skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"7 People saved my life" By Paul Browning
I thought I'd return the favor to Paul and post here in HN (Paul Browning is the creator of howtonetwork.net which is a Cisco certification training site full of free and paid resources).

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0955781590/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
http://www.7-people.com/

This is a story about one man’s journey to the most terrifying place in the world – rock bottom. Everyone’s rock bottom is different, but for Paul Browning, it came in the form of a long legal battle to save his business, crippling financial problems, and the end of his marriage. During that time, Paul felt desperate, alone, and very frightened, and he almost lost the one thing he needed to keep going – faith. If it weren’t for the support of seven very special individuals, all of whom had been through their own personal hell and not only survived but thrived, Paul might not have made it. With their words of encouragement and advice, Paul was able to face up to the changes he had to make, and he learned some very valuable lessons along the way. These lessons can help you, too. 7 People Saved My Life is more than just a story. It is a survival manual for anyone who is struggling to cope with a life crisis, going through a hard time, or trying to make some meaning out of a traumatic life event. Paul Browning worked as a police officer in the UK for 12 years before embarking upon a career in IT. He has been through enough shit to last a lifetime, but he came out on the other side stronger and wiser – and with his sense of humor intact! Forget the usual self-help manuals. This is the real thing.

PROMO Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA66MwPVw4I

Paul Browning
Reality Press Ltd
Midsummer Ct. 314 Midsummer Blvd.
Milton Keynes, Bucks.
MK9 2UB
GB
Great work as always asksol!
Strapped states cutting unemployment benefits
Yehuda was right: Steak is a scam
[delete] CappCon 2011 On the Fringe - Pushing the Web to its Limits
Oops, fixed link: http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=2850433
They're public accomodations like hotels. As per the Civil Rights Act:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited places of “public accommodation” from discrimination based on customers' race, sex, color, religion, or national origin.

If forcing use of "Legal Names" is a policy that unfairly targets a group protected by that, look for a lawsuit eventually.
Mass Copyright Litigation: Another Court Gets It Right
How to hijack a php botnet found in RFI logs
Taking Little Steps Towards Your Dream
Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting. – Christopher Morley
US borrowing tops 100% of GDP: Treasury
At most jobs I've been at so far, "optimizing code" involved digging through the entire codebase with profilers and instrumentation for weeks at a time trying to find performance bottlenecks. Then maybe if you were very lucky you got to fix it, but more often than not it was an architectural bottleneck and you'd be SOL, best case is that a domain expert would get to fix it.

Then again this is dealing with system-wide performance. Application-specific performance should be significantly less of a problem to fix.

I think the jobs that are simply "here is this function, make it 10x faster" would be pretty rare, since usually people don't know what part of the code is going slow. A lot of the times they'll guess "X, Y, Z is making it slow" but without a real performance analysis patching stuff all over the place just doesn't pan out.
Tell us how they could have saved the world.
Forget About Devices Why IT Execs Should Focus On Content
Well, yeah, that's what useful stack traces are for - but stack traces aren't useful in the least when you click on a button and it's supposed to do x but it's doing y; how do you figure out why it isn't doing something it's supposed to be doing without either putting a bunch of log.debug() calls in the code or breakpoints?

With Python, when stack traces happen now, WebError will even give you an in-browser prompt to explore the state of that Python session; so log.debug() calls are only used when the software is working but not working as intended - that is a case where debugging tools can actually come in handy because I hate cleaning up log.debug() calls littered everywhere.
Summary: A marketing guy accidentally made an advertisement too informative, which made the useless, overpaid sales staff unhappy. A couple years later, the entire market segment died, because their crappy products couldn't compete with personal computers.
My First PhoneGap App for Android
The slides from my lighting talk at Conferencia Rails 2011 fully annotated for your personal enjoyment
I can confirm that Brother printers stop working even though the toner still prints perfect pages. I couldn't believe that a company would program a functional product to suicide, so I did some searching on the subject. There used to be a hack that was possible to get Brother printers to continue printing by covering an "eye" on the printer (http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806). However, the new Brothers (like my HL2270DW) no longer have this exploit available.

I feel that a company that would deliberately program its toner to stop functioning, is questionable on moral grounds. It is purposeful destruction of value. It hurts the environment and is wasteful.
Krav Maga and Combat Samba are the first two that come to mind. MMA is good, as are boxing and wrestling but they're not designed from the ground up for getting you as good as possible at beating people up as fast as possible.
It's a fundamental right to go by whatever name you want in Common Law actually. You have to do it fairly consistently for entities to HAVE to recognize it though, and it does a good fuckup of your credit reports when you change, and is pretty hard to do pre-18 (and you have to tell lots of entities when you have a felony record).

So yeah, fundamental right is accurate.

http://www.washingtonlawhelp.org/documents/1488013400EN.pdf?...
CappCon 2011 On the Fringe - Pushing the Web to its Limits
Oops I was born this way
To me this all sounds like rhetoric.
It's a good story but I really, really hate auto playing videos.

Edit: "video ads" -> "videos" I don't like either one.
I gave up on Rails, because I didn't want to unlearn SQL / relational DB principles. Is there a good guide somewhere that will teach me how to stay in control of my DB schema with Rails and not do dumb shit the framework wants me to do?
I suppose at night someone could pick this up if there is a window in the room being used, but this is no different than normal wifi which can be picked up outside the house.

More of the problem is that it doesn't work room to room, only line of sight like with a remote control. Could be useful sending to wireless speakers from the media player, if the player is in a different location than the TV for some reason, but in the same room. I suppose it breaks down if you add a second device unless each one grabs its own specific light frequency and you have narrow optical filters able to distinguish between them.
It really depends on the program architecture and what issue you're debugging.

For most single-threaded or simple multithreaded programs, it's easier just to throw a print statement where you need it and analyze that. Even with a large data set, a simple grep will probably get you what you need.

When you're debugging a complex, multithreaded program, on the other hand, an external debugger is much more valuable, because you can break at the exact point where things go wrong, and examine the entire program's behavior at that point. Debugging a race condition with prints can be pretty difficult, especially when the printing changes the timings of the threads.
Preview of Storm: The Hadoop of Realtime Processing
Darpa rolls out 'Cyber Fast Track' to fund hackers
The other post with the link to techcrunch also refers to this URL. So is this a google project then?
>So you say my ex is going to correlate the social graphs of well-known friends of mine to find me online?

That's exactly what abusive ex partners due.

I am currently working with a social networking component of an iPhone app and "Guy who used to beat his wife" and "Not being found by that guy if you're the ex-wife" is a scenario we're actively making sure is protected against.

You are aware many pictures have geolocation data in them no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format#...

You don't see how that could be accidentally dangerous for a person?
Needham Raises Apple Target to $540 on Strong iPad Sales | The Mac Observer
Extjs ajax implementation internals and the evolution of xmlhttprequest
I hate upvoting stories like these, because the HN comments are always going to be pure crap, but oh well.

Also, fuck video ads.
The iPhone experience is that the system Contacts app is only for calling via the phone system. If you want to call via Skype, you open Skype and then use its embedding of the system address book. It is really quite clunky.
Quick Tip: How to hard reset Nokia E 72.
And now the cost of hosting a hundred webapps is just a rounding error in contrast to the cost of developing one. Isn't it nice living in the future?

The additional benefit is that I can take the same program and handle 20,000+ concurrent users on two servers— which is when I suddenly become very glad that my hardware costs are significant compared to my dev costs.
i'm sure it was helpful. the first skill in learning how to code is little details, like making sure all the text is the same as the listing, and that you pressed enter after every line ... ;-)
As always, talk to a lawyer and nothing offered here is legal advice nor should be taken as such.

But......

We got this letter about a year ago. The price then was $35,000 if paid within 2 weeks, $70,000 after that. If you didn't pay, they were "gonna getcha'". A ton got this email. I doubt many paid (we certainly didn't).

New suits by Kelora since they sent that letter over a year ago?

Zero.

I would confer with a lawyer loooooooong before I would pony up to Kelora. They are bleeding money to lawyers trying to make a large sum off of one of the big boys. Its been 3 years since PartsRiver started down this path and 1 year since Kelora picked up the torch with absolutely nothing to show for it.

They need to cover their lawyer fees. They must be getting really low on funds now if they've upped it to $150k....

(also, correct me if I'm wrong, this second group of letters are the threat of suit, not actually suits, correct?)
What happens if the app that provides that intent isn't installed on the user's phone? Are they prompted to install it?
I think these things do help with programming in a manner that is probably hard to measure. Making something has an affect, I find hard to describe, on my ability to think logically and creatively (in more areas than just programming, but it so happens that I spend most of my time programming).

For those interested, here's a series of books on how to build your own machine shop from scratch (by building your own foundry, casting parts, etc...): http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html (I'm not affiliated with Lindsay Books in any way)
It's kind of strange, but when I read ESR's "Portrait of a Hacker", I recognized many traits in myself that I had independently developed, many prior to getting into the software world online.
I think it's kinda funny how the "Did you consider a woman player's perspective?" question at the end asks us to be mindful of women as a game-playing demographic while simultaneously forgetting that women are also a game-designing demographic who might be reading this very article.

Just sayin'!

The "Art of Game Design" book looks fascinating, too--I ordered a copy!
Everything they show here is available as open source at:

https://github.com/austinsarner/Frappuccino
https://github.com/austinsarner/RunKit
Notch attacked by bethesda
If IP rules had been enforced better, the industrial revolution wouldn't have come to America. Samuel Slater, "Father of the American Industrial Revolution") was not famous for inventing stuff, but for successfully sneaking the tech out of Britain, against the rules.
The 2011 Web Analytics Review
The funny thing is that if the DoD contracted out to build these, they would end up costing over $1 million each. There are a lot of unique opportunities for startups that are willing to use off the shelf technology and package it in unique ways. Provided, of course, you don't have any ethical qualms about selling technology that might be used for good or evil.
How To Find New Customers Online
I have Flashblock and I didn't see any ads.
You are still missing my point I am afraid:

"Even if entropy is low are - how are you going to randomly select a person, and know their serial ID ? Unless you know what units are distributed to what hospitals/doctors - at exact times - at exact shipments and then from the sample delivered know the exact unit given to any person at any particular time."

A sufficiently low entropy serial number would mean you don't need to know those things. Because it is low entropy.
Microsoft’s open-source toolkit for building gadgets
Orbiter Photos Suggest Salt Water on Mars
Good resumes are short & informative. Great ones are recursive.
Russians won’t pursue Magnitsky case
Why would you say this? Is discrimination okay here as long as it's in the reverse?
Judge says domain name loss is not a "substantial hardship"
Navy tests Unmanned Surface Vessels
This is why most companies need a 'talk to an engineer' instead of a sales person for those who want the details. From my understanding a few soft/hard tech companies do this with engineer rotations as you could learn a lot from talking to perspective customers (who knew!).
Another choice comment:

On each planet is something ice on one, sand, lava, on another, etc., This is where we get our weather from in some ways. Our Earth is in the solar system of these other planets revolving around them.

I'm just not sure that's how it works...
I thought the same thing, but if you wait around, you'll see that the ad is a pre-roll to a TV news story about the Afghanistan story. So it's not really an auto-playing ad, it's an auto-playing news video with an ad in the front. Still annoying.
This is a lot because the PHP Debuggers are very time consuming to set up and a lot of people prefer to code in Notepad++, rather than a complex IDE.
Kasparov would've run like hell
[T]he team began bringing in Grandmasters to give Deep Blue further training, Hsu explained. But did this qualify as "artificial intelligence," Spicer pressed?

Hardly, Hsu answered. "Assume that we were playing Kasparov at the World Trade Center, and 9/11 hit. Kasparov would've run like hell. We would've run like hell. Deep Blue would just sit there... computing."

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/08/force-versus-heuristics-the-contentious-rise-of-computer-chess.ars/
Social networks, especially powerful social networks are a powerful source of jobs. I'm not so concerned about the right to go about as Gte910h, but the right of a person with a non-European name to use a European sounding pseudonym if they want for purposes of getting a job.

Non-European names are shown to face continual discrimination (unconsciously or no).

Yes, you can change your name by a mere notification to everyone that you have, but it pisses off your family, and is pretty hard to do if you're under 18, which is when people join social networks.
Isn't that true of any technology?
I've never encountered a community as poor at cost/benefits analysis as computer security. You see it every time when some new "irresponsible" loophole is gleefully broadcast by some smug cracker. There are far, FAR more economical and efficient ways of getting away with murder. I mean, several orders of magnitude easier.
I eat a lot of things dipped in tzatziki sauce, mostly pitas.
Slim, World’s Richest Man, Loses $8 Billion in Four Days
ComScore Acquires AdXpose for $22 million
Actually, if you don't sell it for at least 1M$, you won't get any contract, it doesn't look serious enough. Terrestrial drones were being done during WWII, Russians were remote-controlling full-sized tanks in the 40s, these techs should be obvious by now.

I have been working for a defense project about instrumenting some armored vehicles with video cameras and monitors. The project was more than 10 years old when I arrived in it. I couldn't help but thinking "bring the prototype to any hackerspace and pay 20k of salary for two weeks of dev and you'll be done."
Forbes.com is vulnerable to XSS injection
I have shared this story with some of the Army leaders I work with.
The Future of the Search Engine
Booyah Brings Monopoly To The Real World--With Real Money
I'd like to add that a huge issue I saw in big Corp were when people/teams used FOSS and _didn't_ look at the source.

Just like the phrase rtfm, there should be rtfs.
Um, what's "Steak"?
At home I do the cooking as I enjoy cooking much more than my wife. Indeed I do love it.
Wrong lesson. The story was telling you something about how b2b sales work.

EDIT: Also, since every sales force everywhere runs on commission, it's impossible for them to be overpaid unless they don't sell anything (in which case they're not paid very well).
Living to see 100 is just luck, not lifestyle
‪Trick Bike Rider does Sic Face Plant into Concrete Epic Fail‬‏ - YouTube
Two points: Why argue about this at all? Securing known-in-advance endpoints isn't impossible. Why not just do it, and stop arguing?

Second: The relevant risk metric isn't "For a given person, is someone going to try to kill them today?" The relevant metric is "For all such remote-controlled implanted devices (including not just "insulin pumps" but any potentially dangerous device) placed in all human beings across the entire lifetime of both the implanted devices and the human beings, what are the odds someone will be attacked via this vulnerability and physically harmed?" to which the answer is trivial: 100%, rounded to the nearest thousandth of a percent.

Don't argue about it, fix it.

(Oh, and narrowing it down to "technically-skilled teenage sociopaths" is cognitively hazardous, even in casual debate. That's not even close to the full threat model and encourages subconscious dismissal of very real threats not sourced from that narrow group.)
I really didn't find this useful. I don't know what steak is. I don't know what it's relation to RSpec is. I don't understand how it's a scam. It seems like these slides depend on a lot of context that I don't have.

I'm primarily a rails programmer. I've used rspec and cucumber before. (And I'm aware that rspec can be used outside rails.) I understand these slides may not have been for me but then who are they for?

Edit: I think I know what bugs me. These slides feel like they are in response to some events I haven't seen. Like an open letter[1], but with less context.

1. Not a stab at the author, letters are generally more verbose and context rich than speeches.
Sorry to be dense ... are you saying that Steak is really just Webrat and Rspec, but that you gave it a new name?
I'm disappointed at the reception of this comment. I have never respected software patents, but I am not ashamed that my name is on one. There is prestige in knowing that you are capable of doing something notable, even if it doesn't deserve the protections that patents currently provide. I don't care to do it again, but neither do I fault those who have participated in creating these patents.

If every respectable developer abstained from the patent system the problem would not go away, so let's not punish those who create but not benefit. The only end to this abusive situation is to remove the value of all patents on software.
Maybe it is just me, but I can never bring myself to setting up Celery and RabbitMQ and all for some Django apps that could sorely use it. There seems to be so many moving parts, last I checked there were like 3-4 different services to tie everything together...

Anyone know of a simpler system or technique for achieving the same thing? Or perhaps, a better way to go about using Celery.
Why will the comments be pure crap?
Yes, taxes. Taxes will be a problem.

I say do away with money. No money, no taxes. I won't need money. My robot will provide the things I need.

Since I said that much I better elaborate. Here it goes.

Most major countries do their thing. One thing is to be competitive. A company in China is employing 1 MegaBots. They will produce more and less expensive products. Another country might eventually employ more robots. Short of war there is no stopping it.

Lets say there is no war. Eventually everything is automated. What will I do? Well, I like sitting here doing relatively nothing. I also like messing around in the garage. I like going on walks with my wife. I don't like working.

Who will control the robots? Elected people. They will also be unpaid. They will run and be elected because they like to do such things.

No money. That's the key.

Who gets what? I would hope that greediness would be frowned on. No one wants to be frowned on. And social standing (getting along) will be everything. And that will not be a function of how much money I have.

That's my 2 cents.
"Looking back on some piano competitions, it seems like the vast majority of the time, winners were chosen simply because they didn't do anything that was stupid enough to be easily criticised."

The recent presidential election comes to mind.
The article (and links to other articles) are mildly interesting, but what is the future of search engines?

Saying that there will not be linked lists in the future of search engines is mildly unrealistic. In the future, information will still be information.
Excuse me at being unrealistic, but I like to think that I should not be able to kill someone with a GNU Radio setup and a cheap laptop.

I am not actually afraid that people are going to start doing this, however such flaws and failures in security thinking are systemic. Bad security is not limited to insulin pumps, but insulin pumps are a great way of getting the publics attention and (hopefully) getting programmers to consider the impact their laziness could have on the world.
Same story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847028 <- Many comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847114 <- A few comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847225

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847262
I really like the "?" method of bringing up keyboard shortcuts.

Somewhere, an animated paperclip (i.e. Clippy) died a tragic death.
An outdated law that puts a cap on creativity
I was able to get this to work on an HL2140 last year. I just taped a small piece of construction paper over the eye on the cartridge and it happily went about printing for quite some time- I made it through an entire ream before the quality degraded. Since then, I always cover the eye on new cartridges before I insert them and use the quality of the prints, not the printer itself, to let me know when to buy more toner.
The threat model is totally different, so the metaphor fails horribly. I could, theoretically, do some horrible thing to a chemical plant, but if I'm going to put that much physical effort into it, driving a truck bomb up to it is way easier. Preventing that attack is infeasibly expensive. So the obscure stuff is hardly relevant anyhow, when the straightforward stuff works fine.

I could, theoretically, hack a medical device to do something horrible... in which case I might be able to kill someone untraceably, from the other side of the country, with no consequences to myself, and possible dozens or thousands of people at a time, and all it would have taken to protect against this is a programmer adding one line of code that would have checked for the buffer overflow. Or using one of the languages designed with preventing buffer overflows in mind.

It's two things so different that they just aren't comparable. We aren't going to secure our electronic devices by not spending time thinking about how to secure them, and that can not help but manifest as ways to attack them.