skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a tradeoff between how powerful addons can be and how much they are sandboxed. Firefox errs on the side of letting the user control their browsing experience. This patch reins in addons a tiny amount to eliminate a very common source of addon leaks.
You can get a refurbished Mac Mini for around the same cost as a new iPad.
MongoDB Driver Now Includes Hadoop MapReduce & Node.js Support
It still hurts everybody, because it bloats your files with unnecessary opcodes and forces the JIT to sift through it and optimize it away, instead of spending its time to do useful optimizations.

It might only seem like a little turd on the sideway that you can easily step over, but quite evidently in the case of flash little things like these have added up and its performance is now -- in the metaphorical sense -- up to its neck in shit.
Don't know where you are getting the idea that half the US budget is spent on defense.

Estimates I've seen range from 20-40% depending on what you count as "defense". See for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S...
Reducing design to pure visual style is similar to reducing programming to writing lines of code. Neither is enough to create a useful, engaging product. Neither nice code nor nice style in itself means that your product is good.

I assume the original post was written in response to a personal experience and then generalized into blanket statements. This seems to happen a lot online with all the "X lessons from Y" blog posts floating around.
The IT paradox: Diminished role in technology, greater clout in the business
The pirate bay is banned by my ISP.

Now I don't actually use it, but I am still pissed of by the censorship. Fortunately getting around the filter is extremely simple -- but there is a part of me that almost wish it was more of a challenge.
"Taking Any Rand seriously" seems to be something of a persistent folly.
Peculiar article - I'd read a couple of sentences and think, "wow, Noam's spot on here". Then after the next few sentences or major point, I'd think, "what a moron".

Seems like there is something for everyone to love and hate in this one. Probably the one thing everyone can agree on is the concentration of wealth and stratification of society isn't a good thing.

Like a lot of these analyses, it is often hard to sort out cause/effect, I'm not so sure that this article didn't make some wrong conclusions in this regard.

I do have to say his contention that OWS is the first push-back against the concentration & corruption of power in the U.S. is sort of naive. There are plenty of people and movements that have been railing about this at least since the early 90's - I'm not going to mention specific ones because I don't want to seem like I'm touting them.
Facebook – the social network of 21st century
Facebook – social network that became a lifestyle for billions of people all around the world. Find out the useful side of it and open your mind for new horizons.
Includes v1.0 of the Mongo-Hadoop connector for MongoDB on Hadoop’s MapReduce and Node.js Driver v1.0.
IMO, when it comes to accounting software, the browser shouldn't make a damn bit of difference to how it works, only to how it appears.

If a choice of browsers breaks a modern accounting application, that's poor design, not a feature because an accounting app damn sure better not be relying on javascript's math capability.
>Aside from the fact that this story is clearly made-up, the idea that a profit-seeking corporation would favor "shutting down" an asset rather than selling it because it fears an uprising of the working class is just about the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.

Profit-seeking corporations aren't immune to stupidity and pettiness. Another reason not to sell it is to prevent the emergence of a competitor.
Yes, that’s right, I verbified “offline.” Yes, I verbified “verb.” Feel free to inbox me grammar complaints that I’ll trashinate.

I think more worders should matriculate into the Strongbad School of Verbinizin' Speechy Things.
MIT's SWYP
I was just about to make that observation myself.

This question has been around since 2008 and clearly has garnered enough interest to earn 167 votes on its top answer. It's definitely one of those question/answers that I walk away feeling more knowledgable from -- and presumably the people upvoting it on HN feel the same way.

So yeah it survives intact and unmolested for nearly 5 years -- but an hour on the HN front page is its death knell.

I guess I understand the reasoning behind closing it, but it smacks of the worst kind of pedantry.
Light gray text on dark gray background! Great choice.

> Using a third party tool is like gambling: you might win or loose

"Loose"? AAAAAGH
The entire "monad" discussion is pretty hard to get your head around. Perhaps part of the problem is that it represents not just side effects, but also forced ordering of operations (albeit, largely to allow for those effect-full interactions with the outside world).

I think that maybe for "industrial" programmers, we need a language, perhaps something like Scala, where the default is pure functions and immutable data, but you can tag things (functions & data) as "mutants", er, "mutable"/"mutates", and those tags "taint" what those elements can be combined with. Call something with side effects from something that should be pure, and get an error, that sort of thing. Then, teach people to use mutable data as sparingly as possible. Maybe wrap database updates in some kind of (small!) message handling actor?
This looks fantastic. I've been using a similar (but less complete) css3 less file in some of my projects. It's nice to have a more complete one available.

I would reccomend also taking a look at this border-radius mixin:
http://tech.matchfwd.com/a-better-border-radius-mixin-in-les...
it's quite well done using guard statements to allow more fine-grain control.
Replacing the currently indefinite delay with a 3-4 second one sounds like an improvement.
The funny thing is; That's not listing any of the major issues I have with RubyMotion. One of them would be that I bought the software and I can't integrate one external library I need, but, one of the greatest thing about RubyMotion is that it has been getting updated every day. So I bet you they'll update it with any new version of the SDK before it gets released.

The reason you should be excited about RubyMotion is that it's just easier to read that ObjC since it has a lot less noise, and lot of goodies you just "get" from Ruby's core. And the debugger is fantastic!
Safety Critical software is really about the confidence level in the software to function as intended and is really language agnostic. This is why most Safety Critical projects focus on development and test practices. You want to have a good warm and fuzzy that the product your outputting will work as intended when needed. The traditional way to accomplish this is through rigorous design processes and robust testing. So no one language has an advantage over another (unless real-time is a requirement which it often is) at the root level. Over the years tools have been developed to help assist in testing and giving you that warm fuzzy feeling at the end. Static analysis tools and code coverage tools are an example. These tools tend to be more mature for traditional languages like C/C++ and ADA thus making them more popular for Safety Critical projects, but that's not to say another language that the development group was more familiar with wouldn't do better. At the end of the day its all about your ability to detect defects and the systems ability to detect anomalies so the tool set that the development team thinks they can accomplish this the best with is the best choice.
> Whilst I begrudged paying £16 (~$26 US) for me and the girlfriend

Does this mean that you only had to pay $13 per person? In Sweden, a single ticket sells for $20.
What year is this? I was sure the world had long since moved on to entirely digital projection. I for one can't remember the last time I saw the "end-of-reel" spots on a movie in the cinema.

Are reel projectors actually widely used still?
Remember that Firefox was originally intended as a minimalist platform, with the expectation that users would use its extension mechanism to build it up according to their needs. As a result, Firefox's extension mechanism is quite liberal. The upside is that its extensions are capable of much more than, for example, addons in Chrome. The downside is that extensions are responsible for much more, and can touch basically any part of the program (which is why powerful addons are so prone to breaking with new versions of Firefox: they're effectively targeting an unstable API).

Chrome addons are less prone to breakage and mischief, because Chrome addons target a stable API with a limited set of functionality. Firefox introduced just such an API last year, called the Jetpack API (it may have been renamed since then). You can tell if an extension is using the Jetpack API if it doesn't require a browser restart to install.
I don''t know. It is my impression that traditional companies are not able to produce complex software. I guess there are many paradigms that you have to break to become a software company. It seems to me that is the reason why cell phone companies ended up buying their O.S. from google.
BUT I am Not a Programmer, or an Artist, or a Writer, or a Marketer
"If you enjoy the cinema you are going to watch a film like this at the cinema"

If you enjoy 'cinema' you would probably rather pluck your eyes out than watch a film like this anywhere in anyway
Samsung looks beyond Android
Interesting idea. Instead of aiming for something hard and true, you can probably find a good proxy of complexity fairly easily. Once you have it, just don't confuse the map with the territory; but use it as a hint to see what code to investigate.

Global complexity might not be much harder to measure than local complexity, perhaps even easier. Look for interdependencies.
If you're interested, the German Verisoft project [1] aims at such pervasive verification. AFAIK they haven't yet verified anything matching the complexity of seL4, but they did verify a simple real-time OS. Of course you do need to stop somewhere, as in trusting something "blindly" (say, the verification tools themselves and the hardware they run on).

[1] http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/publications/papers/Klein_08.p...
Same service here, but for newspapers (with more than 1000 newspapers around the globe):

http://en.kiosko.net/us/
LIDAR works _through_ reflections. It essentially paints out the surrounding area with laser pulses and then measures the time for those pulses to come back. Since lasers travel at the speed of light, this time-to-return is quite small and hence they need quite accurate clocks (which is where a lot of the expense comes in).

That being said, laser range-finding works well on diffuse surfaces; this is because when diffuse surfaces reflect, they reflect the incoming light in a broad hemisphere (or cone) which sends the laser pulse out in many directions. Consequently, the surface to measure can be at a variety of angles and still be picked up by the LIDAR sensors (the sensor doesn't care about strength, only time-to-return)

So in terms of "weirdly reflective" surfaces out there, almost everything is diffuse enough for LIDAR to work well. Car hoods, carbon fiber, chrome wheel covers, etc. The only exception is glass, where generally lasers travel straight through and don't return to the sensors. So LIDAR actually detects "holes" in these situations, as if other cars were driving with no windshield an all their windows down.

So the only real risk would be a large plane of glass in the middle of the highway with completely normal road behind it. LIDAR would miss the glass, and the cameras would not be able to see it either. Most real drivers would fail at that too though :D
The Lidar cost is not a concern in my opinion. What is Lidar actually used for right now? I'm guessing just military, science and research. This makes it very expensive. If there were demand for a million of them, they would cost a tenth as much-or less
The porn companies I frequent all have big warnings that it is 18+. The most hardcore even had a 'here is how to block us in netnanny (and other software)' page with extremly prominent links from the front page.
It's telling of what exactly? That I didn't connect defense spending and dependence on handouts? You are reading more into what I'm saying than is there. Check your pre-conceived notions.

And, AGAIN, where do I blame the people on food stamps? The system is the problem, not the people who take advantage of it.
The river and the tide: why publishers should own their own rivers of content.
Output is up, but employment is down in that same sector.

You know why? Robots.

Doesn't make the employment picture look any more rosy, in light of that increased output, does it?

Chomsky's pretty ideological and I'd always take him with a grain of salt, but the manufacturing output doesn't really rebut his main point about industrialists no longer needing workers as much as they used to.
Ask HN: Looking for feedback on a new social platform.
Hi hackers :),

I'm looking for feedback on a new product of my company called Deed. It's a place where people can challenge each other just for fun or for any other reasons you can come up with.

Give Deed a chance and try it for just 5 min then share your feedback here with me.

Here is the URL: http://www.ideedit.com/

Thanks a lot and have a great day!!!
Yes reel projectors are still used - even at some multiplexes.
The reason there are no end of reel dots is that the changeover is now electronic and is coded into the sound track but most places now have full film reels and single projectors anyway to reduce the staffing requirements so there is no changeover.
The Theory of Computing blog http://feedworld.net/toc/ is an aggregator about theoretical CS stuff.
I was trying to develop a similar library, but realized that I would need migrations pretty quickly. Do you have any ideas about the best way to do database migrations?
What about user support ? Can you write and get an answer from the author in a reasonable amount of time ?
Cleaners TN14 Cudham. Cleaning Services Cudham Bromley
I did exactly the same thing after 14 days of having the ZAGG invisibleSHIELD on the iPhone. It just felt too unnatural. Instead, I bought Speck Pixelskin HD which offers all the protection I need. Not for the screen, true, but the bumper part overlaps just enough that larger objects can't damage the screen. And truth be told, Gorilla glass is quite scratch tolerant on it's own.
Disease management system
The OmniMD disease management system helps providers to manage patients’ chronic diseases such as diabetes, congestive heart failure (CHF), and hypertension before they lead to more serious health complications.
> if you have the financial risk tolerance to work at a startup, why not start your own company instead?

I don't think I'm ready for that yet, and I'd like to think that working at a startup will better prepare me for starting my own.

What really sent me down this path was PG's comment suggesting that "you can titrate the amount of startupness you get in your job by the size of the company you join." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1346224) It's not a binary decision, but a sliding scale.
You want your numbers to go up?

You need a viral component. That "You aren't following these results" thing should be a Facebook app (or maybe a Twitter bot?), not an email.
Rich Hickey: Reducers - A Library And Model For Collection Processing
Laconic: a New Way to Generate DOM Content from JavaScript
Also, publicity... Never discount publicity
It's a good, if fairly old [1] insight. The fact is, there are two kinds of patterns: architectural patterns (e.g. "message bus", "web service", etc.) and there are language deficiency patterns (e.g. factory, double dispatch/visitor, etc.). A good way to gauge the power of a language is to see how many of these patterns you need.

For example, when I was exposed to Smalltalk I fell in love with it. So many of the patterns I was used to needing were not necessarily there. That's because Smalltalk is more expressively powerful than, say, Java. You see this directly in the GoF patterns book as several of the patterns only provide C++ code and say "Smalltalk doesn't need this as it does X".

Eventually, though, I begin to see that pg was right and single dispatch is a subset (in this case; inferior) of generic functions. The issue was double dispatch. Smalltalk needs it, Lisp doesn't. I never have to write boring double dispatch wiring in Lisp because of how generic functions work.

So I don't think it's OO itself that is flawed (though it's not as a big a deal as it's made out to be. It's a form of code organization, specifically global variable demarcation and code reuse), but rather many OO languages that are weak enough to require programmers to hand-code out these common patterns instead of either providing it in the language or providing a powerful enough language to let us solve it once.

[1] http://blog.plover.com/2006/09/11/
Works for me! I would often prefer to avoid the ORM make-work, and just take a Perl-ish approach (in Java), processing something like List <Map <String, Object> > (emulate an array/list of hash/tuple), rather than dealing with a bunch of boiler plate classes which contain no logic what-so-ever.
"The exam included questions from the lectures"
When I was a student I hated this practice from some professors.
Demo Day report from SF's Greenstart digital cleantech accelerator
Users don't understand. Browsers are browsers, and for a vast majority of users, IE came with their machine. You aren't going to provoke thought, you'll just lose potential users.

I can understand not supporting legacy IE. Not supporting modern IE doesn't make sense. It seems a lot like nerd rage misdirected.
Coming from someone who's done embedded work (although nothing that's controlled an airframe), I have to say that methodology is much more important than language choice. Sure, choosing something that is deterministic and that you have half a chance of Proving Correct can help, but you're probably better off studying CMMI or Zero-Defect Software design[1]. Just as reference, the JSF (F-35) software is being written in C++ by the DoD, although that group is one of the few CMMI level 5 groups in existence. While I personally hate CMMI, I have to admit that it is one way to ensure an organization is accountable and ticking all the checkboxes.

That being said, avoid PHP, Matlab and C# at all costs if safety is at all important to you.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Toward-Defect-Programming-Allan-Stavel...
> Lastly one of the biggest lessons someone pointed out to me is we teach other people how to treat us. If someone calls you at 10pm at night and asks you to do something and you do it. You have just confirmed to that person this is ok.

So true! I still did it after vehemently expressing my displeasure and taking my manager's word that it was "just this time only" -- then he did the same thing the next week!

After that experience, I'd much rather risk getting fired than subject myself to that sort of abuse repeatedly.
Ha! If you know a way around them I'd appreciate the tip.
The logo simulator on heroku is pretty good. http://logo-blank.heroku.com/

My five year old has learned a few commands to get the turtle moving. Hit the ? in the top right to get a list of commands.
Tech@NYU is changing the technology culture in NYC and I predict its members and alumni will be at the forefront of innovation in the coming years. Glad to be a part of this vibrant culture.
Sorry, I revised the question -- I'm basically asking, what you'd pay on top of the premium. To boil it down, I want to know what you are willing to pay to acquire a random user.
Galaxy S3 Features Include Free 50 GB Dropbox
I think you found the punch line.

Something like "if you want to write small, solid and safe control logic for an embedded system, you should generally use C. But if you want to prove it mathematically correct, you'll need to test it with software written in this obscure language from INRIA in Grenoble."
I'd rather see a long tap bring up options related to a shortcut.

It's less discoverable than a delay, but it is also far less annoying in the common case.
Pornography is a (digital) substance that induces comparable if not identical neurological changes as traditional addictive substances such as nicotine. It has already been established the internet generally is sufficient to induce addiction-related neurological changes.

I don't disagree that it is easier to implement age-based restrictions in real life versus online, but the fact remains that every single porn site distributes to minors, with obvious benefits to the industry.
That only works if you launch the wrong app every time. Extremely unlikely.
I think that design is just as important as how it functions. The two aren't mutually exclusive. In a day and age where there are so many options which can do similar things, the better looking one often gets chosen. So to say that if you read a book or two about design that magically you'll know what you need to in order to be an effective designer lacks any and all logic in thinking. That would be like me saying, well I finished my ruby course at codeacademy, now I'm an engineer with the ability to build apps.

Design, like coding, takes absolute determination and vigilance in perfecting. It not something you just 'learn to do' over a night or even a few months. The quote by Dieter (a design hero of mine) was also taken out of context. Everyone in the company needs to be adept in their role, and have a bit of say as to how the product should be. He didn't say you only need engineers who can read design books.

So how about you focus on doing what you do best, and let the designers continue focusing on what they do best. Perhaps start a company with 3 instead of two. A designer, an engineer, and a business minded individual. Imagine that.
My local indie theater recently ran a substantial (for them) fundraising campaign to upgrade to digital. They claimed that within a year or two, the major studios were going digital only and any theater without digital would be completely shut out. I didn't verify this, but I have no reason to doubt them.
Apple, Samsung cut some patent claims
You are missing the point. The point is that there is a need for infrastructure on the operator side to handle the incoming requests from Passpoint. There are already other solutions that allow operators to do mobile offloading over wifi over regular wifi access points.
Just trying to avoid a lawsuit.
There is substantial research in porn addiction, some psychologists even define "stages" of this addiction. It may be included in future psychiatric disorder manuals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_addiction

However it seems like addiction is reinforced by the negative social attitudes towards sex (i want what is forbidden/taboo), which is really a vicious cycle. Rationally speaking, porn shouldn't even exist (a dog never has to pay for it).