skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note that re-downloading the source prevents this attack, but does not mean that the source you are looking at is what the page is actually running - just make the web server leave out the reference to evil.js the second time an IP address requests the page...
The various Dooms are also on Steam - I bought them again just to have easier access to them.
hmmm..... Just forecasting here, but sounds like Spam might be a huge issue in the future for them..
STMs need nothing! They are Software.

There is more then one point to make here:

- There is a IO macro that you can use to signal "Hey IO is going on you cant do this". I have jet to see this beeing used in production.

- Only Refs can change in Clojure (would be diffrent if you would have it in java)

- Refs are not really used that often. (in java everything changes all the time)

- Its easy to see/know if a function is dangerous because of naming conventions and other coding conventions

So why does "by convention" work out in Clojure and not in C#:

- Standard library is written with this in mind.

- Immutable Data structures are standard.

- The conventions where there since the language was created and get inforced both by the community and the language.

So you are right in terms of compiler guarantees you don't have much more in clojure then you have in Java but in the end it on the programmer that he writtes something that works. The stuff mention above seem to make it easy enought to work with them that people don't have a problem creating something that works with the STM.
> While Democrats and Gov. Jerry Brown fretted that they would lose $200 million a year in sales taxes

California residents are supposed to pay use tax on internet purchases regardless of the physical presence of the retailer, right?

Running the math: the $200 million/year loss that they claim is an estimate on tax fraud on just Amazon purchases? At a 7.25% tax rate, that's a tax on $2.7 billion in sales, and Amazon's US sales last year were 18.7 billion [1]. They're estimating that unreported purchases in California comprise 14% of Amazon's revenue in the US.

California comprises about 12% of the US population. The assumption is invalid, because 14% is greater than 12% - but, assuming it's reasonably close, we can still say that either (1) the politicians are ignoring the use tax or (2) there is a massive amount of fraud going on in use tax reporting.

[1] http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/01/27/amazon-sales-and-...
Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution
I'm guessing for California they'll lobby to extend it for another year, and another year, etc...

Nationally, I'm not sure Congress can force non-taxation on the sates, I think that's a constitutional issue. I think Amazon's plan there is just to use their market dominance and hope the states fold.
Atari Arcade is the $60 answer to iCade
Opera has an about:about, but it doesn't list all about:X pages. It does gives version information, browser identification and folders where it has files (that one is very handy).

And a few pages of licenses.
Neat. This is the first time I have seen this.

First impression: I'm not really sure what this is solving - the syntax is a bit ugly and the projects seem unstructured. Seems like the ability to customize the stack is minimal. I couldn't find any solid examples of this being used in production.

It looks fairly young so hopefully these concerns will be addressed.
Be interested to hear why you're learning code and attempting the transition from biz guy to tech.
For some reason I cannot see the article linked.

Using this instead http://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=dZ6jw2rLSA2UmxMxmSxu9F...

I guess this is the critical line:

If Amazon cannot get a change in federal tax policy by next June
it will start collecting the tax in September 2012.

So I guess the door is now open and every state will go after amazon for sales tax.
Actually, there is: public school teachers' unions lobby against school vouchers. Since they have twice or more the budget of any private school groups advocating for vouchers, the populace is convinced that vouchers are evil. This happened in my state: those advocating for vouchers mailed a folded 8"x10" flyer to voters. In response, the teachers' union mailed a folded 16"x20" flyer.
If the death was something mundane for somebody born in 1947 (a heart attack for example), then you're engaging in #1 which doesn't belong on Hacker News.

If the death is something juicy like drugs or suicide, then you're engaging in #2. You don't have to be malicious to spread malicious chatter.
Great point, nobody should ever improve their software or provide it to a wider audience unless they charge money for it.

Brilliant.
Not even state by state. County by county and municipality by municipality. What's taxable, how much, etc.
Also data-related things... today's strip is Rails. Or, that is, problems with ActiveRecord.
Interstate commerce clause allows them to most likely.
Saks 5th Avenue store features 64 iPads in interactive display
I'm glad that you like it, maybe you can explain to me: Newspeak is a Smalltalk variant, and, if I understand:

http://bracha.org/newspeak-101.pdf

it can currently work only in its own IDE, which, IMHO, immensely reduces the possibilities for its application.

Even if we get "a kind of smalltalk in a browser" who's going to use it? Imagine, all that goodness I have in my favorite editor, just goes away. I'm supposed to click around in some IDE modifying some classes with something, only to change something that works only in that same single IDE? What should be the real use of it all?
Diaspora sending out alpha invitations
This is from the email I have just received:

--- --- ---

Dear Friend of Diaspora* -

Thanks for your interest in being part of the Diaspora* community. You may not have heard from us in a while, but we’ve been working hard, head-down. We’ve built the first stage of a new social web, one better than what’s out there today: a place where each of us owns our own information, where each person controls his or her own privacy, where no-one is a product, and where we all control our own destinies.

We’re sending out alpha invitations now, as quickly as we can. If you haven’t gotten yours yet, you will receive it by the end of October.

There's been big news in the social networking world recently, and we can't help but be pleased with the impact our work has had on two of the biggest developments. We're proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles. And now Facebook is at last moving in the right direction with user control over privacy, a move spurred not just by Google+, but more fundamentally by you and thousands of other donors, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who've lined up to try Diaspora* -- that is, by all of us who've stood up to say "there has to be a better way." We're making a difference already.

And aspects is just one of the many ways we're pioneering the future of the social web.

Here's a quick preview of some of the other ways:

- We'll make the social web more fun than it is today.
- Our distributed design gives you the security of owning your own identity and data.
- This also gives you the freedom to do what you want online.
- Our ecosystem provides the commons, the connective tissue for an evolving social web.
- We're not gatekeepers, so our ecosystem will always support the latest apps.

We’ll tell you a little more about each of these points in the weeks ahead.

And we’ll keep working to get your alpha invitation to you just as quickly as we can.

Until then, thanks again for your interest in Diaspora.

Sincerely,
- Maxwell, Daniel, Ilya, Sarah, Yosem and Peter

The Diaspora team
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
Grouper Sets You Up With Three Facebook Strangers, But ‘It’s Not a Date’
The assumption doesn't have to be invalid. California citizens may be wealthier than those other states and spend more money on Amazon goods. California may also have more computer users with decent internet access than, say, Wyoming.
Cute, but no.

Homeboy introduced this as a "weekend project."

That's code for "I did whatever the hell I wanted to because it was fun, want a look?"

To me, it's in bad taste to gripe about the stack someone chooses in the pursuit of their personal, free projects, the same way only a jerk bitches about a thoughtful housewarming gift.
AOL's Armstrong feeling the heat with Project Devil
Or maybe just buy them enough time to close up operations in an orderly fashion and leave California. I'm not sure if Amazon has a physical presence in the state but if they have a distribution plant or other company owned assets this will give them time to relocate. I believe Amazon had already notified their affiliates that they were terminating the relationship when the law was passed (similar to what they do when other states passed nexus provisions).
Just because the percent of Amazon's revenue from California is greater than the proportional population of California relative to the US doesn't make it invalid. You need a purchase distribution function to make that claim.
The cause of death is important to know in the aggregate: 1 person died last year in the United States from alien laser beams.

In the specific, it's morbid, yes.
Thanks for the upvote, but I do see profanity in a professional setting as disrespectful, because there are people who take offense to profanity (that is the point of profanity, right, to offend or to indicate intense anger?) I realize of course in this instance it wasn't meant to offend, but that doesn't mean it's not offensive.

I'd consider the site equally unprofessional if they used the words "retarded" or "Jew" (as in, "our competitors' products are retarded, don't let them Jew you!"), or if they used scatological humor. It's just bad taste.
It can be super costly to legally gain control of a domain that contains your mark (tens of thousands of dollars). And there is no guarantee you will win it back. Trademarks are registered by country/territory, so even though you may have the mark in the US, it doesn't mean that someone else can't use it in another country.

My concern is that many people on HN are building brands, and the last thing you want is someone buying yourbrand.xxx and covering it with porn.

If you have an established brand, you almost have to buy the .xxx.
I'm not convinces of this last point -- what my friends and family like has a lot to do with what I like when we do it together moreso than what our actual similarities in taste are.
> California comprises about 12% of the US population. The assumption is invalid, because 14% is greater than 12%

I'm not sure that it's that far fetched that a tech oriented culture like California would buy on average more goods from Amazon then other areas of the US.
"The problem is that most of the idle people will have an unsustainable amount of children."

Madness.
"It offers streaming of local radio stations"

As someone who has worked in college radio I find this statement strange -- ClearChannel defined itself by simulcasting automated radio shows across the country. Their near-monopoly of commercial spectrum in the 90s rendered 'local radio stations' nonexistent, and NPR took care of most of the non-profit (under 92Mhz) spectrum as well.
The rate of buying products online isn't going to be the same in every state, and it's reasonable that it would be slightly higher in CA than in other states.

And on use-tax: have anyone ever met someone who paid use-tax on goods purchased from Amazon? Most consumers don't even know they're supposed to, and audit enforcement is expensive and therefore uncommon.
Increase USB File Transfer Rate in Windows 7
The real history of Java and Android, as told by Google
Sponsored by... Betable? Never heard of them before. Interesting site. It's like a license in search of a casino, instead of the other way around.

They did get it right, though... the gambling model is FAR more profitable than any other gaming revenue model out there. The question (I guess) is whether their dev market understands what they're actually offering and how hard it is to achieve. My feeling is that the UK has made acquiring a gaming license so effortless, and game developers are so locked into the current in-world rev and/or app-based models, that no one's paying much attention to this. There have been a few stand-out articles on the subject, like this one from Bruce Everiss, a probable basis for their service:
http://www.bruceongames.com/2011/01/28/gambling-as-a-video-g...
but basically it's been ignored. And will continue to be ignored as long as the market becomes more fractured, and the largest segments outlaw anything of the kind, and Silicon Valley continues to treat gambling as a toxic form of revenue.

Nonetheless, I think there are serious issues with Betable's business model, not the least of which is that they have no way to certify what the games tying into their API are actually DOING, or whether they're fair. That lack of auditing in itself seems to pretty much explode any reason to acquire a legal license in the first place. What's the license actually get you, then, if not auditing and regulation? An ability to take payments for gambling? How is it legal, if it's not audited? How do they guarantee on behalf of the government that the sites they're putting under their license are running fair and legitimate games?

Again, this is basically a license in search of a new kind of casino. But why wouldn't a new kind of casino, or gaming site utilizing that model, just take Bitcoin or Linden dollars? Why bother with all this licensing at all, especially if it's just window dressing?
I grew up in a small town, so you're right--there weren't many homeschoolers. I think there were two families in the area that homeschooled but later sent their kids to public school for high school. These kids were the stereotype of homeschooled kids: didn't really make friends, didn't interact well with people, got good grades. One was a very nice guy who I became friends with in cross country. Another seemed to be overtaken with the "preacher's son" thing, tended to do crazy stuff and act out once he finally broke away from the house. His sister was a strange, quiet girl who would wear her parka during indoor P.E. so she would get heat exhaustion and be allowed to sit down.

The nearest towns to mine were all about 40 minutes away, and not even the largest one had more than 20,000 people--not a big population to draw homeschoolers from. In the case of the homeschoolers I met, I definitely got the impression that their lives had been pretty well isolated, outside of church--religion being the reason they were homeschooled in the first place.

I appreciate the way public school throws you into a mix with a bunch of people you would not normally be around. Do homeschool kids sit in the back of the bus and have the weird dude show them how to make a marijuana pipe out of a pepsi can? When you're hanging with other homeschool kids, is there really that much opportunity to learn how to deal with macho cholo bullshit when all you want them to do is load the band truck? To me, it seems like it would generally be a very restricted community: deeply religious people who don't want their children polluted, and parents who are well-off and smart enough to do the teaching themselves.

I probably could have learned more academically being homeschooled, but at least where I grew up, public school was the only social game in town, and looking back I am glad I went. When I have kids, there will be serious consideration to homeschooling for a while, but I strongly believe that their first year or two of school and at least some of the middle/high school years should be spent at a public school.
The current direction of agile development
Thank you - this is my entire line of thought.
Thanks! Here's mine if anyone's interested. https://github.com/tylerball/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx
A fair approach would be to allow me to use the thing for a day without "liking" it. Then they could say "Like it so far? Then click the Like button and listen on!" and only after that keep me out if I don't.

I don't think they'd get much fewer likes this way and at least they would be genuine. Plus, since more users would sign up to test the service, perhaps the numbers would even play to their advantage.
>> Why does my pinky has to do most the work?

Same thing happens with the saxophone keywork. It seems that pinkies get to handle all the stuff that was not included in the original spec.

Oh, you want to add a shift key? Let the pinky handle it. A C# key? No problem, we can fit it in the pinky cluster.
LucasFilm's New Sandcrawler Offices
This beats Apple's new HQ design.
Ignoring the deal-breaker Facebook requirement, I only have one question:

I live in Canada, is it US only?
Right, or be part of the government itself.
Whoa, cool! I had no idea this existed. I've occasionally had to tweak some defaults but never really knew where the seemingly arcane knowledge had been drawn from (I was usually lucky enough to find a mailing list where someone had mentioned a solution, but of course that eschewed where they had found their knowledge). It's great to have a repository to draw from. Thank you!
Margin Call - Full HD trailer
I'm not necessarily trying to transition from the business side to the technical side, more that I'm trying to round out my skill set. There are a few reasons for this:

1. I want to have a better understanding of the technical side in terms of requirements, limitations, resources, etc.

2. In the early development stage of a startup there is lots to do on the technical side and less to do on the business side. I think being able to contribute technically is important.

3. I've got lots of ideas for projects that I'd like to make, but it's no fun trying find somebody to help you build them.

4. It's fun to make stuff.
First explanation I've seen that makes some sense.
I think its hard to belive that google would make a client site language that works only on V8. Chrom does not have enough marked share to do something like that. It need to run everywhere.

There are two ways you could go about this:
- Write a VM in JS where you run Dart/Newspeak on. This could be a Interpreter or to make it fast a Jit that runs ontop of a JS VM. Jit on a Jit has been don before (pypy with the .NET backend is an example (look for the paper on the website its very intressting)

- Write a compiler like CoffeeScript or ClojureScript.

I think with newspeak gilad when down the VM road as far as I know (don't hold me to that).

Maybe the are snicky and work it in a way that it runs anywhere JS runs but build spezial support into V8 to make it faster.
Good for them! Bootstrapping at its finest.
If this goes anything like AppEngine they will wait until it gets popular, then start charging $0.25 per line of code you write with it.
From another point of view: what if you're not Amazon and doing online retail in California? Amazon now has a one-year price advantage. Is it enough to disrupt market share in that state?
It's not even non-taxation. It's the fact that no two states with sales taxes have the same rates (which can also vary by locality), rules about what it applies to, or filing mechanism.

Amazon and everyone else involved in ecommerce would be a lot happier if there were a unified system/database for dealing with sales taxes in the US. Rates and rules wouldn't necessarily have to be the same, but there at least has to be one system with unified categorization of products and a unified filing mechanism which can be automatically queried, and as long as the merchants use that system in good faith, they would need to be immune to any sort of lawsuit or prosecution for not meeting the actual legal requirements of any particular state/locality.
TextOnly - Android Browser which displays only readable content/text
Perl programmers do seem to comment a lot... the "#" looks almost as heavily used as the "$", which is mandatory for variables.
Fair 'nuff. All valid!
There are some other people involved now, and they've asked that I hold off on anything like that for a little bit. http://ertw.com/blog/ is where it'll be.
Okay, then looking at their blog I found this:
http://blog.betable.com/where-is-gambling-legal

THIS IS COMPLETELY WRONG. There are at least 15 green countries on that map where gambling's either completely illegal, or else under so much regulation that their license would certainly not stand up in court. What they're trying to do is insane, stupid, and basically abusing the naivete of your average iphone developer. I pity the idiot that's their first guinea pig.

edit. Thinking about it more, the first guinea pig is probably going to be some poor guy who ends up getting arrested the next time he's in Russia (green on the map). I think the revocation of Betable's gaming license is going to be the least of their problems when that happens...
> In fact, the shortage is in computer-science research.

and

> There is plenty of innovation in the programming language space.

Are at odds with each other. All of the programming languages that we use today can trace their roots back to computer-science research, either in the dark ages or in the immediate past.

Things like software transactional memory and other goodies are the pay-offs from that research and those things are only now making their way into programming languages.

You can't have the one without the other. And that goes both ways, computer-science research needs to have people that try the concepts it comes up with in the marketplace to see what survives in an adversarial context, so that it will be able to make the next step based on what survived and what didn't. So that's two birds with one stone, it's a proving ground and the foundation for the next generation of concepts.
Node's primary innovation is in terms of A) unifying JS on a single high-performance platform and B) creating an ecosystem from the ground up where thread-safety is required at all times.

These innovations are significant, especially at the boots-on-the-ground level. That said, when people speak about lack of innovation in programming languages I think they are looking for more fundamentally new ideas. I don't want to be a cynic—all ideas are derivative after all—but I don't think Node qualifies.
Google uses 260 million watts -- about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant -- to run Google searches, YouTube views, Gmail messaging and display ads on all those services around the world.
Of course you use a lawyer, but you should understand it as well.
I'm looking for the setting that stops OSX from asking me to retype my admin password 1000 times per hour.

ME: Cmd+c

Macbook Air: Seriously??? OK, if you really want to copy that text I'll let you, but first you'll need to prove that you're an administrator.
So this is a triple "non date"? That sounds like it has a lot of potential to be awkward. What kind of social engineering goes into picking the people?
And not a single one of the links you've just given are actually sources. Those figures come from the UN, but again no methodology is given. Are these figures actually independent and unbiased? We don't know. But we do know is that just last week the US ambassador to the UN said that the UN can't even issue so much as a press statement with the US agreement.

http://turtlebay.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/16/susan_ri...

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/mortality.htm
I'm not sure that the article does such a good job of talking about the value of in-person contact, which often gets lost in discussions about the power of 'social media'. In business, as in politics people still like the guy, or gal who is willing to shake their hand, and kiss their baby -- even if that's all he/she does.

Clearly the power of cheap, instant communication is powerful, but it can be incredibly dangerous when things go wrong, such as when the wrong guys/gals end up with the megaphone. Pretty well written, but otherwise standard boilerplate web 2.0 Utopianism.