skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The News.YC "community" is not homogenous. I find this just as odious as Dropbox's security issues, and just as indicative of a broken software development process.

Then again, it's Apple. I wouldn't normally even bother commenting here, because nobody from Apple cares. My finest rant would have epsilon impact on anyone at Apple, so why bother?

Dropbox, on the other hand, is present here. Someone might be able to convince them to change their practices for the better by getting on their case here.

That doesn't justify meanness, but a different response from this community over an issue from BigIvoryTowerCo versus OneOfOurOwn shouldn't be surprising.
Agreed ... I wasn't suggesting that Google was not at fault, just pointing out that the system for approving ads is not completely automated.
Keywords that I believe would be worth mentioning:

- Lambda Calculus
- Reflective and Meta-programming
- Meta-object Protocol
- Closures
- Continuations
- Monads
- Arrows
- First-class Everything
- Stack and Register-based Programming
- XML
- Linear Algebra
- Fractal and Wavelet Image Compression
- Regular Expressions
- Clojure
- LaTeX

NB. The concepts to which the above keywords refer, may or may not have been covered by the article. The keywords themselves are however absent.

Additional reading suggestions:

- Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls
- Tom Mitchell's Machine Learning
- Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach
- Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's Unix Programming Environment
Soyuz is so good that Arianespace will be launching it from their Guiana Space Center starting later this year:

http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services-soyuz/soyuz-intro...

This is in addition to the existing Ariane 5 heavy launcher and the new Vega launcher:

http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services/launch-services-o...
Many developers I know, myself included, avoid facebook integration like the plague for just this reason. Other services manage to version their APIs and depreciate them gracefully. Facebook apparently doesn't understand how to do this, or simply doesn't care.
Symmetry of graphs
Please help me prove that if a graph is symmetric with respect to the x-axis and to the y-axis,then it is symmetric with respect to the origin.
I tried to post this in math stack exchange and it gives me an error "your question does not meet our quality standards" even though i was descriptive and i have seen this error many times.
CVE draft: http://marc.info/?l=apache-httpd-dev&m=131418828705324&#...
Sure, it's as fallible as any blanket generalisation. But there are extra risks you take when young men are involved, and a lot of those risks are statistically quantifiable.

There's a reason they pay more (a lot more) for car insurance, and it's not because risk assessors are playing the age card. It's because young men are more risky.

(Of course, this also means they're much more likely to take the big risks required for entrepreneurship -- a tendency to risk-taking is not an unqualified bad. I think it's an essential quality. I just don't want to fly in planes flown by 19-year-olds, and I don't want them in my mail spool.)
Digital distribution is coming, whether GameStop like it or not. Removing the free codes for OnLive is not going to stem the tide.

For proprietary media like Playstation, XBox, etc they're going to be disintermediated whether they like it or not. They still can win in the PC arena.

So rather than acquiring strategically pointless startups like casual gaming site Kongregate, they'd be wise to ramp up their efforts to compete with Steam or even acquire whole digital distribution + consumption stacks like OnLive itself.

Competing with Steam is more a relationship challenge than a technical one, and of all companies GameStop is well placed with those existing relationships.

The downfall of Blockbuster should have proved that they need to change a long time ago.
It's harder to get entry-level work without a degree, but after you have about four years of work experience, plenty of people will hire you, especially startups.
(I know because I'm working in SF as a college dropout)
This is on such a different level as to be irrelevant. The I/O scheduler will still try to accommodate requests within timeframes of seconds, at most. When copying large files to/from two different areas on a spinning disk simultaneously, this means significant time will be spent flying the heads back and forth between them, regardless of the elevator. So queueing two 8GB movie files to go one after another will be significantly faster than copying them simultaneously.
I don't know about Macs specifically (Apple makes servers?) or why they aren't using Kerb, but LDAP is commonly used over SSL/TLS. "LDAPS" some call it.

LDAP wasn't originally designed to be an authentication protocol. If Mac clients are using it to make authentication decisions, they had better be requiring SSL/TLS on that connection (and validating the server cert perfectly, too).
There's no way your probability is close to 0.1%.

Exhibit A: http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/Death_by_Age_2007-a.pd...

Exhibit B: life insurance companies collect a lot of data from you, and no company will price a 21 year old anywhere near 0.1%.
Automustache tries to detect faces and adds mustaches. THE END IS NIGH
I have to play Devil's advocate here. An interesting spelling corrector does not place someone in the annals of computer science history as "one of the most influential computer scientists of the post-Turing era."
Deal. You promise?

Since you're here, what do you feel like is a bigger constraint for Google (or the worldwide technical economy) - software engineering discipline or computer science fundamentals? I understand that you work in research, but for a hugely profitable company, so you have the insight to give a good answer.
I would imagine that facebook actually writing non-terrible documentation for their API would be a better strategy then integrating with stack overflow.

This can't hurt, but hopefully they don't see it as an replacement for real documentation.
Facebook crosses 1 trillion pageviews per month
As someone from Portland, Maine, I always get a little miffed when people don't specify that this is Portland, Oregon.

Yeah, Portland, Oregon's metro area is about 4x the size of that of Maine's largest city, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude or anything.

Maybe I'm just jealous that there's more going on there than here. :(
I like this post very much. This strategy can be applied anywhere for your success. The core value or target here is "people". You get people's heart, you get everything!
Lots of books have influenced me over time, but these are some of the books that have a lot of influence over my current mindset:

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter

Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson

Historical Capitalism - Immanuel Wallerstein

Young Man Luther - Erik Erikson
Perhaps you were oversold on the HGP :-) Actually as more and more humans have their DNA mapped, and we begin to see the variations and nuance it becomes more valuable. The HGP was analagous to getting a map of the United States with the state outlines and names filled in, and perhaps outlines on the major bodies of water. As the technology improved each successive 'frame' that gets layered into that provides additional information (capital cities, roads, etc).

So 'finding the Higgs boson' won't change humanity like 'achieving a stable fusion reaction with net power generation' would but it does let people use that information in finding solutions to problems that are life changing.

In biology, the combination of the HGP and the work on understanding cellular mechanics and operation, will eventually result in tools where we don't 'cure' disease so much as 'fix' it.
A classic from Joel:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
You can set priorities with the excellent walkshed.org.
http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/finding-a-rhythm/daily-standu... is too weird: we do the exact same thing, at the same time, every day.
I read the whole article without taking a single sip from this cool beer next to my laptop.

In other words: Wow. Amazing. From the 'I read old science magazines on the attic' start to the final 'Let's revive this program, build a translator to python, a test suite and check the result' - the article was an amazing read. Thanks a lot. More of that, please!
Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)
But can Ruby do this?
Not enough information.
I've both responded to SO questions with updates, as well as had one of my top answers be replaced by a newer, better solution. In browsing questions, I've also seen a number of updates to existing answers.

I guess the point is, if you've spent a lot of time figuring something out, and you've proved that a number of solutions on the internet are now wrong, you're tempted to make it easier for the next guy. I think this is true regardless of the medium, but SO seems to have done well at creating an environment where it happens.
"CPL was so new that it had no compiler, nor a complete formal description. Journal articles from 1963 and 1968 and a posthumously published set of notes from 2000 partially describe versions of the language that are slightly different than the one presented in the article."

Apparently a formal definition was finally written down in "CPL working papers", but this was never published. The only place I know which has a copy is the Bodleian library at Oxford:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/records.aspx?cat=161-...

It would be a good thing if someone (google?) were to scan this piece of computer history and put it on the web.
Newest XenDesktop Using Pooled OS Images
This is great, because the Facebook Developer Forums are effectively useless.
Because when Obama takes bribes from pharma companies they ask him to let Americans die rather than be able to buy lifesaving medicine from Canada, whereas when wall street bribes Obama they're only asking to be allowed to steal trillions of dollars.
Google are just playing it fair, but also it's more dangerous - it concerns the health of the people, rather than financial turmoil (not that the latter won't bring the former, but not direct at least).
I use LinkedIn to vet people for a mailing list I help manage. Mostly to verify that they're real people and not accounts which a spammer will use. It's not perfect as many people don't have the address they use for the mailing list aliased on their LI account.

On the other hand, every single contact I've received from recruiters has demonstrated that not a single one managed to actually READ my LinkedIn profile.
The market is more immature, there's less cutthroat competition than for burgers. That's why the profit margins will should be higher.
Lend your smartphone out while you take a break from it. Someone assumes it for that time and essentially rents it from you.

Obviously, some personal information would need to be blocked out before it's rented out. In other cases, the SIMM would need to be removed.
My Best Failure
Truly useful features require truly useful data to support them. Many devs are incredibly creative at using the data at hand in innovative and even beautiful ways. The Swiss Army knife syndrome, which I have seen in shopping apps, comes from moving into area features where the data is relatively easy to get, but the usefulness to the shopper is dubious.

So, in some cases, the syndrome's cure will be found in finding ways to collect, measure or count something new before adding another widget to the screen.
This seems like one of those ideas where the devil is in the details -- balancing out something reasonable for consumers with what advertisers dream of, while not screwing publishers.

I'm not sure how I'll respond to my first one; looking forward to seeing it in action.

Dear DoubleRecall, I URGE YOU to mandate no video ads. That would be a first step to providing a good consumer experience.
Every manager in the world needs to spend 10 minutes and watch that video.
GOOD ARTICLE
http://www.egr-renovation.com
I agree with the article but if I put in my words I would say "willingness to change the environment around you to stay focused".
I think that the spelling corrector was cited to support the grandparent's assertion that Norvig can "communicate them so well that you feel it was so obvious that you should have found it immediately".
Should I feel better about Facebook trying to crowd-source their developer support? This doesn't address any of the real concerns with usable documentation or proper API deprecation. I get the impression that this is an attempt to spin past bad behavior into acceptable future bad behavior.
Mobile Developer Opportunity
Hello I'm Sandhya, an Associate Editor at FierceDeveloper.com, a news site devoted to mobile application developers and news related to mobile operating systems, carriers, smartphone makers and the rest of the ecosystem. The site gets around 25,000 pageviews per month and counts around 31,000 subscribers to its weekly newsletter. FierceDeveloper.com is part of a family of Fierce sites dedicated to the telecom industry.

We’re working on improving the relevance of FierceDeveloper.com by getting real developers to write for the site about their experiences as mobile application developers. We’re looking for firsthand accounts of what developers are working on, and how different projects are coming along--the goal being to help our readers understand what it’s like “in the trenches.” Specifically, we’re interested in what apps you’re working on, what platforms you’re developing for, and what issues you’re running into.

To be clear, this is not a paid position. What we can offer you is access to our readership and the opportunity to promote yourself and your products to this readership.

Ideally we’d like you to submit one opinion column per month, but we can work out the details. If you’re interested in this opportunity, send me an email and we can discuss the details.

Thanks!
Sandhya
sraman@fiercemarkets.com
Really? Can you name even one university that uses LDAP but not Kerberos for their computer labs?
To be clear: I consider understanding version control essential. I'll emphasize it.

I agree that OCaml and SML are roughly interchangeable for educational purposes. I picked SML because it's slightly "cleaner."

As a compilers prof, I agree that compilers should be its own item, but politically, that's a tough sell. Teaching compilers needs to be sold in the service of another end for most faculties.
Please read everything this man has ever written.

Yes. Especially, please read "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

before submitting to Hacker News a link to a press release or low-quality news report about a new research finding. This link is by far my favorite link to post in comments on HN, because the issues brought up in "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" come up over and over and over again in discussions of purported research findings.
The spell checker is an accessible example of his work, not his entire body of work.
My philosophy is pretty simple: Don't major in things that teach you "How" something is done, go to school for majors in "Why” things are done the way they are (exception: degrees that give certification to practice or a license - like CPA or MD etc.).

I started with a business degree, and noticed we were being taught processes like how to create a balance sheet etc, things I could learn myself by looking it up online or reading the textbook, no added value from schooling, so 2 semesters later I switched to Economics, which talks about why people do this over that, why governments do that over this etc. Then I decided to major in CS, and started a new bachelor's degree, noticed again I could learn everything they were teaching me myself and it was far too much theory that would be useful “later”, so I switched to Electrical and Computer Engineering which was focused more on building stuff in teams – which was why I got into a tech major in the first place.

Ask yourself what you want out of it – seems like you want to build stuff – universities don’t focus on that, vocational and technical institutes do.
I don't really like the framing of the title for this project. Text is no longer treated as a dumb chain of bytes in 1.9, but that's not really what this project addresses. A good article with information about how strings have changed in 1.9 can be found here:

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string

The problem is, when an outside service or file is provided to you, it doesn't always come with information about how the text is encoded. With Ruby 1.9, you have the option of specifying the character encoding for a given string, but if the string is from an outside source, it's often a guessing game.
Certainly ... and the condemning / damaging thing is the scale of the imperfection. But it's also worth pointing out that many of Google's AdWords policies have long been written to be at the edge of a nexus of the law and public pressure of a market. Pornography, for example. Or "drugs and drug paraphernalia", where bongs and water pipes are prohibited, but vaporisers are allowed if they are advertised as "an aromatherapy device".[1] Which is to say: the pharmacy policy, like others, was likely constructed by Google to get away with as much as possible without damaging the brand or the bottom line. And it hasn't worked.

[1] http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en-GB&...
You sure that's just not an account "accident" to avoid paying taxes?
In the Universities I've worked with, or visited, the computers in the labs (Macs anyway) have all been using Kerberos in one fashion or another-AD uses Kerberos, so does OpenDirectory (OS X directory offering).
Ask HN: How does your startup manage user logins?
What do you use to manage multiple users having to connect to multiple resources? For example your own admin pages, linux servers, email and databases. What do you do if a password is compromised or someone leaves the company?

Do you use an Excel sheet with places where to add/remove users, or do you have some kind of LDAP/SASL setup, or perhaps a single username for all users?
Increasing the cost seems detrimental to their primary goal:

"We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.

Our first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a fully-configured system."
How to Hire a Good Marketer (for Startups)
Bummer! So close; I'll be in Seattle from the 1st to the morning of the 6th. This would have been awesome.

Maybe next time! haha
VMware puts Cloud Foundry on laptops
So rather than acquiring strategically pointless startups like casual gaming site Kongregate, they'd be wise to ramp up their efforts to compete with Steam or even acquire whole digital distribution + consumption stacks like OnLive itself.

They've already acquired companies to directly compete with both OnLive and Steam: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/01/gamestop-details-plans-fo...
Ticketmaster launches social ticket maps
I'm not doubting the effectiveness of the ads, I'm doubting the quality of the people being exposed to them.
Plano, Texas (and surrounding areas: Frisco, North Dallas, Richardson, Allen). I live in Seattle now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano,_Texas
Good design seems obvious in hindsight, but there is no denying that Apple are often the first to either do something, or the first to make something work. And then everyone copies that thing.

Doesn't mean I like software patents, just saying.
Marakana is looking for Java Experts
I'm no Obama fan, but... come on, dude.
These types of posts are posted really often. Is there a conglomerated list of all these "lessons learned" posts? I think that would be really useful.
The problem I have found is that many supposedly-good sales people seem to set customer expectations too high. After the fact, there is a lot of effort expended on easing customer concerns.

I'm not a good salesperson either, as I will easily give away my concerns about a product I'm not completely sure of, but I've worked for people that are great at closing deals for shoddy products.

At one time, I worked with the sales guys from Akamai-during-the-ipo. It was very interesting to see them operate (and how specifically they wanted our salesforce account configured).
GameStop's lack of scruples: not surprising.
GameStop fears OnLive as a substantial threat: a little surprising. Internet speeds for the majority of Americans are just way too slow for OnLive to be viable.
People find it amazing that an analog oscilloscope from 1985 sells for $200 on the used market. Or that a milling machine from 1965 sells for $1,200. Tools, certainly solid tools, derive their value from their ability to meet the need, and once silicon density intersected with the needs of high school math they reached 'equilibrium.' From that point on, a solid calculator has an intrinsic value. What is more its pretty clear that the value is higher than the cost of manufacturing it, so building solid calculators is nearly always going to have some 'profit' associated with it.

Personally the TI-92+ was the pinnacle, it was basically a Sun-2 workstation with Macsyma installed in a handheld unit. I've still got mine :-)
I agree. When I was looking at apartments and was using walkability, I didn't think it had the sophistication I was looking for, such as using yelp to rank to get a weight of a walkable location, your sugggestion.

Also, it seemed to limit the stores and location used to only a few blocks. I was 6 blocks away (a walkable distance) and an area that had EVERYTHING I could need. That should value for something, and it didn't (seem to).

Furthermore, I think people have different values for what they care about being walkable. At a previous apartment, there was a cafe with a full menu that was literally 30 feet away from my apartment. It wasn't fantastic food, but the fact that it was so convenient was huge for me. I would like to have the ability to dial up and dial down what I value in the walkability score. For instance, I don't care about clothing stores being walkable, because I barely ever do that. I would bet a lot of women would. Maybe that is making a UI that is too complex, and it's easier to just roll up in to 1 score and make it simple? I'm not sure, but that's something I personally would like to see.
+1 for "before writing it" - it's easy to end up wasting time building stuff which isn't a differentiator to your business, if it's not a differentiator for you than see if you can use something off-the-shelf.

This applies for the operational side of the business as well, there's no reason you should be running your own mail server, etc. today. If you're not doing it in some unique way, figure out it you can get someone else to do it for you.
So what can we get from this article if we're selling software to normal people over the internet?

No meetings, client is not on LinkedIn, no breakfast/lunch/dinner, etc.
just saw this post after I posted, sound like exactly what I was suggesting, will check it out.
I'd bite and take the bet.

I'm a gadget lover, wouldn't want to give up my Android (and mourn the braindead WebOS and MeeGo kill-offs), but a feature phone Nokia beats a touchpad in every way if we're talking text messages.

You can type blindly (you might need some time to know that a certain combination always suggests something wrong first, the real word is N alternatives away). You have good tactile feedback. And - the prediction is far better than what I've got on WebOS and Android as well..
The lat/long one at -179, 37, -5, which I guess is an oblique mercator.