skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
War is the norm throughout history. Peace is really just an interval between the normal behavior of countries.

And conflating war with mass murder is a tenuous argument. Was it mass murder when HMS Conqueror torpedoed the Belgrano in the Falklands killing 323?

How about all the deaths resulting from NATO interceding in the Libyan civil war? Or during the Kosovo/Serbian confict?

And that's just recent history. In Vietnam, you had Australia, France, and the US fighting a ruthless war. Are they all uncivilized?

Careful when you sling epithets at countries; most have a history of engaging in this barbarism you deplore.

And if you think that "we're all past that now," you need to do some reading of pre-WW1 literature and news. The idea tha t the Continent would engage in some of the most ruthless fighting was inconceivable. After all, it was a "civilized" time.
Unifying mobile development platforms with HTML5
Slowloris DDoS tool used by Anonymous hacked to include Zeus trojan
The claim in the article was that they're a "convicted monopolist" and I just gave you two convictions.

Nothing I wrote and nothing the article wrote requires them to be a monopolist today. The OP said the article writer didn't know what monopoly meant. I'm pointing out that they know perfectly well what it means and that the OP merely disagrees with their conclusion.
Illustrated cross-section of the Kowloon Walled City
ازياء الصيف للمحجبات
ازياء الصيف للمحجبات
ازياء الصيف للمحجبات
ازياء الصيف للمحجبات
So what? The most important is the content. Did they give wrong examples about Google? This is similar to when giving Coca-Cola as an example of how bad soda drinks are. It does not mean that Pepsi is good.
When I was an indie game developer (distinct from a start-up in that I wasn't externally funded, though at the time we were quite profitable), I gave programming tests that I could have passed with flying colors.

If I remember correctly, I only had two people every really pass my test. One I hired and he worked with me for years and went on to be the VP of Engineering at a Fortune 500 company. One wanted $80/hour as a contractor and I couldn't afford to hire him.

I did hire someone who had a positively mediocre performance (keep in mind most people failed outright, many answering NO questions correctly) on the test once, because I thought maybe my test was too hard. He washed out after a few weeks.

What's my point? Don't set your bar too low, or you'll regret it. On the other hand, if you feel you need programmers better than you are, you may already be in trouble.

If you need programmers at the same level but with different domain knowledge, that's not a problem, but it's hard to "look up" at a skill higher than you and be sure of what you're seeing. Even if you think you understand what the candidate is saying, it's hard to distinguish between someone smarter than you mapping out a realistic approach and a smooth-talker very effectively blowing smoke out of their nether regions.
Great tool. Returned some false positives for me. Also, searching for a specific domain in all lower case will "find" that domain 50 times.
Is the benefit worth the inconvenience? I've had my email in plain text on my personal site for the last 2 years and haven't noticed an increase in spam (thanks to gmail, I suspect).
>it seems we are just giving the world awesome things... like the Spanish Flu

At first glance, I read that as Spanish Fly. Another awesome thing from Spain...
That linked article is from 2007. Interestingly, the stuff that the author mentions as useless (proof carrying code) is now basically The Way that developers handle code that has security, reliability, or robustness requirements.

- For example, Google Native Client uses a formal verifier to prove the safety of binaries (http://sos.cse.lehigh.edu/gonative/index.html )

- Microsoft has long used a formal driver verifier to prove liveness and protocol properties associated with device drivers

One amazing piece of work going on right now in compilers is by Xavier Leroy, who cares a lot about formally proving that your compiler and its optimizations respect the semantics of the language (i.e. that its execution on hardware is within the range of possible executions specified by the original input language). Without the decades of work on formalization, semantics work, theorem provers, etc. the community wouldn't have a chance of tackling those problems today.

Certainly, if you read the proceedings of POPL or even some ICFP papers, you might wonder where it's going. And even the authors might admit to the same. But until you've fully explored the issues that come up when you try to merge (shameless example from my own work) effect types, region types, concurrency, parallelism, and transactions, it's hard to know what sets of language features can be safely combined in a way that programmers can modularly reason about and a toolchain can implement efficiently and correctly.
Microsoft still seems to have that culture of playing dirty tricks on competitors. It has stuck with them.
Bah, it doesn't even randomize the access. I put consTonant consTonant and of the million possibilities it started checking all the bb___ ones... not so useful if they show just 50 and the only thing they allow you to do is to keep going with the next 50...

I wonder who designed the algorithm...
the simple answer is: because simple is better than complicated

...
var blurFilter = new BoxBlurFilter(32, 2, 2);
var margins = blurFilter.getBounds();
bmp = bmp.clone();
bmp.filters = [blurFilter];
// filters are only displayed when the display object is cached
// later, you can call updateCache() to update changes to your filters
bmp.cache(margins.x,margins.y,img.width+margins.width,img.height+margins.height);
bmp.x += bmp.x+img.width;
stage.addChild(bmp);
...

should be

var blurcanvas = boxBlurFilter(originalcanvas,32,2,2);

and then, if we want to see it on the page (i.e. instead of the original canvas)

$(originalcanvas).replaceWith(blurcanvas) //or any other jQuery mumbo jumbo

canvas are cheap. we must start wasting them.
Not that they were a monopoly, that's not illegal per se. The charges brought against them were related to the abuse of said monopoly.
It seems the site's encoding is broken somehow. I see only question marks, instead of the å's, ä's and ö's it should display. (Trying to view the Swedish version)
www.nametoolkit.com.

We have lots of different algorithms, and you can click on one to get just those results.
New or Updated Web Platform Features IE10
The Great App bubble
Is there any good way to have two keyboards, two mice, both act semi independently? That is, I want two mouse pointers, and if mouse A clicks on a window, I want keyboard A bound to that same window; same with mouse B and keyboard B (and of course they can also each click on and be bound to the same window as needed). Preferably a Linux solution, but something on Windows would be OK also.

What often happens, is someone would ask me to help them look at something, but they are multitasking multiple problems. Initially I can take over their keyboard & screen, but before long another call comes up and I have to transfer the problem / environment back to my desk, and get back to them (or end up owning the problem completely).

I think having the keyboard & pointer independence combined with an editor that lets you have multiple windows attached to the same edit buffer (like Emacs) would be wonderful.
> "It does not mean that Pepsi is good."

But yet, that is exactly what MS is implying. Check out the shameful "Google salesman" ad that MS put out lately for more of the same.
I am programming my own stuff. I swap code blocks back and forth though.
In support of pair programming with a knowledge disparity, I have to say I've found it a fantastic way of bringing new team members up to speed. Yes, it's a bit of a pain in that it can bring productivity down for a while, but I really feel that it has long-term benefits.
> I once wrote reviews for Amazon until I thought better of it.

I don't write reviews on Amazon to make Amazon better. I do that to let other people know of a good or bad product, so they can make a better buying decision than me. And I too appreciate when other people tell me when some product is amazing or crappy. Amazon just sells most of the products available for sale on the internet. So no wonder it collects reviews. But reviews is not what Amazon sells. It's just a byproduct.
Why Don't We Read About Architecture?
With all that said, games like "Brothers in Arms" helped me experience, to a degree, the sacrifices brave men made.
Here you go: "SpeechJammer (en)" http://youtu.be/USDI3wnTZZg
Ah yes I completely forgot to stop duplicates. I'll just add that now.

Checking if a domain name is registered can be a trick task. The only reliable method is to run a whois; but most hosts only search a fraction of the whois records (perhaps just .com) and also limit your queries. You need to pay money to make mass requests.

I have opted to check for any kind of DNS record. That means registered but unused domains will still return available, but the trade off is that it's very quick, pretty accurate most of the time and most importantly free. :)
I never said that being a monopoly was illegal. But they were found to be a monopoly. That's a necessary condition for finding someone guilty of abuse of a monopoly position.
Is your boss trying to make you work in another office? In that case can you negotiate with him a relocation package?
Your second (third?) point is moot, since Sony's own Content Manager Assistant[1] can copy anything from your Vita memory card onto a Mac or PC. The piracy chat from Sony's spokespersons is pure marketing dross.

As for their right to earn money, I don't think anyone is debating that - Digital Foundary's main criticism is the speed of the media, which is (through empirical testing of course) significantly worse than standard microSD cards that are much cheaper.

The best comparison though is to Nintendo's 3DS which comes bundled with a standard SD card, and it hasn't fallen to piracy yet.

[1] http://cma.dl.playstation.net/cma/
Shameless plug: here's my (free) Hacker News app for Android. I've tried my hardest to make it sexy. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.airlocksoftware.ha...
I have an iPhone program called "Inspiro" which generates phrases, story ideas, etc. Great for improv or a random laugh. Got my blog domain idea "syncing dreams" from it, and I'm happy with that. No, it isn't checking for domain availability of course, but the combinations are unusual enough that you'll probably find the domain available. A few Inspiro results:

charmless koala

whispering playgrounds

day-glow demons

juicy naked mole rats

forging ice

You can generate different kinds of nonsense, like:

ruthlessly sneezing on perfect phrases

cheerfully grabbing handfuls of fascinated buildings
repeating naughty garden hoses

So, fun for strange ideas that make your brain get creative. My favorite tool for generating actual domain names though is easily http://impossibility.org/
+1 for randomizing.

do you produce the string with the monte carlo choosing within a specific subset? I'm not sure why it wouldn't produce more than 5 combinations and then 5 different combinations...

also, if you have-time/like, you can probably implement a quick hash on the fly for the domains already returned to avoid listing the same domain twice in a search with few alternatives, it should be quick.

but cool tool!
I pair 100 percent of the day so 8 hours a day for the last year. It has been a very rewarding process. As a natural introvert pairing has made me a much more communicative person and my programming ability has significantly leveled up as well.

We pair with 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, and 2 mice facing each other with our own desks which I feel gives each person in the pair enough privacy and space to make us both very comfortable.

Is pairing intense? Yep. Is it worth it? Absolutely in my mind. The high quality of the code and the productivity is well worth it.
Performance Optimization and Gzip compression with Ehcache
You could try mirroring monitors.
"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." --Winston Churchill

In other words, beats the alternatives at the scale required for a nation-state.
Ask HN: Looking for a mentor on PL design/implementation
Hi everyone,

I'm working on designing a language with the dual goal of being a) very powerful in a repl, and b) easy to scale up to larger programs. I've got the beginnings of an implementation of the most basic features here: (http://github.com/jayferd/ixl-prototype), and I'd love to chat with someone more experienced about the design and the implementation.

Talk to you soon!
--Jay
Not working :S
Then they probally are not the kind of person That would require a HN article to tell them what code to work on.
I work with a lot of interns these days, doing what's essentially pair programming with them and I don't feel their lack of expertise brings me down at all. Instead, I find having to explain everything I do to them brings a clarity to my own mind that is difficult to obtain otherwise.

Of course it does help that when my explanations truly fail, I still have the nuclear option (Hey, they pay me to teach you this stuff, so just believe me) available, but (I'd like to think) I only rarely use it.
When they say that you will be "completely taken care of", they don't mean it if they don't put it in writing. That means a salary, stock options or grants, anti-dilution clauses...

The way you ask is, "I'm considering putting school on hold for this. Could you give me a formal offer letter?" If there is any resistance at all to putting promises on paper, or anything that will be determined "when the time comes", don't accept. (Family pressure to finish school is a fine excuse.) It doesn't matter if they're malicious or incompetent, either way you'll work your ass off and get nothing. Better to take extra classes at school and graduate earlier with your increasingly impressive resume.
I am not vouching for MS nor Google. I don't take sides. All what I am interested in is to know wether the examples given about google were valid or not.
The problem is that canvas are not cheap enough. And there are numerous scenarios where wasting them will prove to be a huge disadvantage to performance. Which is already mostly a problem in JavaScript, and the web in general.
auto-rotate was off for me by default, i suggest enabling this to just gaze into it's abyss. i wish it went to the top of the cliffs however!
Once HN makes their site mobile, app becomes bulky and pointless.
Shameless self-promotion for my project:

I've also been making an HTML5 animation design app called Radi [1]. Compared to CSS3-based animation tools like Hype or Edge, Radi is more similar to the Flash Pro environment because it has vector drawing tools and supports more forms of animation (e.g. shape keyframes). Radi also does video.

[1] http://radiapp.com
>>you can't replace microsoft with anything and expect existing systems to still work. Hopefully reactos will reach this point but it's not there yet.

That will be impossible in practice.

It is in a monopoly's interest to not be compatible, so they will make complex systems that will be expensive and take a long time to be bug-compatible with. And when the APIs are cloned, they will have gone to something else. All this will also be well locked down with patents.

The worst part (well, worst for me) is that the resulting systems will be unnecessarily complex and hence unpleasant to use for developers. That is, it lowers my life quality if I work with their systems.
My experience is that pair programming works almost as well when one of the pair is virtual, or time-shifted [i.e.: code review or review rehearsal]. And it's much more efficient.
But in that case, both monitors are still tied to the same workspace, and only one window can be active at a time. I'm looking for a way to have two active windows, each with its own keyboard attached.
The PS3 is OpenGL based. Specifically it's OpenGL ES with some extra proprietary Sony stuff. The important point is that the engine is not directly tied to any low-level rendering API and clearly has enough abstraction to be ported to multiple platforms with a reasonably low cost of development.
for web-sized-pics and (instagram like) filter-effects (even effects stacked upon each other) they are cheap enough, but yeah, that question will only be solved with real world performance tests.

from my point of view: most of the canvas (effect) libs smell like premature optimization to me. could be wrong, though.
Joshua(StolenPlease Help Me Find Him)-Lisle,IL.
Why the iPad Mini Would be a Disgrace to Apple
Prototype Your Web App Without A Single Line of Code
Results of the Swift*Stitch 'pay when you want' sale
That story was posted on April 1st in 2009, and isn't hosted on BBC's website. There isn't even a first name given for the researcher (only "Radio astronomer Dr. Venn"). Looks sketchy to me.

I can't find any other information about it, so I'm guessing its a hoax / April Fools joke.
No, it wasn't my decision; it was a series of decisions the other Admins and I adamantly opposed that were taken in the misguided belief that EE's problems were strictly SEO-related (with the 2007 launch), and that those problems could be mitigated by doing literally everything Google said to do without actually addressing the core problem. In 2009, the internal landscape at EE changed -- in large part because the Admins were exceedingly concerned about EE's future -- which led to a wholesale change in almost every aspect of the company internally and led to the recently completed rewrite of the entire site.

But since you're more interested in griping about news five years old, you don't care, won't look at the new Freemium model (another community contribution to EE), and will continue to parrot the kind of misinformation Mr Spolsky has made almost a career of promulgating.

ep
Having seen this kind of articles over and over in the past, I can't help but wonder why people keep on producing benchmarks to evaluate the capabilities of different servers/languages/frameworks/designs.

Unless the person producing the code or setup for the comparative benchmarks is an expert in all the fields he's comparing and handcrafting every single byte to perfection, it WILL all boil down to respective members of said communities pointing just how skewed, unprofessional and unfair the benchmark is.

There's no value to extract from such poney shows most of the time because it generally reduces complex concepts to mere numbers and metrics, with the additional task of managing to handle all the different setups, flags and whatnot in a way that doesn't create an outcry.
Bret Victor, Explorable Explanations
The title of the article got me quite frightened for a moment, until I read on and realized the "gun" is more-or-less an audio playback speaker with minor delay.

Early Skype users who made calls to people using their speakers instead of headsets/headphones know how this feels.. disorienting yes, but easily ignored after you get used to it.

I never imagined the effect could be implemented as a directed energy weapon. Just makes me think it would be that much easier to re-make as a DIY project, smaller and cheaper..
The slanderous words used at this seminar, which is brought together by many companies, with one being the convicted monopolist Microsoft...

> in Google’s latest privacy scandal

> Google made the headlines again

> allegations that Google has downranked relevant search results

Who wouldn't be enraged! Look. At. Those. Words.

> designed to plant ungrounded ideas in the audience’s mind.

Now. Think. Of. The. Children.

And then they had the audacity to call the Google representatives to speak!
Same on Russian page.
This is a good insight. Pair programming is a tool that is very useful in some contexts but not in others.

There are so many things that can vary from project to project: How big is the system? What level of expertise does each developer have with the domain, or with the tools being used to build it? What are the personalities of all the people involved? Is the system a cutting edge research project or a well understood thing that just doesn't happen to exist yet?

All of these variables, and lots more, would influence my decisions about who I'd want to work with, and (if there is someone other than me) how we'd work together.

Given all that I consider it extremely unlikely that there are any useful and universal conclusions to be drawn.
"Ya Face Place" - A social network I built for an assignment in 2008
If you appreciate pixel art and you haven't heard of Henk Nieborg you might want to check out his website: http://www.henknieborg.nl/home.html
http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-... 24000 5 letter 'brandables'
I'm not so sure it's so clear (in research) that some form of public commitment reduces the likelihood of completion.

In fact, Robert Cialdini found that commitment was an excellent form of motivation. "If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment because of establishing that idea or goal as being congruent with their self image. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement. For example, in car sales, suddenly raising the price at the last moment works because the buyer has already decided to buy."[1]

Cialdini performed his original research several decades ago, but it has been continued by the Freakonomics/Kahneman/"Nudge" crew. To the best of my recollection, all of their experiments showed a strong positive effect when public commitment was added. It's the principle behind StickK.com, as well.

Perhaps there are certain types of improvements (vague self improvement was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that are harmed by external reinforcement, but I think that's more the exception rather than the rule.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini (also check out his "psychology of influence" book for more on the topic)
Tell HN: Hacker News is blocking Tor exit nodes again
Hi.

I can't seem to access https://news.ycombinator.com/ reliably anymore. For many exit nodes, the result is a 502 error. For the non-SSL website the results are similar.

This is likely due to abuse from other Tor users. I would suggest the following:

1) If you want to block all of Tor, just parse the cached-consensus file from a Tor client to obtain a list of the likely IP addresses of exit nodes. Block these, and maybe print a nice message saying that Tor users are not welcome here... I can still connect on Tor from some exit nodes, as seen by this post here.

2) If you don't want to block Tor, consider alternate methods to combat abuse besides blocking IP addresses. It's easy to get a new IP address.
ReCAPTHA has become such a huge pain to solve. Personally I wouldn't even bother solving their horrible captcha to get your email unless I REALLY REALLY need it.
Hash is a great idea. Thanks! I'll implement the hash now.

I build an array of arrays where each subset array has all the possibilities for that letter. So if the query was N then a[0] = [0,..,9]. Then I just pick a random element from each subset array and stitch them all together in order.
Awesome! Now I want a good one for the iPad, please!
Machine Learning for Hackers (book)
80 Year Old Man Writes Novel Entirely In Tweets
3 hours is not extensive.... That would means the majority of your day is still solo.
Stripe CEO Discusses Online Payment Service