skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?”

I don't think one is better than the other. They are both critical and serve a different purpose.

"What needs to be obvious?" is a design question. It's important, but it doesn't tell you what you should be doing each day.

"What's high priority?" is a project management question. Once your product already exists, and you have a zillion features that should be possible but don't need to be easy, you then have to prioritize all of them to figure out what gets done.
Is Google jQuery CDN expiration broken?
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js

Response Headers

Age:536193
Cache-Control:public,max-age=31536000
Content-Encoding:gzip
Content-Length:33321
Content-Type:text/javascript; charset=UTF-8
Date:Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:39:54 GMT
Expires:Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:39:54 GMT <--- WTF??? That's like 6 days ago
Last-Modified:Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:58:43 GMT
Server:sffe
Vary:Accept-Encoding
X-Content-Type-Options:nosniff
X-XSS-Protection:1; mode=block
This is not complex at all. As long as new legislation concerning formerly unregulated areas of life is as easily introduced as today, and politics having as close a connection with money as it has, this is just not going to end, ever.

Good luck fighting the good fight, you're going to need it. The problem is a few meta-levels above.
hire more seo's. in the pre-internet days they hire more marketers/distributors, in the internet age they need seo;s
> you could get the governments to stop making stupid decisions/laws

I know we live in an age of hitherto unimagined prosperity and wealth and miracles, but you may be reaching a little too far.
There is a strong need to keep a very public list of every host that is blocked in this way, so we can keep track of what's being censored. Has anyone set up a wiki or something similar for this purpose yet?
So why the talk of a liberal state? America is far more conservative overall than, for example, most Western European countries.
IANAL, but it's unimaginable that Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al. would somehow be compelled by this with no possibility of appeal.

That kind of law hasn't passed yet.
If Subway lied in an objectively verifiable manner (as opposed to on a subjective/gray-area claim), they'd also be breaking the law. For example, if they told their customers that a certain sandwich had 6 oz of meat, and it in fact had 5 oz of meat, that wouldn't be legal. If they told their customers that their credit card transaction data was not being resold, and in fact it was, that wouldn't be legal. Facebook is alleged to have done the latter, among other things.
Heroism aside, it's still a little reminiscent of "OpenOffice" and "Office Open XML".
Looking forward to a strong Pinax. I'm tired of reinventing the wheel.
Sigh, don't panic, the system will work, just legislative time is not internet time. As far as I can tell by reading the order [1] the order is temporary, and as its from a district judge [2] really only holds for Nevada at the moment. If it gets to the appeals process and the circuit court upholds it, it will apply more broadly, up to the supreme court where it will apply to the US as a whole. However what that means with regard to Chanel I'm not sure as it really only means that from within the US are these things outlawed.

But having such cases is useful because it gives the system something on which to chew, and then publish opinions (not all cases get published opinions) which set case law. So the good news might be that it gets to the circuit court which then has a chance to publish an opinion that our courts can't make these kinds of claims, and that gets upheld in the Supreme court and life is better because all the judges have to follow along.

The system is cranky, and obtuse at times, but its remarkably resilient in the face of unexpected challenges.

That being said, for the folks who are complaining about the institutions in the US being subverted, I point out that nearly all the elections in this country are won or lost by at most a 10% difference in votes. Further, in general more than 20% of the registered voters don't even bother to vote. So one could argue that if 20% of the 99% really cared about stuff they could actully vote in whomever they chose to vote in and no amount of money, croniesim, or stupidity on the part of the voters who are being lead around by their noses could stop them. The math says it is impossible (short of fraud) but fraud on that scale is really really hard to cover up.

[1] http://servingnotice.com/sdv/038%20-%20Order%20Granting%20Se...

[2] Federal courts have 89 districts, feeding into 13 circut courts, feeding into the supreme court. http://www.uscourts.gov/Common/FAQS.aspx
I think my biggest problem with this is that these sorts of things should be rejected before they get on the store, before people pay money for things. I don't like the precedent that's set by "oops we decided we don't like your thing so it's going bye-bye".

If Apple can't stop stuff like this at the onset, you have to start asking other questions, like how closely they are looking at the apps they let in. Is it really a safe walled garden?

Or is it simply "Hey we don't like that app anymore. It competes with us somehow. So get out."

Sadly I suspect both of those cases are true.
> I do. I would never comply with any government request unless it was preceded by a court order.

... isn't the article in question about a court order?
I think GP is suggesting EFF has more in common with the ACLU than with the Tea Party.

I think of the EFF as more Libertarian, and a often bit extreme in its position, which I think often puts it at the fringes of either of the major parties.

As is mentioned elsewhere, both parties have trouble understanding/responding to tech/privacy/open source/IP issues, so it's good there's a voice. I glad the EFF finds opportunities to disagree with both parties.
Namecoin is pretty great, but as with all these things, there's the problem of the network effect.

Diaspora has all sorts of problems.

With the SSL certificate thing, there's Convergence, which basically solves the whole lot at a stroke. See http://convergence.io/ and the guy's Blackhat talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA
I don't think you're being irrational. I'm a single founder and it sounds to me like these guys are hunting for "tech help" on the cheap while trying to clear out potential competition -- otherwise, why the admonition to ditch your product?

Listen to your gut instincts. You might learn something about your market by meeting the competing team although it will probably be a waste of time. But it seems foolish to abandon your own plans in order to join some random and profitless company that has decided joining a no-investment incubator is a good deal. If money is an issue wouldn't you be better served just getting a job at market rates and continuing to work on your business part-time?

If you think there is some value in the community, you can always offer to advise some of their teams as a mentor in exchange for access to group events.
Good suggestion, thanks! Added it to the list: http://getsatisfaction.com/bugcam/topics/check_that_user_is_...
The Psychology of Software Performance
> It is also unfair to take him to task for quoting from a publicly available source

Quotes which were already removed from their full context, taken further out of context by Arrington, with a shallow, incomplete understanding of the long-term consequences of the events being recounted.

Arrington has a Bachelor's in economics and a law degree, until 1999 he was a securities lawyer. He was still in law school when jwz was actually doing useful things and wrote those diary entries.

Arrington has never been an engineer of any kind. He has no concept of the kind of stress placed on engineers, little grasp of the work environments he wants people to put up with, and as a VC, has a massive conflict of interest.

Invoking a respected name through excerpts of a document that offered only a narrow, fuzzy window into what jwz went through in order to lure young hackers to an inevitable burnout for a likely reward of zilch is just scummy, and it is in no way unfair to call Arrington on his BS.
> Exercise for the reader: what happens if you base a Lisp-like language on vectors instead of cons cells?

I've been thinking about this in terms of a self-hosted Parenscript. What I see is a lot more pattern matching and map/reducing. Not altogether a bad thing.
You appeal to a higher court. Courts make mistakes. The system is designed to handle that. Let it work.

Relax, basically. This won't stand. That's not to say you're going to agree with everything the higher courts do (c.f. the Citizens United ruling, yada yada). But you can be sure that smart people will look at the problem. Silliness like this won't stand.
I wouldn't suggest that we need a social network, but your first suggestion isn't too far from the truth.

The exact thing needed is very boring, very low-level, and very unsexy, and I believe can be summarized thusly:

We need a method for locating hosts on a network graph which does not have a central point of failure and which cannot be easily disabled.

We then need a method for authentically routing messages back and forth between these hosts without fear of man-in-the-middle attacks that can change the contents of the messages.

This is pure transport-layer engineering.

As long as we can locate anyone connected to our network, and communicate with them without interference, we can build whatever else we need to on top of that.

We shouldn't confuse our efforts by trying to make a social network, or new hashcoin lottery, or advanced supergovernment, or whatever else. We shouldn't worry about interception of message contents--that way lies madness; as long as I know my message reached somebody in one piece, and as long as they know that a message signed by me is from me, we can fix the rest later.

This is a pure, straightforward, fucking hard engineering problem.
You can't invent around policy problems.
Swagger API Console
That's one of the two bullet points where I can see a reasonable case for Facebook's side. It's slightly muddied because the app is running on Facebook where they control it, but I can sort of see an argument for apps' actions conceptually being actions of the user running them.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to Facebook on the other app-related claim as well, "Facebook represented that third-party apps that users' installed would have access only to user information that they needed to operate." Yes, Facebook could've done better on that, but fine-grained security is something nearly nobody has solved.
Hard to fight real people commenting earnestly for the wrong reasons.
That sounds like a typical startup. Are you sure it's as bad as you are thinking? In other words, is this a mismatch of risk profiles or a truly bad situation. Anxiety or legitimate concern/fear?
My Head teacher won't let me teach computing
How To Find Free MLM Leads
Lovely work - really elegant and simple pastebin server! Wondered whether you could add syntax highlighting for Puppet config files (.pp)?
Business Guys on Business Trips › Client slash Designer
Or he believed there were new laws coming, or the issue as a whole was over his head, he's just punting this up to some higher courts.
Have a look at Xtend (http://xtend-lang.org). It's exactly what the yammer guy is looking for: convenience of Scala (closures, type inference, and more) without the complexity.

And it compiles to Java source code, which makes it an ideal language for Android development.
Just the ones they happen to care about. I don't think it matters such a great deal however: people tend to care about the same things. Feature creep is when you want to fully satisfy everyone, a few people at the time. Plus, if you want your missing feature, you can code it. I mean, you really can. Many components of that system don't spend more than 1K LOC, they really are accessible.

But that's kind of a straw man. Even if you convince me that feature creep really is valuable, lack of features explains but 1 order of magnitude out of 4. There's still 3 to go. I have two explanations for those.

First, they reuse their code. A lot. When they write a compiler, all phases (parsing, AST to intermediate language, optimizations, code generation) are done with the same tool (augmented Parsing Expression Grammars, search for the OMeta language for more details). When they draw something on the screen, be it a window frame, a drawing, or text, they again use a single piece of code. Mere factorization goes a long way. Id' say it explains about 1 order of magnitude as well.

Second, their use of specialized languages yield astonishing results: they can build a self-implementing compilation system in about 1000 lines (including a bunch of optimizations). 200 more lines gets you a reasonably efficient implementation of Javascript, 200 more gets you Prolog, and a couple hundreds more can get you about any DSL you may want (external DSLs, not your average Ruby/Haskell combinator library). They implemented an equivalent of Cairo in 457 lines, which is about 100 times smaller (and quite efficient to boot, but that was a surprise bonus). They did a TCP-IP stack in about 160 lines, which again is about 100 times smaller than a typical C implementation. And they did all that with specialized languages that themselves are implemented in very little code. Based on that, I'd say their use of domain specific languages explains about 2 orders of magnitude. (Don't take my word for it. See their last progress report here: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf )

To sum up, we could argue that current systems are about 4 orders of magnitude too big. Of the 4, 1 may be debatable (lots of features). Another (not reusing and factorizing code) is obviously something that has Gone Wrong™ (I mean, it could have been avoided if we cared about it). The remaining 2 (DSLs) are a Silver Bullet. Not enough to kill the Complexity Werewolf, but it sure makes it much less frightening. By the way, we should note that the idea of DSLs is around for quite some time. Not using them so far may count as something that has Gone Wrong as well, though I'm not sure.
The author is surprised at the justice's competence, but, by the time someone gets promoted to the ECJ (remember, they go all the way through their undergraduate degree, then through their postgraduate legal training, then maybe some more training, then a placement, then a junior position...etc) they are going to be pretty well read and probably pretty competent too. To top it off, they are totally unaccountable and unbeholden to anyone (ie: it's the EU).

In short, you can expect an an international copyright judge in a very senior court to be smart and to do what he feels like.
Contracts are a pretty gray area. In a lot of contexts, a handshake agreement or email exchange, if documented well enough, can constitute a binding, legally enforceable contract. It doesn't have to be on a paper saying OFFICIAL CONTRACT with signatures at the bottom.
The Kindle Fire Bests The iPad At Best Buy
I love PyPy, but it kind of sucks watching everyone get excited about the CPU performance of a web server while forgetting about this:

"Pypy used about three times as much memory in both cases, but usage was stable over time (i.e. it's not "leaking" like pypy 1.6 did)."

For a front-end web server, I'd trade CPU perf for memory any day of the week.
Major thanks to Justin Peel for finding the memory leak! That was a fun one, memory allocated external to the GC (so e.g. something allocated by OpenSSL) wasn't factored into calculating when to run the GC, which meant that the destructors of the objects holding onto the OpenSSL structs weren't being called because the GC never saw the correct memory pressure.
I know a better benefit. Since I started chewing gum (brand x - contains Xylitol) I have better teeth.

I slowed down my coke/dew consumption and eat gum instead after every meal after a glass of water. Believe me, having fresh breath makes a huge difference. Yes... cognitive in my case :)
Consider that the number of people who might walk by and look in your car window is much larger than the number of people who happen to see you at the exact moment you put your backpack in the trunk. It's safer to not leave it in view of passersby.

It's even safer to get in the habit of putting it in an inconspicuous location when you get into the car.
Stop Stansted
"Facebook promised users that it would not share their personal information with advertisers. It did."

Wow, that sounds like a huge violation of user's rights and kind of contradicts everything Facebook has been saying about using "anonymized data."
Yeah, I edited my list to include a CA-free encrypted replacement for TCP, just before I saw your comment.

To all the super-geniuses reading this: burn your socialmobilelocal startup to the ground tomorrow and do this instead.

Start by watching this Blackhat talk I linked elsewhere in the thread, the guy has the right kind of ideas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA
So ... he won the amazon affiliate race condition lottery, and somehow this is a bad thing? You could argue that he sent you to amazon, possibly having a non-negligible impact on your purchasing something from them.

Also, seriously, his cut doesn't get added to your bill. Almost nothing happens totally for free, and I'd rather have free-to-view content with affiliate links than buy my way through a paywall for every damn thing on the internet.
While I realize that there are defensible reasons to actively reject some government directives the benefits of a lawful society should not be underestimated. Bad laws should be fixed via legislative action. Sometimes this means complying with the bad law in the interim.

Selective enforcement and/or selective non-compliance may be justifiable as a tactical response but if taken too far then we no longer have the rule of law.
Does it support WebM or only h.264?
People who still believe in politics in the US tend to attach themselves to "liberal" or "conservative" and use the other one as a pejorative. Neither term has a very well defined meaning, other than for a few select issues like, say, gay marriage.
I bristled when I read this. They are making some steep requests and I can't see how you could seriously consider going along with this. It can't be in your best interest.
Facebook users are not Facebook's customers.
I wonder how this settlement compares to EU Data Protection Law. Is it possible FB could abide by FTC rules and still be outside EU rules? Will FB use this "We're OK by the FTC now!" as a claim to be not so bad in the EU?
The kind of inconsistencies I hate
More related to the central topic of redis as a store for this, I think it really depends on the read per write ratio. Gathering stats like this would be very useful, and its very easy to write a SQL adapter for haste-server, since its just a set/get and optional expire
Accompl.sh Tracks Your Year-Long Goals in Clean, Simple Fashion
It's very unlikely that this article is correct. Here is the legal ruling:

http://servingnotice.com/sdv/038%20-%20Order%20Granting%20Se...

This is a temporary restraining order. Chanel is posting a bond for any damages to the defendants, should the trial prove them innocent.

Regarding de-indexing, there is only one paragraph (10) which says the domains "shall immediately be de-indexed and/or removed", without specifying who will do this action. This is vague, but I don't think it can be interpreted as an order to Google / FB because:

- the list of search engines / social sites is open ended

- the previous paragraphs require actions by the plaintiff or by the defendants (e.g. preserve computer files). Among others, paragraph (8) states that the plaintiff can use Google Webmaster Tools on these domains.

- the (temporary) transfer of DNS records is specified in small technical details (including multiple technical solutions for the redirection involved) in multiple paragraphs, while this arguably much more complex requirement receives minimum treatment.

While the language is indeed a bit vague in paragraph (10), I think consideration of all these factors seems to indicate it is the plaintiff and the defendants who are to take action to see the sites de-indexed (using, e.g., Google Webmaster Tools) and not the indexing companies.
Thanks - glad you like it :)
If you can submit a ticket on github for .pp highlighting I can get it in, by writing a highlight.js adapter for puppet config files
Could make a fb app for submitting the form - lolz
It's well known that Harry Reid is bought-and-paid-for by MPAA/RIAA, just like Dianne Feinstein in California (who most of my liberal friends loved, but who I couldn't stand for her MAFIAA connections).

Politics is no fun. It's not like if I voted for the Republican opposing her that we'd get a better deal for ANYTHING that I cared about. We need a third party with reasonable political power, and/or a proportional-governance system where you tally the votes and give each party its proportional share of representatives. The current system is broken.
You're very right but I believe there's an even deeper problem here. There will always be people trying to manipulate the system to serve their needs but I think we can start winning some of these cases by educating the public. A lot of the people deciding on these issues have no clue how the things they're ruling on works. This judge most likely doesn't know that he just opened the floodgates for abuse.

This judge was a guy most likely like my mother who uses google as her browser address bar. First navigate to goof,e type the web address in search then click the first result. He seems to have been thinking about the issue in terms of the physical world. If someone was using the Chanel name and logo to sell fake goods then an order along these lines in the physical world makes some sense.

A lot of people who don't quote get the web think of these issues with physical analogies in mind. The problem is that these physical world analogies just don't apply. They only sound good to the uninformed. So yeah, we need to be protesting but more importantly we need to be educating. There are far more people who make bad judgements based on ignorance of the web than there are that make bad judgements because they need to please their pay masters.
That's true. I was just imagining blank white space which would look terrible in many layouts... but with the depth and texture, that could be a solution.

Related problem: shift+scrolling up... are we going to go above the top of the page?
Practically, this ruling won't have much effect. There's a team of people at Google already dedicated to removing results like these from the index, as they aren't that great for users. Any counterfeit goods site with enough SERP already gets on their radar, and gets removed/demoted, without action from Us courts.
So it's a shame that it's the default for a desktop, not mobile, OS.

Ubuntu had NBR, and dropped it, and kludged it into Ubuntu main.

Now people with netbooks (small drives) may like Unity but aren't so keen on all the other Ubuntu stuff.
Proactive techniques to stop & squish #botnets
Abstract. Botnets, consisting of thousands of interconnected, remote-controlled computers, pose a big threat against the Internet. We have witnessed the involvement of such malicious infrastructures in politically motivated attacks more than once in recent years. Classical countermeasures are mostly reactive and conducted as part of incident response actions. This is often not sufficient. We argue that proactive measures are necessary to mitigate the botnet threat and demonstrate techniques based on a formalized view of botnet infrastructures. However, while being technically feasible, such actions raise legal and ethical questions.