skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ASK HN: Generic backend interface for web apps
I'm wondering if anyone knows of a generic backend interface for web apps. Sure we could be lazy and just use phpmyadmin for playing with simple apps that we can't be bothered to build a backend for. But is there a generic product that can be intelligently incorporated without too much hassle.
I Put In 5 Miles at the Office: Walking Workstations
I second Emacswiki as suggested, but I find quite a bit by searching through the Emacs and Elisp info pages and using M-x apropos / M-x apropos-variable. It doesn't always work though - to find something, you generally need to know what Emacs calls it.
How to Be Outstanding
Now that's how you do a market intervention.
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Western Union still has a huge presence in India..especially in southern parts..
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Gr8 db8r takes on linguistic luddites
The end of a profligate era
Apple's iTunes genius button seems pretty dumb to me
Image Vision Design • Vendo Tópico - Capcom vs Tatsunoko sairá para Wii também
The Prototype - when is it worth it and when is it just wasted effort
> I'm outsourcing to South America and I've been using PayPal.

Sure, but that's not the group of people I was talking about, who generally go into a physical office, cash in hand, and want to send it somewhere else where someone can go pick up cash. WU isn't a complete monopoly in terms of sending money, obviously, but they still have a big chunk of the market. Actual facts would help the conversation, though:-)
A common image for the developer machines.

You'll easily lose a week per developer (especially ones that may join the project later) if each one is himself responsible for setting up development environment, support tools, off-line documentation etc.
I agree, it needs a footer.

Would help with my Apple mouse that has a frustrating dodgy down-scroll.
Check LuaRocks (http://luarocks.org), a package manager/installer for Lua, it makes deployment of C extensions much easier (no root access required).

About deployed Lua webapps, there's http://www.wowprogramming.com/, using Sputnik (http://sputnik.freewisdom.org) on top of the Kepler (http://www.keplerproject.org) stack. The forums are Sputnik extensions.
If that's true, I think it's very interesting. I wonder if the security community will step up and take advantage of this opportunity to discuss the inherent security issues with the "secret question" method of account recovery.
They can turn around tomorrow and say it'll cost 10 bucks a year to use it. Most people will pay to play, just because they've been sucked in. $10 x however many millions of users they have... you do that math!
No, the money to repay the bonds comes from the sale of future bonds.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=307472
Wow how awesome isn't this? Major props to MIT and Stanford for pushing making knowledge available to everyone.

A lot of universities don't even offer courses like this and here you get it for free.
MacBook Pros, what to expect, when
Google to display religious groups' anti-abortion ads
The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time
One of the hardest bits can be working out what the easy problems are in the first place.
I wouldn't use a single regexp for complete username validation -- if it fails, all you can display is a generic "username is not valid, it must obey rules X, Y & Z" message. I'd check min and max length separately and display an appropriate error message for that.

Also ignore leading/trailing spaces; or you'll end up puzzled why you have two "bob@example.org" users in your database even with appropriate database constraint, and bob mails you saying he can't login on the account he just paid for.
How To Solve A Problem Like The Browser
Massachusetts Toll Collectors Make An Average of $70,000/yr
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Kingfisher
Amazon Web Services to release CDN by end of the year
Know what amazes me? That you can't buy a Fastlane/EZPass at one of the toll booths. You have to order online and wait for it to arrive in the mail.

If they had one lane setup where you could pick up a transponder and then activate it via the phone or Internet when you got home, I bet in a month nearly everyone in the state would have one.
> [-\.\\w] means match a dash, a dot, a backslash and the w character.

That one could very well depend on language:

<?php var_dump(preg_match('/[\\w]/', 'Lies.')); ?>
int(1)

Note that PHP still interprets \' and \\ in single-quotes, too.
Like I said, it wasn't easy doing it this way. Every bone in my body screamed, "What's wrong with you? Stop replicating code! Write flexible functions!" But I struggled on until everything worked perfectly.

Here's the good news: I couldn't wait to refactor. I was "in the zone" the whole day. And it felt great. I finally got to clean up the mess that I made, and best of all, I didn't have to struggle trying to figure out how to handle that strange outlying case: it was all already there!

I don't know if I'd try this in someone else's shop. You're right; they'd probably pull me off before I got to refactor, leaving a mess for someone else with nothing learned.
National Science Foundation has given UC Irvine $100,000 to research WoW
Walmart Credit Card
An informative and detailed review of the Walmart Credit Card
You might want to read Cal Henderson's book Building Scalable Web Sites: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596102356/
Has anyone here actually tried this? It sounds interesting, but I'd sure like to suss it out further before making the investment...
Securely access email remotely – via BlackBerry or Treo
People running Exchange as their email server typically use Microsoft Outlook 2003 as their email ‘client’. Among many advanced features, this lets them:
•Securely access email remotely – via the Web or a mobile device like a BlackBerry or Treo
•View colleagues’ up-to-date calendars and schedule meetings
•Assign and manage company tasks on central ‘to do’ lists
•Manage contact information of employees and customers and access it anytime
•Share documents across the team so everyone’s working from the most current version
http://apps4rent.com/microsoft-exchange.html
People doing research make news. These guys make money. Let me know when you've heard of one of their groundbreaking discoveries that wasn't simply purchased from some professor somewhere.
The all new BBC music site where programmes meet music and the semantic web
They're certainly a middleman in the patent system. The question is whether they're a middleman for positive exchanges (good) or a middleman for extortionate exchanges (bad).

Most people seem to be assuming the latter; you seem to be assuming the former.

To clarify, the two business plans I'm thinking of are

A) Find overlooked innovations; buy the patents; sell or license the patents to firms interested in developing products based on the innovations.

B) Find overlooked overly broad patents; buy the patents; find companies who rely on systems which likely infringe these patents; threaten to sue these companies unless they pay large licensing fees.

I would say that the evidence is on the side of model B. First of all, middlemen for extortion abound - the so called "patent trolls" - it is a proven market. Have you heard of any middlemen for genuine innovation?

Secondly, we can look at the company's client list. Cisco, Verizon, Sony, Nokia, Microsoft, Intel, Google, eBay, SAP, and Nvidia are named in the linked article. Lots of software and electronics companies. The nature of software companies probably makes business plan (A) impossible (the conventional wisdom, at least, is that no one cares about a bright idea in software; they care about implementation). If they were following business plan (A), I'd expect to see industries where ideas are worth a great deal of money more represented - biotechnology maybe. I don't know if patents are worth anything, except for litigation purposes, in any industry really though.

Finally, the actual article spells things out, although we can't be sure how accurate it is.

"It works like this: Technology companies agree to pay patent-licensing fees to inoculate themselves against potential lawsuits by Intellectual Ventures."

This kind of business plan is strictly destructive to the economy. Under this business plan, the patent gives nothing of value to the company licensing it (they are already infringing the patent, having "discovered" it in the normal course of business). It is the prevalence of these sorts of deals, and the rarity of the sort typified by model (A), that have put many of us against the patent system.

By the way, a strong economy is no evidence that the patent system is pretty good. The economy could be strong even if we had an absolutely miserable, almost purely destructive patent system. The patent system may have simply too small an effect to make the difference singlehandedly between a strong economy and a weak one. Or maybe it has a large effect, and our economy would be far stronger with a non-broken patent system. It's impossible to know, when all we have is this tangled-up complex system called the economy which somehow works pretty well.
Yes it does change that vector. I'm talking about the physical tokens which generate a new key every 30 seconds, like:

http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=1156

This way you need to know the password _and_ have the physical token in your hand to know the current key. On the downside, it's also a hassle to carry it around and use it (I have a couple of 'em for access to various supercomputers), so I wouldn't bother doing it for my own email, but if you're a public figure or otherwise sufficiently paranoid it might be worthwhile.
The NSA Teams Up with the Chinese Government to Limit Internet Anonymity
Amazon will launch Content Delivery Network web-service
AWS to offer a content delivery service
Amazon Web Services to Launch Content Delivery Network
Do I see Amazon doing to the web as a platform what Google did to the web as an application?
This is the sort of service that, if you're providing it for free, you really ought to just open source the code so anyone can set their own up.
If they're going to offer digital services on a large scale, they need this CDN anyway. Good idea to make it available as a service too.
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So there are two types of products. Products that are new, never-before-seen ideas, and products that are big twists or features added to existing products.

If you are building a new product, build the simplest thing possible to complete the use case. Don't worry about the fonts or ajax, don't worry about anything other than 'did we meet our core scenario -- did the user get what he/she wanted?' And then test this on the user -- does this help you?

If you are building a tweak or revision of some existing thing, go for the out-there features and see if those actually stick to users. If you are writing a new blogging platform, for example, it's expected that you'll be able to add, remove, and edit posts, and you'll have a great RSS feed. Users will assume you'll have that, and if you don't have it right now, you'll add it. In this case, build the parts that are truly novel. And then check this with your users -- is this something they want?

A good example is Zenter (YC startup acquired by google). They didn't build the "save" feature into their web presentation app until very late because it's assumed that you can save a presentation -- they instead focused on the cool stuff that people didn't expect -- collaborating on the web on your presentation, sharing it live, etc.

The bottom line is, build the minimum form of the unique thing first, and see if it sticks. Don't worry about being too simple -- your users will let you know if you don't meet their needs.
Bruce Schneier's one of the more prominent security writers around, and he covered that one over three years ago: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/the_curse_of_t...

Where I work, all webmail is blocked, so the IA department is grateful to Palin for the object lesson supporting the policy.
Final answer?
Probably the most obvious business move ever. They've had the framework for it, they just never labeled it as such.
why don't you use any parser generator (e.g. PLY) and write a grammar instead?
urnpike Executive Director Alan LeBovidge says the move is part of an effort to modernize its toll collecting system by eventually making it fully automated.

Thank god. Having 2 lanes out of 8 be automated means that everyone just has to wait in traffic until those lanes open up right at the tolls, thus killing any time savings.
I thought stack overflow was for programming problems. is it just another digg/reddit/HN with pictures after all?

Do we all have to migrate now, yet again?
The narrative of the compromise is pretty convoluted, but from what I understand, it was done more for lulz than for politics or ideology. The way I understand it, notification of the compromise went out to one of her contacts at the same time that the password was posted to /b/, so with all of Anonymous trying to log in at once, the account got shut down quickly, and was deleted shortly thereafter.
Learning Some Twisted Lessons
Monopolies create power and with power comes corruption

and debacle...
Target nonconsumption
People also try to look up the MX records for the domain to see if it has a valid mail server. This works 95% of the time--but breaks in certain cases leading to false positives.

As olavk said, just do basic validation (@ exists) and send off a confirmation e-mail. It works 100% of the time.
So this is what Tom does all day; I always wondered.
You encrypt them, but then how does anyone decrypt them? Do you have to pre-brief "normal" people about how to use PGP?

It would be nice if there was a service that you could actually trust that would store the information in an encrypted file but then allow the correct people to access it.
Underdoing - if you forget about all those details that people tell you that you must have, and instead make a really useful product, people will find ways around those details, and buy it.
Carleton student helps pin down largest known prime number
Sandbag text wrapping with Canvas
I'm not sure whether "Request for documents" and "Confidential ethics investigation" are really there, but even if they are, they may still be personal email.

"Request for documents" could be any kind of request for documents. Maybe it's the McCain campaign doing some vetting. Maybe it's some journalist requesting a copy of Trig's birth certificate. I actually think it's unlikely to be official business -- if you need documents from the governor's office you probably request them from a low-level official, not from the governor herself.

"Confidential: ethics investigation" could be personal too -- if she's under investigation and has hired a lawyer, for instance, then communications with that lawyer should be protected under client/lawyer privilege and shouldn't be a matter of public record.

I"m not sure exactly where the dividing line is between personal and official email for government officials -- I expect it's blurry, having been defined in a law somewhere but never tested in court.
Computers figuring out what words mean
I'm in a rush, so I don't have time to dissect this the way I want to. I will say, however that:

Please provide ... the name of a good civil defense attorney. Public accusations of the criminality of the unconvicted are legally actionable.

... is ill-informed, melodramatic, and weakens what's otherwise a strong post, albeit one whose sentiment I disagree with.

Sarah Palin's a public figure and, unless the person you're responding to is an officer of the court or a news agency of some kind, I don't think he's going to need a "civil defense" attorney for stating his opinion.
You shouldn´t use your Yahoo account for work. Period.

OTOH, if she uses Yahoo for her personal stuff only, then it´s just a common privacy violation and should be prosecuted as such.
There is absolutely zero credibility in the statement that they only intended Seinfeld to do these two ads. That being said, it is entirely reasonable to assume that they planned to shot a couple of ads, see how they went, and switch to Plan B if they were not achieving what MSFT wanted at this point.

That's just good business.
Oh yeah, hoo-fricking-ray for that brave 4chan script kiddie, heroicially giving up his own freedom so that the rest of us could see more of Sarah Palin's family photos.

More likely this particular asshole is just an idiot who didn't think through the consequences of his actions. He just thought it'd be funny.
"Joe-E is a subset of the Java programming language designed to support programming according to object-capability discipline." http://code.google.com/p/joe-e/
Australian company launches 3D Internet tool
backed with gravity hydro reservoirs ... is probably the most realistic ... in the short term.

There seems to be a relative concensus among engineers that Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) makes the most sense for grid energy storage in the longer term.

http://topics.energycentral.com/centers/gentech/view/detail....

In Europe, a group of researchers are studying a different [from standard CAES] approach. It eliminates fuel consumption altogether, so that the system functions as a pure storage facility. They call it Advanced Adiabatic CAES.

The idea for AACAES is that, in the charge cycle, hot compressed air is passed through a counter-flow heat exchanger before being sent to its storage cavern. The compressed air transfers its heat to a thermal storage fluid, which then enters a well-insulated storage tank of its own. In the discharge cycle, both flows are reversed, and the cool compressed air from the storage cavern recovers most of the heat it gave up before being stored. The now-hot compressed air exiting the heat exchanger drives an expander turbine to generate power.

If the heat exchanger and thermal storage work well, then efficiencies approaching those achieved with pumped hydroelectric storage should be possible.
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Greek TV Show is about a super social sister and her anti-social brother who are both dealing with living the Greek life in college. The series focuses on a group of college students in and out of the fraternity and sorority system at a campus.
IIRC the Massachusetts Turnpike is, mile-for-mile, the most expensive road in the state.

The Turnpike Authority was chartered as an independent agency that could float bonds for road construction, and once the bonds were paid off, ownership of the Turnpike would pass to the state government. So the Authority keeps itself perpetually in debt.
8 laptop bags that will speed you through airport security
Sarah Palin Hacked | TechJaws
Indeed, sexual selection among bowerbirds revolves around the female rating the possessions of the male:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowerbird#Mating_behaviour

In a striking example of what is known as the "transfer effect," bowerbird species that build the most elaborate bowers are dull in color and show little variation between male and female, whereas in bowerbird species with less elaborate bowers the males have bright plumage. Presumably, evolution has "transferred" the reproductive benefits of bright male plumage (common among polygamous birds) to elaborate bowers, allowing males to display their fitness by means other than physical characteristics that would appear to attract predation.

The female bowerbird is a material girl.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_Are_a_Girl%27s_Best_Fr...
For just a couple bucks a month you buy a virtual server you can install your IMAP server and do VPN or SSL (or both, just in case).
The story behind the Palin e-mail hacking
wonder what their speeds will be like compared to other CDNs
Is it one of those horrible Mighty Mouses? The scroll ball on those is truly dire. Try turning it upside down and rolling it round really hard on the scroll ball and it should free it up for a few weeks. (After I got fed up of doing that, I went out and got a track ball!)
It's almost funny reading some of the comments attempting to twist the story around the US position.

In the UK abortion is very nearly approaching a non-story. The only surprise for me was that google banned the advert to begin with.
Reasons to Use Inspiring Tools and Brands
Is there something wrong with toll collectors making an average of $70,000?
We are paying them $70,000 per year to do something that could be done for $7/hour (or automated completely).
Powerset Teams Up With Live Search
But then the only ones who can afford it are specifically those who don't need it...
Official Google Blog: The intelligent cloud
It's mind-killing work from both the monotony and the monoxide. And it could be done by cheap technology. The state is wasting its money; the collectors are wasting their human potential.
If I understand what you mean, you actually can balance tags around arbitrarily nested expressions if your regex parser supports recursion. The Ruby Way has an example of using recursive regexes to balance parentheses.
Google CEO says ready to move on Yahoo deal
Notice there's already this exact suggestion by fharper1961 rb that page. Only 2 upvotes so far...
Yep, I found that turning it upside down and rolling it around on a clean, coarse piece of paper works well too.
What would be great as well is a column width limitation, so that reading on the Iphone would be a less frustrating exercise of scrolling sideways on each line.
I'm sorry for the confusion. I'm not endorsing that people break into other people's accounts. What I am saying, is that I don't really think that the script kiddies that (I'm assuming) did this truly realize the extent of the deep guano that they've just gotten themselves into.

I won't feel bad that these people get punished for their crimes. I will feel bad if these people have charges of "terrorism" brought against them, which I suspect might happen.
Agreed! But let's go further: there should be only one lane where you can pay cash.

Ultimately, even the transponders and phone-signup are superfluous. At least in the SF Bay area, there are license plate cameras which handle any case where the transponder fails or cars blow through without paying -- it's then added to your bill or mailed as a ticket.

So most lanes just need to be: "I agree to be billed according to my car registration."

With the one lane for people who want to pay cash.
Twitturly for sale and YouNoodle thinks its worth $9.8M in 3 yrs time
Twitturly is a PR6 site and has an Alexa Rank of 59,377 (9/17/08).

If you believe in the YouNoodle Startup Valuation tool (not that you should), Twitturly will be worth $9,810,000 in three years. I am not sure about that number (likely not), but I am sure it will be worth far more in three years than it goes for here today.
From the auction description:

"If you believe in the YouNoodle Startup Valuation tool (not that you should), Twitturly will be worth $9,810,000 in three years. I am not sure about that number (likely not), but I am sure it will be worth far more in three years than it goes for here today."
Google Chrome Options Considered Dangerous
Virtualization: How far are we willing to take it?