skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have a cite for Apple "revolutionizing" working conditions? Please, they're a electronics designer. They contract with whoever bids lowest, and always have. One of the big reason Foxconn is so large now is precisely because they were the low bidder for Apple's business years ago.

Now, I agree with the premise of the linked article that Apple has been unfairly tarnished for problems that are endemic to the industry as a whole.

But to flip this around and claim that Apple is somehow a champion fighting for workers rights is ... just weird (and I'll admit that it makes me sad to see this kind of completely unselfaware fawning on a site where discussion used to be a lot more intellectually robust). Like the rest of the industry, Apple didn't do poop about chinese workers until they were embarassed.
I set up an ifttt to email me in the morning if it will be too hot to wear a sweater that day. Love it.
> Go isn't the step forward from C++ and Java I expected from Google

Go is a lovely language, imo. Quirky in parts, but definitely a charmer, very fun to code in, and once you get the Go zen, simple and elegant code effortlessly follows. I haven't had this much fun since Java came out in mid 90s.

Of course, I do agree with the other comments that would like to see Golang.org be more clear as to the platform coverage and the current state of Scheduler and MM -- but they are certainly upfront in the source tree (c.f. proc.c header comment), forums, and the issue tracker.

So hacker fine print is there and available, and frankly (IMHO) that approach to disclosure may turn out to be a good filter for the growth of Go community.

The issue at hand is nothing that time and resources will not solve -- they just ran out of time (c.f. RSC's comment before Abtin's in the issue.)
Initially it was not encrypted and was stored in plain text in the database. Then we started encrypting sensitive information at rest, both the database files and the backups. We also encrypted certain sensitive information with a secondary encryption. The next massive undertaking was to find all of the processes that use the data, how they use it - both internally and externally, and then ensure the data was protected throughout the entire process. The company was still working through that process when I left. They had identified many places that were problematic and were actively working on fixing them. The team I managed was the payment processing and cash management team. There were a number of legacy systems written in access, fox pro, DTS, Excel even. Many of those were the most painful, and frankly the most problematic.

Many people were put in a situation where the requirements for getting something implemented through the IT teams would take months, yet they were still held accountable for getting things done, so they would build an Excel process to get the job done. They would build some fantastic process, and get promoted, then that Excel system would get dumped on either someone in IT or someone replacing them.

I'm getting off track, but looking at it superficially the data was encrypted. If, however, you watch the data through it's entire value stream, there are many places it is vulnerable. Given the state of affairs in most companies and how few of them think in terms of managing value streams, I expect my observations are fairly widely applicable.
That's another thing where BitBucket got it right and clean.

One thing both services suck at is the dashboard full of irrelevant noise.
Most of my friends who use Groupon have automatically defended Groupon users and blamed the businesses without knowing any of the story. Most of my friends who use Groupon regularly are, honestly, kind of cheap (you know the ones... who always cause an issue at the end of eating out with a group of people when it's time to split the check and leave a tip).

One business I know of had no predisposed opinion of Groupon users (they aren't tech savvy and never heard of it before doing it at the suggestion of a friend) and regularly does discounts for seniors and students as well as deep "first visit" discounts for Yelp users where they ran a promotion. They even did a similar promotion for NYC businesses with a similar deep discount to Groupon. They said that the Groupon users were, without fail, the most demanding of any group of promotion-using customers and some even made it obnoxiously clear that they would never use my friend's services without a similar discount in the future. Of all the Groupon users, not one became a repeat customer. In every other promotion they have run, they have gotten numerous repeat customers, including the similarly deep discount program for NYC businesses. So, they never plan to use Groupon again and have warned their fellow local businesses away from it.
Do you live in California or something? Where I live, the weather is as shifty as the politicians, and the temperature dances around what's comfortable.
Great question. ifttt is far more powerful -- and complicated.

Also, it seems to only support ONE criteria, such as "Sunny" condition OR temperature above a certain range. Maybe I'm missing it, but I can't find a way to replicate BDB.

Another perspective: There is something special about the packaging of meeting this niche use case. The e-mail notifications are super upbeat, have inspirational quotes, etc.

Also, BDB is easy enough my Mom has figured out how to sign up.
It's easier to understand five simpler patches if 'diff' is too stupid to render the more complex patch. "Here I renamed this variable, then I moved this hunk over there, then I made the change."

Even aside from the artifact of diff, I don't think this situation is analogous to short functions at all. The big difference is that commit logs are much more serial in nature. If I break one commit down to a sequence of 5 simpler commits they will almost always be read in that order, with context preserved.

I'm ambivalent about long functions, but am much more draconian about complex commits: http://github.com/akkartik/wart
Виджет - Виджет | Смотреть лучшее за день
Back to Basics: Dynamic Image Generation, ASP.NET Controllers ...
Agreed, they put a lot of thought into small conveniences that most other apps ignore. It's nice to have it grab e-mails as task items, and to just type "taskname<tab>1w<tab>1m" to create a task that won't be addressed for a week, but is due in a month.
They do say "standard rates ... include the license". Amazon presumably gets Windows licenses through SPLA. http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/licensing-options/spla-pr...
I wonder if anyone has written up a comparison on R and J.
"If even our most professional and trained humans misuse force this much, we have a problem and need to do something about it."

If police are our 'most professional and trained humans' we have a very big problem indeed.
Tackling Technical Debt
What do you think caused the decline and when do you think it happened?

Most of my direct experiences are in New York. I've never spent more than a week at one time in the Valley.

I don't think I'm the only person to spot the problem. Most people are afraid it will hurt their careers to speak up about it. I'm not as worried, because I know that I'm talented (i'm not worried about blackballing myself) and someone has to do the "dirty" work of blowing the whistle.

My first whistle-blowing experience was at Google, which was odd because people (a) acknowledged that some of this shit had been going on for a long time, but (b) really didn't want to hear it. They wanted to ignore it and still believe in their Googley workplace utopia. I literally have thousands of people (from G.) who've never met me but think I'm a loose cannon because I blew a whistle on someone else they never met. The thing is, though: it's a whistle, not a gun, that I'm waving. If you don't do scummy shit, you don't need to worry.
I agree, too. Maybe the less-often used features could rather go to the bottom of the page?
Awesome! I was always jealous of people who had problem sets like this in their CS curriculum.
Writing Chrome extensions
> A few months later

Unlikely. Porting Forth is not a few months long project ;-) Most of Forth is usually written in Forth anyway - all you have to do is to port some primitives and you're set.

In any case, I did a lot of interesting stuff with Paul Lutus' GraFORTH and TransFORTH. Much more mileage than I ever got out of Aztec C.

BTW, I probably shouldn't say that, but that chess program was most likely the one that came on the boot disk of my first Apple II clone (I live in Brazil and it was impossible - as in "a fellony" - to get a computer from abroad). Thanks for the many hours of challenging chess. I never had the patience to play against humans, however. Meat is too slow. ;-)
Image-only "Craigslist"
Text-based classifieds(i.e. Craigslist) is boring. What do you guys think of image-only classifieds?
I've mentioned Taskwarrior previously (command line task management, GTDable), but it's worth noting that it recently hit 2.0 and has an upcoming server component (in alpha):

http://taskwarrior.org/
Another interesting point about using a JSON file to map to device-specific resources is that the concept could be extended for future devices.

Let's say that a future iDevice comes with a better audio engine. Maybe it can do 5.1 surround? You could extend the JSON structure to include a section to define where the 5.1 surround files would be for the new device. Older devices wouldn't have to waste storage and download audio files that they can never use.
This bill gives big internet companies more power and less oversight. We will see whether all the triumph and idealism around the "people power" defeat of SOPA/PIPA was effectively astroturf. CISPA threatens basic user privacy, not the user generated content cash cow. We will see how far this protest gets without the support of silicon valley big money.
Like Rumgr? It’s great, but extremely low volume.

At higher volume, some metadata is going to be needed.
Maybe they can create an alternate dashboard, more minimalistic.
There is always room for improvement.
"login with facebook"

closes browser tab
No disagreement that $575 in profits per phone is nonsensical, but

> the iPhone 4S (the most expensive model) costs $599 off-contract

649 according to the store, and that's for the 16GB version, the 64GB one is 849. According to http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph... anyway.
You're right, statistical significance is a valid concern but error bars is not the way to go. Check the paper for a rigorous analysis. We are not drawing our conclusions from a single plot.
There have been a thousand graduate school and commercial project to try to develop program representations and languages that were superior to the flat text file. Obviously, none of them have received wide usage.

Chunk format Smalltalk change logs are a text file, but they're combined with a mechanism for treating code changes like db transaction logs, in a language with very little syntax, with very fine grained codebase change (method level, with generally small methods) built into the language and environment. It's also as rock solid as traditional flat text files, and even more robust in some regards.

Code syntax which requires all information relevant in a class to be defined together interferes with a change log scheme. But such syntactic structures are helpful if dealing with code in traditional flat files. In a way, it's like an Evolutionary Stable Strategy. It's mostly a flat file world, so the languages are mostly implemented with that in mind. This general situation makes it almost impossible for anything else to develop its won ecosystem.

I think forward progress will be made by leveraging "code folding" schemes. Eventually, this will amount to the same functionality people are aiming for then they discuss non-text representations.
Often I don’t even see an option to comment on these stories! — Especially when they appear as little lists of articles people have been reading.
I think you are giving Apple a bit too much credit. Apple is not teaching the Chinese how to be ethical. Apple is not revolutionizing manufacturing in China.

Apple is using a Chinese manufacturing company and giving them a lot of business. A LOTTTTT of business. This is a good thing.

But you can't go from there to claim that Apple is somehow teaching the poor Chinese, who are incapable of ethical action. It sounds very insulting the way you put it :(

I do wholeheartedly agree with the statement that the peculiar focus on Apple for Foxconn's bad working conditions is very strange. It's not like Foxconn is the only manufacturing company, nor is Apple their only customer.

Edit: I can grammar.
Being the author of the report, a vulnerability researcher, and having been in the industry for years I too think your post misses the point. The article wasn't written for someone who knows the ins and outs of properly securing an environment, it was written for the corporate IT professional or corporate IT security professional who gets thrown into a meeting and someone mentioned the new app they are deploying uses "NoSQL" and they don't know what that means or how they can even start securing it.

While the editors may have sensationalized the title, the key here is that the majority of the users of NoSQL databases are not security researchers or even developers that understand proper defense in depth. Most are using these "database technologies" to solve a specific problem or because they are "cool" so when they go from dev to production, very few controls are implemented anywhere in the stack (network, OS, or app).

Furthermore, if the solution to securing a NoSQL DB is to "secure everything around it" (e.g, the references in the posts to hardening the OS, Network, segmenation, etc) then I can tell you it isn't happening and the deployers of NoSQL don't know that.

The financial institutions that are using NoSQL, that I have assessed, aren't using commercial versions mostly because a developer throws something together, proves it works, and moves it into production rather quickly. I think they will move to commercial versions though as more support is needed.

I don't have an axe to grind, and if you look at my previous database security reports I don't think the big SQL DBs are great either BUT they do provide more options for controls to be put in place at the database level. Of course the rest of the stack should be secured too(duh) but when it comes to defense in depth you want to have as granular controls as possible as close to the data as possible.

I did not make the claim you shouldn't use these technologies, rather I make the claim you can't assume these technologies support the same controls as other relational databases have and call it a day. You have to be much more creative to properly control and audit access.

Lastly, it is difficult to provide actionable technical advice in a article format such as that used by InformationWeek because of the wide variety of readers. Rather, we make recommendations that readers can use to do additional research and find the proper answers which is what we did provide in the actual research report (which is longer and more detailed than the articles).

Oh, and I think Tom had the right idea. Can you explain your firewall and SSL comments? Also, xp_cmdshell as been disabled by default since SQL 2005, so that isn't valid example of "in-secure by default" for a new deployment (even though an attacker can re-enable it if they are 'sa'). If you are deploying SQL 2000 into an environment in 2012 you have other issues)
It has nothing to do with PAE.
> ... will not take kindly to their 16 GB iPhone becoming obsolete simply because Apple released an iPad with more resolution.

The vast majority of normals will never even realize this is the case. Plus, even if they do, people are well conditioned to the obsolescence of technology. I mean more people buy a new PC before they re-install Windows when things get unbearably slow, and if we had a graph of how often people upgrade their phones, I don't think we'd see much to support your point.

Now if the media decides to latch onto this (which I wouldn't doubt given the fervor for a juice Apple scandal), then it might piss off a few people, but do you really think that people will be convinced to trade in their iPads for pitchforks over this? What percentage of people are really not going to be able to update their apps anyway? If this really became a media problem then Apple might move to address it, but I stand by my written and attributed assertion that this is a non-issue for Apple and will not affect their bottom line or move them to any action other than to perhaps go 32/64/128 for the next iPad.
Just as there are "clean youtube" browser extensions and the like, the interwebs are in dire need of a "clean github" browser extension.
Draft Proposal for Namespaces in Objective-C
Yeah, I guess I'm racist. I want diversity in my populations, applied to every context possible. Full stop.

"I'm sorry you're offended."
It's a reasonable question. When you combine the concept of a very simple CPU + instruction set (which reminds many of us of the systems we used when first learning to hack) with a system based on a much-loved and much-imitated older game, you have a recipe for success among a certain class of geek.

I think it tickles some of the same interest points as Corewars[1], but a little less abstract and with a newly-galvanized and potentially larger community.

[1]: http://corewars.org
Yup ;)

Well, the service should be especially nice for you, since the beautiful days are more special? :)
I have to come to love R (for what I use it it for), but reading this makes me realize how unusual my R-workflow must be, because most of the 'advantages' of Julia over R don't really come up in my daily workflow anymore - it seems that's likely because I've adapted to the shortcomings of R and have twisted other tools to my needs. I'll add Julia to my list of languages to check out in more detail, because perhaps Julia could replace my need for this rather esoteric workflow that I've developed out of sheer necessity.

I use Python (NumPy/SciPy) for most of the data preprocessing, and perhaps that's why. I used to do this in R, and I realized that it's just a lot easier to get done in Python (and it ends up being faster anyway). The problem is that Python/NumPy/SciPy still doesn't lend itself quite as well as R does to certain aspects of the statistician's use case. It's possible that things have changed since the last time I evaluated the two, but I still find it easier to prototype various models in R, even if I do all of the preqrequisite data munging in a different environment.

I understand that R, like Perl, is 'blessed' (pun intended) with two different, incompatible type systems - in fact, this is the reason I avoid using R's type system, and whenever I'm advising newcomers, I always recommend the same. I don't write statistical packages, so this doesn't come up, but when I find myself needing to write a method in R, I ask myself if this would actually be done more easily another way instead. Generally, I find the answer is 'yes, yes it would'.

I really do think the problem is the type system. The kind of type system that lends itself well to data manipulation is not the same type system that lends itself well to model manipulation - when I think about it, I've unconsciously segregated my workflow into two parts, doing everything naturally done with Python's type system in Python, and likewise for R. Maybe that's just the way that I happen to approach data manipulation, but I think it's non-coincidental. R's relative homoiconicity (compared to Python) makes it really nice for some things, but there are other warts with its typing that are just too annoying to work around, when a python shell is just a few keystrokes away.

I guess the answer is (as always!) to use a purely homoiconic Lisp dialect, so you get the best of both worlds but that's asking a lot of statisticians.

I really have come love R for what it does do, though. Of all all the statistical software packages I've seen (comparable: SAS, SPSS, Stata, MATLAB), it's far and away the best (and the GNU license makes it very, very attractive to broke students looking to avoid the still-absurdly-priced student licenses for the alternatives). That said, I still sigh every time I realize that I'm essentially gluing together two separate runtime environments for something that should really be easily integrated. I do what I do now because it ends up being faster than using either Python or R for everything, but it still strikes me as weird that a language so perfect for munging data (Python) can still be so awkward for analyzing it, and vice versa.
I didn't know that.
Those are great covers, as soon as you see them yo know you are looking at O'Reilly books.
It has nothing to do with PAE, but 3G/1G split I think is default on Linux.
The impossible success is the most entertaining
He didn't say it took that person a few months to do a port, he said that person launched their product a few months later.
MachineDrawing DrawingMachines
Careful with your data sources and assertions. Some of this "data" needs a serious dose of fact checking.

The data for:
https://twitter.com/#!/nicepaul/status/163797296306331648/ph...

as indicated at the bottom, comes from:
http://onforb.es/wj2Lt6

which maps to:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/01/29/the-apple...

If you look at Tim Worstall's (kinda op-ed) article on the second page, you can see that the author says that if the fatalities rate in Foxconn was the same as that in the US, we would expect to have 35 fatalities / year. Then he says that we only heard about 3-4 workers hurt at Foxconn, hence the rate is lower. That argument is flawed because what we hear on the news cannot be construed to represent all fatalities at Foxconn. I suspect that the fatalities rate at Foxconn is not publicized (because it doesn't have to be).

Another issue is that to determine the relative safety of the workplaces, the author is only looking at workplace fatalities. What about looking at accidents that leave the workers unable to work or maimed?

Bottom line, I don't think the incomplete data that we have supports the assertion that Foxconn is a safer workplace.
Other Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
I've started using the address bar to get to most things. I usually only need to get to /issues, /commits, /tree/master/filename
Easily sharing music with Dropbox
Agreed. My next car will be fully electric whether I buy it or build it myself.

As far as organizing my life around it. Kind of tough. Sell the house and move? Can't do that. The schools are not moving. One of my kids will start at a school closer to home this year. The number will go down to 35 miles per day then. I can then contemplate the idea of a pedal-powered electric-assisted four-wheel contraption that I could most certainly build myself for a fraction of what an electric car would cost. It'd be a great project to teach the kids some engineering and ride around during good whether.
At least integration is easy to do on the 89, I wasn't taught it and had to figure out how to do integration for the calculator section of one of the AP exams (BC or AB) on a ti 86 as our teacher did not teach us how to use our calculators at all.
Show HN: dcpubin - a pastebin for DCPU-16 programs
Though I agree that there are probably too many things going on in the interface, I don't see many buttons where I immediately think "I never use that".

Github seems to be in the tough situation of trying to reproduce a command line interface and all its flexibility in one simple / easy to visualize dashboard.
I'm happy all of this is your opinion, but I haven't done any of those things

I just say "restrictive" is a fair description of the Apple appstore, Sony's Approval process of the PS3 game catelog, and the GPL, and labeling it as such is a worthwhile service vs permissive licences that almost everyone can use the code of.

For a service such as github, which is about social coding, it's okay to point out some people being idealistic and somewhat slightly less inclined to share.