skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One explanation is that Microsoft is just trying to distract people. I'm not sure why they bother since it just draws attention to the fact they are struggling to keep up.

The other explanation is that not enough senior people have spent any time figuring out for themselves what potential the iPad has. Maybe they genuinely don't get it.

I actually think the second explanation is more likely. It's also much worse for them. It's easy to take a first glance at the iPad and see it as a media player and games console with a browser built in - i.e. A big iPod touch.

Paradoxically this makes it easier for them to brush off. "We all know that iPods are successful. Hats off to Apple, the iPod company - the iPad is the new iPod." Which neatly rationalizes away the success of the iPad in a way that's not threatening to the PC business.

Analysts, always eager to sell people what they want, are colluding with this by calling the iPad a media tablet.

The one thing none of these people are doing (unlike iPad customers) is trying to use them for real work, and discovering where they are strong and where they are weak.

I now use my iPad 2 as my only computer at home. This means I often try to push it into doing real work. I've been surprised to find that for some tasks which are very important to me, it's a lot better than a laptop.

Specifically, I now use the OmniGraffle on the iPad to do all my brainstorming, and technical diagramming.

I'm a long time user of the desktop version and bought the iPad version when it first came out. The combination of the relatively slow iPad 1, and the immature OmniGraffle, made it little more than an expensive curiosity.

Over the course of the year, Omni have worked diligently at improving the UI, understanding how to make good use of multi-touch, and improving performance. It was getting pretty good even on the old iPad, but on the iPad 2 it flies.

For the first time in my life, I feel as though I have a computer that can really replace a paper notebook for capturing ideas. I can be in the middle of making breakfast, and suddenly a design solution will pop into my head, and I can instantly open OmniGraffle and make a diagram capturing the details - better than I could with paper.

It's so good that I'll pick up the iPad to do this even when I'm sitting in front of my top of the range iMac.

Anyway - raving about OmniGraffle is really just by way of example. The real point is that step by step, application authors will figure out how to make their iPad versions better than their desktop versions.

This process won't take long, and it will establish tablets as the primary computer.

I tried similar experiments with Tablet PC's over the years, including using Motion Computing tablet with separate keyboard (i.e. Like a big iPad). It just didn't work, because of the software and the stylus - simple as that.
A buddy of mine made this, works pretty well: http://grabbox.devsoft.no/
I'm not sure how actionable these requests are, but the things frustrating me about windows are:

* Lack of decent symlinks (I know there are ways to accomplish it, but they always seem to have tradeoffs and problems)

* Lack of a decent terminal window with straightforward copy/paste and resizing (Console 2 helps, but it's still less than ideal)

* File locking - I hate this. Can't we have the unix approach instead?

* Notification bubbles - way too annoying
ok, i get your point now.

They may have been using version control, but if they were checking out to a server and editing remotely, and that server happened to be the same server where the central repo was stored, it could explain how one attack would get it all.
In the same vein as this, I did a weekend project to write a mac app / chrome extension combo which adds a "Clone Now" button to every github page. It works pretty okay and is available here: https://github.com/patr1ck/Mitosis
Well that gives a reasonable use case for this: http://dpaste.de/61O8/ (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402136)

Makes more sense now.
GameBytes Weekly - April 3, 2011
The person controls government money and now reaps the benefits, conflict? Judging by your answer, this isn't considered unethical, so it must be common.
+1 All MS's rhetoric on this subject is a useless distraction. What matters is whether they are shipping competitive mobile products that consumers want to buy and developers want to develop for. By those benchmarks, they have failed and are continuing to fail.

The Nokia partnership is clearly a desperate attempt to resuscitate their mobile strategy. Given the ground that Nokia has ceded at the high end of the mobile market to Apple and Google it is far from certain, that this move will succeed.

What might be interesting is to leverage Nokia's production & distribution power to push WP7 into mid-range devices & featurephones. MicroNokia need to move fast though, the likes of ZTE are already targeting the mid-range with cheaper Android devices and are growing fast as a result.
I don't believe reprocessing means "no waste" but anyway, that's just half of the problem: what will we do in 50 years ?

And how do you reprocess the lives of the 200'000 people who had to leave after the nuclear accident in Tchernobyl alone ? Tell the fishermen by Fukushima to go reprocess their lives because some over-confident engineers thought they mastered what they were doing.

Nuclear power is just like the "green revolution": pure megalomania by people too afraid to consider alternatives like... a less power greedy way of living.
You can find the privacy policy at http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/privacy-policy.html
It's Ok to walk away.
"The Windows explorer has also got a lot of new stuffs - mainly the inclusion of ribbons. Ribbons was first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007 and in Windows 7, it was used in other applications such as Paint, WordPad etc. The Ribbons UI makes it possible for users to notice features much more easily than the old menu based system.

No doubt some people will complain about the change. However, I believe that the Ribbon UI is quite a good and refreshing replacement for the old menu based system."

So to summarize:

IE9: "We have the cleanest UI out there, more space for content, less UI! Streamline!"

Windows Ribbons: "Show it all to the user! Less space for content, more UI, expose every option all the time!"

And we wonder why Microsoft is conflicted. (yes I will admit to being a 'Ribbon Hater')
I thought Microsoft came off rather well in that strip. It was also a very quick way to make the point. Would you rather have had a 1000 word article droning on about how all the tech companies are copying each other these days?
In 2007, we have Steve Ballmer’s infamous “It’s a passing fad” reply when asked about the iPhone.

Bill Gates himself made a lofty prediction: “The tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available whenever you want it…It’s a PC that is virtually without limits — and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.”

As much as people like to stretch the word "tablet", applying statements made about the "iPhone" to "tablets" is simply going too far. Yes: the article's title says "Microsoft: Tablets are a passing fad", but the article doesn't claim this is Microsoft's "stance" (you don't mean "stand"), so frankly this HN post comes off as link-bait.
What field are you in may I ask? Because it sounds like the exact opposite of what I've seen for CS; extremely well paid, and very understanding about expected skill levels (as in, I was easily able to land a very good, and wellish paid position after merely my freshman year)
years later, some internet sociologist will come out with a study saying that every community of size>N will have "I'm leaving" drama posts like this.
> If you want a stable desktop for production use, use an LTS version of ubuntu.

I'm not so sure about it. All releases are supposed to be stable (final releases at least, not the current beta). LTS has nothing to do with "not-beta" - it's about the length of support only and this is the way it's advertised on the ubuntu website. Whenever they write about "stable" regarding LTS it's in the business context - it's "not changing" rather than "not crashing".
The alternative is to have high profile members like nickb disappearing and then to have 10 threads (or even more, instead of just one) that wonder whatever happened to 'x'.

Also, after contributing 100's of hours (or even 1000's...) I think a goodbye note is good form rather than bad form, these threads apply to all the friends and contacts that someone has made through HN and in the case of RiderOfGiraffes my guess would be that would be a very large number of people indeed.

I agree with your general sentiment, but if patio11 or tptacek were to slink off like a thief in the night then they'd be overwhelmed with email from concerned people.

Also, when I was growing up I was taught to say hello on entering a venue and goodbye on leaving, maybe that's old fashioned but it's perfectly ok with me.

As for the criticism, check the last couple of entries in this thread and say he doesn't have a point.

Anyway, since I'm not here, I'll leave it at that ;)
China's Facebook Clones
I think we have different definitions of ugly ;-)

I confess. I don't think unthemed GTK 2 is ugly.
From that chart, it appears the problem is the healthcare industry is getting too much money. Medicare is expensive along with the tax deduction for health insurance. If we could get down healthcare costs, it would solve the problem.
Thanks. I agree for the most part. But, I think the font choice/spacing here at HN for instance, works for a tech forum, whereas it might not be as optimal for articles or poetry.

I guess I am saying that content and audience can define the problem you you are trying to solve. It could vary for that reason.
Did you think all of the other carefully reasoned points by a seasoned industry player (not just a pundit) were also invalid, or was that one alone enough to invalidate the piece?
One could also argue that the point was lost on you that "there is no such thing as partial security".
Slightly OT, but my pet peeve is the growing number of sites that assume a minimum browser width that is wider than I like to keep my browser windows, as if everybody kept their browser window maximized at all times. I still read old bare-HTML sites often enough that I don't like to do that; I prefer to keep them about 800 pixels wide. Too many sites won't fit; some of them even manage to turn off the horizontal scrollbar, a neat trick.

I think the largest minimum width any page should assume is 640. I could live with 800, but 1024 is too wide.
...or at least use shred(1) and then rm(1)
Come on... Microsoft is just a passing fad. ;-)
No, hence why I complained about the HN post and the link-bait title, and not the article itself. The idea that I am attempting to "invalidate the piece" is just you making things up.
This is a drastic oversimplification. Both urandom and random (on Linux; there's no difference between the two on BSD) are seeded from hard entropy sources. Both urandom and random extract entropy by updating pools with SHA1. The difference is that random has an estimator and will demand more hard entropy when it has serviced too many requests. But it's not as if urandom goes from producing "101010100101000101010100111001" to "111011011110111101111111110111" when entropy is depleted.

In any case, this is entirely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. You can absolutely use /dev/urandom to make a one-shot crypto key. You shouldn't wire /dev/urandom up into an online cryptosystem (don't use it to produce DH parameters, for instance), but even then, urandom isn't going to be how your system really gets broken.

In your case, experimenting with encrypting whole files with RSA instead of using RSA to exchange keys is what's really going to break your system. This is almost a decent example of how people obsess over the wrong things in cryptosystem design, and why perhaps generalist programmers should stay far, far away from this stuff.
> why are they still relying on Ctrl + Alt + Del

That's a security measure. No application can hook into Ctrl + Alt + Del... the OS always handles it. This way, a malicious application can't phish you with a fake login screen.

If they were to pick another key combination to reserve for the OS, they would break backward compatibility.
Really? You can plot them together, and it appears 'quorra' spiked about two weeks before 'quora'. Tron released December 17th 2010, according to wikipedia, correlating nicely with 'quorra' searches. What happened January 1st to cause a huge spike in 'quora' searches?
http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra%2C+quora&ctab=0...
I think it's great that this is being addressed in a video game. If a game's going to be realistic, it should take realistic consequences in this sort of thing. Concussions are a problem which have a growing awareness; this kind of action only helps awareness and understanding, leading towards a better life for athletes.

Massive kudos.
This problem was solved brilliantly by Clojure. Everything is immutable by default, and modifications of references happen at explicit points in the flow, with well-defined semantics.
Time does not equal money
With regard to 2, I don't care so much about compile speed (within reason) as I do about the speed of the produced binary. How fast is the output?
Have you considered taking other sorts of CS positions? It's pretty messed up if companies expect you to do development work for free...
Very cool - have you emailed the github guys about this? Tom's insanely focused on the users, and anything that makes github a nicer experience for them. They might blog about it :)
One of the things that a post like this offers is closure. People are notified that "Elvis has left the building" and something has changed. I've had a couple of cases where I made it clear I planned to leave an online community and the listowner and others begged me to stay/come back. In both cases, I was ultimately thrown off. I now think that if it's no longer a good personal fit for a major contributor, it's a mistake to try to keep them. If the community values what they contributed, this might be an opportunity to consider what the remaining members wish to do to create something of value which can draw the interest of high quality members. But begging someone to stay who is no longer satisfied is coming from a position of "you have something of value to give us but we don't really have much of value to give you". It's not a healthy, sustainable thing.

Of course, the door is always open. It's not like ROG or Jacqesm or whomever else has left was thrown off. But it's probably not a good idea to make too big of a deal out of it should they choose to post again/occasionally.

Peace and good luck in your life's journey, wherever it may take you.
I wonder if it will make a comeback. Tron Legacy (DVD rip) was the #4 most downloaded movie on piratebay yesterday with 12,000 seeders and the DVD doesn't release for another 2 days.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other?

Also note that there are interesting complications in relation to file data long-term storage on SSD drives. It should be investigated.
Clever algorithms in Ruby
A big chunk of map reduce use cases deal with logs, which can be high value to a company. In order to deal with a lot of unstructured data you either need a crap load of rules running on it up front and somewhere to store all that meta data, or a search engine that helps you filter results quickly, and then use those results with map reduce to extract your meta data post-search.

Basically you take ing a lot of data, put it in a search engine, serialize it, build a simple map reduce framework users can code in quickly (with JavaScript say) and then run it as a service.

Sounds like a great idea! :)
It depends on what government money he controls. In California, I don't think this would be very common as it may violate some conflict of interest regulations depending on when he left the agency, when he joined/formed the start-up, and some other facts. I suspect similar regulations apply to federal agencies.
Looking at all these big players juggling the same small set of pieces as part of their corporate strategy makes it clear that the market is ripe for disruption. There's a Google-sized opportunity for a startup that can hit these guys in their collective blindspot.
Why not use GnuPG?
We have more backups than you can shake a stick at. The issues lays with the server being compromised and being forced to shut down. The old API and apps relied on a fixed IP address. It would have taken us months to get TinyGrab v1 back up to scratch, or a few weeks to perfect 2.0. No data was lost, what would you choose?

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Founder and Project Manager
chris@tinygrab.com
I appreciate the work you put into your post, but I can't help but point out that it's "all intent[s] and purposes" not "all intensive purposes." Apologies for the snark.
Fair enough. I don't think your complaint is particularly clear.
A good alternative you'll find is FileShuttle. - http://getfileshuttle.com
Have you used Windows 7 much? The firewall is no longer the "Allow/Block" only version that was included in previous versions.

And similarly, I've found it quite responsive. If you're on a laptop -- and it's Vista -- then it probably suffers from the same issue a lot of laptops do: it's not the cores that's the problem, it's the RPMs. Pop a SSD in there and it'll sing. In the meantime, if you're on Win7, stick a USB stick in and let Readyboost do it's thing. At least 2 GB. Preferably bigger. Readyboost never wowed me in Vista and in 7 it's still not "wowable" i guess (i mean, wowable is a high bar to attain) but it definitely works to speed things up.
Why the US needs to blacklist, censor pirate websites
I wonder how easy it is inside a corporation to get access to the SSL private key? I'm guessing a company like Microsoft doesn't hand that out to their developers easily.
Good advice for a blog or news site, but figuring out a good design becomes exponentially harder for web apps.

Yes, they include plenty of text, but you also have a lot of "actions" (links, buttons, tabs, whatever). Web apps also have to balance readability with making common tasks easy. In particular, making common tasks easy may mean putting more buttons and form elements on a single screen to reduce the number of pages/clicks for a task.
StartupGuild is like the Facebook activity stream you wish you had... :)
This is why CoffeeScript introduced the "do" keyword. I'd have to agree that, while in Javascript in particular this is considered a rookie mistake, loop variables not being closed over is a rather confusing phenomenon for newcomers.
So if you want something disposable, pay a couple hundred extra for a Mac.

Right.
Wife got an e-mail from Disney about it, which is not yet on the list.
I could not agree with your more.

Even if there was nothing wrong with the car. What Tesla should have done is, take it on the chin, say something in the lines of 'we will correct and make it better', even though nothing is wrong, and then do a retest, and simply have that test on their terms. And then really, they could have gone from good to great.
Kudos to Zed, for at least attempting to find a workable middle-ground. It's a change from the usual and useless finger-pointing.
Mark Cuban has a lot to say from the other side of the coin. He tried to set up an unpaid internship program and was denied by their legal department.

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship...
I don't know, but I know that I'd like a burger right now.
Why do you install BIND?
Doesn't this mean that anyone who administers (or breaks in to) a webserver or ssl reverse proxy belonging to the vulnerable party would be able to decrypt the report+POC?

Isn't that a pretty serious issue given that such reports can be extremely sensitive and at least in most mid to large size vendors like cisco, microsoft, google etc. they would normally only be available to the security teams + the responsible engineering team? Certainly not to ops.
Javascript is too hostile an environment for crypto. How do you know your js crypto code wasn't modified in transit? You use SSL. Now that you're using SSL why do you need encryption in the js at all?
Sorry, didn't mean to hit "down" arrow, meant to mod-up :)

You're entirely right, that's a domain-policy option. It's a security feature to require a Ctrl+Alt+Del before showing a password box.
Website redesign: A design for strife
I'm not in CS, i'm an interactive media person trying to switch over to advanced front end development.

It does suck but I am not going to complain I have nothing on my resume so something is better than nothing.
If product isn't released is it real? The case of Google face detection/search
It's also important to understand how the internship dynamics change as you progress through the four years of college. Getting a paid internship after your freshmen or sophomore year is extremely difficult. Very few large, "name brand" companies include freshman and sophomores in their internship programs. Those that do typically have ratios along the lines of 90% juniors, 10% freshman and sophomores.

The catch is that landing the junior year internship in large part depends on having at least one previous relevant internship. That leaves most freshman and sophomores struggling to find internships at local businesses in their field of interest. Most of the businesses don't have an actual internship program, have no idea what to do with an intern, and don't have the money to pay one even if they wanted to.

This describes the experience of me and 95% of my friends at Duke over the last 4 years. Many of us have awesome, extremely high paying jobs lined up after graduation, but we got those jobs as a more or less direct result of working for free after freshman or sophomore year.

My personal experience:
Freshman summer: part-time job to support myself, took a summer class, did a lot of (free) work for Duke Student Government
Sophomore summer: 3/4 time job as a waiter in a restaurant to support myself. Spent all my free time programming.
Junior summer: awesome internship at Microsoft.
Post-grad: offers from Google and Microsoft, trying to start my own company.

Basically over the past 20 months or so my pay has gone from ~$6/hr part-time, to ~$75 full time. Trust me, I am not 12-13x smarter, more valuable, or more skilled now than 2 years ago. The system is broken.

Although I never had an unpaid internship my ability to land a paying one after junior year was dependent on the projects I worked on in my free time the previous summer. And that is in the tech industry, which is in by far the best shape. The internship situation in other field (as SandBOx mentioned) is much, much worse.
Not to forget about pg himself:

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html
The real issue is that Python's for construct doesn't create a new lexical scope for the body.

In either Perl 5 or Perl 6, both of which use mutable variables, the corresponding code does the right thing (although Perl 5 only does so if you actually use a newly defined lexical: as in "for my $m ('do', 're', 'mi') {...}").

Unfortunately, Python's implicit declaration of lexicals means that it would be difficult to do a for loop with an iteration variable that isn't lexical to the loop body if that was the default (where would you put the "nonlocal" statement?).
You would essentially proxy the request over to ops for decryption. That's how we handle GPG-encrypted vulnerability reports in the company I work for. We don't have out the private key to everybody, I think only two people have it, and they forward back the decrypted result internally to a security mailing list.

The first couple of times you tried I would expect a general "WTF?" response from ops (indeed they should ask some pointed questions and not just immediately comply), but once you got over that it wouldn't be hard to put a process in place to deal with this routinely.