skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you go to a malicious website and it's able to move your mouse around or lock it in place. That would not be a good situation to be in, especially for the segment of the population that doesn't understand keyboard shortcuts (which would, presumably, allow escape from this). Even if it's not used maliciously, it seems very plausible that it would be used to make advertisements harder to avoid (on websites like Hulu that run ads during a video, preventing most users from being able to go elsewhere during them could be a tempting idea).

I get why something with this effect is necessary if we are to have FPS games running in the browser, I just don't think that it's a good idea to allow websites to do so without explicit user permission. Admittedly, there are few things I hate as much as programs moving my mouse around, so I'm a bit biased.
Anyone want a live stream of my Eclipse when I code my stochastic progressive photon mapper that will calculate photosynthetically usable radiation in an aquarium?
Corporations also have executives that drive companies to the ground and yet get handsome bonuses for it. Both government and private enterprise can fall prey to problems of corruption and incompetence.
That would require convicting the woman for rape. Good luck with that.
Touchdroid: Android for the HP Touchpad Project
Evidence? Seems plausible or common knowledge, but lots of wrong things seem plausible or common knowledge (remember Columbus and falling off the side of the earth?)
> The US is freaking out simply at the mention of socialized healthcare

Mass media and ensurance companies certainly are, But i don't think the majority of population is. Besides, US is not the whole world yet, and the book, afaiu, talks about the global economy.
Haking
hello
Fundamentally, this is a compiler and runtime issue. If they guys behind some mainstream programming language wanted to, they could go and add lightweight threads that people could just use. It would take a lot of engineering effort, and there would be some compatibility edge cases, but it could definitely be done.

(In the meantime, I'm happily using eventlet in Python, and some people swear by gevent. These have their shortcomings, but they're worth the trouble, easily.)
It's not true that 1/2 the players will flip tails each round, or that there will necessarily be one winner. In fact, if you go 7 rounds with 64 people there's a 60% chance that no one will flip all-heads.
I've written both kinds of code and I like threads better. With threads there's an abundant literature about the problems you'll run into. With events I often feel like I'm on my own.

Back in 2002 I did an evaluation of all the open source event-based web servers that were out there for Linux and found that all of them had issues with data corruption. You just couldn't expect to download a 100MB file and get it right every time. Things are better now, but process and thread-based web servers got mature by 1996 if not sooner.
There's no way to use biometrics to login?
> Yes, there's a lot of money but there's not enough ethical business people.

Well, that's bound to happen when a generation suddenly becomes rich for first time in long family history. You kind of had it coming.

It'd take some metabolism cycles to ingest the wealth they come by. Until then they'll act like pigs on money steroid rather than the rich.

Best to avoid the shitbag of shitstorm until they learn to be civil.
I think the pids are getting confused. When I say pid, I mean an id for a combination of a given function and some data, an instance, a fake sort of process that is facilitated by my code invoking the function with the data from its mailbox, whenever there is a message sent to the function by another "process". I'm not talking about erlang processes or "real" processes. So, you wouldn't have the problem of the "pid might not be allocated yet" because you would allocated it.

example in pseudo coffeerlangscript:

init->
pidOne = spawn(functionA, argumentlist),
pidTwo = spawn(functionA, differentarguments),
contextSet("pidOne",pidOne),
contextSet("pidTwo",pidTwo),
lookupData(bucket, key, pidOne),
lookupData(bucket, key, functionB).

functionA(message) ->
doStuff().

So, the here you're "spawning" two processes. For a function to act like a process it is written such that it takes any messages it get as arguments. I could set up their own contexts too, so "contextSet" in pidOne and pidTwo would be unique namespaces. LookupData, instead of taking a function to invoke, takes a process, and sends a message when it has retrieved the data off of the disk.

FunctionB could send a message or to pidOne and pidTwo (which it can find in the context).

So, the init phase is here, and later the start phase will be called. But the thread of execution would be: init, then the database queries happen in parallel, when they are successful, pidOne gets a message and functionB are called (possibly running in different environments.) FunctionB sends a message to pidOne and pidTwo, both of which are invoked with these new messages. When there are no more messages waiting for any of these pseudo processes, and no more database queries or other long running processes running in parallel, then the next phase is called.

If you're saying there's a better way to do this, my ears are open, I just need a little more explanation.
I did CS and Philosophy in college. If I did it over, I'd spend more time on Math.
This is great. Especially now, Javascript's a great language to learn and possibly is directly useful to many people.

A suggestion is to gently scold users who do a variety of "bad javascript" things. You may want to let them know that what they did works, but may cause problems somehow.

The first item that comes to mind is accidentally making global variables by leaving out the `var` when creating new variables.

Also encourage users to end lines with semicolons (maybe only when using an editor).

Currently, if you do these things you can pass the exercises anyway. Arguably you shouldn't be able to pass "Let's Try That Again" in "Variables" if you do it with a global variable.
This reminds me of a newspaper in Sweden asking people on the streets 1) Do you care if children have made the merchandise you buy? 2) Do you do anything to follow up on it?
Where one woman responded 1) Yes, children have no sense of quality and it shows on the product. 2) No.
In that sense it's probably a better pre-screener than a headhunter who says, "I see they're requesting a C guru, and my Word search found the letter C on your resume..."
They can tour the mine or nuclear reactor, or work there. Colleges and universities add nothing to this.
A dead man's switch is interesting to me, because it is one way to (try to) work around the what-if's that can foil the best laid plans of the unimaginative deceased.

Any solution where the sensitive information is physically near me doesn't work well -- what if I die when my house burns down, and my computer and paper documents are destroyed? What if I carefully document everything, store the document encrypted offsite, and make sure my wife knows the password.. and we die together in a car crash?

There needs to be a solution that lives somewhere I don't, and doesn't rely on people I normally accompany on airplanes, in cars, in dark alleyways...

One "what-if" that is super-important to an email-based dead man's switch -- how are your email servers set up for getting email through? I.e, DKIM, RDNS... all of the tricks & protocols that Google uses (and if you don't, you'll end up in the Hotmail junk folder more often than not), processing of auto-replies like Earthlink's whitelist system, etc..
> However, the rendering or parsing in a dynamic language like JavaScript or Python typically takes one line of code. The equivalent in something like Java can be horrible. [...] you still have the problems of how to describe that format.

I'm not familiar with Java, but in the scenario I illustrated it took 0 lines of your own code to receive a JSON structure, and one line to return one. That's outside of defining the structure itself (creating the class; what I think you mean by "the problem of describing the format"), but generally you'd want to do the exact same thing in a dynamic language to make working with the structure easier. Example: you still define model classes in a Django app.

> ... and how to handle errors where the incoming JSON doesn't match your expected format in some way.

I don't see how you wouldn't have the same exact problem in a dynamic language. You can't just receive input and know magically what to do with it, you need to have the input be in a defined/expected form in order to process it. This to me is outside of dilemma of dynamic vs static because it is a problem in both approaches.

> I suppose you could simplify common cases by determining the expected format using reflection if your language supports it, but that's not going to be powerful enough to cope with the general case without providing some sort of metadata as well.

Right, in the scenario I gave the framework looked at the signature of the controller, saw that it expected to receive an object of such and such type, and told the serializer to use the JSON data to create an instance of that type. I'm not sure what more metadata would be needed to make that work? I suppose if you get a parsing error you can just use the exception handler in your client code because the client submitted data in the wrong format, etc.

> In short, I'm still waiting to find a library that can parse arbitrary incoming JSON within a statically typed language without at best requiring the programmer to repeat structural information that is already implicit in the code that uses the resulting object.

Defining a class once and saying you expect to receive an instance of it is not "repeating structural information" in my opinion. I can only see it as being "repeated" if you look at the initial JSON data structure as sort of the type itself. I personally look at the role of JSON to be a "data container" and not a "structure descriptor", but if that's the way you like looking at it, well then yeah, dynamic typing is going to be your best bet right now. The closest I can think of is Haskell's type inference which constrains types based on how they're used in the function, but even then the types have to be defined at compile time, and it will not just create one for you that matches what you're trying to do at run time -- it just accepts already defined ones based on whether they meet the constraints gathered from the code.
Trees have leaves on all sides so that catch the sun throughout the day.
The host for the Ludum Dare website has taken them down for using too much CPU.

https://twitter.com/#!/ludumdare
That's like saying 'it would be great if Santa were our principal'. I'm sure the people at Twitter would love it, but Santa is far better off employing industrious elves in foreign lands.
IBM Brainlike Chips Will Boost Cognitive Computing
That's why I was pitching so many times to my friends. Why not go to Taiwan first? Small island for testing the foreseeable mainland market, initial understanding the culture and language, and enjoy freedom of speech and better human right. Mostly OEM industry HQ are all right here. All you have to worried are air pollution, the crazy traffic, and the heat, humidity tropical weather. There is a site called techorange dot com blog talked about China and Taiwan startup. You can have a look.
Not only that, it seems like a lot more fun than going to an HR first-round interview!
That problem is self-correcting as long as it's possible for the company to actually die. It's the governments, heavily entrenched mega-companies, and companies that are "too big to fail" that I'm more worried about.
Try moving to a different country.
> What outcome would be preferable?

A sustainable one. What happens when manufacturing moves from China to someplace even cheaper with harsher labor laws?
What makes you think that the node community has a well-thought-out rebuttal to a mostly academic debate about whether ideal threads could perform as well as events?
Imagine that you bought a robot that, using no energy and no raw materials, could produce all the shoes needed in the world, out of thin air. What price could you ask for those shoes? Also imagine that your neighbor could buy the same robot for the same price you paid it, let's say the equivalent of 1,000 times the price you wanted to sell your shoes at. What would happen?

Robots don't get paid for their "work"; it's their owners and their operators that get the money. Moreover, robots don't vote, but workers do. Between (imperfect) market competition and (imperfect) democracy, goods that are created with very little human work and that aren't very rare will always command very little prices compared to work-intensive goods, if the system is given enough time to adapt.

So we could end up in a world where one massage by a (human) masseuse will be worth 1,000 shoes. That wouldn't be such a big problem. The real issue is how fast we get there: People need time to adapt, to retrain, to give different relative values to different things.

What is really disrupting is a change that is too fast. But in the long run, even if we'll all be dead, as Keynes said, it won't be automation that will create world misery. On the other hand it could be a lack of energy to power all those automatons, or of raw materials to build them, or of storage to put away all the wastes they create...
The point of the UDID was for a unique identifier representing a device, not an application on a device. This project is a bit misleading indeed.
The article's suggestion does not say the mouse would be moved or locked by the web program. The program would be able to hide the cursor (which it can already do) and receive 'virtual' mouse coordinates.

My main concern is number overflow for long-running applications, but I seriously doubt this will be a problem for anyone.

I don't see any security problems with the proposed solution (though I don't claim to be a security expert!).
This should probably be a browser API, with a standardized "do you want this page to steal your cursor" and "press escape to release cursor" interface.
What makes Apple revolutionary?
Jobs won't be hard to automate because they require superior abstract intelligence. The machines will have covered that pretty soon.

Some will be hard to automate, because they are fuzzy and depend on interacting with human beings.

It's harder for a robot to cut your hair and put on make up like you direct it to, than to play chess.
Coming back to this almost eight hours later, I ask: What is the problem here? On HN, we upvote articles that are interesting. My idea of a downvote is an article where I felt I lost IQ for reading it. In the case of the kid’s mistaken result, is there any question his research and theory were interesting? Does anyone honestly feel stupider for having read about it and considered the possibility that he was correct?

Quite honestly, almost everything that makes it to the front page of HN is wrong. We talk about software development, startups, muse about whether Apple is brilliant or is lucky enough to have lame competition, argue about Haskell and Erlang... All stuff that is non-empirical and therefore unfalsifiable.

How does that stuff get a free pass to be on the front page of HN without peer-reviewed research backing it up? I’ll tell you how: We’re smart enough to know that all of that stuff is probably at least partly wrong, but if there’s something in there that makes us smarter, it’s worth reading and upvoting and discussing.

If the kid’s ideas had in them just one thing that made us smarter for having thought about it... That’s a win, that’s worth upvoting and repeating. Why wait for peer review? As long as nobody ran out and dropped a million bucks on manufacturing solar arrays, what’s the harm? If anything is wrong with an article, a day or so later, all of the flaws will be corrected. And thats exactly what has happened here.

Thinking about this, I don’t see a problem with the “blogosphere” or with HN upvoting and tweeting and repeating the original article. Thank goodness we don’t put everything through a peer-review first. I’d say things are working just fine, and I encourage every other thirteen year-old kid to experiment and publish.

No harm, no foul. There’s nothing in there that’s more wrong than anything I’ve ever said in a blog post or a comment, it’s just easier to prove where empirical science is concerned. But even when they’re wrong, my posts are useful if they help people think, and I suspect his post is useful for the same reason.
Because I don't use Firefox.

Anyway, I had a broader point and was only using browsers as an example. The ideal here is a universal login that allows me to be at any terminal/device and have my working environment there in its entirety (or some device-appropriate representation thereof). Things like Dropbox are nice, but they're certainly no substitute for an integrated, comprehensive solution and offer little or no value to me right now. (Hey I've got an iDisk if I want to share some files with my devices or friends.)
The system doesn't self-destruct. This is simply diffusion on a geo-socio-economic gradient.
Ruby 1.9 has lightweight threads built-in (fibers) but you have to write and manage the scheduler on your own. That also means you can't use any existing IO libraries that already know how to yield back to the scheduler, but it's only a matter of time before that's a solved problem.
Check out peepcode.com - the "Play by Play" series with Zed Shaw and Gary Bernhardt.
The videos are not specifically dedicated to vim tips and tricks but since the programming is done on vim you should be able to find something interesting.
I might be wrong, but I actually don't think it is as simple as that. Yes, it is detrimental with a too strong us-vs-them sentiment. But it is also true that the world is better off when every individual state is in good shape.

The author of the article argues that the ability to innovate within an industry niche disappears with the manufacturing. Correct or not, the problem they are pointing out is not that manufacturing is disappearing but that all capacity for intellectual development goes with it.

I'm all for balance, but I don't think the right way to achieve it is to cripple the stronger side of the scale.
Why isn't the 'plus' subdomain shown for plus.Google.com articles?
It's an important distinction from the usual official google.com articles.
You have to find another way to generate value. That can end up being hard if the research attached to the manufacturing operation gets behind the competition.
I'd guess that the material welfare of the 80% will be far better than what you described. Just their access to positional goods (e.g. social status,sea front property) that is good where being better than somebody else is part of their allure, will be scarce for them.
What makes you think iCloud will be "locked"? There's a Window's version of the MobileMe services (as some kind of plugin from what I understand). I don't see why there won't be a similar solution for iCloud.

Btw, Firefox Sync is "locked" to a platform itself: Firefox.
See JRebel mentioned by the other poster for more dramatic modification.
He makes a lot of money, therefore he should throw money into a fire.
A typo is the hint in "UpperLowerCase" reads `just type .toUpperCase after it` missing the parenthesis on the function.

Additionally if the user actually does this, they don't get an error and instead get something they probably don't expect:

> "asdf".toUpperCase
==> function toUpperCase() {
[native code]
}

Maybe sometimes don't always output the evaluated result of what the user typed. Or just output an error also with it.
Income Times Ten Review
Income Times Ten Review
I remember the last HN thread about Interview street they promised more 'real world' problems, instead they added more euler style algorithm quizes. I guess the companies have achieved good results basing hiring decisions on these algorithm quizes, maybe someone from interviewstreet can share some results?
> Today's leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.

Wait... others don't?

> Likewise for FedEx, which is best thought of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached.

Again... do their competitors really not? How can they get anything done?
I may be hugely misreading the article, but when it says "The mouse will be anchored to that position and the mousemove events are going to set a virtual position" and "Everytime the user moves the mouse ... the cursor is moved to the center of the screen" I find it difficult to interpret that in any way that doesn't effectively mean that a website is able to move or lock the cursor. I admit that I use cursor and mouse interchangeably, when they're actually not the exact same thing, however.
Sorry guys but I just don't see the point. The issue with the Touchpad was the hardware, not the OS. A Touchpad with Android installed is a pretty poor prospect, frankly there are better Android tablets out there.

I'm buying a Touchpad because I love webOS, otherwise I would just go out and buy a Samsung or whatever with Honeycomb and much better hardware than the Touchpad.
If I could quantify it, I would probably be able to accurately predict it. The chess analogy was only to point out how optimizing for short outcomes can be against your best interests.
Your perspective might benefit from looking at the situation in other countries.
Hi Tomh,
we've received good results on this puzzles. But that said, we had a soft launch on the real world puzzles where we gave a few server instances and EC2 had to go down that day :| We're launching one soon - a real-world hack, given a server.
Poll: how should Google+ fix its names problems?
>Why not GPL? That would ensure no competing platform could grab it and run.

Not that I don't like GPL, but why would HP care at this point? They just took their only viable product and said "Whatever". They act like they have an interest in licensing webOS. Ha! How long have they been shopping licensing? Even if it is true, they've just coated it in a nice splash of red paint.
I believe you are talking about mouse lock (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=72754), something Sirisian and me (but mostly Sirisian) have been trying to push into the browsers (right now chrome and hoping the other browsers catch on).

There are many problems regarding this idea, specially security for the user, this is why it's hard to convince the people of the benefits for RTS and FPS games.
Composer - The PHP package archivist.
The whole idea behind science is to try out what seems most impossible. That's the whole magic and beauty behind it. What annoyed me was the fact that the author seems to be personally offended over the kid's article and all the hype it got. Considering it was a 13 year old kid doing a science project, it doesn't make much sense to put in so much of hardwork in proving what he did and wrote about was completely wrong or "nonsense" (as he likes to call it).