skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you waste some more brain cycles and add some links to these studies that show AT&T had the worst everything around 2007 when the iPhone came out?
CDNetworks, we tested global page load times with Gomez. CDNetworks was more stable and usually slightly faster.
The article raises some interesting points, but I think the author makes a major error by misusing the terms 'spyware' and 'malware' multiple times throughout.

The term 'spyware', in particular, has a well-defined meaning which indicates that the malicious software is communicating data back to the creator in order to exploit the user unknowingly. The author of this article uses the term to refer to non-general-purpose computers, and I think that's exceptionally misleading. The iPad could be considered a non-general-purpose computer, but most people would not go around labeling it as coming pre-loaded with 'spyware'.
Come hack the auto industry at CarWoo (YC09)
We are looking for an awesome Rails developer to help us take the online auto industry by storm. You'll join a great engineering and design team that's working hard to bring car-buying into the 21st century. The features you create will help turn the mostly terrible experience of buying a new car into a wonderful experience for our customers.

Responsibilities

Work with Michael, Erik, Scott, Rimas, Tim, Andrew, and Patrick to create a world class set of products. We're a small team (just 5 engineers and 2 designers), but we work smart and get a lot done. Here's some of the cool stuff we're working on right now: a queuing system to optimize our operations across the country, an iOS app, and a stealth web crawler.

We do story-driven development, so you'll get the chance to work on any or all of this stuff if you so choose.

Qualifications

- Deep knowledge of Rails and everything that goes along with it (MVC, REST, relational database design/SQL)

- Solid grasp on modern web application design using Javascript, HTML, CSS

- Experience with version control systems (we use Git/Github)

- Solid testing methodologies and willingness to write comprehensive tests before release

You get extra bonus points for:

- Extensive Javascript experience outside of JQuery (e.g. Backbone)

- Ability to write complex SQL

- Understanding of good RDBMS design. Experience optimizing queries.

- Experience with memcached, sphinx, and nginx

- Story-driven development

- Web service/API development (REST)

- Experience with iOS development (Objective-C)

- Ability to play ping-pong skillfully and/or drive a go-kart furiously

Perks

- Full Benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401k)

- 17 days of PTO (vacation)

- $5,000 to buy anything you want to get your work done (must include an Apple computer of some sort)

- A substantial amount of equity in the company

If you're interested, send an email with your résume and something interesting about yourself to michael@carwoo.com.

We're based in Silicon Valley, but if you live outside the Valley, we still really want to talk to you (we'll pay for your flight, hotel, and meals when you come interview with us).
I have to say that I like the perspective. I think that a good programmer should be able to use virtually any good language to create anything.

In particular, it seems worthwhile, if for example one is well versed in say Ruby, to learn C to get at the root of what is occurring "under the hood". I really enjoy Ruby, but I'm learning C to fully immerse myself in what is occurring with the bits and bytes (or at least the bytes).
SOPA: House to hear testimony from Reddit co-founder
Forget Intel in smartphones; Qualcomm aims to bring ARM to PCs
I don't find it surprising; I guess because he didn't actually admit to it being a video at any point during the talk. His excuse was that "they're running (playing) it backstage", which sounds hastily constructed, and would be a believable lie only if we hadn't seen the VLC dialog.
> So much of the change involved in the WordPress product is horribly unmanaged.

As the volunteer admin of a small blog network, I cannot agree more.

Having to upgrade whole versions just to get a security fix is terrible practice, but I'm forced to do it.
Why C++? Go (golang.org) is too much fun!
Yup, if you have to work with old iSeries servers, or just about anything dealing with old retailers in eCommerce, you've probably touched it one time or another.

Fortunately, the recode program makes it easy to switch between different encodings.
I wanted to repeat a comment I made in the thread about Cory's talk - as I'd be interested in the answer.

Many of today's printers, scanners and image editors already ship with restrictions designed to prevent the counterfeiting of currency. In effect general-purpose digital imaging has already been restricted.

What I wonder is how are these restrictions implemented, legally? Do laws or regulations require it? Or is it ad-hoc? Are OEM vendors persuaded or paid to implement it by the proprietors of the pattern matching technology (who in turn sell it to currency mints), or they concerned about vicarious liability if they don't?

I'm interested because this may serve as a template for how other restrictions are implemented in future.
What about using spam filters + Disqus?

<1% of spam gets through by using spam filters.
This would force twitter and others to open up their APIs to google and other search engines. Google and twitter had the deal before - not sure who pulled the plug when it expired in 2011.

Overall, this is probably good for openness of internet, IMHO,
Maybe I'm missing something. Twitter no longer provides Google a firehose feed, though I'm unsure where the breakdown originated. But Google does index Twitter and includes results from it. Google+ results get a higher ranking, and that's the issue, right?

From somebody outside the social media echo chamber (i.e. a user, not a maven), this seems like a tempest in a teapot. I'd welcome some elaboration.
Glad there are people spearheading discussions around backbone project organization.

I agree that backbone is very powerful, but talk is just beginning on how to fit it in to current web app projects that don't fit the boostrapped-singled-html page model
That's encouraging too, although I bet it doesn't refill
at the same rate as topping it up yourself?

No one is doing that sort of thing yet, so it's impossible to say how it would work if it were done.

I think we Americans have a pretty good idea of how much the current situation sucks. The issue people worry about has three aspects (in a very oversimplified view):

1) How do we make it not suck for individuals?
2) How do we, as a society, stop spending 16% of GDP (and climbing) on healthcare?
3) How do we avoid some sort of explicit rationing?

People's worries are that a lot of proposed solutions for #1 seem to imply giving up on #2 or #3. I suspect the worries about #3 are overblown, but it's hard to say without doing an experiment of course.

Luckily, perhaps, experimenting on humans is considered acceptable in politics. ;)
This whole time, I thought I had a sleeping problem because I couldn't fall asleep until after 12:30 a.m. or 1 a.m. and I would get irritable and tired from 3-6 p.m. Now if only that didn't clash with my work hours.
You mention Macs doing the same job being real pricey and I'm wondering how you figure that? I have a 4 year old iMac and a netbook running Xununtu. The tools I use on both machines are basically the same with the big difference Bering my text editor (Chocolat on Mac and SublimeText on Linux). Other than that all the tools are free for both platforms. I've got my AMP stack, RVM, PHP, Apache, SQLite, etc., etc., all free. Even Xcode 4 is free on Lion and 3.6 is free if you run anything less. The Mac itself is more expensive but doing any equivalent work as I would on Linux doesn't require a real powerful Mac anyway. I love them both equally but prefer my Mac. It may be a comfort issue as my Linux box is a netbook but I digress. I'm just wondering, besides the cost of a mid grade Mac to begin with, what makes you say Mac development is expensive?
And sometimes it's useful to engage a new audience with an older, but useful, article.
That's exactly what Doctorow is arguing. He says that we don't actually have a way to make a computer capable of only running specific applications, we just have general purpose computers that are loaded with spyware/malware to prevent running every program as an approximation to a specialized computer.
Writing C++ code that works reliably in a benign setting is not a big deal. With the right libraries, it is almost as easy and perhaps only a little slower than writing in a high-level language; you can't, for instance, really believe that everyone who writes a popular iOS application is a solid bare-metal C programmer.

But writing reliable C++ code that works under adversarial conditions is very hard; hard enough that the best C programmers in the world have track records like "only one theoretically-exploitable memory corruption vulnerability in the release history", and quite a few people who set out with "no vulnerabilities" in their project charter end up with way worse records.

I've found over the last couple years that one way to get C/C++ code fit into a web application is via "nosql" databases, particularly Redis; let something like Ruby/Rack or Python/WSGI or Java Servlets soak up the hostile HTTP traffic, and use it to drive an async API over Redis.

The less C/C++/ObjC code you have talking to an adversary, the better off you are.

I'm a C/C++ programmer; C is my first language, from when I was a teenager. I respect C programmers. But if I was interviewing a developer and they told me their gut was to write a C program to do something a Rails program would normally do, and it wasn't an exceptionally specific circumstance, I would think less of them.
Don't count on jailbreak and unlock. Jailbreaking is easy, but unlocking a phone with a new baseband will prove quite challenging.
Parallel Javascript
It's the main domain: https://joindiaspora.com/

Public content is indexed by Google, like the 'cake' tag: https://joindiaspora.com/tags/cake
THANK YOU! I totally agree that it is not unreasonable to write websites in C/C++.

I've just started looking into writing Nginx modules, which are generally written in C. Now that I've started to understand it, I can write secure content handlers in a reasonable time and reasonable effort, whilst being able to use the exhaustive libraries on offer, as well as my experience with the language. Couple this with great performance, and I can't justify writing apps in PHP anymore. We're moving more and more processing to the client , as we have realised that networks are pretty slow. Well then, how do you justify writing slow code behind the slow network?

I highly encourage the author to look at writing Nginx modules, possibly not on a hackathon, since you get security and fantastic performance for free!
Great in theory, but it's impractical to expect that you're going to get your friends to give access to their FB data so it can show up in your search results. Just awkward.
The $1,000 genome: are we there yet?
> How did you manage to learn anything in your profession then?

I cared about it. I will forget to eat and sleep if I am studying something I am motivated about. The rest I just learn as needed only if am forced to (read "when stuff breaks"). Not a very good approach I guess.
The VPN-only wireless network: phone home to get online
I don't see what the big deal is here. He throws inputs at a function not meant to handle them and gets a segfault. Isn't this more-or-less expected from all C functions?

We are getting separated from that kind of behavior. Nowadays the language is generally expected to protect you from yourself.
Why the downvote? I'm not exaggerating, I've seen several Wordpress sites hacked in the past few months, one of them several times (after they reinstalled and updated from scratch too). I know it's a target because it's popular, but it also has a long track record of security issues, and isn't particularly well written code...

On the other hand, alternatives like Drupal are just too complicated for users, which leads to them simply not keeping their sites updated. So I'm building an alternative that focuses on minimalism, so it's lightweight and fast, and easy because it's uncluttered.

Obviously I have a long way to go in terms of supporting the plethora of plugins Wordpress users enjoy, but I've got a solid showing already for being a 6-month-old project. I've been implementing CMSes for about 12 years now, from newspaper and university sites to simple ma & pa sites, so I've personally made all of the mistakes you can make and learned what does and doesn't work.

So I don't mean to just disparage Wordpress, but it's a platform that's been stretched far beyond its central purpase and it shows, and I think an alternative is due.
[..] I haven't had a reason to touch them. The few times I've seen or heard about them, it's all been linked to frothy people clamoring for the latest shiny thing.

Avoiding a technology by applying a frivolous standard like this is a good way to miss out on useful learning experiences.

"Doing" is great, but stretching your boundaries and trying new things outside of your comfort zone is an essential part of being a well rounded programmer.
Antitrust+?
This "nap wheel" is useful for finding the right time to nap:

http://www.saramednick.com/htmls/book/napwheel.htm
This is absolutely true. Firefighting used to be handled by the private sector through insurance companies. This was "socialized" mainly because of the free rider problem - firefighters would put out a fire even if the house was Not insured. Now all houses in a town pay for firefighting through local taxes.
I'm not from Bocoup, but I want something like this to build, test, deploy the client portion of my apps and then proxy api calls to backend services.
I'm confused. If a company pays people money to build stuff for them (as in India or Indonesia), you criticize them as exploiting the poor.

And if they stop paying people money to build stuff for them (as in Flint Michigan), you also criticize them for exploiting the poor?
I love how Joel manages to come off as a total snarky douchebag in his writing.
Production code is supposed to define away the assertions. It is an actual error to manage important program state with asserts.

(That doesn't make these particular asserts an error).
The big reason for avoid C++ is to avoid bugs and security issues. In particular, overflow attacks. That the language requires constant, conscious diligence to achieve a security baseline that comes for free in other languages is wasteful.

Then there's the library/tools situation. I did all the work for my honours dissertation in Ruby in part because the Ruby ecosystem is vast and vibrant (sometimes inconveniently so).

I imagine that the C++-for-the-web ecosystem is going to be a bit more spartan.
Anyone using GWT has been doing this since... well, since GWT exist.

There are challenges of this approach.
If copyright were declared unconstitutional, that would render the GPL (et al) toothless.

Edit:I'm sorry that someone was offended by this, but I thought it was worth mentioning given that many of those that might celebrate arguments against copyright would consider this an undesirable consequence of that happening. I never know with the HN crowd.
Each hub has its own database to store the data about its own user(s). Then the hubs can communicate with each other so you can "friend/follow" users from other hubs.
Here is a way to generate simple, wonderful pink noise (with a slight tremolo) from the commandline, if you have sox installed. It somewhat mimics the sounds of waves on a beach - I find it very relaxing.

A nice side affect (and the reason I played around with it originally) is that it helps mask tinnitus when it gets too annoying (I find that if tinnitus flares up too loud, it can make it more difficult to fall asleep).

The cmdline:

play -t sl -r48000 -c2 - synth -1 pinknoise tremolo .1 40 < /dev/zero
How?? What nation would be a distant second place???

I have lived in three countries and feel that America has the best system for sure.

Cheers
The Rise and Fall of Programming Languages in 2011
Not saying it isn't an approach, I'm just saying,it's apples and oranges. When someone suggests that OSX doesn't have a linux style package management, they are technically correct.
> you haven't written any complicated software that deals with other people's text data

Actually you are right. Most input and output of our software is not text. And we mostly work for the US military (so UI is in English). This probably explains why. However in general I feel I should know more about. It is sort one of those things like when we were talking about interview questions and someone brought up Pascal's triangle. I felt I should have known about what it is, but I couldn't remember. It is not something I need to know for work, but rather something I felt embarrassed for not knowing.
Dave Fayram's lovely coding setup
We are talking abou K&R here. Please use the less spacious TrueBraceStyle instead of the heretic Allman style. :)

Joke aside, the problem I see in your argument is that lack of braces is also a cognitive load. If braces are always there I can safely ignore them but if they can be ommited I need to worry if a certain piece if code is braced or not when I read and edit it.

The only exception I currently live with is single line if statements, as long as the statement is on the same line as the `if`
Many presumably know about the issue, but reluctantly decide that the scope of their project doesn't justify the effort in worrying about it, especially when there won't conceivably be much non-English text interacting with their project. This is particularly true if an integral part of your environment screws things up: e.g. your programming language, web server, targeted device/browser, etc. does text wrong.
Welcome to software. If it isn't changing, it's probably been abandoned.
FYI - "Click, close your eyes and count to ten" was actually closer to fifty on the first load. I went back and clicked the button again, and it only took about seven seconds. Just thought you should be aware.
The jquery page hasn't made it into the new site yet, but still true.

VJS also has free CDN hosting, and is pretty easy to skin both HTML5 and Flash using just CSS. MEJS is a pretty decent project though, as are a few of the many other HTML5 video players. So not my place to say which is best, but we're working hard to make Video.js pretty great.
Thanks! Making "handlers" feel like ordinary PHP scripts that execute top-down seems like the most natural way in PHP, since that's how the language itself works. It's not much different than inverting the require statement, your front controller includes your handler after initializing some helpers for you :)

It's not as "structured" as methods in a class that extends a Controller class, but it works just as well and eliminates a good bit of boilerplate code in the process. Also helps new developers get up to speed quickly I've found.
Ah, you grabbed onto the second sentence while dismissing the first. I avoid them because I haven't had a reason to bother. The task could be accomplished some other way, and was.

I've used plenty of things used by "foamers" out of necessity. I don't enjoy it, but it does get the job done.
During the age of conquest Spain was able to extract natural resources (such as minerals), but for the most part, Britain, Portugal, France benefitted from the trade with their colonists --not trade with new world peoples.

I think it could be argued that this reliance on natural resources by Spain, contrasted with commerce favored by Britain, for example, resulted in the slow decline of imperial power by Spain. I think by the 1800s, Spain had pretty much ceased to be economically relevant vis-a-vis the more commerce oriented Empires of the time.

A crude analogy would be China selling to their diaspora outside China proper.
I've really struggled with sleep schedules recently (varying from getting up at 6am to 3pm within a week, due to various late-night engagements whilst trying to get up earlier).

I have found that setting an alarm and counting down from 10 to force myself out of bed unnaturally early has left me feeling really awake once showered and very dozy around mid-day. Time will tell if this is sustainable but it feels pretty amazing right now, far more productive hours (in amount and intensity) than when I was sleeping 8-9hours a night.
Watch Dance Moms Season 2 Episode 1 S02E01 Free Streaming
Watch Dance Moms Season 2 Episode 1 Everyone's Replaceable Streaming for Free Dance Moms Season 2 Episode 1 Full S02E01 Free Watch Dance Moms Season 2 Episode 1 streaming
Maybe they're just encouraging you to run your own server.
Thank you! This is Hacker News! Why isn't everyone trying to solve the problem?!
Not hardly communist any more, actually.

The other option would not be to 'starve', most likely, since there is an abundance of low-skill, low-pay work to be found. But don't be fooled into thinking the government (especially the local government) or the companies care about the workers.

No one will be doing them any favors.
coffeescript might be worth a look. I know my enjoyment of writing javascript is much improved since starting to use cs.
How  to Save Your Brain from the Internet
A few things I wish I could tell all newbies about staying out of trouble with Unicode:

* Use UTF-8 for external text, whenever possible. If your collaborators have other ideas, bribe them with tasty cookies or something, because this right here solves a lot of hassles. There are some circumstances in which a different encoding might have its advantages, but it is tremendously reassuring to be able to say "Ah, text! I shall decode it as UTF-8!" and be right. This has the advantage of being compatible with ASCII input, and avoiding the perennial UTF16/UCS2 confusion.

* Make it explicit that you're using UTF-8. For example, if you're making a web page, be sure to set "Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8" in the HTTP headers, to make the browser's content encoding detection trivially correct.

* When dealing with strings in your favorite programming language, always know whether it's an array of Unicode code-points, or of bytes in UTF-8, or some third messed-up thing. Not all strings are the same kind of thing! Unless your programming language has this distinction enforced by its type system, of course.

* Be aware when you're crossing the boundary between Unicode code points and Unicode in some external encoding. Decoding can fail, so be prepared. It's best to reject invalid text as early as possible.

* When in doubt, use other people's code for Unicode handling. For most of the crazy crap you run into in the wild, there is well-tested crazy-crap-handling code.
Flask-Skeleton - a boilerplate for flask
Yup. I was just pointing out the misuse of the terminology. Specialized computers certainly are, as you say, just general-purpose computers with restrictive software. But calling all of the restrictive software 'spyware' or 'malware' is unfair to a multitude of devices that are intended to operate in a specialized way. I think it's scare-tactics and a failure of the author to generalize all restrictive software as 'spyware' or 'malware'
According to my zeo deep sleep usually starts way before 45 minutes into sleep.
This looks like what I have been thinking about developing for the last few days. Thanks for sharing, it looks really interesting and it's going to save me several days of work.
All the things he listed that WordPress doesn't have are the reasons why I like it. With the exception of better caching/CDN integration, I like that WordPress is simple, straightforward, and super hackable with plugins and theme functions. A lot of people don't even know all the capabilities. Few know about the WP Transients capabilities, for example. They're quite powerful and useful.