (So this is documented very clearly.)

It's minor inconvenience but it solves the problems like this.
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.a...
It seems like what you're doing is Reddit + some small changes. Wouldn't it be best to just fork Reddit's code base? (Unless you want to keep your code closed source, of course.)
Ask HN: Any good Node.js books?
RSA Breach and What You Can Do Right Now
I am not sure if that means that our notion of _time_ is completely broken. You're assuming an electron is a sphere, that goes like a tennis ball through one slit, then goes back in time through another slit to interfere with itself.

In Quantum Mechanics, there is no such thing as a _particle_ taking _this single path_. There is a continuum---that of the probability distribution of the position of the particle in a region of space, by the very axioms of QM. By definition, the statement "an electron exists here" has no meaning in QM.
Until someone types i?php when when creating the file ;)

Edit: Unless of course you're using YAML or some other representation rather than a pure PHP file.
Pornography Sites Will Be Allowed to Use .XXX Addresses
Off course, but in this case, passwords would only be exposed if the config file had a miss-typed opening PHP tag. If "test.php" had it, you wouldn't be able to see the contents of "test2.php".
Yes, you are right. And in this exact case they (mis-)edited the file, that contained passwords (i.e. test2.php in my improvised example).
The most important things for me as a developer:

- Money (I have a family to care about)

- 'Interestingness' of the job: does it require creativity? Do I have ownership? Can I start things from scratch, or do I have to maintain an ugly overcomplicated buggy code full of EntrpriseEntiytyManagerConfigurationFactoryFacadeIntefaceBean-s created without any philosophy behind?

Hardware setup is not that important for me. Never was.

Also there is no war for talent yet. Firms in Silicon Valley did not realize yet that there is talent in other parts of the world for much cheaper than in Sillicon Valley. When the real war will begin, I hope we will gain access to better opportunities here in the east than now. (Now they mostly resort to the east if some noncreative work should be done. (So called 'offshoring'.))
use emacs, not vi :-P
I suggest you watch "Waiting for Superman" where they address the problems teachers face with being given merit based pay, which they could reinvest in product purchase.
A quick solution for this is to create a localized version of craigslist specific to teachers where they can request donations of items/funds for specific projects.
I tried to implement this many years back with a focus on computer donations, but the school administration shot it down because they feared the increase cost of their incompetent IT staff supporting multiple hardware formats, despite them often being nearly new technology.
I did have teachers in Highschool who were able to build amazing labs based on applying for grants. Unfortunately these grants were not widely known about among teachers and they had no knowledge on how to write a good grant request. My HS physics lab actually exceeded the quality of the lab I used at university (UT at Austin). I was able to skip every literally single class, with exceptions of tests, and ended with a final score in the top 5% of the class.
Sure but you will expose only that line, which tells you almost nothing.
That's the part that gets me: the particle seemingly interacting with itself. How do you know that it is indeed the same particle interacting with itself??!!
I worked for a company that used remote instances to do development, the latency was terrible and everything took much longer to get done. We eventually switched to local dev environments and saw a big boost in productivity.

the 13inch macbook pro also surprised me, what about when you want to work away from the desk with the 30inch monitor?
Is the "to view a more specific community" your own writing or a font?! If it's a font, may I know which one it is? Thanks
Not necessarily. Makes sense for syntax check to only check between php tags.

Root of the issue is that by default php outputs anything not between php tags to the browser.

Perhaps some sort of buffer control at the top most include can disable output to browser until a later time. That's pretty much how templating systems work except they don't disable output afaik thus leaving possibility of this open.
Sure, but if they'd made just a tiny effort to test their code before releasing it they'd have caught that bug instantly. We're not talking about time-consuming tests here - we talking about loading the page in the browser once. If the PHP code is showing, you're doing it wrong.
Sure, I was replying for this hypothetical situation that you guys ware discussing, where they would store passwords in a different file outside of webroot ...
Oh, totally. This should have been caught very quickly.
the node API is not yet stable so a node.js book would date to quickly. pure js books are a better bet. I love Javascript patterns by Stoyan Stefanov. There are two other good Javascript books.
Wow, you're right. I sort of assumed it would pick up on an error like this.
Turn Your iPad 1 or 2 into an Interactive Whiteboard
Sure! http://www.dafont.com/a-safe-place-to-fall.font
If travelling backwards in time is possible, Novikov's Self Consistency Principle is a neat explanation of how the Grandfather Paradox may be avoided: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox#Novikov_sel....

Basically, the idea is that if you are alive and capable of travelling backwards in time to attempt (directly or indirectly) your own murder, then your attempt has to fail by virtue of the fact that you're alive in the present. There's a nice thought experiment with a billiard ball here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_princi...
Obviously this is a post begging for counter-examples, but I'll refer to Joel Spolsky's strategy letter "Ben and Jerry's versus Amazon" for a better articulation of how there are many roads to a billion dollars: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html Some markets just lend themselves to land-grabs.
You know, back in the 70s, there was the concept of a "computer bureau", these would be some people who had a mainframe and you would rent time on it by the hour, so if you had a payroll run, or a simulation, or whatever, you would upload it to them via a modem (or courier them the punchcards!), run it there, download the results (or get them delivered printed out). Early BBSs and MUDs often ran in spare capacity on these mainframes.

There ain't nothin' new under the sun...
So, a few things.

No Facebook login? I know you're probably still working on things, but that seems kind of big. I know there are pros and cons to using a universal login (specifically marrying yourself to FB), but because you've pitched this as "for the rest of the world," I don't see much sense in it not being an option.

24 hour time isn't necessarily confusing, but not UX friendly.

I tried to add an event and received Rails' "We're sorry..." just btw.

I really like the city-centric reddit idea. But that already kinda exists...on reddit.

I dunno—it's so much the people that make HN what it is...it's hard.
That's exactly right. I did a similar quiz for my current job, and now I administer something similar when I look for new hires. It's amazing how many people with solid-looking resumes flub basic questions once you ask to see actual code they wrote.
Twitter: Building a business-critical tool, then breaking it
A Report Card on Web 2 and the App Economy
Because even when you fire electrons one at a time through 2 slits, the same wave pattern is seen to emerge. It appears as though a single electron explores every one of its options before it chooses a single route. The exploration process seems to leave footprints in a universe we can't see which causes the electron to behave strangely.
Innovative Intative by industries, entrepreneur, Gov etc.
Bill Maris, Davide Krane, google ventures, Jobfairs, Nycstartup, Startup America, startup referral, Techcrunch, Whitehous, willager.
It physically can't: without the opening PHP tag the parser just thinks the entire file is HTML to be outputted to the browser, which is still a valid PHP file. ;)
Just a word.. not that it is really relevant but I wanted to share this with fellow hackers. To encourage the Clojure community/language, I've pre-ordered the book Joy of Clojure on amazon. On the book's website, it is clearly stated that you also get a free pdf of the book before the release date. So, I was pretty enthusiastic about starting to read the book.

But then, I find out that you only get the pdf if you ordered from manning.. So, I email manning saying that had I know about the "order at manning instead of amazon", I really would have bought it there and that I'd be more then happy to blog about "Joy of Clojure" and give a link to manning's order web page.

So, then, I receive an email saying (summarized in my word): "Fu, it's your problem, next time buy it at manning, not amazon".

It really frustrated me.. I mean, isn't it the best way to demolish someone's best intention? I just feel like never ever buying anything from manning; never ever linking anything to their website, and spread the word about that story.

Am I over-reacting? What's your thought on that, fellow HN-users?
They have fixed this in the most recent iOS update. In-app purchases will always ask for passwords now.