skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My Soapbox Advice to the OWS Movement and then some
FTA: "Crazy ? Maybe, maybe not. What happened to the price of homes when the mortgage loan bubble popped ? They plummeted. If the size of student loans are capped at a low level, you know what will happen to the price of going to a college or university ? It will plummet. Colleges and universities will have to completely rethink what they are, what purpose they serve and who their customers will be. Will some go out of business ? Absolutely. That is real world. Will the quality of education suffer ? Given that TAs will still work for cheap, I doubt it.

Now some might argue that limiting student loans will limit the ability of lower income students to go to better schools. I say nonsense on two fronts. The only thing that allowing students to graduate with 50k , 80k or even more debt does is assure they will stay low income for a long, long time after they graduate ! The 2nd improvement will be that smart students will find the schools that adapt to the new rules and offer the best education they can afford. Just as they do now, but without loading up on debt.

The beauty of capitalism is that people like me will figure out new and better ways to create and operate for profit universities that educate as well or better as today’s state institutions, AND I have no doubt that the state colleges and universities will figure out how to adapt to the new world of limited student loans as well.

Finally, the impact on the overall economy will be ENORMOUS. There is more student loan debt than credit card debt outstanding today. By relieving this burden at graduation, students will be able to participate in the economy"

http://blogmaverick.com/2011/10/14/my-soapbox-advice-to-the-ows-movement-and-then-some/
Isn't "secure PHP" an oxymoron?
"Every time I open my editor, I’m reminded that I can’t just “jump in for a few minutes” the way I can with my usual work – either because coding isn’t like that, or because I’m not good enough yet."

That is the best reason for a manager to learn to code that I have ever heard. Assuming he eventually realizes that it really is because "coding isn't like that."
A lawyer friend once described to me (but did not advise me) that a large part of contract disputes is figuring out what the original intent was.

If that's true, is there any benefit practically speaking to having a simple e-mail that records the main points of agreement?

It's perhaps not legally ironclad, but could provide evidence of the intent of both parties.

I think there's a mental hurdle of going to the lawyer versus just exchanging a few emails.
I guess it is not surprising anymore, but I couldn't help wondering about Microsoft being left out of consideration. Would love to here thoughts about how, and if, MS will compete among these companies.
And if the cost of that micromanagement is 10x the value derived from it?

Cut your nose to spite your face much?
No doubt. I wonder if they stopped giving away shwag worth more than the ticket/travel cost if that would limit the crowds. Or do ticketing on a lottery system. (What bad consequences would that have; trying to game or hack it?)
I find it very interesting that over 400 people expressed interest in writing, but only 13 even made it to the contract signing stage. So only 3% of all interest materialized. And at the end of it all only 1/400 made it to the publishable stage.

As another comment mentioned, the amount of time the editor had probably made some difference. But, I still think it is interesting. It's common sense that people like to back out once actual work materializes, but 3% is really low.
It's a question of benefits vs. costs. Yeah, retailers could eliminate shoplifting if they really wanted to. But, to do so, they'd have to turn their stores into prisons, with full cavity searches at the exits. This is obviously bad for business, so most retailers accept a certain level of shoplifting and aggressively prosecute the shoplifters they do catch.

The problem is that with government, there is no mechanism for assessing whether the costs of a regulation are outweighed by its benefits. What good does banning biscuits at company meetings do? Yes, you've saved 200 thousand odd pounds sterling, but what has it cost you?

More importantly, what's the accumulated costs of all of these little regulations. Individually, they don't sound like much, but if you get enough of them, they really start to drag on productivity. What's worse, the impact of these regulations tends to be non-linear. Something as little as "no more free pop at all hands meetings" can lead to an exodus of talent if it happens to be the last straw, as it were.

EDIT: Joel Spolsky had a very nice column on this, but I can't find it at the moment.
Ask HN: How to escape from technologic addiction?
I don't know if many of you share this problem, but this sometimes I feel addicted to technology, and I believe this hinders the full “potential” for my life.

I’ve always been surrounded by technology in a higher-than-average way. For example, I used to sit on the lap of my older brother when I was 3 to learn about computers!

However, I feel that there are serious drawbacks to this knowledge: technology has become a source of distraction and time drag. I spent several (2~3) hours a day reading articles and comments from HN -- all very relevant and well written, but nevertheless time goes by before I notice it.

Meanwhile, I don’t actively work on what I want to. I’ve given up on several projects because the day seem so short and there is multitude of interesting things to see on the web.

I am on the verge of not finishing a flying four-engine helicopter because I just can’t concentrate and take the time to code the robot. Also, even though I just signed up for Stanford’s online AI class, I’m already behind on the lessons because I don’t take the time to see the lectures.

I realized that all of this time that seems to lack is used up by me reading articles and random interesting things, instead of working to completion and to ship things (as I’ve read over and over).

I’d love some advice on how to fix this situation! Does anyone also feel this way? Is it a normal part of the process of growing and acquiring more knowledge?

I've found some good articles here on HN about the theme (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1980770 and PG's essay http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549363), but none of them seems to address the issue directly.

Thanks!

tl;dr: Has internet addiction ever been a problem for you? If so, what steps did you take to fix it?
It would also be cool if there was some documentation on how you might use validate.js in concert with server-side validations.
I wonder if I am just bitter, but it feels to me like the problem is not in the availability of software. Even this page on HN summarizes many open source or well-thought-out LMS packages.

There seems to be some kind of bad intersection between bureaucracy and apathy (each individual institution scoring higher or one or the other, usually).

Alternatively, the less bile-filled version says that it is closer to the old adage: "no one got fired for buying IBM." =~ s/IBM/BlackBoard/.
> the general answer is "don't change the database
> structure of a database that's serving live traffic:
> You'll never enumerate all the things that could
> possibly go wrong."

And what if you need to? Even adding an index on a large table can slow down the things tremendously. Let alone adding/deleting columns with indexes.

"Don't do it" is not really an answer.

> Or put the DB in read-only mode and still mostly
> manage to serve pages

Of yeah, let's put our credit card processing app in the read-only mode during the day. What can possibly go wrong, just those silly 503s.
NodeUp 5 Podcast: Node 0.6, Bouncy, Node vs RoR and more
I think that makes it less testable but would probably work, it's probably a good stop gap as long as you don't want to test more than one "feature" at a time.

Gating would probably work better in the long term as you get more devs and users, and need to do things like A/B/C testing.
IIRC in recent years they said there would be no swag but there was. So that probably won't work.
Not sure what you mean by Marshal having implementation details in the bitstream, it doesn't. Marshal has been reimplemented in many different implementations just fine.

As for why not JSON, because there is no JSON parser as part of the standard library and rubygems needs to be extremely careful about what dependencies it has.
So as a data point:

I found 1.2 remarkably painful. Here's why: my math sucks, and I didn't have basic algebra internalized (I flunked algebra in high school and so while I can reason my way through a system of equations, I couldn't do it instantly).

On top of that, I was way overthinking the problems. The sense I got of the 1.2 problems is that they're largely refresher stuff; that is, when given a system of 2 equations in 2 variables, they just want you to go ahead and solve it, not graph it in row and column view.

I grabbed an algebra cheat sheet and breezed through it once I realized that.

1.3 went much faster for me; it was clear what the "new" material was, and Gaussian elimination is straightforward. This was material I really just wanted to go ahead and code up in Ruby (I wound up using a spreadsheet instead).

Incidentally, I've found spreadsheets extremely useful for these early exercises.

I'm hoping to be done with 1.4 tomorrow night.

By far the biggest issue I'm having is finding time to spend on this, so I'm really only a couple (literally) hours into this so far.
Hint: This isn't about math or logic where A + B certainly does equal A - (-B).

It's about storing negative values in unsigned data types in C.
There is a better way. It's to stop deleting and start deprecating. Write your code in a backwards compatible way. If your storage engine, whatever it is, can't handle it then switch storage engines.

The author makes some amazing points that I'm surprised intelligent people are missing.

Let me give an example. We are currently migrating from storing blobs of data in Voldemort (a key/value store) to storing them in S3. They should have never been in there in the first place but whatever. We're going to do it with "zero" migration time. In fact we're already doing it.

- Set up a job that copies existing data in Voldemort to S3.

- Deploy a minor release of our code that multiplexes the current writes to both Voldemort and S3.

- Continue migrating existing data

- When existing data is finished migrating, deploy a new release that forces all traffic to S3 instead of Voldemort.

- Profit

People need to learn to do things like dark launching and feature flags. Dark launching let's you exercise new code paths with no impact to the user. Feature flags give you the ability to enable to features to some or all of your users. Feature flags are awesome ways to A/B test as well.

People need to stop doing stupid shit like redefining what some property means mid-release and instead define NEW properties and deprecate old ones in subsequent releases.

Same goes for schema changes. If some part of your code base cannot tolerate an additional column that it doesn't need, that's a bug.

You can also adopt some configuration management that allows you to provision duplicates of the components you're deploying so you can swap back and forth between them in the case where you might have a breaking release. That's what we do and it's one of the upsides of using EC2.

All of this requires discipline and dedication but the benefit is so worth it. You have to stay on top of dependencies. You can't let bitrot take hold by going 4 major revisions without upgrading some package. We did and it bit us in the ass.

This is why we adopted the swinging strategy of duplicating our entire stack (takes about 30 minutes depending on Amazon allocation latency) on major upgrades.
Well, I guess we just disagree on the operator overloading.. I agree that it's fundamentally the same in one sense, but in another sense it's much more likely to sneak up on you than method overloading, especially if you're in an environment that doesn't allow monkey-patching. It's always fairly obvious which version of collection.add() you're invoking, and can be much less obvious which version of '+' you're invoking. IMO you need a much bigger productivity win to justify operator overloading, and aside from numerics, it's usually not there.
I guess "PIP" fits into this category. It's been in beta about as long as OpenID has been a term. I used it for a several years before finally giving in an using my Google Account for everything.

https://pip.verisignlabs.com/

EDIT: Oh.. it's now Symantec, and they will no doubt try and sell you their other products :( ... well at least it used to just be an identity provider.
This stuff is nuts. I really need to get deeper in to vim.
One workable approach, which I use, is to not be notable.
Online Payments made easy - Interview with PaySimple CEO
I am hoping they do pre-registration again for developers and those who have attended in the past.
Armorize Partners With Symantec to Provide Anti-Malvertising Technology
Gov't Mediated 6 Strike ISP Plan - Administration & Industry Cozy, Not Consumers
FYI, this is pretty easy in a country that has boiling hot water and steam right below the surface.

There are a lot of buildings in Iceland that run on renewable energy, this isn't anything new or exciting.
Thank you stating the truth. I could not agree more.
Here are the links for the submissions mentioned:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1980770
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549363
That just feels like Symantec trying to sell me more garbage though
#Jobs : Social Media Marketing Manager at HBO (New York, NY)
Facebook for surfers i.e. Secondsea……..
I've seen several projects named "validate.js". May I suggest coming up with a different name to let devs know which of the several libraries by that name they're working with? ("valid8.js" is already used too)
Don't forget that the Google ecosystem is not just the "@gmail.com" or "@googlemail.com" domains. There are tons of deployments of Google Apps for Domains, wherein one authenticates using the DNS domain[1] of the hosted system, not via the "traditional" Google credentials.

I could be misunderstanding your concern, however, since the vanilla Apps for Domains does store the credentials in a Google controlled machine, AFAIK. I cannot speak to whether there are any customizable authentication options available with Apps for Domains.

1 = and thus creates a new namespace for usernames
I would have expected a harangue by Dick regarding how thoroughly the movie trashed the setting and premise of the book. This only increases my respect for him.
A refreshing about-face from where I thought he was going to go with it.

I don't see people out protesting Apple or Google. I think people see those companies as offering opportunity and reward. In fact, I'll go this far:

Reward = Work * Opportunity;

As productivity continues to rise (as measured by output / wealth generated from labor), reward drops. I think opportunity has dwindled, siphoned off as reducing expenses, to make short term gain.

At least, that's my theory.
Nice work Adrian. <queries youtube insult generator for "adrian holovaty">

You did not have a childhood and/or think Justin Bieber is cool. #

You are goombas #

You thought the dislike button was a chat bubble where you could post a comment on the video. #

You belive in tomorrow's dreams. thats pretty gay if you ask me..:P great job man, i love your work, i have listened to your work for a long time, and im a huge fan: i have recorded a song, listen to it and say what u think about it. its pretty old, im just waiting to get some sort of recording software to record some of my other songs:) cya! //Frode @Norskpsycho #

You don't believe in daydreams #

You obviously wish you could jam like this dude - seriously, I don't know how anyone can dislike this vid. Top stuff, Adrian, you're a genius, man! :o) #

You are called Jack.. #
Android tablet launched by Fly Mobile…..
Introduction to Constraint Programming (in Haskell)
AmEx Leads $12 Million Round In Clickable
Inline, instant validation would make this very useful as a compliment to full server-side validation. I agree that client-side validation can significantly improve the ux for forms.
AFAIK, Ruby's Marshal only calls internal stuff like allocate and special Marshal methods (e.g. marshal_dump and marshal_load) on classes in the Marshal data. It doesn't even actually use new or initialize to create instances, and it doesn't go through methods to set up the object. So unless you have a class that overrides Marshal hooks or Ruby internals in an insecure way, it shouldn't allow arbitrary code execution (barring buffer overflows and the like that could allow arbitrary code execution from any function).

Basically, I'm not convinced Marshal is necessarily any more risky than something like YAML would be, even though it feels scarier. But I haven't done an extensive audit or anything — I just looked over the Marshal code a while back because I was curious what it was doing.
dadgum has been mentioned a few times in this thread .. could someone please explain why that is a good blog, maybe a link to an article that is insightful?
Equifax couldn't care less what the public thinks about them. They are frequently featured on sites like ripoffreport.com They target computer illiterates by offering them a free credit report. Not long after they get the free report, these people notice that they are being charged monthly fees for services that they didn't even know they signed up for. While not technically illegal, it is highly unethical and I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of their income came from scamming people who don't know better.

It can be argued that the people getting scammed are partly to blame because they didn't read the fine print. I agree to an extent but I also believe that if a business wants to succeed, they should do so on honest terms.
It isn't in there yet, but that is definitely something I wanted to add.
Education costs should be half of what it used to be before the internet.
Try $800/hour. Or maybe even higher. Grade A lawyers are in that realm, I know people who charge that much, and have founder friends who have lawyers that charge that much.

edit: which is why contingency is so important here.
ITC judge rules against HTC's first complaint against Apple
I've looked into that, but the last update was 5 years ago. I realize it's a patch, so it doesn't necessarily correspond to a particular release, but is it up to date for modern PHP installs?
Sorry for taking it seriously :) I was looking for something on the web to help me explain some Java homework to a friend and your tool was literally the best one I could find! Great job, IMHO.
Firefox’s “funny” css3 image scaling quirk
http://planetsix.perl.org/ -- Perl 6
http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/ -- Perl 5
Ignores the #1 reason I use chose the female voice for most electronics. It sounds better and is more clearly understood coming out of under powered speakers at low volume.
It should be noted that "biscuit" is one of those words that has somewhat different meaning in the UK and the US. What they call a biscuit in the UK would be called a cookie in the US. (A biscuit in the US is a small leavened bread, similar to a scone).
pretty cool... i can see this being used as a pretty slick "try before you buy" feature for an online furniture/home goods store.
I find it easiest to do a binary transition from "on the computer", which is full of frenzied multitasking, snippets of articles, and no attention span; all the way to "off the computer", where I'm taking a walk thinking about stuff, or sitting at a diner or coffee shop jotting down ideas on a piece of paper (not on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone!).

It's trickier to figure out what to do about on-computer productivity, for those of us whose productivity often involves actually using a computer as well. I've resorted to actually writing out code on paper! Perhaps some sort of non-multitasking environment with a full-screen code editor would be a solution also, though.
middle-of-the day seamless deployments from day one

From my experience, it's easier to start there from day one than to try to get there after years of dysfunctional deployment processes.
Its ok that they require verification through official documents but PayPal is known for locking people out of their accounts even after they have submitted these verification proofs. The Resolution Center is a farce. I have uploaded many different documents, but it keeps showing me the same verification problem. This has gone on for over an year now. PayPal is not important to me and so I can just ignore this problem. I don't even the worst bank here, in India, keeping people out of their accounts in such a way.
And this is exactly why I love the fact that my two bosses (direct manager and department VP) write code on a daily basis (well, in the case of the VP, it's probably weekly at this point, but he's been in the trenches long enough).
Turn Investors On: Speak Their Language
This'll be my third I/O so I hope the same. But in any case I hope they don't use the same third party vendor who handled registration last year.

That was not fun for some colleagues of mine who spent the better part of an hour trying to get the registration site to generate actual pages instead of ColdFusion error messages.
It happens all the time. The most prominent case was/is American Express mining spending patterns to characterize users into various categories. Here's a slightly dated NYT article on the issue:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/your-money/credit-and-debi...
I'm not sure where you're looking, but there are up-to-date patches at:

http://hardened-php.org/suhosin/download.html
When written properly, a PHP app is probably just as secure as one written in any other language.
Never had a dragon, but I was very fond of my "teapotahedron"
I try to read from FolkLore.ORg as often as I can - it's not a daily read and there's not much new stuff, but it's off the beaten path and the old stories of Bill and Steve and Woz are pure win.
Come on, this is a play on "texts from last night" (representative quote: "I drank entirely too much. My skin hurts to wear"). It's not life advice.
Those examples aren't awful, actually. A one-liner commit log is the ideal, not a huge paragraph of description (if that's really needed, it should be in the comments, not the metadata). Maybe "I hate IE because I can't use X" would be better, and "stopped the thing from doing XYZ" would add more info.

But I'd fight against the assumption that clarity is the same as verbosity. It's usually the reverse. And profanity is just another way to waste your S/N budget (and frankly it's an easier one to filter than a bunch of needless explanation).

Most of the time when I'm seriously reading commit logs, I'm doing some kind of regression hunting. There, I want to scan through the list for things that look like they might be related. Extra text hurts this task pretty badly.
If this happened, we would have many people claiming that many universities were discriminating against the poor, because their loans wouldn't cover tuition.
I'm not sure where you see that - the latest patch is available for 5.3.7 at http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/download.html

It's not up to date with 5.3.8 or 5.4 - but they are always slightly behind - but not 5 years behind.

Edit: Now I see that their news page is really out of date - my bad.