skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Twitter users give any odd site their Twitter username and password.
2. Twitpay and Twitter now have the ability to pay other Twitter users via simple tweets.

So all someone has to do is create a Twitter-app that collects username and password for 10,000 users and randomly starts paying themselves. What could go wrong?
http://twitter.com/spolsky/status/1049545180
"She also talked about the joy of working with a team where every member was passionate about the project"

As a former employee I cared about my company, but only because they were the ones who paid me every two weeks. Expecting your employees to be teammates and to 'buy in' to your master plan doesn't work unless you back it up with real (monetary) incentives. I unfortunatly worked for a company who told me I was a 'partner', told me I would have shares of the company 'some day' and in the end it didn't mean anything.

Only the young and gullible buy into the "team" aspect when they are only an employee. Everyone has got to watch their own ass, or like me, employ their own ass and never have to worry about the axe falling again.
It isn't only that the tools cost money and the format is less open. If I believed that Flash were superior technology for what we're doing (a complex web app), we'd be using it. For me, the real issue is that Flash doesn't fit the web as well as Ajax. That's a big deal.

One hears frequent complaints about how awful it is to have to cobble applications out of HTML/JS/CSS and coax them into running in browsers that were never designed for that. That's true, but it begs a question: why, if it's so awful, do so many people do it? It must have huge value to justify all that effort.

There are all kinds of subtle differences between programming for the web and programming for a desktop-like environment embedded in a web browser. I think it's a mistake to assume that the latter would be better if only we could have it.

There's another way to look at this. One reason the "bad" approach often succeeds while the "good" approach fails is that what seems good is based on previous experiences that don't quite fit what's emerging. Meanwhile the "bad" approaches seem bad because they're messy and chaotic, yet they contain something important and new that is worth the messiness. This is how I look at Flash. People want to program in what they think of as the proper way to build applications. But if it comes at the cost of taking the "web" out of web apps, it's not worth it.
It's also possible that the she was forced to use Unix in college. As she is not a techie, and probably wouldn't pay a very large amount of attention to the details, mixed the two up.
Deep Green
He's gradually rolling out a new design: http://twitter.com/spolsky/status/1048696589
Without going into the frivolity of each patent, let's not forget that Amazon has actually used their patent aggressively against Barnes and Noble.

http://www.out-law.com/page-2424
I'd add The Little Schemer to the list of books.
He's running ads on his site and these submissions are driving traffic to them. He's not increasing his PageRank, but it's not true that these submissions are doing nothing.
How in the hell can "american idol" be in the Fastest Rising category still? Hasn't the show been on for years now?

Also, am I the only one who hasn't heard of "Surf the Channel" until now?
Very nice.. I've been looking for something like this. Keep up the good work ;)
Google shut off my account for a week and I lost access to everything google controls - adsense, adwords, gmail, google code, youtube, blogger, google apps, google for domains etc etc They shut it off because "Someone tried to log in to it unsuccessfully"

Probably for the average person though as you say, centralizing control is probably easiest until something like that happens to them.

Wouldn't an idea be to centralize this with your ISP? The ISP already knows who you are, seems like they would be a good authority on handling authentication to websites for you. (OK, doesn't work for when you're using some hotel wifi etc)
"She doesn’t need holidays, food or rest and she will work almost 24-hours a day. She is the perfect woman." I'm a white male, born and raised in the midwest, (where you'll find more traditional roles), and I find this offensive.
It does have the design of a web page trying to sell me Viagra... in 1999. However, the few people they quoted looked like their credentials were reasonably legit ("award-winning" is meaningless. However, many had degrees in the right fields, and had worked for legitimate organizations).

I don't know what the credentials of the whole 400 looks like, though. It is interesting that when supporters of climate change alarm have petitions like this, it is considered a faux pas to question its validity. You are accused of being anti-science if you do. I suppose that is what the "politicization of science" means in practice.

The point is to challenge the idea that the "science is settled", and that you are a quack/heretic/flat-earther if you disagree.
They're referencing an O'Reilly blog post that cites those numbers: http://blogs.oreilly.com/iphone/2008/11/turning-ideas-into-a...

They've gone from the realm of anecdote to Known Fact, unfortunately.
Would you buy a robo-woman? How accurate to life would she have to be? 50% 80% 95%? At what point do men swear off women when they get a taste of robo-women?
I thought this was funny, I'm surprised it was downmoded so much. Granted it isn't as relevant as other high thoughts expressed on news.yc--such as the history of bagels. But... still funny.
It doesn't convince me either way, but it does bother me that it's been a long time since I've heard anything other than "scientist counts" for and against, rather than actual evidence.

Forget the scientist counts -- a lot of doctors went to their graves denouncing Pasteur as a quack. What's the actual evidence for and against? What's the CO2 count lately? Is that number significant? Have ocean levels risen? Where? How much? Etc.

The financial crisis is pretty complex too but there have been many insightful and detailed essays written about it.
When I interview people I have a form from HR I need to fill in and some of those are on it as mandatory questions. I tick the box and move on quickly.
"Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly.As a scientist I remain skeptical."

Whoopty fricken' do, you're "skeptical", now how about you actually go out and do some 'science' and prove some people wrong. Simply writing a letter about how you're skeptical does nothing, solves nothing and is just a distraction.
AVG stopped me from extracting that file. Phew!
After some fiddling, I found some gotchas. Most importantly, SSH keys, security groups, and AMIs are not replicated between regions. You can use the ec2-migrate-bundle command (from the AMI tools) to copy your images from the US to Europe.

ec2-migrate-bundle --location EU --cert /mnt/cert-*.pem --privatekey /mnt/pk-*.pem \
--access-key ORANGEJUICE --secret-key SUp0rS3kRu7 \
--bucket BUCKET-IN-US --destination-bucket BUCKET-IN-EU \
--manifest IMAGE.manifest.xml

I put together the rest in another post:
http://blog.solutious.com/post/64129126/using-amazon-ec2-in-...
The App Store is doing the right thing -- putting the apps that make them the most money in a place where they have the opportunity to make even more money.

That's fine and expected.

The mistake developers are making is relying on the App Store to solve their marketing problem, when it only really solves the distribution problem.

If you're trying to stimulate demand in that environment your only option is to lower your price (see, e.g., 3-for-2 sales at Borders). What developers should be doing is looking for marketing channels outside the App Store that drive people to the App Store with the intent of buying their app.
I wasn't exactly whining, but in the spirit of this idiotic argument, I'd say you got lucky. They didn't like you, so no need to like them. Now they're dead. You won.
This is a minority report blog. It's just more Republican propaganda using the senate.gov source to give it credibility.
So, is it just me, or he complains that students are pointed in the wrong direction and therefore don't write "real/maintainable" programs, instead focusing on more CS (algorithms, data structure) - but when talking about java, he says the education needs to focus more on algorithms, data structure.. ?

When talking about magic constants on students' code:
"I have seen the result of that attitude in new graduate students: It is rare that anyone thinks about the structure of their code or the implications for scaling and maintenance – those are not academic subjects. Students are taught good practical and essential topics, such as algorithms, data structures, machine architecture, programming languages, and “systems,” but only rarely do they “connect the dots” to see how it all fits together in a maintainable program. "

When talking about the use of java in universities:
"Education should prepare people to face new challenges; that’s what makes education different from training. In computing, that means knowing your basic algorithms, data structures, system issues, etc., and the languages needed to apply that knowledge."

To me this is like a "everything is a priority" problem. Students should learn all of the CS stuff, and also all of the "realworld" stuff.
My comment is directed to this community.

I agree 100% that asking for passwords is a very bad practice, and users shouldn't be trained to do it. They should fix it immediately.

I suppose people could stick to twitter.com and sms - but to me, the defacto twitter world has clients. They are important. I want people to use them. Give your password to sites you trust, Mom.
One of my most interesting interviews was at a defense contractor. "Can you do this job?" was a very difficult question to get at, because they couldn't even tell me what the job was! As you might imagine, they had to use a lot of very general language. I did get an offer from them in the end.
I think you make a valuable point. App Store, although tremendously powerful at marketing, isn't the end all.

In theory, you could push yourself into the top 10 list with enough external marketing. At which point, you get the supercharger strapped on for free.
What's wrong about backward compatibility. When MS had to make lots of changes to .NET 2.0 and broke pretty much every application that was implemented for .NET 1.0 that was a major turn off, so many people found another excuse dismissing MS. So if MS aren't backward compatibility that's bad, but if Python that's good?

Dead languages are actually good, you can extend them while keeping the core stable and extending them with other flavours (e.g. J2ME, Android, JSP) making them easy be adopted to new uses.

BTW
Delphi is the most backward compatibility language that I know,
It's good to hear mainstream covering this. I'd like to hear more back from Apple.

Where art thou App Store Evangelist at Apple?
That's an impossible test. What would you ask an airplane pilot to ensure he's a skilled pilot? No magic question will let a random unskilled person effectively interview for a technical position.
Quite often, the most random and insight-free blog posts containing no substance or logical deduction are upvoted because of a strong title. For some reason, some readers try to pull out whatever tiny bit of insight that the article might contain, to make up the for the time lost reading it. I say, write it off as a loss and move on. There are no logical deductions to see in the article.

What does it matter if a certain question shows up in an interview? Why try to analyze every word? In the end, you either did well, or you didn't, and they either did well, or made a bad impression on you. Just answer the question and remain friendly whether you still think you're interested in them or not--not all questions are going to be highly technical. At the end of the day, it's just another person sitting across the table.
Yeah, the whole thing seems a little pat.

Plus a real world response would be more along the lines of "I'd like to meet with you to allay some of your concerns regarding free software."; most definitely not the "Super Flame Powers Ignite" response he claims to have sent.
In my case my employer pays for it ;-) Otherwise I'd be running Ubuntu!
Hey, maybe it's all made up and someone on the Linux side is going nuts trying to make that school system look bad. I don't know.
Hey, you are quoting just part of my sentence! I said prefer OS X to Windows. I agree with you.
If I was an interviewer and a job applicant told me that he would "google" the answer to a question, I would quickly show him the door and put his resume in the circular file.
Agreed, my first instinct was article spam.
Wow. Six-hundred fifty, eh? That sure is a big number!

(Sounds like we need another Project Steve:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve)
Funny, I came to the same estimate using my town of 30,000 with approximately 30 gas stations.
Open for Questions: Submit questions to the Obama team, with Reddit/HN-style voting
Grouper Co-Founder’s New Gig: LiveKick, A Concert Ticket Search Engine... REALLY?
For any of you working with creating "apps-in-the-browser", ExtJS is a pretty well-thought out platform.

It's a JS framework that includes many of the common widgets you find on the desktop.

Google 'ext samples' and prepare to be impressed.

I recently stumbled on it and have been aggressively rolling it out in my company.
"...scant little data to draw conclusions with on with our current climate"

Yeah, I guess the scientists just forgot to put data in the IPCC reports, and the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed articles on the subject that came before them.
I'd use AWS only if you are intending to have your app auto-scale from the start. Aside from that, it's not worth the extra expense (about twice the cost of a comparable Linode) and hassle (you must manage S3 backups, at the least... or lose everything when a shutdown/failure occurs). Start on shared hosting and if you need more room horizontally, you can always move the app to AWS later, when traffic justifies it.
Advisors --> Grad students?
Yahoo Layoffs Target Former Right Media Employees (YHOO)
It really is common sense stuff, but the longer I live the more I learn how uncommon 'common sense' really is.
There's an interview with Lewis talking about the same subject here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9742937...
I'd like to know who the author thinks is giving Flash a run for it's money with some evidence. Silverlight? HTML+Canvas+Ajax+JS?

(If it's possible to blast pixels on a webpage quickly enough, I'm sure we'll see frameworks popping out of the later. ExtJS doesn't use Canvas and it's very app-like.)
s/start game it/start to game it

Argh. I hate catching typos in my own comments.
His emphasis is on problem solving. That's his complaint about having students use Java libraries to build stuff - they don't learn how to solve problems. You need algorithms, data structures and theory since it's the language of solving problems, but you also need practice, feedback, and mentoring to get good at programming. He objects to those academics who think programming isn't an essential activity.
Looks like Gears, but I can't find a word about Google in this text.
In Ireland (see above)
Right, that's why it was initially useful. Now that lots of people use the question, though, even mediocre developers will make sure to come to the interview with a list of criticisms of their favorite language.
My wife -- who barely understands what HTML is -- found this on CNN and sent me the link. There's nothing like negative mainstream media coverage to get a company's attention...
It's the age old dream of having slaves without the moral qualms of enslaving other human beings.

I rather suspect that a lot of men who think they would want a fembot would find them boring and unsatisfactory. And if you made them well enough to pass a turing test, they would end up being just as willful and obstinate as actual humans; and thus just as threatening.
Lets face it we are at a cossroads. Our population is growing exponentially, our technology is pacing with us. Our planet cannot sustain people and nature successfully without one giving way. I'd make the argument that spending money on technology to improve our well being with things like,

Better plants, better growing techniques, safer drugs, more sustainable energy, cheaper housing, better schools and space travel technology.

Improving all of those will help us take the next step as humanity and thats towords the moon.
Twitter is currently trialling OAuth on its API which will be available as a beta soon http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#Authentica...
Photo Books and the Power of Oprah
“Tell me about yourself” is a hugely useful question. It gives you a chance to take control of the interview and steer it towards the areas you perform best or can talk about most persuasively.
Looks good. You should checkout http://www.efactor.com
Why? It's often a good idea to google for an answer. See the second result for "number of gas stations in the us", for example:

http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/number-gas-stations-us-1995...

If you want the candidate to show his reasoning abilities by making good guesses based on reasonable assumptions, you should tell him to do so beforehand.
I've been on AWS for almost a year now. We haven't yet needed the real benefits, which is the potentially easy scaling.

If you're starting out and don't see yourself getting INSANE load requests in your first several months then I would go with slicehost, as it is much simpler to get started with.
Separate experience, but we chose Flex because the typographic control, while quite broken, still beats HTML/JS. I wrote a WYSIWYG editor for brochures and other printed marketing materials.
you should check this out, it's pretty sweet who you can find in here
Most interesting quote (in my opinion):

Job vs. Calling

The distinction is artificial but worth drawing. A job will never satisfy you all by itself, but it will afford you security and the chance to pursue an exciting and fulfilling life outside of your work. A calling is an activity you find so compelling that you wind up organizing your entire self around it — often to the detriment of your life outside of it.

There’s no shame in either. Each has costs and benefits. There is no reason to make a fetish of your career. There are activities other than work in which to find meaning and pleasure and even a sense of self-importance — you just need to learn how to look.

Having something that is both a calling & a job may be a luxury or a curse. I have yet to find it, so they've been separate for me so far.
Wouldn't know...doesn't sound like a good way to spend money if that's the case.
Also: http://newyork.garysguide.org/
Greek fighting: the eurozone's weakest link starts to crack
No, it's not. I built this special page into the search engine because I generate random usernames and passwords for every site I use, e.g. epi0Bauqu.

I was picking up a friend (Todd V., long time lurker) for lunch, and he showed me the post since he uses the pwgen feature as well. I didn't know my password by heart, so he finally created an account and made the post.
andr's Law of Lists of Great Stuff:

The greatness of the items in a list is inversely proportional to the size of the list.

For further proof, see "Top 100 XYZ Apps" lists in ReadWriteWeb.
People file patents, not companies. The people then assign ownership to the company. Erik Arvidsson's blog clearly shows he works at Google and while Andrew Palay does not have a blog his $4600 donation to the Obama campaign reveals that he also works at Google.
I don't like asking "what's your greatest weakness". However, other people on my team have insisted on asking this question during interviews.

In this case, I use it to gauge how an applicant handles a somewhat inappropriate question that he/she probably shouldn't answer honestly.
37 - sneaky number choice.
Limewire releases version 5.0 with revamped UI and Jabber / GTalk support
I would be surprised by the amount of people who have the intuition to actually go to Google in the first place. It's a lot better than a "Hmm, I don't know--how many?"

It shows that someone is willing to go and seek out the answer on their own.
language style matters too

from my experiences, code-length continuum is between FP and OOP (imagine haiku vs bible)
Well, it's part and parcel of the existing gender roles. Men chase, women choose. Being chosen by women indicates a man has value.

Mechanized playthings for a man indicate low value (he can't find a real woman). It gives little info about a woman.

On the flip side, having many human playmates indicate a man has high value. It lowers a woman's value, however, both due to perception and for some intrinsic reasons.

Looking at the whole picture, I think men come out ahead: human playmates >> mechanical playthings.
Lame article. One of the strengths of Java is the very conservatism that the author bashes. Generics may have broken backwards compatibility if you opt to use that language feature, but the VM and compiler preserved forward compatibility of all previously-written code, an extremely important and considerate design goal. Just ask all the Python developers who now have to port their 2.x code to run on the V3 engine. And what is the big benefit of that porting effort? "A much saner string processing model based on Unicode." Oh, you mean like the one Java has had since its 1.0 release? This article, like most language-cheerleading flamebait, shows a deep misunderstanding about what has kept Java so popular for so long. Keep breaking compatibility, Pythonistas -- you'll be able to brag about the nimbleness of your language on blogs, and you will see your language continue to be passed over by developers who don't want to periodically rewrite their applications for marginal benefit.
There are more growing glaciers than shrinking glaciers.
No?

If global warming is happening for whatever non-man-made-CO2 reason, spending ridiculous amounts of money cutting carbon won't help us.

Since that's the preferred public policy option these days, it's pretty relevant arguing over the cause.
Big hat, no cattle.
The state of the debate is now whether global warming is even happening, not potential warming causes.
i'm the happy user of suckless' dwm and dmenu :D
Java remains is the most popular programming language out there but the number of Java programmers exceeds the number of jobs for available to those Java programmers. That is not true for c++, Python, Ruby. I know because the career center at the university I work for tells me so. The question is: do you what to be a small fish swimming in a shrinking large pond or a big fish swimming in a growing small pong?
What do you do when you come across a simple fact that you need to know in order to continue?
Contrast Steve Yegge: "Done, and Gets Things Smart"

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...

(Previously discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219425 )
A major part of the problem is that many schools are still trying to cram everything into a BS Computer Science degree. Both the students and industry would be better off if schools offered alternatives such as a BS Software Engineering and/or BA Software Development, which would focus more on construction and somewhat less on theory. Some schools are doing that, but not enough.
Blog Posts on Infrastructure 2.0 - Archimedius
> But if some private school starts to produce much better students than the public system, there will be chaos.

I'm a miltary brat, so I've been in and out of a half-dozen public and private schools in my K-12 education. Everywhere I went there were private schools significantly better than the public ones.

The chaos seems to be confined along socioeconomic lines. The best teachers in the world can't teach kids that don't show up for class, and I'd say America is pretty split as to whether showing up for class is strictly necessary for future success.