skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>when even the standards body doesn't support it anymore

Don't they? I am curious, do you have a reference for that?
No, I think the engine metaphor is pretty apt. I completely understand what he's saying, but the alternative he seems to imply is no better. Why would I want the interface to load but not be able to use it for another 45 seconds? Okay, so I'm in my car (clicked on the shortcut) but I won't be able to go anywhere (use the application) for a few minutes because it's slow to accelerate (load). Who cares about the max speed of your car as long as it 0-60s in a reasonable amount time?

Either way it's going to take some time to load because it's a big application. One way lets you know it's working, the other makes you think it has frozen as you're fruitlessly clicking around. The interface is the least important thing in the application until it's fully loaded.
To be fair, unless you're a huge organisation with thousands of users, an IRC server is just a single process on a low-end machine or small VM. You can't really compare that with the whole infrastructure Heroku provides.
Usability guru Jackob Nielsen disagrees with you and the author: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html
Facebook Timeline Ad Displays "Random" Number of Friends
I got this ad on my facebook.. when i visited the next page to my surprise i was served the same ad with a different number of users who have already signed up for timeline. When I refreshed a few times i actually got a number less than i had previously gotten. Strange behaviour. Wonder what the reason for this is.
As has already been discussed in numerous places, Google, Facebook, Amazon and even Microsoft have broken P3P implementations in several places.

That's hardly "shady warez sites". I love you you jumped straight to that conclusion, though. Shows your biases coming through...
I really enjoyed Convore on PyCon last year. Much more than Twitter for example. I remember there were rooms on just about anything, and among other things I met some guys to grab beers with on Convore. Too bad it didn't work out.
National Defense and President Obama’s 2013 Clean Energy Budget
President Obama's 2013 budget includes clean energy initiatives that create new green jobs and increase security of overseas clean energy supplies.
After Microsoft introduced cookie-blocking features in IE they've been dancing around how to get users to block ads without telling users to install the blockers directly.

Here's the blacklist they suggest in their post, which they recommend "as a protection":
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/browser/p3p/google.txt

The "-d" lines block domains entirely, which I believe means this has the consequence of blocking Google ads entirely.
Agreed. Kickstarter has done a good job positioning itself as a central hub for emerging artists to raise money, which means that there is a very creative community of people making those videos.
Right. So if you are afraid of that then don't use Chrome.

And if you are afraid that cookies can be used for tracking then disable them in your browser.

P3P imho is useless because people whom I don't want to be tracked by will serve all the reassuring tokens in P3P and do whatever they want anyway.

I want my +1 buttons to work and if that means pulling curtain on some security theater then so be it.
I hope they fix the file locking issues Mesh has had since the beginning. I was a big fan and user of Mesh for quite a while but switched to Dropbox 100% because of this problem.

For whatever reason Live Mesh appears to lock files for way too long such that if you use it to sync files that are always changing (because you're a compulsive manual saver in your IDE for example) you're bound to see conflicts between the program trying to save the file and Mesh.

This sort of conflict occurred for me all the time when using Mesh, even the newest one in Live Essentials 2011.. make a change, save it, now Mesh has to sync that file, you make another change and save it again and your code editor complains about not being able to write to the file (because Mesh is holding a lock on it for far longer than seems necessary). Haven't had this issue once with Dropbox so that's why I use Dropbox and ditched Mesh.

If anyone from Microsoft's Mesh/SkyDrive/Win8 teams sees this, please fix this issue because it makes Mesh nearly unusable for me, but other than this one thing I prefer Mesh to Dropbox (I like being able to sync any directory anywhere on my system without jumping through hoops, YMMV).
Privacy violations should be opt-in. That's what is wrong with privacy on the web.
It's not a privacy implication, it's an anonymity one. Different things. If you want privacy, use PGP or check the appropriate setting in Facebook to make sure only the intended recipient(s) sees your message. If you want anonymity for publicly broadcast messages of anything you say, that's a lot harder since one can infer on content as well as style and draw inferences around collections of lies just as easily as collections of truths.
Crowdfunding is a solution to high quality software development, open source development, science funding, and sopa/pipa. It's really quite amazing and people haven't caught on yet. It's also a solution to the startup problem of building what people want.

Eric Ries talks about "pre-testing" - put up a landing page and seeing if you get signups. However, this sounds scammy. A better way is to simply launch a kickstarter/indiegogo campaign. You release the software as open source, which is better for the world as well. But you also get paid as well. You want to launch as startup that does project management as a saas. Instead put a kickstarter campaign up for 1 million dollars, or however much you were expecting to earn from the lifetime of your startup. If enough people want it, it will get funded. The next step you build and release as open source. Afterwards you can host it, or a bunch of other people who are expert at sysadmin host it and get customers paying for saas. You move on to the next project you want to build. The point is, you can have many crowdfunding campaigns going. Think of 20 apps, list them for 60 days. The ones that get funded, you build.

It also solves sopa/pipa. Someone has ideas for movies, launches campaigns in parallel. The ones that get funded, he creates releases for free on youtube.

Same for science. Scientists would no longer need to be attached to a university or do the politics that is involved in getting funding in science. They go directly to the public.

In the above scenarios everyone wins. Customers and creators. The only people who lose are people who were good at politicking their way up the coroorate ladder. Although, they don't really lose. They can switch to being marketers who launch campaigns, however they'll now need to have competence in marketing and brainstorming ideas.

Firms only exist to solve the communication problem. Now that we have the internet, there really is no need for organizations to exist. As more database-based information systems are created for crowdsourcing (kickstarter, fiverr, mechanical turk) , the more efficient this process becomes - which is good news for startups because this is what they are creating.
There are countless tracking mechanisms besides cookies, for example flash cookies and so on. They have been used for years. I would be surprised if any ad network would opt to not use them (I don't like it, but still).
You don't know how much you suck at something until you are good at it.
>Not exactly. The user setting is inaccurate, as it actually should have said "Do not allow 3rd party cookies, except for those from sites which have a code that indicates they aren't tracking cookies or a code we don't understand."

That's exactly what they do.

>Instead it says "Third Party Cookies" with choices of Accept, Block, or Prompt.

No, it doesn't.

You sound as if you have researched it, but you seem to be trying to mislead folks by spreading nonsense.
Funny, I just started reading about adversarial stylometry the other day. https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~mb553/stuff/Indiana_20110407.pdf
How does the "Internet" know which CDN server is located close to you?
Content Delivery networks hack around the BGS to deliver content effectively.
Domain owners behind WHOIS privacy are not necessarily unreachable. The privacy service has to offer some way of contacting those domain owners by proxy, so you may just have to fill out a web form behind a CAPTCHA to get your message across.

I did this for a domain a few weeks ago that was using OpenSRS' WHOIS privacy (via http://contactprivacy.com) and while it took 2 weeks for the owner to get back to me, he responded by putting the domain up on Sedo so I could make an offer on it.
One for each question that is moved out of StackOverflow, of course.
>The nefarious bit is in IE- which, although it pretends to allow you to "instruct the browser not to accept 3rd party cookies, full stop," actually accepts third party cookies from any site with a P3P code it doesn't understand.

No, if you select that option, it actually blocks all third party cookies.
In the most basic of definitions, Days Working Capital tells you how many days you can operate before your working capital is gone. WC's equation is current assets(accounts receivable, inventory) - current liabilities(accounts payable). This tells you how well a company can pay off its short term debts.

The days working capital number tells you how well it can pay off its debt, but it can also tell you how efficient a company is. This is where the author made a mistake. A company with 10 days WC may be in better shape than a company with 90 days WC depending on how well they are operating. If a company holds almost no inventory by having suppliers who can deliver in a short time period, the company will save lots of costs by keeping inventory down, which will then lower their DWC.

Basically, if Apple stopped selling products and just sat there, they'd be bankrupt in 90 days. But this is unrealistic, and thus, the authors words were a bit over dramatic.
Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
I know that I semi-consciously engage in a few spelling anachronisms that probably serve to isolate me. Actually, since I recognized both them and their likely effect, I've become somewhat more conscious in applying them -- or in checking for them while proofreading and deciding whether to leave them in.
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Generalised Caching Strategy
"But the person making the decisions not a designer."

Who is making the design decisions (what's their name)?

How do you know this person is not a designer?

How do you know that there's only one person making the decisions?
Apple Please don’t get dizzy at the top
I have always understood that mathematics is a formal science, whereas the scientific method applies to what we call empirical sciences. Then there are things like “Management Science,” which are considered “Bodies of Knowledge” and are unlike both formal and empirical sciences. The theoretical side of Computer Science is a formal science.

I won’t say what psychology or psychiatry are. Depending on who you ask, they’re empirical sciences, bodies of knowledge, or cargo cult medicine. Software development seems to be all over the place. Some of it clearly relies on computer science, some of it seems to be a body of knowledge.
I've been wondering the same thing about CSS recently. With the advent of SCSS and other CSS preprocessors our CSS files are blowing out of late, and I am starting to worry about parsing time.

Does anyone have any good sources on
a) caching of CSS parse trees
b) what the latest thinking is on CSS file size, # of selectors, complexity of selectors for page load times.

Thinking of writing something about this myself but I am wondering what's out there.
So this post inspired me because I've been doing a lot of the Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/) problems and this seemed in a similar vein.

I let it run a few hours in Python on a fastish laptop (although I could only use one core) and only got to ~23%. I became interested in the number of minutes it took to advance each step, and found an interesting pattern:

To go from 7% to 8% takes 2.719 times as long as 6% to 7%, and 8% to 9% takes 2.719 times as long as that. The period eventually settles at e (2.7182818...). Using this, it should be easy to calculate the total number of minutes as such: I found it took 100210581 minutes to get to 19%, so:
100% = 100210581 * e^(100-19) = 1.509e+43

I checked my math by using another number (36865412 is ~18%) so while I don't understand the underlying mathematics, I'm at least confident that this is correct. It also contradicts my intuition which says that as the ant gets closer to the end, the rubber band stretching goes on mostly behind him and he should be able to make % increases in fewer minutes.

Anyway, here is my python script which never gets past 23% (I'm on minute 14803200000, or year 28,164):
https://gist.github.com/1871474
>The "-d" lines block domains entirely, which I believe means this has the accidental consequence of blocking Google ads entirely.

Err what? Why would disabling cookies disable displaying ads?

You seem to be overly concerned about Google being unable to track the browsing habits of some people.
Matlab is considered MathWorks "property" because of the IP laws. These IP laws have jurisdiction over areas and peoples that are governed by the legislation that adopt these laws. Why would people who are not governed and protected by the legislations and laws (to do business etc.) of particular authorities be obligated to obey their laws? I am speaking rhetorically, of course, and I do want to support actual innovators to be paid for their efforts.
It's not like every YC startup was a paying customer of Convore. I'm pretty sure he meant that they used Convore instead of/as well as a mailing list to communicate with the rest of the batch. He was making a claim that Convore leads to better communication than a mailing list, and that in the case of that YC batch, it was enough better that he thinks it made the companies noticeably better overall.

But 200 people using it for free (and probably naturally fading out of using it once the summer is over anyway) is not going to keep them afloat.
Crazy awesome HTML5 demo
The vast majority of Mozilla's revenue comes from a search deal with Google.
Facebook's troubling trend Down Under
There's already a bill to change the law to accommodate.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/08/faq-what-the-new-u-s-crowd...

Kickstarter et al. have been project-focused and artist-centric primarily in order to get around the "motivations to invest" problem, so passing this could open the gates to a new wave of startups.
Consider that people were saying Louis CK was a chump to spend so much on the website he had made to sell his video. That was $32k. These mega-Kickstarter projects are giving Kickstarter at least $50k (5%).
Many Quants are not really interested in new languages. I know at least one bank that's C++ and Perl, because that's what they know.
Just a quick note. Avoid w3schools[0]. The Mozilla Developer Network docs[1] look much nicer and are far more accurate.

[0]: http://w3fools.com
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML
What functionality would that be? Tracking what pages the visitor browsed via the +1 buttons?
A blacklist seems like a pretty effective strategy and allows them to deal with offenders simply. I'd imagine you're not advocating for them to add proprietary extensions to P3P. What would you suggest they do otherwise, out of curiosity?
Ask HN: What kind of database does the IRS use?
You would launch a campaign asking that you would write this many articles with these titles and publish them in your magazine. You can launch parallel campaigns, with lists of articles, for example 10 different campaigns with different themes. Also show your previous work. Also say that you'll give the articles away as creative commons. If the public actually wants what you're giving, you'll get funded and have readers as well. If they don't, you'll know that what you're doing isn't worthwhile to customers and you can think of seeking funding for something else.
Probably just historical reasons. The original Clojure videos from Rich Hickey were put there, so I suppose it makes sense to consolidate them all in one place.
Actually it's the default in IE, not a feature people opted into. I'd be a lot less sympathetic to Google if it was a feature people opted into rather than one that IE users were unaware of.
I've used BDB a lot over the last 10 years, embedded inside a C++ server, and I have to say I've been disappointed in its multi-threaded scalability.

Running a single threaded access pattern can easily get you 20K plus reads/sec, but if you try to run more threads the throughput per thread just goes down, up to a point where more threads actually slow you down.

Make sure to run extensive benchmarks if you consider using it in a multi-threaded application.

I've never tried running BDB in a multi-process architecture, so I have no idea how it'd behave when used that way.
> it's more or less impossible to be productive in Java without an IDE

At my last full-time Java job most of us used Emacs and we got along just fine. I think the real trick is not to write shit code.

Another job I had I used a dialect of Lisp (won't name any names...) which relied pretty heavily on an IDE. It was painful to work in the IDE or in Emacs, but that's because it was shit code.
Show HN: Try my musician-savvy bot
You can't mean this literally.
The other issue will be the I/O bottleneck. A practical application would need to have on-chip memory to buffer data (not mentioned here, I think). Even so, the applications will be severely limited by having data with enough processing needs.

I spend most of my time working on FPGAs, and I would imagine that in the end, a practical implementation of this chip would involve a good deal of similar work. Data would have to be piped from one core to adjacent cores, to keep the inter-chip bandwidth tractable. This could result in portions on the edges left unused because the data can't get there.

In summary, the applications for such a chip are limited, and will require a different skillset from what we usually ascribe to a programmer, but in those constraints these chips could be incredibly high-performance.

EDIT: I haven't played with log-scale arithmetic yet, but I think that adds / subs will be much more computationally complex--probably more so than multiplies in the current linear-scale numbers. Just a thought.
I'd also be interested in what anonymizing techniques come from this, but the way to specifically beat the Chinese government here is to carefully guard the border between your online presence and your offline government-issued identity. At minimal this means anyone in China should be encrypting everything before it leaves their machine and goes to the network through a connection with their name on it, and if they're in the business of writing anti-China political blogs, they need to treat everything they do publicly as a threat to their identity. You can't expect to carelessly leak your identity today and try to hide it tomorrow. You either don't leak your identity at all or what you're trying to keep anonymous has to be so low-bit in information content that it's probably worthless because it would be like everything else.
A caffeine driven, simplistic approach to benchmarking Node.js code.
Contaqt
At what point does Kickstarter become a NGO stand-in for the more traditional Gov't grants that are continually being short-changed in budget battles and austerity measures?

It will also be interesting to see how a move to "crowd-sourced" changes what pursuits are successful. Presumably, the upside to something like Kickstarter (as opposed to tax-funded Gov't grants) is that the individual financiers have a greater say in what they value enough to fund. The downside, I worry, is that some of the best things to come from science and technology in the last century would probably never have gotten funded...

Also, it bears mention, while $1M+ is a lot for an indy game developer or starving artist, a basic biomedical research lab needs at least that much per year and the standard amount for an R01 grant from the NIH is ~$4M for a 2-3 yr project.
Friends don't let friends use BerkeleyDB.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bdb+corruption
Forget The Suburbs: Living In Beautiful, Well-Designed Cities Makes People Happy
A Brief Review: Motorola Droid 4
I hate it when people say "I switch my phone on and it starts instantly". No it doesn't. My iphone takes about a minute to start...of course I never switch it off, so it's not a problem.

If you never "turn off" Photoshop or Office, they too will appear the instant you click on them. Amazing!
What is the best open source tool to archive MySQL database?
Hi,

I created a script to archive mysql database. It updates master tables and inserts transactions records in archive DB. It works fine for sometime, but throws an error and terminates after inserting few thousand records (I probably missed some scenarios). It is also very slow.
Can anyone please tell me if there is any open source ETL tool that is good for archiving MySQL database?
Because they have no idea about C++11? Usually those who treat it this way obviously don't know C++.
The last 2 sound good.
How To Search Within A Webpage
CESAR : Computer-Executed Semi-Autonomous Robot
Broken implementations are different from intentionally subverted ones. If FB is doing this, they deserve blame too.

The argument I was responding to seems to be that P3P is a gentleman's agreement and thus is doomed to fail. However, I expect more from Google than I would from random sites on the internet.

So Google flouting a gentleman's agreement is very different from a warez site doing it. After all, you don't expect Google to read your mail in Gmail versus the site admins of warez-mail.com reading your email. Or do you?
Google really should have the cojones to stand up and state their actual position plainly, which as far as I can tell is this:

"If you haven't taken an active, positive step to block our +1 buttons, we're going to assume you don't really care and we'll do whatever we can to show them to you, no matter what your browser's default settings are. Why? Well, because we think the default settings are bullshit, and 99 times out of 100 they're only that way because they're the default. They don't reflect actual user preferences, they reflect other browsers messing with our business plans."

Not only is that an intellectually honest position, it's a lot more accurate than assuming all IE users who haven't changed their settings don't want +1 buttons.
Housebites cooks up a storm as the new Airbnb-for-takeout
I stopped reading at "Run my gestures against an image in the cloud"
There are over 300 sites similar to kickstarter now. Competition will drive down the 5% fee kickstarter gets, and sites will start competing by providing api's for managing multiple campaigns, as well as differentiating on providing marketing support.

This is a great opporunity for startups - both getting funded on crowdfunded sites and launching crowdfunded sites, because unlike the usual ad-supported business model or saas offering, serious money changes hands and every sector of the economy can be flowing through this.
This is a good step. One thing people don't remember is the mid-2000s Linux Foundation Patent Commons initiative. At one time Oracle was a member (http://lwn.net/Articles/227902/).