skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Had fun writing a gnome-sort in a minute or two:

pos = 1
while pos < VA.length
if (VA.gte(pos, pos-1))
pos++
else
VA.swap(pos, pos-1)
if (pos > 1)
pos--
else
pos++
Owen Hatherley's _Militant Modernism_ is a good overview of what modernism (Le Corbusier's side) was supposed to be about, what went wrong, and some ideas for the future. I helped Owen translate some documents for the research behind the book, but I don't agree with him on many of the conclusions in the book.

Where I think Alexander's work comes in is where the Modernism movement started - rationalism in architecture. _A Pattern Language_ is essentially a set of inductive inferences about what works in urban planning and what doesn't. A lot of what went wrong with modernist projects stem from ignoring reality.

I think project cities like Germany's Vauban (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.htm...) embody this spirit. Soleri's Arcosanti is also built with very much the same intentions. I think Soleri's work can actually be a good example of "Corbusier meets Alexander," but most people seem to only remember him for the arcologies in Blade Runner...
I suspect thaat most of the positive responses were from people who, like me, have a depth of experience...

What a condescending asshole.
The input set is problematic because it contains every number from 0 to VA.length exactly once.

This allows "algorithms" like this:

for x in [0...VA.length]
while (VA.get(x) > x)
VA.swap(VA.get(x), x)
I went to mysql.com this morning and Symantec popped up with a "malware detected" message. Do we know which browsers are vulnerable, and how to tell whether I'm infected?
This might be a dumb question, but can you add numbers about the size of the stack to the right-side statistics? I.e. How many variables and calls to functions are stored in memory at at a time.

I'm not sure if this possible or relevant to record based on how Javascript engines compile and work, but it would seem interesting to know.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Attack on the One-Word E-mail.
Why is it that Flash is so exploitable? The web is rampant with Flash exploits and Adobe seems to do nothing about it.
Speaking as a developer who royally sucks at design... THANK YOU. This looks like it could be a big help for me :)
This Trojan requires the ability to execute arbitrary code and write to files - so it's not in itself any kind of exploit. It's just malicious Python code.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=xa-4ca0cd5b70191fef
Would an a-hole know that he was an a-hole?
Facebook to form its own PAC to back political candidates
Oracle may "fork itself" with recent MySQL moves
Way to explicitly update SASS in Rails if they don't get Auto-Updated
On Facebook’s privacy policy (RE: Logging out of Facebook is not enough)
It doesn't make it more of an issue. Installing any Python package already requires "arbitrary code execution" -- which is the big problem with Python packaging. (And hopefully will be fixed by distutils2 which uses a setup.cfg to install packages rather than relying on executing setup.py.)
From the article: "The ultimate irony of this attack is that the owner of mysql.com is Oracle Corp., which also owns Java, a software suite that I have often advised readers to avoid due to its numerous security and update problems."

Seriously, I'm not a fan of Java, but still, a software suite?

Anyway, it's quite hard taking that article seriously after that.
NinjaReply - get quality feedback on your design, product or ideea
Two totally different things. This is for recovery of their (SpaceX's) first stage rocket.
Aurora Borealis from the International Space Station
Have a look at the movie that's embedded in the blog post. He's explaining which piece of malware is downloaded.
My favorite of these is from Ars Technica: "Magic Trackpad or tragic Mac pad?"
Sponge Bob - Anime Movie :)
Looks awful on this (admittedly small) screen: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2819425/fontorie.png
An important point! I wonder if it would be a good idea to separate provision of free internet and computer services from provision of books? It seems pretty obvious that free computer services should be a staple of society today, regardless of what happens to collections of publicly-available books.
I'd love to see a four-pass of this using CMYK colored sharpies. I'm sure it wouldn't line up perfectly, but it might end up better that way.
Find in all files with Linux/Ubuntu
Would be interested for such service but like others mentioned you need to add some examples of what you guys can do.
While reading this all I can think of is... would pg & co. fund Sergey if he applied to YC?
I've worked at a long series of companies that deal with these at least every week or so. Maybe not daily. But I'm writing code where it matters most days.

Maybe I'm unusually hardcore? I'm definitely not all about the algorithms, but I work on a lot of systems programming.

The other thing is that often you don't realize that what you're doing requires thinking of this until somebody else has to go fix what you wrote. The fix will even look very simple. The insight going into the fix isn't as simple, though.
This was a Java Exploit.
Well from the point of view of your typical end users, Java is just a random bit of software.
> "Rules" are human mental constructs that the universe cares nothing for.

Yes, but we humans do.

> If you want to live your life chained up because somehow that proves or validates your ego, it will only impress similar minded individuals.

I don't need to impress anybody and I don't care what others think. This is a matter of self respect and good stewardship of the resources that we all need.

> You're still playing this game, yet win nothing at the end.

You can win plenty by playing by the rules.

> Realize that the only way you're going to get ahead is via advantages.

Sure, you can study and you can use that to your advantage. Or build up a web of people that you can rely on and that can rely on you.

> You can work hard or you can work smart...

You should go and watch 'the smartest boys in the room'. It's enlightening for those that think that they can obey some of the rules most of the time to get ahead.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/
Its not a game; its a learning tool. It doesn't bother me that people can do that.

Also, that's not going to work quite right - the values are [1..VA.length] (see the bottom of the page), while the indices are [0...VA.length].
Except its flash only...
Are Linux users susceptible to these kind of attacks too? In the video the exploit is presented on a Windows machine.
It matters a bit. With 2.2 (Froyo), they added a JIT Compiler that, in my experience (upgrading from 2.1 to 2.2), resulted in a drastic performance improvement.

[Edit: This was on my phone. Sibling response from stonemetal provides interesting counterpoint.]
How Modern Lighting Designs Can Boost Creativity in Your Office
> I'm skeptical of that statement. Some of the engineers at, say, Google, deal with code complexity and scaling every day. Most probably don't.

I am an engineer at Google, and basically all of the engineers I work with have to scale their software in least one dimension such that big-O complexity is a significant (and daily) concern. What I mean by "daily concern" is that the check-ins are happening on a daily basis would be noticeably inefficient if they used an O(n^2) algorithm instead of an O(n) algorithm, for example.

> Certainly, most at the non-Googlish companies hardly ever deal with this.

My main experience is Google and Amazon, so I couldn't say. I was meaning to talk mainly about Google/Amazon/Facebook/Twitter-like companies. I'm betting Palantir is also one such place.
Java has security problems? That is surprising to me.

I have always considered it a relatively secure platform... am I so wrong?
"It's only "sweeping hyperbolic pseudo religious" if you discard the facts that ARE there."

No need for that. All he asked for was a citation; nobody's 'discarding' anything.
Someone stole my wheel
Does this make seeing the real dead sea scrolls more or less impressive I wonder?
It ended up being the latter.
We're Funded & Making Money. Looking for ROI Based Marketer
Good to hear that this has changed. Thanks for the info.
yes android 2.2 and 2.3 introduces significant performance improvements, that are definitely noticeable. Just moving from froyo to gingerbread, feels like a new phone.
But Facebook isn't closed off from the internet. The internet is now using Facebook's APIs to tie the two ever closer.
That would be a great name if they were in this to sell hardware. Boom – it's a Kindle, and a tablet, here it is, buy it.

But I'm not sure that would address Amazon's goals here. Amazon doesn't want to sell you a tablet. At all. They want to sell you digital content. But until we jack right into our occipital lobes, they're stuck needing a medium upon which to display that content.

So they sell you a "Kindle Fire." What is that? Well, Amazon gets to define that for themselves, rather than being freighted with all the expectations that "tablet" carries. Which, now that I think about it, worked pretty well for Apple, too.
How about adding the VA.equals and VA.notequals functions? You've got all the other comparators, but it seems a shame that you don't have these.
I do hear, on occasion, of Facebook closing down someone's account. I wonder what Spotify does if you are a paying member and your Facebook account is closed.
The same was said about the iPad but it turns out you need a place to put your thumbs.
I'll give you my point of view. I'm young(21), I'm in my third year as an informatics student, and I feel greatly intimidated by all these hard stuff. I can barely write a working web app, even with all the hand-holding modern frameworks give me. I don't consider myself smart(i'm bright enough to be a programmer, but nothing more).

Recently I sat down and thought about where I want to be in 5-10 years. I don't want to be writing django apps in 10 years, I don't want to write software that sort of works some of the time, and i don't want to be a replaceable commodity programmer working on outsourced software that the real programmers didn't feel like working on, so they send it to India, or Eastern Europe(which is where I’m from). Sure, I can make a comfortable living that way, but what I want to be in 10 years is a competent expert.

I want to work in diverse fields, with people much smarter than me, and the little knowledge and experience I can gain in my career I want to pass down to younger programmers. I want to wake up in the morning and be proud that I've build things that actually matter, and not just the latest social networking pop-culture crap that many of us are dealing with now. In short, i want to e a hacker!

To do this, I decided to dedicate myself to actually learn the hard stuff that most people shy away from, just because they can get by with only some python/ruby/php and jquery knowledge. Math, CS(algorithms, data structures, languages, compilers, architectures, networks, operating systems), science, philosophy, history, art, etc. All hard stuff that I'll never need to know in order to build a web store site for a small business that barely gets the web, get paid, and go wash the car on the weekend. Even if i can never learn all of it, even a fraction is better that writing the same simple web apps for 10 years.
> “It exploits the visitor’s browsing platform (the browser, the browser plugins like Adobe Flash, Adobe PDF, etc, Java, …)

Both Java and Flash. Java was more dangerous, but still...
That line of reasoning might fly for a $100 tablet. For a $300 tablet, it does not.
You're right. I didn't understand the market. However I'd substitute that I blame myself for not understanding my customers, rather than blaming my customers.

Also, I posted a follow up here:
http://blog.studiofellow.com/2011/09/26/the-follow-up-knack-...
Which is why it's 7", and why it doesn't have an email client on it. They're directly competing with the Nook Color, and positioning themselves as a multimedia tablet that's cheaper than an iPad.

Which is in my opinion a much better idea than trying to compete on price, features AND software with the iPad. Get a couple clear differentiators - price, Kindle bookstore, multimedia content, etc - and actually compete.
App Store Optimization: Part 2, Rankings
Ask HN: Minimalistic Multiplatform Chat Client for OS X?
Looking for a non command line gui based super minimal multi platform chat client, possibly one that runs entirely from the menubar.

Looking for super small footprint, no frills whatsoever.

I have spent a great deal of time looking and can't seem to find anything remotely close to this.
This exactly. Why the anonymity with web service vendors? I was looking at fiabee.com the other day and "About Us" and "Contact" give the impression that the business owners have something to hide. Even the blog is written "by admin". Why not use the name listed on the domain registry that anyone can look up? Doesn't inspire confidence.
>"Jeez, this thing takes forever to boot up"

this "forever" consists of myriad of "a fraction of a second"-s, with each fraction individually not being "notieably slow" and thus not "prematurely optimized".

And if not optimized "prematurely" (ie. written efficiently from the start), then after-the-fact optimization, if happens at all, would shave only a fraction out of the "forever" - thus it frequently doesn't happen at all because of such low projected ROI.
The Amazon tablet will look like a PlayBook -- because it basically is.
I love it, has a very nice HipChat feel to it. No push notifications / etc, but the lower barrier to entry (no tedious signup or the like) makes it a great tool. Where's your privacy policy concerning created and deleted meeting rooms?
Chemistry of the future: 3D models and augmented reality
I'm pretty sure they're exhibiting confusion about the JVM vs. the browser plugin.
As cool as this sounds I still can't imagine using it in public at all.

I felt like I got enough unwanted attention as owner of the first iPhone, I can only imagine the sense of embarrassment I'd feel when using this.

"Siri, please remind me to pick up more preparation H when I get to Walgreens..."
How to Benchmark your termsheet
Well, it may be that the frightening reality is such that supply is so abundant that a single site with 12m dailies doesn't demand the prices one might expect.

edit: 12m monthlies, sorry.
Facebook's Makeover Is Actually Really Scary
Out of interest, why not? Is it that you don't trust GitHub's security, or do you believe there's a chance GitHub might appropriate your source code?
What do i do in startup weekend
i'm kinda shy. I want to know how you pull off pitching in front of like-minded folks? my idea: careers 2.0 reinvented (maybe more content than stackoverflows') what do you think?
I decoded the scripts on some recent WordPress blogs that were hacked. It would try to exploit Java first, then Flash if that didn't work, and then a couple other things if I recall correctly.
Sort of. Google ads tend to be conversion-oriented and facebook ads tend to be branding-oriented. PPC vs CPM.
Create a 'zoomable' UI with CSS3
Lately, yes. Over the last couple of years (Read: after Microsoft mostly cleaned up its act), Java has been been one of the primary sources of client exploits, along with Adobe products.

I don't know that there's anything special wrong with it other than that anything deployed widely enough makes a good target.

Edit: here's one sample article from last year:

http://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=9916
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Nutshell-OReilly-George-Hei...

The book was written as a companion to Introduction to Algorithms by CLRS and is comparatively lighter on theory, but still a handy desk reference.

disclaimer: it was written by my undergraduate advisors
im in asia by the way. stack's careers 2.0 seems to not have it for asians..
Author of the post here. I don't think you're "doing it wrong" or missing anything because of a cognitive blindspot. Algo skills are important for certain types of problems (scaling, number crunching), but useless for others (interaction design, API design, ...). It's just one of the skills we're looking for, since a lot of our meatiest problems don't require algorithms at all (beyond a simple hashtable or two). If you've looked at your own coding history and don't see the need to be more fluent with algorithms, then you're probably right.
The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), Knuth

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html
yes, it seems to be a service for proof reading. what's your point?
NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson On Cloud Innovation
Love this quote: "You'll find that things like a cubicle wall or a walk across the street can be as wide as an ocean was 100 years ago."
Notice their choice in words- it is based on Android 2.1. They didn't say it runs Android 2.1.
I live in a country where most of the big music streaming services are not available, only last.fm.
With this move, may Spotify open their service to other countries? Yeah, I know music labels are strong but side by side with Facebook they have some power. And I guess, it's hard to ignore 700+ million users.
There are ways to make the n^2 worst case extraordinarily unlikely, and there is a way to make it impossible (though it is highly technical).

Some others have posted methods (random pivot, median of 3). The gnu libc qsort implementation is a good learning tool (it uses median of 3). I think CLRS has the guaranteed n log n version.
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhlcodex.html - The Nag Hammadi Codex. Gnostic scriptures, some of which are of the Gnostic Christian varieties that were circulating around the time of Jesus and after. These offer a fascinating counterpoint to the officialized, hierarchical Christian dogma the ideas of the time were honed into.
> That line of reasoning might fly for a $100 tablet. For a $300 tablet, it does not.

I agree completely.

But this isn't a tablet. This is a Kindle. That's why it's the "Kindle Fire" not the "Amazon 7" Tablet Buddy Pro S 1.0." It's going to be exceptionally good at doing Kindle things: reading books, listening to music, streaming movies – and paying for the privilege.

They're going to sell a shitload of these things. They know how to make a great experience around content.
> I work predominantly with server-side, interpreted languages, and I just don't run into the bottlenecks and performance problems that Big O-knowledge seems to mitigate.

Algorithmic complexity isn't about performance, it's about scalability. A hand-written implementation in assembly that's O(N^2) will be slower than an implementation in Basic that's O(N) (or even O(N log N)) for a sufficiently large N.

I suggest picking up Programming Pearls, they had an example of a BASIC program on C64 vs. a Fortran program on a mainframe (the book is from the 80s) demonstrating this.

That said, if building basics web apps is all you want to do (e.g., internal enterprise applications) then you don't need this knowledge. However, the harder stuff (whether algorithmic, systems, etc...) like (but not limited to) what Palantir works is what I find more interesting.
This link lists the AV packages that can currently detect the installed malware:

https://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=d761babc...
Mildly disappointed? That's putting it mildly! I was going to buy one. Now I'm not :(

95% of the reason I bought my Kindle was because it has an eInk screen.
Strange - you insert an apostrophe and thus write "it is user profile" but leave it out of "facebook's perspective" where is needed. I can't work out why apostrophic abuse is so popular.
On Making Money vs Quality Work
Merge sort:

s = (lo, hi) ->
if lo==hi
return
if lo+1==hi
if VA.gt(lo,hi)
VA.swap(lo,hi)
return
mid=Math.floor(lo+(hi-lo)/2)
s(lo,mid)
s(mid+1,hi)
mid++
while lo<=mid && mid<=hi
if VA.gt(lo,mid)
VA.insert(mid, lo)
mid++
else
lo++
s(0,VA.length)
You can rent books from your public library and read them on the kindle...
I'm interested in knowing if there are any similar services.
smells like "the yes men" did it again

edit:
its not the yes men. its https://twitter.com/#!/AlessioRastani
I think the point was that most of the visitors to mysql.com are developers and system administrators, and compromises to their machines can probably be leveraged into compromises of other sites. I doubt we've heard the last of this.
whats humorous is that Strunk and White use the passive voice in their recommendation to not use it!
The surprising thing to me is the lack of concern over the security of cloud services. There are real risks in not having proper data segregation or even know in which country your data is stored in. Or what the security at the data center(s) is like.

Subverting the bureaucratic channel at a large corporation to "get on the cloud" must drive the CPO and CSO nuts. There is a time and place for bureaucracy.
That's exactly right. Even the cheapest Android tablets from Archos feature 3.2 - 80 G9 for instance at $299. And you can have Kindle, Amazon MP3 and Instant Video on it as it supports Flash. So why would I want to buy a $300 Amazon tablet?

That's not to say it won't sell well - brand and integration might make it work and Amazon never discloses how many Kindles they sell - but it's hard to argue Apple is going to sweat. B&N may be but not Apple and not any other Android Tablet maker.
AngelList: The Right Way To Use It To Raise Funding – with Naval Ravikant
Slightly off topic, has anyone successfully sold any ebooks on Amazon? Would love to ask few questions, if possible via email.
Today's Awesome Startups
Bali, Indonesia
Bali is the most beautiful island of Indonesia located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, which is lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east.The population of Bali is 3,891,000.
I know Joe personally and he is not condescending or an asshole. He's an extremely nice, personable guy who happens to have done some amazing things that have changed the web (like start FireFox for instance).

Perhaps you should think a little before insulting someone you don't know based on half a sentence they wrote.
Do you have any sources to prove the midwest eats a lot of meat and cheese? Do you have any sources to prove that matters?
Ask HN: How do I become a good coder?
I am not a good coder. I recently graduated from an Msc (in CS), having previously studied Physics. Though I learned a lot during the Msc, none was related to actually creating good code. I can get small things to work in python (and a bit in java), and in general can understand what a given program does. I've even made a few small applications for Android. Having said that I am no software engineer - mostly I just piece it together. I enjoy the algorithmic side of things, and I enjoy getting an idea to actually work - but on larger projects I just don't know where to begin. Given this background, I have a number of questions!

- I want to work in programming, at some level. Ideally I would find a job that allows me to do something interesting, and learn (with the emphasis being on learning). Where should I be looking in the UK?

- Most importantly, how do I become a better at creating good code?

Thanks in advance!
Neat, I've never actually seen a radix sort before.

I thought it was a bit clearer to understand what it was doing when I stuck

VA.locals.bit = bit

at the very top of your sort function.
Once again, yet another diet-related study which reinforces the old maxim of everything in moderation (including moderation, of course :-)).
Best-Selling Author Gives Away His Work
Generous Ex-Google Employee Requests Tax Increase from Obama
Spotify's selection is awful and they lump tons of unrelated artists together. I've been using MOG for a month and have been 99% satisfied (their new beta doesn't work with my firewall at work for some reason).