skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm curious about the constraints this would impose on alternate transports. How similar would they have to be to HTTP?

For example, zerorpc (http://github.com/dotcloud/zerorpc-python) supports a request-response pattern (using ZMQ REQ/REP), and can return a stream as a response. That maps nicely to http, and I could see that "mounted" as a mock http endpoint which is very interesting.

But there are lots of features in zerorpc that I'm not sure how to map to an http library. For example:

* zerorpc methods must expose positional arguments; how would that map to http query arguments?

* zerorpc arguments can be arbitrary data structures.

* zerorpc has no notion of headers.

* etc.

I'm excited at the idea of making cross-transport interop easier. At the same time I wonder if the mold of "HTTP-ness" might stifle the ability to think outside the box when designing a transport?
Way to hog attention with your drama away from the topic at hand about the legal liability of employers invading privacy via Facebook. The OP wasn't a generic "some companies suck" rant, it was a parable about a specific problem.
http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
http://www.makotemplates.org/
http://docs.pylonsproject.org/en/latest/index.html
We also do measure the performance of partners reading applications. We don't actually use the data in any way except to motivate us though.
Privacy backlash over 'Girls Around Me' mobile app
Hang on a second, what if the interviewee doesn't have a Facebook account? Or just lies and says they don't have one? Would the next question be "why not" or "show us your email in-box"?

Don't tell me that not having a Facebook account now weighs against your eligibility in an interview? That would be sad. What next? Everyone must have a FB account by law?

And why didn't Braithwaite just not ask the candidates the FB question?

"Fired for refusing to invade interviewee privacy"
is better than
"resigns after invading interviewee privacy".

Edit... so apparently it's all fiction. Time wasted.
Thank you. The three little icons on the bottom give you access to the Frontpage, Newly submitted links and the 'Best' section, in that order.
Documentation will be forthcoming. What do you mean by audio sample formats? One of the things I tried to do was make sure that you never, ever, EVER have to think about anything but floating point audio. In my experience, audio comes in as either float or SInt16s (I've never seen fixed-point coming in by default, but I haven't done an enormous amount of odd-peripheral Mac audio), and novocaine just handles it for you.
I started on a Spectrum ZX80 back in '86. At that time I learned how to bypass the mathematics training software that my father had written in hopes of getting my arithmetics skills in shape. Instead, I learned how to debug, and hack his program. From then on, it was a game of cat and mouse with him trying harder tricks to bypass. I've been programming ever since!
Google buys payments company TxVia
جدول پخش برنامه های شبکه من و تو از30/03/2012 الی05/04/2012
I object to the title here. If this is "hacking", then this site really needs to start calling itself "Hacker" News.

homakov has just done some damn fine work, and it deserves actual discussion, not dismissal and downvotes.

Honest question: could many of these have been addressed if the browser simply didn't send a cookie along with a post or get to a domain that violated the usual same-origin rules? At a glance, it looks like most of the sites are receiving some kind of account or session information from the browser, with Slideshare being a notable exception (they just flatly Did It Wrong).
I enjoyed it. The simplistic design is visually appealing, but it may not be immediately evident what each icon does without a bit of experimentation. It might also be worth giving the title of the article a second line, or a smaller font, as this information is more useful to me than first few sentences of an article but is often cut off.
The reason we want to grow YC is (a) to see how big an effect we can have and (b) as PB says in the article, because it's better for the startups.

As for not being able to support 1000 startups, maybe we couldn't. 1000 is a lot. But if you'd asked me in 2005, I would have been skeptical about the idea of supporting 66 startups at a time, and yet the last batch turned out better than ever. That's the thing about scaling. You can always do better than you expect. I'm not saying there's no upper limit, just that experience has taught me to reserve judgment about where it is.
They believe in smaller rather than larger government. Choose your label..
Sorry guys, got carried away today!

I was home sick all day and spent the better part of 15 restless hours scouring the net and feeding my brain. I was collecting noteworthy links along the way, and generally posted (what I considered to be) the good ones in clusters as I returned to HN.

The inundation of knowledge, boredom and medication seemed to have triggered a bit of irrational exuberance. Not my typical posting activity as you can see by my submission history. It's back to the office tomorrow, which means I'll return to my normal 2 or 3 posts a day.

Apologies if I offended. Lesson learned.
OSX vs Linux vs Windows vs XXXXX, I don't care a bit about it. I'm happy to see that people here use Linux more than windows :D
I thought was saying he already bought in? I'm not sure what he's doing is illegal, but I don't think it's insider trading that he'd be running afoul of. Rather, I think he needs to worry about the rules about advertising a company using an article to pump up your stock's value.
Thanks for replying. So income that is not revenue. That makes sense.

Some backers chose to receive nothing, though, so for them its not even a transaction, just a donation, I guess. It's more complicated than just selling items, even though it looks like that on the surface.
You will absolutely find XSS all over the Alexa top domains.
Bayesian, or other algorithmic approaches (what many call AI), on signals like word frequency can help with separating wheat from chaff. Rarely any better when it comes to such multivariate decisions. Given the uncertainty in startup success, perhaps a rough solution at scale would perform. Maybe that's the goal with YC, but at least on the outside YC has always seemed more like an elite private school that delivers on personal treatment and alumni network. I wonder whoa is building the equivalent of the public university.
You mean, how many of these sites would be vulnerable to CSRF if we just broke a feature of HTTP that secure applications have depended on for 10+ years?
Wow, that was sobering. First program was a basic spaceship animation in the 80s. Whoa.
http://itunes.apple.com/ca/artist/audioforge-labs-inc./id305...

Made by a developer I met at WWDC. Good stuff and he puts a whole lot of love into them.
Dennis Ritchie said the universities he works at give him Windows computers and he installs cygwin immediately so he can get things done.
Not sure what this means...?
Framework: Rails/CakePHP/NodeJS

Language: Ruby/PHP/Javascript

Web Server: Nginx/Ubuntu

Database: MySQL/Postgres/MongoDB/Redis

OS: OSX 10.7.3

Technical Reference: API Documentation

Dev Evironment: RVM, Zsh, Vim, Git, and thousands of lines of custom dotfiles
An excellent, simple extension to this is to throw simple arithmetic operators into the mix (digits 0-9, +, -, / and * perhaps) and to try and breed an algorithm which when evaluated yields a number, like the number 500. You can get startlingly close answers and interesting equations this way.
Looks like the SA was taking the piss...
+Heyo for evolution > intelligent design
I don't know if I'd call XSS "the real bitch". I remember reading a blog post a while ago (that I sadly can't seem to find now) which recommended using a good variable naming system - something like us_blah for unsafe content, and s_blah for safe content - and only writing / storing safe content. Furthermore, the only thing that returns safe content is the appropriate escaping function, so you can look at each line and notice that "s_blah = us_blah2" is wrong.

I always wondered if it'd be possible to use the type system of a language to do something similar - make a "safe to output" type, and a "not safe to output" type, which are not mutually convertible, and then write a function that converts between UnsafeStr and SafeStr. Then, you can write all your code to only work on and only print a SafeStr.
High-technology civilizations rely on a more-or-less constant stream of innovations (or solutions to hard problems) in order to maintain a reasonable equilibrium in all sorts of areas (economy, environment, society). That reliance increases with the degree of high-tech, but also provides the benefits of high-tech.

A failure of that system can lead to much worse than just a lack of progress.
so you're trying to solve the "upper corner square" of an item, rather than the "approximately first third" of a linear one?

also, i wonder what his UI works like? i bet you can do this in two clicks of a human per comic.
Taj Hotel- The Pride of India
The history of the best run chain of hotels The Taj group of hotels is quite an interesting one. History goes back to the19th century when the hotel industry was almost nonexistent and the only Hotel that catered to the British need was the Watson Esplanade Hotel.
I find the summaries hardly helpful since they're too short anyway. Personally I would remove the summary and use multi-line for the title instead. "Instantly create beautiful GitHub pr...".

Some of the icons are rather confusing. Those on the front page and the tick to go back.

There seems to be a bug in the article view where you could scroll the screen left and right when the text size or social network tabs are open.

Overall, the look & feel is great.
Oh, this is where the on-topic discussion is. I had to wade through a pretty meaty Google flamewar to get here...

I have a question about this Facebook fiasco: what exactly does HR hope to discover and how would they plan to use such intelligence?

The reason I ask is that here in South Africa, when applying to a position (from my experience as a business intelligence consultant) I must release HR to check both my credit history as well as submit to having my fingerprints taken by an electronic device which connects to a governmental database and checks my criminal record for any misconduct.

Are these checks common place in your part of the world?

Can you see anything that HR in South Africa might gain by snooping through Facebook that wouldn't be outweighed by the information already available to them?
Sorry for that; I did not realize I wasn't supposed to do that.
How Do I Protect My Option Grant From A Down Round In The Future?
Going meta with the website of a print magazine about websites
Groupon restates Q4 earnings after audit (revenue reduced $14.3 million)
Jinja, a Python template engine, does something like that. When you include a string in a template, it's automatically escaped, but you can disable that by wrapping the string in a Markup object. You can also use the Markup class directly:

>>> foo = u'I <3 you.'
>>> bar = Markup(u'<h1>') + foo + Markup(u'</h1>')
>>> print bar
<h1>I &lt;3 you.</h1>
Have never witnessed so many people with ZX Spectrum as in this poll!

My case:

Got it when in sixth grade. Used to wonder what sin and cos functions were (having not studied trigonometry as yet) :-) Managed to figure coordinate geometry out though to create shapes on the screen.

This was the best gift my father ever gave to me. Around seventh grade, I was imagining 3D animated movies. Tried hard to figure an equation that would describe a human face, so I won't have to compose it from geometrical primitives! :-)

Tenth grade, I was programming in machine code (no assembler, converted mnemonics to machine code by hand!). Imagined a compiler (was not aware of them preexisting) and made a simple prototype that converted post-fix expressions to machine code. My last bit was to finally manage to create a 3D animation, as big as I could fit into the available memory (<48K max), precomputed with BASIC and cycled on the screen using machine code.

My biggest loss here was not having any non-volatile storage whatsoever. Used to write down finished programs back into my notebook! Could never build on the top of software I had already written once...

I still have the machine with me in my home country, though haven't touched it in years!
Your .NET problems are my java problems on OSX.

Yes it's the same, no it's not easier in any way. I get all kinds of alert boxes and inane dialogs in OSX. I develop all day on a mac and it's constantly annoying, as much or more so than windows7.
It's not nearly as simple as you make it seem:

1. What is "safe content"? That entirely depends on the context in which you're using a particular string. (See https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_%28Cross_Site_Scripting%... for a summary of the kinds of things you have to think about)

2. The system you're describing is somewhat similar to http://yehudakatz.com/2010/02/01/safebuffers-and-rails-3-0/. People still find plenty of XSS vulnerabilities in Rails applications.

3. http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/postxss/
Isn't the onus on them to prove that he is guilty? IANAL but it sounds like there isn't a thing he can do.
Sit tight, consider getting a lawyer, and let them make the next move. It sounds like they have no case, but on the other hand you haven't suffered any harm as such. IANAL, mind.
Not that your point of people taking an "at all costs" approach to career advancement is missed, but I'm not sure about your analogy re: the finance industry. He's an engineer, not someone trying to close deals on mortgages or equity loans, none of that is his domain.

I work in finance software (specifically regulatory compliance) and it's arguably one of the most supportive and communicative industries to be on the engineering side of.

Until you start having to deal with compliance regulations, then it becomes a chore.
The trouble is that a lot of NDAs include onerous clauses. I was recently handed an NDA that would've barred me from working in the potential client's entire vertical if I signed it. (yep, a hidden exclusivity clause, in a fucking NDA)

I don't mind signing things, but they need to give them to me well in advance so I can review it with counsel and make sure it's something I'm comfortable signing.
Completely agree, and it worries me. But at the same time, if I don't have more refined user education, or if we don't add feature X that customer Y wants to pay big money for, we don't survive long enough for me to one day fix our security. I worry about this stuff all the time, but based on the way some of my partners act, I sometimes also feel guilty for worrying. It seems like I'm shouting at a corner or wanting to waste time on something that "Isn't an issue yet". Just the other day a friend claimed that worrying too often about security was a form of premature optimization. I thought he was joking. He wasn't.

From the article: I don't even mention middle and small websites. they're just doomed...

Being at a small website and working day and night, at the end of it I look back, feel like I've accomplished a lot, but deep down know that I understand almost nothing about the security implications for 90% of what I touch.

My security is based on obscurity. I know it. And it keeps me up at night.
It is my extremely unqualified opinion that perhaps you should seek the advice of a legal professional, before, um, doing anything else.
If your software matters, you will write it in C++
Search Facebook the awesome way
I thought the line promoting his blog was amusing - he put it on an example letter for the reader to use (it says "sincerely (you)" at the bottom) as a joke. I don't think it was a actual e-mail that he would send out.
Startups: This Is How Design Works
This seems extremely strange, what does the letter actually state with regards to them believing it's your creation?

And what activity do they want ceased, anyway? From what I briefly read, it's just a browser extension that doesn't talk to facebook at all, but just maintains a separate thread of conversation anchored against a facebook comment stream. Is this not the case?

Also curious, are you planning to release the C&D or pass it to chillingeffects.org? Thanks for the great browser extension! :p
I really hope you're kidding here and you did notify them. I'm very impressed by your skills but you have to realize that if you want people to take you seriously you have to be a little more responsible with these things. You have to give people some time to fix their bugs before you release them to the public. If you did notify them then please ignore this.
Agreed. Thank you. However spending money on a lawyer for this is painful.
In court yeah. A judge or jury thinking you sound guilty is one thing, a lawyer saying it means absolutely nothing.

Excuse the language but I would tell these people to go fuck themselves. Unless there's a lot of missing info here, I can't imagine a single judge that would allow that to go to trial.

Unfortunately (for his wallet) he probably should get a lawyer. Their actions might be idiotic but I would suspect they're very good at getting their way.

[Edit] What I mean is they don't seem to have a case unless he slips up somehow . That's why he should get a lawyer.
First off, occasional forays into Windows VM is always fraught with windows and AV updates - you can delay them if you're only in for a few minutes, but...

That evenutally got me to dust off an old netbook, use it as my windows "server" that faithfully wakes on LAN, and just keep that in the cupboard access through remote desktop (Microsoft makes a great OSX app for this).

Every week the machine wakes up, backs up (to image), fires off a bunch of updates, potentially reboots, then goes back to it's aquiescent sleep state.

The RDC is generally faster and has the upside that crazy activity on Windows stays on it's own hardware, and I don't have a crazy 60GB file that's clogging my backups - the netbook has it's own backup.
They should open source it.
Just to be clear, I didnt make the thing!

I hope that these lawyers come to their senses.
Sounds like they are defaming you.

If it was me, and I truly had nothing to do with this thing they are upset about, I'd greatly welcome their lawsuit, and countersue when it comes. Little guy versus the big mean corporation, let it play out.

Right now they are on a fishing exposition.
This is particularly interesting because it is common to hear complaints that (A) it is hard to find "good" people, and (B) it is hard to go through huge quantities of resumes. If those are both true then clearly it's time to worry about false negatives. Maybe failing to hire isn't such a big deal? Maybe there's an element of bravado in claiming that nobody's good enough? Or is a lot of tech hiring just horribly misguided? I'm not sure.

Personally I've got to say that I also find the "rock star" rhetoric to be a huge turn-off. When I see it in a job ad I think of how horrible it would be to have to work with a club of self-described "A" players.

The gruelling interviews are another perverse system that I think has a negative effect. If you can easily get lots of interviews are you going to bother with the five stage interview with four hours of quiz questions and "homework"?
The letter states that I need to stop the service and shut down the site, both of which I have no control over!
> I don't know what happened to those scumbags though.

Unlike the S&L crisis, exactly none of them got indicted and all of them got bailed out, except Bernie Madoff whose schemes were totally orthogonal to the financial crisis.
Why such intensely large VMs? I've gotten by with 256MB appliances that then get their source deployed into big iron on-site, or into the cloud.
just to add on, after pressing the eye, the original article takes quite a while to load. Some indication would be nice so users know it didn't break.
Alas, often in the U.S. legal system it is expected of the accused to produce evidence that disproves the claims made by another party despite them not having any proof to back up their claims. The burden of proof issue can become very murky quickly.
Bongs ("drug paraphernalia") are in fact illegal in many jurisdictions.
Can Two Young Entrepreneurs Disrupt A Market And Solve The High Cost Of Hearing?
Mozilla Blocked Older Versions of Java Plug-ins for Firefox
Are you insinuatIng that only black people can suffer from beat cancer?

As a white boy who has the funk, I take exception to that as I have lost a friend to beat cancer and let me tell you: it ain't no joke.

Watching your homie lose his beat step by step is a terrible thing and it leaves you with the worst feeling that maybe... just maybe, the rhythm really is going to get you.
What's wrong with the old README.md files. Github should be ALL about the code, not sure I really like these pages
I found the "Obama for America Tech Volunteer Sign-Up" google form available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHR0WXl...

The form was found here, with context: http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2012/03/26/obama-technology-fi...
I am not a lawyer, but briefly consulting a lawyer might also allow you to find out if it's possible to litigate (countersue?), and thereby recoup your legal fees.
Is Java the platform of the future?
More unqualified, unsolicited advice ... I'd let them pester you long enough to accumulate enough evidence for a harassment counter suit.
Thanks for this. Reading all this stuff about people releasing stuff after 2 nights of work I was starting to wonder if I was crazy having my closed beta planned after 3 months development. I've been working damn hard part-time on the core technology of my project. Time adds up slowly when you're working part-time, and surely sometimes a new idea really does require a fair bit of work before it's ready for customer feedback?

Then I saw your comment about iterating on real customer feedback and I realised there's no difference between "releasing early" and "release a beta [early and get feedback early]", and obviously the time to release a beta varies depending on the product. If you think about Google or Shazaam or any technology-based service, the core algorithms took time to develop to a point where a beta made sense because access to the technology was the product. Or am I missing something?)
Technical Co-Founder needed in Texas
I have been working on a project off and on for the past 6 months. I have a name, I have several ideas on the drawing board, I have a UI in mind and am ready to get this thing into beta.

I am located in Dallas, TX but would consider anywhere in the state for your location. Florida is also a consideration as a travel there frequently for work.

My idea is taking Facebook events head on, as I feel it is broken. This product would provide some competition to Event Brite as well.

Can you code? Lets team up. Pay + Equity. I have a technical background but I can't call myself a coder. I know just enough to get me in trouble as they say.

I know databases, hardware, linux administration, software in general. I can code if I need to, but there would be a lot of googling and I just want to get this thing off the ground. I don't have time to learn as I go and launch this.

Please reach out to me. Thanks.
Originally posted on your blog.

A sworn affidavit should work in a courtroom. (Not a lawyer!)

So at this point I would send a nicely worded certified letter telling them to stop harassing you.

At that point they have limited options (in my opinion).
1) Sue you because they can prove you own it in court. (At which point a simple affidavit should end your part in said suit).
2) File a John Doe suit and actually find out who runs it.

Best option would of course be to obtain a lawyer and head it off sooner than later. Also once you have yourself a lawyer you won't have to deal with their lawyers at all as they should be bared from contacting anyone but your lawyer.