skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read it also, and I found it quite interesting.
Particularly the historic tidbits, which the author uses to put the rules into context.

In Venezuela for example, many of our politicians actions can be analyzed and compared with some of the book's stories.

I wouldn't be to eager to dismiss it as a Machiavellian Field Guide -although Machiavelli appears quite a lot throughout the book-. Many of the examples, in a less drastic way, happen all around us, all day long. So being prepared, can't be bad, right?

I wouldn't use the book word-for-word for my daily interactions.

That being said, this is a book I wouldn't swap out of my personal library at all.

PS: LOL @ the Rules of Acquisition! Thanks for the link, LogicHoleFlaw.
How did this submission receive so many upvotes?

I'm not seeing any interesting information in this article, it's just a big criticism of Palin and the Republican Party. Take it to reddit.
Rapidshare: We're not going to control user uploads
I'm 23.
As an aside, there are multiple popular uses of the word "work" - I tend to use "activity that I do (or am obliged through contract to do) that I am compensated at least partially by money"

Work, in the way I use it, neither excludes or includes fun. Whether or not my "work" is fun changes from 'assignment' to 'assignment', however it does generally include some activities which I do not consider fun. Luckily, a large part of the non-fun portions of what I do can be automated.

For instance, every time I start a new cherrypy app, there's a bit of stuff that I know I'm going to do - create a certain directory structure, possibly a database/tables, put some files in said directory structure, create a python file for the main app, etc.

This is boring, but can be handled easily by writing a small shell script that accepts a few options. On my machine, I have a few cherrypy apps that are mounted at any given time. When I create a new app, I just use my little script - and if I tell it to, it will open the file that runs the main cherrypy server on my machine, add the import line for the new app, and add the part to the server configuration that mounts it under a specific URL, by default the name of the apps class.

All of the steps handled by the script are generally part of the "work" I need to do, but instead of taking 20 minutes, it takes half a second. Granted, not every boring, menial task can be automated away like this - but a much larger proportion of boring, menial tasks can be than is found in other lines of work.
Idiocracy anyone?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
To be clear, I'm not convinced this is actually true. It sure sounds like someone is pushing an anti-standardized-test agenda (not that I disagree with that).

But if it is true, note that they're testing highly-gifted kids, who might very well be getting fewer teaching resources now that they would have in the early 70's. American public education at any rate seems to be a bit of a squeaky-wheel-gets-the-oil environment, where if you're not failing tests you don't need any special treatment.
Doesn't using the same password everywhere (particularly if it's also your online banking password) qualify it as a "shit password" as I so eloquently put it? :)

In any case, I accept that there should be some degree of responsibility taken by the developer to try and protect their users information, lest we get the whole Reddit situation.

But as someone once said, you can't make the Internet idiot proof.
Be picky about what projects you accept, and don't let your clients walk all over you. There's definitely a balance that has to be found there though.
I wonder how much Gravatar sold for?
Google can help your wonderment.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
I'll comment, only because this is inexplicitly at #1:

Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. He's a smooth, careful, reasonable man. I admire him, in a limited way. He will not cause alarms. Nevertheless, he will, step by step, move this country towards a socialistic regime in which the fruits of your hard work are transfered to the scum of the earth. This has been his intention, by his own published testimony, for many years.
H/w vendors are only cut out if MSFT invents a replacement for metal. Granted, utility computing in the cloud is about squeezing more utilization and value out of a given piece of h/w, so it's not without impact. You might perceive this as a change, but I'd say it's a change in the paradigm moreso than a change in MSFT.

Also, people tend to overlook this but cloud isn't really about infrastructure or hosting. Sure those are the current analogs--cloud is about what happens next, and I think it's more about shifting architectural tenets so that we do what works well with cloud scale and lifecycle. When you do those things, other interesting things start to become possible (e.g., in the cloud, it's hard to have misaligned test and prod envs, not the rule like it is most everywhere else).
Codeweaver's giving away free software download as promised on 10/28/2008
Perhaps that doesn't make it a "shit password", but it certainly is a "shit password policy".

Regardless, you can't realistically force your users to not have a "shit password policy". What you can do, however, is make sure that your app is probably not the point of failure for their password.

You can't make the internet idiot-proof, but you can make your apps reasonably malicious-person proof, and it's viewed by some (me) to be close to a moral responsibility of yours to do so - you either already know about, or are probably easily able to learn about "good" security policy, and ways to store users passwords and do validation while minimizing the risk of a malicious person acquiring your users passwords.

That is not to say that writing your own authentication / password storage scheme is something that you just shouldn't ever do - it can certainly be educational and entertaining - but 9 times out of 10 what you write probably shouldn't be used in production.
The Xbox is not the internet. It is a dedicated internet-powered appliance. And while they may have done a good job there, they have failed in every other internet initiative.

Microsoft does not understand the internet and has never made any notable internet service. Silverlight? Live? MSN? Hotmail? All knockoffs. And they have "failed miserably" every time.

Why would I trust their new internet cloud system when it directly, extricably integrates into all of these other failed initiatives as a feature?
If I want to buy something development and execution architecture based, I'm happy to buy that from MSFT since they've done exceedingly well there. How many sites out there have been running on google and amzn's dev/exec arch's the past 10 years? A lot less than Microsoft's. As far as them getting the internet or not, who cares. There's more to life than the internet. Java and .NET run the enterprise, not sure who among MSFT, IBM and Sun really "gets the internet" in the sense you're probably working to define.
Want a Loan? Act Responsibly
Cuban: My favorite drunken commentator.

I don't know, but I suspect his vino, while costing him 10x as much as mine, is leading him towards somewhat more foolish investments. Plus, he's consistently 24 months behind in his basic realization of things:

At no other time in the history of this country did savings fall as far below zero pct of income

O WeewY????
I've been talking about indirect effects. Direct effects are what you injected into the conversation by way of talking about epidemics. You are indeed indirectly affected by the poor state of health care in this nation as a result of the lost economic productivity, and any cultural decline that can ensue. My analogy to fire control is simply to point out that we are affected by the well being of others.

Tort reform is a solution to a completely different problem than what I've been talking about, so again, I fail to see the relevance.

We clearly disagree on what would improve the public health, and our disagreement clearly stems from ideological differences which haven't surfaced here. That's fine, but nothing that we've been doing amounts to an actual debate over the issue in question.
comment first, then decide if you should read (;
You're asking for an AppleTV with everything that was intentionally omitted.
well part of it, is we don't need to rely on our brain as much any more. When my parents were in school you had to do complicated math in your head. Nowadays you get a calculator.

Same for spelling, in 1975 you needed to be a walking dictionary. Nowadays we have spell checker.

As far as kids are concerned, a lot more of their time is now "wasted" on TV and video games.
Does this take into account immigration to England? If not, it's as worthless as studies saying American students aren't on a par with students abroad. The question is, which American students we're talking about: the black ones or the white ones? The distribution of IQ among white students is on a par with that of other white kids in other places. The distribution of IQ among black students is less favorable. (This does not mean they are inferior; biology is about trade-offs, and if you don't live in a city, it does not make sense to trade muscle for brains; there's a mountain of evidence that proves there are differences between these two groups, just as there would be between any two groups that spent over 100 generations in very different places).

Averaging the two groups is not very meaningful. After all, it only takes a few smart dudes to get to an IPO or win a Nobel prize, although a critical mass of smart people often proves essential.
I have gone similiar route, but I would suggest to not go totally free. Having something for a fee in the outset with a free version is better because your users will sign up knowing that not everything is free. If everything is free they could even end up resenting that at some point you have some add-on for a fee that they are not getting, regardless of there ability to pay.
I don't get what you mean. They've failed at search, clearly, but so has everyone but Google. Hotmail is most definitely not a failure, and was a pretty smart acquisition. Silverlight is too new to call a failure, though it's clearly not going to be taking much market share from Flash any time soon. If by MSN you mean their instant messenger, it's the largest by far.

Some huge sites (Myspace, MS's stuff, PlentyofFish) run on their servers and programming languages. Their browser still has the majority of the market share (though arguably not for quality reasons.)

I don't understand this "they're failing at the internet" sentiment. It seems to just be normal anti-Microsoft stuff. They're failing at search, not the internet as a whole.
Wow, interesting. Thanks for the info and the link. This is a surprising and disappointing aspect of this CPU.

Do you know if there's something about this (seemingly trivial) workload that is pathologically bad for this processor, or do you believe that the CPU is just wimpy? I've only ever had a glossy spec-sheet-level introduction to these at work. Given this load I don't see the value of "4 threads per core" that they proclaim on http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/specs.xml
Hmm, so now we're moving onto 90% of the time you shouldn't use your own authentication / password storage scheme in production? So now it's not just the encryption algorithm, it's the whole login/permissions system that I should rip out? I'm not even going to touch that one, sorry.

This whole conversation is based on the above users belief that unless you are using bcrypt to encrypt the passwords in your database, you are doing a moral disservice to your users. I and at least one other guy have chosen for varying reasons to use salted SHA256.

If anyone can prove to me that salted SHA256 is easily crackable, not by NSA super computers, but by some guy who just might want to steal the database of my little application and crack my users passwords, then I will strongly reconsider my choice. This is not a dick size competition, I'm not a security expert, I'm not challenging anyone to prove me wrong, because I don't think I have the first hand knowledge to know if I'm right or not. But all the material I have found so far tells me that salted SHA256 is still viable encryption for my purposes.

If it's not, then I am genuinely interested to see the conclusive proof.
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Applying game design to building apps (and games)
Everything they do is a knockoff of something else, and it's usually not better (I actually cannot think of a single case where it is better). I am not just randomly anti-Microsoft for religious reasons. They make terrible products that have horrendous user experiences. They do not innovate. In general, I have heard they hire sub-par programmers.

All of this is exaggerated in their internet initiatives. Who uses Hotmail anymore? Who used MSN, which they abandoned for Live? Who uses Live? Why would they try to compete against Flash with Silverlight? What gives them the authority or experience to do such a thing?

And if you asked me which were the two most horrendous monstrosities of popular websites on the internet, I would say PlentyOfFish and MySpace. They are the two sites which have the least sense of design, ergonomics, usability, and general respect.

Why, then, should I trust that they would make good decisions on their backend code and server software?
Is there a problem this solves better and cheaper than other available solutions?

If there is I can't see it. Did they even do a proper business case?

I can't see startups using it for a ton of reasons.

I can't see most businesses using it. They want their data in their data center.

The only use I can see would be a way for MS to sell software as a service to companies that want hosted Exchange, sharepoint, etc.
IE6.
Ram Shriram: Open Up the Airwaves
I wasn't necessarily saying you should rip anything out of your system. I haven't examined it, nor am I an expert on security (encryption, particularly is a rather complicated area filled with implementations with very subtle flaws, possibly undiscovered).

I wasn't trying to come of as critical of you, although I can see how my post could be read that way - I was just making the point that homegrown stuff in this area has a notorious reputation for being unreliable.

I would argue that if using bcrypt makes your passwords harder to crack than using SHA256, there isn't much of a reason to keep using SHA256 - salted or not - regardless of how hard SHA256 is to crack.

And yes, 90% of the time, authentication / password storage schemes exist for whatever framework or platform that you're using that have been thoroughly tested by people who probably know their stuff better than you or I - and, from a security standpoint, it's probably better to use their scheme as opposed to writing one yourself.
"There is a general tendency to believe that programmers can’t style things because they have no style themselves. Yet, all of them will be able to tell you very quickly which one of two designs they like the best, even if they generally can’t verbalize why."

There's a huge difference between being able to tell if something looks good and being able to design something that looks good.

I think for most programmers that difference isn't a technical one. The basic idea behind CSS is pretty trivial compared to even a moderate programming task.

Personally, even if I knew CSS inside and out I doubt I would be a very good designer.
Well, the decision is yours, but we can hardly help you without context. Post the website, everyone else does so freely!
I can see where you're coming from. And trust me, I'm keenly aware that there are many people who have a better understanding of this and other issues than I do. This is the main reason why I'm using a framework to begin with.

However, as far as I can tell, none of the ready made authentication/password storage schemes for Rails use bcrypt in a cross-platform way, if they did I'd switch over. Where does that leave us? You can take that as a rhetorical question if you like.
I don't see the advantage of ownership for Microsoft. A significant strategic investment, sure. Netflix is a pretty effective standalone entity, and if they are going to Silverlight, that's the big Microsoft win. Traffic to Netflix is not likely to be convertable -- I go to the site to adjust my queue or watch something, and advertising or cross promotions would be an unwelcome mix.
Ignore all the people giving advice along the lines of 'suck it up, work is not supposed to be fun'. That is the talk of people who hate the idea of anyone having a better life than them.

You need to map your way out of this situation - demotivation (regardless of the cause) is bad for you and your employer. Persisting with it is unprofessional. If you try and 'suck it up' you will travel the path to burnout and damage to your health and career.

Try and identify the cause before you take the appropriate action - it could be boring/unsuitable work, a medical problem like depression or even something like anemia, burnout, poor diet/exercise, or a lack of fulfilment from other areas of your life.
A List of Non-English Ruby and Rails News Sites
"The tests - designed to assess grasp of abstract scientific concepts such as volume, density, quantity and weight - found far fewer youngsters hit top scores than in 1976."

Maybe kids just get outside less?
Economists are often consulted by politicians wrt govt spending, so they have a more specific interest in govt funding. Average Joes may see a benefit or two but every paycheck has deductions, so they have a different interest.
cool! this would be right at home at the chess exhibit at the computer history museum.
Suzuki.ca goes live on Grails and Flex
I use a mac & I actually like that. Seems to work for me in this case.
I think that I no longer need seashore
Ubuntu's Shuttleworth: "I don't think anyone can make money from the Linux desktop."
Giving Life to Your Photos through Digital Photo Frames
If you are tired of the old photo album and you feel that it is a pain to have all those great snapshots developed, then it is time for change. Not only is it a pain to maintain the albums, but the cost of having photos developed can be expensive and they often get ruined with finger marks and sometimes they even get bent or torn.
Ten Comments You Think Are Cool And Insightful But Aren’t
How does a business, or an idea, get traction?
You still need to be able to do the maths in your head, otherwise how can you interpret what the calculator is telling you? Maybe your whole calculation is an order of magnitude out, for example. A calculator saves time, not understanding. The same is true of a spellchecker. Doesn't matter if every word is correct if no meaning is communicated.

And even if it were true for the general population it wouldn't be true of the HN crowd... We are the toolmakers.
Regarding the downmodding... discussing biological differences in the races is one of those Things You Can't Say (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html). It's been discussed here before and it never goes anywhere. I would recommend letting it go.

I am inclined to agree with you that this study is just as worthless as the ones comparing American students to foreign ones, but for different reasons. It's just about what is being tested -- kids may do worse on some measures, but on average, in the age of Google, everyone is a great deal smarter than 30 years ago.
Spammers' Stories
Succinctness is Power
I had the same thought when Sars struck in the sense that you lose the ability to avoid correlation with a globalized world.

Unconnected tribals will probably have the best shot at making it through something really crazy like that.
keeping scaling in mind helps a lot, but the real problems you'll run into then are the ones you're not aware of... like a 32,000 directory limit on linux. as your application grows, you just get blindsided at random, and need to put out fires constantly.

and that's where experience with scaling comes in handy. if you don't have it, the next best thing you can do is to have a knowledgeable friend, read up on best practices, and deal with fires quickly.
Sorry for being naive and offtopic. What does successful seppuku mean?

I had to do a search for this word when I read the post and didnt quite get what a moral suicide means.
The word "dollar" has its origins in the Roman Empire
Who discovered the element gold, silver, copper, neon, etc ?
Did you come up w/ that joke on your own? I ask because it's awfully similar to a highly moderated comment left on /.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1009471&cid=2553...

If you borrowed it from /., I would imagine that giving credit to the creator (who happens to be "Anonymous Coward" in this case) would be appropriate.
Battle of the CSS Frameworks
> if you can get 90% more performance up front with only 10% more effort, go for it.

Scale is only loosely related to performance.

You can have an application that performs pretty badly, but scales. This is much better than an application that performs well, but won't scale.

Performance tends to degrade slowly, while scale is usually a hard limit (you've reached "n" users? server crashes). Hitting an issue of scale is usually a fairly traumatic thing for a service.

I'd agree with the original comment that when you're starting you don't need fancy caching schemes, load balancers or replicated databases.

Equally you don't want to build something that is incompatible with these in the future. It's a terrible pain and is probably indicative of a bad design... As the other reply said quite well: A good, simple design will allow you to move faster and scale better..

I'm a big fan of "optimise last", but I think this is often interpreted as "put together badly and fix later"... It should really be "quantify what you optimise".
Try a ms webapp and tell me they're not failing. Load up adcenter and try it out.
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To my astonishment, this writeup was actually interesting. I wonder what they could do to improve the quality of the comments on TechCrunch. These 11 types seem to make up the vast majority of the things said there, unfortunately.
Ask HN: best office jukebox?
So there's going to be about 6 of us in a new open plan office. We have one set of speakers we'd like to all play music through.

Ideally I imagine a box we can all copy mp3s to and then some sort of web interface for queueing selections? Ability to remotely control volume would be a definate plus too.
The article cites ebay's reputation system, but ebay doesn't allow sellers to give buyers negative feedback anymore.
Is it just me or is the Azure website having a lot of problems at the moment? http://www.microsoft.com/azure/

I'm getting a lot of "page not available" errors and broken image links.
Spammer Hiding Techniques
Continuing Spam Legislation
I think I remember seeing it on Fark, and I wouldn't be surprised if that guy took it from Slashdot, who then probably took it from a blog somewhere...
Usually that's a different cache, but even if it's the same, the code is usually smaller.

But you bring a good point - for example on certain platforms (certain game consoles for example), where memory, and cache miss is expensive, often compiling with -O1 rather than -O2 (inline expansion) is better.
Right. TC is where the news may be, but it is definitely not where the conversation is...
Useful info. The author thinks BlueprintCSS + Tripoli make a great combination. I use Blueprint but in an effort to get away from understanding more, I would hate to integrate Tripoli with Blueprint myself. Does anyone have a good stock solution for such a combination?
Game Theory - Open Yale Courses