skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This essay was evidently written in 1997. I don't know what the competitors to Emacs were in 1997 other than Vi, but these days there are extremely powerful text editors which are exceedingly easy for a novice to pick up and use right out of the gate and then go on to offer vast arrays of substantially more advanced tools for those prepared to explore and become experts.

Just because it used to be extremely painful to become a towering expert at text editing doesn't mean it should continue to be so. It's not like riding a bicycle-- text editing actually is easy. Or at least, it can be made easy, and there is no argument for keeping it difficult.

Remember, text editing in and of itself is of no value. Tools should get the hell out of the way of their users.
My comment was reflecting my intuition that most programmers would not find the blog post useful or insightful.

The first two sentences of the blog post are, "I wonder why we have separate arrays and hashes in Perl. Other languages don't do it." However, as evidenced by only 4 contrary languages listed in the comments here, the vast majority of programming languages have separate array and hash structures.

Much of the post is absolutely trivial. The post is a combination of circular reasoning (arrays and hashes must be different because they... are different) and some sort of straw man gedanken (well it would be easy to do if we did this but then that doesn't work, so obviously this way's "thought out").

It's a whole post to point out that arrays and hashes are different and are used differently. Hurray? Let's upvote it?
Edsger Dijkstra's note on starting array indices at 0 (pdf, 1982)
> The message is fine. The venue is wrong.

bingo. they needed a message that was easily understandable and relatable by all clients. there's nothing inherently wrong about the post and would've been a good status update or part of a post mortem, but not the entire PR statement of the company about the incident.
I thought that the OP meant actual device thickness, not the marketing tricks employed by Apple or Nokia.
Also, let's keep things in perspective. It took Sony days/weeks (?) to admit the problems with their network. This is a) honest and b) reasonably timely.

Wether or not one agrees or disagrees with the actual technical setup of Dropbox is a separate question altogether.
I will now transfer 1 UNC (UNicorn Coin) to the devs for this. Definitely a feature that should have been there earlier.

However there is a bug, clicking the X sometimes causes the need to click it twice because the first time it is ignored.

I havent seen this on linux yet, is it still ugly as all hell or did they improve it like they did with windows version?
It kind of does but it doesn't work nearly as well, at least in part because it clutters up the list of options with suggested searches.
I just use Array.prototype.[forEach|map|filter] instead, or the equivalent Underscore.js function (which aliases to native when it can) if IE-compatibility is needed.

If you need performances, nothing will beat C-style access anyway. And FWIW, using for...in on an array is slower than using Array.prototype.forEach.

edit: FWIW, even hand-rolling an each() function (in the style of underscore's) will be faster than for...in.
NYC BigApps Ideas Turns Challenge On its Head, Asks For Problems To Solve
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around why someone would platform-source something as tightly coupled as client-server push services. I can see not developing it in house -- something like Socket.io comes to mind -- but signing up for a service to proxy communication between your app and the browser for "push" services seems a little bit on the lazy side.

Pushing complexity out to specialized platforms is a popular trend these days. PaaS vendors are popping up in every area, but there's a threshold where this type of outsourcing makes sense.

* How complex/specialized is the problem?

* How close is it to our core product/competencies?

* What are the comparative costs in development and maintenance vs using the service?

These are the core questions I ask when I'm evaluating PaaS vs in-house solutions.

Q: How complex/specialized is the problem?

A: Unlike HTTP, WebSockets aren't widely supported, so real-time browser communication is a complex problem. However, it is a generalized issue. It is not a problem that we will have to solve alone. There are probably libraries available to assist in the implementation of our own "push" stack.

Q: How close is it to our core product/competencies?

A: A core feature of our product is real-time exchange of pricing data between clients (browsers) and the server. The faster clients receive feedback on their pricing, the better our product works. This means real-time browser communication is central to our product. It is not core, but it is very, very close.

Q: What are the comparative costs in development and maintenance vs using the service?

A: An initial review shows that there are popular libraries that abstract a significant portion of the complexity away, including fail-over for browsers that don't have support for WebSockets. Availability of commercial support isn't clear, but source code is available. We will have to build our own API, but we have the benefit of tailoring it to our application, rather than using a generic API. Back-end message queuing services will need to be added to our monitoring suite.

In a more general sense, we also evaluate how the use of PaaS would affect our product in the event of downtime. Every PaaS you use in your application spreads your exposure out over their systems as well. Can you afford for "push" to go away? What will a fail-over system cost you? We opted to make real-time communications part of our app, so the redundancy we built in to our app hosting also covers our real-time services.

For my money, I just can't see outsourcing something like client-server "push" communication.
What do you suggest? Sitting back with some popcorn and waiting for the nice people in the TV to figure it out and explain it to us?
Am I the only one who typed "cd overview" instead of just "overview"?
I really like the landing page they made for this event. Very creative and nerdy.
yes, I typed "cd schedule" before typing just "schedule"
be sure to take your vitamins!
Well to be fair Gregg Tavares works directly on the issue since he is part of the team implementing WebGL in chrome. He might not have Carmack's insane amount of knowledge about the subject but I wouldn't discount Tavares' views completely here.
ICANN Approves Historic Change to Internet's Domain Name System
> All of the criticism is [...] minimal in nature (not saying the word "sorry" when explaining an outage).

I can't disagree with this sentiment enough.

The word "sorry" isn't about being nice – it's about being accountable. What we're seeing here is a second lapse in Dropbox's security – a hard problem! – but little acknowledgement that hey, this really isn't okay, these files are important to users, and this is a breach of trust that needs to be remedied.

Moreover, this isn't an outage as in "boy, wish I could access my dropbox." This is a security outage as in "boy, wish the entire world couldn't access my Dropbox." The period of time, the cause, the impact is, in the end, immaterial to the outcome of breached trust.

So when we fuck up, as grownups, we take a moment to acknowledge it, explain the cause, and express how much we value the trust we've been given. The alternative is to leave the impression that trust is taken for granted. Which, in this case, it sure as hell feels like it is because Dropbox is doing nothing to dissuade that impression.

These are good guys with a great product that makes a lot of people's lives better. They just need to be accountable for their shit – that's all people are asking for here. Perfection is impossible but being good in your relationships with users is something anyone can do with a little empathy.
Uh,

BTC appears entirely dysfunctional as currency.

"currency refers to a generally accepted medium of exchange." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency

BTC is neither generally accepted nor does it have the STABLE VALUE needed to become more accepted as a medium of exchange. And last element is something the Bitcommunists just utterly miss. Because a currency is medium, just a means, it will not function unless its value is stable. Not decreasing OR increasing.

Whenever the BTC shills tout the increasing value, they've accomplished the old "switch-a-roo" from currency to speculative commodity.
Oh crap, the terminology got me confused, I thought they were used the same. Fixing now.
This works in Snow Leopard (and possibly Leopard), but in Tiger it definitely didn't work.
SoCal only, damn. If there were only interesting tech startups in the Midwest to intern with that had hackdays.
Me too, I don't like the feeling that I am now two versions behind.
A new Battle featuring strong photos
they use VPN's to hide their IP

The FBI routinely uses software exploits to install something called CIPAV on the remote client computer to retrieve forensics data and negate the effect of proxies, vpns, tor, etc.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/07/fbi-spyware-how/

Twitter almost assuredly has the ability to push a custom iframe or similar based on who is logged on to support these kinds of government payloads. In the case the wired article references myspace directly assisted.

Surely being more security paranoid than usual should make it harder for an attack like this to succeed, but if the feds get pissed enough it's not unthinkable that they could get access to a targeted zero day to use.
You might want to be more specific about what you mean by "most free" because Singapore isn't very free as in freedom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Singapore
Chrome user here since launch (who is also very entrenched into Chrome in terms of workflow): Ever since FF4b, I've been nearing a full switch back to Firefox, but the main deterring factor for me was performance. With FF5, the performance increase is absolutely noticeable and I commend the Mozilla team for their work. It's nearing a point where I'd like to switch back.

Now if only they can polish the Android browser a little more ;)
Hahaa... I just typed in "sudo make me a sandwich"
I don't think this is a reasonable comparison. Twitter was at least 80% as useful when its uptime was erratic as it is now, when it's uptime is reasonably good. But Dropbox security flaws potentially cough up your data to criminals; when Dropbox security fails, its utility is negative, not slightly diminished.
> who designs a programming language and doesn't think it through?

"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on." Rasmus Lerdorf (src:http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf)
Hong Kong tax calculator: http://www.ird.gov.hk/eng/ese/st_comp_2011_12_b/stcfrm.htm
BetterWorks New Product Features
It is not, however, mandatory that they continue to make sounds when they are recording video.
Very yes (we don't allow Dropbox† on our machines, but we know of companies that rely on it).

Grandalf's point is extremely well taken. It's actually true. Not only that, but regulated companies (in health care and finance) that have a reasonable belief that any of their systems might have had Dropbox on them technically need to audit now.

I point this out not to bag on Dropbox, but as an illustration of how sane some unreasonable-sounding IT policies (like, "you don't get to install random software on your desktop") turn out to be.

† (Or Tarsnap or SpiderOak, for what it's worth.)
haha nice was this a hackday project?
The Billy Baldwin of Conditional Assignment in Ruby
Yes I would say the exact same thing. The buyer was a direct counter-party to a trade involving stolen property.

The buyer isn't liable as he didn't know the property was stolen, but he don't get to keep the property. Typically in this case he would need to seek damages from the exchange to recover his assets (the dollars used in the trade)

IANAL but I have first hand seen this type of stuff on various exchanges. (i.e. stock gets fraudulently wired out one account, and sold. Trades get busted)

It sucks all around, but the fact of the matter is the great deal the buyer was getting never would have existed if somebody didn't steal from someone else. If I stole your life savings and sold it to your neighbor for a dollar, you don't really think your neighbor should be able to keep it do you?

Buying stolen goods on an exchange doesn't make it ok. It sounds to me that you'd like it to be - but that isn't how it works.
Most ads are put in a disruptive place, or put out of site. Advertising should be put in a disruptive place, but not in a disruptive way.

Google's ads are kind of put to the side and there because they need to make money, not because it actually makes Google's products better, and the same thing goes for Facebook. They just do a good job of putting it in a place that doesn't hurt the user experience that much, while being worthwhile.

An example of good advertising is in Grooveshark. I legitimately think that the themed search looks good, and I don't get annoyed by it.
You've created a false dichotomy here. You don't need PR to have empathy or accountability – just a sense of humility. You can still be completely blunt. If the blog post had ended with:

"We fucked up. Not cool. We're going to work hard to prevent these things in the future and earn your trust."

Then the tone of the response would have been very different. That email was pretty good – they should have said something closer to that in their blog, too.
It's not clear because it does not explain what happened and why it will never again.

Users expect something like "There was a solar eclipse that caused a bit flip on our login server which caused strcmp to give the wrong result ...". We expect an explanation of why it happened and why it will never again happen, and "lulz sry" is not very confidence inspiring.
Google -- Is Search-by-Multimedia on the Way?
The aversion is restricted to capitalizing the initial word of a sentence.

It's easier to rearrange words in a sentence and join or split sentences in a paragraph if the first word of a sentence is not capitalized.

Capitalizing the first word of a sentence can also lose information.

It's also helpful to identify people who focus on the trivial.
If only there were multiple suppliers of mobile phones.
This is really not about marketing.

First off, Google rarely even mentions Chrome version numbers in its marketing material, and neither will Mozilla. The http://blog.mozilla.com/ post announcing Firefox 5 does not mention the version number, and neither does the main web site at http://firefox.com/ - also see Chrome's release announcements at http://chrome.blogspot.com/

We actually care much more about delivering features and performance improvements in a timely way than about having a big number before the dot. "Just add one" is a simple rule that saves us from arguing about versions and lets us spend that time improving the browser instead.

Non-technical users rarely even know about version numbers. Meanwhile, people who have any experience in software know that version numbers are and have always been arbitrary. Neither group would be "fooled" by a higher version number, so why would we bother trying?

(Did MacOS really have "more" changes from 8 to 9 than from 10.3 to 10.4, or does Apple just really like the number 10? Did Linux stop getting major changes during the 2.4 series and suddenly start again with the release of 3.0? Is the Solaris 11 release more significant than the SunOS 5.11 release even though they are the same thing? The "real" meaning of a version number has always been whatever the developer wants it to mean.)
RaptorQ codes, an efficient fountain code implementation, have a relative reception overhead of K+2 symbols with probability of 99.9999%. See: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rmt-bb-fec-raptorq-06

Unfortunately, they're patent encumbered.
What's your point? The IT guys can't catch a break, can they? If they say "no you can't install stuff on your machine", message board geeks are up in arms. But when normal people, for whom these computer systems are designed in the first place, make (layperson-) reasonable decisions about what folders to put files in, there's the message board geek again, harassing them for not understanding how transparent cloud file sync works under the covers and interacts with regulated data.
Five reasons your startup won’t be getting into that incubator or accelerator
Why Tumblr?
That's great feedback thanks. People who actually use this really only update it when they think they went over their daily budget. Maybe the use of the word "daily" is a bit misleading?

For me personally, what I never got from mint is how much can I spend today and how much have I saved this pay period. That's a key reason why I built this.

Thanks again! I <3 critiques. :)
After knowing that there was a "View Customizations" link, it took me > 1 minute to find it. It is in the most unintuitive place where 99% of the time I don't even scroll to. Sorry this is in no way advertised.

Google also filters special terms like bittorrent in instant search. This is part of that bubble and people don't even realize it. Thats the point, that most people won't notice, not that the views are not there.

Its like experts-exchange.com putting content below the long footer of the page, yea they can claim its there but many won't notice.
Thanks, yeah it's all about what is my daily budget and how much have I saved this pay period.

Rather than tracking all of your expenditures you just tell PocketLoot what your account balance is. That way you don't have to keep track of everything and you only update it when you want.

A mobile version is in the works for those who prefer to update expenses through out the day and who want to play what-if with their daily budget and potentially large expenses.

Thanks for checking it out!
The problem is that the message doesn't make anyone feel better. They apologized for the problem, but i still wonder if Dropbox fails open. If their login servers go down for a few minutes or get DoSed, can anyone access my account?

That doesn't leave a warm fuzzy feeling for storing my important personal information with Dropbox. It also makes me wonder; why didn't they clarify what the problem was? Are they hiding a big vulnerability?
But they were pointing out that what WebGL does would never pass their security reviews. This isn't even the IE team from my understanding but the security team at Mircosoft making this statement. I'm sure they work on multiple projects.
> For example, can a post simultaneously score highly in "anxiety" and "confidence"? Aren't these opposites?

Indeed they are opposites. People can hold many dual emotions simultaneously-- love and hate, belief and doubt, etc.
the next billion on board with mobile phones that run apps from an app store, have a developer community, etc, you mean.
> If you can see the future, I recommend playing the lottery.

I can't see the future, but I can edit the past. It's just a little disappointing to be downvoted without anyone actually commenting on the subject.

> but having actual arrays and hashes as different types is super convenient.

I agree especially if, in the language, arrays and hashes are objects with methods.

I didn't claim PHP's arrays were the greatest data structure on earth but ordered hashes that special-cases integer indexes is a pretty nice procedural-style data structure. PHP doesn't really have arrays; it's just the hash type is flexible enough to do double-duty.

Apparently, on Hacker News, having such opinions is both downvote worthy and punch-in-the-face worthy.
> However, the announcement by CTO Arash Ferdowsi has received an especially negative response. This post presents an EffectCheck analysis of Ferdowsi’s statement and the reaction of the audience.

No it doesn't present the reaction of the audience. It shows the reaction of a specific audience (i.e. HackerNews) - which is a very specific demographic. I love HackerNews like the next person, but people on here need to realize there is a whole big world out there that wears a different pair of glasses...and don't sport neck beards.
> the future is perceived as more advanced than the past

This is a very recent development, and it's still not universal. For the longest time, people believed that things were better in the past, that we are slowly moving away from a golden age, and that things are getting worse.

Some concrete examples are the biblical Garden of Eden/Armageddon; beliefs in Atlantis and other mystical places; the admiration for the Greek and Roman times, especially during the dark ages.
> can a post simultaneously score highly in "anxiety" and "confidence"?

"I'm absolutely utterly sure that climate change is real; we are all going to die in two years! PANIC!"
The depression and anxiety scores are complete fabrications. Why is this nonsense voted up so high? Also, some of the comments smell of astroturfing.
LOL LOL LOL "sudo rm -rf *"
Also keep in mind that bandwidth is not necessarily going to be your most expensive component. Power and cooling usually is. If you have hardware you need to fire it up somewhere and cool it somewhere. Most colo's charge more for power and cooling then for bandwidth.

Just my 2c.
Andy Hunt - How Good a Job Can You Do?
I call this blackmail
They seem to jump on any chance to promote their technology. Very aggressive and annoying marketing. If the articles had any meat to them, I'd nod and move on, but this seems just a cheap plug.

My BS-meter went way up, when I scrolled down and saw the charts that conveniently "verified" the sentiment on Hacker News. I hope they don't think I typed this message, because I am depressed and lack compassion.
If you're disquieted by the idea that a single broken boolean expression could allow arbitrary users to access a web site, one way to mitigate the concern is indeed to write fiddly little tests to catch every point at which a broken boolean expression could short-circuit authentication.

Another thing to do would be to change the design of the authentication process so that it is more inherently fail-closed. For instance, you could encrypt/decrypt the database ID of the user with a key derived securely and deterministically from the user's password, perhaps (just to keep the code simple) after verifying the password against a secure password hash.
MIT creates new nanoparticle method to target cancer more effectively
Ask HN: Should I join a company that relies on Flash?
Hi HN,

I am considering a move from a stable corporate job to a 10 person company that is serving the same industry. I am very impressed by their application (SaaS) it is really miles ahead of the competitors and is getting a lot of buzz recently.

My only worry: They built their entire application in Flex... If flash dies a slow death like IE6 we may be up a creek without a paddle if we don't completely revamp the UI.

I asked about this conundrum in a call with the CIO and the answer was we will deal with it when we need to.

I'm not worried about iOS not supporting flash since the application is data entry driven by nature so I'm not sure if mobile will be a factor.

What do you guys think? Should I jump in?
It might not be necessary, but it is the one feature I prefer about Firefox than Chrome. I use it a lot and it is more handy to change search engines or to search other sites than typing those things in my hand in Chrome.
Alright, took the plunge. I never liked tree style tabs much in the past, but I've tweaked it abit here in Firefox 5, also got FireGestures & Firebug updated too. Good stuff, we'll see if I stick with it.
NorCal, actually. But close enough :)
Another meta comment :)

The bar charts in the article would have been much easier to read if the horizontal axis would start at "typical". That way low would be seen as negative, while high would be seen as positive.