skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alltop Launches Redesign Amid Rapid Expansion
we need meta.news.ycombinator.com
GNU Make Hints and Tips
That's a good point, I often catch myself conflating TDD with general unit testing.

I definitely ascribe to TDBF (Test-Driven Bug Fixing) more than TDD - if a bug shows up in my production code, adding a test to the suite to make sure that bug never comes back gives me a great deal of peace of mind. And it helps if I have enough of a testing framework from initial development (such as data and mock object setup) to add new tests quickly. But I definitely don't do enough testing for it to qualify as TDD.
From the little I know about this kind of stuff this makes a lot of sense... could this let them innovate/take risks more, instead of being tied to stock holder's demands of sticking tightly to financial forecasts?
People talk about news.ycombinator.com like it's somehow special and destined for something greater than "Another Reddit."

I'm sorry, but there is simply no evidence that this is the case. All social news sites have a lifespan before they become intolerable bastions foolish commentry. I am here as opposed to reddit for the time being because this is still the least ridiculous social news site I can find.

I am sad about it, but I accept that one day news.ycomb will be just another reddit.
Why do you believe pair-programming is crap?

I have found it very useful for spreading knowledge amongst a team and for ensuring a tricky or fundamental piece of code.
That is not true. Django and web2py both escape HTML output when variables are displayed, broadly neutralizing this attack by default.

Developers in those frameworks must explicitly say that they want to display HTML in order to have it displayed. Presumably, they have thought about this and also taken action to remove bad HTML from this output. When you have to make a choice to display it, it makes you think about this.

There is no setting in Rails to automatically escape HTML. There is Erubis, which is a replacement for Erb that can do it, and there are some XSS plugins that escape input on input or output.

I'm saying escaping HTML on output should be the default for the framework.
Not to mention that if you're on windows you can just download the Wamp stack executable and you're done. One click.
From what little I know, I'd expect the opposite. Their war chest is what allowed them to run exploratory divisions at a loss, like the XBox and Zune groups.
Seems rather odd to be complaining to the customers that their complaining is wrong.

Sound like a guy running a hot dog stand. Each day, a thousand folks come by and buy hot dogs. Maybe ten thousand just read the signs. About a hundred of the regulars say "Why don't you paint the sign blue?"

You can say, "no" or you can say "yes". What makes no sense at all is to keep arguing with the complainers.

Is there a way to paint the sign blue without losing the traffic? If so, do it. However -- and this is what bugs me -- perhaps you like the traffic more than the contributors. Perhaps the contributors are just suckers creating unique, interesting, and varied content on your site everyday. And if that's the case, well it doesn't really matter at all what 'HN' really is, because the whole point is to let it evolve into a mindless link farm not to service the commenters/readers. In other words, the true customers are the passerbys, not the people eating the hotdogs.

I don't believe this premise, but it is self-consistent. I would like to see a drop-down voting system where there would be 5-7 categories each user could choose from. If I thought the article was interesting, I could choose "interesting". If you thought it was on-topic, you could choose "on-topic". etc. Add a flag and tag feature, get rid of downvotes entirely, and at least then the site is customizable to work no matter the reader's preference.
Oh, yes, absolutely. I think few people would argue with that, though they may not have formally articulated it as "having a test framework". (To my understanding, what you're referring to as "TDBF" is more commonly called "regression testing".)

As is often the case, most arguments are about extreme positions.
Yup. I am suggesting escaping HTML on output (of user input) by default -- making h() the default, essentially.

(Incidentally, the reason why this will probably never happen is that it would break all of Rails' HTML helpers.)

There are several frameworks that do this already. Django even broke existing apps to make such a change.
This was already posted, and that was a link to the actual source rather than to Slashdot. Double spam.
Thanks go out to Eric for this article, which led (among other things) to fixing some important bugs in Insoshi. You can find my companion post on fixing Rails mass assignment problems here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311533
I'm not sure what your point is, since every "serious" Rails app does need it, and even unserious web apps with "incidental" auth features can end up storing bank passwords.
I think you're making a good point, which is that the new python features are usually more "syntactic sugar" than they are "features". It is not very hard to teach people that

alist = [foo(x) for x in things if isok(x)]

is equivalent to

alist = []
for x in things:
if isok(x):
alist.append(foo(x))

Similarly it's not hard to explain what an @login_required or a @memoize decorator does, although it is tricky to write a decorator yourself. Same goes for generators.

I don't think syntactic sugar is a bad thing. I wish C++ had better syntax. If I could never type hash_map<blah, blah>::iterator ever again, I would be happy. But that isn't the sort of feature that C++ tends to add.
I think the concept is interesting - but needs a bit of intellectual hacking so to speak.

The point that if a story is on digg or reddit it doesn't belong on HN is a symptom of something else, namely that digg or reddit is associated with a low common denominator, and thus an article that appears on these sites first shouldn't appear here. The real problem to be solved here is twofold:

1) Quality - An article doesn't become bad simply by appearing on reddit, it only seems so because it appears in the colorful company of lolcats and conspiracy theories. It might also have something to do with the psychology of having a "better" site over here at HN.

2) Categorisation - not all quality articles should have high HN quotient. Political articles for instance should have a markedly harder time getting a good HN rating.

I think that the HN quotient should involve the data you propose, but it should also go beyond that and consider the points I made above.

If the HN quotient is a measure of being uniquely hacker the problem is coming up with this definition. It's probably impossible to come up with a hard definition, but since we have ratings of articles, users with ratings and longevity data for these (how long has the user been a member), ratings for comments to articles (including the users that commented) for this site it should be possible to get an idea of what is uniquely hacker news. This could be done by using some statistical kung-fu.

Example:

Each article gets a number of points that distinguishes it as more or less uniquely hacker news - the more points the better:

- articles points/3
- submitted users longevity (days since user was created)/5
- average of (commenters karma + commenters longevity) for top level comments to the story. (second level comments and below often have less to do with the submitted article than the comment it responds to)

When these are added together it gives a number which is the "uniquely hacker news" quotient. Note that there are many ways of getting this number, the above is just a simple example that favors submissions that old users that are in the conversation find interesting and comment on. It could easily be made smarter.

Now we have a basic definition of what constitutes a definition. The ineresting bit of course would be to see whether submissions with a high score correllate with articles that are submitted/not submitted to other sites, and the timing of this.

Oh well - just rambling along here. Feel free to tear down my algorithmic proposals all you want :-)
The even-bigger problem, as I understand it, is that the nanotubes don't just have to be 30,000 km long, they also have to be more-or-less defect free.
Doesn't protect_from_forgery solves this? I'm pretty sure when I tried using curl the other day I was getting a message error message because the form was missing the secret.
Amazon launching a mobile music/movie store for Google’s platform
So we the people can ship eBay about 200 billion in listing fees?
Real programmers won´t use Windows even at gunpoint

Real hackers use the tools at their disposal whatever they may be.
I don't think you read my comment carefully. The difference between XSS "susceptability" between Django and Rails is one setting (safeERB, sanitize, etc). Yes, it's a difference. I don't think it's a particularly meaningful one, because Django autoescape doesn't actually stop XSS attacks, just the stupid ones.

There's a big religious debate inside the Rails community about autoescaping, which ran aground on the point that autoescape doesn't actually stop XSS. I agree with Rails, but concede that reasonable people could think otherwise.

It's hard to see how reasonable, well-informed people could think that mass-assignment was a good default feature.
I actually began casually training for a triathlon "sprint" which is a great lead into the sport.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triathlon#Standard_race_distanc...

I figure its the perfect length to get into it - each individual section I could do right now, but the combined effort will be killer :)
Tired of thieves, Portland woman lets the world watch her Obama sign
"Here's the story. We got an Obama sign a few months ago and it was stolen off our lawn within five days. Just yesterday we got another one (after searching for some time) and put it up on the lawn again. This morning it was gone, so we decided we'd make our own homemade sign and set up a camera to catch the thief in the act."
What a piece of... erm.. crap. Sorry.
This only stops the "hello world" attacks. Be careful not to give the impression that Django "solved" cross-site scripting; they clearly haven't.
Every election seems like the most important election ever at the time. The entire 24 hour news cycle depends on channels like CNN convincing you that what happens today is more important than what happened yesterday.
I think if you come up with 5-7 attributes that make hacker news unique, then you use those for your categorization system

See my earlier comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311592

This would just be a coorindate in n-dimenstional space. Instead of the up/down quotient, you'd simply use the distance from the current measurement to the ideal. Other than that, the ranking system would work the same way (might be harder to understand by looking at it, since there would be no "points")
The adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland/2
I haven't read this entire commentary thread, but you could look at a URL submitted to HN, in the Reddit website's categories of finance and politics, and if it's in one of those, you remove it from HN as being non-hackerish.
well, if a woman, a webcam, and an election are involved, it MUST be hacker news. upvoted.
Slatex:Scheme inside latex.
I wasn't going to reply, but I've seen this "One political post every hundred or so" comment from you several times now, and it's simply irrelevant. It is not how many political submissions there have been lately, but how many are reaching the top 30, or even the top 5, and the quality of discussion therein.

When I first joined Hacker News (near the beginning), a political article on the front page was an anomaly; in fact, I can't remember a good example of one. Sure, there were a few things in regards to the importance of Net Neutrality and how it could potentially affect the landscape of the Internet. There were a few about AT&T sharing records with the government, or Google not doing it. These are issues that have direct relevance to startups and "hackers", and there were hardly ever political debates or democrat/republican leanings expressed in the comments. Even then, I remember seeing perhaps one such submission on the front page per month.

Lately, it is strange not to see a few front page political articles per week. Not only that, but these articles are less relevant to our startups and to the lives of non-Americans. And to take the cake, their comments inevitably include at least one political debate thread, a few snarky comments, and a general lack of substance.

Many of the members who are here for hacker-related submissions simply stay away from such topics, and that is apparent from the difference in comment quality. It seems to me that there is a slow shift towards a Hacker News divide: "good" Hacker News submissions where the discussion is interesting and intellectually stimulating, and "bad" Hacker News submissions where the discussion tends more towards the things we're trying to avoid.

In a site called "Hacker News", this divide is unwelcome and senseless. That this submission has over 200 upvotes (not including one by me, by the way) is evidence of that. I would much rather see 3 submissions like this that indicate that the community is fighting back against irrelevance than to see even one submission that is dominated by political debates that could easily happen elsewhere.

People have been talking politics for centuries, and the likelihood that someone here is going to bring up a novel, interesting point is minuscule. In a community that is dominated by programmers, entrepreneurs, and other tech people, I'd much rather see discussion that might actually introduce me to brand new ideas and change my life for the better.
I don't think he meant the government should directly list on ebay; but rather any assets should be clearly listed and auctioned off on the web.

The stock market is already a giant "ebay" for shares in these companies and the market has already voted with its dollars that it doesn't think that the underlying assets are enough to cover outstanding obligations.

Under the bailout plan, I believe that companies will be allowed to keep their valuable assets but get rid of their toxic ones so I don't know how many buyers you will find for that anyway.
Haskell for C Programmers
Truer words were never spoken.

I figured this out about 4 cycles ago. The entire system is rigged to suck you in and be convinced that the future of mankind and the universe is at stake.

Now I try my best to ignore news outlets, especially cable news outlets, during this time of P'on Far. But every time they still suck me in anyway. This time around I was doing some bug fixes and left the convention coverage on. Pretty soon there I was, glued to the set.

Politics is much better (or worse) than sports. The games go on for months, everybody gets involved by the end, both sides try to make the stakes out to be something incredibly huge, millions (or billions) are spent trying to find you everywhere from the subway to the toilet and convince you the other guy abuses old people. Better still? The last few games have been really, really close.

I love it. But it's not HN. :)
They could do like cinemas: you can't bring your own popcorn/binoculars.
Straight from the Gut: Secrets of Successful Web Companies (event)
New Immersive Wii Ad On Youtube (Watch full video)
Blue Cheese (Bleu Cheese)
Religiously. ;-)
again, as i said the last time this article was posted, this is a huge ad hominem fallacy. attacking the people that make an argument does not equate to attacking the argument.

all humans are irrational. it doesn't make the irrationality of religion or the loch ness monster any less irrational, just because someone else has some irrationalities in their beliefs, too. this is not a zero sum game.
As Android approaches, carriers embrace change
D-Expressions: Lisp Power, Dylan Style
Sounds a bit like Slashdots rating system, which I by the way quite like.

http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml
Not necessarily true. To really get a fundamental understanding of a phenomenon, you do not have the time to build it and often you don't have the inclination. Nothing wrong with that. It's up to others to take that research, distill it and build solutions.
The point about breaking up CSS into multiple files helps when the lines of CSS get to be too much. For example, I'm looking at a CSS file right here where I've got 1162 lines of CSS to sift through. Just like code is fragmented into .cpp, .java, .rb, .php files per logical component, it's useful to do the same for .css.
Is this reddit.com?
I have a beta HN-like site that's focused on business and finance. If you're interested, visit:

http://www.newmogul.com/

and post there.
She's really behind the paradigmatic curve, here. First of all, this is Web .05-level technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot). Second, it's clear that the crowdsourced participatory community has downvoted her content multiple times -- and they've expressed this webocracy-enable opinion even though she didn't bother to include a simple AJAX-based method for removing her sign. Rather than accept this and move on, she's trying to trap and shame downvoters in order to keep promoting her repost of a repost (the content of which has been hosted at numerous other occasions, already).
I will totally pay 1 cent for all those "toxic loans". I'm bound to find somebody who will pay at least 1 cent of their loan back. Eventually somebody will pay 2 cents, etc. until you get a fair market value.
That depends on whether or not they think their stock is underpriced. Microsoft could give their shareholders cash, or they could purchase an asset (MSFT) with an earnings yield of over 7%.
The size is way off for me. Tried on my Mac Book Pro's 15" screen and the batteries are huge, a good 50% bigger than real life. I'd imagine you would need to get screen size and DPI to accurately resize the images. Perhaps you could have a sample image (like the AA batteries) along with a slider to allow the user to set the exact ratio.
I don't disagree - but this November is quite different, in kind, from last November. I have no doubt we're seeing a little seepage here, but the relative paucity, given the great noise in the outside environs, gives me greater confidence in this community, not less.
I think that you might be confusing the attitude with the usual crowd. I personally apply the "guesswork" attitude whenever learning anything programming related - snipe a few packages which look right from the Ubuntu repositories, play around in the REPL, write a few toy programs. Then maybe after a few days, go read a few tutorials online and sometime later browse through the manual, but that is only later, after the initial 'guesswork'.

Either you're talking about something different, or I don't understand what's wrong with such an approach... Although maybe 'experimental' is a better title?

...correction: On rereading your post a few more times, I realize it's just a misconception of terminology.
i beg to differ. here are "serious" websites that doesn't do user authentication:
- google.com (the original search engine)
- techmeme.com
- wikipedia (the original version)
- tinyurl
I could probably find dozens of examples, but those are just the ones I could find on my toolbar. And yes, those are not specifically rails application, but they do prove that there are web applications without user authentication
I don't think that's the point of the article at all. It sounds like this piece is talking about how Christianity sort of inoculates people: they do believe in something crazy, but that crazy belief also requires them to disbelieve in lots of other crazy stuff.
Look, it's fair to freak out, but it's also fair to point out that most people have known about this problem for a long time. I was scrubbing my hashes of unwanted keys as far back as when I wrote ma.gnolia.com in 2006.

And it was considered common knowledge back then. And most people don't fix it using attr_protected, so are we really sure that all those projects are vulnerable? A simple string search would not suffice.
I was hoping someone will stop giving business advices as there is a magical formula that "pooofs" your way to success.
To be fair, what is it you think the phrase "hidden feature" could possibly mean other than "frequently misunderstood" or "available, but often unused by beginners"?

Surely you weren't expecting "hidden" features in any literal sense?
Oh whoa! I never realized I could just type "javascript:..." into the status bar in Firefox and have it run it. That's awesome. (In retrospect, I realize I should've realized it, because I've always known that the javascript links are "javascript:functionCall()" or some such.)
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.

The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.

Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.

But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.

:%s/COBOL/Windows/g
Interesting comment, thanks. Although:

The point that if a story is on digg or reddit it doesn't belong on HN is a symptom of something else, namely that digg or reddit is associated with a low common denominator, and thus an article that appears on these sites first shouldn't appear here.

Not necessarily. It could simply be that many people who reads HN also reads, say, programming.reddit.com and are interested in stories with low duplication.

Another possibility is simply that I am curious about what kinds of stories appear here but don't appear there. It doesn't have to be an elite vs. LCD, it could be startups vs. working for the man, Lisp vs. Python, anything.
T-Mobile to charge app developers for users' bandwidth consumption?
Do you mean occasional, organically-happening-as-necessary pair programming or mandatory-all-the-time pair programming?
i suppose it could be read that way, although i took the slant based on the title. like, a "look who's irrational now" playing on the fact that atheists like to point at theists and say that they're irrational, but based on this information they also believe in irrational things.
The Present and Future of Ruby and Rails
There will still be a big war chest because:

1) The $40B buyback is over the next 5 years.
2) At least for the next couple years, Windows and Office are still the closest thing in the world to a money printing press.
Any suggestions for other things we could be doing?
Yes.

You're not saying something is simply good or bad -- ie, you are not ranking. Instead you are doing something much more important: you are categorizing. Quite frankly I don't give a hoot whether most hackers thought this article good or bad: I want to read interesting news for hackers. It's a different thing. Once you get it, you wonder why this old system is still hanging out in so many places.
Can you give an example of an XSS attack that isn't prevented by auto-escaping (other than the UTF-7 one)?
Deletion decisions on Wikipedia are made by users, not a singular entity known as "Wikipedia."
They only increased the quarterly divident by $0.02 per share. The 2004 special one-time dividend was $3.00 per share. Without the buyback, Micosoft could repeat the $3.00 per share dividend with money to spare.

Granted, this is an over-simplification of what is going on. Microsoft authorized a $40 billion buyback but they probably won't buy back all $40 billion. This has the effect of inflating the price of shares beyond their true value.

The main people who win are here are the ones that would have used the dividend to buy more Microsoft shares (since a buyback effectively is a way of the company forcing you to buy more shares with your dividend, but with lower taxation and brokerage fees), and the ones that are were going to sell their Microsoft shares anyway.
Advanced bit manipulation-fu