skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you sure? I still see a page full of ugly pixelated courier-esque font, with 3px-wide "i" characters distracting from being able to read anything. (Chrome/XP)

Please, bloggers of the world. If you don't understand fonts or how to correctly embed fonts into a web page in a way that looks good cross-platform and not just on your machine, just use web-safe fonts.
Having someone steal a Credit Card number is vary safe at worst your out 50$ and need to wait a few days to get another one in the mail. It's checks I worry about, you can easily drain a bank account with the 2 numbers on the bottom of them and you don't get your money back when that happens.
That's because python and ruby sites do the right thing: a page is not a script, the url should not point to a "file" ("index.php" and such). When using python or ruby, most of the time you use frameworks that let you define your urls, and not just put a script and let the url point to it. Urls should be readable and easy to remember, they are directions for the user. Wich script is running on the server is an implementation detail that shouldn't be part of the user interaction, he doesn't need to tell you wich script to run.

"mysite.com/add_user" is waaaaay better than "mysite.com/add_user.php"

This is one of many bad things php encourages you to do... and that's why most good programmers don't like php, because it makes easy to do bad things.

Some big sites using python: youtube.com, addons.mozilla.org, dropbox.com, disqus.com, ...

Big sites using ruby: twitter.com, jango.com, ...
Yes, everything is copyright its creator.

I guess my point was that all that doesn't matter if the original design doesn't exhibit enough originality (I used the term 'novel').

To give an example: if I have an A4 page with left aligned text, that looks very similar to any other A4 page with left aligned text that happens to use the same font size and line height.

In the case at hand, the design wasn't even dcurtis', he presumably took it from http://drawar.com/
Or maybe not?

With a design so simple, similarity by coincidence can't be ruled out.
I wouldn't be surprised if another dozen websites existed that exhibited a /very/ similar design.
I guess it's possible, but extremely unlikely, that I am just so cool that they want to give me a free copy to share with people, but I have legitimately never paid for local band's music. By this I mean a band member or representative will give me CDs or Download links all the time. Usually I stop by the table to grab a couple band stickers or a tshirt, and they ask if I want a CD (usually I don't, my live music preferences are much different than my recorded preferences but I still want to encourage their performing). When I decline, they just hand me one anyway and say here take it anyway. If I point out that I wouldn't listen to it, I prefer this music live, they say "give it to a friend".

Basically my point is, they won't decline the money, but they still want their name out there bad enough to make the trade-off. Particularly when it's download coupons rather than CDs (which have an up-front cost). Similarly all the recoding studios in my town are booked up solid, and the better dozen or so sound engineers are never hurting for work. (And this is a pretty small town, 200K pop in the greater metro area).
Again, because PHP has such a low barrier of entry, more developers use it. So it's only logical that you'd see more tutorials and questions for it.
The U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Numerical Weather Prediction: Part I
The same story when anything involving race comes up.
Code Small FTW: Epilogue on creating an iPhone App in less than 24 hours
Debit cards are particularly dangerous, as they are as vulnerable as credit cards but do not offer the same protections.
Cynical-me thinks "screwed up page rendering and swiping just achieved 4times more page views to claim to advertisers - mission accomplished, goals met!"
Boston's 'Innovation District' Eagerly Awaits More Innovators
I really like lua and have been lookin at getting my hands dirty with this.. Sounds like I have my weekend planned then!
I am surprised they allows that. That sounds like a far more obvious antitrust violation than putting an IE icon on the Windows desktop.
Seems to me like the last sentence explains it all:

The part that Neary left out in his letter? According to sources after Pugh departed he gave employees an ultimatum: 24 hours to decide if they were in or out for the long haul, even if that meant no more salary without a new fundraise, which seemed unlikely. Given that binary choice, they elected to abandon ship.
Maybe it's just me, but I saw "Phi Delta Toolbag" and immediately imagined a fraternity created for the express purpose of congregating toolbags together ... which seems likely and hilarious. I did not consider it a generalization about fraternities in general.
They've changed their tune then, because that used to be explicitly called out as an example of a grey area in the old license that they would be prevented with the new license.

If that's correct then that's fantastic.

Given that it's contradictory to what used to be claimed, it still makes me concerned about touching it without having a lawyer going over the license in great detail, though...
BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?
> due to being easier to get into - you don't need a framework, understand OOP

what kind of framework? i was seeing khan academy videos that teach python and they did not use any framework and the basic things were same as in php (conditionals, loops, function, etc), no OOP. OOP might be used for some advanced stuff but that stands true for php too.

Also a note from me too, i am not against python or ruby. They are great. I am just trying to make sense of what i observe daily.
> It's pretty clear that the innovation in Dustin's work wasn't the code -- it was the interface.

What part? While it looked pretty, I didn't see anything new or unique (outside of the liking mechanism he uses).
If you're looking to read up on negotiation, "Getting to Yes" (mentioned by Jacques) is good but a bit warm/fuzzy.

For a first book, try Wharton prof Richard Shell's Bargaining for Advantage: http://www.amazon.com/Bargaining-Advantage-Negotiation-Strat...
It crashed my browser too. Twice. Big tower-computer-thingy with a couple of meg-joules of RAM and Pewter web browser.

Thankfully, I was able to spot the problem after visiting the page with my lawnmower: http://i.imgur.com/4jnGv.png
I will add a link to the paper itself; sorry about making you jump through hoops.
This is currently hung on the SIM. Couldn't it just as well be hung on a web service, or paypal account? Why make it physical? This screams for virtualization.
Tell one major problem with SIM is the ancient outdated hard locked data model, and phone software developers refusing to implement a proper merge when exposing both SIM and phone data in UI.
One way of getting to "no" is to put forward a high price, particularly if it's something you don't actually want to do.

What I like to do is put a number at about double what I consider it to be worth. This basically reflects the fact that I'd be spending weekends working, but also isn't so high as to be insulting - we're not talking huge numbers here.

The upside is they might say "yes", in which case you're getting what you consider a good rate for your time.

The downside is that they might say "yes", in which case they may expect higher quality for the price that you put forward.

This is also troublesome if you don't know the going rate, and unintentionally put a low-ball offer in.

Clearly if you want to just say "no", and have no interest whatsoever, then telling the client "no... but" is probably a better option.
the future is almost certainly RISC

What does RISC even mean anymore? Seriously, I remember the debates during the early 90s (back when MIPS and friends were going to destroy Intel) and the RISC of then is very different from the RISC of today. Then the merit of RISC was that you literally reduced the instruction set to the minimum possible, putting the demand on the compiler to gang them to do even rudimentary work. The idea was that the simpler silicon would be easier to scale up (frequency scaling was a major problem), and the compiler would have more insight into the operations of a product giving such a product a performance advantage.

The MIPS of the 90s had about 45 instructions, total, and a corresponding simplicity of implementation. The 8086 had 114, providing higher level, much more complex silicon, and has grown since then.

How many instructions does ARMv7a provide (this is actually a hard question to answer)? It has floating point operations, SIMD / NEON, virtualization support, and on and on and on. I do know that while it once feature just 25,000 transistors (ARM2), a modern ARM9 design like the Tegra2 hosts 26 million transistors for just the cores (not the GPU).

I realize that I'm stepping into a linguistic landmine, and various contrived "this is the differentiator" definitions will appear, but the original intent of RISC versus CISC was exactly what I described above. Today the meanings are absolutely nothing like that.
无锡办证
I'd make a counterpoint. It probably took Dustin years to get to the skill level he's at now. Most of the work here was in the design and "ideation" stage rather than the CSS/HTML/JS. Once something is built it only requires the necessary tech skills to copy it.

Reminds me of a story about Picasso: A woman asks Picasso to paint a painting of her, five minutes later there's a wonderful painting of her. When she asks Picasso how much she owes, he quotes her 5,000 francs. She's surprised by how much it is and tells him that it only took him 5 minutes. He responds with "No, it took me my entire life."

This is an extreme comparison but I just want to highlight that there's a value to the experience that people have. As hackers we tend to underestimate that since we focus on the more visible tech skills.
150,000 Requests/Sec – Dynamic HTML & JSON Can Be Fast
Tangential to the main topic:

But microkernels see more and more adoption every day. They offer a degree of reliability that is unprecedented. But they also come with a performance penalty that is for a lot of people enough of a drawback that they would rather have 'good enough' than 'perfect'.

For software that needs to be 'perfect' microkernels are the way to go and in fact in the embedded world there are more microkernel varieties that you can choose from now than ever before.

I'm looking into this space a bit for some personal projects. Would you be able to point me to some examples/good resources on this?
Save money (on energy costs) with $845,000 Porsche 918 plug-in hybrid
> There's no technical reason why CDMA networks couldn't have supported SIM cards in their phones, but it was just never done.

Indeed. RUIMs (and CSIMs) were standardized for CDMA, but carriers in the americas never bothered with them. A fair number of asian countries have CDMA carriers that use the, though.
Think of the shame people are facing who posted the story to their social network and backed it up with spirits uplifting comments like "if you have a dream, you can fly"! - reassuring faith in engineering and hard work(8 years he said). One particularly missing feature of the feel-good video was the lack of technical details ... but then you believe the source from where it came and your brain accepts it based on the established trust relationship with the source (in this case, hackernews/weird science) - and more importantly a video.

The difference between watching news and movies - is what we should compare this video to. When I'm seeing the space station in a news clip my brain is telling me this is legit because what I have seen previously from this source has proven to be legit. But when I see death star being blown up, I'm realize its fake because it comes from a source which, well, told you Jedi traits were real. :(

Whatever you proved bird man, you won't be able to sleep at night. Ever.
The problem is not just debt, it is the lack of jobs to make money to pay off that debt. In the 1950s and earlier, a college degree of any kind would guarantee you a white-collar job. People with advanced educations, particularly in the soft subjects like English and History, were highly sought after and groomed to be managers and executives. Now you not only need a degree specific to the field you are attempting to enter, the degree only gets you into the entry level if you can even get the job because there are fewer jobs than there are degree-holders. If you do manage to get the job, wages have gone down relative to inflation and the cost of a university education has gone up, leading to more debt. College graduates today have fewer opportunities than high school graduates did a few decades ago and fewer opportunities than high school drop-outs had before the Depression, and are often making less money. Adjusted for inflation, my father made more as a bagger at a grocery store in the 1970s than I have ever made as a computer programmer, and that's when I can find work.

It's easy to say the problem is a lack of jobs, but it's harder to say what to do about it.
> In fact, I suspect that modern processors have to use some sort of "Guess the three most likely solutions throw out the results if we're wrong" solution for current processors to get the performance needed.

IIRC, it's way more sophisticated than that.

As I understand Intel's trace caches, their guess is basically the result of decoding the next N instructions, accounting for branch prediction.

And yes, it includes detection/recovery for writes into the instruction memory that would invalidate that guess.
A better fight would be to push for 802.22 (super-wifi) broadband ISP's. Cell networks are obviously going to have a hissy-fit when any competition to their 3G and 4G oligopolies get tumbled over by superior technology. Due to the corruption of US politics I seriously doubt this will ever see the day of light.

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/08/07/ieee-completes-62-mile-s...
can you elaborate a little on how does it have low barrier of entry? as my current understanding stands, python has all the basic things like loops, conditional, functions, variables etc just like php. What makes python difficult to start learning? (or if put another way: what makes php easier to start learning?)
Show HN: one huge dapple (aka: my house as camera obscura)
The problem with metro is it’s hard to differentiate
> Clicking seems to advance or retreat somewhat randomly

It depends on which half of the slide you click.
We will die too, my fellow winner, and not necessarily in a pleasant way.
I'm not an expert on this, just a linguist who happens to code a lot, but there is some serious work on the complexity of frequency ordering. The algorithms proposed by R. Rivest (1976, Communications of the ACM) produce near-optimal frequency orders online, so if you can settle for "near optimal" then the problem is hardly traveling salesman as this author claims.
At my last job we used Python to write the UI for controlling train brakes (electronically controlled pneumatic railway brakes). Worked really well for us since we did a buttload of testing (with robotframework http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/ and a bunch of other things).
Jim Stogdill: My Paleo Media Diet
They're running a freemium model, who knows what their conversion rate is.
We had a rash of credit/debit card skimming locally as a result of crooks coming into stores in the mall and replacing the store's point-of-sale card reader terminal with one of their own which was rigged to skim before passing on the information to the register, according to the local news.

Normally, I'd distrust the news when it comes to anything vaguely technical but it got me wondering if the POS terminal does anything to guarantee that its credit card reader is still "authentic" (hopefully, it at least used some kind of good faith challenge-response mechanism, even if it could be easily spoofed by a potential attacker).

Physically swapping them out - both to put the rigged reader in, and to remove it once it's "full" - also seems pretty risky. It was probably something like this story instead where the register itself was targeted remotely.
> Would Apple be so creative if they weren't so profitable? Isn't it their profitability which gives them the ability to spend time and money on R&D? If you take away the profit, don't you take away the opportunity to do R&D?

If Apple's profit equates to Android not doing what they are doing, Apple going bankrupt will be a fair trade in my book. If Apple comes up with something original, which Android re-implements, it doesn't owe Apple anything, even if it affects Apple's profits. Apple working on original things and being in business is good, but not so much that others' ability to re-implement things be taken away.
Compressors, Fans and Pumps: Basics, Selection & Operation (1.2 CEUs)
Facebook Started Taking Google+ Seriously
Darwin, ca: a mining town stuck on the shoulder of the information superhighway
ESN is equivalent to IMEI in GSM/UMTS networks. IMEI is tied to equipment, and never changes, just like ESN.

CDMA networks use IMSI to identify subscribers (as opposed to the equipment serial number) just like GSM/UMTS. IMSIs are provisioned on to the phone by the carrier with special software supplied by the phone manufacturer, instead of being supplied to the phone by the phone asking the SIM for it.

There's no technical reason why CDMA networks can't use a removable card to store subscriber data, and indeed there are a few standards for doing so (RUIM and CSIM) and a few carriers that use them.
I wonder if by deleting not so nice memories (i'm guessing that would be one of the first applications) the person will continue to make the same decisions over and over, because they might not remember them and keep re-experiencing (and learning) repeatedly?
Simsimi: The Robot You Can Have a Real Conversation With Via Text
The new geek chic: Celebs lend star power to Web start-ups
Yeah, sounds disturbingly like the people looking to "protect marriage" in America.
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Prepare for the rise of Magneto!
I recommend "Crowds & Power" by Elias Canetti. Someone should release an adapted 21st century edition.
FYI, SIM cards aren't necessary for NFC. In fact, it is only the carriers that would prefer the SIM be used as the secure element, as they have control over it. Other potential NFC players would prefer the secure element be separate, so that the carrier doesn't have control over NFC-based transactions. And, ISO 14443 is not directly related NFC, which is governed by ISO 18092 and ISO 21481.
"Just look at this thread here on HN. We have people doubting all sorts of things, but these may well be things that are addressed in the actual work."

Presumably if MIT had actually discovered the nature of consciousness we wouldn't be reading about it in some tabloid. The research may be less bad than the article suggests, but there's no way it's as good as the article suggests either.
Not exactly an IT magazine, but I subscribe to Inc which has some nice articles on technology and enterpreneurship and I like it.
[Scheme-reports] Just a load of.. well..
How to increase productivity per square inch of your screen
Why employers shouldn't ask for access to your Facebook account
Sadly ideas aren't valued in the business world, only execution is promoted as the important part - so people trying to make profit can feel less guilty.
Dustin Curtis didn't create a blogging platform, he created another PR and traffic grab. Which is great for his career and visibility.

But come on, the only way this could get any more farcical is if Dustin revealed that he orchestrated this whole thing and is in fact both parties.

If I were Dustin, I'd be ecstatic that I'd almost permanently glued to the front page of HN. Any publicity is good publicity.
Poll: How Long Have You Been Programming?
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There are some countries you do have to give extra documentation, and often providers will rip you off by giving you more airtime only if you register.

Funny you mention Ethiopia, the telecom there is completely state controlled, and it has been used to thwart opposition (listen in on calls, shut down complete SMS, etc). It's one of the many "remnants" of the communist regime. Supposedly Orange was coming in to manage and change that however...
About 6-7 years overall, 2 years of which were commercially.
My experience with AT&T is they've always given me a new SIM, when buying a new phone from them, but I've also bought raw sim's from them with no problem.

I think they just write the "New Phone" script for their employees, with a new sim, so the steps,are always the same. Less chances to mess things up when there are less choices.
x86 will die out and RISC architectures will dominate the market

IIRC Intel's processors now translate x86 instructions into a series of RISC micro-instructions on the fly.
In the Netherlands, even on prepaid they are required to do so after 12 months.
Depends what country you're in and who you bank with. If I lose my debit card I'm not responsible for anything spent with it afterwards.
The languages themselves are pretty equivalent. But with PHP it's easier for newbies to grok things when you can just point a web server at a directory that has a "blog.php" file in it, and visit "myserver.com/blog.php" to execute that script and see results. With python you have to understand the basics of what WSGI is and how it works, which is pretty poorly documented for people just starting web development. The "visit a file from my browser's address bar" motif is easier to grasp than "my url gets interpreted as a string that I then parse and route to a function imported from some other file".
Maybe its just me, but I feel that giving special privileges to hybrid owners is just a way of giving rich people private parking spaces and their own lanes on some highways.
That is another part i like about Server Side Rendering. You have much more control. Rendering Web Page would work well with your 1Ghz Machine.
Are Bankers Capitalists?
Ex-FBI informant tells how the FBI manufactures terror plots then thwarts them
Why patent lawyers are clueless about the software industry
Yes that's a valid point. But that alone is not enough for php to be disregarded. Because one who wants to not have urls point to files on disk will change this behaviour. .htaccess makes it possible.

This is a security problem, i agree. But not a major security problem. Because if it were, sites like Facebook would have been exploited long ago. It's certainly possible to do things right way. Which brings us back to "its developer's fault and not language's".

to which what you said suits.

> most good programmers don't like php, because it makes easy to do bad things