skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks so much for re-posting this Tony. This was a really hard decision but once we made it, there's no turning back. I hope everyone can benefit from our logic and thoughts behind our pivot, and the 10 questions listed in the post.

Happy to discuss more here too!
Seems like a CYA kind of policy.
We've been using SoundManager 2 on quizlet.com for playing audio clips. We're not just playing long music clips in the background, so it's essential to have all the precise APIs for preloading, playing, and firing callbacks when sound is done playing. It handles all the browser deficiencies very elegantly, either with HTML5 or flash. Also, it's just 10k of js (gzipped) so it's pretty lightweight.

link: http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
I don't get it. What's the difference between using Square, swiping a customer's credit card and storing the data, or using a POS system, swiping a customer's CC and storing the data from that? A lot of those packages consist of a windows/mac machine and a simple reader, you could write a kernel module or similar to do just that. Is it that Square advertises as being secure?
No, reflections can have any phase, so you can't possibly cancel them out with a fixed geometry. But given the 1/r^2 falloff, unless the reflections are from very nearby, they will be a lot weaker than the direct path.
> Are you serious?

Very, and I will dig my heels in on this. For the record, your point would have been just as clear without this assertion that my point is stupid.

> The victim in this scenario is HANDING THEIR CREDIT CARD TO THE ATTACKER. That's game over. It doesn't matter whether the attacker has a Square, a VeriFone device, or a piece of paper for writing down the card number. If you hand your credit card to someone malicious, they can figure out how to do bad things with it.

So everybody should just stop doing security, since people will figure out ways around it? Why bother? The Square device, as another commenter points out elsewhere in this thread, sets the expectation of a legitimate transaction. It's pushed, it's marketed, it's being set as the new brand of credit card processing.

As such, Square have a responsibility to make sure that their products do not make skimming easier. And guess what? VeriFone found a way to skim, easily, with their product.

This whole "but you can do it on the black market for $20!" argument is, pardon the Latin, fucking ridiculous. I seriously can't believe there are people in this thread, who identify themselves as IT specialists, siding with Square because credit card processing is a lost cause. Internet Explorer 6 is pretty much a lost cause for Web exploits. Does that mean the rest of the browsers should not protect against Web exploits? This argument makes absolutely no sense. Who cares what others are doing? Do your product right.

> I'm a big fan of Square, but it's important to remember that their solution doesn't remove the traditional risks of credit card usage.

True. But there is NO REASON to make the vector EASIER. PERIOD. Simply because there are real risks with the vector means that we should take strides to make the vector harder.
the poor article is not so surprising to me.
When I see information linked to Fastcompany I usually take a step back. Reading all kind of tech magazines and articles I noticed they offer a lot of flashy headlines, with sometimes little meat under the skin. I stopped this subscription.
Drink Cold Water to Burn Calories
StartupBus 2011 Live Valuations
The way I think of it is "is this function call (including arguments) the last item on the line". If the answer is yes, you can drop the parens otherwise you have to keep them. E.g.

foo bar baz 2 # is foo(bar(baz(2)))
foo bar baz(), 2 # is foo(bar(baz(),2))
foo bar().baz 2 # is foo(bar().baz(2))

In every case, the foo is the last item on the line. In the second there's an argument after the call to baz() so it's not the last thing on the line and needs parens. In the third, baz is being chained off bar so bar is not the last thing on the line and needs parens. In general I'd do all the parens except maybe the ones for foo in the second and third cases simply because it takes a minute to figure out where the calls get split when you re-read the code.

I tend to drop the call parens in situations the following:

# DSLish things
task 'foo', depends: ['bar']

# Callback/lambda taking things
xhr_get url, ->
stop_animation()

That actually covers a fairly wide set of use cases for me since I tend to write DSLish/callback code but for things like `add(2,2)` I write in the parens regardless of position.
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/instruments.html
In theory, it should be possible to enumerate your SQL queries ahead of time rather than ever generating one on the fly. In practice, that could be a huge pain of the O(2^n) variety, depending on the application type.
I would just say make sure she knows she is loved and appreciated. Its hard because all the attention will be on the baby from you, from her, and from anyone else that comes around.

You know her best so make some special time for you and her. For my wife and myself we found special time during the odd hours of the night when baby was feeding to just sit and talk and be together even though we were exhausted.

It really is a magical time and sharing it together makes it even better.
VeriFone calls out Square for 'gaping security hole'
I don't see how. Wouldn't it increase your liability risk? That's more like OYA :-)
GameSalad’s new CEO wants everyone to be iPhone game developers
I can't agree with this more. However, whenever I refuse to do work I get stamped on the forehead with "lazy". For example, I figure out that the homework in a class is 25% the grade but there are 25 of them, so each is worth 1%. I understand the topic so I figure that it's a waste of my 4 hours to do the work for 1% extra. Bam, "you're so lazy".
Google: Xoom Still Weak, Says Global Equities; Honeycomb A Mess
Salesforce-for-Marketing Startup Raises $32 Million
As someone who hates IE, I must say that I'm actually really looking forward to IE9. The "worst" of the major browsers just closed the gap (and surpassed?) with fast JavaScript and gpu acceleration.

Hopefully, there's more to come.
IE 9 launches officially on March 14th
It isn't illegal, but it doesn't seem moral during a recession either.
Well, sabayon, the binary derivative, is stuck in the top 6 of distrowatch for a while. I don't think things are going downhill there. Competing with debian derivatives is no joke, considering that the tech skill required to adopt the distro is far higher. Beating Arch on a live CD :)
I thought about that too, so I had checked what ACM said:

"It is given to an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field"

I think his work with GNU has been one of the most important technical contributions to the community we've seen.

On a non-technical note, his push for free software has also been incredibly influential for the community. While I disagree with a lot of ideology and in particular the ideology behind the GPL personally, I think the world is generally better for it.
One big benefit of the pivot is now your addressable customer base may have just significantly expanded. Looking forward to seeing if this becomes another Socialmedian.
Sweden may soon exchange postage stamps for SMS codes
The Dark Side of Medical Globalization
A Mathematical Definition of Lisp
Possible answer: the Square device is free to anybody that wants one.
Let it crash: Compute Grid with Cloudy Akka
Brand new lawyers are really terrible in this regard. Out of the young lawyers I know, two are really in it because they love the law and justice. The other 95%+ are in it for money and prestige, not because they actually like doing the job.

If he's in the latter group, what he heard was "You've worked like a dog in school and now you're going to have to work 80+ hour weeks to make half as much as I do." In contrast, he's probably able to rationalize the hedge fund guy as a lottery-type combination of talent, ridiculously hard work, and luck.
Steve wasn't even involved in most of those. Taligent, Pippin, 20th Anniversary Macintosh, Mac Portable, and Newton all happened after he left in 1985. Apple III wasn't Steve's project--and Steve wasn't the head of Apple at the time, either. That leaves the Lisa, a project Steve Jobs was forced out of a year before it was released, and the Motorola ROKR, which was designed and released by a separate company entirely.

On the other hand, there was the NeXT Cube, the Power Mac G4 Cube, Mobile Me, and the Apple TV. But out of those, the NeXT Cube is the only real failure Steve ever bet the company on. Meanwhile, Mobile Me and the Apple TV are projects Apple is at least working on improving.
Is it true that it won't work on Windows XP? I know XP is like a decade old, and I really don't wanna start an upgrade-your-browser-you-noob flamefest, but it seems kinda lame to exclude the people still on XP from having a modern browser and I can't figure out what the rationale might be for that.
Age of Indecisiveness (and how to move beyond)
Chrome 10 brings Flash sandboxing and new settings UI
It may not be new or unique, but I didn't know sleep was that important.

And no, I'm not tired.
Depending on which side Neptune & Voyager is on, the Earth might be closer than Neptune... ;-)
For you: http://i.imgur.com/8Qr0Y.jpg
Agree Louis. It constantly frustrated us with fab.com that we were building really cool product that most of our friends would never use. Hopefully that will change with the new focus!
Thank god they finally got rid of that Silverlight crap for those channel9 videos.

It still doesn't work in Firefox4 though. Not sure if I'm surprised.
Aside from the part where a vendor is required to keep your card number for refunds...

Square (as I see it) is a two part solution: hardware to read your card and software to handle the transaction. The hardware is talking to whatever software is running. As a customer, you hope that software is legit, but you never know. How is this any different from handing your card to anyone else?

USB card readers aren't black market by any means. This is how most POS devices read credit cards. It used to just be straight serial connections. It seems you're under the false assumption that the hardware path from your card to the software was ever secure.

If Verifone really cared about a completely protected path for card numbers, they would disallow all USB card readers and require a secured path from reader to their clearing house. Unfortunately, that would remove credit card processing for many (all?) vendors.

They are blaming Square for a security "flaw" that is present in their own system.
‘Viagra for your communications’ Meshin launches Android app at SXSW
that will be a sad day, another junk launched :(
Have you used a language with strong static checking? It might change your mind about the central role of testing. I'm not saying tests are never necessary in such languages, but you can expect to spend orders of magnitude less time thinking about them.

Random guesses are a poor substitute for logical certainty.
How to Spot a Liar (Infograph)
They didn't, it still uses Silverlight if Silverlight is installed. It just falls back to other stuff now.
http://psd2html.com has given me good results in the past. Worth it? Depends on how much you value your time.
How many doctors are actually weeded out after they get to their residency, though? First year of med school, absolutely. Residency is a bit late.
Adobe Gives Devs Access to Wallaby Flash-to-HTML5 Converter
It used to demand that Silverlight be installed before playing anything. It no longer does, thankfully. That's what I meant.

EDIT: Argh, didn't take long to find an "install Silverlight" while browsing through the HTML5 demos site:

http://html5labs.cloudapp.net/WebSockets/ChatDemo/wsdemo.htm...

Why do they keep doing this?
Haven't checked it yet, but calculating on the server, in particular with Python as a macro language, sounds like a can of worms: doesn't it make very easy for any malicious user to DoS your server?
FAQ: Some individual features that Jetpack provides will be free, but others in the future may require payment.
If they're selling the hardware at loss, they may turn profit once sales of hardware increase. Economies of scale == cheaper components, cheaper labor, cheaper distribution. Initial development costs spread over more units. At some point network effect and referrals kick in.
The submitted article here specifically examines claims about surgical treatment for multiple sclerosis, previously discussed on HN 471 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956770

and again 332 days ago (submitted by pg).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257229
There's never been a good reason publicly stated, but I imagine they don't want to be seeing as supporting their decade-old OS.

Chrome, Firefox and Safari have no problem doing it, so it's very likely a political decision.

I think Microsoft has some responsibility to update IE6 on XP, given that they left it out on the market so long and caused an incalculable amount of time to be lost developing for it while the rest of the worst was trying to move on.
I'd argue against a law like this (if it isn't already illegal). Like most discrimination laws it would be complete unenforceable. Since an employer can not hire you for any other reason. They can claim they didn't hire you because you have a mustache (completely legal) when really it was because you were previously unemployed.

Given that if I were unemployed I think I'd prefer employers who have no intention of hiring me not waste my time with an interview.
That URL reminds me of The King's Speech.
The idea isn't that the prospective candidate isn't loyal. As the theory has been described to me, a candidate who is still employed after the bloodbath has been able to successfully navigate the "don't get fired because you're now redundant" waters and remain "in the game." Allegedly this means that the person is one or more of: a) valuable; b) competent; c) a good salesperson of his or her worth. (That's the way the theory goes, at least; I'm sure we can all think of plenty more reasons why someone remains employed that are not at all desirable for future employers)

Regardless, being laid off in a down economy means "you suck" to some people and, since everyone professes to only wants the "top 10%," that naturally excludes the unemployed. It's akin to being arrested: You wouldn't have been arrested (fired) if you weren't guilty (worthless as an employee).

For the record, I strongly disagree with this "theory," but that's how it's been explained to me from two small business owners.
It's wrong to discriminate on any basis other than an applicant's ability to carry out a post.

There is no definitive or provable correlation between employment status and ability.
No gradients, no transforms, no history. That's just off the top of my head with the stuff I already use.
IP Address Information to Know
Here's something else along the same lines:

http://www.typetester.org/
What a lazy weed-out policy.

As an anecdote, when I took my current job in October 2010, I was the only currently working applicant out of hundreds or so to apply for the job, and I'm the one who got it.
"nobody was saying much to me"

"I didn't bother to read the irc spec, I just watched the real-world traffic and used that as a spec"

"no code review, not even any conversation about how I'd implemented things"

Is this really the work environment we want to idolize?
I'm fond of Vista Smoky Bacon edition myself: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/2/2/
"SEO is not quality. It's popularity"

Search Engines' goals are (probably) to show people the way to the "best content". Whilst they use "popularity" as a metric at the moment, we don't know how that will change. As they adjust their algorithms they will find more ingenious ways of finding "the best content" (I can't define that), making so called "optimizations" useless.

Your thought experiment works, but only in the absence of perfect (or futuristic) search engines. If Google's NLP power massively increased, and they'd indexed your site, I'm sure it would be found, even if no one had linked to it. It's the search engine's job to find it. Current methods of SEO are violating the encapsulation we usually have around the search engine (a black box function string -> URL[]). SEO is looking into how SEs work and trying to game the system. That's fine, but as SEs improves SEO will move more towards "Content is King".
I should have phrased it differently as I have no familiarity with their margins. I just meant that I'm sure they priced it with future book sale revenue in mind.
I think you are taking what he said in the wrong way. The way I read it, he is not saying Nigerian banks are bad (or anything about the banks at all really). What he is saying is that he is promising his users that their money isn't going from them to a 419 scammer THEN into the Nigerian banks.
I've just discovered another serious security hole! When you hand your credit card to a waiter, they can see the credit card number totally unencrypted with their eyes! Clearly the solution is to blind all waiters.

The truth is credit card "security" is a bad joke. The only real defense these days is the fact that every payment processor has extremely sensitive fraudulent transaction detection systems because of the consumer protection laws that put fraud liability on the card issuer instead of the consumer. The whole system is a relic from the days before the internet and the only way to fix it is to replace it with something better like NFC.
That will make it harder for large companies in web development. Still using XP...
if you don't like it, don't use it. But please don't be sad. Hope you are not depending on ie's rendering engine.
I agree. The question which ought to be answered is "Is it optimal for us to preferentially hire the employed?" Frankly, the answer to that question ought to be left to each individual employer and left out of the law entirely.
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Logged in to check the area I live only to find out that no places deliver to me. Given the plethora of places that do, I hope their funding goes a long way towards changing that.
Everybody thinks they are above average. "I can exceed the speed limits, because I am an excellent driver." "I need less sleep than the average person."
Another possible answer: the square device is targeted at merchants with no permanent physical location thus lowering the barrier to entry for thieves.
I agree, but good luck getting every mom-and-pop merchant in the entire world to redo their POS. Moving is going to take a long time.
$$ Apple / HP laptop price comparison
I love my macs (MBP13, Pro tower) and my HP Envy 17, but $1,255 more for a MBP is insane.

http://bit.ly/ffnFJ7
OOT: It's a long-standing design decision (I've seen it described as such; don't currently have the link) not to implement MRU (most recently used) order for Ctrl-Tab switching.

In other browsers, I used that all the time. When looking for a solution for Chrome, I found many other people miss it, as well. As of v5 or v6, IIRC, default key bindings cannot be overridden (for security), so an extension cannot solve this.

Just mentioning again, in case any Chrome developers are passing by and have just had a big jolt of caffeine, making them temporarily more agreeable. ;-)

EDIT: To clarify, I think it would make a good -- even if they are rare in Chrome -- selectable option; keep the default as it is.
A person's ability to survive a culling, isn't usually the objective that the person was initially hired to achieve.

It's perfectly reasonable that someone could be a very skilled ______ (gardener, banker, coder, nurse, chef, accountant etc.) and not be very skilled at office politics. It's perfectly reasonable that a person might have just suffered bad luck.
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> For at least the last 15 years, there has been no central way to upgrade user software on Microsoft Windows.

For most of the last 15 years, most people installed their software by sliding shiny round things into their computer.

> The "mobile" OS space is consistently more user-friendly than the desktop space.

Unless you want to print something. Mobile OS's are considerably more limited, which with very little effort makes them much more user-friendly. A pocket calculator is also consistently more user-friendly than a smartphone.

> The automatic software updates was merely an example to show where "mobile" excels and "desktop" fails.

But that's actually such an easy problem to solve. Mobile operating systems (and, in my cases Linux in general) are very bad at solving the hard yet common problems -- like seamlessly printing documents or working with arbitrary hardware and software.

I agree that there will be a shift to "mobile" OS style on computers -- it's already happening with Mac OS X and the Mac App store. No doubt Microsoft is already planning a UI for Windows that is also much more limited and they are certainly working on an app store. Taking a mobile OS and making it work on a PC is much more difficult than taking an existing desktop OS and making it function more like a mobile OS.
Bitcoin network reaches size half that of Tianhe-1A, quarter of FoldingHome
Seems silly to write, "Move Over Apple, My Tablet Cost $200" and then spend a couple of paragraphs writing about what it is lacking compared to an iPad, Xoom, etc. Doesn't seem "Move Over Apple"-worthy.
QBN is great for industry gossip and trends - lots of high profile designers and a healthy sense of elitism.

Just don't ask what it stands for...

Another good one is http://www.typophile.com/
Do you have good face memory? Try the Cambridge Face Memory Test
My question is, just like in socket.io, why not fall back to flash audio when required?
Space Shuttles For Good Home - NASA Mission
Offtopic: The title of the article sounds interesting, but WOW I can't read text where every fifth word is bold.
Lack of HTML5 history is a big disappointment. This would have been a game-changer for the web - no more #! workarounds.
Why do people even need to say they have been unemployed? I have been a freelance web developer for the last few years plus, that's job experience. I keep myself very busy, but I'm not sure a potential employer would be able to tell the difference if you were just creating a business and job position for little more reason that serving as resume gap filler. To make it look as legit is possible you could even create a business entity other than a sole proprietorship (though that would cost you more money, maybe not good for unemployed.) However, it would be a good idea to come up with a real business that you could do cheaply and at least use that as something to give you hope and take up some of your idle time.
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I've done a lot of SEO and this really nails it. But my own form of the very most important rule of SEO is slightly different.

It is, "Build links to content that people will want to link to."

The reason for this different wording is that in my experience, you can have highly linkable material, but without a critical mass of attention, it will get limited results.