skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was a fun post, but I found the other post on this blog more interesting:

http://altreus.blogspot.com/2011/06/anatomy-of-types.html

Not terribly useful to anyone who's been around the block in Perl at least once, but it's a great explanation of the three Perl variable types. Saving it for the next time I need to teach someone Perl.
It's unfortunate that simple public key encryption, which has been easily available for many years, is still seen as untenable and "super-paranoid." Any email client, or better yet Gmail, could easily implement it and make it virtually transparent to the user (when both ends of the email are using such a client, obviously).
No, there are others.http://certs.ipsca.com offers free 3 month certs also
I was about to forward this story to a recent law school grad I know who works at an 'in sourced' legal center in the midwest, but then I realized it wouldn't make him laugh like I did. Thank goodness for that $4500 communications class I took at b-school!
Usually in this kind of context, the phrase "next billion" refers to developing countries where leading-edge technology is not commonplace. It implies that Qt will be a major factor in getting the next billion people on board with mobile phones.
Introducing Nokia N9 : Just swipe
Released this free special issue few months ago: http://hackermonthly.com/startup-marketing.html

</selfplug>
For those of us who'd like to add this to our Squrl queues to watch later, the video is here:

http://www.vimeo.com/8057986

and the slide deck is here:

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcbpz3ck_24f3v83ggz&...
Seems weird to only say it's an "improved experience" to no longer be able to write 2,001 characters. Can't remember many long comments on that site that have been worth it - they're usually bickering that wears thing - but still, that reads like calling a bug "a feature."
Yup he's already on the list. Unfortunately couldn't add all the awesome resources I've curated..
We use Scala at our company too (The Weather Channel) and as long as you get a competent developer and a good mentor, they can write decent Scala code quick.
It's the assumption I'm finding fault with, though. Why include it? It's entirely unreasonable.
I guess it's because I'm an engineer that I appreciate understanding exactly what happened, and can tell he understands this is a big mistake.

"This should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again."

How is that not clear enough? All of the criticism is either unfounded (saying they need PR doesn't explain the problem) or minimal in nature (not saying the word "sorry" when explaining an outage).
http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/ (not mine or anything, just read about it here on HN)

To the Hacker News crowd: good luck!
UK police arrest Suspected LulzSec
I suck at stats but isn't the expected value of Math.random E=0.5? Which makes the result Ex11x2 = 11?

EDIT: I do suck. The expected value of Math.random*11 is 5.5, which floors to 5. Thus the total is 10.
Agreed.

Your users should not find out about these things via HN (or any other news site).

At this point, I don't think I can trust Dropbox with anything remotely valuable or private, and I bet I'm not the only person who feels this way.
My take is that Nokia bought Trolltech because they realised they needed to drastically upgrade their software chops. Unfortunately while Qt is great stuff, turning it from a GUI toolkit into a top-to-bottom platform is taking more time than Nokia can afford. Hence the MS deal which is just intended to buy them, time.

Apple has proved that device manufacturers need to have solid software capabilities in-house in order to be able to compete. Licensing an OS is a ticket to the bottom of the value chain.

If Nokia has really learned this lesson, then they should recognise that Qt is their only long-term hope of becoming a top-tier player again. Frankly, they're doing exactly what I would be doing in their situation (except I'd have preferred to go with Android and a Qt compatibility layer as a stopgap, but large tranches of MS cash might have turned my head towards WP7 as well).
> How is this different from Python's lists/dictionaries?

It's not. FWIW, I know of three languages which use the same data structure for arrays and associative arrays (/maps/hashes/whatever key/value collections are called these days): PHP, Lua and Awk (edit: had originally put "Tcl" here, but an other commenter set me straight: Tcl's arrays are called "list", Tcl's associative arrays are called "array", this got me confused. Sorry about that).

Some functional languages also use lists of (key, value) pairs for small associative arrays (they may or may not provide "proper" associative arrays as well). They are called "association lists"[0] in many lisps (using a list of dotted pairs, rather than a list of lists) and "proplists"[1] in Erlang (using a mixed list of tuples and atoms).

[0] http://www.gnu.org/s/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Associatio...

[1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/proplists.html
No, they will not recover.

Microsoft's fate is tied very tightly to the personal computer, and that type of computing is coming to end. Microsoft knows they're in very serious trouble and they're not pumping billions of dollars into Bing, Azure, Skype and Windows Phone for the hell of it. They're doing it so that the company will still be around (in its current form) 10 years from now.

But Microsoft has already lost the mindshare of developers. That's what really matters. Developers are moving en-masse to mobile and cloud computing and leaving Microsoft's platforms behind. And if they aren't using Microsoft technologies to write software, then nobody is writing software for personal computers, which means every way that Microsoft currently making money is a shrinking market.

Microsoft can still make money in a shrinking PC market the same way Phillip Morris makes profit as the last big tobacco company. And I think they may have no choice but to accept that fate.
I found the blog comments far more interesting than the post itself.
Great meeting you too. Definitely let us know when you post it.
Humans Could Have Geomagnetic Sight
It's a pity Rich doesn't film all his talks himself. The way he translates his passion for language design into eloquent presentations is a big part of what drew me to Clojure in the first place.
For anyone who went to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/ looking for release notes and didn't find them, here they are: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0/releasenotes/

And a complete list of bug fixes: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0/releasenotes/buglis...
Kevin Rose’s First Project Revealed: Oink, A Mobile App To Vote, Rank, And Share
This is because Chrome has a little disassembler built into their binary-diff mechanism, so they can get really small diffs (at least on Windows; for Linux they fall back onto bsdiff).

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software... has some of the details. Note the ~90% reduction in size going from bsdiff to this.

I want to use this for my own stuff, because that's cool as hell, but the Courgette source has pretty major dependencies on the rest of Chromium.
Doesn't mean it's necessary. The size of the update matters little to the end user as long as it's small and 5 megs is small for most people.
I don't understand this comment. I'm a programmer, designing a language in my spare time, and I found it interesting, since I considered going the Lua/PHP route with my collections. I thought it was nice to find an article about actual programming an HN again, and I don't know why non-programmers would upvote it.

Please explain. I'm really curious.
if you measure iP4 depth at Power button, it will be even less (~3 mm?). Makes about same sense as 7.6mm for N9.
> That's not even close to true. Getting different building blocks from a language/runtime is not the same as not getting any building blocks.

As an example of this, how to write a mutex in erlang: http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/04/erlang-style-actors-ar...
in our research study, we found the impact/presence of personalization very strong: after about 3'000 search queries, in some cases more than every search query received personalised search results. out of the 10 blue links in some cases we found 6.4 personalised: see for yourself
(search for Hypothesis 1 to get to the data)
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...
Startup Quote: Gary Chou, general manager, USV Network
Cool. Thx for the feedback... will play around with the color scheme
You can pivot a product, but not a user base.

- Gary Chou (@GCSF)

http://startupquote.com/post/6761027118
Agree - Google is more interested in expanding its power in the RBT market than "purchasing publisher relationships".

The latter would be a dubious strategy given Google's place in the ad business.
Be that as it may, I do however sincerely hope that widespread adoption of their technology will not lead to PR being even more bloated and filled with meaningless feel-good phrases and buzz-words. I, for one, appreciate concise, straightforward PR (which might sound oxymoronic).
He's not making his case when he essentially asserts it is OK because they've put in work arounds for a large list of known driver bugs.
It's not clear enough, because people that don't frequent HN, Techcrunch, and the like, still haven't heard about this lapse. No email was sent out, and I doubt there's one coming. Had someone not noticed something was up yesterday and not made a stink about it, we wouldn't even have this message to read.

The message is fine. The venue is wrong.
I was reading this and wondering why he is so pissed off. Then I saw his "signature".

Still, worthless read.
Super-quick tips for better business writing
> Friends don't let friends iterate over arrays with for...in.

Which is too bad because it looks so much better.
The Design Dilemma: Dismay vs. Delight
Mt.Gox - Account recovery
The security hole was an egregious error on the part of Dropbox, but the text of the CTO's response seems right on the money to me. Should "EffectCheck" be renamed "DumbDown?"
I like the fact that I can start using it without having to sign up, and that you let me create an account later if I want to save my data.

I'm not entirely sure what I would use this for though. It seems like I have to constantly update your site with the amount of money I spend, and that is a lot of work just to be able to have a daily budget calculated for me.

I use mint.com, and I don't have to enter anything, everything is just automatically pulled from my credit cards and bank accounts. They let me set monthly budgets for different categories of spending, and let me see if I am on track for my budget or if I need to reduce my spending to meet the budget.
AWS Users Are Leaving Security Holes
Final Cut Pro X: Hand On Walkthrough [video]
Summary:

TC has higher volume / lower median quality

Time-to-market trumps quality / accuracy in a zero barrier to entry space.

The AOL buyout gave TC some resources it didn't have before and it put demands on the staff that were perhaps not as explicit before. That it would evolve is unsurprising, whether or not the evolution is for better or for worse is impossible to predict. If they leave a gap another TC equivalent will grow in that gap.

That being said it would be fun to have a site focussed on what the original TC market was, small startups & new ideas & connecting people. And if they could do that without egregious site advertising (I don't mind advertising but the TMZ look is, well distracting to say the least). I would read it.

Disclaimer, I still read the RSS feed for TC but don't visit much.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the message from Arash. They made a fix in 5 minutes and clearly say how they will be working to prevent this in the future. I think the best way to handle such thing is to be honest about it as they did.

They also don't give an example of what might be a better way. It's easy to say things are wrong. And I'm not sure if their data is an indication of anything. Ok people react with anxiety (or the analysis of their comments suggests this). But wouldn't you suspect that people don't react happy if their data could've been stolen? You should measure if people would trust dropbox again in the long run.
If you use more than one search engine, keeping the term after pressing enter can make a lot of sense.

Example: If I search wikipedia and that produces no results, I'll google the same term instead.

That said, it would probably make sense for it to clear out after a few minutes, or after your interaction seems to indicate that you're done with that search term.
Oh right, I thought it was today !
Maybe I'll be in Paris !
Probably an extension you had installed.
This is true of all tools.
It's not absolutely necessary - what is? It is however a great loss in Chrom[e|ium] and I must say it does get annoying when you're forced to put a slash after domain names which are only at the top level (e.g localhost). You could argue that this is a bug in Chromium which is probably not gonna be fixed any time soon however if it were treated as a domain then it no longer works for searches, ambiguity, ambiguity, ambiguity.
I'm currently reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Even if you won't be doing much work on the design side, it's a great study in why things are made the way they are and what constitutes good/bad design.
Please spread the word.
UPDATE - Chrome Web Store Flatline
There is a little more to them than that. What you describe can be achieved simply by broadcasting the whole file over and over again with sequence numbers. The thing about fountain codes, if I remember them correctly, is that you can recover from having received corrupted packets by receiving only a few more packets, instead of the whole newspaper again.

But that, too, is achievable in a simple way: just fit a degree-N polynomial over a finite field to N+1 symbols made out of your data and emit an infinite stream of values of the polynomial. Any N+1 correctly received symbols are sufficient to reconstruct the original polynomial. A computable algorithm for error correction in this case is to try all the N+1-sized subsets of the data you've received, largest first: omit received symbol #1, then #2, then #3, etc. If you have found a subset with no errors, then the polynomial fit to its N+1 first values will successfully predict the rest.

Unfortunately, this error correction algorithm is absurdly inefficient. But I seem to recall that fountain codes have an efficient error correction algorithm as well.
Thanks, but unfortunately we already have a quick and dirty solution. Problem is latency, and its a huge problem.
Dropbox's security is twitter's downtime. While much more is at stake than not being able to tweet, I can't imagine that this isn't their number one growth challenge -- something that, if they conquer it, will give them a much higher market valuation.

If this happens, let's look forward to a trove of blogposts about "how to make dropbox secure" from armchair CTOs, just like we saw with Twitter and the string of posts around "How I'd scale twitter" Sharding! Webscale!
He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things).

I remember a study that said people read based on shapes of words, particularly ascenders, descenders and edges (i.e., first and last letters). Does capitalizing the first letter of the sentence make a difference? If it does, do people that read languages like German which has more capitalization (but the same script) adapt to it?
I totally agree, an email would be much better than a blog post. Or a message you see when you login, which could also help you check your access logs in these 4 hours.
Apple specifies Macbook Air thickness like this [1], so I think it should be fair game for the N9.

[1] http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html
He moved to Seattle and then sold it.
For true first world Hong Kong and Singapore are an entrepreneurs dream. They are both usually rated as the 1st and 2nd most free places on the planet. Every country in the world should copy their system of taxes, regulations, and bureaucratic environment. Their idea is to just minimize the burden and get out of the way. Just look at the results, they went from complete poverty to two of the richest places on the planet in a matter of decades.

Russia, while not really first world or really safe it has a ridiculous simple tax system designed by Milton Freeman and the guys at UofC. Most of the former Soviet Bloc countries have adopted similar systems. One single flat rate, minimal deductions, how every system should be.

As a side note, when I do business in Asia I usually always go through Hong Kong or Singapore, makes life a whole lot easier. Don't worry as much about getting screwed.
Harvard scientists are modifying yeast to mass produce LSD
he.net: $600/month Includes 42U Cabinet, Power, 100 Mbps bandwidth. That is a lot of bandwidth. This is where I colo.
I don't understand what you see in this technology. It doesn't take a genius — or a computer for that matter — to figure out that the post was emotionally tone deaf.

The axes used by EffectCheck don't make sense to me. For example, can a post simultaneously score highly in "anxiety" and "confidence"? Aren't these opposites?

As a designer and programmer — Don Norman's newest article for Core77[1] got me thinking about this — I am a bit quick to roll my eyes when I see the powerful visuals ("Oh, a chart!") deployed to trivial ends (a relatively simple Bayesian classifier?), and EffectCheck has the hallmarks of something as unsophisticated as ELIZA[2] or the Myers-Briggs personality test.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2679720

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Libyan Rebel Engineers Improvise War Robots In Fight Against Gaddafi
Alfresco Brings Its Enterprise-Level Content Management to Small Businesses
Meta comment - this article was originally submitted 7 hours ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2678163). The article was then submitted a second time just recently with an alias url '/?p=291', presumably with the proper voting rings in place. Is this an accepted tactic for promoting articles on HN?
More important is that tab kit still isn't fixed.

That damned plugin keep me in FF3, since tree style tabs are so goddamed ugly.

Edit: But looking at the page, it seems the developer posted an update yesterday promising an update in a week or two. yay!
Internet Land Rush - ICANN in favour of increasing domain suffixes
let me know what you guys are thinking about this - i am curious on what we could add to keep it simple but give you designers and planners better leverage. thanks guys
Chrome searches your history and offers the search option, without requiring a separate search box. It doesn't force you to use the start of the URL or title, either, as far as I can tell.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I was thinking of saying something along the lines of I'd be surprised if they view their own actions so introspectively. Perhaps comparing it to the classic english teacher interpreting meaning behind a work for he class that the author never intended.

But I suppose it really doesn't matter - if people get something from a work it really makes no difference if the intent was there with the creation.
I know a lot of grizzled video Final Cut users who are very nervous about the "iMoviefication" of the UI. But after reading these reviews I'm feeling optimistic about Apple's ability to deliver a simplified interface without sacrificing power-user features.
No one is ignoring the issues. The author was never saying their wasn't security issues. He even states some of the steps that the Chrome team and the Firefox team (who are working together on this) are taking to make WebGL more secure.

The point is, Microsoft will have to do that exact same things to secure 3D in Silverlight 5. Why not use that work for WebGL in IE10?

The author also point it out that microsoft is in one of the best position to help secure WebGL by putting pressure on Driver vendors and using their knowldege of the OS. In fact Gregg in the post talks about the reset ability in windows which lets browser reset GPU when they see browser operation blocking them for too long. This is a feature that he claims is only well supported on Windows. And that Microsoft could work with GPU vendors to make that even better on Windows.
I kind of view it the other way.

Shooting someone for speeding toward your checkpoint who turns out to have actually been deaf or in a hurry to rush a sick kid to the hospital is sad, really bad for everyone, should be avoided if at all possible, etc. There are also a lot of liability and cultural concerns. If you're willing/able to make a real apology for that, it should be really easy to do so for something comparatively minor.
I received the following from Drop box late last night:

We are writing to let you know that there was some activity in your Dropbox account that we'd like you to review. On June 19, 2011, there was a brief bug with our authentication system that could have allowed unauthorized access to accounts. You can read more about it at our blog post linked here.

Based on a careful review of our records, we noticed that your account settings page was accessed during the time the bug was in effect. While it's unlikely, we'd like to be cautious and make sure this was you because if the activity was unauthorized, the information in your account could have been improperly accessed. Please review recent activity in your account, which you can view at http://www.dropbox.com/events, and let us know if you find anything suspicious.

We noticed that during the time the bug was in effect you also:

Logged into the Dropbox website
Linked the desktop application to your Dropbox

As a precautionary measure, we logged you out of the website and disabled any apps.

We are very sorry and this should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again. If you're not able to access your account or have any other questions or concerns, please contact us at support@dropbox.com.

I don't know what else they are supposed to do. They should have never screwed this up to begin with, but grandted that they did I think they've responded just fine.

IMHO All the moaning about how they've handled this is just a bunch of baloney. If a company spokesperson speaks out of both sides of their mouth, people cry for honesty. When a company is blunt and honest, they need to hire a PR person. I wonder how many people on these threads are 'PR' people.
You're going to find that security researchers are going to agree with Microsoft's take on this. People have been finding actual flaws in this stuff. Web browsers are the hardest piece of software we have to secure in 2011. Coupling them directly to video drivers is disquieting.
I agree that an email should have gone out (instead of just a blog post), but it's not at all clear to me what is wrong with Ferdowski's message. This blog post contains lots of shiny graphs but doesn't explain in any capacity what was wrong with the statement. Changing the color of words is not a cogent explanation.
Am I being too close minded here or would the advent/influx of a bunch of new domains severely dilute the internet to the point where it's not as intuitive--I just see a huge mental barrier on the horizon and a ton of headaches.
Brian Belhendorf on how to contribute to OSS projects
Everything is a Remix Part 3
Tcl doesn't really fall into this category -- Tcl's hashes are called arrays, but for sequential structures you would use a list instead.