skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand. Emacs blows vim away here. Of course, obviously both emacs and vim users are unaware of these symbolic modes. But Emacs modes are designed to have this idea of customizing the word, sentence, paragraph, and symbolic expression per language/syntax. And using the mark and region and operating on them with commands is exactly what's described in this vim article. That said, I didn't know that vim could do these things, either, because the default vim objects are lines, which are hideously crude and turned me off.
I was just about to say this ;)

> iPhone 4S is available today in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK
You are not entirely off-topic in that "by" still shows for comments where you can see the number of points.
I don't think that any of the three are willing to try to integrate billing directly instead of relying on Paypal, Visa, etc. It's a regulatory minefield between all the world governments, and the % that the payment processors take is probably very much worth the costs that would otherwise be taken from keeping such a system working.

I'm sure Apple and Google have explored it, but in the end, found that the current payment processors provide both a level of service(Visa's payment backend, as far as I can tell, has never suffered non-scheduled downtime) and help avoid all the regulatory pitfalls that it's worth the price.
lately i wonder if these "biz guy learning to code" posts are harmful. I'm not sure which is worse: a product owner who can't code, or a product owner who thinks he knows how to code.

"People who are not professional programmers often don’t realize how the difficulty of writing software increases with size. Many people who wrote 100-line programs in college imagine that they could write 1,000-line programs if they worked at it 10 times longer. Or even worse, they imagine they could write 10,000-line programs if they worked 100 times longer. It doesn’t work that way. Most people who can write a 100-line program could never finish a 10,000-line program no matter how long they worked on it. They would simply drown in complexity. One of the marks of a professional programmer is knowing how to organize software so that the complexity remains manageable as the size increases. Even among professionals there are large differences in ability. The programmers who can effectively manage 100,000-line projects are in a different league than those who can manage 10,000-line projects."[1]

I had a product owner once who had an EE & signals background. He thought since he could implement a complicated algorithm in matlab, he knew how to write software. Love the guy, one of my long-time mentors, but the project didn't go anywhere and part of the reason is some really bad early technical decisions.

[1] http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/09/19/writes-large-correc...
So, does Lodsys (actually they are just a shell for Intellectual Ventures) still have firepower left, or is this the end of the game?
There are already increasing reply delays based on nesting depth, which tends to be the real indicator of a fight.
the ruby world moved away from this for a few reasons.

1. I develop on a mac and deploy on different linux distros. It makes more sense for me to have a single system for managing ruby dependencies than to do it with 3 or 4 different systems that work differently and may not be fully compatible. Plus, with bundler and rubygems I'm not stuck on whatever version the distro decides to support.

2. If I install something like the mysql driver manually or with apt-get, and then a year from now I'm no longer around and some other developer checks out the code ... how do they know which versions of the libraries were used? With bundler all versions of all gems are checked into version control. This is a big win, and they can get a system with exactly the same versions of everything with a simple 'bundle install' after a clean checkout!

Edit:
3. Also, there are likely to be C based python libraries you want to use that aren't maintained by your distro. Now you're in a situation where you are mixing multiple dependency management systems which gets ugly fast.
Any workaround would help going forward but there's still the issue of past infringement. Invalidating the patents fixes both those problems.
I didn't forget to mention Android; which other mobile OS did anyone think I meant?

As for AWS, you hit the nail on the head: I think it's Amazon's little side business. I haven't seen any detailed figures about where their income comes from, but I'm guessing AWS is almost lost in the noise compared to what they make on retail directly and via their marketplace.

Moreover, I think cloud services is a much easier market for others to attack, and obviously some already do. In contrast, there isn't really any other global retail giant on the Web today and the barrier to becoming one is prohibitively high for just about anyone.

Finally, I'm not a great believer in everything-in-the-cloud anyway. Too many people have made grand claims about how security/reliability/whatever is improved if you use cloud services compared to doing things in house, how much money you can save, how much faster you can be up and running, yada yada. And yet, we've seen numerous major outages now from even the big players, and plenty more complaints about pricing, lack of flexibility, etc. on top of those.

Basically, the cloud services emperor might not be naked, but he's close to indecent. My money is on the company that utterly dominates on-line retail, and if its internal services architecture brings in a little on the side as well, great.
Fred Wilson Explains Why Angels Are About To Get A Rude Awakening
Technology is a means to an end. Once you can reach the end with the tech that you have there is no need to upgrade any further.

Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do.

Most of us could get through the day just fine on a 486/33 if we had to. In fact, we'd probably write better software if we did.
I'd consider it. But what would be the point? Old pages are viewed mostly by crawlers.
i'm not sure why you would think that Microsoft is backing them.
Thanks for all the suggestions. In terms of content, that is exactly what I'm going for with the majority of my site - to be an objective resource for people looking for information on cards. The industry has been plagued with a lot of backroom dealing and unethical partnerships, so being an unbiased source has been one of my strongest selling points.

I've used a few market research services to randomly survey visitors to my site. The content itself was always gotten exceedingly positive marks from collectors, but non-collectors have given it mixed marks. That seems to substantiate the feedback I've also gotten on some Webmaster forums. The vast majority of collectors and people in the sports collectibles industry (and to a lesser extent people in the mainstream sports industry) regard my content as high quality and those outside of it give more of a mixed response.

What did you mean by http://www.cardboardconnection.com/2011-topps-tier-one-baseb... being an empty page though? Did it not show up correctly for you?
Glad at least one person reads the page in it's entirety ;) But I'm also glad the thread could fuel some healthy debate.
"A technician in the NYPD's forensics lab has been suspended for allegedly falsifying drug-test results, throwing into question "maybe thousands" of criminal cases -- and prompting a panicked meeting yesterday between cops and the city district attorneys."

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/queens/lab_tech_wQIOPAcKY...
> The BBC costs more to run than the Royal Navy.

I'd think it a sign of societal wellbeing that we spend more on ensuring that we have a source of quality journalism than we do on waging war.
Exactly. ICS is going to be a major "polish" release for Android. I'm looking forward to next week's announcement.
If one person (even the author) learns one thing from any of those beginners guides, then it was worth it.
what i do is to serve user facing php files as .html and keep backend includes as .php

then just block apache to serve anything .php

this usually get me covered of most backdoors bugs in pear and such. ...not that i do that because of this reason. it was first only for organizing the code tree.
x and xxx are two different segments of the porn industry. I guess porn hackers (yeah, I coined that expression) will be mad if you mix them up.

I'm not sure if I am being ironic, relevant, or trying to be funny.
"You stay up until 3am... spend a day in zombie mode with limited productivity or you start working much later."

Another option is to just wake up much later: my office is dead until 2pm, and the "key players" often don't wake up until 6pm.
As long as it can help beat the content providers more quickly into their only ultimately tenable position (all content available online, from one service or another), I'm all for it.

To be honest, I don't even care about price that much at this point in history. The fact that there are lots of movies and shows (Game of Thrones, anyone?) that are not digitally available at all is absurd.

Having more competing VOD services negotiating with providers can only make things better.
pg(space) works most of the time, since there're not many words that ends on "pg" and not a lot of users I suppose.

EDIT: Well.. unless it's an "Ask PG" :-)
Today (October 17, 2011), it went down. And, of course many will see Jobs gone as a problem, as well as iPhone 4S being somewhat of a bust. Whenever they release iPhone 5 and their killer settop media/gaming box, their stock may go up. But, for the most part the market is currently volatile and people are less in the mood to spend on higher cost products, so I would bet on a downward trend. Who knows though. I would not buy now.
After the addition of the search feature in the footer, I find myself looking for old discussions of all kinds of tech.
Introducing Anyblabla (youtube roulette)
When I say the dock I mean the big bar down the left hand side.
> However, it turns out that [an on-disk tree] is a major performance problem when reading settings

To you it's a "major performance problem". To me, it's how I was able to unfuck my panel when I accidentally deleted the NetworkManager applet from it, because it was possible for me to see what was different in a freshly-created (!!) account.
> It’s the WiFi, no cellular to worry about

A palpable hit. Gibson was talking about the tablet, but I suspect there may be quite a few (Wi-Fi enabled) phones out there without data plans.
Experiment: Chocolate subscription service
Handpicked chocolate sweets delivered every month.
Awesome cstross - thanks for taking time to answer the question - I like the idea behind the MacBook Air with the 480 GB upgrade and may have to look into that myself. I just got an iPhone 4S and it surprises me how close it feels to being eligible to be my only computing device - in a few years I can imagine sitting down next to my computer and just having the Apple Wireless Thunderbolt display connect to it and have my entire computer ready to go (I'd go through the trouble of plugging in a cable if necessary :)

This line really caught my eye: "(because when I write myself into a corner and need to refactor the deep structure of a book, Scrivener makes life a lot easier)" I've heard of Scrivener being used by writers for this purpose, but do you think it would work well for programmers? I'm struggling right now like I've written myself into a corner and notes/diagrams aren't really helping as much as I'd like.
The root, to me, is corporate money and influence in Washington to such a degree that it effectively shuts out democracy.

I see another layer to the onion. Inside of your problem is a deeper one, which is that so much power is concentrated in such a small place.

While we might wish for our government officials to be better, at the end of the day they're people just like us. In giving them so much power, we're also expect them to exhibit a super-human degree of self control. When the possible rewards to them for "selling out" are so high; when any one act of selling out may not have much impact; and when in many cases, the morality is fuzzy and it's not clear that what they're doing is selling out at all; I think it's too much to expect that they'll keep to the straight-and-narrow.

It seems to me that these cries about "too much corporate money" contain an unspoken assumption of a need for greater governmental oversight. But if you see my point about the danger of the concentration of power in Washington, then it should be obvious that vesting the government with greater oversight powers is just adding fuel to the fire.
GDC online shifted from games to monetization since the success of freemium
Note that geothermal energy is not - in general - considered a renewable energy. The source will loose energy over time.

That is not a problem for Iceland of course, since strong volcanic activity makes sources very reliable. If it's not causing earthquakes.
Some of us need a language to hold our hand. Some of us don't. Some of us enjoy the freedom of coding the way we want to code, without a language shoving some perceived notion of correctness down our throat.

> Except that building a "properly written PHP app" is way harder than in almost every other language in widespread use.

This makes no sense. PHP doesn't force you to do things the right way, but it doesn't force you to do things the wrong way either. It just doesn't force you either way.

Those of us who know what we're doing can make intelligent decisions ... and those of us who can't, shouldn't be writing in PHP.
It also decreases the level of engagement, readability of a thread, and because weighting of comments is now invisible there is no reason to upvote or downvote anything, or read any particular comment over another. It's all just one big blob of text that I have to manually sift through. Might as well just remove the arrows because they serve no purpose now.
I like LiveValidation http://livevalidation.com/
Of course, Google also literally try to pay people to use their search, to the tune of many millions in Mozilla's bank account.

Still, I think Google's main risk with search is that they have become victims of their own success: when you dominate the market as heavily as they have done for several years, everyone wants to be high up in your rankings, and people are constantly finding new ways to game the system. Even with all they've done about pseudo-legitimate but probably unwelcome sites like content farms and shopping comparison services, there has definitely been an increase for the past year or two in the frequency with which I try to look something up on Google and give up because what they're giving me back is completely unhelpful.

When you're stagnating like that, keeping up in the race against SEO blackhats but not really pulling away from them, the market is ripe for disruption by someone who does things in a different and (to users) more helpful way, just as Google basically wiped out everyone else with PageRank and the related ideas a few years ago. I'm not disputing that Google are still dominant today and no-one else is really giving them serious competition right now, but as I said before, I think that's more by luck than judgement on Google's part.
I worked in a music shop during high school and pulled apart a few tubas worth at least that. We had a similar magnet tool, but it didn't always work perfectly, and could leave scars in the metal if you weren't careful. His tool might be better, or he might have gotten lucky.

We certainly didn't try to unroll them, however, and I let my mentor solder them back together.
creepy

I'll certainly never use a paypal account to log in to some arbitrary website, and I'll never offer it as an option for my own users.

ESPECIALLY after reading all the data they're bragging about sharing.
>Those two things are one in the same.

Fair point.
Shameless iOS promotion.
The first thing I thought was Venereal Disease I/O.
In cases like that you may still be figuring out the business model. Unless you are selling to companies that maintain lots of websites, that may not really be a subscription service but rather more like a "rental."
(disclaimer - founder of Puppet)

Just to be clear, this has always been a core goal with Puppet - very low dependencies to make it easy to adopt.

There are some real downsides - we have to do a lot more coding, and it can be tough to get all of the hot newness - but we think the users benefit from a much simpler solution that's much easier to support.
For what it's worth, I can't remember what caused me to start reading your books, but it probably was your awards.
Zetalisp didn't store code in binary blobs. There's a reason Smalltalk, Zope, and Interlisp are or were tiny-minority platforms.
Votes still help move a comment above or below its siblings.
Wow. This is much more what I'd expect from a scifi writer, or really anyone who uses a computer all day professionally.

Have you considered Microsoft Office 2011 for office documents? I agree about the ribbon, but it is better than the free alternatives.

Why not upgrade to the 27" or a dell u3011 now, and mba11 later?

Also, backups?
(disclaimer - founder of Puppet)

We at Puppet Labs have always focused on building tools that anyone can use, not just the best hackers in the world. We've got some of the best sysadmins working with us, but we punish them by making them write software that even people who aren't the best sysadmins can use.

So yeah, we get a ton of enterprise adoption as a result, but we've also got a ton of web companies using Puppet. It's true that in the Rails web startup, we're not always the number 1 choice, though. :)
"every PHP app"??

What about apps that don't limit themself to just index.php?

I never understood this obsession with having everything flow through index.php. Apache already has a method to dispatch requests to the proper controller AKA file. Why rewrite it again?

This is fictional security. If someone can upload a file, they can also upload index.php (and from my experience cleaning up a few hacks, that is exactly what they do).

And if you (correctly) set it so they can't write to the top level directory, what you really should do is remove the php handler from the directories they can write to.
Statistics if nothing else. Maybe more people would look at old pages given the incentive. Maybe someone will come up with a "best of hacker news" website, with the highly rated or popular stories and a selection of the most prominent comments.

Given the demographics, I'm sure the ratings will be used by someone for something. :)
Hey, I'm still using an old version of GNOME; would you be willing to post the output of

gsettings list-recursively | wc
gsettings list-recursively | gzip -9c | wc -c

to help us understand the issues?
Also, most modern software/hardware is not particularly exciting from a usefulness point of view. It is mostly the same stuff that has been around for ages in a slightly smaller package with a new coat of paint.
From one of the linked papers, by Mike Cole, the guy who seems to be cited the most:

>> My argument is not that capitalism cannot in theory be made more democratic or humane.

This is an incredibly revealing statement.

I'm a big fan of Steve Keen, an Australian economist who won some award for predicting the GFC (http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/). He's a huge critic of mainstream neo-liberal economists, claiming they use bad mathematics to prove theorems that don't work in theory (once you correct the mathematical errors) or practice (if you look at the data). He also has a chapter in his book on why Marx was wrong, but I'm not up to it yet.

While agree with some of the points of Transmodernism, it seems to be more of a destination than a way of travelling. The only concrete methodology seems to be a deep suspicion against The Man (or neo-liberal agenda, as it's called now).

The IMF, World Bank, Federal Reserve, and so on aren't bad because they want to be. They are bad because they are following theoretically and empirically flawed theories. They aren't propped up by governments because doing so helps keep the elite in power, governments actually believe that there's no real alternative. The problem is, academic economists (and worse, government onces) like to be safe and conservative. Non-mainstream economists are simply frozen out of the dialogue, like positivists are in post-modern academic societies. Which is quite a problem, when economists are dealing with billions of dollars, and millions of lives.
I really hope someone has set him up with an offsite automatic backup system, plus maybe some versioned local storage.
I am trying to do the same thing as this guy. I have and iPhone 4 and got a Nexus S (on the cheap!) to try out Android.

Some Good things:
- Widgets are better than I thought.

- The standard key board with the spelling suggests is better than the iOS keyboard.

- Pending notifications show up in the notification bar.

- Having the standard set of buttons is a good idea.

- The scrolling background as you swipe between screens is a nice touch.

- Better integration with Google services.

- More useful navigation & location software out of the box. Maps, Navigation, Places.

But I find that it is really quite hard to be really objective. All the features they get right are poisoned by their poor UI.

- Icons and widgets don't rearrange themselves when you move them.

- Inconsistent use of the standard 4 buttons. Google themselves don't use them consistently. Their functionality is duplicated all over with software buttons.

- The stock camera app is really kinda ugly. There was no after thought at all.

- All the animations just suck and there is lag everywhere.

- On the Nexus S, they squished up the 4 standard buttons for some reason. The Home icons looks more like an up arrow than a house. They seriously did not think to redo the buttons?

- Outdoors the 4 standard buttons are quite dim. You can hardly see them. Why is this not connected to the light sensor?

iOS really spoils you. It is missing features I would like, but what is there is quite polished. I find that this really colours my view. [Edited for formatting]
I think the major problem is PHP's 'noob friendliness'. To achieve that it goes out of its way to mitigate and recover from bad code and thus doesn't have a decent set of well known good practices to code against.

The huge vulnerability that opens up is that of data validation, and you can tighten up your server config all you want, but it won't mean shit without any of that.

Of course, since PHP is such a comparatively simple language, everyone thinks they're an expert once they know how to open a mysql connection (through the now deprecated bindings, of course) and code a simple blog script with basic CRUD functionality.

As a result, there's a 'simple/complicated' dichotomy when it comes to online documentation and tutorials, where the beginner developer ignores the complicated (and typically well thought-out) stuff, and goes for what they can easily copy and paste or get their head around.

Typically none of that code has any sort of validation or sanitisation. Half of it might go on about `magic_quotes_gpc` and `mysql_real_escape_string` and other PHP4-tastic curios, and the rest won't even mention that because checking user input is seemingly only related to db communication.

I feel pretty strongly about it because I've seen people post code snippets for PHP, trying to be helpful, but the code is dangerous. They serve better as examples of exactly what you shouldn't do.

And the one thing PHP beginners (and intermediates) need is better, simpler explanations of responsible coding practices, and how it isn't hard to do at all (it's only tedious); because the sooner they know, the better.

I should write a book or something.
Not a blog per se but I do check it most weekdays: http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=week
I see what you're getting at but in this case the author is clearly taking a very humble approach.