skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I loved my Harbinson/Steele C book, a long time ago. Google says the last version came 2002 with additions on the web. Good memories, I'll buy a copy and read just for nostalgia. Thanks.
Great news! Honestly, the only software that will be holding people back from switching fully to linux now will be creative tools (audio, 3d + 2d design, video editing). I think this can be solved by us. If we show them that there is a demand for these tools on linux someone will move to supply. Open operating systems provide too many advantages to ignore.
That's fine. I'd just like to disagree with the idea that the US was late to this party. If anything the US has been one of a few countries leading the world into this "cyber arms" race, albeit mostly covertly until recent years.
I often drive home from work very late at night and I've been pulled over and followed for doing absolutely nothing wrong. I think one said my license plate was dirty. They let me go and told me to have a nice night when it was clear that I wasn't doing anything wrong, though.
Thank you. Problem solved (until they change it).
Yeah I got the same impression as you - both sides did legitimate work, and both have the right to feel like their toes are being stepped on. They both seem to be tuned into this community too. In an ideal world they'd take it under advisement to sit down with each other and worth this out like reasonable people instead of wasting all their money on a legal arms race.
I think the usual benchmark if you get to the point that you can run Linux and use an extensive libc is compatibility with existing software, not necessarily a conformant implementation.
What, like SomethingAwful's "tenbux" policy? I guess it could work, if it wasn't spoiled by cliquey moderation.
No, but it's perfect for an experienced programmer in other languages to pick up C.
I tweeted a comment along these lines about Flickr's mobile view just last night. Rather than user-friendly, it's user-hostile design.
I did not realize the insane size of HP. 350,000 employees in 2011!
HackerNews API: What if HN does not have API? Make API on the fly with APIfy
I agree that managing a large number of apps can be tricky. What kind of solution would you like to see? Generally I just use spotlight. One swipe, type a few letters, and the app is found.
> Using prepared statements or variable binding to fight SQL injections is not the best idea

What is the best idea then? If you bind variables to SQL statements, you are SQL injection safe 100% of the time. There is no crafty input sequence that can fool anything.

> In most cases where you want a prepared statement, you'd be better off using a stored proc, as you'll skip the expensive optimization every single time.

I am only qualified to speak about Oracle which is a DB I know extremely well. A query is a query, whether it comes from Java, Perl, Ruby or inside of a stored proc. If you prepare a statement once, and then cache that handle and execute it many times, you optimize the query one time. Also in Oracle, if you prepare-bind-execute one time only, the next time you do the same sequence of steps you Oracle doesn't have to optimize the query again - it can spot it is the same as a previous query and short circuit the process.

Mysql I think doesn't cache SQL statements for later reuse like Oracle, which is why binding isn't as important for performance (in Oracle, not bind queries is a pretty good way to bring the database to its knees) - but its still essential for security.

> SQL injections are 100% avoided by user input control in the application, and the simplest way is to escape all escape characters

What this bug has just proven, is that this escaping is not all that easy - crafty attackers can come up will all sorts of strings that seem to work around the escaping time and time again.
I really would like an updated version of it, but I guess it will never be written.
Significance of Link Building & SEO in Online Success
Sites with high quality links get more value from the search engines as well as their webmasters compared to the sites that don’t have high quality links.
That's true, but then you have to follow up with users and take careful notes.

The impression I get with many open source projects is that they just push out updates in a vacuum and aren't so interested in "regular" users feedback beyond bug reports and patches.
'No signal' from targeted ET hunt
Things the TSA doesn't want you to see: this site.

(Sorry, couldn't resist... or access.)
Thank you for informing us that this is just an "X Things..." post without having to visit the link. ;)
> The strange thing I found is that finding a job as a developer has been just as difficult, if not more so, than finding a non-technical job.

It's easier to bullshit when interviewing for non-technical jobs. Technical jobs have mostly-objective tests you can give to candidates where they have to program stuff, solve equations, etc. Non-technical jobs have squishy mostly-subjective tests that aren't very reliable at gauging anything.
That would be nice. They could combine it with the iPad advanced gestures. Pinching your hand currently closes and app and does nothing on the home screen. How about making that zoom out to an exposé view?
ZA Logistics  (NAP 235014)
ZA Logistics is active and Freight Forwarder,providing services of Sea and Airfreight shipments, offers cost-savings complete Import & Export services, managing of any shipment.	http://www.zalogistics.com
I'm wondering how many Tallinn HN'ers there are! I am one myself as well.
It looks interesting, but why is a sequence of users that vouch for the final user detrimental? User(1) would vouch for user(2), which should make user(2) more trustworthy, and therefor have greater voting power. Wouldn't this phenomenon simply stack as user(3) becomes more trustworthy because of the trustworthiness of user2? So that the final user, user(n) would be more trustworthy then a similar user who only had a sequence of two users, with the final one vouching for him?
Besides that, however, it looks like a good idea, and i personally am interested in the final product.
Handling Internal Tracking Without Code
BJ Fogg is doing interesting work on that mobile-persuasion subject at Stanford. I remember reading one of his papers that had a quite helpful evaluation of what kind of health regarded persuasion aspects are supported by mobile technology - as a simple example mobile tech having a disadvantage in starting a new behavior, but strong advantage of training an existing one over (ir)regular intervals. It is quite a fascinating subject ( http://www.mobilepersuasion.org/ ).
I think presence of mainstream CAD software is very important as well. I have seen many people not willing or not being able to shift to Linux only because of CAD.
Ok, so here goes. This is by no means a suggestion that anyone become an amateur lawyer, practice law without a license, handle a particular case pro se, or do any other such thing. This is just useful info for anyone who might want to learn some law. (Nothing wrong with learning as much about the world as you can.)

I'm not aware of any single repository of such information other than law school. But if you're willing to consult multiple sources, you can definitely find the information.

For starters, one can always get a copy of the reading lists for various law school classes. You could also look at commercially prepared law school study guides. Pretty much everything you would learn in law school is available in book form, in one place or another. Obviously, law professors and lecturers contribute a great deal of value added in the form of their own experience and idiosyncratic knowledge. But the core material is all written down in various places.

Those types of materials will teach you the basics of American law. The next step is to research the statutes and case law in your jurisdiction. That means federal, state, county, and municipal laws. The statutes can be found by Googling, for example, "Illinois Statutes," or "Chicago Municipal Code." As for case law, assuming you don't have a subscription to a legal database, you can use some Google-fu to find articles that address whatever legal question you're researching. You can also buy a "treatise" on the field of law you're researching; they're packed full of case citations.

As for court procedure--well, first, let me just say that you probably don't want to litigate your own cases unless you're in small claims court. And even then, having a lawyer really, really helps. But if for some reason you want to learn procedure, that'a a bit harder. There are books specific to individual jurisdictions. Also, courts often publish their own procedural rules. All of this can be found through Google.

Again, this won't make you a lawyer, and it won't eliminate the need for one. But I'm a firm believer that anyone can benefit concretely from a solid understanding of the law. There's no better combination than a smart lawyer and a smart client.
Very good service. Gives inside to Hacker News. Lately, I have the feeling many submissions get gamed by YC-affiliated parties.
And employers are not that picky either. Most of the things they ask, at least in Europe, are pretty basic. For a finance is usually a bachelor, English skills, some prove you are not a lazy ass. Of course, requirements go up with better positions, but this article deceives into thinking that employers are looking for stars even in entry level jobs, it doesn't look like that to me.

I am still convinced the problem is on the employee side...
It means "is", so yes, they do. It's used for predication instead of existence (iru & aru are for existence), but that's probably the more common is in English as well.

If you want filler, it's when people are going え～と while trying to collect their thoughts.
Some of the best tools in the industry (Audacity, Blender, Inkscape, others?) are already free, open source, and native on Linux.
>Why wouldn't one be able to do something like that? What would stop it from happening?

A board/committee or whatever that oversaw what was happening at the university. They could have censored it as being too taboo. I've heard a lot of fuss about resistance to Stem Cell Research/Creationist textbooks etc. But as another commenter said, the speakers are a lot more autonomous and free. Nice to hear.
Your proposal sounds a lot like the risk reduction schemes implemented in France a few years ago under Sarkozy. The net result of the legislation was the creation of a micro-job economy like we see in Germany today (and a lot of street riots). Basically, employees are "hired" with an unspoken understanding that the job is essentially a temporary position, and they will be fired without severance near the end of their 6 month term. If you look into how consumer buying power among young micro-employees in Germany has decreased, the idea may seem a bit less appealing.
I meant that too. Basically when adobe and autodesk make their software linux compatible we will see a huge shift to linux. The amount of money saved by businesses on a whole would be huge if switching to linux was an option.
The point is, the police are (usually) required to have cause to stop motor vehicle drivers, and if they arrest you for DUI after stopping you for no reason, you have grounds to challenge the arrest.

Obviously, "grounds to challenge" is no guarantee that you'll be acquitted or have charges dismissed, and obviously the police can and do manufacture reasons to pull drivers over, but the requirement to have cause creates a disincentive to do that routinely.

Which, my point was, was one reason one might experience stricter detection of DUI's in another country.
Could you explain what is the matter with the filesystem metaphor?
Reading and writing code does not teach you recursion. Certain abstract ideas fall into the domain of mathematics even if you can pick up some of them outside of a formal mathematical education.
Try this (you can't see the videos in this version though) https://www.readability.com/articles/bleqmeer
Don't know why you're getting downvotes, I'd rather people reply to you as you're pretty specific.

Personally, I prefer SV when it's leaner. I'm actually working on a project that is actually innovative, and I'd much prefer to raise money later, hopefully when all this madness has dried up and VC's have time to evaluate something new.
Because only the democrats have seen the light? Just because republicans pander to ensure they get votes from a certain base does not mean all republicans are fundamentalists. Some of us vote republican because there isn't a viable libertarian candidate.
Agreed, and with Adobe and Autodesk monopolizing creative software, I think we'll see more and more of this. Blender has been doing spectacularly with 3D to the point that Autodesk must be incredibly worried, and I expect we'll see more Photoshop contenders as projects like GIMP start to answer the pleas of its on-the-fence users. See the GIMP roadmap: http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap

Edit: And I expect as browser technologies continue to expand, we'll see more web-based competitors. In particular, with WebGL, I'm surprised we haven't seen things like all-GPU image editors to compete with the slow giants we have to deal with now.
Something I think the OP doesn't get is that this delineation into high and low quality people isn't useful anymore. It was, in a time when books had to be copied by hand and almost everyone was illiterate, and when long-standing reputations (built over centuries, carried through blood) mattered because information traveled at 20 miles per day (if that) but that ended a few centuries ago. Ideas and contributions matter a lot more.

For example, Davos and the Bilderberg Group are relics of a feudal era that humanity is evolving out of. They don't belong in this century.

In fact, one of the most disappointing things about getting rich for a lot of people is realizing that "rich people" actually aren't more interesting, more creative, more intelligent, or even more energetic than people in general. Few people will admit as much, but a lot of the desire behind social climbing is the belief that "better" people hang out behind those closed doors. And yet, in reality the people don't get worse or better as you climb. The average quality stays (perhaps remarkably) the same.

The problem isn't, "How do we keep the hoi polloi out?" The whole point of the internet is that you can't. It's, "How do we keep the average quality of contribution high?" It shouldn't matter if those contributions come from a European prince or an African peasant. It's a big world and there are a lot of mind-bogglingly stupid rich, expensively-educated people, and an equally large number of very intelligent poor people with no formal education.

To prove that "high quality" people can produce low-quality content, just look at Autoadmit or some of the Wall Street-oriented career websites. These are some of the most educated people in the world, and yet the quality of content is very low. Or look at fucking UrbanBaby, which represents the average IQ among the Manhattan upper class as 82 and a third.
"Usability nazis"? I'm afraid your choice of words is leading me to suspect that it's not the designers' arrogance that is the problem here.
So how do I open files made in app A in B?
Try to change font faces or default frame parameters on Emacs. You could describe that catastrophe as a high learning curve, but I think it's a usability problem. This is just one example.
Okay, the generations makes sense. Thanks!
Sadly, some people refuse to work if they aren't using photoshop/illustrator/autocad/etc. But yeah, I'm with you, I use gimp and inkscape but I'm no professional.
They just want to press button X and have action Y happen with the least possible friction in between.

I don't think that this is just an attitude for less technical users, I have the same attitude myself whether I am configuring an HTTP server or playing a video I want a low friction way to do this. I don't think that power users exactly seek out the hardest interfaces.

The problem is though that the highest friction way to do something is to not be able to do it at all and have to work around that. I think this is why there is much resistance to things like Unity on Ubuntu.

It's also worth bearing in mind that consistency is also important, so doing something like releasing an "easier" Window Manager that is a huge departure from what was there before will not necessarily be welcomed by users as much as you think.

Having said that , I don't think that usability is the #1 thing holding back FOSS desktop adoption. The biggest things are MS inertia and also compatibility, for example without Silverlight4 + DRM you can't use things like netflix which is going to really hurt adoption (although I'm not sure what could be easily done about this case).
It's poorly implemented on Android. I have 5 browsers installed and when in any particular app I might click a link and it will ask me which browser I want to use to open it!
The advantage of not feeling tied to valgrind is that you don't need to run your program under valgrind to get the benefit of whatever mechanisms are in place to detect scribbles, accesses to uninitialised data, and leaks.

(valgrind's lack of availability is a bit of a problem. I'm not complaining - I bet it is a bit fiddly to port it to a new system - but it's very easy to never have come across any system that can run it in your professional life. So being able to work without it is no waste of time.)

Uninitialised data and memory scribbles can be tricky to detect 100% reliably without valgrind, but if you code appropriately, you'll spot it. Leaks are very easy to find (fixing them, not always so much), and I don't really understand why one needs this monster program to discover them - but maybe one day I'll actually be in a position to use it, and I'll find out what I'm missing.
I thought the IKEA logo was actually Heineken's for a second.
Not being a experienced C programmer by any measure, but this doesn't look right to me: https://github.com/thraxil/boggle/blob/master/boggle.c#L92

struct foo f() {
struct foo f;
return f;
}

isn't returning a stack-allocated struct a bad idea?
I downvoted because the opinion is generic, reactionary and not insightful. Groupon has lots of problems, but some blanket stereotype about VC funding and the identification of Groupon, which millions of people choose to use, as "stupid," is neither "pretty specific" nor helpful.

Groupon might not be a strong company, might not have a good product, might be in for a lower share price, etc. But it doesn't add anything to call it "stupid" or lament the fact that they were given money, especially given how many times this sentiment is reiterated on every thread relating to Groupon.
Operation India - Anonymous [video]
Thank you for implementing BrowserID.
seems like everyone writes one of these(mine is notefeeder.heroku.com). I hope one of them gets popular so that others will stop repeating this cycle.

Looks good though.
The washing machine changed the world more than the internet
Sort of off-topic, is there a reason Steam on windows is so unresponsive? Mac, too, but I think that's because it's a port.

It seems to me that Steam is not written in native windows code and that's why it runs so sluggishly. Some say they have no idea what I'm talking about, while others agree. What does HN think?
It's not that they devalue training, it's just that they're realists. You seem to believe that people are willing to learn how to use software slowly over time but the reality is that when a user gets frustrated they simply stop using the product and find an alternative even if it lacks features.

One thing I think we're all confused about is our definitions of users and target audiences. Obviously the users of CLI programs and other "power user" software are willing to take the time to read the manual and educate themselves. Software for these users doesmt require the kind of attention to design the article talks about. Then there are the average users and software they use. Things like word processors, GUI file managers, etc. Those users need their hands held with "dumbed down" and "pretty/glossy" design. You can still provide complex and powerful features to them but you have to design their software in a way that makes their first introduction very easy to use. Meanwhile you can provide options within settings menus and customizable toolbars for the veterans who already know how to use such tools. It's the best of both worlds and everyone wins.

There's also some software that you'd think only power users would use but then someone comes along and makes it accessible to the average user in a way that's easy for them to get into while still useful for the power user. GitHub's GUI app is a great example of that. They took something that we all assume only programmers and savvy users would get and designed it in such a way that makes it easily accessible for total newbies. Because of that there now people you'd never think would use a VCS like Git making heavy use of it. People like writers, graphic designers, bloggers, scrapbookers, and all sorts of "average users" are now using the thing that we thought only the power user's would touch. The best part is that even those familiar with the command line use of Git now use it because it makes their life easier too! We can totally take a lesson from that and apply it to these tools that we think don't need better design.
I agree.

Here's one in lieu - the stillsuits in "Dune" could not work. They use evaporative cooling ("Perspiration passes through it, having cooled the body") but turning the evaporated water back into a liquid - which is condensative warming - requires more energy than was needed to cool the person in the first place.
They are turning things around ever so slightly at groupon. They have gone from negative operating income to positive. Still no income after taxes. I doubt that Groupon that will really turn a profit.
I thought I was the only one who noticed
In the mid-2000s, Macromedia started an experimental port of Dreamweaver (I think) to Linux using Wine. The project was abandoned because the market for commercial Linux applications was seen to be too limited for the difficulty of maintaining the port.
A perfect example are front-end developers. It can be tough for anyone to make a living in that line of work without being able to edit/open photoshop and illustrated without having to configure wine.

I truly believe Adobe holding back their products is one of the largest roadblocks linux has to get widespread adoption amongst the design/developer community.
cache http://google.com/search?q=cache:www.elliott.org/blog/5-thin...
It works both ways:

More eyes on HN = more chance everyone else gets quick up-votes
pud's Starbucks analogy is still apt though. Bitly is making a conscious change to their business model, and they have to insert a speed bump in the link-shortening process to start making money. There's no way they can continue providing seamless 1-click link-shortening for free.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, if you forgive the cliche.
> My observation is that it is a combination of timing, title, content, and luck.

And friends/followers in other communities/media.
I suppose that it's how you go about meeting anybody. Pick a field you think has potential, look up a meeting (say on meetup), go enough to be a regular, drink some beer, talk about it.
Reading code using recursion certainly does teach you recursion.

Classification of ideas does not lend the classifier ownership over the idea. Ferns were around long before mathematicians.

(To a certain degree, I'm taking a devil's advocate position. I'm not arguing against the worth of mathematics. But not a lot of SE requires much mathematics; what I am specifically disputing is that teaching a lot of abstract mathematics necessarily results in a better software engineer than deliberate practice. Solving simple combinatorial, tree and graph search problems teaches you more about the practical uses of recursion than any amount of recurrence relations, IMO.)