skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course there are nice people everywhere. But there are nice people at home, too.

What would be a nice country to visit? That is my question?

Take China - it is fascinating, but they don't have free speech and lots of death sentences. That makes it very unattractive to me. Even if I could meet interesting people there, chances are the interesting stuff would be illegal to say. So if I talk about it, I put myself at risk.

At other countries, you don't even meet women on the street. Sure, they might be really nice, but why do all the work to get beyond "culture"? In a lot of countries, if I talk to a woman her brothers might set out to kill me. Additionally, I am not keen on any kind of religion to begin with.

I wrote my rant in the hopes that somebody would come up with a good reason to learn a language or visit "challenged" countries.

I am aware that the Euro zone is a small bubble of moderate happiness on a sea of misery. I am lucky - but why should I leave the bubble and put myself at risk? Or even if I don't put myself at risk, chances are I am just taking advantage of some poor people (because I would travel to some holiday resort because it is so cheap).

Unfortunately historically culture tends to be all about suppressing women, among other things, I am just not into it. It is a set of rules, why should I force myself into it? I want to be free from culture, and I want to meet people who are free minds.

Can you name one worthwhile culture to get to know, and why is it worthwhile? Apart from scientific studies, which are fascinating, but not my line of work.

Clothes are the same all over the world now. Food you can also get a huge variety in most major cities.

Nothing against traveling to the odd country, but then again it is questionable if traveling to some country once for two weeks warrants investing years to learn their language.
Availability means it's online all the time. A server isn't, people's Skype isn't. Maybe it works for you if you're all in the same office, but I have people in 8 different time zones.
Just speaking from Mexico... Telmex soon announcing - "Banda Ancha Internacional". Mr Slim already charges insane fees for any form of communication through his company, having an opportunity like this, he'd seize it immediately.
That depends on your country of origin. In the US it is 02.21.2012, which isn't.
I do gripe about that aspect of modern live, that I feel most jobs are really worthless and bullshit. It includes my own work life and it depresses me greatly. But I try to work against it and actually do something meaningful. Is it really so bad to encourage my friends to do something meaningful in their lives, too? It's not as if the majority of people is ever so happy about their jobs. They are all depressed, but they think it is normal and so they put up with it. I don't feel guilty for pointing that out occasionally.

Incidentally, isn't that part of what Hacker News is all about?
I would love to be there, but the JAWS (Japan AWS) Summit meeting is also taking place that day:

http://jaws-ug.jp/summit2012/index.html
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
Google = CIA ,
Facebook = CIA ,
RIM = CIA

duh.
What I'm looking for is a way to easily create single DOM nodes, not a full templating language.

HAML and Jade assume that you have static pseudo-markup defined upfront and you just fill it with data, this approach is not suitable for apps that are doing heavy DOM manipulations (e.g. SVG editor, text editor, sophisticated widget toolkit).
I doubt Facebook shares have anything to do with it. Microsoft wanted to embarrass Google, but the alleged crime is very common because IE's implementation of privacy controls is flawed.
Let me get this straight: can you fund a startup with Kickstarter or not?

I used to think yes but the in the interview someone from their team (?) says no.
This change only affects JavaScriptCore, the original WebKit JS engine. (Various iterations of JavaScriptCore have been promoted as "Squirrelfish" and "Squirrelfish Extreme" and marketed by Apple as "Nitro", so the nomenclature around this engine is a bit confusing.)

Chrome uses V8 instead of JavaScriptCore, and I don't think anything would make them change, since having their own VM is such a large asset for Google (for example, they can use V8 to promote Dart).

JavaScriptCore actually has several JITs. There was the simple JIT that translates JS bytecode to machine code (I think it's called "method JIT"). There's a more advanced JIT that does data flow analysis. This is fairly new; I think it shipped last year in 64-bit Safari.

This new development is about improving performance on code that may not need to be JIT-compiled. Instead of always going to the JIT, they now use a fast interpreter (called LLInt), and only do the native compilation if a code path is deemed hot.
Yeah, I agree with @hsmyers - the question is extremely general.

I will say, however, that a CS degree does provide the basic programming and debugging skills necessary for a career in software engineering. The downside is that a 4 year degree is quite pricey, and much of the content of a CS degree is more theoretical and less applied.

I recently had an interesting conversation where a fellow programmer made the argument that CS was splitting into two branches, much like mathematics: applied CS and theoretical CS.

I think this is an oversimplification, but largely correct. A traditional CS degree is about 20% programming skills, and then lots of math problems to solve.

The time is ripe for a good software engineering degree (i.e. applied CS), which would be far more valuable in the job market.
- Because SIMD is 'easy' from the processor's point of view. Basically the compiler it tasked to bundle parallel computations together. SIMD died out back in the 90s because no one could get that magical parallelizing compiler to work. Similar story with VLIW ISA.

- Modern GPUs are not your 80's SIMD. Programs are written with very fine granularity. Lots of processor real estate is dedicated to scheduling/task switching, basically bundling fine-grained computations where possible. Modern GPUs are more like the 80's experimental dataflow machines than the SIMDs.
The article makes it sound a bit like the big companies are doing something very evil to the users data just because they are evil and greedy. I encountered this problem in my development work, and in reality it's much more complicated, while some companies might well be evil and greedy, the real problem is that the means available in the browser for doing cross-domain integration of web services while controlling privacy are really poor.

The P3P header is just a formal way of describing the companies privacy policy. Now, the problems is that when targeting MSIE, there is no way for a company to make their P3P header honestly reflect their existing privacy policy and still do integration with a third-party vendor on their page, because if the privacy policy described in the P3P is not restrictive enough IE blocks the cookies and there is nothing you can do about it, there will not even be a popup window for the user to decide what he wants do about it, it simply won't work.

Example: let's say you want to embed a facebook widget or whatever in your page and you have to do it via an iframe because that's the way facebook supplies it (and it might well be that for technical reasons no other way would work OK for both facebook and you). Then, after the user does something with the widget, you want your page to be called again, while maintaining the users identity (with the user still being logged-in in your page). This works well by default in all browsers, except for IE, which without the privacy policy being restrictive enough (as described in the P3P header sent by your page), will simply ignore the session-id cookie and log the user out in the iframe.

I don't think with a well thought out security model companies should have to make such a choice between functionality vs. having a specific privacy policy, those things should be completely independent. If the user actually wants to use third-party integration on a page supplied by a company with a not very restrictive privacy policy, why should the browser prohibit it? This is commonly needed, and currently the only way in MSIE to fix it other then sending an adequate P3P is AFAIR to lower the security settings, which most common users don't know how to do, and of course as a company you wouldn't like to recommend your users to lower their security level anyway. The browser should make sure the user knows what is going to happen, but then give him a choice and stay out of the way if that's the user wish.
I agree. It seems to me that it's a browser level problem if Google and Facebook could subvert so could the less "upstanding" websites.
David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview
Because you block accounts.

There are a number of reasons. Use your favorite search engine and look for reasons. Maybe have a look at what reasons people give when canceling their accounts.
wazoox, you are a terrific summary writer!
Kaggle.com,

http://trec.nist.gov/data.html

https://sqlazureservices.com/browse/Data (expired Cert, but i'm reasonably sure it's a legit MS site)

http://www.aggdata.com/data
So Facebook uses the exact same trick. They could have just omitted the P3P header completely, but no they must and shall have 3rd party cookies so they respond with an invalid P3P header, just like Google.

The fact that the invalid P3P header contains the string "We don't support P3P and here's why" is a red herring:

The only reason why they would place a statement regarding their non-support in the very header that they claim not to support, is to circumvent IE-users' privacy policy. It's very disingenuous.

If you don't support it, leave out the header, if you want to make a statement that says "We don't support the P3P header", don't put it in a place that really says

"We disagree with the P3P header and believe in circumventing it.
Read why here: http://xyz"

If FB or Google's headers had said that, at least it wouldn't have been as disingenious. Saying you don't support P3P--oops! and by saying that we broke it! whoops!

It's a bit like placing a sticker "WE DONT SUPPORT READING THE LEFT HALF OF A SIGNPOST" over the left half of a "NO ENTRY" sign. Childish.

It would be interesting if we could see that list of other 500 companies. Because "there's 498 others that do it too" has a very different implication depending on what sort of company Google and Facebook find themselves in by acting in such a childish manner.
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Excuses kill dreams
Easy fix: use DuckDuckGo

https://duckduckgo.com/

Don't let them track and bubble you:

http://donttrack.us/

http://dontbubble.us/
Problem: instead of having to sniff my servers' connections, an attacker (say, a government) can just download the blockchain - which is easily accessible - to have a list of everyone who has sent me email and everyone I've sent email to.

Besides, what's the point of the blockchain there anyway? Why not just have a distributed naming system (like namecoin) for the addresses and then simply integrate an MTA with the client, allowing simple P2P between users?
Bridging the gap between doctors and hackers to upgrade health care
Yegge, as usual, is hyperbole and a half. Don't get me wrong, I like his writing. I liked it more when I was younger, but I still enjoy it.

I have to say though, after working the last 3.5 years in an organization that Yegge would categorize flatly in Bad Agile, first as a developer and now as a PM, that I disagree. Plainly, his hyperbole and name calling doesn't open up for a constructive debate but I'll give it a try.

We do iterations, retrospectives and kaizen, automated testing (yes, part of XP), user stories and more. A few people practice TDD or pair programming. Importantly, all of this is voluntary - after five years of experimenting with process, tools, methodology we've found a set of things that work for us and help us deliver software with high quality and on time. It just happens that the tools we use fit in the Agile and XP umbrella. And if we look back five years to the pre-agile days and start looking at delivery times, quality (in terms of defect rates, patch releases, …) and customer satisfaction, they've trended continuously upwards and in a big way.

I'm not sure what we're doing wrong and why, and I'd like to have that explained to me.
why the heck stuttgart?
Megaflop: 4 millennia. Exaflop: 50 years more?
The CIA has nowhere near as much control over those businesses, it's limited by all kinds of legal obstacles and procedures. The FSB can do almost anything they want.

Also, the CIA has a mission dictated by the US govt. You can disagree with US policies, or find some practices of US intelligence community objectionable, but that doesn't compare to the motivations of Russian security services. Which are indeed hardly different than those of your typical mafia boss: Amass wealth and influence, by any means necessary, while staying out of the spotlight. Except: their means are way beyond anything any mafia could dream of.
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Author here. I went off on a bit of a rant, so here's the meat of it:

The funny thing about excuses is that they can be cleverly disguised to the point that they almost seem legitimate: I can’t start a website because I don’t know how to code; I can’t run a startup because I have no business experience; I can’t travel the world because I’m too busy with work.

Are you fucking kidding me? It’s 2012, and I call bullshit. We are living in an age of virtually unlimited access to knowledge and opportunity. It’s not okay to have excuses anymore. We complain that we don’t have enough time, but we spend hours a day on Facebook and Youtube. We complain that we don’t have the proper knowledge or skill, but anything we could ever want to know is right at our fingertips and the information infrastructure is expanding so rapidly that we can literally learn forever.

If you aren’t doing exactly what you want to be doing, there’s only one reason: you don’t want it badly enough. That’s all there is to it.
It's a general question, but the linked article explores it from a few angles of different kinds of career :-)

It agrees with your points - a split into applied and theoretical would probably be a good thing. The programmers I work with in the UK seem to come from physics/mathematics backgrounds, or electronic engineering, with just a few CS graduates. All of them (even the CS graduates) feel that a large proportion of what they learnt on the degree is irrelevant to their career going forwards. A degree focussing on practical software engineering would probably be very useful!
http://startupdigest.com

You can choose after you signed up.

I would also prefer Munich btw.
Waledac Spam Botnet Evolves into Password Sniffer
Is Pfizer Liable for Pregnancies Caused by Faulty Birth Control?
>Use more namespaces, write smaller functions, embrace lexical scoping, etc. You don't need to call something a foo-bar-frobber when it's being used in the foo-bar context, just call it a frobber.

I agree with this part and code this way.

>line noise

I generally follow this, it depends on how clear the abbreviation is. If I would need a comment I'll spell out the name instead.

>I always feel dirty when I have a long variable name.

Once it passes a certain size, I do too.

>pg writes about this in On Lisp: long names feel heavier.

This is something I strongly disagree with pg on and I would point to arch as prove that he's wrong here. Arch uses ridiculously short names for everything and I personally can't stand the language. As far as I can tell, the language never got popular despite a decent sized group of people waiting to see what pg would make.

>They might be super cheap to call, but because the name is long, you're less likely to call it.

I think pg arrives at this position because he uses vi. If you have a really nice IDE that does advanced code completion (e.g. I can type "RBV <tab>" for ReallyBigVariable) you'll find that you're no less likely to use a long variable or function name.

>Furthermore, I much rather adhere to a line length limit,

Agreed.
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I apologize for using the wrong words. I meant situation around uncontrolled corruption in every aspect of russian citizen's life.

Please, would you be so intelligent not to state things of which you are not sure?

I'm russian and Yandex employee since 2008. There's a lot of smart people doing cool things because they like to. That's how Yandex doing it's business. Some of yandexers openly considered with government influence over big (mostly petroleum) companies, some prefer to keep their liberal views in silence. I'm sure many employees will quit Yandex as soon as it would be involved in cooperation with KGB.
If it's broken to begin with, it's not really "breaking the users security settings". Specifically if it can be broken just by saying "break it", then it's broken from the start.
> it touches more routers, and takes up more fiber capacity, so it costs more, but the customer isn't charged more.

From a consumer protection standpoint, how would you communicate this to the end user?

When you're dialing a phone number, you can look at it and know if it's local, long-distance or international, and you can make the informed decision to make the call or not given your phone company's price list.

But when you're on the internet, how would that work? A popup before each TCP connection is established? What about "local" webpages that use "international" resources, like embedding jQuery from Google?

No, the business model is already taken care of, the various providers are organized in tiers with peering agreements, and everyone pays to their upstream link.
It is. FB too. They've done it to themselves (in more important cases than this P3P stuff btw). And that doesn't make it right, at all.
It's a joke for people to expect that P3P is a good privacy model.
int *p = &a;

?
Chrome Extension Applies NSA-Class Encryption to Facebook
"It's tracking based on hardcoded colours. Try this on a video with even the slightest colour variation, and it will fall apart."

How would you improve it? (Serious question.) Some sort of training data set of many different footballs from many different games? It's easy to offer criticism without also offering how this could improve.

I personally think this kind of thing could be the future of television - heavy in-game analysis for sports stat nerds.

At the moment football (i.e. soccer) teams pay a lot of money to get stats on their own players[1] (distance ran, passes complete, assists, etc, etc). This kind of thing could lower the cost of gathering this data. I'm not an expert in the area, but I read somewhere that at the moment at least some stats are gathered manually (guy sitting in the stands.) It would be of particular interest to clubs doing the whole soccernomics thing (idea adopted from "Moneyball" in US baseball). Some clubs practicing soccernomics: Liverpool in England and Lyon in France [2]. Could be a serious startup opportunity here!

[1] http://www.optasports.com/sports/football.html

[2] See this book for more: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soccernomics-England-Germany-Austral...
True, but apparent "not including the header" gives you strict privacy controls, while "including an invalid header" will set them wide open.

That is a bit strange behaviour on IE's side as well.
> chances are I am just taking advantage of some poor people (because I would travel to some holiday resort because it is so cheap)

Those of us in the 'west' are doing this anyway through food and goods. Sounds like you'd prefer some kind of ethical tourism.

As a note of optimism, history is there to be learnt from. Not very long ago did we see women and blacks oppressed in the so called civilised world.
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string hell squared.
The relationship between a candidate and an employer is seldom an equal one, and it's ridiculous to claim otherwise -- we already made the case why candidates should want to work for us, and now it's up to them to prove that we want to work with them.

There are exceptional employees who we'll tolerate the bullshit for, but they are the exception.

Making talented people work for you when they don't have to is not an easy thing. Sitting on a high horse, like you are, it is pretty impossible.

If this helps you sleep better at night, you go nuts.

Whenever discussions about interviews or interviewers come up, the vast majority of comments are naturally going to come from people with a chip on their shoulder about the process -- the bottom dregs who churn from interview to interview. If you think the sorts of comments that discussions like this yield represents the actual talent that employers are seeking, you are sadly misinformed in the internet echo chamber.
Ask HN: How do you store/recall professional contacts
Every now and then, and more often recently, I offer to help someone out. Generally it's a little thing but the recipient is appreciative and often says in one way or another, "if I can repay the favor let me know." Or maybe I met someone with a mutual interest but there was nothing specific (or active) enough to keep in close touch at the time.

As the months go by something will come across my path where I would like to reconnect with someone, but I often can't recall the person's name, their site or exactly how we left off our last communication. I end up sifting through my email to piece the memory back together, but I get a lot of email so that task is arduous and occasionally fruitless.

So I'm asking what people use to manage their professional contacts. I know applications like Salesforce are built for this kind of relationship management, but that seems like over-kill. Could be it as simple as notes in the contact list of your email client? If someone could enlighten me on the application and methodology they use that would be very helpful.
Users need to verify the source code to cryptwit.com on every single page load to ensure that the "client side" code is not leaking the key/plaintext. There are many highly creative methods for leaking this information that would pass unnoticed through a quick code review. For this reason (amongst numerous others) the site is useless at best and harmful at worst (false sense of security for unsuspecting users).
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