skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The list saddens me, to be quite honest. Yes, SOPA is morally wrong and technically stupid, and I don't think the government can or should fight piracy like this. But I think it devalues the cause if such a large portion of the "emergency list" is porno and piracy web sites. Seriously? The real reasons this is dangerous is because of civil rights and the damage that's already been caused to legitimate businesses by government incompetence (e.g. erroneously changing the DNS of small businesses to forward to an accusation of child sex crimes because they happened to share infrastructure with the real criminal).

The fact remains that piracy is dishonest, and only serves to legitimize the claims of Big Media. Say what you want about DRM, copyright law and ridiculous terms of service, but if you're really someone who believes in free government and the important role of the Internet in preserving it, I hope you join with me in rolling your eyes at people who torrent illegal media and worry about the effect of SOPA on their porn viewing. There are plenty of ways to buy inexpensive, DRM-free music, and plenty of ways to actually support the artists who make the music.
Engineering is horseshit
1. why does stackoverflow close all the interesting questions?

2. fuck is wrong with javascript?
There's some info in refman: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#8

There was a more detailed summary at http://www.lua.org/work/doc/#changes but it looks like it's been taken down. There's the Google cache: http://tinyurl.com/832f273
Recently...

Mgmt: We need to replace this system ASAP!
Me: What does it do?
Mgmt: We don't know.
Me: Who knows?
Mgmt: Maybe this girl.
Girl: I'm too busy to talk, but make sure nothing breaks.

I did end up writing a replacement system. What I found out was all the people who were 'too busy' to talk or email me back with information suddenly responded when I took down their part of the system as I worked to replace it. I've never had to do a worse project and I'm happy it's over.
Hackers vs CarrierIQ
My opinion on the recent use of word "hacker" in Software Engineering in the light of CarrierIQ fuss.
Are You Taking The Best Photos Possible With Your Digital Camera?
Tried it on my T-Mobile Nexus S and it worked perfectly. Can't speak to other carriers but doubt that it matters.. try at your own risk though.
Snowy Google
In Defense of The Designer Fund
Goodbye With
Why you need a Pyramid at home
Yes, they seized 150 domains. I would not be surprised if they printed the list out and handed it over, and someone had a very boring afternoon of banning them. What happens when a counterfeiter registers 1000 domains? or 10000? or 100000? That's all besides the point. The point is that somebody who knows this is a bad idea had to be involved in making it happen. I want that person to stand up and refuse to do it. There are thousands of engineers working at the companies that are advocating this law. How long would Sony stay in business if its engineering staff up and quit?
2000 emails a day sounds like a profound lack of organization. What kind of company is this?

I like how you feel you protected the developer even while he was criticizing you for not doing any real work. That sums up a lot of big co. work relationships.
SOPA has NOT been postponed until 2012
If you think like that, then you shouldn't go to California either, same earthquake problem and the state is broke.

Chile is a very stable country, equal or less corruption than the US, and the best economy in south america. Not to mention really beautiful and great weather.

You should stop worrying so much and start enjoying life a bit more.
Thanks for the AltDevBlogADay reference. I hadn't heard of this.

Your suggestions seem spot on. I hadn't thought to incorporate the GitHub api for collaborative features like you outline.

I had an idea for a reputation system backed by GitHub auth. Basically any githubber can upvote an article as a kind of endorsement. The idea being that a reader can trust the source content a bit more knowing it has x upvotes or what not. It's just an idea at this point and would have to work with a lot of javascript/jsonp/widget stuff going on.

But back to your collaboration suggestions, yes definitely something I'm writing down! Hopefully working with native GitHub integration will spur more adoption.
Depends on if things are being decided that will impact my ability to do my job.
I don't know how the developers are feeling, but years ago I was in a similar situation a couple different times. Poured my heart and soul into excellent best in class design and then had it all yanked out and dumped in a vat of acid. Years of my work, of my life, was gone and squandered and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. The couple thousand hours of unpaid overtime was just insult on top of injury. The last time it happened was from a decision by clueless MBAs after a hostile talent acquisition by a Fortune 500 outfit. The talent doesn't always stick around after that sort of shafting. It's like someone has murdered your baby and then wants to to stick around and help them move furniture across town. No thanks.

One of the best arguments for open source is your work can't be trashed and dismissed by financiers and people with business degrees who have no taste and no idea how to create anything. The one thing that redeemed HP in its recent move to trash WebOS was the decision to open source it. Without that, many of the best engineers on the project would have ended up leaving the company in disgust.
I don't think knowing how the internet works is a gargantuan task. The basic concepts, though abstract compared to the physical world, are rather simple: addressing, routing, name resolution...

The tough part is knowing how unpredictable humans and their demands will affect network performance at any given point at any given time. What's worse is mixing in geography and politics, corporations and "peering agreements," etc.
1 − 2 + 3 − 4 + · · ·  =  1/4
Increase Sales By Making Customers Buy From You More Often
Increasing the number suggesting times your customers buy from you is possibly the easiest way (pretty) much the same as increase sales, improve profit and grow your business.

Why? Because it can cost up equivalent to5times fresh of a piece with win a mint customer than it does of a piece with get an authentic customer equal to buy from you again. You invest lots indicating time and money amounting to sign upa virgin customer, but every sale rear that involvesvery undersized cost. So you actually make another profit on every sale you make equivalent to an realized customer.

Here are a few strategies like increase sales up to the minute your business by moving your customers amounting to buy from you more often
Yes indeed, my suggested strategy assumes that there is no penalty for guessing wrong except on the day of the exam.
Thanks, I have a T-Mobile device and it is working great. Posting from it now :)
I used to work for a university High Performance Computing Lab. This was one of the things I loved about it. We were 3 guys running the whole system (10k cores) and we somehow slipped between the cracks of all departments and were left to do our own thing. When a professor or student would request something, we could make the change live while still on the phone with them. While we did try to put all features into our ticket tracker at least for records sake, it was nice not having to go through a big approval process to make the changes.
Right. I think more than the fact that they didn't know how the internet works was the arrogance that they didn't need to know how it worked or listen to/trust people who say they know how it works to make a decision.
Chargify Recurring Billing
Chargify is the best way to securely manage billing. Recurring billing software makes it easier to keep track of your recurring payments. See how it works!
Unsolicited advice
I would equate democracy to a ship where the captaincy is decided by whomever promises the most goodies out of the ship's rations.
So now that module(...) is deprecated does anyone know the expected standard pattern? The changes say to just build it with code (setting _ENV?) but do the devs have a "right way" to do it?
Even more mind-blowing: Apple, one of the most forward-looking companies in the world, requires faxed forms for enrollment in their paid dev programs. They won't accept them via email (even though you know the fax number is a fax-to-email setup) and refused my faxed PDFs (copies of an electronic filing) of my articles of incorporation because they weren't authentic (read: photocopied) enough - despite being the authoritative (PDF) copies from the state.
I'm in no hurry, as I just got a Nexus S. Wouldn't it run Ice Cream Sandwich worse than it runs Gingerbread?
Thanks for clarifying, that does seem to imply pretty widespread authority. What if commerce is only an incidental use of something, though? Commerce is related somehow to a huge number of things which couldn't be considered primarily commercial. There has to be some reasonable limit placed on these things. The internet, radio, newspapers, and so on are not used primarily for commerce.
Anyone know if there is a good custom ROM for the Nexus S 4g?
If the browser can remember a BrowserID token, it could also remember an OpenID URL. If the browser can have chrome that triggers a BrowserID login, it could have chrome that triggers an OpenID (3.0) login and does all the redirects behind the scenes. I think with OpenID+OAuth the RP can get an email address.
I used an unoptimized ROM a few weeks back for the Nexus S 4G. Scrolling performance is much better in the launcher and browser than Gingerbread. The high memory use though slowed application loading (I'm guessing the apps kept getting kicked out of RAM) enough that I switched back to Gingerbread. Supposedly, the real ICS image for Nexus S is optimized for the device's mere 384 MB of ram.
Wow, that makes a HUGE difference in price. Now it makes a lot more sense and leaves me wondering about your QA practices. Just pulling your chain. ;-)

Anyway, the fact that you are responding here and being active would definitely make me feel like your company would be the first to check out. This is similar to how I feel about WePay as well. Their ceo and engineers read HN and respond to comments. It is the dawn of a new era of access and support.

Cheers.
Actually, I have no problem with Congress lacking knowledge about how the Internet works, as long as they keep their hands off of it.
"Directive 595 is as follows: 'Not null constraints give lack of flexibility, more costly evolution, inhibit the use of the database acting as a service to applications and make it an inhibitor to evolution.' As such, please remove from all production databases." To find out how this ends: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Directive-595.aspx
Helen, would love your feedback on http://www.uencounter.me - thanks.
I object to the connections drawn in this article. I am a tech professional which means it is not terribly uncommon to have the nerd/geek label placed upon me, but I have never and will never have anything to do with the comics/videogame culture being described here.
Fair enough, as my grandfather wouldn't consider learning seed germination and modification techniques a gargantuan task either, it's quite simple in his eyes.

To fully understand a new topic every day enough to vote on is the gargantuan task I should have been referring to.
Keynote for Continuous Integration in PHP
Ah, thanks! These are much more informative.
Yeah. Look what we did to Visa and Mastercard after they screwed Wikileaks. Cisco's gonna be totally scared!
Science in the Kitchen (Nathan Myhrvold's Harvard lecture)
That doesn't seem to be the important part of the article? I think the title (ought to) imply "Some nerds..." anyway. Some people understand privilege better than others, often due to their own circumstances. Being gay has given me an interesting insight into privileges that span sexuality and gender issues and having a close female friend who tells me about her daily experiences repeatedly shocks me into new realizations of how good I have it as a male, even if not a straight male.
Pragmatic Git Flow
This site still looks blank with Javascript off.

How hard is it to provide content in 2011?
This is the exact opposite of my experience working on the USCMs Tier 1 team at Fermilab (we took data directly from the CMS detector at the LHC, processed it, and distributed it across the world).

We were a team of 10 people, constantly bogged down in red tape. Oh! You want iptables rules on your thousands of nodes that are publicly facing on a Class B to the world with no firewalls, etc in the way? That's 8 months of back and forth with PHDs, committees, etc.

Needless to say, I left after a year and moved to someplace where I could effect much more change in a more rapid pace.
That seems to be the entire focus of the article. A modified headline would have saved me my time.

An article about male privilege in the tech industry, which is what I expected seeing as this is HNs, I would have appreciated. This however meant nothing to me.
Psychopaths, sociopaths, and hackers.

I could draw you a venn diagram if you like.

I can't believe in all your experience, you haven't met extremely smart hackers who are also utterly immoral. A situation like this just means they will be worth more money.
A Day At Asana
We should stop conflating the term 'geek' with the term 'nerd'. I think most people familiar with the cultures in question would agree that there is an increasingly clear difference between the two (although membership in the two is certainly correlated.)
I guess I took it as more of a general intro to privilege for the lay-person or 'lay-nerd'. I mean, take the basic concepts of privilege and extend them to almost ANY females-in-tech-industry topic and you'll see it fits.

It's just like the thread a few weeks ago about women asking for raises or more competitive pay with a shocking number of HN users saying "it's their own fault for not asking for more", ignoring the research, discussions and psychology behind why women don't ask for raises (they're rejected, shunned in the workplace and often later let go).

(For the "record", I agree that there is a potential for a better discussion of male privilege that would be more appropriate for HN that would probably foster a more directed, specific discussion.)
Do flashing, moving ads violate Internet access for the disabled?
I am autistic and have a serious problem with sensory overload. Now flashing, moving and dynamic ads are all the craze on the Internet, but these adds give me significant problems in being able to read the text on the pages they are on. Beyond that I perceive them as being mildly painful. When I was a web developer on large projects in the nineties there was a significant concern about making our web sites legally compliant with laws about Internet access for the disabled. I'm afraid the web is turning into a sea of dancing boloney. Are there any laws that regulate this? If not, do people think there should be laws that regulate this? I also suffer from the autistic tendency towards excessive honesty and so I have been reluctant to use ad blockers. If nothing else are there good options for blocking these sorts of adds. It would kill me if I could no longer use the web and I'd hate to have to use something like Lynx.
Note...its not over yet as CarrierIQ is still running jobs ads for android developers
I don't think there's a concrete, universally accepted difference. Pretty much everyone has their own definition of "geek" and "nerd," and how much they overlap, and most of those definitions are mutually incompatible.

Also, http://xkcd.com/747/
Do they have importantly distinct definitions? A quick check via Google implies they're both about "unfashionable or socially inept person" or "foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious" but that's not necessarily how I view either term.
I know why missed calls work for personal use.

But the use case described just sounds like an 800 number replacement. A better solution would be to have an 800 number than a missed call feature that calls you back do you don't have to pay.
People can have different, mutually incompatible definitions of the two, that's fine. All I'm saying is that very few people who have any opinion on the subject think the two refer to the same set of values and behaviors.
The Lua developers are generally not very fond of endorsing a single "right way" to do things. But basically, it's something like:

-- localize all the stuff you need
local _ENV = {}
-- module code
return _ENV

So really not that much code to add yourself.
OVH building huge datacenter in Montreal, 6x more servers than Facebook
You're making a lot of assumptions there. The idea that there are finite number of possible thoughts is highly improbable given the number of things there aren't finite numbers of.

If you argue from a base mechanics point of view (e.g. Your brain is basically a hard drive with n bits of storage an thus can only enter 2^n states) then you're assuming that in this hypothetical afterlife your physical limitations are maintained. Since your basic assumptions about the universe have been demonstrated to be wrong, assuming this particular assumption will be correct is drawing a very long bow. And the initial assumption is very much in doubt.

To my mind an atheist is someone who has yet to encounter a plausible religion, not (a) someone who defines their beliefs in opposition to one religion (e.g. I do not believ heaven is a green pasture populated by angels playing harps and dead Christians tending sheep) or (b) someone who is closed to the possibility that a plausible religion might exist.
As an outside observer, I'd say that speaking about male privilege from the context of comic book stores is like speaking about racism from the context of 19th century Alabama. It's just so blatant to anybody disconnected from it that it is very hard to make comparisons to other contexts.
I understand the author's frustration that Congress does not understand how the internet works. But does anyone know of any simple article or books that would be able to teach non-tech savvy Congressmen how the internet works? The material would probably need to be short enough for them to digest in 1 full day at a maximum. If anyone has any great suggestions, I would be happy to pass them along to my Congressman.
I always figured that "nerd" implied some sort of technical knowledge or scientific mindedness. Hence slashdot being "news for nerds, stuff that matters". Geek then I suppose, would be your standard comic book store customer.

Enough people use them interchangeably that it seems there is no longer any meaning. We should probably just jettison both words.
Apple Fiscal Q1 2012: The Biggest Earnings Blowout in History
And with that, I agree.
Is anyone seriously surprised that this is taking place? Zynga runs a business that is, at it's heart, parasitic and predatory. Such businesses may enjoy short term success but cannot be sustainable in the long run.
If you turn javascript on, the text appears but it is still pretty blank.
How do you go further west when you've reached the Pacific Ocean? Sail to China?
Wikipedia considers strike in response to SOPA
You are reading the news, I am trying to read between the lines. My assumption is that the in house council is saying the same thing the reporters are, and that the CEO is saying, "fuckit, let's do what is best for customers".

I could be completely wrong, but given that Sprint unfucked their customer service during Hesse's tenure, I speculate that he is actually a decent guy. I am obviously massively over extrapolating my own personal experience.

Having written this comment, I now realize how ridiculous my initial comment was. I based an opinion on the integrity of a company and its chief executive only on a CSR experience. You are absolutely right, I have no real basis for my opinion. --Though I did just buy some sprint stock... sometimes you have to go with your gut :)
I used jekyll to build zv.github.com and I also hate Liquid. Markdown is the ticket. The source is of course available on github.
Cinch, By Palantir, introduces annotation-based MVC for Swing
Engineers are not usually characterized as "expressive creatures", it has nothing to do with pushing pixels to make things pretty and is actually about problem solving, and how does debating "look & feel" apply to engineers in the sense that it applies to designers ? Almost nothing in that article applies as a criticism of engineering so the point that you can replace [graphic] design with engineer fails.

Without engineering you have no product. And, as demonstrated by numerous applications, especially in the corporate world, you can have products without any input from a [graphic] designer or consideration for graphics design.

There is definitely a case to be made about over-engineering, doing engineering for engineering sake, and ignoring other aspects of building a product, but this certainly isn't it so I'm ether missing something or this post is ?
Many people mistakenly assume that MapReduce is only useful when dealing with Google or Facebook scale datasets. Nowadays, MapReduce is simply a convenient data access pattern, particularly when your data is spread across multiple machines. For example, Riak employs the MapReduce paradigm as its "primary querying and data-processing system." [0]

Clearly, Riak does not expect each and every query to run for hours and involve TBs of data. MapReduce is just a straightforward way to process distributed data.

[0] http://wiki.basho.com/MapReduce.html
Or like developers that got promoted to management and have no idea how to actually manage.
Dear Congress,

It's no longer okay (and never has been) to listen to people who are paid to convince you to pass a law that benefits only them. Instead, you should listen to the people who know what they are talking about and aren't being paid.
This site is part of the Gawker network, which recently had a redesign for the entire network of sites. The response from the community was very critical.
Just installed and fully functional for those who care. (Nexus S on Wind Mobile)
Proliferation of Choices Hurts BlackBerry Sales
Sorry friend, but english has been modern since around the sixteenth or seventeenth century, depending on how you look at it. The language of shakespeare is literally the language of today. The changes since then have been minor when compared to the history of the language.
Your metaphor is completely lost on me. Care to elaborate?
A totally new approach just means you have to support two incompatible standards, most likely with more bugs and inconsistencies than you have now. I'd much rather see all the browser momentum we've gained lately going towards more comprehensive support of the existing standards, as flawed as they may be.
I believe if Dwolla had a rash of stolen funds, the insurance of its partner bank would not cover it (since the insurance covers the bank, not Dwolla).

The US is much different from the rest of the world as far as I know. There are thousands of banks and even more non-banks that have established ACH routing numbers. Fraudsters look for banks or companies with the laxest account opening procedures.

There are some notable payments companies that went out of business because of fraud (NextCard, BankOne EmoneyMail). When that happens, there's a very real possibility of customers losing money.
Apple co-founder Ronald Wayne shares early company documents and drawings
When you say "islamic nation," are you referring to one with majority islamic citizens, in the same way that britain, america or sweden are "christian nations," or are you referring to islamic theocracies?

It seems you are referring to the latter, but you should be careful bandying around such terms. There are highly secular democracies with muslim populations, such as turkey.
Kid legally changes his name to Mark Zuckerberg
Good catch by MailChimp. Truth is, though, AWS does churn out a lot of exciting (for developers) services.