skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will not be upgrading to Lion or later -- I prefer Finder to have ~/Library, I don't want to see all the thousands of tiny UI images on my computer, I don't want the mouse to scroll backwards, or a stray finger on the mouse to go back a page in webkit when I wanted to scroll left. Don't get me started on the latest Xcodes, which I have to use at work.

So, speaking as the target market, Ubuntu has created a horrible user experience with Unity, and have made it not worth the effort it takes to remove it. I will never run Ubuntu (desktop) again.

My Linux laptop now runs Mint, which is fine but cannot connect to a network without the Gnome graphical configuration tool for whatever reason. probably layer 8 or ID10T in this case.
http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky/
The Zen mystique in the Lisp community
The Paul Graham essay Beating the Averages (http://paulgraham.com/avg.html) contains a telling quote from the dubiously sane Eric S. Raymond:

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

Rhetoric about Lisp is often couched in the language of the arduous journey of a novice monk to Nirvana. (Perhaps Lisp advocates are the bodhisattvas in this narrative.)

I don't think this sort of quasi-religious approach is a good way of evaluating programming languages. I would prefer a more scientific, even quantitative approach.

Reviewing the packages available on common-lisp.net, one notices that most of them, in fact the vast majority of them have not thrived. Quite a few have been sitting idle in permanent alpha stage since I graduated high school.

When it comes to claims about Lisp's superior expressive power (as claimed here for example: http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html), quantitative data are also lacking. The only hard metrics on the subject that I can find are from the Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Incidentally, these measure the length of code in gzip bytes, which seems like a more fundamental consideration than LOC.

How do they compare Lisp to comparable languages in this regard? Not favorably. Here I'm using SBCL, as the default referent of Lisp is usually Common Lisp, but you'll find broadly similar results with other Lisp implementations, like Racket.

SBCL vs Python 3:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=sbcl&lang2=python3

SBCL vs Ruby:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=sbcl&lang2=yarv

SBCL vs OCaml:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=sbcl&lang2=ocaml

And, indeed, SBCL vs Java:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=sbcl&lang2=java

Here, Lisp appears to be a teensy bit more verbose on average than Java, which brought unto the world such marvels as the anonymous inner class.

Are there any more objective (as opposed to anecdotal) measures for the superior efficacy of Lisp?
Linux Marketshare Myth: 2012 Edition
I'd love to know that too. I just threw in $100 (via the donation button on the top right of the linked article), but I'm glad to donate more if he needs it.

I really wish I had time to tilt at this particular windmill, so I'm very grateful that this fellow is being so relentless.
If you check their blog it shows they were on course to join Facebook - http://blog.gowalla.com/post/13782997303/gowalla-going-to-fa...
It shows us why just using C/C++ is not a performance-wise decision. You need to spend more time developing the product and spend MORE time to improve it's performance.
It seems he's trying to find some middle ground between two outlooks that are taken for granted as being two polar opposites: the Randian selfish pursuit versus the altruistic self-sacrificial.

Balance is good, so can I appreciate that. It becomes apparent that its a false dichotomy if you try and label an open-source project as belonging to one category or the other (Rails and Linux as two examples in the sibling comment).
Google Play Store (aka the product formerly known as Android Market) needs more ways for users to fund their Google Wallet in order for content providers (app developers, book/music publishers) to feel confident in the monetization model

The issue was (and probably still is) is that Google Checkout is a different division and whilst Android Market may be a big customer of theirs, wasn't their only customer.

Products which you would expect available from an online store such as gifting of apps and prepaid cards are not available on the Play Store. I've given my old Android device to my 13 year old child (its above the min age limit)

http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

and there is no way for me to buy paid apps without linking a credit card to my child's Google Wallet account. There is ofcourse the secondary point then its only in ICS that one is kinda required to setup a Google Wallet account when activating your Android device

The current model of funding for Google Wallet assumes that it can only be funding via credit cards. Andy Rubin would like to get more carrier billing coverage and if he (aka Google) is willing to eat margins to give a consistent 70% revshare to developers that's great but this may be a long wait
The difference is that Next had a technology; Apple bought something tangible with actual value and a real engineering investment. All loopt has is a "brand".
Quora's approach to the same question is interesting http://www.quora.com/How-to-explain-callbacks-in-plain-Engli...
You might want to read this interesting (albeit slightly outdated) post about leveraging `sendfile` in Node.JS by Peter Griess:

http://blog.std.in/2010/09/09/using-sendfile-with-nodejs/
Thank you for that! The cost in filing fees, printing, and mailing for SCOTUS I estimate to be near $2K. If it's accepted, I need to travel to DC for oral arguments. All this in addition to dozens (or more) hours of missed work in order to research, write, and handle things.

Even if I got no donations, I would self-fund this suit, so no worries about donating more... anything anyone wants to contribute is much appreciated!
That's quite a lot to read into a tiny example like this.
The only realistic utility of this feature is that it could let you "guess" when the user has finished typing their password and check it automatically upon completion without them needing to press return. That would be a neat gimmick, but I don't see it working out.

The issues are twofold:

1. The obvious, it reduces an attacker's search space by the guess accuracy, in this case 256 times. To maintain equivalent security you must compensate for this by increasing the work of your hash function 256 times. Depending on your password's entropy (and thus your default work factor) this may or may not be acceptable. For user-supplied passwords secure hashes should take order of 100ms -- 10ms at the least -- and increasing that many orders of magnitude is definitely not acceptable. This, alas, pretty much breaks the idea, but putting it aside:

2. There will be collisions. The odds of a particular collision are 1/256; since an 8-character password contains seven chances for a collision, ballpark one in 36 of your users will have at least one collision during their password. This means that to maintain the seamless experience, you need to check the crypto-hash on the server silently, without indicating checking or failure to the user (anything else would be confusing). This introduces a number of very weird problems which you can definitely not be sure you have accurately addressed.

So, not really a good plan for passwords. Still a neat hack, though.
It looks like most of these people are making less than minimum wage. (feigned gasp!)

I'm glad they're making money somehow, but it does annoy me that laws are preventing them from pursuing a lot of other jobs.
Not sure, it might actually make it harder to tell where the body ends and the checkerboard begins, because the resolution is so poor. Either way, this was but one exploit I found. :)
I'll say it again: Apple was not the first to invent the tablet, they were the last, and that is precisely why they succeeded.
Emulators are a dime a dozen, and almost every console from before the PSX already had at least one by 1999.

In the beginning it wasn't (usually) one person but an entire team studying every component of the console, dumping the BIOS and then coding something that (at first) could at least boot the game. After that it was mostly about working out the details like graphic glitches, slow framerate, certain graphical issues, etc...

But once the "core" was made other teams or individuals could use it to make their own versions, or port it to other OSes/architectures.

The NES is together with the Sega Genesis one of the most emulated consoles out there: you'll find emulators of these two for every computer, PDA, PMP, phone or tablet.
New Apple Austin Campus To Cost $304 Million
Nanny Poppins could leverage this with an API for the approved/vetted sitters that are available for that set of parents.
That's actually a pretty neat idea!
This, exactly. I keep reading about this huge shortage of qualified developers, but I've now met enough talented developers looking for work -- who are reliable and talented, and not assholes, that I know that the standard line about a talent shortage can't be true. Perhaps it's an issue in and around the Valley, but it's not in most of the rest of the country. If you're having trouble hiring in the US outside of SF, then you probably either:

1) Fail to realize that good programmers know about programming in general, and that this knowledge easily transfers from one language or technology to another. If you're looking for an X programmer with Y years experience in Z technology, then good luck with that!

2) Conduct your actual hiring process wrong, as described in this blog post. All these companies ask for "rock star" developers, yet when they actually get one to an interview, they spend all their time running them through one whiteboard exercise after another, instead of asking about all their amazing projects.

Unfortunately, I know I'm preaching the the choir here. I wish this kind of blog post could reach the eyes of HR people and/or hiring managers. Perhaps it could change some minds.
Recognizing mortality is not the cure to existentialism.
Recognizing mortality _is_ existentialism.
So, who's the one still on IE?
Linux runs great on an Apple MacBook.
The Go-Nowhere Generation
And WYSIWYG editing.
My current reading of the job market around me, and I may well be just in a funky mood so forgive me, is that all the IT job listings seem to itemize all the ways you won't be allowed to be creative, and also list a bunch of surprisingly general, and contradictory, experience requirements. They promote any kind of actual CS knowledge as being a masters degree skill only needing 10 years in direct experience in a 10 year old technology. This combination sounds like they have a bunch of old crap that they've built up to be so complex that no one wants to maintain it, and it will take a year for anyone to understand it anyway. So that's the total message like "here, you take this," but the HR people can only translate the requirements into someone that doesn't exist, because they want someone to hit the ground running, on an amateur complexity study.
Yup I saw it a each "blog entry" being its own repository with its own history of corrections, updates etc. There was multiple master branches that groups blog entries such as "public" or with other tags. The real fun came because you could publish your git repository and when someone fetched it if they say used http they would only get the public branch and all those commits, but if you fetched using the key "bob" you could get all of the refs that were both public and bob. Those on the public branch would never know that they are missing refs because they have separate roots. And just to make things more fun you could have encrypted messages to boot with private keys.
Kernel panic was as simple as:

volatile void panic(const char * s)
{
printk("Kernel panic: %s\n\r",s);
for(;;);
}
He had those too: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/did-apple-crib-this-m...
It's a lot more complicated than that. The car can't always stop when the map disagrees with the sensor. There are any number of situations where that's a bad idea.
Thanks for the link, that clears it up nicely. Maybe the video could explore the production workflow a bit more, it looked like a simple tech demo to me.
Most of the videos posted so far are from the tutorials on Wed-Thu, so I imagine the rest will be up soon. The AV crew is kicking serious butt to get them up so quickly.
The Afternoon Gentlemen - Pissedography
Porn site Digital Playground hacked, hackers say “too enticing to resist”
I think it more shows that just picking C/C++ over Python doesn't mean you automatically get awesome performance. You still need to know what your doing.
The only question that matters is "Can you do the job?" If you don't hear this question or for those doing the interviewing, if you don't ask this question, then there is something seriously wrong. All of the rest is pretty much a waste of time at least until after that key item is settled. With that out of the way, then it is time to worry about how well someone may or may not fit in etc (something that can be allowed for or fixed as may be). And whatever else might come to mind. But first and foremost everyone should realize that doing the job is the single most important item.
A big part of why I consider HN worthwhile to read and post to: we only have time to even attempt executing on so many ideas, but maybe someone else is working on it. Like a big "take an idea, leave an idea" jar.
has anyone got it working?
RSA cracking puzzle designed for beginner programmers
I agree, though I think it could fairly be taken as one small bit of evidence in favor of "C++ has a lot of gotchas". In this case it looks like the culprit is C++'s C-compatibility-driven decision to sync with stdio by default, and therefore to avoid buffering input. Of course, if they made the opposite decision on defaults, "C++ doesn't sync with stdio by default" would be a different, probably also common, variety of "gotcha".
I think that many things in life rely on luck, unfortunately. And I think that's why a lot of people love video games. Not just for the entertainment aspect but because they know if they eventually figure out all the rules, they know if they follow a certain path, and do X, Y, Z, they will accomplish their goal. Life isn't as black and white. But I do think entrepreneurship is one of very few areas where luck doesn't play as big a part as it does in other areas.. like finding a good relationship, good health, not getting into a car accident, etc.
I'm sick of reading these parables from the perspective of an all-knowing outsider with perfect information. All it does is give the reader a smug sense of satisfaction that they could never be so stupid.

For once, I'd like to see it from the perspective of someone with uncertain, incomplete information, gathered by people who have their own agendas about a topic whose towers of abstraction the protagonist barely has a grasp on, on which they have to make decisions with inadequate time for consideration or research and of which, 999 will be utterly uneventful and 1 will blow up completely in their face.
IPad as hip flask
What if we could have opportunistic dynamic linking, where an application uses a shared library, if present and compatible, and otherwise uses the bundled?
Seems to get the best of both worlds, no?
How India Became America
Mobile Payments: Siri Hears Your Words And Pays Your Rent In Seconds
Whenever this question is asked, it's almost always std::sync_with_stdio.
Might be a poor soul who has to visit HN from corporate computer behind corporate firewall. :)
We stopped dreaming
Yup, got mine a few weeks back. Must've been part of the first batch--I responded very quickly.
ComfortableMexicanSofa (Rails 3 CMS Engine)
www.taskforceapp.com (Disclaimer: I'm the developer for Taskforce)
I used to passive-agressively mention this to our HR department and my old job all the time. The basic "Software Engineer" posting has "At least 3 years of desktop or server software development" as a requirement. I always liked to point out that I (and everyone else they hired out of college) wasn't qualified for the jobs we were doing.

They're in Michigan, so finding development talent is a little bit harder so I don't know why they're discouraging college students from applying by having pointless job requirements that don't actually matter.
Ask HN:  Just how many hackers are there?
I often think while driving "How many hackers are there within a mile of me?"

Obviously this number is higher when in a metro area as opposed to rural, but that's about all I can go off of. I don't have any data that says "There are X hackers in Tokyo, Japan but only Y hackers in Toad Suck, Arkansas" so I can't even make assumptions about overall geographical spread.

For the sake of argument, let's keep the definition of "hacker" fairly loose:

- Someone who creatively uses/writes software/hardware, and/or

- Someone who studies security and how to subvert it

I think this is an interesting question for several reasons. First, the challenge of coming up with an accurate way to gauge the number of hackers in the world is intriguing enough, without further breaking it down to "How many hackers are within X miles of my location?" Second, let's just assume we could know exactly how many and our locations. Imagine finding out that your 70-year-old neighbor who bakes you cookies every Sunday in return for helping rake her lawn also enjoys reversing malware samples in her spare time. Last but not least, I think no matter what the number is, high or low, I would be surprised.

So while this isn't a question I readily expect an answer to, feel free to ponder the details of such an experiment or to give a good estimate (along with good, solid reasoning, of course).
But then you do what Apple does on its MBP/iMac refurbished page and list the iPad release date, i.e. "case for early 2012 iPad." It's not ideal for accessory sellers, but that's not Apple's problem.
Is there something tricky about callbacks?
The commit adding the "trap" referred to in the article appears to be:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=...

The change causes a specific exception when a style of attack known as a JIT spraying attack is detected. The exception generates a minidump which is uploaded to Google's crash servers.

Further info:

* http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=113891

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIT_spraying
Where did you get your ~1GB number? It's 384 megabytes on machines with 4GB, probably 256 on 2GB.

(If you have 13.3" MBP with 8GB of RAM, it carves out 512 MB for video memory.)
Making a decision is one aspect of negotiating, but it isn't the most important one.

Establishing the scope of the negotiation (ie. what does each side care about?) is what inexperienced negotiators typically miss.

Smart legislators understand this, and use time to defeat opponents. That's why you see so many 11th hour deals.
Why does changing ip route does not have any effect on initial window
How to create your own URL shortening service
Hi, it's johnbhall, the creator of the demo. Here's a video by YouTube user louisstamour that shows the exact animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ASoqmyj19A

Apple's code is complex; my demo is simplified because I wanted the source code to focus only on the core idea of the animation -- the main phone stage that rotates and translates. All the other moving parts in the animation follow the same JS pattern as the phone stage: for each of the six states, there's a Slide object that contains JS objects that define the x, y, rotation, opacity, etc. for each element. These properties are applied to their respective elements when that state is transitioned to. See gallery.js.

I hope my 5000-foot view is a good starting point for those interested in exploring Apple's source code for further explanation.
It's about the culture that the language enables.

Homoiconicity proposes a very particular philosophy of computation:
programs that read and write programs, something you wouldn't really
even think of doing in a language like Ruby. "Code is data" is not a meaningless mantra.

Emacs and Slime propose a very particular philosophy of programming:
interactive development in a live, dynamic environment. Growing and
healing programs rather than performing autopsies with the
compile-edit-run cycle.

Counting packages on common-lisp.net and measuring program size in
bytes completely misses these points. This is why the zen mystique
exists: Lisp and its memeplex are not about quantitative things like
"I can write program X in Y lines", but about the way you think about
computation and programming.

Not many languages even come close to the idea of proposing a robust and interesting philosophy. Ask yourself what Java and Eclipse have to say about the nature of computation.

Haskell is probably the other big one, and it'll be interesting to see how that community continues to develop.
I hope slides get posted - especially the Intro to Django talk :) thanks for putting these up!
This is spot on. I think it's a recruiter problem - many look at the resume and take that as the full story.

I have a funny example of this "hiring problem." Shortly after I consulted for a established, public web company, they were hiring a FT person for the same thing (design-related). The dept I consulted for emailed me and asked me to submit a resume and said they'd make sure I floated to the top. What happened? I didn't get past the phone recruiter. I could tell she got hung up (no pun intended) on something on my resume and I got a rejection email from her shortly thereafter.

So as this post suggested, the company went the consulting route before-hand and we worked well with each other. Then a recruiter got in the middle and messed it all up.
The very feature/bug that this post culminates with is actually the very reason why iframes on iOS have become an invaluable and seemingly irreplaceable tool in my architecture. It is the lack of cross-site uncooperative content resizing that has kept a lot of my stuff confined to iOS.
Thingiverse has a very similar thing, though they chose three vertical bars that change color.
The original comment was about Apple developers using it for over 16 years. You can't count the NeXT years, as NeXT developers were not Apple employees.
The space suits in alien were his design.
Apple faces its 'Nike moment' in China
We're Only in It for Ourselves
Those look to be free/homebrew not commercial games.
I haven't. I dont see anything at http://code.google.com/p/super-dartendo/ either?
Use none of them, try Grails or JRuby. Really.
This is the most wonderful thing anyone has every told me.
I think he means he prefers the package of services provided by the German gov more than the package provided by the Kansas/Alabama gov.
Michio on the World of Tomorrow and too Many Investment Bankers
What's supremely confusing is that the back scatter machines were meant to protect us against the growing threat of non-metallic weapons and yet many TSA demos show how effective they are at finding things like guns and knives. Such objects would be passively and reliably detected by a metal detector and now we find they can be easily taken through a back scatter machine.

We've put incomplete tech and massive room for human error in between people and air planes. It's worse than security theater, it's a full digression in our our actual security. We're actually less safe than we were 15 years ago. If this man's video is to be trusted, it's now easier than ever to bring a box cutter onto an airplane. Boggles the mind.
This is insanely awesome. Thank you guys.

A bit surprised the tutorials are all up and available for free...
Stegano.js : a javascript and HTML based steganography encoder/decoder