skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't just learn to code, learn to program. I m of the opinion that one starts with the classics, like C, that will make everything else (e.g. Python) fall into place. Also, despite the sex appeal of rails, I'd start with PHP, that will introduce you the underlying technologies of web dev.

P.s. It's only too late when you are dead. I started a phd at 29. Just beware cause it's addictive, and you may end up smelling a little more
I commend you for using <map> to link the markers to the items. Image maps... wow that takes me back to 1999. I can't believe people still remember how to use them. Of course you can't do any rollover effects with them, but otherwise it seems like a pretty quick and effective solution for the interface you wanted to make. When I first saw this I thought the Google Chart API had maybe changed to add JavaScript-based interactions.
Too big to float.
I'm not big fan of the name (I would assume it's another node.js SaaS provider), but otherwise it looks like a great directory for node.js beginners.
IT Professionals: MUST READ
I just got a MBP and didn't realize that I'd have to resort to a stupid USB dongle. I've decided to just go back to two monitors, but it makes me sad.
I worked for some time as self-employed.. The hardest part was to maintain discipline.
And I've got to the same conclusion: routine.
What makes your life seem boring when you're an employee, is what keeps you from procrastinating all day when you are self-employed.
We are 100% sure.

(See this comment from our editor in chief: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/06/16/lulzsec-has-releas...)
Actually, that's an interesting point. Silverlight allows pixel shader usage, which they view unsafe in WebGL. That'd be interesting to read SDL team's views on this.
Vivek wasn't the CIO of data.gov as the headline implies. He was the CIO of the united states. IMO Its a real shame to see him go. Data.gov and other important projects like the federal it dashboard and his efforts to reduce wasteful spending on data centers seem destined for termination without him.
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
Just to be clear, I think we have the same opinion about the study in question (though I just read the posted article). I just think you did yourself a disservice by stating "... is an anti-nuclear activist." Just pointing out that the article was "insulting in its lack of statistical rigor" would have been enough. At that point, arguing about the opinions of the writers is superfluous.

But regarding "facts": It is entirely possible to only know things that are true but still have an extremely biased view of the world, if those facts are a biased subsample of all possible facts. I work in astrophysics, and it happens all the time. We have such scant information that it's easy to draw all kinds of erroneous conclusions if you don't constantly keep in mind the potential facts we do not have because even if they were true we would have failed to acquire them.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.

This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre programming job, but your office is a folding table under a decommissioned fume hood. Physicists and mathematicians who program are so underpaid they dream about the glamour and glitz of working in a cube on Wall Street. There are bad jobs with technology firms, but by far the programming jobs with the most "respect", most fun and usually highest pay are with tech firms and well funded startups.
Wow, this thread is turning into another security-clueless developer freakout. Microsoft very clearly laid out reasons why they believe that WebGL presents possible security vulnerabilities. While GPU security isn't my area of expertise, the driver issues seem very plausible. If someone wants to actually address Microsoft's points in this thread then that would be great.
I immediately thought that this wasn't worth the risk of trying just on the off-chance its phoning back to Lulz with my info. Sort of asking to be hunted. Maybe I'm paranoid...
author here: I second that - I know who wrote the widget but the developers are understandably afraid to get hacked themselves if they make their identity known.
Exactly. There's a fine line between a business trip, and something that requires a work visa.

I'd imagine that the best way for a foreigner to work in the US on non-US projects is if a body-shop (possibly owned by them - I think most people can own a US company) hires them, then subcontracts them out to the offshore employer. The question is how they get everything set up while they don't have a work visa. I wonder if a business visa would allow them to set the paperwork up? Anyway, it's madness.
That is why I keep a second home directory, /home/experimental for trying things out.
I'm not a fan of most MS products, and I get a bit of NIH syndrome vibe from the article. However, the security argument is spot on.

Perhaps browser developers have come up with strong countermeasures, but experience shows the state of OS and app development today is still ineffective in the area.

I don't allow Java, most Javascript, and most Flash to run on my system either, so its nothing personal. With direct access to hardware, flakey video drivers, and no thought to security, the possibilities for disaster are even greater with WebGL. Remember Windows has graphics drivers in the kernel.

Also, as long as browsers continue to execute objects on page load instead of behind a play button security breaches will continue.
As a quick note, some of the things that Brendan mentioned in the talk didn't end up making it in to Harmony. Here's a link to the meeting minutes:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2011-May/01474...

Notably, arrow functions and paren-free blocks of code didn't make it in ... classes and comprehensions did.
Basically, I only consider something "ad hominem" if the flaws pointed out are irrelevant to what is being said. I think background is relevant when someone is presenting something as a fact that may not be (like the statistics in this post). When background is irrelevant is when it's used as an attack on someone's logic.

Even if it's Stalin saying "Murder is wrong, because kills someone", it doesn't matter that he himself was a mass murderer. It would make him a hypocrite, and a terrible person, but his logic still stands by himself.

On an unrelated note, I liked your (unintentional?) subtle humor of pointing out who wrote the article on ad hominem.
NVIDIA display driver heat sensitivity.

Due to Mr. Jobs' pathological hatred of fan noise, Macintoshes always seem to run hotter than their PC brethren. Consequently when it's a hot day (like only 27°C) occasionally the screen of my 2010 MBP locks solid (check the Apple Discussion Forums for the phrase "Channel Exception!" to see how widespread this problem is). Frustrating.

Also the leading edge of the Unibody design is too sharp. Pretty but not good for the palms/wrists!
Honestly, what could possibly go wrong?

The biggest issue is that GPUs can do DMA to read and write directly in main RAM. This can be exploited to overwrite arbitrary kernel data structures, for example.
patronizing FBI shrinks.

God says...
spectator Euodius retard Texas defers wazz_up_with_that wanderings acceptable teachest theirs nominally costs year's middle division raisedst comprehended equalled unsuitably inchoate

In complete denial on God. God said 640x480 16 color.

God says...
shadows charge depending Michael ensues pupils

LoseThos is a 2ndary OS for recreational programming.

God says...
honour Preacher crucifixion rashly musing monastery toiled stealing affections despairing straying sex Christian wings exorbitant misery OTHERWISE their Orestes Vacation why_is_it proffering resulting willed sparrows styled I vexed conferring tv applied affliction steer confiding stored Whatever shoutedst putrefied generation exuberance Supreme relax processing Wisdom's bride secretly Vacation cloud legal reply conservative flows sorry trials mainly limits roused punish studious precedest taste wisdom preventing severally ships hooah tenet unallowed applauses seldomness disembowelled discourses thickets intermitted whereupon qualified purified sin Knowing shrinking distrusted expressions discovers transitory thousand plants recollection alteration Thagaste dishonour commender dispenser conformably
You can preload the assets and store them in the html5 app cache. If you've seen the webgl Quake 2 port you know that javascript is fast enough to do games, at least the lighter ones, like the stuff telltale makes.
Check out my application: https://brainbrowser.cbrain.mcgill.ca (sorry if it's a little hard to use, I'm working on documentation but my user base usually knows what all the stuff means.)

It's in use by neuroscientist for a varity of stuff. I have users in almost all continents. (I need people in Australia and African Countries ;p)

There are many games that could be done with WebGL as it is today. Some little RTS games that could be fun. Zynga has proven that you don't need anything fancy to make money from games.

As for other applications, well I think http://ro.me is a great example of something that can be done with WebGL. I bought the CD just because of that video. It was brilliant marketing.
Honest feedback:

I visited Tusulog (the name should be re-evaluated) and there was very little description of what it is, what it does, why its good, etc.

I then registered and was told that the service was meaningless unless I invited friends. Ok. Try to wedge out of the chicken and the egg, or piggyback on something else, because in all honesty, theres no way I'm inviting friends to a service of questionable value.

Something something "its not what your service does, its how people use it". Right now, for all I know, Tusulog is the most genius website ever made, I just wouldn't get to the part where I discover that.
Some good points buried among juvenile posturing, I guess the "old" part must be irony. Would you take programming language advice from someone who has learned the language in "a day or a week"? I realize the point is the language doesn't really matter but statements like that and the general tenor of the post don't inspire me.
I'd be more worried that the drivers run in kernel mode and this could actually allow a new class of root-level arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.
You won't even make the widget's author known. You're keeping that secret, and I doubt you've had someone competent analyze the widget's source code. No thanks.

Also, after some fuzzing, it looks like the widget might be vulnerable to a SQL injection attack, so I hope nothing really is being harvested.
Who cares? I don't understand people who act like their email is special. Even if it was "consuming" email addresses, what difference does it make?
Awesome, looks like a good idea to me! It should also not be very destructive as most legitimate websites already try to eradicate mixed (secure|insecure) content.
Possibly off topic, possibly related, but can anyone explain to me how Google's Native Client (NaCl) is different from ActiveX and Flash? Sounds like a security exploit waiting to happen.
> Microsoft has spent more time and resources than any technology company in the world focusing on web related security.

Mostly because they had to. If others spent less it could be because they had a smaller vulnerable surface to begin with, or simpler codebases.
I don't think you have to find someone necessarily with a heavy software background. I would think it's more important to find someone with a lot of IP experience that knows a little about software than vice-versa.
I use a script that moves a file to a ~/.trash directory when I use rm. If I am sure I want to actually delete a file permanently I just use /bin/rm.
Read these papers:

http://www.contextis.com/resources/blog/webgl/

http://www.contextis.com/resources/blog/webgl2/

To learn more about WebGl and security. Goes into more depth than that article.
Who is the old programmer that Shaw interviewed for this section? He should have credited him.
Any chance of adding a 'save' feature? I clicked through from your blog to the board, saw an interesting job or two, and now I either have to email myself the links, or hope I remember when I get home from work.

Reddit has a nice little link below every post that says 'save'. Click it and that post goes into a page of saved links [0] I can skim through when I get home. It'd be nice if you had this too.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/saved/
Oh boy here we go... queue the apologies for Apple, how this is innovative and how it will benefit the platform.

I'm sorry for the snark (not really), but do you have any citations for any of this? I'm a skeptic, but it doesn't help that they still haven't turned on the acceleration for Javascript in webviews.
Home screen apps are not running in the browser - they run in a separate process.

What distinguishes a 'design bug' from 'doesn't work the way I want it to'?
And as the grandparent post mentioned, he would probably not be interested in working at companies that focused so much on what their employees did in their free time.
"Oh, it's not a swindle. What you do is, see, you give 'em all your credit card numbers, and if one of them is lucky, they'll send you a prize."
Commercial DBMSes have way better customer support than open source DBMSes. Not only do they better understand the performance characteristics of their clients, but they have dedicated teams whose job it is to isolate corner cases where the DBMS is not optimized for a particular environment.

My statement -- there is not a whole lot you can do to tune your queries -- is about rewriting the queries themselves, such as join hints, etc. Changing RAID configurations, organizing the data physically on disk differently, etc. have no bearing on the quality of SQL an ORM generates. So what does? Well, 20 years ago many DBMSes required you to compile stored procedures in order for the cost-based optimizer to cache anything. Today, not only does SQL Server 2008 R2 support fine grained plan caching and allow you to adjust the size of that cache, but you can remove from the cache any plan you dislike. You can also force a poorly performing query to use a specific plan cache. This is one of the ideas behind the LINQ Re-Motion project for .NET.

I am really arguing about where to put work effort into, and really NOT disagreeing with you. We are talking past each other.

I personally believe, as I wrote in the author's blog comments, that an ORM based on an algebraic model would likely be better than the big and irregular ORM APIs we have today.
The ridiculously annoying "breathing" sleep light on the front lid. Don't plan on sleeping in the same room as your Mac, your room will be completely dark then brighter than 1000 suns every 30 seconds or so. Repeat all night.
Project Management Books
What are some good software project management books out there?
> Programming as an intellectual activity is the only art form that allows you to create interactive art.

What about oral storytelling? Or just (re)telling jokes? Improv and related performing arts? Stage magicians? Mimes? Community murals?
Facebook constantly banning applications
This is absolutely correct. Exposing video drivers to untrusted code is bonkers. Unfortunately, the ad-hominem attacks against Microsoft will likely prevail here.
I believe they used to call this "looking a gift horse in the mouth". Almost an insult eh? I hope you never encounter any real insults, you'd likely be traumatized.
Trash has restore: the menu item is "Put Back". I'm on Snow Leopard.
As an old programmer myself, who has learned many languages over the years, and written programs for pay in most of them, learning languages in a day or week is not at all unusual, or difficult. Especially after learning assembly for a few different machines, with widely different instruction set architectures.
My 2 cents:

1 thing i am dying to see in posterous is "preview" option plus the pages & link section is a littile clumsy.
Google listen.js
I you collect them and believe Global Warming is a religion, perhaps you can analyze the data yourself and prove it wrong, just like jgc did: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/01/new-version-of-crutem3-and-h...
> People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.

Totally
i start off with enthusiasm and lose it at some point. For atleast one of the projects, I do think something worthwhile can come of it, that's twitterex.com. i am not sure how to go about doing AB testing on a simple site like that
It's also probably true that no one that works at Facebook started there with the aim of facilitating regime change in Egypt and Tunisia. So while it seems that they had the unforeseen consequence of aiding these, I think the idea that you should start working at Facebook because you want to save the world is a stretch.
I wonder if this is what the founders of github expected from "social coding"?
HTML5's New "form" Attribute
http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-refuses-to-endorse-webgl-...
When you get to the point where you understand that all programming languages are just implementations of turing machines (some more limited than others), and have much experience with a few languages, I'd say yes, you can give quite good advice regardless of the language, even if you've never once used it.
The server currently appears to be serving everything up as text/plain. Has been doing (for me, at least) for at least the last 5 minutes or so.

[EDITED after redpill fixed the server: yup, it's fine again now.]
That's definitively an issue. Is there a way around graphic drivers in the kernel? Userspace graphics drivers could be interesting if they were possible.
you mean this?
http://posterous.com/api
how DARE you even try and figure this out. That's like trying to figure out how to ninja-sneak through a harem of beautiful harlots and not get loved-up. why!?
Motive is incredibly important. Saying someone has a reason to be biased is not ad hominem. Saying they're a fucking hippie is.
Earlier discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2613508
I disagree. People who code in the world of technology companies get respect, and quite a lot of it. Getting paid for your work is a form of respect.
>thanks for ditching the open standard h264 on Chrome

I think that someone may have lied to you when they explained the words "open" or "standard".

Also, why am I "looking at" MSFT/AAPL/GOOG for in relation to HTML/CSS/JS apps? They fact that many are still native? Google's apps for iOS are web based, and I'm sure iCloud apps for Android will be web based. Microsoft just got done demoing HTML5/CSS3 applications for Windows 8.

Your comment is all over the place without actually saying much or really making any legitimate claims.
The whole point of NaCl is that it provides a safe sandbox for running verified native code - the Wikipedia article has more on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client

Google ran a security contest to find problems with it, which turned up a few. I'm not sure what the status is at the moment with regards to security: http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/faq.ht...
Imprisoned Syrian Blogger a Fake: This Week in Online Tyranny
Mine does, now. I have a directory ~/.trash and a script rm that moves files to the trash. If I really want to permanently delete something I need to use /bin/rm (including for cleaning out my .trash dirs).

ADDED: Note that I have a .trash in each user's home directory including /root. And a copy of the rm script in each user's home/bin.
It's not about whether it could affect Direct X or not - one game crashing your GPU due to some unintentional bug code (there's no incentive on game publisher's side to make it intentional) is not the same as the Web, where anybody can push something to your browser that exploits hole in some graphics card driver. Microsoft has a point. They do not explain, however, how Silverlight is invincible in the same situation.
> Another problem is: how would I use my phone to pay for goods? Some mobile app?

I bet people asked the same question about credit cards when they were a brand new thing.
I love you Linode! Best host ever.
Perhaps, but just as ignorant.

I would expect a scientist or engineer to react in the absence of good information to say something like: "Is this the worst disaster ever? I don't know, it depends."

At least the person assuming that the sky is falling is reacting out of fear. The technical person assuming that all is well is reacting out of hubris.
They have a point. OpenGL was not designed with security in mind (same goes for Direct 3D). Prior to WebGL there wasn't really a need for security, since applications making use of OpenGL would typically be considered trusted.

Index buffers into vertex arrays, for example, are not bounds checked in OpenGL. This makes perfect sense in terms of efficiency, but can lead to code execution in adversarial settings. I'm sure there are many more cases where choices were made in favor of speed, and where security was simply not a concern.

Having said that, all these things can certainly be fixed. For example, Microsoft could add a security layer that does all the bounds checking prior to passing on the commands to the driver (so securing all the drivers is not necessary). Makes me wonder how Chrome or Safari handle this. Anyone know more?
My first thought is of a phone case that has a slot for credit and ID cards. I thought it was a pretty brilliant idea - the only reason I don't use it is because I still have to carry cash and other miscellaneous crap. :(
Do you have a link to that Apple study? I find that very exciting and never heard about it before. Though it would mean, that me and many other geeks are plain wrong about their preferred input method.

You might be interested in DiamondTouch [1] which allows multiple users on one touch table. I tried it out at a presentation at the MediaLab in Nov 2010.
The trick, if I remember correct, is that the user sits on a special chair. The chair, then detects an electric connection between the user and the table.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiamondTouch
You should learn to apply your knowledge of programming to his business.

I find that that when knowledge of programming and software systems is combined with business, one has the potential to create a highly profitable autonomous system which only requires the initial investment of time (and hard work, of course).
I'm using 2/16GB (2/20GB now I guess) on my Linode. RAM is always the pain point for me.
Denial is a totally natural and incredibly powerful human reaction to uncontrollable tragedy. People who are "more logical than others" are actually no less prone to this than anyone else, they just use a different mechanism to fuel their denial.
I didn't read him that way at all. I thought they were just good, pointed questions, asked straight out.
Mozilla planning to use HTML5 and JavaScript to render PDFs in Firefox
chances are they will be hacked either way..
For all his faults, Zed Shaw is really a great personality to have in the programming world. He loves to code, but doesn't get caught up in the minutia and cargo-culting.
From the article: As The Register has previously reported, Data.gov has been the subject of serious funding cuts in recent months. Its budget was dramatically reduced from $35m in 2010 to just $8m this year.

From http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/datagov_et_al_budget_sl... : Federal government transparency programs, including data resource directory Data.gov, face across-the-board budget cuts by 75% in the latest version of the federal budget to emerge from Congressional negotiations.

Congress slashed the budget, not the President.