skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm realizing that the distinction between vim/emacs and typical IDE editors is entropy. Vim is extraordinarily precise - very low entropy at all times. An IDE editor is constantly moving between high entropy (e.g. mouse motion) and low entropy (e.g. the interpretation of the mouse motion as a precise command). This implies that vim appeals to minds that desire constant precision, and GUI editors appeal to minds that prefer to vacillate between levels of precision.

Decoupled from this is the question of which pattern of thought lends itself to being a better programmer. There is a good argument either way: staying at a very precise level of thought is wonderful when solving problems; and yet it is better to loosen up when figuring out which problems to solve.

I tend to take the view that a programmer's actions while programming should ideally be unambiguous, precise, and regular at all times. Higher level thought should have a distinct place, time and another set of tools (pencil and paper being foremost among the alternatives).
Facebook’s next big move: a paywall?
Interesting. I don't buy the security argument though. If, after a crash, the file size is larger than the actual extents, why not just truncate the file size to match the extents?
In Leiningen 2, `lein repl` will be https://github.com/trptcolin/reply which has tab completion. May not be perfect yet (I haven't tried it personally) but I expect it to improve.
Much like Office 365 competes with Google Apps for Business, not Gmail. Gmail is Hotmail's competitor.
How does outflow of capital from one asset to another measure investor's ability at timing the market? Yes, one pulls out on equity if one predicts that S&P500's going to drop but most of times decisions are made based on the volatility and risk tolerance. A retirement fund with a closer retirement date or income/growth fund will pull out if they find the risk/volatility level of the general market to be unacceptable.

A better measure of investor's ability to time the market is the performance of hedge funds as by its nature, the traders trades both sides of the market and performance is measured by their ability to predict both downward and upward trends.
Traders vs. Makers: Internet Bubble IPOs vs Facebook IPO
These debates are always silly at best, and painfully indicative at worst.

Indicative of what exactly? A certain type of nerd (emphasis that I mean a sub group) that is likely to never accumulate wealth or create anything particularly successful on their own because they're too anal-retentive to understand that success in building a Web app or business is not defined by whether you use PHP or Ruby or Python or even ColdFusion.

Unless you think you're the next Facebook or Tumblr, then extreme optimization is necessary. Otherwise, the rest of the discussion is bullshit stacked on top of bullshit.

If the common wisdom were followed, Plenty of Fish should have never existed, given their infrastructure and development approach. And Stack Exchange should have never existed with their 'lame' Win stack (popular opinion of the Windows development environment among a certain class of developers =) ).

There are a lot of ways to 'skin a cat'. The only thing that matters is whether you can get to the finish line, build something people want to use, and perhaps monetize it so you can keep putting resources into making it better. Who gives a shit what you use to get there, just so long as you get there.
I don't get it. Family income is a very strong (if not the best) predictor of SAT score. In this case, if you order each race by median income you get the exact same order as mean SAT score, Asian-American families with the highest median income and SAT, African-American families with the lowest.
I agree with all that, and I think the logical question is - isn't the accessibility a good thing? A lower barrier to entry for programming... that sounds like a great thing to me. Like in any industry, some people will improve with time and some will stay n00bish and produce weak code -- but lowering the barrier to entry seems like a good thing to me.
The short answer is "You get what you pay for". There are plenty of 'cheap' contractors who get as many jobs as possible, churning out bad code that kind of does the job. Most of these will be "copy and paste code" style contractors who only write a little bit of relevant code to make it look "right".

I would, generally, avoid any short-term developer who's charging under $50/hour.

The other thing to note about elance, vworker, etc. is that there are a number of companies in very low-cost places (such as India, Pakistan, etc.) who will then re-distribute the work to their own employees. They tend to produce very low quality work, and there have been some horror stories about these types of developers using the job to insert nastiness into your site for their own ends (why hack a site to insert your malware when someone will give you access and pay you for it?)

YMMV. Treat them like any other person you want to employ and check them out before giving them much access or responsibility.
Contractors from India or eastern Europe countries are way cheaper than the average hourly rate in the US.

In Spain, which is western Europe, but cheaper than other countries like UK, Germany or France, hourly rate for a freelancer can range from 15€ to 60€, being between 25€ and 35€ the most common pricing.
The Anti-Zynga
IP(v4) addresses are going away though! No one but the network staff will notice.

Semantically, choosing "obsolete" might have been incorrect, but I think the point stands. IP address and phone numbers don't matter anymore to the end users.
EFF looking for innocent Megaupload users
> We have done some calculations and believe that it is possible to make service economically viable (even with free basic usage)

So how do you make money?
I have to agree with a lot of what microsoft if pointing out. However, gmail is still superior in features to any of microsoft's email offerings, so I won't be changing providers. Can anyone name a competitor to gmail that has all of gmail's features?
Yeah, you've got me there.
Windows Phone 8 Preview
> Ssh ControlMaster allowing to reuse connections can really improve responsiveness.

Yes it does, but I've noticed when I do this, it breaks my rsnapshot backups. Is this something you've heard of or know a fix for?
> The only thing that matters is whether you can get to the finish line, build something people want to use, and perhaps monetize it so you can keep putting resources into making it better.

Bingo. Everything else is just navel-gazing.
You and your sibling posters are all focusing on my point about scaling. Fair enough, maybe the fact that it's so much cheaper means that point is moot.

That still doesn't mean that it's a fair comparison. EC2 has plenty of other features out-of-the-box like the ability to manage security groups, VPNs, elastic IPs, easy access to other AWS offerings like SQS and S3, the ability to treat images and the machines they're running on as independent, multiple locations, etc.etc.

Yes you can have all these things outside of the cloud, and yes you might not need any or all of them. (EDIT: and yes using their services means you're locked-in to some degree.) Still, I maintain my original point which is that you can't really say that Hetzner is X times cheaper based purely on the hardware specs, disregarding the fact that EC2 is much more than just a bunch of virtual machines.
The problem is that it's vague, meaning that not even top lawyers interpret it the same way.
According to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy3zBZ4vI4E in such a case (according to the Vienna Convention) interpreted such laws requires the documents during the drafting phase of the convention. In case of ACTA these documents are secret even to the governments that have signed the agreement.

Paranoid yet?
The Dodd-Frank Act allows minimum amounts up to $10.
Actually, I used the terminology that Hoffman and Cantrill used. The point is not that the behaviors are unreasonable "in a given circumstance" but when applied continually.
Where is the link between the graphical analysis (investors as a whole are bad at timing the market) and the subsequent quotes, (e.g., Bogle saying "I do not know anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. . . .")

It is a far cry from knowing that investors _as a whole_ don't market time well, but that has nothing to do proving that some skilled specific investors might not be good market timers.

For the record, I do think there's evidence out there that does show that even the "best" market timers succeed largely because of chance or luck, but it's not something you can get to from the data offered here. Because there are individuals who do succeed at timing the market. The question is whether they succeed due to skill or luck. . .
According to Gartner, Google Apps for Business represents .5% of Google's almost 40 billion revenue. That would be about US$ 200 million a year. What are Microsoft's BPOS/365 revenue numbers?
They didn't fail. The comedy in this video is supposed to be corny.
Windows Phone 8 Preview 
Since Winsupersite seems to be banned on HN (probably due to Apple and Google fanboy flagging, can there be any other reason?), I am pasting the link here

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/windows-phone-8-preview-142154
Survey Finds Reducing Complexity Critical for IT
Nice S.O. post on the topic:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3430280/ruby-how-does-obj...
I don't understand why we trust lone authentication services. They are single points of failure. SSL Certificates should be validated by a collection of independent certificate authorities. If not all of the authorities agree on the certificate, that's a sign there is hacking going on - or a sign that not all of the services have synchronized the certificate.

If we do it this way, a hacker who wants to try to imitate a site can't get away with compromising just one certificate authority. They'd have to compromise all of them, which (if there are enough) would be nearly impossible.
I don't know about ActionScript, but javascript is actually a pretty beautiful language. It's basically scheme with Java syntax.

Also, we're stuck with JS for the time being. PHP is easy to ditch by comparison.
Blah blah blah PHP blah blah startup blah blah blah blah lean blah pivot blah blah we're special blah blah.

I don't see how the unstructured development of the past has anything to do with using PHP in startups today. It's not about the language capabilities (90% of business aren't doing anything special in code), but developer speed and happiness. If you're happy with PHP then so be it, but that doesn't make it better.
Node.js for beginners - Hello world and a bit of fun
Some experimentation suggests that it's actually `git-command` (with a hyphen, not an underscore). This is consistent with the man pages, where, for example, one asks for `man git-add`.

EDIT: Not to take away from this handy tip, which I didn't know. I guess one can view it as a sort of souped-up alias.
I wonder how this affects the mechanical engineering labor distribution in firms. Perhaps smaller shops like in software?
Isn't 365 the paid (unlike Hotmail) alternative to Google Apps for Business?
The big news seems to be that Windows Phone 8 will be based on the NT kernel, which seems to have been made minimal enough to run on phones and tablets.

Anyway, sad to see anti-MSFT and pro-Apple/Google fanboyism taken on the extreme on HN in which the major Microsoft-news site is actively censored from being submitted.
Zuckerberg will retain voting control of Facebook
scp has some end-to-end latency for each file transferred. This means that for lots of small files, a single tar file stream is much quicker than 'scp -r'.
Don't ever have a great experience when you're young. It'll ruin the rest of your life. Avoid it at all costs.

Or maybe you'll move on and it isn't that big of a deal.

You have been warned.
If it's a violation of privacy to serve ads based on email content, why is it not a violation of privacy to filter out spam? It's exactly the same thing: a computer program "reads" your email, and then it does something with the information it learned.
"Mobile HTML5" talk by Scott Davis
His performance improvements are very specific to XFS; arguably they were fixing a problem/fundamental design issue in the original journaling code in XFS. Ext4's journaling code is very, very different from XFS. So a design improvement that applies to XFS is not necessarily applicable to ext4. That being said, there have been times when we've looked at what XFS has done with some feature (such as delayed allocation writeback for example) and written code which has been inspired by XFS's algorithms. I'm an engineer, I'll take good ideas from wherever I can. (Unless I suspect there may be legal reasons why I had better stay away from certain techniques :-/)

Also, the scalability issues that Dave has been talking about aren't ones that matter for any of the workloads that the ext4 developers or their employers care about. We don't have 32 CPU cores all writing small files and requiring small block allocations to a single file system at the same time. So yes, there are scalability problems which he has identified with that specific benchmark that Dave was experimenting with (fs_mark) where ext4 has its own performance problems that could be fixed with the appropriate developer attention. It's on my list to look at and hopefully address, but I have higher priority things that do benefit the workloads that my company is interested in.

For example, I am currently working on making Async I/O truly Async even when we need to read metadata blocks, which is a bug that all file systems suffer from under Linux; AIO is not truly "A". This is something that has been known for over a decade, but up until now, no one who was funding fs development, for ext4 or XFS, has had a workload where this has mattered enough. When I do fix this, it will be an area where ext4 will have an advantage over XFS. Will I then trumpet this as the reason why they should switch from XFS to ext4? Of course not. Not everyone has a need for true Async I/O. On the other hand, if ext4 has such a feature, it may appeal to some application writers, probably of various different storage servers or perhaps web servers, and if they start using it, then there may be more workloads where true AIO is relevant. And that in turn might inspire XFS developers to add a similar feature. This is why I've always believed competition is a good thing, and why I've never argued that fs developers should abandon one file system and go work on another file system. (As Dave has done on the linux-ext4 list, but never mind that.)
I don't know how Google stores and uses the data gathered by keyword parsing and subjecting/contextualizing my emails. Or what info the advertiser/destination gets or can infer.

It could be a potential privacy violation if the data is hacked, leaked, used to gather intel on my business, analyzed, backed up for eternity, accessed by 3rd party, etc.

> Does this mean Microsoft free Gmail competitor, Hotmail, does not relate ads with viewer profile and screen content?

Hotmail does not analyze your emails for keywords. They display ads on other, less intrusive, factors.
Git from the bottom up
Anthropomorphizing webmail are we?

Equating machine parsing to a human "reading" email is just straight out deception and preying on the uninformed. Hotmail and every other webmail service parses emails either to check for spelling errors or combat spam, Gmail uses adsense as well which is a much less annoying ad system than Hotmail's display ads.

Oh and Google Apps, the primary target to this Microsoft propaganda is ad free.
Except there is no finish line. I currently work on an application that is 10 years old, where's the finish line? Its not done in PHP, anyways it has parts that were done very sloppily and "against the grain" and the organization is still paying for it with a higher cost of maintenance.
Cool trick -- thanks!
Were Microsoft comparing Gmail to Hotmail, it could be a fair comparison. But then Microsoft wouldn't be able to criticize Google without admitting their own banners are completely unrelated to context (and, thus, offer much worse relevance and click-through ratios).

Or they aren't and, again, Microsoft wouldn't be able to complain.
no. it's still very much a solution searching for a problem and outside of specific events like SXSWi I'd say it shows a fundamental lack of general tech understanding that could be slightly damaging.
Sounds like BS:

> On the x-axis we show the flow of capital into an asset class

For every buyer, there is a seller, so every single transaction nets out to exactly $0 flowing into the asset class. So exactly how does capital "flow" into or out of an asset class?

You would guess that they are confusing the change in valuation, but that is what they are using for the other axis.
The reuters article provides no details about the security breach, so I did some digging. The most I could find was VeriSign's original SEC filing at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1014473/0001193125112...

From the filing: We experienced security breaches in the corporate network in 2010 which were not sufficiently reported to Management.

In 2010, the Company faced several successful attacks against its corporate network in which access was gained to information on a small portion of our computers and servers. We have investigated and do not believe these attacks breached the servers that support our Domain Name System (“DNS”) network. Information stored on the compromised corporate systems was exfiltrated. The Company’s information security group was aware of the attacks shortly after the time of their occurrence and the group implemented remedial measures designed to mitigate the attacks and to detect and thwart similar additional attacks. However, given the nature of such attacks, we cannot assure that our remedial actions will be sufficient to thwart future attacks or prevent the future loss of information. In addition, although the Company is unaware of any situation in which possibly exfiltrated information has been used, we are unable to assure that such information was not or could not be used in the future.

The occurrences of the attacks were not sufficiently reported to the Company’s management at the time they occurred for the purpose of assessing any disclosure requirements. Management was informed of the incident in September 2011 and, following the review, the Company’s management concluded that our disclosure controls and procedures are effective. However, the Company has implemented reporting line and escalation organization changes, procedures and processes to strengthen the Company’s disclosure controls and procedures in this area. See Item 4 “Controls and Procedures” in Part I of this report.

It's interesting to note that the SEC issued guidelines on the reporting of security breaches on October 13th, 2011 ( http://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/guidance/cfguidance-top... ) and VeriSign's SEC filing was released about two weeks later on October 28th, 2011. It could be the case that the security breach wasn't actually a major one, but because the SEC guidelines were so new they thought it prudent to mention even a minor security breach.

From this filing, there's no way to know the severity of the breach, which is why I think it's unfair for reuters to make this seem like a bigger deal than it might actually be. (They mention the RSA security breach which was a huge deal, and they suggest the attack was done by a "nation-state".) It reads like an article written by Nancy Grace.

Of course it could be the case that this was a major attack carried out by China, but it could also be a mundane attack on a public web server that wouldn't have made the news if not for the timing of the recent SEC guidelines. There's just no way to know from the information available.
Stay Focused & Keep Shipping - get your own print
I created this in homage to the now famous FB print. I think we should all have it in our offices- and i'm going to be making it a reality. Order now! :)
They couldn't figure out how to algorithmically serve ads, so they just hire a real person to read your email and find the right ads.
This ad is meant to mislead laypeople into thinking that Google employs humans to read your email.
I actually went on to implement an automated file sharing service over SSH using these tricks in our college when they blocked normal protocols. You can see the software on github tailored for my college
https://github.com/sravfeyn/SparkDC
I created this in homage to the now famous FB print. I think we should all have it in our offices- and i'm going to be making it a reality. Order now! :)
Yes. The obstacles are primarily cultural, not technical. You need to impedance match both simultaneously in order to break in, and ??? to seriously disrupt the entrenched players.
Well, how do you distribute trust? Do you have a quorum or something?

Consider this ... what if I wanted to introduce doubt that X is really verified, and thereby hurt their business. How can you avoid me doing stuff like that? Besides harsh laws of course.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think having a crappy development environment is a very good way to build things quickly. Perhaps in the days when there were few stable alternatives, this may have made some sense, but there are so many easy alternatives these days.

Perhaps the PHP community is different now from when I left it a few years ago. I'd never go back to that.
One more trick that I really like: using an SSH agent. On Gnome-based systems, Seahorse provides one (sometimes you have to install seahorse-plugins to get it); otherwise, gpg-agent can be an ssh agent. Pageant on Windows, and I'm not sure what's available on Mac.

SSH agents let you keep your key encrypted while only needing to enter your passphrase on first use (with the default ssh-agent, you must load the key manually with ssh-add; gpg-agent and seahorse both prompt you the first time it's needed). Add that to SSH agent forwarding (where multi-hop SSH connections authenticate using the agent on the originating machine, and your key is (A) only on the local machine and (B) encrypted when not in use.
ESR on Facebook
France is well known for being protectionist however, when it's a foreign firm competing with local firms regardless of the terms. I expect protectionism like this is probably timed around the upcoming election, which will feature several candidates who are anti-globalization and/or protectionist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/business/global/19inside.h...
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/news/1080479/Tender-will-fav...
That's nonsense. First of all, even during the "secret" negotiations, the current drafts were routinely leaked and widely discussed.

Second, there was an official release of the draft text on April 21, 2010. An updated "near-final" draft (which was quite close to the April 21 draft) was released on October 6, 2010. The final draft was released on November 15, 2010.

All of those drafts are readily available on the Office of the United States Trade Representative site: http://www.ustr.gov/trade-topics/intellectual-property/anti-...

The idea that people are misinformed because a document that has been officially and readily available for nearly two years (and unofficially available long before that) was at one time years ago secret is ridiculous.
Learn the M programming language, and teach it to others.
The problem with a paywall is that the core of what makes Facebook successful is the fact that "everybody" you know is on there. A freemium model might be the only feasible paywall option. They have to be careful not to alienate the large percentage of users that will never upgrade. LinkedIn is a good example of how to do things right, however, their audience of more professional users is a bit different
It's a very fine line. You can do overtly corny and still be funny. It just takes clever writing.