skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I read comments like this I'm left with two questions:
1. What are "serious applications"?
2. How does this person define "failed"?

This task of counting word frequencies looks like an ideal job for awk. But there are many ways to do it, and with different UNIX's utilities. UNIX is remarkably flexible.

When awk was introduced it was not imagined that people would try to write 10 page programs with it. But of course, they did. Are these the so-called "serious applications" that some people want to write?

If UNIX utilities and pipes (including the pipe function in C) are a "failure", why are they still with us after so many years? If that's failure, then what is "success"?

I think it comes down to what you're trying to do. For processing text, such as the task discussed in the article, I find UNIX utilities to be enough.

I still have no idea what "serious applications" are. Is text processing "serious"?

Much of UNIX's userland was intended for text processing. And for that it works very well.
The reason our housing is so expensive is largely due to supply issues. Australia has some of the most complex land release and use laws in the world. The incentives to liberalise these rules are weak because State governments, who hold the legal power to do so, get higher revenues from stamp duty if land prices are higher.

The high cost of property runs the risk of slowly strangling the middle class. Not a good idea.
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As interesting as that possibility might sound, I am reminded of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

A drone with improper (or beaten) failsafes and countermeasures seems far more likely than a planted trojan.

And if modern history -- especially 21st century modern history -- is any guide, we can bet on two things: 1) The US's overestimation of its own technological advantages; 2) The US's underestimation of its enemies' technological capabilities.
How To Setup the Latest Rails on Linux with Spork and Autotest
To be fair, Perth is literally the most isolated city on earth. Sydney or Melbourne are much different.
Probably invade Afghanistan again?
While I agree that having a github is great for a number of reasons, I do not think it's a Resume/CV "replacement" when looking for "any" software job.

> A cv is useless for conveying who you are and what value you bring relative to all the other thousands of people out there. A paper is a paper is a paper.

True. Therefore if you're looking at integrating a Startup, it is great because educated developers might have the time to meticulously review every application. But when you're looking for a job, any job, especially in a more established company it doesn't work the same way.

Of course, if your github projects are "famous", say you created Redis (the 1% case), then it can act as a CV replacement. A replacement NOT because someone will dig into the actual code, but rather because they'll know you created this known thing called Redis (or they'll read about it on Wikipedia and realize it's a big deal)... so it's in a way your CV. But if your github only has random projects (which is the 99% case), it's actually quite hard and time consuming to jump into the code to evaluate an applicant's skill.

To better explain my point that a resume/CV actually makes the difference, let's look at it the other way around. Imagine you are a recruiter, you have 100 applicants, and you need to filter the list because you can't interview all 100 of them. Are you going to look into at everyone's repo?! No. Instead you will give a quick look at the CV to identify 'potentially' good candidates. Having a link to your github on the CV is a big plus at this point (independently of what it has), because it's different from most of the other ones (aka: you're special, more passionate about technology). Once the filtering is done, only then will you usually have the occasion to be heard through an interview. And it's at this point that you actually need to show you're real value.

Now I do agree that this system is flawed, but it's the game. If you want to maximize your chances, which you most likely do considering you have no options, you should play the game and get a solid cv/resume. Having said that, if you lack experience or content for your CV, personal projects (on github) are a good filler ;)
That's one of the less obvious reasons that secret proceedings, secret rules, and the like are bad. They make it harder to discredit conspiracy theorists. "Well, if they kept the seizure proceedings secret for a year, maybe the seven days of food rule is secret too".
> If/when you have multiple concrete objects which share the same interface, it's trivial there to switch references from the concrete type to that of the Interface

you're a lucky person that it has been trivial for you, your teammates and all the known and unknown clients of your code and components. I can only envy your experience.
I wish WakeMate would have done something like this. Their customer support has been a black hole for the past 2 months; the solution[1][2][3] is to first ping them on twitter, then email random co-founders and hope for a response. It kind of sucks since it was a great idea but terrible execution.

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/wakemate/status/139012967692894209

[2] https://twitter.com/#!/wakemate/status/114720498511912960

[3] https://twitter.com/#!/wakemate/status/114463267061104640
How many times have you been standing in a queue with the money in your hand, wishing you could just drop the money and get out, who cares about change, you just want to get the hell out of here.

This is my proposal for a "no change given" line.

You walk up, you plop down at least the amount of money that the items are worth, they quickly scan the <5 items, check the money is at least as much as the total, then you move on. You don't get change, you don't get a receipt, they don't take cards. Just drop the money and run.

Good for business as they would collect many extra $$ from impatient shoppers, and good for shoppers who are impatient. All-round good.
If you've got such an awesome domain, that others are valuing, why not build your own company on that domain? Busy? Hire someone to build something that gets you even 2-3x your adwords revenue - and you'll no longer care that you can't sell the domain.
So they had to endure being talked to by this man, getting elbowed a few times and a spilled drink. Does that sound fun, no. "One of the most unsafe flights of my life" though... seriously?

Yeah, if it was actually an off-duty employee then they should have made sure it didn't happen, but clearly he's not going to get taken seriously if he talks about this annoyance as if it's a matter of national security.

Here's an example of the exaggeration:

For an entire Boeing 747 [ED. NOTE: the plane was large commercial airliner, not necessarily a 747 specifically] plane-load of people. Not enough seats. The remaining 14 passengers

A "large commercial airliner" only carried a busload + 14 people?

Your nonexistent policy threatened the safety of everyone on-board flight AA 223

Yeah, everybody on board nearly died when this man talked loudly.

Oh, I can't be assed going on, flagged it instead - how on earth did 6 people feel the need to upvote this, guessing nobody actually bothered to read it. Just wonder if the author's a liar or delusional.
I think the better description would be:

You are on the hook as soon as your code touches credit card data.
Those photos are substantive proof that the Iranians are masters in the art of tacky propaganda bunting.
A sad story for passengers on board, but the letter was far too verbose to be effective as a complaint. A shorter, less emotional letter sent as an executive email carpet bomb[1] may have gotten a better response.

--

[1] http://consumerist.com/2007/05/how-to-launch-an-executive-em...
Yup, i'd switch to either Stripe or WePay- tbh, being based in Canada... Stripe/WePay guys make it seem like we're foreigners o_O
the only worthwhile conducts of human life are technological and scientific research, and building infrastructure

Wow... the basis of my philosophy! IMHO: technological and scientific research - and art! - are basically the worthwhile "ends".

Building infrastructure (as well as mining, agriculture, most manufacturing, health care, SOME lawmaking, SOME politics, SOME entertainment, SOME advertising etc etc) ARE worthwhile, being the means to the abovementioned ends.

(and MOST politics, entertainment, lawmaking, advertising and so on are plain old not worthwhile, or even harmful).
That's exactly why having completed projects on github (and actually working on a live website with a domain) will put you in the top 10% of developers. Isn't that a good leg to stand on when looking for a job?

I feel you man, it definitely isn't easy. One huge point to note is that HN is extremely biased view of the tech scene. We are bombarded with so many elite programmers and projects that we forget this only represents a fraction of the entire tech scene. This is GOOD thing. You want to be in the presence of elite company. But it's super important to not let it deter your motivation. It may look like everyone is ahead of you because they are. But so too are 100x more people behind you. In the end, it really doesn't matter.

I started the same way, hacking spaghetti PHP and being a really poor programmer - I just wanted to make a website to sell some shirts.

The best thing I did and you can do is just keep at it. If it feels like work then you are probably in the wrong industry. You have to have a passion for building stuff, that's what keeps me going. I never thought I'd be able to stand 8+ hours staring at a computer screen. But it's not about that is it? It's about being able to see your creation realized.

Anyway, I'm by no means an elite programmer, but I have a very active GitHub profile =) http://github.com/plusjade.

Email me and we can work on something together. I agree shipping a complete project from top to bottom that actually runs online is hard. I'm stubborn so I just willed myself into doing it. But everyone can use help so please take my offer seriously. Also put contact info in your HN profile.

look forward to working with you.
The system is so very large, and it only takes one person to make one decision - in this case, a single federal prosecutor or his boss who decided he wanted to charge this case - to decide to utilize their power. You don't hear about the thousands of other prosecutors who use appropriate discretion, and don't file inappropriate charges/motions.
The link you cite refers to first gen drones and then dives quickly into "probably" territory. It goes on to state the reason they don't bother with on-board self destruct anymore... if you had any working comms with which to trigger it, you'd just use that to regain control.

They absolutely have the means. Good friends of mine ran intercept and recovery operations in Afganistan and Iraq. Further I agree completely that it was a political calculation. The risk of flying a fighter (it would be near impossible to retask a bomber or cruise missle into the role) and a recovery team into Iran's borders was way higher than the risk of them recovering anything sensitive.
Our exceptionalism began before the mining boom. Australia has been growing more or less continuously for decades, in spite of other crises and setbacks. It's a story of sensible reforms being progressively applied with an eye to the long term.
If ever need a network engineer on a part time or on a on-call basis. Let me know. I'm based out of Brisbane.

caskings@ionetworks.com.au
This reminds me of what David Siegel (creator of Gnome Do & Docky) said once at a Ubuntu Developer Summit. Each open source project should have a design advocate whose sole role is constantly make sure that as much though goes into usability as the code.
Reality check: Is Eric Schmidt’s Android optimism bravado or bull?
I think a large source of the UX quality gap for volunteer-driven Open Source products is the grossly underestimated cost of getting good UX. I submit (without proof) that volunteer Open Source efforts are great at competing on easily quantified dimensions (foos per cycle, feature parity) and not-as-great at competing on dimensions that take anything other than free time and a computer to evaluate.

It's very expensive to truly evaluate UX quality of complex products, except at a bare minimum level of "can users do what they want without being harassed". Measuring UX quality means finding the common appeal in a potentially large and heterogeneous group (as a heuristic: the more heterogeneous the audience's tastes, the less satisfying volunteer-based solutions tend to be). To find the common appeal in a large heterogeneous group you have to interact with a lot of people and measure them repeatedly because people's tastes for complex products is not something that can be well-modeled by point-in-time measurements (e.g. it took me a few weeks to discover my MacBook's 4-finger touchpad gestures).

Apache is an excellent competitor in the web server market (very narrow, highly technical audience). GIMP has a decent, but not huge following (somewhat broader audience, but still specialists). Open/Libre Office, GNUmeric, and GNUcash are not going to replace their commercial competitors any time soon.
or somehow figure how to get 10x more users

Not only are they currently growing quickly, their rate of growth is increasing.

They grew from ~2M at the start of 2010 to ~6M at the start of 2011 to ~20M at the end of 2011[1]. Growth in paid customer looks to be similar.

In September they stated they are getting 40,000 new users a day[2].

200 million users strikes me as unlikely, and doubling conversion while also getting 100 million users does too. It's not to say it can't happen, but I just don't see it for a paid consumer service.

Why do you think this? The market of "everyone who has a smartphone and needs to remember things" seems pretty large to me.

[1] http://blog.evernote.com/2011/01/04/evernote-2010-a-year-in-...

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/09/us-evernote-idUSTR...
Crikey leans left. Don't sweat it.
No, I meant the product line - you don't get this bug in their "pro" version, only "step ahead" - step ahead of the vendors presumably.

It seems hard to believe that private 0-days are legitimate pentesting apparatus - what are you testing in this case, whether your enterprise runs software that someone might find a bug in in the future?

As far as I understand it canvas/Immunity is firmly in the offensive security market anyway, aren't they actively part of the scene that derides "killing bugs" aka reporting security bugs to software vendors (for any price)?

I'm sure this bug hasn't been reported to Adobe, all they'd be doing is closing their marketing window.
I've been thinking about this situation myself this last month and wanted to help give back to the OSS community as a designer/front-end developer - but I didn't know where to start.

I'm considering building a simple matchmaking site that lets open source project developers request for design/front-end help and for designers/front-enders to offer up their time as well.

Would anyone be interested in this if I built it or has this already been done?
> If Amazon ever decides to open up an Australian subsidiary with warehouses located in Australia they will wipe out entire retail chains.

Amazon, IIRC, refuse to do so because of the ban on parallel importation of books.
I guess you could say Stripe gives you the shotgun, but you have to decide whether you want to use it properly, or blow your foot off.

So basically: Be smart about what goes on your sensitive, mission-critical payment-receiving pages, as you should be. It's not extremely difficult. A little bit more responsibility in turn for more flexibility.
I didn't miss anything: my most recent purchase from Amazon cost $11 in shipping and arrived in less than a week. I have a USD credit card, but even if you pay w/ a AUD card the currency conversion is instantaneous and costs maybe a couple of percentage points.

Shipping is often cheaper from outside of Australia than it is within Australia (http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/blogs/malcolms-blog/barrie...) which creates more of an incentive to shop internationally.

Where goods are purely digital (e.g., Amazon Kindle or O'Reilly e-books) the whole discussion around shipping costs is obviously moot.
Why artists and indies shouldn't write Spotify off – at least not yet
It's a photo frame, and their tablet resembles that photo frame (a legacy Samsung product that predates the iPad) at least as much as it resembles the iPad. The claim is that Apple's suit is spurious.
You took the words out of my mouth! Thanks for writing this.
It was already tried, through Java and LiveConnect. It was criticized as bloated and slow, and was eventually removed.
You know I read all these comments about how this is just incompetence, but I think it smells like payback for something. How interesting that it was all filed under seal. That speaks to intent to me more strongly than anything else.

How doing all this is legal is still beyond me. I hope someone SOMEWHERE is planning to sue the living crap out of these asshats.
Point taken.

FWIW, helping with the mentoring.is page (albeit a small project) is what got me started about this whole topic. I've been talking with a couple of mentors (who are heavily involved in open source themselves) about how I can contribute to some of my favourite projects, and it's definitely something I plan to do as I get free time.
missed the reasonable part

GOOG floated at 100x earnings, and that was really, really good value.

20x revenue seems more-than-reasonable for a high-growth company with a contained cost structure and a clear path to profitability.
Have you been on a congested highway or interstate?
Seriously, HMAC was built for this exact purpose. The primary design goal of HMAC was to combat insecure ad-hoc keyed hash schemes exactly like this. I saw this a couple months ago on moonshado's SMS API and after going back and forth with someone from their team I just let it go because they obviously didn't get it. For anyone who cares about security, this is a huge red flag.
And we all know how well that worked out for Borders Australia.

E-books obviously make import regulations of books irrelevant so I don't think Amazon would bother setting up a retail operation in Australia.

But if Amazon Web Services set up shop down under, well now, that would be quite disruptive!
The logic of this article is flawed and deliberately trying to deceive.
This is an article which assumes that the designer will value identical design problems as Apple. Hence they incorrectly argue that since Apple's design is simple, it's automatic to come to a similar design. It's trivial to argue that it's not only possible to solve the problems differently, but that other designers (e.g. HTC) have valued different design problems which result in a different looking tablet, that while similar(mostly for technical reasons), is different enough to escape scrutiny.

Not unlike the joke of the expert who knows where the place the chalk 'x' on the broken machine.(http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp) Apple's choice of favouring certain design problems over others is the result of their own research and how they want their users to experience their device. Valuing different problems produces different results, e.g. if Apple were adamant that the device should be held with one hand the design might approximate an artists palette or have a dedicated strap.

It's up to the lawyers from here, however Apple has been having success in demonstrating that the few differences between the devices are confusingly similar. Samsung's case is weakened by copying, not only the look and feel of the applications, but also the packaging, and even the 30 pin connector which rather than being an elegant solution it's a compatibility choice inherited from other iDevices.

To me, as a consumer, while my opinion is worthless in the matter: I feel it's a high profile knock off and something I'd expect to find in the chinese markets. Also it's association with Android damages the Android brand, allowing people to assume that Android is a rough counterfeit.
Avoiding SQL Injection Attacks
The New Elf II Computer
I think this would be a great project!
I do not know why companies insist on buying domains. We have given domains to open source groups for years for Free including Drupal.com, OsCon.com, and many others. and yet we have companies insist they want to own the domain. We are "open source for domains" - don't they understand it is free to use?
Kinect Gesture Recognition Competition
Good points all around. To respond to your main points:

"When looking for a job, any job..."
Ideally we should find the job that we are most motivated to do our best work at. It's a win for both parties. So I would try to avoid "finding any job" if it all possible. Granted it's easier said than done but that's the whole point. You want a place that you can grow at and that you don't dread going to work everyday. I think that's super important for a healthy life. So we should definitely aspire to be picky where we do our work. Also specifically to the current tech industry ; we can be picky. There is a ton of money in a ton of different kinds of companies in tech right now. Take advantage of it.

Secondly, regarding the concept of having a GitHub profile.
I agree, the simple fact of a GitHub profile existing is pretty meaningless. I do agree that most profiles have bash profiles, incomplete projects, and a ton of forks. Yup that is meaningless. I should state that when we talk about "having a GitHub profile" I necessarily mean having completed projects that you've created, from start to finish, and that actually run in the wild. A GitHub profile is simply the most relevant way to show of these kinds of projects. Sure you can link to the website your code runs on but I'd argue it's still better that you also Open Source the code so everyone can see your design decisions. You're right in that people aren't going to take the time to dig through your code, but what if the readme listed major stack components, and majore design decisions? Isn't that better than linking to a consumer-facing splashpage?

The key here as with anything, is that you market it correctly. A GitHub profile can be used to more effectively market skills and knowledge that a tech employer would be interested in.

I still contend that its actually better to not use a resume to get a job. This forces you to find some other way to make an impression with the company you are interested in. Granted you need to zone in on companies you are interested in and you can't apply the "shotgun" approach like you can with a resume ....

but isn't that the point!?
I don't think you really read what I wrote code-wise. I'm all for using accessors, that's why I wrote:

var prop = model.prop()

Note the parens there. I just like giving each accessor a unique method name as opposed to getting at all properties through a single get() method.
Shangai: edificio de 13 pisos acostado en el suelo