skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A Chrome extension for Delicious/Pinboard
My partner and I are avid users of Delicious/Pinboard and wanted a quick way to add to and access our stored bookmarks. We created a Chrome extension to scratch that itch. It shows your ten most-recent bookmarks by default, with a fast search interface to find older bookmarks, and keyboard shortcuts for navigation. We plan to add pagination in an upcoming release, and have considered adding support for Safari as well as alternate bookmarking backends.

The (mostly CoffeeScript) source is up on GitHub, and may be interesting as an example of caching Backbone Collections in localStorage or using in-page iframes to simulate opening a Chrome extension popup via keyboard shortcut.

Is this something you find useful? We welcome comments or suggestions.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ndjggnnohdkheiijjhbklkanjcpibbng
https://github.com/cabin/linkhunter
You have to factor in the DBAs that come with that Oracle db, too.
You can write forward compatible 2.x. Here is a small guide to pitfalls and writing forward compatible code:

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/1/22/forwards-compatible-python...

Note that he advises leaving print statement be; it's more familiar in 2.x land, editors often are confused with print function syntax highlighting, and it's easily handled by 2to3.
The class of vulnerabilities was known but not this particular case. That's like saying people should be publish 0-day buffer overflows because it's a known vulnerability class.
We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran
Significant discussion about this idea (checklists in surgery, and beyond) when it was submitted three years ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436575

This article and that discussion are both fascinating reading.
I have always wondered how much of CS coding knowledge applies to web apps and how necessary it is to take some of the killer math courses offered in university to be able to code web apps proficiently. And if there is that big of a difference between coding and web apps, then shouldn't universities and students be better off learning how to code web apps since they seem to be in dominant usage anyway?

Btw, I am not a technical person, hence the curiosity. Insights would be much appreciated.
It may not be mentioned in the beginner docs... I feel ok insisting that professional software developers read more than an intro to the framework they are using.

Also not mentioning it isn't the same as avoiding it 'at all costs'.

To continue the analogy: Sales person says "Look how fast this Ferrari can go!", then later, in the manual, "Drive at a responsible speed given your local laws, etc."

All that said I do actually think that changing the default to be more annoying and more safe is a good thing (and it's been done https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/06a3a8a458e70c1b6531ac...). Just saying that I agree with raganwald -- this isn't even close to a 'security vulnerability'.
Presumably, Github could check for this activity by finding all public key submissions in which a public key registration involved a user id that is not the same user id as the signed-in user who submitted that. I'm not sure that's a simple DB query though...
I've had similar thoughts recently. I'm fairly new to jQuery, so maybe I just still don't know how to use it properly, but sometimes I don't feel that the costs of adding another 'plug-in' and requiring another server call for another js file is worth it when my needs for the feature are low.

For instance, just recently I was looking into plug-ins for automatically changing text and color of input fields, but I only needed it once, and I ultimately decided it was much more efficient to just manually code this into the onclick:

> if(this.value==\'Search Products\'){ this.value=\'\';this.style.color=\'#000\';}
Why critics of Rails have it all wrong (and Ruby's bright multicore future)
There are a lot of them, trust me. Browsers have been improving? Wonderful, but some of us still need to support the unimproved ones. As grandparent says, dealing with these quirks is a waste of time and effort.

We've gotten to such a point of jQuery saturation that it seems some of us have forgotten why we use it in the first place. Which is really just the other side of the coin of people blindly using it without knowing why.
Clickable links:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ndjggnnohdkheiijjh...

https://github.com/cabin/linkhunter
This really doesn't sound like a problem with the update function, this just sounds like web applications 101 - don't trust user data.
Building an AJAX currency converter with PHP, jQuery and Google
Well, you should have just stated that in the first place instead of name calling and acting immature. A simple "we have suspended his account while we carry out further investigations, this is practice" would have gone a long way to ease people's minds and kind of reactions you got. Instead, Github just came across as massive douches.

EDIT: On second thoughts, I think I am being overly critical on all parties. Instead, I think I hands up "we messed up, but we are learning" approach would be better, and we see how both sides act if/when this happens again, lessons learnt and all that!
I agree with you on the landing page. The introductory paragraph seems rather "fluffy". That combined with the fact that it uses a whitepaper immediately gave me the feeling that it's not really meant as something for regular programmers to check out and hack with. It's surprising, since that's how many Clojure programmers get their start.

On the other hand, it's very new so maybe they'll add more developer-friendly pages soon. Or maybe it's only meant for "enterprise" environments? Time will tell.
And we're confident that this guy is the only guy to ever exploit that weakness on github in the last 4 years?
great article! I wish I had read this when I first started coding. I am sending this to all my friends that are now asking how they can learn to build web apps.
Thanks for asking this question. I was wondering this as well.
It's good to hear that very early stage ideas are not shunned altogether, even though we are at a disadvantage to other candidates.

I'm currently following David's advice; questioning my idea using YC application as a reference and starting to get a prototype together.
School for quants
Indeed this is what the article concludes. The last paragraph says, Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."
In terms of performance, it's actively worse than a compiler's output. Using the x87 FPU makes no sense in this day and age, considering this is Intel 64 assembly.

GPUs (and plain CPU SIMD) would help very much yes. Any serious NN implementation will be using it.
Yes it does.

Gain unauthorized access to an account and using it falls under pretty much any standard definition of "black-hat" and in practical terms breaks computer security laws in pretty much all legal jurisdictions which have them.
Five years ago, this was definitely true; however, I've had pretty good luck lately writing code in Chrome that works equally well in Firefox or IE9 without any additional effort on my part. I'm a pure JS guy.

I used to do a lot of work in Flash, and one of the nicest parts was knowing that what you write works as intended across environments. One of the nice side-effects of the HTML5 mob is that the browser vendors are putting a lot of work into both improving their APIs and doing so in a cross-compatible way.
Actually you have got a pretty good point. In fact quite a few guys suggested that we pull some structured data/do some basic analytics on all companies that have ever pitched/launched at DEMO and all its subsidary conferences. Unfortunately we never had the time nor the resources to pull it off.

Anyway, its something other startups exhibiting at conferences could think about.
Homakov kind of gave the impression he had discovered a previously unknown vulnerability in Rails. This is not the case. Rather, he discovered an instance in which one very prominent Rails app (Github) failed to implement a standard Rails security practice.

For those not familiar with Rails, it boils down to this: You as the programmer need to use a security feature built into Rails called mass assignment security. If you fail to use this feature, you have a vulnerability. In other words, the default is insecure by design. The alternative would be to make Rails secure by default, but that would mean pretty much nothing would work until you explicitly granted access where necessary. I guess the core team figured "not working by default" was worse than "insecure by default."

Homakov obviously disagreed with this design decision. I can understand why, and I mostly feel the same way.

So Homakov posted an issue to the Rails repo Github (https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228) suggesting the default be changed. He made a good case and was initially polite. A few days passed, and nobody else had posted to his thread.

So, presumably to draw attention to this issue, he exploited the fact that Github had failed to use mass assignment protection. Specifically, he posted a comment with a far-future timestamp, which obviously should be impossible. (I think that's what he did, although Github seems to to have fixed the timestamp now.) He then said this should be proof enough that the Rails defaults need to be changed.

The problem with Homakov's argument, as pointed out in subsequent comments in the thread, is that Homakov's hack only demonstrated a mistake on Github's part, not a bug in Rails. It didn't prove anything about Rails that we didn't already know. The only thing surprising he demonstrated was that Github had left open a rather serious vulnerability.

TL;DR: Rails has some less-than-secure defaults which all Rails developers are expected to understand and deal with. Homakov found out that Github failed to do so in at least one instance, and he wanted to use that as proof the Rails defaults should be changed.
On that checklist remark, I'd like to see and use more checklists. Hopefully some smarter person will write the "How to put a Rails app to prod" checklist, now that the need is obvious. Same for Django, or any other popular stack. It would be great if the communities created and maintained checklists summarizing best practices for different tasks.
The elephant in the corner of the room of course is that the ancient Athenians quite deliberately didn't have a universal franchise. Property-owning tax-paying full citizens who fulfilled their military obligations voted, because they were the ones that would pay for, implement and generally be responsible for whatever was voted for.
I had the same reaction. I think Rich Hickey is a genius, and I'm an absolute Clojure nut. I have every confidence that this is probably a very cool thing.

But judging from that opening description, I gather that Datomic puts the data and analysis in the same application. As a description of what the thing IS, it's about as informative as saying, "This new language allows you to take control of your computer by allowing you to give it coded instructions!" or "Our storage solution allows you to persistently store data!"
Samsung Galaxy Player 70 with dual core processor | GadgetMAG
I wouldn't exactly say web development and CS have no linkage though...
Best Fashion Wordpress Theme
Automated stress testing for Web 2.0 applications
computer scientists from Saarland University are working on automatic methods of testing, which check complex web applications autonomously
Man Dies While Trying to Set Record for Longest Time Buried Alive
Rich will be discussing Datomic in his keynote at Clojure/West next week in San Jose (Friday March 16th). Schedule: http://clojurewest.org/schedule

Tickets for the conference are available, including Friday-only tickets for $250. Friday will include Rich's keynote and a keynote by Richard Gabriel as well as lots of other Clojure-y goodness. http://regonline.com/clojurewest2012
"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be
tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that
democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been
said that democracy is the worst form of government
except all those other forms that have been tried from
time to time."

Churchill, 1947

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1947/nov/11/parli...
It's more that they display both. Unlike git core, github actually tracks "push" events to branches (git doesn't care, it only sees commits) as distinct from the commits they contain.

So presumably it would have shown the rails developer pushing a change authored by Homakov.
I have to admit I'm a little confused about what this is. I'm taking a coffee break and not really into reading a whitepaper, so take that with a grain of salt, but I'd call that a landing page failure.

That said, it sounds like a database-as-a-service? If so, is the primary benefit the reduced database management load? Or is there some special sauce in here that makes it more capable than other RDMS or NoSQL databases?
To give an example: I'm working on something that is on one level a simple web app. But then, I needed to code what amounted to a concurrent merge sort (merging multiple streams of information (and their histories) that are each ordered but not relative to each other — think Twitter streams, since that's what they were.)

Because I have a degree in computer science, that theory background meant I could quickly recognise the type of problem I was trying to solve and apply standard stuff I had learned to it. Without that theoretical background, I would have developed something that worked, but it would have taken me longer, it wouldn't work so well, and would probably break in unpredictable ways :)

In short, its never just web development.
It's time for us all to rally behind the Raspberry Pi
IE6 is below 5% market share. But if you absolutely have to support IE6, then yeah, use JQuery.

There are still some differences in modern browsers but those can mostly be repaired with polyfills.

Oh, and while I would not recommend doing your chaining operation (chaining just makes it harder to debug), I can write the same thing in one line of JavaScript:

Array.prototype.slice.call(document.querySelectorAll('.something > *')).forEach(function(el) { el.className += ' bold-font'; });
if you want a more lightweight version of twitter on any browser, try: http://mobile.twitter.com
Webdevs will be all over this when the Peer runs on Javascript runtimes. Who's taking bets that it's written in Clojurescript?
Google's rules of acquisition: How to be an Android, not an Aardvark
David Dunning and Justin Kruger - aren't these the guys who proposed the idea now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect?
OAuth is a mess in many languages and frameworks. It's unusable for anyone but those dedicated to its success, which is very strange because those are the same people who should be making it more accessible. But they are not.
While I mostly agree that the Rails default should probably be changed, I think in fairness it's also worth pointing out that the Rails team does give fair warning about this issue. Specifically, anyone who reads the official Rails Security Guide back-to-back will know about this:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html

One might counter that nobody reads these guides back-to-back. I must admit I haven't read every word of every Rails guide. But I have read the security guide in its entirety, and I think every developer owes it to herself and her clients to do the same.
Trucos para Windows 8
It is anarchy that requires real smarts, not democracy.
I'd like to know how its model of transaction isolation works given that reads and writes are claimed to be independent.

It seems as though a 'transaction' is defined as an atomic set of updates, but doesn't involve reads.
It's 100% not true. It's also a pain in the arse if you serve everything over SSL like we do.
I think saying that web apps are in "dominant usage" right now is a bit unsubstantiated--there are plenty of jobs that do not involve web apps.

Also, you have to remember that universities are not about preparing you for a career. You do not need 4 years of general education if your only goal is to produce web apps quickly.

Finally, non-trivial web apps--those doing something complicated or needing to scale significantly--do need CS knowledge, and even simple ones doubtlessly benefit from it.
"Datomic is not an update-in-place system. All data is retained by default."

I'm becoming more and more convinced that your canonical data store should be append-only whenever possible (see eg [1][2] for detailed arguments). It's nice to see first class support for this.

[1] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/how-to-beat-the-cap-theorem.html

[2] http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

EDIT: Just read through the whitepaper. Looks like the indexes / storage engine form an MVCC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_contro...) key-value store, similar to Clojure's STM. Peers cache data and run datalog queries locally.

This could be either an available or consistent system, depending on how cache invalidation in peers works. In the available, eventually-consistent case you have the added benefit that all queries see a consistent snapshot of the system, even if that snapshot is not totally current.

Like most of Hickey's work, the whole thing seems really obvious in hindsight. It also bears a lot of similarity to Nathan Marz' recommendations for data processing and schema design.
I would go on to say that, IMO, the most important feature of a democracy is the periodic and orderly transfer of power every X years. Or, to put it another way, the ability to easily get rid of a leader.
> how much of CS coding knowledge applies to web apps

That depends on your web application and what programming problems you need to solve. If you only need to glue together other people's code and components, then not so much. If you need to write your own framework, crunch ratings data for recommendations, custom binary serialize data for your ux layer, or do complexity analysis of some backend algorithms, then a CS major will help you a lot.

> shouldn't universities and students be better off learning how to code web apps since they seem to be in dominant usage

Oh no they're not. The absolute majority of software being produced is for internal corporate use, helping businesses on the inside.

Also, universities do teach web apps, it's just that they're not very complex or interesting problems. HTTP requests go in. HTTP responses go out. You have a framework in between that abstracts this, and there you have it.
Web applications are more of a specialized field.

Coding/programming encompasses many programming languages, frameworks, platforms, etc.

Web applications use a subset of these, by using mostly markup languages (html/css) and some web languages (javascript/php). They are deployed to servers with http software, and are built for handling web traffic.
Confluence of events really made it natural to leave the job. But agreed on principle - I don't think I've ever quit a job to find a new one before...
Constitutional Republic yes, Democracy no.

Democracy isn't desirable. Mob rule is a terrible system of government. Democracy != voting; Democracy != freedom.

America and many other systems have long since proven that freedom through constitutional protections with representative government does flourish. Those systems specifically flourish by protecting the weak from the powerful, the minority from the majority. The 'people aren't smart enough' is a fascist, asinine argument. The only time I see that used, is when someone has a complex to dominate others.
Unfortunately bandwidth has not kept up with the rate of Moore's law(unrelated one, I know), so it is becoming a bottleneck for faster computing(along with spin disk speeds) for a large section of people.

And even if you have large bandwidth, the latency that comes into play is another factor, not to mention folks opening 50 tabs which causes delays in opening and rendering a new one.
Democracy is also the only way to effectively stop armed revolutions. From Ron Paul to Che, the entire spectrum says "no" to armed resistance until all democratic means are exhausted.
Computer Science is an academic subject, and famously the Computer Scientist Djikstra didn't have a personal computer for a very long time, so you're right that you don't need CS for web apps.

You also don't need to be a surgeon to put in a few stitches (though you will have very nice stitches if you are one).

In other words, if all you can do after a Computer Science course is web apps, ask for you money back. As you alluded to, simple web apps have never been easier, but there are lots of highly interesting and difficult coding problems outside of that niche (think search engines, aircraft software, operating systems and the list goes on).
So...? The owner has to assume that anyway because they relied on faulty security. Assuming they even care--and honestly why would you think they care now when the evidence is they have not cared about this for at least months.
This is where my head was on this whole undertaking. I assumed that the people she'd engage with would immediately see the potential in the individual - not whether or not the intersection of the resume and job description was a 100% match.
"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create." --Why The Lucky Stiff
TestFlight + Burstly = TestFlight Live
I am surprised that a normal distribution was used for the distribution of "leadership skills". I imagine this could be similar to income distribution which has fat tails. I wonder if the result would change if such a distribution was used.
Yes. The new research builds on that work.
Hurray! Thanks. :)
Personal memories of Dennis Ritchie (dmr) by those who worked alongside him
She's done plenty of writing herself of late. I'm turning to the community that I know and understand and that I knew would be a valuable resource for feedback.
What about Peter Thiel wanting to make a sea-based libertarian country that doesn't have a democracy because people arn't smart enough to keep it libertarian? (Granted, they could leave by relocating somewhere else, but that is true of most countries anyways.)
The Benefits and Pitfalls of ESPN's new Developer Center
And another way of looking at it is: someone offered you free entertainment and education and you slapped them in the face and ruined the fun for everyone for quite some time. "Hacker" certainly does not include or entitle you to being a dick.
Hmmm. The PRC seems to have this down.

I'm not sure if that's a point against you or a point in the PRC's favor.
I quote from http://developer.espn.com/terms:

The following default rules apply to all Apps:

- Branding. All Apps must include an approved ESPN trademark, logo or other
intellectual property (each, an "ESPN Mark").

- Advertising. No advertising or sponsorship of any kind may appear on or be
associated with any App (unless included in the Content made available by
ESPN).

- No Charge. All Apps must be offered free of charge to download or
otherwise access and may not contain any in-App purchase features.

If you are interested in creating a for-profit App, please
contact us at apipartneropps@espn.com to discuss a
potential partnership opportunity. All for-profit Apps
must be pre-approved in writing by ESPN (such approval to
be granted or withheld in ESPN’s sole discretion). To the
extent any for-profit Apps are approved in writing by ESPN
(in its sole discretion), you will be solely responsible
for any and all taxes due in connection with the
distribution of such App in any territory.

Kind of limits the use cases...
NYC Hackers and Designers List