skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most comments here are dead on:

1.) Youtube, Twitter, Facebook... blocked
2.) Google... rerouted to HK and still censored
3.) Gmail... increasingly unreliable
4.) Chinese mostly don't care, but only because of length of time that the situation has endured. China runs on 'Guanxi', or relationships. In other words, rampant nepotism and (sometimes) thinly veiled corruption. You start company Y competing with foreign company X. You get the government to block company X's service in China. Within a fairly short amount of time, your company's site dominates, and people mostly forget about the foreign competitor.
5.) Foreigners are generally not bothered when using VPNs (I have had excellent experience with one in particular, but avoid posting it publicly for obvious reasons). Assuming, of course, the use is apolitical.
6.) Young Chinese web users have developed conventions for speaking about sensitive topics in ways that (somewhat) evade censorship, such as using homophones, metaphors, etc.
7.) The general atmosphere in China, as regards the censorship, contains less animosity than most westerners would assume. Most web users understand that censors are just doing their job, and occasionally even speak to censors directly in their social network site posts, such as to make a plea to leave the post up for just a little bit longer before censoring it.
8.) In general people in China do desire change, but they're largely pragmatic about it. They've seen incredible progress in their lifetime, and though there are occasional steps backward that are frustrating, the overall march still tends to be in the right general direction (the nature of information - it naturally breeds freedom, bringing access to more information, and thus more freedom, in a virtuous cycle). Young Chinese people are often more informed about political issues than young westerners, through their prolific use of social networking sites (yes - even more than their counterparts in more developed nations).

Ah, back to the point... use a good VPN, and all will be well.
FYI: Seems to work now.
Chrome Extension to create 3D stereoscopic anaglyph
Getting a foothold in the marketplace by launching a city specific version is great. Or cater the service to a niche group, such as medical students or other group looking for social options.
> Nice. So people are forced to set up their own mail services and all.
> Much more secure than assuming some corporation will value your data.

Only if you do it right.
Boston uma cidade de História e Cultura - Estados Unidos da América
What Americans typically refer to as "salsa" is not interchangeable with guacamole.
Hey BarackObama  Please don't extradite Gary McKinnon
You can self publish
The topics menu switches order. that makes it hard for me to know what's going on.

(This is a friendly comment, even if it seems terse.)
Well, you don't strictly need to enable another repository. If you have VLC or Totem installed, then running:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

...will set everything up for you.
As others have noted, the money isn't directly coming from companies, but from people who state those companies as their employers. So what's going on here may just be the "correlation does not equal causation" phenomenon.
Sounds like he's wanting to use a lot of native C++ libraries, so I imagine he'd still run into performance problems even if he found a way to use JNI with JRuby.
Having done the startup thing and lost my shirt in the process - you can read my Lessons from the Land of Hard Knocks - http://wp.me/1pqm - realize there are no guarantees of an ROI in monetary terms. However, as a teacher you have a much higher probability of actually making a difference and touching peoples lives than getting excellent an excellent Karmic ROI.

That said, I'm still working toward my entrepreneurial goals, just a little wiser and in a little more measured fashion - and this time I'm focused on working on something that I really care about whether I make a dollar on it or not.
Have you actually gotten any results? I just get a nav bar with nothing in any of the tabs.
Have you reported it to Apple?
If you haven't watched these "Fun to imagine" with Feynman videos from YouTube, I really recommend them. You just can't capture his joy and passion with a transcript.

"Fun to Imagine" playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pYRn5j7oI&feature=BFa&#...
One advantage of using C/C++ is that (performance allowing) it's going to be relatively easy to port to Android's NDK or iOS.
Get out of the way.
I can see you're not really selling to an informed audience (and that's fine!) but I really think you want to sacrifice some of the Google-like simplicity of your front page to explain what, exactly, you're testing on target sites.

Some reasons to at least give broad strokes about how you're testing:

(i) Testing for some kinds of web flaws is inherently intrusive; for instance, it's very hard to reliably test for stored XSS without potentially disrupting an application for users.

(ii) Aggressive spidering will create performance issues for some clients, and "oh well you should have known better" isn't going to stanch the PR bleeding when you take someone's site down.

(iii) If you're doing authz testing, you will eventually find a site where a post-auth crawl will delete huge swaths of database entries because someone implemented "delete" as a vanilla GET link.

(iv) (To me, the most important) Lots of uninformed clients will run something like this and feel confident they've checked the "security" part of their deployment checklist; without knowing exactly what you're testing for (and ideally being up front about the things you don't test for), you can give clients a really dangerous false confidence.
Samsung to announce Swipeit, an Apple Airplay competitor, at CES 2012
For one thing, these are donations in the 2010 cycle. Secondly, all of the top-receiving lawmakers in the "for" category are some of the most senior members of the Senate...and/or represent California, which will have high numbers of constituents from both entertainment and online industries.
While I don't believe that this belongs on HN, I will say that Emperor Norton's Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton) is far more interesting than what is presented here.
Thought the iphone case was going to help me reason with siri or something. Instead I had to turn my speakers down and fight the urge to move to the country side away from noisy, abrasive hunks of plastic. I am glad he's doing what gets him going though and I mildly envy his lack of public inhibition.
Bummer! But your school is way more advanced than the ones around here where the closest thing they have is Intro to MS Office :(
P.S.My daughter's in IB too and she thought it was pretty cool that you are too :) Now if I could just get her interested in programming....
A few of these were okay but many were utterly toxic. Would anybody here wish to work in a tech company which didn't care for fresh opinions, where employees were taught to dogmatically follow authority and play politics?

Perhaps I'm not the target market since I work in a tech company and value creativity and passion, but it would take me all of a few days to run away from a company that had these values. Especially those that tell you to be agreeable, suck up to authority and to not the rock the boat. For example: don't share your knowledge and shut up; mentally challenge yourself but don't let people know what you're thinking; get people to like you; become a 'part' of a team; do everything you can to give your boss a higher status; be seen in the corridors and stay late but don't be too social by having lunch with people...

This is horribly disrespectful and a sure-fire way of hurting innovation and making everything political. I understand nobody wants arrogant employees that don't respect the team, but people should be hired because of the talent and experience they bring a company. They should be hired to help improve a company and not forced into being cogs in a machine. Let them be human; they should be respectful and participative members of your company, not passive slaves!

Hire people because you respect them and want to see them use their past experiences and talent to help you. Care about the fresh opinions they bring to your organisation and respect them for this. Help them to take ownership of their thoughts and participate fully in the company. Help them to grow the confidence to take control of their lives in and out of work.
I remember enjoying SciAm so much as a teenager, but right around that time it seemed to decline. It got more political (I say this as someone who agrees with their politics, I just don't want it in my science). It got a lot more pop-oriented. This article is a great example of the latter. They take the utilitarian angle of improving human performance, but it turns out the cited study has little to no relevance to human learning, as the article itself points out, a lot more study is needed. I am not a expert and I am sure this is an important finding, but it seems like SciAm is overselling it to mass audiences.
A lot of stuff are going at the Communitech Hub (i'm in the Velocity Workspace) and the Accelerator Center. There is free drinks & food for startups Jan 11th 5:30 - 7:30 at the Accelerator Center.
The ObjC object model is very similar to Ruby's object model.

ObjC's way of handling mundane data structures (strings, arrays, hashes) is (once you learn to stop worrying and love long sequences of calls to very long method names) very similar to how Ruby addresses the same problems.

ObjC lets you drop into vanilla C code when you want to.

ObjC doesn't impose GC.

ObjC implements a form of duck typing.

You might be surprised at how good a fit ObjC is for a game engine you prototyped in Ruby, as opposed to C++.
You need adblock to self-censor. Otherwise every site with Facebook's trojans (i.e. "Like" buttons) will hang while you try to access facebook's blocked domains.
I'll look into LUA. Never used it back in my games dev days as it was just coming into vogue.
Writing everything in C++ is not my idea of fun. It's definitely possible to write almost all of the game code in a scripting language. It would be reasonably easy to abstract all the native APIs you want, but you could also just let someone else do it: http://love2d.org/
ruby excels where time to market and RAD are more important than performance, and where the standard and other libraries work well. Ruby saves lots of time doing things like CRUD operations where you're basically mapping on set of fields to another in a predictable way. When performance and memory are an issue and you can't trivially scale your code (eg. More processes or more machines) C++ is a big win.
Yes. Just wait some minutes. I guess the server is under heavy load.

Got some false positives though. For example "PHP Admin Application" and "PHP Debug Application" for files <root>/admin.php and <root>/debug.php which both do not exist actually.
Hacker is such a loaded term... but the point is they have some technical skills that are actually valuable and can lead to decent paying jobs as well as additional study/development if they choose to... vs. cosmetology or some of the other vocational ed being offered.
Do you own 400 companies? So, you are not too busy
Just because the Lua community will ream you out for the mistake (though it's the only thing they're mean about), it's "Lua" (Portuguese for "moon"), not an acronym. :)
Facebook Adds In-Game Offers Option For All Developers
Do you happen to know how translate.google.com deals with this problem ?
Usually the way you solve GC issues is by either not allocating after some initial massive allocation, or by running the GC constantly and having it clean up bits and peices every frame. I don't know enough about ruby to know if this is possible but this is how you handle GC in Java and C#.

As for Lua, Garry's mod runs almost entirely in Lua (outside of the source engine).
ObjC++ might be an even better fit
The site fell pretty far down that slope in its first year before turning itself around. Here are some good examples of top-30 questions from the days of softer moderation:

- What's your favorite "programmer" cartoon?
- What is your best programmer joke?
- Great programming quotes
- Defend PHP; convince me it isn't horrible
- What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered?
- What's your most controversial programming opinion?
- What are some funny loading statements to keep users amused?
- Worst UI You've Ever Used
Using blocks don't seem to be getting enough love, imo.

Instead of writing this pattern all the time:

StreamWriter writer = null;
try {
writer = new StreamWriter(filename);
// etc.
} finally {
if (writer != null) {
writer.Close();
}
}

You can just write this:

using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(filename)) {
// etc.
}

Which does exactly the same thing.
"Because some things are, and some things are not!"
Louis CK does a hilarious job describing how it is digging down the "why" hole:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u2ZsoYWwJA
I'm asking seriously: how much cash? Couple hundred bucks?

The system you describe is obviously corrupt, and I sympathize with the frustration, but I might prefer a system where I had to spiff doctors a couple bills to get an arm set over a system where I could be both insured and bankrupted by minor surgery that happened to snag a loophole in my policy. That's the private market insurance system we have in the US.
UPDATE: In case anyone is interested, I've just added a screenshot to the blog post by (very) popular demand. It's not final artwork, and it's only a few days work!

http://chrismdp.github.com/2012/01/why-i-switched-from-ruby-...
Funny, I came here to say the exact opposite--how the four-months-at-a-time thing doesn't make any sense to me because I've always experienced the vast majority of learning during the 4-12 month range of my employment periods.

University of Toronto (my alma mater) does 18 month coop terms which make marginally more sense to me. I'm generally anti-coop for people who would have no trouble finding a job when they graduate without coop.

> We [Waterloo grads] account for every Google acquisition in Canada, ever.

That's completely untrue. There are plenty of UofT grads acquired into Google, off the top of my head: Bumptop[1] (or even myself[2] if you count that). A bunch more from BC and Montreal, I'm sure. I'd be skeptical of a claim that Waterloo even accounts for a majority of Canadian acquisitions into Google.

--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumptop

[2] http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/10/google-acquires-socialgrap...
This reminds me, for some reason even though it's totally different, of NeXT's Distributed Objects facility, which I think is still floating around OS X but am not sure. Here's how it worked.

In Objective-C, method calls are dynamically bound. So you can make the following call:

[myObject crazyMethodName:x:y:z]

In Java that'd be myObject.crazyMethodName(x,y,z)

However unlike Java, there doesn't have to be a method called crazyMethodName, and the compiler will still compile it just fine. What happens is that at runtime, when this method is called, the message "crazyMethodName" is sent to myObject. If it doesn't have a method which responds to that name, then Objective-C calls the "forward" message on myObject, passing in the "crazyMethodName" method name and the arguments. "forward" can do what it likes with this -- the default implementation of "forward" is (was?) to issue a No Such Method Found error.

What Distributed Objects did was create a special proxy object which has a single method implemented: "forward". The system worked as follows. When machine A connects to machine B, machine B gives machine A its "entry" object (as defined by the user). B thinks it gave A an object, but in fact what A received was a proxy object. Let's say that the entry object responds to a method "foo". A calls

[obj foo]

obj is actually a proxy which responds to no methods at all, except for "forward". Objective-C fails to call "foo" on obj, so it tries "forward", and lo and behold the proxy has implemented that in a special way -- it wraps up the method call and ships it over to machine B and calls "foo" on the real object.

Through this procedure objects get passed as arguments back and forth through these method calls, which in turn wind up generating more and more proxies. Ultimately neither machine knows that the objects it's got access to are fakes. It just feels like you've been given access to call and manipulate another processes objects. Very clean and elegant.
I experienced the same issue.
Complaining specifically about iOS and iTunes seems unfair in the extreme.

An AppleTV won't run Android games and apps, and it won't play video and films bought from the Android Market.
I always got a "stay on the golden path and away from ObjC++" vibe from ObjC++, kind of like trying to ask Rails to do database stuff without using ActiveRecord in 2008.

You can easily write C++ code without having to bridge ObjC's object system to C++'s object-and-generics system: provide a simple C API to your C++ libraries.

But the other thing is, one reason to do ObjC at all is to avoid all the heartache that comes bundled with C++.

PS: You got modded down. Baffling. Fixed.
This sounds very "link bait-ish"…

Why were you trying to write a game in Ruby to start with? You didn't "switch back to C++", you simply realized you were trying to use a wrench to tight a philips screw…

-.-
With JRuby, you wouldn't have to be comfortable with Java. You get to use Ruby with the benefit of it running in the JVM.
here we discussed some technology interviewing topics:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3437831

your approach looks interesting, although I would prefer some practical micro-assignments from the candidate's field of technology. If the questions require some thinking and solving micro-problems, you immediately learn how the person analyzes and solves them.
I liked the idea of the product enough on first glance that I went straight to the pledge rewards, and nearly pledged the $25 without knowing any more. That's an affordable price for any case at all - most start around $40.

Since the images happened to be broken when I looked at the page, I decided to watch the video to learn something about the product.

You can guess how well that went.

I tried not to hide behind my hands while he danced and made bad jokes, because I figured that sooner or later, he'd demonstrate some details.

By the time the three minutes and eight seconds of self-love had ended, I not only didn't want to contribute anymore, I never wanted to see him speak again. I've never had a Kickstarter video talk me out of supporting a project before.
Thanks! It's been a fun little project.
I think to get to that point one needs to be comfortable with discomfort. That is when you push the boundaries you are capable of, grow, and accomplish amazing feats.
Attacks are directed at the weakest point, not the strongest.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Look at all the great products that have come out of Quirky. No dancing philosophers there.

If this case were truly innovative—and I sort of think it is—people would go for it, and share it with their friends.

I believe he lost sales with the corny video, rather than gaining any new ones.
While that we are touching on Feynman, I thought this bit was interesting (just 1:26 long)

Richard Feynman on Computer Science - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4wg6ZAFIM&feature=relat...

I believe he has a point, I don't know if term Computer Science is the best choice of words.
"An AppleTV won't run Android games and apps, and it won't play video and films bought from the Android Market"

Agreed, but you wouldn't want to, if you were using an AppleTV. There is less content available in the Android Market. There are less apps and games (let alone for big screens), most contain ads and frankly, just aren't as good as iOS counterparts.

If the marketplaces were comparable, I wouldn't have commented in the first place.

(NB: from what I understand, you can't buy movies from the Android Market, you can only rent them.)
I've had Clear for 18 months now. It had a lot of rough edges at the start but the service has been pretty stable lately. Maybe two outages lasting 2-6 hours each time.

I'm literally next door to a tower, so my experience is going to be better than most, I fear. I get 2mbit down and 1mbit up on a typical day. 8mbit down on a great one. I seem to get better speed after an outage, oddly enough.

The price is about 1/3 what Comcast would charge (I have the two-plan bundle: home net and phone service). No complaints about the phone service at all except for the extreme ping times. Talking to a mobile phone from the "home" phone is just as laggy as two mobiles talking. International rates are awesome.

I've run a light bittorrent set over it with no problem. I haven't hit a usage cap so far. Customer service, as others have noted, is pretty bad. AT&T/DSL-level bad.
"competence" on its own does not exist. Congress has shown time and again that they are competent investors (it helps to not be bound by insider trading rules, and to be exposed to non-public info, and actually vote on the results of your investment). They are also competent with their money - 50% of them are millionaires.

> understanding alone is, obviously, not enough to fix the problems here.

Which problem? Are you implying that elected politicians are trying to fix things for the average citizen? if so, why do you think that?
Maybe you could not have recreated the problem but you could have indeed described the symptoms and the problem statement. It's not written anywhere in the FAQ but SO places the subliminal message to write better, communicate better and research better. The more you do this, the more you understand your own problem and you will be able to reach your solution.

See: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/02/how-to-write-withou...

Did some digging and found this

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8449696/project-doesnt-re...

This doesn't look like something to point someone in the right direction. Yes, you are working with proprietary code but you could think of ways to describe what is happening without disclosing information otherwise you are making users play the 20 questions game with your question (as noted by a moderator). A high rep and top contributor to the site (Jon Skeet) was trying to help you but you didn't seem to want to reciprocate with more information. As I said earlier, clear communication is key in SO, don't make users point in the dark. You are wasting their time and yours with the back and forth clarifications.
The US too.

The public domain is where things go when their copyright expires. In most countries -- including the United States -- there is no legal procedure to dedicate something to the public domain. You can claim something you wrote is in the public domain until you're blue in the face, but it's not. You still own the copyright on it.

The closest you can get to a public domain declaration is a bare license: basically a license which says "Copyright 2012 by me: I give you the license to do whatever you want with this." The problem with a bare license is that if your code doesn't work right, people can (and do) turn around and sue your pants off. Because -- remember -- the work is not in the public domain. You own it and are responsible for it.

Thus we get to a BSD-style ("academic") license. At a minimum this license says "Copyright 2012 by me: I give you a license to do whatever you want with this as long as you agree not to sue me if something doesn't work".

Always use, at a minimum, a BSD-style license. Public domain is a fiction.
A good round up of design resources.