skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Usually when news like this comes up there are many comments along the lines of "it's okay, if you behave/do not touch data files/disclose/etc". Bad news folks - this might be ok by you, it's not ok by the law.

Unauthorized computer access is jail-time illegal. Do not access any computer or computer network without owner's permission. Seek legal counsel if you're not 100% clear about this, and do it before you get your ass in trouble.
You don't really need shims for selectors these days, querySelector() and querySelectorAll() are supported by all modern browsers and IE8.
> Apple could have made App store only the default. Or they could have prevented all non-signed apps completely.

No, they couldn't. They actually need and want people to upgrade and you can't do that if their existing apps won't run out of the box.

This is also the reason why the first version of OS X had the classic mode and why the Carbon API exists.
The article states that the judge clearly wanted to send a message to other hackers that this type of hacking is not "just fun". To give him a job as a professional security consultant would send the opposite message.

Reminds me of the movie War Games.
When I use Facebook Auth in my applications, I create a''User'' account with the clients e-mail address and a nil password. My users can then use "Password Recovery" to get a password for traditional login.
What does the user care if the time is spent rendering, transmitting or baking cookies?
This echoes a lot of the ideas from Clay Johnson's book "Information Diet: a case for conscious consumption". That book has a few good actionable ideas about how to modify your sources and methods of getting news so you get better information and learn to identify bias.
Agreed, the headline comes from a real email from one of our users. It's just one of many pretty direct responses to (only) fb auth (I'm the author)
You have yourself all worked up because of the wording in a dialog box on a dev preview of an OS due months from now?
Wow. This really hit me in the face. This is exactly my situation, my issues right now (and I am also a college/university freshman). I am spending so much time consuming information that I am behind on essentially everything I should and could be doing. I think I needed to read this.

"What followed were the most productive three years of my life."

It's become an addiction for sure, but I have had enough. Seeing someone else with the exact same issue, stating the above about productive years, is inspiring. I'm done, it's time to do things, get my life back on track. I don't need to know "everything", and I shouldn't try to build my world around that.

Thank you for making me realize it.
Argument #1: Presidential candidates are noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-explicitly-political work that contributes to justice, peace and prosperity. A small career choice can do a lot more than the most forceful checkmark on a ballot.

Argument #2: You probably need something like ten kilobytes of information to make a reasonable decision about which presidential candidate to vote for. This is way less than the amount of information that news-oriented people spend their time and attention to absorb on a single day.

(If you want to overkill, on November 1st you could read the election issue of The Economist cover to cover, whatever political posts are on the front page of HN, and the Wikipedia pages for the major issues. Then sit and think carefully for an hour. This would take about five hours, and I’ll bet $1 you’d vote for the same candidate you would have if you’d read five hours of political news per day for the last year.)
Reading HN will also not expose you to non-hacker-related information. At the same time, it's always possible to make the stories you're more likely to like more likely to be chosen, and introduce some randomness to be exposed to the odd lower-rated story.
I ditched rss readers a long time ago and refuse to use any service with an 'unread' counter except email.
Structural Pattern Matching using Exceptions
Sure you can! Like everything else, you have to pick your sources. I go with NYT and the IHT for "American" sources, and the BBC and Al Jaz, and then occassionally the local newspapers if I'm bored. NYT is quite decent, IMO, although obviously far from perfect.
I know people think that is a little harsh, but it does involve HUGE costs in time and money for corporations.

It gives hackers a bad name too.

I think legal action is totally appropriate
Initially we had a 2-step process: ask for email permissions only during signup, and for post permissions later when you actually wanted to share something. Unfortunately this confused our users even more - they didn't understand why they had to FB-auth twice. I guess that many don't actually read the list of permissions (although a short list is better than a long list).
2. It was important that the new logo carries our Metro principle of being “Authentically Digital”. By that, we mean it does not try to emulate faux-industrial design characteristics such as materiality (glass, wood, plastic, etc.)

This is in stark contrast to everything Apple has been doing lately with address books and calendar on iPad trying to look like cartoonish versions of real materials. I prefer "authentically digital"
I wrote a little code to analyze the letter density etc:

https://gist.github.com/1855582

tl;dr:

DOTSIES

Average density: 2.02
Vowel density: 1.52
Consonant density: 2.33

DOTSIES 3

Average density: 2.78
Vowel density: 4.12
Consonant density: 1.96
cool screensaver

while true; do echo http://dicks.heroku.com/66.txt| xargs -P 16 curl -s; done;
Boring can be good, from a usability perspective. Metro seems to be their big selling point now and I imagine they want the branding to reflect the usability of the product.

Not trying to give you grief. I agree it's kinda boring, I'm just thinking that maybe it's boring by design.
Got a question to you all Ruby developers:

I came from Java background where Maven reigns supreme when it comes to build + dependency + convention on file structure and I like this set-up.

What is the equivalent to that in Ruby, I know there's Bundler and Rake, but Rake feels like Ant where you'd have to do a few things yourself.
If facebook was involved in helping prosecute this guy, sounds like they were, makes me want to boycott facebook. I only get online once every 2-3 days, but this is too much.
He should have invented TeX.
I agree. Good creative output requires at least some degree of good creative input (especially, IMHO, in more artistic endeavors like creative writing). You need other people's ideas to help expand your own, even as you try to escape from their boxes. Yet, if you spend all your time doing that, you'll never reap the benefits.

I'm yet to find the balance.
Apple in China: End of the iPad?
I don't think your point is at odds with the OP. Even though the OP essentially advocates cutting out all new sources from your life at the end of the article, the real point of the article is to disabuse you of the illusion that these news sources are contributing to your productivity. So, if you want to keep up with the news so you can participate in water cooler discussions and build your social network[1], that's fine. But if you are spending large fractions of your time reading news because you think it will somehow improve your productivity, or even make you more informed, you're fooling yourself.

[1] I mean your actual social network, in the sense we all used that term before Facebook came along.
YAAB - can you guess what the acronym means...
Someone told me that Sinatra sets the ground work for Rails.

From my little interaction, it appears that they are very separate (sinatra less complexed).

Is Sinatra a building block or just a simple first step???
OpenCL vs CUDA Comparisons
iPad 3 LCD Under Microscope Reveals 2048x1536 Retina Display
Nice graphic, but what does it show? Infographics tend to insinuate a conclusion and not state a conclusion. That is not good.

1.In this case the infographic misleads the reader by selectively choosing metrics (foreign-born scientists and decreased percentage of workforce).

2.There needs to be a complete set of metrics, with every metric given equal emphasis, unless you are explicitly stating a conclusion

3. The most obvious conclusion: "Americans aren't focusing on engineering" is not proven

Here are some scenarios where the conclusion can fail

1. steady number of scientists, higher number of other professions

2. drastically lower number of scientists, moderately lower number other professions
I think you're biased due to where you live. Many people don't work with computers and at least around here (southern European country) the number of smartphones is still very low (2.8% in August). Not to mention that FB only has 640M users of working age, vs the 3.25 billion people of working age in the world.
Not much - you can always login by granting FB permissions again, and you'll return to the same account. FB just provides you with a facebook id that you use to lookup the user in the db.
It seems ilke you are countering the previous point...Are you implying that I should stay with Rails vs Sinatra?
It is really, really, really, really, really hard for me to find a good temporary distraction nowadays. The noise is so monotonous, so repetitive, so completely devoid of intellectual stimulation that I go between four websites in a loop looking for something interesting to read.

HN has maybe one article every two hours that pops up to the top that I find worth reading, and maybe half the time worth upvoting. And that's the only good source of noise I have. Everything else is shit.

I don't care about politics. I don't care about the tech scene, or gadgets, or games, or celebrities, or sports, or this quarter's fiscal projections for a multinational corporation. You name a "news" story and I probably would hate to read about it. Even if I want to read it, it has almost no background information or anything more than the re-cutting of a press release with a paragraph describing why the press release was released. Regurgitated stock information with nothing of value.

Here's some choice excerpts from Google News, which I guess is supposed to be some representation of what's happening in journalism today:

* Microsoft unveils new, more window-like logo for Windows 8
* Robin Thicke Arrested for Pot Possession
* The mostly good and sometimes bad Top 10 moments of Tim Wakefield's Red Sox career
* [John] Glenn worries the US is ceding its space leadership
* Ohio AG DeWine switches from Romney to Santorum
* Identity Theft Tops IRS's 2012 "Dirty Dozen" Tax Scams
* GOP candidates fighting over Michigan
* Anthony Shadid, New York Times foreign correspondent, dies at 43
* FDA Still Wary of Diet Pill's Side Effects

I don't want noise, but sometimes I need noise. And when I want it, I want it to be worth while. It seems like nothing on the internet ever is.
My RepRap build, day 1
I am pretty sure you can see them at the cryptography museum right next to the NSA. I went two weeks ago and Nash letter is right in the front.
This may be of some use to you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
How will Gatekeeper make it stronger?
"knowledgeable and active communities"...such as??? Sorry, I'm a beginner. I would assume RoR and Python...any other suggestions?
One of the OP's points is that most "news" sources are not actually informative, but rather just another form of entertainment. That is, they tell you things that your brain latches on to and wants to hear about, not things that you actually need to hear about. How do you respond to that?
I wouldn't be surprised if people think that offering only FB login means you're trying to exploit on FB specifically, but if you have self-login as well it means you're not trying to force them into it.
Desktop Jellyfish Tank arrives: traffic up 700% to 14k in one day
I've captured a lot of my thoughts about this here: http://www.erictang.org/process/2012/02/16/brainstorming/
Let's see now: CMU, Stanford, MIT, UPenn, USC, LAAS, USyd, Oxford, Caltech, just to name a few. All of these universities have already dropped at least that much building technology for the DARPA Grand Challenges or related research demonstrations.
Gotcha; I definitely hear where you're coming from and admit my lifestyle could use an audit in this regard.

My first step was keeping my iPhone out of the bed room :)
Awards for the most useless usage of the Unix command `cat`
Still going to stick with R5RS.
do we really need to revise Latin?
Consuming information by choice allows us to express ourselves later with our opinions. Everyone should make an effort to learn about their surroundings to be an informed, contributing member of a democratic society. People say politicians are out of touch, but compared to a lot of Americans who willingly cut off their exposure to news, are they really?

If you are not an expert on a political issue. You are uninformed, period. You don't have time to write papers, do extensive research, email scientists. The reality of being humans is that we don't know most of everything and we can't. We specialize, not have uber intelligent men decide the fate of humanity.

This is the problem with politics. It's not that we are stupid, it's just that our brain can't store and think through the vast amount of knowledge needed to decide on multiple complex issues. To believe that we can build our society with informed voters in democracies is extremely naive.
Gunslinging Hackers: “Dust And Whiskey And Pistols”
Is it impossible to think that something you do is a more ethical thing to do than something someone else does without a.) judging the person who isn't doing it or b.) at least thinking that their decision not to do it is wrong?

I'm not sure I know the answer..
Very true. I didn't try to imply in any previous post that being motivated by profit is a bad thing. The app store definitely provides the ultra-simple software ecosystem you mentioned, and I agree that's awesome for most users. It also happens to guarantee that apple will be in the pipeline for all sales, so it's really win-win.

Despite my surprise that anybody would use it, there are over a thousand apps on the mac app store, so apple must be adding value by getting the product in front of eyeballs and streamlining the payment process. Still, I don't think they'll be able to get away with the draconian rule that they enjoy in the iDevice world. After all, if they make the experience too unpleasant, developers can still sell software through a competing app store, their website, or by mailing you a CD-ROM if all else fails. I think this is a good thing - the "escape hatch" means they'll actually have to put effort into pleasing the vendors who use their channel.

You'll never see a "why we decided to abandon the iPhone app store" - the only choice in that world is to abandon the platform altogether.
That's quite comforting actually!
Show HN: AppWithPHP - Straight, Simple PHP Articles for Everyone
> If you read/watch American news, you think you actually know what other nations are up to?

This reminds me of a recent Daily Show segment that showed how Time magazine offers different cover stories for their international and their US issues on the same date. One example was the Arab Spring (international) and something on "doing chores" for us here in the US.
Nope.

I graduated with a BSEE over two decades ago (gulp!). A few months after graduation, I was asked to analyze a simple filter circuit to make some changes. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and it pissed me off to no end that after 4 years of hard-as-hell classes I couldn't do it.

Then I happened to look at the paper from a different angle and it just hit me -- the filter was nothing more than a 2-port network. I knew everything about analyzing 2-port networks!

I sympathize, but I can assure you that it will get better with practice.
Sure, knowing that Osama was killed isn't a life or death piece of information but staying informed is important to many people. It doesn't have to be binary - read it all or read nothing. You can quickly stay informed if you pick news sources that respect your time.

IMO, reading several short summaries of current events is a better solution than limiting yourself to 1 or 2 stories a day. That's exactly why I created a website[1] that crowd sources summaries of news articles. People come in, read the news, and get on with their day.

[1] http://skimthat.com - Crowd sourced news summaries.

Another source for news summaries is http://www.newser.com and if you like videos you can try http://www.newsy.com/
fuzzix said it best. Long ago I configured ratpoison to be modal like vi, with tons of personal customizations. I've set it up to behave exactly like I'd want any WM to, so what's the use of moving to something newer?
I don't read newspapers, or watch news, or follow current events at all, except for hn, and I agree that most if not all news is of completely no consequence to my life but I do have ~130 feeds in my rss reader and derive a lot of value from them.

From 10 or so comics that are pure distraction (but great to steal jokes from), through blogs on fashion and style (at least I now know when I'm terribly dressed) to life-changing, paradigm-shifting feeds like Overcoming Bias (it's about signalling), The Last Psychiatrist (we're all narcissists) or Barking up the wrong tree (science delivered in tabloid style).

So instead of turning the noise down, this advice allows you to pick your kind of noise.
How about the part where some APIs are App Store only?
Frequency and quality are negatively correlated when it comes to news.

I would recommend Instapaper's curated list of articles, which tend to be long-form and more interesting than most, as well as The Browser ("Writing Worth Reading") for curated quality content. http://www.thebrowser.com

But you're not going to find quality content many times a day, no matter where you look.
I'm facing the same issue. It looks like there are plenty of those "roadmaps" for Rails, but not much for Sinatra. I think the community assumes a higher level of learning.

I've started working on Sinatra with friends. Let me know if you land the information, I couldn't fast enough-so went to people instead of the web.
>Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone.

One could make a good argument that this kind of faulty thinking is the reason third party candidates can never get any footing, and also the reason that we get such downright evil people elected.

Your vote is not "foregone" unless you choose not to vote. Period.
This is how I perceive Spotify. I can't sign up for it because I deleted my FB account. FB as the only option makes me think they must want to datamine me as hard as possible.
> If it really is one and they start down that path use a different product. Use Windows or Linux.

That makes no sense. I'm an Android developer for a number of reasons, freedom being the primary one. Developers are fighting about this and warning of the future because we don't want to be forced into a specific development system due to artificial limits. Apple, Google and Microsoft are building the future of operating systems right now, and that future defines much of the way I will live for the next 50 years.

Don't tell me not to care about this and brush this topic off as "just switch". I don't even use this system, I never will, and I care a lot about what happens to it.
Thanks you for the links. I found a simple Rails pjax app and I am going through the code right now: https://github.com/edison/pjax-rails-sample
Programming in higher order logic - tutorial
While I personally would prefer to put most JavaScript in an separate file, rather than sprinkled inline, it happens. So, why doesn't the browser handle this problem for us???

Why not have the browser drop all of the js script fragments and references into a queue, then run them later? Why make people reshuffle the stuff that they have working?

Hell, for that matter, I'm a bit puzzled why js even runs before the document is ready anyway. Is there some user in a hurry to get his alerts and popup windows?
You would prefer to see a grown man die on TV?

Your comment is wrong and false. He doesn't spend every night in a hotel, the shoots are between 5 to 7 days. Some he stays outside all night, the other supporting shots he stays in a hotel.

He risks his life in significant (and foolish) ways every episode. Climbing and swinging on rope vines over 1,000 foot drops are not faked. Hunting by hand, cleaning and cooking animals, or eating them raw is not faked. Sure he has assistance and safety precautions but that's reasonable.
Fair enough. It's important to have different paradigms for different work styles. You use whatever works best for you. My point was just that tiling WMs were not anachronistic back in '85.
Are there any alternatives to Code Academy...by that I mean other informal schools ???
It's still fair to say that prosecuting after the fact, if you can find the person responsible, is a pretty shoddy way to run your security. And if you acknowledge that, then it isn't difficult to see the value - both to product and to PR - of choosing to be magnanimous with the benign ones. It's still fair to criticize Facebook for an overreaction which appears to be a way to cover its own ass and deflect attention from the larger issue, namely, that it should have spent to prevent this in the first place, and that nobody knows who else is accessing user information.
Show HN: Distraction-free writing environment
> nurture a community of real, authentic users.

This is utter BS and the author knows it. The last people you want to fill the role of early adopter are the people of Facebook. Nurture, foster, incubate. That's lazy business people speak for not actually doing any work of note and spending more time networking and that all-consuming fundraising so they can actually hire someone to do the work for them and pay them squat. You know, living the dream that made them go to B-school in the first place.

Facebook-only? That's what lazy people do.
In "The Four Hour Work Week", Timothy Ferriss claims to not have read a newspaper for years. It's all about maximum output. Minimizing input is one great way to free up time and energy to drastically increase output.
Video Preview: Software Engineering for Software as a Service
I get this....I just wonder how to "break in" to a great learning platform (or job). Can you really teach yourself to become great???
I like it better than the new one. If they got rid of the rounded corners and added the new type, it would be a pretty good one.

It would also give Microsoft employees something I think they need - a bridge to their former greatness. Microsoft was a very interesting company back then and they may need to be reminded they can still be that company.
Still, the question by itself is pretty dumb/meaningless.

It's like asking a band why all their album covers aren't them playing instruments.
I don't think China does a more prudent job of enforcing responsibility. Rather China occasionally makes an example of the most blatant cases of corruption.
The slippery slope that bothers me is iCloud.
I'm not saying he deserved this sentence
but if you have that much talent and energy BUILD SOMETHING OF YOUR OWN.

We all understand the tinkering nature of taking something apart to see how it works.

But if you are that clever and deep into hacking apart facebook, stop and make your own project with that kind of energy.