skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You need to add a c) data liberation and this is/was Posterous' long time problem, and tellingly so.

Would raganwald be writing his essay if he owned his data and could easily export it from Posterous?

Or would he have just exported his data and imported it into another blogging service?

People have been asking Posterous for a data export solution FOR YEARS, and Posterous NEVER supplied one.

There is backuperous, but that's some guy's project and doesn't save media.

I wanted to learn more, so I wrote my own data export tool in elisp -- it took me a couple of weeks to do so, with the main task being learning elisp and how the url package works, and now I feel confident I can get the data in several client's blogs back from Posterous and import it into another blogging service. But it will surely be a pain in the butt.

So while you are looking for a) and b), also look for c) companies that allow you to own your own data and export it and back it up.

On that scale, Posterous is/was always just absolutely terrible for their customers, and at the risk of alienating people here, I absolutely condemn Posterous and their behavior in this manner.

Posterous had years to supply a backup/export solution and consistently, and clearly intentionally, failed to do so. In contrast, I wrote my own backup solution in a very short time. There was no technical reason why Posterous could not supply a backup solution. And the resources required were minimal, almost trival. That they did no do so indicates this was part of a strategy of customer lock-in, and was a value-subtract to customers, not a value-add, and just abusive of the customer in general.

Here at HN, we love to laud the founders and act all clubby with them, but ya know, what Posterous did to its users by failing to provide a backup was just terrible and shame on Posterous' founders for using the user's data as an element of their lock-in strategy.
Yeah I was referring to that, but I just realized that there's probably some legal bs preventing them from doing it. So nevermind!
Everyone says they do Unit Tests, but no one "really" does it.
The Deception of Difficulty (why nothing is as confusing at it seems)
Even when you're prototyping, I find it useful to write one test. The gains from the first test are the biggest - pretty low investment, with reasonable returns.

It won't be great, but it will provide some form of sanity checking when you work on other stuff. Of course, it informs the design, which is a very overlooked feature of testing.

Lastly, it provides a foothold for more tests. When you're working on something hairy, there won't be any obstacle to "well, maybe I'll just add this one more test to save me some time".
Thanks for the link.

So: what about GUIS? How does one formally describe pixels displayed on a screen in a way that captures their ability to correctly communicate with the human intended to view them? So that my notice

Please turn off the foo within bar

doesn't show up truncated to say

Please turn off the foo

on all reasonably applicable screens? This example is just one of a googleplex of possible failures.
TL; DR: “Let τ=2π”

It's a simple substitution, and it should be used "when it's convenient to".

I really don't see any innovation in the article as everything in it is directly derived from the above mentioned substitution.
Our Favorite SXSW Notes on HackPad
Making Avro file reading in Python faster than Java
Text messages are on internal storage, which becomes unmountable when the device is locked.

Depending on the phone, they should be able to get into recovery mode and connect via adb. However, if it has a locked bootloader, they're SOL, and my schaudenfreude is without limit :)
The usual arguments in a language or OS flame war are relevant here. Do you choose the allegedly superior design, or the more popular and practiced one? The answer depends on your use case, love of tinkering, tolerance for productivity risk. But were it not for people trying new designs, we'd all be writing code in assembly language on single-user systems.
Google ruined itself with social, Google+, says former exec
This has a lot to do with the time the article was written. 2008 was a time where ring0 had gone out of fashion (SoftIce dead, nothing usable to replace it), and virtual machines weren't quite that common yet for debugging.

Today you'll find lots of anti-VM tricks, and if you go a few more years back, lots of ring0/SoftIce tricks.

That said, they are what they are, tricks. Good protections can't simply rely on tricks, which simply temporarily inconvenience whoever is not aware of them.
All of these wats are wrong.

Here is mine, to you, from me: http://soundcloud.com/ironballs/wat
LocalStorage? IndexedDB? What we need is Redis for the browser.
Tim Ewald demonstrates the simplicity of using Datomic from code
Apply to the MountainTop Without an Idea, Team, Expertise, or Education.
WikiLeaks suspect ‘tortured’
In production; its good to involve your customers in the development process so they feel included.

Seriously though, for small web projects I usually aim for 100% unit-test coverage on the models, 70-80% on controllers, and then depending on the application jasmine or selenium to verify the UI components are happy.

For larger projects, add in more integration tests ( models -> controllers, controller -> views ) and on something like mechanize to do full stack tests ( models -> view ).

Additionally for either small or large, running some sort of lint/static analysis at the CI can be beneficial.
I certainly did my lowest level stuff (building PC ISA hardware from scratch) in high school. Mainly it was out of necessity as I didn't have the money for the real hardware. Other folks I've known who have gotten into ASM in high school did so for game cracking/cheating/modding, also a form of necessity.

Any* sane professional development organization is going to try to minimize the amount of time their developers spend writing ASM by hand. There's almost always a higher level tool that's more productive.

* Actually, I worked at a place where the main DOS product had been hand written entirely in x86 ASM. The sanity of continuing such a practice into the 90's is an open question. Rumor had it that even the Windows versions of Wordperfect were written in ASM.
Internet Explorer is most likely intentionally broken [2007]
http://chrisdone.com/posts/2012-03-11-fsf-stallman-interview... has a recent take on it.
pi is "wrong" in the same way as imperial measurements are "wrong".
Really polished design for the book, and it looks like it's going to be a great read. I'm personally not interested in going for YC investment, but I am curious about the process.

Thanks Jason. Nice work.
Why bother to threaten? Why not just expose them? The Jester believes he has hacked "known-bad" people. His list of "known-bad" may not coincide withe people guilty of crimes, and probably coincides even less with people chargeable with crimes.

His evidence probably isn't admissible in court, at least in the USA. I would guess that chain-of-posession is at least a lot suspect. So, The Jester can't really give this to any law enforcement that can use it.

Why not just release the data? What does The Jester believe he/she/it/them can gain from just a threat?
Mine was the third comment on the story; the other two comments at the time both seemed to be reacting as though it were real.

Obviously nobody who posted after me is going to assume it's real...
Come on, stop trolling, Tau Day will be on 28th of June. Live and let others live. Today is Pi day, let people celebrate.

;)
Programmers should make money by creating services. Since there is no source code, you don't have to worry about piracy or distribution licenses.
It isn't innovation from a math sense, it's innovation in a pedagogical sense. Once you've internalized pi (and math in general) it is pretty hard to see what is so difficult about it (a well studied issue with expert knowledge and teaching things to novices). However a simplification from the point of view of the novice who doesn't "just get it" is a good thing.
Make it Easy to Unsubscribe from your Email List
I strongly feel you should try to add one test in each category. That adds a sanity check and lowers to cost to adding more tests when you really need it.

It's pretty painful to think "oh, this really needs a test, but I haven't got a test suite set up and besides, I don't know to write a test of this kind".

Writing tests for edge cases we see in production is the most valuable thing we do. We use Airbrake to find the bugs, and then we add a test for it, if possible (it's not always possible).

That gives us good confidence that other changes aren't fucking things up. It's also a pretty sane strategy for growing a test suite when you inevitably have some portion of your code which has no tests at all.
yes yes yes and yes again
we're not obsessed about code coverage
- but get disappointed when it falls below about 75%

We've a code based which is a mixture of javascript MVC (Backbone) and PHP (Zend)

A healthy attitude to unit testing and dev-ops has saved our back more times than I care to mention.

Also - it's a very useful way to "train" new developers. Spending 2-3 weeks writing tests is a great way to get a feel for
a) the code
b) house style
where new developers can be immediately productive - without risking touching production code on day 1
Sorry, I wasn't really trying to strongly disagree. I just started writing and it became more of a commentary on the media and people who think they're righting the world, but are really trapped in Blub.

It could actually totally could be Facebook again, especially given how the narrative is all about individual users being at risk. It seems like interaction on Pinterest would diminish a segment of mass-market Facebook usage. Spread some FUD to make people think using new 'untested' social sites could possibly subject one to liabilities, meanwhile attempt to fill the demand for Pinterest-style interaction with new features.

Actually, now that I think about it more, isn't Pinterest directly monetizing what Facebook has always claimed to be able to monetize sometime in the future?
All the good (heavyweight) Java IDEs have had excellent cross-referencing tools for well over a decade at least.
It's also easier to remember that the area of a unit circle is pi.

Also, e ^ (-i * pi) + 1 = 0
I'm not a testing fanatic, but I do TDD. I don't put "testing" on the invoice any more than I would put "typing" or "refactoring." That's internal to my process of delivering quality software, and either you like my estimates/deliveries or you don't.

But... it does sound like you need a new job.
I would need some sort of spec or at least a vague understanding of intended behavior before testing. A good day is a day my lead dev doesn't bork the repository.
At this point, why would anyone trust the Anonymous didn't but some kind of backdoor in this?
I saw RMS speak in person at WordCamp one year. Although he has some great, important ideas and he's made great contributions, I think he might be mentally unstable. Seriously - seeing him in person, he came across as quite crazy.
Be sure to check out the rebuttal.

http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto#sec:the_pi_manifesto_a_rebut...
RestService, the missing Android class.
He's been on here for years, and so have I.

I have often wondered, though, about his alacrity to side with the establishment, in defense of investment bankers, against net neutrality, etc., and what his motivation is.
I suppose 'lock in' was the wrong choice of words to use.
I understand that the data is only there because I chose to auto-upload it, and I also understand that I can easily re-upload the photo to facebook, but my point was that Google themselves are actively preventing me from doing something like that through the Picasa interface.

I think you understood the meaning behind my point, but I'd argue that they shouldn't even be in that space in the first place.
The very first thing that any photo-storage/sharing site should be looking at, after the service itself is working, is social sharing and interaction. Google are restricting the interaction on their platform (understandably, I might add) because they have built a competitor to Facebook.

that is what I have a problem with.
Cool, thanks for responding.
To be fair he does say clearly that all of these would be reasonably easy to bypass.

Perhaps he needed a better, but less catchy, title. "Some tricks that will slightly delay reverse-engineering" or "What I know about making reverse engineering a little bit harder than it needs to be".
Peter Thiel to Teach Startup Course at Stanford
I think it depends who you are targeting. Even though Oink was targeting regular consumers, it does no favours for the reputation of start-ups trying to target businesses. I'm trying to sell a B2B startup's product into my office: one of the questions I'm asked is "it's a startup, what do we do if they shut it down in a few months"? Continuity can be a very important factor for certain types of startups.
While I'm not disagreeing with this, I wonder if it will impact the users of Milk Inc tools' willingness to participate in future projects. For services which run off of user's submitting content (reviews in the case of Oink), I'd imagine users may become hesitant to contributefor fear of the project (and thus their work) getting shot in the head.

I'm not saying terminating a project that didn't meet expectations is wrong, I'm just curious about the lasting implications.
Google can give you a new password if you forget yours. There is no technical barrier to giving the FBI access and clearly no requirement for plaintext passwords anywhere (setting aside how the request was expressed in the article as a request for a password).
Live iPad tweets
Hey @abasija. What are you working on here? Hit my email bcackerman AT gmail
All that prior art will certainly bubble to the surface during the trial process. There is a cottage industry around finding it - kind of like bounty hunting. See articleonepartners.com, a service that lets researchers be rewarded for invalidating litigious patents.
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand - can you explain more? How does the OS making it unmountable when it's locked stop the FBI from physically removing the internal storage and looking at its contents via another device? I can see how it might require specialized forensics equipment depending on how obscure/proprietary the internal storage hardware is, but that seems like something the FBI would have access to or be able to obtain...
Can you imagine yourself paying someone to smear others on a forum?

I cannot, no.

But a large (and dare I say ruthless) organization interested in limiting the PR damage?

Sure.
Is there any good/usable point and click code browser / code comprehension tool these days? Or is the state of the art of 1998 still that of today?

That's a lot to ask for code that the editor may not know the compile and link options for, which may not even compile using the right options, or which may only be understood by a compiler that isn't installed on the system where you're browsing the code.

Basically what you want is an IDE with a project set up telling it exactly how to compile the code or what the runtime setup will be for a dynamic language. Then you'll have decent code navigation, if the IDE is integrated with a compiler that can handle the code, and if there aren't any bugs! I can tell you that for Java the problem is thoroughly solved. The language is simple, and the IDEs are mature. For C++ you're SOL. Scala is getting there with Eclipse and IntelliJ. I don't know about other languages.

I for one enjoy knowing how to handle unstructured text, because you can never count on having tools that will understand everything you come across. XML configuration files, Java projects that have Ruby build scripts for unknown reasons, log files, there's an unlimited number of text formats that some tool somewhere knows how to parse, but it isn't worth your while to spend half an hour setting up an obscure dev environment for a one-off job that you can do in five minutes in emacs.
>Did anyone else find this to be skeevy/pervy typical male nerd fantasy bullshit?

To some degree, yeah, but I think your self-loathing is showing.
The average customer is more likely to act on what they perceive as warm fuzzies at the moment that they're making a purchasing decision. That may or may not correlate with what geeks such as ourselves feel warm and fuzzy about in the abstract.

Regardless, you misinterpret me. When I said warm fuzzies, I meant companies doing things just to be nice to customers, regardless of whether there's reason to believe it will draw immediate profit. These things can't be reasonably expected to affect revenues for companies that don't have very strong brands (say, Apple) simply because they're things that people generally aren't thinking about while they're in the store. People in general are barely aware of HTC as an actual entity, so they have a hard time having any sort of emotional reaction to it, positive or negative.

Pray tell, which players remain from that era and, of those, which are not on the brink of insolvency?

Dell, HP, Acer, Samsung, IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba. . . and they're all doing fine. I just double-checked on their rough financials, and all but HP had healthy increasing revenue and profit over the past year. HP's profits are down, but still deep in the black.
How could the FBI not know his SSN?!
Goldman's Greg Smith Just One More 1% Buddhist Convert
I came away with a couple of things after reading this article. One was that it was nice to know that there are principled people out there on Wall Street who are willing to place their conscience ahead of their own interests and be willing to resign if necessary in order to protest a corporate culture willing to mistreat their customers for the sake of a dollar (as did Mr. Smith). The second is that the real way to create long-term wealth for any business is by exercising the time-tested principles such as the one mentioned in the article- integrity, a spirit of humility, teamwork and always doing right by your clients.
FYI, code is not shared freely in biology and physics, it's a big problem.

academia is not a hegemony. there are a few people in academia that share beliefs with stallman, there are many others that have no problem with making money off of their work.
Comprehensive collection of PG talks & interviews
Pattern locks are notoriously vulnerable to visual analysis of fingertip grease marks on the screen. Don't count on this to protect your data.
As a mechanical engineer by training, I will be a sad panda if you use tau for something other than torque.

EDIT: And shear stress. Derp. That's why I write software now. :)
He's not an idealist, he is an ideologue. He will not even consider a compromise or gradual moves to his position. His position is unquestionably right and just and everyone who disagrees or does otherwise is wrong and undeniably evil.

He is no different than a religious zealot. He just worships a different god.

The only lens he provides is one for us to say 'hell, at least I'm not that crazy.'
The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time
So then the question that follows is how do you prevent any niche gathering, digital or real world, from becoming an echo chamber? Don't all like-minded groups eventually become echo chambers? Even HN runs a risk of becoming an echo chamber as a group of like-minded people that quickly popularize a news story and then comment/respond in similar fashion.

I'm not saying that to bash HN. I love HN. I learn more from the stories and comments than any other source. I think "regular news" (RN?) is mostly a mix of garbage and entertainment. I like having like-minded individuals to learn from. I don't want to spend time in groups that talk about which Hollywood celebrity of the month is getting married/divorced/hired/fired/honored/dissed.

I think a diversity of participants, diversity of opinion, and diversity of passions is a good start. I think we have that here (even if in a somewhat narrow slice of diversity). After that, do we just hope for the best?
If startups / entrepreneurs who claim to be innovative would work with the patent landscape, rather than irrationally fearing and hating it, they would find that a huge patent portfolio or broad patent like those Yahoo owns are really just big houses of cards. A true innovator can topple it readily just using innovation; and then, voila, those innovations are now patentable.

I am reminded of star wars in this case: The more you tighten your grip, Admiral Tarkin, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
I wouldn't call this a pivot. This is an abandonment.
IANAL, but I'm assuming Google doesn't have to hand over anything that's not explicitly listed in the warrant. If you're the FBI, you might as well ask for the world and see what you get back.
Sometimes we test, sometimes we let users test!! Either way...we find our bugs...
The difference between Digg and Slashdot is that with Slashdot, all the stories were placed by editors. You might have been able to submit stories to the editors, but there was no upvoting and the front page was purely up to the editors. Of course, later Slashdot added Firehose, and then awhile after that I stopped reading Slashdot.

Slashdot had moderation for comments, but no similar mechanism for stories. Digg had the voting system for stories and for comments.
OneID - Secure Online Authentication
New single ion clock is ’100 times more precise' than existing atomic models
We use a combination of user testing and developer testing...
Thanks! Design will be improved later on.
I guess what I meant is not the code people write to conduct the research, but the actual results of that research. As in, you can't copyright a fact. You can't copyright a beaker or a flask. I know there's a lot of debate within the scientific community about commercialization, but I think there was a lot less of this in the '70s when Stallman was forming his ideas.
> Secondly, testing instills a fear of code, like code is a monster under the bed that could do anything if you don't constantly have a flashlight under there pinning it down

In my experience, testing frees you from that fear. You have empirical evidence that you haven't broken things.

My company does Continuous Integration as a service. You would be utterly amazed at how often our customers break their code with tiny innocuous changes.

> How many people test their tests for correctness? Then test their test-testing programs for correctness? "Test all the things!" is an infinite loop.

Try to think of testing in terms of the value it brings to your business. Adding the first few tests to a module has immense value. Adding tests for the edge cases has some value, but you're probably at break even unless it's breaking in production [1]. Adding tests to test the tests? I would say that is valueless in nearly all cases [2].

[1] Bonus: use Airbrake to find the edge cases that happen in real life, and only add tests for them

[2] If you're writing software for cars, planes, medical stuff or transferring money, there is probably value here.
Sometimes I think: Testing has not invented by a geek. Geeks don't test.
Some other times I think: Testing is good. It gives quality.
Corporate Psychopaths [movie]
MG Siegler Drove More Traffic to Branch.com Than Ten Major Publications Combined
I Don't Always Test My Code, but when I Do, I Do It in Production.

http://troll.me/i-dont-always-test-my-code-but-when-i-do-i-d...
Ignorant and uninformed commentary from the Linux Action Show? I would be surprised but I've listened to the podcast before.

So I'm not.

Although the literal "think of the children" argument is a surprise. Poe's law in full effect.
Happy birthday! And...

A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?