skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It used to be that Danish police would tell the radio stations where they would conduct station people with radar guns to check for people driving too fast.

Since the goal was to prevent speeding, it didn't matter if they slowed down because they wanted to avoid a ticket so long as they slowed down.

These days they don't do so anymore because it is a nice way to pad government coffers, but it would be nice to build such an app.
Legal fees are negotiable. Next time ask them to do it for a flat fee of $5,000!
>"it seemed a bit trite."

And so it goes.
Make Yelp a Part of Your Social Strategy
How do you advertise it? Or just SEO?
Whenever somebody says that they love something about firefox 4 are you going to reply like that?

Congrats on chrome, but berfore they did it there already was tab mix plus and faviconize extensions which had this concept.

Yeah, everybody copies the good stuff, that's what good about competition. Don't be mean and ironic with useless information on other people's positive comments.

Both are great software, there is no need to fight over and be always looking for the fight
No, but in Safari I'm seeing the content column below the sidebar column.
If you look at some of the big investment banks and hedge funds, they won't bother refactoring; they'll just throwaway and re-write.

Their architecture is designed to be really modular and very loosely coupled. So you there is little value lost in throwing away and re-writing (ie. You won't throw stuff away thats working fine with the studd you want to re-write).
I think that the essence of being a coder is being willing to solve, with absolute precision and certainty, a problem that is at first glance poorly defined and/or seemingly difficult or impossible.

So, with that definition, you've got to not only be curious, but also tenacious in the pursuit of solutions.

If you're the type of person who is satisfied with just pressing a button and having something work, and have never paused to wonder about the why, then programming is not for you.
Why The Celebrity Entrepreneur Is Here To Stay
> You don't see that many states declaring war on the United States because of Guantanamo or the immoral treatment of Bradley Manning.

Are you equating those actions to Gaddafi's proclamation that he would weed out rebels 'House by house, room by room' in Benghazi? Or would you accept that in the real world there are shades of grey?
The OP claimed that he procured a reference that attested to his "hard-workingness". It's perfectly ok to be a smart worker, and I don't disagree with your point. My point of contention is with the abuse of the reference system - what value does the reference system have if you simply ask for (and receive) character attributes you do not possess?

So basically he was admitted on traditional merit, by misleading application reviewers.
And, when you booted into GNU/Linux, you also had a web browser, chat programs, games, etc. The possibilities for distractions are numerous. Contrast that to a BASIC prompt. If you go to your computer to learn BASIC, as long as you are sitting in front of the computer and actively staring at it, you're either going to:

a) get bored as hell by doing nothing
b) type some stuff in from your magazine and execute
(thereby learning "something" along the way because of
typos, pattern recognition, etc. (of course you'll /then/ get
distracted, but you had to work a bit)
c) write a program from scratch by exploration, or need.
Why not start but putting up a simple splash page advertising the fact that you are willing to sell the domain along with a method of contacting you?
It really differs between universities. In some universities, there isn't a difference between BA and BS, while in others, there are big differences. And in some British universities (like the one I attend), the only choice is BA in computer science.
code coverage numbers are ridiculously stupid.

I know you aren't attacking me. I realize that for this simple method, the code coverage is, well, very good (perhaps to a point of being bad). This is an contrived example to showcase the implication of using mocks versus stubs though....or more abstractly to show the difference, and the different way to test, behaviors vs implementation logic. Whether these always have to be tested, I agree is worthwhile to talk about.

I don't wanna become the "Programming, Motherfucker" example of what's wrong with software development :)
Yeah I guess it depends how you define "hard work". Certainly spending hours reading math books and programming is some sort of work.
Corporate fool here.

I take issue with the use of "derogatory". I would be ecstatic if I could bootstrap a startup into providing myself with $100k+ per year, with no potential for substantial growth from there.

My impression was that the term also strongly implied that the business owner had the freedom of spending their time how they liked. I have a friend who lives relatively comfortably and does freelance development. If he wants to work 16 hours one day on a cool project and take a long weekend for some biking or hiking, he can. He isn't going to be a rich, rich man in terms of money anytime soon, but he is not wanting of much, either. He is happy, satisfied, locally respected, relatively stress free and content. That sounds like a lifestyle I would enjoy.
And it was well over 1 USD at one point (the first time the subject really blew up on HN).
Just for debate sake (because I tend to feel as you do) letm e take the other side (although we could be arguing semantics around the world simple.... so leaving that aside)

Is making a web page simple? Yes.
Is making a web page do cool stuff simple? Yes. And it's way cooler than the logo and basic (and worse) of my youth.

IS "web development" simple? Not in the slightest, as a generalization.

The web is the UI component of an application. That application could be as complex as any other - but instead of a simple visual toolkit for our GUI, we have to understand a bundle of technologies that is constantly changing (HTML, CSS, JS), plus the end user platform (browser) and all it's quirks.... now throw mobile in,now throw in that some understanding of the network itself is required.

Thing are more open now, information is more readily available, and there is certainly a lot to choose from.

Further, there's the audience - you can now publish your apps to the world immediately, you don't need to get recognized and published on paper or through a publisher. So a simple, silly little game hacked up in javascript/html5 by a kid (yay kid! You did more than I did at you age, keep it up!) has more impact and visibility than did similar feats by similar kids back in the 8-bit days when they figured out how to make my CRT do things God didn't intend it to do all for my amusement.
> I had to read out of scrappy library copies of Byte and Compute magazine. There were hours of trial and error.

Funny, I look back on the same experience fondly, except it was assembly on an 8088. The "a-ha" moments were exhilirating.
Dropbox + Condor = DropAndCompute -- High-Throughput Computing Made Easy
I see your point.
I was keeping in mind this comment - "Just to test this out, if anyone is staying quiet about their project for fear of attracting competition, could they please reply to this comment and say so? Don't worry, your silence is totally understandable :)" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358309

After reading that comment, I felt a simple yes/no answer seemed a viable answer (at least to me). I agree though, that this response would detract from the general trend and usefulness. (Although getting a neg score seems a bit harsh). Thanks for the response.
I agree.
Also if a business seems to be 'lifestyle business' at a moment (whathever this means) it does not necessarily mean that it cannot grow huge. (E.g.: Ikea, Microsoft)
A stock is backed by companies' performance, I think.
Thanks. Currently it relies on labels that the user applies on the discussion in their inbox, but we're extending Fetch Rules to be sensitive to conditions similar to what you define in a gmail label, and more. (like, whenever a certain person discusses anything with a person from a specific domain or not from a specific domain, fetch the discussion)
What about an app "curing shyness"? Would you expect a peer reviewed evidence of its efficacy?

IMVHO that's a ridiculous standard for a lifestyle app.
Ive been looking into the addons and both of them have the same update date, whats the difference? they look the same to me (I havent installed both of them since vimperator works well :P )
A century of quantum physics and people are still talking about the deterministic universe. Old ideas die hard.

Not to say that quantum randomness really counts as "free will" either. I'm not exactly sure how you would define it.
"you should never blame the victim of a crime just because the victim didn't take adequate steps to defend themselves."

This reasoning is not applicable when the victim is a corporation who gives implicit or explicit guarantees to their customers about security. Your example should be: if you stored your stuff at a paid storage facility and someone there accidentally left the door yo your unit open.

I wouldn't care if it's a bunch of teenagers or Chinese cyber-warfare team who breaks into my Gmail account, I'd be mad as hell with Google for letting this happen.

Pressing charges against the proprietors of the crime will not change the fact that this host acted in a very irresponsible and sloppy way, and is in short untrustworthy.
"I almost never test at the view level, and barely at the controller level"

You sound like every Rails dev I know.

It depends on the controller action in question. If it's a boilerplate Rails controller action, then the ROI might not be that high, but if the controller is doing something more specific (assuming it's not doing something that ought to be pushed to the model) then unit testing the action is important, sometimes very important.

Code coverage is pretty much a meaningless metric because it can't say whether the tests are actually good and useful. But it can help point experienced devs into areas of risk that may or may not warrant more attention.
And why couldn't you just take the CS classes that the BS requires anyway? The BA/BS non-major classes are the ones where the BS/BA are going to matter for CS. Do you have more background knowledge in Arts? or Sciences?
Nice one! Ever since the port of Mac OS X to the iPhone - the iOS - I am in awe of Apple engineering. They are Gods.

I mean - imagine Vista, or Win 7 going on the phone, just with a new touch UI framework added. It simply wouldn't work, couldn't work, would be impossible, beyond the reach of the richest software company in the world.

Sometimes, good engineering does pay off, and ultimately one could say that iOS is a direct result of good engineering. Every time the iOS wins it's a win for good design, and for object oriented programming.

That said, the dark side of being so far ahead of everyone for so long is a severe case of NIH syndrome at Apple. Those times when others surprisingly better Apple, Apple takes a very long time to catch up.
Dev tools are the best example with XCode 10 years behind Eclipse.
MobileMe Mail is perhaps another one: MobileMe Mail is similar to Mail.app on OS X - but Gmail is way better than that, and has been pretty much from the beginning.
Does the speech recognition computation happen in the browser code, or do they send the voice bits to their Google servers which translates it into text and then send it back to the browser?

The latter is how voice recognition works on Android, and why it only works when you have an active internet connection.
It seems a little weird to me to build an html5 standard that requires server side computation. How is a non-profit open source browser going to fund the massive server load needed, not to mention the R&D needed to develop a voice-to-text translator? Google’s stuff is proprietary.
> These statements are irreconcilable. A hard worker does work that he/she is assigned, and does not make pre-mature value judgements on the worthiness of said work.

Nonsense. Work should always be in furtherance of some goal.

I don't want to hire the person who does exactly as I say, even if it's a dumb idea in the larger context. What's important is reaching the goal (ethically, legally &c).

While there are people who use anti-authoritarianism to justify laziness, that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Interesting perspective, but I'm surprised that you're lumping in "controller level" tests (i.e. unit tests) with tests against the view.

While I'm definitely on board that tests against the UI are brittle, I feel like unit testing individual methods and classes ensure your code is modular and functions as designed.

Integration tests are great, especially since they more reflect how a user interacts with the code, but I think you can get a lot of value from unit tests without getting too religous about it.
Should Startup Founders Keep Their Day Job?
> Furthermore, today's computing environments are arguably less conducive to autodidactism.

You might be interested in this if you haven't seen it before:

http://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredica...
That's what I heard when I discovered this at my kitchen table and the "docking" succeeded. :)
That's going a bit far. People May use encryption for illegal activities. What possible use does the DUI checkpoint software have, outside of enabling drunk drivers?
Have you ever seen a three year old play with an iPad?

I have and it's incredible. They are absolutely fascinated by them and I truly believe that there is massive potential for iPad apps that help with childrens development. There are more than likley apps already on the market but it's something to consider.
Great stuff for makers of all types.
Similarly to jerf, I think if you point this out to someone "in the know", and dig deep enough, they won't get mad, but it'll turn out that it's "really complicated" and "you wouldn't understand unless you were heavily involved". It happened at least once, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was common.
Not going to criticize the advice, since I think there's a point to it. I will take issue with this, though:

> The three hours spent at a networking event could also be invested in emailing your customers

Please, no, entrepreneurs. Don't consider e-mail a magic customer builder. I dropped Twilio like a bad habit after their community manager e-mailed me three templates in as many weeks, reminding me that I had signed up for an account; I was developing something using their service, and instantly shelved the project once these started to roll in:

I’d like to introduce myself, I'm Danielle, Twilio's Community Manager, and I'm here to help out with any questions you may have

I wanted to drop a note to see how your experience with Twilio has been going.

Danielle here, I wanted to share a few more Twilio tips and tricks with you.

I'm all for an occasional e-mail or two, but when your company is in my inbox once a week, that's too much. That's not developing a relationship with me, that's trying desperately to keep me interested in your service. Find better ways to develop relationships with your customers aside from e-mail.
I'm certain that's right - someone unfamiliar with the process will have to invest more time with the first few clients and might stumble a bit at first, but not in ways that would prejudice anyone's interests. The networking advantages a "connected" lawyer can provide to a startup are huge, but a VC like yourself could bring a new lawyer into that world if you wanted to invest the time. I think that investment could pay as many or more dividends than your cash injections to new tech companies.

I don't see the excessive billing as a matter of efficiency, but then again I'm not seeing the billable hour statements you get. I see it as a symptom of the bloat that has created a huge crash in the legal marketplace, but I may be wrong.

I think you have the power to create the change you're looking for, perhaps just by starting this dialogue - but I know you could do it by finding a young lawyer to engage with personally as well.
Well, part of that goes to how I code. The controller is rarely doing anything important, more than boilerplate. I push that into the model as much as possible.
Mark Bao tracks down his stolen laptop and has the last laugh
I'd like to believe we're hitting a productivity limit, but I'm skeptical. Historically, we still work shorter hours, take more holidays and have more leasure activity than our ancestors.

I guess what is different is that we've automated lots of mechanical/clerical tasks like finding a file, duplicating and delivering a memo or compiling a report. Executives used to need a large staff to do that for them but there are fewer jobs like that now. In a way, we've all become executives. And to operate at that level can be draining, especially if you're not doing something you love because it takes much more emotional investment.
Diving into the Linux Networking Stack
I am seeing many things copied from Chrome. Reading the article top to bottom:

-Tabs above the address bar

-1 button for stop/refresh

-single star button for bookmarks

-transient status bar

-manage extensions in a tab

-pinning tabs

Tab groups, awesome bar, sync, and the privacy features do look awesome though. Will try them out for a while.
What you're saying is fine. Its probably the better adult way to handle it - talk to the parents. Other people are suggesting FBI/Criminal law. How would you have fared/grown up if they sent you to court?

Do note that since he is tech oriented, he probably now knows what a S* storm he has kicked up - the blog response pretty much ensures that he is aware. I assume you would be sweating bricks if you knew that the FBI was coming after you AND that you had hand delivered a bullet point confession. I assume thats a pretty strong deterrent (in his specific case)

(Incidentally fighting to stick up for your woods was a kinda nice thing to do, modulo the amount of vandalism you pulled off.)
To be fair, there's a difference between "you shouldn't do this" and "you shouldn't be allowed to do this". At least in this letter, the senators are not explicitly trying or threatening to ban anything.
Interesting - in that case I cheer his departure. One of the most important abilities of a great engineer is to be able to throw away his own code (so it can be replaced by something better).
Finger Wars: a Finger Battle clone for Android
Indeed, nothing ever monotonically increases, or keeps growing forever. Didn't we already made that mistake with the housing crisis? There will be drops, eventually, maybe even big ones.

I think the biggest confidence crisis possible for bitcoin would be a security breach discovered in the software.

Other things, like the IRS interefering, will cause smaller panics. There will still be a lot of countries left where it can be used. Bitcoin is by no means a US-only operation.

The surprising thing for me for bitcoin is that it's actually being used to trade things, and is not just seen as an investment vehicle. This makes me think it can succeed.
Google books agreement torpedoed by US court
"I would be ecstatic if I could bootstrap a startup into providing myself with $100k+ per year"

Me too, except that I would prefer that 100k to be (relatively) passive income. With passive invcome it is easier to be creative, innovate an existing product without too much time pressure, learn etc...
Freelancing does not differ from corporate work that much (except if you earn so much money that you have to work less.)
Avoiding checkpoints if you're sober and don't want the inconvenience of waiting in line at a checkpoint for one. Also see the explanations of other people in this thread describing how announcing the locations of the checkpoints ahead of time can be more effective.
Here's the point I'm trying to make with these links:

There are costs and risks to every form of energy. For fission power a lot of those costs are novel or at least unknown and unappreciated by the population at large (who, sadly, are woefully ignorant about such things). For coal, oil, wood, etc. those costs have been known and paid for so long that they have become accepted.

We render huge portions of land, collectively larger than the Chernobyl exclusion zone, uninhabitable by man or animal and we accept that as the cost of digging up coal. Millions of people throughout history have fallen to early deaths due to the smoke and pollution of wood and coal fires, and to gas and diesel smog, but we accept that as the way things are. London is not naturally a foggy city, but it has been densely inhabited for so many hundreds of years and has had a persistent smog for so much of that time that the term "London fog" has become part of the lexicon.

Simply put, we look at our energy sources and our eyes skip over their downsides, largely because they are so familiar, we could not imagine a world without them. Nuclear is new, some of the downsides have yet to be experienced (the Fukushima accidents being a case in point), but the question still remains: are the downsides less than those of other power sources? If you build nuclear reactors to the level of safety precautions of the old Soviet Union (within epsilon of the null-set) then perhaps not, but if you build more responsibly then perhaps so.
The quote is taken directly from the article:
in fact, it shouldn't even be available
Georgia Tech to Pursue 'Transparent Internet' With $1M Google Research Award
it looked like you photographed it that way. well done sir.
All of the popup panels for menu items are displayed erratically with the contents appearing and disappearing as I move over them with the mouse. This only happens on a second monitor under Windows Vista.
For me it all depends on what I'm doing. If it's something that needs a bit of a creative spark, one or two beers tends to help that process.
If it's more of a complex/mathematical type problem I need to be completely sober and in total silence!
>we still work shorter hours, take more holidays and have more leasure activity than our ancestors

No, we don't. Peruse any study on this subject by a reputable researcher - we actually work far more hours and have much less leisure time than almost any point in prior history (the notable exception perhaps being the end of the 19th century).
البورصة المصرية
The biggest issue that ever comes up for me when using mocks is getting the assumptions wrong. For instance perhaps I mock my interactions with an external web service and they change the JSON structure on me. My tests continue to pass but in production, bad things happen.
> The reason for this is that, in general, you can't
> transform one kind of encrypted password into another kind
> of encrypted password, not unless you have the plaintext
> form.

You have the plaintext form every time your users log in. If you want to change the hashing/encryption scheme, keep a bit for each user denoting whether or not they've been switched to the new scheme. If the bit is clear, hash their password the old way; if it matches, hash it the new way, store that, and set the bit. This is how people usually suggest transitioning from crappy hashing schemes to something more sane, rather than requiring people to sign up for new accounts or actually change their (plaintext) password.

Granted, this requires some logic external to the encryption/hashing module, but the encryption/hashing bit should be relatively pluggable.
People have been using the term 'class-based views' to describe the new feature but am I right in thinking this only affects generic views?
Tipping Etiquette Around the World
My god this is poorly written: "he beats to a different drummer." I didn't know it was possible to mangle a cliche so thoroughly. Also, regurgitating jobs' best quotes and attributing them to "legend" is not informative in the least. Next time anybody thinks of voting a story like this up ask thyself "what would jon Gruber do?"