skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cassette | Asset bundling for .NET web apps
I have always thought D was an interesting language. I never got into it because I thought it was pretty dormant. Has it been resurrected?
Let’s host a tech conference, it’ll be easy right?
I don't think there are such things as 'the definitive biography/history/story'. All such endeavours are filtered tellings of actual fact through prisms of bias, limited knowledge and the limitations of condensation.
There's also the Stack Overflow method for first-time users: no sign-up at all. Let them use the site anonymously but fully, and register at their leisure. I'm using that for a current project.
I had two problems with this post. First:
'NeXTStep was not “just warmed over UNIX”.'

It was, and so was Mac OSX. What Gruber doesn't seem to get is that warmed over unix provides a much more stable OS than Windows NT or DOS. He should be proudly admitting its warmed over unix.

Second:
"It’s almost impossible to overstate just how wrong Bill Gates is here, but Isaacson presents Gates’s side as the truth."

It should be mentioned more clearly that Gates was saying this on a sales call - his ultimate goal being to have every consumer computer made running Windows NT. If he stretched the truth a bit, he shouldn't be blamed for being ignorant, only ambitious.

This is what often irks me about Gruber - he makes disagreeing with Apple out to be an act of incompetence. Most engineers that don't like Apple products simply want greater customization over their tech, something Apple denies their users to promote ease of use.
Ask HN: Alternatives to Google's Static Maps API?
We're building a web application that needs to display many small static map images with a custom image marker in the center. Each image is around 200 x 60 pixels.

We quickly hit Google's Static Maps API limits, and their enterprise pricing is impossible for us right now.

We could use open data like OpenStreetMap with custom styles and host it ourselves. Does anyone have any experience with that for static maps? What tools do you recommend? Any other suggestions?
>Nobody uses it with that meaning anymore, the phrase has taken on a different meaning.

Nobody you know, maybe. I remember hearing Tony Blair use it (in the original sense) in Parliament once and I know I've read it several times in British publications.

I wonder if it is still properly used in the UK, then?
Nice collection. Just noticed a small spelling mistake: The blurb on "Free Range VHDL" has got "fro" instead of "for".
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Zynga Sees $978.6 Million Loss In 2011
I feel like the article ended a little early, like there should've been more. It almost reads like it should've said, "I'd rather you didn't have it, but..."

Beyond that it was a pretty gripping story. As this technology becomes cheaper we'll probably see more startups take advantage of it, but the human side of it can be unsettling.
An alternate, and which I use, is 1Password which doesn't store our database of passwords and whatnot on their services as it's a local file. You can sync it with Dropbox and it's therefore on Dropbox's servers but it's secured in some way. I remember trying LastPass but dropped it because of security worries.

You're definitely right about it being amusing at what get's people in a row. The main difference between this and the phone apps is that they deliberately chose to place their data with LastPass. So, it seems to be not the content but the authority that matters.
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I was there in this Startup Weekend and the difference was really stark! Inside, people trying to disrupt the status quo by CREATING, while downtown Athens others trying to disrupt it by DESTROYING!

Never doubted my preference to be in the CREATING side...
This is an incredibly ridiculous story. This student is exactly the type of person Hollywood should be nurturing: a creative student with vision, perusing his creative 'dream' and not letting his limited means get in the way of his vision.

It's a real pity that this happened, and a lost opportunity for the film industry. It could have been simple for them to take this as an opportunity and make something great out it. Instead, they alienated the type of person they need.

That said, I don't think this is an excuse to take 'revenge' on these companies, "one download at a time".
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This isn't easy to navigate right now…

Here are the schedules for saturday and sunday:
http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/days/sat
http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/days/sun

If the talks are in the first three rooms, they are in these three directories respectively:
http://video.fosdem.org/2012/maintracks/janson/
http://video.fosdem.org/2012/maintracks/k.1.105/
http://video.fosdem.org/2012/lightningtalks/

If they took place in H.1301 or H.1302, they are in this directory:
http://video.fosdem.org/2012/crossdistro/

Otherwise they are in one of these thematic directories:
http://video.fosdem.org/2012/devrooms/
It's interesting that you bring up European cities. I was about to type a post offering the counter example, New York (specifically Manhattan) and to some extent Chicago. Both are products of a strong "framework" of transit and utilities, but the growth within this framework has been more or less organic...all buildings don't have to be the same height a la Paris.

I've felt that organically grown cities, of which most major European cities are good examples, are very sub-optimal for because of the haphazard and random way the cities are laid out. It many such cities, the old, medieval core became so bogged down that cars aren't even allowed and it's basically a pedestrian heaven.

Navigation is hard in these cities, traffic is usually a mess without modern development to route around the "organicness" of the city centers, as a result certain types of goods and services...namely anything to do with lots of manufacturing or bulk goods, ends up moving away from the city core. And while it means that the cores tends to become very pedestrian friendly, they really just sort of end up as extended outdoor shopping malls with some housing for the shop workers above.

It's interesting in some of the older Asian cities which have very old histories, say Seoul, the the haphazard, medieval-style organic planning has given way to a large effort to put the major thoroughfares on a grid and as old areas are redeveloped, to do so with a heavily planned development policy in mind. The city was simply not able to handle the growth and population demands the organic system created.

There's a reason Paris' business center is not in Paris' geographic center, and central London has restricted driving zones, and most of Barcelona's population enjoys the 19th century planned developed residential areas, while the older parts are being turned into tourist hotels, malls, restaurants and more shopping areas.
Data mining and ranking is neither debugging, nor DoS protection or abuse protection, so I don't see how it could be allowed.

The FAQ makes it even more clear:

> Is information about my queries to Google Public DNS shared with other Google properties, such as Search, Gmail, ads networks, etc.?

> No.
Ministry of Justice offender tagging contract could top £3.5bn
How to optimize your caffeine intake with an app
I've never done any systems programming on Linux (or any other OS for that matter) so I can't comment on most of the article but I HAVE configured a network on a Fedora box on many occasions and it's simpler than the author's making it out to be.

On my fedora computer, I can just run system-config-network from the terminal and have a GUI pop up where I can configure network devices and DNS addresses with no need for X11 whatsoever. This is enough for a stable internet connection with no further action from the administrator of the computer such as "periodically calling ifconfig and ip route add until you finally managed to fetch all the data before NetworkManager would mess it up again."

Of course, if your router issues the configuration via DHCP, then you don't even need to do this much. You can just boot in on install and access the internet. I believe RedHat and CentOS work the same way. Contrary to his perception, configuring a network is not really a big deal on a Linux computer! :-D
This is factually wrong: Then you try to figure out how to configure NetworkManager from the command line. There's no tool in the entire distribution which lets you do that

nmcli lets you configure network manager through command line http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man1/nmcli.1.ht...
I have two long-standing bets with myself. One bet is that no NCAA men's basketball team will top the 1975-1976 Indiana perfect record, and the second bet is that there isn't any other combination of software and hardware that beats the speed of entry of my HP200-LX with Buddy and the little database todo list.

But this app might be the one to make the second bet fall.
Having network manager on the server just doesn't make sence in most cases. I'm running CenOS 6 (community rebuild of RHEL 6) on my vps without network manager and don't see any problems with this setup. I also don't know any service which would not work without network manager, I'm aware only of the opposite ones (eg. Red Hat cluster suite won't work with networkmanager). Moreover I'm quite sure that you can install RHEL, Fedora or Debian in headless mode.
You've got it! Biz idea: Create hack weekends
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Is everyone ok with the password being mailed out in plain text? (as one of these flows does, and Hacker News does itself)

Even if doing this on password creation doesnt imply that the passwords are stored plaintext, by emailing out the password, it can be sniffed over wifi or unsegmented wired networks, or read on intermediate servers, in your caches, in your backups, etc. Fairly low-hanging fruit.
Thanks for the feedback! I'm guessing your right about the video skipping, but I'll keep my eye on it.
It's inspired by Blockout. There is a lot to improve, but there is a little potential in such game. I was rather considering turning it into a tutorial, it's around 500 lines of code and may be a good, simple introduction to WebGL games. Would you like to read such thing?
There's an RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/nsscreencast. It doesn't yet contain the enclosure for iTunes, but I'll get that in shortly.

I'll be releasing a video each week.
Americans Elect
Crypto shocker: four of every 1,000 public keys provide no security
Reminds me of driving on 19 in the New Port Richey/Bayonet Point area in Florida. The only place I know where you can drive for 40 or 50 miles on one road and see continuous strip malls the entire time.

Every 4 or 5 miles the scene will basically repeat. The same set of stores, in virtually the same order, arranged in their various strip malls in virtually the same way. It felt like you were driving in a Zoetrope.

Go a mile or two off that and you're in the Gulf of Mexico or in a swamp if you go the other way.

It was an interesting city plan, but it felt miserable to me (other than the close proximity of nature).
Wow, kleiba, that's interesting to know

Of course "NS" is a play on Apple's Foundation classes that use the NextStep prefix for pseudo-namespaces.

It's unfortunate that it has connotations from our sordid past.
I'm really hoping that BrowserID takes away a lot of these issues and streamlines the process of logging in to sites.
can I get a ride from Dresden?
While I don't quite understand the specifics the author describes, I can relate very well to the general problem: Open Source software often depends on packages that are common on the Linux Desktop. This quickly gets you into dependency hell if you try to compile the program/library on a different platform.

An example I was recently confronted with was libmdb, a library that reads Microsoft Access databases. For some reason it depends on glib2, which in turn depends on a few other libraries. In the end I needed to compile 5 different libraries because libmdb uses hash tables and arrays from glib2.
Seems like Google Identity Toolkit addresses these problems and offers a viable solution. It's what I'm planning to use at our startup.

http://code.google.com/apis/identitytoolkit/

http://accountchooser.com/

example use: http://www.openidsamplestore.com/basic/
Most colleges have student legal assistance available, I think. I wonder if he tried going that route?
Ask HN: Why does Facebook put itself under EU Data Protection Law?
Just something I was wondering about, I'm (obviously) not looking for legal advice or insights into the inner workings of Facebook

When you're signing up to a Facebook account, the terms of use ( http://www.facebook.com/legal/terms ) state, in §18(1), that:

> If you are a resident of or have your principal place of business in the US or Canada, this Statement is an agreement between you and Facebook, Inc. Otherwise, this Statement is an agreement between you and Facebook Ireland Limited. References to “us,” “we,” and “our” mean either Facebook, Inc. or Facebook Ireland Limited, as appropriate.

So if you're in the USA or Canada, you've a contract with a US company, else, you have a contract with an Irish company, that then has to work under EU Data Protection Laws.

But why would Facebook do this? Why not just tell everyone that they have a contract with the US company, and then you don't have to be audited by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (as they recently were). Why would they put themselves through that?

(And yes, the corporate tax rate in Ireland is 12½%, but that doesn't mean that end users need to have a contract with Facebook Ireland Ltd.)
Why Cologne and not Berlin?
I want an Android phone with keyboard - I like the slider phones, and I'd like an Android equivalent of the Blackberry Torch.

I looked into the Galaxy Pro (http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_pro_b7510-3850.php) , but it looks like a bad compromise.
Network manager is particularly annoying. It doesn't seem to like static IP addresses at all, sure the GUI will allow you to assign them but it doesn't actually seem to affect the system at all.

I tried disabling NetworkManager since on my development box I like to have a number of static IPs assigned to it for testing on the LAN. However I also want to be able to easily connect to wireless networks and I can't find an easy way to do that without NM (I tried wickd but had other issues with that).

The upshot of this is that I have to use NM with some bash scripts that run on login to overwrite some of it's settings.

Don't get me started on sound..
There are some simple things that could be done to protect against this kind of abuse:

- Loser pays the winner's costs, but capped such that the loser won't be bankrupted. This effectively means that when a big company loses, they get to pay for all of the trial, but individuals can still lose without being totally doomed.

- A judge could be allowed to grant "free trial" if he thought the case had merit and one of the parties couldn't afford the legal costs. This would mean that the state would cover the legal costs of that party no matter the outcome.
How we'll get WWDC tickets
+1 for the author's use of the WTFPL.
There are better books out there.

Advanced Mechanics: UPGRADE: Sussman and Wisdom

Basic Quantum: UPGRADE: Wichmann
>You need to chemically analyze your product, and ultimately you need to try it on people.

I can think of many industrial applications where biotech could help without the need to test it on humans, eg. food synthesis - efficiently producing essential amino acids, carbs and fats by bacteria in an environment suitable to industrial production. Or materials like that spider silk they did when genetically modifying silkworm.
I suspect that the author is used to the old interface, involving manually writing shell scripts that call ifconfig and friends. And now he's pissed off because he can't do that anymore and concludes that the system must suck, or that his "freedom" is in jeopardy because his old way is no longer supported.

Well I see things differently. Users should be free from interference from ancient and non-user-friendly cruft. Yeah so some /etc scripts don't work anymore, but the new way allows displaying GUI dialogs which the old way didn't allow so there are legit reasons supporting the new way.
Americans, why don't you introduce the concept where courts are encouraged to award all costs against the loser? This culture is widespread in the commonwealth, and strategic court actions are less common. It should be a really simple change.
Buildings can't be taller than the Washington Monument or 555 feet.
Apple App Store outpace Google Market three to one
The alternative would be for libmdb to implement that stuff themselves. That would increase development time, increase the amount of bugs, increase the size and decrease developer happiness.
Remark: As far I know 1Password does not encrypt everything. Lets say you store a password in 1Password for twitter.com then the password is being encrypted but the information that the password is used for twitter.com is not. So someone could find out that you are using twitter simply by going through your 1Password file. This may be a problem with sites that are not as harmless like twitter.
... and that's why loser pays system is better. This guy would just get one of those lawyers who you have to pay only after the case (that is if you lose) and have them eat their C&D letters.
I've recently connected my bedside lights (on each side of my bed) to a dimmable X10 socket. Using the programmable controller, they gradually brighten over 20 mins when all lights in the room turn on and my alarm goes off.

Felt it was more fun, less intrusive, and as cheap (ish) to roll my own solution.

It's a long way from the old days of a radio on full-volume static or alarm clock thrown under the middle of my bed!
While I agree with the article that WP is in trouble, I disagree entirely as to what the problem is. WP is not too bad at the low-level policing part, to do with stopping vandalism, enforcing its biography of living persons policy, &c.

It has mostly failed at the higher-level policing mission, of ensuring that those editors who are trying to write articles that are soundly sourced and informative are able to get on with this task without being harassed by people pushing agendas. The more value a resource Wikipedia becomes, the more valuable it is to such agenda pushers: cranks, lobbyists, corporate PR, &c, who often can devote considerable energy to this task.

For example, the editor FT2, who earned money through his NLP practice, pushed pseudoscientific doctrines on many Wikipedia pages. he was expert at playing Wikipedia politics, and rose to become a member of Arbcom, and only came unstuck when he abused this position to punish editor Orangemarlin, an editor who campaigned against pseudoscience and who was a nuisance to FT2.

The way WP now works is that the enforcement of the low-level policing is done at the expense of the higher-level issue of neutrality. By playing the politics well, as FT2 did, agenda pushers can use the WP rules to waste the time and wear down the patience of good content editors. I left WP following the fiasco of the Arbcom ruling against Peter Damian.

Ed Buckner wrote an excellent summary of the problem with agenda pushers in Skeptica Adsversaria (apologies: the formatting in this copy is awful 400px left and right margin hard coded into every paragraph: OK if you have a very wide screen or can overide the margin somehow): http://www.btinternet.com/~musicweaver/wikipedia-by-ed-buckn...
Can’t monetize free users? Try threatening them with legal action
The Internet is broken - we need to start over
Zac Efron Fans website Hacked
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There's are really good book on that: Responsive web design

http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design
honestly i didn't get the NetworkManager thing either. since my Arch Linux days i remember that it's manageable from cli. although i never used that cli.

but the thing that touched me is that there are standards like POSIX for the cli world and there are standards like DBus for the gui world and lack of any sane standards for both of them. POSIX-based software and DBus-based software took quite different paths in their evolution. so different that they look now like creatures from two different universes. it's always nice to see how devs from GNOME and KDE develop standards that help interoperability. i wish someone would look into interoperability between the gui world and the cli world too. i originally moved to Arch from Ubuntu because the latter looked quite noisy to me - too many desktop components that i never used, to many system resources waisted on activities that i consider useless or harmful. i've created a very minimalistic environment built around some cli tools and a few very simple gui components that didn't depend on a whole desktop. and it worked quite well until it started to fall apart - every program that didn't belong to the cli world tended to either crash or work with some limitations. mostly because of the problems with DBus. most of these problems were caused by differences between the actual DBus interfaces provided and what those programs were expecting to see. and of course there were some missing components that depended on a ton of other components from either GNOME or KDE. so now i'm back to square one - i'm back on Ubuntu and i feel like an alien. most things indeed work out of the box but it's not a linux that i understand, can easily learn, fix and customize myself.
We wrote a service for sending out one-time URIs instead of the value itself:

https://onetimesecret.com/
The Machines Are Talking a Lot
Please note that there is another article here which provides some more information and another choice of words: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3593653
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