skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This would have been the ultimate trump card back in the days when websites tried to prevent people from stealing their JavaScript and images by disabling things like right click and using twiddly bits of obfuscation. View source, eh? There is no source, punk!

Of course, the Link: header hadn't even been proposed yet, and the whole "DOM scripting" movement plus tools like Firebug/Webkit inspector has turned obfuscation of web content into a pointless exercise. So, like the author says, this is just a fun parlor trick.
>Their interface is the same. Are you utterly blind? Stop looking at the UX as a programmer and imagining the complexity of the features. The actual screen is displaying exactly the same stuff.

Seriously? I mean, my Dodge Neon has the same gas, brake, clutch and steering wheel that a Ferrari 599 has, why doesn't it 0-60 as fast? Stop comparing engine size and complexity, it has all the superficial elements of a sports car! God, you're such a mechanic.
Of course it does. The question is, does it still do that even if the browser explicitly told it not to.

If you have some evidence that it does, I am looking forward to seeing it. But more likely, I think you just read the headline and jumped in to comment.
P3P is a load of garbage as it is implemented/written.

There is no real enforcement behind it and it just causes lots of confusion. Seriously I have to go lookup what each of these acronyms are in order to figure out how my privacy is being violated? What guarantees do I even have that you are obeying P3P and not simply sending it to make me feel good.

Hell while we are at it we should implement P3P for phone apps. I'm sure Path (and others) will stop uploading your address book if the P3P says "ADDRBKNOUP"
The actions have been cleared with Facebook. The debate was using their icon which we've removed.

Thanks!
Lets not get lost in semantics. True it's a documented standard, but only Microsoft supports it and given its many drawbacks no one else is likely to add support any time soon. It might as well be proprietary.
Even open sourcing it would be good enough for those that really care to self-host.
Fixed. Thank you
I wonder whether enough developers would care about that extra few seconds on the initial view to make a noticeable impact?
According to the article, Google has done it in a way that indicates (according to the P3P protocol) "that the cookie will not be used for any tracking purpose or any purpose at all."

Basically they are abusing the standard to force P3P browsers to override the user's choice to block 3rd party cookies, by telling the browser that the cookie isn't intended for tracking, but Google is using it to track users.

That's kinda of appalling privacy-wise.

Maybe it isn't maliciously intended, which is what you mean, but it is an intentional misuse of a browser feature to force user tracking.
Microsoft would have to conspire and use its monopoly powers to undermine and place barriers to entry of SkyDrive's competitors, for something such as the above to happen.

Bundling or providing for download a cloud storage application or service is not illegal. Having a monopoly is not illegal. Providing useful applications and features with Windows is not illegal.

Don't want SkyDrive? Don't use it. Do as you did before, download your choice of a cloud storage application and use that instead.
All bitching should be invalidated on the basis that they added Blu Ray Disc support. Kudos, VLC.
Is Writing Style Sufficient to Deanonymize Material Posted Online?
I wish many more papers came with expository blog posts like that ...
New iOS app teaches you tech startup lingo and "people you should know"
What kinds of problems? I can't easily think of problems where C++ templates are more powerful than metaprogramming facilities of high level languages like lisp...
Working capital is short-term assets minus short-term debts. So yes, you are correct. A company could have a ton of long-term assets, but very low working-capital. It's too much of a simplification to say low working-capital means you are close to bankruptcy.
Yeah, this isn't quite the same level as the Safari one, which was a bit of a tempest in a teacup to begin with. In both cases you can partially blame the browser, though more so in this case.
To certain extent this analysis is right, but there's also one other company that you must consider when thinking about this, and that's Google. They have also not focused on profits, and at least, in theory, have tried to create amazing products. Unfortunately, they neither have great products or great profits. You can be like Apple and focus on building great products but keep Google in mind and ask why their stock price is stagnant for last 5 years now.

Yes, Apple focuses on products but it also focuses on profits by optimizing operations and pricing products correctly. Unfortunately, at Google, they haven't done either well. They are still a search company which runs on the grace of AdWords.

Yes, Android is successful but compared to iPhone platform it is significantly behind in terms of profits - in fact, still loosing money considering Motorola acquisition was essentially to stave off patent attacks on Android.
Global Logistics Media - Public-Sector Procurement and the Cloud
There was a cultural revolution in business whereby people saw the role of the firm as profit-maximizing, where profit is measured on a quarter-by-quarter basis.

In that light, Jobs was crazy for focusing on the product (and letting the profits flow).
It might as well be proprietary.

Not even slightly. That does a huge disservice to any standardisation process. In fact, how "only Microsoft supports it" ends up being Microsoft's problem baffles me.

It was created by a standards body. The other browser manufacturers did not implement it. Therefore, it's all Microsoft's fault?
Snipt API Contest
Not on Safari Library yet, unfortunately.
> Oh look, Google fails to fully support features only MSIE has [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P#Criticisms]! Shame on them.

No, Google deliberately set a P3P header that confuses IE into letting Google bypass the user's privacy settings.
If you read more closely, it's not enough to _have_ a header; the header must also indicate that cookies are not used for tracking.

The problem is, that indication is made with _lack_ of a particular token; and google includes a fake P3P header with no tokens in it. Thus, according to the protocol, google's header indicates that it does not use cookies for anything at all.
How about something like this for the "Card Services" scams?

These are the robo-calls with the female voice telling you that you can lower your credit card's interest rate, but it's only for a limited time, so press 1 to talk to a service rep.

I've gone pretty far down the road with a few of these "service reps". I'm convinced they want credit card number, expiration date and CVS/CVC for cards with a large available balance. They hang up on me if I just want the lower interest, or if I inquire too closely about who they work for, or why they need the CVS/CVC (3-digit code on the back of a card).
useful info to have on hand.
Debian (Stable and Testing) are running GNOME 2.

My issues with Unity, as of Unity 5 (in Ubuntu 12.04):

1) Alt-tab should switch between windows within a workspace. This is HUGE. What is the point of workspaces if your navigation buttons/application launchers ignore the boundries?

2) Clicking on an application launcher should open a new instance of the program, not retrieve a window already open.

3) IF item 2 is to remain true, then the possible windows to re-focus should ONLY be the windows in the current workspace. See item 1.

4) Unity's taskbar should be movable to the bottom of the screen.

---

Credit where it's due: Unity 5 allows resizing of the Unity bar, and you can now pin it to the desktop, so it's not constantly popping over the left side of the window when you try to close windows, access menus, etc.

One must still install gnome-tweak-tools to edit the font configuration and other things, which is inexcuseable.
On the same note, I've never understood how people could stand iOS' SMS notifications; it just plain breaks the basic rule of not stealing focus from what the user is doing. Irritates me to no end.

In iOS5 there's a notification bar (similar to Android, from what I've heard). You can set SMS messages to only appear there.

It provides a welcome level of control, but I found the whole notification UI initially confusing. I found it difficult to match my mental model of an app's notification to the right settings to flip in the UI.
CyanogenMod is not a for-profit business.

Maybe they should be.
I've been trying out Arch Linux (http://www.archlinux.org) for a few weeks now and am really happy with the results. I installed using ArchBang (http://archbang.org) which I think for a first time install might be the best way to go. (I think I'm almost ready to try a from scratch Arch install)

Now that it's installed and I'm used to the package manager (pacman - which I like better than apt-get / aptitude if that's possible) I find that it's been refreshingly easy on a day to day basis. And I feel like I have a great deal more confidence that I know what's actually going on as far as installed programs and configured behaviour.
Pinterest - hot new network or another Quora?
It's not really much of a standard if no one references it in the real world.

And the W3C standards are most successful when they document how technology is already being used in the wild. Proscriptive web standards handed down from on high have historically not fared well. Plenty of W3C standards are duds.
I'd opine that when one first encounters mathematics which is not just rote calculation depends, at least, upon whom one has for a teacher. It can happen long before college that a teacher drives students towards the discoveries you allude to.
"Ignore" is a reaction. Notifications are a distraction whether you ignore them or not.
The definition of 'freak' for most people is "people who don't have sensible regard to norms". The norm for almost all companies is that the bottom line is the overriding factor.

So Jobs priorities made Apple a freak in the eyes of most managers. Apple didn't get any respect from ordinary managers before the iPhone sales took off and made the bottom line became impressive.

I have yet to work at/for a company that cared about its products.
Ask HN: Which Emacs to use on OS X Lion?
I would like to try out Emacs but I'm unsure of which Emacs version to use. AquaMacs, Emacs 23, Emacs 24, etc.

What does HN recommend?
Late last year I was in an incubator where Convore started. There were 2 other companies doing the same exact thing .. All of the YC companies were using HipChat, Convore seemed like "yet another copycat site to sign up for an account with". Chat is a solved problem. Let's move on.
Aren't C++ smart pointers essentially reference counting? That's well known to be much slower than well implemented GC.
I would expect shady sites from the dark parts of the internet to actively lie but Google?

What do you think about robots.txt then? Isn't that a standard that isn't enforced as well?
> almost unlike any other commodity

Art and people (sports, movie starts) are two I thought of instantly. And the insane, somewhat arbitrary (although it's always whatever someone is willing to pay) pricing of those makes domain market look clean and efficient.
FWIW, the `Link` HTTP header is defined in RFC 5988: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5988
I use most of these methods for caching. I have my own little methods for making cache keys. I use Rails.cache all over the place. I have a couple sweepers. What I really struggle is testing this stuff. You really can't do it anywhere other than an integration test, and they're ugly. I mostly just test the sweepers. Anyone have any nice solutions for testing caching, or think its unnecessary?
:) Yes there are a few kinks. Especially if you type quickly and do mult-line replace operations. It also sometimes doesn't register newlines accurately. All this might have to do with the way my code talks to the editor.

Thank you for your appreciation! And I hadn't yet thought about embedding. Technically it actually could be a bit tricky to embed because you can't really mix websocket- with vanilla HTTP servers yet.
Assuming the question is "Why is Kickstarter showing me all the projects with good videos?"

The answer is simple. People respond to them. There's a good reason why companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year creating advertisements.

My question is, given the importance of a good pitch video, why aren't more people making them?

As I've stated in my comments, there really isn't any good excuse not to.

If you own an iPhone you have access to better video than we were shooting just a handful of years ago on projects with budgets upwards of $100,000.

I think the issue is that many people don't recognize the importance of putting some effort into their pitch video. They see their video as an afterthought, when in fact, it's quite possibly their most important asset to a successful fundraising campaign.

A bulk of our business in editing was doing pitch videos for ad agencies. When landing a job means you're bringing in millions of dollars to your agency, spending $80,000 on a pitch video seems like chump change.

Granted, many Kickstarters aren't working on that level, but the principles are the same. If spending a few hundred bucks and some time could land you the funding for your dream project, would that be worth it to you?
Splash screens are leftovers from the old-old days of text-based computing when you had to mask the fact that the program being loaded was going to take awhile (>30 secs).

Hardware, software, network, total users, i/o, it didn't matter, it was better to say something than let users sit there at a terminal thinking nothing's happening.

Or worse, tell their boss the "system's down again."

No excuse for them today. They just say "big app", it's gonna be awhile.
So the WSJ publishes another one of it’s alarmist articles about Google and Safari during the weekend and Microsoft wants to capitalize by pretending it just now discovered that P3P (a defunct and shitty protocol) is useless and no one uses it.

NYT September 17, 2010:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/a-loophole-big-enou...
If you rely on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s privacy settings to control cookies on your computer, you may want to rethink that strategy.
Large numbers of Web sites, including giants like Facebook, appear to be using a loophole that circumvents I.E.’s ability to block cookies, according to researchers at CyLab at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Engineering.
A technical paper published by the researchers says that a third of the more than 33,000 sites they studied have technical errors that cause I.E. to allow cookies to install, even if the browser has been set to reject them. Of the 100 most visited destinations on the Internet, 21 sites had the errors, including Facebook, several of Microsoft’s own sites, Amazon, IMDB, AOL, Mapquest, GoDaddy and Hulu.

Google doesn’t support a broken feature that is exclusive to IE somehow it’s their fault. If anyone ever doubted Microsoft's PR sleaziness and propaganda tactics that blog post is proof.
Steve McConnell's book "Code Complete" was an eye-opener for me. It also has a whole chapter on variable naming, and is worth a read.

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Const...
and both of which are BSD licensed, which Apple has shown to prefer.
The difference is that users can understand when the interface is poorly designed because they have to interact with it constantly. Sure, there are parts of UX that most users never think about, but when something has been overlooked, like when you can't move the launcher sidebar to the bottom, or the settings are confusing to get to, there's a usability problem.

I think the real thing about Ubuntu, however, is that it's Linux. That means if you don't like Unity, you can install GDM, KDE, Fluxbox, Awesome or any number of other window managers. You aren't stuck with the (subjectively) poor design decisions Canonical made, and you certainly have more choice than you do in OS X or Windows.
Think of how complex merely fetching and decoding an instruction is on a current x86 machine.

Now consider how the pipeline, multiple issue, hazard detection and mitigation, and out-of-order execution are implemented.

Ten million is probably an underestimate by a fair margin.
I'd wager that very few P3P headers used in the wild are an accurate and complete representation of the privacy policy of the site. Most are either deliberately confusing IE (as you put it) or copied from a tutorial by a developer who just needed to fix the damn login button for stupid IE users.

Creating an accurate P3P header that captures the nuances of different ways data can be used is somewhere between difficult and impossible (I've tried).
Let me be clear. There is NOTHING a computer needs your attention for that can't either be handled on its own or that can't wait until you're ready to pay attention to it.

I think hardware failures are probably the only class of notifications I'd want to be told of immediately. I had a HD start to go bad that was in a striped RAID array, I suspect it's been in that state for awhile and only learned of it when the RAID firmware had red in it when I restarted the PC and happened to be sitting there. I don't know why Windows never complained (I've seen "HD is bad" notification messages before in XP, but not this time - maybe the RAID controller abstracted the failure away?).

Similarly, I would also like to know if there were critical thermal problems in my laptop.

In the case of imminent hardware damage or data loss, I'd like to know.
Great initiative; hope you get the internship. I showed it to a friend who hires ~5 interns per summer in Austin (more communication / consulting, less technology) and she loved it.

Good luck!
I bet that there are lots of companies that have interesting project ideas but not enough resources to bring them to market. Do you really think it would become a pre order catalog? I think letting business's get information about what people wanted ahead of time would increase the quality of projects/products being created.
>Seriously I have to go lookup what each of these acronyms are in order to figure out how my privacy is being violated?

No, you don't. This is mentioned in the article.
I agree completely. Design by community is what every distro does. As a result, Linux got nowhere on the desktop. Maybe the problem lies in how Ubuntu communicates. It is very much a "we'll do it how we want to do it". And as a result, it's been very successful. If Ubuntu was designed by the community, it would be just another distro. The fact that it has top-down directed design means it can differentiate. Ubuntu's measure of success can be directly tied to the amount of outrage from the Linux community, people who don't seem to understand that Ubuntu is Ubuntu and Debian is Linux and they can both successfully coexist.

Linux on the desktop was always a non-starter until Ubuntu gave it a kick in the ass. Now there's even a successful Ubuntu-only PC maker, System76 making (not quite) Apple-style laptops. Because of Shuttleworth, we have a nearly-ready viable third option in the market.

Do I agree with all their choices? No. Am I using Ubuntu on a daily basis? No. Am I looking forward to the day when they announce Ubuntu is "ready"? Hell yes. If you have a point, make it. If you just want to complain, get a cat.
Only apps that are written that way.
>So Google doesn’t support an IE exclusive broken feature

I am tired of this constant meme in the comments. It's one thing not to support a standard, it's another to actually go to the effort of actively subverting it.

They are supporting it by sending out (fake) P3P headers.

If they didn't support it, they wouldn't send P3P headers. As simple as that.
Fair enough. This occurs roughly once in two months when I least expect it.

But the point is that with just a bit more attention to detail, they could have made this process utterly unobtrusive: don't process more than once file per second, if you want want to build in heuristics to infer the disk seek bandwidth.

Btw, Microsoft Security Essentials may be doing things like this. For me, it is totally not noticeable.
Having a PhD in physics doesn't necessarily mean you've been exposed to the current state of the art in software development practices.

In my experience C++ is the default language in finance because of legacy reasons and because they don't know any better. This was only a couple of years ago and I saw some horrendously poorly written C++ code--virtually no comments, early 90's style ("let me tell you about the STL"), no comments for hundreds of lines--that was being used in production to value mortgage bonds worth tens of billions of dollars. The group I was in had switched to using Python with Numpy, and was much more productive for it.
I didn't use the word 'powerful' because powerful generally refers to expressivity. I'm most interested in performance.

C++ template metaprogramming gives you most of the expressivity of generic programming without paying a large runtime penalty (because the resolution still occurs at compile time, the compiler can take advantage of this). This is in contrast to other languages, where run-time generic programming leads to performance penalties.

Now, as the stereotypical example of how C++ template metaprogramming can actually beat standard C programming, compare the performance of C qsort with C++ std::sort.
Lead author here. Since my serious thinking on this topic started when I responded to this Ask HN post[1] Π years ago[2], it's nice to see this posted here, to come full circle in a sense. Happy to answer any questions.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=413730

[2] No, really, it's been exactly Π years to the day :-)
I also encourage interviewees to ask the hiring manager, "What are your strengths and weaknesses?"

First, it'll help you find out if the person you'll be working for thinks it's a bullshit question too. Or if she answers honestly. And since you're going to be reporting to her, so doesn't it make sense to know what you're going to be dealing with?
Bollocks. "Nobody can beat x" is never true. "Simple to use" is one of the worst arguments to make, especially when it requires a third-party download to your OS. Skydrive is simple and readily available. If it's installed by default, then yes, somebody can beat Dropbox.
So P3P is flawed and IE implements a flawed standard. Granted.

Google is still using this flaw to override the user setting "Do not allow 3rd party cookies" to allow themselves to track users.

There is no "technically" about this, they've misused the standard to override user settings.
The paper quoted in the post says:

> I show that firms bid excessively for the pool of incumbent workers at the expense of trying out new talent. (...) This problem is most severe where information about talent is initially very imprecise

This is nothing else than the Lemon effect at work.

(As it happens I wrote a post about it today: http://blog.medusis.com/are-you-a-lemon )

The Lemon effect (first discussed in a paper from 1970) appears in markets where buyers know much less about goods being sold than sellers.

When the probability of buying a bad product is high, buyers only offer to pay the lowest price. Sellers of bad products will sell at that price, but not sellers of good products. Therefore, after a short while, all good products are pushed out of the market and all that's left are duds (lemons).

That explains why employers are willing to pay more for incumbent workers: uncertainty about an incumbent workforce is much less than for "new talent", because the former is vetted by their current employers and new talent is, well... new.