skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Researchers log keystrokes from afar with an antenna
WSJ does the same. It's simply done by detecting user-agent during the crawl, and then referrer during regular use.
I always find myself loving Lua, while continually wishing that it had a larger standard library like Python's. Without all the batteries included, it makes a great embeddable language, but stands very poorly on its own. It'd be my language of choice otherwise.
I found this very funny. Thanks for kn0thing!
axod, you can download these slides and other MySQL related presentations directly from http://ronaldbradford.com/presentations/
A video of the presentation can be found at http://technocation.org/node/533/play
Which does not mean that Spec work is a reasonable way to work in software development.
Ummm... Replace performance reviews with performance previews and pretty soon, they will become indistinguishable.
Because 255 is now just an arbitrary choice for a VARCHAR length.

Explanation: Prior to MySQL 5.0.3 (give or take a few point releases - I forget) a VARCHAR column could be 255 characters in length maximum, so VARCHAR(255) was often used as a default. Now, however, you can go up to 65,535 characters on VARCHAR, so if you're still using "255" then that seems arbitrary and not well thought out (or your schema is just old).
Assembla is awesome.
It did feel rather tacked on and poorly considered. Human beings are not slaves to employers but to our own needs. We take out our frustration at this upon our employers even though it isn't really their fault (most of the time) that the only safe and efficient way to satisfy these needs is through tedious employment.

(Well, it's not the only way, but it is the way most people chose, which is primarily their fault.)

I very much liked the comparison of management of people to management of computers. We each understand our own field and how, generally, to utilize the resources we are meant to manage, but we don't understand each other's so well. This is a problem when we have to cooperate and each have a good understanding of what the other needs and does, as it is in the employer/techie relationship. Division of labor has its advantages, but it's no excuse for not knowing what your neighbor does.
Complexity (cartoon)
Clojure has squiggly brace syntax for map literals, and multiple shortcuts for map lookups. E.g. both (map :key) or (:key map) return the value for :key in map (I think).

Arc has similar syntax shortcuts for hashes (but sticks with parentheses):

http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt

arc> (let h (obj x 1 y 2)
(h 'y))
2
As a database architect expert, I generally average a 25-30% reduction in the Disk Footprint of the database, sometimes with zero impact for application changes.

I use a very simple equation. DISK = MEMORY = PERFORMANCE
Reducing the size of the disk footprint, and therefore the amount of disk reads (disk is the slowest of the 4 physical mediums) you improve performance. By then enabling more data to be stored in the appropriately tuned MySQL Memory buffers, you get a further increase in performance.

For more information on this point, you can contact me at http://ronaldbradford.com/contact
step 6. Reevaluate your blog title

Did he skip this step when he titled his blog Influential Marketing Blog?
This is a key failing of Java, but you can make it hurt a little less with syntax like:

Map<String,Integer> map = new HashMap<String,Integer>() {{
put("x", 1);
put("y", 2);
}}

This abuses the fact that a brace after a constructor invocation indicates the creation of an anonymous inner subclass, and the second brace indicates code to be executed at instantiation time. So this "double brace initialization" has become a Java idiom. Still pretty awful, I know.

I'm not sure if anyone has been able to use generics and varargs to create a map generating static function, but it might be possible. Something like:

Map<String,Object> m = map("x", 1, "y", 2);

I think the trouble is with automatically extracting the key value types from the varargs array. I think I have seen the approach:

Map<String,Object> m = map(kv("x", 1), kv("y", 2));

where kv would just create a key value pair. That way you can make the generics inference come out right.

All of this does make a pretty good argument for Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc.

UPDATE: just found this:

http://nicolas.lehuen.com/index.php/post/2006/10/07/113-java...

// Example usage :
import static Literals.map;

Map<String,Integer> example = map("hello",1).map("world",2).map("!",3);

Pick your poison.
I love Waxy. I got really into it after the last redesign, and I've loved most of the things I've read on it.
From the article: "I don’t do anything to protect against decompiling, and I’m not worried about it."

So I assume you've changed your mind a little, and you're now at least a little worried about it ;)
You can start with mine :)
I'm not going to get in a back-and-forth with you about what I hate about Macs.

The point is that there are a LOT of people out there that absolutely can't stand Macs. As a matter of fact, besides me and my wife EVERY single person in my office hates them (most of us are programmers and YES, we've actually used them before).
Ubuntu is not more polished than even Windows XP. The main things keeping me from switching my day-to-day work to my Ubuntu partition are (1) text rendering, (2) reliability, (3) battery life, and (4) Lenovo's Thinkvantage tools. Windows XP absolutely kills Ubuntu in these aspects.
I liked the video, he did a great job of holding my attention, as someone noted, for 10 minutes and at the end of part 1 I can say I clearly understood what he was talking about, and that's critical both when presenting to customers and presenting to partners/investors.
I've skimmed over a few the articles in this series and I'm confused as to how it keeps making appearances on the front page of HN.

There is nothing specific here that applies to start-up founders/employees/entrepreneurs (despite the intended purpose), the articles are poorly written and far from complete, most of the advice is common knowledge, and the rest of the advice is of dubious value.

For anyone looking to get in shape, I highly recommend reading the stickies in the John Stone Fitness forums:
http://forums.johnstonefitness.com/
Unless you figure out how the key is generated, then you just create a name "John Smith" and apply the code to create the key. Now he's looking for a John Smith, so I'm not sure this is really the best way to think about it.
"The purpose of the review is to make sure the manager is doing his job with the employee, knowing what's going on in the employee's work, having an interest, offering to help, seeing where the employee and the company's interests can be aligned."

If performance reviews were that useful, why are they done only once a year? I feel like this should be a weekly conversation. Employee growth needs constant attention, but unfortunately it only happens for a handful of hours once a year.

My attitude is more pessimistic. I feel like these reviews are only useful for HR, so that they have a paper trail in place in the event that an employee needs to be terminated.

Edit: Just so my intentions are clear, I'm a cofounder of ididwork
And/or a realtor taking a heavy chunk of the sale value...
Yes, a little. The guy made a good point that making life harder to beginner-level hackers is a good idea, so that's what I think I'll do. I'll update the post after the dust settles a bit. :)
It's sell it and forget it or host it and regret it. Hosting a web app and peoples' data is a whole different business model.
I don't think you said this, but a big one is not to feel you need to finish everything on your plate.
Coca-Cola everywhere in the world except the US uses sugar.
Considering I launched my blog about 90 days ago... and I have no idea if you'd deem it a success (i've had about 40k uniques in that time -- a runaway success by my standards), my approach was somewhat similar to this. I did install analytics early. I went live very rapidly, and I've begun integrating it into all my profiles. These seem like logical things to do.

As far as branding, I went ahead and made it slightly above ugly but recognizable such that repeat visitors might recognize that they've come frequently, and subscribe.

My main difference from him is how I actually go about marketing it. That part is much easier, in my estimation. I write about the union of the stuff that I know and the stuff that I find interesting. I then submit it to the appropriate social news sites. Since, for me, that is pretty much covered by hacker news and reddit (proggit), that's all I've done. I haven't been "greedy" and have tried to be really sensitive to the predilections of the respective communities, and so far it's worked out great. If I post it in the place that I'd expect to find it, the people who think and enjoy the same things I do might find it interesting. So far they have.

It seems like a pretty simple two step process. Find a niche you like and write some content, then post it in the social news sites that dominate that niche.

The only piece of advice of his I haven't done but I'd consider is directly emailing other bloggers who might enjoy reading and/or responding to what I've written. Maybe I'll give that a try.
I don't think he meant that all employment is evil or akin to slavery. What sucks about work from the employee's perspective usually has roots in the employee's belief that he/she is not properly appreciated/respected/compensated for his/her personal contributions to the job.

It's not like working for a startup or starting one yourself frees you from your personal financial commitments, but it can (and often does) make you feel more appreciated/respected/compensated for the work you do.
Cheap espresso machines are almost universally crap. This is certainly one case where value correlates to cost.

Point is, if you really want an espresso, go to a fricken coffee shop.
I don't know if Vista is wonderful or not. I just know that UAC is more convenient and more secure then the workarounds that I have to use now. I have heard the performance complaints but I've also heard that you just need to disable the visual effects and they mostly go away.

I think the main issue with Vista is that there is no obvious huge improvement that would motivate people to pay the retail price to upgrade. For example, I am interested in UAC and some of the other security features but I am reluctant to buy Vista just to get them, especially if Windows 7 is just a year or so away.

Plus, upgrading Windows has always been a hassle in the past. Right now, I guess Windows XP mostly works okay for me, so I am sticking in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd.
Motorola V360 BLUE (Unlocked Factory Reconditioned)
Motorola V360 is smaller, lighter upgrade to the V330 adds a memory card slot and music player, while bringing the antenna inside. Other key features include Bluetooth, EDGE high-speed data, VGA camera with video capture, email, and SyncML.
Because it only takes a few votes to get on the front page, David has some HN readers that subscribe to his blog, so within a few hours of submitting, 1-2 upvotes put it on the front page. Once it's there, more people see it and upvote it. It doesn't take much.

On a depressing note, once an author has a history of getting upvoted (37s, Godin, Maroon), people race to submit anything they write so they can get karma.
If the MySQL documentation is right, it doesn't matter at all in MySQL. VARCHARs up to 255 uses an extra byte for counting the size of the column. There is a reading problem with variable-size records of any kind compared to fixed-size records.

It goes to say that other databases uses different allocation strategies for VARCHARs so the advice can't be carried over. For instance, they might define a fixed-size area together with an optional overflow area. This way one can make it such that most records have a fixed size and gain speedup.
As with ad blockers, the proportion of "savvy" web users is so small as to effectively not exist.

It would be trivial for someone to write a Firefox plugin so that every page request on a "protected" domain is given a Google referrer (e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953). But unless someone builds this functionality by default into a browser with significant market share, it won't be worth it for the content provider to try to stop.
Allo Allo
Meet René, the most wanted man in Occupied France: Women want his body. The Resistance wants his brain. And the Nazis want his sausage!
The only difference between the two is that Microsoft was far more successful. Apple would have done everything people complain about Microsoft doing and more. They basically have in the couple product areas where they've had similar success.
Back-and-forth? I asked you a few questions about what you said, and made a few statements of my own. You act like this is a hostile conversation.

I don't understand the sort of mindset that doesn't like the Mac, but I acknowledge that it exists. I would still guess that that mindset is in the minority, however: as a casual OS it is vastly better than Windows. Your office experience is not indicative of the majority of computer users.
Run Mac OSX on a PC
Also, they say "hack" in the title, like the recent story about football hacking.
Same here. Have you looked at LuaRocks, though? (http://www.luarocks.org/) It automatically grabs and installs packages, a la CPAN. It will take some time for there to be libraries for everything, of course, but the infrastructure is there.
It depends on where you live, among other things. In some states creditors can garnish your wages. Other places they can't, but they can come after your bank accounts.

I'm not sure about coming after your startup. It seems unlikely to me, but I'm the wrong guy to ask.
Rocket Man Ran a Proper Business, But Loftiest Plans Were Ill-Starred
And a mortgage broker taking a hefty fee.
While it looks silly now to buy a house with no equity (nothing down), it didn't seem so silly a few years ago. If you bought during the boom there was a good chance you would have a lot of equity in a couple years...
As a red-green color blind person myself I can only cheer on articles like this and wish more people would pay consider color blind in their designs.

Off the top of my head, some UI's that suck due to my color blindness:

- MS Word 97 (haven't used anything beyond that) underlines misspelled words and grammar mistakes with two different colors that look the same to me.

- Civilization 2 has those villages that blend right into the background for me. I quickly gave up on the game after looking forward to it for a very long time.

- My digicam battery charger has an LED that's red when charging and green when the battery is fully charged. Um thanks . . . why not just have two separate (labeled) LEDs or just have one LED that's turned on/off?

- Settlers of Catan's board. Darn lumber and bricks look pretty darn similar to a color blind person which makes it difficult to quickly skim through the board and make analyses for your next moves.

- Traffic Lights - Why not use shapes also? In some areas (Castro Street in Mountain View comes to mind) the green lights are very close in color to the street lights themselves. I have to concentrate really hard when driving on Castro at night. Also I don't know WTH additional reading article "What about Traffic Lights?" is talking about. I rely very heavily on the order of lights which makes driving at night difficult because you can't tell if the light is on the top, middle, or bottom.

- Sushi Restaurants with the conveyer belt where you take dishes off the conveyer belt and you're charged based on the plate color/pattern. I once went to eat at such a Japanese restaurant with three other color blind people and one non-color blind person. We were constantly asking the non-color blind person how much each plate was as it passed by, as a result usually miss it, and have to wait for it to loop back around (assuming it was still there).

Oh and when you find out someone is color blind please don't randomly point to nearby objects and ask "what color is that?" If you want to know what it's like see http://www.vischeck.com/examples/
9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers
Very cool. Thanks I'll take a look there :)
The Convenience of Nondisclosure
Really? Kind of like the point that I was responding to? The one that made all those good points about how great Leper'd is?

Oh, but since you mentioned it...no I didn't mean any of the things you mentioned. I value the flexibility of being able to do what I want to do, the way I want to do it.

For instance, Apple is always trying to lock you into: their hardware, their iTunes store, their AppStore, their ONE way of doing things (see the pattern here?)

I can buy a Windows laptop that becomes a tablet. I can buy a Gyration (wii style) remote for my Media Center. I can get a CableCARD tuner. I can buy any graphics card under the Sun. Can you do that with Apple? No, instead Apple locks you into two choices: "somewhat expensive" and "really expensive".

Besides hardware, I also have flexibility in how I can build programs. You got xCode and Objective-C and that's all Apple will really help you with. Sure, they let you build programs in other languages like Python but since it's not part of "the ONE true way", they won't really help you much.

Microsoft OTOH supports C, C++, C#, F#, VB.Net and VB classic and they'll actually help you out with any of those (yes, even VB classic if you ask them nicely). Besides all of the officially supported languages, you still have every single language that's popular on *nix right now (Python, Perl, Ruby, etc.). Oh and the environment libraries are simply the best (.Net, WPF, DirectX, etc.) but if they aren't good enough for you there's a billion dollar market for third-party components that you can use. On the Mac? Not so much.

Then we come to user experience. I'm a power user and I could go on for days about how bad I think the Mac user interface is. I simply don't want to get into that with you, it's a very, very long discussion.

Suffice it to say that Apple is very opinionated about the way they think YOU should work and if you can't see that, you're blind. I'll take Windows over OSuX any day thx.
(#1) I'm not sure age discrimination works that way, does it? It's discrimination to not hire someone you think is too old, but what about too young?
Not really. What you're asking is outside of the point I'm making.
It's twice as good as 37 signals!
The Osborne Myth
I noticed a few people talking about skipping over Vista upgrades to wait for Windows 7. While MSFT is not going to go bankrupt over this, it seems like an interesting time to look back at an infamous case of pre-announcing a product.
Photos of New 2010 Prius Hybrid Leaked, Confirmed by Toyota
Oh and I find it amazing that you think you know what the majority of people are thinking.

I'm going off of actual experience talking to actual people that don't live in a bubble. What are you going off of? Your imagination?
From my point of view, Vista could be very secure and usable, but at the end of the day I need to be on a Unix box, and Cygwin doesn't quite cut it.

This isn't in response to any particular comment, but it's based on a personal preference so I'm burying it here.
There's a PyObjC bridge as well: http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/pyobjc.html
I use a 2 monitor system with the task bar vertical along the center. It's hard to getting used to but definitely nicer in the end since you can see the programs open.
Really? Kind of like the point that I was responding to? The one that made all those good points about how great Leper'd is?

Yes, exactly like it. That post was also pointless.

For instance, Apple is always trying to lock you into: their hardware, their iTunes store, their AppStore, their ONE way of doing things (see the pattern here?)

Apple has complete control over their product. I think that is a good thing. I would shudder to think of OS X running on a Dell or an HP: it would be incomplete. As for iTunes, you can add music from outside of it and it still works. The App Store I'm hoping becomes more open - you've got a point there - but it lies entirely outside of Leopard.

Can you do that with Apple? No, instead Apple locks you into two choices: "somewhat expensive" and "really expensive".

Apple has had a choice for a long time: the choice between compromise and excellence. I am glad that they have never dumbed down their products for the sake of cheapening their product line: it has kept the brand as pure and as good as it ought to be.

but if they aren't good enough for you there's a billion dollar market for third-party components that you can use. On the Mac? Not so much.

I'm not a programmer, so I can't argue with you here. You might have a point here: I'm not entirely certain.

Then we come to user experience. I'm a power user and I could go on for days about how bad I think the Mac user interface is. I simply don't want to get into that with you, it's a very, very long discussion.

I'm not a power user. I like getting things done quickly, absolutely, and Apple makes it possible to operate entirely out of the command line if you want. I don't go that far. And as far as "power casual" - intuitive AND quick - Apple is bar none. Its ease of use is staggering compared to Windows or Linux.

Suffice it to say that Apple is very opinionated about the way they think YOU should work and if you can't see that, you're blind.

Of course I see that. I see it and like it. Nothing good has ever come out of being mild. Apple is certain that its way is the right way, and I almost always agree with it, and because of that, they've created the far superior product.

I'll take Windows over OSuX any day thx.

See, people call Apple users smug, and then say dickish things like this. I've never understood that. Of course I love Apple, but I try to at least be mature about it. Windows users get so childish and then turn around and call us smug.

If you don't want to debate, then don't debate. But don't jump in, insult something, and then get prim when the conversation doesn't end there.
Sounds like you need a lot of repositories but not much disk space.

I have no experience with them, but some googling brings up http://svnrepository.com/. They've got a plan with unlimited repositories (2 gb disk space) for $7/month.
Most of the products I use are built by people who use the Mac. That's why I looked into getting a Mac in the first place.

37signals. The Big Noob. The Tumblr team. Paul Graham once wrote an article on using the Mac. The Omni Group and Panic and Delicious Monster. Coudal. Rososo and Vimeo and NowDoThis. Facebook. Everywhere I looked, people told me that the Mac was wonderful and they were fanatic about it. So I gave it a try and found that I was equally fanatic.

I'm going off of every designer whose opinion I like and respect. You're going off of people who work in a single environment. If we wanted to be logical, we'd work off of user statistics, where Apple's rated as one of the most satisfactory companies in the nation. They blow competition away. Hence my confidence in my statement. Now, can we drop it, or are you going to continue to make arguments in a debate that's convincing nobody on either side?
Small note about using unsigned ints: In PHP (and possibly others) they will turn into signed ints when you read them.

If you read and write them and never show them, it's probably OK, but if you have logic that checks for < 0, or the like, be aware of it.

But then again, if you have so many rows in a table that your auto_number has reached over 2 billion, you probably have other issues as well.
Watch out for using int's for storing IP addresses. It won't work with IPv6.
That's entirely possible. I've never used Ubuntu on a laptop setting.

From my experience with it, it works great if and only if you can find the right drivers. When it runs well, I like it more than Vista and most likely more than XP. But XP is certainly more supported overall, and that's another thing that's definitely worth considering.
Q3 Results in Less VC Funding for Open Source Vendors