skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> First problem being cookies have been obsolete for a few years now. With the recent developments in new storage mechanisms like Local Storage, cookies are no longer needed anymore. Local storage has even implemented in every modern browser (and IE8+). What does this mean? Well it’s simple… If you don’t update your browser, some of your favorite sites aren’t going to work.

Okay, one more time: neither EU Directive 2009/136/EC [1] nor the local laws that implement that directive are specific to cookies. They are worded such that they apply to all mechanisms that involve storage on the client.

Take, for example, the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) [2], after applying the 2011 amendment [3] that includes the changes necessitated by Directive 2009/136/EC, reads:

(1) Subject to paragraph (4), a person shall not store or gain access to
information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user
unless the requirements of paragraph (2) are met.

(2) The requirements are that the subscriber or user of that terminal
equipment-

(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the
purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and

(b) has given his or her consent.

(3) Where an electronic communications network is used by the same person to
store or access information in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or
user on more than one occasion, it is sufficient for the purposes of
this regulation that the requirements of paragraph (2) are met in
respect of the initial use.

(3A) For the purposes of paragraph (2), consent may be signified by a
subscriber who amends or sets controls on the internet browser which
the subscriber uses or by using another application or programme to
signify consent.

(4) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to the technical storage of, or access to,
information—

(a) for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a
communication over an electronic communications network; or

(b) where such storage or access is strictly necessary for the provision
of an information society service requested by the subscriber or user.

No mention of cookies, and "information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user" would seem to apply to solutions that use HTML5 local storage, ETag headers, Flash LocalSharedObjects or any other similar technologies.

[1]: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...

[2]: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/contents/made

[3]: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/1208/contents/made
What most people seem to do with these scales is pick the language that they are most comfortable with and say that they are an 8 or 9 in that and then arrange everything else on the scale relative to that.

The problem with this is that your overall numbers are likely to go down over time.

If you are a college freshman who spent a weekend learning JS then you can now probably do most of everything you can do in your main language (say Java). That means that you put down "5" for JS.

Once you've got a few years under your belt, your knowledge in any new language has a much higher standard to meet.

I filled in a questionnaire for a job once that has vague questions such as "Rate your skills in TCP/IP , Novice/Intermediate/Advanced".

I had no idea what the scale was here, did advanced mean being able to write a TCP/IP stack from scratch, identify bottlenecks in huge networks or what?

I was trying to decide whether to tick novice or intermediate however it turned out that "advanced" actually meant being able to run traceroute from command prompt and set A records in DNS.

I remember the advice a friend of mine gave me, he said "Just put 10 for everything, you'll get an interview"
Is it possible to use an oauth-based thing instead? I don't know if github lets you do much with oauth, I'm just a little wary of storing my password in what would presumably be plaintext.
It got downvoted because HackerNews isn't like Reddit where you comment for the purpose of just speaking your opinion. I learned this the hard way a few times. Unless your comment contributes something to the conversation it's just noise.

A rule of thumb is basically: Unless you have something important to add don't add anything, otherwise it's just more mediocre comments to sort through. That's why HN has good comments and less noise. Whereas at Reddit and forums and comment systems on other sites, everyone and their grandmother chimes in. Creating a monstrous wall of "thank you"s, "neat", "I agree"s and other babble.
I agree you can self-teach a lot of it, and a lot of it isn't needed in a lot of jobs, either. I somewhat disagree on the last part. I think there's a significant amount of work in Big-Data-related areas where not having a solid knowledge of statistics greatly increases the odds of doing something completely wrongly, or interpreting the results wrongly. On the other hand, there's a significant amount of work where deep knowledge of statistics is optional at most. But companies like Palantir do seem to put a strong emphasis on the statistical background of people they hire.
Excellent thoughts. I think that more people need to know how to program their computers. But, as you have so elegantly pointed out, the inexorable march of progress will not bring this to pass. It hurts a little to think about, but in a large way you seem to be on the money.

These ideas are worthy of more than a two paragraph comment on HN. I third the notion that you should pen a full blog post.
omg, its super painful to read this list. whats wrong with these people?
Paraphrasing Kenneth Williams from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdDtwc9HA7s

It's frightening to think with modern medicine and all the technology available, they can't really help you. In the old days, we were better off because now they're all "specialists." Everyone's getting better and better at less and less. Eventually someone will be absolutely amazing at doing nothing.
I see in this thread that a number of people are talking past each other, each with a different subtle sub definition of the word "know".

I know of 7 basic subcategories of know - all but the last susceptible to phrasing:

(1) Knowledge that is immediately accessible at great depth and can be traversed quickly

(2) Knowledge that is not immediately accessible but resides in the unconscious. It surfaces in dreams, showers and intuition.

(3) Knowledge that is not immediately accesible but can be so quickly understood from a search (physical or digital) that it might as well have been remembered. Truly, the old fashioned idea that all your knowledge can only be kept inside your head is quaint.

(4) Knowledge that is not had but can be quickly acquired due to the similarity of the underlying structure to already possessed knowledge. With speed of acquisition proportional to similarity.

(5) Knowledge that is not had but can be acquired due to available learning strategies, knowledgebase and skill in acquiring knowledge.

(6) Knowledge that will be had in the distant future

(7) Knowledge that can not be gained due to difference in interests, lack of motivation or sufficient strength of reason, entrenched mode of thinking and set of beliefs which inhibit deftness with abstraction and for a very small few - reasons of biology.

Knowledge that cannot be accessed by Human Brains.

For many cases, the level 4 definition of knowing is sufficient and anything above should be good enough for almost all problems.
Statistics implying you’re always better off with more education are misleading
A lot of people use garbage collected languages because garbage collection isn't an issue in their projects... until it is. And then folks who really have to deal with it, get to learn about their garbage collector and how to manage memory allocation in their apps.

But to some how claim that the productivity savings that folks get from deferring learning about the details about their language's garbage collector is somehow problematic, because in a subset of cases, you do care about object allocation and garbage collection is a pretty silly argument (especially in the face of the article's admission that garbage collection has won out).

Garbage collection for most people is a tool of convenience. When the tool becomes inappropriate, yes, people do have to learn how to optimize their code. None of this should shock us, or keep us from using garbage collectors.
Sorry, I meant #1 as far as actual domain name registrars go.

Namecheap was #2 and GoDaddy was #3. I think the author was referring to the fact that while Wikipedia has always been #1, GoDaddy & NameCheap had switched spots.
Not sure which pieces you're talking about. Code changes to various open source projects within OS X, iOS, and Xcode can be found here (and the referenced sites therein).

http://opensource.apple.com/
It's a reliable heuristic for filtering links that usually do not stand on their own technical merit. The same applies more generally, e.g. to fancy domains, university affiliations, site designs, random fashionable buzzword dropping, ...

You could call it the I Automatically Do Not Care Rule(tm).
Wow, that's unfortunate too. Combined with your previous comments I have to assume that you were a long time googler. Can you tell us what it was like back in the day? I'm really curious how big companies change / devolve over time.
edw519: "4. But I'm a 10 in Javascript & PHP."

Hang in there, 2009 edw519! JavaScript is increasingly back again in 2012 ;-)
Your next mayor: A computer - Dream City
OpenStack open source cloud platform needs to pick up the pace
Quicksort: Caveat Implementor
Thanks for the feedback.

I find all three of the buttons slow and clunky. For a while I didn't have a delete button because using shift+backspace is so much faster. Same goes for the other two buttons.

I like "task" more than "notes" because I plan to add more things than just notes to that panel.
It is particularly concerning, at least in the case of Java, that I cannot even fall back on the old paradigm and free memory manually. I am not persuaded that figuring out how best to hoard objects is a better use of my mental energy than proving they are properly allocated and freed.
Hue and Cry for Argentina
If someone gave me a sort implementation in a code review, I'd have to seriously wonder how the heck that person got hired. Libraries exist for a reason.

Sorting is a good example, though, because it is often complicated not because the algorithm is hard, but because the sorting criteria rely on heterogeneous data, sometimes coming from multiple services. Coming up with a clean code design in such cases is challenging, and that's where good developers shine.
This is assuming that they are using open source projects internally and that you A. Know what they are using and B. That they care about who maintains them rather than treating them as a black box that does stuff for free (how most open source projects are used most of the time in practice).

Also tech conferences seem to be a pretty expensive way (at least in terms of travel) for hoping to bump into someone.
Specialized Trojan can stealing credit card details from hotel
My cynical view is that at some point in the past few years, the perfect storm of outsourcing, funny money bonanzas aka IPOs, and the standing mindset of corporations to focus on their self interest (and not but) got us to this point. The winners have been the corporations (surprise) and a few (very few) rock star OSS developers. Everyone else is being taken for a ride, in my opinion.

I release OSS software myself. So far, Apache 2 only, but decided to switch for everything new to (L)GPL a couple of months ago. GPL makes sense economically, socially, and politically.
Not only can you make the ham sandwich, but when you give ME the ham sandwich I can put mustard on it, and when I give it to some one else THEY can put cheese on it.

Because that's what the GPL does . It ensures that the right to modify the (sandwich)program never gets taken away from the next user in the chain.
If I find an simple easy way I'll re-write it again with sharing :D Meteor.js looks promising.
Why would they apply it differently to non-game developers?

"Whatever group you’re in, whether you’re building Steam servers, translating support articles, or making the tenthousandth hat for Team Fortress 2, this applies to you."
Unknown experiences are fundamentally scary; so scary that we feel more afraid of walking in a dark alley than we do of heart disease.

Bah, that isn't the fear of the unknown vs. the fear of the known. It is immediate, physical fear (in thirty seconds those gang members are going to mug me) vs. eventual, abstract fear (in twenty years, something might go wrong inside me).
When naming I always consider the product benefits not features. So ServerTools is just a bit too literal. Think about what your tools afford you to do. Save time, be more organised, respond to alerts quickly.

Have a play around in Google keyword tool and find all the popular random phrases that people use when they are searching for the solutions that your product provides!
How many times has that happened?

jQuery changed the face of client side development, and its MIT license has encouraged significant and substantial corporate participation, but I have never even heard of a jquery fork. They actually have MS offering paid support for their library.

Rails changed the face of server side programming, and its MIT license has only increased corporate participation. Where is the rails fork?

Node.js changed the face of the app server landscape and is probably the latest big thing in web development. MIT license, where are the forks?

It is definitely a theoretical possibility, but it just doesn't seem to ever happen in this world. What does happen is you gain the ability to have companies throw money/manpower behind your project that they would otherwise have spent building a competing product that they could actually use.
Those projects are often not in a state where they can be compiled, and when they are you find that they are heavily redacted. For example, none of the code required to make any of that run correctly on ARM devices is available. (Given the context from this thread about large projects, however, I feel the redactions of things like touch events from WebKit, are a more serious issue.)
Also, probably a first-mover advantage, early on. Linux, the GNU toolkit, etc. come on to the scene and are based on GPL, so a lot of developers's first experience with open/permissive/whatever software licensing was GPL. Over time, though, developers become aware of alternatives, and for various reasons, many use them.
True story:

Recruiter: "So you were writing Java code that talked to an Oracle Database, right?"

Me: "Right"

Her: "What version of Oracle was it?"

Me: "8i I think"

Her: "Sorry, we're looking for people with 9i experience." (9i had just come out.)

Me: "Really? You know SQL[1] is a standard and I'm writing Java code anyway, we were using a ORM as well. I didn't even end up writing that much direct SQL code."

Her: "Sorry, the client specifically said Oracle 9i -- I'm looking at it right now. They're not looking for Sequal experience."

This is when I decided to always avoid recruiters if I possibly could.

[1] I pronounced this "Ess Que Ell" but she responded "Sequel" which I think was the name of another database vendor at the time.
Has the Pinterest bubble burst already? dramatic drop in site's users
The NeTV is a fascinating device. Until now it wasn't possible to manipulate video protected by HDCP unless you got an expensive license. Probably not doable for hobbyists and startups. Bunnie solved this by performing a man-in-the-middle attack to inject video in the stream. Since he is not decrypting anything he is not breaking the DMCA. Brilliant! The development platform is also really nice. They have a virtual machine with the toolchain setup so you can start developing immediately and push firmware to your device through the net.

Bunnie gives more details here: http://youtu.be/37SBMyGoCAU

Hopefully, he will have more success outside the consumer market.
Erm, isn't "share-alike" closer to the GPL than MIT/BSD licenses? That is, the whole point of the GPL is that anybody who uses your code has to release the product under the same license; this is exactly what the "share-alike" licenses do as well.
I didn't know why primes are considered special, apart from the basic requirement they fulfill. GP sounded like they might serve a bigger unknown purpose.
Part of the problem is that we don't know how to teach computer science to students that haven't already been programming for years before college. The major has the highest first-year dropout rate.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/18532-compute...

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1151604

That suggests that one reason there are so few CS graduates despite demand is that those who enter CS programs because of said employment demand, and not because they are already interested in programming, don't make it out with a CS degree.
> That is always touted by GPL advocates, but where is the proof? Where are all the companies enhancing non-GPL-licensed software and not giving anything back?

They're doing it to GPL software. Take a look at pretty much any embedded Linux project and you will find a GPL violation. For example, most ARM devices are unusable without binary drivers that rely on specific builds of specific Linux kernel versions (example - you can't get sound or accelerated video on the Raspberry Pi!). I've had one plug computer maker tell me they have a custom version of Linux and they won't provide the source. Whenever I come across anything like that I report it at http://gpl-violations.org/
But it wasn't so long ago that it was felt to be impossible for software companies. Actually, it mostly still is.

People tend to lower themselves to the preconceptions others have of them. It can be very convincing.
Hey look the author of this post even has another one which says basically what i feel on the subject: http://prog21.dadgum.com/15.html
I sympathize with the provider here, if the systems weren't designed to take the heat, do they continue trying to defend (at the risk of the other 1.5 mil) when they believed they couldn't keep everything online, or discuss with the user how to put their domain somewhere with more resources to defend against this kind of attack?

Any small company would do the same (hosting etc) to stop everything going offline. You can't blame name.com for being overwhelmed, because this sounds like a DDoS from an organized group who knew what they were doing, which is quite hard to mitigate against.
If there was a GPLed project for every paranoid rant on how anyone interested in any other license is trying to mislead people and destroy the GPL, TFA would never have been written.
> Not necessarily, but 50% are below the median.

Not necessarily. The numbers could all be the same.
I've always wanted to buy a system76 laptop; can you please elaborate on the model that you bought? The only things I was unsure of:
1) Is it very heavy (as in weight) compared to MBP?
2) Display quality?
3) Trackpad quality?

(I don't mean to turn this into a review, but just wanted a developers experienced opinion on the issues that nagged me most)
Options - Extensions
I started off working on my startup as a single founder and found it enjoyable, especially the coding part. What I underestimated was the emotional challenge and that's where having a cofounder helps tremendously. I was fortunate enough to find a cofounder and while the level of stress is still high, its much easier to deal with having somebody in the trenches with you. As far as the later stages of a startup, very few startups even get to that point so I wouldn't worry so much.
It is very easy to work around the LGPL: the main thing it ends up protecting the user from is not being able to modify the exact functionality provided by the LGPL library inside of the surrounding software system.

As a case example: Apple has modifications to their version of WebCore (lower-level than WebKit, for context), a project shipped under LGPL (unlike WebKit, which is distributed under a modified BSD license).

However, they don't want to have to give out those changes, so they provide the source code to a WebKit with some minimal changes to call into new code that they then don't provide: it will compile, but you will get link errors.

Understand: this new code may be critical to the functionality of the library, and may be modifying the behavior of or even outright replacing key APIs and mechanisms of the LGPL library, in this case WebKit.

They then provide binary object files for the new functionality that they added, and the result is compiled together to form the unified WebCore dynamic library. Even though the result is a single linked-together library, this is totally legal under the LGPL, as I can still modify the original WebKit code if I wish and still manage to build Apple's modified WebKit binary.

In essence, the boundary around the LGPL code can be made very tight indeed, such that even code that is semantically required for the library to function does not fall under the redistribution requirements of the GPL part of the LGPL code.
The article falls flat on its face in the first two paragraphs when he says that car technology has not advanced in the last 126 years. That just being ignorant of how cars work if he believes that. And to call them a stupid technology is purely idiotic.

I love cars but I wouldn't mind if a better technology came around to replace them. The keyword being better and not just different. People are always going to want a way to independently travel. I live in NYC and while PT is convenient it is still a pain in the ass overall. Getting to places too late or too early because of the train schedule. Being forced to deal with the different weirdos of the city. Delays and breakdowns that happen more often than they should. There is a reason why there is still so much traffic in the city. People, for the most part, who can afford to take Taxis or have their own car still do.

Even if you have Jet packs or any other alternative travel tech that we know about now there are still going to be infrastructure problems. Clearing skyways for the jetpacks, knocking down structures which impede these skyways. And the results of a malfunctioned jetpack would probably lead to a more instant death than the normal car accident.

This paragraph alone "We sacrifice ourselves and our environment to these death traps, health hazards, planet killers, money sucks; these land-grabbers, respiratory rapists, and insidious isolation engines. And for what? The pleasure and convenience of rapid movement? That’s a problem we can solve in other ways." makes me not take the article or the author seriously.

I welcome advances in technology that allow us to travel more cleanly and efficiently. But we have to remember that cars serve a number of different purposes for different people. So until we can find one technology that is better & not hodge podge of different tech that replaces the car I wouldn't hold my breath about people willingly giving them up.

-edit misspelled "of"
You could at least tidy up the presentation.

> A free, open source solution for creating github repositories from the commandline avoid the usual copy and paste. Keep up to date on issues, and much more.

Needs a comma.

> octogit login &ltusername> &ltpassword> # allows you to store your github authetication data octogit create &ltreponame> 'description' # lets you create the repository both locally and on github octogit issues # lets you see all the related issues in the current repository octogit issues &ltnumber> # lets you see a specific issue with summary octogit issues &ltnumber> close # lets you close an issue

&lt's everywhere.

The "follow" link's right hand corners are cut off.

The title is showing Octogit plus a unicode D with a horizontal line through it (can't seem to paste it here).

EDIT: Downvotes for constructive criticism? Really?