skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is libtrash (http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/libtrash/), which does something very similar. It adds a library to your LD_PRELOAD variable which intercepts unlink syscalls and moves deleted files to $HOME/Trash instead of actually deleting them. The nice thing about this is that it works transparently, and not just for /bin/rm, but for anything that deletes files.

That's not to say it couldn't be improved upon, though.
I'm pretty sure that was the coolest piece of software ever written anywhere at any time.

Hah! I literally (not figuratively) laughed for a minute at that. I'm still smiling a few minutes later. Well played.

Let's mourn together at the memories of long lost code.
As well as any content hosted on a CDN.
I'm not a huge fan of CoffeeScript in general, but one big plus in its favour would be the ability to write one set of CoffeeScript that compiles to JavaScript AND ES.next. That way you could serve the regular JS to older browsers, and the newer JS to browsers that support it.
Yes, that's it, thanks. For the GP, please note I said: [not applicable to expert fingers]
look at the nice map on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_O’odham showing the reservation. Notice the significant % of the border it takes up. Notice that no NG were placed in that section of the border.
This jibes with my experience. Once upon a time I know a lot of grad students in the sciences, once they found out I was a professional programmer the fun was effectively over due to a barrage of programming questions. They all hacked on some sort of code.
I fear this website will be forgotten after a few days.

It may have a chance if people keep posting links to jobs there on their profiles or relevant comment threads.
This would be fine, if only more third party resources were available over HTTPS at a reasonable cost.

For instance, I'd love to use Olark for occasional customer support queries, and the free plan would work great for now. Unfortunately, Olark doesn't offer SSL until their $49/month plan.

Similarly, Cloudmade's fantastic OpenStreetMap tileserver is only available over plain HTTP, period.

With this change, I would have to choose between great services like Olark or CloudMade and offering SSL everywhere on the site. I understand that select pages with mixed content could be subject to man-in-the-middle attacks, but surely that's a better risk profile than forcing me to run everything over HTTP, right?
Or you could just be responsible with your rm commands.

Also keep good backups. As soon as I read the article it reminded me to plug in my 2tb drive and run timemachine.
I think what we're seeing here is people no longer search for Facebook on Google; they have started going straight to Facebook, with no Google in between. For lots of folks, Facebook is the internet.
Indeed. Those were exactly the design goals I had when I wrote safe-rm (shortly after deleting my /usr/lib!).
Awesome. Love this app. The most used app when I'm on the toilet.
I see mixed http/https in gmail a lot. I wonder if that will break it.
You know, I'm sympathetic to this point and yet... I can't help feeling like this sort of thing really screws people who put up perfectly serviceable websites just 3 short years ago, who now need to go back and spend effort just to keep things working.

It's hard to say if the benefits in this particular case are worth it, but I'm becoming increasingly wary of "this old hotness is deprecated, everyone should upgrade to the new hotness!"
Thanks for the comment. The avatar is optional, as are LI/Twitter invites. The signup process is two screens, but I mention the Avatars because people are engaging to this degree at least. And it's 1000's of users doing this, so I'm pretty comfortable that the signup process is OK, but you're right: get people to us the meat quicker. Maybe some guided first steps, for example.

>Team members use email to communicate, not LI/Twitter/FB/Social Media.
We agree, everything else is optional.

> From your website, I can't tell what your app actually does
Good feedback, thanks. I should say that the discovery is primarily from the App Store so the landing page is more focused on describing features in detail, but I agree with your point: get the primary use case front & prominent.

The problem I have is that there isn't just one use case. At a high-level we combine Twitter (or GroupMe?) with CRM-lite productivity tools. We're selling the tight integration as our primary use case. And so your point would be to tight integration more obvious, and get people using that feature ASAP.
Thanks for sharing that. I've been thinking on and off about moving programming from a hobby to full-time job and it's nice to see someone who took the plunge.

I'm curious to know if it was difficult to find an internship. Typically, companies are looking for people out of college and I would expect them to dismiss older candidates pretty fast unless you have a strong cover letter.

Good luck with the new endeavor!
That is just how much people search for it. Here is traffic:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com#
How To Ruin A Web Design
Old, but had me cracking up all over again.
Or house prices (oh wait that has direct relevance to rental unit costs)
I am a software developer in the energy industry. So whether or not that is Computer Science is up for debate. I do need to have my skills up on the technology in use, and I most definitely need to have a solid understanding of technology. But I do not need to know the latest and greatest flavors of it.
As a HubSpotter I am pretty psyched about this. We have admired (and competed with) Performable for a while and it is great to combine forces.
Oracle seeking ‘billions’ in damages from Google
Mine are too... seems that HN users tend to reward quick "aligns with our zeitgeist" posts.
Strawman? My points are completely factual.

Where is the evidence of this false-flag operation? There is none. Why would congress need to conduct such a false-flag operation when they wouldn't have much trouble passing such a law regardless?
I do this sort of thing a lot, not as a formalized utility but as a practice. For example I'll often do something like this:

mv data ~/tmp/
cd ~/tmp/
rm -rf data

At least when I'm in the tmp directory I can see that clearly on the command line so I'm more comfortable issuing dangerous commands.

I suppose there might be room for a formal utility, but sometimes you just have to be careful. Take for example my "build" script for Fexl (at https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/master/src/build). There you will see these lines:

# I don't use $obj and $bin here because that would be dangerous if I made
# a mistake setting them above.
rm -rf ../obj
rm -rf ../bin

If I were not being so careful, I could simply say:

rm -rf $obj
rm -rf $bin

Because after, all, the $obj and $bin variables are "guaranteed" to point to safely disposable directories. Heh. Famous last words. Redundancy is key to reliability.
I have an account with Linode and loves their service; however, given the competition from AWS and AppEngine, I don't know whether I should stay. Light traffic static website can be run in AppEngine for free. AWS has some very competitive pricing for VPS. Linode's yearly $240 fee is less and less appealing.
> At the time that I wrote this book I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how weird they were.

Funny. I've been programming quite a bit too and feel comfortable in a handful of languages. Knowing what's happening in the compiler and in the hardware or vm (runtime) is a different story. Being able to understand what programs do no matter what language they're written in is also a different story. We all know 20 different languages.
I thought I was the coolest guy on the planet when I recovered most of my data.

That's the feeling. It's almost euphoric. It's the "FUCK YEA" meme (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fck-yea).

In actual content, it's convenient that you had timestamps to work with. That eliminates a lot of the need to trim off trailing bytes. Kudos to you for the epic save, and on a live (mounted?) disk too? Living dangerously :)
We're also hiring! Check out our jobs page: http://www.pulse.me/jobs
My parents do that all the time. Often then typing the URL they wanted originally (and knew) in the google.com search bar after.
Transfer Contacts From iPhone to Android
How To Transfer Contacts From iPhone to Android Nowadays the different people are using different smartphones, and its pretty much seems like a race of
Normally I'd just vote you up, but since no one will see it, I'll vote you up and echo your sentiment.

Lack of a docking station -> I third this.
If I'm understanding this right, if a user stays on a single page for longer than 30 seconds, their session is invalidated? That sounds pretty harsh.

I typically concatenate the users IP and UserAgent. If the new request doesn't match, the session is invalidated and they need to log in again -- But I also don't have a mobile offering for many of the sites I build, so the changing IPs problem is mitigated substantially.
There is an advantage to the overconfidence described (from drugs, sleeplessness, or whatever) - if you are the sort to over-edit and second-guess yourself (cough), then it can help produce a first draft of something. It'll be a lousy first draft, but that's often better than one that doesn't exist.
Most people writing here are not generally practicing computer science, but rather focusing on software development. For me, good communication skills, an ability to understand project requirements and a focused and responsible attitude are often worth more in an employee than an exhaustive knowledge of design patterns.
Does anyone else not trust the data on data.gov? I don't have any evidence to prove otherwise, but I have a feeling that the raw data is tampered with before release...

Perhaps its just the fact that the US government really goes out of its way to protect its data (remember how much the US government hates Wikileaks and how long it takes to de-classify documents). Why would they up and release data all of a sudden?
They do look great, but you can't use your Macbook as a second monitor with it.
Tell HN: PG on Bloomberg TV today at 3
says his tweet at http://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/81461340920750080
Hackers Attack CIA Website
Given that the device potentially draws power based in part on the driver, I think its reasonable. It's unlikely to cause any problem, but warranties are about expected use -- not to cover any use including those of hackers. They're NOT prohibiting hackers from using it, but if you brick it, then its yours to unbrick. That seems very fair.
View a PDF in the Browser using JavaScript
This article predicted this a while back: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-w...

"RIM's real problems center around two big issues: its market is saturating, and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products. This is a classic problem that eventually faces most successful computer platforms. The danger is not that RIM is about to collapse, but that it'll drift into in a situation where it can't afford the investments needed to succeed in the future. It's very easy for a company to accidentally cross that line, and very hard to get back across it."
Original quote here: http://www.quotes.net/quote/19982
That's not really true. Social Security is insolvent, but so what; the sooner that gets shut down the better. There's no evidence that boomer retirement is creating a labor shortage. The boomers are retiring now and wages are not increasing. Japan's boomers are 10 years ahead of ours and their retirements have not created problematic labor shortages.

Even if there were labor shortages, impending water shortages rather plainly remove the option of continued population growth.

The native population of this country decided the land was full in the 1970s. Native born birth rates leveled to replacement. The current immigration paradigm is a political agenda at odds with democracy. Poll after poll shows pretty much everybody agrees we don't need more people. What we have here is a political alliance between certain business interests and certain ethnic interest groups to benefit at the expense of the majority.
Mhh. I knew I should have shorted after the initial upo.
What's wrong with clear and simple?
Apple's "1000 songs in your pocket" is a great example of this vs, say, "8gb HD capable of holding over 1000 songs".
RIM Is The New Palm
Genome study solves twins' mystery condition
So why are these things still hot?
You are there definitively some things that will need to change for 3D games to be possible in WebGL. LocalStorage limits (unless using the Chrome WebStore) is preventing games from store let say 300mb of data into your browser for later use. For bigger games we are talking about GB. The audio api is also in flux right now and isn't ready for prime time in my view but it's getting there. WebCL is another thing that could help. Game physics will probably make good use of WebCL.

But at the same time, games that can run on your iPad should be able to be made in WebGL with not to many issues. I'm looking at games like the new Age of Empires online (since I played that not to long ago). I feel that it's a game which could be implemented using WebGL and a larger local storage limit and proper WebSocket support.

I'm sure you will find that I'm very optimistic but my app barely pushes the capabilities of WebGL and new javascript APIs.
Wow! The timing couldn't be better! I was regularly hitting 98% and 99% full, having to purge files here and there. I was just about to increase my space.
I use my MacBook Pro at my desk a lot -- probably 80% of the time -- but I invested in the fastest model I could get, and bought an SSD hard drive, so performance is great. I'd rather not spend another $2500 on an iMac when I have such a great MacBook Pro.

Not to mention, I really love working from a single machine. I used to do the iMac + MacBook 13" shuffle. Even with tools like Dropbox, it's next to impossible to keep everything synced. I don't want my 30 GB Aperture library syncing in my Dropbox. It's just much more convenient to work from one machine.

When you factor in that Apple sells more laptops than anything, I'd say it's a fair argument that there are a lot of people running a MacBook (Pro) attached to an external display, keyboard, mouse, and related peripherals. The lack of a dock makes this a real exercise.
What does NoScript.net look like without all the ads?
+1 for Schumpeterian destruction!
For the unaware, Teamliquid is the biggest Starcraft fan site and it features streamers on their homepage and links to their justin.tv accounts, people have risen to "fame" through being featured on teamliquid. Also Justin.tv is a big part of the Starcraft 2 streaming scene so that's why it's relevant to TL.

I assume that now it's offline and being patched it's ok to link to a "how-to" that people were using: http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=55667625&f=214
You may also like this essay of his: http://zedshaw.com/essays/master_and_expert.html
There's a phrase for this fallacy: Turing tarpit
Not true in biology, at least. You're correct that most people realize that computers are important, but most biologists can barely use a mouse, frankly. Being able to code doesn't make you a great scientist, but it's one more tool in your arsenal that you can use to attack scientific problems, and it's a fairly rare one in many fields of biology.
I’m not brave enough to speak in extremes/absolutes like "completely wrong" on a topic like this.

My experience aligns with his advice. As a finance student, I was selected for a research project because of my database/SQL knowledge, which got me mention in the Journal of Finance when my prof. was published, and which later paid unexpected dividends. Later, knowing to code in a finance/analyst job ultimately positioned me for a startup that has left me much better off financially than if I had stayed in my job. I also have a friend in the pharma research field that did very well because he could write code.

(Note that it’s not always the money that is the pay off. Sometimes it is an opportunity that leads to other opportunities that would have never been open to you had you not been able to code, as in my case. )

So, in my experience his advice has proven to be right on.
From the FreeBSD handbook (
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/users-introduction.html):

The home directory is the full path to a directory on the system in
which the user will start when logging on to the system. A common
convention is to put all user home directories under /home/username
or /usr/home/username. The user would store their personal
files in their home directory, and any directories they may create
in there.

All of my irreplaceable data is stored in `/usr'. `/home' is a symlink to `/usr/home', as created by the installer.
It seems to be back up again. Nasty bug they had though.

edit: Down again.
Whenever I hear about MSFT, Nokia, or RIM struggling to catch up to the incredible lead that Apple has, I remember back in 2007 when Steve Jobs said basically "the iPhone is at least 3 years ahead of everything else in the market."

It took about 3 years for most of the competition to catch up to what the iPhone launched as. Microsoft kept trying to ride the WP 6 train hoping the iPhone was going to flop and not become the next iPod. Eventually they had to do a major rewrite which put them a few years behind of iPhone. Oops. Blackberry Storm and Torch are both still below par and not even competitive against Android devices, let alone iPhone. Nokia never caught up at all with the iPhone.

Similar story is playing out with the iPad. Android is catching up on hardware, but not software ecosystem. Maybe that will be different in a year, but the market could certainly shape up to be more like the iPod dominance of music players than the iPhone/Android dominance of phones. Windows 8 will launch when? 2 or 3 years after the iPad. Sound familiar? Blackberry Playbook is out, but that's such a mess it's not worth discussing.

Steve Jobs was right back in 2007 and most of the market is still 2-3 years behind where Apple is.
I'm pretty sure on computer monitors, sans-serif produces better readability, but on paper it's the opposite.

"Numerous studies have been done on the readability of serif vs. sans serif typefaces. Studies indicate that serif typefaces may be more readable in print. Studies of on-screen use are more ambiguous, suggesting that low screen resolutions make serifs more difficult to discern, with a resulting erosion of readability compared to sans serif fonts."
-Wiki, so feel free to cite a better source.
Thanks for all the feedback. These will help us greatly. Appreciated.

First of all, we don't say it's the most genius site ever or the next Facebook. All we say is that our product makes socializing with your friends easier.

There are very few things on our to-do list before going to work on improving the home page and so. After that there will be a lot more explanation of what it is and what it does. Last but not least I hope you all will be using our product!
Ubermind: How ignoring mobile in your company will become an existential threat
When the iPhone was announced, RIM was trading at just under $50/share. It's now trading at ~$35, its lowest point since. To realize that gain, you would have had to hold your short position in RIM for over 4 years.

Alternatively, if you believed in the iPhone, why not just invest in Apple? Their stock has risen 300% over that same period.
I finally had a chance to play with node over the weekend. First impression is that the library ecosystem is way bigger than I'd have thought and documentation is generally very well done.

Node really seems to have captured the imagination of a lot of people. I'm looking forward to using more libraries and building out the toy app I started.
I would argue ActiveX gives MS a lot of credibility here. If they're saying it's insecure...
well, the only difference is that truncate also resets the auto-increment to zero. But you could allow where 1=1 to make it explicit if people really wanted an unbounded DELETE FROM.
RIMM is one of the few companies that can actual compete based on it's hardware specs, as opposed to it's software. People who use blackberry's love their keyboards. They also love their email functionality. They should have switched over to Android based devices running on their hardware with their email client, with BBM thrown in. It could have been a killer device with a ton of apps available from the get go.

This really could have, and should have, been done a while ago, but it's seems like Mike Lazardis is on some kind of a ego trip.
I think that might work ... a holographic keyboard and trackpad that hangs in mid air and on any surface pointed at it. Try doing typing motions in mid air or with your arms on arm rest with your hands drooping down end of rest(arm rest scenario would be a split keyboard). The latter is more comfortable then what I am doing now - wrists and hands on metallic/plastic laptop and keyboard.

Also, remember Kinect has a fairly solid voice controlled engine. I know many people who use the Android talk to text function regularly. I wouldnt mind using similar tech to execute searching, reading and communicating via text on the web.
Great list! Using a few of those myself

If i can be cheeky I'd love an intro to the guys at Stripe, think it was a fair few months ago I registered my email for their Beta and would love to implement it for my startup.
and it was 666 points a second ago. symbolic.
Good luck spotting the next iPhone. It wasn't exactly a given that the iPhone was going to be a success. And if you remove the recession, MSFT hasn't really moved it's just stagnent. Same for RIM from what I can see EDIT: I was wrong on rim they went to 100 bucks in 2008 but quickly dropped back to 40-50 range where they are now. I was looking at 2007 where they were in the same range.
This is why I want the public and the Governments to focus on pouring money into solar energy. The more attention it gets, the better the technology becomes and the price keeps dropping.
I'm not sure, but this thread might be of help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4310953/invalid-date-in-s...
I love the idea, but doesn't HN make its money from the job listings on the front page? If this gains traction HN might have to figure out other ways to monetize.
> Programmers (or IT) got no respect from "business" people (finance, biologists, doctors, etc). They don't understand the difficulty of programming and think you are replaceable commodity.

The inverse is also (probably even more-so IME) true.

> But if you have the domain knowledge and the programming skill, you can turn the field upside down. Automate the jobs done by "business" people and commoditize them.

Case in point. ;-)
when everybody is trained with at least a basic ability to program, then your super advantage is gone

Yes, but like Math, not everybody can be trained in it. People either get math or they don't. Everybody has to take calculus to become a scientist or a doctor but most people never really get it and forget it shortly after taking the classes. I imagine the same will happen with programming: there will be a few required classes for a basic science education, but it will be lost on most people. Broader exposure will be good, but it won't magically give all scientists the ability to code.