skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Shipley has missed the point of OS X sandboxing.

He's right that sandboxes won't directly prevent malware. But that's not why users want sandboxes. Sandboxes mitigate accidental vulnerabilities. Virtually every security vulnerability you've ever heard about has been an accident.

Sandboxes aren't a new idea (the sandbox code didn't even originate at Apple). The idea goes back to the '70s; an obvious and more recent example is the Java applet sandbox, and a somewhat more successful instance is Daniel Bernstein's qmail security architecture (qmail has one of th best security track records of any major software package).

It's best to think of sandboxes not as a preventer of malice, but as one incremental form of forced developer competence: all developers are being asked to at least consider what privileges their applications need (most developers do not do this today), so that they can voluntarily renounce capabilities that will be turned against them when someone finds a heap overflow in their code later on. The technology and policy Apple is working with here will do a fine job of that.

Also, no matter what Bertrand Serlet said, sandboxes don't need to cover "as many instructions as are in the human brain". Because of its Mach / Unix underpinnings, sandboxes have a relatively simple user/kernel interface they actually need to deal with. There are just a few hundred system calls, many of them already privileged.
Come ON guys: It looks like you are missing it! It looks like you could go live, start getting okay revenue, 'bootstrapping', and doing 'organic' growth NOW.

Notice something really special about your application and your users: You are LOCAL, geographically LOCAL.

So, if you want to get users in, say, Boston, then it's essentially irrelevant what you are doing in San Francisco, New York City, Miami, etc.

Sooooooo, to get started with only a small, tiny, cheap server farm, get started in just ONE city.

When you have some good 'traction' and/or revenue from that one city, expand your server farm, etc. to another city, say, an adjacent city.

Then grow across the country and world this way.

Besides, your ad revenue will be similarly local.

So, you don't have to bite off the whole country in one bite to be successful and, instead, can do well one city at a time.

Also, this fact gives you a 'geographical barrier to entry' since when you are in Boston you have no competition from a company in San Francisco or Miami.
I don't know of anything better that I can think of. I also don't necessarily think a replacement is needed. Long after floppies are consigned to myth & legend, the icon can live on. I see road signs featuring steam trains but I've never seen a steam train, I see rotary phone images and I have only hazy memories of using one in the 80's. The purpose becomes its meaning and its origins are pretty irrelevant.
I get the benefits of having identical environments as production (and that's what I aim for, at least, with our staging server) but to be honest, I like having a small amount of diversity across our development servers. It's the small differences that have helped us to work out that bizarre bug (turns out, it was actually a problem specific to a particular version of PHP) or to find those small assumptions about the environment (eg. assumed file paths and so on).

The latter aren't that much of an issue, but I find that being able to deal path changes, for example, makes the code that little bit more flexible, making it a little easier to make changes to the production environments going forward with less issue.
That looks interesting. I'll give it a look.
Yeah, that's exactly what I meant by it.
It's probably not reasonably to compare a hugely popular general purpose operating system to a research prototype designed specifically to demonstrate an extreme form of application segregation.

Similar logic would allow the "we - implemented - the - kernel - in - a - type - safe - runtime - so - we - don't - even - need - to - switch - out - of - ring - zero" crowd to say Qubes was inadequate.
I think the argument whether a copy is theft is irrelevant. In my view, hacking into a bank's database and adding a few thousand dollars to your bank balance would be theft as well even if you didn't modify any other accounts or data. The point is that you steal money from the copyright owners when you copy their work without their permission because you owe them money you and you didn't pay.
Ruby and Rails news for the French
fetch_column() does essentially that. You can pass in the column number you want fetched, in this case, it would be the 0th column.
Apple sold 16.8 million Macs just this year, so at $100 million for 400 laser system, Apple could pay them all off entirely in 2011 by adding $5.95 to the cost per Mac.
I find it hard - like, really hard - to put myself in the state of mind of someone who would write something like this at someone else. It's strange - I just really don't get it.

The danger is when people with mindsets like us extrapolate outward to assume that essentially everyone is people like us, and therefore "it's not that serious a problem".

It is a serious problem - if even 1% of internet users are behaving this way, then there's a lot of abuse going around every day.

No easy or obvious solutions - it's systemic.
Revitaderm
It should be obvious that I like Revitaderm by now as soon as well, lesson learned. That's only going to help Revitaderm in the long run. Now here's something that my Grandpop opines about, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It is incomparable. There's a secret to Revitaderm.

It should be obvious that I like Revitaderm by now as soon as well, lesson learned. That's only going to help Revitaderm in the long run. Now here's something that my Grandpop opines about, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It is incomparable. There's a secret to Revitaderm.
Best quote to conclude article:

"Don’t be scared of change, be scared of the debt growing in your code base and in in your infrastructure. It won’t go away and there is no government bailout on the way to fix it."
I totally agree with you regarding PL/Python.
I may try to ask upstream what they think about it.
Groupon IPO: What’s Everyone Worth On Paper?
Improve Your Business Process with Inventory Software
Heads Up, Another Twitter Phishing Scam Is Afoot: itiwittier.com
Ah, apologies, I'll eat my hat (or buy you a beer sometime - you folks Covent Garden based?).

I had assumed Kompressor also handled REDCODE with its hardware requirements, as well the Avid Connection Manager and other Quicktime codecs.
Reddit's Github Repo (including all their source code)
We expend huge amounts of time and computing power to track people's likes, dislikes and spending habits to show them better advertising. It would be interesting to see a service that uses the same expertise to pin online hate speech to someone, publicly and for all time.
Outsource Online Virtual Assistant Servicess; What can they do for me?
I was saying that I think that's what the parent is talking about.

There have been many examples of cloned tech in China's recent history, though, so I'm not sure where your outrage is coming from. I didn't say anything about Chinese people as a race.
The Secrets To Marketing Thanksgiving On The Web
BT under pressure to block The Pirate Bay
Determining whether an audio track is speech or not
Really excited for this. Going to be a fantastic day of practice, community and fun!
From TFA: 'a [GroupOn] spokesperson said it was "difficult to give an accurate figure" for how many businesses are repeat users of the site.'

Really? I would have thought it would be pretty easy to run a query on their accounts and find out a nearly exact number.
The Future of Television [presentation]
Hey Jermy, no worries ;-) We're in Soho, so within spitting distance. Beer sounds good!
It's not paying 90 days 'late'. It's completely standard in manufacturing for payments to be agreed as due 30, 60 or 90 days after delivery. 90 days fairly long, but not particularly unusual.

It's also not unusual for companies to pay later than the agreed dates, but no-one has said Apple's doing that.
Adding a thousand dollars to your bank balance does deprive others. It's hard to take anything else you say seriously when you make such a basic mistake.
I'm working to build a cluster of pandaboards. This week I've taken delivery of a powersupply that will power several boards from a single wall-socket.

Something I've been stuck on - how to create mess-free casing.

The least-bad idea I've had so far is to make a four-leg rack, strap the boards and cables to chipboard, lay them in the rack, and then fold an asian-style room partition around it. This won't keep out dust and spiders though. Any advice?
Frankly, this little magic trick is worth the high price paid?
Groupon set to go public today.
I know. I would at least add it as an alias to $fetch_column(0), out of sheer readability preciosism =D
Blog post author here. Yeah, I figured it has been around a lot longer than 20 years but I thought the 20 year thing would get the point across.
Google as Philosophy: The Limits of Data
I actually wrote a PHP framework with the intention of mimicing the ASP.NET MVC file structure layout and "convention over configuration" ideology, though it's not compiled so it's probably slower than YAF. http://www.killstone.net/software/killstone-php-framework
But that's exactly my point. In my view, you also deprive the interested parties in copyright when you don't pay for the content you use or redistribute.

There's no need for ad hominem attacks, we're all civil, nice people on Hacker News.
That's not what this is about.

His beef is:

1. Signup to a new service using facebook connect

2. One of your facebook friends also joins service

3. The service automatically adds them as your friend/follower/highlighteduser/whatever inside this new service without your intervention

It's downloaded your existing social network from another application to create its internal one even though the use cases might be wildly different.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Is there reason to believe that this will not work with PHP >= 5.3?
Google threatens to cut ties with Chamber of Commerce over Protect-IP lobbying
What about database design debt? Or is this still considered technical debt?

In our company, this is 90% responsible for the paralysis that is keeping us from migrating from a 10 year old enterprise architecture. It is designed in such a way that makes it hard for us to extend and scale, but the whole foundation of our business rests on this outdated model. It's to the point that the only way we can move forward is to start over.

I've read about technical debt, but it's usually in reference to code design, lack of proper testing, and tightly coupled dependencies.

And we definitely suffer from "infrastructure debt" as this article describes, but I feel this is the least of our problems.

To me, possibly the most expensive kind of debt to be in is database design debt, as everything rests on this. At least this is the case where I work.
Google Securing The Web One Discrete Monopolizing Push At A Time
I've spent quite a bit of time working on systems that became untenable and had to be partially re-written or completely re-written. The result is the original code was either a baseline or a reference. I will say, without a doubt, comments are a code smell. Any comments.

If you write a piece of code and think you need to comment it because it won't be clear for the next guy. It is good at best.

Furthermore, comments rarely help. They are written while you are in complete comprehension of the program or that part of it. The next person (assuming the comment is something they are using to figure it out) won't be.

That said, if you can do nothing to improve the quality because of time, lack of interest or necessary complexity. At least, make your best effort to comment what it does. Appreciating the fact that this is a minimal quality improvement action. Sometimes it is just a piece of code that has to be optimized, explain why so the next guy doesn't refactor/re-write it.
Auto Accident renders two Children Paraplegics
Wait, I thought this only happened to women?

Incidentally, to anyone who gets hate speech: take a lesson from ESR. Buy a gun, learn to shoot. These people seem to be all talk, but just in case.
Ge.tt new low-cost premium service
Thanks for pointing to that interesting article. However, a link to the corresponding HN discussion would have been more useful, at least to me.
Piracy and copying seem to have more to do with the accessibility/usability of a product than its cost per se. In that sense, piracy is the market attempting to provide what people want when the copyright owners are unwilling to do so.

Here's an example (I deliberately picked an issue that seems trivial): I deeply resent DVDs that force me to stare at the FBI/INTERPOL warning for several seconds before I can advance to the menu - which also frequently takes a long time to load - or, God forbid, the actual movie. (Again, this is not even to raise the issue of DVD Regions, different release dates for different areas, and all that nonsense.)

These things are steady, low-grade reminders that the heavy-handed UI wrapped around the movie exists to accommodate someone else's interests, not mine. If a DVD is really egregious - and that seems increasingly to be the case - I'll rip the movie, strip out the menus, warnings and other crap, and re-burn it or just watch it on my computer. Yet I can't help but notice that it's easier simply to download the torrent of a movie than it is to rip it from a DVD.

Now consider that in Canada, where I live, a planned update to our federal copyright legislation would make it a criminal offence to make a personal copy of a DVD I legally purchased for my own use - with no exception for "fair use", which doesn't exist in Canadian copyright law (we have "fair dealing", which is weaker and more limited in scope than "fair use"). It would be illegal because DVDs are nominally protected by DRM - even though the encryption was broken 12 years ago - and it is a criminal offence to break a 'digital lock' for any reason.
I think it's one of these situations where it's not difficult to calculate, but it's difficult for them to release the figure. I suspect it would clearly indicate the malcontent of small businesses. "0.5% are repeat users" doesn't really bode well for you if your company is looking at an IPO.
E-volo - first manned flight with an electric multicopter
(I'm the blog post author)

I would place database design debt firmly in the technical debt side of the ledger (as it were). To me, infrastructure debt deals more with consistency across environments and consistency in moving code from one environment to another.

I also agree with you that database design debt is very expensive and, as you pointed out, leads to paralysis over fixing problems with an established application.
New PST File Creation & MBOX to PST Conversion in .NET Application 
We are pleased to announce the release of Aspose.Email for .NET 1.1.0. This release includes support for creating a new PST file and adding/importing email messages to a PST. The reading PST feature has been available for a while and we’ve been working on the modification feature but this is the first version with which you can create your own PST files, add new folders and messages. It allows developers to work with SMTP, POP3, FTP & MS Exchange servers. It supports mail merge, iCalendar, customized header & body, header information, embedded files, Twitter & many more.
And their bouncy ball commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMl5l6mOySU
Sparrow For iPhone
Wasn't very successful, 3 points and 0 comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3059460

I found it with hnsearch, by the way.
Question for the article author: Could you explain why "piracy" is not also a nonsense metaphor?

Piracy is an act of robbery and/or criminal violence at sea.

It feels like 99% of arguments are between people who haven't clearly defined the meaning of words they are arguing over.
Is SaaS causing neglect in native Linux app development?
[me]# pecl remote-info yaf
Package details:
================
Latest 2.1.3
Installed - no -
Package yaf
License PHP
Category System
Summary PHP Framework in PHP extension
Description Yaf is a PHP framework similar to zend
framework, which is written in c and built as
PHP extension.

Windows binaries can be found at <a
href="http://code.google.com/p/yafphp/downloads/list">http://code.google.com/p/yafphp/downloads/list</a>

[me]# pecl install yaf
pecl/yaf requires PHP (version >= 5.1.0, version <= 5.3.6), installed version is 5.3.8
No valid packages found

So... 2.1.3 doesn't know how to work with 5.3.8. I'm not upgrading to 5.4.0 to test this right now. Any hacks to get around this?
...for Groupon! Not so much the retailers though.
Batteries die whether you use them or not. Modern laptop batteries don't really need any special care or cycling. I say just use and enjoy your laptop and stop worrying about the battery. When it dies, it dies, and you can go buy a new one at that time.
(a) She's quoting someone else (a MAN!)

(b) That's rather hard to equate with rape threats.
Hear hear.

I had to work around this insidious creation http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/8205

It creates a memory leak (it hit my getJSON calls) that slowly strangled one of my apps until it crashed the browser.

I list a lot of hours on that one...
https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues?milestone=6&...
John Glenn's Heuer Stopwatch
I think a lot of people misunderstand what Groupon offers a business. Basically it's advertising, but in a way that makes it affordable for small businesses. The company offering their deal, is putting their name out there, and only has to pay for it when someone walks through the door an makes a purchase.

Tradition advertising means paying for your brand to be seen. Magazines, newspapers, ect can target markets, but not to a very large extent. Google, Facebook, ect can target their market better, and businesses only pay when someone clicks (ie shows a bit of interest in the company). This is why they are stealing traditional advertising revenue. Groupon took this one step further, and made it so that businesses only pay when a customer walks through the door. This opened up advertising to much smaller businesses, Mom and Pop shops, since there is no upfront cost.

You'd think that Groupon would be trying to target their deals better. Have a "select your interests" when you sign up. Yipit is doing this, and it's a pretty cool take on it. That type of service adds a lot more value then a generic daily deal.
It would be a bit confusing to have two 'Steve' offices.
Depriving others of revenue IS theft. If the terms of use for a service or product require payment then any use without payment is, in effect, theft. These juvenile justifications are how 13-year olds comfort themeselves about their behaviour. Don't want to pay? Don't use it.
Unless you have the option to blend out whitespace-only changes, e.g. https://github.com/blog/967-github-secrets
SEO Link Building Isn’t Easy
that is totally false; I (comscore, nielsen) observe that android came from 1% to near 50% of all sales globally in 2 years despite the media buzz around ip. most of my friends are disappointed by over promised, not met expectations of ip5 and they are moving to large screen android phones. sgs2 and sgn are clear winners as well as htc.
Show HN: A way to build multiplayer browser based mobile adventures using lua.
4 Marketing Benefits of Social Media
WikiLeaks: Out of time and money
I built Geolua, a website that allows you to play and develop mobile adventures
using lua. Lua runs on the server side and controls the user interface and game logic
of one or many players. Players use a web browser (on their phones) to play.

I tried to make it easy for programmers to get started: There is lots of
executable example code available on the documentation page: http://geolua.com/doc

Players can be guided to locations or interact with the environment or other players by scanning qr codes. Here is an
example, showing all available widgets and some qr code multiplayer interaction: http://geolua.com/adventure/all-widgets-132

The sourcecode of some adventures is available on github: https://github.com/dividuum/Geolua-examples

The site is written in python, using werkzeug and jinja2. I'm using GWT on the game page. The wsgi app is running in
gunicorn behind nginx/varnish. Lua is running sandboxed in a custom service called luaengine. It hosts all active lua
instances.

I'd like to hear your feedback and questions. Thanks!
Couple of small things: you shouldn't `return ($var);`, since that returns the result of the statement `($var)`. Use `return $var;` instead, and return them by reference where possible.

I also would have gone with naming consistent with PDO's (i.e. `halfCamelCase` rather than `lower_case`), but that's personal preference. Consistency would be nice though.
Its more the update circuitry that's responsible - it row-scans like an analog TV. Combined with the relatively slow eInk update rate you get the very-large product of a second per frame or so. There is nothing inherent in eInk that demands row-scanning; its just the choice made by the first commercially-available eInk screen.

Patents exist for better eInk displays: http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20080238894
I look forward to a fast-updating book reader. One day I may even be able to flip through an eBook! Until then they have a long way to go, to reproduce the book-in-hand feel.
"Bootlegging" always seemed like a more appropriate term to me. Although perhaps that has the connotation attached that the illegal distributor is profiting from the materials in question.
Its just annoying, even insulting, that something that could have been fixed, permanently, for everybody, was let out the door with that stain on it. Unlike wine, software CAN be (nearly) perfect for everybody, every time.
Although I agree that removing non-primary features would help have a more honest comparison, there is a great advantage to the Kindle having a web browser.

You can download books straight from the internet to your device. You can go to the Project Gutenberg website (http://www.gutenberg.org/) browse for a public domain book, and download it straight to your device. You don't need to use an intermediate computer.
It's not racist or xenophobic to give priority to your own citizens over others. We're not racists or xenophobes just because our great-great-great-great-grandparents did a better job at setting up a country than yours. We're not obliged to fix the world just for you, we just want to live our own lives. Our unemployment is high enough to need to give priority to the children of the people who paid for it all, because that was the promise of the struggle.

Start a business in your own country. If it's such a crap country, work on fixing it for the next generation. That responsibility's fallen to your generation, stop moaning and stand up.
ScienceShot: Meet the Saber-Toothed Squirrel
Suggested times in Google Calendar
Jotly, the new app for sharing everything with everyone.
Damn, this is the correct URL:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/jotly-the-ultimate-app-for-sharing-everything-with-everyone-psych/247866/
GRPN IPO
Quick Poll, what do you think the price is going to close at today?
"There is no loss when something is copied, or the loss is radically different from losing something like your bike..."

The question is not about tangible loss, it's about property rights, and the forceful encroachment thereof.

Being semantically picky about the concept doesn't alter the fact that the property of one individual is interacted with apart from their prerogative, i.e., their right to property is being violated - by force.

There is a loss when something is copied by force, the loss of one's right to private property. Call it theft or not, the legal repercussions should be the same.
I'm going with $28.21