skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll say that I disagree with just about every point made here and certainly not because of some religious fervor. I won't enumerate them all, and I completely refuse to get drawn into the debate of semicolons vs. no semicolons; but statements like this,

"Whether you like it or not, whitespace is significant in JavaScript. A linebreak indicates, in most cases, the end of a statement; a semicolon is automatically inserted for you."

Are just flat out absurd. Like it or not, automatic semicolon insertion is NOT significant whitespace and the second sentence completely contradicts the first by pointing out that ASI happens in MOST cases--but not all. If whitespace were truly significant, it would apply in ALL cases. Again, I'm not debating whether you should use semicolons or not--but I'm willing to flat out state that Javascript does not have significant whitespace; no matter how you want to spin it.

That said (and now here comes the "someone had to say it department") this strikes me, yet again, as Thomas being contrarian for the sake of getting a rise out of folks to draw attention to himself. I mean no disrespect with this statement; but anyone who has followed him for a long time on Twitter knows that he's apt to taking an unpopular position and leveraging it as a marketing opportunity for himself (and, by extension, his consulting and training enterprises). That's a fine approach; but, I felt it time someone identified it for what it is. Thomas is a smart dude and he's built some amazing things; but his public persona and style is carefully crafted and contrarian and we're all buying in by popularizing the debates he either creates or catalyzes.

[Edit: fixed a typo]
1: Firefox always used UAC for updates. Did it wreak havoc? Because believe it or not, UAC = admin rights. That's because Firefox always installed itself in program files.

2: You could exploit Google's update service as well. Do I see flurry exploits around it? Much much smaller code base. Much less complex tasks.

3: A digital signature signs the whole binary. Not parts of the binary. Do you know how this works? There's no such thing such as signing a partial binary.
NDA's are for amateurs
Depending on your position, there really isn't one. The hosting company can implement one, which they might be able to insert in your path if you are at the receiving end of an attack. There are Cisco products and a bunch of up-and-comers that can do this.

If you're a "typical startup" with an Amazon footprint, you have no mitigation strategy for flooding attacks aside from not attracting them. If someone points multiple gigabit at you, there is just about nothing you can do except hope Amazon can do something.
Cloud storage Terms of Service comparison: Avoid Google Drive
This is all spectacularly bad advice. Some of it is actually just false.

> A linebreak indicates, in most cases, the end of a statement; a semicolon is automatically inserted for you.

These are weasel words. Either a line break is the end of a statement or it's not. In JavaScript it is not.

> In order to be able to write properly working code, you need to be aware of the rules of Automatic Semicolon Insertion, regardless if you choose to add semicolons at the end of lines or not.

You absolutely do not. I don't care if you use semicolons or not, but don't claim that knowledge of ASI is required to write good JavaScript.

> Fix problems when you actually have them. Use the time you’ve freed up by not prematurely optimizing and spend it with your family or have a holiday on the beach.

Using deprecated features like __proto__ and arguments.callee is not something that you can trivially fix later. These are advanced features and I can't think of an easy why to duplicate their behavior once they are gone. You're going to have to rewrite a significant chunk of your code. Please never, ever use these features in libraries that are shared with other developers.
Think wi-fi is cool? Sky-fi will blow your mind! It's just like wi-fi, only it uses satellites instead of terrestrial nodes for communication.

That is to say, my main problem with IPS is that it sounds like GPS, but isn't at all the same. One is a massive global satellite network, and the other is glorified RFID with a hefty glob of marketing on top. Call it something else, at least, please?
This is completely awesome! sferik rocks
Some Investors May Request Protection From Aqui-Hires
Okay, but then why null route the entire machine, as opposed to dropping just the UDP packets going towards it? If you already have routing infrastructure that can disseminate "attempts to access this IP address will fail" it does not seem a stretch to disseminate "attempts to access this IP address over UDP will fail; over TCP there is no issue". Are "upstream bandwidth providers" really that impotent against that kind of issue? :(

I, personally, have absolutely no need to have incoming UDP packets of any kind at all entering my network, and can not come up with a reason why any web hosting company would: it seems like it should almost be a question on your bandwidth contract "will you need UDP (recommendation: no)". (Given the simplicity of the UDP problem, I personally assumed that the complexity would come from state-ful TCP filtering issues.)
I did. Posterous was perfect in the beginning, then it got slow, cluttered and complicated. I switched back to good old Wordpress.
Show HN: Support/learn from fellow entrepreneurs - "Surviving the Startup Life"
Well, they're playing catch up on that, that's for sure.
But my understanding is that they're adding the necessary features one by one.
Next is silent updates (=no dialogs). This one is just "no UAC prompt".
Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 6 Notes Essay
Only if the error is to my benefit :-)
Zero downtime deploys for Rails apps
I don't think the GPS approach can work with ground stations - what GPS has going for it is line-of-sight to the satellites. Multipath would be a hell of an issue in an urban environment.

That said, here's a paper describing various positioning methods - http://emits.esa.int/emits-doc/1-5200-RD25-Signal-processing...

EOTD looks rather interesting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-OTD
I'm personally getting bored of hearing about semi-colons in javascript.

But #4 rubs me the wrong way. This strikes me as the opposite way to spend more time with your family. A little bit of preventative effort done on the clock will often reduce the amount of emergency code fixes that you do after-hours.
Facebook Makes Android Apps More Viral With Social Discovery
I went with a Nook Touch instead of a Kindle, because it is very easy to get your hands on standard epub and load them at will. Loading e-books from outside the Amazon ecosystem can be done, but it is a cumbersome process at best. The Nook feels less tied to the B&N ecosystem than the Kindle is to Amazon. This is true for Sony and possibly Kobo as well, but I prefer the Nook as a device.
Chrome + Firefox means 40%-50% of the Internet is getting a browser update every six weeks. This will be a boon for software developers.

I never understand this argument.

All we have now is two different fast-moving targets, both with a track record of introducing breaking changes. IME this just results in a significantly higher number of customers complaining to our customer support team (not Mozilla's or Google's) that our web pages/embedded UIs don't work properly any more.

I have yet to be convinced that this obsession with releasing every six weeks really gets useful features out there in a way that benefits most users anyway. As far as I can tell, about 99% of the developers using those features are people writing tech demos for the browser makers and/or trendy web design blogs. Much of the content on those sites doesn't even work on both Gecko and WebKit at the same time, never mind IE. Meanwhile, real sites still have to cope with a majority of visitors who don't have the latest shiny new features.

In any case, a lot of those features frankly aren't all that beneficial anyway compared to basic things like not freezing the entire browser UI because one tab is taking a while to load. That is something Firefox still can't do even though it's several years after every other major browser had it, and the apologists are getting awfully boring now.
I Can Has Co-Founder: A Tale of Cheezburgers and K-Pop Stars
Women have an obligation to help each other
Slightly OT, a little power user tip for people using twitter.com is hit "?" and you'll see there's actually a ton of keyboard shortcuts in there. Much more than j and k for navigation.
I'll tell you why that can be described as disappointing. Apple is extremely profitable. Sales are climbing at a great rate. Shares of ownership (and by proxy, a share in that profit) are priced according to this wild growth and profitability. The market buys stock based on this expected growth and return. When the expected return is less than the actual return, this is disappointing EVEN IF THE RETURN IS 150%.

This like buying an expensive sports car and having it ONLY go 150MPH when similarly priced cars can reach 200MPH. 150MPH is great compared to a stock Honda Civic, but you will be disappointed when your friends best you with their supercars, because you paid so much. Apple stock is a supercar stock, so when it doesn't perform at supercar standards, the market is disappointed.
> Please never, ever write libraries that are shared with other developers.

FTFY
I'm not even sure why they're trying to create a Firebug replacement. Isn't this how we get browser bloat, by including every possible tool with the core browser?
I like the relationship terminology T introduces. Looks like managing lists will be a breeze with this too.
Biz Dev is a clever name for dirty work
Are you settling for mediocre solution?
And down 2% today before earnings. AAPL, she sure does swing.
That's what most providers (certainly the one I've worked at) do, in fact, do, is null route the entire machine. Rather than leave you nulled in the router for weeks waiting for the attack to subside, eventually, they'll just cut you loose. That's the typical form these things take.

It would be tempting to blackhole UDP, but it's just as easy to flood a pipe with TCP. You don't need an established connection to get packets in the pipe, and there are many mismanaged networks on planet Earth (as I alluded to) that let just about anything exit. A small botnet of five or ten machines with gigabit uplinks on poorly-managed networks is enough to be a force to reckon with. When I was an administrator on IRC, Cisco routers themselves were common targets to exploit and use for this purpose; often, they're directly plugged into gigabit or even ten gigabit connectivity, and there are really easy ways in IOS to perform a DoS attack.

I can't speak to the decision Pastie's host made in this case, but it sounds like since Rails Machine was donating resources (and Pastie wasn't paying them), Rails Machine must act as a smart company -- certainly, any entrepreneur who enjoys Hacker News would sympathize -- and protect its income flow. Which means, you mess with my customers, I fire you.
A key point to draw from this: When the other party's lawyers come out, bring out yours or refuse to talk, depending on the conversation's importance.
Sriracha lollipops
You don't seem to understand what I said.

Firefox (or any other program for that matter) should be able to install itself when run by an under-privileged user. SHOULD. If it CANT, then its installer is designed incorrectly and its installation mechanics are wrong.

Consider a simple case when I am on a shared computer as a restricted user. In an Internet cafe or similar. I should be able to install, run and use Firefox. There's basically no technical reason why it will not be able to run under a restricted set of privileges. It has no drivers to install, it doesn't bind to privileges range of ports, it doesn't need to install a service. It should quietly go into C:\Users\dude\Program Files and make itself comfortable there.

Microsoft has a set of guidelines, in part covering where what should go. Some of these guidelines are simply retarded, they have always been. Their existence is not an excuse for not questioning them. If a developer insists on following them, it just doesn't speak much of a developer.
Then software companies might add intrinsic value by selling storage media containing the programs, instead of just the programs.
"I've been exploring Google Drive for the past few hours now. It's a very stable storage platform".

How could you possibly tell that it's "very stable" after a few hours?
Google voice already picks up the phone for you, prompts the caller for their name, then rings your actual phone. Adding fax detection in there doesn't seem like it would be that hard to do.

Or, they can answer the phone, listen for any fax modems, then continue to play their own ring sound.
I really love this visual. Black inverted beetle hump devices, masquerading as security cameras, moving from place to place on the roof at night when the lights are out to confuse nav algorithms that defeat 'enchhanced discovery' layout.
Apple: we could settle patent fights if others would "invent their own stuff"
Oxford academics tentatively embrace startup culture
The amount of redesigns is plentiful for sure. None of the ones I have seen solved the problems I have with reading HN. I wanted to post my take on it.
#1 has nothing to do with size optimization, it's purely stylistic and about having to write less code. See also http://blog.izs.me/post/3393190720/how-this-works
Manning trial: US Gov. ordered to release WikiLeaks damage assessments
That is probably because the Evernote founders were the team that developed the CalliGrapher cursive recognition engine which was used by the Apple Newton back in the day.
Oh look, it's the same necessary boilerplate we've seen in a thousand other online services. Let's tear it out of context and make false comparisons (see comments on the article) so we can paint Google as eeeeeeeeevil - instant linkbait.

This crap is getting really tiresome.
To clarify: growth is great, don't get me wrong, but there's a point where you just start running out of market and need to focus on stability & maintenance. When you've got over 10% of the world's population signed up and 5% using the non-essential service daily, focus on efficiency and loyalty; growth becomes the follow instead of the lead.

I'm surprised so little is made of dividends. Growth has faster and sexier return, but will fail sooner than long-term steady well-maintained income. $5/user may not be much, but it's better than $4 and falling. Focus on maintaining long term loyalty; there are a lot of newcomers bent on seducing current users away.
Apple, why don't you just make this the right way?
Love at first sight. Now it's easier than ever to appear busy at work while tweeting.
If Firefox is in UAC'd location, then a Firefox compromise would simply drop an .exe or .dll into user's directory and set it up to be launched by Firefox. As an add-on, for example, or through the same exploit it used to enter the system.

In other words, the installation location doesn't really matter. If the process is breached, the user context is f#cked regardless.
Go yell at people convincing college kids to sign up for credit cards or buy magazines by handing out T-shirts and movie passes.

Gladly. Those people are assholes.
And this behavior is totally obvious (not)

var id = 123;
function updateOptionalProperty(obj) {
with (obj) {
id = 456;
}
}

updateOptionalProperty({id: 0});
id // 123

updateOptionalProperty({});
id // 456
Show HN: We created an iPhone app that lets you share your plans for tonight
I don't know if it still works, but rubygems.org/gems/tit
I'm looking at the "Compare Plans" page; is DDoS Mitigation part of another feature that I missed, or is it implicit in the service (i.e., a side effect of having a good CDN)? I can ask that an easier way: if my site takes a 10 Gbps hit, which plan would mitigate it? Enterprise? Do you bill for the transfer that you eat?

Genuinely curious and haven't really looked around the site much, and you guys hit my radar when you took on Lulzsec. Can't imagine the plethora of nasties directed at their gear.
A lot of people would use Google over Microsoft because of the good will and reputation Google currently holds.
I would guess that this more of an oversight than anything else. There will be some public grumbling about it, and Google will respond by fixing their Terms of Service to look more like the others.

I'm fairly certain they will respond quickly.
App Engine 1.6.5 Released
Working great on Arch!
CISPA cybersecurity bill opposed by Obama administration
"publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content"

Please point out concrete examples of this supposed boilerplate. I'm honestly curious as to where else you've found this, as it strikes me as a very broad term where you give Google the right to do almost anything with whatever you may store.
"Meanwhile, real sites still have to cope with a majority of visitors who don't have the latest shiny new features."

Umm, isn't that what the 6-week-automatic-update cycle that you're arguing against is intended to address?
Wonderful, I will be able to use this in an upcoming project. Thank you. :)
Imagine if Google released a service where, for $5 a month you received different terms of service, owned your data contractually and, just for fun, got to turn off ads in gmail?

They already did. It's Google Apps. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html

For less than $5 a month I get completely different terms of service than Google's standard gmail accounts. I get a lot of other interesting control options as well in the Apps dashboard.

I really disapprove of the Google terms in the free accounts, but $5 a month is a no brainer. Unlike facebook, I find Google docs to be worth having, if for no other reason than collaboration. It's also worth a small fee for me to have contractual ownership of my hosted data.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
I wrote a similar but far more simple script in Python to follow all those who follow you and unfollow those who
unfollow you. Take a look if your interested: http://forrst.com/posts/Keep_your_twitter_followers_and_frie...
Fabric. Because finding freelance work sucks.
This is just silly. Google should know they are going to get called out on this in 2012.

Also, all of my docs showed up in Drive automatically. Do these terms automatically apply to those docs now too?
+1 on this. Had a similar bad experience as a customer of Aw.Rem. After a few months of charging $10/month, Zach increased the price to $40 and cut the calls to my girlfriend roughly twice a week -- instead of every day.

That's fair enough. I didn't mind all that much.
But then a few month later the calls stopped alltogether, then Zach went in and cancelled the $10 subscription manually on Paypal.

I didn't complain about the frequency of calls, but sent an email asking about the cancellation. That went unanswered. Sorry but this guy doesn't seem responsible.

And one more insight from this interview:
http://www.twilio.com/blog/2010/12/awesomeness-reminders-mak...:

'...I made all the phone calls while I was high...'
While this may be true, is it too much to ask of a company as large as Google to maybe not just slap some boilerplate ToS on their brand new services? Surely they could be a little more specific and allay unnecessary fears while still protecting their own business interests.
Roadmaps : We Should Have Known Better
When I lived in Seattle, there was a good community of C# people for freelance work. I always wished for "C# on Rails", basically a Rails-like framework built on C# with convention, migrations, a reasonable package management solution (e.g. bundler), a mature approach to test, and a deployment system that didn't take 30 minutes to spin up a VM (Azure).

AppHarbor, you guys are bringing this one step closer to existing; great job.
There's no doubt SimpleHoney can do awesome job. Because these guys are awesome.
I understand what you're saying, but Google does not have a monopoly on anything. You don't have to use their search, their email, or their cloud storage.

Ideally, if privacy is important to a person, then they'll gravitate towards services that cater to that need. DuckDuckGo is a great example, where search is concerned. I'm not saying that this is easy. Unfortunately, I don't think that many people care about privacy unless the lack of it gets them into trouble, and then it is only 20/20 hindsight.

The burden for maintaining your privacy lies mostly in your own hands. I don't expect governments to do anything other than to remove privacy rights, at this point.
What's most shocking at this point is that this story has been up for seven hours and Yelp hasn't bothered to fix the page in question, the wrongness of which could be observed by any human with eyes: http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-stor...
This is FUD. Read PepperoniJack's comment to the article (at http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/24/2972228/cloud-storage-term... ) that points out that the TOS excerpts were taken out of context.
Does anyone remember mICQ, the command-line ICQ client? Man, it was awesome.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/micq
I doubt it's an oversight. Google's legal team doesn't miss a beat on stuff like this. If they backtrack it will be an intentional change of an intentional set of terms.
Or people who refuse to pay exorbitant rates (in comparison) for internet access to communications companies who on one hand claim the last mile is the bottleneck and expensive, yet refuse to invest in infrastructure for their wireless towers. AT&T and Verizon in particular.
MetaFilter launches "Best of…" blog
Q: Rails or Django?

A:Users don't care so I don't care.

--

If I could pay with my Karma I could give you 1/5th of it.
try putting cache: in front of the link and pasting it into google.

eg. cache:http://nytimes.com/somearticle20382

and you can read the article
Congrats to Doingtonight! Big fan of your app
You do own your data. Google never claims to own your data.
The Dropbox Difference
CrashPlan seems to and it's bloody amazing in terms of features, reliability, price and tech support.. It also has unlimited storage and uploads fairly fast.
Just curious: why is this something you're excited about?
I don't, because I fairly frequently don't have internet or cell access. Hopefully this will spur telecom companies to get their asses in gear, but I'm not optimistic, and that sounds like a supremely frustrating future of trying to get reception.