skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found this to be a common issue on Stack Overflow. Someone will ask a question that might indicate they're doing something wrong, and all of the answers will be pointing that out, usually ignoring the possibility that the user has a legitimate reason for wanting to do whatever it is.

A current example is a question I asked recently: How do you safely use variable table/column names with SQLite in Python? [1] I want to write a slightly high-level wrapper over Python's SQLite API, so I need to be able to escape table/column names. The first response is one of Stack Exchange's top users telling me the premise of my question is "evil".

It's very frustrating.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6514274/how-do-you-safely...
I always compile C code this way, so it warns me about that particular type of error:

gcc -c -Wall -Werror -ansi ...

You may not have to use all of those options, I'm not sure. The error message is:

"error: suggest parentheses around assignment used as truth value"

I find that very helpful.
How Little Things Change: a Pascal-to-Javascript Converter
I suspect that means a .PST is mmap()'d (or Windows equivalent), 32-bit Windows gives each process a 2G address space by default.
Sorry, but this is the latest entry in obsolete and obtrusive functionality. It's useless for mobile (just tested iOS Safari and Opera), which is the platform you should start with, and it's been proven out to be an annoying hindrance to the user on the desktop.

Don't interrupt CRUD. If you can't trust the user to not perform an irreversible action, then you're doing it wrong.
Make them the CEO? An engineering undergrad degree is the most prevalent degree among CEOs (at least with a sample of S&P 500 companies).

http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/2007/06/05/sp-500-ceos...

I think there is a problem in business school focus on short-term optimization. There's data showing the while businesses have fatter profit margins than ever, total profit growth has been much weaker than in past decades. Hmm I think I saw that data in a Umair Haique presentation.
I think calling G+ to be growing like crazy is misleading. Gmail itself has about 200 mio. users - migrating those users to a G+ account shouldnt be that difficult. What's really gonna be interesting is whether G+ will be capable of attracting new users, which are not yet part of google's 'services cloud'.
Cuepoint.js - Adding Cue-Points & Subtitles To HTML5 Video
Eating more fat makes you want more fat
And my assessment is that the article is wrong. Google+'s goal is absolutely to kill Facebook. With something this important to Google, they want to control it themselves. If not, there is always the chance that Facebook will screw them over at the next opportunity and the battle restarts.
Beg to differ. Code that "works" the first time it is run is no different from code that "works" after several debugging cycles. You still have to prove (or test, in a pinch) that it works in either case.
Dear Google: Why did you ban teenagers from Google+?
Groupon Privacy Policy Update: Mobile Tracking and Personal Information
var listen = function(el, evt, cbk) {
if (el.addEventListener) {
el.addEventListener(evt, cbk, false);
} else {
el.attachEvent('on' + evt, cbk);
}
};

No jQuery or whatever necessary ... if all you're doing is basic event handling and you know how the DOM works for other things, it really isn't much trouble to include this and a couple other small functions in a one-off, and is far preferable to including a hefty all-purpose DOM abstraction library like jQuery or MooTools.

Their example including an ugly onclick attribute doesn't imply that that is the only way to do things, it merely demonstrates the absolute simplest way to use the library. Of course any fool can use a script that includes the function above and locates the element manually.
I'm inclined to agree with this fraction. I just used POP3 to LIST the first 360 messages in my mailbox and the graph shows an distinct upshot around 95%.

Around 95% of my (360) emails consume 6.5% of the space (360 messages take).
Court Rules Use of GPS to Track Individuals Not Privacy Invasion
Government grants
The article title on ChristianPost.com emphasizes 'Cheating Spouse' but the judges ruled based on the following:

"Appellate Judges Joseph Lisa, Jack Sabatino and Carmen Alvarez said Villanova had no right to "expect privacy" because the GPS tracked his movements while he was driving on public streets."

With no mention of the relation of the tracker to the tracked.
I think this would essentially amount to having save/load game for multiplayer, and how often have you seen games have one of those?

Still, desync errors are pretty common in early versions of RTS, I remember pulling my hair out while playing Starcraft and getting desynced non-stop. Or maybe it was the cheaters!
I do have a twitter account, but I closed the page immediately when I saw that's what I needed to do to proceed.
Watch,Online,free,Megavideo
Watch,Online,free,Megavideo
Meanwhile, the Rector of UGM Sudjarwadi said, KRN 2011 is expected to be used as a means to develop and advance the world of robotics in Indonesia. "The contest was also expected to become an
Get the HN you want: follow HN folk with email notifications.
Lethal to people who don't look where they are walking. Natural selection thinning the herd, I think it's a fair trade for reduced noise pollution. I'd be surprised if iPods haven't already begun the process.
Times curbs Pogue's P.R. appearances
How an Obscure Supreme Court Decision Might Influence Viacom's YouTube Case
I don't understand. Google showed you how to use BLAST?
True, but I also think it will be interesting to see whether the users that get a Google+ account actually use it. I use Twitter for purpose-less tech/business opinions. I use Facebook rarely to talk to my brother and sister. I use Skype for work conversations. I don't yet see people using this enough for me to want to move to it.

edit; If they created some kind of BBM-type android service that sat on top of Google+ I think it would make me switch my SMS usage because I have a lot of friends that use Android phones...
I think the point was that resyncs (exchanging game state) are too intensive (hence the prohibition on "join in game") - as you say if people are prepared to wait a few minutes it's less of an issue. Having said that, this explains load screens on joining multiplayer games much better for me (first load is a state sync, but subsequently input-sync could be sufficient).
Out of all the HN interface apps I've tried, this is one has stuck. Enjoy.
"It's indisputable that as MBAs have gained prominence in the US auto industry, the products have become less compelling."

While I don't entirely disagree with your premise. Correlation does not equal causation.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/54/139092366_ce5b410228_o.jpg
It also didn't help that, by and large, their products were absolute rubbish.
It's silly that the layout requires a width of 1280px because of the right column, when there's plenty of free space in the left column: http://oi54.tinypic.com/20a3xxc.jpg
(only offending areas shown :)
The Divorce Generation
كلمات اغنية متى متى حسين الجسمي حلا حلا 2011 
كلمات اغنية متى متى حسين الجسمي حلا حلا 2011
no, I am pretty serious, down votes dont change reality.
there are apps/services which are signing on 99.999% availability.

if after having a expertise in managing 200million+ gmail accounts, I would consider it a bad fumble at 5 million+ users
NP. I spent a lot of time dancing in the Detroit techno scene 1993-95. I love this site.
Posts like this make me want to switch fields again! Video games can have so many interesting problems to solve.

One thing it does make me wonder about is the difference between pure code and code with side-effects. Knowing large regions of your state-transformation code is pure would go a long way towards limiting the possible scope of these desync bugs. The fact that many of them are uninitialized variables and padding is interesting as well and makes me wonder what the language could do to prevent these sorts of problems.
Google+ Added $20 Billion To Google’s Market Cap
You're right, but I suck at CSS - any hints?
You have to appear in person to get certain paperwork done.
Show HN: My weekend project, WhatColorIsThisSong.com
Texas Aglow with Effort to Save the Incandescent Bulb
Use two fingers. It's still a pain, but you can read it.
you have to ask yourself which alternatives are already there. From scratch I know http://www.instructables.com/ and the Evil Genius book series. Many specialized forums will probably exist. You have to ask yourself if you want to create a funding market for the brainiacs to improve science/patent mining or HR networking.

There is no email adress on your personal page and twitter is inactive - you can find me by the same name on skype or twitter.
I find these personal attacks in the form "you don't know what you're talking about" all over the Internet, and highly annoying.

I'm not sure if that's a flaw with me, or with everyone else.

It seems entirely reasonable to engage with things one doesnt know about, and writing being one valid way of doing so.

Mentally tag everything ever written as if the author had said "IMO" at the end. Even people who do know what they are talking about can be wrong or interpreted wrongly. This is almost a variant on the theme of proof by appeal to authority.
U.S. Suspects Contaminated Foreign-Made Components Threaten Cyber Security
I'd love to get some HN'ers trying this out over the next few days. Here's a little write-up we wrote about why we built it: http://akkartik.name/blog/2011-05-13-05-47-29-soc
I think of a code name to refer to it :)
It's a shame that we give attention whoring journalists like this guy any attention at all. More sensational bs. If I wanted sensationalist, I'd be on reddit's /r/politics.
This looks promising!

Two ux issues:
1. If I switch into another tab while listening to the music there is a notification sound every time someone says something new in the chat room. This sound is overlayed over the music which is somewhat annoying. The only way to turn the notification sound off and still listen to the music is by closing the chat room.
2. Once you close the chat room there is no obvious way to re-open it until you refresh the page and click on "More chats" in the lower left corner - a part of the screen I'm least likely to look at. Expected behavior is that the chat should just reappear where it was in the first place.
Almost everything on the internet should be prefixed by "IMO". That said, a well-reasoned argument's correctness does not vary with author.
np. It was actually your post a few days ago that led me to it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2737779 I started using HS, and I have been enjoying it. -so thank you.
My point is that code that "works" the first time is at best a false optimization.

It takes more time to prove the code than it does to write the code, and it generally takes more time to design the code than it takes to prove it.

Syntax errors are caught by the compiler, and are very quick to fix. Semantic errors are usually caught by compiler warnings (provided you turn them on) and by static analyzers, and are also quick and easy to fix. Anything more insidious will not be uncovered by code that "works" the first time it's run, so you really haven't saved yourself anything.
The New Economics of Summer Camp
Still, he brings up a good point. If the source of non-determinism is known to be exactly in the physics engine, maybe it's possible to share the global physics state every once in a while.

I don't know much about game network code, but is this feasible at all? Another post brought up the reason for using lock-step networking is because of "thousands" of units, so I assume the biggest data is the physics data (x,y,z velocity, etc of said units).

If some physics errors could be tolerated for a few ticks, maybe a binary search of the gamespace could be used to figure out where the error came from, and sync up the game state in that area. Could be fairly low bandwidth right?
Google Map Maker is for Cartographic Mascochists
Autism and Agile Software Development; pt 3
I couldn't agree more. Check out the tools he has built: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/
Prosthetic eye digital camera
Very nice!
I seem to have hit a bug, though. The color selection is always many pixels below my mouse cursor.
dude i haven't received a invite yet. Just to remind you, my email is contentpro gmail com
I have seen your ad a number of times when googling for "hacker news". Are you planning to implement some sort of monetization in the future?
Browse safe when online with Browser Defender.
I'd add SSL/https. I'd also add "Strict-Transport-Security" and "Content-Security-Policy", both of which can be seen by looking at HTTP response headers.
It's not, but that's another problem.
Whenever I see a thought like that my first thought is that English is a human language, for the transmission of meaning.

Rendering it devoid of all ambiguity and shade in such a fashion would make it easier for computers to parse, but the expense would be losing most poetry and literature.
Jack Welch was an engineer before he ever ran GE...
Who cares? Let those who want to spend more money and/or have insurance go ahead and spend it on expensive eye care -- but for those with less money and/or no insurance, why stop them from using a tool like this, which is surely better than the nothing they're getting today?
That's great to hear :) No, no plans for monetization. We're just trying to build a steady little stream of feedback.

Why do you type 'hacker news' into google?
I'm not sure what is up with the recent hostility on HN. This is an interesting service that is already launched (so your quibble about it not being news is kind of strange). The fact you don't want to use it and you consider the signup page "blank" means you could have responded with positive criticism and helped them improve the landing page.

That would help the community more as a whole here.
Japanese Reactor Shut Down By Jellyfish
Has anyone considered that there just might be room for more than one particular set of talents inside a company?
Insights from Dharmesh Shah on building a Saas startup
The answer to this should be easy. What are the APIs exposed to Google developers.

In the MS antitrust case one of the important things that came out of it was that internal MS developers had access to the same set of APIs to Windows as 3rd party developers. That is, the CLR or Excel or Sharepoint, for example, don't have access to special APIs that no one else has access to.

Google should do the same. Anything that GMail, Search, Docs, have acess to, so should Facebook, Bing, and Twitter.
Pure client-side wiki with version control, for one.
I run up against this each year. Had an initial corruption and then started new PSTs each year and separated out some of my larger clients. It's quite heart-attack inducing to corrupt a massive PST when you base a lot of work and billing on the unread status of emails!
'Space Invaders' to Become Hollywood Movie
Not streamable in my region (UK)

:(
Big gap if you ask me, because a clean UI would be a desirable and obvious differentiator in what mostly looks like a commodity market.

Yeah, an API would be huge but I think we're a long way from that. Retail banking in 2011==Mobile telephony in 2005.
I used the fool word in my reply to show that the story makes a wrong point. Engineers are being smart in Including the sound aspect, customers are being smart in paying attention to the sound as a cue. That means the author of the story is a fool :)
My mistake for assuming that HN didn't follow the Reddit pattern of downvoting anything that disagrees with the hivemind...
This must be awesome one to truncate all social networks, mainly it overcome the Facebook and make a rapid change in visited list in top one...I'm eagerly waiting for this to join... if u need to know how the Google+ works visit this link "http://newstarocean.blogspot.com/search/label/NEW%20RELEASEa... watch the video "First look at Google's Facebook killer " this really super.....!!!
I'm curious as to weather or not this is sarcasm? I remember the owner of a small company that makes top of the line a/v equipment (the type of stuff Saudies wih oil money put in their private jets) come talk in one of my college courses. He showed us the inside of a case, and where they added weights on the inside, so it felt 'solid'. And thus sold it at a premeimum.

p.s. I'm a horrible speller, Somebody make a keyboard app with a spell checker, eh?
EyeWriter
It's not just migrating users, its keeping them interested in Google+ as opposed to Facebook.
15 keyboard shortcuts for PCs
I just started to use gmail's imap support to access my email accounts with thunderbird. It's quite impressive what the thunderbird team have done with it since I got disheartened with it a few years ago. One thing I was pleasantly surprised with was how good the search feature was.
Scilab Code for examples in (Popular) textbooks
Don't forget http://hackerfollow.com/, it's still up and going strong. No email notifications, but it just works.
Google + Hangout Jam Session [video]
Chris DiBona on Open Source at Google
Chris DiBona, Googles Open Source Boss talks about the role of Linux inside the company and why Chrome and Android use so fundamentally different release models
There's a large gap between removing all ambiguity and adding an explicit grouping syntax. Nevermind computers, plenty of English is far more difficult than it should be for humans to parse.
I think "illegally installing software" is a red herring.

Rather, the issue is "Spy Camera Artist." It's possible that most of the folks photographed for his show have no idea; and might not be happy.

While photography in a public place is protected, private property photography is at the discretion of the property owner.

Apple might come to the idea that unwittingly photographed customers could sue them for invasion of privacy. Hence, they went after him.

There are plenty of other reasons and explanations as well.
So you can get better at creating things of value later?
Long live the fat American
Similar interface http://thrivingkings.com/apprise/
50 million WordPress sites in the world.
The quickest and easiest thing to get you up and running might be a grid framework, like grid960 (960.gs) or blueprint (blueprintcss.org).

Though off the top of my head, I can't think of a way that you could maintain your current layout but collapse the left column first.
Overheard in the park today, "google plus is like facebook but looks better". The same thing was said by non-tech people about facebook vs myspace.
Awesome Python and django related projects
You should probably change your Dropbox password. It could be compromised.

Or maybe someone just changed a file in a shared folder? You can see a list of your shared folders here: https://www.dropbox.com/share
The Myth of the Genius Programmer (I/O '09)
stream does not play in Poland as well
Mentioning devops undermines your credibility. What service is 5 nines? How is that measured?

In general, Google SRE just gets it done. Sometimes people screw up. It happens.
hacker news + $article-title
"Adding insult to injury, one of the most common cases is an uninitialized variable."

Somebody needs to turn on compiler warnings!
Bill Gates: Creative Capitalism (2008)
I wonder if network connectivity has improved to the point that it would be better to run a single gameplay engine on the server and let the clients simply run the visuals.

Semi-related: Does Javascript have the chops to power a multiplayer RTS? I keep thinking to myself that something comparable to the original Age of Empires would be quite doable in HTML5. Not only would it run on modern phones and tablets, a Google Maps style touch interface would be ideal for flinging around the map and controlling units.
An astute observation.

I believe it took spreadsheets for 'personal' computers to really start taking off in the smaller business world; it wasn't until - IIRC - Windows 95 that computers took off in households. I remember that you were something special prior to '95 or so if you owned a computer.
It isn't sarcasm. Good quality pro audio gear weighs a ton. I know this because I've schlepped lots of it around. I've seen enough of it opened up to know that it doesn't have weights added to it. The kind of people who buy this stuff often open it up as soon as it comes into their possession, out of curiosity. Any brand adding weights to their products would soon be laughed out of the market.

Good quality in this context doesn't necessarily mean audiophile sound quality, it means consistently high performance and low failure rates over many years of abuse.

As I said, when you get to the really top end stuff, it stops holding true. Weight is the last thing to be optimised as you go upmarket.

This is pro audio gear I'm talking about, not so called "high end" consumer stuff. I mean the stuff which has rackmounting brackets, not the stuff with a delicate finish. "Audiophile" kit is synonymous with snake-oil, as that guy who came into your college demonstrated.
Why I Suck Less At Hiring These Days
That also doesn't quite happen enough to make it a priority!
Another cool tool in this world is CouchDB. A local instance can replicate back and forth with a master when available, and you can serve an entire app right out of the DB.
What emerged from this panel and others at this year CMC is overwhelming evidence that today’s kids don’t want to be a captive audience.
Vacation interruptus: Don't let an office tech crisis ruin your getaway
BBM-type android service

You've described Huddle[1], part of the Google+ app for Android.

"Huddle lets you send super-fast messages to the people you care about most."

Presumably, Huddle will be part of the Google+ app on other platforms, too.

[1] https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.app...
jeez. writing code that works the first time is a productivity hack. it doesn't really have anything to do with preventing logic bugs so much as it has to do with tightening your feedback loop.
The convention for ruby is 2 spaces.
Stop posting crap, start realizing you're reacting
Why I stopped following Seth Godin’s blog & stopped buying his books
I'm very torn on this. I do think it should be on our national agenda to produce and consume energy as efficiently as possible. That said, CF are not exactly a drop-in replacement for incandescents. They make a humming sound that's hard on my ears, and I've yet to find one that really gives off proper warm light. In short, I want to participate (even before I have to) but the technology is not quite there yet. Here's hoping for the newer LED technologies.
I understand how you feel, but I can't imagine Google's restricting the service for anything but practical reasons. Minors are, legally, a special case, and Google+, being in such an early stage of development, might not have the privacy features necessary yet, or they may not feel ready to test them. A legal issue arising from minors using the service at this point in the product's lifecycle would be disastrous PR-wise.
Pretty cool! My only suggestion might be to hide the artist and song name, if possible, and show it after the color is picked. I kind of felt like I was ready to pick a color for some well known artist before even hearing the song.
This is a really great introduction to Couch, and if you like this model of working with data, you can keep exploring as soon as installing Couch. The database has a fantastic admin console that lets you explore your data, create and edit views ad hoc, and try out more advanced couch features. It has a great UI too.
I actually bought the bundle! :) great work! PDFs and ePub looks great on my nook color.
Blogger.com down/having issues?
Getting a lot of 503/Service unavailable errors for blogger.com.
If I finally do get it, some or all or the links start giving the same issues.
From what I remember 503 is app. server specific issue.