skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I write my Ruby on Windows Vista and deploy on Ubuntu. And I've run into the usual set of headaches with doing this. Sometimes this results in me having to make fairly simple changes to, e.g., older versions of Capistrano to get them to work on my machine -- not too terrible because, after all, it is OSS Ruby code.

(I'm still running Cap 1.4.2 because it only took one line to make compatible. If I upgraded I would have to fix everything again.)

What flavor are the bugs? Usually, it ends up being a weak link in filesystem paths, SVN integration, or SSH integration. What causes these issues? Much respect for the folks who code them, I understand you do not owe anybody anything, but any honest assessment points to platform chauvanism.

"I do not use Windows, nobody I know uses Windows, true Ruby hackers are too cool to use Windows, begone ye Microsoft-infested slimeball"

The community (which I generally like and, let me note, actively contribute to) positively drips with this sentiment. DHH mentioned that 37signals wouldn't hire a Windows programmer (though he later backed down, somewhat), and the reasons were essentially tribal more than anything else.

And a big -1 to everyone who says that the Windows API is getting in the way of compatibility. Really folks? The Windows API being opaque made you hard code the path separator? The Windows API being opaque made parsing the results of a call to ls the more obvious choice than using the built-into-the-standard-library cross-platform way to get the contents of a directory? (To name just two implementation choices I've seen in Ruby libraries.)
FYI, I open-sourced the split-testing framework discussed on hacker news a couple weeks ago... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376331

http://github.com/gregdingle/genetify/wikis'

I'd love to hear anyone's feedback.
You trust the FDA to tell you what is safe and what is not?
The RV770 Story: Documenting ATI's Road to Success
How does anyone edit code in an editor that can't split a window? I don't think I'll ever get that.
I want to hire hacker to help me to remove articles in Chinese about the bad news of our company from the internet .Can you help me?
Thank you
majesticdesign88@yahoo.com.hk
Now I know why everyone claimed they were a chemical engineering major my first semester of college. Most of those people ended up switching, but those that stayed had the reputation of being the most pre-med-like of the engineering world.
It is possible to integrate encryption seamlessly with Linux using dm-crypt and OSX is basically BSD (darwin) below the UI so there should be something there as well. As for windows, I heard (somewhere, and with no substantiation) that MS was working on a full disk encryption system. Then again, If you have enough technical resources to setup a crypfs system on a linux box, it should be trivial to setup fileserver on Amazon S3 or some other system so thats not really a good solution.

I think that this highlights a general problem with web-based services. How do you trust them to safeguard your data? Its hard enough when the software is local on your own computer and you have contact with some immediate physical retailer but with the web, who knows?

Oh well... Its the old security vs. convenience problem again.
"The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes... " Not altogether sure that's the best switch to install on an airplane.
Summary...

Tip #1: Empower your team.

Tip #2: Go Real-Time & User IRC (Talk to each other in real-time in a searchable medium).

Tip #3: Go Semi Real Time (Use their prologue tool, or twitter to communicate).

Tip #4: Get Together (Have real world meetups).

Tip #5: Open Source your projects (Get others involved, increases your product shelf life).

Tip #6: Obsess over metrics (experiment, collect data, analyse).

Tip #7: Break down projects into bytesize tasks that can be worked on individually.
I used wordle to create a bio of sorts for my Twitter background

http://twitter.com/jaxn
Agreesies.

I've been fighting with the leading analytics packages and hosted tools for a bit, and while I do think stats packages have come a long way, they feel like fancied-up versions of questions we were asking/answering way before content management systems, blogs, multiple authors, social software, categories, etc.

We've moved beyond "hits," but we're still stuck in pageviews, visitors, return visitors, etc.

All of these things are great to know, but are very ad-buyer centric... Even if you don't care about ads/ad buyers, stats are very geared not to the publisher, but the person comparing your site's traffic, to some other site's traffic. There is a place for this, but I think we need a wave of programs that are just for the publisher... and I hate to suggest a fragmentation, but they probably need to be more aware of different content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, etc.)

I am aware of and excited about the promise of open-source Piwik, but its primary goal seems to emulate Google Analytics.

About 3 years ago, Performancing had a tool called Pmetrics that was awesome. It didn't think about URL's, it thought of content. Then they changed the whole thing, kept the name, but now it's a 3rd party whitebox software that is pretty friendly (I still recommend it), but nowhere near as cool as it used to be.

(Does anybody know what happened to that original software?)
While it may not be "free software" or "Open Source" (with capital letters) it's "open source" in the broader sense of the phrase.

Not to mention Open Source (proper) hardly has a monopoly on the "Open" prefix.
And let us not forget SATAN.
What if I'm an anything else coder and I want to support Mac? Forget license, I need to buy a new machine. Linux is the only really painless platform to support if you're not using it.
Wow. FYI, this blog post is a straight quote/reproduction of the original article here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/i-fell-in-l...
I think that XP will be supported for a very long time. A lot of people, including myself, have jumped onto the Apple bandwagon and only use XP for those few programs, including IE6 and various arrays of games, via Boot Camp or some sort of virtualization. Unless Microsoft will actually let me dumb down Windows 7 for the bare minimum for even lower levels of boot time, memory usage, etc, I probably will stick with XP for my dual boot.

But the problem at hand isn't people using IE6 at home, there's a lot of companies that will not allow upgrades to even IE7. Somebody, either Mozilla, Google, whatever, needs to implement the features enterprise values most, and then advertise the hell out of it.

There's a business idea for somebody willing to take it: Enterprise Browsers. They pay you for support, updates, and insurance that their legacy apps still work. If, for any reason at all, many PHBs see free as 'cheap, inefficient, and worthless'.
Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy: Analysis of privacy on social network sites
I find it disturbing that this is even controversial.

First, the notion that there is an optimal "healthy" state is make-believe. We all get old and die, so in a sense we are all terminally ill. We should have a right to improve our minds and bodies as long as there is room for improvement.

More to the point, brain types fall on a spectrum. ADHD is just one extreme. Equating "median" with "healthy" is a fallacy. Consider this: is synesthesia a disease? It can make life very hard, but it can also make patient extremely creative. Imagine a world where synesthesia is the normal condition -- non-synesthetes would be considered retards!

If there were a drug that could turn you into a synesthete, should the drug be illegal?

Second, we all already take a brain-boosting drug: caffeine, which is both undeniably effective, and has a wide spectrum of side effects. Other drugs like modafinil have almost zero side-effects in comparison, but they are prescription-only because they don't have a history of social acceptability. "Used historically" = "safe" is an even bigger fallacy.

Third, you can't prevent people from taking brain pills by not funding research (if the research doesn't happen in the U.S, it will happen in other countries.). All that this policy will achieve is encourage a black market and unsafe usage.

The whole thing reminds me strongly of that Kurt Vonnegut piece posted here yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388642.
Looking at the photo for this article, all I can say is that I'll chip in an extra $10 on my AdWords bill for this month if you guys will send someone out to clean that sign off. I don't know, maybe I've just been in Japan too long, but I see that and I immediately think "organizational decay".

(My company -- and a few American companies I know, including Disney -- would have had the CEO out front with a bucket of soapy water within 10 minutes of seeing that photo run.)
Webfaction thinking about adding Sieve mail filtering
Sieve[0] is a filtering system similar to procmail, but a lot better[1]. Sieve, which usually hooks into the LDA, gives you a lot more flexibility; for example, allowing you to easily mark messages as read in Maildirs[2].

I don't know how many of you are using WebFaction; but for those of you who are (or thinking about switching to them), there has been a little discussion over at their forums about supporting Sieve. If this sounds like something you want, you might consider making yourself known at the discussion.

http://forum.webfaction.com/viewtopic.php?id=2081

Cheers.

[0] RFC 5228-5235, plus some others...it's still growing.
[1] Procmail is more or less the same as it was in 2001.
[2]
Sieve, a one-liner:
if size :over 500K {setflag "\\Seen";}

Procmail, almost a dozen lines, including nested recipes:
:0
* conditions
{
foldername=whatever
:0c
.$foldername/ # stores in .$foldername/new/
:0
* LASTFOLDER ?? /\/[^/]+$
{ tail=$MATCH }
TRAP="mv $LASTFOLDER .$foldername/cur/$tail:2,S"
HOST
}
Blog spam + not HN + was on reddit months ago = flagged
dupe -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387283
I would not trust any such service, frankly. I'm sure the people there are very nice, but it only takes one bad employee. On the other hand, any secure backup solution is going to involve encryption, even if you're putting DVDs in a safe deposit box.
From a purely legal standpoint, "some or all of its assets, including your Personal Information," could be argued to include the user's data under "assets."

That's not to say Dropbox would do that. But it probably would be nice to explicitly say somewhere that you won't sell or give away the physical bits that are uploaded to the service.
What is the most intrusive wart on your favourite programming language?
What's most intriguing about this to me is the pics of the device (http://www.eprice.com.hk/mobile/news/?news_id=6051) don't seem to show a hardware keyboard.

Has android picked up a touch-screen keyboard already, or are they maybe just assuming that it will be available by the release date? (or do phones for the Chinese market use a different input mechanism anyway, perhaps).
Any sensitive data you should be encrypting anyway. I use TrueCrypt volumes mounted inside Dropbox.

You never know when that nosy Arash might decide to load up your Quicken file :)
"... dupe -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387283
..."

I didn't see that... & I posted the printed page.
Its more than the recession. Its the next revolution. We have microtized/DIY everything. VC's are just one of those that is both a casualty and a cause.

Wrote about his over two years ago but re-posted recently at www.flairjax.com
No, where did you get that from???

I hope that FDA keeps those drugs unavailable for next 40 years, and during that time hundreds of organization and individual doctors around the world will be able to test the long-term safety.
At a point, this just goes to the competitive nature of our society. From a moral standpoint, if who we are is a product of our environment and our genetics, then we ourselves aren't anything that isn't predefined. Someone who is lazy is a product of their genes and environment in the same way that someone with a disease is the product of their environment and genes. So, what makes asthma (which I have) something that I'm applauded for overcoming with medicine while obesity is something people are generally frowned upon for overcoming with medicine? Well, the fact that we want to ascribe the later as a choice - the choice to eat.

Einstein didn't believe in free will. However, he said that holding people responsible for their actions was a pragmatic approach for society to take (presumably because such action changes the environment that we are all in).

There are huge struggles because people don't want to accept that they have less free will than they ascribe. As such, the goal is to hold people responsible for faults that you don't have and find excuses that let you off the hook for any faults that you have. There are organizations that create campaigns to get society to accept their fault as something that should be compensated for. Short attention span? That's ok because it's medical. Stupid? Lazy? Those are things that are the fault of the individual.

It's really hard. If you can medicalize your faults, you get legal protection for them. If you can't medicalize them, you're personally responsible for keeping them in control. That creates a huge incentive for medicalization of everything in the human condition. And we're all worried about being left behind in this Red Queen's Race.
not exactly ;-)

pasted from terms:

Dropbox does not claim any ownership rights in Your Files. You acknowledge that Dropbox does not have any obligation to monitor the Files or User Posts that are uploaded, posted, submitted, linked to or otherwise transmitted using the Site or Services, for any purpose and, as a result, is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, appropriateness, legality or applicability of the Files or anything said, depicted or written by users in their User Posts, including without limitation, any information obtained by using the Site or Services. Dropbox does not endorse anything contained in the Files or User Posts or any opinion, recommendation or advice expressed therein and you agree to waive, and hereby do waive, any legal or equitable rights or remedies you have or may have against Dropbox with respect thereto.
Teen Transplant Candidate Sued Over Music Downloads
I happen to know that Colin Percival knows what he is doing.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. :-)
Personally, I use JungleDisk (which was recently acquired by Rackspace) to encrypt all my data and back it up to Amazon (on my own S3 account, not JungleDisk's). Sure, it costs more than Dropbox or Carbonite or other services but it seems incredibly more safer and controllable to me.

On the other hand, I use Dropbox to synchronize non-sensitive files between my machines. I never put anything on there that I'd be worried about being published unprotected to the world.
Strangely, her confession did not have the impact one would expect; I did not recoil in horror...

My initial reaction would have been, "Will you marry me?!" I could probably even get by the whole daughter thing. Then again, I suppose I'm quite strange.

Edit: The fact that it's Blog spam is pretty lame, though. Thanks for the original, kalvin.
Thanks for the feedback. The personality test is an intriguing idea.. I guess it would match terms derived from selections the user makes in the quiz to tags the games have? I'll have to look into how recommendation systems work.
A hallmark of conservativism is to recognize that 90 percent of our behavior is much the same as occurred 2000 years ago, but many, many innovations came and went in between (Heroin: Cure for morphine addiction). What happened to them? They were tried, and they were discarded by the credible professions.

Maybe these drugs are good. "Maybe". Most drug tests occur over a matter of months, rather than a lifetime. Caffeine has been tried over centuries, and that fact has value, because within those centuries are lifetimes and generations. Every new drug is roulette, and you know it.

modafinil have almost zero side-effects in comparison,

See, bullshit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil#Side-effects
It was a bit of a personal shock to find this article on HN. I attended Scarsdale High and AP English was one of my favorite classes. That said, it was the strength of a wonderful, memorable teacher -- Julie Leerburger -- that made the class my favorite, not the structure of the AP system.
Why not?

http://www.seasteading.org/

See also http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/04/_trial_version.ht...

tl;dr Applied anarcho-capitalism for fun and (hopeful) profit.
You might want to rewrite the terms to clarify that. I don't personally see a problem with them, but a few days ago I suggested that someone use dropbox in order to send me some files (the freebsd.org mailserver was returning a "550 5.7.1 Microsoft Executable detected" error), but he replied that he was "scared of the dropbox EULA" and that it "seemed too broad".
Ask YC:  Apple Camera Hack? Peeping Tom 2.0?
I was in a cafe the other day and while using their open wireless decided to get some work done. As I surfed the web... all of a sudden the light on my MacBook Pro Camera turned on!

I was not using any application or program that would make this happen. There were some crazy lookin techies in the room and I got kinda freaked... was it possible for someone to create a Mac Camera Hack?

Is it possible to even make an application where as the light would not even go on to tell me it was in use?

Creepy.
From the article: Physics students now study string theory — a hot topic in some college courses that is absent from the Advanced Placement exam.

FAIL.
On my computer:

$ python -m timeit -s 'import re' '"".join(chr(i) for i in range(256) if re.match(r"\w", chr(i)))'
1000 loops, best of 3: 841 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s 'import re' "''.join(sorted(c for c in map(chr, range(256)) if re.match(r'\w', c)))"
1000 loops, best of 3: 792 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s 'import re' "''.join(sorted(c for i in range(256) for c in (chr(i),) if re.match(r'\w', c)))"
1000 loops, best of 3: 921 usec per loop

Your DRY variants (against which my complaint was) are not faster.

As to the principle of DRY: Which is easier to debug? my code or your code? mine is certainly easier to read. Principles are the average of large amounts of experience. Its never a good idea to ignore them completely but just blindly following them without keeping in mind the context they were formulated in is just as stupid.

PS: Your version with the re.findall is faster but requires the user to bring up a definition of string.maketrans and re.findall, both things that an experienced python coder would know but its another little thing that they now have to track. OTOH, the generator expressions (especially mine) are straightforward and blindingly obvious as to their purpose.
Minnesota Games Examiner: Is PC gaming dying?
Java: The fact that I have to manually cast Arrays to a template. Everything else allows me to template nicely except arrays.

Python: The error message passed when you call a method with the wrong number of arguments. It's just off since the method "def apple(self, steve, new_product)" has three args, but you'll call it with two "apple(steve, new_product)". So, the message that gets passed back if I pass in one or three arguments is just wrong. I actually like the explicit self in the definition, but the error message needs to say something like "method given the wrong number of args. 1 argument passed when there are 2 arguments plus implicitly passed self."

Python: The functions that should be methods. len(list) just doesn't rub me as well as list.len(). It's such a stupid criticism that I'm hesitant to post it, but whatever, it bothers me. Likewise, Ruby's int.to_f seems much nicer than a built-in function float(int). Same with int and str.

PHP: The fact that 0 == "apple". Yeah, integer 0 is equal to any string. That means:
$a = 0;
$b = "apple"
$c = "ms"
$a == $b
$b != $c
$a == $c

Yeah, a == b, a == c and b != c. Um? Heck, integer 0 is equal to an uninitialized variable. It just makes bugs that are so hard to find. Yeah, it stops you from having to cast in certain situations, but for the little time it takes to cast, you end up with horrible bugs.

Java: The fact that I can't do if(a) { return true } else { return false } in a method. The Java compiler will say that I don't have a return in that method because all of my returns are within a conditional even though it will always hit one of the return statements. if the Java compiler is going to check that I have an appropriate return, be smart enough to figure out that I do.
The weirdest computing disasters of 2008
Google Rebuts 'Bandwith Hog' Title
What's Old Is New: 12 Living Fossils
> Fingers are crossed, prayers are muttered, but alas, to no avail. The nemesis browser invariably screws something up.

I must be doing something right, because while there's usually something to fix, it seldom takes more than a few minutes (in my experience building templates over the past few years). Recently, the nastiest bugs I find are in IE7. They defy classification...there's some weird voodoo going on in that browser.
Linode, currently, thinking about switching or augmenting it with WebFaction.

I've used WebFaction before, and they're really good. But they're geared a little more towards frameworks like Django and Rails (but naturally, they do PHP too). They're really quite good. Pretty solid email set up too (which is important to me).
I understand your first reason. The second is a puzzler. The third is really off the wall.
Newspapers: Time for a Hail Mary Pass
Any of the puzzle pieces individually aren't bad, it's putting them all together then adding additional pipes to stuff like (as you mention) SPAM filtering, etc. that make it such a huge pain in the ass. In an ideal world, there would be some package available where you simply specify the credentials for the machines you want to use for each piece (smtp, pop3, imap, secure pop3/imap interface, etc.) and it will setup everything for you.

In an ideal world.
Those Enterprise intranet apps are very often dependent on IE6 bugs. Yes, some admins are also concerned about ease of SMS or WUS deployment, or central control over preferences such as proxy settings and the home page, but bug-compatibility with MSIE6 is probably more important and certainly (much) harder to implement.

I think the cheapest way to run an IE6 application will be to keep using IE6, for as long as Microsoft is willing to collect the license revenue on WinXP or whatever.
10 Microsoft research projects
About your last point:
You can get around it by typing
return (a);
Schneier blogged this 8 months ago here:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/german_police_...
Thanks for the original, the posted site not only ripped this off but seems off the deep end in general (check out the front page, bunch of junk like Obama not being eligible for President). Great article, but no need to support a site like that!
"Other drugs like modafinil have almost zero side-effects in comparison"

Oh? I'd love to read the study on the safety of long term modafinil usage that you are doubtlessly referring to.

I think it's ridiculous that the government prevents me from taking various substances, but claiming that poorly understood drugs are safe is ridiculous. No one even knows how modafinil works.
He really really really needs to fix the project-wide search and replace that hangs textmate until it finishes.