skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Performance - my meek single core CPU and my tendency to open dozens of tabs at once often collide.

2. Privacy - I'm far too lazy to go the full mile, but if I can avoid most of the tracking, I certainly appreciate it. 'though I do keep some domains null routed anyway.

3. Security - after Flash, JS is the main source of security problems, and I don't mean just attacks on my machine, but also stuff like CSRF and such.

But the most important:

4. Peace of mind - JS is used to implement the most annoying parts of the web: popups (particularly those "inline" that can't be blocked by the browser), paywalls, preventing right-click, distracting real-time updates, etc. The web is just a calmer, saner place without JS, and I like that.
Google also had a good introduction on web exploits: http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/

It reminded me a lot of Hack this site[1], which is a bit older, but can be helpful

[1] http://www.hackthissite.org/
I would say using a VM with ubuntu isnt so bad
The Politics Of Going Interstellar
Cool. I've made a video describing an "Hello World" C program with Ed. http://youtu.be/jxlcIMPyAt4
Unless your customers are paranoid computer geeks, you should completely ignore users who disable JavaScript. They are extremely few in number and they are already accustom to being ignored. If your site is worth viewing as you intended and are worth having as a customer, they will whitelist you.
I would have thought so too, but with where "web 2.0" is going nowadays...
Is this really true ? I would love to experiment this if I can have longer laptop battery life by disabling JS.
I have Ubuntu 12 running on a Toshiba laptop. Runs fine.

Toshiba's keyboards kind of suck now but otherwise they are pretty solid.
I totally agree, but I'm not sure of any other places that offer such flexibility in pricing and hardware.

If you were to conduct a test like this, where would you go for more reliable performance from hardware?
In my experience, it's hard to evaluate this with NoScript because you typically whitelist domains as you go. There is probably a Pareto distribution here... whitelisting a handful of domains will cover 80% of your web browsing. Once you get going, it's not very obtrusive... although I certainly have to temporarily enable or whitelist new sites every day, it's an automatic response at this point.

Often a site will link in lots of third-party javascript, and this is where NoScript gives you more flexibility. A lot of times it's easy to tell where the advertising and tracking code is coming from and leave those domains disabled. Sited usually work any way.

The worst thing about NoScript is when a "third-party" site itself uses third party (fourth party?) code, since NoScript does not seem to detect that. Of course this is a heinous practice, and it's disturbing how often it seems to occur. If I really have to use a site that does that, I typically pop into IE.
Thanks for the link. Remarkable Amazon overview: "Nor does the author offer any particularly illuminating perspectives...his frequently fawning account of the CME's origins and first 50 years as an arena for commercial hedgers and venturesome speculators amounts to little more than a family album in which forgotten knaves are as fondly and foolishly remembered as hitherto unheralded princes and their lightweight aides. Remarkable mainly for its consistently graceless style"

Ouch. Remind me never to have that guy review any of my books.

I understand what you are saying, and I understand why it's feasible to keep it small, concealed and restrict participants to certain customers. At least early in the game.

What I'm saying is that this state of affairs is temporary at best. Forbes is out with it. There will be many more articles. The prices are already in the 6-figure range. Soon they'll be at seven figures. No matter what we'd like the market to be like, any programmer with Google access should easily be able to determine he could make himself a millionaire just by releasing a vulnerability into the wild. Whether that information is easy to find right now or not is moot. It'll get easier. We're all connected. Supply meets demand. No amount of wishing it weren't so is going to change any of that. Works this way for illegal drugs, will work this way for security vulnerabilities.

I think the question here is whether to shun, outlaw, shame and hide this kind of stuff or to embrace it. In my opinion, we have enough examples that the first choice doesn't work so well, where the second choice benefits the rest of us even if we find the entire affair distasteful.

But I believe the greater point is that there are so many people affected by this hidden market that keeping information from them should be a crime. Yes, I wish that we could live in a world where we could slap a big old Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple logo on something and know that it is safe. But that world doesn't exist and it's never going to exist. Might as well start living in the world we find ourselves.
I used Opera from version 8 to 10 because it let me quickly enable/disable Flash and javascript on a global basis. Then I found NoScript, with its fine-tuning options, and moved definitely to Firefox. It's not as annoying as some people think, just 1 or 2 clicks on a menu and reload if I really want to see the page.

I use private browsing for the privacy paranoia. No need to block cookies. I block JS and Flash mainly to protect from buggy sites that thrash CPU and memory.

EDIT: also, it has surrogate scripts to fix some sites, for instance it removes clutter from Google Search links. And ABE has almost the same functionality as RequestPolicy.
Tcl is one heck of a Swiss-army knife solution. The core team is of the first order. The best thing is that it's so easy to use pipes to integrate a 'C'/C++ console mode program and control it via stdin/stdout/sockets. That turns out to be a significant architectural plus - rather than using some MVC C++/Java type library, you get complete seperation of concern. You don't even have to integrate it tightly with 'C' code; just use stdin/stdout and wrap a Tcl package to build a pipe around it.

Tcl might have been too easy. I also recall ESR dismissing it at one point in favor of Python.
Not nearly as good as the last two birthdays. :)

2010's brought a massive RAM increase: http://blog.linode.com/2010/06/16/linode-turns-7-big-ram-inc...

2011's bumped disk space up 25%: http://blog.linode.com/2011/06/16/linode-turns-8-disk-space-...
You can safely ignore that "audience" since they comprise 0.01% of a niche. They are vocal in sites like HN and Reddit and so on but the numbers are safely ignorable from a market standpoint.

If you want to spend your development effort in something worthy that will increase your audience, your should instead make sure your sites are available to people with disabilities. They are a far bigger share of the market (any market) and you will feel better by supporting them.
So you're smart, you read hacker news, write it yourself. Or you could post the idea to the jobs board to do that if you really need it.
Yes, but it would be less profitable. That's less extra money for turf wars. Also, less incentives for people to become criminals, even if current ones are hopeless.
The problem most sites have is that they don't even attempt to convince users who block JavaScript. Too many devs rely on JavaScript to do even the most basic layout and end up throwing a blank screen saying "This site requires JavaScript".

I don't expect developers to go out of their way to make the site work perfectly for me but I need to see something to convince me that it is worth a chance.
This is bullshit. I'm under the spell of heavy depression but I hit none of the main points of the article. I'm not a gamer, I almost never watch movies and don't use much P2P, I only listen to music maybe three to four times a month because I can't get in the mood much these days, the only use I have for email is for billing, subscriptions and anything that requires it.

"It would monitor your Internet usage and alert you when your usage patterns might signal symptoms of depression"

I'm not a depressive under their criteria. The software they hope for is broken before they even wrote a single line of code.

You know what helps coping with depression ? Alcohol, smoking, not standing in front of a computer downloading loads of crap to listen and watch.
Office hours revisited
We in #Udacity on irc.freenode.net definitely are :) !

You can join via webchat if you don't have an IRC client yet: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=udacity
hey, he just sent me an email
It's true, and you can.
Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds 
You have to love Linus for not being afraid to speak his mind.
Database communication with ruby
Install Ghostery and AdBlocker. They're available for most modern browsers and eliminate issues #2, 3 and 4.

http://www.ghostery.com/download
This is actually pretty interesting. Such felt connections between humans are a space in which a great deal that is worthwhile, such as healing and learning, can take place. The psychologist Stephen Gilligan (a student of Erickson and Bateson who has articulated their work conceptually in a way that preserves some of its unexpectedness) calls it the relational field and says that it is a somatic process.

The reason this kind of communication usually only succeeds by accident is that you can't force it. That's like trying to have fun. Or the old joke where someone screams, "I thought I told you to relax!"

You can, however, learn the patterns whereby it tends to arise and cultivate them. The disciplines that have the most to teach about this are the ones where practical success depends on working this way; so, things like therapy, teaching, and the arts. By contrast, disciplines that work by reducing their material to mechanism tend to exist in a realm that is disjoint from it.
I focus on non-radio solutions because I'm looking to see how we can do it without radio, period. So, there is no "live" connection for aggregators to download from. News is perhaps a bad name for the kind of content, think about it more in the sense of magazines or programs that aren't strictly time-sensitive, but entertaining and informative.

This is kind of related to the "Slow Web" movement I just read about in http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web . I'm not interested in seeing regional radio-ISPs blanket cities with smaller radio. I'm coming from this with the view point that some people won't have an "active" Internet connection, period. This can be very rural or situations where the density is just too low to bother with radios---who's going to build a network for 5 customers? The networks create their own scarcity of bandwidth because they're only profitable where there are enough people---where there are enough people, there isn't enough bandwidth to give everyone a good experience. A asynchronous hypernet is something that is "instant-on" for any location where people desire to have it---there's no permitting required, building agreements to negotiate, pole rights to acquire, or hardware to buy-install-maintain. If you want it, a few SD cards, a USB SD card reader and software similar to UUCP to manage it will make it happen for everyone---the cost to start is less than $50 or even $25 for anyone wanting to start a node.

Instead of being potentially online 24/7, I'm imagining these asynchronous hypernet users are /never/ online with the Internet. What they receive is what comes on the memory cards or other mediums. If some content does come from the Internet, it's because someone elsewhere on the asynchronous hypernet is providing a gateway for it. For a news paper that isn't increasing their readership of physical papers and struggling to convince readers to pay for the online version (again, only useful to users of synchronous networks), a daily memory card of batched data will be attractive in any area where the local Internet monopoly starts charging significant money for GB of data above their "approved" threshold. If the newspaper can deliver data cheaper to the user than the synchronous Internet provider can, people will use it. If the newspaper makes their own original audio/visual content (which is already happening at newspapers like the NYTimes) and makes it available only via the cards, they have content that people can't get anywhere else---and a reason to subscribe.
Or should we try to control them by controlling "default behavior"?

Who's "we"? I'm not a browser programmer and I have no ability to do that. Frankly, I dislike this common idea that we all part of this common team just because we happen to know something more about computers than the average schmoe. I certainly don't have the power to control any important defaults and therefore people, do you?

And while I can understand the goal, frankly I'm rather skeptical of our ability to teach most people, or of their willingness to be taught, which comes to much about the same. And I'm not sure if they're wrong in not wanting to waste valuable hours of life learning about a bunch of technical stuff that they don't really have much control over.

If a person running a DNS server (that could be anyone, including the end user) changes this setting, they can bypass ICANN and these landgrab gtlds.

But why should we do that? Why do you care? So some companies get shorter domains, so what? We don't even know if those generic TLDs will be accepted. Much ado about nothing, really.
You don't need an ancient version. For Linux, "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space" and compile with -fno-stack-protector.
What part of OOCSS do you think SASS already solves? Perhaps there's some disagreement about this that can help me answer your question.
This. Sometimes, "a merry centrism" of HN shows rather well...
Exactly this. Arriving at a nice-looking site with good content would convince me to whitelist, but I'm going right back if things get too blinky, flashy, or generally annoying.
Anything Lenovo is generally deemed to have a fairly decent build quality, along with some of the best Linux compatibility amongst laptop manufacturers.
No. He is using Cowboy[1], which is the mainstream websocket Erlang implementation (uh.. cowboy actually is a socket acceptor pool which happens to have awesome HTTP and WS handlers).

[1]: https://github.com/ericmoritz/wsdemo/blob/master/src/wsdemo....
[2]: https://github.com/extend/cowboy
That's not a domain, that's a full URL. But facebook did start as thefacebook.com and still had no problems growing like crazy.
Expert C Programming is a good book to have around because it discuses some of the more esoteric corners of the C standard. These are the places that you'll end up exploring.
Try using powertop to help tweak power settings Linux may have overlooked by default. It's in the repos, last time I checked.
Very cool, added to my channel list in Textual.

Just started the Crypto course and it's paced really well, I like it.
What browser are you using? This worked in my browser.
I think instead of `verbose' you meant the opposite `terse.'
It's DRM.

Someone needs to build an open source alternative.

Rather than using change.org to lobby for a return of this closed-source app to a closed environment, it could be argued that the author would do better to start a kickstarter project to get donations for a quality open source alternative.

(One that might work for non-English speakers, more than one type of device, etc...)
I highly recommend The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez. If you have some background in C++, C, and PHP, this book will suit you well.

However I agree with the other commenters that you should absolutely learn HTML, CSS, and JS first. There's no point digging into Rails until you know these basic technologies...
FACT: Javascript/HTML/CSS holds the biggest monopoly any piece of technology ever has. There is almost NO viable alternative if you want to program for the web. Even the notoriously closed IOS has far more (over 20 popular languages now can be used to compile an app's UI and logic code for)

The title is true BUT for another reason.

It is not suitable because there are so many great languages and language experts - but relatively few who are JS experts.

Why does javascript have a monopoly on browsers? Why can't there be some kind of WBVM (web browser virtual machine) that X language can be compiled down to? Why does JS have to be the assembly language of the web? This fact only makes things difficult and messy to have most languages cross compile to. I think that the W3C are a bunch of idiots for not pushing for something like this. They are stifling innovation more than Microsoft (or anyone else I can remember) ever has IMO. There SHOULD be an open standard for this.

Only very high level JS experts could pull off a large web application in JS. This accounts for maybe 5% of US businesses. Throw in High level experts for X language and now you probably have 60%+ of businesses who could accomplish such a thing. The Same goes for the browser UI as well (HTML and CSS pffff) How about the VM having the ability to draw all these elements instead of merely pushing HTML/CSS in our faces as an only option). We could use superior technologies like Flex, XAML, ETC. instead of HTML/CSS.

You love Javascript? great, but don't push it in my face. I have 3 favorite languages and JS is not anywhere near them.

The web browser is a platform (though it lives inside another platform) but one which is among most proprietary ever.

Why aren't more people pissed off about this?
'"We can't be outcome driven," said Anne Tompkins, the U.S. attorney in Charlotte.'

The quote seems like it may be out of context even in the article, but seems like a good capture of the problems with total dedication to process over discretion and justice described (or so I gather, have only read reviews of yet) in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" by William Stuntz.
(sorta similar to how .biz and .name might be viewed by Joe Consumer now).

But doesn't the current perception of those domains today indicate what we can expect from yet more gratuitous TLDs?

I had almost forgotten about those two TLDs, and can just imagine how a more casual Web user might think of them: not at all.

On the other hand, it may well be meaningless. I'm continually surprised to see big companies use facebook.com/[companyname] in their advertising too.

I find that to be a more disturbing trend.
Count Sereno Real Vampire
> person-to-person oral tradition

seriously, these days they teach these skills at universities; there was even a Coursera (cancelled?) http://www.security-class.org/

a book that only assumes you know some C:
http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-The-Art-Exploitation-Edition/
While I agree with the jist of your comment, I don't think rails is something you can "just do." Navigating the folder structure of a rails project alone requires an explanation..
CSS overrides to get rid of box shadows and rounded corners can also make a significant difference in scrolling speed. Essentially every browser out now lets you define a user css file, just include something like:

* { box-shadow: none !important;
border-radius: 0 !important; }

etc. YMMV, and you may have to include the corner / browser specific variants, I forget the details. Box shadows with a large spread still perform terrifyingly poorly in browsers, though small ones tend to be fast enough to not notice on modern machines.
I don't think we understand the term "business value" the same way. It seems to me a better term for what you're talking about would just be "value".

The power dynamic aspect is this: who gets to decide what has "business value"? I would like the answer to be: anyone who has good insight and can convince their team. But when the answer instead is "a class of people called 'managers' or 'businessperson'", that is what I object to. Membership in that class is a matter of organizational status, not insight or merit.

But in a message board discussion it's hard to tell where we're talking about the same things and where we're not. Wish there were an easy way to get semantic diffs.
In case anybody's curious, the general principle behind those anecdotes is called comparative advantage. Definitely one of the more entertaining bits of economics!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
That was also my theory, but it results in a cruel zero or one binary world. Here is a more friendly one. Imagine a probability distribution (lets say a Gaussian :))over all possible partners. Now, there is a small number of people that really, really like you (they are at the right end of the Gaussian). Also there is a small number of people that you will never have, no matter how hard you try (left end). Now, for anyone in between the two opposites you will need to actually do some work :), and in the process you can make them shift to the left or right. By improving yourself, you can also improve the shape of you distribution :)
Does anyone have a recommendation for a cheap but fast xen VPS either in Chicago or NYC? (Like under $7/month cheap)
Does anyone know where this one actually comes from?
4 of top 6 Le Mans contenders are hybrid race cars
The owners of (books|music|whatever).com are going to be happy because a good number of people are going to see "best.books" and end up thinking that means "best.books.com"
I'm still amazed how quick people are to forget what happened with Linode.

Massive security issue (i.e. Bitcoin incident) where hackers got root access to any Linode VPS at the click of a button. Loyal customers were the last to hear about it (through their website no less) and absolutely no proper explanation was or has been given as to what happened, what was done about it and whether it will happen again.

You look at how Cloudflare handled their issue and it's night and day. Linode are one of the least transparent providers going around IMHO.
Best example I know of to illustrate what happens when you don't have a guy with the authority to say 'this is insane, stop doing this'.
They use p2p file sharing more and watch more videos. That makes sense. When I'm feeling depressed I tend to watch lots and lots of TV. But then I get more depressed because I'm wasting my time watching TV. It's like a drug, the cure becomes the cause.

"I need a TV embrace" - Ben Lee
The problem is that it takes effort to make good comparative benchmarks — for a platform you're not totally immersed in, you'd ideally speak with the community about your methods. Furthermore, good benchmarks require real investigation explaining the differences; otherwise you could be measuring something silly. And you should graph some of the stats by time.

Maybe in an ideal world, quality benchmarks would be commonplace. But in this world, doing good benchmarks in response to everyone's bad benchmarks is a heavy burden.
I found it genuinely ambiguous. I guess I'm not used to read "American English".
I do it because it reduces my attack surface by quite a bit. There have been many bugs mitigated by having no JavaScript.

All you really need to do on your site is to use a few noscript tags to send people a message saying that the site requires JavaScript to function and asking them to turn on JavaScript or whitelist your domain in NoScript.
You could have just typed CTRL+[ or CTRL+C, both exit insert mode in Vi. It's in the man page: http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/hp-ux/man1/vi.1.html
If you wan't to learn to develop exploits I would read some of these few sources to get started...

1. The Shellcoder's Handbook
2. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
3. Gray Hat Hacking
4. w00w00 Exploiting Heaps

Basically memory exploits all boil down to overwriting the EIP with an address that points to some code that does something.

Of course there are all sorts of exploits, some simply send bad data to crash the server as a Proof of concept.. others are more sophisticated, either way if you can program all you need to do is learn a few methods and then writing the exploit shouldn't be so bad..
Well, I have no problem with calling it cyberintelligence, or even cyberespionage, but just because espionage is part of warfare doesn't make it warfare.