skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that all those people on Stackexchange have read the question properly.

The question is "What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?"
I.e. given the set of books that every programmer should read, which one is the single most influential?

As a programmer, lets consider the answer to the question, as parsed logically (regardless of intent).

Typing 'most influential books' into Google brings me to this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_Most_Influential_Books_...

It turns out its just one persons opinion - but pageranked to the top for 'most influential books'; and notable enough for wikipedia - thats good enough crowd-vetting for my purposes.

If I knew which books all programmers should read, it'd now be a simple matter of finding the highest ranked; but here, I have to use my judgement.

So I suggest:

Number 13, Euclid's Elements

Number 32, Machiavelli's The Prince

Number 93, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

I'm not sure every programmer should read Elements - maybe, but its a little abstract these days.

I think The Prince would be good reading for the softer skills of the programming profession - and genuinely has really influenced management thinking; its short, so probably worth everyone's time.

Finally, I believe without a doubt, 1984 should certainly be required reading for all programmers - a single read is worth a great many 'ethics for technologists' courses.

There are other candidates on that list too, but I don't think there's anything that I'm as certain all programmers should read as 1984.

Any differing opinions?
Yes, package.el doesn't install arbitrary snippets from anywhere on the internet.
record and play macro (someone had to mention)

C-x (
<type some magic />
C-x )
C-x e

M-x 99 C-x e

(play macro 99 times)
In October they apparently updated this figure to 18 billion at a rate of 1 billion / month.

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/smartphones/smartphoneapps/New...
My motto when buying Chinese stuff is to steer clear of brands that try to be fake.

Such as not buying Hyundai because their logo tries to mimic Honda's.
The post I replied to speculated that it would be possible to change the system's behavior without recompiling apps.

That would change the rules from "model updates and screen redraws never run concurrently" to "...will typically run concurrently". I think you agree that is asking for problems.

Of course, it is possible to adjust the system to apply different rules to different apps, but then apps would have to be changed to advertise "I am fine with running updates on a different thread". I think newer versions of Android already have some of that.
I'm wondering if Chris is talking about Series A+ with this.

If you raise anything less than $500k angel it's going to be very tight to make that last 18 months by the time you've hired a few developers, covered expenses, etc - esp in SF/SV
Then either BB will start charging an entrance fee, or they will start charging the manufacturers display fees. At that point they can reduce their prices to about that of online shopping (since you have the value added of being able to purchase the product immediately, but your time spent driving plus gas plus maintenance costs more than shipping).
"The latest rumour is that both ATLAS and CMS have evidence that the Higgs mass is about 125 GeV/C2 at confidence levels of 3.5σ and 2.5σ respectively. At 3.5σ, the measurement could be the result of a random fluke just 0.1% of the time whereas at 2.5σ the fluke factor is about 1%."
Will do! Actually was a bit egotistical of me to expect the reverse, hah.

It's a shame that you couldn't get empowered at Yahoo to turn Flickr into this. Maybe they'll buy you back (as talent) and give you the big chair to run things? ;)
Working towards a Goal
if your to dos are part of an overall goal then you can management in an organized way at www.goalsgonesocial.com. In addition, there's opportunity to get benefit from other site members who have a similar interest.
So many of the listings seem shady to me... "I made $1,500 with this site in 2 weeks"

But I'm selling the site for $1,995. WTF?
Perhaps he's right depending on your definition of "top performing". He doesn't define it but I'm guessing he means "scores well on standardized tests involving math and verbal skills".

When you optimize for creation of wealth for others (products / services) and for yourself (positive life experiences), you end up with a very different solution: http://www.sudval.org/
Undo in region saves me every day.
Ask HN: LinkedIn Ads
Anyone had any success with LinkedIn ads for a B2B product? I was attracted to it because it seems like a really good fit for a product for professionals. So far though I haven't been able to get a click, after about a week of targeting 50,000, getting 15000 impressions and offering 4 dollars a click just to see if I could get anything at all.
carve looks like another mesh library to me.

See http://code.google.com/p/carve/source/browse/src/intersect.c...
Android Phone Name Generator
The article focuses on the financial priorities and incentives of other countries rather than on their teaching techniques. And of course something does need to change in this regard. Bill Gates did a very interesting TED talk on the topic earlier this year if you didn't happen to see it:

http://is.gd/IG8Z1w

But personally i'm much more interested in the many exciting ideas being developed that will transform the modern classroom -- regardless of how we ultimately decide to pay for it. If you haven't seen the TED talk by Salman Khan of the "Khan Academy" and you're interested in education, it's _well_ worth the 20 minutes:

http://is.gd/BtESeg
What are the best books on robust/secure/scalable web/services architecture?
No, it was like that for as long as I can remember. I signed up for $0.17.
No love for Edward Yourdon's Death March?

I think a copy should be given to every CS student upon graduation.
Going through the list:

Code Complete: First ed 1993

Prag Prog: 1999

SICP: 80s?

K&R C: ditto

CLRS: 1990

Refactoring: 1999?

GoF DP: 1994

Mythical Man Month: late 70s, 80s?

TAOCP: Decades ago, and not a serious suggestion

Dragon book: 1986

GEB: 80s was it?

Programming Pearls: 1999

CODE: 1999

Off the top items in that list, only two have them have been published in the last TWELVE years, which in our industry is at least two full generations.

I don't know about you guys but that makes me a little sad. I think somethings have changed a lot in the last 20 years. I refuse to believe that Brooks had the last word on project management several generations ago.

I accept the notion that "the more things change, the more they stay the same" but I can't help but think this Greatest Hits List couldn't be improved somewhat.
TRAMP. Being able to seamlessly remotely edit files and run remote modes.

At work I regularly edit files on 10-15 remote machines. But I never ssh to them and run an editor. Instead I'll just visit them through TRAMP, run Magit to commit stuff that I've done etc.
Apologies yes you're right.

Often in terms of websites that exist on the internet.

Rarely in terms of ones that are mentioned on hackernews.
But maybe people would actually be better off buying nothing than a frustration-inducing $100 tablet. A tablet is a luxury, so why buy a non-luxurious one?
The idea with responsible disclosure is that you want to maximize safety of the public by incentivizing vendors to fix problems while not letting malicious actors exploit them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsible_disclosure. Once the vendor has fixed the flaw (or refused to, or taken longer than a reasonable time to do so), it's generally accepted as OK to publish details. You can of course get whatever media coverage you want at that point.

I'm curious - do you think responsible disclosure is a bad idea? Or is the "badness" of this bug small enough (compared to malware) that you think it's better for the common good to publicly post the repro instructions and enable many users to exploit it?

I think having a bug bounty program is actually a lot better than the vast majority of sites / vendors that don't even have a whitehat disclosure program, let alone a bug bounty program. It's worth noting that this is just the base bounty - I've seen us pay out a lot more for good discoveries. $500 is also the base that Google and Mozilla offer for their programs (http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2010/11/rewarding-w..., http://www.mozilla.org/security/bug-bounty.html). What would be a good price, do you think? I'm not hooked in enough to know what black market prices are like for bugs like this.
Chicago, IL - Rockstar Front & Backend Developer - TrainSignal

Want To Move to Chicago? Moving costs & bonus! 10 year old company, 4 years in a row on Inc. 5000 list and profitable year over year!

Have front-end skills with backend experience? A variety of tools we use PHP/MySql, jQuery, HTML, CSS, nginx & Apache.

Very highly competitive salary & benefits.

Contact me at iman@trainsignal.com for more info
He will tell me that the license that governs my entry to the store prohibits this and that I am now banned from the store and police will be called in the future.

That is absolutely hilarious. I'm suddenly eager to walk into random Best Buys and try this. If it doesn't work, I'll try purchasing something and leaving without stopping at the receipt checker.
Nope, it's not a replacement for OpenCASCADE. It solves "only" one problem: boolean operations on BREPs and NURBs. OpenCASCADE will be replaced over time. At this point, the FOSS community desperately needs this and it would be hugely disruptive. I would love to get more hands on deck for working on this sort of BREP library, any takers?
This is an extremely compelling idea for users who run their own websites. However, it is not clear what the pricing trade-offs are for a consumer (for example flickr) user.

I would want to transfer my stuff out of flickr right away if there was a non-painful way to determine how much I'd be paying to amazon for s3 storage of my photos. I have thousands of photos, but haven't actually counted them. Is there an easy way from within flickr to compute the total storage I'd need?

Flickr-pro has been a very good deal at $25/year (for virtually unlimited storage with some annoying terms/conditions). What will OpenPhoto be priced at?
That's true. The general rule I go by is carry between 3-5 months worth of expenses (debt service + living expenses) in cash and the rest goes into various investments to make more money. The cash is my emergency fund and the investments are my savings.

If you leave 18 months worth of cash in a savings account, you're losing value to inflation.
From the article:

I recently used this strategy for storing raw XML data that we are receiving in the background from an API. We parse it, normalize some of it out to our own data model, but keep the raw XML around.

This is why you might not want to parse the XML: Maybe you don't control the XML schema or its upgrade schedule. If the API you're querying decides to add additional fields, you won't see them until you rewrite your parser.

Or if the API doesn't return perfectly consistent field sets (e.g. perhaps you're actually querying many different APIs to populate the same table, like a table storing the raw RSS feed output from a thousand websites) then you'll either drop the inconsistent portions on the floor or enjoy the thrill of maintaining one parser per possible result fieldset, plus a SQL schema that captures the intersection of all possible result fieldsets.
Ruby on Ales rocks!
Sigh.

I bet every cryptographer in the world, other than Bruce Schneier and Ron Rivest, hears that all the damn time.

No wonder so few of them ever release any code.
Can Color-Blind Users See Your Site?
Ah, just realized you're the OP. I don't think there's anything particularly irresponsible about posting an already-public disclosure to HN or other aggregators. It's the first person posting it publicly without first privately disclosing that I find irresponsible.
First, when you "pivot" after losing a fight for a market and take an A round of funding, you failed.

The product failed. You (and your investors) might take the lessons of that failure forward and enjoy wild success with a different product. The question is whether the team has a new idea to pivot to, and whether the investor has confidence that the team will do better the second time around. I don't know the facts of the Gowalla situation, but suppose the 'new idea' here was that while the Gowalla product didn't make sense on its own, it could be combined with Facebook to create a profitable feature for them. If so, the investors who helped create that value should not be cut out of the deal.

Second, whatever you want to call it, nobody is better off not selling if Gowalla 2012 was destined to fail anyways.

Just because Gowalla had no value as an independent company doesn't mean the company had no value. Obviously Facebook valued something about it, and like anything else, a company is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Now maybe Facebook just really valued the founders' skills and work ethic, in which case I'd agree with you. But maybe they want the founders to reproduce Gowalla as a Facebook feature, in which case the total price they pay to acquire that expertise should in fairness be distributed to the shareholders and not just to the founders. In the software business there is a fuzzy line between a talent acquisition and a straight-up acquisition.
You could say this about any unprofitable business. It's the business's job to offer transactions to each individual customer that aggregate to the positive for the business. It's not my job to provide corporate welfare to ailing Best Buy.

You could use the same logic to criticize a listener for not buying a bad album from their favorite band.

Heck, even I waited until the price drop on Amazon MP3 to buy The Roots' new album today. (it was $8 last night)
Sallie Mae and all of the banks that pushed changes so that bankruptcy couldn’t happen for student loans are just greedy and really shouldn’t be allowed to offer these loans.

The bankruptcy reform bill was the biggest assault on citizens right that has happened over the last few years and almost no one took notice. America was founded on the principal of debt amnesty, in which a citizen at any time could based on their own analysis of their situation could absolve themselves from the burden of their debt. In doing so the owner of their debt would liquidate their assets and take to proceeds. The debtor was then free to try to rebuild.

This institution was created because any other construct, will inevitably lead to slavery and create a debtors nation. They studied the factors that created debtors prisons in Europe and wanted to avoid the pitfalls of a nation built on debt burden. Because it is a nation built on slavery.

The fact that an institution as old as the founding fathers was changed on the eve of the collapse bears more than coincidence. Student Loans are the most over leveraged product on the market, what is worse is they are not backed by an asset that can be liquidated. Knowing this and seeing the collapse coming the lobbyist and politicians quickly worked to place safeguards into place to keep the house of cards from coming down.

Coincidentally the timing of the move is damning evidence to the fact that not only the financial industry but also the politicians knew the collapse was coming. The instituted the means test as a way to strap homeowners to underwater mortgages and outright removed student loans from consideration. It was the most blatant display of politicians putting business interest before the people.

They did everything in their power to strap us to the debt of poor choices while simultaneously working to form legislation to bail out businesses that made equally poor chooses.

I implore each and every one of you, to look at the bankruptcy reform bill and who voted for it and vote them out. They have shown that they are now overtly and directly working against your interest. It is a huge assault on your rights, while you may never need the relief those rights afforded, if you do you will find that they have blocked your ability to start over, denying you of rights when you need them the most. It is a heinous attack on the rights of the citizenry.
If you use he hosted version and the storage provided by OpenPhoto it should be tiered and competitive to Flickr.

If you use your own personal storage (i.e. S3 bucket) then the cost is between you and the provider (Amazon).

I've got about 25GB of photos (≈4k in number) and it runs me just under $3/month on S3.
Verizon Couldn’t Be More Full Of It
There's no Rails 2.8, I guess you meant Rails 2.3...

There are three major versions of Rails that are still maintained: 2.3.n, 3.0.y, and 3.1.x

http://rubygems.org/gems/rails/versions
> Confidentiality isn't the killer feature/flaw here; integrity is.

I initially posted "Authentication, too" in response to this, but then I reread the page and it says it doesn't provide authentication.

...in which case, I don't really understand this at all. What good is integrity if there's no authentication? Doesn't that mean an active network attacker can completely swap out the DNS response for a different one, but just can't modify it (short of creating a brand new one)? If that's the case, it seems completely useless. It claims to protect against man-in-the-middle attacks, but I don't understand how that's possible if there's no authentication.

I'm sure I'm missing something here.
I guess on a site all about links I really should have figured that one out!

Main github repo: https://github.com/makeusabrew/bootbox

Issues list / feature requests: https://github.com/makeusabrew/bootbox/issues

And a bit of a rubbish demo: http://makeusabrew.github.com/bootbox/demo/

Cheers!

Nick
The article seems to be in response to the recent Gowalla acquisition. If Gowalla had been successful and still used, it may have continued on. Facebook isn't shutting it down because it was a free service. They're shutting it down because it's unpopular and unprofitable. To use the Gowalla acquisition as evidence that companies acquire other companies just to shut them down is silly. All it shows is that a company can be acquired even if they fail.
I think it would be better to link directly to the article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020463090457705...

The Marginal Revolution post doesn't add much to the discussion.
Delete generally means gone forever. If you wanted your account gone (but not permanently) you should use the deactivate option.
I thought I'd seen this all before with the $100 tablets last year, but then I noticed something that sent my jaw to the floor:
http://en.ingenic.cn/product.aspx?ID=78

That's the manufacturer for the JZ4770 SoC (system-on-a-chip) used in the Novo7. Their page has:

- Product Datasheet (admittedly with only physical/electrical not logical details.)

- Links to Android NDK, Linux toolchain, Linux source, uboot source, sample Linux rootfs for the SoC family.

This is more open development information than almost any other SoC platform used in cheap Android hardware! Admittedly, it all looks a little old but even as an indication of attitude, it's a great sign.

To date, nearly every vendor of these kind of designs has kept this information close to their chest and charges for it - if it's available it's nearly always because of leaks not releases. That's one of the underlying reasons why most of the cheap tablets violate GPL.

Unfortunately, I can't turn up any information about the "vivante gc860" graphics engine - drivers for that will probably be binary blobs (like on nearly every other Android device, at any price point.)

Anyhow, I'm excited that if Ingenic put out sufficient information about this SoC and its features, and if the hardware is "good enough", you might expect to see some interesting other uses & ports in the coming months.
Hackers exploit Adobe Reader zero-day, may be targeting defense contractors
you need to keep an eye on good deals. There are good deals. However, you need to check it out thoroughly before deciding to purchase. Never go after revenues. Check the PR and the authenticity of the site.
Not bad for a few weeks. The most important things for niche Adsense sites are content and links. I made a few sites in 2009 and some are earning $150 a month each, but they all started at pennies to $1 per month at the beginning. Get some plugins to tweet new posts, and get some plugins to post content from RSS feeds (check with site owners first) if you aren't putting much content in yourself or hiring people to do it.
Haven't heard of Edward Yourdon, so Google'd. Since you are familiar, can you comment on this:

http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-07-1997/swol-07-...
My coworkers often don't even realize I'm editing a remote file or working in a remote shell. It's really that seamless.

Of course, sometimes I forget I'm working remotely, and hilarity ensues. The worst episode was in a recent school project. I thought "oh, I'll just finish this on the train". And then, when I got on the train, realized I had actually been working remotely. Oops.
It may be interactive, but it's not really a tool when all I can do is switch between two displays: more like a slideshow.

And the "interactivity" was just a hindrance to understanding what the article was trying to illustrate: it would have been much more illuminating to have the two bills side by side, with lines joining corresponding items.
What´s it like flying down a mountain at 250 km/h?
Twitters top 2011 hashtags
I think this type of learning will be considerably more effective in quantitative subjects than qualitative ones. Maths especially but essentially any subject that has 'right' answers lends its self well to this as content and tests can be automated algorithmically.

I'm curious however to see how this works in humanity type subjects that require more critical thinking and higher order reasoning. These seem to me to still require human interpretation in order to assess understanding.
This helps: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-phot...
True enough, Best Buy will probably not go extinct. However, this type of thing is so unbelievably damaging to mom-and-pop retail operations who do not have the buying power/leverage with manufacturers that a giant like Best Buy has. If I owned a mom-and-pop place like my parents, I would immediately investigate how I could jam cell signal in my shop. There is no way in hell I would let a customer in to just try some jeans on, watch them scan the price tag, and walk out the door with five extra bucks from Amazon without buying my product.
Also note that

C-u 0 C-x e

plays the macro until it rings the bell (e.g. runs out of buffer space or tries to forward-search for a name that doesn't exist. This is great when you don't know how many times it needs to be run.
Looks interesting, wish the video has been uploaded in HD, its a bit difficult to see.
So now you only need to manage that table so it does not grow out of control, create a basic interface, some kind of alerts... all for $15-30 month. I don't know you, my hours are way more expensive. For this kind of non-core features SaaS is the way to go.
this looks like an awesome project, I'll definitely sign up, but how are you going to make any money? Sure, the $25K from kickstarter was nice, but how are you going to continue to make money?
Hahaha, I was asked so many times why I didn't stay at Yahoo with this idea. Upper management at Yahoo would have made sure to do whatever they could to get promotions while killing the product.
I remember hearing about it while I was at uni, and checking it out of my uni library. I read through it, and it was a dusty old tome full of references to long dead systems.

And it was good, while not saying anything I was hugely shocked by, but making clear and sensible points.

And now a few years down the line, I'm out of uni and working, and I find myself toying with buying it for my boss...