skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Posting anonymously because I have some industry experience with this. I have designed circuit boards to protect lithium-ion batteries in notebooks. (By the way, all this information could be learned from publically-available data sheets on Texas Instrument's website)

The is a complete non-story, and I will tell you why:

1) Regarding installing "malware" on a battery. I have never worked with a battery monitoring ASIC that contains a general purpose micro controller. I have worked with Texas Instruments notebook battery monitors, and none of the ones I have worked on can run general purpose code. They have registers that the host can poll to get information about the battery, but there is no way to load code onto them. The researcher keeps talking about "reverse engineering the firmware" of the battery. Maybe things have changed recently, but I have never seen actual general-purpose firmware in a battery. Limits and calibrations settings yes, but firmware no.

2) Regarding any potential safety issues: Every battery controller board has a secondary battery protection IC. This IC has no firmware at all, and is a purely hardware based way to detect over-voltage, under-voltage, or over-temperature conditions. This can not be overridden in any way (it does not sit on a communication bus). Usually when this secondary protection kicks in, it will permanently disable the battery. In addition, each individual cell has a "PTC" (positive-temperature-coefficient) resistor in series that will isolate the cell if too much current is drawn. (Some battery designs might use a fuse instead.) This is in addition to the main battery fuse, and the controllable FETs.

These batteries are designed with multiple levels of protection. Any one of them failing (including the main monitor ASIC) will not make a battery catch on fire.

3) As far as I remember, you can't really use the SMBus of a notebook without having root access. I could be wrong here though.

4) Finally, this is by no means limited to only Macs. Every PC notebook has extremely similar battery architecture, with the exact same "security risks".

The worst that this guy could do, given he has physical access to your computer, would be to disable your battery. If you just want to do that, a hammer will do a much better job.
There is also this:

http://mysite.verizon.net/astronaut/vim/index.html#MPAGE
It went viral because all you do is talk and talk and talk and talk, and people love hearing about other people with problems. A "look at that poor sap, I'm better than him," kind of thing.

But anyway, we would appreciate it if you didn't start spamming HN with this story. We know the details. We know you're upset. We don't really care.

If you must comment, one comment per threading level, please. Don't reply to the same comment more than once. And, keep it short. There must be something better to do with your life than tell everyone that Google disabled your account due to ToS violations.

It's sad. Move on.
The universe is roughly 14 billion years old, so events at this distance are near the beginning of it.
Why RTFM is broken ( and how to use your FAQs )
Information FASTER please.

RTFM is easy... for YOU... RTFM is there because WE ( those already knowledgeable individuals) are lazy.

200 page manual vrs a paragraph
who would choose the prior? nobody.

Simply put:
RTFM assumes that the user knows the language of what they're after:
( whats a "method", how is an "array" different from a "variable", how do "variable pointers" differ from "variables" themselves )

If this was a solved problem Natural Language Processing wouldn't be the massive field that it is today.

In conclusion:

1) I need to work on giving better answers to those asking me questions

2) Keep a current FAQ ... but also realize you're the expert on the matter... and theres quite a bit of value in being the proxy between a user... and the information they're after.
Will the cursor automatically swap between the buffers when you reach the edge? (e.g. buffer 1 is showing page 1 and buffer 2 is showing page 2; when you get the end of page 1, the cursor/focus switches to buffer 2, rather than it just being two independently scrolling views into the same file)
Unfortunately, that's almost the purpose of patents in general. In many industries patents aren't usually licensed so its even worse. In those you don't extort for money, you have an X year monopoly on a whole technology.

IV is probably the best example of don't hate the player, hate the game. They've looked at the game and figured out how to play it. It's like the expert Scrabble players who know all the Scrabble words, but none of the actual definitions. It's completely legal, but probably not in the original spirit of the game.
Title: Functional Programming Doesn't Work

Content: At this point I should make it clear: functional programming is useful and important.
TV's Max Headroom intro was prescient in that regard.

"20 minutes into the future ..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM9BOkcG9M0&feature=playe...
Seriously. Are they even being serious with that?
The problem is for all the people who are not prominent enough, but get nuked anyway.

When people get special treatment because they are prominent, have a reputation, or have a posse, that's a problem. Often the problem is that the special treatment should not be special, but should be the usual case.

I have at least four friends on G+ with this problem... which makes me suspect that the name/identity/pseudo problem is not merely a few special cases, but is in fact widespread.
Sexism? She guessed it might be because of her nickname in quotes, or because the page talks more about her business than it does about her. But I don't see any claims of sexism.
The link isn't published yet, but they use a predictable URL for the mp3 file so it is not difficult to find. This sort of early reveal is probably frowned upon by the organization that produces the radio show, though.

I'll admit that I let my curiosity overtake my sense of ethics in this case. :/
How to export data from your Google account
"EVEN critics of Hulu concede that this company has accomplished something astonishing. It has helped to free television from the tyranny of the TV set."

No love for Netflix Watch Instantly?
The documentation is misleading. You can use follow-mode on an arbitrary number of windows that show the same buffer.
That all assumes your host and even hosting and even the internet still exists in 40 years.
Matt, can you suggest a strategy for dealing with Google support issues that doesn't involve "get Matt Cutt's attention on Hacker News"?

I don't mean any snark with that question, for what it's worth, but I fear that you don't scale well. :)
I am mainly writing code for Hadoop. I find that I learn better when I actually physically write the code which is why I am trying to find a more vim like editor but the problem is that Java is incredibly verbose which makes it rather tired to keep rewriting Map and Reduce code.
"Imperative and object oriented are two different things" - Martin Odersky. An object is just a something that implements an interface and an interface is just a collection of functions. It may or may not have mutable state. That's why OO and functional are really just two sides
of the same coin. I think that tightly associating a set of functions with data is still a very good way to organize programs for the same reasons that it always was. Its the over use of the imperative bit of many languages that caused all the problems.
How I Dealt with Student Plagiarism
What is 'hard' about harvesting public and private keys? Especially if you are the sysadmin.

What purpose would faking 6 months of inbound traffic serve? If he just wanted to cover his tracks, wouldn't he just erase logs rather than trying to make them look legit? That would seem like doing things the hard way.
IntelliJ IDEA. Best there is :-)
You can copy and paste the .min.js file into http://jsbeautifier.org/. That would beautify everything so it's readable. :)

Crystal
Actually, I'd argue that this is going viral because you spammed the entire internet with your twitter post. Surely someone would bite eventually. Just a hunch, though.
Doing something is usually much more rewarding than talking about it.
The problem is most languages don't have an analogue to Haskell type classes. So it's kind of impossible to write code that applies to all monads.
I can't help but point out that you're not the real thomasmonopoly, even though you sound like as much of an imbecile.
On my macbook (because I suspect some of these things might not work quite so well on a desktop without a magic pad).

It took me a day to get used to the multi gesture, now I'm loving it. Oddly enough my favorite new UI feature is the launch pad, which I heckled when I saw screen shots of. The iPad interface is very clean as easy to navigate/find stuff (after a reorder) compared to my messy application folder.

The hardest part was the reverse in scroll, I had to completely relearn that behave. I initially checked the box to reverse it back to normal, and then I realized they where right in context to left and right scrolling. So I swapped it back, and I think I made the correct choice now... haven't tried a mouse however... 20 years of mouse behavior is not going to change easy I can guarantee.

The new finder preview is FAST, and show images at true size which is awesome.

I'm toying with turning off the dock lights for whats active ATM after reading an article to do with focus. When something isn't running you aren't tempted to toy with it, you stay on task. It feels weird at first, but then remembering everything is viewable in Exposé any way I'm letting go.

Dropping java support was an unneeded annoyance. Having to download a 10.7 specific version made me groan (but I suspect it may have been part of the security upgrades).

Overall I'm extremely happy with it. Would love to try a new full screen apps to see if it increases focus or not, but currently none of my favorite apps support it.
follow-mode is great. I use functions that:

1. split into three or four windows

2. balance the windows (so each takes up equal amount of space)

3. turn on line highlighting

Line highlighting helps because when using follow-mode it can become difficult to quickly spot where the cursor is without it (e.g. if you do an incremental search, the cursor could end up in any one of the many windows).

You can find the functions I wrote here, search for functions that end in "-and-follow":

https://github.com/nileshk/emacs/blob/master/nileshk/functio...

What I'd like to have is a function that dynamically opens just enough windows so that the entire file you are editing is entirely visible (possibly with an upper limit for number of windows that can be set).
Gates wrote, by himself, the best BAISC interpreter in the industry in a matter of months. At a time where there was no internet to check out the latest papers, StackOverflow to help you out, etc.

Way more impressive than sticking together a few perlscripts for a social networking website. Zuckerberg wasn't the main programmer behind Facebook, btw.
I try to not be surprised by the power and flexibility of Emacs. Having been impressed so much over the years, I've tried to come to know it as simply "awesome". That said, it's hard to not be impressed when it shows itself as even more awesome, even when you thought you were prepared for that eventuality ;)
That's right--this is not just multiple views on one file/buffer, this is multiple views that are synchronized to follow one another, to give you the full effect of one long view.
It also bugs me that @refs count against the limit. When I come across 3 developers having a conversation and I'd like to chime in, I'm already down to <120 chars just by including their names. And since Twitter's model means they can't reasonably find out about my tweet if I don't put their name in it, the more people you want to talk with, the less you can say.
Several decades ago I was a principal in a startup that produced a word processor. For the first release we included a brief manual that covered the features, less than 100 pages. Users liked it. For the second release we included a thorough 300 page manual. Users hated it. It was too short! They couldnt find anything they needed.
>> OCaml is OO, and it's one of the most functional languages I know

Hmmm, the OCaml usage I've seen from French academia and Jane Street is very imperative.
Key quote: "Why would I invite my friends to sign-up, when I haven't even tested it out first?"
Why Skin-Deep Correctness Isn't, and Foundations Matter
Gates wrote the interpreter along with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff... while he distinguished himself as a programmer, he's not quite that level of amazing. I get the impression that in a situation similar to (but not as lopsided as) Wozniak and Jobs' arrangement, Allen did a bit more of the technical heavy lifting and Gates planned and arranged the business side.
isn't it also means there was that much water xx billion light years ago, it could be all gone now!
The only ethical course of action is to stop the circus and explain to your manager:

- what this guy is asking for

- how that is in violation of the PCI data security standard

- explain that you are not able, and not allowed to provide this information

- explain that this likely means the auditor is a hack and steps need to be taken to get a proper auditor
What's the digital equivalent of leaving all your crap on the front porch?
Firefox Plugin MurdochAlert warns you when visiting a Murdoch-controlled website
Hacker News is for anything of interest to hackers, not just computers. The independence and individualism that home gardening affords is right in line with hacker ethos. This story of the epistomological challenges surrounding poppy cultivation could be seen as analogous to the perceptions toward possession of a password-cracking program. What one could use to audit security or for intellectual exercise could also be used with malicious intent.

The role of authority in these matters is of interest to many hackers.
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying in your response.

You're probably trying to find something that's not there. Just read what's there. I'm not disagreeing with you.

We have a system that is fundamentally designed to reward the people who pay.

Yes, people pay for mumbo jumbo, then they get to do stuff in the legal system. How about a system where we get results that aren't nonsense? We need to incentivize the patent office to avoid being full of shit.
The post in question by itself means nothing. There is no context.

We know Google and Sun were in talks about Java. This post could have very well been posted when Google made it clear they were going to use the Java language, but before making it clear to Sun they weren't going to license anything. Without a timeline or any other details this proves nothing.
It is not easy to avoid the nasty pieces of "factory factory" patterns if the people who you have to work with think it is a great idea. The problem is not peculiar to Java. I spend most of my C# time stepping through OPF (other people's factories) before hitting the code that actually performs some work.
And your proof is this is, Mr. Made-An-Account ten minutes ago?
What I'm getting at is that from the perspective of those "in the know": of course its obvious what someone is looking for.

But especially in the case of user adoption: does it not make sense to make it as easy as possible for someone to fix the problem they have?
The internet-cynical, tech-savvy thing to say is how much of a waste of time Facebook is, but I think it changes communication in the same way that every house having a telephone did. Yes, email and IM existed before Facebook, but Facebook is a different model of communication.
Pull the other one. Its a deliberate feature not a bug. Its to try and detect the use of pseudonyms (and fake profiles) and force people to use real identities.

I 100% will not support another platform which does this. Its to important to the arts not to have pseudonyms.
I think a fun interview question might be how to implement follow-mode.
Sides hurt (me) more. Don't ask why, no idea. I know some doctors suggest the sides, for that exact reason however.
Keeping in mind, people 200 years from now may look back on this comment and go "Ha ha, people used to think crazy things like 'the universe is only 14 billion years old'".
Programming is like building stuff out of Lego. Just grab a box of lego and start creating things. I don't think fun would be had if you had to think and design and plan everything before you built it.

The way to learn something, is to do it.
When someone violates adwords and adsense TOS they don't get everything banned, just access to those services. In fact I think that is the case with many Google services. I once had an unused youtube account banned for an unknown reason but everything else worked. It is curious that they would shut down all of his accounts.
So far, it seems the occurrence rate is 1 user in 19,000,000 users. If everyone on Earth joined Google+, then there would be a grand total of 316 similar incidents.

I think Matt will be able to handle that :)
It's possible that while in Beta they are at a point where there are no clear policies or standard procedures. Or that such things are still very malleable while they figure things out.
I don't get it. (But I didn't downvote.)
I don't know about those Deitel books. I had to use a Java one in college and did not enjoy it. Maybe they've gotten better.

Here's Peter Norvig's review of a Python title:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2C7L5KHUVHOR2/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pe...
better luck next time
How China is Kicking America's Ass In Clean Tech
he did, you're belaboring the point too much
Nothing wrong with googling solutions to code...or is there?
As someone who did use Spaces quite a lot for separating different projects/tools, I'm a little sad about Mission Control. I agree with the new unified direction, but the functionality is a step backwards. You can't rearrange desktops anymore, which completely cripples it for me.

The nicest thing about Spaces was that I could use my spatial memory to keep track of my applications, ie "oh, yes, that editor window is to the left of this other one, and the browser is underneath". Unfortunately, now it's more like "which tiny black editor window is the one I want? I can't see from the expose view, time to swipe like mad until I find it".

I'm sure they'll fix it in a future update, but right now it does, unfortunately, suck. It's surprising, because the fix seems so simple - the old Spaces let you rearrange desktops by dragging, so it's not like the interface metaphor isn't figured out. The OS can rearrange them for you, so the backend must support it. Maybe they just ran out of time.
Troll or not, it generated good responses and summaries of standard security.
No proof. Just a gut feeling, Mr. Made-An-Account three hours ago.

(Also, in the space of ycombinator users, fozzymandias and thomasmonopoly share the same coordinates. No proof.)
Are you being a Zombie? - Increase Productivity at your Startup
Yes - it's not simple to make sure you've done the right thing to make email clients backup correctly.

I used to be a regular Thunderbird user on Windows because the mail file format would be open, but haven't touched desktop email since GMail.

If I were to make a choice now, I'd look at those with conversation support i.e. Postbox or Thunderbird for Windows, Sparrow or Lion's Mail.app for Mac.
If you don't want to share with your friends, then don't.

But if you are a startup founder, remember the reason you see these viral sign up forms everywhere is because they work. You'd be silly not to offer the opportunity w/ your visitors because a small percentage will indeed share with their friends. Of course, that percentage is going down as people get fatigued or get burned by other startups that don't follow through.
in what world is account suspension for having " " in your username justified? There should be nothing malleable about that
This is a game called "7 degrees of hacker news" where you try and "connect the dots". For instance, "This story of the epistomological challenges surrounding poppy cultivation could be seen as analogous to the perceptions toward possession of a password-cracking program." is certainly one of the more creative ones I've read here. When you start being that broad though, you really stop being able to exclude anything.

Most of us are interested in a great variety of things, and, being intelligent, well read people, have opinions - sometimes strong ones - on things like politics too.

Those topics, however, are not really hacker news.
>There is clearly a pecking order on Twitter that doesn't exist in other social networks. If you have 10k followers you can tell off some loser with only 500.

There is something about this attitude that is genuinely evil.
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Nice one! :)

Pastebin or mailinator.com I guess :)

I can see it now, datafrontporch.com, an escrow service for data. Sign up now for protection when, not if, your account is cancelled.

The cost of storing that data for 60 days after the account is terminated would be minor.
Not as good as the giant cloud of alcohol http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Jodrell_Bank_Astronomers_S...
4.3	As part of this continuing innovation, you acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you. You may stop using the Services at any time. You do not need to specifically inform Google when you stop using the Services.

4.4	You acknowledge and agree that if Google disables access to your account, you may be prevented from accessing the Services, your account details or any files or other content which is contained in your account.

I have no knowledge of what services he can or can't access, just that it is within Google's purview to remove access to all Google's services.

P.S. This is not Twitter and we don't use hashtags in our posts. Please act as though you have a semblance of decorum.
TGD Reklam çalışması
> Help me find newbies like me, who want to follow and be followed!

This is otherwise know as a "business opportunity".
I thought this article would be about how hard it is to get a decent Twitter username now that spammers have taken up so many of them. That was my biggest challenge, but Twitter doesn't really seem to care about the problem.
Why I Blame Rush for the Tea Party
> OCaml is OO

Interestingly, the class system of Ocaml is one of its least useful parts. This is basically because most uses for inheritance (mixins, interfaces) are covered by first class functions.

> However, this is also imperative - we're telling the computer what to do.

No we don't (if you except the assignment to even). The fact that "filter" is an active verb is slightly misleading here. It deludes us into thinking the computer does something. (Well, it does, but not in the imperative programming sense of the word.) A more correct name would be "filtered", which makes it clearer that it produces a result, which is a filtered version of its second argument. I we wanted to be pedantic, "filter" should be reserved for a procedure that actually modifies its argument in place. But as there's no such procedure in the standard library of the typical functional language, it doesn't really matter.